Now a Hospice Volunteer

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

How shocked I was
as a child to learn
that the architecture of life
included death—a frightened fire
starting inside of me fueled
by containment.

I have watched people die,
held their cool hands
as they exhale a last breath.

Each time is a lessening,
an echo—the way veins
of a fallen leaf are a faint imprint
of the tree or the inside whorl
of a shell holds onto the sea.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form of writing with conscious linebreaks. She has three poetry collections: The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.

Aunt Gracie's

SWWIM Every Day
by Hannah Jones

by Hannah Jones

tobacco fields stink
worse than collards
greenish brown

windows down

muggy breeze
fingers reaching out to touch
nearly touch
the cotton balls
as they fluff by

because if you touch
perhaps you will know
what your foremothers knew
ages ago

down in the Cackalacky
the dirt road
stationwagon
rickety, creaks

with the grease of fried chicken
in spotted napkins

and thighs, sweaty
sticking to hot leather

two angry sisters in the backseat
lips smarting from the pinch
of reprove
and stewing from the heat

cold tomato slices
say Goodbye
and every 200 miles
you might stop
at a tiny gas station
where there’s a single attendant
and your father

vanishes
and emerges

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Hannah Jones is a child clinical psychologist from the San Francisco Bay by way of Virginia. Dr. Jones also leads social justice oriented didactics. She has always used written word as an outlet to integrate her academic and artistic identities. Dr. Jones writes to articulate silenced hopes, dreams, anxieties, fears, and experiences. Her work has been featured by Split This Rock and My Whisper Roars and is published in TAYO Literary Magazine.

Inheritance

SWWIM Every Day
by Rosie Prohías Driscoll

by Rosie Prohías Driscoll

Abuela Aida was obsessed with whether
her daughters would sprout las orejas de torreja
de Abuelo Cesar y José Basilio, those ears
that induced Sisa to tie a blue ribbon around
Tio Raul’s infant head (even if people might think
he was a girl) to prevent them from smothering
him in his sleep. She gave thanks to God when
Mami and Mina each emerged from the womb
with ears well-proportioned for wearing a proper
moño, and again years later, when we her nietos
also managed to escape the elephantine curse.
So when our first daughter is born the women
of the family swoop down ceremoniously to dissect
her baby body. Mami proclaims que la niña tiene
las sortijitas pegadas a la cabeza like my father,
though the strawberry blond hue of her ringlets
belong to Abuela Rosina. Most importantly, her ears
are perfect, tiny caracoles de nacar. Lying in her moisés,
la niña gazes at her father, not yet able to recognize
the amused smile taking shape as he strokes the reddish
stubble of his beard, while I fix my eyes on hers, wanting
to believe it’s true, that a little piece of ourselves
can live in the precise curve of a fingernail bed,
or in the pupil of the bluest eye


____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Rosie Prohías Driscoll is a Cuban-American educator and poet. Raised in Miami, she now lives in Alexandria, VA with her husband and greyhound. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Acentos Review, Más Tequila Review, Literary Mama, Blue Lyra Review, Temenos Journal, Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art, No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant and First-Generation American Poetry, and Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders.

The Artists’ Sacrifice

SWWIM Every Day
by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

I think careful cooking is love, don't you?
~Julia Child

Isaac's not mentioned
once replaced by the ram,
only his sparing. Not one

ounce of disappointment,
not one question
about an unfit parent,

only people singing.
Show me how we prevent
fathers from sacrificing

children to honor
Gods with offerings.
Show me a mother

who wouldn't bind
babies to a stranger
to recover an hour

over the fire alone.
The "card-carrying carnivore,"
Julia Child's just one

whose sacrifice—
hers to Boeuf Bourguignon—
was childlessness.

My son and daughter
bound to rock-like seats
in the sanctuary, augur

their own dismay.
To feel God in my hands
what wouldn't I give away?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, is the author of Imperfect Tense (poems) and three scholarly books in education. Winner of NEA Big Read Grants, the Beckman Award for Professors Who Inspire, and a Fulbright for the nine-month study of adult Spanish language acquisition in Oaxaca Mexico, she's served for over ten years as poetry editor for Anthropology & Humanism, judging the ethnographic poetry competition. She blogs at http://teachersactup.com.

26

SWWIM Every Day
by Kunjana Parashar

by Kunjana Parashar

In the 1990s, diclofenac was used to treat cattle diseases. Many
vultures started dropping dead after feeding on the medicated carcasses:
Gyps bengalensis, G. Indicus & G. Tenuirostris: they took a hit so badly,
that later, the Parsis planned to build vulture-aviaries for the traditional
departure of their dead. I was born in that decade–somewhere around
the confirmed end of Javan tigers. Since my birth, there are others who
have gone extinct–birds, civets, rhinos. And yet, countless anurans hide
in the Western ghats. Turn this shola, peatland, lateritic plateau–and you will
find a species still willing to live, shy only of the blessed grace of taxonomy.
When my mother asks how I want to celebrate my birthday this year,
I say quietly.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kunjana Parashar is a poet living in Mumbai. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, The Indianapolis Review, Parentheses Journal, UCity Review, What Are Birds, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @wolfwasp.

Lorena

SWWIM Every Day
by Emily Banks

by Emily Banks

The first breaking story I remember
hearing as a child, wide-eyed between my parents
on the couch as we ate ice cream, watching
the six o’clock news. I’d never seen one before,
except in a quick flash, a boy my mom tutored
in his closet laughing though I didn’t understand
why it was a big deal. I knew boys had one
and I hated boys. How I imagined it,
there was no blood. Just a pale limp organ
like a peeled banana snapped softly in half.
I pictured her tossing it out the window
into a dark pile of twigs and driving off.
Why she did it was unimportant to me.
I’d seen my mom get angry
at my dad and believed women
were always right. It was the ’90s. Wives
were a punchline. Their thighs
were too fat and they were too old
for their belching husbands whose stomachs peeked
out from their Buffalo-sauce-stained tees:
Take my wife. It would have been a fair conclusion
to any family sitcom, honestly: the husband
in the den, remote in hand, snoring gently,
or at the kitchen table with his other husband-friends
gawking at the sixteen-year-old nanny over poker chips,
none of them even good at poker—then wife
enters with butcher knife. The news anchors
never explained how he hurt her. Entered her
body in ways she could barely whisper to the court.
Never said he promised to kill her.
The penis was the story as, I would soon learn,
it always is. But still I liked how it made men,
even the grown-up ones on TV, squirm
like little boys with mothers scrubbing
the backs of their necks for Sunday, scrubbing
harder than they needed to, like it was more
than dirt their rough cloths sought.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Cortland Review, The Southampton Review, Memoir Mixtapes, Glass (Poets Resist), Superstition Review, New South, Collective Unrest, and other journals. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and is currently a doctoral candidate at Emory University.

Her Last Words

SWWIM Every Day
by Joan Colby

by Joan Colby

She half-stood after dinner, said
Six words and seized
Like the old Packard following
The shrieking squad car
With Annie in the back seat,
Her appendix rupturing, the oil light
Coming on, unnoticed.

Gabriella said Your mother is dead now,
We trundled her to her room,
Laid her down. I could swear
She was still breathing, but it was
Just the final bodily functions
Shutting down like gears freezing
Ungreased, the rattle of the
Radiator hissing its last
Exhalation. What was it she said
Standing there, surprised,
Her voice gone thick.

Last words. You expect
Profundity. Or an image:
The spiritual bird on an updraft.
Surely, I think now when the light suddenly
Flares and dims at the archway to
Something or nothing, in that ancient
Turtle mutter, a primeval tone
Before civilization mustered
Columns of rationality,
She might have enlightened us.

But there was nothing
Significant. Nothing to bequeath.
No evidence. She said
I want to go to bed
So firmly there was no denying
The order. We shouldered her
Into the darkness.


__________________________________________________________________

Joan Colby’s Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage was awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Her recent books include Her Heartsongs from Presa Press, Joyriding to Nightfall from FutureCycle Press, Elements from Presa Press and Bony Old Folks from Cyberwit Press. She has another book forthcoming from The Poetry Box Select series titled The Kingdom of the Birds which should be out next August.

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.

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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.

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