rewilding
look back once, twice, three times the moon follows me as I walk sunset so glamorous, her beauty transcends the capabilities of my iPhone camera next to me, the lawn of a neighbor I’ve never spoken to more and more like that these days their grass, green and freshly trimmed mower’s marks like scars bisecting the skin of the earth I remember what it was like to be wild shirtless and sticky in the backyard cherry juice cascading down my chin childhood marked by indulgence without care we wore clashing colors and twirly dresses and smiles so big adults mistook them for grimaces we were not told to be neat then were we? if we were, we didn’t listen and the walks! every Sunday, my mother and my friends and I would go to Forest Park climb the monstrous logs and dart in and out of Witches’ Castle picnic by the creek, swollen with summer rain politics did not concern us then next week, our city council votes on a proposal to tear down the park and replace it with a data center AI is the future, don’t you know? sustainable solutions and all! but the computer doesn’t know what it’s like to hold a bumblebee in the palm of your hand and feel their heart beating six hundred times a minute like a tiny drum thump-thump. thump-thump. the computer will never know what it is to stand and feel the arms of the boy you love encircle you to let the soft cells of his body collide with yours his fingers ever-so-gentle on your neck; to feel at home the computer can never know how it feels to wake up and see thick, heavy snowflakes falling outside your window the whole world silent no obligations, besides making snow-angels in the street and laughing until your belly hurts how it feels to finally understand a math problem you’ve been working on since nine pm and it’s already midnight, sleep growing more appealing by the minute and you listen to your body, not your teachers, because you might fail the test tomorrow but at least you finally know what the square root of x is how it feels to trek through the woods once again with your best friend peeling oranges and identifying plants from memory oxalis, sour but not as bad as Oregon grape, and a great laxative, or here’s some plantain no, not like the bananas, good for wounds, see? I’ll chew it up for you, the taste is awfully bitter, and I’ll put it on your knee where you fell, balancing on river rocks tomorrow, I will walk to school straight past the house with the cubic hedges; when I see a neighbor out washing her car I won’t say a word about the immaculate lawn I know originated as a declaration of prosperity, won’t tell her how European nobility used to keep close-cropped grass to show that they were so rich they didn’t need to use the land for food I will write testimony for my city councilors imploring them to keep a little wildness in our city; perhaps I will send them this poem, which I will edit, on the bus, and I will not use ChatGPT no matter how much I might want to I will smile at the copse of crocuses that have popped up in an abandoned lot I will laugh with my friends and share with them sweet blackberries harvested on the side of the freeway I won’t bother to brush my hair, or clean the dirt from beneath my fingernails and if the big men come next week with their saws and their axes and fell my childhood for their computers, a little of her wildness might still remain within my heart.
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a quick disclaimer: the tech infrastructure that was proposed to replace parts of forest park was not actually a data center, but at the time of writing this poem I didn’t know that, and decided connecting the proposal to ai was ideal narratively. furthermore, thanks to the work of local climate organizers and city councilors, the proposal was blocked by portland city council in may of this year. as always, please let me know what you thought in the comments.