Talking About New Orleans
by Jayne Cortez
Talking about New Orleans About deforestation & the flood of vodun paraphernalia the Congo line losing its Congo the funeral bands losing their funding the killer winds humming intertribal warfare hums into two storm-surges touching down tonguing the ground three thousand times in a circle of grief four thousand times on a levee of lips five thousand times between a fema of fangs everything fiendish, fetid, funky, swollen, overheated and splashed with blood & guts & drops of urinated gin in syncopation with me riding through on a refrigerator covered with asphalt chips with pieces of ragtime music charts torn photo mug shots & pulverized turtle shells from Biloxi me bumping against a million-dollar oil rig me in a ghost town floating on a river on top of a river me with a hundred ton of crab legs and no evacuation plan me in a battered tree barking & howling with abandoned dogs my cheeks stained with dried suicide kisses my isolation rising with a rainbow of human corpse & fecal rat bones where is that fire chief in his big hat where are the fucking pumps the rescue boats & the famous coalition of bullhorns calling out names hey I want my red life jacket now & I need some sacred sandbags some fix-the-levee-powder some blood-pressure-support-juice some get-it-together-dust some lucky-rooftop-charms & some magic-helicopter-blades I'm not prepared to live on the bottom of the water like Oshun I don't have a house built on stilts I can't cross the sea like Olokun I'm not equipped to walk on water like Marie Laveau or swim away from a Titanic situation like Mr. Shine Send in those paddling engineers I'm inside of my insides & I need to distinguish between the nightmare, the mirage, the dream and the hallucination Give me statistics how many residents died while waiting how many drowned how many suffocated how many were dehydrated how many were separated how many are missing how many had babies and anyway who's in charge of this confusion this gulf coast engulfment this displacement this superdome shelter this stench of stank this demolition order this crowded convention center chaos making me crave solitary confinement Am I on my own exhausted from fighting racist policies exhausted from fighting off sex offenders exhausted from fighting for cots for tents for trailers for a way out of this anxiety this fear this emptiness this avoidance this unequal opportunity world of disappointments accumulating in my undocumented eye of no return tickets Is this freedom is this global warming is this the new identity me riding on a refrigerator through contaminated debris talking to no one in particular about a storm that became a hurricane & a hurricane that got violent and started eyeballing & whistling & stretching toward a category three domination that caught me in the numbness of my own consciousness unprepared, unprotected and made more vulnerable to destabilization by the corporate installation of human greed, human poverty human invention of racism & human neglect of the environment I mean even Buddy Bolden came back to say move to higher ground because a hurricane will not rearrange its creativity for you & the river will meet the ocean in the lake of your flesh again so move to higher ground and let your jungle find its new defense let the smell of your wisdom restore the power of pure air & let your intoxicated shoreline rumble above & beyond the water-marks of disaster I'm speaking of New Orleans of deportation of belching bulldozers of poisonous snakes of bruised bodies of instability and madness mechanism of indifference and process of elimination I'm talking about transformation about death re-entering life with Bonne chance, bon ton roulé, bonjour & bonne vie in New Orleans, bon