By Amanda Maret Scharf and Hannah Smith
In twenty years, we’re going to run out
Amanda Maret Scharf is a poet from Los Angeles. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry at Ohio State University where she served as Poetry Editor for The Journal.
by Janet Jennings
after Paisley Rekdal
No green bean girl. No limber cucumber.
I’m ample-angled. A gamble in bangles.
Madrigal in a cramped catsuit made
indelible. I’m fractal, flammable,
a fabular handful of arpeggios.
Cupid still visits me. I’m emblem
and actual, sequined, chromatic.
I dance a red fandango into embers.
I’m a naughty old bag, a wild
December. Keep your bowler on.
I’m Jupiter’s daughter, a triple moon
Dame in low-heeled sandals.
Heft the Prosecco. Light a candle.
I’ve still got a scandal left in me.
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Janet Jennings’ poetry and flash fiction have appeared in 32 Poems, Baltimore Review, Nimrod, Shenandoah, and Verse Daily, among others. She is the author of the chapbook, Traces in Water. For twenty years she owned and ran Sunspire, a natural foods company. Janet lives in San Anselmo, California, with her husband and twin daughters.
by Maureen Thorson
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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The cuckoo is a trash bird.
It puts its eggs in other birds’ nests
and peaces out, like, whatever.
Cuckoo does what it wants,
which is eat all your fruit
then get up in a clock
and make out with the gears.
You pretend not to care but it hurts.
And while you cry in the bathroom,
cuckoo “borrows” your car
doesn’t come home till dawn
smelling like weed
with a long scratch on the hood.
Your friends don’t come around now,
your mom cut you off
cause you spent the money
she gave you for rent
to feed him, but they don’t see
how huge and fat and
hungry hungry hungry cuckoo is how soft
how big his eyes, shiny with tears
how he needs you
and so you say okay, even
though cuckoo’s big body crumples
your furniture, squeezes you
cramps you until your breath is shallow
and so you keep double-time hoofing it
to love this swollen baby in your nest.
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Maureen Thorson is author of three collections of poetry: Share the Wealth (Veliz Books 2022), My Resignation (Shearsman Books 2014), and Applies to Oranges (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). Her collection of lyric essays, On Dreams, is newly out from Bloof Books. She lives in Falmouth, Maine. Visit her at maureenthorson.com.
by Catherine Broadwall
by Susan Milchman
(a golden shovel after INXS)
We are all secretly in love with the scent of a storm coming. the awakening of an unknown. Your
absence casts a haunt that holds me like a knife. / Every wounded beast knows / the herd moves
away from the injured / in an untraceable moment / in a silent tear down the middle. / You are
the dark corner my body belongs to. / I am the wound that waits patiently for blood to arrive / so
I wait / knowing my lineage will arrive like a sea storm. deep from my watershed. urgent & raw.
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Susan Milchman’s poetry has appeared in The Journal, Stirring, Sweet Tree Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, SWWIM Every Day, Rust+Moth, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She has poetry in the anthologies Bramble & Thorn, 2017 and haunted, 2022 (Porkbelly Press); forthcoming work can be found in the anthology, FINAL GIRL (Porkbelly Press, 2024). Susan’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and her published work can be found at susanmilchman.com.
by Melanie McCabe
Once I walked out into the world with flesh on, cluster
pins of nerves arranged artfully. If you had exhaled
against my shoulder or the back of my knee,
you might have watched me bloom. I weighed down
the darkening like honeysuckle or stones plinked
into pockets. I leaned hard against twilight
to leave a print of myself for you to find.
How very like a small girl to leave so many
finger smudges, my palms upturned for a wet cloth,
a murmur that wipes them clean. How very like
a ghost to tell you, here, this is my hand, and then
to pull it away. I was both and more. As fast
as I could fold, there were more paper boats to let
loose on the air. And yes, of course, I see
the flaw in that logic. I tilted my head, opened my
mouth to the breeze because I remembered kisses.
That kind of faith should have been rewarded, ought
to have made the lame lift up their pallets and stand
steady in their high heels, but instead I rolled on
my tongue no more than a whit of wind. It was a trick
to balance it there so long without swallowing.
I walked out into the world with eyes on. If you
had draped your shadow across them, I would still
have seen that it wasn’t you. You were like that, making
night blacker than it was ever intended to be. I blinked,
not to clear my sight, but to make you feel the stroke
of my lashes down your skin. You shuddered; you
were legion. I would have settled for any one of you.
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Melanie McCabe is the author of three collections of poems: The Nights Divers (Terrapin Books, 2022), What The Neighbors Know (FutureCycle Press, 2014), and History of the Body (David Robert Books, 2012). Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize, and a feature article about it appeared in The Washington Post in December of 2017.
by Cathlin Noonan
by Ashley Elizabeth
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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My father does not believe women
who say they have been raped
He asks questions like
why and how and why now
as if assault on their bodies is merely an inconvenience
as if their bodies do not rot on their own with each passing second.
They do not need help feeling less than.
He asks why I am so affected
by the orange man in office with the tiny hands
and other men stepping down from positions of power.
I do not have the heart to tell him my brother
did not always keep his hands to himself.
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Ashley Elizabeth (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer and teacher from Baltimore, MD. Her poetry has appeared in OutWrite, Voicemail Poems, and Stanchion, among others. She is the author of chapbooks, you were supposed to be a friend (Nightingale & Sparrow, 2020) and black has every right to be angry (Alternating Current Press). Ashley's debut collection, A Family Thing, is forthcoming from Redacted Books/ELJ Editions (August 2024). When Ashley isn't teaching or working as the Chapbook Editor with Sundress Publications, she habitually posts on Twitter and Instagram (@ae_thepoet). She lives with her partner and their cats.
by Susan Blackwell Ramsey
I didn’t love him. He was sweet,
teasing letters all winter long.
Flirtation is a fragile art.
Some loss is casual, some cuts deep.
Horns don’t fall off, antlers do,
a tusk means something had to die.
He brought me back an ivory mask
three inches high, with spiral horns,
almond eyes, a pointed chin.
He was very proud he knew
how to recognize a fake,
how to tell bone from ivory.
All he had to do was take
his lighter out, for bone will burn.
What’s true survives a feeble flame,
something I had yet to learn.
As my mother puzzled how
to string it from a cord it slipped
and snapped one horn off, a clean break,
nothing that she couldn’t glue.
And while the epoxy set
it slipped, and the other snapped off, too.
She felt terrible. I did not
mind very much, which was my clue.
I’m sure he wouldn’t buy it now.
Regret saves nothing. Elephants
are matriarchal, mourn their dead.
Their great slow hearts weigh fifty pounds.
And when I hold this in my hand
I miss my mother, not that man.
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Susan Blackwell Ramsey's work has appeared, among other places, in The Southern Review, 32 Poems, Smartish Pace, and Best American Poetry; her book, A Mind Like This, won the Prairie Schooner Poetry Book Prize. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which actually does exist.
by Carolene Kurien
Oiled legs pile on top of one another,
glistening in the afternoon light.
This isn’t an orgy: it’s a feast of frog.
Appa fries and stacks them like meditation
rocks on the cooling rack. I tell the toad
watching from the backyard you’re safe, your poison
is your grace as I jenga one out from the heap.
The taste of second-hand fly murder
is pleasant to me. If I had a long, sticky tongue,
I’d trap horrible things: rich people &
bad weather. Consume everything you hate,
that’s what Amma should have told me before
I left for school. Instead I let that girl spit in my face,
as sweethearts do.
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Carolene Kurien is a Malayali-American poet from South Florida. She received her MFA from the University of Miami, where she was a James Michener fellow. A Tin House alum, she has been published in Salt Hill, Hobart After Dark, and Two Serious Ladies, and she has poems forthcoming in Redivider and the South Florida Poetry Journal.
by Lucy Griffith
by Eileen Cleary
after Dorianne Laux
Red in the face the first time I faced it. The sun,
hanging since before the first someone, the sun
dipping amber fingers into dewy-cool lawns.
A warming cabinet for grass blankets, the sun,
call it day-star. Luminous over hayfields, loosed
in the furs of chipmunk. Honey: homespun sun,
a taffeta dress stitched with lemon zest, rested
in an ocean blue backdrop. Dear Sun,
Like a frantic greenhouse, I’ve a blind spot when
it comes to what’s too hot, Smothering One,
I love you like a child though you scorch me.
O Variant of Helen, for what’s left of eternity
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Eileen Cleary is the author of Child Ward of the Commonwealth (2019) and 2 a.m. with Keats (Nixes Mate, 2021). In addition, she co-edited the anthology Voices Amidst the Virus, the featured text at the 2021 Michigan State University Filmetry Festival. Cleary founded and is EIC of Lily Poetry Review Books and Lily Poetry Review. Recent work is included in Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poetry, just out through Grayson Books.
by Donna Vorreyer
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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In the kitchen, I refine the alchemy
of avocados, salt and stir them into guacamole,
this conversion a delicious and knowable magic.
Other tricks are difficult to master—
cards that repair themselves when torn in two,
an assistant who disappears into empty space.
I prefer spells within reach—lying prone
as a masseuse resets my muscles and meridians
or sitting on a weathered chair as vapor rises
from the lawn, a spider descending
from a branch to thread a new web.
Some nights, it is as simple as static
on the radio, the hiss of disconnection
and departure, or a kiss hello after a day apart.
This is the kind of magic I know best, accepting
love, returning it. It is this string of years,
this bowl of avocados, mashed with lime
and garlic, just the way you like it.
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Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She lives in the Chicago suburbs where she hosts the monthly online reading series, A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
by Ruth Hoberman
We dress up to lay our dead down—so ceremonial,
even though there’s no such thing as buried. Disassembled,
sure—my mother a heap of shards by now, twenty years on—
but hardly underground. Mainly she’s here, a ramshackle
ghost in need of repair. She haunts the hardware store
where my husband sifts through bolts and rings
for customers intent on resurrecting broken things. Everything
fails with time but lingers, waits to reassemble.
Let me tell you what I’m trying to do, customers say.
Let me tell you what I need. And he finds the very thing
that works. The coffee grinder grinds again, the plate’s
undropped—mending being a kind of memory (like words)
a bringing back. Though when I think of all my mother
wanted still to do—how not quite ready she was to die
and how alone (the rest of us a thousand miles away
and not a clue)—I wonder where the bolt for that is,
the hinge, the metal plate to cover up the hole; the screw.
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Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and essays in such journals as Smartish Pace, RHINO, West Trestle Review, Ibbetson Street, and Ploughshares.
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.
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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.
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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—
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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.
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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