Spangled

SWWIM Every Day
by Dion O'Reilly

by Dion O’Reilly



What was the beat
in my mother's brain when she
beat me—not a
metronome—
not the mud thump
of a march,
nothing like a dirge.
No, I think when she
flamed the whip,
she winged a Hendrix solo.
Rock-star mommy, red-lipped
maestro of an electric age,
slim-hipped genius
of bite and longing,
violet-eyed siren
of slash and response—
daily, I was her
wah wah pedal,
her feedback,
her Oh Say Can You See,
her conjuring fingers
turning the whole hot
spotlight of the world
in our direction.
From the round mouth
of every speaker,
a Stratacaster howl,
a static shatter, mortar and Napalm,
land of the free,
home of the brave,
my flag still there.

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Dion O'Reilly’s early years were spent on an isolated family compound, subject to the whims of a culty, psychopathic parent. Her debut collection, Ghost Dogs, was runner-up for The Catamaran Prize and shortlisted for The Eric Hoffer Award. Her second book, Sadness of the Apex Predator, will be published by University of Wisconsin's Cornerstone Press in 2024. Her work appears in The Bellingham Review, The Sun, Rattle, Narrative, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She facilitates private workshops, hosts a podcast at The Hive Poetry Collective, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Quarterly. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.

Middle School Passage

SWWIM Every Day
Catherine Maryse Anderson

by Catherine Maryse Anderson

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

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My son was proud of his performance
on stage or so I thought by his
posture and grin.

His drum solo was intoxicating,
his smile like maple syrup on
pancakes, overflowing.

Did you notice that all the Black
kids were in the back? And you know
it's not because we're not as good.

You know that, right? he said, the
syrup falling off the fork, onto his lap.
The music he played turning to static.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Maryse Anderson (she/they) is a poet, essayist, photographer, anti-racist ally, abolitionist, and educator in Providence, Rhode Island. She is currently collaborating on a shared poetry project with her 90-year-old mother with dementia.

Wire Walker

SWWIM Every Day
by Susan Aizenberg

by Susan Aizenberg



— after watching Man on Wire

Like an acrobat in the spotlight
of a darkened circus ring,

or like Baryshnikov
at thirty, easy in his skin,

one graceful hand soft
on the barre—close up, black

silks billowing in the misted wind,
he’s slender & erect, smiles

as he struts the shivering cable
a quarter mile above the city.

But from below, he seems more
human, a fragile speck

against the stark immensities
of sky & doomed

towers. One step, one moment’s lapse,
as he’ll explain, above death.

Is this why he grins, why he lies
down along the braided wires,

one leg dangling over
the abyss? See how he kneels—

kneels!—and looks down
at the wondering crowd. How can

we help but love him? Even
a transit cop who hasn’t missed

much sounds awed: He was dancing.
You couldn’t call it walking. Even the lover

he’s about to betray still trembles,
decades later, remembering.

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Susan Aizenberg’s newest collection, A Walk with Frank O’Hara and Other Poems, is forthcoming in 2024 in University of New Mexico Press’s Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series. She’s also author of Quiet City (BkMk) and Muse (SIUP). Her awards include the VCU/Levis Reading Prize and the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including On the Seawall, Plume, Nine Mile, North American Review, and Blackbird.

Among the Fallen

SWWIM Every Day
by Judy Kaber

by Judy Kaber

After Sky Through Trees by Lois Dodd


If I declare that the woods hold a door,
that the red earth sprouts stalks, shivers

like a teenage girl, twisted and fallen,
would you ask how we can get

through it, how so young a girl can
feel so much despair, how trees can

slice the air like that, how the sky
becomes plastic, almost silver

instead of blue? If you climb this hill
of disarray, are you drawn to the door,

do you crave it, even if you don’t know
what lies on the other side, even if your face

turns to glass, sharp and echoing?

Sit down. We’ll picnic. Bread.
Wine. All the letters of the alphabet

slopping like soup from our hands.
Was there a house there once? I swear

I see a barn caught aloft in branches,
in a swirl of lines. We’re all headed

for that door. It looks so clean here,
not a rope astray, not a feather dropped.

No pistol. No whip. No wet cloth
bound across the mouth. The trees not

silhouettes of us. Not our story.
Our story lies on the other side of that door.

Maybe we’ll find pain, a gleam of loveliness,
a girl sitting breathless in a room.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Judy Kaber is the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, and author of three chapbooks: Renaming the Seasons, In Sleep We Are All the Same, and, most recently, A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, december, Hunger Mountain, and Spillway. She won the 2021 Maine Poetry Contest and was a finalist for a 2022 Maine Literary Award. Judy lives and writes in Maine.

Rachel Contemplates Slow Motion

SWWIM Every Day
by Jessica Hudson

by Jessica Hudson

after Cher’s 1990 film Mermaids


One of my daughters prefers to sleep underwater.
Before bed, she holds her breath for five seconds

short of the world record, stopwatch gripped
in her fist raised high above the bathwater.

I can’t watch. As the slitted lampshade ripples
yellow light over the blue walls and paper fishes,

she drifts off. We’re each determined to survive
in those places where we don’t belong. To settle

for change rather than slow-motion ourselves
into a settled life. In the kitchen, we bump hips

and bop our heads to Jimmy Soul. Eat stars
for dinner: fruity hors d’oeuvres slipping

down damp toothpicks. Our life is so much
better than a kiss. My older daughter defines

resolution as wish. This year I wish to be—
who knows? Cherished, I think, but cannot say

aloud because tonight I am a mermaid, blond
curls and glittering crown, my cardboard tail

strung to one wrist raised high so I can dance.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Hudson (she/her) received her Creative Writing MFA from Northern Michigan University. Her work has been published in several literary magazines, and her first poetry chapbook is forthcoming from Nightingale & Sparrow Press. Jessica lives in Albuquerque, NM with an experimental artist and a black cat.

Adirondack Upland Flora

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Kilch Gaffney

by Sarah Kilch Gaffney

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

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A book from your college days
tucked next to my Strunk & White,
your name scrawled
on a page in your mix
of capitals and lowercase.

Such precision of bloom dates,
soil pH, and mineral composition,
almost invasive in the details
of the little lives of these plants.

You always said you wanted
to take me to the Adirondacks.
A trip .02 degrees north never made.

It is a prayer of sorts
to touch these pages
of bloodroot and bittersweet,
trillium and nightshade,
paper birch and hornbeam.
I pause on Monotropa uniflora:
Indian pipe, otherwise, ghost
pipe, corpse plant, one
they say can grow
even absent all light.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Kilch Gaffney is a writer, brain injury advocate, and homemade caramel aficionado living in Maine. You can find her work at www.sarahkilchgaffney.com.

Laundry

SWWIM Every Day
by Tamara J. Madison

by Tamara J. Madison

for all the misbehaved women who have yet to make history…
 (Response to poet Amanda Johnston’s “Even Now”)


How you just air all our dirty
laundry like that, sis?
The granny panties with the bleached moon stains,
the big gurl draw’s with frayed elastic bands,
even the silky G-strings and
crotchless leopard print with lace
beneath blushing sun ablaze,
the worn titty holders,
the weakened bosom brace its
thinning cups translucent—
all our frolicking exposed
along one long hussy line.

How you just put all our business
on the street for passersby to preen? But

then again, hussy is as hussy does:
brazen, grinning, dangling
her charms on a velvet rope
waiting to tie him up,
wash him clean with her sins
again.

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Tamara J. Madison is a writer/poet, editor, and instructor motivated and inspired by her ancestry and relations. Her work is published in various journals and anthologies. She has also shared her poetry on the TEDx platform. She is producer of "BREAKDOWN: The Poet & The Poems," a YouTube conversation series. Her recent poetry collection, Threed, This Road Not Damascus, is published by Trio House Press.

Back at the Airbnb

SWWIM Every Day
by Merrill Oliver Douglas

by Merrill Oliver Douglas

When they realize I haven’t come to this table to sit quietly
with takeout spare ribs, that I have questions and want to chat
while their mother cooks pasta in the kitchen—this mother
who has moved them to one big room just until the divorce
goes through—then the girls warm up, like popcorn
in the microwave, giggling, elbowing each other, waving
crayoned pages, bringing me riddles and jump rope rhymes
from school like armloads of zinnias, Leora snatching off
Athena’s hat to force a chase around the table. Oh sisters,
where did this yearning come from? It knocks me nose over
knees like the voice of that young man staffing the counter at
Au Bon Pain, who, when I walked in, called, Hey baby girl!
a greeting so absurd my face grew hot and I tripped
on the toe of my sneaker. Girls, right now, in this suburb
where no person claims me, you are my best friends. Set
aside my ignorance of private jokes that make you laugh
so hard you rush to the kitchen to spit out your Coke;
forget that I don’t know whether your hearts slam shut
or glow like sun-tipped asters when your dad phones.
What makes me think you’ll remember me at all?
For years now, my life has been picked clean of children,
raked, mowed, sprayed for bees. Not a thing I can do.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Merrill Oliver Douglas is the author of the poetry chapbook, Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, Little Patuxent Review, and Whale Road Review, among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York, where she works as a freelance business writer, goes kayaking when she can, and takes Yiddish classes on Zoom.

Don'ts for Girls

SWWIM Every Day
by Suzanne Langlois

by Suzanne Langlois

It’s mostly don’ts, really.
Even the dos are thinly veiled don’ts.
Do cross your legs at the ankles and no higher.
Do place your purse between your leg and that
of the boy sitting next to you on the couch.
Do cover your mouth when you laugh at his jokes.
Do laugh at his jokes, even if they are not funny,
even if they are at your expense.
If they are at your expense and not funny,
do realize that they are not jokes, but directions.
A few weeks before graduation, the president
of my college announced that all gender-based
courses would be discontinued at the start
of the next academic year.
Girls in Education, gone.
Women poets before 1900, gone.
Gender and Politics, gone.
He claimed gender was no longer relevant.
This was nineteen years before Roe was overturned.
A concurrent email read,
Women, do wear flats with your graduation robe.
The ground will be uneven.

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Suzanne Langlois’s chapbook, Bright Glint Gone, won the 2019 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance chapbook award. Her poems have appeared most recently in Best New Poets, Rust + Moth, Menacing Hedge, Scoundrel Time, and Leon Literary Review. She holds a MFA from Warren Wilson College and teaches high school English in Falmouth, Maine.

this country will require you to be magical then attempt to burn you for being a witch

SWWIM Every Day
by Angelique Zobitz

by Angelique Zobitz


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

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Girl-child, power-in-waiting, Revolution,
this world will try to cleave you
in half, reach inside—
lay waste, leave you
a bloody mess of seed,
pulp, carved out meat—
pick your bones
attempt to harness your sweet
for a world full
of eager carrion birds.

Transfigurate:
flower, fruit, fire—
unfurl an inferno
curling coils down
your devil back.
Scorch them with your flame
tongue. Remind them you
predate evangelism;
leave them ashes,
burn them down—
teach them our bodies
are best left alone.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Angelique Zobitz (she/her/hers) is the author of the chapbooks Burn Down Your House (Milk & Cake Press) and Love Letters to The Revolution (American Poetry Journal). Her first book, Seraphim, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in April 2024. She is a 2022-2023 Jake Adam York Prize and Philip Levine Prize finalist, multi-nominated for the Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Her work appears in The Journal, Sugar House Review, Yemasse, Obsidian: Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora, The Adirondack Review, ANMLY, and many others. She can be found at www.angeliquezobitz.com and on Twitter and Instagram: @angeliquezobitz.

Abecedarian for the Walking Woman

SWWIM Every Day

by Simone Muench and Jackie K. White


Alleys: never. Boulevard: maybe. But only in broad daylight.
Corners: not without a label. Dead end to end up dead.
Entrance: not without a fee. Fear? Always. on route to a gangplank.
Hill: where they found Heather's body. Into the garden: a flaming

sword swung against Eve. Near Joshua Tree: more bodies
and next to a knoll: a doll. Livid? Also always. when loathed
as marionettes in the morning; nowhere girls by night.
Overlook: not without witnesses. Passageway, ripe

with striations where ponytail or limbs were left, evidence
of trying a short-cut. Queue: movie, concert, or liquor
store, not without looking over your shoulder. Railway
tracks: stitches will be needed. And no forest trails

or tunnels for you. Underground: not without a few
hey babys. And whether by valley or viaduct, you’ll need
wings to bypass the xylophonic yelp from your own
throat. Wending: still not allowed. Yonder: always zip-tied.

______________________________________________________________________

Simone Muench is a recipient of an NEA fellowship and author of several books, including Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande; winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize) and Wolf Centos (Sarabande). She’s an editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) and serves as a poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, advisor for Jet Fuel Review, poetry editor for JackLeg Press, and founder of the HB Sunday Reading Series.

Jackie K. White is the author of three previous chapbooks and the co-author, with Simone Muench, of Hex & Howl (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Professor Emerita at Lewis University, her poems, translations, and collaborative poems have appeared in such journals as The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Hypertext, Pleiades, and Shenandoah.

untitled (i imagine)

SWWIM Every Day
by Ditta Baron Hoeber

by Ditta Baron Hoeber

I imagine

That there’s no one
For whom I’ll break my hands

But it’s not true.
I would break my hands for you.

& I imagine that you ask.

______________________________________________________________________

Ditta Baron Hoeber is an artist as well as a poet. Her poems have been published in a number of magazines including Noon, Gargoyle, The American Journal of Poetry, Juxtaprose, Pank, Burningword Literary Review, The American Poetry Review, and Contemporary American Voices. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her first book, Without You: A Poem And A Preface, is forthcoming in 2023.

the convert discovers joy

SWWIM Every Day
by Doritt Carroll

by Doritt Carroll


the church had a slogan for it: JOY, meaning
that one tried to please Jesus first, then Others,
and only if there was time left over Yourself

later, after i had given up, i called the mothers’
group that met in the rectory basement
the Martyrdom Olympics if i mentioned

i’d been sick every other mother had been sicker
and while deathly ill also had driven one hundred
fifty miles for sports drop-off and iced three

classrooms’ worth of cupcakes on the way
when they asked how many children i had
their response always was the same—“only

two?” not just because it suggested I was using
birth control but also because it meant i wasn’t
suffering enough one of the expressions everyone

repeated was “offer it up” meaning give your suffering
to God and one time i made the room fall silent when
i blurted out “but why would He want it?”

______________________________________________________________________

Doritt Carroll is a native of Washington, DC. Doritt is the winner of Harbor Review’s 2020 Laura Lee Washburn prize for her chapbook, A Meditation on Purgatory. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Main Street Rag and RHINO, among others. Her collection, GLTTL STP, was published by Brickhouse Books. Her chapbook, Sorry You Are Not An Instant Winner, was published by Kattywompus (2017). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

My Name

SWWIM Every Day
by Nivi Engineer

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.

______________________________________________________________________

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. 

Reflections on Sex Lessons

SWWIM Every Day
by Karen Elizabeth Sharpe

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.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

Gifting My Mother Tabu Dusting Powder

SWWIM Every Day
by Luci Huhn

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.

______________________________________________________________________

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.

Smolder

SWWIM Every Day
by Sara Potocsny

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.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

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