We can pretend many bad things aren't happening.          
We can look at each other and see a windowsill’s

collection of them coming: birds who fly faster
into windows than away from them, fooled by

reflections of trees, promises of light and company,
gravitas in deception, epigraphs in flights, then lost.
 
When my sister painted green falcons across
every surface of her apartment, we added feathers

to the wing outlines and introduced her to the couch.
The Howard Frankland bridge roosts behind me,

its own ex-inhibition in the forms of blocks of neon,
homeless with crazy stories, the worst of which

is the one my sister tells of waking up and not
knowing about it until the music started once again.

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After almost ten years of living here, I'm becoming a person who writes about Florida, and I'm taking my family with me.