Good News for People Who Love Bad news
Breaking poetry from Victoria A. Rotton, Alexandra Donovan, Megan Merchant and more
Dearest Reader,
I write to you from Big Sur. I haven’t seen the Pacific Ocean in days. And where a mountain ridge should stand crisp as a Louise Bogan line there hangs a loose gray body instead, the palpable ghost of Paradise - the small town in northern California that has been devoured by fire.
Here in California, smoke from Paradise has blinded every vista and rendered hiking a fool's errand. Hundreds of travelers from places like Sacramento, Oakland and San Francisco have fled to Big Sur, where I live, as dangerous particles-per-millions levels hold steady up north. I study astonishment on the visitors’ faces as they survey the panicked atmosphere blanketing the coast, the same one they thought they'd left behind. So here's good news for anyone who loves bad news: when the whole world burns, escaping gets harder to do. As for me, I use the tools at hand: a door that mostly closes, a playlist with this song on it, and poetry.
This week, I offer you new poems from Victoria A. Rotton, Megan Merchant and Alexandra Donovan that document our continent's flames, caravans and shootings. From the archives, a yet-again-breaking poem by Anna Leahy, written in the aftermath of last year’s fire season.
In the hopes of rain,
Elle Aviv Newton
Editor-in-Chief,
Poets Reading the News
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Half in Shadow
By Victoria A. Rotton
Ash clots our breath
and falls in feathers of carbon,
blots out mountain and meadow,
thickens the world
into a swirling softness.
The sun stares a bloodshot eye.
Stay inside, officials warn
but we shrug on our backpacks,
hike into the Cascades,
fish for cutthroat in Upper Wildcat,
hook trout with every cast
of muddler minnow and wooly bugger.
My son and I swing the steep face to Derrick lake
using hemlock and fir as trapezes
to see a shore hardly walked by humans.
Goat, bear, marten tracks pattern the sand.
Grey haze flattens the landscape.
Green melts to grime; blue disappears in gloom.
I am 57, but forget my age
and scale a waterfall on the way back to Hatchet,
tiny toeholds slick with algae
and a toss of freezing water over my body.
Fright zips with electricity,
leaves me high on adrenaline even smoke cannot quench.
An hour across granite boulders that tilt and grumble
under our weight. We collapse in a patch of huckleberry
stuffing our mouths with sweet blue fruit. Linger
in forest duff, forget the blotted sun.
The incense of cedar rises over the scent of smoke.
I relax in my love for my son.
I want a grandchild to watch an osprey
pluck a cutthroat from lake Caroline,
but fear the earth cannot sustain this dream
when alpine meadow burns
and waterfalls dry to skull and rib.
Back at camp a dragon fly shines
emerald eyes, flicks its crystalline wings
in a song I will not forget.
We know we should leave this place,
but everywhere, half in shadow, the world beckons.
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Murmuration
By Megan Merchant
I dream that I sew wings
from eyelashes off the dead,
pack honey into bones for the long walk.
If someone said, live here long enough and your
blood will mix with the soil, and they meant your children
and buried, not an honest days work, you too would flee,
flow into this murmuration to keep safe. How could a country
possibly border its breath? We have already set our tables for their souls,
lit candles for every child fainted along the path.
You are the one counting your steps to nowhere, proselytizing fear.
They have bodies of water to cross, hunger to outpace.
Listen, I’ve seen starlings form mesmerizing shapes in the sky.
But this caravan doesn’t need to wow you, witness.
They are you—only after risking this journey—more human.
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How Do We Go On
By Alexandra Donovan
The violence is at our back door now
or perhaps it’s always been.
Three hundred seven out of three hundred eleven
is the number of shootings they’re saying
in so many days.
This morning I take a hot salt bath,
text friends. “My first line dance
was at that bar.”
I sit there, my naked knees growing cold
while a mother, somewhere, rocks the emptiness
in her arms because that’s all that’s left to her
to do. I get dressed, put on my coat,
walk to the front door.
How do we go on as though
each day is not a mine we walk into,
when the question is no longer if, but where?
What else can we do; how would we know
any different way, we
who have only ever walked straight through
that mine and lived, who have never not returned
to our doorways,
our lives trailing behind us
like some shaking dog
who had sensed what we could not
but followed us when we called to it
out of love, or something worse.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
The World is Wind, The World is Fire
By Anna Leahy
Environment, 12 December 2017
Tonight, I wait for wind to become fire.
This wind is ocean, crash and clatter of inexorable squall, wind the world over.
I’ve misread live briefing as live briefly.
They’ve purpled the virtual landscape here for the first time.
One spark, and the wind is fire.
And how much time is enough?
Tonight’s impossible to sleep, to dream, the map too arid, the mortal coil too parched.
The heart aches like a furrowed pit without its flesh, the flare miles away, the blaze visible.
My skin feels cowardly as if with fever and also shrewd, too-nerved, all-knowing not what.
Prediction is mathematical fiction and the fact of fire and wind.
And who will be scorched? And when?
There’s no logic between sin and safety, just a crack of flame between two dark eternities.
If we keep up our own undoing, our existence will be extinguished altogether—all together, all of us
together—much sooner than eventually.
The world will be wind. The world will be fire.