by Mary Johnson-Butterworth
I need a new tatt,
by Kelli Russell Agodon
Because scientists have their fingers on our spines, we lift our shirts
to let their studies slap against our waves. Where are the sandpipers
of our youth? The house on the coast where I saw ghosts
of myself in every mirror. Sometimes I lust for a year
that has already happened. There’s no need to apologize
for hope because every year another kingfisher catches a fish,
because the herons pose like dark preachers talking about afterlife.
How often we forget what is holy, forget the holy in each other,
forget the tenderness of a stranger painting our grief
beneath the ocean in big brushstrokes, and for a moment
we walk around the dunes where families
of ants carry what crumbs they can find and we find a new trail
of wild strawberries and become beach citizens of found fruit,
become the P.S. I love you on the postcard we continue to write.
_______________________________________________________________
Kelli Russell Agodon’s fourth collection of poems, Dialogues with Rising Tides will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2021. She is the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press as well as the Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Retreat for Women. Agodon lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. You can write to her directly at kelli@agodon.com or visit her website: www.agodon.com
by Sharanya Sharma
Mom pronounces my name the same way Christian priests pronounce crucifix.
Dad and I pronounce home in utter alien tongues. Swallow vinegar, blister
with rust & go mute. He detests how I pronounce yesterday. I plead deaf to
verbs pronounced in future tense. Important to note that and is always
pronounced but. Indian and American. Faithful and menstruating. Angry and
loud. Freedom and mine. Pronouncing god correctly means pronouncing it
wrong. Culture wants to be pronounced like me & is pronounced like not me,
wait no, sounds like all? with a question mark. Family isn’t always
pronounced. should the i in family be silent? Grandfather pronounces my
name the way mom used to—in syllables that make god (am I pronouncing
that right?) a giddy toddler with paint-rivered fingers, smearing peach
horizons that seep into velvet starry blue. Laughter is pronounced like the hull
of a ship slicing through thigh-thick mist. These days dad pronounces my name
in mountain of granite rupturing from bullet’s kiss. Truth is pronounced like
palms hugging by a hospital bed. Earth is pronounced the way someone told
the first bedtime story ever dreamed. In white folks’ mouths my name trips,
an avalanche of basalt. Impotent molars split on volcanic syllables. Note: when
descendants pronounce brown like galaxy, linger. I whistle come long & slow,
in the space between foliage fluttering from trees. Yes, there is always a
pronunciation for them. Ghosts know the pronunciation of hunger. Some people
pronounce love with blood in their throats & some make it sigh in the dark. so what? Love
is pronounced however the fuck you want. On tongues labeled “used—like
new” my name sounds like memory—carousing vagrant, slanting sideways
towards sunlight. Hope sounds like rage & protest sounds like prayer, set to
your neighbor’s pulse. Important to note that in my mouth my name is iron-
spined, tall, mounted on a lion & weaponed for war, but I love most the way
my name is pronounced tomorrow: cavernous dark of temples before lamps
are lit; ocean waltzing, bridge of boulders draped like pearls on its back.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Sharanya Sharma a writer and teacher from Washington, D.C. with an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, The Margins and Black Warrior Review, among others. You can find more of her writing at www.sharanyawrites.com.
by Ronda Piszk Broatch
I put in radishes because they seem in such a hurry.
The garden weeded, free of buttercup, dandelion,
and I tossed out a whole sack of wildflower seeds
I’d hung onto for years, not knowing where to sow.
The birds must have looked the other way, busy
with new-laid eggs, the soil now covered with green stars.
Sometimes nothing happens.
Sometimes we have to shake the ghost globe,
ask the ancestors where they wish to travel today.
In the distance a dog barks. Sometimes my dead
remind me of stars I’d all but forgotten.
There were prisoners who drank poison, some
who threw themselves against the electric wires,
out of windows—they were so afraid of dying
somewhere else. This morning I water strawberry plants
fading in a black planter, worry about people I don’t know
dying in nursing homes, in cages along the border.
What if truth was loud enough, even the deniers heard
and began to believe? This morning I pull a snail
away from beneath the leaves of the bay plant, uncover
a tree frog beneath a pot of soil, and nothing growing in it.
The snail was beautiful. The frog was hesitant
to leave the bowl of my glove for the unknown territory
of a tulip leaf.
It’s what I’ll never know
sometimes saves me.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Poet and photographer, Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press, 2015). Ronda is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Her journal publications include Blackbird, Diagram, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and Public Radio KUOW’s “All Things Considered,” among others.
by Lara Payne
written after the Las Vegas Shooting on Oct 1, 2017
I start the day not knowing much.
My children leave for school.
Their bright, ribboned voices
banner the chill air, and fade.
I turn on the news to get the facts.
I listen to the report and think,
At least it wasn’t a school.
I carefully do not picture my children
with a gunman in their school.
I fill the pan to boil the eggs.
I think of the word another
and the resignation that lives in those letters.
How words like legislation
and individual rights
are weighed beside one another.
The newscaster adds the word mass,
so now we call it a mass shooting.
They don’t tell me anything about the man
I think, At least he was white.
I don’t think, At least it was a man,
because I already knew that.
I turn the flame off and set the timer,
place bread in the toaster.
And then the numbers are updated.
Almost 500 people injured or killed.
One man with a gun.
I do not know if the shooter
is counted in that number.
I measure sugar and milk
by sight into my tea.
Today I will talk to my students
about when to use words that minimize.
My friend writes about responsible gun laws
and receives death threats.
The toaster chimes.
I want to write this poem,
but I fear who might read it.
I have children.
And I am a woman.
And my husband does not have the right
skin color. We are all targets.
I no longer think if
but when. My hands are shaking,
I salt my toast instead of my eggs.
I consider using a false name.
I wonder who will protect us,
who will be brave enough
to change? I do not
taste my mistake until
I’ve sat with my tea, egg
and toast. There is a day
waiting for me
and for now,
I must face it.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lara Payne lives in Maryland. Once an archeologist, she now teaches writing at the college level, to veterans, and to small children. She has been a resident of the VCCA and a semi-finalist for the Nation/Discovery Award. Her poem “Corn Stand, 10 ears for two dollars” was a winner in the Moving Words Competition. and was placed on buses in Arlington, VA over the Summer of 2018. Recent poems have appeared in SWWIM, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Mom Egg Review. Her poems explore the environment, motherhood, mental illness, and the hidden work of women.
by Amy Small-McKinney
by Joannie Stangeland
The Californica Plena rose
looks ready to bust out, bristling
with buds like tiny mouths opening,
small kisses or gasps, an emerging hunger.
When does enough become too much?
In its prickly nest, the rose will be sweetly
bedecked in pink ruffles fading to white
and the sunny stamens that sing the bees.
The rose is, on its rockery ledge, steadfast.
And this is what I want to be for you.
As my complement, you are balm
and barb, rose and sticker, laughter,
silence, and on some days, nothing fits,
like rosemary’s name coming from Latin,
the ros for dew, marinus, the sea,
while its green spears are kin to mint,
nothing to do with a rose, and this rose,
named Plena for full, will swell
into a high tide of teeth,
sharks in the garden. I can’t tell you
what scares me most—the virus
or your cancer or my penchant for gin.
All I know is that the rose must be chopped
to the roots to stave off invasion,
the tumors must be made to shrink;
the rose again will thunder green,
and this metaphor fails.
People keep saying, “an abundance
of caution.” I live in the caution.
I distrust abundance. All I know
for now is this impending extravagance,
reminder we’re still clinging here and whole.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Joannie Stangeland is the author the collections The Scene You See, In Both Hands, and Into the Rumored Spring, as well as two chapbooks. She received the 2019 Crosswinds Poetry Journal grand prize, and her poems have also appeared in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, The Southern Review, and other journals. Joannie holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. By day, she works as a technical writer.
by Lisa Zimmerman
There is a murmur of faraway rain and we are
small in sleep’s corner, breath of the dog
dreaming a field and running—
there is time in a tin cup turned over
while all across the world’s steady body
souls press toward any window of release
any open door, any open, oh—
let’s not open our eyes right now, let’s wander
down the tunnel sleep carved from our breathing
break into sunlight warm as a hand
on someone’s forehead, song after song
of the untouched departed, how they keep ahead of us flying—
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lisa Zimmerman’s writing has appeared in Redbook, The Sun, Poet Lore, Amethyst Review, SWWIM Every Day, and other journals. Her first book won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Others include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. She lives in Colorado.
by Natalie Staples
My father taught me to play defense.
Like watching men on the street,
I map the distance to keep.
I saw the ball coming down the field
before it left the striker’s cleats,
like watching men on the street.
A chest will lean right to move left.
Track the body not the feet;
I map the distance to keep.
At half-time we ate orange slices,
tore riblets of fruit with our teeth—
like watching men on the street.
My father whispered: put your body
between the striker and the goalie.
I map the distance to keep.
He stormed the field in his head
as the silver sphere flew into the corner.
Like watching men on the street:
goalie alone at the net, post unfriendly,
and the net taking its fish, fresh scales in its fist.
I map the distance to keep.
Once at the beach, too far into the tide,
I couldn’t read the wave’s curled undertow,
like watching men on the street.
Once the silver dance of studs dazzled me
away. As if vigilance could hold back a wave,
like watching men on the street.
I map the distance to keep.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
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. Her work has appeared in SWWIM Every Day. She is the Associate Poetry Editor for the Northwest Review.
by Ashley Porras
What I hope (when I hope) is that we’ll see each other again,
but you would never accept a voice like mine—you said I could have
anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud.
There were (for example) months when I seemed only to displease,
frustrate, disappoint you—; so much light pulled off course. What month
was that in? What did you want from me? Actually, you said, Love, for you
—it’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.
How one walks through the world. Endless small adjustments of balance,
filled with endless distances (Longing, they say), the shifting weights
of beautiful things, the objects you busily name. One must have a mind of winter
to regard the frost; and have been cold a long time between the ribs
or where the dusk waits. It is a grace to be a watcher on such a scene,
from where even watching is an anachronism. It existed. It existed
[on a vine that grows up trees]. Perhaps there is a life here of not being afraid
of your own heart beating, for I too am half-spun
wishing you all the aloneness you hunger for. So much light
pulled off course. For even the Gods misuse the unfolding blue. Who’d believe
that what ends here. Continues. So much light. It’s senseless—useless
-ness is the last form love takes and yesterday
is gone. And I’ve had nothing to do with it.
In order of appearance: Bidart, Gluck, Siken, Bidart, F. Wright, Dimitrov, Siken, Scarry, Hass, Scarry, Gluck, Stevens, Dimitrov, C. Wright, Graham, Bidart, Sappho [trans. Carson], Mayer, Griffiths, F. Wright, Sealey, Dimitrov, F. Wright, Dimitrov, Graham, Kahn
_______________________________________________________________
Ashley Porras lives in Cambridge, MA. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, and The Cimarron Review. She is currently a Poetry MFA candidate at Columbia University.
by Catherine Rockwood
The birches up the hill
toss their blent yellow-green
sparkling like surf
while the unsecured back screen door
creaks and bangs.
Our fall yard’s a ship underway,
big and solid and restless.
The useful winds, occupied
with the roof and billowing trees
don’t touch my body at all
but float oxygen in like a kiss.
My bluejeans suit me today. My ass
has never looked better,
and I say that at forty-six
with some expectation of fifty.
Yes it’s a great afternoon,
it’s dreadfully fine. I can stretch.
My shoulders are settled in just the right spot
for action; also, they don’t hurt. And the air—
like cider? no, like good tea:
wakes you up, gold-washed, see-through.
Twenty years from now, thirty,
will somebody conjure this up? Will they say,
“Sip. It’s a microclimate,
exactly like former October?”
Look, I don’t know. Ask Montaigne,
who will tell you a tale of an egg.
In his time they had troubles too.
Exactly like? There’s no such thing.
Only every very last day,
and the one after that.
___________________________________________________________________
Catherine Rockwood is a poet and independent scholar based in MA. Poems in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Rust + Moth, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere. Essays and reviews in Strange Horizons, Rain Taxi, Mom Egg Review, and Tin House.
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