I. The Founding, 2040

John bought the lake house for pennies
on the dollar, split it, part headquarters
part museum. His father’s shovel hung
like the leg bone of a dead saint above
his desk, refracting amber dustlight.

A terrain model of the brinefields shone
under fixed lights with a glossy sheen.
The old docks stick out, fifty feet up,
like old railroad trestles, half dynamited.
Around the room, behind glass cases

are catalogued finds by year; fished
out, dredged, tractor-pulled, unearthed.
Colorful at first, then slowly tauped—
electronics, boats, and factory parts
then the nearly fossilized, pre-industrial.

John’s rise, from day labor to magnate,
meteoric in hindsight, seemed natural
to him. People fell, he took their place.
His shovel dug, he understood patterns,
then pointed at maps for where to dig.

Then told investors how much to dig.
The government added funds, sometimes
without him asking. He hired geologists
for that textbook glaze to his intuition
to parrot in front of Congress and CNN.

He bought the building he grew up in,
walled off the apartment he had shared
with his father and converted the rest
for his dustmen, dustwomen, dustbeings.
Then he bought his foreclosed city

banks, post offices, office towers.
He needed HR, accounting, supply
chain, logistics, support, IT, legal.
Everything grew once the lake shrank.
Everything empty started to fill.

John got in front of cameras, both
to eulogize the lake, and birth the mine.
The governor named what was left
Playa Michigan, and set a blue-ribbon
commission to write it into law.

The first order of business: tax breaks
for rejuvenating the “Playa Area."
John recalled an entire ecosystem
could arrive and thrive for months
on the carcass of one dead whale.

II. The Rise of the Dustmen, 2030s

There was so much lake, extra shoreline
crested in dunes, high enough for ATVs
to struggle with their angles. The “third coast”
made its own weather, its own economy,
a glass surface that gleamed from space,

from millions of lake family photos.
But the patriarch was sick with salt.
It rained less, then stopped for two years.
Folks thought they would move on,
as it shrunk and dried into memory.

As the water line dropped, detritus rose
like trash islands. He found a tommy gun,
a model T, generations of gadgets
brined sepia beneath the water. Archeology
dominated social media the summer

that his father gifted him his army shovel,
while clearing his life between coughs.
By winter, they declared the lake would not refill.
There’s new moto-cross, extreme sports
for half a lake, then a third, then dry land.

He worked one summer selling ice cream,
the next towing ATVs out of the muck.
The lakebed started into him: mineral smells
crept into his dreams, it dried like glitter,
on his shovel, his gloves, his skin, his thoughts,

so he wore a heavy-duty painter’s mask.
His father refused, he was too old for all that.
Before he succumbed, they named it White Lung,
rent prices dropped with bodies. Eventually
full face masks were required to be alive

near what was left of the lake. In the glare
of goggles it’s impossible to separate skin
and clothes from dust. It was under John’s nails,
in his hair. A dustman stops smelling,
then stops tasting anything but metallic salt.

John remembers his first day harvesting
in the mineral fields of Playa Michigan,
the Milwaukee side where blue collar
was the only work left. Tan-wrapped,
half-blind in swirls, his team hobbled

like a chain gang in a cage of sand.
The shovel, heavy that first summer,
felt light then, maybe the dust was drier,
thinner, without memory of sloughed lake.
The sunlight came through dust mist,

reflecting the porcelain white sparkles
of lithium mounds like hives of glass ants.
They used this for batteries in places
where people still wanted to live. John saw
geometry, invisible patterns to plunder.

He inspected the chunk on his shovel
that once filled sandbags for redoubts
on blasted Afghan hills for his father
and wondered what use the world
would conjure for it next.

III. The Churn, 2050

Eventually, Playa Michigan’s lithium
flesh was torn to its shallow bones.
But it was the first, not the only.
Playas multiplied, with their briny
underbellies exposed, vulnerable,

dangerous, lucrative. Dustman,
Dustwoman, Dustperson, were added
to the dictionary, then became
words of the year. John dusted off
a stable-world term, hyperscaler.

Bubbles grew with hype and hope—
that venture capital had in abundance.
Investors stretched the few avenues
left to move, swap, invert, and hide
their increasingly critical assets,

they had no choice but to make
a new god whose shadow hid portfolios.
John rose everywhere, to everyone.
Capitalism was reborn, lake mining
merged the old world, extraction,

with the new worlds’ trickle down;
predictive trading, synthetic revenue,
super frequency swaps, buy-sell
at the low-high with quantum-entangled
trading in Schrödinger’s market.

John trusted, not that it was right,
or even that it was correct, just
that he could continue following
the inexplicable patterns his mind
mapped onto lake beds, scratching

an insatiable itch. The trends were
irreversible, as the sun kept boiling
every lake, whale falls multiplied,
and desperate workers were easy
to come by and buoyed with dust jobs.

IV. The Close of Business, 2065

Sometimes you can scratch
an itch until it bleeds. Lake
effects, water husks, brine
barrens appeared worldwide,
with cheaper labor, less regs.

But the governor was a friend,
Michigan still a swing state, more
important than ever, managing
retreats across the two coasts,
Midwest and Heartland compete.

So a consortium of businesses
with guaranteed government loans
bought the company, which his
lawyers told him, by happenstance
would multiply his wealth twenty-fold.

John kept everyone on anyway.
He let them know they were running
out the clock, and eventually
shutting down, probably. He left
it at that, his aura did the rest.

It wasn’t safe to do the work anyway;
the hazmat suits he remembered
would not meet current standards.
Everyone who dug died sooner
than later. John hoped later.

V. Dusts’ End, 2072

John replaced his blood, refiltered
through horseshoe crab stem cells.
His lungs were more machine
than flesh, but John persisted
in the semitrance of old age.

While the west was left
dried out, turned crispy, charred,
the east was drowning
as tropical storms veered north,
dropped a foot of rain a day.

Water always goes somewhere.
Why not the places that used
to hold it? The third coast
was the only strip of sand
stubbornly refusing to flood.

For the first time since the fall
of Rome all hope was pinned on
aqueducts. We filled out our dead
lakes after sucking the lithium
marrow from their bones.

John spent his final years watching
the lake, different, yet the same,
wishing his dad could see it.
He pulled the shovel off the wall,
felt the shock of old muscles
pulse. Digging once more,
he placed a white oak in the hole
next to a cactus planted after
his father stopped breathing,
and wondered which of the two
would grow taller with time.

Editor's Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Kristin Waller during our annual fundraiser.