searching for a necropastoral Climate Solution

………………..

…………………………………….I learned Drink in a country of drought.
…………………………………….—Natalie Diaz

& I found it in a mouthful of plastic at the edge of the minimart
as American as not keeping promises: rewilding the 24-hour store,
which just means they now close at midnight or nothing matters

Taco Bell is never open when you need it, Colonial Pipeline
gets      hacked, and its citizens create a gas crisis in fear of
a gas crisis: or oil wells in Afghanistan,         or a spill, or muck

It’s me:            I want to stand on the next day, but we die all
at different times like it has always been.                  but now,
there is a tornado in Florida that almost steals our house

My House:
a footprint, a boatload of carbon just to sleep, propane existing
to stave off a hunger and the lost      receipt in the wind

2:42 there is nothing profound you said, nothing to quote you on
It becomes too easy to throw another going away party every day
the ground shifts or the subways flood or      Don’t you see?

may it be fear & anything but the sun blowing up or
a Few drops of rain—may it be drowning, or in Foucault’s
memory as a site of resistance, a fire that turns the sky red

and I get angry at the fitted sheet                   unfurling again,
to have a past to run from, the            7/10 12:43 p.m. hedonistic
comfort generation,    like standard school attire or uniform

a picket fence      bordered     by a green green lawn, a picket
is a soldier, a form of protest,             timely warning, the report
or wild glint of fossil fuel,       and I say I look better in the heat

anyways air bubbles sucked through its body, just by listening
& dead tigers now a tattoo on some arm, and burning burning
road trip written by a Swissman and a junkie, east of great plains

“Why are they half-abandoned on a hillside?” asks John Berger
and I quiver from injury, from cars, air conditioning, cows
from american             bully    pulpit, from reserve to power plant

To Move is to Dirty, To Move from the trash-filled street that
forgets & weathers, out of refuge to Come and Empty into earth,
while my grandmother drinks from a vessel older than she is

and younger than anything New: they were right! not Doom,
but we are sinking when we should hold out our hands, scoop
the dirt from the skins and the dead machines, itself a Body now

____

Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay is the author of the books this is our war (Penmanship Press, Brooklyn, 2016) and everything is always leaving (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, Kolkata, 2019), along with her latest poetry album release i don’t know anyone here in 2020. An Indian-born poet raised in Nashville, she was the first Nashville Youth Poet Laureate, finalist for the first National Youth Poet Laureate, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. With a Masters’ in Migration and Diaspora at SOAS, she is now a Masters’ candidate in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Find her work in Poetry Society of America, Nashville Arts Magazine, and Connecticut River Review, among others.