Joshua Garcia

Evacuation

The crepe myrtles are still blushing
with good fortune on Coming Street
where traffic has emptied to the escape
routes rivering east. Today has quieted
with yesterday’s evacuation orders
and news of the Bahamas’ mounting death toll.
CNN shows chest-deep water pooling
from two days’ wind lancing Freeport
like the skateboarder who zips past me,
sinuous and long, one leg planted
beneath him and the other striking
and floating. Striking and floating,
my chest follows as if caught on lure
and line, rippling in the shade of palmettos.
On King Street the bells of St. Matthews
sound off time unattended to, except
by men shouting at a construction site
outside the cafe where I stop for an americano.
A sparrow lands on my table in prey
of a fallen offering, and across from me
a woman leans back under a ginkgo, eyes
boarded up to thoughts of a ransacked city.
Together, as the bells toll on, we slacken
into little fevers if only to savor the still
hot sun through trees unheavied by rain
and warming our faces. How good to look up
at the run of vine on the lattice, to chance on
the god-made and what man made
intermingled, and all of it waiting.

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Joshua Garcia lives and writes in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the College of Charleston and is an editorial assistant at Crazyhorse. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Hobart, Bodega, Ruminate Magazine and elsewhere.