After the Drought, the Flood
by Christine Barkley
California, 2015
Wild dogs in the orchard;
some small animal, treed.
My own mouth useless as a drought,
a corpse, nothing but
kindling and dry sinews. I didn’t need
to be told that the groundwater was tainted.
It was still easy enough to pretend
that everything was fine.
I spent the afternoons on fire.
I waited as long as I could.
Each evening rolled out slowly across the horizon,
cloudless and unremarkable.
I measured the angles, counted the degrees;
hell, I had it down to the minute. At dusk
I became wild, thirsty,
inconsolable. I dredged poison from the well
and had my fill. I thought that I would be fine
if I only drank every other night.
I wrote it down, read it back,
and it sounded like self control.
When the sun finally rose,
I repeated it like
a spell, a prayer;
"easy enough to pretend."
Each morning as the heat peeled
the skin from my fingertips,
I began my vigil. Just past noon, just
beyond the edge of the tree-line,
the world fell away.
And with it, all pretense.
I could already see it; splintered almond shells
floating half-capsized down the canal.
I could already see it;
a copse of drowned trees,
an endlessly unbroken sky.
I was honest then, for a moment -
standing just on the brink of a deluge, a final
storm that would rend straight through that cracked
earth. One last breath, of fresher air, and then
the end.
Wild dogs in the orchard;
some small animal, treed.
My own mouth useless as a drought,
a corpse, nothing but
kindling and dry sinews. I didn’t need
to be told that the groundwater was tainted.
It was still easy enough to pretend
that everything was fine.
I spent the afternoons on fire.
I waited as long as I could.
Each evening rolled out slowly across the horizon,
cloudless and unremarkable.
I measured the angles, counted the degrees;
hell, I had it down to the minute. At dusk
I became wild, thirsty,
inconsolable. I dredged poison from the well
and had my fill. I thought that I would be fine
if I only drank every other night.
I wrote it down, read it back,
and it sounded like self control.
When the sun finally rose,
I repeated it like
a spell, a prayer;
"easy enough to pretend."
Each morning as the heat peeled
the skin from my fingertips,
I began my vigil. Just past noon, just
beyond the edge of the tree-line,
the world fell away.
And with it, all pretense.
I could already see it; splintered almond shells
floating half-capsized down the canal.
I could already see it;
a copse of drowned trees,
an endlessly unbroken sky.
I was honest then, for a moment -
standing just on the brink of a deluge, a final
storm that would rend straight through that cracked
earth. One last breath, of fresher air, and then
the end.
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Christine Barkley a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her poems and personal essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Manhattan Review, Palette Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, The Journal, The Indianapolis Review, and Salamander, among others.
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