by Ashley Sojin Kim

From September 14-25, in honor of her residency at The Betsy Hotel and our 10th anniversary season, SWWIM Every Day will be featuring a selection of poems curated by Sarah Audsley.

Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She serves as the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center.

We hope you enjoy this special collaboration!

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Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—W. S. Merwin, “Separation”


It feels the most like wriggling—not bubbles or gas
—frenetic bursts asserting proof of life.

She’s most active when I lie supine. I rest
my hand on my belly to feel her from the surface.

She doesn’t know that each insistent flurry
eases my anxiety, that she’s not

my only child, that I am mother to both
the quick and the dead, of whom I was scraped clean.

I think less often of the one who was
before (a new kind of pain—healing a form

of loss). I know well how to carry grief, but what
to do with hope? It wriggles within me, faint

at first, then stronger, more assured. To come
alive once more, savor these strange delights.

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Ashley Sojin Kim’s poems appear or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Literary Matters, Gulf Coast, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Florida and BA from Johns Hopkins. She has received support from Kundiman, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Kearny Street Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center. You can find her at ashleysojin.com.