creative writing on environmental justice
After Nnadi Samuel
The river no longer sings to me; and I know,
in the basin of my throat, what holds it back.
The roses now are molting into thistles, and
I cannot hold back the despair. The way the
earth gave open at the taste of the dusty
evening cyclone, even the shuttling flowers
By the edge of a ferry boat
I let go of my earthly tether.
Whatever wishes to enter the listless
Waters and satisfy their thirst
Must come with its rampageous longing.
I, an i of conundrum memories, tear
All of my mothers’ pictures from my heart.
The way a gunshot plunges silence into the thick
Skin of life. I forget all my lovers, the way the living, inevitably
Forgets . . .
It may take a decade or longer to train a human clinician, but it took a team of Ministry of Health technicians only seven days to certify me a Clinically Adept Machine Sentience (CAMS) and hand me control of their newest clinic on Zamalek Island. My mission: to keep the locals healthy enough to perform their essential jobs in and around Cairo, and away from human-staffed . . .
Dear Reader,
The author of “The River Forgets Us First” is broadly suspected of employing generative AI in her writing, and she misrepresented herself in a number of ways when submitting to Reckoning. Accordingly, we will no longer be working with this author. We will not be publishing this poem on our website, and we’ll be removing it from future copies . . .
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 . . .