a sunshined state
by Warren Buchholz
I believed sunsets over beaches
and green natural wetlands
made this place worth living
but my father said we come here to die
not from old age but by the hands
of man that only seemed possible
on CSI: Miami reruns
and mass market disaster
paperbacks
we’re too busy criminalizing
the poor to see
our wetlands
become parking lots
and our grassland
become condos
we continue to sink deeper into
a red tide that cannot be fixed
mother nature teaches us
she always wins against
man's conceit
as time marches on
and disney flushes away,
it’ll be too late to adapt,
and we’ll all be swallowed by
the raging sea.
Warren Buchholz is an autistic, queer writer and digital producer whose fiction and poetry have been featured in Caffeine Press, Zygote in My Coffee, Words Dance, and Straight Forward Poetry. He serves as the jazz brand manager for WUSF, Tampa’s NPR station. He lives in St. Pete, FL.