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!
My friend won’t go sleeveless because of her Czech arms. She means her meaty upper arms, arms like Ruben’s beauties, artful arms that remind me of fictional southern belles, mamas and grand-mamas with flesh like bread dough, moist and heavy. I admire my friend’s solid arms and her line of women who worked them over a washboard. Used them to wield a hoe and whip oxen; assemble artillery casings and drape over a flannel shoulder while doing the two-step or polka. Arms like mine from eastern Poland, where they dug beets and potatoes. Made the sign of the cross and lit Sabbath candles, both. A generation and two later they wrung chicken necks, planted gladiolus bulbs and a daughter in the ground. Learned to turn a steering wheel, hurl a bowling ball and carry a suitcase away from a marriage. Arms, in this life, that taught on a blackboard and rocked some babies, reached up at family weddings to dance the YMCA, washed a father on his deathbed now jiggle and flap when I wave goodbye. Today I’ll put on a sleeveless shirt, grab my trowel and a bag of mixed bulbs. Today I’ll plant gladioli. Row after row.
Kathy Jacobs is a retired nursing professor who recently left the fellowship of gifted and generous Nebraska poets and is at play finding others in the Twin Cities. Her poems have been published in Plainsongs, The Comstock Review, and several anthologies from The Nebraska Writers Guild, including How It Looks from Here: Poetry from the Plains.
**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.