Mother

SWWIM Every Day
by Catherine Keefe

by Catherine Keefe

as dictionary. Silent as the word
book. Unabridged. Not the kind
you carry in your back pocket. You

must go home to stand agape before
that hand-hewn cherry wood table
lit by rainbow of abalone glass

holding all the words, a sketch of starlings
flooding the Iowa plains just before
snow falls. At your fingertips. Dog

ear me. Highlight. Memorize. How
long it took to write the first
Oxford English Dictionary?

Seventy years. An almost life-
time to gather precise meaning. Unused
words kicked to the curb for rubbish

pick-up. I've thrown away so much. Once
I said the right thing and you leaned forward
so quickly I couldn't uncross my arms. Crack

my spine to find crumbs and new
adjectives. This is my body for you
to find your way. Pluck

grace notes like the guitarist
on the green that summer
before the great migration.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Keefe is a California poet, essayist and social justice activist. Recent work appeared in Collateral Damage, a Pirene's Fountain Anthology, TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, andThe Gettysburg Review. Catherine works as a story coach, helping families shape and document generational narratives. Her current writing project, Kind In Kind, is a yearlong effort to turn public attention towards the transformational effect of performing daily, simple acts of kindness. Follow along at www.catherinekeefe.com

Somewhere in America

SWWIM Every Day
by Lily Starr

by Lily Starr

Risk in our lifetime is slipping
something small into the full
pocket of a leather purse.
I have lost so much this way,
sunglasses, lighters,
a knife so thin it could fit
in a fold of your knuckle.
I lost you somewhere in America,
between the river
and everything after it.
We always feared landlock.
Only the current loved us this way—
enough to hold our bodies until
we stopped our shaking.
I dreamt of you once. The field
behind my house, my father’s deer
feeder replaced by your hands,
full of sweet corn and invitation
for a velvet mouth. But nothing came.
The hunting camera caught your body,
flash turning your face a shock of white.
I think of you now, in Alabama,
where the light doesn’t dare
touch the stars. I bet you’re so tan
your toenails look like mother of pearl.
I bet everyone loves you like a country.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lily Starr is an eager and passionate student of poetry from Cecil County, Maryland. She earned a BA in English from Washington College in the spring of 2017 and is currently pursuing her MFA at Florida International University in Miami. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, The Journal, and Gulf Stream.

Thirty-Year Friendship

SWWIM Every Day
by Nan Cohen

by Nan Cohen

If I say you know me better than I know myself,
that’s not to say you know everything about me.

What I mean is that a forest doesn’t know itself
the way a woodcutter does. Or a wolf. Or a child
walking into the woods.

But, you, you know what it is
to walk in these woods. To greet the woodcutter
and the wolf. To take the child’s hand.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nan Cohen, the longtime poetry program director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, is the author of two books of poems, Rope Bridge (2005) and Unfinished City (2017). The recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, she lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at Viewpoint School and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Espalier

SWWIM Every Day
by Zoë Ryder White

by Zoë Ryder White

My neighbor, in her green gloves and plastic bunny mask, is training her pear tree—a child, really—to stand straight, arms outstretched. The tree goes two-dimensional with this effort. It’s a training meant to bring beauty; symmetry. Every year as the branches grow, there is more length to tie down. To plant a no-shitting-dogs icon in the square of dirt around what you’d call the tree’s trunk, my neighbor trades the bunny mask for raccoon. The tree is drawn and quartered, though my neighbor is kind; encouraging. Things grow well around her. She binds the tree’s branches to the frame with twisties. She pushes the raccoon mask onto the top of her head so she can see what she’s doing. When the tree is old enough to bear fruit, pears will hang from the frame like a row of pears at the market. When the other neighbor walks by, the one who calls me fucking white whore, will she admire the honey blush around the pears’ dangling bottoms? And will I? My neighbor puts a new mask on. What a collection! This one is the tusked wild boar. Dangerous, delicious. G. says we’re each a little queer in our queer little way. Kurt C. said something similar in the nineties but I’m not sure he meant what she means. If I sit still, I feel what moves through my carotid. A pot of bones boils in the kitchen. I render the spring fat. I lay my hands on me.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Zoë Ryder White lives in Brooklyn with her family, writing poems and editing books for educators about the craft of teaching. Her poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, Threepenny Review, Crab Creek Review, and Subtropics, among others.

I was visible

I was visible

SWWIM Every Day
by Amanda J. Forrester

by Amanda J. Forrester

Please click on the post to view this poem.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amanda J. Forrester received her MFA from the University of Tampa. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Azahares Spanish Language Literary Magazine, Pink Panther Magazine, Collective Unrest, Trailer Park Quarterly, and other anthologies and journals. She is a founder and production manager of Critical Sun Press and snuggles with her fur babies when she isn’t working long hours as a data analyst at Saint Leo University. Follow her on Twitter @ajforrester75.

Are You Latinx

SWWIM Every Day
by Andrea Dulanto

by Andrea Dulanto

Did you know your grandparents?

No? 

Then you have no history.

Your mother from Argentina?

Tu padre de Peru?

He doesn’t look like your father.

Is he your real father?

You look white.

Why don’t you just say you’re from here?

Can’t cook,
slightly anorexic.

Middle-class.

Catholic school—yes, okay—we’ll accept that.

Pero Buddhist—spiritual—Unitarian Universalist? ¿Qué es eso?

You only read books in English.

Never read Don Quixote/
tried to read Don Quixote.

Didn’t you leave behind the entire Spanish language?

(but sometimes it’s home)

Didn’t you leave home?

More than once?

The daughter
should stay home.

No husband, no hijos?

Too queer.

(not queer enough,
but that’s another poem)

Middle-aged,
sola sola sola.

Familia es todo.

What is home?

What is home?

you listen to Kingdom of the Sun: The Inca Heritage

(is this your culture
or the need to prove your culture)

you read Nelly’s story in the liner notes—

the nuns at school
teach her

singing
is a sin

a musicologist
records Nelly’s father, Don Luis Camasco, with his band of musicians/guitar makers—
Conjunto Mensajeros Dos de Mayo

they lift their songs
late into the night

Nelly listens

finally, one night, her father says—you’re my daughter

finally, the musicologist says—the nuns didn’t know
all there is

so she sings

the musicologist takes notes—

“a voice harsh from disuse but full of spirit”

you listen

you are not her
she is not you

every voice
is a story

her voice
is a story

hers
alone.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Andrea Dulanto is a Latina queer writer. Degrees include an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Florida International University, and a B.A. in Literature and Women’s Studies from Antioch College in Ohio. She has worked as a writing instructor, a freelance writer, and editor. In 2016, she was awarded an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. Publications include Gertrude Journal, The Kenyon Review, BlazeVOX, Court Green, and Sinister Wisdom.

Why Walk When We Can Fly

SWWIM Every Day

by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Toilet paper wings
trailing behind him, my son
flaps through the house.
He’s unraveled the entire roll
in seconds, that’s all it took
to leave so much white behind,
on the floor and in the air
and in his hands. That’s how he burned,
I think, Icarus that is, but my son
isn’t reaching for the sun yet
and I haven’t taught him intent,
that arms transform
when they move that quickly,
that the body is always just an instant
away from becoming
something else, from leaving
the ground or returning to it.
And he falls, on his knees
or face, flat to the hardwood, falls
without knowing how
it happened and rises
having forgotten he ever fell.
Maybe we need that too, to forget
or fall more, to move against
the past instead of towards it,
because underwater, the wax
must have congealed
back to wings around him
as the backwards sun
swallowed the whole
bird of him, clouds and body
strewn inside out,
left white and bare
as the hottest part
of a dying flame
or a star maybe, 
one we watch night after night
forgetting it must have died
so long ago
to still trail the sky.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Julia is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize, forthcoming from Kent State University Press in the fall of 2019, as well as the chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her newest poems appear in POETRY, Nashville Review, TriQuarterly, and Waxwing. Julia is the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine and writes a blog about motherhood.

Ride a Red Horse

SWWIM Every Day
by Jan Steckel

by Jan Steckel

We watched waxwings spiral after
gorging on rotten cherries.
Deer staggered when they munched
those wizened sloe berries.

We went from mead to rye spirits
in a thousand years flat.

Get you a copper kettle and coil.
Distill moonshine. Fuck the government.
They can shove their whiskey taxes
where the moon don’t rise.

We’ve been bootlegging
since before we crossed the pond,
rum-running in skiffs and canoes since
the first thick sticky drop of molasses.

We’re the red light in a monkey’s eye,
a red horse rearing rampant,
liquid crystal joy, white lightning
up the spine and out the brain.

Pour that new liquor in old bottles,
can money and cackle at the Fed.

Every cell of yeast’s a joy factory.
Corn makes a better liquid lunch
than stores of next year’s seed.

Some say farms birthed civilization,
but we know alcohol’s the real reason
we tamed that wild grass into grain.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jan Steckel’s lastest poetry book is Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018). Her poetry book, The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011), won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook, Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009), and poetry chapbook, The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006), also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, SWWIM Every Day, Canary, Assaracus, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California.

Last Seen

SWWIM Every Day
by Jessica Dionne

by Jessica Dionne

“Anywhere there are good and bad spirits, but the more there is hardship, the more bad spirits come around”—Ivan Posey, Eastern Shoshone Council 

Last seen tearing down the lane on thick
thighs like thunder-bang, Jr. queen of Wind
River Res. Last seen wresting things out of
cracks in scorched earth, holding them up
to the light. Last seen laughing, head thrown
back like a hallelujah. Last seen curled up
in scrub-grass with friends, blowing kisses
to a bottle of Black Velvet. Last seen enraptured
by the crack-up of baby bird bones, that lissome cull.

Last seen cheeks currant with scatter-heat,
the kind that roils. Last seen in any bar, in every bar.
At a parade. The gas station. At 11:09.
Last seen hair the color of crow although, one that
cannot fly. Last seen on an encrusted couch, legs
draped like an afterthought. Last seen covering
breasts like mountain peaks that they will not
know. Last seen mouth cherry O, forming the
word no, lips fused around pearls.

Last seen in Hot Springs County, before the first
snow. Last seen bruises blooming up an arm like
nothing else in this place can. Last seen inky locks
in the river, tangling. Last seen clavicle-splintered.
Last seen bones with gnaw-marks made from things
which scurry home to nests, grateful for small gifts. Last
seen a body, sparkling like a thing yet to be discovered.
Last seen as a scream, clawing its way out of a red, red mouth.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Dionne is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University. She received her MA in Literature from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her work has appeared in Rust + Moth, Banshee (IE), Mascara Literary Review (AU), The Mayo Review, The Longleaf Pine, and JMWW. She also received a writing residency from the Weymouth Center of the Arts and Humanities.

My Still Life with Wasps

SWWIM Every Day
by Amanda Moore

by Amanda Moore

I’ve lived in three homes in this town.
In three homes, wasps
nestled my walls:

paper hives blooming wildly,
unwanted August weeds.
They burrow toward my sleeping sounds at night,

and in the day they track me,
little sentinels from door
to driveway to door again.

The Bee Man arrives,
poisons this new nest
and can only cross his fingers.

Once before they died in pools
along my porch. Another,
they chewed through the wall and writhed

in inch-thick ribbons on my bed
until death gripped them in its teeth.
Once nestled, a home cannot

cut wasps loose to life, send them flying
to wilder, wider eaves,
an abandoned house or hollow tree—

this isn’t like the mother’s body, baby
breaking womb to emerge alive
and far from what it fed upon.

The house swells with wasps
that will be carried out only by death.
I am not afraid of such evil birth.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amanda Moore's poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including ZZYZVA, Cream City Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Best New Poets, and SWWIM Every Day, and she is currently a fellow at the San Francisco Writers Grotto. A high school English teacher, Amanda lives by the beach with her husband and daughter in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. More about her work is available at http://amandapmoore.com.

Boom

SWWIM Every Day
by Haya Pomrenze

by Haya Pomrenze

My son tells me he stopped eating
hummus and falafel on Bezalel Street
after Bus #18 split in half in Jerusalem.
East or West?

My son froze, watched the Burial Society
men tweeze flesh from a tree.
Mesmerized by the Hello Kitty book bag
streaked with blood, inches from his Nike sneakers.

After the Europe explosion—London or France?—
my son went everywhere on foot, sold
his train pass to an unsuspecting kid from Kansas.
After the Aurora cinema shootings, 

my son subscribed to Netflix
but never saw The Dark Knight Rises.
The shooter looked more like a dazed joker
with a bad dye job than a crazed killer.

My son settles into the car’s
passenger seat, secures the belt, and I notice the shaving gash
by his ear. I’m firing questions in staccato,
but he's fiddling with his iPhone, bopping to Labyrinth

when we both hear the boom, the backfire
of a car. And I pretend not to notice
my son’s lurch, the Book of Psalms
falling from his pocket.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Haya Pomrenze’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals including Hanging Loose, Rattle, Hawaii Pacific Review, MiPOesias, Lake Effect, and Lalitamba.  She is the author of two poetry collections: Hook (Rock Press, 2007), which was a National Jewish Book Award nominee, and How It’s Done (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Haya is an occupational therapist and uses poetry as a healing tool on a psychiatric unit. She is also a second degree black belt in the martial arts.

weightless

SWWIM Every Day
by Constance Schultz

by Constance Schultz

barely there I see you &
drifting snow the deer are here
clouds of cotton & you say

the sun heard it
even when the walls were there more
are cold & I love you

there is no roof I’m guessing
& snow pretends heart & maybe
      to melt it hears

hearted what it wants
when he smiles maybe it knows nothing

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Constance Schultz and her family live in the diverse Pacific Northwest. She has work in the Rising Phoenix Review, Bone & Ink Press, Empty Mirror, Sobotka Literary Review, and Hidden Channel Zine. Ms. Schultz also regularly contributes to Them Dam Writers online.

Sigiriya Rock Temple

SWWIM Every Day
by Abigail Wender

by Abigail Wender

I. Last Monologue of King Kashyapa in Which He Praises His Finest Work, 5C


“My city is guarded by five hundred goddesses,
each one is a jewel dug from clay.

No one sees the goddesses without desire.
A man may be lost forever
dreaming of their pale red mouths and blue shadows.

I have built a city near to heaven.
My enemy will never understand.

They were my harem.
From villages I saved them, from the underworld
beneath the trees; mothers and fathers gave them to me freely.

The maidens praised the artists who captured them
in frescos on these high cliff walls.

Praise me: I have made them immortal.
My home is this city near to heaven.
Goddesses: protect me from my enemy!

A man may be lost forever dreaming of his enemies.
Watch over me, o goddesses,

I have built my city to rival heaven.”   

II. The Defacement, 1967


A monk looks at the ancient frescoes—

he feels a pulse
fast as the blackout
of desire

The almost naked
goddesses, platters of mango
about to fall from slender fingers

A goddess’s smoky chime of bangles,
her nipples like orchids
in wet heat

Someone calls to him, he believes, a bhikkhus, 
master from the sacred ranks of monks,
the ONE among many

From the pail, he lifts a heavy broom and sweeps—
smothers us whores with tar

Swallows, too, foul the rock face with streaks 

III.  The Goddesses’ Song  


we goddesses                                          we dance with birds
we are the words                                    written on leaves
we are gods                                             mothers of gods
we mother                                               we give birth to the gods
we are                                                     gods’ eyes

lovers come closer                                 here with us forever
we are your sisters                                 flow of water   of leaf
we are your lovers                                   rain    leaf   rice
read us                                                     arm   breast   belly
sail with the swallows                             our eyes   your eyes

below us                                                  you who made us
you who read us                                      we are fresco   we are rock
you preserve us                                       do not deceive us
we live forever                                         do not defile us   
call the swallows                                     shade our witness

call the wind                                            night protect us
the rain blows in                                      night oh protect
the sun beats                                             and rock protect us
god’s eyes                                                flute   drum   chime
our names                                                rain   rock   rice

__________________________________________________________________

Abigail Wender’s poetry and translations have appeared in The Cortland Review, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Epiphany, Kenyon Review Online, New Orleans Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her translation of a selection of Iris Hanika’s Das Eigentliche (THE ESSENTIAL) was published in Asymptote. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and lives in New York City.

Specs

SWWIM Every Day
by Karen George

by Karen George

             ~ After Mary Oliver's "Sand Dabs, Four"



Where does your breath go when you lose it? When it gets knocked out of you?

Try not to laugh at accidents.

Beneath trees, gaze up to swell your lungs, elate your heart.

Why is it you adore paisley and parsley?

Wheels of color and spirals fuel you.

Why did it take so long to fathom the sky?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Karen George is the author of five chapbooks, and two poetry collections from Dos Madres Press, Swim Your Way Back (2014) and A Map and One Year (2018). My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Adirondack Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, Sliver of Stone, and Still: The Journal. She reviews poetry and interviews poets at Poetry Matters, and is the co-founder and fiction editor of the online journal, Waypoints.

Hole

SWWIM Every Day
by Hilary Sideris

by Hilary Sideris

To drain our
mother’s hematoma,

they drill into her
head. Not blood,

she says, a pinkish
liquid—lymph, pus?—

pools in the space
between her brain

& skull. Our father’s
dead, a good rid-

dance. Her depth
perception’s off.

She falls & falls.  
We call it grief.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Hilary Sideris grew up in Indiana. She lives in Brooklyn and works for The City University of New York. Her poems have recently been published in Gravel, Main Street Rag, The Lake, and Salamander. Her collection Un Amore Veloce is just out from Kelsay Books. “Hole” will appear in The Silent b, forthcoming from Dos Madres Press.

There, Now That's Better

SWWIM Every Day
by Caroline Plasket

by Caroline Plasket

Once, my body was the Red Sea,
and I was Moses, only Moses was

a woman and she screamed into the water,
and it split unilaterally. From her

midline she pulled with an arm, not a staff,
the head of humanity. She cradled the warm,

red life with intention—the way
a midwife feels for the cliff of fundus. And then

the waters closed. There was the salty
expanse of sea—they were on

it, not in it, and her body was bread. Was Jesus
the myth of a woman who softened under

the delicious, pink, wet pallet of life,
in the milky ocean of saliva? We have

drifted        the slow evolution to the shore. Where
the child faces me

before drinking me into herself.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Caroline Plasket's poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Atticus Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Orange Blossom Review, Compose, IDK, and Stirring, among others. She was a fall 2016 mentee in the AWP Writer to Writer Program.

Modern Degas

SWWIM Every Day
by Adina Kopinsky

by Adina Kopinsky

A knee joint, a bent elbow,
a spangled skirt—ballerinas passé
towards the floor, shoulders gleam
with the minutiae of anatomy;
elegant as ever you sketched—

dancers in the dim light of a dressing room,
skin like cream and caramel, hollow
against spine, like horses paused
before the Kentucky Derby, prize stallions
of the Bolshoi Ballet. 

No wonder you loved them all, Edgar—
muscles, feathered skirts and plumed
tails, the heave of chests, mist
and paw, the rise and fall of music,
gunshot, the hee-yaw! of a jockey—

you would have loved Messi too,
instep kick like a dancer on the soccer field,
rising a relevé to the rhythm of his fans;
hearts stopped, tableau, the body
of work you left behind, ballerina and horse,

brush and charcoal, form and flesh,
Raymondo, Ronaldo, the sweat and swell
of delusions, dreams, a revelation
of what our bodies, our hands
might have been—

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Adina Kopinsky is an emerging poet balancing poetry, motherhood, and reflective living. Now living in Israel, she is originally from Los Angeles and has a degree in English Literature from California State University, Northridge. She has work published or forthcoming in Carbon Culture Review, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, and Peacock Journal, among other publications.

Two Daughters

SWWIM Every Day
by Emily Pérez

by Emily Pérez

When there are two
daughters, one is soft
one is swift
            one can stretch
her face to contain
honey or humor
saline, a bone graft
disdain.
One cannot bend
but knows her place
the curtains
the floorboard’s tongue-
in-groove, the hearthstone.

When there are two
            daughters there are two
moons, both sickle-celled
            and fawn-eyed.
One that sings
one that scolds.
Both hold their breath
            under bridges.

Sometimes there are two
rivers cutting landscape
flooding farms
            sometimes fire strides forth
on two fronts
            sometimes two stars
orbit each other, but these
            reflect each other’s light
and these are not
            two daughters.


_____________________________________________________________________________________

Emily Pérez is the author of the full-length collection, House of Sugar, House of Stone, and the chapbooks Made and Unmade and Backyard Migration Route. A CantoMundo fellow, her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Fairy Tale Review, and Poetry. She teaches English and Gender Studies in Denver, where she lives with her husband and sons.

The Winter of Our Marriage

SWWIM Every Day
by Sara Backer

by Sara Backer

For several months, this snow
has held us under siege, indentured servants
of the shovel, supplicants at power line altars.

We drive through gray crystallized mazes,
forced into potholes, blind at every corner.
Our eyes burn from ceaseless white:

walls, windows, ground, and sky. I threaten
to paint each room lime green and you almost agree.
We hunker under the blanket we call Old Sparky,

and our old cat chisels herself between us.
After midnight, a full moon makes the clouded sky
bright as day—and pink?

I wake you. You confirm the sky is pink.
We never figure out the mystery.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sara Backer has two poetry chapbooks: Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork 2015), which won the Turtle Island Poetry Award, and Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press 2018). Her writing has been honored with residency fellowships from the Norton Island and Djerassi programs and with eight Pushcart nominations. For links to her online publications, visit sarabacker.com.

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