America’s coast is ragged at the bottomYou know this from maps, of courseBut you don’t know it until you fly down into Louisianaon a late sultry afternoon,the Ocean of Lake Pontchartrain shimmering under a causeway that yawns on forever,a lazy finger trailing a line.Haphazard green curls dipping down are impossibly,somehow,ancestral homes
Where native people absconded in boats,out on these wild tendrils of half-land,to escape Jackson’s Trail of Tears
Where their descendants speak a half-mouthed Englishand bake their wrinkled necks in the same searing sunsets
The boats no longer promise salvation
“America’s First Climate Refugees,” the headlines would readif there were any.But there are only a few dozen families,and Choctaw displacement is long since a background backwater hum,and that the United States could be a place refugees come fromis too inconceivable to print.
Soon comes the quiet relocationto federal lands in the interior,away from their drowned islands,their eroded homescrumbled under with the oil conglomerates’ channel-digging
The Trail has looped down for them at last,one hundred sixty years on.
Photo by Mitchel Lensink on Unsplash