creative writing on environmental justice
In ten thousand B.C.E., a family of three made shelter beneath my branches. My family watched through the wild winds as they shivered together against the winter fury. I waited for their cooling bodies to nourish my grasping roots.
But with a fallen branch and a magic spell, they brought a shard of summer into the heart of the frozen forest, and I began to wonder . . .
The last goodbye Simon had to say was to the tree. It had been a while, but he knew where to pull off the mountain road and knew where to walk sure as a dog going home. The old hills rolling without a spot flat enough to set a dinner plate, the twitching sounds of birds and squirrels, the sky the color of old jeans tossed over the June canopy: leaves of maple, basswood, and . . .
One thousand apologies to my great-grandfather and the generations of fishermen I come from. I want to be an astronaut.
In the summer of 2019, a box jellyfish, known colloquially as the seawasp, stung the girl’s left ankle. She had just resurfaced after a night dive and was stargazing, lying on her back and imagining the worlds miles above and below her. She’d . . .
Trail Diary, Day 377
Birds: Barred owl, still and silent at the top of the old oak. Chickadee on her buckthorn branch at the edge of the clearing. Waiting for me and my pocket of seeds.
Animals: None to be seen in the trailcam frame, but hoofprints in the mud by the creek. Deer. A big buck by the depth of the imprint.
Notes: I couldn’t walk the trail today, not after the . . .
We are sorry for the way this will arrive,
damp and damagesome. No doubt
the peculiar constitutions of our nations,
catastrophically susceptible to each other,
account for the long gap in correspondence
though here we find no record of any sort
to suggest a former, well-established channel.
That is, however, the way of our state;
we operate, as you can see, impromptu, . . .
The house was wide open, all the windows lit with yellow light of a warmer shade than he’d ever seen in the city, and the table was laid for one. That was the way my father always told it. It was a strange tale to tell a child at bedtime, but I loved him to recount every detail—each dish set out for him, every floral pattern on every serving spoon. I marvelled at the exacting . . .
My fiancée’s aunt takes us to look for owls.
We wear ice cleats. New family, new ways,
but I’m an indoor cat (cats are another thing
I’ve had to learn). I am new at this, new
as the ring on my finger, but my love
puts on earmuffs and glows in the full moon.
I pull up my hood. We stand in a circle
and strain for owl calls. Who-cooks-for-you?
Who-cooks-for-you? my new aunt . . .
The forest preserve district wants me to cut down trees. With a saw in one hand and loppers in the other, I oblige.
As a child I got my destructive tendencies out in videogames and martial arts. Beating all of my friends at Street Fighter—and gloating about it—was fine. Plucking flowers was not. Even the ubiquitous dandelions like tiny weak suns in the lawn grass . . .
maybe ground is meant to ripple
and sag like skin showing
her age. the wisdom
of roots aching to surface
maybe we’re meant to stumble
and break blades made for vain
manicuring to steep amazement
in unpredictable growth
you downed nana cottonwood onto
teenaged limbs, too young
to hold weighted life, a shock
of white, stripped . . .
We had to close up another building that day—bolt the doors shut, board over the windows, stop up the chimney and all the vents with concrete. Hank Parker came stumbling out of his house, gasping and cussing, dragging his two oldest kids by the arm while his wife huddled on the sidewalk with the three-year-old. As soon as Hank got clear, he was shaking the two kids, . . .