creative writing on environmental justice
You don’t know what it means to live unknown,
to smile in the market square as a stranger
haughtily spills your mother’s name on a pig’s head
and you become a boil on Miss World’s lips.
This is how a mangrove lives without prop roots:
a branch is starved until its pregnant leaves become
ghosts of IDPs walking backwards to Oloibiri Well 1.
def.: Oloibiri is the . . .
In a twenty-year temperature inversion
California walks in to me through
the windows of a hot car with no
air conditioning, it’s summer and
the heater is full-blast, it’s a hundred-
degree day, I am younger and California
is cleaner, the engine doesn’t self-
eject and it jets out oil all across
the country. This awful air of
ourselves, we have nowhere to . . .
Once the doors shut behind you,
shift to saving yourself.
Try steam and chest percussions
to chase factory smoke out of
your lungs, you need to be a human
still. Which is hard to do with dioxin,
so get that out too, with ghee.
If it goes as far
as your liver
then a long shot is to blast
it by eating dandelion buds.
Also asbestos comes in like
a cloud of unseeable needles . . .
Pinguinus impennis
Once, flocks of great auks nested on the rocks
off the coast of the North Atlantic. The first bird
to be called a penguin, they were built to swim,
but slow, defenseless on land. Pairs mated for life,
nesting shoulder to shoulder in dense rookeries,
laying one egg on bare rock, taking turns tending
the egg until it . . .
It’s time for agitation against the dark,
for poetry to watch and adore silence―
now it’s no time for hug, kiss, or love.
Last summer when we were far away
I planned a rendezvous by a riverbank―
the warm river having a quiet stream
stirring souls―and to bathe together.
One year already passed, but my plan
hasn’t seen the light, because nature
had probably hatched . . .
Again, Papa drags the TV remote from my little girl,
his grimace listing all the ills of our nowadays children—
true, such headiness didn’t exist even in my own time;
and once they start the territorial dance of Agama agama
I quickly zip my lips and run into the kitchen
before his festering eyes ask how she became a dictator.
Mia’s a swashbuckler—I . . .
When the haze descends
upon this sun-speared land, already wet
with sweat and tropical rain, clouds are veiled,
and there is smoke
in the air. Everything is a dismal grey.
Beneath September’s scented moon
the flames of lanterns link
together like lovers’ hands. Ghosts
let loose for a day, rise
to meet the haze.
My heart turns wistful. Longing
for . . .
asphalt in our sinuses,
sipping what we cannot
swallow. ghosts announce themselves:
the Tings, family of five.
youngest daughter likes watching
songbirds in her pleated skirt.
it’s not about pity, but some kind of
justice. parents do factory work, pipe thickets
to meet our needs until
the accident that is
no accident. it’s a feature, the inevitable
explosion . . .
I remember my first death
under dim lights. A smear of fur
and utter dark on the asphalt,
life stretched and flattened onto the killing plane
described by a singular yellow lamp of
suburban wrongness. I snapped
my neck away, blood-phantom-shard-pain
of seeing something terrible in the sublime.
oof, roadkill, my father said, as if we
should be described by how . . .
They never tell you how brown flood water is,
like thin gravy overflowing a plate;
that it’s cold, that it smells like mildew—
or how heavy it is,
as you struggle to push
the car door open against the press of it,
the angry river like a giant
leaning against the car’s side,
that if you do,
the water will sweep in, curling cold
against your legs in seconds.