Post-Katrina Salvage

Abe Louise Young
Aug 26, 2017 · 1 min read

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.

)
Abe Louise Young

Written by

Writer & educator thinking about poetry, social justice, prisons, feminism, kidlit & love letters. Work in @NarrativeMag @TheNation @WitnessMag #binders

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