by B Rivka Clifton
by Marie Kressin
By the river, I pass a pearl-white spider sack of eggs
that could not be a spider sack of eggs—
and I don’t stop
to look until I remembered her saying: Noticing shit
is how we save the world. I turned and knelt.
Two bulbing lobes, two black holes dusted
in feathers, a too-big beak, poor crushed
decapitated
body and open-ended questions
for wings. Sometimes, I feel the world turning,
and it’s okay that I can’t start my life over. Right now,
I’d like to prick my finger on this needle
mouth, allow
my left ventricle to balloon
blood through a puncture wound. That’s how
I want to say: I’m sorry and thank you and sweet
angel, we don’t know how to stop failing you and
failing you
and failing you and there is a future where
you and I become the same water.
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Marie Kressin is currently an MFA candidate at the University of the South. She has been published in Arkansas's Best Emerging Poets, Timber, and elsewhere. She supports her habit of paying rent by writing full-time for a local education magazine.
by Cynthia White
The sofa she lounged on—
with Michener, with Updike and Roth—
was not burnished, not a throne,
but though she’s been dead
years now, it burns.
Against cloth of Harvest Gold,
her curls gleamed—
Summer Blonde by Clairol—
and bright flecks gilded the glass
she drank from, like alluvium washed
down from great heights. As for her person,
her aspect could vanquish
the Stygian gloom of any bar.
My sisters and I, no matter the hour,
would attend her. Bound
as we were, by blood. On occasion,
my father would leave the house
and return with a paper bag, brimful
of Oh! Henrys and Cadbury Creams.
She wouldn’t get up. But what there was,
she’d polish off in small, tragic bites.
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Cynthia White's work has appeared in Adroit, Massachusetts Review, Plume, New Letters, and ZYZZYVA, among others. She was a finalist for Slapering Hol's Poetry Chapbook Prize and the winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Prize for poetry. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.
by Angela Narciso Torres
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Truth is, one can’t write about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.
Why have I so little control?
One wants to finish sentences.
To go adventuring on the streams of other people’s lives.
Why have I so little control?
This is the normal feeling, I think.
To go adventuring on the streams of other people’s lives.
I take a census of happy people, and unhappy.
This is the normal feeling, I think.
Happiness is a little string onto which things will attach.
I take a census of happy people, and unhappy.
How Vita’s inkpot flowered on her table.
Happiness is a little string onto which things will attach.
How can I express the darkness?
How Vita’s inkpot flowered on her table?
Shall I remember any of this?
How can I express the darkness?
At this moment, all we wish is to escape seeing.
Shall I remember any of this?
I am repeating things.
At this moment, all we wish is to escape seeing.
The world swinging round again, bringing its greens and blues.
I am repeating things.
My pen protests. This writing is nonsense, it says.
The world swinging round again, bringing its greens and blues.
Time flaps on the mast—my own phrase.
My pen protests. This writing is nonsense, it says.
But what little I can get down with my pen.
Time flaps on the mast—my own phrase.
Winter has set in. Draw the curtains, light the fire, and so to work.
But what little I can get down with my pen.
I am giving up the hope of being well dressed.
Winter has set in. Draw the curtains, light the fire, and so to work.
Truth is, one can’t write about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.
I am giving up the hope of being well dressed.
One wants to finish sentences.
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Angela Narciso Torres is the author of three poetry collections including her most recent book, What Happens is Neither (Four Way Books). She is a reviews editor for RHINO; her work appears in POETRY, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Northwest.
by Bryana Joy
will you be my
second thing o I
don’t care what and sex
doesn’t matter let’s be
two terns squalling
on the shore the tide
going out and in
two pencils side
by side in the case let’s
be anything but male
and female anything
but far
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Bryana Joy is a poet & painter who has lived in Türkiye, Texas, & England, & now resides in Eastern Pennsylvania. Her work is inspired by her passionate interest in the ocean, honest spirituality, & women's global liberation. Her poetry has appeared in dozens of literary journals, & she also hosts online poetry workshops to foster meaningful arts community & support writers. Find her at www.bryanajoy.com or on Twitter and Instagram at @_bryana_joy.
by Chel Campbell
Old snow turns me feral, I’m through, don’t tell me to get cozy when I live
in a land encrusted with icy oil and dirt. I am turning 31 next week, what a silly number,
though I admire its nerve of only being divisible by one and itself. I take myself out
to lunch, overhear a stranger tell a friend she bought 60 bucks of art supplies that
sit in a corner untouched, how she wishes Jerry was better about things, and such
needing brings her to tears. Hey stranger, I wanna tell you Jerry needs to step the fuck up
or you step the fuck out, unbury your watercolors, eat and drink and paint naked all day
if that’s what you want, but I am silent as I finish my soup (understand that I’m always
braver in my head) tip cash, and return to the concrete lot. Even the sky is mush, but
at least my belly is warm, my brain wrapped in the kind of wool scarf that tickles
the neck. Thoughts itch, divide themselves, seek temporary relief as my fingers
stop on the car door handle, knuckles split and bleeding, slush seeping through
cracks in my well-worn boots, my inner evils melting into temporary calm,
for they, too, only exist in my head. Say I open that door. Say I begin to thaw.
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Chel Campbell (she/they) is a poet from Sioux Falls, South Dakota whose work appears in trampset, HORNS, Pidgeonholes, Midway Journal, The MacGuffin, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. In 2021, she completed her master's degree in English at the University of South Dakota where she taught literature and composition and read poetry for the South Dakota Review. They have been a stay-at-home parent since the pandemic began.
by Victoria Nordlund
My Dad brought me back a Blue Morpho pressed
in a black shadow box after returning from his mission
in Guyana in 1978. I was 10 & obsessed with catching
Monarchs & Swallowtails in my backyard.
Waited for them to pass in jelly jars shelved in my carport.
I can still feel their fairy dust on my fingertips
& they were fresh & I was careful how I spread
their wings so they wouldn’t break,
how I made sure their corpses were centered,
how I held my specimens under their thoraxes
& gently inserted the pins, how I created the illusion
that they still floated—
When I pulled them from a container in my basement
yesterday, they emerged uglier than I remembered:
Wings frayed, antennae askew, guts leaking on burlap
& I killed so many without remorse.
I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News
& the shots of the rainforest & the reports of Kool-Aid
in little Dixie Cups & the people face down
on the ground & I was supposed to feel something
but I didn’t understand what a massacre meant & I was spared
the details of how Dad flew all the bodies back from Jonestown
& I saved the Morpho & its remains still shimmer–
I didn’t realize that its undersides were brown, that it was never blue.
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Victoria Nordlund's poetry collection, Wine-Dark Sea, was published by Main Street Rag in 2020. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize Nominee, whose work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Rust+Moth, Chestnut Review, trampset, Pidgeonholes, and elsewhere. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
by Andrea Krause
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
by Laura Minor
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.
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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.
by Ellen Austin-Li