Homeland

ROBERT IS HERE, the sign promises

in big white letters scrawled on the roof

and Robert is here somewhere inside

the shack. I don’t remember when Robert

was not a fruit farmer in this swamp

with a sunburnt scalp and a thick 

white beard. In the third grade he showed me that 

the rivers of sawgrass run smooth when I drag my fingers 

up the blades but draw blood from

the pulp of my palm when I drag it 

down. The Everglades is all dust till you hit

this place, Robert’s shack, where the egg fruit custard 

drips down my throat and leaves my mucus slick 

so I have to spit in the only gravel I have 

ever known. Louis’s dad has been here as long as Robert has, 

this same block and this same sun, except Louis’s dad is 

stuck in the jailhouse with the striking white walls 

that Robert sells fruit in front of. When Louis and I went

the mamey sapote shakes were almost

thick as fudge. I half-thought Louis would say 

something akin to going in and seeing the prison

if only to talk to his father, but he just 

husked his sugar cane stalk till the layers piled

onto the gravel by the prison gates. My sweat in this swamp

is always sweet, between the soft of my neck 

dribbling down to my collar bones and the 

underbelly of my knees. This sweat is the only thing

Louis’s dad and Robert will ever know.

We are all stuck here, in this river of 

sawgrass that someone named ever-glades 

like they don’t ever end, ever, cause we are 

always home again here. Some of us have chosen 

this swamp, and others stare out the window

imagining where the home will end

where they do not sell fruit in the dust.