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SWWIM Every Day publishes a poem a day by women writers (she/they).
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Spring stutters, as it has these last late years of ruin, the sentence we are yearning for coiled under its tongue. A dog wanders the valley, ignoring its girl’s call. Another storm worries its skirts along the seaboard. You’ll take back these blossoms, a promise reneged, its words hedged and qualified until it’s still snowing. Toward the end of pregnancy, I walked six miles a day, talking on the phone or listening to the city’s buzzing fear. As always, I was racing: I walked to show I could outpace my body, that it wouldn’t bury me. Each step an argument against your coming and a beckoning, the comma a hand makes to say go on. I walked in thaw past the closed entrance to the interstate, past a woman who said her daughter never took a step after the first trimester, past a homeless man who muttered happy mother’s day, and, when I didn’t answer, I presume. The wishes of the wrung-out world alit upon my body, as if I were an altar, as if I were the goat released into the wilderness. When the pains began I arched my body to allow them an instrument: strings well-tempered, rubbed with amber. Trees’ colored applause outside the hospital window let us know real spring had come at last, despite the air’s embrace. But already we were in thrall to no other season, subject to the revolution of no other sphere. We lived from then on out of time— each day in our mouths.
Leah Falk is the author of To Look After and Use (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, FIELD, Electric Literature, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Her writing has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Yiddish Book Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Asylum Arts.
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