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.
still, my voice keeps catching on the past tenses of spanish verbs. like my ancestors are playing dudo in my amygdala. like my heritage is a stack of torn up party napkins.
only yesterday, i learned how to speak— scraped my mouth full of peppery papaya seeds, chewed, swallowed, retched up full sentences of poetry and black
saliva. today, i ask my mother if i will ever see honduras; she pulls US travel advisories out of the long basketball scar across her knee—the advisories turn
into birds cawing outside my windowsill at midnight. i ask my mother if i will ever see costa rica; she severs her own deltoid and pulls from it grandmother’s
jaundiced right eye, says she fears death will soon be our history’s home. america has mistaken itself for a benzodiazepine, turns me sleepy when i mention diaspora,
runs the richter scale over my unsacred body—uncovers moments where my disintegration become synonymous with comfort, with my inevitable lightness.
Adelina Rose Gowans is a 16-year-old, second-generation Costa Rican/Honduran-American writer and artist with a passion for floral dresses and big skies. She is a junior at the South Carolina Governor's School For the Arts and Humanities, a 2020 YoungArts Winner in Writing, the first place winner in the Leyla Beban Young Writers Foundation 1,000 words for 1,000$ contest, the second place winner of the Hollins University Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest, Art Director at Faces of Feminism Media, and the recipient of eleven Scholastic Art & Writing awards including national gold and silver medals. Her work has been previously published or is forthcoming in Atlas and Alice, Storyscape Journal, Bluefire Journal, Barely South Review, Cargoes, and elsewhere. See more at https://www.adelinarose.me/.
