Earth-Like

SWWIM Every Day
by Megan Pinto

by Megan Pinto


At home, we keep my father from the news.
The news addles his mind. Our doctor says
she tells all her patients to turn off
their screens, to consider knitting or meditation
instead. She has experienced the mind’s slow
pull toward oblivion.

My father fears economic collapse.
He would feel more comfortable if I
would only withdraw $200,000
in cash—just to have on hand.
I thought the end would need more
bright angels in chariots, a sudden bloom
of locust in the tap water,
but no. The light each morning
is the same. When I sleep, I sleep fitfully
each hour opening an eye to check
for the sun’s slow rise
over the neighbor's lawn.

Alone, I resume a documentary
about space. There is an urgent search
for another planet just like Earth.
It’s very possible, scientists say.
A PhD in Hawaii demonstrates centrifugal force
with her fire fan. On the International
Space Station, Astronauts see sixteen
sunsets and sunrises in one
human day. Imagine the abundance.
You could begin again.

______________________________________________________________________


Megan Pinto's poems can be found or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Plume, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Megan holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.

Tang Orange Drink Mix

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Zimmerman

by Lisa Zimmerman


The sales pitch was to tell you
astronauts drank me in outer space.
It’s true. John Glenn and I did
have a fling on his 1962 Mercury flight
and that made me popular, for a little while.
Only because you thought NASA invented me.
But no, I was always just my sweet powdery self
until someone mixed me with water
and stirred me. John Glenn never

loved me. The way some men don’t
really love the women they drink up
and put back on a shelf afterwards.

______________________________________________________________________


Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award winner), The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press), and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Redbook, The Sun, Cave Wall, Hole in the Head Review, and other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize anthology, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology.

Manatee Nebula

SWWIM Every Day
by Laura Reece Hogan

by Laura Reece Hogan


Grow ever tender lolling on the razor rocks, belly out.
Slow, curious, trusting. Graze the pickerel weed, water
hyacinth, turtle grass. The sea my blustery bed, sky
my blue forgiving. Mistaken for mermaid, misheard.
Fed a twisting tune, wrong song at the surface. Mis-
herded, propeller whipped. Grow hide over hurt. Scab
over ship strikes. Scar over spiral-cut scar. Meander silky,
like I own the star fields, trailing my own shredded
skin. Always the vulnerable swathes, mammaries, whiskers,
slashed tail. The venerable slacken it, know how to slide
softness into sea. They know themselves: elastic
and ephemeral. It is still alive, what you have left in me,
glinting with scars, gliding to mangrove leaves, to nova.

______________________________________________________________________

Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press, 2020), winner of the Paraclete Poetry Prize, the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press), and the nonfiction book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Scientific American, RHINO, Lily Poetry Review, Whale Road Review, River Heron River, Cloudbank, DMQ Review, and other publications. She can be found online at laurareecehogan.com.

My Father’s Ghost Thinks About Joining the Circus

SWWIM Every Day
by Judy Kaber

by Judy Kaber



It’s the fragrance of peanut shells that draws him in,
the smell of horsewhipped joy in such a crowd.

Maybe I can follow him as he disappears around
the tent flap, maybe I can see his shadowless legs

as he stands outside the center ring, considering
the caged tigers, acrobatic clowns, death-defying

women in spangled costumes who climb footholds
to the high wire. Here’s what he did for me:

he carried me to my bed when I begged him,
lowered me gently to the pillow, or, later,

threw me down like a bag of old clothes
that needed to be washed clean.

His love for me was olive-colored, dirt mixed with tears,
so it’s a surprise to find him beneath the big top,

his hand on a rope that coils to the highest platform,
ready to head for the trapeze, to reel out into space,

all those faces below turned up to him,
the ripe fruit of the living.


______________________________________________________________________



Judy Kaber is currently the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, as well as the author of three chapbooks: Renaming the Seasons, In Sleep We Are All the Same, and A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Atlanta Review, december, Crab Orchard Review, Hunger Mountain, and Spillway. She won the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, the Larry Kramer Memorial Chapbook Contest, and second place in the 2016 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest.

Lemon Silence

SWWIM Every Day
by Gunilla T. Kester

by Gunilla T. Kester



This morning the dentist. She scraped my old teeth
clean like a Roman monument or the Sacré Coeur
in Montmartre where Stendahl and Zola rest. Every
spring in Paris they start washing her north of the main
gate and reach the other side a year later only to see
she’s already blackened where they began. You left

me a lemon on the doorstep. It seemed all spring we set
up camp every night to pull it down again in the morning
each day we got faster got faster at tearing things down
I took comfort from the great poet who wrote angels
cannot distinguish between the living and the dead.
On the stone steps the lemon you left.

Juncos’ nest in the hanging basket by the front door
greeted me for a month with their tsktsktsk warning calls
facing me from roof or birch branches whether I
was leaving or coming home. Shady place. Plant shaggy.
Greens pouring out along the sides like a waterfall.

My Puerto Rican friend says these birds are lucky signs
in his country—are we not now both of us American
born or otherwise included—when he smashed his car,
black blossoms on his torso. Could no longer speak.
Luck is to know which silence hurts and which doesn’t.

______________________________________________________________________


Gunilla T. Kester is an award-winning poet and the author of If I Were More Like Myself (The Writer's Den, 2015), and two chapbooks, Mysteries I-XXIII (2011) and Time of Sand and Teeth (2009), with Finishing Line Press. Her work has or will be published in American Journal of Poetry, Great Lakes Review, Pendemics, I-70 Review, Slipstream, and Trampoline.

St. Suzy Waud of the WXGT

SWWIM Every Day
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!


Let us not forget our songs
that sang us in our times

of powerlessnesss,
swirling in our sacrums like

soul’s Charybdis
as our legs walked to their beats

because our hearts were
muffled AM stations,

hollow in their antiquated mono.
May we thank them on the daily

for their visions of crashing
waves and changing tides

when all we felt: feedback, static,
our own cluttered airwaves.

______________________________________________________________________


Jennifer Schomburg Kanke lives in Florida where she edits confidential documents. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah, and Salamander. Her zine about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, Fine, Considering, is available from Rinky Dink Press. She serves as a reader for The Dodge.

Acid Test

SWWIM Every Day
by K. T. Landon

by K.T. Landon


The appraiser holds the ring to the light
and turns it carefully towards us: see, here,
where one of the smaller stones fell out
and was replaced by a cheaper one.
Under the microscope he looks for flaws,
stands the diamond in in a lineup
of greater and lesser gems. For the final assay,
he scratches the shank into a pane of smoky glass,
white line etching the polished pane. He drops
a clear bead onto the glass and with the tip
of the bottle draws acid across the scratch.
Whether metal dissolves tells you it’s worth.
We wait: time and damage the only proof.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

K. T. Landon is the author of 'Orange, Dreaming' (Five Oaks Press, 2017) and received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Narrative, North American Review, Spillway, and Best New Poets. She is a reader for Lily Poetry Review.

The Sweetness

SWWIM Every Day
by Laura Ann Read

by Laura Ann Read


My grandfather peels cellophane wrap
from a fresh pack of Camels,
taps one out, lights up,
and blows a perfect orbit above my head.
I rise on my toes and reach
toward a form that blurs
and disappears.

Why didn’t your sister come with you
on the boat? Where did she go?
In the windless heat and deep shadow
of a California orange grove,
his weathered hand gestures at the heavy farmer’s boots
that replaced a music stand. I glance down
at his feet, hoping for a glimpse
of my great-aunt’s face.
But all I see is dust
and a dust-choked
jimson-weed.

How long did it take
to get here from Odessa? Is it true,
what my mother says, that you brought
only those Yiddish songs you wrote?
He goes into the house and comes out
carrying a card-table and two folding chairs.
He sets up his chessboard in the green shade
of a citrus tree and darts from chair
to chair, playing against himself.
He doesn’t cheat. I watch him
nudge a knight, a queen. Grandpa,
when you were my age, did you laugh?
Did you dance? He swivels in his seat
and plucks a Valencia orange
that hangs on a branch behind his back.
He strips the rind with his pocket knife
and hands me a piece of fruit.

I eat it all, meat, pith, seeds—
the way the earth ate my grandfather’s life,
his sister’s. The way it will eat mine.
Juice streams down my chin. My eyes sting
from the sweetness.

______________________________________________________________________

Laura Ann Reed was a dancer and dance instructor in the San Francisco Bay Area before assuming the role of Leadership Development Trainer at the US Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in San Francisco, prior to the Trump Administration. She and her husband now reside in western Washington. Her work has been anthologized in How To Love the World, and has appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Loch Raven Review, and Willawaw, among other journals.


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