Stephen Reilly

Hotel Florida

Not like now, towering glass and steel where
bored actuaries and attorneys drift off in daydreams

over the skyline, out and over Tampa Bay
into wide Gulf waters. In 1972,
 
the Hotel Florida was never meant
to be home, but a downtown home it was for

guys very much like us — well, like me —
paycheckers to paycheckers.

Our lives lived out like Polaroids.
What we did who we were:

Fred, a Fuller Brush man, who failed
to make his monthly quotas.

Larry, a mechanic with a rambler heart,
tuning Chevy sedans and station wagons.

and George, the Piggly Wiggly manager,
always sweaty in his white short-sleeve shirts.

What the hell Wally did was anybody's guess.

We slept hard and heavy
and dreamed what dreams we had left.

Half pints of Jack Daniels sat on nightstands.

Winstons smoked down to the filters.
Gideon tucked away in bureaus.

Any wives long gone,
moved back to Detroit, Duluth, Buffalo,

and our kids much better off —
if we ever cared to confess the truth.

Female companionship still sought
with as little as a drink or as much as a c-note.

The hotel elevator sputtered from floor to floor
hour after hour, night after night, sleepless.

A Miami Memoir

If it ain’t poetry, it’s history.
				— Carl Sandburg

The neighbors on the corner, North Carolinians,
quiet, kept to themselves, and landscaped immaculate,
while we were the New Yorkers — me tagged
as the wise-ass kid from New York City, though
not quite a city kid, more a Long Island pissant.
And then the Oklahomans whose cousin recorded
hillbilly rock for the KKK. All I can recall
about the family two doors down, they were
Floridians whose great-great grandparents migrated
from Georgia after the war, the War Between the States.
A gracias Dios for the retired Columbian couple
who helped me muddle through high school Spanish.
Their price: a rosary said on Wednesdays.

Sinatra quit his winter gigs at the Fontainebleau.
South Beach aged like the elderly in retirement homes.
Vice cops and Mafioso vacationed at the Castaways.
Godfrey on the radio. Gleason teed off in Miami Lakes.
Eastern Airlines owned the sky. The Snake Creek
still fat with bass. The Grahams grazed their cattle west
of the Palmetto Expressway. The city not yet the city
with its silvery and glassy skyline, gateway to all Americas.
The Cubans settled into their casas and Flagler Street.

Fifty years since my family traded maples and apples
for palms and citrus, bluebirds for mockingbirds.
My father may have been right. That city a city
for bust outs from other states. The steady onshore breeze,
afternoon rains, the relentless sun breathes any day
into new days. The refugees relieved, whether
Batista’s boys demonizing Castro’s crew over dominoes
or Haitians no longer mired down by Papa and Baby Doc.

Before the discos, pistoleros and cocaine psychosis
at the altar of La Madrina de Muerte,
midnight Donzi crews motoring into Haulover Cut,
we floated on herbs — best in the nation — along
Collins in a battered blue VW, Dylan or Creedence
on the 8-track. Laid-back love-in weekends
in Coconut Grove. Sailboats rocked on Sailboat Bay.
A first love with acid discovered at Fairchilds.
Not that we ever broke out with choruses from Hair.
We held down our jobs the best we could. Had to.
No one a fortunate son. And hell no, we didn’t go
where we already went. Half the neighborhood
shot up and shipped back by Sixty-eight.

Dilly-dallying through the decades — no denying it —
more often than naught circling like a mullet
in the shallows while Miami decked itself out
in pastels, nouveau nouveau, condos atop condos,
Casas del Sol sprung up like wildflowers.
This city, now a city, no more Miamah. Muy bonita.

Julia Tuttle mailed her citrus blossoms to Flagler,
birthing a city with his railroad and a sibyl insight
of what could be, would be. Did she see our freeways?
We did and rode them to other states or migrated
back to our home states. The Pacific Coast always tempting.
My own sojourn cut short by an Arctic blast. A pledge
to all that’s good: Nowhere without alligators and palms.
Still time for a tequila sunrise at the Eden Roc.

Stephen Reilly’s poems have appeared in Charon, Wraparound South, Albatross, Main Street Rag, Broad River Review, Cape Rock, Poetry South, and other publications. One of his poems appears in the anthology Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination, edited by Jane Anderson Jones and Maurice O’Sullivan, Pineapple Press, Sarasota, FL 1995.
Reilly retired in 2023 after working more than 30 years as a staff writer for the Englewood Sun, a daily Florida newspaper with circulation in south Sarasota County, Charlotte and DeSoto counties.