by Sarah Ann Winn
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
by Doritt Carroll
the deacon at church looked like Mister Rogers if
Mister Rogers had a really bad day same
beaky nose, gaunt cheeks, the swoop
of hair but instead of the one-sided smile the lips
were pressed together like the wringer
on an old-fashioned washing machine or maybe
there were two different Mister Rogers and finally
the bad-tempered guy got loose
I used to think that—that I had two mothers
and every night they fought and the one who won
locked the other one in the closet because how else
could you explain that on Tuesday we were painting
with watercolors making fish faces trying to suck
our milkshakes up our straws but by Wednesday she was ripping
the pages out of my father’s books and snapping the necks
of his cigars screaming that my neck was
next I told my father my idea about the two
mothers and my father told me to cut the crap
because only a childhood schizophrenic would split
their thoughts that way and since I clearly wasn’t
a schiz I needed to stop reading his medical journals
and making up bullshit diagnoses for attention I never
thought my father was two people he was
always just like that
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Doritt Carroll is the winner of the 2023 Stephen Meats Poetry Prize and the Laura Lee Washburn chapbook prize. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
by Shlagha Borah
walks out of the house, walks into a ditch,
disappears. inside, he grows into my father.
he is muddy. dirt crawls on his body.
he wakes up at dawn and draws water from the well,
shivers,
sits on his father’s bicycle, delivering newspapers through the january fog.
boils two eggs on an open fire, slices them with a thread.
smoke covers the boy’s trachea.
the boy feeds his five siblings.
he is sent to the boy scout camp.
learns how to be a wife.
the boy’s mother leaves for the city.
the boy paints sets for onkiya naat. becomes the narrator. plays a woman.
sits with his dying aunt through the entire night.
terrified of touch, he lets his aunt hold his hand.
he cycles through the graveyard at midnight.
wakes up the only doctor in three villages.
the boy’s aunt does not make it through the night.
the boy doesn’t believe in worship
the boy is belted
the boy stops growing
the boy walks out of the ditch.
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Shlagha Borah (she/her) is from Assam, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and is an Assistant Editor at The Offing. She’s a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist. Her work has been supported by Tin House, Brooklyn Poets, and VCCA, among others. See shlaghaborah.com.
by Jodi Balas
At the beach and nearly 40 I lay, stretched out, eyes bleached
from the overcast sky. The kind of biting light that doesn’t
know when to give—coloring the mood with its tin breath.
As a child, I would cloud gaze, viewing all possibilities from
above: my future home, the boat I would never own,
a family anchored in a cloak of purity. My body—a revolver
launching cartwheels off diving boards, the blasé hand of
youth flipping the bird to my future self with joints firmly intact.
But today the sky exudes a somber glow, as if saying, I am tired.
Clouds pull like a swath of torn linens; and although I lather
my aging skin with the highest level of SPF, it merely glints
like an apparition. I turn on my stomach and sink into a bed
of tight sand, heartbeat caught in the tunnel of my throat—
the closest thing to a landing strip I have.
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Jodi Balas is a neurodivergent poet based out of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Her poetry has been featured in The Shore, December Magazine, Chestnut Review, McNeese Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “His mouth, mine” was selected as a finalist for the 2023 River Heron Review Poetry Prize and her poem “Bone Density” was chosen by Danusha Lameris as the winning poem for the 2023 Comstock Review Poetry Prize.
Gwenyth Wheat
so bright you don’t get to return it.
Hold the abundance gently—
the news that she’s entered recovery,
or the conversation about young grief,
or the feeling of his cry balanced
right there, as if on the waterline,
waiting. And he is too, the man
wondering how to go about days
like normal. He’s outside
in his golden California garden,
tending to plums, ferns, and rose.
But the most beautiful thing—
the lemon tree, he salvaged
from trash and replanted,
right there by the fence,
now bears endless yellow.
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Gwenyth Wheat (she/her), nominee for Best New Poets 2024, is currently earning her MFA and MA at McNeese State University. Her work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in Poetry and has appeared in Great Lakes Review, The Poet’s Touchstone, Voicemail Poems, ZAUM, and elsewhere. She is a writing instructor and the Poetry Editor for The McNeese Review.
by Sharon Tracey
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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—Jennifer Bartlett (1991-92); oil on canvas
How do you build a painting with only
sixty minutes to live
between five and six in the evening
on a seven square-foot grid—
she’s dug a fishpond in a courtyard
fissured it in time
stocked it with cold-blooded koi
dressed in calico and banana yellow
some seem dredged in flour as if
they might be battered. They dart
and swim among the water lilies
then tip their scales and slip
under as if cold war spies.
Leaves past their prime have fallen
and float upon the placid surface
like Matisse cutouts that have died.
So much happens in a single hour
and so little—you stare
at the appearance of depth
and think of the fish, the ticking clock,
where the weeping light goes
and realize that you could just walk away
just take something and walk—
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Sharon Tracey is the author of three poetry collections—Land Marks (Shanti Arts 2022), Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Shanti Arts 2020), and What I Remember Most is Everything (All Caps Publishing 2017). Her poems have been published in Crab Creek Review, Terrain, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others. See sharontracey.com.
by Louise Robertson
It moves like three rocks
at the bottom of a book bag
and smells
like a dropped soda cup,
a torn open packet of barbeque sauce,
and a Yu Gi Oh card
fading on the dash.
It reminds me
of the kitten we found
mewing under the deck
as well as the kibble
used to lure him out.
Today, it floats me
to work, a carriage with
smudged windows displaying a vast
panorama
ahead. This slow chariot
handles the long
veer, a sharp cutover and—
oh god, what soft light fills
this space made of tin and fabric
reeking of youth’s
frankincense, sweat,
and myrrh.
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Louise Robertson’s poetry has appeared in New Ohio Review, Dialogist, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, and many other publications. It’s been nominated three times for the Best of the Net and twice for a Pushcart and earned numerous other accolades. Her second full-length book of poetry (Body. Voice. Mind. Mouth.) was released late 2025.
by Ann Lauinger
Today is The Hunter’s last Valentine’s Day.
Let the record show how
eight decades of sweet talk and banter
are lavished tonight on The Parcae, "
three kindly, hygienic females who sponge
and diaper, tucking him in, fluttering out.
They’ll be back soon with the shears.
Let the record show the lifelong Hunt
for pubis or bum, desire’s rude triangles,
almost a heart.
This is the house The Hunter built. Let the record show
The Three-Cornered Home for The Wife,
The Girlfriend he cheated on The Wife with,
and The Other Girlfriend he cheated on
The Cheating-on-The-Wife Girlfriend with.
Note the separate studio for that ever-popular
girl group, The Incidentals.
Let the record show The Hunter is still beloved.
Taped to the blank TV screen,
item, one hand-made valentine (from artist girl-friend)
item, one comic valentine (from witty girl-friend).
Perched on the narrow white bed,
item, one daughter.
The Hunter whimpers without waking,
I want my mommy. Is love,
that ruthless, that simple?
Let the record show.
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Ann Lauinger’s three books are Dime Saint, Nickel Devil (Broadstone Books, 2022), Against Butterflies (Little Red Tree, 2013), and Persuasions of Fall (U. of Utah, 2004), which won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Poems have appeared in journals such as The Cumberland River Review, Georgia Review, Parnassus, Smartish Pace, and Southern Poetry Review; in anthologies including The Bedford Introduction to Literature; and on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.
by Julie L. Moore
I awoke to a song in the field,
penny whistle beckoning in the pitch
of expectation, last evening’s sleet
sighing beneath the morning sun.
Nothing melts this month, least of all hearts
of ice. What else can I say? The devil does exist
in the dreadful details. His heavy musk
hangs in the air, clawing at us. He is father
to many lies because his misery
loves their company.
But oh, that song! It lifts me
not into rapture over the Valentine sky—
this is not about transcendence—
but into the slow work of the rabbit outside,
foraging for food amid the shrubs,
toting a twig back to its den.
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A Best of the Net and eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award. Recent poetry has appeared in African American Review, Fare Forward, Image Journal, Quartet, River Heron Review, Thimble, and Verse Daily. See julielmoore.com.
by Jennifer Franklin
February 11, 2025
Each year when the sharp
threat of snow
pierces me as I walk the dog,
I think of you. Of your impossible
words piled
on the desk waiting to be pressed
between the covers of your last
book, waiting
in your bedroom while you
fiddled with the gas. I refuse
to believe
this is what you wanted.
Certain he would find you—
save you
from the fire in your brain.
Unappreciated, you made him
what he was.
Wounded, abandoned with endless
childcare. Insatiable need
of babies
crying into the harsh morning light.
They take and take until
there is nothing
recognizable left. I know this can drive
you to a room full of weapons—
knives, flame, gas
until you think, in sleep-deprived
delirium that they are calling
offering oblivion—
a lover’s hand on your neck.
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Jennifer Franklin is the author of three poetry collections, including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way, 2023), finalist for the Paterson Prize and the Julie Suk Award. Her work has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum, and published in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Poetry in Motion. She won a Pushcart Prize, a NYFA grant, and a CRCF Award. She is cofounder of Words Like Blades reading series.
by Rachel Mindell
Less than two inches high or wide.
Made of copper alloy and gilt, the buckle
depicts two incredible happenings.
On one side, a couple to be betrothed.
The woman’s arm extended
such that the man can grip her hand.
Each has a right foot out.
Above their heads, the Christogram
sanctifies their union in an emerging faith.
On the reverse, Bellerophon astride Pegasus
slays the Chimera with lead on his spear,
forcing it down her lion throat such that
the dragon fire she breathes will melt it,
gagging her, killing also her goat
midsection and her snake behind.
In each scene, a woman of parts is tamed.
In each scene, the divine is invoked, be it
the hovering miracle or the heroism of metal.
What was the comfort of bearing both tales
simultaneously at the belly when one must
have always remained dominant, facing out.
In this beginning, two things true and violent, one obscured.
In the beginning, one always takes and another is taken.
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Rachel Mindell is a writer living in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of three chapbooks and poems scattered around the internet.
by Emily Patterson
From below the branches it’s easy to mistake a ripe leaf for a Red Haven, and the rapid rain that drives us under shallow eaves might be misconstrued as urgency, but nothing is urgent here: not the cattails blowzy by the pond; not my daughter’s short steps through sodden rows of unmown clover; not the sunny fuzz of each fruit’s underside, flesh that would be rosy if not for its own shadow. At home on the kitchen table, we tally our bounty: precisely forty peaches and not one ready, to my daughter’s dismay. Impatience, for all its false rush, has been my own longtime companion, and so I try not to shoo her grasping hands. How slowly I am learning to love: not only what takes time, but the time it takes.
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Emily Patterson (she/her) is the author of The Birth of Undoing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), as well as three chapbooks. Her work is published or forthcoming in North American Review, CALYX, Christian Century, The Penn Review, Literary Mama, NELLE, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Emily is a curriculum designer for Highlights for Children and lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. See emilypattersonpoet.com.
by Susan Rich
like the finest wine I’ve never tasted—
perhaps the tang of a Montepulciano.
How the liquid looks full-bodied,
catches light as it breathes.
We stare as if into a still life,
watch our sommelier pour
the complex, expensive taste
on the edge of a dome-shaped glass.
O, to be admired like that—
desired for stable ankles, softening
bellies, healthy breasts.
Sixty-one and still here. At the party,
I meet a man with hair,
check his hands: perhaps mid-eighties?
But I see the earlier version
call me honey, carry my packages
from the car. What if
we could see the octogenarian,
as delicious as a Shiraz,
bold, buttery, rare;
perhaps in the body’s limitations
we might transform
into a tribe of small kindnesses—
our extended outlooks reconfigured
into art installation or tableaus
underneath cool sheets—
long fingers still entering
the bungalows of our bodies.
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Susan Rich is the author and/or editor of nine books including Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry). She is editor of Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds (Raven Chronicles Press). Her poems appear in Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.
by Katherine Maurer
On the sixty-degree day in February, here
on a picnic blanket we should not be lying on
under insects that should not have hatched
from the slow creek, which should not be warm enough.
Too big to be gnats, hovering too still to be flies
changing direction abruptly as spaceships.
I’m uneasy because I have no name
for them, don’t know their intentions. They are outliers,
like everything now—lonely line this year draws on the graph,
the sun at the wrong angle to be warm, winter sky smeared
with cirrus clouds no one planned to be under. A man
with a telephoto lens enters the frame, focuses, considers,
then walks on. Wind hisses through the dead oak leaves,
a cold sound, as if we are listening to a recording of winter,
the way we would to rain on a sound machine, to fall asleep.
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Katherine Maurer received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her MA in clinical psychology from Eastern Illinois University. Her poetry has been published in journals including Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Cave Wall, and Sycamore Review, and twice-nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Champaign, Illinois and works as a mental health therapist. See katherinemaurer.com and katherinemaurer.substack.com."
by Michelle Geoga
by Romana Iorga
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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by Mary Beth Hines
she teaches me crave must have and I beg
because her brown eyes open and close, alive,
and prettier than Jo Ellen Darcy’s blues
plus, the way her two perfect, pink-bowed
ponytails brush her pinafored shoulders
but mainly, it’s that you pull her string
and she talks and talks, buttery-voiced
like a dream girlfriend will you play with me
tell me a story please brush my hair
and I do, one afternoon in Jo Ellen’s
basement playroom, thrilled to be let in,
I find that doll and cling
till Jo Ellen tires of me, says
your shorts are too short,
I can see your fat butt and I flee
home where I plead with mother, father,
God, and my best bet, Santa, who gave that doll
to give-and-grab-back Jo Ellen last Christmas,
now, clearly, I must have my own, and defenses
down, I let them all know how much I need
a dependable friend and really what girl doesn’t
yearn as I do—all those Chatty Cathys beamed
into our living rooms amidst Flintstones
and Road Runner cartoons, and when I close
my eyes, tune them out, I can almost feel
my finger hook around that little hoop, my pull
and release, and her I love you rings and rings
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Mary Beth Hines is the author of Winter at a Summer House (Kelsay, 2021). Her writing is widely published, with her most recent work appearing, or soon to appear, in Cider Press Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. See marybethhines.com.
by Sophie Yu
by Tammy C. Greenwood
by Dorian Kotsiopoulos