creative writing on environmental justice
We gathered Her pieces from across the land.
She left them under a palmyra tree where She huddled overnight. I would say ‘slept,’ but I think no one there truly slept, unless, perhaps, the infants. I imagine they dreamt of the earth cracking around them.
Others were deep in drifts of white beach sand, itself made up of fragmented bodies of long-dead sea life.
One . . .
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.
Robin’s toy nestled in my hand, purring with something akin to life. The clear ball was filled with undulating blobs that changed color when they bumped into one another, merging into new forms before splitting off in a graceful mitosis. Coming together, falling apart, together and apart, over and over. Ahimsa told me it was inspired by a pre-Depletion Era artifact . . .
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. . . .
Going from Kyiv to my mother’s native land, a village in the Cherkasy region, we used to take a road that ran like a thin ribbon across the endless dark blue water body. I have always been fascinated by these enormous reservoirs and this overarching lake called the “Cherkasy Sea”. As a child, I knew that Ukraine had two seas in the South, far away from where I live. . . .
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 . . .
Artist’s statement
“After Gaza” does not mean that the Gaza genocide is over—not only because the genocide is ongoing, but because Gaza, like the Shoah and the Nakba, will never be over. “Never again” feels like “the hope” that Benjamin said was for those who have none.
Theodor Adorno said that poetry “after Auschwitz” is barbaric, but you only live “after . . .
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 . . .
Akka left for the war. She didn’t come back, not right away.
For a while, we thought that our mother might go, since she was the marine biologist, but Akka was a pilot, an astronaut in training.
The monsters had come from the sea, and we had to take the fight to the deep dark waters, so alike and yet so different from the vast quiet and emptiness of space. Deep pressure . . .
The glass in my veins
still remembers white sand.
Gold-stopped, the head of Crassus
lolls beneath the raft of the filling station,
a reliquary of fossil greed.