Pondweed

SWWIM Every Day
by Mary Elder Jacobsen

by Mary Elder Jacobsen

The grass is greener under-

water. I’ve grown green with envy over every under-

water weed, so long and thinly, loved and lively, glint and greenly under-

water. Fluidly, movingly under-

water. Leave me, grow me, willowy green me under-

water. Ebb and billow me. Lap and please me. Leave me be thee under-

water. O ribbon me, oh ravel me. Oh under-

water’s where un-

done I’ve long become have gone and go under

spells and lo how soon am over-

whelmed by deep by shallow

waters all and in whose realms I’ll gladly dwell, all unhoused and under-

water. Take me under,

water me there, make me pondweed under-

water, un-

dulate me under-

water.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Elder Jacobsen’s poetry has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Four Way Review, One, deLuge, the anthology Healing the Divide: Poetry of Kindness & Connection, and elsewhere. A recent winner of the Lyric Memorial Prize and recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency, she holds an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from UNC-Greensboro. Jacobsen lives in rural Vermont where she swims in a glacial lake with loons.

The Shoes by the Door

SWWIM Every Day
by Amy Gottlieb

by Amy Gottlieb

Toss off your Moroccan slippers, lay your wet socks
on the radiator while we drink tea and talk of our sons,
how time crafted them into men. After your feet thaw
and the tea bags form seashells at the bottom of our cups
I will tell you that the whole house is a membrane, porous
to the shouts in the street, the stench of our neighbor's weed,
the sweetness of her garlic as it caramelizes in a pan.
We have no curio cabinets to preserve what we tried to save,
only the lines that deepen around our eyes, the tales of
your seafaring uncle’s dinghy that weathered an Atlantic storm,
my return to Venice and how the steps where I sat as a girl
have been submerged for years, sinking lower still.
Ask me if you can stay for a week and I will invite you
to flop backwards on the unmade beds, indent your body
on our rumpled sheets, your beaded slippers waiting
by the door like sentries at the gate to a holy kingdom.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Gottlieb's poems have appeared in the Ilanot Review, Storyscape, On Being, Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, and elsewhere. Her poetry manuscript, Sabbath Cinema, was a semi-finalist for the 2019 Orison Poetry Prize. Her debut novel, The Beautiful Possible (Harper Perennial), was a finalist for the Ribalow Prize, Wallant Award, and a National Jewish Book Award. She lives on the edge of the Hudson River in the Bronx.

power ballad without the sacred

SWWIM Every Day
by nicole v basta

by nicole v basta

who taught the man on the bus he could pendulum
into my seat / that his hands should search for my thigh

i make excuses into the window’s eyes like maybe
under the underneath where power feeds the machine

he was cleaved too                 how he cleaves me

i like to imagine there are a few things sacred left strewn about

my knuckled keys sturdy in curved palm on the walk home
this is a night i want to survive

the weapon here also opens the door

is power like any    body
/ does it want to be held?

who taught the men i invite to rattle the wind
from my body

i’ve made the best of it
/ turning whiplash into windchimes

bells fill my home with nobody
but the safeness of sound

and never once has it been just the nameless
shadows drape the darkest from the people you trust

what’s the difference between respite
from the sun and how it’s getting a little chilly there

where can what’s cleaved also be cradle ?
i am safest                  when no one holds

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

nicole v basta's chapbook 'V' was chosen by Rigoberto González as the winner of The New School's Annual Contest. She is the co-founder of the Brooklyn-based arts community + performance night Say Yes (Electric Collective) that ran from 2015-2018. Recent work appears in Ninth Letter, Nat. Brut, Pinwheel, New South, and elsewhere. Find her hologram at nicolevbasta.com.

At the New Bedford Whaling Museum

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Litt

by Jennifer Litt

I found my father a wheelchair.
The footrest had dropsy;
every time we crossed a threshold
into another room his right foot,
missing its baby toe, scraped the floor.
We surveyed the giant skeletons of whales—
sperm, humpback, blue—suspended
from the atrium ceiling. Below us,
the staff set up tables and chairs
for a wedding reception.
When Dad saw the female
right whale with fetus, he whispered,
Your mother had a miscarriage
when we were first married.
Later, he lifted an exhibit phone
to listen to a whale song.
You’re no Tony Bennett, he yelled
into the handset.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Litt, the Assistant Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, taught secondary and college level writing for more than 25 years. Jennifer is the author of the poetry chapbook, Maximum Speed Through Zero (Blue Lyra, 2016). Her work has appeared in many publications, including Gulf Stream, Jet Fuel Review, Lumina, Mixed Fruit, Naugatuck River Review, nycBigCityLit, South Florida Poetry Journal, and Stone Canoe. She lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The Art of Instinct

SWWIM Every Day
by Elizabeth Jacobson

by Elizabeth Jacobson

Although everything always has everything to do with sex,

each time, this one thing

has more to do with the sway of tree shadows

contained in rectangle boxes of light—

reflections of the windows, yielding from the windows,

caught in a breeze on the white plaster walls of the room,

and although it is often true the male of a species

has the more colorful markings, here I am the brightest one

against the white sheets

back arching,

a rising whale throwing its form from the sea

turning rose, then scarlet, then peony—light spreading across our flesh

and the marvelous ability to be held by instinct.

__________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Jacobson’s second book,Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019). She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which conducts weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in New Mexico. Wingspan has received 4 grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, Plume, and others. Elizabeth is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org and the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
 

Incantation for an Operatic Child

SWWIM Every Day
by Beverly Burch

by Beverly Burch

She called after midnight from every sleepover,
begged to come home. Alarming as it was,
there was the luxury of settling her back into bed.

Until she wouldn’t be seen with us.
In time came a midnight call of the terrifying kind.
Hospital, alcohol. She sang in her room after fits

of weeping. Laid waste, ripped through, mended,
cured. Then it would start again. How did one body
contain the churn? Shifting mirrors,

colliding bits of colored glass, how did we?
She couldn’t wait to leave home, couldn’t bear to.
Once I stood at her door, long

metal spoon in my hand from cooking.
We both thought I would hurl it. Mercy descended.
O why so angry? Like my mother’s jagged bolt

of love, blazed by fear. Legacy
running the line of mothers and daughters:
does anything redeem us?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Beverly Burch’s third poetry collection, Latter Days of Eve, won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize and will appear in 2019. Her first, Sweet to Burn, won a Lambda Literary Award and the Gival Poetry Prize. Her second, How a Mirage Works, was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Poetry and fiction appear in Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Willow Springs, Salamander, Tinderbox, Mudlark, and Poetry Northwest.

Summer

SWWIM Every Day

We’re on vacation, and we hope you are, too!

If you need a SWWIM Every Day fix, please visit our Archives. We’ll be back September 1st!

However, we are still reading, so please do keep submitting. We might be a little bit slower to respond, but we WILL get back to you!

Until then, Keep SWWIMing.


XO,
Jen & Catherine

Cross Body

SWWIM Every Day
by Hilary King

by Hilary King

The day my 10-year-old daughter started taking Prozac,
I go full baggallini. Cry-walk into my local gift shop,
stationery in the back, greeting cards up front,
in between bath salts, travel alarms, fuzzy socks.
This was my mother’s store. Not mine. Not

yet. Please not yet the need for socks both fuzzy
and slip-proof. Couldn’t I still trust where I tread
in the world? Until my daughter needed a pill
to push through her clouds, I kept my dreams loose,
tossed into whatever I carried with me every day.

I was ambitious and Christ my shoulder hurt, carrying
a bag full of notebooks,books, pens, lipstick,
another notebook, another book.
If an hour or an idea appeared, I was ready.
Now, therapists and teacher conferences later,

I wanted a separate pocket each for
grief, for anger, for courage.
What I needed to be ready for now
had to be packed precisely and worn throughout the body,
right across the heart.

*This poem won First Place in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Hilary King is lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. She writes poetry as a way of witnessing, as an aid to memory, as a way to explore the ever enduring mystery of human beings. Her poems have appeared in Fourth River, Belletrist, PANK, Blue Fifth Review, Cortland Review, Mom Egg Review, Gyroscope, and other publications. She is the author of the book of poems, The Maid's Car. She has an 12-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son.

Two Coach Purses, Stolen

SWWIM Every Day
by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

The purse was the object, not the violence.
An open maw that gaped, while we, away
were bridging (sea wind, slices of rain).  Or,
the purse was an open mouth gone mute, while
I walked alone (low blue sky, one hundred
one cent stamps). You came out of nowhere, or
you wove in and out of five locked cars, an
invisible thread. Each moment became
a film strip, stuttering: how did we get
here? Both occasions, the purse was returned.
Found emptied of valuables on the berm,
or tossed into the tangled wet grass.
You remained ghost shingled with should or could
a genie stitched into each leather flap.

*This poem won first Second Place in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her work has been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, SWWIM, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market, Women’s Studies, and Chicago Quarterly Review. Her biography on Charmian London, Jack London's wife, will be published by University of Oklahoma Press in Spring 2020. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

The Cable Car Purse

SWWIM Every Day
by Kim King

by Kim King

She rummaged through the cartons that

were stacked inside the family room,

unwrapping, sorting, tossing stuff

on messy piles of save or sell.

She found it with a crystal vase,

two sequined evening bags, and five

Saint Joseph statues underneath

the mildewed news from eighty-four,

the year they packed up Grandma's things.

 

The wooden box's hinges, latch,

and handle were of brass. It smelled

of musty basement and Guerlain

perfume. Faux jewels and beads were glued

onto the painted cable car—

a missing amber teardrop fixed

with a round blue replacement gem.

 

When she opened it, her puzzled

reflection looked back from inside

the mirrored lid. Her Grandma's name

was printed in a shaky blue

along the edge; the purse empty,

except for two metal hair pins.

 

She saw a younger woman there,

the bag in hand at ample hips,

a trolley swaying over curves,

She heard the ringing bells, the voice

of someone clinging to a pole—

the fog, the fog. And nothing else.

*This poem won Third Place in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kim King's poetry has appeared in Wild Onions, In Gilded Frame, Point Mass, The Midwest Quarterly, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Potnia: A Devotional Anthology in Honor of Demeter, Poets for Paris, O-Dark-Thirty, and other publications. Her poems were selected and recorded for the Telepoem Booth Project in State College, PA. Kim has an M.A. in Writing from the Johns Hopkins University, blogs sporadically at KSquaredPoetry.wordpress.com, and is looking to publish her first poetry collection. She writes from her home in Hershey. 

My Purse Is a Mother Is My Birthright

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Carey

by Sarah Carey

I give her the feminine gender, this pride
on my sleeve, reflecting sensibility
and taste. Inside the gap of my scapula

she hangs, curved like a womb,
seamed strap attaching her whole body,
hip to shoulder to mine, a line—

taut at times, as when I press my hand
to the base of her sewn buckles,
feel my mother’s fingers, still at the Singer,

hem-mending after fold and chalk.
Other times she bends into my side waist
muscles, as when I sit to listen

as my mother shares her latest skin flare-up,
asks the specialist to work her in, wonders if
advancing years will cause one’s largest organ

to grow thin, or if that’s just what physicians say
to help old women make peace with pain,
or when she leans against me

for a moment, lets me feel her weight.
Bearing all I hold dear zipped, she models merits
of restraint, yet elides a sigh from deep within

her secret walls when I reach down, across,
inside her compartments to claim
my tube of lip gloss, lost key rings,

forgotten change, a pair of shades, a buried pen
grit glistens. I emerge with all my broken bits
to see that everything we carry,

mold ourselves to, wears, fades away.
I think I don’t deserve her,
but I do.

*This poem won first Honorable Mention in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her work has also appeared in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. She received an International Merit Award in the Atlanta Review's 2018 International Poetry Prize competition and was a finalist in Sequestrum Literary Journal's 2018 New Writer Award competition. Accommodations (fall, 2019) received the 2018 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. She also is the author of a previous chapbook, The Heart Contracts (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Sarah directs communications for the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, and lives in Gainesville with her husband and her exceedingly precocious black Lab.

Eyeing the Kate Spade "Heart It Sam" Crossbody

SWWIM Every Day
by Gail Goepfert

by Gail Goepfert

Noon. The café line snakes by the handbags, 
fine leather goods meant to entice—a Givenchy GV3 
Diamond Quilted Crossbody Bag, a Nancy Gonzalez 

Cristie Linen & Genuine Crocodile Tote, a Devotion 
Leather Shoulder Bag, adorned with an oversized heart, 
lustrous imitation pearls detailing the envelope flap—

all secured to metal cables and the airy sparkling display 
of glass and gold. We giggle, almost, as we try to resurrect 
the price tags, buried in a zippered compartment,

giddy school girls, under the scrutiny of the salesperson
who materializes from nowhere. Just looking. Seating 
saves us. We order our usual—Cranberry Turkey 

and Tuscan Roasted Salmon. Lunch talk stretches 
for hours, chemo and chaos, Poetry and CBD. 
Things the heart must hold.

How it’s time to say yes to what matters. 
To stop saying sorry when we need to say no.
No need to check words for genuine or imitation.

*This poem won second Honorable Mention in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, is a Midwest poet, photographer, and teacher. She has two published books: A Mind on Pain (2015) and Tapping Roots (2018). Get Up Said the World will appear in 2019 from Červená Barva. She’s received four Pushcart Prize Nominations. Recent or forthcoming publications include Kudzu House, Stone Boat, Postcard, Poems and Prose Magazine, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, Bluestem, and Beloit Poetry Journal. Please see more at gailgoepfert.com.

At The Party, The Famous Poet Goes Too Far With The Latest Sweet Young Thang

SWWIM Every Day
by Alexis Rhone Fancher

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

Baby, you were a tiger last night,
the famous poet growls,
paws at my breast like an apology.

He knows I like it rough.

I know his penchant for variety,
his lust’s juvenescence.

I saw his arm
slip around her flirtation,
saw him meet her platinum gaze,

maneuver her out on the deck,
grope her like he once groped me.

When we make our make-up love,
I picture impossibly young women,
lined up, his for the taking,

and I hear my time running out,
that desperate, loudening thrum.

I’m his blond, his punch-drunk muse.
He knows I’ll go down swinging.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, Plume, Tinderbox, Cleaver, Diode, SWWIM Every Day, The MacGuffin, Nasty Women Poets, Nashville Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Her books include: How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen…, State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, Enter Here, Junkie Wife, and The Dead Kid Poems. Her photographs are published worldwide. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. Please see more at www.alexisrhonefancher.com.

Swarming

SWWIM Every Day
by Ellen Kombiyil

by Ellen Kombiyil

with two lines from Bernadette Mayer

 

 

On the avenues, white exhaust tinges blue;
a pigeon nearly gets me, perched over the red church door.

For lunch I pack a ham & turkey sandwich;
I want to hose the city down with bleach.

Mostly images don’t form patterns;
or they do—it’s my mind

arranging them, giving an impression
of continuity, not unlike the man with a serpentine walk

I’ve avoided all my life looking down at my shoes—
When I say the man I don’t mean my father.

Of course, I’m told we walk alike;
from behind we have the same stooped cadence,

arches collapsed, soles worn on a slant—
Is that him I just passed?

I don’t like cooking dinner,
get bored listening to my husband’s yakety yak.

“I have to send my meeting notes out in the morning,” he says;
I stir fry the tofu-slash-get distracted

by the inner turmoil of paying rent
& what it means to be a good person.

In another place or through window tint
it appears to be raining on asphalt.

Storm pipes branch beneath swarming feet;
we weave around each other

like flamingos on takeoff or just before dancing,
each of us moving in unison, a dot on the GPS.

Little Dot move left;
Little Dot don’t move just blink in vertical space

going up the office escalator, toting coffee in a paper cup;
Little Dot plugged with earbuds.

Riding backwards on trains we’re time-lapsed
like night scenes, streaming taillights, headlights

the signal’s shifting red-green;
or we flicker like flamingos

mating in the infrared,
each orange splotch with a yellow heart

pulsing “at once above/below” as Bernadette says,
and “it’s easier for love to have a million neighbors”

seems a breezy thing to say, appropriate
not slutty, our mouths’ sucking frenzy;

or we zag in blue swaths like zebra fish
flaunting eyes, lacing fins, in fact

yes, I’m avoiding the text
just in from my landlord asking WHERE IS THE RENT

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook avalanche tunnel (2016). Recent work has appeared in diode, The Moth, Muzzle, Plume, Pleiades, and The Offing. She is a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. She is a founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model press publishing emerging poets from India and the diaspora. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, she currently teaches creative writing at Hunter College.

Shame Is a Bull

SWWIM Every Day
by Shannon K. Winston

by Shannon K. Winston

Girl Carrying Bull, by Vladimir Fokanov

 

I carry the bull on my shoulders.
Some days the weight is impossible:

its skull bores into my collar,
sweat pools under my arms,

and trickles around my breasts.
This is the price I pay for being

headstrong and outspoken.
My first words: not yes or please,

but no, my way, never.
I want, I want…

Other days, delight burns
in my legs, my arms ache

as I hoist this beast through
the void, across rivers

and sandbars, over snowcapped
mountains, and through galaxies.

My muscles, its muscles
burdened and buoyed by gravity.

And always the trembling
of my body,

its body, our bodies
on the brink—

I sigh, it grunts.
I smile, it breathes.

Only when we reach a clearing,
do we turn to one another

in some gesture of self-recognition,
do I dare whisper:

Yes, sweet lovely creature
we will make it though.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Shannon K. Winston’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Dialogist, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and several times for the Best of the Net. She earned her MFA at Warren Wilson College and currently teaches in Princeton University’s Writing Program.

Imagining Summer 2467

SWWIM Every Day
by Nicole Callihan

by Nicole Callihan

On the beach, asking questions of the wind, 
it was the horse conch I straddled, 
but what was it I thought I could know of the wind 
that it did not already know of me? 
It is a Monday in July and having no poisonous flowers, 
no magical seaweed, not even salt on my skin, 
I lunch on salmon in plastic, separate the flesh 
with more plastic, sip bathroom sink water 
from more plastic still. I consider 450 years from now 
when this plastic will finally, if it’s weak, decompose, 
and I am grateful I will be dead by then, 
that my daughters will be dead, that their daughters 
will be dead, because I do not want to imagine us 
standing vigil, remembering this very summer day 
and how well the plastic held the salmon and the water. 
As the years go by, my thirst gets deeper. I keep 
meaning to ask my mother to write me a prescription 
that will make me skinny and sober and solemn, 
but she is busy too, the shit-for-brains ex-husband, 
the vials of poison, the Baked Lays. She recommends 
only the latter and slips me a map that takes me years 
to realize only leads back to her. But I’m talking about 
the wind, or I’m talking to the wind, talking with, 
and the wind is acting lovely, is brushing my hair 
from my face. When Ella’s hands are dirty, she holds me 
really tight and says, I love you so much, mama, 
I love you sooooo much, and she wipes the grease 
all over me, and I say, Oh, I love you too, until I realize 
I am a napkin. Let me suck your nipples, mama, she says. 
No more milk! I say and point to the plastic cup. 
She’s too old for this. And so am I. But in plastic years, 
we are hardly even born. In plastic years, I would only be 1, 
and barely 1, and unable to form words yet, and so could 
do little but sit on the beach and pretend my shell was a horse.
Giddy-up, I would say, Giddy-up, but it would sound 
like nothing. Everything starts out sounding like nothing. 
And, probably, in the end, everything sounds that way too.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her poetry books include SuperLoop (2014) and Translucence (with Samar Abdel Jaber, 2018), and the chapbooks: A Study in Spring (with Zoë Ryder White, 2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), and Aging (2018). Her novella, The Couples, will be published by Mason Jar Press in summer 2019. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.

Sonnet with Zinnias, Roses, But Not Persimmons

SWWIM Every Day
by Crystal C. Karlberg

by Crystal C. Karlberg

My mother plunged her hands into the dirt
like a woman who knew she couldn’t bear fruit.
The roses were her children, calling through
the salt hay, through the storms doors until spring.

The zinnias looked up at her with pink,
their almost faces, their peculiar needs,
requiring a mother’s touch, love
in summer when the beetles stretch their legs,

with barbs that bring her back into the room
where lighting from above was clearly not
the blue-robed Virgin Mary that she saw
above the neighbor’s house when she was young.

Her ring fell through a hole, was never found
like all the babies she would never hold.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Crystal C. Karlberg teaches middle school English. Her writing has been published in Mom Egg Review, The Compassion Anthology, Soundings East, and Scary Mommy Teen & Tween.

Ritual

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer K. Sweeney

by Jennifer K. Sweeney

In the dissolve of the ordinary—kitchen sink,
corralled line at the bank—I reach for myself
like a mother whose arm pushes back

her child-passenger at the stoplight or
I reach like a child carelessly
smoothing the silk of her mother’s

skirt while reciting bits of song.
Automated phone call, another stripe
of ants across the floor,

I do not think to do this but suddenly
realize I have been holding my shoulders
my face my throat O the throat so wants

to be held in a little cup of blue light.
The body with its aches and silences,
who can understand it?

Mostly the holding does little, but still
better than not. And sometimes it is the only
kind thing I can do. I often wish I were

kinder. That’s a hard one. Or maybe
less hard than it seems. Once I slept
in a tent in a field I thought was vacant

as a man I thought I loved tried to hold me.
The body and all its mistakes, the however
did I end up here filling the damp dome of canvas.

In the night, a cloud of wild horses came thundering
toward. I heard them through my body against
the ground from a great distance and then

so close as they skimmed the tent they nearly
trampled us and I held the sound gaining
and breaking, I laid down into it,

dug my fingers into the earth
as they rode the night, I knew their bodies
were waves and terror and distance,

though I never saw them. I knew
that the soul is a little bottle rocket
even when it seems a mistake

stuffed into a cheap coin purse,
and that a mistake is often a porthole
from which one can peer

to make out the shape of any approaching light.
I held my forehead when my thoughts felt too dark
to bear, I held my womb the years I could not

have a baby, I held my mouth
when I could not easily speak in a room.
And just once when I held my heart—

again my hands reaching for the thin pulse
to ease it, make certain it was there—
wet thump-wet thump, just once

it felt like that. Over the field my heart
came rushing, toward me and from me
without regard for the rest of the being,

and now, each time since,
I hold it to remember
that marvelous ruin of praise.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three poetry collections: Little Spells (New Issues Press, 2015), How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poems have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, American Poetry Review, The Awl, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard, Kenyon Review Online, Love’s Executive Order, Mid-American Review, New American Writing, Stirring, Terrain, Thrush, and Verse Daily.

PRAYER for WHAT STAYS, as a CORSET

SWWIM Every Day
by Katrina Roberts

by Katrina Roberts

Please breath, unfurl without a hitch, fill lungs with wind, rise, then
fall to rise again ad infinitum. Mere moments, you might cease, or seize

instead, constrained concavity squeezed, two grasped balloons, gone
limp. I gasp. Party’s over, each steampunk gear, all mechanisms grinding

to a halt unseen but felt, a siren’s clutching, a meter’s coin of time
drained into a black hole, a wreck of gulls, flecks, particles, the idea of

existence cracking open lesions in the addled mind riding above; if clods
kick up into clouds of dust, or clotted smoke slides in to choke

the valley, or fear lodges deep within a throat slippery, wet this
second, now brimming with ash or remnants of trash a burn barrel

harbors somewhere too close to let its throbbing pink songbird
sing, writhing to adjust its tenuous frayed grasp, not wanting to lose

grip on its storm-tossed jerking swing; if this thorax were a brittle
vessel rolled on seas, within this metered corpus you make a cage

of 24 arms to cradle my gimbaled heart, stunned sparrow stuffed
into a torn garden glove to keep it calm: I can’t, I can’t…. Tiny

corset stays sprung though still too tight; I’m the minke whale
beached at land’s end to house a colony of crabs, each elegant

arch between your staves a door sluiced with stinging brine; you
exploded, a shattered wine cask, seeping juice, dismantled, jagged,

flayed open when we slid and slammed into a tree; I’m sorry, afraid,
my only casket; not yet a corpse I work to calm the weightless soul

weighing you down, my cavern of ticking stalactites, my straight
jacket, my box of meat, silt, rain—containing this wheezing song

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Katrina Roberts has published four books of poems, Underdog; Friendly Fire; The Quick; and How Late Desire Looks, and edited the anthology, Because You Asked: A Book of Answers on the Art & Craft of the Writing Life. Her work appears in places such as The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets. Her graphic poems appear or are forthcoming in places such as Poetry Northwest, Permafrost, and Evergreen: Fairy Tales, Essays, and Fables from the Dark Northwest (Scablands Books). She teaches and curates the Visiting Writers Reading Series at Whitman College, and co-runs the Walla Walla Distilling Company. See more at www.katrinaroberts.net.

Egret

SWWIM Every Day
by Carolyn H. Zukowski

by Carolyn H. Zukowski

A stand-alone herald of light in the marshes
among the reed beds. Contemplate. Question
the shallows for toads and newts. Still, the body
an exclamation point between land and sky
or a divining rod between land and water.
         
                                Regrets start

like this—a stone unturned. Thoughts, minnows
left unpursued. Weather threats. Risk
the awkward pull of flight. A reach of wings
draws shadow over the hot salt flats. To land
is to make a slow, murky splash. Repeat.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Carolyn H. Zukowski likes to combine words and wanderlust. She runs Hostel Krumlov House & WriteAway Retreat (www.krumlovhouse.com), and is managing editor of The Literary Bohemian (www.literarybohemian.com) while living in her adopted town of Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic. You can find her poetry in Envoi (UK), Orbis (UK), Poetry Salzburg (Austria), RHINO (US), and SAND (Berlin).

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