Hold us
up to the light—we’re full of detritus, run-
off from boats, trees
and PVC—
mangrove pods, eggshells, Scotch tape
rubber worms
bits of wire
fish bones.
Tap a hole in our veins and a canal forms
like an oil strike. Here comes
a railroad bridge, an alligator
a flotilla of Pollo Tropical wrappers
two fingers from an unidentified corpse.
Born
brackish, our bodies will never freeze.
They’ve nursed too many August afternoons.
Blood radiates our arms. Marrow throbs
inside the pit of our bodies like charcoal.
We’re dioxide. We’re spit
in the dirt. Toilet champagne.
We fell out of our mothers into this state’s
hot tub of muck and oil
and we float
like half-zipped Ziplock bags
stuffed with beer.
Under a new moon or the purple buzz
of a bug zapper, we’re incandescent.
We’ve swallowed the peninsula’s piss
and pissed it back into the bay and eaten the bonefish
that called it breath before a rusty hook
tossed over the side of the Tuttle at rush hour
took it up into the air—
how the sun made
its dappled surface
sing—
You can’t drown us
in water darker than the sky.
We don’t sink
in cement or quicksand.
We love the swamp.
We are its thing.
I step off the plane and smell the humidity—
the canal, the marl, the ocean’s ubiquity.
A day without clouds? That’s only publicity.
Water is everywhere. It’s called a utility.
No horizon in Miami leads toward the city.
I stand on the sky and walk toward a balcony.
Bodies float. There’s no way to bury me.
I sleep in the bay, speaking topographically.
The wind can destroy us? We grant it identity.
The palms bow their heads, as if for nobility.
I swim in the sea—some exercise in futility.
Salt is my language so drowning is literacy.
They say that we’re sinking? I call it humility.
One day the sun will explode. I’ll miss the humidity.
after Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Raise me. Bring me up to break
bread in the nearest
restaurant chain tucked
into a bed
of monstera bushes and
irrigated medians.
Lock me up in luxury.
Carry me
parking lot to parking lot
a carpet of asphalt
unrolling as my feet descend.
Run me
sideways into the guardrail
and over
the edge into the canal where
the pythons
will find me soft and
pliable as a baby
deer. Be my keeper
with a leash
my crooked warden with
an unchecked fiefdom.
Pull me closer with the fierceness
of an undertow
at a crowded beach when
the lifeguard
is distracted by his phone.
Reject my application
for a fair and just amount of years.
Donate my remains
to the moment when the bartender
calls out, Last call
and the man in the back by himself
mutters to no one
I’ve got nothing left to leave.
Show me where
the light goes when the neon
sparks and the letters
darken. Scatter me
to the chatter
of katydids, the whoop
of sirens, the trill of engines
calling out in the twilight for
the florescence of their mates.
Be my six-car pileup, my
end place, my cul de sac
the shallow strip of shimmer
I’ll be found face-down in
not looking up to the sky
but sipping you, my oracle
through the mouths of my eyes.
Wash me away, then pull me
back. Drag me across the mass
of cement and sawgrass.
Flip me, un-season me, soak me
in your broken bottles
your spilled colognes, your solemn
promises made with
fingers crossed. Coat
my heart in guava
and traffic cones. Toss me like
a handful of ships into
the horizon’s flattened heartbeat. Bury me
in your brand-new land
haphazardly, beside an unreturned
shopping cart, a scratched-off
scratch-off ticket, a pair of stone-washed
jeans ripped on purpose
in a far-off factory, and when
the ocean comes to claim me
let my bones wash out like bits
of plastic, let them catch
on the knobby knees of mangroves
and never be found
by kids on field trips cleaning up
the shoreline, let me be
the wings of ants cast off in the swarm
littered on the linoleum
of a one-bedroom apartment
where the cops discovered
the sliding glass door thrown off
its track, a half-naked
couple in bed, stabbed to nothing
but still holding
one another, still lost in the reverie
of being. Florida–
You’ve never saved anyone.
Don’t start with me.
P. Scott Cunningham is the author of Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas, 2018), selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins as part of the Miller Williams Poetry Series. The manuscript was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Cunningham’s poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The Nation, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, POETRY, A Public Space, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Monocle, The Guardian, and elsewhere. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Cunningham lives in Miami where he serves as the Executive Director of O, Miami.
This early photography book, titled Specimens of Fancy Turning, features thirty tipped-in albumen silver prints of geometric designs created on “the hand or foot lathe”. Resembling something between spirograph drawings and textbook diagrams of orbiting electrons, the figures were created using geometric, oval, and eccentric chucks and an elliptical cutting frame. Attributed to “an amateur” on its title page, the book is the work of Edward J. Woolsey (1803–1872), an heir of the mercantile Woolsey family and partner in the New York Patent Sugar Refinery. From Public Domain Review.
