after the photograph by Frank Relle (2025)

 
 
I was born on the edge
of death, a ghost forest
lit from the bayou below

I was born over-exposed
underground, in the roots
of a dying cypress tree

I was born and then I was swaddled
into a boat, unmoored,
shoved off

to a new mother
and new father
up north. It was winter

when I was born:
a new year, a hard freeze
and everything sallow.

I was born on the other side
of this swamp: a pocket
of prairie just across

the state line. An absence
filled the space where I was
born. The sky

filled the stretch between
the trees. The gold turned
to green and frost

to floodwater.
The fleece around me
unspooled into rabbitbrush,

parish-less. Parent-
ess—my mother,
she went on

without me. My father—
a shadow in the bayou’s
murky water—

raised another
son in my stead
but still, I was born

and lived and floated off
and now here I am
drifted to this

cradle of cypress,
again and for the first time.
I am here and hungry

for the magic promised
by the proper aperture,
an open shutter, dawning

across this wet burrow—all
these trees swallowed whole
by the water that birthed us

has become us despite
how far we’ve been
pulled by its almost-current.