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.
From the Greek for “the dropping of scabs.” A formula built into us, a process that assists the shape we take becoming human. Its purpose, to guarantee that certain initial connectives fall away.
A signal’s sent and then a cell shrinks, blebs (grows bumps) its chromatin degrades, mitochondria leaks, and in the final mop up, phagocytic cells feed on the bite size apoptotic bodies.
Without it, we’d be freaks, our toes and fingers grown together and no eyelids separate from eyes. Especially early on, but at each stage from birth, we need cell suicide.
PCD: programmed cell death. Too much, organs degenerate. Too little prompts a cancer mass. A form of check and balance echoing, on the small scale, a broader scheme. Imagine if each body of each species grew and lasted very long or for forever and multiplied its kind…
In PCD, a wisdom to override that instinct to survive: fewer, eventually, are more. Room must be made for increments of change, adjustments to the surrounding flux. And so, the individual flesh, conducted from dark shore to dark shore, the you-shape, which apoptosis helped to make, will be absorbed into something different, fresh, new.
Lavina Blossom lives in Southern California. She divides her creative hours between poetry and painting. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including The Paris Review, The Literary Review, Kansas Quarterly, Poemeleon, and 3Elements Review. She is an Associate Editor of Poetry for Inlandia: a Literary Journey.
