sex without children, forests without trees

The charcoal thumb of the priest-painter darkens as he brushes ash across my forehead. It’s Wednesday, and like a ribbon around my finger, I’m reminded of my mortality, that we come from both the cosmos and the dust.

I read a book about midwifery. These are the skills needed to give birth: intuition, confidence, generosity, flexibility, presence, sensuality, health. I’ve never really wanted children but I’ve always wondered about the experience of childbirth. Is it akin to ego death, like dropping acid in a hot tub or ascending the face of a cliff? The closest I’ve come: shit-orgasm. I told this story to a friend and she didn’t flinch. She has given birth twice. Both times on hands and knees, and the babies came out behind her. She says we have a sphincter problem—we are afraid to release. We might cum or shit or cry, maybe all at once, and this is matter out of place. Lately, I feel like Annie Ernaux in her forties as the tears well up in my eyes; I get fucked from behind and we collapse into a poem. My favourite is the Sharon Olds come to the come to the come to the, the lovers’ fingers hooked inside each other.

I am giving birth right now to this thought: milk air. The sky is milky with smoke. Like God snuffing out the candle on our lives. It smells like campfire and tobacco, bad birthdays and death. My tongue loses sensation. My phlegm is black. I think its God snuffing us out then I remember its an oil executive in Calgary using his mouth like O O O to emit carbon while he’s sucked off, his trousers lined with silk and cash. Another thing I remember: some people don’t want everybody to live.

Dear God, I mean oil executive, shall the meek inherit the earth, or shall they squat on the land until they assume the legal right to ownership? Shall they come to your condo on the forty-third floor with torches and a class war? Where will you be as the earth burns? Burrowed in an open pit mine with the bones of women you shot while they gleaned in the exclusion zone? O O O don’t look so shocked.

Caus or caut, the affix in words like caustic, cauterize, and holocaust, translates from the Greek as burn. When I visited a concentration camp outside of Berlin as a teenager, the first directive was tread with reverence. Embedded in the cracks of the cobblestone was the fine dust of thousands of incinerated lives. A dust made of genocide. I didn’t want to walk; I wanted to drag my body across the stones, wailing, because how could a loss so unfathomable be felt through my foot alone? No, I needed all of my skin.

I felt the same as I drove through the town of Lytton the summer after it burned. Not because the scope of the atrocity is comparable, but because I only have so much capacity for loss. Suffering is a gas, wrote Victor E Frankl, that expands to fill our whole bodies. As we drove past skeleton trees and the charred black pillars of homes, I burst into tears. I couldn’t contain the water within me. The valley was uninhabitable; our future had become uninhabitable.

My friend who gave birth on her hands and knees thinks of herself as a keener. Like the women in The Iliad who tore off their clothes and cried in procession when their husbands died. A keener practices the Gaelic oral tradition of wailing and singing at funerals. Keening was a labour performed by women as a duty of remembrance. They sang and mourned until the lost were buried. My friend sings at funerals, she tends to the dying, she is learning to dig a grave.

As I peel myself from my lovers body to open the window, that acrid taste comes back to my tongue. Outside, the milky air conceals the mountain across the lake. The plants wither, insulated from the sun. I lay back on his sweaty chest and we talk about forest fires, the evacuation order, fascism, Israel, his children. The Sharon Olds poem goes like this: sex without love, faces red as steak, wine, wet as children at birth whose mothers will give them away. Then my lover reminds me that the trees are beings, too. He says genocide and ecocide are colonial tactics used to destroy cultures and beings. I think about the ash raining down, the trees scorched to dust. These forests need keeners like the future needs children.

I am giving birth to these words because I know six-year-olds and ten-year-olds who think this horror is normal, because the lush green valley that I love will never be the same. We all wear an indiscernible smudge across our foreheads, a symbol of our mortality, our connection to the stones and comets and dust that we came from. The ash adorns us with reverence. Dear God, I mean oil executive, what will it take for you to believe that we all deserve to live?