Pam Ward

Water Rights   

or Arizona v. Navaho Nation                       

How does it taste?

How do you drink-in

this glistening extinction?

How do you sleep? 

Or wash your new car at night?

while buckets go empty

while mother’s eyes drip

while animals lick over rock.

Can’t you see?

Don’t you know what happens 

when swollen breasts sag?

evaporating like hope

evaporating like peace from the planet

changing the rules, once again.

Oh, Colorado. Oh, river.

85 generations deep.

How do you sleep?

How can you stand to see the signs?

A railroad flashing its red Warning X!

as if daring someone to pass.

Daring us to blink.

Daring us to not twitch a feather.

Denying us access.

Drying up livestock or crop

Creating a nation of sunken

unquenchable want

as dry as the crunch of Ritz crackers.

Living somewhere between

life totally off the grid

and reneging the treaty, again.

_________________________________

Cynthia Hogue

the calculation 

We measured the branch.

From that we calculated drought’s cost.

                        —Anon.

roasted in the sun to the color of burnished chestnut

it’d lain untouched in the dirt for weeks         we couldn’t imagine why

the scale of the issue        the fact of the mystery         was infinitesimal

given the nature of shifting weather patterns         the blam of drought

the reality no photo could capture      the descent into a dispirited land         

it was a kind of experiment

to ignore     to demand proof beyond the self-

evident       at last to discover

the balm for being too late to attend to earth in its burning          

ash-shroud

From: Ultima Thule

8

Dreams of the well-armed charged

by anger, implacable, unintelligible.

Power rides the force that anger generates,

but it's subject to backslide, devolves 

into bitter persistence when compassion fails.

Did it matter that we couldn't understand

the import of a glittering world, or how

it distracted us? What had we resolved

when we staggered from the ruins

of cruelty, bearing our green kindness?

In August

We walked down the hill lined with dots

of houses shuttered to the rising heat.

Ahead, fields like flattened wings,

vectors of green. A bakery

we’d noticed that morning

on the corner was empty inside,

but outside a scattering of tables on the terrace,

people bristling if one spoke

of the slant of chance,

the disaster foretold. 

We’d thought it so far away

but here it was needing, among the odd

sad flotsam of humanity,

discipline. I held the tiny book of time

which I renamed the book of no-time.