by Emily Jungmin Yoon
Wanting
by Diannely Antigua
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Diannely Antigua, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 2 pm, Room 8303, and Sunday, 11/24/2024, 4 pm, Room 8303
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I want to write about joy—I decide this when I sit down at my desk,
the overwatered succulents lining the perimeter. I don’t
understand the ratio of plant to water to dirt, so I drown
them in what I think is needed. I forget sun.
I forget patience. I try to forget the look death makes—
the Haworthia, the snake plant, my grandmother, the dog.
I wanted to write about joy. Everything is pale.
Outside, winter persists, even though it’s May.
A lover once told me he believed in the risk
of joy, used it to explain away the kiss on my neck.
He’s married now, the risk of joy tattooed on the right side
of his own neck, his new wife’s name on the left.
My friend said I dodged a bullet with that one, I say
I would’ve opened my chest to it.
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Diannely Antigua (she/her) is a Dominican American poet and educator born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection, Ugly Music, won a 2020 Whiting Award and the Pamet River Prize. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and the winner of fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in the Best of the Net Anthology and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, and is the youngest and first person of color to hold the title. As host of the Bread & Poetry podcast, she aims to make poetry more accessible to the community, interviewing poets and non-poets alike about what poetry means to them.
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"Wanting" from Good Monster, copyright 2024 by Diannely Antigua, used by permission of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.
Play, with Foreign Object
by Jen Karetnick
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Jen Karetnick, Saturday 11/23/2024, 11 am, Room 8303
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The octopus found a coconut,
hollow and halved like a locket,
dropped into its world. A chair
waiting for its occupant, the shell
rocked on the ocean floor, inviting
as tea. The octopus lowered its mantle
into the crisp ochre fruit where the meat
once was, and closed the other section
over its head, sliding each of its arms
in from the cracks, leaving not a single
sucker to be caught by edges. And then
it rolled and bounced, propelled by
the predictable tide. And the whole sea
shuddered with this shred of saturated joy.
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A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 11 poetry collections, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate, winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award (January 2024); The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 CIPA EVVY Gold Medal and an Eric Hoffer Book Award Poetry Finalist; and The Crossing Over (2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition. Her poems have received first place from the Sweet: Lit Poetry Contest, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Pine Meadows Ranch Center for Arts & Agriculture, Wassaic Project, Write On, Door County, Wildacres Retreat, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, Mother’s Milk, Centrum Residencies, and elsewhere. Jen's work has appeared in Cold Mountain Review's 50th-anniversary issue, Michigan Quarterly Review's 60th-anniversary issue, The Missouri Review's Poem of the Week feature, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, Shenandoah, and other venues. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Miami. See jkaretnick.com or follow on Instagram @JenKaretnick.
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"Play, with Foreign Object" first appeared in The Fourth River and is collected in Inheritance with a High Error Rate, winner of the 2022 Cider Press review Book Award (January 2024). Permission granted by the poet.
Home / Hogar
by Nidia Hernández
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Nidia Hernández, Saturday, 11/23/2024, 4:30 pm, Room 8303
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A clock pointed
toward the place
where an incandescent ring
touched the shadows
it was my room
floating in the night
my room
defending me from myself
my dark room
where I hide
the pyramids I dream
it was the space of a second
to be everywhere
to reach you
to touch you
to hear your voice
it was unreality
my true room
inmense unreality
my only home
*
Un reloj apuntaba
hacia el lugar
donde un aro incandescente
tocaba las sombras
era mi cuarto
que flotaba en la noche
mi cuarto
defendiéndome de mí misma
mi cuarto oscuro
donde escondo
las pirámides que sueño
era mi cuarto de segundo
para estar en todas partes
para llegar a ti
para tocarte
para oír tu voz
era la irrealidad
mi verdadero cuarto
la inmensa irrealidad
mi único hogar
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Venezuelan native Nidia Hernández has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet, translator of Portuguese poetry, editor, broadcaster, and radio producer. Her editorial project lamajadesnuda.com--the digital backup of a radio program (also called La Maja Desnuda) from the last 35 years and a collection of the best poets from around the world--won the 2011 world Summit Awards. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM Spain. In Boston, Nidia is an associate editor of ArrowsmithPress, and through them also curates Poesiaudio, a collection of Latin American poetry in English and Spanish, in which one can hear the voices of Latin American poets themselves, and belongs to the Board of Directors of The New England Poetry Club. Hernández is the winner of the 2021 Sundara Ramaswamy Prize for her editorial work on The Land of Mild Light, an anthology by Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas, which includes translations by Robert Pinsky, Sophie Cabot Black, Carolyn Forché, Shara McCallum, and Forrest Gander. Nidia Hernández was awarded a 2021 Certificate of Recognition “for her exemplary leadership in support of English language training for immigrants in the city of Boston.” In 2022, she published a new anthology, The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets, for which she which won the 2023 Mass Poetry Community Award. The Farewell Light (Arrowsmith Press, 2024) is her most recent collection of poems.
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"Home" / "Hogar" appears in The Farewell Light (Arrowsmith Press, 2024). Permission granted by the poet.
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Give the Lake a Moment to Speak About the Horses
by Carlie Hoffman
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Carlie Hoffman, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 11:00 am, Room 8303
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Inevitable
by Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Jennifer Maritza McCauley, Saturday, 11/23/2023, 3:30 pm, Room 8303
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Before the mirage, I see the zigzagging slap of sun
It’s an easy light, rocking back and forth
Look, I see this as a simple art:
The bright on the summer porch rails, the moon
hand-clamping the veranda
the night sky keeps talking about morning;
I’m just a little child witnessing this all.
What to do when the sun is setting?
What to do when the inevitable comes?
I’ve spent my life counting time like pennies
in my Mami’s cocina mason jar
But I know no matter what,
the next moment comes
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Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home, and Kinds of Grace. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio, and CantoMundo, and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, and a Must-Read by Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine, and Southern Review of Books. She is fiction editor at Pleiades, has been faculty at Yale Writers' Workshop and Yale Young Writers' Workshop and is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
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This poem first appeared in the Afro-Hispanic Review. Permission granted by the poet.
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Tired, but not insane
by Merle Collins
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Merle Collins, Saturday, 11/23202, 2 pm, Room 8303
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Insane is something else.
Insane is white sheets and long guns,
breaking windows and lynching people,
killing people because they are Black.
The insane people that attack me and my family have no rhythm, no logic, no reason.
That is insane.
I am tired but
I am not insane.
About the poem: Tired, but not insane" is taken from Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings. The last part of the publication features poetry imaginatively creating the voice of Oseyan, a character invented to pay tribute to Louise Little. This is one of several poems created to find a voice for the character during parts of the 1940s and 1950s in Michigan, a period when she is confined to the spaces of a mental asylum.
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Merle Collins is a writer of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels are Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings (2023), The Colour of Forgetting (2023, 1995), and Angel (2011, 1997). Her short story collections include Rain Darling (1997) and The Ladies are Upstairs (2011). She has also written a biography, The Governor's Story: The Authorised Biography of Dame Hilda Bynoe. Her critical works include “Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today” in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World; “To be Free is Very Sweet” in Slavery and Abolition; “Cultural Expression and the Grenada Revolution,” a chapter in Nicole Phillips-Dowe & John Angus Martin, ed., Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, and “Explorations of the Self,” a chapter in Raphael Dalleo and Curdella Forbes, Caribbean Literature in Transition. Collins is also the producer of a documentary, Saracca and Nation, exploring African influences on the culture of Grenada and its sister isle, Carriacou. She is Professor Emerita, University of Maryland, College Park.
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"Tired, but not insane" is taken from Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings. Permission granted by the author.
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Torn Mind
by Jessica Jacobs
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Jessica Jacobs, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 4 pm, Room 8302
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Avivah Zornberg notes וַיֵּ֣שֶׁב יַעֲקֹ֔ב Vayeshev Yaakov (And Jacob
settled)—the first words of this parshah—point to Jacob’s
desire for יִשּׁוּב הַדַּעַת yishuv ha-da’at (a settled mind), as
opposed to הַדַּעַת טֵירוּף tiruf ha-da’at (a torn mind).
A rabbit savaged in the field, my mind
is that torn, that scattered.
All dog-paddle day, all surface
and screens, I sink sometimes
but bob back up.
Someone, somewhere
needs an answer.
Not bold enough to run from destiny,
I let it seep from me instead.
So though he shivered in the briny dark,
krill wreathing his ankles, I find
I am jealous of Jonah.
Like Nineveh, I am a city in need of saving.
Like Jonah, I have words stuck
in the scrim of my ribs
and the whale seems
an ideal retreat—
three days, three nights
at a depth I can barely imagine.
The whale, both vessel and message:
to settle into time like it does
into water. To patient
beside the rumbling pump room
of the heart. The quiet there
like God—nowhere and everywhere
at once. The holiness of that
wholeness. Of what rises to meet it.
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Jessica Jacobs is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis (Four Way Books, March 2024); Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards, and a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell, American Fiction, and Julie Suk Book Awards; Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and co-author of Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/Penguin RandomHouse). She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.
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"Torn Mind" from unalone © 2024 by Jessica Jacobs. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
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Cape Disappointment
by Diana Khoi Nguyen
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Diana Khoi Nguyen, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 3 pm, Room 8303
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open the window to erase your ghost or maybe let one in
I unlatch like a cello case, air filling every dent in the velvet
a burr in the wool sock, that's what inspired velcro
why does this avocado rot before it could ripen
time and time again it is time we can't apprehend
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Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. Her debut poetry collection Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Colorado Book Award. A Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese diasporic artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s), Nguyen’s other honors include awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry Contest, Key West Literary Seminars, and Academy of American Poets. She teaches creative writing at Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
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"Cape Disappointment" appears in Root Fractures (Scribner 2024). Permission granted by the poet.
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Light Reading
by Ana María Caballero
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Dayto watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Ana María Caballero, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 12 pm, Room 8303
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I bought the book at the airport in Bogotá and finished it on the flight
that carried me home, landing as another late season hurricane approached. A
tight book by the new French Noble, Ernaux.
The story is probably true, but the entire point is why must we ask. Sixty pages.
The brutal telling of a pitiless passion. Brutal because blunt. No lingerie.
No foreplay. Only the act. Its dry, spent language.
I left the book on the plane, every one of its verbs unmarked.
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Ana María Caballero is an award-winning literary artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites. She's the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and a Future Art Writers Award. She’s the first living poet to sell a poem at Sotheby’s and the first triple Lumen Prize finalist. Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been published extensively and exhibited at venues like the Ashmolean Museum, the V&A Museum, and HEK Virtual, among others. The author of six books, she also co-founded digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse. See anamariacaballero.com.
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Permission granted by the poet.
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If You Want to Fall in Love Again
by Traci Brimhall
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Traci Brimhall, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 2 pm, Room 8303
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Meet me in the mint field under a black umbrella.
Half your memories wait there in the shallow burial
of a cigar box labeled My Once and Future Homecoming.
The prairie and its empire of grasses aged from green
to champagne, and my pupils are useless in this biblical light.
A stray wandered through the backdoor I left open.
I gave it your middle name, picked it up by its neck.
Ticks studded its ribs like proofless rubies. I do that
a lot now, leave doors open. See how little I’ve changed?
I still cover the eastern windows with masking tape X’s
in every storm. Once I was in love with leaving, with wearing
a dress with forty-two white buttons down the back.
Now I know the German name for the counterfeit darkness
you see when you close your eyes translates to ownlight.
When I press my eyelids looking for it, red spreads
its knowing stain the way the oil in our fingertips once
darkened pages of hand-me-down erotica as we sucked
each other’s toes. The months after you left, fantasy
was a form of injury. I catalogued each What if in cursive
to try and wish my way across the thin distance between faith
and waiting. Truth is, I put up with your bad waltzing
because it made you close enough to kiss, to push the pin
in your boutonnière into your breastbone. I think I might
be in love again, this time with the finch pilfering purple
coneflower seeds in my garden. You loved, once, the prayer
in me where a prayer shouldn’t be, the crisis with a theme.
The way I kneaded breath into the shape of you.
How your absence reefs my skin. How your breath once did.
How you tailored your sentences to almost but not quite reach
the floor. The parts of me that ache for you lately are incus,
malleus, stapes. And when I whisper Come back to the scentless
side of the bed you almost do, or your voice does—my heart
in its bone kennel, shaking, convinced it can hear you from
that far, from here, from this home I cannot live in or leave.
“The river’s injury is its shape.” —Wendell Berry
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Traci Brimhall’s newest book, Love Prodigal, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2024. She is also the author of Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press), Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Parks Service, and is currently the Poet Laureate of Kansas.
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This poem first appeared in The American Poetry Review and is forthcoming in Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon Press, November 19, 2024).
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When I Was Straight
by Caridad Moro-Gronlier
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 2 pm, Room 8303
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After Maureen Seaton
I married a straight man & stayed
married for sixteen straight years.
I said I love you straight-faced, but I knew
the truth—I was no straight arrow.
My parents thought I held a straight flush
when I brought home a boy with straight blonde hair
& blue eyes, a real straight shooter who asked Papi
if he could take me off his hands. Straightaway,
Papi said yes. I was 20 & it was time to straighten
me up & out of his house. He thought that straightlaced
Americano would make me walk the straight
& narrow, straitjacket my mouth, & remove
the straight edged razor from my demeanor,
but that boy thought I was straight up awesome
even though I felt straight up awful that I wasn’t
straightforward about kissing my best girlfriend
or just how dire the straits of my desire for her
were, a want I was not straightbred for.
For sixteen years I tried, but I was never straight
with him until I walked straight out the door.
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In April 2024, Caridad Moro-Gronlier was appointed the second Poet Laureate in County history by Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. She is the author of Tortillera, the winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize published by Texas Review Press (2021), and Visionware (Finishing Line Press, 2009) as well as the editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing (Beacon Press, 2020). Her work has been featured in The Best American Poetry Blog, Verse Daily, NPR, The Hive, Split This Rock, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, and others. She is the recipient of a Julia Peterkin Literary Award, an International Latino Book Award Honorable Mention, an Eric Hoffer Book Award Honorable Mention, First Horizon Award Finalist, three Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs Miami-Dade Individual Artists Grants, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry.
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This poem first appeared in Pleiades: Literature in Context, Pleiades 441, Spring 2024.
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by Kate Northrop
At the bottom of the aquarium,
I am arranged like a note.
At the bottom of the aquarium,
tucked by a pile of loot, I hang
while voices stop overhead,
then vanish. Constellations, floors
soaring with stars, mean nothing
to me, nothing the loaded trees
pinpointing a street. But this
knocking on walls? This
is my heart, this my fury
turned low inside, like sunlight
stuck afternoons in red drapes.
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Kate Northrop's recent poetry collections are Homewrecker (New Letters vol. 88, 2022) and cuntstruck (C & R Press, 2017). New poems are forthcoming in MER, Terrain.org and Glacier. She teaches at the University of Wyoming.
by Heidi Seaborn
~inspired by Natasha Trethewey’s “Elegy”
where rivers slough beneath the bank,
round the stones, eddy in the slow run
home—
an alluvial fan of sediment and sentiment.
My mother needed to say goodbye
to the rivers—Bitterroot, Yellowstone,
Flathead, Blackfoot, Bighorn, Gallatin—
where her fly once teased the brown and cutthroat,
once cast into the light of my father.
Morning mist sifting off the meadows
like steam rising from the coffee brewed
over their camp stove.
Wading hip-deep in the currents,
their lines whipping through the weather—
whatever that day offered.
Catching a silver glimmer then
releasing, as if each fish was a child
held for the instant.
If I was there, it was as a trout—
a fluorescence in motion. The stream
coursing, coursing past.
A river seeks weakness, the unrooted—
My mother had brought her fly rods,
renewed her license. But the rivers
were thick with memory and she is an old
river—resisting, then changing
direction.
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Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She’s the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. She has recent work in Agni, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times of London, Poetry Northwest, Plume, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU. See heidiseabornpoet.com.
by Jane Medved
by Jennifer A Sutherland
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Twilight, and I hear
her voice, familiar
kettle-hiss.
Quiet, girl,
she commands; then
my childhood rooms
are here, each
one dark as pitch,
bulls-eyed, red-
end cigaretted.
In the center
Mother sits,
seething.
Labyrinthine lady
fulcrum : rattle
preening. Tiny
importuning click/
click/click of gas
as she warms
the morning’s
coffee, aluminum
saucepan tap
and pour. Snap
of air trapped inside
her. Cricket clatter.
The house, its grid
of trenches, of gangrene
and defilade,
unacknowledged.
Rainbow-sheen halo
of puff and smoke,
her whisper-drab
devotional,
her pieta. Membrane
contracting, clutching
fibrous wall
and sinew.
Lung, spasming
and black,
immobile,
wheeze and block.
I must
have frailed her,
asked too much
of her thin-stretched
décolletage,
engendered
a reaction.
When she died the
aperture swelled to many times
its anxious size.
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Jennifer A Sutherland is the author of Bullet Points: A Lyric, from River River Books, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur and Foreword Indies Poetry Book of the Year. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, EPOCH, Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at Hollins University and she lives and works in Baltimore.
by Deirdre O’Connor
the one who picked another wife, another life
on the other coast. The one who chose
the one nearby, the younger one, the one
who had a son. Praise them for toughening us,
for bracketing the time we shared, sticking it
in footnotes, in envelopes on which we wrote
their names, a birthday card their kid found
in a book on native plants, their name
inscribed above ours, love comma our name.
Their handwriting, we know it decades on,
can’t unrecognize it, the slope and paraph,
even the marginal squiggle in Keats
or Derrida will go to the grave with us.
It is wrought in the iron of our brains.
Praise our brains for keeping them out
of our hearts, for letting them go where they went.
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Deirdre O’Connor is the author of two books of poems, most recently The Cupped Field, which received the 2018 Able Muse Book Award. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Bennington Review, On the Seawall, Rust + Moth, JAMA, Cave Wall, and other journals. She directs the Writing Center at Bucknell University.
by Lauren Camp
There was no moment apart from this stubbing self
and its newest habit
to hurt. Rapid, what we battered about.
In the courtyard, a boy in embroidered turquoise held a small rack
of candy strapped to his chest.
It was a sweet estate. Summer: blurred and distracted.
We had fought all week. Shut in
to greater, deeper, no response. Missed
the plane, which lengthened its vibration.
Stephen Hawking spoke of three different times that converge.
Walking into darkness, we found the darkness
a history of bat wings pushed to pinwheel.
That city wrapped in its buds. Its curbs and dogs
soaked to concrete. Did you see around us those careless
with joy all those hours
we shadowed? Such shame to need
what I can’t remember: the communion, or red skirts, the drench
as citrus let out its juice. Filled
with the reflex to find what is holy, we went—
root and plaster, doorways,
similar flowers, ghosts and cactus spines. In each place, I looked
through a lens as the sun
dispersed to its mirrors. And in some frames I found
God or salt, some high-pitched singing.
The church served its bells
as if to sound what I feared. How little I know myself. I love you.
We will die, live; these are our options.
The bats slanted, concealed.
They never stopped. You carried what we need.
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Lauren Camp serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). A former Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, she is a recipient of the Dorset Prize, finalist commendations for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. See laurencamp.com.
by Sara Femenella
For years Quinn sat in a gymnasium
full of post-pubescent girls
so holy with hormones
that his own girlhood
must have felt unrelenting,
his Catholic schoolgirl uniform
a false cognate of cosplay
while a priest ordained all those
bodies perfect in their own images.
I admit, when he first came
to me, I loved the girl in him.
His she/her an abandoned bird’s nest,
whose beauty lies not only
in its painstaking construction
but in how easily that labor is left.
Quinn wanted to know
what makes a good man,
as if I could teach him
what he can better teach me.
His boyhood has been there
all along, a revelation
beneath all the bullshit,
a transcendent knowledge
that when he pronounces
his manhood his words will
emerge glittering formed
by the vestiges of dead legislations
and the joy of knowing what
he has always known. His manhood
will rhyme with nothing.
A brand-new word, unlike anything
we’ve ever heard. We’re listening.
Ready to repeat after him.
____________________________________________________________
Sara Femenella has recent or forthcoming poems in The North American Review, Palette Poetry, Pleiades, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, Denver Quarterly, Salamander, and Seventh Wave, among others. Her book, Elegies for One Small Future, has been a finalist or semi-finalist for a number of contests, including Autumn House Press' Poetry Prize and The Waywiser Press's Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.
by Jane McKinley