White Savior

SWWIM Every Day
by Ansley Moon

by Ansley Moon



My brown girl traveled an ocean
to me. Swam in a bucket, a caught

& angry fish. Always swimming
in frantic laps. Never being good girl

for mama. But now, she is mine & I
will teach her virtue. How to never leave

your room without matching bras & panties.
How to wrap, wrap, wrap & hide blood.

How to be gracious for those that saved you
to say thank you after a beating & not cry.

By my hand, my brown girl will be worthy,
will be different. Will learn to wash

away the day’s stink & always wear lipstick.

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Ansley Moon is the author of the poetry collections, Register the Missing (Kaya Press, 2026) and How to Bury the Dead (Black Coffee Press, 2011). They are an Asian American adoptee, poet, and educator. Moon writes the "Teach this Poem" series for the Academy of American poets and is a Co-Founding member of The Starlings Collective, a BIPOC adoptee writers and artists collective.

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From September 14-25, in honor of her residency at The Betsy Hotel and our 10th anniversary season, SWWIM Every Day will be featuring a selection of poems curated by Sarah Audsley.

Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She serves as the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center.

We hope you enjoy this special collaboration!

A Small Selfishness

SWWIM Every Day

by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello



I could hear you smoking through the phone
that night after work, could hear the horns

of taxis and tires grinding glass into asphalt,
could almost see the cigarette’s whorls caught

between your knuckles and in your throat.
That night you told me what others don’t

know about leaving someone behind, how
many mothers and fathers we have lost, how

easy it had become to harden and molt, again
and again abandoning yourself. What, then,

muscled you back on your feet the next day?
And after that? Let me be selfish this once. Stay

like that, alive. Let the ash fall, let the smoke rise.
I can almost still see you, and me not yet left behind.

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Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox, winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry; and co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, winner of the Translation Grand Prize from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and more. She serves as Director of Programs and Marketing for Miami Book Fair.

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From September 14-25, in honor of her residency at The Betsy Hotel and our 10th anniversary season, SWWIM Every Day will be featuring a selection of poems curated by Sarah Audsley.

Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She serves as the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center.

We hope you enjoy this special collaboration!

Sad Girls Wearing Paper Hat

SWWIM Every Day
by Mary-Kim Arnold

by Mary-Kim Arnold


I’ve had enough with all the sad girls, you said
and I imagined all of history’s women laughing so hard their heads
rolled off into the filthy trash pits of time
So much for solidarity, I said and then we sipped our gin in silence

The girl was twenty-two when from her loft window in the city, she fell
some will say jumped or leaped but I prefer to think fell
I do not mean to undermine intention
only to question the arc of motion

I think of her while driving this highway
I think of her and I think of you
The center lane of traffic has stopped, but on either side, the cars and trucks rush by
it is hard to see what is ahead
We inch forward
A crate full of hats has spilled out on the asphalt
and you, a milliner!
But that was years ago
before your divorce
before you started falling
for men you could not have
bookish men with their bookish wives
You made hats of paper
ornate and delicate
the fine fragile threads you guided through the fine eyes
of such fine, fine needles
You are not a sad girl
not you

Sad girls are young with upturned mouths
Sad girls stay up late with their drinks and their broken hearts

I for one love them all
love them for all that they long for but cannot have
the fragile girls
the ornate and the delicate
the ambitious and the broken-hearted
the girls who cry into their cocktails
and on their kitchen floors while all around them the world swirls
in its stupid cruelty
the girls who have stared out over the city
and for what they have seen there
might fall
or jump
or leap
or perhaps they would take flight

Choose a pretty hat today, sad girls
wear a pretty dress and make your way downtown
Sit at your office desk and let the cityscape astonish you
You have seen before how the days can astonish
You have seen such astonishing things

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Mary-Kim Arnold is a writer, artist, arts administrator, and educator. She is the author of The Fish & The Dove: Poems (Noemi Press) and Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press). Other work has appeared in Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. A transnational, transracial Korean-born adoptee, her text and textile work explore themes of hybridity, dislocation, racial and cultural identity, and gender.

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From September 14-25, in honor of her residency at The Betsy Hotel and our 10th anniversary season, SWWIM Every Day will be featuring a selection of poems curated by Sarah Audsley.

Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She serves as the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center.

We hope you enjoy this special collaboration!

Dog Days

SWWIM Every Day
by Rosanna Young Oh

by Rosanna Young Oh




From September 14-25, in honor of her residency at The Betsy Hotel and our 10th anniversary season, SWWIM Every Day will be featuring a selection of poems curated by Sarah Audsley.

Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She serves as the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center.

We hope you enjoy this special collaboration!

Quickening

SWWIM Every Day
by Ashley Sojin Kim

by Ashley Sojin Kim




From September 14-25, in honor of her residency at The Betsy Hotel and our 10th anniversary season, SWWIM Every Day will be featuring a selection of poems curated by Sarah Audsley.

Sarah Audsley is the author of Landlock X (Texas Review Press, 2023). A Korean American adoptee, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a member of The Starlings Collective, Audsley lives and works in northern Vermont. She serves as the Writing Program Director at Vermont Studio Center.

We hope you enjoy this special collaboration!

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Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—W. S. Merwin, “Separation”


It feels the most like wriggling—not bubbles or gas
—frenetic bursts asserting proof of life.

She’s most active when I lie supine. I rest
my hand on my belly to feel her from the surface.

She doesn’t know that each insistent flurry
eases my anxiety, that she’s not

my only child, that I am mother to both
the quick and the dead, of whom I was scraped clean.

I think less often of the one who was
before (a new kind of pain—healing a form

of loss). I know well how to carry grief, but what
to do with hope? It wriggles within me, faint

at first, then stronger, more assured. To come
alive once more, savor these strange delights.

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Ashley Sojin Kim’s poems appear or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Literary Matters, Gulf Coast, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Florida and BA from Johns Hopkins. She has received support from Kundiman, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Kearny Street Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center. You can find her at ashleysojin.com.

Venus in Aries pt 2

SWWIM Every Day
by Cloud Delfina Cardona

by Cloud Delfina Cardona



Let’s go 90 on I-10. Fuck the cops. The beach feels right. Who cares that it’s February and overcast. Who cares that our lives are on the line. There is a road. There is a car. There are these hours we don’t know what to do with. There’s your mouth on the can again. There’s you lifting up the joint to my mouth again. There’s you getting lost in the moment again. There I go pulling The Devil card again. Who cares that we are not in love. We will never see each other again, but there’s this photo I have of us after we finally made it to the beach. After we stop for breakfast tacos that drip grease on my car seats. There I go again. Turning this night into a myth I can pass down to anyone who has ever risked it all for what you thought was love, but really, it was limerence. It’s always limerence. I have a hard time wrangling in all this want. Maybe that’s why I am so drawn to deserts, oceans, and sky, the extremity of it all. When you find someone else who hates themselves as much as you, things only end as well as you can imagine.

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Cloud Delfina Cardona is an artist, writer, and book cover designer from San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of What Remains, winner of the 2020 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and the past is a jean jacket, winner of the Naomi Shihab Nye First Book of Poetry Award. Cardona moonlights as DJ Mexistentialism.

The Great Before

SWWIM Every Day

by Emily Mohn-Slate

We drive through lava fields to the Puʻuloa petroglyphs,
scream-singing “Wild Heart” and craning our necks toward pāhoehoe fields,

hot lava flows shaped into roping swirls of rock. Our kids,
somehow tweens, still wake us with nightmares, still find us funny
when we chase them around the house, yelling Pubertypubertypuberty!‍ ‍

We drive this empty road down the mountain, through craters and lava fields
going on forever, old eruptions hardened, new ones coming, steam building up unseen.

The country of eyerolls and talkback grows near, but for now, they’re still happy here,
no smartphones yet, no texting vacant-eyed selfies to friends. Distance from us
a future thing, too—like college and us pining for their voices, which just this morning

were whining and inescapable—them fighting over who sketched the better apple.
Later, we’ll be in our corners of the house on our screens.

I’ll want everyone to leave me alone, which is so often all I want.
Now, there they are in the backseat, grinning with smooth, pre-braces teeth,
and my daughter is beaming at me because we’re the ones who know every word,

we two share this secret code, and I’m craning my head back to grin at her,
and we’re singing together with our still-forming faces, with all our sweet unknowing.

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Emily Mohn-Slate is the author of The Falls, winner of the New American Poetry Prize (New American Press), and Feed, winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press). Her poems and essays can be found in AGNI, New Ohio Review, The Adroit Journal, CALYX, NELLE, and elsewhere. She teaches writing workshops for the Madwomen in the Attic, writes the "Be Where You Are" newsletter, and co-hosts the Ass in Chair Collective.

Love Stung

SWWIM Every Day
by Paula R. Hilton

by Paula R. Hilton


How do you get the stinger out
when you’re mad for the bee?
Its venom should make you shout.
How do you get the stinger out,
without beating yourself up about
no longer wanting to be free?
How do you get the stinger out
when you’re mad for the bee?

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Paula R. Hilton explores the immediacy of memory and how our most important relationships define us. Her work has appeared in The Sunlight Press, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Feminine Collective, Ink Sweat & Tears, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans.

Curtains

SWWIM Every Day
by Jane Hilberry

by Jane Hilberry



I string aprons on the windows for curtains.
I try to breathe normally.

I try to breathe normally, but the air’s
too thin. I never saw your body.

I never saw the body you left,
small as a bird in a cat’s paws.

Bird small as a leaf fallen on the grass.
I see no children that belong to me.

Whatever children belonged to me,
my body’s a reservoir, evaporating.

The reservoir of my body evaporates.
Possums snuffle in the yard at dusk.

Shapes move through the night yard.
I string aprons on the windows for curtains.

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Jane Hilberry taught Creativity classes and Creative Writing workshops at Colorado College for 35 years until her recent retirement. She also led arts-based leadership courses for executives at The Banff Centre in Canada. Her books of poems include Still the Animals Enter and Body Painting, which won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry, as well as a chapbook co-authored with her father, Conrad Hilberry: This Awkward Art: Poems by a Father and Daughter (Mayapple Press).

Diffusion

SWWIM Every Day
by Renuka Raghavan

by Renuka Raghavan


He takes nothing which is how you know it was decided in the body before the mind knew, socks without shoes, the door left open like a sentence that stops mid-, the road accepts him without opinion, without warmth, the asphalt holding the day’s heat a little longer than the air, rising through the threadbare socks, nearly tender, behind him the house with its one lit window, its noise holding a shape by now, violent weather he was born into, quickly learning the smell and taste of your own blood, he is of six or seven or the age that is not yet old enough to be believed, the trees on either side lean in, enormous, their darkness a kind of shelter, the first he has been offered freely, somewhere a dog, somewhere the low complaint of a truck on a distant road, moving toward a place he cannot name but recognizes as safer than the home he left, the idea of away, the only geography he has, his breathing evens, this is the thing no one will tell him, the body forgives faster than the mind, already his is making adjustments, already his is carrying him elsewhere, the stars come out, ancient and indiscriminate, entirely without knowledge of him, yet he still looks up, the way the drowning always look up, the water growing, the light above, cold and very, very far.

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Renuka Raghavan is the author of three prose and poetry collections. Her most recent is Nothing Resplendent Lives Here (Červená Barva Press, 2022). Her previous work has appeared in Boston Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, The American Journal of Poetry, and Mom Egg Review, among others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives and writes in California.

Lucille Clifton's Ouija Board

SWWIM Every Day
by Mary Morris

by Mary Morris



We weren’t sure.
We asked the oracle—miracle of the mercurial.

Don’t buckle, reader.

Lucille utilized it religiously—
summoning spirits, invoking ghosts

as she conjured the departed
in their alchemy with questions. Lit beeswax candles

circling her abundant garden

of greens and sweet potatoes, prepared
to reach beyond arias of the flesh.

You will remember, reader, she was wild with divinity—
prophetic, the seer we all seek to learn from.

To be taught by the mistress
of soothsayers

is to hang your senses out
in the tallest trees, closer to clouds, for devotions

with her soul, her six children, her six toes
on each foot, that extreme depth

of gentleness, as she blesses the boats
before departing the harbor

of the dead.

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Mary Morris is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Lanterns in the Night Market (2025). Her poems are published in North American Review, Poetry Magazine, Boulevard, and Prairie Schooner. She has received a number of awards, including the Rita Dove Award, Wheelbarrow Book Prize (selected by Leila Chatti), and the New Mexico Book Award. Mary has been invited to read her work at the Library of Congress, which aired on NPR.



Afterword

SWWIM Every Day
by Lauren Hilger

by Lauren Hilger


It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!

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Long after and still,
three horses appear.

I am a child’s
corner of that field.
A huge readiness.

I stare into a face with too much.

I contain what I don’t want to say

and exist so outside my voice
why even talk.

The fear like a dark
ringed circle with bells.

The task to touch what exists while we do.
The three horses gone.

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Lauren Hilger is the author of Morality Play (Poetry NW Editions, 2022) and Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016). Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has work in BOMB, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, Poetry Foundation's online archive, NEA's Poetry Out Loud, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.

Desert Abecedarian

SWWIM Every Day
by Rebecca Aronson

by Rebecca Aronson


“Another day in paradise,” my son jokes,
back from school, rooting in the cabinet for popcorn,
crackers, the last squares of my secret chocolate—
dark—I keep hidden behind the plain matzah.
Everything is eroding, I know it, even as he grows,
flourishes, has to duck his head at doorways,
giant feet scuffing the fresh painted walls. He radiates
hope to meet my fear and fury. Love like tree sap,
impossible to scrape free. Someone said children
join you to the world as long as they are in it,
kick you forward even when stillness is sometimes all you
long for. My own mother kept breathing until
minutes after I arrived in her room, then
no more waiting. Was that on purpose?
Only my mother knows, and she’s not telling.
People say all sorts of things I don’t even half believe;
questioning was the family gospel, the only traditional
rite I practice, pass on, the teenager’s
smart mouth both sting and proof.
The trouble with life is death. Or said another way,
undoing is most of what is always happening.
Viewed in this light, crackers are no less pleasing than cake,
water as good as wine. Outside the window, the desert,
xeric and bare at first glance, is a teeming city:
yarrow and fleabane in the ditches,
zigzagging lifelines you’d have to know to look for.

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Rebecca Aronson is the author of three books of poetry: Anchor, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, and Creature, Creature. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, a Yetzirah poetry fellowship, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee writers conference. She is host of "Bad Mouth," a series of words and music. She lives in Albuquerque, where she teaches writing. See rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com.

Kelp Me, Doctor, I’m a Female Echinoderm

SWWIM Every Day
by Christa Fairbrother

by Christa Fairbrother



The doctor asks, What brought you in today?
I feel like felt.
Spending time in the sand will do that.
Some days I spew mucus.
A poor heart can cause that.
And I’m waved away.
My questions a tumble
of bitten rocks I swallow
sure I’ve failed the test, my body.
Never once did he ask after
the sharp star of my core,
lantern bright, but my pores
ache and my bladder sinks.
In anger or hunger
I can clear-cut a forest
of seaweed, roll through every nori,
drown my sorrows in food,
but that only leaves me
a lonely urchin, to blame
for the sea’s poverty.

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Christa Fairbrother, MA, has had poetry in Bellingham Review, Crannog, Epiphany, Pleiades, and Salamander, among others. Currently, she’s Gulfport, Florida’s Poet Laureate and a poetry editor at Phylum Press. She’s been a finalist for the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, the Wilder Prize, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice. She loves tea and avocados. Connect with her at christafairbrotherwrites.com, on IG @christafairbrotherwrites, or BlueSky @christafairbrother.

My Daughter Doesn’t Speak to Me

SWWIM Every Day
by Barbra Nightingale

by Barbra Nightingale



Neither do my cats, the owls burrowing
down the street, the raccoon that competes
with the feral cat for the food I leave out,
the opossums who do the same.

It’s been years since a conversation
didn’t end with lemon seeds
in our mouths, spit out in my face,
those looks that say, “Disappear, bitch.”

But the jatropha are in bloom, even though
they were cut way back, as were the passion
fruit vines, the gardenia, along with
The Bleeding Heart and Wandering Jew.

Life, they say, keeps growing
no matter the cuts, intertwining roots,
tangles of pots that won’t pull apart
rooted to the ground in a bid for permanence.

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Barbra Nightingale's poems have appeared in The Mackinaw, Dunes Review, Chameleon Chimera, Rattle, Limp Wrist,The Liberal Media Made Me Do It (Anthology), SWWIM Every Day, Narrative Magazine (nominated for a Pushcart), Barrow Street, The Georgetown Review, CRIT Journal, Jet Fuel, The Apalachee Review, and elsewhere. Her most recent book is Spells & Other Ways of Flying. She is an Associate Editor with the South Florida Poetry Journal.

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