Poetry

Desiccation Daze by Marla Dial Moore

[247 words]

I used to believe / in water – / even when the world / told me blood / is thicker, I knew / that life was in water, / all of us born in water, / made of water / on this broken / blue / planet that / turns again to the sun, / El Niño, warming planet / paying the price for our sins, / and I am dried up – evaporating, even as / I breathe and sweat water droplets, desiccating, / shimmering and sizzling under a hard blue sky. / (My friend jokes that we are “rendering.”) / But it’s no joke that the axis has shifted farther and faster / than ever before – a consequence, they say, / of groundwater removals from mid-latitude regions. / It makes me think of some bizarre global / liposuction – that we’ve / fracked and cannula’d / our way through the / round fullness and / ample girth of the / Rubenesque Earth, / corseted this ball / into an hourglass shape –no / wonder it feels like the sands / are running out. We’ve overdrawn our / credit with groundwater purchase, flushing / the runoff into a rising sea: Mass displacement / shifting the midline, turning our belly up toward / that sun, a mass extinction event. Meanwhile, / authorities still search for the missing in Maui, / the island paradise now singed to smoking / hellscape. Images of the charred coastline / bring to mind Manhattan on that blue / September day – fleeing from a fireball / to jump, to dive, to fling oneself into the kinder / void – a final act of defiant free will. / How can we now / pray for the ocean / to save us / from ourselves?

Marla Dial Moore is a recovering journalist who previously worked for The Associated Press and various news publications in Arizona and Texas. She also spent more than 15 years with an Austin-based geopolitical intelligence firm. She has written poetry peripatetically for more than 20 years as a means of surviving global, local and personal news events. Her work has appeared in Voices de la Luna, Journal X, the San Antonio Review and other publications.

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