Secondhand Smoke
by Suhani Goyal
we never lit the match and yet
somehow we're breathing in the
ash it curls beneath our
doorframes seeps into our skin
settles in the silence between
dinner conversations finds its
home in the gap between
heartbeats
dad says the summers feel angry now like a
cruel mirage bestowed upon us by the very
light that once held warmth mom counts
hurricanes instead of birthdays my cousin
stopped jogging by the bay the water
climbed too high the air too thick to hold
and me?
i scroll past statistics with a guilt i can't
name i write poetry till my hands fall
apart while the planet falls into chasms
a silent departure; felt more than seen
like a secret we all knew but dared not
say aloud
the sky doesn't blush anymore.
it bruises.
our cities are tired
our lungs borrowed farmers bury their
hopes next to dry roots while billionaires
build bunkers
with money that still won't buy
a second earth
they say it's political.
i say it's personal.
because climate change isn't a headline
it's my friend's medication costs rising it's
my uncle's job lost to a dried-out field it's
the fear that the future
won't know green
the way we did
but still
i believe in healing in
hands planting more
than they destroy in
change that comes not
in silence
but in song
we are the generation
that inhales smoke
and exhales resistance
— Jackson Holbert, Jones Lecturer & Former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Stanford University