Beyond the iris of an eyeball, vitreous gel stagnates, never replenishing, so blood, cells, inflammatory byproducts remain there forever. What’s weird is the proper name for this colorless mass is vitreous humour, but really, what’s funny about eye pollution? I mean, now that I know all this, I keep thinking about the Crying Indian in the “Keep America Beautiful” commercial, that one tear straggling his cheek after a fast food litterer trashes the landscape and his moccasin. I cried at that when I was a kid who didn’t know the braided Indian was an Italian actor, and the ad was sponsored by less than ecological businesses. Makes me wonder if my tears were contaminated, if his, too, if — “There’s more here than meets the eye” is literal and reliable, if when we “see eye to eye,” a baby blue fronting the lens, we see nothing at all, the colorless fluid where a birch bark canoe might paddle obscured by the city’s smoke stacks’ haze.
Amy Lerman lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert where she is residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn Press, 2022) won the 2022 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, she has been a Pushcart nominee and was the inaugural winner of the Art Young Memorial Award for Poetry, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Book of Matches, The Madison Review, Radar Poetry, Slippery Elm, Rattle, and other publications.
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