Pitch

SWWIM Every Day
by Shannon K. Winston

by Shannon K. Winston

What did you say?
My mother asks me every day.

She tunes her hearing aids:
one millimeter up, half a one down,

a musician with a tuning fork.

Walking down the street,
I crank up the music, a conductor
of a concerto, a jam session,

or a pop refrain. Louder, louder—
notes flower in my ear buds.

What did you say? I ask
my mother almost every day.

Some would call it inattention,
but meaning blooms
between quietness and cadence.

A musician and conductor
meander through a field.

They press their ears to the ground.

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Shannon K. Winston’s book, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press), was published in 2021. Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, On the Seawall, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She lives in Bloomington, IN. Find her here: shannonkwinston.com.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

The Strangers Were Poets

SWWIM Every Day
by Kelle Groom

by Kelle Groom



It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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I remember sleeping with the Ballad for Metka
Krasovec over my head for years in Florida, white
cover with people crowded together
and their ghosts above their black print selves,
pink too like shells, book small enough
to hold comfortably in a hand,
the ballad singing over my head all night
long, while I slept close to the floor, train
shaking as if trying to rouse me.
I remember shaking Tomaz Salamun’s
hand in St. Marks, I’d asked strangers
in the dark, where is St. Mark’s, laughing
because they’d been to St. Mark’s
or wanted to go but couldn’t,
or we asked strangers on the street
where is Tomaz Salamun
reading, and the strangers were poets
or lovers of poetry, and pointed us
toward St. Marks, their arms raised
like parentheses, like waves, but it was
almost over, and this was clear when we
arrived, and everyone stood in one of many
little circles, a large medieval door
shut. It was over. Dejected,
I climbed stairs to another floor,
down a hall, a restroom where I
stood in front of the glass examining
my face, my newly shorn
hair, and Teresa ran in, Hurry,
Hurry, she cried. Simen is holding
Tomaz Salamun hostage downstairs.
Simen said he can’t leave until
he meets you. She loves you, Simen said
to Tomaz Salamun, as if this would convince
him to stay until I ran out the bathroom door,
down the stairs, into the vast hall
to find Simen from Sweden
by way of Norway who doesn’t even like
people all that much, holding Tomaz
Salamun hostage for me because
I’d said I loved him. Like the cold
spark in a violet on a winter sill,
alive and unexpected. I remember
my hand in Tomaz Salamun’s, like a hand but
also like bread rising around
my hand, warm, tremendously
comforting, Who are you,
he asked, who are you?

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Kelle Groom is the author of four poetry collections, Underwater City, Luckily, Five Kingdoms, and Spill; a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, a B&N Discover selection and New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice; and How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays (Tupelo Press, October 2023). An NEA Fellow, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, and winner of two Florida Book Awards, Groom’s work also appears in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She is currently director of communications and foundation relations at Atlantic Center for the Arts, an international artists-in-residence facility in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

In Love

SWWIM Every Day
by Chloe Martinez

by Chloe Martinez



After Dorianne Laux


I’m in love with you, coffee,
and with you, green ink in my pen,
and with you, imaginary reader.
I’m in love with you, recirculated office air
that gets a little too warm, then
a little too cold, because now I am
putting on and taking off repeatedly
this shawl I got long ago
when I was a student,
living in India for the first time,

and it still smells like incense
in Mount Abu, where the lake
was named Nakki, fingernail,
and the surrounding mountains were said
to be holy fragments of the body
of a goddess who fell to earth there.
I was a little in love with her.
I climbed long flights of stone stairs
to visit the mountain cave shrines
where she accepted flowers, coconuts, and cash.

Shawl, I’m in love with your pattern of vines.
Your border that runs wild. I’m in love with you, memory
of how my body felt then: curious
and excited, shy and defiant.
Also you, knowledge of how it feels
now: sometimes tired, or heavy
with sadness and experience,
which are often the same thing,

but other times, electric, connected
back to that person. She didn’t
know much. I wasn’t in love with her
then, but now I see her better.
How she stood unsure on a rural road.
Nowhere she had to be, and the forest
lush and loud all around her.

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Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College. See more at chloeAVmartinez.com.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

Metamorphoses

SWWIM Every Day
by Arah Ko

by Arah Ko


I want to speak about bodies that changed into new forms. And you,
gods, who altered them… -Ovid



Zeus walks by in a three-piece suit,
smelling like ozone, casual thunder,
money. You remember how he came
to you in the apple orchard, bright
face of a boy, swan feathers in
his hair, how fingers skimmed your
skin and you cried when he crawled
inside. Now his silhouette has shifted,
hard-nosed and high-cheeked, trunk
of marble, feet of stone. Silver
cufflinks separate the animal from
the man. And no, you don’t want
to talk about bodies that change forms,
or the lightning in flesh bottles keeping
them there. The conqueror storms
through glass office doors, ignores
your complaints, knowing he’ll never
sweat or bleed, tear or be changed, not
like you have.

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Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai'i and the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books, 2025) and Animal Logic (Bull City Press, 2025). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Arah was nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets and received her MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University. Arah edits at Surging Tide Magazine. Catch her at arahko.com.


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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

Hearing The Dizzy Gillespie Sextet’s “All The Things You Are” In The Foodtown

SWWIM Every Day
by Christine Potter

by Christine Potter


Among the red bell peppers that aren’t even organic,
Ziplock bags and detergent and cube steak, fake
butterscotch chips for holiday baking, and Christmas

wrap out way early, this! This hug, this smile, this old
friend who didn’t ghost you after all, this Yes. This
Yes, of course as unseen nozzles mist the fresh herbs.

Really Diz, really Bird, really Slam Stewart on bass.
In this shadowless place of milk so homogenized
it won’t cottage cheese your coffee for weeks. In this

place where everything crinkles in cellophane, happy
ghosts blowing joy: Oh, yeah, it’s cool, it’s cool. And
then a few days later in the same store: Caravan, “All

The Way,” from Blind Dog At St. Dunstan’s: synth,
drums, prog rock from 1976, nameable only by total
obsessives but sweet as dulce de leche ice cream and

the encouraging scent of fresh celery! In a world so
well-married to woe that even the wars have to line up
and vie for your attention each morning, a complex

secret handshake, a compliment on the cool hat you
forgot you’d worn. The President of the World
flashing a peace sign. Three green lights going home.

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Christine Potter ‘s poetry has been curated by Rattle, Kestrel, Third Wednesday, Thimble, Eclectica, The Midwest Quarterly, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily—and featured by ABC Radio News. She has work forthcoming in The McNeese Review. Her young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen, and her third full-length collection of poetry, Unforgetting, Kelsay Books.


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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.


Transplant

SWWIM Every Day
by Kelly Madigan

by Kelly Madigan


The neighbor calls
about the feral swine he killed,
tells us that in the half light
he first thought it was a calf, then,
because of the way it was moving, a bear.
Says it took five shots to drop it. It’s extra dark
in the field by the time we’ve come to extract samples
for the state research lab, but our headlamps
reveal him, on his side, covered in wiry bristles.
His feet are off the ground, so I count
four toes on each stubby leg. It’s twice my size,
tusked, eyes closed. I put my boot next to it
to shoot a photo, for size. We’ll bring
the samples home, and keep them cool until
they can be delivered.

The neighbor has lived here
a long time but can’t remember a wild boar
in this area, ever. He points out
the places in the field disturbed by the animal.

When the wildlife biologist cuts
open the heart to retrieve the liquid sample
the protocol requires, I ask him, and the neighbor,
if they remember pigs’ hearts being placed
in humans, and they do, and they note this heart
is smaller than they might’ve guessed, the first
any of us has seen, and all three of us
are staring at it, in a black field near a pack
of very vocal coyotes. And I’m thinking
of my dad, and his damaged heart,
how he wanted to save enough money
to pay for a transplant himself
if insurance denied it.

In the end he wasn’t
a candidate, and I can’t recall now
why they used pigs’ hearts in people
or if they still do, and I’m in this field
with two men, one holding the heart—
my pledge, my vow maker—the other
part neighbor, part stranger, and the pig
splayed open, alive and wild an hour ago,
every last one of us with a heart
that will eventually give way,
curious and marveling, mortal.

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Kelly Madigan has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Distinguished Artist Award from the Nebraska Arts Council. Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, Terrain.org, Prairie Schooner, Flyway, and Calyx. Her books include The Edge of Known Things (SFASU Press) and Getting Sober (McGraw-Hill.)


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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

evening : girl

SWWIM Every Day
Gabrielle Brant Freeman

by Gabrielle Brant Freeman

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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I

Most of the women I know sleep with a weapon.
A crowbar between the headboard and the bed,
a hammer just under the mattress. Truth?
We’ve been women all our lives. Baby,
we know our misogyny.
Our trust has a honed edge, always woke.

Because we’ve lain awake,
insomnia as much a weapon
as a curse, listening in the dark, a mass
of sibilant shadow, lain awake in our beds
listening for the floorboard creak, the debate
raging in our heads. It’s safe now, trust.

But. We know everything’s a weapon. Best learn the truth
early. Sweetheart? Wake up. Your mouth is full of teeth.


II

You bite. You kick. You scream. This is a truth
we teach our daughters. I feel like I am just now waking
up. This America says girl babies
turn from children to objects in a minute. Weaponized
bodies overnight. As I tuck my pre-teen into bed,
I wonder exactly how much misogyny

it took for me to reach middle age with a mess
of defensive lessons right behind my eyes. Don’t trust
any man. Keys between your fingers to gouge. Best
stay sober. Yell fire, not rape. Our boy babies wake
one sudden morning as licensed weapons.
Each and every one, somebody’s baby.

It’s true. Every morning, mothers wake their babies,
lock and load for the bed that has been made.  


III

Hush little baby,
don’t say a word. Papa’s gonna miss
the point. The mockingbird’s voice is a weapon
for which a diamond ring is no substitute.
I am a grown woman. I am a little girl awake
in the dark tucked in to my bed

and quiet. Something lurks in the dark, and my bed
crouches. My ears are trained to hear my babies’
breathing, to hear each distinct footfall. I am awake
in my own bed in my own house, mistress
to fear. Papa’s gonna teach you a truth:
the weapon that you know is better than the weapon

you miss. Evening is to girl as silence is to truth.
They tell you you better hush? Baby, choose your weapon.

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Gabrielle Brant Freeman is an award-winning poet and artist whose poetry has been published in many journals including Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Scoundrel Time, Shenandoah, storySouth, SWWIM Every Day, Waxwing, and Whale Road Review. Most recently, Gabrielle’s work was featured along with three other poets in a choreopoem titled "A Chorus Within Her" at Theater Alliance in Washington ton DC. She teaches at East Carolina University, and she lives with her two awesome kids in Eastern North Carolina.


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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

Cathedral

SWWIM Every Day
by Emily Patterson

by Emily Patterson

Upstairs in the stone church
at night, we gather once each month,
and not to pray. At the center

of the table, tiny cupcakes cluster
like an offering: light pink icing,
soft blue sugar, left untouched.

Instead, a circle of stories unfolds,
each of us reciting her chapter, so often
unchanged month after month

after month. We are a chorus of grief
in metal folding chairs; we are a collective
hush: here for the holiness

of being heard, for the echoes bearing
into the emptiness like a cathedral
of children, singing.

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Emily Patterson is the author of So Much Tending Remains (2022) and To Bend and Braid (2023). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Spiritual Literature and appears in Sweet Lit, Rust & Moth, The Shore, tiny wren, Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. She received her B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University and her M.A. in Education from Ohio State University. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.


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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

Self-Portrait Poem That Is Also a Study

SWWIM Every Day
by Fabienne Josaphat

by Fabienne Josaphat


I see myself in her in photos, and see her in myself. Lately it seems I see her everywhere. Sometimes she is the woman pushing her shopping cart down the aisles hunting for canned olives and mackerel to fill her pantry, shopping with her eyes first, and then weighing and smelling candles, the ultimate luxury in this American life, one a nurse’s aide cannot afford. I recognize her in the way she slumps over the frame of the cart for support, unable to carry the weight of her own body, heels clapping in clogs with each step, applauding her survival. My mother endured too much and that is the miracle and this is what I tell myself too when I look in the mirror, for this is where I find her the most: in the double chin of motherhood, creased with fear of my own failure, in the wrinkles on my forehead that I massage with anti-time creme, in the way I push the cart down the aisle and lean in for support, barely holding up my own body under the weight of this country, what it has done to me, her, us—in the way I emotionally down an entire bar of chocolate as I sit in the car, swallowing shame, in the gray hairs I now count in each brittle braid. I too am falling. I too am failing. I too am afraid.

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Fabienne Josaphat is the 2023 PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and the author of the forthcoming novel Kingdom of No Tomorrow (Algonquin). Her first novel, Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow, was published by Unnamed Press. Her publications include poems in Kitchen Table Quarterly, Grist Journal, Hinchas de Poesia, and Eight Miami Poets, and essays in The Washington Post and Teen Vogue. She is currently at work on a third novel.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio recording of today’s poem.

Bird Watching

SWWIM Every Day
by Brett Warren

by Brett Warren

He watches his wife push open the door
of the campground bathroom, take a step in,
check to make sure someone isn’t hiding
in the single stall. The maneuver takes all

of three seconds, but the hesitation is at odds
with her vigor on the trail. When he asks,
she says she hardly thinks of it—most women
do some variation of the same thing, or at least

it crosses their minds, to be ready. Decades
married, he’s only just noticing this vigilance—
unspoken, subterranean, intuitive. The door
swings shut with a thud, startling a barn swallow

who nests above it every spring. The bird
swoops out from under the overhang, up again
to perch on a branch until it’s safe to return.
How many times a day does she do this?

He remembers another bird he saw once,
nesting on a restaurant’s outdoor fire alarm—
the curve of her taupe feathers, dry thatch
of twigs a surprise, so jarring atop the flame-

red box. He wonders what it is with these birds,
why they don’t find somewhere safer.

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Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Harbor Review, ONE ART, Rise Up Review, and elsewhere. A triple poetry nominee for Best of the Net 2024, she lives in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway. See brettwarrenpoetry.com.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio recording of today’s poem.

Mathew

SWWIM Every Day
by Amber Adams

by Amber Adams


Your name starts with the subject
of torque. The way childhood twists
with the fraught numbering

of birth order. The subtracted state
of sister, breezy second to the sun.
Then air moved by so fast. Suddenly you were

in high school drag racing cars
for sport. My money was always on the Mustang
because of its horsepower—the calculation

at which you can move 550 lbs—and its low
profile pony zip. Sometimes, I wonder
if you were ever really here.

I walked with your apostle name
knowing its fraudulence, its missing “t.”
A crucifix taken out for posting. I want

this to mean something but I’ve never
been the cross-carrying kind.
Your name tries to sell me on it though.

The day after you died, your name
really took me for a ride. I said it over
and over until it appeared on the news.

But just like that, it was gone again,
My flyaways still waving in a gust
of syllables.

I chased my tail a while
looking at the aftermath. Nothing
added up. I wanted a somewhere

to vanish like you had. A city gone.
And the dumbfounded gapes of people
open like a gift horse. I do not have

that kind of power. But I think about
leaving sometimes. Hang a cross
from my rearview mirror,

simply for the way it catches the sun,
and watch the dash lines roll,
this time leaving, not being left.

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Amber Adams is a poet and counselor living in Longmont, Colorado. Her debut collection, Becoming Ribbons (Unicorn Press, 2022), was a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and semifinalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. She received her MA in Literary Studies from the University of Denver, and her MA in Counseling from Regis University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, Witness, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio recording of today’s poem.

Little Bird

SWWIM Every Day
by Lesléa Newman

by Lesléa Newman

The small arrow-shaped bird nestled
among the other pins in my jewelry box,
is smooth, shiny, and red as the hard candy
apples sold at the local cider mill
that my mother never let me eat,
I could break my teeth or worse grow
fat, and my glamorous mother would
never have that. My fashion
plate mother who made me
this tiny bird one summer in the Catskills
when we lived in a cabin and swam
in a lake and all the moms took morning
art classes where they painted pins,
an orange leaf, a yellow swan, a red bird,
this red bird, its ruby lacquer sleek
as the cherry patent leather three-inch heels
my stylish mother slipped on
her size six high-arched ballerina feet
or the glossy scarlet polish she wore on her fingers
and toes every day of her life even
at the very end when she lay in a hospital bed
in a hospice, all twenty nails growing
brighter and brighter as she shrunk
further and further into herself,
the skin on her hands and feet mottled,
puffy, and blue as the jeweled eye
of the tiny stoplight-colored bird
now perched on my palm and staring
at nothing the way my dying mother,
whose name Faigl means Little Bird, curled
on her side and stared at nothing, not me,
not my broken father slumped
in his seat, sniffling and sobbing,
not the tree outside her open window
where a robin puffed out her red breast
and sang her heart out, the nurse stepping
silently as only nurses can into the room to listen,
her hand landing softly on my shoulder
her voice, a whisper gentle as the wind
reminding me that hearing is the last to go

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Lesléa Newman's 85 books for readers of all ages including I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father (memoirs-in-verse) and October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard (novel-in-verse). She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, two National Jewish Book Awards, two American Library Stonewall Honors, and the Sydney Taylor Body-of-Work Award. From 2008 - 2010, she served as the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.


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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio recording of today’s poem.

Black History 101

SWWIM Every Day
by Ellen June Wright

by Ellen June Wright



after Alice Coltrane’s harp solo 1970



Under the waterfall
music’s cataract streams down

hands a flurry of grace
fingers cast spells

deftly move among strings
pull sound out—head tilted

watch the winged notes lift and fly
coaxes each reverberation

she could be in a wood
summoning angels to dance

or Alice Tully Hall
showing the white folks

she can fix jazz like gumbo
like shellfish after the shucking

on an instrument so old pharaohs heard it
and David played one too

his music medicine for a king
John was dead three years

I wish he could listen the way I do
bathe in his wife's onslaught once more

but this is my history month
And while I'm on this grave’s side

every month will be Black history
I’ve got nothing else to do

I'm coming with a shovel
I'm coming with a spade

to unearth what's long buried
I might find diamonds, I might hit oil

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Ellen June Wright consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work has been featured by Verse Daily, Rappahannock Review, The Good Life Review, Passengers Journal, Scoundrel Times, Banyan Review, and others. She’s a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and a 2021 and 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee.

Deadheading the Roses

SWWIM Every Day
By Alison Jennings

by Alison Jennings


It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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The miniature pink rose is brightly blooming now,

but its spent flowers bow: she pinches these by hand.

This “tool” is banned by Sunset Gardening, which tells us how

to cut with clippers (a sacred cow), yet Alison can’t stand

to, when, you see, it’s grand to feel the plant allow

such gentle nips—anyhow, fingers crave a verdant land.

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Alison Jennings is a Seattle-based poet who worked as a journalist, accountant, and teacher before returning to poetry. She’s had over 100 poems published, including a mini-chapbook, in numerous places, such as Amethyst Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meat for Tea, Mslexia, Poetic Sun, Red Door, Society of Classical Poets, Sonic Boom, Stone Poetry, and The Raw Art Review. She has also won 3rd Place/Honorable Mention in several contests. See airandfirepoet/home.

Small Mammal

SWWIM Every Day
by Lindsay Rockwell

by Lindsay Rockwell


Each loss fits inside the others.
Each loss folds itself

neatly inside, then quietly
clears its throat of shame.

Holds its eyes up toward day
as my eyelashes dust the floor

again. Again, I count my losses.
Six. Seven. Eight. Sniff

their soft bodies. Watch
their hands reach toward

the tiny gate my pain opens.
My tiny pain gate opens

and each loss scuffles through
hobbling on all fours. Small

mammal. Each with chin up
in hopes to lick a drop of rain.


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Lindsay Rockwell is poet-in-residence for the Episcopal Church of Connecticut and hosts their Poetry and Social Justice Dialogue series. She's recently published, or forthcoming in Calyx, EcoTheo Review, Gargoyle, Radar, and The Dewdrop, among others. Her first collection, Ghost Fires, was published by Main Street Rag in April 2023. She’s received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and Edith Wharton/The Mount residency. Lindsay is also an oncologist.

Love Poem for Dimitri

SWWIM Every Day
by Dana Raja Wahab

by Dana Raja Wahab

Golden Shovel after Natalie Diaz


I.

It’s always a love poem with cookies, as if
I am, in fact, my mother’s daughter, although I
fought not to be. I thought love should
be free of tradition, should not come
from service—but a rare rib eye steak set upon
a bed of spinach and those sweet potatoes, your
favorite—they do the trick. Your cupped hands wander into my yellow-lit house
looking to be filled with butter and chipotle, and the lonely
saltshaker spilling with kindness, mixing it in
with blood and love and blood and love; the
recipe always calls for blood and love, like a mid-century West-
ern soap opera filmed on a small set in Texas,
where prickly pears peak in through the stone windows of the desert.


II.

Here I am again, writing about food! So let’s eat
fish this week, or shrimp—anything but steaks. My
body is craving lemon and salt and capers. Mediterranean meals
laid on brown ceramic plates with black olives beside us and a strawberry Jarritos between us; at
least it’s got real sugar, though I’ve never cared much for sugar at all. The
real pleasure lies in sampling the savory: tomatoes not yet red,
quartered and salted and soaked in olive oil, that which sits at the head of our table
and the center of our kitchen hearts; a dark bottle of
remembering, my mother standing there, but now you, sprinkling on your
plate a dash of black pepper, onto a fish from a foreign, warmer sea—the new home of your heart.

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Dana Raja Wahab is a writer, illustrator, and educator from Miami. She worked for seven years as a teaching artist at The Cushman School and now teaches in O, Miami's Sunroom program, in addition to managing and editing O, Miami book projects. Dana holds an M.A. in Children's Literature and Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London.




Naming the Animals

SWWIM Every Day
by Marcela Sulak

by Marcela Sulak

Shopping on Friday F tells his wife
about the animals. There is a mouse
that’s made a nest in the sea chest
where he keeps the paper napkins
and rum. And a rat is chewing the feet
of the furniture. He forgets its name.
It is a rat or a mouse, he feels very
certain, and there is a roach in the
bathroom. Well, it isn’t in the bathroom,
it is at the foot of his wardrobe, but
his wardrobe is near the bathroom.
If he sees it again he will spray. There
are gecko stars upon the screen but
those are just their feet, not really
stars, and guinea pigs in the garden,
but we knew that before. On Sunday
F enters the bathroom, poison bottle
in hand. But the only thing in the bathroom
is his wife, who looks up from the mirror.
On her fingertip is a long thin whisker,
or possibly a hair.

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Marcela Sulak has authored four poetry collections, including the National Jewish Book Awards Finalist City of Skypapers (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and the memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). She's co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres (Rose Metal Press, 2016) and translated four poetry collections from Czech, French, and Hebrew. Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.

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