A Moral Universe

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

You could also
believe that instead of the arc
bending toward justice, it falls into mud,
that there is no magnetic pull of goodness lingering
in the stars. How some of us will end in a nursing home,
alone, our minds washed of the stacks and stacks of scenes
we held in the folds. Or maybe there will be rebirth—
scientists have regenerated parts of dead pigs’
brains. I wonder what returns—The trough?
The suckling at a teat? The last touch
of dirt on those four tiny feet
before the slaughter?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has three poetry collections, The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera, forthcoming in 2019. Recently, poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.

when Chen Chen tweets about deer in a poem

SWWIM Every Day
By Ray Ball

by Ray Ball

I think
I can’t see a deer
on a page
without bracing for impact
the word evokes
not one car crash
but two antlers
shattering windshields
in stricken moments
replicated later in a set
of vanishing headlights

one summer morning
a dear friend and I gasped
snippets of conversation
and gossip pushing our tempo
quick turnover on a shaded path
clouds of mosquitos
blocked the sun
when we startled a doe

her eyes reminded me
of the color of a totaled sedan
of the terror of waking
as glass breaks and soars
of the way winds lift
off a river the way
darknesses intertwine
creating a fragile anchor
to tether a vessel between worlds

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ray Ball grew up in a house full of snakes. She is a history professor, Pushcart-nominated poet, and editor at Alaska Women Speak. Her first chapbook, Tithe of Salt, was published by Louisiana Literature Press, and she has recent publications in Coffin Bell, Moria, and UCity Review. When she's not in the classroom, you can find her drinking bitter beverages, researching in the Spanish and Italian archives, or on Twitter.

When the famous poet's widower sidles up to you at her memorial

SWWIM Every Day
by Alexis Rhone Fancher

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

he’ll ask if you’re the same girl who used to live on Clinton St, and weren’t your sons 
once friends? Old, with bushy brows and a scraggly beard, he’ll be even more repellant. 

You’ll recall his fusty smell, how he’d push his way into your apartment,
sit too close to you on your couch, uninvited, stroke your hair.

He’ll ask if you remember the handmade books he tried to sell you
scribbled drawings, pages of ramblings disguised as poems, ink-splotched, unintelligible,

glitter escaping from the gaping pages onto your apartment’s grey shag confusion;
how he almost coerced you into buying one, you, who could barely make rent, 

who could barely afford cheap, Payless shoes for your growing boy.

Did I come on to you back then? he’ll ask, gripping your arm so you can’t escape. 
He’ll feign foggy, confused. When you answer yes, he’ll smile, and say,

Yeah, well. In those days, I came on to everyone.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

L.A. poet Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, Plume, The American Journal of Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Diode, Nashville Review, Wide Awake, Poets of Los Angeles, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She’s the author of 5 poetry collections; How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen, (2014), State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, (2015), Enter Here, (2017), Junkie Wife, (2018), and The Dead Kid Poems (2019). EROTIC, New & Selected, publishes in 2020 from New York Quarterly. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. www.alexisrhonefancher.com

When Mars Is Aligned

SWWIM Every Day
by Barbra Nightingale

by Barbra Nightingale

And the moon is in its second house
or is it third? Or fourth or fifth?
I can’t keep track of all those lyrics
let alone events the symbols might portend.

The only thing I’m sure of is the night sky
and how when I look up in the dark
I see the red planet winking,
the moon going through its phases,
the planets moving together or apart.

What would Galileo say about the galaxies
twisting and turning in space,
the bubbles and black holes, the dark and heavy
matter pressing down on all the souls of earth?

What would be the point, he’d say,
or maybe what difference would it make?
One way or the other, we’re collapsing
on ourselves, the seas are rising,
and each breath we take is measured.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Barbra Nightingale recently retired from 34 years at Broward College. She is now an Associate Editor with the South Florida Poetry Journal, and she volunteers with the Ft. Lauderdale Film Festival. She has eight books of poetry with small presses, and over 200 published poems. Visit her at www.barbranightingale.com.

In Which I am Surprised to Find Myself in April Again

SWWIM Every Day
by Beth Gordon

by Beth Gordon

This spring I am required to turn the tap left, ending the river of recycled 
tears, I am required to pray to living children, to their knees and small stomachs,
their throats and green toes, I am required to cover the witch’s well with cut cedar,
board it up with magic mirrors buried beneath the bones, I am required to float 
with  my grandson in sun-blue pool water, his unscarred skin so gentle a sponge for 
all things clean and in flight, his good hands in motion, his fingers antennae, his voice 
as deep as a baby bullfrog, creaky as a rusted bell, I am required to 
look into the face of my newborn grand daughter, her crystal ball eyes revealing 
her amber-scented future with 90 years of hurricane survival stories, 
not the weedy-trailed paths of the past, snakes tasting her heels as she passes, this spring 
I am required to take a lover, let something touch my skin that was born in floods
of blood and womb-water not wool-woven or cast iron, I am required to use 
my body, remove it from the cellar where it hides with canned okra, mulberry 
jam, I am required to drape it around my songs, I am required to pinch and be
pinched, to bruise, to slither, to goosebump, to wander with memories of tongues and teeth, 
to wallow in muddy creeks with tadpoles and crawfish, I am required to dry my-
self with forsythia and dandelion dust, until I am aglow with yellow.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother, currently landlocked in St. Louis, MO. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous journals including Into the Void, Noble/Gas, Five:2:One, Verity La, Califragile, Pretty Owl Poetry and Yes Poetry. Her chapbook, Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe will be published in May 2019 by AHC Press. She is also the Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.

Skin Deep

SWWIM Every Day
by Cynthia Atkins

by Cynthia Atkins

I took my body out of the hand-me-down 
bin. It sagged empty as a winter coat 
on its hanger. Believe it or not, once it was chased
by a town-car of clowns—The drunken 
pimpled sons of sons of sons 
of the Ku Klux Klan.  
            I was a Jew, a Jew.
My body had kinky hair and a crooked nose.
Not like the girls with bowling-pin white teeth
and doily-tanned toes. The blood of a Jew 
           on my virgin Kmart underwear.
They shadowed me down aisles, 
into a junkyard purgatory of broken toys.    
          God’s drunk at 2 am 
when the fluorescent lights
hone in on the Denny’s bathroom. 
Interrogating every truth and blemish.  
           I did it in the graffiti-riddled stall, 
staring down a cracked toilet. My body’s 
tongue forced on his dark pulse.  
He squeezed my head so hard, 
          it burned a hole in time. 
I counted the headstones 
of my people, like tiny boats 
in an inlet. One by one, they saved me.  
The cuts and wounds filled 
not with blood, but umpteen years 
       of Sweet’N Low and sadness.      
I’m easy, tell me what I want to hear. 
”Your face is damn ugly.” The next day, 
“Kike” and “Slut” Magic Markered 
on my locker— a swastika like a jungle gym
for the dead. My name scrawled in every 
defiled bathroom stall—Our calls
       hollow in the wax of God’s ear.

__________________________________________________________________

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, Denver Quarterly, Diode, Florida Review, Flock Lit, Green Mountains Review, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Rust + Moth, SWWIM Every Day, Tampa Review, andVerse Daily, among others. She lives in Rockbridge County, VA with her family. More info at www.cynthiaatkins.com or @catkinspoet.

Minotaur

SWWIM Every Day
by Romana Iorga

by Romana Iorga

Somewhere on the outskirts of the body
the gulls are trying their wings
on gusts of wind.
Somewhere the foghorn announces danger
at low tide and billows break
over hidden rocks
the way sleep breaks
over the submerged cliffs
of consciousness.

I spill into the world all anew,
carried forth by the amniotic gush
of half-dreamed words.
No newborns are ugly,
though some of them turn out more handsome
than others.
But who’s to profess judgment,
when we all are sinking lead, bait
for what lurks beneath,
when the line
we hold in our hands
leads directly to the beast?

The morning is yielding
its foggy pastels to brighter
tempera.  Soon,
I will slip into familiar skin,
utter the names
of these almost forgotten
alleys of veins and arteries,
learn to inhabit again
the labyrinth of my body.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga lives in Switzerland. She is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian, 'Poem of Arrival' and 'Simple Hearing.' Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Cagibi, Washington Square Review, PANK, and others, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.

her story is my story is your story

SWWIM Every Day
by Melissa Eleftherion

by Melissa Eleftherion

her story is my story is your story the axes we intersect, collide, ruminate, devise the branches we extend to heartache to the larynx to the mouth humans in our filth and consequence partially digested morals and transformative butt yoga we allied in flesh and rattles a kindred of sextants making sense of pecuniary disease a systemic longing for connections when criminal justice is criminal warfare and we are all under this rock heaving against it with our might intact and our eyes xanthic with exhaustion. we are in this radial of desire we dichroic points & light when we turn we turn together and that’s where we’re going

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Melissa Eleftherion is a writer, librarian, and a visual artist. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & six chapbooks, including the recently released little ditch (above/ground press, 2018). Born & raised in Brooklyn, Melissa now lives in Mendocino County where she manages the Ukiah Library, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.

5 PM

SWWIM Every Day
by Sharon Tracey

by Sharon Tracey

            —Jennifer Bartlett (1991-92); oil on canvas


How do you build a painting with only
sixty minutes to live
between five and six in the evening
on a seven square-foot grid—

she’s dug a fishpond in a courtyard
fissured it in time
stocked it with cold-blooded koi
dressed in calico and banana yellow

some seem dredged in flour as if
they might be battered. They dart
and swim among the water lilies
then tip their scales and slip

under as if cold war spies.
Leaves past their prime have fallen
and float upon the placid surface
like Matisse cutouts that have died.

So much happens in a single hour
and so little—you stare
at the appearance of depth
and think of the fish, the ticking clock,
where the weeping light goes

and realize that you could just walk away
just take something and walk—

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sharon Tracey is a poet, editor, and author of the poetry collection, What I Remember Most Is Everything (ALL CAPS PUBLISHING, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Mom Egg Review, Tule Review, Common Ground Review, Light: A Journal of Photography and Poetry, Forth, Canary, Naugatuck River Review, Ekphrasis, and elsewhere. She lives in western Massachusetts. For more, please see www.sharontracey.com.

How to Reach the Moon by Folding

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Ann Winn

by Sarah Ann Winn

Spoilers: it can be done. Given paper

large enough, thin enough. I have always been
so creased and compressed I’d explode inside

a compressor. Too heavy to lift and yes, some
have tried or joked about it. The first
seven turns are easy. Everyone has
a set number of tools and limited

energy and then we’re done. We can’t
take any more halving, we can’t keep
coming back to the same place pressed
together. We are all imperfect
logic, math-matched,
given the choice,
the moon or that time
I thought I would never be able

to fold again,
I would take the distance
I have
and be grateful
to stand under.
Sistered to the sky.
Darkness is always ready
to do the final calculations,
to keep close.
If most answer forty-five
I return at forty six,
still counting.
At forty seven, nobody
asks any more
where will we go
from here?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Ann Winn’s first book, Alma Almanac, was selected by Elaine Equi as winner of the 2017 Barrow Street Book Prize. She’s the author of five chapbooks, the most recent of which, Ever After the End Matter, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2019. She teaches poetry workshops in Northern Virginia and the DC Metro area, and online at the Loft Literary Center. Visit her at http://bluebirdwords.com or follow her @blueaisling.

There comes a time

SWWIM Every Day
by Laura Gardner

by Laura Gardner

when you realize you didn’t really want to be a Russian gymnast
or the lion trainer for Ringling Brothers, or a jockey,
though your sister did make costumes for the circus
and could have come up with something daring and sparkly

there’s no real hurry to see the tomb of Hafez, and
how great can the Great Barrier Reef be, really?
Because, well, Australia and all those other places,
they’re way too far. Besides—the plane ride…no,

as the workday wanes into the humid night you anticipate
the morning commute down Route 31, looking east,
where ordinary clouds form on the horizon like mountains.

above the tree line, they’re the Himalayan ice blue peaks,
the misty tips of New Zealand’s Southern Alps,
they’re the Andes of Peru, llamas and all,
and as your wheels roll over the pavement, hot coffee at your lips,

the planet turns ever so perfectly toward the sun, toward our dawning star,
and a neon ridge blazes over those mountains
like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Gardner is a rural mail carrier who writes poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She self-studied the writing craft while working as a library assistant before graduating with a BA in English/Creative Writing. Her poems have been published in various journals including Rosebud, Lily Literary Review, and Modern Haiku. She lives in New York’s Finger Lakes Region and enjoys kayaking, hiking, berry picking, and pie.

4th Century Roman Belt Ornament

SWWIM Every Day
by Rachel Mindell

by Rachel Mindell

Less than two inches high or wide.
Made of copper alloy and gilt, the buckle
depicts two incredible happenings.

On one side, a couple to be betrothed.
The woman’s arm extended
such that the man can grip her hand.

Each has a right foot out.
Above their heads, the Christogram
sanctifies their union in an emerging faith.

On the reverse, Bellerophon astride Pegasus
slays the Chimera with lead on his spear,
forcing it down her lion throat such that

the dragon fire she breathes will melt it,
gagging her, killing also her goat
midsection and her snake behind.

In each scene, a woman of parts is tamed.
In each scene, the divine is invoked, be it
the hovering miracle or the heroism of metal.

What was the comfort of bearing both tales
simultaneously at the belly when one must
have always remained dominant, facing out.

In this beginning, two things true and violent, one obscured.
In the beginning, one always takes and another is taken.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rachel Mindell is a queer writer living in Tucson. She is the author of two chapbooks: Like a Teardrop and a Bullet (Dancing Girl Press) and rib and instep: honey (above/ground). Individual poems have appeared (or will) in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Foglifter, Forklift, Ohio, The Journal, and elsewhere. She works for the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Submittable.

Mother

SWWIM Every Day
by Catherine Keefe

by Catherine Keefe

as dictionary. Silent as the word
book. Unabridged. Not the kind
you carry in your back pocket. You

must go home to stand agape before
that hand-hewn cherry wood table
lit by rainbow of abalone glass

holding all the words, a sketch of starlings
flooding the Iowa plains just before
snow falls. At your fingertips. Dog

ear me. Highlight. Memorize. How
long it took to write the first
Oxford English Dictionary?

Seventy years. An almost life-
time to gather precise meaning. Unused
words kicked to the curb for rubbish

pick-up. I've thrown away so much. Once
I said the right thing and you leaned forward
so quickly I couldn't uncross my arms. Crack

my spine to find crumbs and new
adjectives. This is my body for you
to find your way. Pluck

grace notes like the guitarist
on the green that summer
before the great migration.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Keefe is a California poet, essayist and social justice activist. Recent work appeared in Collateral Damage, a Pirene's Fountain Anthology, TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, andThe Gettysburg Review. Catherine works as a story coach, helping families shape and document generational narratives. Her current writing project, Kind In Kind, is a yearlong effort to turn public attention towards the transformational effect of performing daily, simple acts of kindness. Follow along at www.catherinekeefe.com

Somewhere in America

SWWIM Every Day
by Lily Starr

by Lily Starr

Risk in our lifetime is slipping
something small into the full
pocket of a leather purse.
I have lost so much this way,
sunglasses, lighters,
a knife so thin it could fit
in a fold of your knuckle.
I lost you somewhere in America,
between the river
and everything after it.
We always feared landlock.
Only the current loved us this way—
enough to hold our bodies until
we stopped our shaking.
I dreamt of you once. The field
behind my house, my father’s deer
feeder replaced by your hands,
full of sweet corn and invitation
for a velvet mouth. But nothing came.
The hunting camera caught your body,
flash turning your face a shock of white.
I think of you now, in Alabama,
where the light doesn’t dare
touch the stars. I bet you’re so tan
your toenails look like mother of pearl.
I bet everyone loves you like a country.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lily Starr is an eager and passionate student of poetry from Cecil County, Maryland. She earned a BA in English from Washington College in the spring of 2017 and is currently pursuing her MFA at Florida International University in Miami. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, The Journal, and Gulf Stream.

Thirty-Year Friendship

SWWIM Every Day
by Nan Cohen

by Nan Cohen

If I say you know me better than I know myself,
that’s not to say you know everything about me.

What I mean is that a forest doesn’t know itself
the way a woodcutter does. Or a wolf. Or a child
walking into the woods.

But, you, you know what it is
to walk in these woods. To greet the woodcutter
and the wolf. To take the child’s hand.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nan Cohen, the longtime poetry program director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, is the author of two books of poems, Rope Bridge (2005) and Unfinished City (2017). The recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, she lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at Viewpoint School and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Espalier

SWWIM Every Day
by Zoë Ryder White

by Zoë Ryder White

My neighbor, in her green gloves and plastic bunny mask, is training her pear tree—a child, really—to stand straight, arms outstretched. The tree goes two-dimensional with this effort. It’s a training meant to bring beauty; symmetry. Every year as the branches grow, there is more length to tie down. To plant a no-shitting-dogs icon in the square of dirt around what you’d call the tree’s trunk, my neighbor trades the bunny mask for raccoon. The tree is drawn and quartered, though my neighbor is kind; encouraging. Things grow well around her. She binds the tree’s branches to the frame with twisties. She pushes the raccoon mask onto the top of her head so she can see what she’s doing. When the tree is old enough to bear fruit, pears will hang from the frame like a row of pears at the market. When the other neighbor walks by, the one who calls me fucking white whore, will she admire the honey blush around the pears’ dangling bottoms? And will I? My neighbor puts a new mask on. What a collection! This one is the tusked wild boar. Dangerous, delicious. G. says we’re each a little queer in our queer little way. Kurt C. said something similar in the nineties but I’m not sure he meant what she means. If I sit still, I feel what moves through my carotid. A pot of bones boils in the kitchen. I render the spring fat. I lay my hands on me.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Zoë Ryder White lives in Brooklyn with her family, writing poems and editing books for educators about the craft of teaching. Her poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, Threepenny Review, Crab Creek Review, and Subtropics, among others.

I was visible

I was visible

SWWIM Every Day
by Amanda J. Forrester

by Amanda J. Forrester

Please click on the post to view this poem.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amanda J. Forrester received her MFA from the University of Tampa. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Azahares Spanish Language Literary Magazine, Pink Panther Magazine, Collective Unrest, Trailer Park Quarterly, and other anthologies and journals. She is a founder and production manager of Critical Sun Press and snuggles with her fur babies when she isn’t working long hours as a data analyst at Saint Leo University. Follow her on Twitter @ajforrester75.

Are You Latinx

SWWIM Every Day
by Andrea Dulanto

by Andrea Dulanto

Did you know your grandparents?

No? 

Then you have no history.

Your mother from Argentina?

Tu padre de Peru?

He doesn’t look like your father.

Is he your real father?

You look white.

Why don’t you just say you’re from here?

Can’t cook,
slightly anorexic.

Middle-class.

Catholic school—yes, okay—we’ll accept that.

Pero Buddhist—spiritual—Unitarian Universalist? ¿Qué es eso?

You only read books in English.

Never read Don Quixote/
tried to read Don Quixote.

Didn’t you leave behind the entire Spanish language?

(but sometimes it’s home)

Didn’t you leave home?

More than once?

The daughter
should stay home.

No husband, no hijos?

Too queer.

(not queer enough,
but that’s another poem)

Middle-aged,
sola sola sola.

Familia es todo.

What is home?

What is home?

you listen to Kingdom of the Sun: The Inca Heritage

(is this your culture
or the need to prove your culture)

you read Nelly’s story in the liner notes—

the nuns at school
teach her

singing
is a sin

a musicologist
records Nelly’s father, Don Luis Camasco, with his band of musicians/guitar makers—
Conjunto Mensajeros Dos de Mayo

they lift their songs
late into the night

Nelly listens

finally, one night, her father says—you’re my daughter

finally, the musicologist says—the nuns didn’t know
all there is

so she sings

the musicologist takes notes—

“a voice harsh from disuse but full of spirit”

you listen

you are not her
she is not you

every voice
is a story

her voice
is a story

hers
alone.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Andrea Dulanto is a Latina queer writer. Degrees include an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Florida International University, and a B.A. in Literature and Women’s Studies from Antioch College in Ohio. She has worked as a writing instructor, a freelance writer, and editor. In 2016, she was awarded an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. Publications include Gertrude Journal, The Kenyon Review, BlazeVOX, Court Green, and Sinister Wisdom.

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.

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