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.
An osprey beats the wind with bowed wings, steady till it drops and shakes in flight. The wind catches and it rises again. I watch from the porch where I’ve come early to stop avoiding our father’s call. Last night, I turned the ringer off then on then off again, swiped down to ignore but texted back. There are two birds in the tree across the street and a third circling and circling, rising and falling in the wind from a distant hurricane. The phone rings. He wants to talk about you.
They say each bird attends to just seven others, and, in this way, a thousand starlings turn together like one creature. I’ll try not to make this a metaphor. Once, you and I climbed the hills outside Florence, Italy. Our dearest ones climbed with us and, because we were few and each one loved by all the others, I thought we made a kind of net that might hold the breaking world together. A murmuration of starlings unfurled like the aurora borealis, a sheer curtain caught in wind, twisting, tracing a path through twilight.
A hawk swoops low over the osprey nest. I think it might land, but it doesn’t. You ask to meet for coffee. Our father calls, and I don’t answer.
Amy Watkins is the author of the chapbooks Milk & Water, Lucky, and Wolf Daughter. She lives in Orlando with her husband and a large, cuddly, mixed-breed dog.
Amy Watkins grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, religious family—the kind of upbringing that’s produced generations of southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl, and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of the chapbooks Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press) and Wolf Daughter (forthcoming from Sundress Publications).