with a closing line from Ted Hughes. Festooned with beads, dusted in beignet sugar, baubles clank against our soft stomachs as we trip down filthy streets reeking of lust, pools of urine steaming beneath bricked and shuttered shotguns. Masked figures rear like horse heads against a wrought-iron sky. Is this the America he promised us? Now that he’s gone, his ghost remains restless— unappeased by altars in voodoo shops, spells dissolved in a glass of water under the bed, snags of Spanish moss and alligator claws. Kratom in my purse and codeine fizzing my blood, we gag at shoeless scruff who parades Bourbon St. with his cardboard sign: Will lick pussy for anything. In the Lower Ninth Ward, lots of overgrown weeds and grass form a kind of parkland, slabs of foundation visible like cemetery stones. Did you know a football field of wetlands succumbs to saltwater every hour? On the cover of USA Today, it’s the farm states now where the levees are gone. The couple from Huntsville says you just keep moving on, rebuild in the wake of tornadoes, hurricanes, floods. What else y’all gonna do? Prepare to live in a motel by the freeway, food-shop at gas station marts, camp under the overpass littered with chopsticks, tampons, tire skins. Still the trees are blue-black with grackles, sunset a peach haze behind the water tower, oil refinery. We are walking where maybe no one has walked before. Beautiful, beautiful America!
N’awlins
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