Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
“America’s natural wonders are our nation’s heart and soul. They unite and inspire us, and connect us to something bigger than ourselves. From his first day in office, President Biden has taken historic steps to protect, conserve, and restore them. He set our nation’s first-ever national conservation goal to protect at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030, including by supporting locally-led, voluntary efforts. Today, he is on track to conserve more American lands and waters than any President in history – over 41 million acres so far, including dozens of new national monuments, wildlife refuges, and other protected areas, from the Grand Canyon to the Great Lakes.”
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World Endings
After Sylvia Wynter
I hope this finds you well. I hope this finds you dancing. I hope the water of Lake Michigan knows the water of your body like kin. I hope there is soil under your nails, that the light of necessary fires burns luminous in your corneas. The Mayflower was a ship built of wood like all the others. The fungi must have their feast. I hope this finds you toppling statues. I hope this finds you ripping up pipelines. I hope for the light of your necessary fires. His theories are made of paper—the worms must have their soil. You know him, but he doesn’t know you. stomp until it become dance. stomp until it be. come dance.¹
¹The final three lines are from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “Dub.”
Fingerprints
At the jail they fingerprint my thumbs first, then index fingers, then the last three, then my palm, then the sides of my hands and they roll, roll, roll—
to get the edges of the pattern as it meets my wrist and they put it all in their computer, a unique ID to deny me things in the future, to set an example or something—
but I was born in a long line of creatures
stretching to the oceans, deep in those trenches, each of us a varying pattern in a constellation, and when we began to take a form with fingers, each fingertip and palm was different, every single one, and more and more and more kept being made—
my mother got her palm read once, had someone study her grooves and valleys, a story that flashes past my mind as the green light blinks to add my biometrics, my fingers, my pattern, my billions of years straining, my throbbing life re-making itself differently with each gasp of emergence, my hand, my fingers, that hold, that push, that punch, that break, stilled into this machine that feeds on my hum, on the stretching of the ancestors—
what is taken is captured
what is captured is catalogued
what is catalogued is circulated
They believe in their own success. The machines don’t break, keep blinking green, accumulate sweat as hundreds of hands press together. The cold eye of the camera aims at me and they ask me to remove my mask. I stare beyond it, breathing in their oxidizing arrogance. Their buoyant naiveté. When the camera clicks, I am dead-eyed but smiling.
They believe they can pause the ever-sprawling being and freeze it in time.
They believe they can split the body from its history.
They believe they can rupture the eternal chain that breathes into them, moves through them, decays them, stretches onward from their bones.
On growing more conservative with age
I beset the doors of that room with barricades.
god gave me these years so I could learn
to make and crave fire.
The more air I breathe—air of burning forests, of reoccurring genocides, of bombs primed and prepped in my corner of dying lands—the deeper I sink into the earth.
At thirty I am still being split, a knife slicing through melon. I am taking friends and lovers with me. Our forces multiply with ancestors. We are returning to something: flesh that can accommodate pain but not betrayal.
A new world coming. I am staring at the crescent as it grows.
My rage and I merge the way rainclouds do, tumbling into each other until we burst. On cold nights we taste the stars to come.
praise the waters
praise the thickets that obscure us on the enemy’s scopes
praise the old growths that survived this world and are going to the next one
praise the ones who shape the wind with their voices
singing far so that our dead can hear us
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Nisha Atalie is a poet, editor, educator, and creature in a constant state of becoming and unbecoming. Some of her inspirations include Lake Michigan, her pup Moti, the moon, and friends and comrades—human and otherwise. Her biggest inspiration is the ongoing, centuries-long struggle to decolonize the world and uproot racial capitalism. Nisha is based in Chicago, on occupied Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi land.
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Jury S. Judge is an internationally published artist, writer, poet, and cartoonist. Her “Astronomy Comedy” cartoons were published in Lowell Observatory’s publication, The Lowell Observer. She was interviewed on the television news program, “NAZ Today” for her work as a cartoonist. Her artwork has been widely featured in over one hundred and thirty-five literary magazines, including the covers of Blue Mesa Review, 3 Elements Review, Glass Mountain, and Levitate. She has also been interviewed by Streetlight Magazine and The Antonym. She received a BFA from the University of Houston-Clear Lake in 2014. In addition to art and photography, her passions include hiking and traveling to exciting, new destinations.
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