creative writing on environmental justice
White wave heads were making a line that stretched northward parallel to the coastline. A gentle sea breeze changed to an updraft on the sunshine-warmed land and pushed an osprey’s wings up softly. The osprey rose higher and higher into the sky in wide circles. The bird felt the heat on its back. It was not uncomfortable. Its feathers held the warmed air, and it . . .
1. Following the conventional naming system created by the Court of the Five Silver Moons.
2. Estimates derived from a survey of original documents and scholarly papers. The claim of 77,777 watermaidens by the Ambassador of the Court of the Indigo Sun, frequently cited by later scholars, may be safely dismissed as propaganda intended to convince Court members . . .
The mangroves inhale her, a buzzing, air-thick, knotted world. She has seen eighty-one years of their change—
Eighty-two? Perhaps eighty. The decades, like the roots, tangle themselves together, extend into murky depths. In her best sturdy shoes, Sik pads as quickly as she can over the silt. Her soles squelch in the softened edges. Brackish water laps at her . . .
*after Greta Gaard’s Toward a Queer Ecofeminism
But maybe nature isn’t even
a “her” . . . . When nature is feminized
and thereby erotized,
and culture is masculinized*,
the trouble starts, and it’s the bad kind.
When the girl puts on a summer dress:
“she’s asking for it”.
When the soil is “too rich not to steal”:
“she’s asking . . .
“And the ship, the black freighter,
disappears out to sea, and on it is me.”
Wetlands become one with the rising gulf
as oil rigs drink the earth’s secret juices
and phallic man-made things do other rapey things
to things to which we have ascribed yonic features
and so forth in a pastiche of sexes assigned
to things that never asked not to be sexless.
Does Mother . . .
Last September, they told us not to drink the water.
Our water, from our river, the same water that’s cooled every summer thirst, washed every dish at every birthday party, rinsed the sap off every Christmas since the day I was born.
The advisory was only a precaution, the news broadcast reassured us, but the Food Lion and Harris Teeter shelves were empty in hours . . .
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Today on the Reckoning Press podcast we have Catherine Rockwood reading NIB’s quiet flash story “Sold for Parts”, about surviving, coping, in a world of loss. This piece seems particularly relevant here in the U.S., after a series of Supreme Court decisions that signals a precipitous erosion of . . .
Among the stones, there was a flower that reached out to me.
Many years ago, I dreamt of the Arabian Nights
When I woke up I found myself laughing
Nothing wrong with the laughter
But we shouldn’t take history seriously when it turned into a big joke.
I sat at the edge of the battle
Dressed like a warrior
I am not a half person anymore
No Matter how my society categorizes . . .
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Hi everyone, I’m Catherine Rockwood, and today on the Reckoning Magazine Podcast I’m going to be reading “The Watcher on the Wall” by Rebecca Bratten Weiss. And this poem is featured in Reckoning 6, which we are very proud of and which hope you will pick up or survey.
So the way we’d like to order the podcast . . .
Lured by the first snow of winter,
my dead father managed to struggle out
of his grave on the far hill, managed to stagger
down into the walnut grove to meet me
as the heavy flakes fell.
He did not look bad. There
was a grandeur in his features in the half-light of
my torch.
What is it the snow does for the soil, again?
he asked me. Fixes nitrogen, I answered. No, wait
that’s . . .