for Jacqui Disler
the ghost of any breeze
will fly
under the stars
I serve
buoyant
born of the air
of silence and invisibility
and that which swims past you
in algae water or
silt water or
fresh water sewer spilled
into the primal residuals of
Lake Ponchartrain
she rises
like a bride
a nun of love and the moon
an endangered white bird
go up the delta
up the river
crossing in still light at Memphis
curving at Osceola – a seasonless banal yellow that
is camouflage to
shoot outs and battles
a vortex of death
reach
the steamy fingers
not now an eleven o clock
push at your shins
bubbling like kittens
past Marion still in lockdown
and it will take your eyes
the gridiron of
farms to factories
the ravening the rapine
the sprawl of petit-bourgeois
in insulated ghettos
the sky at noon is pink in Illinois
each day a metal haze
mixed luck
a greater throng of
people in Chicago
where ya can’t get
neither spark or rain
2
as people we suffer
by the constraints of
our own stupidity
thus we birth upon each other
pain and evil
ecosystems broken by automobile air conditioning.
be aware that even jogging reserve officers
huff discourse on moral superiority.
they have forgotten the nightmare
that every crucifixion is a carnival
that goodness gets arrested
and that you can buy a flag
at a truck stop
along with a burnt plate of liver and onions
species fascism is ignored here
because the cashier
brings the counter-forgotten car keys
she’s a snappy senior
on the swing shift
that includes Studs at breakfast after Last Call
my flag is stamped
made in America
is made of cotton
submergence
the vapor of the dead
is always on the skin
3
but now I smoke the ash
to a transience in evolution
a drug induced passive dejection
parallel in my fancy
to the chart of toxins
let me be explicit:
landfill proportions
disappearing wetlands
the backwash of river levee
and water rechanneling
is coastal erosion…
she’s a wet thing
a folding of moisture
with ready caress
easy in air or earth
stunned only by the burnt circles
of government testing
innocent to the tortures of
super-colliders and
hurricane walls
the Americanization of Louisiana:
more brutality in the mud
legacy paraded as franchise novelty
her response is fast creeping vines
a dream come true
a misspelling of the DNA
a raw crime in a sorry state.
![Su Zi Su Zi](https://www.unlikelystories.org/sites/default/files/su%20zi.jpeg)
Su Zi is a 2023 Zoeglossia Fellow. She has been writing life-long, with publications in poetry, fiction, essay and interview/essay form, both in literary periodicals and special interest publications for equestrian life. She's a maker of art in a variety of forms, including painting, printmaking, artistbooks, and pottery, and publisher of an artist-made, eco-feminist, chapbook series called Red Mare. Her latest book is from Hysterical Books.