Hold The River Banks Up

H O L D
T H E
R I V E R
B A N K S
U P
(A BOAT ZINE)

These pieces will form the third layer of the hull of a paper boat

INDEX
INTRODUCTION
CHRIS STAUDINGER
5
PRINCIPAL OF THE SHELTER
CAROLYN VOSBURG
6
UNTITLED
MAHALIA ABEO
7
HER PATH
YUSUF ISHAN YOUNG
8
THE SLOUGH
KITTY O’CONNOR
10
HOBBES & THE
ALLIGATOR GAR
KITTY O’CONNOR
11
SPOKES AND DITCHES
KAREN DEEL
12
TWO PIECES
KATAALYST ALCINDOR
13
LOVE YOU, BABY
CHRIS STAUDINGER
14
THE MILE-HIGH WOMAN
KATE KOKONTIS
16
BLACK WILLOW
ELEANOR WARNER
18
EVERY BEACH
SOLEIL GARNEAU
22
GOODBYE, LOVEBUGS
IN THE SKIES
CASINA WILLIAMS
26
PHOTOGRAPHY by SCOTT EUSTIS
LAYOUT & DESIGN by SOLEIL GARNEAU
3

INTRODUCTION
Chris Staudinger
A single female Gulf Menhaden has the ability to produce twentythree
thousand eggs in one spawning season. The eggs are suspended
in cool offshore waters, sometimes four-hundred feet deep, where
they drift and hatch into skinny larvae. They have big heads, big eyes,
and big mouths. For four or five weeks, they drift out there and eat
microscopic floating plants.
There’s some debate about what happens when they are pushed closer
to shore. Some say they are washed up by the currents into shallower
waters; other say they can swim themselves in. In rushes and lulls, they
travel from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi Sound through the
Rigolets into Lake Pontchartrain and up through Pass Manchac. They
glitter and shine on the water and make it ripple up from underneath.
They’re heading for a warmer place where the water is still water, but
it’s a totally different world: the place where salt and freshwater meet.
This water is being mashed between other waters, rivers, lagoons, and
land. The land sloughs off into water. The bodies of plants are falling
apart into tiny-enough pieces that fall to the bottom and feed a world
of microscopic bugs. The bottom of the water and the top of the land
is an explosion of tiny life. The Gulf Menhaden finds shallow, quiet
cuts in these underwater jungles and eats all of it.
In the heat of this nursery, they don’t grow so much as transform.
They triple in size. Their heads get smaller and their bodies get fatter.
They swim and their gills expand into intricate hooked branches that
rake the water like a fishing net. They filter and snag invisible plants,
animals, and plastics. They grow a gizzard to handle all of the mud.
They are dull-colored and iridescent.
After a year, they emmigrate when they’re ready. In large schools, they
follow the same passes out into the Gulf. Sometimes they hybridize
with others from the Atlantic or the Yucatan.
894 million pounds of them are pulled from the water by humans
alone. They are food for croakers, catfish, perch, ladyfish, snook,
needlefish, bluefish, cobia, eels, flounder, trout, redfish, black drum,
tarpon, scorpionfish, batfish, mackerel, jacks, bull sharks, blacktips,
bottlenose dolphins, loggerhead turtles, pelicans, eagles, ospreys,
gulls, gannets, cormorants, loons, and skimmers. The Gulf Menhaden
are commonly called pogies.
5

PRINCIPAL OF THE SHELTER
Carolyn Vosburg
The first day I dropped my ginger-kissed five year old twin boys off
at First United Methodist Church’s entitled little Kindergarten, a
place where they would grow organic gardens and create without
parameters, I was met with stares of great concern. Me with a black
eye, no stitch of makeup, hair that had dried without manipulation
in that evil August thickness, t-shirt, shorts, tennis shoes stained
with thick unrelenting Louisiana mud mixed with cigarette ashes
and unidentified bodily fluids.
I felt confident that the multiplying stepfords descending from
Range Rovers adorned with British Virgin Islands stickers
immediately began discussing taking a collection for those
poor twins that joined kindergarten—flood victims—and that
unfortunate mother, she had been through hell. This family was
clearly accepted on a full scholarship. But, it was not I that had been
through hell. My body, face, hair, shoes—rumpled and tired after so
much constant contact with those that had been through pure hell.
You see, when you sign up to be a public school principal, middle
school at that, you know that you’re half-cocked and nuts, but you
do not know that one day you’ll run a disaster shelter. A shelter in a
school gym—hungry, tired, homeless people and pets and children.
They detox. Hospice is set up in the coaches office. Crazy is not left
at the door, luckily neither is hope. So you hire a clown, a bar room
band, and you squeal when a street car trolley food truck shows
up out of nowhere straight from the New Orleans Superdome to
feed the people. They come back for seven days straight. Slowly the
shelter folks become family and you realize that you are Principal of
the Shelter. And when the crazy old bat smoking incessantly outside
the gym demands to know how you got your black eye, you tell her.
You tell her how you cried so damn hard for all of your flooding
teachers, students, secretaries—helpless on your couch. You tell her
about that one teacher, the one that caused the pressure to build
until the blood vessel popped rendering your eye black. The one that
you knew was floating in the front of her neighborhood her three
children clutching to her praying for a boat and how for hours that
you did not know that she was safe. But then you found out that she
was.
6

UNTITLED
Mahalia Abéo
The waves of Lake Michigan mimic the sea as flatterers imitate the
trend: naturally, with such entitlement and confidence that we all
forget who did it first.
She is giant; some won’t even near her for fear of being swallowed
and born again.
Others compare then lose sight of her, but ships are wrecked here,
still chock full of yesterday, washed clean then grown over.
Metallic din and foam and rot and rock.
And water.
I’ve closed my eyes, submerged in her more times than I’ve called
any lovers name.
She is where and who. She is both muse and composition.
We are kin.
And I am grateful.
7

HER PATH
Yusuf Ihsan Young
She runs every day but she still doesn’t consider herself an
athlete. She’s just prone to run because it seems right, because it feels
right. She first started running to relieve the pain and the frustration
that would come in the middle of the day or in the middle of the
night. During the day, at work, she couldn’t do anything about it;
just try not to relive the moment, try not to hear the other woman’s
moans or see the other woman’s body on top of his. Her job would
distract her enough and allow her mind to not visualize the act. At
night, lying in bed, right before sleep would creep in and the last
television show would lose her interest, there was no reprieve. There
was no distraction. There was just the black back drop of her eyes
that set the stage for the entire scene to play out in front of her. Again.
And again. Every thrust. Every timely moan. She was there in the
front row to witness her husband being pleasured and fulfilled by
another woman. The first time she went running she just jumped
out of bed, put on her shoes and started running in the middle of
the street. His old white t-shirt, some shorts that were lying around
and her Reeboks that he had purchased for her. Over time her feet
hitting the pavement was her way of moving on, of putting the
past behind her or from what her overpriced, obnoxious therapist
would say “healing the deep wound and not picking the scab.”
It became part of her nighttime routine. Eat dinner, watch
the news, go running until she was too tired to stay up and watch
the scenes play out in her head. The next couple of weeks she would
find herself wandering into a store to buy the “right” kind of running
shoes. Buying shorts and tights that were the right fit and T-shirts
that absorbed the sweat but not the tears. Over time she found a route
along the river that stretched 7.5 miles. Perfect. The night time became
less and less painful, the images began to slow down and became less
frequent. Sleep returned to her and nighttime became a time for rest.
She decided to run in the mornings instead. Rise early,
meditate and go. The river was a 2 minute car ride from her home. She
would get there, park her car, get out and stretch. As soon as the image
of the other woman began to seep into her mind she would take off.
Always a strong start, always running as hard and as fast as she could.
The water from the river sat to the left of her where she wanted to toss
every memory she had of him on top of the other woman. Every cry
of pleasure that she heard from her husband’s mouth she wanted to
throw into the river and to keep running. The sweat from her forehead
would come soon. She looked forward to it. The sweat would hide the
tears and would be a blend that tasted of regret and pain leaving her
body through her pores and her eyes. Finally her pace would slow
up, her stride got shorter and her burst of energy was gone. Now it
was just her and the pavement with memories of their relationship
stretched across the water floating gently on the top. Memories of
her and her husband picnicking at the river. The first time they held
hands and kissed was there. They would sit at the river bank, stare
at the moon and make lofty plans about their future together. It
was there at the river when she confessed to seeing her college boyfriend
and telling him that she was completely done with him, regrets
of thinking the truth would set her free. The river was their spot.
8

She quickly made a sharp right away from the river to a
destination that was undetermined, a route that she was unfamiliar
with. Leaving the main road she noticed that she found herself on
the street that connected the river to the lake; she picked up her
pace again. She had already ran 8 miles that morning and she had
no idea how long it would take to get to the lake but that’s where
she was headed, that is where the pain took her. She had driven
there before, from the lake to the river and from the river to the
lake but never had she thought about running the entire distance.
Unknowingly she had already covered 13 miles and she
was half way there when it happened. Her body shut down. She had
never ran that much, that fast, that quick. She came to an abrupt stop,
kneeled over and everything came up. Her breakfast, her tears, her
regret, her sweat; all of it came out. It felt as if every drop of water that
was in the river came out of her eyes. Every meal that they shared
together came out of her mouth. Every amount of energy that she
put into their relationship sweated out through her pores. She felt
relieved. She felt lighter. She stood up straight, cracked her back
stretched a couple times and stepped away from the mess that was
left on the pavement. She started to run toward the lake. Toward a
body of water that she was unfamiliar with, to a body of water that
she knew nothing about but wanted to touch for the first time.
9

THE SLOUGH
Kitty O’Connor
The slough as we knew it was more of an empty moat. A ditch that
marked the perimeter of my grandparent’s seventeen acre walnut
orchard. As children, my cousins and I were tasked with gathering
all the stray nuts that had fallen into the slough during harvest.
We pretended to be alligators, chomping up and down the ravines,
reenacting the living history of this swamp. It was definitely manmade,
none of us had ever seen water in it, but we knew our parents’
stories, and that was more real than a technicality. Mere proximity to
the slough would cause my dad to reminisce about how much wider
it was when he was a kid. How the slough would flow consistently
with water. How he would float in his homemade boat, paddling
around the perimeter of the orchard.
What a complicated feeling it is, to be handed the gift of memories
and the weight of loss at the same time. I saw most of my town
through the lens of my dad’s memories; for it was these things that
used-to-be that remained most definitive and vivid for my dad. His
relationship with the past often seemed more solid than the one he
held with the present. Change is more than just something being
different. It is when the reason you love something, the very way in
which you connect to something, no longer exists.
The population in my hometown has quadrupled since I lived there.
When I left home nearly twenty years ago, I relied on a singular fact to
help new friends understand the depths of my rural upbringing, “my
hometown didn’t have a stoplight.” This statement is no longer true.
Now, everytime I near a stoplight back home, I am compelled to say,
“there weren’t any stoplights here when I was a kid.” I will continue
on about how narrow the road used to be, how much lower the speed
limit was, and how my brother and I would push a homemade car
across what is now a highway. I can’t relate to what my hometown has
become, but I sure can relate to my dad.
10

HOBBES & THE
ALLIGATOR GAR
Kitty O’Connor
As a boy born on a hot summer morning in his New Orleans living
room, Hobbes entered the world silent with eyes wide open. He has
spent his first six years on Earth blinking as infrequently as possible
and questioning everything. Hobbes sat down one humid morning
to discuss origins and action with an Alligator Gar. The following is
a transcript of this meeting of earnest pleas and jaded survival.
Hobbes: What do you mean you’re prehistoric? Pre means before.
How can you be before history? Everything is a part of history.
Alligator Gar: I am before the history you know or have been
taught.
Hobbes: So if you teach me about yourself, will you no longer be
prehistoric?
Alligator Gar: You will be more informed. I will still be prehistoric.
I have not changed.
Hobbes: Why haven’t you changed?
Alligator Gar: I haven’t needed to. I am able to breathe in water that
other fish cannot. My enamel scales are armor. I am strong. I am
clever. I stay in the depths.
Hobbes: No one knows about you.
Alligator Gar: That is part of my survival. Those who know about
me are misinformed. They think I am a nuisance. Fishermen think
I deplete their food supply.
Hobbes: But if you are so elusive, no one will learn the truth.
Alligator Gar: If I come out, I will die.
Hobbes: Not if you speak your truth first.
Alligator Gar: They do not know my language.
Hobbes: Teach them.
Alligator Gar: They do not care, and they don’t have the patience.
Hobbes: Some do.
Alligator Gar: But not all. The ones who don’t, the majority, will be
my death.
Hobbes: But if you don’t tell anyone, no one will ever know.
Alligator Gar: You know the truth. You speak their language. Who
are you telling?
11

SPOKES AND DITCHES
Karen Deel
Manchac Swamp has always been a special place to me. I have traveled
by car over these black waters all my life, and I have boated and fished
up and down the Pass. So, this is why I’m fascinated by the “spokes”
that surrounds us. I’ve never heard of such a thing.
I just read the information on the wall plaque, so of course, I Googled
it too. Sure enough, on Google maps...it looks just like wheel spokes. I
have to read more, thank goodness for Google even here in the middle
of the swamp. The Manchac Swamp was stripped of its enormous
cypress trees?! No wonder this place looks more like a marsh instead
of a swamp! I see very few woody plants... mostly grass, but I saw
evidence and photos of once massive cypress trees that shaded this
area. Around 1890 until the 1920s, loggers dropped the old cypress
logs and dragged them out with pull boats leaving behind scars all
through the swamp. The scars can still be seen, and that is why it
looks like spokes looking down from an airplane or a satellite image.
After the cypress forest disappeared, the majestic Manchac Swamp
was now a cutover swamp, so the land went up for sale. Mr. Edward
Schleider, a millionaire brewer/businessman purchased this land for
super cheap. He then built a two-story building right here...which
is now Turtle Cove. Now I know why they named the canal next to
Turtle Cove, Schleider Ditch.
I am getting excited because tomorrow we will be canoeing down this
“ditch”. I wonder how different it would look with the gigantic cypress
trees? I wonder how different it would sound with a myriad of birds
floating over and nesting in the high lofts? I’m sad to think of all the
trees that will not be there, but for now, I will enjoy what is here... Mr.
Schleider’s Ditch and his former home. I love this place!
12

TWO PIECES
Kataalyst Alcindor
What images contain or represent change for you?
The catalyst in an elemental experience
The insect
Death and money
A welcome
The weather
A vice
A love
A skill learned and used at the prime of remembrance
A lie, the truth
The stroke of a pen in a powerful hand
And yes, all of these we must touch once in all of our lives.
What does time look like for you?
Time for me looks like a myriad of things. A wooden piece of furniture.
The dead flower. A wrinkled hand. A chipped mug. Aged whiskey or
a photograph. The life of a old film you saw when it first came out.
A scar, a tattoo, we saw a moth on the way here that had two weeks
to live.His coat was majestic but ultimately fleeting. Time maybe is
in vibrant color that may gradually fade or deep in depending on a
person’s perspective. I imagine it as a smile that changes the more you
learn about a person.
13

LOVE YOU, BABY
nostalgia
Chris Staudinger
When I think of her, it feels like trying to walk forward with a handful
of water. Drop by drop, it slips: Willow, Pleasant, Charity, Prytania,
Majestic, Liberty. A person is full of a million places. Drop by drop
and layer by layer she didn’t so much conjure them, she took me there.
We’re there in her living room where the air is hot and still, and the
weight of the air slows you down, a little sweaty. And there are gold and
scarlet drapes hanging over the windows. The dogs are barking, and
the settlers have taken in the chief ’s son who they found half-dead on
a rock in the heat. It smells like he’s been under those heavy blankets
for a while. And there are gold and scarlet drapes hanging over the
windows of my parents’ bedroom, and my grandparents are visiting
from the North, and she is watching everything. I miss her. I can’t take
you to these places. The riverbend. The church circuit. Libraries. Maps.
The open road. Past Walnut Grove. The edges of the Irish Channel,
leaning on a pool cue waiting for some dude to assume that she would
be easy, but instead she’s a shark. The banana boat has arrived and the
people are waiting in line for their plate lunches. There is flirting. Have
you ever tasted the vanilla wafers in a home-made banana pudding? A
garden in Central City that once grew football-sized sweet potatoes.
The words are the first to be lost, because there are so many: there
are words in the telling, and there are words in the millions of places,
struck from the map. Some, doggone, floating and suspended, persist,
like give me my flowers while I yet live. And upstairs by the sink,
she sees how scared I am and takes my hand, and we wander for a
little while in a house with many many mansions. Warm sweaty hands.
And the whole building was swaying and the windows looked like they
were breathing, so we just moved into one of the other rooms, and
it was a little different there. We are in her back yard in Liberty in a
thunderstorm. It’s deep green and there’s rain darkening the red dirt
and she’s playing in the puddle with a metal bucket. Suddenly a gigantic
flash of light engulfs everything. She stops to bring me a little closer.
The metal bucket is flipped on its side, and she shows me the tiny space
between her fingertip and the lightning bolt.
14

THE MILE-HIGH WOMAN
STALKS THE MISSISSIPPI
WITH HER GOLDEN COUGAR
part I
Kate Kokontis
A yearly pilgrimage to access the healing balm: walking for hours
on the shores of Lake Michigan. In this place, so much remains the
same, so much shifts from minute to minute – it is an inland sea, after
all, with life carrying on in the sky, on the surface, and beneath the
waves. The flat horizon, which you can see forever. The lake may as
well be the ocean, if sight is to be believed. The smell is particular to a
lake, lacking the brine of the ocean, but it is still fresh and fishy which
makes me feel wild and free, frisky and wriggling from my entrails to
my flesh. The texture below my feet is distractingly varied, sometimes
sandy and inviting, sometimes too soft with oil so you sink suddenly,
sometimes slicingly hard and sharp on a bed of rocks that stretches
too long. The sensory specificity of this place jolts my nervous system
to bring me back to all of the times I have visited in the past, the
textures and worries and feelings and hopes, the unknowns from
those times become suddenly palpable once more. Water is beautiful
and deadly, yes, but it is also soothing, such that a walk on a stormy
beach or a walk on a placid one does to my soul what water does to
rocks: soothes it, softens up its prickly bits, smooths its rough edges.
I go to walk the shore each year to convene my past, present, and
future selves, and there we confer, invisibly arrayed along the beach,
inspecting one another’s cracks and fissures, the soft bruised and
tender bits, the newly hardened ones, the new and old recognitions
and wisdom gained. The lake is a temporal container and a memory
machine.
Walking is the force, the propulsion, of movement between space and
time. The body of water is the container, and walking is a dredging, a
conjuring process, entreating and inviting the forms to rise up from
the past and the future. Yes, the past, present, and future coexist in
the same spot, and the ritual of walking in these places we have been
many times before, a cyclical return-to-the-source yearly after new
worlds have revealed themselves, this ritual walking-our-return does
the work of unhooking the opaque veils between time that make
this coexistence invisible, and making their mutuality transparently
manifest.
It is the gloaming, those hours between night and day when time is
especially thin, and it is the equinox, the time of leveling and evening.
Tonight, I am a witch; I shapeshift; I time-jump. I will myself to
become invisible, a mile tall, propelled by the wind, by the smoke
that swirls between and amongst these coexistent temporalities, and
by the strength of my own two legs to stalk like a ghost from the
shores of Lake Michigan down the length of the Mississippi River
to its mouth, which wetly makes love – sometimes withholding,
sometimes overwhelming – to the shore on the other end: the coast
of the Gulf.
16

I do not walk alone. The oddly smiling cougar with outsize paws
and yellow eyes, standing at attention in the corner of the museum,
leering in death, gets up to walk with me, to skulk and to pounce. The
panther is beige, a kind of colorless faded golden ivory, which looks
golden brown in the shadows. This panther has witnessed much
destruction, not to mention forgetting, which may account for its
weird smile. It is a smile of knowingness, not contentment.
We walk past Cahokia, where our mighty Mississippian ancestors
built monumental architecture out of the very earth itself, and upon
those earthen mounds invoked the power of the sun. We walk through
the cypress swamps seething with life, with histories of maroonage,
trailing our fingers in logging ditches and oil canals, what once was
swamp reduced to marsh, what once was marsh returned to water,
the hastening of our destruction fueled slickly by our desire for speed.
We walk to the mouth of the Mississippi, and the shores of the Gulf
of Mexico, a coast that not only traces the shape of the land, but is
also the coast of the sea; the sea is itself a shape, not negative space,
and the circum-Caribbean world is edged by the Gulf coast. From
my height and the thinness of time, I can faintly hear the drums and
guns of revolutions, 1791, 1811, and 1959, in the three sister colonies
of Haiti, New Orleans, and Cuba.
From elsewhere on this same battered continent, whose soil has seen
it all, I hear the wailing cries of La Llorona. She calls and I respond.
We have been losing our children for centuries. Sometimes we find
them again, inhabiting new and unexpected shapes. I am holding a
fistful of feathers which I raise high to test their strength against the
wind. I have gathered them up from the ground, from fields become
final resting places for birds who die en masse. Blackbirds falling from
the sky in flocks five thousand strong after fireworks stole them from
the sky, passenger pigeons whose migrations in the millions once
blackened the heavens for days, killed off in the short span of 100
years by hungry or sporting hunters or those with the insatiable lust
for hats that flirted with flight. The base of each feather is so strong
that it can be buffeted by the hurricane winds of history without
fracturing. The tip so thin, more flexible for purposes of flight, but
much more vulnerable to being snapped.
My cougar and I will meet with my ancestors here, in and by these
waters, will meet with my progeny’s progeny.
[[Turtle Cove, Pass Manchac, March 24, 2018.]]
17

BLACK WILLOW
salix nigra
Eleanor Warner
You have seen them: when the river runs low, its banks are strewn with
vibrant magenta spider webs, strands and coils washed in disarray by
the current, trailing out from the banks. Wait, you think in sudden
terror – is the river bank wired? With river-wide electricity? Is that a
hidden power grid? Some apocalyptic new infrastructure I’ve never
yet dared to imagine, undergirding even the tired Mississippi clay?
No! Those are willow roots. Those are the tapestries of filament that
hold the riverbanks up.
One summer, Stix busted his knee the day before we had all planned
to race down through the irrigation flumes, towering wooden
catwalks that pipe privately owned water across miles of rugged
sierra backcountry. Stix was carrying Scoots the dog so carefully out
of Candy Rock Canyon. He slipped in the river and fell, cradling
her so that her weight landed on top of his own all together precisely
funneled into and ricocheted through his left knee, cracked like
gunfire against the bedrock. That night, Jen took us to find a plant
that could help. We searched the overgrown fields, the tool yards,
the shadows of shed roofs and woodpiles. Willow crowded the creek
beds. Jen pointedly encouraged Stix’s girlfriend to put her hands on
each of the steps: to harvest the curls of bark, to strip the leaves with
her own hands, to heat the pot pushed full of stems, to administer the
steaming jug of willow tea and the boiled hot rags full of medicine.
Her fingerprints mattered. Her meticulous motions, invested and
patient, made the willow warm to its task.
With confirmed anti-inflammatory, pain-reducing, fever-lowering,
and antiseptic properties, willow bark has an important place in the
herbal repertoire of many cultures. The bark and leaves contain
salicin, a naturally occurring salicylate, which is modified into
salicylic acid in the body. Chemically related to aspirin, [it has]
similar properties. Salicylate content of willow bark varies widely,
depending on the species and time of year. 1
+++
Lead was outlawed in house paint eight years before I was born.
No longer viable stock, thousands of cans of lead-laced house paint
were sold cheap in the South. I remember standing jaw-dropped
in an agricultural supply tienda in Guadalajara; a gleaming counter
presented a lineup of guileless pesticide bottles recently banned in
the united states, still abundant, still needing to be distributed, sold,
used... somewhere. When I first moved to New Orleans, I spent a week
triple-washing every dimension top to bottom of Kitty and Ross’s
sculptural house, because their one-year-old tested dangerously high
for lead toxicity. Lead in a child hampers the development of impulse
control. Lead in a community maps more perfectly the likelihood of
violent crime than any other studied factor, including poverty.
Willow reputedly was able to extract lead, according to small,
anecdotal studies conducted in uncontrolled urban garden settings.
Perhaps, the thinking went, willow was especially good at binding
metal soil constituents into its tough wooden body so that they
became biologically unavailable. We should propagate black willow
from the river, I urged. Let’s plant it thickly down every street, give
over our soils and their industrial nightmares to its roots. Sunflower
plantings had been pushed for this same reason, but sunflowers lived
18

shorter lives. They returned their constituent parts to the world
around them much more quickly than trees. Turns out: no study
since the advent of tissue culture has given solid evidence of any plant
species accumulating lead within its cells. Willow roots pull lead close
but do not eat it up, and sunflower smelters at times yield nickel but
sweat no lead bullets. Phyto-remediation of this heavy metal remain
untenable. Willow does, however, hold promise for the clean up of
many other dangerous toxins – salts, leachates, effluents, other heavy
metals. It grows so fast, leafs out so early, gleams so green.
The leaves are used by many butterflies as larval food, especially
the beautiful mourning cloak. 2
Enter the sick room. The Cree hung branches of black willow in the
spaces they set aside for the invalid and the dying. As willow branches
decay, they fill the air around them with the fragrance of sour green
apples, charged with fresh green vitality. For many months I hung
the enormous branches of black willow upside down in the center
of my one-room shack. They formed an elusive presence. They came
to feel like a slight shadow in the room – a substance not altogether
haunting, but strangely sentient. They were something I felt through
my peripheral vision that complicated the room, suggesting other
dimensions. They felt this way, I suppose, because they were dead.
Because they were upside down. Because in death, they emitted the
most vibrant, evocative scent, something I’d never noticed when
walking amongst willow trees. Some people burn smudges to clear
space, to restore presence. This strange ritual felt like a slow, silent
burn – the dessication of cells, in the presence of oxygen – almost, I
imagined smoke. Almost, I imagined a burning bush hanging from
my rafters for moments at a time. The vision would vanish, again
replaced by the same old dried out bunch of branches and crunching,
twisted leaves. Then they would turn colorless, gray, without detail
or feature – a shroud in the corner. What death was I mourning, or
sickness untangling? I’d lost love, companionship... all sorts of hope.
I felt that granite shift, and I sat in a ruined landscape, alone with
ghosts. The black willow branches helped me to see more clearly all
of the rubble.
You may be crippled
You may be blind
You can not walk
You can not speak
When the Lord
Gets Ready
You got to move
You got to move 3
I walk amongst willows daily at the sandy point where tug boats turn
their massive cargo off the Mississippi River sharp into the Industrial
Canal, intended toward railroad terminals. Jesse, gentle confidante
during the days of the hanging branches, first introduced me to this
place. He met me at the first rise of the levee. We walked through the
19

cold spring air, and a flash of color lit down from the quick sky. Jesse
turned an ear: “that’s the redwing blackbird song!” he cheered. “You’ll
never forget it now. Sweetest sound ever made by any little half robot
bird yet.” I’d heard this rough trill a thousand times but never noticed
or placed it. (A week later my neighbor would look up at his mulberry
tree suddenly flocked with red-wing blackbirds in his backyard and
reminisce: at his mother’s request, every spring migration, he would
bring out his bb gun and shoot those redwing blackbirds out of that
mulberry tree for dinner. “How did you prepare them?” I would
ask, picturing blackbird pie. “Why, we’d pan fry them!” He would
exclaim.) But yes, we walked on that levee, heard those blackbirds
trill, and continued on to the muddy end of the world. Here we
descended through that stand of willow trees lime green, twisted,
persistent. They greet the river, whether it rushes high or low, with
a pliant strength. Jesse and I walked through the rustling branches,
the shifting light, continued past all those willows to the dark tunnel
formed by pilings deep underneath the navy wharf.
We walked onward, into the dark caverns underneath the city’s river
edge, into the city’s subconscious. Little specks of light floated down
from holes in the boards high over our heads. An eerie blue glow
shone out from a portal window low along the belly of a navy ship
docked in the depths. The mud beneath our feet slowly softened,
suctioned, pulled at our steps like quicksand. An amorphous, melting
earth faced me. Under those piers, I felt my understanding of nature
shift: this earth is dark, and sucking, and unshaped, and rough.
Venomous, tremendous, rotten. This mud held up a place of spiders,
snakes, people, guns, storms, parties – all things I felt afraid of. One
patch of shimmering magma grabbed hold of my ankle with a sticky
grip and swallowed me to my thigh – my underworld baptism. The
grip of that clay like the grip of those willow roots, unearthly strong,
muscular, and pumped flush with water.
Willows are widely used for erosion control in wetlands as well as
in stream bank restoration and stabilization, short pieces of mature
stems often simply being stuck in the wet ground where they root
over winter (as live stakes). 4
Black willow grows wild along the banks of the Bogue Chitto river, up
two hours drive north of New Orleans. They straggle up from sand
banks along the floodplain, pearl out across islands, shine bright
between magnolias, maples, and elms. They feel different in this
dark-eyed landscape, their colors pale and luminescent, cool to the
touch. Have you ever seen foxfire glow silent from a fractured pine
branch at night? Have you ever touched a sleeping fish? Like leaves
of willow, those memories conjure cold green fire. Drive the highway
down the eastern edge of town in cold early spring and you’ll see
this yellow lime flame thicketing everything in sight. Spring stands
of willow address this world with a needed color. Spring stands of
willow contain vigor enough to remake land and life from pools of
watery dream.
20

+++
Find a bucket and fill it with water. Take a walk to the river. Gather
willow whips, pull them from trees here and there, gather them with
your arms, bunch and bundle them, make a bushel. Take this bushel
home to your bucket, set each branch into that water, and allow them
time to emanate their willful exudates. Agitate those branches a
few times a day. In several days, your bucket will contain rooting
hormone every bit as effective as formulas bought from chemists.
Willows yearn so badly to persist; they cling to life on this battering
planet with bony fingers stronger than storms. They have power to
spare. Use it for their tenuous companions, plants less electric than
they, and take heart. Not all creatures want to snuff out the minute
they suffer sideways glances, like sick sheep and blind birds. Some
earthly things just burn, and burn, and burn, emanating a green light
so bright it curdles. Some earthly creations behave more like water
than like earth.
Elastic.
Back at the levee, the willow forests are gone one day, mowed to the
ground. Gritty and cold without them, the river banks feel vulnerable.
Now you can see straight through to the sugar factory and all those
yards full of giant bars of steel, cranes wheeling through the sky
under floodlights at midnight, none of it filtered through cascades
of rustling yellow green leaves. Where did all those spirits go, hid
amidst their branches? How will the river stay in its place, without
its guides? Pounding sun on a shallow gulf, ocean current reversal,
oil pipelines dredged through soft marsh skins, willow-less riverfront
development—these are the things I am afraid of now. Green anchors
come back, I want to say. Hold us here, and teach us how to better
grip this earth.
1. entry in A Field Guide to Western Medicinal Plants and Herbs by Steven Foster
and Christopher Hobbs
2. entry in The Wildlife Garden by Charlotte Seidenberg
3. gospel standard sung by Mississippi Fred McDowell
4. entry in Native Plants of the Southeast, by Larry Melichamp
21

E V E R Y B E A C H
s o l e i l g a r n e a u
i’m in the tropics here where it’s sticky and hot
it’s in my blood
to want
to take
the heat
i’m in the tropics here and i’m thinking
that
to inhabit a space is an intimate act and
i hope i’m treating her well
i think
of the coast
i think of this coast
of drinking whiskey straight
i think of sleeping in a tent
in the back of a car wherever
waking up wherever
i think of this coast
i think of people lost in the dunes
i think of kids breaking bottles
i think i am lost in the dunes
somewhere
in the tropics
where
we all want something
and
most of us end up with
somethin
else
i’m in the tropics thinking
of my mother’s tropics
thinking
about
how people move around
how we migrate
we escape
i think of my mother’s wrinkled hand
like my wrinkled hand
lines
like a map
of
how people traverse the world
like the cracks that tell us how long we’ll live
and
how
time is an open sea
a horizon line that’s flat
when the water is calm
when you’re far away
22

time is the sea and we are all our own rowboats
staying afloat or
drowning
becoming
water
i’m lost
i’m tangled in the mangroves
in the tropics
i’m knee deep
walking with my mother
following
her heels
her calloused feet
dragging a palm frond behind her in the sand
in the manila street
a boat is headed towards the dock
i’m always running back to the coast where
you and i
we sit by the overturned kayaks on the beach
we smoke cigarettes in the cafe
i know
in some way
you and i
have disappeared
we are the pools of water in the palms
we are the pools of water in the mud on the ground
we are on the beach again and my eyes are heavy
the
fine
sand
so fine it’s
like silk
hot
in the hot sun
the rocks that don’t have edges
the sea
impregnates the air
with it’s scent
and i remember
your body smelled soft like sweat
i closed my eyes
23

i’m always running to the horizon line of time
running out to sea
when
i’m lookin for a place to ease my mind
or
following in the footsteps of my family
i’m always running to the coast
thinking
how we are fighting the turbulent sea
performing the radical
the magical act of
staying afloat
and
there’s always room to change history
i think of
the overcrowded boats and
how we’re all trying to get somewhere
i think about people on the beach with flares
how memory / vision
is laden / laced
with pain / with trauma
i got floorboards at the bottom of my gut
the floorboards i hammered
to take me where
i need to go
we
are all out looking for something
i keep running back to a fictional coast
a beach
a motel
a quiet town on
a mythical coast
the overturned kayaks on the beach
where
we watch the tourists come and go
years drag on
like
time
the horizon line
and
we
all find something to look forward to
when the water’s calm we enjoy the view
we are all reaching for something
we are all our own rowboats and our arms
are oars
keeping us afloat
24

we
fight the hard fight
against the choppy waters of history
i listen to music on the beach
i hear it echo across oceans and seas
(the seas we cross to escape brutality)
i know
time moves and
we change history
my feet are pounding on the sand
i’m out on the coast looking for something
and there are feet pounding on the sand
of every beach
everywhere looking
to time’s horizon
to the turbulent sea
(if you haven’t
been an outlaw
a captive
a refugee
then maybe it’s high time you learn what it’s like)
we are all out looking for something on the coast
but only some of us
are on the right side of history
and we are
flailing
building rafts like
floorboards in the sea
we are all
tangled
in the tropics
(i’m on the coast again)
25

GOODBYE, LOVEBUGS
IN THE SKIES
Casina Williams
1.
when we breathe deeply, we bob on the water
buoyant
i remember all of it
but really
it’s the all i choose to remember
2.
How do you leave something
How do you leave your memories?
When they towed our crumpled Chevy Astro van from our driveway,
my oldest around 8 cried, “You’re throwing away my memories.”
Now he’s getting ready to fly away with 2 suitcases. i know it’s real
because the penny collection got poured into the coinstar machine,
the same coins we’ve been stepping on for years, flinching at the cold
metal stuck underfoot.
When he turned 18, our house in Baton Rouge took 2 feet of water the
next day. He never got that milestone party. The carpet darkened and
got squishy. i left because i didn’t want to have to poop in a bucket. i
left because i didn’t want to watch my kids wear themselves out. i left
because my husband called and told me to.
We wore backpacks, ready for adventure. Me and my 3 teens waited
by the mailbox for rescue. The ant piles travelled as families, as did
we, clumps floating on the water.
3.
my life is a hoard because
finding is one of my favorite things to do
that moment where i’m the first
to discover exactly that one thing
it could be something on the ground
smelling a smell i’ve never experienced before
anything, it’s mine
sometimes i find a feeling i want to hold
i hope to capture it in my mind
i don’t want it to end
i physically try to hold still as long as i can
and soak it all in
4.
How do i feel about Louisiana after flooding twice?
i’m coasting: the coast is the edge where things meet
P O S T - F L O O D / P R E - N E X T
is what it says on my social media
26

Now we’re an hour’s drive away on the Northshore, wondering about
foreclosure, waiting to move again
i want to remember the now because this pre-next time is ending
my kids will grow and leave
i’m looking forward to it yet
the next is always faster than i expect
5.
i wish i had a memory machine
sometimes our moments feel sweet! i want a contraption to capture
them, keep and visit later
Like the time y’all sang your song Lovebug Paradise running in circles
in the Mid-City living room.
i need a memory machine
i don’t want it to be about words or pictures
i want to be there dancing with you
i fit perfectly in that scene
if i could just remember more of it i’ll find the answers i’m lookin for
i need that memory machine
i’ll find out who i am in this world
and then? i’ll know what to do
6.
my memories are flooded and dumped into the water that ran to
Hurricane Creek at Wormbelly Drive
to the Comite River
to the Amite River
to Lake Maurepas
to Lake Pontchartrain
through the Rigolets
through Lake Borgne & Chandeleur Sound
to the Gulf of Mexico
flowing to the Atlantic Ocean
7.
Some roads opened in 3 days and everyone arrived
The first thing we needed was a trash can
imagine the surf of a hundred city trash cans that gently travelled
miles
left by flood wake
maybe filling ditches into piles
resting
27

8.
my memories flood when i touch my post-flood objects hoarded
these memory machines anchor the time
i’m holding a spray bottle to clean something that got wet
i’m wiping something that i’ll probably throw away but i can’t tell yet
When i hold it, things kick in
this repeats
9.
They were little and i was busy looking at photos of them. My 1, 3, &
5 year olds were bumping into me, telling me something. Hungry and
loudly wanting attention.
i just want to look at the cuteness! i roared at them. Maybe, that was
only in my mind?
but i never really cleaned up my jpgs and photo libraries since
10.
my current memory machine will be disrupted if i spill too much
time on the old ones
hey i don’t have time for these things i don’t have time to bask in the
past
i don’t have time to hold on
i don’t have time for this trash
i’m supposed to set the example
i’m supposed to be makin memories now
i want them to say i saw and listened to them now
not flooded lost, not fishing for the past not
scrubbing garbage and some ego thing to find myself
it’s not about me it’s about all of us together
everything else did but
my family didn’t flood away
even though we will be scattering
11.
i don’t want to be left behind. we’ve left the creek. i’m close to the gulf
now. i want to swim the ocean too.
12.
The two of us canoed to the house 2 days later. We’d scouted it out
earlier and were able to park a mile away at the gas station. The pastel
painted box bocage beehives had shimmied over by the pumps, lids
open and bees circling. Usually they’re humming across the street
near where that guy used to sell coons but now he sells watermelons.
We boated down Greenwell Springs Road. The scene was serene and
abandoned, overflowing with water and submerged rescue trucks
and boats. One car was on its end, so deep, and we passed solitary
people looking out at corners and intersections like an art film or
a video game. Some parts were dry and one guy helped us haul the
canoe at the Winn-Dixie, i mean Shopper’s Value. We reached our
soggy house where the floodwaters had receded. The cats were mad
at us, but they were okay. We hurried to get back before dark.
28

13.
If we’re going to lose everything, we should lose those old habits that
hurt us:
We drove the 67 miles again and again. One month post-flood, i left
my children with crowbars to pull the big bathroom cabinet, 13, 15,
& 18. When i came back from errands i found my middle kid needing
stitches.
It was time to clear out and find new patterns.
14.
Grievous endings are multipassageways
to discover the shy and shiny,
To love is to be familiar, to be our family
You’ve grown on me. You’ve grown on me. You’ve grown on me.
15.
We live at one end of the Causeway Bridge in Mandeville. It goes
straight across the water for a $5 toll. The Lake Pontchartrain looks
different every time driving the 24 mile bridge to New Orleans.
On foggy nights it looks like going nowhere. One sunny time, the
laughing gulls and brown pelicans coasted on air currents next to the
windows. Pelicans seem fat and inelegant until you see them flying
like that.
16.
note to people, places, and things:
i’ll miss you. my favorite parts are windowsills of minutes watching
you be who you are
i’m scraping together a pile of all my thankfulness
into a sparkling pile of softness, throwing hearts
17.
Cougar paw print at the creek, bald eagle
Red tailed hawks, bluebirds, turkey vultures, hummingbirds
Fireflies, black widow spiders, turtles, red fox, alligator gar, flying
squirrels
Cicadas, horned beetles, silk moths, tiger moths, swallowtails all
kinds of iridescence and fuzz
Marathon of deer, raccoons, and possums
i remember the wriggling of that little snake in my hand
29

18.
It’s a Lovebug Paradise
They might be aliens in disguise
It’s a Lovebug Paradise
They could be monsters in the skies
Monsters love monsters
People love people
Especially lovebugs
(by my family: lyrics R.L. Williams, music D.Williams)
19.
When you watch a favorite tv show and the cool people are doing
goodbyes:
They’re moving on
They aren’t stooped over with a noisy wheeled luggage
They’re carrying one bag on their shoulder or even five
Walking, nodding with a forward stride
i know it ain’t real/ but That’s how i wanna feel
20.
we carry and share the water
it seeps
the water in me holds the memories
in saturation
30

Many thanks to Turtle Cove Environmental Research Station
of Southeastern Louisiana University, which helped inspire this
collection of writing
This project was supported by a grant
from the platforms fund