Storms with new names came earlier every summer. Suddenly, we were all reading books about moss and menopause. Pirate vines came in the windows and crawled along the ceiling. Translucent frogs warbled on our windowpanes, tiny organs visible inside the inflated cellophane of their bodies like umbilical jewels. We unsealed our own skins daily for afternoon rains and became just porous enough to survive. In the parish prison, floodlines still ring jail cells.

Lush, exuberant March grass gives me pleasure when it rushes up after the winter rains. It’s more than the relief of green of living in a drought state, where summers are dry enough to make death. It’s the pleasure of knowing how a horse loose on this grass would eat joyfully until the sugars curdled in her belly, and maybe it would hurt but oh she would bring her whole being into her jaw and tongue, the taste, the juice. The teeth tearing soft blades, grinding the promised season, how she inhales the new. She is magnetized, hot and humming like a content little bumblebee, she would eat until she crashes. I can feel this, too, because I have spent so many hours beside horses, leaning on their scapulas listening to them eat. Hundreds of hours feels like hundreds of years watching their delight invited in on the uneven surfaces of teeth smeared in green juice. That engine heart rumbles me with pleasure as if her big body were mine. As she devours these first shares of spring sweetness, another load of bombs slips down the train tracks towards the port, heading towards some other humans’ babies on the other sides of unreadable walls.