Foundation

SWWIM Every Day
by Jessica Cuello

by Jessica Cuello



I turned five years old
forty years ago and sat
on the back steps waiting
for my father for a visit

Waiting for his last visit
my back to the house
on the gravel steps
where the railing rusted

loose in the cement rusted
off and the house was
condemned When the landlord
died the metal and gravel crumbled

back into earth crumbled
into dust except the basement
stayed behind still intact
Even in the ancient

world outlines of ancient
houses stay Tourists kneel
on the ground to touch the sites
Mostly they make a single visit

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Cuello is the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. New poems can be found or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, On the Seawall, Jet Fuel Review, Tinderbox, and Image. She is co-poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review.

Wild Ode to the Catfish Splashing in Alta Lake

SWWIM Every Day
by Emma Miao

by Emma Miao

He’s twirling three feet
ahead of the reporter’s yellowed boots,
searching for prey before migrating south.

Someone’s thrown rotten cheese into
the lake, leftover from pasta night, a fuzzy
cube half-buried under pebbles, visible

in the moonlit clear. The catfish eyes it, brushing
with its silver whiskers. A twitch later, it’s gone.
It has been a month since I could taste anything.

Catfish find aromas irresistible,
unlike me, eyes closed, struggling to remember
the taste of charred chicken. Catfish have a hundred

thousand taste buds within and around
their blue-black bodies, while I lay here, lemon
juice running down my chin, aching for a fizzle

on the tongue, to peel
back this numb, wet mouth,
the promise of zest dancing on the wind.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emma Miao is a Chinese-Canadian poet from Vancouver, BC. Her poems appear in Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Emerson Review, Rising Phoenix Review, and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among others. The winner of the F(r)iction Poetry Contest 2020 and a finalist for the Yemmasee Poetry Contest 2020, Emma is a Commended Foyle Young Poet 2019, a COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective Fellow, and an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio. Her spoken word + piano album, Oscillation, is forthcoming this winter. Tweet her @emmaamiao.

Confessions of a Pregnant Bride

SWWIM Every Day
by Geula Geurts

by Geula Geurts

I used to be the wind, not the veil fluttering in its path.
I used to be the veil, not the woman obscured, a white flag
waving over her face, surrendered. I swore I’d never marry

& here I am, pressed into a delicate dress, twelve weeks
of fetus simmering inside. I am hemmed
into a laugh, drunk under the scaffold of canopy, smile

bright with heartburn. Has anyone noticed?
I used to have one heart, not three trembling all at once.
The lilies in my bouquet are just another smell I can’t bear.

One more week & I could’ve let my mammal loose.
I used to suck in my tummy for fun. What is a façade
without the bones behind it, the bedrock upon which we stand?

I want to grab the microphone & say it: there was no will you
marry me? My love looked beyond my skeleton and said:
will you be the mother of my children? A proposal that ended

in unprotected hunger. The rest is a spectacle of wedding.
For family, friends. The ring is the umbilical cord, the placenta
is the vow. I count three flashes of jagged light

when I close my eyes. One for each of my animal hearts.
The happiest day of my life? I was so ravenous I could’ve eaten
the groom. I didn’t, and that is called sacrifice.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Geula Geurts is a Dutch-born poet and essayist living in Jerusalem. She is a graduate of the Shaindy Rudolph Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University. Her mini chapbook, Like Any Good Daughter, was published by Platypus Press. She was named a finalist in the 2018 Autumn House Chapbook Contest and a semifinalist in the 2020 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, The Penn Review, Blood Orange Review, New South, River Heron Review, Tinderbox Editions, and Counterclock, among others. She works as a literary agent at the Deborah Harris Agency.

To Sarah on the Shortest Day of the Year

SWWIM Every Day
by Elizabeth Vignali

by Elizabeth Vignali

Clouded sky, a huckleberry moon
hidden up there somewhere. It’s night

nearly all day. I think about you
and your pocketful of paper matches

gone damp in the rain. The convocation
of flares we left behind. My pocketful

of cigarette butts, my pocketful of ash.
How many hearts broken between us

and pasted back together with the sticky
remains of rum and chewing gum.

Once I thought your voice would save me.
I’m sorry for that. In the dark I walk

the labyrinth lined with pebbles
and seashells and smooth broken

bits of green bottles and remember
July’s light: campfire, a setting sun,

flashlight beams stravaging the trail,
waves shocked into bioluminescence,

each flame struck tender and vincible
and in a flash extinguished.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Vignali is the author of three chapbooks, the most recent of which is Endangered [Animal] (Floating Bridge Press 2019), and the forthcoming poetry collection, House of the Silverfish (Unsolicited Press 2021). Her work has appeared in Willow Springs, Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Tinderbox, The Literary Review, and others. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she works as an optician, produces the Bellingham Kitchen Session reading series, and serves as poetry editor of Sweet Tree Review.

Distances

SWWIM Every Day
by Esther Sadoff

by Esther Sadoff

Like windows between windows,
solid air encapsulates the space between us.
A faint shadow separates sight from occurrence.
My thoughts overflow into the distant
horizon like Rapunzel lingering in extremity,
weaving last-minute silk into ladders.
Her tears restored vision
to a prince who still felt far away,
as if touching a thing meant you could keep it,
as if the world were made of balconies
spilling onto other balconies,
as if all you had to do was let your hair
down and see who climbed back up.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Esther Sadoff currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she teaches English to gifted and talented middle school students. She has a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied literature as well as a Master of Education from The Ohio State University. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in The 2River View, The Bookends Review, River River, SWIMM Every Day, Marathon Literary Review, Sunspot Literary Journal, West Trade Review, and River Mouth Review.

Does Anyone Know Where to Begin?

SWWIM Every Day
by Chloe Firetto-Toomey

by Chloe Firetto-Toomey

Three sections inspired by eco-documentaries

Mum and I visit the Sistine Chapel and agree
it is one ornate question: cherubs with spears,

gold-threaded shadows, massacres in the tapestries.
People gather like crows or cells or clouds, taking pictures.

Michelangelo’s distant fingers
so high, the altar so small.

Recall Sagrada Familia, doves chiseled in the masonry.
Gaudi’s lungs of light, harnessing

every hue in stoned-carved hallows—
This is how man should capture everything.

Witness the body’s departure

:: shaped by wind, carved into the mouths of birds ::
:: a pyre flickers on still water ::
two modes of reckoning.

Snub-nosed monkeys
in robes, munching lichen.

A circus of parrots in the canopies.
Jellyfish, immortal, unless eaten.

Is death another word for home;
departure or arrival?

:: :: ::

Walking with the archeologist
along the old river line
scanning for clam-shell clusters,
conch spines, divots in the bedrock.

He stops to select an oblong object
from the dirt. Coprolite, he says,
fossilized human shit, and holds it up for me.
A dark and slender root which he places in a Ziploc.

We wander to the edge of Little River,
:: glimpse the water :: as you might glimpse ::
patches of sky from a New York alleyway.

Styrofoam icebergs dissipate to snow balls::
mint flotsam, peppered and oiled;

an abandoned washing machine
embedded in the riverbed.
All our empty packages
tripped up-wind,
to crowd
gutters,
to settle
here on surface
and seabed.


Then, movement: a paddle-tail
disturbs the rubbled water,

dislodges plastic bags and bottles—
two manatees surface, wastelands bob
against their large grey bodies.

It could be a clip from an eco-documentary, I say,

manatees return home as guests. [1]

:: :: ::



There's nothing wild. There's no wilderness. It's all home [2]

A freighter ship trundles through the arctic sea
dwarfing icebergs

black bow
arrowing the hazed water

:: a polar bear curled on the black rocks

hind legs tucked
to elbows
head bowed
on fore-paw

mourning the vibrancy of glaciers ::

Did a wild and invasive species take refuge in us
while we were sleeping?

Gannets nosedive
for the secrets sardines keep
while the world binges
on moon pies, medias, and
food-shaped candy,
heads turned away from the window.

90 percent of the goods we consume are brought to us by ship. [3]

[1] “24 Snow” directed by Mikhail Barynin (Environmental film festival)
[2] Ray Reitze in “Guided” directed by Bridget Besaw (Environmental film festival)
[3] "Freightened: The Real Price of Shipping " directed by Denis Delestrac


_____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Chloe Firetto-Toomey has an MFA degree from Florida International University. She taught nonfiction at Everglades Correctional Institution (pre-lockdown), and is an author assistant. She is a two-time finalist in Tupelo Quarterly's Prose Open Contest and a finalist in Diagram's chapbook contest. She won the 2017 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry and 2020 Scotti Merrill Award for poetry. Her chapbook of poems, Little Cauliflower, was published in 2019 by Dancing Girl Press.



My gone mother sees me in my grief overalls, says

SWWIM Every Day
by Preeti Vangani

by Preeti Vangani

Strip the cloak of clichés
you've buried yourself under,
there are better graves to ghost.
Look, the gray whales are dying,
socialism has been aborted
in an American womb,
and your father isn't your father
like he used to be—less stone, more salt.
If you must gin, give it lime
& spine, don't permit grief
to whitewash you
in the suburban gloom
I worked 24/7 to repaint.
Zipline on the rift of
my unspent anger. Our unused
skillet shines for you, kiss
its engraved initials, PV.
Could be me, could be you.
Record the seasons I couldn't:
isolation, Internet and TikTok.
I hear they have a dimension now
which can bring any wild animal
into your room through a screen.
Make me a tiger. Grow taller
than monsoon grass. I'll walk
through you and nobody will know.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Preeti Vangani is an Indian poet and personal essayist. Born and raised in Mumbai, she is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (RLFPA Editions), her first book of poems (selected as the winner of RL India Poetry Prize.) Her work has been published in BOAAT, Gulf Coast, and Threepenny Review, among other journals. She is the Poetry Editor for Glass Journal, a Poet Mentor at Youth Speaks, and holds an MFA (Writing) from University of San Francisco.

Borrowed Glamour

SWWIM Every Day
by Natalie Staples

by Natalie Staples

Allure leather, sequin blue tube top,
velvet whimsy 115 shoes,
I let my heart go where it wants:
the dizzy twirl of the rack
spinning, how we’d flip through blue
mining for the glint of power.

I miss the ease of climbing stairs to your door.
You aren’t here to tell me the right fit—
good gold heel with the violet clutch,
lipstick print nightgown, the red dress on sale
with a tire-like stain. What lasts after dust.
This is not our mad rush, J.Crew to H&M,
Forever 21’s slit dress, how I learned,
began to learn, about beauty, lace at my torso.

Sky blue with gold buttons, a pair
of steel bones, I find a bustier: what we’d wear
in our girls’ apartment. How we gathered:
love and a flat iron in your hand,
what is a face mask? Does this go?
Eyeshadow and glitter flickered on the carpet.
You brushed my face with quiet attention.
We make do with borrowed things,
holding their shine on our cheekbones.

The heart flies to delicacy like this.
Friends staring into a vanity mirror
or black velvet bows, those whimsy shoes,
how we fall in a dark twister:
this daze of color and cool texture:
where wind knocks thick glass,
windows rattle in their frames,
and a hard blast lifts the house,
clear off the foundation to its own wild design.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Natalie Staples grew up outside of Philadelphia. She received a B.A. from Kenyon College in 2014. After graduation, she served as an AmeriCorps member and Program Associate for The Schuler Scholar Program, a college access program in the Chicago area. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Oregon. She has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. This is her first published poem.

Don't Wash

SWWIM Every Day
by Alexis Rhone Fancher

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

“I’m returning in three days. Don’t wash.”
—From a love letter Napoleon sent to Josephine

I touch myself so I can savvy what you rut in. Bring my fingers to my mouth, imagine you in our bed, returned from the three-day fray, redolent of the weight of the world, and me, your dirty, dirty girl, naked, eager, as you make your way down, breathing in my hair, my lips, the sweet spot where neck meets collarbone. I’ve made a religion of your fantasies, a science of what you desire. That ferine moan, my always startled gasp at first thrust. I angle, cocked hips, a bit askew, arched for maximum penetration. Our bed is a rocket launch, a bacchanal, a pelican’s steep dive into the sea. For Michael, my first love, I used the freshening wipe before I arrived, so as not to offend. I spread myself wide on his bed, confident, watching the top of his head (black curls) as he explored me — that fear of not being Summer’s Eve™ fresh, worried my pussy might disenchant, the musk of me — all wiped away. He raised his head. Next time, Michael said, don’t wash.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, Plume, Cleaver, Diode, SWWIM, Poetry East, Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s authored five poetry collections, most recently, Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018), and The Dead Kid Poems (KYSO Flash Press, 2019). Her sixth collection, EROTIC: New & Selected, publishes in 2020 from New York Quarterly. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. See more at www.alexisrhonefancher.com.

The history of sea legs

SWWIM Every Day
by Michele Troutman

by Michele Troutman

Jim Crow. Jimmy Buffet. Jim Bean

crack

-corn

white waters

rafting

black and brown bodies

sink

mama never taught me how to swim

frivolous work

endeavor another day

Jimmy

paddles

in the deep end

laughing

-sans duress

laps round’ rope

me, I

keep on keeping on

questioning strokes

for bodies made to float


_____________________________________________________________________

Michele Troutman is a Maryland native living in Boston. She is a proud Black woman. She is also a lover of science, coffee, fundamental rights, and her stout cat “Brady.” This is her debut.

Sign

SWWIM Every Day
by Susana H. Case

by Susana H. Case


Remember Nim Chimpsky,
in his red knit sweater,
the chimpanzee that thought
he was human, learned to sign stone
when he wanted to smoke a joint?

Not made for complex language,
later he lived alone,
sad and immobile, inside a pen.
He asked for beer and oranges.

Give orange me give eat orange me eat
orange give me eat orange give me you.

You may be going blind,
my doctor’s words bite me:
yellow deposits of drusen in the eye,
and I rush to order the nutrients
he claims are my only hope,
capsules too big to swallow.

I shuffle between writing directives
for when I am dead, and wanting
to bonfire the papers.

If I were a pine, my rough barked arms
would stretch toward the sun.
I wouldn’t worry about eyes or words.
They’re selling pods now,
to grow death’s ashes into trees.

Give capsule me give swallow
capsule me swallow capsule give me
swallow capsule give me you.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susana H. Case is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train in 2020 from Broadstone Books, in which “Sign” appears as the final poem. Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press) won an IPPY Award in 2019. She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City. She can be reached at www.susanahcase.com

Sleeping Without My Sons

SWWIM Every Day
by Emma Wynn

By Emma Wynn

I brought the sheet from home
but not them—
the little one who pinches my breasts
with cold fingers and
pushes the blankets off us both
even as I pull them back,
all night long.
And the bigger boy, rolled
in his own blanket with his face
to the wall,
who kicks me in the darkness
with untrimmed toenails.
From their parted lips, the slow
sweet breath of corpses.

In this stranger’s thin bed
I keep waking,
arms hanging off to emptiness
on both sides, while
on the floor, the white stripes of dawn
brighten like steel
and lie heavy,
as if I could hold them
the light
in both hands.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emma Wynn received her M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School and teaches Philosophy & Religion and LGBTQ U.S. History at a boarding school in rural Connecticut. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Sky Island Journal (which nominated her poem for the Pushcart Prize), West Trade Review, peculiar magazine, apricity press, and The Raw Art Review.

On Academia (an abecedarian)

SWWIM Every Day

by Luna Dragon Mac-Williams

Abstractions don’t split
body from soul from
corner of 23rd and Washtenaw.

Distance is danger is
every conversation
fixated on a them.

Groundfolk can live
heralded by we and by
interpersonal, can
jettison the I.

Known by
living,
made for
needing,
owned by
people, their
question,
resistance,
song.

There is worth
under shadow, in
vein,
wisdom in
xenia.
You can never
zip up and leave.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Luna Dragon Mac-Williams is a poet, playwright, actor, dancer, handmade jeweler, zine editor, and arts educator at After School Matters, a non-profit in her hometown of Chicago. She is an undergraduate student at Wesleyan University and a narrator and writer for The Ice Colony podcast. She has recently been published in Ariel’s Dream, and her poetry appears in the 2020 KCBS Zine. Her one-act, Good Strong Coffee, premiered at Chicago Dramatists through Pegasus Theater in winter 2018. She is a firm believer in the power of coffee, community care, house parties, and helping youth honor and share their personal narratives. Find her on Instagram at @lalunadragon and @bylunawithlove.

In Old Delhi Heat

SWWIM Every Day
by Sonia Aggarwal

by Sonia Aggarwal

I sink into the couch.
You open the windows,
Letting the sheer curtains go
Dragging along the carpet.
We listen to them sway
From windowsill to chair,
Taking sips of peach tea
And leftover beer, watching
The room inhale
The afternoon
And release
It again. This
Is what they must have done
During the outages: sat
By open windows and doors,
Or on roofs, in courtyards,
Pulling stools and blankets
Beside grass, on cold stone
By the stairs, taking long
Gulps of water, sweet lassi
From steel cups, before
Sweeping an old cloth
Around the forehead
And behind the neck,
Wiping beads of sweat
Before they spill,
Sitting and sifting
Through a heap
Of red lentils, or cutting
Okra on aged silver,
Hearing the faint noise
Of rickshaws
And far-off voices
Until the dust of sun
Settled
Into smoke of night.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sonia Aggarwal is a Boston-based writer, currently pursuing her MFA at Emerson College. She is interested in cultural and personal histories, and the moments in which the two intersect.

Mississippi Nocturne

SWWIM Every Day
by Jessica Kinnison

by Jessica Kinnison

To steal watermelon
you must
be willing
to eat their hearts
and leave the rest.

To steal watermelon
you must
be ready
for scared snakes
in the dark grass.

To steal watermelon
you must
walk with
all that lives
in thickets, brambles, unworn paths.

To steal watermelon
you must
be in cahoots
with the unknown.
Have some kind of spirit about you.

To steal watermelon
you must
steer clear of any other vine.
The changes it puts you through.
You got to run, run all the time.

To steal watermelon
you must leave
your shoes off in the mud,
they remain there empty,
looking like you were snatched.

To steal watermelon
you have to dream
of having a taste for something,
have to test-run sugar water on your tongue.
You have to hope the scarecrow doesn't have a gun.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Jessica Kinnison's work has appeared in Phoebe, Entropy, Juked, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, her story "Star Party" placed second in the 2019 Tennessee Williams Festival Short Short Fiction Contest. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In April 2020, she was listed as the first of eight New Orleans poets to watch in Poets & Writers. She serves as Director of Programs at Project Lazarus, a housing facility for people living with HIV/ AIDS. A Mississippi native, she is co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop and host of the Dogfish Reading Series in New Orleans.

Back in the Tiki Days

SWWIM Every Day
by Catherine Keefe

by Catherine Keefe

A boy stands in the holding pen
of Disneyland's Tiki Room, tries

to tell Mother truth, but she
won't stop looking at her phone even

when he beats rhythm on her knee,
a banana leaf slapping sand MA-ma,

MA-ma. Everyone drove canoes
and ate pineapples. There was rain

and drums and I wish I lived back
then. I bend my knees to meet this child's

eyes. Oh, I remember the Tiki Days with all that
pineapple, rain and drums. Remember

the dancing? Like seaweed. Like dolphins.
My hand undulates the horizon in

floating waves anyone can see except
his mother who yanks his arm. I remember

the Tiki Days too and those were the good old
days before kids. The boy resumes softly slapping

his mother's bare knee, back of his hand, open
palm, swishing gently on her skin. In his rhythm, MA-

ma, MA-ma, MA-ma. He folds in
upon himself, a kapa cloth with perfect

plaited corners, lays himself down in the bottom
of a koa canoe, pushes off to sail by the stars

you may only see in the dark.

________________________________________________________________


Catherine Keefe is a California poet, essayist, and family story coach. She earned her MFA at Chapman University after spending years as a journalist. Her poetry has appeared in Split This Rock anthology compiled for the U.S. Congress and NRA to advocate for gun law change; TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics; The Gettysburg Review and many others. Find more at www.catherinekeefe.com

Duplex (With Crying Through The Walls)

SWWIM Every Day
by Kara Lewis

by Kara Lewis

I counted days, waiting for you to cry so that I could call you baby.
I tell you our love lives in my body, that it feels like being born.

Love lives too long in my body: stillborn, an irritant, like an onion,
acid against sclera. Still, my tears protect me, the way I yearn for strangers

to unpeel me. The praying woman turned from Mecca toward my strange, acid rainstorm
when I screamed on the phone, praying mascara clouds storm your whitest shirt.

I feel holiest in someone else’s shirt, holding a phone while it’s still ringing, or crying in public.
Tears hold the same holy hormone as breast milk. You say you can’t cry, but you stand publicly

shirtless. You say you can’t hold me when I’m like this: Hormonal, unholy, milking
you for some type of mourning. I shoved on a shirt and went to visit the elephants

because I read of their matriarchy and their weeping. Every mother knows a type of mourning like
sleeves through which she can’t reach, like a trunk that can’t close around trumpet or breath.

I reach for you like breath, a sleeveless dress, like everything I would let close to my body.
We counted the wallpaper elephants and waited for an elegy to name baby.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kara Lewis is a poet and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in Stirring, Sprung Formal, Pithead Chapel, Plainsongs, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the John Mark Eberhart Memorial Award for a collection of poetry, as well as a weekly contributor to the Read Poetry blog. Her work will be anthologized in the upcoming Aunt Flo project. You can follow her on Twitter @kararaywrites.

99 Lines for 2020

SWWIM Every Day

by Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade

A pair of spectacles washes up on the shore,
the lenses still intact. I pick them up and try
to see the world through salt-spackled glass.
When I was a girl, I wanted to be a fish
or even a mermaid, which seemed sexless, safe,
no legs to spread open, only a tail to slap.

These days I’m filled to the gills
with rage. So many things to protest,
my voice muted under my mask.
If only this were a persona poem
set in another time—how I would testify,
my writer-self knowing future outcomes,

relying on dramatic irony: In Century 21,
I stock up on Levi’s vintage denim.
I refuse contacts, wear Steinem-inspired
Aviators, make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Bellbottoms return, and The Bell Jar remains
on syllabi. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Sylvia

in the biopic, though I favor Great Expectations,
Paltrow’s Estella spurning her suitors.
Were my own expectations great in 1998?
Pre-9/11, 2008 recession. Pre-COVID-19,
10 years of stop-and-frisk. MAGA
hat as metaphor in Spike Lee’s new movie.

In 2020, hindsight is just a hashtag like
its former use, the pound key or number sign.
So much we should have seen coming, should have
met his crazy with our fury, should have
refused to dignify with answers later dubbed “fake news.”
Sociopath or psychopath? Narcissist or sadist?

Careful not to say his name, I simmer in euphemisms—
accepted norms, unprecedented times. How will we
un-mike the maniac, unflip the panic switch
that’s gripped our gut these past four years?
Long walks on the beach fail to assuage my fear
of the climate crisis. The only mask he wears

is his own face, bed-tanned and sand-blasted,
atop the red ire in his brow and cheeks.
When I try to change the channel, his voice
booms through imitators, late-night comics
whose parodies only enhance his power.
The white half-moons under his eyes

must be waning, though—I need to believe
America will wise up, rise up, that we’ll see
something new in the dawn’s early light
with 20-20 vision, this year’s namesake.
Christians speak of a Second Coming,
and novelists invoke deus ex machina.

I guess intervention always seemed a given.
Monuments toppling at last, the Supreme
Court swerving at the last second like a car
avoiding a cliff that hangs over the sea.
Is it wrong that I still long for a savior
with a bagful of miracles, multiplying fish?

Century 21 Christ is most likely vegan,
a savior to cows and chickens and pigs,
a slender brown man who rides his bike
wearing yellow Dollar Store sunglasses
and a God Made Dirt So Dirt Don’t Hurt
t-shirt. When a truck cuts him off,

he says “Bless you” as if the driver had
given him a hummus club sandwich.
Century 21 Christ works at Goodwill,
sports a “Radical Feminist” ball cap.
His blue apron pocket holds a small adze
to smooth any furniture’s rough edges.

If this were a persona poem, he’d tell
you how he loved carpentry, restoring
old wood and reclaiming discards
from families—drunks, homeless teens,
atheists and Bible-thumpers alike.
He’d turn water from Flint faucets

sweet as ambrosia, Confederate flags
into BLM banners, rifles and pepper spray
into bran muffins with coconut butter.
Who would be his Judas? Too many
to name: a supervisor at Goodwill who,
for $30, turned him over to ICE;

a kid from youth group who heard him
speaking Spanish, grew suspicious.
Another heard him singing a Farsi
party song “Qataghani” in dark shades.
And what about that time he gave directions
to Hollywood Beach, then asked for a lift?

Century 21 Christ ran the Rainbow 5K
and prefers to be known as “they.”
Non-binary, anti-racist, multi-lingual, pro-
choice. As the human face of a Trinity,
they are dismantling the Tower of Babel
in hopes that everyone will understand

simple messages of safety and compassion.
Frog & Toad is selling “Just Be Nice” tees,
an honest cotton compass always ready to wear
with a smiley face mask to protect others.
I use the soft shirt to wipe these spectacles
of empathy, hoping the person who lost them

has goggles instead, or perhaps can see underwater.
When I hook the temples over my ears, I can see
where the ocean bows to the sky as if in prayer.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade are the authors of The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, published by Noctuary Press in 2019. Their collaborative poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals, including Arts & Letters, The Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Common, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, The Louisville Review, Nimrod, No Tokens, PoemMemoirStory, Prairie Schooner, Quarter After Eight, So to Speak, Story Quarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly. Together they were awarded the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner for their co-written lyric essay, “13 Superstitions.” Duhamel and Wade both teach in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.

Visiting the Bodies Exhibit in Las Vegas

SWWIM Every Day
by Diamond Forde

by Diamond Forde

As a girl, I fingered the penises
in Momma’s copy of The Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies,

a habit, dragging my finger while I studied
blister and boil, admiring the penis’s profile

glossed in primary colors, or the uterus, a red yawn
widening, those doodles, my most detailed lesson

of the bellow below my belt, the grammarless
clamor of sex, of blood, of a mother

who I would one day see in this exhibit,
her belly a cabinet shelving the striations of her bell-

shaped uterus. In a month’s time, I will be slit
sinew from skin, doctors clefting the webbed

fat wickering my womb, then snip
my fibrous knots, I must admit then

it will be the only way my uterus is worthy
of exhibition, my muscular cauliflower

so unlike the drawings thumbed
on my childhood floor, my uterus lumped, bruised.

When the anesthetic quilts over me
I will dream, as I witnessed, what could be:

ovaries polished as jade stone, the glossy bauble
of my fundus, wonder clutched in a perfect wound.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Diamond Forde is a PhD candidate at Florida State University. Her debut book, Mother Body, is forthcoming with Saturnalia Books in Spring 2021. She is the recent recipient of the Furious Flower Prize and a Tin House and Callaloo fellow. Her work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Tinderbox Journal, and more.

Now Kiss the Word Lips on This Paper

SWWIM Every Day
by Elizabeth Hughey

by Elizabeth Hughey

I eat a piece of paper with the word honey written on it and give my son the word toast and he eats it whole. I cover the windows with the words white sky, red brick and 7 AM, though it still feels like night, so I write to the weak sunlight, let us feel worthy of your love. We do not feel worthy, bound in our clothes made of paper with clean written all over them. We go out into the streets with our post-its made of fire and stick them on everything. Nothing burns. I take a note to my son’s teacher that says help and she gives it right back with her red ink covering mine. Help. On my forehead, I write, What? I write on the school walls, I hate you words. You are not worthy of my love, anymore. And the words are quiet. So, I say them out loud. I yell all the words I can yell. Walnut! Suitcase! Pistol! Wastebasket! I keep spitting words trying to rid them from my mouth.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Hughey is the author two poetry collections: Sunday Houses the Sunday House (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Guest Host (National Poetry Review Press, 2012). She is a co-founder of the Desert Island Supply Co. (DISCO), a literary arts center in Birmingham, where she teaches poetry in the public schools. New poems have been published or are forthcoming in Open Letters Monthly, The Bennington Review, The Hunger, and Tinderbox.

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