by Dana Wall
I have become a country
Dana Wall traded balance sheets for prose sheets after keeping Hollywood’s agents and lawyers in order. With a Psychology degree for character building and an MBA/CPA for plotting with precision, she earned her MFA from Goddard College. Now writing full-time, her thirty published works mark milestones in her journey from numbers to words.
by Marceline White
In her bomb hair: Shells full of thunder; in her mouth: the fingers of some calamity.
the footsteps of your ghosts are white stones weighting my center, America
I am asleep in America too, And I don’t know how to wake myself,
And what now of dreaming? (All dreaming is now retroactive.) America,
Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Madison Avenue, handsome, in-the-know, and superstitious. America:
O, this political air so heavy with the bells
This is my plangent note to the ambassadors of love. America’s,
blood-veined rivers, painted pipestone quarries, circled canyons
Sing you home into yourself and back to reason, America.
Let the water come
I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart, my America.
Sources: Terence Hayes, Aria Aber, Tony Hoagland, Deborah Landeau, Tony Hoagland, Gregory Corso, Gregory Corso, Deborah Landeau, Allison Adell Hedge Coke, Allison Adell Hedge Coke, Saadi Youseff, Terence Hayes
The author’s additions are in italics.
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Marceline White is a Baltimore-based writer and activist whose writing has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, trampset, yolk, Prime Number, The Orchard Review, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review, and others. She has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. When not writing, Marceline can be found serving her two cats and telling her son to text her when he arrives at the EDM show. See marcelinewhitewrites.com.
by Susan Michele Coronel
The beat goes on & on as you springsystem
us into awareness amid harbor views,
dazzling galleries, bougainvillea arched
over café walls. You’re like a humpback whale
in Hawaiian shirt communicating more than
the bare necessities of life with clicks, whistles,
vocalizations & slapping sounds. Echolocate this,
you troubadour of brotherly love! Your beard
is bread in a tangled vine, your eyes at once
sparkly beach stones, raindrops & holes
in clam shells drilled by mollusks searching for food.
You do not need to search for sustenance. You are
the provider of soul morsels & offer them freely.
After dining at Fresco’s Waterfront Bistro, we hear
a new question pepper the sidewalk by the ice cream shop:
Did you know that you’re beautiful? Saint Pete holds
a Guinness World Record for the most consecutive
days of sunshine. You’re like the Sumerian sun god Utu,
momentarily relieving us of our distress, planting joy
like moss, & for a moment, we acquiesce.
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Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. Her first full-length collection, In the Needle, A Woman, won the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she has had poems published in numerous journals including MOM Egg Review, Spillway 29, Redivider, and One Art. In 2023, she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Award.
by Ronna Magy
by Emily Pérez
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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by Cecille Marcato
Minus a uterus
the pelvic floor is rugose,
a desert waiting
for the driest weather
of age to collapse
the roof of its house.
It’s about gravity,
the lawyer explains
to the empaneled men
who put their belongings
on the edge of the jury box
not believing that the pen
the pad
the paper cup
(hot & full of coffee)
will fall
to the courtroom floor.
On Earth, she tells them
everything falls.
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Cecille Marcato (she/her) is a poet and cartoonist in Austin. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Leon, South Florida Poetry Journal, Free State Review, Naugatuck River Review, Husk, Solstice, and Slipstream. She holds degrees in literature and design and graduated from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
by Dani Janae
My entire life, I have learned to subsist on love that was
not whole, that was piecemeal, that was not made for me
to begin with. That kind of love makes you think you were
born wrong, a villain invading the crib. My adoptive mom
did not love me in a way I could understand, so I learned to live
in the hollow. I learned to love the mother that birthed me,
loved what I made her: a quiet, bookish woman who played piano.
When she was not who I wanted, I learned to love who she was.
I searched any approximation of her name, and learned to love
the errors. Did you mean: Sarah Walsh? Did you mean: Sarah Welch?
I learned to love the woe. I learned to love her demons. I learned to
love her refuse. I have a face only my mother could love. I have some
secrets only my mother could forgive. I say all this to say: my mother
left me to the wolves and I still loved her. Do you understand?
The weight we give daughters to carry? Like a fruit tree, I spawn good
children. Each poem sparkling and juicy. It takes a therapist one session
to name “abandonment.” The search engine says, did you mean: absence?
Did you mean: abscess? Did you mean: abstract? Did you mean: abet?
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Dani Janae is a poet and journalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has been published by Longleaf Review, SWWIM Every Day, Palette Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, and others. Her debut collection of poetry, Hound Triptych, will be published by Sundress Publications in Spring 2026. She lives in South Carolina.
by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
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