I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. At a dinner party, a new friend brought up the many poems she had been reading about the outsized impact human beings had on the planet.

The whole table became wrapped up in a discussion about entrance into this new era,

the Anthropocene.

Turns out the bar is high, very high when it comes to naming a new geologic time scale.

Several weeks later, a New York Times article announced scientists were not ready to officially grant humans their own

epoch. We are still in the hollow scene, a period after the Ice Age that led to radical shifts and sea levels due to

retreating glaciers. Here is my ignorance. I thought we settled the matter of

the Anthropocene a long time ago.

Isn't there enough conclusive evidence? Wars, loss of biodiversity,

overpopulation, endangered species,

deforestation, earth warming, greenhouse gases,

the production of non-biodegradable materials, nuclear waste

that further threatens wildlife, human beings,

and agricultural lands. But, as one scientist noted, human impact goes much deeper into geological time.

Today's poem points to a violence that belies our psychological demise, tying it to that of our planet.

A black dough in the Anthropocene by Artrus Bethany White after Buffalo and Yuvaldi.

I only wanted to see the plantation where my forebears trod.

Place my feet in the footprints of enslaved lives.

Let's just walk through the woods to see it, I whispered. In a flash, forgetting the nature

of guns and people in towns where weapons are primed in every room, pillows and picture frames beyond the Olympic gaze of a pair of dear eyes.

Forgetting, as soon as my sneakers sifted, needled pine, I would become a black dough in the

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