Breakage

SWWIM Every Day
by Susanna Lang

by Susanna Lang

Once it’s been broken, the body
holds the memory of falling
as you would hold a fragile goblet
that belonged to your great grandmother,
whose name you also carry.

The body holds with two hands
the memory of falling, as you
would hold an entire tray of goblets.
That delay before you reach the ground,
the sound of something shattering

that blanks all other sounds—birds
silenced, no broom to sweep up
the shards, no arm to sweep with.

Cobbled together, the body walks
with eyes fixed on where the next
step falls and the step after that, sings
a few words over and over, once again
upright and moving across the earth.

Always the body holds its memory,
water brimming a goblet etched in gold.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susanna Lang’s third collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was released in 2017 from Terrapin Books. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry, and Verse Daily. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. She lives and teaches in Chicago.

Hope

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Freligh

by Sara Freligh

She was blonde and freckled—that, I remember, and how
spraddled she sat, pregnant belly ballooning
over spread legs. This from a time in my life
when I’d pocket my lunch tips and stop by a bar
where old guys argued about the batting averages
of ballplayers I’d never heard of. Pigs’ feet floated
in a clear jar and peanuts were free, TV tuned
to a talk show where the freckled blonde
said she cried whenever someone asked boy
or girl?, and if it was her first. Her baby
was dead, nothing but a dark stone in the gut
of the x-ray machine but still another month
of lugging around that coffin before she gave
birth and buried the kid. I remember the man
next to me whispered Jesus, less an expletive
than a prayer for what he’d never have
to endure, and I think of him and her
when I think about hope as a seed
of something that maybe might not be.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis.Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, diode, and in the anthology New Microfiction (WW Norton, 20180. Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006.

Begging to Differ

SWWIM Every Day
by Devon Balwit

by Devon Balwit

            (Mary Oliver, 1935-2019)

 

The snide will ever be snide, complaining
that a marmot isn’t a red-tail, disappointed
that the chamber quartet doesn’t beatbox,
wanting white bread to spice itself into dal,
condemning the popular, their own envy
visible like a slip sagging beneath a hem.
She never seems to be in her poems,
a critic complains, but outside them,
putting them together from the available
literary elements. Where else would a poet work,
and what else with, drawing the outside in,
a diligent gleaner? Another, deriding her
homiletic upward yearning jokes
that no animals appear to have been harmed
in the making of her poems. No. Only that critic’s
sensibilities. The rest of us hang on the cries
of her wild geese, harsh and exciting,
announcing our place in the family of things.
We sit in pews, on yoga mats, on buses,
at kitchen tables, hoping for words
to lighten our burden. We want the ordinary
to be consecrated, for most of us only ever
abide there—no more special than our good dog
sniffing the common yards of our common streets.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Devon Balwit's most recent collection is A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found at SWWIM Every Day, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Fifth Wednesday (on-line), Apt, Grist, and Oxidant Engine, among others. For more on her book and movie reviews, chapbooks, collections and individual works, see her website at https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet.

Carousel #2

SWWIM Every Day
by Jen Rouse

by Jen Rouse

The beveled mirrors hold
you open to the sky. Reglazed
and lit to dazzle. Sometimes
I am waltzing with you
there. Your wig elaborate
and winged with birds.
The woman in the painting
next door runs through
the pasture wild, unbridled. How
I always want you this way.
Gleaming teeth, eyes that spark
and gallop. We are in worlds split,
untimed, and tragic. So stop
tapping at the glass because I
cannot take you. I raise my hand
to touch your hand to still you there.
(Oh the tapping.) We look beside
ourselves, and I become your
mouth moving so quickly, and you
become my finger against these lips.
The carousel keeps us fixed in place.
I want to tell you this thing about
the way you dance inside me. 
Endless. The circles. No sound.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jen Rouse is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Gulf Stream, Parentheses, Cleaver, Up the Staircase, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Rouse is a two-time finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize. Headmistress Press has published her books Acid and Tender, CAKE, and Riding with Anne Sexton. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.

telegrams to the lover that maybe I never really had

SWWIM Every Day
by Paula Harris

by Paula Harris

I cannot possibly actually meet someone as lovely as you comma can I query

I am mad to think you really look at me like you are so happy stop

So happy stop

So you must not exist query

So you must not exist stop

Maybe I really am as happy as I think comma but maybe I never left the house stop

Maybe I am lying in bed comma dreaming stop

I am a daydreamer stop

Sorry that I call you my lover comma I know it might make you uncomfortable stop

But you are not my boyfriend and I do not want to call you that guy who I am fucking stop

And comma imaginary or not comma you have loved my body right on down stop

Maybe the reason your beard never tickles me is that it does not exist because you do not exist stop

Maybe comma when you do talk comma you always say the right things because I am saying them stop

Maybe the reason the sex is exactly how I have always wanted sex to be is because it is all in my imagination stop

My imagination definitely knows how I like to be touched comma but imaginary you finds some new things with me stop

Fuck comma I love the way you kiss stop

Do not stop kissing me stop

Do not stop stop

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Paula Harris lives in New Zealand, where she writes poems and sleeps in a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award, and her chapbook, i make men like you die sweetly, will be published in September 2019 by dancing girl press. Her poetry has been published in various journals, including Berfrois, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Snorkel, The Spinoff and Landfall. She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric. She tweets randomly at @paulaoffkilter.

Panama

SWWIM Every Day
by Donna Spruijt-Metz

by Donna Spruijt-Metz



Under my skin, now, 
disorder, unruliness, a gift
a country
of hummingbirds. So many
with tremolo 

wings, the hummingbirds— 
part of one thousand 
species of birds here—they sip sweet
sap, beaks bright,
the lush forest shows, greens

Rembrandt never had
and yellows 

oh!

The agouti swifts across 

my path—right across 
my feet while my skin’s 
undoing is now 

the rainforest, the slow denuding.
For now, the birds
            deceive us— 

continue to migrate
back and forth—old patterns
break slow.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, translator, and Professor of Psychology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her first career was as a professional flutist. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as the American Journal of Poetry, Naugatuck River Review, Juked, Poets Reading the News, and Poetry Northwest. Her chapbook, Slippery Surfaces, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2019.

Cannibal Woman

SWWIM Every Day
by Ada Limón

by Ada Limón

I’m looking for the right words, but all I can think of is: 
parachute or ice water. 

There’s nothing, but this sailboat inside me, slowly trying to catch 
a wind, maybe there’s an old man on it, maybe a small child, 

all I know is they’d like to go somewhere. They’d like to see the sail 

straighten go tense and take them some place. But instead they wait,
a little tender wave comes and leaves them 
           right where they were all along. 

How did this happen? No wind I can conjure anymore. 

My father told me the story of a woman larger than a mountain,
who crushed redwoods with her feet, who could swim a whole lake

in two strokes—she ate human flesh and terrorized the people. 
I loved that story. She was bigger than any monster, or Bigfoot, 
           or Loch Ness creature—

a woman who was like weather, as enormous as a storm. 

He’d tell me how she walked through the woods, each tree 
coming down, branch to sawdust, leaf to skeleton, each mountain 
            pulverized to dust. 

Then, they set a trap. A hole so deep she could not climb out of it.  

         (I have known that trap.) 

Then, people set her on fire with torches. So she could not eat them
anymore, could not steal their children or ruin their trees. 

I liked this part too. The fire. I imagined how it burned her mouth, 
her skin, and how she tried to stand but couldn’t, how it almost felt

good to her—as if something was finally meeting her desire with desire. 

The part I didn’t like was the end, how each ash that flew up in the night 
           became a mosquito, how she is still all around us 
in the dark, multiplied. 

I’ve worried my whole life that my father told me this because 
she is my anger: first comes this hunger, then abyss, then fire, 

and then a nearly invisible fly made of ash goes on and on eating mouthful  

           after mouthful of those I love.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was named one of the top five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the online and summer programs for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer in Lexington, Kentucky.

Want. My MTV.

SWWIM Every Day
by Kimberly Reyes

by Kimberly Reyes

More than AIDS, Arthur Ashe said
his true burden was being Black.
C.C. DeVille said being a junkie
was sexier than being fat.

Everything I know I learned from TV.
So my narration is jerky,
preemptive, unreliable. 

I know Madonna said power
is being told you're not loved
undesirable
and not being destroyed

between commercial breaks.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kimberly Reyes’s poetry appears widely online and in journals, including poets.org, The Feminist Wire, The Acentos Review, RHINO, Columbia Journal, Yemassee, New American Writing, Juked, Cosmonauts Avenue and Eleven Eleven. Her chapbook, Warning Coloration, was recently released by dancing girl press. Her full-length manuscript, Running to Stand Still, is forthcoming from Omnidawn.

What I Have Lost at Sea

SWWIM Every Day
by Kerrin McCadden

by Kerrin McCadden

            What have I lost at sea

                        is a question you insist has an answer,

                                    the gap between flotsam

 

            and jetsam begging the question

                        about discarding versus truly losing,

                                    and while you explain that flotsam floats

 

            up from inside and jetsam is

                        introduced into the water,

                                    I think instead about generosity,

 

            about walking into the bathroom

                        at work and the paper towel dispenser

                                    has already begun its offering,

 

            triggered in the dark

                        to roll out its dry tongue

                                    before I open the door and switch

 

            on the light, how one place

                        where the dark is holy and offerings

                                    are made is not the sea, where generosity

 

            is not a thing but beauty is:

                        the octopus walking on two legs

                                    is beautiful, jet-packing away

 

            or shrinking into a shadow it makes

                        of itself, countless waving arms

                                    of anemones, the seahorse

 

            that never seems to tip, 

                        the tiny fans in all the gills,

                                    the moray eels in caves, even the shark.

 

            I think finding anything in the sea

                        would be impossible. I am not at sea.

                                    I have lost everything here.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kerrin McCadden’s Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes won the Vermont Book Award and the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. She lives in South Burlingon, Vermont.

Ode to Iron

SWWIM Every Day
Elisabeth Adwin Edwards

by Elisabeth Adwin Edwards

Call me Stellar Demise, my hemoglobin pulses with the last exhalations

of stars. I have cast myself

into a cup, a scaffold, a fence, a pipe, a cup. That which is foundational,

marks the edge of a loving space, or fills

to overflowing, that which can be used as weapon, but more often

the thing that spills

over. Well-seasoned skillet, molasses, rust. Some days I’m so hard, heavy. Others,

so magnetic I can't move. I have carried water

no one would want to drink, water not fit for a child to bathe in. Cells of the fetus

I aborted at age twenty-one

bored through the blood-brain barrier and his tiny double-helixes corkscrewed

my mind. He still courses

through me. I imagine his eyes the color of black ore, like his father's. Sometimes

I dream him into a strong body, a body

outside of myself, a body I can touch, and I become a spigot, all I do is weep.

Another star died and found its way here.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

After a successful 20-year career as a regional theater actor, Elisabeth Adwin Edwards has shifted her focus to poetry; her work has appeared in Rogue Agent, ASKEW, Serving House, Melancholy Hyperbole, Menacing Hedge, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other publications. Her chapbook, The Way I Learn To Take It Like A Girl, won the 2018 These Fragile Lilacs Chapbook Contest (judged by William Fargason). She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Yellow List

SWWIM Every Day
by Callista Buchen

by Callista Buchen

here, in the sunshine, a lemon

picked from a neighbor’s tree

like the moon later on, in the right

season for color, a giant caution

light, cars slowing, waiting, heads

turning left—right—left, and still

someone grows daylilies, daffodils,  

and marigolds in the landscaped beds

by the nursing home windows,

jaundice, fear, and a canary

named Stan who sings and sings,

having learned the melodies

from a recording when he was younger, 

while someone creams butter and sugar,

adds yolks until the mixture becomes

something else and disappears,

like the old song, like the petals

that drop and the stems that carry on,

holding space. Bow ties, novelty

socks, the right shade of campfire,

the moment where flame leaps

and vanishes, the murmurs of goodnight,

goodnight, holding a cold hand

in a cold hospital room, stained

glass windows and old paper,

that handwriting, the words still good.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Callista Buchen is the author of Look Look Look (forthcoming, Black Lawrence Press) and the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, October 2015) and Double-Mouthed (winter 2016, dancing girl press). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals, and she is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award and DIAGRAM's essay contest.

America (as a Gigantic Female)

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Martelli

by Jennifer Martelli

lay spread eagle on the sidewalk

bleeding out state after state: airless blue deep red.

 

(The men will come with chalk to trace her shape: white edges like hooks,

some like small penises, or a single mitten, and some crawl through the desert

and under a river.)

 

Three times the country screamed:

the first scream, an old car’s shrill brakes;

the second, a lovers’ spat, but the country knew the man who slapped her around, perhaps

          she asked for it;

third, could’ve been a dog in heat or in want.

 

And the lit windows were spaces between jack o’lantern teeth, backlit by a fat candle

nestled inside the scraped-out shell.

 

Honest to god, it could’ve been stopped. Rain-

 

storm after rainstorm barely washed the blood off this crime scene:

off the hot top, off the granite, off the pitch.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Martelli is the author of MyTarantella (Bordighera Press), as well as the chapbook, After Bird (Grey Book Press, winner of the open reading, 2016). Her work has appeared or will appear in Verse Daily, The Sonora Review, and Iron Horse Review (winner, Photo Finish contest). Jennifer Martelli is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is co-poetry editor for The Mom Egg Review.

For Once, Just Flowers

SWWIM Every Day
by Juliana Gray

bu Juliana Gray

Feeling sorry for myself,

I blew five bucks

 

on grocery store tulips,

pink as organ meats.

 

Outside, April sleeted down,

sealing the earth. A treat.

 

My good cleaver trimmed

the stems; an aspirin wafer dissolved

 

at the bottom of a blue vase.

If I’d stopped thinking,

 

I could’ve had what I wanted:

innocent prettiness.

 

But Google confirmed my pangs,

described the suffering

 

of cats who nibbled toxic leaves

or petals. Metaphor,

 

again. It always ends this way:

prowlers on the ground

 

and some verdant god enshrined

on a high shelf, unreachable.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Juliana Gray is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press 2017). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, and other journals, and her humor writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.

Perspective

SWWIM Every Day
by Katherine Riegel

by Katherine Riegel

The back yard is drowning and I can’t tell

if that’s good or bad for nesting birds.

They still come for both suet and seed

but they always do, freeze and scorch and all

the in-between days too. I should be worried

 

about more than the birds, I picture

the worms fleeing in miniature arks

and spend some time considering how high

the water has to get before someone

decides it’s time to go. I keep wanting

 

to call my mother, ten years dead,

just to find out what she would make

of this mess. To get perspective. Have we

really fucked up this time, neck deep

in bloody water like it feels? Is clinging

 

to the beat and rise of feathered things,

their profligate beauty, more or less hopeless

than putting our faith in builders

of drains and ships and all those hungry

machines? If Earth is our mother I already know

 

how it is to be motherless: like the suit of armor

moving on its own, ridiculous

but frightening because nobody knows how.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Katherine Riegel's newest book, Love Songs from the End of the World, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing. She's also the author of two other poetry collections and a prose poem/flash cnf chapbook, Letters to Colin Firth. Her work has appeared in Brevity, The Gettysburg Review, The Offing, Orion, Poets.org, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and poetry editor for Sweet: A Literary Confection. Her website is katherineriegel.com.

Boomerang

SWWIM Every Day
by Marissa Glover

by Marissa Glover

When we let go of anything, it’s always with the secret hope

that whatever we once held will one day come back to us.

 

This is a truth we don’t like to admit, even to ourselves.

We want to think we’re being generous or zen or wise,

 

when we move from the marital bed into the guest room.

But deep down we dream of a future return, some kind

 

of restoration; otherwise we’d never let go—

not of our small child’s hand, not of a lover who’s eager

 

to be someplace else, not of the happy dream that life could be better.

We treat our teaching job and our son’s school and a kiss goodbye

 

like waiting rooms, a temporary holding place for everything we love,

trusting that we will get it all back soon enough—healthy, whole.

 

But when the thing does not return, the truth we wouldn’t admit

is made clear. We let it go and wanted it to stay and it was always both,

 

at the same time. When the email notification says my points are expiring—

a CVS coupon, Old Navy Super Cash, BWW Blazin’ Rewards,

 

I want to rush out and buy something; it doesn’t matter what. I just can’t

bear to lose anything else. Not again. Not today. Not even 300 points.

 

Life is a series of repeated starts and stops; my time is measured

in the opening and closing of blinds, white wood slats on box windows

 

and the drawing of slate gray curtains across sliding glass doors.

Every morning opens, every evening closes—this day the same

 

as the day before. It’s hard not to wonder what’s the point.

My son’s hands are bigger than mine now—he holds his phone

 

a basketball, a pencil with no eraser. He doesn’t yet know

that his hands will never be big enough or strong enough.

 

I don’t have an answer when he asks why I let go of Daddy’s hand,

why I walked out. I think maybe I made a mistake because now

 

there’s no one here but me to close the curtains. No one but me

to ready the house for sleep. This life is not much different

 

from the life I kissed goodbye years ago, exhausted,

thinking it would someday return to me—healthy, whole.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Marissa Glover teaches writing at Saint Leo University and is currently co-editor for Orange Blossom Review. Marissa’s poem “Some Things Are Decided Before You Are Born” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Lascaux Review. Other poems have appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal, After the Pause, Gyroscope Review, and War, Literature & the Arts, among other journals. Follow Marissa on Twitter @_MarissaGlover_.

A New Truth

SWWIM Every Day
by Madeleine Barnes

by Madeleine Barnes

*This is a visual poem. Please click on the title to view.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Madeleine Barnes is a writer and visual artist from Pittsburgh, PA. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women-identified and non-binary writers and artists. She is the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets prizes, and the Princeton Poetry Prize. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU in 2016, and her second chapbook is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2018.

To Answer Verlaine

SWWIM Every Day
by Allison Joseph

by Allison Joseph

"What mad Negro, or tone-deaf child
created this penny jewel, this crime,
that rings hollow, false under the file?"

                                    “Ars Poetica,” Paul Verlaine

This mad negro has skills 
you and all those pasty symbolists 
better recognize, music in my 

very walk, my laughter like Langston’s. 
I have my gaudy jewels: 
shiny dimestore pendants, 

cubic zirconia rings, 
my sold-on-late-night-television 
phony diamond earrings, 

and I make them look good— 
strutting without a stutter, 
striding in my own glistening skin. 

My only crime was to be born 
in this subtle and shaded hue, 
born to marvel at curious things 

until I had to write them down 
ringing with the very sound of verse, 
a kind of molten dignity 

even a mad negro could recognize, 
even on the edge of sanity— 
knife slice of all that enmity, 

all those ugly scratches history 
etched onto my eyeballs. 
Far from false, but still in your files— 

a literary suspect, accessible wreck, 
baby girl not fit for the Captain’s table. 
Riddle me this, Verlaine: 

how many poets does it take 
to stop a war, to broker a peace, 
to cut off a piece of any 

reader’s heart, swallow it whole, 
and live? I don’t know if you know 
how it truly feels to be mad, 

angered under the surface 
of myriad subtleties while another 
campus rages, and a city blisters with gunfire.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. She serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review. She is the author of 17 collections of poetry, most recently Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press, 2018), which won the Gold/First Place 2019 Feathered Quill Award in Poetry and is nominated for the 2019 NAACP Image Award in Poetry. She is the literary partner and wife of poet and editor Jon Tribble. 

Polka Dot Dress

SWWIM Every Day
by Angele Ellis

by Angele Ellis

Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), daughter of artists,

jumped from a Manhattan rooftop during a struggle

with depression. She gained posthumous fame

for her innovative photography of the body.

 

 

Your mother worked steadily

in the wake of your death,

peasant feet in painted slippers.

Shocked from function to form,

she blanketed a wall in Beijing

with pottery birds suspended in flight.

 

Your father abandoned abstraction,

clinging to the women he shuttered.

He clicked on a tattoo, kohl-rimmed zero.

The back of the model exposed

by her checkered schoolgirl uniform

stared at him, aperture of failure.

 

You—figure in the yellow wallpaper

blur of beautiful body and shadow

Eros with singed feathers and wild Psyche

Icarus with designer wings, fallen.

No ID but your polka dot dress and

your face, unrecognizable.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Angele Ellis is author of Under the Kaufmann’s Clock (Six Gallery), a hybrid prose-poetry tribute to her adopted city of Pittsburgh with photographs by Rebecca Clever; Spared (A Main Street Rag Editors’ Choice Chapbook); and Arab on Radar (Six Gallery), whose poems won her a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She is a contributing editor to Al Jadid Magazine.

The Chrysanthemums. Liège, 1968

SWWIM Every Day
by Ann Fisher-Wirth

by Ann Fisher-Wirth

First marriage, first party, first apartment.

I invited our boss the principal, and his wife,

 

both from the States, who I wished would

ask us over but who never did, so that

 

sometimes I cried after lunch in the bathroom

at school. On a concrete ledge beside the bed

 

in the one-room apartment, I placed

candles and a potted white chrysanthemum,

 

marked down at Delhaize, where I bought

haché de boeuf for my special meatloaf

 

and red-black wine in a plastic bottle.

At seven, when the guests arrived, I started

 

cooking the meatloaf and making apple pie.

In the pocket-sized kitchen, I finished the pie

 

and fixed the salad as my husband and guests

drank that wine, gazing despondently

 

out the window at the barges on the Meuse.

We ate at half past ten. The meatloaf

 

was a failure, the hardboiled eggs baked

in the meatloaf had turned rubbery and gray,

 

the wine could peel paint. My husband

struggled to keep up conversation.

 

The principal’s wife smirked, said, Oh my,

you don’t know about the chrysanthemums?

                        .           .           .

 

But why smirk at my flowers—even if,

as I learned, they were leftovers marked down

 

after All Souls’ Day, intended only to decorate

graves? My father died when I was fifteen,

 

when the spider chrysanthemums

in my parents’ back yard were blooming,

 

white feathery petals trailing in the mud

after the autumn rains. And since then it always

 

seemed to me that white chrysanthemums

blooming among rain-soaked shadows

 

were like the beautiful ghost

in the film of a Noh play that my father once

 

took me to see, the ghost that appears at twilight

by a temple, to the wanderer in a far country.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s sixth book of poems is The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin Books 2019). Ann collaborated with photographer Maude Schuyler Clay for Mississippi (Wings Press 2018), and coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology with Laura-Gray Street (Trinity UP 2013). Ann has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and residencies to Djerassi, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and CAMAC/France. A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, and 2017 Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College, she teaches at the University of Mississippi.

Self-Portrait as Moon Clichés

SWWIM Every Day
by Anne Graue

by Anne Graue

Some say I am Artemis the Huntress

and I wax like a candle dipped over and over

 

and I wane until I disappear. I pull the oceans

toward me and then push them away. I am cold

 

and dark in shadow and almost transparent

by day. I bring scores of children and make wolves

 

howl at midnight. Full, I am wise. Quartered, I am

nearly empty. Halved, I am ambiguous. When I am

 

crescent, I am nearly new, ready to be filled.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Anne Graue is the author of Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press), and has published work in journals and anthologies including Westchester Review, Red Paint Hill Poetry Journal, the Plath Poetry Project, Random Sample Review, The Book of Donuts (Terrapin Books), Rivet Journal, and One Sentence Poems. Originally from Kansas, she lives in New York where she reviews poetry for the Saturday Poetry Series at Asitoughttobe.com and literary magazines and chapbooks for NewPages.com.

Load More