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.
How many dictionaries’ worth of words have we exchanged and they taught me nothing, I know now, having just committed the whites of your eyes, the nonsense you uttered, to memory as we waited for the ambulance to come, as I waited. Now some technician brandishing her wand stands witness to an architecture that ought to remain hidden, yours to disclose to none or one—yet here onscreen it materializes. Now I’m the one who can’t breathe, it’s so beautiful, my God: Venus flytrap gulping its blood meal, cathedral arches in cross- section buttressed by lung, flaps of the mitral valve high-fiving, over. And over. And over. So this is your heart: object of long study. Only now, staring down the double barrel as it loads and fires, loads and fires, words having failed us both, do I know it fully.
Mary Fontana is a scientist and writer who lives in Seattle with her parents, husband, two children, and eight-to-ten pet fish. She is currently writing a narrative history about the migrant house of hospitality where she has volunteered for the past 20 years. Her poems have appeared in journals including Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, The Seattle Review, Rust + Moth, and Moss. See her on Instargram at @maryfontanawrites.
