thirteen kidney beans laid on the threshold
the
loup-garou counts and counts
and
counts and â
tideâs morning vocabulary: the thrown and rescinded words
over and over and: gravel crunches a bit differently every time the basketball
bounces, I was taught by its sporadic coming-up. For some reason, I think of
wobbling women in stilettos and how theyâd walk with bulging calves over the
gravel thatâd crunch a bit differently every time the heel hits. Like most
boys, Iâve tried on my motherâs heels and felt them out. I think nothing of
this. Iâve also, many times, like most boys, rode many times on the tops of my
fatherâs feet, his steps, my steps.
froggers come back after long nights tossing big bulls into
chests
church
of the empty
two generations separate the second graders from their
teachers
some
get the paddleâs correction
11, 12 ⊠1, 2, 3 ⊠lycanthrope
is full to the brim with bloodlust
moon rises, looks for prey
shout as loud as
but it will be swallowed
by the blanket
the water makes
an argument
washes up
on shore
carrying globs
of seaweed
in
tears are archives?
LOUISIANA
DEPARTMENT OF WILDLIFE & FISHERIES (22:14): Houma Wildlife and Fisheries, how can we help?
RICHARD
AUCOIN (22:14): [background noise] Yessir, I believe I seen the garou out back [mixed voices] shhh,
I said, it gone get us.
LA
DEPT. W&F (22:15):
Can you
describe what you have seen as closely as possible?
R.
AUCOIN (22:15):
Yessir, I seen
something full with hair and standing on big two feet then it came [background
noise] [long pause] â
LA
DEPT. W&F (22:16):
Sir, Iâm sorry,
can you â sir?
morning
formed itself
something
moved over wiregrass
and
it wasnât fog
dogs bark through screen doors moon mad
she is tired of walking to Lapeyrouseâs when the tap isnât
drinkable
it is hot
and gnats how
else might
need
constant swatting the
day spend itself
cocks run the strays underneath camps
leaving
them to the cottonmouths
That was nice, us laying on the algae-slicked rocks. Our
feet pointed toward the Caribbean. Me in my swim trunks and you in the bikini
youâd later spill out of. We made another game of letting the water wash over
us. We hadnât yet realized the power of pretending to be dead. You liked the
moments when the water would reach all the way to your ears. How, when the water
filled the basins of your ears, youâd lose yourself for a second, now knowing
which wayâs up. I told you all of it was my favorite: but mostly the
threatening prospect of dying beside you. Can you imagine both of us buoys only
for the minutes out lungs would work to keep the water out? Can you imagine the
streaked night thatâd be above us, a night ready to unspool its darkness and a
morning ready to unravel its best clouds?
hack heads off with the garden hoe
keep in
mason jars when the house needs
good
gris-gris
the town has a new ghost â unnamed
see the beginnings
of jaundice under
the nails or
too many
cigarettes?
Food N Fun goes up cattycorner to the bait shop with no name
the one at
the warning light
the one who didnât come back three trick-or-treats ago âŠ
the
mower moans its bass when no grass tangles itself underneath
and
the egret matches, constructing, as if to say,
Let
us do the only thing possible in the face of another day:
call
the moonâs limb
quivers in apogee
because the loup-garou
was first on it
itâll run rampant
through the breccia
called childhood
memories
voodoo
is in the hand ready
to
hurl a million bellyaches
dealer in diabolatry
flophouse ramshackled
flimsy
and berserkly grizzly love dormant at last
when it seems dead lift the driftwood near the lean-to
there is
life
there
are earthworms bound
together
There is a horizon I always looked to. It was far and I
watched through my bedroom window, inland, for about 3 years before I told my
mother about it. You donât just look at a horizon, because a horizon, my mother
told me, is just a word for something else. There
are camps lining the horizon or The
grass composing the horizon glows in morning light, my mother would say, It is impossible to say, Hey, look, a
horizon, without talking about something else. I would tell her that what
the horizon is for me is the up-down of a machine far off. Son, come get your toast, my mother would demand. Lufkin 912D 365-192, my father said,
barging into our conversation. He knew the pumpjackâs make and model simply
from the intervals of its bob in and out of sight. Thatâs a hardworking donkey pump, he said.
some congruency
between
the dog that found its
place
in the dried out stone
fountain and the way
the elderly must
be coaxed into a home?
first look, combatting the near freeze blowing in off the
Gulf
second
look, a speaking, a language of tethering
third
look, just that, a third look
no matter how soft you step you
shake the mosquito world
fiddler crabs run long-ways to
their black
holes
peeking
ever-so-often
for
serenity
the
fist came
down the contrast
blue-black on yellow
and this is a grounds for peeling and
peeling
and â
it
is now the red that trickles to drain
the
want;
to
not be gotten enough of:
carve
chip
incise
someone
said the closer to mirror
the
blurrier ; pressed so close
scoured
belief
ten years too late ICEEs become talk of the town
fishermen watch the forecast like the Superbowl
just like
how they watched WWE and NWO years ago
inside
the Bud Light, smashed cigarette butts,
stale beer
thereâs a sixty year high school reunion happening (8 women)
they play
Cajun craps with pocket change and nicked die
may the word not come
from
else- where:
one cannot be:
disappointed
men shoot Old Crow from work boots until their throats say
no more
or
until they sink the boat trailer at the landing
some sit on
their front porches all day and count cars
My mother speaks of a time I fell sick as a baby: She didnât
sleep a full night in 8 months. Only 2 hours here and there, always interrupted
by my cough or cry. She tells me how Iâd always want to be on my side in the
cradle. Same in the crib months after. She describes the phlegm, mucus, my
susceptible body. She describes my bronchitis and fever that climbed to 100,
101, 102. She tells me of her worries about getting me to swallow the
antibiotic. She laughs and says I was as stubborn as she was. As stubborn and
we both are now, sharing a surname and all. She says that she thought of the
throat in general, the way she saw my tantrums coming, the way the antibiotic
worked its chemical sorcery for ten days and my crying, coughing, fever hadnât
stopped. She remembers yellow-green gook on her shirts and how she tried
everything.
headline reads BOY, 11, RIDES ATV OFF BANK INTO CANAL, DIES
whatever needs naming
will be named
it is said
his school ribbons, trophies, awards, certificates are
somewhere on a shelf
collecting
dust
the Sabbath full of its excesses:
football,
hallelujahs,
ennui,
dishwashing,
sleep,
âŠ
donât mais la
donât hug the
submerged, barnacled pier posts while canal-swimming
donât leave the filet
knife plugged in if there are children around
donât gah dehy dohn your elders
donât let the traiteur
get carried away with her remedies
donât let her tell you
you must sleep under the relentless half moon
donât be canaille
donât stomp when
Mawmaw is trying to make do-do
donât pass Henderson
exit and skip out on boudin and cracklin
donât be moon mad
donât scrape the potâs
gratin and not give some to the dogs
donât come in muddy,
wash down with the hose pipe
donât throw away last
yearâs Mardi Gras beads, but do save the dishes
ceramic frogs out front will keep the coons away
what
moves: when
you look on it?
kindness
not of one dimension
leaks
like weeping and blasts
like
a convulsing turret
God bless you: God bless you:
God
save you
extreme measures include elevating trash cans
â the sound a family makes in rupture, the more and more
silence is capable of, the various meanings of washing, the smoothing the answer does opens more questions
âYou can just about have dinner with those bullfrogs before
you catch âem.â â Pierre, frogger, Cocodrie
TODAYS
SPECIAL
CATFISH
N TURTLE
COURTBILLION
she reads the obituaries to her grandmother for the twelfth
day in the a row
for the twelfth day they cry
I should be a bit more stubborn to the prophet who was close
enough for comfort and to the ghost who let itself in without a key to the
front door. We, both Alan and I, saw the apparition as we pulled up to he and
his girlfriend, Monicaâs, place. Monica started to yell even before we walked
through the front door. Who are you? Who
are you? Who are you? â ad infinitum. Then, the fluidity of her pronouns as
she described what he/she/it was. What Alan hadnât told Monica, despite being
with her for 6 years (living with her for 3) was that heâd known a woman, now a
witch, black magic practitioner somewhere in Florida. As I recalled this
episode, now with a worldview that gives less space to those events, I cannot
help but think of how Monica, as long as she âknowsâ Alan, will continue to
know this ghost, this he/she/it. Again and again in the same way; forever.
hose down the dog just like you hose down
the muddy white rubber boots
gravity
pushes off and pulls over clothes of the coast
with
anxiety the same is done day in and out
afternoon
pregnant with simple dreams:
that
grandkids donât end up in Big âGola,
that
milk doesnât go up,
that
the rotting balcony makes it through until next season,
that,
for the sake of the town,
Father
Will donât fall into the ways of the flesh like Father Jacob,
that
Lent fasting goes by fast fast
doxology
of breaks: and break
ing
â wonder
how the sugar
gets from cane
to tables
an answer
can be fabricated: however reasonable
tangled in the barbed wire fence:
the skeleton of an unrecognizable animal.
bones sucked crawfish head-dry by the wind
underneath
the carcass,
wildflowers
flourish
to not look
at the flesh for five months
to come
back to it
the
way that what we see becomes
the
way that we not-see easily
figuring
meaning distorts more
fishermen
arrive at the same hole
the
way speech is almost a habit
the
way success is almost depressing in
its way of ushering
another
cycle of failures
Then, my mother speaks of consulting a healer: She tells me
how she never thought sheâd consult a healer, but it was harder and harder to
think of me as a gift. She remembers 6 Advil and dosage recommendations. She
reminds me of growing up on the Teche, close to traiteurs from Jeanerette and
St. Martinville, old and chubby. She recalls their Cajun French; liminal and
inhabited. She tells me about method, measurable result, testability, and
things in her life thatâve caused her to thrown those out. She grabbed a
foil-lined pan at the traiteurâs request. The traiteur, she remembers, wore a
crucifix strung on knotted twine around his neck and how it sat on his Adamâs
apple, vibrating at the words of his prayers. She shows me pictures of me as a
baby all in the same front-buttoning bodysuit, a onesie she calls it. She then
explains how the traiteur asked for it. He ripped it to shreds and piled the
shreds on the foiled pan. She told me that, before she knew it, he was cutting
my hair and I kept my head still. The almost-translucent strands of hair fell
on the pulled apart clothes, on top of the foiled pan. She explains
alternatives to me and the philosophies of their mysteries, but also the inevitability
of the traiteur, the hair â its DNA, too, and how it somehow threads each of us
and holds us together — the metals of pan and foil, how the here and now slips
up right before us. She describes the way the traiteur lit a match and guided
it toward all that was piled up now, his hand shielding the flicker from the
stuffy air and small winds accompanying such a ritual. A slow engulfing,
meticulous enough to keep nothing from the flame. She tells me that he told her
blow it out before everything was made ash of. She passed her through the
smoke, and again. The traiteur cradled in his arms. He infused the room with
more prayer. My mother explains that we know so little of what happens on the
small scale: which part of smoke sets off the smoke alarm, which of the
traiteurâs words cleansed.
here, no sidewalk giving a warning of the shoulder
here, no center line, nothing dictating where or how
here, dirt and gravel and grass, nothing such as road and
not-road
opossum in
every ditch
who knows when a
hurricane will come through
chop off another slice
of the coast
who knows when a
hurricane will come through
flatten the next row
of fishing camps
she is convinced there is an intruder in the walls
the
new ghost may be a cat
rosaries
hung wherever sexuality repressed
mold
making its way to the loafâs end feed to the gulls
Mother Mary has been flooded over
blunted to
a lump of Quik-crete
another
dog, this one doors down from the screen-door wailer, joins the howl
calm
canal-cut topwater shivers under the dogsâ calling
all
is directed toward becomings of three kinds
see the sparrow
duck up and down
into the trash bin,
stand to call the
flowers
painfully purple,
excruciating even
a frogâs spaded feet slap topwater, sliding it across â
(oneâs
mind skirting around the Christ archetype)
â
a few more and it reaches the lonely shore with its cypress-knee gnomes, moss
awnings, âŠ
(shape)shift
at night
My father stood at the end of the family campâs pier. At its
farthest reach, a covering, underneath the covering a rusting countertop with a
sink and a trashcan. He fileted redfish and speckled trout, maybe a drum or
two. He couldnât stop talking about how his new double-welled sink sped up the process.
Itâs deep deep, he says. Look, he adds, a chute with a pipe going right down into the water there. This, on
top of his new Mister Twister filet knife. The bladesâ back and forth make a
sound like a rolled R enclosed in the mouth, a silent working thing like a new
John Deere riding mower. Poo-yi, he
says. To this day, I do not know how easily the electric knife moves through
the speckâs see-through meat. I do know the click of the hook yanked out of the
redâs mouth, the way it must not hurt, its lips like plastic â threshold for
the low croak whispering catch, release,
catch, release.
the bronzed
crucifix transforms the threshold
into
something other and â
the
dumpster rental company
boasts
a totem of recycled cross
widower wishes for wifeâs chill
essentially a disobedient act
donât
carry away the traiteur with her remedies
passerby is told jumbo shrimp at 5.95/lb but who knows
where?
countenance best
described as weather-beaten, the all of someone slouching toward payday
prick
of burr dents skin
the gutted junkyardâs congregants lined and solemn
in their pews, yet no one is truly lovely
everyoneâs got a prayer on their head, a haunting
fishing reports are
true
as Jesus is true as
carpet-dented knees
are true as the heaven
that catches bedside
pleas
are true as
flyswatter-
patterned buttock is
true
as the curfew is true
as
the loup-garou is
true as âŠ
shrimpers step from boat to dock, dock to boat,
dew rags,
taut and muscular, crowning their heads
black eyed peas on the 1st with tough parts of
bacon squeezed between buttered white â fava
beans
in wallets, pockets, tight fists â some still have nothing
the
morals oversaturated with bleakness: make the world when
faced
with the familiar landscape of
where two walls meet
frog
legs taste like chicken just
as much as anything else tastes like it
âDonât youâ â âBut
it looks like those shake-up snowy things.â
â
daughter, turning over and over
a jar of pickled quail eggs,
and mother reprimanding; Piggly Wiggly,
just outside of Houma, Louisiana
everything powerful here is invisible, which is not to say
imaginary; dually trucks rut the gravel roads, the divet yanks another steering
wheel
on a scale of 1-10, how pretty your women, how pretty your
tides, how good your fishing?
[1-3: poor | 4-7: good | 8-10: excellent]
Cocodrie,
Terrebone Bay, Louisiana (8762928)
â
5: women, tides, fishing
the same scaly hands feed the Sunday wafer, scrape the
scales
everything
powerful here is abbreviated,
which
is not to say premature
chances
are youâve got your grave dug for you, the only thing is keeping other things out of it before youâre ready
We woke at 4am because we needed to be the first ones to
Bayou Dularge. After only 3 hours on the water, we kept 247 specks, all big enough.
We knew it was over limit and illegal. Remember the camp named DADâS PAD WHEN
MOMâS MAD? Where it used to be? Itâs all skeleton now. We laughed when we first
saw its bare stilts and the toilet atop one of them, a true and lonesome
throne. Mustâve been a bad storm to do it in. You told me if I ever needed a
whooping, weâd take that half-hour boat to whateverâs left of the campâs floor,
youâd sling me over your knee and give me my whooping. 247 and we couldnât even
close the ice chest. Specks flapped at our feet. You told me to keep my head on
a swivel in case one tried to jump out. We cleared out the console with our
tackle boxes and lifejackets and filled it with water and more specks. 247 and
no one believed us. I wanted pictures but you said, No itâs between just us.
some
have simply resorted to houseboat
the devil is beating his wife: sunny out
and rainy
Jesus is moving furniture: sunny out and
thundering
We had to keep ourselves occupied, you know, living in a
fishing town on the coast. One bad move and the devil could suspend inertia and
bloop, weâd slide right into the Gulf. I tried my hardest not to curse in front
of family, but did more under my breath. We lit spiders on fire with just
sunlight and shards of glass, poured alcohol down ant piles and watched them
float and sizzle, wore our bare feet on the gravel road to the marina, filled
rubber boots with minnows and let them go in our kiddie pool. If the night
before held high tide, thereâd be frogs hopping against the screen porch in the
morning. We had a field day with bubble wrap on the odd occasion that a truck
dropped us a package. I hadnât realized how much hurt the world held.
thereâs something to be said for unsaid
should
we do the Lordâs work and plant
the
blessed candle overnight? If so,
how
many? â
(the
way what is destructive blurs
what
is above it)
donât you see it? the camps are risen, risen in order to escape the corpse-laden marsh â
Originally from New Iberia, Louisiana, Nicholas Molbert now lives and writes in Central Illinois. He has work published in or forthcoming from American Literary Review, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Permafrost, and South Carolina Review among others.