wind in fire
candles on altar
walk through temple              sing
stir fingers through holy water
pull dampness through hair
over temples            loosen
plump curls             dance with holy
raindrops            breathe

dance with fire
sway to altar candles
one two three
hundred prayers
for the living
for the dead
for those yet waiting
to enter

how many brides
have toed this path
pinching shoes to
keep them upright
father arm propulsion
through cool ceramic echoes

I slip on rose petals
I dance with fire
I sing high on holy water
I anoint with sensuous oils

make me a holy chamber
and I’ll make you whole

dance with water
dance with fire
dance with lemonscent
as it wafts from pews

how many bodies have left this way
carried off with a last hipshake
on the shoulders of friends, nephews,
officiants trembling with the weight
of their task.

dance with the pulpits
holding the beat of the fist
dance with the sun
streaming through colored glass
dance with earthen walls
dance with iron lung skies

I’ll stretch my arms heavenward
push through painted ceilings
harden fingertips to punch through
wood and spackle and frothy insulation

I’ll stretch a hole wide as a thousand stars
so when children shift their eyes
heavenward in distraction
they may still receive the word

the word says
we are holy
the stars will agree
that what we are
is holier yet
than the whole
of the world

from Gospel: poems.  RedBone Press. 2009. Used with permission of the author.

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SAMIYA BASHIR is the author of Gospel, a 2009 Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Where the Apple Falls, a Poetry Foundation bestseller and finalist for the 2005 Lambda Literary Award. She is also editor of Black Women’s Erotica 2 and co-editor, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana, of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. Her poetry, stories, articles, essays and editorial work have been featured in numerous publications including: Ms. Magazine, Essence, Curve, ColorLines, Callaloo, Obsidian III, Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, and more. Bashir has been honored with awards, fellowships, grants, and residencies from a variety of organizations, is an alumni fellow with Cave Canem and a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, a writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent.

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Celebration Series is a bimonthly CAYENNE feature that aims to magnify and spotlight work by queer poets of color. To learn more, click here.

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Back in the olden days, at the end of the revolution, when popular movements against colonialism and racial segregation, against patriarchy, and against war had changed what it meant to be a human being on this earth–in this country and all over the world—when there was less talk about marriage and more about liberation–when the liberations that had already been fought for and won seemed a prelude for more to come–there were brilliant French feminists writing about ‘writing the body,’ in ways that fascinated me as writer and as a woman, and also gave me pause. Their inquiry did make me think for the first time about the vast silences in literature where the particulars of a woman’s physical existence might be–but “écriture feminine” was never a phrase that corresponded with my thinking or experience, as vastly various as even then I understood what the world called “men” and what the world called “women” to be. My comrades sometimes sorted into the anti-racist organizers I worked with and the people we teasingly called ‘the gynuflectors’; sometimes the teasing turned to something else, as on the occasion of one Take Back the Night march which fell apart over some wanting only women to march and some wanting men of color to be included. In more intimate terms–between me and my clothes, between me and the page–I never fit any social definition of gender I encountered. Sometimes I still hesitate in front of gendered bathroom signs, forgetting which door I’m supposed to be assigned to. But while I wasn’t sure my ‘écriture’ would be especially ‘feminine,’ I did and do remember and value radical parts of those French feminists’ thinking–like that of Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” writing, “Ecris-toi: il faut que ton corps se fasse entendre.” (“Write you”–the intimate you–”your body must make itself understood.”) (It sounds like the end of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso,” doesn’t it: “You must change your life.”)

It seems to me that the body is important to women writers, to queer writers, to writers of color, because in the systems of oppression in which we live, the parts of human life a dominant group finds frightening are projected onto the subordinate group–as if women writers have bodies and men writers do not, as if queer writers are made of our sexuality and unqueer writers are not, as if writers of color have a skin and ‘white’ writers do not. So those of us who possess the privileges of this system possess both power and emptiness–what James Baldwin called “a terrifying sterility”–and those of us dispossessed possess the richness of human life as it is, without the power to live it that liberation might bring.

And now these ways of living, or ways of not living, have brought us to this time some people are calling The Great Dying–because of course the splitting and denying of the body is a move toward death, a move that we as a human species may, in the time of our great-grands even, complete. So for me this is why write the body–the individual body, the sexual body, the body politic, the assailed body of the earth–in this time. To make a possibility for human survival on this planet. To listen to hunger, one’s own and that of others: for food, for touch, for liberation. To feed and to eat.
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SUZANNE GARDINIER is the author of several books of essays and poetry, including the long poem  The New World, which won the Associated Writing Program’s Award Series in poetry in 1992, and Today: 101 Ghazals. Suzanne has also received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
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the word that comes to mind after many nights.
As when a plane descends over a city
you call home, the body’s rise against the belt
strung across your lap. Darkness and lampposts,
like gold and silver beads below, falling
into them. Or better yet, wading in
the bioluminescent bay and each kick
creates a soft glow, each stroke makes you think
light could come from the body, and not
a world disturbed into brilliance. Because
it captures what I mean—both the weight
and how you see what you could not. As when
I heard him cry and lumbered down the hall
to find you there first, pacing the room, singing
softly in his ear. Through the window,
the city sparkled and seemed to have grown
though, by day, I never see more than
two or three men working at once, lifting
together, say, a plank of wood. Years ago,
my mother sat beside my bed, eager to bear
the fever with me. We pass him back
and forth between us until it breaks,
and I no longer want what I wanted
before. As when one day you look upon
the house you’ve built and can’t recall the field.

from A Question of Gravity and Light.  University of Arizona Press.  2007. Used with permission of the author.

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Blas Falconer is the author of A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press 2007) and The Foundling Wheel (forthcoming Four Way Books Fall 2012). He is the coeditor of Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press 2010) and the poetry editor of Zone 3: A Literary Journal/ Zone 3 Press. A recent recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, he coordinates Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University.

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Celebration Series is a bimonthly CAYENNE feature that aims to magnify and spotlight work by queer poets of color. To learn more, click here.

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Legendary, Harlem 1987

You want me to say who I am and all of that?
—Pepper LaBeija

LaBeija, my house, is kept gold, swept clean—
fronts fantasy from top to plump bottom.
What I want to be, I be: crew-cut queen,
middle sex owed to manicured pink thumbs.
Catwalk as fierce as the fiercest real bitch,
I am high like fashion. And fame. I am
a man who likes men and a good cross-stitch,
whom homesick kids crowned legendary. Ma’am
of the ball, been walking now two decades
and got more grand prizes than all the rest.
The long and short: I’m a one-man parade,
elaborate drag, from manner to breasts.
Within ballrooms I am most opulent.
Inside this house I am most relevant.

Though not unheard of, it’s still not everyday one encounters an author deliberately writing “outside herself.” Jake Adam York, a white, Southern male does this, for instance, in his A Murmuration of Starlings, a book everywhere concerned with the history of Civil Rights, race and racism in this country. And you also do it in this poem, assuming the voice of Pepper LaBeija, notorious drag performer and personality who’s probably best remembered for her feature in Paris Is Burning, and you do this as a black, heterosexual woman. What lead you to this subject matter, which many might characterize as far removed from your own experiences?

As writer David Shields wrote in his manifesto, Reality Hunger, “Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography.” I don’t believe anyone can write outside his or herself, as what is written is always a product of experience—lived and imagined. And, when it comes to race and racism, white people should be as much a part of the dialogue as people of color; so, too, should “straight” people enter into conversations about sexuality and homophobia, as homophobia is usually an illogical heterosexual fear.

I’ve always loved performance and fashion—I was homecoming queen in high school and, as a freshman in college, ran for Ms. [insert black fraternity] and lost. Before ever seeing Paris Is Burning, which documents the gay ball scene in late 1980s Harlem, I competed in and patronized pageants. This work is very me and is meant to celebrate the seemingly auxiliary. (Aren’t we all auxiliary to some extent?)  Richard Hugo wrote, “Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.” Check.

This poem is clearly a sonnet. It adheres strictly to the Shakespearean rhyme scheme, and each of its fourteen lines is exactly ten syllables. What lead you to this particular form? Was there any connection between form and content that you felt, either before or after writing this poem?

Marilyn Nelson once told me the sonnet is queen of poetic forms. How fitting, a queen for a queen. But, “Legendary” is really passing as a Shakespearean sonnet—it is not a love poem to the narrator’s beloved nor is it in iambic pentameter. Its form (rhyme scheme, syllable and line count), as I determined during the creative process, allows the sonnet to appear real regardless of its content, and the idea of realness is to look as much as possible like your straight counterpart.

To no surprise, I keep gravitating toward the poem’s ending couplet: “Within ballrooms I am most opulent. / Inside this house I am most relevant.” I am particularly interested in the double interiority the lines suggest, how “within” a ballroom—that is itself a sub-section of an already marginalized community—there is perhaps another ring, which is “inside this house”. Threaded through these circles are ideas of opulence and relevance, and one begins to wonder if there exists a certain hierarchy. Then again, the couplet is constructed nearly identically, its nucleus being around the phrase “I am most”. This might suggest, instead, a sort of democracy or at least no particular bias between ballroom and house. Could you speak a little on this? What were your thoughts while constructing these lines?

There are definite class and caste implications in these lines. In an impartial world, Pepper LaBeija would have lived the fabulous life he both fakes and flaunts in Paris Is Burning; instead, his high-ranking status is limited to ballroom only. The couplet acknowledges LaBeija’s restricted authority and, in so doing, is as much an assertion of his power as it is commentary on his lack thereof. Also at play is the idea of one-upmanship, “I am most,” despite marginalization—most people don’t get the chance to experience fame, however marginal it may be.

Another line, or I should say half-line, which pulls at me occurs near the beginning: “What I want to be, I be”. I am struck immediately by its audacity, its straightforwardness and utter lack of hesitation. As a gay, black man myself, I am empowered by this line. This line also seems to empower the poem, for there is no identifiable victim’s narrative anywhere present. Was this a conscious decision on your part or was it inspired more so by the figure, LaBeija her and himself?

I was similarly taken with LaBeija’s charming pomposities and overall fabulousness. He was brilliantly aplomb, and “What I want to be, I be” is a conscious attempt at capturing this spirit. Richard Hugo wrote, “If you feel pressure to say what you know others want to hear and don’t have enough devil in you to surprise them, shut up.” What Hugo calls “devil” is, simply, nerve. And, LaBeija had nerve enough for you, me and your entire blog community.

Before his death in 2003, LaBeija had been walking the balls for more than 30 years. In 1987, when Paris Is Burning was being filmed, it was much too late in his career for modesty, diplomacy and uncertainty.

The title of the poem was originally published as “Legendary #1,” and this to me reads purposefully ambiguous. It could suggest that LaBeija is, in fact, and as she declares in the poem, the #1 legend—“[m]a’am of the ball.” But it could also suggest that this poem is one of a series, just as Paris Is Burning documents a series of such personalities. So, are there more Legendary poems forthcoming? If so, what are your plans for those poems?

Let LaBeija tell it, he was the legend. Any mother, father or member of a house—a community who collectively competes in drag balls—would say the same about him or herself. Let me tell it, they’d all be right.

Though I’ve since dropped “#1,” it initially signaled that the poem is the first in a sonnet cycle entitled “Legendary.” Thus far, the cycle includes a foreword, an afterword and five personae poems, which introduce Dorian Corey, Octavia Saint Laurent, Willi Ninja and Kim Pendavis as well as the art of insult or shade.

Finally, are there any books you are currently reading that you’d recommend? Movies? Music? What new releases are you most anticipating?

I’d recommend Daniel Menaker’s A Good Talk, a funny take on what makes for a good conversation and the four stages thereof: Survey, Discovery, Risk and Roles and, as always, Richard Hugo’s A Triggering Town—as you may have guessed by my trigger-happy answers to your first and forth question.

I’ve seen several movies in the last month. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work lived up to its title, while Salt, on the other hand, lacked all flavor. Rivers may not have invented shade, but she certainly has a handle on the art. I took my little sister to see Step Up in 3D. I said, “This movie ain’t nothing but Breakin’ with less black people.” She said, “Breakin’, what’s that?” …I’m looking forward to hating the remake of The Last Dragon with Samuel L. Jackson rumored to play Sho’nuff, aka Shogun of Harlem.

And, both Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 and Erykah Badu’s Out My Mind, Just in Time stay on “repeat.”

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RICKEY LAURENTIIS manages  CAYENNE.

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They lived nearby, I was in the book, and what kind of name was —-,
anyway. My students blinked in the porch light. One day
they want to teach in town, having lived here all their lives.
They knew everyone: even the dregs at the liquor store,
the pregnant girl down the road, niggers, though not by name.
Their words rippled out, far from them, over the town
with its thousand steeples. Behind me, my family held
their poses in their tiny frames, each of us a shade lighter than
our parents. On the wall, my mother frowned, her closed mouth
about to break. When I left she said, Don’t tell them who you are.
And once, you warned, More people want us dead because we’re fags.
I closed the door, and watched them shift behind the screen.
I hated them. I hated them for all of us, though no one asked me to,
and wished them a lesson in pain. It wasn’t right, but I didn’t care.

from A Question of Gravity and Light.  University of Arizona Press.  2007. Used with permission of the author.

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Blas Falconer is the author of A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press 2007) and The Foundling Wheel (forthcoming Four Way Books Fall 2012). He is the coeditor of Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press 2010) and the poetry editor of Zone 3: A Literary Journal/ Zone 3 Press. A recent recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, he coordinates Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University.

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Celebration Series is a bimonthly CAYENNE feature that aims to magnify and spotlight work by queer poets of color. To learn more, click here.

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*

Where some of the old levees were built with dredged mud and shell fill that washed away in the storm, the new ones are toughened with clay. Many old flood walls were shaped, in cross section, like the letter I and stood on muddy soil that seemed almost eager to give way; most of the new work is sturdier, shaped like an inverted T and braced with pilings driven diagonally into the ground. The corps is strengthening some soil, by mixing cement deep into the ground.

*

But you don’t really need to know most of this to play the young Ginsberg. Young Ginsberg—the Ginsberg who went to Columbia, whose work was read by Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, who was kicked out of college (and institutionalized) in part because he was gay—is not a familiar character. Everyone has an image of the large-bellied, bearded, balding Buddha figure that Ginsberg became. But to play the young Ginsberg, you, the actor, must be slim and clean-shaven and must dye your hair black—your full head of hair. You must wear thick-framed glasses. You must apply prostheses to your ears to make them stick out.

*

“Morally, what he teaches is to be accepting, to be generous, unselfish; to refuse to reject anyone else’s suffering, or pain, or joy either; to not fear sex, to revel in it, all of it, every permutation of it; to desire desire, to not mistrust the demands of the body. . . . He wants us not to be afraid of ourselves, even of our dark, darkest, most doubting selves. . . . To be tender with the young, to admire the old, to fear neither age nor death, to exalt in them both.”

Galveston Beach 2005

Seaweed chokes the sand

We won’t have children

My lover’s arms around me

Natural like the falling sun

What once burned

Clings to my feet

Salt inches

Closer, salt stains the sea

Something brown about it

The blood of those

Flung overboard

The word ancestors

The word ancestors in another poem

To say the Gulf of Mexico is the Dead Sea

Today the Gulf of Mexico is the Red Sea

Its waves a siren of song

Beware the dark

Sand, the skin of my father

Will my lover look in his face

And call me his baby

Kiss my black back

Or cut me open with a switchblade

The red, the Gulf, the sea

A song our mothers sang

Arms around us natural as

My falling soul

One mother jumped

One threw us in

from Please.  New Issues Poetry & Prose.  2008.
Used with permission of the author.

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JERICHO BROWN worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego.  His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, Oxford American, and several other journals and anthologies.  His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the 2009 American Book Award.

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Celebration Series is a bimonthly CAYENNE feature that aims to magnify and spotlight work by queer poets of color. To learn more, click here.

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*

I think of poems as having vertical depth. It’s as if prose is a horizontal structure, built across a surface, while poetry is a catacomb. Prose speeds the eye onwards, while poems resist—and purposely impede— that forward movement. Their language is so faceted—strange, rich—that it creates beautiful obstacles and sends the eye backwards over lines, enticing us to slow down and reread. Rather than pulling us forward, a poem drives us more deeply into the page. Its resistance should give pleasure . . .

*

The decision, though an instant landmark in American legal history, is more than that. It also is a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of pathbreaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults.

*

It hurt me to realize that even though I was from this place I wasn’t quite of it anymore. I had to picture the people of this place seeing me as not quite belonging; I was feeling revealed to them as an outsider. A lot of the poems turned on being personal, I think, because I couldn’t let go of trying to challenge myself on what I was doing. I thought in order for me to actually complete this project I had to critique it, and to critique my role in it.

*

. . . Tar Baby’s sole purpose is to spur action between two male figures at war, Bruh Rabbit and Bruh Fox. Tar Baby is what I would call an “anti-blues” figure, a black woman without the agency to voice her own vernacular complaint and who only serves to illustrate black male complexity and trauma, never her own. And although she is an archaic figure, she exhibits a great deal of similarity to the contemporary black female figure portrayed in hip hop music and poetry.

From bed to dresser drawer
And all while rolling latex down
He’d whistle, and I felt
Daily at first, a chore, a long walk
Without trees. If anyone,
I should have known—
I who hate for people to comment
That I must be happy
Just because they hear me hum.
I want to ask
If they ever heard of slavery,
The work song—the best music
Is made of subtraction,
The singer seeks an exit from the scarred body
And opens his mouth
Trying to get out.
Or at least this is how I came to understand
Willie whistling his way into me.
What was my last name? Did he remember?
Had I said? We both wanted to be rid of desire,
How it made even the shower
A rigorous experience. It driving
My coughing Corolla across Highway 90
At the darkest time of morning. It opening
His dead-bolted door.
Us splayed as if for punishment
At every corner of the carpet. Then
Pause for the condom,
Elastic ache against death
Heavy in his hand,
And something our fingernails couldn’t reach
Itching out a song. He was not content.
He was not bored.
If I had known the location of my own runaway
Breath, I too would have found a blues.
Poor Willie, whistling around my last name,
Wrapping his gift in safety. Poor me, thinking
If the man moves inside me
I must be empty, if I hide
Inside the man I must be cold.

from Please.  New Issues Poetry & Prose.  2008.
Used with permission of the author.

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JERICHO BROWN worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego.  His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, Oxford American, and several other journals and anthologies.  His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the 2009 American Book Award.

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Celebration Series is a bimonthly CAYENNE feature that aims to magnify and spotlight work by queer poets of color. To learn more, click here.

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*

I think this is true: ugly is the presentation of the unexpected. But, more than unexpected, what before wasn’t imaginable. Ugly as a force, one that challenges a reconsideration of what can be. I think there are queerer possibilities in ugly alone, more so than its sibling. For queer is the defense against the normative, and the normative is ultimately an insistence on silence. Don’t speak, can’t you hear them saying? Be good; be beautiful. So is ugly loud? An epistemological order? Or divine? Ugly as what destroys older knowledges (of beauty, of normal, et al) for the creation of new ones? What can both destroy and create being godly, right, if not a god? I remember a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. That we ate from it, and were ashamed.

*

But the wicked will perish:

The LORD’s enemies will be like the beauty of the fields,

they will vanish—vanish like smoke. (Psalm 37:20)

I’m sure, on the other hand, that beauty is perfectly imaginable; is able to be actualized; and is, therefore, imperfectly actualized. We demand beauty in this world because, at one point, we thought it could exist in—we thought it was necessary to—the world. Hear me out: this is why beauty is fleeting. For it is already built into, built around, built into today’s specific world; one that imagined it, and well understands it: there is no mystery. The world will change, reader; so must beauty.

*

I don’t know if oil is ugly. To me or to the earth. I don’t know (but want to believe) oil—now stopped, now gushing, now stopped again—from the ocean floor, to the surface, to shore, and bird-feather and feather: I want to say this is ugly. But oil cannot be ugly to the earth if found in the earth: is that true? Or the theft of oil, its abuse by man, can that be ugly? To the latter, I say yes. I believe it. I listen to the poet:

By perspective, I meant how

eventually every landscape wouldn’t

have to include defilement, or any other outrage, getting smaller

each time we looked back on it

or forgot not to.

(Carl Phillips, “Naming the Stars”)

And I mean that too: how beauty and ugly are both defined, are known, by their contexts.

*

I wish we could live without oil dependency. But how to say: I wish we could live without beauty?

*

How it happened, I have my theories. Ask a lover, he may guess. Whatever the case, I grew up convinced—knowing—I was ugly. And not because I repelled, I had seen the effects of that: I didn’t sicken more than I just didn’t attract. And not because (if I may say so) my “inner beauty” was corroded: I was shy, but still charming; I knew my manners. But that I felt a difference lived in me like a second heart, and the difference engendered shame and I wore my shame like a habit. I could not—cannot—could not bear myself. I avoid mirrors. I tolerate cameras. I had to teach myself to smile. What I saw in me conflicted with what I expected (read: wanted) to see: gapless, buff, even-skinned; suave, bold, straight; white, green-eyed, fit; desired. I couldn’t imagine how I existed, came to exist or why—a nasty fate. So it was through poetry that I searched for an answer, as you would search for a person to love.

*

The point about beauty is to see it. The point of the poem is not to say anything about beauty, but to enact the vision of it. (Carl Phillips, “The Case for Beauty,” Coin of the Realm)

In poetry, beauty is often related as just that. But to ugly I think we give a number of terms, one of which is “risk.” Example: in a poem, the line breaks (a la Jorie Graham) on “the” and, what would be an unruly mark for a novice poet, becomes risk. Still, it is no less ugly as it would be in the hand of the novice; changed contexts have only warped this ugliness into kind of beauty. If it is better to say nothing has changed about the word themselves, then rather we have changed: our perspectives. The point is as Phillips says: to see beauty, but to see it by saying nothing about it (by doing nothing of it); to enact its vision—a way to say Create the space (psychic or otherwise) for where this vision can be, rightly, recognized.

Ugly in poetry, in life, is obviously needed. Avoid it, you avoid beauty. Which is not to suggest that beauty is the end-all-be-all. But is to say that the two are, at the end, so dependent on the other that they are each other. I wrote earlier that I found greater queer potential in ugly alone than its siblings—but surely the greatest potential is found in the object (whether poem, whether person) who embodies both: where ugly becomes beauty precisely because it is ugly. Can you believe me? That that strange combination (Sir Francis Bacon: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”), that that trajectory and how it works, how it behaves, that all of this: does it not attract a certain mystery? But tomorrow the world, its beauty with it, will change, I hear you saying. Yes, but mystery maintains.

*

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep,

but we will all be changed— (1 Corinthians 15:51)

Lord, that the life in the gulf oil survives; that we find beauty in their even trying to.

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RICKEY LAURENTIIS manages CAYENNE and supports Poets for Living Waters.

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