CZM Book Club: Babang Luksa

And this is the first week that we are reading a story that, you know, we started the book club by me reading a novella of mine called The Lama Slaughter or The Lion, and then I've been collecting stories from different authors that relate to the themes of the show It could Happen Here, that talk about people working together or the world changing due to climate and other crises.

And I'm really excited about the story that I'm gonna read today because I think it I think it kind of helps set the tone for a what a slow apocalypse, like what we're dealing with is really all about. And I think we're all living through times where we're gonna have to start blurring the lines of what is science fiction and what is reality? You know.

trees outside it where Gino smoked his first cigarettes. A line of fat old maples that in the summer had dropped their seeds in spinning helicopter wings by the whirling hundreds, and in the autumn had lit up like match heads, screaming into the sky first week of June. Now and they're not doing much of anything, their branches almost bare, bark,

corpse gray from drinking salt water. Around the corner to Mifflin Street, past the strip bones of the gas station, up two blocks to the high tide line of the sand bagged steps of the shop, and go the empty lot opposite repurposed into a dock for the neighborhood fleet.

Half a dozen rowboats with their oars padlocked, a thwart one eight seater bow rider with yellowing upholstery, one jet ski and as they come into dock the roofed pontoon that Gino caught a ride on, a habitat for humanity donation forty Benji, the helmsman, get out of here, you know, sucking his teeth. We got a problem, naw man nah. Gino digs out his wallet.

molder as the mud takes them. Gino slings his bag over his shoulder and walks across with his eyes on his feet, distrustful of the dark patches where it looks rotted. Through the street is a relief, even with sedge and

woolgrass cutting up through the cracks in the pavement. For the first few yards past the water line, the distance from the stop and go to his childhood home is the length of time it took to eat a bag of spicy pork skins and throw the evidence in a neighbor's garbage can, so his mom wouldn't know he'd been ruining his dinner, but he'd measured it in a teenage

boy's appetite. And the walk seemed quicker now. The street's narrower, the telephone poles shorter, the sky closer, everything more squat, and the gritty smell of the marsh clinging on even two blocks up the street. Still, it's late in the afternoon and the sun on the clouds is starting to blush. So folks are setting themselves up on front stoops and threes and sixes, with cigarettes and beer bottles and babies on bouncing knees, their friendly racket sounding to Gino something

like a first language, so familiar, unheard for years. He gets a couple nods and throws them back, but nobody knows him on sight. He turns the corner on South Bosnel Street. The sidewalk is broken in all the same spots he didn't know he knew until he sees them again, and then he knows every fissure and crack, every dog pole mortalized in wet cement. No parked cars, a lot more boarded updoors and windows than there used to be,

although there had always been some. There were never any front yards in the neighborhood, all the basement windows looking directly out onto the sidewalk. Now every house on the road that still looks occupied as a rain barrel out front, and a couple have one of those larger galvanized metal cisterns that look like fat, little grain silos. There's a line of grass growing right down the middle of the street s edge, probably a bad sign on what used

to be high ground. And then inevitably there is number twenty seventeen. He's been gone almost twenty years, and it looks not the same, but like a faded photograph of itself. Gino doesn't know if it's looked like that for a while, or if it happened all at once. If a year ago when his father died the color drained from the

house's facade, he could still turn around. It's not that he hasn't thought about his father's death or how it would be to come home and see the place without him, but he's been able to think about it from a distance know it without seeing it, and that's worked for

him overall. But from the bottom of the steps and through the screen door, there's his mother's voice telling someone to bring out the good plates, the ones for company, so much clearer than her voice over the phone, telling him she'd understand if he couldn't make the trip, like she was forgiving him for disappointing her even before he did it. Gino wants very much to be someone who doesn't need to be forgiven, so up the stairs he goes.

Gino was five years old when the bulge of the schoolkil river met the fat and trickle of cobs creaked to the east, and together they fingered their way west through parkways and back yards to touch the gutted Delaware. It was then declared that everything south of the Roosevelt Expressway was officially part of the Greater Chesapeake Floodplain. The majority of Philadelphia was under at least six inches of water, so the entirety of it was legally classified it as inundated.

The news his folks, every adult he knew, kept track of the losses. The city took bids on where to relocate the Liberty Bell and crowd funded the removal and transport of the arch at the foot of Chinatown, the neighborhood threw up barriers around the Pentecostal church on Snyder Avenue and brought up in replanted mangroves from nurseries on the Jersey Shore. They were losing more ground than they saved, though,

for as long as he could remember. When he was eight, the block half a mile away where his mom grew up was evacuated, and his Grandpap moved in with them. Slept on the couch. His sharp pressed slacks and red striped shirts displaced Gino's clothes in the closet. His basketball games and bachi club pushed Gino out of the afternoons he'd spent with his dad, and his voice, old Philly short vowels running up into each other, filtered into every room and out the front door onto the stoop every day,

adding to the to his eulogy for the city. Grief was the background static of Gino's childhood, every one else's grief for a place he'd never been. Gino's family was in West Pasiunk, a little too distant from the heart of old Italian Philadelphia to benefit from the touristing nostalgia and too black and brown for their one sob story, among many to generate charitable donations, like for the black

folks down in king Sessing Up in Kensington. The official plan was to leave it to rod in the water, but the less than a mile square from twentieth Street to twenty sixth sat on a rise known only to the kids who'd biked it, pushing and sweating up one way and gliding legs storked out down the other, while the rest of the neighborhood went to algae and rot. Gino's old block and the couple dozen around it became an island in the marsh. It was almost lucky a

mile in any direction. The government offered to buy homeowners out of their property for less than a quarter of how much it would cost them to start over somewhere further inland. Most people took it because, in the choice between an insultingly low offer and nothing at all, they figured it was better not to wait around for the

insulting offer to expire. Up in the neighborhood, basements flooded, tap water went funny, electricity flickered and failed, but no buyout offers came and even as everything else changed, the old rule still held true. If you didn't get out of the neighborhood by the time you were eighteen, then chances were you were never getting out. Gino left when he was eighteen. Gino's older brother, Stevie, got married at eighteen.

Stevie's in his forties now and on the couch this morning, his knees as high as his chest because his spot on the far corner has sagged under the years he's spent there. There's a stack of dishes and cutlery on the coffee table in front of him. He's the ghost of their dad, heavy brows, a twice broken nose, an ancient thick sweater despite the heat, and a smile that'll never let you in on the joke. More hymn than their mom, some more Filipino than Italian, and Gino never

pegged as either remembers again to resent him for it. Jesus, you actually showed, Stevie says to him. There's a pause where Gino's supposed to say something biting, but he doesn't rise to it. Stevie shrugs. He got about a minute to turn around and leave before the rest notice you're here, Eugenio Stevie's husband frozen halfway down the stairs. Got some fucking nerves showing up here. Kevin Gino says he hasn't set his bag down yet. You look good, change your hair,

don't tell me how I fucking look you. Geno his name Ricochet, is down the hall and around the kitchen, then back out into the living room, carried on the high voices of his nieces, who make him hug them. One of them takes his bag upstairs, whispering something strident to her dad on the way. Jasmine. Geno thinks, the one with freckles is Jasmine. The other one is Roxy, who's telling him about what they're making in the kitchen, what they had to substitute in the ponset, what they

grew in the community garden. Cousins, assorted children, neighborhood aunties, and their husband cycle into the room with dry kisses and slaps on the shoulder, telling him he hasn't changed at all, telling him he's gained weight. Kevin slips behind them all and into the kitchen, and Gino tells everyone that he needs to go volunteer to help out his mom. Before word spreads that he rolled up to her house,

expecting to stand around being waited on. He steps heavy down the short hall back to the kitchen, less to give Kevin and his mom warning he's coming, and more to spare himself whatever they were saying about him, which might have been a sound strategy in another family. Don't know, I bothered, Kevin is saying, from less of a distance. Now Gino can see white in his hair, and that

pinched line between his brow never quite disappears. Kevin spots Gino in the doorway and turns back to tell his mother in law, it's a cruel thing to do to you, Francesca. God knows he's just going to turn around and leave tomorrow. His mom, her small hands shining with oil inflecked with carrot skins, turns and sees him well. She says, will you head out tomorrow? Hey ma? Nah, No, I took the week off. Takes about a day to get back, though, took a day to get here, so I can stay

a couple days. She looks him up and down, then away just as quickly and goes back to chopping a lemon. He adds, right now there's a break between the last project and the shoreline thing in Maine. I don't know if you've heard about it real. Glad you could squeeze us into your busy schedule, Kevin says, about a year late for the funeral, but it's the thought that counts right. He leaves a heaping bowl of rice under one arm

and a pan of lasagna under the other. For a long minute, Gino just watches his mother work, reaching for this and that, washing her hands. There's less of her in reality than there had been in his imagination. She tells him the garlic bread is ready, and he falls into the routine of ducking outside to turn off the gas, grabbing the wire basket on top of the fridge, a cloth from the drawer on the left, and plucking the steaming slices from the oven pan, folding them under the cloth.

With the buttery smell of a thousand ancient dinners. Around the kitchen table. There's a lot of chatter coming from the front room, and someone comes in and out of the back door to bring in the folding chairs that have been rusting out there since before Gino was born. Gino hovers in the middle of the kitchen. He's spent an inordinate amount of time over the past weeks thinking about what he'd say to her. Even in his imagination, he never quite got it right. Finally, he asks, is

there anything else to do? His mom waves a hand at him without turning around. Take those out there, okay, and then he tries, I'm sorry, ma for what he's wiping down the counter now piling pans and ladles in the sink. Or Gino takes a couple breaths. He's feeling a little sick, which isn't the same as feeling sorry, but it is close enough that he's sure it is what he should say. I should have been here last year. His mom is brisk, business like with her hands. She

shakes her head. You were gone a long time before that you knew you weren't coming back, she says it, plainly, without accusation, right, Gino says okay. He carries the basket of bread into the front room. Out front, there are people everywhere on mismatched chairs, kids cross legged on the floor, and not enough plates for everyone. A neighbor comes in the door with a package of paper plates to make

up the difference. Stevie gestures Geno over to a spot he's saved on the couch, and their mom comes in and settles herself into the big, cracked leather armchair that used to be their dad's. There's a moment where everyone pauses, leaning over their plates. The youngest kid in the room asks if they can eat now, and Uncle Lenny turns to Gino's mom and says, hold up, Francesca, you want to say something. She says yes and puts her plate down on her lap. She'd insisted on taking one of

the paper plates. She runs a quick hand over the arm of the chair. It's strange to see her in it. It's strange to see her. I hear it's not always easy to get here across the water these days, and it's nice to see you. Who did? She nods at some folks eu Gino didn't know had moved away. The house is always better with a whole lot of people in it, even if it's a little crowded. Nato and I moved in here him a few months before Stevie was born, all the way across town for an extra bedroom.

When we had Eugenio and he wanted his own room. Nato told him, you can make a down payment, then you get your own room. There's some laughter in Gino's direction. His mom turns to her own brother and Lenny, you know our dad, God rest him. He didn't like me taking up with Nato, didn't like us moving away from the old neighborhood. And we had some conversations about all that. Lenny chuckles, incredulous that what you want to call it?

All right, she says, we had some loud conversations about all that, But then give it ten twenty years and him and Nato were best goddamn friends, getting up to all sorts of trouble together here in this house. When Dad passed, it was a mess, you know what I mean. I wasn't ready for that. She looks at Gino for a moment, then at Stevie and your father. He held me up and gave me ways to say goodbye. We

did this for my dad the year after. And if anyone said it was a little strange to have a babang lusa for some old Italian from South Philly, then they had to have a loud conversation with me. She clutches a hand on Lenny's knee. This year, us of all held me up, So let's eat and say goodbye to Nato. Kevin and a cousin who Gino couldn't place take charge of dishing out food. There's a massive salad that he hadn't noticed before, weighed down by a mount

of black olives and grated parmesan. The lasagna is meatless, but the pansup beyond his chicken and liver. And there's something that smells like a dobo, even if it doesn't look like it. Jasmine and Roxy start a folk war over the best looking corner slice of lasagna, which Kevin settles by taking it for himself. Gino lets mostly everyone be served before him while he tries to unclench his hands and his jaw from his left. Lenny shovels all the olives from his own plate onto Gino's an old

joke he'd forgotten they shared. Good to have you around here, Lenny says. Can't get anyone else to take those off your hands, not all of them at once. I got to do two here, three, there, hit five, six plates. It's a logistical nightmare. That's rough man. Luckily I'm a logistics guy. Oh yeah, you uh still with the uh? What's the thing? Army Corps of Engineers yeah, Gino catches

Lenny's searching Look almost ten years now, he offers. Roxy breaks off talking to the neighbor kids and shoots Stephen, accusing, Look, Uncle Gino's in the army. No, Gino answers for her cors. Mostly see, we do infrastructure projects, building stuff. They did the levees downtown. You worked on that, Roxy lights up. The levees would have been big news in the city when she was a kid. They're half the reason their little island is still above water. No, Kevin says, he

was long gone, but the mail still came. Then he sent you postcards from all his little projects. When was the levee? What year was that? Hmm? Roxy looks uncomfortable, but Jasmine puts in that she was in sixth grade, right, big year. You were in that inner city youth boxing thing, Jess. She made the quarter finals. Where were you that time? Eugenio Gino isn't sure what year Jasmine was in the sixth grade or exactly how old she is now, but he can see Kevin waiting for him to ask. Connecticut.

He says, coastal restoration. Oh yeah, how'd that work out for Connecticut? Come on, keV, says Stevie. Gino says, not bad. Last I heard, I've seen worse. Yeah, me too, Lenny says, and jerks his chin at the front window. Everyone laughs.

Gino nods, which is close enough to laughing. Another neighbor, a big guy whose name Gino can't come up with, asks use guy's got work planned down here, and the woman next to him, his wife maybe, says oh, they should put up boardwalks, and somebody else we've been saying there's plenty of high enough ground for boardwalks to connect up to downtown. They gonna do that, Gino, They don't really tell me that kind of thing. I just keep the truck and everything running. I'm a you know what

I mean, A glorified mechanic. He trails off, and his brother laughs. Please. Stevie says, they're not gonna do shit. I mean, sorry, but you're not right. The levee was what eight years back and nothing since that they gave up. Francesca, who had been quiet eating, says they did, but that's okay. Everyone is allowed to give up when they got a from the tension in the room. A popular statement, but

nobody argues her on it. After a second someone brings up the NBA finals and how piss Nato would have been that the Raptors made it this far again, and then his general grudge against Canadian teams in the NBA, and then his earnest incompetence on the court himself as

a young man. And then a picture is brought out of a shoe box, and it's Gino, perhaps three years old, with a bowl cut and a look of childish ecstasy up on his father's shoulders, his father's hands holding up Gino's chubby, childlike legs, Gino's arms up at the end of an arc, a basketball in the air, suspended in

the moment before it fell short of the net. Gino ducks out to sit on the front stoop and finds a pack of Stevie's cigarettes where he's always left them, in the nook of the broken corner of the top step. He lights one just as the screen door creaks open and shut, and his brother sucks his teeth at him and says a asshole. Gino hands him the one he's

lit and takes another for himself. They settle into their old arranged Gino facing the street on the middle step, Stevie behind him, leaning back against the railing between the two of them, A view of the narrow street and the intersection nearby, and all of the folks who would wander over to shoot the shit. Nobody wandering today, Just the distant figures of other stoop loiterers at another house. A familiar view, but uncanny. It's so quiet around here,

Gino says, it's weird. It's been this quiet for hell years. You just weren't around to notice. Gino grimaces, shakes his head. I'm not going to keep apologizing for living my own life. Didn't ask you to. I'm just saying right, sorry, shouldn't put words in your mouth. Stevie never won to let discomfort sit for long. Ask Gina how work is and you've still seeing that girl, Tina Trisha Tanya says Gino.

We call it quits. It's the job. I'm somewhere for six eight months, than a couple weeks of nothing, being a bum on her couch, then some other place, do it all over again. I like the work, get a project, see it through, tie it up. I like that, But I think she got sick of the whole thing. Dolan says, man, I'm good, so who's couch you bumming on between projects? Now? Stevie asks, you know, shrugs, just still around. Really, HQ has some ten housing, so I'm there mostly, bro Hold up?

Are you homeless right now? Gino shoves back against Stevie's knee. Fuck off, man, I just I don't need a place as all? All right, all right. I was going to say he could crash here, but being honest, I think I'd have a heart attack if you said yes, and Kevin would fucking kill you or me. Stevie grunts an agreement. You wouldn't stand a chance. He's a bitter too. Gino sputters,

Come on, man, I don't even know that shit. He hesitates, then says, you guys don't have to stay here either, you know, Gino just saying I know what it's like to feel trapped here, but you're not. You don't have to stick around and watch it all sink. You know I can help. We can pack up Ma, and Stevie cuts him off. I'm the fuck on, man. You think Ma's leaving this house? You want to pry her out of here with a crowbar? You're gonna break her heart with that, And who's gonna take care of her, then

you I could help you get set up somewhere. Get the fuck out of here with that. Come on, I'm just saying, I know what you're saying, but be real, Okay, Ma's not going anywhere, and if Kevin and I leave, there's no one to be with Ma. You're not dropping everything and coming back. So yeah, you're not trapped because I am. And that's not on you. I'm glad you're out there doing your thing. You're my little brother, you know. And you're a smart kid, Stevie. I'm thirty six. See,

you can count real high and everything. Stevie laughs at his own joke. That loud on self conscious snorting that always makes Gino smile. Jesus listen to us like we're in therapy or some shit. I am, actually, Gino offers, for real. Yeah, Stevie nudges Gino's back with his foot. So he goes on work, has these folks on staff, and it's free, so I figured it might as well, you know what I mean. Huh, nice of them. I guess what do you us talk about? Geno Crane's neck

around to glare at him. What I've never been to therapy before I'm curious. Come on, it's personal, all right, fine, don't tell me anything. It's like, aa, you know, it's confidential. How much confidential shit could you even have? Oh? Come on, screw you, Stevie, He laughs again, kidding, I'm kidding. Gino finishes his cigarette and rummages in the pack for another, offers Stevie one, then lights them both. Overhead, the sun is behind gray clouds, and some sort of hawk or

kite is making high, irregular circles. He's cool the therapist they got. Gino says he thought coming here for this was a good idea. He's kind of a hard ass, though, you know, calls me on my bullshit. That's a big job. You're full of bullshit. Hilarious, I know, right. Stevie taps a little song on the top step of his fingertips. Inside the house, Roxy and Kevin are talking fast, back and forth, loud and happy enough. So go on, Stevie says, what kind of bullshit? Gino sighs. He gestures with his

chin back at the front door. This kind mostly for a session we had. He gave it fifteen minutes before asking why I kept getting angry at myself for having feelings. Oh fuck yeah, I almost walked out, and he was like, see right there, there it is again. He shakes his head smiles. Bastard, you still do that, though, Stevie says, with all the self assurance of someone who changed his stipers, I do. But I notice it now, which he says

is good. Stevie blows smoke out of the corner of his mouth and they watch the hawk drop out of sight somewhere over the marsh. Is it good?

when Gino uses this fork. Gino walks with his mom to his dad's grave about a five minute trip up the street. It was Kevin who pointedly heard at his family, and everyone else left at the house to clean things up and follow a long afterwards. So Gino and his mom are alone together for the time being, in the dim late afternoon, walking through sticky air and the droning

noise of a neighbor's household generator. It's slow going, not because of any infirmary on Francesca's part, but because she walks slowly and always has an infuriating trait in a city person. Finally at home, now that this part of the city has been cut off, made circumstantially provincial. Gino doesn't mind meandering, but he's not used to the sound of his mother not talking. Stevie's girls look all grown up,

he says. She nods. She puts her hand on his arm and folds it so that her hand is tucked into the crook of his elbow, and they walk like that, a dignified little procession. He's a good father. She says, you're still not seeing anyone, Nah, would you tell me if you were, Gino put docs his head. Probably they come to the graveyard. Steevev had written to Geno about the place and sent some pictures, but it's more odd

more abrupt to see it in person. What used to be a messy six way intersection in the middle of the neighborhood had become just so much useless space. When the seasonal flooding stopped being seasonal and residents were cut off from the closest gas station, now half an hour away, over the water, folks brought out the sledgehammers and tore it down to the dirt. The original plan had been to till the soil and put in vegetable crops before

they started planting. Someone on twenty third Street died, and all at once the residents of the Newborn Island realized that they didn't know what to do if they're dead. Cemeteries in South Philly had been exhumed and relocated long ago, well before most of the living started to leave. If the bereaved were so inclined and could afford it, they'd ship their dead up to a plot in the northwest

of the city, or even to the suburbs. Churches and mosques and synagogues pitched in, but most people, if their faith allowed, opted for cremation. The shore had been in flux their whole lives, and there was no assurance their kids wouldn't have to dig up Grampa and ship his bones even further inland a couple decades down the line.

Unfortunately for the remains of west passiunc However, when the water rose around them, no crematoriums remained on dry land, so they had the body of a young woman whose heart gave out and a fresh field of open dirt. They planted her in it, and then the next death, and the next one. By the time Gino's dad was buried here yet plenty of company. The graveyard has the long triangular shape of the old intersection, enclosed by a

chain link fence to keep out dogs and raccoons. The grass is clipped short, the regular sort of lawn grass, instead of the mess of marsh grasses that have crept in everywhere else. White forget me nots are dotted in among the plots, and one corner of the yard is taken up by a huge mess of purple aster. The markers are pale wood names and dates burned into them in a dark, neat script. Gino's mom leads him to his dad's plot, which is catching some late light. Gino

knows his father is dead. He's known it for a year, but seeing a grave with his father's name on it feels like coming down off a high wire. Sickening and sudden. He sits down in the grass, and after wiping some dust and grit off the marker, his mom sits down next to him. You should come visit him in the morning, too, she says. A lot of bees then, and bluebirds. I almost move that feeter over here, that one he put out by the back door, But then they wouldn't come

to the house so much. They come here already anyhow. Gino doesn't trust himself to speak yet. He hadn't known it would feel like this. He had hoped to avoid feeling like this indefinitely, the finality of it, and the premonition that she would be gone soon enough too, and even Stevie one day, and that this gentle garden of the dead would flood with salt water and he wouldn't get another chance to be brave enough to stick around. He thought he'd buried them for himself already by leaving,

by not watching it happen. But they're still here, and all he'd done was lose time that he'll never recover, and let Stevie dig their dad's grave, all on his own. Gino's squeezing his hands, one in the other, and his mom rests hers on top of them. A question. He shakes his head convulsively. Is fine, sorry, I'm fine, sorry, I'm sorry. All right, she says. She squeezes his hand, rubs his back. All right, you go on. He knows what Stevie said, but he's got to ask. It's clawing

at him. You and all of them could come back with me, Gino says, I can take some more time off and find a place. Doesn't have to be that far. There's a whole lot of Pennsylvania. We can get you out of here. It's time to get out of here, all of us. She looks at him like he just spat in her face. Your brother can make his own decisions. And you, baby boy, I'm happy to see your face. But you can go any time. She nods at the grave. But I'm not about to leave him, don't you ask

me to. I'm sorry, ma for leaving, for coming back for the moment a few days from now, when he'll leave again. That's all right, it's all right to have things you're sorry for. Your dad lived a good, long life, and he left, still sorry for all sorts of things. You go on, be sorry, that's okay. A trio of swallows have landed on the fence and are calling their

clear tittering trills into the dusk. Insects are flitting around, and the birds take turn launching themselves from the fence, diving in wild arcs, then coming back to rest, the other two waiting chirrup, laughing, the insects droning on, oblivious to the game that's been made of their fate. I couldn't watch, Gino says, leaning into his mom's hand on his back. I couldn't watch it happen dad, the neighborhood.

Her hands stills, Then she passed him briskly and stands. Stevie, Kevin and the girls are coming through the gate into the yard, chattering like birds. Well, anytime you want to see us, we'll be here, his mom says, whether you're watching or not, that's the story.

I've been thinking about a lot more. I mean not just from you know, it's people losing this fight, and this has been you know, this is in essence, this is the story of America, right, is the story of people fighting to stay in the place they love him losing.

isn't the first time this has happened. Yeah, and it's you know and like yeah, like the sort of horror of it, right is like it will it will keep happening and people will live.

family accepts it, but it's kind of going to give him shit forever for it. And like, yeah, I don't know. I think it's just a really human thing and I think it helps like because also, like, Okay, this hasn't happened to Philly yet, right, This has happened already many places in the world, and will happen many places more places in the world. Like that is an inevitability at this point, right, and just like we need to start grappling with that, you know. Okay, So I'm gonna I'm

gonna read his bio the author's bio. Nicassio andras Read is a writer, poet, and essayist whose work has appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons, Light Speed on Canny Magazine, and Shimmer. A Philadelphia resident until age nine, he now lives in Tagateay in the Philippines with four dogs, some family and the occasional uninvited monitor lizard. He's the poetry editor at the dead Lands and is working on a novel about the history of Filipino migrant laborers in Alaska.

statistically and if not go listening could happen here. But I asked, I asked Nico, and he said and for an additional plug, I don't have any recent pubs, and I feel slightly bad about Wetlands being the de facto bad guy in the story, So I'd love to shout out the Society for the Conservation of Philippine Wetlands, which is at Wetlands p. The Philippines is one of the most dangerous places in the world for environmental activists and land defenders, who are often red tagged, that is, publicly

labeled as members or supporters of the armed communist insurgency. For many years now, it's been open season on red tagged individuals, State forces and private corporate armed groups alike kill them with impunity, almost always in the name of land grabbing. At the same time, we are one of the countries facing early and extreme effects of climate change and the damage that these land grabbing entities due to

our natural resources is making things worse fast. A healthy, diverse, resilient wetland barrier to typhoons is one of the most vital things for us, for us to rebuild and protect. So that is the plug for this episode and we will catch you next week on the cool Zone Media book Club.