Sinéad O’Connor Was Right All Along
The Shape of Progress
O Sinéad—you are dead & the headlines beside you are all interest rate increases & thermal hellscapes. I am new to the prairie but even the New York Times thinks Duluth is the place to be in the Anthropocene; climate-proof, they dubbed it: ample freshwater & buffered from sea-level rise. Sinéad— I am listening to “Just Like U Said It Would B” on repeat & it was exactly that when you called out misogyny, excessive commercialism, sex abuse in the Catholic church, a climate scientist who says now all the projected changes are happening, & this morning to beat the record temps, I woke before dawn to walk backroad shoulders littered with crushed Bud Light cans & sandwich clamshells & skittering chip bags tossed from car windows into Queen Anne’s lace, purple chicory still folded in on itself—it’s so early the sun is just rising wildfire orange over the tracks draped in kudzu, & Sinéad, the invasive species are everywhere—the spotted lanternflies too that I’m supposed to kill on sight, but who has the heart for that kind of violence. I wish I had your conviction & righteousness. Instead of thwacking them, I’ve been trapping them under drinking glasses until they suffocate & the radio is playing “Nothing Compares 2 U” all day as tribute while their delicate pinkish polka-dotted wings are still beating, & Sinéad—I think you might like the farm across the road with a Manure Happens sign out front, & even the green barn with punched out windows next to it the neighbors call the meth lab, maybe as a joke or maybe not. Sinéad, you were always right—nothing compares to you—not even the climate apocalypse. But I’m still here with my similes. This July is the hottest month on Earth since scientists have kept records. This week the ocean off the coast of Florida reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit— a toddler running a low fever, the temperature of an average hot tub. Sinéad, you sing I will learn how to sink & to swim, & your voice is an emergency, triple digits, summer asphalt, breath blowing charcoal briquettes to life.