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Reckoning 5 Electronic Edition: Winter 2021 Poetry Editor: Leah Bobet Fiction/Nonfiction Editor: Cécile Cristofari Reckoning is a communal effort. Editorial staff, in alphabetical order: Noa Covo Michael J. DeLuca Danika Dinsmore Mohammad Shafiqul Islam Andrew Kozma Giselle K. Leeb Johannes Punkt Waverly SM Aïcha Martine Thiam Hal Y. Zhang Cover and text ornament by Hana Amani Reckoning Press 206 East Flint Street Lake Orion, MI 48362 www.reckoning.press distributed by IngramSpark printed by Book Mobile on 100% post-consumer recyled paper. Contents © 2021 by the authors and artists. All rights reserved. ISSN 2474-7327 e-ISBN 978-0-9989252-9-5 Reckoning 5 Contents Cover: Reckoning 5 Hana Amani 7 From the Editors Cécile Cristofari 9 From the Editors: a scribbled note in a water-damaged notebook Leah Bobet 13 Salvage Song Julia DaSilva 17 Mula sa Melismas Marlon Hacla 20 From Melismas Marlon Hacla 21 Translated from Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim 21 No More Creepy Crawlies Anthony Pearce 23 The Wild Inside Angela Penrose 29 you said, “they’re making the ground soft” Christy Jones 43 On the Destruction and Restoration of Habitats Priya Chand 45 Owl Prowl Maya Chhabra 51 Riverine Danielle Jorgenson Murray 53 From the Embassy of Leaks to the Court of Cracks Catherine Rockwood 73 You Cannot Return to the Burning Glade Eileen Gunnell Lee 77 Facing Medusas Liv Kane 83 Ash and Scar S. L. Harris 89 Gingko Biloba William Tao 97 A Song Born Remi Skytterstad 103 when the coral copies our fashion advice Ashley Bao 131 Wash’ashore Plastics Museum Corey Farrenkopf 135 photolinguistics Jennifer Mace 147 The Talking Bears of Greikengkul Sandy Parsons 149 We Have So Little Time Left D. Dina Friedman 157 Mummies Steve Rasnic Tem 159 All We Have Left Is Ourselves Oyedotun Damilola Muees 173 Voice of God Joseph Hope 185 SPF Justine Teu 189 Too Hot to Handle Tracy Whiteside 205 After Me, A Flood Rae Kocatka 207 letters from the ides Jennifer Mace 219 The Restoration Karen Heuler 223 Cover Reckoning 5 Hana Amani HANA AMANI is a Sri Lankan visual artist and curator. Having received a Bachelor in Design from Emily Carr University of Art And Design, she lives in Vancouver, creating prints based on myth and folk- lore. With a love of art history and a curiosity about the future, Amani’s work follows themes both of historical and futuristic concepts, with an emphasis on the state of women. She loves science fiction, opera, fairytales, playing chess, and listening to Amadeus at midnight. You can find more of her work on Instagram as hana.on.earth. 7 The Beach From the Editors Cécile Cristofari inter comes (in Provence, it looks much the same as summer from a distance, only crisp and windier), and with it the end of a long, harrowing year. A year of sorrow,W for the families of a million and a half. A year of change, some say, though change may be less eagerly anticipated than a return to normal. An opportunity to take a break, for a lucky few, to think, to watch, to wonder. To realise that, no matter how shel- tered, no one is safe from the brutal consequences of environmental destruction. As I asked short story authors to share their sense of wonder with us, to stop and look at the world and report on the beauties they glimpsed there, I had no idea how relevant that question would be, a year later. Yet as the virus came to us out of destroyed forests and ravaged species, the question of the cost of sheltered lifestyles is more pressing than ever. How can we protect our environment if we are hardly ever reminded that it exists? Living in the heart of cities, it is far too easy to forget that there is such a thing as nature, messy, scary and uncontrollable, when trees around us are slashed into submission every year, weeds plucked out of pavements and birds driven out with spikes and hoses. Nature is no longer a fact of life, but a rumour, a holiday experience. Our lives have adjusted around its absence. There are reports that as covid numbers soar, sales of scented candles drop, as customers report on their disappointing lack of smell. Whether it is true or not, the realisation gives one pause: we live in a world where it is plausible to imagine that thousands of people would fail to realise that they’ve lost one of their senses, so little do they use it in their lives. It is equally disturbing to hear the phrase ‘augmented reality’ used, without irony, to refer to games that restrict reality to pixels on a palm-sized screen. The enormity of the loss, when the reality itself of the world we live in, its weight, its sensorial presence, has faded away from our lives should no longer be allowed to go unnoticed. But it would be far too easy to answer with nostalgia. There 9 From the Editors is no utopian past to go back to; we are the direct result of the cen- turies that preceded us, where nature was an enemy, a poison, an endless source of fear. We did not descend from a golden age. But maybe we can make it come true. So let’s make it happen. Let’s head towards a world where the ground under our feet crawls with life, and we don’t call it vermin. A world where glyphosate is only allowed to keep existing to rectify past mistakes, where trees grow free and rivers run clean, where the people who live off untamed forests and tundras no longer have to fight for dignity and peace, where the beasts that terrify us are left alone rather than slaughtered, when we turn the mistakes of our past into something that can thrive again. This is a time of waiting, of stillness, but only if we accept it so. When winter descends on Provence, the north wind some- times turns the sky into the purest, brightest shade of blue. Such stillness can only come from the deepest turmoil, air twirling above in mighty currents, even though we cannot see it. Only when we look down to the ground do we notice the trees swaying. Only when we pause at last to look at what stands right in front of us do we realise that movement is in the nature of the world, and it only takes a strong will to steer it where we want it to go. The present is clay, sitting cool and wet in the palm of your hand. Squash it, twist it, mold it. Shape it into something beautiful. 10 Cécile Cristofari lives in South France, where she teaches English to unruly but endearing teenagers. Her stories have previously appeared in Daily Science Fiction. In a previous life, she authored a PhD dis- sertation on imaginary cosmogonies in science fiction and fantasy (someone once described it as “more dedicated fan work than aca- demic work,” which she chooses to take as a compliment). She blogs at http://staywherepeoplesing.wordpress.com/. 11 From the Editors a scribbled note in a water-damaged notebook Leah Bobet he call for submissions for Reckoning 5’s poetry started as a scribbled note in a water-damaged notebook I lost years ago. It was Toronto labour rights activist and scholar Dr. TWinnie Ng’s answer to a 2013 panel question on what she’d tell young organizers: that we can organize from rage, but where it was possible, you could go the long haul if you organized from joy. I lost the notebook, so I’m not going to get that quote right. Living in a busy urban downtown sharpens your vision for the natural world living alongside and around you. You start rela- tionships: with the raccoon that topples over your compost bin to eat tomato scraps; with the ash tree whose lowest leaves are low enough to, on the days you wear high heels to work, brush the top of your head like a benediction. You learn to truly value that eco- system threaded through the cracks, and realize that busy spaces are full of half-visible mitzvot. You can think nobody is and then your vision sharpens to those little signs, and you realize: somebody is. That public native species garden didn’t grow itself, and those squir- rels aren’t fat and happy on their own account. Someone planted chestnut trees. Someone is, just outside your frame of reference, doing the work. Our call for poetry was about those intimacies: the seed wait- ing in your pocket, cupped handfuls of gorgeous things in motion, little gods. What work you were doing, and why you did it. Maybe we could all sharpen our vision, together. We had no idea what was coming. In Toronto, I have spent this pandemic year uneasily hiber- nating as part of a high-risk household. I stepped outside in May and the trees were leafing outward; the next time, in mid-June, the flowers were already going to fruit. It has been hard to know whose precautions to trust, where the future was leading. 13 From the Editors a scribbled note in a water-damaged notebook Meanwhile, submissions poured in from every continent except Antarctica, and built a paper spine to keep my head up as the case counts fluctuated. Every week this year, I’ve spent a few hours reading poetry and essays about those little flecks of possibil- ity: vivid, loving descriptions of the ground as wrinkled wise skin; laughing lines about coral; how far you can travel on patched-up sails; “we breathe and breathe and / breathe”.