by Jill Michelle
by Jennifer Markell
Petrified Forest, Arizona
In the dawn of the dinosaurs, a conifer topples,
is captured by a river, smothered in mud
for two hundred million years
and then returned to land, its core
transformed to stone, heartwood turned opal and jasper.
The shape of the tree remains, like the armature
of a sculpture, or the bone
structure of a familiar face—your first love,
the cherished cat who sits on your shoulder and watches
the computer’s cursor twitch like a whisker,
and stares out the window at a kingbird
without considering the broom of time that
sweeps every living thing
away, and returns us to the earth, where we imagine
ourselves a raindrop, wave of grass or
gust of wind arranging the blue mesa.
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Jennifer Markell’s first poetry collection, Samsara (Turning Point), was named a "Must Read" by the Massachusetts Book Awards in 2015. Her second collection, Singing at High Altitude, was published in 2021 by Main Street Rag. Jennifer’s poems have been published in The Bitter Oleander, Cimarron Review, Consequence, Diode, RHINO, and The Women's Review of Books. She works as a psychotherapist and lives in the Boston area with her husband and two securely-attached cats.
by Katrina Roberts
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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Please breath, unfurl without a hitch, fill lungs with wind, rise, then
fall to rise again ad infinitum. Mere moments, you might cease, or seize
instead, constrained concavity squeezed, two grasped balloons, gone
limp. I gasp. Party’s over, each steampunk gear, all mechanisms grinding
to a halt unseen but felt, a siren’s clutching, a meter’s coin of time
drained into a black hole, a wreck of gulls, flecks, particles, the idea of
existence cracking open lesions in the addled mind riding above; if clods
kick up into clouds of dust, or clotted smoke slides in to choke
the valley, or fear lodges deep within a throat slippery, wet this
second, now brimming with ash or remnants of trash a burn barrel
harbors somewhere too close to let its throbbing pink songbird
sing, writhing to adjust its tenuous frayed grasp, not wanting to lose
grip on its storm-tossed jerking swing; if this thorax were a brittle
vessel rolled on seas, within this metered corpus you make a cage
of 24 arms to cradle my gimbaled heart, stunned sparrow stuffed
into a torn garden glove to keep it calm: I can’t, I can’t…. Tiny
corset stays sprung though still too tight; I’m the minke whale
beached at land’s end to house a colony of crabs, each elegant
arch between your staves a door sluiced with stinging brine; you
exploded, a shattered wine cask, seeping juice, dismantled, jagged,
flayed open when we slid and slammed into a tree; I’m sorry, afraid,
my only casket; not yet a corpse I work to calm the weightless soul
weighing you down, my cavern of ticking stalactites, my straight
jacket, my box of meat, silt, rain—containing this wheezing song
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Katrina Roberts is author of several books, including LIKENESS (visual poems); Underdog; Friendly Fire; The Quick; and How Late Desire Looks; as well as the chapbook LACE. She’s editor of Because You Asked. Her work appears in journals such as BOMB, The Ilanot Review, Cleaver; Brink, Poetry Northwest, Brooklyn Review, Thrush, Interim; Iterant; The Indianapolis Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and Permafrost, and in many anthologies. She curates the Visiting Writers Reading Series and teaches at Whitman College. See katrinaroberts.net.
by Chloe Cook
Almost nothing is known
of its ecological role.
No herbivores have shown
interest in the green marble
burrowing like a boil
in the coral’s epidermis,
immune to benzoyl
peroxide and remiss
to popping unprovoked.
Without neurons, it vegetates
like a grudge, hard and cloaked
in nacre, fine to satiate
its most revered tenet:
solitude. The “eye” grows alone,
single-celled, the only tenant
of the lot, sea-fast though
the name’s a misnomer—
it can’t see. It would be useless
stowed in any sailor’s
socket, but a seamstress
might pluck it for its sheen:
ornamental grape sewn
into a bodice gone unseen
by men; gem for one’s own.
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Chloe Cook's work is featured in The New Criterion, The Southeast Review, Quarterly West, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from Community of Writers, Poetry by the Sea, and the Key West Literary Seminar. A 2025 Helen Degen Cohen Fellow at RHINO, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Florida. See chloecookwrites.com.
by Therese Gleason
On learning I inherited
a biomarker for the disease
that felled my father,
I dream of tiny cardinals,
a plague invading
the house through a gap
in the wall. They swirl
and spawn, my bedroom
thick with red.
I thrash to catch them,
grasp at crimson fistfuls
like feathery fireflies,
trapping wingbeats
between hands clasped
in the shape of a heart:
a ribcage I crack
at the open window
to fling the infestation out,
forgetting they can fly.
As if this will kill them,
my favorite bird,
a salutation my dead
father sends. As if
this will save me—
but I was born
with a radiance of redbirds
in my blood, a brood
of drab and hardy females
roosting in my cells,
their nests already knit
inside.
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Therese Gleason’s third chapbook, Hemicrania (Chestnut Review, 2024), won the 2025 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. Her other chapbooks include Matrilineal (Finishing Line, 2021), and Libation (2006), co-winner of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Competition. Gleason’s poetry, flash, and essays appear in 32 Poems, Cincinnati Review, Indiana Review, New Ohio Review, Pithead Chapel, Rattle's Poets Respond, and elsewhere. Originally from Kentucky, she lives in Massachusetts. See theresegleason.com.
by Kelli Russell Agodon
by Carol Blaizy D’Souza
"We need to find the right geography for our revelations."
--Etel Adnan, Of Cities and Women: Letters to Fawwaz
Swaddled in quiet, sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair
I wink back at the strip of glass-sheet sea, glittering in the distance.
Grey in the May dusk when I visited her last,
she was frothing frustration at the sleek-backed rocks
dozing on her banks. They only sank deeper into slumber,
their soft snores bubbling up her sandy shanks.
In my early middle age, the moral obligation to work feels Catholic.
V, sundered to shreds with no hope of mending, our friendship
cowers in a corner of my mind always. You are a shadow
slinking at the centre of every thought. Confessing is a supine activity,
I read in a painter’s diary. At my window, sashes of sunlight slip
through the blinds and rest possessively on my books.
The moong, soaked last night, drained this morning,
is sprouting another year into my life. It is Saturday.
With thanks to Janos Lavin and John Berger
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Carol Blaizy D’Souza is a poet, translator and researcher living in Chennai, India. A collation of her work can be found at linktr.ee/cblaizd.
by Carolyn H. Zukowski
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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A stand-alone herald of light in the marshes
among the reed beds. Contemplate. Question
the shallows for toads and newts. Still, the body
an exclamation point between land and sky
or a divining rod between land and water.
Regrets start
like this—a stone unturned. Thoughts, minnows
left unpursued. Weather threats. Risk
the awkward pull of flight. A reach of wings
draws shadow over the hot salt flats. To land
is to make a slow, murky splash. Repeat.
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Carolyn H. Zukowski is an American poet whose work has been shaped by years of living between cultures and languages. She lives in Český Krumlov, Czech Republic, where she works as a writer and copyeditor. She is the founder and former editor-in-chief of The Literary Bohemian. Her poems have appeared in Orbis, Poetry Salzburg, Rhino, Sand, and The Stony Thursday Book, and often explore place, movement, and the practical realities of making a life abroad.
by Liz Grisaru
The grocer’s helper left off stacking six packs
to meet me at the counter, me in my prodigal’s shoes,
where she totted up the milk and bread
and said it wasn’t a bad winter, only one lost,
Effie Smith who was ninety-five last summer
now gone to rest in the family plot. Meantime,
how’s your mother? It only gets harder,
the old people in these old places. They don’t ask for help
having been themselves so long they wouldn’t ask anyway.
Mine was the same. On her own, like Effie Smith,
until she left the stovetop on and Richie stopped
to pull her from the smoke—she didn’t know how close
she came to burning down the house, her inside,
goodness, thank goodness your mother has you—
well, as often as you can. It’s hard. Want the receipt?
Tell her I said hello, she’s got a credit on her account.
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Liz Grisaru’s poetry has appeared in Months to Years, Poetica Magazine, Trolley, and the online publications of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. She lives outside of Albany, New York and spends time with family on the Maine coast. Liz works for the State of New York in renewable energy policy.
by Barbara Crooker
"What doesn’t / in time enter Grief’s lexicon?"
Danusha Laméris, “Glass”
The first time seeing a new doctor, one of the standard
questions is always How many children do you have? The one
I don’t know how to answer. The naked truth: four,
but one died seems like a blunt instrument, but three
feels like a lie. She notices that my pressure is up,
says she’ll come back for another reading, leaves me
beached in the cold white room. Adrift on an iceberg,
I remember how young I was, how nothing in the Lamaze
books prepared me for the nurse unable to find a heartbeat,
the doctor pretending there was nothing wrong. Until he couldn’t
anymore. What I was like afterwards: an empty shell. And
there were more questions: boy or girl? asked the cheerful
checkout girl at the local grocery; her bafflement when I
abandoned a week’s worth of groceries, unable to stutter
out an answer. And where is she now, my sweet
firstborn, the one I never held, never even got to see?
She swam inside the ocean of my body for nine short
months, safe and warm, but I failed to deliver her to the sandy
shore. Oh, my little starfish, I see you floating in the dark
night sky. Now I count my breaths, and a nurse returns, says
I’m back to normal. Which is, of course, impossible,
in this world without her in it.
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Barbara Crooker is author of ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series), longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press; The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea; and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and more.
by Maria Caponi
Dust grounds me here, air thick,
streets uneven, light blurred. Murals
on cracking cement walls, entangled
serpents in fading greens and reds. Chipped
black paint on the long hair of a woman,
her head raised high, above her in
blue letters: AMOR.
Dust of memories blown away
in the taste of corn masa, carried
by the perfume of fresh guayaba.
Untethered from sorrow, shared stories,
a ground empty of ghosts.
Dust on the wooden counter
in a local market, the old woman cleans
with a rag. I am starved, I say.
The market closing, there
is nothing left.
Dust of her kindness, as she heats
corn tortillas on her blackened comal,
on the temporary stove, offering whatever
she has: a hard-boiled egg, one tomato,
and a plate, while I sit on the wobbly bench.
Dust of tender sadness
the pesos heavy in my pocket,
when I ask, How much?
Nothing, she says.
Dust of greed, grief, and gluttony
disappears as I walk unknown
streets, my steps forming
words, as I invent a prayer, that is not
a supplication, or an invocation,
or devotion to an unknown Lord, but a litany
Aum. Be safe. Namaste.
Dust dissolves. A thin blade
of light pierces through,
reaching the ground where I stay.
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Maria Caponi was born and grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has a Ph. D. in physics and a creative certificate in fiction writing with distinction from UCLA. A list of her work can be found at mariacaponi.com.
by Heather Swan
In the apartment where I left the candle burning,
the rabbit and the bird must have seen the flame
jump from wick to lace tablecloth, must have smelled
the smoke which blackened the ceiling, slowly eating
its way through my notebook, my mail, and the
wood of the small walnut table, the way our histories
can consume the present until nothing is left, must have
looked for a way out, and must have heard the fire alarm
piercing the quiet of the building. Did they know to blame
me? Who fed them and spoke softly to them? And when
the strangers came in masks, found them huddled together,
and rushed them outside into the clean December air,
as they gulped the good oxygen, did they imagine
freedom? Only to be placed in my arms again,
my wet face buried in their feathers and fur?
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Heather Swan is the author of four books, two works of prose, most recently Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, which examines the importance of insects to larger ecosystems, and two books of poetry, Dandelion and A KInship with Ash. Her work has been published in journals such as The Sun, Lit Hub, Aeon, Poet Lore, Emergence Magazine, and Terrain.org.
by Terese Svoboda
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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A fork and a spoon lie together
to spoon and to fork.
E = MC squared says the spoon.
I don't have the energy says the fork.
Forgiveness? says the spoon.
It is as if we lie on a vast table
says the fork. Useless.
The spoon measures a dose.
Sink to your knees. The fork
submits. The past is prescient.
The fork clasps the spoon.
Of course, says the spoon.
It's all about portion control.
Let's sleep says the fork.
Weep? says the spoon.
The spoon keeps busy until
the fork is sorry too, like the song.
Make me toast says the spoon, and snappy.
The fork says Who turned out
the light? Birds begin singing
their favorite: O moon, O moon.
The table was laid, says the spoon,
not me. Tines, my dear, are everything,
says the fork. My tines are retired.
They spoon through course
after intercourse, the hunger being
incurable, inconsolable.
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"Silverwear" is from Terese Svoboda's Theatrix: Poetry Plays (Anhinga Press), her eighth book of poetry. Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, her second memoir, was published last December. PW said, "Readers will be riveted."
by Maureen Alsop
by Laura Van Prooyen
According to the sages, an authentic life engages with
beginnings & endings, doesn’t shy away from
contradictory realms—not so easy for me to
do, but seems I can either resist or roll w/ this
evolving situation, let it be in the in-between:
fascination up, frustration down—genuine life
go on, hit me w/ your best shot. I’ve got a worry
hangover, but I shut off my phone, no more news,
imagined catastrophes, texts from home. I sit w/o
judgment in silence. Meditate. Belly breathing
knocks me out. Jumpstarts my palpitating heart.
Let me start again. Paradox is not new. In this unsteady
moment, being okay with uncertainty is what I
need to do to have a calm sense of anything. Yet, I resist
opening the door of solitude, the quiet, the holy (shit!)—
prayer? Is that what I’m doing here? Going there? I
question again & forever my fragile faith, but I’m
ready to fix myself up, even if it means confronting my
singular self (soul?) daily with the exhilarating reminder
that death is coming (for us all!), our most common
unquestionable truth. Eat the peach. Comb my hair.
Vow to stop fretting petty bullshit & be better
where I can—spare the cockroach my shoe & lead a more
examined life? I want the patience of a potato. Funny,
yes. But imagine sitting on a counter so long as to go soft,
zero regrets & shoots sprouting from so many new eyes.
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Laura Van Prooyen is author of four collections of poetry, including Sorry, We No Longer Offer Bereavement Fares, forthcoming in 2026. Laura facilitates workshops for healthcare workers, works as an independent consultant to writing clients, and teaches at Trinity University. She lives in San Antonio, TX and is the founder of Next Page Press. See lauravanprooyen.com.
by Cynthia Good
by Jessica Thiru
I keep thinking about this first day of April
—so thin, March’s cheek is pressed against the morning
How the air quenched with spring will soon be thirsty again
How this day, fast and forgettable like a year, is still a day
I keep thinking about
the lake of sadness in me
How violent it is to drown within oneself
How tragic to re-enter the mouth of your suffering and still kneel to its hunger
Yet still April is bright and forgiving
and each chirping bird is reinventing its pocket of the sky with song
and maybe despite all this,
life itself is not a wound
Tenderness, swallow me whole
let me enter another April
with hope dancing between my ribs.
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Jessica Thiru is a Kenyan poet born and bred in South Africa. Her work appears in Button Poetry’s 2023 video contest and Querencia Press’s Not Ghosts, But Spirits IV. Her poems explore the morphing space between becoming and noticing. Her first chapbook, Burning of Absence, is forthcoming with Querencia Press. You can find her on Instagram at @leechteeeth and Tumblr at @leechteethwrites.
by Susan Browne
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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Scrolling down my iPhone calendar, I stop at 2071.
That year, my birthday is on a Sunday. I’ll be 119.
If I had to add it all up, I’d say I was way too normal.
I can’t believe I spent a minute feeling guilty
for having lots of boyfriends in my youth
or having sex with two men in one day. It wasn’t easy
getting from the east side of town to the west side
on my bicycle in time. I should keep the faith.
Yesterday, I was in a hot tub with two men.
They were discussing earthquake preparedness.
One said he had a kit that could filter
any kind of water, including sewage.
The other said he had a rafter built in his garage
to protect his car, and it could support
the local high school cheerleading squad doing pull-ups.
Or so the builder advertised. I have nothing prepared
for an emergency, except a gallon of Tanqueray
in the cupboard above the oven because I gave up gin
after my second divorce. Maybe this means I have faith
in something. At least twice a week I wake up astonished
at how living calmly goes on, shoulder to shoulder
with unreckonable tragedy. The men paused
to take a scrolling glance when I stepped out of the hot tub.
Then they went on about where to store the food
and the importance of keeping a pair of running shoes
under the desk at the office.
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Susan Browne is the author of four poetry collections, including Monster Mash (Four Way Books, 2025); Just Living (Catamaran Literary Reader, 2019), winner of the 2019 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Buddha’s Dogs (Four Way Books, 2002), winner of Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, selected by Edward Hirsch. A recipient of the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, Browne lives in Northern California. She was an English Professor for 34 years and currently teaches poetry workshops online. See susanbrownepoems.com.
by Tina Kelley
The website said there were exploded bits of the holy in everybody,
so I put them on my bucket list. The lobby was welcoming, concierge
and maître d’ were all I could ask for. Lots of fun activities like parades
and pools and playgrounds. Food: consistent and potentially plentiful.
I really wanted to like this species, but other kids left a lot to be desired,
the ones the doorman called “common,” who tied me up back-to-back
with the only other only child. And that mean teacher, the sun-warmed
mayonnaise of her smile, put me in the hall twice for talking too much.
Middle school IF I COULD GIVE IT ZERO STARS I WOULD—whispers
in the backseat and getting ditched. And no one warned me that guys snap
their fingers at waitresses, drivers tailgate, fools talk in the train’s quiet car,
and doctors speak in acronyms, moving their mouths without sharing info.
I came back to downgrade my stars to 2 after wading through the cereal
shelves and finding only three healthy ones. Why is everyone staring
at their phones while sightseeing? Why was that meeting not an e-mail?
Looking back, I might’ve qualified for a refund—never had sisters, aunts,
brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, or brothers-in-law. Never walked into
a bar alone, had a one-night stand, cooked a Thanksgiving turkey, skydived.
But when I hear my mix tape, meet the librarian who made a Reading Trail
through the park posted with pages of funny kid books, interview the boy
who got his class to shave their heads with the kid on chemo, when I garden,
decorate the community club for an eightieth birthday, think about my kids
and what they will look like when they’re 80, knock wood, when I pass
the turnoff for Shades of Death Road and hear yes, triple rainbows do exist,
when I see the silver carp rock-skipping themselves across the lake surface,
when my friend came with me to write mom’s Christmas cards from hospice:
Would come back. Would hurry back. Totally coming back.
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Tina Kelley’s Rise Wildly appeared in 2020 from CavanKerry Press, joining Abloom & Awry, Precise, and The Gospel of Galore, a Washington State Book Award winner. She reported for The New York Times for ten years and wrote two nonfiction books. She received a 2023 and 2025 Finalist award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, NJ.
by Heidi Seaborn