An activist conscious dialogue, Marcia Slatkin’s Cheese After Fukushima laments an impending future occupied by melted ice caps, fishless oceans, persistence of global obesity, the absence of CO2, and a wheezing Earth suffocated under city sidewalks. These wildly inventive poems are backed with a beautiful linguistic language which brings an element of beauty to the otherwise stark descriptions of our own reality.

Cheese after Fukushima
If I were young,
my ovaries prodding possibility,
squirming newness still in my future,
I might stop. Rain brings rads
to grass, unknowing ruminants
munch, and the rest is amplification.
“Then buy skim, packed before
the Japanese release – enough
for a lifetime -- and mix your ration
daily,” says the health ‘umai.’
But I’d so mourn lessened
pleasure: that thick milk-magic
that lets enzymes ferment
and grow wildly-unctuous tastes
undreamed...