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.

At Sarah Byker James's Shower

 

If it were me blindfolded, I would fumble the honeydew too,
but Sarah’s aunts, formidable, do not let their charges roll.
Cindy pins and denudes a decorative gourd. I swear she is set
on scouring the warts from the squash along with its Jiff spackle.

Anyway she has not even reached for a diaper when Mary mugs
with her Pampered cantaloupe. She holds the fruit with two hands.

Sarah, though, lets go her clingstone to clap and it rolls, it cracks 
at her feet.

   I am not the kind of mother I wish I were, 
the kind to hear a melon open against the ground and laugh. 
The kind to sit down on the lawn, a hemisphere of summer in my lap 
and a picnicker’s spoon in my hand. 

 

Jane Zwart teaches Engilsh at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have previously appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Threepenny Review, as well as other magazines.

 

I will write a poem on the back of my family which will end up being their chest

Anniversary