Equinox

SWWIM Every Day
by Kristen Zory King

by Kristen Zory King

Every time my brother calls stoned
he tells me he doesn’t believe
in God. I know, I say. What else is there?

I list all the things I know for sure, 
like a kind of centipede that can see
an entire spectrum of purple

we could never imagine. Or, an oak tree
older than things like math or music.
I keep going, though I know he is not listening.

Some frogs bark, the sound louder
than a pack of dogs. You can hear them
best each May. Brother, don’t you remember

spring always comes late?  

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Kristen Zory King is a queer writer based in Washington, DC. She is founder of MoonLit, an organization that strives to creatively connect community through low-cost arts-based programming. Some of her previously published work can be found in Cactus Heart Press, Poetry Breakfast, and Lipstick Party Magazine. For more information, please visit kristenzoryking.com.

Mirage

SWWIM Every Day
by Emily Lake Hansen

by Emily Lake Hansen

I learned to swim inland. Somewhere

in Maine my mother took me to a lake,

a round, sandy bottom thing shaded by trees.

We called it a beach as if we could make

it so by naming it. If we called it love,

then it was love. The first duty station

I remember wasn’t even on a coast. There

it snowed in droves and we lived in a house

with green shutters. Or at least I think

they were green. My memory’s broken

sometimes like a naval base without a sea.

My father told planes where to land,

my mother cried into her soup, I read

fairy tales in the closet and we called it

home. At the lake I swam out to a far

away dock. I cannonballed into schools

of minnows. I shivered in my pink suit,

the water cold like snow.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Emily Lake Hansen is the author of the chapbook, The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Nightjar Review, The McNeese Review, Stirring: A Literary Collection, and Atticus Review, among others. She received an MFA from Georgia College and currently writes, teaches, and plays too many children's board games in Atlanta.

Etymology

SWWIM Every Day
by Jeni De La O

by Jeni De La O

Is it like peeling ginger root skin with a spoon,

the sadness for losing something you did not want?

Is it what coats the fingers when you squeeze a lemon?

What language exists for replacing existing emptiness

with a new emptiness that mourns in spite of you?

I think the root should be Latin; Latin loves quiet turmoil

and linden leaf tea. Latin feels appropriately weighty.

Can it have two suffixes, for the sake of accuracy?

Truth is I’ve never wanted a baby and, despite this sadness,

I still don’t want one; all this emotion feels wasteful.

I cook large dinners and insist on smoked sea salt,

as if I weren’t shedding a tear or two over the saucepan.

What is the clinical term for when you don't have a potato peeler

so you use a paring knife, and no matter how good you are, you lose a little potato?  

          and if you’re not very good, you lose the entire potato.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jeni De La O is an Afro-Cuban poet and storyteller living in Detroit. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Obsidian, York Literary Review, Really System, Gigantic Sequins, Eastern Iowa Review, Rigorous Magazine, and others. Jeni founded Relato:Detroit, the nation’s first bilingual community storytelling event, which seeks to bridge linguistics divides through story. She is a Poetry Editor for Rockvale Review and organizes Poems in the Park, an acoustic reading series based in Detroit.

On a Scale of 1-10

SWWIM Every Day
by Suzanne Edison

by Suzanne Edison

Who isn’t sick

            of being Sisyphus, pushing the rock

                        of your body daily, up from the bed?

When someone says hypochondriac

            all I can think is, give me a shot

                       

of adrenaline    irradiate this burden

no pain, no need to gain.

            So many tried

                        and failed treatments I say

                                    give it a name

call it, a filament

            spun into tourniquet

anomaly twisted to penalty, an infestation

scaling my nerves.

                                    ✷

What about heartache? multiple strains

            of arthritis, hers, her child’s,

                        the husband leaves

            she’s a power outage

                        a walking specter in bruised daylight

what bandage or antiseptic for her plight?

                       

                        was there an expiration date

                                                            for rupture?

pathologic or melancholic,

            her grieving—

                        a trail of gauze.

                                    ✷

A man says, “it’s transient”—

            he’s seeking

                        ground—a rock

the war

            still resides inside, amps up

                        his sugared house

bloody lows and highs, twitchy

brood of his eyes

            a bilious babble, warbles

                        like a bird of necrosis

                                    winged psychosis

his fractured peace

            begs     for measure.


_______________________________________________________________________________________

Suzanne Edison is the author of The Moth Eaten World, published by Finishing Line Press. Poems can be found in: About Place Journal: Rewilding issue, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, JAMA, SWWIM Every Day, What Rough Beast, Bombay Gin, The Naugatuck River Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening, ed. Joy Harjo & Brenda Peterson, and The Healing Art of Writing, Volume One.

St. Suzy Waud of the WXGT

SWWIM Every Day
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

Let us not forget our songs

that sang us in our times

of powerlessness,

swirling in our sacrums like

soul’s Charybdis

as our legs walked to their beats

because our hearts were

muffled AM stations,

hollow in their antiquated mono.

May we thank them on the daily

for their visions of crashing

waves and changing tides

when all we felt: feedback, static,

our own cluttered airwaves.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Originally from Columbus, Ohio, Jennifer Schomburg Kanke now lives in Tallahassee, Florida where she edits boring internal documents for Tallahassee Community College and is a poetry reader for Emrys. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Court Green, and Gingerbread House.

At the Scattering Garden

SWWIM Every Day
by Lori Desrosiers

by Lori Desrosiers

We scatter her ashes
in a cemetery garden near the house
protected by roses, blossoming cherry.

I open the bag inside the urn.
They look different than expected,
dry and brown with tiny bits of bone,
more sand-soft than powdery.

My daughters take their turns
and I take mine. My mother
does not blow away
but lands.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Lori Desrosiers’ poetry books are The Philosopher’s Daughter (Salmon Poetry, 2013); a chapbook, Inner Sky (Glass Lyre Press 2015); and Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak (Salmon Poetry, 2016). A new book of poems, Keeping Planes in the Air, will be out in March, 2019 from Salmon. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She edits Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry, and Wordpeace, an online journal dedicated to peace and justice.

Turkey in the Straw

SWWIM Every Day
by Eileen Murphy

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.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

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.

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.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

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.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

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.

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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