by David Eileen
she leads from the front, lilies at her throat, waving, waving
by Shannon Quinn
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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I trade you small pot of light
for key that sticks in door.
Our worst nights, coin toss
burn house or bed down.
Wool-drunk moths in sock drawer
judge our quiet violence and dime-bag sentiment
but then we have an early evening
you mostly sober, me mostly clean
thinking of every possible animal afterlife.
Prescription sleeping pills smuggle
us into sleep, where we are strangers.
Cross the street to avoid each other.
Drowning girl can’t climb
on another body, call it shore.
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Shannon Quinn is the author of three collections of poetry. She has a chapbook from JackPine Press coming out this November and two multi-disciplinary pieces forthcoming from Ponder Review. Her work was included in The Best of Canadian Poetry 2025. Quinn is based out of Toronto.
by Danielle Coffyn
by Cecelia Hagen
by Shelby Handler
My mother, with her long, ringless fingers, couldn’t
knot the slippery gizzards to the fishing twine, but she tried.
Still, I blamed her. For not being like the other mothers
who bought hot dogs from the Albertson’s,
sliced them in neat rounds, strung them to the lines
of real fishing poles, studded like pink-boiled beads
dunked into the dirty creek. The crawdads scurried,
swished up silt to seize those lures, appearing
eager to be stolen from their homes. Airlifted, plopped
into a bucket. Those mothers knew how to trap
innocent creatures. Those mothers put stickered notes
in their daughters’ lunch sacks, baked cakes that weren’t born
from a box. But I turned out fine. Taught myself
how to cook, how to bake bread from scratch. Last month,
I separated six yolks from their whites, the gold orbs cold
in my palms. My mother, in from out of town, peered
into the pile, saying, I can see myself in your eggs!
I leaned over to see, and the convex portraits
multiplied. A brood appeared. A hive comprised
of her and me and me and her and her and me.
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Shelby Handler is a writer, translator, and organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace. Recent work has appeared in and or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Redivider, Poetry Northwest, The Journal, Black Warrior Review Online, Four Way Review, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. Shelby received their MFA in poetry at the University of Washington-Seattle, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net.
by Pam Williams
Future? I drink coffee first. When I’m done my coffee, rinse it out. Gotta eat after coffee. Snack at night after six. I know it’ll rain. I don’t like rain. I. Don’t. Like. Rain. Rain makes me scared. Storms, lightning. I’m tired of looking at rain. In ten years, I’m going to be bored. Not doing nothing. Watching TV all day. Watching football. I like getting prizes. I like doing books. I’ll be watching crime and football. I’m a TV watcher. I like football a lot. That’s on today. I like the future. The future wakes me up in the night.
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Her name is Pam Williams. She is a Black poet and winner of the 2026 Cow Tipping Prize, awarded to a writer with intellectual/developmental disabilities. She knows herself. Everyone around here knows her name. They call her Pamela or Pam. She likes herself. She’d like to be friends with anybody here.
by Mary Elder Jacobsen
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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The grass is greener under-
water. I’ve grown green with envy over every under-
water weed, so long and thinly, loved and lively, glint and greenly under-
water. Fluidly, movingly under-
water. Leave me, grow me, willowy green me under-
water. Ebb and billow me. Lap and please me. Leave me be thee under-
water. O ribbon me, oh ravel me. Oh under-
water’s where un-
done I’ve long become have gone and go under
spells and lo how soon am over-
whelmed by deep by shallow
waters all and in whose realms I’ll gladly dwell, all unhoused and under-
water. Take me under,
water me there, make me pondweed under-
water, un-
dulate me under-
water.
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Mary Elder Jacobsen is the author of Stonechat, her debut collection of poetry. Her writing has appeared widely in print, online, and on the air in places such as SWWIM Every Day, The Greensboro Review, Cold Mountain Review, Poetry Daily, and The Slowdown with host Major Jackson, to name a handful. She lives in rural Vermont where she works in editing, the arts, and nurturing community spaces.
by Angie Mazakis
In Colorado, they are illegal to pluck.
Colorado citizens must “protect them
from needless destruction.”
It’s a flower that can subsist
for a while, then it fades away.
But one of its seedlings will persist
somewhere in the garden.
James Tate published the poem
“Why I Will Not Get out of Bed”
in 1967. The sense of these lines
was entirely altered every time
I read them after 1999:
“I see children running
through columbine…”
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Angie Mazakis’s book, I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First, was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Boston Globe. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Columbia Journal, Black Warrior Review, Mizna, and Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry. She was named a 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellow and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
by Amelia Badri
(or a sorry sestina)
That first year of life, I constantly used a washcloth to wipe the corner of your eye,
the blocked tear duct created a sticky goo that obstructed the foothill and flower
view of your little browns, as if two copper irises that dipped in and out
of our clay soil sleep, but Aurora, I could take all the candle-fly’s light
in the dull world, and it still wouldn’t match the moon-tune
of your smile, those lost sock memories that fuzz and fade so
fast, flutter off like the Amazon’s animals dying colors, our Calypso-
hip-to-hip-hammock-hugs phase, temple of the lost kitty days, a doll-eye
dot on your forehead to chase away the envy of your joy for a goofy cartoon
or lining wads of dough up like dwarves and trying to lick the flour
off your fingers, I worried that my own lack of spice and kick and light
would put yours out,
sometimes my eelpout aggression would turn into a dark rainspout
puddle, too swamped to help you put your boots on to trek to the patio’s Rio Oso
to pick fresh peaches off the backs of wet bears, read leaf maps, and stay light
on your feet, I could probably blame the spot on my tongue like a black eye,
according to my mother’s mole astrology, her and I are flowered
with the power to have most our negative words come true, is it Neptune
or Mars that makes me more porcupine platoon
when you need me to be a dumpling-star-soup, safe space in a blackout,
lost in your alien wonders and tiger scribbles as wild as passionflowers,
I want to deliver the syrup of alphonso mangos to your quick whips, lasso
your words onto all my pages, watch YouTube shorts about the iguana’s third eye
and help you unlock your own when night’s lack of happy light
sends you looking for me, where our arms can still be two pegs on the Lite-
Brite board that is missing most of the other pieces, little escaped Looney Tunes
we hardly find throughout the house, pink and green, and like our bunny’s eyes
that were at one point baby blue, thank you for helping me out
with these lines, to pause on the parts I usually let crawl away, for making it so
easy to turn a cold-front morning burst in sun-dried, plantain-flour
yellow, I pray goddess of good mommies, wherever you may be, turn me from undone sunflower
to pork crackling mofongo, filled and merry as the full moon, even she takes delight
in your chicken and rice jokes, she knows how to sew
each one into her thick cardigan so your grandpa can tune
into all your inherited trickster hues, even when life binds us in tears, we’ll get out
together, a calm place to play, when it’s just you and I
cry, scream, cat crouch, spear the flower’s too quiet tune,
hit me with your quick jabs or take a light swing, slug it out,
bruise the gummy day’s ego, poke the murk so precisely in the eye.
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Amelia Badri is a Guyanese-American mother, teacher, and writer from Miami.
by Yiskah Rosenfeld
You take me for a mountain
when I offer a flower, blossoming
bone-white in dark earth.
I give myself away
egg by petaled egg.
Never assume a heart.
What holds me together?
The ribbed parchment of a poem
not yet written, a torso
not yet rubbed. If you come early,
you’ll peel the thickest cloves,
but all of them tell lies.
Inside, sheathed in muslin,
those baby crescent moons
release my sweetest stink.
I’ll stick to you for days if you love me,
I’ll skulk under your fingernails,
you’ll know me from your own pores.
It’s the dense, ugly ones bellied in dirt,
skin crinkling like dry breath,
who savage life for all it’s worth,
make love with the sizzle and sweat
of those who wait a lifetime
to be opened.
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Yiskah Rosenfeld is the author of Tasting Flight and Naked Beside Fish, an ekphrastic chapbook. A single mom by choice, Yiskah holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and lives in the SF Bay Area with her trans daughter. Honors include the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, the Prism Review Prize, and a Frontier Poetry Prize. Poems appear in Lilith Magazine, The Bitter Oleander, December Magazine, Rattle, and elsewhere. See yiskahrosenfeld.com.
by Hilary Sideris
Carina, he’d say, as I left for work
in thrifted sweaters & pencil skirts.
He proclaimed it from our bed
where he lay like a pasha, plump,
unemployed. Carina—not lovely
or beautiful—just cute—was good
enough for me. I loved his language.
He didn’t love mine. Didn’t read
English, not even The Times.
He stuck to La Repubblica.
Once, we held hands at the Met,
gazed at a woman with outsized
breasts in neolithic bronze—
squatting—the label read.
I went so far as to demonstrate
when he asked what squat meant.
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Hilary Sideris is the author of the poetry collections Calliope (Broadstone Books, 2024), Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press, 2022), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press, 2020), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books, 2019), and The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful LLC, 2016).
by Jennifer Litt
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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I found my father a wheelchair.
The footrest had dropsy;
every time we crossed a threshold
into another room his right foot,
missing its baby toe, scraped the floor.
We surveyed the giant skeletons of whales—
sperm, humpback, blue—suspended
from the atrium ceiling. Below us,
the staff set up tables and chairs
for a wedding reception.
When Dad saw the female
right whale with fetus, he whispered,
Your mother had a miscarriage
when we were first married.
Later, he lifted an exhibit phone
to listen to a whale song.
You’re no Tony Bennett, he yelled
into the handset.
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Jennifer Litt is the author of the full-length poetry collection Strictly from Hunger (Accents Publishing, 2022) and the poetry chapbook, Maximum Speed Through Zero (Blue Lyra Press, 2016). Her poems have been published in About Place, ellipsis…literature & art, Hole in the Head Review, Jet Fuel Review, Stone Canoe, SWWIM Every Day, and in several anthologies. She lives in Fort Lauderdale with her cat, Tiger Lily.
by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
by Romana Iorga
After Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (III, 33)
He came forth like a new beginning.
A portent, a fevered dream, an ultimatum.
Even asleep I knew how momentous
it was, that confrontation of ours
between blossom and rot. You’ll say
it’s a lie, but in the years after,
the shoebox under my bed filled up
with blue, wet-bird letters from God.
He’d been sending them down
and across the borders of thought.
What could I possibly do?
I took them all in. The first one
burst open. I buried it in the sod
under clouds like blimp mailboxes
pouring rain. A river rushed
through my mouth: cold and green.
Each letter was written in cursive
sadness only. He told me how
there was so much promise in pain—
the one faithful thing certain
to make us less mean, or grant
what we wished for: to have been
happy, unhappy, insane or not,
to have been lonely, to have been.
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Romana Iorga is the author of Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, 2024) and a woman made entirely of air (Dancing Girl Press, 2025). Her poems have appeared in various journals, including New England Review, RHINO, and The Nation. She lives with her husband and children in Lausanne, Switzerland.
by Kimberly Ann Priest
I don’t know what the words mean.
I mean, I don’t know
“peacemaker,” “pacemaker”
in the context of what the research proclaims
about a zebrafish heart, “a two-layer
localized peacemaking/control system,
a nodal pacemaker.” What does it mean?
The words? The study of vertebrate hearts?
My vertebrate heart: dum-da-duh,
dum-da-duh, dum-da-duh. We have
similar intracardiac nervous systems, it claims,
the zebrafish and I;
but no, I am no more fish than zebra,
no more gospel than disinformation.
No more what is written on paper to label
my difference: diagnosis, disability.
I wish to repeat the results of the test
that I took to be placed on “a spectrum,”
the high IQ it named.
I want to be pretentious.
I long to be so to his face—my ex, I mean.
In a text, he has called me “fucking stupid” again.
Fool, I’d like to say,
scientists perceive I am drowning in logic
the moment I discern this as murder.
My heart has a brain taking on water.
My heart has two kissy lips.
Note: Research found in “Decoding the molecular, cellular, and functional heterogeneity of zebrafish intracardiac nervous system” by Andrea Pedroni et al. in nature communications.
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Kimberly Ann Priest is a neurodivergent writer and photographer whose book Wolves in Shells won the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University, her poetry has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, and Chicago Quarterly Review.
by M.L. Hedison
I am the only one left
who knows how to make the bread
that came from Armenia
where my grandmother was born
in Eastern Anatolia, a region
the Turks swallowed whole in 1915.
The bread escaped with her
to a Beirut orphanage, emerged
from my mother’s hands
wrist-deep in flour, butter, milk
kneading with rhythmic purpose,
a folk dance of clenched fists
until the dough, no longer sticky,
was lifted from the bowl, into my hands.
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M.L. Hedison is an emerging poet based in the coastal town of Wakefield, R.I. Her work explores themes of absence, longing, and her Armenian family through lyrical verse. She continues to study with Jennifer Franklin and Wyn Cooper. She was published for the first time in 2025 where her poems appeared in ONE ART, The Tiny Journal, and Right Hand Pointing. She has work forthcoming in the Cimarron Review. This poem is a part of a manuscript in progress.
by Beverly Burch
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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She called after midnight from every sleepover,
begged to come home. Alarming as it was,
there was the luxury of settling her back into bed.
Until she wouldn’t be seen with us.
In time came a midnight call of the terrifying kind.
Hospital, alcohol. She sang in her room after fits
of weeping. Laid waste, ripped through, mended,
cured. Then it would start again. How did one body
contain the churn? Shifting mirrors,
colliding bits of colored glass, how did we?
She couldn’t wait to leave home, couldn’t bear to.
Once I stood at her door, long
metal spoon in my hand from cooking.
We both thought I would hurl it. Mercy descended.
O why so angry? Like my mother’s jagged bolt
of love, blazed by fear. Legacy
running the line of mothers and daughters:
does anything redeem us?
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Beverly Burch’s novel, What You Don’t Know, is the first book of a trilogy with interlinked characters. Part Two, No Guilty Secrets, will be out Spring 2027. She also has four poetry collections and two nonfiction books. Her work has won the John Ciardi Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a Gival Poetry Prize and was a finalist for Audre Lorde Award. She lives in Oakland, CA. See beverlyburch.com or her Substack, Rethinking…(Almost) Everything.
by Julie Weiss
messy, as in your mud-splashed pants, that day we should have stayed
inside during the rains. As in the folly of a mother’s insistence. The walk to
the shop we braved, for insistence’s sake. Messy, as in the ice cream I was
too distracted to catch before it avalanched over the edge of the cone I was
holding. Your triple chocolate treat puddling at our feet, while I stared at my
phone screen. How you rummaged through my coin purse, mouth
immaculate as a blade, its angles an accusation. How emptiness can stain a
moment, if not a memory. Messy, as in my smile, skidding unwittingly into a
serious childhood grievance. Your favorite toy, broken. An argument with a
friend. Sometimes, even if I don’t want to, it’s as though I graffiti no big deal
in sloppy letters across your sadness, then crash. Messy, as in a starling,
lying on its back in the street, stone-still. The broken-winged one you had
begged me to stop and save, but we were late to somewhere. Lateness, the
messiest apology for those difficult mornings, time teetering on the cliff
edge of its own crumbling seconds. The way I sometimes can’t stop my
rebukes from marching across the field of my voice, like a battalion. Messy
is as messy does, my loves. The more I fail to observe the world through the
eye of your storms, the messier I feel in the aftermath. As if I were buried
nose-deep in mud. As if I were the aftermath.
_________________________________________________________
Julie Weiss is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in February, 2025. Her work appears in ONE ART, The Westchester Review, Up The Staircase Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Gyroscope Review, and MER. See julieweisspoet.com.
by Melissa Ginsburg
by Jessica Zhao