Disaster workers in West Bengal yesterday. (Rupak de Chowdhuri/Reuters via Guardian) “internal displacement monitoring center
may i help you?” actually, there is such a place; and if you called, they’ll tell you that 55 million humans were internally displaced last year; more & more by storms & floods no surprise: ⅓ of guatemala prone to floods & mud- slides: almost 20k people affected this year alone; 71 chinese rivers already passed “warning levels” -- w/summer flooding season not even arrived last week, cyclone tauktae killed 155 humans in w. india; another week, another cyclone, this time in the east: > 1,200,000 human beings evac’d from low-lying grounds before cyclone yaas hit the coast w/95 mph winds, pounding rain, broken cables & uprooted trees; 20k mud huts & houses damaged or collapsed, 10m humans affected; tornado snaps power lines: 2 people electrocuted; trains cancelled; 6.5” rained overnight in parts of odisha; 200 bangladeshi villages inundated & if it's not the water, it's the fire: india issues twice the forest fire alerts april 1-14 as last year; moscow & st. petersburg went from snow to 90s f in 10 days; but if you think that’s hot . . . go to quatar, which just hit its may heat record: 118.6 f; but it’s not the heat, it’s — well, o.k.: it’s the heat: places getting uninhabitable, even as the s.w. u.s. desert desertifies more: “we have never seen drought at the scale and intensity that we see right now, and it is possible that this may be the baseline for the future,” sez the interior dept. official & if that weren’t enough, here’s something new: “sea snot” -- a swirling, viscous beige muck blanketing the surface of the sea around istambul; phytoplankton cause it; e coli infests it; & global heating spreads it; meaning, no fishing for you, fisher-folk, because no fish i, joseph, testify to everything i saw in the news feed & herewith chronicle for the future & attest that few in lawrence, kansas, usa were panicking: blue sky, light winds, mild temps: why worry?
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |