The Bougainvillea Will Be Forgiven and other works

 

Andy Young is co-editor of Meena Magazine, a bilingual Arabic-English literary journal, and teaches Creative Writing at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in U.S. publications such as third coast, Paste, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, and Callaloo, as well as in Lebanon, Egypt, Ireland, and Mexico. Her writing has also been included in the anthologies We Begin Here (Interlink Books) and Voices of the Storm (McSweeney's). Her words have been featured on buses in Santa Fe, on jewelry designs by Jeanine Payer, in a flamenco play premiered in 2007 in New York City, and in electronic music. Her translations, with Khaled Hegazzi, were recently included in the Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond. Her chapbook All Fires the Fire was published in 2003 in a limited, hand-made edition and her chapbook mine was published in 2000 by Lavender Ink. Winner of the 1999 Marble Faun Poetry Award given by the Faulkner Festival, she was a 2000 Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellow, a 2005 Surdna Artist-Teacher Fellow, a writer-in-residence at the Santa Fe Arts Institute and the Vermont Studio Center, an invited guest to the 2007 Nicaragua International Poetry Festival and the 2008 Encuentro International de Poetas El Salvador Poetry Festival, a finalist in the 2007 Margie Strong Medicine Award, and an invited guest of the U.S Consulate in Monterey, Mexico, in 2003, for their "Voices of America" series.

 

By the Huey P. Long

 

August. The Coast Guard dredges up the barge,
mud-stuck, from its river bed, its split oil vats
dripping a slick viscous wake for steamboats
to churn. Three days and each hacked part's disgorged.
Not two miles from here the canal split, surged
into homes. I saw the rusted heft
of the barge that broke that levee. And that
went, too: the work of some clever thaumaturge.
We'll still have the sludge that coats the catfish,
swirling with assurances deep inside
the eddies, men casting lines, blind wishes
from the banks. Floodlight and moonlight combine
on the river lacquer, the reflection
of the dangling craft doubled in its shine.

 

 

The Bougainvillea Will Be Forgiven*

On the road to Saida, you write,
bougainvillea frames the ruin:

bridges torn…the coastal highway
entirely deserted...carcasses of cars,

some buried under blocks of concrete…
Everything has changed except

the glorious bloom of the bougainvillea.
I want to tell you about the land here

in New Orleans, where sunflowers
sprout in muck among the slabs,

where mold paints elaborate
tapestries on ungutted walls.

Other flowering trees have wilted, or shied,
you say, but the stubborn colors of these

blooms: purplish red, boastful fuchsia, glaring white,
flaunt themselves against the broken land.

When my friend returned to his house in Mid-City,
the same bold, pink shrub was all that was left

of what he knew. You tell me your TV station
airs cries for help from citizens trapped

in homes in the south, and I flash to watching
my city between commercial breaks, the sign

HELP US PLEAS, white cloth flapping,
white teeth of news announcers

parsing out facts between platitudes.
You obsess about bodies still trapped

in rubble. I obsess about bodies still
turning up like potatoes when flood

ground shifts. A year since the hurricane, tufts
of green poke up from mud's hieroglyphs

as if to erase them. What will flourish, what remain
for us? When your skies are still and our season

passes, will ducks nest in levee
breaks, will bombs seed the field?

 

*This poem first appeared in Callaloo.

 

 

X
Bywater, New Orleans, 2008

 

When we returned, stench
dense in our noses, the Stations
of Mercy set up in the park,
smiling faces dispensing
bottled water and bleach,

we noticed them most:
the Xs on our houses,
each quadrant marking
the date of entry, troop
number- at bottom,

the number of bodies found.
Months after, I'd drive
through blight, thick reek
of mold, fields once
straight rows of suburb

now abscessed mouths,
the barely standing homes
rotten teeth to be yanked,
and nothing on walls
that were no longer there.

We were thankful for zeros--
the "o"s in no bodies,
the oh of a sigh--between
other rescue graffiti,
the HELP HELP HELP

of one house along Saint
Claude, the HELP in huge,
careful white letters across
Burgundy for someone
to read from the swarm

of helicopters. Our X
is scrawled to the right
of our door, its red uneven
slashes, its lopsided 0

testaments to high ground,
to another passing-over,
the blood slash smeared
on doors, Spare Us
it says or, rather, We
Were Spared, that 0

like an uncracked egg
balancing the whole
broken world. What
does it mean to be
or not be chosen?