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.
A narrow path overseen by a few metal benches leads to the massive wonder this place is named for, limbs the size of trunks, and a plaque that dates it back to 1650. Today, beneath that great latticework of shade, my friends discuss what is known about the communal network of roots. Even a stump, otherwise dead, still shares what it has with the group. Meanwhile, my own stingy core keeps replaying a moment on the phone this morning, Jean sniping in a way that was so old and familiar it stung me to silence, same tone, same words, I swear, as in that first summer when I was eighteen and enthralled with her. Now I’m nearly sixty, she’s newly widowed and, as she fingers the mottled bark, I half think it must be illegal to be pissed at a friend, no, a sister with a grief that fresh. And yet, as Sue explains how fungi are the brains underground, my mind goes from fungus to fester. “How do botanists date trees,” Lisa asks, “when they can’t see the rings?” I shrug and glance at the gold band that links Jean to an absence, then hug my thickening middle and, with it, the girl I was who always assumed, whenever someone was so much as brusque, it was somehow her fault. “I can’t get over this thing,” I say, wanting to mean the sycamore. All it has felt in its almost four hundred years. All it must know and have forgiven.
Ona Gritz’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, One Art, and elsewhere. Her books include Geode, a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and Present Imperfect: Essays. Ona is also a children's author and essayist. Recent honors include two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays, a winning entry in The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 project, and a 2022 Best of the Net nomination.
