Southern Legitimacy Statement: New Orleans, the South’s brattiest city is my home. In my mind and experience, there is no such thing as a succinct goodbye, ask my Michigander husband. I live three blocks from Bayou St. John and six blocks from where I was born, the hospital that’s been boarded up for twenty years since hurricane Katrina.
The Telling Hour
Beyond the day’s half point and bells, a persistent breeze, jalousies aslant, scents of ligustrum and clover, newly mown, secrets, then, came in whispers rustles of small leaves, when our teacher, her loud print dress a distraction of marigolds and cherries smearing, sat us in an oval, a long hour elongated, wooden chairs, plentiful as teeth, a lion’s mouth, agape before swallowing prey, her exaggerated neck and torso, giraffe like lowering to her right whispering a single sentence in Eileen’s ear, to teach us how secrets could become fabricated passed around, repeated, each time, our whispers barely audible, ambulatory, ever evolving more complicated, twisted, the secret returning to her completely changed, embellished, grandiose, from seed to tree, no playing. What was kept was hard. I already knew that heaviness, having to harbor truths that couldn’t be told.
