So the title of this poem is called Layers. And yeah, here we go. I don't know much about how to talk about climate change, but I do know a thing or two about water. I know that San Francisco, city of my birth, is running out of it. As in the state of California is losing its memory of what lakes look like, because not enough rain has fallen to replenish them. I know that my island of Samoa is thriving off of the very thing that plants to kill it once the sea levels are too high to distinguish the difference between swimming and drowning. I know that the hurricane spared my grandpa and his home back in September of 2009, but took 200 others. How no one in my family ever dared to call this a blessing. I don't know much about how to talk about the impacts of fossil fuels or carbon footprints, but I do know a lot about poverty in the paradoxes of being poor. How saving the environment rarely means saving those who come from environments like mine where black and brown bodies are riddled with despair, too worried about going broke, to even worried about going green, losing their fight, losing their will to fight the foreclosure signs, sprouting on their blocks like redwoods, worried about how to make a dollar stretch with dignity, to even worry about anything but themselves, and I can't blame them. According to a recent poll, most Americans know that the climate is changing, but they say that they're just not that worried about it. They say that it's too distant for them to care about it right now, too abstract, too big, too rich to care about it affecting them, too poor to prioritize caring about how it affects them. Climate change is something that I'm not always confident talking about, but I know what it's like to watch Mother Nature, watch other mothers grieving in the streets, as their child's black body decomposes on hot gravel, at the feet of police brutality, in the face of an iPhone camera, watch the rest of the world, watch our extinction go viral, another version of an inconvenient truth. Call this a debate if you want. Call this a liberal, left-wing protest cry all you want, but this is what I know about climate change. I know the academics who take my community's pain and turn it into a grant proposal without our permission. The reporters who take my community's grief and use it as a fear tactic. I know the price of greed and the people who have to pay for it a third world away. I know how to trace the puppet strings back to the corporations who hold the world's wealth for hostage in their back pockets while the rest of us spend our lives paying for the gun. I know what it's like to come from the most powerful country on the planet. Forever pregnant off of its own power. There are those who want to talk about climate change yet don't want to talk about how those who are affected the most can't prioritize it in the first place. Because prioritizing it would mean being forced to pull the layers back and also talk about the poverty, the racism, the injustice, the privilege, the hush money, the hit list that climate change is operating from, the rounds it makes on earth starting with the most vulnerable. Everyone is affected by climate change. Yet some are affected first. But no one cares until it's affecting them. This is for those of us who may not have the language but who still have a voice. For those of us who can't afford rent but who also can't afford to wait. For those of us who are ready to act, even if it means doing it for someone you will never know. In a place on the other side of the world, you didn't even know existed. There are those of us who are talking about climate change and then there are those of us who are fighting it. This is for those of us who have always had to figure out a way to do both.