I’m really in love with all the little details in Volume 5. From the precision of quarks, half-lives, and decimal places learned in science class to the moment where a farmer can’t pass the trade to his two kids, it shows how the tiniest things mean so much. It’s easy to miss the coffee cups and plastic containers when the world around us is full of big people and idols vying for our attention on tiny gorilla glass sandwiches. Ark Review  shows the beautiful things that make

I declare / this Arbor Day a day of / celebration / of / clearing / burning / taking / First observed in Nebraska / 1872 / they planted the first trees / so the pioneers wouldn’t / melt / bleed / burn / to death / on the plains they / stole / Today we call that / preservation. / Today we say: / We honor the beauty / of God’s creation / while / leasing it / to Shell / auctioning it / to Koch / offering it tax-free / to BlackRock / while / bulldozers groan / in Yosemite’s gut /

You are invited. To seek a sky soaked in color, before the sun decides to rise, with lavender and melon spilling over sleepy shingles. To let cool air greet your skin, lofting you forward. Before the day becomes warm, and long, and full. To breathe in seared toast, And strawberries, sun-warmed. To taste jam left on your thumb, its story too sweet to be told just once. To step out, bare toes dug in, curling down, rooting for this day. To watch bees looping like drunks, composi

We’re not going to Mars, we’ve decided, we’re staying here.  We’re going to stick it out with the 8.7 million species  who live on Earth rather than schlep our stuff to a planet  with 0.0 species, and an average temperature of 81 degrees below zero.  We’ll take our 332 cubic miles of oceans, rivers, and lakes  over a planet with 0.0 gallons of visible water and the most dreadful  real estate in the galaxy: rocky, dust-covered desert, canyons and craters in all directions, and

I was made on an acre of land where the trees remember everything: the places we invented under splayed branches of manzanita when we were seven and naming the dirt, the cherry popsicle sticks we buried like bones between its roots as we grew up and forgot the meaning of objects, the bodies we held against their trunks that never came back again. I turn fourteen and trade soil for plastic, bark for gorilla glass, fingers for a stylus. I read about nitrogen cycles and I walk o

As the year nears its end, Eomma ¹ and I make an all too familiar trip to Halmeoni’s ² farm. We arrive late at night, then wake up early the next morning to a landscape muffled in mist. The air is just cold enough to keep us awake. Halmeoni invited us to her village’s kimjang, a centuries-old culinary tradition, deep in the mountains of North Gangwon Province. Before the invention of modern refrigeration, my ancestors salted, seasoned, and fermented vegetables to preserve

that summer of gold and green the season rushing between our  fingers and through our hair  together we cast blankets upon  banks of both river and of sea  catching radioactive isotopes  like young children catching  fireflies  and together we painted our faces with remnants of caesium 137  listening  to tall, tall trees long and  dream of their silent spring  ; but  how could we have ever known? August Mishayev is an educator and writer based in Bangkok, Thailand. When not

We are all attracted to suffering. And repulsed by it, too. This doesn’t make the world go round  exactly. It isn’t a law of physics  technically. But it may have something to do with the relationships of bodies in the universe. And also the atmosphere of Earth. Which is where we all must live for as long as we have left. For as long as we have lift. And when you consider all of the plastic found in the stomachs of dead seabirds— bits of beach toy, medical waste, gnarled cass

The windows seemed to whisper to him, or perhaps he was just imagining things.  It couldn’t even be called a window; more of an opening in the wall than anything else. Outside, the light had been leeched out, a thick darkness suspended from the sky like impending doom. Or blessing. Ravi couldn’t tell.   They said his name was prophesied. He believed them. In retrospect it was a pretty obvious lie. They just wanted the drought gone and the rain to come back. The very fact that