PINE: a geopoetic work about menopause and wildfires

No current data captures total global numbers of menopausal or menopaused women. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), however, nearly 700,000,000 women in 2021 were between the age of 45 and 60, the age bracket when many people with uteruses enter perimenopause or menopausal years. Despite clarion calls more than a decade ago by feminist geographers about destigmatizing menopause and expanding menopause geographies, as of 2025 not a single publication title in Gender, Place, and Culture contained the word ‘menopause’. Indeed, a paucity about menopausal geographies persists across the discipline. This paper is an interventional effort to change that. Anchored in growing geopoetic practices, PINE is a single long-poem work (3000+ words) about wildfires and menopause. This poem-paper turns on a central and extended metaphor of ‘burning times’ to consider aging, hormones, wildfires, menopause, semi-arid landscapes, northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert, pine trees, and global warming.