by Charlotte Foreman
some hot providence asked the palms to move
from the groves of Orlando / light flooded the tidal
sun presses through Spanish moss / I don heels
by Chloe Martinez
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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A wave slides slantways under surfers, skinny teenage
hips kicked out as they fall in water
that swirls like mercury, and the kids
shrieking in the shallows, and the tankers
still as the corpses of giants along the horizon line,
and the pier rough-tumbling out to its conclusion.
Small boys: kick water at one other.
Old people: sit on the bench. Observe.
Skinny girls: selfie, selfie, text. My baby,
not a baby anymore, tugs my shirt aside anyway, nurses.
The surfers falling and falling. The first-grader’s current
joke: Why do seagulls fly over the sea? Because,
if they flew over the bay they’d be bagels!
Bend the knees, bend the knees,
swivel-twist, fall back, fall back, fall.
A teen with boy-band bleached hair
smokes beneath the pier. You’ve been at sea
for some time now. You’ve been
sick of it. But then, the roar of the waves
calms you too. The kids are doing handstands
at the waterline like your inverted
brain, sand-suck around their hands
as the tide runs out, the world
upside-down, then slowly righting itself.
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Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Claremont, CA with her husband and two daughters. See chloeAVmartinez.com.
by Julia B. Levine
and stand on the balcony, listening to deer
step through the crisp of dead leaves.
Behind me, the dream.
Your body asleep in our bed. Above me,
a river of half-living, half-dying stars,
Now the stony knock of a falling acorn.
Now my knot of terror at losing you.
Once we hiked into these hills
to a ruined homestead. Moss and vine
and bramble. House as rumor,
a few fitted stones, a fallen beam.
It was late afternoon. Red on the gold hills,
sound of a river we searched to find,
but it was just a breeze
moving between leaves.
I remember we undressed
and lay down
inside the hieroglyphics of shelter
that meant finally nothing
could hold us, your breath
on my neck, our bodies binding,
unbinding in sunlight.
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Julia B. Levine’s many awards for her work include the Northern California Book Award in Poetry for Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU press, 2014), the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, and the Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Prize. She has been published widely in anthologies and journals, including The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and The Nation. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU Press) was published in 2021. She lives in Davis, California, where she serves as the current poet laureate.
by Raina J. León
above us there are no helicopters
not like when the wind
smelled like california soot
and every hour sirens wove
their hair into ours and sung
names to enchant cacophony
say their names and we were home
your sister newborn in my arms
protecting her life a protest
weeks before, each time a plane
scored the berkeley sky in white
you would point up
say mamma because i am always
in the sky even when my skin
burns in the sun next to yours
how my eyes leak with storms
you cannot yet name
we stand in unhinged weather
there are no helicopters today
you bang on a wheelbarrow
with dried bamboo stalks as drum sticks
and lift your toddler throat up to shout
‘cotto! over and over again
a screamo chorus
lyrics perfectly formed to your ears
i nod only yes
and keep beat
at the people’s park
marchers assemble
with banners of i can’t breathe
san pablo, i can hear
the horns of a car parade
inside the mourners shout behind masks
from open windows
while a virus flies around us all
pandemic in crown
and white
surrounded by fences
i can keep you safe
and breathing
until i can’t
every door has the threat of splinter
there are no helicopters today
‘cotto you yell
somewhere they descend
somewhere a body hangs
halfway between metal and earth
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Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia. She is the author of Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate and the chapbooks profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She has received fellowships and residencies with Cave Canem, The Obsidian Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center, among others. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto and the Carolina African American Writers Collective. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts, which has published over 900 Latinx voices in its history. She is an emerging visual artist and digital archivist, particularly with StoryJoy, which she co-founded with her mother, Dr. Norma Thomas. She is the lead coordinator for Nomadic Press in Philadelphia and a senior researcher and editor on various grants in education and literature. Find her on all the platforms @rainaleon.
by Kiyoko Reidy
Stinging nettle mashed or dried, dandelion
leaves with their bitter milk—steep in tea,
add to salad, or prayer. In the waiting room,
all the women are pregnant, and I am
jealous. One moth clings to a lit
bulb, its feet burning with light,
tiny brain firing off with pleasure.
The prefix mis— originally meant
to change; now: ill, wrong, absence,
negation. As though change flows only
downstream, the direction of loss. My mother
describes field dressing a deer in detail: winding
through thick cords of intestine
like combing a daughter’s hair. The snow
dotted with birds, dark bodies against the white,
While my organs flash like abstract art
on the screen someone leans into the sky at the apex
of the world’s tallest building seventy-five
hundred miles away. Still, someone builds toward
heaven, as though they’ve learned
nothing. Still, we risk it—proliferation
of language, the collapse into confusion.
The technician with her mouth ajar
asking when I’ll meet with the doctor.
The other nurse in the room looking
worried, or just exhausted. Only one man died
building the Burj Khalifa—If we had known
in advance, the building would have been
built anyway. To call something an attempt
is to admit failure. In front of me, the uterus. A dark bean
on the ultrasound, set in the body’s center and cut
through by a crease of light—my vanishing point.
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Kiyoko Reidy is a poet from East Tennessee. She currently lives in Nashville with her partner and two dogs. Her poetry and nonfiction is published or forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, RHINO, Sugar House Review, Missouri Review’s poem of the week, Creative Nonfiction’s Sunday Short Reads, and elsewhere.
by Elizabeth Sylvia
After watching the documentary Free Solo
I keep thinking of you measuring the walls,
saying you’re allowed one question every day
about furnishing the condo Alex has just bought,
or when you asked him in the front seat of his van
(saying you’re allowed one question every day)
if you were someone worth not dying for
or, when you asked him in the front seat of his van
to rate his happiness, how blank he looked.
If you were someone worth not dying for
you would be someone more than just a girl
to rate his happiness. How blank he looked
remitting your devotion and your hope.
You would be someone more than just a girl
if you were loved by someone far out on the ledge,
remitting your devotion and your hope
with the reflective glow of his cold greatness.
If you were loved by someone far out on the ledge,
his hands would always hope for stone
with the reflective glow of his own greatness
before him on the mountain face.
Alex’s hands will always hope for stone,
the form that excellence must take for him;
before him on the mountain face
your passions can’t seem anything but trivial.
The form that excellence must take for him
makes people on the ground seem tiny specks,
our passions can’t seem anything but trivial.
Heights and solitude like that
make people on the ground seem tiny specks.
Don’t come to see yourself
from heights and solitude like that
as if your soul were no more than a dot.
Don’t come to see yourself
as little. Things you love
as if your soul were no more than a dot
are great things even in their commonness.
As little things we love
are requited, they become
great things, even in their commonness:
Those joys and cares tie us together.
Requited, they become
the solid rock to build a life upon,
those joys and cares that tie us together,
shared work, shared devotion.
The solid rock to build a life upon
isn’t furnishing the condo Alex has just bought,
but shared work, shared devotion.
I keep thinking of you measuring the wall.
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Elizabeth Sylvia (she/her) is a writer of poems and other lists who lives with her family in Massachusetts, where she teaches high school English and coaches debate. Elizabeth’s work is upcoming or has recently appeared in Salamander, Pleiades, Soundings East, J Journal, RHINO, Main Street Rag, and a bunch of other wonderful journals. She is currently working on a verse investigation of the writer Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard.
by Beth Gordon
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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There is no mortician or used car dealer in the town
where they tested the bomb. No place to bury bodies
without disturbing nuclear dust, Oppenheimer dead
from multiple cellular mutations. We move out of desert
towards hurricane memories and seashell swamps and she
tells me about the acres of land she will buy, the horses
she will count and name. We have nothing in common
but funerals and highways and she searches for cigarettes.
I wonder if I am wrong to be suspicious of grapes grown
in sand fertilized by heron hatchlings. Pirate’s gold. Purple
wildflowers shaded by Spanish moss. Azaleas and palm trees
search for April sunshine and billboards appear like haunted
ships in fog. Breast enhancements, injury law hotline, gun show
at the state fairgrounds. I suggest Clementine, Madeline,
Layla, knowing that she hasn’t slept more than three hours
at a time for the last four years. O Lord Make a Shepherd
of Me in this land of bone dice and my stepmother’s suicide.
I want to swallow salt and fiddler crabs, but I taste panther
and pig, the lovely buzzing of low flying planes. The wildfire
daydreams of insomniacs and horses and unexpected cows.
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Beth Gordon is a poet, mother, and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. She is the author of Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (2019, Animal Heart Press); Particularly Dangerous Situation (2020, Clare Songbirds Publishing);This Small Machine of Prayer (2021, Kelsay Books); and The Water Cycle (2022, Variant Literature). Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art; Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press; and Grandma of Femme Salve Books. Twitter and Instagram @bethgordonpoet.
by Jocelyn Ulevicus
When a woman from my sober group
confessed to me that she felt invisible,
I did and didn’t feel that—the tension of
aging out of the civil hold society still has
on its women. The burning question is not,
should I drink, but how do I stay relevant
as my body changes, without having given
birth or given away my name and even still,
to be known is the ultimate disobedience—sitting
with my two breasts out, carving space in the
remembered world. I wanted more for my own
mother, even if that meant not having given
birth to me. That’s what I think of when I see
a particular wedding image of her pitched on
a small green hill, carving space against a stark
blue sky, her veil caught in the wind as if to
say it knew something none of us did.
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Jocelyn Ulevicus is an artist and writer with work forthcoming or published in magazines such as The Free State Review, The Petigru Review, Blue Mesa Review, No Contact Mag, Blue Bottle Journal, The Santa Ana Review, Humana Obscura, Dewdrop, and elsewhere. Working from a female speculative perspective, themes of nature and the unseen; and exit and entry are dominantly present in her work. She resides in Amsterdam and is currently working on her first book of poems. You can contact her on Instagram at @jocelyn.ulevicus or via her website: jocelynulevicus.com.
by Shir Lovett-Graff
The week I binge an anime show / is the same week I practice a tahara [1] / in the first episode / they lose arms and legs / and bodies / deconstruct and reconstruct / from metal, skin and souls / they call it / transmutation / they transmute their limbs / deconstruct themselves / and reconstruct their hands / to practice again / the only rule / they can’t bring back the dead / in my first tahara ritual / I wash her body / a grandmother / comb her tangled hair / keep her head steady / a precious vase / full and empty / it made me question / the softness of my mother / her swollen lungs / my own body / existing / however long / we transmute this grandmother / into gentle rest / sprinkle dirt / like snow / upon her linens / pray to collect / her beauty / upon returning home / I watch the second episode / learn about creatures made of souls / and memories / from people who died / aren’t we also souls / and memories / from people who died / don’t we also transmute / each touch / a renewal / each glance / a blooming /
[1] Tahara, meaning “purity,” is a Jewish ritual cleansing of the deceased, often performed by members of a local Chevra Kadisha, meaning “holy society.”
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Shir Lovett-Graff is a writer, organizer, and student at Harvard Divinity School studying conflict transformation and spiritual care. Their creative work has been published in Silver Rose Magazine, EcoTheo Review, West Trestle Review, SWWIM Every Day, Poetry Online, and more.
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