SPLIT THIS ROCK: Poems of Provocation & Witness Melissa Tuckey   GHOST FISHING LOUISIANA “These people are in prison and there’s poison loose.” --Rev. Willie T. Snead, Sr., Mossville, Louisiana That's not an ambulance that's the sun going down in your rear view mirror It gets in your clothes it gets in the way you talk And the thunder late at night railroad cars full of poison bumping into one another Gambling boats ghost fishing on Lake Charles Sugar is refined here for sweet tea flour bleached white Men selling melons the size of heads Her house held the cancer like fish in a locked box     WHEN THE GIRAFFES COME The last days of July we walk past an oak struck by lightening bark blown hundreds of feet above the creek and hanging rocks and Pete asks will you put all of this in a poem and will you include the part about giraffes taking over the continent and the elephants fucking like it’s a community event? At breakfast beneath the dazzle of locust shells that hang above the kitchen table he says when the giraffes come we’ll sneak to the fields and cut the barbed wire so they can come and go as they please I’ve already cut the wires here Pete says showing tracks where the deer have passed through     Melissa Tuckey is an activist, writer and teacher. Her poems have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Verse Daily. Her chapbook, Rope as Witness, is published by Pudding House Press. Melissa serves on the Executive Coordinating Committee of Split This Rock and is active with DC Poets Against the War. She lives in Takoma Park, DC.   Published in Volume 9, Number 1, Winter 2008. Read more by this author: Melissa Tuckey: The Wartime Issue Melissa Tuckey: Museum Issue