On Academia (an abecedarian)

SWWIM Every Day

by Luna Dragon Mac-Williams

Abstractions don’t split
body from soul from
corner of 23rd and Washtenaw.

Distance is danger is
every conversation
fixated on a them.

Groundfolk can live
heralded by we and by
interpersonal, can
jettison the I.

Known by
living,
made for
needing,
owned by
people, their
question,
resistance,
song.

There is worth
under shadow, in
vein,
wisdom in
xenia.
You can never
zip up and leave.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Luna Dragon Mac-Williams is a poet, playwright, actor, dancer, handmade jeweler, zine editor, and arts educator at After School Matters, a non-profit in her hometown of Chicago. She is an undergraduate student at Wesleyan University and a narrator and writer for The Ice Colony podcast. She has recently been published in Ariel’s Dream, and her poetry appears in the 2020 KCBS Zine. Her one-act, Good Strong Coffee, premiered at Chicago Dramatists through Pegasus Theater in winter 2018. She is a firm believer in the power of coffee, community care, house parties, and helping youth honor and share their personal narratives. Find her on Instagram at @lalunadragon and @bylunawithlove.

In Old Delhi Heat

SWWIM Every Day
by Sonia Aggarwal

by Sonia Aggarwal

I sink into the couch.
You open the windows,
Letting the sheer curtains go
Dragging along the carpet.
We listen to them sway
From windowsill to chair,
Taking sips of peach tea
And leftover beer, watching
The room inhale
The afternoon
And release
It again. This
Is what they must have done
During the outages: sat
By open windows and doors,
Or on roofs, in courtyards,
Pulling stools and blankets
Beside grass, on cold stone
By the stairs, taking long
Gulps of water, sweet lassi
From steel cups, before
Sweeping an old cloth
Around the forehead
And behind the neck,
Wiping beads of sweat
Before they spill,
Sitting and sifting
Through a heap
Of red lentils, or cutting
Okra on aged silver,
Hearing the faint noise
Of rickshaws
And far-off voices
Until the dust of sun
Settled
Into smoke of night.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sonia Aggarwal is a Boston-based writer, currently pursuing her MFA at Emerson College. She is interested in cultural and personal histories, and the moments in which the two intersect.

Mississippi Nocturne

SWWIM Every Day
by Jessica Kinnison

by Jessica Kinnison

To steal watermelon
you must
be willing
to eat their hearts
and leave the rest.

To steal watermelon
you must
be ready
for scared snakes
in the dark grass.

To steal watermelon
you must
walk with
all that lives
in thickets, brambles, unworn paths.

To steal watermelon
you must
be in cahoots
with the unknown.
Have some kind of spirit about you.

To steal watermelon
you must
steer clear of any other vine.
The changes it puts you through.
You got to run, run all the time.

To steal watermelon
you must leave
your shoes off in the mud,
they remain there empty,
looking like you were snatched.

To steal watermelon
you have to dream
of having a taste for something,
have to test-run sugar water on your tongue.
You have to hope the scarecrow doesn't have a gun.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Jessica Kinnison's work has appeared in Phoebe, Entropy, Juked, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, her story "Star Party" placed second in the 2019 Tennessee Williams Festival Short Short Fiction Contest. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In April 2020, she was listed as the first of eight New Orleans poets to watch in Poets & Writers. She serves as Director of Programs at Project Lazarus, a housing facility for people living with HIV/ AIDS. A Mississippi native, she is co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop and host of the Dogfish Reading Series in New Orleans.

Back in the Tiki Days

SWWIM Every Day
by Catherine Keefe

by Catherine Keefe

A boy stands in the holding pen
of Disneyland's Tiki Room, tries

to tell Mother truth, but she
won't stop looking at her phone even

when he beats rhythm on her knee,
a banana leaf slapping sand MA-ma,

MA-ma. Everyone drove canoes
and ate pineapples. There was rain

and drums and I wish I lived back
then. I bend my knees to meet this child's

eyes. Oh, I remember the Tiki Days with all that
pineapple, rain and drums. Remember

the dancing? Like seaweed. Like dolphins.
My hand undulates the horizon in

floating waves anyone can see except
his mother who yanks his arm. I remember

the Tiki Days too and those were the good old
days before kids. The boy resumes softly slapping

his mother's bare knee, back of his hand, open
palm, swishing gently on her skin. In his rhythm, MA-

ma, MA-ma, MA-ma. He folds in
upon himself, a kapa cloth with perfect

plaited corners, lays himself down in the bottom
of a koa canoe, pushes off to sail by the stars

you may only see in the dark.

________________________________________________________________


Catherine Keefe is a California poet, essayist, and family story coach. She earned her MFA at Chapman University after spending years as a journalist. Her poetry has appeared in Split This Rock anthology compiled for the U.S. Congress and NRA to advocate for gun law change; TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics; The Gettysburg Review and many others. Find more at www.catherinekeefe.com

Duplex (With Crying Through The Walls)

SWWIM Every Day
by Kara Lewis

by Kara Lewis

I counted days, waiting for you to cry so that I could call you baby.
I tell you our love lives in my body, that it feels like being born.

Love lives too long in my body: stillborn, an irritant, like an onion,
acid against sclera. Still, my tears protect me, the way I yearn for strangers

to unpeel me. The praying woman turned from Mecca toward my strange, acid rainstorm
when I screamed on the phone, praying mascara clouds storm your whitest shirt.

I feel holiest in someone else’s shirt, holding a phone while it’s still ringing, or crying in public.
Tears hold the same holy hormone as breast milk. You say you can’t cry, but you stand publicly

shirtless. You say you can’t hold me when I’m like this: Hormonal, unholy, milking
you for some type of mourning. I shoved on a shirt and went to visit the elephants

because I read of their matriarchy and their weeping. Every mother knows a type of mourning like
sleeves through which she can’t reach, like a trunk that can’t close around trumpet or breath.

I reach for you like breath, a sleeveless dress, like everything I would let close to my body.
We counted the wallpaper elephants and waited for an elegy to name baby.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kara Lewis is a poet and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in Stirring, Sprung Formal, Pithead Chapel, Plainsongs, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the John Mark Eberhart Memorial Award for a collection of poetry, as well as a weekly contributor to the Read Poetry blog. Her work will be anthologized in the upcoming Aunt Flo project. You can follow her on Twitter @kararaywrites.

99 Lines for 2020

SWWIM Every Day

by Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade

A pair of spectacles washes up on the shore,
the lenses still intact. I pick them up and try
to see the world through salt-spackled glass.
When I was a girl, I wanted to be a fish
or even a mermaid, which seemed sexless, safe,
no legs to spread open, only a tail to slap.

These days I’m filled to the gills
with rage. So many things to protest,
my voice muted under my mask.
If only this were a persona poem
set in another time—how I would testify,
my writer-self knowing future outcomes,

relying on dramatic irony: In Century 21,
I stock up on Levi’s vintage denim.
I refuse contacts, wear Steinem-inspired
Aviators, make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Bellbottoms return, and The Bell Jar remains
on syllabi. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Sylvia

in the biopic, though I favor Great Expectations,
Paltrow’s Estella spurning her suitors.
Were my own expectations great in 1998?
Pre-9/11, 2008 recession. Pre-COVID-19,
10 years of stop-and-frisk. MAGA
hat as metaphor in Spike Lee’s new movie.

In 2020, hindsight is just a hashtag like
its former use, the pound key or number sign.
So much we should have seen coming, should have
met his crazy with our fury, should have
refused to dignify with answers later dubbed “fake news.”
Sociopath or psychopath? Narcissist or sadist?

Careful not to say his name, I simmer in euphemisms—
accepted norms, unprecedented times. How will we
un-mike the maniac, unflip the panic switch
that’s gripped our gut these past four years?
Long walks on the beach fail to assuage my fear
of the climate crisis. The only mask he wears

is his own face, bed-tanned and sand-blasted,
atop the red ire in his brow and cheeks.
When I try to change the channel, his voice
booms through imitators, late-night comics
whose parodies only enhance his power.
The white half-moons under his eyes

must be waning, though—I need to believe
America will wise up, rise up, that we’ll see
something new in the dawn’s early light
with 20-20 vision, this year’s namesake.
Christians speak of a Second Coming,
and novelists invoke deus ex machina.

I guess intervention always seemed a given.
Monuments toppling at last, the Supreme
Court swerving at the last second like a car
avoiding a cliff that hangs over the sea.
Is it wrong that I still long for a savior
with a bagful of miracles, multiplying fish?

Century 21 Christ is most likely vegan,
a savior to cows and chickens and pigs,
a slender brown man who rides his bike
wearing yellow Dollar Store sunglasses
and a God Made Dirt So Dirt Don’t Hurt
t-shirt. When a truck cuts him off,

he says “Bless you” as if the driver had
given him a hummus club sandwich.
Century 21 Christ works at Goodwill,
sports a “Radical Feminist” ball cap.
His blue apron pocket holds a small adze
to smooth any furniture’s rough edges.

If this were a persona poem, he’d tell
you how he loved carpentry, restoring
old wood and reclaiming discards
from families—drunks, homeless teens,
atheists and Bible-thumpers alike.
He’d turn water from Flint faucets

sweet as ambrosia, Confederate flags
into BLM banners, rifles and pepper spray
into bran muffins with coconut butter.
Who would be his Judas? Too many
to name: a supervisor at Goodwill who,
for $30, turned him over to ICE;

a kid from youth group who heard him
speaking Spanish, grew suspicious.
Another heard him singing a Farsi
party song “Qataghani” in dark shades.
And what about that time he gave directions
to Hollywood Beach, then asked for a lift?

Century 21 Christ ran the Rainbow 5K
and prefers to be known as “they.”
Non-binary, anti-racist, multi-lingual, pro-
choice. As the human face of a Trinity,
they are dismantling the Tower of Babel
in hopes that everyone will understand

simple messages of safety and compassion.
Frog & Toad is selling “Just Be Nice” tees,
an honest cotton compass always ready to wear
with a smiley face mask to protect others.
I use the soft shirt to wipe these spectacles
of empathy, hoping the person who lost them

has goggles instead, or perhaps can see underwater.
When I hook the temples over my ears, I can see
where the ocean bows to the sky as if in prayer.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade are the authors of The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, published by Noctuary Press in 2019. Their collaborative poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals, including Arts & Letters, The Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Common, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, The Louisville Review, Nimrod, No Tokens, PoemMemoirStory, Prairie Schooner, Quarter After Eight, So to Speak, Story Quarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly. Together they were awarded the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner for their co-written lyric essay, “13 Superstitions.” Duhamel and Wade both teach in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.

Visiting the Bodies Exhibit in Las Vegas

SWWIM Every Day
by Diamond Forde

by Diamond Forde

As a girl, I fingered the penises
in Momma’s copy of The Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies,

a habit, dragging my finger while I studied
blister and boil, admiring the penis’s profile

glossed in primary colors, or the uterus, a red yawn
widening, those doodles, my most detailed lesson

of the bellow below my belt, the grammarless
clamor of sex, of blood, of a mother

who I would one day see in this exhibit,
her belly a cabinet shelving the striations of her bell-

shaped uterus. In a month’s time, I will be slit
sinew from skin, doctors clefting the webbed

fat wickering my womb, then snip
my fibrous knots, I must admit then

it will be the only way my uterus is worthy
of exhibition, my muscular cauliflower

so unlike the drawings thumbed
on my childhood floor, my uterus lumped, bruised.

When the anesthetic quilts over me
I will dream, as I witnessed, what could be:

ovaries polished as jade stone, the glossy bauble
of my fundus, wonder clutched in a perfect wound.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Diamond Forde is a PhD candidate at Florida State University. Her debut book, Mother Body, is forthcoming with Saturnalia Books in Spring 2021. She is the recent recipient of the Furious Flower Prize and a Tin House and Callaloo fellow. Her work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Tinderbox Journal, and more.

Now Kiss the Word Lips on This Paper

SWWIM Every Day
by Elizabeth Hughey

by Elizabeth Hughey

I eat a piece of paper with the word honey written on it and give my son the word toast and he eats it whole. I cover the windows with the words white sky, red brick and 7 AM, though it still feels like night, so I write to the weak sunlight, let us feel worthy of your love. We do not feel worthy, bound in our clothes made of paper with clean written all over them. We go out into the streets with our post-its made of fire and stick them on everything. Nothing burns. I take a note to my son’s teacher that says help and she gives it right back with her red ink covering mine. Help. On my forehead, I write, What? I write on the school walls, I hate you words. You are not worthy of my love, anymore. And the words are quiet. So, I say them out loud. I yell all the words I can yell. Walnut! Suitcase! Pistol! Wastebasket! I keep spitting words trying to rid them from my mouth.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Hughey is the author two poetry collections: Sunday Houses the Sunday House (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Guest Host (National Poetry Review Press, 2012). She is a co-founder of the Desert Island Supply Co. (DISCO), a literary arts center in Birmingham, where she teaches poetry in the public schools. New poems have been published or are forthcoming in Open Letters Monthly, The Bennington Review, The Hunger, and Tinderbox.

The ritual of lightning

SWWIM Every Day
by Samara Powers

by Samara Powers



After CA Conrad’s (SOMA)tic Poetry Exercises

Wait for a flood warning
that comes 10 minutes before you’re
meant to leave for rehearsal, or the supermarket.
Instead of leaving, stay. Take your shoes off.
Stand outside next to a tree or a flagpole and
make yourself an outlet. Plug in. Feel the
rage that the rain is trying to douse, let
it burn out your grounding wire.
Call down the lightning with it,
light it up inside you like dynamite
in your hand. Wrap your arms around
the tree/pole for dear life, know
that the lightning with spark through
the roots under the dirt, under
your feet, a neon tree of life
burning up the earthworms and
beetles, the sky will spit its forked tongue
and the earth will boil but like seeks like—
they say you can’t survive
seeing g-d, but you will try.

_______________________________________________________________


Samara Powers is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared in Bird’s Thumb, The Christian Century, Inflectionist Review, and others. She has two children and works in marketing and design. She returned to University in her 40s, completing her BA in Poetry in 2018. More at www.samarawords.com.



I have eaten geographies

SWWIM Every Day
by Sharon Tracey

by Sharon Tracey

hard bits and soft pieces,
bitter, sour, and sweet
places that have talked back
to me,
made me who I am,
made me ache from too much—
whittled me.

What we love, we love.

I have sipped from a cenote,
bitten a spur, savored fine strata
near the mouth of a river.
Swallowed decades of dust,
mere motes
in the soul of an eon.

I have settled in a valley
between green hills. Given birth
to a daughter in a world of a billion
daughters. Given birth to two sons
in a world of a billion sons.
I have sun-dried my hands.

Rumi said there are a thousand ways
to kneel
and kiss the ground.

I have lost count. I am counting.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sharon Tracey's poems have appeared in The Worcester Review, Mom Egg Review, Tule Review, Common Ground Review, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collections include What I Remember Most Is Everything (All Caps Publishing, 2017) and Chroma, forthcoming from Shanti Arts. See more at www.sharontracey.com.

Four Girls Laying Under a Willow on June 10, 2020

SWWIM Every Day
by Megan Mary Moore

by Megan Mary Moore

They take their white cotton masks off
and their honeysuckle breath blows
blonde strands that escaped from braids.
When girls group, they drape
themselves like satin, over each other.
Not to touch, to rest.
Quarantined together,
skin sticking, sweat living
in places razors missed.
Handing hairbrushes and lotion
back and forth and back again.
Limbs against limbs,
sleeping open-eyed outside.
Masks in the grass,
bare lips toward the clouds.

As long as trees last,
girls will be under them
shedding cloth and
asking the sun for more.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Megan Mary Moore is the author of Dwellers (Unsolicited Press, 2019). Her poetry has appeared in Rattle and is forthcoming in Lammergeier and Plainsongs. She lives in Cincinnati where she teaches dance and talks to ghosts.

Poem Written for the Occasion of My Fiftieth Birthday or Poem Written for the Auspicious Initiation into the Invisibility Club

SWWIM Every Day
by Sonia Greenfield

by Sonia Greenfield

I remove all underwires from my bras
then bend them into hearts and moons
use them like rebar for miniature cities
made from common household items
such as regret or pluck or as a key
for the lock to enter the door
to invisibility and yes my breasts
are still proud but ghostly tits under
a ghostly shroud how they haunt
the dreams of every ex-lover under
the cover of this sheath I walk
among you and buy pants with
elastic waistbands until everything
expands my soft belly the reach
of my life stretched before me
to a shore still too far for the eye
to see in the drugstore mirror
I spot silver in my hair like a seam
of precious ore running through
this crown of unearthly brown except
no one sees it but me because of my
(dare I say?) delicious anonymity I could
blow in the ear of a man under forty
and he would only hear a stirring
breeze I could try to catch his eye
but his glance bounces off or skitters
by some say Harry Potter’s magic
cloak was made from the skin
of a woman past her prime it’s my
time to shine as a white glow moves
through the orchard after dark until
a chill tickles the nape of your neck
and yes you could bounce a quarter
off this ass but I am passed have
The Cure sing of my demise or crank
some Gen X anthem to senora
ephemera taking up space between
the rain play haunting music
for madam phantom seen
through as a windowpane.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sonia Greenfield is the author of two full-length collections of poetry. Letdown, released in March, was selected for the 2020 Marie Alexander Series and published by White Pine Press. Her collection, Boy With a Halo at the Farmer's Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize and was published in 2015. Her chapbook, American Parable, won the 2017 Autumn House Press/Coal Hill Review chapbook prize. She lives in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College and edits the Rise Up Review.

Sweet Dills

SWWIM Every Day
by Dawn Terpstra

by Dawn Terpstra

Decay curled around your outbuildings like a wild thing claiming the yard. It squatted near the hedges beneath afternoon sun. Weeds grew, metal rusted. Old plows and tractors salvaged for parts piled like corpses. The house withered, then its joints gave beneath a sway-backed roof. Vacancy, except for a dozen Mason jars glistening in the window of the summer kitchen. Three neat rows packed tight with smooth-skinned pickles, dill heads bursting like fireworks against the glass. The artistry of your skilled hands passed from your mother, her mother. Beautiful beyond blight. Your husband passed quietly in his La-Z-Boy. A month later, flames consumed it all. A backhoe buried what you couldn’t. God knows the order of things. Earth, seed, rain, and heat.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dawn Terpstra lives in Iowa where she leads a corporate communications team. She holds two masters’ degrees and conducted fieldwork in Micronesia. Her poetry appears in print and online, including Third Wednesday, Neologism, Eastern Iowa Review, and Telepoem Booth Iowa. She enjoys explorations—landing in a new place, driving down gravel roads, or walking through the timber with her chocolate lab.

Missing Cat

SWWIM Every Day
by Freesia McKee

by Freesia McKee

In a few hours I’ll score
my loss and blessings

lying in bed like the cats
we count when we walk

the dog When I was a small kid
spring was palm fronds

shaking hands in church In the pew
I closed my eyes The green backdrop

behind the cat Misu hides
under the bench In this city

I’m supposed to be a teacher
Mispronounced a student’s name

for weeks Would we say something
again if we knew the other person would

change My
assumption

as Misu’s tail wraps around my wrist
I think of eating lunch once

when we got a phone call A friend
had died We thought we knew who

I stopped chewing I remember
the carrots in my mouth

The hunched shoulders the shudder
before a second phone call a miracle

from the person we thought was gone
It rained so hard when we drove here

A wet accident at the end of our block
Could have been her or us

The cat running past
Rubbing his soft head against

my calves Misu’s back
He’s re-appeared I’m want to tell

our neighbor Oobi
his cat’s escaped the trains cars

the predators this time Only loss
can redeem itself like this

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap. Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.

For the Jamun Tree (in an All-Girls Boarding School) at the Edge of the Thar Desert

SWWIM Every Day
by Shikha Malaviya

by Shikha Malaviya


In your fruit we find
a lover’s tart kiss, magenta lipstick
as we gather you by the fistfuls
conspiring dreams beyond
glass studded boundary walls
a doctor’s white coat, a poet’s fountain pen

In your shade we offer morning prayers
to Saraswati, the goddess of learning
daya kar daan vidya ka, hamein parmatma dena
it is from Her mercy that we receive this knowledge
of tiny seeds housed below our bellies
and how we must guard them zealously
by crossing our legs. Hungry & young
we hold your fruit in our palms
salty with sweat, our lips parched
from desert dust that water doesn’t quench
nibbling on your flesh, we spit out seeds
into sand from which nothing sprouts


*Jamun-Java plum/Indian blackberry; a sweet yet tart fruit that leaves a purple stain when eaten

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Shikha Malaviya (www.shikhamalaviya.com) is a South Asian-American poet and writer. She is co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship model press publishing powerful voices from India & the Indian diaspora. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in PLUME, Prairie Schooner & other fine publications. Shikha was selected as Poet Laureate of San Ramon, California, 2016. Her book of poems is Geography of Tongues.

When the Air-Conditioning Breaks

SWWIM Every Day
by Taylor Byas

by Taylor Byas


We discover home-grown autotune and yawp
our Vaselined lips mere inches from the box-fan’s
lattice—the flowered blades compute and swap
our breaths for robot, monotone. When our friends

sardine the porch and ask (y’all coming out?),
we let the screen door boomerang back to chop
the wooden frame, our dizzy laughter cutting out
our grandmother’s kitchen edict—close that door and stop

letting my air out this house. All bark, no bite.
When we return, our shadows race the sunset
back to the earth. Inside, we doff our white
tank tops and blue jean shorts, our naked silhouettes

like trophies welded in summer’s afterburn,
hot metal cooling to things for her to love—to spurn.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Taylor 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 PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Journal, storySouth, and others.

Absorbed Twin

SWWIM Every Day
by Dion O'Reilly

by Dion O’Reilly


The ghost is complaining,
her memories are a wind

I can do nothing about.
Pale ghost. Skinny ghost. Bird ghost
who gorges on drunken berries,

leaves a body smear on my window
I can’t bear to clean. Exhausted ghost.
Felon ghost. Ghost who lived with me

beneath the same ribs. Carved my past
like a glacier. Melted and left me
a burning sea of dust and playa.

Ghost who curled with me
inside our mother,
whom I took into my blood

in order to survive.
Did she die inside me?
Let me cough her up,

razor myself open.
I want another chance.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dion O’Reilly's first book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts and events, and she Zoom-facilitates ongoing workshops from an artsy farmhouse in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

What Fear?

SWWIM Every Day
by Jeanne Foster

by Jeanne Foster


On the other side of the plate glass window,
they sipped coffee, chatted—her mother had a smoke—
relaxed finish to a Sunday morning breakfast
under the signature orange roof,

Howard Johnson’s, Biscayne Boulevard, Old Miami.
Bug-eyed, boxy cars parked at the curb, her space
just a strip of sidewalk, a little plot of St. Augustine grass
neatly mowed, and the predictable manicured shrubs

close to the window. It was good enough,
a watchful presence with space around it
for the little girl to play in. She forgot them,
alone with a bush that sported brilliant red seeds.

She plucked off a seed. Up close she could see
a shining black eye. With the preoccupation
of a scientist or an artist, she put the seed
between her teeth to see if she could crack it.

“Don’t eat that seed, little girl,” a voice
fractured her private world. “It’s poisonous.”
She stumbled indoors to her mother’s side—sobbing,
“That lady told me not to eat it. I wasn’t going to eat it,”

the red seed with the shining black eye still clutched
in her folded palm, which her mother gently opened.
“Did you eat the seed, chickadee?” “No, I just
wanted to see how hard it was.” “Then it’s okay.”

On the other side of the plate glass window,
the lady, her husband obediently behind,
got into the car and drove away.
But the fear stayed.

Not of the poison. It was the stranger’s voice
that followed the little girl out into the world,
in which Howard Johnson’s under the orange roof
would circle the globe, then go extinct.


_______________________________________________________________

Jeanne Foster’s latest poetry collection, Goodbye, Silver Sister, was released by Northwestern University Press, 2015. She is also the author of A Blessing of Safe Travel, which won the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Award, and co-editor of Appetite: Food as Metaphor, an anthology of poems by women (BOA). Her most recent book is The Living Theatre: Selected Poems of Bianca Tarozzi, which won the Northern California Book Award in Translation. Her poems, critical work and memoir have appeared in Hudson Review, Triquarterly, North American Review, Ploughshares, Literary Imagination, and American Poetry Review. Professor Emerita of English Literature and Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, she divides her time between Berkeley and Le Convertoie, a medieval borgo in Tuscany. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is also a Unitarian Universalist minister. 

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