by Cammy Thomas
the last gold is slipping out of the trees
by Kathryn Weld
He picked the morel I was saving—
announced, I found the granny. I wish
he’d left it. Beige, and pitted like tripe.
Last week, we savored eight, sautéed
with ramps and eggs, a crunch like
knucklebone. I’d plucked the yard
of all but one, hoping the sponge-like
fruit would seed the hill. The wizened
Molly Moocher now lies on my counter.
The undulating divots of her blond
craters—mother dimples where I
lose myself. A waning crescent
sets at noon. I liked watching her
bow and lean her head toward earth.
______________________________________________________________________
Kathryn Weld’s chapbook is Waking Light (Kattywompus Press, 2019). A finalist for both SER’s Gearhardt Poetry Award and The Bellevue Literary Review’s Jan and Marica Vilcek Award her work has also recently appeared in The Cortland Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Blueline, The Midwest Quarterly, and more. Her prose appears in The American Book Review, Connotations Press, The Critical Flame, and elsewhere. She is professor of mathematics at Manhattan College.
by Robin Turner
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
like a great sea mirroring
cloud and moon and willow
some mornings stand lovely
and idle
first words a whisper
from the earth—
there are certain fields ripe
for cutting
::
a found/collage poem
source text: Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth
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Robin Turner is a Texas poet and an online writing guide for teens. Her poems have been tucked into little poetry houses in Pittsburgh, paired with photographs in a Deep Ellum art gallery, and transformed into tiny artist books for the White Rock Zine Machine in Dallas. A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has most recently appeared in Bracken Magazine, River Mouth Review, Ethel, One Art, and Unbroken.
by Frances Klein
A golden shovel with thanks to William Golding
On a good day the pain recedes into the background, somewhere
on the outskirts of my body, past the treeline. It might be just over
the horizon, killing time at a dive bar, or around the
next bend in the highway, no light on darkened
asphalt, headlights barely making a dent. Each wend and curve
is a held breath, a suspension of
the hammer before it falls to strike the
piano string. It seems all the mindfulness in the world
cannot abate this ache, nor the green tea, nor the
acupuncture. I look at opiates like I look at the sun,
never directly, and with a caveman’s mix of awe and
suspicion. I look at the rising moon
like every little death, bringing the hours when I were-
wolf across the landscape of my bed, pain pulling, pulling, pulling.
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Frances Klein is a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She was born and raised in Southeast Alaska, and now lives in Indianapolis with her husband and son. She has been published in So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Vonnegut Memorial Library and Tupelo Press, among others. Klein currently serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review. Readers can find more of her work at kleinpoetryblog.wordpress.com.
by Jen Ryan Onken
Like stepping off a lip into the air—
snow and sky a ruptured sense of who
is where. All that white, even the barn
and house loosen like confusion into
the field. My father used to throw a ball
around with me as darkness fell. Hard to lose
the muscle-memory of catching and
letting go. I feel him settle in this ghosting
meadow like a print—a gap that sinks
when shadows drop into the snow.
______________________________________________________________________
Jen Ryan Onken lives and teaches in southern Maine. Recent poems have appeared in Deep Water, Zocalo Public Square, The Night Heron Barks, and LEON Literary Review. Her chapbook, Medea at the Laundromat, was a 2020 finalist for the Larry Levis Post-Grad Prize at Warren Wilson's Program for Writers, where she recently completed her MFA. Jen was the Maine Poet's Society winner of their 2019 prize for previously unpublished poets.
by Rebecca Faulkner
by Liana Meffert
by Kim Jacobs-Beck
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
by Victoria Nordlund
by Paula J. Lambert
In Texas, fish pelted the pavement,
less stunned than the men who’d found them
in the parking lot. They’d come a long way,
the fish. It was a hell of a ride, lifted from the sea
by a force no fish brain could possibly have fathomed,
slapped down dead at the used car dealership
on Summerhill Road. The men who gathered,
trying to figure out what in the name of sweet baby Jesus
could have happened, were at a disadvantage,
never having been lifted themselves, knowing plenty
about plagues of frogs and locusts but next to nothing
about fishes come without loaves. They’d heard
that crack of thunder, five days past Christmas,
two days before the new year. Fish were dropping
here and everywhere, they’d told the reporter,
not knowing what to say except what was obvious,
broken fish bodies starting to stink up their shoes.
The smell stayed with them all day, and now,
after saying prayers and shivering in the cold
that came with the storm, they stared at the ceiling
wishing there’d been a way to close those damn
fish eyes staring like they’d seen the face of God.
And they guessed the fish had. And they guessed
that was blasphemy. And they guessed the fish
had gotten what they deserved. So they closed
their own eyes and curled up closer to their wives,
women who’d been staring at the ceiling for weeks,
who were pretty sure they knew what those fish
had been through, pretty sure they hadn’t seen God.
______________________________________________________________________
Paula J. Lambert of Columbus, Ohio, has authored several collections of poetry including The Ghost of Every Feathered Thing (FutureCycle 2022) and How to See the World (Bottom Dog 2020). Awarded PEN America's L'Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship, Lambert's work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. She has twice been in residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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