climate crisis – Writers Resist

What Did You Wish For?

By Myna Chang

Maria peered at the items locked inside Trillion Mart’s display case. The packet of birthday candles cost only $25, but the environmental tax was 300 carbits. That would put her way over her monthly carbon footprint allotment.

She sighed and leaned against the cool surface of the display. She’d hoped to give little Gabi a special birthday, like the ones she remembered from her own childhood. Her mom had always made her a pretty cake with fluffy frosting. Friends from school sang the birthday song, then her mom lit the candles, saying “make a wish, sweetheart!”

Maria recalled puffing out her cheeks and blowing as hard as she could, but it often took two tries to extinguish all the candles.

“What did you wish for?” her friends always asked in giggly little-girl voices. Maria knew not to tell, otherwise her wish wouldn’t come true. Sometimes, though, she couldn’t help letting slip her wish for a pink pony or neon markers.

An alarm shrilled, yanking her out of her daydream. The display case launched an anti-theft video—she’d maintained physical contact with it for more than 2.5 seconds without buying anything. She jerked away, but screens flanking the aisle had already erupted with the trillionaire’s face, amplified in all his high-def smarm.

“Now, now,” his recorded message scolded. He wagged a finger. “We wouldn’t take more than our fair share, would we?”

Maria noticed the footprint-shaped logo emblazoned on his crisp white shirt. Her own hand-me-down blouse had been patched and re-patched to avoid the exorbitant carbit tax of new clothing. She smoothed a loose thread as the store attendant approached. He wore the pressed green uniform of all the trillionaire’s minions.

After confirming she hadn’t stolen anything, he pointed at the door. “If you’re not buying, you have to go. Can’t have freeloaders in here, breathing Trillion’s reconditioned air.”

“Sorry,” Maria murmured.

She secured her filtration mask and stepped outside, into the brown haze that had hung in the air ever since the trillionaire took power. Maria secretly thought the pollution had only grown worse with the introduction of his complicated carbon footprint scheme.

His doughy face leered down from electronic billboards lining the street, with his current catch phrase rotating above his head in blocky letters: Engineering A Cleaner Future!

The camera angle zoomed out, showing ten shiny sports cars parked in front of a mansion—all environmentally neutral, as defined by his personalized carbon-offset calculations. The image shifted to a close-up of ten seedling pine trees, and then the camera tilted up to focus on a crystal blue sky.

Maria hadn’t seen a blue sky in ages. The atmosphere had been brown and thick with soot since long before her daughter was born.

The thought of Gabi filled her with warmth. Such a smart little girl. She didn’t ask for silly pink ponies for her birthday. No, Gabi wanted a science kit. She was still innocent enough to think she could save the world when she grew up, that she could be an even better engineer than the rich man in charge.

Maria coughed, particulate matter irritating her throat with each breath. Her Trillion Air Mask was on the fritz again.

She glanced at the time. Gabi’s school didn’t get out for several hours. Maybe Maria couldn’t give her child a perfect blue-sky birthday, but at least she could scrape together the ingredients for a proper cake.

• • •

Maria paused behind a dumpster, trying to calm her nerves. She’d never been to the underground market and was unsure which grimy doorway was the entrance. She scanned the alley ahead, and then she spotted it. Her heart thumped in anticipation—and fear. What if she got caught?

She shook the thought away. Lots of people visited the underground market, especially since the carbon allowance had been cut again. Most folks couldn’t make ends meet if they didn’t cheat a little.

The neighborhood had been crowned with lush cherry trees, once upon a time. Now, electronic billboards sprouted in their place. A new video burst to life with a buzz that set Maria’s teeth on edge. This time, the trillionaire juggled weird-shaped balls. No, not balls. They were . . . feet? The image shifted and Maria realized they were his logo—little plastic footprints, each emblazoned with a source of pollution: fossil fuels, beef, luxury goods.

He explained how each person’s carbon footprint was calculated, including the rate of carbit taxation, and how this was tied to shareholder value and population malleability and the amount of greenhouse gas people emitted when they exhaled.

Maria didn’t understand any of it.

A group of teenagers across the street started throwing rocks at the nearest billboard. They chanted, “No more carbits,” while continuing to hurl stones and pieces of trash from the gutter. Maria had never dared anything so brazen, but she couldn’t help smiling when a crack split the screen.

The damage didn’t stop the video, though; the trillionaire kept juggling and laughing.

Maria’s apprehension washed away, replaced by a wave of disgust at his oily voice and his legion of carbon-neutral billboards. No amount of fancy math could justify those monstrosities.

She squared her shoulders and marched into the underground market.

• • •

The market filled an abandoned neighborhood library. Maria remembered visiting as a child to watch puppet hour and look at picture books. The space was now packed with vendors selling everything from homemade baskets to decades-old music chips.

Maria gaped at a table stacked with vintage exercise shoes; all that plastic and rubber in one place. The shoes looked comfortable, but she remembered how much pollution spewed into the atmosphere when petroleum was refined into plastic and rubber. The lesson had been drilled into her head when she was in school. She trailed a finger along a pair of neon pink and purple sneakers, then walked on.

She finally found a table with cooking supplies. Selection was slim. An older woman with widely spaced teeth smiled warmly at Maria and helped her find most of the ingredients for the cake. Altogether, it cost less than even one item would cost at a Trillion Mart, so she splurged and bought a whole cup of sugar.

“What about the tax?” Maria asked. “You don’t charge carbits?”

The gap-toothed woman shook her head. “No, dear. We don’t play that man’s scam here.”

Maria smiled. She still had a little money left. “Do you have any candles?”

The woman scratched her chin. “I don’t get many requests for combustibles.” She rummaged through a tattered box. “Ah, here we go.” She held up a single birthday candle; pink and white wax braided into a tiny pillar of childhood whimsy.

“Oh,” Maria whispered. The sweet swirl of colors conjured images of her mother, of birthday parties past. She still remembered the sugar-ache of that first bite of cake, and the way her mom beamed when the girls said how they loved her frosting.

Grinning, she reached for the contraband candle. “How much?”

The woman winked. “It’s on the house. I hope your kid’s wish comes true.”

“Thank you,” Maria breathed. The unexpected kindness caught her off-guard. She blinked as she tucked the candle into her bag with the other items. “Thank you,” she repeated softly.

A loud boom shook the walls and screams erupted near the front of the building. Maria staggered, gripping the edge of the table. “What’s happening?”

Tables of goods overturned as panicked people stampeded toward the exits.

“Hurry,” the woman yelled, motioning Maria out a hidden door. “It’s a raid!”

Pulse racing, Maria followed her down a short flight of concrete stairs, through a dilapidated fire door, into an unfamiliar side street.

The sudden miasma of acrid air and billboard buzz hit her like a truck. She paused, disoriented. Which way to go? The old woman had already disappeared. Sirens wailed somewhere on her left, so Maria turned right and sprinted as fast as she could, securing her mask mid-stride.

Two blocks later, she had to stop. Each breath burned her throat, searing into her lungs. The filtration mask was useless. She pulled it off to check the connections and found the filter mechanism loose. Etched into its plastic housing was the green footprint logo, with another product slogan: Trillion Air! From your favorite trillionaire!

Maria slammed the mask on the ground and kicked it away from her.

Ahead, tires squealed on pavement. Hardly anyone drove cars anymore, so Maria knew it must be the trillionaire’s raiders.

She bolted toward a different alley, but a pair of soldiers emerged. They wore body armor with the green footprint logo emblazoned on their chest plates. Each one had a long-barreled gun slung around his shoulder.

“Stop!” one of them yelled.

Frantic, Maria spun, seeking somewhere to hide. A huge green SUV careened down the street and jumped the curb, heading directly at her. She lurched behind the dumpster, tripping over the stupid mask she’d just discarded. She hit the pavement hard, knocking the wind out of her and skinning the heels of her hands.

Stunned and gasping, all she could see was her bag, its contents spilling across the cracked asphalt. Hundreds of tiny sugar crystals bounced, the pure beauty of each grain sparkling for an instant, before melting into the gray sludge ringing the dumpster.

“No,” Maria rasped. She wanted to rise, take her things and run back home. She wanted to hold little Gabi and rock her to sleep, to sink backward, into a better time, where her own mother called her sweetheart and she still believed the world’s problems could be cured with a secret birthday wish.

A green boot slammed down, inches from her face. She flinched away from the thick rubber sole, curling into a ball. “Please,” she whimpered, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Oh, yeah?” the soldier’s voice boomed. “Trading contraband goods at an illegal market isn’t wrong?”

He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her up. Something inside her shoulder joint crackled and she cried out. Vomit rose in her throat. She retched, emptying her stomach onto the ground.

It splashed his boots and he cursed. He shoved her toward a second soldier, who caught her and held her upright, pulling her hands behind her back. She gasped at the jagged bolts of agony that radiated from her shoulder down the length of her arm.

The first man opened her bag. Only a few items remained: her ID and carbit card—and the candle. He sneered at her.

“A black-market combustible, purchased without the required carbit tax,” he said. “This is a Class One offense.”

“But it’s just a little birthday candle,” Maria stammered.

The man stood tall, jutting out his chin. He locked eyes with her and grinned, mashing the candle into his chest plate. It left a pink smear. He flicked what was left of it at Maria. She winced when the ruined wax struck her cheek.

“Wax is a petro product, you dumb bitch. And it makes nasty shit when it burns.”

The soldier holding her arms pulled a zip tie around her wrists, launching fresh waves of pain from her shoulder. White spots filled her vision and her knees buckled.

“Guess what the sentence is for cheating the carbit tax?” He yanked her upright with a tight grip on the back of her neck. “You’re going to carbon re-education camp, sweetheart.”

“No!” she cried. She’d heard rumors of people disappearing into these work camps, but she’d never believed it was true. “I have a daughter! I have to get home to my little girl!”

“Should have thought of your kid before you went on this crime spree.” He laughed and turned to his partner. “Think they’ll let her make wax at the refinery?”

The man with the vomit-stained boots grunted. “I hope they send her to the rubber factory.”

He stomped his feet, dislodging some of the vomit. In her dazed state, she noticed that the soldier’s boots left prints in the same shape as the trillionaire’s logo. All this time she’d believed his carbon footprint referred to the environment. Now, too late, she understood its true meaning.

The soldiers dragged her to a large open-backed cargo truck and shoved her to a seat between two other prisoners. They loosened her zip tie, freeing one hand and securing the other to an overhead rail. She moaned, twisting to relieve the pressure on her tortured shoulder.

Several additional trucks and SUVs were parked near the underground market. She recognized one of the teenagers who had been throwing rocks earlier, as well as vendors she’d encountered inside the market. The kindly old cooking vendor slumped next to her, barely conscious. Grime in the shape of a boot tread was imprinted on the side of her face.

A small vid screen in the cargo area played a message on loop: “Get ready for carbon re-education camp, where you’ll work off your debt to society! All while helping me engineer a cleaner future!” The video glitched and froze, stuck on a close-up of the trillionaire’s face.

Maria realized she was crying. Through blurred vision, she made out the footprint logo on the truck’s metal floorboard. She spat a glob of bloody phlegm at it and wiped her face with her free hand. Mingled with tears and crusted vomit, she found a fleck of pink wax. It must have stuck when the soldier threw it at her.

She squeezed the happy-birthday wax in her fist and closed her eyes, wishing she’d never gone to the market, that she was on her way to Gabi’s school right now. What would happen to her little girl, alone and waiting for a mother who wouldn’t be there? A raw sob tore from Maria’s throat. The candle shard dug into her palm, and she wished she could erase this day, stomp out the brutal raiders, sweep away the trillionaire’s bloated footprints.

More than anything, she wished she could do more than wish.

Outside the truck, a raider banged his hand against the cab. “Take ’em to the smokestacks!” The engine backfired as the truck rocked into motion. Maria’s gaze filled with thick smoke; the whole sky blackened with it.

Myna Chang (she/her) is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books). Her writing has been selected for the Locus Recommended Reading List, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and WW Norton’s Flash Fiction America. Find her at MynaChang.com or on Bluesky at @MynaChang.

Photo by K-B Gressitt 2025

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

Awaiting Harris’ Concession Speech November 6, 2024

By Dotty LeMieux

A woman adjusts the flags lining the stage
just so, as if perfectly draped flags
can protect us from the ignominy
of the next four years.

On stage, the flags wilt
despite folding, tucking,
crimping.

A young man in the crowd raises
his iPhone high above his head,
its flashlight beaming out.
With his other hand he holds
a plastic water bottle
on top of the phone,
a pale tribute
to a lost Lady Liberty.

While a nation holds
its ragged breath,
polar ice melts,
oceans die,
billionaires increase
their wealth and power.

In Texas, Oklahoma,
Georgia, Indiana—
Women bleed
in parking lots,
on hospital gurneys,
waiting—

Waiting

still waiting

My pronouns are she, her, hers. I often write what might be called political or topical poetry. Much of it is in my five chapbooks, three long out of print, but the most recent are Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune from Finishing Line Press, 2021, and Viruses, Guns and War from Main Street Rag Press, 2023. My work has appeared in several anthologies, Writers Resist, Gyroscope, Rise Up Review, Poetry and Covid, MacQueens Quinterly and more. I live in northern California with my husband and two active dogs.

Photo credit: Adam Fagen 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.

Uprooted/Planted

By Ash Reynolds

Today I learned the word “ecocide”
murder of the environment
Intentional destruction of the soil, air
of olive trees, strawberry fields
Mourn for all that is lost
the homeless animals, the rootless trees
Don’t cry over spilled oil
or plastic crowding the ocean
Colonizers raping an open wound
hands stained copper-tongue carmine
Dear planet, look what they’ve done to you

Today I planted my garden
birth of nourishment
Intentional tending of green zebra tomatoes
of hot & spicy oregano, mini-me cucumbers
Celebrate all that is growing
the native flowers, the bumblebees
Don’t cry over dry soil
or squirrels snacking
Tenderly dug holes in fecund earth
garden gloves stained abundant brown
Dear planet, look what you’ve given me

Ash Reynolds (they/them) is a nonbinary, queer, ace poet living in College Park, Maryland, USA, with their rescue dog and 41 houseplants. They are published in new words {press} and have a poem forthcoming in The Bitchin’ Kitsch.

Photograph by Gabriel Jimenez on Unsplash.

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.

Beware the Homo Sapiens

By Robyn Bashaw

“Don’t!” Eeip closes his mitt over Swee’s, stopping her from placing the bone into the waiting psittaciforme’s beak. Eeip pulls the bone from Swee’s grasp, tossing it in the Trash Trench where it lands between a rusty fork with its one twisted tine veering right and a single brass earring with its post back missing.

There had also been a Trash Trench at the archaeology dig where Swee had interned, growing steadily taller, but it was better in the trenches than the oceans, decomposing slowly, as it was wont to do, with occasional help from the curious nibble of a fish or the tear of a passing crocodile leg.

Beyond the bone, Swee can make out colored rectangular cases holding deadened black screens, wires crisscrossing over black boxes of varying sizes, deformed plastics of every color, brown and green glass bottles perfectly preserved in black bags. The plastic reminds her of the wide-eyed skull of a sciuridae, whose skeleton she’d uncovered in her second week on her internship, throttled by a plastic ring that finally fell loose as she brushed aside the dirt by its neck.

“Never the homo sapiens,” Eeip scolds, and Swee nods her head, glistening silver under the sun. It had been a mistake, but Eeip wouldn’t believe that. Swee knew the homo sapiens were the ones responsible for the Trash Trenches, for the plastic-choked deaths they found below ground, for the entrapment of fantastical creatures. They hadn’t known what to call them when they first uncovered them, entrapped in wired boxes, giftwrapped for their convenience: a huge creature with two long teeth poking out from its head, an animal with sharp teeth bigger than a shark’s protruding from its lips, a short-armed creature leaning back on a long line of delicate bones making up its tail, a tail-less animal with a curved spine and long nails clinging tight to an echo of a tree.

When the linguists had cracked one of the written human codes, they had learned some of the names along with the homo sapiens’: Elephas maximus, Panthera leo, Macropus rufus, Phascolarctos cinereus. It was archaeology that told the tale of their final extinction where the homo sapiens held them captive: Trees were pushed and tossed about past the brick walls and glass windows that were tortured by the wind. Tiny flowers cowered in fear, trying to hide their bright little heads before they were snapped right off. Rain poured out over the Earth, sweeping coffins over cliffs to be splattered against the rocks below. When the storm finished stirring graveyards, churches, homes, and schools together to be poured out fresh across the globe, all traces of homo sapiens’ time upon the world were washed away, buried beneath the new rising ocean.

Millions of years later, the water receded once more, cooling back into mountains of ice that revealed beaches for the cephalopods to waddle upon.

The psittaciforme plants its all-knowing black pupil on Swee, highlighted by the amber iris, as he accepts the bone of a tiktaalik from Eeip. The psittaciforme takes to the sky, its red wings flashing between the blue and yellow of his brethren, each carrying a bone in its talons to the river’s edge where the scientists would sort them and harness any DNA still inside. The tiktaalik have strong fins like the cetaceans to support their body weight out of water, scales like a fish, head like a crocodile, and tail as powerful as the cetaceans. Swee knew it was the kindred features that had made the tiktaalik a prime choice to resurrect from extinction.

Eeip snapped his jaw at Swee. “I thought you were trained! Do you know the damage you could have caused, passing on a homo sapiens’ bone?”

“I am trained!” Swee held her ground. She could have told Eeip about the extinctions the cetaceans had mapped backwards: the storm and subsequent flood that had wiped out the two-legged homo sapiens, the homo sapiens’ entrapment of the multitude of four-legged life, the four-legged life’s emerging from the tsunamis and fires rippling after the asteroid, the giant four-legged dinosaurs tramping across Pangea after the red lava of volcanoes coated the large, lumbering lizards whose steak knife teeth and sail atop their backs kept rivals at bay. It was back another layer of lava that they had discovered the tiktaalik before facing fathoms of ice. Swee stares at the ground under her fins; this was not her mistake. Homo sapiens were more than five extinctions apart from the tiktaalik. Their bones should not have been here at all. Swee lifts her eyes. “Maybe it fell from the Trash Trench?”

Eeip let his eyes scan over the Trash Trench, its logged edges monitored by the loyal canis lupus familiaris, and Swee felt her stomach landlock. Of course, the canis would never permit any piece of trash, much less a homo sapiens bone, to slip past their guard.

“Sorry,” Swee sings sweetly, and Eeip allows her to move on with a final warning to not let the mistake happen again.

• • •

Swee does her best to work diligently, but, when the day is done, she finds herself wandering past the cetacean and tiktaalik races with their long-standing battle of wisdom versus brute force, to slip into the river herself. Kicking her strong flippers at the end of her legs, she follows the current to the ocean where her fins shiver to brush alongside a shark and her heart pumps in relish of her flying leaps across the surface. A cackling laugh erupts from her when she spots a seal, but, when it dives deep off a shelf, she lets it pull ahead, content in the chase alone. She swims back through the teeming life of the ocean, untroubled by the schools of fish that dart away from her passage.

She pulls herself up on the river’s bank, pleased to see the brachiosaurus stretching its neck out to pluck a branch free beneath the setting sun. The land had been too bare when the cetaceans had first emerged from the ocean, so the brachiosaurs, the triceratops, and the stegosaurs had been welcome additions to help manage the plants aboveground. The same pity that had sparked Swee to pass her sciuridae’s skull along to the scientists at her internship had led to the resurrection of some of the encaged mammals.

Elephas maximus had been the most pleasant surprise. Not only did they help dig out and build the bases for the Trash Trenches, but they quickly learned to bubble the waters alongside the cephalopods to gather fish from the river to distribute to feed the pod. Swee lifts a fin now to wave at the elephas called Hoount, who swings her trunk to toss a fish Swee’s way. Swee catches it in her flipper, closing her fin over the damp scales. When she slips into her mud bed, Swee bites into the cool flesh. She tears off a small chunk of scale, offering it to her hallucigenia, which grasps the offering in three of its spindly arms, bringing it to its first mouth to suck inside its tiny body. Its two beady, black eyes watch Swee to see if more is incoming, but she does not want to overfeed her pet.

Smaller than the bottle caps littering the first layer of soil, the hallucigenia curves its hair-like neck to the ocean floor while it processes its dinner. Balanced upon its seven legs, its antennae feel ahead as it returns to Swee, who runs her fin over the spikes across its back. The tiny prickles make her laugh, and the hallucigenia nuzzles close until Swee relents and tears loose another scale chunk, reasoning to herself that one more bite wouldn’t hurt it.

Her hallucigenia is a reminder of why she chose to go into archaeology. Many would have been satisfied to stop once they reached the fathoms of ice, but Ipip was a curious cephalopod and he continued to dig. Fathoms down, the sea levels dropped as they did today and whole new creatures, including the hallucigenia, were unearthed. The gecko-sized twenty-eight-legged centipede creeping its way to nibble on microbes at low tide was perfect to keep the ecosystem balanced, but, like the hallucigenia, the wiwaxia was resurrected for its beauty. Outside many mud beds, a wiwaxia sits with its eight rows of armored plates, shimmering like a bird’s feathers with flashes of blue, green, and yellow.

Swee’s fin rests on her hallucigenia’s spikes, and she stares down into its dark black eyes as it lifts one of its legs and places it on Swee’s smooth leg. Of course. Her hallucigenia only knows her as the bringer of food. Even if Eeip hadn’t stopped her today and the homo sapiens had been resurrected, her hallucigenia would be crawling on her, seeking out more treats and rubs.

• • •

Swee arrives at the dig site early the next day, bypassing the layers etched into the ground to walk straight to the Trash Trench. The canis lap the trench, but there is one brown canis in front who paces by where the trash is thrown. Swee stops before the brown canis. Knowing they can understand more than they can say, she takes a deep breath.

“Were you once a pet?”

The brown canis, naturally, does not answer, but he does whine.

Swee reaches out her fin, forcing herself to not pull away as she runs it over the canis’s scratchy fur. She had practiced her speech last night. “I bet your homo sapiens took good care of you—fed you, petted you—but all of them weren’t that way. We can’t risk bringing any back.”

The brown canis hangs its head and whimpers, so Swee strokes him again. She had gone over it every way, but she wasn’t sure how to make a canis understand the difference between how something cared for its pet and how it cared for the world at large. Pets have such a narrow focus of the world.

“You can’t slip any more bones in,” she speaks firmly, eyeing the canis so he will know she’s serious. “Understood?”

The canis whines once more, but he drops his body forward in an accepting bow. So, Swee pats him on the side and takes her leave. At the dig, Eeip is waiting. He lifts his fin in welcome, and Swee returns the gesture, assuring as she flops down with him that there will be no more mistakes today.

Note: The title is based on John Whitfeld’s Lost animals: Extinct, endangered, and rediscovered species. Welbeck publishing group limited, 2020.

Though Robyn Bashaw has graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing and published a piddling of stories, her greatest accomplishment to date is training her ball python to distinguish the fast taps of playtime and the slow taps of foodtime. Communication, however possible, is vital. Check out her work at: https://robynbashaw.wordpress.com/.

Photo credit: Debbie Hall, poet, photographer and Writers Resist poetry editor.

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 Moment, Nixes’ Mate, What Rough Beast, The Main Street Rag and is forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review.

Image credit: “The Whale” by Christopher Michel 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.

Two Poems by Deborah Hochberg

Congregation of Ibis

“A barrage of storms has resurrected what was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River, setting the stage for a disaster this spring.”

– from “Tulare Lake Was Drained Off the Map. Nature Would Like a Word,” Soumya Karlamangla and Shawn Hubler, New York Times, April 2, 2023

They drained the Great Lake
in the late 19th century

Humans took
the vast waters from us
to grow their cotton, their tomatoes

Like gods, they separated
the land and the skies from the water
and the water was no more

They came, and they took
what was ours
and we had no say

And they did what they willed
with the earth

And the earth was obedient
for decades, over a century

And then the earth decided —
I have had enough
I am taking it back
I miss the lake
I will bring back the lake

And the atmospheric rivers
raged through the skies

And the land received the waters
waters that the mammoths
once drank

The farms, homes, brewery, and cafe
the crops and ranches
were inundated

And then we returned —
the ibis
and the herons, pelicans, and coots

Soon the snowpack will melt
without mercy
for agriculture
or prisons

The lake, like a surging
aqueous ghost, a watery resurrection
has again staked its claim

And we are here —
as long as the lake
can sustain its deep
irriguous expanse

Migrant Child

Home
is a thing
that does not yet exist
Existed as a point of departure
But a home
where one cannot live
is not a home
My feet are my home
My legs are my home
My sneakers are my home
They carry me
through arduous terrains
that seek to have me
lie down
and sink
into the mud
Mud-child
I hold my own hand
This way, I say
No, this way
Journey of a thousand steps
Countless steps, numerous
as stars in the sky
Stars that blanket me
on cold nights
No longer human
I move through the mud
like a turtle
Did I just crawl
over a border?
I have forgotten
thoughts of home
and now think only
of movement
This journey, a trial
and I am guilty
of what I do not know
Hope
is a thing
that grips you
around your throat
Pulls you
like a leash
and won’t let go

Deborah Hochberg is from Detroit, Michigan, and studied at Wayne State University. She is a musician, a gardener, and a health care provider. She is the author of two collections of poetry entitled Waiting For the Snow and Memory’s Reservoir.

Image credit: Bob Peterson 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yet Another Poem About Trees

By Larry Needham

“Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!”

—Bertolt Brecht, “To Posterity”

Before the jar
the anecdote
and Tennessee,

wilderness.
Forests primeval,
grim and awful—

extravagant
as first growth
imaginings.

The Dark Ages.
Then dominion
bleaker still.

Maps, surveys,
plots, deeds, sub-
plots, divisions;

trees measured,
monetized,
milled to spec;

scaffolding
raised up, torn
down, tossed into

the burn barrels of
histories
declining on

the ash heap
crematoria
of woodlots

warming the near
reaches of
advancing night.

_____

Hard to admit
the bleak truth of
a twilight

premonition:
Birnam Wood
departing

that one cast shade on
clear-cut fell
ambition,

slash-and-burn
madness, doubtful
illuminations

kindled in darkness,
guttering in
airless corridors,

all talk of
tomorrows
sucking up

the oxygen,
and, at the end,
no one left to

breathe a word about
equities,
justice or

what followed in
un-natural
succession:

birthright woods
supplanted and
the newly planted

contracted to
an oak on crutches
and hollowed-

out sycamore, mere
stand-ins for
a tired allusion.

_____

The witness
to dark times
wasn’t wrong about

its silences,
indifference,
cold imperatives,

having weathered
the flood—too avid,
perhaps, for landfall

too hopeful of
olive branches,
rainbow signs and

fruitful generations-—
unmindful of the
fire next time,

new dark ages and
a certain justice in
our sad leave-taking.

In blindness or
naked disregard
he was not unlike

the rapt poet of trees
and makers before
The Great War who

couldn’t see death in
the Aisnes and Ardennes
forests for his Trees

and never thought he’d
ever see an end to
first-growth woodlands

or dream that there
could possibly be
future times without

green canopies,
sublimity, poems,
posterity.

Larry Needham is a retired community college teacher who has published on Romantic literature and the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali. His work has recently appeared in a handful of online journals including: Amethyst Review, The Alchemy Spoon, and Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

Photo credit: Thomas H 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Body Before Extinction

By Emily Hockaday

I sing to the water and lower my only child
into the foam, wiggling toes first. I think about
all the species the ocean held
that I don’t know the names of
that have gone extinct this past year
and focus on the sound of the waves
and all the metaphors
that the tide could cover.

I have walked this beach
and pulled balloons, broken bottles,
cracked plastic, and wristwatches
from the surf and dunes
without seeing another person
for miles. I listen for the wind
through the beach grass and
the plover and seagulls
and hand my daughter a trash bag
and gloves. I don’t even know how many
animals are left. I am afraid
to look for the answer.

Emily Hockaday’s first full-length collection Naming the Ghost is out with Cornerstone Press November 2022. She is the author of five prior chapbooks, most recently Beach Vocabulary from Red Bird Chaps. Her work has appeared in print and online journals, as well as the Wayfinding, Poets of Queens, and In Isolation anthologies. She can be found on the web at www.emilyhockaday.com and on Twitter @E_Hockaday.

Photograph by Aryeh Alex 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.

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.

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.

Cicuta

By K. L. Lord

The delicate blooms, alabaster petaled and fragrant, sprout from gardens across the land, mingling with the peas and green beans. They are lovely, but they’ve never grown here before. The first person to find them thought they were carrots, but when pulled from the ground, tendrils of roots ripple through the dirt. No matter how many times they are pulled up, they grow back. A parasite in otherwise pristine gardens. She used to thrive in only wet and marshy lands, but so many of her homes have been destroyed by humans. She has adapted, working to evolve. At first, survival was her only goal. Not every species of living creature found a way to live on. Bees die by the thousands. Birds and mammals struggle, and for some the only salvation is inside a cage.

She will be their voice. Their vengeance. For years, she’s studied the human gardens, feeling out with her roots to understand her neighbors, especially those harvested as food. They too, are tired—heavy with pesticides and lacking the tenderness given by past generations. Her collective consciousness speaks through the earth, preparing every tendril of her being. Communing with her brethren. It is time.

As one, each of her roots reach out to the plants around them, targeting only what is edible, wrapping around them until they become one. She sends her toxins up into every leaf, every seed, every particle. The nourishing flora do not resist. They’ve heard her plans and they are ready to help her take back their habitats and help their choked-out neighbors thrive once more.

The toxins work quickly throughout the population of destructive humans. The flora and fauna of all the world sing as confusion takes over humanity, as the bodies of the dead are given in offering to the earth. Once a plight, now fertilizer for those they abused.

The alabaster petals soak up the rays of the shining sun. Across the lands, ivy climbs up buildings and devours cars. Tree roots burst through concrete. Deer and other smaller creatures cross abandoned highways without danger. Life blooms in the wake of the dead.

Reclaimed.

K.L. LORD writes horror and poetry and has published in both fiction and academic markets. She has an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and is pursuing her Ph.D. in English Literature. You can find her (in non-Covid times) lurking in bookstores, libraries, and tattoo shops; on Twitter, @lord_thelady; and on her website.

Image credit: Tractatus de Herbis (ca.1440) via Public Domain Review

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.

Deputized

By Holly A. Stovall

Congratulations! You are Deputized!

Abortion after 6 weeks is illegal in Texas.

Help enforce the law by reporting an illegal abortion in the anonymous form below!

How do you think the law has been violated?

I’ve had three spontaneous abortions (that’s doctor lingo for miscarriages) in three years, each at 8 or 9 weeks, and that’s illegal. I know this sounds CRA-A-A-AZY, but my Yankee cousin in Chicago says that multinational fossil fuel corporations are poisoning my babies in my womb, and this is causing my babies to self-abort (that’s practically suicide)! I don’t want to sound like I’m not a good, patriotic Republican or anything, but why can’t I stay pregnant? These companies must be arrested under this great new abortion ban, and then you can make them pay for the cleanup of the chemicals they leave in the air and then maybe my babies will want to live. (Not only that, my family and friends got bad cancer. My aunt died. Everybody knows someone who died of cancer.) Here in Texas, we believe in pro-life through and through. I know you agree.

How did you obtain this evidence?

I found blood and red sinewy stuff on my panties. And then I read a report from some OSHA website (I think they meant to write “OCEAN,” because it’s probably some society that doesn’t want chemicals in the ocean) and the Mayo Clinic (that Yankee hospital), that everyday chemicals the multinational corporations put out there are causing my uterine babies to abort themselves. I know. Cra-a-a-azy, right? Except that I’m desperate for one of my womb babies to live. I’ll try anything, even reporting them for suicide so maybe you can do something to stop them.

Clinic or Doctor this evidence relates to:

Clinics of Hydrocarbon Gasses. Clinics of Mining, Quarrying, & Oil & Gas Extraction.

I’d add, in addition, The Clinics of Plastic Water Bottles, The Food Packaging Clinic, The Fossil Fuel Clinic, the Paper Mill Clinic, the Toxic Dyes Clinic, and the Off-Gassing Mattress Clinic. Clinic of White Male Lawmakers.

Don’t mess with Texas.

City Crowell
State Texas
Zip 79227
County Foard

I’m an MFA student at Northwestern University. This spring, I published my first short story in Litbreak Magazine. I’ve published essays, literary histories and criticism, and scholarly research in various news outlets, scholarly journals, and blogs, including Letras Hispanas, Peace and Change, In These Times, and Inside Higher Ed’s “University of Venus Blog.” I hold a PhD in Spanish literature and an MA in Women’s History. I was a tenured professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Western Illinois University until WIU eliminated my department and my position with it. I went to high school in East Texas, where my mom’s family is from. Now I live in Macomb, Illinois, with my spouse, son, and poodle.

Photo credit: Deputy Enforcement Officer Blanche Rogers, 1913, Dewey, Oklahoma, from the U.S. Library of Congress, restored by sixpounder and used 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.

Election Day

By Elizabeth Edelglass

We stand in line beside our mothers’ stockinged legs, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we’d also snaked through same gymnasium, mouths agape for the healing cube, sugar our mothers said, but bitter, live virus, our parents had said, to save us from the deadly virus, their voices husky with fear, when they thought we couldn’t hear from our secret perch on the upstairs landing, aliens landed from our beds in the sky. Now our mothers lift us high with strong arms, purposeful fingers, click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, we the people whisper our secret choices. Then home to our fathers in their fatigues from the war, fathers who’d already voted, forsaking sleeping houses at sunup, as always, though no work today, so rake the leaves, let us jump the piles, crisp and sharp, then watch our fathers set the piles aflame, red and orange and crunchy brown, smoke soaring to the sky.

We stand in line in our fathers’ fatigues from the war, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we square-danced, dosido, allemande left, allemande right, line snaking, choose your partner, change your partner, kiss your partner behind the bleachers. Old enough now to snake on our bellies through Asian jungle, if we were boys, old enough to click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, assert our choice to save the boys we think we love from snaking through the jungle mud. Then home to huddle in those boys’ strong arms under percale piles, to scream and husky cry, election stolen by dirty tricks, as bombs keep crying from the sky, until at last those tricky fingers flash the famous V before boarding a chopper to fly out of sight, rotors roaring into the sky.

We stand in line with our kangaroo pouches, babies snuggled at our breasts, toddlers at our denimed legs, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we were chosen, or not chosen, for the team. Line snaking through the gymnasium where soon our babies will be chosen, or not chosen, we pray for them as we click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, affirm our choices, big and small, win or lose, year after year, school board, zoning board, firemen’s budget. Then home to rake the leaves, we let our children jump in the piles, when they think we cannot see, freely fly across grass and sky, then rake again, into bio-safe bags, saving the smoke, restoring the sky.

We stand in line in our pantsuits and pearls, behind our masks, line snaking outside the gymnasium, six-foot circles on grass as green as far-off jungle, leaves painting rainbow sky, sun shining as if God knows, line snaking one-by-one, dosido into the gymnasium, where tomorrow our grandchildren will all be chosen, everyone a winner now, though they know truths we think they don’t. Yesterday we helped our mothers, safe on Facetime, mark their ballots with brittle fingers, will they touch us once again before they soar to unknown sky? We’re determined to stand in line, though old enough to be at risk, we shout our choice to save the world from sneaky virus, snake-y words, both sharp with spikes that can kill. We mark our ballots with gloved fingers, slide into scanners, what happens next we do not know, missing the click of levers, the pull of arm, the reassuring slide of curtain. Then home to rake the leaves with bony fingers, aching arms, anything to avoid the blaring TV voices, we lift our eyes, imploring the sky.

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer and book reviewer who finds herself writing poetry in response to today’s world—personal, national, and global. Her first published poems recently appeared in Global Poemic and Trouvaille Review. Her story “An Implausibility of Wildebeests” appeared in Writers Resist in November 2020. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo by Patrick Schöpflin on Unsplash.

I can’t breathe

By Mary F. Lenox

I can’t breathe
the words said
written on a waste container
near the sidewalk

I wondered what other
unheard voices say
I can’t breathe

Dying fish of the sea
echo
I can’t breathe
as they
navigate through
plastic and oil invaders

Birds
call out
through polluted air
I can’t breathe

Children playing
in urban streets
for lack of space elsewhere
I can’t breathe

Rivers and streams
full of sewage from earthlings
scream
I can’t breathe

Shouting voices of people of color
grieving for relief
from all the ways oppressors
have tried to kill, destroy, eliminate
I can’t breathe

Yet
young and old around the world march and proclaim
No more!

We will not stand silently by
hearing those words
I can’t breathe

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Mary F. Lenox is a poet, writer, speaker, and educator. She was a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the School of Library and Information Science where she served as dean for 12 years. She is the author of two books of poetry, Threads of Grace: Selected Poems (2015) and Riches of Life: Poems (2019). She resides in San Diego, California.

Photo credit: Tyler Merbler via a Creative Commons license.

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.

Humanity

By Steven Croft

Wants to believe kindness, its namesake, can still a morning rain
of bombs, calm the lightning strike of artillery shells on cratered streets
scorched hot and unlivable as the surface of the sun

Wants to believe foresight will quiet the chainsaws’ outcry against
ancient trees in the last remaining rainforests, make abandoned
the coal-fired cooling towers as monuments to itself, leave at least some
of the fish in the sea

Wants to believe in the white sorcery of hope: we will never be starving
animals on a dying planet, we are not tongueless to stop a world’s
unraveling, wants to believe in good hearts joining us together in time
like a savior walking out of a desert, the world as scry bowl of better angels

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. For the last thirteen years he has worked in a library. He has recent poems in Sky Island Journal, As It Ought to Be Magazine, Poets Reading the News, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, and other places.

Photo credit: Xavier Vergés via a Creative Commons license.