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streets not flooded
look like a garbage dump
refrigerators on trucks
coming for bodies
with a police escort.
Past the bayou,
6 Labrador retrievers
walking in a pack
down the highway
snakes in the water
an old woman,
legs covered in red scars
black swollen bodies
a city in near death
the poorest, the sickest
blood out of control,
diabetic in the hot sun
little children, barefoot
holding all the things
they folded over in a sheet
People who have no
idea where they're going
if you find an arm,
is it a body?
four mangled houses
pancaked on the rail tracks
tombstones poke up
thru the ground
You just line up and
start walking and find an odor
Seven days into this,
your nose is the biggest clue
Lyn Lifshin's Another Woman Who Looks Like Me was published by Black Sparrow in 2006 and selected for the 2007 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Also out in 2006 was The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian from Texas Review Press. Lifshin's recent books include Before It's Light (Black Sparrow, 2000), Cold Comfort (Black Sparrow, 1997), In Mirrors (Presa Press), Upstate: An Unfinished Story (Foot Hills) and The Daughter I Don't Have (Plan B Press). Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines and she is the subject of a film, Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass, from Women Make Movies. Her web site is www.lynlifshin.com.