by Georgia San Li
by Sharon A. Foley
It took two years to get permission
to see my father. I begin to imagine
my first words with him. Beautiful day
and he will answer, Did you see the light
ripple on the stone wall? But it rains
on my first visit. I say, I wish the rain
would stop. And he replies,
It always has. He’s wearing a blue johnny
my mother made from one of his old shirts.
There is a cross above his bed,
a big wooden one with metal Jesus,
a touch of red paint on the wounds.
Dad’s been carving oak into a bowl
he has rubbed with linseed oil.
My habit does not scrape his floor.
My breasts are bridled by a blue gamp.
I am Sister Mary Sharon now.
It’s against the rules but for him
I lift my veil to show
wisps of my hair.
I have come from the high-ceilinged cloister.
In this tiny room
he seems so small to me.
______________________________________________________________________
Sharon A. Foley’s poems have or will soon appear in Paterson Literary Review, Speckled Trout Review, Solstice, South Florida Poetry Journal, and The Big Windows Review. She entered the Sisters of Mercy at age eighteen and lived with them as a nun for twenty-nine years. Ms. Foley is now a psychotherapist.
by Nicole Santalucia
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Silence snaps in the wind
next to a confederate flag
on the back of a pickup truck.
On a Sunday afternoon, silence
carves into a farmer’s throat.
It grows behind the chicken coop.
Silence is on Post Road across the street
from jail. It shuffles across cement floors
in sandals and white socks, sits under
a pill in a paper cup.
Drug addicts overdose on silence
behind the warehouse near Exit 52.
Silence is a needle mark between toes.
It is the dirt under my fingernails.
Exhaust pipes and horses choke
on silence. Engines and people
and guns tried to sink silence
in the Susquehanna River,
but silence shot back and started war.
______________________________________________________________________
Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize, and Arkana Magazine's Editor’s Choice Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Best American Poetry, Palette Poetry, The Colorado Review, North American Review, and Los Angeles Review as well as other journals and anthologies. She is an Associate Professor, the Director of First-Year Writing, and a member of the LGBTQ+ Advisory Council at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
by Laura Ann Reed
Some wounds never close.
I only mentioned his necktie
in passing, then watched him
whip it off and drape it around
what was nearest to hand, saying
to the lamp post, Monsieur,
your taste is atrocious. Already
glorying in his strangeness
I didn’t know whether to laugh,
remain silent, or run away.
I call back through the years
because so much been lost
to silence. Because the place
no longer survives as what
it was when I loved it. This deep
need for what is gone. I keep seeing
it hanging green against gold
on the lamp post where I can
almost touch it.
______________________________________________________________________
Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.
by Zia Wang
My mother cowers on our tattered couch
her long black hair a stage curtain
My father looms, disco mustache,
pompous pointed collar. His voice knifes
her. Words so well-honed.
I am three years old, standing off stage
in Wonder Woman Underoos.
I taste my father’s resentment,
its oily slick across my baby teeth,
but my mother’s helplessness
melting cold and wet in my palm
prompts me to leave my post.
I step on stage, hold out a tissue
to dab my mother’s cheek. My eyes widen–
Surprising sting of her slap. Together
we watch tissues flutter recklessly
between us. My mother whimpers
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
What else can she say?
Only the lines she was given.
______________________________________________________________________
Zia Wang is Indian-American and part of the third generation of her family from East Africa. She completed her undergraduate degree in English at Princeton University and her medical degree at NYU. Her poetry has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, MORIA, and Wilderness House Literary Review and was selected as second-runner-up in the New Orleans Review Poetry Contest 2023. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
by Mary Beth Hines
They flee, half-obliterated
faces frozen flat to paper.
Behind them, a river careens.
Mountains slice sky lit by a siege
of flailing stars, scissored strips
of cloud, no cover.
They might be anyone, these haggard
travelers, a people marked, caught,
carved by a master, his plywood
blocks, inked, pressed, reproducible,
expulsion destined to occur
over and over though never
the same way twice—undulant wood grain,
colors, frenzy of dash, strength,
and the eyes, the myriad eyes
staring straight at you from the depths
of the dead page, waiting, waiting
for you to tire, to turn away.
______________________________________________________________________
Mary Beth Hines lives and writes from her home in Massachusetts. Her work appears in Cider Press Review, SWWIM Every Day, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Kelsay Books published her debut collection, Winter at a Summer House, in 2021. See marybethhines.com.
by Pamela Epps
For my seventh birthday
before he stopped celebrating
anything but Jewish holidays,
my father sent a gold bracelet
speckled with my birthstone.
I was more comfortable in T-shirts
and baseball mitt. I loved to wrestle,
shock with vulgar words.
Such a mouth.
The delicate bangle
looked tiny in the white box
meant for girls in frilly dresses
with fathers who scoop them up.
How could it fit on this wrist
cocked for battle?
I stared down at the red stones
floating in the gold river.
Whose hand is this?
Whose father?
______________________________________________________________________
Pamela Hill Epps’ work has most recently appeared in the anthology 101 Jewish Poems For The Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press) as well as in other literary publications such as Heartwood Literary Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, and Poetry Breakfast. She has published A Last Glance, a chapbook with YellowJacket Press. She is a psychologist, poet, and jazz musician living in Tampa, Fl. She spends a great deal of time looking out at the river.
by Hilary Sideris
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
Every day
my love burns
down the house
almost, la moka
on the stove, then
off for a walk
or soccer match.
If I accuse him,
he admits I’m right:
why fight about
a fire not burning
anymore or yet.
______________________________________________________________________
Hilary Sideris is the author of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press 2020), and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press 2022.) She works as a professional developer for the CUNY Start program at The City University of New York and lives in Brooklyn.
by Nik Moore
She was collected, eventually,
at the neighbor boy’s behest.
Back on the ground they smashed robin eggs
one by one into dirt—little monsters.
What it would have been like for them both
to be boys, to hold their fathers’ middle names.
Instead, her vulva—denying
at her birth some eager prayer.
The children showed themselves for the first time
in the side-yard near the broken yolks
and she saw for the first time
that difference on her body,
worked to slink out of the skin,
its slow ripening toward
that silhouette of a pregnant body
on her mother’s lotion bottle.
Today sees an unhealed wound
where the plum tree was years ago felled.
And how impossible it suddenly seems
to go back, to be the girl sitting up high
in those leaves—who were not yet sick, not yet
rotting, not yet asking questions of the yard.
______________________________________________________________________
Nik Moore (they/them) is a Kentucky poet and an alum of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Montana. They work as a college writing instructor and as an editor at Many Nice Donkeys. Poems of Nik's have appeared in or are forthcoming from Olney, GASHER, Poetry Northwest, A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, and elsewhere.
by Emily Tuszynska
The day out of focus. Egg
on the floor half-wiped,
the dryer’s buzz.
What am I looking for,
I keep thinking,
as if it’s a thing I’ve set down
and forgotten, something I might
find again and take up in my hand.
I was just—going back up
to take out the meat to thaw
for supper. Underfoot,
my daughter. Snick, snick,
the snips fall from her scissors.
A fistful, a smear of glue.
Sometimes my life
seems so far way it’s almost
invisible. A blue dot
on my phone’s screen
tracks my sons’ ride to the lake.
Sidewalks. Leaves crushed
beneath bike tires. I’m half here,
half there where they are,
restless light off the water
flashing among trees
in a code I can’t decipher.
Upstairs my daughter
keeps picking out the same
six notes on the piano. Stopping.
Repeating. Waiting
for the song to take hold.
Daily I press against the familiar
hours, searching for a gap,
an opening. When the path
meets the water’s edge, the wind
gusts off the water like a draft
through some hidden door.
______________________________________________________________________
Emily Tuszynska lives with her family in Virginia, just outside Washington D.C. Her poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and many other journals. Her first full-length collection will be published by Grayson Books in 2024.
by Elinor Ann Walker
by Devon Balwit
The pours look short, my need many-fingered.
Don’t worry. You can always order another,
I whisper, my own enabler, but all measures
prove insufficient to the thirst that conjures
them. Coming here, I saw two redtails copulating over
the freeway, a flutter of feathers on a pole, surely
they didn’t fret as they took again to air—
that a failing of marrow-boned creatures.
Twice today, I stumbled upon the same Millner
sonnet—IKEA, B & D, the narrator
younger than I, so presumably hipper.
Is that what fame requires—calling pain pleasure?
I close my tab, tip the bartender,
and, exiting, hug my misery tighter.
______________________________________________________________________
Teacher Devon Balwit walks in all weather. In her most recent collection, Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023], she romps through Melville’s Moby Dick. For more, visit: pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet.
by Brook J. Sadler
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
The band does not form a closed loop.
Each end, in a dainty curve, bends
like the entrance to a formal garden—
two platinum pathways studded
with diamond stepping stones—
and circles the central diamond,
which, set by six small prongs,
rises like a modest fountain.
She never married, my mother says
when she gives it to me.
She worked and saved
and bought it for herself.
It is the day after my mother’s
last mammogram; the cancer is gone.
It is time to pass on an heirloom.
This small splash of light
on my finger illumines the room
and reflects us.
My mother has had three wedding
rings of her own. I have had none. A choice
few understand.
I wonder if Great Aunt Ethel hoped
the ring would deflect attention from men.
Or was it compensation
for a heart that had quietly broken?
Was it vanity sparkling on her finger?
Or a shield to her pride,
conversing in parlors among married women?
And what will it be for me?
I, who have no daughters or nieces.
I keep looking at the facets,
wondering.
Will these diamonds be returned
to the dark from which they came?
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Brook J. Sadler, Ph.D. is a poet, writer, and professor of philosophy, who enjoys writing across all genres. Her poems can be found in many journals, including Greensboro Review, Calyx, Kestrel, and Tampa Review, and online at the Cortland Review, South Writ Large, South Florida Poetry Journal, and The Boiler Journal. Her online prose publications include pieces at McSweeney's, Women's Review of Books, Ms. Magazine, and Aquifer.
by Hilary King
Not upright and boxy as my predecessors,
I was lean and long and tan. I was modern.
I was her pet, wasn’t I? It was me she loved,
me she wanted to be with first, later, last.
Not the husband, the lovers, the betrayers.
Interrupted from our hour by her daughter,
she flung me at that daughter. And Reader,
I leapt into mother’s violence, my keys of steel
clacking, my carriage swinging, my ribbon spooling
to be back alone with my mistress, to be teased
by her nicotine-scented fingers. Don’t pretend,
Writer, you haven’t lifted your instrument, hefted
its weight in a clenched fist when another voice
calling your false name pierces the lovely, empty page.
______________________________________________________________________
Originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared or will appear in Ploughshares, TAB, Salamander, Belletrist, Fourth River, The Cortland Review, and other publications. She is the author of the book of poems, The Maid’s Car. She is currently studying for her MFA degree at San Jose State University, where she is a Steinbeck Fellow.
by Beth GylysI
(with 1st line by Judy Ireland)
1.
I stand prayerless on your threshold.
2.
I stand on your threshold
choking, my mouth
stuffed with prayers.
3.
Every prayer the wind at my back,
you, my threshold.
4.
The prayers curses, a scream
blocks the threshold. Listen too long
and turn to stone.
5.
Too lonely to pray, I curl
at your threshold, hands
outstretched as if I might
gather air, make a thick braid
to climb down from the balcony.
6.
The threshold gone, I stand
in an emptiness, an archless
archway, you at dinner,
my prayers your crudité,
your plum gravy, your
raspberry millefeuille.
7.
Prayers like feathers
molting by your feet,
you smile at the threshold
still wielding the bloody dagger.
8.
Fragments of prayer—
a shredded, stained curtain
blown over the threshold.
9.
Sinks like a brick
thrown in a pond,
this prayer I think
far from any threshold.
10.
We walk across
the threshold of each other,
prayers like moths
winging in our mouths.
______________________________________________________________________
Award-winning author and the founder/Principal Investigator of Beyond Bars, a Mellon sponsored literary journal for incarcerated writers and artists, Beth Gylys is the author of five books of poetry—the last two (The Conversation Turns to Wide Mouth Jars, co-written with Cathy Carlisi and Jennifer Wheelock, and Sky Blue Enough to Drink) were both named Books All Georgians Should Read. Her work has recently appeared in West Branch, The James Dickey Review, and on The Best American Poetry blog.
by Carol Young
by Lynne Knight
In none of the versions do stars reel
from their courses as Orpheus plays.
Always the stones, roots, rivers
that cannot keep still at his song.
So suppose it’s not just his song
but a woman, singing back to him.
Not Eurydice, with her mouth full of dark.
An ordinary woman, in plain dress,
singing of ordinary loss. The child
turned against her, the lover gone,
her womb drying. Or maybe a sick mother,
a brother on drugs, a boss who thinks
equality might not be a bad idea, but where
is it supported in the natural order?
A woman who sings not in patterned forms
but according to the rhythm of her blood
so that some of the songs rush,
some are slower than the slowest
shoes, unlaced, too big, dragged along
an alley street. A woman who sings
of kitchens and weeds and the fixed stars
we started with . . .
And then suppose over time not one
but thousands of women sing like this
as not one but thousands of rivers
carry songs past where we stand.
Or say it’s the birds singing,
opening their mouths at dawn
to sing of where we’ve been and gone,
of where we’ll go and be tomorrow.
Wouldn’t a woman know enough to sing
along? And doesn’t it make sense
that when the head of Orpheus floats
downriver, the mouth that sings
is no more than the ordinary mouth
of man or woman, reed or river,
grieving over time?
______________________________________________________________________
Lynne Knight has published six full-length poetry collections and six chapbooks. Her poems have been widely published in journals such as Poetry and The Southern Review; her awards include a Poetry Society of America Award, a RATTLE Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship. Although she lived in the United States for most of her life, she now lives on Vancouver Island.
by Jennifer Jean
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
the whole interview’s about her girl.
D says, I wanted her to know
but know my way,
not at school or from some jerk.
So one day I say, “We should talk,” & she’s freaked.
We sit down in the kitchen &
she starts crying. (So I’m thinking, She knows…)
“You got Cancer!
You got Cancer!” she starts screaming.
D snorts, We laugh about it now.
How she was so relieved
I wasn’t
dying.
*
Others in town talk
about D’s son
finding her nude online, or
fellow yacht-clubbers finding her & showing him
her webcam antics, her customer ratings
on her “Escort” ads.
My son was bound,
says D,
to notice
my overnight bag. I stuffed it
with lingerie.
I mean—
jeez…
she shrugs.
There’s a bit of dead
air for the boy, then
he’s gone
from the interview.
*
D scans the Starbucks
where we perch on stools. Says she’s failed
the bar exam a lot, her ex is a nerd, that she wants another degree
& to write a memoir,
But I’m so exhausted!
Then it’s back to her girl, When I take my girl
on errands, I point out
all the jerks in town who’re clients &
we laugh. An orgasm
is like a pedicure for these guys.
I mean—jeez…
Who does that?
she shakes out her long, frosted hair. She’s fifty-three
so she’s got some grey
but it looks classy.
I wonder if she’ll start pointing.
*
Instead, D looks back at me, One time we saw
this big ass politico I’ve known for years
slurping pancakes with his wife, at IHOP.
She says his name
& I’m ready to stop the recorder.
Too funny, she sighs. She’s so
far away she squints
at me, says, My girl’s cool. I nod.
We talk about all our guys.
It’s all good.
*
Just wish there wasn’t
side effects.
She leans away but we’re closer now—like mother,
like daughter. & the monied men in Starbucks seem to be
closing in as the place crowds, but
I’m hooked. Side effects?
I feel nothing. Like that song!
After nine years of this, she sings, I feel nothing
nothing nothing at all…
______________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Jean's poetry collections are VOZ, The Fool, and Object Lesson, which explores sex-trafficking and objectification in America. She's also released the teaching resource Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry. Her poetry, prose, and co-translations have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Rattle, The Common, On the Seawall, The Los Angeles Review, and as an Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day.” She's been awarded fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Disquiet/Dzanc Books, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Kolkata International Poetry Festival; as well, she received an Ambassador for Peace Award from the Women's Federation for World Peace. Jennifer is the senior program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center's online writing program.
by Megan Leonard
by Michele Karas