Every piece of plastic ever created still exists.
The man in the television is telling my father about the many ways the world is ending
While my mother reads a book on the couch.
Everything is more complicated than I thought it was going to be.
Every clothing brand bleeds a different country dry.
My cell phone batteries are stained with blood.
I grew up in a coal town
Where the signs shouted smoke into the air
And the cars choked the summer highways like locusts.
It is so hard to hate the mines when they feed almost everyone I know.
It is so hard to save the world without putting my best friend’s father out of a job.
I used to stride through the clean air of the mountains.
Now I keep finding beer cans along my old trails.
This is the warmest winter we have had, my grandfather comments
For the third year in a row.
Oh Canada,
Our home and
(on)
Native land,
Land of kindness and healthcare.
My sister’s $300 glucose monitor
(changed every ten days)
Will only be paid for
(funded by oil money)
Until she turns eighteen.
I do not believe that I will ever buy a house.
I cannot afford organic fruit.
I cannot afford handmade clothing.
I do not know how to care for the earth I stand on in any meaningful way.
The plastic covers from my sister’s insulin needles pile up in the waste container.
We have changed to paper straws.
Two years ago on asphalt slick with black ice,
I crashed my car to avoid hitting a doe crossing the road.
She survived, she ran away
Into the coulees to live a life unburdened by machinery.
It seems that something is always dying,
Some impact is required.
There is no choice that I can make that will not result in pain.
If not the deer, the highway guardrail.
If not me,
Then someone else.