We are making the Earth uninhabitable for ourselves and those that live most like us, but we are not making the Earth uninhabitable for itself.   ichigan really does feel like home. Some sense of longing in me is quenched by the Lake, the rivers, and the leaves just turning red. The dune grasses on the sides of the highway billow through my bones. I see the image of a Sandhill crane moving through them. I hear the song that […] The post Why I Do Not Worry About the Earth appeared first on Terrain.org ..read more

    lames climb trees like circus performers on rope. Each inhale burns deep into his stomach and the heat leaves no space in his mind to consider escape. He imagines the gallons of water in his pack evaporating, his tongue scorching like the earth, his skin blackening. Around him, people are yelling orders, reminding him of something, but the roar of the fire and the crash of branches to the ground are all he hears. And then, even then, […] The post On Fire appeared first on Terrain.org ..read more

Friends, These are hard, hot days in many ways. Here in the Upstate of South Carolina, wedged between the Blue Ridge northward and fractured Piedmont rolling south towards the coast, the thermometer rises to inhospitable. No matter where one stands terrain-wise, the summer sun’s relentless rays seem ever intent on beating us into submission. My sweat, sweats with little relief to be had except in the confines of air-conditioned consumption. I seek wildness always as respite, but it’s hard to […] The post Why J. Drew Lanham Supports Terrain.org appeared first on Terrain.org ..read more

In the Beginning After Donika Kelly’s “In the Beginning”   In the beginning, there was only this lake pounding harsh against the jagged rocks— this brutal beating below bark shadowed blue by afternoon waves. The wind blows frigid against my uncovered ear tips, as the birch’s roots lie upturned, body moss-covered— new flesh forming in her finality. Flat cedar branchlets parallel the horizon; their fallen needles soften my steps on this forest floor. I taste their burnt smell in my […] The post Three Poems by<br> Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake appeared first on Terrain.org ..read more

All My Life I Never Once sliced into a pomegranate. It was delivered to me open and pretty— turned up pithy with fresh juice just starting to soak the inner white flesh— all I can ask now is why, why wasn’t I given any fruit (but most of all this fruit) to hold in my hand with all its potential? Still, I will buy a lone ruman when in season and leave it unopen. Watch it shrivel to a dry […] The post One Poem by Majda Gama appeared first on Terrain.org ..read more

Becalmed City, Hong Kong The ultra-modern train pulls into the station smooth as an informant’s gloved hand. Former newsrooms, union halls, and student clubs have all been shuttered, even teashops are quiet. The city’s topography is unchanged, streets, parks, bus lines, a far-flung prison no one believes was built for them. At the press conference the ministers of justice appear well-rested, friendly reporters yawn. But in the wee hours the homeless emerge from underpasses, the accused write long letters in […] The post Three Poems by Pui Ying Wong appeared first on Terrain.org ..read more

Souvenir our piecemeal world. life stitched together from unravelling. the stone pulled from the bed of the river. polished by forgetting. wool or pelt a diminishing. what warms us? remember how the cat hates its coat rubbed against the grain? that was in my last letter. it may have been removed. I think of him often. the feathers loose on his lips. we scour foreign language for the right way to say I’m not coming back or at least all […] The post One Poem by Michael McLane appeared first on Terrain.org ..read more

  The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.   – Jennifer Wenzel, How to Read for Oil The identification of the harmony between the particulate and the planetary is a necessary condition for meaningful life in the Anthropocene.   – Malcolm Sen, “Godhuli,” An Ecotopian Lexicon   […] The post Westley and the Wood Ways appeared first on Terrain.org ..read more

  When Someone Scratches a Swastika Onto a Stall in the Boys’ Bathroom the Anti-Defamation League holds an assembly in our auditorium. After explaining who they are and why they’ve come, they show our students photos of kids their age on the big screen and ask them to determine, based on the photos, who they think would be a bully, a jock, a nerd, who looks like someone they’d want to sit with at lunch. (They do not ask students […] The post Letter to America by Joan Kwon Glass appeared first on Terrain.org ..read more

  Lawn Chairs The marine weather radio reports visibility in percentages. To hear this from shore means little, but on the water in the fog (even with GPS) a truth is revealed: you are not where you thought you were. There can be a sense of disorientation proven through daily squandry until something out of the ordinary— good or bad, like the breathless call of an osprey or the chimes of glass across the floor—slow or stun us. Sun and […] The post Two Poems + Paintings<br> by Sarah Platenius appeared first on Terrain.org ..read more