"That Bitter Scent"

"I remembered when I was just five, running around wild on the shore near Cocodrie where the herons nested. Maman waved her hands at me to quiet down. Like always, she had those pink rosary beads and they caught the sun just right, glinting and shining. I sunk into the cool sand by her feet. She had some shadow, you know?" - from "That Bitter Scent" 

To read more, visit:

http://www.primenumbermagazine.com/Issue7_PrimeDecimals2.html#anchor_344

"Eliza, in the Event of a Hurricane"

"Eliza, in the Event of a Hurricane" is now up on the website at Precipitate Journal. (Re-established & renamed in 2012 as NEWFOUND JOURNAL).

"On this particular night we get weathermen, talking and talking.  And when El pulls the ottoman up to the television, it becomes evident that you’re in this for the long haul.  She looks at you and winks and cracks the same joke she told five minutes before.  Something about a girl walking into a warehouse where nobody works and nothing is sold.  Smile, but don’t laugh."

Read more at: 

"Eliza, in the Event of a Hurricane" - Precipitate - Journal of of the New Environmental Imagination - PRECIPITATE is now NEWFOUND JOURNAL. 

Discards

post-Katrina painting by Tuni Bose, from a photograph by Mary Bradley Virre

Old sweaters, sneakers, beach towels and blankets, 

college texts, ill intentions, forgotten dreams, 

odd bits of poetry we once thought pretty but really were pretty bad, 

passages torn out of notebooks that were meant to define 

and ended up 

misrepresentative and misanthropic, even maudlin.  

Better to pass them on, throw them out, no reason to rinse or even refurbish them.  

Just put them in the big, heaping dustbin, 

or straight into that corner of the basement, 

into the boxes with the rest of the discards.  

Only the weather can remind of things we meant to save.

A Different Sort of Beach

Destin, Florida - September 2010

The sand is still sugar fine, just like it was in the 60's, the 70's, even the 80's.  Even last year.  But now there is something new.  A coating of green that buckles and kicks up under your bare feet like sheafs of wallpaper.  And further down past the navy chairs, there's a layer of seaweed.  No, not seaweed.  This is seagrass that once lived on the bottom of the Gulf.  A member of the brown algae family, the grass now lies in great sodden blankets, thick layers of olive- and coffee-colored cloth, that no beach-goer wants to touch.  I imagine lying in bed with this blanket up to my chin, but the stench of something rotting, a pond in trouble, reminds me that this is nothing usual, nothing comforting.

If this grass now lies in folds at the edge of the water, then what is at the bottom of the Gulf where the grass once grew?  Go ahead, guess.  Dispersants, oil, a little supper of BP crude for all you fishes.  Sometimes the little fishes float up to the surface and end up on the beach amongst the soft dead grasses.  Algae as funereal bed.  

Swimmers wade through the algae and into the waves that are laden with more algae, fresh from the deep.  If one swims out far enough, the water is clear, a luscious turquoise.  Paddle surfers, ocean kayakers, infrequent pods of dolphin do better out there than swimmers.  Still, some are determined to get past the brown-green detritus.  Heads bob, laughter floats to shore, and soon they head in, once again through the algae, and on the beach the sunbathers eye them, perhaps expecting the brave ones to emerge covered in slime, sporting gills, like so many modern-day sea monsters.

Louisiana and the Gulf Coast

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig went up in flames, a friend in New Orleans wrote that you could smell the fire all the way in the city, describing it as the sweet, acrid smell of burning crayons.  And then he added a few words, which called up the five years spent in recovering from Katrina: “Here we go again."

The Gulf Coast is plain tired of recovering.  Would it be out of the ordinary if the region could thrive and enrich the nation with seafood, commerce, energy sources, music, and culture that no other city in the United States can match?  Without all the disaster drama?  Well, darlin, life just ain’t that simple.

1999 BP advertisement

According to some of our Gulf coast representatives, the BP oil spill is a “statistical anomaly,” whereby the deepwater drilling moratorium is unfounded.  Really?  British Petroleum has such a good record?  Well, let’s see: the 2005 BP oil refinery explosion in Texas City, TX, which killed 15 workers and injured 170; the 2006 BP pipeline leak in Prudhoe Bay, AK; several more spills in Alaska; and add to all this charges of manipulating propane prices.  Yeah, sure they’re clean: as clean as the waters their pipes in the Gulf of Mexico are spewing crude oil at – what is it now, 100,000 gallons a day?  According to the radio program, Democracy Now, it is now apparent that the “BP Oil Spill  Confirmed as Worst in US History.”  So much for that anomaly idea.

And then there’s the fact of the many oil rigs that continue to operate in the Gulf of Mexico, despite the moratorium, and the 49 offshore drilling plans approved without complete environmental assessments.  Hold on though: it’s even more complicated than that.  On the Gulf coast the fishing and oil industries have worked side by side for decades, each providing a wide base of support for the economies of Texas and Louisiana.  So when the companies running a rig don’t have a backup plan for emergencies – yes, like this one – everyone gets hurt.  That workers die is unforgiveable.  That the coast, along with its fragile wetlands and wildlife, is mired in an ongoing deluge of oil is unbelievable.  That the billions of dollars BP has accumulated over the decades were never invested in research on “how to cap a leak immediately if one should occur” is unthinkable.

Louisiana shouldn’t have to feel forgotten, a lost cause, “Lose-iana.”  The depth of culture in New Orleans and the delta lands is immeasurable.  And by culture I mean, the people, all of them: musicians, culinary chefs, Krewes, waitresses and waiters, writers, fishermen and fisherwomen, oyster shuckers, artists, mechanics, Saints, preachers, singers, deck hands, therapists and teachers.  From all this humanity, surely new ideas will grow from old ones, and oil will sink back below the surface and new sources of energy will grow.  It’s the Gulf, after all, where the sun shines and the wind does indeed bend marsh grasses against its shores.