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.
The big things, obviously. Birthdays, and how old. Anniversaries, and what number. When to pick up the beloved child from school. But the small things, too. Field trip permission slips. Planetarium tickets. Watering the philodendron, its tumble of parched foliage like yellow banners signaling distress. When my mother came to visit, she wiped six years’ dust off each leaf using her thumb. Now it can breathe, she said. How could I forget? Match our minds to the task of ticking every box, even the ones in the basement crawling with roaches. Among all the to-doing, let us not forget the pink dogwood. Even if we tread in dog shit, Lady, let us not forget to look up when we pass. Colonoscopy. Mammogram. Dentist. The email, or letter, or text, or line of a poem we’ve been meaning to write. Tie a scrap of yarn around our wrists. Inscribe reminders, impermanent tattoos, in the sail of skin between pointer and thumb. A red asterisk for meteor shower. A black L for library, late fines mounting up to catastrophe. Prick our memory from its slump on the couch, so we recall: How to rouse for a blood moon. How to release the trapped animal of breath. How to steal the tooth-pearl tucked beneath our children’s dreams.
Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has appeared recently in POETRY, AGNI, and Passages North, among others. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. See more at daynapatterson.com.
