by Sarah Dickenson Snyder
When I try my best not to say “fuck” as in
by Kindra McDonald
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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How long is the longest breath
you can hold? How long the grudge
of silence? How do you fight buoyancy
so well? Swelling your lungs with birdshot—
The slow rain bends the stems
of the tall weeds like piano keys.
In the steeple of your hands we lean in again
of the tall weeds like piano keys
the slow rain bends the stems
so well swelling your lungs with birdshot
of silence, how do you fight buoyancy?
You can hold, how long the grudge,
how long is the longest breath?
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Kindra McDonald is the author of the collections Teaching a Wild Thing, Fossils, and In the Meat Years and the chapbooks Elements and Briars and Concealed Weapons. She was the recipient of the 2020 Haunted Waters Press Poetry Award. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and is a poet-artist working in mixed-media and found poetry and a Teaching Artist at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, VA. She served as the Poetry Society of Virginia Southeastern region Vice President from 2019-2022. You can find her in the woods or at kindramcdonald.com.
by Alison Hurwitz
She knew how to be forgiven:
Filled to spilling over with the
holy spirit, she never missed those
all-day Sunday Masses on the Catholic channel,
Mass in person at the church. She was a total pro
at penitence.
Morphed to mother at fourteen to four small sisters and a brother,
she packed her brilliance into attic, became an empty
confessional. When we emerged from service,
went to Sunday dinner at King’s Table Buffet,
she waited till we left to use the bathroom,
then dumped
the table’s After-Eights into her best blue purse.
That first time when I emerged too soon,
pretended I saw nothing.
She took collection from another table’s
bowl to even out the emptiness, lips pursed.
I thought I had escaped, but then her notice crossed
the room, caught me as I tried to fix
my own reflection in a mirror, cheeks staining glass.
She would not meet my eyes,
just simpered, said I’ll pray for you
to lose those thighs before
you’re old enough to date.
My inheritance. Months after she
had passed, we unearthed her secret cache,
saw the way she had buffeted her heart
with candy in her drawers:
mints and chocolate kisses,
tootsie rolls rolled into girdles.
While her husband called her Sugar,
trapped inside her housewife life,
she minted hunger into currency,
pawned away her pain,
hairshirt nothing
but a mouth.
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Alison Hurwitz has been featured in Global Poemic, Words and Whispers Journal, Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus Volumes 1 and 2, Tiferet Journal, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice, and is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Book of Matches Lit Magazine, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She hosts a free online poetry reading, Well-Versed Words. Alison lives with her husband, sons and rescue dog in North Carolina. See more at alisonhurwitz.com.
by Cynthia Neely
by Ona Gritz
A narrow path overseen by a few
metal benches leads to the massive wonder
this place is named for, limbs the size of trunks,
and a plaque that dates it back to 1650.
Today, beneath that great latticework
of shade, my friends discuss
what is known about the communal
network of roots. Even a stump,
otherwise dead, still shares
what it has with the group. Meanwhile,
my own stingy core keeps replaying
a moment on the phone this morning,
Jean sniping in a way that was so old
and familiar it stung me to silence,
same tone, same words, I swear,
as in that first summer
when I was eighteen and enthralled with her.
Now I’m nearly sixty, she’s newly widowed
and, as she fingers the mottled bark,
I half think it must be illegal
to be pissed at a friend, no, a sister
with a grief that fresh. And yet,
as Sue explains how fungi are the brains
underground, my mind goes
from fungus to fester.
“How do botanists date trees,” Lisa asks,
“when they can’t see the rings?”
I shrug and glance at the gold band
that links Jean to an absence,
then hug my thickening middle
and, with it, the girl I was
who always assumed, whenever
someone was so much as brusque,
it was somehow her fault.
“I can’t get over this thing,” I say, wanting
to mean the sycamore. All it has felt
in its almost four hundred years.
All it must know and have forgiven.
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Ona Gritz’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, One Art, and elsewhere. Her books include Geode, a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and Present Imperfect: Essays. Ona is also a children's author and essayist. Recent honors include two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays, a winning entry in The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 project, and a 2022 Best of the Net nomination.
by Paola Bruni
The surf rumbles along like a misspent
youth, turning its pockets inside out, dumping
stolen goods. Beachgoers march like hooded patriots,
scour wet grains for polished stones, shells,
hanks of driftwood, smoky glass, jewels
and coins. Everyone wants something from the sea.
The ashes of a father float among the grit—
him reborn a porpoise whose hake pierces
my peripheral, as my chin tilts toward the waning moon
and I’m counting cloud formations that slide
across dusk like the bi-conical beads of an abacus.
He’s there, just beneath the jacket of grey
and I want to wrap my arms around a rubbery mammalian
body but I know it’s forbidden. Chasing ghosts
is its own kind of death. The downpour unhitches soil
from the cliff, uproots stinging nettle, coyote
brush, slips of lady fern in a heady rush of destruction
or perhaps, reunion. We don’t know. Earth reaching
for the sea. Surf racing toward the cliff. Bark
of a sea lion, ancient call of a conch. Rain fills our eyes
and ears, pummels the small bones of our faces.
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Paola Bruni is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize, as well as a finalist for the Mudfish Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, and Rattle, among others. Her debut book of poetry is an epistolary collection titled how do you spell the sound of crickets (Paper Angel Press, May 2022).
by Rachael Nevins
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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It’s possible to go wild again, says the woman sitting next to me
over breakfast this January morning at the monastery.
There are neurons in our hearts and guts,
she says, and we fail to heed them because we’ve filled our minds
with language. I’ve just met this woman
sitting here at this table by the ox-herding pictures.
She tells me she’s a farmer and that she speaks to the earth.
Getting messy is my dharma, she says. The soil is alive
and it wants us to listen.
I live in the city, where my fingers never touch the soil.
I have to seek the wilderness inside, I say, among
our cups and bowls and my children’s many
miniature cars and trucks. My dharma is simple.
I wake in the dark to write poems by hand, and the words
rise up from inside of me, unbidden.
They want me to listen.
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Rachael Nevins’s poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Literary Mama, Hazlitt, the Ploughshares blog, and elsewhere, as well as in her newsletter, The Variegated Life. She expects to complete her degree in Library and Information Studies at Queens College of the City University of New York in May, and her chapbook, Only Provisional, is forthcoming from Ethel in March. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
She’s lived here all her life,
a gift to know this land, its seasons,
tastes, smells, mindful of its wants—
even knowing every acre was once taken
by violence. We all have mortifications,
history’s footprints threaded among the trees.
From the porch, sunset paints the surface
of the pond, pregnant with twigs
and twitching insects, a Gaia of breeze
strums shuffled reeds.
She’s had a good cry, one that could
have left a lesser woman sharp-cornered.
Later she will wash the dishes,
her face splashed and wakened,
her life unremarkable as the house fly
balanced on her dinner plate,
rubbing its bristly bowed legs together.
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Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and a recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship Grant. Her poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022) and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, World Literature Today, The New York Times, and Poets.org.
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