Flipbook of Sky in Love

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Met

by Jennifer Met

a cento for Max*

The moon was dark.

She had eyes, I could see them—

eyes like blisters.

She described an orgasm

is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets—

small, precise, and a little wicked.

The hilarious moon—

part bone, part me—

your gift for gab is of cosmic import.

Made of shadow

with white chalk,

your lips, right after mine, form a crescent.

In our bed, in the dark,

when you smile, every tooth is a perfect O

staring at pictures, paralyzed for hours.

 

Look at me and bore me—

to ever be bored

under the light of the moon.

Listening to you makes me naked,

my body lit up—

not sleeping, for who can sleep

beyond the door, in the realest bed

where we levitate—

true not only of the world, but of perceiving it.

 

 

*A circular cento using lines from different poems in Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016), starting and ending with “The End.”

 

Title: “Appeal to my First Love”; 1 “The End”; 2 “Plush Bunny”; 3 “Radiation in New Jersey, Convalescence in New York”; 4 “Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture”; 5 “The Senses”; 6 “Lyric Complicity for One”; 7 “Universe Where We Weren’t Artisis”; 8 “The Watercolor Eulogy”; 9 “Poem in Which My Shrink is a Little Boy”; 10 “The Vacuum Planet of the Pee Pee Priestess”; 11 “The Blimp”; 12 “Poem About My Wife Being Perfect And Me Being Afraid”; 13 “For Crow”; 14 “Poem Set in the Day and Night”; 15 “Dawn of Man”; 16 “Sky-Sex Dreams of Randal”; 17 “The Curve”; 18 “Troy”; 19 “Hi, Melissa”; 20 “Afternoon”; 21 “The Big Loser”; 22 “When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying To Criticize the Universe”; 23 “Poem To My Dog, Monday, On Night I Accidentally Ate Meat”; 24 “The End”

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Met lives in a small town in North Idaho. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and winner of the Jovanovich Award. Recent work is published or forthcoming in the Comstock Review, Gravel, Gulf Stream, Harpur Palate, Juked, Kestrel, Moon City Review, Nimrod, Sleet Magazine, Tinderbox, and Zone 3, among other journals. She is the author of the chapbook, Gallery Withheld (Glass Poetry Press, 2017).

Drowning

SWWIM Every Day
by Kindra McDonald

by Kindra McDonald

How long is the longest breath

you can hold? How long the grudge

of silence? How do you fight buoyancy

so well? Swelling your lungs with birdshot—

The slow rain bends the stems

of the tall weeds like piano keys.

In the steeple of your hands we lean in again

of the tall weeds like piano keys

the slow rain bends the stems

so well swelling your lungs with birdshot

of silence, how do you fight buoyancy?

You can hold, how long the grudge,

how long is the longest breath?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Kindra McDonald received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is an adjunct writing professor and doctoral student. Her work has appeared in Rise up Review, Plainsongs and others. She is the author of the chapbooks Concealed Weapons (ELJ Publications, 2015) and Elements and Briars (Redbird Chapbooks, 2016). Her full-length book, Fossils, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She lives with her husband in Coastal Virginia where she bakes and wrangles cats.

My Dharma

SWWIM Every Day
by Rachael Lynn Nevins

by Rachael Lynn Nevins

It’s possible to go wild again, says the woman sitting next to me

over breakfast this January morning at the monastery.

There are neurons in our hearts and guts,

and we fail to heed them because we’ve filled our minds

with language.

 

I’ve just met this woman

sitting here at this table by the ox-herding pictures.

She tells me she’s a farmer and that she speaks to the earth.

Getting messy is my dharma. The soil is alive

and it wants us to listen.

I live in the city where, I confess, my fingers never touch the soil.

I have to seek the wilderness inside, among

our cups and bowls and my children’s many

miniature cars and trucks. My dharma is simple.

I wake in the dark to write poems by hand, and the words

rise up from inside of me, unbidden.

They want me to listen.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Rachael Lynn Nevins is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer whose poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Rattle, Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Literary Mama, Hazlitt, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. She teaches Online Advanced Poetry for The Writers Studio.

Curly, My Tangler

SWWIM Every Day
by Jessica Jacobs

by Jessica Jacobs

  “Other lovers want to live with particular eyes

                                        I only want to be your stylist.”

                                        —Pablo Neruda


Who needs Rumpelstiltskin, when such treasure

abounds: her gold woven

around my bike gears, tangled in my toothbrush,

vining every drain—even, sometimes, found

in my mouth upon waking. And just

this morning, from the bathroom, she called me in.

            My mama’s the only one who ever

            brushed out my hair, she said. But you’re

            my wife. You should know.

                                                                                                    

I began at the bottom, her curls separating

with the thick sound of good cloth tearing.

            Do you see why I had no friends

            when I was little? she asked. Mama

            brushed out my hair each day before school.

I eased my fingers, for the first time,

all the way through; asked how that felt for her.

            Vulnerable, she said.

Shimmering out beneath the overhead light—a climbing

of kudzu, a symphony of trumpet vines—her hair revealed itself.

            It was like Velcro, she said. Anything would stick in it—

            bubble gum, spitwads, pencils. I’d come home crying

            and Mama would hold my ugly, frizzy head

            and say, Baby, they’re just jealous.

            As though her love could make the lie so.

When it comes to her, her mother and I

have this kind of love in common. Only now, the lie

has come to pass. My wife, whose hair

is the shade of farm-fresh yolks, the color of things rich

on the tongue. Whose hair sings the plaintive song

of bed springs. Whose hair is the drifting

smoke from a village of chimneys, corkscrews

enough for a thousand bottles of wine. A ski slope

of s-curves, a grove of twirling maple keys,

every playground slide

worth sliding. Before a rapt audience,

a company of ballerinas cambers their hands

to trace out, in the air, your hair; my dear angora

goat, my cloud of bats spiraling from the cave.


_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Pelvis with Distance, winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her second collection Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going is forthcoming from Four Way Books in March 2019. She lives in Asheville with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, and serves as the Associate Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. You can find more of her work at www.jessicalgjacobs.com.

Gertrude on artum nuptias

SWWIM Every Day
by Dayna Patterson

by Dayna Patterson

Grief wolfed me from the inside gnawed my

spine and I could roll over and suffer or dig a

pit and bait it flay the beast on my marriage

bed I chose the shovel I chose the hunter’s

knife to slit grief scrotum to throat and no I

didn’t know I took a murderer as husband

and please keep in mind married so long I’d

acquired the habit of twoness two minds two

crowns two pairs of eyes the worst word in

any language alone 

                                           and letting go I felt 

formal as a stone splitting and a brother-in-

law’s suit was a solution to my un-halving

yes frailty if frail is to bury my dead and seize

fruit growing over the grave and if I had to

do it again perhaps Polonius this time yes

even in his fussy grandiloquence I tell you

remarriage would’ve still been overhasty still

a thorn to my son still this old heart’s

cleaving

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Dayna Patterson's creative work has appeared recently in Hotel Amerika, So to Speak, Western Humanities Review, and Zone 3. She is a former managing editor of Bellingham Review, founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre, and poetry editor for Exponent II Magazine. She is a co-editor (with Tyler Chadwick and Martin Pulido) of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry (Peculiar Pages, 2018). Connect with her at: www.daynapatterson.com.

Ordinary Psalm with Alternative Facts

SWWIM Every Day
by Julia B. Levine

by Julia B. Levine

Say it and it will be so.

Say there are borders that cannot be broken.

That science is an expertly shot horror film

we are wise to avoid before bed. 

Say that an executive order

has unshackled our lives from natural law,

our flesh from the entwined entire.

That, in time, we do not vanish. 

Say that the first week you know it's terminal,

I bake bread and bear it warm,

swaddled in paper towels, against my chest.

Outside, your husband picks lemons

shin-deep in a lawn gone neon-green.

In pictures above the table,

your two boys shine.  

Say that I’m not sick too

of love as the original congress on loss.

Of hope handcuffed to habeas corpus.

Say blue for your eyes, black for your hair,

wren for your twitching hand in mine.

Say that it’s not happening

so that it won’t, the world no longer turning

at the speed of betrayal, a little sunlight instead

sown across your kitchen floor.

Say that we are poised to enter spring

and in the alt-truth all around us

it's smooth sailing, easy peasy,

nothing but the blast furnaces

of the almond orchards fired up,

exploding in a sudden, ethereal snow.

_______________________________________________________________________________________


Julia B. Levine’s most recent poetry collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU press 2014), was awarded the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her awards include the Tampa Review Poetry Prize for her second collection, Ask, and the Anhinga Prize in Poetry and a bronze medal from Foreword Magazine for her first collection, Practicing for Heaven. Widely published, her work has been anthologized in many collections. She lives and works in Davis, California.

Twitch

SWWIM Every Day
by Issa M. Lewis

by Issa M. Lewis

The weight of his gunmetal tongue was staggering.

A projectile of marked velocity, propelled

by an explosion—in this case, uncontrolled. I had deflected—

turned a shoulder to his trigger finger, left a strand

of hair that must have tugged in just the wrong way—

just enough—or not nearly—depending on which of us you asked.

The sex we never had made him twitch. Someone told me later

it was because he liked me so much

that he wanted me to vanish. That he wanted to do the vanishing.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Issa M. Lewis is the author of Infinite Collisions (Finishing Line Press, 2017). A runner-up in the 2017 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize and 2013 winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, her poems have appeared in journals such as Jabberwock, Pearl, and Naugatuck River Review.

Eye of the Storm

SWWIM Every Day
by Beth Gordon

by Beth Gordon

Hungry for asparagus and honeysuckle, damaged forsythia,

the thick persistent dandelions which have also just arrived, we sit

on the unswept deck and drink the last of syrupy Christmas wine, 

ready for clear liquor and citrus, lemon or lime or tangerines,

for violets to emerge from the muddy ground, purple and naïve 

to our impatience, our forced hibernation, our weeks of unpredictable 

temperatures and hurricanes where there is no ocean.  


Mockingbirds repeat our hungry cadence and wait for baby 

foxes to respond, the white cat bathes in half-damp dirt, letting newborn 

field mice escape his precise claws, today is not a day for murder 

or lightning, he looks the other way because he knows where 

to find them in morning darkness, he will always find them no matter 

the season, the barometric pressure or category six tornadoes 

or possible ice in the first full days of May.


A train groans its winter song unaware that crows and lesser birds

are disoriented, dizzy with pollen, unable to mimic the sound 

of February frost, of legal gunfire, deadly force, of inconsolable

mothers, on this late April evening when the sun promises to bloom 

until midnight, swaddle us like abandoned babies on Viking ships, 

our sun-starved skin ready to shed, to metamorphose 

into living creatures who need no touch or care. 


_______________________________________________________________________________________

Beth Gordon received her MFA from American University a long time ago and was not heard from again until 2017 when her poems began to appear in numerous journals including Into the Void, Outlook Springs, Verity La and After Happy Hour Review. Landlocked in St. Louis for 17 years, Beth has taught several local writing workshops, and is co-founder of a poetry reading series in Grafton, IL. She is also co-editor of Gone Lawn.

When the Spine Fails to Offer Support

SWWIM Every Day
by Jude Marr

by Jude Marr

a treachery of flesh and bone: hope no

wider than a walking cane: pain

no killer will cross—

                                    fear this pain

                                    back away, back

                                    away

or stand: take a stand: fake

it till you make a stand: broken but (not)

bowed: knotted but (un)frayed: laid

out flat—

no, not that—

fetal curl: furled fern leaf: ammonite

or amber shell: trunk or tusk: snaking

root—

from brain to base, a cord—

strength is curved,  not straight: I make

myself into a curve—

                                    bear this pain

                                    wait, wait

                                    wait

the turning gyrus cingulate

will motivate

a slow uncurl—

my spine and I reintegrate—

                                    courage is pain

                                    (don’t) resist

                                    curve your brain

                                    into a fist.


_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jude Marr teaches, and writes poetry, as protest. They are currently a PhD candidate at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and their first chapbook Breakfast for the Birds (Finishing Line), was published in 2017. Recent credits include Nightjar Review, Weatherbeaten and Punch Drunk. Jude is also poetry editor for r.kv.r.y.

At the Nimbus Fish Hatchery, Sacramento

SWWIM Every Day
by Chloe Martinez

by Chloe Martinez

Nimbus: droplets in air, cloud-thought word

that rainbows at the right angle, as along the


             stair-step artificial river where the rainbow

             trout start small, just gently making their way


upstream—but if we proceed to the first little

waterfall place, we see the bigger ones making


             the leap, some failing and one caught mid-

             evolution for a moment, gripping with one fin-


arm the tiny fence, falling back—but they keep

flinging forward their slick slight bodies, as if trying


             to demonstrate a principle, as if God made them

             to show us what effort is. A real river is rushing,


after recent rains, beside us, but the rainbows

don’t even know or care, or do they? But at the top


             of the fake stream, the wall is higher, so

             the biggest fish leap up again and again but cannot


cross over—but the breathless curl of their

fan tails, but the wild and doomed enterprise of them—


             but we lean forward, watching, as if our bodies

             might lift theirs into the air, but a little higher—


_______________________________________________________________________________________

Chloe Martinez lives with her husband and two daughters in Claremont, CA, where she teaches on the religions of South Asia at Claremont McKenna College. A graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing MA and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Waxwing, The Normal School, The Cortland Review, The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is at work on a scholarly monograph and seeking a publisher for her first poetry collection.

Imaginary Elegy

SWWIM Every Day
by Melissa Eleftherion

by Melissa Eleftherion

I am trying to understand you, moth

Your brown blink of dun fur dotted white buzzing

You, dead on my office floor

You, taunting me on the house porch

Who do you carry?

The Internet tells me you bear a skull on your thorax

But I see a smiling pig snout as if you welcomed the down and out and muddy

Do I know you? Did we meet on the beached fishing boat in Monterosso?

I sense you have a message transcending statistical data

We are both honey-named short proboscis Medusas

Larvae for the undercurrent’s meat

Taxonomical aberrations

Pierce the wax, damage the fruit

The myth of my Italian heritage says I may have the malocchia

To be stalked by a death’s head moth

To be stalked by wings I must carry a horn

Stout tongue of the stigma

If the oil forms an eye, your fur is mine

Myth says moths are dead souls

Your body was as intact as a specimen

As I set you in the wastebasket

Where is the apparition you’ve been carrying?

I want to talk to her.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Melissa Eleftherion is a writer, librarian, and a visual artist. She grew up in Brooklyn, dropped out of high school, and went on to earn an MFA in Poetry from Mills College and an MLIS from San Jose State University. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018) & six chapbooks: huminsect (dancing girl press, 2013), prism maps (Dusie, 2014), Pigtail Duty (dancing girl press, 2015), the leaves the leaves (poems-for-all, 2017), green glass asterisms (poems-for-all, 2017) & little ditch (above/ground press, 2018). Founder of the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange for San Francisco State University, Melissa now lives in Mendocino County where she works as a Teen Librarian, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series at Ukiah Library. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.

Her Spring Day Poetry Reading

SWWIM Every Day
by Marjorie Thomsen

by Marjorie Thomsen

for Wendy DeGroat

a seedling pushing through ash is worlds away

from morning’s lawnmower, neighborhood turkey vulture

and its shock of magnificence above children

rapt with a small ball. Her lines bring a woman’s

hands to life: cayenne onto the chick peas. I ache

for the mundane but come evening, will try to woo

something celestial to my open and undraped window.

Deep-end blue napery on table, swaying wildflowers

in a funky-shaped vase. I swear I’ll make nectarine-cardamom

jam to sing into the deep bowl of morning. Before bed and dreams

without words, there’s the private act of serene ablutions—

lather of warm water and rose soap. Her poems.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Marjorie Thomsen is the author of Pretty Things Please and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Poems have been read on The Writer’s Almanac and she has received awards from the New England Poetry Club and the University of Iowa. A poem about hiking in high heels is being made into a short animated film. She recently earned certification to become a Poet-in-Residence in the Boston Public Schools.


Daughter I

SWWIM Every Day
by Meg Reynolds

by Meg Reynolds

  Nepal Paper, Methyl Cellulose, Hair, Fabric, Glass. Kiki Smith, 1999


As usual, I have lost you. You’ve left me 

walking a crooked mile. If I stand

this morning, I’ll spill to the floor. 

Who else looks at you? Who combs your snarls

and dodges your teeth? Who listens to your pleas

for milky affection? Who strokes 

your brown and leathered head?

You have my eyes, that daunted look. 

The red-membrane cape wasn’t meant for this. 

I stitched it for the yard, to stitch you 

to the yard and lullabies and felted goodnight stories. 

O little wolf, did you 

have to follow the moon

like a ball bouncing out the door? 

Wasn’t our house, choked with ivy 

and old time, enough for you? 

When I lie on my back at night, 

my back is your bare foot,

thick-pricked with thorns. I can’t sleep under your bloody coat,

the red, red loss of you.

How long before you stop unspooling

between tree trunks and make a home with me? 

How long before you lacquer me in happiness,

a film of laughter thin on the hardwood?

Come home. I long 

to smooth your bent dress.

Isn’t my wanting reason enough?

I have enough of me. You

are the thing worth having, worth

all the bite marks, the unknowable cost. 

I’ve left you a brick of chocolate 

by the door. Come kiss me goodnight

with that mess on your face.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Meg Reynolds is a poet, artist, and teacher living in Burlington, VT. Her work has appeared in The Missing Slate, Mid-American Review, Fugue, and the anthology Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman as well as The Book of Donuts. She is the co-director of writinginsideVT, a program offers that writing instruction at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility.


Best of the Net Nominations 2018

SWWIM Every Day

Congratulations to our Best of the Net nominees for 2018! Thank you for these wonderful poems that we keep in our hearts, minds, and souls:

1. Cannibal Woman by Ada Limón

https://www.swwim.org/blog/2018/2/21/cannibal-woman-by-ada-limn?rq=Ada

2. After Pawning the Engagement Ring by Jenny Molberg

https://www.swwim.org/blog/2018/1/31/after-pawning-the-engagement-ring-by-jenny-molberg?rq=Jenny%20Molberg

3. Midlife Crisis by Mia Leonin

https://www.swwim.org/blog/2018/6/6/midlife-crisis-by-mia-leonin?rq=Mia%20Leonin

4. Among Us, Divine by Maureen Seaton

https://www.swwim.org/blog/2018/6/6/among-us-divine-by-maureen-seaton?rq=Maureen%20Seaton

5. I Want Some Land by Mary Block

https://www.swwim.org/blog/2018/6/6/i-want-some-land-by-mary-block?rq=Mary%20Block

6. Road to Labelle, FLA by Beth Gordon

https://www.swwim.org/blog/2018/6/22/road-to-labelle-fla-by-beth-gordon?rq=Beth%20Gordon


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.

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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.

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