disorder reigns

2

Last December, I saw my first alligator gar. City Park was decked with a shamble of lights; I was hiding from enthusiastic school children in the greenhouse with a half-full cup of buttered rum. She circled the poinsettia-wreathed pool as if she were an ice floe that never intended to melt. She was beautiful and prehistoric, and I fell in love, as I often do with fish, getting tipsy as the lights bled through the hexagonal windows and the hothouse ferns breathed around me.

I feel the tug, too, of the bull sharks in Lake Pontchartrain, the rays that come almost to shore, the catfish whose heads litter the Mississippi beaches. Everything for me always comes back to water: what’s living in it, how much I could see if I tipped my head under the waves.

As I write this, the whole East Bank of New Orleans is under a water boil advisory. This comes days after water the color of squid ink spewed from my tap. The city waited seven hours to tell us power surges at the Carrolton Water Plant have made the water (possibly) unsafe to drink. An excuse to drink more beer, someone tweets, and I take him up on it by drinking an Andygator at 2:30 in the afternoon.

As long as it’s clear again, it’s perfectly fine to drink, the water board told me when I emailed them about the black water in my sink—no dangerous pathogens, no mutant arrow squid threading themselves through the pipes. Today I can’t use it to wash my face.

Most cities would crumble under this degree of uncertainty. But then again, most cities are not home to three-hundred-pound gars with scales like the armor of knights errant. When I feel particularly frustrated, I think of how easy it is to spot fish in Bayou St. John. Or maybe it’s just that I spend a long time looking for them. In the city of inefficiency, there’s no reason to rush.

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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