Counting Blackbirds

SWWIM Every Day
by Zoë Ryder White

by Zoë Ryder White

From inside the murmuration, I texted Jo. I am inside these birds, I wrote. I sent a seven-second video. OH!! Jo wrote back. The birds lifted in sequence from their several trees, lit again on several others a little farther down the hill. I felt the air they beat on my face and hands. I felt my heart’s indecorous thud. How many landing blackbirds, and no one missed their branch! Then they were gone. Since they were gone, I started running. I thought to text Jo later: is there a finite number that represents how many times a person might stand inside a flock? What if this is my fourth-to-last time??? But maybe the issue is less a scarcity of murmurations than a scarcity of imagination, of action plans. Running down the ridge, I thought, I need not passively accept my own projected lack of blackbird. I could just go to where the birds are and be still. But where had they gone? At bedtime tonight, my son said, a number is a number is a number and it goes on forever. Ever is a number, he said, and every number also has its word. He asked, what is the difference between the number alone and the word we say for it? It irks, that distance. The birds are darts, are darning needles, are gasps of sorrow, are bickering in the bare trees, are gripping bark, are gorging on seeds, are sparks on the wire, are gone again, lifting as you stumble through their cloud.

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Zoë Ryder White’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her most recent chapbook, Via Post, won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. Her chapbook, HYPERSPACE, is available from Factory Hollow. She co-authored, with Nicole Callihan, A Study in Spring. Elsewhere, their most recent collaboration, won the Sixth Finch chapbook competition in 2019. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.

Negative Capabilities

SWWIM Every Day
by Grace Q. Song

by Grace Q. Song

We will never know what broke
The course of the full moon train.
At the restaurant, people stared
As the performance of our lives

Crashed out the window into destiny.
It wasn’t awful at first. Only funny.
The cold, watery light ran down
My dress, and I didn’t know what to do.

You were so wrong, so right,
I felt almost betrayed. Those were the years
You watched me through, standing
Like a pale flush across the lake.

I was leaving when you told me
What kind of person I’d become.
Now the train won’t come on time.
The moon had broken over the table,

And I couldn’t pick up all
The aluminum pieces on the floor.
I am a terrible sister,
And an even more painful daughter.

We will change each other.

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Grace Q. Song is a writer residing in New York City. Her poetry and fiction have been published in The Boiler, The Offing, The Cincinnati Review, The Minnesota Review, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Past works have been selected for inclusion in Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She is the winner of the 11th Annual Gigantic Sequins Poetry Contest, selected by Vi Khi Nao, and she studies English at Columbia University.

Sweet Nothings

SWWIM Every Day
by Sherine Elise Gilmour

by Sherine Elise Gilmour

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

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Some mornings the bus is a miniature party.
Our words like streamers.

At each bus stop: a different home. A door opens
and a child with a ventilator is carried down.

At each stop, applause from all the mothers lucky enough
to ride the bus. “Go Sasha, go Sasha.” We compete

to catch the child’s attention. Who will hit the right tone?
The right volume. Right smile or word or phrase to make

the child notice and grin. The children who can walk do so
down the rubber yellow-lines of the bus, turned fashion runway.

We want them to strut. We call and hoot. We pout,
blow kisses. We are inappropriate

with our affections, nicknames, the way we touch their hands
like mini saviors, the passing of saints. The way we demand

high fives. “She’s better looking than Beyonce. Watch out for the boys.”
“Look at Jaden’s Micky Mouse sneakers. He’s so handsome today.”

The children are rained down on in every language.
For their clothing and their hair. For the toys

they are technically not allowed to bring onto the city-sanctioned bus.
“Oh my! Is that Thomas? Is that Miss Piggy? Is that your blinky?”

“Look what Eduardo has today, his very own cellphone.
Mr. Businessman, that’s what you are.”

We give them futures, possible and improbable.
Proclamations: “Look at all these beautiful, blessed children.”

Excuses: “That’s okay, you don’t have to say “hi.”
Tender jibing: “Are you going to stay awake so we can see your eyes?”

And for my son, always, “How is my boyfriend this morning?”
These mothers smile their widest smiles

as if paparazzi are on the bus, as if it’s picture day every day.
I am slow to rise to this kind of excitement

but manage to say good morning. My son and I take our seats
in this moving cranking manual ignition diesel-tank theater of love.

Who are these women? I have never met any like them before.

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Sherine Elise Gilmour graduated with an MFA in poetry from New York University. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her poems and essays have appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Many Mountains Moving, River Styx, So To Speak, Tinderbox Literay Journal, and elsewhere.

Letter to a Teen

SWWIM Every Day
by Eileen Pettycrew

by Eileen Pettycrew

Students in a Dallas school district must wear clear backpacks after Uvalde shooting.
 —NPR, July 19, 2022


Is it enough to say
I’m rooting for you, though I was
never a cheerleader. Enough to say

I’m thinking of you, like a Hallmark card.
Is it enough to say my whole school
had to evacuate, shiver for hours

in the bleachers. She did it on a dare.
Her name was Bonnie, freshman calling in
a bomb scare. Is it enough

my brother cracked like a windshield
and became a stranger. That was
the year I forgot how to feel. The year

of leather drawstring purses girls carried
like dark planets. Tampons, lip gloss,
gum, cigarettes. Numbness,

my secret crush. Listen to me
blather on. I would have written sooner
but I didn’t know what to say.

And now it’s December.
Is it enough I see sunrise
reflected in my car window,

and silhouetted there,
the bare branches of trees,
still carrying their dose of night?

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Eileen Pettycrew’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in ONE ART, New Ohio Review, CALYX Journal, Cave Wall Press, SWWIM Every Day, and other journals. In 2022 she was one of two runners-up for the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry from Press 53, and a finalist for both the NORward Prize for Poetry from New Ohio Review as well as the New Letters Award for Poetry. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Eileen lives in Portland, Oregon.

Bone Song

SWWIM Every Day
by Tin Fogdall

by Tin Fogdall

We sat upstairs while they slipped her into a bag.
On the desk, in a photograph album,
she kept walking into the ocean,
holding her sister’s hand.
Sun dribbled down between javelin firs.
A small amount of other people’s ashes
get mixed in. Your signature
means you understand.
Without her body, she was washing away.
Memory is a strange Bell— I can’t
make it ring. The phoebes are coming back,
their ridiculous, wagging tails
a balm. Blown limbs
beside the trail. I can’t haul back up
how she touched or smelled
there is no hemisphere where she registers,
but when I sing,
it’s her voice.
She was mostly oxygen, sixty percent
breath. For one hundred mornings,
I’ve stood at the mirror
—it’s not me there but the light
I keep shedding. By this time,
she has fallen
somewhere as rain.

Note: The italicized line is by Emily Dickinson.

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Tin Fogdall’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Missouri Reivew, The Threepenny Review, Poetry, Slate, Green Mountains Review, and Poetry Northwest, among other venues. She earned her M.A. in creative writing from Boston University and lives now in Vermont. On Instagram, she documents a minor obsession with circles.

Lines

SWWIM Every Day
by Wendy Wisner

by Wendy Wisner

Blood in the sink when I spit.
Blood on the morning sheets.
Milk, too. Is that blood
on the baby’s belly button?
Are those mosquito bites
on our older son’s arms
or something worse, something
he could give the baby?
Blood and milk, blood and milk.
How many lines can I write
between the baby’s cries?

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Wendy Wisner is the author of two books of poems, Epicenter and Morph and Bloom. Her essays and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Passages North, Tar River Poetry, Nashville Review, The Washington Post, Full Grown People, The Manifest-Station, Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York with her husband and two kids. Find her at www.wendywisner.com.

Communion of Dust

SWWIM Every Day
by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

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

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It's how I arrived in this place. Dust. Blood.
Thin figures. Shadows stretched like bars
against a farm gone fallow. Gone dust. Gone wind.

My grandmother said, Steinbeck never got it right.
The place. The leaving and how it felt:
to be child in a world gone back to dust.

She'd breath the dust into me some birthdays.
Or, when I'd come back to visit from college.
Until the dust stuck to my tongue, clouded my eyes
as I tried to drift farther and farther away.
She whispered into my ear the songs she'd sung
in the canneries those long hours she'd worked as a child.
Until the land had become me. No way to escape
the need to carry it, to tell it right.

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer and poet. Her books include the biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and her fourth poetry collection West : Fire : Archive (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2021). She is currently writing a biography about the author Sanora Babb which will be published by the University of California Press 2024.

Wormholes

SWWIM Every Day
by Carolina Hotchandani

by Carolina Hotchandani



Sometimes I believed the future lived
under the surface
of the present,

and if I tried, I could
unveil it. The way my mother
peeled back the artichoke’s scales,

paring away a light fuzz
to reach the heart.
Lately, I’m afraid of the cores

I find strewn about the counter.
My father’s eating peaches,
cherries, plums.

So many bananas.
He even tries to eat the peels.
I remember how he’d prick

his finger each day—
a globule of blood rising
from beneath this moment

to its outer tip. He’d stamp
his blood onto a strip to learn
if he was fine.

Now he takes in the sweetness
he always feared.
As a child

I shuddered at that lance,
that scarlet sphere.
I worry: his worry’s gone.

Tira as minhocas da cabeça,
my mother says.
Pull those worms out of your head.

Imagined futures:
I need you to stay under
the grass, wriggling deep in the earth.

Close to its unknown core.

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Carolina Hotchandani won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize for her debut poetry collection, The Book Eaters, which will be released in September 2023. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Diode, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska.

Incantation

SWWIM Every Day
by Helena Mesa

by Helena Mesa

Not even flight patterns offer certainty tonight.
Which words will bring you beside me tonight?

The plane trembles over your state line. Mountains,
plains—how do I map our geography tonight?

Rain ferries across your streets, inverts the stars.
Nearly asleep, I know snow muffles my eaves tonight.

Once, we lived together—our time marked
by a season, a plan. Why think of that lease tonight?

Extrañar, to miss, as in, extraño tu voz en la mañana.
Me extraña, as in, how odd your voice feels tonight.

You say planes are also arrivals. Why is there always
a suitcase half-packed? Forgive my defeat tonight.

These nights, these archipelagos of words:
Say skin, breath, tongue—say Helena, here, tonight.

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Helena Mesa is the author of Where Land Is Indistinguishable from Sea (forthcoming from Terrapin Press) and Horse Dance Underwater, and is an editor for Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Ode to Error

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Saunders

by Jennifer Saunders

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

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“ … Whatever
mistakes we make, we will become what we are
because of our blunders.”
Dorianne Laux “Zulu, Indiana (An Ode to the Internet)”


O stirrup pants, o acid-washed jeans, o single
black lace glove and rubber bracelets. Forgive me,
but you were mistakes, all of you,
you and the thigh-ripped-open jeans
I criss-crossed with skate laces. O big hair,
o green eye shadow, o hanging out on the beach
drinking ill-gotten Bartles & Jaymes and letting JP
of the fake ID unlace me and feed me
vodka-spiked watermelon
and slide his fingers inside me.
O dark parking lot, o end of the lane.
O you missteps, you well-practiced mistakes,
you paving of my crooked road. Fender-bender
in the McDonald’s parking lot
on the way home from Great America
because I was too impatient
to wipe the steam from the back window.
The ride I hitched with those guys
who turned out to be high
and on shore leave. O narrow escapes.
That haircut sophomore year.
That blue prom dress. Jellies.
Not going to Homecoming with G
because nice guys scared me
more than JP and his Alabama Slammers.
O grapefruit diet, o Jane Fonda’s Workout, o beginning
of erasure. Daisy Dukes and ankle boots,
D+ in calculus, girl sitting in the back row
chewing her hair. O child, o paving stone,
o boat somebody else rowed. Off-the-shoulder
sweatshirts, “Let’s Get Physical,” o parachute pants—
the kind that were so easy to slip out of.

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Jennifer Saunders (she/her) is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the Clockwise Chapbook Competition. Her poem “Crosswalk” was selected by Kim Addonizio as the winner of the 2020 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize and appeared in Southword. Jennifer's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, Pidgeonholes, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is also the co-editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, 2023). Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.

Attachment Theory

SWWIM Every Day
by Alecia Beymer

by Alecia Beymer

"Scientists Watched a Star Explode in Real Time for the First Time Ever." LiveScience, https://www.livescience.com/first-supernova-real-time-observations.

Closeness is a fiery supernova located 120 million light years from earth. Even in its violent collapse, we watched. We talked as if we knew each other all along. Days, arms like scarves around the neck. Days like small children reaching their arms to a parent. What of this desire to be held? There were conversations: sentences sewing distance. Say goodbye, on repeat. How did I learn to be close to someone? Looking up, a clattering of light fused into darkness. I realize later, we were all just learning how to love. Arms expanded in belief that someone might run towards them. Meanwhile, the wind cradles shallow edges—cutting on the backs of necks. Tiny explosions.

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Alecia Beymer is an Assistant Professor - Educator in the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, The Inflectionist Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, and Sugar House Review. Her research is focused on literacies formed by space and place, considerations of the interconnected resonances of teachers and students, and the poetics of education.

Moon, real and reflected

SWWIM Every Day
by Carolyn Guinzio

by Carolyn Guinzio

If you put in to the river near where you live,
how close will it bring you to home? Nothing is familiar

from here. There is always an emptiness coming
towards us to take something back or away. Blue heron

on bank, green heron in branch, bittern
on bar, mussel husk. THANKS FOR A GREAT

FORTY FIVE YEARS was written in the gritty
window of the shop. Even the nests in the eaves

are empty. TO EACH THEIR OWN ETERNITY
is written on the stone city gate. It's safe

to say now, from this distance, wobbling in the blue
basket of a yellow balloon, that everything ends,

and everything ends in water, or, what doesn't end
in water ends in light, or what doesn't end in light doesn't

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Carolyn Guinzio's most recent collection is A Vertigo Book, winner of The Tenth Gate Prize and winner of the Foreword Indies Award for Poetry Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and many other journals. Her poetry films have been screened at numerous festivals throughout the world, including the Cadence Festival, where she was a jury award winner. Her website is carolynguinzio.tumblr.com.

Meditation

SWWIM Every Day
by Wendy Drexler

by Wendy Drexler

—with a line by Marguerite Yourcenar


The candle isn’t bothered by the flame, light doesn’t complain
when swallowed by dusk, pebbles don’t mourn the mountain
they’ve crumbled from, mountain lions fatten on feral burrows
that are wrecking wetlands, the Australian crocodile that makes
a fine meal of feral pigs doesn’t know it’s endangered,
the pigs don’t know they’re invasive, we’re all ravenous, cascading
tragedies, dipping into glimmers of relief, gripping the flywheel,
trying to get by, sorting angels from villains, poachers from
preachers, loners from shooters, all of us wreathed in this
sorry mixture of blood and lymph. I mean, look at me, shelling
invasive Asian tiger shrimp for dinner, tearing off the soft
swimmerets that once streamed seaweed and brooded eggs,
slitting the fleshly crescent with a paring knife as my thumbnail
scrapes the thin white vein that once carried the colorless blood.

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Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, was published in September 2022 by Terrapin Books. She’s been the poet-in-residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.

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