The sky tongues its way into houses,
into hot water cornbread rising
out of the pan. Someone sings trouble
the water, adds flour to roux, parboils
rice. Rosary-fisted, someone kneels
to the floor, says, swallow me back,
Oh Lord. Death, a box packed
with photographs, quilts, trumpets,
song. Here, the river erases each street’s face,
buries houses where they stand:
street-scattered, drowned. Each window
bursts, cowrie shells thrown into the dark
floodwater. Tonight, it wants bodies,
will catch a man who looks
for a dropped cigarette, brand him
with briars, mud, the bones of dead birds,
before raising him against a splintered fence,
tree limbs, a car upended in the yard.
Alex Streiff is the fiction editor of The Journal.