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 the desert only small, stout flowers impossible to avoid, whose heads I clobbered all day then watched night freeze them up. In the morning, the steam rising where I puddled myself behind a bush, the coyotes woke with me, calling across the valley to another family, or their own—it didn’t matter that you weren’t there. It didn’t matter that the superbloom, which I had flown a thousand miles to find, was too far south to reach from there. Instead, big hunks of quartz to hold in my lap, which I let charge themselves into my palms, though I had never learned what exactly it was or how, really, to let it work through me. Eventually, I think I absorbed something—the steady oath of solitude, the authority. The impossibility of blooming love in any body, except my own dusty gut. And I did: chin lifted to the Joshuas’ white snakehead of an opening, the crows huffing, shuffling as the sun raised herself through the boulders, propping her tired elbows on that frozen earth, the night-stiffed flowers straightening their thin spines.
Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/her) is a bi-continental writer with roots in both the French and American South. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Winter Tangerine, EcoTheo, Muzzle Magazine, and others.
