by Julie Marie Wade
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
by Angela Just
I check the posted prices near my gate, wonder if there’s time
for a shoeshine, maybe “The Basic” at six dollars, fifty cents.
You need a shine, says the woman running the booth. And she’s
not asking. Yes, I think: a shine, a polish, a reboot. Her words
hit me like my friend’s this morning: You have a right to your life,
she’d said, and now I want this shine like my life depends on it.
The stand rises like a shrine where anyone can sit as Buddha,
observe in silence the rivers of passing feet. The woman concedes
she likes my shoes, but scowls when my foot slips off the stirrup.
Relax, she says, pulling me back in line for the final brush.
She buffs each shoe to a luster, coaxes light from the leather.
Give care to these, she says, they’ll last forever.
The final slaps of rag on shoe clap like a call to arms.
My body rattles with the work it takes for shining.
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Angela Just is the author of Everything I Own, a micro-chapbook published by Porkbelly Press. Her poems have appeared in Sweet: A Literary Confection, Haunted Waters Press, Flyway, MAKE, After Hours, and others. A Chicago writer, she is a long-time member of Egg Money Poets, a small collective of writers who support each other’s work and writing lives. Her chapbook manuscript, The Last Thing I Would Smell, is beginning to make the rounds.
by Maria Surricchio
of figs dripping in Adriatic heat,
in the mulberry-stained
strings of a mandolin,
rowdy goats, vines ablaze in autumn,
and the jewel-colored lining
of a dark wool coat. I love you
in day arriving all-at-once after
smooth night cracks open, and spring
that can’t make up its mind—
will it come, will it try today?
I love you in a painting I saw once
of wondrous anatomy—
how the heart filled the chest
and had to be cradled—
and the forty frescoes
of the Vatican Map Gallery,
all cities south of Rome
announcing their names
upside down. I love you
in the sound of geese
before I see them,
the same beach walk three times
in one day, in the octopus—
den festooned
like a holiday parade
as she begins to waste away.
And in your father,
clipped cinnamon saint,
who puts fish sauce in every recipe,
keeps seven hives
but doesn’t eat honey, releases trout
to a stream as though
it’s a bassinet of reeds.
Our boys, we miss the mark
constantly. Still, I love
how you’re every point
on a compass,
and we’re like the Pineapple Express—
I’m often hot, he’s mostly
heavy—but not
in our overwhelming arrival, in how
we circled and circled
before making landfall.
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Maria Surricchio is originally from the UK and now lives near Boulder, Colorado. A life-long lover of poetry, she began writing in 2020 after a long marketing career. Pushcart-nominated, her work has been published and is forthcoming in Pirene's Fountain, Poet Lore, Lily Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, I-70 Review, and elsewhere. She has a BA in Modern Languages from Cambridge University and is an MFA candidate at Pacific University.
by Sonya Schneider
If, by which I mean, when
he was hungry, our mother
would prop him up like a round-cheeked doll
between the wheelchair’s blue vinyl seat
and the homemade wooden tray, moaning.
Then she’d sit across from him
and feed him from her mouth
so that he would not choke.
First, the food was cut,
then carefully chewed, then spit
between her fingers and tucked
onto his outstretched tongue.
Two birds, hungry for love.
This was after she nursed him
for years, after the blue scar
down his chest began to lighten,
and the other one wrapping his
ribcage was made. My brother’s
heart was healing, but his mind
would never be the same.
She learned to give him sustenance,
and he learned to eat all of her.
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Sonya Schneider lives in Seattle, WA, and is currently earning her MFA from Pacific University. Born and raised in San Diego, CA, she graduated with a BA in English from Stanford University. Her plays have been produced in Seattle, and her poetry can be found in Catamaran Literary Reader, West Trestle Review, Aji Magazine, Eunoia Review, and Mom Egg Review. She was a finalist for the 2022 New Letters Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry.
by Alysse Kathleen McCanna
by Ayşe Tekşen
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I hated the lesson more than
I hated the teacher who preached,
revealing his yellow teeth,
and told the whole class that
we were revolving around the sun.
Why? It was a popular question
the teachers loved to ask.
I wanted to ask him the same then:
Why teacher, tell me, why do we
revolve around the sun, while he,
sun of a beach, sits as if he is
the lord of fire, all crimson,
orange, yellow, and white,
heating, simmering, burning,
and doing nothing?
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Ayşe Tekşen lives in Antalya, Turkey. Her work has been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, UutPoetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, Arcturus, Constellations, the Same, The Mystic Blue Review, Jaffat El Aqlam, Brickplight, Willow, Fearsome Critters, Susan, The Broke Bohemian, The Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, Shoe Music Press, Havik: Las Positas College Anthology, Deep Overstock, Lavender Review, Voice of Eve, The Courtship of Winds, Mojave Heart Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rigorous, Rabid Oak, The Thieving Magpie, Headway Quarterly, The Roadrunner Review, Helen Literary Magazine, The Ilanot Review, Pensive, The Hamilton Stone Review, Room, and The Manifest-Station.
by Yvonne Zipter
Your limbless
body winging
down the side-
walk. Ess, ess,
ess. A stutter,
a slow leak, a
hiss. A thread
following an
invisible needle
stitching a quick
hem in the air.
Frantic to find
an escape under
the fence, you
bunch up against
the boards like
ribbon candy
or a flamenco
ruffle—com-
pressed esses
on esses. When
I was six, we
called your like
grass snakes,
nearly as common
as the blades
your kin zipped
between, green-
&-black lightning
parting the grass
as they passed.
The chase was
as thrilling as
the capture,
the ropy creature
slipping through
my fingers, one
hand to the next
as I attempted
to detain it—
slipping like
the chain of
a luxurious
necklace, silky
and supple.
Look!, I say,
pointing you
out to my dog,
wanting someone
with whom
to share my
wonderment.
The dog brings
her nose to
the pile you’ve
made of yourself
beside the fence,
just as you begin
to unfold, loop
after loop, and
glide beneath
a ragged plank.
The dog jumps
backward then,
surprised to find
that something
alive could flow
like water.
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Yvonne Zipter is author of the poetry collections The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets, Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, The Patience of Metal (Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and Like Some Bookie God, as well as the Russian historical novel Infraction and the nonfiction books Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend and Ransacking the Closet. Her individual published poems are being sold in two repurposed toy-vending machines in Chicago, the proceeds of which support a local nonprofit organization.
by Amy Dryansky
On this the most holy of days I wish I wasn’t writing my sins
on the back of my kid’s Learner’s Permit, though I suppose it’s appropriate
for what am I to God, to anyone to the people I love and hurt and love
but a student, perpetually sharpening her pencil blowing off the gray dust
spiral of shavings? I know an artist who did that. Worked hour after hour
to produce a spiraling pencil’s worth of unbroken yellow. A strange beauty
that undoing. Whereas I lack talent or patience. I tabulate small
deaths of conscience, the lost, soft unmuscled places
of my will. Everything happens while everything else happens
somebody famous said, and it’s what I’m chewing on as I pump gas
beneath the 7-11’s nacreous lights, interstate pulsing behind me and in the sky
an arrow of geese clacking their exit aligning and realigning
a continual shifting of priorities that reminds me what my body already knows
that it’s getting colder and darker earlier and earlier. A tow truck
pulls in, hauling a dead tour bus, casino trip interrupted, ruptured
fractured by chance, and I finish filling my tank an innocuous act
though it has consequences. But that’s not what’s got me on my knees.
Reader, we’re alone until we need something. We huddle colonize.
My son failed so many tests. What did I teach? I left holes.
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Amy Dryansky’s second book, Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry) received the Massachusetts Book Award. Her first, How I Got Lost So Close to Home, won the New England/New York Award from Alice James Books. Poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, The Sun, Tin House, and other journals and anthologies. She’s also received honors from the Poetry Society of America and Massachusetts Cultural Council. See adryansky.com.
by Talia Pinzari
Give me pectorals
in plunging
ruffled necklines /
give me coy
breasts in tweed-
buttoned vests /
give me faux hawks /
edged lines– /
jaws and otherwise /
give me pseudonyms /
embered eyes /
give me swagger drip
with hip dips /
strapping brows /
petaled lips /
give me the middle
of shadow-bled
borders / from where
the moon’s man
is La Luna /
Die Sonne is not
your daughter /
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Talia Pinzari’s poetry most recently appears or is forthcoming in Pangyrus, Salamander Magazine, Lily Poetry Review, and Ibbetson St., and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is working on her first collection. Talia grew up in eastern Massachusetts and now lives in Austin, Texas where she runs Pinzari PR and dances tango.
by Lisa Raatikainen
I wanted them to see in me a certain
light: a secondary hue that swerves on
past one purity through to some other,
depending on the viewer.
Invited to envision my aura,
one (a drinker) suggested wine
while another thought the void sky
of a January afternoon.
To paint light, mused a third, requires
the blunt refusal of line for gradient—
from him I learned to squint
and so discern in the eye-locked lovers
a negative hum of space
in the shape of an hourglass.
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Lisa Raatikainen is a writer, poet, and choir director who holds degrees in religion and biology. Her poetry has appeared in Five South, Whale Road Review, Moist Poetry Journal, 3 Elements Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Burlington, Vermont with her family.
by Robbi Nester
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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After Biltmore Backyard by Robb Shaffer
In autumn I hunger for seasons,
the small fires of October
burning fields to the root,
skies suffused with smoke,
reducing summer to ash, to
leaf mold and yellow sheaves.
A ribbon of migrating geese
sounds their convivial trumpets.
Naked oaks, late-season
bathers caught in a chill,
spread their silver branches,
catching a last bit of sun.
Covens of pines summon forth
winter; the smallest Japanese
maples burst into flame.
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Robbi Nester lives and writes in Southern California. She has published four books of poetry and edited three anthologies, as well as hosting and curating two monthly poetry reading series on Zoom. Her website may be found at www.robbinester.net.
by Kami Westhoff
I did not want to write this poem. I’m sick of the street
lined with cotton-candy blossoms, how their scent douses
my clothes when I pass, their skin-thin petals all fuss and flutter.
I’m done trying to describe what spring does to the eye—
how it expects the pupil to swallow the tree’s scaffold
and curve, the slope of muscle from crown to crotch.
I’m over what it might mean when my daughters find
a wing-cricked sparrow in my driveway, its pinprick
wounds nothing like starlight reversed.
Who cares how quickly the storm stuffed the sky
with its charcoal clouds, pattered my daughters,
who were worried about the sparrow, with pellets of pearl.
Wait. Let’s be clear. I’m trying to use the right words
for things—too much pain erupts when we mistake
one thing for another. It was hail, not pearls—
just what happens when updrafts whisk water drops
high enough to freeze, but can’t bear the weight
of what they’ve become.
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Kami Westhoff is the author of the story collection, The Criteria, and three poetry chapbooks including Sleepwalker, the winner of the 2016 Dare to Be Contest from Minerva Rising Press. Her work has appeared in such journals as Carve, Meridian, Third Coast, Hippocampus, Booth, Redivider, and West Branch. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.
by Gaian Rena Bird
We are the stuff of burnt-out stars
Salt song oceans
Million-year-old mud
Our bones tell us secrets
We do not know this
Sunflowers we planted
in April are 10-foot giants
Russet faces smile down
On us even in the rain
We know this is so but do not know why
The backyard is bereft
Empty of you sitting in your sun dress
Your iced tea with a straw
I was with you the day
you bought the blue gingham from Goodwill
Your shoulders so thin and frail
I wanted to drag
you back into childhood
Take back wishes for easy and quick
We know this is called regret
The shopping cart with
Everything you own is in the garage
The policeman hooks his thumb
Near his gun as he says we can't
Give you your things
Tells me the cart cannot stay
On the street where they
Took you bruised and dirty
to Nisqually for 60 days or three years
We know this is called the system
The place where you are
lets you choose "transgender"
on your electronic profile
Makes you wear men's clothes
We know this is called progress
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Gaian Rena Bird is a Black Indigenous womxn, writer, poet, and artist living in University Place, WA. She is an Elder, a sojourner in liminal spaces, and a denizen of multiple margins. As an introverted human with numerous disabilities, she reveres Crip Time as her superpower. Gaian writes from a place inseparable from her motherline. The works of transgressive Black and Indigenous women are the spiritual food and drink that fuel her words.
by Sibani Sen
Under the vernacular sun
I tally cane and gold
I, raconteur of the tannic hills.
Mandarins in castled groves
Cultivate calendula blooms
Upon my back.
Red sill and coal
Suss out my thousand eyes
I lash time
Shiver in my
Slurry skin, pitched, flailed
I prepare the vestal
I bring it level to the light
Brim, flow
One immaculate, everlasting life.
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Sibani Sen teaches creative writing and South Asian history. She has a PhD in Indology from Harvard University and an MFA from Boston University. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including Off the Coast, Nixes Mate Review, Rogue Agent, and Main Street Rag. She has done collaborative projects with the History Design Studio at the Harvard Hutchins Center, the Concord Museum, the Beacon Street Arts Studios in Somerville, the former Green Street Studio in Cambridge, and the pop-up New Rasa Initiative group at the Public Theater in NYC. Her current projects based on migration and feminism include forthcoming poetry and a monograph on the Indian pre-modern poet Bharatchandra.
by Kelly Vance
for Heather
Sandalwood smoke through lavender
stems and dim sunlight filtered
through elm leaves, half-lidded
blinds, and the dust motes
your house made from our leftover
flesh and fur. We were the dander-
lions, shedding ourselves
little fluff balls, mighty manes
falling stranded on the tiles.
I never minded a little dust
knowing it was just a little
us, remainders, reminders
of living so much we scattered
ourselves like blue through leaves.
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Kelly Vance is a graduate student in Eastern Kentucky University's MFA program in creative writing where she received the Emerging Writers Award for poetry in 2021. In 2019, she completed the Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy affiliated with Women Writing for (a) Change, Cincinnati, and incorporates many conscious leadership concepts into her writing, mentorship, and professional work as a psychiatrist.
by Lola Haskins
1. Turquoise
The sky loved the bay so much
he melted into her.
Beside such devotion we,
with all our pride, are less than ants.
2. Ocean Drive, Miami
The hotel fronts pretend to be cake.
Look out!
Los niños are banging their spoons on the table.
3. A Generation
The piece of paper we were given
is too small. Still, up and down
the rows we bend our heads,
and a silence falls over us as
along a street where one by one
the house lights are going out.
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Lola Haskins's new collection, Homelight, is just out from Charlotte Lit Press. The Betsy-South Beach is The hotel in “Poems Written in Pencil,” which appeared in Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (University of Pittsburgh, 2019), also featured in The New York Times The Sunday Magazine. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and New England Review/Breadloaf Quarterly, a Florida's Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson Prize from Poetry Society of America.
by Charlotte Pence
It’s too early for the new
hurricane season, yet warnings
flood my phone. New Orleans’
tug boat bellows blocks away.
Amid the paleness of morning
mimosas, the bedpost anchors.
Storm alerts confirm:
hurricane is headed our way.
But I’m already cracking
crab legs and contemplating
eleven years of marriage.
Of what no longer holds
a charge. A text interrupts:
“Your stepfather’s health is
deteriorating quickly.”
My stepfather’s neighbor
“just wants me to know.”
How it always returns to small
cubes of raw fish placed before us,
oil’s admiration for the surface
of things, daughters who slowly
stop kissing goodbye. What is
goodbye when Facebook chooses
memories to return to me?
We push on, down damp
streets, scent of urine on brick.
Sax notes rising up like my blister,
shiny as lighting—
none of which will photo.
At the street corner, an upturned
bucket sticks out its tongue
to become a drum, pounding us
to another place: past trips with other
downpours that laughed, that ducked.
Is this marriage, or is it
raining again? My mother texts
“Don’t worry, relax,” so we pose
a video, scoff at cocktails
in neon plastic penises, praise
weathered flamingo-pink shutters,
ignore what shutters do
when they’re shut, when they’re screwed,
the storm’s percussive wanting in and in.
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Charlotte Pence’s most recent book of poetry, Code, received the 2020 Book of the Year award from APS. Her first book of poems, Many Small Fires, which received an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews, explores her father’s chronic homelessness while simultaneously detailing the physiological changes that enabled humans to form cities, communities, and households. A graduate of Emerson College and UT Knoxville, she now directs the Stokes Center for Creative Writing.
by Kuhu Joshi
On a date with the boy I finally like
I talk about my father.
How he found my mother
at the officers’ academy, smiling
and pinning her sarees.
I tell my date, biting into ravioli, my father hunted
for the woman who would birth me
in the bowl of her lap, humming
lullabies. My father still in office.
“I really like this guy,” I texted my girlfriends
from the bathroom on WhatsApp.
And of course I didn’t tell my date
how the story unfolded. My father twisted
my arm, and more, on my sixteenth birthday.
I was laughing with a boy, unwrapping
presents. I still blew the candles,
light in the bruise of the night
and after, my mother stroked my curls
on her lap and said, “He is not a monster,”
“He is not a monster.” “I want to date him,”
“I want to date him,” my mind was flashing
as I sat across this warm and confident
man who made me laugh so hard
my kajal ran the length of my cheek. O,
I wanted, then, to love him.
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Kuhu Joshi is an Indian poet based in New York City. Her work has been published in POETRY, Best New Poets, Four Way Review, Black Fork Review, Rattle, Memorious, and others. She was awarded an honorable mention for the Academy of American Poets' university prize. She currently teaches college-level creative writing and composition. Her debut poetry collection, My Body Didn't Come Before Me, is forthcoming with Speaking Tiger Books India.
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.
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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