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.
He watches his wife push open the door of the campground bathroom, take a step in, check to make sure someone isn’t hiding in the single stall. The maneuver takes all
of three seconds, but the hesitation is at odds with her vigor on the trail. When he asks, she says she hardly thinks of it—most women do some variation of the same thing, or at least
it crosses their minds, to be ready. Decades married, he’s only just noticing this vigilance— unspoken, subterranean, intuitive. The door swings shut with a thud, startling a barn swallow
who nests above it every spring. The bird swoops out from under the overhang, up again to perch on a branch until it’s safe to return. How many times a day does she do this?
He remembers another bird he saw once, nesting on a restaurant’s outdoor fire alarm— the curve of her taupe feathers, dry thatch of twigs a surprise, so jarring atop the flame-
red box. He wonders what it is with these birds, why they don’t find somewhere safer.
Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Harbor Review, ONE ART, Rise Up Review, and elsewhere. A triple poetry nominee for Best of the Net 2024, she lives in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway. See brettwarrenpoetry.com.
I wear socks in my mom’s favorite color, pray to her a little as I’m led to the vestibule by a woman who explains how the gown ties in front, which I already know. But I don’t interrupt. It’s bad luck to keep a woman from doing her job. And maybe her words are a ritual blessing. I thank her and enter the changing room, trade everything I have for a thin cotton gown, emerge with my clothes balled up under my arm. I search the bank of lockers for a lucky number, but all my usuals are taken. Then I see it: 22. The year and the day I’m standing in, the minute the clock-hand just landed on. The lanyard dangling from locker 22 is purple, the exact purple of the winter coat my mom always wore before she began to disappear. I stuff everything inside, close and lock the skinny door, slip the purple coil around my wrist. Luck turns the key into a protection charm, the interior waiting room into a temple of filtered light. We enter, one at a time, to sit together in silence. In our identical habits, we look more like our mothers than on most days. We leaf through magazines or pretend to watch the news, which someone, probably a nurse, has muted.
Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Canary, The Comstock Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Hole in the Head Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts, in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway.
