Issue 3. September 2026. Zoe M. Savitsky

Just a little pond.
A pretty one,
grass growing at the banks, 
frogs, fish, water striders, weeds.

A little pond in a thousand-year drought.
Alone, banks crumble into dust,
edges crust over,
water evaporates,
dry rivulets of naked benthic zones grow 
brittle, lifeless, exposed.

Sometimes, men visit, dump buckets, truckloads of water.
Her crenulations grow smooth. 
She throws her shoreline wide.
She ripples, leaps, welcomes the dragonflies, the sturgeon,
the glowing algae flowers.
Light dapples her surface.
She basks, content, filled, overflowing.

It never stops, though.
The drought never ends.
It’s been going since forever.
The planet is warming.
There is no natural slake to her thirst.

She stays rich and full and dewy and lush
for a time.
And then it fades, she bakes, she desiccates, she shrinks,
her loamy wet mud turns cottony, drained.

She needs them, again and again, 
the men with their tankers of water,
the men who visit, fill her, depart.
They return and return and return but
so does the sun, its heat, its pitiless rays.
They are never enough, with their trucks and their sharp pale teeth
and their hoses and their shovels
and their hands and their laughter and—

She has never considered being a stream,
weaving her way toward other bodies, other waters.

She has never considered being a meadow,
fed by chance, by condensation, by the roving storm.

She has never considered being a desert,
harsh, wild, glorious, extreme,
baking in the heat with her toads,
growing an army of saguaro,
body the sand that dances in the hot wind.

Zoe M. Savitsky (she/her)

Zoe is a Ph.D. candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, where she researches corporate mis/disinformation and transnational corporate accountability. Her broader research agenda examines corporations as social actors, and the wider, and stranger, theoretical, critical, and social dimensions of law’s “persons.” Prior to her doctoral studies, she spent many years in government and nonprofit litigation and leadership roles in the United States, managing teams and leading cases focused on racial, economic, housing, education, health, and climate justice. She lives in Toronto (Tkoronto) with her wife and their dog.

Editorial Note

The verses in this poem seem to flow like a gentle coasting down a hill toward a final settlement.

On its surface, the poem captures a facet of ecological reality. Through a deeper lens, one might discern possibilities of an evolutionary pivot for consciousness or for inward change from the inertial and externally sustained existence.