on tuesday the ballona creek retaining wall bursts, sending fifty cubic feet of water per second streaming into playa vista, flooding the wetlands with more life than they’ve seen in twenty years.
in a matter of days, the google building has sunk ten feet into the marshlands and keeps going. every red spanish tile succumbs to the algae and duckweed and the waters keep rising. by friday the red foxes have come back, the terns too and plovers flock into the lowlands. the governor takes this as a sign, relinquishes the land to the people, sets a national example.
so, then they get it in their heads that all this is reversible. they un-name all the bases. un-build the statues. un-open the prisons. the money reverses its trickle and floods into the hands of the people. they un-erase the histories. un-name the country and un-draw the borders. whole time the wetlands still filling up with water. the mountain tops scrambling back to the tops of the mountains.
and then the river basin settles, breathes out. how blue the evening light spilling over the undone country. and how blue the people—me, and the people they took, and you, and the land they took, and all of us, clutching at our great-grandmothers’ mothers’ memories of a time before. we ask: how do you un-steal a people? un-raze a homeland? how then do i un-remember it? how do our bodies un-know the ends of our worlds?
then there, where the sea-bluffs slope down to kiss the wetlands, some people convened. where the cemetery was, where it was dug up and scattered along the hillside, some people returned, tended grave in the gentle quiet of the sea-breeze.
and more people and more people came drifting over the hillside,
hands tangled with the spirits and the tall grasses.