When Columbia broke into a burning rain over Louisiana,
fell in pieces into a thousand pastures and backyards,
my uncle joined the search party. It was not a rescue mission. It couldn’t be.
In a stretch of amber water some call the swamps of Florida, a man longs for the home he has always lived in, a long-muscled wave tossing between shores, the quarter mile of liquid he knows as if he were the watchman of its vein.
The moon painted a picture of me and she called it “hay.” The picture is my hair, sliced off from the ears down, tied with rope and slapped onto a clean, metal table.