Condominium by Amelia Frank (17, New York City)

How to grapple with this spewing
Dialectical thought.
Out of the airport
We drove past concrete lilypads
Man’s calloused hands pressed against stone
Shoulders stung with saltwater.

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Thousands of eyes in the mangroves
Unmoving and silently crying
For the houses that have forced themselves
In swamp and brack water
Pushed suburbia into a cluttered paradise
Mammalian skeleton of what once was
The beer cans that have tangled themselves
On the fins of a manatee
White egret choked by the tides of tourists and screeching toddlers.
My mother’s mother speaks swedish
The language’s lull fills the sulfur smelling room with stories of general stores
And Minnesotan winter
Her cracked voice pours fresh water into our ears
It will freeze over.
My cousin delivered three babies today
Souls welcomed by florida hospital heat
Scrubs and tired smiles
Teeth that have bitten into once beautiful land.
My other cousin’s head clashes with the wheel in front of him
The chameleons cry in his pickup truck
Tails wrapped around black rubber
A rainbow frenzy of reptilia moving at seventy miles per hour.
And I sit on rock adjacent to the intercostal
Guiding paddle boards with sharp breath
I root my hands in the dry grass that digests my body
Eaten by plant shards born by a storm
In front of me a windswept wicker chair crawling with fiddler crabs.
I have run on the oily wings of roseate spoonbills
Now I glide my bitten hands through the ocean of stars below me
Trace the constellations with a tan body, humidity’s child.
My arms propped up by swarms of mosquitoes
Small bodies bursting with sugary blood
Floridians taste the worst.

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Amelia Frank is a senior at the Spence School who has won three regional scholastic awards, been published in the Ellipsis, We Write Here and Georgetown's Creative Writing Magazine. She is 17 years old and from New York City. In addition to writing she enjoys debate, chess, and singing.