by Beth Oast Williams
Dark Matter
by Cynthia Marie Hoffman
by Rebecca Aronson
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
I used to hip-check the jukebox
when I passed it if I didn’t like the song playing;
the music would veer and skip where my curve met
the rounded corner of neon and metal. I took out Peggy Lee’s guttural whine
this way every month until they finally stopped replacing it.
I looked good in my stain-hiding brown waitress uniform,
all camber and coil, shined up with kitchen heat
and magnetic. Who wants to be reminded
magic is illusory when the dove is still flying
out of the hat with such disarming reliability?
I wanted to dance because dancing made a flame
lick at the edges of everything. Here was the secret
to living: what is dull can be polished
to a hot glow with the right friction.
What is lost can be added to the heart’s altar.
Peggy Lee wailed her faith in disappointment
but she was wrong:
even the fryer grease
which hung in the air and followed me
from work to the bar after
once made a hungry boy tell me
I smelled miraculous.
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Rebecca Aronson is the author of Anchor, forthcoming from Orison Books in October, 2022; Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize and winner of the 2019 Margaret Randall Book Award from the Albuquerque Museum Foundation; and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize (2007). She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. Her website is rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com.
by Nicole Tallman
I’m like a birch tree in the naked white of winter.
The birch that autocorrect first changed to bitch then butch.
I’m shedding layers of black and white paper and ash.
Newspapers have never been more alive or dead,
as I silence my phone and turn to
phonographs, still photography, and vinyl.
Here I find comfort,
among the old, the dusty, the musty, and familiar—the 1880s
and the 1980s
the granny panties and overwhelming old French perfumes.
Here I crank up the heady rose,
the saccharine violet, the languid linden blossom,
resurrect the pink fluorescent
of my faded electric youth.
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Nicole Tallman is the Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County, Associate Editor for South Florida Poetry Journal, and Interviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review. She is the author of the hybrid prose-poetry chapbook Something Kindred (The Southern Collective Experience Press), and her debut full-length book is forthcoming in the summer. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @natallman and at nicoletallman.com.
by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza
In the past sixty minutes, the mother-poet
has not written a dozen lines. Her resting
heart rate crests 119 beats per minute
twice a day, on average. This began in 2020;
it is 2022. Of her three children, one kicks
the table leg every seven seconds, another
counts songbirds in the quarter-acre yard aloud,
a third reads from a book of little-known statistics:
The safest color car is white; two out of five
people marry their first love; a woman
is more likely to be killed by a champagne cork
than a shark. In her inbox, a litmag says
no thanks, but send more poems. In other news,
a Japanese amusement park advises patrons scream
inside their hearts. Sea level rise holds steady
at one-eighth of an inch per year. Four out of five
surveyed Americans are likely to describe the sun
as shining. It is almost dinnertime; no trains
leaving the station. There are over 10 trillion living
cells in every human body. Based on this set
of data calculate the future probable
with a single roll of one icosahedron die.
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Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, writer, photographer, and teacher. She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops and a reader for Split Rock Review/Press. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Peatsmoke, District Lit, and Saint Katherine Review. Violeta lives with her family in Western Pennsylvania.
by Cammy Thomas
the last gold is slipping out of the trees
the surface of the pond is unruffled
the far-off highway is louder
without its barrier of leaves
shall we dare the ghost out of the wall
shall we display our love in the square
shall we demand spare food
for the prisoners who die inside
when can we hug our children the way
they do in the movies
when can we catch the bat that flies
in slow patient circles through our rooms
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Cammy Thomas’s newest poetry collection, Tremors, came out in fall, 2021. Her first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second, Inscriptions. All are published by Four Way Books. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, and in the anthologies Poems in the Aftermath (2017), and Echoes From Walden (2021). Two poems titled Far Past War are the text for a choral work by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas, premiering at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in 2022. She lives in the Boston area.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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*Rebecca Brock is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. This poem was accepted before she became a reader.
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by Mary Beth Hines