Katrina calendar September cement blooms black mold graffiti   October’s street is full of Hefty trash bags—                                     the city’s not collecting   Drowned photographs stuck in thick layers dry out fine, baked in the oven   Left-behind cats crunch kibble poured in piles in the park   December, a rooster prances across the porch with a cockroach in its beak, gobbles   only when someone is watching January, a pit bull   wearing a duct tape collar, sprints in full moon circles   February, a mailman surfaces                         with way too many utility bills   he should pour in the lake        Who’s got a belly full of cornbread crumbs?   I do, he sings to the dog,   And you do too   March is honey falling in ribbons of light             on cobblestones laid by slaves that whisper   about your age March bats up her eyelids of treasure at dawn   April, the city’s lungs relax, her children walk the river home   Abe Louise Young

New Orleans native/Austin activist Abe Louise Young is the author of two chapbooks Heaven to Me (2016) and Ammonite (2010) and the free guide, Queer Youth Advice for Educators, and she is co-editor of Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays, and vision from American Teenagers. She just finished a week-long February 2018 residency at Smith College, reading poetry and exhibiting “Poet-to Poet: A Friendship in Letters.” After working for many years as an independent writer, grant-writer, and editor, Young recently became Education and Training Director at TexasCASA. Her program will create learning programs that will reach 30,000 children in foster care across the state. In her own words, “I'm incredibly lucky and humbled to help shape what the grown folks will learn, and how, in the here and now, w[ith] this team of brilliant, committed people working to make life better for kids!”