Transmigration

SWWIM Every Day

by Sneha Subramanian Kanta

Ghosts threading space between animals.
Imagine: shoals of fish, a pod of whales,
a swarm of bodies around glacial heights

in kaolin snow. The velocity of clear-sky
precipitation increases with the glint of
shadows. Ghosts float between silence

and static with ammonites in their hands
blessing the way fossils metamorphosize.
The interference with light, an iridescence.

Ghosts unlatch the burials inside earth as
roots rising from its craters, skyward. It
smells like monsoon. Birds gravitating

toward wave-crests, flapping their wings
in ocean-mist, a beacon of sunlight tilts
through the water. The city plunges into

its reflection, every fragment becomes a
joint rhythm from a harmonium. Ghosts
bless the spell of light. A plume of dust

gathers rain. Ghost of sublime animals
in the rain. The granularity of bones in
a body. A forest with galaxies of moss.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a recipient of The Charles Wallace Fellowship at the University of Stirling (2019). A GREAT scholarship awardee, she has earned her second postgraduate degree in literature from England. Her work is forthcoming in The Normal School, Waxwing Magazine, Quiddity, The Puritan, and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal, and reader for Palette Poetry and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She is the author of Land: Bone / Ocean: Muscle (forthcoming with dancing girl press).

Birthday

SWWIM Every Day
by Esther Sadoff

By Esther Sadoff

The leaves rippling
like wide-bellied sails
on a blustery shore,
the hedge thick with birds,
and the black, velvety
crickets chirping in
the cradle of the dark
tell us we are the same
age. We are burglars
arrested on the same night,
hands slipping into
a fortuitous handshake,
cars beaming past
a tumbledown shack
where a frenetic farmer
drives his tractor
upon the lip of dusk.
We are a few sparks
rubbed together in
the universe by giant
palms, poured into
the same cup of each
brief, waking moment,
falling in and out of the same
happenstance with hands
outstretched, and so vastly
outnumbered by the dead
that we might as well
celebrate it on the same day.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Esther Sadoff currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she teaches English to gifted and talented middle school students. She has a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied literature as well as a Master of Education from The Ohio State University. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in The 2River View, The Bookends Review, and Tule Review.

ellipses

SWWIM Every Day
by Erin Mizrahi

by Erin Mizrahi

somebody told me
my mother tongue is ellipses
that I don’t use words for breathing
let silence into everything
I take my lover’s head in my hands
forgive me I don’t know how
not to be broken
you think I mean as a partner
and I do but I swear I mean more
I mean my dna is laced with exile
I mean my family carries a dead language
I mean conversion was inevitable
and when I tell you all this
I really mean I am a stranger
my lover takes me by the throat
grip tightening whispering gently
I love you but you’ve got to grow up
I’m in my thirties all I’ve learned is
time is a dirty word
it gets thrown at me like a warning
but the future is terrifying
and the past is embarrassing
and I think I’ll stay right here
I’ve got work to do
I’m revising a piece I wrote on shame
but I don’t know where to start

Reviewer 1

There are no theoretical coordinates and no theoretical framework to justify any of these claims

Reviewer 2

This is a really interesting paper that is beautifully written and easy to follow

What?

you say teach you something in Ladino
before you can finish I say mi das scarinyo
you hold out your hands
I pull a whole ocean through my teeth to greet you
your language is different than mine 
just because our mouths can find each other
doesn't mean they understand
I am made of faultlines
of forgiveness and quiet
and silence is not easy to love
mi das scarinyo
I adore your wanting
but I know you just miss someone else
we all miss someone else
my dear have I told you
you remind me of the desert at night

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Erin Mizrahi is a poet, scholar, and educator. She received her PhD in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. She is currently an adjunct assistant professor of English at Hunter College where she teaches first-year writing. She is an Asylum Arts and Institute for Jewish Creativity Fellow. Erin is also the host of Cobra Milk, a Brooklyn-based monthly reading and music series featuring emerging and established voices.

Tallulah Wraps Her Fingers around My Drink

SWWIM Every Day
by Carrie Chappell

by Carrie Chappell

& I wrap mine around hers,
Quietly, as we wait for
Spirituality’s spoon
To deliver us to candlelight

& jealousy to cork doldrum
Right in the sipper.
Our silhouettes are like two
Women fighting the same body

Or maybe like one body fighting
Two terribly angular faces.
Our legs swish under the table
& I feel like saying taffeta.

It’s then we separate,
Contemplate just how self-centered
We can get, what with good grammar
& a liberal education.

All this at sundown
Of course, in the shallows
Of the yellow kitchen,
Where my roux cackles

Louder than she can
& the burning butter
Is the smell of her hair.
So we spray the air

With our questions,
Walk the dim hall to go out to
Mock the moon.
All we feel in us is the night,

As in all we feel in us is a sea
Of terrible euphemism,
As in the water is smaller
& kept, as in they built moats

Around us. We sit there, mope,
In our whiskey-crisping critiques
& wait for the men
To turn to brooms,

The women to swoon
& whisper, & for our words
To sink in with the sureness of
How we fought for them.

Our plots twist
up our legs like
Jasmine & her fingers
Wrap around my drink

& mine around hers
So that we are now woven,
Accomplice, guilty by association.
Two women, two terribly angular faces

Now more terribly outspoken
In our silence, our hush,
Holding out our wisdom to
Wait for a real touch.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Carrie Chappell’s poetry has been published in Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Harpur Palate, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. Her book and lyric essays have appeared in Diagram, FANZINE, The Iowa Review, The Rupture, The Rumpus, Xavier Review, and Buried Letter Press. Currently, she lives in Paris, France, and serves as Poetry Editor for Sundog Lit.

I Am Not Talking About Bees

SWWIM Every Day
by C. Kubasta

by C. Kubasta

The bee box arrives, its furious Latin, or Greek: menarche & all that. But
you know what this is for, this is not for
you. Nubility comes later, maybe. You are neither predictable nor consistent
in your intervals, your duration, your pain.

Less celebrated, the hive depends
on non-fertile female worker bees. We clean & build, forage 
& gather, guard. We
are often short-lived, our bodies
collect at the mouth of hives, we sacrificial females, we noble
honey-drudges. Few songs sung
for this thousand-strong caste.

For the woman who doesn’t mother, others caution: you will regret
your choice. For the woman who mothers, no one asks: do you regret
your choice? But some do – there is research on regretting motherhood,
but it is the great taboo. The ecologist said, “The ability to birth
fertilized eggs – to mate – is called a ‘privilege.’” (That’s just how
she put it.) The way we word platitudes: Children are a joy; Children
are a blessing, encode non-choice into our Cultural DNA.

Since stopping my fallopian tubes with nickel and overgrowth flesh, I’ve become
predictable & consistent in interval, duration, pain. I exceed my own estimation
of absorptive materials, the ticking of the clock. I throw clots, accumulated
endometrium. (Brood cells uncleaned). The women I know
are long past this – menopausal, or hysterectomied. The aged queens ask
why I save this equipment, this empty room, this deflated balloon. 

As if it only values with use, as if it doesn’t reside inside me, isn’t me. 

As if I haven’t stored things there: an armoire; two tube TV’s – their elegant curved backs, outdated, but still working; some clothes I may fit into again.

The nuptial flight marks the position of the hive, days after the Queen
emerges from her cell; other flights last only minutes, long enough 
to collect what she needs of drones, before returning to keep the factory 
humming. Sometimes she cannot or will not
fly; sometimes she leaves. A hive without a proper queen is doomed.

___________________________________________________________________

C. Kubasta writes poetry, fiction, & hybrid forms. Her most recent book of poetry is Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press) and the novel This Business of the Flesh (Apprentice House). Lately, she's been writing feminist horror—and is excited about her forthcoming collection of short stories Abjectification (fall 2020). Find her at www.ckubasta.com & follow her @CKubastathePoet




Clearing the Throat Chakra

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Stockton

by Sarah Stockton

An old woman gave me a geode to cure anxiety
but no instructions on how to break it open
and let the magic bleed out.

I remember the joy I felt at first,
clenching the rough dragon’s egg
which would set me free, until I tried

to smash its secrets apart—my fingers
bled all over the dense crystal prison
concealing amethyst, dolomite, quartz.

Hacksaws, hammers were no use; my teeth
broke tasting stone then the rock lodged
in my throat after shredding my tongue

until that same old woman slapped me so hard
I began heaving up bile, blood, and great globs of anxiety—
eventually, I spit the god-damned geode out.

You’re welcome, she said.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Stockton completed her MA/Edu at San Francisco State University, freelanced as a writer/editor, trained as a spiritual director, authored two books, and taught at the University of San Francisco. Adjusting to the realities of a decades-long chronic illness, Sarah now lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest and writes poems. Sarah's poems have appeared in Glass Poetry, The Shallow Ends, Rise Up Review and Crab Creek Review, among others. Poems forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine and Gone Lawn. www.sarahstockton.com 

Rind

SWWIM Every Day
by Kami Westhoff

by Kami Westhoff

You close your mouth
to the spoon’s cool curve,
not impressed with the cubes
of summer melon. Soon, you
will refuse other favorites,
maple nut ice cream, clusters
of chocolate-bound
peanuts.

We are told it’s a blessing,
this gradual refusal of what
you love. Your face still
bursts into relief when you
see us, we are swallowed
in the split-second when
we are daughters a mother
just wants to hold. Though
the nurses won’t say it, we
know this is cruel—
this reminder of who
you once were, of what
you’ve since lost.

We want you summer
again. When we’d watch
you half the melon, scoop
the mess of seeds from its
center, carve flesh so carefully
none was lost to the rind.

We didn’t get it, but now we know
you were teaching us everything
we’d ever need to know about love.
The way it halves us. Slices us.
Carves the best of us from what
cannot be swallowed. Closes
its mouth to the rest. 

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Kami Westhoff is the author of Sleepwalker, winner of Minerva Rising's Dare to Be Contest, and Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali. Her work has also appeared in various journals, including Meridian, Carve, Third Coast, The Pinch, West Branch, and Waxwing.

To the boys who bully my nephew in the 6th grade

SWWIM Every Day
by M. Soledad Caballero

by M. Soledad Caballero

Here. Take this apple, small and sweet
like the middle of his heart when he was
born, a heart that was not certain how to
beat. Small sack of veins and rice paper-thin
skin, he looked like an old man with wide
grey eyes and wrinkled newborn bamboo
fingers. Oh, he was a sack of joy then, like
apples in the middle of a pie. Don’t get me
wrong, he is now so annoying like the wild
woodpecker that throws his head into
a tree, all day all day all day, a mad mad bird
who beats the same beat with the same
charcoal beak and what you want to say
is, ya, ya, enough hijo, no more banging.

Yes, I know this language of eye rolling.
This wish to stop the sounds from his mouth,
hold his body down, force his mind,
his thoughts, his lanky self to stop, to stop
to be still. Basta, you want to say. No mas.
I know. I have done it. I know this wish.
The wish to freeze time when he throws
his whole body into my arms, like a wilding
thing that cannot feel anger or fear, a boy
who wants to share his blood and the mess
of his mind with you so much he hurts
you in the flight between his body and yours.
He is something like lightning. Or Hermes
mid-run looking for invisible fairies just to
prove they are in the forest. Es mucho, we
say at family dinners, es mucho.

So maybe you see his flutterings, his deep
deep laugh, his body like electricity and you
think, maricón. You think the ugliness of
stale brown thoughts. Or maybe you are
in the middle of your own wilding and you
wish for love even when your body vibrates.
I do not know. No lo sé. But I know this:
my boy, this strange creature of teeth and heat,
he will outlive me. He will outlive you.
He will outlive even the sun in the sky. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

M. Soledad Caballero is Professor of English at Allegheny College Her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, post-colonial literatures, WGSS, and interdisciplinarity. She is a 2017 CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a New Poet's Prize, and has been a finalist for the Missouri Review's Jeffry E. Smith poetry prize, Mississippi Review's annual editor's prize, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. In 2019, her manuscript was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Review first book prize, the Saturnalia Press first book prize, and a runner-up for the Autumn House Press first book prize. Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Memorius, Crab Orchard Review, Anomaly, and other venues.

When Another American Shooting Makes You

SWWIM Every Day
by Christen Noel Kauffman

by Christen Noel Kauffman

pick up your daughter playing
at your feet, she holds
a measuring spoon to fill you
with imaginary soup, fill you
with the way she pulls your hair.
Instead of kissing her round jaw,
you fold her up into sapling, plant
her back into your core. You cradle
her into fresh bread and swallow
her whole. You open as a barn door
and pull her into warmth.
You carry her in the pouch
of your cheek, whisper there now,
stay. You wish there were still trees,
wish the sun had been made
by a god you could love,
wish the world was a laugh
she could catch on her tongue,
wish you’d worked to fix it all
before carving her into pine,
before letting her loose
where the wolves come to feed.
You tell her a story
as you press her into egg,
how once there was a mother
who broke herself in two,
who would carry a seed
in the break of her chest, until
it was safe to let go.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Christen Noel Kauffman currently lives in Richmond, IN, with her husband, two daughters, and an opinionated shih tzu named Dr. Watson. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Cherry Tree, Willow Springs, Booth, The Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, and Glass Poets Resist, among others.

The Wake

SWWIM Every Day
by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

He’s in active dying, his family texted.
They held the phone under his comatose ear,
I said my good-bye, I wished him release.
I watched the rest of the day, then all night.
Still nothing, so finally I slept. Wakened
out of my second sleep by the call
carrying the hospital’s stinging perfume,
the sign everyone knows.

They’d asked me what music he’d loved.
I’d told them: The Great Fugue,
the Solemn Little Mass,
the Eroïca. They’d found them all
and played him out sweetly. It could do no harm.
His breath slowed, wafted out.
Was it a ritard or finally a fermata,
timed for the turn of the Funeral March.

To help out, I’d called the Institute where he’d trained,
I gave them the news.
How odd, the director told me,
I was just looking over the analysts.
His face is on my screen right now.

As offering, I made bagels the way he’d liked,
with double salt, double honey,
extra gluten for extra chew.
I’d proofed the yeast,
I’d checked the temperature,
I’d done everything I could,
but they just weren’t going to rise.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a retired clinical psychologist, German major, two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and photographer. Her work has appeared in journals, including  B O D Y, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Comstock Poetry Review, Off the Coast, Otoliths, Naugatuck Poetry Review, and Measure. Kattywompus Press publishes Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and Kafka’s Cat. Kelsay Books publishes The Book of Knots and their Untying. She co-curates Fourth Sundays, a poetry series in Claremont, California. 


Letter to Buddha’s Wife

SWWIM Every Day
by Stella Reed

by Stella Reed

Dear Yashodhara,

I, too, make do without fathers. Take full fat
in my chai. Never stop to ponder the meaning
of duality, having lived with a person inside me.
Before he was a god he lay naked in a charnel ground
contemplating existence. He sat beneath a spreading tree
where Mara’s daughters danced for him, breasts
with the sheen of new apples, while you were home
changing diapers, wiping milky spit from the furniture,
pulling your striped flesh from a damp bra,
your fluid body a meal.

We both know enlightenment
is when the child screams all night and we don’t leave her
for the crows to pick over. We saunter and jostle
up and down halls, strap her in a car seat and drive
blocks around blocks, guilt about our carbon footprint
rubbing against the last collapsing nerve.
Beneath the lantern of the mind is the mud
of these bodies, able to conceive what the mind cannot.
I lift my daughter to the saddle of a carousel horse,
watch her ride the spinning prayer wheel,
pray it carries her away
from the curse of too much light.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Stella Reed is the co-author of We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press, 2019). She is the 2018 winner of the Tusculum Review chapbook contest for Origami. Stella teaches poetry to women in domestic violence and homeless shelters through WingSpan Poetry Project in Santa Fe, NM. You can find her work in The Bellingham Review, American Journal of Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, and anthologized in They Said (Black Lawrence Press, 2018).

On the Origin of Karl Marx

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Alvarez

by Lisa Alvarez

She found him in the office copy machine
still warm. His hair

a righteous white halo. His countenance
confident as ever.

“I told you so,” he seemed to say,
“In capitalism, things are personified

and people are commodified.” Turning
the lever let her release him.

The paper jam resolved.
The machine restored.

She was sure that
he belonged to someone

that someone was looking for him
wanted him     needed him.

When she pinned him to the bulletin board
she was not trying to be clever

not trying to be ironic
but to be of use, like Karl.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa Alvarez’s poetry has appeared in Codex Journal, Huizache, Truthdig, and Zócalo Public Square and is forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. She is the co-editor of Orange County: A Literary Field Guide and a professor at Irvine Valley College. For 20 years, she has co-directed the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers in the California’s Sierra Nevada.

Blizzard of Nothing

SWWIM Every Day
by Julia Wendell

by Julia Wendell

It snows in feet, not inches,
the fleeting, hushing plunge of it.
It snows, all day and then some,
piling silently up
on the hilly pastures.
When I’ve finally had my fill,
it snows another ocean—
pelting, as if falling
wasn’t enough—
a crazed Einstein,
erasing what came before
to start the lesson over—
a blizzard of wisdoms
traveling at the speed
of incomprehension.
My breath comes fitfully—
slate, chalk, merciful dusk.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Julia Wendell's memoir, Come to the X, will be published by Galileo Press in 2019. Her most recent book of poems is Take This Spoon (Main Street Rag Press). She lives in South Carolina.

When I was ten, the insides of my father’s mouth

SWWIM Every Day

by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick

Turned to a garden. He would walk
& the earth would fall out—acorn & oak
Leaves, his menthol cigarettes. Sometimes,
A canary cooed his tongue
With lemon-yellow sonnets. Angry
His secrets fell.
He circled for hours in the yard
What his mother carved into him, a curse.
It will befall you, too. His hands
Large canteens filled with liquor & ice-cream,
Releasing pressure wherever we’d go—
The feed store, the rig, to buy chicken
From KFC—behind him, I’d walk
The path of dirt & desire & ever the good daughter,
Light his hidden bodies on fire.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick's work has appeared in Salt Hill, Versal, The Texas Observer, Devil's Lake, Four Way Review, Sugar House Review, and Huffington Post UK, among others. A graduate from Sarah Lawrence College's MFA program, Hardwick serves as the poetry editor for The Boiler Journal and her first full-length, Before Isadore, was published by Sundress Publications. She currently lives in a village outside Cambridge, England.

The Names of the Planets

SWWIM Every Day
by Cornelia Channing

by Cornelia Channing

I forgot to call that hotel where we stayed in White Sulphur Springs
about your shoes that you’re sure you left under the bed but which I quite remember
you wearing in the lobby of that casino in Nashville the day after. I forgot to
pick up the dog food. I forgot to drink eight glasses of water. I forgot to tell you
that I hate it when you walk in front of me on the sidewalk.
I forgot to stop for gas on the way home from the movie about the fisherman
and ended up on the side of the highway thinking of trout. I forgot the address
of our old apartment. I forgot the names of the planets. I forgot about that
restaurant we used to go to as kids where our parents would smoke outside
and we stole those peppermint candies from the dish. I forgot the smell of cigarettes
on jackets. I forgot about the time I scared you with my foot under the table.
I forgot how much I like Irish music. I forgot how to behave myself and then remembered.
I forgot to order the dressing on the side at that Greek Diner
we like and the salad got soggy like it does. I forgot the words to that Ashlee Simpson
song I used to love. I forgot to tip the guy for cleaning my windshield and
the perfect streak-free shine is blinding. I forgot that I don’t like oysters
unless cooked so long in butter that they resemble coins. I forgot to move the car
when the street sweep came so I got a fat ticket. I forgot about the nice old woman
who used to work at the bookstore on Bay Street that and what happened to her.
I forgot to back up my computer. I forgot to add ¾ cups buttermilk
to the batter. I forgot to cancel my subscription. I forgot to remind you to call
your sister. I forgot about the pasta pizza we ordered from Nike’s on 189th street
and so we fell asleep and when we woke up it was on the front stoop dusted in snow.
I forgot that name you used to call me. I forgot what flavor you asked for so I just got
all of them. I forgot to watch the news. I forgot about global warming and mass incarceration
and abortion referendums and police brutality and institutionalized racism and gun control
for four seconds. I forgot to meditate. I forgot about the fight we had in Maine.
I forgot about Maine. I forgot the feeling of pulling ticks off my ankles.
I forgot holding cold hands in warm armpits. I forgot the sound of crunching gravel
in the driveway when mom comes home from dinner. I forgot to get a flu shot. I forgot what
it felt like to sleep alone in a big bed and not wish for less space. I forgot that I was
a little girl running barefoot through grass for hundreds of years before I met you.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Cornelia Channing is an MFA Candidate in creative writing at Stony Brook University in Southampton, NY. Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, Public Pool, Method Magazine, and The Stethoscope Press. A chapter of her forthcoming novel will be published in East Magazine next month. She lives in Bridgehampton, NY with her dog, Tucker. 
 

 

Dream Journal: July 5th at 5:06 am

SWWIM Every Day
by Laura Grace Weldon

by Laura Grace Weldon

I fainted in a little NYC store.
Came to
and there was Allen Ginsburg
patting my arm.
Embarrassed, I asked,
How long have I been out?
He answered, Out?
Most people are out all their lives.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Grace Weldon has published two poetry collections, Blackbird (Grayson 2019) and Tending (Aldrich 2013). She was named Ohio Poet of the Year for 2019. She's written poems on the soles of children’s feet and painted poems on beehives but her work appears in more conventional places such as Verse Daily, One: Jacar Press, Neurology, J Journal, and Amsterdam Quarterly. Laura works as a book editor and teaches community-based writing workshops. See more at lauragraceweldon.com.

Dusk Graze

SWWIM Every Day
by Carolina Hospital

by Carolina Hospital

In our sticky plaid uniforms and loose pony tails, we skip and jump,

pocketing minutes from the cool soft twilight, rushing all play before our

mother hails us. The front lawn is a wide field on which we collapse,

bruised knees, roll and roll and roll, sprawled in damp greenery. 

 

I run my finger down
the silken green blade
a gentle snap.
Along its vein I unzip
the leaf, so thin it curls
like a lover’s smile.

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Carolina Hospital is a poet, novelist, and editor. Her books include Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press); The Child of Exile: a Poetry Memoir (Arte Público Press); the novel, A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina (Warner Books); and A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida (Pineapple Press). Her works have appeared in the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature; the anthology Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Occupy the Workplace; Florida Literature, and Longman’s Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.

"Vila Franca di Xira, Portugal, May 8, 1994"

SWWIM Every Day
Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

by Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

After the photograph by Dutch artist, Rineke Dijkstra, from her series of portraits of los forcados. In the final event of a Portuguese bullfight, young men known as los forcados use their bodies to exhaust and subdue the bull in a kind of dance called pega de caras.  

 

It was me or the bull
as it always is. The bull

with his brute-breath
and steam, fear that smells

of a father’s knowing
his smaller son can take him

and will. Offer to bow
to the beast. Offer the dreams

in your skull, the Praia
de Benagil sunlight flaring

through a hole. Time is a boy
I can almost reach—

a kite flown, the blue-tiled floor
of my faraway mother

stampeded with footprints.
I came here for the question

answered by the crowd’s
ovation: a man now, must

I have blood on my face
to be seen.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and author of the poetry collection, a lesson in smallness. Her poems have appeared in RHINO (winner of their Founder's Prize), Pleiades, 32 Poems, Kenyon Review Online, Verse Daily, ONE, Sugar House Review, Nashville Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among many other places. She is an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is Editor-in-Chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing by women. See more at www.laurenslaughter.com.

Ghazal After the Abortion, the Drought, the Rape

SWWIM Every Day
by Julia B Levine

by Julia B Levine

You are otherwise each time you dream. The train arrives in Nice. You reach for your suitcase
& the aborted baby tumbles down alive. Into your arms, his milky breath. His uncanny reach.

Drought’s engine picks up speed. Rivers, once a ligature of sheen, smear to grease. Lord,
bless the not-yet-arrived. Wildfires unwilling to be touched. Forests dying as they reach.

That’s all I wanted, he says. Your body crumpled like a day-old corsage. A raven shrieks.
He zips up his pants. Pockets the gun. Wild bird of your before, perches out of reach.

Wingless, we invented music. This first morning of rain you can believe again
in a cappella green. Joy to lift the body’s stone. Fog to lower the sky’s snowy reach.

All being is fenestra. And the mind a churchyard, a market, an orphic meet-&-greet.  This
world wrecks us, then it enters. The body leaves. The soul is fallout, drifting far outside of reach.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Julia B Levine has been widely published. Her latest full-length collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU press, 2014), was awarded the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She has poems forthcoming in Calyx, Southern Review, and Third Coast. In her everyday life, she loves to swim!

Girl Upon a Time

SWWIM Every Day
by Leonore Hildebrandt

by Leonore Hildebrandt

Sky is a woven rug, a measured opening—
a “window,” from wind eye.
Hinges are smooth as ligaments,
and her fingers leave oily prints.

You may wear this tale
like a hat, a wondrous little hat
from the pelt of a mouse.

A canopy of swallows. The river’s steep banks.
The girl runs with the boys, then hides
in sprawling hedges—beech and rhododendron.

She knows a place to slip into—
lower the bridge, walk the sheep and fox,
cows and knights in procession to the fields.
The moat deepens. Look, poor Rapunzel’s
long braids uncoil from the sill.

The girl is looking under leaves
for mice and spiders.
She rips her sandwich for the dogs,
calls them her strays.

On a narrow sidewalk,
a little hairy man blocks her way
with his scales and knives.
She tries to run, sand sucks at her feet,
she stumbles, falls into the air's updraft—
her dress spreads like a sheet.
A girl is a cloud of dust.

In the yard, metal posts are sunk into holes.
On rainy days, they fill with water and bugs.
She hears of storm petrels, lit as lamps—
oily flames mounted on sticks, a wick shoved down the throat.
Things one can not pronounce another way.

Clamor in the street—voracious brooms
suck in leaves and garbage.
The many worlds are falling—the seven brothers,
three sisters. She hides, counts her fingers.
This is the dry tongue of utterance.

But the second son still goes out into the world
to learn about fear. At night,
bronzed in smoke, the seven ravens return.
The girl slips through a fence.

She is falling toward the upon-time,
dark against the luminous wind eye.
Her dress is woven into the sky.

In the sallow wax of morning,
street lamps are bright nebulae.
The window’s stern eyes relent
to swirls and river snails.

Worms scatter holes,
bored in the wooden frame.
She blows the dust, pulls up her hair.



____________________________________________________________________

Leonore Hildebrandt is the author of the poetry collections Where You Happen to Be, The Work at Hand, and The Next Unknown. Her poems and translations have appeared in the Cafe Review, Cerise Press, the Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Harpur Palate, Poetry Daily, RHINO, and the Sugar House Review, among other journals. Winner of the 2013 Gemini Poetry Contest, she received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Maine Community Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission. She was nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. A native of Germany, Leonore lives “off the grid” in Harrington, Maine, and spends the winter in Silver City, New Mexico. She teaches writing at the University of Maine and serves on the editorial board of the Beloit Poetry Journal.

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