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.
But he'd received the third notice from Georgia Power
so I paid his $700 electric bill though told him
never again, unless his wife got a job, any job.
I cc'ed her on the email.
She wrote back, you're an awful person
with a mixture of rage and bitterness I could hear
even on the screen. Still, this time
I meant it. I overheard the woman at the party
tell her friend they'd actually purchased the dog
from a breeder in upstate New York.
We spent so much money, we could have adopted
a baby from China. I found her statement funny.
I want to be better. I want to save a dog, to save
my brother. I want to tread lightly on this world without
leaving footprints or too many
plastic wrappers. I want to see Singapore
and Vietnam, to spend a summer in Italy writing
short stories and a sonnet or two.
Learn to tango and foxtrot equally well.
I want to be good.
I want to write one poem so perfect
that when I'm dead, a stranger will pin it to the wall,
perhaps even claim it as their own.
Sarah Wetzel is the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize and was published in 2010. A PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, Sarah also teaches creative writing at The American University of Rome. You can read some of her work at www.sarahwetzel.com.