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The Dream of New Orleans
New Orleans was named by the Lord himself, the lord of the breeze and the smell of your mothers necklaces.

In New Orleans there are people who have purple skin. They sit upright in the air as if held up by invisible chairs. These are the sacred ones.

There are plants that cannot grow without stagnant old bath water.

If you have a dream in New Orleans you will wake up with a swollen heart and blurry vision. You can hear a dream approaching a few days out it cries like a hungry baby and roars like an army. You might wake up making the noises of dried out instrument.

You never want to eat alone because some lady with a duck will find you and contaminate your soup. She might ask you where you have been and where your mother is.

And you don’t want to talk about your mother.


In New Orleans there is an animal called the Marble and it eats shrimp tails and the remnants of your eggs florentine. It has eyeballs in its stomach and only comes out in the summer.

There are a race of people here and they are the only ones who can hold a chalice of sea water, and they will be the ones who get to sing the last songs the world ever hears. And these are the people who get to pave the roads and they pave them with residue from the streetcar seats. The sweat from under your legs and the grease left in your hair. They use fake gold and elephant ears to make the lines in the road for you to follow.

In New Orleans no one is honest. And everyone had sex last night, to the sound of a housing filling with water. You can tell the future here from the poets that bring their type writers out of their houses on Saturday nights, they tell you to go home before you commit and unknown crime to an unknown lover.

And you don’t want to talk about your lover.

In New Orleans people grieve in public, the drag queens hang onto door frames as they push their giant fragile bodies into the night air to get a look at the fire that has been burning and the bodies that have been feeding it. And they cry big sloppy tears that runs mascara into the drains.

They use tubas for trousers.

In New Orleans if you go out into the street after dreaming and hear the sound of weezing you must go back inside because it is a bad omen. You can come back out with the Magnolia gets chopped down and your mothers clothes have finally gone to Goodwill.

There are warrior women who fight on the streets with silk horses with the names of slaves stitched onto their flanks. They fight while the men cheer, they drink out of large long glasses and speak a language you don’t know if you will be able to learn.

The water is so warm in New Orleans rubies crystalize in your bathtub sprinkle over your feet when you bathe. You listen to the songs of the mystics alone in the trees and you spy on the horses the warrior women have abandoned. You suck on popsicles made of saffron and the skin of a lake fish.

In New Orleans you can let your nails grow long and take days off from work to make sure they are growing correctly.

In New Orleans they don’t title any of their books.

When you drive in New Orleans you like to have somebody following you as you drive down the road.