by Nylah Lyman
by Dana Tenille Weekes
i prefer empty paper towel rolls
to film daddy when we cook hot dogs
for dinner. daddy takes the marigold
apron blushed with bleach in two spots.
it’s the one i always give him & he gives
Julia Child a beard & Bajan accent
his tenor breaking both our funny bones:
& once dey have boiled you must take dem
& slice each into triangles like dis. you see?
you see is daddy’s cue for me to hold tight
onto that paper towel roll, tilt
my braided ponytail & zoom in
to the rubbed-away cutting board
as rice gripes in a pot’s humidity & onions
perspire to the finish on a back burner.
daddy tells me, we never need much salt.
he says often, we never need much.
reminds me, you can cook good without salt
(and butter).
the things he says would rile the real Julia.
bottle clanking bottle in the cupboard. its oak
-knotted belly binged with curry & cumin
& grounded sorts whose names
i am still learning. the sort of things
ships once risked their hulls for in vexed
seas & occupied ambitions, i would soon learn.
each bottle past my tippytoed arms on otherwise
unoccupied shelves i never notice
as daddy tells me, zoom in
come closer & closer & closer
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Dana Tenille Weekes lives in the swirl of Washington, DC, where she navigates the worlds of law, policy, and politics. Some of her poems can be found, or are forthcoming, in A Gathering of the Tribes, Apogee, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Elevation Review, and Torch Literary Arts. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist in Rhino Poetry’s 2022 Founders’ Prize.
by Emily Blair
"I-Special” is the title
of a charcoal drawing by Georgia O’Keeffe.
“If that’s not what’s inside us I don’t know what is,”
says one woman gallery-goer to another,
who replies that she was thinking the same thing.
To me it looks like the letter “I,”
which seems even more bold and embarrassing.
That’s why in poetry we call it “the speaker.”
A little symbolic distance, like when the gynecologist
drapes a paper cloth over my thighs.
A friend reminds me that all poems
are persona poems, including this one.
“I” is a fiction, “you” is a fiction,
and so is “the speaker,” popping up
out of the ground like the undead
at the poem’s start. I’m reminded of
a video I checked out of the library
years ago. Actors in chunky sweaters
walked around the Lake District
reciting the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth
as if they thought it up on the spot.
How can you tell the lyric I from the confessional I?
Does it depend on who’s talking?
And if we think we know what’s inside them?
The figure in “I-Special” has a little loop at the top.
It could be a sardine can key, or a tent stake.
It could be a vagina.
It could be a shape
saying something
we have no words for.
Note: Alfred Stieglitz is supposed to have said upon first seeing Georgia O’Keeffe’s work, “Finally, a woman on paper!” Georgia O’Keeffe herself said of her work, “I found I could say things with colors and shapes I couldn’t say in any other way—things I had no words for.”
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Emily Blair lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poetry has appeared in The Iowa Review, Sixth Finch, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, and The Gettysburg Review, among many other places. She has received New York Foundation of Arts Fellowships in both Poetry and Fiction.
by Barbara Sabol
by Cara Waterfall
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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by Shara McCallum
I grow weary of not using the word cunt.
Hers is the hairy mess I want, precisely that cunt.
Don’t offer me a neatly trimmed or, God forbid,
shaved, depilated, waxed, exfoliated cunt.
I disavow the ones still posing as virgins,
won’t suffer lightly those ever-prepubescent cunts.
Nor even wyfe or witch, reeking of myth, burned
for the crime of possessing her human cunt.
The one I need, the one I’m calling on now, is she
of the cuntiest-ways-of-knowing-herself cunt.
She, the alpha and omega, unshackled
by the chaos of the universe cunt.
She, the OG, motherfucking cunt come
to rain down fire on all our cuntishness.
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From Jamaica and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including Behold (forthcoming in 2026), No Ruined Stone (winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry), and Madwoman (winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize). In her youth, Miami was her old stomping grounds. McCallum now lives in Pennsylvania and teaches at Penn State University.
by Jesse Curran
On a street named Sea Cove
there stands a Japanese maple.
It’s called an orange dream.
It halts me. It ceases
the stride I’ve long used
to steady the buzzing inside me.
It’s been a full year
since he slipped away
into the soft sleep of a cold night.
I haven’t seen him in any red birds
on the porch, nor in any blue birds
on the sill, nor in any doves in the gutter.
I haven’t felt his ghost
fluttering in the breeze
or shifting the curtain.
There’s been no glimpse
in the mirror, the other world
hovering inside this one.
Instead, just this.
I’m here. My body
warm and streaming.
Here, the damp gray dawn
breath surging
cells swirling.
The tree is on fire.
Living
is so searing.
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Jesse Curran is a mother, poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals including About Place, After the Art, Allium, Blueline, and Ruminate. She teaches in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury. www.jesseleecurran.com
by Luci Huhn
by Jessica Furtado
Investigation: Therapist’s Notes
(an erasure from Stephen King’s Carrie)
The victim of wild talent, we suspect
she was put into an extreme situation
of guilt and stress; an advent
of terrible events worn as a corsage.
Herself, a prayer;
her voice, a full-length mirror
bright with tea roses.
No one could understand
the brute courage it had taken
to leave herself open
to a creeping existence,
restless with tiredness or headache.
She kept waning, a strain
as if smiling inside
another’s body, forcing
her to run and run and run;
a terrific drain on the body’s resources.
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Jessica Furtado is a multi-passionate artist whose visual work has been featured in Grub Street, Muzzle Magazine, Waxwing, & elsewhere, and whose writing has appeared in Qwerty, Rogue Agent, & Stirring, among others. Jessica’s poetry was a finalist in Best of the Net (2020), and her debut chapbook, A Kiss for the Misbehaved (2023), is available from BatCat Press. To see what she’s up to next, visit Jess at jessicafurtado.com.
by Marjorie Maddox
if I’m someone she should know,
pay attention to, bother having coffee with,
talk with about the father who raped her at twelve,
about my father, about the slant of rainy light after
you’re weeping for half a life and then some and
when/if you leave the toilet paper unwinding from the top
or bottom, and what our papas said the two days after,
and avocados and kumquats, and the strange
geometric shapes that cascade into our dreams
five days each year before the equinox, and if
I’m well known enough for her to pry open my palm
and slice my lifelines with an X-Acto knife—would I
do that for her?—and have I won a Pulitzer yet, and
what color were the eyes of God when I looked straight
at Him for three minutes without blinking once, Ok
maybe once, and may she have that last bottle of wine,
could she borrow a glass, and how much does The New Yorker
pay, do I think they would consider her work, she’s started
writing, too, have I slept with anyone there, and does the mold
in my studio make my eyes itch in the morning—or evening,
she’s heard both—because she really wants to know about the time
the London editor who knew the New York editor who knew me
from someone at the colony or raved about my work on Eskimos or
transplants or something like that and later sat on a committee
that judged that really important prize—she can’t remember
which one right now because, thanks again, she had a bit too much
of my Merlot, but am I that writer, the one she’s heard
something about, the one she should know?
No, I say, no, though I am someone
writing, trying to write, someone.
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Poetry Moment host for WPSU-FM, Presence assistant editor, and Professor Emerita of English at Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry—most recently How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled?, In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, Small Earthly Space, and Seeing Things—plus a story collection, four children’s books, and the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone Poetry (co-editor). See marjoriemaddox.com.
by Christy Prahl
There was the one who called me Hubcap when I asked for a nickname. The
one who got famous and still owes me eighty dollars. The one with a haircut
like Joey Ramone, who cut me loose with a note tied to the foot of a baby
rabbit. The one with a side hustle in magic, who could find the six of
diamonds in your wallet. Two years before he died—face bruised in sarcoma,
his body a muslin sheet—the one who made an exception for me. I was the
only girl he’d ever kissed, he said, and he’d do it again. You ask me why I tell
you these things. It’s not so much to sanctify them as to tame who I was when
I loved them.
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Christy Prahl is an Illinois Arts Council grant recipient and the author of the collections We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023) and Catalog of Labors (Unsolicited Press, forthcoming 2026). A Best of the Net and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been featured in Poetry Daily as well as many national and international journals, including CALYX (forthcoming), The Penn Review, Salt Hill Journal, and others. She splits her time between Chicago and rural Michigan.
by Kerrin McCadden
In the country of Bed,
I am unemployed,
a hobbyist. Mornings,
various alarms go off
that mean nothing to me.
There goes more time.
There goes another election
of who should get up.
Glad I lost again.
I wander from border
to border slowly,
a slow-motion octopus,
a getaway car out of gas.
Off to the south, somewhere,
there is water, and farther
away, I hear there are others
— right here, though,
an extraordinary number
of threads to count!
Not a bad idea to chronicle things
in this remarkable land
where the laws are simple
—go nowhere, hurt no one.
My neighbor from the other side
of the bed will be back soon.
He is friendly and kind.
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Kerrin McCadden is the author of two poetry collections and a chapbook, American Wake (finalist for the New England Book Award and the Vermont Book Award), Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes (winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize and the Vermont Book Award), and Keep This to Yourself (winner of the Button Poetry Prize). She lives in South Burlington, Vermont.
by Stella Brice
In third grade after lunch, Mrs. Joseph tells us to
alphabetize ourselves into a straight line. We take
satisfaction in the knowledge of our 31 names—of all
the names, both the first one and the last.
Lunch boiling in our stomachs, we line up in the order
of the knowledge of these names.
We live the alphabet: flesh made word.
On a scraped floor, Mrs. Joseph perfects us. She
shuffles a body here to there. She forms a kind of
library—each child bound and placed.
Now we march towards homeroom. We are mesmerized by
the back of the kid in front of us; mesmerized by the
swirling patterns of their hair.
Then we rest our heads on our desks and Mrs. Joseph
reads us a book about a girl who lives alone in the
forest; who grinds acorns for bread; who survives
winter; who has her fox; who has her owl; who has
her wounded dog for company.
We drink this book in the darkness of our triangles
of arms as the girl’s father searches for her entire
seasons in his airplane but we don’t want her to be
found.
We want her crawling down
difficult trails where there
is barely any light.
She takes another breath.
Her belly distending with cold water,
she crawls on the school of the ground.
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Stella Brice is the author of five books of poetry, including Urged and Wait ‘Til I Get Fatter (both by VAC/Purple Flag Press) and Creatures (INKira Press). She is a Pushcart and a Best of the Net nominee and a winner of the John Z. Bennet Prize. For several years, she served as a mentor and literary advisor for the PEN Prison Writing Program.
by Amy Thatcher
I grew my mind
with the work
ethic of a weed—
eating baked beans
and canned asparagus.
Learned to fix
my mind’s thick
accent, fit in
with a clique,
snap and screwtop, spill-proof
and shatter-free.
I rolled with the kind
of knack it took
to pull up
a decorative bootstrap
with a borrowed degree,
bold as an albino
deer in the open,
ears alert
to the drawn bow.
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Amy Thatcher is a native of Philadelphia, where she works as a public librarian. Her poems have been published in Guesthouse, Bear Review, Rhino, SWWIM, Rust + Moth, Iron Horse Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Palette Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Shore, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets 2024 and is forthcoming in The Journal and Denver Quarterly.
by Ferral Willcox
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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In the place of cisterns
swaddled in cobra lilies
spawn of cloud seed heals
the moon of its infected swelling.
A heat dissipates to crystal, gaslit
in the aging night. You were
a slip of a boat set off in a slit
of wild waters, two down
no rudder, no oar. One love
travels in tides, in elliptic swirls
hot to cold, then back again.
The other, a faucet, a cup
a tinseled lake warming
in a metronome of sun.
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Ferral Willcox is a U.S.-born poet and musician currently living in Pokhara, Nepal. Ferral’s work can be found in Per Contra, concis, Peacock Journal, Rat’s Ass Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry was featured in the Q-Street venue of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and she is a regular contributor to the Plath Poetry Project.
by Robbie Nester
“Ars longa, vita brevis” --Hippocrates
The noodle master Peter Song once said
a chef must make 100 bowls of noodles
a day, all by hand, to learn the craft,
to knead the pyramid of flour and water
from a pile of disparate dust till it
comes together in a ball, until it shines,
to stretch and pull it, twist it into a rope,
an umbilicus pulsing with life. Only then
can the chef bring it down hard
onto the butcher block like a cat-of-nine-tails,
whack it till it separates into strands,
long fibers that weren’t there before.
It doesn’t matter how many times
I watch it, I can’t see how it’s done.
He doesn’t estimate how many pounds
of flour, how many hours and days
I will need to stand over this table
before the noodles finally unfold
in my hand, spring to life in the roil
of the steaming water, tender as clouds.
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Robbi Nester is a retired college educator and author of four books of poetry (plus a few manuscripts currently making the rounds). She hosts two poetry reading series on Zoom per month. You can learn more about this and her work on her website: robbinester.net.
by Amy Lemmon
“To write these days is to avoid telling people how angry I am.”
—Daniel Nester
Behold the Rottweiler in its cage, behold homemade cornhusk
ornaments, behold the photo of a Jaymar miniature piano,
behold the galaxy of knees at noon, facing the maestro’s
fragrance. Behold, behold, I stand at the door and knock-knock-knock
Answer the call, be real now, be here & calculate
cost vs. bennies, don’t be that person who waits
until the last chorus to join in. Makes you look careless.
Care less. Rejection is a state, like catalepsy, to move through.
Behold the scroll, the wretched bankroll, the double tongue
summoning his minions to court, calculate the chorus
and ford the spring, a small thing, mysterious as amaryllis—
a little water, a little sun. Behold my process of (pre)tending.
Sweetpea, the voice will always call, a murmur or hum,
a spring burbling or a dammed-up flood. Locally sourced,
unforced, double-spaced & tortured into shape. Copyright
the Year of Our Lord blank blankety-blank, Amen.
Behold the ample galaxy, a naked miracle through the blinds.
Clean your damn windows and the bulb will bloom.
____________________________________________________________
Amy Lemmon is the author of five poetry collections, including Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press) and The Miracles (C&R Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Court Green, The Journal, Marginalia, and many other magazines and anthologies. Amy is Professor of English at the Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY, where she teaches writing, literature, and creativity studies. She lives in Astoria, Queens.
by Indu Parvathi
by Dion O'Reilly
I have no great fluency, but I love the cloud-sounds
the chords make when I push the una corda pedal,
the strange power of the black keys, every note,
a little person with a head—empty or full. I love
the confidence of the right hand and the shady
misgivings of the left, the practice pieces
I’ve tried, for years, to master. This time, I’m also
lying in my unwashed bed, listening to Sister
attempt “Für Elise” for the twentieth time. With every
discordant note, my mother knocks her off the bench—
The smack, the fall, the cry, then a faulty “Für Elise.”
On and on. This is how she taught us
to ride bikes, wash dishes, weed the endless lawn. It’s how
she drilled spelling, forced hotel corners. It’s how
I learned to look in the mirror, my ugliness working her up
for the next gut-punch, the next backhand to the head. It’s a miracle I love
piano, love to sing, love how it lifts me, most of the time, from my dark
churn of thoughts. I wait till no one’s home in case I break
when I get it wrong, or even when I get it right. There it is
again, the same blunt fist, the same ritual
of excoriation, the same aching crescendos and adagios
in every imperfect song I won't stop playing.
____________________________________________________________
Dion O'Reilly is the author of Sadness of the Apex Predator, Ghost Dogs, and Limerence, a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition, forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, The Slowdown, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran. She splits her time between a ranch in California and a residence in Bellingham.
by Jan Steckel