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.
My phone goes off at 2 am, but I just let it buzz. In the morning, I'll decide how far to wade into this sea of texts— the high tide I expect every so often. My own masochistic interest in what it will carry back to shore this time.
A wave can be defined as "a repeating and periodic disturbance" which sounds a lot like what we always called "episodes”— though I'm not sure that's what this is yet. Sometimes it's just you, yourself (whatever that means) pulling hard at everything you can until you are too much and too angry for even you to handle.
Those of us in the water should probably know by now the reach of you, the power of your hold; your tendency to conjure up things past or lost when it suits you. But the universe only has so much energy. Every rise demands a fall, and you will carry us all with you for the breaking.
Jessica Covil is a third-year PhD student in English at Duke, where she is also pursuing graduate certificates in African & African American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies. Her research focuses on literary representations of community, belonging, and “home” in 20th-Century American Literature, and on connections between the poetic and the political. Some of her research-influenced poetry can be found at https://sites.duke.edu/representingmigration/poetry-reading/.
