for my grandmother Mere

Never has there been a more respectable hurricane, provided with all the portents, predictions, omens, etc. The awful sunrise — no one could fail to take a warning from it — the hovering black spirit bird, the man of war, just one, comme il faut.

— New Orleanian Painter Walter Anderson on Hurricane Betsy, which he rode out tied to a tree on the highest dune on Horn Island

i.

the clouds & my lips &

the catfish & my fingers &

my grandmother & her stories:

all Mississippi-burnt marshmallows

by the pool & lounging,

along the Gulf coast & manning it

my grandmother’s gaze keeping water spouts

from touching down too close to me

allowing me the space to enjoy my catch in peace

a tiny sun in my belly quieted by sweet tea & new tales

go print your new piece & read it to me, my lamby

i steer hurricanes from interrupting us

by knowing just how to ride the eye

i just found out my heart stopped while my mom was

giving birth to me & i see now how that feeling never left me

it lifts me above the heavy clouds

in moments

when the barometric pressure drops too low

it begins to begin

a flash of orange & black from Mexico

the first wings of October

falling upward opposite the

leaves up north sharing their shade

do people also need to die to keep the air around us fertile?

here they are gathering flame & giving way to a flock

Mere’s been waiting for that flicker

of how the dead perceive the living & i embed it in my body as a

prayer for my unraveling & the becoming that might follow

you know butterflies are the communication medium for when i die

watch for butterflies

especially monarchs

we speak through them,

curve into their coastal margins

parading through the air just above the swells

like Creole royalty holding our ground as

it recedes beneath us—

least of all a throne—

leaving us with nothing to grip,

but the heart quickening needed for what’s coming

ii.

we’ve been windbeaten to ready

for the years of this coming century will be divided by its storms

beneath Mere’s print of Jonah bursting from the whale

i lie in bed

throbbing a beat inside the terror of what i’ve called to me

in moments i let the mad waves’ break breach the berm

wetlands absorbing a new night’s surge

to say that men need to destroy & rebuild

is to say Laska likes chasing tennis balls up grassy hills

or like saying i finish to our videos

i can barely maintain the boundaries of my body

on beaches, in bars, in The Woods she presses up against me

& touches what she

wants

another noun becomes a verb & she lingers on it

i wait under the weight of language bodies

piling up in this battle

the costumes of The Leopard Society calling my skin

promising to save me from the monstrous hunger if

i don’t mind eating my own

it’s not in me

but in me still my antennae with all they can feel still hidden

in my dream panoply

i tell Mere everything i hope to do with my life

& get a quick scolding to wake me

well, you better get started

& i see how close i am to emerging from the sea

or swallowing it

time a trade wind in my migration

         or a lighthouse before the crash

we’re all one sail to Horn Island from being Walter Anderson during Betsy:

a body & a waist with a skiff tethered to it

two lungs & a chest roped to a black mangrove tree

even on the highest dune

the ocean wet all the way to both nipples spilling

windwhipped seed & milk frothed to every wavelength at once

interlocking watercolors unveiled where the pelican first appeared white