Volume VIII, Issue I Strange Wests – Under Fire, Under Water section banner

Jasminé Elizabeth Smith

Under Fire, Under Water (Inspired by the Bruce Cain book)

Underwater and underfire have a thousand and one connotations when spoken about in context to the West. So many of us who call this region home bear an intimate understanding of what it means to stay afloat or rush to put another fire out. In the opening poem of this section, Wren Tuatha asks about this time and its onslaught of catastrophes: …when will the fire stop following me?

Each year, fire after fire chews through the uncleared forest brush in Eastern Washington and razes foothills as far South as San Bernardino County. Though it is only May, there have been 14,363 wildfires that have burned 1,866,415 acres nationally. In Seattle, locals brace themselves for a summer where we will choke on the smoke season.

And yet, this is only one of the many ways the West is set ablaze: it engulfs us in the housing crises, suppresses student speech on college campuses, disintegrates the ozone layer, melts ice sheets, shifts climate patterns, disappears shorelines and wetlands across California, Oregon, and Washington, and drains the Colorado River to its record low.

While each piece in the section bears witness to the increasing stakes of these perils, they do not do so without, most importantly, a modicum of hope: a river flooding to speak to environmental scientists, sockeye salmon feeding heavily after dam removal, the California sky perform[ing] sweet pinkness[…] the capacity of fruit trees to flower after rain, sky-mouths, the sweep of a wildfire in an Oregon forest’s understory melting the resin of a Jack Pine’s serotinous cone into planting, or the torch of a protest blazing through the streets across Phoenix, Salt Lake, LA, Riverside, Portland, and Seattle.

While we are still far from understanding how to put out the fires of our time, so very afraid to admit/ we are afraid: we might/ be killed we might be killing, we heed its incendiary warning. Though we have never been worthy of such water[.] Full/ of its own sweet glisten, what responsibility do we bear to this land we call West and all its living beings?

With love,
Jasminé Elizabeth

Jasminé Elizabeth Smith is a Black poet and educator from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She received her MFA from the University of California, Riverside and is a Cave Canem and Black Earth Institute Fellow. Her debut collection, South Flight (University of Georgia Press, 2022), was the recipient of the 2021 Georgia Prize and finalist for the National Poetry Series. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Jasminé’s work has been featured in publications such as POETRY, RHINO, and World Literature Today, among others. Jasminé Elizabeth Smith’s poetic work is a confluence of poetry of witness, archival research, and radical imagination, in which constructed narratives of both real and invented characters become a space in which previously conceived notions of the Black experience can be challenged, complicated, and dismantled. Merging history and what is acutely felt from the margins of history, her poetry ranges from Black love in the peripheral of the Tulsa Race Massacres of 1921, the desires of Black Americans attempting to find fulfillment and dignity through the perceived democracy of the The People’s Temple in Guyana, and subversions of the well-worn tropes of cowboys within the genre of Black Soul Westerns.

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