Waterlines

TL;DR: The author's experience of writing poetry after Hurricane Katrina, where she had to make lists instead of poetry due to the circumstances.

Abstract: A Katrina I quit poetry and made lists instead: a best-to-worst ranking of MREs, kindnesses from cashiers and Mississippi strangers, the address of the lady I’d never met who offered to foster our dog. One night that October I jerked awake in our rental house with an air mattress stuck to my back, the phrase “big muddy river of stars” ringing in my head, and I don’t know if it was as poet or list maker that I felt through darkness for my poetry notebook turned personal yellow pages. Poetry had been crowded out by names and numbers for insurance adjusters, FEMA hold times, and never-ending punch lists for contractors who always seemed to skip out in the middle of the night. It took a minute of gazing at the ceiling fan to get oriented in this unfamiliar house, and I had to flip the notebook over in my hands like an upside-down psalter before I could remember what used to come to me so easily. I don’t know if it was out of amusement, hope, habit, or faith that I wrote that phrase on a blank page bookmarked with a Polaroid snapshot of me with my sons at the Gulfport Oceanarium, a sea lion pecking the oldest on his cheek.