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.

Planet Earth with amamma

Two months of sunless winter
emperor penguins huddle to conserve heat—

it’s how a thousand-petalled black marigold
stays abloom the icy Antarctic

until the arrival of spring.  Three oceans away
my half-blind grandmother

is discovering for the first time water
halted by its own limitations:

icebergs, frozen seas, glaciers. I pause the movie
to tell her there are places on this planet

that don’t see sunshine for six months & she fixes
her one good eye on me, bewildered—Soon,

the view of Eurasia from outer space
fills our screen and I tell her

this is Earth, the thing you’re standing on, a part of me
worried if the heart at 72 can absorb

the shock of such revelations.
Amamma devours     the season

as we binge-watch six episodes in two days:
Mushrooms inching out of tree bark. The jaw of a croc

snap-shut on the leg of a wildebeest. Or a million snow geese
like heartbeats emerging

out of my grandmother’s chest, a flutter of wings
so furious it decries every notion

of flightlessness, amamma’s feet
twitching inches above the stone floor—


Vismai Rao's poems appear or are forthcoming in the Indianapolis Review, RHINO, Salamander, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Parentheses Journal, Rust+Moth, The Shore, & elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She lives in India. Find her on Twitter @vismairao.

My father has never made an effort to memorize how my name is spelled

I Serve My God Pineapple Upside-Down Cake