After Katrina
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- After Katrina
There's no Sabbath in this house. Just work.
The black of garbage bags, yellow-cinched throats opening to gloved hands.
Black tombs along the road now, proof she knew to cherish the passing things,
even those muted before the waters came, before the mold's grotesquerie and the wooden house choked on bones.
My aunt wades through wreckage, failing, no matter how hard she tries, at letting go.
I look on, glad, at her failing, her slow rites, fingering what she'd once been given to care for.
The waistbands of her husband's briefs, elastic as memory; the blank stare of rotted drawers,
their irises of folded linen still, smelling of soap and wood and clean hands. [End Page 1116]
Daylight through the silent soft windows and I'm sure now: Today is Sabbath, the work we do, prayer.
I know what she releases into the garbage bags, shiny like the wet skins of seals, beached on the shore of this house.
Kevin Simmonds, a native of New Orleans, is both a writer and a musician. He has performed as a musician throughout the USA, Japan, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom.
