- Midden
Manasota Key, Florida; Bridgeton, Missouri
She wants to show me the midden, rocky dune, bulldozedin the ’50s to make way for the path that leads to the dockat Lemon Bay. Just arrived, I want only a nap.
Later, I’ll understand: It’s one of a series of terraformed mounds,some even keys off the mainland, the prehistoric indigenous Calusareworking dump sites— piling “debris of human
activity,” animal bones, shells used for scraping food,then tossed. Each piece ordinary in its own way,till they repurposed it for contriving an island.
I come from a region that glaciers buffedflat till they stopped and piled up moraines—but not everyone needs a massive icy force [End Page 190]
to push the land into what they require.And where I grew up, they spread ManhattanProject nuclear waste atop the landfill,
barium sulfate from enriching uranium “mixed inwith soil as top cover.” A subsurface fire near myhometown has smoldered for more than a decade,
now about a thousand feet away from that Superfund site.It smells like “rotten cabbage,” “like a house is on fire,” shouldburn itself out in the next five years, if it doesn’t breach
the firebreak. They’ve added a cap—rock, clay, soil—to stiflethe stench, track the fire’s spread by seeing where plastic bags,partially combusted, are “gummy black.” The midden, alkaline heap,
pH of the shells delaying decay, will at some point becomereef, when the bay and gulf meet, the glaciers of our timeforsaking the poles and melting into sea. [End Page 191]
lisa ampleman’s most recent poetry collection is Romances. A recipient of a 2020 Hermitage Artist Retreat fellowship, she is the managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and the poetry series editor at Acre Books.