Pulse: A Memorial in Driftwood, Cannon Beach, OR

SWWIM Every Day
by Caridad Moro-Gronlier

by Caridad Moro-Gronlier

I have crossed a continent
to cast forty-nine names into the sea,
cuarenta y nueve nombres mangled
by anchors—Flores, Paniagua, Sanfeliz—
on a beach strewn with bones
of giants: Redwood, Sequoia, Sitka Spruce.
Behemoths that would not stay buried.

Before the ruined beauty of this necropolis,
saplings cleaved to elders, grew
stronger in each other’s arms
as they danced in darkened groves,
lit by the strobe of sunlight, dappled
limbs akimbo, unprepared for annihilation,
unprepared for the spilled sap, the glint
of the axe, the buzz saw, the prayers
planted at the root of their destruction.

I step over titans battered down
to driftwood, stripped of tannin and pulp,
bark bleached white as sheets and offer
forty-nine names to the sea,
cuarenta y nueve nombres.

Here I can believe the ocean
returns what she is given.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the author of Visionware (Finishing Line Press). She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has appeared in The Tishman Review, The Cossack Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Antioch Review, The South Florida Poetry Journal, and others. She is an English instructor for MDCPS, an English professor for Miami Dade College and the Editor of The Orange Island Review.

The World is a Scented Handkerchief

SWWIM Every Day

by Erin Murphy

                        after Shakir Li’aibi



The world is a moonlit rib,
a disheveled vigil, a shackled

clock. The world is greedy
geography, empty bells,

unripened tides, breathless
shells on a desert beach.

The world is a newborn
nun. The world is a fluttering

gun. The world is extinguished
chants, listless ships, bleeding

thieves. It is clouded vowels,
the taste of sound on the tongue

of a young girl. The world
is every word unfurled.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Erin Murphy’s eighth book of poems is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, North American Review, Field, Brevity, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her awards include The Normal School Poetry Prize judged by Nick Flynn, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award judged by Patricia Smith. She is editor of three anthologies from the University of Nebraska Press and SUNY Press and serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona.

Silverwear

SWWIM Every Day
by Terese Svoboda

by Terese Svoboda

A fork and a spoon lie together
to spoon and to fork.

E = MC squared says the spoon.
I don't have the energy says the fork.

Forgiveness? says the spoon.
It is as if we lie on a vast table

says the fork. Useless.
The spoon measures a dose.

Sink to your knees. The fork
submits. The past is prescient.

The fork clasps the spoon.
Of course, says the spoon.

It's all about portion control.
Let's sleep says the fork.

Weep? says the spoon.
The spoon keeps busy until
the fork is sorry too, like the song.

Make me toast says the spoon, and snappy.
The fork says Who turned out

the light? Birds begin singing
their favorite: O moon, O moon.

The table was laid, says the spoon,
not me. Tines, my dear, are everything,

says the fork. My tines are retired.
They spoon through course

after intercourse, the hunger being
incurable, inconsolable.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Terese Svoboda's Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, her most recent book of poetry, was published in 2016. Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, was published in paper in 2018, and Great American Desert, a book of stories, in 2019. "Terese Svoboda is one of those writers you would be tempted to read regardless of the setting or the period or the plot or even the genre.”—Bloomsbury Review.

The Broken Cedar Waxwing

SWWIM Every Day
by Eliana Swerdlow

by Eliana Swerdlow

When you opened my leg,
I imagined I was the cedar waxwing
you picked up off the red patio
after it flew into the living room window,
bouncing back off the glass, its back against
the brick. You pulled its right wing
from its body gently and let the bird rest
on the yellow-striped kitchen towel.
Now, when you leave, you wrap me
in the comforter and tell me I can leave
before you come back. But I am not scared
of your touch like the cedar waxwing.
I am only scared I will fall between your fingers
when you are here and warm,
and I will hit the bed like a brick patio,
my body echoing away from you,
its noise lost in the mattress springs,
my freedom always underneath you
even when my body is gone.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

An undergraduate at Yale University, Eliana Swerdlow is a Human Rights scholar studying English. In New Haven, she is an editor for the street publication Elm City Echo. Her work has appeared previously in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and she has poems forthcoming in the Gordon Square Review, White Wall Review, Panoplyzine, and Yale Literary Magazine.

Faith is a Thing with Running Shoes

SWWIM Every Day
by Susan Browne

by Susan Browne

Scrolling down my iPhone calendar, I stop at 2071.
That year, my birthday is on a Sunday. I’ll be 119.
If I had to add it all up, I’d say I was way too normal.
I can’t believe I spent a minute feeling guilty
for having lots of boyfriends in my youth
or having sex with two men in one day. It wasn’t easy
getting from the east side of town to the west side
on my bicycle in time. I should keep the faith.
Yesterday, I was in a hot tub with two men.
They were discussing earthquake preparedness.
One said he had a kit that could filter
any kind of water, including sewage.
The other said he had a rafter built in his garage
to protect his car, and it could support
the local high school cheerleading squad doing pull-ups.
Or so the builder advertised. I have nothing prepared
for an emergency, except a gallon of Tanqueray
in the cupboard above the oven because I gave up gin
after my second divorce. Maybe this means I have faith
in something. At least twice a week I wake up astonished
at how living calmly goes on, shoulder to shoulder
with unreckonable tragedy. The men paused
to take a scrolling glance when I stepped out of the hot tub.
Then they went on about where to store the food
and the importance of keeping a pair of running shoes
under the desk at the office.

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susan Browne’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Subtropics, The Southern Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Superstition Review, American Life in Poetry, and 180 More, Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. Her first book, Buddha’s Dogs (Four Way Books), was awarded the Intro Prize. Her second book, Zephyr (Steel Toe Books), won the Editor’s Prize. For more, see www.susanbrownepoems.com.

Sampaguita (When We're in Bloom)

SWWIM Every Day
by Momo Manalang

by Momo Manalang

Mother                                    you splice my mango mouth in June,

 

                    shed my ripe skin                    in pockets of dawn,

                                                                                  lather

 

this naked tongue                    til’ shrimp paste                                  permeates,

 

                   beckon summer           to sing us                     eighteen thousand miles,

 

         until Pampango harvests                     my name                     from the sampaguita;

 

you, an exhausted ocean         who enlivens such roots,

 

          I learn to arrive            home                                      a child of the sun

 

                                   who serenades             without dry lungs—

 

         Nanay                                      you unravel me like seeds unfurling

 

in diaspora’s garden.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Momo Manalang is a Filipino-American writer from Miami, Florida. She is currently studying Human Rights at Columbia University in New York, and already has plans of returning to the Philippines to pursue various political endeavors. Between July to January, she will be embarking on a leave of absence to Luzon to participate in community integrations with Filipino activists, assist in an international convening of women leaders, and intern at a reputable research institution for human rights. 

Scene from a Birmingham Diner Rated Four Stars by Zagat

SWWIM Every Day
by Alina Stefanescu

by Alina Stefanescu

You meet a nice immigrant that fills
up space with stories about Bosnia;
fills in the gaps with New York. The

question of Alaska is melting and yes
ice cubes in your Fanta would be nice.
You perform the usual astonishment

at her skilled use of English idioms. She
smiles and spills an affinity for the Brontes.
Her hair is Crimson Tide red, protected

by trademark. She hates football but maybe
plays anything when in Rome. You are a solid
Greek graduate of togas and keg-stands who

can italicize any era into parties. She says
it is difficult to unburden yourself to men
that don't see you as separate. She's dying

her hair orange for Auburn next month.
You think middle schools should teach
physics or start earlier—and you hope she

can tell you're joking. Being hilarious.
She says it's hard to talk to men that can't
hear you. Which is strange since you'd never

disparage her accent. She says men can't hear
her ever plus never. Your hair is solid pine-trunk
brown. You ready that quip about separate

spheres ideology but the waitress drums
her nails against the menu plastic. As if
to say: You pompous old fuck, no thing is
separate & here I am, serving you anyway.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Alabama. Her poems and prose are recent or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, New South, Mantis, VOLT, Cloudbank, Prairie Schooner, NELLE, and others. She serves as Poetry Editor of Pidgeonholes and President of the Alabama State Poetry Society. Her first poetry chapbook, Objects in Vases (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016), won the ASPS Poetry Book of the Year Award. Her first poetry collection, Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus (Finishing Line Press, 2017) included Pushcart-nominated poems. Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize and was published in May 2018. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com or @aliner.

The wild rain

SWWIM Every Day
by Heidi Williamson

by Heidi Williamson

What waters our bodies have received
—each filament of rain
coursing the length of our skin
lies undiscovered now at this dark hour.

In here, the night is quiet and cool. Outside,
the wild rain courts the grass: even in the dark
I feel its greening—the grass glossed like keratin smoothly
anchoring, protecting the dust of us.

I lean against the solidity of your clement body
soft with sleep, lean in to you. On your arm, your hand,
each tiny hair responds to my disclosing touch.
The territory of your body grounds me, strands me.

The grass has craved this all day:
the phantom rain fell too lightly to reach land,
the heavy sun striking out
droplets as they formed.

Above all, my uncontrollable heart
coils wild as the wild rain outside
springing right back up again
from the earth where it belongs.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Heidi Williamson is the current Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is a poetry surgeon for The Poetry Society and teaches for The Poetry School and National Centre for Writing. She mentors poets by Skype worldwide. The Print Museum (Bloodaxe) won the 2016 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry. Electric Shadow (Bloodaxe, 2011) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. For more, please see www.heidiwilliamsonpoet.com.

A Moral Universe

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

You could also
believe that instead of the arc
bending toward justice, it falls into mud,
that there is no magnetic pull of goodness lingering
in the stars. How some of us will end in a nursing home,
alone, our minds washed of the stacks and stacks of scenes
we held in the folds. Or maybe there will be rebirth—
scientists have regenerated parts of dead pigs’
brains. I wonder what returns—The trough?
The suckling at a teat? The last touch
of dirt on those four tiny feet
before the slaughter?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has three poetry collections, The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera, forthcoming in 2019. Recently, poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.

when Chen Chen tweets about deer in a poem

SWWIM Every Day
By Ray Ball

by Ray Ball

I think
I can’t see a deer
on a page
without bracing for impact
the word evokes
not one car crash
but two antlers
shattering windshields
in stricken moments
replicated later in a set
of vanishing headlights

one summer morning
a dear friend and I gasped
snippets of conversation
and gossip pushing our tempo
quick turnover on a shaded path
clouds of mosquitos
blocked the sun
when we startled a doe

her eyes reminded me
of the color of a totaled sedan
of the terror of waking
as glass breaks and soars
of the way winds lift
off a river the way
darknesses intertwine
creating a fragile anchor
to tether a vessel between worlds

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ray Ball grew up in a house full of snakes. She is a history professor, Pushcart-nominated poet, and editor at Alaska Women Speak. Her first chapbook, Tithe of Salt, was published by Louisiana Literature Press, and she has recent publications in Coffin Bell, Moria, and UCity Review. When she's not in the classroom, you can find her drinking bitter beverages, researching in the Spanish and Italian archives, or on Twitter.

When the famous poet's widower sidles up to you at her memorial

SWWIM Every Day
by Alexis Rhone Fancher

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

he’ll ask if you’re the same girl who used to live on Clinton St, and weren’t your sons 
once friends? Old, with bushy brows and a scraggly beard, he’ll be even more repellant. 

You’ll recall his fusty smell, how he’d push his way into your apartment,
sit too close to you on your couch, uninvited, stroke your hair.

He’ll ask if you remember the handmade books he tried to sell you
scribbled drawings, pages of ramblings disguised as poems, ink-splotched, unintelligible,

glitter escaping from the gaping pages onto your apartment’s grey shag confusion;
how he almost coerced you into buying one, you, who could barely make rent, 

who could barely afford cheap, Payless shoes for your growing boy.

Did I come on to you back then? he’ll ask, gripping your arm so you can’t escape. 
He’ll feign foggy, confused. When you answer yes, he’ll smile, and say,

Yeah, well. In those days, I came on to everyone.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

L.A. poet Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, Plume, The American Journal of Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Diode, Nashville Review, Wide Awake, Poets of Los Angeles, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She’s the author of 5 poetry collections; How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen, (2014), State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, (2015), Enter Here, (2017), Junkie Wife, (2018), and The Dead Kid Poems (2019). EROTIC, New & Selected, publishes in 2020 from New York Quarterly. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. www.alexisrhonefancher.com

When Mars Is Aligned

SWWIM Every Day
by Barbra Nightingale

by Barbra Nightingale

And the moon is in its second house
or is it third? Or fourth or fifth?
I can’t keep track of all those lyrics
let alone events the symbols might portend.

The only thing I’m sure of is the night sky
and how when I look up in the dark
I see the red planet winking,
the moon going through its phases,
the planets moving together or apart.

What would Galileo say about the galaxies
twisting and turning in space,
the bubbles and black holes, the dark and heavy
matter pressing down on all the souls of earth?

What would be the point, he’d say,
or maybe what difference would it make?
One way or the other, we’re collapsing
on ourselves, the seas are rising,
and each breath we take is measured.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Barbra Nightingale recently retired from 34 years at Broward College. She is now an Associate Editor with the South Florida Poetry Journal, and she volunteers with the Ft. Lauderdale Film Festival. She has eight books of poetry with small presses, and over 200 published poems. Visit her at www.barbranightingale.com.

In Which I am Surprised to Find Myself in April Again

SWWIM Every Day
by Beth Gordon

by Beth Gordon

This spring I am required to turn the tap left, ending the river of recycled 
tears, I am required to pray to living children, to their knees and small stomachs,
their throats and green toes, I am required to cover the witch’s well with cut cedar,
board it up with magic mirrors buried beneath the bones, I am required to float 
with  my grandson in sun-blue pool water, his unscarred skin so gentle a sponge for 
all things clean and in flight, his good hands in motion, his fingers antennae, his voice 
as deep as a baby bullfrog, creaky as a rusted bell, I am required to 
look into the face of my newborn grand daughter, her crystal ball eyes revealing 
her amber-scented future with 90 years of hurricane survival stories, 
not the weedy-trailed paths of the past, snakes tasting her heels as she passes, this spring 
I am required to take a lover, let something touch my skin that was born in floods
of blood and womb-water not wool-woven or cast iron, I am required to use 
my body, remove it from the cellar where it hides with canned okra, mulberry 
jam, I am required to drape it around my songs, I am required to pinch and be
pinched, to bruise, to slither, to goosebump, to wander with memories of tongues and teeth, 
to wallow in muddy creeks with tadpoles and crawfish, I am required to dry my-
self with forsythia and dandelion dust, until I am aglow with yellow.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother, currently landlocked in St. Louis, MO. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous journals including Into the Void, Noble/Gas, Five:2:One, Verity La, Califragile, Pretty Owl Poetry and Yes Poetry. Her chapbook, Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe will be published in May 2019 by AHC Press. She is also the Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.

Skin Deep

SWWIM Every Day
by Cynthia Atkins

by Cynthia Atkins

I took my body out of the hand-me-down 
bin. It sagged empty as a winter coat 
on its hanger. Believe it or not, once it was chased
by a town-car of clowns—The drunken 
pimpled sons of sons of sons 
of the Ku Klux Klan.  
            I was a Jew, a Jew.
My body had kinky hair and a crooked nose.
Not like the girls with bowling-pin white teeth
and doily-tanned toes. The blood of a Jew 
           on my virgin Kmart underwear.
They shadowed me down aisles, 
into a junkyard purgatory of broken toys.    
          God’s drunk at 2 am 
when the fluorescent lights
hone in on the Denny’s bathroom. 
Interrogating every truth and blemish.  
           I did it in the graffiti-riddled stall, 
staring down a cracked toilet. My body’s 
tongue forced on his dark pulse.  
He squeezed my head so hard, 
          it burned a hole in time. 
I counted the headstones 
of my people, like tiny boats 
in an inlet. One by one, they saved me.  
The cuts and wounds filled 
not with blood, but umpteen years 
       of Sweet’N Low and sadness.      
I’m easy, tell me what I want to hear. 
”Your face is damn ugly.” The next day, 
“Kike” and “Slut” Magic Markered 
on my locker— a swastika like a jungle gym
for the dead. My name scrawled in every 
defiled bathroom stall—Our calls
       hollow in the wax of God’s ear.

__________________________________________________________________

Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers and In The Event of Full Disclosure, and the forthcoming collection, Still-Life With God. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Apogee, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Diode, Florida Review, Flock Lit, Green Mountains Review, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Rust + Moth, SWWIM Every Day, Tampa Review, andVerse Daily, among others. She lives in Rockbridge County, VA with her family. More info at www.cynthiaatkins.com or @catkinspoet.

Minotaur

SWWIM Every Day
by Romana Iorga

by Romana Iorga

Somewhere on the outskirts of the body
the gulls are trying their wings
on gusts of wind.
Somewhere the foghorn announces danger
at low tide and billows break
over hidden rocks
the way sleep breaks
over the submerged cliffs
of consciousness.

I spill into the world all anew,
carried forth by the amniotic gush
of half-dreamed words.
No newborns are ugly,
though some of them turn out more handsome
than others.
But who’s to profess judgment,
when we all are sinking lead, bait
for what lurks beneath,
when the line
we hold in our hands
leads directly to the beast?

The morning is yielding
its foggy pastels to brighter
tempera.  Soon,
I will slip into familiar skin,
utter the names
of these almost forgotten
alleys of veins and arteries,
learn to inhabit again
the labyrinth of my body.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga lives in Switzerland. She is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian, 'Poem of Arrival' and 'Simple Hearing.' Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Cagibi, Washington Square Review, PANK, and others, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.

her story is my story is your story

SWWIM Every Day
by Melissa Eleftherion

by Melissa Eleftherion

her story is my story is your story the axes we intersect, collide, ruminate, devise the branches we extend to heartache to the larynx to the mouth humans in our filth and consequence partially digested morals and transformative butt yoga we allied in flesh and rattles a kindred of sextants making sense of pecuniary disease a systemic longing for connections when criminal justice is criminal warfare and we are all under this rock heaving against it with our might intact and our eyes xanthic with exhaustion. we are in this radial of desire we dichroic points & light when we turn we turn together and that’s where we’re going

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Melissa Eleftherion is a writer, librarian, and a visual artist. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & six chapbooks, including the recently released little ditch (above/ground press, 2018). Born & raised in Brooklyn, Melissa now lives in Mendocino County where she manages the Ukiah Library, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.

5 PM

SWWIM Every Day
by Sharon Tracey

by Sharon Tracey

            —Jennifer Bartlett (1991-92); oil on canvas


How do you build a painting with only
sixty minutes to live
between five and six in the evening
on a seven square-foot grid—

she’s dug a fishpond in a courtyard
fissured it in time
stocked it with cold-blooded koi
dressed in calico and banana yellow

some seem dredged in flour as if
they might be battered. They dart
and swim among the water lilies
then tip their scales and slip

under as if cold war spies.
Leaves past their prime have fallen
and float upon the placid surface
like Matisse cutouts that have died.

So much happens in a single hour
and so little—you stare
at the appearance of depth
and think of the fish, the ticking clock,
where the weeping light goes

and realize that you could just walk away
just take something and walk—

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sharon Tracey is a poet, editor, and author of the poetry collection, What I Remember Most Is Everything (ALL CAPS PUBLISHING, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Mom Egg Review, Tule Review, Common Ground Review, Light: A Journal of Photography and Poetry, Forth, Canary, Naugatuck River Review, Ekphrasis, and elsewhere. She lives in western Massachusetts. For more, please see www.sharontracey.com.

How to Reach the Moon by Folding

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Ann Winn

by Sarah Ann Winn

Spoilers: it can be done. Given paper

large enough, thin enough. I have always been
so creased and compressed I’d explode inside

a compressor. Too heavy to lift and yes, some
have tried or joked about it. The first
seven turns are easy. Everyone has
a set number of tools and limited

energy and then we’re done. We can’t
take any more halving, we can’t keep
coming back to the same place pressed
together. We are all imperfect
logic, math-matched,
given the choice,
the moon or that time
I thought I would never be able

to fold again,
I would take the distance
I have
and be grateful
to stand under.
Sistered to the sky.
Darkness is always ready
to do the final calculations,
to keep close.
If most answer forty-five
I return at forty six,
still counting.
At forty seven, nobody
asks any more
where will we go
from here?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Ann Winn’s first book, Alma Almanac, was selected by Elaine Equi as winner of the 2017 Barrow Street Book Prize. She’s the author of five chapbooks, the most recent of which, Ever After the End Matter, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2019. She teaches poetry workshops in Northern Virginia and the DC Metro area, and online at the Loft Literary Center. Visit her at http://bluebirdwords.com or follow her @blueaisling.

There comes a time

SWWIM Every Day
by Laura Gardner

by Laura Gardner

when you realize you didn’t really want to be a Russian gymnast
or the lion trainer for Ringling Brothers, or a jockey,
though your sister did make costumes for the circus
and could have come up with something daring and sparkly

there’s no real hurry to see the tomb of Hafez, and
how great can the Great Barrier Reef be, really?
Because, well, Australia and all those other places,
they’re way too far. Besides—the plane ride…no,

as the workday wanes into the humid night you anticipate
the morning commute down Route 31, looking east,
where ordinary clouds form on the horizon like mountains.

above the tree line, they’re the Himalayan ice blue peaks,
the misty tips of New Zealand’s Southern Alps,
they’re the Andes of Peru, llamas and all,
and as your wheels roll over the pavement, hot coffee at your lips,

the planet turns ever so perfectly toward the sun, toward our dawning star,
and a neon ridge blazes over those mountains
like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Gardner is a rural mail carrier who writes poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She self-studied the writing craft while working as a library assistant before graduating with a BA in English/Creative Writing. Her poems have been published in various journals including Rosebud, Lily Literary Review, and Modern Haiku. She lives in New York’s Finger Lakes Region and enjoys kayaking, hiking, berry picking, and pie.

4th Century Roman Belt Ornament

SWWIM Every Day
by Rachel Mindell

by Rachel Mindell

Less than two inches high or wide.
Made of copper alloy and gilt, the buckle
depicts two incredible happenings.

On one side, a couple to be betrothed.
The woman’s arm extended
such that the man can grip her hand.

Each has a right foot out.
Above their heads, the Christogram
sanctifies their union in an emerging faith.

On the reverse, Bellerophon astride Pegasus
slays the Chimera with lead on his spear,
forcing it down her lion throat such that

the dragon fire she breathes will melt it,
gagging her, killing also her goat
midsection and her snake behind.

In each scene, a woman of parts is tamed.
In each scene, the divine is invoked, be it
the hovering miracle or the heroism of metal.

What was the comfort of bearing both tales
simultaneously at the belly when one must
have always remained dominant, facing out.

In this beginning, two things true and violent, one obscured.
In the beginning, one always takes and another is taken.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rachel Mindell is a queer writer living in Tucson. She is the author of two chapbooks: Like a Teardrop and a Bullet (Dancing Girl Press) and rib and instep: honey (above/ground). Individual poems have appeared (or will) in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Foglifter, Forklift, Ohio, The Journal, and elsewhere. She works for the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Submittable.

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