by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
by Julia Salem
Don’t you want to take a hatchet to it sometimes,
when the whole world becomes a patchwork
of itches, your brain’s scruffiness unbearable,
the mangy carpets, paint shedding like dandruff,
and it becomes clear that despite years of pledging
to pick up the pace, take shorter lunch breaks,
the scabby scaffolding is permanent, that just
as you’re hanging red and green curtains
in the Lebanese history room, the World War 1 floor
craters despite the good joists your history teacher
put there, and now all you can make out is a body-
smashed window and an arched doorway inscribed F.F.,
but you know Friar Fuck was a Sex and the City character
and definitely not an archduke, whatever that even is,
and now you’re picturing a duke doing a backbend
while your history teacher cries into his green tea,
which you remember he drank most mornings
before he rolled up his sleeves, revealing
his forearms’ tectonic musculature,
his verve revving you like a squirt of sun.
Is that when it started, this problem of attention
cantering off in the wrong direction,
yoking itself to the litany of men
who each take up a whole fucking room,
while you are trying to learn something true
about the world, trawling for insight through articles
that pitch into landfills of dollar-store hypotheses,
of which you’ve got plenty gunking up your bar cart,
the berms of your bookshelves, even the stairs.
You can’t go anywhere without stepping on a gimcrack
notion, some of which look like dandelions
but when you claw through the carpet, there’s no root,
just a shred of ribbon from a long-shelved gift.
Can you still hear the cry of delight that shot
into the rafters when you opened the small
black telescope, and again when you pointed it
to the sky, and asked how? And why?
____________________________________________________________
Julia Salem is a London-based writer and editor from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Atlanta Review, Pigeon Pages, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first poetry collection.
by Summar West
After Jane Kenyon
shows up when least expected,
almost like its first cousin (on both sides) Happiness,
who’s told to arrive three hours earlier than everyone
for fear they still won’t make it to the dinner on time.
It’s like that, my sober friend says
after she attempts a story to describe how spiritual
transformation happens: no, that’s not quite it,
and the inky nucleus erases us again.
Maybe that’s what happened this week
at lunch with your daughter—the first time we’ve met—
and while I’m tuned in to her, trying to ignore your presence,
the light from the window halos you. Love—
enters the room like some special guest
we gasp to see because she’s here to sing.
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Summar West's poems have been published in a variety of places, including including Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Construction, Ellipsis, New South, Prairie Schooner, Still: the Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Tar River Poetry, and others. Born and raised in east Tennessee, she currently resides in coastal Connecticut.
by Heidi Williamson
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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What waters our bodies have received
—each filament of rain
coursing the length of our skin
lies undiscovered now at this dark hour.
In here, the night is quiet and cool. Outside,
the wild rain courts the grass: even in the dark
I feel its greening—the grass glossed like keratin smoothly
anchoring, protecting the dust of us.
I lean against the solidity of your clement body
soft with sleep, lean in to you. On your arm, your hand,
each tiny hair responds to my disclosing touch.
The territory of your body grounds me, strands me.
The grass has craved this all day:
the phantom rain fell too lightly to reach land,
the heavy sun striking out
droplets as they formed.
Above all, my uncontrollable heart
coils wild as the wild rain outside
springing right back up again
from the earth where it belongs.
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Heidi Williamson is a Writing for Life Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund, running reading and writing groups in community and care settings. She teaches for the Poetry School, Poetry Society, National Centre for Writing and The Writing Coach. Her poetry is published by Bloodaxe: Electric Shadow (2011), The Print Museum (2016), and Return by Minor Road (2020). Her short fiction has been selected for the Bath Flash Fiction Awards, Edinburgh True Flash Awards, and Fish International Short Story Prize.
by Lara Payne
Such an abundance of green, I used
to think, passing that corner lot, daily
But the man was taken from his lawn
two weeks ago, now, and the grass grows
uncut and unruly. We are in gold time,
now, gold season. Light abundant
in its waning glory. A whole field
of children running, kicking. Dive
and fall. Voices meld with owl
and hawk, the last peepers. I am
the partially rusted crank of a bicycle
that barely rattles. I am the skill
you pretend will come back. Memory
grows in me like that uncut grass
will, one season later. If I take the high
path above the river who will I see, fear?
Will ticks unstick from tall grass, attach
to my churning legs? Tick tick tick
the bicycle is singing, now. Everything ends
the grasshoppers sing and the sunset-bound
birds, and the man in some cell, taken
from my street while I walked in sun
at the farmer’s market.
____________________________________________________________
Lara Payne lives in Maryland. Once an archeologist, she now teaches writing at the college level, to veterans, and to small children. Her poems, many of which explore the Chesapeake environment and people, have appeared in a museum, on buses, and in print and online journals. Recent poems have appeared in the Broadkill Review and One Art.
by Judith Hoyer
Believe me when I tell you that I sat next to Julia Child in 2001.
It was dinner for a cause, two days before 9/11, in her backyard
at 103 Irving Street in Cambridge. Forgot my camera in the car.
Sun cracked open on our backs. Me in my aqua knit.
No lights. No cameramen. No script. Would you believe
I owned up to my sin? Those red lentil, thyme-smudged pages
on my Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It’s my therapy, I confessed.
She nodded, hummed her approval. She was warm, easy like an omelet,
me like a napkin in her lap. Her smell, apricot, pear, with a hint of ambrosia.
Sometimes I believe that amazing things happen by accident or loss.
That’s when I want to have a little cry, feeling kind of lucky with my
grandmother’s recipe for fish chowder following me around the kitchen.
Believe me when I say that inside Julia’s house I peeked in the pantry,
caught a chef riffing jazz on the bottom of copper pots. In the living room
bodies leaned against wood-paneled walls, or sunk deep in sofas, plastic
forks deep in Ragoûts de Porc. I snaked through the kitchen where someone
handed me a martini glass tipsy with Mousse au Chocolat. Believe me,
I saw those chipped blue cabinets, the old oak table where she lunched
on a baked potato every day, said she saved her appetite for dinner with Paul,
and by her banged-up gas six burner, the one that’s in the Smithsonian.
_________________________________________________________
Judith’s poetry collection, Imagine That, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2023. Her poems have appeared in journals that include CALYX Magazine, Cider Press Review, Southwest Review, Tar River Review, Atlanta Review, Moth Magazine (IRE), Worcester Review, and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). She lives in Wayland, Massachusetts.
by Terrie Elaine Joplin
by Holiday Noel Campanella
Things are worse the farther we get
from your aliveness.
I thought I could fill it with action,
the holes you left,
but I keep returning to the stillness
of my bed. I can’t run at night.
My dreams tangle into you. I turn corners
into what should be empty rooms
and you are in them. There you are—
in the morning I tell my grandmother
about my dreams. That you are exploring—
in my house in Nashville, where you’ve never been,
you do not speak. You are observant.
You do not smile. You are not sure
about this death thing yet.
I am not so sure about this death thing yet.
You never did trust anything easily.
Would repeat yourself over and over,
wanted people to get things right.
You’re putting God through the wringer right now.
She’s trying to convince you to trust her,
don’t you know she’s God?
You tell her you were always told God
was a man, is she sure she’s God?
But you should know why—
you were always surrounded by us women.
You could never have been given a man as God.
He never could have convinced you to sit down,
have a few more bites,
stay.
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Holiday Noel Campanella is a multi-disciplinary writer and artist. Her work has been exhibited and sold nationally (The Smithsonian Museum, The Clay Studio, Anthropologie), published in lit mags and journals (Gigantic Sequins, Philadelphia Stories, Imposter Lit, San Pedro River Review), and is in public and private collections (The Free Library of Philadelphia, Vanderbilt Libraries Special Collections). She has a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania with The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
by Ray Ball
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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I think
I can’t see a deer
on a page
without bracing for impact
the word evokes
not one car crash
but two antlers
shattering windshields
in stricken moments
replicated later in a set
of vanishing headlights
one summer morning
a dear friend and I gasped
snippets of conversation
and gossip pushing our tempo
quick turnover on a shaded path
clouds of mosquitos
blocked the sun
when we startled a doe
her eyes reminded me
of the color of a totaled sedan
of the terror of waking
as glass breaks and soars
of the way winds lift
off a river the way
darknesses intertwine
creating a fragile anchor
to tether a vessel between worlds sleep.
_________________________________________________________
Originally from Oklahoma, Ray Ball currently lives on the land of the Dena’ina, where she works as the Vice Provost for Student Success and the Dean of the Honors College at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is the author of two history books and three books of poetry. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Free State Review, Glass, and Sierra Nevada Review. Ray has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and been a Best of the Net finalist.
by Susanna Rich
Because this is a collegial trip
and we knew each other only
through virtual meetings,
and I’m doing you a favor
introducing you at the panel,
you are blowing up an air mattress
for yourself,
insist I sleep in your bed.
I insist I can’t—please let me lie
on your living room love seat.
No.
You close the door between us,
you say, because, all night, your cat
would jump on and off me.
On and off.
I lie on top of your blue spread
in my yoga pants and leopard T,
study the red numbers on the clock.
Minutes climb to 59,
plummet to the 00
of slow, withholding hours—
the colon pulsing
the seconds between.
Morning, you guide me to your window,
point to an egret by the river’s edge,
its body a white eighth note against ripples,
beak piercing the far bank.
You press two cling-free peaches—
hard, green—into my hands,
and leave so I can shower and dress.
I rinse the raspberries I brought,
eat the crushed overripe,
leave you the plump red mouths
to cool in your single bowl.
_________________________________________________________
Susanna Rich is an Emmy-Award nominated poet and founding producer of Wild Nights Productions, LLC, including her musical, Shakespeare’s *itches: The Women v. Will, and ashes, ashes: A Poet Responds to the Shoah. She is author of five poetry collections, most recently Beware the House and SHOUT! Poetry for Suffrage. See wildnightsproductions.com.
by Elisa Albo
For Lisa B.
Each time we are sixteen, friends who attend rival
high schools in our Southern, segregated town. You
don’t care I’m Jewish, speak Spanish at home. Our
dads are beloved physicians, still make house calls,
write off overdue patient bills. Each time it’s the day
we meet at your house, mid-afternoon, no one home,
go skinny dipping in your backyard swimming pool—
your idea. How comfortable a slim creatura you are
in your own skin. Tall, fearless, each time you dive
into water with ease, a kingfisher’s iridescent grace,
brace fingers at the rough edge to spring out, then
in again, slice the clear surface like a leaf-blade to
the low depths, emerge as if from some halcyon
stratum, jewels in your hair, a slow-motion film in
the waning day’s glow. Years later, our fathers gone,
no contact since we were girls, my mother calls from
our growing up town to break gently the news of your
overdose—you escaped a bad marriage, remarried
someone older, kind. You were happy—they didn’t
think it intentional. The obit said heart failure, as it
often does. Each time from beneath pearlized silver,
wavy black hair frames a gleaming face, smiling
brown eyes. Water beads on skin, dissolves into air,
into sunlight, as we leap out together, plunge in again.
_________________________________________________________
Elisa Albo is a contributing co-editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Harassment, Empowerment, and Healing. Her chapbooks are Passage to America and Each Day More. Her poems have appeared in Bomb, Crab Orchard Review, Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents, and Vinegar and Char, among others. Associate editor for SoFloPoJo.com and award-winning professor of English at Broward College, she was born in Havana and lives with her family in Fort Lauderdale.
by Nancy Krygowski
The store that sold my red girl shoes
was across from the dentist who didn’t use Novacaine,
who shoved my mouth open and tugged
at my problem teeth, then offered me suckers
in primary colors while my mother pulled coins
from the bottom of her purse.
The shoes were corrective. I don’t know
what was wrong with my feet, didn’t understand
why I couldn’t have single buckle black patent leather.
The red was oxblood, a word I understood
though I’d never seen an ox or the smear
of brown-red on underwear, knew only blood
thin as a geranium petal from flesh freshly nicked.
When my mother looked down at my deeply red feet
she saw my difference and what she and her other kids
couldn’t have—bags of pink-red pistachios, quarts
of black-red cherries, red velvet cake slices asleep
on paper doilies, a new coral-red lipstick named Fire
and Ice. The shoes were stiff as the arms she wouldn’t curl
around me and my deformities. I need to believe
each of her sacrifices made me able to run.
_________________________________________________________
Nancy Krygowski is the author of The Woman in the Corner, named one of the top 100 (or so) poetry books of 2020 by Library Journal, and Velocity, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She teaches in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing program, and is Co-Editor of the Pitt Poetry Series and the Pittsburgh Bureau Chief of the tiny newspaper, Tiny Day.
by Miranda Beeson
by Cynthia Atkins
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
_________________________________________________________
by Ashley VarelaI
by Marion Wrenn
One way to listen to the city
is to choose one sound above the rest;
let the ear engineer a soundscape; let it
glide across the crush of tender missions
at treacherous intersections, shun interlocked
brakes, fire smashed horns
from transplanted drivers; plunge against
the flow and attend the absence
of the Muezzin’s call in the gloaming.
Avenues drop rose-colored
light. I’ve been listening for the distant crow
of a rooster someone’s keeping close
whose cry erases the tumult–the marriage
of soil in a raised box for root vegetables
and the carrot of birdcall above the hum.
Every prayer is a gentle wish for a time
machine; every wish a feathered freefall
that robs the thanks from my lips;
listen for the chicken someone
can’t keep secret and be glad.
____________________________________________________________
Marion Wrenn is the author of Gladiola Girls (Cooper Dillon Press). Recent poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, River Heron Review, and The Georgia Review. She co-edits the literary journal Painted Bride Quarterly, where she also co-hosts the literary podcast "The Slush Pile." She is the Executive Director of Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi.
by Rachel Becker
The doctor says the hearing
loss is bilateral, mild
to moderate, premature
given my age. During the test,
a robotic voice intones
You can say firetruck,
so I say firetruck
and you can say nosebleed,
and I say nosebleed.
Why is every crisis
compounded? And what if
I can’t say? Sometimes,
I hear death instead
of best. Moon instead
of noon. The air chooses
which sounds to swallow
into its vanishing mouth,
which ones to leave fallow.
____________________________________________________________
Rachel Becker’s poetry recently appears or is forthcoming in journals including North American Review, Post Road, MER, SoFloPoJo, Rust & Moth, Wild Roof, Crab Orchard Review, and RHINO. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is a poetry editor for Porcupine Literary: a journal for and by teachers. She lives in Boston.
by Veronica Kornberg
Either end of the same street.
Same neglect, same shaming.
Same keepsake maple leaves
pressed between pages
of World Book Encyclopedia.
We had the creek and bust-out laughter.
Caged beagles that licked us
through chain-link. And shadows coiled
in the verges. Delight and fear
twinned in our hearts.
At night, we walked each other
halfway home, toed the asphalt's
center line. Always, moths plastered
the milky streetlamps. Always a flicker of bats.
I'd walk you halfway home, then
all the way. After that, you'd walk me back,
the shifting distance too fierce
for either one of us
to brave alone. Eventually,
on a count of three
we broke and ran. I always paused
to turn, am turning still, to see
the empty cone of lamplight
where once you stood, a long-limbed girl,
barefoot and alone.
____________________________________________________________
Recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry, Veronica Kornberg's work appears in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Calyx, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Plume. Veronica is a habitat gardener on California's Central Coast and a Peer Reviewer for Whale Road Review. Her debut collection will be published by Wandering Aengus Press in early April of 2026.
by Sarah Ann Winn
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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Spoilers: it can be done. Given paper
large enough, thin enough. I have always been
so creased and compressed I’d explode inside
a compressor. Too heavy to lift and yes, some
have tried or joked about it. The first
seven turns are easy. Everyone has
a set number of tools and limited
energy and then we’re done. We can’t
take any more halving, we can’t keep
coming back to the same place pressed
together. We are all imperfect
logic, math-matched,
given the choice,
the moon or that time
I thought I would never be able
to fold again,
I would take the distance
I have
and be grateful
to stand under.
Sistered to the sky.
Darkness is always ready
to do the final calculations,
to keep close.
If most answer forty five
I return at forty six,
still counting.
At forty seven, nobody
asks any more
where will we go
from here?
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Sarah Ann Winn’s first book, Alma Almanac, won the Barrow Street Book Prize. She is the author of five chapbooks, most recently, Ever After the End Matter. Her writing has appeared in Five Points, Massachusetts Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Sarah has led workshops at the Writer's Center, Loft Literary Center and the Poetry Foundation. She's also the founder of Poet Camp, a creative community where she leads online classes, jumpstarts and cozy writing retreats. Find her at poetcamp.com.
by Doritt Carroll