Everywhere I go, my palms are never large enough: the anamnesis of my sorrow tumbles into the wetness. Soaked through is everything in me I had hoped to re-read one day. Soggy pages disintegrate beneath the murkiness; me, covered in mud, my mouth, stuffed with grief. Each new place brings its own funerals, its own memorials, its own hallowed artifacts.

I watch a slow and unstoppable procession — a kingdom of innocence lost to this battlefield of time, the swamp and the swollen air grant the illusion of safety in exchange for fragments of girlhood — dead stories being marched to a graveyard. The graveyard is a metaphor; so is everything I have ever loved. It all turns to ancient simile, turns to fossilized analogy, turns into paper figurines of imaginary speech.

At the opening of each day, I am called to pray. Openings I cannot calculate on my own– I need an app, a sign, someone else’s reassurance. On the eve of every hurricane, it is sweltering inside. I burn with humiliation at all of the memories, I flush with agony at the remnants of my own mundane archive, I grow sticky in the thickness of my own shame. In the humidity, shame clings to everything.

I wish I could burry what I want and take with me to the exhibits of my soul what I have regarded with tenderness and let the water swallow everything else. Why can’t I at least till my own cemetery, slice through the damp soil and turn the decomposed childhood-softness into fertility / make anew what I have let wither away / seize the miracle of weeping skies — a promised expressway to heaven.

“Aint nothing like a Louisiana Rain
Ain’t nothing like a Louisiana Rain”
— John Wesley Ryles