by Kathy Jacobs
How do you love me let me count your ways
by Anne Yarbrough
We went from one place—our home, that is—
to a place we’d never been, to make a
theological point. I could have had this baby
my mother and my aunts around me, in my own bed. Instead
we had to go to Bethlehem. Pretty pointless trip, I said.
I wasn’t into narrative at the time, the dramatic
possibilities. Later they added the donkey. There was
no donkey. I walked, like everybody. My belly sloshed
against me with every step. I could feel the animal
inside me protest, unfurl, hurl its sticky fins against
the wet insides of its skin cave. I was its outside,
my own taut skin, possessed, leaping wild—
this furious journey
to claim the realm of air.
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Anne Yarbrough's first collection, Refinery (Broadkill River Press), received the 2021 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. Her poems have been or will be in Poet Lore, Delmarva Review, Philadelphia Stories, Amethyst Review, Gargoyle Magazine, CALYX Journal, and elsewhere. She lives along the lower Delaware River.
by Kelly Grace Thomas
My mother-in law tells me
a baby will not come
without music. Says in Sufi
cultures, any woman
who wants to bloom
mother is sent
to dark. She must steep
inside a cave, damp with doubt,
until she pulls song
from want. She must compose
the lyrics to welcome
her child in. And when she returns
certain with hunger,
she must teach
each cousin, neighbor,
family the chorus,
until stranger
and soothe mean
the same. So tonight, my child,
I build my body,
your village. I unfork the river,
water each vineyard, serenade this sea.
I have written this world
for you. Can you hear us
chanting your name?
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Kelly Grace Thomas is the winner of the 2020 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, was released with YesYes Books in 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Muzzle, and more. She is the Director of Education for Get Lit- Words Ignite. See kellygracethomas.com.
by Camille Carter
by Meg Reynolds
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Nepal Paper, Methyl Cellulose, Hair, Fabric, Glass. Kiki Smith, 1999
As usual, I have lost you. You’ve left me
walking a crooked mile. If I stand this
morning, I’ll spill to the floor.
Who else looks at you? Who combs your snarls
and dodges your teeth? Who listens to your pleas
for milky affection? Who strokes
your brown and leathered head?
You have my eyes, that daunted look.
The red-membrane cape wasn’t meant for this.
I stitched it for the yard, to stitch you
to the yard and lullabies and felted goodnight stories.
O little wolf, did you
have to follow the moon
like a ball bouncing out the door?
Wasn’t our house, choked with ivy
and old time, enough for you?
When I lie on my back at night,
my back is your bare foot,
thick-pricked with thorns.
I can’t sleep under your bloody coat,
the red, red loss of you.
How long before you stop unspooling
between tree trunks and make a home with me?
How long before you lacquer me in happiness,
a film of laughter thin on the hardwood?
Come home. I long
to smooth your bent dress.
Isn’t my wanting reason enough?
I have enough of me. You
are the thing worth having, worth
all the bitemarks, the unknowable cost.
I’ve left you a brick of chocolate
by the door. Come kiss me goodnight
with that mess on your face.
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Meg Reynolds is a poet, artist, and teacher from New England. Her work has appeared in The Missing Slate, Mid-American Review, Fugue, The Offing, and Inverted Syntax amongst others. Her first collection of poetry comics, A Comic Year, was published in October 2021 from Finishing Line Press. Her second collection, Does the Earth, is forthcoming in the spring of 2023 from Harpoon Review Books. She lives in Burlington, VT with her family.
by Lisa Dordal
April 3, 2001
My mother’s final correspondence was a postcard
dated six days before her death and received
the Monday after—the way postcards sometimes arrive
after the traveler has returned. This one
is from Graceland (a place I know she’d never been)—
the photo of Elvis, half in shadow, half bright.
Clipped to the card is a scrap of yellow paper on which I had transcribed—
from a phone call weeks after her death—my father’s words:
Sometimes alcohol attacks the heart—
for him, a singular admission; and, too,
that he’d known about the bottles—Years ago,
he said. I found them years ago. Like me,
had pulled away the books on the shelves in her study,
to find them there—tucked by her own hand—
like something nearly alive, waiting for her return.
My father and I—each departing from that room—
saying nothing to anyone. Her words
on the card are cheerful—niceties about my recent visit—
ending with: I have to cut back. She means
from Campus Ministry—a committee from which she’s just resigned.
The blue ink of her fountain pen is a random mix
of dark strokes and light—as if my mother,
noticing the fading, corrected with a firmer hand—
giving the appearance of a small battle transpiring.
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Lisa Dordal teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University and is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; Water Lessons (April 2022); and Next Time You Come Home (forthcoming 2023), all from Black Lawrence Press. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, Narrative, Image, The New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Greensboro Review, RHINO, Ninth Letter, and CALYX.
by Laura Joyce-Hubbard
In the centrifuge, I spin. Searching for staying-power like a trout searches for a midge, I hold out, hold on. I’m strapped in with a five-point harness.
High-G acceleration. I’m twirling like a ballerina on point: around, and faster, and around and faster, blood pooling toward my boots. My back pressed; vertebrae compressed.
The Air Force trainers taught me the anti-G strain-maneuver: thighs and buttocks squeeze as hard as you can, they said, everything below the waist to force blood to reverse course, away from the feet, back toward the brain.
Vision wanes into a swirl of gray streaks—smacked. G-Lock so close, it whispers in my vestibular, the middle ear—You’re almost gone.
A loss of consciousness one breath away. Drink your oxygen like a lady sipping wine, they said.
My skin travels the length of my face, like ripples spreading from a stone thrown into a still pond. They record my spin for proof: how ugly you look, trying to pass their tests. I can’t see them anymore: behind the glass, can’t hear their crass comments about weeding out.
Like a nautilus shell, my body curls inward. Squeeze. Press back.
If a mind can will a body, a current, a field-flow of blood, a consciousness: then I’ll stay with it, stay with me, breathe, stay with me, hold, stay with, stay, stay.
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Laura Joyce-Hubbard’s a fiction editor for TriQuarterly. Her work appears in Creative Nonfiction, Sewanee Review, Chicago Tribune, the Rumpus, Boulevard, Ninth Letter, Hippocampus, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her poetry and nonfiction has been supported by Ragdale Foundation and the NEA to attend a residency at VCCA. She won Southeast Review’s 2021 Ned Stuckey-French nonfiction contest. Among the first women to pilot the C-130H in the USAF, Laura now lives with her family in Highland Park, Illinois.
by Anjanette Delgado
The blue silk blouse
breaks before it
grazes my ribs.
I don’t want to die.
I want to kill
myself, my elbows
splayed above, up,
over my head stuck
in the textile, in its steel,
my fat—trapped—as if
I were praying to the skinny
girl, all B cups and bones,
I’m told lives inside
my excess brown
pounds forced to wear
Lycra. That girl stretches,
then screams, this is no way
to breathe, or be—
still, why can’t silk
slide, graceful, on its way
down? A lovely puddle
of blue, diving, unworn,
headfirst into the ground
beside my feet.
It’s art, says the skinny
girl then, and she’s not
talking about me.
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Anjanette Delgado is a Puerto Rican writer based in Miami, and the award-winning author of three books: the novels The Heartbreak Pill and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho, and the multi-genre anthology Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, published by the University of Florida Press in 2021. Anjanette's work has also appeared in The New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, Vogue, NPR, HBO, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, the Boston Review, Lithub, Electric Literature, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, december magazine, The Rumpus, The Hong Kong Review, and others.
by Heather Sellers
over lawns and parking lots and land
the black water rose,
rose higher than ever before,
downtown knee-deep in dark liquid—just
under an hour. I fled
through rivers of rain as the road disappeared
behind me in wake.
Three days of storm, three days of hard sun, then
at last the water slid slowly away, a great black cape
dragged under the clear blue sea.
I drove back home alone along the frazzled wires,
across the frond-strung bridge,
down drowned Denver Street, where broken palms
and dining chairs in ruined taffeta skirts
and sodden sofas turned upside-down listed on lawns
and tables and bins lined the curbs
and curtain rods speared from black trash bags
and tarps crumpled over soaked grass like giant placemats
matting undone cupboards, the blistered veneer,
children’s bright plastics, grimacing plush,
outside of every single house:
island turned inside out.
In the fetid puddle
at my doorstep, I envisioned the For Sale sign
just above the waterline and in the great wave
that might pour forth when I opened the door,
if I opened—I must open—I imagined catfish,
caught, as if in amber, with my books
and seaweed, earrings, the tea things,
all the old silences rushing past.
As a girl I lived here
in the monotonous salt-silk waves
as I lived in God. Sea in me
and I in sea, both of us mute,
and sand-burnt, sun-soaked, fearless,
twinned with our endless vision of home,
the distant shore.
She’s out too far!
Did anyone notice? No one
knew me like the sea.
I wore her around my waist
as skirts, mine to unfurl
if I wanted, only if I ever wanted.
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Heather Sellers, a Florida native, is the author of two new poetry collections, Field Notes from the Flood Zone and The Present State of the Garden, as well as two previous collections, The Boys I Borrow and Drinking Girls and Their Dresses. Her textbook, The Practice of Creative Writing, is in its fourth edition, following two books on craft, Page After Page and Chapter After Chapter.
by Kristen Zory King
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Every time my brother calls stoned
he tells me he doesn’t believe
in God. I know, I say. What else is there?
I list all the things I know for sure,
like a kind of centipede that can see
an entire spectrum of purple
we could never imagine. Or, an oak tree
older than things like math or music.
I keep going, though I know he is not listening.
Some frogs bark, the sound louder
than a pack of dogs. You can hear them
best each May. Brother, don’t you remember
spring always comes late?
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Kristen Zory King is a writer, teaching artist, and yoga instructor based in Washington, DC. Recent work can be found in Electric Lit, The Citron Review, Mason Jar Press’s The Jarnal: Volume Two, Stanchion, and mac(ro)mic, among others. She is currently at work on a collection of flash fiction stories, among other projects. Learn more at kristenzoryking.com.
by Alexandra Crivici-Kramer
I remember when I learned my body
is a river. In some places a whisper,
& in others louder than the groans
of a cut tree.
Clear, roiled, demure, expansive.
Fed by rain, adored by roots
of ferns. In late summer
wildflowers bloom along
my edges, & in winter I learn to
live beneath
the superficial.
I can hold a landscape
on my hip, a valley
in the crook of my arm—
safe, swaddled, and warm.
Oh how free I felt,
when I welcomed
impermanence
and gave this body
the grace to transform.
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Alexandra Crivici-Kramer earned her MA from The Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College and has been a member of the Poetry Society of Vermont since 2017. Her poetry can be found in The Mountain Troubadour, The Bread Loaf Journal, The Inflectionist Review, The Button-Eye Review, and The Middlebury Centennial Journal. She is a teacher of English and Humanities, a certified yoga and ski instructor, and lives in Vermont with her husband, dog, and son born last spring.
by Silvia Curbelo
In the place where sad
is a verb she holds
the window open
as if light were a book
she could live in.
Over and over
her small hands
the fragile, brimming
cup, the bluest
page. Love’s tender
necessary grammar.
A flower pressed into the flesh
of a reminder. Words
twisted into feathers.
Tiny arrows. Her broken
origami bird.
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Silvia Curbelo was born in Matanzas, Cuba, and emigrated to the U.S. with her family as a child. Her poetry collections include Falling Landscape and The Secret History of Water, both from Anhinga Press, and Ambush, winner of the Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation, and the Writer’s Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and more than three-dozen anthologies and textbooks, including Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford/St. Martin) and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (W.W. Norton). Silvia has lived in Tampa, Florida, all her adult life.
by Nicole Callihan
that my husband was never
a breast man; that I was wasted
on him, my stepfather once joked;
that the doctor can make nipples
of scar tissue, though they flatten
over time, or do not take at all;
that the lady can airbrush color
on my areolas, though she warns
against the deeper pinks, as I’m
getting older; that I’m getting older;
that there are calcium pills
to counteract the pills that leach
the calcium from my bones,
and other pills, and others,
and the cold water, too,
with which I swallow it all down.
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Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her books include SuperLoop and the poetry chapbooks: A Study in Spring (with Zoë Ryder White, 2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), Aging (2018), and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White, 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Find out more at nicolecallihan.com.
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