Tagged: Miami

In April, we invited unpublished writers to submit their work as part of our Write South Florida contest. There were three categories in the contest: Amateur, College, and Children.  These are the runners-up from the contest in the College category.

Mommy the Commie and Me

by Sadie Kurzban

It’s a time-honored tradition. Spring breakers descend on Miami from across the nation this time of year to guzzle beer, work on their tanlines and hit the clubs.

Or there’s Alternative Spring Break, where you sit in a windowless room, guzzle coffee, and fill out reams of immigration paperwork. You can compile proof of residence, and file for fee waivers. Sound appealing?

When you see a book titled Florida Poems, you might imagine titles and verses about bright sunshine and sand-swept beaches, with a picturesque Key West sunset thrown in.  You know, kind of like the poetry version of those generic landscape paintings that hang in every Florida seaside motel? (With the exception of paintings by the Florida Highwaymen, but that’s another story for another time.)

Host Alicia Zuckerman was intensely curious about how young poets graduating with Masters of Fine Arts degrees expect to make money.  Since the average poetry journal pays just $20 for a poem, it’s not exactly a way to make a living.   Sure, writing by candlelight because you can’t pay FPL has a certain romance to it, but what happens when you run out of matches?  So how do poets expect to pay their bills?

For years, billiards aficionados made a kind of pilgrimage to a place called Star Cue. It was a tiny shop just off Fifth Street in South Beach—tucked behind Flower Bazaar, an upscale floral boutique. Holocaust survivor Abe Rich made some of the country’s most coveted pool cues. Tristram Korten stopped in and spoke with Rich shortly before he passed away.

If you’ve spent time at South Pointe Park in Miami Beach, you might have noticed the steady stream of cruise and cargo ships going in and out of Port Miami.  These hulking ships are one of the signature images of South Florida.

All of these ships are driven in and out of the port by a highly trained group of sea captains, also known as harbor pilots.   Harbor pilots know the waters around the port well–they have to be able to draw a map from memory as part of their qualifications.

It had been 38 years since Don Bailey posed for his popular carpet ad – a spoof of a famous Burt Reynolds picture. In March 2010, Under the Sun reporter Sammy Mack convinced Bailey to pose again, wearing exactly the same … smile.

Journalist Nicholas Spangler wrote in The Miami Herald, “He calls to mind Michelangelo’s David, with a mission from a more swinging time.” He was referring to Don Bailey, the naked carpet guy you’ve noticed on the billboard driving down I-95.

When we ran a poll in 2009 to find out the question our readers most wanted answered, you chose the bronzed, scantily clad Don stretched out on a burgundy shag.