Home Depot

SWWIM Every Day
by Michelle Matz

by Michelle Matz


It isn’t necessarily true
that it will all work out in the end.
One door closes but another opens?
Maybe. Maybe
not.
It depends on architecture.
Material matters. And
construction.
A draft can make a house
feel several degrees colder,
drive up your heating
bill.
Caulking helps.
It’s about adhesion
and sash locks.
The man at Home Depot
said properly done,
5 to 10 years. I don’t know
if that’s a lot or a little.
Sometimes I feel so much
sorrow my heart needs propping
up. I don’t know
if it’s a design flaw
or if I lean too hard against walls
never meant to sustain such
weight. Even the best plywood,
the man tells me,
can start to buckle.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michelle Matz’s chapbook, Atilt, was published by Finishing Line Press. She won the Mary Merritt Henry Prize for a group of poems, was a semifinalist in The Ledge Press Manuscript Contest, and was awarded an Individual Artist Grant through the San Francisco Arts Commission. Her poems have been published in numerous journals, including The Berkeley Poetry Review, Rainbow Curve, So To Speak, Natural Bridge, Cider Press Review, and Lifelines. She lives in San Francisco.

I make you and disappear

SWWIM Every Day
by Samantha Duncan

by Samantha Duncan


into swaddled narrative
tendon stretch, neuron-wide fall.

My garish cartoon life-gap
caulked your bones with milk

and drowned my landscape,
made of decades
a simple cutout smile.

Disappearing is an easy
stake in the ground, but here,

hunger doesn’t have to know
a mouth. May your character

awaken in a few years,
quench me with clay or ash
or blood. Meanwhile, I fold

my bones into their most
welcoming meridians,

where everything’s expectant:
mother, waiting, void.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016). Her work has recently appeared in BOAAT, decomP, Kissing Dynamite, Meridian, and The Pinch. She is an Assistant Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Journal and lives in Houston.

Some Violet Urge

SWWIM Every Day
by Shannon Hozinec

by Shannon Hozinec

And what is a woman
but a cathedral of wounds—

fostered in nacre and nightshell, is it any wonder
we learn the red of our mouths so quickly?

Each morning I wake to find fresh reserves of cruelty
within me, like flakes of dried blood lingering

underneath a torn fingernail. Was this the gift you intended—
a black pulse, endlessly beating through the stitches

with which you wove me together, from neck to navel,

collar to cunt, an electric web of malintent
so tightly constructed that to pluck

a single hair from its nested brethren
would bring forth instantaneous collapse.

What crumbs could I gather
from the thicket of my mind
that did not fall from your mouth?

I may call myself silver echolatory prayer,
eschatological tug-of-war, but I know I am

what you have made me. A throne of arrows.
Gentle rasp of come-hither.

A chandelier of antlers,
glistening in a dark room with no windows.

I pour all the slivered glass into a jar,
call it holy, holy, whole.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Shannon Hozinec lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work can be found in Thrush, The Adroit Journal, Deluge, Dream Pop Press, and elsewhere.

My father has never made an effort to memorize how my name is spelled

SWWIM Every Day
by Elisabeth Blair

by Elisabeth Blair

I gave up all, went into the wildlands.

I was last seen on the peninsula.

I was caught in a storm, cast adrift.

I and my ships waited in a cave.

I became lost in the clouds.

I disappeared during a descent.

There is some evidence my disappearance was voluntary.

I left hints.

I was depressed, walked out with just 30 dollars.

I bought a book.

I got on a train.

I went down into a sewage canal.

I was presumed to have drowned, but I may have survived.

Several women came forth saying they suspected they might be me.

I was found at last, abandoned, partially submerged, listing heavily.

They tested me and found incontrovertible proof:

no one is related to me.

_______________________________________________________________

Elisabeth Blair is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, and manuscript consultant. Her poems have recently appeared in Juked, GNU Journal, WomenArts Quarterly Journal, and Feminist Studies. A chapbook, We He She/It, was published in 2016 by Dancing Girl Press. Another chapbook (Ethel Press, 2020) and a full-length collection (Unsolicited Press, 2022) are forthcoming. Since 2018 she's been honored to be the poetry workshop leader for the Burlington Writers Workshop in Vermont. www.elisabethblair.net

Planet Earth with amamma

SWWIM Every Day
by Vismai Rao

by Vismai Rao

Two months of sunless winter
emperor penguins huddle to conserve heat—

it’s how a thousand-petalled black marigold
stays abloom the icy Antarctic

until the arrival of spring. Three oceans away
my half-blind grandmother

is discovering for the first time water
halted by its own limitations:

icebergs, frozen seas, glaciers. I pause the movie
to tell her there are places on this planet

that don’t see sunshine for six months & she fixes
her one good eye on me, bewildered—Soon,

the view of Eurasia from outer space
fills our screen and I tell her

this is Earth, the thing you’re standing on, a part of me
worried if the heart at 72 can absorb

the shock of such revelations.
Amamma devours the season

as we binge-watch six episodes in two days:
Mushrooms inching out of tree bark. The jaw of a croc

snap-shut on the leg of a wildebeest. Or a million snow geese
like heartbeats emerging

out of my grandmother’s chest, a flutter of wings
so furious it decries every notion

of flightlessness, amamma’s feet
twitching inches above the stone floor—

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Vismai Rao's poems appear or are forthcoming in the Indianapolis Review, RHINO, Salamander, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Parentheses Journal, Rust+Moth, The Shore, & elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She lives in India. Find her on Twitter @vismairao.

I Serve My God Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

SWWIM Every Day
by Anne Barngrover

by Anne Barngrover

because he demands hothouse eyes and delayed
manifestation. He requests my best side
hidden then flipped upright, wetly visible
only for his decree. Look at the golden ring
and cherry topping, retro and crystalized
as living room stained glass. I serve my god
clementine cake made from ground
almonds and six eggs. It’s easy to lie
about how many oranges I can go through.
It’s a cake of pulp and rind, a stepping stone
to the potential he knows I can reach
if I just concentrate on what he wants from me.
I serve my god lemon poppy seed cake,
zesting over a bowl until my shoulder aches.
Three times the glaze pools on the yellow flower
plate. Three times the base falls apart.
But the taste—so tart, so sweet. I suck my cuticles
and plead. I serve my god a carrot cake.
It’s clogged with nuts and raisins, and I can’t
move after grating roots with a rusted tool.
He is most displeased. The icing, too thick
or will not thicken. Layers collapsing like a cave.
I serve my god his birthday cake. I research
all night long. Its buttermilk, well shaken.
The batter’s air bubbles slapped away. Its flour
comes from a red box with a picture of a swan.
His favorite icing, chocolate sour cream. My god
wants and wants from me. I make it perfectly
but still he doesn’t believe me when I tell him
that pineapple comes from the ground
despite how I point to the row of blue-green spikes
growing in acidic soil. He wants me to show
him what I mean, to get down low. Maybe then
I can prove to him what it is he already knows.
He says, I always had faith you could do it. He says, welcome.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Anne Barngrover’s most recent poetry collection, Brazen Creature, was published with The University of Akron Press in 2018 and was a finalist for the 2019 Ohioana Award for Poetry. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is on faculty in the low-residency MA program in Creative Writing, and lives in Tampa, Florida.

Still Life

SWWIM Every Day
by Diane Hueter

by Diane Hueter

I paint a bowl, mounded with limes,
leaves cast shadows on the tablecloth,
candles flicker, flames draw a moth,
then another, and one more, and in time

all memories gather, listening to the moon.
I paint a bowl, steaming with stew,
potatoes, meat—I would feed to you—
peas, carrots—morsels that justify the spoon.

A painting or a dream, a wall of clay
bending to the wind, my bowl. Twigs
fill it. Lemons and limes, currants and figs.
Feathers of fledglings before they fly away.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Diane Warner (publishing as Diane Hueter) works at the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library of Texas Tech University, where she is curator of a manuscript collection concentrating on contemporary writers of place. She received a BA and MA from the University of Kansas, an MLIS from UT-Austin, and a PhD in English from Texas Tech. Her poetry has appeared in Isotope, BlueLine, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and PMS: Poem Memoir Story. Her book, After the Tornado, was published by Stephen F. Austin UP (2013).

A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery

SWWIM Every Day
by Tina Carlson

by Tina Carlson

Say excavation, exoneration.
My mother’s mouth, washed out

with soap. In that cool cocoon
a salmon caught in stones.

Bird flapping in a trap. Cheek
swab, sea snail. Show me

how a smile hides argument
behind its teeth. Ask her,

what words made your
crimes? She ate wood,

sampled leather. Grazed
the back yard of her alphabets.

Grass cats lumbered the clods
of her thoughts. We tumbled

through her silent gardens
filled them with noise.

To untether the tongue,
say frenulum. Say frenzy.

A simple snip and a drop
of blood. Let her taste

peaches, warm June. I imagine
my mother is more than apology,

flag planted in her throat
unfurled past mumble and scorn.

Poplar at dawn, she is lingual.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tina Carlson is a Santa Fe poet. Her most recent book, We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press), is a book of poetic epistles written in collaboration with poets Katherine DiBella Seluja and Stella Reed, in response to the 2016 US presidential election. Her first poetry book, Ground, Wind, This Body (UNM, 2017), explores the impact of war on a family when the veteran does not receive adequate help for their trauma.

Before Landfall

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Carey

by Sarah Carey


for my father


In the latest projection, Irma creeps
up the spine of the supine peninsula.

We lie sober in our safe room,
foundation beneath us, rooted to the soil

doors and windows shut tight, radio, flashlight,
extra batteries and covered shoes at hand

so we can run from room to room
between gusts, snaps and thuds

as if we might save what we’ve built
from intrusion, elements we’ll never escape.

As the fluids left my father’s body,
he tracked my moving mouth, a salt river

smelling of seaweed and grief.
His good eye would see me through

my slips, the mopping up
I’d always do when storms swept in

then out with who we were,
so sure we’d not be hit again.

When I was as tiny as a country
seen from light years away,

he held me high above the swirling sea
that was the beginning and the end of everything.



________________________________________________________________


Sarah Carey's work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Grist, Yemassee, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere. A Pushcart and Orison Anthology nominee, her new poetry chapbook, Accommodations, received the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award and was published in June 2019. Sarah's first chapbook, The Heart Contracts, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. She works in communications at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1. 

Crows Call, High Above the Floodplain

SWWIM Every Day
by Annette Sisson

by Annette Sisson

An empty wooden frame, years
layered like rings of oak, the painting
discarded—a turbulent sea and sky
scarcely divided, streaks of gray
mimicking a choleric body of water.
This strife—a chaos, a suffering.

You consider a new canvas, how
it might be stretched, fitted—perhaps
a mossy kayak, a river, its creeping
tendrils and fronds jacketing mud-
slick banks. From the mullioned
window of a rural farmhouse, black-
slatted fencing bisects fields
of grass, rusty-feathered weeds.
Crows light in tree tops an acre
away. Jabbering ducks aggravate
the sky. A northern mockingbird scats
a rhyme, and coyotes shriek into night,
their scraping laughter sandpaper on slate.
The old tumult swells.

But ducks spread their wings
on rivers of air—like paddles turning,
countering surge. The canvas beckons
these birds, this kayak bearing you
through woodlands, copper fields patched
with fencerows, crows calling from threadbare
trees high above the chalky floodplain.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Annette Sisson is a professor at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. Besides teaching, she enjoys traveling, hiking, baking, playing piano, singing alto in choir, watching birds, and being with her family. In the last year, she has published 15 poems in 13 journals and a chapbook, A Casting Off (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She was named a BOAAT Writing Fellow (2020), won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s poetry prize (2019), and received honorable mention in Passager’s national poetry contest (2019). She is currently at work on a full-length book of poetry.

Mother Has Broken

SWWIM Every Day
by Sally Rosen Kindred

by Sally Rosen Kindred


like the first

1. In your throat now when you speak, I hear the seed-cries of blue blooms from the dining room walls you papered over when my father left. In your throat it’s night. A meadow frosts and hardstars.

2. In the meadow we meet. Here our bodies are paper blooms, only the widows of actual larkspur, actual flax. Still, we lean.

Mother has spoken, like

3. Here in your throat, cold wind, a wreath of stones. Roots lit blue by skin, by your fury, break through the ground beneath me. How did I get here. How do I leave.

4. I keep telling you not to die, but you do. Meadows ago, we sang flax hymns in a candle room, wrapped in the paper of his unremembered breath.

the wet garden

5. Now the meadow sinks beneath blackwater. It is the Edisto River. Leaves fringe overhead in shards, blue pulp. Your arms tread and drip. Your Girlbloom face in the water could open.

6. There is nowhere for you to swim from here.

Praise for the singing

7. Meadows and meadows ago, you made me into skin from flax and chicory. Breath strung, the sepals yours, star to star, wet lace. Now I have no throat, only a blue paper tower in which a mother sits, cupping a river. It’s getting dark in there. I have no bones but the ones that crack through the violet grass.

8. Through the violet grass, leaning away from threats of light.

where his feet pass

9. I keep telling you not to die but you do. I tell him to stay but his voice peels from the walls, the blue beads behind it drip but don’t speak. O soft leaning. Praise with elation. I am waiting in a meadow where the candle breaks and there is no wax but waiting, no skin but ink unbeading. There are no hymns but his feet, no walls but your throat: the frost of black, unblossomed stars—not pulsing, never morning.


(Words in italics from “Morning Has Broken,” Eleanor Farjeon, 1931)


____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of two poetry books from Mayapple Press, Book of Asters and No Eden. Her most recent chapbook is Says the Forest To the Girl (Porkbelly Press). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online.

On the Screen, Only Somewhat

SWWIM Every Day
by Kelly R. Samuels

by Kelly R. Samuels


like teeth. Close up and two dimensional, as they are.
I sit in the chair with my bib. He’s gesturing,

pointing to what I often conceal—never smiling
broadly, or: only when forgetting. Here is the canine,

he says. Like a dog’s, he says. And the molars
with their two-pronged or fused roots.

All is white and gray and a deeper gray, the darkest
parts not even teeth but the sinuses like storm clouds.

I see a child’s toes after a long bath.
Tulips bleached of all color. But more:

of the sea or cave—what is found where
there is little light and delving is necessary.

Farther north, that lake I love and the crystal
ice structures formed in its wet, wind-rocked caves.

Somewhere other, the white sand anemone without
its magenta—so disparaged, so delicate.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly R. Samuels is a Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She is the author of Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited) and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line). Her poems have appeared in RHINO, The Pinch, DMQ Review, Salt Hill, and Quiddity. She lives in the Upper Midwest.

Great Bear

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Creech Bledsoe

by Lisa Creech Bledsoe

When the day pours down in a silken glaze
the great bear walks up
and up each milk-white step of noon

leaving the restless woods
and her green cave of weeds
emptying her pockets of berries, roots, and grubs

climbing past the crows in the lemony air
above the hornbeam and chestnut oak
between cloud and mountain.

She slowly shakes aside the heavy rug of her fur
and muscle of her body
letting go

memories of grievous winters
boom and howl of the wind and weight
of each cub, before it was born

wending up the stairs of the night chorus
into the embrace of grandmother sky,
with bones as light and fierce as polished suns.

I tell you this so you won't be surprised
if the scent of pine sap drifts down
with milkweed, and memories of wild fat summers—

if you too
are stretched out in the field watching
for the rise of the great mother.

Remember your enchantment:
every day is a doorway
every moment is the world revealing itself.

Death is not waiting at the end,
but is here, vibrating with promises
of wider horizons and songs in different languages.

We are not waiting, but are
constant and becoming as we climb
listening for

learning what the river wants
and how the plants became healers—
letting go of our bodies

slowly, carrying nothing else into
the black and silver night
but the great shining we came from, and are.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Watched by crows and friend to salamanders, Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She is the author of two full-length books of poetry, Appalachian Ground (2019) and Wolf Laundry (2020), and she has new poems out or forthcoming in American Writers Review, The Main Street Rag, Jam & Sand, The Writer’s Cafe Magazine, Cabinet of Heed, and Front Porch Review, among others.

Teaching Tammy Faye's Daughter to Swim

SWWIM Every Day
by Joy Roulier Sawyer

by Joy Roulier Sawyer



Cup your hands like this, I said,
and when your arm comes out of the pool,
just roll your head to the side for air

She giggled, slurped water, puffed her
chipmunk cheeks and squirted me
through gaps in her teeth

Later, we climbed out and dangled our feet,
her baby fat pooched over her swimsuit
like white-flour dumplings

Then we heard two pool workers picking up Coke cans behind us

They bought another Rolls Royce yesterday.
Makes me sick

Wonder how many little old ladies
paid for that

They laughed like the shrill whine of the pool’s vacuum

I turned and looked Tammy Faye's daughter straight in the eye,
but she'd disappeared—

gone scuba diving in Maui,

enough oxygen strapped to her back
so she'd never have to surface
again.

________________________________________________________________

Joy Roulier Sawyer is the author of Lifeguards (Conundrum Press) and Tongues of Men and Angels (White Violet Press). Her poetry has appeared in LIGHT, Lilliput Review, New York Quarterly, St. Petersburg Review and many others. Joy teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she also facilitates the Hard Times workshops for people experiencing homelessness, poverty, and other difficult life issues. She also leads the Writing to Be Free workshops for women transitioning out of incarceration. She is the recipient of both the National Association for Poetry Therapy’s Distinguished Service Award, as well as the 2019 Lighthouse Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence. 

So Long

SWWIM Every Day
by Sunni Brown Wilkinson

by Sunni Brown Wilkinson


On the road that opens
to mountains and snow,
away from the houses cramped
in their quarters like too many socks
in a drawer, the eye of the eye
inside of me opens.

All the years of children
I loved and feared
would kill me.
Not their brightness
or the electric thrill of their skin
next to mine, not even the crying
that pried me from sleep
but the dormancy of a wild
inner life I loved and knew well.
To survive, it left me. I cared then

for other wild things. Now in silence
it’s returning. I turn a corner
to a doe and two fawns. I know you. I too
live like this. The body
and the spirit are a bicycle
you ride carefully
and uphill
and for how long?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Adirondack Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press 2019), and winner of New Ohio Review’s inaugural NORward Poetry Prize. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three young sons.

Birches

SWWIM Every Day
by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

by Sally Bliumis-Dunn


From their long white trunks
brighter than winter air,
their dark eyes watching,

motionless, without judgment
as I walk the rough stone driveway.
I know these eyes are wounds

healed over, or scars
from branches lost.
And I know the language

between us is untranslatable.
But for the entire three-mile hike
I sense their eyes behind me

holding me, as I might hold
an over-full glass of water,
meniscus trembling in the winter sky

measuring me as I grow smaller
by the mailbox, letter in my hand.
And though at a great distance

I can feel them taking in
the loops and dips in the black script
of the address and its return,

as I might observe
without distinction wreaths
of moss around their trunks

if I were focusing on something else
or everything at once.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry at Manhattanville College and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ “poem-a-day” series, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s third full-length collection, Echolocation, was published by Plume editions/MadHat Press in March 2018.

Abecedarian for My Neighbor, Whose Name I Still Don't Know

SWWIM Every Day
by Melissa Fite Johnson

by Melissa Fite Johnson


A garden born beyond my window. Not my
backyard, my neighbor’s. Before
coronavirus, before isolation, she and I
didn’t acknowledge each other.
Every night my dogs spilled
from my back door, and she sat outside with a
glass of wine listening to—something. I’d
hush to spy but could never tell.
I imagined long-distance love, her voice
joined with his. Maybe Rosetta Stone, too low to
know what language. No wave, no hello.

Little pots line the wooden deck,
matching sprigs of green. A tarp covers
nothing, for now. She tells me, You’re the
only person I’ve seen in days.

Planting’s like praying, both
quests for communion. We
receive stale wafers on our
shining tongues, gather
tomatoes fallen off the vine too soon. I’m an
unbeliever who only pulls weeds, puts
voids in the ground instead of life. But
witness this small miracle: she was
X in her yard, I was
Y in mine. We’re still rooted in these
zones, but now our voices soar over the fence.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Melissa Fite Johnson is a high school English teacher who lives with her husband and dogs in Lawrence, KS. She is the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Sidereal, Stirring, Whale Road Review, Broadsided Press, and elsewhere. See more at melissafitejohnson.com.

Mollusk

SWWIM Every Day
by Kyle Potvin

by Kyle Potvin


Pink mucket, wartyback, catspaw.
We are all endangered:

Your mother, mine, a young traveler
who never makes it home.

Just check your phone,
filter feeder of grief.

Ming, a bivalve mollusk,
lived 500 years.

I weep
for his longevity.

This earth is ringed
tight as a mussel.

Forgive me: I have been thinking
of death nearly since birth.

I am soft-bellied.
Take me first.

Don’t leave me burrowed.
Gasping for air.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kyle Potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water (Finishing Line Press, 2012), won the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, The New York Times, and others. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Loosen, is coming from Hobblebush Books in September 2020. Kyle lives in Southern New Hampshire.

I Am Tired of Being a Wife

SWWIM Every Day
by Geraldine Connolly

by Geraldine Connolly


—after Neruda


I walk into the kitchen stores empty of desire
for Dutch ovens, silicon mats, tart pans.
In the grocery stores and farm markets
I am cold and still as an iceberg.

Recipes bore me. Bathtub rings disgust me.
The smell of bakeries brings me to tears.
I want no more dust rags or oven cleaners,
no more spray starch or furniture polish.

I want to swim in the cool lake of indifference.
That’s why the days unroll like heavy carpets
covered in dust and dog hair, bearing
discarded seeds and crumbs,
the lost nickels and pennies.

I only want to slip
like a grain of sand into the ocean.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________


Geraldine Connolly is a native of western Pennsylvania and the author of four poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press) and Hand of the Wind (Iris Press), Aileron (Terrapin Books). She is the recipient of two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships in poetry, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has had residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Chautauqua Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework and The Sonoran Desert:A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is http: www.geraldineconnolly.com

The Bright Part

SWWIM Every Day
by Paige Sullivan

by Paige Sullivan

In the dark with my eye doctor,
amongst tools and contraptions
to measure

how much light comes in, where it
wrongly refracts, misaligns
with the retina, she warns

Here comes the bright part, a white-gold
glare filling my vision, an ache—flame,
warmth, sun through

my wide-open windows, so brilliant
that book spines are sapped
of their hues—Keep

those eyes wide open, she murmurs.
Splotches of leaf-filtered afternoon
litter my dashboard

on the drive home, past the Victorian houses
and women in athleisure
briskly pushing strollers—

thinking of my friend and her dog
put down that morning, its toys
now immobile on the rug—

the precious and the perilous lit up,
irrefutable, and how does one
get better at staring

straight on at that blinding
all-of-it, not screw their eyes shut,
to lose it unbearable?

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Paige Sullivan is a poet and writer living in Atlanta. A graduate of the creative writing program at Georgia State University, her work has appeared or will soon appear in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, RHINO Poetry, and other journals.

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