Repost--

its been ten fucking years since katrina. shit hasnt changed. ten years since i wrote this.

Flood

The bottles had been underwater long enough to soak the labels off;

   they were dark and anonymous, decorating this dragged-in mattress

biding their time in dead city silence.

The last light slants over former computers while hopeful words—modem! keyboard! url!—peel off the blistered wall.

Rescued saints regard us from their pile in the corner

shading the walls’ scrawled notes from refugees

unsteady words wild with desperation, unread, unheeded,

like the rest of their pleas.

A feral diver meets my eyes. Twists the cap off. Not a tight seal.

He brings it to his lips—tastes a little funny,

this glass jewel plucked from the ruins.
   He looks at me again, eyes like a tomcat in the darkness, kills the flashlight

so it’s just a smooth heaviness cradled in my hands.

I raise and drink; first it’s whiskey with a hint of rain

near factories.

Then comes Katrina, Kali the destroyer

a dark hot machine bringing fragile order to its knees,

roaring through houses and filling lungs to the brim.

My tongue slicks with tearwater,

mudwater,

bloodwater: the flood

of the people's funeral.

When the bottle is empty, sad-eyed ghosts float in

and we rage in the ruins    with me laying down my body

and them breathing in their bones

from my breath.

Vacilando heart (Yankton, SD) --Re-edit

blues like your worn out shoes in the dead tired end of main st. town,
blues like the bar with no sign but Bud Lite alight behind the glass,
and them real hard time blues like your woman with her neck wrung and still steaming down by the James headwater this first freezing night of the fall,
behind your trailer which is coming down on itself in this prison scented with whiskey breath and empty sky.

you’re just pacing there, caged behind cheap vinyl siding,

not saying much to this land of bluffs and buffalo rolling weak kneed into an oblivion of ancestors that the sunset burns alive

 over and over til there aint even a memory of ashes.

Blue Mountain night--new edit

We werent getting a ride. Standing dirty in front of the mcdonalds, reeking of campfire and sweat, we sure as hell werent getting a ride. Meanwhile two boys observed us from behind their dashboard, big mac wrappers in hand. Finally, pityingly, one rolled the window down.
 Where yall headed?
 Into the woods, bout 10 miles that way if you could spare it.
 Shit, why yall goin there?
 Aint got anything better to do, not really.
 They put the seat down and we slid in the back with our packs, knees pressed against the cracked vinyl. The car wheezed to life. Hi. we’re Indian. Said the one driving, handed me his tribal ID card. A wave of bass flooded the speakers. His companion looked back at us, didn’t say nothing nor offer his blood quantum, didn’t need to. He asked what we thought of his tribe, this rez today. All the white folks claiming Cherokee somewhere on their grandma’s side. My reply was drowned in hip-hop and pocahontases mounted on wolves, staring vacantly from billboards all around us. We passed an older native dude in full regalia, playing flute for a doughy clutch of tourists. Now you see that yall? that is just wrong, our guide muttered, his eyes downcast.

As we rose into the hills he hit the gas and his mood turned bitter. They fastened their seatbelts. Man fuck these mountains, I hate these fucking mountains, being trapped in this shithole, and he raised his long middle finger out the window of the sedan. And what the hell are yall doing. Ive never seen two girls hitchhiking before. Yall are crazy. Told you, just disaffected, jobless, aint got shit else to do. Us neither. But I dont know about this hiking or whatever. Yall are hobos. Never met two lady hobos before. Yall are crazy. And he laughed. His friend laughed too, coughed a little on the brickweed joint, and peered back through the haze at us with our stinking packs clutched like children to our breasts. I mean, yall dont need to go out into the woods now, it being almost dark and all. Yall can stay down in the trailer tonight. Lucky youre with us, I wouldnt fuckin walk around here at night, not on this land, even if yall think youre crazy or whatever. They are worse here, I swear to god, they do terrible things to each other down here, their own families.

The speedometer crept up higher and their prison-mountains rolled blue into red clouds gathering at the foot of the sinking sun. Lil Wayne giggled on the stereo. After it got dark, we waited outside somewhere for a long time, sipping warm beer beside a double-wide. All around us lost boys were flitting like moths under a bare bulb out back, them looking at us in the yellowed light like we weren’t real till someone’s ma put on her night robe at this indecent hour and shoo’d us along to go make a racket and smoke someplace else. Headlights cut the darkness into slices of dirt track and fecund weeds, then we were at his trailer. We dragged our packs over the folded passenger seat. All around us, the barely-contained forest issued a throaty beat of crickets and frogs.

We filed across the cool grass into the smell of hot linoleum and stale beer. Make yourselves at home. He offered his last clean towels. No kitchen on account of a fire last year. We sat up a while longer till they got too deep into the pills and we couldn’t watch them do it anymore. So we put our boots outside to dry a little and cleared a space in the corner and laid our bedrolls out and collapsed.

I woke sometime later and the quiet one was kneeling over me with eyes like a mineshaft full of water on a moonless night. We should do something, he was whispering over and over again. He’d recently just been a boy, now half-grown skinny but fleshing out to heartbreaker. He was shaking in his nikes, out of his mind on whatever was in those lines laid out on the table. I sat up and in my best mama voice soothed him to hush now and get on to bed. My thumb ran down the knife in my palm. I whispered hush now, calm down. The driver called him back to the table, saying that’s no way to do things, apologizing, promising us tomorrow he’d take us on down to the truckstop to catch a ride. It was late. I should’ve stayed awake but drifted, instead, back into dreamless sleep with the rest of the darkness.

Heat fever

for now, the sun has set but its heat still shimmers in the red bottoms of thunderheads. I clutch cheap wine in a canteen, fingers cut by this sharp wyoming wind. distant highway headlights roll down the hills like teardrops. the bleached asphalt ends in a t-junction. I ask god which way but he answers with tumbleweeds and antelope. hawks float above the blacktop and maybe the dust in my eyes is burning me back to life.

Hospital thoughts part II

5.He peered earnestly over his bottlecap glasses. “Ears are the window to the soul,” he whispered and eyed the orderly looking but not listening to us. They had taken his shoelaces too.
“You know. Ears are the window to the soul.” I looked out the window at birds moving that I couldn’t hear through the thick sealed glass. I run my thumbnail across the garden scene but it finds no purchase; not a crack in sight.

6. “I can hear you in there,” some asshole muttered from the other room. “Praying. It’s pathetic, heartbreaking even.” I tried to talk but the cat—I mean the demon—got my tongue instead and I dripped hot spit onto the cement floor.

Hospital thoughts part I

1.Driving through this clapboard rural world we see the seedier side of the lord. His highway side cardboard signs scrawled, TRUST JESUS in unsteady sharpie. The crucifixion painted in rusting strokes on silent hulks of Chevrolet. A large and tattered faith indeed.

2. In the rain I let the blue roll down my face. Cold steel water runs through my nose and across my tongue with the taste of pennies. Each eyelash drops heavy dew and my ears flood with the roar. A washout streaming indigo till I know nothing else.

3. After you died for a while I couldnt do anything but look at my hands. I would rub those mortal pieces of flesh together and wonder what wonders they might hold before they come on home.

4. a thousand miles of tattered ribbon highway later, I dreamed of acts of unspeakable violence. In a field I would find myself alone beneath a sky whose vastness stirred me with holy terror. In the whispering dry grass, I would sit quietly in cutoffs with blood to the hem and a dark felt hat against the sun.
And somewhere out there, as the shadows lengthened, I would hollow out into demon of the blue desert nights with starshine cutting through to my bones. Whistling a little tune with the wind.

my baby passed me by

o my baby passed me by
deep on the road somewhere in oregon. I put makeup on in the rearview. A bracelet and mascara in my eyes but o lord my baby passed me on. I just stood next to the asphalt, clouds rumbling and me wishing I couldve put some sunshine in my step, if only I couldve smiled and lit him up in the dark.

INTERLUDE

time slips.

***********

acedia

We werent getting a ride. Standing dirty in front of the mcdonalds, reeking of campfire and sweat, we sure as hell werent getting a ride. meanwhile two boys observed these two idiot girls from behind the dashboard, big mac wrappers in hand. finally, pityingly, one rolled the window down.
where yall headed?
into the woods, bout 20 miles that way if you could spare it.
shit, why yall goin there?
aint got anything better to do, not really.

they put the seat down and we slid in the back with our packs, knees pressed against the cracked vinyl. the car wheezed to life.
hi. we're Cherokee. said the one driving, handed me his tribal ID card. a wave of bass flooded the speakers. his companion looked back at us, didnt say nothing nor offer his quantum, didnt need to.
he asked what we thought of his tribe, this rez today. what i couldve said was drowned in hiphop and the high cheekboned indian princesses mounted on wolves and clutching dreamcatchers and staring vacantly for the tourists on neon billboards all around us.
we passed an older native dude in full regalia, playing flute for a clutch of doughy faced floridians.
now you see that yall? thats just wrong, he breathed.
as we rose into the hills he hit the gas and his mood turned bitter. they fastened their seatbelts. man fuck these mountains, i hate these fucking mountains, being trapped in this shithole, and he raised his long middle finger out the window of the sedan.
and what the fuck are yall doing. ive never seen two girls hitchhiking before. yall are crazy.
were hiking the appalachian trail.
why?
told you, we graduated, homeless, jobless, aint got shit else to do.
i dont know about this hiking or whatever. yall are hobos. never met two girl hobos before. yall are crazy. and he laughed.

his friend laughed too, coughed a little on the shit being smoked, peered back through the haze at us with our stinking packs cluched like children to our breasts. i mean, yall dont need to go out into the woods now, its almost dark and all. yall can stay down in the trailer tonight. lucky youre with us, i wouldnt fuckin walk around here at night, not on this land, even if yall think youre crazy or whatever. they are worse here, i swear to god, they do terrible things to eachother down here, their own families.
we nodded. the speedometer crept up, the mountains rolled blue and red into the clouds gathering at the foot of the setting sun till it was a scene beyond my power to articulate.
so moving on-- it got dark. lil wayne laughed and flowed on the stereo. we made the rounds, waited outside somewhere for a long time; beer from someone elses trailer; visited some friends in their yard, shootin the shit, them laughing about women with muscle, how cool it was, looking at us in the light from the car like we werent real till someones ma put the porch light on at this indecent hour and shood her sons friends along to go make a racket and smoke someplace else. some time later we pulled up at the trailer, walked across the cool grass and cricket sounds into the smell of hot linolium and stale beer.
make yourselves at home.
he offered his last clean towels. no kitchen on account of a fire last year. we sat and shot the shit a while longer till they got too deep into the pills and we couldnt watch them do it anymore. so we put our boots outside to dry a little and cleared a space in the corner of the room and laid our bedrolls out and collapsed.

I woke sometime later and the quieter one was kneeling over me with eyes like a mineshaft full of water on a moonless night. we should do something, he was whispering over and over again. he was 17, still halfgrown skinny but on his way to heartbreaker status, shaking in his nikes, out of his mind on whatever was in those lines laid out on the table. i sat up, soothed him to hush now and get on to bed. ran my thumb down the knife in my palm, didnt open it. whispered again for him to hush now, calm down. his friend called him back to the table, saying thats no way to do things, apologizing to us, assuring us he'd take us on down to a truckstop on the tourist route where wed be sure to catch a ride in the morning. it was late. i shouldve stayed awake but i drifted out of my control back into dreamless sleep of the long road.

sloth

id cultivated the sin called idleness, of laying for uncountable stretches of time calmly with my eyes closed or open. practicing. tonight rats or something else hungry banged around the cooking pots, which id forgotten to put up. i was thinking this small thought, of getting up and putting them up and id almost commenced it but the vacancy of the long hours filled me too heavy to move except so slowly as to be almost unperceptable. so sinew by sinew i flexed my left hand.
thus begun a trance completely by accident, an episode during which the lord was speaking not bidden thru praying or nothing just the low throaty sound of the woods at night, green lips and tounge never abating, his wild hands crawling over me with the long legged spiders lit by a snatch of moon through the thick blue leaves. we hung in the minutes or seconds or hours like this for a while, any stretch of time really, till the wind wound through the trees and the campfire wrapped me in smoke so unspeakably more pure than that perfume incense they are always swinging from heavy chains at mass (them and their damn chains) and i coughed and came awake and the rats, having concluded, scrambled off to some other holy purpose.

wrath

Hard to tell, on account of the gray sky over the sun, exactly what time it was when we collapsed into the shelter on the other side of thunder ridge mountain. mustve been mid afternoon. every peak on the ridge was a cycle of sweating up switchbacks then shivering on the summits in the low violent clouds. for a few minutes we just sat quiet on the dusty wood platform under the roof, digesting the miles, glassy eyed with hunger.
a bird picked up and flew out of the path of a man. he was young at first but as he stepped through the misting rain, his face had hard eyes and two equal lines cut like canyons around his mouth.
"They call me Wrath."
we have always been warned about wrath. his blond hair was twisted into filthy dreadlocks. he had an old external frame pack on, a faded Gap hoodie. he eyed us. "My mother was raped, you know. Rape is invading another being's space without their permission: I don't believe in doing that."
He produced an empty doritos bag and laid it carefully across soaked kindling in the fire pit. he gathered larger branches, everything wet through from the rain.
As he spoke, his eyes lit with earnest reverence while the lines around his mouth twisted with something seething and bitter.
"There are many things people aren't aware of. For one thing, there are machines who are sentient beings. If a woman remains a virgin until age 36, she can give birth to other entirely new species of sentient beings."
He lit the corner of the doritos bag and it went up almost immediately, catching the tinder with it. He produced a peanut butter jar, scraped of every morsel, and laid it atop the brightly burning blue foil. by the time we could smell it burning, the large branches had already caught and the fire blossomed stunningly in the cold rain. The warmth bathed over me and I stopped shivering.
He was still talking, giving us the whole doxology; and now he shook his head.
"well there are these human bodies who are inhabited by bad spirits. They need to be gotten rid of."
Me and my girl looked at each other, and scraped the last of the hot rice from our bowl. As I washed it by the spring, I watched him looking for wood, walking head down with clenched muscles, lips moving almost imperceptibly. We silently packed and balanced our food and water and got to our feet and put on our ponchos and set off. when I looked back, he was shrouded from the rain in the heat and smoke of the fire, mixing a gruel of flour or bisquick with kraft powdered cheese. he was pacing like a lonely, bewildered lion in a zoo enclosure. gaunt from all that walking under such great strain.

we'd been walking, you see, through this field.
next to a bridge an old woman had splayed herself in the green grass.
her eyes were closed.
we circled like big hungry birds wheeling in the blue sky. i touched her:
Maam, are you alright?
she started awake: my my, I'd just got so...tired....so very tired in this heat.thank you kindly. reckon I'll get on home.

she had a haze of holiness--or was it pollen--like guadalupe's halo on a cheap candle burning its mortal wick. her and i, we didnt need to say nothing further, both knowing it wont be long till her body is no longer flesh but carrion in actuality: next time it will be real buzzards prodding her to wake and knowing that she wont.

to be wild

next time you need me. i’ll be standing at the edge of your town, brown, behind heaving swarms of june bugs as the sun sinks.
when you need me with your skin soft and perfumed on the concrete, i will will myself to forget your form from behind the trees. i will drop my words and my gaze
with my dripping sweat like any old bastard, take a second look at my battered boots that are breaking up in the long shadows, and let it go
back towards the new moon rising over a warm-breathed forest that is vast and still in the evening heat.

May dreams: Under the falling sky

I woke up and it was revelations, my body ablaze with insects, the meek standing hungry at the threshold.
some of us known this day was a long time coming, the weight of so many days like this finally breaking the back of a world whose bruises and fractures had already mottled its skin past the turning point.
but upon rupture there was also this last rapture:
a brief moment of reckoning, of seeing light from the dark cooling earth beneath my stone. so here I held my bones close, awake,
and it was a blessing just to call
my savior’s name.

paradise

at last the tide comes in
bringing the empty bottles to shore. the sand polishes the lables till the glass glistens like jellyfish or other smooth treasures wreathed in
tangled seaweed, fishscales and the rest that been cast aside.

now their small mouths call to me above the surf, begging my lips for a kiss, and god willing
these spirits would wet my tongue and burn down my body.
i am so thirsty
never mind them bottles are empty inside save for a little sea salt
nevermind bottles on the beach are supposed to have other messages,
i dont figure i could read em in the dark      anyway.

the trapper

he was always walking in like he ownd the place, looking deep into every pair of brown eyes with this deep desire to take:
with long strong hands he would be grabbing them up, holding his mouth close
to breathe in and out their scent of unconquered forests, heavy lidded &thick green.

he struts another step forward, consumed with greed to grab her wrists, which snap like a tree falling

and it is then that the mud starts to run in earnest off the newly naked mountainsides. the sound roars like fresh laid railroad tracks cutting through the night, a blade that parts the plains with waves of wheels and pestilence.

behind them you could smell the grass beginning to burn,
the people scattering like ashes into the sky.

days of a g**

god knows you could get used to this--the new heft of some .38 heat stuck down your jeans. hell, it couldve belonged to someone’s dead grandfather
and maybe you traded a drunk a bottle of hootch for its cold oiled barrel digging into your skin.

upon contact with the revolver's worn wooden handle, your body goes electric with a great reckoning of scale: life and death shrink and grow like the plain shadow of your hand on the wood planks out back.
you imagine that the birds have stopped singing.
even the light thru the window bends away a little from this heavy thing resting with a dead weight on your thigh.

but you remind yourself that you would never actually…as you pull a long shirt down. in the mirror there is your split lip pulling into a grimace, and this slow building probability of lightning clouds in your eyes.

your woman

is waiting for you with shimmering eyelids and soft plentiful body under rough cotton sheets

back home.
so why you always finding yourself here with these skinny white girls instead? they look about to disappear like thin threads of opium suspended in a dark room just before someone opens the door.
and maybe thats it--you was just dizzy with the smoke,
unable to speak once wrappd in the bony arms of these well-shod ghosts with mist shrouding their delicate painted feet.

we both know that in the end you will wind up hand- full and empty-eyed
as pale milk starts to spill in the gutter.

The fall of standing cloud

I was still soaking wet from a hot shower when you called.
“Natalie.” you deadpanned. “I am hangin down with these people, Puerto Ricans maybe, and they was jokin about my friend who jumped under the train a few years ago. I told you about that. And now they fuckin jokin about him. Natalie. I am tired. I am old and tired and I aint sober and I lost my higher power. And Darnell jumped in front of that train, he just straight jumped... over in a quick second, it probably didnt even stop.”

I blink and my words come out strangely, “Please listen to me when I say this cause these days I am hardly never impressed with people and even more rarely do I say so if I am. But you, your strength is earth shaking. For the love of god, dont fall down now….it aint time yet. hold on to your higher power.” and I shiver in my towel from the chill leaking under the rotting back door.

“Natalie. Everyone is always sayin that I am strong. I aint strong. Im just fuckin alive. And Natalie I am tired. It is always this hard, it just dont never get fucking easier and I am too old. I cant even see my grandson. I am so tired. Come on, you always paintin those pictures back in your room, well paint this: a little girl, tired and dirty, dirty teddybear and dark brown hair. And a big heart. Paint that and you will know.”
You are very drunk by now. You pause, gulp something, breathe heavy, and continue:
“You made me that CD for the bus ride and I listen to it and that makes me happy but underneath, those songs you played for me back at the lodge was so sad. and I feel it in you, that sadness under you. I say, damn that girls been through a lot, been through some shit. but listen to me, goddamn it, would you fucking listen to me, I know you aint listening!!! dont let it get you like this, dont take my fuckin way, cause look a me I aint happy Natalie I am so fuckin tired and Im just like when you finally hike that appalacian mountain trail or whatever you call it think of me, girl.”
Through the static reception and the Puerto Ricans laughing in the background I swear I hear a train start clacking down the tracks.

the Denver gentlemen

"Hey girl, what are you drinkin, and why you lookin so down? Come on, make that fine face of yours smile, it's more becoming!
Oh, youre workin out on the rez huh?
Hows that goin for you? chaos, right?and welfare! What about you, surviving on charity tonight like the rest, right? I bet you want me to buy you a drink. Shit, I bet right now we're on sacred land stolen from the indians! [laughter from wingmen] Comeon, I'm not trying to insult you or nothin, dont look at me like that! Cheers to the land!God bless america! Drink up, girl!"

The walls and the irony and tight jeans suddenly close in on me and I slam my club soda on the table and grab up my coat and set my jaw as they turn to watch my body leave. Outside this grief wells in my chest and I start home down Colfax walking too fast.