EVACUATION SONNET
My first displacement hangover, same dreams
where an ex-lover or some other life
antagonist fills me with guilt before
I even wake up with a dull tension
headache. News from home oscillates between
crisis and heroism. Combing the
outage map, magnifying it to spot
rare green streaks. There are mile long lines at gas
stations, and much shorter lines at the bar
serving free hot meals. The consistent nag
of the there's something I forgot feeling
along with the realization of all
the loose ends that are rotting, withering
back in my dark, perhaps wet, empty house.
REENTRY SONNET
No one dwelling here should have to explain
loneliness, but I asked for her report.
A needing to know how far the thread of
disconnect runs around the spools of some.
Or if unspooled how does one gather string,
threaded through hem or in a web of self?
Have you seen the chainsawed segments of trees
in the neutral ground, at the rim of a
street corner? They are not lonely but sad,
a partitioned reconstituted sad,
not quite the sad of chopped up body parts
but something similar in the kingdom
plantae. Loneliness insists on absence
bricks signaling a past home’s foundation.
KEEPING UP WITH THE NEIGHBORS
The next-door neighbor is a tow truck zealot. When my guest’s sloppy parking job nudged into his driveway, he scrawled on a piece of paper and used her wiper to pin it across the windshield: People from Rhode Island are stupid or assholes- you choose.
The couple on the other side of my duplex strike me as more-radical-than-thou. They keep bees in their backyard and sew our shared front lawn with wildflowers. But they take little interest in me or mine, besides a cordial hi or a curt knock at the front door when my dog crawls into their compost bin.
The neighbor perpendicular to me grills religiously in front of his house. This lures my dog to lick at the grease spots that have seeped into his sidewalk. We’ve exchanged pleasantries and he once blessed me with a bag of apples, without ever learning each other’s names.
My neighbor around the corner has rock-star syndrome. It’s him, his guitar, and an amplified classic rock backing track for an audience of whoever walks by on the way back from buying beer at the gas station.
The short couple who live across the street, in a brick ranch house with a low sloping roof, gleefully court my dog’s affection. I stopped to let them revel in canine-parent role play, until they let it slip that they weren’t in favor of removing Confederate monuments. Then I cut them out of my heart and my dog-walking radius.
The neighbor living with his family at the head of the block reminds me of Gilbert Gottfried, without the signature gravelly voice. He has mammoth sunflowers growing in his expansive yard and a fig tree that spills into the street, like a signpost for a free-for-all eatery.
But it is the reclusive neighbor that lives alone near the back end of the block, in a white house with shapely trimmed hedges and an ivy-covered façade, who captivates my curiosity. After four years of walking past his fence twice a day and nodding my head in greeting, I recently met his gardening gaze and told him how I felt— Yours is the most beautiful house on the block.
Danielle “Danny” Unger is a poet and therapist who has called New Orleans home for a little over a decade. She is currently in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans, where she is an associate editor for Bayou Magazine. Her first chapbook, Dear Egg, is forthcoming from Tilted House.