Weekly Poem: 'Fish Head for Katrina'

**By Terrance Hayes** The mouth is where the dead Who are not dead do not dream A house of damaged translations Task married to distraction As in a bucket left in a storm A choir singing in the rain like fish Acquiring air under water Prayer and sin the body Performs to know it is alive Lit from the inside by reckoning As in a city Which is no longer a city The tongue reaching down a tunnel And the teeth wet as windows Set along a highway Where the dead live in the noise Of their shotgun houses They drift from their wards Like fish spreading thin as a song Diminished by its own opening Split by faith and soaked in it The mouth is a flooded machine   "Terrance Hayes":http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/terrance-hayes, a creative writing professor at Carnegie Mellon, received the "National Book Award":http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010_p_hayes.html for poetry for his collection, "Lighthead." The PBS NewsHour "profiled Hayes in 2008":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june08/poetry_04-24.html. You can hear Hayes reading some of his older poems "here":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment/poetry/profiles/poet_hayes.html at our Poetry Series.