9
Dysclimate
by Jennifer Wolfe
PRIZE: BEST WRITING ABOUT AN ISSUE
A snakeskin of road, rushing of tyres That wind through the land of wildfires Too hot to breathe, to scream and cry Fenced away we quietly die. Schools of plastic sail empty seas: Bags, bottlecaps, parts of SUVs, Held together with chains of zipties Succeeding millennia fail to prise Roughened, the broken nails of time Scratch markless through the microgrime. Axes, chainsaws, guns and blades Chop and fell, over countless decades Soon the only trees left in the land Are the metal pylons by which it is spanned.
