vid 001

Take me to the water. Take me to the water. Take me to the water to be baptized.

i look for god among
the strung-stilled shore;
                  sliced into pieces,
taken beneath black hand.
                                    across the bay
                  there is no bay.
the wind strips
the land into a vibrant
                  mess.
tides galloping,
spreading
new orleans into butter.

i see a boy dipped
in water
by katrina’s pastoral grip.

what a perfect time to be baptized—
she must be thinking—
for the blood of the lamb. i don’t know

what’s real and what’s a flush
of bodies. i don’t know where
the woman goes once all the boys breakdown
into crystalline
and the shuffle of dead things.

the naked house
to the left
of the boy, clothed in light,
is a church—full—of something other
than god’s grace.

when i was nine,
my mother dressed me in white
                  for my baptism.
her eyes watched me die,
                                    rise again
                  like a wooden plank
inside the pastor’s palm.                i saw the water
push itself around my new body.
                  but where is my shed
skin?                        where did the boy

trapped in the jowls of the disaster
flee?        i still can’t find god. katrina,
                                    still swings her hammer,
waiting until the unearthed
                  land unrolls its tongue
from the back of its dirtied throat.

as i leave the pool
of water, i’m still wet from god’s absence.
                  the white robes crying
                                    out of happiness. my mother kisses
my salty forehead.            but i can’t feel her.
i’m still being baptized.

i walk beside her
into the ripple of pews, the bobbing heads
singing about god—the purity of blood.
how it pearls inside me, now.
a beaded necklace.

i wait for my new body
to find me. i look back. there i am.
mouth to mouth
with katrina.

a white linen pulled over my head.

“Luther Hughes plays language like a wind instrument, seamlessly merging New Orlean’s memory of Katrina with the speaker's memory of his first baptism. The hymn that follows echoes a boy’s intimate search for god amidst the reality of flood water and destruction. Luther Hughes fearlessly stewards the transformative power of poetry, articulating a space where the dreams and traumas of the speakers’ body and the body of the land become one—and in the process, we are reincarnated with him.”

— Jess X Chen, poetry judge

the blueshift journal

blueshift / ˈblo͞oˌSHift / noun

the displacement of the spectrum to shorter wavelengths in the light coming from distant celestial objects moving toward the observer.

VID 001