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.
On this the most holy of days I wish I wasn’t writing my sins on the back of my kid’s Learner’s Permit, though I suppose it’s appropriate for what am I to God, to anyone to the people I love and hurt and love but a student, perpetually sharpening her pencil blowing off the gray dust spiral of shavings? I know an artist who did that. Worked hour after hour to produce a spiraling pencil’s worth of unbroken yellow. A strange beauty that undoing. Whereas I lack talent or patience. I tabulate small deaths of conscience, the lost, soft unmuscled places of my will. Everythinghappens while everything else happens somebody famous said, and it’s what I’m chewing on as I pump gas beneath the 7-11’s nacreous lights, interstate pulsing behind me and in the sky an arrow of geese clacking their exit aligning and realigning a continual shifting of priorities that reminds me what my body already knows that it’s getting colder and darker earlier and earlier. A tow truck pulls in, hauling a dead tour bus, casino trip interrupted, ruptured fractured by chance, and I finish filling my tank an innocuous act though it has consequences. But that’s not what’s got me on my knees. Reader, we’re alone until we need something. We huddle colonize. My son failed so many tests. What did I teach? I left holes.
Amy Dryansky’s second book, Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry) received the Massachusetts Book Award. Her first, How I Got Lost So Close to Home, won the New England/New York Award from Alice James Books. Poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, The Sun, Tin House, and other journals and anthologies. She’s also received honors from the Poetry Society of America and Massachusetts Cultural Council. See adryansky.com.
