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.
We had to have the mast to see ourselves, as if the icebergs’ sapphire veins did not contain enough for human touch, or this ice grotto, conserved as a sclera, which seemed to spill out siren songs at tidal surges. The lack of scope and scale distort the scene—where do we place our feet? Can we tune our ears to hear the ice making its fractured adjustments, as eerie as static? Darwin writes that light
will be thrown on the origin of ourselves and our history. The mast wasn’t originally in the frame; it was a later addition, and so were we. Light lilts on the smooth ice-sheet, as the ocean hushes against ice- rocks, enduring the wind’s chisel. But the mast—the mast remains in the painting like an unwanted splinter, where loneliness and ice align.
Taylor Light is a poet from Dallas. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Florida and has received support from the Convivio Conference in Postignano, Italy. Currently, she is a PhD student at Southern Methodist University with a focus on eco-poetics.
