Rind

SWWIM Every Day
by Kami Westhoff

by Kami Westhoff

You close your mouth
to the spoon’s cool curve,
not impressed with the cubes
of summer melon. Soon, you
will refuse other favorites,
maple nut ice cream, clusters
of chocolate-bound
peanuts.

We are told it’s a blessing,
this gradual refusal of what
you love. Your face still
bursts into relief when you
see us, we are swallowed
in the split-second when
we are daughters a mother
just wants to hold. Though
the nurses won’t say it, we
know this is cruel—
this reminder of who
you once were, of what
you’ve since lost.

We want you summer
again. When we’d watch
you half the melon, scoop
the mess of seeds from its
center, carve flesh so carefully
none was lost to the rind.

We didn’t get it, but now we know
you were teaching us everything
we’d ever need to know about love.
The way it halves us. Slices us.
Carves the best of us from what
cannot be swallowed. Closes
its mouth to the rest. 

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Kami Westhoff is the author of Sleepwalker, winner of Minerva Rising's Dare to Be Contest, and Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali. Her work has also appeared in various journals, including Meridian, Carve, Third Coast, The Pinch, West Branch, and Waxwing.

To the boys who bully my nephew in the 6th grade

SWWIM Every Day
by M. Soledad Caballero

by M. Soledad Caballero

Here. Take this apple, small and sweet
like the middle of his heart when he was
born, a heart that was not certain how to
beat. Small sack of veins and rice paper-thin
skin, he looked like an old man with wide
grey eyes and wrinkled newborn bamboo
fingers. Oh, he was a sack of joy then, like
apples in the middle of a pie. Don’t get me
wrong, he is now so annoying like the wild
woodpecker that throws his head into
a tree, all day all day all day, a mad mad bird
who beats the same beat with the same
charcoal beak and what you want to say
is, ya, ya, enough hijo, no more banging.

Yes, I know this language of eye rolling.
This wish to stop the sounds from his mouth,
hold his body down, force his mind,
his thoughts, his lanky self to stop, to stop
to be still. Basta, you want to say. No mas.
I know. I have done it. I know this wish.
The wish to freeze time when he throws
his whole body into my arms, like a wilding
thing that cannot feel anger or fear, a boy
who wants to share his blood and the mess
of his mind with you so much he hurts
you in the flight between his body and yours.
He is something like lightning. Or Hermes
mid-run looking for invisible fairies just to
prove they are in the forest. Es mucho, we
say at family dinners, es mucho.

So maybe you see his flutterings, his deep
deep laugh, his body like electricity and you
think, maricón. You think the ugliness of
stale brown thoughts. Or maybe you are
in the middle of your own wilding and you
wish for love even when your body vibrates.
I do not know. No lo sé. But I know this:
my boy, this strange creature of teeth and heat,
he will outlive me. He will outlive you.
He will outlive even the sun in the sky. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

M. Soledad Caballero is Professor of English at Allegheny College Her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, post-colonial literatures, WGSS, and interdisciplinarity. She is a 2017 CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a New Poet's Prize, and has been a finalist for the Missouri Review's Jeffry E. Smith poetry prize, Mississippi Review's annual editor's prize, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. In 2019, her manuscript was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Review first book prize, the Saturnalia Press first book prize, and a runner-up for the Autumn House Press first book prize. Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Memorius, Crab Orchard Review, Anomaly, and other venues.

When Another American Shooting Makes You

SWWIM Every Day
by Christen Noel Kauffman

by Christen Noel Kauffman

pick up your daughter playing
at your feet, she holds
a measuring spoon to fill you
with imaginary soup, fill you
with the way she pulls your hair.
Instead of kissing her round jaw,
you fold her up into sapling, plant
her back into your core. You cradle
her into fresh bread and swallow
her whole. You open as a barn door
and pull her into warmth.
You carry her in the pouch
of your cheek, whisper there now,
stay. You wish there were still trees,
wish the sun had been made
by a god you could love,
wish the world was a laugh
she could catch on her tongue,
wish you’d worked to fix it all
before carving her into pine,
before letting her loose
where the wolves come to feed.
You tell her a story
as you press her into egg,
how once there was a mother
who broke herself in two,
who would carry a seed
in the break of her chest, until
it was safe to let go.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Christen Noel Kauffman currently lives in Richmond, IN, with her husband, two daughters, and an opinionated shih tzu named Dr. Watson. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Cherry Tree, Willow Springs, Booth, The Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, and Glass Poets Resist, among others.

The Wake

SWWIM Every Day
by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

He’s in active dying, his family texted.
They held the phone under his comatose ear,
I said my good-bye, I wished him release.
I watched the rest of the day, then all night.
Still nothing, so finally I slept. Wakened
out of my second sleep by the call
carrying the hospital’s stinging perfume,
the sign everyone knows.

They’d asked me what music he’d loved.
I’d told them: The Great Fugue,
the Solemn Little Mass,
the Eroïca. They’d found them all
and played him out sweetly. It could do no harm.
His breath slowed, wafted out.
Was it a ritard or finally a fermata,
timed for the turn of the Funeral March.

To help out, I’d called the Institute where he’d trained,
I gave them the news.
How odd, the director told me,
I was just looking over the analysts.
His face is on my screen right now.

As offering, I made bagels the way he’d liked,
with double salt, double honey,
extra gluten for extra chew.
I’d proofed the yeast,
I’d checked the temperature,
I’d done everything I could,
but they just weren’t going to rise.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a retired clinical psychologist, German major, two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and photographer. Her work has appeared in journals, including  B O D Y, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Comstock Poetry Review, Off the Coast, Otoliths, Naugatuck Poetry Review, and Measure. Kattywompus Press publishes Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and Kafka’s Cat. Kelsay Books publishes The Book of Knots and their Untying. She co-curates Fourth Sundays, a poetry series in Claremont, California. 


Letter to Buddha’s Wife

SWWIM Every Day
by Stella Reed

by Stella Reed

Dear Yashodhara,

I, too, make do without fathers. Take full fat
in my chai. Never stop to ponder the meaning
of duality, having lived with a person inside me.
Before he was a god he lay naked in a charnel ground
contemplating existence. He sat beneath a spreading tree
where Mara’s daughters danced for him, breasts
with the sheen of new apples, while you were home
changing diapers, wiping milky spit from the furniture,
pulling your striped flesh from a damp bra,
your fluid body a meal.

We both know enlightenment
is when the child screams all night and we don’t leave her
for the crows to pick over. We saunter and jostle
up and down halls, strap her in a car seat and drive
blocks around blocks, guilt about our carbon footprint
rubbing against the last collapsing nerve.
Beneath the lantern of the mind is the mud
of these bodies, able to conceive what the mind cannot.
I lift my daughter to the saddle of a carousel horse,
watch her ride the spinning prayer wheel,
pray it carries her away
from the curse of too much light.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Stella Reed is the co-author of We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press, 2019). She is the 2018 winner of the Tusculum Review chapbook contest for Origami. Stella teaches poetry to women in domestic violence and homeless shelters through WingSpan Poetry Project in Santa Fe, NM. You can find her work in The Bellingham Review, American Journal of Poetry, Tahoma Literary Review, and anthologized in They Said (Black Lawrence Press, 2018).

On the Origin of Karl Marx

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Alvarez

by Lisa Alvarez

She found him in the office copy machine
still warm. His hair

a righteous white halo. His countenance
confident as ever.

“I told you so,” he seemed to say,
“In capitalism, things are personified

and people are commodified.” Turning
the lever let her release him.

The paper jam resolved.
The machine restored.

She was sure that
he belonged to someone

that someone was looking for him
wanted him     needed him.

When she pinned him to the bulletin board
she was not trying to be clever

not trying to be ironic
but to be of use, like Karl.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa Alvarez’s poetry has appeared in Codex Journal, Huizache, Truthdig, and Zócalo Public Square and is forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. She is the co-editor of Orange County: A Literary Field Guide and a professor at Irvine Valley College. For 20 years, she has co-directed the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers in the California’s Sierra Nevada.

Blizzard of Nothing

SWWIM Every Day
by Julia Wendell

by Julia Wendell

It snows in feet, not inches,
the fleeting, hushing plunge of it.
It snows, all day and then some,
piling silently up
on the hilly pastures.
When I’ve finally had my fill,
it snows another ocean—
pelting, as if falling
wasn’t enough—
a crazed Einstein,
erasing what came before
to start the lesson over—
a blizzard of wisdoms
traveling at the speed
of incomprehension.
My breath comes fitfully—
slate, chalk, merciful dusk.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Julia Wendell's memoir, Come to the X, will be published by Galileo Press in 2019. Her most recent book of poems is Take This Spoon (Main Street Rag Press). She lives in South Carolina.

When I was ten, the insides of my father’s mouth

SWWIM Every Day

by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick

Turned to a garden. He would walk
& the earth would fall out—acorn & oak
Leaves, his menthol cigarettes. Sometimes,
A canary cooed his tongue
With lemon-yellow sonnets. Angry
His secrets fell.
He circled for hours in the yard
What his mother carved into him, a curse.
It will befall you, too. His hands
Large canteens filled with liquor & ice-cream,
Releasing pressure wherever we’d go—
The feed store, the rig, to buy chicken
From KFC—behind him, I’d walk
The path of dirt & desire & ever the good daughter,
Light his hidden bodies on fire.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick's work has appeared in Salt Hill, Versal, The Texas Observer, Devil's Lake, Four Way Review, Sugar House Review, and Huffington Post UK, among others. A graduate from Sarah Lawrence College's MFA program, Hardwick serves as the poetry editor for The Boiler Journal and her first full-length, Before Isadore, was published by Sundress Publications. She currently lives in a village outside Cambridge, England.

The Names of the Planets

SWWIM Every Day
by Cornelia Channing

by Cornelia Channing

I forgot to call that hotel where we stayed in White Sulphur Springs
about your shoes that you’re sure you left under the bed but which I quite remember
you wearing in the lobby of that casino in Nashville the day after. I forgot to
pick up the dog food. I forgot to drink eight glasses of water. I forgot to tell you
that I hate it when you walk in front of me on the sidewalk.
I forgot to stop for gas on the way home from the movie about the fisherman
and ended up on the side of the highway thinking of trout. I forgot the address
of our old apartment. I forgot the names of the planets. I forgot about that
restaurant we used to go to as kids where our parents would smoke outside
and we stole those peppermint candies from the dish. I forgot the smell of cigarettes
on jackets. I forgot about the time I scared you with my foot under the table.
I forgot how much I like Irish music. I forgot how to behave myself and then remembered.
I forgot to order the dressing on the side at that Greek Diner
we like and the salad got soggy like it does. I forgot the words to that Ashlee Simpson
song I used to love. I forgot to tip the guy for cleaning my windshield and
the perfect streak-free shine is blinding. I forgot that I don’t like oysters
unless cooked so long in butter that they resemble coins. I forgot to move the car
when the street sweep came so I got a fat ticket. I forgot about the nice old woman
who used to work at the bookstore on Bay Street that and what happened to her.
I forgot to back up my computer. I forgot to add ¾ cups buttermilk
to the batter. I forgot to cancel my subscription. I forgot to remind you to call
your sister. I forgot about the pasta pizza we ordered from Nike’s on 189th street
and so we fell asleep and when we woke up it was on the front stoop dusted in snow.
I forgot that name you used to call me. I forgot what flavor you asked for so I just got
all of them. I forgot to watch the news. I forgot about global warming and mass incarceration
and abortion referendums and police brutality and institutionalized racism and gun control
for four seconds. I forgot to meditate. I forgot about the fight we had in Maine.
I forgot about Maine. I forgot the feeling of pulling ticks off my ankles.
I forgot holding cold hands in warm armpits. I forgot the sound of crunching gravel
in the driveway when mom comes home from dinner. I forgot to get a flu shot. I forgot what
it felt like to sleep alone in a big bed and not wish for less space. I forgot that I was
a little girl running barefoot through grass for hundreds of years before I met you.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Cornelia Channing is an MFA Candidate in creative writing at Stony Brook University in Southampton, NY. Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, Public Pool, Method Magazine, and The Stethoscope Press. A chapter of her forthcoming novel will be published in East Magazine next month. She lives in Bridgehampton, NY with her dog, Tucker. 
 

 

Dream Journal: July 5th at 5:06 am

SWWIM Every Day
by Laura Grace Weldon

by Laura Grace Weldon

I fainted in a little NYC store.
Came to
and there was Allen Ginsburg
patting my arm.
Embarrassed, I asked,
How long have I been out?
He answered, Out?
Most people are out all their lives.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Grace Weldon has published two poetry collections, Blackbird (Grayson 2019) and Tending (Aldrich 2013). She was named Ohio Poet of the Year for 2019. She's written poems on the soles of children’s feet and painted poems on beehives but her work appears in more conventional places such as Verse Daily, One: Jacar Press, Neurology, J Journal, and Amsterdam Quarterly. Laura works as a book editor and teaches community-based writing workshops. See more at lauragraceweldon.com.

Dusk Graze

SWWIM Every Day
by Carolina Hospital

by Carolina Hospital

In our sticky plaid uniforms and loose pony tails, we skip and jump,

pocketing minutes from the cool soft twilight, rushing all play before our

mother hails us. The front lawn is a wide field on which we collapse,

bruised knees, roll and roll and roll, sprawled in damp greenery. 

 

I run my finger down
the silken green blade
a gentle snap.
Along its vein I unzip
the leaf, so thin it curls
like a lover’s smile.

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Carolina Hospital is a poet, novelist, and editor. Her books include Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press); The Child of Exile: a Poetry Memoir (Arte Público Press); the novel, A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina (Warner Books); and A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida (Pineapple Press). Her works have appeared in the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature; the anthology Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Occupy the Workplace; Florida Literature, and Longman’s Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.

"Vila Franca di Xira, Portugal, May 8, 1994"

SWWIM Every Day
Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

by Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

After the photograph by Dutch artist, Rineke Dijkstra, from her series of portraits of los forcados. In the final event of a Portuguese bullfight, young men known as los forcados use their bodies to exhaust and subdue the bull in a kind of dance called pega de caras.  

 

It was me or the bull
as it always is. The bull

with his brute-breath
and steam, fear that smells

of a father’s knowing
his smaller son can take him

and will. Offer to bow
to the beast. Offer the dreams

in your skull, the Praia
de Benagil sunlight flaring

through a hole. Time is a boy
I can almost reach—

a kite flown, the blue-tiled floor
of my faraway mother

stampeded with footprints.
I came here for the question

answered by the crowd’s
ovation: a man now, must

I have blood on my face
to be seen.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and author of the poetry collection, a lesson in smallness. Her poems have appeared in RHINO (winner of their Founder's Prize), Pleiades, 32 Poems, Kenyon Review Online, Verse Daily, ONE, Sugar House Review, Nashville Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among many other places. She is an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is Editor-in-Chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing by women. See more at www.laurenslaughter.com.

Ghazal After the Abortion, the Drought, the Rape

SWWIM Every Day
by Julia B Levine

by Julia B Levine

You are otherwise each time you dream. The train arrives in Nice. You reach for your suitcase
& the aborted baby tumbles down alive. Into your arms, his milky breath. His uncanny reach.

Drought’s engine picks up speed. Rivers, once a ligature of sheen, smear to grease. Lord,
bless the not-yet-arrived. Wildfires unwilling to be touched. Forests dying as they reach.

That’s all I wanted, he says. Your body crumpled like a day-old corsage. A raven shrieks.
He zips up his pants. Pockets the gun. Wild bird of your before, perches out of reach.

Wingless, we invented music. This first morning of rain you can believe again
in a cappella green. Joy to lift the body’s stone. Fog to lower the sky’s snowy reach.

All being is fenestra. And the mind a churchyard, a market, an orphic meet-&-greet.  This
world wrecks us, then it enters. The body leaves. The soul is fallout, drifting far outside of reach.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Julia B Levine has been widely published. Her latest full-length collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU press, 2014), was awarded the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She has poems forthcoming in Calyx, Southern Review, and Third Coast. In her everyday life, she loves to swim!

Girl Upon a Time

SWWIM Every Day
by Leonore Hildebrandt

by Leonore Hildebrandt

Sky is a woven rug, a measured opening—
a “window,” from wind eye.
Hinges are smooth as ligaments,
and her fingers leave oily prints.

You may wear this tale
like a hat, a wondrous little hat
from the pelt of a mouse.

A canopy of swallows. The river’s steep banks.
The girl runs with the boys, then hides
in sprawling hedges—beech and rhododendron.

She knows a place to slip into—
lower the bridge, walk the sheep and fox,
cows and knights in procession to the fields.
The moat deepens. Look, poor Rapunzel’s
long braids uncoil from the sill.

The girl is looking under leaves
for mice and spiders.
She rips her sandwich for the dogs,
calls them her strays.

On a narrow sidewalk,
a little hairy man blocks her way
with his scales and knives.
She tries to run, sand sucks at her feet,
she stumbles, falls into the air's updraft—
her dress spreads like a sheet.
A girl is a cloud of dust.

In the yard, metal posts are sunk into holes.
On rainy days, they fill with water and bugs.
She hears of storm petrels, lit as lamps—
oily flames mounted on sticks, a wick shoved down the throat.
Things one can not pronounce another way.

Clamor in the street—voracious brooms
suck in leaves and garbage.
The many worlds are falling—the seven brothers,
three sisters. She hides, counts her fingers.
This is the dry tongue of utterance.

But the second son still goes out into the world
to learn about fear. At night,
bronzed in smoke, the seven ravens return.
The girl slips through a fence.

She is falling toward the upon-time,
dark against the luminous wind eye.
Her dress is woven into the sky.

In the sallow wax of morning,
street lamps are bright nebulae.
The window’s stern eyes relent
to swirls and river snails.

Worms scatter holes,
bored in the wooden frame.
She blows the dust, pulls up her hair.



____________________________________________________________________

Leonore Hildebrandt is the author of the poetry collections Where You Happen to Be, The Work at Hand, and The Next Unknown. Her poems and translations have appeared in the Cafe Review, Cerise Press, the Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Harpur Palate, Poetry Daily, RHINO, and the Sugar House Review, among other journals. Winner of the 2013 Gemini Poetry Contest, she received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Maine Community Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission. She was nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. A native of Germany, Leonore lives “off the grid” in Harrington, Maine, and spends the winter in Silver City, New Mexico. She teaches writing at the University of Maine and serves on the editorial board of the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Mom's Risperidone

SWWIM Every Day
by Annmarie O'Connell

by Annmarie O’Connell

is killing her. I sing this to you once:
killing her.  She is
the bowl of a spoon dripping
tobacco and trailer park,
a roar of diesels
runs over her breastbone.
All the mountains
in my life
are fists of my mother.
I do not waste one drop
when I see her voice taken
out of her body and put
in a stunted star
that always moves
away from me
in a night that twiddles my hair
by the root no matter
where I go. I braid a trail
in the dirty South Side
street. This is a daughter
carving a path off to God
then kicked to her knees—a psalm
hung from her big mouth.
Flag her in
from the dark. Tell her
where to go.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Annmarie O’Connell is a lifelong resident of the South Side of Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Sixth Finch, Juked, Room Magazine, Verse Daily, Slipstream, SOFTBLOW, Vinyl Poetry, Thrush, Escape Into Life, 2River View, and many other wonderful journals. Her first full-length collection of poems, Your Immaculate Heart, was released with Trio House Press in 2016. Her third chapbook was released last year with Yellow Flag Press. See more at annmarieoconnell.com.

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 in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review and The Cortland Review. 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. Her work has appeared in many anthologies including Poetry 180: A Poem A Day for High School Students and A Constellation of Kisses. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. www.geraldineconnolly.com

Exit 63, Mile Marker 61.8

SWWIM Every Day
by Nicole Markert

by Nicole Markert

The first time, teeth grind. My knees are
on holly leaves, scream
to the God:
I will breathe life into his dust
even if it means to scratch and peel
the layers of my forearm like onion skins.
I gnaw my raw lip.
I only stop when we drive away.
The next time, I carry crosses with my mother
and listen to repeated winds
of passing cars on the highway & the crush
of pinecones on the shoulder. We bear
with the whizz of screws into the crosses
pressed to the pine bark and the choked-up mutters
of the Our Father.
The most recent time, I watch the sunset while fingers freeze.
My lips taste lukewarm watery hot chocolate.
I pray even when God never fills
the chasm in my sternum.
I place my hand on the pine’s bark.
I breathe exhaust fumes like fresh air.

__________________________________________________________________


Nicole Markert is a Senior English Writing and Literature major at Eastern University in St. David’s Pennsylvania, although, she originally hails from New Jersey. She is the Editor-in-Chief for Eastern’s literary magazine, Inklings, as well as the Managing Editor for the student-led newspaper, The Waltonian. You can find some of her other work at nicolemarkert.com.

Story of a Boy

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Greenberg

by Jennifer Greenberg

She could have meant the light that falls
in the west, or a bird catapulting himself east
when she told me the story of a boy
leaving me for the empty sky. The night
she asked where babies come from, I told her
the truth: how they come to find bodies
inside our bodies, how they bubble
out of fat and shed their mother’s skin. Some
only visit—like sun spokes through a rainbow,
temporary, too weary to make the trip.
She might have meant we are all brothers
in this life. The dying light, the innocent bird.
I could have said, No, I've never met that soul,
just heard his name in my sleep. But I didn't
correct my daughter when she said, My brother
goes up there, motioning her hands
into a piece of ribbon unfurling up
and up above us, then floating away
like a balloon, buoyant, bodiless.

Jennifer Greenberg is a Florida native pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida. When not at the office, Jennifer enjoys writing in her sleep and jazz. Her words have been featured in Literary Mama, Homology Lit, Sonder Midwest, and Chomp, and are forthcoming in Coffin Bell.

Autumn

SWWIM Every Day
by Leslie Leonard

by Leslie Leonard

Color spreads up the hillside in a deep, blushing rash,
the leaves around the thin evergreens
puffed out like the spores of a great orange mold.
The birches have flaked their skin, sudden and snake-like,
and now reach up
like bone-carved totems from the earth.
We use the nights to press our feet together, bare and numb,
or covered thinly in your running socks.
Inside, the water spreads
in Rorschach figures down the wall
from the hole you said you’d fix. Outside,
the trees are leaking down leaves like water droplets,
standing still and many-armed in their rough-skinned nakedness.
I must admit that I stand in the heat of the shower
and imagine sloughing myself clean
and anchoring myself with a solid, immovable tap root.
We may crunch the leaves beneath us, with our shoulders
bumping like old friends. But I am thinking
about the effortlessness of letting something die.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Leslie Leonard is currently pursuing her PhD in American Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is hard at work on her dissertation. Her occasional poetry centers first-person experience and feeling. She lives in Western Mass with her partner where she teaches both literature and academic writing.



Skin to Skin

SWWIM Every Day
by Barbara Daniels

by Barbara Daniels

Someone new turns the bass up.
It vibrates through my fingers
and feet. This body—It’s open

though I’m swathed in a sweatshirt
and jacket. Is this dance music?
Friends laugh and move,

the lights so low I can’t see
who I am. Your scent
on my clothes, your hand

up my blouse. We ran through
cornfields to get here. Not really.
I’m walking wet sidewalks

in our neighborhood, pink petals
falling, their skin to my skin.
So many scars on this body.

Are you sleeping? Wet petals fall.
Your sweet breathing, our big bed.
Music like madwomen typing.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Barbara Daniels’ book, Rose Fever, was published by WordTech Press, and her chapbooks Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and Moon Kitchen were published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She received three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

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