We’re gonna live with water for the rest of our lives
& here we are at Dania Beach again where the city motto
is Sea It – Live It – Love It & the Army Corps of Engineers
just completed a renourishment project: dumped 120
truckloads of sand from a mine near Lake Okeechobee
onto the dunes—Emergency Restoration in Progress say
the signs zip-tied to rope ringing the sea grape & saltbush.

Last time we were back, the guard shacks were tilted
& jacked up half into the parking lot, lapped by waves,
accessible by painters’ ladders anchored in deep mats
of sargassum. The lifeguard stand at the edge of the world,
I said to Anna as we passed a man lying under a palm
sandwiched in its exposed roots—the only place to rest

due to shore erosion—hand-towel draped over his face,
looking like he’d been shipwrecked. But now the sargasso
seaweed is gone & tower 2 is set level, has steps again.
We ask a leathery veteran lifeguard about the new beach,
and he says, normally they just take a big pipe & suck up
sand from the ocean floor, but this time they trucked it in.

It’ll last maybe another two years or until the next storm.
He tells us to go down to Hollywood Beach—they got
Margaritaville & the bandshell. I’ve known these beaches
since I was a kid, before luxury high-rises jammed along
A1A vanished the Atlantic, back when bricks of cocaine
washed up on shore on the regular, no one talked about

erosion, & the Dania Jai Alai fronton was a destination:
game of dodging death, fastest sport in the world. We watch
an elderly couple on the newly expanded beach walk into
the Atlantic under the brutal midday sun holding hands.
They may not know any of this, but still—they are steadying
each other against the current, moving into the breaking waves