Barrel Dog - Thanksgiving 2014

American Thursday

The hotel never closes

The front doors do not have locks

Used chains during Katrina

Housekeeping, maintenance, front desk

Stay in shifts like another twenty-four of the three-sixty-five

Families banking about minimum wage

Brown skin Betty’s and Joaquin’s rolling carts

In the service elevator as I roll out for from behind my desk for paid vacation day

Vegetables tossed in olive oil and rosemary from a garden

Soil easy to grow the privilege of alkaline and sun

Contemplating how my thighs need a tan

Uncle driving to the hunting camp

Pulled over going 75 in a 50

Officer lets him off with a warning

Pulled over again going 50 in a 35

Got a ticket there, pulled his shirt up from his waistband 

Jokes, “One out of two ain’t bad”

Had one of the guns in the passenger seat

Crucifix hanging from the rearview

Dreaming of whitetails

A week ago

Poet friend says, “Yes sir”

After a strap that started, “What are you doing boy?”

Officer wants in, pulls him out

Arms spread, tucks back

Tulane sweatshirt on the passenger seat

Alumni homecoming Yulman stadium

He was architecture; I was business

Ferguson is on fire and the damn country

Is fixed to stampede Wal-Mart for the wrong reasons

Poultry and football, hands in prayer circles

Barrels and beer chasing a limping doe in the woods

Bleeding sending the Carolina Cur in a faceoff

Growling as the doe bolted because the bullet did not drop her

She ran, the man in an orange hat follows the growl of the dog

Pow! the echo waves the silence through the trees

Meat, he has a license all legal to the butcher

On the land his daddy owned, that his daddy owned

In Mississippi acreage in places where they name Wilson Road

After the family that hunts there

Acorn fed, natural, no GMO’s, no CAFO lot

Balance in the images of what one thing is and another is not

Of where land comes from when you find arrow heads in the creek bed

Of what another man’s daddy’s daddy would hear in the sound of a dog

The benefit of a clear shot

The trees not so thick

The meat so close for the taking

The branches fell at just the right angle for the sunlight

The wind in a man’s face

As the doe becomes dinner

An officer tells an architect to be careful boy

A hotel has the cleanest porcelain toilet in New Orleans

I have the privilege of a rocking chair, a sunset
The legs of the table I am blessed to raise my fork from

A full belly and a space to write
Finding thanks, appreciation, responsibility