_Empty and hungry behind the hotel desk, I’m staring at the revolving door and stuffing my tongue into the hole in my back tooth. Mya and her mom are laughing, pushing the cleaning cart down the lobby, the warm light filling their mouths. Mya’s my age. We both should be doing different things. I walk to the spinning doors and close myself in. Then Asha calls me, shrinking me back to her baby sister, softening me to clay waiting for her voice.

I’m pacing in a slow circle, the warm pre-dawn and cold AC taking turns touching my body. When she says, You ain’t hit me back in weeks, I eat the silence. I’m thinking of her face, her nostrils flaring from frustration. I want to say, You saved my whole life. You saved her whole life. I don’t say this. I apologize instead. When she says, We’re moving back home, there’s a hole in my belly. I find my face murky in the glass, the palm foliage black-green and blurry behind me.

I go to the ocean after my shift, the beach dimly lit from the strip of lights winding along the coast. The waves loop, crashing the shore with a stretched, hushed rhythm. This water is old, carrying years by the billion, and I see Michael’s pink-brown mouth moving in my head—Two-thirds of the air we breathe comes from the ocean, from plankton, from bacteria, from these little forests of kelp making sugar and air. I feel the humidity, inhaling until my ribs spread tight, holding it in, letting it out.

Leaving the shore, I pop some pills to help me sleep, always timing it right, just as the dawn’s bright body begins to knock beneath the black. My tongue is still chalky as I’m getting in the pale gold Impala Asha left me. Then the engine yawns and Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” begins to detangle me, the drums and strings unspooling some yellow thread coiled inside, like Mama before me, her body suspended in the syrupy light coming through the window, eyes closed, Marvin singing out the curve of her soft mouth. I was small, singing with them too, the fan cycling wind over my bare legs.

I open my eyes and want to be high. Miami is mostly quiet at night save for the ghosts, moving, laughing, and yelling beneath the oaks and poinciana, shifting in the dark. Other cars swim through the calm, moving toward work or home, some memory growing smaller behind them. Water runs below me, streaming through the porous rock. All of us in this city dipped in the blurry border of sea level, some water people, closest to the earth. But I’m choking the steering wheel, trying to avoid the film in my head—the geography unfurling and changing shape as the moving truck cuts across the country leaving California, Asha’s eyebrows almost touching each other, her eyes absorbing the road—next to her, the passing lights sculpting my daughter’s round face drooped with sleep.

A bird skims the windshield with a dark color. It feels like I’m falling through my chest, the blood drumming in my ears. I pull over, my hazard lights coloring the fronds of the clumping palms and clusia cut to hedges. I don’t find a body. I find a shape unfolding to a bird, flying toward the bridge in the distance, the bay lit from the private ports of some rich folk, their boats bobbing with the tide.

_Walking in the door I catch a trace of my funk. I’m too tired to shower. My shoulders begin to soften below the ceiling fan moving in a sleepy circle. The Juliet balcony door is open, the warm air spilling through. A balcony in the building across from us begins to collect the blue morning. Someone’s smoking, the red dot of light moving like an insect in a flight loop. A tall bird lands on the railing, spreading its wide wings before folding them softly to its body. The woman has hair like me, a thick, curly bob touching her shoulders. She’s staring at the bird like an old friend. Then she’s lifting a little girl into her arms and I feel sick. She points at the bird, guiding the girl’s small eyes. The bird opens again, daybreak beginning to lay gold on its gray-blue back. I shut the blinds.

Michael’s a dense shape in the bed. He’ll be gone soon, on a plane to see his sister in Georgia. The sadness is gummy in my chest. My clothes coil at my feet and disappear into the dark. I get behind him, bringing our waists together, my arms around him, seeping into his heat, his body a little sun. Kiss his neck. Kiss it again. Smelling the sweet of his scalp. I can’t know he’ll die. But I hold him like water, anxious to keep his shape, waiting for him to return already, so we can continue coming back together. But the past is there, dragging its viscous body over the horizon, with a wet mouth that knows my name.

_I miss Michael in the morning. His voicemail says he couldn’t get me up. I lie in the copper noon until I’m restless. I wish I was being fucked. After it was done, my body emptied, I was fearful we wouldn’t be intimate again. And we hadn’t been. But we both been tired, both been working two jobs, stressing, and dreaming of a life outside the fatigue of money. Maybe the sadness was walking in us too.

Our apartment is light on furniture, and dark, except for the small hours of sun that find their way through the glass, but Michael is adamant on filling it with plants. Rejects from the nursery, clippings gathered from the city, plants bought with credit cards and their ugly interest. Grow lights hang everywhere, coloring the mist lifting from the humidifiers. He works to give us imagery, a home buzzing with green gradients. I love him for that, these colors he fills me with.

I wear his body and begin the watering routine, filling the tub with philodendron, pothos, monstera, and the bamboo palms. I change out the water in the vases holding mangrove propagules and vine clippings, light and time coaxing new roots out in tiny green nubs. When I slide the balcony door open the heat is sticky and hungry for my skin. In the hanging planter I find Michael’s peppers collecting color, and strangely, a coontie seedling beginning to unfurl next to them. Had to have been a mockingbird passing the seed through its body.

There in the building across from me is the woman wearing my face, her balcony crowded with blue herons, shuffling their gray wings and itching their backs with bright beaks. But I’m watching her hands, fluid as water, braiding a girl’s hair lovingly between her legs, holding a comb in her mouth.

_Second job. To make enough money to stay alive in my city, I sit in a car and help a machine learn to drive. The company’s founder’s people are from old money in Argentina. I looked up the history and learned what that meant. He looks how you think, icy eyes with a smile full of pretty white teeth. He hasn’t started yet, but I know he’s close to calling himself a founding father of the tech sector spilling into the city. He shared that the goal was not to live in a future where everyone has a chauffeur, but to perfect the machine for delivery, some small fleet dedicated to packages, groceries, whatever. This would make this labor greener, safer, and rooted in the collective. I guess it makes sense, but sometimes I think of the people being erased, wondering what ripples I’m making.

I took the job because I know the city, been mapping it in my body, catching buses and the Metrorail through the punishing heat, then driving, that freedom, trying not to get mowed down by some fool with a heavy foot and bad decision-making skills. Save for the fear of losing my life, the job isn’t bad, drifting through the city in the white Ford, music seeping into my skin, a camera with a mind, heavy atop the car. The routes are basic—down Biscayne, over MacArthur, Port of Miami, Miami Beach, Wynwood, Brickell, and Coconut Grove, the car slowing down to record the surroundings, making little measurements in light. But today the assignment is to run our personal errands, a more natural route, so I’m taking the long way to Mama’s house, heading through Overtown.

I’d drive this way with Michael, up NW 3rd, peeking down to the shapes of light falling on his hand holding my thigh. That smile. His small curls touched with light. I’m listening to a podcast to fill up the space. They’re talking about climate gentrification, how the limestone ridge all the Black neighborhoods rest on has been targeted by developers. A woman from Liberty City is speaking, that touch of Southernness in the language that is Black Miami, and I feel warm in the cadence, following the rhythm of her voice talking about the floods. It’s funny when people don’t think Miami is the South. I’m thinking about the history, the ghosts that the camera can’t absorb lugging their bodies across the asphalt.

Instead, I feed it this block bowed beneath the mahoganies swaying with brown fruit. A boy at the bus stop waterfalling bright soda and passing it to the next kid. The gold in a woman’s mouth outside the corner store, laughing. I’m digging my tongue into my tooth, trying to soothe my pulsing gums.

My grandpa had a house here once, somewhere before 20th Street. Don’t know if it’s still here or gone. Mama won’t come back to point it out. I make the house up: reduced to dust; emptied behind a gate; still whole and filled with the weight of people loving each other. The car’s camera doesn’t see my mother as a girl, missing teeth, running iridescent in the sun. All the people dressed gorgeous, out for the night, hungry for the music to color their bodies. Muhammad Ali beginning his run to Miami Beach, children trailing him with joy stretching their mouths. It can’t record this place as it used to be, Harlem of the South, little plot of earth transformed by Black people's hands.

The car slows beneath the 95, the traffic thrumming above me. People are huddled in tents on each side. Mama’s mouth is moving in my head—That highway is haunted. Those cranes changed everything. Cut us down to nothing. Right in the middle. Then the neighborhood was gone.

The border between Overtown and Wynwood is blurry. Here, Mama and my father still touch. The traffic begins to thicken when I turn onto NW 2nd, the development spreading like spilt water. This neighborhood is made of the limbs of Overtown and Little San Juan to the north, a small place where Puerto Rican women wove in the garment factories on NW 5th. Little San Juan is all fossils now, save for a Puerto Rican flag hanging out someone’s window, a coqui petroglyph, or someone speaking Spanish with a lilt from the islands.

Boys on bikes fill the street, twenty of them, weaving through the traffic, tilting their bikes to coast on their back wheels, their shirts billowing behind them. A boy with dreads stops in the intersection and spins himself, a shape of wind, making circles, the cars honking, tourists drinking him with their phones, until he pulls off. I feel warm in my chest watching them take space back. I’m wondering if the car is making memories.

_Mama treats me like a friend. Sometimes I feel like she forgot I filled her once. Felt like I was being punished for the way I said no to being a mother, back when I was young and more foolish and took a swing at her. She caught my wrist and slammed me into the wall. The stroke hadn’t run through her yet. She was strong as a tree. Asha was cradling my infant daughter.

That’s your child. That boy and his family are gone. It’s on you. Get what needs to be done, done. Asha didn’t build that baby in her, push that baby out, you did. She’s not gonna lose what she worked for because of your ugly choices.

Her breath was soft on my face, mint with a touch of liquor. Asha had already done what none of us had done before: diploma, bachelor’s, master’s, a job in Brickell in a building seemingly shooting up from the ocean, her office overlooking the thick canopy of ancient banyan. I had just got my diploma thanks to summer school, struggling to rearrange myself into something solid for the tiny girl with my eyes, my bones, the shape of my nails. There was something missing. The night before, I’d stood above her crib in the living room where we slept, staring down at her like a surface of water. I still wasn’t there. She began to wake, cracking open to a shrill, and I looked at her. Louder, and I looked at her. Asha came and lifted her, cradling her to dreamy silence. Moonlight made milky shapes on her arms, on the floor, but falling short of my body. The truth began to glitter. Mothering was an impossible thing.

So, with no answers for any of them, the shame still buzzing in my hands, I ran out the door, the city still warm trying to shake the ugly heat. I got on a bus, the driver’s bulbous eyes moving over me, sat in the back to carefully watch who came in and who left. I went to the water, the beach dim and windy, the brine brushing my nose. The beach elder, green and eager, watched me as I stared at a ship light blinking red in the distance. I was there a minute or an hour. Then Mama came up from behind, all the water almost leaking out of me. I found her black eyes and lost my shape, bawling into her neck. There’s always a solution, baby, even if we don’t like it. But come back home. I need you to come back home.

_The mango trees on the block are bright with bloom. I pull up to the apartment. Inside, Mama’s back is soft, hunched over the stovetop, stirring a pot too black at the bottom with a wooden spoon. Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes warm the air singing, you know how to make me, make me feel so good, Teddy Pendergrass behind the rhythm, melting the room with his ad-libs. The walls are painted marigold. She is cooking me my dad’s arroz con gandules, the banana leaf damp and green in her hand as she keeps stirring. She cooks the same meal every Friday, says a girl needs to know her father. He made this with his grandmother in Isabela when he was a boy, she’d remind me.

I remember him teaching her some sleepy Saturday afternoon, guiding her hands through the recipe he pulled out his body. The light touched his wide hands as he chopped cilantro, peppers, onions, culantro, and garlic, passing it to Mama to grind them into recaito in the pilón.

Mama is hauling ghosts. I am too. I keep my father’s belongings in a box inside me, his food, his voice, his skin, his little boy self in some green country I’ve never been to. The islands are inside me. Sometimes I feel it, a shape on the horizon, a piece of metal, a nothingness.

Come here and taste this rice for me. She lifts the spoon to my mouth, the little mound of gold wisping steam. I bounce it around in my mouth, panting to avoid a burn, giving her a thumbs up.

Where’s Michael? she asks.

Visiting his sister in Georgia.

So, you’re all alone now? You never liked being alone. Her dark lips curve.

Please, I have my friends. I see them when I want to. I know how to be alone, can enjoy it. You on the other hand are stuck on a screen, or tied up on that boy.

He’s more than that. We live together, Mama.

Let those boys see a snout or a tooth and they end up running.

I look at her body, counting the people who’ve left, by death or disappearance. I don’t know how to look her in the face and tell her that she is still worth staying for.

How much longer before Asha gets here? she asks, walking with her dark wood cane to the fridge.

I’m not sure. Depends on how often they stop.

Does Michael know?

Why would he need to know?

She turns to me: He doesn’t know about Yaminah?

I look at her.

This is another chance for you, Anisa.

Asha and I worked that out between ourselves.

And how much that cost? That girl needs to know her mother.

She has a mother.

I could lie to an infant, but I can’t lie to my grandbaby’s face who’s talking and thinking now.

She’s not coming home to drop her off, Mama. She’s not coming here for me. She’s coming here for work.

How long you gonna run? She slams the wooden spoon on the counter, clumps of yellow rice falling to the white tiled floors. I move to clean up the mess. The veins in her legs bulge, thick as rivers. She turns around and plates the food. We eat in silence.

We watch TV, the glow shaping her face. I’m massaging her feet in my lap.

I’m so proud of your sister. She told you it was a promotion, right? All that with everything she’s been through. I was so mad when that job sent her off to California, but now I get to have her here with me, and my grandbaby. This is exciting for you too. You two should talk more; I know she has some advice for you that can help, get that full-time job, get yourself some more money and insurance and take care of that tooth—I see how you chewing on one side.

I go to the bathroom and sit at the tub’s edge. Close my eyes. Think of my empty belly. How she has no idea. I think of Asha, scan her body and picture each organ, each passageway of blood, the shooting light in her brain. Map the little girl next to her in the same way. Mama the same way. Wonder who we could have been if we had everything we needed.

_The clinic’s inside me, dense as a bone. The crack in the door’s window. Michael’s hands running over each other in the waiting room. A tingle in my mouth. Afterward, we were hungry for distraction. We went to the botanic garden. I didn’t touch my stomach. I felt something loosen, a small boat drifting from the coast. The word money echoed in my head. A flash of Michael’s face falling from the coming grief. Then I felt his hands.

We sat in the greenhouse, below the philodendron climbing the walls, the warm mist softening our bodies in the warm green light. There was a Black family laughing below the fern tree. An old couple passing Kreyol to each other. Some kid was screaming.

We not gonna be living this way forever, he said.

Sad or broke?

That smile. Both.

What else the future look like? I smiled back.

Gold and green. Me and you and a weird-looking house.

He grew quiet. A family passed us, a father with a lanky girl sitting on his shoulders, her hands resting on his head. He had a large tattoo of the Puerto Rican flag on his arm.

There goes your people. I nudged him.

Oh, they my people now? That smile again.

You don’t gotta hide it. My dad wore one of those tacky necklaces you get from the corner store: red, white, and blue beads with the small shape of the island at the end.

Yeah, that’s called culture.

I laughed. He tilted his head up to the foggy glass. We continued this way, talking around the invisible thing gathering mass. It was easy. I wanted his voice. He wanted my voice. We gave it to each other. We hid the words that were too heavy. But everything we didn’t talk about grew a gravity, a pull on our limbs. We kept feeding the silence anyway. It was comfortable, the gummy pleasure of habit.

The next day was hard, but Michael took care of me. The next day too.

_I keep picking at my tooth at stoplights on the way home. The city sinks to the dusk, the palm blooms catching the orange color. I think about the distance between me and Michael. I want him close. He knows how to make me feel safe. He knows what it’s like to not have shit, to be eaten by loss. But how far would he be once he finds out what I hid? Everything could be undone, all in the shape of a little girl patiently growing larger by the second. I park the car beneath a pine, the day’s pictures swirling in the car’s memory box.

Upstairs, I smoke half a joint in front of the closed balcony doors, thinking about everything in life I should’ve done. The realities fork and duplicate until there’s a thousand of me, somehow better, drifting off toward a life that holds a bit more gold. I stare at the tiles, my eyes traveling along the dark grout, thinking about the future I can’t see, the events I’ll orbit, and if I’ll survive them. Doom was a seed I kept watering, waiting for the green to come out the brown-black soil.

I need to do something. I open my computer and set up the projectors. I’ve been working on a visual collage, or an essay, or an installation, something shapeless, trying to map all the ghosts moving through Miami—not cartoonish, slipping-through-the-wall ghosts, but country-shaped ghosts, city-shaped ghosts, what our parents did, what our grandparents did, and how history drags its silver limbs through the streets. I should’ve been a filmmaker. When the film is shot right, edited right, I can feel the color and grain in my chest. I want to make something like that, something textural and honest, draining my city of the myths.

I fill the walls, cycling the images over the houseplants—Black hands chopping the marsh; Black limbs sunlit and laying the railway through the pineland; blueprints; hurricanes slanting the palms; the coast dotted with boats carrying another country; slash pines, mangrove, coontie, and cycads; exiles dotting the city with bombs, a station wagon leaking smoke and flame; ’80s Miami fantasy; close shot of dark eyes turning copper in the light; the Everglades shrinking on a map; blueprints; the Miami River bright in its old body; Columbus, a dark statue; Ponce de León, a dark statue; the Tequesta-made Miami Circle; Miami Beach sundown town; the pale yellow wall in Liberty City built to shield the white neighborhood; blueprints; Black families slipping into Virginia Key; riot in Liberty City; panthers brushing past the saw palmetto; riot in Little San Juan; poinciana in bloom; footprints out the surf sloping up the shore.

But still there are ghosts I can’t capture. I stand in the middle of the apartment layered in light, the images covering my skin. I lie down. I doze off.

_Trapped in a dream state, I stand over my own body in bed with Michael, the sun coming through the window, the dust dancing in the amber, watching him, his mouth between my legs, how I undulate, until I rise and slip on top of him, feeling how I stretch, softly rocking into each other, until the feeling begins to leave me, and it’s all her, the weight of her breath, watching the color of her arms against the color of his neck, her hands touching his hair, how we both look to the window, seeing the palms cutting the light, looking at our hands, how the light falls on them too.

_I’m heavy waking up, the dream a portrait nailed to the back of my head. I walk to the window, opening the blinds to find a blue heron spreading its wings on her balcony, two girls in braids pointing. The woman’s laughing, her clean teeth bouncing back the streetlight glow. I wonder why the girls are up, until I notice their clothing, pajamas, and the woman with my face, a dark uniform.

I go to the car, massaging my gums with my tongue. Wherever I drive will be recorded. I don’t care. The engine wakes. I turn off the assisted driving. I’m waiting. Then I’m sure I caught her pulling out in a new black Impala. I trail behind her, down the sparse streets and into the quiet hum of the dark highway. I follow her, down to the Everglades. All of South Florida looked like this once—palmetto, slash pine, cordgrass, and cypress, Tequesta people rowing through the waters, then the Miccosukee migrating through the swamp, a hundred of them hiding from a country’s hunger in the river of grass. Them too, severed by a highway. Them too, refusing to vanish. I’m wondering what images the camera is holding.

Her car lights go black and the trees lose their names. It starts to rain. We reach the black ocean washing up against the lip of the continent. Her car roams over the sodden grass until stopping at the shore. She steps out, the rainwater making dark shapes on her white dress. I’m picturing the girls as she walks toward the water. I step outside, all of me heavy in the humming rain. The ocean throws itself against the land, mangroves dim along the coast. I keep digging my tongue into the hole in my tooth. Our bodies in sync, both our feet gently sinking into the ground soft with seaweed. She walks into the water. Then she’s gone. I clench my jaw and feel a crack. I pluck a nugget of my molar out my mouth, looking at it in the dark, tossing it to the ground and running my tongue over the new sharpness of my ruined tooth.

_Outside Mama’s building, I can’t let go of the steering wheel, watching the trees dance. I get out, slipping into the humid night, the insects making music. At the top of a palm, a shadow of a heron is flapping its wings, letting out a crooked song. I ignore this. I’m looking at Mama’s window. Then I hear the grit of the truck engine. I look behind me and I’m doused in light. Then it’s gone. And it’s my daughter’s face looking at me.