Circuit Theory

SWWIM Every Day
by Kat Myers

by Kat Myers

July unzips its belly
and lets heat lightning loose on the
suburbs. Somewhere, it rains
but here, the power lines collapse
into one another like lovers
weary with the weight of holding up.

Here, the dogs howl
once for yes and twice for no,
answering questions of the thunder
thrown to their side of the street.
Is it beautiful?
Are they dancing?

Three houses down, a girl
puts her hand to the window and pretends
to hold the wires seizing in her yard,
imagines herself
the key or the kite, the string
suddenly alive. How glorious
to be grounded. To know your bones
by the way they shake
inside you. To give your pain one name
and let it turn to light.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kat Myers is an emerging poet and former party girl. She is part of the MFA program at North Carolina State University in her hometown, Raleigh. A finalist for the 2018 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, she has also been published in Kingdoms in the Wild, The Write Launch, and Sonder Midwest.

ChapStick

SWWIM Every Day
by Karen J. Weyant

by Karen J. Weyant

Little girls in small towns love
their ChapStick: vanilla bean,
coca cola, root beer. They dig
in their mothers’ purses,
fingering loose pennies
and half sticks of bubble gum,
searching for the elusive lip balm.
They beg for extra money
in store check-out lines, longing
for flavors that taunt them
from the shelves.
They know the smooth wax soothes
split lips parched in the dead
of winter-dry months.
They watch their mothers
rub lotion through the pinched
lines around their eyes, favorite
aunts smooth oil on their torn
cuticles. Even their older sisters
dot snags in their nylons
with clear fingernail polish.
These girls already believe in salves
for all the raw wounds women
around them are forced to wear:
rough elbows and heels, paper cuts,
deep scrapes that never healed, but
turned to scabs, and then scars.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Karen J. Weyant's poetry has been published in Arsenic Lobster, Cave Wall, Cold Mountain Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry East, Rattle, River Styx, Tahoma Literary Review, and Whiskey Island. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Stealing Dust(Finishing Line Press, 2009) and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Winner of Main Street Rag's 2011 Chapbook Contest). She teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. When she is not teaching, she explores the rural Rust Belt of northern Pennsylvania and western New York. 

Watching My Son Play Alone

SWWIM Every Day
by Sayuri Ayers

by Sayuri Ayers

Crouched behind
the burning bush, he watches
the other children.
He breaks into laughter
as girls leap into mounds
of autumn leaves.
As the children play,
he sketches in the dust
with a twig. He turns to me,
his face, a pale leaf
trembling in the haze
of crimson.
At six years old
I wandered from recess
into the meadow.
Sinking to the ground
I pressed my cheek
to a bed of clover.
I closed my eyes
and heard the churn
of soil, grubs gnawing
the pale limbs of
dandelion roots.
Delving beetles
hummed me to sleep,
the schoolyard vanishing
in the meadow’s golden flame.
Listen, my son,
as the children pass.
Feel the call
of a greater pleasure.
Palm the darkened
heart of the fallen
walnut. Let it crumble
in your hand.
Kneel and stroke
the bristling back
of the meadow. Emerge
from its blaze, a new animal.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

A Kundiman Fellow, Sayuri Ayers is a resident of Columbus, Ohio. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Entropy, The Pinch, Hobart, and other literary journals. She is the author of two chapbooks: Radish Legs, Duck Feet (Green Bottle Press) and Mother/Wound (forthcoming from Full/Crescent Press). Sayuri has been awarded grants from the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, and VSA Ohio. She is also the recipient of the Hippocampus Magazine’s 2019 HippoCamp Scholarship.

Afterword

SWWIM Every Day
by Lauren Hilger

by Lauren Hilger

Long after and still,
three horses appear.

I am a child’s
corner of that field.
A huge readiness.

I stare into a face with too much.

I contain what I don’t want to say

and exist so outside my voice
why even talk.

The fear like a dark
ringed circle with bells.

The task to touch what exists while we do.
The three horses gone.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016) Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from the MacDowell Colony, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared or forthcoming in BOMB, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review online, Kenyon Review online, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.

Where Winter Spends the Summer

SWWIM Every Day
by M.B. McLatchey

by M.B. McLatchey

On a beach towel print of a bosomy mermaid
that reads I LOVE Miami. In an everglade’s
wild plan marked with grilles and canopies.

Between concrete, leaning towers and a sea
meant for healing. In a daze, dreaming, gazing
at Odysseus’ wine-dark deep. In the unclothed

body’s prescient haze. On the front of a postcard—
a postcard painter’s dream—in dabs of yellow
and green, intended, as postcard painters will,

to make a symphony of bathers between brush marks;
map out, in palm-tree fences, a new world: an answer to
the sirens’ call, when all the bathers want is no world at all.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

M.B. McLatchey is the author of two books of poems, The Lame God, for which she won the 2013 May Swenson Award (Utah State University Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press), as well as an educational memoir, Beginner’s Mind (Regal House Publishing, forthcoming), excerpts of which have won The Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award and appeared in journals such as MEMOIR (and), Slippery Elm, Chautauqua, and Carolina Quarterly. She is the recipient of several literary awards, including the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal and the Annie Finch Prize from the National Poetry Review. Recently elected as Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County, she is Associate Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Visit her at www.mbmclatchey.com.

Interior Vs. Exterior

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Sala

by Sarah Sala

At my worst, I control the boundaries of my form,
and yet, when divine, the self permeates the
physical world. It’s true: the atoms of our bodies
grieve each other in death just like a color doesn’t
occur alone—but takes meaning from other colors.
The moon was a changeable star that ruled men’s
fate. Water was green and not blue to medieval
cartographers. The complexity of ocher begs        
the viewer to grapple with it. We are swiftly
becoming an indoor species. Yet, scientists know
more about outer space than the Earth’s oceans.
Humans brought the natural world into their homes
to combat the rise of machines. Without us
knowing, trees converse via latticed fungi. Gender
isn’t something one is, but  does. We are a vast
assembly of nerve cells — the continents longing
for each other. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Sala is a queer poet of Polish-Lebanese descent. Her debut poetry collection, Devil’s Lake, is forthcoming from Tolsun Books in June 2020. She is the founder of the free poetry workshop Office Hours and assistant poetry editor at The Bellevue Literary Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in BOMB, The Southampton Review, and Poetry Ireland Review, among others. She teaches at New York University, and lives in Manhattan. Visit her at sarahsala.com.

There Will Be No Thunderstorms Tomorrow

SWWIM Every Day
by Maggie Blake Bailey

by Maggie Blake Bailey

    For the first time since early in the morning on February 11, no thunderstorms are predicted anywhere in the United States tomorrow. ~The Vane 10/16/14

 

Because we are slow to believe our good fortune,
there will be no picnics, no swim meets,
no dancing in raincoats made of tinfoil and bottle caps.

Instead we will turn to each other, only now
realizing who sits at our table,

and say, I didn’t know, because we cannot say,
Did you see that storm today?

Because we cannot touch each other, even lightly,
in passing. There is no release without payment,
and payment is measured in damage.

I will not hear you talk in your sleep
and you will not brace your sodden body to mine.

No power will go out, no dogs will shake in the corners
as we light candle stubs with long matches.

Instead I will wake late, convinced
it is a different tomorrow, one threaded with salt
and metal brought in over the Atlantic,

I will open our windows to a sky that is blue and blue
and purple, the color of the child inside
of me, breathing water.

I will name my body fore and aft and rolling.
There will be no fog warnings, buoys stuttering
like mouths without tongues, dumb in the sunshine.

For the first time we are radar with nothing to see.


___________________________________________________________________

Maggie Blake Bailey has poems published or forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Foundry, A-Minor Magazine and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Bury the Lede, is available from Finishing Line Press and her full-length debut, Visitation, will be available from Tinderbox Editions in winter 2019. She lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband and two young children.  For more work, please visit  www.maggieblakebailey.com  and follow her @maggiebbpoet on Twitter. 

Spring Mourning: after the plane crash

SWWIM Every Day
by Sheree La Puma

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.

Season Three Disappoints

SWWIM Every Day
by Devon Balwit

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.

Commitment

SWWIM Every Day
by Shannon Quinn

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.

Summer Vacation in the Subjunctive

SWWIM Every Day
by Ashley M. Jones

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.

At the Crossroads of the Dying World

SWWIM Every Day
by Michelle Brooks

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.

Pondweed

SWWIM Every Day
by Mary Elder Jacobsen

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.

The Shoes by the Door

SWWIM Every Day
by Amy Gottlieb

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.

power ballad without the sacred

SWWIM Every Day
by nicole v basta

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.

At the New Bedford Whaling Museum

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Litt

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.

The Art of Instinct

SWWIM Every Day
by Elizabeth Jacobson

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.
 

Incantation for an Operatic Child

SWWIM Every Day
by Beverly Burch

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.

Summer

SWWIM Every Day

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

Cross Body

SWWIM Every Day
by Hilary King

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.

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