☀ Today's Poem: "De Soto Park" Erika Meitner

"What if the moon was essence of quinine"
—Frank Stanford

everyday antidote to numerous maladies my grandmother drank
tonic water in yellow bottles—something to do with her restless legs

at night or was it the morning in Florida maybe after the Early Bird Special
which was actually afternoon with that blistering sun on the Boulevard

along the ocean & then the Intracoastal where signs warned boats propellers
from manatee since some creature was near extinction, some creature bled—

or was it something to do with the girls who had Russian soldiers chasing
after them, since it was always someone during the war or after but no one

mentioned the war exactly: a story without an end in which they all came to America
to play cards & raise children—my grandmother, you should have seen her

at poker in her turban, North Miami so hot anytime including December
but no one minded—not the grandparents, not the children, not the grandchildren

since 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 moons

even when nothing shined down on the Atlantic up the block where we escaped
to dodge man-o-wars on the beach & shiver exquisitely in each other's dark arms

then hopped chain-link fences or tore across metal drawbridges past midnight
to 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 tribe

of survivors, a dream country everyday in this state of ocean & oranges & tattooed
Yiddish 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 something

to eat & there I was always saying yes—there's no choice—because in this place
no one is really in danger & no one ever gets full