8.17

Kate Foran

Hartford Climate Strike

After the speeches and chanting and rallying cries for action, the climate strike ends with a die-in. I shove the cardboard sign your sister scrawled for you, Old enough to save the planet under my head. You lie down andflip andflop around, engineering a position for your body on my stomach, and then you sit up again and look around at the crowd of kids skipping school and the hobby protestors. In the quiet everyone hears your urgent sotto voce, I’m ready to be all done now. I hush you and say A few more minutes.

Eleven to be exact, one for each year

before the damage becomes irreversible. You will be fourteen then. You busy yourself with the grass on the Capitol lawn.

Mom, you hiss, releasing handfuls on my shirt. I pulled the grass out and I can’t get it back in.

The easy late September sun glints off the Capitol gold dome. Below the streets runs the Hog River, long ago denied and buried.

Alex MacConochie

Advent 2016 in Newport News, VA

Anthracite, piled at the river’s gray blank edge: a mountain’s Form remembered here, at last without complexities and small Enough to comprehend. Dull soldier of a concrete dawn.

Self-satisfieddemandforvalue, function—spurtingflame An essence rain-wet boulders, darting jays and fungi white On hollow logs cannot obscure—the stalled conception

Of our paralyzing now. Death’s legacy, blind power As a promise of light: heavy, still simplicity the living Have no answer for but rising, urgent in decay.