This month’s Versed in Florida is with Sara Comito. She graduated with an English degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and has been living in Fort Myers for the past 13 years. Comito works as communications editor for a local PR and Marketing agency. Her poetry has appeared in dozens of print and electronic journals and anthologies.
Undeterred by the small size of their square city lot, she and her stonemason husband have become urban farmers and beekeepers, eschewing the traditional front lawn for a jungle of fruits, veggies and flowering plants much of which, she tells WGCU’s Amy Tardif, has now become a muse for her poetry.
Originally published in Mad Hatter’s Review
All drains lead to the sea
The iris in its exigency strives only
to flower. These things are of a marshy sort
and a far way from any Africa.
How did I think I could serve? This soil
is bereft, with only mocking water
below, so catacombed in chalk.
There have been people lately diving to chart
the aquifer. The support staff shadows above ground,
beacon squealing as those below veer in and out of range,
bushwhacking through swales,
through supermarkets,
knocking on residences.
Would they know, from a slow contrary course,
of the intrepid demise and follow to the output
—“all drains lead to the sea”—after losing one on the mic?
Here is only silt. Precambria stress testing the botany.