By Rochelle Potkar

Waters when they evaporate, meet …
at a global conference, to speak of fish dropouts,
obscura of clouds, near-deaths, hydrological dynamics,
monocultures and metals:
nickel, lead, chromium at their beds.

The bend is notional: water for coffee, cane,
banana, paddy,
mills, distilleries,
fertilizer plants.

The Aral sea was water for cotton
in Uzbekistan:
one shirt drinking 2,000 litres,
now more saline than the Dead Sea —
palm-sized, a fossil-tiger’s footprint,

Read the full poem in our print anthology ‘The Brave New World of Goan Writing 2018.’ Buy the anthology here.

Rochelle Potkar is the author of The Arithmetic of Breasts and Other Stories (fiction) and Four Degrees of Separation (poetry). She is an alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program and the Charles Wallace Writer’s Fellowship, Stirling. Paper Asylum (Copper Coin Publishing, May 2018) is her latest book publication. Some of her works have won awards, most recently, her poem ‘To Daraza’ won the Norton Girault Literary Prize 2018.