In the dark room, air blows
Around my still body.

I become too aware of myself for comfort-

I see the outline of the window.
A square shaded by darkness
Surrounded by an even greater darkness.

Nothing is clear but these darknesses,
Of which I am the center.

Space makes no apology for depth.

There is trust between the space
And I- that even when I wake,
Everything will be as it were.

Whatever happens in between
Is not my business.

There is a girl called Southern Ugly,
She often faces the mirror- Believing
that the reflection must be oneself.

But a woman’s essence
Lives in the light, not in our eyes.
Mother Mary, dressed in blue-

Your daughter sees her face, knowing
That she is not first to be saved for Heaven.
We come second to God

(Though Man did not refuse the apple).
Mother said, “You are a southern belle,
Just baptized in the bayou.

****** in the water,
The depths of the swamp do not foster
Power nor Fortune

But your birth, the prayer of the Moon.
And like a cypress knee
That has not yet broken the surface,

You’re hidden in wisdom unknown."

The mouth of a flower opens-
two lips part, shouting to the sun
to swallow the fields

So light pours over, and
floods out the shadows
and the wind blows
waves of green

the tree is rooted, unmoved
by the tornado of day, which
swirls into the leaves

and folds the twigs of branches
together, clasping like fingers
as if to thank the sky for
all the movement it brings.

The springs offer no explanation that cannot be heeded.
My feet meet the water, which absorbs those sins that have calloused my soles.

The sight of you across the bank, under the cedar
Chills me with a sharp current.
I will never know why the cold water
Surrenders me softly to the Earth,
But grips me at the heart
When you appeared below the trees among
Their fallen leaves.

There are salamanders that live in the creek,
But they are so small, and exist so profoundly in the water
That only the people who have used their lives searching-
To protect them-
Have ever seen these blind animals.

You have never noticed me at the river,
But the river knows that I'm here
To guard the stretch of Earth that keeps us at our ends.

There was once a moment when
nothing existed.
Nothing was called darkness.
I have never known nothingness
but I have felt darkness.
Darkness is anywhere that I am not
and everywhere that I will be.
It is on either side
of my life.
It is not shadows,
or blindness,
or a new moon.
Darkness is nothing.

if i give birth it will be in the handicap stall of a mall bathroom
on Sunday afternoon
and people are noticing how
i ain’t been to church in a while
and it’s funny
how some spaces, just out of necessity
make themselves into chapels
i don’t have holy water but
i do have this coke zero and
i don’t have wafers but momma
gave me some motrin this morning

if i get married it will be in one of those old dusty dug outs
where someone had scratched
“*****”
into the wall and
daddy’s workin and  momma’s sleepin so
i’m alone standing face to a man and God
i’ll wear my helmet and black face paint coz
i don’t have my Sundays’ best
and it’s funny  
how some spaces, just out of circumstance
must become a chapel

and when i leave Him
some, many nights later
i’ll go to midnight mass
and ask Mother Mary
how a stable must have felt

Spit the small words stuck
between the gaps of your teeth.
Before too long, they will begin
to decay the bones of your mouth.
Your smile will be stained
with things hoarded behind your lips-
Those little bits of bitterness
spread sour on your tongue.
Take a string drawn taught,
or a sharp stick
and carve out those nasty thoughts
and see just how much
your gums bleed

I feel as light as light itself.
Not as fast, not as constant-
but weightless
as if the only way to feel
like I'm anything at all
is to illuminate
everything in my range

Nature, too, is self-consuming.
Even the grandest oak
of all southern Louisiana
will be uprooted in a hurricane.
The moss that grazes the water
with gentle finger tips
from those weary branches
will be swallowed by the water.
An old man's life spent in Houma
is reflected in the river currents;
his house built on stilts
across from the cemetery
where is wife is buried
next to her eldest son.
It meets the Mississippi
not surrendering,
returning

Tiny ankles hang down from a wooden bridge over the bayou-
and my friend and I stare at the black water
and point at all the furniture legs jetting out of the blackness
as if they were Cyprus knees—
and he says to me  “Someone said there’s at least a hundred bodies in there”
and without hesitation or a moment of silence
for the uncertain yet forgotten Dead
I say, “Bodies float, so we would see them if that were true”
and he replied,  after a brief moment of thought,
“Maybe they’re tied to all the couches or stuffed in the refrigerators”  
and I couldn’t believe how many house hold appliances
have been repurposed to host all these passed souls
in the bowels of the swamp
and with a swing of my leg, too swift—
my left shoe dropped  and hovered on the water
where lily pads should have been

in the small town land marked by it's single gas station,
teens skateboard through
the Walmart 15 minutes away
smoke cigarettes
in the baseball field of their high school rival
spend Friday nights at waffle house
after football games
the hospital near Walmart
is being closed down
history replaced by
churches and banks
patriotism and school pride
is sewn into the school
t-shirts
a memorial for the boys
who drove drunk and died
it's a community
built on family values,
everyone recounts their
blessings and after years
of collective prayer
He even
bestowed upon that town
a Dollar General

Everything still exists,
and will continue to exist.
Every ruin, illegible or destroyed or altered
is here-
Not alive, but present.
Today,
we have heritage sights and landfills.
History is a Waste of our time.
It sticks like tar
in the Earth’s lungs.
I stood before the Great Pyramids
and I wondered if my
great grandchildren’s great grandchildren
will do the same when
our past stacks as high

Who are you, a Man?
A God fearing creature made in the image of God,
And like Our Lord, you are surrounding
Even when I hide from you.
For whom his own Ego are the gates of Heaven-
God, why are you afraid?
That I may not love you how Eve loved the apple.
What is my pleasure if it cannot please you,
But you shall be appeased in knowing that my love is fruitless
By design.
As though I'm the ****** herself, crack my rib
And tell me that no woman deserves your Son
Who cannot sacrifice her heart
to a Man of God

Shadows move like the arms of a clock
they stretch through the cycle
from dusk
to dawn
they follow, reminding
that time is behind us
we live in the Light
and shadows sleep
with the Sun

Falling backwards- Never mind where from,
it could have happened anywhere
you stood.
The dark water below is so vast that
the only word that can describe it's volume
is open.
Landing on its surface, like a crucifix
you sink forever downward, but
otherwise still.
There is no end to its depth,
but increasingly crushing the farther
you drown.

Grief is not a feeling, but a force.
Like a boulder, I am confident in my place on Earth.
But after several setting suns, I start to feel the weight of time
under thousands of feet of
existence.
There's a push, and a pull
and I go falling.
A fragment of a fragment,
I tumble somewhere unfamiliar-
and it takes eons to reconnect to something bigger
than my pieces.