Amelia Island, Florida

Finally, the silence. The workers on the east & west wings 
        have ceased their drilling, & now just the wind through 

everything it can touch. It would be torturous to walk 
        through life like that: yearning for cigarettes or lips, undressing

in front of everyone, with no one who can see. We don’t belong 
        among the doctors & deep southern accents, the overcast sky 

above ashen water the color of a body pulled from a hundred 
        yards out. They can’t feel the water, & there’s no riptide alert, 

sharks sensing blood from razor cuts, the fear of drowning. 
        But there can be no relief. All of them look like ghosts: floating 

through long hallways, cell phones glued to their ears, wrapped 
        in thousand-dollar suits, alligator purses under their arms. 

But jumping into bodies can’t happen, so we hope we’ve done 
        enough to stay here, avoid the shadows from darkened street lamps 

stretched into formless beings to drag us somewhere under 
        this earth, our penance we believed in afforded no longer. 

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