The road bent serpentine,
and an armadillo waddled across it
slow like it hauled the Strawberry
Moon on its back, rosy and ripe.

I packed lightly: three boxes of books, 
a winter coat I'd rarely needed, 
two more boxes of books. 

Just what fit in a rust-specked Durango, 
full of old wasps’ nests with a bad 
suspension and two working doors.

We leave you scraps salvaged at Mémère’s feet, little fingers grasping at a lost lingua franca, and in that timeless game of broken telephone, their legacies become your legends.

In Terrebonne Parish, subsidence occurs at a rate of thirty-five millimeters per year, a disappearance act measured in a stretching distance between step and ground.

The morning after the floodwaters recede, my neighbor's chickens are loose on our street, red hens stepping gingerly over debris, unexpectedly dignified.

I open my ribs slowly
like how a body moves in water
or when I try to run in dreams.
I do not scream.
This is what unsettles them first.

Who can cry loud enough to rattle the bars,
to split the hush like lightning in a fenced-in field?
I've learned to stop listening for the yelp of the wounded dog 
wherever poppies bloom in careful rows.