So this is home in New Orleans:

new or built
on contrast rhythms.

Poverty rhymes with candy-colored houses,
iron, swirly painted gates and window cover grates.
In this home
is destruction
and construction and
the highest incarceration rate in the world,
so they say
sky and baby blues
sunflower yellows and
cherry reds

(Who are we to be here, and who are they?)

They said,
Before the flood
we would not leave our homes.
With no insurance
and our wrinkles, we gathered
our things would be gone
if we returned.
We prayed.
“I survived Betsy,
and I’ll survive this.”

In a home for Doris,
86-year old woman in the 7th Ward,
we fill in nail holes with hummus.
Every cab driver warns us not to go here at night.
All day we roar along
with power tools and music from the early aughts.
Those of us who know what we’re doing have done this before.
Those of us who do not
thought we ought
and start to build a part of the porch fence.
We accustom to the site, the sound of the angled saw,
level and drill and begin to see
a house being willed from ground. Continue reading →

Red circle with a crisp white number through
Notification center, sans serif
THIS MIGHT BE HIM and yet, you don’t know if
Left unread, the upper left disrupts blue

It’s not as if you killed someone. Instead
You sit there wondering if the like you’ve spun
Should merit this encircled, glaring “1”
Replay his words as you get into bed

Sleep will come whether or not you know
You tell yourself, but you believe it not
Then simply out of need to nix the spot
A soldier, and afeard? Your face aglow

On your side of the room, the rest is dark
Messages hidden from what they may be
And as the narrow number turns to “3”
With ringing heart you reach for scarlet mark