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. . . .
After Nnadi Samuel
The river no longer sings to me; and I know,
in the basin of my throat, what holds it back.
The roses now are molting into thistles, and
I cannot hold back the despair. The way the
earth gave open at the taste of the dusty
evening cyclone, even the shuttling flowers
By the edge of a ferry boat
I let go of my earthly tether.
Whatever wishes to enter the listless
Waters and satisfy their thirst
Must come with its rampageous longing.
I, an i of conundrum memories, tear
All of my mothers’ pictures from my heart.
The way a gunshot plunges silence into the thick
Skin of life. I forget all my lovers, the way the living, inevitably
Forgets . . .
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.
The wheel of probable harm
falls forward over the inaction
of a state, over the houses
as fangs along a cancerous jaw.
The rate of loss is not hesitant,
finger-tapping uncertainty
finalizing the weight of itself
in a legislative session.
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 . . .
I leap out of bed. & night burns at my feet.
Awake. My morning is ashes—naked &
quiet, because the birds have flown to a country
where the trees can dance & my tongue can
only go as far as the border. I’m nothing short
of tragedy, so I drink myself to stupor. My
memories are alcoholic & melancholic. . . .
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 . . .
Mississippi flows carries secrets in silt the bronze serpent’s scales
Cicada static rasps against the high noon sun
Trilobite locked in the bluff’s ancestral stone silence
Oil refinery flare stains the bruised . . .