The Whale

SWWIM Every Day
by Rebecca Hart Olander

by Rebecca Hart Olander

Mine died when I hit middle age, he still young

at sixty-eight. I’ll never say we’re through.

He is that creature under the cold Atlantic blanket,

migratory mammal, singing a complex song,

large heart beating in time with mine, wide cetacean

smile, throat pleats, fluke, and fin. All that potential

lamplight and winter warmth stored in his immortal bulk.

No harvested baleen, no corset bone. He’ll never stop

his route, though sometimes he needs to breach,

and once I dreamed he beached. I tried to drag him back

to the surf, where the salt could lick his wounds

and he could open one eye to the sun.

But that was a nightmare. The truth is in the Gulf

Stream, dark shadow spouting, swimming with seals.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently in Ilanot Review, Plath Poetry Project, and Solstice, and collaborative work made with Elizabeth Paul has been published in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (BLP) and online at Duende. Rebecca won the 2013 Women’s National Book Association poetry contest. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she teaches writing at Westfield State University and is the editor/director of Perugia Press. Find her at rebeccahartolander.com.

Ambition

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Wetzel

by Sarah Wetzel

I wanted to tell her that I knew the truth—

she didn't adopt her dog from a kill shelter,

which is what she was telling a group of us.

I held my tongue for fear of appearing petty.

We all want to be better than we are.

Yesterday, my brother called and asked for money.

At first, I told him no.

But he'd received the third notice from Georgia Power

so I paid his $700 electric bill though told him

never again, unless his wife got a job, any job.

I cc'ed her on the email.

She wrote back, you're an awful person

with a mixture of rage and bitterness I could hear

even on the screen. Still, this time

I meant it. I overheard the woman at the party

tell her friend they'd actually purchased the dog

from a breeder in upstate New York.

We spent so much money, we could have adopted

a baby from China. I found her statement funny.

I want to be better. I want to save a dog, to save

my brother. I want to tread lightly on this world without

leaving footprints or too many

plastic wrappers. I want to see Singapore

and Vietnam, to spend a summer in Italy writing

short stories and a sonnet or two.

Learn to tango and foxtrot equally well.

I want to be good.

I want to write one poem so perfect

that when I'm dead, a stranger will pin it to the wall,

perhaps even claim it as their own.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Wetzel is the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize and was published in 2010. A PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, Sarah also teaches creative writing at The American University of Rome. You can read some of her work at www.sarahwetzel.com.

Destierro Means Exile

SWWIM Every Day
by Yaddyra Peralta

by Yaddyra Peralta

            For Hurricane Irma

 

Come water.

Come lift me

bodily, in hopes

that my soul too

may rise.

Come wreck

the artifacts

of this lived life.

Come lick

my fingerprints off

the childhood photos.

 

Take the travel guidebooks,

the embossed-in-plastic

Made in Chinas.

Carry me out

to open sea.

Let the salt feed

on my memories.

Outliving the Holocene

drifting and unseen

with the plankton

let me live.

Past memory, I will return

too cool to be a prodigal.

__________________________________________________________

Yaddyra Peralta is a poet. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Jai-alai, Abe’s Penny, Tigertail, The New Poet, and Hinchas de Poesia. In 2013 she was a Visiting Writer at the Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room in South Miami Beach, Florida, and one of six collaborative Helen M. Salzberg Artists in Residence at Florida Atlantic University’s Jaffe Center for the Book Arts, where she completed the book Conversation, Too, along with Tom Virgin, John Dufresne, Kari Snyder, Laura Tan and Michael Hettich.

August, still

SWWIM Every Day
by Nicole Callihan

by Nicole Callihan

Born, I cried,

and growing, I cried.

Gathering the broken egg, I cried.

Making the pancakes, eating the pancakes,

cleaning up after the pancakes, I cried.

Watching you swim to the deep area, I cried.

Watching you return to the shallows, I cried.

When my husband could not love me

like I wanted, I cried.

When I could not love my husband

as he needed, I cried.

When we loved each other anyway, I cried.

 

And then, there was the pulling of the weeds,

which I did all morning, crying,

and the watching them return,

which I did all afternoon, crying.

Now, evening, and what am I to do

but pull the weeds again,

and let the mosquitos suck on me,

and watch the stars come out, one by one?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Nicole Callihan’s books include SuperLoop (Sockmonkey Press 2014), and the chapbooks A Study in Spring (2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), and Aging (2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Sixth Finch, Painted Bride Quarterly, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Her latest project, Translucence, a dual-language, cross-culture collaboration with Palestinian poet Samar Abdel Jaber, was released by Indolent Books in 2018.

Sunday Morning in the Church of Air

SWWIM Every Day
by Catherine Abbey Hodges

by Catherine Abbey Hodges

Sunday morning in the church of air,

great blue heron hunched over the good

book, chapters and verses swirling

about his legs.

Never the same river,

always the same word—history, proverb,

psalm, parable—and the one sermon

in many tongues season to season,

moment to moment, whether

I attend or not.

   Pews of lichened granite,

obsidian cherts that caught the light

before landing among the grasses

and fallen leaves:

the wood ducks

in the high windows know it all

by heart. Small birds with names

I don’t recall

sound from sycamores

like bells.

       And none of this depends

on me, though I see now that somehow

I depend on it—the river, the stooped

heron and the one rising on great wings

above its reflection, the Yokuts family

at home here

in the ouzel’s inner eyelid,

the wood ducks with their deep

memories

and the small birds

with their bells—

         you and I depend

on this whether or not we’ve ever

darkened the slim doorway,

lifted the latch that’s everywhere.

__________________________________________________________

Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of the poetry collections Raft of Days (Gunpowder Press 2017) and Instead of Sadness (Gunpowder Press 2015), selected by Dan Gerber as winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared widely and been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. Catherine teaches English at Porterville College in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where she was named 2017 Faculty of the Year. She co-coordinates California Poets in the Schools for Tulare County and collaborates with her husband, musician Rob Hodges.

I Arrive at Midlife, Unplanned

SWWIM Every Day
by Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen

by Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen

Crow’s feet. Pointing

in directions taken. All wrong.

Spring fling melted

into a slow summer tango—

a liminal romance &

you offer me ways to live:

creams and vapors,

a softer place to lay.

And as we entwine, cradled

like crabs, limbs clutching

the cardio echo of the other,

I ask if you might be kept.

And rocking, breast against breast

you confess your fear of cages.

I toy with thoughts in an adjacent room;

you are a better hostess than I,

admiring self-reflection in tall grasses,

the dandelions gone to seed,

insects, a surrounding conundrum of beauty,

cicada static: variations on a theme &

you emerge. Like a child’s

fascination with what is not within the box—

we pour ourselves into ill-fitting molds

until cracks appear.

Count the futile attempts before the clay holds

true to its design and we discover intent.

Pretense or predisposed,

prepositional and packaged like ladle and broth:

cupped hands and waiting lips

reaching for the reciprocated gift.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen is a poly-artist and humanitarian residing in Utah. Her poetic work has been featured in Quarterly West, Rust+Moth, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, CrabFat, Peculiar: a queer literary journal, and the anthologies Broken Atoms in Our Hands and Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. She blogs sporadically at secondsetofwings.com and provides regular taxi service for her four children.

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.

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