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.
—after watching Misty Copeland’s “Swans for Relief”
The freelance ballerina does not need your company. She doesn’t concern herself with the freshly shortened half-lives of your weeks’ complaints, but time falls quick and savage on her relevé.
She makes space for what she craves, then: cellos and tall fescue. Salmon, lime, and sunlight. This solitude sustains itself only because it’s not confined. The cygnet locks down, then up. Releases herself to sage and ozone. Binds herself to jetés and sobresauts performed on sand.
She solos on demand, paused and unpaused for 10,000 audiences of one. I could never have afforded the tickets I’d require to witness all these dancers in my life before, could never have replayed the freelancer’s flutter over and over outside a quarantine. We’ve neither of us change to throw.
Greedy, I trap her on my screen, my pocket nickelodeon—
I labor en pointe solely in brute dreams, mute swan leashed until the dark.
B. Tyler Lee is the author of one poetry collection, With Our Lungs in Our Hands (Redbird Chapbooks, 2016), and her essay “●A large volume of small nonsenses” won the 2020 Talking Writing Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, Jet Fuel Review, Acting Up: Queer in the New Century (Jacar Press), and elsewhere. She teaches at Purdue University Northwest.
