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.
Don’t you want to take a hatchet to it sometimes, when the whole world becomes a patchwork of itches, your brain’s scruffiness unbearable, the mangy carpets, paint shedding like dandruff, and it becomes clear that despite years of pledging to pick up the pace, take shorter lunch breaks, the scabby scaffolding is permanent, that just as you’re hanging red and green curtains in the Lebanese history room, the World War 1 floor craters despite the good joists your history teacher put there, and now all you can make out is a body- smashed window and an arched doorway inscribed F.F., but you know Friar Fuck was a Sex and the City character and definitely not an archduke, whatever that even is, and now you’re picturing a duke doing a backbend while your history teacher cries into his green tea, which you remember he drank most mornings before he rolled up his sleeves, revealing his forearms’ tectonic musculature, his verve revving you like a squirt of sun. Is that when it started, this problem of attention cantering off in the wrong direction, yoking itself to the litany of men who each take up a whole fucking room, while you are trying to learn something true about the world, trawling for insight through articles that pitch into landfills of dollar-store hypotheses, of which you’ve got plenty gunking up your bar cart, the berms of your bookshelves, even the stairs. You can’t go anywhere without stepping on a gimcrack notion, some of which look like dandelions but when you claw through the carpet, there’s no root, just a shred of ribbon from a long-shelved gift. Can you still hear the cry of delight that shot into the rafters when you opened the small black telescope, and again when you pointed it to the sky, and asked how? And why?
Julia Salem is a London-based writer and editor from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Atlanta Review, Pigeon Pages, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first poetry collection.
