A sinkhole chewed a canal through
the Florida bush.In a can the mood-war was setting,
digging in irony packs.Under the Seminole rub,
lawn chairs were crackling.Each pool was a love organ,
the collected blue gales of, then all the tiny
witnesses grew as they swum the air,collecting hair samples and car alarms
in the pink-palmed sundown.Where our blues were shorn,
lawns buzzed with immigrants,
and couples in stretched fabric walked.We were now the old folks, our fears
and loss of balance when we closedour eyes in the shower. We remembered
long-dead cats bulging in an old campground,a shed’s greasy tools and tangle of fishing gear.
We feared the pedicures we paid forand the insect-free islands our lush winters
of heaven preserved.
The Reservation
Vincent Zompa
Feature Date
- July 18, 2018
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Copyright © 2018 by Vincent Zompa
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Vincent Zompa is the author of Heard Animal (Dusie, 2014), Moonraker (Dusie, 2011), The Recife Plectrum (Dusie, 2010) and Jacket of the Straits (New Michigan Press, 2007). His poems have most recently appeared in BOMB Magazine and Verse, where he was the 2016 winner of the Tomas Salamun Prize.
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