Shootin' Pool in New Orleans

Reposting because poems, people, and cities deserve a second chance.

My son in post-Katrina NOLA. Photo by author.

 Shootin’ Pool
          ❦a New Orleans sestina for Kendall Williams

Two twenty-two. Afternoon deadlock at White
and Washington. Sirens scrape Thirteenth’s daylight.
Death goads life, Call it. Chalk it up to violent
no-excuse-for-it sidewalk crime near the Broad Street
strip mall: Divine Hands Hair Salon, Video City,
and Kajun Crab can’t keep young men racked-up, safe.

Unidentified somebody’s son pops the glock’s safety,
shoots stripes and solids, and slips cops’ black-and-whites.
Victim, twenty-to-one clean shot at life in the chocolate city,
on the ball, survived the flood, his family’s plight,
and federal so-called assistance. In the kitchen, off the street,
he catches a break along the rail, but violence

runs the ball, breaks the triangle, violates
the felt. Ghost-ball jumps the table, angles safely
to a corner pocket of narrow streets,
glances the sidewalk, and rolls past white
do-gooders mapping post-Katrina blight,
abandoned homes, and parish cities.

                                                    Department duplicity
breaks the po’boy, beignet, voodoo spell and violence
pockets the change. Red-blue guardian angel lights
pursue the perp, but scratch the table. No fail-safe
after two—now three—murders near White
and Washington’s indifferent. Up to Eden Street,

down Eve, traffic slows for detour arrows, street
signs. Shotgun-shack and crawfish city
curious—black and brown, rainbow and white—
rue their brother’s chalk outline, own neighborhoods violated.
There ain’t no such thing as gun safety,
baby girl. Damn. Curse the devils’ sleight

of hand, red sedans cruising through stoplights
on Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Sixteenth ward backstreets,
halfway to homicide. Every quarter declares safety
before the next shots carom against a city
crescent inured to violence
and pools cash for a second-line parade, off-white

marble, and white fleur-de-lis. Safe home, interred?
Violence deterred? Steady light rain on city streets.

© Andi Penner, Upcycled: Poetry Repurposed, 2024

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I first drafted that poem sometime after returning home from a week visiting my son in New Orleans about eight years after Katrina tore through the city. My son landed in NOLA for his freshman orientation at Tulane University as the storm was twisting itself into a Cat 5 hurricane. He and his friend called the college from the airport and were told to flee the city and “come back Wednesday.” Over four and a half months later, the university re-opened its doors for returning students.

NOLA became his home. He graduated and then stayed, first as an Americorps volunteer and then as an employee doing redevelopment work in the Broadmoor neighborhood. I visited him a few times during those years. In 2013, I was in his office looking at maps of which homes were yet to be rehabilitated or demolished, when we heard gun shots.

“Stay here,” he told me before running out the back door in the direction of the shooting.

He returned a few minutes later and advised waiting inside together. After hearing sirens approach and stop, we walked a few blocks to where a crowd had gathered. Over the next couple of days, details of the senseless shooting trickled in through the local news.

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By the time I returned to Albuquerque, the incident at the intersection of Washington and White was recent history, but in my heart it was fresh every time I thought about the lives of the two young men, the murder victim and my son.

A few years later, I took a six-week poetry workshop to learn a formal poetic structure called the sestina, which is composed of 39-lines in a prescribed pattern of six stanzas, six lines each, six repeated end words, and a final 3-line stanza that uses all six end words. Don’t worry—there’s no quiz!

The first version of “Shootin’ Pool” was a verbose, overwritten, self-conscious sestina titled “The Devil Plays Pool at Washington & White.” Later, a differently formatted version of the same name appeared in a local anthology. Every year or so, I’d work on it to tighten the language, remove myself further from the action, revise, research, edit, submit it for publication, receive a rejection notice, and then, revise, edit, and submit it again. Kelsay Books Blog published it in 2023. Because the poet’s deliberate line and stanza breaks matter, especially in sestinas, I republished the poem in Upcycled: Poetry Repurposed, my chapbook, available on Amazon.

OR if you contact me directly (DM) through Substack and request a signed copy, I will send you purchase instructions so we can both bypass the megastore.

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