Bolivar Ferry
As we cross over the water, moon jellies
clap the causeway, filmy, phosphorescent,
Bolivar a black pearl of a bayou.
I swear I can smell the specters skimming
the seawall and salt-caked planking
of abandoned factories, Gulf air
so glutted with ghosts our tongues
turn gray. Dune plants plume like undines
in the lagoon and a tangle of tanzanite
colored nets dangle from the mosquito
fleets. We watch rapt as red-tailed hawks
rim the swampland, a black-necked
stilt cranes its bill, stalking the marsh,
and a yellow-crowned night heron screams,
the queen of the sea. Underbellies of sand-
dwelling sanderlings glimmer in the seagrass
where nettles swarm, this sin city a symphony
of tentacles and triple-digit heat, turbulent
whitecaps more sulphur than azure, rich
with gypsum and ocean jasper. Shorewinds
whip white horses lush on the water’s edge,
sea-rose oleanders overlay the inlet in a
lunatic fringe. Broadway shivers down
the spine of the island where Bettie’s brass-
bound souvenir box locks itself, clutching her
secrets like a prayer shawl, the ghosts of Galveston
little hat tricks rattling our brackish bones loose.
Brood XXII
The summer before the great storm, the magicicadas sputter
and scrim, a whispered chorus chirring like wire brushes on snare
drums. This Baton Rouge brood of stragglers rises four years
early from their subterranean chambers, hatchlings bunching
in branches, nymphs cloaking themselves in crackling exoskeletons
to emerge immortal, imago, feeding on the xylem fizz of root
sap and molting into winged things. Let their tymbals throb,
a squeeze box of ribs buckling one after another in a glamorous
babble. My sisters and I spill onto the balcony, marveling
at the sea of sound, up close the caterwauling of a million cats,
the mating dance of an alien race, the lament of jilted lovers doomed
to sing their throats out, to rasp and dance and clamor until the room
is all on fire, red-eyed and green-skinned, wings as membranous
as embryos. Let us from our safe distance hear them shrilling
the word pharaoh over and over on a loop like a prayer. Enthralled
by their frenzy, let us choose the fugues to drag us from the deep.
Let the Pretenders hijack my world, flying into the townhouse
like pigeons from hell. But half a year later, let it be Stevie who
delivers me from my hospital bed with her cicatrix of black skirts,
a vespiary of veined wings reverberating through the ash
trees, limpid as vapors. Let the brood report back to the Muses:
This is the season she emerges. This is the year she’s reborn.
LeeAnn Olivier, MFA, is the author of the chapbooks Doom Loop Wonderland (The Hunger Press, 2021) and Spindle, My Spindle (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in The Missouri Review, Rockvale Review, Driftwood Press and elsewhere. Originally from Louisiana, LeeAnn now teaches English at a college in Fort Worth, Texas. She is a survivor of domestic violence and breast cancer. In December, LeeAnn went into acute liver failure due to a medication injury and received an emergency liver transplant. Much of her recent work explores the power of the natural world to aid in the healing process.
