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.

Choke by Emily Shearer

You make me cry oranges,

my throat envelop stones.  

Your honed-in focus rattles me

to bones. You could spend one whole poem

looking for a grain of sand in an ocean cove. 

 

I dream of quiet boys poking around in a buried trove.

They listen like doves

to the sound of fruit growing

in my orchards and my groves.

 

You were roving, clamoring in droves.

I stove off cravings by piercing them with cloves

and left them boiling on the stove in copper.

Into the soup of us, I dropped a mote of x, a jot of o

a note of hex, a spot of no,

and blended it real slow.

 

To complete this stock I must roast

your host of bones. 

Let it be known, the way we grow

together is the place where we don’t know

who’s choking on whose oranges

or whose stones. 


Emily Shearer teaches yoga and practices persistence. Her poems have been nominated and shortlisted for a couple of prizes and have been or will soon be published in Firefly Magazine, West Texas Literary Review, Ruminate, the bookends review, and All We Can Hold: poems about motherhood, among others, including the inaugural issue of Minerva Rising, where she now serves as Poetry Editor and Associate Book Developer.

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