Category: Poetry

Tim Fab-Eme

You don’t know what it means to live unknown,

to smile in the market square as a stranger

haughtily spills your mother’s name on a pig’s head

and you become a boil on Miss World’s lips.

This is how a mangrove lives without prop roots:

 

a branch is starved until its pregnant leaves become

ghosts of IDPs walking backwards to Oloibiri Well 1.

def.: Oloibiri is the longing of a surrogate mum

e.g.: She died birthing crude oil for the outsiders.

 

You don’t know how it feels when a foe

owns your child and you bow calling him, Lord,

while your neighbours cut your neck with snail shells;

 

you can’t protest because your life’s a nursery rhyme

of CH4 NOx VOCs SO2 CO2 PAHs PCBs HFCs

 

and the other poisons that eat me away daily.

Laurinda Lind

In a twenty-year temperature inversion

California walks in to me through

the windows of a hot car with no

air conditioning, it’s summer and

the heater is full-blast, it’s a hundred-

degree day, I am younger and California

is cleaner, the engine doesn’t self-

 

eject and it jets out oil all across

the country. This awful air of

ourselves, we have nowhere to drive

 

but down into it, the freeway

folding over and under, everything

settling which also means seething,

the old rocks with all the time

in-between them and the road

 

only a ribbon of exhaust

held harmless between the jaws

of a geologic age.

Laurinda Lind

Once the doors shut behind you,

shift to saving yourself.

Try steam and chest percussions

to chase factory smoke out of

your lungs, you need to be a human

still. Which is hard to do with dioxin,

so get that out too, with ghee.

If it goes as far

as your liver

 

then a long shot is to blast

it by eating dandelion buds.

Also asbestos comes in like

a cloud of unseeable needles

and won’t like to leave but

while you are learning how long

you have left to live and they are pulling

the professional

 

smile down over their lips

at the clinic, look up

hydrogen peroxide

and hum that to yourself

along with vitamin C

 

until you can find a doctor

who doesn’t want you dead.

Oh, and Atlantic dulse,

a seaweed that strips out mercury, so

you can start filling up with it

all over again in the morning.

Holly J. Hughes

Pinguinus impennis

 

Once, flocks of great auks nested on the rocks

off the coast of the North Atlantic. The first bird

 

to be called a penguin, they were built to swim,

but slow, defenseless on land. Pairs mated for life,

 

nesting shoulder to shoulder in dense rookeries,

laying one egg on bare rock, taking turns tending

 

the egg until it hatched. Devoted parents, they cared

for their young even after they’d fledged;

 

adults were seen swimming, chicks perched

on their backs. In those days, a sighting of great auks

 

quickened a sailor’s heart, signaled landfall ahead.

Their end came when the Europeans’ love for featherbeds

 

brought hunters in search of down (after every eider

had been plucked, gone). To loosen their plumage,

 

auks were boiled in cauldrons over fires fed with the oil

of auks killed before them, since there was little wood to be found.

 

In 1830, a volcano erupted off the tip of Iceland, submerging

the last nesting colony on Geirfuglasker, great auk rock.

 

Refugees, the auks moved to the island of Eldey. There,

on July 3, 1844, the last pair was killed by hunters

 

gathering specimens for a museum. Here’s how one hunter

described the scene: I took him by the neck and he flapped his wings.

 

He made no cry. I strangled him.

 

 

Note: Great auk specialist John Wolley interviewed the two men who killed the last birds, and Sigurour Ísleifsson described the act; the words in italics are his.

 

“Great Auk” originally appeared in Passings, first published by Expedition Press in 2016 and reprinted by Wandering Aengus Press in 2019.

Shikhandin

When the haze descends

upon this sun-speared land, already wet

with sweat and tropical rain, clouds are veiled,

and there is smoke

in the air. Everything is a dismal grey.

 

Beneath September’s scented moon

the flames of lanterns link

together like lovers’ hands. Ghosts

let loose for a day, rise

to meet the haze.

 

My heart turns wistful. Longing

for things I had once abhorred —the acrid blue

of spent crackers. The noise. The oil

of lamps defying a moon

mourning for the night.

 

I sniff around for autumn’s nip

right here in scoops of briny air.

My children are oblivious of my pain,

my friends aghast at my embrace

of the haze.

 

This polluting dust and smoke,

poverty’s export, falling

like toxic pollen on their children—

that’s their haze.

 

I walk under open skies tiara’d by

Singapore’s cityscape, and the static

of this wired metropolis hisses. I

walk on to meet the chins of street lamps

growing fuzzy beards of light.

The smell of insects roasting

in the dying embers

of spent fireworks. A dusk

hanging low in the sky. And a strange

wind murmuring, as if to itself,

a soliloquy about a land

that gropes in the sea for rock and sand.

 

 

Note: Around September each year, fires from vegetation burning in Indonesia affect Singapore’s air.

Hal Y. Zhang

I remember my first death

under dim lights. A smear of fur

and utter dark on the asphalt,

life stretched and flattened onto the killing plane

described by a singular yellow lamp of

suburban wrongness. I snapped

my neck away, blood-phantom-shard-pain

of seeing something terrible in the sublime.

oof, roadkill, my father said, as if we

should be described by how our murderers

twist the knife. All night I dreamt

of vengeance and the black serrated blade

until I was tugged in by the extended arm of my mother

who did not know the new changeling

in her daughter’s body shirking the

garish daylight, helpless to alter our

sun and moon elliptical orbit. Then round the corner

with not-yet-myopic eyes I could see precisely

nothing below new buds of the imprisoned

city pear, midday wheels heaving over

a lacuna blown on the negative reel

of my mind as if maliciously

imagined. I lingered. Here was a

vanished crime scene cleared

of all wrongdoing, not even a televised

sham trial. As my head lightened into her embrace

I could hear my mother’s sinewy panic above

all else, a pietà for the unborn

and undeserving.

Hal Y. Zhang

asphalt in our sinuses,

sipping what we cannot

swallow. ghosts announce themselves:

the Tings, family of five.

youngest daughter likes watching

songbirds in her pleated skirt.

it’s not about pity, but some kind of

justice. parents do factory work, pipe thickets

to meet our needs until

the accident that is

no accident. it’s a feature, the inevitable

explosion when there are so many that stay intact

to pay for the lawsuit. the smoke powers

our lives, our lungs—how to choose one?

how to cast fault on the neighbors, sliced

and diced blocks on pavement with

sincerity, nothing more dangerous. to point fingers

at the designer, the engineer, the architect,

the people for living & breathing closed eyes, the sun

for stinging radiation. blame the ill

for malingering, blame the dead

for standing quiet

for whispers

for pathos

for not fading

Deborah L. Davitt

They never tell you how brown flood water is,

like thin gravy overflowing a plate;

 

that it’s cold, that it smells like mildew—

or how heavy it is,

as you struggle to push

the car door open against the press of it,

the angry river like a giant

leaning against the car’s side,

that if you do,

the water will sweep in, curling cold

against your legs in seconds.

 

They never mention that modern cars

don’t have window-cranks anymore,

that they can’t be opened without

the aid of the drowned engine—

 

they never suggest

that the highway system’s designed

to channel water

like a mass of tangled rivers—

that we’re living

in a delta that can’t be seen

only inferred

through change over time,

 

or that the swamps

and the hungry ocean

are just waiting to take it all back.