Windows

SWWIM Every Day
by Sherine Elise Gilmour

by Sherine Elise Gilmour

A mother I do not know says, “I am told my child cannot go to school next year because she needs a feeding tube.”

The words “feeding tube” hang in the air. Her daughter wears purple corduroy pants embroidered with princess crowns. Her legs are thin toothpicks. They kick and kick the seat in front of her. The mother says, “Most days, I put on tights, then leggings, then jeans, just to keep her warm. Just to hold up her pants.”

Another mother says, “My husband’s family is so angry with me. I am the one who got our son evaluated.”

 

Another mother says, “Where I come from, autism means 'alone.' 'Auto,' 'alone,' so now my mother keeps calling and saying, 'Why do you send Ibrahim to a special school? He’s just a loner.' They called him loner last weekend at my house after I spent the day cooking for them. Why does a loner need a special school? Loner, loner. I pray to God, I tell them. But why can’t my son have Allah and a special school too?”

 

Words in me I can’t get out. I am the perpetual listener. Locked up, mummified, my ribs like a corset, my anxiety like a cloth wrapped tight around me.

 

Finally, I lean into the group of women, heads huddled together in the aisle of the bus, and I say, “I had to speak to my mother… She never calls my son by name. She calls him nicknames, Sheldon and Forrest Gump. She visited and she kept shouting, 'Run, Forest, run,' in front of everyone at the park."

 

The mother who usually sleeps says in a low quiet voice, “My family will not visit for the holidays. They are embarrassed of him.” She wraps her cardigan around her chest like a blanket and turns away.

 

The one mother in the second row who is always rude starts laughing.

 

A mother who understands some English begins to speak. She speaks quickly in Spanish, covers her eyes, begins to cry.

 

The mother in the seat behind me says, “I am so lucky. My parents understand. They try to help, but my mother is in her 80s. I worry, what’s going to happen? Who will take care of him when I die? I know, I know, he’ll be in a home. But …” She trails off and looks at her two-year-old son, his skin moon-colored, a child’s skin, soft and sweet. He is reaching toward the top of the bus window. He reaches over and over again to where it is brightly lit. She leans down to his face and looks up. “What is it, honey? What is it?” Something only her son can see.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sherine Elise Gilmour graduated with an M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Green Mountains Review, Many Mountains Moving, Oxford University Press, River Styx, So To Speak, SWWIM, Tinderbox, and other publications.




Weather

SWWIM Every Day
by Heather Treseler

by Heather Treseler

A small rain down can rain but I am not outside, beside

an aluminum mouth of a gushing gutter, watching

the city sluiced in the casual event of falling water.


Nor am I standing in a shale of rubble, circled by dead

children’s toys, or crouched in a buckling raft, crusted

in cold salt and urine, chattel in a game of rockets


and gas. I breathe from two lungs, integral; my legs

warm under blankets’ nightly benediction. And love

lies sleeping, unharmed and unarmed beside me, arc


of her shoulder familiar as landscape to a painter whose

hands remember the curves of two cleaved hills, forelock

of treeline, the wild mane of sky. I trace hollow shadows


in a dark naming of parts as if my lover were a getaway

horse: throatlatch, barrel, and cannon; pastern, gaskin,

and hock. Tender, the names given to boats and beasts


of burden, what carries us from dock to ocean, trailhead

to highway, midnight to morning, censure to pleasure:

fugitives from dreams’ disasters. My beloved of nape,


buttock, and thigh; or stern, winch, and turnbuckle; or

dock, loin, and withers: in your body’s boat, I stow trust

for safe passage while distant wars make their incursions,


violence sends its newsworthy summons, and weather makes

a music of time. A small rain down can rain and by luck, Christ,

or zeitgeist, I cradle her in sleep’s long sail toward morning.

*Note from the author: The italicized line is adapted from the famous anonymous poem “Western Wind” from the early sixteenth century. To read it in modern English, please visit: https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/poetry_in_motion/atlas/newyork/western_wind/
For my purposes, I swap out the first article (“a” for “the”). 

__________________________________________________________

Heather Treseler’s poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Obsidian, Southern Humanities Review, and Missouri Review, among other journals. She is an associate professor of English at Worcester State University and a Visiting Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. In 2018-19, she is working on a manuscript of poems, Thesaurus for a Year of Desire, with the support of a fellowship from the Boston Athenaeum.

Daphne's Broken Sonnet

SWWIM Every Day
by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Apples are imagining themselves
onto hillsides—pink petals stick out their
tongues from the dark mouths of branches
and the forest canopy ripens overnight
until it pulses like a green heart.  Spring
frankensteins us all—softens our cyborg
brains (Admit it: you were thinking about what
mysteries your phone will sing out!) while your
body turns like a tree toward the light. Reader,
somedays it's just too much: powder blue sky,
light wind stirring the leaves as if they are
waving, no, beckoning me to root
and join in. How could I not give in? Trying
to find the song that’s buried in the soil.


__________________________________________________________

Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press), is her third collection of poetry. It was featured as the Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection for July 2017. Her other books include: Gold Passage and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air. Her work has been published in numerous publications including San Francisco Chronicle, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market 2013, Women’s Studies, and Chicago Quarterly Review. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

Ritual

SWWIM Every Day
by Alyse Knorr

by Alyse Knorr

When you pray to your ancestors I pray too—

por favor, avó, não deixe isso ser verdade—but

I don’t ask them about the bolt piercing

the heart on your skin, or why I’m a decade late.

My mothers foretold that night you pulled me in,

foretold how you’d take my head in your

steel-trap hands. Listen: quando eu não estou

com você, estou pensando em você—can you hear it

over the coffee fields, the cries of the women

birthing in the dirt? Can you hear it underground,

deeper than the seeds and the roots and the cashbox

and the mantle? Down in the core I’m keening        

quando estou com você, estou pensando em beijar você;

down in the mantle I’m keening you home.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and editor of Switchback Books. She is the author of the poetry collections Mega-City Redux (Green Mountains Review 2017), Copper Mother (Switchback Books 2016), and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books 2013), as well as the non-fiction book Super Mario Bros. 3 (Boss Fight Books 2016) and the poetry chapbooks Epithalamia (Horse Less Press 2015) and Alternates (dancing girl press 2014).


Welcome to the new SWWIM!

SWWIM Every Day


We're back! Thank you for waiting & reading & for supporting SWWIM and its mission! 

From 8/15/18 on, evey poem of the day will appear here as well as in your inbox (if you subscribe). 

Please roam through the site, find upcoming readings and events, and visit the archive of our first year when we published 192 poems by women, women-identifying and/or femme-presenting writers. Yeah!

Submissions are now open (click here to submit), and fee-free weeks will appear throughout the year. We're working hard to balance the real costs of running this operation and the fact that submission fees are a burden for many poets. We hear you, and we're trying to make this work for everyone.

Please reach out to us with any comments and/or feedback about the site. We're excited to hear what you think.


Take care & happy writing!

Catherine & Jen


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