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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems and pictures. We pair poets with poets and photographers with photographers. Each pair produces a sequence of new works responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry and photography to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice in a wide range of places. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here, look at photographs here.
 

Café du Monde


Years ago we left late winter

for incipient azalea blooms and that river,

smaller than imagination and muddier,

muddy as the coffee ground with chicory

and frothed with milk and poured

for us to drink alongside that selfsame river.

Upon which so much depended,

though the levee was so high we had to climb the stairs

to find it there, that slow grey going somewhere.


Cranked open back home, the canister of coffee

emanated There: the crinch of our sandals

on the powdered-sugar floor, the damp

curl of hair. It didn’t taste the same

though when that can ran out we ordered more

and more until the river spilled.


Then we ordered more again.

The New Orleans of the mind

now lives behind a scrim but still the croak

of a fogey’s “When the Saints Come Marching In”

makes its way across.


Meanwhile, really . . . .

Whatever goes on goes on down there

for whoever’s left and whoever’s come

to see what’s left.


Up here, it’s about to be winter again.

In a vacant lot, beside concrete steps

that rise five times then end without an edifice,

a little chicory still blooms, blue as nothing.