by JC Reilly
by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
I'm sorry for the extra-long wait,
the doctor tells me. None of us
expected this. Two hours
and finally I get to toss
my panties on the chair
beside us and open
the puke pink gown
just enough. We joke
about our husband's
intended vasectomies
while her fingers
ease inside.
I see you're not
from around here,
so I confess it's harder
than I thought
to be seen
by an OB, today,
in this state.
She responds, Imagine
how hard it is
to be the OB, today,
in this state. If only
this difficulty
could be
just imagined.
______________________________________________________________________
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six. She is author of three collections: The Many Names for Mother; Don't Touch the Bones; and 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023). Her poems appear in POETRY, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Julia wrote the model poem for dearukrainepoem.com. She is the Murphy Visiting Fellow at Hendrix College.
by M. Cynthia Cheung
-Anna Bertha Roentgen, 1885
In physics, x represents the unknown.
When Anna’s husband discovered a strange
new radiation, he named it and made history’s
first image of a living hand: her fingers’
bones and, on the fourth digit, the ring floating,
as if around a planet.
*
When I was six, I unfolded an artist’s
rendition of the solar system from the center
of an old National Geographic and discovered
that the sun would dilate within 5 billion years and overtake
the Earth. I couldn’t decide which was worse—this
or extinction.
*
It’s true that scientists apply Latin
best. For instance, a dying star’s
final breath is a nebula.
But my favorite is ex, meaning “lacking”
or “out of.” Examples: to extirpate,
to exsanguinate. A cell dividing
will arrange its chromosomes
into a line of exes, a heap
of cells, waiting.
*
On the day when I lay, feet in stirrups, possibly grateful
for unconsciousness while the doctor scraped and sucked,
what did my mind turn to? I had no dreams.
The embryo neither; it lacked half
its parts. When I awoke, my heart was still
beating too quickly.
*
Mrs. Roentgen, tell me what future you saw
when you first laid eyes on that x-ray—
your black bones, your incandescent flesh.
______________________________________________________________________
M. Cynthia Cheung is a physician whose writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Dialogist, Palette Poetry, RHINO, Salamander, Sugar House Review, Zócalo Public Square, and others.
by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
Apples are imagining themselves
onto hillsides—pink petals stick out their
tongues from the dark mouths of branches
and the forest canopy ripens overnight
until it pulses like a green heart. Spring
frankensteins us all—softens our cyborg
brains (Admit it: you were thinking about what
mysteries your phone will sing out!) While your
body turns like a tree toward the light. Reader,
somedays it’s just too much: powder blue sky,
light wind stirring the leaves as if they are
waving, no, beckoning me to root
and join in. How could I not give in? Trying
to find the song that’s buried in the soil.
______________________________________________________________________
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer and poet and former Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her latest books include the biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and her poetry collection West : Fire : Archive (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2021). Her next biography, Done Dirty: Sanora Babb, the American West, and a Forgotten Literary Masterpiece, will be published by the University of California Press in 2024. She’s received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and Millay Arts. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and UC Davis and is the Poetry and Translation Director at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
by Jill Crammond
by Heidi Seaborn
At a wine bar, the sommelier queries
Do you want body or complexity?
I hesitate, weighing this choice.
My body craves complexity, again.
I have simplified my life: I write. I love.
Each with the clarity of a city skyline
seen from a distance after a rainstorm.
My muddied boots neatly stashed.
Long ago, when I first joined Facebook,
I checked the relationship option: It’s Complicated.
Having found myself caught like a lazy
housefly in my own intricate web.
I’m out with younger poets. I try to parse
the complex syntax of their lives—
familiar yet foreign. Like returning to a city
after decades or encountering
a former lover and remembering only
the language of his tongue on your skin.
Perhaps the body can hold only
so much memory. My mouth cradles
words of advice. How easy to clarify
butter, reduce sauce with experience.
Tazzelenghe, the sommelier says, pouring
the red wine, it means cut the tongue.
______________________________________________________________________
Heidi Seaborn is author of the PANK Poetry Prize-winning An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, the acclaimed debut Give a Girl Chaos and Comstock Chapbook Award-winning Bite Marks, as well as the chapbooks Once a Diva and Finding My Way Home. Her recent work in Beloit Poetry Journal, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Diode, Financial Times of London, Missouri Review, The Offing, Penn Review, Pleiades, The Slowdown and the Washington Post. Heidi is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds an MFA from NYU. See heidiseabornpoet.com.
by Robin Reagler
But mostly I think about love.
I think about you. I think about time
as the ocean and our stories as boats
made of paper. The fragility of our stories,
the unlikeliness of love, and the tomboy
certainty of a childhood in Arkansas
where I swallowed back down my fear
and felt things secretly, then not at all.
I think about the ocean, the engineering
within ocean waves. I feel the technicality
of my body as a part of the waves, the pull
and suck of the tides. The moon as a kind
of kindness masterminding the landscape.
I feel Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer providing
rhythm for just how the living will remember
the dead. I swear on my own skeleton that
I can see the hidden architecture inside living
things in the natural world. I remember darkness.
I remember my mother, the way she held her jaw
like stone and maintained that rigid grip
even as she was dying. I think about her.
I think about you. And my words as bricks
that sink deeper and deeper, as bricks dreaming
their way back into the earth.
______________________________________________________________________
Robin Reagler is the author of Into The The (Backlash, 2020), winner of the UK’s Best Book Award; Teeth & Teeth (Headmistress, 2018), winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz; Dear Red Airplane (Seven Kitchens, 2011, 2018) winner of the Rebound Prize; and Night Is This Anyway (Lily Poetry Books, 2022). For 22 years she led Writers in the Schools (WITS). She is a queer poet living in Texas.
by Aída Esmeralda
by Alyse Knorr
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
When you pray to your ancestors I pray too—
por favor, avó, não deixe isso ser verdade—but
I don’t ask them about the bolt piercing
the heart on your skin, or why I’m a decade late.
My mothers foretold that night you pulled me in,
foretold how you’d take my head in your
steel-trap hands. Listen: quando eu não estou
com você, estou pensando em você—can you hear it
over the coffee fields, the cries of the women
birthing in the dirt? Can you hear it underground,
deeper than the seeds and the roots and the cashbox
and the mantle? Down in the core I’m keening
quando estou com você, estou pensando em beijar você;
down in the mantle I’m keening you home.
______________________________________________________________________
Alyse Knorr is an associate professor of English at Regis University and co-editor of Switchback Books. She is the author of three poetry collections and four poetry chapbooks as well as two non-fiction books, including, most recently, GoldenEye (Boss Fight Books 2022). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University.
by Jeanne Wagner
by Rachael Philipps
Treating Adult Children of Alcoholics: A Behavioral Approach by Douglas H. Ruben
Chapter 5: Family Rules and Contingencies
Rule 7: Do not play or enjoy yourself
Your children:
are so wonderfully quiet,
they never interrupt,
move slowly
and sit neatly
Your children:
are eyeing but not playing with the toys
I set out for them, same with the snack,
won’t leave this house a mess,
not like the others
Your children:
are still sitting where we left them
an hour ago
same TV channel
remote untouched
Your children:
have faces solemn as past presidents
voices tight and low
in their throats,
emanating from a swallow
Your children:
have bruises I can’t see fizzing
in their armpits
from your hard-pressing thumb
deployed on the walk over
Your children:
show no workings
feet together
hands in lap
eyes concave mirrors
open little echoes
______________________________________________________________________
Rachael Philipps is a poet and journalist and a properly misanthropic Welsh woman with an unhealthy dependency on caffeine and marmalade. She is constantly chastened by her iPhone’s audio settings for playing LCD Soundsystem too loud whilst out on her regular jogs around the mean streets of Westchester. Rachael was awarded a Bethany Arts Poetry Residency in 2021 and was the recipient of an AWP Writer to Writer mentorship for poetry in 2020. Her journalism spans broadcasting for the BBC plus writing and editorial work for print titles including Time Out London, The New York Times, and Food and Wine Magazine. She is currently at work on her first chapbook.
by Melinda Palacio
by Carrie Vaughn
The lungs are not two large balloons.
Spongy bronchus branches stretch down and
hold clustered pockets of air like fruit hidden
in our core, flavored with each inhale whether
mountain or wildfire or assassin. Each breath is
an exchange. Out. In. Useless for useful. A bargain
struck in collective exhale by earth’s first life. A deal
fragile as any tree in a harvester’s blades. Tenuous
as a trachea. Infection grew my mom’s lungs darker
daily, until they were only shadows, her pink and
flexing organs swapped for construction paper
cutouts barely twitching in the wind.
The left lung is somewhat smaller than the right.
Space must be made for the heart.
______________________________________________________________________
Carrie Vaughn is a poet and middle school science teacher. She received her MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. She currently lives in Baltimore, MD with her partner and their musclebeast mutt. Her work has been published in Entropy and Grist.
by Ada Limón
by Vivian Eyre
The wall photograph—taken right there—
a girl, lying on your stomach, face almost touching
the tidal pond. Looking for what? Water fleas,
red-plumed tube worms,
the widening rings of being.
How much time to see—
as much time as it takes to make a friend—
cunners & hat pin urchins,
snails & gills, rock grit & us.
I’ve read about Aristotle & limpets,
how a muscled foot locomotes
into the sea to feed. How a limpet’s shell
imprints like a scar/tattoo on the home-rock.
And the limpet always returns to the same spot.
Aristotle never figured out how
this homing works.
A home can be a room in an inn,
beyond the deep & wide, Sheepscot,
sun-dried rocks, glistening.
______________________________________________________________________
Vivian Eyre is a Rhode Island-based poet, and the author of the poetry chapbook, To the Sound (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as The Massachusetts Review, The Fourth River, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. She served as a rescue volunteer for marine life on Long Island.
by Lara Hamidi-Ismert
Fridays I drive west on Quincy—
a fox avoiding its foxhole—
to the wheat fields, away from
someone else’s bed, the sweet
mildew of beer-rotting floors.
I lie on my back in the weeds,
itchy, cold, alone, and let only
the stalks graze me. Out here
the obtrusive city light is hushed
by the dark. I see meteors streak
the sky far more often than my
mother ever confessed they do,
and she never warned of the cry
a mountain lion makes when
it’s crouched low in the grasses
of southeastern Kansas, like
a baby left on a gravel road—
confused, hungry, beckoning.
______________________________________________________________________
Lara Hamidi-Ismert is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. Her poetry appears in Caustic Frolic, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Tether's End Magazine. She has also published articles on the mathematics related to quantum mechanics in Communications in Mathematical Physics and New York Journal of Math. Lara earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Nebraska after earning a BA in creative writing and a BS in mathematics from Pittsburg State University in Kansas. When she’s not mathing, she writes poetry and short fiction, acts in theatre productions, hikes with her husband, and scoops her four cats’ litter boxes.
by Maw Shein Win
My ovary, an egg desert.
Fortnight Lily, petal armor.
Uterus, container of blood memory.
Left ovary, a mourning bud.
Swallow painkillers, lean back in tub.
One perfumed fibroid, rock melon.
Remove seed pods from cervix. Bouquet effect.
Floating frond, an enigma in the canal.
Disorderly array of tissues, tendrils.
Blooms in dark.
______________________________________________________________________
Maw Shein Win’s poetry collection, Invisible Gifts: Poems, was published by Manic D Press (2018). Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California. Her poetry collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020), was longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award and a Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. See mawsheinwin.com
by Charlotte Foreman
when you were born / in a passive red sluice
some hot providence asked the palms to move
Heaven’s ferns peeled back / to give you an orange
from the groves of Orlando / light flooded the tidal
marshes / in a place south-er than south / afternoon
sun presses through Spanish moss / I don heels
from Kohl’s / a baby blue dress / become a woman
in the community center / all these lives around me
______________________________________________________________________
Charlotte Foreman is a writer and educator in Davie, Florida. She received her B.A. in Written Arts from Bard College in 2020. She is the English editor-in-chief of the international cultural criticism magazine The Swings and is currently completing a 200-hour yoga instructor training. Her work has previously been included in Yew! Magazine and Waterproof: Evidence of a Miami Worth Remembering, published by Jai Alai Books.
by Chloe Martinez
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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