by Jennifer Franklin
February 11, 2025
by Rachel Mindell
Less than two inches high or wide.
Made of copper alloy and gilt, the buckle
depicts two incredible happenings.
On one side, a couple to be betrothed.
The woman’s arm extended
such that the man can grip her hand.
Each has a right foot out.
Above their heads, the Christogram
sanctifies their union in an emerging faith.
On the reverse, Bellerophon astride Pegasus
slays the Chimera with lead on his spear,
forcing it down her lion throat such that
the dragon fire she breathes will melt it,
gagging her, killing also her goat
midsection and her snake behind.
In each scene, a woman of parts is tamed.
In each scene, the divine is invoked, be it
the hovering miracle or the heroism of metal.
What was the comfort of bearing both tales
simultaneously at the belly when one must
have always remained dominant, facing out.
In this beginning, two things true and violent, one obscured.
In the beginning, one always takes and another is taken.
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Rachel Mindell is a writer living in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of three chapbooks and poems scattered around the internet.
by Emily Patterson
From below the branches it’s easy to mistake a ripe leaf for a Red Haven, and the rapid rain that drives us under shallow eaves might be misconstrued as urgency, but nothing is urgent here: not the cattails blowzy by the pond; not my daughter’s short steps through sodden rows of unmown clover; not the sunny fuzz of each fruit’s underside, flesh that would be rosy if not for its own shadow. At home on the kitchen table, we tally our bounty: precisely forty peaches and not one ready, to my daughter’s dismay. Impatience, for all its false rush, has been my own longtime companion, and so I try not to shoo her grasping hands. How slowly I am learning to love: not only what takes time, but the time it takes.
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Emily Patterson (she/her) is the author of The Birth of Undoing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), as well as three chapbooks. Her work is published or forthcoming in North American Review, CALYX, Christian Century, The Penn Review, Literary Mama, NELLE, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Emily is a curriculum designer for Highlights for Children and lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. See emilypattersonpoet.com.
by Susan Rich
like the finest wine I’ve never tasted—
perhaps the tang of a Montepulciano.
How the liquid looks full-bodied,
catches light as it breathes.
We stare as if into a still life,
watch our sommelier pour
the complex, expensive taste
on the edge of a dome-shaped glass.
O, to be admired like that—
desired for stable ankles, softening
bellies, healthy breasts.
Sixty-one and still here. At the party,
I meet a man with hair,
check his hands: perhaps mid-eighties?
But I see the earlier version
call me honey, carry my packages
from the car. What if
we could see the octogenarian,
as delicious as a Shiraz,
bold, buttery, rare;
perhaps in the body’s limitations
we might transform
into a tribe of small kindnesses—
our extended outlooks reconfigured
into art installation or tableaus
underneath cool sheets—
long fingers still entering
the bungalows of our bodies.
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Susan Rich is the author and/or editor of nine books including Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry). She is editor of Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds (Raven Chronicles Press). Her poems appear in Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.
by Katherine Maurer
On the sixty-degree day in February, here
on a picnic blanket we should not be lying on
under insects that should not have hatched
from the slow creek, which should not be warm enough.
Too big to be gnats, hovering too still to be flies
changing direction abruptly as spaceships.
I’m uneasy because I have no name
for them, don’t know their intentions. They are outliers,
like everything now—lonely line this year draws on the graph,
the sun at the wrong angle to be warm, winter sky smeared
with cirrus clouds no one planned to be under. A man
with a telephoto lens enters the frame, focuses, considers,
then walks on. Wind hisses through the dead oak leaves,
a cold sound, as if we are listening to a recording of winter,
the way we would to rain on a sound machine, to fall asleep.
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Katherine Maurer received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her MA in clinical psychology from Eastern Illinois University. Her poetry has been published in journals including Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Cave Wall, and Sycamore Review, and twice-nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Champaign, Illinois and works as a mental health therapist. See katherinemaurer.com and katherinemaurer.substack.com."
by Michelle Geoga
by Romana Iorga
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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by Mary Beth Hines
she teaches me crave must have and I beg
because her brown eyes open and close, alive,
and prettier than Jo Ellen Darcy’s blues
plus, the way her two perfect, pink-bowed
ponytails brush her pinafored shoulders
but mainly, it’s that you pull her string
and she talks and talks, buttery-voiced
like a dream girlfriend will you play with me
tell me a story please brush my hair
and I do, one afternoon in Jo Ellen’s
basement playroom, thrilled to be let in,
I find that doll and cling
till Jo Ellen tires of me, says
your shorts are too short,
I can see your fat butt and I flee
home where I plead with mother, father,
God, and my best bet, Santa, who gave that doll
to give-and-grab-back Jo Ellen last Christmas,
now, clearly, I must have my own, and defenses
down, I let them all know how much I need
a dependable friend and really what girl doesn’t
yearn as I do—all those Chatty Cathys beamed
into our living rooms amidst Flintstones
and Road Runner cartoons, and when I close
my eyes, tune them out, I can almost feel
my finger hook around that little hoop, my pull
and release, and her I love you rings and rings
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Mary Beth Hines is the author of Winter at a Summer House (Kelsay, 2021). Her writing is widely published, with her most recent work appearing, or soon to appear, in Cider Press Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. See marybethhines.com.
by Sophie Yu
by Tammy C. Greenwood
by Dorian Kotsiopoulos
My mother steals away to her back stairs
for a quiet smoke. I find her,
wiggle in close. The wooden step sighs.
She exhales hard, tosses her cigarette
in the ashtray of the yard, slips inside.
The bent butt is a broken bird,
the lipstick-stained filter a red wing tipped with ash,
or a folded crane made from burnt paper.
I pick up the still-lit butt, inhale
the flavor of exhaust, grind it out
on my bare foot. A warm red sore,
the start of infection, a secret tattoo,
that calls to me with every step.
The pile of butts a campfire,
abandoned, a thin line of smoke
dissipates from its center, then reappears
in the shape of something familiar,
a pigeon, or a dove.
Someone mentions Lucky Strikes years later,
and I remember how I swore
I’d never smoke, or shadow people
with my clingy, sticky love.
That’s not true. I do both,
sometimes at the same time.
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Dorian Kotsiopoulos's work has appeared in various literary and medical journals, including Poet Lore, Salamander, New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, On the Seawall, Smartish Pace, and Third Wednesday as well as in the anthology, All Poems Are Ghosts (Tiny Wren Lit). She is a reviewer for the Bellevue Literary Review. In addition, she’s recently began serving as a co-director of a reading series in Boston called Chapter & Verse.
by Nan Cohen
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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If I say you know me better than I know myself,
that’s not to say you know everything about me.
What I mean is that a forest doesn’t know itself
the way a woodcutter does. Or a wolf. Or a child
walking into the woods.
But, you, you know what it is
to walk in these woods. To greet the woodcutter
and the wolf. To take the child’s hand.
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Nan Cohen is the author of two books of poems, Rope Bridge and Unfinished City, and a chapbook, Thousand-Year-Old Words. She lives in Los Angeles.
by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
by Laura Sobbott Ross
It was an all-night party
she will confess later.
Splayed and snoring on the beach,
she draws the curious, mostly women.
We cover her with our shadows.
That’s my daughter, I tell them.
She’s had too much to drink.
One of the women asks if she can pray for me,
and another asks if my shorts are from Shein.
Yes, I say to both, remembering the pattern
I wear is of brightly colored fish.
Dreamless eyes. Hollow, gaping mouths.
Tailfins that long for current
but are caught in the stitches of seams.
As the mother of an addict, I want to
tell the other women there is no rock bottom,
at least not one my daughter has found.
She just sinks a little deeper, I mean to say,
but the tide has already begun to rise around us.
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Laura Sobbott Ross has worked as a teacher and a writing coach for Lake County Schools in Central Florida and was named Lake County’s poet laureate. Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and have appeared in Meridian, 32 Poems, Blackbird, Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Arts & Letters Poetry Prize and won the Southern Humanities Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. She is the author of six poetry books.
by Laura Last
My son flew out west yesterday,
into sunset’s bloodshot eye, back
to the desert where dust hides
its venoms and salves. Life holds itself
in dry stumps, and at night: that bowl of sky,
punctured by stars. He loves
the creosote smell after rain, the saguaro
that blooms after dark. Scorpion
shoe, hidden wound—he is half javelina,
a tough-hided creature patrolling
the canyon with his wide-shouldered
squadron, hiding the most tender
parts of himself: just what we meant
not to teach him. Here in his boyhood
home, rain smears the skylight, too warm
to freeze. Attic dripping with absence,
a room thick with loss and relief.
We sent him away to keep him alive
and so far, it has. Face-down in his pillow,
I pretend to breathe in his mountains, his sky,
the smell of wet dog in his bed. We know
we walk backwards by water, blind-
folded, unclenching, unpeeling ourselves
off of him: only child, phantom limb.
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Laura Last is a writer and musician living in the Hudson River Valley. In 2024, her poem, “Apology,” was published in Fantastic Imaginary Creatures: An Anthology of Contemporary Prose Poems and was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
by Janet MacFadyen
Isn't every poem
an unfinished love poem, the needle
making a new hole to fix the old?
I come to you the way the half moon
comes into the yard—I could be more whole
but it lands on the roof of the next house, singing.
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born out of nothing. I need a poem
about happiness I haven't written yet,
even though all I want
is what I already have. Nothing
different, just more. So sit with me
under the plum tree and trace our lifelines
together—how they branch,
how they sing.
Lines from Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Alegria Barclay, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Naomi Shahib Nye, Li-Young Lee, Kyla Jamieson, Mondi Sbeity, Michael Simms, and Jessica E. Pierce (Taken from Love Is for All of Us, James Crews and Brad Peacock, editors).
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Janet MacFadyen is the author of three full-length collections, most recently State of Grass (Salmon Poetry 2024), with a new collection, Love Letters to the Wild, forthcoming from Dos Madres Press in 2025. Honors include a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, a residency in Cill Rialaig, Ireland, and a 7-month Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellowship. Her poetry appears widely. She is the managing editor of Slate Roof Press, a poetry chapbook collaborative. See slateroofpress.com.
by Zoë Ryder White
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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My neighbor, in her green gloves and plastic bunny mask, is training her pear
tree—a child, really—to stand straight, arms outstretched. The tree goes two-
dimensional with this effort. It’s a training meant to bring beauty; symmetry.
Every year as the branches grow, there is more length to tie down. To plant a no-
shitting-dogs icon in the square of dirt around what you’d call the tree’s trunk,
my neighbor trades the bunny mask for raccoon. The tree is drawn and
quartered, though my neighbor is kind; encouraging. Things grow well around
her. She binds the tree’s branches to the frame with twisties. She pushes the
raccoon mask onto the top of her head so she can see what she’s doing. When
the tree is old enough to bear fruit, pears will hang from the frame like a row of
pears at the market. When the other neighbor walks by, the one who calls me
fucking white whore, will she admire the honey blush around the pears’
dangling bottoms? And will I? My neighbor puts a new mask on. What a
collection! This one is the tusked wild boar. Dangerous, delicious. G. says we’re
each a little queer in our queer little way. Kurt C. said something similar in the
nineties but I’m not sure he meant what she means. If I sit still, I feel what
moves through my carotid. A pot of bones boils in the kitchen. I render the
spring fat. I lay my hands on me.
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Zoë Ryder White’s first full-length collection, The Visible Field, is forthcoming from River River Books in February, 2026. A chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. HYPERSPACE was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015) and Elsewhere (Sixth Finch Press, 2020) with Nicole Callihan. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family.
by Ruiyan Zhu
Lomonosov is the birthplace of composer Igor Stravinsky
Light spills through morning like a jar of pennies—
pooling over the music scores, each page waiting for fingertips.
It’s our first morning ritual: I press my thumbs
through the f carved into the violin’s cheek, bridging bow to string.
On the second-hand leather bench, I work rosin
into the bristles, its powder rising like sawdust
from a workshop where the air once carried notes
of tobacco, varnish. Beside a frost-tipped photograph, a bottle
of Kemlya stands capped in dust, remembering the curtained corner
of a New York apartment, the hand that tipped it back. In its reflection, home
spins, tilts into view: its floorboards loosening under the weight
of record players, photo albums, Stravinsky wafting through the kitchen.
In the hall, shoes scuff, lifting as students tumble through
the doorway. Between a welcome home mat and the painted gaze
pinching a Matryoshka doll, Lomonosov blinks awake.
His bow lifts. Our strings unclutch. For a moment, the room forgets
we are on the other side of the world.
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Ruiyan Zhu is a high school senior from Saratoga, California who currently serves as the editor-in-chief of her school newspaper and literary magazine. Her work has been recognized by JUST POETRY!!! and the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
by Leona Sevick
My mother loved the Old Testament best,
stories that invited Charlton Heston
to bare his broad, oiled chest, his pronouncements
delivered with otherworldly cadence.
He looked something like my father, light hair
and good bones, tall and wide in the shoulders.
She’d seen The Ten Commandments a dozen
times as a child in Korea, the cool
dark theater, the screen a miracle
of movement and sound—a haven from a
world that never promised peace. When she
first saw my smiling father, she doubtless
found him familiar: his broad brow and white
teeth a comfort in the days that follow
war. She’d hold my hand each time the Red Sea
parted, Israelites pushing through, pharaoh’s
soldiers at their heels. I never saw her
in the Moses role, imagined, instead,
her following that flowing hair and raised
staff. But in the end she went first, the sea
and all its creatures crashing down around
us, our chariots flung into the whorl.
I reach for my father’s hand, my brother’s,
but they are not reaching for mine. They are
looking eastward, just spotting a head of
still black hair, a small hand waving goodbye.
_________________________________________________________
Leona Sevick’s work appears in Orion, The Southern Review, The Sun, Poetry Northwest, and Pleiades. She serves on the boards of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference, and she is professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. Her second collection of poems, The Bamboo Wife, is published by Trio House Press.
by Eggie