Cheese After Fukushima: Poems for a Changing Planet

An activist conscious dialogue, Marcia Slatkin’s Cheese After Fukushima laments an impending future occupied by melted ice caps, fishless oceans, persistence of global obesity, the absence of CO2, and a wheezing Earth suffocated under city sidewalks. These wildly inventive poems are backed with a beautiful linguistic language which brings an element of beauty to the otherwise stark descriptions of our own reality.

Cheese after Fukushima
If I were young,
my ovaries prodding possibility,
squirming newness still in my future,
I might stop. Rain brings rads
to grass, unknowing ruminants
munch, and the rest is amplification.
“Then buy skim, packed before
the Japanese release – enough
for a lifetime -- and mix your ration
daily,” says the health ‘umai.’
But I’d so mourn lessened
pleasure: that thick milk-magic
that lets enzymes ferment
and grow wildly-unctuous tastes
undreamed.