PROSE POETRY
INGRID ANDERSSON
INGRID ANDERSSON
SOMETHING LIKE SALVATION
Whatever is in the world's water is here in my hands.
-Sandra Steingraber, ecologist & poet
Faithful old limbs half-naked before a basin of water, wash rag in hand, my immigrant mother performs her daily ablution. I know that later, every drop of the graywater will be re-used to slake her heirloom flowers, or if her recycled rain drums are full, to flush her off-the-meter toilet. This morning, she rages over America's flushing of fire hydrants: well water pumped from one-thousand feet that gushed like a gashed artery down her gutter—she salvaged 40 bucketfuls for her raspberries. Sitting in her kitchen now, eating the red berries from a Tupperware as old as I am—from slag of fossil fuel—I feel how she's drummed it into me: these are the world's water too, and each sweet small sphere floods me with something like salvation.
-Sandra Steingraber, ecologist & poet
Faithful old limbs half-naked before a basin of water, wash rag in hand, my immigrant mother performs her daily ablution. I know that later, every drop of the graywater will be re-used to slake her heirloom flowers, or if her recycled rain drums are full, to flush her off-the-meter toilet. This morning, she rages over America's flushing of fire hydrants: well water pumped from one-thousand feet that gushed like a gashed artery down her gutter—she salvaged 40 bucketfuls for her raspberries. Sitting in her kitchen now, eating the red berries from a Tupperware as old as I am—from slag of fossil fuel—I feel how she's drummed it into me: these are the world's water too, and each sweet small sphere floods me with something like salvation.
Ingrid writes poetry in praise of common ground, uncommon sense and essential aging, while practicing home birth midwifery in Madison, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Eastern Iowa Review, Midwest Review, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Intima, Ars Medica, Minerva Rising, and About Place Journal. Her poetry was awarded a 2020 Editor's Choice prize by Eastern Iowa Review, honorable mentions in the 2020 and 2019 Wisconsin People & Ideas statewide poetry contests, and nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize (Intima).