Ode to the Burner Boys
after Alexander Clapp's Waste Wars: The Wild Life of Your Trash
making pennies by the hour to pull apart our cellphones, chargers, our tv remotes and big-screens the burner boys work the technically dead bare-handed extracting elements dug from earth now homeless in a graveyard in Accra, capital of Ghana, a place that wanted a different existence but became burial ground for First World trash without eyes to see these young men as people only dimes by dozens easy to shuffle aside or criminalize instead of calling out companies—actual people hiding behind filed paperwork—pushing trash down our throats, to choke our pockets, grope and poke the air we breathe, what seethes as the burner boys face the always growing never ending disgrace of our ignorant tossing our empties to the ground to scrounge our cobalt, Chilean copper, Argentinium lithium, Australian silica processed into silicon dioxide particles an organic fluorophore also called a pearl necklace or frozen smoke used to amplify signals, how we all need to get through, to make do by using the products we approve the mining of from our planet carved into countries including Chinese Germanium, West African and Indian bauxite to make that glowing LED light, potassium for my touchscreen from a salt called sylvite found in Canada, Russia and Belarus, just a few of the mineral elements used to produce chlorinated dioxins, cytotoxic byproducts of electronic waste for who to pick up, who to toss out, for who to be assigned to fail to ever erase, so the burner boys sell it as scrap bound somehow instead of finding ways to send it back to those who mined it for true payment back to earth, a burning stench for death protocol. We forgot how once we learned to put it all away to music, a game we played, to place it how we found it. Now no way to impound it since we’ve or they’ve, who dug it up and who received the pound of flesh as ore the poor earth poorer for giving by the moment for the price of the mining? What is required to be paid by the billionaires while the burner boys pay with their lives.
Emma Goldman-Sherman‘s plays have been produced on 4 continents and include Abraham’s Daughters based on their documentation of human rights abuses during the first Intifada available as a podcast at TheParsnipShip.com. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in Eckleburg, Toyon (with Arabic translation), Gigantic Sequins (1st prize), Exist Otherwise, Writers Resist and others. Emma’s microchapbook, Possible Paths for the Minotaur, is forthcoming as part of the Ghost City Press Summer Series. Their microfiction is anthologized in Best Microfiction 2025 and the Fish Anthology of 2023. They have received support from ATHE, Ragdale, Millay, WordBridge, LMCC, and others. They work as a neuroaffirming coach, teach for the Dramatists Guild Institute and PlayPenn, and support writers and artists at: https://www.bravespace.online.
