by Connemara Wadsworth
Standing naked in the doorway,
by Lindsay Tigue
I.
It’s like this. There is a structure that might be on fire. For years I’ve been filling a small room inside a small house with statues made of paper. And the paper is lined with gauzy script. I am wanting this to be mine. For an era, I’ve lined the walls and inked the details, filling collection baskets with more than I have. But you knew this. You knew everything was made of paper. What can I say about knowing.
II.
There is something beautiful about this horizon. Dust storms and fishbowl-sky and tumbleweeds stacking next to a fence. But in the end it wasn’t mine.
III.
Look. It’s called still wanting. It’s called remembering something shiny and new, but thinking: Am I rust? It’s called–three weeks before the end–a student in my office lifting her two hands. On one side is poetry and the other: repair. Something here is helping.
IV.
Let me break it down. It’s broken down. At the same time my students write these perfect lines. At the same time I am something spent. Tired of counting quarters for a McChicken after class. At the same time I cry, I clap.
V.
The place I’m leaving: staked and semiarid. The spring comes late and full of wind. Grass fires break out around the boundaries of town and it’s as if I’m on a treadmill walking toward the industrial whir of a turbojet. Getting nowhere; leaking everywhere. Hair in my mouth, face, eyes. You see, I am tangled and my very self starts lifting off the plain.
______________________________________________________________________
Lindsay Tigue is the author of System of Ghosts, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize and was published by University of Iowa Press. Her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and a PhD in Creative Writing and English from the University of Georgia.
by Sherine Gilmour
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
A mother I do not know says, “I am told my child cannot go to school next
year because she needs a feeding tube.”
The words “feeding tube” hang in the air. Her daughter wears purple corduroy
pants embroidered with princess crowns. Her legs are thin toothpicks. They
kick and kick the seat in front of her. The mother says, “Most days, I put on
tights, then leggings, then jeans, just to keep her warm. Just to hold up her
pants.”
Another mother says, “My husband’s family is so angry with me. I am the one
who got our son evaluated.”
Another mother says, “Where I come from, autism means 'alone.' 'Auto,' 'alone,'
so now my mother keeps calling and saying 'Why do you send Ibrahim to a
special school? He’s just a loner.' They called him loner last weekend at my
house after I spent the day cooking for them. Why does a loner need a special
school? Loner, loner. I pray to God, I tell them. But why can’t my son have
Allah and a special school too?”
Words in me I can’t get out. I am the perpetual listener. Locked up,
mummified, my ribs like a corset, my anxiety like a cloth wrapped tight
around me.
Finally, I lean into the group of women, heads huddled together in the aisle of
the bus, and I say, “I had to speak to my mother … She never calls my son by
name. She calls him nicknames, Sheldon and Forrest Gump. She visited and
she kept shouting, 'Run, Forest, run' in front of everyone at the park.
The mother who usually sleeps says in a low quiet voice, “My family will not
visit for the holidays. They are embarrassed of him.” She wraps her cardigan
around her chest like a blanket and turns away.
The one mother in the second row who is always rude starts laughing.
A mother who understands some English begins to speak. She speaks quickly
in Spanish, covers her eyes, begins to cry.
The mother in the seat behind me says, “I am so lucky. My parents
understand. They try to help, but my mother is in her 80s. I worry, what’s
going to happen? Who will take care of him when I die? I know, I know, he’ll be
in a home. But …” She trails off and looks at her two-year-old son, his skin
moon-colored, a child’s skin, soft and sweet. He is reaching toward the top of
the bus window. He reaches over and over again to where it is brightly lit. She
leans down to his face and looks up. “What is it, honey? What is it?”
Something only her son can see.
______________________________________________________________________
Sherine Gilmour has an MFA from NYU. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry, essays, and nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming from Cleaver, Entropy, Redivider, Salamander, So To Speak, Third Coast, and other publications.
by Marcella Remund
a ghazal, after Agha Shahid Ali
We’re most fully human on the cusp, the seed of night,
with pretense left behind to gather dust. Then comes the night.
You walk about when all the world’s gone dark, when footsteps
tap Morse code in patterns meant just for the weary night.
Shadows move along a wall, stretch, point long bent
fingers toward the distant black, tricks of wanderlust at night.
Hypnotic glitter’s net—stars, lake’s surface, silver maple
leaves’ flicker—you’re caught in the moondust night.
From house vents, late-hour laundress scents—“soft rain,”
“sea breeze,” “spring meadow,” sudden gust of “summer night.”
You keep to back alleys, where past lives tower in great heaps
of broken bikes, swing sets gone to rust. No play tonight.
Sizzle-pop and spit of snapping wires precedes a fire that
lights a street, melts someone’s home to crust in dead of night.
The owl’s silent glide, the moan of cats, the coyote’s howl
harmonize with our despair or lust—the needs of night.
And what of you, old wanderer, creeping closer to the edge?
Will you let go, release your grip on morning, trust the night?
______________________________________________________________________
Marcella Remund is from South Dakota, where she taught at the University of South Dakota. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals. Her chapbook, The Sea is My Ugly Twin, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. Her first full-length collection, The Book of Crooked Prayer, was published by Finishing Line in 2020. You can find more information and links to her books, at marcellaremund.com.
by Monica Colón
after she couldn't bring herself to say the word
"lesbian"—it stuck in her throat like cattail down
to its stalk on a windless day—and so instead
she said "same sex." She said "who you think
you are," and I didn't bother correcting
her because I know my saviors.
Before the meds, before the friends, before the realization
that flipped me right-side-up, it was the house finch
flinging treble notes to the sun. The fossils in limestone,
the smell of the balsam fir. The cinnamon roll
thawed in the microwave and gulped down with
with cafe con leche. Waiting for the next episode
of the animated show about queer witches.
Reading what the others have written down
to make their resting places, following them
in my little handcar of poems. So I try
to tell her, and she is blank
and disappointed under her Bible-verse decals,
and I burn, I burn with lust for living.
______________________________________________________________________
Monica Colón is a Salvadoran/American writer from Waco, Texas who has lived and studied in the Chicago suburbs and Querétaro, Mexico. Her poems have been featured in Susurrus Magazine, Cool Rock Repository, and Paddler Press. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of the 2021 Iris N. Spencer Sonnet Contest from West Chester University Poetry Center.
by Joni Wallace
by Susan Cohen
prurient, watching sex
between bat rays,
their paired wings stirring water.
Oblivious
to anything but each other,
they float joined
from the harbor’s sand bed to its surface
with a grace
Fonteyn and Baryshnikov would envy.
How can I not project
pure liquid pleasure on them—
their rising and rolling, gentle thrash,
the long, slow synchronous glide?
How can I not imagine tenderness
when they spread their wings like eagles
coasting on a thermal
and swirl their own currents?
Until done, or alerted
by our canoe—
its aggressive whisper in the water,
its manufactured buoyancy—
they startle
and shoot away like stars.
______________________________________________________________________
Susan Cohen is the author of Throat Singing, A Different Wakeful Animal, and the forthcoming Democracy of Fire. Her recent poems appeared in 32 Poems, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize judged by Mark Doty and the 11th Annual Poetry Prize from Terrain.org judged by Arthur Sze. She has an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Berkeley, California.
by Heather Treseler
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
A small rain down can rain but I am not outside, beside
an aluminum mouth of a gushing gutter, watching
the city sluiced in the casual event of falling water.
Nor am I standing in a shale of rubble, circled by dead
children’s toys, or crouched in a buckling raft, crusted
in cold salt and urine, chattel in a game of rockets
and gas. I breathe from two lungs, integral; my legs
warm under blankets’ nightly benediction. And love
lies sleeping, unharmed and unarmed beside me, arc
of her shoulder familiar as landscape to a painter whose
hands remember the curves of two cleaved hills, forelock
of treeline, the wild mane of sky. I trace hollow shadows
in a dark naming of parts as if my lover were a getaway
horse: throatlatch, barrel, and cannon; pastern, gaskin,
and hock. Tender, the names given to boats and beasts
of burden, what carries us from dock to ocean, trailhead
to highway, midnight to morning, censure to pleasure:
fugitives from dreams’ disasters. My beloved of nape,
buttock, and thigh; or stern, winch, and turnbuckle; or
dock, loin, and withers: in your body’s boat, I stow trust
for safe passage while distant wars make their incursions,
violence sends its newsworthy summons, and weather makes
a music of time. A small rain down can rain and by luck, Christ,
or zeitgeist, I cradle her in sleep’s long sail toward morning.
______________________________________________________________________
Heather Treseler is the author of Parturition (2020), which won a chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Ireland and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Cincinnati Review, The Irish Times, Harvard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Iowa Review, and her essays appear in eight books about contemporary poetry as well as in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Boston Review. Her poem “Wildlife” was chosen by Spencer Reece for the W. B. Yeats Prize (2021) and her sequence “The Lucie Odes” was selected for The Missouri Review's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize (2019). She is professor of English at Worcester State University and a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center.
by Laura Turnbull
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