Aries on the Rise

SWWIM Every Day
by Nicole Zdeb

by Nicole Zdeb

Just escaped the cosmic dustbin,

March’s swirling floodwaters, and

you’re a master of beginnings,

the bright idea, strong coffee.

You hit your head more than once

against the deliberate consideration

of others. You like to fall in love.

You like to fall.

You build landings for the sky.

Subject to high fevers,

clairvoyance and weird dreams.

You want seven

women on seven seas

to bear your silvery seed.

You speak in puffs of smoke,

your mouth a popular sculpture.

A more desperate man would reach for his hat.

You look like you’re swallowing clouds.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicole Zdeb is a writer living in Portland, OR. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2011, Bedouin Press published her chapbook, The Friction of Distance. Most recently, she has had work published in Rue, Magma, and Lily Poetry.

Cinderella's End

SWWIM Every Day
by Denise Duhamel

by Denise Duhamel

You died the day the first unripe squash sprouts 

curled from the garden. You’d grown weak, 

couldn’t make a fist to hold the lilies. They dropped 

to the floor, a bouquet of dream-teeth 

loosened from the gums. The morphine drip 

helped you forget your prince who had passed 

a few years before. The green 

hospital gown was a misnomer—how inelegant.  

How unready you were for your final social occasion, 

your tiny cracked feet in those floppy rubber slippers.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). She and Julie Marie Wade co-authored TheUnrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. 



On the Night Tom Holland Lip-Synched Rihanna’s “Umbrella” While Zendaya, LL Cool J, and Chrissy Teigen Looked On

SWWIM Every Day
by Michele Battiste

by Michele Battiste

the earth shifted                uncomfortably

on its axis, its oceans        swelling in defiance

of the tides. The moon      hesitated in her

orbit, uncertain of the       trajectory.

Dusk loitered above the horizon, radiating

a heat previously               unknown to climate

scientists. Grasslands        paused their sway,

rigid in the                        disturbance.

 

Old men flooded               online markets, depleted

stocks of body                   paint and long strands

of rhinestones. Children   rose from early bedtimes

to stroke their parents’ backs and guide them gently

to their rooms. Deer          crept from the outskirts

of yards to huddle                beneath open

windows and they             could not be chased

 

away. Pale-winged            moths fluttered by the dozen

in the blue light                 of screens and they could

not be chased away. Ghosts who crossed—meek

and obedient—crossed back with reckless

speed and they could        not be chased away.

 

Gravity shrugged off        certain burdensome

laws. Sound waves           bent at undiscovered

angles. Matter                   sidestepped the customary

forms, and the vast            unknown forces

of the universe let go one long-held collective breath

knowing exactly               what will happen next.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michele Battiste’s latest book is Waiting for the Wreck to Burn, which received the 2018 Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press and will be published in Spring, 2019. She is also the author of Uprising and Ink for an Odd Cartography, both from Black Lawrence Press. She lives in Colorado where she raises money to save the planet. Visit her at www.michelebattiste.net.

Kitchen Meditation

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Zimmerman

by Lisa Zimmerman

The study in blue and white is the kitchen window

with its winter history, bottles on the sill holding

 

a steady cordial of January’s thin light—

clean, cold, undrinkable. Whereas summer

 

remains unthinkable, so future I could build a church

around it, be saved again by the virgin’s blue gown,

 

its cascade down to her naked feet, stained

glass windows a brilliant fracture of gold, black,

 

red for blood, and other passions.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Natural Bridge, Florida Review, Poet Lore, Cave Wall, and other journals and anthologies. Her first book won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Her most recent collections are The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). Her poems have been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. She’s a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado.

Family Portrait as the Golden Mummies of Bahareya

SWWIM Every Day
by Andy Young

by Andy Young

A couple faces one another

as if in conversation.

This is how they were found.

 

Now they lie in vitrines

like fish in facing tanks.

Could not speak if they

 

could speak. They were

dressed for their death passage,

not to be specimens in glass.

 

Her bare breasts shine

like doorknobs. Linen

wraps for the poor, gold

 

masks for the rich, eyes

so lifelike excavators

gasped when they brushed

 

the dust away. The revolution

left no money for excavation;

thousands of mummies

 

still lie in burrowed tunnels

under the houses and roads.

The dead do not ponder

 

revolutions, but they like

to sometimes be considered.

Small mourning statues

 

were found in the tombs,

meant to eternally weep

at their side. One man

 

is a merchant with a Horus crown.

Tolemic, someone says.

Our son points to another’s

 

thickly outlined eyes.

He is awake, he says,

but does not answer.

 

A stone girl, five years old,

too poor for a golden crown;

my daughter, also five,

 

asks if they’re the same

size—yes, almost exactly.

For a while, this is how

 

our children will think of death:

gilded bodies that keep their shape,

wide-eyed and adored.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Andy Young is the author of four chapbooks, including the just-published John Swenson Dynamicron (Dancing Girl Press), and a full-length poetry collection, All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014). She teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Southern Review, Waxwing, and Prairie Schooner, and has been recognized in contests by Black Warrior Review, the Auburn Witness Poetry Award, and Consequence Magazine’s Women Writing War.

Cargoes

SWWIM Every Day
by Luisa A. Igloria

by Luisa A. Igloria

In late afternoon sun, toddlers tilt

forward and back on yard swings

at the halfway home. The high

 

school girl who volunteers there

wants to know what mother,

what father would throw

 

a daughter out into the streets, say

Don’t come back or You are as good

as dead to me; and the middle-aged

 

woman washing up at the sink looks

through the window at the vanishing light,

startling at the sudden film on her cheeks.

 

What sifts through the packed soil

as years rush by? Swift as birds in the corn,

long green tassels in the summer evening;

 

lifted by wind, bearing redolence

of cow manure and honeysuckle.

Along the southbound road,

 

where the dip rises toward the knoll,

locals tell of a girl who rode behind

her brother on a motorcycle. Who

 

could have foreseen the truck in the other lane,

its side-view mirror glancing like a blade

along her jaw? The sky’s inverted basin

 

flooding her eyes with the surprise of indigo,

before the head’s brittle husk snapped back

and arms and fingers tightened in rigor

 

around the living body. That’s how we press

forward into deepening twilight, carry the shape

of our eternal cargo: the voice that breathes

 

in our ear saying love or goodbye—as we

crest the hill and gun to a stop, waiting for the lights

to flash and change from yellow to red to green.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Luisa A. Igloria's publications include What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Chapbook Poetry Prize), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, March 2018), and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press). She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015.

The Eye Is Collapsing

SWWIM Every Day
by LB Thompson

by LB Thompson

rain unpeels from wheels or treads

ominous pause before wind begins

 

tell me, how could love be any different

bodily love at some precipice

 

when the holding is stronger

than the flourish of release

 

            outside, the wind over and over shows

            the pale undersides of maple leaves

 

the release, not the holding means

but this is a palpable bonding that refuses to fuse

 

separation is a more conscious choice

first one, then the other loses interest

 

            venerable maple trunk squeezed by rain shined ivy vines

            downed limbs cracked, softened nearly to pulp

 

features praised now fade

the freckle on the stretched neck

 

that wanted kissing and was kissed

now assimilates in a night wash

 

            even the ivy lets go

            its whisker claws unclench the bark

 

even the nodes pinched

into life a moment ago

 

do not shine out

possible to see morning’s blurred blue

 

            the electricity does not thrum

            the clocks have nothing to say

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

LB Thompson's poetry has won national awards from The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the Rona Jaffe Foundation and has appeared in The New Yorker and other literary journals. Her collaborative work with artist Ellen Wiener has been exhibited in New York and at Vanderbilt University. LB teaches at Suffolk County Community College and The New School/Parsons in New York City. She lives with her wife and book collection in Greenport, NY. 

Post-checkup, I don’t watch the State of the Union

SWWIM Every Day
by Emily Rose Cole

by Emily Rose Cole

He will say strong. They always do. The ending’s spoiled.

Spoiled, too, as I learned today from my doctor, probably my spine.

Or, more technically, my thoracic spinal nerves. In one of them,

my doctor thinks, a lesion. Bright erasure. Corrosive smudge.

(Why do I always want these new eyelets in my brain to suggest

light?) Just a little one, she postulates, pre-MRI. A little one

that could turn python, swallow whole my feet. With MS, it’s impossible

to predict an ending—my checkup tests a catalogue of potential

losses: Balance. Reflexes. Vision. Memory. Strength. She holds down

my arms one by one. Push back, she says, and I do. For now. At home,

unfocused on my work or my country, I prime my abdomen

for injection. The drug burns its acidic promise, leaves its welting,

subcutaneous kiss. Stay strong, my dad incants through the phone.

I decline. On Capitol Hill, the President rises to a paroxysm of applause. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emily Rose Cole is the author of a chapbook, Love & a Loaded Gun, from Minerva Rising Press. She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2018, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is pursuing a PhD in Poetry and Disability Studies at the University of Cincinnati. You can reach her via her website at emilyrosecolepoetry.com.

O Keeper of the Dreaming Skull, I am in Love with Everything

SWWIM Every Day
by Ronda Piszk Broatch

by Ronda Piszk Broatch

red wine tells me so    and poetry

come hell        come mother flooded

 

sky igniting  tossing cottonwoods

upon raftered lids        O gale conjurers

 

O maples in bodacious feather

needle-strewn fir on lawns across town

 

High    I was that       and more than half

gone    I saw like an animal

 

in darkness      all things couched between

the lines           How long must I wait for

 

sanity to return            bear this dis-

quiet like a head in vice-grip

 

muscle-shudder           love-a-lurk

an albino gorilla

 

in my childhood closet            O mother

the tide comes high     nigh your heart

 

and still so much has yet to be conceived

and still our mouths sewn shut resist

 

wind damped against lips       O keeper

of the owls defying night        you sent me

 

little planet      to float on my own

with my little box of bones

 

golden-eyed and bared

into an orbit too long   and undiscovered

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Poet and photographer Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press, 2015). Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Ronda is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, a May Swenson Poetry Award finalist, and former editor of Crab Creek Review. Her journal publications include Atlanta Review, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Fourteen Hills, Mid-American Review, and Public Radio KUOW’s “All Things Considered.” She has work forth-coming in Sycamore Review, Palette Poetry, and Tishman Review.

A Pileated Woodpecker Shares Where to Find God

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Carey

by Sarah Carey

I live for what the dead give.

Hidden by leaf screens and branches,

I pillage rotting wood. My tribe fought

long for salvation, after the forests’ razing

dug into ragged stumps, felled trunks,

a miracle of wholeness from fragments,

a feast of insects who thrive on decay.

What’s left when I leave is for others to say.

Should you see my black wings

and red head knocking wood for nourishment,

you might ask if I believe God is dead,

as Altizer said, believing God lived and died

in Christ, that the church lied

about becoming the body—but what Altizer said

was not what most thought he meant,

which was in death, life—a spirit

indwelling to drill the dying down,

incarnate carnage, God’s passion.

If you ask me, I’m proof he was right.

If you listen to my rat-a-tat melody

echoing my drumming beak, you may hear

an answered prayer of oneness, in desire’s

shrill tattoo, and the thrumming

of your own wild heart.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her work has appeared recently in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, The Christian Century, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of an International Merit Award in the Atlanta Review's 2018 International Poetry Prize competition and a finalist in Sequestrum Literary Journal's 2018 New Writer Award competition. She is the author of The Heart Contracts (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Sarah works for the University of Florida and lives in Gainesville. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com.

Mammary Duct Ectastia

SWWIM Every Day
by Mary Lou Buschi

by Mary Lou Buschi

She said she knew how hard it was—

 

kite of knives pushing through

 

lactiferous ducts,

 

but she doesn’t.

 

Nothing has ever left her

 

 

with that much rage. Nothing inside her

 

ringing to get out.

Mary Lou Buschi’s collections of poetry include the full-length Awful Baby (2015) and the chapbooksTight Wire (2016), Ukiyo-e (2014), and The Spell of Coming (or Going) (2013). Her poems have appeared in many journals such as Radar, Willow Springs, Thrush, Dream Pop, and Field, among others.

Fellow Travelers

SWWIM Every Day
by Jenny Browne

by Jenny Browne

1. Apache Plume

 

The road is a drone note,

 

            also known as a burden.

 

I traveled but a short distance,

 

            late and thirsty, repeating

 

hold yourself empty,

 

            hold yourself full.

 

 

2. Desert Sumac

 

Sun rising

like an elegant

tranquilizer,

 

considering

the hockey

stick curve

 

of carbon

emissions,

considering

 

the hundred

year flood

again this one,

 

considering

I turn red

when crushed.

 

 

3. Creosote

 

That under-employed boyfriend

 

you could smell approaching

 

all summer, strumming his guitar

 

played only one song: 

 

            I know you rider

 

 

& we play it again

 

for the ringtail, the rattler

 

the javelinas, even

 

a magnificant hummingbird:

 

            gonna miss me when I’m gone.

 

 

4. Ocotillo

 

I keep thinking of the salt flats

& the great Neruda poem that says

I want no truck with death.

Once I asked a man what word

he would have chosen instead,

but he sped on toward Carlsbad.

Did you know truck comes from

the old French for barter?

I wonder how a translator chooses

between bear hug & strangle?

I didn’t say let’s make a deal.

Nights I still dream of the ocean,

waves big enough to drown

the engine that makes them. 

The exposed shoulders of the reef

grow colder with the past. Something

told me if I waited long enough

I could have that back too.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jenny Browne lives in San Antonio, Texas, and teaches at Trinity University. Her most recent collection is Dear Stranger. New work has been published, or is forthcoming, in Love's Executive Order, Harvard Review, and Oxford American. 

These Peonies

SWWIM Every Day
by Patrice Boyer Claeys

by Patrice Boyer Claeys

From just-June’s

                         generous sun

 

come snouts through solid

                                        soil like hogs

 

tracking truffles

                      in tangled leaf litter,

 

red rockets from

                          subterranean pads

 

borne up

            on blind bandy-legged stems,

 

obeying orders

                      of otherworldly wills

 

to defy the downward

                                drag of gravity,

 

these spiky shoots

                          upstretched and think

 

uncurl their curd-like

                                 culver buds,

 

transformed to feathers

                                     flounce of doves.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

After years in publishing and PR, Patrice Boyer Claeys joined Plumb Line Poets of Evanston, Illinois, and completed her first book, Lovely Daughter of the Shattering, soon out from Kelsay Books. Her work has appeared in Clementine Unbound, YDP, Postcard Poems and Prose, Typishly, Open: Journal of Arts & Literature, and Light - Journal of Photography & Poetry. Patrice reads for and contributes to the Mom Egg Review and has been nominated for Best of the Net.

The Church Office in the Summertime

SWWIM Every Day
by Cat Dixon

by Cat Dixon

The vent whistles and blows the papers from the desk to the floor—all those checks that need to be signed, all those welcome letters to be mailed, the return address label page missing an entire row. The carpet—littered with eraser dandruff, bent paper clips and crumbs from my Poptart— needs to be vacuumed. The filing cabinet with its open mouth calls, file, file, organize this shit. Instead, I slip the Leonard Cohen CD into the computer. “First We Take Manhattan” begins and I dust and vacuum and wipe. The window sill is filled with dead flies and grit. The lever on the office chair is caked in dust. The blessing bags for the homeless are piled underneath the table—all their strings knotted together. When the doorbell rings, and the man asks for help, I hand him four bags instead of one—too lazy to untwine them. He says, “I don’t need all this,” and I think, none of us do. 

__________________________________________________________________

Cat Dixon is the author of Eva and Too Heavy to Carry (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2016; 2014) and a chapbook, The Book of Levinson (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She teaches creative writing at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. She has poems (co-written with Trent Walters) in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018).

Powerlessness

SWWIM Every Day
by KT Herr

by KT Herr

I thought I had exhausted all my metaphors: various prey; coins

inserted slant, jamming vending machines; cartoon hand over cartoon

mouth. I studied grim histories of hysterical patients, listened

to accounts of fish who change their sex to breed. I thought I knew what all

there is to know about glass: a viscous liquid forced to acquiesce

to rigidity. If I could learn the posture well enough I’d know

how to unlearn it. I practiced exhaustively. I was practicing

today as I sat smoking. Next door three men were lowering a door-

sized piece of plywood from the building’s distant roof. Above, one reversed

a winch while below another gathered slack, taming the spent plywood’s

wild twists. A third man stood, watched the plank pirouette toward several windows,

waited for the swinging scrap to reach the ground. You think I’m telling you

the story of the plank; how it feels to be trussed, grappled over. But

I am the third man, waiting for some purpose to come into my hands.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

KT Herr is or was: queer poet, songwriter, and grilled cheese enthusiast; advisory board member for Write616; poetry editor for The 3288 Review; host of WYCE’s Electric Poetry; Retort Slam finalist; writing workshop facilitator; MFA candidate in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College (2020). Her poems have been published with Pilgrimage Magazine, Punch Drunk Press, and Francis House, and her nonfiction has appeared in Goat’s Milk Magazine. She lives in Yonkers with someone else’s cat.

So That He May Step into the Tender Light

SWWIM Every Day
by Marcia J. Pradzinski

by Marcia J. Pradzinski

Let his body down in our

grainy ribbons of light 

along the bones of me.

On the ground, come morning the grasses will genuflect

with a dozen swirling constellations.

 

How silently a heart pivots on its hinge—

 

silent as the moment before the world was.

Eyes closed,

he falls into darkness,

receding from my grasp—

a person can die of motherhood.  

  

 

Cento Sources: David Caddy, Kwame Davis, Dorianne Laux, Alison Croggon, Cynthia Brackett Vincent, Marcia Hurlow, Jane Hirshfield, Elvis Alves, Hedy Habra, Louis Gallo, Karen Bowles, Sage Cohen

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Marcia J. Pradzinski, an award-winning poet, lives in Skokie, Illinois. Her poems have been featured in print and online. Recent and forthcoming publications include Clementine Unbound, Your Daily Poem, Ink In Thirds, Scarlet Leaf Review, and Honey & Lime. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Left Behind, in 2015. Her fellow poets help her stay productive. When not reading or writing, she enjoys water aerobics, walking, and going to movies.

Midlife Crisis

SWWIM Every Day
by Mia Leonin

by Mia Leonin

Just like that a barge drifted from my throat, listing 

from icy Nordic waters to the warm Mississippi Delta. 

 

Just like that I shook the moon from its claw 

and realized funnel cake magic was just powdered sugar. 

 

Just like that a concussion became a memory of betrayal, a pack 

toted off on the missing hump of a camel. 

 

Just like that I made peace with heaven 

and whether or not I was going to be invited to the after party. 

 

Just like that I traded in my many dresses for one 

then crawled out of that one and got on with my day. 

 

Just like that my dad—well, yeah, him. 

 

Just like that my mother’s pointer finger 

landed on Mars and transmitted satellite info 

 

from the worm in her bosom  

to the flower in my breast 

 

from the yowl of her silence 

to the om of my omniscience 

 

from her sidewinding 

to my stomping through 

 

from her branding and rebranding our life 

to my five-word review: Lunch. Table. Eat. Starve. Repeat. 

 

from her stomped blossoms and overburdened nightgowns 

to my room with a slit of mirror and salty lamp light. 

 

Just like that, mom came and went. 

When she touched me, she made no touches show 

 

and when she put on her face, a show for the millions, 

the laugh track guffawed at full force slobbering vodka to gin. 

 

Just like that, God doles out her punishment 

in the form of unfettered happiness 

 

and we are forced to build a stronger fort 

or ram our pole into the mud and push off 

 

from the creek’s sandy bank 

toward a farther, glittering shore.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mia Leonin is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Chance Born (Anhinga Press), as well as a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). A book-length poem, Fable of the Pack Saddle Child, was published by BkMk Press in 2018 with illustrations by Cuban artist, Nereida García Ferraz. Leonin has written extensively about theater and culture for the Miami Herald, New Times, and other publications. She teaches creative writing at the University of Miami.

When the Irises Don’t Come

SWWIM Every Day
by Kyle Potvin

by Kyle Potvin

I have survived the darts of winter icing my face

and scrubbed mud from the carpet all spring.

 

I have rejoiced at the sky turned bowl-like and blue

and studied the family of fox living beneath our forsythia.

And yet you do not appear, as you always do,

your purple palms upraised.

 

The spectacle of fireworks does not entice you,

nor the young blueberries about to burst

from their tight pods.

 

The tall stalks swish a strange summons,

first casual, then insistent. Still,

you do not come.

 

I can't explain this sadness.

 

All I know is that since I came to this place,

I have relied on you to open, so that each July,

I can place your stems in the guest room

for my mother, who, ill and slowing,

has yet to tell me if she will arrive.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water (Finishing Line Press), won the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, The New York Times, Measure, JAMA, and others. She is an advisor to Frost Farm Poetry in Derry, NH, and helps produce the New Hampshire Poetry Festival. Kyle lives with her family in Southern New Hampshire.

After the Greeks Tippy-Toed out of a Horse

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Sarai

by Sarah Sarai

            Arms, and the man…

                        Virgil

 

Christ almighty was that a year.

The damn war FINALLY over

though one many-faced hero heroed-on

ten more to slay a weaver’s suitors lined-up

and slicked-back on Ithaca Ave.

 

THAT year, warriors de-warriorized, or tried to.

Mothers had died fathers had died wives

husbands aunts uncles sisters brothers had died.

 

But not one golden-guy,

with eyes a glinty glint

and sweaty sweat on biceps bulging.

 

Sailing sea-y seas Aeneas ashored on land

of a lady founder

who took one gandy gander and

plunged into bicepboy’s eyes—not deep pools—

 

and after the jumping-off-joy—

no small joy we agree—was deady dead,

having lit sticks and self and such when

loverboy sailed again. Soon,

the city-on-a-boot he birthed,

 

Rome, all Latinated and lawyered up,

warriorized and empired, though,

we admit, the engineering was good.

 

Those aqueducts and bridges, those walls. 

They were something else.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Sarai's second full-length poetry collection, That Strapless Bra in Heaven, will be published by Kelsay Books in 2020. Her first collection is The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX) and her most recent chapbook is Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books). Her poems are in Ethel, Susan the Journal, Barrow Street, Boston Review, Prelude, Sinister Wisdom, Threepenny Review, Fifth Wednesday, Minnesota Review, and many other journals, as well as many anthologies. She lives in New York and works as an editor.

Yemaya (or Grandmother)

SWWIM Every Day
by Lea Anderson

by Lea Anderson

she throws her hair like a fisherman throws a net—

the dark threads draping across her shoulder’s sweep—

a body, themselves. languishing. shimmering with sweat

or sun. the boredom of barnacles half-steeped

in salt. what was it they say about the meek

and inheritance? her dark skin’s glistening.

the fact of her in the surf. waves lapping her feet

like excited hound-tongues. she’s listening

to the gulls cat-calling. they all want her.

the wind’s grabby hands, pressing her skirts

to the round of her hips. challenge demure.

the world, one large sopera in which we hurt—

above, the abalone sliver of crescent could be her heel.

this, the beginning or end of the earth at which we kneel.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lea Anderson holds an MFA in Poetry from The New School. She received honorable mention for Boulevard's 2017 Contest for Emerging Poets. Her poems and other writing have appeared in Jai Alai Magazine and Luna Luna.

Load More