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.

Pruning the Bittersweet (I Mark the Morning)

Dear friend, this morning I opened the front door to find
a small dead bird on the welcome mat,
lying on its side, unbloodied, just still,
probably from a quick smash
against the beveled glass. It wasn’t a sparrow,
but was sparrow-sized, and brown with black stipples on its tail.
I carried it to the farthest corner of the yard
and dropped it into composting leaves.

It’s three days shy of the anniversary of your death,
which is to say, just a Tuesday in July, not
the day itself, or the day I learned the news, or the day
we lifted your memory to God, but maybe the one
on which we met in the hallway at church
and you reminded me of your upcoming trip,
and I told you we would miss you
at the baseball game.

So I mark the morning as I do most days,
with a list of tasks that must get done.
I start early with weeding the garden beds, pruning
the bittersweet by the fence, dragging the reaching tendrils
from where they’ve caught in the magnolia branches,
and pulling them from the dirt
where they’ve reached back to send up suckers
throughout the yard.


Lisa Rhoades is the author of The Long Grass, forthcoming from Saint Julian Press in early 2020, and Strange Gravity, selected by Elaine Terranova for the Bright Hill Press Poetry Award Series (2004). Her work has been published in such journals as The Bellingham Review, Chelsea, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Saranac Review, and Smartish Pace. She lives on Staten Island with her spouse and their two children.

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