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 will not allow the building of anything on bones of people.” Governor Alexander Rogachuk, Belarus, DailyMailUK, “Mass grave containing 1,000 executed Jewish men, women, and children uncovered”
see all two-hundred
& seventy bones found at birth
in a single body. Multiply each
by a thousand, ten-thousand,
hundred-thousand, million
by the millions. Magnitude
past numbers, beyond
bodies. We don’t know how
to know such things.
We try to take them
in our hands. Sift the soil
we let our children
build on, palming dirt
into their open mouths.
Wash their hands of it.
Scrub under the nails.
We still can’t clean
what gets inside.
Show me a place
not made of bone
& see the generations
we have swallowed.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones, won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize (Lost Horse Press, March 2020). 40 WEEKS, written while pregnant with her now 4-month-old daughter, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2021. Her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. The editor of Construction Magazine, Juliaholds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philly with her two kids, two cats, one dog, and one husband.
