by Ronna Magy
by Emily Pérez
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
____________________________________________________________
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?
____________________________________________________________
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
by Sarah Carey
by Kimberly Reyes
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
____________________________________________________________
More than AIDS, Arthur Ashe said
his true burden was being Black.
C.C. DeVille said being a junkie
was sexier than being fat.
Everything I know I learned from TV.
So my narration is jerky,
preemptive, unreliable.
I know Madonna said power
is being told you’re not loved
undesirable
and not being destroyed
between commercial breaks.
____________________________________________________________
Kimberly Reyes is an award-winning poet, essayist, pop culture critic, and visual culture scholar. Her work has earned honors from The Poetry Foundation, The Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, Tin House, the Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, and many other institutions across the world. She is the author of the new poetry collection Bloodletting (Omnidawn, 2025), vanishing point. (Omnidawn, 2023)—featuring the award-winning poetry film We Are All Drowned Out— and Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. She is also the author of Warning Coloration (dancing girl press, 2018), finalist for the Two Sylvias Press 2017 Chapbook Competition, and Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills, 2019), winner of the 2018 Michael Rubin Chapbook Award. A recent Ph.D. graduate, Dr. Reyes recently joined the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Miami as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing—Poetry.
by Athena Kildegaard
A cardinal in a lilac beside the parking lot
snapped its insistent note. The air was damp.
My brother settled a box of half-eaten pies
into the back of his dark blue SUV, laughing
at something someone nearby had said.
We’d come out of the community center, all of us,
family, friends, some we hadn’t seen since 1973,
full of pie and remembrances of our father,
and my brother would drive his long drive home,
nothing anywhere on the calendar ever
to bring us together again. He would have
driven off without saying goodbye—just as
my stepmother and stepsister had done—
a blunt clapping closed, a locking up. But
I insisted and hugged him, not a hug of care
or even of sadness, a simple shuttering, as if
a light rain had begun or as if a middle-aged
man had passed pushing a wheelbarrow
of manure. Something had to be protected.
Dignity, perhaps. The cardinal had flown.
The air was damp with the smell of lilacs.
____________________________________________________________
Athena Kildegaard is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Prairie Midden (Tinderbox Editions), winner of the 2023 WILLA Literary Award for poetry. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.
by Esther Lin
by Rickey Laurentiis
by Stine An (a (translation of Yoo Heekyung)
by Ruth Dickey
by Simone Zapata
by Barbara Hamby
by Naomi Shihab Nye
by Natalie Shapero
by Jo-Ann Mort
by Ae Hee Lee
by Karen Elizabeth Sharpe
A simple sky beams into the afternoon, 34-degree bank sign blinking overhead. I’m waiting for the light to change, mid-October, out on a corner, a thousand fingerprints on the silver signal walk button in front of me. At home the socks sit in separate piles. Your old record albums stacked separately. My winter coats in their own separate closet. We’ve always come together best in argument, our emotional forte, the dark ash of thrown books and shoes. It took hardly any time at all for us to learn the value of my body, its intonations. Its pitch. At the curb, transgressions mound in a thick paste of early snow.
Crosswalk signal bleating
walk, walk, walk
I do what it says
____________________________________________________________
Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is a poetry editor at The Worcester Review and author of Prayer Can Be Anything (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have or will soon appear in On the Seawall, The MacGuffin, SWWIM Everyday, Split Rock Review, Mom Egg Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs, among others.
by Suzanne Cleary