Piece of Work

SWWIM Every Day
by Diane K. Martin

by Diane K. Martin

The night is almost too quiet.

His snore is the exhaust of a semi

roaring down the two-lane. The dog

 

at her water bowl is a summer lake

lapping the silt beach. And the woman

—big glasses, denim jeans, hair

 

pulled back with a scarf—holds

a yellow pencil in her teeth.

The woman is the poem.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Diane K. Martin has published work in SWWIM Every Day, American Poetry Review, Field, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Plume, and many other print and online 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.

How to Get Out of a 20-Year Hole

SWWIM Every Day
by Kristina Bicher

by Kristina Bicher

a prison spoon, sharp teeth, a rosary

and chicken feet, a compass rose, magnetic blood

TNT, equanimity, and a diamond file for a finger;

jeweler’s glass, rubber suit, passport stamp

kick in the ass, the right shoes, the North Star

a shiv and an ampule of musk; sulfuric acid,

wooden mask, litmus test, laughing gas, atom bomb

doctor’s note, hammer of Thor, a metaphor,

a stronger rope, a longer hope, a golden tongue

le mot juste, safer roost, divining rod

echolocation and a sleeve of magical staves.

 

But in order to exit, I first had to step over the body.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kristina Bicher is a poet, essayist and translator; her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Hayden’s Ferry Review ,Plume, Denver Quarterly, Narrative, Barrow Street, The Atlantic, Harvard Review and others. Author of She-Giant in the Land of Here-We-Go-Again (forthcoming from MadHat Press in 2019) and Just Now Alive (2014), she earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Harvard University.

Drupe

SWWIM Every Day
by Angela Narciso Torres

by Angela Narciso Torres


Her sadness is coarse and thick as a horsehair overcoat.
As a child I tried it on. Its heavy folds engulfed me.

I learned to balance the weight on my head the way 
fruit sellers carried baskets of mangoes on their crowns.

Mornings it cloyed to my throat like the hairy pits of drupes.
My eyes teared. I tried to spit. It insisted, impeded my breathing.

I swallowed the bitter seed. Washed it down like the whale
who gulped a grown man and kept him in darkness for days.

As a child I learned from an aunt:
if you swallow a seed, a tree will grow in your stomach.

I nurture her sadness like a sapling. 
Decades of summers pass. The tree fruits.    

Lay your hand on my chest. Feel the heft
of sour-sweet drupes my mother’s tears have fed.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Angela Narciso Torres, author of Blood Orange (Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry), has recent or forthcoming work in POETRY, Missouri Review, Bellingham Review, Quarterly West, and Cortland Review.  A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Ragdale Foundation. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she’s a senior and reviews editor for RHINO and serves on the editorial panel of New England Review. 

Among Us, Divine

SWWIM Every Day
by Maureen Seaton

by Maureen Seaton

I parted my own sea and you came to me: sort of unscripted, sort of splendid.
A loose bolt in the imagination—the very one that got me in trouble sipping 

lilac wine (stolen from you five minutes ago). Remember? You were breaking 
in your ukulele. All those tiny hand movements. I glued myself into a collage 

and you flew. There was something old school about us. Or scientifically
unsound. We made faces at Czars. My eyes were browning then, and yours

were shaped like starfish. You never know who you’ll run into as you sweep
the sea with a slender stalk. I’ve carried my life inside me for so long now, 

never knowing where it would take me, so irretrievable, so stark raving mine.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Maureen Seaton has authored twenty poetry collections, both solo and collaborative, most recently, Sweet World (CavanKerry, 2019) and Fisher (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her awards include the Iowa Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Audre Lorde Award, NEA fellowship, and the Pushcart. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), also garnered a “Lammy” and was recently reprinted in paperback (2018). ). With poet Neil de la Flor, she edited the anthology Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos (Anhinga Press, 2018). Seaton teaches at the University of Miami.

Living Room

SWWIM Every Day
by Kristin Ryan

by Kristin Ryan

She is bruised by sunlight.

Uncertain hands

move towards

a tea cup full of grapes.

She remembers it being easier this way.

Bowls are simply too much:

 

they can trick you into filling them—

what if you can’t stop—

 

Listen: sometimes a girl can’t eat,

becomes afraid of kitchens and knives.

The way the air presses skin, through

blood into bone, into the marrow.

 

No, it’s better to stay here

in the living room where blues and yellows weep

 

from the starry nights, the sunflowers,

the wheat fields on the walls. She wonders if

 

this room will become her wheat field—

if his face will become her gun.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kristin Ryan is a poet working towards healing, and full sleeves of tattoos. She is a recipient of the Nancy D. Hargrove Editor's Prize in Poetry, was listed as a Write Bloody Finalist, and has been nominated for Best New Poets. Her poems have been featured in Glass, Jabberwock Review, Milk and Beans, among others. She holds an MFA from Ashland University and works in the mental health field. She tweets @kristinwrites.

All the Hungry Falcons

SWWIM Every Day
by Dion O'Reilly

by Dion O’Reilly

Appetite makes them keen

when they scan the tunneled field

for shivers in the dead grass.

Their vision sharpens, pupils dilate.

From a mile away, they see

their feed, and they take it.

All my life, I’ve stowed my stories

like a box of banned books

under the bed. Each one, unforgiven,

an arc of trouble and want.

They quicken my hunger

for what I’ll never have

or never have again—

a mother mainly, certain men,

but a sister and brother too, a city

I walked in with hot paper cups,

my lips foamed with cappuccino

as it rained and rained.

Oh, the world feels tidal

when I get like this, when l can’t stop

hunting for something intimate and filling.

I see it lift from the soil.

The sun, a muzzle flash,

turning the meadow bright, burning

off the haze. I soar in, see it magnified,

everything itself only more so.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dion O’Reilly has spent  much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Canary Magazine, Spillway, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review and a many other journals and anthologies, including a Lambda Anthology. Her work has been nominated for Pushcarts and a variety of prizes and contests.

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.

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