by Paula J. Lambert
In Texas, fish pelted the pavement,
by Alyx Chandler
The debate of the nipple lasts for weeks.
Drags out across the countryside. Becomes a third eye.
Get rid of it, mom says. Keep it, grandpa says.
Tattoo it into a bouquet, wildflowers galore. The first piece.
Adding artwork is easy. I let them press into my skin
like a jogged memory. Let the mountain form a mountain
as Grandma watches soap operas with us,
covers my eyes for the shirtless scenes,
cackling: nipples are sacred.
In Tennessee, mom speeds past cows with bright ear tags.
Windows rolled down and wind loud
as I drape my fingers out,
reach for slopes, rinded but glowing.
Breasts in the dark.
When she got the mastectomy,
I tried to cut my breasts with sewing scissors,
instead I made a scar like a stem,
a crooked line to tattoo.
I used to think all the women in my family
were forced to have them removed, that together
all our breasts would weigh the same as one woman.
I imagined we would bury the bras with them.
Never do laundry again.
Attached to wooden clothespins are bras
polka dot, diaphanous, silk, polyester
wings flapping like birds at me, lace linguistics.
Time is a prioritization of tissue,
a tattoo in an open-backed dress
gripping my ribcage
like hooks of a bra.
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Alyx Chandler received her MFA in poetry at the University of Montana, where she taught poetry. She is a publicist for Poetry Northwest, a poetry reader for Electric Literature, and former poetry editor for CutBank Literary Magazine. Her poetry can be found in Cordella Magazine, Glass House Press, and is forthcoming in the Greensboro Review. Currently, she lives in Missoula and serves as the 2021-22 Americorps VISTA for two Montana-based creative writing nonprofits, the Missoula Writing Collaborative and the Free Verse Writing Project.
by Lynne Thompson
there are no contingencies when it’s twilight & it’s you
& every contingency has its flag-wavers and every night is
the night before the flames and the screaming and the mad-
men who always want more. Last night, I took precautions
but it was you and I trusted and never suspected & I let you
touch me everywhere you wanted until your night executed
its old stranglehold, no star or stripe in sight. What Bill of Rights
have the dark-suits ever given black bodies? Were it otherwise,
you would have lifted your knee off of our necks. But the flag-
wavers have traded sunlight to the Klan, to the blue wall in your
True North, and we and they will set ourselves on fire because
of it. And yet, I’m sure they’ll give us another poultice of don’t
worry about the ways you’ll be killed. Because it’s you. This is us.
rip George Floyd
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Lynne Thompson is the current Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The author of three collections of poetry, most recently Fretwork (2019), she has poems in numerous journals including the Massachusetts Review and Ploughshares as well as Best American Poetry 2020. Thompson is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College and sits on the Boards of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cave Canem.
by Kristin Garth
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
It’s not just him that’s on the phone. He’s deaf,
this customer. You should have known. He types
to you, TTY, translated request
by some young jocular guy. Sounds like snipes
what he relays—the pay, full nude, where you
will meet the boat Sunday. A birthday gift
you said you’d never be—and naked, too;
ignoring boundaries. Just topless shifts
inside the bar. No outside dances, nude,
with caviar. Your boss insisted for
her friend, executive, distinguished, lewd
“a gentleman—just one hour, nothing more.”
But this witness, because it’s TTY,
knows how expensive you are to buy.
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Kristin Garth is a Pushcart- and Rhysling-nominated sonneteer and a Best of the Net 2020 finalist. She is the author of a short story collection You Don’t Want This (Pink Plastic Press) as well as The Staked (Really Serious Literature) and many more books.
by Rebecca Brock*
She didn’t say it to me.
But I was old enough to understand
it pertained to girls like me,
to the women we would be—the not
born with it, I mean. I’m trying to explain why,
when the house painter sent me a video
of him playing the saxophone
in a dim but freshly painted
dining room, naked
beneath his white overalls,
his eye contact
with the camera as he wailed—
I really didn’t think it meant
what he probably meant it to mean—
he’d talked to me about his daughter,
about his wife. He’d be back in the spring ,
to finish the outside of the house.
When he fell off someone else’s roof
and broke his foot, I was surprised
by how safe it felt
to ask for my deposit money back.
When he said I was beautiful
I found out I still believed
I should say thank you.
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Rebecca Brock’s work appears/will appear in CALYX, Mom Egg Review, Threepenny Review, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. Recently, she won the Spring 2021 prize at Sheila-Na-Gig and was a semi-finalist in the New Women’s Voices contest at Finishing Line Press. Idaho born, she is raising her two sons in Virginia and still isn’t used to the humidity. You can find more of her work at rebeccabrock.org.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
*Rebecca Brock is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. This poem was accepted before she became a reader.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
by Mary Beth Hines
Mother savored the mock
mayo, slathered it
on Wonder Bread with a leaf
of iceberg lettuce
amidst a hail
of salt and pepper.
She shredded cabbage
and drowned the tendrils,
mixed it with relish
to home-make tartar,
bought it by the jug
yet she never had enough.
I learned to crave the zing
when it first
hits your tongue—a bit
like a lemon
but without
the bitter after.
I would eat spoonfuls
after a bad day at school—
satin slipping
silver through
my angsty
teenage body.
And I understood,
without words for it,
how addictions start
with yearn then bargain
for that rush
of soothe and hearten.
______________________________________________________________________
Mary Beth Hines’s debut poetry collection, Winter at a Summer House, was published by Kelsay Books in November 2021. Her poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction appear or will soon appear in Aji Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Feral, Tar River, The MacGuffin, Valparaiso, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. Visit her at www.marybethhines.com.
by Maria S. Picone—수영
my grandmother scrawls a poem,
thin uncertain lines: tomatoes, basil, salt—
oh, how she could open her
self like a downward dog & flower
hibiscus instructions I long to read,
pathways to buds that taste only
bitter assonance—that craft, those stanzas,
how they break—
how memory touches us, how we touch memory
fractures like the mug she shattered fell & once,
I microwaved her gold-rimmed teacup,
lightning storm of synapses & blue veins, tender,
misfiring words I watched as she erased
one daring bon mot for another, image laid on image
as she stopped
blooming, as her writing hand
trembled—as her writing
trembled.
______________________________________________________________________
Maria S. Picone—수영—is a Korean American adoptee who won Cream City Review’s 2020 Summer Poetry Prize. She has been published in Ice Floe Press, Bending Genres, Whale Road Review, and more, including Best Small Fictions 2021. She has received grants from Kenyon Review, Lighthouse Writers, GrubStreet, The Watering Hole, SAFTA, The Speakeasy Project, and others. She is the prose editor at Chestnut Review. Her website is mariaspicone.com and Twitter is @mspicone.
by Katie Berta
that it in fact wouldn’t even save my face, and slowly my fervor
for it died. Stopped watching the videos in which women
would cup their hands into a white basin of water to simulate
their evening routine, to wash their faces of the colored wax
they’d applied to them just for their videos, of their detergents and oils.
Stopped patting the water from the shower into my cheeks,
tapping never pulling, patiently pressing. The cheek
a sunken cheek, the skin a gray corpsish skin. A cheek that
no hydrator can revive. And in the mirror I see a gray corpsish
face, the kind of face that, if found at the foot of a stair
or curled stiffly around the lily mouth of a toilet bowl,
would signal that its owner has ceased to be. Being
old is fine, if no one can tell. But they obviously can. Being
ugly has no particular meaning attached to it
until some other person enters the room. Hard not to
crumble under the gaze, knowing what they see. Or,
thinking I know. No, it is intractable—it is the direction
I’m moving in, intractably. A crepiness that turns
into something you can stick your finger through,
to your horror, and they’re marketing you argan oil.
Lasers. Telling you to roll out the skin under your eyes
with jade. Fuck it. Staring at yourself in the mirror
as you wipe it all on feels more like dying than dying.
Feels as ugly as you feel, feeling your doom as you are.
Looking out from its gelid eye.
______________________________________________________________________
Katie Berta is the managing editor of The Iowa Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. You can find her criticism in American Poetry Review, West Branch, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has received a residency from Millay Arts, a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and an Iowa Review Award.
by Carlie Hoffman
When the dawn gulls call
we meet them near the wharf’s edge.
There is wind. The ferryman
gone, quarters scattered
along the dock. The sun a rusted
knob unhounding light.
Our landscape: blond hills stretch
into more blond hills. Our tongues
stunned in observance of white-tails in the field.
Everywhere, unflinching, the public
glare of August. Never have we been
so involved with our bodies, the risk
of them. A sorrow soft
and punctual as antlers in bloom.
______________________________________________________________________
Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), which is a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. Her second collection is forthcoming with Four Way Books in 2023. A poet and translator, her honors include a 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize and a Poet’s & Writers Amy Award. Her work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Jewish Currents, and other publications. Carlie earned her MFA from Columbia University and is a Lecturer of Creative Writing at Purchase College-SUNY. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal and lives in Brooklyn.
by Catherine Strisik
Say it. Say. While standing
on your head: the Greek alphabet,
and I will toss you pennies. Keep going.
It’s an alphabet. It’s the first alphabet.
It’s the alphabet said by Alexander the Greek.
Say it. Alexander the Greek. Say Alexander the
Great. History says we are related by DNA.
No, but we really are. We are.
See my crooked teeth. Twenty-four
letters, chant as though we always existed: Antiquity, Ovum,
Alpha Beta Gamma,
that’s three pennies for you.
An alphabet that cries, waves, swoons
in the air at Delphi circling the stadium,
everybody’s running the length.
We sing in the alphabet where it becomes sumptuous,
and the alphabet is melodic when striking ancient.
Crescent. A blue root. Over here, a copper cup
with water for drinking and water for bathing
the inside of your mouth
when you speak fluently. Hear, my voice-
silhouetted-dedicated-life force
a warmed shape resembling Omega.
Round your lips. O-me-ga
Early mornings, it’s the smallest birds that perch
around the feeders, pick seed. And song.
Say: Epsilon, Iota.
A full mouth. Yes.
The crown of your head lights up the room,
and now scattered pennies.
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Catherine Strisik, poet, teacher, editor is Taos, New Mexico’s 2nd Poet Laureate 2020-2021; is a recipient of 2020 Taoseña Award as Woman of Impact based on literary contribution; is author of Insectum Gravitis (finalist New Mexico/AZ Book Award in Poetry 2020); The Mistress (awarded New Mexico/AZ Book Award for Poetry 2017); Thousand-Cricket Song, and a recently completed manuscript And They Saw Me Turn To Hear Them (semi-finalist, Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, 2021). Numerous publications span over 30 years, including awards and Pushcart nominations, and with poetry translated into Greek, Persian, and Bulgarian. See cathystrisik.com.
by Danielle Lemay
For a month, my father’s sister slept
on the furry, black sleeper couch, spilling
red wine, breastmilk, baby drool, and spit-up.
She pocked the black fur with cigarette burns.
Drunk, she bought a crib, to go where?
When the heavy box arrived, she drunk-pushed
the load into the hallway and a staple
ripped a skid-line into the new linoleum.
We dropped the ruined couch at the dump.
The scar in the hall remained. My mother
greeted that skidded rip each time she entered
the house and when she walked barefoot
from the garage with a basket of clean clothes,
she felt that rough wound with her toes.
____________________________________________________________________
Danielle Lemay is a poet and scientist. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net in 2021 and has appeared or is forthcoming in California Quarterly, The Blue Mountain Review, New Verse News, ONE ART, Limp Wrist Magazine, Lavender Review, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. She lives in central California with her wife, two children, and six chickens.
by Emma Bolden
Having kept a list of dangers living
sick in the back of my throat, having
numbered the entrances & exigencies,
having taken note of the exits at both ends
of the plane knowing one is always behind me,
having kept to myself secrets, hands, a series
of descriptions that involve the word blood,
having up-buttoned the blouse & up-stitched
the hem, having whittled a half-inch off each
pair of heels, having walked only outside
of alleyways & under streetlamps, having learned
by fistblow, by bladetooth, having found myself
inside & safe & asking my door’s lock if safety is a myth
I have locked myself into believing in order to step
from my bed, having slid from the bed & onto my knees
& there offered the blank called God both gratitude
& supplication, having wondered if there can be gratitude
without supplication, having nonetheless given thanks
for storm clouds, sugar packets, dust mites & silence,
having prayed that the war is ending, having prayed
that the war has not yet begun, having lost teeth &
the concept of virginity, having called the absence
God & God an absence, having raw-picked
the scab, having stone-packed my pockets before walking
out of the river, having thanked the night for hiding
the dumb wasted furniture of what I call a life, having given
my best plans & laid down in the rain, having noticed
in the oil an iridescence spectacular, having held a winged
insect in my hand & seen on its wings the same
shimmer & sheen before it asked its wings to fly
again & I stood watching, having after all this no choice
but to stay here, to stand & to marvel, to see & to see.
______________________________________________________________________
Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State UP), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Press). The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an Editor of Screen Door Review. Her memoir, The Tiger and the Cage, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2022.
by Crystal C. Karlberg
for my daughter
I would like to say something
about this joy I feel from knowing you
are alive in the world sometimes
in your bedroom other times the trees
alone acknowledge me but no matter
because you are
somewhere even without me
the lines of you not like smoke
like permanent marker the un-
mistakable shape, the shape of my love
the shape of my body not mothers
or sisters I share that only with you
There is a picture
I’m holding you next to the mailbox
There is a picture of you
sitting in the orchard just before
you tried to run
She’ll always come back, I thought
drawn in as it were by the earthquake
of my love shaking not
with fear but with delight
because you are. With your short hair
and your doe-eyed twinkle twitching
your way through some forest or other
some wooded haven I can almost see
my coiled love for you releasing and
releasing as sails fill with unfamiliar
air you cut your teeth on beach glass
remember deer tracks in the sand and
following to learn the story
look how deep the marks all night
I smash bottles against rocks so you
will always have something
to search for. The possibilities are
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Crystal C. Karlberg is a Library Assistant at her local public library in Massachusetts. She is a speaker for Greater Boston PFLAG. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Nixes Mate, and Oddball Magazine.
by Momo Manalang
—for my mother
She wore a tongue collapsing between
a native ring and a Westerner’s thunder,
traced her name from a typhoon’s mouth–
its petrichor bearing Haiyan’s accent.
She married the maid’s broom,
cleansing boats across the Pacific’s lips
of marine backwash, backwash, backwash;
oceans warbling in English and Pampango.
Somewhere in the belly of her province
nanay lit votives, holy in glass sheath.
She was brought to the Americas without
a language to mother, absent of its flame.
What remains prophetic of the Immigrant?
Bodies of neighborhoods reimagined,
bodies of borders exposed,
origin melting into colorless waters.
______________________________________________________________________
Momo Manalang is a queer Filipino-American writer and community organizer. She is the Vice-Chair of GABRIELA New York, a militant women’s organization fighting for National Democracy in the Philippines with a socialist perspective. Her work entails waging local campaigns in defense of the Filipino people’s human rights and welfare. She currently resides in Little Manila Queens.
by Pam Sinicrope
by Sheila Dong
by Kara Knickerbocker
by Ariel Machell
There are no snapdragons to pinch, only sheets
of moss strung up on low-hanging branches
by the river where rocks shine red like meat.
The sun slivers through the veiny gaps, bringing heat,
and yellow lupine blankets the water’s edge in patches,
but there are no snapdragons to pinch, only sheets
folded twice on the bank for sitting, nice and neat,
where we’ve come this afternoon to eat our lunches
by the river where rocks shine red like meat.
The place has changed but smells just as sweet.
Pollen floats down to rest in our lashes,
though there are no snapdragons to pinch, only sheets
and ribbons of plump blackberries, which secrete
a juice that glistens like blood and splashes
by the river where rocks shine red like meat.
We remembered snapdragons, last time we came to eat.
They’d open their mouths when we’d squeeze at their latches,
but there are no snapdragons here to pinch, only sheets
of roaring river where rocks shine red like meat.
____________________________________________________________________
Ariel Machell is a poet from California. She received her MFA from the University of Oregon in 2021. Her work has been published in Gravel, Verdad, Landlocked, and Up the Staircase Quarterly.
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Rise before the sun,
help it over the horizon,
sit in a silent room,
walk on the rain,
sliver the day
into breaths,
& swallow
desire.
____________________________________________________________________
Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019) with another book forthcoming in 2023. Recent work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com
by Jeri Theriault