by Dion O'Reilly
I have no great fluency, but I love the cloud-sounds
by Jan Steckel
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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She dreams of comfrey and burdock,
feels through skin and spasmed muscles,
waits for marrow to hit the heart.
Pulls the stalks that serve for splints,
boils the tea that lays down bone,
mixes in ground egg- and oyster-shells.
They come for her father,
but after the crack, the scream,
he leaves the mending to her.
They give him a chicken, a hare,
or a passed-down brooch,
their gratitude mixed with suspicion.
To her he leaves the slow accretion
of the months, the strength
of calluses, the ache of rain.
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Jan Steckel’s fiction collection, Ghosts and Oceans, came out from Zeitgeist Press in 2023. Her poetry book, The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011), won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards for poetry. Her chapbooks Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her writing has appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus, and elsewhere.
by Angie Minkin
A flamboyance of slate-blue history—
these eyebrow-penciled water bearers,
these tales twice-told flock over cobblestones,
revolve around each other, faster and faster.
An end game looms.
Stone-faced, they recite odysseys of lost mates,
woven mud nests, tangled mangrove roots.
They haven’t lost their fancy footwork.
Not yet.
They dance together or alone, on one leg or two.
How straight they fly into the offing, the sun.
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Angie Minkin is a San Francisco-based, award-winning poet. A volunteer poetry reader with The MacGuffin, her work appears in that journal, Rattle, Unbroken Journal, The Poeming Pigeon, Rise Up Review, Birdy, and several others. Angie’s chapbook, Balm for the Living, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2023. She is also the co-author of Dreams and Blessings: Six Visionary Poets, published in 2020 by Blue Light Press. Angie travels to Oaxaca, Mexico whenever possible. See angieminkin.com.
by Merna Dyer Skinner
by Anya Kirshbaum
by Bleah Patterson
by Martha Silano
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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When the contours of mountains resemble coliseums.
Cathedrality of mountains.
Relief of roadlessness.
That there are lakes impossible to reach by car.
That from this window just behind the wing, 20F,
there are no signs of life.
Once I packed a bag with cheddar goldfish.
Once my son threw up before we even boarded the plane.
Cracks and fissures, cuneiform of rock. Backbones and capillaries,
the snaking green edged with bluffs (long-ago ocean?).
He will turn eighteen next week.
Brain-like contours—cerebral cortex or cerebellum?
Contours thin like the veins of leaves, fronds of a sword fern, feet of a coot.
Time passed like a silent rail in the reeds.
The folds very Egyptian, mummies reposed in their tombs.
Like an alligator’s enormous tail, though lacking snout and teeth.
Once I sang La crocodile il est malade, il est malade a Singapour.
All those years, I thought I was singing sangue a peu—a little blood.
Clouds less cumulus, more cumulonimbus.
Towns scattered with houses like paint chips.
From the ground he would wave to the passengers in the sky: Bye-bye, babies!
Claw-like hills, afghan of cloud not like fresh snow but snow a few days old,
the occasional indentation where a foot or tire met asphalt.
The crocodile is sick. A little mercy, a little blood.
Between fluffy swirls, black holes.
When the binky and the sippy cup.
When the diaper bag and the teething ring.
Cottoned from above
like first tracks on Lynx Pass,
a pristine path through aspen, lodgepole, spruce.
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Martha Silano has authored seven poetry books, including The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award finalist, and most recently, This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize. Acre Books will release Terminal Surreal, her book about living with ALS, in September 2025. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Paris Review, AGNI, North American Review, American Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Her poem "Love" appears in The Best American Poetry 2009.
by Sherry Fraser
by Meghan Sterling
Something about the way a mother
can keep herself from falling. Having
children ruins your life, my mother raised
her glass and toasted after my baby shower.
Something about the way the river turns, its
sunken blue like a stone in place of a doll’s eye.
Something about the myth of a mother’s love.
Love is not an automatic thing, my mother said.
What was it that ground us down to dirt? Something
about my head tilting up in the dark, cracking my
mother’s nose with my chin. My lips are lucky
to find her cheek, still smooth, still scented with leaves. Something about the turned back. Nothing drives
love away like loving too much, my mother said
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Meghan Sterling (she/her) is a bi/queer writer whose work is published in Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Rhino Poetry, Hunger Mountain, and many journals. Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize) came out in 2023. Her next collection, You Are Here to Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review Press), is forthcoming in 2025. Read her work at meghansterling.com.
by Kashiana Singh
by Tracey Knapp
by Chloe N. Clark
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Today, someone I love told me
a joke. It wasn’t even that funny
but I laughed, let the sound fill my mouth
until it spilled out, made my lungs ache
with the push push of air
until even my bones hurt. Today,
one of my students told me to have
a lovely day, not even just a good
one, but a lovely one. I can imagine
that as a blessing, though the air was
cold and the sky was gray and I’ve been
holding a sense of dread under my skin
for days, no weeks, no I’ve been holding
it there for years. Today, I worked out
until my muscles tingled under my skin,
today I laid on the floor like this,
closed my eyes, and it was the closest feeling
to flying I might ever get. Today, I still
said “might” about impossible things. Today,
a friend and I made plans for the future and
the world felt like something I could hold
in the palm of my hand. Today, no one I loved
died. Today, I woke up breathing. Today,
I thought how much I wanted to give you
this day. Today, if I could, I’d push it
into your hands, say, here, here, here,
I’m here, you’re here. Today is going
to be good.
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Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Patterns of Orbit, Escaping the Body, and more. Her short story collection, Every Galaxy Is a Circle, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press.
by Lea Marshall
No Parking or Impeding Traffic Flow During Emergency
Richmond, VA
In one snow emergency, my cousins
and I tied trash bags around our legs
when we had no boots. In another,
I stayed in bed with a man for three
days, all the bread eaten, all the milk
drunk. Thirteen years later I carried
my girl at four months, wrapped
like a lamb through the stilled city,
our breath clouding the sparkling,
unfolding air. We sang a song for her
father. What constitutes a snow
emergency? Whiteness so sudden
and bright upon the forehead?
Excessive festooning of trees
and power lines? Instant darkening
of all evergreens? A woman once
discovered under a microscope
two identical snowflakes. There are
no snow emergencies, only human.
Her fingers cold, she shut her eyes
against their spidered gleaming.
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Lea Marshall’s poetry has recently appeared in A-Minor and Rise Up Review. She was named a finalist for the 2023 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets, and for the Diode Editions 2023 Book Contest. Her work has appeared in failbetter, BOAAT Journal, Linebreak, Unsplendid, Hayden’s Ferry Review, B O D Y, Diode Poetry Journal, Thrush Poetry Journal, Broad Street Magazine, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University.
by Rose Jenny
by Juliana Gray
Every morning in this vacation rental,
I watch the surfers riding the cold Pacific,
hoping that a plucky shark will eat one.
Don’t they know how small and ridiculous
they look? They paddle out at dawn and float
for hours just offshore, tiny dots
like lice in parted hair, waiting for
a perfect wave that never seems to come.
Sometimes one will catch a breaker and coast
for maybe three or four seconds, then fall.
Are they just inept, the specific men
(almost all of them are men) on this
specific beach? I sip my creamy coffee
and finish my crossword while they bob in the swell,
freezing even in their expensive wetsuits.
How good can it be, those three seconds
skimming the outstretched hand of god? No,
really, I’m asking. How good can it be?
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Juliana Gray's third poetry collection is Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press 2017). Recent poems have appeared in Willow Springs, Allium, storySouth, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.
by Heather L. Davis
The small vinyl case like a mouth,
the silver clasp like lips. Always
with her, it spoke all day. Twenty
times or more. Open it up and out came
the word cigarette, which meant
small pleasure, which meant
relief.
We sat in the back of a blue Datsun
as it rolled over the Delaware Bridge,
a mobile capsule fueled by nicotine,
our mother on her way to work or back.
We thought nothing of it, the invisible
tar swaddling, the floating
chemical hug.
When I got older, I hid the case
and gave lectures. Older still and
I snuck to the cold stone basement
to try it, to know what it was like.
It tasted of home, of menthol
and mystery, was a spiny
sea breeze.
Out of eight kids, only two never
took up the habit. The rest of us liked
that glowing, the fire in our mouths.
And so we became smoke, the smell of it
everywhere in our clothes and in the walls.
We ate it, bathed in it, took it everywhere
with us.
Mom had her first one in nursing school.
It showed she was a modern girl, helped
with her nerves. She had an ashtray
I loved—half of a huge mollusk shell. Now
it’s mine, though we all quit years ago,
except for Mom, even after the cancer,
the crumbling jaw.
The ashtray sits on my dresser, insides
no longer sooty, but pearly as heaven. It
served her well, holding twenty-thousand
days and nights, life measured
in crushed Salems, their pink lipstick tips
proof of minutes burned
clean through.
I take off the fused glass ring—sky blue—
embedded with swirls of remains, place it
in the shell for safe keeping. Half
the beauty and half the sorrow
of the world rest in that sea creature,
which lit each place we lived,
the homes where
she took care of ten people or tried.
No doubt she’d be annoyed by this storage
arrangement, maybe even notice the anger in it,
then slowly smile, slowly nod because it’s funny
after all, how our hapless bodies end: ashes
to ashes, bone to glorious
bone.
____________________________________________________________
The small vinyl case like a mouth,
the silver clasp like lips. Always
with her, it spoke all day. Twenty
times or more. Open it up and out came
the word cigarette, which meant
small pleasure, which meant
relief.
We sat in the back of a blue Datsun
as it rolled over the Delaware Bridge,
a mobile capsule fueled by nicotine,
our mother on her way to work or back.
We thought nothing of it, the invisible
tar swaddling, the floating
chemical hug.
When I got older, I hid the case
and gave lectures. Older still and
I snuck to the cold stone basement
to try it, to know what it was like.
It tasted of home, of menthol
and mystery, was a spiny
sea breeze.
Out of eight kids, only two never
took up the habit. The rest of us liked
that glowing, the fire in our mouths.
And so we became smoke, the smell of it
everywhere in our clothes and in the walls.
We ate it, bathed in it, took it everywhere
with us.
Mom had her first one in nursing school.
It showed she was a modern girl, helped
with her nerves. She had an ashtray
I loved—half of a huge mollusk shell. Now
it’s mine, though we all quit years ago,
except for Mom, even after the cancer,
the crumbling jaw.
The ashtray sits on my dresser, insides
no longer sooty, but pearly as heaven. It
served her well, holding twenty-thousand
days and nights, life measured
in crushed Salems, their pink lipstick tips
proof of minutes burned
clean through.
I take off the fused glass ring—sky blue—
embedded with swirls of remains, place it
in the shell for safe keeping. Half
the beauty and half the sorrow
of the world rest in that sea creature,
which lit each place we lived,
the homes where
she took care of ten people or tried.
No doubt she’d be annoyed by this storage
arrangement, maybe even notice the anger in it,
then slowly smile, slowly nod because it’s funny
after all, how our hapless bodies end: ashes
to ashes, bone to glorious
bone.
Listen now
Heather L. Davis is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist with an MA in creative writing from Syracuse University. Her book, The Lost Tribe of Us, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She works in international public health and lives with her husband and two kids in Lancaster, PA. She often misplaces her bank card and puts the creamer back into the cupboard instead of the fridge.
by Diane K. Martin
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Tucking the wings back under the bird’s body must have resurrected
her, because there was Mom, already chopping onions. We didn’t talk
about my lifestyle, my father, or the burnt-to-a crisp skin of my brilliant
career, nor did we chat about the time she stuffed the turkey with Saltines
because they were on sale at Raley’s, and everyone got so thirsty we all
got drunk, even the children. We didn’t reminisce about past Thanksgivings,
like the time I arrived late and my brother slammed the table and roared,
“We are not going to save her any goddamn salad.” Mom made a point
of reminding me that she set out a half grapefruit for my appetizer,
because I’m allergic to shrimp. We didn’t mention her bad heart—or mine.
We just chopped, boiled, simmered, stewed, sliced, roasted, and sautéed
in butter, and then twisted the turkey wing and tucked it under the body
of the bird, even though it meant breaking the bones a little bit to do it.
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Diane K. Martin lives in western Sonoma County, California. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, diode, Field, Harvard Review, Narrative, Plume, and Zyzzyva, among many other journals and anthologies. A poem was awarded second place in the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize, judged by B.H. Fairchild. Another poem received a Pushcart Special Mention, and yet another won first prize from the journal Smartish Pace. Her first book, Conjugated Visits, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published by Dream Horse Press. Her second collection, Hue & Cry, was published by MadHat Press.
by Angela Sucich
by Julia Kolchinsky
by Stella Reed