The Earth

SWWIM Every Day
by Mary Meriam

by Mary Meriam

I grabbed my witch’s broom too late to sweep the earth
under the rug. The watchers came to creep the earth.

How could I hide my eyes, and which way turn my feet,
without them watching, hand in grave, to reap the earth?

I put my spell on frothing crowds to pacify
the very rocking waves that ride and leap the earth.

In open sky, I leave the clouds, the jets, the stars,
the everlasting icy wind and weep the earth.

To battlements, I cry. Or just begin to cry.
Where is my girl’s green jacket? She will keep the earth.

Return my trees. Bring back the rocks and rooks, my treasures,
and all streams, swift or slow, the fields, the sheep, the earth.

When my true army carries wounded home, I’ll soothe
and heal the crippled seas, the silver deep, the earth.


_______________________________________________________________

Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, and Subtropics.

byob, or yearning (in wintertime)

SWWIM Every Day
by Ashley Cline

by Ashley Cline



bring your own body. call it back from the
forest, call it up from the sea floor & watch

how the garden blooms her shipwreck tongue:
lilacs & oceans & isn’t it funny how everything

tastes of riptides this spring, you’ll say. & the
caramel spades you’ll make of my tongue, &

the salted currents you’ll lay along the flower
bed—listen how the garden sighs with her antler

fuzz & trapper fur trimmings left somewhere
among ankles & winter & isn’t it lovely how

a hungry mouth cares for such reckless lips?
you’ll say. & the tides you’ll prune; the

shark-toothed carrots you’ll pull from their
tender-earthed home & place, gently, belly

up, in the basket perched on your feral hip.
she’ll wait for you, there, i’ll say. this body

made of bouquets & drownings & the moon’s
magnetism. & oh, how you’ll undo my

cheeks along your palm—& watch
how easily the jaw sings of god.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

An avid introvert and full-time carbon-based life-form, Ashley Cline crash-landed in south Jersey 28 years ago and still calls that strange land home. Most often found listening to Carly Rae Jepsen, her essays on music and feelings have been published by Sound Bites Media, while her poetry has appeared in 404 Ink, Third Point Press, and Francis House.

This Kill Bill Scene Has Me Thinking About Weave and Girl-Fights

SWWIM Every Day
by Taylor Byas

by Taylor Byas

The camera lingers for a moment on the black
flame of O-Ren Ishii’s hair in the snow, just sheared
by the bride’s Hatori Hanzo, and I think
about what it means to draw hair in a fight. To hitch

a braid or a track from another woman’s scalp.
What would our grandmothers say if they knew
we’d forsaken the old proverbs—where is my Vaseline?
or Bitch, hold my earrings. These days, victory depends on:

· Grip-strength, how well we crook our nails
beneath the cornrows, how much we loosen
the black thread holding the extensions

· The strength of the first tug

· Drag-distance

· The size of the hole the asphalt eats
into the other girl’s jeans.

Somebody yells out Worldstar, starts recording,
and the crowd’s collective flash is hot as stage lights.
Someone’s nose is knuckled to spit and blood.
A lip bellies around a cut. A black girl’s bruises

grey under white light. And when they’re pulled
apart, pieces of themselves left behind
on the other’s shirt like O-Ren’s slit of blood
in winter’s fresh down, the judges must decide

on a loser. The phones record a tracking shot
to the clump of hair or braids on the pavement,
zoom in. The cameras linger on the weave yanked
from owner and updo, and the crowd’s uproar

is something like exit music. But we know
this is no samurai’s death. No one lives this down.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Taylor Byas is a 23-year-old Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received both a Bachelor's Degree with Honors in English and a Masters in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is now a first-year PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.

On Captain Marvel Being Told That She Should Smile More

SWWIM Every Day
by Kate Polak

by Kate Polak

My grin isn’t what you think it is: joy
finds no quarter in the creaking teeth edged
between my lips. My smile is weltering
rage: it’s a stage of grief. It isn’t laugh,

delight, or any recognition that
would please. It’s what my face does when told
it offends, what I gird myself with
and against: it’s armor more than interior.

Am I not my face? If not, what can I say:
my mouth an unfilled space, hollow but for what?
The hope a glance will grant me deference,
the flesh of men. Not our twitching jaw at all, no:

It’s the gracious smile, an unthreatening skin
that you demand I clothe my disappointment in.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kate Polak is a professor and writer. Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Plainsongs, So to Speak, In Parentheses, Barzakh, and elsewhere. She lives in Yellow Springs with her husband and five familiars, and has painted her house to resemble a jack-o’-lantern.

Burial Ground

SWWIM Every Day
by Laurie Kolp

by Laurie Kolp


Bark mulch armors me brave.
When I separate its matter, I am defenseless
in the mounds I have made around me.

I become my mother: mattressed in living
room, all puffed up and naked, months like
meddlesome weeds.

Breaths are muffled grunts
because still air is too humid, hands
the only things movable in this
present moment. I rush

to disentomb mismanaged mess
until I reach moisture. There, the ashen soil
provides comfort I can admire.

Soon, I will cover the ground back up
with mulch knowing Mother
would want it that way.

_________________________________________________________________


Laurie Kolp’s poems have appeared in Stirring, Whale Road Review, Pith, and more. Her poetry books include the full-length Upon the Blue Couch and chapbook Hello, It's Your Mother. An avid runner and lover of nature, Laurie lives in Texas with her husband, three children, and two dogs.

When My Husband Tells Me He Wants a Divorce

SWWIM Every Day
by Cyndie Randall

by Cyndie Randall

I am eating a waffle
He follows the wood grain on the table with his
trigger finger I wonder if I should
direct my questions there When

animals are hungry they hunt and
moan When they are hurting they cower and
moan When any need arises they moan never

deceiving themselves on the road between
gut and throat We just looked at a house
yesterday I say Laughed
with our friends in this room
Next we plead the regrettables: Is there someone else This will
make your mother happy What about our daughter I don’t
want you
Don’t want you
I type husband said he wants a divorce into the search bar
The results instruct me not to beg to look and be the best wife no

sweatpants or lying in bed I find it difficult to fold our laundry
with a bomb strapped to my chest remote in his hand
tracing tracing the deep-seated grain

Conversations like these don’t end they die
hungry I go outside to scream My moaning hits our home
and echoes back to me Do I cut the red wire or the blue

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Cyndie Randall's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Love’s Executive Order, Whale Road Review, Boston Accent Lit, Okay Donkey, Yes Poetry, and elsewhere. She works as a therapist and plays among the Great Lakes.

Errata

SWWIM Every Day
by Susan Aizenberg

by Susan Aizenberg

What I took to be a slim wire
lost on the pavement
turned out to be a tiny snake
that whipped itself around
the panicked toe of my kindergarten
saddle shoe. What I believed
the smoke from a swallowed cigarette,
burning in a young bully’s belly,
turned out to be only the mist
of his breath rising on the chilly air
of a foreign cold snap one rare
North Miami morning. It turned out
to be a stone outside our window,
not a dead deer curled
beneath the oak, and that cry
through the bedroom wall
was not a hungry baby, but only
our neighbor’s cat left too long alone.
That bite from some nasty bug
off the Smith Corona floor blackening
the skin beneath my jeans turned
out to be a third-shift splash
of the sulfuric acid it was my job
to dip the metal parts in,
and that closet I discovered,
jerry-rigged from textbooks,
around my son’s third-grade desk,
a small prison his teacher’d built
to wall him off when he couldn’t stop
talking out of turn. It wasn’t a starburst
we saw that summer evening as we left
the theater, just a woman’s sun-struck
hair. At first we’d thought it was snow
falling on the camps and trains
in the famous movie, those ashes
I learned were the words a friend
would speak one day, explaining to me
the transgressions of the Jews.
And what I thought the face of love
forever turned out to be heat
shimmering like water on a distant
blacktop, tar rising and then cracking
like my own lustful, fickle heart.

—after Stern

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susan Aizenberg is the author most recently of Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015) and editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia UP 2001). Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in blackbird, Summerset Review, NAR, Bosque, and elsewhere. Her new chapbook, First Light, is forthcoming from Gibraltar Editions in 2020 in a limited, letterpress edition. She lives and writes in Iowa City and teaches in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Jardin des Plantes, 1980

SWWIM Every Day
by Theresa Burns

by Theresa Burns

Sometimes I wanted to crawl into a cave myself
when I watched the unfortunate baboons
palming their mangos at the zoo across the street,
then trying for hours to lick the stick off themselves.
I felt sorry for them as I felt sorry for the birds
in their high windowless cells—what good all that
red iridescence, all that sky-pitched soar?—
but not as sorry as I felt for myself that spring.
Nineteen and alone, no dancing in boîtes along
la Huchette, no fine-boned boys walking me
back to my room where I kept a knife
and a hotplate and a penlight so I could open
the right door when I visited the bathroom late,
my hand along the wall when the timed light
timed out, the hallway that held the most amazing
smells, crêpe and sleeping animal, pissoir and coffee.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Theresa Burns’ poetry, reviews, and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, America Magazine, New Ohio Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the author of the chapbook Two Train Town (Finishing Line Press, 2017). The curator of Watershed Literary Events in New Jersey, she teaches writing in and around New York.

Working the Porn Circuit

SWWIM Every Day
by Deborah Bacharach

by Deborah Bacharach

—a duplex after Jericho Brown

Girls get one thousand a day. The extras,
like him, get a hamburger with fries.

He’s like a juicy hamburger with fries
without the courage to ask for a dance.

Without the courage to ask for a dance,
The Wall Street Journal says men don’t marry.

The old Journal runs the pro/cons of marry
for men against just getting the sex for free.

Men against just giving sex for free
ask for the basic beat they’re supposed to know.

Ask for the basic beat you’re supposed to know.
Even Questlove, with his music certainty,

knows in the quest for certainty, love,
he’s no Prince, but he can delve down deep.

He’s no prince, but he can delve whale ear bone-deep,
give day girls his one thousand extra selves.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). She recently received a Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention and has been published in journals such as Adroit, Poetry Ireland Review, Vallum, Cimarron Review, and Poet Lore among many others. She is an editor, teacher, and tutor in Seattle. Find out more at DeborahBacharach.com.

Inset

SWWIM Every Day
by Laurinda Lind

by Laurinda Lind

Stuck between panes and walls,
here is a prophet poet in a church

so packed I can’t reach what
he says from inside myself

in the rain, though I stay, steal
charity under a strange umbrella.

Geese have been going all fall,
full of themselves up the sky.

Within, white coals seem to hiss
along the floor, heating someone

else’s heart. Even wet, the light
from the real world also is religion

so I suck it in like air till it
saves me under my skin.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laurinda Lind, a former journalist, lives in New York’s North Country and teaches English composition classes. Some poetry publications/acceptances have been in Anima, Antithesis, Artemis, Blue Fifth Review, Bombay Gin, Chautauqua, Compose, Comstock Review, The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Gone Lawn, Gyroscope, Jet Fuel Review, Josephine Quarterly, Kestrel, Main Street Rag, Mobius, Moonsick, New Rivers Press, Off the Coast, Passager, Paterson Literary Review, The Poeming Pigeon, Soliloquies, Sonic Boom, Triggerfish, Two Thirds North, and Unbroken.

By the Time We Reached Quilcene

SWWIM Every Day
by Emma Murray

by Emma Murray

“Well she was an American girl / Raised on promises /
She couldn't help thinkin' that there / Was a little more to life / Somewhere else”

— Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “American Girl”

Sisters and I left our fingernails in the Badlands,
our teeth along a Wyoming roadside,
and our skin in Big Sky Country—
a syzygy of bodily offerings for the road gods.

We summited the Idaho Panhandle
and fortified our naked spines
with pieces of the Rockies.

Dad’s calls were red pushpins
metastasizing in our wake,
asking us to heed his advice—
Buy a bat.

By the time we reached Quilcene
we covered our bodies in succulence
the Olympic Peninsula offered us.

We pitched our tent on a bed
of fern and moss while the boombox
played Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’
“American Girl”

and reimagined the promises
we were raised on, the destinies
preordained by fathers.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emma Murray holds an MFA from Oklahoma State University and received an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2016. Her works have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Territory, Pilgrimage, The RS 500, and The Collapsar. She currently lives in Iowa and teaches at Iowa State University.

The Ghosts of Missing Animals

SWWIM Every Day
by Katie Manning

by Katie Manning

The sign behind the lighthouse
says sea otters used to live
in the kelp forest below until
accidental over-hunting made
them disappear. Now the sea
urchins run wild without
the otters to keep them at bay.
This majestic view—cliff, wave,
and sky—would be all the more
magical with a few otters at play,
slick bellies glinting at the sun.
I can almost see their ghosts
shining in the surf. I can almost
see your ghosts, too, reading
this sign with me and exclaiming
over everything: the otters, the water,
the lighthouse, our boys. I could
place another sign here—
The Ghosts of Missing Parents—
to explain how you also used to
come to this place, how you
would be here now if not for one
accident, a terrible moment.
How my grief runs wild
when I stand without you
and stare across the bay.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Katie Manning is the founding editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of Tasty Other, which won the 2016 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and her fifth chapbook, 28,065 Nights, is forthcoming from River Glass Books. Her poems have appeared in Glass, The Lascaux Review, Stirring, THRUSH, Verse Daily, and many other venues. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.

Mammal Twenty

SWWIM Every Day
by Ana Maria Caballero

by Ana Maria Caballero

time
and small children
time
to think too much of
it
the child plays
you
squat and ruminate
time
disbursed as mother
apart
from yourself the child
wants
park with you only
you
you travel to park here
child
scrambles you ponder only
me
me but also them only
them
the other mothers who
smile
or do not it does not
matter
now now the minor
face
gapes down the major
slide
does not ask to be
caught
does not beckon
you
climb but you must
watch
for the slide to matter
is
the child right another
query
dashed at the
park

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ana Maria Caballero was born in Miami in 1981 but grew up in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s a student of poetry at FIU, where she was runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Prize. In 2014 her collection Entre domingo y domingo won Colombia's José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize. Finishing Line Press published Mid- life, her first chapbook, in 2016. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Tupelo Quarterly, Sundog Lit, and CutBank.

Devotion

SWWIM Every Day
by Suzanne Swanson

by Suzanne Swanson

when it blunders into the boardwalk, the second-
rate jellyfish, we are not sorry for it, watch amused

as it bumps and bumps the piling, finally getting
the angle right for escape, a vagrant pulsing against

the tide, blurring toward the atlantic, purples subdued
to brown under gathering grey. the cormorants

don’t notice or boredom sets in: they have seen it
a hundred times, know no reward comes from a morsel

of rubbery flesh. somewhere in this salt marsh, tide
runneling dark water, is a salt marsh sparrow, easily

confused with the Nelson’s or the seaside, look close
for the less buffy chest, the strong markings—white

stripes down the back. seeing means letting
the day turn away time, splitting with patience

the spartina from the sparrow, adjusting the eyes
to capture the rustle that turns to one, two, three

possible specimens, lifting off towards another swale
backs to us as if offering binoculars the perfect

perspective for accurate ID. our fantasy. we know
they don’t care, their devotion only to each other, to

the insects and spiders of these muddy flats, to the tiny
spineless marine creatures, the merging of inlet with sea,

how each pulls and pushes the other every single day,
a borderless survival never stopping, not stopping ever.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Suzanne Swanson is the author of House of Music and the chapbook What Other Worlds: Postpartum Poems. She is a winner of the Loft Mentor Series; she helped to found Laurel Poetry Collective. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and in the Land Stewardship Letter. She rows on the Mississippi River and is happiest near big water.

Meteor Shower

SWWIM Every Day
by Dawn Leas

by Dawn Leas

Tempel-Tuttle takes her time orbiting the sun.
Slow, but fierce. Leaves her signature
and when Earth crosses her path—
an orchestrated show of light.

Just before dawn,
you lie on the concrete sidewalk
five hours behind the East Coast,
a symphony of birds
singing the morning awake.

You snap pictures of Jupiter, Venus and Mars,
the distance between immeasurable with just the eye.

Then Leonid's radiant falls through the constellation Leo
and the shower changes everything.

I ask when you'll be home.
You answer, right quick.

Just after midnight,
I lie down on a cold driveway,
dead leaves scratching its surface.
Above me, pines and red oaks tip-toe
their way to the northern sky.

My Scorpio lives by the moon.
Has a hard time forgetting.
Your Aries lives close to the edge of Mars.
We will forgive each other for this every day.

The comet lumbers along.
The meteor shower comforts.
Mother Earth spins.

Right quick takes on new meaning
in space. Thirty-three years to orbit
just once? We are experts at waiting.


_________________________________________________________________

Dawn Leas is the author of Take Something When You Go, (Winter Goose Publishing 2016), and I Know When to Keep Quiet, (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, San Pedro River Review, The Pedestal Magazine, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Her work won an honorable mention in the 2005 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She's a writer, editor, and writing coach. For more information, please visit www.thehammockwriter.com.

Singing at the funeral of a thirty-one-year-old stranger

SWWIM Every Day
by Libby Maxey

by Libby Maxey


slow with the communion Alleluia
like I've forgotten even at the grave
we make our song

we bending to the pews
feel the organ quiver in the wood
the wrinkled grain impressing us with age

they remember how the boy walked the fence rail
as his mother watched unbreathing, how he
leaped down running, wild to reassure

how he, insistent, called himself a crowd for all adventures
making good every swift, unearthly choice
like going into water in the dark

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Libby Maxey is a senior editor with Literary Mama. She has reviewed poetry for The Mom Egg Review and Solstice, and her own poems have appeared in Crannóg, Emrys, Pinyon, Pirene’s Fountain, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Kairos, won the 2018 Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her nonliterary activities include singing classical repertoire and mothering two sons.

Spritz

SWWIM Every Day
by Elizabeth A.I. Powell

by Elizabeth A.I. Powell

Be like a flower that gives its fragrance even to the hand that crushed it
Ali ibn Abi Talib

Was what my mother called sweating. We spritz, we don’t sweat.

What about skank? So exotic. Rules for nice girls— Don’t wear nylon

drawers. The smell of white cotton panties, fresh

from the line is best. Go for nuance of honey and cumin. Don’t be catcalled—

catfish. Arousal is a communication the body makes. As a child the smell

of mud and cinnamon soothed my sunburns. Now at night when

tendril musks bloom patchouli, my body does the lindy.

Whatever signal my respiration plus heartbeat plus endocrine

chemicals publicize, I attract strange bedfellows. Even the bees

pollinating roses and jasmine for endnotes know

the olfactory signatures of their own group. We communicate

through scent, we don’t walk blindly toward the plank of love.

Trigger identification, primordial emotion: Big brother knows

how to market that in synthetic pheromone molecules.

Once, I tried smell dating: Wore a T-shirt three days and nights,

then took it off, sent it to Smell Dating Central,

where they cut the shirt in pieces, mailed out to prospective suitors

for them to smell, identify which appealed, see if my choice matched theirs,

voila, ode to our limbic system cha cha cha over a martini or espresso

in a darling bistro where pheromone baits trap gypsy moths.

History shows my ovulation triggered spermatozoa wars.

In the mornings washing with Cashmere Bouquet,

I make it new like a car. In my kimono and red lipstick

I read the papers in bed. But at 9:51 a.m. I go back to the idea:

Perfume is the feeling of flowers, a prayer burning

like brandy down the gullet. Poor flowers,

how shall they avoid their feelings? I read Glück’s “The Wild Iris,”

study their voices. I keep scents I never wear

like “Love’s Baby Fresh” circa 1976. It’s like keeping a specimen

of a lie in a bottle. Forcing yourself to love a perfume

is like forcing yourself to love someone you don’t.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including Atomizer (LSU Press, 2020). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, was named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker, and was a Small Press Bestseller. Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Ploughshares, Plume, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University.

The Tyranny of the Blank Page

SWWIM Every Day
by Adina Kopinsky

by Adina Kopinsky

The revolution will not
be televised—chronicled
instead in college notebooks,
composition, spiral, leather
bound. Give me your eager,
your broken words
yearning to scale free—breathe
an ellipsis, break a dash,
lie down in a grave
of your own first drafts,
climb on top of cars
to cry               for cease,
for fire, for the UN
to haul the click-clack of
red pens away, wash yourself
in a bath of ink, lay your body
on an A4 paper and spread
snow-angels,               peel words
out of your skin, slough yourself
into the irregular lines of your mind
music, drink    the wine
of your subconscious and sleep with
its multiverse, its nonsense, its huddled life:              listen
to Walt Whitman tell you all the world’s
a poetry slam; he’s chanting through
a megaphone on the rooftop,
an audience of letters is breaking the fourth wall,
streaming through the theater, thrown
at the actor’s feet howling
for a chance to shine, to skip, to halt,
to stream         like light until the end of the line.
Dream songs, inscape, break out
of Amherst in your white dress
sprout wings from your scapula
cry for revolution—    
put down your spades, your keyboards,
your codes and locks, leave your cubicles,
your lawnmowers and yoga mats,
park your trucks
on the side of the road            because
the time has come—hand in hand—my friends,
the tyranny loosens and in each
child’s hand a notebook is open
to the first blank page
and the sky sings hope—
the epic of tomorrow is written,
word by word,
in your hand today.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Adina Kopinsky is an emerging poet living in Israel with her husband and three sons. She has work published or forthcoming in Rust + Moth, SWWIM Every Day, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among other publications.

On “Journey to Go” by Kay Sage

SWWIM Every Day
by Nadia Wolnisty

by Nadia Wolnisty

When I knew you, everything I owned was chapped.
A wooden fence around my yard,
white with brown beneath.
Do you know that ache?
The dust covers of my books went peely.
My face did it too—
nose a terrible melon, mouth like Pompeii.

Not the crumbling but the moment before.
Like stepping on the lip of a canyon.
My insides went fluidic. If you
were to open my stomach, an ocean
would fall out. A deep-fried human
with something undercooked between skins.

But I am making the journey to smooth.
I no longer know your name.
Look how I become unfeathered.
My torso is runner's knee before the gun.
I am tooth; I will bite air.

When I knew you, I shook, unable to paint,
or smile, or stand. A polyphony of poor taste.
I thought it was nerves, but it was just
my skeleton starting to hatch.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Nadia Wolnisty is the founder and editor-in-chief for ThimbleLitMag.com. Her work has appeared in Spry, Philosophical Idiot, Apogee, Anti-Heroin Chic, Blue Pepper Review, McNeese Review, Paper & Ink, and others. She has chapbooks from Cringe-Worthy Poetry Collective, Dancing Girl Press, Punk Provincial (forthcoming) and a full-length from Spartan.

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