Subsidence

Note: Thank you to the editors of January House Literary Journal for first publishing this poem and for nominating it for a 2026 pushcart prize in poetry.

Subsidence

Millimeters (Annual Measurement)

In Terrebonne Parish, subsidence occurs at a rate
of thirty-five millimeters per year, a disappearance act
measured in a stretching distance between step and ground,
in water lines on buildings like faded magic-marker
charting growth spurts on your childhood bedroom door.

The Corps calls this relative sea level rise,
a bureaucrat's term for drowning.

Once, we believed that concrete could save us,
poured into foundations, formed into levees,
the illusion of permanence hardening into place.
But concrete itself subsides, cracks, tilts seaward.
Nothing we build escapes the physics of sinking.

What we call permanent could only ever be
provisional next to water’s ancient patience.

Centimeters (Human Lifetime)

We adapt without noticing: the extra cement
poured each year to level porches, heirlooms
settling into new homes on higher shelves,
the casual way we say it's always flooded here
when history and soil samples say otherwise.

This slow normalization of loss might be
our most dangerous adaptation.

South of Golden Meadow, you can stand
where maps still show land, body impossibly
buoyant over ghosted properties, gulf rippling
over what tax records still list as residential lots.
Paperwork doesn't sink as fast as soil.

The land and the law might subside at different rates,
but neither can be trusted to hold you.

Meters (Generational Scale)

My cousin adds cinderblocks to his hunting camp in Cocodrie
each season, a slow elevator rising from the edge of the earth.
He says it's easier than selling, says he's gaining elevation
while the world sinks around him. I admire his obstinance,
so I don’t tell him it’s no match against the river’s hydrology.

We can’t run from the compacting of sediment
cut from its source when we built the levees.

At the water's edge, oak tree skeletons stand in formation,
bone-white and leafless, a vanguard. They don't topple
dramatically as you might expect. They simply dissolve,
molecule by molecule, cellulose digested by salt and sun,
until one morning, you notice a tree is shorter.

Years later, you notice it’s gone—you didn’t have time
to watch the clock's hour hand move.

Kilometers (Historical Record)

Engineers avoid certain words: abandonment, retreat, loss.
They talk instead of adaptation strategies, resilience planning,
managed retirement of assets. Euphemisms echo in half-empty
town halls, language subsiding under the weight of denial,
attendance abating as residents relocate, as hope too subsides.

The scrape of folding chairs being put away
grows louder than the voices of those who remain.

Loss measured in millimeters feels manageable
until you multiply by decades, centuries, millenia.
Until your old grocery store and your grammar school
become nautical navigation hazards, the roads on GPS
leading you straight into open water.

In Terrebonne Parish, subsidence occurs at a rate
of thirty-five millimeters per year.

In a lifetime, that's enough to drown a world.