Why Walk When We Can Fly

SWWIM Every Day

by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Toilet paper wings
trailing behind him, my son
flaps through the house.
He’s unraveled the entire roll
in seconds, that’s all it took
to leave so much white behind,
on the floor and in the air
and in his hands. That’s how he burned,
I think, Icarus that is, but my son
isn’t reaching for the sun yet
and I haven’t taught him intent,
that arms transform
when they move that quickly,
that the body is always just an instant
away from becoming
something else, from leaving
the ground or returning to it.
And he falls, on his knees
or face, flat to the hardwood, falls
without knowing how
it happened and rises
having forgotten he ever fell.
Maybe we need that too, to forget
or fall more, to move against
the past instead of towards it,
because underwater, the wax
must have congealed
back to wings around him
as the backwards sun
swallowed the whole
bird of him, clouds and body
strewn inside out,
left white and bare
as the hottest part
of a dying flame
or a star maybe, 
one we watch night after night
forgetting it must have died
so long ago
to still trail the sky.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Julia is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize, forthcoming from Kent State University Press in the fall of 2019, as well as the chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her newest poems appear in POETRY, Nashville Review, TriQuarterly, and Waxwing. Julia is the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine and writes a blog about motherhood.

Ride a Red Horse

SWWIM Every Day
by Jan Steckel

by Jan Steckel

We watched waxwings spiral after
gorging on rotten cherries.
Deer staggered when they munched
those wizened sloe berries.

We went from mead to rye spirits
in a thousand years flat.

Get you a copper kettle and coil.
Distill moonshine. Fuck the government.
They can shove their whiskey taxes
where the moon don’t rise.

We’ve been bootlegging
since before we crossed the pond,
rum-running in skiffs and canoes since
the first thick sticky drop of molasses.

We’re the red light in a monkey’s eye,
a red horse rearing rampant,
liquid crystal joy, white lightning
up the spine and out the brain.

Pour that new liquor in old bottles,
can money and cackle at the Fed.

Every cell of yeast’s a joy factory.
Corn makes a better liquid lunch
than stores of next year’s seed.

Some say farms birthed civilization,
but we know alcohol’s the real reason
we tamed that wild grass into grain.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jan Steckel’s lastest poetry book is Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018). Her poetry book, The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011), won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook, Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009), and poetry chapbook, The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006), also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, SWWIM Every Day, Canary, Assaracus, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California.

Last Seen

SWWIM Every Day
by Jessica Dionne

by Jessica Dionne

“Anywhere there are good and bad spirits, but the more there is hardship, the more bad spirits come around”—Ivan Posey, Eastern Shoshone Council 

Last seen tearing down the lane on thick
thighs like thunder-bang, Jr. queen of Wind
River Res. Last seen wresting things out of
cracks in scorched earth, holding them up
to the light. Last seen laughing, head thrown
back like a hallelujah. Last seen curled up
in scrub-grass with friends, blowing kisses
to a bottle of Black Velvet. Last seen enraptured
by the crack-up of baby bird bones, that lissome cull.

Last seen cheeks currant with scatter-heat,
the kind that roils. Last seen in any bar, in every bar.
At a parade. The gas station. At 11:09.
Last seen hair the color of crow although, one that
cannot fly. Last seen on an encrusted couch, legs
draped like an afterthought. Last seen covering
breasts like mountain peaks that they will not
know. Last seen mouth cherry O, forming the
word no, lips fused around pearls.

Last seen in Hot Springs County, before the first
snow. Last seen bruises blooming up an arm like
nothing else in this place can. Last seen inky locks
in the river, tangling. Last seen clavicle-splintered.
Last seen bones with gnaw-marks made from things
which scurry home to nests, grateful for small gifts. Last
seen a body, sparkling like a thing yet to be discovered.
Last seen as a scream, clawing its way out of a red, red mouth.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Dionne is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University. She received her MA in Literature from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her work has appeared in Rust + Moth, Banshee (IE), Mascara Literary Review (AU), The Mayo Review, The Longleaf Pine, and JMWW. She also received a writing residency from the Weymouth Center of the Arts and Humanities.

My Still Life with Wasps

SWWIM Every Day
by Amanda Moore

by Amanda Moore

I’ve lived in three homes in this town.
In three homes, wasps
nestled my walls:

paper hives blooming wildly,
unwanted August weeds.
They burrow toward my sleeping sounds at night,

and in the day they track me,
little sentinels from door
to driveway to door again.

The Bee Man arrives,
poisons this new nest
and can only cross his fingers.

Once before they died in pools
along my porch. Another,
they chewed through the wall and writhed

in inch-thick ribbons on my bed
until death gripped them in its teeth.
Once nestled, a home cannot

cut wasps loose to life, send them flying
to wilder, wider eaves,
an abandoned house or hollow tree—

this isn’t like the mother’s body, baby
breaking womb to emerge alive
and far from what it fed upon.

The house swells with wasps
that will be carried out only by death.
I am not afraid of such evil birth.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amanda Moore's poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including ZZYZVA, Cream City Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Best New Poets, and SWWIM Every Day, and she is currently a fellow at the San Francisco Writers Grotto. A high school English teacher, Amanda lives by the beach with her husband and daughter in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. More about her work is available at http://amandapmoore.com.

Boom

SWWIM Every Day
by Haya Pomrenze

by Haya Pomrenze

My son tells me he stopped eating
hummus and falafel on Bezalel Street
after Bus #18 split in half in Jerusalem.
East or West?

My son froze, watched the Burial Society
men tweeze flesh from a tree.
Mesmerized by the Hello Kitty book bag
streaked with blood, inches from his Nike sneakers.

After the Europe explosion—London or France?—
my son went everywhere on foot, sold
his train pass to an unsuspecting kid from Kansas.
After the Aurora cinema shootings, 

my son subscribed to Netflix
but never saw The Dark Knight Rises.
The shooter looked more like a dazed joker
with a bad dye job than a crazed killer.

My son settles into the car’s
passenger seat, secures the belt, and I notice the shaving gash
by his ear. I’m firing questions in staccato,
but he's fiddling with his iPhone, bopping to Labyrinth

when we both hear the boom, the backfire
of a car. And I pretend not to notice
my son’s lurch, the Book of Psalms
falling from his pocket.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Haya Pomrenze’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals including Hanging Loose, Rattle, Hawaii Pacific Review, MiPOesias, Lake Effect, and Lalitamba.  She is the author of two poetry collections: Hook (Rock Press, 2007), which was a National Jewish Book Award nominee, and How It’s Done (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Haya is an occupational therapist and uses poetry as a healing tool on a psychiatric unit. She is also a second degree black belt in the martial arts.

weightless

SWWIM Every Day
by Constance Schultz

by Constance Schultz

barely there I see you &
drifting snow the deer are here
clouds of cotton & you say

the sun heard it
even when the walls were there more
are cold & I love you

there is no roof I’m guessing
& snow pretends heart & maybe
      to melt it hears

hearted what it wants
when he smiles maybe it knows nothing

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Constance Schultz and her family live in the diverse Pacific Northwest. She has work in the Rising Phoenix Review, Bone & Ink Press, Empty Mirror, Sobotka Literary Review, and Hidden Channel Zine. Ms. Schultz also regularly contributes to Them Dam Writers online.

Sigiriya Rock Temple

SWWIM Every Day
by Abigail Wender

by Abigail Wender

I. Last Monologue of King Kashyapa in Which He Praises His Finest Work, 5C


“My city is guarded by five hundred goddesses,
each one is a jewel dug from clay.

No one sees the goddesses without desire.
A man may be lost forever
dreaming of their pale red mouths and blue shadows.

I have built a city near to heaven.
My enemy will never understand.

They were my harem.
From villages I saved them, from the underworld
beneath the trees; mothers and fathers gave them to me freely.

The maidens praised the artists who captured them
in frescos on these high cliff walls.

Praise me: I have made them immortal.
My home is this city near to heaven.
Goddesses: protect me from my enemy!

A man may be lost forever dreaming of his enemies.
Watch over me, o goddesses,

I have built my city to rival heaven.”   

II. The Defacement, 1967


A monk looks at the ancient frescoes—

he feels a pulse
fast as the blackout
of desire

The almost naked
goddesses, platters of mango
about to fall from slender fingers

A goddess’s smoky chime of bangles,
her nipples like orchids
in wet heat

Someone calls to him, he believes, a bhikkhus, 
master from the sacred ranks of monks,
the ONE among many

From the pail, he lifts a heavy broom and sweeps—
smothers us whores with tar

Swallows, too, foul the rock face with streaks 

III.  The Goddesses’ Song  


we goddesses                                          we dance with birds
we are the words                                    written on leaves
we are gods                                             mothers of gods
we mother                                               we give birth to the gods
we are                                                     gods’ eyes

lovers come closer                                 here with us forever
we are your sisters                                 flow of water   of leaf
we are your lovers                                   rain    leaf   rice
read us                                                     arm   breast   belly
sail with the swallows                             our eyes   your eyes

below us                                                  you who made us
you who read us                                      we are fresco   we are rock
you preserve us                                       do not deceive us
we live forever                                         do not defile us   
call the swallows                                     shade our witness

call the wind                                            night protect us
the rain blows in                                      night oh protect
the sun beats                                             and rock protect us
god’s eyes                                                flute   drum   chime
our names                                                rain   rock   rice

__________________________________________________________________

Abigail Wender’s poetry and translations have appeared in The Cortland Review, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Epiphany, Kenyon Review Online, New Orleans Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her translation of a selection of Iris Hanika’s Das Eigentliche (THE ESSENTIAL) was published in Asymptote. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and lives in New York City.

Specs

SWWIM Every Day
by Karen George

by Karen George

             ~ After Mary Oliver's "Sand Dabs, Four"



Where does your breath go when you lose it? When it gets knocked out of you?

Try not to laugh at accidents.

Beneath trees, gaze up to swell your lungs, elate your heart.

Why is it you adore paisley and parsley?

Wheels of color and spirals fuel you.

Why did it take so long to fathom the sky?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Karen George is the author of five chapbooks, and two poetry collections from Dos Madres Press, Swim Your Way Back (2014) and A Map and One Year (2018). My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Adirondack Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, Sliver of Stone, and Still: The Journal. She reviews poetry and interviews poets at Poetry Matters, and is the co-founder and fiction editor of the online journal, Waypoints.

Hole

SWWIM Every Day
by Hilary Sideris

by Hilary Sideris

To drain our
mother’s hematoma,

they drill into her
head. Not blood,

she says, a pinkish
liquid—lymph, pus?—

pools in the space
between her brain

& skull. Our father’s
dead, a good rid-

dance. Her depth
perception’s off.

She falls & falls.  
We call it grief.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Hilary Sideris grew up in Indiana. She lives in Brooklyn and works for The City University of New York. Her poems have recently been published in Gravel, Main Street Rag, The Lake, and Salamander. Her collection Un Amore Veloce is just out from Kelsay Books. “Hole” will appear in The Silent b, forthcoming from Dos Madres Press.

There, Now That's Better

SWWIM Every Day
by Caroline Plasket

by Caroline Plasket

Once, my body was the Red Sea,
and I was Moses, only Moses was

a woman and she screamed into the water,
and it split unilaterally. From her

midline she pulled with an arm, not a staff,
the head of humanity. She cradled the warm,

red life with intention—the way
a midwife feels for the cliff of fundus. And then

the waters closed. There was the salty
expanse of sea—they were on

it, not in it, and her body was bread. Was Jesus
the myth of a woman who softened under

the delicious, pink, wet pallet of life,
in the milky ocean of saliva? We have

drifted        the slow evolution to the shore. Where
the child faces me

before drinking me into herself.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Caroline Plasket's poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Atticus Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Orange Blossom Review, Compose, IDK, and Stirring, among others. She was a fall 2016 mentee in the AWP Writer to Writer Program.

Modern Degas

SWWIM Every Day
by Adina Kopinsky

by Adina Kopinsky

A knee joint, a bent elbow,
a spangled skirt—ballerinas passé
towards the floor, shoulders gleam
with the minutiae of anatomy;
elegant as ever you sketched—

dancers in the dim light of a dressing room,
skin like cream and caramel, hollow
against spine, like horses paused
before the Kentucky Derby, prize stallions
of the Bolshoi Ballet. 

No wonder you loved them all, Edgar—
muscles, feathered skirts and plumed
tails, the heave of chests, mist
and paw, the rise and fall of music,
gunshot, the hee-yaw! of a jockey—

you would have loved Messi too,
instep kick like a dancer on the soccer field,
rising a relevé to the rhythm of his fans;
hearts stopped, tableau, the body
of work you left behind, ballerina and horse,

brush and charcoal, form and flesh,
Raymondo, Ronaldo, the sweat and swell
of delusions, dreams, a revelation
of what our bodies, our hands
might have been—

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Adina Kopinsky is an emerging poet balancing poetry, motherhood, and reflective living. Now living in Israel, she is originally from Los Angeles and has a degree in English Literature from California State University, Northridge. She has work published or forthcoming in Carbon Culture Review, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, and Peacock Journal, among other publications.

Two Daughters

SWWIM Every Day
by Emily Pérez

by Emily Pérez

When there are two
daughters, one is soft
one is swift
            one can stretch
her face to contain
honey or humor
saline, a bone graft
disdain.
One cannot bend
but knows her place
the curtains
the floorboard’s tongue-
in-groove, the hearthstone.

When there are two
            daughters there are two
moons, both sickle-celled
            and fawn-eyed.
One that sings
one that scolds.
Both hold their breath
            under bridges.

Sometimes there are two
rivers cutting landscape
flooding farms
            sometimes fire strides forth
on two fronts
            sometimes two stars
orbit each other, but these
            reflect each other’s light
and these are not
            two daughters.


_____________________________________________________________________________________

Emily Pérez is the author of the full-length collection, House of Sugar, House of Stone, and the chapbooks Made and Unmade and Backyard Migration Route. A CantoMundo fellow, her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Fairy Tale Review, and Poetry. She teaches English and Gender Studies in Denver, where she lives with her husband and sons.

The Winter of Our Marriage

SWWIM Every Day
by Sara Backer

by Sara Backer

For several months, this snow
has held us under siege, indentured servants
of the shovel, supplicants at power line altars.

We drive through gray crystallized mazes,
forced into potholes, blind at every corner.
Our eyes burn from ceaseless white:

walls, windows, ground, and sky. I threaten
to paint each room lime green and you almost agree.
We hunker under the blanket we call Old Sparky,

and our old cat chisels herself between us.
After midnight, a full moon makes the clouded sky
bright as day—and pink?

I wake you. You confirm the sky is pink.
We never figure out the mystery.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sara Backer has two poetry chapbooks: Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork 2015), which won the Turtle Island Poetry Award, and Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press 2018). Her writing has been honored with residency fellowships from the Norton Island and Djerassi programs and with eight Pushcart nominations. For links to her online publications, visit sarabacker.com.

Breakage

SWWIM Every Day
by Susanna Lang

by Susanna Lang

Once it’s been broken, the body
holds the memory of falling
as you would hold a fragile goblet
that belonged to your great grandmother,
whose name you also carry.

The body holds with two hands
the memory of falling, as you
would hold an entire tray of goblets.
That delay before you reach the ground,
the sound of something shattering

that blanks all other sounds—birds
silenced, no broom to sweep up
the shards, no arm to sweep with.

Cobbled together, the body walks
with eyes fixed on where the next
step falls and the step after that, sings
a few words over and over, once again
upright and moving across the earth.

Always the body holds its memory,
water brimming a goblet etched in gold.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susanna Lang’s third collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was released in 2017 from Terrapin Books. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry, and Verse Daily. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. She lives and teaches in Chicago.

Hope

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Freligh

by Sara Freligh

She was blonde and freckled—that, I remember, and how
spraddled she sat, pregnant belly ballooning
over spread legs. This from a time in my life
when I’d pocket my lunch tips and stop by a bar
where old guys argued about the batting averages
of ballplayers I’d never heard of. Pigs’ feet floated
in a clear jar and peanuts were free, TV tuned
to a talk show where the freckled blonde
said she cried whenever someone asked boy
or girl?, and if it was her first. Her baby
was dead, nothing but a dark stone in the gut
of the x-ray machine but still another month
of lugging around that coffin before she gave
birth and buried the kid. I remember the man
next to me whispered Jesus, less an expletive
than a prayer for what he’d never have
to endure, and I think of him and her
when I think about hope as a seed
of something that maybe might not be.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis.Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, diode, and in the anthology New Microfiction (WW Norton, 20180. Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006.

Begging to Differ

SWWIM Every Day
by Devon Balwit

by Devon Balwit

            (Mary Oliver, 1935-2019)

 

The snide will ever be snide, complaining
that a marmot isn’t a red-tail, disappointed
that the chamber quartet doesn’t beatbox,
wanting white bread to spice itself into dal,
condemning the popular, their own envy
visible like a slip sagging beneath a hem.
She never seems to be in her poems,
a critic complains, but outside them,
putting them together from the available
literary elements. Where else would a poet work,
and what else with, drawing the outside in,
a diligent gleaner? Another, deriding her
homiletic upward yearning jokes
that no animals appear to have been harmed
in the making of her poems. No. Only that critic’s
sensibilities. The rest of us hang on the cries
of her wild geese, harsh and exciting,
announcing our place in the family of things.
We sit in pews, on yoga mats, on buses,
at kitchen tables, hoping for words
to lighten our burden. We want the ordinary
to be consecrated, for most of us only ever
abide there—no more special than our good dog
sniffing the common yards of our common streets.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Devon Balwit's most recent collection is A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found at SWWIM Every Day, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Fifth Wednesday (on-line), Apt, Grist, and Oxidant Engine, among others. For more on her book and movie reviews, chapbooks, collections and individual works, see her website at https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet.

Carousel #2

SWWIM Every Day
by Jen Rouse

by Jen Rouse

The beveled mirrors hold
you open to the sky. Reglazed
and lit to dazzle. Sometimes
I am waltzing with you
there. Your wig elaborate
and winged with birds.
The woman in the painting
next door runs through
the pasture wild, unbridled. How
I always want you this way.
Gleaming teeth, eyes that spark
and gallop. We are in worlds split,
untimed, and tragic. So stop
tapping at the glass because I
cannot take you. I raise my hand
to touch your hand to still you there.
(Oh the tapping.) We look beside
ourselves, and I become your
mouth moving so quickly, and you
become my finger against these lips.
The carousel keeps us fixed in place.
I want to tell you this thing about
the way you dance inside me. 
Endless. The circles. No sound.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jen Rouse is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Gulf Stream, Parentheses, Cleaver, Up the Staircase, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Rouse is a two-time finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize. Headmistress Press has published her books Acid and Tender, CAKE, and Riding with Anne Sexton. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.

telegrams to the lover that maybe I never really had

SWWIM Every Day
by Paula Harris

by Paula Harris

I cannot possibly actually meet someone as lovely as you comma can I query

I am mad to think you really look at me like you are so happy stop

So happy stop

So you must not exist query

So you must not exist stop

Maybe I really am as happy as I think comma but maybe I never left the house stop

Maybe I am lying in bed comma dreaming stop

I am a daydreamer stop

Sorry that I call you my lover comma I know it might make you uncomfortable stop

But you are not my boyfriend and I do not want to call you that guy who I am fucking stop

And comma imaginary or not comma you have loved my body right on down stop

Maybe the reason your beard never tickles me is that it does not exist because you do not exist stop

Maybe comma when you do talk comma you always say the right things because I am saying them stop

Maybe the reason the sex is exactly how I have always wanted sex to be is because it is all in my imagination stop

My imagination definitely knows how I like to be touched comma but imaginary you finds some new things with me stop

Fuck comma I love the way you kiss stop

Do not stop kissing me stop

Do not stop stop

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Paula Harris lives in New Zealand, where she writes poems and sleeps in a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award, and her chapbook, i make men like you die sweetly, will be published in September 2019 by dancing girl press. Her poetry has been published in various journals, including Berfrois, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Snorkel, The Spinoff and Landfall. She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric. She tweets randomly at @paulaoffkilter.

Panama

SWWIM Every Day
by Donna Spruijt-Metz

by Donna Spruijt-Metz



Under my skin, now, 
disorder, unruliness, a gift
a country
of hummingbirds. So many
with tremolo 

wings, the hummingbirds— 
part of one thousand 
species of birds here—they sip sweet
sap, beaks bright,
the lush forest shows, greens

Rembrandt never had
and yellows 

oh!

The agouti swifts across 

my path—right across 
my feet while my skin’s 
undoing is now 

the rainforest, the slow denuding.
For now, the birds
            deceive us— 

continue to migrate
back and forth—old patterns
break slow.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, translator, and Professor of Psychology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her first career was as a professional flutist. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as the American Journal of Poetry, Naugatuck River Review, Juked, Poets Reading the News, and Poetry Northwest. Her chapbook, Slippery Surfaces, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2019.

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