Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Nicole Cooley
Day of Commemoration
August 29, 2006
When I stand outside the Souvenir Mart on Canal Street, I can still
smell water through the cracked storefront window.
When one year later mold’s dull black edge could choke you.
When the woman from St. Bernard who sells T-shirts in the Quarter
told me she was evacuated to the parish prison.
When she says, “if we leave we take the city with us.”
*
When the first pastor at the Convention Center Ceremony insists: the
city has a body.
When he stands before the blue serge curtain on stage and explains the
storm: a birth gone wrong.
When we now wait in the “Delivery Room of Opportunity,” he says and
the audience says Amen, Amen.
When the storm was a cesarean birth, he says. The storm was a surgeon’s
scalpel cutting open the city’s body.
*
When we walk through the bright hot afternoon down Poydras to the
Superdome, shelter where I begged my parents to go.
When I walk behind The Black Men of Labor and Popular Ladies Social
Aid and Pleasure Club, behind the Tremé Brass Band.
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