Inklings 2025

This Is My Miami Poem Unknown How do you write a love poem for a city that does not love you back? A city where red doesn’t mean stop, red means go back inside, remove nail polish with acetone because one wrong look can mean death. A week before my birthday, a gay man on South Beach was beaten with a stick and called a and the tide still came in that night. The music still played and the tourists still stumbled through, drunk and barefoot in the neon rain, and the drag queens still did their rounds. And with the weight of every streetlight you’ve prayed was a moon to look up to, you search schools in the north and remove your bracelets before walking on the sidewalk at night. Out of the corner of your eye, you watch the buildings and streets and people and lights, a ghost of yourself in the darkened window, and you pray you could leave, but you know that you won’t. Coastline Painting Sloane Mason ’27 19