– spray painted on a garbage can in Luquillo, PR

Before the low security post and the mangrove trail 
teeming with hermit crabs and darts of lizards, 
we find the Drake quotation and think of the video 
the island needs in real life. To believe the way things are 
is justified if you were denied an education. God’s plan
disgusts as we avoid the sidelong trash visitors leave 
on the way to the ideal beach. I imagine the rap-pop king 
slash stacked philanthropist dropping hundred bands 
into an adoration of hands. Here, who wouldn’t cheer
such generous clemency? If that was what the rich did
I might incline to think these waters exist to drown
tourists unfamiliar with riptides. No ads needed here
where even the sand doesn’t stick, and the kioskos’ oil is 
always afire. It’s February yet the sun knows its strength. 
The clouds go dark before dinner; the morning’s mist. 
To think we thought island rain was a bad forecast. 
By night, our girls watch the British Baking Show,
a prodigal entertainment of judged sand paintings 
of sugar and buttercream. I get takeaway margaritas. 
To be able to travel makes two teachers rich as rappers,
and what decent deity would deny anyone the salt rim? 
As much as it’s tempting to accept inequity as a lesson 
in the inevitable, to say that unattended suffering or luck’s
anything but improvised is the way the captive comes to
love the captor and forget the dream of lifted keys.

*

Max Heinegg is the author of Good Harbor which won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Press in 2022. His second book, Going There, is forthcoming later this year. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Thrush, Nimrod, Kestrel, and Crab Creek Review, among others.

Find him on the web at www.maxheinegg.com