The Good Earth?

Sandra Steingraber On How We’ve Made The Environment Dangerous To Our Health

Cancer is definitely not a random tragedy. If you look at a map of the U.S. and plot out the incidence of different sorts of cancers, you see patterns. Some cancers are more common in the Midwest and the Great Plains. Other cancers tend to cluster around certain industries. Those cancer maps are not proof, but they present a compelling hypothesis. If we see, over and over again, that bladder-cancer rates are higher in counties with leaking toxic-waste dumps — which is indeed the case — then that’s a clue. If we see leukemias and lymphomas are highest in areas of the Great Plains and the Midwest where herbicide use is highest, that’s a clue. It means “Dig here. Further inquiry required.”

Two Days (Or, The Joys Of Being On Television)

I didn’t want to go, but my fiancée, Cora, insisted it would be good for me. She and I hadn’t been apart for more than a few hours at a time since I’d left the hospital, where my left arm had been removed after a car accident. Now I was to spend the weekend at a crippled-children’s camp.

The Bird At The Window

My mother’s pet pigeon, Birdy-Bird, is sitting outside the kitchen window on the ledge, pecking on the glass: tick-TICK-tick, tick-TICK-tick, tick-TICK-tick. This is his way of communicating that he wants to be let in. Now.

Constellations

I met Laura for the first time at the Department of Human Services. The police picked me up from the domestic-violence-intervention agency where I was working and brought me to the squat cinder-block DHS building. Rain poured steadily from the gutters onto the cracked concrete sidewalk.

The Sweet And The Salt

My maman told me the story of the olden days, when the sun was a sweet orange in the sky. All the days, she said, were buttery, the rivers ran rich like melted coin, and the people were happy as often as not. My maman, she told me that when the Troubles came, even God in his house could not help us, and he squeezed down on that orange sun, but the juice that should have been sweet, when it met this world, it turned to salt; it filled the oceans, and it came out of the people’s eyes.

Scars And Scales

The moon casts a pearl-colored path, and I, ducking into shadows, carry a platter of beef roast, so raw I can smell the blood, to the edge of the backyard swimming pool. Already Dad has reached the shallow end, and my younger twin brothers, Michelangelo and Leonardo — my mother had a passion for art — are not far behind. I coo to them; their tails move from side to side in anticipation.

Sparrow

What could the Bible mean / when it says no sparrow falls / without God’s notice?

New Year

Icy rain and wind outside; inside, my back’s / To the bedraggled human shape asprawl / On the comfy corner sofa at the Starbucks

Selected Poems

— from “An Encounter” | We met naked on the sun deck by the / clothing-optional hot springs, / and I saw the long scar / like a smile across his furred abdomen