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.
I have, really, no recollection of existence prior to moving to the two-story redwood house on Middle St. before first grade.
But in one hazy, sunflower-shaded memory, painted by the late afternoon sun filtering through an upper story window, I can almost feel the tips of my soft, pink and brown fingers pulling the sill, the stretch and bend of my tiptoes seeking a better view.
Outside the window is a yard. A back yard, I think, with patchy sepia and yellow-green grass. There may have been other things in the yard, I don’t recall. My straining eyes are pinned to the small, royal purple sport convertible.
What, I wonder now, made that car so enthralling to a toddling girlchild? Perhaps, it's smallness, shiny wheels and chrome bumpers flashing like silverfish in the sun. Or the two bucket seats that seemed just right-size for me. Or maybe the curve of the panels, plump like plums, that gave the whole thing a somehow supple appearance.
I know he is in the apartment, the man my mother would marry, but his bell bottom jeans, scruffy beard under a gravity-defying bounce of frowzy curls are out of sight. Out of mind.
I remember nothing of their courtship. Nothing of the wedding, or the move, nothing but a snapshot moment of standing in my first-grade classroom, adoption judge in a stern dress suit, declaring him my father. We did not celebrate, or embrace, just thanked the judge and left.
I was never allowed as a passenger in the purple coupe, even after the adoption. I would simply sit in our greening new yard each spring, watching while he waxed and waxed, until his face shone back at him in the sun.
R.B. Simon (she/her) is a queer, black, disabled writer whose work has found homes in multiple literary publications. She is a Senior Poetry Editor for the Harbor Review. Her full-length collection, Not Just the Fire, was released March 2023 from Cornerstone Press, and her next work, Bird Bone Blood, is forthcoming from Milk & Cake Press in 2025. She is currently living in Madison, WI with her spouse and young daughter.
