Fillers
By Majda Gama
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
“Strange Stars Pulsate According to the Golden Ratio”
The BBC headline & a snapshot of Lindsay Lohan
carrying a copy of the holy Quran run parallel on a news site.
Perhaps raw, almond-milk chai was too ordinary for her
so she turned to the book of a more exotic people.
Can America ever forgive her for reaching beyond yoga & rehab
into the terrain of the enemy? I mean, Jane Fonda is still
paying the price for looking eastward.
I like my life dry, like the lips an aesthetician told me she could fix,
use sugar-based fillers to fill in lines from smoking,
fill up the rosy skin browning with middle age.
Sure, the corners are downturned, someone needs to walk
around looking angry & I’m angry that the plump face of youth
is now the face I’m expected to buy back, just as my cheekbones
are emerging. FFS, Lindsey’s now allowed her lips to deflate.
After thinking all this through, I see The Archdruid Report
proclaim we are at peak meaninglessness.Majda Gama is the author of The Call of Paradise, selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2022 Two Sylvias chapbook prize. Her full-length poetry manuscript won the 2023 Wandering Aengus Book Award and will be published in 2025. She is the 2023 Shenandoah Graybeal-Gowen award recipient for Virginia poets. Her poems have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, where she is a 2024 Gregory Djanikian scholar, Ploughshares, POETRY, Shenandoah, Tahoma, and We Call to the Eye & the Night (Persea Press) an anthology of love poems by Arab Anglophone poets. They are forthcoming from Prairie Schooner and TriQuarterly.
9/12 / Poetry Reading in partnership with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), celebrating its 20th year, with visiting poet-in-residence Jordan Pérez + SWWIM’s own Alexandra Lytton Regalado / Conversation moderated by Letras Latinas’s Laura Villareal to immediately follow / The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:00 pm EST / Free
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 on any social media platforms, please.)
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, and Bluesky for more updates—and visit our website to see past, present, and future readings & events.
**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.
"& I’m angry that the plump face of youth / is now the face I’m expected to buy back, just as my cheekbones / are emerging. FFS"
YESSSS!!!!