1.1 / ENVIRONMENTAL FUTURES

Several weeks ago, in the midst of making my final selections for this folio, I was walking around my neighborhood in Tallahassee when I watched a blue jay plummet from the sky. It resembled a colorful paper airplane, wings outstretched and rigid, unflapping and still, falling to the concrete sidewalk like a violent projectile.

  _______ Roger Camp is the author of three photography books including the award winning Butterflies in Flight, Thames & Hudson, 2002 and Heat, Charta, Milano, 2008. His work has appeared on the covers of numerous journals including The New England Review, Southwest Review, and Vassar Review.

  You hear one degree. You hear Fahrenheit.

  There’s a man who cares for the last snail of its kind, Achatinella apexfulva, knows precisely how much moisture, shade and light it needs to thrive while it spends its dwindling time in a glass cabinet.

  Another Bed in Hell’s Ocean You first find Hell’s ocean on the seabed, two feet planted on its bubbling and grainy surfaces. Perhaps if one could glimpse the waters from the horizon, no one would jump in, thirst quenched.

  Sahana biked to our first date. I remember seeing her bike grow larger and larger on Chapel Street. Her bike was dark green and her bike’s handles were soft, cruelty-free leather. I remember Sahana descended wearing a cool blue snapback instead of a helmet.

  The day you and your dad find out you’re both pregnant is the day the last of the leaves fall from the trees. The whole world, all of a sudden, loses its cover, the jades and emeralds of the generous seasons, the golds and vermillions of the lean ones.

  This is where our wealth haunts the earth— bulldozers leveling back to dirt, frayed comforters, pieces of faces ripped from family photos, mancala marbles clanging at the bottom of a black bag with dull spoons & a steel urn sanctifying mounds of past hope.

My father, a former truck driver, didn’t rely on the wirebound Thomas Guide map books that Angelenos kept in their cars with their spare tires and emergency flares. He knew Los Angeles by its hills, gorges, streams, oilfields, lowlands, and valleys.

  Jaden Gongaware is an MFA student from Pittsburgh, PA studying poetry at Florida International University. She earned her undergraduate degrees from Carlow University, where she joined the Madwomen in the Attic workshop group and worked as an open-mic emcee for the Red Dog Reading Series.

  Thank you for the opportunity to submit to the Golden Records anthology to be encoded and shot into space with the Sojourner Space Probe of November 2059. I am specifically responding to the call for applications from Illegal Aliens residing in the New South Territories but seeking asylum.

Spring. My son rushed off the solar tractor and into the shoulder-high brown grass. He stumbled over a tussock but kept running until his head was just a blond tassel. He waved. “I feel it, Mom! Just like they said we would! These are our fields.

  Earth Conjures a Spell for Centralia     Earth Conjures a Spell for Fracking ______ Amanda Hodes is a writer and sound artist. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and is currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech.

I know Leader loves us all, but I like to think he loves me most. “What do you need?” he asks, his voice rough. “Tell me I’m your favorite,” I whisper. He hugs me close, my cheek pressing into the wiry hair of his chest.

  “The United States dropped more bombs — 635,000 tons — on North Korea than in the whole Pacific Theater during World War II, including large quantities of its new incendiary weapon, napalm.

Every Summer, A Murder of monarchs flocks the roads of Oregon. Thousands thud on the windshield or stuck to the grate of my low blue truck hell-bent on getting home.

Each year, instead of being harvested, twenty billion pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables languish in fields and farms.