creative writing on environmental justice
Apricot died, three days into the heat wave. She had just turned three, with no underlying health issues, but temperatures had soared to 120 degrees that weekend, and not even the full strength of Dani’s air conditioner could keep the cat cool, much less alive. One minute, Apricot was a spry thing, young enough to live forever, and the next, she was gone, immobile . . .
When I was younger,
say twelve or thirteen.
I asked my preacher Dad
“How does God sound when he speaks to a mortal man like you?”
He said “Try to talk with water in your mouth,
multiply the rumble you make by infinity.
Try to read a message of inverted alphabets
arranged backwards and italized like birds standing on a rope.
Imagine the mighty . . .
The long list of blame is endless. We point fingers at each other. Someone says Adam caused it. Why did he allow Eve to deceive him? The women point the fingers right back at the men. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Real men take responsibility for their actions. The juju man blames no one in particular. Our ancestors are infuriated at us. We have bitten more . . .
“The Egyptians understood the rise of the sun each day was not guaranteed.”
“Please pause.” The house voice stopped. Dev missed the kind female persona almost instantly, but he needed focus. He owned a dozen books on ancient Egypt and wanted to donate some or all. He didn’t require any of them since he had digital copies. Physical books could be a deceptive comfort. . . .
Already, the sunlight is shrinking like an old shirt
that barely covers the belly, even while it glows
gilding the dried up cattails, the snapped branches
that pierce the cloudless sky like a severed bone.
Only smudges of light left on the slick leaves
languishing in icy mud, and on the rushing squirrels,
newly fattened for their long, incredible fast. . . .
In a way, Silya had grown up with the bears. Her father had, for a time, worked for the Interspecies Language Group, cooing to the cubs and whispering dirty Slavic limericks and snippets of Tolstoy whenever the researchers left the room. He was a subversive, her mother had said, but always with a laugh. “It’s why they killed him.” Following the bear’s lives consumed . . .
come, sit on the mountain, and
watch us speak to the stars.
their language is
morse code and phasic shifts;
we paint in roads and villages
and the hum of high-voltage
transformers, we murmur
in street lamps and stadiums
and the ill-mannered leak
of a window.
like shouting through high wind,
we are veiled
by clouds and magnetic storms and
the jealous . . .
From the dock, the sandbar across the bay looked awash with shipwreck survivors dragging themselves from the surf. It was low tide. The bay was a mirror of sky reflecting off the green Atlantic. Corin guided his Boston Whaler through the shallows, hoping to ferry the stranded back to shore. He already called 911 and the Coast Guard. Their nearest boat was an hour . . .
bleach blonde was the look of the summer:
colorless skeleton of polyps and aging fish spines.
rocks smoothly slate gray as salt water
grinds it down; it had no algal coat to protect and
nourish, no obsidian shelled mussels hanging off
the edges, beating themselves to the rhythm of the tide.
the moon rises and so the tide flows, warming waves
crashed, . . .
I.
What do the ravenous settlers know of faith? Praying on their knees under wooden roofs, without the wind on their cheeks and the sky over their heads, away from the roar of the rivers and the whispers of the leaves? How much is their faith worth when they persecute and murder for a metal cross, in the name of someone who never joins them in song nor dance?
No. . . .