New Orleans is a bouquet of pixilated memories.

A caravan of embers that refuse to turn to ash.

I have tried to write these poems before, you know,

the ones about the infamous storm & its majestic

violence. The flood water that swallowed a city

& then sat still as night.I think often of the things

it took from us that we’ll never know we could

have had. Counterfactuals have always been a bed

of thorns in a room with nowhere else to lay your

head. To imagine what could have been but never

was. The Christmases with my children in the home

where I once opened presents. Kicking a soccer ball

with my daughter against the same playground wall

where I imagined a life of goals & glory. That home

is now silent as a sky of smoke. That wall is no longer

a wall but a smattering of bricks in a lonely field.

I tremble at what I already know is likely, that my

children will not know this city beyond the holidays

& funerals that bring them here. That I no longer

know the city I have always worn like a tattoo.

Nostalgia is a well-intentioned wound. I still remember

the city as something it was kept from becoming.

I am still looking for a language not covered in ash.

I am still mourning the loss of a life that never was.

–Here Nor There by Clint Smith, written about his lifetime home in New Orleans, after Katrina