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.
It wasn’t the ring-necked pheasants strutting across the yard, lumbering ground hogs or deer splayed bloody next to every road that told me it was time
to leave. Sprawled on Hawk Mountain boulders I counted kestrels above dry quilts of corn spread next to brick hotels, general stores,
stone farm houses, red barns with hearts and horses. I played ring toss in every country bar lined with jars of pickled eggs and jerky, shopped
farmer’s market stalls tended by pink-cheeked Amish girls in white aprons, hair pulled tight and braided under capped buns. They sold
stacks of scrapple and cheese, apple butter, pretzels and pig stomach while horse drawn wagons waited for bearded men and black-brimmed boys to drive
them home to Paradise, Virginville, Intercourse, bed sheets flapping in the manure rich air. Inside my thick- walled house, beams stained with ox blood, tradition
echoed in red ware pottery, pierced tin cupboards, blue and white crocks with stiff-necked plump Dutch birds, but there were no women like me.
Lured down highways splattered with billboards, past the sprawl of malls and smoke stacks, I searched for them in bookstores and meetings, women
who lived in disguise, a man’s wife kissing another man’s wife. Let me be clear about this yearning, its embers stoked by more than a juicy bite,
more than feminist books devoured like bread, more than the company of other mothers alone at night, their men working late. Body
and mind yoked to this cultivated garden of my own sowing, I chose wilderness. When I packed up my babies to leave,
Gail Thomas’ books are Odd Mercy, Waving Back, No Simple Wilderness, and Finding the Bear. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. Awards include the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press, Narrative Poetry Prize from Naugatuck River Review, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book’s “Must Read.” She is an editor and teacher who lives in Northampton, MA. See gailthomaspoet.com.
