So Long

SWWIM Every Day
by Sunni Brown Wilkinson

by Sunni Brown Wilkinson


On the road that opens
to mountains and snow,
away from the houses cramped
in their quarters like too many socks
in a drawer, the eye of the eye
inside of me opens.

All the years of children
I loved and feared
would kill me.
Not their brightness
or the electric thrill of their skin
next to mine, not even the crying
that pried me from sleep
but the dormancy of a wild
inner life I loved and knew well.
To survive, it left me. I cared then

for other wild things. Now in silence
it’s returning. I turn a corner
to a doe and two fawns. I know you. I too
live like this. The body
and the spirit are a bicycle
you ride carefully
and uphill
and for how long?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Adirondack Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press 2019), and winner of New Ohio Review’s inaugural NORward Poetry Prize. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three young sons.

Birches

SWWIM Every Day
by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

by Sally Bliumis-Dunn


From their long white trunks
brighter than winter air,
their dark eyes watching,

motionless, without judgment
as I walk the rough stone driveway.
I know these eyes are wounds

healed over, or scars
from branches lost.
And I know the language

between us is untranslatable.
But for the entire three-mile hike
I sense their eyes behind me

holding me, as I might hold
an over-full glass of water,
meniscus trembling in the winter sky

measuring me as I grow smaller
by the mailbox, letter in my hand.
And though at a great distance

I can feel them taking in
the loops and dips in the black script
of the address and its return,

as I might observe
without distinction wreaths
of moss around their trunks

if I were focusing on something else
or everything at once.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry at Manhattanville College and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ “poem-a-day” series, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s third full-length collection, Echolocation, was published by Plume editions/MadHat Press in March 2018.

Abecedarian for My Neighbor, Whose Name I Still Don't Know

SWWIM Every Day
by Melissa Fite Johnson

by Melissa Fite Johnson


A garden born beyond my window. Not my
backyard, my neighbor’s. Before
coronavirus, before isolation, she and I
didn’t acknowledge each other.
Every night my dogs spilled
from my back door, and she sat outside with a
glass of wine listening to—something. I’d
hush to spy but could never tell.
I imagined long-distance love, her voice
joined with his. Maybe Rosetta Stone, too low to
know what language. No wave, no hello.

Little pots line the wooden deck,
matching sprigs of green. A tarp covers
nothing, for now. She tells me, You’re the
only person I’ve seen in days.

Planting’s like praying, both
quests for communion. We
receive stale wafers on our
shining tongues, gather
tomatoes fallen off the vine too soon. I’m an
unbeliever who only pulls weeds, puts
voids in the ground instead of life. But
witness this small miracle: she was
X in her yard, I was
Y in mine. We’re still rooted in these
zones, but now our voices soar over the fence.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Melissa Fite Johnson is a high school English teacher who lives with her husband and dogs in Lawrence, KS. She is the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Sidereal, Stirring, Whale Road Review, Broadsided Press, and elsewhere. See more at melissafitejohnson.com.

Mollusk

SWWIM Every Day
by Kyle Potvin

by Kyle Potvin


Pink mucket, wartyback, catspaw.
We are all endangered:

Your mother, mine, a young traveler
who never makes it home.

Just check your phone,
filter feeder of grief.

Ming, a bivalve mollusk,
lived 500 years.

I weep
for his longevity.

This earth is ringed
tight as a mussel.

Forgive me: I have been thinking
of death nearly since birth.

I am soft-bellied.
Take me first.

Don’t leave me burrowed.
Gasping for air.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water (Finishing Line Press, 2012), won the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, The New York Times, and others. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Loosen, is coming from Hobblebush Books in September 2020. Kyle lives in Southern New Hampshire.

I Am Tired of Being a Wife

SWWIM Every Day
by Geraldine Connolly

by Geraldine Connolly


—after Neruda


I walk into the kitchen stores empty of desire
for Dutch ovens, silicon mats, tart pans.
In the grocery stores and farm markets
I am cold and still as an iceberg.

Recipes bore me. Bathtub rings disgust me.
The smell of bakeries brings me to tears.
I want no more dust rags or oven cleaners,
no more spray starch or furniture polish.

I want to swim in the cool lake of indifference.
That’s why the days unroll like heavy carpets
covered in dust and dog hair, bearing
discarded seeds and crumbs,
the lost nickels and pennies.

I only want to slip
like a grain of sand into the ocean.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________


Geraldine Connolly is a native of western Pennsylvania and the author of four poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press) and Hand of the Wind (Iris Press), Aileron (Terrapin Books). She is the recipient of two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships in poetry, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has had residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Chautauqua Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework and The Sonoran Desert:A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is http: www.geraldineconnolly.com

The Bright Part

SWWIM Every Day
by Paige Sullivan

by Paige Sullivan

In the dark with my eye doctor,
amongst tools and contraptions
to measure

how much light comes in, where it
wrongly refracts, misaligns
with the retina, she warns

Here comes the bright part, a white-gold
glare filling my vision, an ache—flame,
warmth, sun through

my wide-open windows, so brilliant
that book spines are sapped
of their hues—Keep

those eyes wide open, she murmurs.
Splotches of leaf-filtered afternoon
litter my dashboard

on the drive home, past the Victorian houses
and women in athleisure
briskly pushing strollers—

thinking of my friend and her dog
put down that morning, its toys
now immobile on the rug—

the precious and the perilous lit up,
irrefutable, and how does one
get better at staring

straight on at that blinding
all-of-it, not screw their eyes shut,
to lose it unbearable?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Paige Sullivan is a poet and writer living in Atlanta. A graduate of the creative writing program at Georgia State University, her work has appeared or will soon appear in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, RHINO Poetry, and other journals.

On Our First Walk in Three Weeks

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Franklin

by Jennifer Franklin

Fear fills my neighbors’ sunken eyes—
their mouths obscured by make-shift
masks. All week, contractors in hazmat

suits dig temporary mass graves
on Hart Island, where the first victims
of AIDS and abandoned disabled

children were stacked when nobody
wanted to think about how easy it is
to hide illness and imperfection.

The daffodils look old-fashioned
this spring, like ruffles on dresses
my mother forced me to wear

in grade school. My sick daughter
walks beside me, not knowing
the world is wounded. I prompt

her hands back to her pockets again
and again so she won’t touch anything
even in the park. For seventeen years,

her disease has kept us inside
our apartment more days than we
ventured out into the city. I used to think

of Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day.”
This is worse. The sun shines
but we cannot go outside to feel it.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Franklin (AB Brown University, MFA Columbia University School of the Arts) is the author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books 2018) and Looming (Elixir 2015). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, JAMA, Love’s Executive Order, The Nation, Paris Review, Plume, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Prairie Schooner. She currently teaches poetry in Manhattanville’s MFA program. She is co-editor of Slapering Hol Press and teaches manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she runs the reading series and serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City.

My Mother Said No When I Asked for Black Fishnets

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Zimmerman

By Lisa Zimmerman

By then she was pretty much always drunk by the time I got home from school and the mall was too far by bike but Woolworth’s was close so my best friend Dina Peters and I rode our three-speeds to the Circle K first and bought a pack of Kool Menthols and smoked one out front getting lightheaded as workmen descended from their huffing pickups and eyed us before stepping inside the sealed cool interior. It was hot for April and we both wore tube tops and cut-off shorts, neither one of us had much of a bosom though my long blond hair always got a wayward glance and I’m not sure now if I bought black fishnets that day or just borrowed Dina’s, probably a hand-me-down from her older sister who had real cleavage and a boyfriend with a wolf tattoo who drove a beat-up red Camaro and never looked twice at Dina or me.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry and short stories have appeared in Redbook, The Sun, Florida Review, Poet Lore, Chiron Review, Trampset, Amethyst Review, SWWIM Every Day, and other journals. Her first poetry collection won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Other collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). Her poems have been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize. Lisa is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Planned Parenthood, 2002

SWWIM Every Day
by Erin Cisney

by Erin Cisney


sterile, cold, and stirruped
opposite side of the protest line

in my knee socks, black eyeliner cool.
this is a minor inconvenience,

waiting for a green light, a refill.
the doctor tells me to lie back and relax.

there’s a poster of Barcelona
on the ceiling. I think I’d like to see Italy

some day before the world ends.
I think I’d feel less complicated

in a country where I don’t understand
the language. just be young,

pretty and confused, that’s all they’ll ask of you.
isn’t this easy? yes, this is soooo easy.

lie down and be a good girl,
take your pills at the same time every day.

I think the doctor hates me, the way
her callous fingers dig in, rough,

while I grip the metal table, grit my teeth,
think of Barcelona, Atlantis, deep space.

I am anywhere else. I am nowhere.
inconsequential, could never be

more than a supporting role
in another's tragedy. with her back turned,

she tells me I won’t be leaving here
with my paper bag of pills, I’ve become

the worst part of her day at the office.
she suggests I go south, cross state lines

where a problem like mine can be solved
(and she doesn’t mean Barcelona).

I’m as hollow as an x-ray, could see
right through me. I’m a split lip, bled dry.

I have a pink paper folded in my back pocket
when I leave, it’s got an address in Maryland,

it’s got a doomsday countdown. a signholder
says this is no place for a kid like you.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Erin Cisney is a poet from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in such places as Dust Poetry Magazine, rust & moth, and Spry Lit Journal, among others. Her poetry collection, Anatomy Museum, is available from Unsolicited Press.

Blood Orange

SWWIM Every Day
by Megan J. Arlett

by Megan J. Arlett



Marion says the juice is bloody because fruit are always girls.
This seems untrue, but... okay, whatever.
We three walk from school along the beach, shoeless and giggling.

Lorena forgot her keys. Lorena often forgets her keys,
sits outside her gated house, scratches the dog’s nose through a gap
in the fence. Braced teeth, matching skirts swinging,

we wedge ourselves between the garden wall and a palm tree,
shimmy up, over, and cast ourselves adrift
into the pool.

Blue and green tartan blooming around our waists,
white shirts clinging like vines to budding fruit.
Summer is opening like the thick tongues of calla lilies

which means this is the end of something.
We float in chlorine sky. The white dog yips at passersby
through the brick because that’s what bitches do.

We hold hands and form the center of our own universe.
Our dark hair interlaces. None of us are rubia, none of us catch
that laced word thrown from car windows.

At school, Don Carlos and Miss Carmen titter between classes,
insist they are the best of friends, only. We float, heads together— celestial.
Marion’s tennis teacher trains her serve insistently,

until her mother buys her a better fitting sports bra.
The sun touches what it can. Home from work, Lorena’s father
puts glasses of orange juice

on the patio table, fights the rising blood in his cheeks,
goes inside without a word. We drink the redness. We float,
squint back at the sky’s globe.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Megan J. Arlett was born in the UK, grew up in Spain, and now lives in Texas where she is pursuing her PhD. She is an editor at the Plath Poetry Project. The recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2019, Best New British and Irish Poets, The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, and Third Coast.

there’s no 2nd generation 101

SWWIM Every Day
by Adelina Rose Gowans

by Adelina Rose Gowans

still, my voice keeps catching on the past
tenses of spanish verbs. like my ancestors
are playing dudo in my amygdala. like my
heritage is a stack of torn up party napkins.

only yesterday, i learned how to speak—
scraped my mouth full of peppery papaya
seeds, chewed, swallowed, retched up
full sentences of poetry and black

saliva. today, i ask my mother if i will
ever see honduras; she pulls US travel
advisories out of the long basketball
scar across her knee—the advisories turn

into birds cawing outside my windowsill
at midnight. i ask my mother if i will
ever see costa rica; she severs her own
deltoid and pulls from it grandmother’s

jaundiced right eye, says she fears death
will soon be our history’s home. america
has mistaken itself for a benzodiazepine,
turns me sleepy when i mention diaspora,

runs the richter scale over my unsacred
body—uncovers moments where my
disintegration become synonymous with
comfort, with my inevitable lightness.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Adelina Rose Gowans is a 16-year-old, second-generation Costa Rican/Honduran-American writer and artist with a passion for floral dresses and big skies. She is a junior at the South Carolina Governor's School For the Arts and Humanities, a 2020 YoungArts Winner in Writing, the first place winner in the Leyla Beban Young Writers Foundation 1,000 words for 1,000$ contest, the second place winner of the Hollins University Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest, Art Director at Faces of Feminism Media, and the recipient of eleven Scholastic Art & Writing awards including national gold and silver medals. Her work has been previously published or is forthcoming in Atlas and Alice, Storyscape Journal, Bluefire Journal, Barely South Review, Cargoes, and elsewhere. See more at https://www.adelinarose.me/.

My Mother Asks Me to Write Her a Poem About the Sky for Mother’s Day

SWWIM Every Day
by Christine Jones

by Christine Jones


She wants to brag to her new assisted-living friend. She, who loves me big as the sky, who tells me look up when I’m in need of a prayer. She can’t know I’m lost and starless in Delhi. There's a cow at every turn, & in a hut in a hand in the film I watch at the national museum. A girl knocks on the car window. Could I learn to carry bricks on my head? A bushel of hay? Crossing off each day until we leave, I eat sugar crystals & fennel seeds, swim laps in a collegiate pool built for no team—chlorine, my tedious reprieve. I believe the world is smaller than it is. I’m not better than the beggar. My mother can’t hear this city chanting its mix of hymns, me reeling at the fringe. I’m grazing the blessed blue meadow of home in my mind, Mom, picking an iris for you.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Christine Jones is author of the full-length poetry book, Girl Without a Shirt (Finishing Line Press, 2020). She’s also founder/editor-in-chief of Poems2go, a public poetry project, and an associate editor of Lily Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and online, including 32 poems, Sugar House Review, Blue Mountain Review, Ruminate, Mom Egg Review, cagibi, Literary Mama, and Salamander, as well as broadcasted on WOMR’s Poet’s Corner, and WCAI”s Poetry Sunday.

Creature

SWWIM Every Day
by Michelle Bonczek Evory

by Michelle Bonczek Evory

~Aizpute, Latvia

Outside the Jewish Cemetery, it stopped
center road, hunched over
its rib thin legs longer than a wolfhound’s,
as if to take a shit.
It sniffed us on the air, loped,
slipped through a wide split
in a garden’s wooden fence.

We saw it.

Like I once saw in New York State
a cougar bounding across a green field
where one's not been sighted
since 1890. We saw it like I saw
my great grandmother at my bedside
after she died, her warm hand

reaching toward my shoulder.
A book launches itself
from a shelf and traverses an entire room.
A table candle’s flame licks the ceiling
on command. This is no wolf. No
dog. Not a ghost. It stepped into the road
from the pages of a book
where wolves stand on hind legs and speak.

I was not alone when I saw it. I was not
alone when the book crossed the room mid-air.
When the cougar disappeared into the trees.
I am not alone now.
The lights of these creatures
and everything that has been
blink around you
as if in the dark, as if in the light
you could see them any better.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Michelle Bonczek Evory is the author of The Ghosts of Lost Animals (Gunpowder P), three poetry chapbooks, and the Open SUNY Textbook Naming the Unnamable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations. Her poetry is featured in the Best New Poets and has been published in more than 100 journals and magazines, including Crazyhorse, cream city review, Green Mountains Review, Orion Magazine, The Progressive, and Wasifiri: International Contemporary Writing. She mentors poets at The Poet’s Billow (thepoetsbillow.com).

Tautology at the Edge of the Sea

SWWIM Every Day
by Aumaine Rose Gruich

by Aumaine Rose Gruich

San Francisco, California

Cardboard boxes of bok choy / stacked high behind the restaurant
where bus exhaust and smoke compete with fog / soak in rain and release
insistent tendrils that soon will mold / That emerald hue comes up hours later
in dizzy crouch against grafittied bathroom walls / sticky hands on porcelain
and the bite of lime / This youth of mine a ruckus / of carried aways—
Yet somewhere atop the city / the Sutro Baths clatter their colors and woo
O to be imaged anew / I’d shed this snakeskin shift dress / don instead the otherdust
of seaside / tide back what’s been carried away / but which of its tones to choose—

moss, sage, or that light-
struck unmentionable grey
best described as bone

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Aumaine Rose Gruich is the Assistant Managing Editor of Ninth Letter. She has received support from the Chautauqua Writer’s Workshop and the Illinois Department of Dance’s Choreographic Platform. Her poems have been finalists in Ruminate Magazine’s Janet B. McCabe and Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer poetry contests. Other work is published or forthcoming in magazines such as AGNI, Pleiades, Court Green, Phoebe, and Hobart.

Vacationing with the Dead

SWWIM Every Day
by Suzanne Edison

by Suzanne Edison


Maybe it is the shriveled spiders,
looking like compost flakes on the rug that tell me,

these beasts were fornicating and feasting
more than I. Maybe it is the scraping sound

of sow-bug shells, sucked up and spinning
in the vacuum I employ that reminds me

of the ladybug carapaces, dozens
scattered on my dining table, that greeted me

years ago. Then, my mother had been dead

less than a day and I was not there to feed her
ice chips, soothe rattle and wheeze, or shroud

the carcass of her last breath. My memory opens
like a slash of flesh—I am the same age now

as she was then.

Fogging my reflection

in the picture window I watch evening
hug the swelling redbud limbs

as bats drain the air of insects.
But I am not here to grieve.

I want to know about the living
to come. How to navigate by clouds.

How the tree grows around a nail
pounded into it.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Suzanne Edison’s recent chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Poetry can be found in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Naugatuck River Review, Scoundrel Time, Mom Egg Review, Persimmon Tree, JAMA, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. She is a 2019 Hedgebrook alum and teaches at Richard Hugo House in Seattle.

Flare Up

SWWIM Every Day
by Alexa Doran

by Alexa Doran

I have not thought about death the way you have.
I have a disease that makes me vomit till I die.

Harnessed to the hospital bed, I try to tell my son
why I can’t be touched, why so many wires obstruct

what he has come to know as love.
Still. This, I think, is better than Tennessee.

Better than the Night Deposit gloom
I used to swoon to, better than the boy

who sighed I’m bored as I bared
my body, better than the drill of downtown

Clarksville on nights I put reefer aside to feel
the chill of moonshine. For once, I don’t

want to learn anything. I try to find a crescent
of skin he can cling to, slit the paper smock,

pretend I’m a robot, say that’s why the lights
blink blue. Last week, a pond gathered January

at its lips and we bent over it. The world was
many and we were two. Tonight, you count

the needle-stabbed scabs in my hand but
I can’t hear the numbers just the pond lap

the heady swirl of earth losing itself
in an hourless violet splash.

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

Alexa Doran is the author of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019). She is currently a PhD candidate at Florida State University. Her series of poems about the women of Dada, “The Octopus Breath on Her Neck,” was recently released as part of Oxidant/Engine’s BoxSet Series Vol 2. Her work also appears or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, Mud Season Review, Salamander, Pithead Chapel, and New Delta Review, among others. For more, see https://aed16e.wixsite.com/alexadoranpoet.

I Meet My Child’s Birth Mother

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Manthey

by Jennifer Manthey


She says, This is what I want, and the embassy
coughs us out like questions. There is traffic
and the sound of bells.

I can see her death waiting in deep pools
of collarbone. Her smile is a hook
in my skin or a kind of marriage.

I leave her, return to my blank room
where the moon comes out like faith—cool
and distant and changing its shape.

I escape her like a mine
I fear will collapse. My hope
is dusted off and still.

Yes, this is what I want, she says, and her words
float in air like ash
or a song.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Manthey's poems have been published in places such as Best New Poets 2019, Calyx Journal, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Palette, and Tinderbox Poetry Review. She lives in Minneapolis and teaches occasional writing classes at The Loft Literary Center.

At an intersection between fortune and misfortune

SWWIM Every Day
by Jane Ellen Glasser

by Jane Ellen Glasser

when traffic idles
for a red light,
a hand holds up
a cardboard flap
scribbled with child’s print.

When the light turns green,
behind locked doors,
blind eyes
go by, go by.

Those who read
out of work, a family to feed,
sit on their wallets
and stern judgments.

Now and again
a window rolls down.
Now and again
a hand extends to a hand.

Does it matter
what hunger
a handout will feed
to offer relief?

Tell me, who isn’t hurting?
Who isn’t escaping
from something?
Who isn’t a beggar
for a better life?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jane Ellen Glasser’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Hudson Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Georgia Review. In the past, she reviewed poetry books for the Virginian-Pilot, edited poetry for the Ghent Quarterly and Lady Jane’s Miscellany, and co-founded the nonprofit arts organization and journal New Virginia Review. A first collection of poetry, Naming the Darkness, with an introduction by W. D. Snodgrass, was issued by Road Publishers in 1991. She won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry 2005 for Light Persists, and The Long Life won the Poetica Publishing Company Chapbook Contest in 2011. The Red Coat (2013), Cracks (2015), In the Shadow of Paradise (2017), and Selected Poems (2019) are available from FutureCycle Press. For more, see www.janeellenglasser.com.

My Partner Tells Me He Considers His Guns Every Time He Votes

SWWIM Every Day
by Lynne Schmidt

by Lynne Schmidt


When I come home from DC
a fire erupts in the deepest caverns of me that this time
won’t die out.
I tell him, Politics will be the reason we break up,and he says, Maybe.
Over the next few days
I drink enough beer to clean my insides out,
to numb what the nation is doing to its daughters
its victims, its survivors.

When we first started dating, my partner told me
he voted in such a way to keep his guns safe
while my nieces’ bodies are on the political floor
before they’ve even had time to bleed.

I want to tear his eyes out with my fingernails
I want to scream into his throat
and have it come out as justice.

When I started a new job,
the lead teacher pulled me to the side, placed
a green binder in my hands and whispered
When you get the chance, read this.

The manual offered suggestions for what to do
in a live shooting situation.
The manual told me to abandon the children in front of me
and whatever happens
Get out at all costs.
We’re taught not to play dead anymore,
we are taught to run silently so they can’t hear,
swallow the panic like water,
and if that doesn’t work offer our bodies in gun powder sacrifice
in the hopes that our exchange offers
a few minutes to save someone else.

I want my partner to understand
that a gun is an inanimate object
and that I
am right in front of him
breathing fire.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lynne Schmidt is a mental health professional and an award-winning poet and memoir author who also writes young adult fiction. She is the author of the chapbooks Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press) and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West). Her work has received the Maine Nonfiction Award and Editor's Choice Award, and was a 2018 and 2019 PNWA finalist for memoir and poetry respectively. Lynne is a five-time 2019 Best of the Net Nominee and an honorable mention for the Charles Bukowski Poetry Award. In 2012, she started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers the company of her three dogs and one cat to humans.

Penelope Complaining to Her Mother

SWWIM Every Day
by Paula Persoleo

by Paula Persoleo

He’s nothing but trouble, always has been.
You’d think a man might change after
all he’s been through. But no, came and left
—his favorite method—like twenty years
was twenty days. All that excitement over
an olive tree bedpost, then the wanderlust
replaced his other lust. And I’m supposed
to lock myself up, like I hadn’t tried that before.

Who am I supposed to be, the perfect queen
or the perfect wife? The mistress of the house
or the mistress of the town? He told me
about the other women—goddesses, sorceresses,
he couldn’t help himself, it’s all their fault—
but I have to sit here and wait. Let no man enter.
Too dangerous for me, a woman, even one
craftier than her loudmouthed husband
(who can’t help but give himself away
every time) while I outwit the nitwits eating
all the food in the house—like they owned the place.

Maybe he’ll stay gone this time. I’d like
to think in peace for once: maybe meditate
or make a hot yoga room, practice haiku,
unlearn weaving. Build a new bed for myself.

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Paula Persoleo is a 2011 graduate of Stony Brook’s MFA program in Southampton, NY. Her recent work has been accepted by Philadelphia Stories, Mantis, and Tulane Review. In 2018, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Beltway Poetry Quarterly. She lives and works in Delaware.

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