If you missed our Word on the Street Toronto event, you can watch it here.

​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.

Join us for a conversation with editor Kathryn Mockler and anthology contributors Carleigh Baker, Simone Dalton, Christine Leclerc, and Carrianne Leung on their calls to action for the climate crisis facing us all.
​
The City Imagines series is presented by The Word On The Street, a national celebration of storytelling, ideas, and imagination.

About the Panelists
​
Carleigh Baker is a Cree-Métis/Icelandic writer. She was born and raised on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Stó:lō people. Her first collection of stories, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award.

Simone Dalton is a Trinidadian-Canadian writer, arts educator, and recipient of the 2020 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize for nonfiction. Her work is anthologized in Watch Your Head, Black Writers Matter, and The Unpublished City: Volume I. Her play VOWS was produced in 2019. As a memoirist, she explores themes of grief, inherited histories, race, class, and identity.

Christine Leclerc lives, works and studies in Coast Salish Homelands / Burnaby, B.C. She is an award-winning author and Physical Geography major at Simon Fraser University. Leclerc serves on the non-profit boards of Embark Sustainability and Climatch. She has also served on the board of Sierra Club BC.
​
Carrianne Leung is a Canadian writer, who won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2019 for her short story collection That Time I Loved You. Originally from Hong Kong, Leung moved to Canada in childhood, and grew up in the Scarborough district of Toronto, Ontario.

Moderator
​
Kathryn Mockler edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. Her debut collection of stories is forthcoming from Book*hug in 2023, and she is an Assistant Professor of Screenwriting at the University of Victoria.

SWANS

​One frigid midwinter afternoon, early
for the symphony, I look out on the frozen lake.

Unseasonable cold, I worry. Climate change.
That moment a huge bird glides by, slow

motion, long neck outstretched, black bill,
wings extended, body a downy white.

I’ve never seen a trumpeter swan, mythical
creature, surely dreamed to life.

Inside the concert hall beautiful music
swirls, like the thrill of the swan, elevating

me, a wild reminder I’m part of the living
world, an animal too.

Trumpeter swans were nearly extinct.
We think we protected them.

But they protect us, from the impoverishment
of a world without trumpeter swans.

The music ends and I rush out, hoping
to glimpse the swan, what it offers us --

a rare, precious encounter with what
is real, the given world.

Kirsteen MacLeod’s poetry and prose has appeared in many literary journals, and she was a finalist for Arc Poetry’s Poem of the Year in 2020. Her nonfiction book, In Praise of Retreat, is forthcoming in March 2021 from ECW Press. Her debut collection of short fiction, The Animal Game, was published in 2016.

change
Medium: performance documentation
Duration: 10m19s
April 2020

change is a 10-minute performance comprised of a single-channel video projected over a lone singer. The singer’s voice first delivers a rendition of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come through a vocoder, then moves into spoken poetry. By manipulating archived, found footage and combining it with its interactions between the body and voice, this performance confronts decolonization through an Asian-Canadian lens, notably putting the singer/speaker/artist directly into the environment being challenged. Created and performed at the wake of the pandemic, change’s main function is to respond directly to the xenophobia, Sinophobia, and unabashed racism that the current COVID-19 pandemic and biased mainstream media encourage.

James Legaspi is an emerging Filipino-Canadian multimedia artist currently completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and Sheridan College, living and working in Brampton, Ontario. Recent activity includes work exhibited at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and Gallery 44, curatorial work at the Blackwood Gallery, professional experience as a teaching assistant at Sheridan College, and participation in the most recent rendition of Visual Arts Mississauga’s Creative Residency.

NOTES TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOCENE FABLE AT A RUSSIAN SAUNA IN MISSISSAUGA

Rumpelstiltskin’s first wife, I enter and exit
the steam room in a eucalyptus cloud.
 
My rumpled robe scratches. Silt rises
to skin surface. I scrub my pores with sea salt.
 
I pull a rusted chain and a wooden bucket
tips cool torrent on my head.
 
No one in these microclimates has a name
big enough for forests, for air.
 
I am trying to outrun my recurring
daymare, the one with the turret.
 
This olive string bikini, once sinuous,
is now only fit for sweating myself alive.
 
I beg a sauna man in a wool cap
to wave his parched birch wand.
 
My inner bitch wakes up, whining.
I haven’t fed her in too long.
 
My cells realign themselves, spread
around. I eavesdrop on the heat,
 
practice different pronunciations. He ate,
she ate, we ate all the sun’s treats,
 
licked black seeds from slit vanilla beans,
plucked gold croaks from toad throats.
 
I am trying to escape the king’s wealth,
the kind that slashes and slinks through holes.
 
I get to stay here longer than all the white rhinos,
the bees. Will I hand a firstborn to the burn?
 
Infused with cedar scent, buzzing, I lower
myself into a barrel of glacial water.
 
I imagine a cryogenic prince charming
carrying me, limp, into the next ice age.
 
Soothed, I shower. Calmer and slower, I sit
in the tea room afterward, drinking
 
vodka and kombucha, replenishing
my salt sea with pickle brine.
 
A television screens our ever after, a nature
documentary about bleached coral reefs,
 
all those fabulous bows and rainbows
frozen white in the sunshine.


 
Originally published in PRISM International (Issue 57.4: Spring 2019)

​Catriona Wright is the author of the poetry collection Table Manners (Véhicule Press, 2017) and the short story collection Difficult People (Nightwood Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Walrus, Fiddlehead, and Lemon Hound, and they have been anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and in The Best Canadian Poetry 2015 & 2018.

THESE ELEPHANTS IN CANADA


I

                     memory is
                                   a mammoth
                     failure
                                    a trauma dream
             a Zoroastrian declaiming upon
           a dead star weeping on
         a palimpsest of
                                 archipelagos on
      all that remains land written upon
                    by rising seas

     animals
      run
                  to land
        when
                    the sea
          spills over
                      its speech




II

overwhelmed by rising
  I spill my coffee
onto the once fecund table
  as it pools disorder
    into the shape
​of an elephant’s ear

        I gaze into the lifeless dream
     to hear a scattering of
   sound
 reflection





​III
​
alive
  a brown
    melted glacier
      going tidal

    the hot ocean
      of this elephant’s sneeze
         a disorder of all senses
            uncaging

           unguent memories
       drip out into the void
    of human space

​

Gregory Betts is the author of Sweet Forme (2020), a collection of visual renderings of the sound patterns in Shakespeare’s sonnets (published by Australia’s Apothecary Archive, available here: https://bit.ly/383XaTl). He is the digital curator of bpNichol.ca and a poet-professor at Brock University. His next book is Finding Nothing: Vancouver Avant-Garde Literature, 1959-1975, due out in February 2021 with University of Toronto Press.

FOXES IN MICHIGAN 

hundreds of pelts
drip off a flatbed truck
spilling faces and paws
 
velvety tongues
within our reach
flap in the backdraft
 
to the mouth of the mighty Route 66
their innards still pastel pink
like Johnson’s baby oil bottles
 
sticky from slaughter
dried musk-laden riverbeds
lead us to distant edges
 
splendid piles of matted fur
splayed voyageurs just
foraged in the woods
 
below hawks’ nests
not knowing their future
hides tanned, skins cured
 
suspended in a forever-sleep
of glass-bead eyes
dashed hopes and highway lines

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist and has published 25 books of fiction, poetry and work for children. His latest books include For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco, and Ampers&thropocene (visuals) and A Cemetery for Holes (with Tom Prime). A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy will appear from Random House in 2021. He currently WiR at Sheridan College. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com

MANY NIGHTS AGO

The flowers outside my window do not cry anymore.
 
When the war first began, and the weeds took over, they danced about; 
​stretching their roots—perhaps to see how long they could endure it.
That and the shrieking kept me up at night,
 
but that was many nights ago.
Now they fall in line—silently, with heads hung—single file.
 
The only sound I hear, is the “tap, tap, tap” on my windowpane.




"Many Nights Ago" first appeared in Kelvin High School’s literary anthology, Stream (2018).

Jessie Taylor is an avid over-thinker. She loves red lipstick, latkes and fresh cherries in July. She is studying at the University of Manitoba.

DEAR PRINCE OF MELTING ICECAPS,

Bliss has escaped me.
I went down to our beaches.
The oil-sheened, the skinless salmon, the dead
algae, the greasy rocks.
We are in a state. A State.
The moist bliss empty, the air chemical.
The rat on the roof (the political).
 
The call was internal, societal--
I stood up from a gold chair
in the dank back room of a bank;
you climbed out from under thousands of pennies
piled in a cellar.
 
We were recently human,
we endeavoured to cycle, we wanted to juggle,
we had only just learned how to play.
 
The State blew out our candles
and we were in a gorgeous dark,
directing foot and bike traffic to the bridge.
 
I have ten headlamps, community,
and you have this hunch
we might get along, get along.
 
The sea coughs up cell phones
as we build our boats.
A kind rat with a human face helps me
carve the oars.
I vaguely remember
a polar bear's story, the fluff
of myth.
 
Is it the red sky or the sea?
 
We hesitate.

 Jen Currin was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes. She did her schooling at Bard College (B.A.), Arizona State (M.F.A.) and Simon Fraser University (M.A.). She lives and works on unceded Coast Salish territories (New Westminster, Surrey, and Vancouver, B.C.), where she teaches in the Creative Writing and ACP Departments at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Jen’s first collection of stories, Hider/Seeker (Anvil Press, 2018), was one of The Globe and Mail‘s top 100 books of 2018. She has also published four collections of poetry: The Sleep of Four Cities (Anvil Press, 2005); Hagiography (Coach House, 2008); The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 2010), which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2011 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (B.C. Book Prizes), the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, and the ReLit Award; and School (Coach House, 2014), which was a finalist for the 2015 ReLit Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. Her chapbook The Ends was published by Nomados in 2013. Jen was a member of the editorial collective for The Enpipe Line: 70,000 Kilometers of Poetry Produced in Resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline Proposal (Creekstone Press, 2012).

DRONES
 
Debris skirting breakers for miles –
tub ring murk, shells suckered
to trash and kelp like surf store
necklaces. Grand Bend backwash.
 
Scolded not to wade, children
wearing bucket hats fill cups
with mussel remains, raising
each lumpy haul to the sun,
the glint of marble shards.
Toss them back in with a plop.
 
By the docks, suburban fishermen
curse the clear water driving
walleyes deeper. Muttering
about the crowds, rip cording
their motor boats, spraying 
white fans against the waves.
 
Under the pier, a teen wings in his drone
to film locals with paint scrapers
stripping shells from wooden legs.
They yell get lost. He calls back
it’s footage for a school project 
on damage from invasive species.

 OBLIVION
A Response to Don McKay
 
Not no thing, but our
fear of obliteration treats
naming as an end.
 
What species can conceive
of nothingness?
Shield moraines pines beechleaves magpies honeybees snowfleas cells
do not tolerate a void.
Man might be the unintended side-effect,
the by-product of nature, since
humans sense absence,
which does not exist.
 
The air, no longer a divine canopy,
still teems with molecules, chemicals, atoms,
and yet,
man persists in declaring nothingness.
 
This is a lonely species.
 
Perhaps the origins of dwellings,
man sectioning himself off, started with the walls
of his body filled with isolation where
there is none.
 
Perhaps he believes
he has the right
to name the space between things,
can perceive the end of all things.
 
He precepts
and nothing
is
worth his preconceived notice;
he notices nothingness and
does not see anything of note.
 
But his species dies,
man ceases, and the death rattle
betrays that
he does not know what nothing he will be.
 

GREEN CAME INTO MY LIFE THROUGH A HOLE IN THE CEILING
​
I was gestating the mountainside, as my father sustained betwixtment.
 
the curvature of the earth was cone-like, before
 
we ruled out old age—the lips hung like gravity failing.
 
in the sun had a hedgegarden, if I groomed a mine-swallower,
 
I, the tongues of hummingbirds animated,
 
had a burglar alarm; only
dogs spoke in a variety of dialects,
 
their mouths corned.
 
out of my shoulder, a man unable to reach low-hanging fruit, a palmful of water.

*

Tom Prime is a PhD student in English at Western University. He has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria (Specializing in Poetry). He has a BA at Western University. He has been published in Carousel, Ditch, Fjords Review, The Northern Testicle, The Rusty Toque, and Vallum. His first chapbook, A Strange Hospital, was published on Proper Tales Press. His latest chapbook Gravitynipplemilkplanet Anthroposcenesters, was published on above/ground press. His collaborative collection of poems written with Gary Barwin, A Cemetery for Holes, is available from Gordon Hill Press. 

 EXTINCTION CHRONICLES


1662
In 1662, the crew of Volkert Evertsz’s ship was marooned on Mauritius.
 
Spotting a plump bird, he grabbed the bird by its left leg. The captured bird let out a cry which attracted more of the birds. The entire flock was taken and subsequently eaten by the stranded Dutchmen.
 
Five days later, the crew was picked up by a passing ship, leaving behind the well-gnawed bones of the last documented sighting of the Dodo.
 
1800
In 1800, the Giant African Snail was imported to Mauritius by Governor General François Louis Magallon de la Morlière as a potential food source. From there, it spread eastward: to Calcutta in 1847 by W. H. Benson; to Ceylon in 1900 by Oliver Collett; to Taiwan in 1932 by Kumaichi Shimojo; and to the Caroline Islands by Junki Miyahira and Palau Island by Shoichi Nishimara in 1938. By 1967, it had reached as far as Tahiti.
 
It soon became apparent that the Giant African Snail was, in truth, an agricultural pest, so the predatory Rosy Wolfsnail was introduced to many South Pacific islands as a method of biological control. Instead of preying upon the Giant African Snail, however, the Rosy Wolfsnail preferred endemic tree snails to devastating effect. Since its introduction to Tahiti, for example, 71 of that island’s 76 species of Partula snails have become extinct.
 
1826
In 1826, the HMS Wellington made port in Lahaina, Maui. Sailors, rinsing out water barrels in a local stream, introduced mosquitoes to the Hawai’ian islands. The introduction in turn allowed for the spreading of avian pox and avian malaria.
 
As a result, the Oahu Thrush, the Oahu O’o, the Oahu ’Akialoa, the Kioea, the Oahu Nukupu’u, the Lesser Koa Finch, the Ula-ai-hawane, the Oahu ’Akepa, the Lanai ’Akialoa, the Kona Grosbeak, the Hawai’i ’Akialoa, the Greater Koa Finch, the Hawai’i Mamo, the Greater ’Amakihi, the Black Mamo, the Lanai Hookbill, the Laysan Millerbird, the Laysan Honeycreeper, the Lanai Thrush, the Hawai’i O’o, the Lanai Creeper, the Laysan Rail, and the Bishop’s O’o were all extirpated from the islands.
 
1840
In the mid 1840s, the three Icelandic sailors Sigurdur Ísleifsson, Ketill Ketilsson, and Jón Brandsson were asked to collect a few Great Auk specimens for the Danish natural history collector, Carl Siemsen.
 
On the 3rd or 4th of June, 1844, the three sailors arrived at Edley Island. There, Brandsson and Ísleifsson each strangled a bird. There being no other birds about, Ketilsson crushed an egg under his boot.
 
These were the last of the Great Auks.
 
1894
In 1894, David Lyall was appointed assistant lightkeeper on the recently inhabited Stephens Island. In June of that year, Lyall’s cat, Tibbles, started to bring him carcasses of a previously unknown bird, the soon-to-be-named Stephens Island Wren.
 
By 1895, Tibbles had hunted the Wren to extinction.
 
1900
On March 24, 1900, Press Clay Southworth saw a bird eating corn in his family’s barnyard. Unfamiliar with the strange bird, the 14 year old shot and killed it.
 
Several years after the shooting, the state museum in Ohio determined that this was the last authenticated record of a Passenger Pigeon in the wild.
 
1902
The Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore is legendary, primarily for the Singapore Sling, first concocted there by Ngiam Tong Boon in 1815.
 
Less well known is the Billiard Room where, in 1902, Charles McGowan Phillips, the hotel’s general manager, shot a tiger which had sought refuge under a billiard table. It was reported that, in the process, Mr. Phillips ruined his coat. Not reported, however, was that the tiger was the last on the island.
 
1918
By the end of the nineteenth century, settlers had managed to exterminate only four species of bird endemic to Lord Howe Island: the White Gallinule, the White-throated Pigeon, the Red-fronted Parakeet, and the Tasman Booby.
 
In 1918, the Makambo, mastered by Captain ‘Stinger’ Rothery, ran aground on Ned’s Beach, allowing black rats to invade the island. These rats managed to exterminate the Vinous-tinted Thrush, the Robust White-eye, the Silver Eye, the Tasman Starling, the Grey Fantail, and the Lord Howe Gerygone. In addition to these outright extinctions, the rats also extirpated the local populations of the Kermadec Petrel, Little Shearwater, White-bellied Storm-Petrel, and Pycroft’s Petrel.
 
In the 1920s, the Masked Owl was introduced in an attempt to control the rats. The owl managed to exterminate the endemic Boobook Owl, but not the rats.
 
1936
The Thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian Tiger and Ka-Nunnah, was one of the few marsupial predators.
 
In 1824, Thylacine discovered that sheep were easy prey. This resulted in a private bounty being established by the Van Diemen’s Land Company in 1830. The VDLC bounty was supplemented by a government sponsored one in 1888. The government bounty was cancelled in 1912, while the VDLC bounty persisted another two years.
 
In the summer of 1936, the Thylacine was proclaimed a protected species by the Tasmanian Government. Alas, the last Thylacine (named Benjamin) had already died of exposure at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart on September 7th of that year.
 
1943
In 1943, one of the last refuges for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana was slated for logging by the Chicago Mill Lumber Company.
 
Asked by the Audubon Society to aid in setting aside a preserve for the bird, James F. Griswold (chairman of Chicago Mill’s board) responded by saying, “We are just money-grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.”
 
The last confirmed sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana was in April of 1944.
 
1954
At one point, Lake Victoria contained well over 500 unique species of Furu, also known as Cichlid.
 
In August of 1954, J. Ofula Amaras (a Kenyan fisheries officer) introduced Nile Perch into the lake by means of a bucket. This was done with official sanction in the interest of increasing the value of local fisheries.
 
For 30 years, the Nile Perch (a voracious predator) co-existed with other fish, having a relatively benign effect on the local ecology. In the early 1980s, however, a slight increase in the number of Furu led to a population explosion amongst the Nile Perch. Within a few years, over 90% of the total species of Lake Victoria Furu had been eaten into extinction.
 
1964
Prometheus was a Bristlecone Pine located on Wheeler Peak in Nevada.
 
In 1964, Donald Currey, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, was conducting field research on the climate of the Little Ice Age. In the course of his research, he attempted to core-sample Prometheus. After breaking his only increment borer (a $200 drill bit), Currey, with the permission of Donald Cox (a forest Service District Ranger), cut the tree down.
 
Subsequent analysis showed that Prometheus was almost 5,000 years old, making it the oldest living known organism at the time.
 
1997
On January 20, 1997, Grant Hadwin swam across the Yakoun River on Haida Gwaii. A former forester, Hadwin had decided to make a statement protesting the exploitation of old growth trees on the Haida Gwaii archipelago.
 
Once across the river, he made a series of deep cuts into the trunk of Kiidk’yaas, a striking 300-year-old Sitka Spruce that due to a genetic mutation had golden (rather than green) needles. Kiidk’yaas was a culturally significant tree to the local Haida.
 
Two days later, Kiidk’yaas toppled in a winter storm.
 
2006
Sometime in 2006, onboard a research dredger off the coast of Iceland, James Scourse did what he has done hundreds, if not thousands, of times before: he threw a small Ocean Quahog clam into an onboard freezer, preserving it for later study.
 
On that very same day, Ming the Clam did something that hadn’t occured even once in its 507 years: it froze to death.
 
2014
Lafarge, a multinational construction company, owns the mineral rights to Guning Kanthan, a limestone hill in peninsular Malaysia. As is the practice of the company, they are in the process of razing the hill to procure limestone used to manufacture cement.
 
The north side of Guning Kanthan is also the exclusive home of six species of snails. The most famous of the six measures a mere 3 mm in length and was, in July of 2014, named Charopa lafargei in honour of the company that will drive it to extinction.
 
2016
Late October, 2016, gardener Paul Rees of Widnes, England, found a peculiar Earthworm in his garden. Named Dave by Paul’s stepson George, the worm, at 40 centimetres, was twice as long and over five times heavier than the average Earthworm. In fact, it is thought that Dave is the largest worm ever recorded.
 
In the interest of science, Rees donated Dave to the Natural History Museum. Dave was transferred to the care of Emma Sherlock, whose speciality is worms and other related animals.
 
The first thing Dr. Sherlock did, as might be expected, was to euthanize and preserve the specimen.
 
2018
On March 19, 2018, Sudan, a male Northern White Rhino, died at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy if Kenya of complications. Well loved, he is survived by Najin, his daughter, and Fatu, his grand daughter.
 
He was, as you are surely aware, the last male of his species and Najin and Fatu are the last two females.

​NYCTALOPIA

n. the inability to see in dim light
 
 
Reason drips and to me it speaks
to my radical, lost dreams it shrieks yet suits
on Wall Street they say, they say,
 
what are you doing, where are you going?
Compartmentalize these things.
 
My throat closes and wonders, when
will the cared-for things, will the weather-worn things break
from their binds, my stomach pushes my insides in two
billion knots of plastic rouge.
 
That should be enough money to buy
a roof, that should be enough money to buy
a noose, that should be enough money to //
 
Reason slips and to me it speaks
to my sweet, soft, youthful delusions it shrieks yet suits
on Wall Street they say, they say,
 
come play, come stay!
Compartmentalize your dreams.

TELL ME THESE THINGS AND I SHALL TELL YOU MINE
​
I was taught shyness,
they ask for a volunteer
 
I was taught propriety, see
women are not meant to go there
 
I was taught silence, so to
stand up for myself and other people
 
of colour means that I feel the need
to say sorry, to you. For
 
simply being, well, here.
 
Yet the world is clearer
from here. From here, from this
 
place where I happen to sit
I might just believe that I might, just be
 
a person whose skin tone does not make
me, the definition of who or
 
what I am, perceived— by you
so, here            is where you may
 
find me. Where you may, because I say, stare
into my eyes and watch me
 
as I stand up to you, calmly shore up
to you, hands clenched in
 
to fists at the insolence that you
are unaware, that you are.

​Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet, writer and editor of Taiwanese and Cambodian-Chinese descent. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Unlucky Fours (Anstruther Press), Assimilation Tactics (Coven Editions) and snap, pop, performance (Gap Riot Press); the founder of Little Birds Poetry; co-founder/co-curator of Riverbed Reading Series; and a member of the poetry collective VII. Her work is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, untethered magazine, third coast magazine, among others. Ellen currently lives and works on the traditional unceded territories of the Algonquin Anishinabeg First Nation (Ottawa, Ontario). www.ehjchang.com

EPITAPH
 
I should’ve known when I was born
my palm lines were light and cut short
if I walk the beach I walk the line
cadavers and shards shore against my feet
 
I saw on the news
a white man brought a snowball in court
admit into evidence our invincibility, we’ll live
I’ve been chewing on plastic since
 
too old for faith, too young to die
follow smeared geese shit on the sidewalk to Neverland
each day the red sun goes into the drying ocean and I ask:
will you come back for me?
 
is it funny or tragic?
we will all end up sharing one tombstone
here lies a monumental collection of fuck-ups
 
ask me then, oh neighboring bones
where have I been and where did
I really come from. 

SOUTHERN GASTRIC-BROODING FROG
Rheobatrachus silus
 
collected by David S. Liem
Australia
1972
 
adult male
38.4 mm snout to vent
 
slate-coloured
smooth, slimy skin
prominent eyes, black
with gold spots
round blunt snout
jaws close snap
 
inhabit boulder-strewn
streams, spend days
submerged
 
summer rains initiate breeding
 
females swallow
fertilized eggs, tadpoles
develop in the stomach, are birthed
through the mother’s mouth
fully-formed froglets spew forth
 
1978 summer rains late
1979 rains very late
1980 & 1981 rains late again
 
last seen in the wild December 1979
last captive frog died November 1983
Extinct


 

THE CALL OF THIS SPECIES
 
 
The grunting of a pig     a hen cackling     the bleat of a sheep
the low bellow of an ox     a cricket singing near the water
a dog’s bark     a duck quacking     young crows cawing
a delicate insect-like tinkle     a broken banjo string
a finger running over the small teeth of a comb
a squeaky door being slowly opened     a carpenter’s hammer
the tapping of paddles on the side of a canoe     a cough
a watch being wound     a nasal snarl
a low-pitched snore     two marbles being struck together
sleigh bells     the clangor of a blacksmith's shop
 
P-r-r-r-     pip-pip-pip-pip     poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo
purrrreeeek     cr, cr, cr     cre-e-e-e-e-e-p, cre-e-e-e-e-e-p
pst-pst-pst     queenk, queenk     eeek!     kraw, kraw, kraw    
jwah, jwah     ah, ah, ah, ah     krack, krack, krack     
ca-ha-ha-ac, ca-ha-ha-ac, ca-ha-ha-ac     pé-pé, pé-pé    
kle-kle-kle-klee     cran, cran, cran, c-r-r-en, c-r-r-en 
creck-creck-creck     cut-cut-cut-cut     ric-up, ric-up, ric-up
ru-u-u-ummm ru-u-u-ummm     grrruut-grrruut-grrruut-grrruut
grau, grau     gick, gick, gick, gick     tschw, tschw, tschw    
wurrk, wur-r-r-k     trint-trint     tr-r-r-onk tr-r-r-onk, tr-r-r-onk!
 
The call of this species has not been recorded



 
THREATS
 
fragmentation of forest    
clearance of cloud forest
movement of the cloud layer up the mountainside
timber harvesting    
landslides    
ice in the montane grasslands
late rains   
severe dry seasons
drought-related increases in evaporation
successive fires extending deeper into the rainforest
slash-and-burn agriculture    
cattle grazing    
illicit crops
irrigation practices    
illegal mining    
guerrilla activities
construction of a dam upstream
construction of a cable car
pesticides used in maize farming upstream    
airborne pollution
conversion of habitat into a golf course    
Las Vegas
invasion of mist flower   
introduction of the Bullfrog    
non-native trout    
safari ants    
feral pigs    
lack of genetic diversity    
heavy parasite loads    
exportation for the pet trade
stress due to handling for data collection    
over-collecting
chytridiomycosis
chytridiomycosis
chytridiomycosis
 

BLAZE ISLAND: AN EXCERPT

 
Miranda woke in darkness. She was riding a fierce wind. The changes were not going to stop. Someone was moving about below her, and the small sounds would have been reassuring, except that it was only a little after five a.m. Whoever was below had lit a fire. Heat ticked in the metal chimney on the far side of the room, the ticks speeding up. Miranda whispered to Ella, the dog, not to stir.  

Through the half-open door of her father’s bedroom, she took in the tussle of his empty bedclothes, reading glasses tossed atop his dresser. Always there had been secrets in this house, and she had surrendered to her father’s desire for them, the things they’d kept hidden about their past, other things he’d attempted to hide from her and she’d allowed herself to ignore, but a new impatience surged as if she were struggling to climb over the fence that encircled her.

Downstairs, in his coveralls, eating a slice of toast at the counter, her father turned sharply at the sound of her footsteps. “Miranda, what are you doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep.” She kept her voice as low as his. He’d made only the one mug, not a pot, and everything in his posture made her presence an intrusion. He wasn’t welcoming her, she was merely slowing his escape.

“Why don’t you go back to bed. There’s no need for you to be up so early.”

But she was wide awake. “Where are you off to?”

His face relaxed into a smile. “To see if by some miracle I can access the internet at the cabin.”

​“Can I come with you?”

It was an impulsive thought, and he said no before adding, “There’s no need for that.”

“Why not if I want to. Are you meeting someone?”

He shook his head. “Best to have one of us stay with our guest.” Our guest, she thought, and then, more possessively, my guest. Something else gnawed: Would her father lie to her? Had he before, would he again? Did her own safety make the lies justifiable?

“Dad — the plane that landed at the airstrip the day before yesterday, who was on it and what are they doing here?”
Her father gulped down the dregs of his tea and set his mug in the sink.

“Miranda, I need you to sit tight for a bit. Can you do that for me?”

He was ruffling her hair, asking her to do something for him once again. She shook herself free, some essential part of her refusing to be deterred, a new resolve forming in her throat.

“Why won’t you answer me? I’m supposed to do what you want but you’re always hiding things from me — saying we should never leave then inviting people here and going off with them. What are you actually doing? Whatever you’re up to, it isn’t just weather monitoring, is it?”

“Miranda.” He stepped into the middle of the room. “If I’ve kept secrets, it’s only been for your own good. Things are in such a precarious state. I’m trying, from this out-of-the-way corner of the world, to do everything I can—”

“What if I don’t want to be protected like that?”

He didn’t have an answer, other than to show her that she’d jarred him. When he hugged her, the strength of his embrace stopped her mouth even as she struggled to say more. The next moment, with a rustle of jacket and shudder of boot, her father was gone.
 
Always when she’d allowed herself to think about the future it had been shaped by the contours of the past: how else did you envision what was to come other than by reconfiguring what you knew? There were days when, swayed by Caleb’s suggestions, Miranda had imagined living with him on the far side of the cove even as another part of her retracted from the dream. She had assumed that somehow Caleb and Sylvia would be in her life forever. What she loved would always continue, how could it not? More often she’d seen herself living in the little white house in Green Cove with her father and Ella, taking care of her father, because he needed her to do this. She’d ruffle Ella’s fur, meet her brown-eyed stare. There’d be more animals, because she wanted more, she would tend the land, build a bigger greenhouse, listen and note each time the wind shifted, there would be order and safety in such a life, in its deep choreographies and self-sufficiencies, in being responsive to sea and sky and the wild and ragged weather growing wilder all around them. There had been ruptures and alterations, but nothing had shaken her fundamental belief in the continuity of this life, given to her after the biggest rupture of all, the catastrophes that had sent the two of them fleeing to the island: everything here was proof that, despite grief, a new life could be made. Even the rupture of losing Caleb, painful as it was, had somehow been bearable. She’d gone on. They all had. Now, though, the world looked so different she wasn’t sure she could step back into the body she’d inhabited only a day ago.

Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island (2020), the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation (2013), the Trillium Award short-listed Claire’s Head (2004), and The Rules of Engagement (2000), a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year. She was recently a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Germany and has spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph and Coordinator of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA, located in Toronto, Canada, and can be found online at www.catherinebush.com.

COLONY COLLAPSE
 
Survivors crawl across
withered black comb, invisible
 
apocalypse, sisters wandering
lost in the corn fields, seduced
 
by filaments of silk, the toxic
pollen. Scooping up death--
 
no distinction between friend
and foe, all obliterated
 
in service of unblemished
fields, poisoned bees
 
littering the ground.
The low hum of welcome
 
washed into air,
torn apart by a breeze.
 
Sent down streams
like the limbs of Orpheus;
 
the queen perched on her throne,
wondering who will come to feed her.
 
Regal head tilting patiently,
big eyes surveying the decay. Where
 
is her long train, her cloak
of swarming bodies,
 
tight as tapestry? Gone,
all gone. Her own body
 
meaningless without them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“Colony Collapse” has been published in a previous version in Hamilton Arts and Letters  and in Under the Gamma Camera ​ (Gaspereau, 2019).

VANCOUVER SEAWALL, THIRD BENCH FROM THE WATER 
 
let there be a word for how it feels      to stand
waist-deep in your tide         let it be queer    
as in landfall      as in the constellation of sand on
a lover’s elbow or the lie      that this land could be
owned or queer      as in the way time arranges
the earth    into wrinkles the mountain     knows
no monument can stand longer than the mountain    
already has    let there be language for the unceded
shore yielding    pieces of itself to the outbound
ocean     call it love    without ownership call it
the skin between    my hands and your sand and
her collarbone unpinned   call it queer as in
grace comes   from letting go of what was
never ours         to keep in the first place



Previously published in haunt, Damaged Goods Press (2018).

SOLASTALGIA
​View on CBC Gem (Closed Captioning Available)

Short, Lyrical, Dramatic Film
Millefiore Clarkes - Director / Emma Fugate - Producer
13 mins
2019
www.solastalgia.ca

Solastalgia (/ˌsɒləˈstældʒə/) is a neologism that describes a form of mental or existential distress caused by environmental change.

When the panic over global crises threatens to engulf her, Ava embarks on a vision-quest to put things in perspective.

SOLASTALGIA is a lyrical film that explores the anguish that climate change and a global state of uncertainty can impart upon the human psyche.

Ava, (played by Rebecca Parent) a mother of two young children, is bombarded throughout her day with news of global disasters. Over the airwaves, on the internet, overheard at a grocery store - cataclysmic stories of the effects of climate change steadily erode Ava’s inner peace. She acutely feels the burden of guilt for her entire species. She worries about her children's futures. Her mental health is unwinding as she searches for solace and a new perspective.
​
This film is a dreamscape set to the formidable poetic verse of Tanya Davis (former poet-laureate of Halifax). It is a poetic gesture to the vast timeline of the earth and humanity's small but significant place within the web. SOLASTALGIA is a traditional drama that utilizes non-traditional, stock and archival sources for some of its imagery. It blends a straight-forward narrative with a surrealistic journey underpinned with a musical score by Philip Glass, Russell Louder and others.

Funded through FilmPEI Film4Ward program.

GAPING AT THE GROUND WITH THE WINDOW OPEN

we are driving up the side of a mountain
when we run into a lone black cow. she stands
with her knees jutting out of her flesh,
black hide strained bursting, wild stitch holding
together cloudy blood and burnt milk.
you park the car, cutting the ignition, tumbling
out. the air is black exhaust wisping away,
feels dry and flat, cool against the raw wet of
your underarms. the cow lowers its head.
and this is the land of the future, here, the
scraped dry red of the earth, tufts of grass
shuddering in the wind. we walk past metal birds
dipping low into the earth, drawing out oil
thicker than blood, black as anything. watch
the clouds yellowing against the sky,
dimming where they meet smoke, joining
hands only to unjoin them. watch
the sun split itself open like a red, red
plum, sharp against the thickening sky. watch
​bugs claw their way out of the cracks in the
dirt, the way they swarm the nearest sweetest thing.
making our way back to the highway
we stop by the side of a small stream and plunge
our hands into it, steal plums from a nearby tree
and sink our teeth into them. juice bleeds down
your chin, and we wash the red off our hands
and watch it pool at the end of the water,
the red earth clouding into black exhaust,
then wisping away. the cow lowers its head.

PLASTICPOEMS

Plasticpoems, 2:28 minutes

Written by Fiona Tinwei Lam
Animation by Nhat Truong
Sound Design byTinjun Niu:

This short animated video depicts two concrete/visual poems by poet Fiona Tinwei Lam from her collection of poems Odes & Laments  (Caitlin Press, 2019) about marine plastic pollution

PLASTICNIC

Plasticnic, 1:13 minutes

Written/Narrated by Fiona Tinwei Lam
Animation by Tisha Deb Pillai
Sound Design byTinjun Niu:
​
A humorous animated video poem about plastic pollution that shows how we destroy nature while seeking to enjoy ourselves in the great outdoors.

​The video poem is based on a shaped poem in Odes & Laments (Caitlin Press, 2019)

QUENCH

Note: all words come from letters in “plastic” with no doubling. Each shift occurs with the addition or removal of a single letter and/or a reordering of the letters.

"Quench" originally published in  Odes & Laments, (Caitlin Press, 2019).

Fiona Tinwei Lam’s third collection of poetry Odes & Laments celebrates the overlooked wonder and beauty in the everyday, while lamenting harm to our ecosystems. She has also authored a children’s book, edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems on Facing Cancer,  and co-edited Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ins, Outs, Ups & Downs of Marriage with Jane Silcott. Lam won The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford Prize and was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Her work appears in more than thirty-five anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English (both 2010 and 2020) and Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC. Her award-winning poetry videos have screened at festivals locally and internationally. She teaches at Simon Fraser University’s Continuing Studies. fionalam.net @FTinweiL

YERSINIA PESTIS IN ALBERTA

​Clove:
 
It will be manageable at first.
 
a brief tremor in the arms and legs,
squirrels will drop from electrical wires
and robins will lose their voice.
 
The pain will be no brighter
than a flickering candle
 
at first.
 
 
 
Lemon:
 
A man on a podium
will tell you not to worry.
 
The men behind will nod.
 
They will post signs
telling you to exercise
reasonable precautions.
 
 
 
Cinnamon:
 
You will sink your body
beneath bathwater.
 
You can ignore the
darkness in the sides
of your ribcage. You cannot
avoid the shadows on
your fingertips.
 
 
 
Eucalyptus:
 
It will get better
before it gets worse.
 
To contain the infection,
gathering in groups
will be prohibited.
 
The tremors will return
and they will be violent.
 
You must always wear
long pants to keep
the insects from your ankles.
 
 
 
Rosemary:
 
If you find dead birds,
leave them be.
Avoid physical contact--
it can spread
through saliva of the infected.
Wrap black thread around fingertips
to keep the sickness contained:
 
Stay home,
live alone,
and abstain.

​I WAKE WHEN THE BIRDS TELL ME THEY WANT TO DREAM 
 
 
i.
 
a form gathers sweat on every surface
skin touch feathers touch skin
 
pull wings apart
leave pile of quills
outside bedroom window
hot air blows around
 
 
ii.
 
it is springtime
 
animals come out
of hiding
 
 
iii.
 
i try
for lucidity through
sachets
of promised tea
aftermath of sex lies
in warm laundry piles
 
bird tells me not to worry
it sings a melody in my ear
just before i wake
 
i can’t help but listen
 
 
iv.
 
the bird is the first
to believe me when i say
i spun clouds into silkworms the night before
every house was a beacon lit up
 
beyond mesh
behind reflection
of candlelight in smokescreened
sky
 
 
v.
 
chlorophyll
can’t handle early dawn rays
 
 
vi.
 
i match the bird’s tune
with a wooden flute
it tells me please stop
 
some songs
are not mine to play