This Will Be Your Fortune Long After I Can Tell You

SWWIM Every Day
by Chloe N. Clark

by Chloe N. Clark

Today, someone I love told me

a joke. It wasn’t even that funny

but I laughed, let the sound fill my mouth

until it spilled out, made my lungs ache

with the push push of air

until even my bones hurt. Today,

one of my students told me to have

a lovely day, not even just a good

one, but a lovely one. I can imagine

that as a blessing, though the air was

cold and the sky was gray and I’ve been

holding a sense of dread under my skin

for days, no weeks, no I’ve been holding

it there for years. Today, I worked out

until my muscles tingled under my skin,

today I laid on the floor like this,

closed my eyes, and it was the closest feeling

to flying I might ever get. Today, I still

said “might” about impossible things. Today,

a friend and I made plans for the future and

the world felt like something I could hold

in the palm of my hand. Today, no one I loved

died. Today, I woke up breathing. Today,

I thought how much I wanted to give you

this day. Today, if I could, I’d push it

into your hands, say, here, here, here,

I’m here, you’re here. Today is going

to be good.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Chloe N. Clark holds an MFA in Creative Writing & environment. Her work appears in Bombay Gin, Drunken Boat, Glass, Hobart, and more. She is co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph and her chapbook, The Science of Unvanishing Objects, is out from Finishing Line Press. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes.

Ghazal for a Bottle of Shalimar, 1956

SWWIM Every Day
by Maryann Corbett

by Maryann Corbett

The clear amber scent in its bottle. Its glint from the top of the vanity:

cut-crystal flutes with a frosted-glass stopper, catching the sun, on her vanity.

 

The glamorous dreams of our mother, unspoken to curious children,

were sharp as the quarter-moon curve of that bottle enshrined on the vanity.

 

What were they guarding, what secrets? And how would a child understand them?

And what was I thinking, small magpie lured on by the glitter of vanity?

 

Wreckage of beauties: the spill. The wet, the gray film on the rosewood.

I was the firstborn, the first to drive thorns through the heart of her vanity.

 

Painfully, mothers forgive. (On the mountain with seven stories,

how long will the granite of penitence weigh on the spine of my vanity?)

 

(And what do my children remember? what hauntings by anger and tears

does my memory hide from itself in the metal-bound chest of my vanity?)

 

Sixty years on, and the stain-mottled dresser now broods in my bedroom,

breathing regret, and my name, and the words of the Preacher: Vanity!

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Maryann Corbett is the author of four books of poetry. Her work has won the Richard Wilbur Book Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and has been published in venues like Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Rattle, River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Subtropics, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, and The Writer's Almanac, and in an assortment of anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2018.

Those Horses Inside Me

SWWIM Every Day
by Alix Wood

by Alix Wood

Four weeks after I lost him, my doctor asks,

Has anyone ever told you that you have a heart murmur?

I shake my head, swallow dust, and stare at a poster of bones.

Well, you do. But don’t worry about it.

 

How do I tell someone I have never not worried about anything in my entire life?

Heart, you are my hardest-working organ.

Inside me, a valve pulses open-close-open-close, mumbles beneath its breath,

clamors to be heard like the pounding of hooves against packed earth.

Five liters of blood pump through from toe to brain,

each cell a messenger horse carrying a blank letter.

Four weeks ago at the cape, he held me at water’s edge.

He told me if this is to end, let it end in a sunset.

The moment was so littoral I wanted to laugh, or scream, or both,

and a side stitch panged at me like a boxer delivering a sucker punch to my waist,

drawing the air from my lungs into polluted atmosphere.

Heart, you are a closed fist, but my palms are always open.

A pig’s aorta keeps my grandmother’s eighty-five-year-old body alive,

its length stretching from left ventricle to abdomen like a bendable straw.

Just once, I think I see my future.

Just once, I want to be clean.

Inside me, a quiet sound pounds soft as a horse’s nose.

Doctor, does the heart murmur when it’s made a mistake?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Alix Wood was raised by two mothers on Anna Maria Island, Florida. At the University of Vermont, she was the editor-in-chief of Vantage Point, the school's literary and art magazine. This is her first professional publication. Alix currently lives in Vermont and works at a tea house.

Field Work

SWWIM Every Day
by Katrinka Moore

by Katrinka Moore

Her mind a passerine

claws firm on the bough

her body a flowering

tree     She knows

what’s blooming

A luminist

she sees light    

fall into woods

waft over

the undergrowth

A numinist    

she reflects

the weave of seen

and unseen

What’s in her fieldbox

A spectrum     spirit tin

spyglass     spirals

a mud-splattered

map of the air

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Katrinka Moore’s latest book is Wayfarers (Pelekinesis, 2018). Her previous books are Numa, Thief, and This is Not a Story, winner of the New Women’s Voices prize. Recent work appears in Otoliths, Woven Tale, First Literary Review-East, and Leaping Clear, and in the anthology, Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems (Dos Gatos Press). She lives in New York City and Manor Kill, NY. For more, please see https://katrinkamoore.weebly.com.

Primary Source

SWWIM Every Day
by Sara Burnett

by Sara Burnett

A teacher of mine once said every writer

has only four or five subjects.

There’s happiness in repetition

if you don’t hear the seconds ticking.

What’s worse? Dedicating yourself

to failure or denying it again and again?

Pacher’s pupil, a Renaissance carver, perfected

the pine folds of Saint Margaret’s robes

using a large axe, then 

several smaller ones, then

sanded and painted her in fine detail.

Did he ever think where did the time go?

She stands at the back of a church in Tyrol,

a dragon writhing under her feet.

What do you live for? The quiet

before sunrise or the moments after.

The baby coos in her pram.

I’ve always wanted to use the word pram

at least once in a poem.

Now that I’m a mother,

I’ve a better understanding of terror

and the miraculous.

Who will she be when she’s grown?

Do I have time to shower?

If, as a famous writer decreed, it takes 10,000 hours

to achieve mastery,

I’ve perfected rocking my hips from side-to-side,

changing a diaper in dim dawn light.

My baby practices sitting up even in her sleep—

her head bobs like a buoy, her eyelids shudder.

My teacher said sometimes your first line

is your last line.

What’s more? The moment she walks

or the moment she falls down.

Looking again at the photo, the dragon

lies curled at Margaret’s feet.

I’m holding an image of an image

someone else carved in my hands.

She loves it when I sprinkle my fingers

down on her like rain.

I’m holding the rain in my hands

and in my hands, the rain holds her.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Sara Burnett is the author of the chapbook, Mother Tongue (Dancing Girl Press 2018). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. She holds a MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and a MA in English Literature from the University of Vermont. She is a recipient of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarships to support her writing. She lives in MD with her family.

Recipe for a Childhood

SWWIM Every Day
by Amy Katzel

by Amy Katzel

after Natalie Scenters-Zapico

 

1.     When the sun pulls your shade low, when you can’t tell if it’s your belly or throat that hungers—

2.     Find your largest pot.

3.     Remember, as a girl, you’d practice guitar and the dog would cry, except your parents said he was singing, tea kettle whistle perched at the edge of the living room steps:

4.     Fill it with sink water, like rocks filling a pale.

5.     Your room, carpet pulsing stereo, liner notes at your thumbs; lyrics like thick soup, but the chords’ harmonies,

6.     Those seemed inside you,

7.     Girl body running on electric wire—

8.     Hold the dry noodles, thick as hay, as dynamite, hold the stack in both hands

a.     and break. The break is never clean and that’s

b.     the best part, the little twigs that straggle along the burners,

c.     hiss of the water,

d.     steam on your face.

9.     CD cases clacking in your hands, the walls changing shape.

10.  No basil, no onion at your careful hand at the cutting board,

11.  Instead, string a single, hot tendril high in the air and down into your mouth like a sword swallower

12.  —No chopping’s cadence, whole things becoming smaller things,

13.  No, your mother’s recipe not so much a recipe as a prayer:

14.  How she used to leave the strands to bunch together in the strainer, twisted eucalyptus from the roots, or how she’d pull back

15.  Your hair in her hands when you leaned to blow out birthday candles, certain you were capable of catching fire.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Katzel is a marketing and communications professional and writer living in Miami. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland.

Bell on Knee

SWWIM Every Day
by Kelly R. Samuels

by Kelly R. Samuels

There is the man who wears a bell

on his knee in that novel. It serves as a telling,

like the buoy near the north shore that rang out

the first night here—a warning to scatter. To give

berth, wide and slow and steady.

He walks in the garden, this man, this character,

this symbol, but there are no gardens here. Here,

instead, there is the unkempt lilac and drying pine

and the wild thimbleberry.

And the lake lunging, noisy and troubling, and then

still, the waves no more than shaken foil.

The small purple wildflower clinging to the stone

where I saw the butterflies—along the south shore, along

the point with the name of a girl you once loved.

 

The stone, reddish and swirled, bared

and visible below the water. With the hollowed out

bowls for smaller stones of grey.

 

The stream coppery and bloodied at its mouth.

 

Bells for me—markers

of something, these. Not a warning to disperse,

as with him.

Nor a god or faith, I don’t know—

something

of confirmation and bliss.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly R. Samuels is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals including The Carolina Quarterly, Sweet Tree Review, Salt Hill, Permafrost, and RHINO. She lives in the upper Midwest and has two chapbooks being released in early 2019.

The Artist at the Colony Asks Me If I’m Famous

SWWIM Every Day
by Marjorie Maddox

by Marjorie Maddox

if I’m someone she should know,

pay attention to, bother having coffee with,

talk with about the father who raped her at twelve,

about my father, about the slant of rainy light after

you’re weeping for half a life and then some and

when/if you leave the toilet paper unwinding from the top

or bottom, and what our papas said the two days after,

and avocados and kumquats, and the strange

geometric shapes that cascade into our dreams

five days each year before the equinox, and if

I’m well known enough for her to pry open my palm

and slice my lifelines with an X-Acto knife—would I

do that for her?—and have I won a Pulitzer yet, and

what color were the eyes of God when I looked straight

at Him for three minutes without blinking once, Ok

maybe once, and may she have that last bottle of wine,

could she borrow a glass, and how much does The New Yorker

pay, do I think they would consider her work, she’s started

writing, too, have I slept with anyone there, and does the mold

in my studio make my eyes itch in the morning—or evening,

she’s heard both—because she really wants to know about the time

the London editor who knew the New York editor who knew me

from someone at the colony or raved about my work on Eskimos or

transplants or something like that and later sat on a committee

that judged that really important prize—she can’t remember

which one right now because, thanks again, she had a bit too much

of my Merlot, but am I that writer, the one she’s heard

something about, the one she should know?

No, I say, no, though I am someone

writing, trying to write, someone.

 

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University (MFA) and Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including Wives' Tales; True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series); Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock); Weeknights at the Cathedral (WordTech Editions); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); and Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award—as well as the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite Press), and over 550 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. Marjorie is the co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press 2005), assistant editor of Presence, and author of four children's books. For more, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com.

When wispy clouds drift through sparsely wooded mountains

SWWIM Every Day
by Martha Silano

by Martha Silano

When the contours of mountains resemble coliseums.

Cathedrality of mountains.

Relief of roadlessness.

That there are lakes impossible to reach by car.

That from this window just behind the wing, 20F,

there are no signs of life.

Once I packed a bag with cheddar goldfish.

Once my son threw up before we even boarded the plane.

Cracks and fissures, cuneiform of rock. Backbones and capillaries,

the snaking green edged with bluffs (long-ago ocean?).

He will turn eighteen next week.

Brain-like contours—cerebral cortex or cerebellum?

Contours thin like the veins of leaves, fronds of a sword fern, feet of a coot.

Time passed like a silent rail in the reeds.

The folds very Egyptian, mummies reposed in their tombs.

Like an alligator’s enormous tail, though lacking snout and teeth.

Once I sang La crocodile il est malade, il est malade a Singapour.

All those years, I thought I was singing sangue a peu—a little blood.

Clouds less cumulus, more cumulonimbus.

Towns scattered with houses like paint chips.

From the ground he would wave to the passengers in the sky: Bye-bye, babies!

Claw-like hills, afghan of cloud not like fresh snow but snow a few days old,

the occasional indentation where a foot or tire met asphalt.

The crocodile is sick. A little mercy, a little blood.

Between fluffy swirls, black holes.

When the binky and the sippy cup.

When the diaper bag and the teething ring.

Cottoned from above

like first tracks on Lynx Pass,

a pristine path through aspen, lodgepole, spruce.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist (forthcoming 2019), The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and Reckless Lovely, all from Saturnalia Books. She co-authored, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, New England Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. Martha teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA.

Fillers

SWWIM Every Day
by Majda Gama

by Majda Gama

“Strange Stars Pulsate According to the Golden Ratio”

The BBC headline & a snapshot of Lindsay Lohan

carrying a copy of the holy Quran run parallel on a news site.

Perhaps raw, almond-milk chai was too ordinary for her

so she turned to the book of a more exotic people.

Can America ever forgive her for reaching beyond yoga & rehab

into the terrain of the enemy? I mean, Jane Fonda is still

paying the price for looking eastward.

I like my life dry, like the lips an aesthetician told me she could fix,

use sugar-based fillers to fill in lines from smoking,

fill up the rosy skin browning with middle age.

Sure, the corners are downturned, someone needs to walk

around looking angry & I’m angry that the plump face of youth

is now the face I’m expected to buy back, just as my cheekbones

are emerging. FFS, Lindsey’s now allowed her lips to deflate.

After thinking all this through, I see The Archdruid Report

proclaim we are at peak meaninglessness.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Majda Gama is a Saudi-American poet based Washington, DC where she has roots as a Punk DJ and an activist. She has read her poetry at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature and Split This Rock 2018. Majda is a Best of the Net nominee. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Fairy Tale Review, The Normal School, Slice, and The South Dakota Review. Majda is a poetry editor for Tinderbox.

Skipping Rocks Across Cazenovia Creek

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Wiley

by Lisa Wiley

I keep rolling you over in my mind

like a smooth rock tumbled

for centuries along the creek bed.

Picking it up, I admire the polished curves,

wonder where we begin and end.

This pebble, only a few ounces,

weighs heavy on the heart.

Shall I pocket it like an albatross waiting

for that one halcyon summer day you visit?

Or toss it back into fresh water,

see you skip across to the other side?

Sometimes, there aren’t enough fucking rocks.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa Wiley teaches English at SUNY Erie Community College in Buffalo, NY. She is the author of three chapbooks: Big Apple Rain (The Writer’s Den, 2018), My Daughter Wears Her Evil Eye to School (The Writer’s Den, 2015), and Chamber Music (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her poetry has appeared in Earth’s Daughters, The Healing Muse, Medical Journal of Australia, Mom Egg Review and Third Wednesday, among others. She has read her work throughout New York state.

Disrobing God

SWWIM Every Day
by Jane Ellen Glasser

by Jane Ellen Glasser

Shave off that shaggy beard.

You are no one’s grandfather.

Remove the illusion

of white skin.

Admit the lie

that hides

beneath white robes.

Tell the truth.

You did not beget a son.

No one died for our sins.

No one prewrites the script

for our lives.

O we have created you,

fashioned from ego and hubris,

in our own image,

surrounded you with angels

waiting for us

through pearly gates.

Out of the wet tissues

of our need, out of the

sinking clay of our fears,

we whisper prayers in the ear

of a deaf universe.

I am not so foolish.

Redo your curriculum vitae.

Make up a different story.

One I can believe in.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jane Ellen Glasser’s poetry has appeared in journals, such as Hudson Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Georgia Review. In the past, she reviewed poetry books for the Virginian-Pilot, edited poetry for the Ghent Quarterly and Lady Jane’s Miscellany, and co-founded the nonprofit arts organization and journal New Virginia Review. A first collection of her poetry, Naming the Darkness, with an introduction by W. D. Snodgrass, was issued by Road Publishers in 1991. She won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry 2005 for Light Persists, and The Long Life won the Poetica Publishing Company Chapbook Contest in 2011. The Red Coat (2013), Cracks (2015), and In the Shadow of Paradise (2017), are all available from FutureCycle Press. Selected Works: 1980-2019 is due out in 2019. See more at www.janeellenglasser.com.

Pier

SWWIM Every Day
by Kelle Groom

by Kelle Groom

for Mike Murray

I can’t understand the sound barrier.

Ray and I are required to be miles out to sea,

but we don’t have a boat.

It was just mind roar when you were falling.

I have the harpsichord king’s song

déjà vu feeling now. On the pier you can regard us

as one song sung to your body—an angel with four

thousand wings helped, parted you

like a crowd, like the crown of your red

hair.  I needed a sound truck with amps.

After Ray poured you into the air, your bones

made a bright cloud over the ocean, then sank,

and you were a river for a while.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Kelle Groom’s four poetry collections include Spill, Five Kingdoms, Luckily (Anhinga Press), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida). Her memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), is a B&N Discover pick and NYTBR Editor's Choice. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe.

Toxicodendron radicans

SWWIM Every Day
by Jules Jacob

by Jules Jacob

Gardeners stay your eyes to flowers

hikers, trails     walkers, paths.

Let insects have my leaves,

yellow-rumped warblers my berries.

I cling to those temptation woos

closer     I will tendril fingers

brush rushinol between breasts

and lips, your oiled hands forever

touching. Pustules, inflammation

pain, red lines     teachers I gift

after you’re gone—what do you

give me?     A rise in carbon

an increase in size and potency,

my agents distributing greenhouse-

gassed seeds.     Burn me,

I’ll blow you a reminder.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Julie “Jules” Jacob is a contemporary poet who often writes about dichotomousconditions and relationships among humans and the natural world. Her poems are recently featured or forthcoming in Plume Poetry, The Tishman Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Rust + Moth, Yes Poetry and elsewhere. She’s the author of The Glass Sponge, a semi-finalist in the New Women’s Voices Series (Finishing Line Press) and a resident of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Poetry Workshop. Visit julesjacob.com.

Murmuration

SWWIM Every Day
by Amy Watkins

by Amy Watkins

An osprey beats the wind with bowed wings,

steady till it drops and shakes in flight.

The wind catches and it rises again.

I watch from the porch where I’ve come early

to stop avoiding our father’s call. Last night,

I turned the ringer off then on then off again,

swiped down to ignore but texted back.

There are two birds in the tree across the street

and a third circling and circling, rising and falling

in the wind from a distant hurricane.

The phone rings. He wants to talk about you.

They say each bird attends to just seven others, and,

in this way, a thousand starlings turn together

like one creature. I’ll try not to make this a metaphor.

Once, you and I climbed the hills outside

Florence, Italy. Our dearest ones climbed with us

and, because we were few and each one loved

by all the others, I thought we made a kind of net

that might hold the breaking world together.

A murmuration of starlings unfurled like the aurora

borealis, a sheer curtain caught in wind,

twisting, tracing a path through twilight.

A hawk swoops low over the osprey nest.

I think it might land, but it doesn’t. You ask to meet

for coffee. Our father calls, and I don’t answer.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Watkins grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, religious family—the kind of upbringing that’s produced generations of southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl, and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of the chapbooks Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press) and Wolf Daughter (forthcoming from Sundress Publications).

Scar

SWWIM Every Day
by Jeannine Hall Gailey

by Jeannine Hall Gailey

The voice it was in the storm

in the fire in whirlwind

spoke to me and told me

and it was in my veins

it left a scar inside my arm

the many needles

the bone the blood

knit me together in my mother’s womb

and said it is good

but things went wrong I complained

and he opened a river inside me

and he said it is good and

my tongue grew silent in the shadow

and inside my brain exploded with light

holes illuminating the disintegration of nerves

that tell me left from right that tell me when

I’m spinning I’m spinning God catch me I’m slipping

the swift tilting the backhand of God left me broken

let me fall

behold do not be afraid of the light

An aching hip a broken ankle my lips screwed tight

the many places the angels have touched

and left me limping

God spoke and my angel wears a tunic

sewed up with my scars

Wholly, Holy, Holey

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She’s the author of five books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and Field Guide to the End of the World, which won the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA’s Elgin Award. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review and Prairie Schooner. Her web site is www.webbish6.com.

Golden Shovel in the Voice of Margot Begemann

SWWIM Every Day
by Jenna Le

by Jenna Le

I crumple marriage offers made by fishermen,

masons, bakers of brioche, for I know

my consecration is to marry the

great Van Gogh. Look at history and see

men of genius wrecked before there is

the chance for one brave girl to swoop down, dangerous

to his enemies and doubters, the

critics and hecklers, and save him from that storm.

My love shall be his shield, prevent the terrible.

No shy virgin, I’ve seen four decades; they

have handled me the way some clumsy half-

cocked violin restorer does a never-

again-same harp. I know the score. I found

Vincent living with his mother in these

snake-filled backwoods, where gossips embroider the dangers

of his past romancing of a whore. Sufficient

to say I’m not scared off. Inside me, too,

there is a prostitute and a barkeep,

a seamstress and a siren and a shore.

 

Note: In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote about Margot Begemann, briefly his fiancée, “It’s a pity I didn’t meet her earlier—say 10 years ago or so. Now she gives me the impression of a Cremona violin that’s been spoiled in the past by bad bunglers of restorers.” He ended their relationship the same year it began. Margot drank poison but recovered.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) authored Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018; 1st ed. pub. by Anchor & Plume, 2016), which won Second Place in the 2017 Elgin Awards. Her poetry appears in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere.

Scorched

SWWIM Every Day
by Kami Westhoff

by Kami Westhoff

That August, smoke stitched itself to each breath’s tunneling wisp.

The lush lungs of your three-year-old tarred half-pack-a-day dark,

the veins in her eyes cragged crimson. The west was burning,

and without your repentance, your boyfriend said, you would too.

Afterward, your daughter said she didn't understand why your face

was blood-burst when her father told her to kiss you good-bye .

Or why your body, whose arms had lifted her when something 

she wanted was just out of reach, or held her back if that something

might hurt her, why it was rooms away from the lips that kissed better

every bump and bruise. 

By mid-September, your daughter’s lungs were crisped clean

with the ocean’s exhale, her sclera once more white as bone. 

The sky in the west again unflawed—nothing marring its blue

but the scribbled edges of pine trees and moody mountains.

He claimed he didn’t want to hurt you, but couldn’t argue

with a god that’s always wanted you dead. Always wanted

your blood a dark river beneath the earth’s scorched scars,

your body just the soil that swallows it.   

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Kami Westhoff’s chapbook, Sleepwalker, won the 2016 Dare to Be Award from Minerva Rising, and her collaborate chapbook, Your Body a Bullet, was published recently by Unsolicited Press. Her work has appeared in journals including Meridian, Carve, Third Coast, Phoebe, West Branch, the Pinch, and Waxwing. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.

The Ladies Are Waiting

SWWIM Every Day
by Kristin Garth

by Kristin Garth

near guillotines, acclaimed headsmen of means.

Duplicitous gleams eyeing you, their thighs

secretly tattooed, surnames, killers, kings,

state-sanctioned blowjobs, beheadings so why

not princess—even you? One bed, one head,

misstep, or two, detected, collected, stored

fine wine uncorked, with lords, midnight, rust, red

aroma, royal deficiencies poured

some stone-floored cellar, behind arched oak doors.

A happy ending may require cunning,

a crown to topple, rolling heads on floors

ideally yours. Best sacrifice is queen.

Appeasement is the strategy you take.

They’re carnivores, and you serve them cake.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Kristin Garth is a Pushcart Prize- and Best of the Net-nominated poet from Pensacola and a sonnet stalker. Her sonnets have stalked magazines like Five: 2: One, Yes, Glass, Anti-Heroin Chic, Occulum, Drunk Monkeys, Luna Luna, TERSE. Journal, and many more. She is the author of the chapbooks Pink Plastic House (Maverick Duck Press), Pensacola Girls (Bone & Ink Press), Shakespeare for Sociopaths (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, January 2019), and Puritan U (Rhythm & Bones Press, March 2019), as well as a full-length collection Candy Cigarette (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, April 2019). A Victorian Dollhousing Ceremony will also be published by Rhythm & Bones Press in June 2019. Follow her on Twitter @lolaandjolie or visit her at kristingarth.com.

I Cook Thanksgiving Dinner with My Dead Mother

SWWIM Every Day
by Diane K. Martin

by Diane K. Martin

Tucking the wings back under the bird’s body must have resurrected

her, because there was Mom, already chopping onions. We didn’t talk

about my lifestyle, my father, or the burnt-to-a crisp skin of my brilliant

career, nor did we chat about the time she stuffed the turkey with Saltines

because they were on sale at Raley’s, and everyone got so thirsty we all

got drunk, even the children. We didn’t reminisce about past Thanksgivings,

like the time I arrived late and my brother slammed the table and roared,

“We are not going to save her any goddamn salad.” Mom made a point

of reminding me that she set out a half grapefruit for my appetizer,

because I’m allergic to shrimp. We didn’t mention her bad heart—or mine.

We just chopped, boiled, simmered, stewed, sliced, roasted, and sautéed

in butter, and then twisted the turkey wing and tucked it under the body

of the bird, even though it meant breaking the bones a little bit to do it.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Diane K. Martin’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Field, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Plume, and many other journals. Her poems have been included in Best New Poets and have received a Pushcart Special Mention. Her first collection, Conjugated Visits, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published in 2010 by Dream Horse Press. Her second book, Hue & Cry, is forthcoming from MadHat Press in September, 2019.

Load More