somewhere in New York, a woman collects
our dreams—*
ear-tags our fleshy sleeping psyches and lines
them in neat taxonomies on her shelf
in mine, the bees have gone extinct and the fish
have sunk to mud and the backbones of
our ecosystems have collapsed under human weight
we wake to burnt skies, ash like snow, cracked earth,
oceans sinking the heat of five atomic bombs—
ghost crops of maize and wheat, the traces
of more-than-human histories through which
everything is made and unmade
we have turned biota to spectre—haunted ancient
landscapes
the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, Ediacaran
Australia whose moon was far brighter than our own
the tick, tick, tick of deep time
we have sold out companion species for transient comfort,
for dreamworlds of progress—butchered
our Holocene entanglements
here is the debris of capitalist waste,
the unspectacular afterlives of discarded things**
we slept through its beginning, my body
wrapped in yours—
our balcony blanketed in November snow and
stillness—city soundwaves travelling
shorter distances
Notes
*Martha Crawford, a therapist based in New York, has collected and compiled dreams about climate change for her Climate Dreams Project.
**From Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene.Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, Editors
Hana Woodbridge (she/they) is a graduate student at Concordia University and an emerging eco-poet in Tiohti:áke (Montréal). Her artistic work is a mixture of memoir and eco-literature—spanning waterways, climate change, multispecies relations, and her own personal experiences. When she isn’t conducting her research or writing poetry, Hana can be found taking film photographs or spending time in nature.
