Dellwood Recreation Center was the place to be for roller skaters on June 9. The weather, though unpredictable, wasn’t blazing hot like it is now. The smooth, concrete surface of the outdoor skate rink hummed as 80 or more skaters jammed to DJ Reala and DJ Dasho’s mixes of trap, R&B, gospel, and funk.

On the night of September 2, activists with Fandom Forward, A Tribe Called Geek, and Honor the Earth held a rally that mobilized 100 young adults — including me — to take action against the Line 3 Pipeline.

This is where our wealth haunts the earth— bulldozers leveling back to dirt, frayed comforters, pieces of faces ripped from family photos, mancala marbles clanging at the bottom of a black bag with dull spoons & a steel urn Metal corrodes quick in this acidic environment, leaves behind gold leachate turning the land into venom. Like ichor it disenchants the wind, ashes yoked in an alloy vase. Even when we drove past this graveyard ice-capped on I-40, I smelled our bygon

As an early-career environmental journalist, I guessed that objectivity was the most important goal in the field. But as a poet finishing up an MFA at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, this kind of writing doesn’t come naturally to me. Poetry requires that I use the first-person pronoun a lot, and when I do, I often get frustrated because I want to tell a narrative that means something to the collective “we.” Journalism challenges my comfort zone and urges me to become a more versatile wr