Author: Daniel Evans Pritchard

after a painting of the same title by Mark Bradford

how calm it feels
inside the white box
before the floodplain

the warped water
whose fine striations

trace the levy’s grip
as it frays

into the scrawl
of an ever-
maddening tide

syncopating
Turner’s more antique
anxieties

expelling his
tight-oiled gulls
¯            that raven the drowning
and the drowned:

this
a         contradiction
of that
¯            olive swell,
that battering amaranth:

this aerial
hallucination—
¯            America lies
flat
as a pennywrapper,

America un-
conscienced as memorial—
to see if one sees at all

firestamps mark up
¯            a map of the dying

and blistering bright
pocked oceanic fields
hold

each body       like a pearl: no

slavers’ masts
¯            scored into the storm

nor leviathan’s pretty lips
nor black chains raised
over the breakers

nor the tangerine sun
like a bomb:
¯                            instead this
tremulous       bliss of

silver and slate
¯            like a radio left on

repeating their names until

Nina lands the beat
with her teeth:

Can’t you see it?
           Can’t you feel it?

 

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First appeared in the journal Public Pool in August 2016

Culled from quotes by residents and officials in the Louisiana flood area. August 16, 2016

We haven’t been rescuing people,
we’ve been rescuing subdivisions.
It never slowed down last night.
It hasn’t even stopped and
nobody knows what’s going on.

The water’s going to rise.
The Amite River is continuing to rise.
The damage is unreal,
and the water is still coming up.
Muddy, nasty bayou water.

I’m not going to lie, I cried uncontrollably.
I kept picking and hitting and prying.
Please help me. She said they were
going to evacuate, but no one could
get to them. Swim for the boat.

They could hear the baby screaming.
He went under the water. She was
not conscious and not breathing.
Snakes were everywhere. None of
these places are in a “flood zone.”

We tried to save him, but we couldn’t.
The heaviest rain is behind us.
We won’t know the death toll for sure
for several more days. We’ll just let
God show us what we need to do.

 

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First appeared at the journal Public Pool in August 2016.

Gathering specimen in the journal:
crab grass, moss, red oak, burr…
it’s work that takes years out
in the field, abroad, distant from

my home and increasingly from
myself. (Was I ever so patient?)
Locals’ homes are small, filthy.
At night their windows flicker,

opal in a stony reef of eels
and it seems so much like home.
(I must write that in the journal.)
How alike they are! The natives

could all be the same person.
I can feel them watching
from the fields of blue alfalfa,
as suspicion becomes curiosity

and then… I must concern them.
Even I would be anxious.
A foreigner arrives, examines
every petty shrub and tree

like a witch, speaking into a
journal, making grave faces.
This is for the book, that’s all.
That’s all. Knowledge collected

opens a door; when exposed,
the truth succumbs. The universe
is a sunflower tracking the light
we bring, for you. Until then,

confusion, night—but my book
will open the bloom. Until then,
the palm burns. The heart is cut.
Razorwire rings the garden.

 

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First appeared at the Philadelphia Review of Books website in May 2015.

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