21st Century Omniverse Sonnet (i)

SWWIM Every Day
by Beth Gordon

by Beth Gordon

When physicists in Oak Ridge swung the door
wide to glimpse the negative of narrow
existence, a snail with wet wings emerged,
leaving a contrail, and then hummingbirds,
sluggish and attracted only to shades
of white, and called by metaphysical
choirs to reunite with God and my
father appeared, his oiled brain in clockwork
order, to decode triangulations
of weeping willow funerals, lightning
bugs and vanishing tar pits, but did not
know my face, my doppelgänger long drowned

in mud waters and no one through either
mirror knows if it was an accident.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother, and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two chapbooks: Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press) and Particularly Dangerous Situation (Clare Songbird Publishing). She is Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.

Love Song, Cannon Beach

SWWIM Every Day
by Sara Quinn Rivara

by Sara Quinn Rivara

My son tells me to stick my finger
in an open anemone though it might sting.

On Haystack Rock, tufted puffins return
each year to lay eggs and raise their young.
Cells divide but not forever.

Mom, do you remember before me? The tide
is coming in. He’s wet to the knees.
I think I have always been here.

My new husband and his son make sandcastles
while we watch starfish slip beneath the waves.

The sandcastle goes under. There is no before,
no after. The boys trace stars into the sand,

run into a crowd of gulls. How do jellyfish live
without brains? they ask. We eat ice-cream
for dinner, walk barefoot back to the hotel.

The boys talk until midnight. Our bodies taste
like salt. Tree frogs sing through the open window.

My husband hums and puts the boys to bed.
To call a thing by name is a kind of spell:

Mom, Sara, love. Even so, the past wolf-whistles
bitch, unloveable. Fog rolls in, smears the panes.
Today the ocean is calm. Tomorrow,

the weather will shift. Big rollers, north wind.
One rogue wave could swallow us.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sara Quinn Rivara is the author of Animal Bride (Tinderbox Editions) and Lake Effect (Aldrich Press). Her work has recently appeared in Crab Creek Review, West Branch, Dunes Review, Blackbird, RHINO, and numerous other places. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.

you freak me

SWWIM Every Day
by Paula Harris

by Paula Harris

Butterflies in my pants
Got ants in my heart
Supergroove “You Freak Me”


bees in the belfry
bats in my bonnet

a drop in the rough
a diamond in the ocean

hell in a pod
peas in a handbasket

true fact:
one of Saturn’s moons
looks like a round ravioli
(not a square one)

all that glitters cannot change its spots
a leopard is not gold

a little knowledge is a joy forever
a thing of beauty is a dangerous thing

in for a barn door, in for a pound
shutting the penny after the horse has bolted

true fact:
the average cloud weighs
the same as 83 elephants
(a small cloud is 2 elephants)

let’s press into shape
come, lick me into service

let’s make pie while the sun shines
come, be my hay in the sky

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Paula Harris lives in New Zealand, where she writes poems and sleeps in a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award. Her writing has been published in various journals, including Berfrois, Queen Mob's Teahouse, The Rialto, Barren, SWWIM Every Day, Diode, Glass, Aotearotica, The Spinoff, and Landfall. See more at www.paulaharris.co.nz.

For Sure

SWWIM Every Day
by Michele Sharpe

by Michele Sharpe

A dog, maybe a coyote, splashes up a shallow, rocky stream.
The shame carried deepest in the body is the shame of being fooled.

The dog, maybe a coyote, sheds droplets from its fur. They shine.
The shame of being fooled means we can’t trust even ourselves.

Say it: There is a stream. Sunlight. A coyote. Some things have names.
The dog, maybe a coyote, raises its muzzle as if smelling, even tasting the breeze.

You could say the same of getting fooled. First, the scent. Then, you taste it.
Later, nothing is certain until bitten, until its fur comes away in your teeth.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear in venues including The Rumpus, Guernica, Catapult, and The Sycamore Review. Recent poems can be found in Poet Lore, North American Review, Stirring, and Baltimore Review.

Poem for St. John of the Cross

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Zimmerman

by Lisa Zimmerman


 In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God                                                  Saint John of the Cross


Your father married for love
an orphan below his noble station.
Discarded by his wealthy kindred
they say your parents nurtured you in poverty—
and the bread was as sweet as any bread

and the days offered their shiny hands
and their little streams of water
singing in the glades.

I see you wandering happily as a boy,
the sun a crown on your small head,
your bare feet scuffing the dust.
God chirped like a wood lark
in the throat of afternoon
and the lonely months in prison
were far ahead beneath the great shadow
of the future.

I try to follow you there, O mystic,
to watch you defy your greedy brethren
monks who will reject your reforms, your love
of less, of days returned to prayer and fasting.

Fat and threatened, they silenced you
in a narrow stone cell, one tiny window
like the one in the soul where day after day
the voice of God pierced your suffering.

Out of emptiness, a full heart—
out of abandonment, a poem of seeking—
out of utter darkness, a gleam of pure light—
love’s last trembling boat waiting for you
to get in, and row.

_______________________________________________________________

Lisa Zimmerman’s poems have appeared in Cave Wall, Colorado Review, Natural Bridge, Apple Valley Review, Chiron Review, Trampset, and other magazines.  She has published three chapbooks and three full length collections. Her debut poetry collection won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Her other collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado.   

You Pick Out Your Feminist Icon Dress For School Again

SWWIM Every Day
by Amelia Martens

by Amelia Martens

And ask me to put a Christmas pompom in your hair
along with a maroon bow to hold your bun in place.

There is all of breakfast and night across your face
when we leave the house; when we cross the street

your sister wants to talk about gravity
and I am doing math involving trajectory:

if two daughters and their mother step off
this curb now, will they arrive on the other side

before that blue pick-up truck explodes
their bodies in clean clothes and homework?

Why don’t we fall off the surface of the Earth
as our planet spins through space, why don’t

we feel the spin, here on this plate? I make
metaphors with my free hand and conduct

two half conversations at once, without
success. We cross another street and don’t

die and yet, I always feel the sunshine
as a potential threat, my body

your bodies, always under the weight:
a certain level of force exerted to hold us

to the ground, as we are more
dangerous in our space.

I let go your hand, and you run
up the school steps, free radicals.

I turn home, thinking of ice animals
floating off the poles at each end of this ball.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016) and four chapbooks, including Ursa Minor (elsewhere magazine, 2018). She is the recipient of a 2019 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She met her husband in the Indiana University MFA program; together they created the Rivertown Reading Series, Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art, and two awesome daughters.

Did you know

SWWIM Every Day
by Tiana Nobile

by Tiana Nobile

my sister was Fed-Exed from Korea?
you say,

dazed under the haze of hospital lights,
your arm tethered to an intravenous drip

charging like a box to numbing light.
You’re twenty-five, adrift in anesthetic fog

floating through the white sea of hospital hallways,
and you think of me, the living package

that changed your life. On the day of my arrival,
you were a month away from turning four.

While the buzz of anticipation swirled
around the airport terminal, your small body

perched high, anchored in the crook of our father’s arm.
So this is how babies are born,

you thought, and everything was yellow.
Scuffed linoleum tile. Blur of fluorescent lights

hovering above you. How you must have imagined
my body rattling in the box during transport

as our mother scurried
to the airport bathroom to snap my joints

into place. Today, we laugh about what you said.
We laugh until we forget why we’re laughing.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tiana Nobile is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a poetry fellowship from Kundiman. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, she is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the chapbook, The Spirit of the Staircase (2017). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and The Georgia Review, among others. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com.

to Geri from sleepaway camp, the summer before high school

SWWIM Every Day
by Virginia Kane

by Virginia Kane

beside the lake, you asked me to rub sunscreen
on your hard-to-reach places. this was
foreign territory. West Virginia. two weeks

without parents or church service. this meaning
all of you, in a Target bikini,
strawberry popsicle juice staining your lower lip.

you played lacrosse in a sports bra & spandex,
sang loudest during bonfire & knew it.
there were bumps on your shoulder blades

where i squeezed & spread the lotion,
bursting where mosquitos fought
for tastes of you. you & i & every creature

on that campground famished in the
Blue Ridge mountains. she’s bisexual,
Carroll told me in the shower house

one night. you know what that means,
don’t you? how your eyes must be glued
to our bunk bed-sized bodies so

we clutched our towels tighter to our
dandelion chests. but what did it mean
if i wanted you to stare. longer than

it takes to fall asleep under
twin sheets in July. your palms
releasing lighting bugs to

each phase of the moon. your tongue
spitting watermelon seeds through the
volleyball net. so in this version,

there is no boyfriend you made plans
to move in with after graduation,
only baby hairs on the back of your neck.

in this version, i ask where else i can
lather lotion & there is no oil
or guilt on my tiny timid hands.

in this version, i sneak to your cabin
after lights-out & climb each
metal rung barefoot. in this version,

your body matches mine down to
its heartbeat, & i am gone through
your screen door by morning.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Virginia Kane is the author of poetry chapbook, If Organic Deodorant Was Made for Dancing (Sunset Press 2019). A sophomore at Kenyon College, she was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest and a 2018 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Gold Medalist. Virginia has held internships with the Kenyon Review and Split This Rock, performs with the Kenyon Magnetic Voices spoken word poetry team, and serves as Managing Editor of Sunset Press.

Our Lady of Not Forgetting

SWWIM Every Day
by Dayna Patterson

by Dayna Patterson

The big things, obviously. Birthdays, and how old. Anniversaries, and what number. When to pick up the beloved child from school. But the small things, too. Field trip permission slips. Planetarium tickets. Watering the philodendron, its tumble of parched foliage like yellow banners signaling distress. When my mother came to visit, she wiped six years’ dust off each leaf using her thumb. Now it can breathe, she said. How could I forget? Match our minds to the task of ticking every box, even the ones in the basement crawling with roaches. Among all the to-doing, let us not forget the pink dogwood. Even if we tread in dog shit, Lady, let us not forget to look up when we pass. Colonoscopy. Mammogram. Dentist. The email, or letter, or text, or line of a poem we’ve been meaning to write. Tie a scrap of yarn around our wrists. Inscribe reminders, impermanent tattoos, in the sail of skin between pointer and thumb. A red asterisk for meteor shower. A black L for library, late fines mounting up to catastrophe. Prick our memory from its slump on the couch, so we recall: How to rouse for a blood moon. How to release the trapped animal of breath. How to steal the tooth-pearl tucked beneath our children’s dreams.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has appeared recently in POETRY, AGNI, and Passages North, among others. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. See more at daynapatterson.com.

"Escort" is her word &

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Jean

by Jennifer Jean


the whole interview’s about her girl.

D says, I wanted her to know
but know my way,

not at school or from some jerk.
So one day I say, “We should talk,” & she’s freaked.

We sit down in the kitchen &
she starts crying. (So I’m thinking, She knows…)

“You got Cancer!
You got Cancer!” she starts screaming.
D snorts, We laugh about it now.
How she was so relieved
I wasn’t
dying.
*

Others in town talk
about D’s son

finding her nude online, or
fellow yacht-clubbers finding her & showing him
her webcam antics, her customer ratings
on her “Escort” ads.

My son was bound,says D, 
to notice

my overnight bag. I stuffed it
with lingerie.
I mean—
jeez…
she shrugs.

There’s a bit of dead
air for the boy, then
he’s gone

from the interview.
 

                *


D scans the Starbucks
where we perch on stools. Says she’s failed
the bar exam a lot, her ex is a nerd, that she wants another degree
& to write a memoir,
But I’m so exhausted!
Then it’s back to her girl, When I take my girl
on errands, I point out

all the jerks in town who’re clients &
we laugh. An orgasm
is like a pedicure for these guys.
I mean—jeez…

Who does that?
she shakes out her long, frosted hair. She’s fifty-three
so she’s got some grey
but it looks classy.

I wonder if she’ll start pointing.

                *

Instead, D looks back at me, One time we saw

this big ass politico I’ve known for years
slurping pancakes with his wife, at IHOP.
She says his name
& I’m ready to stop the recorder.

Too funny, she sighs. She’s so 

far away she squints
at me, says, My girl’s cool. I nod.
We talk about all our guys.
It’s all good.
                *

Just wish there wasn’t

side effects.
She leans away but we’re closer now—like mother,
like daughter. & the monied men in Starbucks seem to be
closing in as the place crowds, but

I’m hooked. Side effects?

I feel nothing. Like that song!
After nine years of this, she sings, I feel nothing
nothing nothing at all…

______________________________________________________________

Jennifer Jean's debut poetry collection is The Fool (Big Table); her awards include a 2020 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Fellowship; a 2018 Disquiet FLAD Fellowship; a 2017 “Her Story Is” Residency—where she worked with Iraqi women artists in Dubai; and, a 2013 Ambassador for Peace Award for her activism in the arts. Jennifer’s poems and co-translations have appeared in: Poetry Magazine, Rattle Magazine, Waxwing Journal, Crab Creek Review, The Common, and more. She’s the director of Free2Write Poetry Workshops for Trauma Survivors and an editor at Talking Writing Magazine. For more info, visit: http://www.jenniferjeanwriter.weebly.com 

A Bed Among Goats

SWWIM Every Day
by Sherry Rind

by Sherry Rind

“You will have a warmer bed in amongst the goats than among the sheep.” Aristotle, History of Animals



We press up during sleep, all dreaming
of new leaves. The kids’ legs twitch in play.
Against the cold and the roaming panther
we need each other and the shepherd
sharing our warmth.

We bring cheer to horses,
who grow anxious about all they do not recognize;
a fallen branch is a snake,
a blown rag at the edge of vision,
the paw of a wolf. Among us,
their eyes stop rolling
and they bend their long necks to the grass.

We find the wild lands
better than dreams.
We climb high on a hill, high up broken boulders,
testing our clever feet.
Although buzzards hang above,
they are flies to us.

We do not fear these untried places.
Far below, olive trees wave silver and green,
whisper with the small birds
who never settle to their thoughts.

The shepherd comes after us, muttering,
watching her feet slipping among rocks
instead of looking out
where we look,
until we take pity and go to her.
We butt her legs gently, press up
until she lets go her human fears
and we return home as one.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sherry Rind's previous books are The Hawk in the Back Yard (Anhinga Award) and A Fall Out the Door (Confluence Press). Chapbooks are The Whooping Crane Dance and A Natural History of Grief. She has received grants and awards from the Seattle and King County Arts Commissions, Pacific Northwest Writers, National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust. Her next book is Between States of Matter (The Poetry Box select series, 2020). See more at https://sherryrind.wixsite.com/writer.

The Snow Owl

SWWIM Every Day
by Amie Whittemore

by Amie Whittemore

waited for me
at the center

of a frozen pond.
Beneath my feet

I could see the witless
gaze of frozen fish.

A low winter sun
razed the fields,

entrenched in snow
and the cold burden

of being alive
yet waiting.

The owl did not
spread its wings,

did not tap the ice
with a talon, only

watched me
equivocate between

praise and retreat,
its gold eyes

tarnishing me.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection, Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press). Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.

I Will Forgive

SWWIM Every Day
by Anastasia Vassos

By Anastasia Vassos

September is the best month for dying. Sun’s blade sharpens its point.
Birds stop declaring they want to stay. The smell of rain pervades.
Leaves from old-growth trees leave permanent tattoos on the pavement.
Were I to shoulder my grief into the folds of my favorite sweater,
you would tell me to remember how much you loved me. You insisted.
We were finely stitched, edged in bone and blood. Now my hindsight unravels
its tangled net. A keen knife slices night from day. I remember,
as you could not, your words before you left us for those porous borders.
Remember how you made us learn prayers in ancient Greek?
Syllable by syllable. We clenched our teeth to God. We gave him a name.
Say maker. Say middle distance. Cold shudder in my ear. Sense
could not be made. Autumn unleafing, then, the stinging time of year.
If you get another chance, please name me Moira. For bitter. For fate.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Anastasia Vassos is a Greek-American poet. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio and currently lives and writes in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, including Thrush Poetry Journal, Gravel Mag, RHINO, Haibun Today, and Comstock Review. Anastasia is a poetry reader for Lily Poetry Review. She was a BreadLoaf Contributor in Poetry in 2017. Her poem “Tinos, August 2012” was named Poem Of The Moment on MassPoetry.org. She is a long-distance cyclist.

Reunion

SWWIM Every Day
by Jessica L. Walsh

by Jessica L. Walsh

The ratio of tributes to handshakes
tipped earlier than we’d imagined

At times we say remind me
and the list of what happened

is the list of all we loved

the lake the lake the river

a Ford truck
on gravel or mud
on open road with deer
or wild turkey with Wild Turkey

the lying frozen lake

the rip-currented outlet to the lake

When it’s Oxy or tar we say sickness
and talk about times we drank with them
at bonfires by the lake
or flying down dirt roads in the back of a pick-up

What we don’t say is we could all be here
every one

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica L. Walsh is the author of two poetry collections, most recently The List of Last Tries, as well as two chapbooks. Her poetry can be found in Tinderbox, RHINO, Stirring, and elsewhere. She teaches at a community college outside of Chicago, where she lives with her family.

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.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

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?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

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