Meditations in a Climate Emergency
after Cameron Awkward-Rich
I pull the weeds & it breaks my heart. I harvest the strawberries & the smell of sweet rot breaks my heart. I collect the eggs and slaughter the quail, talk to people at the market. The local squirrels & crows, the neighbors screaming in the streets, midnight fights & gunfire, all of them break my heart. There’s a dream I have where pocketed goods go unpunished & the bottle & the neck slimming the flow of supplies to just a drip, is smashed. Regions distinguished only by their floral scents, mingling for miles. Like you, I was an idea. Like you, I come from the realm of big hopes pinned to small things. Heart leading the way. Heart always leading the fucking way.
Fuck Monsanto
I dream of a world
without miles of plastic
wrapped soil,
where weeds are thick
and topsoil is nutrient rich,
home to worms
and beetles
ready to grow and feed
and decompose
and do it all over again
I dream of a world
without gallons of
FDA-approved poison
spray that kills every bug
and bird who eats bugs
every weed
and mole who eats weeds,
that poisons the lung
and skin of the sprayers
tracked home on the soles
of worn boots
passing asthma
down to their children,
and thins the bark
of the hedgerow
running through the streams
filling the reservoirs
with chemicals
that will live in great grand children
of my niece and nephew
I dream of a world
where monsanto
is run out of town
by a pitch-fork armed angry mob
who no longer buys the lies
and the people
in those towns
divide the mono-crop farms
among the workers
who’ve tended the land
for decades,
they know the value
of a hand tended meal,
seeds and chicks and lambs
lives are beyond
hunks of meat
wrapped in plastic
I dream of a world
without perfectly shaped carrots
and blemish free
everything
lacking marks from the world
they came from,
where food rots
and does not burn away
the ozone traveling
thousands of miles
away from the overworked,
underpaid, hungry stomachs
who grew it.
Originally published in Gay Frogs (2026).
KB (they/them) is a queer farmer and poet based on unceded Chinhook land, otherwise
known as Portland, Oregon. These days, KB’s poems explore the connections of the natural
world with queer experiences and radical political perspectives on current realities and their
belief in a better world. Their work can be found in the anthology Transchool Vol. 2, Rogue
Agent Journal, All My Relations, Bel Esprit Literary Paper, the 2024 Trans Farmers for Trans
Farmers zine, and on their instagram, @chronicallykb.