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.

That night,
on Bourbon Street in a line,
drunk college men, not as cool as they look like they think they are,
puff smoke and throw beads off their balcony to my group.

We step off the Bourbon curb into
Jazz
Preservation Hall
poly-
rhythms
scratchy and smooth and alive.
A band member croons glory
through a miniature rusted megaphone
Sound rusts too as five tourists,
seated, clap along with the beat.

Next morning it’s 8 o’clock,
we screw and caulk,
the jokes don’t stop,
and we are nailing it.
We break
for lunch
out on the plot across the street on each other’s stomachs;
we made PB&J and tuna sandwiches
in the morning and eat them now.
We take dinner orders,
look through Snapchat and close
our eyes in front of the sun.
We shivered in the morning then
our arms spread open when the sun snuck through.

We shine,
after a hot shower we walk
to dinner along the highway on the grass
along to eat waffles, savory and sweet
calm, free,
and matching
red noses that night on Frenchman Street,
stepping over fissures in the pavement.

Yea, foolish mortals,
Double-minded,
Noah’s flood is not yet subsided;
two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

To Langston sounds of Jazz,
dinner, sore shoulders,
and mortal beignets at Café Du Monde,
I slip under my covers a container of oil.

The cab driver the next morning
came up to rebuild, met his wife, and stayed.
They have two children
and one home.
Is the only way to hold on
to settle down?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The day of rest comes
before we realize our week is done.
Someone else will paint over what we continued.

So .
Is this city new or
long standing, completely
rebuilt on incongruence,
oil on water, an

energy
that can’t be contained in the swirl of a window gate
nor a house that’s gone
nor the beat of a drum
nor swing of singers

Will it record or slip through fingers?

Showered and warm in that synagogue
rebuilt from flood,
eyes closed by choice,
the waters of words I sing weekly
break through my soul unstable
and through the power of the wish inscribed
on the synagogue’s ark:
Mayim rabim lo yuchlu
lichabot et ha’ahava.
The Song of Songs:
Mighty waters will not be able
to extinguish the love.

With a hum,
plexiglas, and sawdust in my lungs,
I lift home with me above that fluid state.