by Meg Reynolds
Nepal Paper, Methyl Cellulose, Hair, Fabric, Glass. Kiki Smith, 1999
by Lisa Dordal
April 3, 2001
My mother’s final correspondence was a postcard
dated six days before her death and received
the Monday after—the way postcards sometimes arrive
after the traveler has returned. This one
is from Graceland (a place I know she’d never been)—
the photo of Elvis, half in shadow, half bright.
Clipped to the card is a scrap of yellow paper on which I had transcribed—
from a phone call weeks after her death—my father’s words:
Sometimes alcohol attacks the heart—
for him, a singular admission; and, too,
that he’d known about the bottles—Years ago,
he said. I found them years ago. Like me,
had pulled away the books on the shelves in her study,
to find them there—tucked by her own hand—
like something nearly alive, waiting for her return.
My father and I—each departing from that room—
saying nothing to anyone. Her words
on the card are cheerful—niceties about my recent visit—
ending with: I have to cut back. She means
from Campus Ministry—a committee from which she’s just resigned.
The blue ink of her fountain pen is a random mix
of dark strokes and light—as if my mother,
noticing the fading, corrected with a firmer hand—
giving the appearance of a small battle transpiring.
______________________________________________________________________
Lisa Dordal teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University and is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; Water Lessons (April 2022); and Next Time You Come Home (forthcoming 2023), all from Black Lawrence Press. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, Narrative, Image, The New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Greensboro Review, RHINO, Ninth Letter, and CALYX.
by Laura Joyce-Hubbard
In the centrifuge, I spin. Searching for staying-power like a trout searches for a midge, I hold out, hold on. I’m strapped in with a five-point harness.
High-G acceleration. I’m twirling like a ballerina on point: around, and faster, and around and faster, blood pooling toward my boots. My back pressed; vertebrae compressed.
The Air Force trainers taught me the anti-G strain-maneuver: thighs and buttocks squeeze as hard as you can, they said, everything below the waist to force blood to reverse course, away from the feet, back toward the brain.
Vision wanes into a swirl of gray streaks—smacked. G-Lock so close, it whispers in my vestibular, the middle ear—You’re almost gone.
A loss of consciousness one breath away. Drink your oxygen like a lady sipping wine, they said.
My skin travels the length of my face, like ripples spreading from a stone thrown into a still pond. They record my spin for proof: how ugly you look, trying to pass their tests. I can’t see them anymore: behind the glass, can’t hear their crass comments about weeding out.
Like a nautilus shell, my body curls inward. Squeeze. Press back.
If a mind can will a body, a current, a field-flow of blood, a consciousness: then I’ll stay with it, stay with me, breathe, stay with me, hold, stay with, stay, stay.
______________________________________________________________________
Laura Joyce-Hubbard’s a fiction editor for TriQuarterly. Her work appears in Creative Nonfiction, Sewanee Review, Chicago Tribune, the Rumpus, Boulevard, Ninth Letter, Hippocampus, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her poetry and nonfiction has been supported by Ragdale Foundation and the NEA to attend a residency at VCCA. She won Southeast Review’s 2021 Ned Stuckey-French nonfiction contest. Among the first women to pilot the C-130H in the USAF, Laura now lives with her family in Highland Park, Illinois.
by Anjanette Delgado
The blue silk blouse
breaks before it
grazes my ribs.
I don’t want to die.
I want to kill
myself, my elbows
splayed above, up,
over my head stuck
in the textile, in its steel,
my fat—trapped—as if
I were praying to the skinny
girl, all B cups and bones,
I’m told lives inside
my excess brown
pounds forced to wear
Lycra. That girl stretches,
then screams, this is no way
to breathe, or be—
still, why can’t silk
slide, graceful, on its way
down? A lovely puddle
of blue, diving, unworn,
headfirst into the ground
beside my feet.
It’s art, says the skinny
girl then, and she’s not
talking about me.
______________________________________________________________________
Anjanette Delgado is a Puerto Rican writer based in Miami, and the award-winning author of three books: the novels The Heartbreak Pill and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho, and the multi-genre anthology Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, published by the University of Florida Press in 2021. Anjanette's work has also appeared in The New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, Vogue, NPR, HBO, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, the Boston Review, Lithub, Electric Literature, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, december magazine, The Rumpus, The Hong Kong Review, and others.
by Heather Sellers
over lawns and parking lots and land
the black water rose,
rose higher than ever before,
downtown knee-deep in dark liquid—just
under an hour. I fled
through rivers of rain as the road disappeared
behind me in wake.
Three days of storm, three days of hard sun, then
at last the water slid slowly away, a great black cape
dragged under the clear blue sea.
I drove back home alone along the frazzled wires,
across the frond-strung bridge,
down drowned Denver Street, where broken palms
and dining chairs in ruined taffeta skirts
and sodden sofas turned upside-down listed on lawns
and tables and bins lined the curbs
and curtain rods speared from black trash bags
and tarps crumpled over soaked grass like giant placemats
matting undone cupboards, the blistered veneer,
children’s bright plastics, grimacing plush,
outside of every single house:
island turned inside out.
In the fetid puddle
at my doorstep, I envisioned the For Sale sign
just above the waterline and in the great wave
that might pour forth when I opened the door,
if I opened—I must open—I imagined catfish,
caught, as if in amber, with my books
and seaweed, earrings, the tea things,
all the old silences rushing past.
As a girl I lived here
in the monotonous salt-silk waves
as I lived in God. Sea in me
and I in sea, both of us mute,
and sand-burnt, sun-soaked, fearless,
twinned with our endless vision of home,
the distant shore.
She’s out too far!
Did anyone notice? No one
knew me like the sea.
I wore her around my waist
as skirts, mine to unfurl
if I wanted, only if I ever wanted.
______________________________________________________________________
Heather Sellers, a Florida native, is the author of two new poetry collections, Field Notes from the Flood Zone and The Present State of the Garden, as well as two previous collections, The Boys I Borrow and Drinking Girls and Their Dresses. Her textbook, The Practice of Creative Writing, is in its fourth edition, following two books on craft, Page After Page and Chapter After Chapter.
by Kristen Zory King
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Every time my brother calls stoned
he tells me he doesn’t believe
in God. I know, I say. What else is there?
I list all the things I know for sure,
like a kind of centipede that can see
an entire spectrum of purple
we could never imagine. Or, an oak tree
older than things like math or music.
I keep going, though I know he is not listening.
Some frogs bark, the sound louder
than a pack of dogs. You can hear them
best each May. Brother, don’t you remember
spring always comes late?
______________________________________________________________________
Kristen Zory King is a writer, teaching artist, and yoga instructor based in Washington, DC. Recent work can be found in Electric Lit, The Citron Review, Mason Jar Press’s The Jarnal: Volume Two, Stanchion, and mac(ro)mic, among others. She is currently at work on a collection of flash fiction stories, among other projects. Learn more at kristenzoryking.com.
by Alexandra Crivici-Kramer
I remember when I learned my body
is a river. In some places a whisper,
& in others louder than the groans
of a cut tree.
Clear, roiled, demure, expansive.
Fed by rain, adored by roots
of ferns. In late summer
wildflowers bloom along
my edges, & in winter I learn to
live beneath
the superficial.
I can hold a landscape
on my hip, a valley
in the crook of my arm—
safe, swaddled, and warm.
Oh how free I felt,
when I welcomed
impermanence
and gave this body
the grace to transform.
______________________________________________________________________
Alexandra Crivici-Kramer earned her MA from The Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College and has been a member of the Poetry Society of Vermont since 2017. Her poetry can be found in The Mountain Troubadour, The Bread Loaf Journal, The Inflectionist Review, The Button-Eye Review, and The Middlebury Centennial Journal. She is a teacher of English and Humanities, a certified yoga and ski instructor, and lives in Vermont with her husband, dog, and son born last spring.
by Silvia Curbelo
In the place where sad
is a verb she holds
the window open
as if light were a book
she could live in.
Over and over
her small hands
the fragile, brimming
cup, the bluest
page. Love’s tender
necessary grammar.
A flower pressed into the flesh
of a reminder. Words
twisted into feathers.
Tiny arrows. Her broken
origami bird.
______________________________________________________________________
Silvia Curbelo was born in Matanzas, Cuba, and emigrated to the U.S. with her family as a child. Her poetry collections include Falling Landscape and The Secret History of Water, both from Anhinga Press, and Ambush, winner of the Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation, and the Writer’s Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and more than three-dozen anthologies and textbooks, including Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford/St. Martin) and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (W.W. Norton). Silvia has lived in Tampa, Florida, all her adult life.
by Nicole Callihan
that my husband was never
a breast man; that I was wasted
on him, my stepfather once joked;
that the doctor can make nipples
of scar tissue, though they flatten
over time, or do not take at all;
that the lady can airbrush color
on my areolas, though she warns
against the deeper pinks, as I’m
getting older; that I’m getting older;
that there are calcium pills
to counteract the pills that leach
the calcium from my bones,
and other pills, and others,
and the cold water, too,
with which I swallow it all down.
______________________________________________________________________
Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her books include SuperLoop and the poetry chapbooks: A Study in Spring (with Zoë Ryder White, 2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), Aging (2018), and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White, 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Find out more at nicolecallihan.com.
by Karla Daly
by Emily Lake Hansen
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I learned to swim inland. Somewhere
in Maine my mother took me to a lake,
a round, sandy bottom thing shaded by trees.
We called it a beach as if we could make
it so by naming it. If we called it love,
then it was love. The first duty station
I remember wasn’t even on a coast.
There it snowed in droves and we lived in a house
with green shutters. Or at least I think
they were green. My memory’s broken
sometimes like a naval base without a sea.
My father told planes where to land,
my mother cried into her soup, I read
fairy tales in the closet and we called it
home. At the lake I swam out to a far
away dock. I cannonballed into schools
of minnows. I shivered in my pink suit,
the water cold like snow.
______________________________________________________________________
Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, bisexual, and invisibly disabled poet and memoirist and the author of Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as the chapbooks The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press) and Pharaoh's Daughter Keeps a Diary (forthcoming from Kissing Dynamite Press). Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The McNeese Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Rust + Moth, and Atticus Review among others. A recent finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition and the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, she lives in Atlanta where she is a PhD candidate at Georgia State University and an instructor of English and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College.
by Meghan Sterling
I held my baby daughter in her yellow rainsuit every day
on the four-month trip out West: Big Sur, Olympia, Whistler,
Glacier, smile all tooth and grimace in our photographs by the sea,
the yellow nylon like a fever I clutched so I wouldn’t throw her down
to dirt and dart away. Madness’ keen approach like a wolf, lit by stars,
steering my hands to shred at my skin, a crow’s beak tearing apart
a nest in its search for hunger’s end. My daughter’s need a dog’s
steady howl, all night her shrieks of want no voice could answer,
no touch could calm. My breasts shrugged their empty flesh
and I sang a lullaby to still the tremble at the corners—
all the pretty little horses and their bright stampede across my hands,
the walls of the metal camper thin as a knife’s knowing blade.
Every cliff’s lip I considered from a stone’s view—such a long way
down, such a quick step to go from rest to motion, fall to free.
______________________________________________________________________
Meghan Sterling’s debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), came out in 2021. Sterling’s work is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Colorado Review, Poetry South, and many others. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), her collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and her collection, View from a Borrowed Field, which won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize, are forthcoming in 2023.
by Kashiana Singh
after “Scale” by Helen Mort
I measure myself against
the thunderstorm that comes unannounced—
the weight of its howls, the air
locked inside the cage of a black cloud,
against my own held breath,
or the trophy you won for your songs.
I measure myself in
your whispers falling
like condensation
that stays on dutiful
edges of forgotten coffee mugs,
nervous, as if fingerprints
locked inside of droplets
could come alive.
I measure myself against
sandcastles—weightless
as they merge into pleated waves.
My weight is
30 pounds more than Laika,
your dog, just before she died
when she was old and fat—
ten pounds less than the maple in our front yard,
its weight calculated by multiplying the volume
of its presence by the density of its wood.
My weight can also be measured
in bags of rice, flour, ragi—enough
pulses for a satsang gathering
at our own upcoming funerals.
But some days it feels heavier
than this house, a water-logged
presence like the street wrapped
around Maple enclave.
I am the curved intersection
warping itself, a kingsnake
doubled up around a cave.
______________________________________________________________________
Kashiana Singh calls herself a work practitioner and embodies the essence of her TEDx talk - Work as Worship into her everyday. She proudly serves as a Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News. Her newest full-length collection, Woman by the Door, was released with Apprentice House Press in 2022. Kashiana lives in North Carolina and carries her various geopolitical homes within her poetry.
by Sandra Crouch
Thirst is such a simple thing
to heal. Two hands
cupped toward one another
the wine-rich drink of earth
the way it felt to swim
wildly alive.
In the ship of your body
the soul misses the holy bruise
blue from that army of blood
rushing to the wound's side
erasing your sharp edges
softening—
Our veins are absolutely strings
and a fire's struck hiss
in heaps of tender slack.
But the heart is just a muscle
parked beneath the highway overpass
biting her lip.
Fibrillating memory
filled with the amniotic of our own awe.
The earth is just rotating on its axis,
her body a parenthesis
with midwifery hands.
She is tired, tired in the marrow of her bones
spun out into the dark.
But no one heals what they refuse to look at.
Fever is how the body prays, how it burns
as if you were its keeper, not its ghost.
Send the throat stone down.
Be the body breaking everything else open
as a tongue between the teeth.
Night is a mouth, hungry and endless
beyond the mapped world
calling from our porch to come look at the sky.
Come 'round, come whether-or-not
this is a life without sunrise.
Come lightning strike,
there's nothing to be done but turn and praise.
Come undone, come falling apart
clutched close in earth's dun fist.
Let night whisper into the hull
of your ear, the wound still your mouth
bringing it into being,
longing to be whole as a body.
Between every form and its arc
is the sound of the beginning
held taut in the sweetening air.
Braided Cento:
Jen Stewart Fueston, Madonna, Complex, Cascade Books, 2020
Andrea Gibson, Lord of the Butterflies, Button Poetry, 2018
Jennifer K. Sweeney, Foxlogic Fireweed, The Backwaters Press, 2020
______________________________________________________________________
Sandra Crouch, MA, is a poet, artist, and letterpress printer recently transplanted to Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has been published in HAD, MER Literary, Rogue Agent, Rust+Moth, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. You can follow along at https://sandracrouch.com.
by Diana Whitney
August heat rises from the river.
The girl tells her parents she’s at a friend’s
then crosses the state line into Ohio,
brings a bottle of vodka to spike
her Slushy, beelining for the football party,
the boy she likes in the basement.
She sips another drink down in the basement,
the summer night rushing like a river
of stars, fifty kids crushing into the party,
bright and free at sixteen. Her friend
hands her a red Solo cup of ice spiked
with Smirnoff, a favorite in Ohio
where they live for football, for Ohio
victory, Roll Red Roll chanted at the party,
chanted at the stadium, boys spiking
the pigskin, smashing their bodies, the river
inscrutable at the edge of town. Her friends
want to bounce to another party.
She still remembers leaving that party,
following the boy, a hero in Ohio,
his teammates in tow and maybe her friends.
People say she threw up in the basement.
People say she threw up on the curb. The river
is silent as the car glides past, spikes
of willow leaves floating in murk. Trace a spike
in uncertain events after the party:
she wakes beneath a blanket, cloudy as the river,
not back home but naked in Ohio,
freaking out on a couch in a stranger’s basement
missing her panties, her phone, her friends.
The court will call on the testimony of friends.
The girl, Jane Doe, says someone spiked
her drink. Was she blackout-drunk on the basement
floor or passed-out-drunk like a whore at the party?
The boys carried her out, the pride of Ohio.
There are photos and videos, a river
of pixels. One was the quarterback, a party
bro, sharing her body with friends in Ohio—
spikes circle the basement, sink in the river.
______________________________________________________________________
Diana Whitney writes across the genres with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Kenyon Review, Glamour, and many more. Her poetry debut, Wanting It, won the Rubery Book Award, and her inclusive anthology, You Don't Have to be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, became a YA bestseller and won the 2022 Claudia Lewis Award. Find out more at diana-whitney.com.
by Jeni De La O
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
by Jane Wiseman
I have given you bread and salt.
You salted the furrows, you salted the wound.
You wound your way across the Adriatic
ten years to me, while I, at cross-purposes,
wily, unraveled this loom, turned into your maybe,
turn and return and turn again. Made me
bitter. Made me old. You, what may you gain?
Kill the suitors, hang the maids? What? What?
You know the secret of our bed? It suits you that
I wait. No. This time when you’re gone, when
the weight of you is gone, I step onto the portico, and
Goddess, I hold up my hands. You, down at the port
with all your faithful hands. A sail stands in to harbor.
This time I’m done. No more understanding woman.
If you come back, know it, I’ll be gone. Don’t think to moor
in that same cove again.
______________________________________________________________________
Jane M. Wiseman is a poet who splits her time between very urban Minneapolis and the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico. She enjoys all kinds of poetry and writes in other forms, too. She is an enthusiastic Sunday painter, an avid reader, and loves spending time with family. She holds an undergraduate degree from Duke University, an MA from the University of Illinois-Urbana, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
by Erin Kim
by Molly Kugel
—Scottish Gaelic bed-going prayer
You woke to blue, the color of tourmaline
and then the storm at sea, how it dimmed
everything to gray like an old film.
If it were slipping away, this would be a warning.
You woke to magnolia, the sun and then hot
sand, the color of samara, those dried seeds of the
elm come fall, the weather baked on your skin
like that first summer on the Cape before
everything had happened, when you were
still waiting, the waters settling, a still boat.
You woke to green, the fields in Pennsylvania
not quite verdant because of the ash, almost
loden or shale, your mother calling
your name from afar but near—when
you had a mother and father still, the long acres
appeared in front of you, asked what will you do.
______________________________________________________________________
Molly Kugel is the author of The Forest of the Suburbs (Five Oaks 2015). Her book, Groundcover (Tolsun 2022), and chapbook, fo gheasaibh (dancing girl press 2022), are forthcoming. Her poems have appeared most recently or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Calyx, Mid-American Review, Cider Press Review, and Josephine Quarterly. She recently completed a PhD in Literary Studies at the University of Denver. She is the ecology editor for Cordella magazine.
by Leah Schnurr