Telephone Poles

SWWIM Every Day
by Cynthia Atkins

by Cynthia Atkins

Their arms, almost touching, but not. Made in a factory of hands and chains,
unholy plinths furnished and built to tender our long vowels. Taller than us,

and standing to quell the worry of having nothing to say, if only for the weather,
the shopkeeper’s favorite topic. Wired through the fields, where haystacks are yellow

as newly sharpened school pencils. Now waiting to channel our instruments,
our proxy of voices. Our chorus of gossip taking shape in the chatter of afternoon sun.

As if conductors in a symphony, because the music to our language holds
the long maps to the fossils, bone to bone, house to house. Even the birds are wearing

their darkened silhouettes, outlining the sky where long distances go
to be alone. Our glyphs hanging on the laundry line of clouds,

as if the divine was burrowed inside our need to speak—Greet the day,
kick up the volume, take umbrage, and really listen to someone’s

heart leaping into chords—words thrust first, between a string and a cup.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Cynthia Atkins is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press, March 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, The Cortland Review, Diode, North American Review, SWWIM Every Day, Tinderbox Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. See more at www.cynthiaatkins.com and @catkinspoet.

So many have crying rooms

SWWIM Every Day
by Lauren Camp

by Lauren Camp


but in my small home always someone splitting
the berries or murmuring to the console, someone
to open the door to the impulsive
earth; no chance

to furl in a hideaway space and beg
deities the hours to float, mind elsewhere.
For two years, the house has had no songs,
though once it held chords against walls we had painted.

Along the way, I’ve been lucky
in history and hymns. Young, I raced through
pencils, pitch and language.
Though I am often ravished

now by the repeat of an underside—moist, ugly, blowsy,
and want to low every periphery,
want to hostage each pause, I will bless
the windows, the loyal light. I can be weakened

by joy. Even the smallest glisten
and I want everyone in it. Every dare
and dried dream. Before sleep last night, I read
a few pages in a small book on physics.

Time and space are not absolute.
The chapter facts that everything is important
only against other things. The sun constructs our house. A match,
our dinner. Greens and meat.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Camp is the author of five books of poems, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Slice, DIAGRAM and other journals. Winner of the Dorset Prize, Lauren has also received fellowships from The Black Earth Institute and The Taft-Nicholson Center, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. See more at www.laurencamp.com.

Confluence, or every time I google a beautiful word to check for meaning, it comes up as the name of a tech company

SWWIM Every Day
by SK Grout

by SK Grout


In some US states, it’s easier to buy a tiger
than adopt a rescue dog. The morning has just begun

and already I am furious, then empty, then bereft.
One more item added to the resistance list.

I join the queue, salve emotion with an oat milk latte.
In the coffee shop, a middle-aged businesswoman conducts

conversations in A VERY LOUD VOICE. She wants the follow-up
followed up. She up-buttons her jealousies. I won’t be her mirror.

On either side of darkness hours, I work for a photocopier
company, and churn through meetings searching for the way

forward: sell the solution rather than the box. Without irony,
we create presentations, manuals and reports,

millions of words, how one inspires the company’s
income future, the other always faces the past.

Next year, this will exist only as a memory unique to me.
Fiction is one way to tell the truth. I place myself inside

the flow of commuter bodies and chase ephemeral things.
We give them different names: hearts, followers, clout,

happiness and cycle through Valencia, Juno and Lark.
We have searched for the real place ever since.

After I return with the groceries, the pink contrails
have disappeared from the sky. The light travelled so far,

I thought it would stay with me forever. Time like a rustle of silk,
spread taut but imperfect, inching from indigo to black.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

SK Grout grew up in Aotearoa/New Zealand, has lived in Germany, and now splits her time as best she can between London and Auckland. She is the author of the micro chapbook to be female is to be interrogated (the poetry annals, 2018). She holds a post-graduate degree in creative writing from City, University of London and is a Feedback Editor for Tinderbox Poetry. Her work also appears in Crannóg, Landfall, trampset, Banshee Lit, Parentheses Journal, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. See more at https://skgroutpoetry.wixsite.com/poetry.

Then Sex

SWWIM Every Day
by Andrea England

by Andrea England


Girls or boys, I was always told I had
to choose. Is it a wonder I have trouble
with violence, with the gray of urn-ashes

studded with bone, or that I was taught to slip
between these like a predator in the night, that
I learned to keep secrets and became the secret

keeper, that I was told it was a superpower,
my daughter a princess with a superhero
mask. Yet I hear the owl’s warning like I heard

howler monkeys for the first time and think,
how gentle any apocalypse. Do you prefer
the rose to the daisy, hammer to staple gun?

What about dogs to people, or do you like cats?
In the future, I will have to tell you about
Spring and Fall because they will be gone

like the glaciers. All the in-betweens erased,
just as we thought we were getting somewhere.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Andrea England is the author of Other Geographies (2017), Inventory of a Field (2014), and the co-editor of the recently released anthology, Scientists and Poets #Resist (2019). She has been published in The Potomac Review, The Boiler, Sonora Review, Passages North, and others. Having lived in Illinois, Arizona, Massachusetts, Oregon, and The Netherlands, she now resides, writes, mothers three teenage daughters, and teaches between Kalamazoo and Manistee, Michigan. To learn more, andreajengland.com.

Lord, Help Me Be Like The Knitters

SWWIM Every Day
by Amy Baskin

by Amy Baskin


There is as much of a chance that the world will end today as there
ever has been and god knows that Shiva's wheel of destruction is
spinning full bore right now.

But that doesn't stop the six ladies at the next table from holding
their two-hour knitting circle this morning at this cafe, rain or
shine.

All threats and possible endings and Armageddon aside, they actually
called in to book the largest table in the coffee house in advance.

This is the bravest act I am aware of today. They have their steady
gig, their weekly commitment to attendance.

This is how to give zero fucks. Readers sliding down the bridges of
each nose. The occasional smart-ass crack, the furious clack of
needles, the skeins of brightly dyed wool.

When one falls and rolls across the floor, another calmly leans
down to pick up.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Baskin's work is currently featured in Bear Review, River Heron Review, and is forthcoming in Pirene's Fountain. She is a 2019 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a 2019 Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, and a 2019 Oregon Poetry Association prize winner. When not writing, she matches international students at Lewis & Clark College with local resident volunteers to help them feel welcome and connected with the greater community.

Deconstruction: Learning Java

SWWIM Every Day
Jesica Davis

by Jesica Davis

I needed another language
to learn the difference
between
direct and indirect,
objects and constraints.

What is returned
must be explicitly defined
by arguments, referenced
(in parentheses), kept
in a separate file.

Each class, compartmentalized.
Every package separated
by a period.
You could say: time.
Comma, a breath.
At the end of which:
call a method.

New line.

To move around, to live
for a while without
being possessed
by many things
[first construct an array,
then purge, to run(away)].

Another iteration begins,
examine the parameters.
A string can be anything;
a boolean: one of two.

A narrowing of options,
sequence of events.
Each If has a Then,
and (if written well),
an Else.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jesica Davis is a poet and technical writer originally from Chicago, currently not really living anywhere. She’s the Associate Editor for Inverted Syntax literary journal. Her work has appeared in The Laurel Review, Zone 3, streetcake magazine, Stoneboat, Storm Cellar, and other places. Jesica was the final Alice Maxine Bowie Fellow at Lighthouse Writers Workshop (2016-2017) and won the Tarantula Prize for Poetry (Pilgrimage Press, 2018). See jesicacarsondavis.net.

Identifying Light

SWWIM Every Day
by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

by Jenny Sadre-Orafai


I miss being a small girl so I braid my hair.
I stop watching this country on a tear. I climb into
the crown of our tree like it’s a lighthouse. Driving
into neighborhoods at night, I wait for Christmas lights.
The energy it takes to make each bulb turn red or green, heat
flooding a circle. I like the blinking ones and hang onto
my breath when they go blank. I clap when they come back.
Coming back from a wreck feels like eating an orange like an apple.
An outline of my face on the airbag. Bruises sitting in my lap.
I can’t forgive people who drive by without slowing down
to see how hard I’ve tried to keep everything alive.
Everyone fed and bathed. Wading into a cave is one way
to get clean after you’ve been crushed against a wheel.
I’m breaking sandstone in my fire hands, smuggling in light.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the co-author of Book of Levitations and the author of Malak and Paper, Cotton, Leather. Recent poetry appears in Cream City Review, Ninth Letter, The Cortland Review, and Hotel Amerika. Recent prose appears in Fourteen Hills and The Collagist. She is co-founding editor of Josephine Quarterly, Professor of English at Kennesaw State University, and Executive Director of Georgia Writers Association.

Beatitudes of Sobrevivientes de Violencia Doméstica In ESOL Class

SWWIM Every Day
by Barbara Boches

by Barbara Boches

Blessed is the fluorescence for those
long taught not
to speak, now learning
that ___a does not have to
refrain. Blessed

is the pressed laminate, the long
tables lined with those
who once quailed before Cain, now learning
that i do not have to
lie silent. Blessed

is the linoleum, the cork
dust beneath those
who used to kneel to keening, now
learning the silence of e
at the end of refuge and escape.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————--

Barbara Boches’s poetry has been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Poet Lore, Solstice, upstreet, and other journals. Her work has also appeared in the Griffin Museum of Photography at Lafayette City Center. She lives in Brookline, MA and volunteers in a shelter for beautiful ladies.

Self-Portrait in Revision

SWWIM Every Day
by Susan Milchman

by Susan Milchman

i am under renovation. i am a work of restoration. i am rebuilding

after destruction. all my names for beauty have scurried off like crabs

to bury their soft bodies in the sand. i am the wound that waits patiently

for blood to arrive. knowing it has to travel far. deep from the watershed of every

storm-licked sky. but i am not patient. i scream at stop lights. in slow lines at the

grocery store. at the edge of gravesites while people engage in small talk. i am

a yellow crave slinking off into a dark corner. i hear quiet down now. i hear

settle down now. and a murder of scrub grass untangles in my throat. i seek simplicity.

yet swaddle myself in complication. in the passage of other bodies. in the simmering

tides of fluid and fur. i am a fog of moonlight spilling through the ribs of your cage.

a warm bath of crows. a flood of empty words. i am an offering. i am a rejection.

i am blood spill. i am a drop of honey. i am vacancy of body. i am animal in high heels.

a howl in the bathroom. a mad crush in the space between moments. a boneless

blank page. i am a pool of skin in your mouth. i am a long blue sigh of hunger

disguised as a reckoning.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susan Milchman's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal, Sweet Tree Review, Stirring, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, bramble & thorn (an anthology from Porkbelly Press, 2017), Rogue Agent, Rust+Moth, and elsewhere. She was a Best of the Net nominee in 2018 and is working on her first chapbook. Susan lives in Minneapolis by way of Washington, D.C. and holds a degree in Journalism from the University of Maryland. Her published work can be found at susanmilchman.com.

Acts of Contrition

SWWIM Every Day
by Gloria Heffernan

by Gloria Heffernan


I enter the sacred space
of belly, thighs, buttocks,
knowing the Baltimore Catechism
has not prepared me for this confession.

My transgression cannot be eradicated
with a new diet and fifty sit-ups
on the altar of weight loss
in the Cathedral of the Six-Pack Abs.

Self-loathing—
the sin that fuels the propulsion
of Oreos and French fries,
the falling on the swords
of all Three Musketeers,
snickering at the bloated face
in the mirror,
rejecting any joy
but the almond kind.
Daring you to go ahead…
just try to love me.

And so my penance is this—
to run my hands tenderly
over every bulge, crease, and scar
as I would touch the face of my beloved.

My prayer is to give thanks for these legs
that have carried me here,
even with their jiggling thighs and
dimpled knees,

to bless my arms
with their flabby undersides
that so easily embrace others
with the love I would deny myself,

to trace the road map
of stretch marks that etch my belly
and follow their path
to forgiveness.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Gloria Heffernan is the author of the poetry collection, What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). She has written two chapbooks: Hail to the Symptom (Moonstone Press) and Some of Our Parts, (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared in over fifty journals including Anchor, Chautauqua, Magma (UK), Stone Canoe, Columbia Review, and The Healing Muse. She teaches at Le Moyne College and the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center.

"Winter Fields," 1942 —Andrew Wyeth

SWWIM Every Day
by Suzanne Frischkorn

by Suzanne Frischkorn

To view Winter Fields is to feel your face
pressed to the ground, the grass

lace-like, the black crow,
the distant trees & structures on the horizon

focus to distort. & the chokecherries
glow, beacon clues brighter for a background

of blue-black feathers. The worm’s eye view.

Some say the crow is frozen,

rigor mortis set on dead landscape.
I swear it’s poisoned. Wyeth’s light

makes chokecherries

look at least half-ripe, even a clever
crow, a very hungry, clever crow would be duped.

The crow, at best, is resting, if crows rest in line
with horizon, his claws crossed.

I know this call of winter.

How the body longs to lie down.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Lit Windowpane (2008), Girl on a Bridge (2010), and five chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Diode, Ecotone, Indiana Review, North American Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook, Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Center, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

The Phone Is A Fine Invention

SWWIM Every Day
by E. Kristin Anderson

by E. Kristin Anderson

(after Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins)

If this isn’t chaos, it’ll do until chaos gets here.
—Brian Williams, The 11th Hour, October 16, 2019



It’s been almost twenty years since the first time I woke up knowing
the life I’d expected was a myth I’d transcribed on my ribs. Every year

spent wrapped in those telephone cords must have been a trick and
I’ve realized that I might be a relic, a fragile masterpiece to be collected,

to later collect her own dust. But because my heart still beats I’m always
waiting for a heart attack or an aneurysm and because I haven’t died

yet every time I turn on the TV I slip back into suspicion. I look for
the illusion, find another gun, swallow another wildfire. Now I collect

my intentions like seeds and bury them in the neighbors’ potted plants.
I’ll never be a thief but, yes, I might pretend. My best disguise is another

tube of black eyeliner. Another pair of secondhand boots. And every
morning I wake up sweating, wishing I knew how not to love. How to

pack up and leave—as if home is not something I’d have to cut away
with scissors. Today when I slice open another brown box from Amazon

it will be mostly filled with air. Tomorrow when I hold out my hand the men
who take it will give it a twist and as my bones snap they’ll ask for my vote.

One of these days I’ll run screaming from both the sacred and the profane.
Some hills are saintless. Still, I have to believe that this isn’t doomsday.

I look at the map again and realize I’ve walked right off the edge. I’m
a human being, even at arm’s length, even on my doorstep calling my cat

home. I’m all out of ghosts—do you know this sensation, knowing that no
phone call can keep you from locking the door on yourself? I’ve spent a whole

week telling friends to get a flu shot because anything else is too difficult
to say out loud. I’m trying to figure out when time became a trick, but

it turns out I’ve walked right off the calendar, too. Truth and not-truth spin
like the sweater you put in the dryer and, in the end, this is both nothing

and chaos, a crackle in the air. So when my phone rings I let it go to voicemail
and I let the messages pile up for days and days like leaves in a storm drain.

I am the ghost now. It’s the only way to survive a year without a single
slow news day. A year in which we cover all of our mirrors to stay alive.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Based in Austin, TX, E. Kristin Anderson is the author of nine chapbooks, including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, 17 seventeen XVII, We’re Doing Witchcraft, and Behind, All You’ve Got (forthcoming). Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time, she worked nights at The New Yorker.

Shiva

SWWIM Every Day
by Marcella Benton

by Marcella Benton

ceiling lights multiply my shadow to shiva
a bastardized anglicized version
my many arms stretch across the tiled floor and up the shower wall

snaking over the shapes in the fake marble pattern
sinking into the bleached grout

we’re living in a dead woman’s house

fifty years it was hers
our shower tile is laid directly over hers
if we pull it down the wall will likely crumble

from mold or mourning

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Marcella Benton lives in Lakeland, Florida with her husband and pets where she and her husband run their screen printing and embroidery business, Whatever Tees. Marcella's previous work can be seen in Black Fox Literary Magazine and Deep South Magazine.

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.

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