On the third anniversary of the Gulf Coast oil spill

It was the year of the worst disaster. That summer we went to parties where everyone stuffed overworked bits of strangers’ DNA in donated tranny pantyhose, and when the first black balls came clean, two hundred miles upshore they were golf pebbles, then cantaloupes, that inexplicably solid cancer of the sea. Our own cancer

had metastasized to its pulsing final stage. So you breathed in tubes and skimmed the surface after days of specialized training and I wore summer frocks to the parties and drank lemonade and carried rice krispy trays and the clippings from when we did the dog. And even then, the cancer grew. Even then, only May and already it’s sweltering.