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.

Tipping Point, Still Point

 

When it seems we are beyond hope, I hope
instead for time. Even now, spring unsheathes 
a billion blades, as I sprint round the lakes

of treated wastewater. Signs with red slashes warn me 
to avoid contact and the scent of sewage is barley suppressed 
by radish flowers and hard wind, yet all these birds

feel safe. This, their kitchen and cradle. Hospice
gave my friend’s mother five to ten days. She’d been dying
slow at home for months. For ten afternoons she shook 

her head when we met at the afterschool pickup. 
Day eleven, she sighed with exhausted awe, day twelve
day eighteen. When the virus closed the school 

it was day twenty-one. Now she seems to hover 
in some sunlit room within me as I run, beyond 
the climbing death toll. Wind-whipped, I break 

my record. Pant against my mask. From this 
shit-bleached path, I see no contagion spreading
beneath the doubled swan, the mallards rippling

sepia sky. A red-tailed hawk hangs 
motionless above me. I blink and miss 
its dive. Just to know what it was like, I jumped 

from an airplane once. From high enough, 
it doesn’t feel like falling, more like being caught 
in the blast of an enormous fan. Like being lifted 

despite the lakes and fields, rushing 
into painstaking detail. My friend’s mother shared
her rations with a Jewish boy, hidden in her childhood 

home just long enough to save him. 
So her body must remember how to live 
on less, the hospice nurse told my friend. 

How many springs do we have left? 
The shocked trees scatter their confetti 
all at once and too early. Still, I want this 

reclaimed green, for my children, 
and theirs, and theirs. Just to die 
in our own time, beneath at least 

twenty-one forehead kissed goodbyes. 
By now she must be gone, but I hold on, 
let her hold me still, to grieve in freeze-frame 

this exponential losing. For a while 
and from high enough. But so much goes unsaved
as the seasons pick up speed. How many laps?

How many gone? How many? 
My friend’s dead mother soothes me. 
I dress her up in ether, let her sleep 

in peace. Is there a difference
between free fall and flight? 
I want to say there isn’t.

I want to be forgiven 
when I say that it’s okay. It’s not, 
but we have a little time. So let’s pretend

this is what flying feels like. 
There are whole lives that we can live 
before the ground catches us.

 


Erin Rodoni is the author of two poetry collections: Body, in Good Light (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017) and A Landscape for Loss (NFSPS Press, 2017, winner of the Stevens Award). Her third collection, And if the Woods Carry You, won the 2020 Southern Indiana Review Michael Waters Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in fall 2021.


 

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