Illustration by Daniel Tankersley
Iguana Rain
We sipped sweet cortados from paper cups,
taking a long weekend in Miami. Even the bread melted
in a cubano spilling avocado. So many people
happy to fritter away the winter on Mid Beach,
where the one snow was the flesh
of snow crab on a cocktail fork. The sharpest
key lime pie quivered in a clamshell box
beside rows of highball glasses pre-dipped in sugar.
As we passed art deco hotels & classic cars like outsized toys,
the wind gelled our hair with traces of the Atlantic.
We didn’t know this would be our sole escape
before news of a virus, before quarantine,
& we’d cling to the memory like an acacia branch.
In the morning, an iguana stretched on the steps.
He had rained to the ground, I learned, losing his grip
overnight, in the cooling air, only to return
to his digits & slowly move to standing with the sun.
Holly Mitchell is a poet from Kentucky, now living in New York. Sarabande Books published Holly’s debut collection of poems, Mare’s Nest, in 2023.
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