2/24/2023 POETRY: JENNIFER BOWERING DELISLETHE HALL LIGHTMy brother was scared with the hall light off, and I was scared with it on. In those bulbs burned a deadly sun searing through the ozone hole. Beneath my bed I heard the gnashing teeth of hungry polar bears. My mother said be a good big sister, just shut my door if the light was bright. So I held bake sales for the rainforest. Read books that warned of Styrofoam cups and aerosol cans and perfect apples that meant more pesticide. Poured vinegar on spider plants for the science fair, experimenting not with acid rain’s effects but how to make them feel my fear. Liam Johnson drank my vinegar and I told the teacher what I’d observed of wilt and consumption. My son wakes from dreams of wolves, my daughter cries at paper skeletons hung upon the door. Too young, the Earth is round, it’s where we live but also spindled ball--there that’s us, that tiny dot. Where are volcanoes? Penguins? Where does it never snow? Look, purple boot, green bean archipelago. And yes, it is fragile, splits at its equator seam, two cardboard shells. How much of the ball is blue. For my children’s sake I buy individually packaged Goldfish crackers. Bananas all the way from the pink fish that licks Lake Titicaca. Our destination too far for little legs, perfect apples are abandoned browning moons on a petrochemical plate. But someday they’ll understand we fucked it up for them, for 10 minutes of sleep or quiet, because I kept all the want of childhood and not enough belief in my own power. Everyone, now, is scared and comforted by LED, fast vegan burger, rebate and switch recycled distraction offsets. Everyone knows the Arctic ice is tinkling in the bottom of an empty glass. And I lie in the dark and wish for the hall light, that old sweet fear. GO GREENGreen, because the trees. Because the rainforest’s canopy, light as long as history. Because the vine, the moss, the Honduran brook frog. But it could have easily been go blue. For clean sky, ocean swaddle. The whales. The rainy day, minor sax notes of loss. O don’t let this love end. Can’t go on livin’ without you. Ten years, they say, to save our worlds. The ones that quiver on the surface of this sphere, the one of fingers sliding on guitar strings, of cotton sundress, white lines of novel spine, the one in which my daughter’s hair is fine as dandelion spun to seed, and she turns on water just to make a rainbow in the spray. So go blue, go green, go kelly, go sage. Go green with envy of the ones still in denial. Go to the dark-veined forest. Go rogue, go feral. Because the fern, because the kakapo parrot. And when the sky is green from fire, go to the ends of Earth, with rinsed out soup cans and plastic made of corn. And if you don’t believe that this is what it takes, let’s find a way to mix the ocean with the sun. Originally published in Deriving, University of Alberta Press 2021 Jennifer Bowering Delisle is the author of Deriving (2021) and The Bosun Chair (2017). Her collection of essays, Micrographia, is forthcoming in 2023. She regularly teaches creative writing and is a board member of NeWest Press. She is a settler in Amiskwaciwâskahikan/Edmonton in Treaty 6. Find her online at www.jenniferdelisle.ca and @jenbdelisle.
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