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.
At the beach and nearly 40 I lay, stretched out, eyes bleached from the overcast sky. The kind of biting light that doesn’t know when to give—coloring the mood with its tin breath. As a child, I would cloud gaze, viewing all possibilities from above: my future home, the boat I would never own, a family anchored in a cloak of purity. My body—a revolver launching cartwheels off diving boards, the blasé hand of youth flipping the bird to my future self with joints firmly intact. But today the sky exudes a somber glow, as if saying, I am tired. Clouds pull like a swath of torn linens; and although I lather my aging skin with the highest level of SPF, it merely glints like an apparition. I turn on my stomach and sink into a bed of tight sand, heartbeat caught in the tunnel of my throat— the closest thing to a landing strip I have.
Jodi Balas is a neurodivergent poet based out of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Her poetry has been featured in The Shore, December Magazine, Chestnut Review, McNeese Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “His mouth, mine” was selected as a finalist for the 2023 River Heron Review Poetry Prize and her poem “Bone Density” was chosen by Danusha Lameris as the winning poem for the 2023 Comstock Review Poetry Prize.
