by Zoë Ryder White
My neighbor, in her green gloves and plastic bunny mask, is training her pear
by Ruiyan Zhu
Lomonosov is the birthplace of composer Igor Stravinsky
Light spills through morning like a jar of pennies—
pooling over the music scores, each page waiting for fingertips.
It’s our first morning ritual: I press my thumbs
through the f carved into the violin’s cheek, bridging bow to string.
On the second-hand leather bench, I work rosin
into the bristles, its powder rising like sawdust
from a workshop where the air once carried notes
of tobacco, varnish. Beside a frost-tipped photograph, a bottle
of Kemlya stands capped in dust, remembering the curtained corner
of a New York apartment, the hand that tipped it back. In its reflection, home
spins, tilts into view: its floorboards loosening under the weight
of record players, photo albums, Stravinsky wafting through the kitchen.
In the hall, shoes scuff, lifting as students tumble through
the doorway. Between a welcome home mat and the painted gaze
pinching a Matryoshka doll, Lomonosov blinks awake.
His bow lifts. Our strings unclutch. For a moment, the room forgets
we are on the other side of the world.
_________________________________________________________
Ruiyan Zhu is a high school senior from Saratoga, California who currently serves as the editor-in-chief of her school newspaper and literary magazine. Her work has been recognized by JUST POETRY!!! and the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
by Leona Sevick
My mother loved the Old Testament best,
stories that invited Charlton Heston
to bare his broad, oiled chest, his pronouncements
delivered with otherworldly cadence.
He looked something like my father, light hair
and good bones, tall and wide in the shoulders.
She’d seen The Ten Commandments a dozen
times as a child in Korea, the cool
dark theater, the screen a miracle
of movement and sound—a haven from a
world that never promised peace. When she
first saw my smiling father, she doubtless
found him familiar: his broad brow and white
teeth a comfort in the days that follow
war. She’d hold my hand each time the Red Sea
parted, Israelites pushing through, pharaoh’s
soldiers at their heels. I never saw her
in the Moses role, imagined, instead,
her following that flowing hair and raised
staff. But in the end she went first, the sea
and all its creatures crashing down around
us, our chariots flung into the whorl.
I reach for my father’s hand, my brother’s,
but they are not reaching for mine. They are
looking eastward, just spotting a head of
still black hair, a small hand waving goodbye.
_________________________________________________________
Leona Sevick’s work appears in Orion, The Southern Review, The Sun, Poetry Northwest, and Pleiades. She serves on the boards of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference, and she is professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. Her second collection of poems, The Bamboo Wife, is published by Trio House Press.
by Eggie
the letter e
adorned English words
like Mima’s dangly earrings
la letra e
abrazaba las palabras
de mis abuelos y tíos
it was the appetizer of a sentence,
solo para picar,
there was doubt in “umm”
but smiles con “e–”
smiles like a wedge of lime,
fresh and bursting wide—
there was fuerza in fuck,
like fear,
like a fall,
like a bad grade,
but a curse was subdued to a tease
when bookended with e’s
“fuck” sandwiched between two Fibonacci spirals,
the letter e like
the turns of a wooden spoon,
a swirl of dulce de leche,
o merenguitos con café—
y entre e, me quedaré
_________________________________________________________
As a proud Miami Cuban, Eggie enjoys writing about her intersectional experience as “una cubanita” in America. Her work has appeared in The New Croton Review (Fall 2023 issue) and e-magazine The Maroon in 2018. Her poem “Self-Portrait of a Cuban American Woman” received the 2020 Dawson Gaillard Award in Poetry at Loyola University New Orleans. Eggie is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and MA in TESOL/Applied Linguistics at The University of Alabama.
by Sarah Seybold
Mom soaked her pantyhose
in a pale yellow pan
on the counter
beside the sink.
Under the rusted
metal cabinet
and warped plastic mirror,
the nylon stiffened,
crusted with skin flecks
and unrinsed soap.
She left them so long
the water dried up.
_________________________________________________________
Sarah Seybold’s poetry and prose are published or forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Dodge, Chicago Quarterly Review, LIT Magazine, ZYZZYVA, Arts & Letters, The Indianapolis Review, Great River Review, and elsewhere. She grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana, and earned her BA in English and Gender Studies from Indiana University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. She lives with her husband and daughter in Columbus, Ohio.
by Adina Kopinsky
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
_________________________________________________________
A knee joint, a bent elbow,
a spangled skirt—ballerinas passe
towards the floor, shoulders gleam
with the minutiae of anatomy;
Elegant as ever you sketched—
dancers in the dim light of a dressing room,
skin like cream and caramel, hollow
against spine, like horses paused
before the Kentucky Derby, prize stallions
of the Bolshoi Ballet.
No wonder you loved them all, Edgar—
muscles, feathered skirts and plumed
tails, the heave of chests, mist
and paw, the rise and fall of music,
gunshot, the hee-yaw! of a jockey—
you would have loved Messi too,
instep kick like a dancer on the soccer field,
rising a releve to the rhythm of his fans;
hearts stopped, tableau, the body
of work you left behind, ballerina and horse,
brush and charcoal, form and flesh,
Raymondo, Ronaldo, the sweat and swell
of delusions, dreams, a revelation
of what our bodies, our hands
might have been—
_________________________________________________________
Adina Kopinsky is attempting to balance poetry, motherhood, and contemplative living. She is originally from Los Angeles and now lives in Israel with her husband and four sons. She has work published or forthcoming in Crannog, PANK, SWWIM Every Day, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among other publications. She is also a board-certified lactation consultant and a language editor at The Journal of Human Lactation.
by Kara Dorris
Once I beat a purple beanbag chair with a toy bat—
I wanted to destroy a memory. The empty
plastic surround-sounded the attic
like a jet hitting supersonic. A thousand bees
flew out & tiny teeth welted my body, unasked.
Bodies dropped. The chair shed its captivity,
reclaimed the shape of air. Gleamed morning-after
vacant. I wondered if we would ever fly free
air felt like a taser. I could pretend we were topaz
confetti marring the ground or stuffing
waiting to fill something else like phantoms
& reincarnation, Elvis sightings & Britney
Murphys lurking in bulimic teen girls. & still the bees.
A thousand wing-holes ooze Red Hots,
scrunchies, & promises, condoms, & action
figures, the earrings I lost when a boy was lost at sea
inside my body. But the memories pressurized, sank
deep in the skin where they had always been,
pressed tight against synthetic, water-
resistant pleather.
_________________________________________________________
Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections and five chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Redivider, DIAGRAM, Wordgathering, Puerto del Sol, and swamp pink, among other literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She currently teaches writing at Illinois College. See karadorris.com.
by Dayna Patterson
by Julie Ebin
In the shower I inspect my leg,
prop my foot up
in the tiled corner, pivot
shin to calf, slowly back and forth
like a rotisserie display.
Under the blades miles and miles of leg
reveal themselves. A Sahara of leg!
I stay in the shower long
past the hot, long past
sense, admiring
my strong ankle sinews,
alien knees, stroking silky skin.
I swoon smooth strangeness,
feel illicit for days:
every breeze
up my pant leg a thrill,
I’m more naked than skin.
____________________________________________________________
Julie Ebin is a queer human whose work explores sensuality, finding stillness in nature, and motherhood. Ebin is a member of the Poem Works Boston community. In her earlier years, she studied with C.D. Wright and Gale Nelson. Her work has most recently appeared in Solstice, Touch: The Journal of Healing, and Off the Coast. A co-founder of the former experimental collaborative writing group v.e.r.b.a.t.i.m., Ebin lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with one child and zero cats.
by Abigail Michelini
by Jen Rouse
The beveled mirrors hold
you open to the sky. Reglazed
and lit to dazzle. Sometimes
I am waltzing with you
there. Your wig elaborate
and winged with birds.
The woman in the painting
next door runs through
the pasture wild, unbridled. How
I always want you this way.
Gleaming teeth, eyes that spark
and gallop. We are in worlds split,
untimed, and tragic. So stop
tapping at the glass because I
cannot take you. I raise my hand
to touch your hand to still you there.
(Oh the tapping.) We look beside
ourselves, and I become your
mouth moving so quickly, and you
become my finger against these lips.
The carousel keeps us fixed in place.
I want to tell you this thing about
the way you dance inside me.
Endless. The circles. No sound.
____________________________________________________________
Jen Rouse's most recent book is Fragments of V from Small Harbor Publishing. She is the author of four books of poetry from Headmistress Press: A Trickle of Bloom Becomes You, Riding with Anne Sexton, CAKE, and Acid & Tender. Rouse directs the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College.
by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
I welcome winter’s stripped branches,
last year’s nests clinging to the sky,
the possibility of uninterrupted vista.
But this year, Sam tells me,
the generations have turned against us,
since we have eaten up the bounty
they thought would be theirs.
I look around. Perhaps it is so.
Still, I find some glory in final fruits—
a patch of ice, a snow-bent azalea,
one intrepid persimmon failing to fall.
____________________________________________________________
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She has published four books and five chapbooks. Her poems have been anthologized and appeared widely on line and in print. Find her at wendytaylorcarlisle.com.
by Ellen McGrath Smith
After Robert Hayden
When she still tried to entertain over holidays,
before she gave up on pretending things were normal,
she’d often choose a night he worked and set to cleaning house
and placing little bowls of snacks around, begging us to please
not eat them, giving us tasks we probably didn’t complete.
There was a glimmering lull before the first guest arrived,
the tree still lit though school had started up again.
We were on our best behavior for her sake,
and once her friends were all amassed
in a crush of perfume and whiskey sours,
would hang on the stairs and ledges of the night
the way angels are shown to lounge on clouds,
waiting for something to go terribly wrong,
willing the air (in the ineffectual way of angels) to shine.
____________________________________________________________
Ellen McGrath Smith‘s poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Talking Writing, Los Angeles Review, and other journals and anthologies. Books include Scatter, Feed (Seven Kitchens 2014) and Nobody’s Jackknife (West End Press 2015). Her chapbook Lie Low, Goaded Lamb was published in January 2023 by Seven Kitchens Press as part of its Keystone Series.
by D M Gordon
He was, as advertised, a good horse.
We became like an old married couple—
fat and sheeny at thirty, he could still buck me off.
A vet said cancer, in November, before frozen ground
and icy buckets, before a long night’s thrashing
against barn boards when no help would come before dawn.
He grazed the last sweet threads of pasture
in a halter with his name in polished brass.
Someone he didn’t know stroked his neck.
Someone who knew what was coming inserted a needle.
His legs folded, a wisp of grass between his lips.
He was a good horse. It was the death he deserved.
It is the death I deserve. I am telling anyone
who will listen. I too have been good.
____________________________________________________________
D M Gordon is an editor, poet, and novelist. Her prize-winning stories and poems have been published widely. The poetry collection, Nightly, At the Institute of the Possible, was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in fiction and two-time finalist in poetry. Upcoming publications include Loosestrife for Porcupines (Blue Light Press), and Gabriel (Sibylline Press), a novel about a lost boy among Salish Sea islands. See dmgordon.com.
by Taylor Light
Frederic Edwin Church, 1861
We had to have the mast to see ourselves,
as if the icebergs’ sapphire veins
did not contain enough for human touch,
or this ice grotto, conserved as a sclera,
which seemed to spill out siren songs
at tidal surges. The lack of scope and scale
distort the scene—where do we place our feet?
Can we tune our ears to hear the ice
making its fractured adjustments, as eerie
as static? Darwin writes that light
will be thrown on the origin of ourselves
and our history. The mast wasn’t originally
in the frame; it was a later addition,
and so were we. Light lilts on the smooth
ice-sheet, as the ocean hushes against ice-
rocks, enduring the wind’s chisel.
But the mast—the mast remains in the painting
like an unwanted splinter, where loneliness
and ice align.
____________________________________________________________
Taylor Light is a poet from Dallas. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Florida and has received support from the Convivio Conference in Postignano, Italy. Currently, she is a PhD student at Southern Methodist University with a focus on eco-poetics.
by Constance Bacchus
by Liz Ahl
almost rhymes with earth, the solid dirt
we stand on which is neither one single thing
nor solid, but rather amalgam and alchemy,
boulders and grains, plates adrift on magma
seas, sinking, rising, quaking, tested
by forces seen and unseen.
Like those pocket aces you slow-play
among felt-table strangers, it can feel
like a lock as much as a lark, even
as some small voice mutters fold,
remembering well the particular sting
of that kind of loss, the dwindling chip-stack.
Was it faith rewarded when the hydrangea
we’d rudely pruned, having refused to bloom
for years, finally popped back, a dusty violet trio
returned to prodigal parents? Was it faith
or some other ache in us the whole long time
we silently agreed never to mention that empty space?
____________________________________________________________
Liz Ahl’s most recent collection is the chapbook, A Stanza is a Place to Stand, which won the 2023 A.V. Christie prize from Seven Kitchens Press. Her most recent full-length collection, A Case for Solace (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022), won the 2023 New Hampshire Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.
by Leah Umansky
After Maria Popova and for Josh Sapan and The Riverhouse
We name what we see and there are ways to see everything.
This morning, after the river cleaned and cleared itself,
The thick, jagged sheets of ice now gone, the phantom river
Once pushing through the then solid coverlet of snow, now gone,
Gone, and streaming down as one river now to the Delaware Water Gap,
We see two ducks diving for fish at the riverbank, their bodies
Curving into a lowercase ‘c,’ or a partnered dance of sharps and flats
On the bars of the river’s length. We reach for The Sibley Guide to Birds
To learn their names: Red-Breasted Merganser and Hooded Merganser.
We watch these beauties now, unfettered, with their hooded tuft of hair,
And their black and white mask, here, at the break of winter when the sun
Has melted everything in sight. Even the December air is not what it was.
____________________________________________________________
Leah Umansky’s newest collection, OF TYRANT, is out now with The Word Works. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her work can be found on PBS, The Slowdown, and such places as the New York Times, RHINO, and Poetry. See leahumansky.com.
by Valerie Martinez