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!
And my body is a collection of rivers that think they are bones. I love my blood the way I love pink cherry soda, the way I would nibble on my own earlobes and call it good breeding. According to Eduardo Galeano, the church says the body is a sin; science says it’s a machine, and advertising has tried to make it into a business, but the body says, I am a fiesta. That’s why both my elbows think they are wishbones and all my knuckles have decided to be opals, increasingly iridescent with every change of angle. That’s why every glass of pinot grigio I drink is a toast to the diamonds in your and my and Maya Angelou’s thighs. Big, small, and all the in-betweens are perfect to me. Even when what I see in the mirror makes me want to cry, I remember the glory of the aqueducts that would deliver those waters from the vast countryside of my insecurity out to the glamourous cities of my cheeks, and suddenly my body is an event to be marked by festivities, the best year yet of an award-winning vineyard, a half-century-long firework display, a pilgrimage, a parade.
Melissa Studdard is the author of two poetry collections, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast and Dear Selection Committee, and the chapbook Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings. Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and has also appeared in periodicals such as POETRY, Kenyon Review, Psychology Today, New Ohio Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, SWWIM Every Day, and New England Review. Her Awards include The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Tom Howard Prize from Winning Writers, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and more.
**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.
How marvelous each drop.
Love this poem!