by Romana Iorga
After Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (III, 33)
by Kimberly Ann Priest
I don’t know what the words mean.
I mean, I don’t know
“peacemaker,” “pacemaker”
in the context of what the research proclaims
about a zebrafish heart, “a two-layer
localized peacemaking/control system,
a nodal pacemaker.” What does it mean?
The words? The study of vertebrate hearts?
My vertebrate heart: dum-da-duh,
dum-da-duh, dum-da-duh. We have
similar intracardiac nervous systems, it claims,
the zebrafish and I;
but no, I am no more fish than zebra,
no more gospel than disinformation.
No more what is written on paper to label
my difference: diagnosis, disability.
I wish to repeat the results of the test
that I took to be placed on “a spectrum,”
the high IQ it named.
I want to be pretentious.
I long to be so to his face—my ex, I mean.
In a text, he has called me “fucking stupid” again.
Fool, I’d like to say,
scientists perceive I am drowning in logic
the moment I discern this as murder.
My heart has a brain taking on water.
My heart has two kissy lips.
Note: Research found in “Decoding the molecular, cellular, and functional heterogeneity of zebrafish intracardiac nervous system” by Andrea Pedroni et al. in nature communications.
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Kimberly Ann Priest is a neurodivergent writer and photographer whose book Wolves in Shells won the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University, her poetry has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, and Chicago Quarterly Review.
by M.L. Hedison
I am the only one left
who knows how to make the bread
that came from Armenia
where my grandmother was born
in Eastern Anatolia, a region
the Turks swallowed whole in 1915.
The bread escaped with her
to a Beirut orphanage, emerged
from my mother’s hands
wrist-deep in flour, butter, milk
kneading with rhythmic purpose,
a folk dance of clenched fists
until the dough, no longer sticky,
was lifted from the bowl, into my hands.
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M.L. Hedison is an emerging poet based in the coastal town of Wakefield, R.I. Her work explores themes of absence, longing, and her Armenian family through lyrical verse. She continues to study with Jennifer Franklin and Wyn Cooper. She was published for the first time in 2025 where her poems appeared in ONE ART, The Tiny Journal, and Right Hand Pointing. She has work forthcoming in the Cimarron Review. This poem is a part of a manuscript in progress.
by Beverly Burch
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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She called after midnight from every sleepover,
begged to come home. Alarming as it was,
there was the luxury of settling her back into bed.
Until she wouldn’t be seen with us.
In time came a midnight call of the terrifying kind.
Hospital, alcohol. She sang in her room after fits
of weeping. Laid waste, ripped through, mended,
cured. Then it would start again. How did one body
contain the churn? Shifting mirrors,
colliding bits of colored glass, how did we?
She couldn’t wait to leave home, couldn’t bear to.
Once I stood at her door, long
metal spoon in my hand from cooking.
We both thought I would hurl it. Mercy descended.
O why so angry? Like my mother’s jagged bolt
of love, blazed by fear. Legacy
running the line of mothers and daughters:
does anything redeem us?
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Beverly Burch’s novel, What You Don’t Know, is the first book of a trilogy with interlinked characters. Part Two, No Guilty Secrets, will be out Spring 2027. She also has four poetry collections and two nonfiction books. Her work has won the John Ciardi Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a Gival Poetry Prize and was a finalist for Audre Lorde Award. She lives in Oakland, CA. See beverlyburch.com or her Substack, Rethinking…(Almost) Everything.
by Julie Weiss
messy, as in your mud-splashed pants, that day we should have stayed
inside during the rains. As in the folly of a mother’s insistence. The walk to
the shop we braved, for insistence’s sake. Messy, as in the ice cream I was
too distracted to catch before it avalanched over the edge of the cone I was
holding. Your triple chocolate treat puddling at our feet, while I stared at my
phone screen. How you rummaged through my coin purse, mouth
immaculate as a blade, its angles an accusation. How emptiness can stain a
moment, if not a memory. Messy, as in my smile, skidding unwittingly into a
serious childhood grievance. Your favorite toy, broken. An argument with a
friend. Sometimes, even if I don’t want to, it’s as though I graffiti no big deal
in sloppy letters across your sadness, then crash. Messy, as in a starling,
lying on its back in the street, stone-still. The broken-winged one you had
begged me to stop and save, but we were late to somewhere. Lateness, the
messiest apology for those difficult mornings, time teetering on the cliff
edge of its own crumbling seconds. The way I sometimes can’t stop my
rebukes from marching across the field of my voice, like a battalion. Messy
is as messy does, my loves. The more I fail to observe the world through the
eye of your storms, the messier I feel in the aftermath. As if I were buried
nose-deep in mud. As if I were the aftermath.
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Julie Weiss is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in February, 2025. Her work appears in ONE ART, The Westchester Review, Up The Staircase Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Gyroscope Review, and MER. See julieweisspoet.com.
by Melissa Ginsburg
by Jessica Zhao
by Jessica Barlevi
by Amy Gottlieb
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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Toss off your Moroccan slippers, lay your wet socks
on the radiator while we drink tea and talk of our sons,
how time crafted them into men. After your feet thaw
and the tea bags form seashells at the bottom of our cups
I will tell you that the whole house is a membrane, porous
to the shouts in the street, the stench of our neighbor's weed,
the sweetness of her garlic as it caramelizes in a pan.
We have no curio cabinets to preserve what we tried to save,
only the lines that deepen around our eyes, the tales of
your seafaring uncle’s dinghy that weathered an Atlantic storm,
my return to Venice and how the steps where I sat as a girl
have been submerged for years, sinking lower still.
Ask me if you can stay for a week and I will invite you
to flop backwards on the unmade beds, indent your body
on our rumpled sheets, your beaded slippers waiting
by the door like sentries at the gate to a holy kingdom.
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Amy Gottlieb’s debut novel, The Beautiful Possible, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, the Wallant Award, and the Ribalow Prize. Her poetry has appeared in On Being, Ilanot Review, Balagan, Paper Brigade, Quartet Journal, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, and elsewhere. She has been awarded five individual awards from the Bronx Council on the Arts and fellowships from the Civita Institute and VCCA. She lives in New York City.
by Lori Green Pipan
Awake in the board book, asleep in the board book, asleep in myself.
I thought the chair was a chair.
It turns out the couch is a chair.
It turns out the bed is a kitchen table and not for sharing.
2:00 am, I asked my husband as he handed me the baby, "Am I a grocery
store?" I meant it. He said, "More like a convenience store." 3:00 am she was
asleep; he asked if we'd pickled the baby to sleep. He meant it. The books on
our bedside table, stacks from beforetimes, went unread.
Margaret Wise Brown's young rabbit leads a fabulous life you can tell.
Leopard print, balloons, wings, the blue expanse.
I try not to miss the misery hours.
They were misery, a sick leopard.
But the wings.
They were misery
I thought. No. Not misery.
They were the blue expanse.
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Lori Green Pipan is a writer who texts eavesdropping to her family and dreams to her friends. She has: 1 home, 1 husband, 1 hand lino press, 2 daughters, 3 raspberry bushes, 5 siblings, some publications, some friends, some novels in the drawer, 0 oboe reeds, 0 second languages, 14 journals, and 1,400 books. She was raised Catholic. She was raised by the Potomac.
by Jane Zwart
The first time someone calls me
an adult child, I feel it, perfect
and discomfiting, I’m out of my depth
in autonomy, and I’m an amazon
pointed to a nursery school chair.
Adult child, someone says,
and I think of my friend’s mom.
In her childhood, she had I don’t know
how many cavities—one too many—
so her parents, weary of paying
the dentist, paid the dentist
to pull all her teeth. There’s more:
into her forties, this woman wore
the same outgrown maw, a set
of miniature dentures. I think of her,
savoring the unsuitable littleness
of her trick teeth, and I remember
the advance I received on my grin,
on my mother’s incisors, white doors
waiting to be hung. We’re all miscast:
some of us as a kid who can’t grow
into her mouth and some as a woman
issuing orders from a porcelain
apparatus too dinky for authority.
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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book review for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and The Nation. Her first collection, Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, came out with Orison Books in February 2026.
by Bernadette Geyer
by heather emmanuel
by Crystal C. Karlberg
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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My mother plunged her hands into the dirt
like a woman who knew she couldn’t bear fruit.
The roses were her children, calling through
the salt hay, through the storms doors until spring.
The zinnias looked up at her with pink,
their almost faces, their peculiar needs,
requiring a mother’s touch, love
in summer when the beetles stretch their legs,
with barbs that bring her back into the room
where lighting from above was clearly not
the blue-robed Virgin Mary that she saw
above the neighbor’s house when she was young.
Her ring fell through a hole, was never found
like all the babies she would never hold.
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Crystal C. Karlberg is a poet and visual artist who lives in Massachusetts. Her poems have been published by Threepenny Review; Beloit Poetry Journal; The Penn Review; Nixes Mate, and elsewhere. Her artwork has been published by oddball magazine and Mom Egg Review.
by Marianne Kunkel
Garlicky smoke plumes from our oven the afternoon
I come home to grab a meringue pie
and leave again, this time to a Christmas party.
I dart upstairs to warn you your baking potatoes, hastily wrapped in foil
and leaking oil, might burn the house down. But you’re deep in a Zoom call—
so many coworkers your monitor resembles graph paper—
and your locked jaw, stiff back,
signal interruptions aren’t welcome. I miss the one-thoughtness
of childhood: I wanted to drink warm rain
so I did, eyes shut. Petted an alley cat. Made the new kid in suspenders
my BFF. Grown, I tell myself your potatoes won’t start a grease fire,
not to ruin your late lunch with worry.
Driving off, I check my rear-view mirror for flames crowning our house;
could there be a worse thought? The small relief you’d be to blame, not me.
Or, in bed that night, shame I didn’t rewrap your potatoes.
Slip you a note.
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Marianne Kunkel is the author of Hillary, Made Up (Stephen F. Austin State UP) and The Laughing Game (Finishing Line Press), two anthologies, and many poems, including one in Best American Poetry 2025. She is Associate Professor of English at Johnson County Community College and Co-editor of Kansas City Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from University of Florida and Ph.D. in English from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she was Prairie Schooner managing editor.
by Jill McDonough
In Rome once, a Rome I was surprised to find littered with tumbled columns,
ruins, centuries-old marble torsos, temples lit up and lounged upon, not roped off,
I met a boy who took me in a taxi with borrowed money, lira he borrowed from a friend
in front of me. He told me someday he’d like to open a fish restaurant. On a beach
someplace, eat langostine every night. Did I know what langostines were? I did.
Did I like the langostines? Yes. Did I have a dream? One of my own, like his?
I’m sure I told him one, charmed by his use of the word “dream,” like a child’s,
or a foreigner’s, I guess, to talk about some dream job, impossible dream, which actually
didn’t sound so hard to attain: it was the beach, the langostines he wanted, not
the mortgage, employees, lazy langostine supplier. So be a waiter, wait tables
in Sicily, Nice, wherever the langostines are. He asked my dream and I can not
remember if I had one, can’t remember having had one, only know how proud I am
that when I was 22 or 23, I went away with a strange man to a Roman suburb. A beautiful
room, old plaster under construction. And I took a bus back the next morning, thirty minutes
on a city bus at sunrise, from the suburbs into Rome. I only knew mi dispiace,
non parlo italiano, grazie, which was enough; the old people, the driver saw
I didn’t have lira and smiled, indulgent at that hour with an uncombed girl
in last night’s clothes. Just outside Rome, in the middle of living their dream.
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Jill McDonough was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1972. Her books of poems include American Treasure (Alice James, 2022), Here All Night (Alice James, 2019), Reaper (Alice James, 2017), Where You Live (Salt, 2012), and Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008). The recipient of three Pushcart prizes and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the NEA, she directs the MFA program at UMass-Boston.
by Dion O'Reilly
Forgive me if I speak of it again—
the legend of their genesis—
part crocodile, part chicken
fear teaching them to take
their way skyward, bring black
to the clouds. Or the myths—
a witch’s familiar, companion of gods—
riding wind as they grip
thoughts in their claws, lay them
like rubies in Odin’s imperial hand,
so he can choose again and again
who suffers, who dies. We see them screaming
some old language
in a blown-out tree
or in lines of down-valley flight,
bound for trouble, their voices
clawed and scraping, almost legible
like they could live on our shoulders,
shit on our shirts, pick
jewels from our hair. Maybe it matters
they savor the dead, suck eyes
out of hatchlings, steal brass
off a corpse’s chest. There they are,
pieces of night, flip side of light, everything
occult or forgotten, not just soaring, soaring together,
soulmates, bonded accomplices,
getaway drivers on their way to the bank.
So many of our acts
are unpardonable, and the drives and longings
have, as our detractors warned,
returned to the nighttime roosts
of self-hate and decline. But the crows—
they’re laughing, forever dressed in their best
midnight finery, they revel
in carnage, hoppy dance
to sin. They’re so good
at being bad.
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Dion O'Reilly’s third book, Limerence, was finalist for The Floating Bridge John Pierce Competition for Washington State Poets. She is the author of Sadness of the Apex Predator (Cornerstone Press 2024) and Ghost Dogs (Terrapin 2020). Her work appears in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and The Sun. Most recently, her work was chosen as one of the winners of the 17th Annual Narrative Poetry Prize. A podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, private workshop facilitator, and co-editor of En•Trance Journal, she splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.
by Suzanne Edison
In the newspaper, inevitable disasters are there, waiting—
another forest, another animal species, another language,
will disappear unprotected—forgive us
I check on the raspberry patch, this year’s harvest, meager, and know
the wild rats have been up early, beat me to them—
When I say wild, pollen dusts my heart and I wonder—will there be children
—forgive us
I can hold the wren’s wing, but not her extinguished song, cupped
in my hands—I can bury her, forgive the hungry hawk—
won’t my demise be snatched by wind?
I don’t know how to stop whatever is bent on destruction—
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Suzanne Edison’s book, Since the House Is Burning, was published in 2022 by MoonPath Press. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Poetry can be found in The Missouri Review, Solstice Literary Journal, Quartet Journal; Gyroscope Review; The Nature of Our Times; Whale Road Review; Lily Poetry Review; and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle, is an avid gardener, and cloud-watcher. See seedison.com
by Valentina GnupI
by Kate Northrop