Robert Frost Said Poetry Is a Way of Taking Life by the Throat

SWWIM Every Day
by Marissa Glover

by Marissa Glover

So this is the phone call, the email
in the dark hours after everyone’s gone
to bed, glass of wine on the nightstand still
half full, words important as air.
This is the song Kings of Leon sings—
the melancholy one, the one that ends
with a smile, the one your wife plays
in the shower because she doesn’t know
what it means. This is the apology—
an I’m sorry to appease the angels,
bypass the flaming swords barring us
from Eden, put the fruit back on the tree.

This is the sold sign planted in mud,
telling Shropshire the flat’s been taken.
This is the job ad for a man who loves
making plans, who teases fact from fog
the way chefs on Chopped cook complete
meals from whatever mystery ingredients
are in the basket, the way Fred Astaire
dances on the ceiling. This is the history
book teachers warn their class to read
with suspicion, eyes in search of bias
that leads to lies, penned by a poet
compelled to change the past, certain
a few good lines could write the future,
certain a future waits to be written,
certain the only story that ends happily
is the one that never ends.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________



Marissa Glover teaches and writes in Florida, where she is co-editor of Orange Blossom Review and a senior editor at The Lascaux Review. Marissa’s work appears in Rust + Moth, Mothers Always Write, Okay Donkey, and Whale Road Review, among other journals. Her debut poetry collection LET GO OF THE HANDS YOU HOLD is forthcoming from Mercer University Press in 2021. Follow Marissa on Twitter @_MarissaGlover_.

I Grew Eyes at the Nape of My Neck

SWWIM Every Day
by Rita Mookerjee

by Rita Mookerjee

from spending too much time in white
space which alternates between cradling
me and squeezing my guts out and some
time ago, I reached back and felt them

there, blinking under my dark ponytail.
When I don’t use them, they crust with
lymph and old skin. I have to rub
to coax them out of my tendons, knotted

and taut. Open, my eyes all itch as though
the air around me is forever spiked with
goldenrod, and for this reason, I cannot
process comfort: a place where my odd body

ends and the world begins. Eyes three and
four don’t react much to light, but they water
in lust, squint at intimacy, bulge at rejection.
They narrow each time that someone deems

me an alien. A problem. An anomaly. A bitch.
In white space, my body shrinks because I
can never extend my limbs to fit the shape
assigned to me. I wish that all four eyes

had powers like heirloom amulets: two
lookouts always on high alert for temptation
and fraud, and two to guide me from niche
to temporary niche until the day comes that

space has been made for my odd brown body
so that I can rest all four eyes and expand to fill
my space. Sometimes I profit from my many
eyes, however swollen, however sore. In white

space, people line up to gawk at the back
of my neck. They nod together to appreciate
my vitriol and scorn. They buy my books, then
pull me from any niche I try to claim as mine.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University. Her poetry is featured in Aaduna, GlitterMOB, Sinister Wisdom, Berfrois, and Cosmonauts Avenue. She is the author of the chapbook, Becoming the Bronze Idol (Bone & Ink Press, 2019). She is a poetry staff reader for [PANK].

Dear Cassandra

SWWIM Every Day
by Charlotte Hughes

by Charlotte Hughes

*please click on title to see the poem in its proper format

I do believe that an arrow unsung still does its own kind of singing
by singing I mean sorrow and by sorrow I mean the kind of perdition

& limbo you saw from the temple walls, the kind that knocks outside

your brass & teakwood door saying love-lost, honor-country, duty-glory, and when
you open the door it wedges its foot in the crack & won’t be

on its way until you’re on your knees speaking Aeolic to the marble &

I’m on my Persian carpet furiously solving SAT math problems
to keep from crying. One part of me would look at the lot of us, the crying

groundlings, wouldn’t even think of pity—no that’s you who

cannot hear the sound of a plastic bag whipped in the interstate wind, who
cannot switch the channel to the news with a dry face—you are yourself

& the reason not even your mother & father will believe when you prophesize

that the Trojan Horse whispers in Attic & when a wooden panel is screwed
loose there will be an outline of an eye in the belly of the horse.

The other part of me would be absolutely wretched.

I would consider myself ungraspable like the wind, I would throw
my shoes in a heap in one corner of the temple,

run with Cassandra on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea until the sand
caught my feet & I came down headfirst on charred sand,

& at 2 AM on the shore I would drop my chiton run
into the sea like Aphrodite except this time I wouldn’t be carried
out of the water on a conch-shell pedestal but would lurch out howling &

baying with Cassandra. & I would leave apples & oranges & a tub
of water outside the temple for anyone and call that resistance.
Look, I care imperfectly & Cassandra would care imperfectly

but still I carve my fingers clean & make a silly girl out of

myself at family gatherings, just like when Cassandra told Troy to stop
with it already & her family thought they’d better take

the mulled wine away. I even make little sacrifices out of my USAA card &

the time I have left. I stay up far past a girl’s bedtime. But speaking of
sacrifices, I keep circling back to this one: Cassandra snoring on the persimmon

mosaic of the temple. Myrrh. Anise. Anti-shadows of snakes

stretching around Cassandra’s earlobes, lacing through locks of apricot hair,
flicking tongues in her ears while whispering that she’ll have prophecies

no one will believe. She tried to wake up from the dream
but her eyes were already open.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Charlotte Hughes attends high school in Columbia, South Carolina. She has attended the Iowa Young Writerʻs Studio and is an editor for Polyphony Lit. Her poetry can be found in The Louisville Review, Lunch Ticket, and others, and was a finalist in the f(r)iction Summer Poetry Contest.

Meeting the Ex-Boyfriend on the 3rd Floor of the University Library

SWWIM Every Day
by Cat Dixon

by Cat Dixon

I.

This is the quiet section so we whisper as we sort—
my pile has 50 poems. Yours, 30. With a red pen,

you slash through entire stanzas, draw arrows—
move this here, move that there. You say the last line

must bait the hook for the next. Each piece must
be tethered by the invisible push and pull

of the current. This table, floating in the corner,
with a view of the parking lot, now spins,

caught in a whirlpool. I get seasick easily,
but you, chewing on a pen cap, shuffling

manila folders, do not seem to mind the spray
of the water, the carousel of silver sharks,

the dented eel that slithers in my lap,
the shaky hand I use to take notes.


II.

It seemed like a good idea all those years ago,
to salvage our lost letters, poems, and emails

to construct a lifeboat. All that wasted
emotion and time put to use—to make

something to pass the hours, something
to busy our minds, something

so lopsided and ugly that it would
never carry its passengers to shore.

The anchor latched to my broken ankle
guarantees I’ll be pulled under

and you, forever captain, former martyr,
the hero hidden in every book,

are destined for the lighthouse.
Just a little farther.


III.

On my laptop, I create a Google drive—
organization will be so much easier.

We cut and paste and insert a new page break,
but the words smear the screen, my backspace

button gets stuck with seaweed. You
insist we work on paper. Forget

the computer, the cloud that holds
the secret of what happened to the sailor

who didn’t drown, didn’t abandon
ship, didn’t kiss my mouth and then spit

seashells in my face. His siren call
keeps the rain away, plugs the holes,

and I believe I can hold my breath
for as long as it takes.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Cat Dixon works full-time at a church and teaches creative writing as an adjunct at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Cat is the author of Eva and Too Heavy to Carry (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2016, 2014) and The Book of Levinson and Our End Has Brought the Spring (Finishing Line Press, 2017, 2015), as well as the chapbook, Table for Two (Poet's Haven, 2019). Her poetry and reviews have appeared in numerous journals including Sugar House Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Coe Review, Eclectica, and Mid-American Review.

Bad Apology

SWWIM Every Day

by M.B. McLatchey

As if in an endless rehearsal,
I packed and unpacked. The challenge,
you said, was to take no more
than I’d need. Tenderly, you followed
the track of a storm moving in from the east.

In bed, a wrinkled map across our laps;
you circled a town and highlighted a road.
A yellow, satiny, path. When we slept,
you tried the path, left markers
you had kept for days like these.

And the markers were keys. Clues
in a moonscape of dust-covered things –
a pair of gloves with suede tips; a scarf;
a ring. Ruins like proof of a marriage,
a story’s skeletal sheen, small deaths, small

victories. Maestro, my mourning dove,
another chance? Put me back in that place,
with its signals and gestures and promise
of more mistakes. And I’ll show you
the hurtful lessons lovers make.

_______________________________________________________________

M.B. McLatchey is the author of two books of poems, The Lame God, for which she won the 2013 May Swenson Award (Utah State Univ. Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press). She is also the author of a recently-completed educational memoir, Beginner’s Mind, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing (2021). Currently Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County, M.B. is Associate Professor of Classics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Visit her at www.mbmclatchey.com

Pastime

SWWIM Every Day
by Cynthia White

by Cynthia White

Because I’ve slowed
to a tempo I used to dream of
back when my children were children,
I’ve taken up new pastimes—
crosswords, birds, obituaries.

Mornings, I walk a narrow canyon
that leads to a graveyard,
practicing my skills.
Black-headed grosbeak? Warbler
or wren? What’s a four-letter word

for end? I won’t call them golden,exactly, these moments.
Picture something darker—
light struggling through trees,
finding its way.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Cynthia White's poems have appeared in Narrative, New Letters, Poet Lore, ZYZZYVA, and Grist among others. She's been both finalist and semi-finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize and was the winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Pruning, New Year's Day

SWWIM Every Day
by Amy Miller

by Amy Miller

What grew in the wrong direction,
what’s blocking the light—I’m trying
to be kind here, your missteps, misshapes
bloated by last year’s rain. Long handles
and a small steel tooth lop off beauty
sometimes too—I’m sorry
if you thought you were perfect.
You were killing yourself.

Wrong ladder, saw too short, I wake
the neighbor’s hangover cracking
through branches. Crazy-haired tree,
wild profusion frozen in the air—
I see now that you dreamt the hell
out of summer while I slept,
my elbows bound in grief.
Some warm afternoons—I remember—
I woke to the sound of bees
singing little farmer songs,
working in the sudden acres
of your bloom.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Miller’s writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. She lives in Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR listening guide Jefferson Journal. She blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.

Her Mouth

SWWIM Every Day
by Mary Morris

by Mary Morris

is an ocean. Her breathing,
a storm at sea. My mother

is having a tooth pulled today.
This sweet tooth she has had

since she skipped from her tenement
to buy strawberry ice cream

for her parents, running
home before it melted.

That same molar bit into rations
during poverty in war

and through the feathery
wedding cake her mother baked.

One eyetooth drew blood
from the flesh of a midwife’s arm.

El otro diente, another tooth
cracked on an apple last week.

One by one, my mother is losing
all of her teeth. Now I understand

what this means:
someday she won’t be hungry.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Published in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, Massachusetts Review, and numerous other literary journals, Mary Morris received the Rita Dove Award and has been invited to read at the Library of Congress. She recently won the 2019 Mountain West Prize from Western Humanities Review and has been nominated for Best Microfiction 2020. Her book, Enter Water, Swimmer, was the runner-up for the X. J. Kennedy Prize and published by Texas A&M University Consortium through Texas Review Press. A second book by the same press will be published in 2020. Morris writes book reviews, teaches poetry, and lives in Santa Fe New Mexico. See more at www.water400.org.

Second Language

SWWIM Every Day
by Candice Kelsey

by Candice Kelsey

A friend beams to me
about the ASL class she’ll take this spring
and I feign delight
while swallowing the secret

that my parents taught me
sign language early:
I became fluent in their dialect
of disapproval and blistering
syntax of spite.

My friend will learn
the international sign for Happy Birthday
a grimace for that tastes funnymaybe a full-body expression of jubilation;

I was raised to read impatience
in a double finger snap
gnarled lips of disgust
and the finger wag shame on you.

Perhaps she’ll stumble
through the first conversations,
get tutors for finger spelling, or join
a study group to increase speed.

I was an apt student
enrolled in the total immersion program
though some signs I never learned:
I am enough.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Candice Kelsey's debut book of poetry, Still I am Pushing, releases March 6th with Finishing Line Press. Her first nonfiction book explored adolescent identity in the age of social media and was recognized as an Amazon.com Top Ten Parenting Book in 2007. Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals. She has been a finalist for Poetry Quarterly's Rebecca Lard Award and nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction. She is an educator of 20 years' standing, devoted to working with young writers. An Ohio native, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.

This Is How I Am an Addict

SWWIM Every Day
by Sonia Greenfield

by Sonia Greenfield


In that each day I cycle through
my textures—waking as flannel

until I apply espresso so I become
tweed which wears to a kind

of threadbare satin until I apply
one bourbon at bedtime and become

flannel again. Sometimes the rocks
glasses build up on the nightstand

because I am addicted to always
thinking about something else

besides what needs to be done.
And when I say I have named

our puppy Benzo, it is short for
Diazepine, because I know pills

can cover for me as if I were
a crazed canary in a cage and they

were the black curtain to calm me.
And I won’t pick the poppies

that grow overdoses because
I know the nausea that follows

such easy pleasure. I am addicted
to the way loneliness is being

surrounded by all manner of people
I want to kiss but can never

figure out how to talk to and to
the pings of social media where

I don't have to be clever on cue.
Mostly, though, I am addicted

to being in this body, to taking
care, and I know this will kill me,

but no faster or slower
than the average dying.

________________________________________________________________

Sonia Greenfield was born and raised in Peekskill, New York, and her book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer's Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in a variety of places, including in 2010 Best American Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Willow Springs. She lives with her husband and son in Hollywood where she edits the Rise Up Review and co-directs the Southern California Poetry Festival.

I Am More like My Father than I Ever Thought I Would Be

SWWIM Every Day
by Sherine Elise Gilmour

by Sherine Gilmour

I run the Black and Decker
over the car’s upholstery,
press into seams, shove the nozzle under seats.
Every other Saturday
when my father had custody,
I’d sit between shadows
on the lawn and watch
as he vacuumed, then took
each and every piece of carpeting out,
washed it with a hose and special soap.
Sometimes I’d lean inside the car,
admire his face, gleaming
pink with effort,
and ask if I could help
and would be given a rag and told to buff
the glove compartment, at which point,
he’d promptly move somewhere else,
the trunk or the hubcaps.
While I could never be angry
at the cars themselves,
too beautiful, too glorious,
I could be angry with him
and was for years
and still am.
A man who left me when I was eight,
packed up whatever car he had at the time, the Pontiac,
the junky Chrysler, or the apple red Ford,
and drove across state after state after state.
But here I am at the sink, using a little dish soap
to scrub pine needles
out from the ridges of the plastic floor protectors.
What can I say?
I like the new car smell. I like
when the upholstery looks brand-new.
It’s nice to pretend I get to keep something perfect.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sherine Elise Gilmour graduated with an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming from American Journal of Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Many Mountains Moving, River Styx, So To Speak, Tinderbox, and other publications.

Kee Kee Run

SWWIM Every Day
by Patricia Caspers

by Patricia Caspers

(Here I am where are you?)

for Kristen and Lee Anne

Into this silence
I want to howl
Mariah Carey lyrics,
inhale 80s sitcoms
with each deep pull
of clovesmoke,
sweat rum
into couch seams.

Instead, the canyon
beyond the TV screen
is sobering pink stormlight.

Turkeys wander
the garden,
their bronze feathers
shimmer rainbows
and fall to August-
yellowed grass.

Flocks roam the neighborhood
seed-scouring the earth,
unconcerned with the romance
of October twilight.

I wake to the turklets’
three-note whistle-and-yelp
in the starless night.

They scurry the fence line
in search of a path
long buried with foliage
of other autumns.

There’s no word
for the hunter’s practice
of calling a hen to his shotgun
with the cry of her lost poult.

There is no word
for what we are now.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Patricia Caspers is an award-winning poet, columnist and journalist. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Ploughshares, PANK, The Cortland Review, Sugar House Review, and Quiddity. She won the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for poetry, and her full-length poetry collection, In the Belly of the Albatross, was published by Glass Lyre Press.

I mother the sad thought

SWWIM Every Day
by Theresa Senato Edwards

by Theresa Senato Edwards

of what was,
draw circles counterclockwise /
worry the body is / weight
dessert / just ice.

And the dead shouldn’t
circle its breaking.

But I was born with superstitions
in the gift shop / of / personality

change / not my mistake.

And my body will never be still
in the memory of my parents’ home—

father building basement walls
teaches me, his last daughter, to paint
thin layers with each coat,

ration the paint as if my life depended
on each stroke of color saved

/ to position

a nail like a flagpole,
steady / straight,

fear of missing the small, silver target

unable / to not wanting to /
build away
an attic crawlspace: a safe gap

for a little girl before sorrow
metastasized.

_____________________________________________________________________


Theresa Senato Edwards has published two full-length poetry books, one, with painter Lori Schreiner, which won The Tacenda Literary Award for Best Book, and two chapbooks. Edwards was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, received creative writing residencies from Drop Forge & Tool and Craigardan, and is Poetry Editor of The American Poetry Journal (APJ). For more, see her website: https://theresasenatoedwards.wixsite.com/tsenatoedwards.

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.

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