The poems in Alluvial Cities are drawn from this layered landscape's geology and history, its people and language, and the kindred ties between earth and water, flesh and blood. DEUCALIONIDS The waters broke from the void before first light, a divinity ripping through the trembling flesh of marshes and the levees' old clay thighs, covering every mile of St. Bernard Parish. Houses with their cement slabs have floated light as the rinds of watermelons you ate as a boy and chucked into Lake Catherine, swelled to overflowing by the god that surged into the Rigolets estuary and left an afterbirth of sweet crude leaked from foundered tanks. Cars hang like carrion birds on the highest branches and torn roofs. Leached of mud and flood waters, the houses we pass cry out broken window panes, duct-taped fridges, and a stillness that leaves us on the dead grass of this woman's home, like so many thrown bones. |