by Doritt Carroll
the church had a slogan for it: JOY, meaning
by Nivi Engineer
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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He approaches with pen and paper,
asks for my name and number.
I indulge him
his daily ritual;
I’m a stranger, after all
and he, gracious host,
offers donuts I refuse.
So to this small request, how can I say no?
He writes my name
then—digit by digit—jots it down,
a number he hasn’t dialed in months,
a quest for connection,
a map to a road he’ll never drive.
But tomorrow, I know,
he may discover the paper in the pocket
of the pants he’s reluctant to change.
And if I’m here when he does it,
he’ll at least marvel at the coincidence.
But this time,
he asks—
unlike before—
“Whose child are you?”
I reply, watching his face.
“Yours.”
And the joyous smile, the marvel,
is enough.
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Nivi Engineer earned degrees in English (BA from Case Western Reserve University), Computer Science (MS from Washington University in St. Louis), and Fiction (MFA from Spalding University), and is actively pursuing CAPM certification while slowly learning Korean. She is the author of Can We Throw the Colors Yet?, a children’s book about Holi, and The Indian Girl’s Definitive Guide to Staying Single, Jaathi, and numerous short stories. She appeared in two episodes of the “Once Upon a Disney” podcast and recently presented a talk about “The Joy of Failure” at a Women in Computing conference.
by Karen Elizabeth Sharpe
I aimed to be
loved, or at least necessary.
I didn’t know
I could say no.
Pointed at my body:
This old thing? Just slipped it on.
Later, I said no
but my voice was only inside.
I had studied at the school
of the encrypted. Father’s
teasing, nameless women,
Penthouses, Playboys
under the beds, crumpled.
Mother’s slim magazine lessons
Dictating: stay skinny
keep your man happy
dinner in 30 minutes or less.
Dinner in 30 minutes. Or less
keeping your man happy.
Dictating: stay skinny
mothers. Slim magazine lessons
under the beds. Crumpled
Penthouses, Playboys
teasing. Nameless women
of the encrypted fathers.
I had studied at the school
but my voice was only inside.
Later, I said no.
This old thing. Just slipped it on,
pointed at my body.
I could say no.
I didn’t know.
Loved, or at least necessary
I aimed to be.
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Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is a poetry editor at The Worcester Review. Her chapbook, Prayer Can Be Anything, is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press (2023). Her poems have or will soon appear in Split Rock Review, Ocean State Review, West Trade Review, Mom Egg Review, and Catalyst, among others.
by Luci Huhn
Forgive my short walk to the corner store.
Late November, her birthday, forgive me
the same gift each year. Top notes of orange
and bergamot, base notes of musk and cedar—
forgive my intoxication.
Forgive the mystery its name held to a child,
its box round and dark as chocolate cake.
And the talc’s feathery puff—forgive the weightless
pink. Forgive the lake and ocean floors
where it was dug—translucent soapstone
coupled with asbestos ore. Forgive the
crystals, the cleavage—mica, silicate, the tiny
hexagons—forgive the pearly luster
that killed the men who breathed and boxed it.
Forgive the women who pressed their breasts
and hips and more against it. My mother—
soaking in her evening bath—was saved,
the whirl of children sent to town
for hamburgers. We could sit at the drugstore
counter, order again and again if we were still
hungry. Who could predict the evening’s charge—
positive or negative? Who could know
if the talc’s tiny atoms would stir or settle
her mood? Forgive the sand and ore that edged
her body every day. Forgive what washed
down the drain, silvered the street to the river,
rushed over the dam—forgive the roar of inky
water. Forgive what made it to the next town,
and the next, what made it tonight, to the great
lake where I live—white with winter’s dusting.
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Luci Huhn is a poet writing in Southwest Michigan. Most recently her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, West Branch, Leon Literary Review, Rattle, and Persimmon Tree. She was nominated by West Branch in 2022 for a Pushcart Prize, and by Leon Literary Review in 2021 for a Best of the Net Award.
by Sara Potocsny
You send the baby to school that same morning
and it feels right: the wind
breaking around the car.
Proof you are still something
air will yield to.
“When you stop moving the darkness comes,”
someone you loved used to say. And even if you don’t
believe it, you stay in motion just to drown it out.
You hold your son’s hand as he climbs the schoolhouse steps
wearing the neighbor’s clothes, the building still there,
his teachers well slept, like the inside of a barn
first thing in the morning, their eyes trained
on you, measuring by sight the odds you don’t
break in the doorway. Succumb to whatever comes
after shock, there at their feet.
And then you drive yourself not home because it’s gone
but to a little patch of daylight beneath a small tree
where the world is quiet. And as you sit beneath its limbs
you notice the ringing in your ears has dimmed
to something more like chimes, the friction between silks
or fast water through a tin pipe.
And though you still smell like the ribbons of smoke
that have all but killed you,
you amount again and again
to more than you have all your life.
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Sara Potocsny is a writer in Syracuse, NY, where she lives with her son, Sol. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She has one chapbook called The Circle Room, published by Lover Books. She has work in or forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review, Juked, Hobart, Radar, HAD, The Racket, Rejection Letters, and others. You can find her on Twitter at @sarapotocsny and IG at @spotocsny.
by Linda Laderman
the old women, the crones, the crossed,
the witches, the wise, the weary, the widows who wear
grief like a full-length mink stored in the cool dark.
Consider their wounds, the warnings, the fractures,
their cautious steps, the invisible, the inevitable.
Consider their bobbing chins, creased eyelids, lined lips,
fixed smiles, misheard words, memories misplaced
like a sequined black dress stowed in a back hall closet.
Consider their struggle to recall anniversaries, birthdays,
the youngest, the oldest, the miscarriages, the chemo.
Consider their longing, the loneliness, the lost lovers,
the moves, the mirrors, everywhere the mirrors, mocking,
reflecting, rewinding—days consumed with refills, missed
appointments, forgotten plans, lists of what to take when.
Consider their red walkers, the caretakers, the matinees,
the confiscated keys, the condescending conversations—
Now picture fresh squeezed orange juice in a plastic cup,
a straw pushed through the hole on top, and understand
the only way to drink is for a stranger to bring the straw
to your mouth. As the cold liquid trickles down your throat,
consider the time when squeezing an orange was as simple
as turning off the light before you turned over to sleep.
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Linda Laderman is a Detroit writer and poet. Her work has appeared in The Willawaw Journal, Third Wednesday, The Write Launch, The Jewish Literary Journal, and The Scapegoat Review, among others. Two poems are forthcoming this May in The Writers Foundry Review. She belongs to the Poetry Craft Collective, a cohort of poets who review and encourage each other's work. Until recently, she was a docent at The Holocaust Center near Detroit.
by Clair Dunlap
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Katherine Riegel
Having a body is like dragging around
a huge purse, one of those satchel-sized leather
behemoths that holds everything you could possibly
need: wallet, change purse, sunglasses, pen, lip balm,
clear stream to sit beside, existential crisis, your dead
relatives’ voices, doggie poop bags. It’s all
in there but you have to root around
for your keys, and while you’re pawing through
you find other things you forgot you were carrying:
envelope with a friend’s address on it, white-flecked rock
you picked up because it was shaped like a heart.
The thing is fucking heavy, and for some of us
it just gets heavier, and then we discover
we can’t run with it, the corners
are soggy with pain, old to-do lists spill
from the top. The body begins to tear,
duct tape doesn’t help, it’s a struggle to keep
everything where it’s supposed to be. Suddenly
your crackling knees insist I am you and your mind
says Fuck off but then you remember you’re actually
inside the ginormous purse and oh-my-god there’s
the bike you rode at fourteen, hot wind in your face,
the turquoise ring you can no longer wear on your swollen fingers,
and at the very bottom a weedy path
you know you have to walk—you want
to walk—if you can just get it together, chivvy yourself
out of your chair, not always hopeful but alive, still alive.
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Katherine Riegel is the author of Love Songs from the End of the World, the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth, and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Brevity, The Gettysburg Review, The Offing, One, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and managing editor of Sweet Lit, and teaches independent online classes in poetry and creative nonfiction. Find her at katherineriegel.com.
by Marie McGrath
I love to offer you the last bite;
this is new for me. I eat, and I mean
Eat! Before any meal is over
I’m dreaming of the next one.
I always eat most and fastest and I want
a bite of yours too. Folks say stay hungry
and don’t mean it literally but I mean it
literally because when you’ve counted
almonds and grams and know
how many calories live in one lick of a postage stamp
gluttony is a gift. I’m not embarrassed
to overdo it, or at least less so
than I was before. Let everyone know:
even when I’m full, I'm starving. Y’all get it.
I want to fill my fucking plate! I want it piled high
with Everything. Candied and crusted,
salty, briny as the seas I’ve tasted (and those
I haven’t), bright as fluorescence, tangy
enough to pucker my lips as if to kiss
the air itself. Give me umami, give me white-hot
then creamy. Glossy and starchy and stretchy,
crunchy pillowy saucy yes I want to be sick
with want and then fulfillment, haunted by mouth
-feels I’ve yet to imagine. I want to eat and eat
and eat with you until I'm consumed.
Lay me out, a main on the table.
All the sides and soups, too. Nose to tail,
not just my prize cuts—breast, tender
loin, rump—the gamey stuff, the hard bits,
simmered long and soft and succulent, pearly fat
rendered for a fry-up, all the little joints salted and cracked
open to the marrow, and then, at the end,
when all that’s left of me is one gleaming morsel,
I will raise my fork to your lips and, with any luck,
you will open your delicious mouth
and take it.
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Marie McGrath (she/her) is a poet from Miami. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. Her poems have appeared in Subtropics, Poet Lore, Scrivener Creative Review, and others. When not writing, she serves as the Development Director for O, Miami and co-hosts the podcast "Spare Time." She lives in Washington, D.C with her girlfriend and their two baby cats. For more from Marie, visit www.mariekmcgrath.com.
by Jeri Theriault
by Marion Brown
Night blots out the Olympic
Range. My daughter and I
make do with what might be
Cassiopeia. I’ve crossed an ice-
locked continent to lean my leg
on hers, to gaze into nightfall
before I sleep. She cradles
a laptop. A Libra, she weighs
what she reads: fetal cells
get left behind. Not a foreign
tourist, a fetus hangs on.
The alien never goes home.
She and I both harbor some
exotic code. Looking out,
primed for a far-off message,
my daughter does not name
the heartbeat that stopped.
I know a few specifics
but not the one to wean her
from love. (Press a torn
aloe leaf against the burn.)
I, too, squint and peer,
taking in stars far away
or long gone out. In my
solar system, daughter cells
must be orbiting moons
too close for me to see.
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A Yonkers resident, Marion Brown holds a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks Tasted and The Morning After Summer. Her poem “In the Dock, Fagin Reflects” won the Portico Poetry Competition. Other poems have appeared in Guesthouse, the Women’s Review of Books, Kestrel, The Night Heron Barks, and DIAGRAM. She serves on the Advisory Committee of Slapering Hol Press and Graywolf’s National Council.
by Rebecca Hart Olander
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Mine died when I hit middle age, he still young
at sixty-eight. I’ll never say we’re through.
He is that creature under the cold Atlantic blanket,
migratory mammal, singing a complex song,
large heart beating in time with mine, wide cetacean
smile, throat pleats, fluke, and fin. All that potential
lamplight and winter warmth stored in his immortal bulk.
No harvested baleen, no corset bone. He’ll never stop
his route, though sometimes he needs to breach,
and once I dreamed he beached. I tried to drag him back
to the surf, where the salt could lick his wounds
and he could open one eye to the sun.
But that was a nightmare. The truth is in the Gulf
Stream, dark shadow spouting, swimming with seals.
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Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere, and her collaborative visual and written work has been published in multiple venues online and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her books include a chapbook, Dressing the Wounds (dancing girl press, 2019), and her debut full-length collection, Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021). She teaches writing at Westfield State University and Amherst College and works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press. Find her online at rebeccahartolander.com or @rholanderpoet.
by Andrea Carter
Epiphyllum oxypetalum
No need for the moon
if she is open after dark,
completely awake, a circus
of exposure. Fear to touch
her. She could slip her concentric
tongues around an index finger, or
the finger that used to wear
a ring for the pleasure of being
a de-flower, an already at an end.
Her blossom is a honeymoon, all
through the night and gone at the first
insistence of sun. Her dry sickle,
the pink cloak in the morning,
a real marriage with its hints of blood
and bloodlessness, a white-
on-white-on-white derangement,
spiked petals unlocking, un-fisting,
unleashing, her expulsion.
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Andrea Carter is a poet and writer from Southern California. Her work appears in Quartet, San Diego Poetry Annual, Fourteen Hills, and The Florida Review. She is a recent Bread Loaf alum and is finishing her second novel in a YA murder mystery series. She enjoys hiking, travel, surfing, and drinking lots of coffee. She is a lecturer at UC San Diego in the Muir College Writing Program.
by Jody Winer
by Mistee St. Clair
The houseplants have been left to dry and dust
so I repot, gently run my fingers through the roots, shake and untangle.
I could marry all my old lovers.
One loosening my hair with clever fingers.
One with wide, calloused palms at the stem of my back.
Another’s body hot as a horse.
Marry them all and still I disappear.
I wet a cloth to leaves until they shine
and imagine the shock of air against wet skin, imagine electricity
currenting the salt of sweat, imagine a starfish shivering as the tide bares.
The absence of touch has become ordinary.
I touch these leaves and one universe over,
separated by the silver band of a ring, she shudders.
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Mistee St. Clair is the author of the chapbook, This Morning is Different, an Alaska Literary Award grantee, and has poems forthcoming in or published by The Common, Northwest Review, and more. She lives with her family and border collie in Juneau, Alaska, a northern rainforest, where she is an editor for the Alaska State Legislature. She can be found at misteestclair.com.
by Kristin Entler
my body slab-flat on a metal table;
my jaw pulled toward the ceiling;
my tongue held to make room for the rigid
tubes in my throat. Nurses swaddle my legs
in warm blankets simply because I said I’m cold.
Straps secure across my thighs because feral
when unconscious, survival brain will try to keep
anyone out. But I signed the forms for anything
that goes wrong or right for the hours I am
given to the professionals reaching into my chest.
Cradling pieces of my flesh and bone, they know of me
what I never will: the color of the inside of my lungs;
the sound a wheeze makes with my larynx exposed;
the crippled state of my blood before it reaches the heart.
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Kristin Entler was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at six months old, and first came out as LGBT+ several years after her diabetes diagnosis at 12 years old. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for NELLE and lives with her service-dog-in-training, Azzie, whose name is short for the Greek God of Medicine. Entler can be found in publications such as The Bitter Southerner, Porter House Review, and BOOTH, among others, as well as on twitter @findmycure.
by Sarah Wetzel
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I wanted to tell her that I knew the truth—
she didn't adopt her dog from a kill shelter,
which is what she was telling a group of us.
I held my tongue for fear of appearing petty.
We all want to be better than we are.
Yesterday, my brother called and asked for money.
At first, I told him no.
But he'd received the third notice from Georgia Power
so I paid his $700 electric bill though told him
never again, unless his wife got a job, any job.
I cc'ed her on the email.
She wrote back, you're an awful person
with a mixture of rage and bitterness I could hear
even on the screen. Still, this time
I meant it. I overheard the woman at the party
tell her friend they'd actually purchased the dog
from a breeder in upstate New York.
We spent so much money, we could have adopted
a baby from China. I found her statement funny.
I want to be better. I want to save a dog, to save
my brother. I want to tread lightly on this world without
leaving footprints or too many
plastic wrappers. I want to see Singapore
and Vietnam, to spend a summer in Italy writing
short stories and a sonnet or two.
Learn to tango and foxtrot equally well.
I want to be good. I want to write one poem so perfect
that when I'm dead, a stranger will pin it to the wall,
perhaps even claim it as their own.
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Sarah Wetzel is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Davids Inside David, from Terrapin Books. Sarah is Publisher and Editor at Saturnalia Books, and when not shuttling between her two geographic loves—Rome, Italy and New York City—she is a PhD student in Comparative Literature in the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. You can connect at facebook.com/sarah.wetzel.3 or on Instagram @sarahwetz.
by Sarah Elkins
My son takes a closeup photo of my face in profile
from the passenger seat. At the red light
he shows me the soft underbelly of my jaw,
how it’s giving up. What is this?! he asks
in mock disgust at my weakness in the face
of time. And, it’s true, I have forgotten
how to smile for cameras. I say fuck too
freely. I don’t swap my fork to the opposite
hand to cut my steak, haven’t taught him to
either. I pee in the shower and take swigs
of heavy whipping cream while standing
at the fridge suspending the carton over
my mouth without touching my lip to the rim.
I’m not a heathen, after all. I use the words
space and gravity and god interchangeably.
I blow my nose inside the collar of my t-shirt.
It’s allergy season so this is permitted. I have
laughed and laughed. I love this wet and
recyclable body that contracts to bleed, expands
into the waxing phase of the moon and repeats.
It takes so long to get that know-some-shit glow.
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Sarah Elkins lives in southern West Virginia. Her work is forthcoming from or has recently appeared in Cimarron Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, West Trestle Review, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. In 2022, her poem “Water Tension” was a finalist for the 2021 Quarterly West Poetry Contest.
by Bonnie Bostrom
She was a mirror until the sun struck. Shattering,
She was image on image; tiny glittering splinters.
In a Navajo blanket, with sunset painted
On her face,
She raised a Coca-Cola bottle as a sign
That she would be victorious.
She ran non-stop, fourteen miles
To stand in sweat before
A sacred statue,
Got caught at the same place in dreams,
Always nine miles from home.
She threw jeweled rings into the sky
To pass a certain test;
The proctor was invisible.
On an emergency room table, she
Irritated the staff by giving birth to all
The planets and letting oceans spill from her mouth.
At times she bowed and heard applause
From primordial places when
The script went well.
Then, her usual tricks with words didn’t work,
And the juggling got dangerous.
She saw Christ erupting from her heart,
Filling her bed with red and joy
But the world hadn’t ended for anybody else.
She gathered the brightest jigsaw pieces,
Tried forcing them into frames
Without cutting to the quick;
Saw them beckon,
Demanding her allegiance
To each shining part.
She flew away with them
Into the sun.
Her children suffered some but thought her
Entertaining when she danced.
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Bonnie Bostrom is a vintage woman (83 years old) and has published nine books either solo or in collaboration with other poets and artists. Her writing has been published in The Sun, The Thornleigh Review, Cholla Needles, and The Ball State Forum. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at the following online sites: Every Day Fiction, Canary, and A Stray Branch. Her website is bonniebostrom.com.
by Michelle Bitting
Barreling down a coastal road, Supertramp’s
“Dreamer” takes over the radio, Roger Hodgson’s
fingers drilling the dash open. It’s the sound of 40 years
ago and a red tide—swarms of slippery, stinking fish
washed up—goners, all of them, rotting in a hot Pacific
shimmer. And my brother is there with me at a lunar edge
of wet: full moon glint, sulfur whiff, stiff bodies like spilled
quivers of small, silvery arrows pointing every whack way
around us, their stilled eyes wide like sinking babies flopped
in sopping blankets of shore, schools of strewn clock guts,
a splayed and gritty spawning. My brother and I sing along,
our car stopped, listening from the highway, letting the night
and sea chaos carry us: dreamer, you know you are a dreamer…
and we're in sync, somehow, same words, same starry string
of plinked notes chiming the night around crystalized breath.
It was like this: our skins close and a mineral breeze clouding
eyes, blowing back salt-ashed hair, the just-detected distant
spiral jetties. We unbolted metal doors to barefoot skate
the sand berms down, feel a cold crack of waves slap toes.
Stoned on weed and much too high to maneuver our muddied
minds and feet inside whatever plots we were churning, Brother,
whatever in our youth we thought ourselves big enough
to handle, whatever tides and misdemeanors, no worse
than what your hand would steer our way—your demise,
suicide—that ancient refrain recorded: a shocking dream
that wakes in song, even now, the human and remains.
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