On I-75 someplace flat
            between
Miami and Tampa
 
(the alligators snake through swampgrass
the fields wheat or water
the highway might collapse&consume me)

 
I enter Big Cypress Indian Reservation
on the legs of a rusting Accord unceremonious
            like the sign—
 
Now Entering Big Cypress Reservation—
and I wonder what more besides miles-of-land
I wonder what a cypress looks like
 
this is the deep flat-of-it-all
there’s not one tree but failing twists of pine
I think it’s impossible to judge Earth
 
as if it owes us more than everything
as if we ever grow ecosystems like arm hair
or hold a baby deer & a hurricane in a single fist
 
I wonder where this world ends
the world of only-distance
world stolen and stealing itself back
 
 
____
Brendan Walsh has fallen in love with South Korea, Laos, and all of New England; he currently lives in South Florida to sate his palm tree needs. He been published in Connecticut Review, LONTAR, Wisconsin Review, and other journals. His second collection, Go, was published by Aldrich Press in 2016. His work has been awarded the Anna Sonder Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize, and a Freedman Prize for poetry in performance.

Photography by Kathleen Uttenweiler.