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.
2. I stand on your threshold choking, my mouth stuffed with prayers.
3. Every prayer the wind at my back, you, my threshold.
4. The prayers curses, a scream blocks the threshold. Listen too long and turn to stone.
5. Too lonely to pray, I curl at your threshold, hands outstretched as if I might gather air, make a thick braid to climb down from the balcony.
6. The threshold gone, I stand in an emptiness, an archless archway, you at dinner, my prayers your crudité, your plum gravy, your raspberry millefeuille.
7. Prayers like feathers molting by your feet, you smile at the threshold still wielding the bloody dagger.
8. Fragments of prayer— a shredded, stained curtain blown over the threshold.
9. Sinks like a brick thrown in a pond, this prayer I think far from any threshold.
10. We walk across the threshold of each other, prayers like moths winging in our mouths.
Award-winning author and the founder/Principal Investigator of Beyond Bars, a Mellon sponsored literary journal for incarcerated writers and artists, Beth Gylys is the author of five books of poetry—the last two (The Conversation Turns to Wide Mouth Jars,co-written with Cathy Carlisi and Jennifer Wheelock, and Sky Blue Enough to Drink) were both named Books All Georgians Should Read. Her work has recently appeared in West Branch, The James Dickey Review, and on The Best American Poetry blog.
