My contribution to Erased Land, the 2025 Blackout Poetry Project, The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.
You can see other erasures from the project here.
Source material: The Family Reunion, a play by T. S. Eliot.
conscious breathing
ordinary breathing
consider
How little I know
Only this –
You are
the one thing that matters
living rivers lakes
freshwater habitat
ponds streams bogs wetlands
dragonflies fish crabs others
at risk of extinction
pollution dams water extraction
climate change other disruptions
acting together
every river modified
dams deforestation wildfires
illegal mining illegal fires
waves of ash in the river
mercury in the water
everything wrong and
there’s nowhere to go
SOURCE TEXT
Christina Larson, “New Research Shows a Quarter of Freshwater Animals Are Threatened with Extinction.” Associated Press, 8 January 2025.
“Hon We” is a trio of poems created by erasure from “Hon or We have both traveled from the other side of some hill, one side of which we may wish we could forget,” a poem by Anis Mojgani (the same poem that X. P. Callahan used for “Erasure: Love Me,” which combines digital text alteration and collage). In the case of “Hon We,” Microsoft Word text colors and watercolor brush pens were used for the alterations, with a nod to Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s Her Read: A Graphic Poem (Texas A&M University Press, 2021).
Smurf hand
catching leaves as if snowflakes
pitted asphalt ready for winter