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.
All that birdsong in the winter scrub, wrentit and fox sparrow, drab towhee under cover of green tongues— coyote mint and wild lilac.
Listening, you say it’s like the sound of thinking. Or camouflage, I say, the earth
masking its secret music. Now we hear the freeway hum in the distance and I remember
our walk on the salt flats in Death Valley, the silence there, huge and physical, pressing
so we heard nothing but our heartbeats, stood listening
with our bodies to our bodies, the rivers braiding inside us, two creatures under a wallop of sky.
Veronica Kornberg is a poet based in Pescadero, California. Recipient of the 2018 Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, and Crab Creek Review, among other journals. See more at veronicakornberg.com.
