Linda Girardi   FLAMINGOS This is the time of year when nearly every day the strange, lethal red tides appear, burning the Florida Bay, spreading through the Keys on currents that rise and ebb like hearts. Examined closely in the dark, the ocean consists of tiny sparks. A boat's split wake reveals red stars. Once the sea's aflame, it's hard to detect a reason for the fire: the minute and luminous animals, the toxic Noctiluca. This morning another red tide spread its pall of scum across the mud flats of the tidal zone, staining soft creatures: sponges, anemones. I found a fish, its bones like needles clearly visible through a layer of pink skin, its mouth a lightless tunnel. Blue shadows fell on its dorsal fin. I wish I could see what Audubon saw a century, more, ago: this cove filled with flocks of scarlet-winged flamingos. Kathy Keler, "Double Moon" see more of Kathy Keler's work   AUGUST The month when the sky goes crazy at night. --Tennessee Williams Month of suicides, month of lies when everything browns or spoils or dies: the marsh grass, the corn crops, an uncle on my father's side. Caesar Augustus died in August questioning his part in the farce of life. On his chest, seven brown birthmarks arranged like Ursa Major in the sky. My ancestors were Menominee tracking bear across the Great Plains. They buried their children riverside under banks brushed smooth by weeping willow trees. Tonight I rise from blue water. My feet leave long, clawed splashes. I think of my uncle's willows unwinding their arms into the river. I want an interview with the dead. I want to know once and for all if this is to be my inheritance: this pool glowing secretly like an uncut jewel, these stars that have no names. THE PLACES THAT WE LOVE Robinson Jeffers, I turn the pages of your lean, precise life populated with few creatures: a wife, a bulldog, few hawks, yourself an exacting, carved man squatting on a coast of bones. If we become like the places that we love, you, the craggy Pacific shoreline, white wave, red rock, vertebrae, crab claw, then I am a roseate spoonbill dipping her beak in a pool of fresh water, or a tropical sea and all its soft creatures, lily, periwinkle, oyster, medusa. WINTER We dug our cornplants out of the sand and lived on watermelon seeds. There was a lot that we ate that year, in the wintertime. -- from the Hopi When the clouds roar down the mountains like a herd of frightened elk, the arms of oil derricks will break. These riggings our hands have spun will brand our palms forever. No fur-lined glove will hide the disgrace. We will dig in the potato peelings of our neighbor's trash and find naked dolls, even the last, white rocket will plummet back to earth, black scratches across the sky. We will eat our children, we will gnaw at the moon. There will be no other world.   Linda Girardi is a poet, novelist, and environmental writer. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Girardi's poetry has appeared in literary magazines and newspapers. Her environmental work includes journal articles, brochures, and curricula for children. She has been the recipient of the Larry Neal Award for Poetry and an Academy of American Poets prize. Girardi lives in Washington DC with her husband, the novelist Robert Girardi, and their two children. She is currently at work on a mystery novel set in Key West. Published in Volume 1, Number 3, Summer 2000.