by Kari Gunter-Seymour
She’s lived here all her life,
by Rebecca Lauren
At night, conservationists come to save the sea turtle eggs, guide
blind hatchlings to waves away from shore. We play Scrabble
by the rented kitchen’s light. Another year until my aunt asks me
about children. Another morning before my mother mouths one day
to the baby with sand in his fists. Turn around, and you’re tiny, born to water
like tonight’s turtles teething on sand saucers, silver coins, birch beer cans.
They come with wire mesh cages Mom will trip over at dawn. They come for
raccoons and sand erosion, for my empty womb and me. They come because
turtles follow moonlight and menstrual blood, believing glare
to be ocean, home, no longer alone. Turn around and you’re grown
my mother’s wedding ring lost to clutching sea-jaws. What if they don’t
know the way beyond the amniotic sac, slight briny water on shore?
On the porch next door a stranger plucks folk songs that cry salty tears
for their mothers as a million tiny turtles make their way toward us.
It’s phantom glare of beach house that draws them. It’s boardwalk signs,
metal detector, stars, lullaby: Turn around, and you’re a young wife
with babes of your own, and I’ve forgotten the rest of the words.
Mama used to sing it to me. Mama used to sing.
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Rebecca Lauren lives in Philadelphia and serves as managing editor of Saturnalia Books. Her writing has been published in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, Ruminate, Salon, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Her chapbook, The Schwenkfelders, won the Keystone Chapbook Prize and was published by Seven Kitchens Press. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award.
by Christy Lee Barnes
by Urvashi Bahuguna
And then there was that frigid day in spring
we visited the seaside, cormorants speckling
the rock face, ice plant blooming a brilliant
pink as we headed up a hill to a vantage point
where we would point wildly in the distance
and claim, there lies Hawaii.
Wind swinging fists at the walkers the whole way
while the gulls watched, unmoved by the tide.
A laminated guide to the Coastal Birds of California
tucked snugly in my back pocket flew out
long before I knew it was gone. I patted my pocket
over & over as if I could will it back through force
alone. In wind like this, he said, impatiently, it’s long gone.
Even before he had finished speaking,
he began to trek back down the path,
back and back towards the trailhead, till he was
too far to call out to, and I saw a woman, bundled
and accompanied by her husband, give
something to him. I walked briskly, half ran,
to meet him, and took the guide from his certain hands.
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Urvashi Bahuguna is an Indian poet and essayist. Her work has been recognized by a Tin House scholarship, fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Charles Wallace India Trust, and Sangam House, an Eclectica Spotlight Author Prize, and a TOTO Award for Creative Writing. She is the author of Terrarium (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2019) and No Straight Thing Was Ever Made (Penguin India, 2021). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, The Adroit Journal, Wildness, The Shore, Orion, Eclectica, Mud Season Review, UCity Review, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net.
by Dayna Patterson
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Lisa Morin Carcia
In orbit, my child,
your hair, loose and free
from gravity, radiates like a halo.
You say the window
always facing Earth
is where everyone wants to be,
gazing at oceans, learning
to recognize the features
of the continents’ estranged faces.
At night—what is night to you?—
you tuck inside your hibernaculum,
into your sleeping bag
tethered to the inner wall
of the space station.
I feel it in my body,
my heavy body on Earth, the fear
when I think how thin the skin
between you and the cold
airless nothing, the fatal
cosmic rays. On camera, your lightness
dizzies my perception,
conducts your weightless joy.
As if you didn’t know
about the annihilating void!
Oh but you know, you do know—
I’m the one who forgets, every time,
as my head sinks into my pillow
and the ordinary air
moving in and out of my lungs
binds me to this life.
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Lisa Morin Carcia writes software specs for money and poetry for love. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sheila-Na-Gig online, Eunoia Review, Talking River Review, North American Review, Connecticut Review, Floating Bridge Review, Alimentum, and elsewhere. Born and raised in San Diego, she now lives near Seattle.
by Nina Bannett
She wonders why we both can’t inhale properly, all the I’m so weak, all the why don’t I die forced into my nighttime. A throbbing of over and over and good health isn’t what you want even though you have told me you will live to be a hundred and I tell you that you have gained a lucky thirteen pounds since your ninety-sixth birthday and your comeback is, that’s not a lot, I’m so alone here and for me to respond that I’ve lost both my parents would lead to suicide threats tossed at me, casually, pairs of dirty socks. I am a resting place, an old-fashioned hamper, or a washing machine, the top-loader at the bottom of your basement staircase, and when I would offer to save you a trip, two trips, you would troop down anyway, my grandmother-supervisor relentlessly checking, did you turn the right valve, or the left? One set of valves works constantly, the other intermittently and I don’t understand why we can’t work together. Wouldn’t I serve more easily as a machine if the pipes of my mouth stayed fully open?
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Nina Bannett is the author of These Acts of Water (2015) and a chapbook, Lithium Witness (2011). Her poetry has been featured in numerous journals including North American Review, Valley Voices, Bellevue Literary Review, CALYX, LUMINA, and WomenArts Quarterly. She is Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, City University of New York. See ninabannett.com.
by Laura Lee Washburn
After the dog ate the hive,
he hurt and shat bees for a week,
but the sweet comb drew him
with its waxy buzz and dripping love.
And then the tenaciousness of a terrier,
which he was not, not even part,
but still, knowing someone fought him
for this food, drove him to speed.
Like that, chomp, and it was gone, the sweet
sting and sting and sting. Oh, honey,
oh poisonous bees, or pop bottle
shaken with cold pills, ball of fire,
everlasting sex, the hunger and the anger,
all the kids locked out of the room.
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Laura Lee Washburn, Editor-in-Chief of The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative, is a University Professor, the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street), Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize), and The Book of Stolen Images (forthcoming from Meadowlark Press). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as New Verse News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, Radius, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Harbor Review’s annual chapbook prize is named in her honor.
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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