She died last spring. On her porcelain table stained fingers separate rotten grapes, twigs, medwigs escape to the floor. Shit, it's cheaper to buy a bottle of Dago Red, Rick spits. That's what you got for your troubles when you're done, my mom always said. I, the dog in dark glasses who waits on the Harley for hand-outs.
Tourists come, laugh, snap shutters, cast green in up-turned hats.
They're nights are crisp white linen, amarreto lacquered lips in staterooms of The Royal Sovereign, but our night comes on as a black-flak fighter. Over these streets, Hemingway catwalked from Pauline toward wife three, and the smell of deep-fried blackeyed peas and rice tumbles from windows on pillows of bougainvillea. Above the Southern nun buoy hibiscus stars explode, dying angels, while the Isaac Allerton rocks her keel five fathoms and years beyond green ripples of the cay. I can see her tacking west through the Straits of Florida, Saint Elmo's fire cracking from the spars before she broke on the reef. What will they find in a hundred years of us, our garish nights on this spit of coral and palm.