I’ve set my heart on a glimpse of you: Florida Golden Aster (Chrysopsis floridana)
— listed as endangered in 1986
You are so rare I can’t find you.
It’s spring and your woozy stem has yet
to arise from the Florida scrub and blunt sun.
Once it shoots up, your whiskery leaves
will climb it all summer.
Then, in the fall
that’s cooling later and later these days,
your yellow-petaled face will unmask
itself beneath a plushy crown:
a bloom the size of my thumb-knuckle.
You’ll stand tall as my grandson,
lanky as licorice.
You’re native to this place, like me,
so somehow we’re cousins,
though your kind thrive less and less
as my kind crowd more and more.
You might have all but disappeared.
Come Autumn,
I’ll turn myself into a sleuth
and wander the hammocks seeking you
in the sunny sand-patches that still remain,
somewhere beyond the suburbs of Pasco,
the high rises of Hillsborough,
the golf courses and strip malls,
eternity pools and interstate,
somewhere beneath a dazzling sky.
Outside Lula, Georgia
A famous white poet said, White people don’t write about race.
We need to write about race. I was driving past the tiny town of Lula’”
first name of my mother. That got me thinking about our birthplace ,
the South, then cotton, whips, the flag and blackface.
And that led to us white folks on my mother’s side. A big hallelujah.
Is that why I don’t write about race?
For Black people who live there, Lula must seem a null space.
They’re just 9% to the white 90 and the history of us is a fistula
weeping from middle passage to lynching place.
The ghost of our housemaid could be a test case:
Our polished silver, her chapped hands. I birth the memories like a doula.
The gleam leaves me struggling to write about race.
How to reckon the value of my family’s white face?
It all comes down to legacy, a lopsided ruler
that measures the crooked truth about our place.
Our history’s impossible to erase.
My mother was christened Lula Belle. She dropped the “Lulaâ€
like I’ve dropped the rule that White people shouldn’t write about race.
This poem, my passage to a map-less place.
Kite Flying with Red Tide
Fourth of July, Indian Rocks Beach, Florida
The breeze heaves toxins.
But since our eyes aren’t tearing up,
since we’re not coughing,
we set up beach chairs
and you unroll the kite
you bought just for this sugar sand,
the fireworks and flag.
We knew before we arrived that karenia brevis,
red tide, was debasing the Gulf.
We watched reports,
kept track of predictions
and still thought yes, we should go.
This morning sand cleaners
raked the shore,
scooped up putrefied pinfish, mullet, bluefish and drum, the dying and dead.
Gotta keep the tourists coming
You hoist and lift the gray, plastic eagle,
its wings wider that a dolphin’s fin.
The kite weaves and shudders,
urging you to loosen and tighten the string
like you’re pulling saltwater taffy,
like I’m doing any kind of good here,
my dark glasses aimed
at the cirrus-streaked sky
wide as a blue prairie.
Besides the vanished carcasses of blow fish, jelly fish, sting ray, horseshoe crab,
the brown pelicans are absent;
sandpipers, too. They were my favorites:
their skirring chatter chasing the waves.
When the breeze dies,
you let the kite nosedive to the sand.
In the distance the cumulus huddle like pound animals.
Black skimmers and gulls stumble into sunset where
July’s bunched up like a heap of lit briquettes.
Gianna Russo is the inaugural Wordsmith of The City of Tampa. She is the author of All I See is Your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic, with photographer Jenny Carey; One House Down and Moonflower, winner of a Florida Book Award. She is the founding editor of YellowJacket Press. A lifelong educator who co-created the Creative Writing Program at Blake School of the Arts, Gianna is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University where she teaches in both the undergraduate and graduate programs. In 2017, she was named Creative Loafing‘s Best of the Bay Local Poet.