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.
Aguadulce is where my favorite stories live, pieces broken over my childhood like thick galleta crumbs, tongue
quick to lick thumb tip, press down on the surface to catch each one, she sliced into ripe mangoes, told us about summers
she went back, hot Queens pavement trade for las tías favoritas, long dirt- road walks, pocket money for tamarindo balls at the little store, todos
los primitos piled into makeshift beds in front rooms, these stories made human each of my distant aunts, uncles wild Ilin, chilly Chenita, beauty
queen, boisterous Bertito, party boy with Alfredo, gentle Rafael, serio José, taller than his own father at seventeen—
so many gone. Rafa, whom my mother begged teach her to roast chicken when she married at nineteen. At six, the first phone call
came, Mamá’s cries soft as she closed her bedroom door. Years later, she could say AIDS. Then heart attack then cancer then then then—
Spaces I carved from distant hometown historia, shoved behind each cousin cleaned up good in Mamá’s tales as I wandered roads hacked
into desert mountain-side. Pretend it was Panamá three miles to Lizzie’s Grocery for Blow Pops, back home to arroz con guandules, enchilada
church potlucks, my mind’s film still of each tía or primo tucked inside small-town houses all these paper dolls.
Angela Maria Spring is the owner of Duende District, a mobile boutique bookstore by and for people of color. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her poems are most recently published, or forthcoming, in Rust + Moth, Radar Poetry, Pilgrimage, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. You can find her prose at Catapult and Tor.com. Follow her online at Twitter at @BurquenaBoricua.
