What has Water Washed Away

w h a t
h a s
w a t e r
w a s h e d
a w a y
(A BOAT ZINE)
1

B ald Cypress trees require a very specific balance
of wet and dry in order to succeed. Mature trees drop
dense cones which float and disintegrate in the water.
The seeds then need to find dry ground or hope the
water level drops in order to sprout. Once the seed
catches, the young tree can tolerate inundation, but not
if the water reaches its leaves. Once the trees are tall
enough, they can withstand inundation for their entire
lives. It’s entirely possible for a bald cypress tree to live
for more than three thousand years.
T hese stories started at a writing retreat in Lake
Chicot State Park, Louisiana, where the cypress trees
are bulbous at their bases and very very skinny at their
tops. The stories form the fifth layer of a paper boat.
They join the stories of others from across the water
to steadily build the strength of the canoe’s hull. With
enough writing, the boat will be a fully functioning
community vessel.
Chris Staudinger
2

INDEX
THE LIFEGUARD
CHRIS STAUDINGER
4
ABOUT WATER
ELEANOR WARNER
10
DUST
WHAT HAS
WATER WASHED
AWAY
EARLY MARCH 2016
HALF DEAD
WATER WORDS
ZAF YUMRU
KITTY O’CONNOR
PATRICK STAIGER
JENNIFER SAMANI
MATT JOHNSON
15
16
18
21
22
Photography & Layout
zaf yumru
Design
Soleil Garneau
3

THE LIFEGUARD
Chris Staudinger
T he lifeguard sees their bodies. He sees fluids
issue from their noses and float on the surface. He sees
the swimmers in moments as they try to stay suspended,
try to stay afloat, try to keep their heads above water.
He sees the hairs growing out of their crotches, their
bodies jiggle and ripple. One lady in an eggplant
bathing suit swims only on her back and paddles herself
like an insect that has become trapped on the surface
of the water, her chest rising up out of the surface, her
chin high. He sees their faces, a freeze frame of agony
as they jump into the cold pool. He sees the muscles
in their faces relax when they float belly-up weightless,
and, when water creeps in their nose, ageless disgust.
In some way this makes him happy, to know this side
of people. When the lifeguard shares an elevator with
stranger and stares down at the floor, he feels the exact
opposite.
The lifeguard is reticent. A young swimmer hurls his
voice across the pool, the lifeguard hears, “ALLEGHENY
SHIP-WOES!??”
From a flurry of thoughts, the lifeguard mouths, “Pardon
me?”
The child says “HUH?!” and dives down like a duck. A
trail of bubbles, he emerges several seconds later at
the corner of the pool where flippers, foam noodles and
things are piled up.
The boy yells again, “I could take this kickboard???” the
lifeguard understands. He nods his head.
“Red or blue???” the boy raises two up and down. The
lifeguard shrugs.
The kid jumps back in, surfs on the kickboard (an
infraction), yells, “YOU SEE ME LIFEGUARD!!?” falls
backwards and bumps his head on the bricks. The board
shoots a few feet in the air, blue.
4

The boy is okay but the lifeguard is reprimanded.
The lifeguard decided to become a lifeguard one night
while sitting in his late mother’s recliner watching
the evening news. “On the Lakefront, family members
are mourning the loss of a nine year old boy. Rescue
workers found his body this afternoon just a few
hundred yards from where his family had gathered
for the holiday weekend…” The camera panned to a
tiny yellow beach stuck between a pile of rocks and a
parking lot.
The mother, her face a pool of makeup, stared straight
into the camera, “Your children are a lot braver than you
think but they are no match for that water.”
The lifeguard wishes he too could play sharks and
minnows, which the teenagers play violently. By the
end of the summer, they can stay underwater for
frighteningly long stretches of time, and he watches the
pool as someone does a fish tank from above, when the
shapes of its contents are nothing but ripples of color.
“MINNOWS COME OVER” the shark yells from across
the pool.
“SHARKS COME FIRST!” the minnows say, and they push
off the wall, like a school, as if on pilgrimage, to the
deep end.
It’s the underwater wrestling, the shark pulling the
minnow to the surface, the minnow swimming down to
to bottom, the clawing, the turning, all oxygen used and
exhausted. It’s the breathlessness that transfixes the
lifeguard.
The shark grabs a minnow’s arm. The minnow rips it
back. The shark grabs a minnow’s foot. The minnow
flails its whole leg, kicks the shark in the shoulder
(an infraction). The shark, resolved, grabs the minnow
around the waist with both hands and a handful of
swimsuit, and the lifeguard can only assume that this is
the minnow’s last lap. But the minnow begins twisting its
body, a column within the water column. The shark holds
fast, twisting along. But the minnow begins twisting its
5

ody at a frenzied speed, and writhing, lycra
stretching, twisting away from the body like a spool
until the shark lets go. And the minnow, gasping for air,
reaches out and touches the deep-end wall — safe. The
minnow yells “LIL SUCKERRRR,” and slams its fist in the
water, right in the shark’s face.
The lifeguard imagines that God was still a teenager
when it was decided: the lap swimmers with sternbrows
would be white; and the people in the free swim
area, undivided by lane ropes, would be black. Stirring
sugar into coffee in the breakroom, the lifeguard
realizes how agitation encourages two things to mix.
The lifeguard once overheard Deborah, draped over a
pink noodle, telling her friend about the lap swimmer
who had been training to swim across a vast expanse
of the Caribbean in a shark cage. “Amazing,” Deborah
said, fluttering her feet. Her friend replied, “I think
that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.” One day,
someone realized that the shark cage swimmer had
stopped coming to the pool. The lifeguard never saw or
heard from him again.
The lifeguard is a wallflower. The lifeguard is the
parent who stays for the entirety of the ballet
rehearsal. The lifeguard can’t dance. The lifeguard
is a juror. The lifeguard wonders why some people
wear such big underwear beneath their swimsuits. The
lifeguard is comparing the merits of lifeguarding and
“doing something transformative.” The lifeguard is
a pharmacist. The lifeguard hears one aquajogger in
an electric yellow one piece tell her friend, “I do not
like to work with people who smell like that, girl.” The
lifeguard once saw a TV segment about professional
mourners in China who are hired to wail at the funerals
of people for whom no one comes to grieve.
The lifeguard waits for the moments when he
remembers how beautiful life is. He remembers his
mother teaching him how to swim. “Don’t move back
any!” he told her. “I won’t!” she says, “Now come on.”
6

He remembers the ripples and curls of the lines of
sunlight at the bottom of the teal pool, his mother’s
feet always inching backwards, the suffocating feeling
of his face underwater, how everything - the pool and
the ground itself - seemed to be shake around him until
he clasped onto his mother’s hands, which lifted him
back into the air.
One day, without warning, the lady in the eggplant
bathing suit tells the lifeguard that her cancer has gone
into remission and that the pool is has what kept her
alive. He hadn’t known that she had been sick in the
first place. “It’s the only place on earth where all the
bullshit disappears. I get in that water and I’m up in the
clouds.” Now, at times, he looks out at the pool and
imagines that everyone who is swimming has cancer.
The lifeguard could have sworn that once he saw the
lady in the electric yellow one-piece driving a Mercury
Lasabre and wearing a full nun’s habit. So at times, he
looks out at the pool and imagines that everyone who is
swimming is a monk, a nun, a fortune teller, or a Hasidic
Jew.
On the day the lifeguard could have made his first save,
Miss Gloria was there with the kids. She leads them
to the pool every Tuesday and Thursday in a string
of wagons, kiddy cars, and tricycles. She could not
swim, the lifeguard didn’t think, but she sat watching
them from the steps in the shallow end, fiercely and
peacefully from beneath the cap that protected her hair,
though she never let the water come higher than her
breasts. Like most, she rarely looked at the lifeguard or
talked to him.
When the boy went down, it happened silently and
nearly without a splash, the way it is said to happen in
real life. The boy had little egrets printed on his trunks.
His friend had put a hand on his shoulder, and he gently
sunk beneath the water, and that’s where he stayed.
Before the lifeguard felt what was happening or knew
to stand up, Miss Gloria - black and white horizontal
7

stripes across her bathing suit - performed the save.
She threw her body off the steps. She then turned
herself, which turned the water, which brought the
underwater child closer to her. She kept her face
upturned to the air, the water never touched lips
pursed like snorkel. She stretched her hand and waited
for the water to push the boy towards her, which it did.
She sat back on the steps, breathing heavily, and held
the boy close and rocked him while he sobbed. She
looked up at the lifeguard for a brief second before
returning her eyes to the kids.
In the early mornings when the lifeguard empties the
sludge from the underwater vacuum, he sometimes
finds things that have belonged to people. Mostly
there is hair: tangles of human hair, once aquatic
tumbleweeds, and plastic hair in perfectly preserved
black braids. On the shelf of his bathroom medicine
cabinet, the lifeguard has collected several momentos
from the vacuum sack: an extraordinarily long Frenchtipped
fingernail, a tiny ceramic boot, a lavender
barette with delicate plastic rosettes along the edges,
a holy medal depicting St. Anthony of Padua, a Hermes
silk scarf, a toy lifeboat which, in messy handwriting,
has been labeled titanic, and one burgundy ostrich
feather.
There was once a time when two young girls played at
the foot of the lifeguard’s chair for the entirety of his
shift in the deep end. The girls wore massive goggles
and spent long periods underwater. Wide bubbles of
their laughter would surface in the instants before
their pigtailed heads, and they would inevitably giggle
towards the lifeguard, which caused him to look away
from them as much as possible. Later, another lifeguard
discovered what they had been doing. In crayon, they
painted a seven foot mural of the pool, with aquatic
animals as patrons. They had drawn themselves as larval
stage dragonflies (with pigtails), and they had drawn
the lifeguard as a hermit crab.
Just before the pool closed, a new lifeguard named
Frances had been hired. She wore the most raggedy
bathing suit the lifeguard had ever seen on the body
8

of another lifeguard. It was nearly see-through from
the rot of the chlorine, but no one else besides the
lifeguard seemed to have noticed. Frances had worked
as a medic in the U.S. Army and said she had never
once apologized to anyone other than herself, and
even those times were few. She was a vegan who ate
meat when she felt like it, and she had also been in
the merchant marine. During most of her breaks, she
floated on her back, her belly high above the water like
a navigation buoy, asleep.
There is a color-coded chart which tells the lifeguard
how much chlorine to add to the water during times of
chemical distress. So when a mysterious algae began
creeping down the walls of the deep end, and the room
began to fill with the smell of a fish tank, the lifeguard
followed this chart and added more and more white
powder to the water, until patrons began complaining
that their eyes and their skin were burning very badly.
Some suggested that even more powder should be
dumped in the pool. Others, led by Frances, thought
the algae should be left to run its course.
Then the city got a grant from the Wal Mart Foundation
to build a pool that was somehow fed from the water
that leaks out of the aging system of water pipes
underground. There are even fish and baby alligators
and herons on the banks, which were constructed by a
company that builds realistic habitats for zoo animals,
though the lifeguard has never been.
On the night before the pool was set to close forever,
just before lifeguard closed the door on the dark room,
Frances, like a panther and without notice, yelled back
into the room, “HELLO!!??!” and her voice bounced
back and forth from the cinderblock walls to the
surface of the weed-infested pool, and the lifeguard
could feel his eardrums shake.
The lifeguard, unsure how to respond, yelled,
“ HELLO!???!!” and as the sound echoed, the frogs and
the crickets started calling back and forth across the
pool.
9

ABOUT WATER
Eleanor Warner
I dreamed I was free falling 16 seconds. The
ocean was carrying my body up in enormous waves,
waves too big and too terrifying. And then pushing me
over their crested edges, into space, in that spray of
water luminous but liquid, unattached to sea, only sky.
I then fell through paralyzed air and hit the ocean again.
Too terrible the first time, it repeated. By maybe the
third time, I had learned a little, and was ready to look
down and try to see as I fell. Soon after, maybe the
fifth fall, I woke up.
I never before had seen the Gulf, never seen the sea.
I had guessed it would be the endless horizon line that
would stun me to submission, hammer the abstract awe
home. But that wasn’t it. An empty ocean horizon is
not so different from an empty desert horizon really.
No -- it was the dark, glossy surface of the water, its
weight and volume, its textures multiplying around me
on all sides. Yes, its surface. A texture so muscular, so
complex and so infinitely rippling and reflective, light
and dark, both metal and skin. It thickened, over hours,
from royal blue to purple leather to obsidian black. Its
qualities spread eternally in every direction away from
my tenuous spot on a tuna boat, its totality colossal
and its power staggering. Something the rest of my life
had left me utterly unprepared for. Then when the fish
started flying, I knew my mind had spilled.
Oh God, Oh Globe, Oh Holy Garment.
This question now confounds me. Where does that
water come from, that purple muscle? Who is its
mother? Oh soft, warm mother. Does that black glass
infinity humble itself before some kind of ocean’s
ancestors? Oh ocean’s ancestors, I like a blind placid
10

kitten, eyes pasted shut, beseech of you: what? Are we
becoming?
Nelumbo lutea – American lotus -- Alligator Button. I
received seven sacred beans in the mail. I tried four.
Sanded them for ten minutes each, just to get a side of
the hard seed coat worn down enough to see the clean
white in the middle. Sat them in a clean quart jar of
rain water in the window, and lo and behold, two woke
up. They sprouted green fingers, one green unfurled
flag each. These rocketed upwards, reached the top of
the water surface in eighteen hours, spread satellites
out toward the sun.
Wind blew rain in torrents suddenly cold across Matt
and my parting on the front porch this afternoon.
Thunder shook the road. Weather that feels rousing
usually, but recently it’s all felt dull. The only
reassuring and warm place in my imagination lately is
my tenderness toward Matt’s body, to melt into the
spun webs of arms and legs. Why has it all felt mute,
and how strangely does grief creep past? I dream.
On one floor of the building, I coldly retreat from all
people with dark-colored thoughts; on another I spring
like a howler monkey toward a wild, wavery sort of joy
that sheets and flashes; on the next, Bobby has just
killed himself, again; on the one after that, babies are
born in cascades of luminous, warm, tannic froth; and
nowhere, not on any story of this building, is there
water clean or cold enough for me to swim. I break
down crying by the river - of hallway - tormented
by stuffed air and a collapsing field of vision. This
building is aggravation, this gravity driven situation has
strange pacing. Like resin, grief inches along, dressed
as sullen thoughts. The rain pours flat and fierce.
When you lose your vision, all goes dark, all blank,
empty, so the newly blind say. Until it rains. When it
rains, you hear-see the world again, the shapes form
again. The drops saturate, the sounds bounce, and
your mind sees it all. The water splashes live and
11

active, the trees flush and full, the sand pliant, and
the mud. Droplets collide with each substance now
raucous, now soothing, and the world in all its shapely
glory returns.
I dreamt about black widows last night. I dreamt that a
black widow bit me on the upper lip, and a cousin saw
it. Saw it escape, but I reached for it, and there was
another, a second black widow.
Summer smoke. Spring salmon were at their
third lowest count on record this year, and river
temperatures came to within 2 degrees of mortality
thresholds for these ancient fish. Please let there be
a fire. Please, a fire, the people prayed. Then the fire
came, and with it, the smoke. Summer smoke filled the
sky and partially shaded the waters from the hot sun.
Summer smoke cooled down the river as it coursed from
high ground to deltas. Summer smoke blew blues and
grays across the valley lips, overcast the big bald sky,
dropped the water chilly and dark back into favorable
conditions for spring salmon to survive another year,
and to spawn. Summer skies are supposed to fill with
smoke; summer rivers are not supposed to boil.
Oh ocean’s ancestors, how do we contain and protect
mystery, like you have done? How do we encapsulate
possibilities, like testate amoebe do. Like protozoa?
The enormity of outer space spans and courses, spasms
and boils, and oh how it freezes. While my knees grow
achy and sore, my hands chafe, and outer space sits
full of rocks like a cold and magnificent pile of washed
dishes. I rub Matt’s temples, I watch his eyelashes
upturn, I feel the knots burn under his skin, and outer
space churns on unnoticed, magma and supernova. Oh
kernel of ornamented heaven. Oh filament of fragrant
flower. Oh thread of fragile thought. Water’s logic
is muscular. The sea is oh so strong, the deep velvet
and obsidian miles. Those ancient rules, pressure
and weight, can so simply sweep away small riverine
dwellings. Once river is chained, squared, tied, and
12

ound, sea can bound forth and lap up the delta land
like a thirsty dog.
Water laps rhythmically, gently, opaquely over homes
and lives that once were. Water covers right over the
stumps of pilings that held camps like the abandoned
church we float in front of. Water laps against aisles
of trees that once lined bayous. Cool silver waves
flow over human memories not long past – these places
alive twenty years ago now invisible, vanished. By
boat we travel to a midden rising up out of open ocean
– a strange and special land where lemon trees once
grew thick, sprouted forth from lemon fruits dropped
by human hands in offering. This earthen mound was
made by people living here centuries ago, built by
hand-woven basketfuls of mud stacked and sculpted.
Rangia clams sit suspended in deep layers, horizon lines
marking time’s passage, pottery everywhere. Now,
lemon trees vanished, last live oak caved over, the
entire formation stands almost underwater. Inexorable.
Ocean level rises and rises and rises and yes, this
too is almost gone, and yes, this too, and silently.
Dwindling constituents ask for the reinstatement of
local cable tv services; the ocean buries handprints.
Plaquemines, this far south, packed full with orange
orchards and plastics and refineries and coal terminals
and methane terminals and natural gas terminals and
crude oil terminals. Irontown, the freed people of
color’s historic town, cut off and inundated by chemical
polluting transgression after transgression. Ships
empty travelling in, loaded travelling out. The port
here is the country’s 11th largest, sitting on “they’ll
kill you” amounts of coming money while the people
whose lives would be at stake are themselves vanished,
displaced, invisible. 200 billion dollar investments.
Live oak tree pastures grazed by tax cows, feral and
out of place. An overgrown civil rights concentration
camp hides in the marsh, a Spanish fort transformed
to incarcerate past assailants on white supremacy by
Louisiana’s former Hitler of segregation. The ways
these landscapes have been changed – scraped clean
13

and aggrieved – are choking, numbing. Borrow pits
multiply for digging out clay to make and remake again
the levee walls, incarcerating the living river itself, so
that instead of spreading broad and confident across
the land, it tunnels, narrow and deep, 150 feet down.
Ships could sit sunk at its bottom and you’d never even
know it.
And think – my hands. Are they machines? Are they
prayers?
***
Some notes about change: Though we so resist it,
change is inextricable from living. Could we shift some
mental structure so that change felt peaceful, restful,
expected? So that we looked upon ourselves knowingly
as beings of change, living lives cut from the cloth of
change? Surely this could prepare us just a bit better,
with climate change looming, with all the terrifying
changes barreling toward us. Jesse mulled over this.
When a person has to live bed-ridden, deprived of
mobility, they develop bed-sores that ooze. The body
is not built to stay still! Each body is and desires to be
a body in motion, a body in change. I consider. Oh
how we try and we long for and we grasp at figuring
things out, sealing the deals, writing the endings. We
have stiff skin, dense chaotic minds. But: the shape
of practice then emerges. Practice is effort toward
resolution and endings and answers and meaning
transformed into a moving fluid. Oh rain. Practice is
rhythm. Oh holy vapors. Practice is the appropriate
way to try things as a human.
14

DUST
zaf yumru
i am sitting on the banks of a man-made lake,
surrounded by people i just met,
what will become of us?
what will become of this lake?
alligators hibernating,
cypress trees rooting deep,
a flock of storks migrating,
does it matter if if we all weep?
if trees fell down,
alligators poached,
storks never returned?
what will become of us?
what will become of this lake?
the lake will cease,
and we will become our thoughts,
of joy and abundance,
of power and abuse,
and in the end
of what we fear,
dust.
15

WHAT HAS WATER
WASHED AWAY
Kitty O’Connor
I was baptized in a hot tub in the backyard of an
evangelical pastor.
I was seven years old, wearing a white shirt that read,
“He is Risen.”
As a baptismal gift, I was presented with a New
American Standard, red letter edition Bible. My name
was imprinted on the front in gold. The Bible itself was
white, a symbol of my purity.
Kathryn, “pure one”.
What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the heated
jet-streams of chlorinated water in a pleasure pool.
We desire to wash the intangible away.
Scrub, scour and remove spiritual stains.
Wear down.
Flood.
Flush out and cleanse.
But water doesn’t erase. All things resurface.
Out, damned spot.
Sediment is carried down the river, deposited
somewhere new.
Being displaced is temporary.
What is forced out returns.
16

“The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of
our God stands forever.”
Isaiah, chapter 40, verse 8; the opening scripture in my
baptismal Bible.
Wind, waves, currents and tides.
Everything flows and nothing stays.
There is no ground to stand on.
Lost in the current.
Three decades of sediment.
Nutrient rich.
Spiritual erosion and deposition.
Grateful for what I have lost and gained.
There is work that must accompany symbolism.
17

EARLY MARCH 2016
Patrick Staiger
A t a little place outside Del Rio Jim and Gus ate a plate
of enchiladas and afterward Jim said he still wanted to
drive. That was fine with Gus. He’d driven through the
night to pick up Jim in Houston and was enjoying riding
shotgun. He rested his head by the window and looked
out, wondering where the exact spot had been where it
had all changed to desert, and was drifting to sleep as
Jim spoke.
“Whooeee! Look at all that beautiful desert! You
do get tired of just seeing green all the time. Smell
that air! This is going to be a great trip. I checked out
the flow this morning. Not too bad. A little rain would
make it perfect… You know, somewhere around here I
got stopped at some little checkpoint a few years back.
These bored looking border guys in a dusty little trailer
peek in my car see half a joint and the bastards bust my
chops, keep me there for over an hour…”
I’m still awake, Gus thought. Let him vent. It’s great
to see him. And to be out here, get some perspective,
appreciate the things back home. So much it’s hard
to see it. Here it’s so bare, and then a flash. A desert
flower. Change of light. Or, where was it? Near the
Guadalupes. North side of the highway. Probably a dog,
some thin German Shepherd. But who knows? Down from
the Gila, through the White Sands. Or up from the Sierra
del Carmen. They say they’re not there, but maybe.
“Oh, damn. This is where it happened. Right
here,” Jim said.
Gus sat up. They passed a small empty trailer, and
beyond it a structure with gates spanned the highway.
Beside it, a large cluster of mute colored buildings
surrounded by high fence and razor wire took up the
space where the desert had been.
18

“This wasn’t here last time,” Jim said.
A German Shepherd and a young man in fatigues
shouldering a rifle circled the car in front of them. Then
the gate opened, the car drove away, and another man
motioned them forward. Dark wrap around sunglasses
rested on his plump cheeks. He kept the sunglasses on
to speak, though he stood in full shade.
“Citizenship?”
“U.S.”
“Where do you live?”
“Houston.”
“New Orleans.”
The man with the dog circled the truck and
stopped beside the bags in the bed.
“Where you guys heading today with that canoe?”
“The Pecos. In at Pandale, out at the bridge at
Amistad,” Jim said.
The man paused. “How long will that take?”
“A week. If we’re lucky.”
“You are aware of the dangers here? There is a
large amount of smuggling in the area.”
“Yes, we’re aware. Though I don’t think it’s a
concern, where we’ll be.”
“Are either of you carrying any firearms or
explosives?”
“No.”
The man with the dog nodded to his partner.
“Ok guys. Have a safe trip,” the man in
sunglasses said.
The gate opened, and Jim drove away.
“Certainly if I did have a bit of anything, it would
be triple bagged,” Jim said.
“Good to know,” Gus said.
“You looked like you wanted to jump out of the
truck,” Jim said.
The road turned and climbed over a low hill. They both
pulled down their visors in the afternoon sun.
“I grew up on the border,” Gus said.
“Canada?”
“Yeah. The customs agents were often our teachers
moonlighting. We used to cross all the time. Interesting,
19

to head home and have your fate in the hands of your
social studies teacher. I know the drill. Look ‘em in the
eye, be direct, polite, but not too friendly.”
“Can you believe that guy? Telling us how scared
we should be,” Jim said.
The road inched its way further up into the
Edwards Plateau. Gus rested his head back.
Border town, Gus thought. Two words. One is
people. The other a story we tell. About ourselves.
Shapes us, what we become. The stakes couldn’t be
higher.
It can be a story about safety, trust, cooperation.
One that includes history. That all this was Mexico,
north and west up through Utah and California. A
regional story about families.
Back there, the story is that the world is a very
dangerous place. One of scarcity, winners and losers,
and places to fear. A nightmare, with dire effects for
families, for children. Acted out in large and small
ways. Back there, just some young guys, trying too hard
to show strength, not seeing it projects the opposite.
Those sunglasses a wall. How can you look someone in
the eye with those things? Those buildings. A prison,
and a checkpoint miles from the border, a show of
strength of reach. But an overreach. All arbitrary. Gates
dropped in the desert. Borders change, are temporary.
Many others working on a different story. For the
day you’ll hardly notice maybe. Just toot your horn at
a sign by the road. Look around jokingly, see if it looks
any different.
Gus sat up and looked around. “Hey, anything
look different?” he said.
“What?”
20

HALF DEAD
Jennifer Samani
M y plants are dying. One is doing ok at home.
The others, not so much. Three on my stoop are dead,
though I have hope that some rain could bring the two
cacti back. The third receptacle now houses weeds. I’m
a steward of weeds and rotting plant material. Though
being surrounded by living things gives me some joy,
real joy when they’re looking verdant, I wait for them to
die. I watch to see what thrives under circumstances of
neglect--those are the plants I appreciate.
Years ago in San Francisco I occupied a room filled with
plants. There, too, I struggled to keep them alive. It
was a sun-filled, lushly green space, much like photos
found on Pinterest vision boards. I cycled through a lot
of plants. I learned to leave ferns alone--they’re needy.
You don’t water ferns, you soak them, and frequently.
Others you just can’t get the light right and they
droop and brown. I moved, and I couldn’t take the few
remaining.
Here I have few expectations of communing with plants.
they’ve wrung my heart out over time. The one bigleafed
house plant I have will soon be displaced by a
non-living object, a desk. With love, outside it goes.
21

22
WATER WORDS
Matt Johnson
iHEADWATER
SPRING
SEEP
CREEK
RIVER
BROOK
LAKE
POND
RAIN
MIST
SLEET
SNOW
ICE
HAIL
ICEBERG
CUT
DIVERSION
GLACIER
AQUIFER
GEYSER
SALTWATER
FRESHWATER
BRACKISH
WAVES
RIPPLES
EDDIES
UNDERTOW
HIGH TIDE
LOW TIDE
MONSOON
PUDDLE
SPRING TIDE
NEAP TIDE
RIVULET
PERMEATE
DEWDROP
EVAPORATE
MIRAGE
CASCADE
AQUATIC
MARINE
DILUTE
PERCOLATE
UNDULATE
AQUEDUCT
BASIN
BOG
CONDENSATION
ESTUARY
GREYWATER
QUENCH
FLOOD
DRIP
DROPLETS
TORRENT
SPLASH
VAPOR
LIFE
FOG
CLOUDS
OCEAN
SEA
BAY
FJORD
SURGE
COVE
RAPIDS
TRICKLE
SPRAY
WET
HYDRATE
REFLECTION
CLEAR
MURKY
GRAVITY
LIFE
OUTLET
INLET
LAGOON
DEW
SWIM
DIVE
FLOAT
CURRENT
DROWNING
TEARS
SWEAT
TRIBUTARY
JETSTREAM
STAIN
DIP
DUNK
DRIZZLE
STEAM
SHOWER
SLUICE
BATHE
DRENCH
SOAK
DEPTH
BAYOU
TRENASSE
SPIT
CANAL
SWAMP
RIPTIDE
EBB
FLOW

23
CREST
TROUGH
RIFFLE
BAPTIZE
CENOTE
DELUGE
HUMID
CHOPPY
SWELL
TSUNAMI
PASS
DELTA
SQUIRT
TINKLE
GUSH
SPRINKLE
MISTY
BOG
MARSH
WETLAND
MOISTURE
PRECIPITATION
FLUID
LIQUID
FOUNTAIN
WELL
WHIRLPOOL
HOSE
DISCHARGE
INUNDATE
TARN
SUBMERGE
SATURATE
STEEP
IRRIGATE
NOURISH
SLOSH
RINSE
SODDEN
SHOAL
STRAIT
HARBOR
WAKE
CHANNEL
SPOUT
HURRICANE
OXBOW
MOLECULE
TANK
BRANCH
MOUTH
CISTERN
WATERFALL
BIDET
STAGNANT
BLOOD
SERPENTINE
ENEMA
DOUCHE
SLOUGH
SWIRL
BOIL
FREEZE
SNOWFLAKE
ICICLE
SOGGY
SLIPPERY
SATURATE
BUBBLE
BURST
SALINE
DAM
STORM
OVERFLOW
FLUSH
WASH
PRESSURE
GULF
RUSH
STEAM
DREAM
GULP
LIFE
ALLUVIAL
CONFLUENCE
FLUME
POOL
SURF
SWASH
SLAKE
EROSION
TURBID

New Orleans
2019
24