Editor’s Note: The following materials were collected by Locust Review editors Alexander Billet and Adam Turl in the years before the pandemic. We have grouped them and are sharing them with you here.
Red Lung (by “Irene”)
Based on “Black Lung” by Hazel Dickens. Lyrics adapted by “Irene,” last name lost…
He's had more bad breaks than most settlers could stand
This planet’s his first love but never his friend
He's worked a hard life and hard he’ll expire
Red lung's got him, set his breathing on fire
Red lung, red lung, you’ve stolen my time
Soon all of this suffering I'll leave behind
I can't help but ask what the Angel had in mind
To let the dust devils claim this breath of mine
HMO TerraCare won’t return his calls
Your medicine’s radiation or it’s nothing at all
Your dignity is nothing when it’s air that you lack
The silence of deep space is calling you back
Down here in Cowtown, on Elysium’s rim
The broken are accepted, but futures are dim
With his veins and his bronchioles both stopped up with iron
All that awaits him is the industrial pyre
Red lung, Red lung, your hand's like a flame
You fill me with fever and boil my brain
Red hot like the scorched sky while the atmosphere grew
Where I sweat my blood out to make this planet new
The CEO’s letter is hollow and staunch
Tells us he died nobly, as his ashes are launched
Take back your bluster, take back your false hope
He’s no more that dust now, like what choked his throat
He's had more bad breaks than most settlers could stand
This planet’s his first love but never his friend
He's worked a hard life and hard he’ll expire
Red lung's got him, set his breathing on fire
Red lung, red lung, you’ve stolen my time
Soon all of this suffering I'll leave behind
I can't help but ask what the Angel had in mind
To let the dust devils claim this breath of mine
(Added verse, author unknown)
Within the Commune, no bosses endure
Their winter’s the sickness, our Spring is the cure
No more will our lungs burn, no more will our veins
Only our hearts now; a new future’s made
Image provided by the Born Again Labor Museum, based on Malcolm (Red Mars), Adam Turl, acrylic, meteor dust, glitter, stickers, ink, mixed-media, stickers, wheat paste on canvas tarp (2016).
Malcolm/Red Lung (poem by Calvin Williams)
Due to some sort of anomaly I can see and hear the future of colonized Mars, including people’s thoughts, using the telescope on my back porch, off old Highway 13, between Murphysboro and Carbondale, Illinois. I feel I have a responsibility to record the thoughts of those I witness. – Calvin Williams, 2038
When I got the Red Lung
Irene was only three-years old.
The land they promised was useless.
And we moved to Cowtown,
above a café on the high street,
and I faded into a bay window.
She played at my feet —
her toys scaled the machines
that kept me alive,
until we couldn’t afford them anymore.
I was terrified
but I drowned terror in the sunlight,
even though I wasn’t supposed to get any sun,
the doctors-we-couldn’t-afford told me.
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