August in Florida

To get cool we exhale
on each other. Puffs of morse code
against a nipple. A belly. Busy as lice,

the month drips round us–
creeps yellow along arm hairs
& pubic bones. Stained linoleum

sags like our messed bed sheets.
Sometimes we nap beside the lake
where water never stirs. Not even

with thought. Beside it tickling
fire ants took my chest in pieces,
but left their pincer love bites

in a palm tree’s waving fan.
Our schnauzer danced
along the spot’s mercury edge.

His salty beard made wet from play.
His movement coaxed the log
I’d ignored at water’s center

into gliding, perfume-gentle, closer
to the shore where I laid
beside the dog who performed

smart tricks: played dead & held
out his paw to the alligator
who snatched him into its vice.

Jaws broke the dog’s thin wet
leg & took its body under the surface
which became, again, an opaque cradle.

Alexander Duringer is from Buffalo, NY and earned his MFA in Poetry from North Carolina State University. He is a winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Dorianne Laux Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The South Dakota Review, &Change, Plainsongs, Cola Literary Review, The Shore, and Poets.org among others.