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RIVER* When you leave, take with you the way light shimmered gold in the river, how the weight of what you loved swirled into filigreed gold in the river. That was how it felt to me, as the eventide of the annihilated dream, when I first crossed into illumination at the threshold of the river. There were mapmakers before me: their footfalls fade tender on the earth. Like you, they brought palms of amaryllis, asked to be consoled by the river. There's a pond in the forest whose water only ripples where you weep. But here, all ruptures. Let your heart flood, uncontrolled, into the river. Listen: the saga unbraids. Loyalties shift, fish-dappled in her surge. You can no more submerge a story than you can hold a river. Carry all you can into the world, a tributary. But pilgrim, linger a little. Sit a while beside me. There are renderings still untold in the river. * This poem is from Sharanya Manivannan's second collection, The Altar of the Only World (HarperCollins India, 2017). Sharanya Manivannan is the author of five books of fiction, poetry and children's literature, including the novel The Queen of Jasmine Country, which was longlisted for the 2019 JCB Prize, longlisted for the Mathrubumi of the Year Award 2020, shortlisted for The Hindu Prize 2019, and the short story collection The High Priestess Never Marries, which won the 2015-2016 South Asia Laadli Media and Advertising Award for Gender Sensitivity (Best Book – Fiction).
SEVEN IMAGES FROM THE SERIES 'ENDANGERED.'  VISION: Butternutbutternut creates art inspired by conscious living, a bright and quirky take on a utopia where animals and humans coexist in harmony. For this series, Endangered, I wanted to hero endangered species to bring awareness to the alarming reduction in population. When we think of tigers, rhinos, orangutans, the general understanding is that they exist, freely, in the wild, but the truth is that we are close to extinction, and they only exist in conservation areas. This series in meant to humanize these animals, hence they are shown on human bodies, and start the dialogue on what we can do to help them, whether through mindful tourism, conscious buying of goods and services or donations. Over continued years of illegal trade, poaching, deforestation, and climate change, we are responsible for this tragedy, and now we need mass awareness to help save these species. Butternutbutternut was started in 2018 by Shinjini Sur, a self-taught artist. Shin's vision is to create art inspired by conscious living - bright, fun, and quirky pieces critiquing social norms. Her iconic work shows animals on human bodies to personify and humanize them, ultimately bringing to life a utopian world where humans and animals coexist in harmony. She is currently experimenting with new materials and home decor - check out butternutbutternut.com for more of her work. *20% of all proceeds from shopping this collection goes to the World Wildlife Fund in support of endangered, critically endangered, and vulnerable animals.*
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. |
AboutWatch Your Head is an online anthology of creative works devoted to the climate crisis and climate justice.
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