This reading list of poems, essays, and stories published by CLMP member magazines includes writing about nature, the climate crisis, and more.
Essays
“From the Oldest Forest in Montana” by Rick Bass
Orion Magazine
I had to go into the old forest seventy times before I heard it speak, and then it was only one word, urgency.
“A Good Prospect: Mining Climate Anxiety for Profit” by Nick Bowlin
The Drift
Four billion years ago, our planet was a restive place, full of geological commotion. At the earth’s center, a molten metal core began to coalesce, while heat and radioactive energy kept large swaths of the surface liquid.
“What It Feels Like to Live in ‘Satan’s Ashtray’ During Smoke Season” by Aaron M Brown
Open Secrets Magazine
We never used to have a smoke season. I was raised in the Inland Northwest and I can think of only a handful of times when the smoke clung in the air over the Mid-Columbia Valley where I grew up.
“The War on Ecoterror: Environmental Radicalism, Left and Right” by Gaby Del Valle
The Drift
On August 3, 2019, after driving through the night from his grandparents’ house in the Dallas suburbs to El Paso’s east side, Patrick Crusius took a moment to say his goodbyes.
“Cold Comfort: On Learning to Love Cold-Water Swimming” by Asya Graf
Open Secrets Magazine
The waves pick us up and drop us like they do the rafting gulls, like we too are made of buoyant feather and bone. The gulls are unfazed and judgy about our swimming.
“All Our Relations” by Jeanine Pfeiffer
Bellevue Literary Review
It is midsummer and the hummingbird feeder is sucked dry.
I take it down, scrub out the crystallized sugar at the base with a toothbrush, and refill it with fresh sugar water, something I sardonically refer to as “hummingbird crack.”
“Colony Collapse” by Lee Horiksohi Roripaugh
Terrain.org
Late 2022 and petulant billionaire blowhard Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter’s just been reluctantly finalized. The platform’s all stirred up and buzzing.
“Conversations in the Haze: A Delhi Park” by Chesta Wadhwani
Another Chicago Magazine
The season’s first chill embraces walkers as they cover the mud paths in the middle of the lush, green forest that is the Arun Jaitley Park in Delhi.
Poems
“Chafing in Crown Heights” by Ashia Ajani
ANMLY
mira, if you take the climate crisis too personally, you’ll never be happy again. what white
women call climate grief, I call the ghosts of colonialism come to reclaim uninherited earth.
“A Portfolio of Collaborative Writing” by Zachary Bartles
Tupelo Quarterly
Evening. She sets out. Behind her, the trodden-on marsh hay redresses like a timelapse of its growing.
“Fertile” by Kai Coggin
Bellevue Literary Review
I have so much
dirt
under my fingernails from gardening
so much thick soil
new mooning black
“Love in its Seasons” by Nardine Eldalil
Wellspringwords
Thousands of snowflakes
descend gracefully from a winter sky
Each presenting itself as its very own
I gaze upon them all
“Spiritualism” by Nathan Erwin
manywor(l)ds
Past the narrows to Upper Canandaigua, I was drowning.
Water flooded my mind
praying for a story of recovery to be written on its surface.
“Aubade for the Anthropocene” by Caitlin Ferguson
Colorado Review
Outside, a tree, dried out & skeletal, moans. Dead
in spring. The roots can’t find water. It’s May,
the city isn’t greening anymore, & trees are sick
“Crows” by Carole Greenfield
Epistemic Literary
Raucous ballet of dark birds, cries sawing at the cold air,
flapped in staggered sequence, landing of one a cue for the next
“Flood and Fire and Bureau Drawer” by Rachel Hadas
The Hudson Review
The Water Andric, once a slender thread
flowing clear and brown, is now a flood,
white water carrying downed trees along.
“Sweepings” by Jennifer Handy
The Closed Eye Open
the bear walks ever backward
sweeping up its tracks
“The Great Return” by Lucy Murrell
manywor(l)ds
Stuck,
in the green hills—
alien and unforgiving—
“Perigee” by Steven Pan
The Cincinnati Review
Today the Perseverance picks up evidence of water
on Mars. Scaled to Earth’s geography, a body
large enough to be called an ocean.
“Rain . Forest” by Lia Pas
Epistemic Literary
large pines, branches heavy with needles & cones
wait in their weightiness
hang in the wetness
“Love Song in the Breeze” by Niara Perry
Wellspringwords
You will never know
How the trees whisper when you’re gone
Unless you move still enough to trick them
“Mycelium” by Lucinda Pinchot
The Closed Eye Open
Please leave me
to this patch of dirt,
this dark potential
that appears as grit and loam
“To Draw a Body of Water” by Alycia Pirmohamed
Tupelo Quarterly
The artist asks me to think beyond my nostalgia, beyond the
insular, tiny thing I thought was important, which was the
ephemeral quality of this lake that I think exists and my small
“Late Summer Eclogue” by Jessica Poli
Tahoma Literary Review
Let the tomatoes go to rot.
Let crickets and satin moths reign.
Nights, now, I draw the field shut
behind my eyes.
“12/9” by Kate Schapira
ANMLY
Stayed
with 2 climatologists and they walked me through
multiple scenarios. All very stark. I won’t
describe for you because I worry what
you’ll do if I do.
“last summer i dug two graves i hope never to fill” by John Sibley Williams
The Hudson Review
forgive me / i say to the haloes together we crayon
around the heads of each dying bird / dropped by distant
wildfires onto the lawn / & our ungentle sweeping away
of the tainted honeycombs / the bees know never to return to
Short Stories
“Tree Worship” by Pearl Abraham
The Fabulist
Weekends he is outside, tending trees, shrubs, the gardens, the rooted things that stay in place, stationed on the land, as he is not. Rootedness a thing of the past.
“The Pipeline” by Venezia Castro
Adi Magazine
From Túxpam de Rodríguez Cano, on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, to Tula de Allende, more than 300 kilometers inland, flows an underground river of toxic amber.
“Do You Want Green or Red?” by Tommy Cheis
Another Chicago Magazine
As we huddled in the high school football bleachers, wind raked the stadium with the sickly sweet tang of burnt leaves and fog shrouded the lights.
“Loss and Damage” by Bryna Cofrin-Shaw
Colorado Review
The first time Maria ever spoke to me directly, we were somewhere over the North Atlantic on a red-eye to eastern Europe.
“Before We Knew It Was the End of the World” by Lindsay Ferguson
Epiphany
Back when we used to watch those movies—when it was only just the movies—I never told you just how often I imagined surviving a dying earth with you.
“Westley and the Wood Ways” by Larry Flynn
Terrain.org
Take note of this particulate physical space, this open patch of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, this pocket of air between elm and spruce, this perceived emptiness not higher than five feet above moss growth on the log below.
“What We Yield” by Tom Gammarino
Tahoma Literary Review
When the king tides flooded Waikīkī and box jellyfish floated along Kalākaua Avenue, I failed to understand that it had anything to do with me. But two years later, when the number of applicants to the private high school where I was principal had declined by nearly fifty percent, I began to feel the stings.
“Fire Season” by Emily Kevlin
Ecotone
All morning it is night.
The children stand at the window, gazing out at the rust-colored sky. They wiggle like wind-up machines, ticking out their excitement.
“Blackout” by Siobhan Lyons
The Fabulist
It was the third summer of blackouts when the jellyfish first emerged from the seas at night.
“Detour in the Canopy” by María Ospina
Translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary
Adi Magazine
The journey is southward and also ascending. Accompanying the jungle as it climbs the first buds of the cordillera. Rising along the impatient layers from deep in the earth that have stretched to scrape the heavens for thousands of years.
“Notes from Underwater” by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
The Cincinnati Review
She’s a healthy mussel. . . . She’s a wicked mussel. She’s a sliver of the liver of a river whose liver is sick. An ugly river, voluble with its complaints. I had this story from precisely such a river.
