SUMMER SOLSTICE

I remember how you looked that long, humid night—rabid and fierce.

Your mother made some kind of bitter holistic root tea we drank.

In the den, your dad was practicing Japanese for his next trip,

while your brother Scotty was teaching an egg to do tricks

on the speckled Formica kitchen counter.

We snuck out behind your house that endless June night,

to the vacant Baptist school, to the place where the moon nested

with the mockingbirds in the branches of an old banyan tree.

On the front patio, a one-winged palmetto bug flopped into the wall

as your dog Ankota mercilessly pawed it from one corner to the next.

“Hear that?”

“Hear what?”

Music dancing through the leaves gave you reason enough to touch me.

Bio: Laura McDermott, a true native of South Florida, studied creative writing at FSU and received her MFA from FIU while concentrating on poetry in her studies. Currently, Laura is a full time instructor on temporary status at Broward College – South Campus, as well as a part-time instructor at Florida International University and Johnson and Wales University.  For the past five years, she’s served as the Festival Coordinator of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.  Because of her dedication to higher education and writing, Laura received recognition as a 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication Professional Equity Project Grant Recipient.