creative writing on environmental justice
Someone has left the building. The building is now
a rubble of bones. Butterflies are sometimes kisses,
but mostly larvae. Language: a cocoon to emerge into.
To come down from the tree means breaking
a bough. Rocking to wake. The world is a nursery
and rhymes are waves. To be a person describing
is to be a rat scavenging at the crumbs of language
for . . .
after the storm
there is a dryad on my roof
and the river is licking the porch
like it can taste freedom in the foundation
got news for you, bayou baby,
there’s only things to hold you back in there
best look elsewhere for escape.
I splash out to take a better look
and the tree tells me to be careful of fire ants
floating spheres of pain
surrounding the precious queen in . . .
“You hear about those people putting gills in their necks?”
“Yeah.”
“It won’t let you live underwater, y’know, like a fish, but it gives you a bit of time. Lets you stay down longer.”
“Yeah.”
“Man, I’d kill for some gills sometimes. Remember when I got my arm stuck? I could’ve had time to get free on my own, wouldn’t have gone loopy. Wouldn’t have needed you there.” . . .
Salt had crept in while he was away, and now the freshwater wetlands of Gino’s childhood are a marsh, brackish and fickle. There is the soccer field where he’d stained his knees; it had been a low, dry rise of earth bracketed by mud and cordgrass, and today is impassable, a thicket of cattails in algae-skinned water, a humming choir of insects. And here the Jiffy . . .
My hometown was already a wreck by the
time I arrived. Nimishillen Creek ran
motor oil and sewer slops behind the
high school, and downtown disappeared in
smoke the day fathers lit their coal furnaces.
Deer and bluebirds were as rare as the
people who worried about the deer and
the bluebirds, and we hurled beer cans
onto the roadside . . .
oh to be breathing
in a strange
land of strangulation
shown from different
angles where extreme degrees
of difficulty make it harder
to draw anything other
than a gun
oh to be one
with the lung of the universe
expanding . . . inhaling the charred
steak of dead stars, kicking up red
dust on Mars in the pale faces
of fear and dread . . .
To those who can’t stand
the rain:
let it flow
and move mountains.
cry me a spout
for watered mustard seeds
to sprout from well-tended
gardens of grief,
eroding rocks, making hard
places bend to the will
of irrigated tear ducts.
cry me a mountain range
so i can measure variations
in river steepness and rainfall
and calculate the pain
carved . . .
They called us resilient.
They think it only means strong.
They say the Filipino Spirit is all positivity,
is smiling when the storm hits,
is finding the light in the darkness,
no matter what.
They don’t know that daybreak finds us
shadowed and shaking,
breaking and almost broken,
caked in dirt and the debris of someone else’s
irresponsibility.
Because . . .
In a way, hope is a failure of imagination. In a way, it is a flourishing.
It is a failure because I cannot imagine the end. The world goes on, and on and on, even when we wish it would stop.
I know how bad it is. The emission levels, the microplastics, the pipelines, the species gone, the rogue genes introduced, the coral dying, the water rising. The infrastructure . . .
I have resisted writing a Pandemic [insert “poem/story/essay/play/song”] just as I have resisted writing a BLM [____], or a #MeToo [____]. Those borders, those things that can be designated and specificated have given me pause as far as I can remember.
In part it comes from perpetual rage: I want to write about all the worldwide historical injustices faced . . .