bright shards of sea-worn credit cards

"The Future of Nature" Earth Day stories

Dear friends,

“The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem. It was organized by Claudia Befu and Julie Gabrielli, and supported with brilliant advice from scientists JD Tonkin and rebecca hooper. To participate in and spread the word about this great project, I’ve decided to share my poem “Bright Shards” which recently appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of the EcoTheo Review published by the EcoTheo Collective. You can find all the stories as a special Top In Fiction Disruption edition, with thanks to publisher The Happy Place.

Some of you OG subscribers to this newsletter will recall that Bright Shards was its first title. When I chose it, I was thinking of this poem, and ways of seeing the complicated, compromised, but still present beauty in the ruins of what we’ve wrought.

Here is the poem.

---

Bright Shards

In the future there will be no 
internet.  Fish the likes 
of which we’ve never seen
will drift in formation over gabled 
roofs where birds once flew
in undulating Vs. Calls will come 
and go by breeze. No money,
either. Just windfalls 
of apples and leaves. In the future 
insects will sing their vast 
chattering wave, and the waves 
will crash in rhythm until, 
eventually, time dissolves 
the poisons. Bright shards 
of sea-worn credit cards 
mosaic the beach in unintelligible 
patterns. The future knows 
no center, no margin, no page. 
The headless table will seat 
no king. Take heart, my love, 
for the glaciers grow back also. 
Newly ancient and clean. 

---

I hope you’ll head over to Top In Fiction to read all of the Future of Nature Stories this week for a glimpse at the many ways that we can imagine future relationships with earth.

Meanwhile, for those of you in North Carolina, you’re invited to A Reading for the End of the World at the Shadowbox in Durham (2200-D Dominion Street) this evening, 7-10pm, at which I’ll be reading “Bright Shards” among a few other other poems. This will be a banger of an event with twenty local poets of many backgrounds and styles coming together to “read into our shared apocalypse.” I’ll be reading in the first hour of the three—second from the top I believe! I hope to see you there.