SWWIM Every Day — SWWIM

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.

The Coupe

 

I have, really, no recollection of existence
prior to moving to the two-story redwood
house on Middle St. before first grade.

But in one hazy, sunflower-shaded memory,
painted by the late afternoon sun filtering
through an upper story window, I can
almost feel the tips of my soft, pink and brown fingers
pulling the sill, the stretch and bend of my tiptoes
seeking a better view.

Outside the window is a yard.
A back yard, I think, with patchy sepia and yellow-green grass.
There may have been other things in the yard,
I don’t recall. My straining eyes are pinned to
the small, royal purple sport convertible.

What, I wonder now, made that car so enthralling
to a toddling girlchild? Perhaps, it's smallness, shiny wheels
and chrome bumpers flashing like silverfish in the sun.
Or the two bucket seats that seemed just right-size for me.
Or maybe the curve of the panels, plump like plums,
that gave the whole thing a somehow supple appearance.

I know he is in the apartment, the man my mother would marry,
but his bell bottom jeans, scruffy beard under a gravity-defying bounce
of frowzy curls are out of sight. Out of mind.

I remember nothing of their courtship. Nothing of the wedding,
or the move, nothing but a snapshot moment of standing
in my first-grade classroom, adoption judge in a stern dress suit,
declaring him my father. We did not celebrate, or embrace,
just thanked the judge and left.

I was never allowed as a passenger in the purple coupe,
even after the adoption. I would simply sit
in our greening new yard each spring, watching
while he waxed and waxed, until his face
shone back at him in the sun.


Listen now

R.B. Simon (she/her) is a queer, black, disabled writer whose work has found homes in multiple literary publications. She is a Senior Poetry Editor for the Harbor Review. Her full-length collection, Not Just the Fire, was released March 2023 from Cornerstone Press, and her next work, Bird Bone Blood, is forthcoming from Milk & Cake Press in 2025. She is currently living in Madison, WI with her spouse and young daughter.

 

Fledgling

Looking at a photograph of a person looking out a window at Mt. St. Helens years after eruption