creative writing on environmental justice
2020
It is March.
I have slept through my alarm every day this week.
Confusion until the silence of dawn reveals
that commuters are no longer driving past my windowsill
where a dahlia tuber, freshly buried in dirt, prepares for spring.
Their bodies roused my body
and so we met the day together.
No more.
The wheel of probable harm
falls forward over the inaction
of a state, over the houses
as fangs along a cancerous jaw.
The rate of loss is not hesitant,
finger-tapping uncertainty
finalizing the weight of itself
in a legislative session.
My uncle swears you can tell what kind of man someone is
by how he stacks wood in a burn barrel.
We don’t use those anymore but he still talks like they matter.
Still keeps one in the back, rusted and dented, filled with junk mail and busted dreams.
The landfill’s too far now,
gas is too high,
and they shut down bus service out here.
So we’ve been stuffing old campaign . . .
I leap out of bed. & night burns at my feet.
Awake. My morning is ashes—naked &
quiet, because the birds have flown to a country
where the trees can dance & my tongue can
only go as far as the border. I’m nothing short
of tragedy, so I drink myself to stupor. My
memories are alcoholic & melancholic. . . .
During my grandmother’s prayers, I would watch
the cracked earth just outside her windowpane, the dust lifting
like sermons lost in the dry air. My favorite story
was of the river that once carved through the valley,
its body endless, spilling into the fields. Less famous
is how the Big Pharm diverted it, how the heat pressed
its lips against . . .
Mississippi flows carries secrets in silt the bronze serpent’s scales
Cicada static rasps against the high noon sun
Trilobite locked in the bluff’s ancestral stone silence
Oil refinery flare stains the bruised . . .
hear me out please my home has grown into gunfire
the bullet is going round again on the news my people dangle
between nightmares between mouthfuls of regrets in search
of quiet in another headline a child left home . . .
WOLF POINT4
The Lewis and Clark Expedition passed by here, westward bound, in May 1805. Fur trappers and traders followed them a few years later. Steamboats began making it from St. Louis up the Missouri as far as Fort Benton in the early 1860s. Wolf Point was the halfway point between Bismarck and Fort Benton. Wood choppers supplied cord wood for boats stopping . . .
PINKERTON HOT SPRINGS5
Even though this land was Ute territory, the upper Animas River Valley was first settled by prospectors in the spring of 1860. Charles Baker, returning from the mines north of Silverton, established “Old Animas City” and built the first bridge across the Animas River. The community lasted less than a year before it was abandoned. During . . .