everyday antidote to numerous maladies my grandmother dranktonic water in yellow bottles—something to do with her restless legsat night or was it the morning in Florida maybe after the Early Bird Specialwhich was actually afternoon with that blistering sun on the Boulevardalong the ocean & then the Intracoastal where signs warned boats propellersfrom manatee since some creature was near extinction, some creature bled—or was it something to do with the girls who had Russian soldiers chasingafter them, since it was always someone during the war or after but no onementioned the war exactly: a story without an end in which they all came to Americato play cards & raise children—my grandmother, you should have seen herat poker in her turban, North Miami so hot anytime including Decemberbut no one minded—not the grandparents, not the children, not the grandchildrensince the humidity was our country: the humidity & the night-swimming,our slick adolescent bodies like dolphins until golf-cart security chased us out,though the condo pool was lit—even when it was shuttered & locked—with underwater domes that pockmarked the surface like luminary moonseven when nothing shined down on the Atlantic up the block where we escapedto dodge man-o-wars on the beach & shiver exquisitely in each other’s dark armsthen hopped chain-link fences or tore across metal drawbridges past midnightto florescent elevator banks with someone else’s grandmother yelling:I thought you were dead, I thought you were in a ditch, but it wasn’t a ditch:we were drunk on strangers who were not strangers: we were the same tribeof survivors, a dream country everyday in this state of ocean & oranges & tattooedYiddish grandparents—so what if at night we were restless and overly-loved& only the sounds of chairs scraping linoleum waiting up: a tissue, a wheelbarrow,the shovels, the camps, the cards, my grandmother asking if I wanted somethingto eat & there I was always saying yes—there’s no choice—because in this placeno one is really in danger & no one ever gets full.