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.
“…this voice was never mine, nor even yours.” —Lawrence Raab
Our world slowly spinning unbuttons itself— this is a difficult home.
And you, the reason for this telling the way memory and subtraction fool us, a sun-warmed key lime sliced in half its juice on your tongue. Your husband gone taking your child for shoes and you, eyes closed; falling straight to the heart of God—
the smooth slide into the back of a cooled taxi’s leather seat.
But maybe everyone is always almost drowning; and maybe this is all you want to be.
Like the mailbox as a child I stuffed with snow, you could not receive a thing.
Stitching back up the blood you lose each month, forgetting the march of happiness down to your toes, forgetting our world still spins with its nature of hope.
So I ask for everything— I don’t know where to stop. Hands tight on a wheel one fine turn away—
and all the ways to want things; and all the things we shouldn’t want.
Stacie M. Kiner was the recipient of the Hannah Kahn Memorial and The Plainsong Awards. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Madison Review, Comstock Review, Apalachee Quarterly, Ekphrastic Review, Lavender Review, Panoply, Plainsong, Rhino, Southeast Review, SWWIM, Thimble, and Chameleon Chimera: An Anthology of Florida Poets as well as in the chapbooks Inventory and Abbey Road. Stacie is the Essays Editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal. A retired librarian, Stacie resides in South Florida with her wife. See staciemkiner.com.
