Disaster: not thought gone awry
when all this first started
my body broke out into real bad rashes
my eyes my face my neck my chest my back my shoulders
big giant holes on the back of my legs,
holes the size of a #2 pencil
looked just like the holes
in the fish
in the lab
on the slab
Gulf: from Greek κόλπος (kólpos) m. [masculine], a bosom, From Proto-European *bheu-ə- :“to swell, bend
What have you done to know disaster?
we went to detox —December 11 to January 12
the children feel much better now
Alina still has bad days
she may never be 100%
my little boy is doing fantastic,
my husband’s better &
I’m feeling better too…
I’ve shelled out $40.000
Gulf: A hollow place in the Earth
Disaster is on the side of forgetting
we did blue crab before BP
but since BP
we don’t blue crab anymore
Gulf: An abyss, a bottomless or unfathomed depth
Disaster: care for the minuscule
all of a sudden we had shrimp
with what they call black gill disease
if they were blue would it be blue gill disease?
we’ve had shrimp
with growth on them
we’ve had had fish with growths on them
Gulf: A deep Chasm, a steep-sided rift, gap or fissure, a large difference of opinion
Disaster: sovereignty of the accident
the Vietnamese & Cambodian communities had
a really tough time getting hired on
to help in the cleanup because of
the great language barrier:
90% of the information put out
in the first 60 days was English only
Gulf: A basin, from Latin “bacca” wine jug, Welch “baich,” load, burden, Irish “bac,” hindrance
In relation to disaster, one dies too late
the herring came in to mature
dropped on the seafloor dead
compromised immune system couldn’t
fight off a parasite, a natural bacteria
Gulf: A rock formation scooped out by water erosion
Disaster disorients the absolute
grey amberjack, king mackerel, red snapper, mangrove snapper,
caught offshore when gutted
had black sludge in their stomachs
crossed stomach walls
made holes in the flesh
you could see it with the naked eye
Gulf: (obsolete) That which swallow, the gullet
[...]
[author’s note: “Dis/aster” is the third poem of a sequence of three with the general title Rigwreck — The Gulf (between you and me). If the opening section was a write-through of Stéphane Mallarmé’s shipwreck poem Un Coup de dés, (forthcoming in issue #17 of Golden Handcuffs Review) the voices that emerge in the second & third section are those of live witnesses of the BP Gulf disaster. Among these, Sheri Revette (the widow of drill operator Dewey Revette, who was among the 11 dead on the night when the Deepwater Horizon blew up) with phrases taken from interviews with her by Antonia Juhasz in the latter’s book Black Tide (Wiley, 2011) and, throughout the final section, excerpts from my February 2012 interview in New Orleans with Kindra Arnesen, the fisherwoman, mother of two, & activist. The hasard / chance compositional strategy persists at another different level via the etymons for disaster & a writing through of that term via Maurice Blanchot’s L’écriture du désastre.
This work was commissioned by The Crossing, Donald Nally conductor, for their Month of the Moderns 2013, with Funding from the 
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