Panic Attack on the Atchafalaya Basin

for Tony the Truckstop Tiger (2001-2017)

My body is a tin can my mind drags
by a string along this bridge, and my arms
won’t lift off the wheel because they’re
made of the same steel as the rail
that would in theory stop my car
from plunging into the swamp, but I’m
not made of steel. I’m made of lead,
a dead battery jolted on the shoulder.
Don’t look down at the gators drinking oil
through their scales in the murk. Lead melts
at 620 degrees. It’s that hot outside (at least).
Alchemists believed Saturn ruled lead,
and I bow to Saturn until he decides
to bolt, my patriarch of logic off to nap,
his hammock strung up in a bald cypress
playground, while I bubble inside
and breathe out a haze of steam and
become that haze. This bridge has
to decide whether to turn to powder.
The planets have gone off with the gods.
Every place I’ve rented made me sign
an addendum agreeing not to lick the walls.
I once washed a layer of skin off my hands
because I found a fleck of paint under
a fingernail. My grandparents met
in a head-on collision of pirogues not far
beneath me. I descend from two Cajuns
who were once fearless and fucking below,
somewhere between mile marker 116 and 118.
When this bridge concedes, I’m stopping
at the first gas station in Grosse Tête,
the one that keeps a Bengal tiger
in a chain link box out front. My legs
will probably melt like cheap metal
when that tiger looks at me. I’m in need
of a real predator. I’ve heard every night
the gas station owner feeds buckets
of horse meat into the cat’s mouth,
and a star turns to exhaust every time
a diesel crankshaft breaks on I-10.

Brett Hanley is a Poetry Editor for Southeast Review. She holds an MFA from McNeese State and is a PhD candidate at Florida State. Her work is forthcoming or has recently been published in River Styx, Gulf Coast, Hobart, Puerto del Sol, THE BOILER, and elsewhere. American Poetry Journal recently published her debut chapbook, Defeat the Rest.