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.
Toilet paper wings trailing behind him, my son flaps through the house. He’s unraveled the entire roll in seconds, that’s all it took to leave so much white behind, on the floor and in the air and in his hands. That’s how he burned, I think, Icarus that is, but my son isn’t reaching for the sun yet and I haven’t taught him intent, that arms transform when they move that quickly, that the body is always just an instant away from becoming something else, from leaving the ground or returning to it. And he falls, on his knees or face, flat to the hardwood, falls without knowing how it happened and rises having forgotten he ever fell. Maybe we need that too, to forget or fall more, to move against the past instead of towards it, because underwater, the wax must have congealed back to wings around him as the backwards sun swallowed the whole bird of him, clouds and body strewn inside out, left white and bare as the hottest part of a dying flame or a star maybe, one we watch night after night forgetting it must have died so long ago to still trail the sky.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Julia is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize, forthcoming from Kent State University Press in the fall of 2019, as well as the chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her newest poems appear in POETRY, Nashville Review, TriQuarterly, and Waxwing. Julia is the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine and writes a blog about motherhood.
