by Jennifer Blackledge
by Laura Read
which means most of the time no one knows
how much Marie is with me,
inside my right leg in particular,
behind the knee. After a while of standing,
it throbs and I have to shift
my weight and it is difficult for me to listen
to what someone wants from me
because I am in standing in my garden in Brooklyn
with a pair of scissors to trim the white rosebush
my apron splattered with sauce.
I called her Nanny, but her name was Marie.
I can’t say I don’t mind having her blood
running through her varicose veins
but if someone has to, I’m glad it is me.
I don’t garden, but I do make her sauce
and yesterday I accidentally bought four boxes
of lemon cake mix at Trader Joe’s
because I like to serve it in the summers
with berries but then I remembered there was only
me and my husband to serve it to now that the kids
are gone, and that’s a lot of cake.
I thought of Marie’s roses blooming
for no one and her sauce uselessly simmering.
Marie came to this country on a ship
called the Giuseppe Verdi
on December 17, 1920. She was nine.
I don’t know about you, but I like knowing this.
It adds a certain glamour to me sitting here
in these thigh-high compression hose
that I have to wear for three days
after my first round of sclerotherapy
like a cast, the doctor said, so on the third day
I stink like Sylvia’s Esther
who wore her green dirndl skirt and white blouse
that she borrowed from Betsy for three weeks straight.
The hose has grown a little
damp, and my legs are now things
I lug around, lifting them in and out of bed,
you know like all of history, like my poor Nanny
who lived before sclerotherapy,
with her husband Frank who was what they call
no good, drinking in the garage, throwing
plates, ripping the phone from the wall.
Google says sclerotherapy is a relatively
painless procedure for most people,
and I’d like to meet these most people
because I had to bite my knuckle each
of the twenty times the doctor shot
the medicine into my veins, which burns
as it travels, and still
I cried out, which then I had to apologize for,
and the doctor, whose name is Megan,
offering me a side of therapy,
said, It’s okay to cry out when I’m hurting you,
and I said, thank you, and she said,
It’s so cool, watching the medicine move through the vein.
______________________________________________________________________
Laura Read is the author of But She Is Also Jane, Dresses from the Old Country, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You. She teaches at Spokane Falls Community College and in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.
by Tina Parker
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
by Ronda Piszk Broatch
I’m tired because of the way the country is running
around with its scissors pointed the wrong way.
There are people wandering the wilderness,
geo-caching lies, eating them like potato chips.
The fence around my ventricles is coming apart.
Somebody just sent a message sliding across my screen,
and I fell for it. Instead of a pizza,
Amazon delivers a baby.
I want to write poems, but the kettle calls to be boiled,
the eggs are boiling even after the water molecules have
rejoined the atmosphere, and someone’s burning gas
from the tank of a car that hasn’t run in five years.
Never mind what I’ve lived through—sleeping
beneath a pool table, clinging to my horse’s neck
in a pasture of cows, listening to an ex-boyfriend cry
about the time he made pasta for the mafia.
I don’t drink coffee
and still my cups are stained.
There’s a box full of letters that need translating.
There’s a collection of scissors in jars around my house,
petrified pizza crust in the back of my mother’s old Dodge.
When the babies cried, we drove and drove and drove.
______________________________________________________________________
Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), finalist for the Sally Albiso Prize, and Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Greensboro Review, Blackbird, Sycamore Review, The Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News / KUOW’s "All Things Considered." She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.
by Michelle Bitting
My daughter was three and refused
to wear clothes. Naked on the living
room floor, she’d demand another round
of her favorite game, Pretty Pretty Princess,
then move the plastic rainbow markers
about the board—however, wherever
she pleased. Hair and legs wild, carefree,
splayed. She hated to lose and broke what
rules she had to while we laughed, astonished
at such nerve. Years later, she became a he,
and did what he had to, moving the markers
around wherever, however he needed,
winning the crown, himself, in the end.
Some rules are prettier, broken.
______________________________________________________________________
Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She is the author of five poetry collections, including Broken Kingdom (2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize) and Nightmares & Miracles (2022 Two Sylvias Press, Wilder Prize). Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at LMU.
by Minnie Wu
I can barely remember
what I ate with her.
We had a large family
dinner two years ago, and I met
new relatives. My aunt’s sister, teaching
at her hometown college. The little brother
of my grandpa, owner of sprawling farmland.
I learned their names, tried to
pronounce them, but it was so hard
to stay focused. I was starving.
My grandma’s sister—the family’s oldest—she was
there, too. Her brothers and sisters
all passed away, except my grandma. She lost
her husband twenty years ago, once
champion swimmers together. After finishing
the bowl of rice, I began observing.
It was the second or third time I’d met her.
She looked just like my grandma, hair short and curly. Wrinkles
unfolding from the ends of her eyes. And her hands.
Like those crumpled medical history forms
covering her bones. All those crisp veins lining—
could I redraw the lines, once they faded?
When everyone was full, she hugged me.
Her grey sweater nesting my hair, I hugged
her back. Her hair held cooked rice—nothing
special, but it was.
I didn’t have her number, but often she swam
from my grandma’s phone. Her voice crisp
like rain on the kitchen windows.
I thought we would see each other again.
But next spring, my grandma lost
her sister, queen of rice.
Everyone came to the funeral, but I
felt like an outsider. The wind
covered the pool in petals.
April was full of rain and tears. I wasn’t sure
if I needed to cry. Outside, a hurricane
murmuring in the distance—I couldn’t
escape. So instead I watched my grandma blur
from her body into her sister’s, then back again.
______________________________________________________________________
Minnie Wu is a high school sophomore at The Pennington School. Her poetry and prose have been previously published in Blue Marble Review, Teen Ink, and Pennyroyal, among other literary magazines. In the 2022 and 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Minnie was recognized as a Gold Key recipient and a Gold Medalist for her poetry and photography. She is an alumna of Iowa Young Writers’ Studio Summer Residential Program.
by Diane LeBlanc
Day begins with a ligature of moon and water.
Bring me nothing except sage and antler velvet.
Day ends with black bear sow leaking
evening milk on pasqueflower and gravel.
I follow her shining ellipsis
into a meadow of things unsaid.
In the hours between
I release an egg and begin to rust.
I pray for rain to paint my fence
yellow with hollyhock dust.
______________________________________________________________________
Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She is the author of The Feast Delayed (Terrapin Books, 2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Poems and essays appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, and Mid-American Review, among others. Diane is a holistic life coach with emphasis in creativity practice. She is a professor and writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College. Read more at www.dianeleblancwriter.com.
by Sarah Stern
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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It stands up and
takes you on the bus.
Blue jay feather in grass—
summer in City Island.
The drawbridge.
Fishing off the side
and the kids running back
and forth. What d’yah catch?
Orchard Beach
two women dancing
on Saturday afternoon.
Tattooed boys look on.
Mother says keep
writing. It’s what you have.
I hear it in my gut.
Don’t worry it’s the words.
Give me the words that
grind us into meaning like
those two on the plaza:
forgiveness and wild gesture.
______________________________________________________________________
Sarah Stern is the author of three poetry books: We Have Been Lucky in the Midst of Misfortune (Kelsay Books), But Today Is Different (Wipf and Stock Publishers), and Another Word For Love (Finishing Line Press). She is a five-time winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO Poetry Award, a recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations, and several Poets & Writers' Readings & Workshops Grants. Learn more: sarahstern.me.
by Annette Sisson
For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires.
Monster, Frankenstein
If computers expunge humanity,
would their pulsing motherboards
replicate human flaws?
Drones with nervous tics
scratching themselves in public,
or cluttered microchips multiplying
data, hoarding fragments
of cursive. Perhaps some
would dab watercolor light
onto rough press paper,
glide a bow, suffer
the trembling strings to mourn.
Would the warbler’s chipped
trill, the moon-white orchid,
stir their sensors, the Luna’s
lobed wing brush
mystery into code? And if
they chose a god to humble
them, prayed to their creators’
human ashes, would we
kindle ourselves, put on
the Godhead, breathe in translucence—
claim this progeny our own?
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Annette Sisson’s poems are published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Citron Review, Lascaux Review, Cider Press Review, Glassworks, Aeolian Harp Anthology (2023), and others. Her first book, Small Fish in High Branches, was published by Glass Lyre (May 2022), and she is finishing her second, Winter Sharp with Apples. Her poems have placed in Frontier New Voices, The Fish Anthology, and others; several have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
by LaDonna Witmer
I deserve to live
said the girl.
The bomb is falling
from such a height
it could be a seed
blown from a dandelion
surfing the stratosphere.
I am just a girl said the girl
I have barely begun to live
and I’d very much like
to keep doing it.
Everyone wants to keep living
said the bomb but what have you
done to deserve it? Convince me
you’re worthy
and maybe
I’ll fall somewhere else.
The bomb is nearer now
olive shaped and
heartless as gravity.
I don’t want you to fall
somewhere else said the girl
you could crush my cousins
my neighbors the hospital
the school.
Oh says the bomb. It is a fist now.
Would you rather I turn back
and fall upon your enemies?
No said the girl No
I do not wish you to fall
upon anyone anywhere at all.
Can’t you turn into a cloud?
The bomb is quite close and suddenly
so much bigger. You could say
it’s the size of a girl.
Ah says the bomb I see now
you are guiltless and kind and clearly
you deserve to live but
the problem is
you were born
in the wrong place
at the wrong time
and I cannot stop falling
for you.
______________________________________________________________________
LaDonna Witmer is writing for herself after a couple of decades spent writing for other people (journalist, copywriter, editorial director). She has a poem forthcoming in a 2024 anthology from Flipped Mitten Press. Back in her slam poetry youth, she published three chapbooks and had a handful of poems printed in various zines. She writes prose at wordsbyladonna.substack.com and is 2/5 of the way through writing a memoir about her fundamentalist upbringing.
by Megan Merchant
by Jane Ann Fuller
“What’s a witness but a poem?” Remi Recchia
Her left breast, a shallow pool
where blue-tailed fish swim.
Wrist, a vermillion cactus flower.
Thigh’s white owl.
Scapula’s bat’s crooked wing.
Side winder slips through
the cage of her. A carmine heart
drums her chest.
**
In a restaurant called “That Lebanese Place,”
the young man behind the counter has her eyes,
large as figs, lids heavy, as if half asleep.
I can’t stop watching as he bags the falafel
and labneh, mouthing words to music
whose lyrics I do not understand. His beauty
before unknown to me, I fold a dollar into the tip jar.
**
Once I was a desert mother.
I drove through the desert without seeing
myself as desert. I drove through the red rock
of Utah, but all I could see was my suffering,
my son at Fish Lake, dope sick and trying
to recover. I drove his younger brother and sister
in a car so small we didn’t think we’d make it
up the mountain.
**
We were afraid we would never return home
with what we wanted.
**
A scorpion scurries out of my shoe.
A lizard performs push ups on my shoulder.
A hawk screams like a mother dying to her old self.
**
They have been keeping a happy secret from me.
Unafraid to speak, one of them makes a witty remark,
and we laugh together before saying our good-byes.
______________________________________________________________________
Jane Ann Fuller is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and a recipient of the James Boatwright II Poetry Prize. Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2021) was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. Poems appear in Calyx, Verse Daily, On The Seawall, Shenandoah, BODY, All We Know Of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica By Women, and elsewhere. A collaboration REVENANTS: A STORY OF MANY LIVES was published with a grant from the Ohio Arts Council.
by Theresa Malphrus Welford
Why remember that day in fifth grade
when the teacher left the room?
It was no big deal. It was just Mrs. Rowland:
her silver shoes, her gold shoes,
her shimmering beauty-parlor curls,
her odd aphorisms:
Cain’t is hiding behind the fence corner.
Nobody puts on airs when they’re about to vomit.
We were kids,
and we were on our own,
and someone prissy was taking names.
And we were wild.
And then one kid, tall for his age,
lanky, with greasy black hair,
jumped up on a table.
He danced a silly step, rolled his eyes, flicked
his tongue like a snake.
I’d seen that kind of silliness before.
But this was new:
he held his closed fist below his belt,
pumped it rhythmically,
back and forth, back and forth.
The other kids laughed and turned
in their desks to look at each other.
I laughed, too.
And I was ten years old,
and I knew I wasn’t getting it,
and I knew I couldn’t ask,
What’s funny about that?
And I knew I couldn’t say,
You make my skin crawl.
Why remember?
Because, when he was twenty,
this same kid went to the gas station
where his friend Mikey worked,
took him to Mud Turtle Pond,
made him kneel on the ground,
made him beg.
Because I imagine the night sky,
clear, black, spangled with stars.
Pine trees, frogs, cicadas,
a cold, bottomless pond.
Two cars parked haphazardly,
engines idling, doors open,
radios murmuring or pulsing or screeching.
Because I see Mikey on his knees,
sweating and pleading.
Because I hear the kid’s accomplices:
do it come on shoot him.
Because he did.
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Theresa Malphrus Welford, who grew up near Savannah, Georgia, has published poetry, creative nonfiction, book chapters, and academic articles, as well as The Paradelle, The Cento, and Trans-Atlantic Connections: The Movement and New Formalism (all published by Red Hen Press). Theresa and her husband, Mark Welford, happily share their home with countless rescued cats and dogs.
by Deborah Diemont
by Jennifer Stewart Miller
My dog wants to run off into the lit trees,
my 87-year-old mother wants to live on.
To a hungry goldfinch, want is huge—
and as tiny as a thistle seed. I wanted to visit
the hidden smallpox cemetery in Provincetown again,
so in fall I drove, then hiked through woods,
then slipped and slid down a steep hill
to kneel at these little numbered marble slabs.
I have been found wanting. I have been left
wanting. My wants have been distilled.
Fourteen souls carried off in outbreaks—
I longed to find this place, all the wanting
buried here. This plush dark moss, these whole
and broken stones. My wants are small like this.
______________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Stewart Miller’s book Thief (2021) won the Grayson Books Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of a chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appeared in Poet Lore, RHINO, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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!
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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).
