Really Good Poems by Alanna Bailey

In the Middle of a Field down in Louisiana

                         Driving through Plaquemines Parish

An overturned cement draining pipe lies heavy,

protruding up from the overgrown

weeds like an elephant who couldn’t finish

the pilgrimage to the graveyard. On

the side it is tagged. Graffiti, blue and white,

loud and graceful as a break-beat:

PARADISE LOST.

There was no warning for the scenery. Made

less sense than witnessing a beached

whale or a silver tooth amidst an ivory mouth.

Such an exhausted desire in that unruly, blonde

terrain. Abandon personified in a pasture.

I wonder who, in this field, long ago, once

kissed the seeds, bent and weaving in

the heat, who first begged the green back

in the beginning.

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