Boom (a rough draft)

Fourteen on and seven off. Keep your head down,
do what people qualified to handle messes like this say.
Buoyant with oil, two crabs surf the pulling tide.
A habit I’ve adopted people say I need to shake

is naming every bird I treat. Perform a triage good
enough to rescue Alpha through November.
By Whiskey I’m the one who’s drowning. Dish soap
comes in buckets for their wings. Inject a tablespoon

of bismuth subsalicylate past Whiskey’s beak. He coughs,
and dies. Cousins of mine lay out boom and talk
of football season revving up. Them Hurricanes
is looking good. Think the Cardinals got a chance

with Wright at LSU? Everybody loving on the Saints.
Everybody smarter than the Army Corp of Engineers.
Sick of hearing its a spill. Sick of worry on the news
about the Keys. They tell me I’m supposed to dump

his oily body in a bag and date it. Keep a running toll,
they say, so we know how much they’ll have to pay.
Jindal, Vitter, Gao, and both the Landrieus praise
the parish president who hasn’t slept well in a month.

Bait shops closing. Vietnamese fishermen scramble
for a translator keeps them in the loop. Yugoslavs
protect their oyster beds with anything not nailed.
I’m calling it: It’s fuck you you fucking fucks redux.

Last one left in Plaquemines Parish, don’t forget
to turn the lights off. Companies still in the black
refuse to pay for anything not handled with receipts.
There isn’t enough dawn to douse the delta clean.