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 the Ways to Want Things

                    “…this voice was never mine,

                                nor even yours.”

                                   —Lawrence Raab

 

Our world slowly spinning
unbuttons itself—
this is a difficult home.

And you, the reason for this telling
the way memory and subtraction fool us,
a sun-warmed key lime
sliced in half
its juice on your tongue.
Your husband gone
taking your child for shoes
and you, eyes closed;
falling straight to the heart of God—

the smooth slide into the back
of a cooled taxi’s leather seat.

But maybe everyone is always
almost drowning;
and maybe this is all
you want to be.

Like the mailbox as a child
I stuffed with snow,
you could not receive a thing.

Stitching back up
the blood you lose each month,
forgetting the march of happiness
down to your toes,
forgetting our world still spins
with its nature of hope.

So I ask for everything—
I don’t know where to stop.
Hands tight on a wheel
one fine turn away—

and all the ways to want things;
and all the things
we shouldn’t want.


Stacie M. Kiner is a former Fellow at The Vermont Studio Center and Hannah Kahn Memorial Award recipient. Her poems have appeared in The Charlotte Poetry Review, Madison Review, Comstock Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and Apalachee Quarterly as well as other journals and reviews. Stacie's work has also appeared at Palm Beach International Airport, Art in Public Places. A former moderator of a poetry talk show on Channel 17 in Miami, Stacie is currently an Associate Editor of The South Florida Poetry Journal.

Antidote

A Plump Wife & A Big Barn Never Did Any Man Harm