creative writing on environmental justice
Sunlight hits the top floor of One Eastwaters Tower in a hard, bright wave. When the afternoon glow also strikes the lake, everything turns to dazzle.
I’ve lived high-lakeside for three years. I still startle at the ripple of water-light on the floor, dappling my skin, sparking off the bits of my exoskel that are otherwise invisible no matter what I’m wearing. . . .
I’m bad at leaving. My friends Monica and Jeff hosted a high school graduation party for their daughter Juliana on the back patio of an Oakmont restaurant. They served barbecued chicken and steak kabobs and deep-fried chicken rolls. I drank an eight-ounce glass of wine, which contributed to my not leaving. I told Erik I’d be home by 7, but at 7:30 I texted him to . . .
They never tell you how brown flood water is,
like thin gravy overflowing a plate;
that it’s cold, that it smells like mildew—
or how heavy it is,
as you struggle to push
the car door open against the press of it,
the angry river like a giant
leaning against the car’s side,
that if you do,
the water will sweep in, curling cold
against your legs in seconds.
The wall looms outside Amanda’s window, its overlapping concrete segments curving into the distance like a vast serpent. It rises to the height of a four-story building and stretches to the north and south until it merges with the horizon. Three years ago when she first arrived at the refugee camp, before the water came, she couldn’t stop touching the wall. Nobody . . .
Sometimes I live in the country
Sometimes I live in town
Sometimes I have a great notion
To jump into the river and drown
—Leadbelly, “Goodnight Irene”
It’s been nine years since the last 500-year flood, which means we’re due for another one in five or ten. Climate change math: the only thing you know for sure is that the numbers are always the wrong order of magnitude. . . .
@antediluvian: london isn’t alive, zuri
@antediluvian: london is just a city. it can’t hurt you.
@ZRI_: yeah yeah i know
@ZRI_: just let me be delusional for a minute okay i’m having a Time over here
@antediluvian: can you get here? are the railways still up?
@ZRI_: lmao no
@ZRI_: power’s off and everything
@ZRI_: it’s whatever. it be like this sometimes
@antediluvian: . . .
“Reservoirs created by the [Hydro Quebec] James Bay
Project cover an area of 12,241 square kilometers,
the largest bodies of water created by humankind.”
—from the James Bay Road website
your power needs water
traced to distant points of light like stars
unreachable foreign
reflected . . .
We stand above the water when we stand at the water’s edge. The foreshore is elevated, offering protection against hurricanes that come with harvest moons. Williamsburg began with rowboats, and then came steamboats, and then a bridge, and then many forms of forgetting about the river.
Recently, we started to remember.
Williamsburg is not the Brooklyn that . . .
Barren Island is the only place or locality in or near the city of New York for the destruction of garbage and dead animals in the city, and is the only proper place for the rendering of the same . . . .
—The New York Supplement, Volume 70 (New York State Reporter Vol. 104), containing the decisions of the Supreme and lower courts of record . . .
the night of the windstorm
the city swayed
steel branches wrapped in old concrete
the leaves fall in strict equations:
material tolerance plus environmental
pressure plus the work of builders’ hands.
in the morning, we count cracks:
birch lines in the drywall laid bare
for the deer. the corner panhandler lost
his hat in the night. spare . . .