by Arumandhira Howard
by Issa M. Lewis
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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The weight of his gunmetal tongue was staggering,
relentless. A projectile of marked velocity, propelled
by an explosion—in this case, uncontrolled. I had deflected—
turned a vulnerable shoulder to his trigger finger, left a strand
of hair that must have tugged in just the wrong way—
just enough—or not nearly—depending on which of us you asked.
The sex we never had made him twitch. Someone told me later
it was because he liked me so much
that he wanted me to vanish. That he wanted to do the vanishing.
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Issa M. Lewis is the author of Infinite Collisions (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Anchor (Kelsay Books, 2022). She is the 2013 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and a runner-up for the 2017 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Rust+Moth, Thimble, North American Review, South Carolina Review, The Banyan Review, and Panoply, amongst others. She lives in West Michigan.
by Jill Michelle
Now you can’t find your sentences.
Are they hidden in the ice box
where once we looked for treasures:
your keys, remote, glasses, watch?
Are they hidden in the ice box
forgotten on the office desk like
your keys, remote, glasses, watch?
Will we ever finish unearthing things
forgotten on the office desk like
that legal pad, the novel you began?
Will we ever finish unearthing things—
syllables strewn, verbs tossed?
That legal pad, the novel you began
slipping into Alzheimer’s grip—
syllables strewn, verbs tossed
just ghost notes, punctuated loss.
Slipping into Alzheimer’s grip
now you can’t find your sentences—
just ghost notes, punctuated loss
where once we looked for treasures.
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Jill Michelle's latest poems appear/are forthcoming in DMQ Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, Funicular Magazine, and Drunk Monkeys. Recent anthology credits include The Book of Bad Betties (Bad Betty Press, UK) and Words from the Brink (Arachne Press Limited, UK). She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more of her work at byjillmichelle.com.
by Olga Livshin
What was in it, but apples and air,
that cake all the Odesa moms baked
at their dachas? Apple slices, flirting
on magical doughy mattresses.
Ukrainian or not, we are all made
with a tinge of sweetness. Our memories
cannot imagine war. It begins anyway—
explosions, more real than any kitchen.
People ask you: What was that recipe for living?
My mom says: Sometimes there were cherries
instead of apples. Yes, children’s glossy eyes
begging the grownups: When is it cake time?
But what alchemy invites sugar and flour
to cohere into honeyed warmth? What
undoes the protective layers? Was war
mixed into our recipe from the beginning?
You had to run. You stuffed the mute idea
of the cake into your emergency bag. Only
apples and air, but now it weighs like a life,
and grownups are asking: Where do you think
you are going with that cake?
Immortal friend, stranger,
don’t answer them.
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Olga Livshin's poetry and translations appear in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and other journals. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019). Livshin co-translated A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of Vladimir Gandelsman's poetry (New Meridian Arts Books, 2022), and Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023).
by Julie Shulman
When I was ten and my father was sick we sailed to Alaska, which
only sounds like a heartwarming memoir. We ate spam sandwiches
and visited canneries and it was almost always cloudy; the sailing
wasn’t very good. Often I wished I was home, doing normal things like
seeing my friends or taking a shower. Dolphins and orcas sometimes swam
right next to the boat. We tried to find somewhere calm to anchor each night.
We ran aground twice, once on a sandbar with icebergs ominously circling
in the late summer evening light, once with the rudder clicking Morse code
into the ragged ridge of reef at morning’s low tide. Those events imprinted
into me deeply, both the terror of being shipwrecked and sunk but also
the euphoria of surviving and setting back out. There was a button on the
coffee thermos my dad brought out on deck on those long, light evenings
that clicked in the most satisfying way when you opened the spout. Waves
and wind grew calm as night fell, and I pressed it over and over again,
my own morse message carrying far as it does across water. Scientists have
discovered a sun they call the farthest star, halfway across the universe
and twenty-eight billion light-years away. By the time it was dark enough to see the stars
I was too tired to remember what my dad told me about them. The farthest star
burnt out billions of years ago, but its light moves across the empty expanses
of darkness, still transmitting some kind of message to us through the night.
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Julie Shulman is a writer and art director who lives outside of Boston with her architect husband, trusty rescue pup, and three very active boys. Her poems have been featured in Mass Poetry, Soul-lit, and Dartmouth-Hitchock’s 2021 anthology, Telling Our Stories Through Word and Image. She is currently working on her first chapbook, Rotten Medicine.
by Sara Munjack
by Julia B. Levine
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Say it and it will be so.
Say there are borders that cannot be broken.
That science is an expertly shot horror film
we are wise to avoid before bed.
Say that an executive order
has unshackled our lives from natural law,
our flesh from the entwined entire.
That, in time, we do not vanish.
Say that the first week you know its terminal,
I bake bread and bear it warm,
swaddled in paper towels, against my chest.
Outside, your husband picks lemons
shin-deep in a lawn gone neon-green.
In pictures above the table,
your two boys shine.
Say that I’m not sick too
of love as the original congress on loss.
Of hope handcuffed to habeas corpus.
Say blue for your eyes, black for your hair,
wren for your twitching hand in mine.
Say that it’s not happening
so that it won’t, the world no longer turning
at the speed of betrayal, a little sunlight instead
sown across your kitchen floor.
Say that we are poised to enter spring
and in the alt-truth all around us
its smooth sailing, easy peasy,
nothing but the blast furnaces
of the almond orchards fired up,
exploding in a sudden, ethereal snow.
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Julia B. Levine’s poetry has won many awards, including a 2021 Nautilus Award for her fifth poetry collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU press, 2021), as well as the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU, 2014). Widely published and anthologized, currently she is a 2022 American Academy of Poetry Poet Laureate Fellow for her work in building resiliency in teenagers related to climate change through poetry, science and technology. See juliablevine.
by Noel Thistle Tague
Dear plaque, dear tangle, dear knot
of undoing, dear daily vanishings—
keys, directions, sisters dead and alive
—dear harbinger of strangers, dear you:
the beads slipped the string again, just
as I was about to fix the clasp. Almost
perfect this time. Red prisms scatter
the floor, refracting sunlight like tiny
emergencies. You have taken so much.
Another missing person wanders off
into the night with nothing, not even
her name. Leaving as a girl defying
the house marm’s rules, coming to as
an old woman dishabille on the banks
of a minor body of water—a creek,
a brook, a kill, someplace where eddies
casually tumble a ragged leaf like a song
about time. About time: what if what
you inherit is forgetting? Your great-
grandmother, grandmother, father:
what will you do when it is your turn?
Run naked into the highway? Hold
your body like your arms belong to
your dead mother? Hum that old Bing
Crosby tune like it’s the last and only
language you know? The strangers arrive
with too much in their eyes. They want—
what? To solve the keys’ disappearance,
to be the arms that hold you. Disease,
touch not this house. You are a blight
that blackens language. If self is cast
in the grasp of one’s relationship
to others, you are the fire that razes
the forge. If the dead are only as stead-
fast as what the living remember, you
are the bleed. If the body is a house,
you are the carpenter ants in the joists
and the bank at the door. Nonetheless
you will have me, which is why I leave
a paper trail. The strangers again—
be patient, I am opening my mouth.
For I have finally strung the words:
Aphasia would be a beautiful name for a daughter.
Each day she staggers out of death
with beads in her pockets and whirls off
on her bicycle into the white afternoon.
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Noel Thistle Tague grew up in the Thousand Islands Region of northern New York State, where she learned to endure a good cold snap and wait for the ground to thaw. She now lives in a small town in mid-coast Maine with her family and works at the University of Maine at Augusta, where she is an assistant professor of English. Every so often, her children play quietly together, and she writes.
by Ekoko Pauline Omadeke
by Dion O'Reilly
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
—Anne Sexton
When I flew past, giants
turned to watch me,
air transformed my skin
to the shape of wind—
my feet were nob-less,
my chin, cameo ivory,
no score from lip to nostril,
no rumples on the flat
sheet of my cheek.
Hips and femurs, dense
as a bison’s, took me down
to the warm silt
of Canyon de Chelly,
tramped twenty miles up
wildflower trails at Wishon.
My brain tore shapes
from the walls of cliffs—
glyphed deer from the Holocene
the rust-blown shapes of hands.
Oh, my body sweltered,
with every kind of female heat.
Night seeped into morning—
disco balls, ten-speed careening
through traffic, catcalls as common
as chanticleers on the Ponderosa.
Once I had hair,
Medusa-wild, butt-length.
I thought its feathery glaze
would save me.
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Dion O'Reilly’s collection, Ghost Dogs, was shortlisted for The Catamaran Prize and The Eric Hoffer Award. Her second book, Sadness of the Apex Predator, will be published by Cornerstone Press. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She facilitates workshops and hosts a podcast at The Hive Poetry Collective. Recently, her poem "The Value of Tears" was chosen by Denise Duhamel as winner of the Glitter Bomb Award.
by Judy Ireland
Sleep three kids to a bed, switch beds with anyone who works
a different shift. Cut seat belts out of cars because the dinging won’t stop,
drive rods through plugged-up catalytic converters that cost too much to fix.
Borrow chains from backyard swing sets to fling over big tree branches
and hoist motors into the air. Know not only how to pull an entire motor
but how to put another one in. Remove their car batteries during below-zero
weather, take them indoors for the night so the ignition will turn over
in the morning. Go to welding school, make multiple pairs of brass knuckles
just for practice. Drive their cars despite suspended licenses so they won’t
lose their jobs, get kicked out of convenience stores for not wearing shoes,
die from years of breathing polyurethane and gasoline and engine exhaust,
die from drinking, die from old age while they’re still young. Give you their last
can of beer, drop you off somewhere on their way to see their probation officer,
even if it makes them late. Turn off all the lights after supper, except the one
in the hallway, to save on the electric bill. Sit on the couch, watch TV in the dark,
wait for someone to get home from a night shift, wait for a child to go to sleep,
for something to happen that’s probably never going to happen anyway.
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Judy Ireland’s poems have appeared in Hotel Amerika, Calyx, Saranac Review, Eclipse, Cold Mountain, Coe Review, and in other journals and anthologies. Her book, Cement Shoes, won the 2013 Sinclair Poetry Prize and was published in 2014 by Evening Street Press. She is currently Co-Director for the Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches and Senior Poetry Editor & Reading Series Producer for the South Florida Poetry Journal. She teaches at Palm Beach State College.
by Melissa Eleftherion
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I am trying to understand you, moth
Your brown blink of dun fur dotted white buzzing
You, dead on my office floor
You, taunting me on the house porch
Who do you carry?
The Internet tells me you bear a skull on your thorax
But I see a smiling pig snout as if you welcomed the down and out and muddy
Do I know you? Did we meet on the beached fishing boat in Monterosso?
I sense you have a message transcending statistical data
We are both honey-named short proboscis Medusas
Larvae for the undercurrent’s meat
Taxonomical aberrations
Pierce the wax, damage the fruit
The myth of my Italian heritage says I may have the malocchia
To be stalked by a death’s head moth
To be stalked by wings I must carry a horn
Stout tongue of the stigma
If the oil forms an eye, your fur is mine
Myth says moths are dead souls
Your body was as intact as a specimen
As I set you in the wastebasket
Where is the apparition you’ve been carrying?
I want to talk to her.
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Melissa Eleftherion is a cis queer human, a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & eleven chapbooks, including trauma suture (above/ground press, 2020), & sunflower spell (poems-for-all, 2022). Her work has been widely published in various journals including The Berkeley Poetry Review, Paperbag, & Entropy, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net. Born & raised in Brooklyn, Melissa founded and co-curates The San Francisco State Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange with Elise Ficarra. She now lives in Northern California where she manages the Ukiah Branch Library, curates the LOBA Reading Series, and serves as the Poet Laureate of Ukiah. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.
by Kathy Jacobs
How do you love me let me count your ways
With an uppercut, a kidney jab, a backhand slap
Hair by the roots, jammed to a barricade, slugged
To the ground, to the depth your fist can reach
Freely, as men are left to do; purely, from jealousy and spite
With passion driven by monstrous ego, with hands and words
and knives and knees and covetousness of my body,
my choice, my dignity, my liberty, my land
With boots and bullets, tanks and airstrikes, with need
to prove your dominance, your excuses, your entitled rage
On court benches and my kitchen floor, in senate chambers
and through cities’ streets, on every step and stage
Seizing my smiles, my pleas, my breath
Despite all tears I’ll love you better after death
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Kathy Jacobs' work has been published in SWWIM Every Day: Sing the Body, Plainsongs, The Comstock Review, Finelines, and anthologies by the Nebraska Writers Group, including How It Looks from Here: Poetry from the Plains.
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