by Maggie Blake Bailey
Because we are slow to believe our good fortune,
by Sheree La Puma
When you fall from middle earth
my scars
become a selling point.
In a field outside
Los Angeles,
a pale moon rising
over blood
red blooms, poppies.
Somewhere,
in the world, my children
mourn
their father, alone.
Mother
is a body, void
of hope.
I used to be a wildflower
planted
& on this early
morning
I watch spring
explode
like the barrel of a
gun.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in Heron River Review, Juxtaprose, The Rumpus, O:JA&L, Plainsongs, The Main Street Rag, Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Inflectionist Review, Levee, The London Reader, Bordighera Press - VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Gravel, Foliate Oak, PacificReview, Westwind, and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and has taught poetry to former gang members.
by Devon Balwit
The handmaid will do anything for her child—
Reductive, this mother-love above all others.
I, who have mothered, know other hungers.
She stays long after she has the chance to go—
Reductive, this mother-love above all others.
I’d have chosen books over the lost child.
No job, mate, friend until the stolen daughter’s gotten—
Reductive, this mother-love above all others.
I’d have left her to be a different kind of person.
Though daughter cells reside inside her, she chooses—
reductive—this mother-love above all others.
Like mine, her biome’s vaster, a hundred fastnesses.
She glares daggers but grabs the gallows-rope—
Reductive, this mother-love above all others.
I’d not cost lives, just spend my own.
I feel bullied to look longingly at children—
reductive—this mother-love above all others.
I’d pick, instead, the icy swim across the border.
Devon Balwit teaches in the Pacific Northwest. Her most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found here at SWWIM Every Day as well as in The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Apt (long-form issue), Tule Review, Grist, Rattle, and O:JAL, among others. For more, see https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet.
by Shannon Quinn
I trade you small pot of light
for key that sticks in door.
Our worst nights, coin toss
burn house or bed down.
Wool-drunk moths in sock drawer
judge our quiet violence and dime-bag sentiment
but then we have an early evening
you mostly sober, me mostly clean
thinking of every possible animal afterlife.
Prescription sleeping pills smuggle
us into sleep, where we are strangers.
Cross the street to avoid each other.
Drowning girl can’t climb
on another body, call it shore.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Shannon Quinn is the author of two collection of poetry, Questions for Wolf (Thistledown Press) and Nightlight for Children of Insomniacs (Mansfield Press). Quinn lives in Toronto, Canada. See more at shannonquinnpoetry.com.
by Ashley M. Jones
If I were a woman. If I were a wanted woman. If I were a woman with
soft fingers. If I were on a beach with a man — if he was a man, if a
man can be a man before he acts like a man. If I were on a beach with
a man and he held my hand. If I liked my hand being held, even if it
was held at the wrong angle. If my wrist was wringing in pain but I
kept it there. If my heart were held wrong, like my hand. If I kept it
there. If I was kept. If I was kept in pain. If I were pain. If I were a
woman — if I were a woman before I was a woman. If I were a woman
who knew her body like a woman knows her body. If a woman knew.
If I knew. If I were on a beach with that man — if, this time, that man
dissolved into sand. If the sand became hot under my feet but my feet
were gold. If a woman were made of sun. If I were made of sun. If I
burned the world around me until it shone beautiful and brown. If this
burning was called healing. If the healing made light.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including the Academy of American Poets, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, The Sun, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, and The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. Her second collection, dark / / thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press and is forthcoming in February 2019. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is Second Vice President of the Alabama Writers’ Conclave , founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
by Michelle Brooks
There’s a mall cop perched atop
a Segway, riding an escalator,
and I marvel at this strange sight
near the food court. Fluorescent
lights onto shuttered stores dotted
with anchors that have been here
since I was a child. I drift to the playground
where exhausted parents stare at their cell
phones or into the distance while their
children scream and jump and cry
on plastic toys designed to look like animals.
I watch the scene, wishing I could stop time
and its relentless march over us all, wishing
I could close my eyes and will the B. Daltons
back into existence. So many things used
to be something else. I look at a jewelry
repair shop which used to be a novelty store
that sold small trees coated with gold. I’d always
wanted one. The mall cop rides past me, back
to the escalator, and I see my entire life cascade,
like the motorized stairs in their endless loop.
The trees with golden leaves that had once
beckoned me with their promises
of glamour, such as it was, are still gone.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Michelle Brooks has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small (Backwaters Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy (Storylandia Press). A native Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit. She has just completed a book of essays titled Second Day Reported.
by Mary Elder Jacobsen
The grass is greener under-
water. I’ve grown green with envy over every under-
water weed, so long and thinly, loved and lively, glint and greenly under-
water. Fluidly, movingly under-
water. Leave me, grow me, willowy green me under-
water. Ebb and billow me. Lap and please me. Leave me be thee under-
water. O ribbon me, oh ravel me. Oh under-
water’s where un-
done I’ve long become have gone and go under
spells and lo how soon am over-
whelmed by deep by shallow
waters all and in whose realms I’ll gladly dwell, all unhoused and under-
water. Take me under,
water me there, make me pondweed under-
water, un-
dulate me under-
water.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mary Elder Jacobsen’s poetry has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Four Way Review, One, deLuge, the anthology Healing the Divide: Poetry of Kindness & Connection, and elsewhere. A recent winner of the Lyric Memorial Prize and recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency, she holds an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from UNC-Greensboro. Jacobsen lives in rural Vermont where she swims in a glacial lake with loons.
by Amy Gottlieb
Toss off your Moroccan slippers, lay your wet socks
on the radiator while we drink tea and talk of our sons,
how time crafted them into men. After your feet thaw
and the tea bags form seashells at the bottom of our cups
I will tell you that the whole house is a membrane, porous
to the shouts in the street, the stench of our neighbor's weed,
the sweetness of her garlic as it caramelizes in a pan.
We have no curio cabinets to preserve what we tried to save,
only the lines that deepen around our eyes, the tales of
your seafaring uncle’s dinghy that weathered an Atlantic storm,
my return to Venice and how the steps where I sat as a girl
have been submerged for years, sinking lower still.
Ask me if you can stay for a week and I will invite you
to flop backwards on the unmade beds, indent your body
on our rumpled sheets, your beaded slippers waiting
by the door like sentries at the gate to a holy kingdom.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Amy Gottlieb's poems have appeared in the Ilanot Review, Storyscape, On Being, Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, and elsewhere. Her poetry manuscript, Sabbath Cinema, was a semi-finalist for the 2019 Orison Poetry Prize. Her debut novel, The Beautiful Possible (Harper Perennial), was a finalist for the Ribalow Prize, Wallant Award, and a National Jewish Book Award. She lives on the edge of the Hudson River in the Bronx.
by nicole v basta
who taught the man on the bus he could pendulum
into my seat / that his hands should search for my thigh
i make excuses into the window’s eyes like maybe
under the underneath where power feeds the machine
he was cleaved too how he cleaves me
i like to imagine there are a few things sacred left strewn about
my knuckled keys sturdy in curved palm on the walk home
this is a night i want to survive
the weapon here also opens the door
is power like any body
/ does it want to be held?
who taught the men i invite to rattle the wind
from my body
i’ve made the best of it
/ turning whiplash into windchimes
bells fill my home with nobody
but the safeness of sound
and never once has it been just the nameless
shadows drape the darkest from the people you trust
what’s the difference between respite
from the sun and how it’s getting a little chilly there
where can what’s cleaved also be cradle ?
i am safest when no one holds
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
nicole v basta's chapbook 'V' was chosen by Rigoberto González as the winner of The New School's Annual Contest. She is the co-founder of the Brooklyn-based arts community + performance night Say Yes (Electric Collective) that ran from 2015-2018. Recent work appears in Ninth Letter, Nat. Brut, Pinwheel, New South, and elsewhere. Find her hologram at nicolevbasta.com.
by Jennifer Litt
I found my father a wheelchair.
The footrest had dropsy;
every time we crossed a threshold
into another room his right foot,
missing its baby toe, scraped the floor.
We surveyed the giant skeletons of whales—
sperm, humpback, blue—suspended
from the atrium ceiling. Below us,
the staff set up tables and chairs
for a wedding reception.
When Dad saw the female
right whale with fetus, he whispered,
Your mother had a miscarriage
when we were first married.
Later, he lifted an exhibit phone
to listen to a whale song.
You’re no Tony Bennett, he yelled
into the handset.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Litt, the Assistant Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, taught secondary and college level writing for more than 25 years. Jennifer is the author of the poetry chapbook, Maximum Speed Through Zero (Blue Lyra, 2016). Her work has appeared in many publications, including Gulf Stream, Jet Fuel Review, Lumina, Mixed Fruit, Naugatuck River Review, nycBigCityLit, South Florida Poetry Journal, and Stone Canoe. She lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
by Elizabeth Jacobson
Although everything always has everything to do with sex,
each time, this one thing
has more to do with the sway of tree shadows
contained in rectangle boxes of light—
reflections of the windows, yielding from the windows,
caught in a breeze on the white plaster walls of the room,
and although it is often true the male of a species
has the more colorful markings, here I am the brightest one
against the white sheets
back arching,
a rising whale throwing its form from the sea
turning rose, then scarlet, then peony—light spreading across our flesh
and the marvelous ability to be held by instinct.
__________________________________________________________________
Elizabeth Jacobson’s second book,Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019). She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which conducts weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in New Mexico. Wingspan has received 4 grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, Plume, and others. Elizabeth is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org and the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
by Beverly Burch
She called after midnight from every sleepover,
begged to come home. Alarming as it was,
there was the luxury of settling her back into bed.
Until she wouldn’t be seen with us.
In time came a midnight call of the terrifying kind.
Hospital, alcohol. She sang in her room after fits
of weeping. Laid waste, ripped through, mended,
cured. Then it would start again. How did one body
contain the churn? Shifting mirrors,
colliding bits of colored glass, how did we?
She couldn’t wait to leave home, couldn’t bear to.
Once I stood at her door, long
metal spoon in my hand from cooking.
We both thought I would hurl it. Mercy descended.
O why so angry? Like my mother’s jagged bolt
of love, blazed by fear. Legacy
running the line of mothers and daughters:
does anything redeem us?
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Beverly Burch’s third poetry collection, Latter Days of Eve, won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize and will appear in 2019. Her first, Sweet to Burn, won a Lambda Literary Award and the Gival Poetry Prize. Her second, How a Mirage Works, was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Poetry and fiction appear in Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Willow Springs, Salamander, Tinderbox, Mudlark, and Poetry Northwest.
We’re on vacation, and we hope you are, too!
If you need a SWWIM Every Day fix, please visit our Archives. We’ll be back September 1st!
However, we are still reading, so please do keep submitting. We might be a little bit slower to respond, but we WILL get back to you!
Until then, Keep SWWIMing.
XO,
Jen & Catherine
by Hilary King
The day my 10-year-old daughter started taking Prozac,
I go full baggallini. Cry-walk into my local gift shop,
stationery in the back, greeting cards up front,
in between bath salts, travel alarms, fuzzy socks.
This was my mother’s store. Not mine. Not
yet. Please not yet the need for socks both fuzzy
and slip-proof. Couldn’t I still trust where I tread
in the world? Until my daughter needed a pill
to push through her clouds, I kept my dreams loose,
tossed into whatever I carried with me every day.
I was ambitious and Christ my shoulder hurt, carrying
a bag full of notebooks,books, pens, lipstick,
another notebook, another book.
If an hour or an idea appeared, I was ready.
Now, therapists and teacher conferences later,
I wanted a separate pocket each for
grief, for anger, for courage.
What I needed to be ready for now
had to be packed precisely and worn throughout the body,
right across the heart.
*This poem won First Place in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hilary King is lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. She writes poetry as a way of witnessing, as an aid to memory, as a way to explore the ever enduring mystery of human beings. Her poems have appeared in Fourth River, Belletrist, PANK, Blue Fifth Review, Cortland Review, Mom Egg Review, Gyroscope, and other publications. She is the author of the book of poems, The Maid's Car. She has an 12-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son.
by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
The purse was the object, not the violence.
An open maw that gaped, while we, away
were bridging (sea wind, slices of rain). Or,
the purse was an open mouth gone mute, while
I walked alone (low blue sky, one hundred
one cent stamps). You came out of nowhere, or
you wove in and out of five locked cars, an
invisible thread. Each moment became
a film strip, stuttering: how did we get
here? Both occasions, the purse was returned.
Found emptied of valuables on the berm,
or tossed into the tangled wet grass.
You remained ghost shingled with should or could
a genie stitched into each leather flap.
*This poem won first Second Place in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her work has been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, SWWIM, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market, Women’s Studies, and Chicago Quarterly Review. Her biography on Charmian London, Jack London's wife, will be published by University of Oklahoma Press in Spring 2020. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
by Kim King
She rummaged through the cartons that
were stacked inside the family room,
unwrapping, sorting, tossing stuff
on messy piles of save or sell.
She found it with a crystal vase,
two sequined evening bags, and five
Saint Joseph statues underneath
the mildewed news from eighty-four,
the year they packed up Grandma's things.
The wooden box's hinges, latch,
and handle were of brass. It smelled
of musty basement and Guerlain
perfume. Faux jewels and beads were glued
onto the painted cable car—
a missing amber teardrop fixed
with a round blue replacement gem.
When she opened it, her puzzled
reflection looked back from inside
the mirrored lid. Her Grandma's name
was printed in a shaky blue
along the edge; the purse empty,
except for two metal hair pins.
She saw a younger woman there,
the bag in hand at ample hips,
a trolley swaying over curves,
She heard the ringing bells, the voice
of someone clinging to a pole—
the fog, the fog. And nothing else.
*This poem won Third Place in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Kim King's poetry has appeared in Wild Onions, In Gilded Frame, Point Mass, The Midwest Quarterly, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Potnia: A Devotional Anthology in Honor of Demeter, Poets for Paris, O-Dark-Thirty, and other publications. Her poems were selected and recorded for the Telepoem Booth Project in State College, PA. Kim has an M.A. in Writing from the Johns Hopkins University, blogs sporadically at KSquaredPoetry.wordpress.com, and is looking to publish her first poetry collection. She writes from her home in Hershey.
by Sarah Carey
I give her the feminine gender, this pride
on my sleeve, reflecting sensibility
and taste. Inside the gap of my scapula
she hangs, curved like a womb,
seamed strap attaching her whole body,
hip to shoulder to mine, a line—
taut at times, as when I press my hand
to the base of her sewn buckles,
feel my mother’s fingers, still at the Singer,
hem-mending after fold and chalk.
Other times she bends into my side waist
muscles, as when I sit to listen
as my mother shares her latest skin flare-up,
asks the specialist to work her in, wonders if
advancing years will cause one’s largest organ
to grow thin, or if that’s just what physicians say
to help old women make peace with pain,
or when she leans against me
for a moment, lets me feel her weight.
Bearing all I hold dear zipped, she models merits
of restraint, yet elides a sigh from deep within
her secret walls when I reach down, across,
inside her compartments to claim
my tube of lip gloss, lost key rings,
forgotten change, a pair of shades, a buried pen
grit glistens. I emerge with all my broken bits
to see that everything we carry,
mold ourselves to, wears, fades away.
I think I don’t deserve her,
but I do.
*This poem won first Honorable Mention in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her work has also appeared in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. She received an International Merit Award in the Atlanta Review's 2018 International Poetry Prize competition and was a finalist in Sequestrum Literary Journal's 2018 New Writer Award competition. Accommodations (fall, 2019) received the 2018 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. She also is the author of a previous chapbook, The Heart Contracts (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Sarah directs communications for the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, and lives in Gainesville with her husband and her exceedingly precocious black Lab.
by Gail Goepfert
Noon. The café line snakes by the handbags,
fine leather goods meant to entice—a Givenchy GV3
Diamond Quilted Crossbody Bag, a Nancy Gonzalez
Cristie Linen & Genuine Crocodile Tote, a Devotion
Leather Shoulder Bag, adorned with an oversized heart,
lustrous imitation pearls detailing the envelope flap—
all secured to metal cables and the airy sparkling display
of glass and gold. We giggle, almost, as we try to resurrect
the price tags, buried in a zippered compartment,
giddy school girls, under the scrutiny of the salesperson
who materializes from nowhere. Just looking. Seating
saves us. We order our usual—Cranberry Turkey
and Tuscan Roasted Salmon. Lunch talk stretches
for hours, chemo and chaos, Poetry and CBD.
Things the heart must hold.
How it’s time to say yes to what matters.
To stop saying sorry when we need to say no.
No need to check words for genuine or imitation.
*This poem won second Honorable Mention in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, is a Midwest poet, photographer, and teacher. She has two published books: A Mind on Pain (2015) and Tapping Roots (2018). Get Up Said the World will appear in 2019 from Červená Barva. She’s received four Pushcart Prize Nominations. Recent or forthcoming publications include Kudzu House, Stone Boat, Postcard, Poems and Prose Magazine, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, Bluestem, and Beloit Poetry Journal. Please see more at gailgoepfert.com.
by Alexis Rhone Fancher
Baby, you were a tiger last night,
the famous poet growls,
paws at my breast like an apology.
He knows I like it rough.
I know his penchant for variety,
his lust’s juvenescence.
I saw his arm
slip around her flirtation,
saw him meet her platinum gaze,
maneuver her out on the deck,
grope her like he once groped me.
When we make our make-up love,
I picture impossibly young women,
lined up, his for the taking,
and I hear my time running out,
that desperate, loudening thrum.
I’m his blond, his punch-drunk muse.
He knows I’ll go down swinging.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, Plume, Tinderbox, Cleaver, Diode, SWWIM Every Day, The MacGuffin, Nasty Women Poets, Nashville Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Her books include: How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen…, State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, Enter Here, Junkie Wife, and The Dead Kid Poems. Her photographs are published worldwide. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. Please see more at www.alexisrhonefancher.com.
by Ellen Kombiyil
with two lines from Bernadette Mayer
On the avenues, white exhaust tinges blue;
a pigeon nearly gets me, perched over the red church door.
For lunch I pack a ham & turkey sandwich;
I want to hose the city down with bleach.
Mostly images don’t form patterns;
or they do—it’s my mind
arranging them, giving an impression
of continuity, not unlike the man with a serpentine walk
I’ve avoided all my life looking down at my shoes—
When I say the man I don’t mean my father.
Of course, I’m told we walk alike;
from behind we have the same stooped cadence,
arches collapsed, soles worn on a slant—
Is that him I just passed?
I don’t like cooking dinner,
get bored listening to my husband’s yakety yak.
“I have to send my meeting notes out in the morning,” he says;
I stir fry the tofu-slash-get distracted
by the inner turmoil of paying rent
& what it means to be a good person.
In another place or through window tint
it appears to be raining on asphalt.
Storm pipes branch beneath swarming feet;
we weave around each other
like flamingos on takeoff or just before dancing,
each of us moving in unison, a dot on the GPS.
Little Dot move left;
Little Dot don’t move just blink in vertical space
going up the office escalator, toting coffee in a paper cup;
Little Dot plugged with earbuds.
Riding backwards on trains we’re time-lapsed
like night scenes, streaming taillights, headlights
the signal’s shifting red-green;
or we flicker like flamingos
mating in the infrared,
each orange splotch with a yellow heart
pulsing “at once above/below” as Bernadette says,
and “it’s easier for love to have a million neighbors”
seems a breezy thing to say, appropriate
not slutty, our mouths’ sucking frenzy;
or we zag in blue swaths like zebra fish
flaunting eyes, lacing fins, in fact
yes, I’m avoiding the text
just in from my landlord asking WHERE IS THE RENT
____________________________________________________________________________________________________