disorder reigns

1

I return to New Orleans during the summer termite swarm and open the door to my apartment. Detached wings glint up from the floor—it’s impossible not to step on them, impossible not to think of them swept into my red dustpan. I don't turn on the fan because it’ll throw their bodies back into the air. Dirty wing cells will settle onto my shoulders, mixing with my own dandruff.

I forgive these termites their lives—swaths of them drawn to lights and the oak tree spilling into the street near the hipster pizzeria. Look, I say to my girlfriend. They are pretty against the gnarled trunk, like fairies suspended in some fetal stage. I pretend I could contain them in a jar, that they aren't reminders of what rots and bubbles here so close the swamp.

New Orleans: where nature, in her messiest forms, crowds in. Some nights, I stare at the walls in pre-writing blankness and imagine I'm looking at X-ray slides that expose termites munching through drywall and roaches laying eggs too small to eliminate with a vacuum.

Some cities inspire comfort, warmth, desperate allegiance. For me, New Orleans inspires opposition. I sweep, kill the brown recluse in my shower, ignore the vine swallowing the porch. My office, where I do most of my writing, remains tidy.

Still, in the writing itself, disorder reigns. The Virgin Mary, hellbent on revenge, appears cloaked in a swarm of bluebottles. My poetry book's protagonist, a teen prophet who announces the end of the world, is "a saint of gnats and grease," a town crier whose mouth is crusted with Cheeto powder. The apocalypse he warns of is arriving, not steadily, but in fits and bursts, like a rusty engine clogged with chicken bones.

My girlfriend or I turn on the fan as we settle in to watch DS9, and the wings I've missed fly up as if the termites are enjoying a second bodyless existence. The feral roosters scream from the porch next door. The pianist downstairs plays "Penny Lane" again, accompanied by our home's usual ghost choir of unidentifiable sounds. I'm irritated because, in spite of myself, the sounds will worm their way into my next poem—not the poem I’ve been meaning to write, but the one that will come out nonetheless.

Jennifer Hanks is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Prophet Fever (Hyacinth Girl Press) and The Unsteady Planet (Instar Books), a collaboration with illustrator Julie Herndon, both forthcoming in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as PANK, Arcadia, Autostraddle, Ghost Ocean Magazine, and Menacing Hedge. She was awarded a 2015 summer residency at Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, TN. Follow her at @corsetofscales and http://azura09.tumblr.com/

For more work by Jennifer Hanks, visit her page on our Online Sundries site.

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