“Climate Grief” by Gabrielle Martin

Climate Grief

It is March still in the small of my back
and my eyes are reeling—
too many trees flash by like wounded corpses,
too many roads for flooding,
too many miles and I have to slow the car down.
When the fires finally come, will those trees still be standing?

The decay is slow but everyday—
history doesn’t afford
much sympathy to dying empires,
the tomatoes growing
like beacons in my windowsill
less hobby
and more necessity
with each day.

I don’t know how to tell you
that I wish I couldn’t read—
that I wish I could empty out my mind,
pour it out, pour it out
and out, rinse it until the water
is clear and my brain is smooth
and I don’t smell smoke
under every floorboard.
Learning hasn’t made me happy,
only joined me to the Griefsong,
bound me to this collective burning:
rejoice O God,
for what a mess my people have made.

I take my ego and crush it,
I take my space and make it small,
I take my grief and write a poem about it,
bundle it up and hide it in my bra.
Maybe I don’t even want that anymore.

You see, my love, I adore the way
leaves shine in the sunlight
and crunch in the fall,
I am enamored with dirt-gray snow.
I caught a fly and just watched it,
then crushed a mouse under my heel
and felt nothing.

Someone should have prepared us
for all this, this necessity of life,
the fact that I wear jeans sewn with blood
and a womb I’d tear out with my teeth,
but I also see the blinding blue blue sky shuddering
every single day.

A storm rages outside.
I consider my takeout container,
how smooth and warm it is.
Dead like water isn’t, still like rabbits aren’t.
Stained from reuse,
it cracked on the wood floor
when I dropped it.
It was alive once.
I consider the transformation, how many things
it was and is and could be.
I lean in close,
run my tongue along the cracked plastic,
taste tectonic bodies swimming
away, away in a million years of rust.
I toss it in the trash.

The power is out.
I sit powerful in the light of candles
casting warm ceaseless light somewhere else
but the surplus is sent here,
my skin laps it up.
I like the reminder, to see nothing
in detail but the pores on my skin,
to be calmed by firelight.

I brush my teeth and my fingers are spiders.
My belly twists, my toes flexed.
You ever make eye contact with yourself?
Fucked, isn’t it. Your eyes look at you
and see you, your nose and chin and the way
the light catches your glasses and
is sent screaming out, out angular and trapezoiding
through the space like a demon
and your pupils are neither here
nor there and your too-big nose
(the family nose) is tossing you like a lover,
and you regard yourself and think
“oh, I see”
and file this away as the self
God must see when They look upon your soul:
neither one thing nor another, genderless,
inhuman Thou staring levelly at something
either a smile or seduction
or probably both.