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.
Each time we are sixteen, friends who attend rival high schools in our Southern, segregated town. You don’t care I’m Jewish, speak Spanish at home. Our dads are beloved physicians, still make house calls,
write off overdue patient bills. Each time it’s the day we meet at your house, mid-afternoon, no one home, go skinny dipping in your backyard swimming pool— your idea. How comfortable a slim creatura you are
in your own skin. Tall, fearless, each time you dive into water with ease, a kingfisher’s iridescent grace, brace fingers at the rough edge to spring out, then in again, slice the clear surface like a leaf-blade to
the low depths, emerge as if from some halcyon stratum, jewels in your hair, a slow-motion film in the waning day’s glow. Years later, our fathers gone, no contact since we were girls, my mother calls from
our growing up town to break gently the news of your overdose—you escaped a bad marriage, remarried someone older, kind. You were happy—they didn’t think it intentional. The obit said heart failure, as it
often does. Each time from beneath pearlized silver, wavy black hair frames a gleaming face, smiling brown eyes. Water beads on skin, dissolves into air, into sunlight, as we leap out together, plunge in again.
Elisa Albo is a contributing co-editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Harassment, Empowerment, and Healing. Her chapbooks are Passage to America and Each Day More. Her poems have appeared in Bomb, Crab Orchard Review, Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents, and Vinegar and Char, among others. Associate editor for SoFloPoJo.com and award-winning professor of English at Broward College, she was born in Havana and lives with her family in Fort Lauderdale.
