He fixes cars like his father before him:
same garage, different year. His beat-up
blue Toyota pickup pulls up onto the gravel
every day at six a.m. when he unlocks the fence.

The garage still smells of cigarette smoke,
and that soda machine out front still works.
An old hippie van sits at the back of the lot.
The garage was left to him by his father;

now he and his brother work on new, used, foreign.
Iguanas the size of five-year-olds sometimes
saunter through the lot. Manatees still float in the canal
out back, drifting past the old floating dock.

The oil stains on his shirt blend with sweat.
His daughter is almost twenty now.
He looks out at the water, the pink sun
kissing its surface.

Gabrielle Grilli is a twenty-three-year-old poetry writer currently attending the Masters of Fine Arts Program at the University of South Florida. She graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Arts in English with minors in French and Florida Teaching. Gabrielle frequently writes free verse poetry focusing on day to day experiences.