Street · Havana
A Pencil Stub and a Left Hook at a Havana Gym
Between the third and fourth rounds, Lazaro Beltrán-Voss opens a notebook on his knee and finishes a poem before the bell.
By Sven Torkelsson · Saturday, 31 October 2026 · 1 min read
One minute. Lazaro Beltrán-Voss sits on the stool with his right glove unlaced and the water bottle going past his face like a small moon.
The pencil is two inches long. He holds it with three fingers, the way you hold something that might leave.
He wrote the poem during the third round, he says, somewhere between a jab and a bad idea. Now he puts it down:
Heat on the glass. A man tells me something with his elbow. I answer in the only grammar I have.
His trainer reads it upside down and nods once. The bell goes. The pencil goes into Lazaro's sock.
Afterwards he says the fourth round was mostly a rhyme he could not find.