Poem-a-Day

^{for Sonja Larson, Christina Powell, Christa Hoyt, Tracy Paules, and Manny Taboada
                           August 24–27, 1990}
 

It was my first week as a college student.
I’d traveled with friends
to the relative unknown 
of Gainesville: density of trees,
propensity for Spanish names.
This was the University of Florida.

I didn’t know about Florida.
But always a diligent student,
I memorized the names
of my fit dormitory friends:
they stirred, like the trees,
my desire for the unknown.

Then a darkness unknown 
settled on Florida.
Like cicadas in the trees,
there was a buzz about a student
found dead. And my concerned friends?
I called their names

when more names
were reported, cause unknown. 
Would one of my friends
be next? This was Florida.
Another student
was buried under the trees.

I couldn’t see for the trees—
the growing list of names,
the next slaughtered student,
and the terror of an unknown
as airless and new as Florida.
I curled under covers with friends

I suspected might not be friends.
Spanish moss choked the trees:
omens were everywhere in Florida.
In four days, five names.
And then it stopped, quantity unknown,
in my second week as a college student ... 

And now? The trees, my absent friends,
a defaced mural on 34th of student names.
Florida, unknown, remains.