Post-Katrina Salvage
first published in Witness: Disaster — Vol. XXV №1 (Spring 2012)
What life feels like here: quick denial of dawn, then an hour
organizing paper. Wash crotch and armpits with a water bucket.
Paul Celan squats in the book closet watching the word mine
break down. Missing. The subject matter is lost lives and how
to make sense of the present, we need a spherical text
something cyclical, a circular printing press, a backwards
tattoo gun, a series of sleeps and awakes: after-ripples,
and the sore, bitten nipples of mothers. We choose the suit
of cups over the suit of swords so our vessel can fill and spill,
fill and spill. Time is a cell, a gesture, circle, snapped
rubber band, salivary gland, a stone dropped into water.
Time is the concentrate of cider vinegar, the crystallized resin
of remembering in concentric losses, while new migrant workers
give birth in clinic vans in tent compounds, when home
is function of fragments. A junction of overpasses.
Disemboweled light switches. Floss and thread wound tightly
and unwound slowly, and beautiful changes in the sky.
