~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Casey L. Ford

Elegy after Ixtoc I

Trauma lives in the sea / of my body, awash in the waters / of forgetting.

                                                         —Natasha Trethewey, “Waterborne”

Old lessons drift on the Bolivar breeze

like dune fence whitewash gone

to flake in the sun, nostalgic angles

flash from glittering souvenir prisms

cheap memories, pretty, palatable,

not like the honest stink of a thousand beached

hardheads poised to pierce a child’s unwary foot,

or the sign that banned swimming off our beach,

1979, taped like a seedy domestic crime scene—

I asked a grownup to explain but instead

was sent to hunt angel wings.

Off I skipped, easy lamb to herd, to comb

slimy stretches of nothing to see here, folks,

tarballs sticking to the pink bottoms of my feet,

seashells stained black by the big secret.

And the rigs still look at dusk like little parties,

holiday lights winking what they know—

the water will eventually come here

full of other dead, greasy things,

proof we learn too slowly,

there is always more to destroy.

Gulf can mean harbor or abyss,

an inlet or a deep, gaping hole,

undulating, pitchy, maybe more

honest than the frivolity of light

at the shoreline where waves break

things apart, dark sand ruins

a brand-new swimsuit, mixed as it is

with old oil and Mississippi sediment.

Digging it you might find a half-wing,

a cracked conch, a human phalanx —

swimming here is treacherous indeed,

murky surf hiding so much we won’t

or wouldn’t like to see.

Casey L. Ford is a native Southeast Texan born in 1975 in Port Arthur. She works as writing center director and instructor of creative writing at Lamar University in Beaumont. She recently earned the MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University and her first Pushcart Prize nomination from Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Concho River Review, Texas Poetry Assignment, Ocotillo Review, and Amarillo Bay, among other places.