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.

Bootlegger

Oh Unadilla, Nebraska, I think of you,
old homestead to the women
in my family, your cows and cornfields
and bank foreclosures, your broken
banisters and cellars lined with jars
of slippery fruit suspended in the dark,
of great grandma left with all those children
to feed, cleaning latrines on trains
full of businessmen and cons. Thank
God for prohibition and the stove-savvy
females we turned out to be, the cooking
and scrubbing whores, sucking it up
like kitchen sinks, slick as coffee cans
full of grease. If anyone could make
the moon shine in a tub it was us. Who else
was going to feed them? Babies in their hand-
me-down dungarees, crooked teeth
and braids with siblings left to fill in
for who went missing, left to spoon
meal onto hungry tots’ tongues, landing
the grainy lumps like lopsided planes
in abandoned fields, mouths that swallowed,
stayed stuck. Then the runtiest ordered
to sit on porcelain plinths with timers
and firm instructions not to budge until buzzers
signaled a turd gone swimming. All this
so mama could make fire somewhere else
out of what she yanked from the earth, mashing
it to burnt liquid. What's deemed wicked.
What people will pay for when they’re dying for it.


*This poem was a semi-finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.


Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, won the 2018 Fischer Poetry Prize, Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, and a fourth collection of poetry, Broken Kingdom won the 2018 Catamaran Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. She has poems published in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, The Los Angeles Review, Vinyl Poetry, The Paris-American, SWWIM, Love's Executive Order, The Raleigh Review, Green Mountains Review, Plume, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. Recently, she was a finalist in both the 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. Michelle holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Mythological Studies. She is a Lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at Ashford U. www.michellebitting.com





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