CLIMATE CHANGE CONTEST
This summer, we asked for your best small and mighty works that engage with the theme of climate change. We weathered storms, floods, and droughts to bring to you the best of the best.
These are the works saving our world.
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HONORABLE MENTION
Andrew Mobbs
“HAUNTED TIMBER”
Text source: “Ghost Trees,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website
Andrew Alexander Mobbs (he/him/his) is the author of the chapbook, Strangers and Pilgrims (Six Gallery Press, 2013). A Pushcart Prize nominee, he's grateful that his poems have appeared in the tiny journal, Frontier Poetry, New Delta Review, Bayou Magazine, and elsewhere. He co-founded the online lit mag, Nude Bruce Review, and he's currently pursuing his MFA at Oregon State University.
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THIRD PLACE
EMMA BOLDEN
“glut”
why make green the moneyed color
good for wishes, good for winning,
the fair-prize bush all year a forced bright
like spring kept screaming azalea, fuchsia,
aren’t you tired of the emphasis on more &
more & listen, there is a silence that can shatter
& build a world again, there is in every emptiness
an echo, even lulled so low & lonely there is
in nothing a something enough, an answer
like an imprint, like the name etched so deep
in the bark that the tree can’t remember it
as anything other than itself, there are
a thousand ways to linger, there are
a thousand ways we should not last.
“In America the summer stretches out”
its frantic signatures of heat, its frenzied greening, ungreening.
A starling interrogates the zero in her nest, which is itself a zero
built in the absence of a tree. Meanwhile we sow our fields
with buckshot, feeds our children to the mines. Meanwhile
the gutters rain guttural, meanwhile we bed flowers in the shape
of a flag, meanwhile we watch bullets pierce skin and then black out
our screens, we say too much, we say we work our feet too close
to the bone. All our stupid excuses, bright as wings. Outside a starling
sings and I know I’m supposed to ask him to wing his way into
the house of this poem, to show you beauty is the kind of resolution
to which the kind aspire. Dear reader. We are a country that invites
our selves to imagine ourselves as the kindness inside the machine.
Outside a starling sings and I tell you: when it comes to the nature
of beauty, we are the people standing far from its side.
Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. Her work has appeared in such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and the Greensboro Review. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an Editor of Screen Door Review.
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SECOND PLACE
TIEL AISHA ANSARI
“Antarctic Glaciers are like Old Men”
lying on the coast like old white men in beach chairs, arms behind their heads, heels dug into the sand to keep from sliding. Only now the water is rising, lifts them so their feet no longer touch bottom, like yours when you were small and tried to sit in grownup chairs. Now they’re like old men in a swimming pool, floating with elbows hooked over the edge. They sweat, fevered. Their
limbs crevasse and calve. They stare up into the relentless sky, a little puzzled, a little worried perhaps: how did I get like this?
Once I bowed at the foot of the Athabaska glacier because I was awed by the thought of all that time – time is what glaciers are made of, not frozen water. Time falling from the sky in endless accumulation, packing down into layer upon layer upon layer. Time is less substantial even than a snowflake, and yet there it was, a wall of solid time sloping down before me. The old men of Antarctica are drifting, white hair thinning away from their heads. Their flesh –cold white compacted time – gives up its memories. Ice-caves limned in sapphire and emerald,
floored with rock scraped from an unseen continent, collapse and melt. Now they’re skeletons, a scatter of giant bones on the face of the water. Ship-killer knucklebones, a metacarpal the size of Manhattan, vertebrae made of dissolving time. This extinction will leave no fossils.
Sufi warrior poet Tiel Aisha Ansari has been featured by Measure, Windfall, and Everyman’s Library. Her collections include Knocking from Inside, High-Voltage Lines, Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare’s Stable, The Day of My First Driving Lesson, and Dervish Lions. She hosts Wider Window Poetry on KBOO Community Radio.
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WINNER
MYRTH KILLINGSWORTH
“PRAISE TO THE PTEROSAUR”
The wildfire looms in the distance. Hard not to think of it as a beautiful monster, skin of technicolor clouds, a thousand tongues of flame, pure consumption. My car summits the ridge on the way to town, and the plume climbs the sky.
Orange light. Blue shadows. Eerie like an eclipse except without the cool. I wait at an outdoor table at the tap room for my friend and gape at the cylinder of smoke. I text my dad—
Me: Ah! Forest fire erupting like a fucking volcano. You okay? Is it the apocalypse?
Dad: I was on errands and got Siri to read your message. Very funny in that voice. Everybody okay up there?
Me: Lol. Yeah. I’m fine. Just wondering if we should be thinking about evacuating.
Dad: I’ve never been this close to a fire this big. SW wind still holding.
Me: I have when I worked for the park service, but only prescribed ones.
Dad: This was a prescribed burn too!
Me: True
Dad: Somebody fucked up
Me: It might have been Edwin L. Drake
Dad: …
Dad: Is that the first dude to drill for oil?
Me: Yeah.
Dad: (face palm emoji)
Me: Hey, is your Siri butch now? I updated, and now my phone’s targeting me, and it’s working.
Dad: Nah. They are femme.
Me: You use they/them for your machines?
Dad: Mainly for the home pod.
Now I picture Dad grabbing Siri, his “home pod,” when we have to evacuate.
The cloud morphs into something more like a mushroom cloud. Then the pillar shape of the old star trek transporter beam. Original series. Pyro cumulous. I say the word over and over again to distract myself. Thick gray clouds emerge from behind the iridescent softer clouds, the shape of a giant brain.
My friend arrives. She flings her arms to the crawling body of smoke. “Holy shit. You seen the Doom?”
I nod. We agree to stay outside and suck the smoke, because we don’t want to get COVID again.
Orange light. Blue shadows. The doom approaches, burning its way through the land. We talk about our problems. Making rent. Hating work. Tourists.
“The doom will solve it all,” I say.
“To the doom!” We cheers, our pint glasses frothing over their rims.
The sun sets and spins the Doom into cotton candy.
We hug goodbye and get in our separate cars. The cloud spurts upward, rockets like struck oil in the black and white photos before they’ve capped the well. Humans are uncapped wells sprouting blackness onto a silver gelatin sky. The empty fuel tank light flashes on my dash.
How are we still burning carbon?
Gray light. Black shadows. Fossil fuels. I pump gas into my car. The gas is dead Sequoia trees. It’s dead ferns. It’s dead dinosaurs. It’s sort of a prayer for me, to think of all the species I’m resurrecting in my internal combustion engine. I try to form it into a hymn, but can only get the start before the gas clicks off: “Praise to the pterosaur, algae old!” I climb back into my car, twist my key until the engine roars to life. I wonder if my blood will someday be used as someone’s fuel.
Gunmetal sky. The shape of a pterosaur births from the smoke cloud like a phoenix.
Myrth Killingsworth is a wild co-creator in an ecosystem of language.
She is a MFA candidate in Fiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts,
where she is an Asst. Managing Editor for Hunger Mountain Review. Myrth
lives in Northern New Mexico and is currently working on a novel about
electronic dance music and mushroom mycelium.
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SHORTLIST
“The Environmentalist” by Christine Arroyo
“Voice Recognition” by Christine Rhein