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.

Biodegradable

Rain blessed the county this year
& the Los Angeles River
flushed out nearly 13,000 pounds of
mattresses, carts, turpentine,
steak knives, bottle caps, opioids,
& bald, eyeless doll heads
onto shorelines as far as Seal’s Beach.
All that the Valley had chucked was laid bare,
was picked through by a volunteer Cleanup
Brigade—like readers parsing a gnarl
of poems. Even primordial Styrofoam
from my decades-old Walkman box
was exposed—the dirt over the white
had finally eroded. Even this piece of former me

mingled with the rush, the beached.
Then—Jim on the crew
stabbed & stuffed it into an orange bin,
fed the full bin to mealworms.
Then—some county hand
fed that toxin-less feedstock to fowl,
to farmed fish. Oh! I remember hurling it
from mom’s Nova—at her live-in boyfriend
invasion: at Mustache Tony & Butch,
at the young guy I worked with at Home Depot
& Red-Head smiles, at Old Cowdude
& Pathological Paul. & when Pathological
Paul moved out—a rush of tears
blessed my face & began to dislodge them all.


Jennifer Jean's poetry collections include Object Lesson (Lily Books) and The Fool (Big Table). She's also released the teaching resource Object Lesson: A Guide to Writing Poetry (Lily Books). Her poetry, prose, and co-translations have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Waxwing Journal, Rattle Magazine, Crab Creek Review, DMQ Review, On the Seawall, Salamander, The Common, and more. She's been awarded a Peter Taylor Fellowship from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, a Disquiet FLAD Fellowship from Dzanc Books, and an Ambassador for Peace Award from the Women's Federation for World Peace. As well, she is the translations editor at Talking Writing, a consulting editor at the Kenyon Review, and a co-translator of Arabic poetry and organizer for the Her Story Is collective. Jennifer is the new Manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center's Online Writing Program.

Ode to the Morning

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