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.

Parcel

The jeep with its soft-top up

shreds past two small girls.

 

They are rushing the tallgrass

in matching violet nightgowns.

 

Wisconsin late summer.

Sun going down,

 

day like a bobbin

so warm. The air drags

 

low, circles its holdings

drifting there, then back

 

above. One of the girls,

the smaller one,

 

she kneels just in front

of the rhododendrons.

 

She has found something

in the green. A mid-section

 

undone, scratched open

to loosebelly softened

 

to the arbor of bone.

Grazed remains.

 

The lanes of the rib cage

carry their sidemeat,

 

fixed as the cold

of a silent and empty nave.

 

Put it in my hand

the older sister says,

 

and the younger one

reaches down and does.


Laura Romeyn is the author of Wild Conditions, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship (forthcoming spring 2019). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (2015-2017), her poems have appeared in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Ninth Letter, and The Yale Review, among other journals. She lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Louisiana Compulsory Education Act of 1916

Poem in Which I Forget Whether I Wanted Anything Else Back Then