Tag: pollution

Miss Suzie Had a Baby, She Named Him Tiny Tim

By Laura Grace Weldon

 

Outrage drives me outside,
a choice a woman can still make.
I clamber close to our muddy creek
collecting trash caught in fallen branches.
I empty water from a Stroh’s bottle
and battered jug of Cheer detergent.
Pull out blue plastic bags and
an honest-to-God wire hanger.
Untangle a multicolored jump rope
with red wooden handles,
the kind we jumped with during
recess at Pine Elementary School
chanting K.I.S.S.I.N.G., and Cinderella.
Some girls were such good skippers
they didn’t miss a jump till a whistle’s
shrill made us head back in,
line up at the drinking fountain, then
sit every minute of three more hours.
I hear singsong rhymes in my mind
as I walk back with this trash
still feeling our legs leap,
our hair fly in synch,
drumbeat of feet on the ground
the way girls and women
from the beginning
have worked together
while singing in unison.

 

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. lauragraceweldon.com

Photo credit: ErstwhileHuman via a Creative Commons license.

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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.

A note from Writers Resist

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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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Throwaway

By Karen Kilcup

Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?  –Rachel Carson

 

A one-woman Revolution,
Jemima Wilkinson was stoned
for preaching the light that lives
in everyone. The Public Universal Friend
was driven north from Philadelphia
to the Finger Lakes, her movement forecasting
what would follow: women’s rights,
abolition, the Underground Railroad.

Today the monstrous trucks lumber north
with New York City’s trash, creating
a mountain baptized Seneca Meadows,
leaving a trail of sludge and garbage that leaches
slowly into the lakes, their stretched-out
digits trying to grasp what it all means,
will mean, in a moment when land and water
and history are for sale by the Town Council,
which spews the gospel of lower taxes
and buries ever deeper the women
of Seneca Falls, Seneca Lake,
and the sparkling railroad that carried
so many to fresh futures.

In this place, this time, what does clean mean?
What—or who—is dirty? Will we push
the plastic and the people underground
for good, or will the glacial hands
that hold the Haudenosaunee
send the refuse down, down,
until it returns elsewhere
in poisoned protest?

 

Poet’s note: A Quaker known by many as the Public Universal Friend, Jemima Wilkinson fled the ostensibly liberal city of Philadelphia shortly after the American Revolution, joined by devout followers who saw her as a spiritual guide. Susan Brind Morrow’s story in The Nation, “The Finger Lakes Are Being Poisoned,” ironically parallels Wilkinson’s flight to the appalling movement of diesel trucks that carry New York’s waste to the formerly pristine region that is home to centuries of Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) people, as well as to some of America’s most important movements for social justice advanced by Native Americans, women, and enslaved people—all historically considered subhuman and “dirty.”

A teacher and writer for more than forty years, Karen Kilcup is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Professor of American Literature, Environmental & Sustainability Studies, and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at UNC Greensboro. She feels fortunate to work with many students of color, first-generation students, and LGBTQI+ students at this Minority-Serving Institution. Their courage and imagination inspire her and give her hope. Her forthcoming book, winner of the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry Prize, is titled The Art of Restoration.

Photograph by OwlPacino via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist:

Thank you for reading! 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.