where are they, where are they do they look like us do they walk and talk and take their treatment and go on about their business and nobody has to know how
will we know
are they not put away
2.5 million people undiagnosed leprosy
who would you tell, who would need to be told if you are not contagious, do you tell your lover
if you work with children, the elderly, the sick in a hospital, a hospice, a nursing home, on a delivery floor
who needs to know if you are in treatment, if you have been treated, if you are free to go touching
touching
touching
other people’s skin
the world now is empty what do they do with all their time? the lepers in the leprosarium
are making their beds are looking from their windows are using their toilets are changing their socks and now and now
this tale begins once in time as long as there has been a time
we have been among you we have your face, your eyes the wicked witch, the beast, the monster under the bed has nothing on us even to mention us is certain death
isolation and care (to be at the edge) “stone-dead” each hour its task the idea of home as trapped in place, marked and marked off by time’s exclusivity
so within the walls so without
at Carville
will remain
human remains
a hoard of stories held up after the storm
flooding the land is an old tale of mythic proportions as any illness is to being human
to live surrounded by water: a calculated risk a block of prose that imagines it’s an answer
on hope’s last raft bound for surer climes walking miles of levee trying to gauge what will hold trying to assess who is dangerous cap-sized, this too shall float
in any hand that handles the discarded what can it possibly mean any more to be Southern gone south from what to what that they were ferried down river the city’s treacherous curve, its crescent namesake the world rounded by its unspoken fear
to every tremble its stillness hand in hand as in this silence to its own unmaking various lives unspoken, day to day unfolds
and if I were writing this life why not? even here people fall in love get married, why just last week I won at Bingo and now am sewing a red blouse that will bloom against my skin, the color, I mean here in a place obsessed with skin, funny how the color of it doesn’t mean much black and white is not what matters but sick or well part or whole person or
I call it my house because I lay my head here even though no one here knows my name
no one is dreaming having fallen in love with a brown bird outside the window and sings a little song o, happy day
the sun came out again and you are here
Elkborn Plantation burned to the ground by an angry mob rather than it be opened as a leprosarium near New Orleans’ city limits
a city wounded by fear
morally, if not literally, contagious
rather it focuses on memory
alluvial bird foot
to unify a persecuted community
the word New Orleans
it’s a musical line tracing halfway around the globe from one vast continent to this small unanchored city cracked on its own backbeat, feathered and sequined a delicate disorder, how we disappear
exchange this battered day for wolf teeth for toothy grin, for jawbone to play upon take out the color of your burden for daylight’s surmise
it was once a wooden city burned down once a city of brick that sank beneath the water line
there are only two kinds of levees: those that have failed and those that will fail
of the city caught in the crest of its own dead wave as on scalloped leaves irregular bay creolized
[origin Frenchcréole, earlier criole from Spanish criollo prob. from Portuguese crioulo black person born in Brazil, home-born slave, from criar nurse, breed from Latin crearecreate verb]
what do you have to pay your passage the boat man’s pleasure an ecstasy of divining can you say your hands were truly empty when you boarded
the moment of the shatter before the shards emerge the thread of song is never-ending no need to convince us of a water particles’ particular identity speak harshly about a lake season after season exacting in its return
the wind drops three shades cooler and the darkest clouds roll towards the east crossing over the landscape and the mud is the mud sprinkled with white shells rain in its slanted design a smooth black line underscoring important passages the way through language from disaster
but what of this world that is, now, a single violent gesture
Carville stopped accepting residents
in 1986
the last group of people in America to be legally banished due to a contagious infection based on the common social construction that the body would fall apart not hold to a cohesive narrative as a rupture in language disrupted life story where the I was interrupted and reassigned this identity of unclean touch
sin- king into anonymity the displaced marginalization reserved for lepers mentally ill criminals homeless
make no distinctions heart of hearts where the sun rises prefer the shadow to the silent
