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.
And then the heart shows itself inside the small bloody packet among the other organs someone scraped and then neatly gathered into this waxy paper, sealed, and slipped back into the carcass in a packing plant somewhere in Tennessee— it spills out with the liver, the chewy other organs. The dog below me is eager; he will take what I give him of this. Into the shallow Farberware pan from the set my mother gave me more than 30 years ago, its black handle wiggly in my hand, I plunk the parts: the backbone that I cut with the kitchen scissors, then hacked at with a heavy blade to pull away from the rest of the small beast and curved into the bottom of the pan, and these other parts, the fat squat neck with skin still clinging, the nearly black liver that slips and slides dragging its ink-red liquid with it, the tough gizzard I can’t cut through, the kidneys, dark like the liver but shapely in the pan, and then the smallest organ, the triangle shaped heart. Each one is more the history of this animal than the wings, the breast, the thighs we humans will eat. Then I watch the steaming water transform each part from raw to cooked. I’ll feed my dog the wiry meat from the neck and spine, wonder if the gizzards are too tough for him. But at the liver and kidney and heart, the best parts? I stop. That’s all that separates us I think—that heart in the pan and my heart in the wave of light above.
Julia Lisella’s books include Always (WordTech Editions, 2014), Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007), and a chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems are widely anthologized, and are forthcoming or appear in Pangyrus, Lily Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Paterson Literary Review, Mom Egg Review, Nimrod, Exit 7, Ocean State Review, and others. She is a professor of English at Regis College, and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association (IAWA) Reading Series in Boston. Her newest collection, Our Lively Kingdom, was named a finalist in the Lauria/Frasca poetry prize and was published by Bordighera Press in 2022.
