Headline from ABC News // 27 July 2021 

A Florida man, equipped with straw hat 
and stilts, wades between the wave-broken  

beach rock closer to the tidal horizon. The coast 
always begs him to go everywhere  

he has never been. Behind the Florida man, other 
elderly residents of North Bay Retirement Center  

repaint sun-baked housing pastel blue 
and orange and green and red. They clean  

sand from hapless porches. Where have you 
been? the villagers ask. If the Florida man chooses  

the Atlantic he will leave behind his bedside 
collection of cough drops, sea shells,  

and photographs of dead relatives: ten distant 
cousins, three brothers, a wife, another wife,   

a son. His pockets are empty. He wades past 
the pier, past the port’s final warning buoy:  

here is your Florida man, your old and dying 
and nameless man on stilts bridging  

the longest stretch of water, risking abduction 
by waves into the endless pull of ocean.  

Patrick Wilcox is from Independence, Missouri, a large suburb just outside Kansas City. He studied English and Creative writing at the University of Central Missouri where he also was an Assistant Editor for Pleiades and Editor-in-Chief of Arcade. He is a three-time recipient of the David Baker Award for Poetry, the 2020 honorable mention of Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Poetry, and grand-prize winner of The MacGuffin’s Poet Hunt 26. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Quarter After Eight, and Bangalore, among others. He currently teaches English Language Arts at William Chrisman High School.