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.
But mostly I think about love. I think about you. I think about time as the ocean and our stories as boats made of paper. The fragility of our stories, the unlikeliness of love, and the tomboy certainty of a childhood in Arkansas where I swallowed back down my fear and felt things secretly, then not at all. I think about the ocean, the engineering within ocean waves. I feel the technicality of my body as a part of the waves, the pull and suck of the tides. The moon as a kind of kindness masterminding the landscape. I feel Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer providing rhythm for just how the living will remember the dead. I swear on my own skeleton that I can see the hidden architecture inside living things in the natural world. I remember darkness. I remember my mother, the way she held her jaw like stone and maintained that rigid grip even as she was dying. I think about her. I think about you. And my words as bricks that sink deeper and deeper, as bricks dreaming their way back into the earth.
Robin Reagler is the author of Into The The (Backlash, 2020), winner of the UK’s Best Book Award; Teeth & Teeth (Headmistress, 2018), winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz; Dear Red Airplane (Seven Kitchens, 2011, 2018) winner of the Rebound Prize; and Night Is This Anyway (Lily Poetry Books, 2022). For 22 years she led Writers in the Schools (WITS). She is a queer poet living in Texas.
