RB Winning

Identity fills my table,
words strewn in greasy spots
across green mesh metal
filled with holes
holding up my latest
gargantuan effort
at perfection.

My place setting
half full
half empty
stares at me
with incomplete eye.

Christian comes,
unable to go home,
Mom having sold
the ancestral house
too close to the flood plain
but on higher ground
than 9th ward homes
whose washed-out residents
bought it from under her
still-dry feet.

In the face
of his homelessness
my writing about place
my fear of writing place
seems out-of-place
and small.

When the ethno-botanist arrives
and Christian suggests drugs
to get me through,
it seems almost worth it
and besides,
counsels EB,
drugs work.

Still, whose homes
will I write about now
when what I need to know
is whose voice fills my pages
when only Winning
feels like home.