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.
In third grade after lunch, Mrs. Joseph tells us to alphabetize ourselves into a straight line. We take satisfaction in the knowledge of our 31 names—of all the names, both the first one and the last.
Lunch boiling in our stomachs, we line up in the order of the knowledge of these names.
We live the alphabet: flesh made word.
On a scraped floor, Mrs. Joseph perfects us. She shuffles a body here to there. She forms a kind of library—each child bound and placed.
Now we march towards homeroom. We are mesmerized by the back of the kid in front of us; mesmerized by the swirling patterns of their hair.
Then we rest our heads on our desks and Mrs. Joseph reads us a book about a girl who lives alone in the forest; who grinds acorns for bread; who survives winter; who has her fox; who has her owl; who has her wounded dog for company.
We drink this book in the darkness of our triangles of arms as the girl’s father searches for her entire seasons in his airplane but we don’t want her to be found.
We want her crawling down difficult trails where there is barely any light.
She takes another breath.
Her belly distending with cold water, she crawls on the school of the ground.
Stella Brice is the author of five books of poetry, including Urged and Wait ‘Til I Get Fatter (both by VAC/Purple Flag Press) and Creatures (INKira Press). She is a Pushcart and a Best of the Net nominee and a winner of the John Z. Bennet Prize. For several years, she served as a mentor and literary advisor for the PEN Prison Writing Program.
