by Taylor Light
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?
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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.
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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
by Jennifer L. Freed
It will hurt you, what your daughter hints
she told her therapist.
Let go of it.
This is not about you.
Your child burns with venom.
All you need is for her to stop hurting
herself. To stop wanting to
hurt. If she blames you
for the scorpion, the snake,
the spider, for the world
that shelters them,
then let her, for now.
For now, bless these sullen drives
to sleepover, school, therapy. Bless
the weighted air you share inside this car.
Bless her hints and jabs,
from which you shape the outlines
of those dark, barbed things
she hides beneath her tongue.
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Jennifer L Freed’s collection, When Light Shifts, exploring themes of identity, health, and care-giving, was a finalist for the 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Prize and the 2025 Medal Provocateur, and was short-listed for the 2025 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize. Recent poems appear in Atlanta Review, Rust and Moth, Sheila-na-Gig, Vox Populi, What the House Knows, and others. See Jfreed.weebly.com.
by Abigail Wender
by Barbara Daniels
A fly trapped
between double panes
of the bathroom window
smacks itself
into smeared glass.
I’m not more
or less despairing
than others
who wait in small houses
for cash to drop
into accounts
so we can buy milk,
tuna, saltines. No one
judges my lack of dusting
or scum on pans
I more or less washed.
That’s me at the window
watching blue light
on wet asphalt.
Maybe you want order
and freedom? Here’s
what you get—fly, irony,
scum, and daffodils
refusing to bloom.
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Barbara Daniels’ recent book, Talk to the Lioness, was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas. Her books include Rose Fever and four chapbooks: Moon Kitchen, Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and The Woman Who Tries to Believe. In 2025 her poems will appear in Good River Review, Book of Matches, Neologism, Rust & Moth, Streetcake, The Lake, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. She received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
by Taylor Franson-Thiel
Inspired by Sally Keith's "Limus Polyphemus”
That there may be granite unmoveable under gulls departing everywhere.
That there may be applebloom according to its own season, horseshoe crabs laying 4,000 eggs at once.
How can anything predating dinosaurs also outlive everything else?
Tulips are one reason I think God may be real.
Growing up, I pretended to hate the color pink to get boys to like me but I think everything should be pink.
I think everything should come from horseshoe crabs.
Or! Tulips!
When we were dating, it took my Mormon husband 9 months to tell me he loved me.
Our god tells most couples to be married within 6 months. He also promised me my marriage would outlive everything else, and I need that to be true.
Horseshoe crabs have 4,000 babies at once, can you believe that?
It took me 6 months to know I loved him, but it’s the boy’s job to say it first so instead I traced i love you with my fingertips hundreds of times onto his forearms during church.
That there may be firmament below, sky above with three celestial bodies to rule the light.
The lesser, the lesser, and the greater which triggers the appleblooms of spring.
We were married in May.
April showers bring awkward married sex from two recent virgins. Or however the saying departs.
That there may be a dumb rock on my ring finger, a good man inside me, and horseshoe crabs outside on the beach, 4,000 babies fighting their way through sand to open sea.
I didn’t forget about the gulls, I just had to let them leave.
____________________________________________________________
Taylor Franson-Thiel is the author of Bone Valley Hymnal (ELJ Editions 2025). She is a developmental and editorial coordinator for Poetry Daily, the Assistant Poetry Editor for phoebe, and the EIC of BRAWL. She can be found @TaylorFranson on Twitter, @taylorfthiel on Instagram, @taylorfthiel.bsky.social on BlueSky, and at taylorfranson-thiel.com.
by Anne Graue
Of course, Hestia was overlooked &
left in the home to tend the fire.
The existence of tigers didn’t
interest her in the least
as she moved from chore to chore
in the alliterative space. She stoked
& regulated, stirred & heated,
rationing what others would eat
& probably complain about.
She dreamed of having equal time
with marmosets & lemurs—
that was not her story. She barely
made the Pantheon’s top ten—
decidedly on the B-list. She made clean
what was dirty, warmed what went cold.
____________________________________________________________
Anne Graue is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet (Woodley Press, 2020), and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Find more of her poetry in Sundress Publications Best Dressed Blog, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Unbroken Journal, and River Heron Review. Her book reviews have been published in The Kenyon Review and The Rumpus. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review.
by Ann Keniston
I remade the landscape with an emphasis not on hunger but sufficiency.
The sufficiency of the light, the branches wrapped in snow.
From nowhere, a coyote appeared and ran by me fast.
Its passing made an almost streak, then tore the afternoon.
After my father died, I tried to tell the story of my life with him.
A neither-nor proposition, the fiction held lightly in truth’s hands.
I pretended I could fold him and put him in my pocket
like an icon to be revered later in private.
And took him out sometimes, not glittering but lacquered.
Sometimes the danger of disclosure overcomes the need to tell.
Years of slow decline create a declination.
The branches make a latticing with space left in between.
Enough, said the man in the fairy tale who is also my father.
Hush, and he put a finger to my lips.
____________________________________________________________
Ann Keniston is a poet, essayist, and critic interested in the relation of the creative to the scholarly and professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. The author of several books including Somatic (Terrapin 2020), she has work forthcoming in Interim, New England Review, Tampa Review, and elsewhere.
by Sara Backer
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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For several months, this snow
has held us under siege, indentured servants
of the shovel, supplicants at power line altars.
We drive through gray crystallized mazes,
forced into potholes, blind at every corner.
Our eyes burn from ceaseless white:
walls, windows, ground, and sky. I threaten
to paint each room lime green and you almost agree.
We hunker under the blanket we call Old Sparky,
and our old cat chisels herself between us.
After midnight, a full moon makes the clouded sky
bright as day—and pink?
I wake you. You confirm the sky is pink.
We never figure out the mystery.
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Sara Backer holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, lives in New Hampshire, and reads for The Maine Review. She has published a novel, American Fuji, and a book of poems, Such Luck. She has two chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt and Bicycle Lotus, which won the Turtle Island Poetry Award. Her writing has been honored with residency fellowships from the Norton Island and Djerassi programs, ten Pushcart nominations, and a Plough Prize.
by Dana Wall
I have become a country
people leave at night,
suitcases packed with borrowed breath,
passports stamped with might-have-beens.
The sky keeps folding into smaller squares
until it fits inside a locket—
the one my mother wore when fever
turned her garden into salt.
I am learning the architecture of absence:
how doorways remember what passed through,
how silence builds its nest in abandoned bells,
how your name has become a room I no longer enter.
Each winter, the geese reverse their arrows,
rewriting the sky’s ancient manuscript.
Even their certainty is a kind of faith:
north exists, and so we must.
The archaeologists of tomorrow will find
my ribs curled around nothing,
excavate the empty museum where I kept
all the artifacts of almost.
Memory is a climate we cannot predict—
droughts where once were floods,
hurricanes in deserts, ice where fire bloomed.
I’ve become my own strange weather.
Yesterday, a child asked why the moon
follows her home each night.
I wanted to explain how loneliness
becomes devotion if you give it enough time.
The calendar on my wall is quietly
eating its own months. December
feeding on April, September
swallowing May. Soon there will be
only one day left, unnamed and endless.
I have grown wings on the insides of my hands.
They beat against my palms when I make fists,
a private migration no one sees
as I cross borders visible only to me.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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