by Megan Merchant
by Shylah Marie Addante
My dad is an archaeologist now.
He moves through the house slowly,
not to clean,
but to study.
Each drawer is a dig site.
Each object, a fragment
of the life he spent building with her.
His grief is careful,
methodical.
It gives him something to hold.
After the funeral,
he told us to go home.
Said thank you.
Said he needed time.
Grief, like cataloging,
is easier without an audience.
He starts with what’s closest:
her nightgowns,
the cupboard of pill bottles,
the hospital bed still in the living room.
Hospice came for most of it.
They forgot the toilet chair.
He put it in the extra room,
somewhere between keeping and forgetting.
He moves deeper.
Into closets not opened in years.
Boxes labeled in her handwriting:
St. Mary’s.
For Brenda.
Crafts.
He finds
miniature shampoo bottles,
sorted by brand.
Half-finished projects.
A list on the back of an envelope:
coffee creamer,
card for Kenzie’s birthday,
a phone number with no name.
She saved everything
because she saw possibility in all of it:
ways to use things,
people to give them to.
But the reasons were hers alone.
She had enough ideas
to fill a dozen lifetimes.
Dad asked if I wanted her yarn.
He gave it to me in grocery bags,
plus the blankets she never finished;
outsourcing this particular mystery
to my expertise.
Eventually,
he gets to the bathroom.
Installs a vent
thirty years too late.
The steam had nowhere to go.
Behind the wall,
black mold,
threaded through the drywall,
growing quiet and slow.
He doesn’t say much.
Just scrubs.
Another task
on a list
only he can see.
Some things
don’t rot until the silence.
Some damage
waits to be found.
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Shylah Marie Addante is a writer and educator based in New York. Her work explores grief, memory, motherhood, and the quiet resilience woven into everyday moments. She is the author of Garden of Thorns and Light and is currently at work on several projects across fiction, poetry, and game design. When she’s not writing, she’s crafting new worlds for her children through stories, play, and yarn.
by Jennifer Martelli
—after Lucie Brock-Broido
I have the boniest backhands, thick veins, too,
that can take a needle, fill tubes of blood. I could make
your lip bleed and swell with a fast, well-aimed rap.
My rings are loose. I wrap band-aids on their metal backs.
I believed if I prayed hard enough—blanched my palms
from pressing them with all my faithful weight—no one—
no one—would ever die. Now, I only believe in the world,
and the sound a backhand makes on front teeth. What
is it in me that needs to tell you this? I’ve gone a full
season and haven’t lost a glove. They’ve stayed cuffed
into each other in a sack deep in my hall closet, kept
warm by loyalty and by the copper pipe along the floor.
I would love for my hands to learn to play a waltz, to shadow-
mime winter birds, for my hands to transform into,
on the one hand, your heart, on the other hand, my heart.
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Jennifer Martelli has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, and Best of the Net Anthology. She is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree and The Queen of Queens, which won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER.
by Jill Kitchen
It's #tbt! In honor of our 10th anniversary, we are celebrating our staff members by re-running their work from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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what if you are your own secret affair
the warm breath you turn to in the ticking
dark of a sleepless night the liquid glow of skin
you take into the shower in the afternoon
pj harvey's rock and roll strum her low
full-throated whisper pulsing against tile
what if you are the one who finds your own shape
attractive struck by the moonglow from within
who sees your own silhouette undressed and
takes in everything that this body has been through
all the ways it has grown into this knowing
wise against the silt edge of the world
wind-brushed and beaten by sun
eyes crackle-creased by laughter
the buttered pear of mothering, this near mane reaching
toward earth, these guitar curves of hips
you have become the one you wear red lipstick for
buy the black lace edged underwear for
dance the flamenco for, pulling imaginary apples
from low tangled branches over and over
with a trill of long, piano-loving fingers
you have become the one you write sonnets for
the one you sing for with your widest-sky voice
against these soft outer walls of snow
fragile with the still broken spring
you are become this woman that you built
from treebark and the hidden stones of other countries
from salamander sheen and desert crossings
from the way each different language feels on your tongue
in the just waking tremble of your mouth
in the oracle of your heart muscle, once struck silent
you are become this woman you burned for fought for
drove across the continent in the middle of the night for
this green-eyed woman mirrored back
who summons her city within
you are still writing this woman song
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Jill Kitchen is a poet living in Washington, D.C, though her heart can still be found in Colorado, New York, and London. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets and Best Small Fictions and appears in Crab Creek Review, The Dodge, Four Way Review, The Iowa Review, Poet Lore, Split Lip Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, trampset, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. She is at work on her first collection.
by Kelle Groom
The square of beveled glass
at the top of my front door
has four half-octagons
like tiny serving dishes
that hold the slivers
of sky visible below
the porch lintel
Each refraction blue-
green most days here
in Florida and even though
I know the green is trees
sky blue I always think
stained glass my
stained glass sky and
that is where I pray
each day and ask
for help for all
who suffer for
all I’m surprised
I don’t want a wider
view but just today
I thought oh it is
a church I can’t see
from here the bougainvillea
evening primrose red
tasselflower
bottlebrush my door
itself is covered in gray
wood moths which look
more like wood than wood
itself though the jagged
splinters with swollen
bellies may only be
home dozens stuck
to my door with super
glue that withstands rain
wind a flying thing inside.
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Kelle Groom is the author of four poetry collections, Underwater City, Luckily, Five Kingdoms, and Spill, as well as a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, a B&N Discover selection and NYTBR Editor's Choice, and How to Live: A Memoir in Essays. An NEA Fellow and recipient of two Florida Book Awards in poetry, Groom’s work appears in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry.
Have a Poetic Summer!
Dear Readers,
SWWIM Every Day will be on its annual hiatus for July and August. But our editors won’t be idle—we’ll be reading submissions (albeit a little bit more slowly as the editors travel and work on professional development opportunities), reviewing residency applications (see info below), and working behind the scenes to bring you something special when we return in September.
Meanwhile, stay safe, be well, and if you’re a woman-identifying poet, apply for our residency via Submittable until August 1!
Love,
SWWIM Team
P.S. Please hold off on sending any news of your accomplishments for our Weekly Shouts during our hiatus. We will return on September 1!
____________________________________________________________
Residency applications are live from June 1-August 1! If you want to attend a SWWIM residency, please check out the FAQs and submit via Submittable. We’d love to review your work!
by Emily Ransdell
by Charlotte Pence
What is on your bedside table? In your fridge?
Your hedge? Are you the type who searches
for a robin’s egg and its crumbs, or for a bone
with which to beat a brass band’s drum?
What is your first memory, first kiss,
first fist in your own mouth? The fourth?
What is your thirst? How do you prefer your light,
shaken or stirred? Bright or broken?
What is your yours, the unsayable, the
immeasurable, the thing your ex-lovers miss?
They’ll never admit what it is, so you’re left
to list songs for your funeral as if the notes know
who you are, who is on your nightstand, who
is rotting in your fridge. Who is wearing your
old prom dress as a costume, the dress you once
called yours, the dress you once declared was so you.
____________________________________________________________
Charlotte Pence is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and the inaugural poet laureate of Mobile, Alabama.
by Tara Bray
Once we went for a cool drink.
It’s hot as hell, she said—
like she’d known me years—
her office air conditioner on the blink.
She carried a flute,
called me a bit
of a thing, said she’d play
a ditty, pulled out the glint,
though her lips full and clumsy,
her fingers thick, but tricky.
She warbled that flute
sounding like the bird itself,
the one with the beak
like a piccolo tip-tipping
the notes, butter markings
on its crown, rump, wings.
When I, handsewn girl
of few words,
warbled beside her
I felt my own body
lift for the trees.
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Tara Bray is the author of Small Mothers of Fright (LSU Press, 2015) and Mistaken For Song (Persea Books, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Narrative Magazine, Agni, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, New England Review, and The Hudson Review, among others.
by Callista Buchen
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Lisa Rua-Ware
Empty wood crates for wine
grapes, stacked against the wall,
the labels on them decorate,
dark-haired beauties
balancing baskets of green
or purple, their sprigs ripening
Senorita Zinfandel, Pia, and Lodi Gold
are still smiling after their fruit is squeezed,
swallowed, and gone,
My pale white underwear drips
from the inside clothing lines
where no one will see
them, where my mother teaches me to hold
a thick bar of soap, how I should let it sink heavy
into my palm before I rub it into the red,
before I form two fists and scrub
until my washboard thumbs are raw,
until that dark stain of me is clean again.
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Lisa Rua-Ware is a poet in central Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Lily Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, FOLIO, and elsewhere. When she’s not chasing after her two kids, she works as a technical writer.
by Franziska Roesner
After Dalí’s Retrospective Bust of a Woman and The Little Theater
Salvador Dalí put bread on the head
of a woman, and she does not look
amused. Thinks he’s a genius as usual,
when it’s she who baked the loaf
in the first place, weighing out
the flour and mothering the yeast
and tending to the timings
of everything. She longs
to plop a pickle on his head,
plucked dripping from the jar,
watch the vinegar weep
down his face. Or a dollop
of cream like seagull shit,
who is clever now? But she’s
learned to stay still, wipe the crumbs,
bait the ants when he’s not looking.
Later, she reappears in the corner
of a diorama, outside the scene
looking in, face visible
only to the long spoon, to the blue ball,
to the baguette-shaped, pickle-tinged
Italian cypress, asking herself: what
am I doing here, and who
will remember me?
____________________________________________________________
Franziska Roesner is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. She was a poet first, though, and has returned to poetry recently. Her poetry has appeared or will appear in Rust & Moth, Eunoia Review, Third Wednesday, The Loch Raven Review, and others. She lives in Seattle with her husband, two daughters, and one remaining cat.
by Kate Sweeney
by Susan Cossette
In a past life I was a steel four-slice
toaster, random kitchen appliance
relegated to a back corner of
the lime-green Formica counter
standing guard and studying the ceramic sunflower jar
of wooden spoons and rusted spatulas,
notorious for my burnt white toast.
In my next life I was reincarnated
into a front-load stackable washing machine,
married to the matching dryer straddled
above me–always willing to take on those poop-stained
onesies and chartreuse monogrammed bath towels,
until my water inlet valve and drum agitation system gave out.
I prayed to the patron saint of misfit appliances
to become something more evolved and
came back as a vacuum cleaner,
but not just any make or model.
I was an Electrolux canister, the kind
exclusively sold by door-to-door salesmen
in navy pinstriped three-piece polyester suits,
The caboose of me nips the fluffy heeled slippers
of the lady tending her forest-olive shag carpet.
I know it is really me doing her work,
removing the detritus of her life.
I must have done my job because one morning
I woke up as a 90-inch flat screen smart television,
mounted on a bright white bedroom wall in Chelsea,
gazing at the Peloton and Pilates reformer,
out the floor-to-ceiling windows
on the heavenly starlights of New York–
I teach the wisdom of chefs, interior designers,
home renovators and decorators
And I rest
knowing everything is pristine and clean–
Gentrified, purified, deified.
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Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she was awarded the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has poems in the Eunoia Review, Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthology Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press).
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