creative writing on environmental justice
A new oceanographic
ice fades from underneath.
they knew. Tunnels rut
miles of eyeless organisms, carry
of earth to pole. The ice looses
empties itself. Crust crumbles
revelation: glacial
The ocean plumbs deeper than
floor, caverned under
water from belt
its undersides,
into iceberg-speckled sea.
Once the glacier stiffed its lower lip,
Now she slopes, . . .
when you realize there’s nothing
you can do,
your limbs fill with light.
you rise above lands
cordoned off like VIP areas.
watch the tide swell
over the sweet bodies
of dead bees, smoke
the last air, crown
yourself in final
trees, set yourself
on fire. . . .
“There’s no fixing this.”
My grandmother waves at the tv.
Polar bears are stranded on a shrinking ice floe.
I shut my eyes.
I meet with a student.
She’s dealing with an anxiety disorder.
Her brown eyes pool with tears.
“Sometimes it can seem all too much, you know?”
I tell her that just showing up every day is an act of courage.
News coverage of Hurricane Fiona floods . . .
A lumberjack has accidently sawn through his friend;
this sort of thing happens quite frequently. But there is
plenty of wood one might use for their coffins, collected
from a rainforest stripped for its crude oil. Incidentally,
this provides plenty of barren soil for one to bury them:
the split-in-half lumberjacks, interred in a felled mausoleum. . . .
Line up your cars, drive to the storm post-evacuation
7 pm. September 10th. The Keys.
Grab your guitar and serenade the hurricane with Wonderwall
8 p.m. September 10th. Daytona Beach.
Buy the hurricane a drink; ask if she’s from Tennessee.
9 p.m. September 10th. Miami-Dade.
Give the hurricane your number and ask her for sexts.
9:15 p.m. Haha, then what? 🙂
Ask . . .
Surely I will breathe fresh air
Surely I will drink clean water
Surely I will not suffer alone
Surely I will not rage with fever
Surely I will not be turned away
To cramp and bleed unaided
Surely I will root in rich soil
Surely my voice will be heard
For what I meant, not what I said;
For what I should have meant.
Surely my trees will not burn,
Nor my bridges, nor my books. . . .
When I say I miss being with the whales,
what I mean is sitting on the panga
in a lagoon in the blue middle of nowhere.
Nothing to do but be this body,
let the other bodies come, rise
from stillness to rest beneath my palm,
the ache to take up space—
live as exclamation,
breach-bloomed in this world.
When I say I miss being with the whales,
I want water
the holiest kind of . . .
The trash patch did not break us up. The trash patch (or vortex, I should say; it isn’t stationary, it is not an island) did not poison the way I look at you or turn your words to stinging flies. We did not get physical; we did not even throw anything. There is a whole toxic ecosystem built around the microscopic plastic particles—a spread of microorganisms feed on . . .
I sit with my mother across piles of roses, stems clipped
and lined straight in three rows, intersecting. Some chalked
anarchy symbols, others uterus reclaiming. We don’t know
where the roses come from, but nobody will pick them up,
then a few do. Put them back, a trance over the buds.
A communal understanding not to touch. I look for the artist
as my mother translates . . .
Square teeth gummed
with grey filament,
cuspid and bicuspid,
cleave open my clavicle &
peck out the heart like a wet pip
sizzling. A glut, a guttering, head
engorged and swelling like a tick. Santé.
It is our own fault, really.
Diligent hands decode our bodies
to a riddle of bone, leave us segmented
in painless pieces.
Can you stomach me
now? Stripped and stippled . . .