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The jeep with its soft-top up shreds past two small girls. They are rushing the tallgrass in matching violet nightgowns. Wisconsin late summer. Sun going down, day like a bobbin so warm. The air drags low, circles its holdings drifting there, then back above. One of the girls, the smaller one, she kneels just in front of the rhododendrons. She has found something in the green. A mid-section undone, scratched open to loosebelly softened to the arbor of bone. Grazed remains. The lanes of the rib cage carry their sidemeat, fixed as the cold of a silent and empty nave. Put it in my hand the older sister says, and the younger one reaches down and does.
Laura Romeyn is the author of Wild Conditions, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, her poems have appeared in AGNI, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, and The Yale Review, among other journals. Born and raised in Wisconsin’s Driftless Region, Laura currently lives and teaches in Madison, Wisconsin.
12/12 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Nicole Cooley + local writer Caroline Cabrera / The Gallery at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
One workshop remains in our Workshop Series--SWWIM Lessons: From Prompt to Placement: “Surfing Submittable with Jen Karetnick – Keeping your head above water in the poetry submissions process” on 12/10 (register here). Price: $80/workshop. Time: 7:00–9:00 PM (EST). Where: Zoom.
Note: SWWIM Every Day is now accepting poetry translations for publication consideration. Please see swwim.org/submit for the full guidelines.
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