Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN & Climate Justice Toronto. |
Watch Your Head
Coach House Books, 2020 Paperback 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. Cover design by Ingrid Paulson ...Watch Your Head does not disappoint. It serves as a warning to heed, a reminder to be thought of often, and a well-thought-out piece of art. Throughout the anthology, readers encounter pieces that provoke and insist, demanding attention, consideration, action, and creativity. Essays and stories and images alike bring about questions and statements on Indigenous rights, white privilege, exploitation of land and people, colonial power structures, place, home, language, and imagination. |
This anthology is not to be missed. The pandemic may have defined our year, but the climate crisis defines our time in geological history. See how this roster of talented writers and artists advance the conversation, put the crisis in context and call for climate justice. Buy WATCH YOUR HEAD from these booksellers
Coach House Books ~ Glass Bookshop ~ knife | fork | book ~ Librairie Drawn & Quarterly ~ Massy Books ~ Munro's Books If you are an independent bookseller and are carrying this book, let us know! |
I WONDER IF I WILL EVER MANAGE TO WRITE A GOOD POEM ABOUT HEAT DEATH This trajectory is all on us for inability to fact check or read critically. The sparring kangaroos were dancing with rain-joy, we said. That’s fighting, said the scientist, old photo. Those kangaroos are ash by now. Pictures of koalas in renal failure foregoing their fear of us to lap water from the road were deemed “cute.” No, no, said the scientist, it’s not cute. That creature is dying. We’d moved on. Wombats shepherd other critters into their burrows! Stewards of the underbush! Not quite right, said the scientist, wombat burrows are enormous. Most likely the wombat was hiding in another chamber. Too busy anthropomorphizing, we’d already created a hashtag. #WombatEmpathy will save us! I asked ryan what comes next, and he said, either the complete transformation of existing relationships or the heat death of the planet. One of those. My heart’s on relationships, and kangaroos, and scientists. No time for settler logic. No atheists in burrows, friend. No one is coming to save us. I ❤️ ALBERTA’S ENERGY take the elevator to my second-floor apartment bust out the biodiesel firmware use medical grade plastic bottles for my saline nasal rinse gotta keep those mucus membranes clean for u and the dust bowl, babe, gotta run that old car all up and down this city’s sprawl I try to keep warm through frigid prairie winters feel appropriate guilt at the plastic produce bags I bring home from the grocery store / forget the mesh ones every time / I’ve gone full enemy of the state assault vehicle applied to be the next poet-in-residence for carbon capture (mass species death, but make it fashion) everything you see is development gently falling leaves in the inner city: development Enoch Sales heritage home fire: development empty condo tower on empty condo tower: the firing of 5,000 Albertan nurses in the year 2019 / 9 dead from fires in South Wales since Monday now 17 now 24, meanwhile we’re bursting out the seams over here: Montana, Drake, East Village, Tuscany new history razed for imported ideas another thundering swing from settler colonialism’s long neoliberal tail clearing a path for the rule of the patch by the patch for the patch for the capitalist overlord bosses of our demise, for the dinosaurs who never left us Nikki Reimer (she/her) is a carbon-based life form of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent who lives on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. She may or may not be undead. She writes poetry, essays and criticism, yells on the internet, and makes digital art. Published books are My Heart is a Rose Manhattan, DOWNVERSE and [sic].
KING TIDE The boardwalks scuttled like diving reef schooners – a walkable Galilee if anyone dared, but each jogger rears to higher ground. I’ve lost my son a half-second here or there before I pulled him up, his lips like planks, in tubs and pools and once a mirror lake – the obsidian endless kind that really ends abruptly in roots and husks and carcasses and muck. This country’s full of them. All summer we swim bellies up, avoid anoxic thoughts. The joggers, any other day, linger at the point just long enough to catch their breath and contemplate an app, perhaps the sun. Yes, there it is, afloat. My son, I need to know what you thought of water when it first, again, surrounded you. Your eyes were wide. You didn’t make a sound. Not one thing was born or died. THE SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE OF THIS WORLD The successful people of this world are always busy. They work all day then come home and need to do something so they cook the dinner, wash the car, cut the grass. It's because of the successful people that we have water restrictions: this side of the street on even days, that side on odd. They like that kind of thing: schedules, they are usually big fans of schedules, and when they have free time in theirs they spend it composing new schedules. When they take medication they always put it in one of those plastic things that divides the pills up by days. In conclusion: the successful people of this world are busy and efficient, their actions are their own rewards, and a green lawn during a heat wave is their poem. "The Successful People of the World" previously appeared in The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011). Rob Taylor is the author of three poetry collections, including The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Rob is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions, 2018) and guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2019 (Biblioasis, 2019). His fourth collection, Strangers, will be published by Biblioasis in Spring 2021.
FORECASTS it is how our footsteps alter the flurries how we move through the breeze in the boughs of our hope. when time stops in the sideways glance you will find me in the missed heartbeat see me in the many moons of your longing and furies. in the place where words fail us with a sharp astute parlance and war is upon us and the sun sets black under the yoke of a darkening century again we are going nowhere fast. in storms and tornados of prognosis and forecasts over a horizon of planted crosses the weather turns passive aggressive on us. and there is no way we can say such things about the weather as we forget how to move through the elements that we are. it’s up to you and I what we’ll do in this tortured oil-spilled winter. where even in sleep loneliness alters us re-interprets us holds us hostage. how I even begin to smile at people in my dreams. how a little bit of light brings nuance to the shutter in the prolonged exposure photography of grief where the struggling light shreds the clouds of our sorrow into the rags of tomorrow and of course you will also find me here waiting for spring. Acknowledgements: This poem was inspired by the poem Angst by Alexander Block (1880-1921) and it was published in Ping Pong: An Art and Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Memorial Library (Big Sur, California, 2014). Daniela Elza lived on three continents before immigrating to Canada in 1999. Her poetry collections are the weight of dew (2012), the book of It (2011), milk tooth bane bone (2013), and the broken boat (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2020). slow erosions (a chapbook written in collaboration with poet Arlene Ang) is coming out with Collusion Books (2020). Daniela also has essays forthcoming in The Queen’s Quarterly and Riddle Fence. YOU HAVE TO LOVE THEM ENOUGH TO LET THEM BE WILD That’s what Steve said about the mustangs up on Pryor Mountain – no sugar cubes, no carrots no coaxing, stroking, gentling no whispering no ropes, no tires, no pick up trucks no dust storm swing low choppers no Judas horse no gathering, no holding pens no PZP, no freeze brand no breaking in, no putting down no auction block, no slaughterhouse no flank strap, no fast track no stockyard, no consignment no snaffles, bridles, saddles, spurs no blankets, shoes or blinders no rodeo, no latigo, no cincha no clipping, combing, currying no conchos, braids or bells no ranches, no reata no binder twine for breech births no ligatures, no doctoring of tears & rends & bites no vaccination, no inoculation no sterilization no intervention just bales & bales of air seep water, galleta grass the animal vegetable mineral earth exacting, punishing, available Kathleen McCracken is the author of eight collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College (Penumbra Press, 1991), which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. A bilingual English/Portuguese edition of her poetry entitled Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected Poems, and featuring a preface by Medbh McGuckian, was published by the Brazilian press Editora Ex Machina in 2016. She is the recipient of several distinguished poetry prizes in Canada and Ireland, and has held Ontario Arts Council, Poetry Ireland and Northern Ireland Arts Council awards. Kathleen is currently Lecturer in Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature at Ulster University, Northern Ireland.
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.
SELECTIONS FROM THIS REAL assuming that nothing is neither created nor destroyed; that there is nothing new under the sun; that everything is ‘one,’[1] as Parmenides said; that the consistency we feel as ‘real,’ is, and the inconsistency that rises up as interference interruption eruption disruption of our days is not not consistency but simply the insignificant pebble[2] flipped up by the tire from the side of the road as we swerve against the torrent;[3] that an individual is born into this consistency, which is the continuum of time; that time must have started somewhere; that we are edited product of this time and closed off from genesis, dulled and sagging as we are, brittle and horny, spinning and passive and overcome by all manner of natural disasters and essentially as dumb as the pebble, as mother earth wounded by ice age, mitochondria and hypochondria, polar thaws, geological faults and a sunken Atlantis; assuming all that, I would propose that: in these end of days, the only thing with perspective is this angel,[4] whose wings are tangled in it, scorched by it, thrown from it, advancing backwards into our future as she does, so that she can’t warn us; until it’s too late. as if disaster were inevitable. measure it. assuming that it was a dark and stormy night when the world began; that it was the storm of chaos out of which mankind was formed, and assuming that the weather[5] wraps us in its warmth, wet blankets of summer storms; high winds and thunder eclipsing night, exciting us in their grandeur so that we take cover on the porch, or are forced inside with expletives about eaves troughs or weeping tiles, we may assume also that there is weather that is inside us, seasonal disorders in the unstable system of corpus. the tormented tidal waves of loving badly. Oh my. the manic storms of depression or heaven’s wrath. Oh God. we measure how our body is barometer or weathervane. riddled with nerves translating the advancing gale as migraine. vertigo in the wind. a weak heart in humid tremors. oedema of the mind, signalling the countdown to apocalypse. such nature I can’t weather anymore. storm rising; storm landing. storm in a teapot and storm dancing. or the storm that comes through the night in your dreams: wheels of fire spinning across heaven’s blue skies. waking with the thought that the wheels [6] were silent. her theory is that prayers solve everything. you think about the weather and go all dialectic on her. the end approaches. it encroaches. it creeps up from behind.[7] we are blown into it and say we have no choice. but after centuries of feeling it approach and pass, come and go, waiting for the dawn that comes, miraculous, we discover we are weaving the end into ourselves: the eddy of the residue of that first blast is in us.[8] assuming that we are as captive as the angel, we are propelled, storm first, into ourselves, and there encounter apocalypse. a theory. Notes [1] “Only one story of a path remains, that it is” (Parmenides, fragment 8.1). [2] “mire and clay” (Sefer Yetzirah 1:11). [3] “chaos and void” (SY 1:11). [4] “But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in [the angel’s] wings” (Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395). [5] “rush to his saying like a whirlwind” (SY 1:6). [6] “The chayot running and returning” (Ezekiel 1:24). [7] “the end is embedded in the beginning” (SY 1:1). [8] “formed substance out of chaos” (SY 2:6). This Real, Pedlar Press, 2017. Published with permission of the author. Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on trauma and literature. Her recent collection, This Real (Pedlar Press 2017) was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet’s Raymond Souster Award. Her creative non-fiction project, "Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide" is coming out with Gordon Hill Press in the spring of 2021. Her work has appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review, experiment-o, and Hamilton Arts and Literature. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University, Durham, and York University.
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). DESCENDANTS The dinosaurs that didn’t die went slamming into windows, dazzled by the colour of a gold. Instead of flight, they had their houses built on tree tops, over many single blades of grass; they learned to run on fossils of their dead. They lived and learned the many things they thought they had to learn; how to upright, how to sit down, how eventually to crawl. The sun still happened. The water happened. The ice that once had happened didn’t happen anymore. Instead of crawling, the dinosaurs that didn’t lay down without a lullaby and watched a world they made through glass. They saw but thought they didn’t, the edges of the birds whose songs were stuck inside a bottle, the make-believe of golden eggs. UPON DISCOVERING SILICONE IMPLANTS DO NOT BURN AT 1500 ºF All the women I have been have been a beautiful shedding of rat snake confused where her tail ends another bites where the woman ends the Barbie plastic takes a thousand years to decompose; the leather jacket made for a boy I wore when everyone forgot it was skin, now down to hide the reason people don't like rats; they eat their shit. It won't look good on Food TV. Most days I try to breathe human, speak human to men producing plastics, men producing sedatives making fishes fearless, men who say they want to get to know the inside of an oyster will sever adductors to force her from her shell will cut the legs off lady bugs when they were boys they didn't know why the short-tailed cricket eats her wings. I speak human while they touch the me that is fake pearls made from cotton and crumbs that glitter while vacuuming someone else's floor, the me who is dollar store trophy expendable, botox blocked from genuine signal paralysed reliving the men how a cockroach scuttles for seemingly random escape reliving the men as apid stinger lodged in the jaw grinding my teeth while I sleep, the moment my mind became an ant marching in circles. All the women I have had to be have been quiet inside a boardroom watching Predator on casual Fridays, quiet inside a game of Twister, wrong hand on red beautiful in lips sewed up, frog legs stuffed in the back of a cab watching drunk for cobras between my knees. The amygdala says orange is the colour of fear. I am spending my life in someone else's fake tan as though all the women I have had to become have forgotten U.V. In a thousand years all that's left of me will be all those liners on maxi-pads with wings; in a thousand years I want none of this to have to matter to all the women I will not be who after me are issued wings like the short-tailed cricket; I want the matter of synthetic fibres to disintegrate, return to earth. "Upon Discovering Silicone Implants Do Not Burn At 1500 ºF" previously published in RiddleFence, Issue 32, Spring 2019. Paola Ferrante's debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, was published Spring 2019 by Mansfield Press.. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in, PRISM International, Joyland, Grain, and elsewhere. She won The New Quarterly's 2019 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award and Room's 2018 prize for Fiction. She is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review and resides in Toronto, Canada. She can be found on twitter @PaolaOFerrante
COSTAL ROAD PROJECT, MUMBAI A solitary polyp of a coral blooms silently in space. Zoanthids carpet the barks of trees like a fresh field of lichen. Out of the tetrapods, a bush of sea sponge falls like musk roses. Shyly, the barnacles unfurl like onions on chopping boards. In the dream of a Koli fisherwoman, her son tars the road with brittle stars. "Coastal Road Project, Mumbai" appeared in the Winter 2020, Issue 51 of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Kunjana Parashar is a poet living in Mumbai. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, UCity Review, MORIA, Bengaluru Review, 45th Parallel, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @wolfwasp.
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. David Barrick’s poetry appears in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Event, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, and other literary magazines. He teaches creative writing at Western University and is Co-Director of the Poetry London reading series. His first chapbook, Incubation Chamber, was published by Anstruther Press in 2019.
ARTIST STATEMENT My artistic practice concerns a critical examination of human relationships with the natural world and how ecosystems are changing in the anthropocene. I spend time researching ecosystems and the connections within them, particularly via site visits and consultation with scientists and lay experts. My multidisciplinary practice involves collecting materials following ethical foraging practices (plants, feathers, bones, fungi and lichen specimens, for example) from natural environments, or accessing museum collections for use as raw material in making work, and as reference material. These large-scale still life images are produced using a high-resolution scanner as my camera: specimens collected during site visits are arranged on the glass, in groupings that serve to illustrate connections in Canadian ecosystems that may not be immediately apparent to a casual observer. The images are elegiac, dark, mourning, representing not contemporary specimens but rather, recontextualized, some last remaining pieces of a fragmented world, floating in the void. The concepts that I seek to explore with my work – encouraging a sense of wonder, interest, and respectful stewardship with regards to the natural environment – are becoming more and more relevant. It is with increasing unease that I observe developments in human behavior at home and abroad, at the individual and institutional level, that impact negatively on the continued functioning of the complex ecosystems that we humans are part of. I feel that one of my roles as an artist is to interpret events around me and draw attention to matters of political, social, and environmental importance, and so my artistic practice aims to cultivate a deep attention to the details and intricacies of natural ecosystems, and to examine human relationships with the natural world. My pieces attempt to frame the work of plants and animals in terms that are easier for humans to understand, and potentially empathize or identify with. I hope to inspire a sense of wonder or fascination, and encourage the viewer to consider the energy and resources that go into the constant cycle of building and decay in complex environments and ecosystems. Julya Hajnoczky was born in Calgary and raised by hippie parents, surrounded by unruly houseplants, bookishness and art supplies, with CBC radio playing softly, constantly, in the background. It was inevitable, then, that she would grow up to be an artist. She holds a BA in French from the University of Calgary and a BDes in photography from the Alberta College of Art + Design. Her multidisciplinary practice includes digital and analog photography, fibre art, and book and paper sculpture, and seeks to ask questions and inspire curiosity about the complex relationships between humans and the natural world. Her most recent adventures, supported by grants from the Calgary Arts Development Authority and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, involved building a mobile natural history collection laboratory (a combination tiny camper and workspace, the Al Fresco Science Machine), and exploring the many ecosystems of Western
Canada, from Alberta’s Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, to the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve in BC and Wood Buffalo National Park, NWT. If she's not in her home studio working on something tiny, she's out in the forest working on something big. See more of Julya’s work at obscura-lucida.com ENDGAME I’ll rent a basement without Wi-Fi or windows where my typewriter’s keys evoke the nights our rain was still gentle. And we’ll have a black cat named Samuel Bucket. One night, you scream Fuck it and reconnect the Ethernet to scour the hookup-lands in which I found you. In response I recount yesterday’s rumours (kids saying Lima was prey to another monster storm). The death toll, charities, they’re prolly making rounds now on CBC, CNN, BBC— and god knows the death or missing tolls tonight in some other coastal town. Instead, unplug, ignore the screams above our bedroom without windows. Board my craft Calypso: let’s float on this flooded earth where Odysseus abandoned you. Isn’t that when history began, so many years ago? Yusuf Saadi’s first collection is Pluviophile (Nightwood Editions April, 2020). He previously won the 2016 Vallum Chapbook Award and the The Malahat Review‘s 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry. At other times, his writing has appeared in magazines/anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry 2019, The Malahat Review, Vallum, Brick, Canadian Notes & Queries, Best Canadian Poetry 2018, and Arc Poetry Magazine. He currently lives in Montreal.
TRANSLATIONS OF CORMORANTS One of the delightful things about drawing is the looking – in drawing you give attention to details that are often otherwise missed – like the space around a bird. This video belongs to a poem I wrote for the sculptor and hunter Billy Gauthier who I listened to at a symposium in 2020 at Toronto’s Power Plant. He was one of the speakers in a group of Indigenous artists and scientists from the Arctic and Amazon, come together to talk about climate change. It was an incredible conversation to listen to. Billy, in particular, inspired me deeply. And continues to. Here is Billy. Through this past spring and summer double-breasted cormorants have become my companions, especially those belonging to a colony on the Humber River near home. They glide above our kayaks in the early morning, skimming the surface of the Leading Sea (also known as Lake Ontario). We've marvelled at their nests, hooked beaks, bright green eyes. The adult bird is a deep grey and brown but the youngsters have downy white chests. They are called gaagaagiishib in Ojibwe and they've been here a long time. The cormorant is a conservation success story – their population was close to making the endangered list some time ago and now they are thriving. Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation about them, mostly that they're a nuisance and a threat to fish. These are unfounded claims. Distressingly, their future is again in jeopardy. From Sept 15 - December 31st of 2020, the Ontario government has approved their long slaughter. People now have permission to kill up to 15 of these birds a day to "control" their numbers. Toronto visual artist, conservationist and activist, Cole Swanson is currently hard at work to challenge this. You can read about his efforts (along with Gail Fraser, professor of environmental and urban change at York University) and the research behind his efforts here. For those of you interested in the film-making process: My partner, Paul Esposti, photographed the cormorants in flight; I used Paul’s photos to draw stills with ink and pencil on vellum (about 90 drawings!). We then photographed each drawing, and Paul turned them into an animation, created the sound design and edited. This is our first attempt at animation, and we’re just getting started. Paul and I both feel like these birds are our neighbours and teachers. We made the film thinking about how much might be resolved in our world if we could learn to care for a cormorant, for the sky and space around a soaring bird. Paul David Esposti is a photographer and videographer who does his best to listen to birds. One of the ways he listens is through looking closely. Paul's photographed birds from Costa Rica to the Salish Sea and he especially likes photographing them near his home in Etobicoke, Ontario. You can find out more about Paul and see his photographs at pauldavidesposti.com
Jessica Joy Hiemstra is a designer and visual artist who does her best to listen to birds. One of the ways she listens is through drawing. She's also written several books of award-winning poetry, most recently, The Holy Nothing (2016) with Pedlar Press. You can find out more about Jessica here: jessicahiemstra.ca. 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. Mallory Smith is a Creative Writing and English PhD candidate here at the University of Calgary, and the current Artist in Residence to the Cumming School of Medicine. Her thesis poetry collection, Smutty Alchemy, looks at the re-telling of scientific information in verse, materiality, and the work of the 17th century philospher, scientist, and writer Margaret Cavendish. She has interests in photography, recipe making, canoeing, theatre, gardening, and bookbinding.
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. * if brains lip the thoughts caught in the eyes of muscles, there are heavenward bodies cloth-pinned. had the mercy been brainless, our shrivelled sun is a highway sliced through hills. 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. Michael Maranda is assistant curator at the Art Gallery of York University. For the past thirty years he has been engaged with the visual arts sector in Canada, as artist, organiser, administrator, curator, editor, advocate, publisher, critic, and, more recently, as quantitative researcher. He runs the publishing activities of the AGYU, and is a prolific commenter on social media. Maranda was educated at the University of Ottawa, Concordia University, and the University of Rochester. His work has shown internationally, primarily in artists book-related venues. For some deeply ironic reason, his rip-off of Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations was exhibited in several of Gagosian’s gallery spaces.
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. Akshi Chadha is a writer based in London, Ontario, Canada. She is pursuing an Honors Specialization in English Language and Creative Writing at Western University. Her work has previously been published in The Roadrunner Review, Symposium, and SNAPS. She is committed to addressing issues surrounding race, climate change, and feminism through her writing.
Stephen Collis hosts the Watch Your Head West Coast launch!
November 5, 2020 at 6pm, (Pacific) 9pm (EST) FB Invite & Launch Details Readings by contributors to this climate crisis anthology, with: Hari Alluri, Joanne Arnott, Yvonne Blomer & Jenna Butler, Allison Cobb, Jen Currin, Mercedes Eng, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Jonina Kirton, Natalie Lim, and Isabella Wang. Hosted by Stephen Collis. Dear Tree, From Shadow Performative Sculpture Bijarim-ro in Jeju Island is a two-lane road connecting two nearby towns, Songdang and Gyorae. With justifications such as high traffic for tourists using this road and the convenience of transportation for the residents of Songdang, the provincial government of Jeju unilaterally pushed for the “Bijarim Road Expansion Project” in 2018. Since then, 1,000 cedar trees had been clear-cut around Bijarim-ro. Upon hearing the news, a small group of people came out to protect the forest. Sometimes with the support of the residents, other times with the extra help from the creatures living in Bijarim-ro forest, they’ve been protecting the forest for the last three years. I also heard the news about Bijarim-ro, but I couldn’t run out to the forest like them. Perhaps because of their sound of resistance occupying a small corner of my heart, at some point, without thinking, I was out making work with stones by rolling them around in the Bijarim cedar forest. While working there, I met the “Bijarim-ro Cedar Forest Keepers” and was invited to participate in an art event that they organized. I send this video letter to a tree once faced the light, and to a tree facing the light right now. 제주도 ‘비자림로’는 ‘송당’과 ‘교래’를 잇는 2차선 도로이다. 이 도로를 사용하는 관광객 교통 수요 증가와 ‘송당’ 주민들의 교통 편의를 명분으로, 제주도 도정道政은 2018년 ‘비자림로 확장공사’를 일방적으로 밀어붙였다. 결국 ‘비자림로’ 주변 삼나무 1000여 그루가 벌목되었다. 이 소식을 들은 제주 시민들은 현장으로 뛰어나와 ‘비자림로 삼나무 숲’을 지키기 위한 저항운동을 시작하였다. 때로는 시민들의 호응을 받으며, 때로는 비자림로에 사는 뭇 생명들의 힘을 빌어 3년 간 이곳을 지키고 있다. 나 또한 비자림로의 소식을 들었지만, 그들처럼 ‘비자림로 삼나무 숲’으로 달려가진 못했다. 내 마음 한 켠을 차지하고 있던 그들의 함성 때문 이었을까? 언제 부턴가 나는 작업을 한답시고 ‘비자림로 삼나무 숲’에서 돌멩이를 굴리고 있었다. 그러던 중 ‘비자림로 삼나무 숲’ 지킴이들이 진행하는 문화행사에 참여하게 되었다. 한 때 빛을 향했던 나무에게, 그리고 지금 빛을 향하고 있는 나무에게 이 영상편지를 보낸다. 고승욱/ Koh, Seung Wook
I was born and raised in Jeju Island. For 20 years, I lived in Seoul, building my art career. Even though I’ve been back in Jeju for over 10 years, I’m still learning about the island and I surprise myself for my ignorance of Jeju. 제주도에서 나고 자랐다. 20년간 서울에서 미술활동을 했고 제주 내려온지 10년이 지나고 있다. 늦깍기 제주공부에 매달리면서 제주에 대한 자신의 무지함에 새삼 놀라고 있다. 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
Kate Sutherland lives in Toronto where she writes poems, makes collages, and teaches law. She is the author of three books: Summer Reading (winner of a Saskatchewan Book Award), All In Together Girls, and How to Draw a Rhinoceros (shortlisted for a Creative Writing Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). A new collection of poems, The Bones Are There, is forthcoming from Book*hug Press in Fall 2020. These three poems are part of a longer sequence about extinct frog species which will appear in its entirety in the new collection.
WALKING INTO THE OCEAN I frequently think about walking into the ocean. My sense of obligation to the earth simply the flimsy contract of a collapsed toy ship factory. I wonder how long fish would live if no longer fugitive to keel, kellick, and angry boom chain. Giving Botox to the water, the workers of our county must have looked forward to the coolness of soil when they drowned. The last of their incense breaths fleeing from Pender Street, home between ashy pages of quiet night and negligent morning. That portion of motherland was christened Oriental Hawaii. Which part did you name me after? I watch as you twist together umbilical buoy with steaming red sausage. Squeeze blood from wet towel. I get it all mixed up—the water from sausage oil, sun spots from badges of living. Tell me the difference between my bones and the bones of whale shark. Only, this nuclear explosion paints in tiny brushstrokes like iron filings. My ghost grips my neck until I can breathe again. My fear is that the ocean knows too much, would reject me too. The pomelo at the corner of our fridge untouched for months. Face torn up like sausage skin. Roof of my mouth softening, mistaken for glue. The ocean is a fable, seaweed stuck between front teeth. If we laid out our hides side by side, which of us would have more scales? And after all of it: I ride nekton back to before I walked. To find my baby-body fed. To find the coolness of soil in the ship yard’s false summer heat. Safe? A warmth I have betrayed has betrayed me. Who can say if this daydream is more about walking than about water. More about the empty swing than about the drop. More about daring to steal a pillow from a sleeping giant. Unwound spool and a jar of kitchen grease, honeying frozen flies. Somehow the tea is still cold; it’s like you have forgotten who I am. What would you do if I could become a worm wedged between subduction zone boundary between us, waking up to everything, gone? The ocean is not a feeling, not a child, not a mother, not a worker, not a word. But she is still learning from contours of glass—just like we are. jia you [1] putin marches chinese soldiers across shanghai streets. fear the Uighur terrorists, jiuma warns me, and no sooner, street stands steaming with nan and kebab fold into the hollow sprawls of massage parlours, german furniture stores, french bakeries, italian pubs, American sex toy shops, local shoe shops doubling as sunday school, real massage parlours, a lego construction of western carpets and han ornaments. disappeared. students tell each other before gaokao[2]: “jiayou.” mothers tell their children before gaokao: “jiayou.” thick wallets tell their diasporic offspring before AP economics: “jiayou.” translation: build pipelines transporting oil between Skovorodino and Daqing translation: build pipelines transporting greed and colonialism across Turtle Island rupture water with oil. drink oil-flavoured bbt with the thick straw of a gun barrel. brush your teeth with bitumen paste, rinse rinse repeat. extract it from skin browner than ours. take it, drink it. until the sun never dares set on our civilized, meddling kingdom. yellow powder amalgamated with sheens of white-- xiaojie the fairest in the land. a quick nod, scorching back scratcher: got you covered. advancing grades, following orders, guaihaizi marching westward until we lose ourselves between the failure of 89% and the success of swearing allegiance to the queen (making the last payment on the mortgage). filial, determined, loyal to the very end. there would be no chinese faces protesting pipelines that day. I wonder if we’d need to drink poison from these waters we steal from to see the filth on our hands. but you cannot bribe a river to love you, forgive you, no. not today. because the Yangtze remembers the poppies that poisoned, the villages evacuated, the children sold, the maozedongs and elizabeths laundered exchanged transported. just so little xingxing could go to school. just so little favourite grandchild could have a better life. just so we never have to talk about 49, 66-76, 89 tucked between the eights in our addresses and phone numbers, the ones and zeros of our pockets. just so. you tell me, “jia you.” but how can you when you do not know the name of this river. when you do not know where your bones will be buried. when you have crushed your veins between big data and the sea. just so we never have to talk about what we pretend not to know. a bottle of cooking oil, crushed by a tank. [1] jia you means “add oil,” another way to say “good luck” [2] gaokao is the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, a prerequisite exam to get into higher education in the People’s Republic of China Acknowledgement "jia you" previously published in Tributaries: ACAM undergraduate student journal Audio Credits Music for "jia you": "No More Trap" by Audiobinger (CC attribution non-commercial from free music archive). Music for "Walking into the Ocean": "through the water and rain" by soft and furious (public domain from free music archive). Jane Shi is a queer Chinese settler living on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her writing has appeared in Briarpatch Magazine, Canthius, The Malahat Review, PRISM, and Room, among others. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated. Find her online @pipagaopoetry.
HOME = GARBAGE for Khalo looking out the window from my teta’s balcony at the news on my laptop some days they look the same and some days they don’t my aunt says this is weird there have never been any military tanks in zalka before three days in a row imagine the difference between this looks weird and military men directing traffic on a daily basis rifles slung across their shoulders waving the cars to keep going stop, turn left cars in two lanes somehow fitting themselves four wide stop, keep going, turn left this country is corrupt says my uncle this country smells like garbage contracts with the garbage company left unrenewed military men pinching their noses while directing traffic if we can’t manage garbage can we do anything right? we stop, keep going, turn left people sling bags of rotten garbage over mountain sides over roadsides drop garbage onto houses into the ocean anywhere but garbage disposal where to dispose when there is nowhere four months and my uncle is hospitalized lungs filled with pollution hundreds of people in the country polluted beirut protesters push industrial garbage bins into the middle of the road try pretending that doesn’t exist aimed at government officials refusing press people start to move them most people drive around them an obstacle course in preserving ignorance let us press our ignorance deeper throw bags over the shoulders of refugees this country is too small as though that’s the only problem religion into garbage brown sludge building when it’s too hot to stay inside my family heads to the beach stops at a checkpoint on the way up the mountains the military man with a rifle across his shoulders barely looks wipes sweat off his brow bored, nods, motions us forward the privilege of christianity there are hundreds of military checkpoints in this tiny country hundreds of bored military men stop, keep going, shmel there are thousands of palestinians in refugee camps in this country stop, undocumented, prohibited movement hindered by checkpoints in and out stop, undocumented, prohibited I don’t live in zalka anymore but every year I visit the garbage keeps growing downtown beirut skyscrapers hiding the garbage close the back windows or we’ll smell garbage speeding on the only highway in lebanon past garbage piles in flames taller than the gas station beside it my uncle’s lungs filled with garbage this country is corrupt, says my uncle and I ask him why he’s still here it’s home, he says, his nose plugged my family came back 18 years ago this is home, they say lungs filled with garbage Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio’tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory (Montreal). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, the Shade Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the CBC poetry prize in 2019. knot body, a collection of creative non-fiction and poetry will be published September 2020 by Metatron Press, and The Good Arabs, a poetry collection, will be published in Fall 2021 with Metonymy Press. You can find them on Instagram and Twitter @theonlyelitareq.
ANTI-APOCALYPSE no nuclear winter no ice age no superbug no second coming no robot revolution a pear tree buckthorn plastic bags a river turtles "Anti-Apocalypse" previously published in Bad Animals (Insominac Press, 2018) Tom Cull teaches creative writing at Western University and was the Poet Laureate for the City of London from 2016-2018. Tom’s first collection of poems, Bad Animals, was published in 2018 by Insomniac Press. His work has appeared in such journals as the Rusty Toque, Long Con, and the New Quarterly; his poem “After Rivers” was included in the anthology Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (MSU Press, 2019). Tom is the director of Antler River Rally, a grass roots environmental group he co-founded in 2012 with his partner Miriam Love. ARR works to protect and restore Deshkan Ziibi (Thames River).
AVIAN ODES—CANADA GOOSE The chill, glassy mist just then Dissolving into hints of sultriness Echoed with jubilant honks, Avian position-signalling on high, Pulling my gaze up to your magnificent Flying V’s northward bound Flinging joyful vernal greetings. Come the ordained crisp autumn day The calls echoed again off frosted fields As your arrow formations streamed south, Bidding farewell until spring warmth Once more crept in. Winter past was deep, consistent; Now it staggers all around, Reeling under humanity’s blows, Glistening white morphs To sulky brown mud, Defiantly open water Supplants sparkling ice. Eminently flexible, A few goose homebodies Spawned many more of you that Seize what’s on offer, spurn the effort And trade glorious flight for ungainly Waddling about and strolls through traffic, Expropriating luscious, manicured turf, Cheerfully crapping all over your squattage; Soaring nobility mutated to a Grey-brown-black wingéd pest Herded off the cathedral greensward By a bellowing leaf blower; Target practice for a skulking Archer in a London park; Clubbing victim of a sportsman Whose putt was ruined by an Inopportune anserine klaxon. Undaunted, you multiply and toddle on, Once a belovéd seasonal herald, Now flocks of Cassandras trumpeting Warnings, flaunting consequences, Announcing a battle joined. Jennifer Wenn is a trans-identified writer and speaker from London, Ontario. Her first poetry chapbook, A Song of Milestones, has been published by Harmonia Press (an imprint of Beliveau Books). She has also written From Adversity to Accomplishment, a family and social history; and published poetry in Beliveau Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Open Minds Quarterly, Tuck Magazine, Synaeresis, Big Pond Rumours, the League of Canadian Poets Fresh Voices, Wordsfestzine, and the anthology Things That Matter. She is also the proud parent of two adult children with a day job as a systems analyst. Jennifer Wenn's website.
|
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 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 Newsletter
Sign up for our Newsletter Archives
January 2021
Categories
All
|