The Brooklyn Rail

Juliana Went to the Water to Sedate, Cleanse, Escape
Sunset Cove

What did you see by the water?

A flock of something warbles low
in the distance off Big Egg and Little Egg
Marsh, between gray and gray bay, this cove.
Gulls maybe. Foraging to loaf.
A good life in mudflats.
If I knew the names of birds,
I would say I saw a snow goose.
Brant, mallard, or grebe. A bufflehead, maybe.
Yellowlegs or loon. An eagle, a starling,
a black-bellied plover. Kestrel or wren.
They all come here, you know.
Even the glossy ibis, with its nest
on a hassock, that tuffet of boggy ground,
known also as Subway Island.

Ryka Said Poetry’s a River Not A Reservoir
Newtown Creek

What brings you to the water today?

Poetry gave me a reason to walk
across a bridge emulating a boat
over the wastewater resource recovery
plant, its effluence masked by sumac.
To write is a reason to go to the tributary,
to the affluent keeper of bladderwrack
and muck. To appreciate all that is wild
and all that is not at the Superfund site,
beside the sludge digester and Pleistocene rock.
Creek like a comma between boroughs.
Crickets in the horsehair, the scouring rush.
It turns out I want to write like
a glacial erratic, the rock that wanders:
ice-scratched, shining, all flow, then still.

Lyn Wrote It’s Hard to Turn Away from Moving Water
Jamaica Bay

What grounds us by the water?

Still water, too.
As seen from this hill by the bay.
Ziggurats of trash now pitch pine and willow.
Sandy bottom beach recovered from sludge.
The soils of the bay run dark-gray to gray silt,
clay silt to sandy. Silt loam, Malone loam, to peat.
Concrete, a clam-slamming ground.
A bay in recovery from marsh loss,
its marshes long drowning in place.
This park was first marshland, then landfill.
Landfill now capped and off gassing.
The grasses that grow back after sowing.
A process of coming back after injury,
an attempt to recoup what’s been lost.

Rosamond Told Me We Call It The Bronx Because of The River
Bronx River

How did you get to the water?

After digging through and digging out
decades of designed division
—the tires, the toxins, debris—
the borough of the Bronx is reconnected,
in places, to its namesake: the river.
To dredge the river to bridge the land
to access the mummichog and swamp rose.
In the shadow of the 6 train, a palimpsest:
orange silos emptied of concrete now sculptures
by the overpass, the junction, the boat launch,
the chess board, the crabbers, the truck route,
the foodway, a trailway for foraging—
bergamot for mood, amaranth for asthma,
an abundance of mugwort for dreaming.

Mosab Invites Us To Write About The Seashore
Rockaway Inlet

Where exactly is the water?

Beach between a bay and a bay,
a creek, creek, and inlet.
A mudflat lagoon, a dune
with thickets full of memory foam.
Some fluttering terns, a plover.
The peninsula was once an island
full of people till Moses brought
bulldozers to build the Belt.
Today, plastic roses and razor clams.
A dead goose in the sand.
Winter’s a desolate season.
Inlet to harbor to ocean to sea,
five thousand six hundred and seventy three
miles from a genocide in Gaza.