by Regina Caggiano
by Tiana Nobile 문영신
I’m in the birth pool in your room, my cheek resting
against the blue inflatable wall, my body swollen with water.
You are swimming in my amniotic fluid. Outside,
the sky spits rain while I rage in the water.
It is the end of the second day. Rea touches my face.
She holds a straw up to my lips to take a sip of water.
She places a cool wet cloth on my forehead as I grind
my teeth, my face speckled with beads of water.
I can’t contain my hunger. It’s been over 24 hours,
and it still hasn’t ruptured, my bag of waters.
Ross plays “River” by Leon Bridges, and I try to manifest a wave
pouring out of me in a gush of blood and water.
Through the window, I count clouds,
pink billowing masses of air and water.
I can almost feel you scratching at the walls from the inside.
I tell you, come. Pleading, soon. Together, we roar in the water.
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Tiana Nobile 문영신 is the author of Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021). She is a Korean American adoptee, member of the The Starlings Collective, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Lit Hub, and Southern Cultures, among others. She lives with her family in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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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!
by Genevieve DeGuzman
I cupped her living weight. A three-inch bandita
bedded across my three callouses.
Gold leaf dust, empty soda can,
even a bearing ball was heavier.
Black-capped chickadee—warm, pulsing
in my palm, prettied with pollen.
Were you taking from the feeder? Were you vibrating
drunk on abundance before I startled you
to a collision course? Once I, too, crashed hard.
Scraped a cheek, bruised my thin wrist on a pole.
How my mother’s breath forgave and gusted
on my nicked knees. I was a smaller thing then,
all hollow bones and feathers in her thermals.
Before she died, I didn’t know what violence
could be. Fists of bruised mint. Father’s fists
through the wall. Mother’s hair falling out in fistfuls.
My fist with a living bird in hand no one
will ever see. Some sparrows in the underbrush sing
only for themselves. Every day I pined for your split-
second visitations to my hand-offered seed.
But not for anything longer. Don’t stay longer than this.
I’m not meant to hold you forever, my mother said,
setting me down in pollen dust. Unfledged feet
didn’t want to touch the ground.
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Genevieve DeGuzman is the author of Karaoke at the End of the World (JackLeg Press). An Alice James Award finalist and Tin House alum, she appears in The Adroit, Lit Hub, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, Zócalo Public Square, and other journals. She has received the Oregon Literary Fellowship and StoryBoard Fellowship, as well as support from Vermont Studio Center, Poets & Writers, AWP, and Oregon Arts Commission. Born in the Philippines, she lives in Portland, OR.
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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!
by Christine Kitano
The Department of [X] at [Y] University seeks a faculty member with expertise in [A] with a secondary emphasis in [B] and ability to teach [C]; and who will contribute to the department’s stated commitment to fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The candidate will be hired as part of a diversity program, which means one year of probation before the possibility of tenure-track conversion. A good “trial run,” a colleague will say. “Of course we want you, but we have to make sure you want to be here too,” another will say.
The candidate will teach a standard X/X load and maintain an active research agenda.
When the candidate proposes a new course in their field, the curriculum committee will express concern about the candidate’s expertise and ability to teach said new course.
In a course evaluation, a student will write that it’s “cool that [the candidate] seemed to be learning the material along with us.”
A colleague will express disappointment that the candidate, whose field is American literature, does not speak Japanese.
The candidate will fulfill service duties at the departmental and university levels, including serving on the anti-racism committee. The candidate will be the face of the department at recruitment events.
At the anti-racism department retreat, a colleague will complain to the candidate that the avocado in her vegan sushi is brown.
A colleague will question the candidate’s ability to use commas.
A colleague will say that the candidate’s face looks like an apple; he’d love to take a bite.
Note that due to the inordinate privileges afforded by the diversity hiring program, the candidate may never ask for travel funding or course release or research leave.
The candidate must never ask for anything.
The candidate, by being a candidate, has already asked for too much.
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Christine Kitano is the author of the poetry collections Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press) and Sky Country (BOA Editions). Dumb Luck & other poems (Texas Review Press) won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. She is an associate professor at Stony Brook University where she directs the BFA in Creative Writing.
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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!
by Shelley Wong
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!
by Susan Nguyen
After the song by the Baha Men
In gym we lope like dogs, sit back on our haunches
and howl, but already I do not feel animal.
I hate the infantilizing nature of our exercise
set to this song, how freely everyone moves
in their bodies. The room whines with their abandon
as I run on hands and knees, my mouth the wrong
pitch, carpet burn scraping my palms raw.
I mouth lyrics like I mouth prayers in CCD—
there a chorus of Vietnamese undulates loud
and sweet, the room filled with our rhapsody.
Everyone trades milky gel pens while I stab erasers
with lead, fake my Hail Marys and Our Fathers.
Thầy giáo singles me out with his stare,
and I confess
I only know it in English.
He makes me recite the Act of Contrition solo,
so I empty myself of God. The church bell of his hot
mouth, silenced. Me, glad. To know I can wield
language transforms me into something else:
sweaty fire hazard, windowless basement room.
I am a quickening blade. A ringing violence.
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Susan Nguyen is the author of Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. She is the editor in chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a member of the collective She Who Has No Master(s).
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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!
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!
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
by Sayuri Matsuura Ayers
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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by Sharon Dolin
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).
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.
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.
by Lauren Hilger