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!
After the summer’s geography of bodies, you are ribbed seashell stripped to moonlight, mistaken for nautilus, the antediluvian Venus carved from her own bone. Those tight-lipped mammary cells abandoned, sour milk in the sand, hot oceans to undress in, and all my fantasies buxom. When the waves split their tongues, I lie naked in the surf and wait for a second adolescence; for bud-tipped breasts to unearth miniatures of mountain— bluff, bulwark, weathered arches carved teat to teat. This is what’s left of God’s clay, the unmolded archetype, a female animal undone, her gills turned to lungs and set to walk upright in the waning flood. Those who see you will say prairie, but you are hearth. They say empty, but I say flower— all petal, pistil, stem of you bursting for touch.
Jennifer Greenberg is a Floridian poet living in New England, and an associate editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal. Her writing appears in several online publications and was awarded the Joe Bolton Poetry Award in 2020.
**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.