Since Hurricane Katrina

In the Lower Ninth Ward, there are forests of thirty-foot-tall trees growing from the crumbled foundations of houses. In a town one thousand miles away, I’m nine years old, realizing that I know what gay means even though I don’t know what gay means, just from the shapes on the insides of my eyelids as I fall asleep. The house-forests in New Orleans are called Frankensteins, monstrosities, feeding frenzies of non-native species, rottweilers roaming in glossy packs in the street, curling their lips at their reflection in the mirror that was once in a hairdresser’s window, teeth and muscle, telling themselves that they run this shit. Men are paid $2 an hour to attack kudzu with weed wackers, to pull stray kittens from rancid nests in rusted laundry machines. Sometimes they sneak away to the back rooms of these houses, with their kaleidoscopes of rainbow mold, orange and green swirls on the ceiling. They hook a single finger through one another’s belt loops and think about how our language has no adequate way to describe mold or two hands that are not different sizes or the way kudzu flows like a river, and they say nothing instead. Drop the butt of a cigarette among the glass and get back to the work at hand, trying to define what should be here and what should not.

Family Units 

In a textbook, a family unit is defined as two biological parents and their offspring. At some point, in the dead of a never-ending February, you told me you wanted to be a family, even though the textbooks would never believe us. To the textbooks, I said, you idiots. I have seen humans pack-bond with a spork with googly eyes. We make our own definition of family. 

I didn’t know it was possible to love something the way I love the puppy, to love her as a part of me, to love her as it is only possible to love something you have seen the beginning of. In so much heavy snow, she is weightless, black eyes of glass and bounding, she doesn’t care for cold, only this lightness. She doesn’t know what snow is, what made the tall silvery cliffs, what is inside an eggshell. To her, everything is a miracle. In the mornings, she snuffles, little grunts of joy and waking, rubs her eyes and the furred dimple of her cheekbone to the top of my head. In those moments, we understand each other best: breathing heavily, newly surfaced, tucked into our nest and cocooned in dreams, wreathed with images we will never be able to explain to anyone, not even ourselves, knowing only a few things: warmth, the smell of sleep, bodies, breath. Later, when I look back in the afternoon light and feel the distance between us: I, concerned with the timing of meals and the completion of work and the tires on the car, her, sprinting through the dead grass, kicking up yellowed oak leaves and smelling of low tide from the puddles she’s rolled in, violet-green water with bougainvillea blooms—I wonder how it was ever possible that we were so close that we might have dreamed one another’s dreams, sharing breath, sharing a cocoon of night, and that night, when we are all back together again, three pieces of a whole, a mere momentary separation righted, I will wonder how we were ever so far, how we ever forgot that we are made of the same wreckage and bone and missable light behind eyes, that we are always together, her joy and my joy fluttering in the place between.

let’sgocomehererun!sosweetkissesgoodmorninggoodgirlyesgogetitIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou.