Christmas Card from Your First Cousin

Emerges from a jambalaya of past voices – crises –
still alive – if half-forgotten – burbling up like Cajun
peppers – colors – spices: can’t escape
kaleidoscopic chaos at the fringes, bubbling surfaces
of these expansive layered breathing heaving steams,

these bright unfathomed dreams, dimensionalities:
a Christmas card from your first cousin says:
“Still hanging in there” – and at first you think you taste
again the rarefied strange peppered tang of this
exotically elusive just-post-solstice air – but no, you

aren’t here or anywhere you know: this is an atmosphere
in which you’ve never been – stinging like a dozen
dissonantly overlapping saxophones in an indifferent
war of jambalaya jazz bands – moaning out their
frazzled songs about the inescapability of family sin.



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