by Susan Cossette
by Angele Ellis
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), daughter of artists, jumped from a
Manhattan rooftop during a struggle with depression. She gained
posthumous fame for her innovative photography of the body.
Your mother worked steadily
in the wake of your death,
peasant feet in painted slippers.
Shocked from function to form,
she blanketed a wall in Beijing
with pottery birds suspended in flight.
Your father abandoned abstraction,
clinging to the women he shuttered.
He clicked on a tattoo, kohl-rimmed zero.
The back of the model exposed
by her checkered schoolgirl uniform
stared at him, aperture of failure.
You—figure in the yellow wallpaper
blur of beautiful body and shadow
Eros with singed feathers and wild Psyche
Icarus with designer wings, fallen.
No ID but your polka dot dress and
your face, unrecognizable.
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Angele Ellis's work has appeared on a theater marquee, in a museum, and in over ninety publications. She won a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for poems on her Arab American heritage from her first collection, Arab on Radar (Six Gallery). She also is author of Spared (A Main Street Rag Editor's Choice Chapbook) and Under the Kaufmann's Clock (Six Gallery), a poetry and fiction hybrid inspired by her adopted city of Pittsburgh.
by W.J. Herbert
by Ann Fisher-Wirth
by David Eileen
by Linda Hillman Chayes
We mourn that other earth when
every day was an outside day, today
my blue hydrangeas bleach in the summer heat,
our lungs work hard to find oxygen.
Antique white hydrangeas,
guzzling water daily even as we drain the coffers.
You are thinner and worry about why.
Remember when we couldn’t wait for summer?
Look at how the flowers balance hope
and too much sun
how they find the life they can find
bloom the bloom they can
how so much adaptation carries us
forward sparring with memory.
You and I spar less and conserve energy
for conversation and creations. Yesterday,
our granddaughter held a watering can, bent
over the flowers for the first time. She couldn’t
keep her hands out of the wet dirt.
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Linda Hillman Chayes is the author of two chapbooks, Not My First Walk on the Moon and The Lapse, both published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Kestrel, American Poetry Journal, Quartet, Westchester Review, 2 Horatio, Wild Roof, and other publications. She practices in New York as a psychologist/psychoanalyst. She co-wrote and co-edited a book, The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives in Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity, published by Routledge Press in 2018.
by Elisabeth Adwin Edwards
Call me Stellar Demise, my hemoglobin pulses with the last exhalations
of stars. I have cast myself
into a cup, a scaffold, a fence, a pipe, a cup. That which is foundational,
marks the edge of a loving space, or fills
to overflowing, that which can be used as weapon, but more often
the thing that spills
over. Well-seasoned skillet, molasses, rust. Some days I’m so hard, heavy. Others,
so magnetic I can't move. I have carried water
no one would want to drink, water not fit for a child to bathe in. Cells of the fetus
I aborted at age twenty-one
bored through the blood-brain barrier and his tiny double-helixes corkscrewed
my mind. He still courses
through me. I imagine his eyes the color of black ore, like his father's. Sometimes
I dream him into a strong body, a body
outside of myself, a body I can touch, and I become a spigot, all I do is weep.
Another star died and found its way here.
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It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Elisabeth Adwin Edwards' poems have appeared in The Tampa Review, CALYX, B O D Y Literature, Pedestal Magazine, Posit, and elsewhere; her prose has been published in HAD, CutBank, On The Seawall, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets. She has taught her popular online class, "Living Attentively: Journaling through Poetry and Observation", through Grackle & Grackle Literary Enterprises. A native of Massachusetts, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and teen daughter in an apartment filled with books. See elisabethadwinedwards.com.
by Kelsey Britton
I saw you peeking from behind the cupboard door.
I saw you huddled at the bottom of the cookie jar
in my grandma’s kitchen. I saw you
melting down the neighbor’s chin,
nectarine fresh from the market.
I saw you soft caramel between my fingers,
lollipop in the bank, donut beside my father’s coffee,
bright pink icing on the wedding cake.
I imagined you piled high in my bowl,
Neapolitan ice cream stolen from
the deep freezer in my grandpa’s basement.
My mother warned me not to eat you.
My friend pinched my side and said “don’t.”
My aunt reminded me that when I was grown
I’d have to exercise after Christmas dinner
or else the food would collect under my skin
like a dangerous coat and smother me alive.
My TV yelled at me to banish you,
replace you with lean fat and dietary fiber.
I thanked you,
for powering my body
through 10 hours of digging in the dirt,
the small burst of joy I felt to eat
a chocolate cherry from a giant bag.
I saw you,
rosehip blooming on the branch,
apple pulled towards the mud,
fig bruising beneath the blue sky.
All of it beckoning me.
You,
a delicious sight, a tall glass of water, a beauty,
cowering in the cupboard and
shuddering at the mythology we’d built around you—
as a devil disguised as sweetness,
rather than knowing your flavor as an anchor
into the real world,
the belly, and the mouth.
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Kelsey Britton is a botanist and hedge witch living on the Oregon Coast. She is on a lifelong quest of finding the mystical in the ordinary. Her work has been featured in The Fem Lit magazine and is forthcoming in Wild Roof Journal. You can follow her Substack, The Tender Wild, at thetenderwild.substack.com.
by Madeline Schaeffer
We kept missing the aurora borealis. The once-in-a-lifetime just kept appearing. Like, so what?It-just-so-happened-she-was-alive-and-breathing. The sky gave way to Instagram's more vivid purples. I sent flowers to everyone I was ghosting. Surely you heard their misconceptions falling apart. Spine felt like starlight: vertebral glitter. Light scattered randomly, if not for physics. Your text: Doesn’t matter. Love you. There was a sudden illumination on the camera screen. The it-just-so-happened-I-was-there-to-take-her-pulse. We all believed in the afterlife for 10 seconds. Anyway, then we pulled out our bucket lists and crossed off aurora, even though we never really saw it. It was just the sky, after all. The belief came second: that it all amounted to more than plasma, then pixels, on a phone screen. That if we looked closely enough, we could see who we were becoming.
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Madeline Schaeffer is a poet who lives by the Pacific Ocean in Washington state. She writes about her golden retriever and the sea, climate grief, and biology classes. She is a high school student who spends most of her time in college. She was named a 2023 commended Foyle Young Poet, and her work has appeared in the Tiger Moth Review, amongst others.
by Vidushi Rijuta
in the world where men can be
machine gun bodies, trigger-ready hands
tripping on no safety, peace itself inverted,
my body is often hostage situation,
my body is often sentence without punctuation,
my body is often shrinking into my clothes,
my body is often eraser turned inward, trying
so hard to undo the parts of me that are soft.
in the world of a moving metro where men
can be flammable, ruinous, immovable,
may my body be a fire extinguisher.
may my body be a shield for my friends,
may my body be freezing cold, forest fire,
the entire universe collapsing on purpose,
may my body be a sharp weapon wielded
without handle, glass shard,
may my body be immovable too.
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Vidushi Rijuta (she/her) is currently doing a masters in counseling and psychotherapy. She loves writing about love (so naturally, about things like queerness, joy, friendship and grief). Her poems have previously been published in Gulmohur Quarterly, Fruit, and Ink Sweat & Tears.
by Jennifer Mills Kerr
Before dawn, diapers, milk, washing the floors. Skies bathed
by every prayer, sacred wings through snags of stars. You and I
at the kitchen table, a tiny universe. Perhaps the sweet bite
of gossip, laughter, perhaps ghosts and enemies swept clean.
We drink coffee inside the unsteady light, flight of morning darkness
into hushed scarlet. Sorrow, twisted language inside pockets. For
you or I to name a wound, to open the shape of echo and awe,
we recall an eagle circling the blue bowl of sky.
Sources: Joy Harjo, Perhaps the World Ends Here, Eagle Poem, Insomnia & the Seven Steps of Grace, My House is the Red Earth, When the World as We Knew It Ended; Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Cenzontle
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Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. She has work upcoming in The Inflectionist Review and Neologism Poetry Journal. Connect with Jennifer through her Substack, Poetry Inspired.
by Anne Graue
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Some say I am Artemis the Huntress
and I wax like a candle dipped over and over
and I wane until I disappear. I pull the oceans
toward me and then push them away. I am cold
and dark in shadow and almost transparent
by day. I bring scores of children and make wolves
howl at midnight. Full, I am wise. Quartered, I am
nearly empty. Halved, I am ambiguous. When I am
crescent, I am nearly new, ready to be filled.
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Anne Graue is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet (Woodley Press, 2020) and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Find her poetry in Sundress Publications Best Dressed Blog, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, SWWIM Every Day, Spoon River Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Unbroken Journal, and River Heron Review. Her work appears in anthologies, including Blood and Roses: An Anthology in Honor of Aphrodite and Coffee Poems. Her book reviews have been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The Rumpus. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review.
by Sandra Fees
I spume water into the birdbath
the grackle’s shoulders gleaming amethyst
the yellow eye hot as the Anthropocene.
Dear lord, listen,
it’s only June.
Tonight I’m taking a class on listening.
You’d think we’d have learned by now.
I practice listening to this body
that needs to find a spell
that can cool a woman.
Or planet.
I practice with peaches
their warm flesh fresh from the orchard
plucked right out from under the sun’s bright cheeks.
I listen. I practice being a peach.
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Sandra Fees’ poetry has appeared in Crab Creek Review, Nimrod, River Heron Review, and Witness, among others. Her first full-length collection, Wonderwork (BlazeVOX Books), was released in October 2024.
by Jennifer Stewart Miller
by Louisa Muniz
Summer and peach trees everywhere.
Fruit falling into the lap of the earth.
The crows in the yard forage for food.
At the birdbath I find a sparrow on its back.
I watch for its rise and fall
but its legs and feet are frozen. Stiff in repose.
Is this a sign, omen, or message
for something I need to let go?
A breath away, the silent-standing maple flutters.
Doesn’t everything begin & end in stillness?
I call out to my husband in the house,
there’s a dead bird out here.
He yells back,
leave it alone.
I don’t listen.
Instead, I take care to scoop it
from the basin, lay it gently
in a plastic bag.
Dispose of it in the trash.
Later, I’ll be sorry I didn’t take
the time to bury it properly,
maybe even pray for it to soar high
into the spirit of vaulted sky.
But for now I am reminded of
all that is sacred & unpretentious
all that is wondrous & small.
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Louisa Muniz lives in Sayreville, N.J. She holds a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction from Kean University. Her work has appeared Palette Poetry, SWWIM, PANK Magazine, One Art, and elsewhere. She won the Sheila-Na-Gig Spring Contest. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook, After Heavy Rains, was released in December, 2020. Her latest chapbook, The Body is No More Than a Greening Thing, is forthcoming.
by Betsy Mars
A woman stares in a mirror, beholds herself. We in the audience pause to take her in, too. Her brow furrows. Eyes critical slits, we follow her gaze up and down her body. Opening a drawer she pulls out a fettling knife, gets to work, carving slabs, trimming. Stepping back to appraise each new line, each curve, the ratio of waist to hip, breasts uplifted with the edge of her potter’s rib. Now to the face where a straight needle is needed. Her eyes examine her eyes: she shifts them a little further apart on either side of her newly upturned nose, admires the perfect symmetry. A pile of cast-off clay lies at her feet.
The lights come up—
popcorn crumbs
dimple my thighs.
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Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has recently appeared or is upcoming in ONE ART, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Rat’s Ass Review, among others. In 2021, Betsy’s poems were nominated for Best of the Net as well as the Pushcart prize. Her photos have appeared in RATTLE’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Redheaded Stepchild, and Spank the Carp. Her chapbook, In the Muddle of the Night, was co-authored with Alan Walowitz.
by Nicole Zdeb
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Just escaped the cosmic dustbin,
March’s swirling floodwaters, and
you’re a master of beginnings,
the bright idea, strong coffee.
You hit your head more than once
against the deliberate consideration
of others. You like to fall in love.
You like to fall.
You build landings for the sky.
Subject to high fevers,
clairvoyance and weird dreams.
You want seven
women on seven seas
to bear your silvery seed.
You speak in puffs of smoke,
your mouth a popular sculpture.
A more desperate man would reach for his hat.
You look like you’re swallowing clouds.
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Nicole Zdeb is a writer, visual artist, and astrologer based in Oregon. She holds a MFA from the University of Iowa and studied Translation Theory at CUNY and the University of Paris. After starting as a classroom teacher, she embarked on a dual career in educational publishing and astrology. She has designed learning games, an after-school arts curriculum, and consulted for NBC’s Education Nation. In 2021, Zdeb completed a Practitioner’s Level Certificate from the School of Traditional Astrology in London and launched Angela Alston Astrology, a consulting practice focused on horary astrology and creative coaching. She currently resides in Portland, OR, with her husband, writer Jamie Cooper. She is a poetry editor at Airlie Press. Her book, The End of Welcome, is forthcoming in 2025.
by Holly Joy Wertman
I found God at the Broadway Junction stop
headed home from a week of reluctant days
dripping R&B jams from a karaoke speaker
amid the heavy stirred exhaust so invasive
it fermented water holy in each of my pores.
I picked up religion as I waited for paradise
standing clear of the closing doors, o please,
bless me with cranked up freon conditioning
gusts that I will start complaining about soon.
Just the way Lord separated land from water
and It! Was! Good! for a minute—until man
decided to create swimming pools because
we missed how it once felt to maybe drown.
My ears are melting from being pounded
by bootleg bass beat "Jesus died for my sins"
but I guess not for long because the next J
is 17 minutes away and the End of Days
fire and brimstone temperature forecasts
flash on screen behind me, but I don’t turn
because knowing makes everything worse.
There is not a soul who could convince me
it didn't go just like this: Eve ate that apple
and someone spun her around a few times,
sent her train back to its home station, until
she found herself in a far more terrible place
than she was before—still Eden, now aware.
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Holly Joy Wertman is the Director of a guaranteed income and peer support program for parents living in NYC homeless shelters. A recent graduate of Columbia Mailman, her work has been published across research, nonprofit, and journalistic platforms. She also has an upcoming essay in the Rocky Horror Picture Show anthology to be published by the Feminist Press.
by Sarah Kersey
To say love is
a hard thing.
The tongue
has to overcome
the teeth.
A lack of faith.
Saveme I plead.
I am shipwreck,
flood,
mouth open,
bottom sinking.
Every wave-tossed tear
comes. Every
bit of heat
comes.
Blood rushes in.
I clamor through the fog
of cologne for her.
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Sarah Kersey (she/they) is a poet and x-ray technologist living in Boston, MA. Her debut chapbook, Residence Time, is published by Newfound. They have received support from Tin House Workshop. Sarah's work has appeared in The Rumpus, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Account Magazine, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere.
by Tyler Hurula