by Eileen Murphy

1. The surgery was soundless as shadows on grass.

2. I am knifed and stiff as I lie in the brown bed at dusk.

3. My dreams flap tired nightgowns.

4. The first autumn leaves–letters cut out of yellow ochre-colored paper.

5. Geese overhead honk loudly, like an emergency vehicle.

6. I dream a pothos vine snakes down a wooden staircase.

7. I untangle it.

8. I dream five warts on my big toe.

9. I pour acid on them. Will that get rid of them?

10. The ice cream truck plays “Turkey in the Straw” through the neighborhood. Every afternoon.

11. Touch me. Today my face is a blanket.

12. I saw a black racer snake in the back yard.

13. It wasn’t bothering anyone.

14. It slid from Point A to Point B, one clump of weeds to the other.

15. Listen, sick woman, listen–way back to when you minnowed around the block.

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Eileen Murphy lives near Tampa with her husband and three dogs and teaches literature/English at Polk State College. She’s a poet, reviewer, visual artist, and staff writer for Cultural Weekly magazine. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she’s published poetry in Tinderbox (nominated for Pushcart Prize), Thirteen Myna Birds, Rogue Agent, Writing In a Woman’s Voice, and a number of other journals. Her website is mishmurphy.com.

Aug 22
Aug 22 To Eat a Grapefruit

SWWIM Every Day

by Meg Yardley

by Meg Yardley

1. You need a sharp-pointed spoon.

You hunt through the bins at Goodwill,

settling spoons into each others’ hollows,

counting out sets of rose-trellised forks

you don’t need, training your eye

to seek out something serrated.

2. You hollow the pulp out of each section.

You leave the membranes intact.

3. You didn’t set out to eat a grapefruit;

they just started arriving on your doorstep weekly.

Your partner makes a face when you offer

the coral-colored juice: it needs sugar.

You delight perversely in that wince, a reminder

of how much sour you can stand.

4. There will be splatter.

You’d better move your daughter’s homework

off the table. The 400-page biography

will go back to the library with its pages speckled,

crisp white paper damp and relaxed.

5. Eating a grapefruit absorbs

attention. You can try to do the crossword

or write a poem about eating a grapefruit

while eating a grapefruit

but soon you find you haven’t filled in a letter

in five minutes, you’re luxuriating in bitter

liquor, this one thing.

6. Yesterday you set some nectarines on the conveyer belt—

the cashier passed them over her scanner, paused

to inhale with half-closed eyes—

but they seem to be gone so quickly.

Only the grapefruit—its untidy treatment,

its yielding flesh,

its bright and biting flavor—

only the grapefruit lingers.

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Meg Yardley lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is a school-based social worker. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hanging Loose, Rattle, the East Bay Review (Pushcart nominated), AMP, Non-Binary Review, Leveler, Right Hand Pointing, and the Peauxdunque Review. She has a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and a master’s degree in Social Work.

Aug 21
Aug 21 Energize

SWWIM Every Day

by Lesley Wheeler

by Lesley Wheeler

Transporter or holodeck? Either I

have rematerialized incompletely

(sparkling shower of particles

dimmer) or this simulated city

has acquired a wobble, a tell.

Puffy-jacketed people

duck from awning to overhang

along Newbury Street wondering

if swan boats sail in the slanting

drizzle or a hand-held foam-coated

reservoir might suit better. Inside

the Church of the Covenant,

meanwhile, Tiffany glass

somehow glows against cold

puddingstone—how does a yoked

god’s robe luminesce by cloud,

its whiteness alive with ocher

and smoky motion? Gazing

at invisible sparrows, bracing

an overlarge hand on a rock,

he is surely transported too,

that blink of tropical foliage

behind him now, that dreamy blue,

and him thinking how, lord,

did I get to Boston? I drove,

theoretically, via the hospital

where nurses unhooked my mother

from catheter, from I.V.,

and handed her over. Moved

a bed downstairs, stocked her fridge

with little bottles of virtual

food optimistically labeled

Ensure for safety and, for power,

Boost. Counted and sealed

her pills into rows of labeled

oyster shells. Then, north,

as if stillness were heresy.

Back home a library of mountains

I never read. Mosaic rain

I smash right through.

Look at the god, good-looking,

how he looks at the ground,

willing it real, willing himself

to love where he hardly lives,

in his stupid human body,

an always ailing thing. Rather

the sparrow be true than cells

struggling to contain

unlikely radiance, and failing.

Compounding errors. The tumor

an index of poisons, every one

chiming as they transform her.

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Lesley Wheeler is the author of four poetry collections, including Radioland and Heterotopia, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize; her recent chapbook, Propagation, was published by dancing girl press. Her poems and essays appear in Ecotone, Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, and other journals. She is the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia and blogs about poetry at lesleywheeler.org.

Aug 20
Aug 20 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.

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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.

Aug 17
Aug 17 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”).

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