Antisocial Media

SWWIM Every Day
by Leah Mueller

by Leah Mueller

You’re jealous of everyone,

                even when they’re doing things

                                                you don’t want to do,

                   because they’re not sitting

                                at home, feeling jealous of you.

In photos, everyone poses

                in glittery frames, grinning

                                              into the kaleidoscope.

At home, the dishes pile up

                  in the sink, and creditors

            won’t stop calling.

Don’t you want to jump

               into a car and keep driving,

                                over mountains and rivers

 

all the way across

           the Atlantic, to a place where

                               nobody knows your name?

      Can anyone blame you

                         for trying to disappear?

You finally hear

                 what your voice sounds like,

                       

       strong and quiet as trees.

Then one day, you

           have a sudden urge

                    to switch on the computer,

and the whole goddamn thing

              starts all over again.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Leah Mueller is the author of two chapbooks and four books. Her most recent book, a memoir entitled Bastard of a Poet, was published in 2018 by Alien Buddha Press. Her work appears in Blunderbuss, The Spectacle, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, and many other magazines and anthologies. She was a featured poet at the 2015 New York Poetry Festival, and a runner-up in the 2012 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest.

Self-Portrait As Rizzo in the Schoolyard

SWWIM Every Day
by Grace Gardiner

by Grace Gardiner

            after Marty McConnell

 

I hide behind a waterproof shadow

            and red matte lips. You say I can’t hurt,

 

                        though you ignore me on our dead-end street.

            In the tub at home, I scum pink, peel strings

of pus-puckered skin clean off my nail beds.

            I don’t cry. I wait, tuck the bleed under

                        my tongue, clot pain with spit. In your Ford’s

            patinaed backseat I collapsed our altar.

Its centerpiece was me: stripped and naked

            and thin as the skin at the wrist, the back

                        of the knee. I’m not sorry to say the wrong

            words for the right reason: I never wanted you.

There are worse things I could do when leaving

            is not enough, when leaving is still too much.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Grace Gardiner received her MFA in Writing from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is a former poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, burntdistrict, and Mom Egg Review. She’s currently pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she lives with her partner, the poet Eric Morris-Pusey, and one too many brown recluses.

Storyteller

SWWIM Every Day
by Anastasia Jill

by Anastasia Jill

She has a home,

A beautiful home,

Inhumed on the pages

Where she draws—

 

She was never good at history,

So we recreate our own

Laced in paint,

Like on a cave,

In various colors.

 

There are rocks in my blood

To be unearthed,

Martial secrets

Stowed inside her kidneys

That can only come out in a lie.

We can’t lie to each other.

Instead, we settle for truth.

 

And this, right here, is my truth:

 

She is lawful, and that scares me.

What’s more, she senses the chickens

Poking fun at my marrow with their beaks,

Giving my shadow room to breathe,

A chance to escape.

 

She sees the other girls

Who’ve left me alone in bed,

The men who’ve forced me

To stay in theirs.

She sees that I feel unlovable,

Undeserving of her crafts.

 

She picks up a pencil,

She sees me, still,

And continues to draw.

 

The woman on the page is strong,

Virtuous as a helmet.

There is aftermath that’s not my fault—

I am standing tall, but that’s not

The real focus.

 

There are walls behind me,

Two arms, and a roof.

There is nothing holding it up.

We are all free standing structures. 

 

This home, it is beautiful.

She made it just for me.

This may be just a story,

But it’s one she tells

Until it's our truth.

 

Fabulist me;

I want to hear it one more time.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Anastasia Jill is a queer poet, fiction writer, and aspiring filmmaker. Her work has been published or is upcoming with Poets.org, Lunch Ticket, FIVE:2:ONE, Ambit Magazine, apt, Into the Void Magazine, 2River, Requited Journal, and more.

Best Trees for Property Borders

SWWIM Every Day
by Susan Barry-Schulz

by Susan Barry-Schulz

An unruly row of forsythia / barbed wire/ a brick wall / those orange and white barrels in construction zones / chicken wire / a split-rail fence / a split-rail fence with chicken wire / a picket fence /a chain link fence / a thick chain drawn across a driveway / invisible fence /  electric fence /wrought iron / railroad ties / shadowbox / cinderblocks / stockade /rock walls / lattice work / firewalls / the sound barrier / the great barrier reef / the thin screen to which the stink bugs cling / an even line of Italian Cypress / the phospholipid bilayer membrane of the human

cell—

so many ways we won’t be kept

from one another.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Susan Barry-Schulz is a healthcare professional with a special interest in incorporating Mindfulness and Tai Chi into her practice. Her work has been published recently in The Five-Two, The Wild Word, and Minute Magazine. She is a member of the Hudson Valley Writer's Center and the Mahopac Poetry Workshop. She grew up outside of Buffalo, NY, and now lives in a lake neighborhood in Putnam County with her husband and one or more of her 3 adult children. It all depends.

Blessing

SWWIM Every Day
by Hilary Varner

by Hilary Varner

          running up, down

remembering, forgetting my

phone, a sweater in case when

already two minutes late I

          pause with one foot

over the threshold

glance at the back door still

open and take in

          through the shut, left-side

blinds, something white,

waist-high amid the ducks chipmunks

squirrels stuffing in

          the patio’s thrown, bird food—

child in white shirt

bent over, feeding critters too?

I dash and peer

          and the morning

stills: A tremendous

white-as-unfolded-paper

rooster is eating sunflower

          seeds on my back porch

with his florid wattle and comb

bulging almost indecently

full. At his feet, a rabbit

          keeps munching, but he

spots me staring

and stands up, two-and-a half-feet tall,

his head going back

          and forth (like someone

told him it should),

as his yellow pencil legs

and six hotdog toes staccato

          up and down

next to our grill

where we cooked

his many, packaged wives

          before he turns and

takes off in fearless

strides around the hedge

with his tail feathers,

          too fluffy for such

a ravishing male, twitching

back.  How can I not,

even in heels, open the back door

          further,

scatter the fur there to follow? He

glances back, struts

past the neighbor’s purple flowers

          and I think, Roosters

don’t fly, remember my phone

in my hand while he watches

and must understand

          because he really

runs now, reaching

with those crazed legs

that are too cartoon

          to support such white weight,

let him soar between bounds,

or arc around the last row house and

out of the shade

          —all lit

engorged red, lifted white

and skinny bursting yellow—

with such grace

          I feel we should

watch roosters race

instead of horses—

as he leaps to the left

          out of sight.

He was never afraid. His running was

more like showing off or

like he was leading me

          into the sun

and to his last place

in the wide, hot grass

to stand, pondering his point

          while insisting

and giggling on the phone

that there was a huge, white, gorgeous

rooster

          just jogging

behind our houses.

I knew then he was laughing

back, but remembered that

          to appear

as a white animal

to only one woman

is something

          gods used to do—

that thank god his visit

did not leave me

knocked out and

          up as such visits

tend to, but still it struck me

as an impossible wink, meant

just for me, something I had

          to run after, to see,

before I was so late for this lunch

with my sisters, the one where I whisper

I am getting married tomorrow.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Hilary Varner received her MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her poetry has appeared in The Collagist, The Fem, Juked, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband, three kids, and a rabbit, in Plainfield, IL, where she freelance edits for money and bakes good things for joy. 

Remember: A Concerto Turned Anthem

SWWIM Every Day
by Summar West

by Summar West

for Anya and Anne

 

When you’re on the run

because nobody’s shown

in a handful of Sundays

and churches come and gone,

you sweat and listen with

earbuds blooming the whole

orchestra, waiting for the

salvation of what feels

like the godforsaken piano.

But wait, isn’t this

a piano concerto you’ve put

on for just this occasion?

Your feet meet pavement

and push off from one thought

to the next anonymous wave

and deeper into knowing

that August is dying and

all you smell is the sea

and all you taste are tears.

You remember that now

another poet-friend, sick too

long, has died too soon and

will not write again about a God

whose many names she called.

And you remember still more:

the pastor-friend whose grief

will go beyond every instrument,

every song for her son who

a year now is gone.

O Brahms or Bono,

Nina or Aretha,

give us some sound

from the pain suffered

down to the finest point,

where then we are asked,

who are you?

I run and remember

that autumn will arrive

and October will remind me

of when my grandmother died,

of all her lost words and letters,

and how inside my house

back then I played on repeat

an acoustic version of Losing My Religion,

or maybe I was listening for

the trumpet’s blaring,

Love Rescue Me.

This season, I’ll go out to run

that memory down and see another

maple flame out to ash, another

bag of leaves taken to the road,

and all the recyclables headed

for Redemption. Even then,

especially then, may I

remember, remember,

what she wrote to me

on a scrap of paper before

she died: being born again is

likened to the working of the wind.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Summar West’s poems have been published in a variety of places, including 491, Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Ellipsis, New South, Prairie Schooner, Still, and Tar River Poetry. Born and raised in east Tennessee, she currently lives in coastal Connecticut with her partner and their two daughters. 

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


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