P.S. Please hold off on sending any news of your accomplishments for our Weekly Shouts during our hiatus. We will return on September 1!
by Emily Ransdell
by Charlotte Pence
What is on your bedside table? In your fridge?
Your hedge? Are you the type who searches
for a robin’s egg and its crumbs, or for a bone
with which to beat a brass band’s drum?
What is your first memory, first kiss,
first fist in your own mouth? The fourth?
What is your thirst? How do you prefer your light,
shaken or stirred? Bright or broken?
What is your yours, the unsayable, the
immeasurable, the thing your ex-lovers miss?
They’ll never admit what it is, so you’re left
to list songs for your funeral as if the notes know
who you are, who is on your nightstand, who
is rotting in your fridge. Who is wearing your
old prom dress as a costume, the dress you once
called yours, the dress you once declared was so you.
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Charlotte Pence is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and the inaugural poet laureate of Mobile, Alabama.
by Tara Bray
Once we went for a cool drink.
It’s hot as hell, she said—
like she’d known me years—
her office air conditioner on the blink.
She carried a flute,
called me a bit
of a thing, said she’d play
a ditty, pulled out the glint,
though her lips full and clumsy,
her fingers thick, but tricky.
She warbled that flute
sounding like the bird itself,
the one with the beak
like a piccolo tip-tipping
the notes, butter markings
on its crown, rump, wings.
When I, handsewn girl
of few words,
warbled beside her
I felt my own body
lift for the trees.
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Tara Bray is the author of Small Mothers of Fright (LSU Press, 2015) and Mistaken For Song (Persea Books, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Narrative Magazine, Agni, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, New England Review, and The Hudson Review, among others.
by Callista Buchen
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Lisa Rua-Ware
Empty wood crates for wine
grapes, stacked against the wall,
the labels on them decorate,
dark-haired beauties
balancing baskets of green
or purple, their sprigs ripening
Senorita Zinfandel, Pia, and Lodi Gold
are still smiling after their fruit is squeezed,
swallowed, and gone,
My pale white underwear drips
from the inside clothing lines
where no one will see
them, where my mother teaches me to hold
a thick bar of soap, how I should let it sink heavy
into my palm before I rub it into the red,
before I form two fists and scrub
until my washboard thumbs are raw,
until that dark stain of me is clean again.
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Lisa Rua-Ware is a poet in central Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Lily Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, FOLIO, and elsewhere. When she’s not chasing after her two kids, she works as a technical writer.
by Franziska Roesner
After Dalí’s Retrospective Bust of a Woman and The Little Theater
Salvador Dalí put bread on the head
of a woman, and she does not look
amused. Thinks he’s a genius as usual,
when it’s she who baked the loaf
in the first place, weighing out
the flour and mothering the yeast
and tending to the timings
of everything. She longs
to plop a pickle on his head,
plucked dripping from the jar,
watch the vinegar weep
down his face. Or a dollop
of cream like seagull shit,
who is clever now? But she’s
learned to stay still, wipe the crumbs,
bait the ants when he’s not looking.
Later, she reappears in the corner
of a diorama, outside the scene
looking in, face visible
only to the long spoon, to the blue ball,
to the baguette-shaped, pickle-tinged
Italian cypress, asking herself: what
am I doing here, and who
will remember me?
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Franziska Roesner is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. She was a poet first, though, and has returned to poetry recently. Her poetry has appeared or will appear in Rust & Moth, Eunoia Review, Third Wednesday, The Loch Raven Review, and others. She lives in Seattle with her husband, two daughters, and one remaining cat.
by Kate Sweeney
by Susan Cossette
In a past life I was a steel four-slice
toaster, random kitchen appliance
relegated to a back corner of
the lime-green Formica counter
standing guard and studying the ceramic sunflower jar
of wooden spoons and rusted spatulas,
notorious for my burnt white toast.
In my next life I was reincarnated
into a front-load stackable washing machine,
married to the matching dryer straddled
above me–always willing to take on those poop-stained
onesies and chartreuse monogrammed bath towels,
until my water inlet valve and drum agitation system gave out.
I prayed to the patron saint of misfit appliances
to become something more evolved and
came back as a vacuum cleaner,
but not just any make or model.
I was an Electrolux canister, the kind
exclusively sold by door-to-door salesmen
in navy pinstriped three-piece polyester suits,
The caboose of me nips the fluffy heeled slippers
of the lady tending her forest-olive shag carpet.
I know it is really me doing her work,
removing the detritus of her life.
I must have done my job because one morning
I woke up as a 90-inch flat screen smart television,
mounted on a bright white bedroom wall in Chelsea,
gazing at the Peloton and Pilates reformer,
out the floor-to-ceiling windows
on the heavenly starlights of New York–
I teach the wisdom of chefs, interior designers,
home renovators and decorators
And I rest
knowing everything is pristine and clean–
Gentrified, purified, deified.
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Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she was awarded the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has poems in the Eunoia Review, Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthology Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press).
by Angele Ellis
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), daughter of artists, jumped from a
Manhattan rooftop during a struggle with depression. She gained
posthumous fame for her innovative photography of the body.
Your mother worked steadily
in the wake of your death,
peasant feet in painted slippers.
Shocked from function to form,
she blanketed a wall in Beijing
with pottery birds suspended in flight.
Your father abandoned abstraction,
clinging to the women he shuttered.
He clicked on a tattoo, kohl-rimmed zero.
The back of the model exposed
by her checkered schoolgirl uniform
stared at him, aperture of failure.
You—figure in the yellow wallpaper
blur of beautiful body and shadow
Eros with singed feathers and wild Psyche
Icarus with designer wings, fallen.
No ID but your polka dot dress and
your face, unrecognizable.
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Angele Ellis's work has appeared on a theater marquee, in a museum, and in over ninety publications. She won a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for poems on her Arab American heritage from her first collection, Arab on Radar (Six Gallery). She also is author of Spared (A Main Street Rag Editor's Choice Chapbook) and Under the Kaufmann's Clock (Six Gallery), a poetry and fiction hybrid inspired by her adopted city of Pittsburgh.
by W.J. Herbert
by Ann Fisher-Wirth
by David Eileen
by Linda Hillman Chayes
We mourn that other earth when
every day was an outside day, today
my blue hydrangeas bleach in the summer heat,
our lungs work hard to find oxygen.
Antique white hydrangeas,
guzzling water daily even as we drain the coffers.
You are thinner and worry about why.
Remember when we couldn’t wait for summer?
Look at how the flowers balance hope
and too much sun
how they find the life they can find
bloom the bloom they can
how so much adaptation carries us
forward sparring with memory.
You and I spar less and conserve energy
for conversation and creations. Yesterday,
our granddaughter held a watering can, bent
over the flowers for the first time. She couldn’t
keep her hands out of the wet dirt.
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Linda Hillman Chayes is the author of two chapbooks, Not My First Walk on the Moon and The Lapse, both published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Kestrel, American Poetry Journal, Quartet, Westchester Review, 2 Horatio, Wild Roof, and other publications. She practices in New York as a psychologist/psychoanalyst. She co-wrote and co-edited a book, The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives in Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity, published by Routledge Press in 2018.
by Elisabeth Adwin Edwards
Call me Stellar Demise, my hemoglobin pulses with the last exhalations
of stars. I have cast myself
into a cup, a scaffold, a fence, a pipe, a cup. That which is foundational,
marks the edge of a loving space, or fills
to overflowing, that which can be used as weapon, but more often
the thing that spills
over. Well-seasoned skillet, molasses, rust. Some days I’m so hard, heavy. Others,
so magnetic I can't move. I have carried water
no one would want to drink, water not fit for a child to bathe in. Cells of the fetus
I aborted at age twenty-one
bored through the blood-brain barrier and his tiny double-helixes corkscrewed
my mind. He still courses
through me. I imagine his eyes the color of black ore, like his father's. Sometimes
I dream him into a strong body, a body
outside of myself, a body I can touch, and I become a spigot, all I do is weep.
Another star died and found its way here.
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It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Elisabeth Adwin Edwards' poems have appeared in The Tampa Review, CALYX, B O D Y Literature, Pedestal Magazine, Posit, and elsewhere; her prose has been published in HAD, CutBank, On The Seawall, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets. She has taught her popular online class, "Living Attentively: Journaling through Poetry and Observation", through Grackle & Grackle Literary Enterprises. A native of Massachusetts, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and teen daughter in an apartment filled with books. See elisabethadwinedwards.com.
by Kelsey Britton
I saw you peeking from behind the cupboard door.
I saw you huddled at the bottom of the cookie jar
in my grandma’s kitchen. I saw you
melting down the neighbor’s chin,
nectarine fresh from the market.
I saw you soft caramel between my fingers,
lollipop in the bank, donut beside my father’s coffee,
bright pink icing on the wedding cake.
I imagined you piled high in my bowl,
Neapolitan ice cream stolen from
the deep freezer in my grandpa’s basement.
My mother warned me not to eat you.
My friend pinched my side and said “don’t.”
My aunt reminded me that when I was grown
I’d have to exercise after Christmas dinner
or else the food would collect under my skin
like a dangerous coat and smother me alive.
My TV yelled at me to banish you,
replace you with lean fat and dietary fiber.
I thanked you,
for powering my body
through 10 hours of digging in the dirt,
the small burst of joy I felt to eat
a chocolate cherry from a giant bag.
I saw you,
rosehip blooming on the branch,
apple pulled towards the mud,
fig bruising beneath the blue sky.
All of it beckoning me.
You,
a delicious sight, a tall glass of water, a beauty,
cowering in the cupboard and
shuddering at the mythology we’d built around you—
as a devil disguised as sweetness,
rather than knowing your flavor as an anchor
into the real world,
the belly, and the mouth.
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Kelsey Britton is a botanist and hedge witch living on the Oregon Coast. She is on a lifelong quest of finding the mystical in the ordinary. Her work has been featured in The Fem Lit magazine and is forthcoming in Wild Roof Journal. You can follow her Substack, The Tender Wild, at thetenderwild.substack.com.
by Madeline Schaeffer
We kept missing the aurora borealis. The once-in-a-lifetime just kept appearing. Like, so what?It-just-so-happened-she-was-alive-and-breathing. The sky gave way to Instagram's more vivid purples. I sent flowers to everyone I was ghosting. Surely you heard their misconceptions falling apart. Spine felt like starlight: vertebral glitter. Light scattered randomly, if not for physics. Your text: Doesn’t matter. Love you. There was a sudden illumination on the camera screen. The it-just-so-happened-I-was-there-to-take-her-pulse. We all believed in the afterlife for 10 seconds. Anyway, then we pulled out our bucket lists and crossed off aurora, even though we never really saw it. It was just the sky, after all. The belief came second: that it all amounted to more than plasma, then pixels, on a phone screen. That if we looked closely enough, we could see who we were becoming.
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Madeline Schaeffer is a poet who lives by the Pacific Ocean in Washington state. She writes about her golden retriever and the sea, climate grief, and biology classes. She is a high school student who spends most of her time in college. She was named a 2023 commended Foyle Young Poet, and her work has appeared in the Tiger Moth Review, amongst others.
by Vidushi Rijuta
in the world where men can be
machine gun bodies, trigger-ready hands
tripping on no safety, peace itself inverted,
my body is often hostage situation,
my body is often sentence without punctuation,
my body is often shrinking into my clothes,
my body is often eraser turned inward, trying
so hard to undo the parts of me that are soft.
in the world of a moving metro where men
can be flammable, ruinous, immovable,
may my body be a fire extinguisher.
may my body be a shield for my friends,
may my body be freezing cold, forest fire,
the entire universe collapsing on purpose,
may my body be a sharp weapon wielded
without handle, glass shard,
may my body be immovable too.
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Vidushi Rijuta (she/her) is currently doing a masters in counseling and psychotherapy. She loves writing about love (so naturally, about things like queerness, joy, friendship and grief). Her poems have previously been published in Gulmohur Quarterly, Fruit, and Ink Sweat & Tears.
by Jennifer Mills Kerr
Before dawn, diapers, milk, washing the floors. Skies bathed
by every prayer, sacred wings through snags of stars. You and I
at the kitchen table, a tiny universe. Perhaps the sweet bite
of gossip, laughter, perhaps ghosts and enemies swept clean.
We drink coffee inside the unsteady light, flight of morning darkness
into hushed scarlet. Sorrow, twisted language inside pockets. For
you or I to name a wound, to open the shape of echo and awe,
we recall an eagle circling the blue bowl of sky.
Sources: Joy Harjo, Perhaps the World Ends Here, Eagle Poem, Insomnia & the Seven Steps of Grace, My House is the Red Earth, When the World as We Knew It Ended; Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Cenzontle
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Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. She has work upcoming in The Inflectionist Review and Neologism Poetry Journal. Connect with Jennifer through her Substack, Poetry Inspired.
by Anne Graue