by Nicole Tallman
by Shelley Puhak
by Allison Blevins
by Lissette Lendeborg
by Franny Choi
by Taneum Bambrick
by Rio Cortez
by Julie Marie Wade
by Anuradha Bhowmik
by Jenny Xie
by Paul Tran
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.
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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.
by Leslie Morris
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.
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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.
by Suzanne Edison
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
by Leah Falk
by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke