The Everglades

 

            “There are no other Everglades in the world,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas writes in the first sentence of her book about the Everglades, River of Grass. The Everglades, evolving only about 5,000 years ago, are a unique ecosystem on this earth. This river of sedges used to cover the southern half of Florida, beginning around Lake Okeechobee. The Everglades are an incredibly diverse ecosystem, featuring both freshwater and saltwater species. But the main function of the Everglades is water filtration.

            And yet historically in the United States, all our politicians have talked about is “draining the swamp.” They consider the Everglades, and Florida’s swamps in general, to be a useless space. The main response to Florida has been to dramatically alter the landscape. Canals were built, water was redirected. Even the local river, the Caloosahatchee, was dredged to straighten its curves, to tame its winding path. Douglas writes, “West of Lake Flirt, the Caloosahatchee began in earnest, a river so remote, so lovely that even in the days when it was best known it must have been like a dream. It was a river wandering among half-moon banks hung with green dripping trees and enshrouding grapevines, green misted, silent, always meandering. It has that quality of dreaming still, neglected and changed as it is” (21). The river is now a straight line. The diversity of species is gone. The natural water filtration is, you guessed it, gone.

            Florida was transformed into a land that Westerners could understand—fields for grazing animals and crowing crops. Settlers in Florida had no idea how to work with the Everglades or the swamps they encountered, so they changed them into ecosystems that they could use for profit. They drained the swamp and restored a “useless land” to a place that is industrious and productive. But what was lost that can never be recovered? In the river’s dream, we are all underwater, drowned, submerged in waves.

*

Dream our throat is full of snakes. We can’t breathe. Just as We are about to suffocate, one of them ascends from our mouth, whirls its head around to look us in the eye. It’s blue-black with bright green eyes. There are colored patterns of dark red and blue on its sides, which move and undulate as We’re dying. We wake thinking about ICE raids, concentration camps in the United States, and somehow, our complicity in all of it.

 

*

 

              We’re standing in the Everglades, across from an official green sign with white lettering that reads: “Alligator Alcatraz.” Everyone parks on the side of the road across from a locked gate and long, winding road to the camp. These buildings were originally designed to be the Miami-Dade airport, which Marjory Stoneman Douglas and others protested in the late twentieth century. This is a space that was closed for environmental reasons. Alligator Alcatraz isn’t supposed to be open, but it is, housing over 6,700 Latinx immigrants in a facility that was only built for a maximum of 3,000. And it is being funded with Florida’s disaster relief funds. And it’s for profit. So taxpayers are footing the bill, and private contractors, consulting firms, and vendors are profiting from the illegal imprisonment of Hispanic and Latin immigrants. Like the Nazi concentration camps, this is a labor camp.

              We can’t see anything from where we’re protesting, just a locked gate guarded by police vehicles. We arrived with a bus of protestors, mostly retirees, since Naples has an average age of sixty-five. They are seasoned social justice warriors, ready with signs reading “Alligator Auschwitz” and “Abolish ICE.” They are holding upside down American flags. People in vehicles pass by, some honking in support, some shouting obscenities. These protest organizers, mostly from local congregations—particularly Methodist—have been coming here every week. This is the twenty-eighth week of protests, but this is our first visit. If We could sleep, if We could bury our head in the sand, We would. We’re not an activist. We’re an agoraphobic poet with mental health issues. But here We are.

              A leader of the Miccosukee Tribe speaks first. The prison has been built illegally on Native lands. They are going to court again in a few weeks to try to get it shut down. The prison, in addition to being a human rights disaster, puts extreme pressure on the already-stressed Everglades ecosystem. In her moving speech, this Miccosukee leader notes that we are all part of the environment: human, animal, plant, and elements. The way we treat the environment is mirrored by the human rights violations that are taking place less than a mile away, hidden from our eyes.

              Vultures coast overhead, and crows land in the branches all around us. They caw loudly as the religious leaders make impassioned speeches, read poems, sing songs. But the crows tell us what is happening there, what none of us can witness, but what they can see. The crows tell us what they know. And the tears start falling from our eyes. We can feel the suffering there, although We don’t have a name for it. We’re wearing sunglasses and a hat. This is why We don’t leave our house, debilitated by a fear of things We can’t see, of the air itself. We can’t get a grip on our behavior. We’re beginning to break down, wave after wave of blood-red air passes through us. We know. You know. The crows know. We all know what is going on here.

 

*

 

Dream We’re in a labyrinth full of snakes. There is a being sitting beneath a large oak tree. THey hold out a snake to us, and when We touch it, the whole world begins to vibrate and pulse like a strobe light. We tune in to what the tree is saying, something about the nature of existence as sound waves. We become these waves—us, the snake, the tree, the being—turning into sound that is also light.

 

*

              “Colonizers write about flowers.” We read this while sitting on our porch, drinking espresso, and scrolling through Instagram. The quote is from the first line of the poem, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” by Palestinian-American poet and reporter Noor Hindi [1]. In this poem, she writes:

I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them. (lines 11-14)

            We find this to be a fair assessment. We don’t really want to write about anything except for flowers, the moon, and metaphors about death. She’s right. What are We doing, pretending that poetry matters, that any of this matters, while genocide and corruption rage all around us? What would life be like if We really cared about other people, if We understood that no one is separate, no one is other, no one is dying somewhere else? They are dying here, now. Every injustice swells, rises like red waves. We look up to see the flowers in our yard dancing, singing, eating the waves of blood, singing louder and louder until our brain melts into the grass. 

*

               A Hispanic minister from Washington D.C. takes her place at the front of the gathering at Alligator Alcatraz, addressing the protestors first in English, and then explaining that she will be speaking in Spanish. Her voice, touched by divine fire, carries through the swamp. Her voice of razorblades. Of angels. Her voice of the sun. It melts our face, dissolves our body into the muddy ditch: “Santo Espíritu!” Her voice reaches a volume that is otherworldly, the microphone is transformed as her voice cuts the air, rising, rising, “Santo Espíritu!” Her people. They hear her.

 

*

Dream We wake beneath the shallow water. sedges rustle above us. sunlight like silver swords battles in the wind. our spine melts into limestone, our tongue elongates into a black serpent. our skin dissolves, leaving only the glowing, radiant bones.

*

 

            The Everglades mean “Big Water.” Bard of the Everglades, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, writes, “The shores that surround the Everglades were the first on this continent known to white men… Spanish mapmakers, who never saw them, printed over the unknown blank space where they lay on those early maps the words ‘El Laguno del Espiritu Santo.’ To the early Spanish they were truly mysterious…” (7). This translates to “The Lagoon of the Holy Spirit,” a wilderness that could not be tamed, thick with the presence of something holy.

            The waters have a subtle beauty, an elegance of endless sedge grasses, where even a few inches of elevation can transform the ecosystem. The wind rustles the grasses, the earth breathes into the sky, and exhales into the quiet current of water. The Everglades filter impurities from the water as it slowly makes its way toward the gulf, meandering, wandering, taking its time. Douglas writes, “The world is all water, is drowned in water, chill and pale and clean” (19).

 

*

            Under the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies, hundreds of children are now being held in ICE facilities without access to adequate nutrition, healthcare, and education. This is often happening despite the presence of family members who are U.S. citizens or family from the native country who are willing to take care of these children. A fourteen-year-old girl named Ariana writes [2], “I’ve been detained for 45 days and I have never felt so much fear to go to a place as I feel here every time I remind myself that once I go back to Honduras a lot of dangerous things could happen to my mom and my younger siblings haven’t been able to see their mom in a month.” A twelve-year-old named Ender writes [2], “More than 60 days … going to the doctor and that the only thing they tell you is to drink more water and the worst thing is that it seems the water is what makes people sick here.”

            Is this justice? Immigrating to another country isn’t a crime. These are people, children and their parents, leaving their homeland to seek a better life, peace, and opportunity. We need a legal system that supports them, that upholds human dignity. What would you do?

*

            We’re building an altar to Kali, the Hindu goddess of time, death, and destruction. Worshipping her should remain a secret, but We can’t do anything without an audience. We hope she either forgives us, changes us, or kills us.

            We’ll begin with the book In Praise of Adya Kali, by Aditi Devi, a book that our professor on spirit marriage, Dr. Megan Rose, suggested We read. We took her class because We wanted to marry Lake Superior. We love water, and everywhere, water speaks to us, through us, and facilitates our relationship to the spirits, stars, rocks, plants, and animals. We’ll begin our relationship with Kali by chanting her 100 names for 108 days. Preparations for the altar are arriving from Etsy right now. Are We hopeless? 

            Kali is blue-black, a crow woman, a woman of crows. We wrote a whole book to her without knowing it, without knowing a thing about her. One of her favorite flowers is the red rose, like Inanna. She loves red, roses and blood. How will We chant her names when We’re always drunk at night? We can’t stay sober because We’re too weak to withstand the voices, the crying, the screaming of the dying and dead. One night We prayed to her, tears running down our face, and she sent us a dream of snakes that suffocated us, killed us, and We woke for the millionth time as a snake woman, a crow woman, a lady of the swamp.

            Devi asks, “How does the formless give birth to the form of all existence? The formless Adya Sakti becomes the universe first through a glimmer of light” (13). This is involution, the formless giving way to form, yet always containing the infinity of formlessness. She is the disease and the cure, the beautiful and the grotesque, the flower and the corpse. As Devi notes, Kali is described by the Sanskrit word ugra, meaning “powerful, mighty, strong, violent, terrible, fierce, cruel, ferocious, hot, and sharp” (27). This is the intensity of transformation, the fire of change.

            Perhaps Kali is the new goddess for poets, for social change, and for the destruction that must clear away the old and make way for the new. As the primordial form of Shakti, the goddess of all creation, she will usher us into the darkness We must face, the dark waters that will lead us to some form of truth, a truth that We may not want to hear.

 

*

 

            We close our eyes on the way to the Cypress Dome trails in Immokalee, one of the closest spaces near us to connect with the swamp ecosystem. It’s the only decent place We can find to hike, and yes, stare at flowers and birds, near where We live in Southwest Florida. It was a burdened system, with orange groves and cow pastures, and yet the wilderness found a way to coexist within these human disturbances. When We first moved here, five years ago, it was glorious: panthers, deer, sandhill cranes, vultures, kites, hawks, and herons. During the dry season, cows of all colors roamed freely through the pastures, snacking on tall grasses that grew from the swamps. The trails were surrounded by orange groves, where the cows would also wander, lounging beneath the orange trees with shining horns and white, tan, and bluish-gray coats.

            A few years ago, the land was sold to developers. Now, We count over a dozen new housing developments where the orange groves once stood: Wild Blue, Bella Terra, names for the wilderness that’s gone. The cypress trees and orange groves have been clearcut. We feel pain in our chest. The cows have disappeared. The trails are deserted except for a few stray birds. The flowers are all that’s left. Perhaps that’s why colonizers write about flowers. We’ve killed everything else. 

 
 
 

Brandi George is the author of Gog (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), Faun (Plays Inverse/Press 53, 2019), and The Nameless (Kernpunkt Press, 2023). Her most recent collection of poems and paintings, Deus Absconditus and Love Letters from Outer Space (Kernpunkt Press, 2025), was co-written with Michael Barach. Her work has appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Fence, and Orion, and she has been awarded residencies at Hambidge Center for the Arts, the Hill House, and the Time & Place Award in France. She teaches yoga and writing in Southwest Florida.

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Creative NonfictionBrandi George