by KT Herr
I thought I had exhausted all my metaphors: various prey; coins
by Meg Freer
Late at night we threw ice off the roof of Spokane’s historic Ridpath Hotel
where Elvis had once booked three floors for his drunken entourage
ordered windows painted black, loaded a room with his bodyguards’ guns
sent for lobster tails after midnight, sent back eggs to be cooked hard as rocks
where we rode the high-speed elevator, raced to ice machines on each floor—
giddy on adrenaline from several days of music festival performances
and evenings of practice on the white baby grand at the piano store—
where we pressed the Penthouse button for the intriguing, unlucky 13th level.
When the door slid open, we spied on the high rollers dancing in the club
found our way in the dark to the open-air roof, leaned over the railing
whooped and hollered when our ice missiles hit a car or bus
hoped people down below would wonder why there was hail in May
while our mothers in the hotel bar with drinks on the rocks
tried for an hour to forget they were responsible for us.
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Meg Freer lives in Ontario, where she is a writer, editor, and piano teacher. Her work has appeared in many journals, and she has published three poetry chapbooks. She is co-poetry editor for The Sunlight Press and holds two music degrees and a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing. Find her published work on her Facebook page, or her Substack blog at megfreer.substack.com.
by Sanjana Nair
In the praying mantis hidden under the pansy-faced blooms of the autumn
sage, a part of me. On the black stone of the kitchen counter, remnants of my
DNA. In the masala chicken for dinner, the oil of my skin, the oil of the onion,
the sweat of the mustard seeds. In the sky, the mimicking of birds in flight, we
trail fumes from planes in which I dreamed. In the ocean, eel remnants of
what was not consumed, waiting for the floating omnivores of the world.
In my head, a lightning flash brighting my childhood bedroom the day we
burned my mother. Of the head: small star, the light of memories burning
dendrite and neuron to keep alive what has already gone, all the dead.
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A tenured professor at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Sanjana Nair’s poetry has appeared in various journals ranging from Spoon River Poetry Review to Fence Magazine. Deeply invested in collaboration, her work has been performed at Tribeca’s Flea Theater and featured on National Public Radio’s Soundcheck. She has performed at Barnes & Noble in NYC’s Union Square to the Rubin Museum. She resides in Virginia with her family.
by Lizzy Beck
by Tara Labovich
i am looking for answers. i think this is what i have always been looking for.
a little story, or punctuation, to end the impossible sentence.
it was near a year ago now, i sat with my dearest friend in mismatched chairs.
in the nook of those wide mountains, i said, this is the best carrot i have ever eaten.
it was winter, and they had dressed the little stalks like royalty. oil. salt. a little honey for glaze.
that morning, a stranger had held my hand as we walked the steep incline.
she did not let go. even when sweat beaded between us.
it was the first time i had been touched like that in two months.
it is so simple what reminds us of loving again.
no—what wakes the love in us again. like love is a thing that can sleep.
like love can be stirred. with oil. salt. a little honey for glaze.
i told my friend of the carrots, and the long walk through high snow, and the stranger.
they told me, carrots taste the best after a hard frost.
it’s the cold that shocks starch into sugar. it’s a jolt that turns the everyday into dessert.
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Tara Labovich (they/them) is a lecturer of English and Creative Writing at Iowa State University. Their multi-genre creative work explores questions of queerness, survivorship, and multicultural upbringing. Their writing is nominated for Best of the Net, and can be found in journals such as Salt Hill and the Citron Review.
by Deborah Hauser
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Dear Sir/Dear Parental Unit/No/Dear Sperm Donor/No/Dear
Male Relative/Stop/Dear old Dad/how many Our Fathers must
I say to make you appear/like Beetlejuice/why summon evil
spirits/how to apportion blame/to an empty
chair/MIA/absentee parent/you were tricked/ trapped/
torn/she turned you/in/to the Draft Board/she was daft/
I became deft/at avoiding her blows/I never learned/how/
to apply a tourniquet properly/the Girl Scouts don’t award
patches/for the survival skills I needed/she needled/ me/
endlessly/I wrote postcards in my head/having a splendid
time/not/wish you were here/to stop the beatings/brace
yourself/for stormy weather/there’s a cold front moving in/
to the guest room/you were my imaginary friend/perhaps
you wrote me too/invisible ink letters/never delivered/coded
messages/intercepted/by enemy hands/Hansel & Gretel/
my grim role models/my plastic red raincoat/she sent me
out/for milk and bread/I took the long way/home/longed
to be/lost/if I came back too late she locked me out/
always on the lookout/for something/to cling/to/a sharp-
toothed wolf/clever enough/to swallow me/whole.
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Deborah Hauser is the Poet Laureate of Suffolk County (2023-2025) and author of Ennui: From the Diagnostic and Statistical Field Guide of Feminine Disorders (Finishing Line Press). Her poems and book reviews have been published in Ms. Magazine, Women’s Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, and Calyx. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work explores the intersection of poetry and activism. She has taught literature and writing at Stony Brook University and Suffolk County Community College. She leads a double life on Long Island where she works in the insurance industry.
by Adela Najarro
by Donna Vorreyer
Of course, someone has named it “apron” belly.
You know. The kind that women of a certain
age begin to show, a pouch of weight below
the navel that resists attempts at flattening.
Apron. As in part of the road where the slow
or damaged pull aside. As in dinner on the table
when the man gets home. As in domestic, tamed.
As in expected to toil and remain unstained.
As in tradition. As in remember your place. It could
be called prosperous. Could be shield. Could be
creator, battlefield, but it needs no label.
A body is a body. A woman already has a name.
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Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (forthcoming, 2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her poetry, fiction, and essay work have appeared in Ploughshares, Cherry Tree, Poet Lore, Salamander, Harpur Palate, Booth, and elsewhere. She lives and creates in the Chicago area and hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
by Mercedes Rodriguez
1.
The apartment is dangerously cold at night.
The hearth is a perimeter too far from my body.
I’ve taken to freezing a glass of milk before bed
And using it as a doorstopper.
2.
Some days, the heat tickles my toes. Others,
I’m peering through a crack, half-expecting
The neighbor’s nativity scene to come alive—
How long is too long when conspiring?
3.
After saying yes to a sleepover, I wake to a lover
Carelessly making his way to the bathroom.
He reassures me he’s not an angry drunk.
I never told him to pack a pair of slippers.
____________________________________________________________
Mercedes Rodriguez is a poet from Los Angeles, CA. They are an MFA poetry candidate at North Carolina State University.
by Lindsay Rockwell
the rooks and hives have gone quiet
what appears to be the ear of God
is a small boy's palm
catching the rain
a woman begs
to be felled by this rain
the sound it makes
silence gone drumming
a cello lifts from a high up window
there's a pool before the temple
and she before the pool
weeps in her scarf and shoes
I lost my mother to a surgeon's slip
hers to the sea
smoke purls from a chimney
winter's coming—the wait for sorrow
she lost her mother to the sea
mine to a surgeon's slip
before the pool I weep
in my scarf and shoes
from the temple's high up window
a cello lifts
the sound it makes—gone silence
I beg to be felled
by this rain that soothes the boy
his small palm
mistaken for the ear of God
the rooks and hives are quiet
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Lindsay Rockwell is poet-in-residence for the Hartford Connecticut’s Episcopal Cathedral Church. She has recently published or forthcoming work in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Tupelo Quarterly, Radar, SWWIM Every Day, among others. Her collection, Ghost Fires, was published by Main Street Rag, April 2023. She is the recipient of the Andrew Glaser Poetry Prize, fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, and Edith Wharton/The Mount residency.
by Jennifer Markell
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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It isn’t green at all, this suit
you call Dress Greens,
not the color of living things
but what remains when a river
of ice is drained. You align
your shirt buttons with the front
fly seam, straight gig line
with the belt buckle’s edge.
Pin a grenade to your lapel,
sallow eagle, frozen in flight.
Turning to face the mirror,
you catch your reflection taking aim.
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Jennifer Markell’s first poetry collection, Samsara (Turning Point, 2014) was named a "Must Read Book" by the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her second collection, Singing at High Altitude, was published in 2022 by The Main Street Rag. She has received awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, The Comstock Review, The New England Poetry Club, and the Rita Dove Prize in Poetry (Finalist, International Literary Awards.) Her poems have been included in numerous publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Consequence, Diode, RHINO, Storm Cellar, and The Women's Review of Books.
by Roey Leonardi
Because the man at the fruit stand knows Mama
from a lifetime ago, he fetches her a basket
fresh off the tractor’s back. Leaving the orchard,
she tells me what the trees have seen.
The spring before she arrived,
one Skinner boy shot the other
through a clearing in their boughs
which at that time of year were blossom-blushed
such that when buckshot rang through the boy
it dotted the peach petals with scarlet
not unlike the mark on a dogwood flower
which my grandmama says is a kind of stigmata,
though she wouldn’t put it like that,
too lofty a word for a thing as solid as faith, or a tree.
Why? I ask Mama and she looks at me the way
Grandmama looks at her new husband
when he asks if Carolina wrens live round these parts,
bewildered, as if to say, Don’t you know where you are?
Here where cousin Dewey killed a man in a bar fight
with a single punch.
Here where Mama’s junior prom date died at age sixteen
beneath a tractor wheel.
Here where grandmama divided the serpent’s head from its spine
with the blade of her gardening hoe.
Here where something was done to Aunt Lorraine
that she won’t speak of, even now,
except to say the body remembers what the mind lets go.
Here where everything and nothing grows.
Land of red clay, kudzu, whitetail, lightning bug.
Mama says due to development
the orchard gets smaller each year.
We cling to the earth’s jaw even as it yawns shut,
knowing all the same that we will be undone.
We were born with a taste for undoing.
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Roey Leonardi is a poet and writer from South Carolina. She is currently an MFA candidate at Indiana University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Bat City Review, Epiphany, The Harvard Advocate, and Pleiades.
by Traci Brimhall
Fool that I am, I confuse dust motes for angels
heralding my failures. Anxiety strokes my brain
with commandments. I predict the sinking
darkness that will someday call your name.
I forecast the way moonlight will fall from
the sky like a ladder and lift you away.
I’ve been dying to tell you the skull is an icon
of time and a black halo howls around you
in my thoughts, but you roll your eyes and undress
my confessions. Watching you water the garden is
a master class in a theology of happiness, but
no matter how the generations of roses bloom,
I lift each honeycomb like a reliquary from its box.
I forecast disaster at each internet search, every
tea stain in my cup. Each bite of dried apple
deepens the belief that darkness is coming soon.
You kiss my eyelids and ask me to become an oracle
of sunsets, foretell gorgeous and unborn days,
call out the best hilltops for a beautiful tomorrow.
I promise to try if you promise the next kiss will
deserve the stars’ gossip. Let what happens next
be sacred and overlooked, like the missing teeth
of saints. Before the waiting angel falls from
the sky to behold you, my love, let’s make
a tomorrow of our hands, a dawn of our mouths,
our bodies the one future of light that matters.
____________________________________________________________
Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing and narrative medicine at Kansas State University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Love Prodigal (published November 2024 by Copper Canyon). She’s received fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, the National Park Service, and the Academy of American Poets. She’s the Poet Laureate for the State of Kansas.
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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