Ebook: Alluvial cities

The poems in Alluvial Cities are drawn from this layered landscape's geology and history, its people and language, and the kindred ties between earth and water, flesh and blood.

DEUCALIONIDS
The waters broke from the void before first light,
a divinity ripping through the trembling flesh
of marshes and the levees’ old clay thighs,
covering every mile of St. Bernard Parish.
 
Houses with their cement slabs have floated
light as the rinds of watermelons you ate as a boy
and chucked into Lake Catherine, swelled to overflowing
by the god that surged into the Rigolets estuary
 
and left an afterbirth of sweet crude leaked
from foundered tanks.  Cars hang like carrion
birds on the highest branches and torn roofs.  Leached
of mud and flood waters, the houses we pass cry out
 
broken window panes, duct-taped fridges, and a stillness
that leaves us on the dead grass of this
woman’s home, like so many thrown bones.