by Anya Kirshbaum
by Bleah Patterson
by Martha Silano
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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When the contours of mountains resemble coliseums.
Cathedrality of mountains.
Relief of roadlessness.
That there are lakes impossible to reach by car.
That from this window just behind the wing, 20F,
there are no signs of life.
Once I packed a bag with cheddar goldfish.
Once my son threw up before we even boarded the plane.
Cracks and fissures, cuneiform of rock. Backbones and capillaries,
the snaking green edged with bluffs (long-ago ocean?).
He will turn eighteen next week.
Brain-like contours—cerebral cortex or cerebellum?
Contours thin like the veins of leaves, fronds of a sword fern, feet of a coot.
Time passed like a silent rail in the reeds.
The folds very Egyptian, mummies reposed in their tombs.
Like an alligator’s enormous tail, though lacking snout and teeth.
Once I sang La crocodile il est malade, il est malade a Singapour.
All those years, I thought I was singing sangue a peu—a little blood.
Clouds less cumulus, more cumulonimbus.
Towns scattered with houses like paint chips.
From the ground he would wave to the passengers in the sky: Bye-bye, babies!
Claw-like hills, afghan of cloud not like fresh snow but snow a few days old,
the occasional indentation where a foot or tire met asphalt.
The crocodile is sick. A little mercy, a little blood.
Between fluffy swirls, black holes.
When the binky and the sippy cup.
When the diaper bag and the teething ring.
Cottoned from above
like first tracks on Lynx Pass,
a pristine path through aspen, lodgepole, spruce.
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Martha Silano has authored seven poetry books, including The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award finalist, and most recently, This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize. Acre Books will release Terminal Surreal, her book about living with ALS, in September 2025. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Paris Review, AGNI, North American Review, American Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Her poem "Love" appears in The Best American Poetry 2009.
by Sherry Fraser
by Meghan Sterling
Something about the way a mother
can keep herself from falling. Having
children ruins your life, my mother raised
her glass and toasted after my baby shower.
Something about the way the river turns, its
sunken blue like a stone in place of a doll’s eye.
Something about the myth of a mother’s love.
Love is not an automatic thing, my mother said.
What was it that ground us down to dirt? Something
about my head tilting up in the dark, cracking my
mother’s nose with my chin. My lips are lucky
to find her cheek, still smooth, still scented with leaves. Something about the turned back. Nothing drives
love away like loving too much, my mother said
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Meghan Sterling (she/her) is a bi/queer writer whose work is published in Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Rhino Poetry, Hunger Mountain, and many journals. Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize) came out in 2023. Her next collection, You Are Here to Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review Press), is forthcoming in 2025. Read her work at meghansterling.com.
by Kashiana Singh
by Tracey Knapp
by Chloe N. Clark
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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!
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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.
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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
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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