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.
messy, as in your mud-splashed pants, that day we should have stayed inside during the rains. As in the folly of a mother’s insistence. The walk to the shop we braved, for insistence’s sake. Messy, as in the ice cream I was too distracted to catch before it avalanched over the edge of the cone I was holding. Your triple chocolate treat puddling at our feet, while I stared at my phone screen. How you rummaged through my coin purse, mouth immaculate as a blade, its angles an accusation. How emptiness can stain a moment, if not a memory. Messy, as in my smile, skidding unwittingly into a serious childhood grievance. Your favorite toy, broken. An argument with a friend. Sometimes, even if I don’t want to, it’s as though I graffiti no big deal in sloppy letters across your sadness, then crash. Messy, as in a starling, lying on its back in the street, stone-still. The broken-winged one you had begged me to stop and save, but we were late to somewhere. Lateness, the messiest apology for those difficult mornings, time teetering on the cliff edge of its own crumbling seconds. The way I sometimes can’t stop my rebukes from marching across the field of my voice, like a battalion. Messy is as messy does, my loves. The more I fail to observe the world through the eye of your storms, the messier I feel in the aftermath. As if I were buried nose-deep in mud. As if I were the aftermath.
Julie Weiss is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in February, 2025. Her work appears in ONE ART, The Westchester Review, Up The Staircase Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Gyroscope Review, and MER. See julieweisspoet.com.
