Oftentimes, poets must turn tragedy into art — no matter how small it may be.
On a recent afternoon, Miami writer Madari Pendas stood outside a pawn shop on Coral Way, where she once experienced her own personal drama that inspired her writing.
📍 What is a ZipOde? They're five line poems based on where you live, with each number of your zip code determining the number of words in that line.
📥 Submit a poem at wlrn.org/zipodes. Chosen poems will be presented at our ZipOdes finale at Vizcaya Museums and Gardens
Pendas wrote a ZipOde involving the shop and her purple Schwinn bike:
A Miami moment:
seeing your stolen
bike
in the local pawn,
and buying it.
Pendas explained that around 2015, her bike was stolen from outside her parent’s home. One day while riding the bus down Coral Way, she saw the purple cruiser in the pawn’s window. Her efforts to get it back from the shop owner for free were to no avail.
“ I tried to argue as best I could, but eventually I just paid the hundred bucks thinking that was fair and, um, he definitely won that interaction. I don't have that Miami guapear gene of being able to puff out your chest and have confrontations with people at the drop of a dime," she said, using a Spanish slang for acting tough or being brave.
That was also the year when WLRN and the nonprofit poetry foundation O, Miami created the ZipOde poem format and invited South Floridians to write poems about where they live. This year marks ZipOde's 10th anniversary.
This small moment of friction makes up a lot of life in Miami, Pendas said. The Florida International University adjunct professor, who is also a published author and painter, says it’s what she uses to inspire her artistic work.
“ Because in Miami, there is that dissonance between heartache and success … It's the land of opportunity, but it's also the place where the I-95 comes and destroys your house. So, that dissonance grates, and creates poetry,” she said. "I try to write to the Hialeah kid. To people that maybe haven't seen themselves represented in literature."
READ MORE: 16,000 poems and counting: ZipOdes judge sees South Florida through everybody else's eyes
Pendas has written more than 150 ZipOdes. Her other poems range in subjects from wanting to dream about the place she was born, to forgetting how to say certain words in English. She says she tries to cast a wide net with her writing, and in making ZipOdes she tries to deepen her relationship with the place she grew up.
"I think I want Miami to be a place I dream of and not just resent or dislike because it's so hot, or because there's a peacock on the roof. So it's a way of trying to fall back in love with Miami, which I think every Miamian has to do," Pendas said.
She describes her current zip code, 33145, as “Coral Way, but the not-so-nice part.”
Her bike was stolen a second time after she bought it back, and she's been riding the bus exclusively ever since. Pendas' various works can be found on her website.
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