The characters in these poems walk the Gulf South’s back roads. Attentive to grief, faith, and fragile ecologies — tracing how ordinary lives bend under loss yet still reach toward mercy, beauty, and moral clarity.
It is Sunday morning on the Mississippi.
Oil has washed up on the bank.
Absorbent booms soak it up.
A barge loaded
with blue steel containers
appears to spread
Across the river, that rippled skin
of brown
Oil in water
Smooth oiled stones tinted rust
or tire black.
Large chunks of metal have shivered
and now, the whole thing resembles some
surrealistic, aleatoric sculpture garden.
Young black men like Rayvon Carter
pick up oil-soaked mops with pitchforks.
Rayvon wears
the side of a pasteboard box on his head—
protection from the sun.
Bare Cypress gnarled and filigree of roots,
mooring lines washed up on shore:
everything is always
wet
inside the levee
An old man leans against a 74 Ford
parked on top.
You can still see the boy in his face.
His log-shaped arms
seem made of oxen-white hair.
He wears hunting fatigues.
And that block in the pocket
that’s a pack of Winston’s.
He squints at the sky
against belief and insects
and lights a cigarette.
At least the oil will kill the bugs—
among them worms
sheathed
in a warm laziness.
The city fills vast vats with leaden sky
A hard rain makes everything fleeting
ambiguous and skewed
A mirror
This one reflects a soul in pieces
Oil in the ambient air
When I walk past
a turtle drops from the flotsam
Here’s proof water can stink and still hold life
The trash here—filled with fragments
like a poem
concise, compact
yet the water flows along
a long tube to the gulf
Throwing up
White milk jugs and styrofoam blocks—
Giant teeth that keep
dissolving
Held in place by the boom
a jaw wired shut.