The girls with their arm floaters
splash water on each other, this giggle
of summer-like man-o-wars
in joined frolic – the little one
paddles in her green inflatable
alligator, bigger than she is,
toward the center of the pool.
She screams she’s going to gobble
everybody up, the other kids,
because she s a swamp thing-baby.
Out in the Florida Straits, a boy
kicks up his feet to stay afloat
on his back, everywhere water,
sky, the impossibility of return –
firm ground a memory now,
these three days out from the island
of his birth, his parents drowned.
A bad storm gathers meanness,
waiting for the living to spill out
of these makeshift rafts. Coffee
beans in a sack. He is the last.

In his cracked and bitter lips,
a chant, a prayer he learned
from his mother, Santa Barbara
Bendita, goddess of troubled
crossings …the boy closes his eyes,
dreams of a great sea monster rising
to swallow him in one thirsty gulp,
in its belly, a warm dry promise.
In the pool the children laugh, toss
each other into the deep end.
This is the mockery of these Florida
skies, bruised, ripe, long overdue
to fall, ready each time to wipe clean
the slate and start all over again.