Because sometime in between the night
you spent with your ex-lover,
and the night you got bar-humped
by every toothless felon in Tallahassee
at an oyster dive called Paradise,
clearly living up to its name once more,
your hair sprung into a double helix
and your skin prickled like pepper jam,
and you finally began to really see
everything again, all at the same time--
your humid-sized city in a summer
as loud-mouthed as any Derby broad
draped in her big hat azaleas, and look:
there’s the homeless schizo dropping
toe-touches in the Popeyes’ parking lot,
the Tharpe Street pimp who promenades
past a boiled peanut stand while dressed
in a tangerine-colored three-piece suit,
and above you are the storm clouds close
enough to chew, and below there’s that dead
lizard you found in the pantry while sweeping
spilled nutmeg, and there are the carrots
from the farmers’ market that look a little
like squids, a little like those sketches
of this is your baby six weeks in utero,
and because the morning he left for the last
time again, you saw that there’s another
ghost bike on the corner of Apalachee
and Magnolia, and because this is the kind
of place where the streets stew in bourbon
and bug spray, and where you can peer out
one window of the house and see nothing,
then peer out the other side and see rain,
and because here even something roped
to a telephone pole and painted white
till it gleams like a sunspot can still remain
invisible until the one day you pass it by,
your heart a hit-and-run, and you’re see-through.
Anne Barngrover is currently a third-year MFA candidate at Florida State University and has previously published a short story in FreightTrain Magazine, a critical essay in Magazine Americana, and poems in Full of Crow, Poets for Living Waters, and The Houston Literary Review.