Williamson Brasfield, from Creosote Garden
Say high water & every view
returns, morning opens—
throws each window wide & the wingspan—
that not knowing how to say
except the body. Whether any of it was
right side out or everything or just
later: toward the canal & day
shouting up at us & the water fallen,
finally. Puddles of sky between stones.
That city went back to being a city,
not some miracle that floats
sinking. The streets tucked away
their skeletons of cinderblock & plywood
for another rainy day that I should
have passed the minutes overturning. Instead,
from the roof, after you’d peeled off my soaking
clothes, after we’d climbed each other’s bodies,
after—it must be after, after—I watched
all the workers on strike to protest the newest war
at the station where I knew there would be no train.