Prayer to My Seasonal Depression

SWWIM Every Day
by Sara Moore Wagner

by Sara Moore Wagner

Lord of autumn leaves,
draped on a tree like lights
or snow, or any number of temporary things.

God of pickled beets, red as the roof of my mouth. Oh you
spirit who dwells in anything red,
here is my breast, dry.

It’s not regular
to want something blotted out.

Leave me alone, shut the door. I want to sit here
on the floor, grow gills—
And when I sleep, my eyes
can stay open.

Today, when I was driving, I thought the blue sky and the gold
flowers in the dusk looked like some old drawing-room, some Victorian
indoor space. And then—
I felt less alive.

What does that mean? Everyone says it.
Less alive.

God of trees, Lord of beets.
Juice me like an apple, skin on.
Throw me into a basin of water and see
if I breathe.

If my arms and legs pull up into my body,
like retracted antennae. If I skid along the surface
like a stone.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sara Moore Wagner lives in West Chester, OH, with her husband and three small children. She is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award, and the author of the chapbook, Hooked Through (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Waxwing, The Cincinnati Review, Tar River Poetry, Harpur Palate, Western Humanities Review, and Nimrod, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. Find her at www.saramoorewagner.com.

Our Bodies a Bulb in the Cold (A Cento)

SWWIM Every Day
by Devon Balwit

by Devon Balwit




Wintering in a dark without windows,
it is Tate and Lyle we live on, instead of flowers.
We ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white,

solitary confinement our Bodhi Tree,
isolation our mountain, doing hole-time
like retreating to the wilderness,
everything of value
carried without hands.

We chose to swim by turning
inward, a depth in our being
we can tap into. What
will they taste of,
our Christmas Roses?

(sutured from Sylvia Plath’s “Wintering” and Craig Ross & Steve Champion’s “Everything of Value You Must Carry without Hands”)



________________________________________________________________________________________________
Devon Balwit's work can be found in The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Apt (long form issue), Tule Review, Sugar House Review, Plough Quarterly, Poetry South, saltfront, Rattle and Grist among others. For more, see her website at: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet

Lesbian Fashion Struggles

SWWIM Every Day
by Caroline Earleywine

by Caroline Earleywine

Formalwear is toughest—
so suit or dress, so senior prom,
binary bursting

from every corsage
and boutonniere.
The day before a wedding

my wife and I tear through
our closets, model outfits
for each other in hopes

we’ll find something
that doesn’t feel like a costume,
but like our own skin.

We try on words: butch,
femme, androgynous, stud.
But language always fails.

The children we won’t birth
line up on the shelf like shoes,
the men we won’t love

hang limp
on their hangers
in the back.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Caroline Earleywine teaches high school English in Central Arkansas where she tries to convince teenagers that poetry is actually cool. She was a semifinalist for Nimrod’s 2018 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and for the 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. She was also a finalist for the 2019 Write Bloody Publishing Contest. Her work can be found in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Legendary, Nailed Magazine, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Lesbian Fashion Struggles, is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press. She has an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte and lives in Little Rock with her wife and two dogs.

Spell to Be Said Against Despair

SWWIM Every Day
by Patricia Clark

by Patricia Clark

Under the skull’s bone, a thought saying “rest.”
Under the roof, a bed saying “here, sleep.”
Under the breath, simply “wait.”
Under the tongue, moisture, seawater of the body.
Under the rugosa rose, a toad.
Under the sky pending rain, pearl of cloud, grace
of gray-green leaves,
Under the stone, a potato bug rolled in a ball.
Under the suet feeder, crumbs for the chipmunks.
Under the stepping stones, the mole’s earthy trail.
Under the blackberry vine leaf, a spider’s lair.
Under the wrist’s skin, a blue vein pulsing.
Under coleus leaf, under lobelia petal, stems unbroken.
Under the match, the chance of warmth, of fire.
Under candle, wick and, further down, saucer made of glass.
Under wild turkey feather, a nib to hold ink.
Under thought, a word to utter, also to share
with another soul.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Patricia Clark is the author of five volumes of poetry, including The Canopy (2017) and Sunday Rising (2013). She has also published three chapbooks: Wreath for the Red Admiral; Given the Trees; and Deadlifts, a series of elegies on other Patricia Clarks, which came out in 2018 from New Michigan Press. From 2005-2007 she served as the Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is Poet-in-Residence and Professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

You Girls, Find Your Way

SWWIM Every Day
by Mercedes Lawry

by Mercedes Lawry

You bruised girls under a restless sky,
don’t ask for retribution. Rain-drenched,
sorry queens of catastrophe, going all high
and figurative, decide how you’ll be
in front of the crowd of liars and pretenders,
bending your elbows, shooting out your hips.
Girls, clutch at power while the sweat crawls down
your necks and you slide under cover, sassing out
alliances and probable cause.
Hair swinging, take that language
putting you in negative space and spit it
back. You girls, heading one way or another,
with little time to decide, love those hallelujahs,
grab sweet and smear it on your face, play true,
bury the bashing and stand up, unflinching,
though you’ve been rassled and stomped.
You girls, become whole and solid, untouchable,
ready to fly and make noise, yourselves,
yourselves.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. She’s published three chapbooks, the latest, In The Early Garden With Reason, was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her full manuscript, Small Measures, is forthcoming from Twelve Winters Press. She’s also published short fiction and stories and poems for children.

High School Reunion

SWWIM Every Day
by Erin Elizabeth Smith

by Erin Elizabeth Smith

After too much whiskey, I'm having sex
on the hood of my car again, the idling
engine buzzing hot beneath my ass.
I watch the scrub pine weave in and out
of the quiet sky as my ex pumps away
on the dead-end street I grew up on.
Just three houses down, the trailer
where my stepfather beat my mother.
Next to that where the man who raped
my sister lives, or lived. I don't know,
it's been years since I've been in Lexington,
a city now more strip mall than ever,
where women grow up to marry the boys
they loved first, where the parks are filled
with Saturday night blowjobs
and where I almost lost my virginity
on brown pine needles and the wind in the spring
is exactly honeysuckle. I don't know why
I'm here except that I needed him
to see this place, where the chain-link has gone
red with years, where I used to hunt
muscadines and blackberries in the undeveloped
wood across the street. To see if they ever
paved the dirt or if my mother's peach trees lived.
To know if the world I remembered
was as small as I thought it could be.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications and The Wardrobe. Her third full-length poetry collection, Down, will be published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Guernica, Ecotone, Mid-American, Tupelo Quarterly Crab Orchard Review, and Willow Springs, among others. She is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, and in 2017 she was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame.

This Year, While It Still Breathes

SWWIM Every Day
by Marjorie Tesser

by Marjorie Tesser

1. The Visit

In dark of each night, at 3:57 exactly, nine black birds fly in. One perches above each eye, one at my heart, one at my gut, two at my legs, one at my head, one at my sex. The ninth does as it sees fit. At 3:58 they begin to peck. At first it’s like a nudge, or a knock, or the tug of a ribbon around a neck. I toss, I turn, I try to throw them off but they strike harder, drawing specks of blood. At five they rise and circle thrice before flying off.



2. The Weight

A warm evening, late fall, and across the fading fields the children call like birds;
some, deciding when to migrate, reply in kind, shrieking like children.

I want to remember this world while it still breathes.

I have hosted this year in my body, a tumor or stone. I have worn it
turtleneck tight at my throat worn it a weighty too-warm coat

against cold against fire and smoke against my will; I drag it
as spare part, the many-colored coat of our historic home.

I have borne it dense like the fodder of quick-trigger cops
and mad bombers, dead weight, yet a white rhino lighter;

felt its hot breath on my neck, polar icecaps’ drip between
my shoulders, its tectonic plates shift at the flat of my back.

I used to lie awake unquiet for my family.
Now the scope has grown. A preliminary mourning.

The evening grows colder; birds circle and home for the night.
The sunset flames the river as of old, backlit, golden, as if it’s just

beautiful, and not a metaphor for something dire.



3. While It Still Breathes

How to keep it hefted—
this year does not let up; absurd
apocalyptica of disaster.

And yet I could name all day
beauty we’re blessed—

morning’s strong coffee, the sun
warm on my back,

everywhere bright yellow: forsythia,
daffodils, goldfinch at the feeder.

Two crows dive. Calling and cawing, they drive
a red-tailed hawk from their young.

Compassionate action, I tell myself, if despair
and fear are cloud cover be airstream.

Heft, or set down
let down off my back let it slide
down to earth to rest; the better

to free my arms to defend or lift it
to cradle, or weave for it a nest.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Marjorie Tesser is the author of poetry chapbooks The Important Thing Is... (Firewheel Editions Award winner) and The Magic Feather. Her poem “April” won the 2019 John B. Santoiani Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She co-edited three anthologies, most recently Travellin’ Mama (Demeter Press, 2019), and is the editor of Mom Egg Review.

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.

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