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.
It takes almost a year for my aunt’s chicken Tillie to start laying, the months-younger hens outpacing her, and I remember being last to get my period, freshmen year of high school, which was bad but maybe not as bad as being first. How we feared existing on the edges: E. starting to bleed while being bussed to elementary swim lessons. M. with armpit hair at ten and the rest of us smooth. How narrow the window of blending in. But the Ameraucana is an elegant chicken, silver cheek muffs and a saddle that shimmers like folds of slate taffeta. Never mind laying season, Tillie starts in winter, deep February. When I visit months later she jumps on my lap, impossibly light beneath all that fluff. She pecks weeds from my hand and when beak touches skin just a brief pinch of pain, no mark left. Tillie’s first egg was a perfect, pale blue. My blood looked rusty and I feared something wrong. It was 1993, no Google to check. I waited a day before telling my mom, made a pad from toilet paper I checked between classes: civics, earth science, what we learned at fourteen. What becomes routine: decades of bleeding, pills in shades my aunt’s chickens lay, discs pressed from packs at the end of each day. At night, the hens roost tight together, the alpha supposedly tucked most in center. Usually, it’s Esme, but not always. My aunt and uncle peer at their sleeping to see how the clique has shifted. In the dusty dark, the sweet animal smell. A hen tucks her beak beneath wings and it could be any of them or us: looking for a safe place, a self place to fold among bodies almost like our own.
Laura Donnelly's second collection of poetry, Midwest Gothic, was selected by Maggie Smith for the Snyder Memorial Prize and published by Ashland Poetry Press in 2020. Her first book, Watershed, received the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York and serves as Director of Creative Writing at SUNY Oswego.
