Watering Day

SWWIM Every Day
by Mónica Gomery

by Mónica Gomery


Jess brings all the plants into the bathroom. Countertops glow neon jade,
the tub sprouts palm fingers, fiddlehead fig. Waxy verdant cloister
in the sink, emerald dog tongues tonguing porcelain. There’s so much life
to tend to. Jess turns each measuring cup’s silver ear into the brown world
beneath it, the water listening for where it needs to spread among the roots,
the soil offering a welcome. They know each variety’s preference—
some take water from the tap, some bronze at touch of chlorine—so they
patiently filter batches and distribute, pot by pot. When I crack the bathroom
door in the middle of the day, I walk into a glasshouse. Room humming green,
vines corkscrew across the windowsill, faces bright with chlorophyll and drying
in the sunlight. I can hear their drip and sigh. After bathing. After being fed.
We’re trying to discern whether we want to become parents.
A thing you have to work for. Money spent, biology precision-tinkered
in a lab. We take turns lifting the question with our hands, passing
the question between us like it’s already our child; you hold her now,
this fleshy question mark, you pat her on the rump, you wash her hair.
You walk her through the rain. It’s hard to feel like we’re enough, our bodies
settling earthbound into thirty-six. We thirty-six our way through
the supermarket, trying to cut back on sugar. We thirty-six our bed,
sleeping in a limb-knot with the dog. Our knees thirty-six us on our runs
through the neighborhood. Chasing nothing. A teacher of mine
sends a message: I’m looking forward to failure. We thirty-six
the conversation after dinner, me perched on the kitchen counter,
Jess pressed into a stool, the rubber tree ten feet tall reaching raw hands
around the night, around our biggest questions. We’re surrounded
by what greens us. We nourish veined and growing things. The future
a metallic ear tilted toward the potting soil of our hummed and sighing lives.

______________________________________________________________________

Mónica Gomery writes poems about queerness, loss, diaspora, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. Her second book, Might Kindred, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, and is newly out from the University of Nebraska Press. She has been a nominee for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net, and a graduate of the Tin House Winter Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Waxwing, Black Warrior Review, Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, and other publications. Read more at monicagomerywriting.com.

Walking Towards Dr Siddhu, MS, Endocrinology

SWWIM Every Day
by Vasvi Kejriwal

by Vasvi Kejriwal


after Chen Chen



With Rumi in my purse (I’ll be
in the waiting room a while). Without
waterproof chappals. With Bandra in monsoon.
With Fem21 powder mixed in cold-pressed
celery for a morning routine—chaste berry
ashwagandha. Without last month’s savings,

now replaced by Fem21. With periods that arrive
like my anger: always late. With child-wed
great-grandmothers whose angers
could not afford to be on time.
Without a tongue that knows Marwari but loves
to French. With Dadi saying zits are the worst

thing that could happen to a woman. With a face
full of pockmarks. With Dr Siddhu’s voice
in my head: that happens when DHEA is high.
do sport. move. Without knowing how to swim.
With idiocy enough to raft in the Relli’s
high tide in an ill-fitting lifejacket.

With Spotify looped to "Running Up That Hill."
With a father till 391 days ago. With my mother’s
anger at her mother. With an ache to make myself fall
in love with my body. With chipped burgundy shellac.
With a childhood of hearing you have piano fingers.
With a love for eating dosa at Sunday breakfast

with my piano fingers. With a love for eating dosa
at any time. With a secret sisterhood shared with
Chughtai’s post-colonial daughters: from wanting
to forever veil my face like Goribi to wanting to bat
my lashes at every man who owns a house
in our hood, like Lajjo. With Dadi scrubbing

masoor, malai on my skin—to make it
white. With a Google search for Dali’s shapeshifting
phalluses in yesterday’s web history. With Regé-Jean Page’s
trench-deep voice, toasted like a husk of tobacco,
lulling me to bed at 4 a.m. Without enough
melatonin. With telling myself I’d never get a guy

like Regé-Jean Page. With an ache to have faith
in God. Without a single god (from our thousands)
to call out to when called whore
in public. With knowing it’s no better
in private. With 13 years of muscle memory
that cannot erase the Odissi squat. Without a single

headstand. With knowing my privilege
to buy into self-care as I squeeze a drop
of copaiba under my tongue. Without a mirror
from which my Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
does not stare back at me. With telling
& telling & telling myself that I am not that.

______________________________________________________________________

Vasvi Kejriwal received her LLB from Queen Mary University London in 2019. She has been a previous winner of the RATTLE Ekphrastic Challenge. Her works have appeared in Mekong Review, The Alipore Post, and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2021-22.

Ode to Union

SWWIM Every Day
by Athena Kildegaard

by Athena Kildegaard


There is that within—a burl, a knot, a lie—
that gets in the way of forming a perfect union.

But just as the onion contains itself within itself,
hidden, so does each of us hide within our union.

At breakfast the children tell crude jokes, and laugh,
and spit seeds. This is the consequence of union.

In the orchard, the orange grower speaks of scions
with whispered pride and strokes the bud union.

Aspens wear their wedding clothes and clack
in the wind. Between ice and cloud, an uncanny union.

“Behind the door you pull on the rope of longing,”
wrote Nelly Sachs. How rash the desire for union

and how persistent. It wears a hair shirt and a cloak
of dew held together by silk thread—a taut union.

______________________________________________________________________

Athena Kildegaard's sixth book of poems, Prairie Midden, has just appeared from Tinderbox Editions. Her poems have found homes in Beloit Poetry Journal, december, Ecotone, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.

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