creative writing on environmental justice
Hello everyone! Small update to the Reckoning staff roster here: we now have an art director (me ). I did minor in Visual Art way back when, and led PR for a bunch of student clubs before kicking off my current career because the team needed an artsier person, so I’m excited to dip back into this side of the house for Reckoning.
As part of our move to codify this . . .
It’s wild harvest season, maybe my favorite time of year, and this year’s—unlike others recently and in the future— is a pretty good one. So let’s celebrate while we can!
Buy any back issue of Reckoning (R6 or earlier) and while the wild harvest lasts, I’ll include either a wild mushroom spore print or an artisanally squashed wild brambleberry . . .
We’ve got one more late-entry mini-interview for you on the eve of the Our Beautiful Reward launch event! (which is tonight, and for which you can still RSVP, click that link!).
Dyani Sabin’s searing poem about love amid oppression, “This is a romantic comedy” is online here.
Michael: How do the tools of speculative writing . . .
Once upon a time,” I tell my son, “a foolish peasant boasted of a daughter who could spin straw to gold.”
My child starves. Day after day, his eyes grow larger than his shriveling stomach.
“Drink water,” I say when I leave him. “But not too much. I don’t know when we’ll have more.”
He barely nods. Almost, I think he will speak. In the darkness of our half-collapsed basement, . . .
Across the flat horizon: only blue, no sign of other boats, of anything at all.
“Row row your boat, row—”
“Come on.”
“—this goddamn thing.”
The line and anchor had become entangled with something below.
“Pull like this,” Oliver said.
“Nope,” his father said. “Tricksy widget. Snake charmer. Battle slug.”
“Drink much?”
His father yanked back and forth on the line . . .
God planted an olive tree between Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal.
A dove had snatched an olive from a farmer’s cart, and dropped it in her flight over Shekhem. It landed in a quiet corner of the valley.
The seed nestled into the earth, and began its silent, invisible unfolding, sending roots into the deep, until the seedling poked above the ground, and grew into a sapling. . . .