A dark cloud hangs but if rain falls
it evaporates before it hits, while millions
of toilets flush, sinks drain, the shutter shake
release repeat of sprinklers in Summerlin
& Green Valley golf courses
suck it up. Our banter over the starburst
where I bit my cheek, that ridgeline
I run my tongue over in this city named after
what is not here anymore. The mesquite groves
willows cottonwoods & saltgrass that grew here
once, maybe even in our barren yard, the spinach
ricegrass chia screwbean devil’s claw
blazing star (not so long ago): tales

of water grabs & reclamation acts, water buffalos
hairy-eared & glinting in the shadows
like the shrub ox did here once, what
will our descendants (if any)
descend to? At Lake Mead

cobalt blue rider & Klein Blue, to leap I say
into the void (arms outstretched, back arched
the beginning of a doomed swan dive); you
me, the lake keeps us all alive somehow.
I read about it but that doesn’t tell me

how. My inability to comprehend scale, you
say; the solution to pollution is dilution, they
say & after all, people
fish swim waterski (DDT PCB heavy metals
ammonium perchlorate) (endocrine disruptors
scrambled instructions eunuch fish frankenfish)
gaps, punctuations, whats
an oasis too is a convergence of opposites

like plankton & the whale. A drop
of sweat into Lake Mead: the subsidence

& rebound jet, the circular cymbaling waves
they say the ultimate water crisis is not here
& won’t get here, not ultimately
but it ultimately will happen, but it keeps getting
pushed back, ultimately, like a Teflon politician

but you know there must come a day. But
how we loved to leap

splash somersault, round & round, scanning for
flashes of fool’s gold in the form of small
remedies (ways you can help!) & other clever
we thought bargainings, into the dark turning
we never wanted to come back in

—

* “water buffaloes:” a group of men (historically) who controlled water in the US West. See for example Jon Christensen, “Build It and the Water Will Come.” The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas, edited by Hal Rothman and Mike Davis. U of California P, 2002, pp. 115-125. p. 116.

‘Water’ was previously published in Anchorage (Haverthorn Press, UK, 2020). 

**

Rose Hunter is the author of several books of poetry including Body Shell Girl (Spinifex Press, 2022) and glass (Five Islands Press, 2017). She has been widely published in literary journals in Australia, the USA, and Canada, and she has been published at the ABC and a guest on the ABC’s Radio National. Rose was born in Australia and lived in Canada for ten years, then Mexico for ten more. She currently lives in Brisbane/Meanjin.

P76 issue 9: Poetries of place/ displacement/ diaspora/ odyssey: On-line Edition. Table of Contents