by Rebecca Brock
She didn’t say it to me.
But I was old enough to understand
it pertained to girls like me,
to the women we would be—the not
born with it, I mean. I’m trying to explain why,
when the house painter sent me a video
of him playing the saxophone
in a dim but freshly painted
dining room, naked
beneath his white overalls,
his eye contact
with the camera as he wailed—
I really didn’t think it meant
what he probably meant it to mean—
he’d talked to me about his daughter,
about his wife. He’d be back in the spring,
to finish the outside of the house.
When he fell off someone else’s roof
and broke his foot, I was surprised
by how safe it felt
to ask for my deposit money back.
When he said I was beautiful
I found out I still believed
I should say thank you.
____________________________________________________________
Rebecca Brock’s awards include the 2025 Lascaux Poetry Prize, The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest, the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize and the Editor’s Choice Award at Sheila-Na-Gig. Her work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, Mom Egg Review and elsewhere. A MacDowell Fellow, she is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023). See rebeccabrock.org.
by Susanna Lang
Uzès
A pigeon trusts our slender balcony with two eggs
though it’s September, and the leaves she stuffed
around the fragile shells are dry. A late start for her
as it is for us. We step softly, not to startle her
as we shift our few things here or there, looking
for the corner where a chair would be content to sit,
a comfortable space where the buffet can wrap its arms
around our plates and forks. She must have thought
she’d found a quiet spot, empty until we arrived
with our baggage, our foreign speech, a vacuum cleaner.
We want her to stay, want to feel her brooding
presence on the other side of the glass as she waits
for the weeks to pass, for her eggs to stir and crack
into loud insistent voices, into need and finally flight.
____________________________________________________________
Susanna Lang’s chapbook, Like This (Unsolicited Books), appeared in 2023, along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). She was the 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from december magazine. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, This Spangled Dark, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. Her work appears in such publications as The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Rhino Reviews, and The Slowdown.
by Elina Katrin
by M.P. Carver
I’m in the bathroom hurling my guts out. From inside me
comes a needle, a heart, a dozen paint chips
There is no solution to the repetition of morning
My roommate listens to the mice in the walls
entering their own golden age of discovery
Aren’t trees, storms, earth, stone just common things?
Another street, another continent maybe, but the same sun?
There is toothpaste in my hair, smothering the mites
I have fostered there across 800 generations
My roommate helps me hold my head up, puts my heart back
brushes color and sharpness off my knees
The year is 2025, and I am in my 2025th week of life
All around the earth life simmers into vapor
Demodex mites live 2-3 weeks. Domestic mice 2-3 years
The bathroom is old and tired, but still it has a window
And beyond that window, a winter, a weakening sun
Though studded with light, the sea is desolate
So desolate, it’s hard to imagine
____________________________________________________________
M.P. Carver is a poet and artist from Salem, MA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, and Mantis, among others. Her second chapbook, Hard Up, is available now from Lily Poetry Review Books. She directs the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and co-founded and edits Molecule: A Tiny Lit Mag.
by Béthany Pozzi-Johnson
lest you one day ask, let me enlighten you as to why I
chose to live on an island in the middle of the Pacific
with nameless neighbors beyond the bamboo
within a studio nestled into the mountain which has received
no friends, no one for tea, high or low, nor a jam session
unending songs looping riffs and phrases
nor sangha sitting time between bells using the bronze bell
my mother gave me for my 34th birthday, catching wind
that her daughter whose only full time employment had been as a
karma yogi in the Guatemalan Highlands, years ago, who now
prefers silence, the silence which the refrigerator’s hum is the
greatest disturbance to, the daughter who liked small spaces
like the one next to the fridge in our apartment growing up
the space sealed off by a plank of fake wood, you know the kind,
a plank of pressed sawdust, held together by glue, pretend
wood blocking out a tiny cubby-hole she willingly dropped herself into
from the top of the fridge, armed with a screwdriver, to apply tool to
screw, and open up the dusty gap, making way for brooms—
that daughter, who in seventh grade hid in a trunk
during her book report on Houdini, to then leap forth
in a flash of enthusiasm: she-who-loves-small-spaces
she-who-loves-silence she-who-loves-privacy she-who-loves
the-ocean: turquoise and saturated blues, or covered with storms
muted lilacs and radiant gray-green expanding its heart
open to the infinite reaches of the planet she loves,
so she sequesters herself away to be able to see its
subtle shades, hear the delicate tones, the refined voices
of the sun-soaked and rustling bamboo, the incandescent peak
rising out of the sea, tickled by waters and whale song;
she-who-glows-with-love she-who-glows-with-glee
she-whose-roof-has-become-the-star-bright-sky
whose-floor-is-mountain-close-whose-walls-are
salt-rich-breath-she-who-she-who-she-who
____________________________________________________________
Béthany Pozzi-Johnson, winner of the Mark Linenthal Award for Poetry, holds an MA in Songwriting and a BA in Creative Writing, from San Francisco State University and Bath Spa University in the UK. She has worked as an editor, translator and astrologer, and currently lives on an island in the Pacific where she studies Gaelic and sings sean-nós.
by Susan Cohen
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!
____________________________________________________________
prurient, watching sex
between bat rays,
their paired wings stirring water.
Oblivious
to anything but each other,
they float joined
from the harbor’s sand bed to its surface
with a grace
Fonteyn and Baryshnikov would envy.
How can I not project
pure liquid pleasure on them—
their rising and rolling, gentle thrash,
the long, slow synchronous glide?
How can I not imagine tenderness
when they spread their wings like eagles
coasting on a thermal
and swirl their own currents?
Until done, or alerted
by our canoe—
its aggressive whisper in the water,
its manufactured buoyancy—
they startle
and shoot away like stars.
____________________________________________________________
Susan Cohen is the author of Democracy of Fire (2022), A Different Wakeful Animal (2016), and Throat Singing (2012), as well as two chapbooks and a non-fiction book. A former journalist and contributing writer to the Washington Post Magazine, she earned an MFA from Pacific University. Her poetry and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, New Ohio Review, Poetry International, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Review, Verse Daily, and many anthologies. Her honors include the Rita Dove Award, Milton Kessler Poetry Prize, Terrain.org Annual Poetry Prize, the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, and a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prizes. She lives in California. See susancohen-writer.com.
by Cydni Thompson
I brought the little bed downstairs.
On the curb it can be taken by anyone.
In my cave I carved with nails what I thought
was the only sun. It’s cruel, this purple
sky. The light is cruel. Truth walks by
in her ranger uniform, her little dog
barking: you didn’t have to stay so long.
I hate that dog. I hate truth.
I hate that little bed I clutched for years like
an intestinal perforation. The house
stands severe behind me like a statue
of Mary. A dewdrop eats its sister.
I’ve become the sort of woman
who kneels in the wishing well
to wash her face.
____________________________________________________________
Cydni Thompson is an emerging poet from Jamaica, Queens. She is pursuing an MFA at Queens College. Her work can be found in Bear Review, trampset, No, Dear Magazine, and elsewhere.
by Leila Farjami
The good old days were when I wore
too much makeup—triple-coated mascara,
cat-eye clawing my temples black,
lipstick layered like mortar. Too slutty, you said.
Since then, my thighs have thickened on butter
and canola, piglets grazing, fattened for slaughter.
You taught me to boil, drain, brew rice
with a شِک مَد—a cotton-puffed lid to trap steam,
swelling like your belly after three births.
Oh, that flat tummy, you said.
In Tehran, at the bathhouse,
you filled my mouth with pomegranate seeds—
garnets spilling down my chin.
The white tiles of نمره حمام blotched
in fake blood. You worked cedar balm
into my limbs, swore it’d cool my جون.
You lined a coarse کیسه with سفیدآب,
scrubbed me like worn hide.
چرک rolled off in green-grey sloughs.
So filthy, you said. I wasn’t ashamed then—
my young hips, wide like yours, tilted
sideways, claiming I’ve got it.
Breasts? The right size, you said.
Shins rotund, toes too meaty, bunions raw—
no سیندرلا. In time, my thigh gap vanished like yours.
My شکم distended. Saddlebags settled over femurs—
my twin jugs of tallow. Watch your weight, you said.
***
These days in Los Angeles, my ankles carry me
across sidewalks. Unshackled—an immigrant going places.
Unspeakable is the hole in my chest— how it sheds
dead light, like a fizzled star, scabbed-over, ash-heavy.
My mid-age self jams three fingers down her coarse throat—
a trinity: thirst, hunger, Holy Spirit.
I binge on a feast of promises—words.
Then more. Flesh, once given, is never owned.
The end so near,
no bone goes to waste.
____________________________________________________________
Leila Farjami, an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist, is the recipient of The Iowa Review Award in Poetry (2025), The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award in Poetry (2024), and PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship (2025). Her work has been recognized as a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize from Pleiades, the Perugia Press Prize, the Trio House Press Award, and the SIR’s Michael Waters Poetry Prize for her book-length poetry collections. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, The Mississippi Review, Southern Indiana Review, CALYX, The Penn Review, and in anthologies from Sundress and Guernica Editions, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.
by Kristi Maxwell
As a reminder to play, contemplated cocktail
swords for finger tattoos on each of our hands.
Swashed. Considered the bacteria
slurped up by my drink off the skin
of a pierced lemon, a different part for my hair.
I felt tenderly toward the flaw’s expression.
After the flaming sugar cube failed
to totally dissolve, took it as a reminder
of what will remain, the loose hair of loss
ever entangling itself. Celebrated alongside
my love the discovery of a pea crab
inside an oyster’s shell. Became an orchid
then explained to a stranger’s child a reason not to
shoo away a good-news bee. Watched a storm ruffle
the lake surface and rough up un-staked tents
someone dodged on his way to join me.
When I walked, it was chin-up, a smile
latched to my face like a leash.
It wasn’t that I felt made obedient but I was
trying something on, my whole head a dressing room
inside of which many things stood naked.
____________________________________________________________
Kristi Maxwell is the author of nine books of poems, including Wide Ass of Night (Saturnalia Books, 2025); Goners (Green Linden Press, 2023), winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize; My My (Saturnalia, 2020); Realm Sixty-four (Ahsahta Press, 2008), editor’s choice for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize; and Hush Sessions (Saturnalia,2009), editor’s choice for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She’s a professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville.
by Sabina Khan-Ibarra
by Deborah Bacharach
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!
____________________________________________________________
—a duplex after Jericho Brown
Girls get one thousand a day. The extras,
like him, get a hamburger with fries.
He’s like a juicy hamburger with fries
without the courage to ask for a dance.
Without the courage to ask for a dance,
The Wall Street Journal says men don’t marry.
The old Journal runs the pro/cons of marry
for men against just getting the sex for free.
Men against just giving sex for free
ask for the basic beat they’re supposed to know.
Ask for the basic beat you’re supposed to know.
Even Questlove, with his music certainty,
knows in the quest for certainty, love,
he’s no Prince, but he can delve down deep.
He’s no prince, but he can delve whale ear bone-deep,
give day girls his one thousand extra selves.
____________________________________________________________
Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has recently appeared in Poetry East, Last Syllable, Only Poems, and Grist, among many other journals, and she has received a Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention. She is a poetry reader for SWWIM Every Day and Whale Road Review. See more at DeborahBacharach.com.
by Sonya Rose Hartfield
Never have I feared losing
my shadow, it was always
the fear of sewing it back
to my toes, Wendy’s sharp needles
piercing Peter Pan’s flesh with
silk thread, but my greater fear was
my mother rooting around at night in
my brain, to tidy my thoughts like
endless loads of laundry folded into
mind drawers, I was afraid she would
see the shadow parts of myself I kept
hidden from her, my anger stuffed into
forgotten corners that she would not see
beyond happy facades, I did not want to
trigger explosions that would rock the boat we
sailed together, wasn’t I grateful for the
sacrifices she had made without any
apologies? It was easier to place my anger in
Neverland where I could lock it tight as a sacred
treasure chest, sink it beneath waves where it
would be safe from those who might steal it,
accessible only by mermaids, who would marvel at
how the anger glimmered when it touched
the light.
____________________________________________________________
Sonya Rose Hartfield is a poet and creative nonfiction writer who explores the intersection of femininity, chronic illness, somatic healing, poverty, and grief. She believes writing is a powerful vehicle for resilience and the radical act of reclaiming joy.
by Ellen Kombiyil
You are making
macramé at the kitchen
table. Along the long repository
of wood
you are darning your life.
At this table, in this hour
of making, your life
is a fixed hole
spilling, like waterfalls,
a crashing ping of knots,
a silence
where hitch knots accumulate
into flowers, where the knot
coils from its source, a knot without
a mother inside its head
saying, speak.
In another life,
you see yourself
emerging from a tunnel
—you pass your mother
(the echo of a train
remembered)—
on the iron rails, chugging
in the opposite direction.
She wants to tell you something.
She’s wildly gesticulating.
As from a dream, the words
garble, knotted in the throat.
Her hands puncture
the fabric of air.
She’s talking and the void
will not fill.
____________________________________________________________
Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is the author of two poetry collections, Histories of the Future Perfect (2014) and Love as Invasive Species (2024), a tête-bêche exploring matrilineal inheritances. Her visual art has been displayed at Emerge Gallery and is forthcoming in Bear Review, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West. She has new poems appearing or forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Cherry Tree, and Tahoma Literary Review. She currently teaches writing at Hunter College. See ellenkombiyil.com.
by Lizzy 柯 (Ke) Polishan
the horse-girl/cowboy dichotomy wants you
to ride it home for so long it breaks like a heart
in a western, maybe lonesome dove, maybe
some other series, maybe something real.
you ask your lover to unravel: you are given
a toothpick and told to knock yourself out.
at the bottom of the ocean, you learn to eat the unloved
fish first, so you don’t need to watch
every heart break twice. “I built a barn
for my horses and a life for
the last woman who said I love you back,”
your lover writes, to the woman he’s been wanting
to want him for some time. she twists long grass into jewelry
she wears high around her biceps, in the place
you always cover on yourself with a shirt. you don’t mind.
honest. like you, your lover has never wanted anybody,
even her, even you, more than he wanted to feel loved back.
____________________________________________________________
Lizzy 柯 (Ke) Polishan’s poems appear in Gulf Coast, Passages North, EPOCH, RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, petrichor., Poet Lore, Rust + Moth, Greensboro Review, Pacifica, and others. She is a Guest Editor at Palette, a Poetry Reader at Psaltery & Lyre, and the Managing Editor at River & South Review. She is the author of A Little Book of Blooms (2020). She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband.
by Alexis Rhone Fancher
First off, I was bereft. How could Mary have deceived me? I always thought she was satisfied. I can’t tell you how many all-nighters I pulled, staying up late, reading Masters and Johnson, the skills I’d conquered for her pleasure. What about the G-spot, Mary? She always moans when I find it. Now I have to wonder. Was she faking it? As for that bun in the oven... Who’s responsible? When Mary said God, I laughed. That’s who you’re laying this on? What blasphemy is that! I’m a Jew! A pious one! Surely she could come up with something better than God. Still, I have to admit, Mary has a wild imagination. Covering up a peccadillo with a wild goose tale. Who does she think she’s fooling? Curious, I follow her out to the manger, where the tiny tot’s cradled in a bed made of straw, a blanket tucked neatly around his body. He’s cute, looks a lot like Mary’s dad.
It’s a miracle, Mary says. And the kid’s gonna save us all.
____________________________________________________________
Alexis Rhone Fancher is an award-winning poet and photographer. Since 2012, she has published ten books of poetry, most recently Erotic: New & Selected, Brazen (both NYQ Books), and Triggered (MacQueen’s). Her photo book of 100+ Southern California poets will be published in early 2026 by Moon Tide Press. A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, Alexis won Best Micro Fiction 2025. She lives in the Mojave Desert. See alexisrhonefancher.com.
by Jude Marr
by Yukyung Katie Kim
ten kindergarten children pushing one another on the swings, chuckling
about how Sarah unhooked a trout and let it swim back–
nine Earl Gray tea bags strewn along Hampshire Street, shimmering
oil sheens of cinnamon, jasmine, citrus reaching for the storm drain–
eight mink jackets piled on a bench in front of a korean barbeque
joint, ingrained with The Jacobson’s in bold verdana, forest-green–
seven toyotas lined up, single file like hybrid ducklings, dawdling
from Sunderland to Amherst, shadowing black labradoodles on the sidewalk–
six french tourists with polyester bandanas brushing more sweat
than even the sky’s cotton balls have held; the Sahara, half a world away–
five Indian elephants barreling through naked branches, matting the feathers
of downed birds, fellow victims, pebbled with their ancestors’ wrinkles–
four drenched cigarette butts twirling around in the Deerfield River, morphing
into baby tadpoles, flaunting their orange tails, their pale bodies–
three bald heads, checkered overalls, lattice hats
plowing the withered mouths of weeds and browning begonias–
two ladybugs, one hind leg longer than the other, carrying
my diaspora of pomegranate seeds down my right arm—
one barn brushed with the dampness of autumn leaves, tarred
with ashes from last night’s bonfire, still smelling of roadkill and rubber–
____________________________________________________________
Yukyung Katie Kim is a writer, visual artist, and musician from Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her work has appears in Altered Reality, DePaul's Blue Book, and Roanoke Review, among others. She is an alumna of the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, and the Ellipsis Writing Workshops.
by Maria Surricchio
—Eavan Boland
One hovers, head bent sharply down—
strains with waiting for the other
pushing up with such force
its whole body seems to rise
into its chest with the thrust, tailfeathers
tapering long and slender below. Swollen
and filling with blood, my son’s new tattoo
of two swallows he says
are his grandparents. Were they like this—
so muscular an ache as they reached
for each other? My son only knew my mother
in perpetual motion, her small, darting
body. Smiling from photos, my father
appears calm, still, but does my son see
what I did, even as a child: the restlessness
he checked for the life he didn’t want
in a gray country he didn’t love? And more—
how it took everything she had
to be always moving toward him.
And for him, to stay in place.
____________________________________________________________
Maria Surricchio is originally from the UK and now lives near Boulder, Colorado. A life-long lover of poetry, she began writing in 2020 after a long marketing career. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in Blackbird, Salamander, Poet Lore, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Comstock Review, and elsewhere. She has a BA in Modern Languages from Cambridge University and holds an MFA from Pacific University.
by Patricia Clark