I am honor and toll.

Take care where you step the tiger lilies crowd together. The stones talk, telling my foot of assignations in courtyards, in the St. Louis Hotel, under the rotunda, the stones tell me to lay my cheek next to the auction block that never knew a nape of neck, it would not holler SOLD for $105. I am no longer looking for my stolen daughter Anna Océane, rumored to be in this shackle-like city saturated with slavery. I am the Dueling Oaks; I am every day and one Sunday in 1919 when ten duels were fought. I am ten dead men. I am plod and traipse. In an alley I lay me down to sleep beside the black ants and jasmine, I am watching the ghost ladies in their bustles and hoop skirts lower themselves over a curb. They whisper that their men who wore the grey return from the fields in their stench and flayed flesh seeking their beds. They’ve never heard the name Anna Océane. Ask the crib girls who lie in lean-to’s giving their bodies to the riverboat steam engine stokers and coal shovelers who bathe once a summer. Ask the midnights when lovers speak secretly, when they want each other’s breath. I am full of tossings to and fro. My newborn’s eyelids are now be thirteen years old. I am praise for the mullet’s ascension into paradise, every gar fish and crayfish, every egg. I am beggar and vagabond. The wanderers tell me to pocket all the goodness licked from the dance of a Rice Coast princess’s toes. Ask the vagrant and hobo for Anna Océane. Fan away the heat raised from the loins of old Spanish conquistadors and their Choctaw mistresses.

Take care. I am crab ragout and chocolate mousse.

I am braised with malaria and yellow fever, and I sink deeper into the bittersweet. I am haul and lumber. An unmarked grave on Rampart Street where traveling workers make prayers has seen my child alive. A raven brings them bread and flesh. The lost Creole spirits sheltering on houseboats tell me to lift the tablecloth where oysters are set down with comets. Ask the girl whose fat pink mistress can sell her upriver. Ask the creamy-cold octopus beaded with purple, white. The neck-like, the waist-like and ankle-like. Feast on my fingers or tickle them with feathers. Keep looking, keep asking. I am thigh and buttock. I am the animal who smells of azaleas and rape. I am Big-Headed Anna listening to the last sound in the grass.