MARTHE REED after MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE

deposition | dispossession

climate change in the Sundarbans (excerpt)

Sundari

trees

Ganges

delta

drowned

and  t e n d r i l l e d   p r o f u s i o n

another

twilight Ganga’s

blessing

bad dreams

the least of it

Jowar

flood eats

everything

even the ebb

one hundred and two

islands consumed by

(( politics

sea and

salt     (( g  r  e  e  d ))

waxy

elliptical

leaves                        adrift

            over its water

: :

bhasha

f  l  o  o  d  e  d

   p  e  o  p  l  e 

: :

Mousuni Island

West

Bengal

480 people

      /mi²

far

beyond

eco

system

carrying

 capacity

: :

Every year, chunks of the 3,500 kilometre mud embankments collapse,

and every year they are repaired with fresh mud.[1]

: :

8300 acres 1969

7000 acres 2009

erratic monsoons

worsening cyclonic intensity

rising sea levels

5200 acres 2017

: :

what sound does the water make flooding in from the sea

expressed

as a carbon

dioxide equivalent

: :

dis

placed

women

sex

workers

feeding

their families

: :

a body

kept

safe

: :

a communal

what we might know

space

: :

stranded

in

silt

---

[1] “Between the Dark Seas and Living Hell,” Manon Verchot, Indrani Basu & Joanna Plucinska. http://projects.huffingtonpost.in/articles/sundarbans/

*****

The Poet’s Notes on Her Poem

Choosing to address the catastrophic effects of climate change in the Sundarbans of South Bangladesh and India, I intentionally adopted a collage technique from Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Drawing on a diverse set of resources, I began by collecting notes on small pieces of paper (end cuts from chapbook-making, in this case), clipping notes from each source together. My sources ranged from scientific publications, the IPCC Synthesis Report, and research on native plant and animal species, to discussions of culture figures of the region, addresses to ethics and climate change, to literary texts such as The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, Travels In The Mugal Empire by François Bernier, and Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil. The final component were notes addressing my own responsibility and that of the U.S. in climate change. I laid out the text on our dining room table, 10’x3.5’, arranging by juxtaposition a conversation between the texts, “smoothing out grammar,” as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge writes, marrying fragments to one another.

Marthe Reed has published five books: Nights Reading (Lavender Ink, 2014); Pleth, with j hastain (Unlikely Books, 2013); (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books, 2013); Gaze (Black Radish Books, 2010); Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink, 2007). She lives in Syracuse, NY, and is co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books. Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing in the Anthropocene, edited with Linda Russo, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press (2018).