For Emily

SWWIM Every Day
by Geraldine Connolly

by Geraldine Connolly

she listened in the hall
seldom crossed thresholds

baked dark cakes
with spirit-soaked raisins

dug with a trowel
at the edge of deep woods

dropped to her knees
to examine a caterpillar

rinsed windows with vinegar

while inside
intrigue twirled and spun

she loved
interruptions

which nothing could silence
or calm or cool

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Geraldine Connolly is the author of a chapbook and four poetry collections including the recently published Aileron (Terrapin Books). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, and The Cortland Review, as well as many anthologies including Poetry 180: A Poem A Day for High School Students and A Constellation of Kisses. She has taught at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland, The Chautauqua Institution and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland Arts Council and the Cafritz Foundation. See www.geraldineconnolly.com.

My Daughter's Potato

SWWIM Every Day
by Tania Pryputniewicz

by Tania Pryputniewicz

It sits in a flimsy pie-tin of crimped and corrugated silver,
wrapped in a paper towel my daughter wets three times
a day. My son tells her to chop it, one eye per chunk,

bury it in the yard, then dig it up. But she’s like me,
needs to see it grow. It’s an Idaho potato, nothing special,
useful under the right cut of meat in the crockpot. It withers

in toward its center, wrinkling a bit, like me, color
sucked from my hair’s roots by—I don’t know—this—
arguing—over why potato eyes are called eyes when

they’re seeds: Put down the knife. Leave her project
be. She’s not sure she wants it now, like the time
I saw my 12-string guitar in the hands of the mover

my husband hired—My lucky day, he said and smiled,
my husband right behind chirping, She never plays it, take it
away. What do they know of the grad school hours,

the ways it saved me from myself, useless in a house
of crying babies—I see, with my blind potato eyes I see
and from behind them I dream of guitars washing up,

like parts of me, like plastic shovels of the hotel tourists,
reds, blues, mostly primary yellows, days’ children
long gone, sandpipers taking back the shore.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tania Pryputniewicz, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press, 2014). Recent poems have appeared in America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience and NILVX: A Book of Magic (Tarot Series). “Two Gardens," is forthcoming in Rockvale Review and won Tania a residency in Tennessee at the Rockvale Writers' Colony. She teaches poetry at San Diego Writers, Ink and lives in Coronado.

Before the Fly Settles

SWWIM Every Day
by Jules Jacob

by Jules Jacob

And she lets the river answer.
—Leonard Cohen

When I question the river, a chorus
of invisible frogs chants where, where, where.
When I let the river answer, she sets
a baritone soloist in the tall
still weeds beside me. There, there he insists,
familial home, gliding trails of kayaks,
siblings, father. Air, air, I plead. Waves slap
against the concrete cobblestone boat path;
wind breathes my will. Sings, I’m bending your way.
Swallows dip in September light, droplets
collect in my palm. Her hair shiny brown
and wet to her knees, my mother backcasts
and effortlessly cracks the whip before
introducing her nymph to the water.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jules Jacob is a contemporary poet who often writes about dichotomous conditions and relationships between humans and the natural world. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Plume Poetry 8, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Rust + Moth, Frogpond, and elsewhere. She’s the author of The Glass Sponge, with select poems featured at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Art’s Le Moulin à Nef in France. Visit julesjacob.com.

At Gossip the Lesbian Bar

SWWIM Every Day
by Marisa Crane

by Marisa Crane

expect to run into at least six or seven exes.
maybe some girls who wouldn’t dare call you

an ex, not even to make someone jealous.
it’s easy to tip the scales

when your stomach is heavy with secondhand prayer.
what’s that in the blonde’s mouth?

it shimmers like liquid mercury—
only here, none of us has the chance

to rise. they want you down & out
& on the prowl. Gossip, home of the

three-finger pour & finger-me Fridays,
looks like a home if you were born

where gravity forgets to breathe.
I’ll take something I regret for 1,000

we say to the bartender, her hair
short & wavy beneath her snapback.

we give the straight couples the side-eye,
the you-could-have-gone-anywhere-else face.

we fight about what it means
to be inclusive when oppressors crowd

your space. in Gossip, everyone’s smiling
but no one’s happy. we dip our noses in

our beer, we do the bro lean, we do the
head nod. in ten year’s time we don’t want

to still be drinking here but for now, we don’t have
any reason to resist the plunge. in Gossip, we break

our own hearts & pretend to like it. we grow
a million hands & point them every

which way. our own ancestor clocks gone
haywire. the lights turn down low.

we are at once turned off & turned on.
they say that lesbians want to pair up,

that when two women get together
they’re twice as dramatic, three times

as emotional—but I’ve been here since nine
& haven’t seen a single emotion

that didn’t have a gag in its mouth.
in Gossip, there are no undercover cops.

in Gossip, we aren’t afraid for our lives,
but that doesn’t stop us from

calling tomorrow an indecent fantasy.
we hate to consider what shape we take

in someone else’s memory. our exes aren’t
very forgiving & who can blame them?

these bashful desires aren’t so bashful
anymore. it’s terrifying to be a person

when the whole world’s watching.
a regular vomits in the bathroom, another

in the trash can behind the bar, another
in the plant out on the patio. we dig into each other,

hoping to come away with a set of blueprints.
or at the very least, evidence of our disconnect.

what can we say? disappointing ourselves
is our favorite way to delay the responsibility of joy.

two-for-one drinks. swipe & swipe & swipe
& edit bio & upload new pic & curse Tinder &

anyone who has ever used it. what is the use
of earnestness? no one here can say for sure.

the sky outside is black & blue like my knuckles
back when I punched that dude for hitting

on my ex-girlfriend. ask anyone in here & they’ll say
that they want something real but when you ask

what constitutes real, all you get are puffs of smoke.
in the early mist of morning, we crawl from Gossip’s depths.

we blink at all the tiny cars & monstrous clouds.
when the sun comes up, we wait for something

extraordinary to happen. for something to justify our cagey hearts.
one by one, we become our own emergencies.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Marisa Crane is a queer, non-binary writer whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, Wigleaf Top 50, and elsewhere. She is the author of Our Debatable Bodies (Animal Heart Press, 2019). Originally from Allentown, PA, she currently lives in San Diego with her wife.

Antidote

SWWIM Every Day
by Catherine Staples

by Catherine Staples

The slander was a lie, but when whispered
In her ear it held, echoed.
Endless as a rock-pool brimming, a hidden
Spill of water, sounding a cave.

She listened though she knew it wasn’t true.
She shook her head.
The lie rose like yeast, like six seeds
Of pomegranate in the distraction of grief.

Ruined, it whispered and winter   
Swept the small room.
But the floor was lined in stone, old
Rock from a long gone inland sea.

The dark lines of fossils woke her—
The still beauty
Of curved spines and wings,
Birds. Ferns. Whole ferns survived

Exact even to the dark spores on fronds.
A river bank and a bay tree.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Staples is the author of The Rattling Window, winner of the McGovern Prize, and Never a Note Forfeit. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, and others. Recent honors include a Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writer’s Conference and the New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Award. She teaches in the English and Honors programs at Villanova University. Please visit at: www.catherinestaples.com.

All the Ways to Want Things

SWWIM Every Day
by Stacie M. Kiner

by Stacie M. Kiner

                    “…this voice was never mine,

                                nor even yours.”

                                   —Lawrence Raab

 

 

Our world slowly spinning
unbuttons itself—
this is a difficult home.

And you, the reason for this telling
the way memory and subtraction fool us,
a sun-warmed key lime
sliced in half
its juice on your tongue.
Your husband gone
taking your child for shoes
and you, eyes closed;
falling straight to the heart of God—

the smooth slide into the back
of a cooled taxi’s leather seat.

But maybe everyone is always
almost drowning;
and maybe this is all
you want to be.

Like the mailbox as a child
I stuffed with snow,
you could not receive a thing.

Stitching back up
the blood you lose each month,
forgetting the march of happiness
down to your toes,
forgetting our world still spins
with its nature of hope.

So I ask for everything—
I don’t know where to stop.
Hands tight on a wheel
one fine turn away—

and all the ways to want things;
and all the things
we shouldn’t want.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Stacie M. Kiner is a former Fellow at The Vermont Studio Center and Hannah Kahn Memorial Award recipient. Her poems have appeared in The Charlotte Poetry Review, Madison Review, Comstock Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and Apalachee Quarterly as well as other journals and reviews. Stacie's work has also appeared at Palm Beach International Airport, Art in Public Places. A former moderator of a poetry talk show on Channel 17 in Miami, Stacie is currently an Associate Editor of The South Florida Poetry Journal.

A Plump Wife & A Big Barn Never Did Any Man Harm

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Jackson Berry

by Jennifer Jackson Berry

Antique store find: this aphorism on a trivet.
I buy it for irony. I could hurt him
with a thunder thigh squeeze, a motorboat suffocation.
I’m debating whether to hang this as a makeshift plaque
or place every hot pot on it.
I joke when I sit around the barn, I sit around the barn.
When the barn door opens, so plump.
There is harm done sometimes
taking the pressure off,
like once the body knows crush—like every time I ask he says—
the organs are rearranged—no, you’re not hurting me.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of The Feeder (YesYes Books, 2016). Her latest chapbook, Bloodfish, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2019 as part of the Keystone Chapbook Series. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Beauty Being Beauty

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Audsley

by Sarah Audsley

We flipped through
the magazine and didn’t recognize her
in the glossy spread, the lighting just right, hair shiny black,
cheekbones round, dark eyes glinting back at us.
Lucky. Selected for Asian Beauty. I wanted to be her, chosen
right off the streets in New York for Vogue.
Yes, vanity. But, what if I am always five, always
running from the coach’s son who’s shouting
“Flat face!” at me, and I’m always questioning, don’t
recognize the feeling of my fingers touching my nose
(not flat), the contours of a face reflected in mirrors.
Coveted forms of Asian Beauty—
bound tulip-sized feet, docile or timid,
thin yet unbreakable—of course, of course.
Let’s line up all the fetishes
in rows like hardened pearls.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Audsley has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio. Recent work can be found in Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Memorious, Scoundrel Time, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and serves as the Staff Artist, Writing Program Coordinator at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT.

Circuit Theory

SWWIM Every Day
by Kat Myers

by Kat Myers

July unzips its belly
and lets heat lightning loose on the
suburbs. Somewhere, it rains
but here, the power lines collapse
into one another like lovers
weary with the weight of holding up.

Here, the dogs howl
once for yes and twice for no,
answering questions of the thunder
thrown to their side of the street.
Is it beautiful?
Are they dancing?

Three houses down, a girl
puts her hand to the window and pretends
to hold the wires seizing in her yard,
imagines herself
the key or the kite, the string
suddenly alive. How glorious
to be grounded. To know your bones
by the way they shake
inside you. To give your pain one name
and let it turn to light.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kat Myers is an emerging poet and former party girl. She is part of the MFA program at North Carolina State University in her hometown, Raleigh. A finalist for the 2018 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, she has also been published in Kingdoms in the Wild, The Write Launch, and Sonder Midwest.

ChapStick

SWWIM Every Day
by Karen J. Weyant

by Karen J. Weyant

Little girls in small towns love
their ChapStick: vanilla bean,
coca cola, root beer. They dig
in their mothers’ purses,
fingering loose pennies
and half sticks of bubble gum,
searching for the elusive lip balm.
They beg for extra money
in store check-out lines, longing
for flavors that taunt them
from the shelves.
They know the smooth wax soothes
split lips parched in the dead
of winter-dry months.
They watch their mothers
rub lotion through the pinched
lines around their eyes, favorite
aunts smooth oil on their torn
cuticles. Even their older sisters
dot snags in their nylons
with clear fingernail polish.
These girls already believe in salves
for all the raw wounds women
around them are forced to wear:
rough elbows and heels, paper cuts,
deep scrapes that never healed, but
turned to scabs, and then scars.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Karen J. Weyant's poetry has been published in Arsenic Lobster, Cave Wall, Cold Mountain Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry East, Rattle, River Styx, Tahoma Literary Review, and Whiskey Island. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Stealing Dust(Finishing Line Press, 2009) and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Winner of Main Street Rag's 2011 Chapbook Contest). She teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. When she is not teaching, she explores the rural Rust Belt of northern Pennsylvania and western New York. 

Watching My Son Play Alone

SWWIM Every Day
by Sayuri Ayers

by Sayuri Ayers

Crouched behind
the burning bush, he watches
the other children.
He breaks into laughter
as girls leap into mounds
of autumn leaves.
As the children play,
he sketches in the dust
with a twig. He turns to me,
his face, a pale leaf
trembling in the haze
of crimson.
At six years old
I wandered from recess
into the meadow.
Sinking to the ground
I pressed my cheek
to a bed of clover.
I closed my eyes
and heard the churn
of soil, grubs gnawing
the pale limbs of
dandelion roots.
Delving beetles
hummed me to sleep,
the schoolyard vanishing
in the meadow’s golden flame.
Listen, my son,
as the children pass.
Feel the call
of a greater pleasure.
Palm the darkened
heart of the fallen
walnut. Let it crumble
in your hand.
Kneel and stroke
the bristling back
of the meadow. Emerge
from its blaze, a new animal.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

A Kundiman Fellow, Sayuri Ayers is a resident of Columbus, Ohio. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Entropy, The Pinch, Hobart, and other literary journals. She is the author of two chapbooks: Radish Legs, Duck Feet (Green Bottle Press) and Mother/Wound (forthcoming from Full/Crescent Press). Sayuri has been awarded grants from the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, and VSA Ohio. She is also the recipient of the Hippocampus Magazine’s 2019 HippoCamp Scholarship.

Afterword

SWWIM Every Day
by Lauren Hilger

by Lauren Hilger

Long after and still,
three horses appear.

I am a child’s
corner of that field.
A huge readiness.

I stare into a face with too much.

I contain what I don’t want to say

and exist so outside my voice
why even talk.

The fear like a dark
ringed circle with bells.

The task to touch what exists while we do.
The three horses gone.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016) Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from the MacDowell Colony, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared or forthcoming in BOMB, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review online, Kenyon Review online, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.

Where Winter Spends the Summer

SWWIM Every Day
by M.B. McLatchey

by M.B. McLatchey

On a beach towel print of a bosomy mermaid
that reads I LOVE Miami. In an everglade’s
wild plan marked with grilles and canopies.

Between concrete, leaning towers and a sea
meant for healing. In a daze, dreaming, gazing
at Odysseus’ wine-dark deep. In the unclothed

body’s prescient haze. On the front of a postcard—
a postcard painter’s dream—in dabs of yellow
and green, intended, as postcard painters will,

to make a symphony of bathers between brush marks;
map out, in palm-tree fences, a new world: an answer to
the sirens’ call, when all the bathers want is no world at all.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

M.B. McLatchey is the author of two books of poems, The Lame God, for which she won the 2013 May Swenson Award (Utah State University Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press), as well as an educational memoir, Beginner’s Mind (Regal House Publishing, forthcoming), excerpts of which have won The Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award and appeared in journals such as MEMOIR (and), Slippery Elm, Chautauqua, and Carolina Quarterly. She is the recipient of several literary awards, including the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal and the Annie Finch Prize from the National Poetry Review. Recently elected as Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County, she is Associate Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Visit her at www.mbmclatchey.com.

Interior Vs. Exterior

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Sala

by Sarah Sala

At my worst, I control the boundaries of my form,
and yet, when divine, the self permeates the
physical world. It’s true: the atoms of our bodies
grieve each other in death just like a color doesn’t
occur alone—but takes meaning from other colors.
The moon was a changeable star that ruled men’s
fate. Water was green and not blue to medieval
cartographers. The complexity of ocher begs        
the viewer to grapple with it. We are swiftly
becoming an indoor species. Yet, scientists know
more about outer space than the Earth’s oceans.
Humans brought the natural world into their homes
to combat the rise of machines. Without us
knowing, trees converse via latticed fungi. Gender
isn’t something one is, but  does. We are a vast
assembly of nerve cells — the continents longing
for each other. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Sala is a queer poet of Polish-Lebanese descent. Her debut poetry collection, Devil’s Lake, is forthcoming from Tolsun Books in June 2020. She is the founder of the free poetry workshop Office Hours and assistant poetry editor at The Bellevue Literary Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in BOMB, The Southampton Review, and Poetry Ireland Review, among others. She teaches at New York University, and lives in Manhattan. Visit her at sarahsala.com.

There Will Be No Thunderstorms Tomorrow

SWWIM Every Day
by Maggie Blake Bailey

by Maggie Blake Bailey

    For the first time since early in the morning on February 11, no thunderstorms are predicted anywhere in the United States tomorrow. ~The Vane 10/16/14

 

Because we are slow to believe our good fortune,
there will be no picnics, no swim meets,
no dancing in raincoats made of tinfoil and bottle caps.

Instead we will turn to each other, only now
realizing who sits at our table,

and say, I didn’t know, because we cannot say,
Did you see that storm today?

Because we cannot touch each other, even lightly,
in passing. There is no release without payment,
and payment is measured in damage.

I will not hear you talk in your sleep
and you will not brace your sodden body to mine.

No power will go out, no dogs will shake in the corners
as we light candle stubs with long matches.

Instead I will wake late, convinced
it is a different tomorrow, one threaded with salt
and metal brought in over the Atlantic,

I will open our windows to a sky that is blue and blue
and purple, the color of the child inside
of me, breathing water.

I will name my body fore and aft and rolling.
There will be no fog warnings, buoys stuttering
like mouths without tongues, dumb in the sunshine.

For the first time we are radar with nothing to see.


___________________________________________________________________

Maggie Blake Bailey has poems published or forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Foundry, A-Minor Magazine and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Bury the Lede, is available from Finishing Line Press and her full-length debut, Visitation, will be available from Tinderbox Editions in winter 2019. She lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband and two young children.  For more work, please visit  www.maggieblakebailey.com  and follow her @maggiebbpoet on Twitter. 

Spring Mourning: after the plane crash

SWWIM Every Day
by Sheree La Puma

by Sheree La Puma

When you fall from middle earth
my scars
become a selling point.
In a field outside
Los Angeles,
a pale moon rising
over blood
red blooms, poppies.
Somewhere,
in the world, my children
mourn
their father, alone.
Mother
is a body, void
of hope.
I used to be a wildflower
planted
& on this early
morning
I watch spring
explode
like the barrel of a
gun.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in Heron River Review, Juxtaprose, The Rumpus, O:JA&L, Plainsongs, The Main Street Rag, Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Inflectionist Review, Levee, The London Reader, Bordighera Press - VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Gravel, Foliate Oak, PacificReview, Westwind, and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and has taught poetry to former gang members.

Season Three Disappoints

SWWIM Every Day
by Devon Balwit

by Devon Balwit

The handmaid will do anything for her child—
Reductive, this mother-love above all others.
I, who have mothered, know other hungers.

She stays long after she has the chance to go—
Reductive, this mother-love above all others.
I’d have chosen books over the lost child.

No job, mate, friend until the stolen daughter’s gotten—
Reductive, this mother-love above all others.
I’d have left her to be a different kind of person.

Though daughter cells reside inside her, she chooses—
reductive—this mother-love above all others.
Like mine, her biome’s vaster, a hundred fastnesses.

She glares daggers but grabs the gallows-rope—
Reductive, this mother-love above all others.
I’d not cost lives, just spend my own.

I feel bullied to look longingly at children—
reductive—this mother-love above all others.
I’d pick, instead, the icy swim across the border.

Devon Balwit teaches in the Pacific Northwest. Her most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found here at SWWIM Every Day as well as in The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Apt (long-form issue), Tule Review, Grist, Rattle, and O:JAL, among others. For more, see https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet.

Commitment

SWWIM Every Day
by Shannon Quinn

by Shannon Quinn

I trade you small pot of light
for key that sticks in door.

Our worst nights, coin toss
burn house or bed down.

Wool-drunk moths in sock drawer
judge our quiet violence and dime-bag sentiment

but then we have an early evening
you mostly sober, me mostly clean

thinking of every possible animal afterlife.

Prescription sleeping pills smuggle
us into sleep, where we are strangers.

Cross the street to avoid each other.
Drowning girl can’t climb
on another body, call it shore.


________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Shannon Quinn is the author of two collection of poetry, Questions for Wolf (Thistledown Press) and Nightlight for Children of Insomniacs (Mansfield Press). Quinn lives in Toronto, Canada. See more at shannonquinnpoetry.com.

Summer Vacation in the Subjunctive

SWWIM Every Day
by Ashley M. Jones

by Ashley M. Jones

If I were a woman. If I were a wanted woman. If I were a woman with
soft fingers. If I were on a beach with a man — if he was a man, if a
man can be a man before he acts like a man. If I were on a beach with
a man and he held my hand. If I liked my hand being held, even if it
was held at the wrong angle. If my wrist was wringing in pain but I
kept it there. If my heart were held wrong, like my hand. If I kept it
there. If I was kept. If I was kept in pain. If I were pain. If I were a
woman — if I were a woman before I was a woman. If I were a woman
who knew her body like a woman knows her body. If a woman knew.
If I knew. If I were on a beach with that man — if, this time, that man
dissolved into sand. If the sand became hot under my feet but my feet
were gold. If a woman were made of sun. If I were made of sun. If I
burned the world around me until it shone beautiful and brown. If this
burning was called healing. If the healing made light. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including the Academy of American Poets, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, The Sun, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, and The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. Her second collection, dark / / thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press and is forthcoming in February 2019. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is Second Vice President of the Alabama Writers’ Conclave , founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

At the Crossroads of the Dying World

SWWIM Every Day
by Michelle Brooks

by Michelle Brooks


There’s a mall cop perched atop
a Segway, riding an escalator,
and I marvel at this strange sight
near the food court. Fluorescent
lights onto shuttered stores dotted
with anchors that have been here
since I was a child. I drift to the playground
where exhausted parents stare at their cell
phones or into the distance while their
children scream and jump and cry
on plastic toys designed to look like animals.

I watch the scene, wishing I could stop time
and its relentless march over us all, wishing
I could close my eyes and will the B. Daltons
back into existence. So many things used
to be something else. I look at a jewelry
repair shop which used to be a novelty store
that sold small trees coated with gold. I’d always
wanted one. The mall cop rides past me, back
to the escalator, and I see my entire life cascade,
like the motorized stairs in their endless loop.
The trees with golden leaves that had once
beckoned me with their promises
of glamour, such as it was, are still gone.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michelle Brooks has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small (Backwaters Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy (Storylandia Press). A native Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit. She has just completed a book of essays titled Second Day Reported.

Load More