by Kate Golden
I am making a list
by Ilari Pass
Last night I recited some poems to my cat to practice for my big reading and this morning she left a rabbit head beside my sandals, saying, So, we’re even now. Later in the morning, I weeded the garden and discovered a color gamut of vegetables and a crepe myrtle, only to stumble on a Belgian statue of some guy pissing all over them. I love the long beard of fronds on this palm tree growing outside my afternoon. I sit and watch the sun roll over my pink-painted toes, knees held in curves of my elbows.
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When Ilari isn't writing poetry or short stories, she recites Ayahs (verses) from the Quran, travels with her family, plays hide-and-go-seek, blows bubbles, and chases fireflies with her four-year-old grandson. A two-time nominee for the Best of the Net Anthology and other accolades, you can find her Greatest Hits in Pithead Chapel, Door is A Jar, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Indianapolis Review, The Write Launch, and others.
by Lori (Lee) Desrosiers
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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We scatter her ashes
in a cemetery garden near the house
protected by roses, blossoming cherry.
I open the bag inside the urn.
They look different than expected,
dry and brown with tiny bits of bone,
more sandsoft than powdery.
My daughters take their turns
and I take mine. My mother
does not blow away
but lands.
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Lori (Lee) Desrosiers’ poetry books are The Philosopher’s Daughter, Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak, and Keeping Planes in the Air, all from Salmon Poetry. Two chapbooks, Inner Sky and Typing with e.e. cummings, are from Glass Lyre Press. Poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. They teach Poetry in the Lesley University M.F.A. graduate program. Desrosiers edits and publishes a journal of narrative poetry, Naugatuck River Review, and Wordpeace.co, a digital literary and art project dedicated to peace and social justice.
by Michele Kotler
by Melissa McKinstry
And if an owl came
to perch on your sill,
razor beak and talon feet,
feather and vowel,
lanterns for eyes,
dropping five questions
like molten silver
into the cool night air,
you’d turn your blue gaze
toward him in answer.
You would teach him
all about being bound—
the shiver of the rabbit
tricked in a trap
with only the breeze
free in your ears.
He would teach you
about wings—
glittering fingers spread
over green trees.
You both know
the hard truth—
the intractable instinct
to survive,
the hum of the earth,
its endless shiver.
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Melissa McKinstry lives in San Diego where she mothers her disabled adult son, curates a neighborhood poet tree, and assists with translation of Yiddish literature. She earned her MFA in poetry at Pacific University. Her work has appeared in Rattle and Alaska Quarterly Review, earned honorable mention for the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize as well as contests at Crab Creek Review and The Comstock Review, and is forthcoming in december.
by Susan Terris
—Vita brevis, ars longa
Life is brief, as Hippocrates wrote, and art is long,
yet Parra lived to one-hundred-&-four after writing
I take back everything I ever said at fifty-five. But I
differ with him and sought out his ghost.
Found him sitting cross-legged on nothing—electric
white hair crackling, unshaven, and in pajamas—
as he held an unlit Cuban cigar and tried to con me
to talk about Newtonian physics and how miserably
King Lear had aged. Impatient with his faint feints,
I interrupted his interruptions trying to explain
that even my feeble early poems, some existing in
perpetuity on the internet, when next to my newer
ones, show I may have improved over time. No whine
from me about the old old ones written in blood.
As I was explaining I'd told my children it was all right
to fail, Nicky—as he said he wished to be called—
interrupted again, shaking his cigar at me, said he was
sure that my words were all caca, and I was bat-shit
crazy if I didn't want to take them back. Then, instead of
tossing out a quote from Lear bewailing fate, he chose
Stephen Hawking: Look up at the stars, he advised me,
fading slowly from view, not down at your feet.
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Susan Terris is a freelance editor and the author of 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and 2 plays. Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, and Ploughshares. Poems of hers have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Her newest book is DREAM FRAGMENTS, which won the Swan Scythe Press Award. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor at Pedestal. See susanterris.com.
by Ja'net Danielo
by Meg Yardley
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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1. You need a sharp-pointed spoon.
You hunt through the bins at Goodwill,
settling spoons into each others’ hollows,
counting out sets of rose-trellised forks
you don’t need, training your eye
to seek out something serrated.
2. You hollow the pulp out of each section.
You leave the membranes intact.
3. You didn’t set out to eat a grapefruit;
they just started arriving on your doorstep weekly.
Your partner makes a face when you offer
the coral-colored juice: it needs sugar.
You delight perversely in that wince, a reminder
of how much sour you can stand.
4. There will be splatter.
You’d better move your daughter’s homework
off the table. The 400-page biography
will go back to the library with its pages speckled,
crisp white paper damp and relaxed.
5. Eating a grapefruit absorbs
attention. You can try to do the crossword
or write a poem about eating a grapefruit
while eating a grapefruit
but soon you find you haven’t filled in a letter
in five minutes, you’re luxuriating in bitter
liquor, this one thing.
6. Yesterday you set some nectarines on the conveyer belt—
the cashier passed them over her scanner, paused
to inhale with half-closed eyes—
but they seem to be gone so quickly.
Only the grapefruit—its untidy treatment,
its yielding flesh,
its bright and biting flavor—
only the grapefruit lingers.
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Meg Yardley lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry and short fiction have recently appeared in publications including Salamander, Cagibi, SWWIM Every Day, Mom Egg Review, and the Women’s Review of Books.
by Nancy Murphy
Let me tell you about leaving,
how it was almost
easy. Sometimes a mandarin
is so ripe that its skin wants
to be peeled, falls away
as your fingers get close,
pockets of air under the surface
waiting for release. I was ready
like that, open to other
hands, mouths, scents.
I feared being skipped over,
not picked in time. Frostbite.
At first it was a long December
then it was spring
in my step, everyone noticed.
Still I buried a guilt that
I could have done better,
that I had no right
to ripen. I had a secret
tally of faults that I used
against myself like a rainstorm.
I made judges out of accidental
men, took punishment
hungrily. Until
it was enough. Only then
could I let myself look
back, see how smugly
we walked the streets
of Philadelphia, rapt,
wrapped around each other.
Then baby daughter
mornings in the corner
condo, LA beach sun
streaming in, smells
of talcum. Remember,
I said almost. We were once
a light, he and I.
What did we know
then of dimming?
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Nancy Murphy is a Los Angeles-based writer and recent winner of the Aurora Poetry contest. Previous publications include Gyroscope Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Ekphrastic Review, The Baltimore Review, and others. Through the non-profit WriteGirl, Nancy has mentored teen girls and incarcerated teen girls and boys at writing workshops. Her first chapbook, The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence, is forthcoming from Gyroscope Press in fall 2022. More at nancymurphywriter.com.
by Roseline Mgbodichinma
Nobody asked me what it took them to slice me open?
There is a scarf I hold unto
When the crucifixion starts
I let blood & water mix like wine
And when they ask me who tried to kill me
Or where the weapons are
I will show them your tongue
Tell them your closed mouth is the sheath
And your smile, another kind of crimson
Or don’t you remember?
The mockery on that November morning,
How my tight dress became a circus
As you danced around me in blasphemies
Saying there is no room for a belly as big as mine in a dress
as colourful as that
Sometimes shaming is as potent as a bullet
& one shot is all it takes
Do you know death has a fashion sense?
It is a garment of morphed wishes,
The one that wears itself on me when my lover says
We cannot make love with candles
Because my body is not shaped like an hourglass
Not all kinds of death lock you in a grave, some of it leaves you roaming in the world?
I don't know what it means to have a deathless body
Because every day, a part of me dies intestate
My mother is afraid another man will shoot me
for living in this body. I, too, am afraid to exist
So l launch a police report
I am writing my statement & the policeman says I should show him evidence of attempted murder,
I start to undress
& show him my love handles
I tell him this is where the conspiracy began
I tell him my extra skin is their ammunition
& my cellulite, their shotgun
But he does not believe
I tell him to file a restraining order against the world
Because I do not know to which extent this body will grow
But he does not understand
So I dress myself
And I say,
Look! Look! Look!
It all started from the size of my stomach
Now I am wanted everywhere
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Roseline Mgbodichinma is a Nigerian writer, poet, and blogger passionate about documenting women's stories. She is currently pursuing a law degree and actively freelancing. Her work has been published on Isele, Native Skin, Down River Road, Amplify, JFA human rights mag, Blue Marble Review, Kalahari Review, Indianapolis Review, the hellebore, and elsewhere. You can reach her on her blog at mgbodichi.com, where she writes about art, issues, and lifestyle.
by Jane Medved
May the whale stay still as we
pause the boat to remove the net.
May the net find its burial in smoke
or fire. May fire be modest and rise
from the field to release seeds that
have been forgotten. Let them explode
outwards, theirs is a harsh birth.
Let summer pause until its offspring
find the grandfather tree, prepared
by ants, guardians of blind passage
in the ground. Let the ground rest,
there is more corn than the animals
can eat, and earth is a riddle that repeats
itself. Let the dove with its white belly
remain ignorant of my bedroom.
For there are those who are afraid,
and don’t we all depend on a nest.
Even the wind, which circles the wide
open spaces, and loves the grass as much
as the airborne, and sighs and settles there.
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Jane Medved is the author of Deep Calls To Deep (winner of the Many Voices Project, New Rivers Press) and the chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh (Finishing Line Press) Recent essays and poems have appeared in Ruminate, The North American Review, The Cider Press Review, The Normal School, and The Seneca Review. She is the poetry editor of the Ilanot Review, and a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv.
by Kim Ports Parsons
Despite the name, there’s no fruit in May; it ripens, mellow
and rare, under July’s ragged umbrella. You need two cups, pectin,
sugar, and lemon. Stir the honey-guava, simmering yellow.
Strain away the poison of the pulp, seeds, and skin.
Taste the singular fruit, sweet and sour, thickened by pectin.
Consider its names—racoon berry, ground apple, wild mandrake.
Strain life’s poisons. It’s finished when you skim
a spoon and two distinct drops run together, sheeting from a plate.
Consider ways to name the pain. Heart’s mandrake?
Label and shelve. Some days, small spoonfuls are cathartic.
When a life drops, edges scrape like tectonic plates.
Mayapple roots grow underground in winter, their poison cytostatic.
(Meaning cells that won’t divide.) Shelve your losses. Taste spoonfuls
in remembrance. Wait for the sweetness, memory’s calf.
Mothers may teach daughters how to smooth edges, how to placate
pain, how to keen a song of naming, how loss ripens the self.
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Kim Ports Parsons grew up near Baltimore, earned degrees, taught, and worked in libraries. Now she lives next to Shenandoah National Park, gardens, walks, and writes. Her poems have been published in many journals; new pieces are forthcoming in december and Poetry Ireland Review. Her debut collection, The Mayapple Forest, will be published by Terrapin Books in 2022. She volunteers for Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry. Visit her at KimPortsParsons.com.
by Lesley Wheeler
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Transporter or holodeck? Either I
have rematerialized incompletely
(sparkling shower of particles
dimmer) or this simulated city
has acquired a wobble, a tell.
Puffy-jacketed people
duck from awning to overhang
along Newbury Street wondering
if swan boats sail in the slanting
drizzle or a hand-held foam-coated
reservoir might suit better. Inside
the Church of the Covenant,
meanwhile, Tiffany glass
somehow glows against cold
puddingstone—how does a yoked
god’s robe luminesce by cloud,
its whiteness alive with ocher
and smoky motion? Gazing
at invisible sparrows, bracing
an overlarge hand on a rock,
he is surely transported too,
that blink of tropical foliage
behind him now, that dreamy blue,
and him thinking how, lord,
did I get to Boston? I drove,
theoretically, via the hospital
where nurses unhooked my mother
from catheter, from I.V.,
and handed her over. Moved
a bed downstairs, stocked her fridge
with little bottles of virtual
food optimistically labeled
Ensure for safety and, for power,
Boost. Counted and sealed
her pills into rows of labeled
oyster shells. Then, north,
as if stillness were heresy.
Back home a library of mountains
I never read. Mosaic rain
I smash right through.
Look at the god, good-looking,
how he looks at the ground,
willing it real, willing himself
to love where he hardly lives,
in his stupid human body,
an always ailing thing. Rather
the sparrow be true than cells
struggling to contain
unlikely radiance, and failing.
Compounding errors. The tumor
an index of poisons, every one
chiming as they transform her.
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Lesley Wheeler is the author of the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds; the novel Unbecoming; and five books of poetry, most recently The State She’s In. Her poems and essays appear in such journals as Poetry, Ecotone, and Guernica, and she is Poetry Editor of Shenandoah.
by Wendy Drexler
They plucked you out before you could kill me.
I had to make a clean sweep. Forgive me,
conductor of my train to the future—
my artist daughter of long fingers
and kindness, my son with his kilowatt wit
and quiver of dreams. You were my gardener,
my stockpot, my pantry, your shelves
filled with my lifetime supply.
My arbor, predesigned, assigned at birth.
My divine egg timer, my clock that never
needed winding. You were my pinkish-gray,
almond-shaped, and my God, you were brave,
wore menstruation like a brightly flowered dress.
And the bloody labor of your fields.
Your timely hatchery, your drop-down
deliveries, your tubes swaying like anemones.
I, too, thought we could wither together
into gentle senescence. Forgive me
for evicting you in your dotage, not even
a hearing, your desk cleared in an hour,
everything you’d ever carried weighing
just over two ounces. Forgive me,
you who were my wheelhouse, my work
horse, my backfill, my unpaid laborer.
You, who toiled decades deep in the mine of me.
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Wendy Drexler is a 2022 recipient of an artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, South Florida Poetry Review, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. She's been the poet-in-residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and the programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, will be published this September by Terrapin Books.
by Ruby Hansen Murray
We watched white flecks, birds
far up against the ridge. Bright
against blue-green, a trick of evening.
Walked to see them, earthbound,
slow, DV creaky, and me ready to spring
forward, these legs strong, but it’s arms
we need, wings. How we’ll fly,
long necks extending,
then folding, so few wing beats,
thermals holding us up.
Great egrets making a way north.
We say, They’re going to a new country.
Seven birds in cottonwood tops
above Cutoff Slough, nesting
for the first time so far north.
Twisting toward each other
as they fall.
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Ruby Hansen Murray is a poet and writer living in the lower Columbia River estuary. Her work is forthcoming or appears in Cascadia: A Field Guide (Tupelo Press), River Mouth Review, About Place, Under the Sun, the Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program, she’s a citizen of the Osage Nation with West Indian roots. See www.rubyhansenmurray.com.
by Amy Debrecht
What hour do you swivel open
to unfurl your corolla the color of royals?
It’s early, I know, before sunrise.
Your pollinators up at dawn, too,
to tumble down your white throat.
I pet you as I pass, velvet bell horn
under my thumb. Some say
your vines are invasive—
if given the space, you are voracious,
twining around sunflower stalk,
stair rail, fence. But by afternoon
you begin to fold the parasol of your face.
How many ways to say
your blooms die each day:
Monday’s flower is not Tuesday’s.
You blossom like shark teeth.
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Amy Debrecht received her MFA in poetry writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Salt Hill, Poet Lore, Sou’wester, Natural Bridge, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She lives in St. Louis with her partner and pup, where she works as an editor and volunteers for Cinema St. Louis.
by Grace H. Zhou
by Amy Miller
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I had forgotten about you
until this morning at Denny’s
when I didn’t have enough quarters
for a newspaper and pulled,
instead, this book from my purse,
laid in for such emergencies.
And there you were,
asserting your opinions in black ballpoint,
two stars next to the titles
you obviously liked,
crossed-out lines
you seemed to think superfluous—
scratched-off Wasatch,
penned-in mountains.
And then the waitress frowned
when I told her no hashbrowns.
She asked again—no potatoes?
No grits?—as if to correct
this error in the book
of my morning. She scrawled a note
in her own book, lips tight.
But she brought me the eggs
and you finally left the poet alone
as he went on to talk
of farmers, as his horse changed leads
on command, and sometimes not.
And it’s hard to tell
whether you simply tired
of the old, old game—
this singular shaping, this lonely work
for the betterment of us all—
or whether the poet won you over,
maybe with those lines on page 40
about chickens and the little
swaybacked shed he can’t
bring himself to knock down,
beautiful it its disrepair.
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Amy Miller’s Astronauts won the 2022 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal, and her full-length book, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the 2017 Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. She received a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship and blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.
by Susan Landgraf
In an arroyo
wind stirs
the heather and flox
lifts my nipples
brushes my lips
and this rush
like sun-lighted
water spills
through a fissure
in the land.
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Susan Landgraf was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate award in 2020. Books include The Inspired Poet from Two Sylvias Press (2019), What We Bury Changes the Ground, and a chapbook, Other Voices. More than 400 poems have appeared in journals and magazines, most recently in Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Calyx, The Meadow, Tar River, and others. She served as Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington, from 2018 to 2020.
by Terhi K. Cherry