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.
Perhaps some part of me still believes I will live on in my children’s children and their children, still believes there will be children solid as green glass, as dark and bright, sturdy as bone grown from the liquid void of hope, of want, and need. I mean the need to love, which is not need at all but the opposite. Whatever the opposite of need is, I believe in that.
There is a sprig of lavender in a green glass bowl on my white-painted window sill. I believe in the fertile green of the clifftop trees behind the bowl, outside my window. I believe these things know each other, trees, bowl, that both belong to the one solid world I am passing through. They belong and will remain, and one day a girl child will cup the bowl in her two hands at the foot of those trees and laugh, because something will be funny, something will be a joy, the day will be green and the girl, the girl will not know I saw her there. Already today I saw her and the tiny womb deep in her belly.
Rasma Haidri is a South Asian Norwegian-American poet, the author of Blue Like Apples (Rebel Satori) and As If Anything Can Happen (Kelsay Books). Her writing has been widely anthologized and appeared in many journals including Rattle, Fourth Genre, Action Spectacle, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, and Phoebe. She lives with her wife on a Norwegian seacoast island. See rasma.org.
