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.
A life should leave room for pain. Like the daughter who was angry and wrote a note to her mother: I am never talking to you again. The mother wrote back: I am sorry to hear that. What about the bedtime story? The daughter wrote back: Okay, that is the one thing. In the kitchen, a life could leave a loaf of freshly baked bread to cool. The fragrance could waft upstairs, where the daughter has picked out a book. The mother could think that bread is love as she sits next to the daughter on the daughter’s bed. But the mother is thinking of the pencil on the daughter’s desk, how one pencil can draw a line 35 miles long. How she could trace the line to its end and still not know where the daughter came from or where the daughter is going or how long the daughter will lean ever so lightly on her shoulder.
The first line of the poem is from “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” by Kay Ryan.
Eileen Pettycrew lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in The Normal School, Slipstream, CALYX, The Scream Online Dreams Anthology, South 85 Journal, Watershed Review, Gold Man Review, and others.
