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| "Jazzy Shotgun House". Acrylic on Canvas by Melanie Douthit. |
Mo ended up in New Orleans
because the City that Care Forgot
didn’t care that she was gay
and uninterested in making a living.
Mo was interested in her art,
which she thought of as sculpture,
using lumber and wire and glass
that she scavenged from junkyards.
After scraping by to graduation,
she wandered from city to city
in search of patrons,
and when she sank as low as New Orleans,
her family gave up trying
to coax her back home.
Today you can find Mo sitting on the stoop
of a single shotgun house in the Ninth Ward,
showing her wares on the sidewalk.
She has no electricity
so she sits outside all she can.
Her dress looks as though it would fall
off her shoulders any minute.
She’s as thin as a poster child
for Nigerian famine.
Few in our graduating class
are as happy as Mo.
Gail White is active in the formalist poetry movement, with recent or forthcoming work in Measure, Raintown Review, and First Things. Her poems appear in the Best of Barefoot Muse anthology, Southern Poetry - Louisiana, and two Pocket Poets anthologies. She co-edited the anthology The Muse Strikes Back and is the author of 3 books of poetry, the latest being The Accidental Cynic. Her new chapbook, Sonnets in a Hostile World, is available from Amazon. She lives with her husband and 3 cats in on Bayou Teche in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.
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