by January Gill O'Neil
by Wendy Wisner
Blood in the sink when I spit.
Blood on the morning sheets.
Milk, too. Is that blood
on the baby’s belly button?
Are those mosquito bites
on our older son’s arms
or something worse, something
he could give the baby?
Blood and milk, blood and milk.
How many lines can I write
between the baby’s cries?
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Wendy Wisner is the author of two books of poems, Epicenter and Morph and Bloom. Her essays and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Passages North, Tar River Poetry, Nashville Review, The Washington Post, Full Grown People, The Manifest-Station, Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York with her husband and two kids. Find her at www.wendywisner.com.
by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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It's how I arrived in this place. Dust. Blood.
Thin figures. Shadows stretched like bars
against a farm gone fallow. Gone dust. Gone wind.
My grandmother said, Steinbeck never got it right.
The place. The leaving and how it felt:
to be child in a world gone back to dust.
She'd breath the dust into me some birthdays.
Or, when I'd come back to visit from college.
Until the dust stuck to my tongue, clouded my eyes
as I tried to drift farther and farther away.
She whispered into my ear the songs she'd sung
in the canneries those long hours she'd worked as a child.
Until the land had become me. No way to escape
the need to carry it, to tell it right.
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Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer and poet. Her books include the biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and her fourth poetry collection West : Fire : Archive (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2021). She is currently writing a biography about the author Sanora Babb which will be published by the University of California Press 2024.
by Carolina Hotchandani
Sometimes I believed the future lived
under the surface
of the present,
and if I tried, I could
unveil it. The way my mother
peeled back the artichoke’s scales,
paring away a light fuzz
to reach the heart.
Lately, I’m afraid of the cores
I find strewn about the counter.
My father’s eating peaches,
cherries, plums.
So many bananas.
He even tries to eat the peels.
I remember how he’d prick
his finger each day—
a globule of blood rising
from beneath this moment
to its outer tip. He’d stamp
his blood onto a strip to learn
if he was fine.
Now he takes in the sweetness
he always feared.
As a child
I shuddered at that lance,
that scarlet sphere.
I worry: his worry’s gone.
Tira as minhocas da cabeça,
my mother says.
Pull those worms out of your head.
Imagined futures:
I need you to stay under
the grass, wriggling deep in the earth.
Close to its unknown core.
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Carolina Hotchandani won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize for her debut poetry collection, The Book Eaters, which will be released in September 2023. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Diode, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska.
While You Were Gone
by Kathleen McGookey
by Eman Hassan
by Helena Mesa
Not even flight patterns offer certainty tonight.
Which words will bring you beside me tonight?
The plane trembles over your state line. Mountains,
plains—how do I map our geography tonight?
Rain ferries across your streets, inverts the stars.
Nearly asleep, I know snow muffles my eaves tonight.
Once, we lived together—our time marked
by a season, a plan. Why think of that lease tonight?
Extrañar, to miss, as in, extraño tu voz en la mañana.
Me extraña, as in, how odd your voice feels tonight.
You say planes are also arrivals. Why is there always
a suitcase half-packed? Forgive my defeat tonight.
These nights, these archipelagos of words:
Say skin, breath, tongue—say Helena, here, tonight.
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Helena Mesa is the author of Where Land Is Indistinguishable from Sea (forthcoming from Terrapin Press) and Horse Dance Underwater, and is an editor for Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
by Jennifer Saunders
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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“ … Whatever
mistakes we make, we will become what we are
because of our blunders.”
Dorianne Laux “Zulu, Indiana (An Ode to the Internet)”
O stirrup pants, o acid-washed jeans, o single
black lace glove and rubber bracelets. Forgive me,
but you were mistakes, all of you,
you and the thigh-ripped-open jeans
I criss-crossed with skate laces. O big hair,
o green eye shadow, o hanging out on the beach
drinking ill-gotten Bartles & Jaymes and letting JP
of the fake ID unlace me and feed me
vodka-spiked watermelon
and slide his fingers inside me.
O dark parking lot, o end of the lane.
O you missteps, you well-practiced mistakes,
you paving of my crooked road. Fender-bender
in the McDonald’s parking lot
on the way home from Great America
because I was too impatient
to wipe the steam from the back window.
The ride I hitched with those guys
who turned out to be high
and on shore leave. O narrow escapes.
That haircut sophomore year.
That blue prom dress. Jellies.
Not going to Homecoming with G
because nice guys scared me
more than JP and his Alabama Slammers.
O grapefruit diet, o Jane Fonda’s Workout, o beginning
of erasure. Daisy Dukes and ankle boots,
D+ in calculus, girl sitting in the back row
chewing her hair. O child, o paving stone,
o boat somebody else rowed. Off-the-shoulder
sweatshirts, “Let’s Get Physical,” o parachute pants—
the kind that were so easy to slip out of.
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Jennifer Saunders (she/her) is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the Clockwise Chapbook Competition. Her poem “Crosswalk” was selected by Kim Addonizio as the winner of the 2020 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize and appeared in Southword. Jennifer's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, Pidgeonholes, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is also the co-editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, 2023). Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.
by Alecia Beymer
"Scientists Watched a Star Explode in Real Time for the First Time Ever." LiveScience, https://www.livescience.com/first-supernova-real-time-observations.
Closeness is a fiery supernova located 120 million light years from earth. Even in its violent collapse, we watched. We talked as if we knew each other all along. Days, arms like scarves around the neck. Days like small children reaching their arms to a parent. What of this desire to be held? There were conversations: sentences sewing distance. Say goodbye, on repeat. How did I learn to be close to someone? Looking up, a clattering of light fused into darkness. I realize later, we were all just learning how to love. Arms expanded in belief that someone might run towards them. Meanwhile, the wind cradles shallow edges—cutting on the backs of necks. Tiny explosions.
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Alecia Beymer is an Assistant Professor - Educator in the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, The Inflectionist Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, and Sugar House Review. Her research is focused on literacies formed by space and place, considerations of the interconnected resonances of teachers and students, and the poetics of education.
by Lolita Stewart-White
It’s that time of year again. We’re taking July and August off to read residency applications and apply for grants.
See you in September!
XO SWWIM Team
by Carolyn Guinzio
If you put in to the river near where you live,
how close will it bring you to home? Nothing is familiar
from here. There is always an emptiness coming
towards us to take something back or away. Blue heron
on bank, green heron in branch, bittern
on bar, mussel husk. THANKS FOR A GREAT
FORTY FIVE YEARS was written in the gritty
window of the shop. Even the nests in the eaves
are empty. TO EACH THEIR OWN ETERNITY
is written on the stone city gate. It's safe
to say now, from this distance, wobbling in the blue
basket of a yellow balloon, that everything ends,
and everything ends in water, or, what doesn't end
in water ends in light, or what doesn't end in light doesn't
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Carolyn Guinzio's most recent collection is A Vertigo Book, winner of The Tenth Gate Prize and winner of the Foreword Indies Award for Poetry Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and many other journals. Her poetry films have been screened at numerous festivals throughout the world, including the Cadence Festival, where she was a jury award winner. Her website is carolynguinzio.tumblr.com.
by Wendy Drexler
—with a line by Marguerite Yourcenar
The candle isn’t bothered by the flame, light doesn’t complain
when swallowed by dusk, pebbles don’t mourn the mountain
they’ve crumbled from, mountain lions fatten on feral burrows
that are wrecking wetlands, the Australian crocodile that makes
a fine meal of feral pigs doesn’t know it’s endangered,
the pigs don’t know they’re invasive, we’re all ravenous, cascading
tragedies, dipping into glimmers of relief, gripping the flywheel,
trying to get by, sorting angels from villains, poachers from
preachers, loners from shooters, all of us wreathed in this
sorry mixture of blood and lymph. I mean, look at me, shelling
invasive Asian tiger shrimp for dinner, tearing off the soft
swimmerets that once streamed seaweed and brooded eggs,
slitting the fleshly crescent with a paring knife as my thumbnail
scrapes the thin white vein that once carried the colorless blood.
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Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, was published in September 2022 by Terrapin Books. She’s been the poet-in-residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.
by Rosa Sophia
by Julia C. Alter
by Michele Bombardier
A single blue star in the white sky
of my thigh where I drove in the pencil,
its lead tip lodged like a bullet under my skin.
I don’t remember why, only how I hid
the angry red welt, how it raised up
like a slag heap. I was such a good girl.
Perfect, how my mother still describes me,
the word a crown of tungsten weight.
Daughter of a refugee, product of the projects,
her ticket out was the ring on her left hand.
How could she have known different?
I used to pinch the skin on my thigh and roll
the rice-sized cylinder between my fingers,
remind myself of that girl. It’s dissolved now,
nothing left to feel. Only a blue dot reminding me
to drive my pencil into the page, to be the bullet.
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Michele Bombardier is the author of What We Do, a Washington Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in JAMA, Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Parabola, Bellevue Literary Review, and others. She holds an MFA from Pacific University in Poetry. She is a Hedgebrook fellow, the founder of Fishplate Poetry, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of her town.
by Katy Luxem
When something is exceptionally
good in life, perhaps the fried zucchini
slices of late summer or the garden,
beautiful as it is, but still a backdrop
to the evening sky, when the sun dips
its oil lamp past the horizon, perhaps then.
When I get to kiss the constellation
of a body late at night, pressed into the dark
face of gravity, as if it is a whole universe
made just for me. The glow of this luck may
make me feel faint, temporary, outstanding.
The stars are out. And the stars are out.
There is no trick to the light.
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Katy Luxem is based in Salt Lake City. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and the University of Utah. Her work has appeared in Rattle, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Poetry Online, Appalachian Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and others. She is the author of Until It Is True, which is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in fall 2023.
by Dorsey Craft
Get in the boat! I yell, voicing the purple,
quilted Noah, because this scene never
has enough urgency: placid pairs
of swans and aardvarks meekly gliding
up the ramp—We’re the last of our species,
so what? It’s unbelievable, the amount
of toymakers inspired by divinely
designed apocalypse, the Lord wiping
his hand across the white board
of creation. My baby has four Noahs:
two books, his tiny travel ark, plus
a plush with life-size squirrels.
I like to make the waves to smack
against the bow, the doves skitter
in tornado cones as the rhinos
gore chinchillas, barrel to the dry
compartments up top. I no longer
believe in orderly fashion,
double-file lines, anything other
than animal fury at annihilation. My son
pincers a zebra above his head
like a sacrifice. He laughs like violet
lilting to indigo, like rain that torrents,
a reveille for the birth of the world.
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Dorsey Craft is the author of Plunder (Bauhan Publishing 2020), winner of the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She currently serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of Agni and teaches creative writing at University of North Florida.
by Dani Janae
I put on a suit and deem myself Trillary Clinton.
A tag on my cup of tea says “Empty yourself and let
the universe fill you.” I keep thinking of Olivia Benson,
I keep thinking about the jury of my peers. I pose
half-naked for a stranger's project on sexual violence.
My body a blur as I’m asked to move through emotion.
It’s the entire Commonwealth versus a man in a suit.
The detective presses his hand to his face as he asks
me how much I had to drink on the night in question.
The same detective tells me my rapist and his lawyer
are arrogant, like they’ve won already. I still try
to make time to laugh, but every sound from my lips
comes out as a plea. I create a playlist called
“rage suite” and hope it helps me to channel my
tears into fire. In the end, the Commonwealth says
I am incapable of standing trial. In the end, my tongue
is less flame and more a wet muscle. The men have won
the prize of my body, changed thing. Changeling. The hiss
of my name laying gold crowns on their teeth, oh victory.
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Dani Janae is a poet and journalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has been published by Longleaf Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Palette Poetry, Wax Nine Journal, Levee Magazine, and Slush Pile Magazine. Her manuscript, Express Desire, was a finalist for the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize.
by Jenna Le
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I crumple marriage offers made by fishermen,
masons, bakers of brioche, for I know
my consecration is to marry the
great Van Gogh. Look at history and see
men of genius wrecked before there is
the chance for one brave girl to swoop down, dangerous
to his enemies and doubters, the
critics and hecklers, and save him from that storm.
My love shall be his shield, prevent the terrible.
No shy virgin, I’ve seen four decades; they
have handled me the way some clumsy half-
cocked violin restorer does a never-
again-same harp. I know the score. I found
Vincent living with his mother in these
snake-filled backwoods, where gossips embroider the dangers
of his past romancing of a whore. Sufficient
to say I’m not scared off. Inside me, too,
there is a prostitute and a barkeep,
a seamstress and a siren and a shore.
Note: In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote about Margot Begemann, briefly his fiancée, “It’s a pity I didn’t meet her earlier—say 10 years ago or so. Now she gives me the impression of a Cremona violin that’s been spoiled in the past by bad bunglers of restorers.” He ended their relationship the same year it began. Margot drank poison but recovered.
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