by Mary Jo Bang
by Christy Prahl
I wake up lonely
as fog.
So many of us
adrift on life rafts
after a break in the barge.
We dream up archipelagos
rich in coconut
and boar,
yelling to strangers
is it land?
just mirage,
our voices hoarse,
arms weary of rowing.
And what next,
anyway?
We’ve all read
our dog-eared
Lord of the Flies.
We know how close
we get to feral
when pushed.
Push us, we think.
We’re half
crime already.
____________________________________________________________
Christy Prahl is the author of the collections We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023), With Her Hair on Fire (Roadside Press, 2025), and Catalog of Labors (Unsolicited Press, forthcoming 2026). A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been featured in Poetry Daily, Tar River Poetry, Louisville Review, CALYX, and others. She splits her time between a small workers’ cottage in Chicago and refurbished Quonset hut in southwest Michigan.
by Tania Pryputniewicz
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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It sits in a flimsy pie-tin of crimped and corrugated silver,
wrapped in a paper towel my daughter wets three times
a day. My son tells her to chop it, one eye per chunk,
bury it in the yard, then dig it up. But she’s like me,
needs to see it grow. It’s an Idaho potato, nothing special,
useful under the right cut of meat in the crockpot. It withers
in toward its center, wrinkling a bit, like me, color
sucked from my hair’s roots by—I don’t know—this—
arguing—over why potato eyes are called eyes when
they’re seeds: Put down the knife. Leave her project
be. She’s not sure she wants it now, like the time
I saw my 12-string guitar in the hands of the mover
my husband hired—My lucky day, he said and smiled,
my husband right behind chirping, She never plays it, take it
away. What do they know of the grad school hours,
the ways it saved me from myself, useless in a house
of crying babies—I see, with my blind potato eyes I see
and from behind them I dream of guitars washing up,
like parts of me, like plastic shovels of the hotel tourists,
reds, blues, mostly primary yellows, days’ children
long gone, sandpipers taking back the shore.
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Tania Pryputniewicz is the author of two poetry collections, November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press, 2014) and The Fool in the Corn (Saddle Road Press, 2022), as well as Heart’s Compass Tarot: Discover Tarot Journaling and Create Your Own Cards (Two Fine Crows Books, 2021). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tania teaches poetry and tarot-inspired writing classes for San Diego Writers, Ink, Antioch University’s Continuing Education program, and through her website.
by Bonnie Jill Emanuel
In the blizzard you could barely
see the paper birch, nothing but
cold monochromatic clips ghost
white, you could feel yourself
blown sideways. You could see
yourself as in a film. The tree
shows in the slow frozen
fragile way the poem sometimes
anxiously strips down. Duct tape-
colored lenticel strips on bark.
The film is a poem. As if your
thoughts are separating from
you, small beetles. Silent, dense
base of tree now buried in snow,
hiding. They say a birch grows
in a V to sun. Does the world
feel violent to the tree? All night
it had been snowing & everything
had become something else. If
you are a letter you are a lowercase
i. Your arms thin like twigs.
____________________________________________________________
Bonnie Jill Emanuel is the author of Glitter City. Her most recent poems and interviews can be found in American Poetry Review, Pine Hills Review, Colorado Review, RHINO, and more. Emanuel is the recipient of the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the Irwin and Alice Stark Poetry Prize from The City College of New York. Born in Detroit, she lives in New York.
by Namita Krishnamurthy
The day I turned thirty
my father's body changed.
Skin turned inside out.
Eyeballs rolled into a dark corner.
It was as if he had walked into a room and forgotten why,
and I did not know what to say
to remind him of his place.
He says, I am old. What he means is, you are not young anymore.
He says, my shoulder is dislocated. He means, time is out of joint.
He says, remember how I carried you
when you fell asleep watching Denver the Last Dinosaur
and woke not knowing if you lost time—
if it was evening or dawn?
It is like that now. You do not know.
Every year I keep his name, he thinks he is snatching from me.
I say, this is our time. These are our hours.
He says, you're deaf.
But year after year, I hear him—
the rubble in his broken back,
the sandal paste on his forehead
cracking like a wall
around a white and ghastly temple.
_________________________________________________________
Namita Krishnamurthy is an actor and writer from Chennai, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hammock Magazine and Strange Horizons. She was longlisted for the Osmosis Poetry Prize in 2026, and is currently working on her first novel.
by C. E. Janecek
There’s a mutual recognition:
a gait swayed by the fissure
in a Birkenstock. The barber’s
gentle grazing down the slope
of our necks, a straight razor
shearing the wool from the lamb’s
throat. Lingering the aisles
of plastic-wrapped boxer briefs.
The callous on the middle finger,
that callous way we hold ourselves:
teaching each other to glare
at midnight strangers.
There is an invisible muscle
hardening beneath the skin.
I see it in the growing
layer of dust on upper lips:
dolls lingering their thumbs over
the early hours. A room of
strangers becoming familiar:
their joints refigured by
instruments of yearning, a hand
stretching the octaves between lovers.
It’s a pinkie ring, Pit Vipers,
a bush glittering chlorine
and hot sun. It’s a horizon
scar across the chest and
tender gooseflesh after praying
with the priestess of lightning
and good looks. A dip of the chin.
A ring of keys. A mirror
strung between streetlights.
_________________________________________________________
C. E. Janecek is a Czech American writer who holds a poetry MFA from Colorado State University and is a Tin House Workshop alum. Janecek’s writing has appeared in Poetry, Sugar House Review, Gulf Coast Journal, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. See cewritespoems.com.
by Ellie Gomero
During my walk a vulture, half the size of my body,
swoops down to greet its friends, perched neatly
in a line in the grassy patch that slopes into the mangroves,
kissing the bay. My mother calls, and sickness circles
me, a swarming wake, that group of vicious beaks,
they bubble over with laughter at my winglessness,
my inability to escape, to them I am prey.
Though I refuse to believe or bow my head and seek
the sky’s eternity as my mother wishes I would. Truly,
in this moment, she begs me to prey please pray for us
and is this moment not a prayer? The wind, a hymn
that twirls its fingers through the trees' green locks.
The stench of the mangroves, a holler, a hallelujah.
The rippling bay, with it sunken ships, its green and murky depths,
a sacred temple, harboring the dead, as all temples do.
And of course, that swarm of vultures,
is the congregation. Standing at attention,
ready for communion.
_________________________________________________________
Ellie Gomero is a writer, a poet, a feral woman, and a sad girl at heart. She just received her Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Florida International University. Her work has been published in The South Dakota Review, Rust + Moth, and The Orange Island Arts Review, and has received awards / recognition from The Academy of American Poets, Fred Shaw Poetry Contest, Bluapple Poetry Foundation, and Scholastics.
by Jules Jacob
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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And she lets the river answer.
—Leonard Cohen
When I question the river, a chorus
of invisible frogs chants where, where, where.
When I let the river answer, she sets
a baritone soloist in the tall
still weeds beside me. There, there he insists,
familial home, gliding trails of kayaks,
siblings, father. Air, air, I plead. Waves slap
against the concrete cobblestone boat path;
wind breathes my will. Sings, I’m bending your way.
Swallows dip in September light, droplets
collect in my palm. Her hair shiny brown
and wet to her knees, my mother backcasts
and effortlessly cracks the whip before
introducing her nymph to the water.
_________________________________________________________
Jules Jacob’s recent collections include Rappaccini’s Garden (White Stag Publishing, 2024), an illustrated collection co-authored with Sonja Johanson, and Kingdom of Glass & Seed (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023). Poems, interviews, and reviews of the author’s work appear in Plume, Lily Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, SWWIM, Tinderbox, CALYX, and Tupelo Quarterly. Jules’ work has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in France and other fine organizations. Jules resides in Colorado.
by Martha Rhodes
the moon is not a dog. The moon paces the sky
like a worried parent. No, ridiculous. The moon’s
just the moon, though could be compared to
my father's face, pockmarked from teenage acne,
scarred by basal cell carcinoma resulting from
radiation therapy aimed at halting puberty’s assault.
Moon and face, both riddled from eruptions
and bombardments. That’s the extent of their likeness.
The moon is neither romantic nor sad. My father’s face
was mostly sad, unloved, at least, by me—the primitive
crudeness spewed from that foul mouth, witnessed by
my appalled Boston Brahmin friends. Unbearably embarrassed,
I’d slink in the front seat as he drove the carpool each day
to our prissy girl's school. The worst? I thought his filth,
his sexual, scatological jokes, his similes—that raspberry
turnover dribbling down your chest is like a girl's…—
(fill in the blanks if you can even imagine the perversity)
hilarious. Yes, I thought he was hilarious. And disgusting.
He couldn't help himself. Lenny Bruce on steroids. I say it again,
hilarious, and I admit that was my real shame, keeping back
my laughter and my encouragement for more. Also,
as I think of it all now—those jokes, those
stunningly shocking comparisons—as I recall the humiliations—
I think, no, I’m sure he hated women.
_________________________________________________________
Martha Rhodes is the author of five poetry collections, including The Thin Wall (University of Pittsburgh Press). She is on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and is the founding publisher and executive editor of Four Way Books in New York City.
by Joan Kwon Glass
After "Spring Letter from the South" by Keetje Kuipers
Mother, you should see this place.
It’s as if when God created the Earth,
he knew we would destroy it, so, last minute,
he penciled in paradise on the edge
to remind us what we’d taken for granted.
We never talk about them anymore,
my sister and her son—your daughter and your grandson.
I guess there is just so much we can say
after nine years have passed. There’s no one
new to blame. No new memories.
Only old questions.
I look up and the rustling palm trees remind me
how much distance there is between us.
Between you and I, mother, between what is lost
and what is surrendered.
Between their last hours on Earth and this hour.
Between us and everything unknown to us.
I am wearing a sun hat speckled with strawberries
because I want to be ready for joy.
But will I recognize it when it comes?
Would you recognize me without this sorrow?
You would not approve of this place, mother,
with its pride flags everywhere, its dewy, tan women
in spandex rollerblading down the boardwalk,
shirtless men on bikes, blasting music with foul language.
I haven’t seen a single church on Miami Beach.
No Costco either, for that matter. I don’t know
what you would do here, mother,
in a town with no church and no Costco.
Since they died, you’ve gotten worse, going to one or both
every day instead of a few times a week. Now, you need
to know where I am every minute.
I come up the driveway and before I put the car in park,
you are standing in front of me, waiting.
There’s a movie that takes place here in Miami—
The Birdcage with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.
At the end, there’s a scene where everyone dresses in drag
and hides in a gay nightclub to avoid being recognized.
I imagine you and I there together, in stilettos and wigs
dancing to ABBA or Sister Sledge. When I think of joy,
I think of you and I pretending to be other people.
When I was growing up you always told me
that your mother sent you money from Korea
because you were her favorite. What I have come
to understand is that your mother, my grandmother,
understood how limited you are. She understood
that if she did not take care of you, that we—
you, my sister & I—may not survive.
Mother, it is spring in Miami.
The flowers are abundant and their perfume
is dizzying and lascivious. People are coming up
from the beach with wet hair and sunburns and
jazz is playing nearby. I am sitting on a bench
off Ocean Drive in my strawberry hat and later
I’ll buy overpriced gelato as the sun sets in this world
and I’ll wonder if there is a sun wherever they are now.
I’m drawing us all from memory—how we looked
the year they died. I’m drawing us in drag on the dance floor,
mom. I’m leaving room for paradise.
____________________________________________________________
Joan Kwon Glass is the author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry as well as finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her book, Night Swim, won the Diode Book Prize. Joan’s poems have been featured on/in NPR, The Slowdown, Poetry Daily, Poetry, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She has received residencies from SWWIM, Vermont Studio Center, and Prospect Street Writers House.
by Asa Drake
It is the forbidden color. Pick another.
Sweaty yellow. Reflective yellow. So yellow
so free! Yellow Power Ranger. A terrible color
for Asians. I too grew up with no yellow.
It makes me want it more. The no yellow zone.
A field of dead sunflowers is the saddest
color. A flower called poet’s wife? Ginkgo yellow
vs. sweetgum yellow. I have so much
in my closet. It’s not a super easy aesthetic;
it’s playful and indulgent. There’s this vintage
Helmut Lang I found but it’s sateen.
I think we were taught not to wear yellow
out of some sort of self doubt (which I type
as self-donut). Undoubtedly a luminous yellow.
And the pineapple I’m growing. It’s so small
but almost all yellow. The top lush and leafy.
You know me. I love yellow. I love yellow
even if my mother cannot wear it. Some years
it’s my father’s favorite color. I want to confirm,
not only have I received your payment,
I’ve blown it on a heavily discounted yellow dress.
OMG, yes! Yellow dress! I like that yellow made you
call me. Gorgeous, that dress was made for you.
____________________________________________________________
Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. Her poems are published or forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, and Sewanee Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.
by Phoebe Reeves
I am a rabbit in a thicket, a thick
patina of rust on a fire hydrant, a third
degree burn on a forearm which shielded
a face from worse—and I am crouching,
thighs coiled springs, ready to run hither and
thither, the third, the thirteenth, the thirtieth set
of thighs so sprung, like that sound just beyond
hearing—a Thompson submachine gun,
dealing death in the third-person.
What’s the difference between thick-skinned
and thick-witted in this landscape, anyway?
Thistle down floats by, something so soft,
pulled from the heart of something bristly
and bitter. That’s a metaphor, you know.
Thomas had to put his fingers in the seed pod
to feel the contradiction for himself.
Some things require first-hand validation,
no third party reporting, no theft of experience.
No one here gets to third base without
stealing second. It’s thirsty work and
only a thimbleful of whiskey lies in my palm.
This is where I remain. The cover
is thin. The urge to break and run
is unbearable. And dumb.
____________________________________________________________
Phoebe Reeves has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, and is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She has three chapbooks of poetry, most recently The Flame of Her Will (Milk & Cake), and one full length collection, Helen of Bikini (Lily Poetry). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Best New Poets, Forklift OH, and The Chattahoochee Review. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband Don Peteroy, amidst her unruly urban garden.
by Mac Crane
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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expect to run into at least six or seven exes.
maybe some girls who wouldn’t dare call you
an ex, not even to make someone jealous.
it’s easy to tip the scales
when your stomach is heavy with secondhand prayer.
what’s that in the blonde’s mouth?
it shimmers like liquid mercury—
only here, none of us has the chance
to rise. they want you down & out
& on the prowl. Gossip, home of the
three-finger pour & finger-me Fridays,
looks like a home if you were born
where gravity forgets to breathe.
I’ll take something I regret for 1,000
we say to the bartender, her hair
short & wavy beneath her snapback.
we give the straight couples the side-eye,
the you-could-have-gone-anywhere-else face.
we fight about what it means
to be inclusive when oppressors crowd
your space. in Gossip, everyone’s smiling
but no one’s happy. we dip our noses in
our beer, we do the bro lean, we do the
head nod. in ten year’s time we don’t want
to still be drinking here but for now, we don’t have
any reason to resist the plunge. in Gossip, we break
our own hearts & pretend to like it. we grow
a million hands & point them every
which way. our own ancestor clocks gone
haywire. the lights turn down low.
we are at once turned off & turned on.
they say that lesbians want to pair up,
that when two women get together
they’re twice as dramatic, three times
as emotional—but I’ve been here since nine
& haven’t seen a single emotion
that didn’t have a gag in its mouth.
in Gossip, there are no undercover cops.
in Gossip, we aren’t afraid for our lives,
but that doesn’t stop us from
calling tomorrow an indecent fantasy.
we hate to consider what shape we take
in someone else’s memory. our exes aren’t
very forgiving & who can blame them?
these bashful desires aren’t so bashful
anymore. it’s terrifying to be a person
when the whole world’s watching.
a regular vomits in the bathroom, another
in the trash can behind the bar, another
in the plant out on the patio. we dig into each other,
hoping to come away with a set of blueprints.
or at the very least, evidence of our disconnect.
what can we say? disappointing ourselves
is our favorite way to delay the responsibility of joy.
two-for-one drinks. swipe & swipe & swipe
& edit bio & upload new pic & curse Tinder &
anyone who has ever used it. what is the use
of earnestness? no one here can say for sure.
the sky outside is black & blue like my knuckles
back when I punched that dude for hitting
on my ex-girlfriend. ask anyone in here & they’ll say
that they want something real but when you ask
what constitutes real, all you get are puffs of smoke.
in the early mist of morning, we crawl from Gossip’s depths.
we blink at all the tiny cars & monstrous clouds.
when the sun comes up, we wait for something
extraordinary to happen. for something to justify our cagey hearts.
one by one, we become our own emergencies.
____________________________________________________________
Mac Crane is a jock, sweatpants enthusiast, and the award-winning author of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, A Sharp Endless Need, and Perverts. They have received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, American Short Fiction, and Vermont Studio Center, and their short work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Sun, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Joyland, and elsewhere. Originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, they currently live in San Diego with their wife and two kids.
by Alice Duggan
I was busy with happiness when I pulled out and hit the other car.
Thought I could let my attention fly high with the spring sun. No.
True, no one was hurt. True, the other car’s driver was kind. And true,
that winter had been grindingly long, and I was in a frenzy of joy—
had been. As I drove home all of my clan followed behind,
disapproving. All of my tribe shrugged and collectively raised
one eyebrow. That they were all dead only served to sharpen
my understanding. Of their opinions. As I drove home.
Ecstasy’s not in the public life of my people,
it would be a private matter. But didn’t they laugh?
And wasn’t there the deepest gladness in that sound . . .
____________________________________________________________
Poems by Alice Duggan have appeared in Sleet Magazine, Water~Stone Review, Tar River Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry East, Nimrod, Sugar House, SAND, Poet Lore, and elsewhere; in a chapbook, A Brittle Thing; and in an anthology, Home (Holy Cow! Press). She’s interested in dailiness, in colloquial speech, the rhythm of voices, in telling stories.
by Kathleen Winter
She was so tired of I She thought she might kill her
but that was too much in sync with society’s violence
so She just sent I to Libya for a while, which, come
to think of it, struck She as potentially more dangerous.
She’s maxed out on I’s gripes and wiles, worse than
Berryman’s plus less original. She can’t read another
syllable about I’s nasty childhood, current ills,
her aches either in the organ meat or in opaque layers
of abstraction. She knows I’s tricks, her jokes;
She finds them juvenile. She wishes I would reinvent
herself, take herself to task, to heart, to a Devon
swannery, to the moon. She used have a tolerance
for I, like the tolerance She’s old teacher would
from time to time note that some ancient bard
(Auden?) had for a rare rhetorical strategy or twist
of syntax. A tolerance, good Dubie would explain.
I must know She’s lost it, that grace or patience
She once sent I’s way. Now I is out of Africa, yet
She claims she won’t see her, hear her, think of her.
I hopes this all eventually blows over;
She and I share too much history to throw it all away.
_________________________________________________________
Kathleen Winter is the author of Transformer, I will not kick my friends, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Agni, Shenandoah, and Cincinnati Review. Her awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award, the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize and the Ralph Johnston Fellowship at University of Texas's Dobie Paisano Ranch.
by Melanie McCabe
The spool between my daughter and me unwinds and rolls
out of reach. Pulling only propels it farther, and so
I wait, my hand clenched on slack thread that now can be
no more than a reminder tied around a finger.
It would seem that I am done with sewing. My old stitches
will either hold or unravel, and I must live with knowing that
I was never much of a seamstress—though I tried.
I loved and I hated the lulling repetition of it.
This needle left in my hand is neither tool nor weapon—
only something sharp that pricks the memory of a motion
that once was effortless; seaming as natural as breathing
with the soft of that silk held close in my arms.
_________________________________________________________
Melanie McCabe's debut novel, Road Longer Than Memory, was released from Oceanview Publishing in June of 2026. She is also the author of four books of poems, most recently All The Signs Were There, which won the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize. Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Press Prize.
by Samantha Strong Murphey
when she gives them the tokens she gives them with a warning
it’s a scam, built to cheat you, a lesson in false hope
when the token is plunked into the slot anyway
when the joystick jolts the claw’s clumsy arm
when it grazes a rubber ducky at the top of the pile
when one ducky touches another ducky
when the spirit moves in the hearts of the duckies
when the spirit moves the bodies of the duckies
when an avalanche of rubber duckies is triggered by something bigger than us
when it’s raining rubber duckies when rubber duckies
are flooding the base of the machine
when one child holds the flap open and another scoops the duckies to her chest
when the prodigal duckies are finally welcomed home
when the duckies start spilling onto the floor
when everyone in the arcade stops to witness the miracle of the duckies
when everyone in the arcade stops to feel the radiant abundance of, I think, joy
when the kids begin to dance in the pile of duckies, to toss them into the air, to laugh
when one child turns to the mother, palms cupping a singular rubber ducky, an offering
when he says see?
do you see?
_________________________________________________________
Samantha Strong Murphey has an MFA from NYU and has been supported by Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center. She teaches writing at UT-Dallas and reads submissions for Texas-based journal Sine Qua Non. Before poetry, Sam was a journalist and has a rich unwritten resume as a full-time caregiver to three human children, a rescue cat, and a rescue dog.
by Jennifer Jackson Berry
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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Antique store find: this aphorism on a trivet.
I buy it for irony. I could hurt him
with a thunder thigh squeeze, a motorboat suffocation.
I’m debating whether to hang this as a makeshift plaque
or place every hot pot on it.
I joke when I sit around the barn, I sit around the barn.
When the barn door opens, so plump.
There is harm done sometimes
taking the pressure off,
like once the body knows crush—like every time I ask he says—
the organs are rearranged—no, you’re not hurting me.
_________________________________________________________
Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of two books, The Feeder and To Know Crush, both available from YesYes Books.
by Tyler Mills
by Catherine Bowman