Claudette Cohen
How the Water Rolls
at a County Water Quality Meeting
It's really quite simple, actually, says the scientist
pointing at a graph which shows, of course, how rainwater run-off
concentrates particulates (that may contain E. coli) and nutrients
(which, as you know, are nitrogen and phosphorus) into the creeks,
especially, as you can see, [he taps the screen] at low tide in
summer and how this leads, as is plainly evident [he taps the
screen] to algal blooms,
veritable chlorophyll
explosions
which deoxygenate the water, thereby, obviously, making it
uninhabitable for most forms of marine
life.
In slide show darkness, the Town Planner chirps pork from his
teeth and imagines a mall on the acres of woods owned by the geezer
who owned most of the town for so long and now was dead, God rest
his soul.
And the Town Manager swallows the last of his biscuit, wishing he
had just a little of that awful good peanut butter they sell at the
golf course shop, made from the same peanuts, no lie, that are sold
at the ball games.
And the Mayor slurps and jolts from dreaming of the
five-point, trophy-size, drinking at a creek that looks
like the one in the slide show, but he missed and it bolted, tail
flashing white, to be shot by someone else who probably didn't vote
for him, he thought, as he fingered the bubble gum in his pocket
sure that giving that out would make him
unforgettable.
Three fields and a patch of woods away in several long tin cans,
five thousand pigs shit. Nearby, in a silent creek,
fish, bellies moonlit, drift and clump.
Claudette Cohen spent the winters of her early childhood in the
Catskills and Hudson River Valley of New York. She spent almost
every summer of her life in the Cape Fear region of North Carolina.
She has earned degrees from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia,
the University of Wyoming, and the University of North Carolina at
Wilmington. Her poems have been published in The Southern
Anthology, Fireweed, Earth's Daughters,
Mainstreet Rag, Owen Wister Review, Aurora, and
Bay Leaves. She is currently in the PhD program in Creative
Writing at the University of Utah. |