Today's poem is by Adrienne Raphel

The Plumber
       

This morning there is no water coming out of the faucet
but outside, the house is surrounded in full aquarium, frozen,
fish suspended in the ice, the crystalline winter waters
swelled around as though for millions of years,
in the middle of some other era. Am I the only one
who remembers the Anthropocene? I call the plumber
and someone is on the other end, slow and calm and garbled
because she is actually under water, whale song secretary,
Is it an emergency or can it wait until normal business hours.
I don't have any water coming out of my taps.
I can dispatch someone as soon as I get off the line.
How long will that take, I say. As soon as I get off the line.
A flat fish with a neon purple spine stares dead-eyed through the bathroom window
it doesn't see me. A slow-moving nurse shark. A toothless moray eel.
The plumber, who is the same as the heater, is from Greece,
where they don't have any water at all, it's a terrarium,
lizards on sandstone. I have to use my torch for this,
he says, carving an arch through the aquarium
to the doorway like an ice sculpture. Oh, you see it too, I say.
Do you have a space heater, he says. We need to heat the pipes.
We need to set fire to the basement. We need to burn this house,
this dry house, we need to set all the faucets spouting to melt the aquarium.
We need to flood the walls with tropical fish.

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Copyright © 2023 Adrienne Raphel All rights reserved
from Our Dark Academia
Rescue Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission