Joe Dahut

My Third Hurricane Season in My Twenty-Fifth Year

The current picks up speed around the bridge,
and the moon draws us as animals 

when it spills from its cup, brimming with an evening
story you told me when the power went out. 

You held me close the day we put her down,
and in the corner of our bedroom, a cobweb 

becomes a labyrinth that catches conversation
about our guesses for hurricane season, questions 

we can’t control, asking not for answers,
but a closeness only our bodies can exact. 

Under the bridge, a tarpon eats on a strong outgoing
because she has to, not because it pleases her. 

What pleases me will eventually kill me,
I thought, as the sun came up over the Gulf. 

I flip on my truck with my eyes closed and surprise
myself when I wake up in the same bed I make.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joe Dahut is a poet, essayist and educator living and writing in the Florida Keys. He earned his MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he taught creative writing. Joe's poetry and prose can be read in Saw Palm, The Drake, The FlyFish Journal, Clade Song and Little Patuxent Review, among others.