creative writing on environmental justice
In a way, hope is a failure of imagination. In a way, it is a flourishing.
It is a failure because I cannot imagine the end. The world goes on, and on and on, even when we wish it would stop.
I know how bad it is. The emission levels, the microplastics, the pipelines, the species gone, the rogue genes introduced, the coral dying, the water rising. The infrastructure . . .
I have resisted writing a Pandemic [insert “poem/story/essay/play/song”] just as I have resisted writing a BLM [____], or a #MeToo [____]. Those borders, those things that can be designated and specificated have given me pause as far as I can remember.
In part it comes from perpetual rage: I want to write about all the worldwide historical injustices faced . . .
One thousand apologies to my great-grandfather and the generations of fishermen I come from. I want to be an astronaut.
In the summer of 2019, a box jellyfish, known colloquially as the seawasp, stung the girl’s left ankle. She had just resurfaced after a night dive and was stargazing, lying on her back and imagining the worlds miles above and below her. She’d . . .
The forest preserve district wants me to cut down trees. With a saw in one hand and loppers in the other, I oblige.
As a child I got my destructive tendencies out in videogames and martial arts. Beating all of my friends at Street Fighter—and gloating about it—was fine. Plucking flowers was not. Even the ubiquitous dandelions like tiny weak suns in the lawn grass . . .
There are no creepy crawlies hiding in my garden. I know, because I’ve checked.
The compost, under-turned and full of fresh scraps, should have attracted all manner of bugs and buzzers. The tree hanging overhead should be bowing down with orb weavers, feasting on the to-and-fro flitting parade. The bushes should be moving, rustling, going bump in the night . . .
TIDINGS
A harried wind has come
bearing in his arms
ill tidings.
Ratt-a-tatting timidly
on my door,
head hanging low,
hat in hand, my rain-drenched wind
pleads to be let in.
But I do not want him
in. I quickly shut my windows, and
stuff all the nooks and crannies.
I even cotton up my ears,
because I know.
Oh! I know. Don’t I know what my wind . . .
Winter comes (in Provence, it looks much the same as summer from a distance, only crisp and windier), and with it the end of a long, harrowing year. A year of sorrow, for the families of a million and a half. A year of change, some say, though change may be less eagerly anticipated than a return to normal. An opportunity to take a break, for a lucky few, to think, to watch, . . .
The call for submissions for Reckoning 5’s poetry started as a scribbled note in a water-damaged notebook I lost years ago. It was Toronto labour rights activist and scholar Dr. Winnie Ng’s answer to a 2013 panel question on what she’d tell young organizers: that we can organize from rage, but where it was possible, you could go the long haul if you organized from . . .
I take my father’s ghost and a crochet bird nest with me. The air is clean and clear, my body is empty, and no-one mentions the war. It is January. The nest is a half-built tiny home for a tiny injured thing. The left-over yarn I’m using is messy as life, cobbled together. An emergency measure.
We already know which cities will go dry. Which will . . .
In isolation, I thought maybe nature was the answer. No other humans, just the organic Earth and everything else that lived on it. If we were the lice, then all those other plants and animals were what? The too-tiny-to-see worms inhabiting our eyelashes? All the microorganisms living on our bodies, unnoticed until something goes wrong and the benign skin bacteria . . .