by Sarah Carson
When the dog sinks her dull teeth
by Cynthia Marie Hoffman
I threw my back out reaching for the knife
to cut the waffles for my kid
before school. My kid’s a teen already
but still scared of the closet. I’m not
one to talk. I scramble up the stairs at night
when the living room goes dark. What kind of mother
would I be if I didn’t hold on
to the things that make my kid a kid? I let go
of my own dreams, settled for the middle
of the choir, though I wanted
to be a rock star. Did you know
some butterflies have air in the veins in their wings?
My kid learned that in seventh grade,
along with some introductory Spanish.
I’ve been to Spain, where I could understand
everything said to me
but couldn’t form a sentence of my own
out of nothing. Each night I open the door
to affirm the composition of the closet—
more empty space than axe murderer.
Could I fight off an axe with this
kitchen injury and my bad wrist from
lugging the laundry? My idol is a glam
rocker in makeup and platform heels. He reminds me
I’d wanted to live a creative life. These days,
why bother with lipstick? I pour syrup on the same
breakfast my kid has eaten since preschool. My brain
is air. The heaviest thing in my body is my heart.
At a party years ago, I sang one song with a band
and they rushed the bridge into the final verse. I didn’t even
get to sing all the words I knew. Each night, I tuck my kid
in bed though tucking isn’t welcomed anymore. I’m reprimanded
for making sure the quilt is pressed between the mattress
and the wall. But if I let the cold get in, then tell me
what kind of mother would I be?
____________________________________________________________
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently the OCD memoir in prose poems, Exploding Head. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. She has essays in TIME, The Sun, Lit Hub, and elsewhere, and poems in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Cynthia lives in Madison, WI. See cynthiamariehoffman.com.
by Allison Zaczynski
My roommate wants
a different version of me—
one who doesn’t leave
her hearing aids on the charger
when she makes her morning coffee.
I’d like if she didn’t see me
as only my missing parts.
Am I even missing parts anyway?
My hearing aids are just accessories.
Extra. As a child, I chose them in beige.
I wanted them to camouflage
into my body, even though they forced
my ears into elfin protrusion.
Now, I decorate them with holographic stickers.
I wear my hair pulled back
in butterfly clips.
I run into Ilya Kaminsky
at a smoothie shop in Harvard Square
an hour after he signs
my book at Woodberry.
And every morning,
I return to my room with my coffee.
I sit at my desk, let my cat inspect the mug.
Write with the silence of my ears,
listen only to my thoughts.
____________________________________________________________
Allison Zaczynski (she/her) is a deaf poet. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Her poems have been included in Epistemic Lit, The Hooghly Review, Hog River Press, Yoga Journal, and Freshwater Poetry Journal. Allison placed twice in the Asnuntuck Community College Student Poetry Contest, winning third place in 2011, judged by Sue Ellen Thompson, and an honorable mention in 2012 judged by former Connecticut Poet Laureate Dick Allen.
by Kyle Potvin
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I have survived the darts of winter icing my face
and scrubbed mud from the carpet all spring.
I have rejoiced at the sky turned bowl-like and blue
and studied the family of fox living beneath our forsythia.
And yet you do not appear, as you always do,
your purple palms upraised.
The spectacle of fireworks does not entice you,
nor the young blueberries about to burst
from their tight pods.
The tall stalks swish a strange summons,
first casual, then insistent. Still,
you do not come.
I can't explain this sadness.
All I know is that since I came to this place,
I have relied on you to open, so that each July,
I can place your stems in the guest room
for my mother, who, ill and slowing,
has yet to tell me if she will arrive.
____________________________________________________________
Kyle Potvin’s full-length poetry collection is Loosen (Hobblebush Books, 2021). Her chapbook, Sound Travels on Water, won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award, and her poem “After the Biopsy” won The Patricia Eschen Prize for Poetry 2024—Sonnet Award. Kyle’s poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, SWWIM Every Day, Verse Daily, and The New York Times. She is a peer reviewer for Whale Road Review.
by Jennifer Saunders
After David Baker
1.
Last night's storm drips from the redbud.
Droplets stutter in the morning breeze
and dot the patio, bedazzle the grass.
The rabbit's ears twitch when the blue jay—
screecher, dive-bomber, cat-chaser—
emerges from its nest in the pine
to forage among the perennials as
last night's storm drips from the redbud.
2.
In the shady corners of the garden, foxglove
thrives, pointing its purple way skyward,
towering over the spreading hostas, their
white-rimmed leaves. Their drooping leaves.
Beside them the rabbit trims the clover,
pink-white poms disappearing into her
rapidly working jaws. Sun on the grass.
In the shady corner of the garden, foxglove.
3.
I have so much yet to reconcile. Sun and shadow.
I wish I understood how to make a garden thrive.
How to account for the shifting seasons. Drought
and cicada emergence, the emerald ash borer.
Ten years of my brother's labor to green this plot
that draws the rabbit, a pair of cardinals, the jays.
Here, raised beds; there, a shade tree. Patient years.
I have so much yet to reconcile. Shadow, sun.
4.
How to account for the shifting seasons? Sometimes,
even in the face of care, things don't thrive. Rabbits
eat the hostas down to the roots, the jays strip bare
the raspberry bush. Blight migrates northward.
I wish I'd understood how long a root system takes
to secure the soil, how many seasons of growth pass
beneath the surface. Now, trumpet vine and rabbits.
Last night's storm dripping from the redbud.
____________________________________________________________
Jennifer Saunders (she/her) is the author of Tumor Moon, winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest (forthcoming from Concrete Wolf, 2025) and Self Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019). A Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Orison Anthology nominee, Jennifer's work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Poet Lore, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, 2023) and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.
by Aza Pace
by Atia Sattar
a fish slipping
brushing gentle within
bathing anew in everything
I ate: masala dosa, nasi goreng
and thai food spicy.
dad couldn’t eat spicy at the end
couldn’t eat at all. I taped
the tube near his nose, trimmed
the tape with tiny scissors, kept
it from rubbing against his mouth
untrespassed by food, articulated
only in pain or anger or impatience
but mostly staying shut.
we never spoke
of our shared germinations
the bodies growing inside our bodies
eating and eating and eating
until each of us felt sick.
____________________________________________________________
Atia Sattar is a Pakistani-born poet whose writing explores the embodied intersections of motherhood, grief, gender and race. Her poetry has appeared in West Trade Review, MQR: Mixtape; Rogue Agent (Pushcart Nomination) and Cathexis Northwest Press. Her prose can be found in various publications including Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Academe, and the Cambridge Quarterly for Health Care Ethics. She is Associate Teaching Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California.
by Kyra Lisse
In seventh grade, I was sent home
for the weekend with a baby
with a battery for a heart.
She was born with soft-
ware that measured how quickly
I could get out of bed when, at three a.m.,
the soundbox in her belly
started simulating cries—born
with an app that tracked how apt I was
at determining what she needed.
I raised a bottle to her hard plastic
lips; she did not suckle. I pulled
her cheek toward my budding breast;
she did not settle. I peeled off
her spotless diaper and swapped it
for a new one, tried to align the sensor
that was sewn into the cloth
with the chip underlying her absent
vagina. Still, my baby cried.
On Monday, about seventeen hours after
my baby stopped breathing
(I was sitting on the couch, and she, in my lap;
I thought her forehead smelled
sweet, like baby powder, like real baby,
and then she powered off as planned),
Mrs. Chaiken, a mother herself, scrolled
through the automated report and gave me
a grade: ninety-six percent.
She congratulated me
and took my baby away.
___________________________________________________________
Kyra Lisse is a writer and editor from the Philadelphia area. A graduate of Hollins University's MFA in Creative Writing, she has seen her work published in Ghost City Review, Sky Island Journal, Paper Brigade, New Voices Magazine, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, among other places. Kyra currently lives in Lancaster, PA.
by Michelle Bitting
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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We’re all in the same boat ready to float off the edge of the world. —The Band
When I should be asleep
but stay up anyway
step outside to sneak a smoke
behind the recycling bin
froth of soda cans
grass green bottles
spent water from France
a silo of silent witnesses
once effervescent
their colorful labels
torn and scraped now
glass shadows
cast to a rubber raft
under stars
the soft swish
of listing palms
that lean down
but can never reach far enough
lend a hand up
to new dignity.
We are not all in the same boat.
The lucky
find reinvention:
shelf sentinels
curiosities
emerald knickknacks
maybe something more
than holding someone’s luxuries.
Who knows.
Is there a purpose for everything
behind the human grind
beyond the shade
of blameless recycling?
Strangers in a truck
redeeming emptiness
sanctioned on the side
the traffic of coins
sputtered back
at disreputable living
a huddled shimmering
flatbeds
shuttled off in the dark
wet necks
liquid eyes
that glitter the night
shivering as their captors walk
fast from sight
pockets laden with gold
and don’t you just want to
turn them on their heads
shake them hard
til they break
til they shatter
like stars
spilling back
all that stolen brightness?
____________________________________________________________
Michelle Bitting is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook, Dummy Ventriloquist, was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Heavy Feather Review, National Poetry Review, Catamaran, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great-grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
by Sherry Abaldo
I don’t even know whether to pronounce
myself vase like ace or vahz.
Should have come with care instructions.
So fragile, so much wide-mouthed
yearning to be bud vase, mason jar,
Grecian urn. I am aubergine, brackish,
cobalt. I change with the light. Where
feet should be I have a see-through moon.
Water tickles me no end. I thrill to stem
pokes, stray sepals, fallen petals
bright as stars against my midnight belly.
I was almost a bell. I was almost
made of iron. I was almost useful, but
I had to be so precious. Put away
for decades. Maine shed, LA closet. Now
I’m out and shining. Touch my cool assumed
perfection. Careful. Feed me flowers.
____________________________________________________________
Sherry Abaldo lives with her husband in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, ONE ART (Top 10 Read July 2024), Rattle, The Eunoia Review, Down East Magazine, and on The History Channel and PBS among other outlets. Her poems are forthcoming in Sequestrum, The Mackinaw, and elsewhere. As a researcher, her latest nonfiction contribution is due from HarperCollins in 2025. More at sherryabaldo.com.
by Sara Rosenberg
What I want is the buttery light of our kitchen
and my mother’s last lemon chicken.
What I want is your memory of snow
falling on larches. I let go the trails
you carved into the woods, each child’s
name knifed in timber. I dodge the lanky spiders,
leave your cicada shells to march along the sill.
Where would I keep it, your collection of rocks
and my mother’s spent tubes of paint?
I say someday I’ll read your margin notes, drink in
the fading ink, but I let slip the loose pages—
paper’s scattered white petals.
To downsize you to a smaller house,
I am culling the seven decades of your life.
I stack the reams of slides and stories you tell–
days camped at timberline in drifts of snow,
the fox that leveled its gaze at you,
alone together in the wild nowhere.
I find the minerals with penciled names,
boots crusted with a mountain’s silt
that carried you to the ponderosas
and the agates you faceted into my rings.
And now, you doze in the living room
in a cone of light.
I want to hold tender every last thing,
but I cannot contain it, not here,
where the blown leaves scatter and vanish.
I drag the trash can to the curb under a sky scarred
with stars, your trees a dull scratching
against the eaves. How I will miss
your house, its shadows blue along the bear grass
and prickly pear patches, its nests of sleeping does.
When you do not come to the door, I step into the mouth
of your foyer, where your breath floats in off the mildew
and roses, your skin the paper before it molders,
your lungs the books heaving with our dust.
____________________________________________________________
Sara Rosenberg’s poems have appeared in Pine Row Journal, Passengers Journal, and the Ocotillo Review. She lives in Austin, Texas.
by Mary Ann Honaker
It's winter. On foot, we are going some-
where. I wear fishnet, a miniskirt of
leather. We wear all black, all of us.
Laughing, up the icy road we claw
in our tall boots, in our long coats, in our
prime. My boots don't have enough tread. Our way
is steep. A biker-jacketed boy lifts me to
his back. He is bearded, jangles with each step, the
chains dangling off him everywhere. Bottom
is a pleasant place to be, we transcend
our world's comparisons, dart downward.
My fishnet are ripped, it's okay, we're there
in coats with shredded lining, at
a place where we are all fabulous. The
boys wear eyeliner, here at the hub
of my youth. I feel strangely tucked in, of
them, comfortable. The memory, the
moment, framed by snowfall, will never drain
from me. It's in a snowglobe. We are we,
and it's easy for once. Step back; flakes swirl.
This is a golden shovel using lines from Diane Seuss' “I Went Downtown and Went Down,” from Four-Legged Girl.
____________________________________________________________
Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019), and Whichever Way the Moon (Main Street Rag, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Bear Review, JMWW, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Rattle.com, Solstice, Sweet Tree Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.
by Wendy Mannis Scher
“all night it is the one breast/comforting the other” –Lucille Clifton,
"lumpectomy eve”
What you forget is how to disappear—how to unzip, step away from mammograms, ultrasounds, biopsies, diagnoses, MRIs, blood draws, bi-lateral mastectomies. What you don’t remember is the night before, curled up, facing the wall in daughter’s queen-sized bed, husband asleep on the pull-out couch, your breasts’ last hours attached to their chest. You don’t remember tears, a headache, anger at breasts angry at you, frustration with positive family-telling. What you forget is sleep, light tracings on walls/ceiling, full moon in between slats of Venetian blinds, daughter’s steady breath/snort as she shimmers deep in her own somewhere, what else? Two breasts
toss/turn their weights onto a mattress. You don’t remember mourning, cataloguing each milestone of their making, pre-pubescent fruits, painful duct swell, tickled tongue thrill, latched baby-tug, more, more. . . maybe heft and service was too much, hidden shadow flesh turning at last on itself, suicide. What do you forget dreaming of?
You forget breasts, sliced, studied, incinerated ash, smoke, cloud dust floating up there, rain. Rain cleaves to you, to earth, a foreshadowing of sorts, this becoming.
____________________________________________________________
Wendy Mannis Scher is a graduate of Smith College, the University of Colorado’s School of Pharmacy, and the University of Alaska’s MFA Creative Writing program. Her poems most recently have been published in Thin Places & Sacred Spaces (Amethyst Press), Panorama Journal, Harpy Hybrid Review, Warm Milk Publishing, and the chapbook, Fault (Finishing Line Press). Currently, Wendy lives with her family in the Colorado foothills.
by Sarah Sarai
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Arms, and the man…
Virgil
Christ almighty was that a year.
The damn war FINALLY over
though one many-faced hero heroed-on
ten more to slay a weaver’s suitors lined-up
and slicked-back on Ithaca Ave.
THAT year, warriors de-warriorized, or tried to.
Mothers had died fathers had died wives
husbands aunts uncles sisters brothers had died.
But not one golden-guy,
with eyes a glinty glint
and sweaty sweat on biceps bulging.
Sailing sea-y seas Aeneas ashored on land
of a lady founder
who took one gandy gander and
plunged into bicepboy’s eyes—not deep pools—
and after the jumping-off-joy—
no small joy we agree—was deady dead,
having lit sticks and self and such when
loverboy sailed again. Soon,
the city-on-a-boot he birthed,
Rome, all Latinated and lawyered up,
warriorized and empired, though,
we admit, the engineering was good.
Those aqueducts and bridges, those walls.
They were something else.
____________________________________________________________
Sarah Sarai is a birthright New Yorker and skintight Californian. Her most recent collection, Bright-Eyed (Poets Wear Prada), is a sort-of account of her family’s westward motion.
by Jami Macarty
Planted at her birth for maple shade and sway
Big leaf light gathering yellow, a green reach, and sky
Held so in place by its underground life
Limbs so surely rooted and reaching symmetrical flight
Leaves green green filtering a highlighted yellow
Unyielding as the life she already knows she wishes to lead
And so, the tree’s not-yet-lightning-struck boughs
Call the teenager out of the house
Summer’s swung open swoon
A vertigo of the future arriving
Climbing barefoot through the sun
Pollen of her own blooming
The hornet hummed under her blowsy pink nightgown
Stung the flower of her knee
The violence of life sometimes, Nature said, out of her hands
____________________________________________________________
Jami Macarty teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University and writes essays, reviews, and poetry. Jami’s books: The Long Now Conditions Permit (forthcoming University of Nevada Press, 2025), 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize winner; The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award winner; The Whole Catastrophe (2024) and Mind of Spring (2017) from Vallum Chapbook Series, among others. Read Jami’s poetry and reviews, offered in service of poetry’s underrepresented voices, at jamimacarty.com.
by Lisa Fay Coutley
by Laura Ann Reed
—after Tomas Tranströmer
Winter’s iron bell
mutes the white tulip and the peony.
The arguments among the jays
no longer scrape the air.
In the glacial nights my regrets
pace the corridors.
And what I’m trying to say
hangs out of reach
like the fruit of a different season.
____________________________________________________________
Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in Illuminations. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July, 2025. See lauraannreed.net.
by KT Herr
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
____________________________________________________________
I thought I had exhausted all my metaphors: various prey; coins
inserted slant, jamming vending machines; cartoon hand over cartoon
mouth. I studied grim histories of hysterical patients, listened
to accounts of fish who change their sex to breed. I thought I knew all
there is to know about glass: a viscous liquid forced to acquiesce
to rigidity. If I could learn the posture well enough I’d know
how to unlearn it. I practiced exhaustively. I’m practicing now,
today, as I sit smoking. Next door, workmen are lowering a warped
slab of half-inch plywood from the building’s distant roof. Above, one rotates
a winch while below another gathers slack, taming the spent plywood’s
wild twists. A third man stands, watches the rough plank pirouette past several
windows, bracing to receive the spinning scrap. You think I’m telling you
the story of the plank; how it feels to be trussed, grappled over. But I
am the third man: waiting for some purpose to come into my hands.
____________________________________________________________
KT Herr (they/she) is a queer writer, stepparent, and curious person with recent work appearing in Foglifter, The Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, and as winner of the 2023 American Literary Review Award in Poetry, among others. KT is a Four Way Books board member, a poetry editor at Gulf Coast, and an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow in critical poetics at the University of Houston.
by Meg Freer
Late at night we threw ice off the roof of Spokane’s historic Ridpath Hotel
where Elvis had once booked three floors for his drunken entourage
ordered windows painted black, loaded a room with his bodyguards’ guns
sent for lobster tails after midnight, sent back eggs to be cooked hard as rocks
where we rode the high-speed elevator, raced to ice machines on each floor—
giddy on adrenaline from several days of music festival performances
and evenings of practice on the white baby grand at the piano store—
where we pressed the Penthouse button for the intriguing, unlucky 13th level.
When the door slid open, we spied on the high rollers dancing in the club
found our way in the dark to the open-air roof, leaned over the railing
whooped and hollered when our ice missiles hit a car or bus
hoped people down below would wonder why there was hail in May
while our mothers in the hotel bar with drinks on the rocks
tried for an hour to forget they were responsible for us.
____________________________________________________________
Meg Freer lives in Ontario, where she is a writer, editor, and piano teacher. Her work has appeared in many journals, and she has published three poetry chapbooks. She is co-poetry editor for The Sunlight Press and holds two music degrees and a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing. Find her published work on her Facebook page, or her Substack blog at megfreer.substack.com.
by Sanjana Nair