At best this narrative elevates the state to the level of mythology (a pattern of bungling Florida men become Florida Man). At worst Florida is no more than the butt of a joke...
A troupe of Russian dwarves retired from the circus to found a community built to their scale in South Florida. They purchased land off the Tamiami Trail bordering an endless plain of flooded sawgrass and called it Sweetwater, a mistranslation of the Seminole name for the same swamp.
The sharp oyster beds cut into the feet and to move in the water is a slowness. There is a quiet around you there. The sun is almost welcome. Is almost a wanted sun up above the window of the sea you wade through the bending sights below all bended and rippled you pass a hand through that waterpane and see your arm take an angle to the oyster there...
I was desperate for a CVS, but instead found one of those birds—long neck bent like a spring, beak like a spear, caw like a motor that won’t turn over—wading in somebody’s blue blow-up pool.
When Columbia broke into a burning rain over Louisiana,
fell in pieces into a thousand pastures and backyards,
my uncle joined the search party. It was not a rescue mission. It couldn’t be.
The bucket was half full of papery spit globs. Soon she’d be able to take it outside and add onto her project: an enormous wasp nest big enough to house a human body.
There’s something haunting about the chair. It commands the back room of the small cottage on Clouser Avenue in Orlando like some sort of derelict general...