I Laugh and Laugh

SWWIM Every Day
by Sarah Elkins

by Sarah Elkins


My son takes a closeup photo of my face in profile
from the passenger seat. At the red light
he shows me the soft underbelly of my jaw,

how it’s giving up. What is this?! he asks
in mock disgust at my weakness in the face
of time. And, it’s true, I have forgotten

how to smile for cameras. I say fuck too
freely. I don’t swap my fork to the opposite
hand to cut my steak, haven’t taught him to

either. I pee in the shower and take swigs
of heavy whipping cream while standing
at the fridge suspending the carton over

my mouth without touching my lip to the rim.
I’m not a heathen, after all. I use the words
space and gravity and god interchangeably.

I blow my nose inside the collar of my t-shirt.
It’s allergy season so this is permitted. I have
laughed and laughed. I love this wet and

recyclable body that contracts to bleed, expands
into the waxing phase of the moon and repeats.
It takes so long to get that know-some-shit glow.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Elkins lives in southern West Virginia. Her work is forthcoming from or has recently appeared in Cimarron Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, West Trestle Review, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. In 2022, her poem “Water Tension” was a finalist for the 2021 Quarterly West Poetry Contest.

Patient on Ward 6

SWWIM Every Day
by Bonnie Bostrom

by Bonnie Bostrom



She was a mirror until the sun struck.  Shattering,
She was image on image; tiny glittering splinters.
In a Navajo blanket, with sunset painted
On her face,
She raised a Coca-Cola bottle as a sign
That she would be victorious.
She ran non-stop, fourteen miles
To stand in sweat before
A sacred statue,
Got caught at the same place in dreams,
Always nine miles from home.

She threw jeweled rings into the sky
To pass a certain test;
The proctor was invisible.
On an emergency room table, she
Irritated the staff by giving birth to all
The planets and letting oceans spill from her mouth.
At times she bowed and heard applause
From primordial places when
The script went well.
Then, her usual tricks with words didn’t work,
And the juggling got dangerous.

She saw Christ erupting from her heart,
Filling her bed with red and joy
But the world hadn’t ended for anybody else.
She gathered the brightest jigsaw pieces,
Tried forcing them into frames
Without cutting to the quick;
Saw them beckon,
Demanding her allegiance
To each shining part.
She flew away with them
Into the sun.

Her children suffered some but thought her
Entertaining when she danced.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________\

Bonnie Bostrom is a vintage woman (83 years old) and has published nine books either solo or in collaboration with other poets and artists. Her writing has been published in The Sun, The Thornleigh Review, Cholla Needles, and The Ball State Forum. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at the following online sites: Every Day Fiction, Canary, and A Stray Branch. Her website is bonniebostrom.com.

Crime of the Century

SWWIM Every Day
by Michelle Bitting

by Michelle Bitting


Barreling down a coastal road, Supertramp’s
“Dreamer” takes over the radio, Roger Hodgson’s
fingers drilling the dash open. It’s the sound of 40 years
ago and a red tide—swarms of slippery, stinking fish
washed up—goners, all of them, rotting in a hot Pacific
shimmer. And my brother is there with me at a lunar edge
of wet: full moon glint, sulfur whiff, stiff bodies like spilled
quivers of small, silvery arrows pointing every whack way
around us, their stilled eyes wide like sinking babies flopped
in sopping blankets of shore, schools of strewn clock guts,
a splayed and gritty spawning. My brother and I sing along,
our car stopped, listening from the highway, letting the night
and sea chaos carry us: dreamer, you know you are a dreamer…

and we're in sync, somehow, same words, same starry string
of plinked notes chiming the night around crystalized breath.
It was like this: our skins close and a mineral breeze clouding
eyes, blowing back salt-ashed hair, the just-detected distant
spiral jetties. We unbolted metal doors to barefoot skate
the sand berms down, feel a cold crack of waves slap toes.
Stoned on weed and much too high to maneuver our muddied
minds and feet inside whatever plots we were churning, Brother, 
whatever in our youth we thought ourselves big enough 
to handle, whatever tides and misdemeanors, no worse 
than what your hand would steer our way—your demise, 
suicide—that ancient refrain recorded: a shocking dream 
that wakes in song, even now, the human and remains.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michelle Bitting is the author of five poetry collections: Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize and a recipient of a starred Kirkus Review; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook, Dummy Ventriloquist, is forthcoming from C & R Press in 2023. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University and in film studies at University of Arizona Global.

A Fruit Can Be a Metonym for a Home Country

SWWIM Every Day
by Martha Silano

by Martha Silanno


and a tomato is the metonym for my childhood—
my father spreading cow manure,
saying when the seeds

get a whiff of that stench they’ll jump clear out of the ground.
I believed him, believed everything he told me,
including that he loved me,

including, when he let me drop three seeds into each hole,
he’d never raise his voice, never call me dumb bunny
again. What else but a tomato? To savor one

is to understand tomatoes were considered poisonous
until the 1600s, that tomato sauce was born
in Naples, birthplace

of my father’s father, soil of my father’s roots.
Tomato because my father loved them more
than his children, the proof being

that when our kickball landed in his garden,
snapped a seedling stem, he pulled out
his pocketknife, slit the ball in two.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Martha Silano’s most recent collection is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). Previous collections include Reckless Lovely and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, also from Saturnalia Books. Martha’s poems have recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, and Colorado Review, among others. Honors include the North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award. She teaches at Bellevue College. Learn more at marthasilano.net.

Abandon, Reprised

SWWIM Every Day
by Jane Zwart

by Jane Zwart


Almost always it is widows
trying the windchimes.

From technique you can tell
who played tetherball

and which ones flattered
men in uniform, brushing

their shirt fronts free of crumbs.
A few pretend they are there

to buy. Methodical as hand models,
they lift the price tags tied

to bamboo chandeliers
before filling the store

with reports of puppet kendo.
Others start small, browsing

a finger across pipes
sawed from dollhouse organs.

And then there are those
who look both ways before

they swing floating smoke stacks
with whole belfries for echoes.

Sometimes, one says, it’s a relief
being unable to predict

the magnitude of the sound
you’re about to set ringing.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines.

Second Grade Shame

SWWIM Every Day
by Rachel Neve-Midbar

by Rachel Neve-Midbar


Crooked teeth, chipmunk cheeks, all ears—your mind
is the mirror, and the mirror is the
gap you can step into, a place to hide—

Gary Nadir beneath you on the slide.
He lifts your skirt: your panties on display
as you fall through the breach, a cave of shame—

Morning toast confined in your mouth all day
[so you don’t have to swallow what you hate]

Gary Nadir stretched underneath your swing,
under your desk, behind you on the slide—
Gary Nadir follows you through the school gate—

He lifts your skirt, your panties on display.
The nurse says lice, lines wrong in the school play—
you fall through—you fall through, you fall through 

a catalog of shames—

You beg your mother to wear slacks to school.
Gary N.’s rage when he raises your skirt
to uncover the shorts you snuck from home.

At recess you bolt through the trees 
that surround the playground. He’s after you,
ultimately shoves you to the ground—

On your back in the pine nettles, he rips 
away your shorts, even your panties with 
surprising ease— and he sees, and he sees, 

and he sees—

______________________________________________________________________

Rachel Neve-Midbar is a poet and essayist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of the 2014 chapbook, What the Light Reveals. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, The Georgia Review, and Grist as well as other journals and anthologies. Rachel is a current PhD candidate at The University of Southern California.

Chicago Poem

SWWIM Every Day
by Taylor Altman

by Taylor Altman



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

______________________________________________________________________


Past Skokie lawns flat as cemeteries
and airport buildings passing the sherbet colors of evening 
down Harms Road, past the College Prep Academy, a group of boys  

hacks through June’s first greenery 
dreaming of the city on the other side, Lake Michigan’s 
icy cut, mafiosos trailing blue Fibonacci spirals of smoke  

from speakeasies and casinos. They don’t know 
that other city, the ghost city beneath the lake, zoned 
within its loneliness like a boy on the last day  

of his childhood, turning inward to a shore unknown 
to his father and brothers, the sheer blue panels 
of a Calder mobile. The lake is full of stories, voices  

and stories, boys stripped naked to the waist 
and flayed by poison ivy, boys becoming 
trees, becoming air, the circus of clouds moving silently  

across the Plains suffused with light 
from a distant star and floating back to earth, becoming the men 
who work the great belching factories of Detroit  

and Kenosha, expressions forged in steel, who press the levers 
and pistons resounding in the vast cathedral 
of work, holiest of names unspoken, the evening clouds  

piling one atop the other, concatenating 
like stories, twisting, funneling, each more intricate 
than the last, bone-delicate and pale, sifted from the throats  

of boys who float chained to one another 
and the shore, a line of empty boats rocking end to end 
in the fathomless kingdom of night.

______________________________________________________________________

Taylor Altman is an attorney and writer based in Las Vegas, NV. She holds a BA from Stanford University, an MFA from Boston University, and a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. 

At the Women's Health Center

SWWIM Every Day
by Brett Warren

by Brett Warren



I wear socks in my mom’s favorite color, pray to her 
a little as I’m led to the vestibule by a woman  
who explains how the gown ties in front,  
which I already know. But I don’t interrupt.  
It’s bad luck to keep a woman from doing her job.  
And maybe her words are a ritual blessing.  
I thank her and enter the changing room,  
trade everything I have for a thin cotton gown,  
emerge with my clothes balled up under my arm. 
I search the bank of lockers for a lucky number,  
but all my usuals are taken. Then I see it: 22.  
The year and the day I’m standing in, the minute  
the clock-hand just landed on. The lanyard  
dangling from locker 22 is purple, the exact purple  
of the winter coat my mom always wore 
before she began to disappear. I stuff everything  
inside, close and lock the skinny door, slip  
the purple coil around my wrist. Luck turns the key  
into a protection charm, the interior waiting room  
into a temple of filtered light. We enter, one at a time,  
to sit together in silence. In our identical habits,  
we look more like our mothers than on most days.  
We leaf through magazines or pretend to watch  
the news, which someone, probably a nurse,  
has muted.

______________________________________________________________________



Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Canary, The Comstock Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Hole in the Head Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts, in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway.

My Halfway House

SWWIM Every Day
by Susana H. Case

by Susana H. Case


My mother sang opera off-key
while she worked in her kitchen,
favored Pagliacci, a story

of entanglement. The dissonance
irritated me as a teenager
but became part of what I hold

close, the longing for what itches
most after it's gone, for the woman
who never got to use her passport.

Have a career, she advised. It's less
boring. I had a primeval fear
she would devour me,

like the gerbil mother I once observed
in a tank who meticulously
negated all her babies.

Have your own money.
Don't depend on any man.
The colonized body has two choices,

and either way, La commedia è finita!
Lie down with the devil.
Don't lie down.

There will be nothing when you run
out of figs. You will be
like the fireflies, practically gone.

______________________________________________________________________


Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of eight books of poetry, most recently, The Damage Done (Broadstone Books, 2022). She is co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). Case worked several decades as a university professor/program coordinator in New York City. She is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. If This Isn't Love is forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2024.

The Scientist and Her Husband Observed the Consciousness of Gnats in Spoleto, Italy

SWWIM Every Day
by Jo Brachman

by Jo Brachman


Nothing but a blur of brevity. She saw it first.
He tried to capture it—lens-click—still a cloud

of nothing. They’d been sitting on the wall outside
the duomo at early dusk, talking about spending

their last stage of life in a foreign country. To die
here, where the light of the old masters’ brushes

washed the stucco, the cobblestones, their faces.
The small flies arrived. Each frenzied gnat created

the larger, slower shape of a moon in-the-making.
The males moved as swarms do—with one mind

to attract females who would only join
the churning mass to mate. The mundane

ghost-bodies spun, wings backlit by the sun’s
last bone-colors of the ancient.

The gnats would live for hours, at the most
a few days, coded to cheat death by breeding.

The couple vowed to be reborn for a chance
of another lifetime together in this fortress town

where long ago, Etruscans divined the future
by gazing into a goat’s liver. The two watched

in silence. Rising above the duomo piazza,
the flies swelled into a thousand prayers.

______________________________________________________________________

Jo Brachman holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Moon City Review, Terminus Magazine, Poet Lore, Birmingham Review, Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, Best New Poets, Tar River, and others. A 2022 Fulbright Scholar, she recently finished a research grant in the Special Collections Archives of Lund University in Lund, Sweden.

Flood

SWWIM Every Day
by Sherry Stuart Berman

by Sherry Stuart Berman


for S.                                                                                      


All summer, on the news,
citrus-colored skies. Tiny suns
like Red Hots I could pop

in my mouth. Beautiful dust.
Deluge. My patient’s father texts me:
She’s intubated after using drugs

again, and he’ll send me a check.
How often had she said disease and
wish, smoothed her bangs

with the ringed fingers
of both hands. When I call him,
I’m skimming—as in, hard to know

or meant to find. I’m not a star,
right now, boiling an egg
is beyond me. A fork falls

and for hours I don’t notice
how blood frames my toenail.
Some days

the Amazon gods 
leave poetry
on my doorstep. Hulu

and its mock heaven.
I tunnel back
to her chair, finally

stop drinking.
She won’t make it this time.
I’m a mother and scared

to feed my son. I talk to myself
in every room. How else
to admit failure?

Trauma-bodies; pain-
bodies: I pick their hearts
out one by one, lose

my place by the end
of a session.
Intimacy that’s not.

I save a dead woman’s text.
My son needs a feast and I
don’t. I don’t.

Maybe ghosts aren’t real
but I heard a sigh in that room,
turned and said, what?

I have this child and I had this love
and I could not see her through.

______________________________________________________________________


Sherry Stuart Berman’s poems have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Guesthouse, 2 Horatio, The Night Heron Barks, Atticus Review, Rise Up Review, Writers Resist, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies, Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. Originally from South Florida, she is a psychotherapist in private practice and lives in Staten Island, NY, with her husband and son.

The Center

SWWIM Every Day
by Lane Falcon

by Lane Falcon



Bridges keep collapsing
in his body.

What if the graft dissolves
like last time?

Like the surgery didn’t
happen?

Then weeks of epinephrine,
choking so bad

he shot up in his crib
to grab me,

and panic wicked him away
shit after shit, vomit

after vomit. Every day,
death peered closer,

until I let go, let them
replace the trach. 

This time, they’ll cut
the graft wider,

place it higher, so when
I uncurl the canula

from the scar-twined
hole in his neck,

and, in his pupils,
I see a patch of trust

blooming through fear—
he will breathe.

It will hold.

______________________________________________________________________


Lane Falcon is a poet who lives in Alexandria, VA with her two kids and dog. Her manuscript, Deep Blue Odds, was selected as a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize, and semi-finalist for the 2022 Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize and the Inaugural Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Prize.

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