SWWIM sustains and celebrates women poets by connecting creatives across generations and by curating a living archive of contemporary poetry, while solidifying Miami as a nexus for the literary arts.
This afternoon, as you sit by me, all the white sheets shiver. With my eyes closed, we are far outside this hospital, on the Rehoboth Beach sand, under the salted water, just your skin and my skin with their rivers of scars trickling, teaching our fingertips where to go every night. But the time now, the time before surgery, is short, too short because hours here melt away, and you are led away and I am rolled behind a student doctor wearing rose-pink shoes. It'll all be okay, she says, and I have frozen, just taking in white upon white in the hallway and, inside the room, the woman who bends over the sterile instruments, examining them, her back to me. You were there before and now I have forgotten until another doctor says to think of something sweet before covering my face with a blue-tinted mask, soft as your fingertips, and I inhale, thinking of everything your hands know how to do.
Deborah Ager won the 2026 Zócalo Poetry Award. She’s the founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine, and she co-edited The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. Her writing has been featured on Milk Street Radio and in Quarterly West, The Georgia Review, North American Review, and elsewhere.
