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.
More open windows on a summer night. More coolness from the tongue of a conch shell
& warmth from a towel left for hours in the sun & New Orleans growl in art-museum jazz. More shoes with the heels worn out & cross-hatched
sidewalks under fan palm trees & star nurseries blooming through my daughters’ mouths. More close-ups
of faces in photographs of cities getting bombed & study of which direction their eyes are looking. More light that can escape from black holes.
More baby blue-belly lizards scooting away from boots & making it to the shadowed underside of rocks. More
thread for pants slashed at the knees & crabgrass that can nose through astroturf. Bring on the live voltage of the future tense to shake load-bearing beams.
Show me a kind of math that can account for the cruelty a hurricane whips down when it meets land & the beauty
of the blush-lit spun-sugar clouds it leaves behind & my need to remember the pummeling so I can harden when the next storm comes but still
Jia-Rui Cook is a Chinese-American writer, editor, and producer in Los Angeles. Once a staff writer at the L.A. Times and the news events and projects lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she is the senior communications officer at the California Wellness Foundation. Her poetry has recently appeared in Alta Journal, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Hunger Mountain Review, Mom Egg Review, Missouri Review, and Puerto del Sol. Jia-Rui can be found on Instagram @funjiable.
