Aubade with Brushfire, San Diego-Tijuana Border

SWWIM Every Day
by Val Dering Rojas

by Val Dering Rojas

So this is what we amount to:
a commonplace silence
and a damage that is spectacular,
the Santa Ana fueling
an obscene dawn.
Say we awoke
to the awareness
of our teeth
inside our skulls
inside our skin,
how every burning blue oak
distills to ash-leaf, 
how nature's intuition
provides for flight—
to say that there is nothing left
of us would be a lie,
but what to call everything else,
except omission? 
Right now, 100-degree heat,
and our universe is glowing.
My instinct is never reliable:
the bitter cherry
undressing
until the bitter end.
The most beautiful skies
are made from disaster,
and here I am.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Val Dering Rojas is a Los Angeles-based poet and artist who has also studied addiction and recovery counseling and psychology. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Right Hand Pointing, among others. Val is also the author of the chapbooks Ten (dancing girl press) and Waspfish (glass lyre press).



Erosion

SWWIM Every Day
by Brenda Miller

by Brenda Miller

                                         —for J.

 

contains Eros, god of love, cupid’s
arrow piercing unexpectedly—

perhaps that’s what we’re in for:
think of St Theresa, God’s arrows

stabbing at all angles until the body surrenders.
Look: not pain, not pleasure, not the rumble

of hunger or desire. Would we call it joy?
This nipping away of the crust?

With J. we watched her body shrink for six months,
Growing light for the flight, we said

as J. got quieter, all her sharp corners gone.
She sorted greetings on the hospice bed, vast

accumulation of empty
Christmas cards, birthday, sympathy.

I guess I could send myself a card, she chortled,
saying ‘sorry you’re dead.’ She had bags and bags

of Cheetos, quarts of Ginger Ale, pictures of Jesus
elbowing Stars of David, striped socks,

polka dots. At the end, her body barely touched
the sheets, her raspy laugh an echo,

skin so thin, erased.
Think of the sand dunes in Oregon,

or the calving ice of Glacier Bay.
Think gnawing, the way a dog will

wear away a bone, or a termite
the foundation of your home.

Something is whole, and then it’s not.
Find a pattern in the cliffside,

rivulets, divots, and wrinkles
in your mother’s face. Feel it happening

even now: the love of a sandstorm,
or a zephyr, carting away, bit

by bit, all evidence
of a life already done.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Brenda Miller is the author of five essay collections, including An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016). She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (Third Edition published 2019) and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her poetry has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Sweet, Bellevue Literary Review, Fusion, and Psaltery & Lyre. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes.

Jean and Joan and a Who Knows Who

SWWIM Every Day
by Martha Silano

by Martha Silano

You can be a good girl and not know it.
You can have a memory of a man-

made lake named Thunderbird.
You can be ten, driving in the back

of your uncle’s Triumph, listening
to Santana’s “Evil Ways,” a song

about a lady who’s got to change, the singer
getting tired, feeling like a clown.

This can’t go on on a highway to Luzerne,
the hill to grandma and gramps’ house,

a bulging water tower like a giant troll
where we found the fossil of a fern,

where I fell in love with a boy
who enlisted in the Marines.

In love with a soldier? For a day I was.
I was a good girl who had to say it:

I love? you, my voice rising because
I was shy but couldn’t stop myself.

Years later my grandma shared photos
of Kevin in uniform, a row of metals

crowding his chest. There he was,
and there I’d been with him and gramps,

at the edge of the woods to pick boletes.
Kevin, my one-day boyfriend. Evil ways?

Why did I love that song so much?
It was a big hit. WABC played it

on the hour. That opening drum solo!
Still sounds like the day I first heard it.

Everything yellows, wormholes,
is bulldozed under at a dump. Entropy reigns

everywhere except on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora.
Now we call it streaming. Could there be

a better word? Stepping into the same river
twice. Not quite all in flux. Flowing,

yet static. Like the mystery of the star
in the center of every apple.

The apple isn’t evil. The woman
wasn’t evil, didn’t have to change,

stop hanging out with Jean and Joan. She is
all over town. This can go on.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and Reckless Lovely, all from Saturnalia Books. She co-authored The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. Martha teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA.

Letter to My Long-Distance Lover When It’s Over

SWWIM Every Day
by Caitlin Cowan

by Caitlin Cowan

“Maybe distance is what I know of men.”
—Diane Seuss

 

Have you ever seen a zen wishing stone or whatever
sad version the West sells in the neon kitsch of its dying
shopping malls? You write in water to watch it go—
something you want to disappear (pain) or something
already gone (you). I used to cry over that video I took
one night at Beans: August in Texas and you were nothing
but sweat, three buttons undone. You traced our names
in pint-glass condensation on the table’s graffitied wood.
Each word (meditation) laments what it really wants (ruin).
S + C you swirled into the sun-bleached planks, racing the heat
that wouldn’t let our seeds blink open. The distance between
what we wanted and what we had—back then, it was unbearable.
The beer garden evaporates. Our initials in your wet cursive:
headstone after headstone while we both looked on, still breathing.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Born and raised in the Midwest, Caitlin Cowan’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Anomaly, SmokeLong Quarterly, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. She’s taught writing at the University of North Texas, Texas Woman’s University, and Interlochen Center for the Arts, and serves as the Director of International Tours at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. Find her at caitlincowan.com.

black hands pick cotton in 2019

SWWIM Every Day
by Ashley Elizabeth

by Ashley Elizabeth

when teachers think field trips
to plantation and cotton field
are “great ideas” for black students,
I know their ancestors
were my ancestors’ masters
and scarred their backs heavily
were the ones ripping apart families
for profit or pleasure or both.

these teachers are also the ones that say
if we don’t learn from our history,
we are doomed to repeat it.
doomed for one community
to merely exist as footholds
because of the color of their skin again?

I want to laugh at these white women.
loudly. in their faces. and cry.
they are doing this. now.
and don’t realize it, don’t see our children
as more than poor, slang-speaking,
pant-hanging thugs.

why bring an anger they already have to a boil?
the anger is in our dna. the anger is in my blood.
we black people don’t need no reminders. never have,
all we need is conversation with our grandmothers to re-live it.
and our children don’t need to be auctioned off
even in jest, in “well-meaning” dialogue.

sell your white kids, then. we not property
nor playthings. we people.
do not forget this
in the haste to dehumanize the black body
to break black boys.

Don’t worry—our children will learn their history
of pain and adversities and truth
but not like that.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ashley Elizabeth is a writing consultant, teacher, and poet. Her works have appeared in Bonnie's Crew, yell/shout/scream, and Zoetic Press, among others. She has a chaplet, letters from an old mistress, with Damaged Goods Press. When Ashley isn't serving as assistant editor at Sundress Publications, she habitually posts on Twitter and Instagram (@ae_thepoet).

Signs of Dehydration

SWWIM Every Day
by Anna Leahy

by Anna Leahy


          …a sobering message for Southern California after a week of raging wildfires: this is your new normal. 

CNN, December 10, 2017

 

The only thought, water.

Rising tides, the boats lifted. Water, water, everywhere.

The lips crack as if kissed too much, as if leaving the mouth, dry.

          Heat is a game. You’re getting warmer. You’re burning up.

Weakness, in the knees, of the flesh, in the moment.

Early leafing, early blooming. How will the bees know the when of their lives?

The body reshaped too easily, the back of the hand unable to feel its form.

          Loss of ice and snow, the world uncapped by thaw.

Inability to eliminate waste when there's something soluble left to give.

Swimming acidity by the tons, oceans moving toward neutral.

The heart races. The blood’s sluggish.

Wind means fire. Rain means flood. The weather becomes wild.

Loss of salt, in the wound, worth one’s. Everything depends upon the smallest pinch, a grain.

More frequent and violent extremes. Abrupt, from the Latin to break away. Or steep.

Slowing, confusion, the world spinning.

  Fever, the world over. Earth in stupor.

Sleep. Or extreme dozing off, or sleep that cannot reverse itself.

___________________________________________________________________

 Anna Leahy is the author of the poetry collections Aperture and Constituents of Matter as well as the nonfiction book, Tumor. She is the co-author of Generation Space and Conversing with Cancer. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chapman University. See more at www.amleahy.com.

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.

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