CW: none.
I grew up in rural and remote areas across Canada, and have travelled the world, witnessing both willful and incidental destruction of ecosystems. Until I became too disabled to continue, I marched with Land Defenders in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en over the Canadian government’s and Coastal GasLink’s continued desecration of their sovereign territory. This poem was written in response to the LandBack movement and as part of the brainstorming process for my unpublished cli-fi novel The Everwhen.
I fear they will never stop being born,
that the labour of the world is never-ending.
Spasm after spasm,
go go go!
Forced birth pangs of great celerity,
speeding through the earth’s skin and muscle,
tearing open cracks in the landscape like
a self-administered episiotomy.
Mother earth screams as frack holes
carve wounds into her most intimate areas,
fistulas pouring forth fluids
like a gouting tear in her carotid.
Amputate her mountains.
Bone marrow biopsy from her rocky mantle,
that slab of coal-streaked shale is a steak
carved by a bargain butcher.
Dive into her magma and emerge
from the burning birthwaters,
slide high into the sacred stratosphere and
look at what ruin her most self-serving children beget.
Do you kiss your mother with that mouth, child?
Do you kiss your mother at all?
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Shantell Powell
Shantell Powell is an Indigiqueer swamp hag/elder goth who grew up in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid. She is an alum of the Banff Centre for the Arts, The Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, and the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. Her writing appears in Augur Magazine, Solarpunk Magazine, The Deadlands, On Spec, and more. She’s an Aurora nominee, a Brave New Weird winner, and Dystopian Fiction Competition winner. Her TBR pile is decades old and bound to kill her if it falls. When she’s not writing or making things, she wrangles chinchillas or gets filthy in the woods. Find her at shanmonster.dreamwidth.org.
