Going Home: Family Reunion

             The Sands Motel, Treasure Island Beach, Florida

Everything here—the trailers, our mothers
collecting rents, even the bent and heavy
arms of the oaks—this whole 

fleeting, fucked up world needs us
to come home, at least
that’s what mom said when she called. 

Now we gather under a graduation tent,
as the gulls call and recall
the way we do: tasting, teasing, testing 

all the things we’ve been to each other.
Later, we will splash knee-deep through
low tide to a sandbar where the setting sun 

will swathe us all in pink and yellow
movie light. And I will think of all the names
we have for belonging, 

for the people beside me in the Gulf. After
the beer and baked ziti, we children grown,
will nod, look to our own—pinked 

and sticky, still warm from the sun—
those wooly heads whispering
together in the lingering light and we’ll kiss 

temple, crown, a throat the color
of a sparrow’s wing and say nothing
as we carry our children to bed.