—After Eduardo C. Corral Like the blush of an aurora glimpsed in the south, wonder startles. Wonder presses flowers in a pocket press and ducks under swags of spruce as if every garden is a secret. In a rainstorm, wonder hunkers on a tree limb, twitches its feathers intricate as woodwork. Dew pearls the morning spiderwebs with wonder. Even strings of satellites are wonderful beneath the steady stars. But no one wants to hear about all your wonder over a cappuccino: wonder is skittish, like cottontails nibbling grass under the pokeweed. No, I don’t find it every day—wonder is the work.
Aza Pace’s debut poetry collection, Her Terrible Splendor, won the 2024 Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize and is forthcoming from Willow Springs Books. Her poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, Crazyhorse, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of North Texas.
Are you looking for editorial feedback? SWWIM’s editors offer commentary on 3-6 pages of poetry. Submit here!
SWWIM Every Day is now accepting poetry translations for publication consideration. Please see swwim.org/submit for the full guidelines.
Are you a SWWIMmer with literary news to share (publication/feature/award/book/book review)? We’d love to shout out your accomplishments in our Weekly Spotlight! Please email swwimmiami@gmail.com with a link to your news. (No DMs on any social media platforms, please.)
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, and Bluesky for more updates—and visit our website to see past, present, and future readings & events.
**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.
I'm ever interested in wonder. This poem hits a lovely spot in its exploration.
That last line!