Audio: Read by the author.
I foresaw my own undoing in the slow, clumsy flight
of pelicans over Lake Maurepas, out beyond
The fishermen in their peeling boats, in a sky
iridescent as the inside of an abalone shell.
My mother was crabbing at the end of the pier,
dropping her steel net full of chicken guts
Into the murky water, shimmering in July heat.
Angels want humidity and are drawn to Pass Manchac
To sit at tables at Middendorf’s, splintering claws
with nut‐picks and swilling pitchers of Jax. I saw them
As clearly as I saw her in her black swimsuit,
etched against the vanishing horizon. What
Is an angel to a mother, what is a mother to a pelican
doing the slow windhover over shoals of rotting shells?
I suffered sunburn fever. I didn’t know its name.
I held my tiny hand palm out to block the light,
But the sun was imperious, hungry, its great beak
sufficient as whales to Jonah, as black holes to dwarf stars,
And I knew we are not a family. We are a slow procession
of particles spun over water the poisonous color of mercury.
