by Jessica Barlevi
by Amy Gottlieb
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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Toss off your Moroccan slippers, lay your wet socks
on the radiator while we drink tea and talk of our sons,
how time crafted them into men. After your feet thaw
and the tea bags form seashells at the bottom of our cups
I will tell you that the whole house is a membrane, porous
to the shouts in the street, the stench of our neighbor's weed,
the sweetness of her garlic as it caramelizes in a pan.
We have no curio cabinets to preserve what we tried to save,
only the lines that deepen around our eyes, the tales of
your seafaring uncle’s dinghy that weathered an Atlantic storm,
my return to Venice and how the steps where I sat as a girl
have been submerged for years, sinking lower still.
Ask me if you can stay for a week and I will invite you
to flop backwards on the unmade beds, indent your body
on our rumpled sheets, your beaded slippers waiting
by the door like sentries at the gate to a holy kingdom.
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Amy Gottlieb’s debut novel, The Beautiful Possible, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, the Wallant Award, and the Ribalow Prize. Her poetry has appeared in On Being, Ilanot Review, Balagan, Paper Brigade, Quartet Journal, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, and elsewhere. She has been awarded five individual awards from the Bronx Council on the Arts and fellowships from the Civita Institute and VCCA. She lives in New York City.
by Lori Green Pipan
Awake in the board book, asleep in the board book, asleep in myself.
I thought the chair was a chair.
It turns out the couch is a chair.
It turns out the bed is a kitchen table and not for sharing.
2:00 am, I asked my husband as he handed me the baby, "Am I a grocery
store?" I meant it. He said, "More like a convenience store." 3:00 am she was
asleep; he asked if we'd pickled the baby to sleep. He meant it. The books on
our bedside table, stacks from beforetimes, went unread.
Margaret Wise Brown's young rabbit leads a fabulous life you can tell.
Leopard print, balloons, wings, the blue expanse.
I try not to miss the misery hours.
They were misery, a sick leopard.
But the wings.
They were misery
I thought. No. Not misery.
They were the blue expanse.
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Lori Green Pipan is a writer who texts eavesdropping to her family and dreams to her friends. She has: 1 home, 1 husband, 1 hand lino press, 2 daughters, 3 raspberry bushes, 5 siblings, some publications, some friends, some novels in the drawer, 0 oboe reeds, 0 second languages, 14 journals, and 1,400 books. She was raised Catholic. She was raised by the Potomac.
by Jane Zwart
The first time someone calls me
an adult child, I feel it, perfect
and discomfiting, I’m out of my depth
in autonomy, and I’m an amazon
pointed to a nursery school chair.
Adult child, someone says,
and I think of my friend’s mom.
In her childhood, she had I don’t know
how many cavities—one too many—
so her parents, weary of paying
the dentist, paid the dentist
to pull all her teeth. There’s more:
into her forties, this woman wore
the same outgrown maw, a set
of miniature dentures. I think of her,
savoring the unsuitable littleness
of her trick teeth, and I remember
the advance I received on my grin,
on my mother’s incisors, white doors
waiting to be hung. We’re all miscast:
some of us as a kid who can’t grow
into her mouth and some as a woman
issuing orders from a porcelain
apparatus too dinky for authority.
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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book review for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and The Nation. Her first collection, Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, came out with Orison Books in February 2026.
by Bernadette Geyer
by heather emmanuel
by Crystal C. Karlberg
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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My mother plunged her hands into the dirt
like a woman who knew she couldn’t bear fruit.
The roses were her children, calling through
the salt hay, through the storms doors until spring.
The zinnias looked up at her with pink,
their almost faces, their peculiar needs,
requiring a mother’s touch, love
in summer when the beetles stretch their legs,
with barbs that bring her back into the room
where lighting from above was clearly not
the blue-robed Virgin Mary that she saw
above the neighbor’s house when she was young.
Her ring fell through a hole, was never found
like all the babies she would never hold.
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Crystal C. Karlberg is a poet and visual artist who lives in Massachusetts. Her poems have been published by Threepenny Review; Beloit Poetry Journal; The Penn Review; Nixes Mate, and elsewhere. Her artwork has been published by oddball magazine and Mom Egg Review.
by Marianne Kunkel
Garlicky smoke plumes from our oven the afternoon
I come home to grab a meringue pie
and leave again, this time to a Christmas party.
I dart upstairs to warn you your baking potatoes, hastily wrapped in foil
and leaking oil, might burn the house down. But you’re deep in a Zoom call—
so many coworkers your monitor resembles graph paper—
and your locked jaw, stiff back,
signal interruptions aren’t welcome. I miss the one-thoughtness
of childhood: I wanted to drink warm rain
so I did, eyes shut. Petted an alley cat. Made the new kid in suspenders
my BFF. Grown, I tell myself your potatoes won’t start a grease fire,
not to ruin your late lunch with worry.
Driving off, I check my rear-view mirror for flames crowning our house;
could there be a worse thought? The small relief you’d be to blame, not me.
Or, in bed that night, shame I didn’t rewrap your potatoes.
Slip you a note.
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Marianne Kunkel is the author of Hillary, Made Up (Stephen F. Austin State UP) and The Laughing Game (Finishing Line Press), two anthologies, and many poems, including one in Best American Poetry 2025. She is Associate Professor of English at Johnson County Community College and Co-editor of Kansas City Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from University of Florida and Ph.D. in English from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she was Prairie Schooner managing editor.
by Jill McDonough
In Rome once, a Rome I was surprised to find littered with tumbled columns,
ruins, centuries-old marble torsos, temples lit up and lounged upon, not roped off,
I met a boy who took me in a taxi with borrowed money, lira he borrowed from a friend
in front of me. He told me someday he’d like to open a fish restaurant. On a beach
someplace, eat langostine every night. Did I know what langostines were? I did.
Did I like the langostines? Yes. Did I have a dream? One of my own, like his?
I’m sure I told him one, charmed by his use of the word “dream,” like a child’s,
or a foreigner’s, I guess, to talk about some dream job, impossible dream, which actually
didn’t sound so hard to attain: it was the beach, the langostines he wanted, not
the mortgage, employees, lazy langostine supplier. So be a waiter, wait tables
in Sicily, Nice, wherever the langostines are. He asked my dream and I can not
remember if I had one, can’t remember having had one, only know how proud I am
that when I was 22 or 23, I went away with a strange man to a Roman suburb. A beautiful
room, old plaster under construction. And I took a bus back the next morning, thirty minutes
on a city bus at sunrise, from the suburbs into Rome. I only knew mi dispiace,
non parlo italiano, grazie, which was enough; the old people, the driver saw
I didn’t have lira and smiled, indulgent at that hour with an uncombed girl
in last night’s clothes. Just outside Rome, in the middle of living their dream.
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Jill McDonough was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1972. Her books of poems include American Treasure (Alice James, 2022), Here All Night (Alice James, 2019), Reaper (Alice James, 2017), Where You Live (Salt, 2012), and Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008). The recipient of three Pushcart prizes and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the NEA, she directs the MFA program at UMass-Boston.
by Dion O'Reilly
Forgive me if I speak of it again—
the legend of their genesis—
part crocodile, part chicken
fear teaching them to take
their way skyward, bring black
to the clouds. Or the myths—
a witch’s familiar, companion of gods—
riding wind as they grip
thoughts in their claws, lay them
like rubies in Odin’s imperial hand,
so he can choose again and again
who suffers, who dies. We see them screaming
some old language
in a blown-out tree
or in lines of down-valley flight,
bound for trouble, their voices
clawed and scraping, almost legible
like they could live on our shoulders,
shit on our shirts, pick
jewels from our hair. Maybe it matters
they savor the dead, suck eyes
out of hatchlings, steal brass
off a corpse’s chest. There they are,
pieces of night, flip side of light, everything
occult or forgotten, not just soaring, soaring together,
soulmates, bonded accomplices,
getaway drivers on their way to the bank.
So many of our acts
are unpardonable, and the drives and longings
have, as our detractors warned,
returned to the nighttime roosts
of self-hate and decline. But the crows—
they’re laughing, forever dressed in their best
midnight finery, they revel
in carnage, hoppy dance
to sin. They’re so good
at being bad.
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Dion O'Reilly’s third book, Limerence, was finalist for The Floating Bridge John Pierce Competition for Washington State Poets. She is the author of Sadness of the Apex Predator (Cornerstone Press 2024) and Ghost Dogs (Terrapin 2020). Her work appears in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and The Sun. Most recently, her work was chosen as one of the winners of the 17th Annual Narrative Poetry Prize. A podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, private workshop facilitator, and co-editor of En•Trance Journal, she splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.
by Suzanne Edison
In the newspaper, inevitable disasters are there, waiting—
another forest, another animal species, another language,
will disappear unprotected—forgive us
I check on the raspberry patch, this year’s harvest, meager, and know
the wild rats have been up early, beat me to them—
When I say wild, pollen dusts my heart and I wonder—will there be children
—forgive us
I can hold the wren’s wing, but not her extinguished song, cupped
in my hands—I can bury her, forgive the hungry hawk—
won’t my demise be snatched by wind?
I don’t know how to stop whatever is bent on destruction—
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Suzanne Edison’s book, Since the House Is Burning, was published in 2022 by MoonPath Press. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Poetry can be found in The Missouri Review, Solstice Literary Journal, Quartet Journal; Gyroscope Review; The Nature of Our Times; Whale Road Review; Lily Poetry Review; and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle, is an avid gardener, and cloud-watcher. See seedison.com
by Valentina GnupI
by Kate Northrop
(oil on canvas)
In the first man, your gaze can go on
though he is still there,
his face a grid-like exactness,
white tidy tie.
In the second and third, your gaze can go on.
In the far right corner,
filled with
how clothes billow—
This is the feeling of a time:
so smooth it could spill,
ambulance lights flashing
by the side of the road.
In the three men
are ends of aisles in grocery stores
and how I miss everyone
being more or less alive.
In the three men
is a back porch,
the eaves dripping, rain here and there
patting the tree leaves.
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Kate Northrop's recent collections are Homewrecker (New Letters, Vol 88, 2022) and cuntstruck (C & R Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Plume, Sugar Poetry Review, Terrain.org, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She is a recipient of a NY Times Book Review Editor's Choice, the Paumanok Award, Wick Poetry Award, Jeanette Haien Ballard award and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell and Jentel.
by Jill Michelle
n. Privation of that which we had, or had not.
—Ambrose Bierce
It seems I am practicing loss
how to become lacework’s hollow
the hundred empty spots that bloom
beauty across blemished facades.
Year squandered, embroidered in grief—
I am practicing loss, it seems—
wrestling chain-stitched memories of
uncovering his cheating, rings
of purpling fingerprints that
mean I can never take him back,
am practicing loss. It seems I
turned disposable camera
sun yellow box, reflecting his
image, then tossed, like our vows each
time he lied, phoned her instead of
practicing. It seems I am lost.
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Jill Michelle is the author of Underwater (Riot in Your Throat, 2025) and Shuffle Play (Bottlecap, 2024) as well as winner of the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry from New Ohio Review. Her newest work is forthcoming in The Meadow, RHINO Poetry, and Stanchion Magazine. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. See byjillmichelle.com.
by Jennifer Markell
Petrified Forest, Arizona
In the dawn of the dinosaurs, a conifer topples,
is captured by a river, smothered in mud
for two hundred million years
and then returned to land, its core
transformed to stone, heartwood turned opal and jasper.
The shape of the tree remains, like the armature
of a sculpture, or the bone
structure of a familiar face—your first love,
the cherished cat who sits on your shoulder and watches
the computer’s cursor twitch like a whisker,
and stares out the window at a kingbird
without considering the broom of time that
sweeps every living thing
away, and returns us to the earth, where we imagine
ourselves a raindrop, wave of grass or
gust of wind arranging the blue mesa.
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Jennifer Markell’s first poetry collection, Samsara (Turning Point), was named a "Must Read" by the Massachusetts Book Awards in 2015. Her second collection, Singing at High Altitude, was published in 2021 by Main Street Rag. Jennifer’s poems have been published in The Bitter Oleander, Cimarron Review, Consequence, Diode, RHINO, and The Women's Review of Books. She works as a psychotherapist and lives in the Boston area with her husband and two securely-attached cats.
by Katrina Roberts
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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Please breath, unfurl without a hitch, fill lungs with wind, rise, then
fall to rise again ad infinitum. Mere moments, you might cease, or seize
instead, constrained concavity squeezed, two grasped balloons, gone
limp. I gasp. Party’s over, each steampunk gear, all mechanisms grinding
to a halt unseen but felt, a siren’s clutching, a meter’s coin of time
drained into a black hole, a wreck of gulls, flecks, particles, the idea of
existence cracking open lesions in the addled mind riding above; if clods
kick up into clouds of dust, or clotted smoke slides in to choke
the valley, or fear lodges deep within a throat slippery, wet this
second, now brimming with ash or remnants of trash a burn barrel
harbors somewhere too close to let its throbbing pink songbird
sing, writhing to adjust its tenuous frayed grasp, not wanting to lose
grip on its storm-tossed jerking swing; if this thorax were a brittle
vessel rolled on seas, within this metered corpus you make a cage
of 24 arms to cradle my gimbaled heart, stunned sparrow stuffed
into a torn garden glove to keep it calm: I can’t, I can’t…. Tiny
corset stays sprung though still too tight; I’m the minke whale
beached at land’s end to house a colony of crabs, each elegant
arch between your staves a door sluiced with stinging brine; you
exploded, a shattered wine cask, seeping juice, dismantled, jagged,
flayed open when we slid and slammed into a tree; I’m sorry, afraid,
my only casket; not yet a corpse I work to calm the weightless soul
weighing you down, my cavern of ticking stalactites, my straight
jacket, my box of meat, silt, rain—containing this wheezing song
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Katrina Roberts is author of several books, including LIKENESS (visual poems); Underdog; Friendly Fire; The Quick; and How Late Desire Looks; as well as the chapbook LACE. She’s editor of Because You Asked. Her work appears in journals such as BOMB, The Ilanot Review, Cleaver; Brink, Poetry Northwest, Brooklyn Review, Thrush, Interim; Iterant; The Indianapolis Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and Permafrost, and in many anthologies. She curates the Visiting Writers Reading Series and teaches at Whitman College. See katrinaroberts.net.
by Chloe Cook
Almost nothing is known
of its ecological role.
No herbivores have shown
interest in the green marble
burrowing like a boil
in the coral’s epidermis,
immune to benzoyl
peroxide and remiss
to popping unprovoked.
Without neurons, it vegetates
like a grudge, hard and cloaked
in nacre, fine to satiate
its most revered tenet:
solitude. The “eye” grows alone,
single-celled, the only tenant
of the lot, sea-fast though
the name’s a misnomer—
it can’t see. It would be useless
stowed in any sailor’s
socket, but a seamstress
might pluck it for its sheen:
ornamental grape sewn
into a bodice gone unseen
by men; gem for one’s own.
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Chloe Cook's work is featured in The New Criterion, The Southeast Review, Quarterly West, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from Community of Writers, Poetry by the Sea, and the Key West Literary Seminar. A 2025 Helen Degen Cohen Fellow at RHINO, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Florida. See chloecookwrites.com.
by Therese Gleason
On learning I inherited
a biomarker for the disease
that felled my father,
I dream of tiny cardinals,
a plague invading
the house through a gap
in the wall. They swirl
and spawn, my bedroom
thick with red.
I thrash to catch them,
grasp at crimson fistfuls
like feathery fireflies,
trapping wingbeats
between hands clasped
in the shape of a heart:
a ribcage I crack
at the open window
to fling the infestation out,
forgetting they can fly.
As if this will kill them,
my favorite bird,
a salutation my dead
father sends. As if
this will save me—
but I was born
with a radiance of redbirds
in my blood, a brood
of drab and hardy females
roosting in my cells,
their nests already knit
inside.
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Therese Gleason’s third chapbook, Hemicrania (Chestnut Review, 2024), won the 2025 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. Her other chapbooks include Matrilineal (Finishing Line, 2021), and Libation (2006), co-winner of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Competition. Gleason’s poetry, flash, and essays appear in 32 Poems, Cincinnati Review, Indiana Review, New Ohio Review, Pithead Chapel, Rattle's Poets Respond, and elsewhere. Originally from Kentucky, she lives in Massachusetts. See theresegleason.com.
by Kelli Russell Agodon
by Carol Blaizy D’Souza