creative writing on environmental justice
We slide sideways.
You think you would see us, as big as we are, looming over the landscape, but the shale giants know how to slip quietly, one plane against another, and be gone into the fog. We like fog as we like all quiet things. Fog also comes in layers, and that makes us feel safe, at home, almost as safe as if we were still in our burrows.
We wait for our friends, our . . .
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Welcome to the Reckoning Press podcast. Reckoning is a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. This podcast will feature very occasional poetry, fiction and essays from the journal, plus interviews with the authors. I’m Michael J. DeLuca, publisher, and also the editor of Reckoning 2.
For our first episode, we’ve got Casey June Wolf reading . . .
The day after Mom’s funeral was cold for the season, rain heavy in the air but nothing actually spilling over, the sky a featureless silver-grey, and my whole body ached in sharp slivery ways. Her funeral was in Portage, where they lived, so I bussed out early from Winnipeg. Instead of going home afterward, I came back with Dad to keep him company and spend the night. . . .
Alana’s ex-boyfriend, Steve, met her at the driveway to Windermere Farms, his three-acre orchard wedged between the Rapid tracks and East 15 Street. “Thank you for coming so fast!” He backtracked like an excited border collie, leading the way up the weed-choked brick driveway.
“Is it taxes?” Alana’s friends were always asking her to do math for them, like it . . .
This is a memory: a white-washed picture frame around a needlework bouquet of roses. It hangs on a wood-paneled wall in the only direct sunlight in the room, a thin sliver of bright coming down the stairs and slicing in half the wall, the roses, the pull-out couch’s thin, raw-springed mattress.
I am holding myself very still, on my back, thinking about needlework. . . .
What do you take to the Place of Skulls?
Your head, brewing with the thirst for adventure. Your empty stomach to remind you when to come back home for lunch. Your spindly legs, dragging your chapped feet.
Who will you meet on the road to the Place of Skulls?
We don’t know. But we know if we see any simé-simé person; those ugly ones with a big mound of nose sitting between . . .
Once upon a time,” I tell my son, “a foolish peasant boasted of a daughter who could spin straw to gold.”
My child starves. Day after day, his eyes grow larger than his shriveling stomach.
“Drink water,” I say when I leave him. “But not too much. I don’t know when we’ll have more.”
He barely nods. Almost, I think he will speak. In the darkness of our half-collapsed basement, . . .
Too many people dream,” he said, leaning against the door.
“What do you want them to do, stay awake?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll play Linganian flute to keep you up.” I smiled, miming tooting.
“No thanks. I don’t dream,” he said, walking away. A trail of multicolored fumes followed him, dodging in and out of his spiky hair. Butterscotch and shoe polish scents wafted my way, . . .
I’ve never been lost in the woods, so of course I didn’t think I was lost now. I’d simply misplaced the trail. Eventually, I’d find it, because it was around here someplace. It wasn’t until I had stomped around for about an hour that I began to get the creeps, and not because I was lost. It was the sun.
It hadn’t moved; it just hung there in the sky at about twenty degrees . . .
Protocosmo found me as it finds all its inhabitants: the lost, the lonely, and the wayward. I was stranded for twenty-three hours in Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Round about hour seventeen and in the wee hours of the night I took to pacing the long empty hallways past their inert coffee and fusion cuisine franchises. An attendant found me sleeping on one of those . . .