by Sophie Yu
by Tammy C. Greenwood
by Dorian Kotsiopoulos
My mother steals away to her back stairs
for a quiet smoke. I find her,
wiggle in close. The wooden step sighs.
She exhales hard, tosses her cigarette
in the ashtray of the yard, slips inside.
The bent butt is a broken bird,
the lipstick-stained filter a red wing tipped with ash,
or a folded crane made from burnt paper.
I pick up the still-lit butt, inhale
the flavor of exhaust, grind it out
on my bare foot. A warm red sore,
the start of infection, a secret tattoo,
that calls to me with every step.
The pile of butts a campfire,
abandoned, a thin line of smoke
dissipates from its center, then reappears
in the shape of something familiar,
a pigeon, or a dove.
Someone mentions Lucky Strikes years later,
and I remember how I swore
I’d never smoke, or shadow people
with my clingy, sticky love.
That’s not true. I do both,
sometimes at the same time.
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Dorian Kotsiopoulos's work has appeared in various literary and medical journals, including Poet Lore, Salamander, New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, On the Seawall, Smartish Pace, and Third Wednesday as well as in the anthology, All Poems Are Ghosts (Tiny Wren Lit). She is a reviewer for the Bellevue Literary Review. In addition, she’s recently began serving as a co-director of a reading series in Boston called Chapter & Verse.
by Nan Cohen
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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If I say you know me better than I know myself,
that’s not to say you know everything about me.
What I mean is that a forest doesn’t know itself
the way a woodcutter does. Or a wolf. Or a child
walking into the woods.
But, you, you know what it is
to walk in these woods. To greet the woodcutter
and the wolf. To take the child’s hand.
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Nan Cohen is the author of two books of poems, Rope Bridge and Unfinished City, and a chapbook, Thousand-Year-Old Words. She lives in Los Angeles.
by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
by Laura Sobbott Ross
It was an all-night party
she will confess later.
Splayed and snoring on the beach,
she draws the curious, mostly women.
We cover her with our shadows.
That’s my daughter, I tell them.
She’s had too much to drink.
One of the women asks if she can pray for me,
and another asks if my shorts are from Shein.
Yes, I say to both, remembering the pattern
I wear is of brightly colored fish.
Dreamless eyes. Hollow, gaping mouths.
Tailfins that long for current
but are caught in the stitches of seams.
As the mother of an addict, I want to
tell the other women there is no rock bottom,
at least not one my daughter has found.
She just sinks a little deeper, I mean to say,
but the tide has already begun to rise around us.
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Laura Sobbott Ross has worked as a teacher and a writing coach for Lake County Schools in Central Florida and was named Lake County’s poet laureate. Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and have appeared in Meridian, 32 Poems, Blackbird, Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Arts & Letters Poetry Prize and won the Southern Humanities Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. She is the author of six poetry books.
by Laura Last
My son flew out west yesterday,
into sunset’s bloodshot eye, back
to the desert where dust hides
its venoms and salves. Life holds itself
in dry stumps, and at night: that bowl of sky,
punctured by stars. He loves
the creosote smell after rain, the saguaro
that blooms after dark. Scorpion
shoe, hidden wound—he is half javelina,
a tough-hided creature patrolling
the canyon with his wide-shouldered
squadron, hiding the most tender
parts of himself: just what we meant
not to teach him. Here in his boyhood
home, rain smears the skylight, too warm
to freeze. Attic dripping with absence,
a room thick with loss and relief.
We sent him away to keep him alive
and so far, it has. Face-down in his pillow,
I pretend to breathe in his mountains, his sky,
the smell of wet dog in his bed. We know
we walk backwards by water, blind-
folded, unclenching, unpeeling ourselves
off of him: only child, phantom limb.
_________________________________________________________
Laura Last is a writer and musician living in the Hudson River Valley. In 2024, her poem, “Apology,” was published in Fantastic Imaginary Creatures: An Anthology of Contemporary Prose Poems and was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
by Janet MacFadyen
Isn't every poem
an unfinished love poem, the needle
making a new hole to fix the old?
I come to you the way the half moon
comes into the yard—I could be more whole
but it lands on the roof of the next house, singing.
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born out of nothing. I need a poem
about happiness I haven't written yet,
even though all I want
is what I already have. Nothing
different, just more. So sit with me
under the plum tree and trace our lifelines
together—how they branch,
how they sing.
Lines from Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Alegria Barclay, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Naomi Shahib Nye, Li-Young Lee, Kyla Jamieson, Mondi Sbeity, Michael Simms, and Jessica E. Pierce (Taken from Love Is for All of Us, James Crews and Brad Peacock, editors).
_________________________________________________________
Janet MacFadyen is the author of three full-length collections, most recently State of Grass (Salmon Poetry 2024), with a new collection, Love Letters to the Wild, forthcoming from Dos Madres Press in 2025. Honors include a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, a residency in Cill Rialaig, Ireland, and a 7-month Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellowship. Her poetry appears widely. She is the managing editor of Slate Roof Press, a poetry chapbook collaborative. See slateroofpress.com.
by Zoë Ryder White
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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My neighbor, in her green gloves and plastic bunny mask, is training her pear
tree—a child, really—to stand straight, arms outstretched. The tree goes two-
dimensional with this effort. It’s a training meant to bring beauty; symmetry.
Every year as the branches grow, there is more length to tie down. To plant a no-
shitting-dogs icon in the square of dirt around what you’d call the tree’s trunk,
my neighbor trades the bunny mask for raccoon. The tree is drawn and
quartered, though my neighbor is kind; encouraging. Things grow well around
her. She binds the tree’s branches to the frame with twisties. She pushes the
raccoon mask onto the top of her head so she can see what she’s doing. When
the tree is old enough to bear fruit, pears will hang from the frame like a row of
pears at the market. When the other neighbor walks by, the one who calls me
fucking white whore, will she admire the honey blush around the pears’
dangling bottoms? And will I? My neighbor puts a new mask on. What a
collection! This one is the tusked wild boar. Dangerous, delicious. G. says we’re
each a little queer in our queer little way. Kurt C. said something similar in the
nineties but I’m not sure he meant what she means. If I sit still, I feel what
moves through my carotid. A pot of bones boils in the kitchen. I render the
spring fat. I lay my hands on me.
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Zoë Ryder White’s first full-length collection, The Visible Field, is forthcoming from River River Books in February, 2026. A chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. HYPERSPACE was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015) and Elsewhere (Sixth Finch Press, 2020) with Nicole Callihan. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family.
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
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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!
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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