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.
Birch leaf undersides silver the summer shimmer, rumbling. Poppies wince closed, disperse slow bees, and the black butterfly too leaves the ochre-umber sunflower for flicking flies to pick at. Over them, over the new milkweed, fragile stock and sunstruck phlox, a round house made for sharpness, paper lantern never lit. The nest— size of a baby’s fist, if uncurled room enough for a few dashed lines— won’t sway in the wind, won’t say who’s gone, left home, left behind this vessel waiting to be miracled full.
Carolyn Oliver’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, and the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review, where she now serves as a poetry editor. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. See carolynoliver.net.
