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.
Jess brings all the plants into the bathroom. Countertops glow neon jade, the tub sprouts palm fingers, fiddlehead fig. Waxy verdant cloister in the sink, emerald dog tongues tonguing porcelain. There’s so much life to tend to. Jess turns each measuring cup’s silver ear into the brown world beneath it, the water listening for where it needs to spread among the roots, the soil offering a welcome. They know each variety’s preference— some take water from the tap, some bronze at touch of chlorine—so they patiently filter batches and distribute, pot by pot. When I crack the bathroom door in the middle of the day, I walk into a glasshouse. Room humming green, vines corkscrew across the windowsill, faces bright with chlorophyll and drying in the sunlight. I can hear their drip and sigh. After bathing. After being fed. We’re trying to discern whether we want to become parents. A thing you have to work for. Money spent, biology precision-tinkered in a lab. We take turns lifting the question with our hands, passing the question between us like it’s already our child; you hold her now, this fleshy question mark, you pat her on the rump, you wash her hair. You walk her through the rain. It’s hard to feel like we’re enough, our bodies settling earthbound into thirty-six. We thirty-six our way through the supermarket, trying to cut back on sugar. We thirty-six our bed, sleeping in a limb-knot with the dog. Our knees thirty-six us on our runs through the neighborhood. Chasing nothing. A teacher of mine sends a message: I’m looking forward to failure. We thirty-six the conversation after dinner, me perched on the kitchen counter, Jess pressed into a stool, the rubber tree ten feet tall reaching raw hands around the night, around our biggest questions. We’re surrounded by what greens us. We nourish veined and growing things. The future a metallic ear tilted toward the potting soil of our hummed and sighing lives.
Mónica Gomery writes poems about queerness, loss, diaspora, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. Her second book, Might Kindred, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, and is newly out from the University of Nebraska Press. She has been a nominee for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net, and a graduate of the Tin House Winter Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Waxwing, Black Warrior Review, Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, and other publications. Read more at monicagomerywriting.com.
