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.

Ordinary Psalm with Alternative Facts

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!


Say it and it will be so. 
Say there are borders that cannot be broken.  
That science is an expertly shot horror film  
we are wise to avoid before bed.  
Say that an executive order  
has unshackled our lives from natural law,  
our flesh from the entwined entire.  
That, in time, we do not vanish.  
Say that the first week you know its terminal, 
I bake bread and bear it warm, 
swaddled in paper towels, against my chest.  
Outside, your husband picks lemons  
shin-deep in a lawn gone neon-green.  
In pictures above the table,  
your two boys shine.  
Say that I’m not sick too  
of love as the original congress on loss.  
Of hope handcuffed to habeas corpus
Say blue for your eyes, black for your hair,  
wren for your twitching hand in mine.  
Say that it’s not happening  
so that it won’t, the world no longer turning  
at the speed of betrayal, a little sunlight instead  
sown across your kitchen floor. 
Say that we are poised to enter spring  
and in the alt-truth all around us 
its smooth sailing, easy peasy,  
nothing but the blast furnaces  
of the almond orchards fired up,  
exploding in a sudden, ethereal snow.


Julia B. Levine’s poetry has won many awards, including a 2021 Nautilus Award for her fifth poetry collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU press, 2021), as well as the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU, 2014). Widely published and anthologized, currently she is a 2022 American Academy of Poetry Poet Laureate Fellow for her work in building resiliency in teenagers related to climate change through poetry, science and technology. See juliablevine.

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