When your tides come
for our flip-flops left on the porch,
our floorboards in the bedroom,
for our dunes at the beach’s edge,
we see you’ve come for more.
We won’t say you didn’t warn us.
Maybe you’d even laugh if we did.
We’ll let the fish roam as they like,
we’ll clean the rotten nets, 
the spilled oil, the plastic bottles, 
hold tight against a new warmed life. 
We’ll hold negotiations with the sun, 
beg off moody air. We know 
we began to anger it long ago, we know
we continue nagging at it to improve
all the while we make it sick. 
It’s embarrassing, to say the least, 
how we ignore science and don’t 
take responsibility, but we’re trying, 
a little. We know you’ve heard us 
say this before, but this time 
we stand with the shape of the land, 
begging you to work with us. 
It’s never been easy to understand 
our size next to you. We need you 
more than you need us. Help us 
revere your magnitude, your volume, 
as if it were a roll of sound in our ears 
rather than water running over us 
as if we hadn’t caused the flood.

Liza Wolff-Francis is a poet and writer with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She was co-director for the 2014 Austin International Poetry Festival. Her writing has been widely anthologized and her work has most recently appeared in Wild Roof Journal, Pinesong, and eMerge magazine. She has written reviews of poetry books that have been published on Adroit, Compulsive Reader, and LitPub. Her chapbook “Language of Crossing” was published by Swimming with Elephant Publications in 2015 and she lives in North Carolina.