Don’t Gaslight Me
(a prose poem)
Don’t Gaslight Me about global warming being “fake news” when it’s early March and the crabapple in our back yard is about to burst into full bloom when it’s not supposed to bloom in this region until April, or even late April or even May, and short of a gigantic volcanic explosion or the big meteor hitting the planet, no human being should be able to perceive climate change in their lifetime because the Earth’s climate simply does not change this fast — natural climate change happens at a glacial pace taking millions and millions of years or at least tens of thousands of years to go up or down even a handful of degrees, but humans have managed to speed up climate change to a few degrees in just a little over 100 years, which just so happens to coincide with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Don’t gaslight me about global warming not being real when we can’t even trust the backs of our seed packets anymore, and animals that aren’t supposed to be interbreeding — like polar bears and grizzly bears — are, in fact, interbreeding and creating blonde-haired “pizzlies” because their habitats are now overlapping due to arctic ice loss and scientists are concerned that polar bears may become extinct not just because of loss of ice and their hunting habitat, but that they will become subsumed into the grizzly bear population and disappear altogether and the last time grizzlies and polar…
