by Ruth Dickey
by Simone Zapata
by Barbara Hamby
by Naomi Shihab Nye
by Natalie Shapero
by Jo-Ann Mort
by Ae Hee Lee
by Karen Elizabeth Sharpe
A simple sky beams into the afternoon, 34-degree bank sign blinking overhead. I’m waiting for the light to change, mid-October, out on a corner, a thousand fingerprints on the silver signal walk button in front of me. At home the socks sit in separate piles. Your old record albums stacked separately. My winter coats in their own separate closet. We’ve always come together best in argument, our emotional forte, the dark ash of thrown books and shoes. It took hardly any time at all for us to learn the value of my body, its intonations. Its pitch. At the curb, transgressions mound in a thick paste of early snow.
Crosswalk signal bleating
walk, walk, walk
I do what it says
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Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is a poetry editor at The Worcester Review and author of Prayer Can Be Anything (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have or will soon appear in On the Seawall, The MacGuffin, SWWIM Everyday, Split Rock Review, Mom Egg Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs, among others.
by Suzanne Cleary
Giant is the film where Rock Hudson is upstaged by a piece of rope.
He sits behind a big desk while James Dean sits before him, waiting
to see if he’ll be fired—for what, I’ve forgotten. There are lots of things
that can go wrong on a ranch in West Texas. Hudson owns this ranch.
Dean lives in a shack the size of an ice cream truck. In this scene
he holds a piece of rope 15 or 20 inches long. He drapes it across
his palm, pulls it slowly off. He winds it loosely around his wrist,
slips it off. Actors cite this scene as a masterclass in presence.
Dean has the dirty-blond hair of the man I once saw at a funeral home,
wearing a shirt from the local hockey team: bright green, a white number.
He waited in line with the rest of us, and when finally he stood
near the casket, he held the hand of the widow
between his cupped palms, as if he were holding a bird.
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Suzanne Cleary’s fifth book, The Odds (New York Quarterly Books 2025) was selected by Jan Beatty as winner of the 2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. Recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, her poems appear in Best American Poetry and journals including The Atlantic, Southern Review, and Poetry London. She is Core Faculty in the MFA in Creative Writing Program of Converse University.
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.
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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.
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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
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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