The country spent weeks emptying the blood from backyard pools. Pink sheep bleated in muddy fields. Sodden clothes hung from taut laundry lines. The rusty Mississippi ran red for months, and the crops for years afterward were a vibrant, aching green, and the crawfish leaping from the waters were massive and sweet. The city of New Orleans rose again, newer, so vibrant in those headstrong days, glistening metal barbicans and balconies and the steel of midnight jazz and the taste of cayenne on her lips while her husband sleeps in the warm parlour below and the green bayou dampness making the wallpaper pucker and peel and the mildew stains on the plaster mimicking the faces of saints and swollen-cheeked angels and jazz trumpeters, Louie, Kermit, and Israfel tearing down the walls we have and the walls that separate the morning from the night from the time when we were shameless, womb inviolate, crouched and protected by the imagination of birth. The midnight strip club neon lights blaze and splash off the oil-tainted puddles and smell of silver and stale Abita and bargain store perfume, patchouli, and rosewater and the spicy seduction promised by sloe-eyed immigrants with the grime of Eastern Europe embedded in their pores and the roads to Krakau and Minsk etched in the craquelure around their eyes and in the stretch marks on their bruised bellies.
What compelled me to pick up these journals and begin again I do not know. I am sitting in the backyard, magnolias aflame near Pornography's grave. I realize that much of what I have already written does little to explicate the world you live in now. I was focused too much on the world in which I was born, the world I wanted to live in, and truly gave little thought to this strange, untethered time of the Device, these long days of blood and machine. Gambling is tending his garden with care; he has trouble walking, more from age than from the android's bite. I hear Wantoness in her room, crying yet again.
