climate crisis – Page 2 – Writers Resist

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.

Americans are rushing around stocking up on toilet paper

By Marcy Rae Henry

In Himalayan India we used leaves

buckets of water and our hands

Best-selling tampons have applicators

because Americans are afraid to touch themselves

In Himalayan India we didn’t have tampons

We used rags and pads

but didn’t touch each other’s hands to say hello

When wiping with leaves or plants you have to know

which ones are poisonous and that’s different

from knowing the price of toilet paper at Sam’s v. Costco

They want to install outhouses in rural India

where people have only used the forest

Don’t women have enough problems on buses

without feeling vulnerable trapped in a shitbox at night

We learned to cut off tops of water bottles and pee in plastic

during an unknown night

With the tops we made spoons and flimsy guitar picks

At crowded train stations or bus stops food was sold

on plates of leaves that were tossed from windows

to degrade sooner than bones that are outlived by plastic

In Himalayan India we didn’t have many choices

for shampoo toothpaste or hair ties

We got whatever someone carried up the mountain

The States is mad about choice

about opening bars and closing borders

Some see the lack of a mask as an act of rebellion

The Great American Rush on Toilet Paper

A virus that cannot space out everyone

And we are the perfect hosts when we don’t want to be

Marcy Rae Henry is a Latina born and raised in Mexican-America/The Borderlands. She is a resister and an interdisciplinary artist with no social media accounts. Her writing and visual art have appeared in national and international publications and the former has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Ms. M.R. Henry is working on a collection of poems and two novellas. She is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Fine Arts at Harold Washington College Chicago.

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.

Suspension

By Mandy Brown

When their skins have thinned with age,
they will still tell the story: thirteen people
suspended over Portland bridge
to stop a Shell tanker. “I was one of them,”
she will tell his children. “I regret
nothing,” he will tell hers. Living
sometimes means hanging at the end
of a knot. Some dangle by their necks,
counting the breaths. Others ride the swings,
pumping their knees. I have been both,
but these days all I can think about is
how I haven’t come out to my parents
or friends, how my husband and my
poetry are the only beings who know
I am queer and poly, how life was simpler before
I noticed all the oil. He invited a friend
over who could answer so many of my
questions. He teased me as he helped
me choose an outfit and cooked us dinner.
I spent the whole time wondering what
love he must have to expect nothing and
still knot his fingers in mine while I—like the thirteen
lives spinning in air underneath commuting
cars—suspend in limbo to watch her eyes dilate.

Mandy Brown (she/her) is a queer Central Texas poet, a 2019 Poetry Half-Marathon winner, and the 2013 recipient of A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Tillie Olsen Fellowship. Her poetry has been published in Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Extract(s), Eunoia Review, and more. Mandy currently teaches at an alternative school for high-risk students and loves it! Read more at mandyalyssbrown.weebly.com.

Photo credit: Steve Dipaola, Greenpeace.

St. Donald, Patron Saint of Denial

By Laura King

The tweets come to rest
on his chest and shoulders
as he gives a first-light
audience to the Presidential roses.

Last night’s dream still shimmers:
a waterfall, biggest ever, in New York,
backsplashed with diamonds,
applauded by palms, lush as a vulva.

He won’t say “climate change.”
That would break the spell
of the present moment, who,
like a beautiful woman, stands

petal soft, her head turned.
No one sees the future striding
toward her, hard as diamonds.
No one shouts until he grabs.

Laura King litigates climate change cases from Helena, Montana. Her poems have appeared in 14 by 14, Goblin Fruit, Lucid Rhythms, and Inlandia, and have been nominated by the Science Fiction Poetry Association for the Dwarf Stars award.

The Last Straw

By Corey Miller

The entire world was transfixed by the TV. In all languages, the broadcasters described the atmosphere in the room. The camera zoomed in on the lucky woman chosen; next to her, a polished glass and a bottle of Coca Cola. All went quiet. Earth held its breath. The woman cracked the bottle open and decanted the smell of sassafras and caramel. She brought forth the last straw. The humans at home tensed their muscles and observed, not wanting to scare the endangered species.

The woman tore the end of white wrapping paper and the straw poked out of its home. Flashing lights and the sound of awe surrounded the straw. The woman slowly slid it out like a sword from its sheath to slice the Earth down to its fiery core. The straw dove to the bottom and attempted to float its way back out, longing to hop the rim of its cage and return to its unnatural habitat. The woman kinked her head to use the tool that moves liquid six inches and began to suck, her throat pulsating from gulping the sugary juice. The world watched in silence, while the Coca Cola disappeared like the ball dropping on New Years’ Eve. At last, a loud gurgling noise ended an era.

The humans sprung into the air cheering. People ran into the streets shouting and kissing their neighbors in jubilation. Parties broke out and alcohol was consumed. They would tell their children where they were the day of the last straw.

Without notice, while the humans looked the other way, the straw bent and rolled itself out of sight and out of mind. It floated down rivers past parties of people embracing like reunited lovers. It floated past politicians congratulating one another. It floated into the ocean searching for answers. Searching for its origin.

The waves pushed and pulled the straw like an accordion, creating dynamical tones, moving it deeper into the sea. Schools of fish knew all about plastic and carried the straw as servants would carry their ruler. Turtles with plastic belts and snappers with tummy tucks led the way. More and more plastic congregated with the currents. Eventually, the straw washed up on a netting of plastic bags interwoven to catch the guests of Trash Island. Greenhouses constructed from smooth beach glass, hotels of soggy corrugated cardboard, and convenience stores of non-recyclables formed the infrastructure.

The streets were immaculate and travelers constantly flowed in. The beer bottles howled as the wind blew across their lips, the shotgun shells would shoot the shit, and the used condoms got a private beach. The crazy straws arrived by pelican stomach like smuggled inmates who broke out of prison.

They gathered and assembled, first an island, next a castle, then a city for the ecosystem. Straws of all colors connected like Lego bricks to create walls, houses, and districts. The last straw was clear. A looming force banded together. The tides had changed.

Corey Miller lives with his wife in a tiny house they built near Cleveland. He is an award-winning Brewmaster who enjoys a good lager. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Barren, Cleaver, Bending Genres, Hobart, Gravel, and Cease Cows. When not working or writing, Corey likes to take the dogs for adventures. Follow Corey on Twitter @IronBrewer.

Photo credit: MetroUK.

No Drone

By Willa Carroll

Willa Carroll is the author of Nerve Chorus, one of Entropy magazine’s Best Poetry Books of 2018 and a SPD Bestseller. A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she was the winner of Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize and Narrative magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, LARB Quarterly Journal, The Rumpus, Tin House, and elsewhere. Video readings of her poems were featured in Narrative Outloud. A former experimental dancer and actor, she has collaborated with numerous artists, including on text-based projects with her filmmaker husband. Willa lives in NYC. Visit her site at willacarroll.com.

I’m With Exxon Mobile

By Carl Dimitri

Carl Dimitri, a Providence, Rhode Island-based artist, is committed to drawing one cartoon a day until the Trump era is over. Carl has received fellowships in painting from the Vermont Studio Center and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. He was also elected in 2012 into The Drawing Center in New York City.

A version of this cartoon was previously published in Entropy magazine.

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.

Good Mourning, America

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

It’s eighth-grade writing class day and the weekly morning jaunt to my favorite little school, nestled in a rural Southern California valley. Here, the water table’s level prevents developers from bulldozing nurseries and groves, and there’s still a farmer’s grange. A canopy of Live Oaks shades my drive to the school, where the children of immigrants are the dominant demographic. My child went to school here, transferred from our very-white hometown, so she’d no longer speak disparagingly of the Latinx kids on the playground. She didn’t understand back then that she’s one of them.

Today, my students are learning to make notecards for a research paper on climate change. The assigned article that challenges their English can no longer be found on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s website.

“What did you all find most surprising about the article?” I ask.

“That the U.S. is the second biggest producer of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming,” one of them answers.

The students are smart. Smart and so young and hopeful. All but two or three of them want to attend college. They all have plans for the future. Here, in the United States.

They finish up their notecards.

“‘Heat stress is the leading cause of weather-related death in the Southwest, and heat waves are increasing in frequency and intensity.’ That’s a direct quote combined with a paraphrase,” a student says.

“Nice work! Now, before I go, let’s talk about the homework for next week. Please complete—”

An alarm blasts.

“We have to stop,” the classroom teacher says fast and loud. “That’s our emergency response signal. Everyone, under your desks, away from the windows. Quick. Nope, leave your stuff. Get down now. Manuel, I can see your head. Rosa, you’re visible from the window. Get under the desk—under! I don’t want to have to say it again.”

It’s an active shooter drill.

The signal blares while I tuck my laptop into my briefcase, and down the dregs of my coffee. The students are giggling, sprawled on the floor—the perfect opportunity to make quick contact with the objects of their desires. The teacher tells them to cool their jets.

“Okeydoke, nice work today, everyone,” I say. “See you all next week.”

There’s more giggling as I leave. The alarm continues pulsing danger. I hear it—feel it—on the way to my car.

• • •

It’s another day, a Sunday, my writing day. But I can’t.

Five mass shootings in twenty-four hours.*

El Paso: Twenty dead and twenty-six injured. Now that’s twenty-one, now twenty-two.
Dayton: Nine dead and twenty-seven injured.
Memphis: One dead and three injured.
Chicago: None killed but seven injured.
Chicago: One dead and seven injured.

Numbers and names and the detritus of lives litter parking lots and store aisles and nightclubs and theaters and playgrounds and schools. Shootings are linked to hate websites, to Donald Trump, to manifestos, to mental illness, to familial discord, to immigration, to feminism, to news media, to the grotesque availability of guns.

So I wonder.

Which of my students will I be able to save when we have our school shooting?

How many of their heads will I be able to shove under desks before they are seen?

How many of their young bodies will expire in pools of blood, their cries for their mothers interrupted?

Will I die with them?

I wonder, because today, in this nation, with this president, with this Congress, with this NRA gun lobby, it feels inevitable.

* https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting

K-B’s narrative nonfiction, commentary, political fiction, book reviews and author features have been published in Evening Street Review and Evening Street Press, Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent (Thoughtcrime Press, December 2017), Publishers Weekly, Ducts magazine, The Missing Slate, Trivia: Feminist Voices, Ms. Magazine blog, North County Times, Gay San Diego, and others. She is the publisher and a founding editor of Writers Resist, and teaches Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Cal State University system. Read more of her work at ExcuseMeImWriting.com.

Editor’s note: The Trump in Guns photo was allegedly posted by one of the shooters on 8chan.

Fourteen Reasons to Love America the Beautiful

By Tori Cárdenas

Worn flags fall and burn / as bumper stickers / beer cans /
boardshorts / truck nuts / red visors and head coverings /
and hearts purple-swelling with pride / beneath twisted
knuckles
Paint your storm windows / with razor wire / and the
blessed blood of the unborn / seal out / pungent spices and
peppers / from your doorways / restrooms / defend your
borders
It is her fault / their fault / his fault / someone else’s
problem / Reduce to the common denominator / it is the
restaurant on the corner / serving anything but a burger and
fries
Bring your boots / your pipes / your fatigues / bring them
into the town square / to wage war on people who call it a
‘plaza’ / no room for foreign shit here / isolation is survival
Grab ’em by the pussy / treat ’em like shit / fuck their
daughters / they’re begging you / unless their chests are flat /
those ain’t the raping kind / lock them up / uptight lesbians
Circle one: true or false / if follow-up: false / if red: true /
false: blue / no news: good news / the best news / no news
to speak of here: true / not: false / don’t read all that fake
shit
They’re bringing drugs / they’re bringing rape / they’re
bringing crime / and sin and pestilence and parasites / Gas
their children begging at the nation’s bottom / and fuel the
swampy top
And yea, the Lord said, “Shoot the snowflakes / the
women / the children with brown skin / for they displease
your Lord God Almighty / on his golden Mar-a-Lago”
Cover your assets / for the end times are coming / store
your gold beneath the eaglet down of your pillows / when
your coffers runneth empty / a street of walls will meet you
You can survive on nothing / you’re still buying SPAM,
aren’t you / what about the dollar menu / it may not nourish
your cells to overthrow this epidemic / but you can still
make us money
It’s all a hoax / this climate shit / make it warmer / so we
can bust heads on the beach / blow up the schoolhouses /
teacher bullshit / gimme a pencil / sos I can black there eyes
out
Bring back the hanging / decorations / bamboo shoots are
the new manicure / Full page ads of black brown blue
babies / withered elders / toss them into the rivers / erase
them
Hey bro / got a job for you / the boss lets us drink and fuck
anything we want / don’t forget your golf clubs / got a seat
for you right here / with a guzzler helmet / and two cold
Coors Lights
Vote / your voice matters / we’re listening / psst / we want
to know what you think / it’s your right / pass the earplugs /
you fought for it / don’t you want it anymore / pussies /

Poetry editor Tori Cárdenas is a queer Tainx/Latinx poet from Northern New Mexico. In 2014, she graduated from the University of New Mexico with a dual Bachelor of Arts degree in History and English, with a concentration in Poetry. She returned to UNM in Fall 2017 to earn her MFA in Fiction. She served as Blue Mesa Review‘s 2018-2019 Poetry Editor, and serves currently as the 2019-2020 Editor-in-Chief. Tori’s work has appeared in Conceptions Southwest, VICE, Pantheon Magazine, Writers Resist online journal, and Writers Resist: The Anthology 2018, and it has been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology and a Pushcart Prize. Her works were also featured as finalists in the 2018 and 2019 Rabbit Catastrophe Press Really Good Poem Prize contests. Tori lives with her dog Sophie in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Editor’s note: The photo of the U.S. flag pistol is used for purposes of noncommercial commentary, satire, and education under the Fair Use Doctrine.

Bad News

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

In one stop-
action second
you
spin
in
slow
motion
over the sharp edge
of knowing.

There was then
& there is now.

No scrabbling back
up the cliff face.

No rewind button.

No cartoon-stopping
on the way down.

No spaceship
to beam you away.

No, the pressure
is in the here
& now.

Like the whole ocean
bearing down.

Like chloroform-cotton.

Like a pin
piercing you,
straight through
the thorax.

Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s first book, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and received honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. She posts a daily haiku and photo “anti-selfie” @placepoet on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @goodnewsmuse or visit her website at gold-boat.com.

Photo credit: By Sam Shere (1905–1982) – Zeppelin-ramp de Hindenburg / Hindenburg zeppelin disaster, Public Domain.

Two poems by Ginny Lowe Connors

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Onslaught

It spins like a gyroscope,
Our planet. My head.
Wobbles like a promise
too difficult to keep
as the news comes crashing
this way—space stones
hurling toward us from beyond
or from that hidden place
we carry within—
a secret darkness,
unknowable, unthinkable.
O disaster with a tail of flame
you’re hurtling this way again
you’re cratering my brain
and all the pretty cities we have built.

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Forget about It

Hit the snooze button, my fellow Americans,
hit the slot machines. Turn the page, switch

the channel, toss another steak on the barbeque.
Pay no attention to the plagues, the projectiles,

the flying limbs, or to the children who look
toward us, as if we could explain. Tell them our

electrons are all abuzz, they’re attracted, they’re
repelled by the golden glow beyond the power

plants, dust floating everywhere, fires we can’t
explain, flames that have replaced the eyes

of the last coyotes. No wonder we’re running
in circles, no wonder we’re all falling down.

Tell them the towers emit messages of evil
straight into our brains, bzzzt, zap, it makes

us a little crazy, ha ha, our heads floating off
like balloons. Our cell phones spy on us

as we sleep. We’ll turn away, we’ll wander
through the mall, what could be more

American, Big Mac ourselves to smithereens,
to oblivion. Our duty: to be oblivious, to be one

nation, under god, our father up in heaven—but he’s not
coming back, our family’s splintered, rearranged,

commandeered, forever changed, and we’re blind,
and we’re deaf but still yakking, yakking

all the time on the streets, in the vehicles we use
to slaughter our own beautiful hopped-up, zoned-out

young and we keep yakking in the ten million
aisles of merchandise because our family values

the plastic water, artificial turf, Barbie’s sharp
stiletto heels, size of fingernails, size of the astrodome,

home, sweet home, and no, you don’t need,
you’re American, you don’t need to explain

reality, it’s something we watch on TV. If
the desert’s erupting with blood, we’ll pump it with a derrick,

we’ll swill it like cheap wine. We’re chugging
Mai Lai cocktails, chowing down on hot wings straight

from Hiroshima, hot as hell, we’re spitting out the bones,
and if your appetite’s the kind that gnaws at you, gnaws

at you, gnaws, there’s Charlottesville stew a-simmering,
we’ve saved some just for you— we’re stuffing

ourselves silly, we’re tweeting, we’re plugging into iTunes,
it’s all the rage. All the rage. Children strut the streets

in tee-shirts sporting photos of their dead, shot,
stabbed, another one today, did you know him?

I heard his sister moan No, not him, while his best
boy insisted he was turnin’ his life around. His blood,

it soaked the ground as this old wound, our so-called
world, kept turning itself, turning itself around.

Don’t wait for the facts, let it all just spin itself out.
Let the ground turn itself over, let the trees splinter.

Let the hurricanes howl, let glaciers creep over us again
with their slow, cold, pale indifferent melt.

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Ginny Lowe Connors is the author of several poetry collections, including Toward the Hanging Tree: Poems of Salem Village. Connors has also edited a number of poetry anthologies, including the recently published Forgotten Women: A Tribute in Poetry. She is the editor of Connecticut River Review. Connors runs a small poetry press, Grayson Books. Visit her website at ginnyloweconnors.com.

Image credit: Trauma and Dissociation via a Creative Commons license.

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DNA-Edited Spinner for Hire

By Russell Hemmell

Delphis—the Cheerful One—had known it since the beginning. She was going to remember the day the magic of gene editing was discovered in the multifaceted and famously riotous dolphin world.

It could provide a way for the planet to survive climate change, the developers claimed. Once we upgrade, uplift and upscale, we’ll teach the Dumb Ones in Command (read: humans) how to do deal with it.

True or not, the possibility itself was too good to be ignored.

Now, Delphis had expected outrage and disagreements, yet things turned out to be, as often happens, worse than that. Not only was there no consensus among the forty-three species of dolphins inhabiting the seas and the rivers of the blue planet, their quarrels escalated to a full-fledged (holy) war.

Amazon River dolphins—the Elder and Quiet Ones—rallied the rest of the river brethren and shunned the marine cousins away: Nothing can be gained by summoning the devil in the shape of a nasty, alien-looking technology. Weren’t human-devised climate change remedies worse than the ravages themselves? Bugger off. And don’t try to chase us up here, you sinners, or we will feed you to the piranhas.

Delphis was not surprised. Land-bound creatures were always more conservative. Remaining in the same environment all their lives didn’t help them develop an open mind. In the seas, as a matter of fact, positions were more diverse, if not always positive.

Spinners like Delphis and Bottlenoses were definitively interested in a few abilities that could give the clade an edge over the other Earthian species, marine or not, and so were the Pacific White-Sideds, although with somewhat less enthusiasm.

Others were not convinced, and Killer Whales—the (consistently) Worried Ones—were more doubtful than the rest.

Dolphins communicate but don’t talk; they whistle to one another, the naysayers said. Dolphins stay in the sea; they don’t walk around like monstrous bipeds or quadrupeds over a disgusting grey surface. Dolphins certainly do know better than messing with things they can’t manage, say, a past they can’t change, a future they can’t predict, a present they don’t even understand. They’d learnt the hard way to remain in the oceans and do climate change damage control—a time-consuming activity indeed. Dolphins definitively do not interbreed. And with whom—humans, maybe? That’d go in the opposite direction of any DNA upgrade—rational thinking first.

Oh, weren’t you the ones supporting the out-of-the-pond mating? Delphis chirped, immediately fin-slapped by her mother.

Bottlenose-—the-Rebels—were, as usual, the most outspoken (brash) of all species of the clade, using scientific evidence to reinforce their statements and with the clear intent of silencing contrary opinions.

Gene editing was not only good for acquiring skills not inherent to the species—although, they conceded, this was debatable—it was also effective for eradicating diseases, repairing biological damage and, once and for all, fighting those climate change effects their dear human friends seemed unable to understand, let alone to cope with.

Dolphins debated at length pros and cons of the procedure, which gained support especially among the calves, Delphis first of all. A 5-year-old Spinner with considerable migration experience no matter her young age, she was eager to pick up the challenge. What she fancied the most was getting Orca-like black and white spots. And talking, well, she would have loved that, too. Whistles and chirps and blips only worked to a point when it came to communicating with other mammals that didn’t understand the complex dolphin code.

Ethical aspects were also discussed, including the very idea of modifying by engineering something that was maybe better left to Mother Nature and its evolutionary laws.

But, Delphis mused, what if conditions changed and good Mother Nature was just too slow to take care of them? Dinosaurs and other poor Cretaceous creatures had probably made the same considerations, once upon a time.

With power comes responsibility, kids, the wise Clymene dolphins warned, making them all remain in a concerned silence. Extreme upgrade would most likely turn dolphins in the most powerful clade of the entire planet, with the moral duty of securing a future for the others. Are we willing, and, more importantly, are we ready? Once you are able to fly as an eagle and talk as a man endowed with tiger-like fangs and maybe other more esoteric capabilities, you might well start thinking you’re a deity, and be tempted to behave like one.

The brethren were not impressed with what they knew about the human gods.

Time passed by and, after many years of passionate arguments, the worldwide Delphinidae family, all species eventually in agreement, decided to avoid gene editing for the time being: It was too dangerous to mess with something you can’t grasp in all its complexity. A more advanced and wise species, most likely a non-Earthian one, would have to make an informed decision about that, in a far-away future—and, hopefully, deal with climate change, too.

Delphis—the (still) Cheerful One—on the other hand, secretly made the opposite choice. She could, since she belonged to the pond that discovered gene editing in the first place. She got the desired DNA upgrade as a coming-of-age gift and ended up joining one of the marine conservation parks in the Caribbean, working with a mild-mannered marine biologist under an always-shining sun. The scientist taking care of her was smart and willing to learn, already marveling at the unusual, amazing communication capabilities the new Spinner in the swimming pool was demonstrating.

Amazing—and amazed—Delphis had every reason to be so: As she had soon discovered, humans had just begun debating that thorny DNA upgrading issue that for so long had troubled the dolphin world. The science behind it was in its infancy though, she realised: They still called it genome editing, which was something far more primitive.

Clearly, they hadn’t the palest idea about the medium, its possibilities or even where to begin. Apart from playing mad scientists and writing shallow horror stories, their expertise only sufficed for some sheep-cloning, studying the basics of the double helix or messing with fruit fly genes. No DNA swapping or saving the world from greenhouse gas emissions any time soon.

But hey, you have to start somewhere. Delphis was there and keen to help them succeed, one spin at a time.

Russell Hemmell is a statistician and social scientist from the U.K., passionate about astrophysics and speculative fiction. Recent stories have appeared in Aurealis, Not One of Us, Third Flatiron, and others, and she was a Finalist in The Canopus 100 Year Starship Awards 2016-2017. Visit her website at earthianhivemind.net and follow her on Twitter: @SPBianchini.

Photo credit. NOAA.

Administration Rumination

By Kathy Douglas

I step over the cracks trying
not to break my mother’s back
while news accelerates to sideshow
with Prez T as the bearded lady
and Melania in the wrong place,
wrong time. Time starts to taste like wormwood
and rue, sour herb of grace, and climate change parodies itself
in debates over how and why it is named and who does
the naming. In this aluminum wrapped house
it’s like a can’s about to be recycled—
we are poised on the sharp lip
of a popped top waiting
to be dumped into
the hopper

Kathy Douglas’s published work can be found online and in print in Unlost Journal, Calyx, Drunken Boat, The Cafe Review, Noctua, Right Hand Pointing, After The Pause, shufpoetry, and Poetry WTF?! She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College. Recently, she has been focused on cut up and collaged found poems. This interest is rooted in the positive reinforcement in Catholic grammar school of a somewhat above average ability to diagram sentences. During the 45th administration, she almost takes comfort in slashing sentences apart and remixing them into poems. By day, she supports the career development of young professionals in fields related to saving the planet. She tweets @kathydouglas and blogs periodically at medium.com/@kathrynd.

Photo credit: Klearchos Kapoutsis via a Creative Commons license.

A Shithole Is

By William C. Anderson

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation that refuses to provide healthcare for all people.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation that refuses to guarantee access to clean drinking water and heating for schools in the winter.

A shithole is a nation that has enough wealth to end poverty, but allows that money to be hoarded by a small few.

A shithole is a nation where school massacres aren’t surprising and neither are mass shootings, because of politics and profit.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation where college education isn’t free or guaranteed, but debt for pursuing higher education is.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation where the military budget is enough to fix crumbling infrastructure, but it’s used to murder people abroad instead.

A shithole is a nation that pollutes the earth so badly that it’s causing the climate to change, putting everyone at risk, but the nation refuses to change because of politics and profit.

A shithole is a nation that pretends capitalism is fair and equitable.

A shithole is a nation that institutionalizes white supremacy and then blames those who aren’t white for the barriers they face trying to live under a racist system.

A shithole is a nation that goes around the world destabilizing other countries, killing and ruining lives so its corporations can exploit resources.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation with plenty of space that refuses to accept migrants, immigrants and refugees from the countries it destabilizes with its foreign policy.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation where the rate of mortality among women giving birth is increasing as it decreases elsewhere, even in the so-called developing world.

A shithole is a nation that doesn’t guarantee the human rights of women, LGBTQI, gender-nonconforming people and more, but goes around the world demanding other nations do so.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation that regularly abandons its own people during natural disasters and leaves communities to fend for themselves.

A shithole is a nation that elects Donald Trump president.

A shithole is a nation that regularly attacks the human rights of disabled people.

A shithole is a nation that continues its genocidal legacy of broken treaties, disregard for sovereignty, and harmful policies that threaten Native people.

A shithole is the United States of America.

William C. Anderson is a freelance writer. His work has been published by The Guardian, MTV and Pitchfork among others.

Many of his writings can be found at Truthout or at the Praxis Center for Kalamazoo College, where he is a contributing editor covering race, class and immigration.

He’s co-author of the forthcoming book As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018). Read more about the book and order it here.

Photo courtesy of the author.

Season of American Lupine

By Lucille Ausman

he is out extinguishing wild fires
lost in the smoke
digging lines in the ground trying to trap her behind the wall before she can reach him
suffocating in her fury
he’s strong and brave and all American
I guess
but she doesn’t want protecting
she doesn’t want to cool down and calm down
the report reads
0% containment
try to break out the fire hoses and hold her back
but you can’t
her power and heat cover the landscape
filling it with blackness
and everything changes
life as it was
is destroyed

only weeks later
the color purple
emerges
once again
beautiful delicate and full of new life
out of the flames
grow the roots of hope.

Lucille Ausman recently graduated from Smith College where she studied Anthropology and Government and where her interest in activism and social justice took root. She has spent the summer living in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in the Pacific Northwest and working with the Forest Service during one of the most dangerous fire seasons on record, in part due to climate change. She dedicates this poem to the activists whose own flames cannot be contained by our current political climate.

Photo credit: Alan Levine via a Creative Commons license.

Protest personalities

By Ruth McCole

Women’s March, Boston, Massachusetts.
Grim determination turns to gladness turns to awe
We leave too early
Afterward bells ring.

Muslim Ban One, Boston, Massachusetts.
A roiling, boiling storm-crowd
Makes waves.
A man shouts “You’re all going to hell”
A sign reads “Jesus was a refugee.”

Muslim Ban Two, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Nighttime scholar’s vigil
“Not because we are good
But because we are people”
Tears spill.

Tax March, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Village fete, bright and white
“I’m a raisin in a bowl of oatmeal”
“Too many laws killed Freddie.”

March For Science, Washington, D.C.
Rain lashes curious queues
She admires my waterproof placard
I shock her with the PhD Posters price tag
My privilege shows.

Climate March, Boston, Massachusetts.
Rainbows and windmills
My allergies soar
The happiest protest.

Fight Supremacy, Boston, Massachusetts.
A coalition crowd self segregates
Angry men, bandanas, moms
Cameras and screamers dart and shoal
After swaggering flags
Gazebo Nazis through the trees
Unseen, unheard.

Ruth McCole is a scientist from Brookline, Massachusetts. She studies the way genomes evolve to be as they are today. She is resisting and persisting in the new America and tweets about this @Ruth_persists. This is her first poem as an adult.

Photo credit: Haris Krikelis via a Creative Commons license.

The Tao that Trump Won’t Hear

By H.L.M. Lee

When I take my younger daughter to school, I see the rush of her first grade friends running to hug each other and share head lice (much to the chagrin of every parent). My daughter’s BFF has a father from England and a mother from Maine. Another girl’s father is Muslim and her mother is— I don’t know. My own two daughters are Chinese-Italian. They have friends who are African-American and Hispanic. One neighborhood boy has a blended family with a mother and two fathers. I am seldom overwhelmed by emotion, but the morning drop-off often makes me choke up. To these children, unconcerned about the larger world around them, all that matters is the joy in shouting about their newest toy or the treat they have for snack time.

Lately, when I sit alone in my office and stare at the computer screen, I find myself choking up for a different reason. I imagine the death of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. In my more cynical moods, I give up and accept a world where, for my girls and girls everywhere, their gender is an insurmountable obstacle to reaching their potential. The sadness strikes me like the loss of a friend and I fight tears, because a man who couldn’t pass the vetting for babysitter has been elected president.

It takes a team of architects, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, decorators and more to build a house, but only one person with a match to burn it down. The Trump administration is making a shambles of democracy, damaging the environment, perverting our humanity and turning from knowledge. He has fired James Comey, Director of the FBI. Whatever you think of Comey, the action of firing the man investigating Trump and those around him should ring every fire alarm in the country.

In this dispiriting time, I have been reading the Tao Te Ching and keeping it on my nightstand. A classic Chinese text of 81 short chapters, it embodies a philosophy of Tao (pronounced “dow”), which has been described as Path or Way, referring to right conduct. This interpretation, however, is only a shadow of Tao’s many layers of meaning, which underlie all we are and all we perceive. The second word Te (pronounced “deh”) is often translated as Virtue, but virtue from following the Tao rather than transitory social rules.

Attributed to Lao-Tzu, who may or may not have been an actual person, and originating about 2,500 years ago, the Tao Te Ching is the basis of Taoism, one of Asia’s major religions, though it mentions no deity.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

—Chapter 1

Tao itself is undefinable—even in the original Chinese as these first lines admit. Yet, the Tao Te Ching with its terse poetry and insight resonates for many across enormous differences in time and culture. For me it is now a needed source of perspective.

Lifted from their metaphysical context, lines from the Tao Te Ching sound like the epigram in a fortune cookie, but Lao Tzu’s advice to Chinese lords is as relevant in the age of Donald Trump as it was 2,500 years ago.

Oversharpen the blade, and the edge will soon blunt.
. . .
Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will follow.

—Chapter 9

Can there be a better summation of Trump’s path? All his life he has crowed about his wealth and status. But creditors repossessed his 281-foot yacht in 1991 and imminent ruin forced him to take a $916 million write-off in 1995. He would have been richer investing his money in the S&P 500 and leaving it alone, instead of developing businesses and buildings. Trump Airlines was a bust. Trump University was a sham. Trump Steaks were greasy and tasteless.

The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.

—Chapter 16

“No drama” Obama’s steadiness during eight years as president contrasts sharply with Trump’s contradictory statements—often in the same sentence. Trump says that unpredictability gives him the advantage in business. Maybe, but it would be catastrophic in governance and we are seeing its harrowing consequences in real time.

Those who boast achieve nothing.
Those who brag will not endure.

—Chapter 24

Trump has the “best words.” He called the Trump Taj Mahal casino the “Eighth Wonder of the World”—before it went bankrupt and cost him real estate, the yacht I have already mentioned, his private plane, and his helicopter. Can anyone trust a man who masqueraded as his own publicist to bray about affairs with celebrities? Unlike the “fine tuned machine” that Trump touted, his White House lurches like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein from one self-inflicted crisis to another.

Easy promises make for little trust.
Taking things lightly results in great difficulty.

—Chapter 63

Trump pandered to supporters by saying he could “make possible every dream you have ever dreamed.” That’s not a campaign promise, that’s a skeevy pickup line. “We’re going to have insurance for everybody… great healthcare,” he vowed, “It will be in a much-simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.” Now that Trumpcare has passed the House—promising, instead, to throw tens of millions off health insurance and eliminate protections for those with pre-existing conditions—will his supporters finally take off their beer goggles and see, by the cold light of morning, who they brought home?

Knowing ignorance is strength.
Ignoring knowledge is sickness.

—Chapter 71

Science begins by accepting ignorance then moves toward knowledge. That’s how we learned to launch rockets into space and harness electricity, how we developed the Big Bang theory and quantum mechanics, and why we cook pork. To curtail the study of climate change, Trump seeks to cut funding for NOAA weather satellites, which would hobble the ability to forecast tornadoes and hurricanes, and endanger lives in the process.

Why are the people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
. . .
Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.

—Chapter 75

Superficially, these lines support conservative beliefs that people are taxed too much and government regulations are a burden. But the brevity of the Tao Te Ching requires delving beneath the surface. Two chapters later is a more expansive passage:

The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much and give
to those who do not have enough.
Ordinary people act differently.
They take from those who do not have enough to give to those who
already have too much.
Who has more than enough and gives it to the world?
Only the wise.

—Chapter 77

If people starve, it is from taxation in the broader sense, from the wealthy taking too much as they fight the minimum wage and the social safety net, leaving the 99 percent to work more and more for less and less.

If people rebel, it is from interference with women’s control of their bodies; interference with civil rights and the right to vote; interference with the right to live, love and worship freely. These were the cries from protesters on Boston Common the day after Trump’s inauguration. My family and I were there, shouting with them, an official estimate of 175,000. But a number can’t convey the visceral punch from seeing broad patches of pink, like flowers, spread across the Common. The patches were masses of pussy hats and each flower was a woman, man or child gathered on that brisk, sunny day. I stood in awe, seeing that crowd filling the grounds in common cause.

Every morning I wake at 5:30 and lie quietly, a mundane start but one that prepares me for the day. At breakfast, I listen to the news and steel myself against yet another assault on government and society. The list of what’s at stake is overwhelming, but I find the will to persist in these words, implicitly reminding me that water can wear away stone—if it flows and agitates:

Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;
It has no equal.

—Chapter 78

H.L.M. Lee is an electronics engineer with a background in English literature. While owning and operating a small high-tech company, he also writes web content and marketing materials, and develops video scripts for a peer reviewed scientific journal. He has recently finished a novel, Bleeding in Babylon, about the Iraq War.

Author’s note: All passages from Tao Te Ching were translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, with Toinette Lippe, Third Vintage Books edition, 2011.

Photo credit: Derek Gavey via a Creative Commons license.