Sonnenizio with a line from Seamus Heaney

SWWIM Every Day
by Aileen Bassis

by Aileen Bassis

from “Glanmore Sonnets Number Four”

But I never heard that. Always, instead
a drone, a muffled wash, an unheard clamber
of unfinished business. Herds of visions graze by.
We, her, him, our pronouns lapse and you slide off my
flounder-love. Caught in tremulous morning, you misheard
my words. I know you heard me cough. You turned to see
thoughts rippling and I wondered if you heard my keyboard’s
tap, tapping as flotsam words rose and sank and I heard
a kettle whistle and heard the dishwasher’s hum, felt
its steam rise and I wondered if you heard glasses rattling
in their throes. What oceans clasped your un-heard shiver?
We heard girls laughing somewhere in their careless way
and I think you heard me ask you to fill the sugar bowl.
You heard me say, come here. Our coffee’s growing cold. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Aileen Bassis is a visual artist and poet in New York City working in book arts, printmaking, photography, and installation. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. She was awarded two artist residencies in poetry to the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart prizes and two poems are in anthologies on the subject of migration. Her journal publications include B o d y Literature, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal, Canary, The Pinch Journal, and Prelude.

The Bear

SWWIM Every Day
by Deirdre O'Connor

by Deirdre O'Connor

I was surprised the airline allowed us to bring
two foxes, a bear, and a kitten home from Paris.
We had to find cardboard boxes in the airport,
which was no problem, the floors were piled high.
The foxes, together, immediately curled and slept,
and the kitten in her separate box batted our hands
until the flight attendant insisted we close the lid.
The bear was expected to travel like a cello
or upright bass, stashed in the back
near the restrooms in his box, a flimsy coffin.
A bear the size of an average man, his paws
hung at his sides in apparent submission
while, in tears, we taped the box shut,
having poked copious holes for air with a pen.
The conditions were obviously inadequate,
and this was a bear we felt confident could sit
through a flight. A bear the color of damp sidewalk,
the color of sadness, I thought, the color of a path
that has no hope of reaching a destination
beyond itself, no agency at all,
though the bear had been removed from a zoo
and promised, in a language we had to assume
he didn’t understand, a better life elsewhere.
His eyes darted with terror of being closed in,
and his shoulders froze in a tension we shared,
though of course ours didn’t compare. Amazingly,
the flight was smooth and we landed
in New Jersey on time. The foxes and the kitten
appeared no worse for the wear, indeed
seemed energized. The bear, on the other hand,
when we tore the tape from his box,
slumped forward, massive near-dead weight
that almost knocked us down, though we held him up
and kept holding as he gulped
the American air drifting in from the tarmac
and died raggedly, like a person does, in our arms.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Deirdre O'Connor is the author of The Cupped Field (forthcoming in December 2019), which received the Able Muse Book Award, and Before the Blue Hour. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Cave Wall, Crazyhorse, Rust + Moth, Cordella, and other journals. She directs the Writing Center at Bucknell University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets.

Notice: Waves Ahead

SWWIM Every Day
by Jessica Covil

by Jessica Covil

My phone goes off at 2 am,
but I just let it buzz.
In the morning,
I'll decide how far
to wade into this sea of texts—
the high tide I expect
every so often.
My own masochistic interest
in what it will carry back to shore
this time.

A wave can be defined
as "a repeating and periodic disturbance"
which sounds a lot like
what we always called "episodes”—
though I'm not sure
that's what this is yet.
Sometimes it's just you, yourself
(whatever that means)
pulling hard at everything you can
until you are too much
and too angry
for even you to handle.

Those of us in the water
should probably know by now
the reach of you,
the power of your hold;
your tendency to conjure up
things past or lost
when it suits you.
But the universe
only has
so much energy.
Every rise demands a fall,
and you will carry us all with you
for the breaking.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Covil is a third-year PhD student in English at Duke, where she is also pursuing graduate certificates in African & African American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies. Her research focuses on literary representations of community, belonging, and “home” in 20th-Century American Literature, and on connections between the poetic and the political. Some of her research-influenced poetry can be found at https://sites.duke.edu/representingmigration/poetry-reading/.

Rain I'm Here For

SWWIM Every Day
by Sara Luisa Kirk

by Sara Luisa Kirk

Rain I’m here for
fills a day as I have
never, not yet

But like drops growing
in enthusiastic frequency
I’m learning

To track the clouds
nearly toppled by
their speed, read
magnificence

To be a winged thing
in a storm
dart and veer and near
miss, I think they call it
exhilaration

Gutters gushing their
clomping horses down
into buckets
of bobbing leaves

The intensity relative
to the sound
just before or after
surge or lessening

Oh, to write
the downpour
to fill buckets
of my own

Never knew
I had one
never noticed
it was empty

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Sara Luisa Kirk is part poet, part early childhood educator, part budding musician. A graduate of the University of Denver and a Colorado native, she now lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand. When she isn’t writing in her garden, Sara co-curates Magic Theatre, a monthly poetry series.

Local Man Nabbed as Pimp

SWWIM Every Day
by Tina Kelley

by Tina Kelley


There are 70-plus females running around with them now, 
Paul Sprewell's tattoos: God’s Toy. God’s Secret. God’s Boricua. 
God’s Cherri, God's Bitch, God's Power, God's Virgin, God's Star.
The swirly dirt-gray script felt like a thousand stings across each neck. 
God’s 4 Life, God's Love, God's Angel, God's Blessing, God's Jewel, 

and God's Property. All of them worked for him, and he sent them out, 
to cars, to motels that smelled of bandaids and mold, to sweaty strangers 
who would steal their cellphones, reject the condoms, refuse to pay.
The girls called him God, his legal name. He got it from the bail jumpers 
he caught, after washing out of the Reading Police Academy. They'd say 

Oh God! because he's six-foot-five. Oh God give me another chance.
God don't take me now, I'll turn myself in tomorrow. So he changed it, 
legally, even on the voter card, and the article read "God is a Registered 
Republican," though the DMV fought back. Not Visa. He signed God 
whenever he bought them tight jeans or extensions or manicures.  

Too bad if you hate the mug shot, the shit-eating grin, the brows rising 
up at his joke, too clever to believe. Look closely and you'll see angry 
scratches on both cheeks, defensive wounds, red screams branding him 
with "No! I won't!" with “You ain’t God!” CashMoneyBrothers.com 
is not an escort service, it's where men pay to rape women over and over,

young women, some children, females who truly would leave except 
he would beat them, or he'd tell their families they were nothing but ho's, 
or he'd beat their sisters, hunt them down and turn them out, too. 
God's Brown Sugar said she wouldn't leave because he called her pretty
and bought her nice clothes and gold earrings, and said "I love you,"  

and no daddy ever told her that before, only God Daddy, 
which is what he made them all call him. So what would God, 
true God, have to say? Aren't all women God's Diva? Isn't every woman
God's Precious? Aren't those lips for laughing, shouting, telling stories?? 
Those hands, for creating and clapping? Isn't 25 to life too kind?

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tina Kelley’s Rise Wildly is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press, joining Abloom and Awry, Precise, and The Gospel of Galore, which won the Washington State Book Award. She co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and shared in a Pulitzer covering 9/11 at The New York Times. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, NJ.

Pruning the Bittersweet (I Mark the Morning)

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Rhoades

by Lisa Rhoades

Dear friend, this morning I opened the front door to find
a small dead bird on the welcome mat,
lying on its side, unbloodied, just still,
probably from a quick smash
against the beveled glass. It wasn’t a sparrow,
but was sparrow-sized, and brown with black stipples on its tail.
I carried it to the farthest corner of the yard
and dropped it into composting leaves.

It’s three days shy of the anniversary of your death,
which is to say, just a Tuesday in July, not
the day itself, or the day I learned the news, or the day
we lifted your memory to God, but maybe the one
on which we met in the hallway at church
and you reminded me of your upcoming trip,
and I told you we would miss you
at the baseball game.

So I mark the morning as I do most days,
with a list of tasks that must get done.
I start early with weeding the garden beds, pruning
the bittersweet by the fence, dragging the reaching tendrils
from where they’ve caught in the magnolia branches,
and pulling them from the dirt
where they’ve reached back to send up suckers
throughout the yard.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa Rhoades is the author of The Long Grass, forthcoming from Saint Julian Press in early 2020, and Strange Gravity, selected by Elaine Terranova for the Bright Hill Press Poetry Award Series (2004). Her work has been published in such journals as The Bellingham Review, Chelsea, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Saranac Review, and Smartish Pace. She lives on Staten Island with her spouse and their two children.

Pastoral

SWWIM Every Day
by Jessica de Koninck

by Jessica de Koninck 

                                     “To forget would be best, but I have
never forgotten anything yet.
–Miklos Radnoti

 

In the song about sheep
the lake serves as mirror

In the song about death
the mirror shifts to platter
piled high with slabs of meat

served with pitchers of water
by the girl who can’t come back

When sheep drink water
water makes them well

Water a potion
Water a spell

Go to sleep
Go to sleep

Recite the alphabet
Number every sheep

Don’t think about the butcher
Don’t think about the mirror

Don’t think about the girl
her falling     the clatter

If you tell me how it ended
I will say does that matter

She got lost tending sheep
She got lost seeking water

When she learned to spell laughter
it came out as slaughter

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica de Koninck is the author of one full-length collection, Cutting Room (Terrapin Books), and one chapbook, Repairs. Her poems appear in journals and anthologies including Diode, The Paterson Literary Review, and The Valparaiso Poetry Review, and have twice been featured on Verse Daily. She leads a poetry workshop at the Greenwich House Senior Center in New York City and is a long-time resident of Montclair, New Jersey, where she is very active in the community.

After Observing the Mummy with My Students at the Museum

SWWIM Every Day
by Donna Vorreyer

by Donna Vorreyer

One says that his skin glows,
another that he looks peaceful.
Amber-hued yet desiccated, he seems to me
indifferent, the world now the least
of his miseries, his narrative resolved.
He lies surrounded by scarabs, their brilliance
auspicious, more to my liking,
the way their jeweled green and lapis backs
hint at reed and river, the earth that tethered
him, the sky that his gods occupied.
It is no phenomenon, to ritualize death,
the wake for my own father just weeks ago
a somber sort of party, adorned
with photographs and flowers until grief
stomped in like a wayward moose,
terrifying in its stature, but wielding
great tenderness in its enormous eyes.
We move on to the dinosaur remains,
the reconstructed bones majestic, scaffolded
with bolt and steel. We learn to tell carnivore
from herbivore by the teeth,
which bones lingered in pits of tar, how
the creatures thrived, connected to their ecosystems,
could not abide change. One student asks

the docent about the size of their hearts,
and I don’t hear the answer as my own
beats loud and primordial, despite being
petrified lately, my body performing
in hypothalamic motion, first to care for then to bury
both parents within five months, their lives
too entwined to survive one without
the other. There was a holiness to their faces
in their last days, gaunt and drawn yet knowing,
much like the mummy. I wander back to study his face.
Peaceful is right, I decide—the deliberate fold
of his hands across his chest, the scarabs
shimmering, singing remembered, remembered.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), both from Sundress Publications. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Rhino, Tinderbox Poetry, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, Waxwing, and many other journals. Her third full-length collection is forthcoming in 2020 from Sundress.

Vesuvius

SWWIM Every Day

by Gemma Cooper-Novack

The man made of ashes told us all about it:
the red slab
the sky became—the glow echoed creamy
behind his eyelids for
he never knew how long—and the castiron clap
when all of it fell. He was lucky,
he tells us, that he was standing
still, when they cracked
the rock around him centuries after
he still had his shape, though all the color
had faded when his
eyelids burned. It’s not the mountain,
he says, everyone heard
it echo in the days
before, molten bubbles shattering
on slopes of vaulted stone, mountains like that
could happen to anyone. He hopes
he’s answered all our questions. We finger
the lines in our palms where he shook
our hands. He walks over
the bridge and his footprints blow away.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Gemma Cooper-Novack's debut poetry collection, We Might As Well Be Underwater (Unsolicited Press, 2017), was a finalist for the CNY Book Award. Her work has appeared in more than twenty journals. She is a 2016 Deming Fund grantee and a doctoral candidate in education at Syracuse University.

Icons, Limonos Monastery

SWWIM Every Day
by Milla van der Have

by Milla van der Have

Saints here are everywhere
but they're strange ones, give or take

       —their names barely familiar
their miracles mostly unheard of
their creed whetted on sea-crested hills
   and a promise of salt.—

They group the walls of the chapels and
draw the faithful in long black droves,
carrying food and their sunday smiles,
as they trickle in like prayer beads
one by one, to the repetitive
kyrie eleison and the sweet strokes
of incense and petals.

They linger in old stones, the holy ones,
their eyes cast always on the heavens
as if scrutinizing a great canvas
that may yet reveal the secrets of liberation,
the one art they couldn't master.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Milla van der Have (The Netherlands, 1975) is a Gemini. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cherry Tree, Otis Nebula, and Ninth Letter among others. She's the author Ghosts of Old Virginny (Aldrich Press), a chapbook about Virginia City, Nevada. Milla lives and works in Utrecht, The Netherlands with her wife and two rabbits (that occasionally appear in her poems).

What We Heard

SWWIM Every Day
by Veronica Kornberg

by Veronica Kornberg

—After Ada Limón

All that birdsong in the winter scrub,
wrentit and fox sparrow, drab towhee
under cover of green tongues—
coyote mint and wild lilac.

Listening, you say
it’s like the sound of thinking.
Or camouflage, I say,
the earth

masking its secret music.
Now we hear the freeway
hum in the distance
and I remember

our walk on the salt flats
in Death Valley, the silence
there,
huge and physical, pressing

so we heard nothing
but
our heartbeats,
stood listening

with our bodies
to our bodies,
the rivers braiding inside us, two
creatures under a wallop of sky.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Veronica Kornberg is a poet based in Pescadero, California. Recipient of the 2018 Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, and Crab Creek Review, among other journals. See more at veronicakornberg.com.

Take a piece of earth

SWWIM Every Day

by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

“We will not allow the building of anything on bones of people.”
Governor Alexander Rogachuk, Belarus, DailyMailUK,
“Mass grave containing 1,000 executed Jewish men, women,
and children uncovered”   

 

see all two-hundred

& seventy bones found at birth

in a single body. Multiply each

by a thousand, ten-thousand,

hundred-thousand, million

by the millions. Magnitude

past numbers, beyond

bodies. We don’t know how

to know such things.

We try to take them

in our hands. Sift the soil

we let our children

build on, palming dirt

into their open mouths.

Wash their hands of it.

Scrub under the nails. 

We still can’t clean

what gets inside.

Show me a place

not made of bone

& see the generations

we have swallowed.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones, won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize (Lost Horse Press, March 2020). 40 WEEKS, written while pregnant with her now 4-month-old daughter, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2021. Her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. The editor of Construction Magazine, Julia holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philly with her two kids, two cats, one dog, and one husband.

Without a Crown

SWWIM Every Day
by Catherine Staples

by Catherine Staples

What kind of life is the pine leading now—
not Lear on the heath or Richard in the tower.
Is it my father’s life at the end of life?

The slowed-down heartbeat of a northern bear,
slumbers broken by sharp waking, eyes
wide with the self that resides within?

When lightning struck our white pine, a fissure
halved her, rain of needles in our neighbor’s
pool—her verdant green gone rust-red.

Without a crown, her rough beauty undone,
the tree men scaled her to a high stump.
Confined, she’s nothing like herself.

Her long roots radiate across the yard.
She roams like a mad starfish under the earth,
some roots surface, hard as sea ropes with salt.

They tip above the lawn, nearly trip me
as I head out with peels of beet to feed
the compost. Teabags, carrots, winter’s

kindling for the next season’s feast: a butternut
fattens under a canopy, a fig brings bees
and elephantine leaves. All morning, windfall

into the hearth, I watch it blaze a torrent
of words, a snow-white semblance.
Singe of lichen spackles a fallen branch.

The fire keeps. My father sleeps upright
in his chair, I wake him with the oldest stories.
First the scuffed blue rowboat, then the beetle-cat.

Four of us scrapping for holds on the tiller,
my brother alive, the hair in his eyes.
Wind picks up offshore, our centerboard hums.

Hard-to-lee, hairsbreadth to the channel,
all we’d never know flying beneath us. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Staples is the author of two poetry collections: The Rattling Window, winner of the McGovern Prize, and Never a Note Forfeit. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and The Academy of American Poets at poets.org. New work is forthcoming at Copper Nickle and Gettysburg Review. Honors include a Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Southern Poetry Review’s Guy Owen Prize. She teaches in the Honors and English programs at Villanova University.

I Call You Uterus

SWWIM Every Day
by Heidi Seaborn

by Heidi Seaborn

            ~with a nod to Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton, and Sharon Olds 


The poet calls you estrogen kitchen.
But I call you galley.

Another christens you graceful lyre.
Liar. I call you liar.

A third poet calls you her sweet weight.
Wait, I call you. Wait.

Hold this sweet thing, please. Just wait
a minute. Just wait.

She names you soil of the fields,
says, “Welcome roots.” I say

rotting compost, fallopian stone.
Keep your bloody promise: anchor

my creation in your muddy
harbor. Let it moor for the winter.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Heidi Seaborn is Editorial Director of The Adroit Journal and author of the debut collection Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, 2019) and the chapbook Finding My Way Home (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Since Heidi started writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review, and Tar River. She’s currently an NYU MFA candidate.

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.

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