Throwback Thursday: A List Poem

Jobs of Key West (past and present)

            A marine biologist that swims with yellow-blotched turtles, an artisan of thick Cuban cigars, a three-time winner of the Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest at Sloppy Joe’s (that also feeds the six-toed cats cans of tuna on the side), a writer looking for a new muse and  finding it in the form of fuchsia corals, the sunset and waves, in slices of Key lime pie and the pretty girls with Hibiscus in their hair, a local band that only knows the chords to one song (Jimmy Buffett’s Margaretville), a fisherman that catches everything from pink shrimp, whiskered lobster, mahi mahi, mangrove snapper, kingfish, red grouper, and shark, and makes trade with a local restaurant for bottomless shots of Bahamian rum, a scuffed-up  railroad worker (that tells the exotic ladies of the night that he’s the real eighth wonder of the world, the real steamy locomotive, not Flagler’s toy train), a drunken bum that falls asleep with the Atlantic wetting his toes and awakes with crab bites bruises that he thinks are love marks, an on-foot only tour guide that stops in front of Elizabeth Bishop’s house on White Street everyday and recites, “Florida—the state with the prettiest name, the state that floats in brackish water…”

-Amelia Badri