Expulsion

SWWIM Every Day
by Dion O'Reilly

by Dion O’Reilly

I have been waiting like a crooked coiled snake in the corner of my life.—Monique Ferrell


I have a cashmere poncho and a beautiful son,
a husband who watches my shadow
as we walk, sees a nimbus
crowning my head.
My daughter is a bird. She hoots
night into my ear.

I’ve been carried over and over
to the creek like meat to be cleaned
before eating.

Been in double jeopardy.
Sinned the same way more than twice
been exonerated due to luck and money.

Let me put it this way: I was deviled
by my childhood. My sister would beg
to beat me. I was an animal
my mother ate to fortify her blood.

And so I mistook the punctures in my throat
the sudden energy of lovers
when they walked out
as a kind of marriage.  I felt bedecked in white
the very center of attention

until the pump and surge of blood
flooded my lace.

How did I change? Not choice.
More like lightning taken by a tree
because the tree learned to tower.
I stopped believing Paradise
is a place I used to live, neglected the itch
to bolt when I wasn’t the feast.          

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dion O’Reilly's first book, Ghost Dogs, will be published in spring 2020. Her work appears in The New Ohio Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Tupelo Quarterly, Narrative, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her work has been shortlisted for a variety of prizes— most recently, The Charles Bukowski Poetry Prize. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts about poetry in the Monterey Bay and around the world.

Layover, Terminal F

SWWIM Every Day
by Zoë Ryder White

by Zoë Ryder White

There is a fractaled edge of land,
inlaid and resonant, just beneath the one
the plane flew over, getting here.
Just so: the size and shape
of solitude is the size and shape exact
as the real chair encased
in the seen chair, the real hand inside
the hand held, the real lake sunk
into the lake we strip to wade.
So it is. So it is,
isn’t it?
Bone at the bone?
Cell’s cell, atom at
the atom’s dark core?
All this time spent trying
to pull sidewalk off sidewalk,
peel porch from porch.
Bite towards each nut’s nut.
Sometimes, we collide,
and then half a hitch later
the ones within each one
collide, too. That’s how
love is. Neither word
nor word inside
can get it right.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Zoë Ryder White’s poems have appeared in Thrush, Hobart, Sixth Finch, Threepenny Review, Crab Creek Review, and Subtropics, among others. She co-authored a chapbook, A Study in Spring, with Nicole Callihan. Their second chapbook collaboration, Elsewhere, is forthcoming from Sixth Finch in March 2020. A former public elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.

if the poem is a mouth

SWWIM Every Day
by Patrycja Humienik

by Patrycja Humienik

the townspeople name the mouth delusion

i.
who raised you?
stumbling into the meat of the
afternoon downhill uphill

kettle left howling on the stove
that mouth running into evening
with a sciomancing tongue

ii.
if the poem is a mouth the
kettle a burning bright apricot
held softfirm like syllables

which is to say there’s something
ripe and howling in my mouth

iii.
somewhere/someone/follows
the rules          no questions asked

iv.
the bathtub filling up with milk
somewhere a shipwreck
all honey-roses-styrofoam

7000 plastic ducks
traveling into the high arctic

i try to remember which pill on which day
every day seven+ cargo ships sink

v.
somewhere/someone/shuts/up

vi.
here i am/glistening/in this plastic fleet

old-growth vines ensnake the tub
little limbs i soak in balmy time
i sugar scrub the dead things
such that shedding is no litany

sugared no softer doing what you say
and you didn’t have to say it out loud

vii.
the you is imagined
though the mouth could be
yours the poem is not owned
it runs uphill downhill not
away from us but toward

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Patrycja Humienik is a Polish-American writer and performance artist based in Seattle, WA. Her poetry is featured/forthcoming in Passages North, Yemassee, The Shallow Ends, Hobart, and No Tender Fences: An Online Anthology of Immigrant & First-Gen Poetry. She has performed at events including Titwrench Festival, Film on the Rocks at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and REDCAT New Original Works Festival. Find her on Twitter @jej_sen

Again, Again

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Funk

by Jennifer Funk

Not like a tap turned on and not like a match struck
and certainly not like flicking on a light, it is not sudden. 


It is barely sweet.  Ripe?  Hard to tell.  Fingers
pressed carefully into the skin, imagine say, a pear, 


green, faintly so and tenuous, as though the green
were a blush, as though the pear at the prospect


of being plucked from its tree so many weeks ago
flushed a shade that recalls grass dying in the fall


or the barest beginnings of scallion stems. 
Sometimes you tell the story in fits, sometimes


one line at a time.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Funk is native Californian currently proving her mettle in New England. A graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers, she has been a scholarship recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and The Frost Place. Her work can be found or is forthcoming at The Cimarron Review, Four Way Review, The Boiler, SWWIM, and elsewhere.  

Now I live in the sea

SWWIM Every Day
by Genevieve Kaplan

by Genevieve Kaplan

and I find myself susceptible
to flashes of light, soft water, detours
of current, the chill of sand
I’d never left a home
without leaving a note or
some responsible party behind
who would spread the word
the water trickles and
its rivulets make deep
cuts in the beach, sometimes
inches, mostly feet, and I
am required to step through or over
getting down to low to see
the breath holes of bivalves
the three-toed tracks
of birds, how bits
of each have been lapped
away by waves I see
some wholeness to
the world, down low
and looking up and it
is tan and brown and blue
and bright with air

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Genevieve Kaplan’s work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Cherry Tree, POETRY Magazine, TinFish, and South Dakota Review. She is the author of (aviary), forthcoming from Veliz Books in spring 2020 and In the ice house (Red Hen, 2011), as well as three chapbooks. 

Another Kind of Light

SWWIM Every Day
by Catherine Abbey Hodges

by Catherine Abbey Hodges

At last and all of a sudden,
here it is: the afternoon to turn
summer’s last tomatoes,
some on the sill and others still
on the vine, into soup to freeze
for the months to come.

You take the chipped blue
bowl from the high shelf
and we head to the garden.
Overhead, what someone
called a buttermilk sky, sky
banking left from the long
bright days toward winter,
which is to say a mortal sky,
sky-sign of endings, death-
facing sky, lit still
with summer’s last syllables.
We fill the bowl again
and again with tomatoes
warm and heavy in their skins.

Later, we’ll listen
to what we can bear of the news,
and I’ll refuse the violence
that won’t end and must end
a place at the table
of this one poem
while the tomatoes burble
in their complex juices,
fragrant with the further
complications, complicities
if you will, of garlic
and rosemary.

We’ll look at each other.
It’s too much, you’ll say,
or I will—we take turns
like we used to tell the children
to do, and I lose track. Maybe
we’ll step outside where the early
stars will aver for the hundredth
time that the dark overtaking
the sky is another kind of light.
Though we’ll shake our heads
as always,
maybe this time we’ll pray
that somehow they know
something we don’t.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of In a Rind of Light, forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press in February 2020. Her previous full-length collections are Raft of Days (Gunpowder Press 2017) and Instead of Sadness (Gunpowder Press 2015), the latter selected by Dan Gerber as winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Catherine teaches English at Porterville College in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Learn more at www.catherineabbeyhodges.com.

And then what

SWWIM Every Day
by Linda Dove

by Linda Dove

The woman declares there are no more chickens,
none, in the coop, in the yard, on earth. What she misses
first are the eggs, then the feathers, because a world
without eggs might mean you are hungry, but a world without
feathers means you can’t fly. Chickens can’t fly, the man
reminds her. Right, she thinks, putting away the shears
that she used to clip the flight from their wings. It was small
flight, she reminds herself, but at least the chickens
could clear the fence. She has the same resentment
towards the fence that the birds did, but she doesn’t try
to get away. She moves from room to room in the house,
touching the things she’d have to leave behind.
She always stops at the grandfather clock with the moon
in its face. How to pack up time? she asks to no one at all.
How to manage something so tall, how to lock its door?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing. Her books include In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer (2011), This Too (2017), and Fearn (2019). Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She lives in Los Angeles, where she serves as the faculty editor of MORIA Literary Magazine at Woodbury University.

Love Poem

SWWIM Every Day
by Allison Cundiff

by Allison Cundiff

I first learned love by watching two parents who hated each other.
My mother clinging to the paperback, the cover torn off,
the veins in her legs from years of standing in that bookstore.
My father clinging to the other women,
their strange bodies in strange bedrooms.
So many nights she washed the lipstick that wasn’t her color
off his collars. The glances between them a sonic panic
that even I, their half-deaf kid, could hear.

When the house grew too loud with their silence,
I walked instead into the forest with the old beagle.
She had watched all her litters handed away,
and she let me follow her trails.
I’d watch the light change to low in the sky,
the waterbirds swim to the shore to nest for the night.
I’d watch the mosquitoes land on my forearm,
watch the proboscis needle under my skin.

In school they called me hard of hearing, but I could hear.
I heard the tritone ringing in my ears, heard the classroom chair
scratching over linoleum, all this over the teacher’s voice.
And when they’d sit me in the back of the classroom,
her frustrated hands steering heavy on my shoulders,
I did not mind. They’d put me back by
Mark Palachek in the dunce’s hat (they did that in school)
and I did not mind like Mark did.
Mark who now works in Chicago and married the too-beautiful woman
as though to say, f*ck you, Sister Cristine,
Mark, all the money he made, for Sister Cristine,
all the cars he drives, for her too.

Years later I asked him, my father,
why he did it. Why did he hurt my mother like that.
“Because I could, I suppose,” he said, guiltily,
the age hanging in his eyelids, the skin on his hands.
“She could not leave me.” And we stood in the rocking boat,
me reading lips, and him admitting his secrets.

At night he stands before his dresser,
taking his keys and wallet from his pockets,
loose change, a bullet maybe, but not the shame.
That’s coiled inside him now, twisted around his smile,
it’s an organ now, an old forever bird on his shoulder
whose small black wings spread wide as it squats on his chest,
all heaviness in his sleep, the white of his old undershirt
marked with ink from its feathers.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Allison Cundiff is an adjunct Professor of English at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri, and an English teacher at Parkway North High School in Creve Coeur, Missouri. She holds a BA in English Literature from Truman State University and an MA in English Literature and MEd in Secondary Education from the University of Missouri. Her publications include three books of poetry, Just to See How It Feels (Word Press, 2018), Otherings (Golden Antelope Press, 2016), and In Short, A Memory of the Other on a Good Day, co-authored with Steven Schreiner (Golden Antelope Press, 2014). Her non-fiction is featured in The Pragmatic Buddhist, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, Feminist Teacher, HoboCamp, and In Layman's Terms Literary Journal; her fiction in Hot Flash Fiction; and her poetry in The Chariton Review and OxMag. She lives in St. Louis.

Apoptotsis

SWWIM Every Day
by Lavina Blossom

by Lavina Blossom

From the Greek for “the dropping
of scabs.” A formula built
into us, a process that
assists the shape we take
becoming human. Its purpose,
to guarantee that certain
initial connectives fall away.

A signal’s sent and then a cell shrinks,
blebs (grows bumps) its chromatin
degrades, mitochondria leaks, and in
the final mop up, phagocytic cells feed
on the bite size apoptotic bodies.

Without it, we’d be freaks, our toes
and fingers grown together and no
eyelids separate from eyes. Especially
early on, but at each stage from
birth, we need cell suicide.

PCD:  programmed cell death. Too much,
organs degenerate. Too little prompts
a cancer mass. A form of check and balance echoing,
on the small scale, a broader scheme. Imagine
if each body of each species grew and lasted
very long or for forever and multiplied its kind…

In PCD, a wisdom to override
that instinct to survive: fewer, eventually,
are more. Room must be made for increments
of change, adjustments to the surrounding flux. And so,
the individual flesh, conducted from dark shore to
dark shore, the you-shape, which apoptosis
helped to make, will be absorbed into
something different, fresh, new.

______________________________________________________________


Lavina Blossom lives in Southern California. She divides her creative hours between poetry and painting. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including The Paris Review, The Literary Review, Kansas Quarterly, Poemeleon, and 3Elements Review. She is an Associate Editor of Poetry for Inlandia: a Literary Journey.

Danaë

SWWIM Every Day
by Rachel Neve-Midbar

by Rachel Neve-Midbar

I waited every night for you, spread my blood across the bed like a blanket.
Finally you arrived streaming in through the roof—a golden rain of many
leaves. When my maid caught you, you were gilt, so thin you melted on the
tongue, dissolved if wet. When you fell on me your leaves became blood, my
pillow blood, my blanket blood, the blood that ran both in & out from between
my thighs. I feel your hand slow & rough along the soft line from arm to
breast, my open mouth. Gold leaves light my hair, the lush smell of life rises
like a cry into the room.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection, Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach, December 2019), won the 2018 Patricia Bibby First Book Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, and Georgia Review as well as other publications and anthologies. Rachel’s awards include the Crab Orchard Review Richard Peterson Prize, the Passenger Poetry Prize and nominations for The Pushcart Prize. Rachel is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. See more at rachelnevemidbar.com.

Note to My Frailer Self

SWWIM Every Day
by Michelle Bitting

by Michelle Bitting

And note to this day’s demise in stray
holiday lights blinking green and scarlet
splendor across our neighbor’s window.

One might wonder about people who leave
decorations fraying in February’s premature
thaw. Is it ache for a stalling of the cockroach’s

trek along a kitchen trail of crumbs, crude
sign the party’s past done? Or desire to keep
their costume balls rolling long after guests

wander home, capes and cracked tiaras
dragged through moonlit dirt? I want
to invite my neighbors in, share our best

canned mushroom soup dishes because magic
comes in tender buttons turned communal.
We could suck up fading majesty together:

mistletoe and fake snow glittering like in old
dime store displays where a toy train spits
real smoke in fleecy tufts towards stars

threatening to wink out. I’m sworn to a shelf
life of dust and kitsch with a view down
roads where gulls squawk better news

of fish on a rust horizon, where baby crabs
swish in with the brine, squirming through
our iced astonished fingers. I don’t fear

my death, only my children’s skills getting
on without me, despite their learned
mac ‘n’ cheese expertise, their crayon

brilliance triple mine and yet half
baked in ability to navigate the wilds
where a high noon glare can glow your skin

otherworldly or shrivel it to scrap.
I’ll have to mind these butterflies
swarming their young heads, painting

the town in winged, heavenly fits. I’ll have to
follow the fluttering maps, coats of gold
stretched wide like strutting models

launched from freeway shrubs. I’ll have to
know that anything can happen—there’s so much
room for good, and we’ll flaunt it. Like them,

we’ll flaunt it while everyone’s looking.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michelle Bitting won the 2018 Fischer Poetry Prize, Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, and the 2018 Catamaran Prize for her fourth collection of poetry, Broken Kingdom, which was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. Her third collection, The Couple Who Fell to Earth (C & R Press), was named to Kirkus Reviews' Best of 2016. She has poems published in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, The Los Angeles Review, Vinyl Poetry, Plume, Tupelo Quarterly, AJP, American Literary Review, Thrush, and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. Michelle holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Mythological Studies. She is a Lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at Ashford U. See more at www.michellebitting.com.

White Tea

SWWIM Every Day
by Kathryn Petruccelli

by Kathryn Petruccelli

White as the mug that holds it.
A touch of milk, no honey, just
its own sweetness.

I tell my husband that the woman at the shop said
she doesn’t sell closed infusers
because they aren’t good for the leaves.

What did she say? They could break? Bruise?

A note that causes my husband to roll his eyes and huff.

But what if everyone—all 7.6 billion on the planet
loved enough
what they love
to overstretch its importance:

The hairdresser who peers into my scalp
discussing the growth rate of healthy follicles,
extolling his tirade on parabens as Satan’s operatives.
Or the dentist

that would slip Grinch-like into the sleeping houses
of her patients to steal away the sugared formula bottles
from their babies’ cribs if she could.

Later, at the imports store, I choose an infuser I hope
will please my husband but not horrify the tea woman

if she were to see it, though of course, she won’t.

At home, I place the leaves of the white coconut cream tea
into the infuser with some care, with more reverence
than I would have imagined possible only a short time ago.

This is all we can ask of ourselves:

to hold the world
a little more gently
each day
than we did the day before.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathryn Petruccelli is a bicoastal performer and writer with an M.A. in teaching English language learners. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Rattle, Literary Mama, Ruminate's blog, and elsewhere. She is a past winner of San Francisco's Litquake essay contest and her work earned honorable mention for the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest judged by Marge Piercy. She is at work on a poetry series based on the history of the alphabet. See more at poetroar.com.

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.

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