Collaborative

I partnered with two other Humesters – Kate Cross and Gaby Nahm – to create two illustrated poems about the relationship between bodies (and black bodies in particular) and the Earth. After Kate and Gaby wrote their poems, I drew scenes that came to mind as I read them.

—

I face an eternal ombré of blue—

Skies on top of streams flowing into seas.

Eternal? Once a certainty, now a question.

Darkened rivers, whitened corals, blackened future.

Things I don’t see…

So how can this be true?

I quench my thirst with water as clear as glass. 

I swim in rivers as blue as the sky.

I drive by endless fields of green, stretching for miles.

I climb the trees in my years, mow my grass. 

So how can this be true?

In black communities, they hydrate their bodies with tainted water—

Toxins from the waste dump seep into the well-water.

In indigenous communities, they nourish their bodies with toxic fish,

If the fish haven’t already been killed by chemicals dumped in rivers. 

In many minority communities, their bodies are flooded with harmful chemicals released into the air from toxic waste facilities, increasing the risk of cancer and 

long term harm to their bodies. 

Environmental injustice— this is how it can be true.

–Gaby Nahm

—

The heartlines in our hands all echo the cracks in the dirt

Paths we drew ourselves

The devastating beauty of the manmade as our mirror

And so there are bodies holding up the soil by their deathbeds

Dirt, dirt, and redlines filling with thick smog

Judge, jury, and executioner silent in the spring

My world different than theirs, these brown and black bodies

Closer in color to nature than I ever could be 

Watching their faucet drip umber from my ancestors’ papery hands

— Kate Cross