The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by W.M. Rivera

City of the Dead

After Hurrican Katrina, words for my Grandmother:

Jeannette McLeod Hayes Moser, 1899-1965

In summer heat you decomposed in your city’s

“city of the dead.”  Now you float with Katrina

wet in the current swelter—a pulp fiction

captive in a cryptic world.

In New Orleans, the dead get pushed aside,

swept off their resting place on racks (built 

to fend against high water and land’s lack); 

then, swept into burial bags, and sprinkled back

on top the previous layers of ancestral ash— 

to let the latest grief pile on. 

It’s not just the hurricane brings you up,

gnaws at me once more—your presence, this absence;

something I thought settled, over-

flowing the confines of this flooded site.