A momentary shift of gears.
See, there's this metaphorical garden. It's overgrown with Delicate F-ing Flowers, fragile-stemmed blossoms with poetic petals, sharp tongues and hidden thorns, all perfumed in that intoxicating way that makes you have to sniff them.
They may or may not snap their jaws shut fly-trap style and consume you whole when you stick your lovely nose in. They have been known poison admirers when worn in a lapel.
But you'll still want to pick them because they're so damned pretty.
Today I humbly submit for your approval the first of the bouquet. This first bloom is from Louisiana, a green sapling somehow old enough to dangle years of Spanish moss, who knows what it means to miss New Orleans and to help grow it back from scratch. When she's not tending cities she's tending herbs, making roux, stitching vintage undies and dresses back together and making them new, putting little birds under her wing until they're grown, and occasionally tossing back red wine like water.
She sent us this piece scrawled on an old envelope (the best kind of submission) as Mardi Gras approached, when sequins and feathers should take priority over words, earnest or otherwise.
So on this sacred Lundi Gras we post this bit of poem, mailed in from the south by Tobacco Blossom Dearie:
the wind has picked up
my hat lifts, and sails
i shift the weight of solitude from hip to hip,
testing its heft,
and round the corner
a child chases a dervish of leaves,
laughing.
further on
an old man walks by
under my hat.
i can smell the rain on his breath.
-in loving memory of RJS.
