creative writing on environmental justice
She was old
when the triceratops
first rammed their horns
into the trees that became soil,
became ice, became soaring steel
and concrete prisons, became ruins,
became swamp. Becoming herself had
been a beautiful thing: little egg sisters
slipping from their mother’s folds, into the
cool waters of a lake far more dead than she
was. Sturgeon live mighty in quiet
Carried like wreckage on restless currents,
a hushed syllable of scales and fear adrift on brown water.
But a stranger’s hands became a shore: gathered him whole.
The flood itself seemed to bless the act and surrendered him to hope. . . .
“Everything looks worse in the dark, you know”6, writes Tove Jansson, famous Finnish painter and children’s author, in her first book The Moomins and the Great Flood during the last years of World War II. I imagine her sitting hunched over a wooden desk stained with paint and covered in pencil shavings, interrupting her writing every few minutes to glance anxiously . . .
I watched the clip again: the lifeless body of a white-winged dove entered the shot at the top of my screen and plummeted off the bottom a half second later. Whoever was holding the camera didn’t notice; they stayed focused on a white guy speechifying about City plans for a soccer stadium. A few seconds later, four or five more birds fell behind the guy at the podium. . . .
“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 . . .