It’s always sparkling, wet, the cobblestone trailing
around downtown, and in my memories. It’s always
night, during a season that can only be described as
Half Summer, because autumn doesn’t hold weight
here. Rain and blue clouds against blue sky, street
lamps, heat rising, breath. We walk to the top of Lion’s
Bridge just to see the blinking lights reflected in the bay,
to see what it’s like to have something beneath us
last schooners and manatees drift in the salt bath of
Matanzas intracoastal, the moonlight shifts the gray
calm heads into floating Spanish bodies. The breeze
isn’t enough to chill to the veins, but listen for fate’s
whispers, Warnings always come too late. The city
brags because it has the most haunted place in America
black steel bars, splintering walls, sharp palm fronds,
blue orbs. Once, I was walking through all the cemeteries
around town and skipping over the Tolomato tribe plinths,
a red orb drifted, a dandelion seed into my mouth. It
floated bitterly and cold in my throat. Early in the morning
the cobblestone beings to dry, and the ghosts grasp on
to sunbeams, passing out pamphlets about their macabre
adventures to dying. Most of the tales conclude “tell your
heart to be cautious of a love trying to tame you” in that
flowing quill-on-parchment style. No one’s listening to
the omens in St. Augustine anymore. Late at night, try to
test an orange wrapped in magnolia leaves for honesty
over Mai Tai’s and it will just roll right into the ocean, it
just doesn’t care for light, nothing does, except maybe the
jellyfish jumping red tide to stick in the sand. Even they
aren’t alive, and like the ghosts, don’t have tongues to speak.
