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What lies beyond the horizon?
If the planet is to heal, we must restore harmony—which cannot exist without collaboration.
Water can conform to its container, or it can gather in force as whelming as a wave. What will you choose?
Volume 03: Flourish / Collapse
A journey along the axis of abundance and absence, proliferation and putrescence, life and death
An exploration of geographic location and freedom of action and thought
This issue seeks to answer the question: What does “natural” mean now?
Collect four volumes of Atmos at a special price.
WORDS BY MARIE HOWE
in collaboration with parley for the oceans
To celebrate Earth Month, Parley for the Oceans and Atmos team up for an ongoing eco-poetry series on the connection between the environment and the human experience. In “Singularity,” poet Marie Howe asks: Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?
(after Stephen Hawking)
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?
so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—
nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone
pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?
There was no Nature. No
them. No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if
the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up to what we were
—when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all—nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is
All everything home