by Anna Leahy
by Lynne Schmidt
I wonder if his wife remembers
his rampage in undergrad—
the moment he came out of the bathroom
and proclaimed his conquest of a new transfer
and received a line of high fives like
the Friday night football tunnel.
If he told his wife
how this young girl,
scrambling for new friends,
came out of the bathroom
too inebriated to walk, fell
like a stage dive into hands that
were willing high five him,
but fail to catch her.
Stitches from a wall on her face,
a souvenir, just above her eyebrow.
If he told his wife,
before they had children
and she posted all of their happy pictures together,
him and his infant daughter,
how many scars
he gave the other girls in the dorm.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lynne Schmidt is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor and mental health professional with a focus in trauma and healing. She is the author of the chapbooks, Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press) which was listed as one of the 17 Best Breakup Books to Read in 2020, and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West), which was featured on The Wardrobe's Best Dressed for PTSD Awareness Week. Her work has received the Maine Nonfiction Award, Editor's Choice Award, and was a 2018 and 2019 PNWA finalist for memoir and poetry respectively. Lynne was a five time 2019 Best of the Net Nominee, and an honorable mention for the Charles Bukowski and Doug Draime Poetry Awards. 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.
by Kimberly Casey
The tumor took
over half her jaw.
He points to the x-ray
circling the dark spot
with the cap of his pen.
Her head looks barely
bigger than a walnut.
I try to find something
to compare the tumor to,
but it stays a tumor. It grew
so quickly. She wasn’t in pain
long, just a few days of drool
and no appetite, a bit of blood
on the chin. When she goes,
it’s hard to know the moment.
They light a candle. I don’t cry.
I’ve learned the danger of vulnerability
in front of men I do not know.
I stopped crying at funerals when
I lost a love and someone hugged me
a little too long, a little too tight.
A grieving woman is still a target.
If she does not cry, she is cold,
if she does, she needs consoling.
I grieve quietly, in private.
Maybe I hold on to things too long.
I reach for ways to bind my wounds
faster. At my grandmother’s funeral,
it became a joke among my uncles
of who would cry first. My mom
gave a eulogy while they shed tears,
her own never falling. We tell each other
it’s better this way, they were sick,
it was time. Later, I heard her
through a closed door.
My husband goes on misty-eyed drive,
I clean up the litter box, the cat food,
the crate. There is always more
to do. In the shower I make lists,
think about the day ahead, anything
to keep me from falling apart,
becoming the water around me.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Kimberly Casey is a Massachusetts native who received her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College in Boston, MA. She has since moved to Huntsville, Alabama where she founded Out Loud HSV—a spoken word poetry and literary arts nonprofit dedicated to inspiring community outreach and activism through spoken word. Her work has appeared in The Southern Women’s Review, Tilde Literary Journal, and The Corvus Review, among others. Kimberly is currently pursuing an MFA at Pacific University.
by April Nelson
Looking back, we were all so earnest,
gathering for our monthly potlucks
of rice and beans and lumpy breads.
Squatting in the cold March mud
to thumb in the broccoli, our breath
small clouds hanging in the damp, chill air.
And the knitting! My god, the knitting!
We did it endlessly, when we weren’t
spinning the wool, or the honey. Sweaters
and shawls and gloves and hats: small wonder
we didn’t clothe the sheep themselves in wool wraps.
The chickens, the pigs.
The chickweed, the pigweed.
Hauling the slops to the pigs, the pigs
to the butcher, the pork chops to the freezer.
It never stopped.
What was it then, that changed? What was it that made us say
“that’s enough,” and scrub our hands raw at the sink
until every trace of soil was gone from under our nails?
It wasn’t the goodness of the first tomato of summer
or the soft down of the chicks
that did us in. Heaven knows those were gifts,
plain and simple.
It was something more basic.
One mud-tracked rug too many,
another torn fingernail,
too many five grain casseroles and no desserts at the potluck.
Something as little as that.
We sold off
the chickens, the tiller. Gave up the lease and
moved back to the rhythm and hum of the city.
Never looked back, never kept track of the cost,
plus or minus. What good would have come of that?
Nothing but heartache and some tallies on a sheet of paper.
No, better to leave that door closed: the knitting unfinished, the herbs gone wild,
the heart gone to seed.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
April Nelson had her poetry accepted for publication in The Young Voice (Ashland Poetry Press, 1974). She then pursued other paths before returning to writing. In addition to this poem in SWWIM Every Day, she has had poetry published in Rise Up Review and The Licking River Review. She is active in a local poetry group, which she helped found, and all too rarely publishes on Medium on on her blog.
by Sayuri Ayers
by Elizabeth A.I. Powell
by B. Tyler Lee
—after watching Misty Copeland’s “Swans for Relief”
The freelance ballerina does not need your company. She doesn’t concern herself with the freshly shortened half-lives of your weeks’ complaints, but time falls quick and savage on her relevé.
She makes space for what she craves, then: cellos and tall fescue. Salmon, lime, and sunlight. This solitude sustains itself only because it’s not confined. The cygnet locks down, then up. Releases herself to sage and ozone. Binds herself to jetés and sobresauts performed on sand.
She solos on demand, paused and unpaused for 10,000 audiences of one. I could never have afforded the tickets I’d require to witness all these dancers in my life before, could never have replayed the freelancer’s flutter over and over outside a quarantine. We’ve neither of us change to throw.
Greedy, I trap her on my screen, my pocket nickelodeon—
I labor en pointe
solely in brute dreams, mute swan
leashed until the dark.
_________________________________________________________________
B. Tyler Lee is the author of one poetry collection, With Our Lungs in Our Hands (Redbird Chapbooks, 2016), and her essay “●A large volume of small nonsenses” won the 2020 Talking Writing Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, Jet Fuel Review, Acting Up: Queer in the New Century (Jacar Press), and elsewhere. She teaches at Purdue University Northwest.
by Gaia Rajan
by Janelle Cordero
Bob fell off the wagon again. We talked about it
no more than an hour ago. Now, we’re in the front yard
on this sunny day in January and Bob’s wife comes
outside. I’m leaving him, she says. How are you,
we say. I’m wonderful now that I’m leaving him,
she says. Let us know if you need any help, we say.
What does that mean? Nothing can be helped, not now.
They’ve been together a long time, Bob and his wife.
And all we know of their love is how far ahead of him
she always walks, and how she never looks back,
even when he stumbles, even when he falls.
_________________________________________________________________
Janelle Cordero is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in the seventh most hipster city in the U.S. Her writing has been published in dozens of literary journals, including Harpur Palate, Hobart and The Louisville Review, while her paintings have been featured in venues throughout the Pacific Northwest. Janelle is the author of three books of poetry: Many Types of Wildflowers (V.A. Press, 2020), Woke to Birds (V.A. Press, 2019) and Two Cups of Tomatoes (P.W.P. Press, 2015). Stay connected with Janelle's work at www.janellecordero.com.
by Neysa King
Warm butter buttercream
Peanutbutterfudge
Peach cobbler pumpkinpie
Bananapuddingcup
Salt bagel stickybun
Cherrycreamcheeseflan
Cream puff heavycream
Poundcake cupcake cardamom
Toasted pastry puddingpop
Icecreamkeylimepie
Fun fetti lollipop
Rootbeercandy shoofly
Nosh nibble gobbleup
Wolfdown polishoff
Porkout peckat muscledown
Swallow gnaw nod-off
Brown Rice McDonald Clark
RosserGurleyGarner
Taylor Sterling Fonville Gray
BlakeMcDuffieMartin
Popo plainclothes M&P
Sauer M16
Rocke feller submachine
Stopandfrisk brutality
Water cannon grenadier
Rubber pepperball
Snatchsquad phalanx riotwhip
Lawdogs crowdcontrol
Tracking tapping highpolice
Viraldeepfakefeed
Gitmo blacksite holocausts
Ohsay canyousee
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Neysa King is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in Slippery Elm Literary Journal, Chaleur Magazine, the San Antonio Review and others. She was a finalist for the 2019 Princemere Prize in Poetry and the recipient of the 2020 San Antonio Writers Guild Prize in Poetry. You can find her work on instagram @neysaking or at www.neysaking.com.
by Morgan Mullings
by Elizabeth Joy Levinson
by SK Grout
Why don’t you come
still hesitating
by the blackberry bush
Through the twilight I see the small parcels of pink and white blooms that wave between us. Berries
for later in the year. The bees have worked hard to propagate. You’re still hesitating.
Time should be for rearranging but we remain inside locked cabinets unalphabetically ordered. The
key was an oath, could be dreaming, might be gladdening. Right in this moment, it is mist.
Tonight in another time zone another city burns. Is it inevitable that a flame wants vengeance? Often
coloured for easier inspection, after ignition, comes reparation. A place remembers,
it follows you bearing cassia and bowers, caskets and dragons. What do you carry?
Does it taste like hope? Before
I rise and I dance
with my shadow
I sing
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
SK Grout (she/they) 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 (2018, the poetry annals). 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 Cordite Poetry Review, trampset, Banshee Lit, Parentheses Journal, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. More information here: https://skgroutpoetry.wixsite.com/poetry
by Rita Maria Martinez
Amazonium, strongest metal on Earth, forged into
bullet-deflecting bracelets, shiny silver
cuffs inspiring confidence, helping me thwart
derisive bullies who openly threatened
extending their reign of terror beyond shouts of freak,
fea, perra, hound of Hades, eye
gunk of Giganta, chew toy of Cheetah, jock itch of Jor-El. Great
Hera! Athena knows I only possessed
imagination and daydreams of the invisible
jet whisking me away before obnoxious prima donnas
kicked my face in because they thought they had
license to make my benign and solitary existence
miserable, but Marston’s immortal maiden
never succumbed to imbeciles or threats,
openly defied those plotting to plunder
Paradise Island, place that sounded like abuela’s Cuba,
quiet Eden, uncharted isle where peace
reigned supreme and women enjoyed
sailing, fencing, and horseback riding.
Themyscira, I have longed for your refuge
under the full moon’s omniscient,
voluptuous light, desired to enter the sanctum of Diana’s
world, elusive, mysterious, impervious, never
X’d on man-made maps—
your beauty surpasses anything
Zeus could’ve ever imagined.
________________________________________________________________
Rita Maria Martinez’s poetry collection, The Jane and Bertha in Me (Kelsay Books), celebrates Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel Jane Eyre. Her poetry appears in the Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry Blog. Martinez’s work also appears in the textbook Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction/Literary Nonfiction, Poetry and Drama, and in the anthology Burnt Sugar, Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish. Visit Martinez’s website at https://www.comeonhome.org/ritamartinez.
by Paula Harris
Medusa was sent dozens of them every day, men trying to prove their manliness by tempting, seducing and then fucking a monster. Fucking the sea god’s conquest! There’s something to tell your mates about. I know, you probably wouldn’t expect that, but that’s what some men are like. It didn’t work out for any of them, obviously.
They send them to Aphrodite too, but that’s no surprise. She’s changed her number dozens of times, but still the dick pics keep coming. Everyone wants the goddess of love to love their penis, to give it her seal of approval. Paris sent her a dick pic, which she hated, like she hates all of them, but she swallowed her nausea and sent him a reciprocal pic and got herself the Golden Apple. Narcissistic little prick. Helen of Troy was much more impressed by his dick pic, obviously.
It took eons before Athena got her first dick pic. Perhaps men were too afraid that she’d hack their dicks off in disgust. But she’s a visual person. Goddess of the arts, after all. She recognises beauty in many things. Including penises. If she had a husband, she definitely would ask him to send her dick pics if he was going away for extended periods of time. Postcards and dick pics, that’s what she’d ask for.
That first one was a masterpiece, just the introduction you want. A well-chosen angle. Excellent lighting, even if she suspected that was more accidental than intentional. A relaxed environment, although carefully curated. A truly beautiful penis, nicely proportioned, well filled out, definitely worthy of sharing. She spent an entire day looking at it. It made her feel warm inside, so that night she had to rub up against one of the columns at her temple at Acropolis. The roof crumbled a little. She never got around to fixing it.
More dick pics followed. There are pics with strap-ons sent too. Not all meet the standard set by that first one. Some she replies to with suggestions on how they could light things better, a more flattering angle, please don’t include your face in the photo, no one wants to see that. Some she deletes straight away and then goes back to that first one to help with purging the bad ones from her mind.
On Friday nights she and Apollo compare their best and worst of the week. Everyone wants their dick to be seen by the sun.
_______________________________________________________________
Paula Harris lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she writes and sleeps in a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award. Her writing has been published in various journals, including Hobart, Berfrois, Queen Mob's Teahouse, The Rialto, Barren, SWWIM, Diode, Glass, Aotearotica and The Spinoff. She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric. website: www.paulaharris.co.nz | Twitter: @paulaoffkilter | Instagram: @paulaharris_poet | Facebook: @paulaharrispoet
by Maryann Corbett
A sonnenizio for the pandemic year
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free
in the land of the free, and we the beautiful people
are exercising freedom. Toned and tanned
in our athleisure wear, how free we are,
freed by the wonders of delivery service
and grocery shoppers, buy-one-get-one-free
our vespers hymn. Oh, how serenely free
we seem, free-sweating, heart rates pumped and primed,
each trainered foot aiming its freeform way
well clear of any dangerous free breathing.
Like birds, like air, so free, the way we sidestep
that free-range threat that waves its sign on the corner:
barefaced rogue actor, mask-free anarchy,
roaring as we thud past, You think you’re free?
________________________________________________________________
Maryann Corbett is the author of five books of poetry, most recently In Code from Able Muse Press. Her work has won the Richard Wilbur Book Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and has been published in venues like Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Rattle, River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Subtropics, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, and The Writer's Almanac, and in an assortment of anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2018.
by Mel Sherrer
My friends and I are downing dollar drinks
and gabbing about the possible
effects of lockdown on
symphony venues and
concert halls.
My attention keeps spilling over to a table nearby.
I am being called in by the baritones and
buttery tenors of the group of Black men sitting there.
Someone nudges me, asking about another round.
Someone mentions teaching classes online,
but I am drawn back to conversation
which bears no trace of the virus.
The men laugh into their plates,
forks still poised in their hands.
Each of them has something remarkable:
fists as big as coconuts,
a perfect plum of a knot in his tie,
an easy demeanor, leaning back in his chair,
intricate waves in his hair,
shoes with buckles,
a purple silk shirt.
I want to say to them all,
Come home with me and laugh as my father might have.
Teach me how to smile in my skin.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mel Sherrer (She/Her) is a writer, editor and educator. She is a proponent of women’s learning institutions having received her B.F.A. from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia and her M.F.A from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She is the Social Media Editor for South 85 Literary Journal, and she teaches Creative Writing and Performance Literature. A few of her recent publications appear in Recenter Press and Deep South Magazine. She has poetry forthcoming in MORIA Literary Journal and Headmistress Press. She currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada.
by Lori Lasseter Hamilton
an orange
an open mouth
cerulean blue Faberge egg
scoop of ice cream
a spoon
a teardrop
baby’s pink rattle
a pillar candle
red balloon childhood promised
a pearl
a bath bomb
Ferris wheel
a glass paperweight
a stove’s eye
magnifying glass
eyeball with red squiggly lines
round wedding cake with 3 tiers
pressed powder compact with puff and mirror
a lollipop
alarm clock
the red tip of a match
a doll’s head
a red Dixie cup to get her drunk
a porthole window
rusted out barrel where the pearlescent pink button on a wife’s sweater pops off in the flame
a cotton ball
a gold wedding band
chicken pot pie
a Christmas wreath
the starlight mint that broke my teeth
bowl of cherries
the sewing tomato Mom’s needles were stuck in
a pink velvet pillow
a soccer ball
lavender-hued birth control pill dispenser
the dial on a rotary phone
Queen Elizabeth’s crown
King Jesus’ crown of thorns
the zero in 1980
the letter O
a communion chalice
Pilate’s handwashing bowl
a paper cup holding Welch’s grape juice
the slot for a cup on the back of a Baptist pew
the hazardous waste bin in UAB’s operating room
a Gobstopper
a Jawbreaker
a kaleidoscope
a snowball
the white parachute we’d hold above our heads in third grade gym
as the music played and half the kids tried to cross before the music stopped and the parachute fell
kindergarteners singing ring around the rosy holding hands in a circle
my rapist’s palms around my neck
the summer sun in Vacation Bible School as I stepped in an anthill wearing sandals
a moon pie
can of RC Cola
a portable compact disc player spinning The Smiths
my uterus pregnant with a 13-pound fibroid the size of a baby’s head
a hot air balloon I flew up in after a distant relative’s funeral
before stopping in an ice cream shop with cousins on my mother’s side
as Air Supply sang “I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you” over the speakers
an egg
a pocket watch
an earring
a bracelet
a blueberry
a peach
a Coca-Cola can
a pink nipple
a clown’s red nose
Sweet Tarts
an offering plate holding my chump change
a charcoal grill where Dad grilled hamburgers and hot dogs on the Fourth of July
the ice cream maker Papa would pour Morton’s salt into to make the banana ice cream
my dog Domino would eat
the tennis ball Mom cut a round hold in to sneak toothpaste so Domino’s breath wouldn’t stink
and his teeth wouldn’t rot
the round hole in his heart the worms carved out
the face of the grandfather clock in Momommy and Papa’s living room
as it chimed doom doom doom
_________________________________________________________________
Lori Lasseter Hamilton is a 50-year-old breast cancer and rape survivor. She works as a medical records clerk in a local hospital. Lori has competed in Montevallo and Birmingham poetry slams, and was a member of Montevallo's poetry slam team that competed in Southern Fried Regionals in 2003, 2005, and 2013. She is a member of Sister City Connection, a collective of women poets, spoken word artists, and storytellers in Birmingham, Alabama. Some of Lori's poems have been published in Steel Toe Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. One of her finest poetry slam moments is when she got to pet a bulldog named Bam-Bam between slam rounds at Eclipse Coffee in Montevallo.
by Alexandra Lytton Regalado
After Magritte’s The Tomb of the Wrestlers
Eyes in the roses you sent me, eyes in the roses you didn’t send.
We are in the moment before the breath or after the breath, but not
The breath. // These flowers wink and breathe;
Their plush mouths touch everything unsaid, vowels roll
Round their mouths, fringed petals surround the pupil
That speaks for us: what is white, what is yellow,
What is red. // Our love said and unsaid: rose petals floating in a bath
Of herbs and holy water to wash off the year, fistfuls of gardenias torn
Off a shrub and flung onto the sidewalk, daisies tossed
Midair gathering on a carpet and trampled underfoot, plumeria
Threaded into a necklace or crown, the tendril’s unfurling green,
And, other days, tulip buds wilting in a vase. // Years, all we planted pushed
Against soil and rose up. Was gathered, bound, wired and tied
With a ribbon, wrestled into a vessel. We tried our best. // Each day
The sun arcs across the sky, colors fade, smells wane, wrinkled
And brown, edges crimp, blooms limp, and shatter in one breath. // Now,
The flowers’ eyes are unblinking, a silence we wade into. Can we linger
Here, waist-deep, lean back and float beneath these clouds? My lips open
To receive you. // The rose marks a before and after, grows large,
Then larger, petals push against four walls, bears down on the floor, spreads
Across the ceiling, until there are no more words, no room
For us now but this blossoming.
________________________________________________________________
Alexandra Lytton Regalado is author of Matria, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). She is a CantoMundo fellow, winner of the Coniston Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, Narrative, Gulf Coast, and Creative Nonfiction among others. Co-founder of Kalina press, Alexandra is author, editor, and/or translator of more than ten Central American-themed books. www.alexandralyttonregalado.com
by Camille Carter