by Heidi Seaborn
~Citizen App, July 23, 2025, Seattle
by Jessica Ballen
mom taught us
that bad things happen in threes
like us—me, the oldest—
the two of you, younger.
closer. I’d watch you both
as you fell asleep in the car,
your light eyes hidden,
protected; the only time
we look related. there wasn’t a parent
left to tuck me in, so I carried myself to bed,
climbed the spiraling staircase higher
and higher towards my bedroom.
I wanted to know how to fit in
with disappearing clouds.
nobody knew how to answer
but they knew how to demonstrate:
pots and pans flying in the kitchen,
clanking against painted walls, tile,
bone. I’m still watching, observing.
taking note. Wish I knew
how to stay high forever,
the apex of an object thrown
before it comes down too hard,
crashing. the clatter of borrowed time,
the mess of it all. I wish I knew
how to fight with both wrists straight—
a pen tracing a ruler.
But I’m free hand. I’m jazz, baby.
the lightning carving out a spot
in the pavement. some things
you never see but just know.
like meeting someone else
whose mother left them, too.
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Jessica Ballen, MFA, is an AuDHD poet serving as Editor-in-Chief of Lunch Ticket Literary Magazine, Managing Editor of Defunkt Magazine, Senior Editor at Small Harbor Publishing, and guest editor for Frontier Poetry. Their work can be found in RHINO Poetry, Okay Donkey, and Ghost City Review (among others). Catch them compulsively posting on their Instagram stories @_j___esus, listening to dream pop with their four cats, and dancing in the Willamette River.
by Sarah Carleton
One potential ancestor…comes from a word meaning “birdcage”…The ancestor of our word jail is in this lineage as well. —Merriam-Webster
In medieval times, caress jumped on honk,
and cajole was born. It looked like
a balcony for a finch but turned out to be
a jail for language. Over the years,
as requests for cake and feather hats
wheedled their way through its bars and
came out lumpy with innuendo,
some women forgot how to talk
in a straight line. They schmoozed as they
canoodled, jostled as they cavorted,
and the men caught on, cajoling with a
doggedness they believed was seductive.
I won’t mince words—I’m cajole’s
blunt detractor, irked by wiles
that bypass no. I wince at its
jagged sound—the way it flips asshole
on its ear and adds a fool, that forceful
second syllable seizing my tongue.
The origins of cajole may be vague
as smoke, but it needles, like
a splinter embedded in your toe
until at last you coax it into the open.
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Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Valparaiso, Rattle, ONE ART, and As It Ought to Be. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and she was a finalist for the 2023 John Ridland Poetry Prize. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.
by Alina Stefanescu
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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You meet a nice immigrant that fills
up space with stories about Bosnia;
fills in the gaps with New York. The
question of Alaska is melting and yes
ice cubes in your Fanta would be nice.
You perform the usual astonishment
at her skilled use of English idioms. She
smiles and spills an affinity for the Brontes.
Her hair is Crimson Tide red, protected
by trademark. She hates football but maybe
plays anything when in Rome. You are a solid
Greek graduate of togas and keg-stands who
can italicize any era into parties. She says
it is difficult to unburden yourself to men
that don't see you as separate. She's dying
her hair orange for Auburn next month.
You think middle schools should teach
physics or start earlier—and you hope she
can tell you're joking. Being hilarious.
She says it's hard to talk to men that can't
hear you. Which is strange since you'd never
disparage her accent. She says men can't hear
her ever plus never. Your hair is solid pine-trunk
brown. You ready that quip about separate
spheres ideology but the waitress drums
her nails against the menu plastic. As if
to say: You pompous old fuck, no thing is
separate & here I am, serving you anyway.
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Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include My Heresies, (Sarabande, April 2025), a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at alinastefanescuwriter.com.
by Sally Rosen Kindred
After The Souls of the Mountain by Remedios Varo
You need to know you woke inside a mountain.
There’s a city of dirt-birds trembling under your collar,
in your hips. You have to get out of here
but the sky between your mountain
and the holy next is the smoke braid
of a grandmother’s hair. The sky outside knows
what your body said and you
do not. You need to know. You woke
inside a grief dress. There’s a hot moon
chafing at your ribcage. Beneath it the birds
wild with snow try to eat the traffic lights, try
to smother the small cars with their wings.
You could climb out into the ash with your grandmother’s arms.
You could ride her smoke into ghosts.
Tell the birds: the city’s been taken. Scrape your bones
out through the bitter rock.
Climb out of your name. Be a breaking–
a No. Knead yourself smoke-blue.
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Sally Rosen Kindred's third poetry collection is Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the Diode Book Prize and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. She is also the author of No Eden and Book of Asters, both from Mayapple Press, and three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Plume, Pleiades, and Kenyon Review Online.
by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
There is a woman’s face in that tree
gathering moss along the jawline,
paper nest of wasps in her hair.
From the half-open back door,
everything is more magical than me.
Ti Mari folds itself in two,
trembling with sunlight, never once
considering what it might mean
to be shut.
Someone once asked, “Will you still write
after the baby is born?” I think about this often,
about the doorway, its rusted hinges,
the one broken latch that rattles,
wrenched daily by small, insistent hands.
I have been doorway, latch and hinge
all the things that exist for no purpose
but to open for others.
It’s always the smallest things
that take up the most space,
seed under leaf, hiding its medicine,
bachac treading back and forth
in overgrown grass until
eventually the path appears.
I carry it all with me, the right words clenched
between jaws like bitten leaves, wearing
beaten paths from room to room.
We make space for what we must become
in tightly woven nests of spit and paper,
in termite mounds, secret underground chambers
where we can grow into ourselves unseen.
The woman in the tree appears
to no one but me. Her body rises from the earth
in broad plank roots, winding in ridges beneath
cracked concrete. Her arms keep the earth together.
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Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has been published in Poetry London, The Rialto, The Prairie Schooner, The Asian American Literary Review, Wasafiri, and others. She was awarded the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2016, and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize in 2017 and 2020. Her first collection of poetry, Doe Songs (Peepal Tree Press, 2018), was awarded the OCM Prize in Caribbean Poetry.
by Julia Salem
Don’t you want to take a hatchet to it sometimes,
when the whole world becomes a patchwork
of itches, your brain’s scruffiness unbearable,
the mangy carpets, paint shedding like dandruff,
and it becomes clear that despite years of pledging
to pick up the pace, take shorter lunch breaks,
the scabby scaffolding is permanent, that just
as you’re hanging red and green curtains
in the Lebanese history room, the World War 1 floor
craters despite the good joists your history teacher
put there, and now all you can make out is a body-
smashed window and an arched doorway inscribed F.F.,
but you know Friar Fuck was a Sex and the City character
and definitely not an archduke, whatever that even is,
and now you’re picturing a duke doing a backbend
while your history teacher cries into his green tea,
which you remember he drank most mornings
before he rolled up his sleeves, revealing
his forearms’ tectonic musculature,
his verve revving you like a squirt of sun.
Is that when it started, this problem of attention
cantering off in the wrong direction,
yoking itself to the litany of men
who each take up a whole fucking room,
while you are trying to learn something true
about the world, trawling for insight through articles
that pitch into landfills of dollar-store hypotheses,
of which you’ve got plenty gunking up your bar cart,
the berms of your bookshelves, even the stairs.
You can’t go anywhere without stepping on a gimcrack
notion, some of which look like dandelions
but when you claw through the carpet, there’s no root,
just a shred of ribbon from a long-shelved gift.
Can you still hear the cry of delight that shot
into the rafters when you opened the small
black telescope, and again when you pointed it
to the sky, and asked how? And why?
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Julia Salem is a London-based writer and editor from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Atlanta Review, Pigeon Pages, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first poetry collection.
by Summar West
After Jane Kenyon
shows up when least expected,
almost like its first cousin (on both sides) Happiness,
who’s told to arrive three hours earlier than everyone
for fear they still won’t make it to the dinner on time.
It’s like that, my sober friend says
after she attempts a story to describe how spiritual
transformation happens: no, that’s not quite it,
and the inky nucleus erases us again.
Maybe that’s what happened this week
at lunch with your daughter—the first time we’ve met—
and while I’m tuned in to her, trying to ignore your presence,
the light from the window halos you. Love—
enters the room like some special guest
we gasp to see because she’s here to sing.
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Summar West's poems have been published in a variety of places, including including Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Construction, Ellipsis, New South, Prairie Schooner, Still: the Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Tar River Poetry, and others. Born and raised in east Tennessee, she currently resides in coastal Connecticut.
by Heidi Williamson
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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What waters our bodies have received
—each filament of rain
coursing the length of our skin
lies undiscovered now at this dark hour.
In here, the night is quiet and cool. Outside,
the wild rain courts the grass: even in the dark
I feel its greening—the grass glossed like keratin smoothly
anchoring, protecting the dust of us.
I lean against the solidity of your clement body
soft with sleep, lean in to you. On your arm, your hand,
each tiny hair responds to my disclosing touch.
The territory of your body grounds me, strands me.
The grass has craved this all day:
the phantom rain fell too lightly to reach land,
the heavy sun striking out
droplets as they formed.
Above all, my uncontrollable heart
coils wild as the wild rain outside
springing right back up again
from the earth where it belongs.
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Heidi Williamson is a Writing for Life Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund, running reading and writing groups in community and care settings. She teaches for the Poetry School, Poetry Society, National Centre for Writing and The Writing Coach. Her poetry is published by Bloodaxe: Electric Shadow (2011), The Print Museum (2016), and Return by Minor Road (2020). Her short fiction has been selected for the Bath Flash Fiction Awards, Edinburgh True Flash Awards, and Fish International Short Story Prize.
by Lara Payne
Such an abundance of green, I used
to think, passing that corner lot, daily
But the man was taken from his lawn
two weeks ago, now, and the grass grows
uncut and unruly. We are in gold time,
now, gold season. Light abundant
in its waning glory. A whole field
of children running, kicking. Dive
and fall. Voices meld with owl
and hawk, the last peepers. I am
the partially rusted crank of a bicycle
that barely rattles. I am the skill
you pretend will come back. Memory
grows in me like that uncut grass
will, one season later. If I take the high
path above the river who will I see, fear?
Will ticks unstick from tall grass, attach
to my churning legs? Tick tick tick
the bicycle is singing, now. Everything ends
the grasshoppers sing and the sunset-bound
birds, and the man in some cell, taken
from my street while I walked in sun
at the farmer’s market.
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Lara Payne lives in Maryland. Once an archeologist, she now teaches writing at the college level, to veterans, and to small children. Her poems, many of which explore the Chesapeake environment and people, have appeared in a museum, on buses, and in print and online journals. Recent poems have appeared in the Broadkill Review and One Art.
by Judith Hoyer
Believe me when I tell you that I sat next to Julia Child in 2001.
It was dinner for a cause, two days before 9/11, in her backyard
at 103 Irving Street in Cambridge. Forgot my camera in the car.
Sun cracked open on our backs. Me in my aqua knit.
No lights. No cameramen. No script. Would you believe
I owned up to my sin? Those red lentil, thyme-smudged pages
on my Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It’s my therapy, I confessed.
She nodded, hummed her approval. She was warm, easy like an omelet,
me like a napkin in her lap. Her smell, apricot, pear, with a hint of ambrosia.
Sometimes I believe that amazing things happen by accident or loss.
That’s when I want to have a little cry, feeling kind of lucky with my
grandmother’s recipe for fish chowder following me around the kitchen.
Believe me when I say that inside Julia’s house I peeked in the pantry,
caught a chef riffing jazz on the bottom of copper pots. In the living room
bodies leaned against wood-paneled walls, or sunk deep in sofas, plastic
forks deep in Ragoûts de Porc. I snaked through the kitchen where someone
handed me a martini glass tipsy with Mousse au Chocolat. Believe me,
I saw those chipped blue cabinets, the old oak table where she lunched
on a baked potato every day, said she saved her appetite for dinner with Paul,
and by her banged-up gas six burner, the one that’s in the Smithsonian.
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Judith’s poetry collection, Imagine That, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2023. Her poems have appeared in journals that include CALYX Magazine, Cider Press Review, Southwest Review, Tar River Review, Atlanta Review, Moth Magazine (IRE), Worcester Review, and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). She lives in Wayland, Massachusetts.
by Terrie Elaine Joplin
by Holiday Noel Campanella
Things are worse the farther we get
from your aliveness.
I thought I could fill it with action,
the holes you left,
but I keep returning to the stillness
of my bed. I can’t run at night.
My dreams tangle into you. I turn corners
into what should be empty rooms
and you are in them. There you are—
in the morning I tell my grandmother
about my dreams. That you are exploring—
in my house in Nashville, where you’ve never been,
you do not speak. You are observant.
You do not smile. You are not sure
about this death thing yet.
I am not so sure about this death thing yet.
You never did trust anything easily.
Would repeat yourself over and over,
wanted people to get things right.
You’re putting God through the wringer right now.
She’s trying to convince you to trust her,
don’t you know she’s God?
You tell her you were always told God
was a man, is she sure she’s God?
But you should know why—
you were always surrounded by us women.
You could never have been given a man as God.
He never could have convinced you to sit down,
have a few more bites,
stay.
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Holiday Noel Campanella is a multi-disciplinary writer and artist. Her work has been exhibited and sold nationally (The Smithsonian Museum, The Clay Studio, Anthropologie), published in lit mags and journals (Gigantic Sequins, Philadelphia Stories, Imposter Lit, San Pedro River Review), and is in public and private collections (The Free Library of Philadelphia, Vanderbilt Libraries Special Collections). She has a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania with The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
by Ray Ball
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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I think
I can’t see a deer
on a page
without bracing for impact
the word evokes
not one car crash
but two antlers
shattering windshields
in stricken moments
replicated later in a set
of vanishing headlights
one summer morning
a dear friend and I gasped
snippets of conversation
and gossip pushing our tempo
quick turnover on a shaded path
clouds of mosquitos
blocked the sun
when we startled a doe
her eyes reminded me
of the color of a totaled sedan
of the terror of waking
as glass breaks and soars
of the way winds lift
off a river the way
darknesses intertwine
creating a fragile anchor
to tether a vessel between worlds sleep.
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Originally from Oklahoma, Ray Ball currently lives on the land of the Dena’ina, where she works as the Vice Provost for Student Success and the Dean of the Honors College at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is the author of two history books and three books of poetry. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Free State Review, Glass, and Sierra Nevada Review. Ray has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and been a Best of the Net finalist.
by Susanna Rich
Because this is a collegial trip
and we knew each other only
through virtual meetings,
and I’m doing you a favor
introducing you at the panel,
you are blowing up an air mattress
for yourself,
insist I sleep in your bed.
I insist I can’t—please let me lie
on your living room love seat.
No.
You close the door between us,
you say, because, all night, your cat
would jump on and off me.
On and off.
I lie on top of your blue spread
in my yoga pants and leopard T,
study the red numbers on the clock.
Minutes climb to 59,
plummet to the 00
of slow, withholding hours—
the colon pulsing
the seconds between.
Morning, you guide me to your window,
point to an egret by the river’s edge,
its body a white eighth note against ripples,
beak piercing the far bank.
You press two cling-free peaches—
hard, green—into my hands,
and leave so I can shower and dress.
I rinse the raspberries I brought,
eat the crushed overripe,
leave you the plump red mouths
to cool in your single bowl.
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Susanna Rich is an Emmy-Award nominated poet and founding producer of Wild Nights Productions, LLC, including her musical, Shakespeare’s *itches: The Women v. Will, and ashes, ashes: A Poet Responds to the Shoah. She is author of five poetry collections, most recently Beware the House and SHOUT! Poetry for Suffrage. See wildnightsproductions.com.
by Elisa Albo
For Lisa B.
Each time we are sixteen, friends who attend rival
high schools in our Southern, segregated town. You
don’t care I’m Jewish, speak Spanish at home. Our
dads are beloved physicians, still make house calls,
write off overdue patient bills. Each time it’s the day
we meet at your house, mid-afternoon, no one home,
go skinny dipping in your backyard swimming pool—
your idea. How comfortable a slim creatura you are
in your own skin. Tall, fearless, each time you dive
into water with ease, a kingfisher’s iridescent grace,
brace fingers at the rough edge to spring out, then
in again, slice the clear surface like a leaf-blade to
the low depths, emerge as if from some halcyon
stratum, jewels in your hair, a slow-motion film in
the waning day’s glow. Years later, our fathers gone,
no contact since we were girls, my mother calls from
our growing up town to break gently the news of your
overdose—you escaped a bad marriage, remarried
someone older, kind. You were happy—they didn’t
think it intentional. The obit said heart failure, as it
often does. Each time from beneath pearlized silver,
wavy black hair frames a gleaming face, smiling
brown eyes. Water beads on skin, dissolves into air,
into sunlight, as we leap out together, plunge in again.
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Elisa Albo is a contributing co-editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Harassment, Empowerment, and Healing. Her chapbooks are Passage to America and Each Day More. Her poems have appeared in Bomb, Crab Orchard Review, Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents, and Vinegar and Char, among others. Associate editor for SoFloPoJo.com and award-winning professor of English at Broward College, she was born in Havana and lives with her family in Fort Lauderdale.
by Nancy Krygowski
The store that sold my red girl shoes
was across from the dentist who didn’t use Novacaine,
who shoved my mouth open and tugged
at my problem teeth, then offered me suckers
in primary colors while my mother pulled coins
from the bottom of her purse.
The shoes were corrective. I don’t know
what was wrong with my feet, didn’t understand
why I couldn’t have single buckle black patent leather.
The red was oxblood, a word I understood
though I’d never seen an ox or the smear
of brown-red on underwear, knew only blood
thin as a geranium petal from flesh freshly nicked.
When my mother looked down at my deeply red feet
she saw my difference and what she and her other kids
couldn’t have—bags of pink-red pistachios, quarts
of black-red cherries, red velvet cake slices asleep
on paper doilies, a new coral-red lipstick named Fire
and Ice. The shoes were stiff as the arms she wouldn’t curl
around me and my deformities. I need to believe
each of her sacrifices made me able to run.
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Nancy Krygowski is the author of The Woman in the Corner, named one of the top 100 (or so) poetry books of 2020 by Library Journal, and Velocity, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She teaches in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing program, and is Co-Editor of the Pitt Poetry Series and the Pittsburgh Bureau Chief of the tiny newspaper, Tiny Day.
by Miranda Beeson
by Cynthia Atkins
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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by Ashley VarelaI