POETRY: MONA'A MALIK

HOROSCOPE
 
 
i.
Dead Sea, Red Earth As far as one can anticipate into the distance
 
When you set me on fire, I go down like California redwoods When I smother you with my pillow, you
Are a pale haze When you make me cry I am glutted by the deluge, and I will now rush up as an eagre.
You eat cereal in our bed until you fall asleep. Drip milk on my hands. In dreams you come with me,
charting devotion, walking toward the glowing ball of pink in the sky then orange now gold But this is
real— I want to wake you up, to shake you, but it is me who is sleeping with milky
hands while Wildfires tear through the coast Keep triggering aftershocks This landslide is
Looking for answers How dark does the world become before you start calculating stillness
 

ii.
I tell you I want to move somewhere cold Where my teeth chatter and splinter And you say that will only
slow the end Whether humanity will be able to continue Has not been scientifically proven Whether “you
and i” will make it has not been proven You want to be big like the Universe you pray to something
above us Star-shaped and good I stare down at the grass I eat that grass Goliath and Bayer Own that grass
Monsanto waltzes with the small town farmers Seed prices rise. i touch the empty space of your thigh the
sky in your body you taste like street and dirt and its chaos for you fate is a thing that already happened
​like a far off place— sense-making and your love-making have been set adrift

iii.
How do you want the world to end? Slow death
When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth more than 65 million years ago it blasted a nearly. 
  mile-high tsunami through the Gulf of Mexico caused chaos throughout the world's oceans shock waves.   
in that delicate crust dust blocking out the sun Did they think all was night? You will be “waves from       
ejecta falling back into the water.” the animal Cooked alive by fire Tssst tssssst go the flames flaring.       
out all over this orb. would you rather be visited by a wandering star so large— that you blink and it is.     
over? You say I am preoccupied with annihilation That the landscape of my mind is ridged with curtains  

 iv.
My oracle says That was a village before it was wiped away Those morgues were once mosques
A dog cries whenever its people leave Stares through broken windows Barks at the space where there was
once a door In that square of pillars that no longer holds up anything That dog is me too Apocalypse can
mean a revelation or a prophecy Maybe we are nothing but prophecy Maybe we can be snow-capped
mountains And flooding And highway closures Instead of scorched earth 

v.
I am drought
I give nothing

vi.
Forests on mountaintops may die out since they cannot Shift to a higher altitude Drought sapped you of
vital juices That would preserve you Safeguard you from the pine beetles laying sweet eggs under your
bark staining blue fungus into your sapwood When you read my palm Can you tell Whether I will help
​the pine beetles Or the trees?

vii.
What astrological numerology Will save us now? recite all the stars to me Lay out every card of my life
Backwards and forwards Until I understand They call it slow Violence “gradual Violence of deforestation
and soil erosion” Invisible and quiet decimation Goodbye seeds and whales and the three-tooth caddisfly
Our violence to each other was as slow and gradual As the ending of the world The skeptic’s belief That
the world will stay the same Would grow and grow and grow Would swell like the beanstalk No matter
how many islands cleft apart On our TV
 
You say I blame other people for everything

​
 
Citations
 
The following quotes were paraphrased from these sources:

1. “When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth more than 65 million years ago it blasted a nearly mile-high tsunami through the Gulf of Mexico caused chaos throughout the world's oceans” Geggel, Laura. “Dinosaur-killing Asteroid Triggered Mile-high Tsunami That Spread Through Earth's Oceans.” LiveScience. 7 Jan. 2019.
2. “waves from ejecta falling back into the water” Geggel, Laura. “Dinosaur-killing Asteroid Triggered Mile-high Tsunami That Spread Through Earth's Oceans.” LiveScience. 7 Jan. 2019.
3. “on mountaintops may die out since they cannot Shift to a higher altitude” United States Environmental Protection Agency. “Climate Impacts on Forests.” 19 Jan. 2017.
4. “Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, by Rob Nixon, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England, 2011, p. 128. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jbsgw.8.

Mona'a Malik’s stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Joyland, Event, The Puritan, and Ricepaper, among other venues. She received an Arts and Letters NL award for poetry, and placed first in Carve Magazine’s 2020 Prose & Poetry Contest. Her play Sania The Destroyer was produced for Theatre New Brunswick's 50th anniversary season (2018-2019), and was a finalist for the QWF Playwriting Prize. She lives in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal on the unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation.