Alina Stefanescu
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include: a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, 2020); her poetry collection, dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize and is forthcoming in July 2021. Alina's writing can be found (or is forthcoming) in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for Pidgeonholes, poetry editor for Random Sample Review, poetry reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and co-director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. Find Alina online at alinastefanescuwriter.com.
Environmental Impact Statement for [a body of] water
As of April 2012, there were 5,537 coalbed methane wells operating in the Black Warrior River watershed to which Hurricane Creek is a tributary. Alabama allows CBM operators to discharge "produced water" into creeks and streams. The water is not tested for fracking waste.
The baptism hole where Johnny Shines played his mouth harp is an eyeful away from the city's largest landfill. An Environmental Impact Statement is a document that describes the impacts on an environment as the result of a proposed action. The summer I was pregnant and floating in that creek for hours only water held the heat back. Wild, stream-lipped azaleas abandoned their pink cotillion skirts on the surface of what must have been glass: with me bobbing in it. The longleaf magnolia was a mesmerist. The dragonfly licked my toes. An environment is defined as the natural and physical environment, including the relationship of humans to that environment and its resources, whether water, air, soil, living organisms, as well as social, cultural, and economic aspects. That summer my water never broke. My water stayed inside me so long that the doctor got worried. The dates of all due kept passing. An impact is a change or consequence that results from an activity. Action was required. The doctor stripped my membranes, broke the water. One theory of how normal labor begins is that the infant's thyroid sends a signal which demonstrates it is ready to operate alone.
The perfect mammal who emerged was flush, ruddied with all imagined figments. The baptism hole was the dragonfly inside the magnolia I remembered prior to the first month after being told she was born without a thyroid. I was liable. To mitigate is to lessen or remove negative impacts.
Every heartbreath was to blame for the impossible impact of absence. Chemical acronyms assembled like mesmerists I collected in documents including maps with specific fracking locations that have been fined but were still discharging waste. I defuncted myself from cupcake peer groups. To mitigate is to operate alone. I huddlebreathed on the patio with her thyroid-less cheek on my chest. The fiesta of hopes passed by in lycra and ice cream trucks, a grimoire of guilt. My water never broke. Actions intended to mitigate negative impacts are called mitigations. My daughter learned to float on pig thyroid. She is perfect, a beautiful mammal in the bestiary of burnt plastics. I dreamt someone got baptized in the creek last week, their face sunk beneath the surface of the unfathomable poisoned relation.