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.
I go to the museum and sit before Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic with three black holes in my head. One for the way I hated the poet when he called me stupid. Another black hole because I felt like a child, carsick and chicken. I don’t care what day it is, he said on my birthday. Was he an aperture, opening inside me? Or was he a bullet I must dodge for the rest of my life. At the Cash America Pawn, I waited in line, the ring box white as ivory, a severed tusk singeing a hole through my hand.
One more black hole, there, in the middle. The question I asked in my head for a year: How can he think he owns other people? Him, in the dark, calling my body his. My breasts, my hair, my hips. I shout leave into Motherwell’s circles. I know I can’t help it, the ring in its strange case, cold as a head with no body.
Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, VCCA, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.
I am not a lucrative person. In 1996, at Enterprise City, the kids got job titles: banker, business owner, marketing director. Me, I was t-shirt maker. I stood alone in a closet feeding cotton to lasers. What I can’t tell is how each of my loves is a reaction to the last: daisy-chain of cruelty and false kindness. Under my bed I used to keep a Mega Bruiser Jumbo Jawbreaker and lick down a layer when everyone else was asleep. Beneath the chalky splatter-paint coat: a planet of color, magic eye inside. At work I suit up in my blazer and the guy in back slams shut his textbook to ask me if I’ve ever heard of T. S. Eliot. I like the feel of a t-shirt that swallows. I like to hold no one too close. Almost yearning, my friend says, raising her wine. Finally I decide to get down to the heart.
Jenny Molberg is the author of the collections Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (forthcoming from LSU Press, 2023). She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, West Branch, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and co-edits Pleiades magazine. Find her online at jennymolberg.com or on Twitter at @jennymolberg.
