​What A Waste of Water - Laurel Milburn

Sprinklers emerge like moccasins in a river,
firing circular spurts across the sodden lawn.

Commuters and dog walkers pause to stare
as a man in tattered clothes steps from a palm grove
between the building and the bay, his arms extended,
mechanically waving at the sky.

You heard me—what a waste of water!
he shouts, anger in his voice like punctuation.

He stumbles past people who turn away.
A security guard sprints from an adjacent playground,
tackles him to the ground, and with a soft thud
his pockets—once filled with pinecones, napkins, t-shirts,
and plastic bottles—scatter across the manicured lawn
in front of the San Diego County Building.

A breeze tosses whimsy to the birds.
Beneath the shadow of landing planes,
sunlight flashes off the door held open and closed,
open and closed, in hexagonal folds of light;
foot traffic distorted into something mystical.

The water blurs the grass;
boats in the bay float quietly
in their small pockets of space.

And I sit like comfortable dust on a park bench
sirens folding into gull cries,
the man’s words swallowed by sprinklers,
his protest evaporating before noon heat.
​
By lunch, no one remembers.
The grass looks greener.



Laurel Milburn holds her BA in English and Spanish from Florida Southern College and her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has recently appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, The Ilanot Review, The Barnstorm Journal, and her chapbook, Investigation for Missing Form, is available from Bottlecap Press.