Are my words enough to justify the trees on which they’re printed
Do my poems offset my carbon dioxide output
Rhyming always makes a fool of me
but then it is not hard to make a fool
of me, a queer sort of creature looking skyward
for meaning which resists articulation—
every time I use an M-dash now I fancy myself a chatbot
which has no qualms about the limits of language but
OK if an AI search engine uses a liter of water to answer a question
then what do I use to answer a question? a lifetime of consumption
and an expensive degree from a college
that sells out students to the feds for peaceful protest—
I can’t find the words for the kind of world I want to live in
all I do is eat underripe plums hoping this time
they will be sweeter
I turn to the sky
The balloon a distant purple dot
Oh who am I kidding
No poem is worth more than a tree
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant living in Munich, Germany, where they are a Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. In their writing, they explore human-nature relation and deconstruct binaries that cast humankind in opposition to the natural world. A 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Award winner, their work appears in publications such as Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, and the Cincinnati Review.