ELEGY Poem: Invasive, by Laura McDermott Matheric

After the painting “Miami Eden” by Jason Aponte

I know your dialect –
heavy heat, restless green,
the hush before the thunder
when everything holds its breath,
the wild is always in season –
a Möbius strip of sun and storm,
highways spooling between sawgrass
shimmer of canal water,
where desire and danger root deep.

The wild is not only what was born here
but what arrived, uninvited,
roots seeking the same sun,
scales glinting in the same blue light.
We inherit the aftermath:
python’s silent hunger,
air potato’s spiral,
the echo of peacocks in neighborhoods
where the only native song is memory.

I know this land by the ache of its heat,
longing grows in the shadow of banyans,
how the heart swells with each green pulse
of something not meant to be here –
python muscle tighten around memory,
iguanas flick prehistoric tails
across seawalls and sidewalks,
feral hogs root up the old stories,
tegu tongues taste the eggs of hope.

Your green climbs my bones,
the python’s slow coil,
the iguana’s flicker in the hibiscus,
invasive, yes-
but I want you, my love, to take root,
to press your hunger into my soil
until I bloom with you,
tangled, lush,
dangerous.

I walk the sawgrass edge,
my heart a comma between longing and loss –
the ache of what’s vanishing,
the thrill of what survives.
I pray to believe in renewal,
in the way fire lilies bloom after the burn,
but some things do not return.

We are always driving, always arriving
at the edge of what we cannot control:
the wild slips in through open windows,
seeds of want carried on the wind,
the pet we could not keep,
the garden that outgrew its fence.

What grows within us is not always native.
Something invasive takes hold –
a vine, a hunger, a secret wish –
and we name it only after
it has flowered, after it has choked
a native song from the air.

The wet heat under my skin,
South Florida’s wild pulse –
I taste you in the thick air,
salt and sugar on my tongue,
your hands a fever,
your breath a storm that never breaks.

Still, there is beauty in our chaos:
the riot of color, the flash of scales,
the way the world remakes itself
despite our best intentions.
We are exiled and at home,
a comma in the sentence of this place,
breathing in the wet heat,
learning the dialect of survival.

Listen to the wild –
not just the birds we know,
but the ones that have learned
to sing new songs in our trees.
Let us walk the exhibit of landscape,
each step a pledge to notice,
to name, to begin again.

Let me be your native wild,
be the vine that climbs me,
your lips the rain that slicks my skin,
your body the thunder that shakes my roots.
We are not meant to be contained-
our want, a species unlisted,
thriving in the forbidden places,
making the Everglades blush
with the memory of our touch.

Every story here
is a story of longing –
for roots, for belonging,
for a place to bloom
without harm.

Let us become the caretakers
of what remains,
writing our own story
between the drainage ditch and the stars,
where the wild waits,
where the wild remembers.

May we learn to listen
to the hush between storms,
to stories coiled in the grass,
to the warning in the wind.
Let us become caretakers,
not just witnesses –
writing a new stanza
where the wild is not lost,
but fiercely, tenderly,
protected.

I want you like the Everglades wants rain,
hungry, flooding, wild and without apology.
I ache for you invasive,
roots uncoiling in the dark.

Map me
like a new territory,
I want your mouth to name me
in the language of sweat and nectar,
to let the wild in you
find the wild in me,
and together,
to make this place
ours.

I’m the python in your garden,
slipping beneath your skin,
tongue flicking secrets,
pressing my wild into your native.
I want to taste the salt-slick of your shoulder,
devour your sighs,
make your legs arch like mangroves in storm surge.

Let me vine up your thighs
flowers opening only for your touch –
petals sticky, fragrant, dripping with want.
I want to tangle you in my wild,
leave you gasping,
your name is a forbidden species on my lips.

Let my mouth be the storm that drowns you,
my hands the roots that hold you firm,
my tongue the fire to your fields.
I want to flood you,
overrun you,
leave you trembling,
your body a new river mapped by my desire.

Let’s make the gods jealous-
let them watch as I take you,
again and again,
until the only thing native here
is my name in your moan,
the way we ruin each other
beautifully,
wildly,
without end.