by Nancy Huggett
by Tammy Greenwood
by Arnisha Royston
i want so bad to stop writing about the
brokenness. my friend said something earlier
about tending to the beautiful in a broken
world and i thought how different our worlds
must break. i’ve tried to imagine the words here
from someplace else. i am thinking about water
from a spring. walking barefoot in red dirt.
horses trailing behind me without saddles. i fell
mounting a horse in california a few years ago
my foot slipped between stool and stirrup.
my back flat against the ground. i could see under
the horse. how a belly extends down when a
body is long. when a butcher slaughters goats
or anything with a similar body they cut from
hind leg to throat. all four legs held tightly apart.
there isn't much more i can say about this. about
something being cut open so easily. i remember
waking up from surgery. trying to make out the
numbers on the clock. if i knew how long i was
under. i could make sense of the damage. the clock
too far. i whispered to the nurse i felt cold everywhere.
animals must feel cold after that first cut. my sister is
somehow standing between the nurse’s station and my
bed smiling. but not happy. i could see the worry
stuff itself into her hands then her hands in her pockets. i
asked if it was quick and she said no. and i knew then
what it meant to be slaughtered. to be cut from throat
to belly. only the parts needed taken from body to bag.
to some place i’ll never see again. yes, the world is broken.
my body a betrayal. sometimes still beautiful.
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Arnisha Royston is a poet from Los Angeles. She holds a BA from UCLA and a MFA from SDSU. Arnisha is currently the Tickner Writing Fellow at the Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland. Her poetry is published in literary journals such as Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Rhino, and Phoebe. Recently receiving nominations for a Pushcart and Best of the Net, Arnisha is excited to work towards the publication of her first manuscript.
by Lisa Rosenberg
by Sarah Browning
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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After Herbie Hancock & Wayne Shorter
How is it I imagine us older, already,
and walking in autumn to this song,
and we are beautiful, as we are now,
beautiful as you are now, when you
look at me. It is autumn, the city is
quiet and not quiet as the song is,
around us, kids on bikes, as we are
wrapped around each other like
the piano and the sax and the sudden
bikes but then the quiet and the yellow
leaves. My arm is through yours, my
hand in your pocket and it is autumn,
late afternoon. We’ve had a quiet good
day of work, each, then headed out
together and the song is the city we love
around us together and we are older but
not yet old and we are beautiful as the song.
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Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works). Co-founder and past Executive Director of Split This Rock, the poetry and social justice organization, she now teaches with Writers in Progress. Browning received the Lillian E. Smith Award and fellowships from DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, VCCA, Yaddo, Porches, and Mesa Refuge. She holds an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Rutgers Camden and lives in Philadelphia. More at sarahbrowning.net.
by Jessica Manack
My great-grandmother Tat birthed three girls and stopped,
said “No use cluttering up my yard trying for a boy.”
Her daughter Peggy was up for the challenge, stayed faithful,
had her four and was then blessed with Eddie one Christmas.
Tat’s daughter Patty, my grandmother, had boys
she didn’t want, a husband she didn’t want, and when she could,
she shed them all, taking up with ladies, so that, by the time
I came along, it was a given, her companions, begrudgingly accepted.
I knew how she felt because I felt the same: the big secret
I couldn’t tell anyone – not my parents, who’d be disgusted,
not my grandmother, who I rarely saw. But one summer, we all went
from the city down to Peggy’s house, a rare confluence of cousins.
It felt like anything could blossom there, like the blueberries
growing in profusion in her yard, something I had never seen.
I gorged myself, sneaking handfuls from the big glass bowl,
afraid of being greedy, worried I’d not find such comfort again.
That night, in one of the row of little Catholic bedrooms
full of little twin beds, I shared a room with my grandmother,
a breath’s width apart, something I never imagined happening,
and I thought, I could tell her. I could say,
I’m like you, something I had never been able to say
to anyone in my family of brutes, being bookish and blue-haired.
The hot dark closed in on us, the smell of mothballs
a blanket no one had asked for, and I pictured opening my mouth,
pictured how, if I told her, it would be the first in a long series
of tellings, each harder than the last.
The cicadas’ screeching made it hard to settle.
The silence I replaced it with made it even harder.
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Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has recently appeared in Still: The Journal, Litro Magazine, and Five South. She was the recipient of a 2022 Curious Creators Grant, and her work has been nominated for The Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. As the winner of the 2023 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions First Chapbook Contest, her first collection, GASTROMYTHOLOGY, comes out in Summer 2024.
by Alafia Nicole Sessions
by Jessica L. Walsh
The string of things I haven’t done could reach
from here to every place I’ve never been:
New York, Golden Corral, an orgy, Rome.
They say that’s a bucket list. My great-grandfather
worked his neighbors’ farms to keep his own,
carrying the tin lunch pail that’s now on my shelf.
Some days he probably swung it empty from dark to dark
hoping someone could toss in day-old bread or a nickel.
My guess is he would be awed by all we have. Or mad at what he didn’t.
My dad griped that we barely had a pot to piss in, but barely
does a lot there. We had a pot to piss in, I’m saying, even Pizza Hut
on paydays, a quarter for Pac-Man if we were good and lucky.
Ain’t no hole in the washtub, sang my mom,
and she was right, though there was once a hole in the back room ceiling
that filled the chili pot when it rained hard and long.
So I’ve never been to Brazil but I’ve never gone hungry,
always had bread, bologna, a coffee can full of grease
way at the back of the fridge, second shelf.
I think I’d like to finish my life with whatever it takes to endure it.
Beyond that, I don’t know. The smell of his pillow. A dog.
Maybe a vodka to close it out. Enough.
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Jessica L. Walsh is the author of Book of Gods and Grudges (Glass Lyre, 2022) as well as two previous collections. Her poetry has appeared in Guesthouse, Lunch Ticket, Crab Creek Review, and more. A nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, her work has also been featured on the Best American Poetry website. A native of small-town Michigan, she lives outside of Chicago and teaches at a community college.
by Karen Earle
by Emily Hockaday
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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In Viking sagas, language is
roundabout. A sword is a blood
worm; blood battle sweat. Is it this
that made me a poet? Around
my finger: a ring of Frejya’s tears bind
us. Your blood is also of Viking
descent. In Iceland we blend in
with the locals, drinking heavy
beers, eating fish stew, until they hear
us speak: Is this also where my gift
for circumlocution stems? You tell me
you love me and I describe all the ways
in which I would have made a good
conqueror. You don’t argue. We
look out over the glacial mountains
(stone teeth, ice trolls, snow knives)
and beneath, the lava (Earth’s blood,
Surtr’s misery, liquid flame) lies
in wait; there is always seismic
activity here, no matter how stable
or frozen the land appears.
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Emily Hockaday's second full-length collection, In a Body, was published by Harbor Editions in 2023. Her first, Naming the Ghost, debuted with Cornerstone Press in 2022. Emily is a De Groot Foundation Writer of Note and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation, NY City Artist Corps, and NYFA Queens Art Fund recipient. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in print and online, including Electric Literature and the North American Review. She is the editor of Heartbeat of the Universe (Interstellar Flight Press 2024). Emily writes about ecology, parenthood, the urban environment, and chronic illness. She can be found online at emilyhockaday.com and @E_Hockaday.
by Eugenie Carabatsos
by Yosra Bouslama
by Mary Morris
Stray cats in the attic,
the high bridge
we jumped from
into the river of frogs
and water moccasin.
We no longer ask
if she imagines
our childhood home—
no longer probe
about a life spent together.
Our mother nursed us
seventeen months apart.
We shared a room,
camped in Mexico,
launched a boat to Sardinia.
Witnessed the births
of each of our children.
I am not sure when
we first noticed her memory
migrating away.
Now I could say
maybe that wasn’t betrayal
but plaques and tangles.
When did she neglect
to turn off the stove?
Bake a cake without flour
and eggs? Lose the way home,
a block from her lane?
Sister, you no longer retain
a history of us, remember less
and less, but the more you forget
the further back I reminisce.
Sleeping together.
Talking too late.
Dancing into oblivion.
Swimming in the lake.
Sometimes you need a sister like a drink of water.
Sometimes you feel you are dying of thirst.
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Mary Morris is the author of three books of poetry: Late Self-Portraits (selected by Leila Chatti for the Wheelbarrow Book Prize), Dear October (Arizona-New Mexico Book Award), and Enter Water, Swimmer (runner-up for the X.J. Kennedy Prize). Morris received the Rita Dove Award and has been invited to read her poems at the Library of Congress which aired on NPR. Her poems are published in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, and North American Review. See water400.org.
by Jessica Q. Stark
by Jules Jacob
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Kendall Turner
We all want to hook the big ones: caught from rough waves,
twenty pounds of fins beating against taut, transparent lines.
We all want to go home and tell a tale: how we nearly
lost our lives catching dinner, how a monster lives beneath
the ocean’s surface, how the glint of its scales hide
in the sun’s reflected rays. Who knows if anyone believes us.
Who knows if that’s why we tell stories anyway.
One time you were reeling in a trout, a bucket of worms
wincing at your feet, and the silver fish flew out of the water
and smacked you in the face, its body flapping against your lips,
leaving the hook lodged inside your cheek.
Look, you said, look what the bastard fish did to me.
I pulled the hook out slowly, the tip catching on your skin,
leaving behind a double-pointed wound, a tail and a head,
as if you’d been kissed by some too-affectionate beast.
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Kendall Turner lives alone with cats in the almost-woods. Her writing has appeared or will appear in Femspec, Prism, Ms. Magazine, and other publications. A long time ago, she won a poetry award from Princeton University and also clerked and argued at the U.S. Supreme Court. She currently teaches with the Bard Prison Initiative.
by Hyejung Kook
I don’t know what to say. The sun is shining directly in my eyes, but I am driving.
Risk blindness. Borges is muttering in my ear about Homer. The sun balanced
on the upper edge of the traffic light, concentric circles dancing like a Kandinsky.
Did you know that if you blow hard enough, the parts of a Calder mobile will move?
Glaring at me, the docent doesn’t speak. I haven’t touched anything. Only the air
moving. I haven’t done anything wrong. Anything right. Anything at all. For days
without first checking the temperature in the room. Sometimes I can’t read
the room at all. I can’t look at you. It’s the kids talking incessantly. Mom. Mom.
Mom. Why aren’t you listening to me? You don’t care about me. Nobody cares
about me. The tendons of the neck distended, torturously clear as they scream.
Risk tears. You wield silence like a knife. Only the air moves. My throat hurts.
At night the air wheezes through the swollen branches of my lungs but no words.
All the leaves fallen. Is this dreaming or reality, my son asks upon waking.
In mine, water is rising, the kids are trapped below deck, I take the deepest breath
I can, try to remember how many turnings, wake before I dive. Wake shaking.
I don’t know what to say.
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Hyejung Kook’s poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Verse Daily, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Hyphen Magazine, and elsewhere. Other works include essays in The Critical Flame and Poetry as Spellcasting (North Atlantic Books, 2023) and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Hyejung now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. She is a Fulbright grantee, a Kundiman fellow, and co-editor of Barahm Press.
by Rosa Sophia
We live at the edge of a flood plain, on the bank of a creek. In the evening my mother drinks,
falls asleep in the woods under the oak trees. It’s so hard to wake her, to get her home.
Summer rain falls. We leave the house and come back to find water.
The flood surrounds us. We park down the street and walk.
I am ten. At my grandmother’s house, I learn the creek can carry sound.
My grandmother says, I hear you kids and your mother all night, screaming at each other.
I’ve never seen anything like it: The flood lodges a car in the arms of a tree.
I try to imagine how this happened as my mother pours another glass of whiskey.
We walk in the woods and hear a rattlesnake before we see it, thick and coiled beneath a boulder.
My mother says it must’ve washed down from the mountains. It readies its venom.
My mother empties the glass. She picks the lock on the bathroom door with a kitchen knife.
She says she will kill herself. I decide my body can be a barrier between her and death.
The water rises. Red and blue lights flash. The cops knock on the door again.
We’re always so close to drowning.
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Rosa Sophia’s poetry has been published in Philadelphia Stories Magazine, Sentience Literary Journal, Limp Wrist, and others. She was the recipient of the 2023 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She holds a degree in automotive technology and is the managing editor of Mobile Electronics magazine.
by Kathryn Moll
There is sadness
in the snap of the maid’s navy smock
I have arrived
too late. La mesa ya está
puesta, the sideboard set
all thoughtful with flowers—your sick bed
now vacant
and unwound. Groups of waiting
stems struggle
to keep their musky summer
blooms—auras azules
en órbita
and limes are left wanting
to be sliced into cups
whose handles are turned
A las diez
A las dos
A dios—arms
Your useless legs
ya no pueden bailar
yet the soul still
creeps. I can see it
clustered
with butterflies
Mariposas borrachas
are silvering the soil
of dogs—they are browsing the blood-
red terracotta
tile
You are
ready to greet the sun
por ventanas abiertas
que cuadran la luz
breathe into the harmonic
bobble of bees
on the vine—to reach for blooming
stalks beyond the eve
Más allá
Más allá
Let us leave this
insect churn—the mourning
that is beating like living
gold leaf
blessing the windfall
fruits
where they lay in the road
ripe with worms
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Kathryn Moll is an architect and California native. Her text-based drawings—collaborative works created under the name modem—have been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Cooper Union in New York City. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
by Jane Ellen Glasser