by Annie Stenzel
(with a deep bow to Bruce Lee)
by Susan Barry-Schulz
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Lisa St. John
Perhaps I left
it in the violet
dusk, near the drowsy hum
of the bees’ nest.
Perhaps I let it fall
from my hands
at the river’s
edge.
Perhaps it is in
the belly
of the wolf—
the alpha
who watches me
at night as I sharpen
the knife,
pare away
at loss;
whittling
it down,
down.
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Lisa St. John is a writer living in upstate New York. Her chapbook, Ponderings, is available on her website at lisachristinastjohn.com. Her first full-length book of poetry, Swallowing Stones, is forthcoming from Kelsay Day Books. Lisa has published her poetry in journals such as The Poet’s Billow, Light, Entropy Magazine, The Poetry Distillery, Poets Reading the News, and Chronogram Magazine. Lisa’s nonfiction work has been published in Grief Digest and Sleet Magazine.
by Xiaoly Li
A photo on my cellphone—a mother holding her newborn baby
whose head is wrapped in gauze. The grandmother lies on a cot
staring at them. The gloomy basement, peeling walls.
They seem to hear sirens, shelling, explosions outside.
Another photo—women hold guns,
waiting to be called to the battlefield.
One raises her head, I tremble at her young face.
I see no end to the deep end.
In the chat groups from my motherland, my compatriots
fight online—some burn with anger, some spill words as knives,
some excuse the present by retelling the past, and some prepare a toast.
Suffocated, I drink a glass of sparkling cider, drive to Horn Pond.
Winter and spring battle out here—
Some parts of the pond are still frozen, shining like frosted glass.
Some crack to the blue abyss.
Some flow water with imprinted white clouds.
The swan pair swim to shore,
open their mouths with hissing squeaks.
I don't know if we are friends or foes,
but repeated encounters have formed a ritual.
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Xiaoly Li is a poet and photographer in Massachusetts. She is a 2022 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant in Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in Spillway, American Journal of Poetry, PANK, Atlanta Review, Chautauqua, Rhino, Cold Mountain Review, J Journal, and elsewhere; her work has been featured on Verse Daily and in several anthologies. Her photography has been shown and sold in galleries in Boston.
by Julia Lisella
And then the heart shows itself
inside the small bloody packet
among the other organs
someone scraped and then neatly gathered
into this waxy paper, sealed, and slipped
back into the carcass
in a packing plant somewhere in Tennessee—
it spills out with the liver, the chewy other organs.
The dog below me is eager; he will take
what I give him of this.
Into the shallow Farberware pan from the set
my mother gave me more than 30 years ago,
its black handle wiggly in my hand,
I plunk the parts: the backbone that I cut with the kitchen scissors,
then hacked at with a heavy blade to pull
away from the rest of the small beast
and curved into the bottom of the pan,
and these other parts, the fat squat neck
with skin still clinging,
the nearly black liver that slips and slides
dragging its ink-red liquid with it, the tough gizzard
I can’t cut through, the kidneys, dark like the liver
but shapely in the pan, and then the smallest
organ, the triangle shaped heart.
Each one is more the history of this animal
than the wings, the breast, the thighs
we humans will eat.
Then I watch the steaming water transform each part
from raw to cooked. I’ll feed my dog
the wiry meat from the neck
and spine, wonder if the gizzards
are too tough for him.
But at the liver and kidney and heart,
the best parts? I stop. That’s all that separates us
I think—that heart in the pan and my heart
in the wave of light above.
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Julia Lisella’s books include Always (WordTech Editions, 2014), Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007), and a chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems are widely anthologized, and are forthcoming or appear in Pangyrus, Lily Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Paterson Literary Review, Mom Egg Review, Nimrod, Exit 7, Ocean State Review, and others. She is a professor of English at Regis College, and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association (IAWA) Reading Series in Boston. Her newest collection, Our Lively Kingdom, was named a finalist in the Lauria/Frasca poetry prize and was published by Bordighera Press in 2022.
by Anna B. Sutton
The doctor draws a pixelated circle
around a photograph of the Moon’s surface
and says, I’m pretty sure it’s a girl.
The photo is not of the Moon’s surface—
though I wouldn’t fault you for thinking
it was. The photo, with its tempestuous swirl
of whites and grays, is of our daughter’s
hazy labia. We call the Moon a woman
but the face inside it a man. I call the fetus
creature because I think it will hurt less
if someday I leave the hospital empty-handed.
We are always naming things
what they are not. The creature thumps
against my abdomen like a squirrel
barreling along my body’s roof, runs
like a rain-fat creek across my cervix. The collision
of two women—Earth and Theia—once birthed
the Moon. Every terrible man fed on the body
of a woman, then fled to set fires and leave them
burning. I would rather this child not be meat
or tinder, but ash-streaked vengeance. I would
rather her be what we see when we peer
at the photograph—tornado of heat and shadow,
suggestion of something that can’t quite be defined.
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Anna B. Sutton (she/her) is a poet and therapist. Her debut collection, Savage Flower, won the 2019 St. Lawrence Book Award and was published by Black Lawrence Press. Individual pieces appear in Indiana Review, Third Coast, Copper Nickel, and other journals. She received her MFA from UNC Wilmington and a James Merrill fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. She was a co-founder of the Porch Writers' Collective and has worked for numerous literary organizations.
by Hilary Varner
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Dagne Forrest
Although they are grown,
the children have remained.
The world outside our door
a new kind of ruin, not ready
for them yet. And it’s easier
to stand sentinel when they
are nearby, still within reach,
even if that’s an illusion.
You might notice a flickering
from this heart and it’s not
from a lack of fire or constancy.
It’s just that we’ve been without
power here since one of the latest
electrical storms rolled through.
I’m hooked up to a generator
which creates noise and smoke.
There isn’t a lot of fuel
and we had to make hard choices.
The food in the fridge and freezer
spoiled, but there are cans and an
opener, unruly plants in the garden.
No computers or fans,
of course. Just enough to keep
this relic of a muscle going.
It churns out enough wattage
for daily love and reassurance,
as well as a small reckoning
on the page, nothing more.
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Dagne Forrest's poetry has appeared in journals in Canada, the US, Australia, and the UK. In 2021 she was one of 15 poets featured in The League of Canadian Poets’ annual Poem in Your Pocket campaign, had a poem shortlisted for the UK's Bridport Prize, and won first prize in the Hammond House Publishing International Literary Prize (Poetry). Her creative nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Lake Effect, Paper Dragon, and Sky Island Journal.
by Joan Kwon Glass
We ride the train into Manhattan
to see the Broadway show Hadestown,
and I wonder how anyone can call this story
romantic. All I can think about is how stupid
Orpheus is—so close to a happily-ever-after,
and he fucked it up like only a man tragically can.
All he had to do was walk out of hell with her
long enough to be worthy of love.
Later, at a new Dada exhibit,
we stand in a room where our footsteps echo,
where we don’t have language to name anything,
not even each other. Anything can
be art, even the space between us.
By sundown, it feels like we’ve walked
every inch of the city and the miles ache
my feet into remembering that I am
connected to my body,
the body I try so hard not to feel,
the body that you long to devour.
Above Times Square, a naked J. Lo gazes down
at me, advertising her skincare line,
sewer steam rising against her golden thighs,
her body seems to ooze onto these swollen streets.
She insists that I too, can (should) GLO.
What JLo’s love life has taught me over the years
is that if you are in a position to start over,
why wouldn’t you?
I’ve always silently cheered for her
when she left one man for another,
shook my head when she went back to Ben.
I long for the women in movies to have an exit plan,
wish they could sense danger the way I always do.
When I read that Olivia Newton-John has died,
I imagine Frenchie comforting the mourners
and Rizzo, stoic, in dark sunglasses,
ahead of me in line at Sandy’s wake.
I want to ask her if she kicked Kinickie
to the curb after that stupid carnival,
why she didn’t prevent Frenchie from giving
Sandy that makeover, a transformation I
never found believable.
Why they let her disappear into the clouds
in that pink convertible with no way
to change her mind, nowhere to land.
I still know all of the lyrics to Hopelessly Devoted.
I sang them in the fourth-grade talent show
and the translucent moon we hung from the ceiling
floated down onto the stage like a white flag.
I didn’t reach up to stop it, just tried not to watch it fall.
Sometimes I like to see how long I can
go without touching a man,
just to show him it’s possible.
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Joan Kwon Glass is the Korean American author of Night Swim (2022), winner of the Diode Editions Book Contest, and three chapbooks. She serves as Editor-in-Chief for Harbor Review, as a Brooklyn Poets Mentor, and as Poet Laureate of Milford, CT. Joan teaches on the faculty of Hudson Valley Writers Center and her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), RHINO, Dialogist, and elsewhere.
by Jillian Barnet
In morning’s cold light, the house shudders—
a truck climbs the hill, shifting gears
as you do. You and not
you, standing in the window.
Our bedroom: a train through a tunnel, dark
and light taking and returning faces.
In the glass you are a boy, a visit
to the asylum where your mother does not recognize you
and chambers of your heart choke off kindness.
Out of the house’s shadow
cows pass, their black lips re-remembering
summer’s grass and crickets. Your mother
walks weightless in that field,
her girl’s palm stroking the tall grass,
stroking your head. Childhood drifts,
a gauzy moon over the barn.
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Having received her MFA in poetry from Vermont College, Jillian Barnet was first a poet and now also writes creative nonfiction. She has taught writing and literature at Pennsylvania State University and Chatham College. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in a variety of anthologies and literary journals such as New Letters, North American Review, Nimrod, and Image. Her chapbook, Falling Bodies, is available from Finishing Line Press.
by Susie Meserve
by Summar West
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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(for Anya and Anne)
When you’re on the run
because nobody’s shown
in a handful of Sundays
and churches come and gone,
you sweat and listen with
earbuds blooming the whole
orchestra, waiting for the
salvation of what feels
like the godforsaken piano.
But wait, isn’t this
a piano concerto you’ve put
on for just this occasion?
Your feet meet pavement
and push off from one thought
to the next anonymous wave
and deeper into knowing
that August is dying and
all you smell is the sea
and all you taste are tears.
You remember that now
another poet-friend, sick too
long, has died too soon and
will not write again about a God
whose many names she called.
And you remember still more:
the pastor-friend whose grief
will go beyond every instrument,
every song for her son who
a year now is gone.
O Brahms or Bono,
Nina or Aretha,
give us some sound
from the pain suffered
down to the finest point,
where then we are asked,
who are you.
I run and remember
that autumn will arrive
and October will remind me
of when my grandmother died,
of all her lost words and letters,
and how inside my house
back then I played on repeat
an acoustic version of Losing My Religion,
or maybe I was listening for
the trumpet’s blaring,
Love Rescue Me.
This season, I’ll go out to run
that memory down and see another
maple flame out to ash, another
bag of leaves taken to the road,
and all the recyclables headed
for Redemption. Even then,
especially then, may I
remember, remember,
what she wrote to me
on a scrap of paper before
she died: being born again is
likened to the working of the wind.
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Summar West was born and raised in east Tennessee and currently resides in Mystic, Connecticut with her family. Her poems have appeared in a variety of places, including Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Construction, Prairie Schooner, The Indianapolis Review, New South, Still, and Tar River Poetry.
by Sharon Tracey
—Topanga: where the mountain meets the sea
The Tongva
Coyote’s call cuts the wind
and wakes me, the summer moon full,
the canyon rimmed midnight blue
as if all water and light,
my dream following the path
of the day’s news—
the thin white
beluga whale
who swam a southern path
from arctic waters
and found himself in France
along the Seine.
They tried to feed him dead
herring and live trout.
They hoped to save him
as they hoisted high
with heavy nets his body,
more sardine-like than cetacean,
so emaciated. There then
was a shape-shifting
above my bed—
a whale’s glow in the echo
of coyote. The beluga’s
final thoughts unknown,
as he was spooned
from the silver river—
too fresh, too warm.
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Sharon Tracey is the author of three poetry collections: Land Marks (forthcoming, Shanti Arts 2022), Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Shanti Arts) and What I Remember Most is Everything (All Caps Publishing). Her poems have appeared in Radar Poetry, Lily Poetry Review, Terrain.org, The Banyan Review, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in western Massachusetts. See sharontracey.com.
by Maja Lukic
The apartment is blue, filled with an absence
posing as air. Something like ice pelts the windows.
Rupture of morning: thunder rolling in like
tanks surrounding a city, and the sky throwing
down rocks as the day grays into itself, into
whatever version of itself it wants to be. There,
already I’ve mistaken storm for story, already
I’ve assumed that something that lives in time
follows its own syntax. How badly I want evolution.
I am alone. The dog curls into a sweetness.
I have been here before, I have never been here
before like this—sure and boundless and close
to happy. It is May, and for days, I’ve been thinking
of someone else, the green storms of his eyes.
A few glazed lights blur yellow through the rain.
It is May, and I know I will never return to you.
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Maja Lukic is a Poetry MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Narrative, A Public Space, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, and Sixth Finch, among other journals, and "The Slowdown" podcast. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
by Caitlin Grace McDonnell
As the booms in the distance start,
the dog darts around the yard in alarm,
from the flame of the bonfire to the citronella
flicking on the wood table, to whatever draws
her under the house with relentless dark
fascination day after day. The moon’s a sly
smirk and the night envelops the lake. Can’t
see the light show, just the trees, huddling
with concern, birds shrieking, frogs creaking:
yeah, we told you, yeah, it’s gonna get worse.
We burn things we want to be free of:
Patriarchy, screens, self-judgment. What
happens to ink on paper as it burns?
What happens to the words? I read
in Mississippi, they are thinking of training
dogs to sniff out pregnancy hormones
in women leaving the state. Boom
in the distance, dark trees, still lake.
It is not yet clear what will be asked
of us. Bug zap in the blue light.
And what we’re prepared to do.
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Caitlin Grace McDonnell was a New York TImes Fellow at NYU where she received her MFA. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He poems and essays have been published widely and she has published a chapbook, Dreaming the Tree (2003), and two books, Looking for Small Animals (2012) and Pandemic City (2021). She teaches writing for CUNY and lives in Brooklyn with her daughter.
by Annie Przypyszny
by Jennifer Met
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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-a cento for Max*
The moon was dark.
She had eyes, I could see them—
eyes like blisters.
She described an orgasm
is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets—
small, precise, and a little wicked.
The hilarious moon—
part bone, part me—
your gift for gab is of cosmic import.
Made of shadow
with white chalk,
your lips, right after mine, form a crescent.
In our bed, in the dark,
when you smile, every tooth is a perfect O
staring at pictures, paralyzed for hours.
Look at me and bore me—
to ever be bored
under the light of the moon.
Listening to you makes me naked,
my body lit up—
not sleeping, for who can sleep
beyond the door, in the realest bed
where we levitate—
true not only of the world, but of perceiving it.
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*A circular cento using lines from different poems in Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016), starting and ending with “The End.”
Title: “Appeal to my First Love”; 1 “The End”; 2 “Plush Bunny”; 3 “Radiation in New Jersey, Convalescence in New York”; 4 “Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture”; 5 “The Senses”; 6 “Lyric Complicity for One”; 7 “Universe Where We Weren’t Artisis”; 8 “The Watercolor Eulogy”; 9 “Poem in Which My Shrink is a Little Boy”; 10 “The Vacuum Planet of the Pee Pee Priestess”; 11 “The Blimp”; 12 “Poem About My Wife Being Perfect And Me Being Afraid”; 13 “For Crow”; 14 “Poem Set in the Day and Night”; 15 “Dawn of Man”; 16 “Sky-Sex Dreams of Randal”; 17 “The Curve”; 18 “Troy”; 19 “Hi, Melissa”; 20 “Afternoon”; 21 “The Big Loser”; 22 “When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying To Criticize the Universe”; 23 “Poem To My Dog, Monday, On Night I Accidentally Ate Meat”; 24 “The End”
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Jennifer Met lives in a small town in North Idaho. She is a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology, a finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and winner of the Jovanovich Award. Recent work is published in Cimarron Review, the Museum of Americana, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, Superstition Review, and Zone 3, among other journals. She serves as an Assistant Prose Poetry Editor for Pithead Chapel and is the author of the microchapbook That Which Sunlight Chases (Origami Poems Project) and the chapbook Gallery Withheld (Glass Poetry Press).
by Elizabeth Loudon
It’s been suggested to me that I’d do better
to have a lie-in instead of waking so early
full of foolish hope, making the dog paw
at the curtains frantic as ever for her first
elusive kill. That nobody cares that I’m awake
to see the smudge of last night’s peach in the sky
or the fox tracks black on the wet lawn,
that sensible people are heaving their arms
and legs from left to right, smoothing the pillow
for one more dream, and I am blessed to be
a woman with cotton pillows who never need
rise at dawn, nor shrug a pack onto her back,
a woman with no reason to climb
to mountain cairns above the sling of a coll
nor to place on their conical heads a stone
like a million other oval rain-worn weights,
scarlet and silver splashed amid grey,
stones I think I can bear in my pocket. Others
don’t trudge up nameless paths whose wooden signs
rotted to splinters years ago, trodden by
so many long-dead pilgrims that not one
toughened blade of grass survives to cut
my skin, nor push their faces, whipped by wind
and streaked with exhaustion, into air that thins
with every step. I’d do better to let the pillow
hold my head, reach over and find your soft
and lonely hand that holds no pen and join you
in the unspoken. I say so little anyway.
I only take small stones from here to there,
leaving them where nobody will walk until
spring melts the white hem of another
winter snow, swallowing ice inch by inch until
there’s nothing to see but granite under sky.
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Elizabeth Loudon's writing has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, INTRO, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Blue Mountain Review, and Trampset. Her debut novel, A Stranger in Baghdad, will be published in spring 2023 by Hoopoe Fiction. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, and has taught English at Smith College and worked as a fundraiser. She lives in England.
by Elizabeth Jacobson
A black widow tends two webs in different corners of my bathroom.
She crawls back and forth on the white plaster wall between her traps,
eats from the abdomen of a millipede first,
head of a pill bug next.
A male widow doesn't spin a web.
He destroys a female’s snare so other males are not attracted to her,
and sacrifices himself after an involved courtship
in which he gently binds her legs with his silk.
After my bath, water dripping on the floor,
the widow crawls from a nook, rests her carapace over a droplet.
Black widows don’t need to drink water;
they get ample fluids from their prey.
With the flashlight on my phone beamed at her head
I see her palps moving, flicking droplets onto her body,
shaking them off.
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Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow. Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org.
by Jennifer Sutherland