Lee Potts’ And Drought Will Follow attempts to piece together familial memory through objects—compasses, coins, even photographs. Yet we quickly learn that our human endeavors to stop and capture time will always fall short of nature’s own proficiency for remembering. How do we heal “the injuries time inflicts” when “photos make us fools”? How does one properly grieve a dead father when every family photo is “already a lie / moments after it was taken”? If photos fail to recall, the earth doesn’t. In these poems, even tree roots grow their way towards water, that which remembers all. If water “remembers briefly / everything that touched it,” then we can only hope that healing waits in water’s aftermath, in the drought that may follow.