How to Deplete I Trisha Iyer

How to Deplete

Trisha Iyer ‘24

is so easy to learn, you just— reach deep into the hollow collarbone of the Earth and dig up Her heart, carbon coal crusting under your fngernails, natural gas wisping across your veins, oil latching onto and through the soft skin hammocks of your thumbs— leach the good, the earnest thrumming of life into your ice-blood like the damp— send the evil puffng smokestacks through your teeth up over Oregon, turn it all orange— stomp the bad into cratering footsteps, foods, fracked-up valleys, catastrophes, grind the stone back into the peach and turn it all to ash in the mouth.

So you are the greatest con man of all—absconding with the soul of the world, but its heartstrings tangle under your arms and pull you back like Scylla, and wrench your eyes open to see— So many other stories, and their solutions that could have been: the wilted-winged bees, bowed appendages trying to scrape homes back together, the withered-raisin boys starving in Sudan, their guts trying to lean out of bodies, Indian not-in-schoolgirls who can’t spell “period poverty,” dignity trying to leak out between their legs.

And before we can change all that, we must Have a home to change. And when we old and frail and brittle-boned we will be bitter-tongued too, wishing that you wrote a better world for us in your will, that you hadn’t learned

how to deplete— dear Dragon, whoever you are and might be: Don’t.