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.
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.
