Apartment home in Florida as failure of the imagination

When you first came here, you loved 
the outlaw construction,
the way all the men seemed to carry a knife 
in the boot. It was wild, wasn’t it?
Calculating all the trajectories of trees
relative to your parked car, learning as you did, 
by the time the schools call out
you best scramble for any battery
and check what it fits later. During the storm, 
you were grateful for few, narrow windows, 
to notch your eye to a glass slat
like a minor parking-lot god. 
Dependent for once on your own 
sense, instead of the TV (gone out), 
the cell tower (busted).
Only after, in weeks of recovery, 
in the unnetworked darkness
you see how ugly this place was built,
how its cement corners depend on electric 
light. You sleep in the hot night,
hot part of the world during
its hot time. You are too old for this. 
You store your food in a damp cloth, 
you wring out clothes
in the pit of your sink. Should you drive, 
you find militarized streets,
service-station lines, caravans of linemen 
and National Guard. Your training,
it was never the right kind.
In these moments you see.
So consumed were you
with the small mechanics of survival 
within an all-devouring premise,
you realize, the premise was all wrong.
You do not have to exhaust your surroundings. 
In equilibrium with the earth,
in a pleasant and kind backdrop, 
gratitude might pulse through you.
But that possibility you will forget once 
power is restored.
Deprivation will make you zealous, 
your celebration worthy of feasting,
of meat and milk, the pulses of animals 
only recently stilled, cold and plentiful 
juices, Publix’s wide and deep
bounty. It was wild, that life, 
wasn’t it?
You had so many choices. 
You had so few.

Read more from Issue 18.1.