Three Poems Written in Pencil on Hotel Memo Paper

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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1. Turquoise

The sky loved the bay so much
he melted into her.
Beside such devotion we,
with all our pride, are less than ants.


2. Ocean Drive, Miami

The hotel fronts pretend to be cake.
Look out!
Los niños are banging their spoons on the table.


3. A Generation

The piece of paper we were given
is too small. Still, up and down
the rows we bend our heads,
and a silence falls over us as
along a street where one by one
the house lights are going out.

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Lola Haskins's new collection, Homelight, is just out from Charlotte Lit Press. The Betsy-South Beach is The hotel in “Poems Written in Pencil,” which appeared in Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (University of Pittsburgh, 2019), also featured in The New York Times The Sunday Magazine. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and New England Review/Breadloaf Quarterly, a Florida's Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson Prize from Poetry Society of America.