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.
that it in fact wouldn’t even save my face, and slowly my fervor for it died. Stopped watching the videos in which women would cup their hands into a white basin of water to simulate their evening routine, to wash their faces of the colored wax they’d applied to them just for their videos, of their detergents and oils. Stopped patting the water from the shower into my cheeks, tapping never pulling, patiently pressing. The cheek a sunken cheek, the skin a gray corpsish skin. A cheek that no hydrator can revive. And in the mirror I see a gray corpsish face, the kind of face that, if found at the foot of a stair or curled stiffly around the lily mouth of a toilet bowl, would signal that its owner has ceased to be. Being old is fine, if no one can tell. But they obviously can. Being ugly has no particular meaning attached to it until some other person enters the room. Hard not to crumble under the gaze, knowing what they see. Or, thinking I know. No, it is intractable—it is the direction I’m moving in, intractably. A crepiness that turns into something you can stick your finger through, to your horror, and they’re marketing you argan oil. Lasers. Telling you to roll out the skin under your eyes with jade. Fuck it. Staring at yourself in the mirror as you wipe it all on feels more like dying than dying. Feels as ugly as you feel, feeling your doom as you are. Looking out from its gelid eye.
Katie Berta is the managing editor of The Iowa Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. You can find her criticism in American Poetry Review, West Branch, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has received a residency from Millay Arts, a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and an Iowa Review Award.
