by Tracey Knapp
by Chloe N. Clark
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
____________________________________________________________
Today, someone I love told me
a joke. It wasn’t even that funny
but I laughed, let the sound fill my mouth
until it spilled out, made my lungs ache
with the push push of air
until even my bones hurt. Today,
one of my students told me to have
a lovely day, not even just a good
one, but a lovely one. I can imagine
that as a blessing, though the air was
cold and the sky was gray and I’ve been
holding a sense of dread under my skin
for days, no weeks, no I’ve been holding
it there for years. Today, I worked out
until my muscles tingled under my skin,
today I laid on the floor like this,
closed my eyes, and it was the closest feeling
to flying I might ever get. Today, I still
said “might” about impossible things. Today,
a friend and I made plans for the future and
the world felt like something I could hold
in the palm of my hand. Today, no one I loved
died. Today, I woke up breathing. Today,
I thought how much I wanted to give you
this day. Today, if I could, I’d push it
into your hands, say, here, here, here,
I’m here, you’re here. Today is going
to be good.
____________________________________________________________
Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Patterns of Orbit, Escaping the Body, and more. Her short story collection, Every Galaxy Is a Circle, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press.
by Lea Marshall
No Parking or Impeding Traffic Flow During Emergency
Richmond, VA
In one snow emergency, my cousins
and I tied trash bags around our legs
when we had no boots. In another,
I stayed in bed with a man for three
days, all the bread eaten, all the milk
drunk. Thirteen years later I carried
my girl at four months, wrapped
like a lamb through the stilled city,
our breath clouding the sparkling,
unfolding air. We sang a song for her
father. What constitutes a snow
emergency? Whiteness so sudden
and bright upon the forehead?
Excessive festooning of trees
and power lines? Instant darkening
of all evergreens? A woman once
discovered under a microscope
two identical snowflakes. There are
no snow emergencies, only human.
Her fingers cold, she shut her eyes
against their spidered gleaming.
____________________________________________________________
Lea Marshall’s poetry has recently appeared in A-Minor and Rise Up Review. She was named a finalist for the 2023 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets, and for the Diode Editions 2023 Book Contest. Her work has appeared in failbetter, BOAAT Journal, Linebreak, Unsplendid, Hayden’s Ferry Review, B O D Y, Diode Poetry Journal, Thrush Poetry Journal, Broad Street Magazine, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University.
by Rose Jenny
by Juliana Gray
Every morning in this vacation rental,
I watch the surfers riding the cold Pacific,
hoping that a plucky shark will eat one.
Don’t they know how small and ridiculous
they look? They paddle out at dawn and float
for hours just offshore, tiny dots
like lice in parted hair, waiting for
a perfect wave that never seems to come.
Sometimes one will catch a breaker and coast
for maybe three or four seconds, then fall.
Are they just inept, the specific men
(almost all of them are men) on this
specific beach? I sip my creamy coffee
and finish my crossword while they bob in the swell,
freezing even in their expensive wetsuits.
How good can it be, those three seconds
skimming the outstretched hand of god? No,
really, I’m asking. How good can it be?
____________________________________________________________
Juliana Gray's third poetry collection is Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press 2017). Recent poems have appeared in Willow Springs, Allium, storySouth, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.
by Heather L. Davis
The small vinyl case like a mouth,
the silver clasp like lips. Always
with her, it spoke all day. Twenty
times or more. Open it up and out came
the word cigarette, which meant
small pleasure, which meant
relief.
We sat in the back of a blue Datsun
as it rolled over the Delaware Bridge,
a mobile capsule fueled by nicotine,
our mother on her way to work or back.
We thought nothing of it, the invisible
tar swaddling, the floating
chemical hug.
When I got older, I hid the case
and gave lectures. Older still and
I snuck to the cold stone basement
to try it, to know what it was like.
It tasted of home, of menthol
and mystery, was a spiny
sea breeze.
Out of eight kids, only two never
took up the habit. The rest of us liked
that glowing, the fire in our mouths.
And so we became smoke, the smell of it
everywhere in our clothes and in the walls.
We ate it, bathed in it, took it everywhere
with us.
Mom had her first one in nursing school.
It showed she was a modern girl, helped
with her nerves. She had an ashtray
I loved—half of a huge mollusk shell. Now
it’s mine, though we all quit years ago,
except for Mom, even after the cancer,
the crumbling jaw.
The ashtray sits on my dresser, insides
no longer sooty, but pearly as heaven. It
served her well, holding twenty-thousand
days and nights, life measured
in crushed Salems, their pink lipstick tips
proof of minutes burned
clean through.
I take off the fused glass ring—sky blue—
embedded with swirls of remains, place it
in the shell for safe keeping. Half
the beauty and half the sorrow
of the world rest in that sea creature,
which lit each place we lived,
the homes where
she took care of ten people or tried.
No doubt she’d be annoyed by this storage
arrangement, maybe even notice the anger in it,
then slowly smile, slowly nod because it’s funny
after all, how our hapless bodies end: ashes
to ashes, bone to glorious
bone.
____________________________________________________________
The small vinyl case like a mouth,
the silver clasp like lips. Always
with her, it spoke all day. Twenty
times or more. Open it up and out came
the word cigarette, which meant
small pleasure, which meant
relief.
We sat in the back of a blue Datsun
as it rolled over the Delaware Bridge,
a mobile capsule fueled by nicotine,
our mother on her way to work or back.
We thought nothing of it, the invisible
tar swaddling, the floating
chemical hug.
When I got older, I hid the case
and gave lectures. Older still and
I snuck to the cold stone basement
to try it, to know what it was like.
It tasted of home, of menthol
and mystery, was a spiny
sea breeze.
Out of eight kids, only two never
took up the habit. The rest of us liked
that glowing, the fire in our mouths.
And so we became smoke, the smell of it
everywhere in our clothes and in the walls.
We ate it, bathed in it, took it everywhere
with us.
Mom had her first one in nursing school.
It showed she was a modern girl, helped
with her nerves. She had an ashtray
I loved—half of a huge mollusk shell. Now
it’s mine, though we all quit years ago,
except for Mom, even after the cancer,
the crumbling jaw.
The ashtray sits on my dresser, insides
no longer sooty, but pearly as heaven. It
served her well, holding twenty-thousand
days and nights, life measured
in crushed Salems, their pink lipstick tips
proof of minutes burned
clean through.
I take off the fused glass ring—sky blue—
embedded with swirls of remains, place it
in the shell for safe keeping. Half
the beauty and half the sorrow
of the world rest in that sea creature,
which lit each place we lived,
the homes where
she took care of ten people or tried.
No doubt she’d be annoyed by this storage
arrangement, maybe even notice the anger in it,
then slowly smile, slowly nod because it’s funny
after all, how our hapless bodies end: ashes
to ashes, bone to glorious
bone.
Listen now
Heather L. Davis is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist with an MA in creative writing from Syracuse University. Her book, The Lost Tribe of Us, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She works in international public health and lives with her husband and two kids in Lancaster, PA. She often misplaces her bank card and puts the creamer back into the cupboard instead of the fridge.
by Diane K. Martin
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
____________________________________________________________
Tucking the wings back under the bird’s body must have resurrected
her, because there was Mom, already chopping onions. We didn’t talk
about my lifestyle, my father, or the burnt-to-a crisp skin of my brilliant
career, nor did we chat about the time she stuffed the turkey with Saltines
because they were on sale at Raley’s, and everyone got so thirsty we all
got drunk, even the children. We didn’t reminisce about past Thanksgivings,
like the time I arrived late and my brother slammed the table and roared,
“We are not going to save her any goddamn salad.” Mom made a point
of reminding me that she set out a half grapefruit for my appetizer,
because I’m allergic to shrimp. We didn’t mention her bad heart—or mine.
We just chopped, boiled, simmered, stewed, sliced, roasted, and sautéed
in butter, and then twisted the turkey wing and tucked it under the body
of the bird, even though it meant breaking the bones a little bit to do it.
____________________________________________________________
Diane K. Martin lives in western Sonoma County, California. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, diode, Field, Harvard Review, Narrative, Plume, and Zyzzyva, among many other journals and anthologies. A poem was awarded second place in the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize, judged by B.H. Fairchild. Another poem received a Pushcart Special Mention, and yet another won first prize from the journal Smartish Pace. Her first book, Conjugated Visits, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published by Dream Horse Press. Her second collection, Hue & Cry, was published by MadHat Press.
by Angela Sucich
by Julia Kolchinsky
by Stella Reed
An English translation of Homer’s Odyssey by Emily Wilson finds that the original text described sirens as bird women, not mermaids
Women who peck at ligatures
Women with plumes of basil and milk
Women who are the arrow to your dove
the canaries of coal mines
Women with voices not tender
Women who sing of strange fruit
An augury of birds who hide
the future in snowstorms
the past in ringing trees
Whose eyes hold sand from poisoned seas
the grainy reels of pornography
Women who refused constellations
Who flew from windows
to breathe the rain in greening pines
Who keep sword beneath wing
Whose breath smells of smoked peat
and the meat on remote highways
Women born of grief
their sky a white wing
Who nest in fields of blossom and bone
If you wear their feathers in your hair
you’ll hear the story of your death
Women who teethe on roses
and bleed on lilies
Women who dream their mothers
wear the crown of a bull
Who cultivate language
of ashes pitch cone
Who yell Goddamit from telephone poles
Women of gunshot and dusk
Who read the calligraphy
of felled trees
of oceans bulging at neap tide
Women whose dark beauty lives in seams
Women who are plundered and razed
How fury their chorus
when they move their bodies
through a sky clear of gods
How you cannot touch them
How you shall not touch them
How they become sirens
How they become song
____________________________________________________________
Stella Reed (she / her) is the co-author of We Are Meant to Carry Water, 2019, from 3: A Taos Press. She is the winner of the Jacar Press Chapbook Prize for Myth from the field where the fox runs with its tail on fire and the Tusculum Review chapbook contest for Origami. Stella is a poetry teacher for several communities including homeless and domestic violence shelters, and Title 1 public school students.
by Laura Villareal
by Laura Romeyn
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
____________________________________________________________
The jeep with its soft-top up
shreds past two small girls.
They are rushing the tallgrass
in matching violet nightgowns.
Wisconsin late summer.
Sun going down,
day like a bobbin
so warm. The air drags
low, circles its holdings
drifting there, then back
above. One of the girls,
the smaller one,
she kneels just in front
of the rhododendrons.
She has found something
in the green. A mid-section
undone, scratched open
to loosebelly softened
to the arbor of bone.
Grazed remains.
The lanes of the rib cage
carry their sidemeat,
fixed as the cold
of a silent and empty nave.
Put it in my hand
the older sister says,
and the younger one
reaches down and does.
____________________________________________________________
Laura Romeyn is the author of Wild Conditions, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, her poems have appeared in AGNI, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, and The Yale Review, among other journals. Born and raised in Wisconsin’s Driftless Region, Laura currently lives and teaches in Madison, Wisconsin.
by Kathleen Winter
Ghost of my face
on my face, specters
of my self on these
streets, turning corners
& corners & corners
& corners, striding
all wrong directions
away from the Parc
away from the Seine
stiff as a stone saint
looming in a stone
chapel of a stone
faith, refusing to bend
with the centuries.
Still poorly using
a paper map, poorly
creased, poorly
folded. Now, at last,
sitting. Staring left
at one leg of an ill-
fated pig, hoof
attached, clasped
by its slender ankle
in a steel ring,
immobilized,
to be sliced by
the deliberate
imperturbable waiter.
Not nearly far
enough away
from the action,
I watch
from a banquette
in this vintage
establishment
known far & wide,
quite over the sea,
where even as it is
here, time
is the butcher.
____________________________________________________________
Kathleen Winter is the author of Transformer, winner of the Hilary Tham prize; I will not kick my friends, winner of the Elixir Prize; and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, winner of the Antivenom Prize. Her poems appear in The New Republic, New Statesman, Yale Review, Agni, Massachusetts Review, Cincinnati Review, and Poetry London. Her awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award, the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, and the Ralph Johnston Fellowship.
The Greenland Shark
by Emily Jungmin Yoon
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Emily Jungmin Yoon, Saturday, 11/23/2024, 3:30 pm, Room 8303
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Editor's note: A transcript was not provided for this poem. For a written version of this poem, please see chicagoreader.com/reader-partners/poetry-foundation/the-greenland-shark/.
____________________________________________________________
Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes and A Cruelty Special to Our Species, a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Yoon is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Ploughshares, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. Yoon is the poetry editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and she is an assistant professor of Korean literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea.
____________________________________________________________
"The Greenland Shark" first appeared in the Chicago Reader and is collected in Find Me the Creature I Am (Knopf, October 2024). Permission granted by the poet.
Wanting
by Diannely Antigua
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Diannely Antigua, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 2 pm, Room 8303, and Sunday, 11/24/2024, 4 pm, Room 8303
__________________________________________________________________________________________
I want to write about joy—I decide this when I sit down at my desk,
the overwatered succulents lining the perimeter. I don’t
understand the ratio of plant to water to dirt, so I drown
them in what I think is needed. I forget sun.
I forget patience. I try to forget the look death makes—
the Haworthia, the snake plant, my grandmother, the dog.
I wanted to write about joy. Everything is pale.
Outside, winter persists, even though it’s May.
A lover once told me he believed in the risk
of joy, used it to explain away the kiss on my neck.
He’s married now, the risk of joy tattooed on the right side
of his own neck, his new wife’s name on the left.
My friend said I dodged a bullet with that one, I say
I would’ve opened my chest to it.
____________________________________________________________
Diannely Antigua (she/her) is a Dominican American poet and educator born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection, Ugly Music, won a 2020 Whiting Award and the Pamet River Prize. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and the winner of fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in the Best of the Net Anthology and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, and is the youngest and first person of color to hold the title. As host of the Bread & Poetry podcast, she aims to make poetry more accessible to the community, interviewing poets and non-poets alike about what poetry means to them.
_____________________________________________________________________________
"Wanting" from Good Monster, copyright 2024 by Diannely Antigua, used by permission of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.
Play, with Foreign Object
by Jen Karetnick
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Jen Karetnick, Saturday 11/23/2024, 11 am, Room 8303
__________________________________________________________________________________________
The octopus found a coconut,
hollow and halved like a locket,
dropped into its world. A chair
waiting for its occupant, the shell
rocked on the ocean floor, inviting
as tea. The octopus lowered its mantle
into the crisp ochre fruit where the meat
once was, and closed the other section
over its head, sliding each of its arms
in from the cracks, leaving not a single
sucker to be caught by edges. And then
it rolled and bounced, propelled by
the predictable tide. And the whole sea
shuddered with this shred of saturated joy.
____________________________________________________________
A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 11 poetry collections, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate, winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award (January 2024); The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 CIPA EVVY Gold Medal and an Eric Hoffer Book Award Poetry Finalist; and The Crossing Over (2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition. Her poems have received first place from the Sweet: Lit Poetry Contest, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Pine Meadows Ranch Center for Arts & Agriculture, Wassaic Project, Write On, Door County, Wildacres Retreat, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, Mother’s Milk, Centrum Residencies, and elsewhere. Jen's work has appeared in Cold Mountain Review's 50th-anniversary issue, Michigan Quarterly Review's 60th-anniversary issue, The Missouri Review's Poem of the Week feature, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, Shenandoah, and other venues. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Miami. See jkaretnick.com or follow on Instagram @JenKaretnick.
_____________________________________________________________________________
"Play, with Foreign Object" first appeared in The Fourth River and is collected in Inheritance with a High Error Rate, winner of the 2022 Cider Press review Book Award (January 2024). Permission granted by the poet.
Home / Hogar
by Nidia Hernández
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Nidia Hernández, Saturday, 11/23/2024, 4:30 pm, Room 8303
__________________________________________________________________________________________
A clock pointed
toward the place
where an incandescent ring
touched the shadows
it was my room
floating in the night
my room
defending me from myself
my dark room
where I hide
the pyramids I dream
it was the space of a second
to be everywhere
to reach you
to touch you
to hear your voice
it was unreality
my true room
inmense unreality
my only home
*
Un reloj apuntaba
hacia el lugar
donde un aro incandescente
tocaba las sombras
era mi cuarto
que flotaba en la noche
mi cuarto
defendiéndome de mí misma
mi cuarto oscuro
donde escondo
las pirámides que sueño
era mi cuarto de segundo
para estar en todas partes
para llegar a ti
para tocarte
para oír tu voz
era la irrealidad
mi verdadero cuarto
la inmensa irrealidad
mi único hogar
____________________________________________________________
Venezuelan native Nidia Hernández has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet, translator of Portuguese poetry, editor, broadcaster, and radio producer. Her editorial project lamajadesnuda.com--the digital backup of a radio program (also called La Maja Desnuda) from the last 35 years and a collection of the best poets from around the world--won the 2011 world Summit Awards. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM Spain. In Boston, Nidia is an associate editor of ArrowsmithPress, and through them also curates Poesiaudio, a collection of Latin American poetry in English and Spanish, in which one can hear the voices of Latin American poets themselves, and belongs to the Board of Directors of The New England Poetry Club. Hernández is the winner of the 2021 Sundara Ramaswamy Prize for her editorial work on The Land of Mild Light, an anthology by Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas, which includes translations by Robert Pinsky, Sophie Cabot Black, Carolyn Forché, Shara McCallum, and Forrest Gander. Nidia Hernández was awarded a 2021 Certificate of Recognition “for her exemplary leadership in support of English language training for immigrants in the city of Boston.” In 2022, she published a new anthology, The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets, for which she which won the 2023 Mass Poetry Community Award. The Farewell Light (Arrowsmith Press, 2024) is her most recent collection of poems.
_____________________________________________________________________________
"Home" / "Hogar" appears in The Farewell Light (Arrowsmith Press, 2024). Permission granted by the poet.
____________________________________________________________
Give the Lake a Moment to Speak About the Horses
by Carlie Hoffman
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Carlie Hoffman, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 11:00 am, Room 8303
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Inevitable
by Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Jennifer Maritza McCauley, Saturday, 11/23/2023, 3:30 pm, Room 8303
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Before the mirage, I see the zigzagging slap of sun
It’s an easy light, rocking back and forth
Look, I see this as a simple art:
The bright on the summer porch rails, the moon
hand-clamping the veranda
the night sky keeps talking about morning;
I’m just a little child witnessing this all.
What to do when the sun is setting?
What to do when the inevitable comes?
I’ve spent my life counting time like pennies
in my Mami’s cocina mason jar
But I know no matter what,
the next moment comes
____________________________________________________________
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home, and Kinds of Grace. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio, and CantoMundo, and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, and a Must-Read by Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine, and Southern Review of Books. She is fiction editor at Pleiades, has been faculty at Yale Writers' Workshop and Yale Young Writers' Workshop and is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
_____________________________________________________________________________
This poem first appeared in the Afro-Hispanic Review. Permission granted by the poet.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Tired, but not insane
by Merle Collins