~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Martha Serpas, Featured Poet

Martha Serpas has written four volumes of poetry, including The Dirty Side of the Storm and most recently Double Effect. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and Southern Review and has been anthologized in the Library of America's American Religious Poems. A native of Bayou Lafourche, Louisiana, she co-produced Veins in the Gulf, a documentary about land loss in the Barataria-Terrebonne Estuary. She is a hospital trauma chaplain and a recent graduate of the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics' psychedelic facilitation program. She teaches at the University of Houston and co-directs Scripts, the narrative and lyric health program at UH's Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine.

Pélican Dans Sa Píeté

Had you never been with me,

I wouldn't hold your absence now—

Had there never been a cord,

I wouldn't have this scar, would I—

Maybe it was the whirlwind of your blood,

the amniotic undertow that had me so blazéd.

For you it must have felt

as if flesh were being plucked away…

A drift line, a double

heartbeat, a kerchief of hair—

In secret Betsy baptized me

into this strange sinful gulf.

I know this much:

Water is oak brown or steel gray

or so clear you see your nail beds

dipping in the fount. I've seen it rise in ditches

or lap over levees or shank down

from the sky. It hems me in

like a country club towel.

What should I have grown up on, love?

(included in Double Effect)

Just Call Me Beb

                        for Joy at the Baton Rouge Best Buy

Just call me beb

Just lift more than one finger

off the steering wheel when we pass

each other in the 25, my having

assumed I could use your lane

to get around the cane truck,

and your grill smiling

like a wildcat coming on

Just call me beb, like

when you put down my catfish

poboy, having told me

it was just filleted in the back

that morning and then

putting a lagniappe of two strips

in front of my friend who ordered

the Plate Lunch instead

Beb, it's reeeally good.

Sometimes joy has to be pushed

on me, like when I tried

to cancel my order online

and then had to call the store

and I got you Joy and you

called me beb and we talked

about computers and breast cancer

and that talk you had with God

on your way home from the Lowe's

parking lot where you got your scan

Just don't let me whine, you said,

'cause nobody likes a whiner,

and if God said anything, God said,

Beb, I liked you from the first.

It was the best thing that ever happened

to me, you said.

I should call myself beb every day, and I

wonder, if I knew I was going to be reborn,

whether I wouldn't grieve extra hard

because there is Life and there is This Life,

and I would have to give up hope

for this one—hope that some further

saving possibility could be found here—

and wait to catch a warm front

and fly away to the next, well, then I might

be like you, Joy, listening for the rustle

of palmetto leaves in the dark

as I put my steps down on the path,

the bebettes harmonizing after the rain.

(included in Double Effect)

Né – Décédé

We were seated around the Thanksgiving table—

turkey, stuffing, potatoes au gratin—

eight or ten of us, when I noticed,

as I passed on the green beans and slivered

almonds, that they were all dead:

gelatin-eyed, orifice-oozing, putrefying dead.

I hadn't detected the strong smell above the broccoli

casserole and crusty Brown 'n Serve rolls.

I had been passing the wine, passing the water,

talking to myself about my affairs.

As their fingers lifted slightly from the table,

I laid coins on their eyes and kissed their brows.

I freed the dogs, who seemed warm, from their filthy pens.

One shouldn't look for the living among the dead.

Back at the farm where my father, dishes done,

moves a stick through ryegrass,

and a sharp-tailed snake heads for a thicket.

He wanders below Douglas firs and

smokes a Kool cigarette.

In the mornings I lie with him in the orchard and watch

the elk calves leap like static.

Sometimes a young bull. Mostly

cows clowning, distracting us while their cow

friends unlace liberty apples

                        from the lowest branches.

He hasn't aged. His nose is still broken

and his knuckles are a size too large.

For July his skin is burned patriot red,

and his eyes are green, green, green.

The hyphen between his dates is so tiny, carved

into the mausoleum's marble, it is a freckle,

half an ellipsis.

It's meant to pull the years one

on top the other. It's meant to erase

itself, like an iris wipe before The End.

On the farm I cut the grass with a push mower.

I try to save the wren's nest I dislodged

with the cane knife—his—

that I had been swinging through the brambles.

I nail new shingles on the porch steps when it rains.

Every morning I bring you tea in bed is his tomorrow.

The tray empty, the kettle and steam quiet,

the bricks fire-polished and weightless as they fall.

(included in The Diener)

The Best of Us

Give me your Greek myths

and I'll give you the Carmen

Kief Bridge—forgotten,

whatever it was called before—

where thirty years ago Trey

scaled the steel lift

still hot from the sun of the day,

with a spray can under his chin

to inscribe the I-beam with the promise

of her memory and the imprimatur of his passion.

Or when Oris G. did his girlfriend on the front lawn

at lunch—I was speechless with admiration.

The football coach looked him right in the eye

and Oris looked right back, the coach hardly

able to draw his smile or keep from pounding

Oris on the back as if he were a safety just

trotting off the field with his first interception.

(What girl could hold me—even under the bleachers?)

            Trey sat with his brother on the T-top

of their Trans Am, a big wing-stretched

bird stamped in gold on the hood.

They drank the better of a twelve-pack

under the scrawl of a new constellation.

There was no moon, there was no call.

Mr. Kief went to early Mass

with his wife and four daughters,

auburn muses sliding into his car,

one hotter than the next, down to his baby girl

whose breasts even the straight girls attended.

Did Carmen see the blazón first or did her father,

driving with his neck stretched as if

the crimson letters themselves were suitors

tearing up his sod and eating at his table?

Before the sun set, sandblasters were at work

clouding the message and marring the sword.

Fathers themselves, they scrubbed

the rust patches and rivets almost to clouds, like those

around great mountain peaks, red rocks

and crags reaching through too-visible haze. "Trey"

watered down to foam by the gritty spray, "loves"

columned in faint streaks, but "Carmen" flaring

like the night it was born from Trey's nozzle.

All that Mr. Kief could not rid himself of:

how his baby became the protagonist,

how she acted through the actor, freeing

herself through photon bonding at the head

of this, our bayou infrastructure. Shame is such

a bastard, its fly-by-night parents,

cowardice and hubris—all that we know

better than God, all we hide from the grass

and the sky. Her name will be remembered,

not like a trophy or the blotted girl on the lawn

but like a woman who guards the pass

or a woman who starts a war.

            (included in The Diener)

Grand Isle Invocation

The warblers, vireos and thrushes fall out

            their three-day spring-break drunk

            into oak     and hackberry     They've stopped to see

if the island is still dying and since it is

            they continue on…

            (Misplaced I too can be seen…)

Before I die a single live oak will catch

            their exhaustion    They will cubby

            like high-tops hung from the Loneliest Road

in America          They will sing the LSU fight song

         and take the 18-hour flight        the red-eye

                     back to Cancún

(appeared in Plume)