This month’s Versed in Florida is with poet Kelly Canaday of Naples. She’s a student at Florida Gulf Coast University where she’s majoring in English and minoring in Creative Writing. She’s also co-president of FGCU’s Creative Writing Club. She says the desire to hone her writing skills is largely what prompted her to begin attending college at the age of 16.
The Gardener
He’s the fly on your front porch
that sends
lost vessels, lapses of skin
over the striped Earth
The sun wakes
scalloped ferns on the edges
of the yard, a flimsy banner
for the voices drowned in sleep
He sounds of slot machines
and organs playing as
he tends to
the prison in between the windows and the gates
he’s
violent to the ground so he isn’t violent to the
face
that stands at the washing machine inside,
softened from the lace curtain
