Vox Populi
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Ellery Akers: Wildfires
Every Day
–-after a line by Sherman Alexie
I try to be sane in this world where elephants are becoming insane,
trampling villagers, and there’s a warning on every package you open,
and a car alarm blares, it’s been blaring for years, but no one is listening.
I try to write with my sane arm and my sane pen
as if the brush fires around me could stop and hold their breath for a minute.
I try to be sane every day on this planet where women’s bodies are bent
from being raped so often and we eat war–-lunch war, dinner war––
it’s war, war, war, and bone, bone, bone:
the bone got up and gave a speech, but the bone was not sane.
The soldiers got up and started to shoot, but the soldiers were not sane.
Birds drop out of the air.
Children kill themselves.
What’s sane? The grass.
The toad who hops out at night to soak under the sprinklers on the motel lawn,
who lies under the moon while neon letters blink across his back
and water spritzes across him. I trust that toad. That toad is sane.
~~~
Wildfires
When I knew
smoke was going to block the stars and the moon,
and the starless water was going to be my water,
and the air that was full of ash was going to be my air,
and I wasn’t going to see the moths
that used to brush against my porch light,
and I wasn’t going to see the shapes chiseled by pine needles
in the clear blue air—
because I didn’t know,
I swear, how much I loved the sharpness of the world
until it left––
and I wasn’t going to swim next to kelp,
where sea lions used to roll through those long blades,
and the sky would be choked and blurred,
and the small telegrams of the deaths of animals
would be delivered every day
to our address, The Earth,
where shine is shine
and smoke is smoke,
I said, what are we supposed to love, now?
~~~~
Copyright 2026 Ellery Akers
Ellery Akers’s new books include A Door into the Wild: Poetry and Art, winner of the 2024 Blue Light Book Award and a 2024 North American Book Award, and Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance, winner of BookAuthority’s Award for Best Environmentalism Books of All Time. Her collection Practicing the Truth won the Autumn House Poetry Prize and an Independent Publisher Book Award. Ellery lives in Northern California.
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These poems are profound and moving and terrifying. The sanity of the toad, the question ‘what are we supposed to love, now?’. I’m in awe of Ellery’s ability to say these hard things with great love.
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Oh, Ellery. Never not looking right at it.
xoxoxoxo
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Those are powerful poems. Wow, just wow. Praise the sane toad.
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Absolutely! Michael Simms
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Oh yessss. These poems touched me deeply. They say what I feel (as probably most of us do), offered me the words. “the bone got up and gave a speech, but the bone was not sane.” and that amazing ending: “I trust that toad. That toad is sane.”
Sharing.
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That toad is sane. Holy toad, what a thing to say. We live in a time when such an affirmation makes sense.
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Yes, I, too, found myself thinking Wow, Wow, wow. Both poems! These are poems I will return to and seek out others. Thank you.
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Yes, I feel Ellery is speaking privately, but also for all of us.
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Such poignancy in Ellery Ackers’ poems! What a pure & exhausted & moving & necessary & beautiful voice that I hope many, many will hear.
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Her voice is going out now around the world.
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Oh She’s so right on! What are we to love?
How are we to love?
What a wonderful voice raised against our plight. We’re living in a world that first and foremost is getting rid of real things. Oh what we’ve lost! The next of us have no idea, and so on and so on. I won’t make a list—it’s too sad and takes too long. I’m going to fight like hell to stay married to this world. I took a vow at some point coming in—i can barely remember doing it. You did too—didn’t you?
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Yes, we did. Thanks for reminding us.
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Wow, wow, wow! I am breathless and in awe after reading both of these poems.
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Yes, the poems are in awe of the beauty of our self-destruction.
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