wept by a cottonwood tree? What does it mean

that your life is made of someone else’s shed

water and blood? Dial 1 if you don’t care.

874.

Blueprints from another water restoration project:

Faint lines of freeway overpass and surrounding houses.

The kidney-shape of a pond circled by a concrete path.

Sketches of a ramada, a parking lot, fake visitors, toy cars…

Graffitied in red spray paint across the blueprints:

This once-river has not been restored to itself—

it is a river and still isn’t a river.

2345.^*

The river is my sister—I am its daughter.

It is my hands when I drink from it,

my own eye when I am weeping,

and my desire when I ache like a yucca bell

in the night. The river says, Open your mouth to me,

and I will make you more.

Because even a river can be lonely,

even a river will die of thirst.

I am both—the river and its vessel.

It maps me alluvium. A net of moon-colored fish.

I’ve flashed through it like copper wire.

A cottonwood root swelling with drink,

I tremble every leaf to lime, every bean to gold,

jingle the willow in the same song the river sings.

I am it and its mud.

I am the body kneeling at the river’s edge

letting it drink from me.

200.

You cannot drink poetry.

19.

There is often trouble choosing which language for the headset:

Makav: ‘Aha Haviily inyep nyuwiich.

Español: A beber y a tragar, que el mundo se va a acabar.

I am fluent in water. Water is fluent in my body—

it spoke my body into existence.

If a river spoke English, it might say:

What begins in water

will end without it.

Or,

I remember you—

I cannot forget

my own body.

88.^**

You remember everything,

carve a waterline of my transgressions,

and despite all I’ve done,

you’ve suffered to return to me.

You’ve fed the mesquite’s thorns

and the sweet of its glowing beans.

You’ve pulled me under and released me clean.

You made me new, something better than good.

Like me you are a fast body.

A coppery current.

I laid in your bed.

I kept you for myself

except you are myself

and kept me instead.

365.

Photograph from a South American newspaper:

US-headquartered companies bought the rights

to water in other countries. These companies are

strangers to the gods of those waters, were not

formed from them, have never said Gracias to

those waters, never prayed to those waters

have never been cleansed by those waters.

The US-headquartered companies announce,

with armed guards, You can’t drink from this lake

anymore. The Natives gather rain instead, open

their beautiful water-shaped mouths to the sky,

catch it in curved, peach-colored shells, in halved

gourds, in their water-shaped hands.

The companies say, Read these documents—

we bought the rain too.

We own the rain.

210.

The Credible Thirst Interview:

When did you first enter the territory of thirst?

How many days have you waited in the long line