Introduction: The US Global South

Introduction:The US Global South Ann Fisher-Wirth (bio) and Laura-Gray Street (bio) Come count the things that vanish one by one. Jennifer Key, "Spell for the Laurel County" The characteristics defining "Global North" and "Global South" are political and economic rather than geographic and reflect the legacies of colonialism, slavery, migration, and diaspora, not to mention globalization. So, while the United States appears in the list of Global North countries, that categorization obscures a far more complex reality, one which encompasses increasing mortality rates, income inequality, environmental degradation and injustices, and more. Thus, we include in this issue a section for the US that we call the "US global South," with poetry, prose, and art that explore both damage and delight. The US global South has been—and continues to be—the site of much human and environmental damage. Many of the works from the region gathered here testify eloquently in their various ways to this damage and these vanishings. Melissa Ginsburg's poem "Pastoral" speaks in the voice of land before development—a place of "Sweetgum" and "pear / And turtle sunning" but also the sinister "site / On the horse's neck / Where bats came / Nightly to feed." Jen Karetnick's "Snowbirds" characterizes the northeasterners who flock to Florida as invasive like the caterpillars that infest the trees, "parasites, laying eggs." Kerry Madden Lunsford's essay "The Sharecropper's Daughter" mentions Alabama "Trees that snapped like twigs along the forest landscapes for timber companies" and Caleb Fisher-Wirth's photographs depict a fire hydrant in a boggy pool with yellow crime tape around it, and the wall of a seemingly abandoned house on which someone has written NO WATER, with an arrow pointing down to a rusted sink. In "Earth Day," Ashley Havird writes of the "soggy offal," the plastic and sodden candy strewn along the beach of the Texas Gulf Coast, and of the microplastics in the water. W.J. Herbert writes in "Pine Woods Tree Frog" of the loss of habitat for the delicate frogs who need water and longleaf pines to survive. Jennie Leitweis-Goff's essay "The Hundred-Year Flood" evokes the "unsettled, shifting, sinking, and shrinking grounds" of post-Katrina New Orleans, concluding grimly, "It's too late. In New Orleans, it always has been, and always will be too late for the future." [End Page 16] Rose McLarney's short essay "Vessels" describes the various boats—birch-bark canoes, kayaks, pirogues, dugout canoes, John boats—that people built throughout time in their desire to leave the land, and ends with her own family's return: "our story, short and written in water, made a gesture to counter all those exalting forward trajectories. … As if we could go back." Michael Martella's "Demolition" juxtaposes the razing of an old building with the impending end of a love affair, and comments grimly, "And isn't that our way?—undoing what we've done." Nickole Brown's playfully serious "Why Raccoons & Squirrels Take Only One Bite of Your Tomatoes" imagines the critters' revenge against humans who have settled what once was "forest—my home—." And Catherine Pierce's "What I Want to Believe About the Vireos" imagines a world after humans have rendered themselves extinct, leaving the beautiful "rain forests, mangroves, / the great deciduous rustle" to heal and the birds to call their questions: What did they do?They did. What did they know?They knew. Past and ongoing damage to human communities is also intense in the US global South. In "Sentenced," Tammy Gomez from Texas writes, I will never forgetthat I am expectedto live likemy BIPOC family isunder permanent siege and in her essay "Love Is Wanting You to Stay Alive—Mississippi Ecology, Race, Reproduction, and the Future," LaToya Faulk, a Black writer, probes the wrenching question of how to teach her daughter about the past. The little girl is wandering through a field in Yalobusha County, discovering the beauty of cotton florets. But a "sharp pain" passes over her mother. "[S]outhern landscapes demand we be attentive to how they raise histories from the dead," she writes; "There are bodies under this earth that map the...