by Melanie McCabe
Once I walked out into the world with flesh on, cluster
by Cathlin Noonan
by Ashley Elizabeth
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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My father does not believe women
who say they have been raped
He asks questions like
why and how and why now
as if assault on their bodies is merely an inconvenience
as if their bodies do not rot on their own with each passing second.
They do not need help feeling less than.
He asks why I am so affected
by the orange man in office with the tiny hands
and other men stepping down from positions of power.
I do not have the heart to tell him my brother
did not always keep his hands to himself.
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Ashley Elizabeth (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer and teacher from Baltimore, MD. Her poetry has appeared in OutWrite, Voicemail Poems, and Stanchion, among others. She is the author of chapbooks, you were supposed to be a friend (Nightingale & Sparrow, 2020) and black has every right to be angry (Alternating Current Press). Ashley's debut collection, A Family Thing, is forthcoming from Redacted Books/ELJ Editions (August 2024). When Ashley isn't teaching or working as the Chapbook Editor with Sundress Publications, she habitually posts on Twitter and Instagram (@ae_thepoet). She lives with her partner and their cats.
by Susan Blackwell Ramsey
I didn’t love him. He was sweet,
teasing letters all winter long.
Flirtation is a fragile art.
Some loss is casual, some cuts deep.
Horns don’t fall off, antlers do,
a tusk means something had to die.
He brought me back an ivory mask
three inches high, with spiral horns,
almond eyes, a pointed chin.
He was very proud he knew
how to recognize a fake,
how to tell bone from ivory.
All he had to do was take
his lighter out, for bone will burn.
What’s true survives a feeble flame,
something I had yet to learn.
As my mother puzzled how
to string it from a cord it slipped
and snapped one horn off, a clean break,
nothing that she couldn’t glue.
And while the epoxy set
it slipped, and the other snapped off, too.
She felt terrible. I did not
mind very much, which was my clue.
I’m sure he wouldn’t buy it now.
Regret saves nothing. Elephants
are matriarchal, mourn their dead.
Their great slow hearts weigh fifty pounds.
And when I hold this in my hand
I miss my mother, not that man.
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Susan Blackwell Ramsey's work has appeared, among other places, in The Southern Review, 32 Poems, Smartish Pace, and Best American Poetry; her book, A Mind Like This, won the Prairie Schooner Poetry Book Prize. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which actually does exist.
by Carolene Kurien
Oiled legs pile on top of one another,
glistening in the afternoon light.
This isn’t an orgy: it’s a feast of frog.
Appa fries and stacks them like meditation
rocks on the cooling rack. I tell the toad
watching from the backyard you’re safe, your poison
is your grace as I jenga one out from the heap.
The taste of second-hand fly murder
is pleasant to me. If I had a long, sticky tongue,
I’d trap horrible things: rich people &
bad weather. Consume everything you hate,
that’s what Amma should have told me before
I left for school. Instead I let that girl spit in my face,
as sweethearts do.
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Carolene Kurien is a Malayali-American poet from South Florida. She received her MFA from the University of Miami, where she was a James Michener fellow. A Tin House alum, she has been published in Salt Hill, Hobart After Dark, and Two Serious Ladies, and she has poems forthcoming in Redivider and the South Florida Poetry Journal.
by Lucy Griffith
by Eileen Cleary
after Dorianne Laux
Red in the face the first time I faced it. The sun,
hanging since before the first someone, the sun
dipping amber fingers into dewy-cool lawns.
A warming cabinet for grass blankets, the sun,
call it day-star. Luminous over hayfields, loosed
in the furs of chipmunk. Honey: homespun sun,
a taffeta dress stitched with lemon zest, rested
in an ocean blue backdrop. Dear Sun,
Like a frantic greenhouse, I’ve a blind spot when
it comes to what’s too hot, Smothering One,
I love you like a child though you scorch me.
O Variant of Helen, for what’s left of eternity
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Eileen Cleary is the author of Child Ward of the Commonwealth (2019) and 2 a.m. with Keats (Nixes Mate, 2021). In addition, she co-edited the anthology Voices Amidst the Virus, the featured text at the 2021 Michigan State University Filmetry Festival. Cleary founded and is EIC of Lily Poetry Review Books and Lily Poetry Review. Recent work is included in Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poetry, just out through Grayson Books.
by Donna Vorreyer
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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In the kitchen, I refine the alchemy
of avocados, salt and stir them into guacamole,
this conversion a delicious and knowable magic.
Other tricks are difficult to master—
cards that repair themselves when torn in two,
an assistant who disappears into empty space.
I prefer spells within reach—lying prone
as a masseuse resets my muscles and meridians
or sitting on a weathered chair as vapor rises
from the lawn, a spider descending
from a branch to thread a new web.
Some nights, it is as simple as static
on the radio, the hiss of disconnection
and departure, or a kiss hello after a day apart.
This is the kind of magic I know best, accepting
love, returning it. It is this string of years,
this bowl of avocados, mashed with lime
and garlic, just the way you like it.
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Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She lives in the Chicago suburbs where she hosts the monthly online reading series, A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
by Ruth Hoberman
We dress up to lay our dead down—so ceremonial,
even though there’s no such thing as buried. Disassembled,
sure—my mother a heap of shards by now, twenty years on—
but hardly underground. Mainly she’s here, a ramshackle
ghost in need of repair. She haunts the hardware store
where my husband sifts through bolts and rings
for customers intent on resurrecting broken things. Everything
fails with time but lingers, waits to reassemble.
Let me tell you what I’m trying to do, customers say.
Let me tell you what I need. And he finds the very thing
that works. The coffee grinder grinds again, the plate’s
undropped—mending being a kind of memory (like words)
a bringing back. Though when I think of all my mother
wanted still to do—how not quite ready she was to die
and how alone (the rest of us a thousand miles away
and not a clue)—I wonder where the bolt for that is,
the hinge, the metal plate to cover up the hole; the screw.
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Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and essays in such journals as Smartish Pace, RHINO, West Trestle Review, Ibbetson Street, and Ploughshares.
by Kate Northrop
Agree with me the rumble of a subway coming in
can be a baby, and the first note in the hush
of a concert hall, the bright name of a baby.
Walking to the bathroom at night, seeing
floorboards rise, this, of course, is a baby, and the sound
of pool balls breaking up pool balls? Like locks down the hall
clicking, one after another, into place? Baby, baby. Babies themselves
are not babies, not their carriages, their clinging
infant fingers, but that they often surface,
creaturely, into my dreams? Four horses gathered
in a window and then, on the counter, a sudden baby?
It’s true. Just this morning, walking with Nell, we saw a horse
standing in a pasture, flicking away flies. I clucked, clucked,
held out my hand and I called here, Baby.
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Kate Northrop's recent poetry collections are Homewrecker (New Letters vol. 88, 2022) and cuntstruck (C & R Press, 2017). Northrop teaches at the University of Wyoming. Currently she is learning to embroider.
by Julia Thacker
By the fistful, licorice-black, Georgia clay-red,
cheddar-yellow pills pressed into my palm.
A doctor wrote the scrip. Remedy for doughy arms,
belly, thighs. Shiva swallowing forest fires.
Wide awake for three consecutive sunrises, scribbling
in a spiral notebook indecipherable inky knots.
Even the teenage poems perspire through their clothes.
I eat only flavored lip gloss. This is before
college and weed, before speed freak.
Before White Cross composed a term paper
overnight. Teetering on platform shoes,
dazed, doll-size, I spread my bramble of hair
across the ironing board, press one hank at a time,
iron hissing, singed, smelling faintly of smoke,
chrysanthemums at my feet.
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Julia Thacker's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast Online, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic, and others. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th anniversary issue of Poetry International. Twice a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she has also received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
by Scarlett Peterson
Of all of my dead you’re the one
I don’t worry about, know you
might have cracked a joke while I cried
and told you about my woman,
still would have taken me out
to pick the last huckleberry (I planted seeds
for my own. I am trying to be patient).
Just the other day I saw a green anole out
on my fence and said James, thought
of the lizards that hung from your finger,
your way of helping me learn to love
even what aches in its latching—
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Scarlett Peterson is a poet, essayist, and lesbian. Her first collection, The Pink I Must Have Worn, was recently published by Kelsay Books. She is a PhD candidate at Georgia State University. Her work can be found in Moon City Review, The Lavender Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Gargoyle Magazine, Counterclock Journal, The Shore, Poetry Online, Eunoia Review, and more.
by Rebecca Beardsall
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Pull my bones from the pebble shores of Lancashire.
Plait my hair with flecks of auburn from the grasses of Donegal.
Push my muscular frame from the Rhine
onto the ringing rocks of Pennsylvania. My
feet sink into black sand; Tasman Sea
leaves a layer of salt on my knees. Face of
freckles emerge like southern hemisphere stars. Layers
of lands live inside me, and I search like a Saturniidae moth
ancestral spirit returning. Sepia spirals
mark my wings with amber, burnt umber.
Warm spring rain sinks into paddock soil
submerges and expels into North Sea, Atlantic, Delaware,
Irish Sea, Pacific, Rhine, Schuykill, Tasman Sea.
Lines of lineage—currents and undercurrents
surface in my eyes, shape of my nose, space of my teeth
Confirm and baptize me into my new, renewed—marriage merges me.
I stand on these Pacific shores, not the shores of my ancestors.
Tell me I am home.
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Rebecca Beardsall (MA, Lehigh University; MFA, Western Washington University) is the author of The Unfurling Frond and My Place in the Spiral. Her current nonfiction work explores her hybrid life as a transnational and explores settler colonialism. Rebecca is an editor, coach, and teacher. She teaches MFA-Style courses for writers. Find out more at rebeccabeardsall.com.
by Alexis Ivy
"whatever’s lost is gained forever"
-Hyam Plutzik
The woman who once wore this dress,
this hot pink sundress, must have
missed her connection in Atlanta.
Which carousel had the flight
attendant said? Finally her
first solo trip where she could feel
like an island, a droplet in the ocean.
Where she’s nothing but eat, sleep, beach.
The dress was for that beach week
that made her seem like she had
a closet of hot pink everything.
I’ll wear it to feel feminine, feminine
is hard for me to wear too. Dress says,
we are fun or looking for fun.
I buy the toiletry kit that traveled with
the dress as well. The size of a cantaloupe.
So much to tell with a toiletry kit, a personal
apothecary so she could stay herself
while traveling—her brands, her lavender,
her forecast, her conditions. This trip,
I’ve decided, she was going natural,
not a single blush or stick, just lip
gloss and lotion to put on a bug bite.
Had to love each of her freckles without
foundation, let go of having her
hair straight and start to love her
wavy look. Her shampoo bottle, full:
not relying on hotel shampoo says
she cared about herself a certain way.
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Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks and Taking the Homeless Census, which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She is co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). A recent resident at The Betsy Writer’s Room, she lives in her hometown Boston and teaches in the PoemWorks community.
by Melissa Fite Johnson
At the antique mall with a friend,
buried in a bin: a Florence Griffith Joyner doll,
comes with a full set of nail stickers. I read once that
during a race her nail flew off; after it
ended she walked the track to
find it. Her miniature wears a one-legged bodysuit, neon
green and pink, the detail I most associate with
her. My friend asks if she’s still alive. I look
it up—no, 1998, seizure in her sleep,
just before her 39th birthday. I only now, in midlife,
know how young that is to die. When I was
little, forty was my father’s scratchy cheek,
my mother’s face cream. Forty was inevitable. Death had
not yet entered my mind, though soon I’d learn. My
old babysitter, my classmate whose father skidded
past the stop sign one winter, Anne Frank, Titanic, I couldn’t
quit learning death. I’m still learning it,
researching even the slightest
symptoms, wondering each birthday how much more
time. I set down Flo-Jo’s cardboard home. My friend holds
up another doll. I look this one up too, déjà
vu, only she’s alive, Billie Jean King,
white tennis dress with blue Peter Pan collar,
x number of years left. Next month, I’ll turn forty. Well—
you never really know. I should. 4-0. In tennis, the
zero is love. 40-love. I would love to turn forty.
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Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, HAD, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches high school English in Lawrence, KS, where she and her husband live with their dogs.
by Alicia Rebecca Myers
This morning I watched a robin convert a pothole into a bird bath, which is
the kind of fearless ingenuity I covet. I ask myself why Rothko listened to
his doctor when advised not to paint color blocks higher than a yard
because of his heart ailment. Did acrylic on paper suddenly convey more
intimate spiritual planes? I don’t know enough about art or spiritual planes
to say, although one time, at the Dalí museum in Figueres, I stood on my head
in front of the wall-size rendering of Gala and made the roots branching
down from her bare chest spring skyward. There is a lockstep to daily life
that can be subverted: the huzzah! of reconfiguring the pattern, of houndstooth
disrupted by gingham to create an intermediate state. On 34B, the sign for the bar
that is also a trailer reads Cans & Clams or Cans & or & Clams, depending on
availability, and I love that, the not knowing, the big marquee, the shifting
language, the discovery made possible every drive.
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Most recently, Alicia Rebecca Myers' poem "Winter Solstice" was selected by Kaveh Akbar for inclusion in Best New Poets 2021, and she was a finalist for the 2022 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize. Her writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Threadcount, FIELD, and The Rumpus. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press), was winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series. She enjoys open water swimming, karaoke, and fostering puppies.
by Amy Thatcher
I pray, approaching
the rapture
in their open, dying
eyes: racoons, skunks,
the occasional dog—
its owner, desperate,
calling Ollie, Ollie…
A Hail Mary can’t help,
but I say one anyway
because it’s all I can do
to relieve the weeping
blister of my brain
from studying their
sweet crushed skulls.
Sometimes, I’ll drag
a doe into the reeds
to keep my secret:
I am not a nice lady.
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Amy Thatcher is a native Philadelphian, where she works as a public librarian. Her poems have been published in Guesthouse, Bear Review, Rust + Moth, Rhino, and are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review.
by Julie Marie Wade
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Bellingham, Washington; February 24, 2014
There is snow on the road, which some might consider an omen. Not us. Not
after two years of Florida swelter, of longing to be colder, of liking at least a
suggestion of winter. Ice on the windowsills. Frost on the grass. A shiver sharp
as good luck.
We wear black dresses. Not so fancy we couldn’t wear them again—though we
haven’t. We carry bright flowers from the Farmer’s Market, arranged by your
sister into bouquets we won’t toss until the next day—and then, only over our
shoulders, only into the Bay.
How strange it was to write where our parents were born in order to procure
the license—to have to print their names on that form at all. A narrative
altered but never erased. A lineage notarized into law by one county clerk or
another. No true new beginnings. And what if we lied or didn’t know or
refused to remember—would we be denied our right to wed, again?
But here is the sun recusing itself from the day, and here the upper room of
Le Chat Noir, flooded with errant light. Here are eleven friends assembled—
one officiating, one reading a poem, another signing as witness to the
speaking of vows, the sharing of rings, and two little girls playing pretend-
wedding afterwards while no one rushes in to say what our mothers always
said—girls can’t marry other girls! They said this often, with words and
without them, the complex machinery of their speech and silence, the fields
they plowed deep in us, so the dream of this day was impossibly furrowed.
Our fathers, who denied such dreams could exist.
We do not smash cake into each other’s mouths or toss garters to a flock of
eager groomsmen. There are no groomsmen, and no bridesmaids either,
which means no one is singled out for being single or dubbed a “matron”
because she has already signed on a dotted line, given herself to another.
I am not thinking of my parents’ house two hours south of here, or of their
other house at the shore, the one I have never seen. I am not thinking of the
weathervane on their roof that announces THE WADES live here, or of the
elephantine hedges that swell along their borders, in order to mask the fence
that masks the yard. The contradiction in terms: declaring themselves, then
hiding. I am not even thinking of the difference between secrecy and privacy,
which was once explained to me as the difference between what we carry as
shame and what we keep for ourselves as an act of self-respect.
I was not ashamed, and yet I cannot believe it was self-respect that compelled
me once, from the post office in this very town, to make six photocopies of
my thesis—that first collection of lesbian love poems—and then to address six
manila envelopes with such meticulous script to the residences of their most
cherished friends. “Your mother had to give up her clubs because of you!” my
father chided through the phone. “You shamed her in front of everyone!” And
though it was my right to claim my love, I regret I ever once used love to
punish someone else, even if it was my mother, who could not love the woman
I had become.
No, I am not thinking of them as we cross the threshold into our room at The
Chrysalis, a grand hotel for which they were breaking ground just as we
moved away. But if I were, I would send a small blessing to my parents
watching Jeopardy! in one of their homes, eating popcorn and drinking Shasta
(diet, of course), my mother impassioned as she calls out, “What is Burma,
Alex?” and “What is the Prime Meridian?”
I am not thinking of them, though, or how even if they knew I had just married
my true love on their side of the country, neither would have found the—what
would you call it, Alex?—the wherewithal?—to come.
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Julie Marie Wade is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Florida International University. She is the author of many books of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Otherwise: Essays, selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize and published this month. She makes her home with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach. Find her online at www.juliemariewade.com.
by Angela Just
I check the posted prices near my gate, wonder if there’s time
for a shoeshine, maybe “The Basic” at six dollars, fifty cents.
You need a shine, says the woman running the booth. And she’s
not asking. Yes, I think: a shine, a polish, a reboot. Her words
hit me like my friend’s this morning: You have a right to your life,
she’d said, and now I want this shine like my life depends on it.
The stand rises like a shrine where anyone can sit as Buddha,
observe in silence the rivers of passing feet. The woman concedes
she likes my shoes, but scowls when my foot slips off the stirrup.
Relax, she says, pulling me back in line for the final brush.
She buffs each shoe to a luster, coaxes light from the leather.
Give care to these, she says, they’ll last forever.
The final slaps of rag on shoe clap like a call to arms.
My body rattles with the work it takes for shining.
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Angela Just is the author of Everything I Own, a micro-chapbook published by Porkbelly Press. Her poems have appeared in Sweet: A Literary Confection, Haunted Waters Press, Flyway, MAKE, After Hours, and others. A Chicago writer, she is a long-time member of Egg Money Poets, a small collective of writers who support each other’s work and writing lives. Her chapbook manuscript, The Last Thing I Would Smell, is beginning to make the rounds.
by Maria Surricchio