POETRY

Finalist for the 2023 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York

The Dead Sea Is Dying

By Felicia Zamora     VOLUME 56 No. 3

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NPR says the Dead Sea is dying. How the moment
a thing lives, death, too, sets up camp. You disgust
yourself when the word irony pops to mind & watch images
of bathers floating in the salt-saturated water. The banks

in collapse. You think about structures. Structures only
Earth can make. The lowest exposed spot on the planet.
You think about what exposes you. You forage
fingers over your limbs, take off your shoes & socks
& wonder, Is this low enough? You know it’s not.

The Russian man sprawled out, babe-like, reading
a newspaper, midsoak. Water levels plummet
four feet every year. Bikini-clad tourist lathered
in mud—mineral rich—& somewhere you read

“therapeutic waters” & somewhere you read
“natural spa” & you think about how language
always positions a thing for exploitation: the ours
& ours of the natural world. Were we born

to be disinherited from the land? Our cognitions
forget. Then forget the forgetting. Belly of the lake
15% shallower than 50 years ago. The lake named a sea--
how we create a language of inaccuracy

inside made-up constructs: If we define a thing,
we think we understand it: compounding
inaccuracy—how this sea touches Jordan, Israel,
West Bank. You think of all the places water touches:

the estuaries, the photosynthetic stem of the cactus,
the 2-3 tablespoons between layers of pericardium
in hug of the human heart, the entire body of cloud:
droplets or ice crystals (along with cooling air

temperatures & nuclei (all these not-so-simple formulas
formulating)). You think about what takes water
& what water takes. Any bound thing at risk—permeability
both a cure & a curse. You wonder how the heart doesn’t

leak all over the body, a geyser flooding us, filling
our organs & cells too full. Then you remember tissues
& thin protective coatings & the desire to hold, if only briefly.
You think of the Dead Sea dying. How the receding

lake reveals salt formations & sinkholes. Somewhere you read
“apocalyptic scenes.” Somewhere you read “living
disaster.” Salinity makes the water inhospitable for aquatic life.
You think of the stillness below the surface, the quiet

of this water compared to the churn inside your body
or the chatter of the Great Barrier Reef or clamor
of the Mississippi River. All the bodies when you say
body of water. Then you read a slew of words: “solutions,”

“rehabilitation,” “further destructions,” “human-made
problem,” but all end with “no significant action.” Then back
to the quiet. You think how silence has always been twisted
by abusers to mean consent. You wonder of all

that’s twisted inside you now. Somewhere you read
“drying up for decades” & somewhere you read
about freshwater diversions, evaporation for mineral
export, drinking water, irrigations. When the human body

decomposes, enzymes digest cell membranes, then leak out
as the cells break down. This leaking begins in the liver,
which is rich in enzymes, & the brain, high in water content.
You imagine all the body leaks into & how the body’s leaking

resembles the movement of water. They say water’s
molecular structure is simple: one oxygen atom
covalently bonded to two hydrogen atoms
through shared electrons. You Google a water molecule:

Atoms resemble an open triangle. You think of mathematics
& the > & < signs. How someone is always deciding
what lives on either side. You imagine quadrillions of ⋁s
rising above the crystalline chimneys, gulping & gulping.



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FELICIA ZAMORA is the author of six books of poetry including I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021) and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; Body of Render, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award (Red Hen Press, 2020); and Of Form & Gather, winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame Press). She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review, a 2022 Tin House Next Book Residency, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poem-A-Day, AGNI, [Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Orion, POETRY Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and others. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for Colorado Review.


VOLUME 56 No. 3