Enterprise Rental Kiosk

In a Florida airport I think I gotta get out
more, to love/hate/sad with humans—you
know what I mean. Every passenger
descending the escalator is not my father
who really, I call Dad. A little girl cradles her babydoll
and I mistake her sibling for plastic. I was named after
three ancestors, a dream on a boat. At the turn
of the century, three of my city’s
canals were named for celestial bodies:
Venus, Altair, Aldebaran—4,000-year-old
bull’s eye. Venice of America, a failed plan filled
in asphalt. When I was little, I held my rituals close.
I talked to the ocean and my ghost family. I believed
in rebirth, a life rented. I knew my dad and I were dogs
which left out my mother. Sometimes I wrap
an umbilical grief around the three of us, still,
because I can. There is love and then there is love.

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