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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The Whale

By Kerry Loughman                                 

 

never budged

becalmed she was

bleached by sun

& beached     on relentless rise

of blue water liquid leeched

from her eyes           her orifices

her great mouth agape

her lungs did evaporate

Climate-changed      her

wishes drowned

in sand

 


Kerry Loughman is a retired educator and photographer living in the Boston area. She writes about memory, art, family, and nature in the city, looking for small transient moments of beauty . . . or discord. Her work has appeared in Mass Poetry’s The Hard Work of Hope and Poem of the MomentNixes’ Mate, What Rough BeastThe Main Street Rag and is forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review.

Image credit: “The Whale” by Christopher Michel via a Creative Commons license.


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Two Poems by Nancy Squires

As the Waters Rise

 

O God, look down
On all our drowned.
Hear us, we beg—
We’re on our knees.
Sorry, so sorry
About the trees,

The polar bears, the birds,
The bees; the icebergs
Gone, the thirsty lawns,
Plastic gyres, redwood
Pyres and all the many,
many cars. The eclipsed stars

We never see. Our Father
In Heaven, we pray
To Thee: Give us
This day.
We promise, oh we swear
On a stack of extinctions

We will repair
Our awful ways
And lead us not into oblivion
Although we can’t pretend
We had no clue. Save us
Now—before
Amen.

 

It’s No Use, Ron DeSantis

 

Before Marie Kondo-ing
I had a pile of beads
in a drawer, cheap baubles
from Gay Prides past:
Chicago, where the crowd spilled
into Halsted, slowing the procession
to a crawl; New York,
where drag queens rode the floats
in headdresses three feet tall
just like Carnival; and Boston,
many years—the one
where Kevin was The Little Mermaid
on the Disney float—his costume
(which he stitched himself),
perfection and his makeup,
animated glam. That woman on the Harley
who dyed her mohawk rainbow
every year, and the time
Sally spotted her coworker
coming down the route—
she was surprised to see him
in a wine-colored corset.
No beads
from Lansing, Michigan,
my first Pride—not
a parade but a march
and what got thrown
at us were insults, curses, glares
from people holding signs
that said God hated us.
So let’s say gay
and everything else
there is to say.
I should’ve kept that pile
of shiny plastic beads—
not sure if it was joy
they sparked but something—
Kevin reclining up there
amongst the other Disney folk
his shimmery mermaid tail
sparkling in the morning sun.
Say it: gay.
All the livelong day.
She and he and them
and they: we
aren’t going back
inside the boxes.

 


Nancy Squires is a writer, lawyer, and freelance copy editor. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Dunes Review, Split Rock Review, and Blueline Magazine. She grew up, and currently resides, in Michigan.

Photo credit: Linda De Volder via a Creative Commons license.


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The first day of cherry season,

By Emily Hockaday

 

the sky becomes apocalyptic. The air is
wool in my throat. I wear a mask to pick
my daughter up from school. The fruit vendors
sit next to their colorful carts like the world
isn’t ending, and I suppose it isn’t for now
or it is just very slowly. And what did
the vendors do at Pompeii? Skewer meat
and sling it under an eerie sky. I bring home
3 lbs of the jeweled fruits. The sun
is the same bright pink behind the haze—
a Rainier cherry hanging above us.
My daughter is studying wildfires
at school, or perhaps just the lifecycles
of trees. She tells me forest fires can be good
for the Earth, right? Because redwood seeds
need fire to grow. Our hallway smells
of smoke from the skylight. We move inside
a yellow cloud. Even as the air quality
outside becomes a disaster, we make plans
to cap our stove’s gas line. I think of
my daughter’s new pink lungs.
I was reckless with mine, but hers
are pristine, and I want to preserve them.
I imagine her serotinous redwood cones
cracking in the heat. I hope that’s
what humanity will do too. Crack
so that seeds release. At night
I roll a towel against her window.
The fires can only burn for so long.

 


Emily Hockaday’s second collection, In a Body, an ecopoetry collection with themes of parenting, chronic illness, and grief, is coming out in October 2023 with Harbor Editions. Her debut, Naming the Ghost, was released with Cornerstone Press in 2022. She has received grants from the City Artists Corp, Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation, the De Groot Foundation, and the NYFA Queens Art Fund. She is a fellow with the Office Hours Poetry workshop and was a 2022 resident at Bethany Arts Community.

Photo credit: Denise Kitagawa via a Creative Commons license.


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U-turn

By Sarah Waldner

 

Sharp U-turn on the language around
fossil fuels. The text now includes a reference
to “low emission and renewable energy.”
New funding arrangement on loss
and damage. Phase-down of unabated
coal power. Concrete demonstration
that we really are all in this together.
No one will be left behind.

Sharp concern on the low wage around
solid rules. The text now includes a preference
for “dough addition and immutable density.”
New crushing pavement over loss
and damage. Gaze-down from unabated
coal power. Concrete demonstration
that we really are small in this weather.
No one will be left behind.

Sharp heartburn on the sandwich around
possum duels. The Etch-A-Sketch now includes a mess
for “pro magician and chewable elderly.”
New hush-hush engagement of fox
and cabbage. Chase-down of underrated
troll chowder. Wet feet explanation
that we really are all Paul in this dresser.
No one will be left behind.

 


Originally from British Columbia, Canada, Sarah Waldner is currently residing in the Ontario area where she is a student at Trent University.

Poet’s note: The first stanza of this poem is comprised of direct quotes from a BBC article about COP27 and the speakers at the conference within it: Climate change: Five key takeaways from COP27 – BBC News.

Photo credit: James Saper 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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Only the Meek

By Dotty LeMieux

 

Where are the birds of spring?

I see bees—are there enough?

Black carpenter ants—we never had them before—
emerge from some dusky damp place
beneath the foundation.

We live in a house of cards.

Even a bear takes exception
to exceptional times
and climbs a backyard tree
he must have crossed mountains
and dried up stream beds to reach.
I hope he got sustenance
out of the dogs’ bowl.

Every night, creatures mate or die
or wail their diminishment
in our backyard, alarming the dogs,
snug in cushioned beds.

Every morning the weather is our bearer of bad news:

Don’t put away the winter clothes
but don’t skimp
on the skimpy.

Gas, lumber, even food scarcer and more costly
because all are vulnerable now
as never before.

Or is just that we are now forced
to face it?

Now that I think of it, dogs
resemble domestic bears
who can’t climb trees.

Squirrels outwit us all.

The nighttime creatures burrow deep
into ground we have given up for dead.
Is this what they mean by the meek

shall inherit the earth?

So why do we still struggle:

to remain upright
to stretch toward breathable air
to stay alive long enough
to inherit what’s left?

 


Dotty LeMieux is the author of four chapbooks, Five Angels, Five Trees Press; Let Us Not Blame Foolish Women, Tombouctou Books; The Land, Smithereens Press, and most recently Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune, Finishing Line Press. In the late 1970s to mid-1980s, she edited the eclectic literary and art journal Turkey Buzzard Review in the poetic haven of Bolinas, California. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals and anthologies, including Writers Resist. Dotty lives in Northern California with her husband and two aging dogs, where she practices environmental law and helps elect progressive candidates to office. Read more at her blog.

Photo credit: Jerzy Durczak 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.


A note from Writers Resist:

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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.

Voting in the Time of Climate Change

By Ying Wu

 

The tide swallows most of the beach these days.
Sunbathers take refuge in the reeds.
And children wade in the new lagoons
that stretch across the soft, loose sand.
Our poles are melting.
The bay spills over the sidewalk sometimes
and breaches the steps of private homes.

Today, in Texas, voters spill down the sidewalk too.
Six-hour lines in Georgia.
Our world is changing.
Queues before dawn in Tennessee.
Crumbling ice shelves in Antarctica.
Thwaites Glacier has destabilized.
Voters defy the rain in Philadelphia.
Lines in Ohio reach the interstate.
Voters a quarter mile deep form a double wrap in Brooklyn.
The sea is rising.
We are the People.
Our tide is sweeping in.

 


Ying Wu, a poetry editor at Writers Resist, is a poet and cognitive scientist, and host of the Gelato Poetry reading series in San Diego (meetup.com/BrokenAnchorPoetry). She is also a proud member of the editorial team of Kids! San Diego Poetry Annual. More examples of her work can be found online at Poetry and Art at the San Diego Art Institute (poetryandartsd.com), in the Serving House Journal, and in Writers Resist, as well as in the material world at the San Diego Airport and in print journals, such as the Clackamas Literary Review.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

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.