Inlay

Denial: Oil Slick Spillage, Family Grade We’ve never seen the sea so flat and black. The tanker, like you, is long gone, too damaged to return. You leave our ecosystem petrified, from the drill-bits you bored us with and the crude oil fires you lit. We don’t realise, that to recover, we must decontaminate ourselves of you. Anger: Dali Bends Time For Me In the photo, I’ve no idea I’m lounging on Mae West’s lips, leather-cracked and red, eyes framed photos of Dali’s soul, Paris and Perpignon. I hold the undeveloped Polaroid, wanting to let go of reality, swearing on those lips that I’ll destroy it all, the golden-eggs, melting time, and Marilyn Monroe, until a tour-guide corrects me, a case of mistaken identity, he says. I discard the pills. There’s time to be reborn. Bargaining: Primordial Soup ‘How many times has life begun on earth?’ I ask. You answer, ‘About 117 billion times.’ I say, ‘Not human life, not homosapiens, not Adam, Eve, the snake, apple or tree, but the soup to create civilisations, that dying out imagine such myths?’ You answer, ‘So many it’s happening now.’ Depression: I Rain I rain days, flood waters carry me to land, where I lay in camouflage, run off, slip into darkness, watch sea levels rise, to take me on a wave, make me buoyant, uplifted in evaporation, to peak in condensation, head in the clouds, until once again, I rain. Acceptance: Neptune Grass My family tree is underwater, a single ancient organism, roots anchoring shoots, spreading over hectares and years, growing into seagrass meadows, floating fields of flowers, and fruit, olives of the sea, Neptune grass rising like rainforest reefs, protecting our ecosystem, birthing a future, a new reality, pollution free, for our land-bound progeny and our tiny seeds of hope. --- Rosaleen Lynch is an Irish community worker, teacher and writer in London with work selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net and is currently exploring the power of stories to promote social change.