11 

A datura plant with creamy white blossoms 
grows between the legs of a half-buried beach 
chair. A sunken boat turns to bones. A story 
from the Hopi says that the previous world 
also flooded. People who escaped made 
it rising on a reed boat or by climbing 
a ladder. Where the cliff went underwater, 
ladders pecked into the rock turned green under 
the surface, then black, then disappeared—tip of 
a shadow-nicked ladder leaning against rock. 


22 

We use the term Mother Earth. But Mother Earth 
is a blue planet. Water is not blue; we 
see it as blue. Amniotic fluid has 
about 2% salinity. Oceans 
are 3.0 to 3.5% dissolved salts. 
All life seems to have come from the ocean, but 
all life does not carry some sort of ancient, 
immutable salt signature. Water is 
the thinnest of layers on the surface of the 
planet. Water is precious. Water is life. 


33 

There is no life in thee, now; except rocking 
imparted by a gently rolling ship, by 
her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the 
inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, 
this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an 
inch; slip your hold at all; and identity 
comes back in horror. Over Descartian 
vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, 
in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled 
shriek you drop, no more to rise for ever. 


44 

The power had been out for a week, snow to 
the rafters. Neighbors found 93-year-old 
“Dolly” bundled up in a chair in front of her 
fireplace, which had gone cold. Alden Park Thayer, 
85, died as the snow drifts outside piled 
up to 10 feet, then 14 feet. His daughter, 
snowed in with his body for days, was keeping 
a wary eye on fine cracks in her ceiling 
that appeared after the blizzard heaped snow on-
to her roof. She was trying not to panic. 


55

There is the crumpling, the mess. A marina 
that once floated in a cove has been towed out 
of the shrinking lake and dropped in a field of 
Russian thistle, metal pontoons partially 
sunk into dry, crack-crazed soil. Cooler doors stand 
open—the marina was once known for its 
ice cream—and conduits hang from ceilings, wires 
stripped. The cove it once occupied is disappearing, 
turning back into land as lake levels fall. 
Only one boat ramp is still operable. 

Footnotes:

* Title is from the poem “Coma Berenices” in John Ashbery’s collection Where Shall I Wander (Ecco Press, 2005).

1. Stanza 1 source: “The Return of Glen Canyon” by Craig Childs in Atlas Obscura (6 March 2023), reprinted from High Country News (see also Stanza 5 source below):
   https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/glen-canyon-lake-powell-drought
   
   
2. Stanza 2 source: “Oceans and Amniotic Fluid” by Nancy Hill, Women’s Legacy Project (22 April 2020; modified 30 April 2020):
   https://womenslegacyproject.com/our-collective-legacy/oceans-and-amniotic-fluid/
   
   
3. Stanza 3 source: “The Masthead,” Chapter 35 of Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville, at Melville Electronic Library: A Critical Archive (the University of Chicago):
   https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/editions/versions-of-moby-dick/35-the-mast-head
   
   
4. Stanza 4 source: “Residents Fret Over Deaths in Southern California Mountains” by Shawn Hubler and Jill Cowan in The New York Times (9 March 2023):
   https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/us/san-bernardino-snow-deaths.html
   
   
5. Stanza 5 source: “Glen Canyon revealed” by Craig Childs in High Country News (1 February 2023), from the print edition (see also Stanza 1 source above):
   https://www.hcn.org/issues/55.2/features-water-glen-canyon-revealed
   

[Links were first accessed by the poet on 10 March 2023, and retrieved by MacQ publisher on 14 August 2023.]

Poet’s Note

This poem was a reaction to two news stories—one on the drying of Lake Powell at the Utah-Arizona border, the second-largest water reservoir in the United States; and the other on the isolation of residents in the San Bernardino Mountains, northeast of Los Angeles, California, due to unusually heavy snowstorms. Global climate change has been suggested as a catalyst for both. Material from the listed sources was lineated but otherwise kept as close to verbatim as possible, as per the practice in writing centos. While not strictly a cadralor, the form’s five-movement structure provided a framework for a love poem for water and the tenuousness of our relationship to it. Love for the ocean continues to gravitate me toward the chapter “The Mast-Head” from Moby Dick, as it has in past work. Its place here as the central stanza seems fitting.

Jonathan Yungkans

is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. His work has appeared in San Pedro Poetry Review, Synkroniciti, West Texas Literary Review, Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and other publications. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Prize and was published in February 2021 by Tebor Bach.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ It Belongs to Each of Us Like a Blanket by Jonathan Yungkans, Winner of “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge (Issue 15, September 2022)

⚡ Le Grand Matin by Yungkans, a Finalist in MacQ’s Triple-Q Writing Challenge (Issue 11, January 2022)

⚡ La Porte, ekphrastic poem in MacQ’s special Christmas Eve issue (10X, December 2021)

⚡ Two Duplex Poems, plus author’s notes on the poems and on the form, in Issue 10 of MacQ (October 2021)

⚡ Lawful and Proper, poem in Rise Up Review (Fall 2020)

⚡ Cadralor in the Key of F-Sharp as It Cuts into My Spine, in the inaugural issue of Gleam (Fall 2020)

⚡ I’d Love to Cook Like Hannibal Lecter [video], read by the poet at an event sponsored by Moon Tide Press (10 October 2019) celebrating the anthology Dark Ink: A Poetry Anthology Inspired by Horror

⚡ Saving the Patient, poem in The Voices Project (18 January 2018)