by Judith Hoyer
Believe me when I tell you that I sat next to Julia Child in 2001.
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
by Marion Wrenn
One way to listen to the city
is to choose one sound above the rest;
let the ear engineer a soundscape; let it
glide across the crush of tender missions
at treacherous intersections, shun interlocked
brakes, fire smashed horns
from transplanted drivers; plunge against
the flow and attend the absence
of the Muezzin’s call in the gloaming.
Avenues drop rose-colored
light. I’ve been listening for the distant crow
of a rooster someone’s keeping close
whose cry erases the tumult–the marriage
of soil in a raised box for root vegetables
and the carrot of birdcall above the hum.
Every prayer is a gentle wish for a time
machine; every wish a feathered freefall
that robs the thanks from my lips;
listen for the chicken someone
can’t keep secret and be glad.
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Marion Wrenn is the author of Gladiola Girls (Cooper Dillon Press). Recent poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, River Heron Review, and The Georgia Review. She co-edits the literary journal Painted Bride Quarterly, where she also co-hosts the literary podcast "The Slush Pile." She is the Executive Director of Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi.
by Rachel Becker
The doctor says the hearing
loss is bilateral, mild
to moderate, premature
given my age. During the test,
a robotic voice intones
You can say firetruck,
so I say firetruck
and you can say nosebleed,
and I say nosebleed.
Why is every crisis
compounded? And what if
I can’t say? Sometimes,
I hear death instead
of best. Moon instead
of noon. The air chooses
which sounds to swallow
into its vanishing mouth,
which ones to leave fallow.
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Rachel Becker’s poetry recently appears or is forthcoming in journals including North American Review, Post Road, MER, SoFloPoJo, Rust & Moth, Wild Roof, Crab Orchard Review, and RHINO. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is a poetry editor for Porcupine Literary: a journal for and by teachers. She lives in Boston.
by Veronica Kornberg
Either end of the same street.
Same neglect, same shaming.
Same keepsake maple leaves
pressed between pages
of World Book Encyclopedia.
We had the creek and bust-out laughter.
Caged beagles that licked us
through chain-link. And shadows coiled
in the verges. Delight and fear
twinned in our hearts.
At night, we walked each other
halfway home, toed the asphalt's
center line. Always, moths plastered
the milky streetlamps. Always a flicker of bats.
I'd walk you halfway home, then
all the way. After that, you'd walk me back,
the shifting distance too fierce
for either one of us
to brave alone. Eventually,
on a count of three
we broke and ran. I always paused
to turn, am turning still, to see
the empty cone of lamplight
where once you stood, a long-limbed girl,
barefoot and alone.
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Recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry, Veronica Kornberg's work appears in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Calyx, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Plume. Veronica is a habitat gardener on California's Central Coast and a Peer Reviewer for Whale Road Review. Her debut collection will be published by Wandering Aengus Press in early April of 2026.
by Sarah Ann Winn
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day‘s archives!
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Spoilers: it can be done. Given paper
large enough, thin enough. I have always been
so creased and compressed I’d explode inside
a compressor. Too heavy to lift and yes, some
have tried or joked about it. The first
seven turns are easy. Everyone has
a set number of tools and limited
energy and then we’re done. We can’t
take any more halving, we can’t keep
coming back to the same place pressed
together. We are all imperfect
logic, math-matched,
given the choice,
the moon or that time
I thought I would never be able
to fold again,
I would take the distance
I have
and be grateful
to stand under.
Sistered to the sky.
Darkness is always ready
to do the final calculations,
to keep close.
If most answer forty five
I return at forty six,
still counting.
At forty seven, nobody
asks any more
where will we go
from here?
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Sarah Ann Winn’s first book, Alma Almanac, won the Barrow Street Book Prize. She is the author of five chapbooks, most recently, Ever After the End Matter. Her writing has appeared in Five Points, Massachusetts Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Sarah has led workshops at the Writer's Center, Loft Literary Center and the Poetry Foundation. She's also the founder of Poet Camp, a creative community where she leads online classes, jumpstarts and cozy writing retreats. Find her at poetcamp.com.
by Doritt Carroll
the deacon at church looked like Mister Rogers if
Mister Rogers had a really bad day same
beaky nose, gaunt cheeks, the swoop
of hair but instead of the one-sided smile the lips
were pressed together like the wringer
on an old-fashioned washing machine or maybe
there were two different Mister Rogers and finally
the bad-tempered guy got loose
I used to think that—that I had two mothers
and every night they fought and the one who won
locked the other one in the closet because how else
could you explain that on Tuesday we were painting
with watercolors making fish faces trying to suck
our milkshakes up our straws but by Wednesday she was ripping
the pages out of my father’s books and snapping the necks
of his cigars screaming that my neck was
next I told my father my idea about the two
mothers and my father told me to cut the crap
because only a childhood schizophrenic would split
their thoughts that way and since I clearly wasn’t
a schiz I needed to stop reading his medical journals
and making up bullshit diagnoses for attention I never
thought my father was two people he was
always just like that
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Doritt Carroll is the winner of the 2023 Stephen Meats Poetry Prize and the Laura Lee Washburn chapbook prize. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
by Shlagha Borah
walks out of the house, walks into a ditch,
disappears. inside, he grows into my father.
he is muddy. dirt crawls on his body.
he wakes up at dawn and draws water from the well,
shivers,
sits on his father’s bicycle, delivering newspapers through the january fog.
boils two eggs on an open fire, slices them with a thread.
smoke covers the boy’s trachea.
the boy feeds his five siblings.
he is sent to the boy scout camp.
learns how to be a wife.
the boy’s mother leaves for the city.
the boy paints sets for onkiya naat. becomes the narrator. plays a woman.
sits with his dying aunt through the entire night.
terrified of touch, he lets his aunt hold his hand.
he cycles through the graveyard at midnight.
wakes up the only doctor in three villages.
the boy’s aunt does not make it through the night.
the boy doesn’t believe in worship
the boy is belted
the boy stops growing
the boy walks out of the ditch.
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Shlagha Borah (she/her) is from Assam, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and is an Assistant Editor at The Offing. She’s a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist. Her work has been supported by Tin House, Brooklyn Poets, and VCCA, among others. See shlaghaborah.com.
by Jodi Balas
At the beach and nearly 40 I lay, stretched out, eyes bleached
from the overcast sky. The kind of biting light that doesn’t
know when to give—coloring the mood with its tin breath.
As a child, I would cloud gaze, viewing all possibilities from
above: my future home, the boat I would never own,
a family anchored in a cloak of purity. My body—a revolver
launching cartwheels off diving boards, the blasé hand of
youth flipping the bird to my future self with joints firmly intact.
But today the sky exudes a somber glow, as if saying, I am tired.
Clouds pull like a swath of torn linens; and although I lather
my aging skin with the highest level of SPF, it merely glints
like an apparition. I turn on my stomach and sink into a bed
of tight sand, heartbeat caught in the tunnel of my throat—
the closest thing to a landing strip I have.
____________________________________________________________
Jodi Balas is a neurodivergent poet based out of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Her poetry has been featured in The Shore, December Magazine, Chestnut Review, McNeese Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “His mouth, mine” was selected as a finalist for the 2023 River Heron Review Poetry Prize and her poem “Bone Density” was chosen by Danusha Lameris as the winning poem for the 2023 Comstock Review Poetry Prize.
Gwenyth Wheat
so bright you don’t get to return it.
Hold the abundance gently—
the news that she’s entered recovery,
or the conversation about young grief,
or the feeling of his cry balanced
right there, as if on the waterline,
waiting. And he is too, the man
wondering how to go about days
like normal. He’s outside
in his golden California garden,
tending to plums, ferns, and rose.
But the most beautiful thing—
the lemon tree, he salvaged
from trash and replanted,
right there by the fence,
now bears endless yellow.
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Gwenyth Wheat (she/her), nominee for Best New Poets 2024, is currently earning her MFA and MA at McNeese State University. Her work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in Poetry and has appeared in Great Lakes Review, The Poet’s Touchstone, Voicemail Poems, ZAUM, and elsewhere. She is a writing instructor and the Poetry Editor for The McNeese Review.
by Sharon Tracey
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
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—Jennifer Bartlett (1991-92); oil on canvas
How do you build a painting with only
sixty minutes to live
between five and six in the evening
on a seven square-foot grid—
she’s dug a fishpond in a courtyard
fissured it in time
stocked it with cold-blooded koi
dressed in calico and banana yellow
some seem dredged in flour as if
they might be battered. They dart
and swim among the water lilies
then tip their scales and slip
under as if cold war spies.
Leaves past their prime have fallen
and float upon the placid surface
like Matisse cutouts that have died.
So much happens in a single hour
and so little—you stare
at the appearance of depth
and think of the fish, the ticking clock,
where the weeping light goes
and realize that you could just walk away
just take something and walk—
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Sharon Tracey is the author of three poetry collections—Land Marks (Shanti Arts 2022), Chroma: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Shanti Arts 2020), and What I Remember Most is Everything (All Caps Publishing 2017). Her poems have been published in Crab Creek Review, Terrain, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others. See sharontracey.com.
by Louise Robertson