Where Will You Go When Things Get Worse? April 28, 2017 By Susan Cohen portside (April 28, 2017) Our ship of state, writes Berkeley poet Susan Cohen, may be facing extinction, but there's no practical escape that will suffice; alternatively, we may resist. Where Will You Go When Things Get Worse? By Susan Cohen Surf keeps overwhelming the remains of a fishing boat beached and abandoned weeks ago, rubbing it to extinction wave by wave, plank by plank. I joke this must be the ship of state— humor being a vehicle for escape. If you’re an astronaut, you can seek another planet for atmosphere. If you’re a wordsmith, you can keep hammering, or else stop and pour the single malt to shake you nightly off your axis. I watch sanderlings, tiny birds who feed on tides—somehow unscathed by pounding—and I imagine flight. But once launched, what Arctic would I land in that isn’t melting? At my feet, red carcasses of crabs, a shell being another vehicle that will take you only so far. If you’re a crab, you can swim or scuttle, or hunker down on your unsettled patch of sand, all ten legs set to resist. Susan Cohen’s most recent book, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Greensboro Review, Los Angeles Review, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry, and the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. A former journalist, she has an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Berkeley. www.susancohen-writer.com -------------------------------------------------------------------- VIEW ONLINE: https://portside.org/2017-04-28/where-will-you-go-when-things-get-worse SUBSCRIBE: http://portside.org/subscribe VISIT PORTSIDE.ORG: http://portside.org TWITTER: https://twitter.com/portsideorg FACEBOOK: https://facebook.com/Portside.PortsideLabor -------------------------------------------------------------------- Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. Submit via email: [log in to unmask] Submit via web: http://portside.org/submittous3 Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the PORTSIDE-CULTURE list, click the following link: &*TICKET_URL(PORTSIDE-CULTURE,SIGNOFF);