By Alissa Elliott

after Natasha Tretheway

The white northern suburbs, clinging to light,

stay clean, their gates swinging closed with a thud.

When Jackson ices over, faucets dry.

I read the clouds. I listen to my blood.

Drive south, to where Ship Island shields the shore,

eat boiled peanuts from roadside Styrofoam.

Purple jellyfish beach themselves in scores,

this silt our shared estuarial home.

Hurricane Cecile washed my great-great-great

grandfather’s bones out of the Union prison plot,

The naiads of the Pascagoula wring Confederate

blood from their hair. For what for what for what.

The guards who died alongside him were Black.

I cringe to see my own name on the plaque.

Alissa Elliott is Writing Center Coordinator at the Jackson, MS, campus of Hinds Community College and holds an MFA in poetry from the Sewanee School of Letters. Her writing and translations have been published in Pedestal Magazine, Ezra, The Shakespeare Standard, a program on Kurdish Iraqi network NRT, and elsewhere.