We know it.
feel the temperature shift.
We talk about getting new air conditioning in the house.
He tells me we’d be happier if we didn’t believe in climate change.
And I tell him we are supposed to be doing something
Something more than what we are doing.
But we aren’t sure how.
There isn’t enough sunlight for solar on our roof
unless we chop down an old tree.
No way to charge an electric car in our garage.
We vote.
We recycle. Rinsing plastics.
Crumpling tin foil into fist-sized balls.
Is this how we fight back,
by reading the numbers on the backs of containers?
Sitting and sweating,
sticking to a leather couch.
Still, I wonder at the pace of it,
if our child will
accuse us of climate genocide when she’s old enough to see it
With our drives, and our flights, and our mass consumption
As the world melts away and refugees cross borders.
What do most people say after a genocide,
That they didn’t know?
On our skin
Drops of denial
it’s ok, it’s all right, and we are not doing anything wrong.
Our child talks about a story,
a frog in a slowly boiling pot of water.
The liquid around us evaporates
Into I’d be happier if
It would be easier if
I’d be happier
if I didn’t know.
But one day, she’ll ask us,
Why didn’t you jump?
K.B. Jensen is an award-winning author, with two novels, Painting With Fire, an artistic murder mystery, and A Storm of Stories, which veers literary and handles love, craziness and impossibility. K.B. lives in Littleton, CO, with her family and rescue mutt. She enjoys skiing and writing poetry. A former crime reporter and journalist, K.B. shifted to the publishing world in 2014, and is a senior publishing consultant and youth writing camp director for My Word Publishing. Her new collection of short stories, Love and Other Monsters in the Dark, is out.