~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Near Seventh Ward, New Orleans

Days mark a slow exit over low roofs,
summer tasting of lightless dust,
bluestems and decay rifled by crows.
Across raddled asphalt,
mongrels loiter a mall
the town gave up on with padlocks
and soaped windows — faith underspent
in nail salon and donut shop.

A teen speeds past on a rusted Schwinn.
Balmy wind billows her skirt,
its pattern of roses faded,
as if defeated by the sun’s bourbon glow
touching the mirror still waiting
to be gone from the vacant boutique.

Watching a Bouquet Drift Down Bayou Teche

Sunfall narrows and recedes

from its last domain

in the bends and trestles

of the bayou bridge,

right down to water hyacinth

and the scaly backs

of garfish hungering

in solitude for bluegill

and sac-a-lait

through the emerald mud,

like a deed unfinished

between dusk and night,

castoff blossoms

still glowing in the dark.

Coda for Bayou Lafourche

Early June or barely. Wind hustles
down a back road flanked by live oak,
raising a scent of crushed wildflowers.
Sky over the causeway seeps a rationed
light that lines the wings of a curving hawk
to score the horizon gray. Airboats
pour their weekend drone under Spanish
moss. A sunburnt fellow fisherman
lists hard to port from booze.
A feral odor hovers like a nimbus
above bayou and marsh. Daylong shadows
drag like hands over blues guitars
where you listen to the water drift past,
drop by drop. Twenty miles north
in Belle Rose, the house you inherited
sits below the streetlights of Route 70
in the shadows of hackberry and elder,
of starlings and thrashers that flutter
through beams of unfinished houses
rising above cane fields that flood the distance.

Jeffrey Alfier’s recent books include Fugue for a Desert Mountain, Anthem for Pacific Avenue, and The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems. Gone This Long: Southern Poems, is forthcoming (2019). His publication credits include The Carolina Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Midwest Quarterly, Kestrel, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Stinging Fly. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review.