Bird

SWWIM Every Day
by Erin Wilson

by Erin Wilson

My mother did not bear me to metaphysical platitudes.

She pushed me out like a package through her purple crucifix,

her luxurious black fur a bramble at earth's door.

 

I spend my years recycling energy through this flesh flap.

 

And yet somewhere in the branches of the greenish-white sycamore

that grows stubbornly from the crescent of my mind, sings a bird.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Erin Wilson has contributed poems to The Adirondack Review, San Pedro River Review, Split Rock Review, and Minola Review, with work forthcoming from The American Journal of Poetry, Juked, and Kestrel. She lives and writes in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.

Self-Portrait in a Thunderstorm

SWWIM Every Day
by Crystal Stone

by Crystal Stone

There are yellow skies and no

storm sirens. The hail bursts

large enough to break my window

and I think about letting nature in,

to clean my carpet. The thunder is

a heartbeat, mine. My eyes June

with longer days. They warm

and lengthen. The prairie grasses

outside look blue because my eyes

want them to water beaches

instead of streets. I want my bed

to boat my body on the coast I miss.

My hair is spring, blooms flyaways.

I’ve lost so much. Many poems, always

listening to others. They tornado my mind

empty of my words. I don’t want

to sound like the men I’ve talked to.

Only the women. Only the earth.

Only the grasses, wind, hail and sky.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Crystal Stone's poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in New Verse News, Occulum, Anomaly, Writers Resist, Drunk Monkeys, Poets Reading the News, Jet Fuel Review, Badlands Review, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University. Her first collection of poetry, Knock-off Monarch (Dawn Valley Press), was recently released on Amazon.

I Want Some Land

SWWIM Every Day
by Mary Block

by Mary Block

I want some loneliness justified by my location. 

 

I want to purchase a piece of the earth. 

 

I want to be in on that giant joke. 

 

I want a fence around my family. 

 

I want the burden of aging infrastructure. 

 

The urge to complain about all the things 

 

I own. I want the place to look overgrown. 

 

Like, potted plants in the bathroom. 

 

Big buxom banana leaves. Ferns. 

 

I want an alarm. I want to love a place 

 

so much I install a siren. 

 

I want a gut renovation. 

 

Maintain some original details 

 

without all the darkness and wasted space. 

 

I want some land. I want the earth 

 

and the sky above it. 

 

I want the mineral rights, the air rights. 

 

I want the right to take legal action 

 

if someone encroaches on my boundaries. 

 

I want to be right when I say 

 

this whole damn thing is mine.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Block lives and writes in her hometown of Miami, Florida. Her poems have been featured in Nimrod Journal, Sonora Review, Rattle, and Conduit, among other publications. She is a graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee.

maquis

SWWIM Every Day
by Cara Waterfall

by Cara Waterfall

Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

the belly of this hardscrabble street growls  under bald  acacia trees. smoke from the
cooking fires uncoils from metal roofs, riddled with bird shit.  in front, the floodlit
disarray of rickety chairs and tables, sticky with  bissap. bottomless bass of the radio
rumbles, static bumbles from the football game. 

a rooster’s scabbed feet dart between plastic tablecloths. an untethered dog yaps, taps its
stumpy tail, skinny strings of saliva swinging from jowl to jowl. 

a woman hovers over the grill. wrists darken with the spatter of palm oil and the gasp of
chillies. her fingernails rap iron. the air seethes with diesel, raw onion, singed feathers.

her thoughts simmer in dusk’s orange silo. 

the calabash spits, a runny yolk hisses. she jabs an eggplant with a blunt knife. her fingers
palpate braised catfish. she splits gray snails from their shells with a hammer. flies
wreathe her nose, mouth. dull pear ls of attieke crumble in a plastic bag. 

evening brims with the blather of hungry customers. blond globules of ginger beer blister
red straws, young throats. truckers loll, quaff Drogbas, trawling for gos. 

she untwines one memory, and then another; they brine in the swelter.

kids giggle, trip in and out of the shadows, spindly as seedlings. night ferments. smear of
cloud, scratch of stars. 

she emerges, serves lukewarm plates. her head-wrap unswaddles as she gnashes through
the flak of dust and bug, the din candling her nerves.

a baby bulges in the small of her back, eyes shuttered against the fat moon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes:

maquis: an outdoor eating area in Côte d'Ivoire; also means “scrub” or “bush”
bissap: juice made of dried hibiscus leaves, sugar and mint
attieke: a side dish prepared from fermented cassava pulp.
Drogbas: the beer “Bock de Solibra’ is nicknamed “Drogba” after the celebrated, Ivoirian footballer.
gos: young women


___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ottawa-born and Costa Rica-based, Cara’s work has been featured in Event, The Fiddlehead, and The Maynard. She won 2018 Room Magazine’s Short Forms contest, and second place in Frontier Poetry’s 2018 Award for New Poets. She was shortlisted for PULP Literature’s 2017 and 2018 The Magpie Award for Poetry prize. She has a diploma in Poetry & Lyric Discourse from The Writer’s Studio at SFU, and a diploma from the London School of Journalism.

When There Were Highways,

SWWIM Every Day
by Molly Sutton Kiefer

by Molly Sutton Kiefer

this is what we saw: deer

with shucked hides, exposing the marimba of ribs

 

and red muscle—others, burned black

 

from rubber’s horrible offices or so scattershot

with flies as to be costumed in moveable scruff. 

 

There are the bloated boats and ripped-aways. 

 

Bird tatter, chipmunks made into flapjacks among

curls of tire, black spinnerets. 

 

When they came upon the dead deer in the woods,

 

she had to press one hand into another, as if in prayer,

stayed against the lifting the tongue

 

back into the cave of its mouth,

 

keep her from plucking the hungry burrs. 

He remembers too, the startle of sudden stopping—

 

that New Year’s when the shock of deer

scattered like pool balls in the crust of snow.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Molly Sutton Kiefer is the author of the full-length lyric essay, Nestuary (Ricochet Editions). She has published three poetry chapbooks, and has work in Orion, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Passages North, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, Fiddlehead Review, Ecotone, South Dakota Review, and The Collagist, among others. She is publisher at Tinderbox Editions and founder of Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She lives in with her family in Minnesota where she teaches.

The Louisiana Compulsory Education Act of 1916

SWWIM Every Day
by Anne Price

by Anne Price

Now when I see old cane

     stiff and leaning off from the wall 

         of the stalks that thrived, I wonder was this 


what the English-speaking teacher

     used on my grandparents 

         when she called on them in words 


they couldn't understand to stand? 

     Eyes can be lowered; what to do 

         with two-tongued mouths but keep

the one hidden behind the stalk 

     of the other, hushed under the cane’s 

         whipped down whistle. Now when I see old cane 

I see the frayed cover 

     of the Cajun dictionary my mother 

         took out from her drawer only when

                                                              no one was looking. I confess 

                                                                         I stole that book, hid it behind

                                                                                             hung dresses, thinking I too

                                                              should learn like that, kneeled

                                                                                                behind the dresses

                                                                                                                      invisible knees


                                                                           sewn for women who 

                                                              hold raw cane and the unraveling red

                                                                                                        binding of a dictionary

                                                         with the same two-handedness. 

                                                                            Thinking it had to be hidden,

                                                                                                          which is another way


                                                                                   to forget, so that 

                                                         when I remembered I too should learn

                                                                                 and went with both hands looking

                                                                                    the big red book

                                                                                        had gone, stolen back

                                                                                                              or muttered away

                                                                       like the seated woman

                                                                                        mouthing two or three

                                                                                                   strange words at a time,


                                                                                       repeating herself at the wall.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Anne Price was born and raised in southern Louisiana. She received her MFA from the University of Maryland, where she was awarded the Stanley Plumly Thesis Award. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Parcel

SWWIM Every Day
by Laura Romeyn

by Laura Romeyn

The jeep with its soft-top up

shreds past two small girls.

 

They are rushing the tallgrass

in matching violet nightgowns.

 

Wisconsin late summer.

Sun going down,

 

day like a bobbin

so warm. The air drags

 

low, circles its holdings

drifting there, then back

 

above. One of the girls,

the smaller one,

 

she kneels just in front

of the rhododendrons.

 

She has found something

in the green. A mid-section

 

undone, scratched open

to loosebelly softened

 

to the arbor of bone.

Grazed remains.

 

The lanes of the rib cage

carry their sidemeat,

 

fixed as the cold

of a silent and empty nave.

 

Put it in my hand

the older sister says,

 

and the younger one

reaches down and does.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Romeyn is the author of Wild Conditions, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship (forthcoming spring 2019). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (2015-2017), her poems have appeared in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Ninth Letter, and The Yale Review, among other journals. She lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Poem in Which I Forget Whether I Wanted Anything Else Back Then

SWWIM Every Day

by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

You said you wanted no more than this

thin black dog draped over our feet

propped heel to heel and thigh to thigh

 

and fingers curved around a white mug

in whose coffee lilts a sweeter version

of the milky way bridging dream and dawn

 

and questions about the prayer mountain

I climbed as the daughter of strangers

made of incense and stones and returning

 

with nothing but the memory

of finding footholds in the musky earth

of a mountainside

 

without you & before us or the dog

who now lifts a red-lidded eye

as vast as stars just starting to spin.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Florida Book Award bronze medal for poetry, and was a finalist for the 2017 Milt Kessler Award. She has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, among others. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, The New York Times, and more. She serves on the advisory board for the Sundress Academy for the Arts and is a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair. See www.marcicalabretta.com.

Self-Portrait with No Spare Parts

SWWIM Every Day
by Cynthia Atkins

by Cynthia Atkins

It has been steam cleaned

in 10 states. Slapped by a mother

spat on by a boss. This is how

everything is fine until it is not.

            It changed its mind

like umbrellas brought

on all the wrong days. 

It wore shoulder pads and burned

          a husband with a curling iron. 

It called 911. It did what it had to do. 

It held your bag of hygiene, oily

perfume, rotten teeth. Joy and pain

          live on the same street.  

It has an expiration date.  

It hung in the closet like a bad check.

It flagged all the pools of blood

        and the grief of mothers.

It was a dirge of old wars and vacant

parking lots. It was the place I sat alone

and cried all nightmare long.  

It is a junkyard clock

        with dog-chewed hands. 

It is God mouthing the anthem

I never learned. It gnawed

        at the wind shield, made of rain.  

It sat in a diner all night long, waiting

for the lord or the guy with a day job

        to take his knife home.  

This is the lake that lives within the skin,

that lives with an illness that dangles 

like a yo-yo on a string. And another body

       beget out of mine, long and wide

as the Rio Grande. The body just wants

something loyal and divine,

     a dog’s eyelids fluttering in sleep.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers and In The Event of Full Disclosure, and the forthcoming collection, Still-Life With God. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Apogee, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Diode, Florida Review, Flock Lit, Green Mountains Review, Le Zaporogue, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Rust + Moth, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Tampa Review, and Verse Daily, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of The Net. Atkins teaches creative writing at Blue Ridge Community College and lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County VA with her family. See more at www.cynthiaatkins.com.

Choosing

SWWIM Every Day
by Feral Willcox

by Feral Willcox

In the place of cisterns

swaddled in cobra lilies

spawn of cloud seed heals

the moon of its infected swelling.

A heat dissipates to crystal, gaslit

in the aging night. You were

a slip of a boat set off in a slit

of wild waters, two down

no rudder, no oar. One love

travels in tides, in elliptic swirls

hot to cold, then back again.

The other, a faucet, a cup

a tinseled lake warming

in a metronome of sun.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ferral Willcox is a U.S. born poet and musician currently living in Pokhara, Nepal. Ferral’s work can be found in Per Contra, concis, Peacock Journal, Rat’s Ass Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry was featured in the Q-Street venue of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and she is a regular contributor to the Plath Poetry Project.

This Time of Night

SWWIM Every Day
by Michelle Bitting

by Michelle Bitting

We’re all in the same boat ready to float off the edge of the world. ~ The Band

When I should be asleep

but stay up anyway

step outside to sneak a smoke

behind the recycling bin

froth of soda cans

grass green bottles

spent water from France

a silo of silent witnesses

once effervescent

their colorful labels

torn and scraped now

glass shadows

cast to a rubber raft

under stars

the soft swish

of listing palms

that lean down

but can never reach far enough

lend a hand up

to new dignity.

We are not all in the same boat.

The lucky

find reinvention:

shelf sentinels

curiosities

emerald knickknacks

maybe something more

than holding someone’s luxuries.

Who knows.

Is there a purpose for everything

behind the human grind

beyond the shade

of blameless recycling?

Strangers in a truck

redeeming emptiness

sanctioned on the side

the traffic of coins

sputtered back

at disreputable living

a huddled shimmering

flatbeds

shuttled off in the dark

wet necks

liquid eyes

that glitter the night

shivering as their captors walk

fast from sight

pockets laden with gold

and don’t you just want to

turn them on their heads

shake them hard

til they break

til they shatter

like stars

spilling back

all that stolen brightness?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michelle Bitting won the 2018 Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, and a fourth collection, Broken Kingdom, won the 2018 Catamaran Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. She has poems published in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review, Vinyl Poetry, Plume, Thrush, Raleigh Review, the Paris-American, AJP, Green Mountains Review, and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, (including Pushcart 2018 and Best of the Net 2018) and recently, The Pablo Neruda, American Literary Review and Tupelo Quarterly poetry contests.

Not Language:

SWWIM Every Day
by Minadora Macheret

by Minadora Macheret

That which comes before

mama

as the ink of the eye.

A rustle in the lining

the fluid disrupts, amniotic

            the womb 
                        & mouth 

it cherishes.

            Now, lapushka

—your cellular prison

                        is motherly fear & hope.

The baby becomes 


viable,             24 weeks,

& slips             past the need for developed organs,


a continued cocoon,

a survival
                 wide as the palm of your hand.

 

The wound of arrival

is just enough

 

to signal desire, 

live—

            away from sustenance,

 

                                    the first sound through which you enter 

your own lungs 

Minadora Macheret is a Ph.D. student in Poetry and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Texas. She is a Poetry Editor for Devilfish Review. Her work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Rogue Agent, Connotation Press, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook, Love Me, Anyway (Porkbelly Press, 2018). She likes to travel across the country with her beagle, Aki.

The Clocks in All the Novels Have Paused

SWWIM Every Day

by Corinna McClanahan Schroeder

From low chairs in the grass,

the heroines pass tiers

of cucumber sandwiches

and raspberry sponge cake.

The usual characters have convened—

grown daughters in muslin

and ribbons, heiresses yawning

diamonds. Teenage housekeepers

whose cupboard keys chime.

Governesses and quiet nieces

weathering tempest minds.

Clouds morph like a story overhead,

 

but the women pay no heed.

They are on break from the uses

of narrative. Crumbs spilling

from their lips, they don’t talk about

the next scene or when their weddings

will be. Not even the ever after,

happily though it’s promised

to be. For this hour, no one

blushes, no one’s made

to weep. The heroines just steep

in the pale sun, and no narrator

takes his stab at what they think.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Corinna McClanahan Schroeder is the author of the poetry collection Inked, winner of the 2014 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. She has been awarded an AWP Intro Journals Award and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and her poems appear or are forthcoming in such journals as Blackbird, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and RHINO.

Nighttime Ischemic

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Sutherland

by Jennifer Sutherland

Twilight, and I hear

her voice, familiar

kettle-hiss.

Quiet, girl,

she commands; then

my childhood rooms

are here, each

one dark as pitch,

bulls-eyed, red-

end cigaretted.

In the center

Mother sits,

seething.

Labyrinthine lady

fulcrum : rattle

preening. Tiny

importuning click/

click/click of gas

as she warms

the morning’s

coffee, aluminum

saucepan tap

and pour. Snap

of air trapped inside

her. Cricket clatter.

The house, its grid

of trenches, of gangrene

and defilade,

unacknowledged.

Rainbow-sheen halo

of puff and smoke,

her whisper-drab

devotional,

her pieta. Membrane

contracting, clutching

fibrous wall

and sinew.

Lung, spasming 

and black,

immobile,

wheeze and block.

I must

have frailed her,

asked too much

of her thin-stretched

décolletage,

engendered

a reaction.

When she died the

aperture swelled to many times

its anxious size.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Sutherland is a mostly former attorney and current MFA student at Hollins University, where she is also an assistant poetry editor for the Hollins Critic. Her work has appeared in the Northern Virginia Review and Anomaly, among other places, and her poem, “An Elegant Variation,” won Streetlight's 2018 Poetry Contest.

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.

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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.

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

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