Your Story of Water


You move east of Los Angeles 
when you’re four years old, 
and even then something feels off. 
Where you came from, 
you stomped on the edges of rivers and rain puddles 
and watched bugs walk across the skin of water. 
The desert was a far-off dream. 
When you move in, 
you stand in your parents’ backyard, 
tilt your head back, 
and watch the wind blow dust 
across your new sky. 
Your mother comes up behind you, 
jokes that it looks just like the end times.

When you’re eight, 
your first drought starts, 
and the governor tells restaurants 
to stop serving water. 
Your father takes you up 
to the reservoir 
to point out the bathtub rings climbing the valley wall. 
That night, your mother reads Revelation 
out loud after dinner. 
She raises her eyebrows specifically at you.

El Niño years come and go. 
When the torrents start, 
you ride your bike in the rain 
and imagine your body is a dirty flatland, 
your pores sucking up moisture. 
You stand on the bridge 
over the concrete river 
and watch the thirty-foot trench fill 
and drain off into the Pacific. 
In these years, when you dream of Revelation, 
Death rides a white skiff.

When you move to London 
at the age of twenty, 
the river becomes your fetish. 
You come from a city of salt water, 
and everything is fresh here. 
It flows through the downtown, 
and the misting rain is a constant. 
You stare at swirling eddies 
until your professors 
ask if everything is all right. 
When you finally have to move back home, 
a tiny masochist part of you finds 
a relief you don’t discuss.

You spend your adulthood trying to move away, 
but at cocktail parties and coffee houses
in distant cities, 
no one understands you, not really. 
They like you 
but can tell you’re off
even though you don’t talk about water. 
The drought has moved inside of you 
as it has with everyone else in the city. 
You carry its lack with you, 
the way you carry 
your mother’s dreams of the end of the world.

-published originally in the Broad River Review