by Jennifer Stewart Miller
My dog wants to run off into the lit trees,
by Hannah Siden
The echo is more beautiful
than I anticipated: my heart
moving to its own rhythm,
surrounded by black & white
film grain. I imagine a diver
with her underwater camera,
eyes wide under a mask.
The muffled sounds of breath
& water pressure. Referencing
the images, the tech explains
my condition to me incorrectly.
He’s my age though & so earnest
that I nod along politely,
marvelling at the bioluminescence
on his screen: flashes of red
& green & blue across my
grey heart. Signs of light
at the bottom of the ocean.
My rate steadies, rises, steadies.
He tells me Breathe in, hold it,
release. The machine makes
a noise like a whale surfacing.
He says That’s the sound of your
blood. In the end, the test isn’t
enlightening in the way they’d
hoped. I need to come back
in two weeks for a bubble study.
I make the right noises of
approval & disappointment
& obligation but can I be honest
with you? I just learned my heart
is a creature of the deep. I am
drifting two miles down, in awe
of the radiance.
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Hannah is a writer and filmmaker living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC). Her poetry is published or forthcoming with PRISM International, The League of Canadian Poets, Metatron Press, and others. Find her on Twitter @hannah_siden or at hannahsiden.com.
by Kate Welsh
I read about an archaeological dig in Alaska
where they upturned multiple layers of earth
and began to smell something cooking.
Aroma, there in the dirt: acrid shadow
of a sizzle, silvery salmon skin crisping, nuts
cracking in high heat, seal meat dripping
fat over flame. Who knew. When
I imagined being Indiana Jones
I thought of arrowheads and jaw bones,
pottery shards and faceless dolls, fabric
scraps lovelier than anything I wear.
I thought treasure, not memory. I thought
there was a difference. I can’t help
but roll up my sleeves. I ask other people
to hand me their memories caked
in hard brown mud. They always hesitate
but then unpack an entire trove. I chip away
at each artifact with a sharpened trowel;
I find edges with a stiff brush. Everything
is more beautiful warmed in someone else’s
hands. I keep asking my father to sing
songs he learned on fishing boats, like I don’t
already know them by heart. I keep asking
my mother to tell me about that day she walked
into the ocean in a big fur coat. I wrote it out
years ago. I just like it in her voice.
______________________________________________________________________
Kate Welsh is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA from Warren Wilson in 2023 and a BA from Barnard College in 2013. She is the director of communications at the Guggenheim Foundation.
by Carlie Hoffman
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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When my sisters can’t scrub the oil
from the sick gull’s feathers, they clip
its wings, untie the cord that binds
the slow sheet of its body
and plant it into a wooden box
drilled with tiny holes. It is my turn
to bring the diseased bird
to the breeder across the bank:
his medicine knives, his hut occupied
with feeders and soap. But because I am
youngest, because a hunter’s moon
is how I locate heaven, I take the gull
down the wharf, kneel in an untouched
tract of snow, and quiet its skull with rock.
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Carlie Hoffman is the author of When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. She is the translator of White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2023) and Selma Meerbaum Eisinger's Blütenlese (Hanging Loose Press, 2024). Her honors include a 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Poet’s & Writers Amy Award, and the Loose Translation Prize, and her work has been published in POETRY, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Jewish Currents, Columbia Journal, New England Review, and elsewhere.
by Julia B. Levine
At first a rumble, then thunder cracks apart the morning
and suddenly I remember half-waking last night
to a heron shrieking
as a coyote made a meal of stilts and feathers—
though in my stupor, I misheard it as drunken boys
yelling Hooray! slowly over and over again,
as if death was jubilant
with a broken singing in her mouth.
Now lightning welds four forks of vanishing
into a sky that has, overnight, lost a bit of winged blue.
When we are lucky, we forget peril’s appetite.
But the August my daughter labored to bring her first child
here, a force and counterforce wrestled in the mystery
of her body and its absence still occupying mine.
Today the marsh steams, brightening green.
And there, further out along the brambled roadside,
I remember last summer, how blackberries
scattered behind a trio of women
as they carried their overfilled buckets home.
And I remember writing then, This baby will destroy the whole of her.
I should know. Speak to me of love and I’ll answer ruin
begins as a brimming sweetness, threatening to spill.
______________________________________________________________________
Julia B. Levine’s recent awards include the Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU, 2014), a 2022 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the American Academy of Poetry, and first prize from the Bellevue Literary Review, the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, and Tiferet. Currently her work is appearing in Terrain, The Night Heron Barks, Blackbird, and The Southern Review. Her most recent collection is Ordinary Psalms (LSU Press, 2021).
Happy Holidays and New Year!
Dearest readers,
During these dark times and fraught hours, we hope that you find some comfort, whether that’s celebrating the holidays with loved ones or curling up with a good book and a cup of cocoa to watch the year turn into 2024.
Here at SWWIM, as the days begin to lengthen little by little, we are praying for peace and light to touch you all and everyone around the world.
Thank you for sharing every day with us. We remain grateful for your companionship and look forward to a bright new year. We’ll be back with poems on January 7.
xo
SWWIM Team
by J.L. Conrad
Because the snarl of packages inside our front door cannot be moved.
Because a great stuckness has taken root in our marriage and I do not know
whether we will survive it.
Because I can’t bear something else dying before my eyes. Because from the
basement with my own hands I have removed their bodies.
Because I wanted our place to be a place of refuge and instead it has become a
place of death. Because when I drew up a net of safety around us I did not
know that I would be required to place bait at intervals around the perimeter.
Because the mice which are now dying visited death on the baby songbirds
growing in their high house this summer, and I was the one to find their
bodies, heads gnawed open, on the steps below.
Because I buried the birds under the yew where none could find them.
Because the mouse who raised its head from the darkness of the birdhouse
when I flicked on the porchlight showed no remorse.
Because I could not bury the others because then what poisons they
possessed would make their way back out into the world. Because even
though it would take fifty of those mice to fell a predator the size of a cat,
there are such animals.
______________________________________________________________________
J.L. Conrad is the author of the full-length poetry collections A World in Which (Terrapin Books, forthcoming) and A Cartography of Birds (LSU Press), and the chapbooks Recovery (winner of the 2022 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize, Texas Review Press) and Not If But When (winner of the third annual Dead Lake Chapbook Competition, Salt Hill). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Sugar House Review, Salamander, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
by Joanna Fuhrman
by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Because you are pregnant
the days grow rounder with light,
long oaks bend towards each other
as through a glass orb—
loose blouses like snow drifts.
I wish I had sung to you more
when you were inside me,
carried you less like the marriage
I knew was failing. I wish I could’ve kept
my mind in the same place as my body.
This year the winter will not drag on.
I will measure the slowly accruing
light in your changing form.
Who knows what settles
as I watch you slice the peaches.
Maybe a future entomologist’s fingers
are finding their first
meticulous rhythm. Maybe the delicate
register of your child’s voice
is gathering its notes.
______________________________________________________________________
Sally Bliumis-Dunn's poems have been published in Paris Review, Poetry London, Plume, SWWIM Every Day, and Poets.org, among others.
by Rhett Watts
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
by Hayley Mitchell Haugen
by Jennifer Litt
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