[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.
