Identifying Light

SWWIM Every Day
by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

by Jenny Sadre-Orafai


I miss being a small girl so I braid my hair.
I stop watching this country on a tear. I climb into
the crown of our tree like it’s a lighthouse. Driving
into neighborhoods at night, I wait for Christmas lights.
The energy it takes to make each bulb turn red or green, heat
flooding a circle. I like the blinking ones and hang onto
my breath when they go blank. I clap when they come back.
Coming back from a wreck feels like eating an orange like an apple.
An outline of my face on the airbag. Bruises sitting in my lap.
I can’t forgive people who drive by without slowing down
to see how hard I’ve tried to keep everything alive.
Everyone fed and bathed. Wading into a cave is one way
to get clean after you’ve been crushed against a wheel.
I’m breaking sandstone in my fire hands, smuggling in light.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the co-author of Book of Levitations and the author of Malak and Paper, Cotton, Leather. Recent poetry appears in Cream City Review, Ninth Letter, The Cortland Review, and Hotel Amerika. Recent prose appears in Fourteen Hills and The Collagist. She is co-founding editor of Josephine Quarterly, Professor of English at Kennesaw State University, and Executive Director of Georgia Writers Association.

Beatitudes of Sobrevivientes de Violencia Doméstica In ESOL Class

SWWIM Every Day
by Barbara Boches

by Barbara Boches

Blessed is the fluorescence for those
long taught not
to speak, now learning
that ___a does not have to
refrain. Blessed

is the pressed laminate, the long
tables lined with those
who once quailed before Cain, now learning
that i do not have to
lie silent. Blessed

is the linoleum, the cork
dust beneath those
who used to kneel to keening, now
learning the silence of e
at the end of refuge and escape.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————--

Barbara Boches’s poetry has been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Poet Lore, Solstice, upstreet, and other journals. Her work has also appeared in the Griffin Museum of Photography at Lafayette City Center. She lives in Brookline, MA and volunteers in a shelter for beautiful ladies.

Self-Portrait in Revision

SWWIM Every Day
by Susan Milchman

by Susan Milchman

i am under renovation. i am a work of restoration. i am rebuilding

after destruction. all my names for beauty have scurried off like crabs

to bury their soft bodies in the sand. i am the wound that waits patiently

for blood to arrive. knowing it has to travel far. deep from the watershed of every

storm-licked sky. but i am not patient. i scream at stop lights. in slow lines at the

grocery store. at the edge of gravesites while people engage in small talk. i am

a yellow crave slinking off into a dark corner. i hear quiet down now. i hear

settle down now. and a murder of scrub grass untangles in my throat. i seek simplicity.

yet swaddle myself in complication. in the passage of other bodies. in the simmering

tides of fluid and fur. i am a fog of moonlight spilling through the ribs of your cage.

a warm bath of crows. a flood of empty words. i am an offering. i am a rejection.

i am blood spill. i am a drop of honey. i am vacancy of body. i am animal in high heels.

a howl in the bathroom. a mad crush in the space between moments. a boneless

blank page. i am a pool of skin in your mouth. i am a long blue sigh of hunger

disguised as a reckoning.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susan Milchman's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal, Sweet Tree Review, Stirring, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, bramble & thorn (an anthology from Porkbelly Press, 2017), Rogue Agent, Rust+Moth, and elsewhere. She was a Best of the Net nominee in 2018 and is working on her first chapbook. Susan lives in Minneapolis by way of Washington, D.C. and holds a degree in Journalism from the University of Maryland. Her published work can be found at susanmilchman.com.

Acts of Contrition

SWWIM Every Day
by Gloria Heffernan

by Gloria Heffernan


I enter the sacred space
of belly, thighs, buttocks,
knowing the Baltimore Catechism
has not prepared me for this confession.

My transgression cannot be eradicated
with a new diet and fifty sit-ups
on the altar of weight loss
in the Cathedral of the Six-Pack Abs.

Self-loathing—
the sin that fuels the propulsion
of Oreos and French fries,
the falling on the swords
of all Three Musketeers,
snickering at the bloated face
in the mirror,
rejecting any joy
but the almond kind.
Daring you to go ahead…
just try to love me.

And so my penance is this—
to run my hands tenderly
over every bulge, crease, and scar
as I would touch the face of my beloved.

My prayer is to give thanks for these legs
that have carried me here,
even with their jiggling thighs and
dimpled knees,

to bless my arms
with their flabby undersides
that so easily embrace others
with the love I would deny myself,

to trace the road map
of stretch marks that etch my belly
and follow their path
to forgiveness.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Gloria Heffernan is the author of the poetry collection, What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). She has written two chapbooks: Hail to the Symptom (Moonstone Press) and Some of Our Parts, (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared in over fifty journals including Anchor, Chautauqua, Magma (UK), Stone Canoe, Columbia Review, and The Healing Muse. She teaches at Le Moyne College and the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center.

"Winter Fields," 1942 —Andrew Wyeth

SWWIM Every Day
by Suzanne Frischkorn

by Suzanne Frischkorn

To view Winter Fields is to feel your face
pressed to the ground, the grass

lace-like, the black crow,
the distant trees & structures on the horizon

focus to distort. & the chokecherries
glow, beacon clues brighter for a background

of blue-black feathers. The worm’s eye view.

Some say the crow is frozen,

rigor mortis set on dead landscape.
I swear it’s poisoned. Wyeth’s light

makes chokecherries

look at least half-ripe, even a clever
crow, a very hungry, clever crow would be duped.

The crow, at best, is resting, if crows rest in line
with horizon, his claws crossed.

I know this call of winter.

How the body longs to lie down.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Lit Windowpane (2008), Girl on a Bridge (2010), and five chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Diode, Ecotone, Indiana Review, North American Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook, Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Center, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

The Phone Is A Fine Invention

SWWIM Every Day
by E. Kristin Anderson

by E. Kristin Anderson

(after Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins)

If this isn’t chaos, it’ll do until chaos gets here.
—Brian Williams, The 11th Hour, October 16, 2019



It’s been almost twenty years since the first time I woke up knowing
the life I’d expected was a myth I’d transcribed on my ribs. Every year

spent wrapped in those telephone cords must have been a trick and
I’ve realized that I might be a relic, a fragile masterpiece to be collected,

to later collect her own dust. But because my heart still beats I’m always
waiting for a heart attack or an aneurysm and because I haven’t died

yet every time I turn on the TV I slip back into suspicion. I look for
the illusion, find another gun, swallow another wildfire. Now I collect

my intentions like seeds and bury them in the neighbors’ potted plants.
I’ll never be a thief but, yes, I might pretend. My best disguise is another

tube of black eyeliner. Another pair of secondhand boots. And every
morning I wake up sweating, wishing I knew how not to love. How to

pack up and leave—as if home is not something I’d have to cut away
with scissors. Today when I slice open another brown box from Amazon

it will be mostly filled with air. Tomorrow when I hold out my hand the men
who take it will give it a twist and as my bones snap they’ll ask for my vote.

One of these days I’ll run screaming from both the sacred and the profane.
Some hills are saintless. Still, I have to believe that this isn’t doomsday.

I look at the map again and realize I’ve walked right off the edge. I’m
a human being, even at arm’s length, even on my doorstep calling my cat

home. I’m all out of ghosts—do you know this sensation, knowing that no
phone call can keep you from locking the door on yourself? I’ve spent a whole

week telling friends to get a flu shot because anything else is too difficult
to say out loud. I’m trying to figure out when time became a trick, but

it turns out I’ve walked right off the calendar, too. Truth and not-truth spin
like the sweater you put in the dryer and, in the end, this is both nothing

and chaos, a crackle in the air. So when my phone rings I let it go to voicemail
and I let the messages pile up for days and days like leaves in a storm drain.

I am the ghost now. It’s the only way to survive a year without a single
slow news day. A year in which we cover all of our mirrors to stay alive.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Based in Austin, TX, E. Kristin Anderson is the author of nine chapbooks, including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, 17 seventeen XVII, We’re Doing Witchcraft, and Behind, All You’ve Got (forthcoming). Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time, she worked nights at The New Yorker.

Shiva

SWWIM Every Day
by Marcella Benton

by Marcella Benton

ceiling lights multiply my shadow to shiva
a bastardized anglicized version
my many arms stretch across the tiled floor and up the shower wall

snaking over the shapes in the fake marble pattern
sinking into the bleached grout

we’re living in a dead woman’s house

fifty years it was hers
our shower tile is laid directly over hers
if we pull it down the wall will likely crumble

from mold or mourning

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Marcella Benton lives in Lakeland, Florida with her husband and pets where she and her husband run their screen printing and embroidery business, Whatever Tees. Marcella's previous work can be seen in Black Fox Literary Magazine and Deep South Magazine.

The Earth

SWWIM Every Day
by Mary Meriam

by Mary Meriam

I grabbed my witch’s broom too late to sweep the earth
under the rug. The watchers came to creep the earth.

How could I hide my eyes, and which way turn my feet,
without them watching, hand in grave, to reap the earth?

I put my spell on frothing crowds to pacify
the very rocking waves that ride and leap the earth.

In open sky, I leave the clouds, the jets, the stars,
the everlasting icy wind and weep the earth.

To battlements, I cry. Or just begin to cry.
Where is my girl’s green jacket? She will keep the earth.

Return my trees. Bring back the rocks and rooks, my treasures,
and all streams, swift or slow, the fields, the sheep, the earth.

When my true army carries wounded home, I’ll soothe
and heal the crippled seas, the silver deep, the earth.


_______________________________________________________________

Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, and Subtropics.

byob, or yearning (in wintertime)

SWWIM Every Day
by Ashley Cline

by Ashley Cline



bring your own body. call it back from the
forest, call it up from the sea floor & watch

how the garden blooms her shipwreck tongue:
lilacs & oceans & isn’t it funny how everything

tastes of riptides this spring, you’ll say. & the
caramel spades you’ll make of my tongue, &

the salted currents you’ll lay along the flower
bed—listen how the garden sighs with her antler

fuzz & trapper fur trimmings left somewhere
among ankles & winter & isn’t it lovely how

a hungry mouth cares for such reckless lips?
you’ll say. & the tides you’ll prune; the

shark-toothed carrots you’ll pull from their
tender-earthed home & place, gently, belly

up, in the basket perched on your feral hip.
she’ll wait for you, there, i’ll say. this body

made of bouquets & drownings & the moon’s
magnetism. & oh, how you’ll undo my

cheeks along your palm—& watch
how easily the jaw sings of god.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

An avid introvert and full-time carbon-based life-form, Ashley Cline crash-landed in south Jersey 28 years ago and still calls that strange land home. Most often found listening to Carly Rae Jepsen, her essays on music and feelings have been published by Sound Bites Media, while her poetry has appeared in 404 Ink, Third Point Press, and Francis House.

This Kill Bill Scene Has Me Thinking About Weave and Girl-Fights

SWWIM Every Day
by Taylor Byas

by Taylor Byas

The camera lingers for a moment on the black
flame of O-Ren Ishii’s hair in the snow, just sheared
by the bride’s Hatori Hanzo, and I think
about what it means to draw hair in a fight. To hitch

a braid or a track from another woman’s scalp.
What would our grandmothers say if they knew
we’d forsaken the old proverbs—where is my Vaseline?
or Bitch, hold my earrings. These days, victory depends on:

· Grip-strength, how well we crook our nails
beneath the cornrows, how much we loosen
the black thread holding the extensions

· The strength of the first tug

· Drag-distance

· The size of the hole the asphalt eats
into the other girl’s jeans.

Somebody yells out Worldstar, starts recording,
and the crowd’s collective flash is hot as stage lights.
Someone’s nose is knuckled to spit and blood.
A lip bellies around a cut. A black girl’s bruises

grey under white light. And when they’re pulled
apart, pieces of themselves left behind
on the other’s shirt like O-Ren’s slit of blood
in winter’s fresh down, the judges must decide

on a loser. The phones record a tracking shot
to the clump of hair or braids on the pavement,
zoom in. The cameras linger on the weave yanked
from owner and updo, and the crowd’s uproar

is something like exit music. But we know
this is no samurai’s death. No one lives this down.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Taylor Byas is a 23-year-old Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received both a Bachelor's Degree with Honors in English and a Masters in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is now a first-year PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.

On Captain Marvel Being Told That She Should Smile More

SWWIM Every Day
by Kate Polak

by Kate Polak

My grin isn’t what you think it is: joy
finds no quarter in the creaking teeth edged
between my lips. My smile is weltering
rage: it’s a stage of grief. It isn’t laugh,

delight, or any recognition that
would please. It’s what my face does when told
it offends, what I gird myself with
and against: it’s armor more than interior.

Am I not my face? If not, what can I say:
my mouth an unfilled space, hollow but for what?
The hope a glance will grant me deference,
the flesh of men. Not our twitching jaw at all, no:

It’s the gracious smile, an unthreatening skin
that you demand I clothe my disappointment in.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kate Polak is a professor and writer. Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Plainsongs, So to Speak, In Parentheses, Barzakh, and elsewhere. She lives in Yellow Springs with her husband and five familiars, and has painted her house to resemble a jack-o’-lantern.

Burial Ground

SWWIM Every Day
by Laurie Kolp

by Laurie Kolp


Bark mulch armors me brave.
When I separate its matter, I am defenseless
in the mounds I have made around me.

I become my mother: mattressed in living
room, all puffed up and naked, months like
meddlesome weeds.

Breaths are muffled grunts
because still air is too humid, hands
the only things movable in this
present moment. I rush

to disentomb mismanaged mess
until I reach moisture. There, the ashen soil
provides comfort I can admire.

Soon, I will cover the ground back up
with mulch knowing Mother
would want it that way.

_________________________________________________________________


Laurie Kolp’s poems have appeared in Stirring, Whale Road Review, Pith, and more. Her poetry books include the full-length Upon the Blue Couch and chapbook Hello, It's Your Mother. An avid runner and lover of nature, Laurie lives in Texas with her husband, three children, and two dogs.

When My Husband Tells Me He Wants a Divorce

SWWIM Every Day
by Cyndie Randall

by Cyndie Randall

I am eating a waffle
He follows the wood grain on the table with his
trigger finger I wonder if I should
direct my questions there When

animals are hungry they hunt and
moan When they are hurting they cower and
moan When any need arises they moan never

deceiving themselves on the road between
gut and throat We just looked at a house
yesterday I say Laughed
with our friends in this room
Next we plead the regrettables: Is there someone else This will
make your mother happy What about our daughter I don’t
want you
Don’t want you
I type husband said he wants a divorce into the search bar
The results instruct me not to beg to look and be the best wife no

sweatpants or lying in bed I find it difficult to fold our laundry
with a bomb strapped to my chest remote in his hand
tracing tracing the deep-seated grain

Conversations like these don’t end they die
hungry I go outside to scream My moaning hits our home
and echoes back to me Do I cut the red wire or the blue

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Cyndie Randall's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Love’s Executive Order, Whale Road Review, Boston Accent Lit, Okay Donkey, Yes Poetry, and elsewhere. She works as a therapist and plays among the Great Lakes.

Errata

SWWIM Every Day
by Susan Aizenberg

by Susan Aizenberg

What I took to be a slim wire
lost on the pavement
turned out to be a tiny snake
that whipped itself around
the panicked toe of my kindergarten
saddle shoe. What I believed
the smoke from a swallowed cigarette,
burning in a young bully’s belly,
turned out to be only the mist
of his breath rising on the chilly air
of a foreign cold snap one rare
North Miami morning. It turned out
to be a stone outside our window,
not a dead deer curled
beneath the oak, and that cry
through the bedroom wall
was not a hungry baby, but only
our neighbor’s cat left too long alone.
That bite from some nasty bug
off the Smith Corona floor blackening
the skin beneath my jeans turned
out to be a third-shift splash
of the sulfuric acid it was my job
to dip the metal parts in,
and that closet I discovered,
jerry-rigged from textbooks,
around my son’s third-grade desk,
a small prison his teacher’d built
to wall him off when he couldn’t stop
talking out of turn. It wasn’t a starburst
we saw that summer evening as we left
the theater, just a woman’s sun-struck
hair. At first we’d thought it was snow
falling on the camps and trains
in the famous movie, those ashes
I learned were the words a friend
would speak one day, explaining to me
the transgressions of the Jews.
And what I thought the face of love
forever turned out to be heat
shimmering like water on a distant
blacktop, tar rising and then cracking
like my own lustful, fickle heart.

—after Stern

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susan Aizenberg is the author most recently of Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015) and editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia UP 2001). Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in blackbird, Summerset Review, NAR, Bosque, and elsewhere. Her new chapbook, First Light, is forthcoming from Gibraltar Editions in 2020 in a limited, letterpress edition. She lives and writes in Iowa City and teaches in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Jardin des Plantes, 1980

SWWIM Every Day
by Theresa Burns

by Theresa Burns

Sometimes I wanted to crawl into a cave myself
when I watched the unfortunate baboons
palming their mangos at the zoo across the street,
then trying for hours to lick the stick off themselves.
I felt sorry for them as I felt sorry for the birds
in their high windowless cells—what good all that
red iridescence, all that sky-pitched soar?—
but not as sorry as I felt for myself that spring.
Nineteen and alone, no dancing in boîtes along
la Huchette, no fine-boned boys walking me
back to my room where I kept a knife
and a hotplate and a penlight so I could open
the right door when I visited the bathroom late,
my hand along the wall when the timed light
timed out, the hallway that held the most amazing
smells, crêpe and sleeping animal, pissoir and coffee.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Theresa Burns’ poetry, reviews, and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, America Magazine, New Ohio Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the author of the chapbook Two Train Town (Finishing Line Press, 2017). The curator of Watershed Literary Events in New Jersey, she teaches writing in and around New York.

Working the Porn Circuit

SWWIM Every Day
by Deborah Bacharach

by Deborah Bacharach

—a duplex after Jericho Brown

Girls get one thousand a day. The extras,
like him, get a hamburger with fries.

He’s like a juicy hamburger with fries
without the courage to ask for a dance.

Without the courage to ask for a dance,
The Wall Street Journal says men don’t marry.

The old Journal runs the pro/cons of marry
for men against just getting the sex for free.

Men against just giving sex for free
ask for the basic beat they’re supposed to know.

Ask for the basic beat you’re supposed to know.
Even Questlove, with his music certainty,

knows in the quest for certainty, love,
he’s no Prince, but he can delve down deep.

He’s no prince, but he can delve whale ear bone-deep,
give day girls his one thousand extra selves.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). She recently received a Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention and has been published in journals such as Adroit, Poetry Ireland Review, Vallum, Cimarron Review, and Poet Lore among many others. She is an editor, teacher, and tutor in Seattle. Find out more at DeborahBacharach.com.

Inset

SWWIM Every Day
by Laurinda Lind

by Laurinda Lind

Stuck between panes and walls,
here is a prophet poet in a church

so packed I can’t reach what
he says from inside myself

in the rain, though I stay, steal
charity under a strange umbrella.

Geese have been going all fall,
full of themselves up the sky.

Within, white coals seem to hiss
along the floor, heating someone

else’s heart. Even wet, the light
from the real world also is religion

so I suck it in like air till it
saves me under my skin.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laurinda Lind, a former journalist, lives in New York’s North Country and teaches English composition classes. Some poetry publications/acceptances have been in Anima, Antithesis, Artemis, Blue Fifth Review, Bombay Gin, Chautauqua, Compose, Comstock Review, The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Gone Lawn, Gyroscope, Jet Fuel Review, Josephine Quarterly, Kestrel, Main Street Rag, Mobius, Moonsick, New Rivers Press, Off the Coast, Passager, Paterson Literary Review, The Poeming Pigeon, Soliloquies, Sonic Boom, Triggerfish, Two Thirds North, and Unbroken.

By the Time We Reached Quilcene

SWWIM Every Day
by Emma Murray

by Emma Murray

“Well she was an American girl / Raised on promises /
She couldn't help thinkin' that there / Was a little more to life / Somewhere else”

— Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “American Girl”

Sisters and I left our fingernails in the Badlands,
our teeth along a Wyoming roadside,
and our skin in Big Sky Country—
a syzygy of bodily offerings for the road gods.

We summited the Idaho Panhandle
and fortified our naked spines
with pieces of the Rockies.

Dad’s calls were red pushpins
metastasizing in our wake,
asking us to heed his advice—
Buy a bat.

By the time we reached Quilcene
we covered our bodies in succulence
the Olympic Peninsula offered us.

We pitched our tent on a bed
of fern and moss while the boombox
played Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’
“American Girl”

and reimagined the promises
we were raised on, the destinies
preordained by fathers.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emma Murray holds an MFA from Oklahoma State University and received an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2016. Her works have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Territory, Pilgrimage, The RS 500, and The Collapsar. She currently lives in Iowa and teaches at Iowa State University.

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