Sixteen Years to the Day Another Hurricane Reverses

the Mississippi’s coursemy father waits in our house

beside the riverand I dream my mother drowning

water closing over her head in my dreams she is always

dying in the too warm Gulf then pricked alive again

fairy-tale spindle my friends and I text each other

to describe dreams in which our mothers

ask us why they’re dead New Orleans is the place

around which I uselessly orbit after Katrina typing

my mother’s name Missing Person Jacki Cooley

into search engines sixteen years ago my daughters asked

what is a hurricane’s eye what can it see

then my mother was alive refusing to leave the city

now I text my father how high is the water are there tornadoes

phone and electric outI wish for a slick of river

to spare our house while a new dream about my mother

wrongly comforts she thrashes to the Gulf’s sand floor

where she can’t burn or come apart