Poetry
There’s been a drought / Amanda Kraley
Image by Tressa Thomas
and the government says to boil tap water
before you use it and I realize how careless I’ve been
and that it takes a lot of water to cook pasta.
I shower standing in a bucket and use the briny liquid to fill the toilets while
my roommate makes tea on the stove and we run outside
to catch rainwater in pots when the sky finally opens.
Describing anything makes it sound alien
but Mars is just 25 kilometers North of us and
all of this is true.
It is a brittle red landscape,
a parched earth that makes every reporter a water reporter
and every person an engineer, like our neighbor
who has lashed a network of pipes
around his roof with twine that
funnels into a large tank. He nods solemnly
at us when he gets back from the local spring
which is now guarded by bored soldiers,
dark guns slack in their arms.
Later, we ride along with a friend of a friend to an empty house in the hills.
The owners are rich, absent,
and we swim in their pool, peeling back
the plastic sheet to expose its wobbling emerald surface,
a thin film of algae clinging to our skin when we emerge,
and jump on their trampoline dug into the ground:
slick, flying, reborn.