Tuesday's Dinner and More

Tuesday's dinner with our guests Hannah and Willy as well as lovely painter Daniel Finnigan consisted of salmon and softshell crab on a bed of crayfish pasta. Also included were grilled squash and other chef Brinks' secrets. If this poetry should not pan out and New Orleans becomes a dry town putting the Gold Mine out of business; we will be able to fall back on Dave's unrealized dream of opening a restaurant. In fact, we'll just use the same building and call it the Golden Mustard.


Solid Quarter Release Party will be August 14th at the Gold Mine Saloon 17 Poets! Reading Series. Readers include Dave Brinks, Thaddeus Conti, David Rowe and Megan Burns.

I've been reading C.D. Wright's new book: Rising, Hovering, Falling. It's a pleasant break from the Leprosy in America and imperialism and leprosy books that I am also engrossed in at the moment. We're deep in house construction again as we build some bookshelves to hold our obsessions in place.

And here is the piece I read at the open mic last night. I am trying to come to terms with the amount of damage this oil spill has done to our already traumatized ecosystem here along the river. I'm not sure what these terms resemble though.



How Trauma is like a Boat


What if there was a place where unwanted people could go to be put away in total anonymity united by their diagnosis. Think of the bodies in their lingering daydreams crowded skin to skin and all the end lines delivering to their own peculiar disasters: slavery, work camps, exile. Removal of any large group of people is problematic; the goal is the hasty evacuation of a city hours after the call is made. This is the loveliness of fiction. For some, removal is another form of torture and death. So, the young doctor administers a sleep aid and is called a murderer. Several will be blamed for the murder of a few while the murder of many is protected by the legal status of immunity. Committees designed to protect enact their right to be faultless for faulty designs, faulty responses; there is no fault it turns out that can be premeditated. Leprosy is like a storm; something still feared even in the face of knowing that you may survive it. But this depends on the ability to construct a cohesive narrative. One both navigable and lightweight as you will have to carry it downriver. And then, here too, turn away from the oil spill’s gleam on the water as it coats the exotic nature of your phrasing: what you would garnish for explanation. Gather in the hull this delicate ecosystem for safe travel to a foreign land. It was never about oil for these small beasts; all water safe from the threat of spills and their antecedents. Imagine trauma like a boat passing by unnoticed on the clipped wing of the horizon.