To flourish is to invite disaster.
Western rain makes weeds, makes fodder for the fires.
Look, I say to disaster, here’s the door, here’s a chair, please make yourself at home.
You learn to live with the houseguests you’re dealt.
Lake Mead’s water level is so low the City is finding corpses sunk in the 1980s.
The City is gifting water to the Lake so it can flourish.
Look at all these crimes, says the podcast host, solved because the lake’s drying up!
Move bad trees to better places, says Palladius, to give them a chance.
To invite disaster is to flourish.
All the corpses are women.
Disaster is one of those houseguests that leaves little things out for me to find, like wet underwear & half-finished cigarettes. It never replaces the milk.
The City has run out of words for how severe its drought is.
Are the corpses still women, or did they used to be women before they were tied to barrels & sunk down so deep only catastrophic change brought them back up?
Like when the stopper comes off the bottom of the bathtub.
You can reduce your water consumption through cold showers three times a week that last less than five minutes.
You can reduce your water consumption by letting your plants wither into ash.
Each summer, my love watches fire come down the mountain & his face is folded, furrowed like the silt in a riverbed.
Living in the West is living in a wound that rips open over & over.
I am flourishing in the home I have made for myself in the wound that gapes wider & wider each year.
When you find what is most tender, says Palladius, don’t cut it back. Let it flourish.
A pea sprout; the thin arm of a vine.
I go into the desert & feel my bones move through the muscle & fat.
A tenderness made of silence; a tenderness that is blank.
It’s just you & me out here, my love says.
Warmth draws things out in the same measure that cold shuts them down, says Palladius.
Sometimes to flourish is to flourish for a while.
Even when the air is so thick & yellow I could cut it with a butter knife & serve it to houseguests on toast.
Loving an uninhabitable place is like watching the people I love change.
Everyone getting very distant very suddenly like they’ve been sucked into the universe’s gaptooth.
This kind of loneliness sprouts & thrives in blank spaces.
A pair of disaster’s shoes on the doormat, two empty pots that once housed basil.
You start seeds in bad soil, says Palladius, so you can later transfer them to good soil & see a sudden blooming.
A sudden blooming of bodies across a lake’s surface.
Sometimes the air shimmers in fire season, like it wants to tell me something.
A slip of my love’s hand around my wrist is a personal quenching.
Half a peach slips off the grill & lands in dead grass & my love watches to see if it will start a fire.
I worry most about disaster when it’s not right under my nose, when it grabs the keys & heads out the door.
The West has taught me to be tender like how nopales are tender once I strip off the surface.
You learn to live as a houseguest in the body you’re dealt.
Disaster raised us. We are most nourished by what’s left behind.
Hello, I want to call back, hello, as if we could be water.