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.

This Time of Night

 

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


We’re all in the same boat ready to float off the edge of the world. —The Band


When I should be asleep
but stay up anyway
step outside to sneak a smoke
behind the recycling bin
froth of soda cans
grass green bottles
spent water from France
a silo of silent witnesses
once effervescent
their colorful labels
torn and scraped now
glass shadows
cast to a rubber raft
under stars
the soft swish
of listing palms
that lean down
but can never reach far enough
lend a hand up
to new dignity.
We are not all in the same boat.
The lucky
find reinvention:
shelf sentinels
curiosities
emerald knickknacks
maybe something more
than holding someone’s luxuries.
Who knows.
Is there a purpose for everything
behind the human grind
beyond the shade
of blameless recycling?
Strangers in a truck
redeeming emptiness
sanctioned on the side
the traffic of coins
sputtered back
at disreputable living
a huddled shimmering
flatbeds
shuttled off in the dark
wet necks
liquid eyes
that glitter the night
shivering as their captors walk
fast from sight
pockets laden with gold
and don’t you just want to
turn them on their heads
shake them hard
til they break
til they shatter
like stars
spilling back
all that stolen brightness?



Michelle Bitting is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook, Dummy Ventriloquist, was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Heavy Feather Review, National Poetry Review, Catamaran, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great-grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

 

Real Care

Self-Portrait as Overpriced Purple Vase from Bay View Street in Camden, Maine