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.
My grandfather peels cellophane wrap from a fresh pack of Camels, taps one out, lights up, and blows a perfect orbit above my head. I rise on my toes and reach toward a form that blurs and disappears.
Why didn’t your sister come with you on the boat? Where did she go? In the windless heat and deep shadow of a California orange grove, his weathered hand gestures at the heavy farmer’s boots that replaced a music stand. I glance down at his feet, hoping for a glimpse of my great-aunt’s face. But all I see is dust and a dust-choked jimson-weed.
How long did it take to get here from Odessa? Is it true, what my mother says, that you brought only those Yiddish songs you wrote? He goes into the house and comes out carrying a card-table and two folding chairs. He sets up his chessboard in the green shade of a citrus tree and darts from chair to chair, playing against himself. He doesn’t cheat. I watch him nudge a knight, a queen. Grandpa, when you were my age, did you laugh? Did you dance? He swivels in his seat and plucks a Valencia orange that hangs on a branch behind his back. He strips the rind with his pocket knife and hands me a piece of fruit.
I eat it all, meat, pith, seeds— the way the earth ate my grandfather’s life, his sister’s. The way it will eat mine. Juice streams down my chin. My eyes sting from the sweetness.
Laura Ann Reed was a dancer and dance instructor in the San Francisco Bay Area before assuming the role of Leadership Development Trainer at the US Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in San Francisco, prior to the Trump Administration. She and her husband now reside in western Washington. Her work has been anthologized in How To Love the World, and has appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Loch Raven Review, and Willawaw, among other journals.