CLIMATE CHANGE
by Art Goodtimes
The petro- geomorphic freight train keeps chugging along dragging the ionosphere behind itki like a superhero cape caught on a junkyard Edsel
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Author’s Note: “Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates for using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of phenomena when speaking of objects in the natural world. The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.”
As a pre-school teacher I learned that we humans learn best by going through the known to the unknown. Instead of substituting “ki” for “it”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate.
Indeed, that syllable, “ki”, is a Potawatomi suffix meaning “from the living earth.” Thus, itki means that even what English sees as gender-neutral objects are in some sense alive.
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Art Goodtimes, poet, basketweaver, former preschool teacher and Green Party social activist, served as San Miguel County Commissioner (1996–2016) and Western Slope Poet Laureate (2011–2013). Poetry editor emeritus for Earth First! Journal, Wild Earth,and the Mountain Gazette, he is currently poetry editor for Fungi and Sage Green Journal.
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by Chad Parenteau
Trump, Kanye and a ghost of others who the former President has never seen without sheets. Also, Milo Yiannopoulos going Jews for Jesus slicing Semitic bits to trade for bodies of Christ. A pride of people fine to be on same side until not. And also, why this is bad for Joe Biden.
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Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His latest collection is The Collapsed Bookshelf. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Nixes Mate Review, and the anthology Reimagine America from Vagabond Books. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine.