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.

Dorothy, in the Dementia Ward

Dear plaque, dear tangle, dear knot 
of undoing, dear daily vanishings— 
keys, directions, sisters dead and alive  

—dear harbinger of strangers, dear you:  
the beads slipped the string again, just  
as I was about to fix the clasp. Almost  

perfect this time. Red prisms scatter  
the floor, refracting sunlight like tiny  
emergencies. You have taken so much.  

Another missing person wanders off  
into the night with nothing, not even  
her name. Leaving as a girl defying  

the house marm’s rules, coming to as  
an old woman dishabille on the banks  
of a minor body of water—a creek,  

a brook, a kill, someplace where eddies  
casually tumble a ragged leaf like a song  
about time. About time: what if what  

you inherit is forgetting? Your great- 
grandmother, grandmother, father:  
what will you do when it is your turn?  

Run naked into the highway? Hold  
your body like your arms belong to  
your dead mother? Hum that old Bing  

Crosby tune like it’s the last and only  
language you know? The strangers arrive  
with too much in their eyes. They want—  

what? To solve the keys’ disappearance,  
to be the arms that hold you. Disease,  
touch not this house. You are a blight  

that blackens language. If self is cast  
in the grasp of one’s relationship 
to others, you are the fire that razes  

the forge. If the dead are only as stead- 
fast as what the living remember, you  
are the bleed. If the body is a house,  

you are the carpenter ants in the joists  
and the bank at the door. Nonetheless 
you will have me, which is why I leave  

a paper trail. The strangers again— 
be patient, I am opening my mouth.  
For I have finally strung the words:  

Aphasia would be a beautiful name for a daughter. 

Each day she staggers out of death  
with beads in her pockets and whirls off 
on her bicycle into the white afternoon.  


Noel Thistle Tague grew up in the Thousand Islands Region of northern New York State, where she learned to endure a good cold snap and wait for the ground to thaw. She now lives in a small town in mid-coast Maine with her family and works at the University of Maine at Augusta, where she is an assistant professor of English. Every so often, her children play quietly together, and she writes.

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