From Issue 4.6 love bends / the mover: The Roy Miki Issue
for rm
the sunrise glinted off the skyscrapers. they held inverted mining
elevators, lifting consumers away from the ravaged earth – going
up or down in embedded grief1
i stood on the sidewalk inhaling the morning’s intrinsic value,
listening for flickers
one small step for humanity is taking one small step away from
the machine every day2
if you find yourself in a zero-sum game, choose the 4000
endangered glaciers over the 7000 satellites polluting the sky
love the lax’yip along with the friends of gitxsan & gitanyow who
see canada’s push for a fracked methane gas pipeline as the death
trap that it is3
capitalism is penny wise, pound foolish, as it gouges & torches the
earth in the name of a progress that is basically theft & arson at
industrial scale
my kingdom for relational intelligence, human intelligence that is
earth intelligence
a long history of british guns now translates into american-funded
drones & air strikes against palestindian families
i can’t unsee the attempted genocides in my lifetime
the names we know, and the ones we don’t, through the
unmarked graves of children killed in the torture chambers
euphemistically known as residential schools
history rhymes with technology’s crimes
the shifting baseline shudders under the latest military onslaught
ethnonationalist supremacy is a joke. the joke is not funny. fascists
laugh as they tear apart homes and hospitals, universities and
children’s bodies
thugs who steal and kill and bully and steal, they try so hard to
steal everyone’s joy, steal our power, but the people’s tender power
rises with the sun and shines with the moon
the ghosts of all those children that scare the deniers who need to
muster up the courage to face their own fears and pain
cornelius eady is proof we are enough
each morning the earth still sings as the sun rises above us,
habibis from the hummingbirds to the coyotes, those who
remember and love and mourn hind rajab, rachel corrie, shireen
abu akleh, refaat el-areer, as one of us
so many poets in mustafa’s cento
life’s orchestra under attack, in disarray from the tech barons,
but beloveds keep singing earth’s songs, picking up dropped lines,
stitching together what is left for those yet to come
sacred, trees hold just a perfect right to be. olive trees, cedar,
ginkgo, mulberry, and more
the human family’s unrecognized debt to the arboreal world
forests remake the world we want and need, in the face of a crisis
wrought by hundreds of years of colonization4
wind, water, sunlight, moonlight, are enough, leave the buried
ancestors alone
waving hello to the plankton who help us breathe
& raising our hands up to the student encampments while we’re at it
flotillas & fireweed for a livable present
tremble yet persist
- Acknowledging Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022) for this insight. ↩︎
- A good enough place to start is Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari (New York: Crown, 2022).
↩︎ - Unlike the sad premier of BC & the prime misery of Canada, placing us all in harm’s way with the PRGT pipeline and Ksi Lisims MAGA fracked gas terminal. See www.stopprgt.ca, www.gitanyowchiefs.ca, www.laxyip.com, and www.dogwoodbc.ca. ↩︎
- See Elastic Spaces Research Group’s panel “Thinking Aloud: West Coast Rainforest Activist Movements – Current Moments and Reflections on Decades of Activism,” held on March 14, 2023 at 4th Space, Concordia University, Montréal, https://www.elasticspaces.hexagram.ca/thinking-allowed-fall-2023-colloquium/west-coast-rainforest-activist-movements/. ↩︎
