by Traci Brimhall
Fool that I am, I confuse dust motes for angels
by Jessica Cuello
What if your name is not yours
but the absent father, a stranger
written on your worksheet,
a glyph on your face
carried through the halls
of West Street Elementary
where the teachers gaze
out the great glass doors longingly,
perpetual pale light at either end,
and you carry a giant French Horn,
the school’s horn on loan,
its swirl a beautiful coil of gold
opening like a bell and it calls to you
though it is heavy
bigger than you
and you stop every block to rest
to change hands and deep inside
the case the dark velvet form
holds the instrument
and you are quiet as survival
walking dreamlike
past the crossing guard
on a street you think of
as your journey
because you walk alone
and everything that happens to you
happens on this route
between name and apartment,
the grey one that leans
sideways and gets Condemned
in a pale paper
pasted over a window
and when you live there
you listen through the walls,
your whole body an ear,
and though you quit later
because you have
the wrong embouchure
and don’t practice enough,
the horn glints
behind your shoulder
in silent wait.
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Jessica Cuello’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book, Liar, was selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize. Cuello is the recipient of a 2023 NYSCA Artist Grant and is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review. She teaches French in Central NY.
by Elizabeth O’Connell-Thompson
by Tina Mozelle Braziel
never fruits. Yet each March blossoms burst
along every branch raised over our neighbors’
bed of daffodils and glinting windmill art.
Its pale petals screen dark limbs, a bridal veil
drawing attention to what’s obscured.
Alive and flowering, it’s unlike the windthrows
or widow-makers Nick usually offers us to cut
and haul to our woodpile. Generous to a fault,
he grins as if we’re doing him the favor.
He says it has been pretty and still is. Tells us
they planted it on their wedding day. But now
that Judy says it’s invasive, it has to go.
Married four years to their twenty, what do we know
of when to hew and root out a beginning,
of how to save all that has been cultivated since?
We know oak burns steady. Dogwood catches quick.
Sweetgum is nearly impossible to split. Poplar
puts out too little heat. And flowering pear?
What else can we say? But that we need fire
and wood to feed it. We’ll haul it home,
fill our stove, learn something of how it burns.
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Tina Mozelle Braziel won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for Known by Salt (Anhinga Press), and her book, Glass Cabin (Pulley Press), co-authored by her husband James Braziel, was named Southern Literary Review’s 2024 Poetry Book of the Year. A meditation on hope, on frustration, and on people’s places in the wilder parts of the world, Glass Cabin chronicles the thirteen years the Braziels spent building their home by hand in rural Alabama.
by Geraldine Connolly
I treasured that tiny dormer room.
When I opened the window, my hair blew into the night
and across the yard above the howls of beagles
as the moon splintered, the wind creaked.
Insects spoke to me, birds knew my dreams.
Beneath a wool blanket my flashlight shone,
lantern by which I read through the night, hungry
for stories. There was no broken glass,
no tanks and coffins, no boys going off to war.
I loved being snug in that room, while outside
wild onions grew among prickly fir trees, briar roses.
The rumbling of trucks from the interstate echoed.
Cooing doves, everyday birds made their
daily music on the patio rinsed with rain.
Nothing sparkled yet nothing was dim
there in the tangled paradise, my own.
Not yet a death. Not yet a funeral.
Where daffodils rose up like lions.
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Geraldine Connolly has published Food for the Winter, Province of Fire, Hand of the Wind, and Aileron. She taught at The Writers Center, Chautauqua Institution, and University of Arizona Poetry Center and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland Arts Council, and Breadloaf Writers Conference. Her work appears in many anthologies including Poetry 180: A Poem A Day for High School Students, Keystone Poets, and The Sonoran Desert: A Field Guide.
by Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett tr. Paolina Secco-Suardo Grismondi
To temper an obstinate and wicked
Pain that has been burrowing into me for some time
I try, now and again, to cry out piteously
To the one who, oh miserable me, preys upon my heart.
But, a disciple of desire, my voice
Is scarcely heard, and already it moans and shouts.
What a harsh refrain, and so inimical to my longings,
I am deterred from begging for mercy.
And a thought says to me: fool, do you not see
That you always receive both scorn and injury
If you throw yourself meekly at the feet of someone cruel?
Thus, in silence, I breed a poorly concealed
Affliction in my heart, which is where the seed
Of that cruel love that gives me such despair took root.
Per alleggiar un’ostinata e ria
Doglia che da gran tempo in me si annida,
Talor tento mandar pietose grida
A chi, lassa, il mio cor tiene in balìa!
Ma seguace al desir la voce mia
È fatta appena, e già si lagna, e grida.
Che dura tema, e alle mie brame infida
Dal dimandar pietà ratta mi svia.
E mi dice un pensier: folle non vedi
Quale ognora ti acquisti e scorno e danno
Se umile ad un crudel ti getti ai piedi?
Così tacendo il mal celato affanno
Cresco nel petto, ove locò le sue sedi
Quel fiero amor che mi dà tanto affanno.
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Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator who increasingly finds herself in a nudiustertian mode. Her recent work has appeared in The Stillwater Review, ANMLY, Cagibi, carte blanche, The Laurel Review, Broad River Review, La Piccioletta Barca, The Fourth River, and Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, among others. She is currently working a collection of villanelles as well as a series of translations from Medieval French, Portuguese, and Italian literature. Born and raised in Bergamo, Italy, Paolina Secco-Suardo Grismondi (1746-1801), was hugely successful in the literary world of her time. As a member of literary academies, she published under the name Lesbia Cidonia. Her poetry bears the stamp of her multi-lingual education and her appreciation of classical literature and classical literary forms, and she frequently enlivens pastoral and arcadian tropes with commentary revealing her personal experience and exploration of gendered embodiment.
by Paula Finn
We find a bench.
I sit with him as if I can barely recall
what he did to me in bed that night.
I let it go for now so we can talk.
We’ve always been good at that.
He tries out his loony theory
about the masculinity of red wine,
unaware that since his death
the word has holed itself up
in a cabin in the woods, loaded for bear.
I let it pass. He turns
to asking questions freighted
with the wish my life’s gone well.
I see the old blue kitchen.
One Sunday after breakfast,
my chin cupped in his palm,
his index finger tapping my face
to count aloud the freckles, one-by-one.
A hundred and two, he beams,
as if I’ve won a prize.
____________________________________________________________
Paula Finn is the author of the chapbook, Eating History. Her work has appeared widely in journals. Finn’s poetry is also featured in From the Fire, a piece of musical theater capturing the historic tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the ensuing female immigrant worker organizing. This dramatic oratorio won the Best New Musical Theater award at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. Finn is a graduate of the NYU Poetry Program.
by Autumn Newman
by Gail Goepfert
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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—I paint flowers so they will not die.
Frida Kahlo
We are watchers, Frida—
aching but obedient to light,
resurrected by shocks of color.
Mornings you pluck
bougainvillea or pearly
gardenias, plait them in your hair
above your brow. I shadow
the fire of spring poppies
and the profusion of lilacs
and pink hydrangea.
With the organ pipe cactus,
you spike a sage-green fence
on the borders of La Casa Azul
tuned to the rhythms of sun
and rain—its lavender-white
flowers tint while you sleep.
Our love-eyes like greedy
tongues lick the rare-red
of wild angel trumpets.
We are aficionados. Pregnant
with joy in the garden’s cosmos.
We pursue hues like lovers’
lips, stalk columns of yellow
calla-lilies, praise the allure
of honey-petalled sunflowers
and the lobes of violet irises.
We thrive on iridescence—
our eyes attuned to its blessing.
Watchers. We bend near
in reverence to the bloom—
all pain humbled, stilled
for a time by beauty.
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Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, authored books that include A Mind on Pain (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Tapping Roots (Kelsay Books, 2018), Get Up Said the World (Červená Barva Press, 2020), and Self-Portrait with Thorns (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). This Hard Business of Living, a collaborative chapbook with Patrice Boyer Claeys, was released in 2021 from Seven Kitchens Press, and two photoverse books, Honey from the Sun, 2020, and Earth Cafeteria, 2023, celebrate fruits and vegetables with Claeys’s centos and Goepfert’s photography. Recent work appears in Ran Away with the Star Bassoon and Tiny Moments. She has been a lifelong educator of junior high through college; her quest is to seek beauty.
by Lisa Bellamy
by Dana Henry Martin
The tree is a tree and it has a soul just as the body does. —Rabbi Amnon
The tree is a tree and it has a soul just as
the body does. I touch its bark the way
I used to touch your hips, torso.
I gather scattered leaves and press them
in your favorite book because they are
of the tree the way your hair was of you,
the way your fingernails were of you, even
after they’d been cut off and discarded.
I water the tree and hope the water seeks
roots which in turn open to accept water,
the way we spent a lifetime learning to accept
matters of faith. I imagine the roots
being shaped like fingers that fan and grip
the soil, each one with a distinct curve
so they can be identified by feel
in the endless dark. When twigs fall,
I weave them into wreaths and hang them
along the road where we lived,
and all the way out to the nearest field,
so they might lead you to open space
where you can breathe. When branches fall,
I treat them the way I would your limbs,
lowering them into a hole near those that have
already fallen, shoveling dirt on top
in the tempo of a dirge. When winter comes
and the tree is bare I imagine your body,
its life turned inward. I tell myself the soul
is a soul and it has a body just as the tree does.
____________________________________________________________
Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Stirring, Willow Springs, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press). Their chapbook, No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press), is forthcoming.
by Mary Sauer
The river may run away with us, but we wade into the shallowest water and
watch a boy climb the bluff on the other side:
Let go, a call from the water, and he drops into the deep center of the
mountain stream where we will spend two nights sleeping on sandstone glade
in the rain. We can’t put down roots here—
But you will learn to fly fish for largemouth, bluegill, sunfish, brook trout, and
throw them back into their second chance
And you take between finger and thumb waxy, blue berries of Eastern Red
Cedar growing there next to our tent
Where we lay on your grandmother’s quilts, folded in half and layered one on
top of the other, and cup hot hands in gloved palms while we sleep
After I read to you the article in Taproot about what happened to the
landscape of the Pacific Northwest when we still hunted beavers as pests and
how we’re reintroducing them, hoping dry creek beds will re-saturate if we
make amends—you fall asleep before I reach the second page, but I read all
five aloud
Before pulling on secondhand duck boots and your dad’s rain jacket to return
to the fire where I swap out dry wool socks with wet, so they hang over the
flame
At the morning goodbye before you drive east and I north, there is sun on our
faces and things we hadn’t noticed in the rain: little bluestem, tickseed,
churchmouse threeawn’s plum forks and splits, growing in shallow soil.
____________________________________________________________
Mary Sauer is a writer and mother living in Kansas City, Missouri, and the managing editor of the upcoming Salt Tooth Press. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her work often touches on caregiving, complicated family dynamics, and neurodiversity, and she has published or upcoming work in Glassworks Magazine, MER Literary, Arc Poetry, The Washington Post, and Popula.
by Amritha York
here comes ma’s kitchen spread corner to corner on khameer sliced bread to
scoop us up her breasts brimming with milk and jaggery.
serenading aloud in the kitchen like lata, songs of rose and cloves, and our
spirits leaven with the dough. her marble quavers with spice
beneath this weight of feast. we evaporate around it, mouths unfasten,
begging to be fed, and with a turn of her singing bowl.
pistachios leave whole and fulsome into a bowl of cream. every dollop
whispers love, love. from the pleats of her embroidered sari.
feeding us rice pudding, halvas, mangoes and fresh roti, all the reassurances
we crave ma envelops cold hands with her own
collar into a determined heart where we are lulled by its subdued beat,
dreaming dreams to fatten on. the real flavor, we know, is her.
____________________________________________________________
Amritha York is a Torontonian queer, East Indian who works as an RN, new mother, & gender fluid woman. She writes about her experiences of trauma, child loss, identity, mental health & addiction recovery. She has worked with Canadian Legion and in social action projects through Gardiner Ceramic Museum and YWCA. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Libre Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Fruitslice, Kintsugi, and Only Poems, as Poet of the Week. Find her at IG:@first.breath.release.
by Kristina Andersson Bicher
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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a prison spoon, sharp teeth, a rosary
and chicken feet, a compass rose, magnetic blood
TNT, equanimity, and a diamond file for a finger;
jeweler’s glass, rubber suit, passport stamp
kick in the ass, the right shoes, the North Star
a shiv and an ampule of musk; sulfuric acid,
wooden mask, litmus test, laughing gas, atom bomb
doctor’s note, hammer of Thor, a metaphor,
a stronger rope, a longer hope, a golden tongue
le mot juste, safer roost, divining rod
echolocation and a sleeve of magical staves.
But in order to exit, I first had to step over the body.
____________________________________________________________
Kristina Andersson Bicher is the author of She-Giant in the Land of Here-We-Go-Again (MadHat Press 2020) and Heat, Sob, Lily (forthcoming MadHat Press 2025), as well as the translator of Swedish poet Marie Lundquist’s full-length collection, I walk around gathering up my garden for the night (Bitter Oleander Press 2020). Her poetry appears in such journals as AGNI, Ploughshares, Hayden’s Ferry, Plume, Denver Quarterly, and Narrative. Her translations and nonfiction have appeared in The Atlantic, Brooklyn Rail, Harvard Review, Asymptote, and Writer’s Chronicle, among others.
by Topaz Winters
Some things are obvious: I write my best poetry
when we’re not on speaking terms. The cellulite
on my thighs grows by the day, blubber
both weeping & whale song. I take pills to forget
that my father sounds his happiest when speaking
in Hindi. You ask whether I’ve eaten even
when I’m angry with you. My grandparents’ house
used to be magic, until I was fifteen & it was a house.
The way you grasp my hand smells like
cigarette smoke, patchouli, desire, map, so ordinary
I can forget how extraordinary all this is. I want you
to choose me more than I want you to love me.
Now you know everything I know about my father.
Rilke says go to the limits of your longing.
Janis Joplin says freedom is just another word
for nothin’ left to lose. I say I’m still mad at you,
you know, & you say shut up & fall asleep
on the other end of the phone. This is what it must
be like for people who believe in God: knowing
someone else is there, breathing, in the dark.
____________________________________________________________
Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022) & Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press & lives between New York & Singapore.
by Ruth Hoberman
First stop, CVS: cards for the grandkids. Red hearts
like catalpa leaves—is this what love looks like?
Nothing like the maroon mess inside me, with its
twittering valves and worry. Study its dimensions
(breadth, height, depth, by imagined disaster)
and you’ll see anything can happen—husband, dog,
daughter, grandkids crushed (toppling masonry, coyote,
truck)—though mornings, there they are unscathed.
So why still this slip of muskrat through the mind—
brown furred curve surfacing—quick swimmer, gone
but hunkered near? Even in daylight, I feel the hush
and sigh of its breathing. Holstered, ready:
call me the quick-draw master of panic. And here
in my hands two cards: animals holding hearts.
We love you says the unicorn.
We love you says the golden bear.
____________________________________________________________
Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and personal essays in (most recently) Salamander, Solstice, Ibbetson Street, and Nixes Mate.
by Lisa Zimmerman
After a photograph by Julie Adams
My neighbor says whenever she’s sad she sits down
with a cup of tea and writes a list of fifty things
she loves, you know, like chocolate chip cookies,
the fresh warmth of laundry spilled from the dryer,
the crescent moon held between tree branches.
I’m remembering this with my arms full of wet towels,
the petition to stop fracking in the far pasture
denied, my heart busted by that and other losses
with their many sharp points. I didn’t know I loved so much
of this vanishing world—early spring breeze rattling cattails
along the pond, bright sword of sunlight on mountain snow,
a toddler singing in the shopping cart, the boy who holds the door
open for me, the car that waits, the promised rain that comes—
and you, daughter, years before the fire that took the barn,
before the divorce, before you moved to the city
for work. I see you ambling home on your chestnut gelding,
your long hair and his long tail, swinging
the lasso as if you could capture the setting sun,
to keep a perfect day from disappearing, to hold it
like a flame inside your heart for the dark days to come.
____________________________________________________________
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award winner), The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press), and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Vox Populi, Cultural Daily, and many other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology.
by Michelle Matz
I watch the plane approach the gate,
the travelers disembark
weary & bedraggled
readjusting straps, shifting a bag’s weight
one hand to another.
A woman stops, abruptly
turns to her teenage son,
where is your bag?
I watch as the drama unfolds—
the bag left in the overhead compartment
fault angrily volleyed
though it’s clear it was the boy’s responsibility
to remember. It is a loss easily recovered—
the gate agent already on the phone—
but what broke is broken
still—
his mother’s hands
clenched, her voice
a blade,
while the boy
still learning the shape
of his life
quietly averts his eyes.
____________________________________________________________
Michelle Matz’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in numerous publications, including Mud Season Review, Atlanta Review, The Lascaux Review, Dodging the Rain, and Atticus Review. Her chapbook was a semifinalist in the Ledge Poetry Contest and was published in 2006. Her book, Acoustic Shadow, was recently published by Main Street Rag. Michelle lives in San Francisco where she is a high school dean.
by Kristin Ryan
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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She is bruised by sunlight.
Uncertain hands
move towards
a tea cup full of grapes.
She remembers it being easier this way.
Bowls are simply too much:
they can trick you into filling them—
what if you can’t stop—
Listen: sometimes a girl can’t eat,
becomes afraid of kitchens and knives.
The way the air presses skin, through
blood into bone, into the marrow.
No, it’s better to stay here
in the living room where blues and yellows weep
from the starry nights, the sunflowers,
the wheat fields on the walls. She wonders if
this room will become her wheat field—
if his face will become her gun.
____________________________________________________________
Kristin Ryan is a poet and essayist working towards healing, and full sleeves of tattoos. She is a recipient of the 2017 Nancy D. Hargrove Editor's Prize in Poetry, and her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Her poems and essays have been featured in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Jabberwock Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Moonchild Magazine, Serotonin Lit, and SWWIM Every Day among others. She holds an MFA from Ashland University.
by Lesley Lambton