Gentilly, 1949

Goodness knows the Mississippi River wants to side-step the banquettes
of New Orleans, ramble straight to the Atchafalaya Basin—scrub clean

the catfish and moccasins. Jean Lafitte foresaw the approaching breach,
snuffed out the smithy and shipped off his mystique to Barataria, said,

when the barroom door closes behind you and morning’s out, stretching
its back, you’ll know why the river wants gone. The patron of the throat,

St. Blaise, will dislodge the white children (some, with only a pot to piss
in), stuck in the city’s neck. He says, when the pepper-hot match presses

against the soft part of your arm, the brain goes silent, thinks I’ll not tell
you about the pain that’s coming. But it rises (regardless) to the surface,

this long song of love and wrong. Take the penurious boy who slipped
pale from the boat of his mother. He discovered an arsenal at his finger-

tips the night he moved the “Colored Patrons Only” sign on the bus and
two passengers stood without question. Let this river mull its ambition.

Let it unhand the church who idled as its brethren hung from lamp posts,
windchime rosaries praying for the air’s delicate touch to sing. Let these

sidewalks pull themselves free, shed their nails, turn back to riverboats.
Let rot here, this crescent of water, like a smile for all that’s left behind.

Daycare at the Garden of Good Children

There are Valerie Susans, lemon grass, various greenery my wife’s
renamed—the three in a row of Rude Beckies, a blueberry bush,
the Sylvias and Anne Uumellmahayes—whose lace-sewn bulbs
flash off and on like fireflies. She walks the yard, scans leaves and
stems for fatigue, deadheads decaying buds into newborns every-
where. She calls it a wellness check, turns water on the girls if
they’re suffering—this woman I joined once in a pit swarming to
The Screaming Blue Messiahs—we young electrons of world-
building. These days we tend a complicated topography. Decide
what’s pleasant to us—what lives, what dies, and a murmuration
of aphids. Each weed’s a drink I can’t take back. So, I leave bits
of root to sleep it off, hum “Sweet Water Pools” to her, survey
what’s left of our urgencies—love’s inclination to flint, one body
against the other.

 Abattoir

The meager French under their feathers told them, we’re fooled. It’s time
to organize, kill the farmer in his sleep, take our message to the masses,
or better yet, keep this deception to ourselves. It’s easier for a few of us
to slip out—s’envoler. Let’s start anew, get our own patch. There’s work
to be done. The brood without Gallic believes an abattoir’s a cheese shop,
a rich rooster’s nook for private mounting, or a provincial inn for the belly
up of absinthe, where, to get there, they’ll walk a rainy alley all stutter step,
all herky-jerky—candelabra at the wing, 15 lbs. of silver and five weeping
candles of spermaceti wax, a goop for buoyancy scooped from the skulls
of whales. They have gone about their lives in quiet servitude, dreaming
of late evening conversations—resting on wooden stools, legs worn to the
floor’s curve, an ingle raising its chorus voices, flames fighting flames like
frigate ship sails & a cube of sugar sweet for the pecking, spooned above
the tumbler, a dozy haze of coop—a smile so long it breaks apart. Others
think an abattoir’s like a taqueria, a chance to pick your chichi food out
of shells, but they are wrong. It’s a place to rip out our plainsong throats,
drain us for consumption. But for now, back in the Victorian bar of their
fancy, they relax, these blissful birds, relay stories of murderous renards,
the relentless demand of sunrise, the yellow jewels of their stolen children.
They long for yards without fences, where they are taught the advantage
of certain words by certain chickens, words like verité. Like liberte.

Fred Dale is husband to his wife, Valerie, and a father to his dog, Earl. He is a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of North Florida. He earned an MFA from the University of Tampa, but mostly, he grades papers. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, The Summerset Review, Chiron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Evansville Review, and others. Three of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. fdale@unf.edu