Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN & Climate Justice Toronto. |
A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest.
In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it. Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. This is a call to climate-justice action.
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THE END OF THE WORLD WAS ANTI-CLIMATIC Bees waxed apocalyptic Change came in drones Cryptocurrency mining hurled the earth’s temp over its two degrees stronghold The permafrost thawed Iced Capps capsized Ancient seeds sprouted primordial strains of disease We were plagued by ennui Gave thanks our daily laundry to the teens practicing necromancy We battened the escape hatch Lowered false flags to half mast Missed the last lifeboats Setting sail off lost coasts Cassidy McFadzean's new book is Drolleries (M&S 2019). ARTWORK BY JESSICA JOY HIEMSTRA POEMS BY KATHRYN MOCKLER DESCRIPTION Part of a series of cathartic reactions to Kathryn Mockler's #thisisntaconversation poems: searing, pithy, moving and funny snippets of writing that put a finger on our collective nerve around climate crisis. Kathryn and I decided that we wanted to donate 100% of the proceeds from these prints to Shades of Hope Wildlife Refuge, a registered charity based in Georgina, Ontario. Licensed by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Canadian Wildlife Services, SOH serves the GTA and areas throughout the South Central Ontario corridor. Their mandate: to nurture and rehabilitate injured and orphaned native wildlife with the goal of releasing healthy animals back into their natural habitats. Prints are available for purchase from this series, and 100% of the proceeds go to Shades of Hope Wildlife Refuge. Jessica Joy Hiemstra likes what Paul Klee once said about art – that one eye sees, the other feels. Jessica works in a variety of mediums on many kinds of surfaces - from watercolour and thread on paper to acrylic on acetate to plastic bags sewn into canvas. Jessica’s also a poet and designer. One of the things people often ask Jessica is “what’s the difference between all the things you do?” Jessica doesn’t distinguish much between her mediums. She just chooses the best medium for exploring whichever question, concern or exaltation is most pressing to her in the moment - from delight in the body to sorrow and anger at how poorly we care for our world and each other. Sometimes she uses words, sometimes pencil, sometimes paint. A selection of Jessica’s work is available as limited, signed prints in Jessica’s online shop.
Kathryn Mockler is the author of four books of poetry and six short films. She is the Editor of Watch Your Head, Canada Editor of Joyland Magazine, Publisher of The Rusty Toque from 2011-2017, and she teaches creative writing at Western University. She has a poetry chapbook written in collaboration with Gary Barwin forthcoming from Knife | Fork | Book (2020) and her debut collection of stories forthcoming from Book*hug (2121). She is working on a TV series pilot called Yardbird. PRAYER FOR HOMESICKNESS We brought tetrapacks of scents so our children would know the smell of summer rain on earth, video to show them what life looked like before and after the heat boiled the rivers and soil was never truly damp. In gravity just loose enough to trip us, our children lost their parents’ hooked-necked gait, their fixed hip-flexors, their fixation on shielding themselves from the sun. They grew leggy and light-kneed in this light world, grew out of their hand-me-down flight-suits. In their new home, where there is no way back, we wanted them to know what it means to come from and to a place. WE SPREAD OUR MILITARY MISSION in a thin serum of science, sent our soldiers into the desert with dictionaries, our exobiologists armoured in exoskeletons. In movies, first contact is almost always a surprise: the alien among us, unveiled by inhuman behaviour; the ship shimmering into rush hour. Ours had the formality of a late-collapse climate summit: everyone avowing commitment to shared cause and collective consternation, the real debate ducked into side rooms and under- mined by ceremony. All the safety protocol of first dates or hiking in bear country: begin in daylight, in public, pull rank on the audience of predators pulling their tongues out in hunger. Nisa Malli is a writer and researcher, born in Winnipeg and currently living in Toronto. She holds a BFA in Writing from the University of Victoria and has completed residencies at the Banff Centre and Artscape Gibraltar Point. Her first chapbook, Remitting, was published by Baseline Press in 2019.
GHAZAL NO. 7 for Rita Wong The caterpillar mistook my palm marks for a leaf, where the folded gorge had been. I run a finger along the topography of your maps, your poems sketched out on real land. Each day, I walk down a deserted railway to the next shore. Eat coconut buns by the water. Stand in a different spot every time the sea ends, and the land begins. You’ll go to places. All my friends, new to the West Coast: the first thing they do is land, then go to the water. SPAWNING GROUNDS* 1. Sandcastle Bucket This fable I grew up hearing that told of a time when the sea swept to shore all of its fishes. From the blue-fin tuna off Scarborough to the mackerels migrating off coast and what’s left of wild sturgeon near Brescia, northern Italy. Where sinkholes had formed, where they were met with obstructions, and where the tide had begun to retreat the fish cannot get back. Along one shore, a child came with a sandcastle bucket, grabbed the fish by the handfuls and carried them back where they were released in to the waters. This time, a bystander watched. They asked the child, Why bother? There is so many of them. To this, the child replied, At least I’m doing something. Hurry. The next time the sea turns again, there will be no more fish left to pick up. 2. Listen A plastic bag pirouettes on the road. Watch how it heaves and falls in the air, clear as diatoms, like jellyfish in the water formation driven by the motor of vehicles pumping 250 mph, the wind blowing east and no one picks it up. 25 plastic cups, a nylon sack and two flip flops are not enough for conservation researchers to determine the cause of death, the sperm whale was too well decayed. A carcass washed ashore Southeast Sulawesi provincial park: a signal, as villagers read. An innuendo seemingly to invite the words, come, butcher me. So they do. 3. Shoreline 60 million cigarette butts currently clogging our oceans but we don’t think of the watershed as a massive ashtray. More than plastic water bottles, more than straws, dislodged caps and unlike plastic, filters can’t be picked up. What’s biodegradable disintegrate, what’s disintegrated carries into rivers by rain, arsenic, nicotine, lead, into oceans by waves. Our ecosystem into waterways, making a return back to our bodies. 4. Spawning Grounds A female salmon by intuition returns to her pre-natal stream carrying the weight of up to 3,000 eggs. This, she will climb to deposit in the hollows of gravel and sediment above falls, packed between fresh-water river beds but to be met along the way by the dam on Muskrat Falls off Labrador, the Keeyask dam on the Nelson River, 93 square kilometres of hydro across boreal lands, snow forests liquefied where a common spawning ground resides for the wild fish being met with the Site C Dam though BC— 128 kilometres of river flooded, the Peace River a reservoir, an Indigenous burial ground and home to 100 endangered species. On the south, 76 killer whales left on the brink of extinction. We erect hydro dams and rear fish in hatcheries away from their natural habitat, bring wildlife back into nature, nature back into industrialization: this is what we call rewilding. The bare necessities of hatcheries strengthened through genetic engineering, forced interbreeding, but fish that rely on muscle memory year after year are the ones we see failing to return. * "Spawning Grounds" was previously published in CV2 and Geez Magazine. Parts 1, 2, and 3 were published in CV2, and part 4 appeared in Geez Magazine. Isabella Wang’s debut poetry chapbook is On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press 2019). At 19, she has been shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Essay Contest, and she holds a Pushcart Prize nomination for poetry. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over twenty literary journals including CV2, Minola Review, and carte blanche. Her work is forthcoming in three anthologies this year, including What You Need to Know Anthology (The Hawkins Project, co-founded by Dave Eggers), andThey Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press 2020). She is working as an assistant editor at Room magazine, a Research Assistant for SpokenWeb, and pursuing a double major in English and World Literature at SFU. IN JUSTICE So, the rains return and your kind cries violence And before? Silence, though the downpour is well established The heavens turn ominous, a heroic chorus with a prescience like the sea, minor continental dominance Bourne apart by the wind's timelessness, the inherent consequence of a delivery from a post-modern Prometheus You manufacture ignorance & umbrellas and tell us: we won’t tolerate defiance. Liars. This atmosphere is a shared inheritance and it will drown us, regardless of identifiers, like justice while you ramble a vain, competitive excuse, tittle on TV and salute a noose Your prodigious memory fails the burden of proof; it’s a bogus note in the deluge of this precipitating symphony-- your sycophancy a song made for silicon, but such an apparatus fails in resilience when the floods last generations. Todd Westcott is a single node in the ganglia of fourth dimensional consciousness. He does what he can to live sensibly with those who came before and those who will come after on Turtle Island. He’s published constantly on facebook. He lives and works in a fury.
BEACHED POEM We have been here before where Duracell bodies of two beached whales melt into the wefted tongues of the sea. Into the rocks glommed and knobbed with night struck out by the daily occasion; the sun announcing its spines. Some fish hurl themselves into the open jaw of air. Breathless and meshed into what steals them from their gills. The water holds both light and grit in the body that is the vestigial shore, the smooth current. Originally published in Forget Magazine. Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of Port of Being (Invisible Publishing), a finalist for the 2019 City of Vancouver Book Award, 2019 BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. It was named by CBC as a best Canadian poetry book of 2018 and received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Shazia's writing is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2019 and has recently appeared in Poetry Northwest, Music & Literature, Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and THIS magazine. She is a columnist for Open Book and is currently at work on a novel.
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AboutWatch Your Head is an online journal of creative works devoted to the climate crisis and climate justice.
New work is published monthly! Masthead Mission Submissions Contact Gallery Film & Video Nonfiction Fiction Contributors Donations Resources Check out our latest project: a print anthology published by Coach House Books!
Watch Your Head: Writers & Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis
Coach House Books October 2020 Archives
February 2022
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