My Heart Was All of the Above
By Ronda Piszk Broatch
I’m tired because of the way the country is running around with its scissors pointed the wrong way. There are people wandering the wilderness, geo-caching lies, eating them like potato chips. The fence around my ventricles is coming apart. Somebody just sent a message sliding across my screen, and I fell for it. Instead of a pizza, Amazon delivers a baby. I want to write poems, but the kettle calls to be boiled, the eggs are boiling even after the water molecules have rejoined the atmosphere, and someone’s burning gas from the tank of a car that hasn’t run in five years. Never mind what I’ve lived through—sleeping beneath a pool table, clinging to my horse’s neck in a pasture of cows, listening to an ex-boyfriend cry about the time he made pasta for the mafia. I don’t drink coffee and still my cups are stained. There’s a box full of letters that need translating. There’s a collection of scissors in jars around my house, petrified pizza crust in the back of my mother’s old Dodge. When the babies cried, we drove and drove and drove.
Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), finalist for the Sally Albiso Prize, and Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Greensboro Review, Blackbird, Sycamore Review, The Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News / KUOW’s "All Things Considered." She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.
SWWIM o-founder/Editor-in-Chief Catherine Esposito Prescott and Editor/Director of Development Mary Block traveled to New York City this past week to celebrate the Academy of American Poets’ Leadership Awards. Jonathan Plutzik and The Betsy Hotel, our residency and reading series host, was one of the recipients for “fostering an appreciation of poetry.” Plutzik, along with his sister Deborah Briggs, have been running the Writer’s Room residency program for a decade, among other literary philanthropy projects, which they do in the name of their Pulitzer Prize-nominated father, Hyam Plutzik, who passed away when he was 50 years old. You can view photos of Plutzik, Briggs, Esposito Prescott, Block, and various literary luminaries at this link.
See you at AWP!
2/7 / Meet the Artist with visiting poet-in-residence Farnaz Fatemi / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 6:00 pm EST / Free
2/7 / Poetry Reading with visiting poet-in-residence Farnaz Fatemi + local writer Fabienne Josaphat / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:30 pm EST / Free
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If I loved this any harder, I would burst into flame.