By LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
The Jersey Shore, NJ, USA
During the Drought
During the drought, we traded water
for wine. Let our plants wither, stopped
doing laundry. Learned to shudder
at the smell of fire. Hoped
it was just some asshole with a chiminea. Every
impostor cloud was suspect: steam rising
from someone’s kitchen, factory
smog above the bay, masquerading.
We stopped washing our hair until it hung in clumps
around our faces. Did dishes in plastic basins,
wash, rinse, sanitize. Pretended we were at camp,
that this would only last the summer. Paced in
figure eights around the kitchen. The house began
to smell of soap and chloride. Restless, we fell
asleep with the windows open.
Water became a tamed thing that dwelled
in ascribed spaces: ponds, ravines, drought’s interstices,
its worn out stitching. In autumn, we learned a litany
of fires, places where sparks had tucked into crevices:
Prospect Park, Jennings Creek, Bethany
Run. Here, November’s Beaver Moon at its peak
hung low above the cordgrass, the marsh higher
than we’d ever seen it. Fall gave in to winter.
At high tide the grass became a lake.
Photo courtesy of the author.
Sestina, Mount Mitchill
The trees that line the boulevard as we drive
up the mountain, iconic in your memory,
have not yet bloomed. We don’t remember their names.
The concrete wall that holds the cliffside at bay
is crumbling. Barren pines raise their heads
while dwarf shrubs lengthen on bluffs above the sea.
From here, the highest point on the Eastern sea-
board, the skyline where, that morning, two planes drove
into the Towers. So many dead. Signs read,
Please respect the solemnity of the memorial.
As you approach, a timeline of that day,
and an eagle’s stone eyes casting over the names
of locals who died, over a hundred names.
In its clutch, a beam from the Towers. You can see
the markings where the plane hit. Below us, the bay
darkens. We pay our respects. Later, driving
down the mountain to your hometown, I’m reminded
I wish I’d known you a child ago, our dead
not yet a figment. Imagine leaving our dead
behind in this godforsaken town. Its street names—
Cheerful Place, Bay Ave—belie your memories
of a childhood not as happy as it seemed.
I could listen to you forever, reliving it, driving
up and down the one-way streets of a bay-
shore town off-season. Late March, and the bay
churns, old and glacial as a graveyard, dead
ice breaking along its surface. As we drive
the streets you used to walk, you list the names
of friends and neighbors, people you haven’t seen
in decades, their faces lost to memory.
I wish I’d been there for it all. Remember
the first time you brought me here? The bay
all drift and shadow as far as our eyes could see.
What happens to the unremembered dead,
whose times of death go unrecorded, whose names
will never be etched in granite? Is this drive
memorial enough? My love, our dead
are luminous. They light the bay, their names
bright comets diving, their monument a sea.
Photo courtesy of the author.
Dragonflies
The boardwalk, damp
with the bay’s distending. The creep of
woodrot. Two plovers nesting. I forgot
how much I miss the birds in winter,
their constant making. Every dune
and saltmarsh, drainage ditch
and wisteria-choked tree.
The earth, as blue and green
as a child’s drawing of the earth—
is this what disaster looks like? My love, think
of the dragonflies, each migratory trip
spanning generations. Imagine
that kind of faith: to leave a place behind
knowing a part of you will find its way back,
instinct outweighing desire.
I have generated nothing
but words, grief like water
rising. This bay will drown the grass
in twenty years, my love, and someday
we will die, but not here. We are the leaving
generation, not the one who makes it home.
The dragonflies, their blurred light.
Underwing, this breakable air. What are we,
if not a generation? What are we, if not this air, this light?
Photo courtesy of the author.
Liza Katz Duncan is the author of Given, which received the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award and the Laurel Prize for Best International First Collection, and Drought/Diagnosis, which received the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. A 2024-25 Climate Resiliency Fellow, she lives in New Jersey (Lenni-Lenape), USA, where she teaches multilingual learners.
