by Brooke Bovee
by Sandra Yannone
Years ago
now
I walked
among
the dying.
I was
already dead.
I was
a shroud
of skin
wrapped
around bones
no one
could touch.
This is
one version
of what
it means
to be
dead.
Around me,
often circling,
teetering
like metal
candelabra
angels,
were
too plenty
of the others
dying, who
in the moment
had outlived
me. Mostly
middle-aged
gay men
dying
into
their shadows.
We all walked
for miles,
for each other,
for liberation,
for purification,
for healing, for life.
The walks began
and ended
with swan boats
in the Boston
Public
Garden.
By the time
I crossed
the bridge
at the finish
line, under
a rainbow
of tethered
balloons,
more among me
were that many
steps closer
to death,
the air
exhausted
in their
lungs
labored
further
heaving,
sighing,
some pulsing
into oxygen
masks
while seated
in wheelchairs,
escorted
by lovers
and friends,
some who
would not
be
permitted
to witness
their beloved’s
final
grasps
for air
before
the lights
blew out
behind
their eyes.
But this day,
sunlight.
Every AIDS walk,
sunlight.
We would walk
into the sun
for miles
beaming
before
together
we
would burn
our skin
always
like flash
paper
ready
to combust.
______________________________________________________________________
Sandra Yannone’s debut collection, Boats for Women, was published by Salmon Poetry (Ennistymon, Ireland) in 2019. Salmon published The Glass Studio in February, 2024. Her poetry and book reviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Lambda Literary Review, and numerous others. Since March, 2020, she has hosted the weekly reading series Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry on Zoom via Facebook. Visit her at sandrayannone.com.
by Paola R. Bruni
As we pull onto the coast highway,
she comes. Alone. Alights on glass,
robust in her dull flesh—plain as a Quaker.
What is velocity to the raw humping muscle
of abdomen, thorax? Or the eight gilded legs
that flatten against all odds to a pane of glass?
How we cling to what repels us!
Moth speak is a gibberish into wind,
her single bulging eye an alert periscope
watching me astonish at her herculean strength.
I want to be as earnest, fight for my life.
But I am a lowly creature by comparison
fraught with bouts of uncertainty—
the anti-hero to moth’s brandishing
courage. My husband pulls off at an exit. Offers
cupped palms, the moth climbing onto the soft
pads of flesh as if entering a chariot. She
is transported to a clump of scotch broom
where she takes flight among yolk-yellow
blossoms. Only then does the symphony
of white and black arrive, officers singing
commands to freeze, raise hands over head.
I try to explain about the bravery of a brown
moth, how it earned its freedom,
but am ordered to remain inside the car,
where I can only guilt-anguish as my brown
husband is made into a still life: hands splayed
in white air, legs spread, head bowed
in supplication.
______________________________________________________________________
Paola R. Bruni’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous print journals as well as popular anthologies. Recent poems can be found in The Birmingham Review, The Adroit Journal, and SWWIM Every Day. Her work is also forthcoming in Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, Red Wheelbarrow, and Spillway. Her debut book of poetry is an epistolary collection titled how do you spell the sound of crickets (Paper Angel Press, August 2022).
by Cassidy McFadzean
Before bed, I count teeth slipping out,
calculate bodies in the high-rise above
As a child, who comforted you
when you woke from sleep?
Did you stand in the doorway,
watching softly snoring faces
too terrified to step inside a room?
Crying a little or a lot,
you run for me the white hot
You were flying home from Tehran
I was bleeding in the bathtub
at the start of the next decade
A toast to this and all other
odds and eclogues
Was it maggot or magnets?
Static or stagnant? No matter—
we cherished each fragment
clasped tight to our clavicles
You visited the Tower of Silence
and returned with copper bracelets
I wore clinking down the aedicula,
songbird ghoori glazed ash-white
*A Tower of Silence or dakhmeh refers to a circular burial tower in Iran where Zoroastrians would leave bodies of their deceased.
______________________________________________________________________
Cassidy McFadzean is the author of two books of poetry with her third, Crying Dress, forthcoming from House of Anansi in 2024. Recent poems have appeared in Afternoon Visitor, Annulet, Hot Pink, Paperbag, and elsewhere.
by Hannah Cohen
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
by Nancy Huggett
by Tammy Greenwood
by Arnisha Royston
i want so bad to stop writing about the
brokenness. my friend said something earlier
about tending to the beautiful in a broken
world and i thought how different our worlds
must break. i’ve tried to imagine the words here
from someplace else. i am thinking about water
from a spring. walking barefoot in red dirt.
horses trailing behind me without saddles. i fell
mounting a horse in california a few years ago
my foot slipped between stool and stirrup.
my back flat against the ground. i could see under
the horse. how a belly extends down when a
body is long. when a butcher slaughters goats
or anything with a similar body they cut from
hind leg to throat. all four legs held tightly apart.
there isn't much more i can say about this. about
something being cut open so easily. i remember
waking up from surgery. trying to make out the
numbers on the clock. if i knew how long i was
under. i could make sense of the damage. the clock
too far. i whispered to the nurse i felt cold everywhere.
animals must feel cold after that first cut. my sister is
somehow standing between the nurse’s station and my
bed smiling. but not happy. i could see the worry
stuff itself into her hands then her hands in her pockets. i
asked if it was quick and she said no. and i knew then
what it meant to be slaughtered. to be cut from throat
to belly. only the parts needed taken from body to bag.
to some place i’ll never see again. yes, the world is broken.
my body a betrayal. sometimes still beautiful.
______________________________________________________________________
Arnisha Royston is a poet from Los Angeles. She holds a BA from UCLA and a MFA from SDSU. Arnisha is currently the Tickner Writing Fellow at the Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland. Her poetry is published in literary journals such as Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Rhino, and Phoebe. Recently receiving nominations for a Pushcart and Best of the Net, Arnisha is excited to work towards the publication of her first manuscript.
by Lisa Rosenberg
by Sarah Browning
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
After Herbie Hancock & Wayne Shorter
How is it I imagine us older, already,
and walking in autumn to this song,
and we are beautiful, as we are now,
beautiful as you are now, when you
look at me. It is autumn, the city is
quiet and not quiet as the song is,
around us, kids on bikes, as we are
wrapped around each other like
the piano and the sax and the sudden
bikes but then the quiet and the yellow
leaves. My arm is through yours, my
hand in your pocket and it is autumn,
late afternoon. We’ve had a quiet good
day of work, each, then headed out
together and the song is the city we love
around us together and we are older but
not yet old and we are beautiful as the song.
______________________________________________________________________
Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works). Co-founder and past Executive Director of Split This Rock, the poetry and social justice organization, she now teaches with Writers in Progress. Browning received the Lillian E. Smith Award and fellowships from DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, VCCA, Yaddo, Porches, and Mesa Refuge. She holds an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Rutgers Camden and lives in Philadelphia. More at sarahbrowning.net.
by Jessica Manack
My great-grandmother Tat birthed three girls and stopped,
said “No use cluttering up my yard trying for a boy.”
Her daughter Peggy was up for the challenge, stayed faithful,
had her four and was then blessed with Eddie one Christmas.
Tat’s daughter Patty, my grandmother, had boys
she didn’t want, a husband she didn’t want, and when she could,
she shed them all, taking up with ladies, so that, by the time
I came along, it was a given, her companions, begrudgingly accepted.
I knew how she felt because I felt the same: the big secret
I couldn’t tell anyone – not my parents, who’d be disgusted,
not my grandmother, who I rarely saw. But one summer, we all went
from the city down to Peggy’s house, a rare confluence of cousins.
It felt like anything could blossom there, like the blueberries
growing in profusion in her yard, something I had never seen.
I gorged myself, sneaking handfuls from the big glass bowl,
afraid of being greedy, worried I’d not find such comfort again.
That night, in one of the row of little Catholic bedrooms
full of little twin beds, I shared a room with my grandmother,
a breath’s width apart, something I never imagined happening,
and I thought, I could tell her. I could say,
I’m like you, something I had never been able to say
to anyone in my family of brutes, being bookish and blue-haired.
The hot dark closed in on us, the smell of mothballs
a blanket no one had asked for, and I pictured opening my mouth,
pictured how, if I told her, it would be the first in a long series
of tellings, each harder than the last.
The cicadas’ screeching made it hard to settle.
The silence I replaced it with made it even harder.
______________________________________________________________________
Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has recently appeared in Still: The Journal, Litro Magazine, and Five South. She was the recipient of a 2022 Curious Creators Grant, and her work has been nominated for The Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. As the winner of the 2023 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions First Chapbook Contest, her first collection, GASTROMYTHOLOGY, comes out in Summer 2024.
by Alafia Nicole Sessions
by Jessica L. Walsh
The string of things I haven’t done could reach
from here to every place I’ve never been:
New York, Golden Corral, an orgy, Rome.
They say that’s a bucket list. My great-grandfather
worked his neighbors’ farms to keep his own,
carrying the tin lunch pail that’s now on my shelf.
Some days he probably swung it empty from dark to dark
hoping someone could toss in day-old bread or a nickel.
My guess is he would be awed by all we have. Or mad at what he didn’t.
My dad griped that we barely had a pot to piss in, but barely
does a lot there. We had a pot to piss in, I’m saying, even Pizza Hut
on paydays, a quarter for Pac-Man if we were good and lucky.
Ain’t no hole in the washtub, sang my mom,
and she was right, though there was once a hole in the back room ceiling
that filled the chili pot when it rained hard and long.
So I’ve never been to Brazil but I’ve never gone hungry,
always had bread, bologna, a coffee can full of grease
way at the back of the fridge, second shelf.
I think I’d like to finish my life with whatever it takes to endure it.
Beyond that, I don’t know. The smell of his pillow. A dog.
Maybe a vodka to close it out. Enough.
______________________________________________________________________
Jessica L. Walsh is the author of Book of Gods and Grudges (Glass Lyre, 2022) as well as two previous collections. Her poetry has appeared in Guesthouse, Lunch Ticket, Crab Creek Review, and more. A nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, her work has also been featured on the Best American Poetry website. A native of small-town Michigan, she lives outside of Chicago and teaches at a community college.
by Karen Earle
by Emily Hockaday
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
In Viking sagas, language is
roundabout. A sword is a blood
worm; blood battle sweat. Is it this
that made me a poet? Around
my finger: a ring of Frejya’s tears bind
us. Your blood is also of Viking
descent. In Iceland we blend in
with the locals, drinking heavy
beers, eating fish stew, until they hear
us speak: Is this also where my gift
for circumlocution stems? You tell me
you love me and I describe all the ways
in which I would have made a good
conqueror. You don’t argue. We
look out over the glacial mountains
(stone teeth, ice trolls, snow knives)
and beneath, the lava (Earth’s blood,
Surtr’s misery, liquid flame) lies
in wait; there is always seismic
activity here, no matter how stable
or frozen the land appears.
______________________________________________________________________
Emily Hockaday's second full-length collection, In a Body, was published by Harbor Editions in 2023. Her first, Naming the Ghost, debuted with Cornerstone Press in 2022. Emily is a De Groot Foundation Writer of Note and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation, NY City Artist Corps, and NYFA Queens Art Fund recipient. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in print and online, including Electric Literature and the North American Review. She is the editor of Heartbeat of the Universe (Interstellar Flight Press 2024). Emily writes about ecology, parenthood, the urban environment, and chronic illness. She can be found online at emilyhockaday.com and @E_Hockaday.
by Eugenie Carabatsos
by Yosra Bouslama
by Mary Morris
Stray cats in the attic,
the high bridge
we jumped from
into the river of frogs
and water moccasin.
We no longer ask
if she imagines
our childhood home—
no longer probe
about a life spent together.
Our mother nursed us
seventeen months apart.
We shared a room,
camped in Mexico,
launched a boat to Sardinia.
Witnessed the births
of each of our children.
I am not sure when
we first noticed her memory
migrating away.
Now I could say
maybe that wasn’t betrayal
but plaques and tangles.
When did she neglect
to turn off the stove?
Bake a cake without flour
and eggs? Lose the way home,
a block from her lane?
Sister, you no longer retain
a history of us, remember less
and less, but the more you forget
the further back I reminisce.
Sleeping together.
Talking too late.
Dancing into oblivion.
Swimming in the lake.
Sometimes you need a sister like a drink of water.
Sometimes you feel you are dying of thirst.
______________________________________________________________________
Mary Morris is the author of three books of poetry: Late Self-Portraits (selected by Leila Chatti for the Wheelbarrow Book Prize), Dear October (Arizona-New Mexico Book Award), and Enter Water, Swimmer (runner-up for the X.J. Kennedy Prize). Morris received the Rita Dove Award and has been invited to read her poems at the Library of Congress which aired on NPR. Her poems are published in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, and North American Review. See water400.org.
by Jessica Q. Stark
by Jules Jacob