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.
The surf rumbles along like a misspent youth, turning its pockets inside out, dumping stolen goods. Beachgoers march like hooded patriots, scour wet grains for polished stones, shells, hanks of driftwood, smoky glass, jewels and coins. Everyone wants something from the sea. The ashes of a father float among the grit— him reborn a porpoise whose hake pierces my peripheral, as my chin tilts toward the waning moon and I’m counting cloud formations that slide across dusk like the bi-conical beads of an abacus. He’s there, just beneath the jacket of grey and I want to wrap my arms around a rubbery mammalian body but I know it’s forbidden. Chasing ghosts is its own kind of death. The downpour unhitches soil from the cliff, uproots stinging nettle, coyote brush, slips of lady fern in a heady rush of destruction or perhaps, reunion. We don’t know. Earth reaching for the sea. Surf racing toward the cliff. Bark of a sea lion, ancient call of a conch. Rain fills our eyes and ears, pummels the small bones of our faces.
Paola Bruni is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize, as well as a finalist for the Mudfish Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, and Rattle, among others. Her debut book of poetry is an epistolary collection titled how do you spell the sound of crickets (Paper Angel Press, May 2022).
