creative writing on environmental justice
The only television shows I cannot bear to watch are nature documentaries. I see them and am reminded that the animals in the titular roles are dying, will be dead before I get to travel and behold them. Their Latin names spoken in gravelly voices are almost obituaries by now.
“There goes Panthera leo, stalking its prey. Too bad it’ll be gone by 2050.” The narrator . . .
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 . . .
momma yell from the kitchen julius buzz her in.
buzz who
my ol high school chum dont you forget turn the hall light on
hall light dont work momma
hall black like the devils ass you open the parlor door get light down there
i done it momma
she call it a parlor goodwill couch goodwill chairs i hear this come up the steps high heels who wear them things
mr robinson watch at . . .
Robot Cities roam the baking deserts of the ocean beds like Baba Yaga huts. They strut about on titanic rusting legs so tall that to fall from the crotch to the ground takes a human 30 seconds. They sing songs, these Robot Cities, melancholic folk songs with introspective lyrics. They sing about shame and adoration, they sing about that sweet moment when love has . . .
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 . . .
On Thursday the sun rose red and stayed red, and stared at us red and red through the shifting candlewax layers of sky. We sealed the windows and cancelled gym, and forbade the children to leave until their mothers came for them, and through lunch period they pressed their noses to the glass and left smears of rainbow oils there. Before their faces and ours the bloody . . .
They hired me last Sunday to suck the carbon from the sky. I imagined the job might give my writing wings; I’d fly across the lower atmosphere with a vacuum strapped to my back like a forgotten character from the Ghostbusters franchise. But it turns out to be nothing like that. I was given the job mostly because my pilot’s license is still valid from the war.
Lee, the . . .
I’m lucky because they replaced a bunch of chairs last month and I got a new one. A good chair is important when you spend ten hours a day in a cubicle talking to strangers about their problems. I’ve been here three years and worked on most of Westermorgen’s services which means I can with no thought help grandma set up her wifi. Or troubleshoot banking software. Or . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .