We think of our bodies as being all that we are: I am my body. This thinking helps us disrespect water, air, land, one another. But water is not external from our body, our self.

My Elder says, Cut off your ear, and you will live. Cut off your hand, you will live. Cut off your leg, you can still live. Cut off our water, we will not live more than a week.

The water we drink, like the air we breathe, is not a part of our body but is our body. What we do to one—to the body, to the water—we do to the other.

Toni Morrison writes, All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Back to the body of earth, of flesh, back to the mouth, the throat, back to the womb, back to the heart, to its blood, back to our grief, back back back.

Will we remember from where we’ve come? The water.

And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other?

Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?

Didn’t they tell you that I was a savage?

ROBYN FENTY

I, Minotaur

I am an invention—dark alarm,

Briareus’s hands striking the bells of my blood.

Whose toll am I?

I think too much—

each morning the Minotauromachy.

Through the night I swing the sickle of my wonders,

a harvest-work—of touch and worry.

Spend dawn and its day burning my dead—

Who fell in the night? What the night reaped?

I am every answer—

a mathematics of anxiety. How any maul can solve

the mesquite tree for the pyre.

In my chest I am two-hearted always—

love and what love becomes

arrive when they want to, and hungry.

The locusts disappeared the fields then themselves.

I bent—wept alone on the threshing floor,

not for what went stick to the feast—

I wept for the locusts.

I know what it’s like to be appetite of your own appetite,

citizen of what savages you,

to dare bloom pleasure from your wounds—

and to bleed out from that bouquet.

A head like mine was shaped on thirst.

I dream what is wet or might quench—

aquifers, rivers, cenotes, canals.

The dusked mirage of lake above your knee I sip and lick—

my tongue blush as the fluoresced ear of a jackrabbit.

I obey what I don’t understand, then I become it,

which needs no understanding.

The astonishment of my body’s limits—

how it is easily divided by a black field,

and the black field multiplied in stars.

The throng of a lover constellating.

Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—

and I am demoned by those desires.

For this, I move like a wound—always, and fruiting,