Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2022! The poets whose work you’ll be reading every weekday from October 15 through November 15 are just a few of the many authors from around the world participating in this year’s MBF, the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. They all look forward to sharing their work, thoughts, and ideas both in person and online. Between November 13-20, new poet conversations and readings will be launched and available for free on miamibookfaironline.com (in addition to other content). For more information, visit the website and follow MBF on Instagram and Twitter at @miamibookfair and use the hashtag #miamibookfair2022.
Radioactive decay is the set of various processes by which unstable atomic nuclei (nuclides) emit subatomic particles. Decay is said to occur in the parent nucleus and produce a daughter nucleus. Allegory made easy, our story foreshadowed by science: another nuclear family, destined for disintegration. But we want to be special, don’t we? We want to believe in the mercurial majesty of our own destruction. Even now, all these miles away, I take refuge in cool subjunctive caves: If only I believed more avidly in God… If only I had kept the Fourth Commandment… My mother had a plan. She told me to stay at home till I was thirty, live in her basement, borrow her car. I could take the bus to school in the University District, complete my Ph.D. without the desperate quest for money, without acquiring a single pint of debt. My father agreed. It only made sense. And then, by their unanimous decree, I would be married, & a down payment would be waiting for me on a three- bedroom brick rambler in their water-view community— close by, so they could always watch the children. That birthright was wealth & security, secret sex & cigarettes stubbed out beneath the wide camellia tree that obscured my bedroom window all those years. It was my mother screaming, for reasons unbeknownst to science, my father pledging his fleeting remedy: Whatever you want, Darling. Whatever you need. So we come back again to detritus, the cells of appeasement & displeasure sloughing off my skin until I glimpsed the mannequin of their most ample aspirations, that proxy-woman I could not become. My father said: “You’re killing your mother.” My mother said: “Listen to your father.” But I had a sundial & a strong intuition & that sinking-ship feeling that shook me clean to my soles. We were headed for a capsize, my family & I, evoking words like asunder & adrift. “Are you trying to be an outcast?” my mother asked, which only begged the question: cast out of what? A house of order—built on stilts, perched in sand? Secret society of private misgivings & public thanksgivings? There’s what we say, & what we do, then there’s what we breathe: whole climate committed to asphyxiation, slow incineration of a last honest wish, final non-bureaucrat’s desire. I can hold my breath a long time under water, my swimmer’s lungs primed for intervals of deep submersion. But I can’t open my eyes. It’s a problem of underworld survival, learning the way of touch, calculated kinesthesia through a wilderness of stray sounds, refracted lights. Here beneath the surface of things, where the floating debris cannot reach me, I still sense earthly tremors, voices booming, the searchlight probing these depths.
Julie Marie Wade is the author of 15 collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, including the forthcoming projects Meditation 40: The Honesty Room (Pank “Little Books,” 2023) and Fugue: An Aural History (New Michigan Press, 2023). With Denise Duhamel, she wrote The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019) and with Brenda Miller, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices (Cleveland State University Press, 2021). A professor of creative writing at Florida International University, Julie makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach.
"Fallout" first appeared in Green Mountains Review and is published in Skirted: Poems (The Word Works, 2021). The author grants permission.
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