creative writing on environmental justice
Sometimes I live in the country
Sometimes I live in town
Sometimes I have a great notion
To jump into the river and drown
—Leadbelly, “Goodnight Irene”
It’s been nine years since the last 500-year flood, which means we’re due for another one in five or ten. Climate change math: the only thing you know for sure is that the numbers are always the wrong order of magnitude. . . .
We stand above the water when we stand at the water’s edge. The foreshore is elevated, offering protection against hurricanes that come with harvest moons. Williamsburg began with rowboats, and then came steamboats, and then a bridge, and then many forms of forgetting about the river.
Recently, we started to remember.
Williamsburg is not the Brooklyn that . . .
I wrote this issue’s call for submissions thinking of architecture. Thinking of drowned cities and burning ones, of sun-cracked concrete where the water can come in and fields gone too fast towards some warmer version of themselves, not even fallow any longer so much as lost. Of waiting for the next hurricane, on the twelfth floor of a Manhattan apartment building, . . .
August 9, 2018
I have paper! I have a pencil! I’m in jail! The world is sharply divided. There is a here and a not here, a yes and a no. Mostly the women in green, like me, are broken and hurt, of course. The women in uniforms are thoughtful and gentle, at least to me, at least for now. All is well. I sleep, eat, wonder, try to phone out, but can’t make things work, so I settle . . .
The city of Yonkers is being invaded in many different ways at once.
Among the types of invasive plants that plague Westchester county are Kudzu, Mile-a-Minute, Oriental Bittersweet, Porcelain Berry, Multiflora Rose, Purple Loosestrife and Japanese Knotweed. Each has a distinct personality; they can be identified by leaf shape, size, color and the aggression . . .
Indicators
On New Year’s Eve, in small towns throughout Kentucky and Louisiana, people celebrate as they always do by setting off fireworks. The eruption of noise and light startles flocks of blackbirds, which rise up into the tumult and quickly become disoriented. While the people below dance and sing and embrace, the birds, mostly unseen in the darkness, . . .
I’m on the side of the road with Bun Lai, the chef at Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Connecticut, and he’s telling me how to eat knotweed, an invasive species. It’s a chilly day turning into a warm day, and around town, it being May, there’s talk about whether the weather is acting like May or not.
We still have our seasons here in southern Connecticut. Winter is cold and . . .
I kneel on the ground, a knife in both hands, its sharpened blade pointed at the center of the earth. I thrust the weight of my body against the wooden handle until my palms hurt—still, the serrated edge penetrates no more than a centimeter. The sun, high overhead and unsympathetic, beats down on my scalp. I breathe, re-adjust my grip, and heave into the knife again. . . .
“Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was ‘as bad as’ Custer. Nonviolence declares that Africans could have stopped the slave trade with hunger strikes and . . .
It starts with me in a frozen parking lot in Detroit “on vacation”. I’m scanning my phone, looking at my friend’s facebook pictures from his vacation in Thailand. “Here’s me at the beach. Here’s me riding an elephant.” The barrage of social media sunshine gets under my skin. In retaliation I share a picture of a snowdrift at the edge of the iced over lot, its surface . . .