climate change – Writers Resist

How I Feel About the 2024 Election

By Jacqueline Jules

Woke this morning
with self-immolation on my mind,
not planning it, just incredulous
that anyone setting themselves on fire
would expect others to pay attention
in this world of “alternative facts”
where the size of an inauguration
can be disputed by the White House
along with whether or not men
scaling the walls of Congress
can be considered an insurrection.

It feels like everyone is burning
a flag these days, metaphorically
at least. If you’re wondering,
it’s not a constitutional crime,
and displaying the stars and stripes
on your underwear is okay, too.
Just check Amazon.

What will convince the voters
in Iowa that wildfires in California
threaten their climate, too,
before the smoke rises so high
it chokes us all?

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in more than 100 publications. Visit her website at www.jacquelinejules.com.

Photo by Malachi Brooks on Unsplash.

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Beware the Homo Sapiens

By Robyn Bashaw

“Don’t!” Eeip closes his mitt over Swee’s, stopping her from placing the bone into the waiting psittaciforme’s beak. Eeip pulls the bone from Swee’s grasp, tossing it in the Trash Trench where it lands between a rusty fork with its one twisted tine veering right and a single brass earring with its post back missing.

There had also been a Trash Trench at the archaeology dig where Swee had interned, growing steadily taller, but it was better in the trenches than the oceans, decomposing slowly, as it was wont to do, with occasional help from the curious nibble of a fish or the tear of a passing crocodile leg.

Beyond the bone, Swee can make out colored rectangular cases holding deadened black screens, wires crisscrossing over black boxes of varying sizes, deformed plastics of every color, brown and green glass bottles perfectly preserved in black bags. The plastic reminds her of the wide-eyed skull of a sciuridae, whose skeleton she’d uncovered in her second week on her internship, throttled by a plastic ring that finally fell loose as she brushed aside the dirt by its neck.

“Never the homo sapiens,” Eeip scolds, and Swee nods her head, glistening silver under the sun. It had been a mistake, but Eeip wouldn’t believe that. Swee knew the homo sapiens were the ones responsible for the Trash Trenches, for the plastic-choked deaths they found below ground, for the entrapment of fantastical creatures. They hadn’t known what to call them when they first uncovered them, entrapped in wired boxes, giftwrapped for their convenience: a huge creature with two long teeth poking out from its head, an animal with sharp teeth bigger than a shark’s protruding from its lips, a short-armed creature leaning back on a long line of delicate bones making up its tail, a tail-less animal with a curved spine and long nails clinging tight to an echo of a tree.

When the linguists had cracked one of the written human codes, they had learned some of the names along with the homo sapiens’: Elephas maximus, Panthera leo, Macropus rufus, Phascolarctos cinereus. It was archaeology that told the tale of their final extinction where the homo sapiens held them captive: Trees were pushed and tossed about past the brick walls and glass windows that were tortured by the wind. Tiny flowers cowered in fear, trying to hide their bright little heads before they were snapped right off. Rain poured out over the Earth, sweeping coffins over cliffs to be splattered against the rocks below. When the storm finished stirring graveyards, churches, homes, and schools together to be poured out fresh across the globe, all traces of homo sapiens’ time upon the world were washed away, buried beneath the new rising ocean.

Millions of years later, the water receded once more, cooling back into mountains of ice that revealed beaches for the cephalopods to waddle upon.

The psittaciforme plants its all-knowing black pupil on Swee, highlighted by the amber iris, as he accepts the bone of a tiktaalik from Eeip. The psittaciforme takes to the sky, its red wings flashing between the blue and yellow of his brethren, each carrying a bone in its talons to the river’s edge where the scientists would sort them and harness any DNA still inside. The tiktaalik have strong fins like the cetaceans to support their body weight out of water, scales like a fish, head like a crocodile, and tail as powerful as the cetaceans. Swee knew it was the kindred features that had made the tiktaalik a prime choice to resurrect from extinction.

Eeip snapped his jaw at Swee. “I thought you were trained! Do you know the damage you could have caused, passing on a homo sapiens’ bone?”

“I am trained!” Swee held her ground. She could have told Eeip about the extinctions the cetaceans had mapped backwards: the storm and subsequent flood that had wiped out the two-legged homo sapiens, the homo sapiens’ entrapment of the multitude of four-legged life, the four-legged life’s emerging from the tsunamis and fires rippling after the asteroid, the giant four-legged dinosaurs tramping across Pangea after the red lava of volcanoes coated the large, lumbering lizards whose steak knife teeth and sail atop their backs kept rivals at bay. It was back another layer of lava that they had discovered the tiktaalik before facing fathoms of ice. Swee stares at the ground under her fins; this was not her mistake. Homo sapiens were more than five extinctions apart from the tiktaalik. Their bones should not have been here at all. Swee lifts her eyes. “Maybe it fell from the Trash Trench?”

Eeip let his eyes scan over the Trash Trench, its logged edges monitored by the loyal canis lupus familiaris, and Swee felt her stomach landlock. Of course, the canis would never permit any piece of trash, much less a homo sapiens bone, to slip past their guard.

“Sorry,” Swee sings sweetly, and Eeip allows her to move on with a final warning to not let the mistake happen again.

• • •

Swee does her best to work diligently, but, when the day is done, she finds herself wandering past the cetacean and tiktaalik races with their long-standing battle of wisdom versus brute force, to slip into the river herself. Kicking her strong flippers at the end of her legs, she follows the current to the ocean where her fins shiver to brush alongside a shark and her heart pumps in relish of her flying leaps across the surface. A cackling laugh erupts from her when she spots a seal, but, when it dives deep off a shelf, she lets it pull ahead, content in the chase alone. She swims back through the teeming life of the ocean, untroubled by the schools of fish that dart away from her passage.

She pulls herself up on the river’s bank, pleased to see the brachiosaurus stretching its neck out to pluck a branch free beneath the setting sun. The land had been too bare when the cetaceans had first emerged from the ocean, so the brachiosaurs, the triceratops, and the stegosaurs had been welcome additions to help manage the plants aboveground. The same pity that had sparked Swee to pass her sciuridae’s skull along to the scientists at her internship had led to the resurrection of some of the encaged mammals.

Elephas maximus had been the most pleasant surprise. Not only did they help dig out and build the bases for the Trash Trenches, but they quickly learned to bubble the waters alongside the cephalopods to gather fish from the river to distribute to feed the pod. Swee lifts a fin now to wave at the elephas called Hoount, who swings her trunk to toss a fish Swee’s way. Swee catches it in her flipper, closing her fin over the damp scales. When she slips into her mud bed, Swee bites into the cool flesh. She tears off a small chunk of scale, offering it to her hallucigenia, which grasps the offering in three of its spindly arms, bringing it to its first mouth to suck inside its tiny body. Its two beady, black eyes watch Swee to see if more is incoming, but she does not want to overfeed her pet.

Smaller than the bottle caps littering the first layer of soil, the hallucigenia curves its hair-like neck to the ocean floor while it processes its dinner. Balanced upon its seven legs, its antennae feel ahead as it returns to Swee, who runs her fin over the spikes across its back. The tiny prickles make her laugh, and the hallucigenia nuzzles close until Swee relents and tears loose another scale chunk, reasoning to herself that one more bite wouldn’t hurt it.

Her hallucigenia is a reminder of why she chose to go into archaeology. Many would have been satisfied to stop once they reached the fathoms of ice, but Ipip was a curious cephalopod and he continued to dig. Fathoms down, the sea levels dropped as they did today and whole new creatures, including the hallucigenia, were unearthed. The gecko-sized twenty-eight-legged centipede creeping its way to nibble on microbes at low tide was perfect to keep the ecosystem balanced, but, like the hallucigenia, the wiwaxia was resurrected for its beauty. Outside many mud beds, a wiwaxia sits with its eight rows of armored plates, shimmering like a bird’s feathers with flashes of blue, green, and yellow.

Swee’s fin rests on her hallucigenia’s spikes, and she stares down into its dark black eyes as it lifts one of its legs and places it on Swee’s smooth leg. Of course. Her hallucigenia only knows her as the bringer of food. Even if Eeip hadn’t stopped her today and the homo sapiens had been resurrected, her hallucigenia would be crawling on her, seeking out more treats and rubs.

• • •

Swee arrives at the dig site early the next day, bypassing the layers etched into the ground to walk straight to the Trash Trench. The canis lap the trench, but there is one brown canis in front who paces by where the trash is thrown. Swee stops before the brown canis. Knowing they can understand more than they can say, she takes a deep breath.

“Were you once a pet?”

The brown canis, naturally, does not answer, but he does whine.

Swee reaches out her fin, forcing herself to not pull away as she runs it over the canis’s scratchy fur. She had practiced her speech last night. “I bet your homo sapiens took good care of you—fed you, petted you—but all of them weren’t that way. We can’t risk bringing any back.”

The brown canis hangs its head and whimpers, so Swee strokes him again. She had gone over it every way, but she wasn’t sure how to make a canis understand the difference between how something cared for its pet and how it cared for the world at large. Pets have such a narrow focus of the world.

“You can’t slip any more bones in,” she speaks firmly, eyeing the canis so he will know she’s serious. “Understood?”

The canis whines once more, but he drops his body forward in an accepting bow. So, Swee pats him on the side and takes her leave. At the dig, Eeip is waiting. He lifts his fin in welcome, and Swee returns the gesture, assuring as she flops down with him that there will be no more mistakes today.

Note: The title is based on John Whitfeld’s Lost animals: Extinct, endangered, and rediscovered species. Welbeck publishing group limited, 2020.

Though Robyn Bashaw has graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing and published a piddling of stories, her greatest accomplishment to date is training her ball python to distinguish the fast taps of playtime and the slow taps of foodtime. Communication, however possible, is vital. Check out her work at: https://robynbashaw.wordpress.com/.

Photo credit: Debbie Hall, poet, photographer and Writers Resist poetry editor.

Come Mourn with Me

By Elizabeth Birch

Come mourn with me. Pour
your aching hearts into the endless
hole we dug to house
Mother Nature’s empty self.
Come throw
your smashed cans, stretched plastic, burnt oil, and dung
on her hollow body below. Come
cry for all the ifs, buts, and whys
we should’ve asked ourselves
decades ago and rejoice
in memories of cooler days. Come
hold my helpless hand and keep
me as close as you wish you kept her. Read
me your regrets but know
no eulogy
will wake her.

Elizabeth Birch lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Her poetry has been featured in previous or forthcoming issues of Yellow Arrow Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, and “For the Love of Words” of Easton Community Access Television.

Photo credit. M. Appelman via a Creative Commons license.

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Two Poems by Deborah Hochberg

Congregation of Ibis

“A barrage of storms has resurrected what was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River, setting the stage for a disaster this spring.”

– from “Tulare Lake Was Drained Off the Map. Nature Would Like a Word,” Soumya Karlamangla and Shawn Hubler, New York Times, April 2, 2023

They drained the Great Lake
in the late 19th century

Humans took
the vast waters from us
to grow their cotton, their tomatoes

Like gods, they separated
the land and the skies from the water
and the water was no more

They came, and they took
what was ours
and we had no say

And they did what they willed
with the earth

And the earth was obedient
for decades, over a century

And then the earth decided —
I have had enough
I am taking it back
I miss the lake
I will bring back the lake

And the atmospheric rivers
raged through the skies

And the land received the waters
waters that the mammoths
once drank

The farms, homes, brewery, and cafe
the crops and ranches
were inundated

And then we returned —
the ibis
and the herons, pelicans, and coots

Soon the snowpack will melt
without mercy
for agriculture
or prisons

The lake, like a surging
aqueous ghost, a watery resurrection
has again staked its claim

And we are here —
as long as the lake
can sustain its deep
irriguous expanse

Migrant Child

Home
is a thing
that does not yet exist
Existed as a point of departure
But a home
where one cannot live
is not a home
My feet are my home
My legs are my home
My sneakers are my home
They carry me
through arduous terrains
that seek to have me
lie down
and sink
into the mud
Mud-child
I hold my own hand
This way, I say
No, this way
Journey of a thousand steps
Countless steps, numerous
as stars in the sky
Stars that blanket me
on cold nights
No longer human
I move through the mud
like a turtle
Did I just crawl
over a border?
I have forgotten
thoughts of home
and now think only
of movement
This journey, a trial
and I am guilty
of what I do not know
Hope
is a thing
that grips you
around your throat
Pulls you
like a leash
and won’t let go

Deborah Hochberg is from Detroit, Michigan, and studied at Wayne State University. She is a musician, a gardener, and a health care provider. She is the author of two collections of poetry entitled Waiting For the Snow and Memory’s Reservoir.

Image credit: Bob Peterson via a Creative Commons license.

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The Lure of Socks on Warm Feet

By Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Never forget, September 20, 2017 and Maria

In my La-Z-Boy I sit, a Puerto Rican queen,
feet-up admiring my knitted socks.
I made these socks by knit and purl.
5,746 miles away from you
it is easy to say, I worship.

—And oh! How I preach this veneration,

the warmth of pale green light
the whiteness of sand
the contrast of ocean currents
the dwarf forest, and the crowded towns—

Yet, the truth can’t be changed—I left.
Abandon your Central Cordillera for the Blues,
an exchange of choice, not necessity.

I saw the hurricane while wearing star-banded socks,
glued to a television where electricity is constant,
three hot meals a day, sitting at home.
There were no cold cuts day after bloody day,

no Samaritan truck around the corner,
no spoils of mud, and expiring life
no kitchens without a roof
no bottled water in locked warehouses
the trees bare of leaves, not a single flower
petals can’t contain the hurts.

That September, out my window,
the meadow was full of lupines.
Purple or gold,
their curious heads sat one on top of another
a soft pyramid greening gently in the breeze.
The sight of those flowers,
a hurricane of shame.

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a ‘Mexi-Rican,’ born in México but raised in Puerto Rico. As a BIPOC poet and writer, she has two full-length poetry books published; Learning to Love a Western Sky by Airlie Press, a bilingual poetry book, Speaking at a Time /Hablando a la Vez by Redbat Press, and a poetry chapbook, Fossils in a Red Flag by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, and she has an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Oregon University. Presently, she and her partner reside in Summerville, Oregon, with two dogs, two cats, and too many chickens.

Photo credit: Carissa Bonham via a Creative Commons license.

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September Together

By Elizabeth Shack

Last September, we hiked the forest
beside the fog-drenched sea.
Followed a swift stream
bridged with salmon spawning,
returning from gray Pacific homes.
Switchbacked beside a waterfall
sparkling down steep granite.

Emerged into sunlight with a view
of lichen-painted rock
and the blue-white ice
that once sculpted this verdant valley.

Is still sculpting:
Just as moss and fern carpeted bare rock,
as alder and spruce sprouted,
as forest appeared where glacier receded,

today melting ice reshapes coasts,
forests flame to ash,
grasslands wither to desert,
rivers run to dust.

This September, whales still sing in the sea.

Will you fight with me
for this vibrant,
dying world?

Elizabeth Shack lives in central Illinois with her spouse, cat, and an expanding collection of art supplies and fitness equipment. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The MacGuffin, Writers Resist, Daily Science Fiction, and other magazines and anthologies. She attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for poetry in 2022. For more of Elizabeth’s work, visit her website.

Photo credit: “Humpback Whale” by J. Maughn via a Creative Commons license.

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Love Songs for End Times

By Zoë Fay-Stindt

I sing to
the green anole
in a made-up
lizard language—
fiddling tongue,
whirlwinds
and whistle-
clucks.
He curves his neck,
ear hole craned
to my porch perch.
He pinks
his bubble-throat.
For years, I saw
devil horns peeking
from each human
head. Yes,
the chemical,
the highway framed
with fields
and fields
of low metal
chicken farms,
bouncing off death
in the sun. Yes,
the river
nearly evaporated.
But on all those
superfund sites,
someone—
no, a people
—are planting
black ash trees.
Sweetgrass
grows thicker
from our harvesting
hands. Reader,
it’s not all gone up
in flames.
I say this
for you
and for me.
On a postcard
taped to my wall,
a globe as deep
pink as the lizard’s
puffed throat:
le soleil
ne se couche pas.
And it’s true:
the sun never sets.

Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/Z/they) is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American South. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, featured or forthcoming in places such as RHINO, Muzzle, and Ninth Letter, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. She lives in Ames, Iowa, where she is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University, award-winning teacher, and co-managing editor for the environmental writing journal, Flyway.

Photo credit: Green anole image by Matthew Paulson via a Creative Commons license.

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Changing Names

Mendocino, California

By Frederick Livingston

after how many years
does “drought” erode
into expected weather?

and then what name
when the rains do come
startling the hard earth
the exhausted aquifers?

we’ll sing to the deep wells
the quieted fire and clean sky
“winter” brittle in our mouths

holding vigil for rivers elders
insects lovers lost forever
when did grieving season begin?
what one word could walk

between delight of sun
hungry skin and unease
in receiving unseasonable gifts?

what of the breath we held
together as cold certainty melts
wondering who burns this turn?
when the broken record

record breaking
dips into new pallets
for our purple summers

the wheel becomes
rows of teeth clenched
against steady instability
in which season do we open

our jaws lungs ears hearts
speak our fears
how it feels to be alive

on Earth still
blooming and unraveling
naming petals
as the wind claims them

Frederick Livingston plants seeds. Grounded in experiential education and sustainable agriculture, he hopes to grow understanding, peace, mangos and avocados. His upcoming poetry collection, The Moon and Other Fruits, is expected in early 2023 from Legacy Book Press.

Photo credit: “Drought,” by Wayne S. Grazio via a Creative Commons license

Photographer’s note: A honeybee, desperate and disoriented, seeks moisture and pollen from dried up sage blossoms. Another sign of climate change.

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Deputized

By Holly A. Stovall

Congratulations! You are Deputized!

Abortion after 6 weeks is illegal in Texas.

Help enforce the law by reporting an illegal abortion in the anonymous form below!

How do you think the law has been violated?

I’ve had three spontaneous abortions (that’s doctor lingo for miscarriages) in three years, each at 8 or 9 weeks, and that’s illegal. I know this sounds CRA-A-A-AZY, but my Yankee cousin in Chicago says that multinational fossil fuel corporations are poisoning my babies in my womb, and this is causing my babies to self-abort (that’s practically suicide)! I don’t want to sound like I’m not a good, patriotic Republican or anything, but why can’t I stay pregnant? These companies must be arrested under this great new abortion ban, and then you can make them pay for the cleanup of the chemicals they leave in the air and then maybe my babies will want to live. (Not only that, my family and friends got bad cancer. My aunt died. Everybody knows someone who died of cancer.) Here in Texas, we believe in pro-life through and through. I know you agree.

How did you obtain this evidence?

I found blood and red sinewy stuff on my panties. And then I read a report from some OSHA website (I think they meant to write “OCEAN,” because it’s probably some society that doesn’t want chemicals in the ocean) and the Mayo Clinic (that Yankee hospital), that everyday chemicals the multinational corporations put out there are causing my uterine babies to abort themselves. I know. Cra-a-a-azy, right? Except that I’m desperate for one of my womb babies to live. I’ll try anything, even reporting them for suicide so maybe you can do something to stop them.

Clinic or Doctor this evidence relates to:

Clinics of Hydrocarbon Gasses. Clinics of Mining, Quarrying, & Oil & Gas Extraction.

I’d add, in addition, The Clinics of Plastic Water Bottles, The Food Packaging Clinic, The Fossil Fuel Clinic, the Paper Mill Clinic, the Toxic Dyes Clinic, and the Off-Gassing Mattress Clinic. Clinic of White Male Lawmakers.

Don’t mess with Texas.

City Crowell
State Texas
Zip 79227
County Foard

I’m an MFA student at Northwestern University. This spring, I published my first short story in Litbreak Magazine. I’ve published essays, literary histories and criticism, and scholarly research in various news outlets, scholarly journals, and blogs, including Letras Hispanas, Peace and Change, In These Times, and Inside Higher Ed’s “University of Venus Blog.” I hold a PhD in Spanish literature and an MA in Women’s History. I was a tenured professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Western Illinois University until WIU eliminated my department and my position with it. I went to high school in East Texas, where my mom’s family is from. Now I live in Macomb, Illinois, with my spouse, son, and poodle.

Photo credit: Deputy Enforcement Officer Blanche Rogers, 1913, Dewey, Oklahoma, from the U.S. Library of Congress, restored by sixpounder and used via a Creative Commons license.

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Backyard Musings in America at Twilight

By Ashley R. Carlson

6:52 p.m.

Summer, twilight, after a thunderous lightning-streaked monsoon that flooded streets and yards and sent trashcans floating into traffic-stalled intersections.

Seventy-eight degrees here in Phoenix, uncharacteristically tolerable for the Sonoran desert mid-August.

A breeze ruffles my hair, my German shepherd panting nearby as she lifts her long, jet-black snout to sniff the muggy air, nostrils flaring.

“What a wet summer,” they said earlier today at the tea room. I was the only person inside wearing a mask, save for one employee. We eyed each other across the small shop in solidarity.

Thank you, we said with our gazes, not our mouths, as the other patrons repeated their loud proclamations of “What a wet summer!” nearby.

“What a green summer, you know what that means! The wildflowers will be blooming like crazy next spring!”

But I knew the truth—I’d already read the latest IPCC climate report released August 9, 2021. And it will not mean rain for flowers.

It will mean unexpected, torrential downpours that end up killing four-year-olds seeking refuge on the roofs of their mothers’ cars during flash floods that come raging down from the foothills, washing them away so that their bodies aren’t found until four days later.[1] It will mean record-breaking wildfires that desecrate entire communities and burn hundreds of animals and elderly alive[2]; it will mean increased diagnoses of childhood respiratory diseases and risks of hospitalization and death from those “blooming wildflowers”[3]; it will mean more bleaching events like those that have already reduced the millennia-old Great Barrier Reef by more than half its size in the last thirty years.[4]

It is but a taste—a drop of cream in a teacup the size of Lake Michigan-Huron, a harbinger of the unprecedented (ah, but that horrific word that’s been overused and tarnished and will never not be met with disdain by English speakers again) climate disasters to come.

“What a wonderfully rainy summer!” they sing-songed in the tea room, and I smiled behind my mask and nodded because that’s what you do to be polite.

•

7:14 p.m.

The sky past my backyard is reminiscent of a Rococo.

Taffy-pink melting into periwinkle pinwheels, interwoven by muted grey and dollops of still-receding storm clouds in the hue of what I can only describe as London Fog—the descriptor jumps out to me because that was the name of the tea I bought for my mother-in-law today.

I hear tires on the wet asphalt of the street in front of my house. The distant traffic on the 51 freeway is an ever-present drone, louder now as the final wave of nine-to-fivers (or “seveners”) return home.

A young neighbor calls for their dog a few houses down. An air conditioner on the roof next to mine kicks on, humming good-naturedly.

A bird sings in the tree over my head—chiiiiirp, chiiiiirp, chiiiiirp, chiiiiirp, CHIRP, CHIRP, CHIRP!

A mosquito finds the only uncovered skin on my ankle and sucks, the skin grows itchy and red a minute later and begs to be scratched.

All is well.

All is safe.

There are no armed fighters pounding on my door with my name on a list,[5] ready to haul me away once the international press evacuates and a new crisis gets everyone’s attention.

•

7:37 p.m.

Afghanistan fell to the Taliban three days ago.

Reddit was flooded with news updates and pictures that quickly began trending, garnering 100k+ upvotes and thousands of comments like these:

“I feel so bad for the people who didn’t get a spot on that military plane. Why are there so many men inside and barely any women or kids?”

“Those poor young girls and women. Jesus fucking christ, what they’re going to do to them…”

“Look at the expressions of the people on that plane! The sheer relief!”

“With nothing but the clothes they’ve got on. Left their grandparents and their pets behind.”

I donated and I shared on social media and I emailed my senators and representatives through their website contact forms and received sterile, automated replies back, and then we spent the afternoon sipping tea from tiny cups painted with pink roses, and we talked about the people who’d fallen to their deaths while clinging to that military plane’s wheels.[6]

•

8:02 p.m.

The 2020 census count results just came out—I know because the two middle-aged white women seated beside me in the tea room were discussing them.

“They say the numbers of white people are declining rapidly,” they’d murmured between bites of scones smothered in clotted cream and sips of their oolong tea.

They’d clutched their costume pearls and wiggled their feathered fascinators—all plucked from a box in the corner of the room, beside a cardboard cutout of Queen Elizabeth II.

“They say in a few years white people will be the minority.”[7]

Their eyes were wide, wider than they’d been when the strawberry-and-chocolate-topped petits fours arrived at their table a few minutes before.

What will they do to us? their eyes said as they shoveled the finger-sized desserts into their mouths and plopped more sugar cubes into their steaming cups of oolong.

Nothing that we don’t deserve, was what I’d wanted to reply. I’d wanted to scream it, to swing from the crystal chandeliers overhead draped in multicolored fabric flowers and fake butterflies and fake robins in their fake nests and shriek it in their artificially wrinkle-free faces.

Nothing that they and their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents haven’t dealt with every single day of their lives.

Instead I sipped my tea, attempting to swallow a chunk of scone in a mouth that was much drier than before.

•

8:19 p.m.

The author of the book Sapiens says that the current—and only existing—human species of Homo sapiens first evolved 300,000 years ago, positing that they may have forced Homo neanderthalis, Homo erectus, Homo denisova, Homo solensis, and all other human beings belonging to the genus Homo into extinction in the years following.[8]

We’re in the midst of the sixth mass extinction right now.[9]

My good friend, a fellow childfree person, is much more anarchist than I. She often tells me, “Fuck it. Humanity doesn’t deserve to be saved—let us burn. Give the planet back to the animals who deserve it; the ones who survive, anyway.”

I want to be more like her. I’d cry and rage a lot less.

But until that day comes, if ever, I’ll keep donating and sharing on social media and sending emails that my congresspeople will almost certainly never read. I’ll keep crying and raging for the oppressed. For the raped. For the tortured. For the abused. For the left behind. For the traumatized. For the enslaved. For the murdered. For the exploited. For the neglected. And for the silenced.

And I’ll keep writing pointless fucking musings in my backyard in America at twilight.

Ashley R. Carlson is an award-winning writer and freelance editor whose short fiction was selected for Metaphorosis Magazine’s “Best of 2020” edition, and whose nonfiction has appeared in Darling Magazine, Medium, and elsewhere. She’s passionate about animal advocacy and biodiversity protection, the intersectionality between climate and social justice, and fighting against oppression in its myriad forms. She lives in Phoenix with her partner, their three furkids, and an ever-rotating series of foster kittens. Find her at www.ashleyrcarlson.com and on Instagramat @ashleyrcarlson1.

Photo credit: Marco Verch via a Creative Commons license.

Note from Writers Resist: If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

[1] Brian Webb et al., “Pima Police: 4-Year-Old Girl Who Was Swept Away during Flash Flooding ‘Did Not Survive,’” Fox 10 Phoenix, updated July 26, 2021, https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/pima-police-4-year-old-girl-who-was-swept-away-during-flash-flooding-did-not-survive.

[2] Hope Miller, “These Are the Victims of the Camp Fire,” KCRA-TV, updated June 17, 2020, https://www.kcra.com/article/these-are-the-victims-of-camp-fire/32885128.

[3] Maria Elisa Di Cicco et al., “Climate Change and Childhood Respiratory Health: A Call to Action for Paediatricians,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 15 (2020): 5344, doi:10.3390/ijerph17155344.

[4] Amy Woodyatt, “The Great Barrier Reef Has Lost Half Its Corals within 3 Decades,” CNN, updated October 14, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/great-barrier-reef-coral-loss-intl-scli-climate-scn/index.html.

[5] Maggie Astor et al., “A Taliban Spokesman Urges Women to Stay Home Because Fighters Haven’t Been Trained to Respect Them,” The New York Times, published August 24, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/world/asia/taliban-women-afghanistan.html.

[6] Marcus Yam and Laura King, “7 Reported Dead Amid Chaos at Kabul Airport as Desperate Afghans Try to Flee,” Los Angeles Times, published August 16, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-08-16/chaos-panic-kabul-airport-afghans-flee-taliban-takeover.

[7] Hansi Lo Wang, “What the New Census Data Can—and Can’t—Tell Us about People Living in the U.S.,” NPR, published August 12, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1010222899/2020-census-race-ethnicity-data-categories-hispanic.

[8] Earth.org, “Sixth Mass Extinction of Wildlife Accelerating – Study,” Earth.org, published August 10, 2021, https://earth.org/sixth-mass-extinction-of-wildlife-accelerating/.

[9] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, (New York: Harper, 2015): 21.

Election Day

By Elizabeth Edelglass

We stand in line beside our mothers’ stockinged legs, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we’d also snaked through same gymnasium, mouths agape for the healing cube, sugar our mothers said, but bitter, live virus, our parents had said, to save us from the deadly virus, their voices husky with fear, when they thought we couldn’t hear from our secret perch on the upstairs landing, aliens landed from our beds in the sky. Now our mothers lift us high with strong arms, purposeful fingers, click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, we the people whisper our secret choices. Then home to our fathers in their fatigues from the war, fathers who’d already voted, forsaking sleeping houses at sunup, as always, though no work today, so rake the leaves, let us jump the piles, crisp and sharp, then watch our fathers set the piles aflame, red and orange and crunchy brown, smoke soaring to the sky.

We stand in line in our fathers’ fatigues from the war, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we square-danced, dosido, allemande left, allemande right, line snaking, choose your partner, change your partner, kiss your partner behind the bleachers. Old enough now to snake on our bellies through Asian jungle, if we were boys, old enough to click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, assert our choice to save the boys we think we love from snaking through the jungle mud. Then home to huddle in those boys’ strong arms under percale piles, to scream and husky cry, election stolen by dirty tricks, as bombs keep crying from the sky, until at last those tricky fingers flash the famous V before boarding a chopper to fly out of sight, rotors roaring into the sky.

We stand in line with our kangaroo pouches, babies snuggled at our breasts, toddlers at our denimed legs, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we were chosen, or not chosen, for the team. Line snaking through the gymnasium where soon our babies will be chosen, or not chosen, we pray for them as we click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, affirm our choices, big and small, win or lose, year after year, school board, zoning board, firemen’s budget. Then home to rake the leaves, we let our children jump in the piles, when they think we cannot see, freely fly across grass and sky, then rake again, into bio-safe bags, saving the smoke, restoring the sky.

We stand in line in our pantsuits and pearls, behind our masks, line snaking outside the gymnasium, six-foot circles on grass as green as far-off jungle, leaves painting rainbow sky, sun shining as if God knows, line snaking one-by-one, dosido into the gymnasium, where tomorrow our grandchildren will all be chosen, everyone a winner now, though they know truths we think they don’t. Yesterday we helped our mothers, safe on Facetime, mark their ballots with brittle fingers, will they touch us once again before they soar to unknown sky? We’re determined to stand in line, though old enough to be at risk, we shout our choice to save the world from sneaky virus, snake-y words, both sharp with spikes that can kill. We mark our ballots with gloved fingers, slide into scanners, what happens next we do not know, missing the click of levers, the pull of arm, the reassuring slide of curtain. Then home to rake the leaves with bony fingers, aching arms, anything to avoid the blaring TV voices, we lift our eyes, imploring the sky.

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer and book reviewer who finds herself writing poetry in response to today’s world—personal, national, and global. Her first published poems recently appeared in Global Poemic and Trouvaille Review. Her story “An Implausibility of Wildebeests” appeared in Writers Resist in November 2020. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo by Patrick Schöpflin on Unsplash.

Humanity

By Steven Croft

Wants to believe kindness, its namesake, can still a morning rain
of bombs, calm the lightning strike of artillery shells on cratered streets
scorched hot and unlivable as the surface of the sun

Wants to believe foresight will quiet the chainsaws’ outcry against
ancient trees in the last remaining rainforests, make abandoned
the coal-fired cooling towers as monuments to itself, leave at least some
of the fish in the sea

Wants to believe in the white sorcery of hope: we will never be starving
animals on a dying planet, we are not tongueless to stop a world’s
unraveling, wants to believe in good hearts joining us together in time
like a savior walking out of a desert, the world as scry bowl of better angels

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. For the last thirteen years he has worked in a library. He has recent poems in Sky Island Journal, As It Ought to Be Magazine, Poets Reading the News, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, and other places.

Photo credit: Xavier Vergés via a Creative Commons license.

The Fire Still Burns

By Gary Priest

Fire makes us all believers.

There’s a unity in fear that allowed science and religion to merge into a rational hysteria that swept us all along on a wave of koala memes and apocalypse FOMO.

The eco-inspired crimewave started in the mid 2020s. This was not just shutting down airport runways or protest hashtags. This was something darker, primal and all persuasive.

My first assignment as a rookie eco-cop was crowd control at the murder of an oil company CEO. He was castrated and hung from a lamppost outside a petrol station on New Year’s Eve, 2028. Six months later, I found myself first on the scene of a luckless idiot who discarded a burger wrapper on a Soho street and was kicked to death by a passing group of vegan death metal kids.

Ten years after those first deaths, “ecoslaughter” was written into the rule of law. By the early 2040s, it was impossible to get a conviction on any death that could show a motive related to saving the planet.

The skies got a little bluer and the oceans were more saltwater than cellophane again.

We saved the world.

Twenty years came and went. I remained on the force.

On a dull evening patrol, I drove past a group of teens waited in an orderly line to get into the hippest of the town’s vice-free nightclubs. I could probably find some reason to take them in. The smallest violations were now offences. Sneaking an outlawed carbohydrate, wearing leather shoes without a permit, and, of course, loitering with intent to pollute, which could be twisted to cover anything anyone did and was great for keeping arrest numbers up.

Hoping there might be some meatier infractions inside the club, I parked my bright green smart car and with one flash of my badge at the door, strode inside the large hall. The whale song and bird tweets were a long way from the old days of EDM and rock ’n roll, but after the Bank Holiday Modular Music riots of ’44, the influencers decided that all human-made music was ecologically unsound.

I still remember the day they executed Keith Richards. The lethal injection didn’t work, so they beheaded him live on the nine o’clock news. The tattered illusion of humane deaths for musicians was put aside. They crucified Miley Cyrus, fed Alfie Boe to a pack of feral hogs and kept going until every last one of them was dead.

Groups of pious youth swayed back and forth to the somnolent sounds of nature. These were the inheritors of the planet.

I hated them and I hated what the world we saved had become.

That was my secret.

Back in the early 21st century, there was a gestalt shift that left no room for doubt in anyone’s mind. They called it Twitter-logic. You never expressed doubts, you never backed down, and if there was a mob, you had better be part of it or you would find yourself its next target.

That shift pulled us back from the brink of global catastrophe. Who’d have thought all those armchair environmentalists would one day bring about the Plastic Purges of 2042, the Meatless Monday Massacres of ’55.

I played along, said all the right things and became the perfect symbol of the new age of woke warrior.

Don’t get me wrong, I was glad the planet had been saved, and I admit that the draconian means were probably the only option we had left by the end of the 2020s. But now that the planet was yet again an Eden, it seemed we had forgotten how to enjoy its bounty and grace.

I clocked up a few arrests in the club. Minor violations of recycling laws and dental hygiene directives. The Prius prison vans came and took the offenders away, and I went back to my patrol.

It was a quiet night and I was nearing the end of my shift when the call came in to investigate a code 411, “possible youthquake in progress.”

She sat alone on a wall by the burnt-out shell of a public library. Hardly a youthquake, but certainly a curfew violation to start with.

She wasn’t much older than fourteen. Her hair was a messy nest of blonde and pink. I could have taken her in for the hour and the highlights, but those abuses were the least of her transgressions.

Smoking a cigarette. In public! A goddamn roll-up! That was a twenty-year minimum sentence right there. At her feet, a small pile of cigarette butts, an empty bottle of bootleg vodka and what looked like the remains of a highly illegal kebab.

I got out of my car. She didn’t look up, just puffed out a plume of smoke and started singing.

Instinctively, I drew my gun. Still, she didn’t react.

The song came from way back in the 1980s. “Are you singing a Russ Ballard song” I asked.

She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall and tossed it to the ground.”‘The Fire Still Burns,” she said. She did not smile but assaulted me with eyes granite grey and defiant.

“How do you even know music? It was outlawed before you were born.”

Her laugh was flat and without warmth. “It’s all still out there in the dark cloud if you know where to look.”

Another violation.

“And is that how you want to die? Singing some forgotten power ballad from the eighties?”

She shrugged. “You remember it.”

“That’s not the point, you dumb fucking kid. I have to kill you now. You get that, right?”

After the first few years I no longer enjoy the killing, nor did I feel anything other than a grim certainty that to disobey an eco-statute would mean my death as well as the offender’s.

“I have to kill you”’ I repeated.

‘Of course, you do. Been waiting half an hour for one of you green-booted arseholes to come and end me.’

My grip tightened on the gun. There was no arrest protocol for this many violations.

“Why are you doing this”’ I asked.

The kid smiled for the first time. “Because extinction is the only rebellion I have left, green-boot.”

I shot her twice in the head and once in the chest. Her smile reddened as she toppled over the wall to the ground. I called the cleanup squad and went home.

For the first time in years, my heart soared. I was too old and too scared to rebel, but that kid hadn’t given it a second thought, and if there was one of her, there were probably more. One kid smoking cigarettes and singing outlawed songs might do little else but give hope to her embittered executioner, but a thousand of them could become a trending topic, a hashtag, a movement, and that was how the world changed these days. In her grey eyes I saw the rebirth of the natural revolt of youth. Our generation saved the world, and now maybe, just maybe, the next one could save us.

Later, in the surveillance dead-spot of three a.m. I started singing “The Fire Still Burns,” softly, in the cold solitude of the night.

Gary Priest writes short fiction and poetry. He has over thirty publications online and in print including Daily Science Fiction, The Eunoia Review, and Literary Orphans. He lives in the UK at the end of a dead-end road, which may explain everything.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

Sonnet: Australia in 2020

By Chris Collins

‘graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day’
– P. B. Shelley, England in 1819

An orange light, pale, sickly, dying
Chokes the sky, while it anaesthetises.
Infected air, poisoned, thick and blinding,
But smoke can’t shroud our eyes from these fire’s sizes.
Our rulers neither see, nor feel nor know
But deny, scorn, politicise and peddle
As drought, hunger and extinction grow;
The stench of half a billion gone to the devil.
They make glib comments on cricket and ‘soul’
And our ‘resilient spirit’ that sucks the lie.
They warm their hands on lacquered coal
While their people sleep on beaches – and die.
Now even water, and breathing air aren’t free
Unless you’re on holiday in Hawaii.

Chris Collins writes poems and fairy fiction in between marking essays, narrowboating, Morris dancing, and folk singing. Her writing has previously been published by Animal Heart Press, Between These Shores Literary Annual, and several online presses and magazines, including Cephalopress and Mooky Chick.

Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash.

Fire Storm: Poem Beginning with a Line from Jane Kenyon

By Lynn Wagner

Into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen
while the crown fires burn and branches break, charred
and brittled to the tall trees’ bones. Fall down from the sky
fantails, so stumble purple swamphen along the shore.
And day is night and ash is all while pyrocumulonimbus
counterclockwise circle the globe.

Into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
Australian sharpshooters cull ten thousand thirsty camels
brought to their knees. To the east, their brothers in choppers
tip carrots and yam to wallabies. Call the Karajarri to pray
for rain. Call the prime minister back home. And all is ash,
is ash, so the children make a circle and sing a tune.

Into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen
like the very same rain from the sky, that gratefully
commingled with beads of hail. And the black earth
knows its sacrifice. And the beasts, vegetarians and sad
predators alike, their bodies baptized in death, yet koala
come, pockmarked, to puddles and drink, satisfied, at dawn.

Lynn Wagner is the author of No Blues This Raucous Song, which won the Slapering Hol Chapbook competition. She received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where she won the Academy of American Poets prize. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Subtropics, West Branch, Green Mountains Review, Cavewall, and other journals. See more at lynnwagner.com.

Photo by Joanne Francis on Unsplash.

Scrolling

By Laura Grace Weldon

Two penguin chicks are the only survivors
of a 40,000 bird Antarctic colony.
I imagine fuzzy hatchlings
chirping for food till silent,
scroll on to read
about a dog taught to talk
with an adaptive device. Stella,
a mixed breed, already uses 29 words
although her choices don’t include “why.”

All this bluster about GDP and NASDAQ,
about trends, ratings, followers,
about so-called political divisions
is just Oz shouting
Pay no attention
to that man behind the curtain
to keep us consuming, keep us distracted
keep us from the startling recognition

we are Stella tapping “want” “Jake” “come,”
then tapping “happy” when Jake indeed
comes home at the expected time.
We are the penguins, the ocean,
the plastic debris filling bird bellies.
Everywhere, curtains.

Laura Grace Weldon has published two poetry collections, Blackbird (Grayson 2019) and Tending (Aldrich 2013). She was named Ohio Poet of the Year for 2019. Laura works as a book editor and teaches community-based writing workshops. She lives with vast optimism on a small farm where she’d get more done if she didn’t spend so much time reading library books, cooking weird things, and singing to livestock. Connect with her at lauragraceweldon.com., on Facebook, and on Twitter @earnestdrollery.

Photo by Cassidy Mills on Unsplash.

Subliminal and Unanimous Dreams of the Future

By Kimberly Kaufman

In the shadowy, damp cities of our eon
no Martian parent will guilt their children
into eating their slimy green protein crumbles
with stories of the starving Children of Earth

As the dust storms rage above no Martian
child will flick internal game consoles, the
giant screens their only chance to marvel at
the blue, cool expanse of the Pacific ocean

No Martian will stagger through the thick,
viscous gravity, envying Earth refugees
who had a chance to spin and fall in warm air
without seventy pounds of protective plastic shell

As Martian children grow to moody, tense teens
they will never dream of an ozone layer keeping
them safe from this hostile universe that waits for
the first opportunity to twist their skulls inside out

We will not look out the window
to a night filled with two shrunken,
misshapen moons,
whispering,
the Earth
she was irreplaceable,
but we lost her

I have previously published speculative fiction in various literary magazines, including Metaphorosis, The Future Fire, and Jersey Devil Press. A brief list of things I’ve been, am, or will be: a student of Spanish literature, a lawyer, a punk bass guitarist, a traveler, a quiet child, and a mountain climber.

Photo credit: Mars dust storm, NASA.

On the President’s Announcement of Our Hashtag

By John Linstrom

The President announced we need to keep
some carbon in the ground; he sounded sure,

his raised and lowered index finger maybe
mimicking an oil rig I’ve seen

on my computer screen. I caught his talk
distilled at first, a single image meme,

hashtagged to my cell phone’s glowing face,
the floating phantom of a president

in light above this tiny glowing slab.
Such phones are made of matter. I forget

sometimes the way the world is swept for me,
the oil that forms the plastic, metals heaved

from mines, and heavy metals concentrated
to this short-term task. I hold it here—

the screen dims—it reminds me of the black
obsidian we’d often find in flakes

along the old ravine. We pretended
that was magic, too, but we really knew

it made the body of the place we played,
the mud’s black fingernails, skeletal

outcropped source of grounded mystic wonder.
That stone had been there for millennia.

Then we’d each lift a rock and toss it up
into the clicking branches, watch it fall

gleaming along a trail the trees had altered,
and catch it in our shirt-sleeve-guarded hands.

Later, we’d return the stones to the mud.
The soul of Earth is black like that, I think,

obsidian and coal and oil, the bridges
from molten core to surface, dinosaurs

to us. We listen to our President
on magic flakes we’ve swept from earth’s ravines.

The flakes can prophesy to how we’ve made
an end to all we’ll ever dream to make—

a human listening to the soil’s voice
might speak of moderation, or of love.

#KeepItInTheGround

Poet’s note: Written on the occasion of President Barack Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline, November 2015.

John Linstrom’s poems have recently appeared in Commonweal Magazine, Bridge Eight, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Dunes Review, and Narrative Northeast’s “Eco Issue.” In 2015, Counterpoint Press published his centennial edition of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s eco-philosophical manifesto, The Holy Earth, with a new foreword by Wendell Berry. He now has a collection of Bailey’s garden writings, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion, forthcoming from Cornell University Press in the fall. John currently lives with his fiancée in Brooklyn, where he is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at New York University, and he also holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. Visit him on Twitter and Instagram @JohnLinstrom, at his website at johnlinstrom.com, and on Facebook.

“On the President’s Announcement of Our Hashtag” was previously publish by This Week in Poetry.

Photo credit: Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash.

Storm Front

By Judith Skillman

Artist Statement

In “Storm Front,” oil and cold wax on canvas, 12” x 12”, the artist used a rag in equal measure to paint and wax. A paint scraper was employed to etch out the trees at the bottom left. Nature provides solace during times of affliction, whether that affliction be physical or political. One can imagine that those who have been targets of fascism and racism—dreamers who deserve their amnesty, “illegal” Mexicans who perform heroic jobs American refuse to do, and the poor from whom government support has been taken and put into the pockets of the very rich—these people still and always remain citizens of the natural world.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the German term Sturm and drang (transl. as storm and urge, or action and high emotionalism—in the German usage, however, against 18th century norms in literature and music)—a website by the same name, “Stormfront,” which had its domain name “seized for displaying bigotry, discrimination, or hatred,” has become a growing force for white nationalists and neo-Nazi’s. To call this site troubling would be euphemistic. Inherent in the attitudes of those who patronize this site lies a disturbing reality. Not only is the current administration bent on making the rich richer and the poor poorer, it is determined to sacrifice nature in the bargain.

Regulations of vehicle greenhouse gas emissions implemented under the Obama administration have been undone; FEMA has stricken the term “climate change” from its plan book and “climate change” websites have been likewise censored; the Trump admin has decreed that accidental bird deaths, in violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), are legal.

To date, the actions of this administration have broken with a tradition of environmental protection—the result of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and other like-minded literature that focuses on understanding the impact humans have had on the earth. The actions taken by Trump and his cronies undo measures to safeguard the only place we have to live. They are shocking; they fly in the face of science, spirituality, and God-given rights for plants, animals and humans.

“Storm Front,” then, can be seen as what has happened since the Trump administration came to power, and what is to come. Viewing the painting requires an admission that this is not the time to sit idly by. Both the natural and the human world require concrete forms of protest—resistance—in order to survive the onslaught of such a dangerous and powerful ignorance.

Judith Skillman is interested in feelings engendered by the natural world. Her medium is oil on canvas and oil on board; her works range from representational to abstract. Her art has appeared in Minerva Rising, Cirque, The Penn Review, The Remembered Arts, and elsewhere. She also writes poetry, and her new collection, Premise of Light, is published by and available from Tebot Bach. Judith has studied at the Pratt Fine Arts Center and the Seattle Artist’s League under the mentorship of Ruthie V. Shows include The Pratt, Galvanize, and The Pocket Theater, in Seattle. Visit jkpaintings.com.

Deaths of Canaries

By Katherine D. Perry

We were standing together, our fingers loosely grasping
each other’s hands, around the planet.
Here, in the good ole U.S. of A., we had been looking elsewhere
for pain: we didn’t notice when we began
to choke from our own smoldering: arrogance
and first world privilege let us take our Zyrtec and Claritin
for months and months thinking we were overproducing
histamines instead of blaming our own toxic fumes.
We thought we would know better when the moment arrived.

The graffiti at the Krog Street bridge
told us that we needed to call our senators,
told us that we needed to march, to rise up,
told us, with bleeding letters, that the dangers were here and now.
The journals and anthologies filled with poems
about death marches and end of days.
But we went to work anyway, and let the men in Washington
roll over the few-and-far-between women.
We grocery shopped and wrote our outrage on social media
as one by one the artists dropped dead.
We mourned them on SNL and in tributes to the hurricane victims,
but we kept moving.
We forgot to notice the yellow feathers
littering the dying grasses.
We couldn’t be bothered to begin the arduous task:
putting people on elevators, sending them up.

When I looked down at my hand, now empty,
I wondered where my sisters’ fingers had gone.
Even as I dropped to my knees, unable to summon another line
for the next poem, the survival instinct whispered
that help would come.

We were the hope we asked for,
but we were also the fingers pulling the triggers.

Katherine D. Perry is an Associate Professor of English at Perimeter College of Georgia State University. Her first book of poetry, Long Alabama Summer, was released in December of 2017 from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Writers Resist, The Dead Mule of Southern Literature, Poetry Quarterly, Melusine, Southern Women’s Review, Bloodroot, Borderlands, Women’s Studies, RiverSedge, Rio Grande Review, and 13th Moon. She is a co-founder of the Georgia State University Prison Education Project which works in Georgia prisons to bring literature and poetry to incarcerated students. She lives in Decatur, Georgia with her spouse and two children. Her website is www.katherinedperry.com.

Image credit: SJDStudio via a Creative Commons license.