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.
In seventh grade, I was sent home for the weekend with a baby with a battery for a heart. She was born with soft- ware that measured how quickly I could get out of bed when, at three a.m., the soundbox in her belly started simulating cries—born with an app that tracked how apt I was at determining what she needed.
I raised a bottle to her hard plastic lips; she did not suckle. I pulled her cheek toward my budding breast; she did not settle. I peeled off her spotless diaper and swapped it for a new one, tried to align the sensor that was sewn into the cloth with the chip underlying her absent vagina. Still, my baby cried.
On Monday, about seventeen hours after my baby stopped breathing (I was sitting on the couch, and she, in my lap; I thought her forehead smelled sweet, like baby powder, like real baby, and then she powered off as planned), Mrs. Chaiken, a mother herself, scrolled through the automated report and gave me a grade: ninety-six percent. She congratulated me
Kyra Lisse is a writer and editor from the Philadelphia area. A graduate of Hollins University's MFA in Creative Writing, she has seen her work published in Ghost City Review, Sky Island Journal, Paper Brigade, New Voices Magazine, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, among other places. Kyra currently lives in Lancaster, PA.
