There’s a man named Allen who has a radish farm
in Monticello, Florida. He’s got a double wide trailer
with a wraparound front porch he made out of cedar wood
and pressure-treated pine. When it rains, you can hear
the droplets fall like freshly cured acrylics tapping
on the driver side window of his tractor-trailer
all over the tin roof he hitched with his hammer
and ten-dollar box of nails. His daughter wrote a thesis
about how she is definitely his child, only smarter
and destined to burl forty minutes forth, to the city,
to Tallahassee, the world waiting in the sunset, but when she stands
underneath the jungle of morning glories living on the shed
where Allen keeps his antique John Deere,
she watches carefully as he bends over the plowed dirt.
We devoured Allen’s watermelons with our bare hands.
Back in town, in Tallahassee, where I learned that love
could look like my coworker giving me a ride
in the Fiat her husband bought her,
there’s this really great roller rink with a floor
so blue it looks like the Caribbean. Everybody in the state
has a story about that place. It’s so easy
to give away your heart when you’re on eight wheels
and going in circles to the beat of music from every decade:
2017 Drake, Pitbull when he was just Mr. 305,
and Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park,” the skating joints of the world
fostering the origins of many gender confused youths,
but especially in Florida. Florida, you made me this way,
a thunderstorm forever threatening my horizon
of palmetto prairies and fresh water springs.
Wherever I am, you are looking at me and asking
if I can see the alligators sleeping in the sand.
You’ve got so many teeth, it’s hard to count
my scars. Here’s one I got from Allen:
Natural Light cans and burning yard scraps,
the earth recently churned. His daughter
can basically see the future, and seeing myself
there too, I am like a young, fruit bearing apple tree.
Allen, a man with a farm, a red tractor,
and an 18-wheeler, gives me a lesson
in gardening: how to prune for next spring.
Florida, I’ve seen the world and learned the all the tricks
to roller skating, wooing my bosses, and throwing parties,
but only you could give me this: the full moon
in Jefferson County, the burning smell of random trash,
and a horticultural study in tearing my life apart.
Parker Logan is from Orlando, Florida and lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. His work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Foglifter, The Texas Review, and elsewhere. He works at a park in New Orleans.
