climate change – Page 2 – Writers Resist

On the President’s Announcement of Our Hashtag

By John Linstrom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#KeepItInTheGround

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

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

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

Photo credit: Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash.

Storm Front

By Judith Skillman

Artist Statement

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deaths of Canaries

By Katherine D. Perry

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: SJDStudio via a Creative Commons license.