by Kathryn Moll
There is sadness
Kathryn Moll is an architect and California native. Her text-based drawings—collaborative works created under the name modem—have been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Cooper Union in New York City. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
by Jane Ellen Glasser
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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She said goodbye
to alarm clocks,
appointment books
bank accounts,
cell phones,
welcome mats,
she scrubbed
guilt and regret
from the floorboards,
evicted troublesome
guests, opened
windows and doors
to let her house breathe
till she was clean
as a wind-stripped thicket,
airy as the left-
open spaces of a
Henri Moore sculpture,
the essence of form
(a face, a chest, an arm)
so clearly defined
by being absent.
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Jane Ellen Glasser’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, such as The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Georgia Review. In the past she served as the poetry critic for The Virginian-Pilot, poetry editor for the Ghent Quarterly and Lady Jane’s Miscellany, and co-founder of the nonprofit arts organization and journal New Virginia Review. She won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for Light Persists (2006), and the Poetica Publishing Chapbook Contest for The Long Life (2011). Her recent collectios are Jane Ellen Glasser: Selected Poems (2019), Staying Afloat during a Plague (2021) and Crow Songs (2021). Visit janeellenglasser.com.
by Marina Hope Wilson
And so it was I tumbled nightly
from the window after sliding it quietly open
and snuck through the abandoned schoolyard
to the field where we met and drank
stolen Bartles & James, or made out
in someone’s trashed trailer,
or what counted as making out
at twelve or thirteen, then riding on
the handlebars of the cop’s son’s bike
just as the sun was coming up, and him saying,
I hella like you now, and his breath on the back
of my neck combined with the surprise of daylight,
and how earlier he had laughed with his friends
about a girl he knew, and how wet she got,
and how disgusted he was, and
a hot feeling rose up in me
of everything it meant to be poor,
and a girl, and in a body,
with no one seeming to be watching,
or to be visible only in the worst ways,
and the shame of those unalterable facts filling me
while they laughed at the girl’s singular desire,
which I knew not to be singular at all.
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Marina Hope Wilson’s poems have appeared in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, Mulberry Literary, Kissing Dynamite, Jet Fuel Review, $, The Racket, Broad River Review, Bodega, and Stirring. She won the 2023 Rash Award in Poetry for her poem, “Origin.” Her poem, “Dilemma,” was nominated for the 2023 Best of the Net anthology. Her chapbook, Nighttime, was published via Cooper Dillon Books in January, 2024. Marina lives in San Francisco with her husband, stepdaughter, and two cats, and makes her living as a speech-language therapist.
by Erica Miriam Fabri
We do not pretend this makes sense:
eating peanuts while suspended inside a cloud?
My wing-less self, moving through the blue,
flying higher than birds do?
My body is not bigger than a mountain,
I am not meant to be more than a mountain away
from the dirt floor where the bodies I Love
are eating breakfast, kicking rocks.
You wouldn’t share a toothbrush
with your best friend, but you trust a stranger
to pilot two-hundred tons of metal
through a cold kind of air that will make you
breathless if it gets to you; you have handed over
your entire life: you know, you might only
get one: your whole wild body is being
gambled; Are you not afraid of this?
Are you also the kind of person who Loves
silently? Is your mouth a monastery?
Do you never moan? Has a surge of heartache
never gushed out from the burning inside part of you?
Do you sing? Do you scream? Do you know
that my great aunts waited until the casket
was lowered halfway into the rectangle hole
before they threw themselves on top of the box
that held their brother, father, husband.
Their wailing was an unkempt orchestra of noise,
a monster’s symphony; Where did they think
he was going? Were they afraid he might fly?
They were trying to hold him fast against
the only rock they have ever known
to be home.
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Erica Miriam Fabri’s first book, Dialect of a Skirt, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and included on the bestseller lists for Small Press Distribution and The Poetry Foundation. She has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and has worked as a writer, and educator for Urban Word NYC, The New York Knicks, and Nickelodeon Television. She teaches Performance Poetry and Fiction Writing at Pace University. See ericafabri.com.
by Lexi Pelle
Something my stepfather said to see
if my mother would believe it.
She did. She’s been to the Vatican.
How blessed the Basilica must be
that some tourist’s enthusiastic
hand gestures never punctured
its pillars, Bernini’s baroque
canopy never collapsed by an old
Catholic’s fainting awe. A miracle
the mosaics still marvelous despite
centuries of storms. She was pissed
when he laughed, thought he wanted
to make her seem stupid, gullible—
I only believed you because
I love you, she said weeks later when
he repeated the story to his bandmates.
Who doesn’t want the world to be
made of softer material? Who isn’t
waiting for truth to transubstantiate
the hours spent scrubbing
sticky spaghetti from the pot.
Say the statue of David is
swiss cheese, wouldn’t you want
to bite a sculpted thigh
until beauty felt a little less
unattainable? Stick a finger in
the wound of truth
like Caravaggio’s Thomas
fishing around in Jesus’s flesh,
tell me what you feel.
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Lexi Pelle was the winner of the 2022 Jack McCarthy Book prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Ninth Letter, One Art, Abandon Journal, and 3Elements Review. Her debut poetry book, Let Go With The Lights On, will be released in May.
by Robbi Nester
“you look just like/your mother, he says, “who looks like a fire/of
suspicious origin.”
from “A Violence,” Nicole Sealey
My mother looked like a woman, a nicely made
woman in her neat turquoise slacks and size 4 shoes,
buttons never hanging by a thread, her face bearing
evidence of everything she feared—up escalators,
finding her way in a strange place, leaving the house.
But she was a fire, an earthquake, an electric storm—
battering the roof with hail, sending blue balls of light,
unraveling skeins of static yarn rolling across the room.
She sent the poltergeist trudging up the stairs, stopping
outside my door like a persistent sleepwalker.
Most of all, she was a voice, telling stories, singing,
teaching me to get the language right,
pin the world in place with words.
Every workday, my father climbed the cellar stairs
at evening, saying “Shut up Lydia. You too, bitch,”
meaning me. All the power of her words couldn’t
keep my father’s belt from lashing at my legs and back.
She spoke less and less, mostly muttered to herself
under her breath in two languages. I saw it all.
I was the message in a bottle sent into the world
to speak her truth. It was my job to plot escape.
She filled me with the family lore. Her silence
turned her to a force that could not be contained,
especially in that small a space, the pressure
mounting underground, voice trapped
behind those perfect teeth, behind the fear
of uttering the unacceptable, the dangerous—
how my father’s family left us to our fate,
wanting to hide the shame, the family
madness, truth that everyone could see
but didn’t want to hear or say.
When a woman is stifled for so long,
the voice will curdle in her chest
and make of her a fire of suspicious origin,
smelling of gasoline and melted plaster.
Her face becomes a crime scene, evident
to anyone who reads the signs, speaking
all the outrage of those who outwardly
accept their fate. Broken wires spark
a conflagration. I must trace the fire
to its origin. I am the arsonist. I am the match.
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Robbi Nester is a retired college educator and author of 4 books of poetry, editor of 3 anthologies. She hosts two poetry series on Zoom--Verse Virtual's monthly reading and Words With You. Her website may be found on robbinester.net.
by Darby Lyons
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Annie Schumacher
While some orchids have blue flowers,
they are rare and troublesome to keep alive.
A florist has dyed this one blue, the blue bloom
will stay blue while it is on the plant. An injection
of dye to the base of the stem. At an online 12-step
meeting, I am told to look back without staring and
to replace suffering with gratitude to perceive
a better world. The blue orchid sits in a plastic cup,
the sky as empty as the inside of a wrist.
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Annie Schumacher is a poet and translator. She is Poetry Editor and Audio Editor at The Cortland Review. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a work-study scholar and by the Our Little Roses Poetry Fellowship. Her chapbook, Vineyard Elegy, was shortlisted for the 2023 Poetry London Pamphlet Prize. Recent publications can be found in On the Seawall, Sobremesa, The London Magazine, California Quarterly, and Poetry London. She is from Fresno, California, lives in Barcelona, Spain, and is at work on her first full-length poetry collection.
by Danielle Sellers
A year after my father died I drove with high school friends from other colleges
to a shitty motel on the outskirts of New Orleans that had green doors with busted locks
and brown stains on the fitted sheets. Not yet 21, all we could do was take a bus
to the city’s center, walk the streets and gather fallen beads that laced the ground,
order hurricanes through barside windows that opened like Scooby Doo passageways.
Holding frosted neon tubes, sucking fruit punch through crazy straws, we peopled the sidewalks,
a crush of glittered bodies. Women’s painted breasts brushed against my arms.
Old men in thongs spiraled my thighs, their beefy bulges flopping like sea cucumbers.
Music from everywhere thundered inside our bodies in one generic thrum and from behind me
someone’s strong fingers inched their way under my skirt, hooked me like a fish. I struggled
against the current of revelers that held me in place, lost the hand of my friend as she was pushed
down Bourbon. When we met up again, sticky and slick with sweat in the cold air, I didn’t dare tell,
wouldn’t break the spirit of fun the night was in. Couldn’t say how in order to free myself
I fought, punched, kicked, became the cartooned tornado of a Tazmanian devil scratching wildly,
how I learned to part a pulsing sea, learned how to walk in kitten heels on fetid water,
instead of what I really did which was to stand there and take it until his grasp was
broken by the barbed surf of the monstrous and dazzling crowd.
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Danielle Sellers’ poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, The Cimarron Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Bone Key Elegies (Main Street Rag 2009) and The Minor Territories (Sundress Publications 2018). She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.
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Danielle Sellers’ poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, The Cimarron Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Bone Key Elegies (Main Street Rag 2009) and The Minor Territories (Sundress Publications 2018). She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.
by Pamela Manasco
My aunt had a frame in her bedroom, three t-pinned
butterflies flattened under glass, and I coveted it
until one day I caught a real one, a black swallowtail.
Its wings rose and fell like clouds. After it flew away
flakes of skin, thin as mica, painted my fingers.
I read in a book that I'd killed it, or good enough;
it wouldn't survive because I'd touched it.
I didn't know then all touch does is wipe away
the camouflage. Take the mimicry some moths display,
an extra set of eyes painted on their wings, as if
a tanager will change its mind & swerve to dive elsewhere
because of those unblinking pupils. Take the walking stick,
Phasmatodea, the first I'd ever seen outside a picture.
Pumping gas before work the movement registered,
and a whittled brown leaf resolved into the insect
climbing the black hose of an unattended diesel pump.
Long past the click of my full tank I watched it explore,
wondering if it had hitched a ride on someone else's car,
if it could blend its small body into the pump somehow,
if it could find enough food to survive, how long their short
lives last. Ten days later a psychologist diagnoses
severe depression. She's conservative with medication,
she says, but not in my case. I get to choose: maybe
Celexa this time, Effexor? She sells hope a different drug
will help. I see the walking stick as I left it, I see myself
as the doctor must, pinned open, heavy weight darkening glass.
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Pamela Manasco is a poet living in Madison, Alabama. Her poetry has been published in New South Journal, Rust + Moth, Palooka, descant, and others, and she has work forthcoming in The Midwest Quarterly, Two Hawks Quarterly, Canyon Voices, and others.
by Kyle Potvin
This winter I need the bite of garlic.
Prepare dish after dish.
Sizzling shrimp with garlic (3 cloves, minced)
Garlic-butter steak (5 cloves, finely chopped)
Chicken curry (4 cloves, crushed)
Three of our mothers lost in as many months.
Requiem aeternam
Allium sativum
I swirl a raw clove around my mouth.
Smooth as a pebble
one should not swallow.
A pungency stays with my breath.
Garlic is pollinated by bees, moths and butterflies.
It does not have a mother.
Friends, we are the bees.
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Kyle Potvin’s debut full-length poetry collection is Loosen (Hobblebush Books, 2021). Her chapbook, Sound Travels on Water, won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, SWWIM Every Day, The New York Times, and others. She is a peer reviewer for Whale Road Review.
by Laurie Kolp
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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She kissed as if to breathe you inside her
(but) from the waist down, she was never there.
In her garden, the lies were shaking out moist silks.
To endure the endless walk through self,
pride pumped in like poison.
Cento credits: L1-Ocean Vuong, Kissing in Vietnamese; L2-Claudia Emerson, Early Elegy: Headmistress; L3-Sylvia Plath, The Detective; L4-Molly Peacock, Altruism; L5-Anne Sexton, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
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Laurie Kolp is an educator, avid reader, runner, and nature lover living in Southeast Texas. She is the author of Upon the Blue Couch and Hello, It's Your Mother. Her poems have appeared in Whale Road Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Inflectionist Review, and more. Laurie’s found poetry has been published online and in journals such as North Dakota Quarterly, Prelude, Dream Pop Press, and more. Laurie is currently working on a project to honor her late father.
by KC Trommer
All around the island I feel her ghost
and wonder what more she would’ve made—
There’s flaking lead paint, vines,
trees growing inside buildings
and under the asbestos.
There is a girl, only 22, half shadow,
one arm crisp, still in the frame,
getting herself on paper.
Alone in the house, I expect Francesca
every time I turn a corner,
expect her eyes soulful and sullen,
half caught/half deserting,
mooning up at me.
Adjust the aperture, let it all in.
In the summer, there’s a suicide
in my family, not the first. That decision
to exit so heavy on everyone left behind.
Some ghosts weigh a ton, heave
themselves on your back, never leave.
Others whisper you into the next day.
Francesca, I never knew you.
Come close. Come back.
Let all of you be seen.
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KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019). A Spanish-language translation is forthcoming in 2024 from Cuarto Propio, translated by the Chilean poet Elisa Montesinos. KC is founder of the online poetry mapping project QUEENSBOUND. Since 2021, she has been poet-in-residence on Governors Island, through LMCC's Residency Program, Works on Water, and the NYU Gallatin WetLab. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son.
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
I want to say it has rained for weeks.
Rain, such an easy metaphor for grief.
All those stages, storms
spinning up from distant dust—
emotional whack-a-mole.
Aren’t we all equal parts tender and not?
What about clouds of irrational hoopla
creeping unbridled up the spine,
anchoring inside the throat,
lodging countless bids to break free—
one careless slip loosing a shriek
of crazed birds skyward?
Nights, I replay footage—
time travels torn from my marrow,
mirages gone rogue and sour,
curse the wisps of nostalgia I cannot touch.
I wear my mother’s predilections,
my sister’s thirst, answer
to the hunger of being left behind,
Hard as I try, I cannot love these storms,
their beaded duplicity of air
wagging a wet finger in my face.
Death convolutes what’s ill faring,
the creek bitter cold with last year's snow.
I can’t stop holding my breath.
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Kari Gunter-Seymour, Poet Laureate of Ohio, focuses on lifting up underrepresented voices including incarcerated adults and women in recovery. She is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology Women Speak. Her poetry collection, Alone in the House of My Heart, received the "2023 Book of the Year Award" from American Book Fest. Find her work in Verse Daily, World Literature Today, The New York Times, and Poem-a-Day.
by S.A. Leger
match my arrhythmic dialect—
three syllables become two
ky oat
now transform a watershed—
praying mantises latched onto your tongue
crick
draw a sonogram of me
with the catechism lodged part way
between my crop & gizzard
my frequency range a wrong smell
ringing off my hollow bones
their scaffolding an impossible Fibonacci
senses poor development in me
commits infanticide to stop
my infernal buzzing
massacre a field of vowels
inject them slantwise into your gumline
ev dent
pr t nearly
watch as mosquitoes take away
small parts of me raising my pitch
my altitude—pine needles
bowing over me like a soft cradle
sap across my lips
shhhhhhh
now pinch my syrinx
watch a kaleidoscope
of nonlinear phenomena
jump off the terminus of my throat
deeper into the hardening clay
my restless bronchi
see ment
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S.A. Leger is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and scientist from Newfoundland, Canada. Her poems have most recently appeared in or are forthcoming from Conduit, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Fourteen Hills, The Dodge, Storm Cellar, and Dunes Review, among others. She spends her days exploring the 47th parallel with her wife and dachshund.
by Danielle DeTiberus
by Jessica Lee
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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When does cohabitation become co-possession?
You bat my hand away
from my own fingers, tell me
to quit picking at the layer of skin I’m peeling
back from the bed around my thumb. I nod
submissive, suck the blood, then sit
on my own hands—a show of moderation.
Like a child, I pay pretend reverence
as if you were a parent, my part-creator.
We switch roles at night over the sink:
I tell you to be more gentle
with your gums, use a lighter hand
for brushing teeth. I’d argue
oral health matters more than
bitten cuticles, long-term,
but what’s the use? Your body
matters to my body and vice versa.
Still, our hands are ultimately
our own. We show love
in the ways the ways we know how.
Concern, a bird twittering just beyond
the window. We look up, smile
at her song, then go on drawing
our own blood.
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Jessica Lee’s poems have been published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Narrative, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. She holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University. Find her online at readjessicalee.com.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
by Heidi Seaborn
You have bought the wrong light bulbs again—
too bright this time. This time you brought
the receipt but first you travel the well-lit aisle
of lighting fixtures. There’s a notice about a ban
on fluorescence which reminds you
of Ben’s offer for a bioluminescence
paddle in the Salish Sea. You want that—
to glide out into a wash of light, stars and sea
bedazzled. But here in the West Seattle True Value,
you are confused by wattage, the question
of dimming and LED. How many hours
of light should you expect? The time changed
this week and you hustle home to walk the dog
before nightfall, his vision dimming with age.
In the dark, he runs into lamp posts even as
they cast a glow and as the neighbors’ televisions pulse
a spectrum of the evening news, the wars brightening
their big screens. You can see into their living
rooms—in a way you never do
during the long summer evenings when you wave
to one another, stop to chat about the weather.
Walking the dog in the gloaming, you feel
an unexpected tenderness for your neighbors,
a desire to enter their darkened rooms and sit
beside them watching the televised world.
Maybe you would be silent together.
Or perhaps, someone would turn on a light,
offer a glass of wine. You want that—
to be a reason for light.
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Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of the 2022 The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She is the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Blackbird, Brevity, Copper Nickel, diode, Financial Times of London, Penn Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Plume, Rattle, and elsewhere. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
by Amie Whittemore
After Chen Chen
Learning the light
switches is the first
trick—each time
I palm the wall
by accident I stay
longer in the dark.
Then, where to put
the spoons and
where to put
my heart? Not
the highest shelf
in the closet,
not among
shoes shucked
by the front door.
Not below
my tongue—
that old home
its outgrown.
Not pressed
in the pages
of a novel—
never again
in her hands.
I throw it
to the cat who
tosses it
between
her paws
and teeth,
another toy
she mistakes
for meat.
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Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books) and Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and directs MTSU Write, a from-home creative writing mentorship program.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
by Tina Barry