by Julia C. Alter
by Michele Bombardier
A single blue star in the white sky
of my thigh where I drove in the pencil,
its lead tip lodged like a bullet under my skin.
I don’t remember why, only how I hid
the angry red welt, how it raised up
like a slag heap. I was such a good girl.
Perfect, how my mother still describes me,
the word a crown of tungsten weight.
Daughter of a refugee, product of the projects,
her ticket out was the ring on her left hand.
How could she have known different?
I used to pinch the skin on my thigh and roll
the rice-sized cylinder between my fingers,
remind myself of that girl. It’s dissolved now,
nothing left to feel. Only a blue dot reminding me
to drive my pencil into the page, to be the bullet.
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Michele Bombardier is the author of What We Do, a Washington Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in JAMA, Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Parabola, Bellevue Literary Review, and others. She holds an MFA from Pacific University in Poetry. She is a Hedgebrook fellow, the founder of Fishplate Poetry, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of her town.
by Katy Luxem
When something is exceptionally
good in life, perhaps the fried zucchini
slices of late summer or the garden,
beautiful as it is, but still a backdrop
to the evening sky, when the sun dips
its oil lamp past the horizon, perhaps then.
When I get to kiss the constellation
of a body late at night, pressed into the dark
face of gravity, as if it is a whole universe
made just for me. The glow of this luck may
make me feel faint, temporary, outstanding.
The stars are out. And the stars are out.
There is no trick to the light.
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Katy Luxem is based in Salt Lake City. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and the University of Utah. Her work has appeared in Rattle, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Poetry Online, Appalachian Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and others. She is the author of Until It Is True, which is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in fall 2023.
by Dorsey Craft
Get in the boat! I yell, voicing the purple,
quilted Noah, because this scene never
has enough urgency: placid pairs
of swans and aardvarks meekly gliding
up the ramp—We’re the last of our species,
so what? It’s unbelievable, the amount
of toymakers inspired by divinely
designed apocalypse, the Lord wiping
his hand across the white board
of creation. My baby has four Noahs:
two books, his tiny travel ark, plus
a plush with life-size squirrels.
I like to make the waves to smack
against the bow, the doves skitter
in tornado cones as the rhinos
gore chinchillas, barrel to the dry
compartments up top. I no longer
believe in orderly fashion,
double-file lines, anything other
than animal fury at annihilation. My son
pincers a zebra above his head
like a sacrifice. He laughs like violet
lilting to indigo, like rain that torrents,
a reveille for the birth of the world.
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Dorsey Craft is the author of Plunder (Bauhan Publishing 2020), winner of the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She currently serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of Agni and teaches creative writing at University of North Florida.
by Dani Janae
I put on a suit and deem myself Trillary Clinton.
A tag on my cup of tea says “Empty yourself and let
the universe fill you.” I keep thinking of Olivia Benson,
I keep thinking about the jury of my peers. I pose
half-naked for a stranger's project on sexual violence.
My body a blur as I’m asked to move through emotion.
It’s the entire Commonwealth versus a man in a suit.
The detective presses his hand to his face as he asks
me how much I had to drink on the night in question.
The same detective tells me my rapist and his lawyer
are arrogant, like they’ve won already. I still try
to make time to laugh, but every sound from my lips
comes out as a plea. I create a playlist called
“rage suite” and hope it helps me to channel my
tears into fire. In the end, the Commonwealth says
I am incapable of standing trial. In the end, my tongue
is less flame and more a wet muscle. The men have won
the prize of my body, changed thing. Changeling. The hiss
of my name laying gold crowns on their teeth, oh victory.
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Dani Janae is a poet and journalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has been published by Longleaf Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Palette Poetry, Wax Nine Journal, Levee Magazine, and Slush Pile Magazine. Her manuscript, Express Desire, was a finalist for the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize.
by Jenna Le
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I crumple marriage offers made by fishermen,
masons, bakers of brioche, for I know
my consecration is to marry the
great Van Gogh. Look at history and see
men of genius wrecked before there is
the chance for one brave girl to swoop down, dangerous
to his enemies and doubters, the
critics and hecklers, and save him from that storm.
My love shall be his shield, prevent the terrible.
No shy virgin, I’ve seen four decades; they
have handled me the way some clumsy half-
cocked violin restorer does a never-
again-same harp. I know the score. I found
Vincent living with his mother in these
snake-filled backwoods, where gossips embroider the dangers
of his past romancing of a whore. Sufficient
to say I’m not scared off. Inside me, too,
there is a prostitute and a barkeep,
a seamstress and a siren and a shore.
Note: In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote about Margot Begemann, briefly his fiancée, “It’s a pity I didn’t meet her earlier—say 10 years ago or so. Now she gives me the impression of a Cremona violin that’s been spoiled in the past by bad bunglers of restorers.” He ended their relationship the same year it began. Margot drank poison but recovered.
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Jenna Le is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011); A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, voted on by the international membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association; and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Verse Daily, West Branch, and many other journals. A daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she has a B.A. in mathematics and an M.D. and works as a physician and educator in New York City.
by Dana Kinsey
over my breakfast of grape skins and pink petals / I’ll darn his sea-blue socks with his shark feet still languishing inside / but I’ll be precise and never disturb that one golden thread / and his beauty / twice beauty / knowing he’s doubly good / at rebirthing me / as a horse / my hair a mane of wild salt / my whinny / the laughter / he cannot live without / hearing because its foamy cascade rises / makes me grow / shoulders like honeyed hills / stretching wide above / my new-moon waist / which never expands / under his dove-wing hands / despite the dirt I’ve swallowed / to make my mouth his earth / where we run together like shadows / in the shadows / always holding hands / even when we’re not / and only he can know / of the crystal crown I wear / that no one else sees / the one that never tilts / though dusty winds and brooding waters I’ve faced / to find him / have shrunken me like a little leaf / trembling on his chest / never jealous of other women / who have also cut across his heart / with crepe paper maps and melting pianos / content to kiss only his fingernails or eyelashes / or drown in dreams that spurt from his heart / the heart you must know / stops loving me / drum beat by drum beat by drum / when I try to transplant it / behind ribs / of a lesser man.
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Dana Kinsey is an actor and teacher published in Fledgling Rag, Drunk Monkeys, ONE ART, On the Seawall, Sledgehammer Lit, West Trestle Review, Better Than Starbucks, Red Ogre Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Prometheus Dreaming, and Prose Online. Dana's play, WaterRise, was produced at the Gene Frankel Theatre. Her chapbook, Mixtape Venus, is published by I. Giraffe Press. Visit wordsbyDK.com.
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.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
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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