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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A DISCUSSION WITH OLD MAN WHO LIVES IN THE FOREST Old Javanese: urang [person] utan [forest], or “person of the forest” I In the treetops, I once saw my grandfather wrap a cigarette filled with cloves and cardamom. Watched him take a pull and felt the marrow thin inside my bones. The aroma, a reminder of places I intended to go, though they had receded into a room called extinction. It was odd to see him there. His beaded eyes a reminder that culture and the wild-man were not incongruent like the translations may say. Arms languid and longer than recalling. There is no need to split apart my body to search for the similarities. His flapping cheeks are shaped in apocalyptic medallions like my brothers. Ache unfurls at the vision of smiling red hairs, while I remain at the precipice of the street below. He starts a puff, did you ever stop to consider that Enkidu represents the start of the Anthropocene? II “I no longer have the four arms essential to semi-terrestrial living. If we spent eighty percent of our lives in trees, we’d ache less.” He sees irony, a corn of transcendental hypocrisy, to this fir-framed house liver, but it’s his blood. In the middle of the night, she wears solitude in the plenty of her veins and he sews the bones. Clotted with wars and grafts, cultivations serving a new purpose: pushing nutrition further into fissures too deep that only plantations exist there. Impenetrable flat cacophony incurs scarcity and violence upon the next generation of everything. She wants to fix forever, but the paws and fungi that used to cross paths for tea have already been replaced. He watches her quivering aftereffects of stitching, don’t let the palms take root like the Asphodel Fields, they make you forget of the habitats that once were. III It’s an odd sight, to see him on a mechanical contraption, peddles elucidating the enormity of his legs. Large V’s jutting out like wings of a collapsing aircraft, a spectacle not meant to be observed. A saffron-cloak and rollup in his jaw frees his arms for travel. This time, he has come to visit her. Axles and wheels a vortex to further phenomenological discussions. She wants to dream of a good place, barren from complications, but the body is hectic with museums trips and forecasts. He enters her cerebrum the way one enters a show, popcorn and candies in stuffed purses. She’s read up on Heidegger and Euripides, but the discourse isn’t enough to stop a cynical critic of a family member. In low coos he throws the mantle, every person in your time is Melinoë birthed from inherited madness, birthed from a river in the underworld. so swim through it in victory. As a Canadian, Maryam Gowralli draws inspiration from her Trinidadian-Indian and Indonesian heritage. She is an MA student in English Literature at the University of Calgary and is the Creative Nonfiction Editor for filling Station magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Citizenship in Water is forthcoming with That Painted Horse Press in 2021. You can find her works at PRISM International, The Carribean Journal and untethered magazine among others.
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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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