First Overnight Visit: Key West, Florida
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Before I deliver her to her father's pressed shirt,I am careful not to notice his ring,or how his new wife prefershim clean-shaven, hatless, veneered.We do not breathe each other in.
He does not ask about allergies, or diapers,or which is her favorite blue dress.I drive away fast, tires slipping down Flagler,past the high school where her father and I hidfrom friends. At lunch, we planned our wedding,debated baby names and nursery themes.
At a stoplight by the Salvation Army,three men in once-white caps smoke,string their bicycles with oiled chains,unaware of the hen with two chickshumped as rats, pecking near their bare feet.By example, she teaches her babies
to separate food from rubbish.They ignore her, scratch their necks,delight in breeze ruffling feather-fuzz.Sniff at what smells like a change in wind,then back to their impressions of childrentumbling after cart-wheeling leaves.
I worry my daughter will love her fatherfor the swimming and ice cream,his garden butterflies and iguanas,that when he returns her she will cling to him,the way I want to even now,now that he is so final, and no longer mine. [End Page 173]
Danielle Sellers is the author of a poetry collection, Bone Key Elegies, and her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Mississippi.
