Trauma Note

What color are errors? In my phone there’s an app. In the app there’s a place for notes. In the notes live thoughts addressed to you. In the thoughts you wear a dress of pampas grass. The thing that tempers fire is flood. Smeared in oily mud during cleanup, a tweekerish dude rolls by asking if we lost a kayak. It saved his life. It floated by him when he could no longer walk through the waist high water. Trying to get to his mother’s house. In my house I am a mother. My mother comes in and out of focus, a caregiver, a survivor, a noun that breaks into plural. On the porch bodies sit smoking. In language, I queer ourselves. I pet the grass. The water hasn’t yet reached the top step. Why hasn’t the electricity gone out? Out there in the flames I’m not imaginative. I see my body cast into a life I can barely watch, arm wands light up and leg cups overflow. We travel deep into the house diving in and out of notes while the river rises all around us. My sister’s old Jeep, submerged, drowning her volumes on astrology and healing spirits. How do we get to work? Wiping the mud off the ghost photos with rags, laying them out in the river’s sunlight. Every fall the coast reliably grows its grass. Do you want to save your brother’s old clothes, Jacob asks, holding open the lid of the flooded trunk. No. But, I am lying. Trying. In living error.