After the Levees Broke
Ma warned me to cool
my nerves when I saw him.
I thought He’s more hound
than gator, more levee
than bayou. In the emergency
room, she carried me down
into the marshlands. When
our names had been made
into a list, we waited hours
to meet him at the north end
of the bog. I was dehydrated—
I took off my T-shirt, my sandals.
I thought a mosquito to be
a sparrow, a bullfrog to be
a kitten—his name was called.
We made our way upstream
on a low-power air boat,
catching glimpses of children
drowned in the silted mud,
lovers lying still at the shore
with fevers only a few degrees
warmer than the air, bodies
with crawdads pulling at their
ears. The treble of our slow
move forward was all I could
hear. Behind a homing thunder
storm, near sunset, Ma cut
the engine and carried me
off the boat, into the bed
of reeds. With those canes
and stalks around me, I looked
down past their roots. I saw
Pop there, lying with his eyes
closed, waiting for the sun
to finally bleed itself dry,
the nighttime air to turn cold.
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Christian Wessels is a senior at SUNY Brockport where he studies poetry with an interest in literary translation. He is the student manager of the Brockport Writers Forum and has received grants from the Brockport Foundation to fund his research on American war literature. He would like to have dinner with all of the Argonauts besides Heracles.