SHER-O/QUEER-O/BING-O! by Julie Marie Wade

A golden shovel for Maureen Seaton

When I learned we would meet that day at Giorgio’s, my

knees turned right then to strawberry Jell-O. Life

has got my number, I thought, & today Life has

called it up on the signboard—NOW SERVING ONE very

lucky me who, at 33, sat across a little,

wobbling table from you for a chance to

bask in your sprightly light, your generous laugh. O, do

you know what it meant to me to be with

you there, eating frittatas & queering the air all around us? Belief

has carried me farther than fear has slowed me down. O, do

you know how much I wanted to tell you,

though flushed & blustered, aslosh (your word!) with awe? O, believe

I’ve loved you longer than I’ve known you. Know your poems are home to me.

When My Mother First Flies into Miami by Ranijun Ruado

She doesn’t know that the Sand and Sun Hotel on South Beach

will catch fire that evening after a woman falls asleep

with a cigarette in her mouth.

She doesn’t know that five convicts have escaped from prison

and are invading a home in Kendall, holding the residents at gunpoint.

She only knows that the world seems so small

from 30,000 feet in the air. That travelling at 500 miles per hour

doesn’t feel very different than a jaunt on a Manila jeepney.

When my mother first flies into Miami

she doesn’t know that a taxi driver has shot a passenger

who tried to rob him. Or that a man will be found at the airport

carrying 50 pounds of cocaine in his suitcase.

She doesn’t know that, in a year or two, someone will drive off

with her first car, and it will never be found. That, so far in 1982,

there have been 151 homicides in Miami-Dade.

She doesn’t know that the mechanical whirring she hears

is the plane’s landing gear extending or that her eardrums

will start to pressurize and pop as she descends to her new homeland.

She only knows that it has been less than two weeks

since her 25th birthday. That she will not be there to help her family

put up Christmas lights or hold sparklers with them on New Year’s.

She doesn’t know that today is Rosh Hashana. That children

throughout the city are smiling, dipping apple slices

in honey while their rabbis blow shofars.

She doesn’t know that her soon-to-be neighbor in Hialeah is looking

for their lost grey cat. That the Burdines in Westland Mall—just a few

steps from her soon-to-be apartment—is having a clearance sale.

She doesn’t know that a woman has just checked out

the 3,000,000 th book from the county library,

setting off sirens and confetti cannons, scaring her half to death.

When my mother steps off the airplane

she doesn’t know how dangerous and frightening this city is,

nor does she know how kind and beautiful it can be.

But as she notices the schism in the sky, between the clear

lustrous blue and cloudy sallow grey, she soon finds out.

Let’s keep writing in the sky by Nicole Tallman

—For Maureen Seaton (October 20, 1947-August 26, 2023)

A life lived through music takes its place in the night sky.

Your song sings through the stars now, the June moon in the night sky.

Through poems you wrote the music and through books you wrote a life.

I call out to you with elements and your music fills the sky.

You, my Libra sign of air, your red hair a crown of light.

The water breezes through the trees and settles in the sky.

You send me a sunflower and I send you roses in reply.

There were poems we didn’t finish here—let’s keep writing in the sky.

I say, I love the rain, and you say, I love Merwin’s “Rain Light.”

We don’t have to see to know—it’s written in the sky.

All night the hurricane rain is your response to my last line.

Maureen, I kept my promise here—let’s keep writing in the sky.

Dad Was a Ten-Pound Poodle by Mary Block

After Caridad Moro-Gronlier

she says,

And mom was a golden retriever.

I don’t totally get the mechanics

But here she is.

She pats the dog on its curly head,

feeds it cappuccino foam on a spoon.

My husband and I had nothing in common.

He kept the money in the freezer.

Made me beg for his cold singles.

Said he’d rather see me dead

than see me work outside the home.

A platter shatters.

Cafe Stability turns and stares

at the waiter stooping

over the shards of his ruined tray.

We drove down here from Chattanooga.

This was a young town

running on old shame.

I could embarrass my husband

by wearing the wrong hat to Publix.

She lifts her coffee to her lips.

Your grandmother drove me

to Key West at midnight

to keep it out of the Sunday Herald.

She lent me her beauty,

her platinum chatter with the judge.

The flustered waiter drops our check.

And when the divorce went through

she picked me up in her giant Cadillac

and we went flying through the Gables,

waving at neighbors

from a chrome-plated Pegasus.

She leaves a monumental tip.

This town was made for making things up.

You decide where you fit, she says,

picking up her impossible dog.

Poem in Which I Name My Mother’s Courage by Elisa Albo

After Denise Duhamel

Before a revolution bloodies the sand and tramples green

coffee-covered mountainsides of Cuba, my mother is born

into a world war in the north of Spain, 30 miles west of

Guernica. Before she sails in 1950 on the Magallanes

to Havana, nuns at school in Bilbao secure her left hand

behind her eight-year-old back. True fact: Her daughters

are lefties, her son, ambidextrous, her handwriting, still

exquisite. Does she recall the ocean passage with her

mother, Mima to all, a sister, three brothers? It was like

the Titanic: the wealthy on top, the rest of us on the bottom,

and the first time I ate white bread—and marmalade.

In 1958 at a Cuban social beach club, my parents meet,

a year later, marry, Jacobo Albo y Maria Dolores, a middle

name for pain. They honeymoon on Miami Beach, so

desolate in ‘59, they cut the trip short, fly back to Havana,

pick up my father’s black and white Chevrolet, drive to

Varadero. I am born nine months later. My mother is 17,

18 in 1961 when my sister is born, their plans to leave

the island underway when she turns 19 and my father has

to flee to Miami. We will not see him again for a month.

After waiting for days at Jose Marti International Airport,

|my beautiful, blue-eyed Mami crosses the tarmac with

my four-month-old sister in one arm and me in hand—

I am 18 months old. The plane is packed with Cubans

pretending to be tourists, she says, as if Castro didn’t

know, as if he cared. Our lives—what we were used to—

were over. Before we reach Miami, Maria Dolores Franco

de Albo holds my pudgy hand and carries my infant sister

down the hall of a Jamaican clinic, a noisy, crowded

asylum. Before we left Cuba, soldiers at the airport kept

her toothpaste, squeezed it empty for jewelry hidden

inside. In Jamaica my mother brushes her teeth with

a bar of Ivory soap. We receive no milk, little food.

She threatens suicide: a jar of strained peas appears.

A week later, our hotel in downtown Miami is a block

away from an immigration office. Jamaica was bad,

Miami, worse, she recalls. We have milk. She eats

saltines for three days. In sweltering August heat, my

mother waits in line with other Cubans, anxious, hopeful.

No stroller, she carries my sister, keeps a tight grasp on

my hand, her blouse sticking like a stamp on her skin,

but we emerge with official refugee status. That night

my father greets us on the tarmac in Tampa and lifts me

up into his arms. My 19-year-old Mami has made certain.

By 1966, my father passes his medical boards, having

spent hours upon hours of hospital shifts and study in

Tampa, Pottsville, PA, Gainesville, FL, my mother doing

the yeoman’s work with us at home. He learns of two

surgical practices he can join: Plantation or Lakeland

in the center of the State? My mother chooses lakes

over ocean, not proximity to Miami or Cuba. For years

we visit and stay with a score of tias, tios, and cousins

in Miami Beach, vacation summers in hotels there with

family from New York, Mexico, and El Salvador. Her

three children eventually move to South Florida and

a decade after my father passes, like another exile, my

mother laments, she leaves our beloved Spanish style

home they built near a lake and moves to a new one,

with my sister, down the street from me in Plantation.

Instructions for Crossing the Street in Miami as Told to Me by My Teenage Daughter by Mia Leonin

In your childhood home on a canal in Kendall, the window of your add-on bedroom always held the moon perfectly in its frame. At night you read by that light. The stories taught you to cross streets with your wings tucked close and an eye for the errant kitten in need of rescuing or a rooster to shoo across the street.

The stories taught you to pack an extra pastelito in your bookbag to give to the man who lives on the bus bench because the one time, you gave him beef jerky, he informed you, I cain’t eat that, mama. I ain’t got teeth.

In Miami canals, even the ones that harbor gators, boas, and toxic run off, are safer than streets.

When men shout “you must be Cuban” they mean hips.

When men call you chinita, they don’t see Lima, Peru, or your abuela who grew up speaking Quechua.

When men your father’s age stare at you from red lights, mouths agape, you point your phone at them like a can of mace and start filming.

If a leering man at the light is making a left-hand turn, you might raise a middle finger as you cross the intersection knowing he can’t turn right to follow you. Or maybe you don’t think it through at all; you just feel justified to return insult with indignation.

Once a thirty-three-year-old coworker at DSW followed you home. He made small talk on the train, told you he wished he had a girlfriend like you. You moved seats. He got off at your stop in the Grove even though he said he lives in Opa-locka.

You descended the stairs from the platform, crossed US1 with other pedestrians, aware that he was somewhere behind you. You walked down 27th avenue.

You did not cross the street even though home was so close but instead strolled purposefully into noisy Flannigan’s and waited for your big sister to come.

The next day you reported him to HR. When they didn’t do anything, even though other employees had said he makes them feel uncomfortable, you wrote a letter to company headquarters.

Yes, to cross the street, you must know how to write a letter whether they read it or not.

Miami Beach Honeymooners by Catherine Esposito Prescott

Deco hotels lined
Collins Avenue

like pastel pearls
on a string, before high-

rises blocked the ocean
from a pedestrian’s view,

back when air travel
was rare and people

wore their best clothes
to fly, that’s when they

arrived, young and
new to their first and

only vacation.
Sun-honeyed,

I think of them
in the pause

before nine children,
before fires fought,

before green mountains–
in the play-

ground, the nursery,
where seven

decades later, their
great-grandchildren

would learn to walk,
to swim, and where

one would cross over
at 18, four years

after his great-
grandmother who left

at 100; they who led
us here, who knew

the place we
would find,

where light
pours

through your
body as if you

were the very
essence of limestone.

What did they know
of light, two kids

from the city?
What did they seek

but couldn’t name
in their lifetime?

What they had–
every child

through adulthood,
we lost. And how

they lost, we did
too, one child

to brain cancer.
The parallels

couldn’t be
scripted by human

hands if we tried,
so I record

what we’ve
been given, light

in abundance,
on the beach, far

from where we
were originated,

far from where we
expected to

and never meant
to stay.

When I Was Young by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

We had no air conditioning
in any of the classrooms
but back then folks knew
what they were doing.
Each room poured out
into a courtyard
the wind swept
and it wasn’t nearly as hot
then as it is now. Now
apartments rise like heat
or water sweeping
ever closer and into my yard
blocks at a time blotting out
my view. What can I do
but keep moving? I thought
back then I had no room
but look at these conditions
now that I’m old.

Ernst Takes His Guitar Everywhere by Jen Karetnick

—in the car on the way to his wife’s doctor
appointments, on walks to the Little River

through Sherwood Forest—in case I get bored,
he says, as if he were seven instead of 70,

retired from 40 years of civil engineering
for the city. Painted with Kreyòl in rust-red

and keloided with tape, the instrument
travels caseless, neck gripped in his left

fret-working hand, belly of it on his knees
like a grandchild. He plays while he paces

in front of his house and the ylang-ylang tree
he uses for home remedies, swearing they keep

him free from disease. Do you sing? he asks
when I pass by with my dogs on their evening walk.

Yes, I say, but I’m out of voice, a phrase
he doesn’t believe in, that makes him laugh

in his screen-door wheeze as if his vocal cords
have been rubbed out by a lifetime of shouting

down bureaucracy, though he still carries a tune
as easily as I do my dachshunds, who bark

over the beat, interrupting him to encourage me:
You know this one! The setting sun’s liquescent

gold plates his platinum curls, the ylang-ylang
leaves shimmy off their silvery perfume to attract

the night’s pearl-winged pollinators, and surrounded
|by the precious metals of his world, I join in.

BERNIE by Denise Duhamal

After I broke my wrist I had to ask
Casey at the front desk to help me
bring a box of books to my apartment.
Copies of a book I’d written
when I could still type with two hands.
Casey had just graduated from college
where she’d taken a creative writing class
so I gave her my book and a ten.
I couldn’t open a jar or the bottle of pain pills
my friend Julie picked up for me at Walgreens.
I couldn’t wash my own hair. I couldn’t drive.
And when John and Cindy took me
to see the orthopedic surgeon, they had to
buckle me in.

I’d lived in the same building
for 25 years. I saw many neighbors go
from swinging tennis rackets to shuffling
with walkers grounded with yellow tennis balls.
I looked at my swollen fingers, almost gray
to match my cast. And I remembered Bernie,
who lived next door. Shortly after I moved in,
he knocked—I’m so embarrassed, so embarrassed,
but will you please help me put in these eye drops?
Bernie tilted his head. I lifted his top lid
and squeezed the bottle until the medicine itself
was a single tear. Bernie had just lost his wife.
I was still unpacking boxes when the EMTs came
and rolled her on a stretcher down the hall.
I heard the ping of the elevator and Bernie
mumbling a prayer.

Shortly after, he gave me
an Afghan she’d crocheted, orange and yellow
zig zags. I knew him mostly as a widower.
He was both gregarious and lonely, his son
in jail. His daughter in New York. Now
a young couple live in his unit, their toddler
obsessed with her convertible “grow and go”
Minnie Mouse car seat and stroller. The last time
I saw Bernie, he asked if I could give him a ride
to his new place, the nursing home. I helped him
with his seatbelt. I twisted my wrists
on the wheel, taking each turn with ease.

Dedication (To the White Women of Miami-Dade) by Anjanette Delgado

After Ámbar Past

This is for the white women of Miami-Dade
who didn’t go north
to escape the foreigners—
who still knock on doors
to welcome new neighbors,
and make as if they understand—
even when the accents are thick
and newcomers think nothing
of looking askance at cookies
bought with dollars meant for yarn.

This is for the white women
who remember the ’60s,
and the miniskirts they wore
to protest everything—who look
at my necklace with the 1973 on it
and smile, ask if I’m in a hurry
and, if I am, wave me ahead
in line, needing no explanation
for what the chain around my neck mourns.

This is for the white women who,
when they see a Latina girl moving
everything the good Lord gave her
while swaddled in a third less textile
than modesty supposedly requires,
smile and say: Let her be! What else
were we fighting for, if not her?

This is for the white women who taught
in Miami-Dade—kids who were
white, Cuban, Haitian, and Black—
who hid those children in libraries
and janitor closets during lunch
so they wouldn’t get beaten up
by kids hopped up on the venom
of their parents’ politics.
Who sat with children
long after after-school pickup,
and when the Black or brown
immigrant mother arrived, harried,
breathless, near tears from traffic,
said: Do not worry. Your child is a treasure.

This is for the white women who don’t take
it personally when people speak of white
privilege, as if entitlement came
in only one shade, who scoff at women
who don’t support the feminine
after they nearly faced divorces for raising
their boys to wear pink shirts with pride,
to bring home every kind of friend,
so long as they were good, and tender
of heart, and could be taught to recognize
love even in the blinding sun.

Yes, this poem is for the white women
who carry the knowledge of what whiteness
has done and still does—and surprise us
by standing for justice, against racism,
fascism and genocide, not because
they’re activists, but because
they have eyes and ears, and a soul.

This is for the white women of Miami-Dade
who love children not their own,
and hand out orange slices
because fruit is important,
because it helps you grow strong,
and because it is also sticky
and sweet on the tongue. Who tend
backyard mango trees
in the swelter of humid heat
and know the Spanish names of flowers
though they speak no other words
in the language of Cervantes.

This is for the white women who outlived
husbands and lovers and children, and fled
cold communities, and still built things
afterward, for themselves
and others. Who lock the door
behind them at dawn and walk
the boardwalk alone, unafraid,
white women who run
their hands over coral walls and remember
when Wynwood was warehouses
and not galleries—who paint and throw pots
because they refuse to stop believing
in beauty for its own sake.

Today, I dedicate this poem
to the white women of Miami-Dade
who invite me to drink the Cuban coffee
they say they learned how to make
years ago—and love—to you I say this:
I will drink your Cuban coffee, but not say
it’s so good I don’t know the difference.

Instead, I’ll say I was that brown girl
you hid in the library during recess,
who learned to speak up in boardrooms,
and raised her girls to be troublesome
and opinionated—and who’s known
for a while that so many of us
would not have survived it without you.