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The O, Miami Poetry Festival is held each April for National Poetry Month. A few of us lucky ducks at the Poetry Foundation arrived last Friday night and attended the Manual Cinema performance of My Soul’s Shadow, an original piece commissioned by O, Miami. My Soul's Shadow is an immersive evening of live, cinematic shadow puppetry based on the world of twentieth-century Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The pictures don’t really do the performance justice. It reminded us of the surreal films of Luis Buñuel. After the performance, we ate delicious tacos and drank craft beer. And, did I mention that this all took place under the warm Miami night sky? We, who hail from Chicago, thought we had died and gone to heaven. Dios mio!

Day two of our trip, we headed over to the Little Haiti Cultural Center for the Word Up! Poetry Initiative and the Omari Hardwick bluapple Poetry Network for SOul FLO. Young poets wowed us with their group and solo poems.

On our last day, we went to the O, Miami Zine Fair, a one-day gathering point for an array of small presses and independent publishers both local and from around the state of Florida.

     Charred sea flakes on the grain

spilling sun blood worms combed by shadow

turtle eggs like living sea shells, a dominion

of dismal, deaf existential pity, hyena teeth

rock tragic woe warriors at salty bath

fire rims the curls edges o’ sea each slain

coconut Canaan milk and a Married Virgin had crow

lenses while baking sea blisters, an opinion

of pistols, darling narcissistic city, solely bequeath

to primitive batches of monads God hath

gilded the foam sizzling during rainbow’s reign

the nunnery of nymphs on divide’s sad glow

as melting seconds lashed by a monk’s minion