creative writing on environmental justice
*after Greta Gaard’s Toward a Queer Ecofeminism
But maybe nature isn’t even
a “her” . . . . When nature is feminized
and thereby erotized,
and culture is masculinized*,
the trouble starts, and it’s the bad kind.
When the girl puts on a summer dress:
“she’s asking for it”.
When the soil is “too rich not to steal”:
“she’s asking . . .
“And the ship, the black freighter,
disappears out to sea, and on it is me.”
Wetlands become one with the rising gulf
as oil rigs drink the earth’s secret juices
and phallic man-made things do other rapey things
to things to which we have ascribed yonic features
and so forth in a pastiche of sexes assigned
to things that never asked not to be sexless.
Does Mother . . .
Among the stones, there was a flower that reached out to me.
Many years ago, I dreamt of the Arabian Nights
When I woke up I found myself laughing
Nothing wrong with the laughter
But we shouldn’t take history seriously when it turned into a big joke.
I sat at the edge of the battle
Dressed like a warrior
I am not a half person anymore
No Matter how my society categorizes . . .
Lured by the first snow of winter,
my dead father managed to struggle out
of his grave on the far hill, managed to stagger
down into the walnut grove to meet me
as the heavy flakes fell.
He did not look bad. There
was a grandeur in his features in the half-light of
my torch.
What is it the snow does for the soil, again?
he asked me. Fixes nitrogen, I answered. No, wait
that’s . . .
try to keep yourself—somehow—
tied: to the earth, perhaps—find joints
and sinews that echo your own in
the tree across the water, discover
home in the shelter of hedges or trace
a life down the edges of the river.
please, remember to stay tied:
maybe in her tender touch,
or in the glance shared—across an
expanse or two meters. above all—
i’ll keep repeating—be tied: . . .
a comforting thought: that
the arc of the moral universe
is long, but it appears to bend
towards crabs. one day, our
exoskeletons will protect us
from the rain, and from the end;
as the seas rise and fall, we will
find homes in the tide pools, or in
the remnants of buildings left empty
by humans. we will build
a better world, as crabs; they say
crabs can’t feel pain. we’ll . . .
in unison,
the wind beating the fence
surrounding the giant intaglios, where
you told me there was nowhere to step
anymore, that the whole
desert started miraging as a geoglyph.
And what was lost
before by time
or destruction returned
in the form of a man etched
on the desert floor,
and you chose
two lucky stones to take home
to remember the black desert— . . .
People talking about the phases of the silvery moon,
the Peter Pan brightness beckoning in the stars—
I haven’t seen a distant sun in months,
and the fairy tales have shimmered away.
No celestial pin pricks in the darkened cyclorama,
no blazes from back in a time before my tiny self
tried to sparkle into existence. I live in
a perfect night, bundled beneath the
suffocation . . .
“Men argue. Nature acts.”
—Voltaire
Palm trees wave their heavy heads,
canna lilies rise brilliant and bloody
in their beds, and the tide floods the streets.
They call it sunny day flooding, because it hasn’t rained
for weeks, and still the water comes.
I haven’t cried in weeks, and still—
I hear the polar caps are nearly free
of ice, that the sea will . . .