The Wish

SWWIM Every Day
by Carol Alexander

by Carol Alexander

I asked for you and now you are here.

There's enough, a rumble of thunder snow,

along with the burnt toast smell of steam.

The spare room is untidy, like my disbelief.

A trellis, a welter of wrens, hard-shelled beasts

scrambling for succor, whatever can cling.

It isn't perfect here. Pinned by an internal map,

wings flit darkly, stray again, plummet blue.

I'll leave the walls without a tin roof,

let the curious snow infringe a darkening sill.

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Carol Alexander is the author of the poetry collections Environments (Dos Madres Press) and Habitat Lost (Cave Moon Press). Her chapbook Bridal Veil Falls is published by Flutter Press. Alexander's poems appear in a variety of anthologies and journals such as The Common, Cumberland River Review, The Healing Muse, New Verse News, One, Poetrybay, Southern Humanities Review, Rise Up Review, Stonecoast Review and Third Wednesday. New work is forthcoming in 2020 in Aji, Chiron Review, and the The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. 

If God Is the Sun

SWWIM Every Day
by Iyanu Adebiyi

by Iyanu Adebiyi

Why are women who fly called witches?

If they have wings, aren’t they birds?

Come and meet my father who leaves his beards

Dangling like feathers.

He is calling me to read the Bible in the sun.

I have taken flight.

Is it true the sun is the face of God?

What then is a shooting star? How many bullets does it have?

& why do we pray to a gun?

My father buried his rib under the belt of Orion

Before he began the trek to hellfire,

said, there is nothing in this body

That deserves salvation except my wife.

In hell, I found my poetry ablaze.

I touched the raging fire and wondered,

Isn’t God burning too?

If God is the sun, then who is hellfire?

If God is the sun, then who is darkness?

Of what use is a light so bright it blinds the eye?

The song of the universe is mostly a solo

& only a blind woman can see its waves

If she dares to sing along, will her tongue sprout wings?

If she dares to fly, does that make her a witch?

If God is the sun, will fire fall down from heaven

& consume her?

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Iyanu Adebiyi is a Nigerian-based writer, poet, and performer. She works as a lawyer at a local firm. Her poems have been published in several publications, including Odd Magazine, African Writers, and elsewhere.

Pigs in Space

SWWIM Every Day
by Sandra Beasley

by Sandra Beasley

Landing at the Sea of Tranquility,
the clock calls for breakfast—
eight squares of bacon, coated in gelatin;
dehydrated peaches; apricot cereal cubes.

No salt on the loose, no spice,
fifteen cups of coffee per astronaut.

All this fine-tuned in the eight years
since Gemini pilot Joe Young’s pocket
revealed a corned beef sandwich
courtesy Wolfie’s of Cocoa Beach,
which he offered to Gus Grissom
as the crumbs broke away and floated
toward the fickle innards of the ship.

Now, everything bound into bar or pouch,
cocktail shrimp hand-selected to squeeze
one by one through the tubing.

Inventing the space taco will take
another two decades. Sturdy tortillas
will be fortified for shelf life,
glued together by creamed onions.

In 2008, Korean scientists will perfect
how to prepare kimchi
without the lactic bacterial fizz
that might, given cosmic rays,
just happen to mutate.

But we are not there yet,
and for days the Apollo 11 menu
has asked them to imagine one paste
as beef, another as chicken;
to discern first tuna, then salmon.

As they ready to step outside
the lunar module, Buzz Aldrin unscrews
a tiny vial drawn from his private pouch,
and the wine drapes at one-sixth gravity.
His fingertips grip a tiny chalice,
while the other hand places
a wafer on his tongue. During all this,

NASA cuts the feed. Soon they’ll return
to regularly scheduled acts of faith,
releasing hydrogen and oxygen
to mix inside the fuel cell:

from that, a gathering of water,
and from that, a chowder of corn.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sandra Beasley is the author of Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a memoir about living with disability. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. "Pigs in Space" is from Made to Explode, her fourth collection, forthcoming with W. W. Norton & Company in early 2021.

As if it were tomorrow

SWWIM Every Day
by Lucia Leao

by Lucia Leao

you arrive and unpack
in the middle
of me.

In the kitchen, tea
labels you unglue, kid-wise,
unearthing  the organic
flavors of fair-trade gardens.

I offer what I have,
basil, ginger, pink pepper,
and fizzy water,
the yellow kettle—
a fountain.

Your clothes unrest the sofa,
thinned jackets, gentle shoes,
multiple shapes of ties,
your exhibited emptiness
the space I can hug,
dispatch denials.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lucia Leao is a Brazilian-American translator and writer. She has a master’s degree in Brazilian literature from UERJ (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and a master’s degree in print journalism from University of Miami. Her poems in English have been published in the South Florida Poetry Journal and in Chariton Review.

Down the Road

SWWIM Every Day
by Jude Marr

by Jude Marr

old lady, as you twirl your candy cane at fractured
worlds, kick up cracked heels: while reason leaks
steal what scenes you can—

Chaplin in a blue nightdress and battered curls, worn
slipper-soles tatter-flapping as you clown-walk
down your dust-cake road toward a vanishing—

through limelight flicker, flash one last, lewd smile.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jude Marr teaches, and writes poetry, as protest. Their chapbook, Breakfast for the Birds (Finishing Line), was published in 2017. Recent credits include Wend, Minerva Rising, and Eye Flash Poetry. Follow them @JudeMarr1 and find more of their work at www.judemarr.com.

You Fit Into Me

SWWIM Every Day
by Stacey Balkun

by Stacey Balkun



We lived in a house made of honey, me and you,
drip in the walls never wavering, a poor fit
for a fatherless girl and a widow, the shimmer of sun fading into
torn wallpaper, yellowed with age. It was supposed to be sweet, but me,
I would shiver to stay warm, fearing your sting, like
a little bee. One fat summer day, I found a
wet stain on the kitchen ceiling, swollen as a hook
dipped in plaster. Mother, remember how we stared, fret locked into
our knuckles and lips, watching a neighbor unholster an
old power drill, eager to find for you the leaking pipe? Closed eye,
we sprinted out of the heavy house, down the drive as a
swarm of bees poured from their hive between stories, leaping like fish
and I wanted to leave right then more than ever but feared your hook,
the funnel of fury, windows darkened with winged bodies, an
apocalypse of fleeing to sunlight, exodus through the open
front door. I knew then I could no longer trust you. Never since looked you in the eye.

 

—after Margaret Atwood (a golden shovel)

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Stacey Balkun is the author of three poetry chapbooks and co-editor of Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest as well as Terrain.org’s 10th Annual Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2018, Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, and other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches creative writing online at The Poetry Barn & The Loft. Visit her online at http://www.staceybalkun.com.

Almost Free

SWWIM Every Day
by Kindra McDonald

by Kindra McDonald

Heaven
is the moon swinging
hand under hand
just to hug the ground
with light strong as knots

Bright egg
dance gingerly
dance delirious
a swan drowned
a half thigh
a lemon pout
moon a lit firefly hum
in my ear

This is a found poem using erasure from pages 260-264 of Andrews, V. C. Flowers in the Attic: the Dollanganger Family Series # 1. Pocket Books, 1979.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kindra McDonald is the author of the poetry collections Fossils (Finishing Line Press) and In the Meat Years (Aldrich Press), both in 2019, and the chapbooks Concealed Weapons (2015) and Elements and Briars (2016). She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and her BA from Virginia Wesleyan University. Her work has appeared in Rise Up Review, Twyckenham Notes, Muddy River Poetry Review, the anthology The Nearest Poem, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Bettering American Poetry. She lives in the city of mermaids with her husband and cats where she bakes, hikes, and changes hobbies monthly.

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

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

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