It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
I go to the museum and sit before Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic with three black holes in my head. One for the way I hated the poet when he called me stupid. Another black hole because I felt like a child, carsick and chicken. I don’t care what day it is, he said on my birthday. Was he an aperture, opening inside me? Or was he a bullet I must dodge for the rest of my life. At the Cash America Pawn, I waited in line, the ring box white as ivory, a severed tusk singeing a hole through my hand. One more black hole, there, in the middle. The question I asked in my head for a year: How can he think he owns other people? Him, in the dark, calling my body his. My breasts, my hair, my hips. I shout leave into Motherwell’s circles. I know I can’t help it, the ring in its strange case, cold as a head with no body.
Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, VCCA, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.
3/6 / Meet the Artist with visiting poet-in-residence Keetje Kuipers / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 6:00 pm EST / Free
3/6 / Poetry Reading with visiting poet-in-residence Keetje Kuipers + local writer Julie Marie Wade / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:30 pm EST / Free
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