Ever since the flood, the long Cassandra scream. Balls of water for nine months, smashing onto concrete, roofs, battering leaves, then water suddenly everywhere lapped up to the highway’s shoulder as we drove pell-mell into the city before the water cut us off from home. Sea north, south, soy and corn waving beneath water like kelp. Ever since the flood, Cassandra pleading, this is coming, this is coming soon everywhere, but it wasn’t soon enough and so was laughed at, chicken-littled, forgotten. Cars floated, entranced in brown foam, then disappeared, like morning dreams. Water surrounded and drowned the water works: no water in the taps, only buckets of rain- water to flush the shit, long lines at the national guard water distribution centers, in the rain, the ceaseless sea. Ever since the flood, the exhaust- tion from Cassandra’s cursed pleading, then her long sink into havoc. You remember? There was rain until my body was rain; and your body was rain, too, beating against your desperate desire to share this prophetic fear, of what you knew was coming everywhere. And I watched a father and four-year- old daughter in the street, in the rain, the ceaseless sea, as he squeezed shampoo onto the girl’s head, in the rain, the ceaseless sea, and lathered her hair, the girl laughing and laughing, her eyes closed against the soap, all roads in and out under water, her head tipped up to the rain, the ceaseless sea, laughing.
Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including Absence: Presence (Shanti Arts), The No One Poems (Thirty West), and All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander); and a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). Several of his chapbooks can be found online, including Tidal Flats (Mudlark) and How the World was Made (2River View). He lives in Oregon, where he is engaged in an endless dialogue about birth and death with a local murder of crows. He can be found at: https://christiengholson.blogspot.com/
