by Barbara Crooker
Barbara Crooker is author of ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series), longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press; The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea; and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and more.
by Maria Caponi
Dust grounds me here, air thick,
streets uneven, light blurred. Murals
on cracking cement walls, entangled
serpents in fading greens and reds. Chipped
black paint on the long hair of a woman,
her head raised high, above her in
blue letters: AMOR.
Dust of memories blown away
in the taste of corn masa, carried
by the perfume of fresh guayaba.
Untethered from sorrow, shared stories,
a ground empty of ghosts.
Dust on the wooden counter
in a local market, the old woman cleans
with a rag. I am starved, I say.
The market closing, there
is nothing left.
Dust of her kindness, as she heats
corn tortillas on her blackened comal,
on the temporary stove, offering whatever
she has: a hard-boiled egg, one tomato,
and a plate, while I sit on the wobbly bench.
Dust of tender sadness
the pesos heavy in my pocket,
when I ask, How much?
Nothing, she says.
Dust of greed, grief, and gluttony
disappears as I walk unknown
streets, my steps forming
words, as I invent a prayer, that is not
a supplication, or an invocation,
or devotion to an unknown Lord, but a litany
Aum. Be safe. Namaste.
Dust dissolves. A thin blade
of light pierces through,
reaching the ground where I stay.
_________________________________________________________
Maria Caponi was born and grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has a Ph. D. in physics and a creative certificate in fiction writing with distinction from UCLA. A list of her work can be found at mariacaponi.com.
by Heather Swan
In the apartment where I left the candle burning,
the rabbit and the bird must have seen the flame
jump from wick to lace tablecloth, must have smelled
the smoke which blackened the ceiling, slowly eating
its way through my notebook, my mail, and the
wood of the small walnut table, the way our histories
can consume the present until nothing is left, must have
looked for a way out, and must have heard the fire alarm
piercing the quiet of the building. Did they know to blame
me? Who fed them and spoke softly to them? And when
the strangers came in masks, found them huddled together,
and rushed them outside into the clean December air,
as they gulped the good oxygen, did they imagine
freedom? Only to be placed in my arms again,
my wet face buried in their feathers and fur?
_________________________________________________________
Heather Swan is the author of four books, two works of prose, most recently Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, which examines the importance of insects to larger ecosystems, and two books of poetry, Dandelion and A KInship with Ash. Her work has been published in journals such as The Sun, Lit Hub, Aeon, Poet Lore, Emergence Magazine, and Terrain.org.
by Terese Svoboda
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
_________________________________________________________
A fork and a spoon lie together
to spoon and to fork.
E = MC squared says the spoon.
I don't have the energy says the fork.
Forgiveness? says the spoon.
It is as if we lie on a vast table
says the fork. Useless.
The spoon measures a dose.
Sink to your knees. The fork
submits. The past is prescient.
The fork clasps the spoon.
Of course, says the spoon.
It's all about portion control.
Let's sleep says the fork.
Weep? says the spoon.
The spoon keeps busy until
the fork is sorry too, like the song.
Make me toast says the spoon, and snappy.
The fork says Who turned out
the light? Birds begin singing
their favorite: O moon, O moon.
The table was laid, says the spoon,
not me. Tines, my dear, are everything,
says the fork. My tines are retired.
They spoon through course
after intercourse, the hunger being
incurable, inconsolable.
_________________________________________________________
"Silverwear" is from Terese Svoboda's Theatrix: Poetry Plays (Anhinga Press), her eighth book of poetry. Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, her second memoir, was published last December. PW said, "Readers will be riveted."
by Maureen Alsop
by Laura Van Prooyen
According to the sages, an authentic life engages with
beginnings & endings, doesn’t shy away from
contradictory realms—not so easy for me to
do, but seems I can either resist or roll w/ this
evolving situation, let it be in the in-between:
fascination up, frustration down—genuine life
go on, hit me w/ your best shot. I’ve got a worry
hangover, but I shut off my phone, no more news,
imagined catastrophes, texts from home. I sit w/o
judgment in silence. Meditate. Belly breathing
knocks me out. Jumpstarts my palpitating heart.
Let me start again. Paradox is not new. In this unsteady
moment, being okay with uncertainty is what I
need to do to have a calm sense of anything. Yet, I resist
opening the door of solitude, the quiet, the holy (shit!)—
prayer? Is that what I’m doing here? Going there? I
question again & forever my fragile faith, but I’m
ready to fix myself up, even if it means confronting my
singular self (soul?) daily with the exhilarating reminder
that death is coming (for us all!), our most common
unquestionable truth. Eat the peach. Comb my hair.
Vow to stop fretting petty bullshit & be better
where I can—spare the cockroach my shoe & lead a more
examined life? I want the patience of a potato. Funny,
yes. But imagine sitting on a counter so long as to go soft,
zero regrets & shoots sprouting from so many new eyes.
____________________________________________________________
Laura Van Prooyen is author of four collections of poetry, including Sorry, We No Longer Offer Bereavement Fares, forthcoming in 2026. Laura facilitates workshops for healthcare workers, works as an independent consultant to writing clients, and teaches at Trinity University. She lives in San Antonio, TX and is the founder of Next Page Press. See lauravanprooyen.com.
by Cynthia Good
by Jessica Thiru
I keep thinking about this first day of April
—so thin, March’s cheek is pressed against the morning
How the air quenched with spring will soon be thirsty again
How this day, fast and forgettable like a year, is still a day
I keep thinking about
the lake of sadness in me
How violent it is to drown within oneself
How tragic to re-enter the mouth of your suffering and still kneel to its hunger
Yet still April is bright and forgiving
and each chirping bird is reinventing its pocket of the sky with song
and maybe despite all this,
life itself is not a wound
Tenderness, swallow me whole
let me enter another April
with hope dancing between my ribs.
____________________________________________________________
Jessica Thiru is a Kenyan poet born and bred in South Africa. Her work appears in Button Poetry’s 2023 video contest and Querencia Press’s Not Ghosts, But Spirits IV. Her poems explore the morphing space between becoming and noticing. Her first chapbook, Burning of Absence, is forthcoming with Querencia Press. You can find her on Instagram at @leechteeeth and Tumblr at @leechteethwrites.
by Susan Browne
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
____________________________________________________________
Scrolling down my iPhone calendar, I stop at 2071.
That year, my birthday is on a Sunday. I’ll be 119.
If I had to add it all up, I’d say I was way too normal.
I can’t believe I spent a minute feeling guilty
for having lots of boyfriends in my youth
or having sex with two men in one day. It wasn’t easy
getting from the east side of town to the west side
on my bicycle in time. I should keep the faith.
Yesterday, I was in a hot tub with two men.
They were discussing earthquake preparedness.
One said he had a kit that could filter
any kind of water, including sewage.
The other said he had a rafter built in his garage
to protect his car, and it could support
the local high school cheerleading squad doing pull-ups.
Or so the builder advertised. I have nothing prepared
for an emergency, except a gallon of Tanqueray
in the cupboard above the oven because I gave up gin
after my second divorce. Maybe this means I have faith
in something. At least twice a week I wake up astonished
at how living calmly goes on, shoulder to shoulder
with unreckonable tragedy. The men paused
to take a scrolling glance when I stepped out of the hot tub.
Then they went on about where to store the food
and the importance of keeping a pair of running shoes
under the desk at the office.
____________________________________________________________
Susan Browne is the author of four poetry collections, including Monster Mash (Four Way Books, 2025); Just Living (Catamaran Literary Reader, 2019), winner of the 2019 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Buddha’s Dogs (Four Way Books, 2002), winner of Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, selected by Edward Hirsch. A recipient of the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, Browne lives in Northern California. She was an English Professor for 34 years and currently teaches poetry workshops online. See susanbrownepoems.com.
by Tina Kelley
The website said there were exploded bits of the holy in everybody,
so I put them on my bucket list. The lobby was welcoming, concierge
and maître d’ were all I could ask for. Lots of fun activities like parades
and pools and playgrounds. Food: consistent and potentially plentiful.
I really wanted to like this species, but other kids left a lot to be desired,
the ones the doorman called “common,” who tied me up back-to-back
with the only other only child. And that mean teacher, the sun-warmed
mayonnaise of her smile, put me in the hall twice for talking too much.
Middle school IF I COULD GIVE IT ZERO STARS I WOULD—whispers
in the backseat and getting ditched. And no one warned me that guys snap
their fingers at waitresses, drivers tailgate, fools talk in the train’s quiet car,
and doctors speak in acronyms, moving their mouths without sharing info.
I came back to downgrade my stars to 2 after wading through the cereal
shelves and finding only three healthy ones. Why is everyone staring
at their phones while sightseeing? Why was that meeting not an e-mail?
Looking back, I might’ve qualified for a refund—never had sisters, aunts,
brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, or brothers-in-law. Never walked into
a bar alone, had a one-night stand, cooked a Thanksgiving turkey, skydived.
But when I hear my mix tape, meet the librarian who made a Reading Trail
through the park posted with pages of funny kid books, interview the boy
who got his class to shave their heads with the kid on chemo, when I garden,
decorate the community club for an eightieth birthday, think about my kids
and what they will look like when they’re 80, knock wood, when I pass
the turnoff for Shades of Death Road and hear yes, triple rainbows do exist,
when I see the silver carp rock-skipping themselves across the lake surface,
when my friend came with me to write mom’s Christmas cards from hospice:
Would come back. Would hurry back. Totally coming back.
____________________________________________________________
Tina Kelley’s Rise Wildly appeared in 2020 from CavanKerry Press, joining Abloom & Awry, Precise, and The Gospel of Galore, a Washington State Book Award winner. She reported for The New York Times for ten years and wrote two nonfiction books. She received a 2023 and 2025 Finalist award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, NJ.
by Heidi Seaborn
~Citizen App, July 23, 2025, Seattle
My love has stress cardiomyopathy—broken
heart syndrome. Grief inflames his body.
My body burns when I drink too much.
I have been drinking too much lately. Lately,
I’ve gone looking for lost dogs.
They are everywhere once you keen
your eye. Their eyes everywhere.
I’d like to think it’s only a frequency illusion—
all the dogs, roaming. The people absent.
Like a partial erasure. Or the tombstone tracings
of ancestors I once made for a great aunt.
She collected artifacts. The dogs are an artifact
of a happier time. After our dog dies, we find
the tender parts of one another—
inner arm, beneath the eye. We press
our mouths to each other’s slender wrists.
When I suck on my love’s weakened pulse,
it quickens.
____________________________________________________________
Heidi Seaborn is the author of three books of poetry: tic tic tic (2025), An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and three chapbooks. She’s won numerous awards including The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. She has recent work in Agni, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU and is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal. See heidiseabornpoet.com.
by Jessica Ballen
mom taught us
that bad things happen in threes
like us—me, the oldest—
the two of you, younger.
closer. I’d watch you both
as you fell asleep in the car,
your light eyes hidden,
protected; the only time
we look related. there wasn’t a parent
left to tuck me in, so I carried myself to bed,
climbed the spiraling staircase higher
and higher towards my bedroom.
I wanted to know how to fit in
with disappearing clouds.
nobody knew how to answer
but they knew how to demonstrate:
pots and pans flying in the kitchen,
clanking against painted walls, tile,
bone. I’m still watching, observing.
taking note. Wish I knew
how to stay high forever,
the apex of an object thrown
before it comes down too hard,
crashing. the clatter of borrowed time,
the mess of it all. I wish I knew
how to fight with both wrists straight—
a pen tracing a ruler.
But I’m free hand. I’m jazz, baby.
the lightning carving out a spot
in the pavement. some things
you never see but just know.
like meeting someone else
whose mother left them, too.
____________________________________________________________
Jessica Ballen, MFA, is an AuDHD poet serving as Editor-in-Chief of Lunch Ticket Literary Magazine, Managing Editor of Defunkt Magazine, Senior Editor at Small Harbor Publishing, and guest editor for Frontier Poetry. Their work can be found in RHINO Poetry, Okay Donkey, and Ghost City Review (among others). Catch them compulsively posting on their Instagram stories @_j___esus, listening to dream pop with their four cats, and dancing in the Willamette River.
by Sarah Carleton
One potential ancestor…comes from a word meaning “birdcage”…The ancestor of our word jail is in this lineage as well. —Merriam-Webster
In medieval times, caress jumped on honk,
and cajole was born. It looked like
a balcony for a finch but turned out to be
a jail for language. Over the years,
as requests for cake and feather hats
wheedled their way through its bars and
came out lumpy with innuendo,
some women forgot how to talk
in a straight line. They schmoozed as they
canoodled, jostled as they cavorted,
and the men caught on, cajoling with a
doggedness they believed was seductive.
I won’t mince words—I’m cajole’s
blunt detractor, irked by wiles
that bypass no. I wince at its
jagged sound—the way it flips asshole
on its ear and adds a fool, that forceful
second syllable seizing my tongue.
The origins of cajole may be vague
as smoke, but it needles, like
a splinter embedded in your toe
until at last you coax it into the open.
____________________________________________________________
Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Valparaiso, Rattle, ONE ART, and As It Ought to Be. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and she was a finalist for the 2023 John Ridland Poetry Prize. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.
by Alina Stefanescu
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
____________________________________________________________
You meet a nice immigrant that fills
up space with stories about Bosnia;
fills in the gaps with New York. The
question of Alaska is melting and yes
ice cubes in your Fanta would be nice.
You perform the usual astonishment
at her skilled use of English idioms. She
smiles and spills an affinity for the Brontes.
Her hair is Crimson Tide red, protected
by trademark. She hates football but maybe
plays anything when in Rome. You are a solid
Greek graduate of togas and keg-stands who
can italicize any era into parties. She says
it is difficult to unburden yourself to men
that don't see you as separate. She's dying
her hair orange for Auburn next month.
You think middle schools should teach
physics or start earlier—and you hope she
can tell you're joking. Being hilarious.
She says it's hard to talk to men that can't
hear you. Which is strange since you'd never
disparage her accent. She says men can't hear
her ever plus never. Your hair is solid pine-trunk
brown. You ready that quip about separate
spheres ideology but the waitress drums
her nails against the menu plastic. As if
to say: You pompous old fuck, no thing is
separate & here I am, serving you anyway.
____________________________________________________________
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include My Heresies, (Sarabande, April 2025), a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at alinastefanescuwriter.com.
by Sally Rosen Kindred
After The Souls of the Mountain by Remedios Varo
You need to know you woke inside a mountain.
There’s a city of dirt-birds trembling under your collar,
in your hips. You have to get out of here
but the sky between your mountain
and the holy next is the smoke braid
of a grandmother’s hair. The sky outside knows
what your body said and you
do not. You need to know. You woke
inside a grief dress. There’s a hot moon
chafing at your ribcage. Beneath it the birds
wild with snow try to eat the traffic lights, try
to smother the small cars with their wings.
You could climb out into the ash with your grandmother’s arms.
You could ride her smoke into ghosts.
Tell the birds: the city’s been taken. Scrape your bones
out through the bitter rock.
Climb out of your name. Be a breaking–
a No. Knead yourself smoke-blue.
____________________________________________________________
Sally Rosen Kindred's third poetry collection is Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the Diode Book Prize and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. She is also the author of No Eden and Book of Asters, both from Mayapple Press, and three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Plume, Pleiades, and Kenyon Review Online.
by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
There is a woman’s face in that tree
gathering moss along the jawline,
paper nest of wasps in her hair.
From the half-open back door,
everything is more magical than me.
Ti Mari folds itself in two,
trembling with sunlight, never once
considering what it might mean
to be shut.
Someone once asked, “Will you still write
after the baby is born?” I think about this often,
about the doorway, its rusted hinges,
the one broken latch that rattles,
wrenched daily by small, insistent hands.
I have been doorway, latch and hinge
all the things that exist for no purpose
but to open for others.
It’s always the smallest things
that take up the most space,
seed under leaf, hiding its medicine,
bachac treading back and forth
in overgrown grass until
eventually the path appears.
I carry it all with me, the right words clenched
between jaws like bitten leaves, wearing
beaten paths from room to room.
We make space for what we must become
in tightly woven nests of spit and paper,
in termite mounds, secret underground chambers
where we can grow into ourselves unseen.
The woman in the tree appears
to no one but me. Her body rises from the earth
in broad plank roots, winding in ridges beneath
cracked concrete. Her arms keep the earth together.
____________________________________________________________
Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has been published in Poetry London, The Rialto, The Prairie Schooner, The Asian American Literary Review, Wasafiri, and others. She was awarded the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2016, and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize in 2017 and 2020. Her first collection of poetry, Doe Songs (Peepal Tree Press, 2018), was awarded the OCM Prize in Caribbean Poetry.
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.
____________________________________________________________
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!
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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