“It’s the year of getting better,” her mother said as she walked into the room. It was Thora’s second hospital stay of the year. The first time was an accident, now it was on purpose.

“For pleasure,” her mother joked. This time was for The Surgery, the one that had become all the rage. Thora finally had a womb. She felt her puffy new face and the ocean of bandages below. Everything in one clean chop.

In the corner, Thora’s boyfriend Eli stared out the window at the spires of Manhattan. He was probably brooding about the medical debt she was racking up to The Company. He acted like it was his burden. Her mother was probably wondering when she’d get grandchildren. Her mother’s name was Lorna. She didn’t get along with Eli.

Almost everyone supported the world becoming one big Company-owned continent. It made sense at first. Now, goods traveled faster, in bright yellow packages with dancing electric mice logos. The US had collapsed under the gig economy until The Company bought a third of the government’s debt. They became the sole media-making conglomerate. The Company made certain cartoons required viewing. A squeaky mouse began to teach kids about amoebas, drugs, love, frog anatomy, and the Lascaux cave paintings. The Company sank the idea of love.

They idolized Andy Warhol and told kids he was a straight man who lived in Disneyland. Thora sounded like a crone when she tried to tell people he was a gay man. “He was not,” they said. “Not that we care.”

Further down the dystopian tunnel they started to care. It wasn’t a good time to be alive. Not that any time was. It was ahistorical to resent one’s position in time.

*

Lorna wanted Thora to date a nice cis boy. Eli hadn’t undergone the male equivalent of The Surgery. He didn’t want to be a dad. He preferred animals. His cat, the porcupine he fostered, videos of camels and bat pups.

“Incredible what they can do these days,” Lorna said, balancing a mint tea on her knee and smoking a cigarette.

“You can’t do that here,” Thora said.

“It’s fine, baby. No one’s here but us.”

“My lung.”

“Oh. Right.”

Thora’s first surgery of the year was for a pneumothorax. Her lung had spontaneously collapsed. Now, only a few months later, she was in pain again. It was difficult to keep up. She refused to look in a mirror.

Eli was the one who called it “The Surgery.” But it was. It was The Surgery. She was getting better. He was just pessimistic. Not that she blamed him. She’d made a trade. She had a new face, a pussy, and a womb now even if she couldn’t see them yet. Eli and her mother would have to wait as she cried out the poison chemicals. It would take time to adjust, to realize what she’d given up.

Eli stood up to find gummy worms and an energy drink. He wanted to give the two of them time to talk. Unfortunately, her mother only wanted to talk about her childhood while the TV illuminated tsunamis in Alaska, car bombs in Missouri, and a new Angel Disease cropping up in Ohio that caused patients to grow thorns.

“When you were young, your father always said the plagues would come for us,” Lorna began. “He thought we strayed too far from the original plan. Men and women and kids and all that. I don’t think he was right but it does make you think about all these Angel Diseases.”

That’s what the scientists called them. Cults capitalized on the language. Thora’s mother and father had even briefly joined one. Her father passed away from the fifth Angel Disease that went around. She no longer kept track of what number they were up to.

Eli re-entered the room, tearing off a surgical gown and guzzling his silly little beverage. “I don’t know why so many trans girls write about the apocalypse,” he said. “We’re here. It doesn’t feel very trans.”

“Shut up,” Thora said, digging her nails into her arms.

Her mother tried to light another cigarette and began talking about Thora’s high school years. Everyone assumed she was going to become a teacher. Young, gentle boys are always encouraged to be domestic but authorial. In high school she worked as a babysitter for an ESL program which later helped her land her first real job at an after-school program on the Upper West Side.

She worried people would find her existence offensive. They did. She failed to hold the pieces of her life far apart from each other. She walked children to and from school and got harassed by men who called her a pedophile on the subway. She was not cut out for such simple brutality, she told herself. Besides, she showed up to work with a hickey once and her boss nearly fired her.

“I don’t care, but what if a mom saw that?”

Thora turned red, knowing it was only going to get harder. Her co-workers, largely cis straight women, told her they never received comments like that despite showing up to work high or hungover. While she became fluent in mom-friendly lingo and demeanor — and even became employee of the year — she lived with constant fear in the panopticon.

Everyone at work debated whether or not they wanted to have kids. None of them asked Thora if she wanted kids. Could they still want one after having seen the process up close? The gross shit, their tantrums and fragility, the nightmare liars? But of course, there were also sweet angels like the one trans girl Thora taught. She would’ve done anything to protect that girl.

“You’re not still working at the after-school program are you?” her mother asked. “That would be hard to do while raising a kid.”

“No, I quit a while ago.”

“That’s for the best. When I had you I stopped working. Your father made enough money.” Her mother took a sip of tea and turned to Eli. “Do you make enough to support her?”

Thora was desperate for fruit. Apricots sounded absolutely heavenly. She wished Rose were still alive. Rose loved apricots.

*

One night, before The Company, before the womb was possible, Thora was tripping on acid with Rose, who wondered if she wanted to be a mother. Rose thought about “having it all.” She was asking the classic question: how much could a woman want before her desire becomes a yoke?

Rose said she thought Thora would be a good mother. They strolled to the park to stare at the trees and then took the train to Coney Island, watching the waves in the cool wind of September. Rose wandered off to get them cotton candy.

“You looked so serious staring at the waves,” Rose said.

After spitting pink clouds into the ocean, they took the train to a bookstore where Rose bought runes. She wanted to teach Thora how to be a witch. Lesbian shit. Thora saw a card that said: “Motherhood looks good on you.”

Rose had tried to get The Surgery as soon as it became available to the general public. Her surgeon fumbled it. She got some bizarre infection and died.

Thora gave a eulogy by the Atlantic.

*

Every morning her mother argued with the doctors.

“My daughter,” she emphasized.

“Is perfectly fine,” the nice man in a white coat said.

Her mother was not going to let what happened to Rose happen to her daughter. She almost told Thora it wasn’t worth the risk, but of course, breedability won out. Her mother wanted lineage. It was easier to pretend, to let others’ reasons drift in and out of her body.

Eli had started playing a game designed by The Company on his phone. A little yellow mouse ran around and stabbed other critters with a javelin. Attention diverted to the screen in his hand, his digital avatar grew more adventurous as Eli fell further into stoic daydreams and lost the web of conversation.

“If I play long enough, I could erase our debt.”

“You’d have to play for a hundred years,” Thora said.

He looked hurt. “I don’t know what else you want me to do, Thora. I’m incredibly

stressed out, I’m exhausted, and neither of us have any money coming in.”

Lorna returned from the cafeteria. “I bought donuts for me and Eli.”

Looking at her mother, Thora saw what she was becoming. She saw the life she so desperately wanted, in all its glory. And she did love her mom, she did.

And feared her, too.

*

Before the botched surgery, Rose took Thora to the hospital when her lung collapsed. She came to visit and gave Thora news of the outside world. A new Angel Disease had emerged, the third in two years. She told Rose what it was like inside the hospital, to be alone, to wonder why her parents wouldn’t visit, how scary it was to hear about people dying from steel halos growing out of their skulls.

“Just think, one day you’ll be in here for a good reason.”

“Yeah,” Thora said. She texted her mom to say she was doing okay — they were going to do a very routine procedure to repair her lung.

All the other trans girls Thora knew were separatists. She was the only one who kept dating men. Rose told her she was being stupid. Rose lived in an all-trans-girl compound. The girls walked around with their dicks swinging and their tits covered in hickies.

“He’s going to get tired of you.”

“And you wouldn’t?”

“Not as quickly.”

The more cynical the better. Rose drew Raidho as they sat in the glow of the hospital vending machine. Transformation.

*

In an effort to produce more heterosexuals, The Company began funding comprehensive sex changes. Breedable women were beloved women. This left little room for trans fags and lesbians but they worked hard to pass the het test. Pee in a cup, jack off to the right kind of porn in front of a clinician. Luckily it was easy for Thora; she was straight.

Eli and Thora tried to wait out the rocky recovery with small talk. But it hung above them with butterfly wings and peach-colored mobiles. He did not want a child. He couldn’t afford anything he promised he’d pay for, much less something he didn’t want. Thora wasn’t sure she could afford it either, but felt it coming like an inevitable, cerulean task.

They joked about wanting to visit Disneyland. It’d been bought out by The Company and divided into parks based on the stages of economic theory. They tried to mask that with cute little characters — mice of different varieties. The electric mouse that Eli liked so much, a pink mouse with fairy wings that Thora joked she would get a tattoo of — they all symbolized some sort of participation in use-value.

To save up for this imagined trip, Thora started fixing other girls’ bikes. Rose teased her it was a short drop to being a gold-star lesbian.

“First you’ll fix a girl’s bike, then you’ll fix her sink and then…”

“As hot as that is, I’m not nearly as handy as Eli.”

“I don’t believe that.”

It was half true.

Rose only met Eli twice before she died. Both times they all got drunk together. The second time Rose had tried to kiss Thora in the bathroom.

Eli was handier with some things than others. He was tired. He shouldered phantom responsibility and let the weight split him. She didn’t need to go to Disneyland with him, even if she thought it would be like being broken open in front of everyone, like rose petals flying. She wanted a public romance. Maybe that’s why trans girls liked the apocalypse. It was the only setting where it made sense for trans girls to fall in love forever. It didn’t have to last that long.

*

“Your mom’s a little kooky,” Eli said, fluffing Thora’s stale hospital pillow. He could tell when Thora was drifting.

“I tried to warn you,” she said, sipping the electric-blue drink everyone told her would make her feel better.

“I just wasn’t expecting it. She’s like…weird.”

Eli didn’t look up from his game. If she were a different girl she would’ve smashed his phone against the wall. Or dropped it out the window. Or sold it online for coffee money. But he loved her and she loved him even if they couldn’t always make sense of the edges.

“She’s been in and out of cults her whole life,” Thora said.

“Was she in one when you were growing up?”

“No. Well. Just the church.”

“Do you consider that a cult?”

It wasn’t like the people at her church were deranged — if anything they were far too normal. A lot of them bought stock in The Company when it first became available. They thought The Company would reinstate serious moral values. When the electric mouse started teaching about the Lascaux cave paintings and disavowing gay men, they were ecstatic. But even then the churchgoers hadn’t brought out any Kool-Aid or advocated for a Second Coming. It was all brick-and-mortar, meat-and-potatoes spirituality. Until her mother started flirting with other

denominations. Cult Mommy.

Eli scooted his chair closer to her bed. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“When we go home I’m going to set up a little canopy above our bed. And I’ll string up those plastic glow-in-the-dark stars you’re always going on about.”

“I’d like that,” she said quietly.

*

The surgeries would sink her if she wasn’t careful. Eli was only tied to her monetarily in the sense that they shared rent and food. Overall, his grumbling about money was for show. She didn’t ask him for surgery money. She was still paying off the first one even after asking for money online. The Company subsidized The Surgery but not enough; Thora had four credit cards. One of the cards was covered in blue mice wielding tacky lavender swords.

The night she got home from her lung surgery, after spending almost a month in the hospital, she sat in the tub and cried until Rose came over. Rose crawled into the tub alongside her and held Thora against her chest as she sobbed.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

It was as okay as it would ever get. They didn’t say anything the rest of the night. Rose made mint tea and they watched the cartoon about the electric mice they’d both seen a hundred times. The comfort of numb repetition. She sat on the couch feeling her lungs contract and expand. They told her it could happen again. She would never be immune.

Rose got up and made popcorn. Thora rummaged through the cabinet for valerian root. The doctor hadn’t given her enough pain meds to use for sleep. They were running low on everything. She met Eli at the Value Plus Company Drug Store two weeks later. He was looking for lube and she clocked him.

“I’m Eli,” he said. “Do you currently have an ugly trans guy or are applications open?”

“My name’s Thora,” she said, eyeing the candy aisle. “What do you mean?”

“Every hot trans girl has an ugly trans guy boyfriend.”

No one she dated had ever called her a “hot girl.”

They spent that summer wandering the rot of Central Park and fucking in the Rambles. Sometimes he stole her peaches from the market by the docks. He would show up grinning and ask which hand she wanted.

That was the Eli she needed. The one who took her to dinner and strung up twinkle lights. But she had to admit, he was not the kind of man who would make a good father. Their straight shelter in the apocalypse was fragile. Passing meant she could walk around without the fear. When she used to walk around with Rose she always felt angular shards in her lung, worried someone would clock them.

*

Thora let her mom talk to the doctors. The inane questions Thora needed to ask were funneled through a haze of polite chitchat.

“Will her vagina be self-lubricating?” (Thora knew the answer to that one, of course.)

“Will she have to take any special probiotics?” (She had already researched the best probiotics for neo-vaginas.)

“Will she have to dilate forever?” (This one she didn’t really want her mother to ask.)

“For her face…how long until it…?” (Until it what? Thora wanted to ask.)

“How long until she could have a child?” (The womb was the biggest source of stress. It carried the greatest risk of complications.)

“Could he impregnate her?” (Eli would never get her pregnant. She already tried telling her mother this.)

A fly buzzed near the bathroom. Eli was still playing that stupid game, cursing loudly every few minutes. The pain made it hard to stay conscious. All the pain meds were going to patients with Angel Diseases. She had to make do with what they gave her no matter how many times she rang the bell.

Her body felt like fog. She wondered if Rose had ever felt like that. A girl was less a body of water than a gradual evaporation.

“Are you alright, honey? How do you feel?”

Bad. She felt raw. She knew her mother was going to start asking about grandchildren soon. She knew Eli was going to leave her. She knew she wanted to raise a kid and read The Giving Tree with funny voices and tell her child she thought Shel Silverstein was hot.

Her father read her stories when she was young. He got really into it, making Sherlock Holmes sound like a clueless cuckold. Her mother never listened, she was always in the bathroom fussing with something.

“I feel fine,” Thora said. “I’m just a little thirsty.”

“Alright sweetie. Eli, why don’t you go get our girl some cream soda?”

Eli got up, shot her mom a poisonous look, and stumbled out of the icy hospital room. When he opened the door she could hear a monitor crash and screaming. Another Angel Disease victim flew by on a stretcher, someone growing thorns all over their body.

*

Before Thora could start estrogen she was asked if she wanted to freeze her sperm. Her response was immediate. No. It was one of the few times in her life someone asked her directly if she wanted kids — perhaps the only time someone asked her if she wanted biological ones. The message was clear: infertility should haunt her, she should want the magical trans uterus. She should do anything for The Company-approved womb since she could afford it. Sort of. She could put it on credit and pay it off for the rest of her life. She wondered if motherhood had to be expected of you in order for you to develop any feelings around it.

She thought about all the MILFs out there. All the times she told someone to fuck her like a woman, to make her afraid of getting pregnant, to all the men she confessed she wasn’t sure she wanted to be a mother but she wanted to have an abortion.

Now motherhood was something people could expect of her.

*

Raspberry sunset pooled against Eli’s legs. She wanted him to come closer so she could touch him. She wanted to curl up next to a body. Desperation only made people angrier; they knew you weren’t internalizing anything they said. Thora wasn’t sure what caused his newest mood shift — sometimes he needed a piss-party afternoon. Involuntarily she smiled. He snapped.

“I know you think it’s stupid but I’m trying to provide for you.”

“This is a way to do that?”

Thora meant it sincerely but it came across like an insult. Like she knew better.

“I’m sorry,” Thora said, not entirely sure why she was saying sorry this time. “I just wish you were more present.”

“I can’t be present when we’re falling apart financially. My mom isn’t coming to take care of us.”

“My mom’s going to leave soon. And then I’ll be back at square one. She’s not rich.”

“She’s not rich but she talks to you. My mom and I haven’t spoken in years. Your mom could help. She could do something if you asked her to but you’re too weak to ask.”

“Shut up. It’s not like that,” she said.

“Then what is it like, babe?”

The AC kicked on.

“I’ll ask her if that’s what you want,” Thora said. She didn’t think about the time as a kid when her mom, Sister Lorna then, came home from prayer service with a “holy adornment.” Thora didn't think about the time Sister Lorna took her to the cult meeting and made her child stand in the middle of the congregation to face judgment. She didn’t think about the time her father explained what demons were by saying, “The thing that’s inside you.”

“No, it's fine. Just read your runes,” Eli spat. “I’m sure they’ll say the apocalypse can be averted. They’ll say it’s fine; we just need to love each other.”

Thora watched him leave, clutching his phone tightly by his side. She tried to imagine him in the hospital courtyard, trying to hum one of his favorite punk songs. It was good for him to have a break.

She realized she was dry heaving. Her face felt hot even though she knew in reality there was no way she could be feeling anything other than pain. She was crying, the kind that made her body fight gravity. Her hands wouldn’t move, wouldn’t wipe the water trapped in her face bandages. It was summer. It was supposed to be a happy time. If she could, she would call Rose and cry into the speaker, but Rose would’ve just said, “I told you so.”

Humid light sifted through the window. Flies continued to collect on the sill. If everything went well, she would only stay in the hospital for four more days.

When her mom came in, she tried to stop the flow of tears. She was mildly successful, turning the flood into a noiseless trickle, but it wouldn’t stop completely.

“Honey,” her mom said, setting down her mint tea and pulling up a chair. “Is it the pain?”

Thora nodded.

“Okay sweetie. Okay. Okay, okay, it’s okay.”

Her mom set her hand on Thora’s, the two intertwining tightly.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come last time, but this time I’m here, sweetpea. I’m here.”

She nodded through the tears. They were getting bigger again. Louder. She was gasping.

“It’s never going to stop. It’s never going to stop.”

“Oh baby.”

They fumbled like this for a few minutes until her mother held up her hand with an idea.

“Why don’t you read my fortune. With your little runes. Did you bring them?”

“You — hate — them —”

“Will you read my fortune?”

The culty side of her mom was winning out.

Thora nodded through the tears and inched closer to the side of the bed. She fumbled with the menagerie on her bedside table. Pudding cups, decaying lilacs, books, an old issue of Vogue, and her little bag of runes carved into beans. Her mom smiled. She needed someone to hold her even if trust felt like a wobbly tune. It was better just to let it happen.

“I’ll do a three-rune spread.”

Thora took a deep breath and searched the bag for a more certain future. Before she took anything out of the bag, though, Lorna grabbed her hand.

“Do you really want kids? Is that why you’re doing this?”

She realized something about living on two sides of a thicket. In fact, she realized the thicket was less of a concrete divide than a small, porous stream.

“If someone else really wanted one,” Thora said, fiddling with the bag.

It would be different, she thought. It would be so different.

She wished someone wanted her to want one.

My mother and grandmother were born in ‘the land of the lake,’ or La Comarca de la Laguna, a cradle of fertile land between the Sierra Madre mountain ranges in the northern Mexican desert — la Sierra Madre Occidental to the west, and la Sierra Madre Oriental to the East, two mountain mothers, two guardians that keep the land between them a secret. It is where the Nazas and Aguanaval rivers break their pact with the ocean and empty fresh water into the land, flooding the expanse with wide, glassy lakes — a miracle that enabled life in miles of landlocked desert, and made impossible soil fertile for thousands of years.

The Comarca de la Laguna, derived from the word marca, or border, is itself a borderland in El Norte, that spans the states of Durango, my grandmother Angelica’s birthplace, and Coahuila, where my mother was born, land that also borders the United States. It is also a site of colonial atrocity and indigenous resistance, where New Spain established las haciendas laguneras, a robust cotton industry whose economy was built on the encomienda system, a legal system of forced unpaid labor by subjugated indigenous people who had been dispossessed and detribalized through systematic extermination and unspeakable acts of genocide.

The ‘land of the lake,’ a land with rich soil replenished by the flooding rivers, was an ideal location for these haciendas, and for New Spanish colonists to begin their cotton enterprises for the crown. The frequent seasonal flooding was an ideal form of natural irrigation. In the middle of hostile, arid desert, there was a fertile oasis, virgin and unknown. But cotton is a thirsty crop, for which even the most generous irrigation does not satisfy its root. It exhausts the soil of nutrients; the water it consumes leaves behind a kind of salt, stripping the land to such a degree it becomes a wasteland, requiring abandonment and expansion, usually into forests. Eventually, the land of the lake was covered in cotton, a sea of whiteness over the land.

In fantasy, and poetry, we build the memory of the world through metaphor.

My maternal grandmother Angelica was born on one of these haciendas to farm laborers, and the only way I knew to trace my way back to my foremothers was through Catholic missions, known to keep excellent records.

My mother does not remember her birthplace, Torreon; she was a toddler when they fled. No one ever talks about Jesus, her father, or what happened before they lived in Tampico. All they know is that after he, a 36 year old man married my grandmother, a 14 year old girl, they lost contact after a year, and that the silence became so extreme that her brother, my Tio Joel, had to rescue her and her two babies in the middle of the night three years later, but not before punching him in the face.

So I must begin with the land; it is the only record that remains. And that land between them was once flooded by rivers that became lakes, lakes that due to construction, development, agribusiness, resource extraction, are disappearing, if not already gone. But the land itself is a record; all it does is remember.

We all come from the land, eat from it, drink from it, touch its surfaces. The land is memory made material, and keeps record of every single one of us. It is the first object ever to come into existence; anything that exists after it is because of, and part of, the land. Therefore, its formations and materials are objective and cannot be denied. The land, when interpreted, is so undeniable, it trumps false narratives — ice cores, tree rings, the amount of water left. These facts build a sequence — a story. It is why in school, my favorite kind of rock was the sedimentary rock, the layers of time visible in cross-section, time itself made material, the story it told. I loved when sedimentary rock tilted, twisted, warped, the story of centuries, millennia, ages the land itself told. My mothers’ histories may be forgotten, but the Sierra Madres still exist.

*

Lacuna (disambiguation)
Lacuna (plural lacunas or lacunae) may refer to:

Related to the meaning “gap”
Lacuna (manuscripts), a gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, painting, or musical work
Great Lacuna, a lacuna of eight leaves in the Codex Regius where there was heroic Old Norse poetry
Lacuna (music), an intentional, extended passage in a musical work during which no notes are played
Scientific lacuna, an area of science that has not been studied but has potential to be studied
Lacuna or accidental gap, in linguistics, a word that does not exist but which would be permitted by the rules of a language
Lacuna, in law, largely overlapping a non liquet (“it is not clear”), a gap (in the law)

In medicine
Lacuna (histology), a small space containing an osteocyte in bone, or chondrocyte in cartilage
Muscular lacuna, a lateral compartment of the thigh
Vascular lacuna, a medial compartment beneath the inguinal ligament
Lacuna magna, the largest of several recesses in the urethra

Other uses
Lacuna model, a tool for unlocking culture differences or missing “gaps” in text Lacunar amnesia, loss of memory about one specific event
Lacunar stroke, in medicine, the most common type of stroke
Lacuna Coil, an Italian hard rock/metal band Lacunary function, an analytic function in mathematics
Lacunarity, a mathematical measure of the extent that a pattern contains gaps
Lacunary polynomial, or sparse polynomial
Petrovsky lacuna, in mathematics

Laguna (disambiguation)

*

Research is a logical process, and evidence must be objective. Responsible research has little to no speculation. Here are the logical facts, arranged into a problem.

Logic problem:

The Rio Grande is the border between the United States and Mexico.

Land O’ Lakes is a butter company that once depicted an illustration of an indigenous woman with a feather in her hair kneeling in front of a lake as its label.

“The company, founded in 1921 by a group of Minnesota dairy farmers, is phasing in a new design ahead of its 100th anniversary. Instead of the depiction of the woman, some products will be labeled ‘Farmer-Owned’ and feature an illustration of a field and lake, or photographs of its farmers, the company announced.” — “Land O’Lakes Removes Native American Woman From Its Products,” New York Times, September 17, 2020.

In 2020, in response to criticism, the depiction of the indigenous woman was removed from the label. Now, only the land, and the lake, remain.

Rivers empty into the ocean, and the end of the river is its mouth.

Rivers empty into the ocean, except the Naza and Aguanaval rivers, which empty into disappearing lakes.

A lake is a lacuna, and a lacuna is also a gap in memory, an absence, a silence.

If the river is a border, and the end is its mouth, where it empties, it speaks.

The Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Synonyms for gulf.
gulf, noun.

1 our ship sailed east into the gulf. inlet, creek, bight, fjord, estuary, sound, arm of the sea; bay, cove.

2 the ice gave way and a gulf widened slowly. opening, gap, fissure, cleft, split, rift, crevasse, hole, pit, cavity, chasm, abyss, void; ravine, gorge, canyon, gully.

3 there is a growing gulf between the rich and the poor. divergence, contrast, polarity, divide, division, separation, difference, wide area of difference; schism, breach, rift, split, severance, rupture, divorce; chasm, abyss, gap; rare scission.

The Rio Grande speaks into the abyss/void/rupture/divorce/chasm/abyss.

Los Rios Naza and Aguanaval empty into lakes, or lagunas.

The rivers Naza and Aguanaval speak into the land of lakes.

A lacuna is a gap in memory.

“Laguna de Mayrán, Vega de San Pedro, Laguna de Viesca, Laguna del Caimán are long forgotten landscapes, long forgotten names.” — Francisco Valdes-Perezgasga, Orion Magazine

The lakes have disappeared.

*

At a talk given at the New York Library in 1986, Toni Morrison said, “You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory — what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our ‘flooding.’”

*

While I was looking for photos of Torreon, I saw a headline: “Tras 6 años seco, corre agua por el lecho del Río Nazas.” After six years dry, water runs through the River Nazas riverbed, it said. The photo showed a wide, gentle, lazy river, almost like a lake. Also called El Rio de la Laguna, or the river of the lake, it is now contained by the Francisco Zarco dam, constructed in 1968, and has been dry ever since. Once naturally irrigated by seasonal floods, the damming of the rivers has had a devastating effect on the area, forcing the people to use groundwater that is laden with arsenic. The return of the river would replenish the aquifers and solve the arsenic problem, but the dairy industry needs the water to grow alfalfa, the thirstiest crop and single largest user of water, which feeds the cows, which produce the milk. On the United States side, the problem is mirrored — alfalfa consumes 80% of the Colorado River’s water supply, to feed the cows, to produce the milk and meat, and the river is disappearing.

As I read more about it, one fact that should have been obvious stood out — the dry riverbed of the Nazas, the one the water returned to, linked the cities of Torreon, Coahuila and Gomez Palacio, Durango — my mother and grandmother’s birthplaces. After the rains, the dams could not contain the excess, and the floodgates opened. And so the cities were linked again; the land remembered the river’s path, and the river ran and spread like always, into a lake — a river that defies its borders.

Author's note: These visual poems draw inspiration from an earlier phase of this project, which itself emerged in response to my daily commutes across the bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. As I look out upon a landscape now heavily shaped by American colonialism, I know another world is possible.

—toward Jacob, who took that river’s first new breath
and for Will and for Paco and for Jenny and for Jeff…

I started asking rivers to feed me as a child—literally, with flesh from fish, then figuratively, with flashes of comfort. On the banks of Pacific Northwest tributaries, I learned to anchor my attention in the ceaselessness of a current pushing towards salt. There, while throwing a line to schools of salmon or steelhead, the realities of poverty and addiction back home felt more elsewhere, and it was easier to believe both good food for family and good food for thought waited in my next cast. Like that, I spent a lot of time fixated on running water.

But it only takes two trips to the same stretch of stream (say, just before and then just after an overdue rain) to see how quickly a river can go from tender to terrifying, from seeming to drift gently at your feet with all that it could offer to holding what you believe you need most beyond your riskiest reach. And a river almost always takes more time to return from raging.

*

In preparation for a craft panel called “Writing the Wounded World: Poets Working from and against Eco-Grief,” I choose to return to an Arkansas stream that I’ve been avoiding. One transplanted suffering or another I am carrying around has changed the stream’s banks from a space of meditative reconnection and release into an unpleasant mirror of my own inner fracturing—of feeling, as Li-Young Lee once put in a poem, “dispersed, though in one body,/ claimed by rabble cares and the need to sleep.”

Like many in struggle will do from time to time, rather than accepting the difficulty of my surroundings—in this case, a Southern stream’s warmwater startle of poisonous snakes and primitive gar—I have been staying away. I have been forgetting how the landscapes that ground me often do so without my fully trusting why. Sometimes, all you have to do is stumble or drag your feet toward a familiar place of relief. Sometimes, all you have to do is return…

*

I have been what I would call healed by several streams. But each healing that I’ve experienced from Vermont has turned the power of running water into a greater mystery for me. One Vermont river-healing didn’t even feel like a healing when it was happening.

I was first in Vermont during a four-week September residency—to rise and write and revise while surrounded by other inspiring writers and visual artists. What’s more, I would eat every meal and write or change every word and sleep every night with a river right outside my window.

Between midday bouts of creating, a handful of us had started strolling to a nearby swimming hole to escape the swelter of late summer. Then someone learned of a chilly spring-fed stream with plunge pools just beyond our normal walking range. So, one day, we crammed into the few cars available, and I spent that particular afternoon with artists showing me how to receive a glorious massage from the right-sized riffle or miniature waterfall. If you can find a roughly body-height drop in a river with rocks to safely wedge yourself steady, you can feel that river’s travel written along your entire body. If the day is hot enough or the water cool enough, your breath will also gain a new story. The story I received that day was about the grace of a togetherness you don’t see coming. After decades of wading and fishing and meditating through streams, there I was, almost by accident, with beautiful not-quite strangers teaching me a whole other way to let a river carry me.

But then the softness of Vermont was punctured by another afternoon, one I spent alone with a different river toward the end of the residency. That day began with a long and difficult route I’d planned for fishing. That day, the pleasant pulls on my attention and warm admissions of connection were slowly then suddenly replaced by nature’s other necessary insight: unbounded indifference.

For years I’d told myself that my time with streams was deepened by a distinction from my writing practice, that I never wrote while on a river, soothed by the ways running water seemed to diminish my traction on the past, weaving my focus into the falling present instead. When I was planning my route to this other Vermont river—which I purposefully made long and difficult to gain more space to fish back from—I imagined it as a gift of sorts, for all the writing I’d been doing back in my studio, day after day, only swimming with new friends but resisting the urge to grab my flyrod to keep the words coming.

Then I trudged the multiple miles down what ended up being a harrowing highway and an oddly named backroad that I swore I’d heard before. Along the way I tracked through ominous clouds of insects, pieces of putrefying roadkill, and other strange signs that needled a sensitivity dredged up by the weeks of unobstructed writing. The brutal heaviness of the sun also seemed determined to wring my body more defenseless with every step.

And once I arrived at the river, what waited for me there was the most intimate conversation I’ve ever had with loneliness, as the meanings I’d built around my own wounded history were stripped away by the rawness of nature’s unreflecting face.

I scribbled notes the entire time—in part to interrupt the unwanted immediacy, in part to reach for understanding all that loneliness was trying to tell me. As the river did nothing but continue, perhaps the hardest thing I heard loneliness saying that day was Trust me.

When I finally returned, the artists I’d grown closest to could read a kind of horror on my face—that I was struggling to get my breath back. They sat with me. They let me stay silent. They let me weep. Their hands confirmed from time to time that my bewildered body was indeed back with them. Amen.

Two summers later, when a writers’ conference brought me back to Vermont, I hadn’t been in or near very much running water since, and I was growing afraid that I’d somehow lost my way to the single healthiest environment of my life.

*

I’m weaving my truck through the Ozarks. This hilly range has soft inclines that can too easily obscure their ancient age from a Washington-born vantage like mine. My literacy of the horizon was shaped by staggering peaks of The Cascades and The Olympians, by looming volcanoes that could demand without warning the entire region’s full attention with smoky reminders of their potential for catastrophe.

As I drive, I catch an episode of Hidden Brain on the radio. The segment I’m hearing is about “wild awe,” and Shankar Vedantam’s guest, Dacher Keltner, is saying that wild awe occurs when we encounter a mystery too vast to perceive with our current knowledge of nature. Such awe requires our accommodation, which can be harrowing—that feeling of rearranging your structures of understanding to make sense of the awesomeness before you.

I pull up to the banks of the Arkansas stream, and something clenched inside me gives…

*

I spent the opening August days of the Vermont conference letting it slip to other writers that I was maybe hoping and also more than a little fearful to make my way to a river during our stay there—and could I maybe have some help to go for a brief swim, maybe look for a miniature waterfall if we had the chance, just to know that I could tolerate a river’s full holding again, to know running water returning my breath.

As it turned out, there was already a well-established tradition of conference-goers visiting a river just a short drive away. And so, I piled in with the handful of writers who had decided to spend their mid-conference break swimming to reset the intensity of the writing and the heat.

Much of the day that unfolded with those writers still feels buffered by a gauzy disbelief at the numinous strands of vulnerability and curiosity and play that kept us both together and apart from moment to moment. Even the drive there was setting some kind of wonder in motion.

With limited space, a few of us had squeezed side-by-side in the trunk of a writer’s hatchback. Because we sat facing backwards, looking through the vehicle’s large rear-window, our view was of the rural road pulling its yellow hashes away from us. A wave not unlike motion sickness started to challenge our trust in staying very long with that perspective.

Something about the challenge also maybe seemed restorative—or somebody wanted to call it that, if only to help us pass the drive. Societal messaging would have us believe that we live strapped forward to time, responsible for predicting and capitalizing on all that’s headed our way (and feeling ashamed when we don’t or cannot). But that day’s backwards travel was more aligned with how we really move through life—time pulling experience from us, moments and people added to the stream of our constantly becoming the past.

Then someone confessed how much they were struggling to actually see the occasional joggers and bikers we kept passing. Faces and forms sprung from a first clarity that felt immediately washed away as each figure entered the obscurity of their growing distance from us. Someone called the feeling sad, and then someone else or that same someone, wanting a different name for sadness, called it forgetting.

When the car finally stopped at the river and our difficult new sense of movement did not relieve, we tried hugging each other to break the spell.

*

“Reading the water” is what anglers call the practice of divining a river’s underwater drama by interpreting what can be seen at its surface: the speed of a floating leaf, color changes created by shadow or depth, boils in the stream’s current as water works around a submerged log, etc. This visual information, when synced with feedback from countless hours of angling’s trials and errors, becomes a foil to imagining invisible fish lying in hiding or tracking something to eat.

It’s what I’m doing now at the Arkansas stream, even though I already know I will push through the first several hundred yards of river, wading for the riffles and pools that past experience has taught me will contain more promising fish. The water’s allure on my attention is immediate, though, and keeps me from rushing by for the moment.

I’ve read so much water in my life it feels like an instinct I’ve always had. Turning that instinct off seems as likely as disregarding what a tree’s leaves can say about the seasons at a glance. Even while standing before an urban spillway or agricultural ditch, pieces of water I know have nothing with scales swimming below, I will catch myself looking where impossible fish could hold in another world…

*

After the cars had all unloaded at the Vermont river, I held somewhere between those writers who took out books in the inviting shade and those who stripped down to swimwear before entering the water. It took me a few beats and then a short leap from an overhang and a brief swim upstream to find my initial waves of relief. In a small bend where the river picked up just enough current to seem heavy, I spent several minutes with a fellow writer (whom I’d learned earlier was also an angler and so could empathize with the odd sensation of splashing straight into a riffle—something you’d never do while stalking fish), showing them a shy version of the massage technique that the residency artists had taught me. We took turns finding our footing, holding hands as necessary, to feel the river kneading at the tension in our shoulders.

Then I heard whoops and hollers, and the garbled word “waterfall” came from further upstream, where some other writers were waving their arms to get our attention. I made my way along the slick river-stones to learn they had discovered a crop of large rocks that broke the current into multiple braids. One braid of stream plunged more dramatically than the rest, creating a perfect scoop in the flow for someone to rest against.

My skin and hair had dried some, which intensified the gasp and grin of easing my body back into the cool hands of the stream. And I lingered there until I was convinced, I had rejoined the one long heave of running water. Then I watched as the other writers took turns receiving their own massages, expressions lit with feeling yourself rippled by a river’s defiance of start or finish.

Then one writer filled their lungs and went face first, playfully ducking their back below the river’s rush. Just as the clock in my head sounded with real worry, they broke the surface and exclaimed, “You can breathe under here!” We were writers. We could hear their voice caught in the familiar thrill of translating individual joy into group resonance. Yes, weren’t we all receiving a kind of breath? But no, they insisted, they’d found a little space behind the river, between water and rock, where you could just fit the front of your face and breathe.

And so, we took new turns, daring ourselves to find the underwater way to draw breath, the trust of which seemed to require opening the eyes against a roar that shouted otherwise to your senses. What kind of air was this that we were taking into our lungs now?

Then another writer perched on an upstream boulder to take in the high view of a face rising with astonishment. But what they saw beneath was the river fanning the torso of each water-breather into one more miracle we maybe didn’t want the language for, so nobody really tried beyond a deep sighing.

Then another writer found this nearly invisible dip in the limestone of the nearby shallows, a slight bowl that seemed a minor mirror to our almost waterfall. And when they plopped down into it to show those of us who couldn’t yet see, the grandeur of their motion added our laughter to the day.

As the afternoon aged, we went on like that, returning to the wonder-cave or playing sillier to soften the ending we had to face once the awe had begun. Some of us could only take a single new breath. Some of us went under over and over. Nobody rose with the same expression. We each took as many tries as needed and then waited until our spell waned enough to leave it.

One by one but also all together, we started moving downstream toward the vehicles. Perhaps as a kind of mercy for the longing already growing within us, someone mentioned what we had to accept about the river: we would never find that cave again. Even if we could return a hundred times, seasonal floods would shift a flow-altering stone or water levels would drop too low to ever recreate the breath we were departing. And maybe that was the blessing. We each had places to go and be present. A desire to be impossibly back would not serve us, nor would convincing others they should have been somewhere else they could not. But we carried in our lungs a shimmery faith in the next strange breath we might drop inside of, if only we dared or lingered or played enough to witness something rewriting the distrust in our bodies.

We floated the last stretch of river with our bellies up, facing backwards, mostly letting a stream’s meander carry us without much effort, feet dimpling the scenery drifting by. I started a quiet prayer for what we may have planted in that cave, and for the gentleness of our leaving—that it might save us from hurting to clutch the clarity that must pass away.

*

While some rivers will show you, either readily or in time, a being that lies underneath, all rivers keep parts of themselves flexing beyond our sight. I return to running water to know what a life spent looking again will sometimes reveal, but also to accept what drifts in the margins of an always incomplete wonder. Today that wonder includes but is not limited or even mostly defined by my fear of—what—the language I’ve been missing for belonging?

Before I start fishing my Arkansas stream to fully break the dry spell, I turn around to make a mental note of the path I’ll need at the end of this day. But the way is bordered by thick bushes and riparian trees that obscure the truck parked somewhere I can’t see. Bless the river once more for making it harder for me to stare off towards where it is I think I am heading, nudging my attention back inside the banks of where I am.

There is a river, lost or hidden, that is impossible to pass six days each week. The force of its waters hurls stones. Or the river is a river of stones, a torrent of stones and sand. Maybe it is a volcano, some say, unable to imagine this river. Maybe it is a spring.

Some say the river is as wide as a bow can shoot an arrow. Others say it is many miles across, seventeen, and that its waters both cure disease and throw stones as tall as a tower. That on the day it does not flow it resembles an inland sea, a sea of snow, a sea of sand. That if one gathers and bottles some of this sand, the sand will be restless for six days each week, agitating itself against the glass every day but one.

The stones in this river of stones or this river of water, can be heard a half-day away and sound like a storm, like an ocean, like the roar of waves, like the howl of wind over water. But one day a week the river is quiet, and does not flow. Certain fish, on that day, draw close to the shore, and refuse to swim. They—like the sand, like the water—are quiet and rest.

There are a people, lost or hidden, that will not cross this river. They cannot six days a week. They will not on the one day they could.

Some say it is the lost tribes of Israel, all ten, or four, who live on the other side of the river. That the river is in Persia, in India, in Ethiopia. That it is south of the Caspian sea. That the lost Jews are in Pakistan, in China, in Syria, in Russia. That they are warriors of tremendous height.

Some medieval Germans believed a legendary Jewish nation of “Red Jews” lived beyond this river. Red-bearded and red-clothed warriors with flushed red faces who would eventually invade Europe and threaten Christianity during the tribulations near the end of the world.

Others believed that across the river are the descendants of Moses himself. That during Babylonian captivity, it was demanded of them to stand before Babylon’s sacred statues and perform the songs the Israelites used to sing in their now destroyed Temple. The children of Moses, instead, so they could not play their own harps, cut off their own thumbs. Many of these Israelite priests were slaughtered, their bodies heaped in mounds. But a cloud descended and a pillar of fire guided the survivors to a place where this river, called Sambatyon, could be stretched around them.

In Portugal, the secret Jews of Lisbon were alerted each Friday afternoon—by a man walking through the city holding up a glass vessel of jumping sand and stones—that the Sabbath was coming. A sign for the converso Jews, the Jews hiding as Christians, to jump up and close their shops. These were not the lost Jews. Not those lost Jews.

Roman senator and provincial governor of Judea, Turnus Rufus the Evil, once asked Rabbi Akiva how do you know which day is the Sabbath? Maybe it’s another day. Reb Akiva replied: the River Sambatyon. We rest when it rests. Thus, the Jews on the other side of the Sambatyon will not cross it on the day that it is quiet. For they too must rest.

In Ancient times, the Sabbath started before the Sabbath started. Three blasts of the shofar were followed by the lighting of the Sabbath candles, the sun not yet set. Everyone would then wait— the time it took to roast a small fish—before three more shofar blasts sanctified time. Only when three stars appeared in the sky the following night would time move forward again.

“There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.” said Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, author of The Sabbath.

“We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass” said the descendent of a long and storied line of rabbis on both sides of his family, Karl Marx.

The time of the soul is not the time of the calendar. The Jewish New Year does not begin at the beginning of the year but on the new moon at the beginning of the seventh month. The calendar does not start anew, the soul does.

The first day of the seventh month is also called a day of rest. But during this day Jews leave their cities to go to a river. They go to a river to perform Tashlich, the throwing of breadcrumbs into the water, the release of one’s transgressions and regrets. They leave the city to do this because in the Middle Ages the custom of Tashlich was used to accuse Jews of casting a spell over the water, even poisoning it through incantation.

The word ‘to rest’ in Biblical Hebrew, shavat, gives rise in the Middle Ages to the word shevitah, referring to the things one must refrain from in order to rest. Shevitah in modern Hebrew has now also come to mean “to go on strike.”

There is a mandate in the Bible that comes even before the mandate to rest each week. Shmita. Shmita occurs every seventh year as a sabbath for the land.

“Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its produce, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave, the beasts of the field may eat. In like manner you shall do with your vineyard and your olive grove.”

Shmita was of such importance that the Prophet Jeremiah declared that the exile of the Israelites was because of this very thing, their regular violation of shmita. Moses Maimonides agreed. The four grave things that could cause exile were idolatry, murder, incest, and the violation of shmita.

Some say the laws of shmita only apply to those living in Israel. And yet when significant numbers of Jews began to settle there again in the 19th century, rabbinical authorities came up with a cheat, heter mechira, where Jews could sell their land, for the length of the shmita year, to non-Jews, and then work the land as employees. In other words, the land never rested. In other words, the poor of the people did not eat what lie fallow in this land. In other words, the beasts of the never-rewilded field did not eat from the never-resting land.

1.3 billion cubic meters of water used to flow through the lower Jordan River, but now it is only 2% of that. The majority of what remains is diverted for human use by Israel, Syria and Jordan, each taking what they can before the other. The Six Day War was partly started over this battle. Untreated sewage and chemicals from agricultural fertilizer have decimated its ecosystem.

Some say there are a people trapped behind the west bank of this river. Trapped yet prohibited from accessing it. From accessing it or fresh water springs. That these people are not allowed to drill new water wells or deepen existing ones. That even the collection of rainwater is controlled by another there, their own cisterns often destroyed as punishment. That hundreds of these communities have no access to running water. That they endure somehow, improbably, by consuming a mere 73% of the recommended daily water minimum. Yet their neighbors, living sometimes in communities that sit side by side with theirs, consume four times more than this.

Which came first, the unquenchable thirst or the river of stones?

*

Reb Palache of Oruro, in the Hebrew year 5831, gathered his followers along the banks of the Kachi Mayu, on the new moon of the seventh month. A shmita year. For the six years before they anticipate it. They know debts will be forgiven this year, and yet some will suffer who were owed a great deal. They know others have experienced crop spoilage and will also need to be helped through the year ahead, but they have planned and imagined for this day. For all of this. For years now. Their neighbors too know of their ways. Some connect them to their own practices—of rotation of crops in seven-year cycles.

Tell us the story of the return of the waters, they ask him. He has told them before of Joseph’s dream, of seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. How he helped, not his own people, but the Egyptians, filling their granaries in anticipation. Peoples of every sort came from around the region, including his own family, his own brothers, to Egypt when they needed food. And for the six years before the shmita, Reb Palache’s community feeds its neighbors, invites them to their fields and their table, goes to theirs.

But he knows this is the result not the cause of the return of the waters. That the boundless thirst had to be broken. That it wasn’t rest that returned them to rest. But something else.

Tell us of the strike, they say. But his mind is elsewhere, his eyes briefly blinded by a flash of sun. A flash of sun glinting off an iridescent scale, of a fish briefly soaring out of the water.

*

Reb Soomekh of Jisr az-Zarqa, in the Hebrew year 5796, had gathered her followers along the banks of the Nahal Taninim, on the new moon of the seventh month. A shmita year. Their first attempt at an enactment of a new ritual, a shmita seder, a mere three years since the end of the shevitah, the strike.

It had been too soon. Too soon for a shared ritual, the land so newly federated. Yes, they had joined the strike, improbably started by one remarkable woman, Sheikha Mariam of Musmus. But even as they came together for the seder, it was as if they were on opposite sides of the river. They could not share their stories, they could not mourn their respective dead together.

This year, the Hebrew year 5803, a shmita year once again, their second shmita seder, they meet closer to Musmus, along the banks of the estuary of the Kishon river, now called Nahr el-Mokatta once again. They keep their distance from the water which still can result in chemical burns, despite the closing of the factories nearly a decade ago. Yet the great cormorants are returning, their astonishing green-blue eyes watching them.

The six cups on the seder plate represent the six elements of the shmita year. They decide this year to focus on the sixth, on otzar, The Commons. The otzar cup holds several dates and is surrounded by many more, split and opened, lying among honey-soaked almonds and pistachios. This isn’t the first time they’ve shared rituals in their respective traditions since the first shmita. And yet it is stilted still. Reb Soomekh and Sheikha Mariam have decided in advance there will be no speaking this year. Everyone will stuff an opened date for another. They will sing together, wordless melodies. They will be together, cup by cup, without words.

*

It is the new moon, on the first day of the seventh month, of the Hebrew year 5845. A shmita year. Rehabiah ben Eliezer and his kinsmen have gathered, as they do every week, at the banks of the river, each time it stops. But this isn’t merely the weekly shavat, for them and the waters both. Nor is it merely the restoration they seek on the seventh month each year; nor the renewal of shmita every seven. This year is the Jubilee year, the seventh cycle of shmita, the seventh cycle of shmita since the strike.

There are no leaders, there are no followers among them. And yet it is often Rehabiah who they ask to speak. They recline on their sides by the water, so impossibly still. Rehabiah strokes his red beard as he drags his hand in the water which does not rush against it. He takes in the silence, which seems so loud after the roar of the last six days, the last six years, the last forty-eight. They want his stories but he is tired, not by the number of times they've been told, but of stories at all. And the ways they direct and point and move and flow.

His fingertips find the top of a rock in the water, and beside it a Sabbatian fish floating without aim. At first Rehabiah places his four fingers to one side of the fish, and his thumb to the other, holding it, grasping it, if lightly; feeling its alien coolness, so different from the ruddiness of his people. He tucks his thumb across his palm, thinking of his thumbless ancestors, thinking of what a hand might be for if it cannot grab. His fingers dangle in the water like fronds of lake grass, the fish bumping up against them without purpose, here and there and here again.

He looks across this river, which looks now like a lake, or an inland sea. He looks across the bodies of his now sleeping brethren, across the body of water with nowhere to be. He lets his mind travel across it. He feels his hand become cool like the fish, and he lets it become cooler still. He thinks of the six years they planned for this, what they might do in the six years after. He reels his mind back in, to his hand, to the fish, to the river they will never cross. And he says to no one: release, shmita means 'release.'