It snowed in New Orleans once, in 1958,
enough to cover the ground, two inches maybe.
We all went crazy. The city shut down for a week.
I’d never seen snow except in pictures
and thought it had the texture of whipped cream,
not airy and wet, more nothing than something.
And blazing white as if we scampered
along a freezing beach with sunglasses.
Or maybe the moon.

We rushed out to hurl snowballs
at garbage cans, stop signs, telephone poles,
passing cars, each other–
an orgy of joyous assault.
The neighborhood punk Walter Emrine
packed some of it around an avocado pit
and aimed my way–SMACK!–on the temple.
I staggered away dazed, saw tiny Saturns
pop like soap bubbles before my eyes
as pain threaded its exquisite fugue
through the hickey rising to crescendo.
I didn’t know what hit me,
thought I was dying, just like that, a finger snap.
Walter guffawed and slapped a fellow hooligan
on the back as they swaggered across the street,
but it was twerpy LaJoye,
his skin pale and glistening like the snow,
who told me what happened.

Who knows what Walter had done
to him in that toilet stall at school
but every night LaJoye dreamed
of plunging a spike through Walter’s black heart.
He thought he might draw me in by stooling
and he almost did; I wanted revenge too.
But LaJoye’s wrath knew no bounds.
He had timetables charting Walter’s every move,
a blueprint of his house, Molotov cocktails,
instructions for making bombs.
He wanted a fellow assassin
to help set Walter’s house on fire
and ambush the family with baseball bats
as they ran out screaming.
When I pushed him away, I figured he’d try
to set my house on fire too. I’d have to keep tabs.

Strange to have become Walter’s ally by default
because an even greater creep comes along–
the state of world politics, I guess.
After all these years I still hear LaJoye
hissing like a defective valve,
after so much real snow in other places
so desolate you wonder why people stay,
why they don’t scramble into covered wagons
and beat it to the equator.
Me, I’m heading back for good. Soon.
Next time it snows, Walter takes a hit.
On the shin, probably, or kneecap.
That’s my leniency this go around.
And unless that mad snowman LaJoye gets there first,
I’ll find him.