POETRY BY AMELIA MARTENS

DEAR PEOPLE OF THE NEAR FUTURE

We gendered our planet, thought Mother

would mean: Care, take care

and not how we treated mothers

in the street, in the store, at home.

O, Mother Earth. The teenage

activists came for us

and we mocked their pain

their mostly female pain

with memes and headlines.

We broke their bodies down

and the ocean took their bones

when it rose to claim the rest of us.

Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016), and four chapbooks, including Ursa Minor (elsewhere magazine, 2018). She is the recipient of a 2019 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She met her husband in the Indiana University MFA program; together they have created the Rivertown Reading Series, Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art, and two awesome daughters.