Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s National Poetry Month project: Sing the Body: A Collection of Poems Praising Our Selves!
With support from Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) and Florida International University’s Center for Women and Gender Studies, we are publishing poems that celebrate body positivity and our selves.
In addition to publishing the poems as poems of the day, 10 select Sing the Body poems will be displayed on FIU’s main campus near mirrors and places where women encounter themselves. These poems will live in a dedicated portfolio on our website.
Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting SWWIM Every Day! Happy National Poetry Month!
marigolds wither & wilt just like my mother’s hands —entropy. the moon disrobes to die & my mother slams shut pinches her flesh, both sides, oppresses the top of her wrist, resists the whole of mortality and glares as if to say can’t you just get along? I want to pluck what she hates and tell her they do, mom look at them bow, conglomerate kneeling because you said so when children glue marigolds into books they’re taught to force the living into things that can’t die, trace paper thin graves which marigolds bloat against. the older kids know this. we don’t have an art class for burials, for pressing our dead into caskets say amen. you will never be a marigold eradicated for growing old. this isn’t children of the corn and I never liked my art class. I’ll let you go because I have to. find you in the moon, like the Ancients. they knew the worth of a spirit disengaged from its skin, the thing inside we pretend isn’t there. what we really want to mummify not your hands. you can hate them. chafe the dermis together until the age spots go raw. but they get along, I swear only friends bow for the other press their knees into dirt, dame-hood frond temples to Gaia, all of them —tree roots which know more than us coiled in prayer, around a marigold.
Olivia Torres is a queer, ex-fundamentalist, biracial fangirl who hails from a small town in western Massachusetts where the potholes in the roads are so large they have now developed sentience. She received her Bachelor's in English from Westfield State University. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Merrimack Review, Secondchance Lit, the Dandelion Review, Horse Egg Literary, and Alyss Literary Journal. In her spare time, she enjoys deconstructing her learned internalized homophobia, being roasted by her tarot cards, avoiding vegetables, and playing eye-tag with the moon.
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