by Nicole Callihan
that my husband was never
by Karla Daly
by Emily Lake Hansen
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I learned to swim inland. Somewhere
in Maine my mother took me to a lake,
a round, sandy bottom thing shaded by trees.
We called it a beach as if we could make
it so by naming it. If we called it love,
then it was love. The first duty station
I remember wasn’t even on a coast.
There it snowed in droves and we lived in a house
with green shutters. Or at least I think
they were green. My memory’s broken
sometimes like a naval base without a sea.
My father told planes where to land,
my mother cried into her soup, I read
fairy tales in the closet and we called it
home. At the lake I swam out to a far
away dock. I cannonballed into schools
of minnows. I shivered in my pink suit,
the water cold like snow.
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Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, bisexual, and invisibly disabled poet and memoirist and the author of Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as the chapbooks The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press) and Pharaoh's Daughter Keeps a Diary (forthcoming from Kissing Dynamite Press). Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The McNeese Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Rust + Moth, and Atticus Review among others. A recent finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition and the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, she lives in Atlanta where she is a PhD candidate at Georgia State University and an instructor of English and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College.
by Meghan Sterling
I held my baby daughter in her yellow rainsuit every day
on the four-month trip out West: Big Sur, Olympia, Whistler,
Glacier, smile all tooth and grimace in our photographs by the sea,
the yellow nylon like a fever I clutched so I wouldn’t throw her down
to dirt and dart away. Madness’ keen approach like a wolf, lit by stars,
steering my hands to shred at my skin, a crow’s beak tearing apart
a nest in its search for hunger’s end. My daughter’s need a dog’s
steady howl, all night her shrieks of want no voice could answer,
no touch could calm. My breasts shrugged their empty flesh
and I sang a lullaby to still the tremble at the corners—
all the pretty little horses and their bright stampede across my hands,
the walls of the metal camper thin as a knife’s knowing blade.
Every cliff’s lip I considered from a stone’s view—such a long way
down, such a quick step to go from rest to motion, fall to free.
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Meghan Sterling’s debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), came out in 2021. Sterling’s work is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Colorado Review, Poetry South, and many others. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), her collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and her collection, View from a Borrowed Field, which won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize, are forthcoming in 2023.
by Kashiana Singh
after “Scale” by Helen Mort
I measure myself against
the thunderstorm that comes unannounced—
the weight of its howls, the air
locked inside the cage of a black cloud,
against my own held breath,
or the trophy you won for your songs.
I measure myself in
your whispers falling
like condensation
that stays on dutiful
edges of forgotten coffee mugs,
nervous, as if fingerprints
locked inside of droplets
could come alive.
I measure myself against
sandcastles—weightless
as they merge into pleated waves.
My weight is
30 pounds more than Laika,
your dog, just before she died
when she was old and fat—
ten pounds less than the maple in our front yard,
its weight calculated by multiplying the volume
of its presence by the density of its wood.
My weight can also be measured
in bags of rice, flour, ragi—enough
pulses for a satsang gathering
at our own upcoming funerals.
But some days it feels heavier
than this house, a water-logged
presence like the street wrapped
around Maple enclave.
I am the curved intersection
warping itself, a kingsnake
doubled up around a cave.
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Kashiana Singh calls herself a work practitioner and embodies the essence of her TEDx talk - Work as Worship into her everyday. She proudly serves as a Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News. Her newest full-length collection, Woman by the Door, was released with Apprentice House Press in 2022. Kashiana lives in North Carolina and carries her various geopolitical homes within her poetry.
by Sandra Crouch
Thirst is such a simple thing
to heal. Two hands
cupped toward one another
the wine-rich drink of earth
the way it felt to swim
wildly alive.
In the ship of your body
the soul misses the holy bruise
blue from that army of blood
rushing to the wound's side
erasing your sharp edges
softening—
Our veins are absolutely strings
and a fire's struck hiss
in heaps of tender slack.
But the heart is just a muscle
parked beneath the highway overpass
biting her lip.
Fibrillating memory
filled with the amniotic of our own awe.
The earth is just rotating on its axis,
her body a parenthesis
with midwifery hands.
She is tired, tired in the marrow of her bones
spun out into the dark.
But no one heals what they refuse to look at.
Fever is how the body prays, how it burns
as if you were its keeper, not its ghost.
Send the throat stone down.
Be the body breaking everything else open
as a tongue between the teeth.
Night is a mouth, hungry and endless
beyond the mapped world
calling from our porch to come look at the sky.
Come 'round, come whether-or-not
this is a life without sunrise.
Come lightning strike,
there's nothing to be done but turn and praise.
Come undone, come falling apart
clutched close in earth's dun fist.
Let night whisper into the hull
of your ear, the wound still your mouth
bringing it into being,
longing to be whole as a body.
Between every form and its arc
is the sound of the beginning
held taut in the sweetening air.
Braided Cento:
Jen Stewart Fueston, Madonna, Complex, Cascade Books, 2020
Andrea Gibson, Lord of the Butterflies, Button Poetry, 2018
Jennifer K. Sweeney, Foxlogic Fireweed, The Backwaters Press, 2020
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Sandra Crouch, MA, is a poet, artist, and letterpress printer recently transplanted to Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has been published in HAD, MER Literary, Rogue Agent, Rust+Moth, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. You can follow along at https://sandracrouch.com.
by Diana Whitney
August heat rises from the river.
The girl tells her parents she’s at a friend’s
then crosses the state line into Ohio,
brings a bottle of vodka to spike
her Slushy, beelining for the football party,
the boy she likes in the basement.
She sips another drink down in the basement,
the summer night rushing like a river
of stars, fifty kids crushing into the party,
bright and free at sixteen. Her friend
hands her a red Solo cup of ice spiked
with Smirnoff, a favorite in Ohio
where they live for football, for Ohio
victory, Roll Red Roll chanted at the party,
chanted at the stadium, boys spiking
the pigskin, smashing their bodies, the river
inscrutable at the edge of town. Her friends
want to bounce to another party.
She still remembers leaving that party,
following the boy, a hero in Ohio,
his teammates in tow and maybe her friends.
People say she threw up in the basement.
People say she threw up on the curb. The river
is silent as the car glides past, spikes
of willow leaves floating in murk. Trace a spike
in uncertain events after the party:
she wakes beneath a blanket, cloudy as the river,
not back home but naked in Ohio,
freaking out on a couch in a stranger’s basement
missing her panties, her phone, her friends.
The court will call on the testimony of friends.
The girl, Jane Doe, says someone spiked
her drink. Was she blackout-drunk on the basement
floor or passed-out-drunk like a whore at the party?
The boys carried her out, the pride of Ohio.
There are photos and videos, a river
of pixels. One was the quarterback, a party
bro, sharing her body with friends in Ohio—
spikes circle the basement, sink in the river.
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Diana Whitney writes across the genres with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Kenyon Review, Glamour, and many more. Her poetry debut, Wanting It, won the Rubery Book Award, and her inclusive anthology, You Don't Have to be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, became a YA bestseller and won the 2022 Claudia Lewis Award. Find out more at diana-whitney.com.
by Jeni De La O
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Jane Wiseman
I have given you bread and salt.
You salted the furrows, you salted the wound.
You wound your way across the Adriatic
ten years to me, while I, at cross-purposes,
wily, unraveled this loom, turned into your maybe,
turn and return and turn again. Made me
bitter. Made me old. You, what may you gain?
Kill the suitors, hang the maids? What? What?
You know the secret of our bed? It suits you that
I wait. No. This time when you’re gone, when
the weight of you is gone, I step onto the portico, and
Goddess, I hold up my hands. You, down at the port
with all your faithful hands. A sail stands in to harbor.
This time I’m done. No more understanding woman.
If you come back, know it, I’ll be gone. Don’t think to moor
in that same cove again.
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Jane M. Wiseman is a poet who splits her time between very urban Minneapolis and the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico. She enjoys all kinds of poetry and writes in other forms, too. She is an enthusiastic Sunday painter, an avid reader, and loves spending time with family. She holds an undergraduate degree from Duke University, an MA from the University of Illinois-Urbana, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
by Erin Kim
by Molly Kugel
—Scottish Gaelic bed-going prayer
You woke to blue, the color of tourmaline
and then the storm at sea, how it dimmed
everything to gray like an old film.
If it were slipping away, this would be a warning.
You woke to magnolia, the sun and then hot
sand, the color of samara, those dried seeds of the
elm come fall, the weather baked on your skin
like that first summer on the Cape before
everything had happened, when you were
still waiting, the waters settling, a still boat.
You woke to green, the fields in Pennsylvania
not quite verdant because of the ash, almost
loden or shale, your mother calling
your name from afar but near—when
you had a mother and father still, the long acres
appeared in front of you, asked what will you do.
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Molly Kugel is the author of The Forest of the Suburbs (Five Oaks 2015). Her book, Groundcover (Tolsun 2022), and chapbook, fo gheasaibh (dancing girl press 2022), are forthcoming. Her poems have appeared most recently or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Calyx, Mid-American Review, Cider Press Review, and Josephine Quarterly. She recently completed a PhD in Literary Studies at the University of Denver. She is the ecology editor for Cordella magazine.
by Leah Schnurr
You will give birth in the spring when the invasive species take hold. The dandelion, the dog strangler. You will become a witch. How else to explain how your body mutated blood and ichor into new life? You will pay close attention to the seasons, what grows and what dies. Do ten sun salutations to a star that hasn’t risen. Divine meaning from small flickers, the squawks and growls your creatura sends up to the moon. She will be fat with love and milk. You will have to keep the other witches from eating her. You will look for birds to bring messages from the dead. Welcome the new year in November. Sing “All Hallows” to yourself when the skin between here and after stretches thinnest. Are you still listening to us? All your miracles will be wrung out and breathe without you.
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Leah Schnurr lives in Ottawa, Canada, where she writes very slowly. Her poetry has appeared in The Windsor Review and is forthcoming in CAROUSEL. She tweets sporadically like the introvert she is at @LeahSchnurr.
by Shannon Finck
I’m watching a girl who looks like my sister write lines of poetry in a Moleskine notebook during the presentation on Frank Stanford, the “Swamprat Rimbaud.” This is exactly what I imagine my sister would be doing. She doesn’t dig poems about outhouses and knives. My sister would turn from all this and write a love poem. She wouldn’t see “The Snake Doctors” as a love poem, even though they ride each other again and again in the dark. What do I know? Maybe it isn’t a love poem. The girl who looks like my sister raises her left hand to ruffle (v.) her whimsical pixie cut. Ruffles (n.) on her sleeve flap in the air conditioner, and the auditorium fills with fiddleheads and frog song. The watercolor bluebirds on her blouse soar and land on the backs of plush theater seats. Her right hand stops. She looks up. My right hand stops and I look up. The presenter talks about the consistency of blood.
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Shannon Finck is a lecturer of English at Georgia State University, where she earned her Ph.D. in 20th-century and contemporary literature and theory in 2014. She also holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and narrative poetry from Georgia College. Her creative work appears in FUGUE, Lammergeier, The Florida Review, Willawaw, and elsewhere. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for the independent literary quarterly, Birdcoat, and is Co-Founder of Ghost Peach Press.
by Cynthia Bargar
Luckily, the night ends
with a calm over Valparaíso.
Neruda’s chair a cloud,
they tell themselves.
A boat muffles
the sound of sleep.
An old woman sighs.
From her fullness or
freedom. From tears
beading the sky.
He might have fled
to Mexico before dying.
Children play &
bend their bodies
in these streets.
Until they scatter
like stars upon the mountains,
their chatter & rattle,
like so many questions
from the withered
flowers around the corner.
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Cynthia Bargar is Associate Poetry editor at Pangyrus. Her poems have appeared in many journals, most recently Rogue Agent, Book of Matches, Driftwood Press, and in the book, Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara E. Cohen (Provincetown Arts Press, 2021). Her first poetry collection, Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room, came out from Lily Poetry Review Books in January, 2022. Cynthia lives with her partner, cartoonist Nick Thorkelson, in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
by Sherry Shenoda
by Shelley Wong
by Zeina Hashem Beck