by Ellen June Wright



after Alice Coltrane’s harp solo 1970



Under the waterfall
music’s cataract streams down

hands a flurry of grace
fingers cast spells

deftly move among strings
pull sound out—head tilted

watch the winged notes lift and fly
coaxes each reverberation

she could be in a wood
summoning angels to dance

or Alice Tully Hall
showing the white folks

she can fix jazz like gumbo
like shellfish after the shucking

on an instrument so old pharaohs heard it
and David played one too

his music medicine for a king
John was dead three years

I wish he could listen the way I do
bathe in his wife's onslaught once more

but this is my history month
And while I'm on this grave’s side

every month will be Black history
I’ve got nothing else to do

I'm coming with a shovel
I'm coming with a spade

to unearth what's long buried
I might find diamonds, I might hit oil

______________________________________________________________________

Ellen June Wright consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work has been featured by Verse Daily, Rappahannock Review, The Good Life Review, Passengers Journal, Scoundrel Times, Banyan Review, and others. She’s a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and a 2021 and 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee.

by Alison Jennings


It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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The miniature pink rose is brightly blooming now,

but its spent flowers bow: she pinches these by hand.

This “tool” is banned by Sunset Gardening, which tells us how

to cut with clippers (a sacred cow), yet Alison can’t stand

to, when, you see, it’s grand to feel the plant allow

such gentle nips—anyhow, fingers crave a verdant land.

______________________________________________________________________

Alison Jennings is a Seattle-based poet who worked as a journalist, accountant, and teacher before returning to poetry. She’s had over 100 poems published, including a mini-chapbook, in numerous places, such as Amethyst Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meat for Tea, Mslexia, Poetic Sun, Red Door, Society of Classical Poets, Sonic Boom, Stone Poetry, and The Raw Art Review. She has also won 3rd Place/Honorable Mention in several contests. See airandfirepoet/home.

by Lindsay Rockwell


Each loss fits inside the others.
Each loss folds itself

neatly inside, then quietly
clears its throat of shame.

Holds its eyes up toward day
as my eyelashes dust the floor

again. Again, I count my losses.
Six. Seven. Eight. Sniff

their soft bodies. Watch
their hands reach toward

the tiny gate my pain opens.
My tiny pain gate opens

and each loss scuffles through
hobbling on all fours. Small

mammal. Each with chin up
in hopes to lick a drop of rain.


———————————————————————————————————————

Lindsay Rockwell is poet-in-residence for the Episcopal Church of Connecticut and hosts their Poetry and Social Justice Dialogue series. She's recently published, or forthcoming in Calyx, EcoTheo Review, Gargoyle, Radar, and The Dewdrop, among others. Her first collection, Ghost Fires, was published by Main Street Rag in April 2023. She’s received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and Edith Wharton/The Mount residency. Lindsay is also an oncologist.

by Dana Raja Wahab

Golden Shovel after Natalie Diaz


I.

It’s always a love poem with cookies, as if
I am, in fact, my mother’s daughter, although I
fought not to be. I thought love should
be free of tradition, should not come
from service—but a rare rib eye steak set upon
a bed of spinach and those sweet potatoes, your
favorite—they do the trick. Your cupped hands wander into my yellow-lit house
looking to be filled with butter and chipotle, and the lonely
saltshaker spilling with kindness, mixing it in
with blood and love and blood and love; the
recipe always calls for blood and love, like a mid-century West-
ern soap opera filmed on a small set in Texas,
where prickly pears peak in through the stone windows of the desert.


II.

Here I am again, writing about food! So let’s eat
fish this week, or shrimp—anything but steaks. My
body is craving lemon and salt and capers. Mediterranean meals
laid on brown ceramic plates with black olives beside us and a strawberry Jarritos between us; at
least it’s got real sugar, though I’ve never cared much for sugar at all. The
real pleasure lies in sampling the savory: tomatoes not yet red,
quartered and salted and soaked in olive oil, that which sits at the head of our table
and the center of our kitchen hearts; a dark bottle of
remembering, my mother standing there, but now you, sprinkling on your
plate a dash of black pepper, onto a fish from a foreign, warmer sea—the new home of your heart.

______________________________________________________________________

Dana Raja Wahab is a writer, illustrator, and educator from Miami. She worked for seven years as a teaching artist at The Cushman School and now teaches in O, Miami's Sunroom program, in addition to managing and editing O, Miami book projects. Dana holds an M.A. in Children's Literature and Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London.




by Marcela Sulak

Shopping on Friday F tells his wife
about the animals. There is a mouse
that’s made a nest in the sea chest
where he keeps the paper napkins
and rum. And a rat is chewing the feet
of the furniture. He forgets its name.
It is a rat or a mouse, he feels very
certain, and there is a roach in the
bathroom. Well, it isn’t in the bathroom,
it is at the foot of his wardrobe, but
his wardrobe is near the bathroom.
If he sees it again he will spray. There
are gecko stars upon the screen but
those are just their feet, not really
stars, and guinea pigs in the garden,
but we knew that before. On Sunday
F enters the bathroom, poison bottle
in hand. But the only thing in the bathroom
is his wife, who looks up from the mirror.
On her fingertip is a long thin whisker,
or possibly a hair.

______________________________________________________________________

Marcela Sulak has authored four poetry collections, including the National Jewish Book Awards Finalist City of Skypapers (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and the memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). She's co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres (Rose Metal Press, 2016) and translated four poetry collections from Czech, French, and Hebrew. Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.

by Amanda Moore


Pretend it was a different adventure:
we traveled in our Chrysler down
8 Mile Road as if in a dinghy
gliding from the bright layer cake of yacht
toward an undiscovered port. Pretend
we were prepared for the awkwardness
of being foreign, of seeking flimsy familiarity
and the perfect snapshot to send home.
We pictured white sheets and hand-holding,
new scenery and our faces changed.

But really it was like the tropics in July: sweaty
and panting, private and primal.
Paradise to one traveler is often hell for another,
so I won’t bore you with the hours passed
watching the ocean swell and retreat,
the tall grasses bend and part in the wind
and some crazy, hooting monkey pulling itself up and down
impossibly straight tree trunks.
When we left at last we had a souvenir,
a golden idol shaped by heat
and meant to be worshipped.  





"Labor as an Exotic Vacation" from Requeening by Amanada Moore. COPYRIGHT YEAR ©2021 by Amanda Moore. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

______________________________________________________________________

Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong and was published by Ecco in 2021. It was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and featured in Oprah's O Magazine Favorite Things issue. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, ZZYZVA, Catapult, Ploughshares, and LitHub. A high school teacher who also leads poetry workshops and freelance edits and teaches, Amanda lives near the beach in San Francisco, California with her husband and daughter. More at amandapmoore.com.

by Ann Weil


At least I think it’s Banksy—
he’s graffiti-ing our corner booth

with little girls reaching for red heart balloons.
Our server gives him the stink-eye,

but Hillary’s stomach growls, distracting us all.
Hil orders a tempeh Reuben and a side

of sweet potato fries. Banksy’s not hungry,
but when the food comes, he turns

puppy-dog eyes on Hillary
and she shares her spuds. I offer him

a pull on my matcha-mango smoothie,
but the straw is soggy. Such is life.

Banksy is surprised that Hil
has taken up Bill’s vegan lifestyle—

apparently, she heard the grass
is always greener on the other side

of the fence, and in this case,
she reports, it actually is.

Hillary asks Banksy what it’s like
to be wildly famous without being known.

Banksy whispers in her ear,
mentioning her time as First Lady.

I order a slice of carrot cake
topped with cashew crème. Three forks.

Hillary wipes walnut dust from Banksy’s chin.
On the way out, Banksy paints a big blue

Hillary 2028 on the restaurant’s door.

______________________________________________________________________


Ann Weil writes at her home on the corner of Stratford and Avon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat at Snipe’s Point Sandbar off Key West, Florida. Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears in Pedestal Magazine, DMQ Review, New World Writing Quarterly, The Shore, 3Elements Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman, was released in April 2023 from Yellow Arrow Publishing.

by Mukethe Kawinzi


Italian thistle has tithed most
to my cuttings these last days.

In later Junes, rough touch
recalled, I’ll spoor less bare.

I ask Charles Darwin: come
eye the goats with me, and how
they eat spined things.

Charles Darwin picks up a rock. He tells me the present is the key to the past.

I want Charles Darwin to know I know something. I want Charles Darwin to
remember me. I speak to him of beetles that bore earth. I tell Charles Darwin
that we have rollers here. I say to him: Charlie, I’ve watched them roll dung
face down/ass up. Do not question me for using 2 Live Crew as a way to
Charles Darwin’s heart. I have learned, in life: there is no slicker way to charm
whitefolk than to let them into blackness. Charles Darwin finishes the lyric.
Charles Darwin and I squat into the royalled ripgut, and count morning
spiderwebs.

______________________________________________________________________

Mukethe Kawinzi is a shepherd who has appeared in Obsidian, Puerto del Sol, and HOBART. She is the author of saanens, nubians, one lamancha (Winner, 2022 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest) and rut (2022 Ghost City Press Summer Series). She herds goats on the open range in coastal California.

by Lisa Rosinsky


On the patio of the bar, with my notebook / and a glass of cabernet and a
thick slice of chocolate cake, it was all soft summer twilight and table to
myself / until two guys said you don’t mind if we join you do you / and since I
small-town knew the redhead, as in / met him at a party that one time, I said
okay / even though I was trying to write

The redhead pulled my cake across the table, you can’t finish all of this can
you
, skinny thing like you? and I did want it / but he ate it without waiting for
an answer while his friend talked about their job putting up tents, pounding in
stakes and then pulling them out again, and his eyes / were the color of a tidal
pool, and I sipped my wine wishing you’d given me a ring already / so they
would have left me alone with my cake and my solitude

Wedding tents mostly, he said, you wouldn’t believe how they can transform
them with curtains and whatnot
/ it turns out nicer than a church, and they
both nodded, yes nicer than a church, and the blue-eyed one / who hadn’t
eaten my cake / showed me where on his arm the muscles tensed up after a
day of sledgehammering, and I laughed / but suddenly saw how in another
life, one without you in it, I might have wanted / to touch those arms, which
made everything go blurred and flimsy

Sometimes I do bounce houses too, he said, but they’re dangerous, did you hear
about the one that blew away
, and I closed my notebook / and said what blew
away


The bounce house the redhead said, there were two kids in it / and a big gust of wind blew it fifty feet up into the sky, pulled the stakes right out of the ground

With the kids inside? I said, listening now, yeah with the kids inside he said, a
boy and a girl, they tumbled around at fifty feet up
/ and made it back down safe
/ only the boy had a broken arm but otherwise they were fine

And we sat there in silence picturing that, the three of us, with the cake
crumbs / and the wineglass and the unfinished / poem I’d been working on,
and within me the waiting seed of the son I’d have one day with you / though
I didn’t know that yet, that night, sitting there, it was just me and the
strangers and I ached / for those children carried by the wind, tumbling in a
house made of rubber and air.

______________________________________________________________________

Lisa Rosinsky has been a finalist for the Slapering Hol Chapbook Prize, Fugue Poetry Contest, and Morton Marr Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Her poems appear in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. In 2016, she won the Writer-in-Residence fellowship at the Boston Public Library, where she completed her debut novel, Inevitable and Only, named one of Barnes & Noble’s “Most Anticipated Indie Novels of 2017.”


by Courtney Bambrick


I.

The girls sleepy, warm, milk-fed—
patient under the avuncular gaze of the artist. You say,

I love the way he works with hair and clothing.
You nose up to the canvas, admire craft.

My eyes are on the floor, the shoes
some women squeak through the hall.


II.

Renoir had young children in his 50s
and he painted them—

You could do that
is all I can think in this room.

Let me bear you your Jean and Claude
and Gabrielle. Let me sit for you with a baby

at my breast. Let your gaze settle, then,
on what could be here: in my arm, my belly.

Let the whole of the universe open to you
in the rabbit breath of a sleeping baby.


III.

Large Bather. Hours since my shower, but
you sniff behind my ear and say

how great my hair smells. And,
Some of these nudes look like you.

______________________________________________________________________

Courtney Bambrick serves as poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories. Her poetry is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, and has appeared in New York Quarterly, Beyond Words, Invisible City, The Fanzine, Philadelphia Poets, Apiary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Mad Poets Review, and Certain Circuits. Chapbooks have been semi-finalists and finalists in contests for Iron Horse and Pavement Saw. She teaches writing at Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus in Philadelphia.


by Jenny Molberg

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

______________________________________________________________________


I go to the museum and sit before Robert Motherwell’s
Elegy to the Spanish Republic with three black holes in my head.
One for the way I hated the poet when he called me stupid.
Another black hole because I felt like a child, carsick
and chicken. I don’t care what day it is, he said on my birthday.
Was he an aperture, opening inside me?
Or was he a bullet I must dodge for the rest of my life.
At the Cash America Pawn, I waited in line, the ring box
white as ivory, a severed tusk singeing a hole through my hand.

One more black hole, there, in the middle. The question
I asked in my head for a year: How can he think
he owns other people? Him, in the dark, calling my body
his. My breasts, my hair, my hips. I shout leave
into Motherwell’s circles. I know I can’t help it, the ring
in its strange case, cold as a head with no body.

______________________________________________________________________

Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, VCCA, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.

by Caroline Earleywine


I now pronounce you your own. Give you back
your names, put down those titles: Mother, Father,

Wife, Husband.
I pronounce you whole. Better
apart, but still better for once having found each

other. I pronounce you human. Both the stove
and the hand that touches it, if only to learn

what burns. I pronounce your every scar
well earned, roads on a worn map you used

to find your way home. I pronounce you home
and road. Minute and hour hand, together

briefly, moving forward. I pronounce you
the golden leaf and its inevitable

fall. I pronounce you deserving of space
to change, the hydrangea moved

from its pot into earth, roots stretched out
like an unclenched fist. I pronounce you worthy

of looking back with gentle eyes. Both the one
who held me in the backseat, my bleeding

knee in your lap, and the steady hand that drove
us to the hospital. I pronounce you both free

and forever bound, your four children stitched
between you like the binding of a book sewed

together by hand. I pronounce you the pages
and the cover that encases them.

Both the story I know
and the one you wrote without me.

______________________________________________________________________


Caroline Earleywine is a poet and educator who taught high school English in Central Arkansas for ten years. She earned her MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, and Sibling Rivalry Press published her chapbook, Lesbian Fashion Struggles, in 2020. She is a Jack McCarthy Book Prize winner and her debut full-length collection, I Now Pronounce You, will be out with Write Bloody Publishing in April 2024. She lives in Little Rock with her wife and two dogs. You can keep up with her work at carolineearleywine.com.


by Shiyang Su


To night
I do not question
its warm reticence
against a flint
or its privation
a river
without unfoldings
dark and cool, without
scoopings of the moon
a copious body
coming down
like an empire
on which
I fold a paper boat
carry it over
the coppery lines
of the black earth
and believe in
a certain narrative
by a certain other
for whom
I keep the tributary
of language: digressive,
small-scale, defiant
as a fish
against the keel
splashing
with an armor
worn old

______________________________________________________________________

Shiyang Su is a Chinese poet. These poems are excerpts from her in-progress collection concerning the struggle, agony, and loss in recent years, intensified by COVID and frequent social and political upheavals. Her other poems can be found or are forthcoming in San Pedro River Review, Blue Marble Review, Unbroken, Rattle, Passages North, and others. She was nominated for Best New Poets.

by Subhaga Crystal Bacon


You were not conceived, despite the spent seed,
the rich bed of blood. You did not laden my life
with bittersweet fruit: memorable sayings,
illness, brilliance, a body made of mine, either
like or unlike. Your gender is neutral, or,
it is your own, your selfness. You love who
and what you love with fire and ice. You are
a pearl of the world, gem of grit and spit,
that gives you a shell and a tongue both salty
and sweet. We speak once a day, week,
month, year, decade. I did you right
and wrong from my own pocket of wounds and stars.

Fleet as the scent of mock orange on the wind,
you are a blossom of loss, phantom limb.

______________________________________________________________________

Subhaga Crystal Bacon (she/they) is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize (April 2023) and Transitory, recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry (November 2023, BOA Editions).


by Virginia Chase Sutton


It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

______________________________________________________________________

It is always twilight when Gramma runs
a tepid bath for my sister and me, four inches
of amber water from the well. Through the window

she watches her luminous garden grow dim, past
the row of outhouses gone to honeysuckle, cabbage roses,
crinkly petunias, vines holding late afternoon

to the ground. In summer nightgowns, carrying
a cracked ceramic chamber-pot between us, we climb
to the one-bedroom apartment where our parents lived

their first married year. Mother drank gin and bourbon
from bottles hidden under the bed and their thick voices
vibrated down the varnished stairs, creased the crimson

rug in Gramma’s front room. When we all visit, they
do not sleep together the way they once did. I pull back
tight covers on the bed in the room beneath gabled windows,

rumpling sheets Gramma spent the morning ironing,
slide into the bed’s furrow. My sister clambers up
the four-poster where Great-grandfather Carter died,

arguing our early bedtime. I do not mind smoky light
pooling under window-shades. Across the highway
hundreds of birds line branches of an old oak, their

voices loud inside this space. My sister is asleep in the front
room. I wait for my parents’ footsteps, foggy silence.
Then a smooth scoop in my bed when my father pulls

soft blankets to his shoulders, rolls into me. Then he sleeps.
Birds settle the night. My father’s breath drones. The birds
wake early. At last, dawn, I fantasize their twittering songs.

______________________________________________________________________

Virginia Chase Sutton, along with Airea Johnson, Liz Robbins, and Lauren Tivey, is the co-author of Fire Carousel, an enhanced chapbook (Main Street Rag, 2023) about varying aspects of mental illness. Poems have recently appeared in Glass: Poets Resist, Mom Egg Review, Drunk Monkeys, Stained: An Anthology, and many other publications. Nine times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Sutton has additionally published three full-length poetry books and a chapbook. Sutton lives in Tempe, Arizona.

by Rebekah Wolman


A mother and a child, I think, then reconsider.
It's a matter of perspective, of the angle and the distance,
whether one seems taller than the other, whether
one seems to take the lead as they tiptoe into
all that settles as the tide recedes.
It's where the light is coming from that elongates
their reflection. It's the direction and strength of the wind
that determines whether their mirror image
wobbles or stands still. There's little at this distance to differentiate them.

The slightest alteration yields regret,
a feeling that something should have happened differently.
I visit with my mother, who used to be
the taller one. Now time is what differentiates
who's the child from who's the mother. Each morning of my visit,
I sweep up Rose of Sharon blossoms, fallen furled
as if ready to begin again at their beginning.

As if ready to begin again at my beginning
I sweep up Rose of Sharon blossoms, fallen furled,
each morning of my visit—or as if she's the child and I'm the mother,
the taller one now. Time is what differentiates
this visit with my mother from what used to be,
a feeling that something could have happened differently.

Regret yields to the slightest alteration,
wobbles, then stands still. There's little at this distance to differentiate us
or determine whether our mirror image
is a true reflection. It's the direction and strength of the wind,
it's where the light is coming from, that elongates
all that settles as the tide recedes.
Who seems to take the lead as we tiptoe into
weather? One seems taller than the other, whether
it's a matter of perspective, of the angle or the distance.
A child and a mother, I think, then reconsider.

______________________________________________________________________

Rebekah Wolman is an erstwhile middle-school principal based in San Francisco, California, on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people. Her poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Sixfold, Limp Wrist, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Orotone, The Hopper, Atticus Review, and Cultural Daily, where she is a 2021 winner of the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. She is the 2022 winner of the Small Orange Emerging Woman Poet Honor.

by Joan Kwon Glass

The billboard just before exit 21 displays a photo
of Rhonda, a middle-aged woman before weight loss surgery.
It promises that in one mile, we will meet a lighter version of her.
A church billboard asks if we have suffered enough.
I’ve started listening to audiobooks to distract myself
from the slow, painful, inching homeward. Today a narrator
explains the tendency of ancient peoples to form cultures
around rejection. Refusing the fishing canoe or superior
farming tool of a neighboring tribe–lineage determined
more by what is renounced than what is shared.
I am writing this poem about traffic instead of the love
poem my partner longs for, and I try not to wonder
what this says about me as a person. The truck behind me
edges closer, and I resist the urge to slam on my brakes.
At least once a week in my town, in spite of signs
warning them against driving beneath it, a four-wheeler
gets stuck under the overpass and has to be pried out,
and today a man in Florida was arrested for trying to roll
across the Atlantic in a giant hamster wheel.
Sometimes I wonder about evolution and whether
a species can regress. What would our ancestors think
of us in these terrible, metal machines, together
on this road every day, getting nowhere?
Something always holds us up—if it’s not
the weather, it’s an accident, and this highway
always seems to need repairs.
I turn my audiobook off and listen
to the sound of my car wheels spinning
against the broken road. A man in the Toyota
next to me clutches his steering wheel.
Staring ahead, he leans in, hard.
We do our best to adapt. I have been patient,
waiting for the lighter version of Rhonda to appear.
I want her to know I’m rooting for her.

______________________________________________________________________

Joan Kwon Glass is the Korean American author of Night Swim, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022) & two chapbooks. She serves as Poet Laureate for Milford, CT; editor-in-chief for Harbor Review; and as a writing instructor for several writing centers. Joan’s poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, Poetry Northwest, Cherry Tree Lit, Ninth Letter, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Texas Review and elsewhere. She lives in coastal Connecticut with her family.