How much do you love Miami? Your ode to the city could be on a downtown billboard

You don’t have to be Shakespeare for your poem to be read by millions. All you need is a downtown Miami billboard.

O, Miami, the nonprofit that organizes poetry programs, launched a new [Your Poem Here] poetry contest in partnership with WLRN Public Media this week ahead of this year’s O, Miami poetry festival in April, which is National Poetry Month. The winning Miami-inspired poem will be displayed on a billboard just across the street from the Miami Heat arena downtown.

O, Miami’s mission is “for every single person in Miami-Dade County to encounter a poem during the month of April,” said P. Scott Cunningham, the organization’s founder and executive director.

The group has hosted several poetry submissions in the past, like in 2010 when O, Miami asked people to submit poems welcoming basketball star Lebron James to the Miami Heat. The reaction was stellar, Cunningham said. Half of those submissions were from happy Heat fans, and the other half were from angry Cleveland Cavaliers fans.

This year, O, Miami is asking for poems dedicated to your Miami-Dade neighborhood. It’s the first time O, Miami and WLRN have used a billboard to display a winning poem.

The rules are simple. Poems have to be in the style of a “Zip Ode,” a poem that follows the numbers on a Miami-Dade County ZIP code. Each number dictates the number of words in each line of the poem. For example, if you’re ZIP code is 33140 for Miami Beach, the first and second lines of the poem have three words, the third line has one word, the fourth has four, and the last has none.

Participants can submit as many poems as they like online at yourpoemhere.com until March 22. The winner will be announced April 3 and the winning poem will be displayed on the billboard for three weeks. On April 26, O, Miami and WLRN will host a late night Zip Ode reading and festival finale at Vizcaya Museum & Gardens. The winner will also be interviewed on WLRN.

“Please send us your best Zip Odes that are about where you live rhapsodize the places about Miami that you love, that annoy you, that drive you crazy, that keep you here, that make you want to leave,” Cunningham said at a press conference in front of the billboard. “Whatever emotions you have about the place that you live, we want to hear them in the form of your ZIP code.”

The festival has several poetry projects and events scheduled throughout the month of April, like Sweet Melody ice cream inspired by students’ poems, a children’s open mic poetry reading at Miami Beach Botanical Garden and Surfside Salve, a series of community writing workshops that will produce selected poems to be displayed at the Surfside Community Center.

If you need some inspiration, here are some Zip Ode poems that were read Wednesday in front of the billboard.

LeeBetsy Charon, who sits on the O, Miami board of directors, lives in Westchester. Her zip code is 33174.

I want croquetas

From Jessy Bakery.

But

I’m only wearing my bata de casa

And feel so lazy.

Theresa Marie Calluori, whose ZIP code is 33183, wrote her Zip Ode about a friend who refuses to visit her.

Too, too far.

Too, too far.

Far.

West Kendall is too far to visit you.

You come here.

Carlos Frías, the WLRN Sundial host and former Miami Herald food editor, wrote his poem about the “Miami side” of the 33134 zip code.

See the chicken

in that bag?

Santeria.

Don’t touch it!

Miami has its rules.

Eat your heart out, Shakespeare.

This story was produced with financial support from The Pérez Family Foundation, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.