We are farming just beyond
your city’s limits to sustain growth
by building houses, irrigating fields
to feed you. We are drilling deeper
wells all around your sufficient
neighborhood mapped on asphalt.
Either side of the fuzzy border,
we get old, get tired of adapting
to mistakes—unlike bugs, we live
too long to develop genetics
our children’s children will need
in an unimaginable future.
History will say our families farmed
the San Joaquin for 200 years
before running out of water
fifty years from now—our thin dust
upon dry layers of earth stacked above
a depleting Pleistocene sea.
drycrikjournal 