It has been a century and some change, since five rivers opened their mouths wide as heaven on a crisp late winter morning and swallowed a city whole,
and ‘round the campfires of my uncertain boyhood they used to tell stories about how the bones still rattle under the floorboards, how you can sometimes catch the ghosts of mothers swimming down the sidewalks calling out for a child,
but what they never told me is, how six months ago I would catch up with an old friend and he’d be coughing up water,
how when the rain started coming, it would never stop,
how every time a storm rolls in I’d have to name it after whoever got swept away and didn’t come back,
they never tell you that there’s only so much in the way of higher ground,
eventually there is just too many bodies and not enough salvation,
and it will always be us in the undertow,
they don’t write histories about it anymore,
like revelations already came through here and the believers returned to the sky,
like I didn’t meet a boy last year who disappeared before he finished writing down his phone number,
like we didn’t all come from an entire genealogy of vanishing,
like the morgue ain’t all full up and spilling into the street and nobody knows how to be surprised anymore,
sometimes death is biblical and sometimes it is quiet
walking the block past midnight and all I see are bodies floating, twenty feet in the air, weightless and anticipating,
the moment when the moon will call the tide back to claim them