Pruning, New Year's Day

SWWIM Every Day
by Amy Miller

by Amy Miller

What grew in the wrong direction,
what’s blocking the light—I’m trying
to be kind here, your missteps, misshapes
bloated by last year’s rain. Long handles
and a small steel tooth lop off beauty
sometimes too—I’m sorry
if you thought you were perfect.
You were killing yourself.

Wrong ladder, saw too short, I wake
the neighbor’s hangover cracking
through branches. Crazy-haired tree,
wild profusion frozen in the air—
I see now that you dreamt the hell
out of summer while I slept,
my elbows bound in grief.
Some warm afternoons—I remember—
I woke to the sound of bees
singing little farmer songs,
working in the sudden acres
of your bloom.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Miller’s writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. She lives in Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR listening guide Jefferson Journal. She blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.

Her Mouth

SWWIM Every Day
by Mary Morris

by Mary Morris

is an ocean. Her breathing,
a storm at sea. My mother

is having a tooth pulled today.
This sweet tooth she has had

since she skipped from her tenement
to buy strawberry ice cream

for her parents, running
home before it melted.

That same molar bit into rations
during poverty in war

and through the feathery
wedding cake her mother baked.

One eyetooth drew blood
from the flesh of a midwife’s arm.

El otro diente, another tooth
cracked on an apple last week.

One by one, my mother is losing
all of her teeth. Now I understand

what this means:
someday she won’t be hungry.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Published in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, Massachusetts Review, and numerous other literary journals, Mary Morris received the Rita Dove Award and has been invited to read at the Library of Congress. She recently won the 2019 Mountain West Prize from Western Humanities Review and has been nominated for Best Microfiction 2020. Her book, Enter Water, Swimmer, was the runner-up for the X. J. Kennedy Prize and published by Texas A&M University Consortium through Texas Review Press. A second book by the same press will be published in 2020. Morris writes book reviews, teaches poetry, and lives in Santa Fe New Mexico. See more at www.water400.org.

Second Language

SWWIM Every Day
by Candice Kelsey

by Candice Kelsey

A friend beams to me
about the ASL class she’ll take this spring
and I feign delight
while swallowing the secret

that my parents taught me
sign language early:
I became fluent in their dialect
of disapproval and blistering
syntax of spite.

My friend will learn
the international sign for Happy Birthday
a grimace for that tastes funnymaybe a full-body expression of jubilation;

I was raised to read impatience
in a double finger snap
gnarled lips of disgust
and the finger wag shame on you.

Perhaps she’ll stumble
through the first conversations,
get tutors for finger spelling, or join
a study group to increase speed.

I was an apt student
enrolled in the total immersion program
though some signs I never learned:
I am enough.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Candice Kelsey's debut book of poetry, Still I am Pushing, releases March 6th with Finishing Line Press. Her first nonfiction book explored adolescent identity in the age of social media and was recognized as an Amazon.com Top Ten Parenting Book in 2007. Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals. She has been a finalist for Poetry Quarterly's Rebecca Lard Award and nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction. She is an educator of 20 years' standing, devoted to working with young writers. An Ohio native, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.

This Is How I Am an Addict

SWWIM Every Day
by Sonia Greenfield

by Sonia Greenfield


In that each day I cycle through
my textures—waking as flannel

until I apply espresso so I become
tweed which wears to a kind

of threadbare satin until I apply
one bourbon at bedtime and become

flannel again. Sometimes the rocks
glasses build up on the nightstand

because I am addicted to always
thinking about something else

besides what needs to be done.
And when I say I have named

our puppy Benzo, it is short for
Diazepine, because I know pills

can cover for me as if I were
a crazed canary in a cage and they

were the black curtain to calm me.
And I won’t pick the poppies

that grow overdoses because
I know the nausea that follows

such easy pleasure. I am addicted
to the way loneliness is being

surrounded by all manner of people
I want to kiss but can never

figure out how to talk to and to
the pings of social media where

I don't have to be clever on cue.
Mostly, though, I am addicted

to being in this body, to taking
care, and I know this will kill me,

but no faster or slower
than the average dying.

________________________________________________________________

Sonia Greenfield was born and raised in Peekskill, New York, and her book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer's Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in a variety of places, including in 2010 Best American Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Willow Springs. She lives with her husband and son in Hollywood where she edits the Rise Up Review and co-directs the Southern California Poetry Festival.

I Am More like My Father than I Ever Thought I Would Be

SWWIM Every Day
by Sherine Elise Gilmour

by Sherine Gilmour

I run the Black and Decker
over the car’s upholstery,
press into seams, shove the nozzle under seats.
Every other Saturday
when my father had custody,
I’d sit between shadows
on the lawn and watch
as he vacuumed, then took
each and every piece of carpeting out,
washed it with a hose and special soap.
Sometimes I’d lean inside the car,
admire his face, gleaming
pink with effort,
and ask if I could help
and would be given a rag and told to buff
the glove compartment, at which point,
he’d promptly move somewhere else,
the trunk or the hubcaps.
While I could never be angry
at the cars themselves,
too beautiful, too glorious,
I could be angry with him
and was for years
and still am.
A man who left me when I was eight,
packed up whatever car he had at the time, the Pontiac,
the junky Chrysler, or the apple red Ford,
and drove across state after state after state.
But here I am at the sink, using a little dish soap
to scrub pine needles
out from the ridges of the plastic floor protectors.
What can I say?
I like the new car smell. I like
when the upholstery looks brand-new.
It’s nice to pretend I get to keep something perfect.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sherine Elise Gilmour graduated with an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming from American Journal of Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Many Mountains Moving, River Styx, So To Speak, Tinderbox, and other publications.

Kee Kee Run

SWWIM Every Day
by Patricia Caspers

by Patricia Caspers

(Here I am where are you?)

for Kristen and Lee Anne

Into this silence
I want to howl
Mariah Carey lyrics,
inhale 80s sitcoms
with each deep pull
of clovesmoke,
sweat rum
into couch seams.

Instead, the canyon
beyond the TV screen
is sobering pink stormlight.

Turkeys wander
the garden,
their bronze feathers
shimmer rainbows
and fall to August-
yellowed grass.

Flocks roam the neighborhood
seed-scouring the earth,
unconcerned with the romance
of October twilight.

I wake to the turklets’
three-note whistle-and-yelp
in the starless night.

They scurry the fence line
in search of a path
long buried with foliage
of other autumns.

There’s no word
for the hunter’s practice
of calling a hen to his shotgun
with the cry of her lost poult.

There is no word
for what we are now.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Patricia Caspers is an award-winning poet, columnist and journalist. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Ploughshares, PANK, The Cortland Review, Sugar House Review, and Quiddity. She won the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for poetry, and her full-length poetry collection, In the Belly of the Albatross, was published by Glass Lyre Press.

I mother the sad thought

SWWIM Every Day
by Theresa Senato Edwards

by Theresa Senato Edwards

of what was,
draw circles counterclockwise /
worry the body is / weight
dessert / just ice.

And the dead shouldn’t
circle its breaking.

But I was born with superstitions
in the gift shop / of / personality

change / not my mistake.

And my body will never be still
in the memory of my parents’ home—

father building basement walls
teaches me, his last daughter, to paint
thin layers with each coat,

ration the paint as if my life depended
on each stroke of color saved

/ to position

a nail like a flagpole,
steady / straight,

fear of missing the small, silver target

unable / to not wanting to /
build away
an attic crawlspace: a safe gap

for a little girl before sorrow
metastasized.

_____________________________________________________________________


Theresa Senato Edwards has published two full-length poetry books, one, with painter Lori Schreiner, which won The Tacenda Literary Award for Best Book, and two chapbooks. Edwards was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, received creative writing residencies from Drop Forge & Tool and Craigardan, and is Poetry Editor of The American Poetry Journal (APJ). For more, see her website: https://theresasenatoedwards.wixsite.com/tsenatoedwards.

Now a Hospice Volunteer

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

How shocked I was
as a child to learn
that the architecture of life
included death—a frightened fire
starting inside of me fueled
by containment.

I have watched people die,
held their cool hands
as they exhale a last breath.

Each time is a lessening,
an echo—the way veins
of a fallen leaf are a faint imprint
of the tree or the inside whorl
of a shell holds onto the sea.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form of writing with conscious linebreaks. She has three poetry collections: The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.

Aunt Gracie's

SWWIM Every Day
by Hannah Jones

by Hannah Jones

tobacco fields stink
worse than collards
greenish brown

windows down

muggy breeze
fingers reaching out to touch
nearly touch
the cotton balls
as they fluff by

because if you touch
perhaps you will know
what your foremothers knew
ages ago

down in the Cackalacky
the dirt road
stationwagon
rickety, creaks

with the grease of fried chicken
in spotted napkins

and thighs, sweaty
sticking to hot leather

two angry sisters in the backseat
lips smarting from the pinch
of reprove
and stewing from the heat

cold tomato slices
say Goodbye
and every 200 miles
you might stop
at a tiny gas station
where there’s a single attendant
and your father

vanishes
and emerges

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Hannah Jones is a child clinical psychologist from the San Francisco Bay by way of Virginia. Dr. Jones also leads social justice oriented didactics. She has always used written word as an outlet to integrate her academic and artistic identities. Dr. Jones writes to articulate silenced hopes, dreams, anxieties, fears, and experiences. Her work has been featured by Split This Rock and My Whisper Roars and is published in TAYO Literary Magazine.

Inheritance

SWWIM Every Day
by Rosie Prohías Driscoll

by Rosie Prohías Driscoll

Abuela Aida was obsessed with whether
her daughters would sprout las orejas de torreja
de Abuelo Cesar y José Basilio, those ears
that induced Sisa to tie a blue ribbon around
Tio Raul’s infant head (even if people might think
he was a girl) to prevent them from smothering
him in his sleep. She gave thanks to God when
Mami and Mina each emerged from the womb
with ears well-proportioned for wearing a proper
moño, and again years later, when we her nietos
also managed to escape the elephantine curse.
So when our first daughter is born the women
of the family swoop down ceremoniously to dissect
her baby body. Mami proclaims que la niña tiene
las sortijitas pegadas a la cabeza like my father,
though the strawberry blond hue of her ringlets
belong to Abuela Rosina. Most importantly, her ears
are perfect, tiny caracoles de nacar. Lying in her moisés,
la niña gazes at her father, not yet able to recognize
the amused smile taking shape as he strokes the reddish
stubble of his beard, while I fix my eyes on hers, wanting
to believe it’s true, that a little piece of ourselves
can live in the precise curve of a fingernail bed,
or in the pupil of the bluest eye


____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Rosie Prohías Driscoll is a Cuban-American educator and poet. Raised in Miami, she now lives in Alexandria, VA with her husband and greyhound. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Acentos Review, Más Tequila Review, Literary Mama, Blue Lyra Review, Temenos Journal, Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art, No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant and First-Generation American Poetry, and Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders.

The Artists’ Sacrifice

SWWIM Every Day
by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

I think careful cooking is love, don't you?
~Julia Child

Isaac's not mentioned
once replaced by the ram,
only his sparing. Not one

ounce of disappointment,
not one question
about an unfit parent,

only people singing.
Show me how we prevent
fathers from sacrificing

children to honor
Gods with offerings.
Show me a mother

who wouldn't bind
babies to a stranger
to recover an hour

over the fire alone.
The "card-carrying carnivore,"
Julia Child's just one

whose sacrifice—
hers to Boeuf Bourguignon—
was childlessness.

My son and daughter
bound to rock-like seats
in the sanctuary, augur

their own dismay.
To feel God in my hands
what wouldn't I give away?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, is the author of Imperfect Tense (poems) and three scholarly books in education. Winner of NEA Big Read Grants, the Beckman Award for Professors Who Inspire, and a Fulbright for the nine-month study of adult Spanish language acquisition in Oaxaca Mexico, she's served for over ten years as poetry editor for Anthropology & Humanism, judging the ethnographic poetry competition. She blogs at http://teachersactup.com.

26

SWWIM Every Day
by Kunjana Parashar

by Kunjana Parashar

In the 1990s, diclofenac was used to treat cattle diseases. Many
vultures started dropping dead after feeding on the medicated carcasses:
Gyps bengalensis, G. Indicus & G. Tenuirostris: they took a hit so badly,
that later, the Parsis planned to build vulture-aviaries for the traditional
departure of their dead. I was born in that decade–somewhere around
the confirmed end of Javan tigers. Since my birth, there are others who
have gone extinct–birds, civets, rhinos. And yet, countless anurans hide
in the Western ghats. Turn this shola, peatland, lateritic plateau–and you will
find a species still willing to live, shy only of the blessed grace of taxonomy.
When my mother asks how I want to celebrate my birthday this year,
I say quietly.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kunjana Parashar is a poet living in Mumbai. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, The Indianapolis Review, Parentheses Journal, UCity Review, What Are Birds, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @wolfwasp.

Lorena

SWWIM Every Day
by Emily Banks

by Emily Banks

The first breaking story I remember
hearing as a child, wide-eyed between my parents
on the couch as we ate ice cream, watching
the six o’clock news. I’d never seen one before,
except in a quick flash, a boy my mom tutored
in his closet laughing though I didn’t understand
why it was a big deal. I knew boys had one
and I hated boys. How I imagined it,
there was no blood. Just a pale limp organ
like a peeled banana snapped softly in half.
I pictured her tossing it out the window
into a dark pile of twigs and driving off.
Why she did it was unimportant to me.
I’d seen my mom get angry
at my dad and believed women
were always right. It was the ’90s. Wives
were a punchline. Their thighs
were too fat and they were too old
for their belching husbands whose stomachs peeked
out from their Buffalo-sauce-stained tees:
Take my wife. It would have been a fair conclusion
to any family sitcom, honestly: the husband
in the den, remote in hand, snoring gently,
or at the kitchen table with his other husband-friends
gawking at the sixteen-year-old nanny over poker chips,
none of them even good at poker—then wife
enters with butcher knife. The news anchors
never explained how he hurt her. Entered her
body in ways she could barely whisper to the court.
Never said he promised to kill her.
The penis was the story as, I would soon learn,
it always is. But still I liked how it made men,
even the grown-up ones on TV, squirm
like little boys with mothers scrubbing
the backs of their necks for Sunday, scrubbing
harder than they needed to, like it was more
than dirt their rough cloths sought.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Cortland Review, The Southampton Review, Memoir Mixtapes, Glass (Poets Resist), Superstition Review, New South, Collective Unrest, and other journals. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and is currently a doctoral candidate at Emory University.

Her Last Words

SWWIM Every Day
by Joan Colby

by Joan Colby

She half-stood after dinner, said
Six words and seized
Like the old Packard following
The shrieking squad car
With Annie in the back seat,
Her appendix rupturing, the oil light
Coming on, unnoticed.

Gabriella said Your mother is dead now,
We trundled her to her room,
Laid her down. I could swear
She was still breathing, but it was
Just the final bodily functions
Shutting down like gears freezing
Ungreased, the rattle of the
Radiator hissing its last
Exhalation. What was it she said
Standing there, surprised,
Her voice gone thick.

Last words. You expect
Profundity. Or an image:
The spiritual bird on an updraft.
Surely, I think now when the light suddenly
Flares and dims at the archway to
Something or nothing, in that ancient
Turtle mutter, a primeval tone
Before civilization mustered
Columns of rationality,
She might have enlightened us.

But there was nothing
Significant. Nothing to bequeath.
No evidence. She said
I want to go to bed
So firmly there was no denying
The order. We shouldered her
Into the darkness.


__________________________________________________________________

Joan Colby’s Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage was awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Her recent books include Her Heartsongs from Presa Press, Joyriding to Nightfall from FutureCycle Press, Elements from Presa Press and Bony Old Folks from Cyberwit Press. She has another book forthcoming from The Poetry Box Select series titled The Kingdom of the Birds which should be out next August.

21st Century Omniverse Sonnet (i)

SWWIM Every Day
by Beth Gordon

by Beth Gordon

When physicists in Oak Ridge swung the door
wide to glimpse the negative of narrow
existence, a snail with wet wings emerged,
leaving a contrail, and then hummingbirds,
sluggish and attracted only to shades
of white, and called by metaphysical
choirs to reunite with God and my
father appeared, his oiled brain in clockwork
order, to decode triangulations
of weeping willow funerals, lightning
bugs and vanishing tar pits, but did not
know my face, my doppelgänger long drowned

in mud waters and no one through either
mirror knows if it was an accident.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother, and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two chapbooks: Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press) and Particularly Dangerous Situation (Clare Songbird Publishing). She is Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.

Love Song, Cannon Beach

SWWIM Every Day
by Sara Quinn Rivara

by Sara Quinn Rivara

My son tells me to stick my finger
in an open anemone though it might sting.

On Haystack Rock, tufted puffins return
each year to lay eggs and raise their young.
Cells divide but not forever.

Mom, do you remember before me? The tide
is coming in. He’s wet to the knees.
I think I have always been here.

My new husband and his son make sandcastles
while we watch starfish slip beneath the waves.

The sandcastle goes under. There is no before,
no after. The boys trace stars into the sand,

run into a crowd of gulls. How do jellyfish live
without brains? they ask. We eat ice-cream
for dinner, walk barefoot back to the hotel.

The boys talk until midnight. Our bodies taste
like salt. Tree frogs sing through the open window.

My husband hums and puts the boys to bed.
To call a thing by name is a kind of spell:

Mom, Sara, love. Even so, the past wolf-whistles
bitch, unloveable. Fog rolls in, smears the panes.
Today the ocean is calm. Tomorrow,

the weather will shift. Big rollers, north wind.
One rogue wave could swallow us.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sara Quinn Rivara is the author of Animal Bride (Tinderbox Editions) and Lake Effect (Aldrich Press). Her work has recently appeared in Crab Creek Review, West Branch, Dunes Review, Blackbird, RHINO, and numerous other places. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.

you freak me

SWWIM Every Day
by Paula Harris

by Paula Harris

Butterflies in my pants
Got ants in my heart
Supergroove “You Freak Me”


bees in the belfry
bats in my bonnet

a drop in the rough
a diamond in the ocean

hell in a pod
peas in a handbasket

true fact:
one of Saturn’s moons
looks like a round ravioli
(not a square one)

all that glitters cannot change its spots
a leopard is not gold

a little knowledge is a joy forever
a thing of beauty is a dangerous thing

in for a barn door, in for a pound
shutting the penny after the horse has bolted

true fact:
the average cloud weighs
the same as 83 elephants
(a small cloud is 2 elephants)

let’s press into shape
come, lick me into service

let’s make pie while the sun shines
come, be my hay in the sky

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Paula Harris lives in New Zealand, where she writes poems and sleeps in a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award. Her writing has been published in various journals, including Berfrois, Queen Mob's Teahouse, The Rialto, Barren, SWWIM Every Day, Diode, Glass, Aotearotica, The Spinoff, and Landfall. See more at www.paulaharris.co.nz.

For Sure

SWWIM Every Day
by Michele Sharpe

by Michele Sharpe

A dog, maybe a coyote, splashes up a shallow, rocky stream.
The shame carried deepest in the body is the shame of being fooled.

The dog, maybe a coyote, sheds droplets from its fur. They shine.
The shame of being fooled means we can’t trust even ourselves.

Say it: There is a stream. Sunlight. A coyote. Some things have names.
The dog, maybe a coyote, raises its muzzle as if smelling, even tasting the breeze.

You could say the same of getting fooled. First, the scent. Then, you taste it.
Later, nothing is certain until bitten, until its fur comes away in your teeth.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear in venues including The Rumpus, Guernica, Catapult, and The Sycamore Review. Recent poems can be found in Poet Lore, North American Review, Stirring, and Baltimore Review.

Poem for St. John of the Cross

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Zimmerman

by Lisa Zimmerman


 In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God                                                  Saint John of the Cross


Your father married for love
an orphan below his noble station.
Discarded by his wealthy kindred
they say your parents nurtured you in poverty—
and the bread was as sweet as any bread

and the days offered their shiny hands
and their little streams of water
singing in the glades.

I see you wandering happily as a boy,
the sun a crown on your small head,
your bare feet scuffing the dust.
God chirped like a wood lark
in the throat of afternoon
and the lonely months in prison
were far ahead beneath the great shadow
of the future.

I try to follow you there, O mystic,
to watch you defy your greedy brethren
monks who will reject your reforms, your love
of less, of days returned to prayer and fasting.

Fat and threatened, they silenced you
in a narrow stone cell, one tiny window
like the one in the soul where day after day
the voice of God pierced your suffering.

Out of emptiness, a full heart—
out of abandonment, a poem of seeking—
out of utter darkness, a gleam of pure light—
love’s last trembling boat waiting for you
to get in, and row.

_______________________________________________________________

Lisa Zimmerman’s poems have appeared in Cave Wall, Colorado Review, Natural Bridge, Apple Valley Review, Chiron Review, Trampset, and other magazines.  She has published three chapbooks and three full length collections. Her debut poetry collection won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Her other collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado.   

You Pick Out Your Feminist Icon Dress For School Again

SWWIM Every Day
by Amelia Martens

by Amelia Martens

And ask me to put a Christmas pompom in your hair
along with a maroon bow to hold your bun in place.

There is all of breakfast and night across your face
when we leave the house; when we cross the street

your sister wants to talk about gravity
and I am doing math involving trajectory:

if two daughters and their mother step off
this curb now, will they arrive on the other side

before that blue pick-up truck explodes
their bodies in clean clothes and homework?

Why don’t we fall off the surface of the Earth
as our planet spins through space, why don’t

we feel the spin, here on this plate? I make
metaphors with my free hand and conduct

two half conversations at once, without
success. We cross another street and don’t

die and yet, I always feel the sunshine
as a potential threat, my body

your bodies, always under the weight:
a certain level of force exerted to hold us

to the ground, as we are more
dangerous in our space.

I let go your hand, and you run
up the school steps, free radicals.

I turn home, thinking of ice animals
floating off the poles at each end of this ball.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016) and four chapbooks, including Ursa Minor (elsewhere magazine, 2018). She is the recipient of a 2019 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She met her husband in the Indiana University MFA program; together they created the Rivertown Reading Series, Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art, and two awesome daughters.

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