by Angie Hexum
by Mary Lou Buschi
There was a year my mother couldn’t leave her bed.
Something about her nerves.
Then the story about almost being kidnapped.
She turned away from the details as one turns
from a needle sliding through skin to enter a vein.
My grandmother made her cry often, yet we’d return,
on The Canarsie Line, 14 stops into Bushwick,
crowded with people daydreaming as they swayed or lurched,
under the wobbling fans, fat art made from spray cans.
I’d crane my neck as far as I could feel the muggy breeze
against my face, inhaling lithium grease, timing the arrival
out of the darkness into flickering lights.
The last time, because there is always a last,
we rode that train, the doors to the exit were locked.
A group of us pushed through the turnstile into a trap.
My mother grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go.
When she was dying, she said, you know your father
apologized. Then she quickly went back under the wave
of the in-between confusing me with her sister,
forgetting my name, my face until the next time
she came up for air, she said, my mother told me
I deserved it—losing my son.
Tending to a body dying is a secret. An unspoken pact,
never disagree with the dying. Tell others it was peaceful,
without incident. No one wants to hear the body swells;
organs strain for oxygen. No one needs to know you placed
your cheek on her hot skin stretched to almost bursting,
while lamplight broke over her and drank her in.
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Mary Lou Buschi authored three poetry collections. Her third book, Blue Physics (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024) was a finalist for Contemporary Poetry in The International Book Awards and Distinguished Favorite: Independent Press Awards. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Glacier, Jet Fuel Review, Hunger Mountain, and many others.
by Jane Poirier Hart
Moths batter the screen door, their
fluttering counterpoint to my medley
of kitchen plops & plinks. I think
of the TV commercial I keep seeing
where a grade-school band blows a sloppy
version of Also Sprach Zarathustra and a kid
on one end of the semi-circle swings his feet,
offbeat, to the wobbly strains of Strauss.
Both Strauss and Nietzsche were responding
to the looming European crisis of their time:
the rise of science over the reign of religion.
I distrust religion, am weak in the sciences—
When I turn to set the dinner table, I see a moth
caught in amber of softened butter, body
stilled. Wings imprinting Land O’Lakes
leave an indigo image as detailed, as a da Vinci,
as unlikely as god painted on a peeling ceiling.
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Jane Poirier Hart holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BMus in Composition from Berklee College of Music. Her awards include a Residency at The Frost Place, a Fellowship at the Writers’ Room of Boston, and nominations to The Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in print and online journals, including Los Angeles Review, The Southern Poetry Review, The Worcester Review, The Ocean State Review, and Lily Poetry Review.
by Andy Young
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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A couple faces one another
as if in conversation.
This is how they were found.
Now they lie in vitrines
like fish in facing tanks.
Could not speak if they
could speak. They were
dressed for their death passage,
not to be specimens in glass.
Her bare breasts shine
like doorknobs. Linen
wraps for the poor, gold
masks for the rich, eyes
so lifelike excavators
gasped when they brushed
the dust away. The revolution
left no money for excavation;
thousands of mummies
still lie in burrowed tunnels
under the houses and roads.
The dead do not ponder
revolutions, but they like
to sometimes be considered.
Small mourning statues
were found in the tombs,
meant to eternally weep
at their side. One man
is a merchant with a Horus crown.
Tolemic, someone says.
Our son points to another’s
thickly outlined eyes.
He is awake, he says,
but does not answer.
A stone girl, five years old,
too poor for a golden crown;
my daughter, also five,
asks if they’re the same
size—yes, almost exactly.
For a while, this is how
our children will think of death:
gilded bodies that keep their shape,
wide-eyed and adored.
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Andy Young's second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, was published in October 2024 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. She grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in Identity Theory, Drunken Boat, and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and in jewelry, tattoos, and public buses. See andyyoung.org.
by Nicole Burdick
By the time I got to her breasts
she was thinking about doughnuts.
I was giving value to the underside
of her left nipple with light stippling
when hunger overtook her,
at least that’s what she said
during the break, casual in her robe,
gobbling the cookies Jen made.
Clark crosshatched the same area
with soft lead, his point dulling
from each mark he left to darken her.
Jen transformed the breasts
into two rounded squares—
very Botero, I thought, but didn’t say.
Her jealousy evoked a three-dimensionality
that made the tits look like they had a life beyond
the chest. I could do this all day, Paul thought
to himself as he used his finger to smudge
a well just where the breast and rib met.
As the model wiped a crumb from her lip,
Ivan admitted he’d been on her thighs
and a data-mining solution for work,
hence the tentative strokes,
just before the timer rang.
And Karen pitched in about troubles
with the feet which most people
rarely bother to depict.
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Nicole Burdick is a Language Arts educator living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam where ants now make their way into her poems more often. Despite the fact that people bless her for doing it, facilitating a thinking-is-fun environment about literature for teenagers is actually a dream job. She also paints abstract stories, collages broken tile, and cooks like she is from everywhere. Her poems can be found in Fence, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere.
by Barbara Schwartz
Your birth mother has the bluest eyes,
as if their color had made her cold, then slowly
numb with pleasure. Attendant to the holy
I offer her hot water, a blanket. Induced, she cries
a flock of spells to the quickening, hexes the squall
in the hallway. Unplugs herself from the wall.
An open gown frames her art. Tattooed thighs,
arms, neck: cupid’s arrowed heart, branching
snakes down her back. Her hair, blood-
red wine. She keeps you dream-feeding
until full. What can I feed you? My words
pour out like milk. She bites an ice cube, curses
the boiling moon. Alive & wailing you turn
from her breast. You breathe my breath.
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Barbara Schwartz is the author of three books of poetry: A chapbook, Any Thriving Root (dancing girl press, 2017); the collaborative collection, Nothing But Light (Circling Rivers, 2022); and the hybrid work, What Survives is the Fire, forthcoming from Alternating Current Press, which was a finalist for the Barrow Street Prize, Alice James Book Award, and a semi-finalist for the Perugia Press Prize. Barbara has chronic leukemia and works as an advocate for children with disabilities.
by Maya Bernstein
by VA Smith
After Jennifer Stewart Miller
Praise Poem About My Four-Year-Old Singing the Hallelujah Chorus from His
Car Seat
Pantoum: On Responding to Friends When They Ask About How My Son Is
“Doing” in State Prison
Villanelle: In the Same Week, Matt Is Ejected from His Varsity Soccer Game
for Sending an Opponent to the Hospital and His Ice Hockey Playoffs for
Gloves Off—Again
After Driving Eight Hours to Visit My Son, We Eat Vending Machine Crackers
in the Prison Visitors’ Room
Poem in Which I Narrate My Son’s Prison Phone Call When We Unpack Killers
of The Flower Moon, and I Am Happy All Afternoon
On My Curiosity About How the Mobius Loop of Multiple Addiction Disorders,
Childhood Sexual Abuse, and Mental Illness Braided This Life for My Son
How to Cut out Dinosaur Cookies with a Small Boy Who Insists on
Maintaining the Relative Approximate Size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex’s Hands to
Its Body
Sonnet: My Son’s Silence After the Parole Board Tells Him He Will Spend
Another Year in Prison
On Remembering the Sweet-Sour Scent of My Blond Toddler’s Body After
Waking from a Summer Nap
Poem in Which I Imagine What Happened: My Thirty-Something Son Fighting
Three Arresting Officers in His House While Knocking Over His Dogs’ Food
and Water Bowls
On Recalling My Newborn Son’s Hold on His Flannel Hospital Hat, as if
It Were Intentional, as if It Would Always Protect Him
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A frequent Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, VA Smith’s poetry has appeared in several anthologies and in dozens of literary journals, among them: Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, and Third Wednesday. VA’s third book, Adaptations, will be published by Green Writers Press Fall of 2025, when she will serve as Poetry Editor of River Heron Review. Her bliss is writing, cooking, hiking and loving on friends and family.
by Patrice Boyer Claeys
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Bonnie Proudfoot
White chintz wallpaper in a wardrobe closet
white glare of vanity lights, triple mirrors,
bridesmaids from Buffalo lay out
white lines on a side table,
white souls slip out of numb bodies,
small white slippers pinching each
white toe, what it takes to be bridled,
tiny white pearls, tierra of frozen snowdrops,
stiff as a stack of white styrofoam cups,
ice ring around the moon, stone
white coral broken and bleached,
washed up on white shore,
empty white thoughts, last winter
snowflake, icing on the cake, blank
piece of white paper, sign here in this
white space. I do.
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Bonnie Proudfoot has published fiction, essays, reviews, and poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies. Her writing has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Her debut novel, Goshen Road (Swallow Press), was named 2022 WCONA Book of the Year and was long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway. Her first chapbook of poems, Household Gods (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) was released in September 2022. Bonnie lives in Athens, Ohio.
by Maegan Gonzales
I run myself a hot bath and soak until the water cools to lukewarm, trying to
forget the roads that connect our houses. In the grocery store, I stand in front
of the avocado display. There are thirteen and all too green. I try to think of a
New Year’s resolution that someone might keep like—Plant a fruit tree. I
cradle a small oval and pulse my palm testing for ripeness, hoping its green is
deceiving me. Once, I read somewhere that avocado trees flower perfectly
with both male and female parts, so no need for two trees. I trace each letter
on my grocery list until the round bellies of my b’s and p’s make words again.
At home, my avocadoes have gone bad at the bottom of an iron fruit basket.
Their darkness stands out from orange citrus, skins dimpled and over-ripe. I
split each pear-shape and expose the seed, scoop the yellow-brown mush
from the leathery walls, salt the souring flesh and taste it. I pierce a single
seed with toothpicks and set it in a water jar, bottom-half submerged.
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Maegan Gonzales is an interdisciplinary southern artist, writer, certified yoga instructor, and educator. She was born in south-central Texas and is currently located in southwest Louisiana where she teaches Composition and Literature at McNeese State University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Bear Review, Common Ground Review, Salt Hill, Northwest Review, Midway Journal, Potomac Review, New Orleans Review, and more.
by M.R. Mandell
Forty years later and I still
dream of them, gliding floors
of Xanadu. Chalky white boots,
laces, bedazzled with stars,
tied in a double bow. Four sleek
wheels painted hot pink,
purple pom poms bouncing
on top. I rabbit eared the page
in Roller Girl magazine, slyly
slipped it under Mom’s biography
of Lady Di. Every night I’d peek
into their room, hoping I’d catch her,
receiver tucked between her shoulder
and right ear, giving my size five
to the operator somewhere in Vermont
or Delaware, requesting gift wrap sprinkled
with shimmery polka dots or rainbow
unicorns. FedEx delivery so they’d arrive
in time for my thirteenth birthday.
So much happened to jinx my plan.
Another August thunderstorm barreled
through Galveston, blew down
our little town, Sugar Land. Dad lost
his latest contract job, boss tired of tardiness
and tales of family illnesses and death.
Spent his days waiting for unemployment checks.
Mom tried to hold on. Stood in line
every Monday for our square of Velveeta
cheese, box of powdered milk, and tin of Spam.
She pawned her diamond wedding ring, promised
herself she’d earn enough to buy it back someday.
Spooned mashed potatoes onto trays for thieves
and drug dealers at the prison a few miles away.
Stretched a net over her curls, wrapped a grey smock
over her dress, buckled white pleather shoes
with rubber soles, so she wouldn’t slip
as she skimmed across floors covered in slop,
unaware of the wheels spinning in my head.
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M.R. Mandell (she/her) is a poet based in Los Angeles. You can find her words in Door Is A Jar, The McNeese Review, HAD, and others. She is the author of two chapbooks, Don’t Worry About Me (Bottlecap Press) and The Last Girl, forthcoming September 2025 (Finishing Line Press). She is a 2024 Pushcart nominee.
by Talia Pinzari
by Cat Dixon
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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The vent whistles and blows the papers from the desk to the floor—all those checks that need to be signed, all those welcome letters to be mailed, the return address label page missing an entire row. The carpet—littered with eraser dandruff, bent paper clips and crumbs from my Poptart— needs to be vacuumed. The filing cabinet with its open mouth calls, file, file, organizethis shit. Instead, I slip the Leonard Cohen CD into the computer. “First We Take Manhattan” begins and I dust and vacuum and wipe. The window sill is filled with dead flies and grit. The lever on the office chair is caked in dust. The blessing bags for the homeless are piled underneath the table—all their strings knotted together. When the doorbell rings, and the man asks for help, I hand him four bags instead of one—too lazy to untwine them. He says, “I don’t need all this,” and I think, none of us do.
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Cat Dixon is the author of What Happens in Nebraska (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2022) along with six other poetry chapbooks and collections. She works full time at a funeral home and she’s a poetry editor with The Good Life Review. Recent poems published in Thimble Lit Mag, Poor Ezra’s Almanac, and Moon City Review.
by Bex Hainsworth
by Alison Prine
to hold stillness
inside the sadness
to hold rain
inside the dust
to hold the girl
who cries on the stairs
and the dream
of the blackbird
and then the blackbird
of the dream
to hold the cold face
of the clock
the late asters
of last summer
to hold the bruise
of the rain cloud
to hold the dust cloud
and the ash cloud
and the choking cloud
of doubt
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Alison Prine’s latest collection of poems, Loss and Its Antonym (Headmistress Press, 2024), won the 2023 Sappho’s Prize in Poetry. Her debut poetry collection, Steel (Cider Press Review, 2016), was named a finalist for the 2017 Vermont Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Five Points, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and others. She lives and works in Burlington, Vermont. See alisonprine.com.
by Rasma Haidri
Perhaps some part of me still believes
I will live on in my children’s children
and their children, still believes there will be children
solid as green glass, as dark and bright,
sturdy as bone grown from the liquid void
of hope, of want, and need. I mean
the need to love, which is not need at all
but the opposite. Whatever the opposite of need is,
I believe in that.
There is a sprig of lavender in a green glass bowl
on my white-painted window sill. I believe
in the fertile green of the clifftop trees
behind the bowl, outside my window. I believe
these things know each other, trees, bowl,
that both belong to the one solid world
I am passing through. They belong and will remain,
and one day a girl child will cup the bowl
in her two hands at the foot of those trees and
laugh, because something will be funny,
something will be a joy, the day will be green
and the girl, the girl will not know
I saw her there. Already today I saw her
and the tiny womb deep in her belly.
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Rasma Haidri is a South Asian Norwegian-American poet, the author of Blue Like Apples (Rebel Satori) and As If Anything Can Happen (Kelsay Books). Her writing has been widely anthologized and appeared in many journals including Rattle, Fourth Genre, Action Spectacle, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, and Phoebe. She lives with her wife on a Norwegian seacoast island. See rasma.org.
by Bonnie Auslander
by Marcia J. Pradzinski
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Let his body down in our
grainy ribbons of light
along the bones of me.
On the ground, come morning the grasses will genuflect
with a dozen swirling constellations.
How silently a heart pivots on its hinge—
silent as the moment before the world was.
Eyes closed,
he falls into darkness,
receding from my grasp—
a person can die of motherhood.
Cento Sources: David Caddy, Kwame Davis, Dorianne Laux, Alison Croggon, Cynthia Brackett Vincent, Marcia Hurlow, Jane Hirshfield, Elvis Alves, Hedy Habra, Louis Gallo, Karen Bowles, Sage Cohen
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Marcia J. Pradzinski writes memoir, poetry, and fiction. She’s working on a memoir about raising a child with a disability, and has short pieces published on that topic featured in Overcoming (a 2013 anthology), Woodcrest, Kaleidoscope, and Harmony. She’s published two books of poetry: Left Behind (Finishing Line Press 2015) and As One Day Slips Out of the Shoe of Another (Kelsay Books 2021). She has a short story published in Meaningful Conflicts (a 2023 anthology). She lives in Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and enjoys watching for cardinals and woodpeckers in the neighborhood.
by Laura Adrienne Brady