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.
What was in it, but apples and air, that cake all the Odesa moms baked at their dachas? Apple slices, flirting on magical doughy mattresses.
Ukrainian or not, we are all made with a tinge of sweetness. Our memories cannot imagine war. It begins anyway— explosions, more real than any kitchen.
People ask you: What was that recipe for living? My mom says: Sometimes there were cherries instead of apples. Yes, children’s glossy eyes begging the grownups: When is it cake time?
But what alchemy invites sugar and flour to cohere into honeyed warmth? What undoes the protective layers? Was war mixed into our recipe from the beginning?
You had to run. You stuffed the mute idea of the cake into your emergency bag. Only apples and air, but now it weighs like a life, and grownups are asking: Where do you think
Olga Livshin's poetry and translations appear in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and other journals. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019). Livshin co-translated A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of Vladimir Gandelsman's poetry (New Meridian Arts Books, 2022), and Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023).
