by Elizabeth Sylvia
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!
by Jennifer Wheelock
Pitri Paksha (পিতৃপক্ষ)
by Dipika Mukherjee
In the fortnight of ancestors
three generations of spirits live
in my home, breathe in me
coloring dreams until the sun
moves through another equinox.
My mother lives in Delhi, in
a house I will inherit, calls
from a balcony where she is
pinching off a rosebush, dead
petals and leaves in palm,
voice diminished and jagged;
the chasm vast between us.
She asks: What happens to ALL
those souls, so many of us,
overrunning the planet now?
How will they find rebirth?
Surely some just die forever?
She is eighty-nine. A Buddhist
master said: There are two kinds
of children in this world. One
born to repay the kindness
of parents; others born to take
what their parents have.
She asks her usual questions
asks about conversations
with my siblings, my day,
my week; I am a child back
from school, my words terse.
Connectivity bars, screens
pixelate and reload. Just when
I think I have lost her, she
blooms again onscreen, hand
brimming with dead petals,
pinching leaves into earth,
mulching
new
buds.
Note: Pitri Paksha is a 16-lunar day period in the Hindu calendar when Bengalis pay homage to their ancestors.
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Dipika Mukherjee’s poetry collection, Dialect of Distant Harbors, was published by CavanKerry Press in October 2022, and won the Quill and Ink Award for Poetry in 2023; it was also shortlisted for a Chicago Review of Books (CHIRBy) Award. She is the recipient of a 2022 Esteemed Artist Award from the City of Chicago and teaches at the Graham School at University of Chicago. She serves as Literary Life Ambassador for the Chicago Poetry Center.
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This week, SWWIM and Matwaala are coming together to celebrate women writers of South Asian heritage with a week of poetry and a SWWIM x Matwaala writing residency and reading at The Betsy-South Beach featuring visiting writer Nina Sudhakar and local writer Carolene Kurien. (The reading will take place on September 11 at 7:00 pm. Please join us in person or via Instagram Live or Facebook Live!)
Matwaala was launched in 2015 to increase the visibility of diasporic South Asian poets (from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Afghanistan) in the mainstream American literary landscape. The name Matwaala in a transferred sense suggests the intoxication of poetic creativity. Matwaala showcases the diversity within the South Asian community—and within the Indo-American community.
A note from Matwaala: Matwaala, the South Asian Diaspora Poetry Collective, is honored to join hands with SWWIM in celebrating a week of South Asian poetry that celebrates Matwaala’s tenth anniversary. A thoughtfully curated selection of women poets offer us a constellation of rich poetry this week. Together with SWWIM, we affirm poetry’s power to bridge distances, and amplify voices.
The Ancestors Invited Me to a Family Convention
by Nina Sudhakar
& sent it by a chatty, brown-winged
myna bird. Our conversation lasted
centuries. The only word we spoke
was my own name, her golden beak
calling it back to me—
(calling it back to me)
Hundreds of years: that’s the time
it took to speak to every life
inhabiting those echoes. I went to
reach for my own gold ornaments
but the bird’s crescent talons tapped
the edge of the time-worn cardstock,
tiny letters reading
come as you are.
I came as I was to the place
where all the tributaries met
& met them all there, wearing
my father’s broad nose & my mother’s
wide-set eyes & my grandmother’s
wild curls & my great-grandmother’s
secret smile. & there, the puzzle
of everyone’s features assembled itself
with no outside help, everyone
remarking, I wore it best
about themselves, because a face
is only a mask when you are not yourself
& here we were faced with
a constellation of ourselves.
& my great-great-great-great-great grandmother
stroked the frayed edge of my hand-me-down handloom,
woven from banana leaves & salt crystals
& the mud formed from a summer’s worth
of downpour mixed with a plateau’s red dust
& said it was the finest she’d ever seen.
I felt sure I’d seen nothing in comparison,
nothing at all, maybe a single afternoon
of rain. But at that moment
the light skirted the clouds
& I noticed I had her hands—
the same palms with lines snaking
like rivers that I trusted
would meet, eventually.
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Nina Sudhakar is a writer, poet, and lawyer based in Chicago. She is the author of Where to Carry the Sound (winner of the 2024 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and a 2024 Foreword INDIES Award) and two poetry chapbooks, Matriarchetypes and Embodiments. She serves as Dispatches Editor & Book Reviews Editor for The Common and as a Board Member of the Chicago Poetry Center. For more, please see ninasudhakar.com.
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This week, SWWIM and Matwaala are coming together to celebrate women writers of South Asian heritage with a week of poetry and a SWWIM x Matwaala writing residency and reading at The Betsy-South Beach featuring visiting writer Nina Sudhakar and local writer Carolene Kurien. (The reading will take place on September 11 at 7:00 pm. Please join us in person or via Instagram Live or Facebook Live!)
Matwaala was launched in 2015 to increase the visibility of diasporic South Asian poets (from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Afghanistan) in the mainstream American literary landscape. The name Matwaala in a transferred sense suggests the intoxication of poetic creativity. Matwaala showcases the diversity within the South Asian community—and within the Indo-American community.
A note from Matwaala: Matwaala, the South Asian Diaspora Poetry Collective, is honored to join hands with SWWIM in celebrating a week of South Asian poetry that celebrates Matwaala’s tenth anniversary. A thoughtfully curated selection of women poets offer us a constellation of rich poetry this week. Together with SWWIM, we affirm poetry’s power to bridge distances, and amplify voices.
South South
by Carolene Kurien
Existence is……fine
I’m unemployed and/or a slut
Take your pick
Baby hairs are the new micro bangs
Micro bangs are the new micro bangs
I’m a woman and I have many friends
I’m a woman and I’m medium-charming
According to the WikiHow page on How to Disappear Completely
You’ll be held responsible for your search party fees
If anyone ends up finding you
Ok
If you were to disappear would you see the gates first
Or the other side of heaven no one talks about
I am mired in modest misery; I dream of neon, veils, Blue, Sandy
Ride the mechanical bull until broken arm, ride, ride, touch me
Making mistakes is a birthright even God won’t interfere with
We’re going south south, every which way
Homestead, Delray, Tito’s, Dora’s
I am sick and I am dying
I’m an entrail ground to nothing
Amma, Appa, this, that
Everything that happens
Is just another thing that happens
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Carolene Kurien is a Malayali-American poet from South Florida. Her work has garnered support and recognition from MacDowell, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship, and Poetry Society UK. A Tennessee Williams Scholar in Poetry for the 2025 Sewanee Writers' Conference, she has poems published or forthcoming in Poetry London, RHINO, Sixth Finch, The Cincinnati Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. You can learn more at carolenekurien.com.
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This week, SWWIM and Matwaala are coming together to celebrate women writers of South Asian heritage with a week of poetry and a SWWIM x Matwaala writing residency and reading at The Betsy-South Beach featuring visiting writer Nina Sudhakar and local writer Carolene Kurien. (The reading will take place on September 11 at 7:00 pm. Please join us in person or via Instagram Live or Facebook Live!)
Matwaala was launched in 2015 to increase the visibility of diasporic South Asian poets (from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Afghanistan) in the mainstream American literary landscape. The name Matwaala in a transferred sense suggests the intoxication of poetic creativity. Matwaala showcases the diversity within the South Asian community—and within the Indo-American community.
A note from Matwaala: Matwaala, the South Asian Diaspora Poetry Collective, is honored to join hands with SWWIM in celebrating a week of South Asian poetry that celebrates Matwaala’s tenth anniversary. A thoughtfully curated selection of women poets offer us a constellation of rich poetry this week. Together with SWWIM, we affirm poetry’s power to bridge distances, and amplify voices.
Night Sequins
by Sophia Naz
(A poem series)
1
Do you sometimes feel that your life is a sequel
to a first act you can’t remember?
Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise?
I mean who wants the terror-imprint of an unfamiliar
fluorescence coupled with first breath and squeal and pull
of gravity despite cradling.
Night of amnion sea anemone
followed by night cribbing as emblem
of first separation
2
Consider how a sequin is a round wound
a moon with a hole in its heart
already prepped for the needle that pierces
and pins it to your absence.
3
Sequins seeking shelter from nightmares
nest in encampments of eyelids
Needle is to finger as knit is to skein
Sequin comes from *sikka, your Urdu purse coins
a glitter of language, sheds
a snake. Hangnails bleed
inconsolable.
4
Insomnia is your unchecked baggage
on the night flights home the cities
also half asleep, their coverlet of light
bulbs sprouting feverish impatience.
5
Tasks upon landing: memorize the taste
of a freshly rolled moon
swim through thousand-layered air
turn your pockets inside out, watch
America clatter to the ground
eons of small change
& cold nights melt
ice on a hot side - walk
walk
6
Humid night evades all metal detectors
smuggles her skin hue midst you
a sequence spilling
in all directions
home
*sikka: coin, the first sequins were coins stitched to fabric. This fashion traveled to Italy where it became zecchino, and from there to France where it became known as sequin
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Sophia Naz has authored the poetry collections Bark Archipelago (Weavers Press, San Francisco & Red River India), Open Zero (Yoda Press), Pointillism (Copper Coin), Date Palms (City Press), Peripheries (Cyberhex ), and a biography, Shehnaz (Penguin Random House.) Her work appears in The Academy of American Poets, Poetry Daily, The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets, The Night Heron Barks, Singing in the Dark, Berfrois, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Rattle, and The Adirondack Review, amontg others. See sophianaz.com.
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This week, SWWIM and Matwaala are coming together to celebrate women writers of South Asian heritage with a week of poetry and a SWWIM x Matwaala writing residency and reading at The Betsy-South Beach featuring visiting writer Nina Sudhakar and local writer Carolene Kurien. (The reading will take place on September 11 at 7:00 pm. Please join us in person or via Instagram Live or Facebook Live!)
Matwaala was launched in 2015 to increase the visibility of diasporic South Asian poets (from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Afghanistan) in the mainstream American literary landscape. The name Matwaala in a transferred sense suggests the intoxication of poetic creativity. Matwaala showcases the diversity within the South Asian community—and within the Indo-American community.
A note from Matwaala: Matwaala, the South Asian Diaspora Poetry Collective, is honored to join hands with SWWIM in celebrating a week of South Asian poetry that celebrates Matwaala’s tenth anniversary. A thoughtfully curated selection of women poets offer us a constellation of rich poetry this week. Together with SWWIM, we affirm poetry’s power to bridge distances, and amplify voices.
Ghazal for an Amputation
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
You ban anesthesia, blood-game the sweet
Evict her, chase her, bomb her, then blame the sweet
How to cut her little legs to save her life?
How inhabit love’s rubble, when you maim the sweet?
Ghosts, even of the burnt olive groves, rise
as stars of Bethlehem—no way to tame the sweet
No sugar in the promised land to numb your pain
Mary herself pours you nectar, names the sweet
Child, your once-supple limbs will, to you, return
What belongs in paradise, will claim the sweet
Zeest, you saw the world fray, weep, dance the dabkeh
Saw how, by love’s force the bitter became the sweet
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Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s poetry and essays have been published worldwide. She is the winner of the San Diego Book Award, Sable’s Hybrid Book Prize, and the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, among other distinctions. Her books include two poetry collections, a book of Ghazals and essays on the Ghazal form titled Ghazal Cosmopolitan, and a lyric memoir, Comb. Her latest nonfiction was published in Best Spiritual Literature Vol. 9 from Orison Press, and poetry in In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature in English (Oxford).
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This week, SWWIM and Matwaala are coming together to celebrate women writers of South Asian heritage with a week of poetry and a SWWIM x Matwaala writing residency and reading at The Betsy-South Beach featuring visiting writer Nina Sudhakar and local writer Carolene Kurien. (The reading will take place on September 11 at 7:00 pm. Please join us in person or via Instagram Live or Facebook Live!)
Matwaala was launched in 2015 to increase the visibility of diasporic South Asian poets (from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Afghanistan) in the mainstream American literary landscape. The name Matwaala in a transferred sense suggests the intoxication of poetic creativity. Matwaala showcases the diversity within the South Asian community—and within the Indo-American community.
A note from Matwaala: Matwaala, the South Asian Diaspora Poetry Collective, is honored to join hands with SWWIM in celebrating a week of South Asian poetry that celebrates Matwaala’s tenth anniversary. A thoughtfully curated selection of women poets offer us a constellation of rich poetry this week. Together with SWWIM, we affirm poetry’s power to bridge distances, and amplify voices.
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!
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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.
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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?
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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