Category: Reckoning 8

Riis Beach

Aureliano Segundo ask[ed the Arabs] with his usual informality what mysterious resources they had relied upon so as not to have gone awash in the storm . . . one after the other, from door to door, they returned a crafty smile and a dreamy look, and without any previous consultation they all gave the answer:

“Swimming.”

 

—Gabriel Garcia Marques, One Hundred Years of Solitude 

 

Leave home. Take what 

I want to survive.

The rest: waterlogged,

pawned, landfilled

by landlords, emptied

photographs of Petra,

Pyramids, child eyes

kneaded into layers of

pecan shells, diapers,

coke cans, chicken bones.

Chew pith, sweet with bitter.

Know father could carry 

less over the Jordan River

and all waters after that.

How he loved even

the worst fried chicken.

 

I only wear 20%

of the identities I own

80% of the time. Remember

sunk costs of saving 

those who don’t want my help.

Good daughter, ungrateful

American, robot. Learn

organic chemistry and become

the Teflon they say I am.

Give one past me away,

everyday. Declutter sorrys,

hoarded words, lab coat,

hair straightener, southern drawl.

Fill a bag with memory

clutter. Use a different bag

to control my breathing.

 

Take pictures from

river to unattainable sea,

of any journey to the ocean

for when I forget what 

I promised myself, and him. 

Replace memories evicted,

displace inheritance of displacement,

so I could savor the shore

while I was still young.

 

One more reminder: a wound,

a hope, a desire expands

to fill the space I allow it.

 

The River Jordan dries up

by baptism held at a rifle’s end

while the rising Western seafront

advances on its deathwish.

 

My promise: I breathe life and

don’t release a thing to the sea.

It is filled with enough trash

human intention already,

hoards everything we give it.

 

Take with you only

what you want to survive.

Trust the small creatures

who tread these waves of passage,

coiling your hair to currents,

kissing your salty skin.

A Chanterelle Empress & Porcini Prince at the Precipice of the World

For K Phung

 

My best male friend in college was a fun guy.

Vietnamese—we share the same “middle name”—

Le, although his is Lê and mine Lệ. That extra

dot carried a lot of weight. Lê, an unassuming pear.

My dad insisted 丽 meant beautiful.

 

My aunt insisted Lì meant crying.

Names get complicated when navigating

three worlds. Consider the mushroom,

not flora, not fauna, but a secret

third thing. A bounty hiding in plain sight—

 

like the two of us. Our majesty masked

by expectations of Asian America.

He “wanted” to become a doctor,

a pediatrician trading lollipops

and smiles to snotty kids.

I chose to be a chemical engineer,

a magician converting matter

to fuel like fungi—

 

our wholeness deep underground,

right next to our group of visible

queer friends. I wonder if he ever

considered death, a self-destruction

on the way to reincarnation.

 

But he was too practical

and artful to consider such

a dismal reinvention.

 

He worried about my future.

Told me to get a credit card,

walked me home, afraid

I’d be taken in the dark.

In my head, that was the moment

 

we became potential beard and wig—

a mess of manicured hair

to be presented to parents,

if needed. As if our mothers’ imaginations

were limited by the pebbled paths of their pasts.

As if a spouse is a requirement

for attainment of the American Dream.

 

But deep in the woods, nấm

show us the way to immortality—

how to pen our poison,

how to draw the world

in networks of beauty,

and how to be

a truffle in the rough.

 

My favorite picture of us is after

we won Risk: Global Domination,

my stupid croakies hanging

from my neck like enokis

and his hair shiny and black

like the inside of a glazed portobello.

 

Both of us in lime green,

mid-laughter, knowing we have all

the time in the world.

Wade

The ruins sitting quiet on the belly

of the earth, the slush of water filling

the bleached street, the mouth of deluge

raising a toast to white hills, and

the farmers’ agony and its harvest basket

of tears, are the bodies of this poem

sickening my inside like a claw.

 

My wet body, a flotsam at edge

with the drenched cushions

scattered across the void, through

the roil of heavens, the sepia grief.

 

How the sky unheld a dirty flood

against a city clogged with neglect,

robust at the throat of its sewerage.

 

Tell God, this city is not a kitchen basin.

Say His name is near to the homeless teeth

gnashing in the dripping cold. Say i body

enough colours in my protest to rainbow

this wreckage into a fleeing breeze.

 

Yet every second of feet-sweeping,

I dread if the mouth of flood is shallow

enough to hold my head above the waters,

trembling with step towards a dry exile.

Tisha b’Av

When Israel finished its retraction of the rights of all immigrants, women, queers, and others, and reduced the Knesset to an advising body for a permanent non-elected executive, when that nation stripped away the rights of the remaining Palestinians, all rights, until they were but animals before the law, the day came when soldiers entered East Jerusalem and rounded up everyone and sent them on trucks to the Negev to live or die, it did not matter, and those who stayed behind were annihilated by missiles, the hospitals, the schools, the people, all gone—on that day, the bulldozers at last arrived on the Temple Mount and drove through the protesters like Moses parting the Red Sea and in the end it was so sudden, one moment there was a shrine, the next debris, and from some of that very material the Israelis began to build the long-yearned-for Third Temple and when it was done, so too ended an entire era of Judaism, and good riddance—it had served us well enough for two thousand years but we turned to the East and saw a Bet-Ha’Mikdash and a Kohen Gadol and a Sanhedrin, and now all halacha was obsolete, no reason to do teshuvah when we now had korbanot, and so we returned, millions of us, though not everyone, not the converts or the half-Jews or the queers or the atheists or the undesirables—and when we arrived we hugged and kissed and danced and ate and sang and drank from the West Bank’s aquifer, we drank and drank until not one drop remained, and we cried out, we were stricken with such terrible thirst that our skin cracked and our health failed and many of us died yet still no amount of rain could replenish what we had taken, and then came the floods, all around the world sparing not the Holy Land, submerging Tel Aviv and Haifa and all the lowlands, and then came such a terrible storm that the parched hills couldn’t contain it and there were landslides, whole towns were lost, and the sea swelled, and the remainder of us fled to the Temple Mount and under a gray sky huddled and held each other’s hands as the water of the deeps lapped at our feet.

 

July 2023

Editor’s Note

The question, as a form, courts: wide-spanning and invitational, it provides the grounds for voicing provisional answers and desires, variously. The works that comprise this issue of Reckoning provoke essential questions for our current historical conjuncture, questions which defy the treacherous narrows of business-as-usual and open instead toward livable futures at once wily and strange—futures filled with the surprises that come of persistence, of life-thrum, prevailing in spite of everything.

How are we to “link fingers in the dark” (following Kelsey Day); what do we do at the checkpoints, when everything goes wrong (querying after Joanna Streetly)? How do we carry the ravages of the past into urgent articulation with our planetary present? What does that carriage—of word and idea; of nightmare-begotten dreams—look like and hold? Where do its lines break, and what wastelands can it be machined into navigating? How do we multiply the tongues of refutation and ignite material practices that collectivize, that make places built against destruction and for flourishing?

Alongside my fellow readers and editors, I have sought, in this issue, to bring together writing that provokes such lines of questioning. In turn, the writers included here have helped me to ask and re-ask the question of militancy, and what it might—or ought—look like on the page.

I tend to agree with the great documentarian, Muriel Rukeyser: we must “walk in the river of crisis toward the real.” Yet a profound recalibration of pace is in order. Amidst the ongoing genocide of Palestinian peoples, we must run, together, gathering the truth up in our hands and hurling it against the barricades to thought itself, which the state of Israel—backed by the death-fund of US empire—has thrown up to obscure the reality of this gruesome moment of flagrant, unblushing human sacrifice.

From Palestine to the abysmal failure of climate talks at COP28, the planet is ablaze with injustice. Even so, in the face of the anti-life operations of empire, menacing extractivism, and the killing racial logics of global capitalism, other stories are bursting forth; sites of resistance are erupting and lines of solidarity are being forged. I am grateful that Reckoning 8 houses some of these stories—counter-behemoths to the fire-spiting behemoths of the now, which would render land, lives, and languages alike moribund (per Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe’s conjurings).

This issue insists that we can, indeed, must, be fierce and uncompromising, on and off the page. That we must retain and seize the right to dissent from planetary collapse, enacting, instead, the inevitability of resistance, that dear and dearly fruiting tree, its luminous stones sweetly enfleshed with fuel for the hurling.

 

December 27, 2023

Occupied Lenape Territory of so-called Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Reckoning 8 Submission Call

and

We’re very excited to announce, for the forthcoming Reckoning 8, editors Knar Gavin and Waverly SM! Read on for their issue-specific submission call.

Reckoning is a journal of creative writing on environmental justice; we’re looking for fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, poetry and art.

For Reckoning 8, we want thinking, writing and art about … this. All of this, right now. We want to hear about active resistance to the patriarchofascist, corporate-captured extractive state. Show us what it means that in order to build Cop City*, a massive facility intended to train a new generation of lethal enforcers into an institution directly descended from slave patrols, the state of Georgia and its actors must first level a forest and label protestors “domestic terrorists” as a precursor to murdering them. Help us understand how strategies of repression and control all over the world concentrate agency in the hands of the few at the expense of all other life. We are looking for work in opposition to a broad, insidious fascism that treats water, trees, and bodies as exploitable, expendable resources rather than sacred, essential components of our global, infinitely interconnected and interdependent web of life.

As always, we’re seeking work from people of all genders or none, all sexualities or none, of all neurotypes, all levels of physical ability, from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, in all parts of the world. We’d love to add all languages to that, though we publish in English and are currently limited to reading submissions for potential translation in Spanish, French and Swedish.

Payment is 10 cents/word, $50/page of poetry, $50 minimum per piece of artwork. We don’t charge submission fees.

We’re always open to submissions. Deadline for Reckoning 8 is the solar equinox, September 22, 2023.

Read the full guidelines and submit!

Further Reading

Recommendations from Reckoning editors and staff