An Environmental Justice Poetry Collection

AIR PERMIT

Soon, they will sell the air we breathe.

The signs were everywhere, but we didn’t acknowledge

that blacks, colored, and poor whites are flotsam.

We booked an early morning meeting with newlyweds

and cried afterward that they arrived very late.

What love the exploiters have for us, like

an extinct thing, means more than a name.

We know Mojave rattlesnakes don’t shed their skins

to keep their prey safe from the wildfires.

When predators pretend to be full and repentant,

we must know that new skins mean thirst

because every quake begins from the fault lines.

Green for mischief, green for malady, not innocence.

What difference does a logo make for corporations

that insist on raising our BP? What difference?

PLAYING HANGMAN

Listen, but do not fall asleep.

Do not fall asleep; do not.

Lullabies will not stop the nightmares.

Let your ears be a roof

so when the lies hit it

they, not you, will fall apart.

Their eyes are AI bugs trained

to switch your mind their way

you will misread their body language,

for they are doctors of doublespeak.

Beware when they, like doves, perch

on your earlobes and whisper hope.

Listen, but do not fall asleep.

Do not forget they always use

regret and reassurance in one sentence.

Wait until the applause transforms itself

into the poisons they are producing,

watch each stage of the disease

dislodge the cells that sustain you.

Contrast the past with the present;

let the destruction rouse the snorers.

Let it be clear the first-comers

never mentioned coal ash, mill tailings,

greenhouse gases, threat, or harm when

your parents welcomed them. Look around,

over their heads, look: Where will

you bury all the dead and dying?

Where will you bury them?

Look again, further this time: How

will you dissolve agony with

a nod? Where do you stand?

Breathe again; do it for me

do it for those who cannot,

deeper so you will speak clearly.

Ask them this time: What exactly

are we exchanging for our lives?

ALARM

Before dislocation, before the breaking and entry

before the hydrophone steamer and airgun array

before they struck and the seabed growled

like a painted dog, before oil spills

before the howl of hydrocarbon hit wellheads

in search of freedom within rugged valves

locked and pressed down the earth’s bowels

before pipelines forecast oil spills and leaks

only biotic and abiotic lyrics echoed again

and again, before commercialized wars, before sonar

baleen whales and sea turtles behaved well

before endocrinological stress, set the seabass on

collision with the simple life it inherited

before startle response and hearing threshold shift

before barotrauma and mischief of angler sports

before masking, like a dark cloud, interfered

with prey detection, predator avoidance, and navigation

the waters moved in normal dance steps

before harvests of corals, sponges, starfish

before turtles and crustaceans, before they became

souvenir, jewelry, and home décor, long before

aircraft noise and sonic booms and exhausts

roared like bomb blasts and set wildebeests

trampling, stampeding, raising their heads, jumping, running

amok; before willow warblers run and crowd

before fireworks, my song soothed my young

and ancestors. Now, my lullabies and invocations

are a cacophony of ceaseless, maddening sound.

DEATH MACHINES

Why do you talk as if I have no ears?

No need to admit culpability in my chaos, no reparations,

no cap and trade, no carbon tax or adaptation fund.

It’s in your blood, and you would’ve hurt me anyway:

you hate my handshake with dawn, how my feet caress

earth as I dance to the calls of laughing doves.

SWEATSHOPS

I can’t stop wondering why we live by the sandbars

yet our eyes remain lathered out, and when I asked

mom what crude meant in the beginning, she said hope

and growth and the other ideals that folks enjoy seesawing

either way, in the end, she admitted that no one

really knows how or when words take on new robes

like overfed seeds and become slippery.

March across this marsh

and see how we ruin our lungs running hydrocarbon plants

just to live now and leave nothing for the future;

here, the oil moguls are tongue-eating lice and slave-making ants.

It’s never strange when they crack us like crude oil

and commodify our bodies for OPEC and the highest bidders,

it’s never strange when they flare and cloud our hopes

for a heaven that looks like hell and the unknown,

theirs is the art of objectifying humans and humanizing objects.

Nowadays, urn, coffin, catafalque, pall, and other icy words slip

out of my mouth like barf because wellheads, rigs, pipelines

and tank farms echo the synonyms as symphonies of extinction.

All our old systems of counting loss have become obsolete,

so I erase God and his hereafter and make earth

the new and only matrix of our beginnings and ends.

CHAOS

My body breaks down like an old fishing net,

traps only crab shells, crude, debris, and dead fish;

I have a permanent room in the private ward.

I was scared of sleeping and slipping away since

the doctors diagnosed ailments too many for one flesh.

Ahem, one said, your blood sample has heavy metals.

My face darkened as a raincloud, and the downpour

glistened like an orphan well spilling from my eyes

until I forgot the shape of a smile and

now my tongue can’t hold laughs and songs anymore.

My body’s slowly disintegrating, slowly failing to cast shadows.

I’m forgetting my name, forgetting how not to greet

my ancestors when they return as banded leaf-toed geckos.

I turn to social media, seek solace in sports,

I take to birdwatching and bird hunting; think I’d

be a dodo and garner attention when I disappear.

The bird-identifier app in my phone works against intent

like a firearm failing, failing when it’s needed most;

yesterday, it mistook a weaver for a cardinal woodpecker.

Grey go-away-birds have lost their melodies, now they echo

doom of talking drums, and as the war

song roars on in my ears I become disoriented.

I mistake bugles for trumpets. I never reckoned that

diplacusis monauralis might be one disorder the doctors failed

to name properly, maybe I misheard the prognoses, so

they don’t grow wild like bushfires and consume me,

maybe I tried to dismiss everything for my sanity,

maybe I forgot it the way bald eagles land

on a flare stark and forget that it burns.