by Sarah Stockton
*This poem was a Finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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by Dion O'Reilly
From the baselines in Big Sister’s
bedroom, from the longhairs
necking with her
in the backseat of the Lincoln,
or stuck together
like dolphins in the deep end,
I knew something of sex,
but I suffered
a nervy pulse I couldn’t decipher.
Wires crossed and fizzed.
Their crux flickered
a teensy bulb, center front
of my hairless cleft.
Crowning bitty head
in a wimply fold.
Tight whorl that needed
soothing. Clenchy itch,
which pressed me to straddle
the edge of my third-grade chair.
glide side to side
on a hidden pin.
Mommy’s lip curled
with what looked like desire.
She pronounced me Dirty. Swarming.
Big Sister and her boyfriends
snickered and scorned.
Still, as I sipped my tea in bone
china with bloody roses,
as I looked at the naked
ceiling pulse, I pushed
my center fire.
Poked and poked to keep it quiet.
When I lay down, it grew louder.
*This poem was a Finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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Dion O’Reilly's first book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her poetry has been nominated for several Pushcarts and been shortlisted for a variety of prizes. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts and events, and she teaches ongoing workshops on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains--now on Zoom.
by Rita Maria Martinez
These hands ache from composing.
These hands are imperfect and arthritic.
These hands are dipped in hot paraffin wax.
These hands soak in pools of ice water.
Right now they seek warmth in the pockets
of my jeans. Sandwiched between
someone else’s hands they seek shelter.
They explore. They dive into fleecy banks of hair.
They have a masochistic desire to return
to Sister Joyce’s sixth-grade English class
jotting what seemed like worthless vocab,
ink spilling from a Bic like bird droppings.
These hands want to inscribe the name
of my first love across the sole of my shoes,
to pry his mouth open and graffiti his tongue.
These are praying hands. These are worshipping hands.
They skim the smooth surface of rosary beads before bed.
These are working hands. These are writing hands.
They enjoy the luxury of a thick pen with cushy padding
where thumb, index and middle finger rest.
These hands produce squiggles burdened by meaning,
as there’s meaning in each small hand that stopped growing
after middle school, each ring finger measuring
a meager 4.5, same size as Abuela Gloria’s withered
hands inside the coffin at Rivero Funeral Home
where a thoughtless mortician wrapped a plastic rosary
around her dead digits instead of the family approved one
from Spain that smelled of roses. I almost screamed
when Mami tried to swap rosaries and untangle the stubborn
string of cheap beads that clung to Abuela’s wrinkled hands
the way the wrinkled roots of the orchid adhered
to the bark of her avocado tree, like a needy lover.
The first poem I wrote was about Gloria’s bulging
nose and wild gray hair giving the impression
she was a witch as she drew in her white notepad,
fruit trees branching from her hands as words branch
from mine, hatch from a discomforting feeling
akin to butterflies, which prompts me to stare at my hands,
fumbling hands that can’t catch a football or open
wine bottles, struggling hands, forgetful hands that lose
car keys, misplace eye glasses somewhere in the house,
beneath the bed perhaps, and it’s just a question of time
before I find them, before I spot the elusive snakeskin
silver clutch, the riddle of sentences revolving in my head,
parts of speech kickboxing past clutter and dust,
words discovered in an old letter I found rummaging
for postage stamps in my father’s desk: I want to pass
the G.E.D. to make my twelve-year-old daughter proud.
Papi wanted to become an agronomist, but repaired
typewriters and vacuums at Sears for thirty-five years.
Washing dishes was his first Miami job. I’ve contemplated
how soap suds felt between his fingers on forsaken stacks
of china as the moon bathed the restaurant with its fractured light.
He now owns a pool maintenance business.
While typing I smell the chlorine on my father’s hands,
disinfectant on mother’s as she clutches a paper towel
to clean the kitchen counter and anything else
because her cleaning, like my writing, is compulsive,
because she dusts to extract sense from a senseless world,
because she is sixty and set in her ways,
though I’d like to see her kneeling in the garden,
dirt trapped beneath fingernails where it belongs,
soil smudged across those hands that pinched
my side and ears, parted and braided hair,
tied shoelaces and held my own,
hands that stroked her swollen belly
before I was born.
*This poem was a semi-finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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Rita Maria Martinez loves all things Jane Eyre. Her poetry collection—The Jane and Bertha in Me (Kelsay Books)—is inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s fiery governess and infamous madwoman. The poet's work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears in publications like the Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry Blog. Her poetry also appears in the textbook Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction/Literary Nonfiction Poetry and Drama; in the anthology Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish; and in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, and Healing. Martinez’s recent poetry raises awareness about the challenges and triumphs inherent in navigating life with chronic daily headaches and migraines. Martinez lives in Florida and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from FIU. Visit Rita's website at comeonhome.org/ritamartinez, follow her on Twitter @cubanbronteite, or on Instragram @rita.maria.martinez.poet
by Kyle Potvin
Brave the tundra, where species cling to life.
Brave infusions that chemical a vein.
Brave a city blackout with its window-shatter,
and lightning igniting a forest away.
Brave scoldings and finger-pointing.
Voices louder than yours.
Brave your sad past, your afraid past.
All that is to come.
Brave the horizon of gray.
Brave the whimper of years.
Brave these trees, first maple, then oak,
losing their familiars, one by one.
Breathe again and again.
Brave again.
*This poem was a semi-finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water, won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Whale Road Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, The New York Times, and others. Her poetry collection, Loosen, is coming from Hobblebush Books in January 2021. Kyle lives in southern New Hampshire.
by Michelle Bitting
Oh Unadilla, Nebraska, I think of you,
old homestead to the women
in my family, your cows and cornfields
and bank foreclosures, your broken
banisters and cellars lined with jars
of slippery fruit suspended in the dark,
of great grandma left with all those children
to feed, cleaning latrines on trains
full of businessmen and cons. Thank
God for prohibition and the stove-savvy
females we turned out to be, the cooking
and scrubbing whores, sucking it up
like kitchen sinks, slick as coffee cans
full of grease. If anyone could make
the moon shine in a tub it was us. Who else
was going to feed them? Babies in their hand-
me-down dungarees, crooked teeth
and braids with siblings left to fill in
for who went missing, left to spoon
meal onto hungry tots’ tongues, landing
the grainy lumps like lopsided planes
in abandoned fields, mouths that swallowed,
stayed stuck. Then the runtiest ordered
to sit on porcelain plinths with timers
and firm instructions not to budge until buzzers
signaled a turd gone swimming. All this
so mama could make fire somewhere else
out of what she yanked from the earth, mashing
it to burnt liquid. What's deemed wicked.
What people will pay for when they’re dying for it.
*This poem was a semi-finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, won the 2018 Fischer Poetry Prize, Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, and a fourth collection of poetry, Broken Kingdom won the 2018 Catamaran Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. She has poems published in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, The Los Angeles Review, Vinyl Poetry, The Paris-American, SWWIM, Love's Executive Order, The Raleigh Review, Green Mountains Review, Plume, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. Recently, she was a finalist in both the 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. Michelle holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Mythological Studies. She is a Lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at Ashford U. www.michellebitting.com
by Hilary King
The day my 10-year-old daughter started taking Prozac,
I go full baggallini. Cry-walk into my local gift shop,
stationery in the back, greeting cards up front,
in between bath salts, travel alarms, fuzzy socks.
This was my mother’s store. Not mine. Not
yet. Please not yet the need for socks both fuzzy
and slip-proof. Couldn’t I still trust where I tread
in the world? Until my daughter needed a pill
to push through her clouds, I kept my dreams loose,
tossed into whatever I carried with me every day.
I was ambitious and Christ my shoulder hurt, carrying
a bag full of notebooks,books, pens, lipstick,
another notebook, another book.
If an hour or an idea appeared, I was ready.
Now, therapists and teacher conferences later,
I wanted a separate pocket each for
grief, for anger, for courage.
What I needed to be ready for now
had to be packed precisely and worn throughout the body,
right across the heart.
*TBT contest winner! This poem won First Place in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.
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Hilary King won SWIMM’s 2019 Kate Spade “Purses for Poetry” Contest, although she claims not to be a purse person. Her poems have appeared in Minerva Rising, Fourth River, Belletrist, PANK, Blue Fifth Review, Cortland Review and other publications. She is the author of the book of poems The Maid’s Car. Originally from Virginia, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.
by Millie Tullis
Once you said I was cold
enough to freeze the cock
off of Satan. I’ve imagined
my body the way you saw it
in that moment— marble
tough. Exhaling a mean
winter wind. The devil
is a man broken
down to a hunk of ice. Thick
and dead in my hand. I like
to think I was happiest
in a real house. Argentina
lasted long enough for chickens
eggs milk the goat—a little stove.
Here you’ll call me
liar. I did like
the running when we were
running. My small heart
a pot crying to boil over.
And for a while I liked what came
after the running. That wet
loosening of bodies. But
didn’t I love Cholila?
Wasn’t I happy that time?
You were the one who wanted
surprise. The surprise of your skin
in my sleep. I woke my dress yanked
to my belly. You already
half inside wanting
the breath half out of me
and still the shock of your weight
in my dreams. Do you remember
winning the puppy at
the St. Louis World’s Fair?
Of course we couldn’t
take him on the boat
—the thing started to shit
and cry on day two—
but I remember your face
moving towards me. Darling
half throttled quiet
behind your back. Your
massive hands
like red dirt.
Something about
the way you loved
me. My pretty talent
for silently taking
in your
gifts.
*This poem was a semi-finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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Millie Tullis is an MFA poetry candidate at George Mason University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, Juked, and elsewhere. She serves as the Assistant Editor for Best of the Net and Poetry Editor and Social Media Manager for Phoebe. She also reads for Poetry Daily. You can find her on twitter @millie_tullis.
It's Winter Break!
We’re taking a two-week publishing hiatus to visit with our families, eat too many cookies, wrap and unwrap things, read piles of books we’ve been meaning to get to— and, since we’re in Miami, go to the beach.
Although we’ll be on break, submissions will remain open. Our response time may be a bit delayed, but rest assured we cannot wait to read your work!
Thank you for reading, writing, and supporting SWWIM! We love our community of writers: we love sharing your work, promoting your work, and shouting from the virtual rooftops to amplify your voices.
Wishing you all lots of peace, love, and poetry this holiday season and always!
See you in 2021!
by Sara Dallmayr
The nurse
pushed a needle into the twist
of cobalt currents under my skin.
In nervous solidarity I blurted out
“Bifurcate: to divide into two parts,
a divergence.”
The three-eyed light above the bed
settled a vacant stare. The light had
a name: Infinity. Of course. But the vein
blew its universal pulse on the sheet,
spilling its ceaseless rhetoric.
I said because like the pattern
of veins the words pumped dumbly:
“Two veins diverged in a yellow wood, and I,
I took the vein less traveled by,” except
the nurse didn’t laugh since he had blown
the second attempt and the vein itself.
Robert said he wasn’t the type
who did things twice, even though he admitted
he liked bifurcated veins. Nestled deep, a twinge.
Inside me, two ovaries diverged, one swollen
and the other unremarkable except in medical
terms unremarkable denotes perfection in shape
and function so in this empty, aging infinite tree
with its lowly eyes and teeth and prominent left
branch of irregular leaves, the light with
three immeasurable eyes, I forgot my mask
with its two loops. The truth
only breathing breeds inescapable focus.
And the needle slid through a place we
weren’t even looking, not even on the path
but on the bend of my left shoulder,
some silent angel
or a forgotten wing.
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Sara Dallmayr is originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan. She received a BA in English from Western Michigan University. Dallmayr is currently a rural mail carrier in South Bend, Indiana, where she cohabitates with her husband and two cats, Olga and Hermione. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Esthetic Apostle, 3Elements, Write Launch, High Shelf Press, Third Coast, and Texas Review.
by Jules Jacob
I was gifted an eastern red columbine.
What more could I ask of a volunteer plant releasing
hydrogen cyanide than one with hermaphrodite
flowers pollinated by bumblebees & hummingbirds.
I was gifted a bird I’d never seen.
Russet-gold feathers, white-specked underbelly, eyes
to the hot pepper suet, claws the swaying cable line.
He sang his presence the previous evening.
I was gifted a quick-stepped intruder.
A devotee to chain link fences who softened
the fall of a latch. Brown thrasher, I cherish
your willingness to draw blood defending your own.
Brown thrasher, the Audubon Guide to North
American Birds says your numbers dwindle.
Describes a leaf-tossing mimic capable
of singing a thousand songs as common.
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Jules Jacob is a writer and child advocate living in Southwest Missouri whose work appears in journals and anthologies including SWWIM Every Day, Plume Anthology 8, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She’s the author of The Glass Sponge (Finishing Line Press) and a recipient of the Virginia Center for the Creative Art’s fellowship in Auvillar, France. Learn more at julesjacob.com
by Meg Yardley
“The rovers were designed to last for 90 days on the martian surface.”
- NASA website, Mars Exploration Rovers
See red: read heat
even as cold cracks the glass
face of the apparatus.
Although there is no scientific consensus on how
to measure absence or the history of absence,
send vapor samples from craters for testing.
Collect soil under the unmathematical rumble
of volcanoes, intervals of thick ash,
table mountains interred in winter.
Searching for liquid, find it all frozen
at the poles. What a relief –
to cease flowing, to calcify, to become
unmoved. To wash hands with ice.
Down cliff sides, with spiral radials
absorbing shock from spokes,
with cleats for traction, roll
over butterscotch terrain and rust,
magnetic dust, chaos in the canyons.
Drill where you can, until
the sand traps your wheels. Then
you're on your own.
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Meg Yardley lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in publications including SWWIM, Bodega Magazine, Cagibi, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and the Women’s Review of Books.
by Leah Umansky
Once you hear it all, once you dream past or burn through
the techniques, the torture, those emotional blizzards
of heartbreak, the great guided guttural pain and
their responses, they are merely barren, simply vacant. Simply put: a desert
of want. And the response is to always have a spare, or a back-up, and to bear any heat
as to keep it running over, running under, and running across
the page, and the mind. Who’s to say at least you and got yours? Please. All torrents
would tell you otherwise. A flood is more than a flood; it is a pouring through,
past what is natural, past baselines, fallacies and logic. It is a narrow
belief of boundaries and delicacies. These imaginary lines you draw get you started;
everything else just passes.
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Leah Umansky is the author of two full length collections, The Barbarous Century, and Domestic Uncertainties among others. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Thrush Poetry Journal, Glass Poetry Journal, The New York Times, POETRY, Guernica, The Bennington Review, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, Rhino, and Pleiades. She is resisting the tyrant with her every move. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.
by Amy Pence
Time deforms, both endless and too fast.
My daughter, hours from me, arrives by car.
Hours to drive, my daughter departs by car.
Red traces the map, a field fraught with poppies.
Contact tracing shoots maps with red like poppies.
Another week like a month, though months fly.
Weak in the mouth, months fray now and fly.
Invincibles ignore contagion, unmask.
Invincibility becomes contagious, a mask.
Without roots to ground us, time comes apart.
Without time to hold us, we space apart.
Goodbyes arrive too quickly, could be our last.
Goodbyes alarm me, who might be last?
Time deforms: both endless and too fast.
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Amy Pence authored two poetry collections, the hybrid book [It] Incandescent, and two chapbooks, including 2019’s Your Posthumous Dress: Remnants from the Alexander McQueen Collection (dancing girl press). Poems and fiction have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Oxford American, Juked, and WSQ. A full-time tutor in Atlanta, she teaches poetry-writing at Emory University and in other workshop settings. Links to other work: www.amypence.com
by Didi Jackson
With the leisure of the snow
falling like a Rothko silence
over the morning, I am astonished.
Although chic-a-dee and titmouse flurry
to the feeder, they do so as timid as winter light
which daily asks for a little more patience
in order to emerge from the frigid night.
The flakes tumble as slow as prophecy,
occasionally buoyant on an invisible breath.
I do not suffer insomnia. I prefer to beat
the dawn; but this I shouldn’t have to explain:
for the morning is naked and beautiful
and yawns many times before turning
on the light. I am there
to see. The birds drop in and out
like lures in a dark ocean littered
with loitering stars. What a drowsy way
to start the day with the silence of God.
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Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day. After having lived in Florida and Vermont teaching art history and creative writing, she will soon join the faculty of Vanderbilt University in Spring 2021 teaching creative writing.
by Maya Pindyck
Today I am my sister’s sister,
my father’s brow,
my mother’s squirm,
urging my spirit to light.
I touch my abdomen,
each daughters’ doorway
opened for a few fluorescent minutes
then sewn shut
for good, if not for now.
I remain here,
even when my form bruises, blooms,
or falls away, by way of what it does
or does not say.
Instead of saying It’s getting out of hand
won’t you say I need it in my hand
won’t you say
my hand
—a cardinal startles.
I do not mistake it for another red thing:
the flower on the soup bowl’s bottom
blurred by golden croutons.
With twitch of beak & eye,
the bird returns me to any tree,
a family.
________________________________________________________________
A recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Maya Pindyck is the author of two poetry books, Emoticoncert (2016, Four Way Books) and Friend Among Stones (2009, New Rivers Press, winner of the Many Voices Project Award). Her writing has recently appeared in Seneca Review, Barrow Street, and Quarterly West. She lives in Philadelphia where she is an assistant professor and director of Writing at Moore College of Art & Design.
by Rachel Marie Patterson
Mr. Tom and I walked the tree-lined field at the edge
of the playground where the music teacher went to smoke
her Parliaments. The day was so hot that the boys
needed towels to ride the aluminum slide. Mr. Tom
gave me a Sweet Tart necklace and said, If you were older,
we could go on a date. Do you know what people do on dates?
I used to daydream about having a bra and wearing jeans
on Picture Day. Mr. Tom put one finger down the neck
of my shirt and pulled. The other girls would be jealous.
But now he was so close, I smelled Old Spice and sour
breath. I blurted out, I’ll spit on you. He just laughed
and pulled me closer. So I did spit and ran down the hill,
and Mr. Tom ran after me. Get on the wall! he yelled.
On the wall, I braided limp stems of clover. He sent
me home with a pink slip in my backpack. That night,
Father removed his box of stationery from the locked drawer.
Mother told me to start the apology Dear Sir. I remembered
wet stains under Mr. Tom’s arms. When I was done,
they made me lick and seal the envelope.
________________________________________________________________
Rachel Marie Patterson is the co-founder and editor of Radar Poetry. Her full-length collection Tall Grass With Violence is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her poems appear in Cimarron Review, Harpur Palate, New Plains Review, The Journal, Thrush, Parcel, Smartish Pace, and other journals. The winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, her poems have also been nominated for Best New Poets, the Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. Most recently, she was a finalist for the 2020 Rita Dove Award from the Center for Women Writers. www.rachelmariepatterson.com
by Erin Rodoni
by Shana Ross
Robins keep their nest tidy, manage to avoid befouling the twigs as the eggs rupture into
chicks grow in four days to fledglings. The how: worm in, tucked tidy into gaping hole,
I mean beak, I mean need. Shit out, worm the trigger, expel a solid thing that can be
grabbed and flown away. Scattered, I think, so no one can trace the waste back to
flightless children, to the safehouse. In my house I find myself. Yelling about the piles
on every flat surface, the ketchup I cannot find because no one ever, no one but me puts
things back, ever puts anything where it belongs. Even though it is the weekend I do not
feel like having the scheduled sex that sustains our hungry skin. In the hot shower, night
so shallow the sky is still blue above the tree shapes that close in on us like teeth, I laugh,
I laugh. I am on the verge of tears. Let in the music, new themes for
protection. Try to overwrite the earworm already tunneling. I beg new lines. Inflate like
a python unhinged, squeeze me like I imagine mother love, wrap me up to take the body
blows from me, for me. Look around, look around – how lucky we are... The robin feeds
cold blueberries to the babies, straight from m fridge, straight in a line I laid down on
the arm of a sunchair. She brings them a worm so fat and flailing I worry she has caught
a newborn snake. I worry about the birdlings. The news warns tatters of a tropical storm
will arrive soon from the Southeast, stroking the coast with wind fingers, rain fingers,
skimming over what is solid. My husband holds my hand as we fall asleep. He always
falls asleep first.
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