by Emily Rose Cole
by Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum
The daughter moves the mother from home to nursing home.
In each suitcase are purple garments of dying.
The daughter folds lavender garments into drawers.
The old woman is fed and folded into clean sheets.
To be old is to be rolled and diapered like a baby daughter.
On blush pink sheets a baby daughter is begun and born.
A daughter grows old in sorrow for her mother’s death.
Death’s luminous violet haloes grieving eyes.
The old woman’s milk-blue eyes yearn for her daughter.
The daughter holds her mother’s hand too tightly.
Old hand, paper and bone, letters blur into cobalt dusk.
The old woman has no home except her daughter’s touch.
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Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum was born, raised, and educated in New York. Mary’s translation of poet Felix Morisseau-Leroy has been published in The Massachusetts Review and the anthology Into English (Graywolf Press). Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Lake Effect, Spoon River Poetry Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere.
by Merrill Oliver Douglas
by Majda Gama
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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“Strange Stars Pulsate According to the Golden Ratio”
The BBC headline & a snapshot of Lindsay Lohan
carrying a copy of the holy Quran run parallel on a news site.
Perhaps raw, almond-milk chai was too ordinary for her
so she turned to the book of a more exotic people.
Can America ever forgive her for reaching beyond yoga & rehab
into the terrain of the enemy? I mean, Jane Fonda is still
paying the price for looking eastward.
I like my life dry, like the lips an aesthetician told me she could fix,
use sugar-based fillers to fill in lines from smoking,
fill up the rosy skin browning with middle age.
Sure, the corners are downturned, someone needs to walk
around looking angry & I’m angry that the plump face of youth
is now the face I’m expected to buy back, just as my cheekbones
are emerging. FFS, Lindsey’s now allowed her lips to deflate.
After thinking all this through, I see The Archdruid Report
proclaim we are at peak meaninglessness.
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Majda Gama is the author of The Call of Paradise, selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2022 Two Sylvias chapbook prize. Her full-length poetry manuscript won the 2023 Wandering Aengus Book Award and will be published in 2025. She is the 2023 Shenandoah Graybeal-Gowen award recipient for Virginia poets. Her poems have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, where she is a 2024 Gregory Djanikian scholar, Ploughshares, POETRY, Shenandoah, Tahoma, and We Call to the Eye & the Night (Persea Press) an anthology of love poems by Arab Anglophone poets. They are forthcoming from Prairie Schooner and TriQuarterly.
by Katherine Riegel
Diving across the concrete patio, I grab
one dog’s collar while keeping hold
of the other. The fledgling—so small
I can’t tell what species it is—chirps
and hops away into the grass. Fifty-
something isn’t an age to be hurling
one’s body down. Elbow, knee, ankle
bruise and swell like rising bread dough.
We had a horse when I was growing up
who loved my mother so much
that if she had a seizure and fell
he would stand over her and bare his teeth
at anyone approaching. This fierce chestnut
lowered his head so at six I could push his bridle
over his ears, opened his mouth for the bit.
I knew I could save the baby bird
even though the first dog—a retriever—
had scooped it up in his mouth
because I could still hear it, muffled
but somehow echoing inside that toothy cage.
When my mother opened her eyes
to the sight of her horse’s belly
she’d say Move, you silly oaf,
and he’d step over her as carefully
as you carry a brimming cup to the table,
never spilling a drop.
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Katherine Riegel’s lyric memoir, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in summer 2025. She is also the author of Love Songs from the End of the World, the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth, and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Catamaran, One, Orion, and elsewhere. She is managing editor of Sweet Lit and teaches online classes in poetry and creative nonfiction. Find her at katherineriegel.com.
by Melissa Studdard
But I’ve tried several doors anyway. Once, my grandmother
found me next to an empty bottle of pills and pumped me
clean herself. Come morning, churches had popped up
inside the problem. Self-harm, preacher said, was yanking
my Christ-self from my body like a tooth. Grandmother’s
face was a fragile piece of China. One more helping
of sorrow, and she would crack beneath the weight. She
taught me how patience didn’t weigh anything. Rubbed
my back all night like I was still six, though I was sixteen
and still afraid to fall asleep. Her two hands limped like
wounded deer across a frozen field. Her two hands holding
all of misery, or life, or hope, or religion. It was hard to tell.
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Melissa Studdard’s most recent book is the poetry collection Dear Selection Committee. Her awards include The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Award, the Tom Howard Award, and more. Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Lambda Literary, The Guardian, the Best American Poetry blog, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. You can find her at melissastuddard.com.
by Jessica Gigot
by Amy Ash
Once, my daughter moved inside me like the memory of music,
cradled in bulge and curve. She was born
in a mosaic of moans, torn from cleaved belly,
abdomen opened, tendon and fascia flayed like strings.
Hammer and damper and wire.
I heard the reverberation of an impossible cry. The curtain
kept her face from mine. As an infant her small fists would play
their way into my mouth, guided by wonder and want.
Now, at the piano bench, skirt fanned wide behind her like a wake,
she reaches into jawbone, ease along the mouth ridge of a whale shark.
Tooth, ivory, tusk, and bone.
My daughter’s posture recalls music played low among lilies
and lace, the fear of peering too close into the open lid of the casket.
Fingers already fluent in the language of loss, she resists song,
refuses to lean into the lift and give of it. I want to hold her
on my lap awhile longer. I want to crawl into this hollow of sound I’ve born.
As she bends her head to read the score, I frame her face in reflection.
I am all shine and swerve, glossy and forgotten. Only an echo
of loss. I collect fingerprints, recording the evidence of her hands.
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Amy Ash is the author of The Open Mouth of the Vase, winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Book Award and the 2016 Etchings Press Whirling Prize post-publication award for poetry. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Stirring: A Literary Collection, I-70 Review, Erase the Patriarchy, and Rogue Agent. She is Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Indiana State University.
by Jennifer Wolkin
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Andrea Jurjević
by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice
by Pichchenda Bao
I’m not raising my sons to be men.
Their futures are inscrutable.
Can this be a compliment?
When it's specific to women,
and our need to be needed
in a world of disposable bodies.
If we’re honest, we, good mothers,
are flickering lenticulars.
Depending on your angle,
monsters or care incarnate.
My sons and I play a game.
I tell them:
I love you more than all the leaves on all the trees in all the forests,
and they respond,
I love you more than all the leaves on all the trees in all the forests
Plus! One!
There we go. On and on. To all the stars. Riding every drop of rain,
accounting each particle of dirt, every trace of matter.
They claim every shifting cloud, every single hair.
I respond with every dissipating wave of sound and every circulating breath.
We race along the number line forward and back.
Infinity becoming a ball we bounce across every boundary.
We take the measure of every little thing in the universe
we can think of, and then sometimes,
they turn and ask me,
Are you happy, or are you mad?
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Pichchenda Bao is a Cambodian American poet and writer. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, exhibitions, and events. She is co-editor, with Nicole Callihan and Jennifer Franklin, of the poetry anthology, Braving the Body (Harbor Editions). She has received fellowships and support from Aspen Words, Kundiman, Bethany Arts Community, and Queens Council on the Arts. She lives, writes and raises her three kids in New York City. More at pichchendabao.com.
by Louisa Schnaithmann
I want a woman the way birds, sick
from a long flight, want water. Her body
in motion, curves splaying out
on the bed like flowers. I am desperate
for a body like my own. I bloom her
into existence, my lover, and she has
orchids in her hair, bright and resplendent.
I hold my hands out to her. She kisses
my fingers and wraps the white linen sheet
around me. I kiss and kiss and kiss.
The sunlight filters in. The curtains are sheer.
We take no time. We take it all.
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Louisa Schnaithmann is an autistic poet and the author of Plague Love (Moonstone Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, The Summerset Review, tiny wren lit, and elsewhere. She is the consulting editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry and lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
by Nicole Callihan
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Born, I cried,
and growing, I cried.
Gathering the broken egg, I cried.
Making the pancakes, eating the pancakes,
cleaning up after the pancakes, I cried.
Watching you swim to the deep area, I cried.
Watching you return to the shallows, I cried.
When my husband could not love me
like I wanted, I cried.
When I could not love my husband
as he needed, I cried.
When we loved each other anyway, I cried.
And then, there was the pulling of the weeds,
which I did all morning, crying,
and the watching them return,
which I did all afternoon, crying.
Now, evening, and what am I to do
but pull the weeds again,
and let the mosquitos suck on me,
and watch the stars come out, one by one?
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Winner of the 2023 Tenth Gate Prize and a 2023 Alma Award, Nicole Callihan has two forthcoming poetry collections: chigger ridge (The Word Works 2024) and SLIP (Saturnalia 2025). Other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023) and the 2019 novella, The Couples. She also co-edited the Braving the Body anthology published by Harbor Editions in March 2024.
by Callie Plaxco
Someone I can’t remember who told me
how to fold into a bird. It made no sense
at the time but now that I am sitting in
this sunlight I begin to understand the way
an arm might one day flatten to a wing
if beat down hard enough, creased and pierced
and strung with beads pretend they’re
feathers. Yes, I can imagine taking flight
right through that window. Probably at first
the jagged edges of glass would hurt
as they slice through skin but the blood
will drip away as my pretend wingspan flumes
higher towards these tallest trees, the ones
hovering above the roofline. Listen, I say,
I’ve been having bird dreams my entire life.
In fact, I think I’ve written this precise poem
on a shitty desktop with a mouse and a hum
and a floppy disk while sitting in a portable
classroom. I was in high school, remember,
I was so entirely broken. Really, I was incredibly
sad. I’d sit in the sun wishing I was someone
else. Had you told me then how to bend
every piece of myself into something other,
I would have snapped each bone in my body
to reconfigure. And then I would have kept folding.
Where’d she go, you’d wonder at the osseous
pearl perched in the doorway. I wouldn’t answer,
of course, my voice now furled and forgotten.
Thank God I didn’t know you then, whoever
you are, folder of things that shouldn’t be folded.
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As her grandmother once said, Callie Plaxco flew the coop when she left South Carolina to journey west to the University of Wyoming for her MFA. Still in Wyoming, Callie lives with her husband, two small boys, and two big dogs. Her chapbook, Dear Person, is available at Dancing Girl Press and individual poems are published by in Carve Magazine, Tinderbox, Gingerbread House, and Sugar House Review.
by Francesca Bell
I find myself on the floor, surprised to be crying,
the way my FBI-agent friend was surprised
to find himself shot through the thigh.
A bullet travels so fast it can enter and exit your body unnoticed.
Fear lives so big in me it can go undetected
but comes shaking out.
When I speak with the principal,
she says thank you, over and over.
If you see something, say something, they tell us, and I do.
I think she is a very nice woman.
Like all the other very nice women,
the dead ones
and the one in Uvalde
who stepped into the hall with the gunman
to test if her classroom door was locked.
I think of that woman from my floor
and quake like a person riven by gunfire.
In the video, the gunman has swagger.
He is, I would say, of excellent cheer,
and his gun sounds like a good American
movie. Automatic, semiautomatic—
what is the difference among friends
and fellow countrymen?
The sound of children screaming has been removed from this video.
The gunman fires in bursts and then pauses,
like a child checking his work.
Officers mingle in the halls, like guests at a funeral.
The gunmen don’t kill themselves anymore, I’ve noticed.
They decline to remove themselves from the video.
They ask for rides home.
They drop their weapons and surrender.
They hide in closets and wait for police
to breach the unlocked classroom door.
The way my child breached my body then left me forever ajar.
The way the gunmen breach with their bullets even those they don’t hit,
even the mothers at a great remove from the video,
safe on their kitchen floors but crying.
And the principals say thank you,
thank you for removing the weeping of mothers,
for scrubbing the sound of children screaming from the video,
for rendering them all silent,
as if they are already dead.
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Francesca Bell is author of Bright Stain, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and What Small Sound, and translator of Max Sessner’s Whoever Drowned Here, all from Red Hen Press. Her work appears in ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Rattle. She is Poet Laureate of Marin County, Events Coordinator for Marin Poetry Center, Translation Editor at Los Angeles Review, and Arts Program Coordinator for the Friends of the San Quentin Prison Library.
by Leonora Simonovis
My great-grandfather
knew to take what was
needed. Today his trade
would be called sustainable.
Barcelona, my father’s
hometown, had a fish
market where head-wrapped
women sang while cleaning
and quartering the catch
of the day. They let scales
and bones onto a tarp, later
offered them to the Goddess.
I loved those days: buying
fish, root vegetables, herbs
for sancocho. I was transported
to a time and place before my father
and my father’s father and his father
before, of men who knew Yemayá’s
swells and rhythms whose nets fed
a whole village. Sky aglow, they
whistled until fish surfaced, the sun’s
fontanelle crowning the horizon.
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Leonora Simonovis is a Venezuelan American poet, editor and educator, living on unceded Kumeyaay territory, colonially known as San Diego. Her debut poetry collection, Study of the Raft, won the 2021 Colorado Prize for poetry and her work has appeared in DMQ Review, The Hopper, About Place Journal, River Mouth Review, and others. She received fellowships and residencies from The Poetry Foundation, VONA, the Vermont Studio Center, and Sundress Academy for the Arts.
by Mary Fontana
How many dictionaries’
worth of words have
we exchanged and they
taught me nothing, I
know now, having just
committed the whites
of your eyes, the nonsense
you uttered, to memory
as we waited for the
ambulance to come,
as I waited. Now some
technician brandishing her
wand stands witness
to an architecture
that ought to remain
hidden, yours to
disclose to none or
one—yet here onscreen
it materializes. Now I’m
the one who can’t
breathe, it’s so
beautiful, my God: Venus
flytrap gulping its
blood meal, cathedral
arches in cross-
section buttressed
by lung, flaps of the mitral
valve high-fiving, over.
And over. And over. So
this is your
heart: object of long
study. Only now,
staring down the double
barrel as it loads
and fires, loads
and fires, words
having failed us both, do
I know it fully.
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Mary Fontana is a scientist and writer who lives in Seattle with her parents, husband, two children, and eight-to-ten pet fish. She is currently writing a narrative history about the migrant house of hospitality where she has volunteered for the past 20 years. Her poems have appeared in journals including Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, The Seattle Review, Rust + Moth, and Moss. See her on Instargram at @maryfontanawrites.
by Amy Watkins