Do we send the kids to school?

Day 8:

A Naming:

Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Dennis, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harvey, Irene, Jose, Katrina, Lee, Maria, Nate, Ophelia, Phillippe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, Wilma, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta

After the season had ended, the World Meteorological Organization's hurricane committee retired five names: Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Stan and Wilma and replaced them with Don, Katia, Rina, Sean and Whitney for the 2011 season.



*******************************************

Process Notes:


but love, do not ask me the secrets
the dead keep
do not ask me of strangers' tongues
slipping in a no mouth

you self assemble into a shape
called consciousness
in response to a universe
vibrating to a specific spiral
helixing in you

place your fate against another
and what can you ever know of distance
when my love leaves my heart
till when it reaches you

do not speak grief to me
if your belief is still in separation
in ending, in death

An untold number of kids—probably numbering in the tens of thousands—missed weeks, months, even years of school after Katrina. Only now, a decade later, are advocates and researchers beginning to grasp the lasting effects of this post-storm duress. Increasingly, they believe the same lower-income teens who waded through the city’s floodwaters and spent several rootless years afterward may now be helping drive a surging need for GED programs and entry-level job-training programs in the city. It’s no coincidence, they say, that Louisiana has the nation’s highest rate of young adults not in school or working.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/04/the-lost-children-of-katrina/389345/


Photograph:

Train tracks by Holt Cemetery
Latitude: 29° 59' 4.1496'' N
Longitude: 90° 6' 20.7972'' W

Holt Cemetery is a potter's field cemetery in New Orleans, Louisiana. It is located next to Delgado Community College, behind the right field fence of the college's baseball facility, Kirsch-Rooney Stadium. The cemetery is named after Dr. Joseph Holt, an official of the New Orleans Board of Health (famously involved with city health issues concerning Storyville, the Red-light district of New Orleans) who officially established the cemetery in the 19th century. Holt Cemetery is one of the Historic Cemeteries of New Orleans.

The cemetery was established in 1879 to inter the bodies of poor or indigent residents of the city. Funeral processions to Holt Cemetery were generally around, rather than through, the city. The original cemetery was 5.5 acres, and it was expanded in 1909 to 7 acres. Nearly all of the tombs are in-ground burials. As established, ownership of the graves at Holt Cemetery were given to the families of the deceased for the cost of digging the grave and subsequent maintenance of the plot.

Most of the graves and tombs at Holt Cemetery were not commercially or professionally produced but were instead fabricated by families of the deceased, giving the cemetery a strong personal touch.
Source: Wikipedia

holt (həʊlt) n
(Physical Geography) archaic or poetic a wood or wooded hill
[Old English holt; related to Old Norse holt, Old High German holz, Old Slavonic kladũ log, Greek klados twig]
Source: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/holt



When we were kids, we would jump the broken fences to cross Holt Cemetery. It was so neglected then it was common to see bones surfaced.

After Katrina, coffins washed ashore on the train tracks near our house. You could tell by the coffins that they had come from the wealthier cemeteries nearby.













We never learned anything in school about death. Everything about death you learned on the streets, in whispers, from your friends, and in the city. After Katrina, there was so much we knew about dying and how they would let us die. And now here we torque on the knowing: America.

How long will you suffer as we have? How did you think you could ever escape our fate?


Imagine a world where instead of being caged by the fear of death, we actually embraced stepping through the portal. Imagine how we would value life if we could learn to hold that truth.


You will know the intelligence of any species by how they handle their dead. And if they put it far away to not be seen, if they hide and ignore death, if they fear and run from it: Woe to the species that would speak of life thinking they can halve reality and not pay the cost of that sacrifice.

This dance is chaos. Come along...


Plague Journal:

5.25.20

you're gonna be changed whether you want to or not. the way a disaster swims inside the time line of all that touches you. you have now inherited before and after. the way we are dissimilar and similar, paradox the wheel that belief sits on. how to be a suicide to the living dead handbook. how do you survive in your suicide mind. i've been here forever. let me draw you a map. you have all of these days and hours now. make something to break against. make something beautiful. don't let any part of your life go uncharted just because the vessel suffers. just because we are made of shattering bodies is no reason to slip the light too. take all of your love and suffering and pain and fear and hold it against your genius heart. pull up the radical imagination that keeps you here when the only real solution to being human is to leave the stage. tie a red string round your wrist for every time you fail to keep the echthroi out. it's not anyone else's job to keep you safe. you will pass each chamber as you are ready. and what we call a night: well, now tell me how long that lasts now in the bardo we call pandemic.

tell me of this bardo's language. the way time shifts. and also, how do you taste under such a lack of touch.

life was a temporary, and what we call death is not something one can do to another. death was the only thing we carried in. it's the only thing you have ever held here. don't you recall this song?


Maps from the Channel: 



Resource:

We're Only Sleeping by Herbert Kearney

DEDICATION

"see you had a lot of moments that didn't last forever"

-Lil Wayne

"Everyone wants a performance from the people they consider brilliant." 

-H. Abdurraqib

i tell her my heart has a hole bottomed, a rot larger than the mouth

a lipping i tongued so you try to outline, i reuse words so much i am

nothing outside repetition: tell me is that love

someone will love you then love nothing, i lay down 

to sleep, pray to take, down on my knees
pray to take, when i wake you are are gone 

my childhood bottled, my city smashed the globe of falling 

gently what is the debris of drowned bodies floating, what of bodies

in my city held suspended, your body lay me down on the porch

of abandoned houses, tell me is that love

can you hear me sobbing through sound, slipped

the anchor called "other people" onto your tongue 

is that love, i thought i could hold, hold the lens up 

what is the trespass, do you gamble with breaking

how netted to surfacing, draw me monstered
enough to terror part human, part dream

whisper, new orleans, do you know the cost 
of dancing in the streets while the dead unrest 
memory of bodies anonymous collect at my feet

you can wade into death so deep the smell
leaves, hard rock in the palm, so we tread miracle
i have seen what cannot be cloaked in this time

blocks of prayers fallen debris, a do not touch
me kind of song that starts: is there love

enough in the world to call me back home

its stain: she says, you have so much trauma 

you lifetime, hold the barrel of the gun up to your mouth

i microphone the harbor of desire where no one can reach 

tell me love, we are not the same. write my name on the bullet

pull it like a kiss, throw it against my body, throw it 

against the soft spaces i made syllabic as punch 

syllabic as what is beautiful will stay in a way you could 

not, tell me is that love: still frames amuse

i was never part of the view, this theater i constructed 

set design of artifacts writing out from under you

& then saw finally that none of it was true

Dear Poetry, no such vulnerable

Dear Poetry,

to poet naked against the backdrop of moving pictures we call the world
we will not see things tomorrow the same way that we saw them today

like i told you don't speak to me again
than i called you over only to lay down on me

dual girl, she rushes & the trap of trap language
coined edges of glistening, i hear you panting so near

consider the loss of selves drained in coming
candle light near the yantra of kali

and you'll want to pretend you aren't scared

happiness is slippery, not worth shooting
yourself over or for and yet we addict suffering

alone in our heads, the echo of where have you
gone, my love, empty moan of strange handling

against my skin, threats of permanence skidding
why is it any different what you put inside

or what the throat offers mocks cutting me
off in mid-song, mid-flight, like I culled my wings

down so you could fit & i whispered
i am taking: don't be so
afraid

of the noise rushing, the bite of surrender
where do you want but you already are: right here

Nonnormative Desire: NaPoMo Day 1

"Desire is the essence of a man, that is, the endeavor whereby a man endeavors to persist in his own body"   -Spinoza


desire in the sense of priority: behind what to what
relegate compartment the "prime" life outside
of much difficult for me, consolidate
or a how much allowed space
by extension how it manifests
by repression how it manifests
& if not privileged, channeled
a narrowing begins to shallow root
fistfuls of danger to the lip
exposed to trail in a mere human
skinned version of lovely
for me nothing, easy
& need, a bellowing reminder
could not come swiftly 
to think of ourselves formally
and foremost sexual absent of other
is the epicenter of rupture in representation




[ when we met three years ago, i said, i don't ever want to be in a monogamous relationship again. we agreed to live in each other lives open to the reality of our desires. and it was naive to think that would be the edge of it. that the negotiation of property isn't always happening. what we agree to is being here by choice and not ignoring what we need. or is it to privilege desire to need. is it hedonistic or pathological to submit. can't you be filled with the properties of worth by the work you do, the dailiness of survival threatening to trample. escape hatch we disappear into the normative spheres of distrust, how another pulls self into a void of expectation. i think distinctly about the holes blown open. shot through your life is the trauma played out on your body before you could even articulate the purpose of this vessel and it maps all the way down. to the deep core at which being filled means being a woman, being filled means i have to take it, that strangeness. embody the quick assault of intrusion & how the excision of control means i must be a kind of broken that can't heal lick its own wounds to satisfaction. the reason i often choose bodies other to mine is that i understand them less. what must occur in the mind of the intruder. the mind of the one who can't stay. here where i hold you, old familiar of how we began. once upon. a linking we were all mostly made from star dust. and it all shines the same. ]


"what is considered real and true is a question of power"  -Foucault

"Pussy like girls, damn, is my pussy gay?
It's a holiday- Play with my pussy day!
Pussy this, pussy that, pussy cakin'
Pussy ride dick like she a Jamaican
Pussy stay warm, pussy on vacation
You loose bitches need a pussy renovation
You can eat it with a pussy reservation
Pussy 'bout to get a standing ovation"

-Nicki Minaj