creative writing on environmental justice
House at night is quiet despite the insects and bird cries and creatures. Floating in liquid. As if the house were sloshing around. A container in which fluid was sloshing. Tidal house. House waves. Amniotic. We cling. We root. We tumble. The sweet gum tree has a greater tolerance for salt than the oak and other hardwoods, and there’s the loblolly pine, fast-growing . . .
Cheena’s so quiet, she never talks anymore after her shifts. She just comes home and puts her clothes away. Drapes herself in a white sheet, tied like a toga, doesn’t worry about anything hanging out or staying in. It’s the shape the toga makes against her thighs that matters to her. The strong edges and the void covered by cloth. I wonder if it’s true what they say, . . .
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Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It’s been ages, but we’re ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. . . .
People talking about the phases of the silvery moon,
the Peter Pan brightness beckoning in the stars—
I haven’t seen a distant sun in months,
and the fairy tales have shimmered away.
No celestial pin pricks in the darkened cyclorama,
no blazes from back in a time before my tiny self
tried to sparkle into existence. I live in
a perfect night, bundled beneath the
suffocation . . .
605,421,005 modular sensors floated across Earth’s waters, analyzing around 54% of the oceans’ chemical makeup. 26,304 of these sensors lay along the passenger ship Afẹmọju’s trans-Atlantic route. This was a microscopic percentage of the global sensor count, but sufficient to keep track of the vessel’s trail of pollutants. The crew and passengers were . . .
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Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It’s been ages, but we’re ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew . . .
So just when humans started dying due to mass suffocation for lack of air to breathe, the teens took it upon themselves to solve the problem and took root—literally. The adults weren’t so surprised, as one would imagine, when the first girl turned into a sturdy Narra tree with dainty yellow flowers. Wasn’t that what rebellious teenagers do anyway? It was just . . .
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Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It’s been ages, but we’re ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging . . .
“Men argue. Nature acts.”
—Voltaire
Palm trees wave their heavy heads,
canna lilies rise brilliant and bloody
in their beds, and the tide floods the streets.
They call it sunny day flooding, because it hasn’t rained
for weeks, and still the water comes.
I haven’t cried in weeks, and still—
I hear the polar caps are nearly free
of ice, that the sea will . . .
(listed as extinct in 2018)
Little black-headed song
bird, discovered
only recently—1973,
the year Secretariat won
the Triple Crown—so much
relentless muscle
racing a circle
while this cryptic bird
flitted up Haleakala’s
steep slope—moss-tangled,
dripping ferns—snapping up
snails and waxworms.
Now imagine this:
a last ditch effort, . . .