Monkey Hill

The best part was losing what we'd made, the moment when the rocket disappeared-

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Lying beside my daughter in her bed all night, hand flat on her back, waiting for her skin to cool, twisting her wet hair away from her face. Tell story, she insists, from when you were little.

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The story of twenty years later, when the river drowns, drowns, drowns the town?

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In fifth grade science we shot our rockets off the levee. Mrs. Cosgrove lined us up beside the hill, we lit each match, and each rocket, balsa wood and poster paint, arced over the flat water of the Mississippi, sank.

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Welcome to New Orleans' oldest mountain!

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No, not that story. Not yet-

"Cool sheet," I whisper, lifting it over my daughter's small hot body, as if I could erase her fever.

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Fake hill, we all knew as kids, built by the city, built to show the children. A truckload of sand brought in and shoveled up in 1933.

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Fourteen, I sat at the top and smoked my mother's cigarettes, watched the water, waited.

Already I called being ten the past. I could look backward.

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We shot our rockets, our hands singed, ash left on our palms.

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Tell story, my daughter whispers, skin limned with sweat.

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Fevered summer by the river: John Macalister, fifteen, drunk, swore he'd drive me to the top of the hill, up and over. Easy, he said, lifting my long hair off my neck as I leaned against him in his mother's station wagon.

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River of dark rot beyond the hill. And what was under?

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River of fever, fever of river, his hands in my hair, dirt and gravel sputtering under the wheels of the car.

His tongue tasted like metal sunk in mud.

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No, Mrs. Cosgrove said, the city is not flat. It's below sea level. It's a bowl.

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I picture the rockets drifting to the muddy river floor, lost ships in a bottle.

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Tell the story:

when all the children of New Orleans have already left,

when I kick up loose gravel on the path back home..

Gone. And scatter. Scatter and scatter, gone -