by Linda Laderman
by January Gill O’Neil
From the freezer, my daughter removes
a gallon bag of dull green scraps, plops them
into boiling water, and watches them simmer
into a funk of vegetable blood.
She understands reduction, appreciates
the economics of brine, what it means
not to waste nor want, the papery onions
disappearing before her eyes.
In the kitchen, everything gets an afterlife,
given enough time and the right touch
on a chilled February evening. Lauryn Hill
spins a groove on the turntable singing
about how everything is everything
as the greens cook down, reduced to
a silky soup, the soupy leavings discarded.
What’s left she pours into a blue and white bowl,
steam swirling above the rim. How easily
my daughter turns nothing into something.
This humble dish, ladling what time delivers,
needs croutons. Maybe some lemon zest.
____________________________________________________________
January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road, Rewilding, Misery Islands, and Underlife, all published by CavanKerry Press. The former executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series, The Nation, and Poetry, among others. She currently serves as the 2022-2025 board chair of AWP.
by Jia-Rui Cook
More open windows on a summer night. More
coolness from the tongue of a conch shell
& warmth from a towel left for hours in the sun
& New Orleans growl in art-museum jazz. More
shoes with the heels worn out & cross-hatched
sidewalks under fan palm trees & star nurseries
blooming through my daughters’ mouths. More close-ups
of faces in photographs of cities getting bombed
& study of which direction their eyes are looking.
More light that can escape from black holes.
More baby blue-belly lizards scooting away from boots
& making it to the shadowed underside of rocks. More
thread for pants slashed at the knees & crabgrass
that can nose through astroturf. Bring on the live voltage
of the future tense to shake load-bearing beams.
Show me a kind of math that can account for the cruelty
a hurricane whips down when it meets land & the beauty
of the blush-lit spun-sugar clouds it leaves behind
& my need to remember the pummeling so I can harden
when the next storm comes but still
leave me the ability to round up.
____________________________________________________________
Jia-Rui Cook is a Chinese-American writer, editor, and producer in Los Angeles. Once a staff writer at the L.A. Times and the news events and projects lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she is the senior communications officer at the California Wellness Foundation. Her poetry has recently appeared in Alta Journal, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Hunger Mountain Review, Mom Egg Review, Missouri Review, and Puerto del Sol. Jia-Rui can be found on Instagram @funjiable.
by Summer Hardinge
by Catherine Abbey Hodges
It's #tbt! In honor of our 10th anniversary, we are celebrating our staff members by re-running their work from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Buffy Shutt
She takes us flying.
Easter weekend, we wear matching outfits.
I drop my yellow sweater in the Potomac.
She leaves my sister in a cherry tree at the Tidal Basin.
Mother flies low so I can scoop up my sweater.
Two tourists rescue my sister from the crook of the cherry tree.
My sister is covered in blossoms.
She never forgives our bird.
We are grade schoolers.
Our mother is eight musical notes.
Not an ear worm exactly, more an anthem.
She unfurls each morning.
In our teens she is a book.
The cover is purple.
She stashes it out of sight.
For me to know and for you to find out.
I like her best as a bird.
She is not home. She is fast.
She is love
gone off course.
I am water gushing over her burial mound.
I haven’t been solid in weeks.
I swim in her rectangle until
my sister orders me to stop.
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Buffy Shutt, a former movie marketing executive, is a poet, mother, and grandmother. Her work appears in various journals. Buffy’s debut poetry collection, Recruit to Deny, is available now. She is also the author of Memos from the [20th] 21st Century, a chapbook of poems disguised as corporate memos, and of the chapbook animal magnetism. Buffy graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where she met her best friend, her husband, and her writing self.
by Jordan E. Franklin
by Dré Pontbriand
My mother doesn’t eat bread: she kneads and picks at her body’s
soft rolls, cursing the mirror for not being a time machine. What good
would going back in time do? She’s always been too much. It’s 1999.
Mid-astronaut craze. My classmates are set on making their way
into space; I’m thinking of ways to take up less. I’d get claustrophobic
in the rocket ship, shatter a window, implode or freeze. Might be worth it
though, to land on the ground more lightly—the weightlessness.
Junior year: every morning, after every meal, before bed—I pray.
Bare knees on a marble pew, a toilet bowl confessional. I take
my socks off last, rip out my hair elastic. Lyle asks why I carry
a sweater everywhere I go no matter the season. As a kid, I was
the queen of snow angels in mid-December, Mom chasing me
with scarf and mittens. The suggestion of a breeze freezes
me in place, so I stay in bed. Showers aren’t for clearing away
the day. There is no day, just softened shivers. My father says:
Now you’ve done it, you’re a perfect weight. I eat leaves
for every meal that isn’t breath and have a panic attack
in the bathroom at Ivy’s dinner party. I don’t have to go
outside to see stars. I just stand up. Freud said dreams are windows
into our subconscious desires. I’m smoke blown through delicate
lips. I lower the bong, envious as gaseous gold evanesces into
the ether. There’s a silk carpet on the yacht I work on. We brush
it to erase footprints even apparitions leave behind. When I walk,
I don’t leave a trace. I did it. I’m nothing. I’m
____________________________________________________________
Dré is a queer Mexican-French Canadian poet, cantadora, and alchemy enthusiast. She also writes in her mother tongues, Spanish and French. Her work has been published in Gnashing Teeth and Arte y Literatura Hispanocanadiense Anthology. She is currently working on her debut poetry collection.
by Iris Rosenberg
I keep my troubles in my hands. A curse
has made them stiff as catcher's mitts. You see
I cannot bend or flex. No pills for this.
Still, others have it worse. And in my dreams
I am Titian. My hand the perfect brush,
slowly circling your nipples, your belly.
First with red, then green. An old artist’s trick
to make skin glow. We’ve seen for ourselves rooms
filled with long-fingered Madonnas divined
in paint the color of olives. Heaven,
how much the eye can hold—even as it
searches for more. Like my hands every night,
longing to draw you into my arms. Though,
as if alone, you lie facing the wall.
____________________________________________________________
Iris Rosenberg writes poetry and fiction in New York City. She has an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute and is a former poetry reviewer for Library Journal. Her work will soon appear or has been featured in L’Esprit, Thimble, Rust & Moth, Right Hand Pointing, and Club Plum, among other literary journals.
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!
____________________________________________________________
After watching the documentary Free Solo
I keep thinking of you measuring the walls,
saying you’re allowed one question every day
about furnishing the condo Alex has just bought,
or when you asked him in the front seat of his van
(saying you’re allowed one question every day)
if you were someone worth not dying for
or, when you asked him in the front seat of his van
to rate his happiness, how blank he looked.
If you were someone worth not dying for
you would be someone more than just a girl
to rate his happiness. How blank he looked
remitting your devotion and your hope.
You would be someone more than just a girl
if you were loved by someone far out on the ledge,
remitting your devotion and your hope
with the reflective glow of his cold greatness.
If you were loved by someone far out on the ledge,
his hands would always hope for stone
with the reflective glow of his own greatness
before him on the mountain face.
Alex’s hands will always hope for stone,
the form that excellence must take for him;
before him on the mountain face
your passions can’t seem anything but trivial.
The form that excellence must take for him
makes people on the ground seem tiny specks,
our passions can’t seem anything but trivial.
Heights and solitude like that
make people on the ground seem tiny specks.
Don’t come to see yourself
from heights and solitude like that
as if your soul were no more than a dot.
Don’t come to see yourself
as little. Things you love
as if your soul were no more than a dot
are great things even in their commonness.
As little things we love
are requited, they become
great things, even in their commonness:
Those joys and cares tie us together.
Requited, they become
the solid rock to build a life upon,
those joys and cares that tie us together,
shared work, shared devotion.
The solid rock to build a life upon
isn’t furnishing the condo Alex has just bought,
but shared work, shared devotion.
I keep thinking of you measuring the wall.
____________________________________________________________
Elizabeth Sylvia is the author of three books of poetry: Scythe (2026), forthcoming from River River Books; My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties (2025) from Ballerini Books Press; and None But Witches (2022), winner of the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. She has received fellowships from the New York Public Library, the West Chester University Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference and was the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize. Elizabeth began reading for SWWIM Every Day in 2023.
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
_____________________________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
____________________________________________________________
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.
_____________________________________________________________________________
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).
_____________________________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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