1

We complain about demagogues, global warming, our low-paying jobs, the prevalence of meritocracy breeding populism, taxes, our imperfect parents. We rage against road rage, homeless taking over libraries and parks, drugs we find easy to avoid, postmodernism with its lack of any ideals other than the ideology of no ideology. We complain about the price of milk, the cruel animal husbandry providing our dinners, the way our skin sags at fifty, the coal mine in our backyard, the way our lover brushes his teeth, the aches and pains of our body, incompetent doctors, incompetent parents that led us to expensive therapy. We rail against all the bad mental health, then put a badge on our own and police others since we know we are cured with antidepressants. We complain because we know we are cured and they, the others, aren’t. We fortify our castles. We buy white cars and pocket salvation in our fortress.

2

If we complained to this Earth, who tries her best to survive our endless complaints, she would make inhospitable our invective language by offering us a desert without a horizon. A saguaro cactus with its arms held high, signaling surrender but laden with its own sharp weapons. As we curse the patriarchs, Earth provides a home for boas and pythons in Florida that we released, complaining they were bad pets. She grows teasel and Russian Olives in Colorado, kudzu in the Everglades. The Earth, it seems, is far too generous, as promiscuous as a dog in heat. So we complain about that.

3

I stave off bitterness. I don’t want to be my grandmother, bitter as sorrel. I followed the Earth today. She walked me through a hurricane and over a torn thatched roof. She led me to an apothecary, to medicine made of my own drowning in self and letting go. Of roadside wisdom and crumbling monoliths. She put on my tongue her humility, how she can lie on her own grave and has no need for heaven, no need to visit a moon she feels on the back of her thighs, how her oceans are kneaded by the sky.

4

She tells me she’s torn asunder. I find baby shoes on washed-up coral. I find windows in my own endless, repeating shadows. Earth with her wounded legs, unable to carry us much further, humble when the storms come in, knowing it’s just a blink of time. Humble as a river shrinking in the heat. As children on a see-saw, their weight pushing them up only to descend, bare feet on the sand. She asks of you this: be humble with your vote, your act of listening, your words of praise, your castle of miraculous hope.

Kika Dorsey

is an author in Boulder, Colorado. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature, and her poetry collection Good Ash is forthcoming in December 2024. Her books also include the novel As Joan Approaches Infinity (Gesture Press, 2023), and the poetry collections Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010); Rust (2016) and Coming Up for Air (2018), both from Word Tech Editions; and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020), winner of the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection.

Her poems and stories have been published in Freshwater, The Columbia Review, The Comstock Review, The Denver Quarterly, and The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, among other journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net. Currently, she is a lecturer at the University of Colorado in literature and creative writing. In her free time she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.

Author’s website: http://kikadorsey.com