Grand Isle
    New Orleans, 1965

There were days we drove for water
past refineries where sulfur made
the sky eggy and my mouth burn. Picnic days
when all we'd find were beaches spilled
with catfish, thousands of spiny shells.
We drove all that way from the city's drained
pools that fissured from mourning Jim Crow.
Couldn't just turn around like we'd never
made it, putting to waste the day and gas.
By noon we'd settle on some beach, the water
dark and warm, before we'd look, any of us,
to the horizon, its far platforms and rigs.
Expecting grandeur only to find it in the surfeit
of fish on the whiskered sand. Was it then we learned
the cunning of names? On the last beach
my sister's hair climbs for the clouds over
sow-thick waves that buckled like tin roof flashing.
Their steely breakers clap, far thunder. For lightning,
her hair bolts into the curdled sky.

Jamie O'Halloran lives in Los Angeles and has work published
or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Yankee, Solo, among other
places. She is co-author with Jim Natal of the chapbook The
Landscape From Behind, VC Press 1997, and a chapbook of her
poems was recently published by The Inevitable Press.