by Suzanne Edison
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Laura Reece Hogan
Grow ever tender lolling on the razor rocks, belly out.
Slow, curious, trusting. Graze the pickerel weed, water
hyacinth, turtle grass. The sea my blustery bed, sky
my blue forgiving. Mistaken for mermaid, misheard.
Fed a twisting tune, wrong song at the surface. Mis-
herded, propeller whipped. Grow hide over hurt. Scab
over ship strikes. Scar over spiral-cut scar. Meander silky,
like I own the star fields, trailing my own shredded
skin. Always the vulnerable swathes, mammaries, whiskers,
slashed tail. The venerable slacken it, know how to slide
softness into sea. They know themselves: elastic
and ephemeral. It is still alive, what you have left in me,
glinting with scars, gliding to mangrove leaves, to nova.
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Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press, 2020), winner of the Paraclete Poetry Prize, the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press), and the nonfiction book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Scientific American, RHINO, Lily Poetry Review, Whale Road Review, River Heron River, Cloudbank, DMQ Review, and other publications. She can be found online at laurareecehogan.com.
by Judy Kaber
It’s the fragrance of peanut shells that draws him in,
the smell of horsewhipped joy in such a crowd.
Maybe I can follow him as he disappears around
the tent flap, maybe I can see his shadowless legs
as he stands outside the center ring, considering
the caged tigers, acrobatic clowns, death-defying
women in spangled costumes who climb footholds
to the high wire. Here’s what he did for me:
he carried me to my bed when I begged him,
lowered me gently to the pillow, or, later,
threw me down like a bag of old clothes
that needed to be washed clean.
His love for me was olive-colored, dirt mixed with tears,
so it’s a surprise to find him beneath the big top,
his hand on a rope that coils to the highest platform,
ready to head for the trapeze, to reel out into space,
all those faces below turned up to him,
the ripe fruit of the living.
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Judy Kaber is currently the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, as well as the author of three chapbooks: Renaming the Seasons, In Sleep We Are All the Same, and A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Atlanta Review, december, Crab Orchard Review, Hunger Mountain, and Spillway. She won the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, the Larry Kramer Memorial Chapbook Contest, and second place in the 2016 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest.
by Gunilla T. Kester
This morning the dentist. She scraped my old teeth
clean like a Roman monument or the Sacré Coeur
in Montmartre where Stendahl and Zola rest. Every
spring in Paris they start washing her north of the main
gate and reach the other side a year later only to see
she’s already blackened where they began. You left
me a lemon on the doorstep. It seemed all spring we set
up camp every night to pull it down again in the morning
each day we got faster got faster at tearing things down
I took comfort from the great poet who wrote angels
cannot distinguish between the living and the dead.
On the stone steps the lemon you left.
Juncos’ nest in the hanging basket by the front door
greeted me for a month with their tsktsktsk warning calls
facing me from roof or birch branches whether I
was leaving or coming home. Shady place. Plant shaggy.
Greens pouring out along the sides like a waterfall.
My Puerto Rican friend says these birds are lucky signs
in his country—are we not now both of us American
born or otherwise included—when he smashed his car,
black blossoms on his torso. Could no longer speak.
Luck is to know which silence hurts and which doesn’t.
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Gunilla T. Kester is an award-winning poet and the author of If I Were More Like Myself (The Writer's Den, 2015), and two chapbooks, Mysteries I-XXIII (2011) and Time of Sand and Teeth (2009), with Finishing Line Press. Her work has or will be published in American Journal of Poetry, Great Lakes Review, Pendemics, I-70 Review, Slipstream, and Trampoline.
by Leah Falk
by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
Let us not forget our songs
that sang us in our times
of powerlessnesss,
swirling in our sacrums like
soul’s Charybdis
as our legs walked to their beats
because our hearts were
muffled AM stations,
hollow in their antiquated mono.
May we thank them on the daily
for their visions of crashing
waves and changing tides
when all we felt: feedback, static,
our own cluttered airwaves.
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Jennifer Schomburg Kanke lives in Florida where she edits confidential documents. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah, and Salamander. Her zine about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, Fine, Considering, is available from Rinky Dink Press. She serves as a reader for The Dodge.
by K.T. Landon
The appraiser holds the ring to the light
and turns it carefully towards us: see, here,
where one of the smaller stones fell out
and was replaced by a cheaper one.
Under the microscope he looks for flaws,
stands the diamond in in a lineup
of greater and lesser gems. For the final assay,
he scratches the shank into a pane of smoky glass,
white line etching the polished pane. He drops
a clear bead onto the glass and with the tip
of the bottle draws acid across the scratch.
Whether metal dissolves tells you it’s worth.
We wait: time and damage the only proof.
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K. T. Landon is the author of 'Orange, Dreaming' (Five Oaks Press, 2017) and received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Narrative, North American Review, Spillway, and Best New Poets. She is a reader for Lily Poetry Review.
by Laura Ann Read
My grandfather peels cellophane wrap
from a fresh pack of Camels,
taps one out, lights up,
and blows a perfect orbit above my head.
I rise on my toes and reach
toward a form that blurs
and disappears.
Why didn’t your sister come with you
on the boat? Where did she go?
In the windless heat and deep shadow
of a California orange grove,
his weathered hand gestures at the heavy farmer’s boots
that replaced a music stand. I glance down
at his feet, hoping for a glimpse
of my great-aunt’s face.
But all I see is dust
and a dust-choked
jimson-weed.
How long did it take
to get here from Odessa? Is it true,
what my mother says, that you brought
only those Yiddish songs you wrote?
He goes into the house and comes out
carrying a card-table and two folding chairs.
He sets up his chessboard in the green shade
of a citrus tree and darts from chair
to chair, playing against himself.
He doesn’t cheat. I watch him
nudge a knight, a queen. Grandpa,
when you were my age, did you laugh?
Did you dance? He swivels in his seat
and plucks a Valencia orange
that hangs on a branch behind his back.
He strips the rind with his pocket knife
and hands me a piece of fruit.
I eat it all, meat, pith, seeds—
the way the earth ate my grandfather’s life,
his sister’s. The way it will eat mine.
Juice streams down my chin. My eyes sting
from the sweetness.
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Laura Ann Reed was a dancer and dance instructor in the San Francisco Bay Area before assuming the role of Leadership Development Trainer at the US Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in San Francisco, prior to the Trump Administration. She and her husband now reside in western Washington. Her work has been anthologized in How To Love the World, and has appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Loch Raven Review, and Willawaw, among other journals.
by Kate Golden
I am making a list
of everything I need
to tell you.
It is long—
about pinnipeds
and the things
people glue to them.
How fat is life for them.
How they sleep while drifting,
just like I would
if I could dive
to a thousand feet,
holding my breath
effortlessly.
How their little black boxes
five-minute-epoxied
onto their heads
tell us things.
Vital things:
Where the Blob came from,
that shocking warm mass
out in the Pacific.
What is happening in secret
under the ice
to the heart
of the ocean. But
writing is grieving.
Every sentence
is the death
of another
there’s no room for.
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Kate Golden is a Sacramento-based science journalist and a contributing writer at Sierra Magazine. She is a watercolor painter, breast cancer survivor, and keen fisherwoman, and she is writing a book about living on a small boat in the South Pacific. Find her on IG/Twitter: @meownderthal.
by Ilari Pass
Last night I recited some poems to my cat to practice for my big reading and this morning she left a rabbit head beside my sandals, saying, So, we’re even now. Later in the morning, I weeded the garden and discovered a color gamut of vegetables and a crepe myrtle, only to stumble on a Belgian statue of some guy pissing all over them. I love the long beard of fronds on this palm tree growing outside my afternoon. I sit and watch the sun roll over my pink-painted toes, knees held in curves of my elbows.
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When Ilari isn't writing poetry or short stories, she recites Ayahs (verses) from the Quran, travels with her family, plays hide-and-go-seek, blows bubbles, and chases fireflies with her four-year-old grandson. A two-time nominee for the Best of the Net Anthology and other accolades, you can find her Greatest Hits in Pithead Chapel, Door is A Jar, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Indianapolis Review, The Write Launch, and others.
by Lori (Lee) Desrosiers
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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We scatter her ashes
in a cemetery garden near the house
protected by roses, blossoming cherry.
I open the bag inside the urn.
They look different than expected,
dry and brown with tiny bits of bone,
more sandsoft than powdery.
My daughters take their turns
and I take mine. My mother
does not blow away
but lands.
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Lori (Lee) Desrosiers’ poetry books are The Philosopher’s Daughter, Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak, and Keeping Planes in the Air, all from Salmon Poetry. Two chapbooks, Inner Sky and Typing with e.e. cummings, are from Glass Lyre Press. Poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. They teach Poetry in the Lesley University M.F.A. graduate program. Desrosiers edits and publishes a journal of narrative poetry, Naugatuck River Review, and Wordpeace.co, a digital literary and art project dedicated to peace and social justice.
by Michele Kotler
by Melissa McKinstry
And if an owl came
to perch on your sill,
razor beak and talon feet,
feather and vowel,
lanterns for eyes,
dropping five questions
like molten silver
into the cool night air,
you’d turn your blue gaze
toward him in answer.
You would teach him
all about being bound—
the shiver of the rabbit
tricked in a trap
with only the breeze
free in your ears.
He would teach you
about wings—
glittering fingers spread
over green trees.
You both know
the hard truth—
the intractable instinct
to survive,
the hum of the earth,
its endless shiver.
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Melissa McKinstry lives in San Diego where she mothers her disabled adult son, curates a neighborhood poet tree, and assists with translation of Yiddish literature. She earned her MFA in poetry at Pacific University. Her work has appeared in Rattle and Alaska Quarterly Review, earned honorable mention for the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize as well as contests at Crab Creek Review and The Comstock Review, and is forthcoming in december.
by Susan Terris
—Vita brevis, ars longa
Life is brief, as Hippocrates wrote, and art is long,
yet Parra lived to one-hundred-&-four after writing
I take back everything I ever said at fifty-five. But I
differ with him and sought out his ghost.
Found him sitting cross-legged on nothing—electric
white hair crackling, unshaven, and in pajamas—
as he held an unlit Cuban cigar and tried to con me
to talk about Newtonian physics and how miserably
King Lear had aged. Impatient with his faint feints,
I interrupted his interruptions trying to explain
that even my feeble early poems, some existing in
perpetuity on the internet, when next to my newer
ones, show I may have improved over time. No whine
from me about the old old ones written in blood.
As I was explaining I'd told my children it was all right
to fail, Nicky—as he said he wished to be called—
interrupted again, shaking his cigar at me, said he was
sure that my words were all caca, and I was bat-shit
crazy if I didn't want to take them back. Then, instead of
tossing out a quote from Lear bewailing fate, he chose
Stephen Hawking: Look up at the stars, he advised me,
fading slowly from view, not down at your feet.
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Susan Terris is a freelance editor and the author of 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and 2 plays. Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, and Ploughshares. Poems of hers have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Her newest book is DREAM FRAGMENTS, which won the Swan Scythe Press Award. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor at Pedestal. See susanterris.com.
by Ja'net Danielo
by Meg Yardley
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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1. You need a sharp-pointed spoon.
You hunt through the bins at Goodwill,
settling spoons into each others’ hollows,
counting out sets of rose-trellised forks
you don’t need, training your eye
to seek out something serrated.
2. You hollow the pulp out of each section.
You leave the membranes intact.
3. You didn’t set out to eat a grapefruit;
they just started arriving on your doorstep weekly.
Your partner makes a face when you offer
the coral-colored juice: it needs sugar.
You delight perversely in that wince, a reminder
of how much sour you can stand.
4. There will be splatter.
You’d better move your daughter’s homework
off the table. The 400-page biography
will go back to the library with its pages speckled,
crisp white paper damp and relaxed.
5. Eating a grapefruit absorbs
attention. You can try to do the crossword
or write a poem about eating a grapefruit
while eating a grapefruit
but soon you find you haven’t filled in a letter
in five minutes, you’re luxuriating in bitter
liquor, this one thing.
6. Yesterday you set some nectarines on the conveyer belt—
the cashier passed them over her scanner, paused
to inhale with half-closed eyes—
but they seem to be gone so quickly.
Only the grapefruit—its untidy treatment,
its yielding flesh,
its bright and biting flavor—
only the grapefruit lingers.
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Meg Yardley lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry and short fiction have recently appeared in publications including Salamander, Cagibi, SWWIM Every Day, Mom Egg Review, and the Women’s Review of Books.
by Nancy Murphy
Let me tell you about leaving,
how it was almost
easy. Sometimes a mandarin
is so ripe that its skin wants
to be peeled, falls away
as your fingers get close,
pockets of air under the surface
waiting for release. I was ready
like that, open to other
hands, mouths, scents.
I feared being skipped over,
not picked in time. Frostbite.
At first it was a long December
then it was spring
in my step, everyone noticed.
Still I buried a guilt that
I could have done better,
that I had no right
to ripen. I had a secret
tally of faults that I used
against myself like a rainstorm.
I made judges out of accidental
men, took punishment
hungrily. Until
it was enough. Only then
could I let myself look
back, see how smugly
we walked the streets
of Philadelphia, rapt,
wrapped around each other.
Then baby daughter
mornings in the corner
condo, LA beach sun
streaming in, smells
of talcum. Remember,
I said almost. We were once
a light, he and I.
What did we know
then of dimming?
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Nancy Murphy is a Los Angeles-based writer and recent winner of the Aurora Poetry contest. Previous publications include Gyroscope Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Ekphrastic Review, The Baltimore Review, and others. Through the non-profit WriteGirl, Nancy has mentored teen girls and incarcerated teen girls and boys at writing workshops. Her first chapbook, The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence, is forthcoming from Gyroscope Press in fall 2022. More at nancymurphywriter.com.
by Roseline Mgbodichinma
Nobody asked me what it took them to slice me open?
There is a scarf I hold unto
When the crucifixion starts
I let blood & water mix like wine
And when they ask me who tried to kill me
Or where the weapons are
I will show them your tongue
Tell them your closed mouth is the sheath
And your smile, another kind of crimson
Or don’t you remember?
The mockery on that November morning,
How my tight dress became a circus
As you danced around me in blasphemies
Saying there is no room for a belly as big as mine in a dress
as colourful as that
Sometimes shaming is as potent as a bullet
& one shot is all it takes
Do you know death has a fashion sense?
It is a garment of morphed wishes,
The one that wears itself on me when my lover says
We cannot make love with candles
Because my body is not shaped like an hourglass
Not all kinds of death lock you in a grave, some of it leaves you roaming in the world?
I don't know what it means to have a deathless body
Because every day, a part of me dies intestate
My mother is afraid another man will shoot me
for living in this body. I, too, am afraid to exist
So l launch a police report
I am writing my statement & the policeman says I should show him evidence of attempted murder,
I start to undress
& show him my love handles
I tell him this is where the conspiracy began
I tell him my extra skin is their ammunition
& my cellulite, their shotgun
But he does not believe
I tell him to file a restraining order against the world
Because I do not know to which extent this body will grow
But he does not understand
So I dress myself
And I say,
Look! Look! Look!
It all started from the size of my stomach
Now I am wanted everywhere
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Roseline Mgbodichinma is a Nigerian writer, poet, and blogger passionate about documenting women's stories. She is currently pursuing a law degree and actively freelancing. Her work has been published on Isele, Native Skin, Down River Road, Amplify, JFA human rights mag, Blue Marble Review, Kalahari Review, Indianapolis Review, the hellebore, and elsewhere. You can reach her on her blog at mgbodichi.com, where she writes about art, issues, and lifestyle.
by Jane Medved
May the whale stay still as we
pause the boat to remove the net.
May the net find its burial in smoke
or fire. May fire be modest and rise
from the field to release seeds that
have been forgotten. Let them explode
outwards, theirs is a harsh birth.
Let summer pause until its offspring
find the grandfather tree, prepared
by ants, guardians of blind passage
in the ground. Let the ground rest,
there is more corn than the animals
can eat, and earth is a riddle that repeats
itself. Let the dove with its white belly
remain ignorant of my bedroom.
For there are those who are afraid,
and don’t we all depend on a nest.
Even the wind, which circles the wide
open spaces, and loves the grass as much
as the airborne, and sighs and settles there.
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Jane Medved is the author of Deep Calls To Deep (winner of the Many Voices Project, New Rivers Press) and the chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh (Finishing Line Press) Recent essays and poems have appeared in Ruminate, The North American Review, The Cider Press Review, The Normal School, and The Seneca Review. She is the poetry editor of the Ilanot Review, and a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv.
by Kim Ports Parsons