Barreling down a coastal road, Supertramp’s
“Dreamer” takes over the radio, Roger Hodgson’s
fingers drilling the dash open. It’s the sound of 40 years
ago and a red tide—swarms of slippery, stinking fish
washed up—goners, all of them, rotting in a hot Pacific
shimmer. And my brother is there with me at a lunar edge
of wet: full moon glint, sulfur whiff, stiff bodies like spilled
quivers of small, silvery arrows pointing every whack way
around us, their stilled eyes wide like sinking babies flopped
in sopping blankets of shore, schools of strewn clock guts,
a splayed and gritty spawning. My brother and I sing along,
our car stopped, listening from the highway, letting the night
and sea chaos carry us: dreamer, you know you are a dreamer…
and we're in sync, somehow, same words, same starry string
of plinked notes chiming the night around crystalized breath.
It was like this: our skins close and a mineral breeze clouding
eyes, blowing back salt-ashed hair, the just-detected distant
spiral jetties. We unbolted metal doors to barefoot skate
the sand berms down, feel a cold crack of waves slap toes.
Stoned on weed and much too high to maneuver our muddied
minds and feet inside whatever plots we were churning, Brother,
whatever in our youth we thought ourselves big enough
to handle, whatever tides and misdemeanors, no worse
than what your hand would steer our way—your demise,
suicide—that ancient refrain recorded: a shocking dream
that wakes in song, even now, the human and remains.
Michelle Bitting is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize and a recipient of a starred Kirkus Review; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook, Dummy Ventriloquist, is forthcoming from C & R Press in 2023. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University and in film studies at University of Arizona Global.
Upcoming Events:
4/28 / O, Miami Festival Conjuring Spirits: An Ekphrastic Workshop, Led by Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Presented in Partnership with The Deering Estate / Live / Sold-Out
* Are you a SWWIMmer with literary news to share (publication/feature/award/book/book review)? We’d love to shout out your accomplishments in our Weekly Spotlight! Please email swwimmiami@gmail.com. (No DMs, please.)
A Note About Submissions:
If you have submitted your work lately, to us or another journal, you may have noticed a response that says something like, “Your application has been submitted to SWWIM Every Day. Thank you for using Submittable.” Please know that we are not intentionally being rude. Nor is this an error. Submittable has made a system-wide change requiring users to verify their email addresses. If you choose not to verify your email address, you will not be able to receive personalized responses because the system will automatically override whatever the journal has set up.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that, according to the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses [CLMP], “it looks like submitters will need to verify their email only once—after a verified email address has been linked to their Submittable account, they will no longer need to take this step for future submissions to any magazine/organization.”
So please do verify your email address, for us or any other journal, which you should only have to do once systemwide. That way, you will continue to receive personalized responses. In the meantime, until everyone has caught up with the new directive, we have changed our response to, “Dear Poet.” We hope that fixes the problem and saves you from wondering what’s been happening.
**We do our best to preserve the integrity of each poem; however, due to programming limitations, some poems may read differently on a mobile phone and in certain browsers. For best viewing, use Chrome on a desktop/laptop.