Cyanotype of a Burning World
White shadow glows on dark blue wash,
a negative space where life once was.
Blank space in collective memory—
our gorgeous extinction event.
Grass glows arsenic
green beneath smoke-
sepia skies and oil spill holds
prism break upon the pave.
Slippery rainbows in poison puddled.
Lives become primordial plankton
tar-tucked into oil
sand beds fueling
a rich man’s future.
Hope is a thin-shelled egg
on our pale blue dot
belly ripe with child
flower gone to seed
pine cones on a dying tree.
Weeds
We were told to deodorise our flowers,
as though flowers require such things.
And brainwashed and believing,
we spent hard-earned money on
what ended up being herbicides.
We sprayed our blossoms.
They withered.
Petals cracked.
Stamens oozed,
and we gardeners wept when
flora died, acids turned alkaline,
and rot inevitably set in.
We gardeners believed.
Misinformed our mentees,
generations poisoned plots.
We trimmed hedges.
Mowed lawns all the way down.
Called natural fragrances filth,
and yanked so-called weeds
until we’d bled our earth dry.
Raised on the land and off the grid in rural and remote areas across Canada, Shantell Powell is a swamp hag and elder goth who grew up in an apocalyptic cult but got better. She’s a graduate of The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s horror residency and a speculative fiction/poetry grad of The Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University. She’s also an alum of LET(s) Lead Academy at Yale University, the Novel Immersive for LGBTQ+ Writers at GrubStreet, the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, and the McCormack Writing Center. An Aurora finalist and Brave New Weird winner, her writing appears in Augur, The Deadlands, The Malahat Review, Nightmare, and Strange Horizons, as well as several anthologies. She has a reverent approach to nature and an irreverent approach to religion. When she’s not writing, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods. You can find her on BlueSky, Mastodon, or at her writing blog, Nudity is Only Skin-Deep.