by Ruth Hoberman
We dress up to lay our dead down—so ceremonial,
by Kate Northrop
Agree with me the rumble of a subway coming in
can be a baby, and the first note in the hush
of a concert hall, the bright name of a baby.
Walking to the bathroom at night, seeing
floorboards rise, this, of course, is a baby, and the sound
of pool balls breaking up pool balls? Like locks down the hall
clicking, one after another, into place? Baby, baby. Babies themselves
are not babies, not their carriages, their clinging
infant fingers, but that they often surface,
creaturely, into my dreams? Four horses gathered
in a window and then, on the counter, a sudden baby?
It’s true. Just this morning, walking with Nell, we saw a horse
standing in a pasture, flicking away flies. I clucked, clucked,
held out my hand and I called here, Baby.
______________________________________________________________________
Kate Northrop's recent poetry collections are Homewrecker (New Letters vol. 88, 2022) and cuntstruck (C & R Press, 2017). Northrop teaches at the University of Wyoming. Currently she is learning to embroider.
by Julia Thacker
By the fistful, licorice-black, Georgia clay-red,
cheddar-yellow pills pressed into my palm.
A doctor wrote the scrip. Remedy for doughy arms,
belly, thighs. Shiva swallowing forest fires.
Wide awake for three consecutive sunrises, scribbling
in a spiral notebook indecipherable inky knots.
Even the teenage poems perspire through their clothes.
I eat only flavored lip gloss. This is before
college and weed, before speed freak.
Before White Cross composed a term paper
overnight. Teetering on platform shoes,
dazed, doll-size, I spread my bramble of hair
across the ironing board, press one hank at a time,
iron hissing, singed, smelling faintly of smoke,
chrysanthemums at my feet.
______________________________________________________________________
Julia Thacker's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast Online, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic, and others. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th anniversary issue of Poetry International. Twice a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she has also received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
by Scarlett Peterson
Of all of my dead you’re the one
I don’t worry about, know you
might have cracked a joke while I cried
and told you about my woman,
still would have taken me out
to pick the last huckleberry (I planted seeds
for my own. I am trying to be patient).
Just the other day I saw a green anole out
on my fence and said James, thought
of the lizards that hung from your finger,
your way of helping me learn to love
even what aches in its latching—
______________________________________________________________________
Scarlett Peterson is a poet, essayist, and lesbian. Her first collection, The Pink I Must Have Worn, was recently published by Kelsay Books. She is a PhD candidate at Georgia State University. Her work can be found in Moon City Review, The Lavender Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Gargoyle Magazine, Counterclock Journal, The Shore, Poetry Online, Eunoia Review, and more.
by Rebecca Beardsall
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Pull my bones from the pebble shores of Lancashire.
Plait my hair with flecks of auburn from the grasses of Donegal.
Push my muscular frame from the Rhine
onto the ringing rocks of Pennsylvania. My
feet sink into black sand; Tasman Sea
leaves a layer of salt on my knees. Face of
freckles emerge like southern hemisphere stars. Layers
of lands live inside me, and I search like a Saturniidae moth
ancestral spirit returning. Sepia spirals
mark my wings with amber, burnt umber.
Warm spring rain sinks into paddock soil
submerges and expels into North Sea, Atlantic, Delaware,
Irish Sea, Pacific, Rhine, Schuykill, Tasman Sea.
Lines of lineage—currents and undercurrents
surface in my eyes, shape of my nose, space of my teeth
Confirm and baptize me into my new, renewed—marriage merges me.
I stand on these Pacific shores, not the shores of my ancestors.
Tell me I am home.
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Rebecca Beardsall (MA, Lehigh University; MFA, Western Washington University) is the author of The Unfurling Frond and My Place in the Spiral. Her current nonfiction work explores her hybrid life as a transnational and explores settler colonialism. Rebecca is an editor, coach, and teacher. She teaches MFA-Style courses for writers. Find out more at rebeccabeardsall.com.
by Alexis Ivy
"whatever’s lost is gained forever"
-Hyam Plutzik
The woman who once wore this dress,
this hot pink sundress, must have
missed her connection in Atlanta.
Which carousel had the flight
attendant said? Finally her
first solo trip where she could feel
like an island, a droplet in the ocean.
Where she’s nothing but eat, sleep, beach.
The dress was for that beach week
that made her seem like she had
a closet of hot pink everything.
I’ll wear it to feel feminine, feminine
is hard for me to wear too. Dress says,
we are fun or looking for fun.
I buy the toiletry kit that traveled with
the dress as well. The size of a cantaloupe.
So much to tell with a toiletry kit, a personal
apothecary so she could stay herself
while traveling—her brands, her lavender,
her forecast, her conditions. This trip,
I’ve decided, she was going natural,
not a single blush or stick, just lip
gloss and lotion to put on a bug bite.
Had to love each of her freckles without
foundation, let go of having her
hair straight and start to love her
wavy look. Her shampoo bottle, full:
not relying on hotel shampoo says
she cared about herself a certain way.
______________________________________________________________________
Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks and Taking the Homeless Census, which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She is co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). A recent resident at The Betsy Writer’s Room, she lives in her hometown Boston and teaches in the PoemWorks community.
by Melissa Fite Johnson
At the antique mall with a friend,
buried in a bin: a Florence Griffith Joyner doll,
comes with a full set of nail stickers. I read once that
during a race her nail flew off; after it
ended she walked the track to
find it. Her miniature wears a one-legged bodysuit, neon
green and pink, the detail I most associate with
her. My friend asks if she’s still alive. I look
it up—no, 1998, seizure in her sleep,
just before her 39th birthday. I only now, in midlife,
know how young that is to die. When I was
little, forty was my father’s scratchy cheek,
my mother’s face cream. Forty was inevitable. Death had
not yet entered my mind, though soon I’d learn. My
old babysitter, my classmate whose father skidded
past the stop sign one winter, Anne Frank, Titanic, I couldn’t
quit learning death. I’m still learning it,
researching even the slightest
symptoms, wondering each birthday how much more
time. I set down Flo-Jo’s cardboard home. My friend holds
up another doll. I look this one up too, déjà
vu, only she’s alive, Billie Jean King,
white tennis dress with blue Peter Pan collar,
x number of years left. Next month, I’ll turn forty. Well—
you never really know. I should. 4-0. In tennis, the
zero is love. 40-love. I would love to turn forty.
______________________________________________________________________
Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, HAD, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches high school English in Lawrence, KS, where she and her husband live with their dogs.
by Alicia Rebecca Myers
This morning I watched a robin convert a pothole into a bird bath, which is
the kind of fearless ingenuity I covet. I ask myself why Rothko listened to
his doctor when advised not to paint color blocks higher than a yard
because of his heart ailment. Did acrylic on paper suddenly convey more
intimate spiritual planes? I don’t know enough about art or spiritual planes
to say, although one time, at the Dalí museum in Figueres, I stood on my head
in front of the wall-size rendering of Gala and made the roots branching
down from her bare chest spring skyward. There is a lockstep to daily life
that can be subverted: the huzzah! of reconfiguring the pattern, of houndstooth
disrupted by gingham to create an intermediate state. On 34B, the sign for the bar
that is also a trailer reads Cans & Clams or Cans & or & Clams, depending on
availability, and I love that, the not knowing, the big marquee, the shifting
language, the discovery made possible every drive.
______________________________________________________________________
Most recently, Alicia Rebecca Myers' poem "Winter Solstice" was selected by Kaveh Akbar for inclusion in Best New Poets 2021, and she was a finalist for the 2022 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize. Her writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Threadcount, FIELD, and The Rumpus. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press), was winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series. She enjoys open water swimming, karaoke, and fostering puppies.
by Amy Thatcher
I pray, approaching
the rapture
in their open, dying
eyes: racoons, skunks,
the occasional dog—
its owner, desperate,
calling Ollie, Ollie…
A Hail Mary can’t help,
but I say one anyway
because it’s all I can do
to relieve the weeping
blister of my brain
from studying their
sweet crushed skulls.
Sometimes, I’ll drag
a doe into the reeds
to keep my secret:
I am not a nice lady.
______________________________________________________________________
Amy Thatcher is a native Philadelphian, where she works as a public librarian. Her poems have been published in Guesthouse, Bear Review, Rust + Moth, Rhino, and are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review.
by Julie Marie Wade
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Bellingham, Washington; February 24, 2014
There is snow on the road, which some might consider an omen. Not us. Not
after two years of Florida swelter, of longing to be colder, of liking at least a
suggestion of winter. Ice on the windowsills. Frost on the grass. A shiver sharp
as good luck.
We wear black dresses. Not so fancy we couldn’t wear them again—though we
haven’t. We carry bright flowers from the Farmer’s Market, arranged by your
sister into bouquets we won’t toss until the next day—and then, only over our
shoulders, only into the Bay.
How strange it was to write where our parents were born in order to procure
the license—to have to print their names on that form at all. A narrative
altered but never erased. A lineage notarized into law by one county clerk or
another. No true new beginnings. And what if we lied or didn’t know or
refused to remember—would we be denied our right to wed, again?
But here is the sun recusing itself from the day, and here the upper room of
Le Chat Noir, flooded with errant light. Here are eleven friends assembled—
one officiating, one reading a poem, another signing as witness to the
speaking of vows, the sharing of rings, and two little girls playing pretend-
wedding afterwards while no one rushes in to say what our mothers always
said—girls can’t marry other girls! They said this often, with words and
without them, the complex machinery of their speech and silence, the fields
they plowed deep in us, so the dream of this day was impossibly furrowed.
Our fathers, who denied such dreams could exist.
We do not smash cake into each other’s mouths or toss garters to a flock of
eager groomsmen. There are no groomsmen, and no bridesmaids either,
which means no one is singled out for being single or dubbed a “matron”
because she has already signed on a dotted line, given herself to another.
I am not thinking of my parents’ house two hours south of here, or of their
other house at the shore, the one I have never seen. I am not thinking of the
weathervane on their roof that announces THE WADES live here, or of the
elephantine hedges that swell along their borders, in order to mask the fence
that masks the yard. The contradiction in terms: declaring themselves, then
hiding. I am not even thinking of the difference between secrecy and privacy,
which was once explained to me as the difference between what we carry as
shame and what we keep for ourselves as an act of self-respect.
I was not ashamed, and yet I cannot believe it was self-respect that compelled
me once, from the post office in this very town, to make six photocopies of
my thesis—that first collection of lesbian love poems—and then to address six
manila envelopes with such meticulous script to the residences of their most
cherished friends. “Your mother had to give up her clubs because of you!” my
father chided through the phone. “You shamed her in front of everyone!” And
though it was my right to claim my love, I regret I ever once used love to
punish someone else, even if it was my mother, who could not love the woman
I had become.
No, I am not thinking of them as we cross the threshold into our room at The
Chrysalis, a grand hotel for which they were breaking ground just as we
moved away. But if I were, I would send a small blessing to my parents
watching Jeopardy! in one of their homes, eating popcorn and drinking Shasta
(diet, of course), my mother impassioned as she calls out, “What is Burma,
Alex?” and “What is the Prime Meridian?”
I am not thinking of them, though, or how even if they knew I had just married
my true love on their side of the country, neither would have found the—what
would you call it, Alex?—the wherewithal?—to come.
______________________________________________________________________
Julie Marie Wade is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Florida International University. She is the author of many books of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Otherwise: Essays, selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize and published this month. She makes her home with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach. Find her online at www.juliemariewade.com.
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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?
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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 /
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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