creative writing on environmental justice
In my childhood, I remember whispering the names under my breath, determined to ward off my family’s amusement by pronouncing them precisely: Tiruchirappalli and Thanjavur, Dindigul and Erode, Coimbatore and Chidambaram. These were the cities of my summer vacations, where I visited relatives, temples, and sights throughout the southeastern Indian state . . .
Line up your cars, drive to the storm post-evacuation
7 pm. September 10th. The Keys.
Grab your guitar and serenade the hurricane with Wonderwall
8 p.m. September 10th. Daytona Beach.
Buy the hurricane a drink; ask if she’s from Tennessee.
9 p.m. September 10th. Miami-Dade.
Give the hurricane your number and ask her for sexts.
9:15 p.m. Haha, then what? 🙂
Ask . . .
This is your reservation reminder from Palmetto Kayak Adventure Tours. Your four-hour self-guided tour is scheduled for today, 1–5pm. Reply 1 to confirm, 2 to cancel. Hope to see you soon!
The text is waiting when I wake up. White letters stark against the black text box. I don’t bother looking at the number. I’ve made no such reservation, nor the one for Lowcountry . . .
When I say I miss being with the whales,
what I mean is sitting on the panga
in a lagoon in the blue middle of nowhere.
Nothing to do but be this body,
let the other bodies come, rise
from stillness to rest beneath my palm,
the ache to take up space—
live as exclamation,
breach-bloomed in this world.
When I say I miss being with the whales,
I want water
the holiest kind of . . .
“Does the defendant admit posting this message after the sinking of the ship Deep Power?” The prosecution lawyer looked up from his papers, directly at Kaveri. “I quote: ‘A hundred oilers nowhere near make up for even a single whale fall, but I guess it’s a start, el-oh-el’.”
My cousin, blank-faced in the dock, said, “Yes.”
The tight bun she’d made of her plaited . . .
The trash patch did not break us up. The trash patch (or vortex, I should say; it isn’t stationary, it is not an island) did not poison the way I look at you or turn your words to stinging flies. We did not get physical; we did not even throw anything. There is a whole toxic ecosystem built around the microscopic plastic particles—a spread of microorganisms feed on . . .
Near the end of the last year of her projected life expectancy, Cora knows she shouldn’t be spending any moment on frivolities. Her store of oxygen tanks is depleting. Her body begins wheezing halfway up the stairs to her apartment. Every last breath in her body needs to be spent on work, on microscopes and slideshows and documentation and the full spectrum of . . .
Water: what is it good for? Absolutely everything.
(I’m sorry. But also not. I hope that’s stuck in your head now.)
In privileged areas worldwide, access to clean water is never far away. Water is so ubiquitous—and, depending where you live, so seemingly renewable—that, if you are in this population, it’s easy to forget how easily disrupted these systems are, . . .
We are so used to statistics that many of us rarely bother about the numbers and what they really mean until alarms trigger us to act. We rarely drink the right amounts of water even when we dread heat injuries, cerebral edema, urinary and kidney problems, seizures, and hypovolemic shocks. The poems in this issue are like a sensor for diagnosing water levels and . . .