Time is Always the Crossroad

in 15 days my brother dies again, time is illusory

disasters shape language, once we were water line 

now we are abandon of a season that shapes our survive

in 15 days, the city will be lost of traditions that float us shore

to shore, we who thrive in the chaos of undone for each day numbered

a costume, a song, the way we arrive at the river in droves and will 

you play for me, will you dance with me, have you ever hungered so much 

in your life for a city as i have hungered for her to be reborn, repeatedly

in 15 days we take the shape of mourning, i don’t know everything suicide 

can do yet, i don’t know everything loss can be, i don’t know if holding ‘

together is a possibility, but here we go out on this lonely flight of what else 

can we drop into those waters, palms painted morning light & for every death, 

some life clings to us, or else we would have to admit we can’t see 

at all. Can we admit it? Can we convince grief that timing matters, or is it true 

every song cannot be unsung, so deep in the threading, is the walk we take at dawn

from the house to the river, and my brother will be there walking from our mother’s house 

to our father’s where he will get the gun, will you lay me down to sleep, for every walking 

wake we keep, i am never alone now. Ever i am with you in time, we travel doubly bound 

find me near the shore on the morning of no Mardi Gras and i will show you how it looks  

to carry all of it, angel of break, to poet is to never heal completely, for i would hold 

until there is no shape, till the burns of time erase, the flood inside me sharp with learning 

in 15 days, ask me what it means to crossroad these deepest pains, for that too we sing. 

What is the edge of sound?

Day 18: 

front doors standing open for blocks
the city at night divided between light and darkness
a neutral ground of garbage for miles
appliances wrapped in tape on corners
coffin flies and coffins on the tracks
cats in the square
the sound of screaming at night
quiet, a quiet deep in the bones
child bones found in the house
smell of the death
i kept dreaming till my brother died

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

Process Notes:

how the poem rhythms you like a lullaby
metaphor like a cave we dwell within
the volume of breaking
as you huddle and hide: silence
a type of shame, silence also a lesson
in naming, silence always a webbing
round which we keep

inside lies a great stack of i can, i can
i can

i can get it right

"I read the writing when he seized my throat."
-H. D.

Photograph:

Kenilworth Cinema in New Orleans East:

The Kenilworth Cinema was opened as a single screen by Ogden-Perry Theatres, Inc. on August 13, 1969. It was twinned in the mid-1970’s. Ogden-Perry divested itself of the theatre in 1982. It closed in 1991 due to problems with the roof.
Source: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/43362


We went to see Dick Tracy with Madonna in it, smoked cigarettes hiding behind the seats.  We were 12 or 13. In 1990, if you were a girl, you wanted to be an object. That was what was held out for you. The boys were pretty, pretty hair, pretty made up faces or the boys were hard, baggy clothes and fast cars and drugs. The boys were active voice. The boys were the center of every story. A girl at the center of a story still was eclipsed, still patterned against sexual passivity, still was a thing for the eye and tongue before the ear and mind. And mind you, we wanted to be seen that way. To be made visible is far superior to being invisible. To be possessed equals a claim to a type of safe.

Sometimes what helps you survive is not what keeps you safe. No boys were harmed in this telling. Water waits and this husky dream waits, and we wait to for truth to surface.

And language matters when you are trying to convince yourself of anything, but does it really matter how you survive.

In all these books of trauma, they don't ever tell you how much you can swallow unharmed. But I believe we must be coded early on to have a bandwidth widened by disaster.



"...even under the most perfect circumstances, there would always be something imperfect that would leave you feeling not exactly good. The trick was to get used to that feeling, or risk missing what little happiness there really was."
-R. Ford


"be stark in the world in which
all that heart breaking brightness will

crack"

RBD, draft 96 

Plague Journal:
6.7.20

Love is always worth doing.



Resource:

Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster
https://www.movingwalls.org/moving-walls/14/katrina-unnatural-disaster.html

What is a container for fire?

Day 14:

You can’t abandon emptiness and emptiness cannot be abandoned.
tell me how the past is “real.”  tell me when we made the performance of our lives more important than our lives.
how has the word safe shaped your days. how has the feel of it hidden in your hide feraled the notion of happiness here.


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

Process Notes: 

when i tell you i am new orleans

i mean i am the deepest secrets she keeps

darkness and shadow, shame & neglect

we do, don't we- want to know the terrible

stories we keep. all that it means to be human

we want to have some say in the bargaining 

for safe passage & i said the city sings of gratitude

for this life & that's the portal 

what do you sacrifice to walk there

they are watching to see

if you pick up the code

"survival always leaves its mark"

-M. Embree

and the angels have every right to refuse us

at some point you have to reconcile

that someone should have taken care of you

that you deserved love and attention and protection

that you needed and didn't get it

but you survived anyway--you made it anyway

and you are never going to get what you need 

in this life, that's the part that will trap you 

if you don't accept it: the poem takes all 

Photograph: 

alley between two buildings on Downman Rd. in New Orleans east

New Orleans East:
About two miles (3.2 km) later, LA 47 crosses a level bridge over Bayou Bienvenue into Orleans Parish and the city of New Orleans, which are co-extensive. The highway then crosses a high-level bridge over the much wider Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, an industrial shipping channel. Returning to grade, LA 47 becomes a controlled-access highway that also serves as the entire route of I-510. This concurrency lasts for 3.5 miles (5.6 km) and contains four closely spaced interchanges. The first is exit 2C, a stingray-shaped diamond interchange that connects with Old Gentilly Road via Almonaster Boulevard and serves the nearby NASA Michoud Assembly Facility. This is followed by exit 2A–B to US 90 (Chef Menteur Highway), a major route through New Orleans East. Continuing north, a more traditional diamond interchange at exit 1B serves Lake Forest Boulevard, and soon afterward, the abandoned Six Flags New Orleans theme park appears on the east side of the highway.

The fourth and final interchange is exit 1A, a partial cloverleaf with flyover ramps that connects to I-10. New Orleans' major east–west route, I-10 connects with the Central Business District to the southwest and the city of Slidell to the northeast. Having intersected its parent route, I-510 ends, and LA 47 continues ahead as a divided four-lane highway without control of access. The highway reaches the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain in an area known as Little Woods, located at the easternmost extent of urban development along the lake shore. Here, LA 47 turns southwest onto Hayne Boulevard, an undivided four-lane thoroughfare. For the next 4.5 miles (7.2 km), LA 47 travels through residential New Orleans East while closely following the lake levee, which is topped by a concrete floodwall. Several divided neighborhood thoroughfares, such as Bullard Avenue, Read Boulevard, and Crowder Boulevard, lead back to interchanges with I-10. Just west of Crowder Boulevard, a ramp provides access to the New Orleans Lakefront Airport and the Senator Ted Hickey Bridge across the Industrial Canal. LA 47 continues along Hayne Boulevard for another 1.3 miles (2.1 km) to an intersection with Downman Road, which parallels the industrial corridor located along the east side of the canal.

Source: Wikipedia 

Plague Journal: 

5.27.20

All of the pictures from my childhood growing up in New Orleans east were destroyed in the flood. 

"Code your language and escape."

-A. Waldman 

"Every poem should be written in all languages simultaneously."

-P. Joris 

Notes from the Channel: 

Resource:
New Orleans east recovery after Katrina:
https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_9906ab1b-a1e7-5eb7-8e52-824adb52d6a3.html

How many people are still missing from Hurricane Katrina?

Day 7:

40% of deaths were drowning:

Here is a short list of things that will cause panic: rain, wind, floods, news reports, bills, federal agencies, leaving the city, returning to the city, hurricane season, attics, evacuations, insurance, your mother, your father, your brother, your children, your friends, childhood, sleeping, dreaming, being in the city, not being in the city, hope.

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

Process Notes: 

"Without a functioning Broca's area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words. Our scans showed that Broca's area went offline whenever a flashback was triggered.... All trauma is preverbal." 

"The scans also revealed that during flashbacks our subjects' brains lit up only on the right side... the left brain remembers facts, statistics, and the vocabulary of events. We call on it to explain our experiences and put them in order."

-The Body Keeps the Score 

"truth means nothing"  - C. Wuehle

"for the secret of death is hard to know" -The Upanishads

The official effort to recover bodies had stalled as local and federal agencies decided who would do so — and how. Eventually, procedures were set, with the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals taking the lead and Jensen’s company receiving a contract to coordinate the work in the heaviest-hit parishes.

Collecting, identifying and counting the dead was an emotionally wrenching, often gruesome, sometimes thankless job. Kenyon workers had to walk through hospitals where the power had been knocked out. Extreme heat decomposed bodies. The sheer size of the affected areas meant each body might have to go through several checkpoints on its way to the morgue. And each stop could mean the loss of valuable information.

Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/we-still-dont-know-how-many-people-died-because-of-katrina/

On the fifth anniversary of the storm, 80 bodies were laid to rest at a memorial  on Canal Street designed, as the engraving on it said, to "evoke" the shape of a hurricane.

"I just thought we should honor our dead in a better way than putting them in Potter's Field," said Frank Minyard, the former Orleans Parish coroner.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/27/bodies-remain-unidentified-decade-after-katrina/32474355/

MEMORIAL

I want to hand you this: At night in the city covered in darkness, you could hear in the French Quarter (because it was so silent)… the howling of humans. The screaming, The crying. We in our cells designed to keep. And keep us safe. What is a container. For time and memory. What happens to grammar in disaster. What is the language of never before or again. What is the stimulus of moving toward or away from terror. 

When they did not come for us, we tried to tell you they would not come for you too. 

And here we are. Blanketed to a suffocating of truth. 

You are free to die. That is the only freedom granted here. 

“There are four components of trauma that will always be present to some degree in any traumatized person: 

1.hyperarousal

2. constriction/ (a form of hypervigilance) 

3. dissociation

4. freezing, associated with the feeling of helplessness” 

-Walking the Tiger

Photograph: 

Haynes Blvd in New Orleans east by the levee

30.0385° N, 90.0264° W

I can no more recall what it felt like to be in the moments of post Katrina New Orleans than I can what it felt like to be a child in New Orleans east. I have the knowledge of it. I have some memories, some facts, photographs, and stories. I have a mapping in my mind of neighborhoods, and the way places looked before and after the storm. Dissociation means you never have to hold the feeling inside you. You become a stranger to yourself. Life a strange patina, a movie playing beyond the scope of your skin. It was a surprise to me to learn I had been dissociated most of my life just as it was a surprise to learn not all people felt actively suicidal. I imagine now there must be so many things I regard as “normal” that are in fact not the way the world is experienced by anyone around me. And also, all of us in this space --because the illusion is that we are basing any of us against a baseline of “normal.” A baseline of what is human: And then to be an artist who has given up trying to be sane, trying to contain madness. To say I can clearly see the art and the hysteria, and I will not relinquish either. It is not that I am hard to love, but you have to understand this about me: I probably can’t feel it. My cerebral cortex has no ability to integrate you into its confines. What I can do is hack into consciousness enough to program this story where we constellate an escape route, what is a sacrifice in any lifetime except to say there were so many hours I spent not in this world but disconnect was where I traveled to make safe: 

We do not forgive.

We do not forget.

Expect us –Always 

Plague Journal:

5.24.20

SIGHT LINES

what i am saying is i have reached the end of my wanting. whatever you barely handed me, i hand back. we kept trying to not be wilderness of untamed things. try to be a common thing made small enough to love. let me pass you by. shipwrecked from the shore. inside the poem. it's such a hollow thread to say, i'll leave this life behind. music to replace the sound of heart's beat, the drum of meter run beneath tongue and to say, this is how you build a life over and over again feeding it to dissolution. i learned from every lover the act of never was. i was abandon. don't pretend you couldn't see me clearly when all you do is look through the glass darkly at what won't hold your gaze.


Notes from the Channel:

Resources:
Encrypting Katrina:
Traumatic Inscription and the
Architecture of Amnesia
https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_16/articles/tuggle/tuggle.html

Will lack of touch induce a failure to thrive?

Day 4


committed/ i fold down my fiery wings & listen:
“Parts of the levee system were either topped or failed, leaving up to 80% of the city under water.” What do you do at 6:10 AM. Where were you when you heard the news. Where did you grow up. Where did you go to school. Do you think there will be a Mardi Gras. Can you locate New Orleans on a map a hundred years from now.  Once there was a city now underwater. We call it home.

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

Process Notes: 

“the habit of photographers seeing – of looking at the world as an array of potential photographs – creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature”
-Susan Sontag

the devotional target goal is to post each piece by 6:10AM, then meditate for 30 minutes, then do a ritual energy clearing directed towards the GPS coordinates of the area of that day coalescing in a 31 day city wide healing reciprocity to the city from my body. if i imagine this makes any difference to the world, am i a form of crazy. is it hysterical in this world to only believe in love. or how have you ever known anyone has ever loved you. or how has no one ever loved me as much as i love this city. or has this city's love created within me a strange capacity to love all things broken and abandoned. and who among us is not.

Photograph:

Picture of New Orleans east sidewalk in the rear view mirror of my brother’s car


30° 1' 56.053" N     90° 1' 0.797" W


My brother was born in New Orleans east at the same hospital where my first daughter was born; it was destroyed by Katrina. After the storm, my brother and I went to the house where we grew up and walked through the abandoned decay. The tiles were visible through the mud, and I remembered them from childhood. Now the house is occupied, and the above ground pool is gone. The tree house my dad built in the oak, gone. The fence we put up for the dogs is still there and the shed where I used to climb on the roof. When I was 13 years old, I used to watch my brother while my mom worked after my dad moved out. After he would fall asleep, I would go in the backyard and smoke one cigarette behind the shed thinking, one day, I’m going to get out of this place. one day…

“Securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help. They learn that they can play an active role when faced with difficult situations. In contrast, children with histories of abuse and neglect learn that their terror, pleading and crying do not register with their caregiver…they’re being conditioned to give up when they face challenges later in life”
-The Body Keeps the Score

“relationships extending curiously throughout space and time… spooky action at a distance”
– Einstein

“entanglement between particles exists everywhere, all the time…”
– Michael Brooks

“Even with high intelligence there is the always the risk of becoming overwhelmed by the persistent state of expanded perception. “
- Dean Radin

listening to the radio in the days following the levee breaks, i remember the story of a mother on a roof who waited for anyone to rescue them and during the night, the baby slipped from her arms into the muddy water that surrounded them. she couldn't swim. the child lost. an island of what takes us is this city. how do you not go into the water. how do you not go into the underworld looking for your dead. how long it has taken me to understand how thin these veils are that appear to separate us and how often we are crossing. and why is there afraid. we can never be lost to one another. there is nowhere to go. these are the ways we survive the nightmares we have constructed here, the types of suffering we dreamed up to make life "matter." we imagined all of this terror and inside of this terrific image, we forgot it was only us in the cave watching our own shadow dance on the wall.


can you hear me//who can hear me// can i hear what i am saying yet// [echo]


Plague Journal:

5.21.20

inside Notley’s poem Eurynome’s Sandals- it feels like she is inside my head, writing to me, inside my thoughts & then she writes about telepathy, being in another’s thoughts and can we get so crystal clear, can we tap into the vessel of language so clearly we share one poetry making mind, or sometimes how it feels when you are in love, and you feel like the other person can hear you, can know what you need, as if you are tethered, is that a type of being open to receive do we make the future with our mutual desire. can you be in a space with someone eclipsed of your need. if you drink poison by mistake, the “mistake” won’t save your life.

“When people begin to argue about doing things instead of doing them, they become absolutely impossible”
– A. Crowley

reality exists only in accordance with what you choose to observe

i have to get to the future to finish the poem that saves me from the past



Notes from the Channel: 





Resources: https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-is-a-medical-and-financial-disaster-for-blacks-in-new-orleans-11590226200

Did we create a model for America?

Day 3:

Time is a problem. If we run it fast enough, it seems solid. We seem solid. This city too should hold; we hold our breath.  Come now, don’t be afraid. This is the end of the story, and we are running backwards.  We have survived this already. We have lost everything and returned. We have abandoned hope and still suddenly, we have found the other shore beneath our feet. Did we ask the right questions. Has your life been a truth or an elaborate fiction? Can we return again. We can return again.

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

Process Notes: 

time is a problem. 

when i was a little girl we would climb to the top of the rocket ship playground equipment in Kenilworth park. i remember this was where my best friend told me about the word: cunt. we lived behind each other and would cut through the neighbor’s yard to hop the fence to knock on each other’s doors to play. the house on the corner across from the park sold cold cups for a solid quarter: strawberry or grape. when i recall my dreams sometimes, i dream about this block. these inner maps are stable across time. 

“Traumatized people simultaneously remember too little and too much.” 

“the organism itself also has a problem knowing how to feel safe” 

-The Body Keeps the Score

Photograph: 

Kenilworth park in New Orleans east 

30.0344° N, 90.0137° W

The eastern section of New Orleans, colloquially known as "New Orleans East" or simply "The East," is the newest section of the city. Eastern New Orleans is bounded by the Industrial Canal, the Intracoastal Waterway and Lake Pontchartrain. Developed extensively from the 1960s onward, its numerous residential subdivisions and shopping centers offered suburban-style living within the city limits of New Orleans. Its overall character is today decidedly suburban, resembling the archetypal postwar American suburb much more than the compactly-built environment found in the city's historic core. Before Hurricane Katrina Eastern New Orleans had begun to suffer from disinvestment and urban decay. The flooding subsequent to Katrina, which affected almost the entire area, accelerated this trend, particularly in the retail sector. Numerous national chains present and operating in August 2005 opted not to reopen their stores and restaurants. Approximately 85,000 residents inhabit Eastern New Orleans today, representing a small decline from the area's peak population of 95,000 inhabitants recorded by the 2000 Census.

Source: from Wikipedia

Plague journal: 

5.10.20

the thing about empty space is that we know instinctively, it’s not empty at all. and yet the emptiness of all of it is also a truth from inside us. 

the balance of objects corners us. we tread both in spaces where we are and where we are not as we imagine there’s nothing i cannot occupy. uncounted hours. primary feathers in winged tellings. & toward framework, a pondering, still dark work. teach me not a new language. teach me a new tempo for danger, what seems still within reach. anything we see inhabits a choice of not seeing something else. observe like an underworld, we travel shadowed. how can a book be like a wheel? 

Maps from the Channel:

Resource: https://youtu.be/uD90KhVV_Jw
BEVERLY KIMBLE DAVIS is a New Orleans Katrina artist who is on a mission to tell the many untold stories of what really happened during and after the flood. Beverly uses her canvas to graphically tell the stories of people and events you've never read about nor ever seen on television.