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.

When the Air-Conditioning Breaks

SWWIM Every Day
by Taylor Byas

We discover home-grown autotune and yawp
our Vaselined lips mere inches from the box-fan’s
lattice—the flowered blades compute and swap
our breaths for robot, monotone. When our friends

sardine the porch and ask (y’all coming out?),
we let the screen door boomerang back to chop
the wooden frame, our dizzy laughter cutting out
our grandmother’s kitchen edict—close that door and stop

letting my air out this house. All bark, no bite.
When we return, our shadows race the sunset
back to the earth. Inside, we doff our white
tank tops and blue jean shorts, our naked silhouettes

like trophies welded in summer’s afterburn,
hot metal cooling to things for her to love—to spurn.

Taylor is a 23-year-old Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received both a Bachelor's Degree with Honors in English and a Masters in English, Creative Writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is now a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Journal, storySouth, and others.

For the Jamun Tree (in an All-Girls Boarding School) at the Edge of the Thar Desert

Absorbed Twin