In long-ago day
we crawled out
of the sea, sister.
I stood upright,
configured a hand
arched a foot
and ran.
You stayed beast,
grew a spiked tail
slit your eyes to sit
above a double line
of impossible teeth
regal in the silk star
night of black water
indifferent as cat
or queen on land.
Dreamed into life
by the sea, she’ll have
us back one day.
Bits of salt, sister.
First, you are a source of luminous wonder
Your brilliance fills the sky.
Then, a seizure of darkness
Collapses your vertebral tower and boats sink
In the harbor. A lighthouse pulls one
Hell of a shadow from inevitable blue depths. Haven’t you
Been the night-shredding radiance so many seek
Safe passage from? All the mythic creatures
Human hands have conjured from the depths come
Barreling towards the surface now.
The ocean floor raises continents
When it shudders. Your shaking
Is a séance. Summons ghosts from your throat.
The light flash behind your eyes sends night
Mares plunging into the ocean. Lighthouse
Zoetrope. See how the islands
Dress themselves with the illusion
Of dance. How the wreckage
Pulls itself back together with a crack
Like leg bones snapping.
One minute you are alive with such incredible light.
The next, phantoms peel themselves
From the clouds. An island forest grows haunted
With all the ships run ashore.
Somewhere in that forest, a tree falls
And crushes the only witness.
“NASA is researching risks for Mars missions which are grouped into five human
spaceflight hazards related to the stressors they place on the body. These can be summarized with
the acronym “RIDGE,” short for Space Radiation, Isolation and Confinement, Distance from
Earth, Gravity fields, and Hostile/Closed Environments.”
Space Radiation
My husband keeps telling me that opening the microwave door before the buzzer sounds will kill
me, I’m already in the basement, radon detectors, twice yearly monitoring, do we remediate,
track bluelight, research glasses, limit screen time, hold my breath before our eyes are scanned,
orange pulsing orb of unclouded vision, the healthy vein. Brick will cause cancer. Plane flights
will cause cancer; the Teflon pan, the TV dinner. Maybe our water is too high in fluoride. Maybe
iron. I’m pretty sure everyone is lying about having the bomb. And I know, for certain, that
whatever anger already has is more than enough.
Isolation and Confinement
No one gave me a psych exam before I moved to Maine. Does the snowpack in front of the door
make you feel cozy or confined? Have you ever screamed into the cold and watched your words
freeze? Do you stop when the sun blinds the snow and just let it all wash over you, every particle
of hoarded light? Do you make tunnel? Labyrinth? Shelter? My children practice self defense,
hurling snowballs at imaginary enemies, crafting escape routes on sleds faster than migration,
they outrace me.
Distance from Earth
Enchantment is easy: our wood stove, shadow contrast of icing pine. The way color floods each
sunset until everywhere rainbows, streaks of salmon crimson so beautiful you never think storm.
It’s only locals up here. We pay for each other’s groceries, fuel oil, pass the peace. Cars drive
slowly up my icy hill, passing us walking, everyone waves.
Gravity Fields
Israel and Palestine. Russia and Ukraine. Iran. China. My daughter reads about vortices and I
think war must be the opposite, life unspiraling never to return. Remember when one body
moving toward another was something beautiful? A law of attraction? In the tent cities we are
passing out blankets. Someone always says get help. Someone always says, take this hand. But
compassion is never enough. The wind blows. The bench empties itself. Another body picks up
its frail shadow and moves on.
Hostile/Closed Environments
I want to say that running is resistance, but I’m not sure. I look at my hands sometimes, bit nails,
wrinkled knuckles, slippery rings, stout fingers like treestumps, you can count these years,
loveline’s luxurious gash. Trees write history, dry times, drought rings, condensing themselves,
the forest itself a boundary, fat again with flood. Can I say peace on earth if I know I’m always
lying? Or just settle for Candlemas, sky of gentle shadow, groundhog slipping back inside its
burrow, paws already folded in prayer, an early spring.
On a street painted with the steps
of the hurried and the dreaming, I am
a whisper among shouts. A child’s laughter
bursting like an air bubble, spiraling
in the beach’s splashing light.
An old man perches a storybook on a bench to etch
his face with tales deep as tree rings, padding
his worn trails. The love
he knew, now simmering—tea leaves
in the evening calm.
A woman darts by the bench—her conversation
a string of pearls lost to the wind. She wavers
on a tightrope of her own making. Squeezing
lemons into her schedule, I see her
spinning gold from her straw. Beneath
the canopy stretching its wide arms, roots
crochet stories into cobblestones.
Each passerby a brushstroke on the easel, easily
missed. Pale faces glowing
in the artificial light, life unfolding
in novels before them. A footnote
in the epic of the street, I bear witness
to the living scarves unwinding, each world
whipping around on its own axis, forever
a riddle, as we are.
After Cecilia Woloch
Surely, there were bears starved by fire.
Beacons of the sky’s assault
and the rain that would never come.
The sound of roosters strangled to death.
Before, only
uninterrupted blue. Rows of ugly
hand-grown carrots—fertilized attempts
at closeness. Before the cougar
hiding beneath the garlic barn. Surely,
the goat woke up knowing
it would not see the sun fall
behind the trees again. Wouldn’t find
its way to the merry-go-round rusted
with apple cores. Isn’t this
proof of something?
What watches us, and the surrealness
of dirt—replacing ten quarter-moons
with hieroglyphs we can’t read back.
Surely, what’s dug by hand
is worth remembering.
Canon of dandelion dust and horse jumps.
Before the root rot. Before
the dog yielded to the broken couch.
Surely, there was a banjo playing.
The clouds, a bruising violence.
Everybody under them.
Lonesome is a resentful night; a rancid
flour sack; a sapling separated
from the crown. The same warning.
Surely the dirt road will lead us out.
Most days I am a museum of things I want to forget
– E. E. Scott
[Part 1]
Museum: a depository of grief displayed aesthetically;
I carry the mishaps of things I want to forget
like the fragments of a brittle artifact—
i. the days I wish I never lived
ii. the partition of my father and mother
iii. the fear of my mother growing old
iv. the pain that came with the loss of my grandmother
[Interlude]
Consider this
poem
a museum
of self-portraits:
of a young adult forgotten
to the retention of survival
of a poet scared of the
greater grief his poem will become
of a boy who dreams of
the future after dying
of aborted dreams
& miscarriages
& a receding hairline
[Part 2]
Aesthetic: the joy that refuses to come in the morning
—I’ve always searched for it in bird songs
the unseen light at the end of the tunnel
—hope is an illusion is a phantasm
the better bad days that are still ahead
the substance of things hoped for
the evidence of things not seen
It is well with my soul.
It is well with my soul.
It is well like a soup.
the bucket of living a day in my life
is knowing it’s a soup.
garlic,
onions,
tomatoes
red pepper,
scotch pepper,
bell pepper,
alligator pepper.
let’s not ignore the meat, that’s me[an].
If I say I’m the pork of most days,
will that mean that I’m conservative?
or that I have no beef left in me,
save for the soft bleached cowskins.
regardless I’m what is being cooked, the soul
of the soup, the chicken feet, & the rabbit ears.
So yea, it is well with my soul in a soup.
It is well with my soul in this soup.
but the dearth of faith inside me
when I say amen is also a well.
clayed,
big as a civil war,
unmistakable cos it’s raised on a hill
like an obese nose,
untimely,
yet yielding to seasons.
So It is well with my soul in November.
It is well with my soul in July
It is well when the soup is bad
It is well when the well is dry.
we say the knife is dead,
or the mouth of the knife is dead
because the death of the mouth is the death
of purpose, or the death of the potency of life
plumbed in the metric noesis inside its tongue.
what we believe— a destiny must sing its course,
regardless. the fire too, must burn its yoke of oxygen.
where I come from, the mouth is also a lethal weapon.
where I come from, you cannot hush the gong
of its pealing, unless the gong is not a gong.
whatever silence the knife has learned in exile
is self-taught in unused. so go ahead, my soul,
follow the ancient achiever’s path, sharpen all
the knives the Blacksmith sheathed
under your skins. sing, Spirit, through
the dreams, speak the harvest
through these efforts, & cut all
my fantasies to testimonies.
It must be that imagination has an expiration date.
My grandmother will never change the amount of sugar
in her sweet tea.
She wouldn’t dream of rearranging the plants on her patio.
She can’t accept that the creeks she knew as a child have dried up.
That the fish her father once caught,
can now only be found in the state over.
It would be easy to live in a beautiful youth.
And if every memory was painted by
growth,
how could you imagine memories painted by death?
Which is all your granddaughters will know.
A world of fire and plague.
She pleads seniority.
I plead for the chance to reach seniority.
I will sit with her on the patio,
holding a glass of tea,
watching as it melts the ice.
I will show her the two worlds I imagine.
The first is a world where vibrational frequencies have finally been decoded,
and giant speakers can be wired to trigger the release of natural plant insecticides.
Halting dead zones. Increasing food supply.
We might last.
By showing her the other world, I scare her.
I show her where we are headed.
I tell her “Even your Bible will burn.”
I tell her that one day she will look down
and see the soot on her hands,
the matches clenched in her fist.
◆
Exegesis
This piece was inspired by my experience growing up in a place that loves the Earth but does not believe in global warming. The culture of the South involves the appreciation for nature, and also the appreciation of simplicity. The simplicity of changing nothing and living life how you always have. This can be such a beautiful lifestyle when it means no phones, fishing in Appalachia, and drinking tea that immediately gives you a sugar high. I wanted to include that feeling in my piece, this feeling of beauty that influences everyone in these areas. I then wanted to lead you into how this can be such an issue. How conflicting it can be to have conversations about change with the people you love and respect, but do not fully understand. There comes a point when frustration consumes you, and in the case of this piece, my frustration is at the people who want to live in the beautiful, simple past, because it means they do not believe, or don’t want to believe, the world has been changing. This lack of regard for the future is ignorance. It is a lack of imagination, because you cannot understand the world looking any different, even if it’s a positive change.
In line 18, I introduced a more recent scientific discovery that I have been obsessed with this past year. Vibrational frequencies have begun to be decoded, and mean much more to plants than we originally thought. Caterpillar movements spur certain plants to excrete a natural chemical as a defense mechanism. If humans can figure out how to replicate this movement through vibrational frequencies, then we may have a chance to use vibrations to eliminate at least one form of pesticide, and hopefully more down the road. The possibilities in this discovery are endless, and if we can eliminate pesticides, we would stop some of the contamination of the Mississippi River. We could stop the dead zones in the ocean that occur from harsh chemicals, and that kill all life that needs Oxygen. To me, this discovery is the beginning of something that could be incredible, it just will take some imagination. By including actual science in this piece, I wanted to emphasize that this isn’t unrealistic. This is something that has promise all over the world, along with plenty of other discoveries. It is easy to fall into Climate Doomism, where there seems to be no hope for our future, when in fact it is just going to take a lot of creative people getting innovative.
This piece is meant to make you feel empathy, because most people love someone who may not understand the severity of climate change. It’s important to educate those around us of the science that tells us the atmosphere has changed. That the stakes are higher. It’s important to emphasize that if we are creative and push towards a better future, it is possible. Hope is necessary for any form of change. This piece is also supposed to make you feel scared. We live in a world that praises consumerism, conspiracy theories, and nostalgia, all of which have little place in this fight. A lot of uncomfortable conversations are ahead of us, but are needed to invoke any form of awakening. You are either the one holding the match, or the one burning. Do not be selfish at the expense of the world.
I wake to another dream of ripening
Becoming perfectly palatable
For all who want to eat me whole.
When I wake I wait for my dreams
To become reality I open my arms
Wide and welcome newfound sweetness.
In my days I remain sour and people
Choke as they try to force me down their throats
My nights see me red-faced and sweat-drenched with effort
I try to make amends with those
I’ve disappointed who sneered at my rigidity
Those who want answers for my sharpness
But I have no answers or antidotes
I only have my dreams where I do everything right
Where I am exactly who people want me to be
Because women who look like me don’t
Stand a chance if they aren’t palatable
To women who look like you.
Say it straight.
Say how the grasses wave you along your path.
How the small nod of the field mouse sends you up.
How the nuthatch’s single note, repeated, reverbs in your bones,
your veins, muscles, what
is of you and what is of all this?
Say it.
All the years of words encripted
to what you thought would be heard—
the forest is silent. It does not mind your reticence.
It is patient beyond your wildest imagining.
But it is time, it is time, so
Say what is true: that you are not just you,
you do not exist except within all this—
The grasses tremble with dew’s touch,
and the nuthatch flits among spruce boughs,
and the field mouse basks in the rising sun,
and you are them,
and they are you,
and this is it,
Said straight.
My father says, with a laugh,
I don’t see color. He doesn’t say it
while looking at me. My father is
an intelligent man, a career man,
a man who would never cause waves.
My father is a kind man, an alcoholic,
a computer geek, a conservative,
an electrical engineer, and yet he doesn’t
look me in the eye – he doesn’t want
to make me uncomfortable. He would never
want to make anyone uncomfortable.
He is a good man, a stand up guy, saves
for the future. His father was a drunk, his brother
was a drunk and he became a drunk. He is American.
He achieved the American dream. Voted for Trump
the first time. I didn’t know my father until he told me
to leave the room when I was a child:
You need to find somewhere else to be.
I didn’t know my father until he pulled the wooden post
from my parent’s bed frame and threatened my mother:
It would only take one swing.
after “The Blue Dress” by Victoria Chang
I wear grandma’s collared shirt— it mostly hangs on
a blue hanger in my closet, fabric continuing
to thin with time, beneath the earth like her body,
as if I have worn her all my life.
I wear her ring on my finger, hold the metal
she used to fiddle with, polish the diamond,
admire the band. Remove her when I wash my hands.
Check to feel she’s still there. She held on
when leukemia wore her, through divorce,
during the war, when she lost
three babies. Grief is wearing her
shirt on my back like a haunting.
Grief brushes my skin like cotton,
striped like her mother’s hand sewn lines.
I keep moving beyond panels of stitches–
Her mother’s mother threads through me.
I’m writing stories for them, trying
to fill days with her belongings. I never
heard her say goodbye. There is a hole
in her shirt. There is a hole in me.
Carbondale, Illinois, May 1992
sound of shattered glass
whiplashed mother
in her long dress
muscles tightened
one summer night
five college girls
in a Mustang
crashed into her
Dodge Caravan
t-boned her driver’s side
metal barrelling
into belly
seatbelt low
pedal anchored to floor
she was alone she held me
in her womb I didn’t move
***
Kept inside the wreckage
until Paramedics cut her out
she stood in the hospital room
pieces of glass held by her belly
fell to the floor when she saw my father
standing in the door
Everything’s okay. She’s okay.
I still hear the shape of her voice in me.
N: the range or limit that is covered by something (such as a law).
Say the ambit of Italy is the sea, you rather find your way back or your way finds you back.
Back, back, back. The turbulence is behind you, the chaos is ahead of you, say we are in the midst
of multilingual doom.
The night, the sea and the noise of mothers calling their kids back into life, or another innate who
suddenly becomes the snapping arms of the ocean.
Ambit is where you are until the Naval says it is a good time to go back home, until your country
calls for you, until the Earth says it is now.
Ambit is the limit you could go until your body says it is over and your legs disown the road.
It is the apogee where plane becomes ashes and horses become dust, men become a spring of
worms.
It’s someone’s Agadez, someone’s Accra, someone’s Tripoli, or Lampedusa. It’s best as someone’s
Berlin.
The lawyer calling to tell you that your application has been granted, but you are no more.
When I was younger, my friends and I would talk about the future.
We would talk about how many kids we wanted and how successful we would be one day
In an almost childish mindset, I would say ‘I want lots of kids maybe three or four’
I would say ‘but I want a son first so he can protect his siblings from harm’
Now as the years go by I have to laugh at myself
The innocent thoughts and joys that consumed my mind have disappeared because the world
does not seem to want the same future as I once did
Now I tell my friends I don’t want any kids
No Sons No Daughters
No child up for an unnecessary slaughter at the hands of those who know nothing about them but
still see them as someone terrifying before someone terrific
someone a mother would give her life for in the same second it takes the heart to beat
I do not want a knock on the door
I do not want a phone call
I do not want to see a video of my child dying
Screaming for me
Praying for their life
Begging that I come save them while people idly stand by and watch them suffer
I do not want to watch my child’s life fade from their body as if I didn’t hold them in my womb and
fight to bring them into a world I promised to hold them in
I don’t want to see my child edited into a cascade of clouds with angel wings and a halo
I don’t want #justicefor—
I don’t want protests just to put a murderer in jail even when there’s video proof of the crime being
committed and everyone gets to watch it again and again and again until it becomes
another dead child lost in time
I want my future child to be able to go to school
To drive
To walk with their hood up or down
To be able to walk alone
To take out their wallet
To buy Skittles
To go to parties To
cash a check To
run
To sleep
To breathe
When I was younger my friends and I would talk about the future
About how many kids we wanted and how successful we would be one day
I would say ‘I want lots of kids maybe three or four’
I would say ‘but I want a son first so he can protect his siblings from harm’
I laugh at myself.
◆
Exegesis
I wrote this poem during the summer of 2020. I was sixteen years old and watching the deaths and protests of Elijah McClain, George Floyd, Breoanna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. Then, I was seventeen and watching the deaths of Daunte Wright, Brayla Stone, and countless others. I remember always being tired of seeing someone else who looked like me dead and never being able to escape the news because the Black Death became an almost popular topic at the time. Suddenly, it became normalized again, the protests lessened, and life went back to how it was before COVID-19 to a certain extent. It was such a confusing time to be alive and witness so much collective chaos and opinions on who deserves to live or die. I had to get my thoughts outside my head, so I wrote: “When I was Younger.” It encompasses a great deal of the emotions I had at the time and the frustration rattling through my body daily.
Poetry is the ecology of memory. ~ David St. John
1. Remember when you were a kid on the first Earth Day, how you decided to celebrate it by
walking your neighborhood to pick up roadside trash?
2. It’s gone, the alpine lake where you and your dogs love to swim after a long hike on one of
Alaska’s endless summer days. It’s dried up, a moonscape of cracked mud where once the blue-
winged teal nested and Ptarmigan Peak reflected.
3. And remember in the 80’s during the first oil crisis, when everyone was talking about solar roof
panels, the government was giving tax credits for them, and you worked on that North Carolina
Solar Law Commission, on the legal implications of people shading their neighbor’s solar panels,
and we all thought that was the problem we needed to solve?
4. Now the Milne ice shelf has collapsed into the Arctic ocean, and the Thwaites and Pine Island
glaciers have broken loose in Antarctica.
5. You don’t remember the last time Beaver Lake froze, only when we were kids it did, and now it
would be considered a miracle that not even your entire Catholic grade school could conjure. All
those ice skates rotting in Asheville basements.
6. But do you remember how the frogs sounded in the marsh, the one kind of amphibian that
survives in Alaska, their lilting songs like the rounds at summer camp, and your boy’s hand in
yours as you stood at the edge and tried to count how long they sang?
7. You do remember when you were a kid like him, and the problem was roadside trash, and on
that first Earth Day, you walked your neighborhood, found one tossed can. How it shone in
sunlight, the glimmer like a ray to your heart telling you the Earth needed you, and what joy that
you could be of use.
8. The marsh is dried up, isn’t it? And your boy now a man who doesn’t want to think about what
used to be here, and why would you want to remind him of what was taken from him before he
could fight for it?
9. And remember, do not forget, that you knew forty years ago, we all knew about global warming
and habitat loss and extinction, we knew what we were doing and how to stop it, remember
Soft Energy Paths and Small is Beautiful and all those books we read in college showing us the
path out of this chaos. And now forty years later, you stand with your hands hanging by your
side, and look back at decades of working hard to help the Earth, and what has come of it, things
are far worse now than that ten-year-old girl who picked up a soda can could ever have
imagined.
10. But do you remember, do you remember, how thick the forests were, how many-layered and
fecund, how melodious the morning chorus, how dark the skies at night, how the Milky Way
arced overhead and fireflies lit the night, and you didn’t think about forgetting, you didn’t think
it could ever leave?
Man so mean
eat carnivorous plant leafy greens.
Break a bottle on his wiener.
Pay for gas with teeth.
Bring a gun on a plane
a gun on a plane so big
bullets full-sized airplanes.
Shit out a whole alligator in a godless land so
now their god is the alligator man. Hail hail the Alligator Man.
Strut through museum
quetzalcoatlus scoff
say pff as if – take a big swig from a pickled piranha specimen jar.
Smash the jar on his wiener.
Say like I give a FUCK to simple requests from girlfriends and mothers.
Finger so beefy.
Original model for “truck nuts”
every time you see those lumpy bumps swinging from a chassis
he get a royalty check for seventeen cents that’s already been spent on cigar
implants for his
backup titties. Ooh finger so beefy. Smell he emissions.
Fume haze warp horizon climb
take the bow from Apollo and shoot it with his GUN.
Only thing he fear: his clone or a NUN.
Only one revere: RUMPLESTILTSKUN
Rhyme so hard it no longer ENJOYABLE.
Breakfast of metal called TITANI-YUMS.
No tears,
eyeball sweat.
All feelings uninstalled, replaced with a single switch
ON – ALL THE FEELINGS AHHHHH
OFF – CATLIKE SLUMBER OF READINESS
winter sunburn chest so damp so smooth
exactly as soft as an almost ripe mango
like that all blue muscle ass dolphin the first minute its beached
the saltwater slip away
nobody knows what happen after sweat dries up.
Nobody nobody knows