Photo: Infrogmation of New Orleans, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsWikimedia Commons I drink a beer that tastes like lemons. The TV is loud. The man next to me, a stranger turned comrade in our mutual attack to get the attention of the bartender, is smiling. He...
A different kind of sunlight that day—the day Bisque sat out on the stoop, shucking pistachios and the gleam of the air settled in on his face, casting half a shadow, a shadow full of cracked thoughts and known uncertainties. The day itself sounded like a broken...
After “Dear Arecelus” by Patrick Royal I wish I had thought of stealing literary fruitfrom dead writers’ houses, like plums, and slurpingat its meat and sweetness to expose their pits;instead, I spend an hour at Carousel Barin New Orleans nursing one glasswith ghosts...
Less than 100 yards down the sloughthis swamp’s so thick it’s easy to imagine a world where carsdon’t exist, where a breeze is worth more than gold.The water under your boat, the mess of palmettos lining the shore,the bald cypress blocking sun— everything, all of it,...
Pull your boat up to the shore here nowwith hundreds of pelicans in flight above the island, their nests scatteredin the mangrove bushes all over this place, and you’d never guessit was a ghost of itself five years ago, just a ring of stone with barely enoughgrass to...
My first night in rehab, I was put in a room with a heroin addict. I was groggy from the medicine the nurse had given me to soften the cut from alcohol—for an alcoholic or for any kind of addict for that matter, immediately quitting could cause some internal issues...
