by Sarah Carey
by Kimberly Reyes
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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More than AIDS, Arthur Ashe said
his true burden was being Black.
C.C. DeVille said being a junkie
was sexier than being fat.
Everything I know I learned from TV.
So my narration is jerky,
preemptive, unreliable.
I know Madonna said power
is being told you’re not loved
undesirable
and not being destroyed
between commercial breaks.
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Kimberly Reyes is an award-winning poet, essayist, pop culture critic, and visual culture scholar. Her work has earned honors from The Poetry Foundation, The Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, Tin House, the Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, and many other institutions across the world. She is the author of the new poetry collection Bloodletting (Omnidawn, 2025), vanishing point. (Omnidawn, 2023)—featuring the award-winning poetry film We Are All Drowned Out— and Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. She is also the author of Warning Coloration (dancing girl press, 2018), finalist for the Two Sylvias Press 2017 Chapbook Competition, and Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills, 2019), winner of the 2018 Michael Rubin Chapbook Award. A recent Ph.D. graduate, Dr. Reyes recently joined the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Miami as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing—Poetry.
by Athena Kildegaard
A cardinal in a lilac beside the parking lot
snapped its insistent note. The air was damp.
My brother settled a box of half-eaten pies
into the back of his dark blue SUV, laughing
at something someone nearby had said.
We’d come out of the community center, all of us,
family, friends, some we hadn’t seen since 1973,
full of pie and remembrances of our father,
and my brother would drive his long drive home,
nothing anywhere on the calendar ever
to bring us together again. He would have
driven off without saying goodbye—just as
my stepmother and stepsister had done—
a blunt clapping closed, a locking up. But
I insisted and hugged him, not a hug of care
or even of sadness, a simple shuttering, as if
a light rain had begun or as if a middle-aged
man had passed pushing a wheelbarrow
of manure. Something had to be protected.
Dignity, perhaps. The cardinal had flown.
The air was damp with the smell of lilacs.
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Athena Kildegaard is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Prairie Midden (Tinderbox Editions), winner of the 2023 WILLA Literary Award for poetry. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.
by Esther Lin
by Rickey Laurentiis
by Stine An (a (translation of Yoo Heekyung)
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