by Lesley Wheeler

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Transporter or holodeck? Either I
have rematerialized incompletely
(sparkling shower of particles
dimmer) or this simulated city

has acquired a wobble, a tell.
Puffy-jacketed people
duck from awning to overhang
along Newbury Street wondering

if swan boats sail in the slanting
drizzle or a hand-held foam-coated
reservoir might suit better. Inside
the Church of the Covenant,

meanwhile, Tiffany glass
somehow glows against cold
puddingstone—how does a yoked
god’s robe luminesce by cloud,

its whiteness alive with ocher
and smoky motion? Gazing
at invisible sparrows, bracing
an overlarge hand on a rock,

he is surely transported too,
that blink of tropical foliage
behind him now, that dreamy blue,
and him thinking how, lord,

did I get to Boston? I drove,
theoretically, via the hospital
where nurses unhooked my mother
from catheter, from I.V.,

and handed her over. Moved
a bed downstairs, stocked her fridge
with little bottles of virtual
food optimistically labeled

Ensure for safety and, for power,
Boost. Counted and sealed
her pills into rows of labeled
oyster shells. Then, north,

as if stillness were heresy.
Back home a library of mountains
I never read. Mosaic rain
I smash right through.

Look at the god, good-looking,
how he looks at the ground,
willing it real, willing himself
to love where he hardly lives,

in his stupid human body,
an always ailing thing. Rather
the sparrow be true than cells
struggling to contain

unlikely radiance, and failing.
Compounding errors. The tumor
an index of poisons, every one
chiming as they transform her.

______________________________________________________________________


Lesley Wheeler is the author of the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds; the novel Unbecoming; and five books of poetry, most recently The State She’s In. Her poems and essays appear in such journals as Poetry, Ecotone, and Guernica, and she is Poetry Editor of Shenandoah.

by Wendy Drexler


They plucked you out before you could kill me.
I had to make a clean sweep. Forgive me,

conductor of my train to the future—
my artist daughter of long fingers

and kindness, my son with his kilowatt wit
and quiver of dreams. You were my gardener,

my stockpot, my pantry, your shelves
filled with my lifetime supply.

My arbor, predesigned, assigned at birth.
My divine egg timer, my clock that never

needed winding. You were my pinkish-gray,
almond-shaped, and my God, you were brave,

wore menstruation like a brightly flowered dress.
And the bloody labor of your fields.

Your timely hatchery, your drop-down
deliveries, your tubes swaying like anemones.

I, too, thought we could wither together
into gentle senescence. Forgive me

for evicting you in your dotage, not even
a hearing, your desk cleared in an hour,

everything you’d ever carried weighing
just over two ounces. Forgive me,

you who were my wheelhouse, my work
horse, my backfill, my unpaid laborer.

You, who toiled decades deep in the mine of me.

______________________________________________________________________

Wendy Drexler is a 2022 recipient of an artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, South Florida Poetry Review, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. She's been the poet-in-residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and the programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, will be published this September by Terrapin Books.

by Ruby Hansen Murray



We watched white flecks, birds
far up against the ridge. Bright
against blue-green, a trick of evening.

Walked to see them, earthbound,
slow, DV creaky, and me ready to spring

forward, these legs strong, but it’s arms
we need, wings. How we’ll fly,

long necks extending,
then folding, so few wing beats,
thermals holding us up.

Great egrets making a way north.
We say, They’re going to a new country.

Seven birds in cottonwood tops
above Cutoff Slough, nesting
for the first time so far north.

Twisting toward each other
as they fall.

______________________________________________________________________

Ruby Hansen Murray is a poet and writer living in the lower Columbia River estuary. Her work is forthcoming or appears in Cascadia: A Field Guide (Tupelo Press), River Mouth Review, About Place, Under the Sun, the Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program, she’s a citizen of the Osage Nation with West Indian roots. See www.rubyhansenmurray.com.

by Amy Debrecht


What hour do you swivel open
to unfurl your corolla the color of royals?
It’s early, I know, before sunrise.
Your pollinators up at dawn, too,
to tumble down your white throat.
I pet you as I pass, velvet bell horn
under my thumb. Some say
your vines are invasive—
if given the space, you are voracious,
twining around sunflower stalk,
stair rail, fence. But by afternoon
you begin to fold the parasol of your face.
How many ways to say
your blooms die each day:
Monday’s flower is not Tuesday’s.
You blossom like shark teeth.

______________________________________________________________________

Amy Debrecht received her MFA in poetry writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Salt Hill, Poet Lore, Sou’wester, Natural Bridge, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She lives in St. Louis with her partner and pup, where she works as an editor and volunteers for Cinema St. Louis.

by Amy Miller


It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

______________________________________________________________________


I had forgotten about you
until this morning at Denny’s
when I didn’t have enough quarters
for a newspaper and pulled,
instead, this book from my purse,
laid in for such emergencies.

And there you were,
asserting your opinions in black ballpoint,
two stars next to the titles
you obviously liked,
crossed-out lines
you seemed to think superfluous—
scratched-off Wasatch,
penned-in mountains.

And then the waitress frowned
when I told her no hashbrowns.
She asked again—no potatoes?
No grits?—as if to correct
this error in the book
of my morning. She scrawled a note
in her own book, lips tight.

But she brought me the eggs
and you finally left the poet alone
as he went on to talk
of farmers, as his horse changed leads
on command, and sometimes not.
And it’s hard to tell
whether you simply tired
of the old, old game—
this singular shaping, this lonely work
for the betterment of us all—
or whether the poet won you over,
maybe with those lines on page 40
about chickens and the little
swaybacked shed he can’t
bring himself to knock down,
beautiful it its disrepair.

______________________________________________________________________


Amy Miller’s Astronauts won the 2022 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal, and her full-length book, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the 2017 Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. She received a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship and blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.




by Susan Landgraf


In an arroyo
wind stirs

the heather and flox
lifts my nipples

brushes my lips
and this rush

like sun-lighted
water spills

through a fissure
in the land.

______________________________________________________________________

Susan Landgraf was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate award in 2020. Books include The Inspired Poet from Two Sylvias Press (2019), What We Bury Changes the Ground, and a chapbook, Other Voices. More than 400 poems have appeared in journals and magazines, most recently in Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Calyx, The Meadow, Tar River, and others. She served as Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington, from 2018 to 2020.

by Terhi K. Cherry



Your baby didn’t die because of raw fish,
soft cheese, deli meat, or sex,

not because of exercise, the grocery bags,
or Tylenol,

not because of one bad choice, an argument,
the side you slept on,

not because of pinot noir before
you knew.

A scientist vows, one in four ends,
it doesn’t mean it wasn’t written:

the hue of the skin,
how the cheekbones would rise,

if hair locks would flock
and tangle.

Someone was taking root,
trying real hard to divide

into a cluster of diamonds,
into liver and lungs, to burrow into you

like you were a rock crevice
and the shoots of a hawthorn unreachable.


______________________________________________________________________


Terhi K. Cherry is a poet, writer, and research psychologist. Her work appears in TIMBER, Rogue Agent, Literary Mama, Cultural Weekly, Vox Viola Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her debut chapbook is forthcoming in 2022. Terhi lives in Los Angeles and facilitates poetry for personal growth.

by Connemara Wadsworth



Standing naked in the doorway,

Listen to this, he says, leans in

toward the page, reads as if

the passage were his own

I turn in my bathing, take in

this light pouring from him

perhaps they were something

sought now found

and how he brings them

to me as he gives me sentence

after sentence, he might have

been pointing to constellations

close enough to touch, that close,

and he wanted each to touch me

as the stars had opened him.

______________________________________________________________________



Connemara Wadsworth's chapbook, The Possibility of Scorpions, about the years her family lived in Iraq in the early 50’s, won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2009 Chapbook Contest. Her poems are forthcoming or appeared in Prairie Schooner, Solstice, San Pedro River Review, Smoky Blue Literary & Arts Magazine, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. “The Women” was nominated for publication in Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses by Bloodroot Magazine. Connemara and her husband live in Newton, Massachusetts.


by Lindsay Tigue



I.

It’s like this. There is a structure that might be on fire. For years I’ve been filling a small room inside a small house with statues made of paper. And the paper is lined with gauzy script. I am wanting this to be mine. For an era, I’ve lined the walls and inked the details, filling collection baskets with more than I have. But you knew this. You knew everything was made of paper. What can I say about knowing.


II.

There is something beautiful about this horizon. Dust storms and fishbowl-sky and tumbleweeds stacking next to a fence. But in the end it wasn’t mine.


III.

Look. It’s called still wanting. It’s called remembering something shiny and new, but thinking: Am I rust? It’s called–three weeks before the end–a student in my office lifting her two hands. On one side is poetry and the other: repair. Something here is helping.


IV.

Let me break it down. It’s broken down. At the same time my students write these perfect lines. At the same time I am something spent. Tired of counting quarters for a McChicken after class. At the same time I cry, I clap.


V.

The place I’m leaving: staked and semiarid. The spring comes late and full of wind. Grass fires break out around the boundaries of town and it’s as if I’m on a treadmill walking toward the industrial whir of a turbojet. Getting nowhere; leaking everywhere. Hair in my mouth, face, eyes. You see, I am tangled and my very self starts lifting off the plain.


______________________________________________________________________

Lindsay Tigue is the author of System of Ghosts, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize and was published by University of Iowa Press. Her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and a PhD in Creative Writing and English from the University of Georgia.

by Sherine Gilmour


It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

A mother I do not know says, “I am told my child cannot go to school next
year because she needs a feeding tube.”

The words “feeding tube” hang in the air. Her daughter wears purple corduroy
pants embroidered with princess crowns. Her legs are thin toothpicks. They
kick and kick the seat in front of her. The mother says, “Most days, I put on
tights, then leggings, then jeans, just to keep her warm. Just to hold up her
pants.”

Another mother says, “My husband’s family is so angry with me. I am the one
who got our son evaluated.”

Another mother says, “Where I come from, autism means 'alone.' 'Auto,' 'alone,'
so now my mother keeps calling and saying 'Why do you send Ibrahim to a
special school? He’s just a loner.' They called him loner last weekend at my
house after I spent the day cooking for them. Why does a loner need a special
school? Loner, loner. I pray to God, I tell them. But why can’t my son have
Allah and a special school too?”

Words in me I can’t get out. I am the perpetual listener. Locked up,
mummified, my ribs like a corset, my anxiety like a cloth wrapped tight
around me.

Finally, I lean into the group of women, heads huddled together in the aisle of
the bus, and I say, “I had to speak to my mother … She never calls my son by
name. She calls him nicknames, Sheldon and Forrest Gump. She visited and
she kept shouting, 'Run, Forest, run' in front of everyone at the park.

The mother who usually sleeps says in a low quiet voice, “My family will not
visit for the holidays. They are embarrassed of him.” She wraps her cardigan
around her chest like a blanket and turns away.

The one mother in the second row who is always rude starts laughing.

A mother who understands some English begins to speak. She speaks quickly
in Spanish, covers her eyes, begins to cry.

The mother in the seat behind me says, “I am so lucky. My parents
understand. They try to help, but my mother is in her 80s. I worry, what’s
going to happen? Who will take care of him when I die? I know, I know, he’ll be
in a home. But …” She trails off and looks at her two-year-old son, his skin
moon-colored, a child’s skin, soft and sweet. He is reaching toward the top of
the bus window. He reaches over and over again to where it is brightly lit. She
leans down to his face and looks up. “What is it, honey? What is it?”
Something only her son can see.

______________________________________________________________________

Sherine Gilmour has an MFA from NYU. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry, essays, and nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming from Cleaver, Entropy, Redivider, Salamander, So To Speak, Third Coast, and other publications.




by Marcella Remund


a ghazal, after Agha Shahid Ali



We’re most fully human on the cusp, the seed of night,
with pretense left behind to gather dust. Then comes the night.

You walk about when all the world’s gone dark, when footsteps
tap Morse code in patterns meant just for the weary night.

Shadows move along a wall, stretch, point long bent
fingers toward the distant black, tricks of wanderlust at night.

Hypnotic glitter’s net—stars, lake’s surface, silver maple
leaves’ flicker—you’re caught in the moondust night.

From house vents, late-hour laundress scents—“soft rain,”
“sea breeze,” “spring meadow,” sudden gust of “summer night.”

You keep to back alleys, where past lives tower in great heaps
of broken bikes, swing sets gone to rust. No play tonight.

Sizzle-pop and spit of snapping wires precedes a fire that
lights a street, melts someone’s home to crust in dead of night.

The owl’s silent glide, the moan of cats, the coyote’s howl
harmonize with our despair or lust—the needs of night.

And what of you, old wanderer, creeping closer to the edge?
Will you let go, release your grip on morning, trust the night?

______________________________________________________________________



Marcella Remund is from South Dakota, where she taught at the University of South Dakota. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals. Her chapbook, The Sea is My Ugly Twin, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. Her first full-length collection, The Book of Crooked Prayer, was published by Finishing Line in 2020. You can find more information and links to her books, at marcellaremund.com.

by Monica Colón


after she couldn't bring herself to say the word
"lesbian"—it stuck in her throat like cattail down
to its stalk on a windless day—and so instead
she said "same sex." She said "who you think
you are," and I didn't bother correcting
her because I know my saviors.
Before the meds, before the friends, before the realization
that flipped me right-side-up, it was the house finch

flinging treble notes to the sun. The fossils in limestone,
the smell of the balsam fir. The cinnamon roll
thawed in the microwave and gulped down with
with cafe con leche. Waiting for the next episode
of the animated show about queer witches.
Reading what the others have written down
to make their resting places, following them
in my little handcar of poems. So I try
to tell her, and she is blank
and disappointed under her Bible-verse decals,

and I burn, I burn with lust for living.

______________________________________________________________________


Monica Colón is a Salvadoran/American writer from Waco, Texas who has lived and studied in the Chicago suburbs and Querétaro, Mexico. Her poems have been featured in Susurrus Magazine, Cool Rock Repository, and Paddler Press. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of the 2021 Iris N. Spencer Sonnet Contest from West Chester University Poetry Center.

by Susan Cohen


prurient, watching sex
between bat rays,
their paired wings stirring water.
Oblivious
to anything but each other,
they float joined
from the harbor’s sand bed to its surface
with a grace
Fonteyn and Baryshnikov would envy.
How can I not project
pure liquid pleasure on them—
their rising and rolling, gentle thrash,
the long, slow synchronous glide?
How can I not imagine tenderness
when they spread their wings like eagles
coasting on a thermal
and swirl their own currents?
Until done, or alerted
by our canoe—
its aggressive whisper in the water,
its manufactured buoyancy—
they startle
and shoot away like stars.

______________________________________________________________________



Susan Cohen is the author of Throat Singing, A Different Wakeful Animal, and the forthcoming Democracy of Fire. Her recent poems appeared in 32 Poems, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize judged by Mark Doty and the 11th Annual Poetry Prize from Terrain.org judged by Arthur Sze. She has an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Berkeley, California.

by Heather Treseler

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!


A small rain down can rain but I am not outside, beside
an aluminum mouth of a gushing gutter, watching
the city sluiced in the casual event of falling water.

Nor am I standing in a shale of rubble, circled by dead
children’s toys, or crouched in a buckling raft, crusted
in cold salt and urine, chattel in a game of rockets

and gas. I breathe from two lungs, integral; my legs
warm under blankets’ nightly benediction. And love
lies sleeping, unharmed and unarmed beside me, arc

of her shoulder familiar as landscape to a painter whose
hands remember the curves of two cleaved hills, forelock
of treeline, the wild mane of sky. I trace hollow shadows

in a dark naming of parts as if my lover were a getaway
horse: throatlatch, barrel, and cannon; pastern, gaskin,
and hock. Tender, the names given to boats and beasts

of burden, what carries us from dock to ocean, trailhead
to highway, midnight to morning, censure to pleasure:
fugitives from dreams’ disasters. My beloved of nape,

buttock, and thigh; or stern, winch, and turnbuckle; or
dock, loin, and withers: in your body’s boat, I stow trust
for safe passage while distant wars make their incursions,

violence sends its newsworthy summons, and weather makes
a music of time. A small rain down can rain and by luck, Christ,
or zeitgeist, I cradle her in sleep’s long sail toward morning.

______________________________________________________________________


Heather Treseler is the author of Parturition (2020), which won a chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Ireland and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Cincinnati Review, The Irish Times, Harvard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Iowa Review, and her essays appear in eight books about contemporary poetry as well as in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Boston Review. Her poem “Wildlife” was chosen by Spencer Reece for the W. B. Yeats Prize (2021) and her sequence “The Lucie Odes” was selected for The Missouri Review's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize (2019). She is professor of English at Worcester State University and a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center.



by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach


I'm sorry for the extra-long wait,
the doctor tells me. None of us
expected this
. Two hours
and finally I get to toss
my panties on the chair
beside us and open
the puke pink gown
just enough. We joke
about our husband's
intended vasectomies
while her fingers
ease inside.
I see you're not
from around here
,
so I confess it's harder
than I thought
to be seen
by an OB, today,
in this state.
She responds, Imagine
how hard it is
to be the OB, today,
in this state.
If only
this difficulty
could be
just imagined.

______________________________________________________________________


Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six. She is author of three collections: The Many Names for Mother; Don't Touch the Bones; and 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023). Her poems appear in POETRY, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Julia wrote the model poem for dearukrainepoem.com. She is the Murphy Visiting Fellow at Hendrix College.

by M. Cynthia Cheung


-Anna Bertha Roentgen, 1885


In physics, x represents the unknown.
When Anna’s husband discovered a strange
new radiation, he named it and made history’s
first image of a living hand: her fingers’
bones and, on the fourth digit, the ring floating,
as if around a planet.

*

When I was six, I unfolded an artist’s
rendition of the solar system from the center
of an old National Geographic and discovered
that the sun would dilate within 5 billion years and overtake
the Earth. I couldn’t decide which was worse—this
or extinction.

*

It’s true that scientists apply Latin
best. For instance, a dying star’s
final breath is a nebula.
But my favorite is ex, meaning “lacking”
or “out of.” Examples: to extirpate,
to exsanguinate
. A cell dividing
will arrange its chromosomes
into a line of exes, a heap
of cells, waiting.

*

On the day when I lay, feet in stirrups, possibly grateful
for unconsciousness while the doctor scraped and sucked,
what did my mind turn to? I had no dreams.
The embryo neither; it lacked half
its parts. When I awoke, my heart was still
beating too quickly.

*

Mrs. Roentgen, tell me what future you saw
when you first laid eyes on that x-ray—
your black bones, your incandescent flesh.

______________________________________________________________________

M. Cynthia Cheung is a physician whose writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Dialogist, Palette Poetry, RHINO, Salamander, Sugar House Review, Zócalo Public Square, and others.