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.
It’s possible to go wild again, says the woman sitting next to me over breakfast this January morning at the monastery. There are neurons in our hearts and guts, she says, and we fail to heed them because we’ve filled our minds with language. I’ve just met this woman sitting here at this table by the ox-herding pictures. She tells me she’s a farmer and that she speaks to the earth. Getting messy is my dharma, she says. The soil is alive and it wants us to listen.
I live in the city, where my fingers never touch the soil. I have to seek the wilderness inside, I say, among our cups and bowls and my children’s many miniature cars and trucks. My dharma is simple. I wake in the dark to write poems by hand, and the words rise up from inside of me, unbidden. They want me to listen.
Rachael Nevins’s poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Literary Mama, Hazlitt, the Ploughshares blog, and elsewhere, as well as in her newsletter, The Variegated Life. She expects to complete her degree in Library and Information Studies at Queens College of the City University of New York in May, and her chapbook, Only Provisional, is forthcoming from Ethel in March. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
