...Orlando used to be called Mellonville, used to be infested
with pests. Shuffleboard, croquet, lawn bowling. Plumosa,
cabbage palms, banana and bamboo. Hibiscus here
is a spicy weed, not a pricey exotic, we rip the stuff
out of the back yard and burn it.

My hair is wet underneath
from March through November. I save a
drowning boy, being from Orlando. My
brother swims in the Junior Olympics. My mother
swims across a lake when she is angry
at my father. She wears her clothes.
She swims for three hours.

Year after year we ski around
Orlando, in between Orlando, all the lakes,
blue pads of cool, some bottomless, some so
brown from pine needles unfolding, they stain
the whites of your eyes til Christmas. We thread
our way through the wet blue heart. We think surely...

Heather Sellers
Being from Orlando
Poetry Daily May 10, 2003