by Susan Stewart
by Shara McCallum
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2026! From November 2-13, watch our daily features on a selection of women and nonbinary poets appearing at MBF.
To see and hear Shara McCallum read her poem, please click on the title, then click on the video, and/or stop by Miami Book Fair.
by Nadine Pinede
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2026! From November 2-13, watch our daily features on a selection of women and nonbinary poets appearing at MBF.
To see and hear Nadine Pinede read her poem, please click on the title, then click on the video, and/or stop by Miami Book Fair.
by Soham Patel
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2026! From November 2-13, watch our daily features on a selection of women and nonbinary poets appearing at MBF.
To see and hear Soham Patel read her poem, please click on the title, then click on the video, and/or stop by Miami Book Fair.
by Laura Kolbe
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2026! From November 2-13, watch our daily features on a selection of women and nonbinary poets appearing at MBF.
To see and hear Laura Kolbe read her poem, please click on the title, then click on the video, and/or stop by Miami Book Fair.
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2026! From November 2-13, watch our daily features on a selection of women and nonbinary poets appearing at MBF.
To see and hear Aimee Nezhukumatathil read her poem, please click on the title, then click on the video, and/or stop by Miami Book Fair.
by Emily Skaja
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2026! From November 2-13, watch our daily features on a selection of women and nonbinary poets appearing at MBF.
To see and hear Emily Skaja read her poem, please click on the title, then click on the video, and/or stop by Miami Book Fair.
By Ellie Black
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2026! From November 2-13, watch our daily features on a selection of women and nonbinary poets appearing at MBF.
To see and hear Ellie Black read her poem, please click on the title, then click on the video, and/or stop by Miami Book Fair.
by Hera Naguib
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2026! From November 2-13, watch our daily features on a selection of women and nonbinary poets appearing at MBF.
To see and hear Hera Naguib read her poem, please click on the title, then click on the video, and/or stop by Miami Book Fair.
by Rae Armantrout
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2026! From November 2-13, watch our daily features on a selection of women and nonbinary poets appearing at MBF.
To see and hear Rae Armantrout read her poem, please click on the title, then click on the video, and/or stop by Miami Book Fair.
by Alina Kalontarov
After Gbenga Adesina
I give you my thunder, a horse
without a name, a wound
like a lighthouse.
I give you the wobbly knob
of my soul, the turmoil
in my purse, my inadequate word.
I give you a sky that tastes like fever,
the forest stitched with smoke,
my little saltine heart.
I give you the blue island
of my crimes, the empty coffers,
a mouth full of pennies.
I give you the moon as a plot
hole, stars like shrapnel,
my twilight of ruin.
I am a sorry witch
who burns like evidence.
I give you my spine
made of matchsticks.
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Alina Kalontarov is an educator, poet, and amateur photographer from New York. She collaborates on the editorial teams of various publications and is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee with work that can be found or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, ONLY POEMS, Sky Island Journal, Gather, Thimble, Sand Hills, and elsewhere.
by Mary Jo Bang
The taxi passes the wall that won’t let anyone see
the cemetery hiding behind it.
Fine, I think. The radium sun is blazing.
A bird takes a bite and spits it back out, pfft.
While I’m fond of the optic nerve, I find
I don’t need it now. The well-lit forever lens
is admitting everything today—today will marry
my white dress; today will marry
my black jacket. Today will marry my dunce heart
that got damaged when a doctor tried
to animate the past I kept in a cage. It’s in there
still with a dreadful procession of people
and the end of everything, everything, everything.
*Untitled photograph of Maria Skłodowska-Curie, photographer unknown, 1903
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Mary Jo Bang is a translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy and author of nine books of poems, including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a PEN Voelcker Award, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. The Museum of Mary is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2027.
by Christy Prahl
I wake up lonely
as fog.
So many of us
adrift on life rafts
after a break in the barge.
We dream up archipelagos
rich in coconut
and boar,
yelling to strangers
is it land?
just mirage,
our voices hoarse,
arms weary of rowing.
And what next,
anyway?
We’ve all read
our dog-eared
Lord of the Flies.
We know how close
we get to feral
when pushed.
Push us, we think.
We’re half
crime already.
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Christy Prahl is the author of the collections We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023), With Her Hair on Fire (Roadside Press, 2025), and Catalog of Labors (Unsolicited Press, forthcoming 2026). A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been featured in Poetry Daily, Tar River Poetry, Louisville Review, CALYX, and others. She splits her time between a small workers’ cottage in Chicago and refurbished Quonset hut in southwest Michigan.
by Tania Pryputniewicz
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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It sits in a flimsy pie-tin of crimped and corrugated silver,
wrapped in a paper towel my daughter wets three times
a day. My son tells her to chop it, one eye per chunk,
bury it in the yard, then dig it up. But she’s like me,
needs to see it grow. It’s an Idaho potato, nothing special,
useful under the right cut of meat in the crockpot. It withers
in toward its center, wrinkling a bit, like me, color
sucked from my hair’s roots by—I don’t know—this—
arguing—over why potato eyes are called eyes when
they’re seeds: Put down the knife. Leave her project
be. She’s not sure she wants it now, like the time
I saw my 12-string guitar in the hands of the mover
my husband hired—My lucky day, he said and smiled,
my husband right behind chirping, She never plays it, take it
away. What do they know of the grad school hours,
the ways it saved me from myself, useless in a house
of crying babies—I see, with my blind potato eyes I see
and from behind them I dream of guitars washing up,
like parts of me, like plastic shovels of the hotel tourists,
reds, blues, mostly primary yellows, days’ children
long gone, sandpipers taking back the shore.
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Tania Pryputniewicz is the author of two poetry collections, November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press, 2014) and The Fool in the Corn (Saddle Road Press, 2022), as well as Heart’s Compass Tarot: Discover Tarot Journaling and Create Your Own Cards (Two Fine Crows Books, 2021). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tania teaches poetry and tarot-inspired writing classes for San Diego Writers, Ink, Antioch University’s Continuing Education program, and through her website.
by Bonnie Jill Emanuel
In the blizzard you could barely
see the paper birch, nothing but
cold monochromatic clips ghost
white, you could feel yourself
blown sideways. You could see
yourself as in a film. The tree
shows in the slow frozen
fragile way the poem sometimes
anxiously strips down. Duct tape-
colored lenticel strips on bark.
The film is a poem. As if your
thoughts are separating from
you, small beetles. Silent, dense
base of tree now buried in snow,
hiding. They say a birch grows
in a V to sun. Does the world
feel violent to the tree? All night
it had been snowing & everything
had become something else. If
you are a letter you are a lowercase
i. Your arms thin like twigs.
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Bonnie Jill Emanuel is the author of Glitter City. Her most recent poems and interviews can be found in American Poetry Review, Pine Hills Review, Colorado Review, RHINO, and more. Emanuel is the recipient of the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the Irwin and Alice Stark Poetry Prize from The City College of New York. Born in Detroit, she lives in New York.
by Namita Krishnamurthy
The day I turned thirty
my father's body changed.
Skin turned inside out.
Eyeballs rolled into a dark corner.
It was as if he had walked into a room and forgotten why,
and I did not know what to say
to remind him of his place.
He says, I am old. What he means is, you are not young anymore.
He says, my shoulder is dislocated. He means, time is out of joint.
He says, remember how I carried you
when you fell asleep watching Denver the Last Dinosaur
and woke not knowing if you lost time—
if it was evening or dawn?
It is like that now. You do not know.
Every year I keep his name, he thinks he is snatching from me.
I say, this is our time. These are our hours.
He says, you're deaf.
But year after year, I hear him—
the rubble in his broken back,
the sandal paste on his forehead
cracking like a wall
around a white and ghastly temple.
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Namita Krishnamurthy is an actor and writer from Chennai, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hammock Magazine and Strange Horizons. She was longlisted for the Osmosis Poetry Prize in 2026, and is currently working on her first novel.
by C. E. Janecek
There’s a mutual recognition:
a gait swayed by the fissure
in a Birkenstock. The barber’s
gentle grazing down the slope
of our necks, a straight razor
shearing the wool from the lamb’s
throat. Lingering the aisles
of plastic-wrapped boxer briefs.
The callous on the middle finger,
that callous way we hold ourselves:
teaching each other to glare
at midnight strangers.
There is an invisible muscle
hardening beneath the skin.
I see it in the growing
layer of dust on upper lips:
dolls lingering their thumbs over
the early hours. A room of
strangers becoming familiar:
their joints refigured by
instruments of yearning, a hand
stretching the octaves between lovers.
It’s a pinkie ring, Pit Vipers,
a bush glittering chlorine
and hot sun. It’s a horizon
scar across the chest and
tender gooseflesh after praying
with the priestess of lightning
and good looks. A dip of the chin.
A ring of keys. A mirror
strung between streetlights.
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C. E. Janecek is a Czech American writer who holds a poetry MFA from Colorado State University and is a Tin House Workshop alum. Janecek’s writing has appeared in Poetry, Sugar House Review, Gulf Coast Journal, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. See cewritespoems.com.
by Ellie Gomero
During my walk a vulture, half the size of my body,
swoops down to greet its friends, perched neatly
in a line in the grassy patch that slopes into the mangroves,
kissing the bay. My mother calls, and sickness circles
me, a swarming wake, that group of vicious beaks,
they bubble over with laughter at my winglessness,
my inability to escape, to them I am prey.
Though I refuse to believe or bow my head and seek
the sky’s eternity as my mother wishes I would. Truly,
in this moment, she begs me to prey please pray for us
and is this moment not a prayer? The wind, a hymn
that twirls its fingers through the trees' green locks.
The stench of the mangroves, a holler, a hallelujah.
The rippling bay, with it sunken ships, its green and murky depths,
a sacred temple, harboring the dead, as all temples do.
And of course, that swarm of vultures,
is the congregation. Standing at attention,
ready for communion.
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Ellie Gomero is a writer, a poet, a feral woman, and a sad girl at heart. She just received her Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Florida International University. Her work has been published in The South Dakota Review, Rust + Moth, and The Orange Island Arts Review, and has received awards / recognition from The Academy of American Poets, Fred Shaw Poetry Contest, Bluapple Poetry Foundation, and Scholastics.
by Jules Jacob
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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And she lets the river answer.
—Leonard Cohen
When I question the river, a chorus
of invisible frogs chants where, where, where.
When I let the river answer, she sets
a baritone soloist in the tall
still weeds beside me. There, there he insists,
familial home, gliding trails of kayaks,
siblings, father. Air, air, I plead. Waves slap
against the concrete cobblestone boat path;
wind breathes my will. Sings, I’m bending your way.
Swallows dip in September light, droplets
collect in my palm. Her hair shiny brown
and wet to her knees, my mother backcasts
and effortlessly cracks the whip before
introducing her nymph to the water.
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Jules Jacob’s recent collections include Rappaccini’s Garden (White Stag Publishing, 2024), an illustrated collection co-authored with Sonja Johanson, and Kingdom of Glass & Seed (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023). Poems, interviews, and reviews of the author’s work appear in Plume, Lily Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, SWWIM, Tinderbox, CALYX, and Tupelo Quarterly. Jules’ work has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in France and other fine organizations. Jules resides in Colorado.
by Martha Rhodes