by Jordan Cobb
for M.F.C.
by Maggie Rue Hess
There are so few things without a reference; there cannot be a lover without beloveds.
Abhay wrote, You returned empty handed from the farms of love, his
ghazal a seeking. We believe in couplets as long as they are in service to each other and more.
As long as they torque
and hinge like the body of a snake resisting. Or the jaw of a snake
refanged. O scaled oblivion. Where in the body do you search
for feeling? There are those for whom not finding is the point—the price and
privilege. Without harvest, we attempt a different accumulation. There can be no farm without promise
but also risk. Call it yearning. Call through the morning’s mist for a neighbor or a pet to return more
than an echo. Whoever responds understands your lonesome
labor. Such a rarity, to be heard. I settle for a silence of my own making, attempt
to ask more questions kindly. Dissipate and gather. Using my hands
the way they’re intended, that both-ness of hold and release. Is this a necessary repetition?
O serpentine
recollection: everything missed is named beloved.
____________________________________________________________
Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a PhD student living in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her partner and their crusty white dog. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Connecticut River Review, SWWIM Every Day, and other publications; her debut chapbook, The Bones That Map Us, was published by Belle Point Press in 2024. She likes to share baked goods with friends and can be found on Instagram as @maggierue_.
by Kathleen Miller
When rustling bushes cause one colt to startle,
it ripples through the herd until they all stare,
eyes wide and nostrils blowing, at the dark woods beyond.
If one bolts, the rest will follow, wheeling
from the known danger to the unknown world,
even plummeting off cliffs in their blind panic.
Humans claim we would never be so irrational.
But I might want to be like them despite it all
because I watch how they greet each other
when five return from hours up on the high ridgeline.
How they dip their long necks over each other, circling,
with quiet whickers, accounting for all,
from the lead mare to the gelding
often cast to the outer rings.
How the daily dynamics dissolve.
How they stand, nose to nose, exchanging air
between their lungs, how they seem to say:
you’ve returned to us.
____________________________________________________________
Kathleen Miller is a queer writer and lawyer who was raised on the plains of Nebraska and now calls the Bay Area home. She is a member and student at The Writing Salon in Berkeley. When not writing, she can be found competing in endurance rides on horseback and attempting to learn how to sing.
by Sheree La Puma
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
____________________________________________________________
When you fall from middle earth
my scars
become a selling point.
In a field outside
Los Angeles,
a pale moon rising
over blood
red blooms, poppies.
Somewhere,
in the world, my children
mourn
their father, alone.
Mother
is a body, void
of hope.
I used to be a wildflower
planted
& on this early
morning
I watch spring
explode
like the barrel of a
gun.
____________________________________________________________
Sheree La Puma is a poet and recent cancer survivor based in both Los Angeles and Rosarito, Mexico. She often writes about border related issues. Her work has appeared in Frontier Poetry, Lake Effect: An International Literary Journal, The Penn Review, Redivider, Sugar House Review, The Maine Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, London Reader, The Lascaux Review, Salt Hill Literary Journal, Stand Magazine, Rust + Moth, Mantis, and Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. She earned her MFA in writing from CalArts. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of The Net and four Pushcarts. A reader for the Orange Blossom Review, her latest chapbook, Broken: Do Not Use, is currently available at Main Street Rag Publishing.
by Sara M Sala
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
____________________________________________________________
by Erika Meitner
Riot of roadside dame’s rocket, lavender
& white, I am walking my way through June
alongside you, & if I keep it up, move faster
than the snapping turtle in the driveway,
& the pickups on route 30 keep swerving
to avoid me while I shoulder myself against
traffic, I might beat the heat. Damask-violet,
join me at the swimming hole in the oldest
marble quarry in the country. We can watch
boys hurl themselves from sun-warmed ledges.
The folks in cut-offs holding local beer koozies
won’t care that you’re an invasive species.
Sweet rocket, ticks be damned, let’s roll around
on the grass—I’ve pulled my socks high, tucked
my shirt in, coated my body with picaridin,
loved this life as I was able to despite perpetual
distractibility. Attention is just infinite waiting
for long webs of connection—who says we can’t
always be moving? Mother-of-the-evening,
I’ve donned my reflective vest in preparation
for a steamy dusk, a twilight of lymph. Where
are the fire-flies? It’s already late. Night-scented
gilliflower, rogue’s gilliflower, I am not a thrill-seeker;
I promise, this time I’ll be the first one to break it off.
____________________________________________________________
Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry; and Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022). Meitner is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the Creative Writing program. Her newest book, Assembled Audience, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in fall 2026.
by Jen Cheng
by Lenore Myers
by Kathleen Miller
When rustling bushes cause one colt to startle,
it ripples through the herd until they all stare,
eyes wide and nostrils blowing, at the dark woods beyond.
If one bolts, the rest will follow, wheeling
from the known danger to the unknown world,
even plummeting off cliffs in their blind panic.
Humans claim we would never be so irrational.
But I might want to be like them despite it all
because I watch how they greet each other
when five return from hours up on the high ridgeline.
How they dip their long necks over each other, circling,
with quiet whickers, accounting for all,
from the lead mare to the gelding
often cast to the outer rings.
How the daily dynamics dissolve.
How they stand, nose to nose, exchanging air
between their lungs, how they seem to say:
you’ve returned to us.
____________________________________________________________
Kathleen Miller is a queer writer and lawyer who was raised on the plains of Nebraska and now calls the Bay Area home. She is a member and student at The Writing Salon in Berkeley. When not writing, she can be found competing in endurance rides on horseback and attempting to learn how to sing.
by Sheree La Puma
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
____________________________________________________________
When you fall from middle earth
my scars
become a selling point.
In a field outside
Los Angeles,
a pale moon rising
over blood
red blooms, poppies.
Somewhere,
in the world, my children
mourn
their father, alone.
Mother
is a body, void
of hope.
I used to be a wildflower
planted
& on this early
morning
I watch spring
explode
like the barrel of a
gun.
____________________________________________________________
Sheree La Puma is a poet and recent cancer survivor based in both Los Angeles and Rosarito, Mexico. She often writes about border related issues. Her work has appeared in Frontier Poetry, Lake Effect: An International Literary Journal, The Penn Review, Redivider, Sugar House Review, The Maine Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, London Reader, The Lascaux Review, Salt Hill Literary Journal, Stand Magazine, Rust + Moth, Mantis, and Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. She earned her MFA in writing from CalArts. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of The Net and four Pushcarts. A reader for the Orange Blossom Review, her latest chapbook, Broken: Do Not Use, is currently available at Main Street Rag Publishing.
by Annie Diamond
He says it sounds like dewdrops,
a bright and rounded pew pew pew,
and then I hear it. His human dupe
not meager, but contextualizing.
I see the cardinal bright as a mouth
of lipstick amid winter-colded trees.
He uses an app to divine their songs
that I call Bird Shazam.
April remains diffident, half exhaled:
after six midwestern springs, I should
expect this, but each time it surprises.
Northeastern childhood seasons more
meticulous, specific;
global warming has not helped, but
midwest flatness seems most relevant.
I have found talk of weather not
small for Chicagoans, though this might
have more to do with aging than geographies.
Feel the difference between climate and weather:
the former what we expect, the latter what we get.
Cornell Lab mimics the cardinal song as
cheer, cheer, cheer, what, what, what, what.
____________________________________________________________
Annie Diamond is an Ashkenazi Jewish poet and recovering academic who has made her home in Chicago. She has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, The Lighthouse Works, and Boston University, where she earned her MFA in 2018. Her poems appear in Prairie Schooner, No Tokens Journal, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working to place her debut poetry manuscript.
by Beth Boylan
This globe of hydrangea hangs on by a thread
after last night’s storm, its bluish petals turned brown
like that patch of hard, grassless earth the sparrows
search for seed or the cinnamon milk left behind in its bowl,
the decaying teeth of a one-armed monkey named Xing Xing,
who Emily and I have watched for months on our tiny screens
in place of the sleep that eludes us. Rapt by her devouring
vegetables and fruits, and her huge, crooked grin, which
at certain moments, seems to hold all the love in the world:
this world that’s on fire, where no one seems able to sleep.
Back in the fall, her caretaker, the old Buddhist nun,
would have surely held my hydrangea in her hand,
gently snipped it from its stem, and whispered a prayer.
A proper pruning as I should have done, instead of
letting winter set in—
Strange solace, then, this morning,
the poet’s words:
that we don’t have to do anything weird
to reach outer space, we’re already here:
billions of astronauts sharing space,
rocketing through stars—all of us, all of this—
to be lost,
to already be where we are going.
____________________________________________________________
by Theresa Burns
according to a segment on Radiolab today.
And not for days or weeks, says the biologist to the host,
but decades. Until my own death.
They’re not sure what you’re doing there—
if you shield me from the worst diseases
or lead me to them faster. But you’re there,
the irritant if not the pearl of you.
Somewhere in my liver, the lobes of my lungs—
you, aborted in my 20s,
still hang around. Maybe in the warp
of my fingers from arthritis. Or maybe they’d swerve
worse without you.
Your dad is there, too—a man I haven’t seen
in half a lifetime, who I’ll also never lose.
And you, unfortunate half-moon, who settled
in my fallopian when I was 37.
Wrong place, wrong time—is there any doubt you’re my spawn?
I nearly bled out in an ambulance before I knew
you existed.
To know you’ve been there all this time,
and I’ve missed it.
Have you met your siblings, the two who survived?
You’d like them, I think.
They’re the murmur in my heart that keeps me up at night.
And the calm that comes down
like a blanket on me.
____________________________________________________________
Theresa Burns is the author of the poetry collections Design (Terrapin Books, 2022) and Two Train Town (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry, reviews, and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, Verse Daily, Plume, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2023 New Jersey Poet's Prize, Burns is the founder of the community reading series Watershed Literary Events and teaches writing in and around New York.
by David Eileen
throws her laugh down the stairs, sends a shimmy into her body
like two hands use aluminum sheets to make thunder, keeps teeth
that bust grapes on my hips, dances as a column of fire writing figures
on sand dunes at night, smooths herself over sheets like water benefits a creek but light
threads through her better, thumbs an encyclopedia of callouses that do not obscure
her tenderness, built a home in this poorly decorated world & called it a parade & now
she leads from the front, lilies at her throat, waving, waving
____________________________________________________________
David Eileen lives in the mountains of Virginia. Their writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Diagram, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Best of the Net. Their work and letters are concerned with interconnectedness, lineage, queer resilience, labor rights, solidarity, and care for our planet. They are a big fan of talking to your neighbors; they would love to talk to you. See more at david-eileen.com.
by Shannon Quinn
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
____________________________________________________________
I trade you small pot of light
for key that sticks in door.
Our worst nights, coin toss
burn house or bed down.
Wool-drunk moths in sock drawer
judge our quiet violence and dime-bag sentiment
but then we have an early evening
you mostly sober, me mostly clean
thinking of every possible animal afterlife.
Prescription sleeping pills smuggle
us into sleep, where we are strangers.
Cross the street to avoid each other.
Drowning girl can’t climb
on another body, call it shore.
____________________________________________________________
Shannon Quinn is the author of three collections of poetry. She has a chapbook from JackPine Press coming out this November and two multi-disciplinary pieces forthcoming from Ponder Review. Her work was included in The Best of Canadian Poetry 2025. Quinn is based out of Toronto.
by Danielle Coffyn
by Cecelia Hagen
by Shelby Handler
My mother, with her long, ringless fingers, couldn’t
knot the slippery gizzards to the fishing twine, but she tried.
Still, I blamed her. For not being like the other mothers
who bought hot dogs from the Albertson’s,
sliced them in neat rounds, strung them to the lines
of real fishing poles, studded like pink-boiled beads
dunked into the dirty creek. The crawdads scurried,
swished up silt to seize those lures, appearing
eager to be stolen from their homes. Airlifted, plopped
into a bucket. Those mothers knew how to trap
innocent creatures. Those mothers put stickered notes
in their daughters’ lunch sacks, baked cakes that weren’t born
from a box. But I turned out fine. Taught myself
how to cook, how to bake bread from scratch. Last month,
I separated six yolks from their whites, the gold orbs cold
in my palms. My mother, in from out of town, peered
into the pile, saying, I can see myself in your eggs!
I leaned over to see, and the convex portraits
multiplied. A brood appeared. A hive comprised
of her and me and me and her and her and me.
_________________________________________________________
Shelby Handler is a writer, translator, and organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace. Recent work has appeared in and or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Redivider, Poetry Northwest, The Journal, Black Warrior Review Online, Four Way Review, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. Shelby received their MFA in poetry at the University of Washington-Seattle, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net.
by Pam Williams
Future? I drink coffee first. When I’m done my coffee, rinse it out. Gotta eat after coffee. Snack at night after six. I know it’ll rain. I don’t like rain. I. Don’t. Like. Rain. Rain makes me scared. Storms, lightning. I’m tired of looking at rain. In ten years, I’m going to be bored. Not doing nothing. Watching TV all day. Watching football. I like getting prizes. I like doing books. I’ll be watching crime and football. I’m a TV watcher. I like football a lot. That’s on today. I like the future. The future wakes me up in the night.
_________________________________________________________
Her name is Pam Williams. She is a Black poet and winner of the 2026 Cow Tipping Prize, awarded to a writer with intellectual/developmental disabilities. She knows herself. Everyone around here knows her name. They call her Pamela or Pam. She likes herself. She’d like to be friends with anybody here.
by Mary Elder Jacobsen