Smoking Section

that's not a grenade, that's a pine cone.

Pine cones and branches buried like land mines. Some of them will have to be pulled up by tractor. Trees are twisted, bent, and mangled. Some of the tap roots didn't even bother to come out of the ground, they snapped at the surface. The ground pulled up like the carpet in the house across the street, the trees lay dying, busted, torn, splintered. The air conditioner is half a foot from where it needs to be, and who knows where that battered piece of metal came from. Four different shades of shingles scattered in the yard, and a lost shoe. The roofs are patchwork quilts of tarps flapping in the unusally cool breeze from the east. "Verizon" and "Low Prices" flash on top of some houses from the tarps and plastic signs used to keep the weather, flora, and fauna out. The people across the street from me have been hauling lumber out of their yard for eight days straight. They are saying that the casinos will be back in the amount of time it takes to have a baby. Razor wire two rows thick block south of the tracks from Biloxi to Bay St. Louis because the people they need to patrol the area are in a war we harldy remember. Helicopters shake the windows and my ear drums, but I have become numb to the thumping. It usually stops around eight anyway. Do not leave your homes, it isn't safe. Do not go back to your homes, it isn't safe.