How sure so ever I be, that the world shall never perish
by water, yet I may be drowned.

—Donne, Sermon No. 6

Childhood is a lie. Ask anyone. Floods appear
to make us thirsty. But floods do not exist. We have been told
many things. I tell my children, “wait where you are, wait a little longer.”
Then the submersion of everything beneath the river. The drinking water
now mingled with raw sewage. The children playing in it, sick with it.
“When I was young…” I tell them. We did this to us, to you.

Joshua Kryah is the author of two collections of poems, We Are Starved (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) and Glean (Nightboat Books, 2007). He teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where he is the poetry editor of Witness. In the spring of 2013 he will be the Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College.