Tag Archives: environment

#2612

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes I want to gather the rocky, pine-strewn mountains of northern California into my arms and croon, I do not blame you, oh land of my birth. I would hold them close like a parent aged fragile as a babe and swear, This was not your fault. You did not cause him to be taken from me, though it was in your heights the ending began. We are connected, even if this place is not the one that raised me, and our relationship should be one of love, not regret. I would sing to the scrub jays and coyotes, whisper tales to the granite boulders, lull the sun to slumber a little longer and hold off the day’s heat. Let there be peace between us, I would ask of those peaks. Your picturesque vistas will always hold as many joyful memories as painful; I will try to remember the beauty before and not the disaster which followed.

#2531

Posted on by
1

While the skies swirl with the gray storm-cloud nebulae of the approaching apocalypse, The Nameless cradles me in black tendrils of chaos that tingle against my skin like TV static. She calls me Her destroying angel and croons a lullaby about mankind’s destructiveness as I watch the skeletons of ancient beasts awaken to devour the Earth. Creatures created in a false god’s image, She sings, never still, never sated, so full of wrath and greed and misery. You brought this end upon yourselves and now it’s come for you, now it’s come for everything. The inky tentacles coil around me, creeping along my skin toward every orifice. My sweet destroying angel, haloed in disaster, now the end has come. As they cover my face I close my eyes, breathe in, and welcome the chaos into my body. The Nameless is right – we brought this upon ourselves. Why not embrace the end if doing so eases the pain?

#2491

Posted on by
Reply

Can you really blame the gods who saw what humanity had become and chose to just wipe the slate clean, start anew? Perhaps when Ra or YHWH or Zeus looked down upon an earth crawling with mortals they saw not present vices but future crimes; not idolatry and rebellion but nuclear war, global warming, and the creeping, inevitable extinction of every beautiful species they themselves created. Maybe the gods saw all that shit and thought nope, gotta get these guys the fuck outta here. Tell me, and be honest now, can you say with perfect certainty that you would not have done the same, had you been in their position? Or would you also send a worldflood or hungry war goddess to handle the situation in your stead? For the bees I might have. For the bees and ice caps and rainforests.

#2490

Posted on by
Reply

feel like i’m going crazy, i keep seeing absent ghosts everywhere, pseudo-specters, nothing-theres, whatever you want to call them, the empty spaces of missing trees that i could swear were there this morning but are gone now this evening, it’s like the city swallowed them whole while i wasn’t looking and left behind more vacancy, more vacuum, more v o i d . . .

or maybe there was never a tree right there in the first place and i’m just too obsessed with ecocide, maybe i’m going crazy from grieving all the trees i couldn’t spare the chainsaw, whole forests weighing on my conscience, i don’t know i just swear there was a tree in that space before and now there isn’t and i’m afraid that if i look away for too long there won’t be anything green left when i turn back

#2489

Posted on by
4

You cannibalize everything on Earth I value
so I cannibalize everything in myself you value.
You devour trees, swallow rivers
I abolish gender, rescind sexuality.
You consume precious resources
I deny you obedience.
You make the world
unsafe//unwelcome//unkind
so I make myself
unavailable//undesirable//unforgiving.
If you leave me nothing
I will give you nothing.
See? I can be a ravenous beast as well
but I won’t be the one that starves first.

New Zine – “turn to geology on your deathbed”

Posted on by
Reply

My 8th zine is here to rock your world! “Turn to geology on your deathbed“ is full of poetry, prose, and hand-drawn art celebrating the nature and lamenting our role in its destruction. Topics include geology, nature, disasters, climate change, environmental justice, and the burden of being alive in such a dark time. The work here is filled with grief, rage, awe, hope, and responsibility.

As always, you can find physical and digital versions of my zines in my Kofi shop! Physical copies are just $5 plus shipping and digital versions are free/pay-what-you-want.

https://ko-fi.com/onlyfragments/shop

#2482

Posted on by
2

Bees bob between moss-covered statues in Gaia’s forest garden, big fat bumblebees and tiger-striped honeybees all fuzzy as dandelion puffballs. Globs of golden pollen weigh down spindly legs so they must beat their translucent wings like mad to stay aloft in the warm spring air. I hold my arms out and they gladly alight upon me by the hundreds, settling onto skin and clothing and hair; they’re light as feathers to my sturdy human frame, just ticklish as they explore this unfamiliar blossom. The bees’ droning floods my mind and vibrates down to my bones until it drowns out every dark thought, eases every tensed muscle, even soothes my aching heart. I’m one with the colony and in harmony with the secluded garden around me. I carry this precious gift from the goddess with me when I wake, the memory of bees drifting lazily through beams of sunlight like giant dust motes a balm for my weary soul when I need it most.

#2479

Posted on by
1

“Olalla”

The river of time bends in its bed just north of here, leaving the Place of Many Berries nestled in the slower currents of its inner curve. The years have been kinder there, marked more by the growth of saplings into trees than the destruction of forests for cheap housing developments and box stores like everywhere else. The kingfishers still perch on telephone wires as they search for salmon fry in the estuary’s lazy waters; the stately heron still wades in the shallows and darts out his long neck to snap up a crab. The same decaying barns still gradually sink into the waiting soil and the same weathered fences still disappear bit by bit beneath encroaching blackberry vines. The beast of greed which devours this sleepy community’s larger neighbors has yet to turn its full ugly gaze on her bountiful woodlands, has yet to covet her velvety nights and clear, crisp mornings, and I pray it never has the chance. I pray society comes to its collective senses before bulldozers break the sacred ground of these fields sprinkled with wildflowers and tadpole ponds. This land grows children quick like deer, curious like crows, and generous as apple trees in autumn. Given a little more of time’s kindness it might raise enough generations of such honorable souls to slay greed’s beast for good – or if not, may it at least remain the last bastion of peace in our rapidly crumbling world. Hold on, home of my youth. We will try to keep you safe as long as possible.

#2442

Posted on by
3

You wax so poetic about the lives of cities, how hot pavement swells with each behemoth breath, subway arteries rushing with electric lifeblood; look at Paris and New York, Rome and Sao Paulo, oh what ancient beasts of civilization! Yet even the oldest cities are naught but animate skeletons, great slabs of concrete death laid out upon the graveyard of a once living land. You want real sentience? You want a consciousness so vast its leviathan architecture is incomprehensible to your human mayfly mind? Go to the country. Go to the wilds. Go to the green growing places where man has yet to fully intrude, where you can be surrounded by things which exist only for themselves and not your convenience or society’s continuity. Walk out into the fields at night; feel the weight of the darkness on your shoulders like a raptor descending, the cool serpentine scales of the silence as it brushes against you. Stare up at the sharp, distant stars which scorn to shine on the polluted corpse-cities and sense like all prey animals the true primordial awareness boring into you. Understand for the first time how very small and fragile and fleeting you are, here among the collective consciousness of a wilderness untamed. The city can kill you just as easily, of course, but when you die in the country they’ll never find your body.

#2437

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve carried the burden of extinction on my shoulders since I was a child, haunted by the sacred spirits of panthera uncia, tigris, and leo, by puma concolor and acinonyx jubatus, by the wailing specters of the burning Amazon and the melting Arctic. Even then I saw the irreversible trajectory of our folly and in the years since no amount of hope in mankind nor faith in divinity could shake that nihilistic certainty. I do not need cursed Cassandra’s terrible gift to know we crossed the point of no return long ago; we will never invent a technology capable of undoing the evils mankind has wrought, and certainly not in time to reverse the mass death we’ve set in motion. Even my childself, full of the dreams and promises of youth, understood the planetary genocide to which she’d bear witness in her lifetime.

Yet as I drown in grief I must remember my own words: turn to geology on your deathbed, it is the only science that can save you. When the ocean is clotted with orcinus orca’s ghosts and plastic shopping bags, it will still wear away continents and heave forth cataclysmic waves. When the mountains are littered with canis lupus corpses and abandoned solar panels, they will still cleave the sky and bury empty cities in eruptions of ash and mud. When every living thing is dead and we have finally committed the last of our species’ incomprehensible crimes, the earth will still remain. The planet will continue its endless cycles of upheaval and erosion, rupture and subduction, its titanic geologic metamorphosis, as if we had never been. Earth, at least, we cannot truly kill, no matter how hard we try.

#2200

Posted on by
Reply

You know, I almost hope unicorns don’t exist. Dragons, too, and fairies and gryphons and harpies, the grim and the sphinx, even ol’ Nessie; all those mythical creatures so rare and beautiful. I hope they’re not real, or at least that they’re long gone by now. That sounds terrible, I know, but think about the shape our world’s in. Do you want such fantastical symbols to exist on an earth we’re running to ruin? I’m not sure I could handle that; it might just be the very last straw. Imagine unicorns treading daintily over cracked concrete with plastic bags tangled around their shining hooves! Imagine kelpies coated in oil, their organs full of microplastics and chemicals! If our trash has made its way to the very farthest depths of the oceans, even onto the moon itself, then where can these legendary creatures possibly hide to escape our touch? Sure, some of them might survive in a polluted landscape – banshees, goblins, other assorted spooks – but not many. And anyway, even a banshee deserves a nice lonely moor to haunt, not some drained and cultivated piece of land with condos sitting on top. It would just suck, is all I’m saying, if we had such magical creatures in our midst and dragged them down with us. If all those unbelievable beings do exist, I hope they can at least get the hell out of here while the getting’s good.

#2191

Posted on by
Reply

These days I find myself longing for Mars. Not like a Bradbury character yearning for adventure, though, but more like someone skipping to the last page of a tense book to see what happens. Why? Because Mars is dead. Mars is a barren wasteland. Mars is red soil and orange rocks and not a single living thing, not even a drop of water, and that’s oddly comforting. Earth will be like that one day at the rate we’re going, so can’t I just pack up now and move to Mars where the end’s already come and gone? It’s the waiting that’s killing me, you know, it’s the anticipation. I know one day all the green places will be buried under cement and the oceans are gonna swallow us up in their acidic, plastic-laden waters, but when? When will the last bee perish from pesticide poisoning and throw our global food production into chaos? When will the last day pass during which we could ever breathe freely without face masks? When will the last polar bear go extinct, the last Amazonian tree be bulldozed, the last national park fall to the greed of big coal and oil? When? When? I just can’t take it anymore; roll the damn credits! I’m out. But at least there’s nothing on Mars we can fuck up very much, just rocks and dirt and dust as far as the eye can see in every direction. And I won’t have any memory of trees on Mars, so the view won’t bother me so. It’s better than waiting, at least, better than having to sit on the sidelines of the whole damn apocalypse. Take us to Mars, Ray. To Mars!

#2180

Posted on by
1

I am no wanderer. I feel no desire to travel far from home, to visit foreign lands or step foot on other continents. I am happy in the same state, the same rainy peninsula, the same ten mile radius of forest and water where I grew up and which I still call home. This place is where I want always to return at the end of the day and I ask no more than that. As I said, I am no wanderer. I am no wanderer, yet the land around me has changed so that I feel lost in this alien landscape. Forests razed to make way for shopping centers; picturesque waterfront blocked by million-dollar homes. Storefronts sit empty while commercial building continues to churn out box stores and parking lots and cheap cookie-cutter housing. The nights aren’t as dark, the stars aren’t as bright. Every season seems hotter and drier than the one before. Where am I? I did not leave my home, yet neither do I recognize this place.