Somehow, January 19, 2017


Well mom, this woman and I have been
hip to hip in the same bed for a decade -
since we hauled: her two cats, forty-seven 
potted plants and a ten foot Australian fern
over here. Had to slow drive that fern 
down back streets, cocked-up, wagging, 
wind-wrenched for four miles out the 
open trunk of my black Mitsubishi.

She brought all of it - jewelry, photos,
a red couch, dresses, a slew of shoes on one
of those winter days where clouds go steel.
It was seventeen months after Katrina sent
six hundred thousand Louisiana lives into
an entanglement of hell but left us unscathed.

I think you’d want to know and probably do
already, anyway or else you never can and I’m just
blowing air, that your youngest, the one that never
could handle marriage despite more attempts than most
has something other than a pillow to nestle at night.
Counts myself among the lucky. Stays well nourished
by what she stirs. Doesn’t get lonely yet can still sit 
solitary when it hits me in my back yard that you never 
got to visit though it seems somehow you do.