creative writing on environmental justice
“Your shuttle will arrive in—four!—minutes. Please proceed to—Caladan Avenue.”
Benny tapped the air above the “Dismiss notification” button on her HUD. She’d been at the shuttle stop for twelve minutes already, and wished she’d taken the time to pee before she left.
Her leg, both where it was and where it wasn’t, felt weird.
She flipped through her notifications. . . .
2020
It is March.
I have slept through my alarm every day this week.
Confusion until the silence of dawn reveals
that commuters are no longer driving past my windowsill
where a dahlia tuber, freshly buried in dirt, prepares for spring.
Their bodies roused my body
and so we met the day together.
No more.
My uncle swears you can tell what kind of man someone is
by how he stacks wood in a burn barrel.
We don’t use those anymore but he still talks like they matter.
Still keeps one in the back, rusted and dented, filled with junk mail and busted dreams.
The landfill’s too far now,
gas is too high,
and they shut down bus service out here.
So we’ve been stuffing old campaign . . .
During my grandmother’s prayers, I would watch
the cracked earth just outside her windowpane, the dust lifting
like sermons lost in the dry air. My favorite story
was of the river that once carved through the valley,
its body endless, spilling into the fields. Less famous
is how the Big Pharm diverted it, how the heat pressed
its lips against . . .
1.
I remember the soil first. When I reached in and filled a farm trowel with it, damp, red, breathing under the greenery, it clung to my fingers like memory. It felt like something alive. It was alive, duh. But I mean something different. The soil felt like it was intelligent. Like it knew what was going on. Like it knew what was about to happen, the evil that was about . . .
“What should we bring Pawpaw for dinner?” I asked Mama.
Her bronze urn rested in the passenger’s seat, secured by the seat belt. Her ghost sat in the backseat, wearing the green skirt suit I’d buried her in, a thin blue aura haloing her body.
We were driving from Birmingham to Pawpaw’s farm in Sweetcreek. The high-rises and billboards gradually surrendered to . . .
WOLF POINT4
The Lewis and Clark Expedition passed by here, westward bound, in May 1805. Fur trappers and traders followed them a few years later. Steamboats began making it from St. Louis up the Missouri as far as Fort Benton in the early 1860s. Wolf Point was the halfway point between Bismarck and Fort Benton. Wood choppers supplied cord wood for boats stopping . . .
PINKERTON HOT SPRINGS5
Even though this land was Ute territory, the upper Animas River Valley was first settled by prospectors in the spring of 1860. Charles Baker, returning from the mines north of Silverton, established “Old Animas City” and built the first bridge across the Animas River. The community lasted less than a year before it was abandoned. During . . .