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.
She didn’t say it to me. But I was old enough to understand it pertained to girls like me, to the women we would be—the not born with it, I mean. I’m trying to explain why, when the house painter sent me a video of him playing the saxophone in a dim but freshly painted dining room, naked beneath his white overalls, his eye contact with the camera as he wailed— I really didn’t think it meant what he probably meant it to mean— he’d talked to me about his daughter, about his wife. He’d be back in the spring, to finish the outside of the house. When he fell off someone else’s roof and broke his foot, I was surprised by how safe it felt to ask for my deposit money back. When he said I was beautiful I found out I still believed I should say thank you.
Rebecca Brock’s awards include the 2025 Lascaux Poetry Prize, The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest, the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize and the Editor’s Choice Award at Sheila-Na-Gig. Her work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, Mom Egg Review and elsewhere. A MacDowell Fellow, she is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023). See rebeccabrock.org.
