beside the crick a few cm deep
it glides across spilt jumbles of rock
curling trails of unctuous vapor
spin fractals up my arm from a stub
pinched between fingers white smoke
fades away into the glare off the water
the crick chatters
the din of each flow a voice
a dinner party. the audience hushes
itself after the orchestra has finished tuning
and for a moment i am with them all
waiting in anticipation
if i were a writer
id described the way i slurped
from the elementary school water fountain
as greedy. it wasn’t greed that tapped politely on shoulders
just lust for the cool clear taste of water
dribbling down my shirt
soaking my collar
before they installed
the burnished steel features
with stop motion sensors to fill
reusable bottles the fountain was
porcelain and the pressure so low i would
place my lips against rusting metal to slurp
until one day the porcelain cracked and
covered the vinyl tile in a thin sheet
of invisible water
when i grew taller
the world got wider
i had to kneel at the
altar but at least they fixed
the pressure so that the water flowed
freely into my mouth
basement
old building with
a gas stove but no hood
and half the ceiling covered in those
false ceiling tiles they had in school covering
dusty pipes in my first apartment
pipes from the highrise condos
drain a few miles up from where
i tempt the water with my dangling feet
watching the heron pick at an old doritos bag
there’s a sign up by the dog park
that gleams with whatever magic
makes hazard vests reflective
and warns the reasonable not to
drink or swim or wade
but an elderly couple pass
carrying their sneakers
ankle deep in sparkling water
not even the fancy
chrome fountains
survived the purge
and we laughed in
high school when one
day we came in to see
each and every fountain
wrapped in plastic bags
and they told us the pipes
were full of lead and had
been for years and we heard
from friends the school over
one sink had 58,000 ppb
and i imagined the tens
of thousands of us could
all be friends now that we
had superpowers
and i remember kissing the faucet
and kneeling in prayer to greedily
slurp and trying to slide down
the soaked hallway on paper towels
but i never noticed the smoke stack
next to the school like the cigarette in my hand whispering
tendrils of gray into sparkling translucence they
said laced the soil with heavy metals
and i can’t warn the deer off the
crick without scaring her
but i wish she knew
pipes yearn to spill and i thought i knew why
someone might bleed too keep them from their veins
but when i heard water splashing in the living room
and desperately stuffed my clueless cat in the carrier and
sloshed through the ankle deep water to pull my most
valuable whatever out of the basement i felt some
tiny part of why folks bleed
kids my age made memes of
the old commercials for the class action
and mesothelioma was always accompanied by laughter
and ive never worked a mine so when the water stopped running
i was throwing out the soggy broken false ceiling tiles with my couch
when i realized the reason the water looked so nasty brackish
draining down the walls filling my living room was
cause the wrapping on the pipes that
were hidden by the tile were
fireproof
pipes in my heart
strain with the fear
of every particle
inside me but
everyday i
take another piece
of this broken world
into myself forever and
inhale and when the heron
is finished with the doritos bag
my fear of pipes and shallow water
will link me to billions like me and maybe
i won’t be a kid when they split the next hill
to run a pipe and ill join you on the line hand in hand
and we can use these superpowers we’ve all been given to plug
leaks and clean spills so that when i take my place in the heavenly host
every particle of plastic embedded within me
will shimmer like the surface of this crick.