Promises From Florida

Morgan Laidler

Even as my mind lies
awake behind tired eyes,
accompanied by promises
of coyote howls,
I can almost feel the house
sinking into the swamp,
taking us up to our eyes
with thick mud, as it has done
so many times before.  

In the howls, the wind
blowing through palms, the heat
that bears down on my sweaty chest,
never letting me relent
the cool whispers of
You Don’t Belong Here
that have echoed in our ears
since Spaniards sought the fountain
of youth, ignoring the eyes popping
yellow stares through the bushes,
the howls of their world gagged
by mouths and eyes watering. 

I’m not the first to force
floor over sawgrass and cry
from the weight of home, but if
the trees and swamp and rising
ocean tides get their way
with our temporary, solid forms,
I will be one of the last. 

I lie awake and hear
the howls and know they ask
this of me, because I cannot answer

Is a land you cannot protect from progress
any sort of land at all?

---

Morgan Laidler
Morgan Laidler is a junior at Boston College studying Secondary Education, English, and Creative Writing. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and then moved to Parkland, Florida, where she began writing poetry and prose. Her work focuses on themes of sentimentality, womanhood, and growing up in Southern America. She has been published in The Laughing Medusa, Stylus, The Wilderness House Literary Review, and Girls Right The World.