Cucumbers are ninety-five percent water, but we don’t call them wet. The sea, which is wet, is ninety-six. I can’t fuck with the sea like I can with a cucumber and their middle name isn’t cum, but they can also pull me down. Human beings are seventy percent water yet wetness is a thing we cannot feel. Right? Think about it. I’m in the river with my lover. She says god, I’m wet, please touch. I say: I can’t. We’ve been through this before: the electrons won’t let me; we just hover over everything. There is only the edge. My tongue knows—hot, cold, smooth, rough, sweet, sour, swollen—but never wet because we always are. I mean we are never dry. She likes it when I eat and read science at the same time, so I do: <rain and other forms of precipitation are not assumed to fall to a surface as water that forms rivers that run to a sea / it rather deepens a wetness that is already everywhere, in the air, earth, flora, and fauna / this wetness does not flow as water does; it holds, soaks, blows, seeps, osmotes, and transpires, moving in nonlinear and emergent ways to ever-extending holdings of wetness, holdings that eventually become an ocean, an all-encompassing wetness in which there is no such thing as dryness / there is only wetness of varying degrees / the sea is very wet, the desert less so> Your clit is more so today, I say. And the river is running cold and the steam is rising from her skin and so where do they end and begin, these bodies of water? Where does it live, the wetness of this fleshthat is between? All the space in an atom. All the atoms in a cucumber. All the cucumber in her cunt. She asks: has the river come inside me? Yes, I say. To the sea. Also the rain, last century’s fog, the lithium from the mining above that dam, the ancestors’ tears. How do you feel? Each atom tending in another way. Holding. Soaking. Blowing. Sweeping. Osmoting. Absorbing. Adsorbing. Condensing. Dissipating. Close your eyes, I say. Look. Everywhere we are, wet.
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The science ǀ Some invertebrate beings (many insects, for example) are hygroreceptive; they can perceive changes in moisture and humidity in their surroundings. Human beings do not have the capacity to sense this as far as we currently understand. The quotation in this poem is part of an article titled ‘Wetness is everywhere’ by architects and planners Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, published in the Journal of Architecture Education (2020 vol. 74, no. 1). It speaks to the constancy of elemental experiences that are beyond human sense and sensibility—our body’s lack of hygroreceptors, the quantum impossibility of material touch, the queer physics of life’s insurgency even through its attempted externimation, the travelling of Earth’s metabolic processes through disparate bodies—whose manifold other-than-human forms we must learn to perceive, trust and collaborate with in molecular ways. Like wetness; like love.
Sarah Amsler 