Shootin' Pool in New Orleans
Reposting because poems, people, and cities deserve a second chance.
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.
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.
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August 6, 2023
Andi,
Congratulations on your well-crafted poem “Shootin’ Pool” and publication in Kelsay Books Blog. I printed a copy so I could read carefully, pencil notes, and learn from your well-crafted lines and word choices. I know a few pool terms but learned more when I looked up words—strong images that speak of chalk, shooting stripes and solids, gun violence, and sudden death. Although I’ve heard and read explanations about the sestina form, a person would need a class to work through the intricacies and complexities. I appreciate how your poem developed over the years, was set aside, was rejected a few times, was once printed with line-break errors [horrors!] …and now the grand arrival of ACCEPTANCE!
Mary Van Pelt
Alamosa, CO
Thank you for honoring the person, the community, our world.