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.
No one remembers you at the party. You’ve made yourself too small. Not small as in a miniature dachshund or a tea rose but small as in constrained. Without warning, your mind goes blank. When you speak, your words, if remembered at all, are attributed to someone else. If you drop your glass, people ask afterward, who was that person who dropped her glass?
It takes skill to vanish your one hundred and thirty pounds of self into thin air— a stillness, a downward gaze, a traffic cop-like dexterity for moving out of the way, a throwing back of attention from whence it came much as ventriloquists throw voices.
You have no switch to turn your skill on when you need it, off when you don’t. It is stamped onto your psyche, which makes things difficult when your need for safety lifts, which it did, long ago
so long ago you wonder now if you made the man up, if your mother was right, if the eyes that pierced you were your own eyes turned inward, if the whisper in your ear was your own blood coursing through your veins, if the oily scent that hung over your bed was from your own unwashed body, if the weight on your chest was the breath that you held and hold still.
Cynthia Knorr is the author of the chapbook, A Vessel of Furious Resolve (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Café Review, Main Street Rag, The Comstock Review, Healing Muse, Chiron Review, and others. After a career in medical communications in New York City, she relocated to Strafford, New Hampshire. She was awarded First Prize in both the New Hampshire Poetry Society’s national and members’ contests, and is a regular participant in the Frost Place Conference on Poetry.