The tap tastes like the factory that promised a hundred jobs
and delivered a century of residue.
We boil and filter and boil again
until only the sediment remembers the river.
My neighbor grows potatoes in a tub because the soil refused apologies.
His hands are callused maps of a season gone wrong.
Children rinse candy in bottled water and call it luxury,
laughing until the coughs arrive.
They hold pennies to the window, trying to guess
what might still buy clean.
A hotline recites results like weather:
lead: low, microplastics: trace, kidneys: slow.
Language so clinical it bruises.
At night the river shines like a broken screen;
beneath it moves a shape of obligation
too old for naming.
We bottle our prayers with labels: Pure, Refined, Better Than Yesterday.
Inspectors visit, smile, take photos, leave invoices.
My daughter drinks from a cup and identifies the metal by taste;
she’s learning to swallow history.
I teach her to spit it back
and name the companies that made rain bitter.
David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, now living in Texas. His work has appeared in Right Hand Pointing, Unbroken Journal, The Scarred Tree, Braided Way, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. His writing often explores intersections of memory, environment, food, medicine, and futurity.
Image: Madlyn, morguefile.com
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