by Sharon Tracey
—Topanga: where the mountain meets the sea
by Maja Lukic
The apartment is blue, filled with an absence
posing as air. Something like ice pelts the windows.
Rupture of morning: thunder rolling in like
tanks surrounding a city, and the sky throwing
down rocks as the day grays into itself, into
whatever version of itself it wants to be. There,
already I’ve mistaken storm for story, already
I’ve assumed that something that lives in time
follows its own syntax. How badly I want evolution.
I am alone. The dog curls into a sweetness.
I have been here before, I have never been here
before like this—sure and boundless and close
to happy. It is May, and for days, I’ve been thinking
of someone else, the green storms of his eyes.
A few glazed lights blur yellow through the rain.
It is May, and I know I will never return to you.
______________________________________________________________________
Maja Lukic is a Poetry MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Narrative, A Public Space, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, and Sixth Finch, among other journals, and "The Slowdown" podcast. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
by Caitlin Grace McDonnell
As the booms in the distance start,
the dog darts around the yard in alarm,
from the flame of the bonfire to the citronella
flicking on the wood table, to whatever draws
her under the house with relentless dark
fascination day after day. The moon’s a sly
smirk and the night envelops the lake. Can’t
see the light show, just the trees, huddling
with concern, birds shrieking, frogs creaking:
yeah, we told you, yeah, it’s gonna get worse.
We burn things we want to be free of:
Patriarchy, screens, self-judgment. What
happens to ink on paper as it burns?
What happens to the words? I read
in Mississippi, they are thinking of training
dogs to sniff out pregnancy hormones
in women leaving the state. Boom
in the distance, dark trees, still lake.
It is not yet clear what will be asked
of us. Bug zap in the blue light.
And what we’re prepared to do.
______________________________________________________________________
Caitlin Grace McDonnell was a New York TImes Fellow at NYU where she received her MFA. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He poems and essays have been published widely and she has published a chapbook, Dreaming the Tree (2003), and two books, Looking for Small Animals (2012) and Pandemic City (2021). She teaches writing for CUNY and lives in Brooklyn with her daughter.
by Annie Przypyszny
by Jennifer Met
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
-a cento for Max*
The moon was dark.
She had eyes, I could see them—
eyes like blisters.
She described an orgasm
is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets—
small, precise, and a little wicked.
The hilarious moon—
part bone, part me—
your gift for gab is of cosmic import.
Made of shadow
with white chalk,
your lips, right after mine, form a crescent.
In our bed, in the dark,
when you smile, every tooth is a perfect O
staring at pictures, paralyzed for hours.
Look at me and bore me—
to ever be bored
under the light of the moon.
Listening to you makes me naked,
my body lit up—
not sleeping, for who can sleep
beyond the door, in the realest bed
where we levitate—
true not only of the world, but of perceiving it.
______________________________________________________________________
*A circular cento using lines from different poems in Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016), starting and ending with “The End.”
Title: “Appeal to my First Love”; 1 “The End”; 2 “Plush Bunny”; 3 “Radiation in New Jersey, Convalescence in New York”; 4 “Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture”; 5 “The Senses”; 6 “Lyric Complicity for One”; 7 “Universe Where We Weren’t Artisis”; 8 “The Watercolor Eulogy”; 9 “Poem in Which My Shrink is a Little Boy”; 10 “The Vacuum Planet of the Pee Pee Priestess”; 11 “The Blimp”; 12 “Poem About My Wife Being Perfect And Me Being Afraid”; 13 “For Crow”; 14 “Poem Set in the Day and Night”; 15 “Dawn of Man”; 16 “Sky-Sex Dreams of Randal”; 17 “The Curve”; 18 “Troy”; 19 “Hi, Melissa”; 20 “Afternoon”; 21 “The Big Loser”; 22 “When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying To Criticize the Universe”; 23 “Poem To My Dog, Monday, On Night I Accidentally Ate Meat”; 24 “The End”
______________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Met lives in a small town in North Idaho. She is a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology, a finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and winner of the Jovanovich Award. Recent work is published in Cimarron Review, the Museum of Americana, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, Superstition Review, and Zone 3, among other journals. She serves as an Assistant Prose Poetry Editor for Pithead Chapel and is the author of the microchapbook That Which Sunlight Chases (Origami Poems Project) and the chapbook Gallery Withheld (Glass Poetry Press).
by Elizabeth Loudon
It’s been suggested to me that I’d do better
to have a lie-in instead of waking so early
full of foolish hope, making the dog paw
at the curtains frantic as ever for her first
elusive kill. That nobody cares that I’m awake
to see the smudge of last night’s peach in the sky
or the fox tracks black on the wet lawn,
that sensible people are heaving their arms
and legs from left to right, smoothing the pillow
for one more dream, and I am blessed to be
a woman with cotton pillows who never need
rise at dawn, nor shrug a pack onto her back,
a woman with no reason to climb
to mountain cairns above the sling of a coll
nor to place on their conical heads a stone
like a million other oval rain-worn weights,
scarlet and silver splashed amid grey,
stones I think I can bear in my pocket. Others
don’t trudge up nameless paths whose wooden signs
rotted to splinters years ago, trodden by
so many long-dead pilgrims that not one
toughened blade of grass survives to cut
my skin, nor push their faces, whipped by wind
and streaked with exhaustion, into air that thins
with every step. I’d do better to let the pillow
hold my head, reach over and find your soft
and lonely hand that holds no pen and join you
in the unspoken. I say so little anyway.
I only take small stones from here to there,
leaving them where nobody will walk until
spring melts the white hem of another
winter snow, swallowing ice inch by inch until
there’s nothing to see but granite under sky.
______________________________________________________________________
Elizabeth Loudon's writing has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, INTRO, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Blue Mountain Review, and Trampset. Her debut novel, A Stranger in Baghdad, will be published in spring 2023 by Hoopoe Fiction. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, and has taught English at Smith College and worked as a fundraiser. She lives in England.
by Elizabeth Jacobson
A black widow tends two webs in different corners of my bathroom.
She crawls back and forth on the white plaster wall between her traps,
eats from the abdomen of a millipede first,
head of a pill bug next.
A male widow doesn't spin a web.
He destroys a female’s snare so other males are not attracted to her,
and sacrifices himself after an involved courtship
in which he gently binds her legs with his silk.
After my bath, water dripping on the floor,
the widow crawls from a nook, rests her carapace over a droplet.
Black widows don’t need to drink water;
they get ample fluids from their prey.
With the flashlight on my phone beamed at her head
I see her palps moving, flicking droplets onto her body,
shaking them off.
______________________________________________________________________
Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow. Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org.
by Jennifer Sutherland
By late afternoon the wind scrambles down
the bluff but the warmer air resists, trapped
in the hollow behind the house. We try opening
and closing all the windows until a shutter loosens
and then tumbles onto the grass. We leave
it lying where it fell. The wet will warp the wood
the same, however way they meet each other. We
won’t be here to nail it up come March, we’re
turning the place over to the bank, that’s what both
of us are thinking even if we haven’t said as much so far.
Jingle mail, it’s called, for the sound made when
the paper hits the mailroom floor. Still, it is December,
after all, I owe us both a little something like festivity,
and I drag a cardboard box down from the attic
onto the porch, remove a wreath. It smells
of mildewed plastic and, very faintly, oranges.
Years ago I pinned a red and yellow ribbon onto
the loop of phony pine, and there it’s stayed, wilting
like a belle in rotten weather. By tonight the temperature
will dip again, the season seeks its equilibrium.
And we’ll close ourselves up in the house for good, wait
inside for the letter that we’ve been told comes certified.
I brush away a cobweb overhead. And then a damselfly,
who must have only yesterday emerged, you can thank
the thaw, while I was fiddling with this synthetic frippery,
descends behind me, stills her wings. It would be cruel
to let a creature like her starve, bright green coruscating
foundling, she should have gone on sleeping in the marsh.
And what will she eat, with so many months left to pass
in slow-moving time before another equanimity of light
and darkness? I crush her underfoot.
______________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Sutherland's first book, Bullet Points, is forthcoming from River River books in June, 2023. Her work has recently appeared or will soon appear in Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, I-70 Review, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore on the unceded land of the Piscataway and Susquehannock peoples.
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder
When I try my best not to say “fuck” as in
it was so fucking adorable when David
used to belt out James Taylor’s
“Shed a Little Light” standing on top
of the coffee table in the living room,
singing into a wooden spoon
as if it were a microphone,
his shirt off, his hair a mass of brown curls.
When I try to act my age,
even though I am wearing
a jean jacket and everyone
else looks a little nicer.
How two families join each other
when a wedding is about to happen
and you all try to be on your best behavior.
How maybe I want to get the award
for the best mother-in-law from the woman
my son is about to marry by making her breakfast
and giving her a necklace I hope she loves.
How she looks at him and he, her.
How it feels a little like a handoff,
not that I am going anywhere,
at least I fucking hope not.
______________________________________________________________________
Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019) with another book forthcoming in 2023. Poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Recent work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. See sarahdickensonsnyder.com.
by Kindra McDonald
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
How long is the longest breath
you can hold? How long the grudge
of silence? How do you fight buoyancy
so well? Swelling your lungs with birdshot—
The slow rain bends the stems
of the tall weeds like piano keys.
In the steeple of your hands we lean in again
of the tall weeds like piano keys
the slow rain bends the stems
so well swelling your lungs with birdshot
of silence, how do you fight buoyancy?
You can hold, how long the grudge,
how long is the longest breath?
______________________________________________________________________
Kindra McDonald is the author of the collections Teaching a Wild Thing, Fossils, and In the Meat Years and the chapbooks Elements and Briars and Concealed Weapons. She was the recipient of the 2020 Haunted Waters Press Poetry Award. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and is a poet-artist working in mixed-media and found poetry and a Teaching Artist at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, VA. She served as the Poetry Society of Virginia Southeastern region Vice President from 2019-2022. You can find her in the woods or at kindramcdonald.com.
by Alison Hurwitz
She knew how to be forgiven:
Filled to spilling over with the
holy spirit, she never missed those
all-day Sunday Masses on the Catholic channel,
Mass in person at the church. She was a total pro
at penitence.
Morphed to mother at fourteen to four small sisters and a brother,
she packed her brilliance into attic, became an empty
confessional. When we emerged from service,
went to Sunday dinner at King’s Table Buffet,
she waited till we left to use the bathroom,
then dumped
the table’s After-Eights into her best blue purse.
That first time when I emerged too soon,
pretended I saw nothing.
She took collection from another table’s
bowl to even out the emptiness, lips pursed.
I thought I had escaped, but then her notice crossed
the room, caught me as I tried to fix
my own reflection in a mirror, cheeks staining glass.
She would not meet my eyes,
just simpered, said I’ll pray for you
to lose those thighs before
you’re old enough to date.
My inheritance. Months after she
had passed, we unearthed her secret cache,
saw the way she had buffeted her heart
with candy in her drawers:
mints and chocolate kisses,
tootsie rolls rolled into girdles.
While her husband called her Sugar,
trapped inside her housewife life,
she minted hunger into currency,
pawned away her pain,
hairshirt nothing
but a mouth.
______________________________________________________________________
Alison Hurwitz has been featured in Global Poemic, Words and Whispers Journal, Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus Volumes 1 and 2, Tiferet Journal, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice, and is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Book of Matches Lit Magazine, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She hosts a free online poetry reading, Well-Versed Words. Alison lives with her husband, sons and rescue dog in North Carolina. See more at alisonhurwitz.com.
by Cynthia Neely
by Ona Gritz
A narrow path overseen by a few
metal benches leads to the massive wonder
this place is named for, limbs the size of trunks,
and a plaque that dates it back to 1650.
Today, beneath that great latticework
of shade, my friends discuss
what is known about the communal
network of roots. Even a stump,
otherwise dead, still shares
what it has with the group. Meanwhile,
my own stingy core keeps replaying
a moment on the phone this morning,
Jean sniping in a way that was so old
and familiar it stung me to silence,
same tone, same words, I swear,
as in that first summer
when I was eighteen and enthralled with her.
Now I’m nearly sixty, she’s newly widowed
and, as she fingers the mottled bark,
I half think it must be illegal
to be pissed at a friend, no, a sister
with a grief that fresh. And yet,
as Sue explains how fungi are the brains
underground, my mind goes
from fungus to fester.
“How do botanists date trees,” Lisa asks,
“when they can’t see the rings?”
I shrug and glance at the gold band
that links Jean to an absence,
then hug my thickening middle
and, with it, the girl I was
who always assumed, whenever
someone was so much as brusque,
it was somehow her fault.
“I can’t get over this thing,” I say, wanting
to mean the sycamore. All it has felt
in its almost four hundred years.
All it must know and have forgiven.
______________________________________________________________________
Ona Gritz’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, One Art, and elsewhere. Her books include Geode, a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and Present Imperfect: Essays. Ona is also a children's author and essayist. Recent honors include two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays, a winning entry in The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 project, and a 2022 Best of the Net nomination.
by Paola Bruni
The surf rumbles along like a misspent
youth, turning its pockets inside out, dumping
stolen goods. Beachgoers march like hooded patriots,
scour wet grains for polished stones, shells,
hanks of driftwood, smoky glass, jewels
and coins. Everyone wants something from the sea.
The ashes of a father float among the grit—
him reborn a porpoise whose hake pierces
my peripheral, as my chin tilts toward the waning moon
and I’m counting cloud formations that slide
across dusk like the bi-conical beads of an abacus.
He’s there, just beneath the jacket of grey
and I want to wrap my arms around a rubbery mammalian
body but I know it’s forbidden. Chasing ghosts
is its own kind of death. The downpour unhitches soil
from the cliff, uproots stinging nettle, coyote
brush, slips of lady fern in a heady rush of destruction
or perhaps, reunion. We don’t know. Earth reaching
for the sea. Surf racing toward the cliff. Bark
of a sea lion, ancient call of a conch. Rain fills our eyes
and ears, pummels the small bones of our faces.
______________________________________________________________________
Paola Bruni is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize, as well as a finalist for the Mudfish Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, and Rattle, among others. Her debut book of poetry is an epistolary collection titled how do you spell the sound of crickets (Paper Angel Press, May 2022).
by Rachael Nevins
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
It’s possible to go wild again, says the woman sitting next to me
over breakfast this January morning at the monastery.
There are neurons in our hearts and guts,
she says, and we fail to heed them because we’ve filled our minds
with language. I’ve just met this woman
sitting here at this table by the ox-herding pictures.
She tells me she’s a farmer and that she speaks to the earth.
Getting messy is my dharma, she says. The soil is alive
and it wants us to listen.
I live in the city, where my fingers never touch the soil.
I have to seek the wilderness inside, I say, among
our cups and bowls and my children’s many
miniature cars and trucks. My dharma is simple.
I wake in the dark to write poems by hand, and the words
rise up from inside of me, unbidden.
They want me to listen.
______________________________________________________________________
Rachael Nevins’s poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Literary Mama, Hazlitt, the Ploughshares blog, and elsewhere, as well as in her newsletter, The Variegated Life. She expects to complete her degree in Library and Information Studies at Queens College of the City University of New York in May, and her chapbook, Only Provisional, is forthcoming from Ethel in March. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
She’s lived here all her life,
a gift to know this land, its seasons,
tastes, smells, mindful of its wants—
even knowing every acre was once taken
by violence. We all have mortifications,
history’s footprints threaded among the trees.
From the porch, sunset paints the surface
of the pond, pregnant with twigs
and twitching insects, a Gaia of breeze
strums shuffled reeds.
She’s had a good cry, one that could
have left a lesser woman sharp-cornered.
Later she will wash the dishes,
her face splashed and wakened,
her life unremarkable as the house fly
balanced on her dinner plate,
rubbing its bristly bowed legs together.
______________________________________________________________________
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and a recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship Grant. Her poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022) and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, World Literature Today, The New York Times, and Poets.org.
by Rebecca Lauren
At night, conservationists come to save the sea turtle eggs, guide
blind hatchlings to waves away from shore. We play Scrabble
by the rented kitchen’s light. Another year until my aunt asks me
about children. Another morning before my mother mouths one day
to the baby with sand in his fists. Turn around, and you’re tiny, born to water
like tonight’s turtles teething on sand saucers, silver coins, birch beer cans.
They come with wire mesh cages Mom will trip over at dawn. They come for
raccoons and sand erosion, for my empty womb and me. They come because
turtles follow moonlight and menstrual blood, believing glare
to be ocean, home, no longer alone. Turn around and you’re grown
my mother’s wedding ring lost to clutching sea-jaws. What if they don’t
know the way beyond the amniotic sac, slight briny water on shore?
On the porch next door a stranger plucks folk songs that cry salty tears
for their mothers as a million tiny turtles make their way toward us.
It’s phantom glare of beach house that draws them. It’s boardwalk signs,
metal detector, stars, lullaby: Turn around, and you’re a young wife
with babes of your own, and I’ve forgotten the rest of the words.
Mama used to sing it to me. Mama used to sing.
______________________________________________________________________
Rebecca Lauren lives in Philadelphia and serves as managing editor of Saturnalia Books. Her writing has been published in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, Ruminate, Salon, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Her chapbook, The Schwenkfelders, won the Keystone Chapbook Prize and was published by Seven Kitchens Press. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award.
by Christy Lee Barnes
by Urvashi Bahuguna
And then there was that frigid day in spring
we visited the seaside, cormorants speckling
the rock face, ice plant blooming a brilliant
pink as we headed up a hill to a vantage point
where we would point wildly in the distance
and claim, there lies Hawaii.
Wind swinging fists at the walkers the whole way
while the gulls watched, unmoved by the tide.
A laminated guide to the Coastal Birds of California
tucked snugly in my back pocket flew out
long before I knew it was gone. I patted my pocket
over & over as if I could will it back through force
alone. In wind like this, he said, impatiently, it’s long gone.
Even before he had finished speaking,
he began to trek back down the path,
back and back towards the trailhead, till he was
too far to call out to, and I saw a woman, bundled
and accompanied by her husband, give
something to him. I walked briskly, half ran,
to meet him, and took the guide from his certain hands.
______________________________________________________________________
Urvashi Bahuguna is an Indian poet and essayist. Her work has been recognized by a Tin House scholarship, fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Charles Wallace India Trust, and Sangam House, an Eclectica Spotlight Author Prize, and a TOTO Award for Creative Writing. She is the author of Terrarium (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2019) and No Straight Thing Was Ever Made (Penguin India, 2021). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, The Adroit Journal, Wildness, The Shore, Orion, Eclectica, Mud Season Review, UCity Review, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net.
by Dayna Patterson