creative writing on environmental justice
Khopesh tugs against her harness, ready to go. She’s a good sniffer, food-motivated and eager to work for treats. Like most sniffers, she’s an African giant pouched rat, about as long as my forearm if you don’t include her tail. We’ve been partnered up for almost two months now.
I try not to get attached to sniffers. Handlers often get reassigned, and the rats don’t . . .
They die in the heat, sometimes. They
die in the afternoon sun, they die
beneath the moon. They need
more water, more shade. They
need—
I could feed this garden
with my blood.
pretty thing come closer
your jaw so tense in the gardening aisle
I brush my knuckles against the
trigger hairs on your mouth, ask about your
waterwheel & sundew cousins,
when you last digested an arachnid, I
admire your hunger, the biology of it,
I read that it takes a tenth of a second
for your teeth to snap
Have you ever seen a behemoth? The ones brought in by the foreigners
after the silent war? I was a boy, eight, nine years old, when I saw it.
Have you ever seen a forest catch fire? Your entire village’s herd destroyed
in an instant? Of course not. The behemoth was eight feet tall & breathed fire.
It’s body was made of metal and painted black. The behemoth destroyed . . .
(Selected from the field guide left on your nightstand)
Common Raven:
Your favorite bird. There was a big one that lived in the hospital courtyard and, on your good days, I’d take you out to see it.
there will never be so many sea lilies.
they will never roll like meadows and lace
their brittle eyelash hands, nod
their heads and kiss. their endless
fields will smother
on ash. they will bow their necks
and break, the ending world
will fall on them like snow
soft shards of dead things.
one day you will lift
your withered hand and touch
the coffee cup to your paper . . .
It is with sorrow that this paper announces the passing of one of our town’s greatest treasures, Wendy “Darling” Marszałek. She died on August 18th, 2081, in her early eighties. Contrary to her frequent predictions, she did not die “crushed under a pile of old tech”; she went peacefully, in her sleep, at her home here in Adden, MO, just a few miles from where she . . .
Dustin picks up the sand dollar and rubs it between his fingers, feels the strange chalkiness of it. He studies the delicate etchings, the five-pointed flower, before putting it in his mouth and closing his eyes. The texture against his tongue. The light salt.
Organics are some of the coolest things left over from the Before Times, and Dustin feels like finding . . .
The whole world is a feast of runaway craving,
of a curse that has outrun its uses.
Early on, our ancestors twisted up,
moved root through rock, spread fragile first leaves wide.
All land was new, mountainous, unsoiled.
The forests that grew have lasted so long,
spreading across the world at glacial pace.
We stretch and recede, grow up and move out.
Famine . . .
The world ended in ice
as scientists predicted
lab coat Noahs
ignored
as they counted the animals
two by two
into their ark
and lifted off