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.
My mother wanted flowers, fragrant and lovely. So she flooded young seeds until they boiled in midday heat, and when they didn’t bloom, she thought she could will blossoms with sullen silence.
My father wanted fruit trees, hardy and useful. So he baked saplings in the sun until they brittled into sand, and when they didn’t ripen, he thought he could shout them into submission.
At night, I snuck into the garden and sang my pleas into the leaves. Still, the gardenia blackened as if scorched, the jasmine shot its stars into the ground, the peaches puckered around unformed pits.
In the end, all we grew was oleander, pink flesh burst from clay, blowing sweet poison to the wind. ______________________________________________________________
Jenny Qi is the author of the debut poetry collection, Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, Tin House, Rattle, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. She grew up in Las Vegas and now resides in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology.
