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We are frantic families here. We are all bitten up.
The lawns have red frosting for flowers, the flowers
have teeth for pistils. They’re not really from around
here. Nothing from around here, not even the water or us,
the people. We vote yes to flamingoes by the highways,
we fling bread at them on the way to the Grapefruit Mall.
And we want
flowers that grow on linen skirts and English china.
Orlando used to be called Mellonville, used to be infested
with pests. Shuffleboard, roque, lawn bowling. Plumosa,
cabbage palms, banana and bamboo. Hibiscus here
is a spicy weed, not a pricy exotic, we rip the stuff
out of the back yard and burn it.
My hair is wet underneath
from March through November. I save a
drowning boy, being from Orlando. My
brother swims in the Junior Olympics. My mother
swims across a lake when she is angry
at my father. She wears her clothes.
She swims for three hours.
Year after year we ski around
Orlando, in between Orlando, all the lakes,
blue pads of cool, some bottomless, some so
brown from pine needles unfolding, they stain
the whites of your eyes til Christmas. We thread
our way through the wet blue heart. We think surely
it will sink, this city of admirals, tangelos and panama
hats, this city with its men in white guyaberas.
We are from Orlando. We don’t like to be too dry.
We have returned to our houses still standing, our citrus
which cannot taste us, and our lakes have returned to soup.
They are melding together. We are trading places. We are
going North to go to school, we are heading South to work
in maritime museums, on the beach. Being away from Orlando
we see we were visiting the place, in its sky blue uniform. It’s a hotel
for fruit, a winter tempo with a hurricane for every girl, and,
in every room by noon a little bit of the sea we lived for.
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