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.
On a good day the pain recedes into the background, somewhere on the outskirts of my body, past the treeline. It might be just over the horizon, killing time at a dive bar, or around the next bend in the highway, no light on darkened asphalt, headlights barely making a dent. Each wend and curve is a held breath, a suspension of the hammer before it falls to strike the piano string. It seems all the mindfulness in the world cannot abate this ache, nor the green tea, nor the acupuncture. I look at opiates like I look at the sun, never directly, and with a caveman’s mix of awe and suspicion. I look at the rising moon like every little death, bringing the hours when I were- wolf across the landscape of my bed, pain pulling, pulling, pulling.
Frances Klein is a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She was born and raised in Southeast Alaska, and now lives in Indianapolis with her husband and son. She has been published in So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Vonnegut Memorial Library and Tupelo Press, among others. Klein currently serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review. Readers can find more of her work at kleinpoetryblog.wordpress.com.
