A Fruit Can Be a Metonym for a Home Country

SWWIM Every Day
by Martha Silano

by Martha Silanno


and a tomato is the metonym for my childhood—
my father spreading cow manure,
saying when the seeds

get a whiff of that stench they’ll jump clear out of the ground.
I believed him, believed everything he told me,
including that he loved me,

including, when he let me drop three seeds into each hole,
he’d never raise his voice, never call me dumb bunny
again. What else but a tomato? To savor one

is to understand tomatoes were considered poisonous
until the 1600s, that tomato sauce was born
in Naples, birthplace

of my father’s father, soil of my father’s roots.
Tomato because my father loved them more
than his children, the proof being

that when our kickball landed in his garden,
snapped a seedling stem, he pulled out
his pocketknife, slit the ball in two.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Martha Silano’s most recent collection is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). Previous collections include Reckless Lovely and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, also from Saturnalia Books. Martha’s poems have recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, and Colorado Review, among others. Honors include the North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award. She teaches at Bellevue College. Learn more at marthasilano.net.

Abandon, Reprised

SWWIM Every Day
by Jane Zwart

by Jane Zwart


Almost always it is widows
trying the windchimes.

From technique you can tell
who played tetherball

and which ones flattered
men in uniform, brushing

their shirt fronts free of crumbs.
A few pretend they are there

to buy. Methodical as hand models,
they lift the price tags tied

to bamboo chandeliers
before filling the store

with reports of puppet kendo.
Others start small, browsing

a finger across pipes
sawed from dollhouse organs.

And then there are those
who look both ways before

they swing floating smoke stacks
with whole belfries for echoes.

Sometimes, one says, it’s a relief
being unable to predict

the magnitude of the sound
you’re about to set ringing.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines.

Second Grade Shame

SWWIM Every Day
by Rachel Neve-Midbar

by Rachel Neve-Midbar


Crooked teeth, chipmunk cheeks, all ears—your mind
is the mirror, and the mirror is the
gap you can step into, a place to hide—

Gary Nadir beneath you on the slide.
He lifts your skirt: your panties on display
as you fall through the breach, a cave of shame—

Morning toast confined in your mouth all day
[so you don’t have to swallow what you hate]

Gary Nadir stretched underneath your swing,
under your desk, behind you on the slide—
Gary Nadir follows you through the school gate—

He lifts your skirt, your panties on display.
The nurse says lice, lines wrong in the school play—
you fall through—you fall through, you fall through 

a catalog of shames—

You beg your mother to wear slacks to school.
Gary N.’s rage when he raises your skirt
to uncover the shorts you snuck from home.

At recess you bolt through the trees 
that surround the playground. He’s after you,
ultimately shoves you to the ground—

On your back in the pine nettles, he rips 
away your shorts, even your panties with 
surprising ease— and he sees, and he sees, 

and he sees—

______________________________________________________________________

Rachel Neve-Midbar is a poet and essayist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of the 2014 chapbook, What the Light Reveals. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, The Georgia Review, and Grist as well as other journals and anthologies. Rachel is a current PhD candidate at The University of Southern California.

Chicago Poem

SWWIM Every Day
by Taylor Altman

by Taylor Altman



It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

______________________________________________________________________


Past Skokie lawns flat as cemeteries
and airport buildings passing the sherbet colors of evening 
down Harms Road, past the College Prep Academy, a group of boys  

hacks through June’s first greenery 
dreaming of the city on the other side, Lake Michigan’s 
icy cut, mafiosos trailing blue Fibonacci spirals of smoke  

from speakeasies and casinos. They don’t know 
that other city, the ghost city beneath the lake, zoned 
within its loneliness like a boy on the last day  

of his childhood, turning inward to a shore unknown 
to his father and brothers, the sheer blue panels 
of a Calder mobile. The lake is full of stories, voices  

and stories, boys stripped naked to the waist 
and flayed by poison ivy, boys becoming 
trees, becoming air, the circus of clouds moving silently  

across the Plains suffused with light 
from a distant star and floating back to earth, becoming the men 
who work the great belching factories of Detroit  

and Kenosha, expressions forged in steel, who press the levers 
and pistons resounding in the vast cathedral 
of work, holiest of names unspoken, the evening clouds  

piling one atop the other, concatenating 
like stories, twisting, funneling, each more intricate 
than the last, bone-delicate and pale, sifted from the throats  

of boys who float chained to one another 
and the shore, a line of empty boats rocking end to end 
in the fathomless kingdom of night.

______________________________________________________________________

Taylor Altman is an attorney and writer based in Las Vegas, NV. She holds a BA from Stanford University, an MFA from Boston University, and a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. 

At the Women's Health Center

SWWIM Every Day
by Brett Warren

by Brett Warren



I wear socks in my mom’s favorite color, pray to her 
a little as I’m led to the vestibule by a woman  
who explains how the gown ties in front,  
which I already know. But I don’t interrupt.  
It’s bad luck to keep a woman from doing her job.  
And maybe her words are a ritual blessing.  
I thank her and enter the changing room,  
trade everything I have for a thin cotton gown,  
emerge with my clothes balled up under my arm. 
I search the bank of lockers for a lucky number,  
but all my usuals are taken. Then I see it: 22.  
The year and the day I’m standing in, the minute  
the clock-hand just landed on. The lanyard  
dangling from locker 22 is purple, the exact purple  
of the winter coat my mom always wore 
before she began to disappear. I stuff everything  
inside, close and lock the skinny door, slip  
the purple coil around my wrist. Luck turns the key  
into a protection charm, the interior waiting room  
into a temple of filtered light. We enter, one at a time,  
to sit together in silence. In our identical habits,  
we look more like our mothers than on most days.  
We leaf through magazines or pretend to watch  
the news, which someone, probably a nurse,  
has muted.

______________________________________________________________________



Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Canary, The Comstock Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Hole in the Head Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts, in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway.

My Halfway House

SWWIM Every Day
by Susana H. Case

by Susana H. Case


My mother sang opera off-key
while she worked in her kitchen,
favored Pagliacci, a story

of entanglement. The dissonance
irritated me as a teenager
but became part of what I hold

close, the longing for what itches
most after it's gone, for the woman
who never got to use her passport.

Have a career, she advised. It's less
boring. I had a primeval fear
she would devour me,

like the gerbil mother I once observed
in a tank who meticulously
negated all her babies.

Have your own money.
Don't depend on any man.
The colonized body has two choices,

and either way, La commedia è finita!
Lie down with the devil.
Don't lie down.

There will be nothing when you run
out of figs. You will be
like the fireflies, practically gone.

______________________________________________________________________


Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of eight books of poetry, most recently, The Damage Done (Broadstone Books, 2022). She is co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). Case worked several decades as a university professor/program coordinator in New York City. She is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. If This Isn't Love is forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2024.

The Scientist and Her Husband Observed the Consciousness of Gnats in Spoleto, Italy

SWWIM Every Day
by Jo Brachman

by Jo Brachman


Nothing but a blur of brevity. She saw it first.
He tried to capture it—lens-click—still a cloud

of nothing. They’d been sitting on the wall outside
the duomo at early dusk, talking about spending

their last stage of life in a foreign country. To die
here, where the light of the old masters’ brushes

washed the stucco, the cobblestones, their faces.
The small flies arrived. Each frenzied gnat created

the larger, slower shape of a moon in-the-making.
The males moved as swarms do—with one mind

to attract females who would only join
the churning mass to mate. The mundane

ghost-bodies spun, wings backlit by the sun’s
last bone-colors of the ancient.

The gnats would live for hours, at the most
a few days, coded to cheat death by breeding.

The couple vowed to be reborn for a chance
of another lifetime together in this fortress town

where long ago, Etruscans divined the future
by gazing into a goat’s liver. The two watched

in silence. Rising above the duomo piazza,
the flies swelled into a thousand prayers.

______________________________________________________________________

Jo Brachman holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Moon City Review, Terminus Magazine, Poet Lore, Birmingham Review, Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, Best New Poets, Tar River, and others. A 2022 Fulbright Scholar, she recently finished a research grant in the Special Collections Archives of Lund University in Lund, Sweden.

Flood

SWWIM Every Day
by Sherry Stuart Berman

by Sherry Stuart Berman


for S.                                                                                      


All summer, on the news,
citrus-colored skies. Tiny suns
like Red Hots I could pop

in my mouth. Beautiful dust.
Deluge. My patient’s father texts me:
She’s intubated after using drugs

again, and he’ll send me a check.
How often had she said disease and
wish, smoothed her bangs

with the ringed fingers
of both hands. When I call him,
I’m skimming—as in, hard to know

or meant to find. I’m not a star,
right now, boiling an egg
is beyond me. A fork falls

and for hours I don’t notice
how blood frames my toenail.
Some days

the Amazon gods 
leave poetry
on my doorstep. Hulu

and its mock heaven.
I tunnel back
to her chair, finally

stop drinking.
She won’t make it this time.
I’m a mother and scared

to feed my son. I talk to myself
in every room. How else
to admit failure?

Trauma-bodies; pain-
bodies: I pick their hearts
out one by one, lose

my place by the end
of a session.
Intimacy that’s not.

I save a dead woman’s text.
My son needs a feast and I
don’t. I don’t.

Maybe ghosts aren’t real
but I heard a sigh in that room,
turned and said, what?

I have this child and I had this love
and I could not see her through.

______________________________________________________________________


Sherry Stuart Berman’s poems have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Guesthouse, 2 Horatio, The Night Heron Barks, Atticus Review, Rise Up Review, Writers Resist, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies, Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. Originally from South Florida, she is a psychotherapist in private practice and lives in Staten Island, NY, with her husband and son.

The Center

SWWIM Every Day
by Lane Falcon

by Lane Falcon



Bridges keep collapsing
in his body.

What if the graft dissolves
like last time?

Like the surgery didn’t
happen?

Then weeks of epinephrine,
choking so bad

he shot up in his crib
to grab me,

and panic wicked him away
shit after shit, vomit

after vomit. Every day,
death peered closer,

until I let go, let them
replace the trach. 

This time, they’ll cut
the graft wider,

place it higher, so when
I uncurl the canula

from the scar-twined
hole in his neck,

and, in his pupils,
I see a patch of trust

blooming through fear—
he will breathe.

It will hold.

______________________________________________________________________


Lane Falcon is a poet who lives in Alexandria, VA with her two kids and dog. Her manuscript, Deep Blue Odds, was selected as a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize, and semi-finalist for the 2022 Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize and the Inaugural Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Prize.

Contrition: Birds-of-Paradise

SWWIM Every Day
by Paula J. Lambert

by Paula J. Lambert


Though pelts had long been traded across Asia, wings and feet removed, Europeans first encountering Birds-of-Paradise believed the birds must have simply floated on air until, like exhausted angels, they fell to earth.

You did not fall, dear heart. We reached for you and,
so surprised our human hands made contact,
pulled you down to what could only be your hell.

Bless us, oh beautiful bird, wingless, footless,
still carrying the scent of cinnamon, cloves, and greed,
for we have surely sinned, so many times

and in so many gruesome ways. We failed to see you,
holy relic, as witness to our own hubris, our inability
to understand that reaching was its own gift.

Oh, beautiful bird, we see you now and bow to you,
ask you to believe we of featherless form can do better,
can be better—truly and without irony—

than what our fathers taught us. We reach now only
for your forgiveness, understanding our penance at last
and firmly resolving, with the help of your grace,

to amend our lives and to see your lovely, still-living 
progeny for what they are: testament to what we might
be instead of what we might own. 

______________________________________________________________________

Paula J. Lambert has published several collections of poetry, including The Ghost of Every Feathered Thing (FutureCycle 2022) and How to See the World (Bottom Dog 2020). Awarded PEN America's L'Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship, Lambert's poetry and prose has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Red Things

SWWIM Every Day
by Yamini Pathak

by Yamini Pathak



A chat on a moonlit terrace where one person is more in love than the other. Both laugh, each sounds different. 

Boatman struggling in the biceps of a river.  

Some memories are redder than others. I watched my brother beat another boy on the playground because he called our father a bastard. Saw the boy’s body crumple like a paper flower, his nose spurt crimson blooms. Nobody knew what a bastard was.

Labor pains.  

The scent of street food wafting up from the vendor’s cart as he puts together a paper cone of puffed rice, slivers of onion, cucumber, tomato and hot green chilies, lemon juice and mustard oil. The tide of saliva that rises in the mouth. This is not a red memory. It’s definitely green. Lime green. Raw mango green.  

Ribbons in shiny black hair. Swinging braids. 

A man who carried newspapers, magazines, bestsellers, and comic books wrapped in a white sheet. A door-to-door visiting library. He smelled of paper and ink. The rush of blood to my face when I opened the door.  

Train journeys. Hot wind. Paddy fields, egret, and buffalo. Towns with names like Itarsi and Manmad Junction where you will never get off but whose names you murmur in time with the rhythm of the rails. Scalding hot chai numbs your tongue. Coal dust from the steam engine blows back in the wind. Take care it doesn’t get in your eyes. Some of it is still on fire. 

______________________________________________________________________

Yamini Pathak was born in India. She is the author of chapbooks, Atlas of Lost Places (Milk and Cake Press, 2020) and Breath Fire Water Song (Ghost City Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Vida Review, About Place Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A Dodge Foundation Poet in Schools, she serves as poetry editor for Inch micro-chapbooks (Bull City Press). Yamini has received her MFA in poetry from Antioch University, LA.


If You Wondered About the Astronaut Who Never Went to Space

SWWIM Every Day
Melissa McEver Huckabay

by Melissa McEver Huckabay


After Luisa Muradyan


This isn’t a motivational poem. 
I’m just a woman doing dishes on a Tuesday. 
I swirl the soap like Andromeda and count 
the stars on the plate, imagining they’re suds. 
The sky turns golden in the evening 
and I remember nebulas I never saw, 
their gleaming clouds a birthplace, 
my daughter never born. Pencils 
are rocket-shaped and I sort them 
by color—yellow, fuchsia, turquoise, 
Io, Europa, Ganymede. Wipe the rings 
off the table. I can’t listen 
to Holst and his Planets anymore, 
the horns announcing Jupiter or Neptune. 
Why does he leave one out, the only one I know well— 
my meteor feet landing here and staying 
since the day I was born?

______________________________________________________________________


Melissa McEver Huckabay is an MFA candidate in poetry at Texas State University. Her work has appeared in Poetry South, Defunkt, Porter House Review, and elsewhere, and her short fiction has won the Spider’s Web Flash Fiction Prize from Spider Road Press. She lives in Central Texas with her husband, son and two affectionate cats.


Load More