New Orleans Love Poem

As my tongue runs

down your spine in bed,

outside my parents’ house

sea levels are rising,

the city filling, flooding,

predicted to disappear

in a hundred years. Outside,

the sky is glazed with light,

soap white. The Mississippi

shimmers. So much beauty.

So how wrong is it

to stay in this room?

To hold each other,

to keep our bodies

safe and alone together?

This house—pink stucco

latticed with mold,

water bubbles in the streets

from storm drains. Asphalt cracks.

And on our screens

bad news unfurls—

War. Fire. Drought.

In my childhood room, you mouth me open.

I close my hands

over your shoulders

then remember driving

to pick up our daughters

while a story about “ecological grief”

played on NPR,

the summer after my mother died.

Outside: magnolia tree lashed with rain.

Tongue. Mouth. Hair.

How wrong is it now to take solace

in the ordinary?

We slide out of our clothes.

A hundred years from now

when the world churns on

without us, the bridge drowns,

braceleted with light.

And here we are, in another

winter of wrong

temperatures. I slip on

my mother’s coat, flash

its red silk lining, invisible skin.

How I wish I could fill its pockets

not with smoke or flood water.