During these dark times and fraught hours, we hope that you find some comfort, whether that’s celebrating the holidays with loved ones or curling up with a good book and a cup of cocoa to watch the year turn into 2024.
by J.L. Conrad
Because the snarl of packages inside our front door cannot be moved.
Because a great stuckness has taken root in our marriage and I do not know
whether we will survive it.
Because I can’t bear something else dying before my eyes. Because from the
basement with my own hands I have removed their bodies.
Because I wanted our place to be a place of refuge and instead it has become a
place of death. Because when I drew up a net of safety around us I did not
know that I would be required to place bait at intervals around the perimeter.
Because the mice which are now dying visited death on the baby songbirds
growing in their high house this summer, and I was the one to find their
bodies, heads gnawed open, on the steps below.
Because I buried the birds under the yew where none could find them.
Because the mouse who raised its head from the darkness of the birdhouse
when I flicked on the porchlight showed no remorse.
Because I could not bury the others because then what poisons they
possessed would make their way back out into the world. Because even
though it would take fifty of those mice to fell a predator the size of a cat,
there are such animals.
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J.L. Conrad is the author of the full-length poetry collections A World in Which (Terrapin Books, forthcoming) and A Cartography of Birds (LSU Press), and the chapbooks Recovery (winner of the 2022 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize, Texas Review Press) and Not If But When (winner of the third annual Dead Lake Chapbook Competition, Salt Hill). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Sugar House Review, Salamander, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
by Joanna Fuhrman
by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Because you are pregnant
the days grow rounder with light,
long oaks bend towards each other
as through a glass orb—
loose blouses like snow drifts.
I wish I had sung to you more
when you were inside me,
carried you less like the marriage
I knew was failing. I wish I could’ve kept
my mind in the same place as my body.
This year the winter will not drag on.
I will measure the slowly accruing
light in your changing form.
Who knows what settles
as I watch you slice the peaches.
Maybe a future entomologist’s fingers
are finding their first
meticulous rhythm. Maybe the delicate
register of your child’s voice
is gathering its notes.
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Sally Bliumis-Dunn's poems have been published in Paris Review, Poetry London, Plume, SWWIM Every Day, and Poets.org, among others.
by Rhett Watts
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Hayley Mitchell Haugen
by Jennifer Litt
by Georgia San Li
by Sharon A. Foley
It took two years to get permission
to see my father. I begin to imagine
my first words with him. Beautiful day
and he will answer, Did you see the light
ripple on the stone wall? But it rains
on my first visit. I say, I wish the rain
would stop. And he replies,
It always has. He’s wearing a blue johnny
my mother made from one of his old shirts.
There is a cross above his bed,
a big wooden one with metal Jesus,
a touch of red paint on the wounds.
Dad’s been carving oak into a bowl
he has rubbed with linseed oil.
My habit does not scrape his floor.
My breasts are bridled by a blue gamp.
I am Sister Mary Sharon now.
It’s against the rules but for him
I lift my veil to show
wisps of my hair.
I have come from the high-ceilinged cloister.
In this tiny room
he seems so small to me.
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Sharon A. Foley’s poems have or will soon appear in Paterson Literary Review, Speckled Trout Review, Solstice, South Florida Poetry Journal, and The Big Windows Review. She entered the Sisters of Mercy at age eighteen and lived with them as a nun for twenty-nine years. Ms. Foley is now a psychotherapist.
by Nicole Santalucia
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Silence snaps in the wind
next to a confederate flag
on the back of a pickup truck.
On a Sunday afternoon, silence
carves into a farmer’s throat.
It grows behind the chicken coop.
Silence is on Post Road across the street
from jail. It shuffles across cement floors
in sandals and white socks, sits under
a pill in a paper cup.
Drug addicts overdose on silence
behind the warehouse near Exit 52.
Silence is a needle mark between toes.
It is the dirt under my fingernails.
Exhaust pipes and horses choke
on silence. Engines and people
and guns tried to sink silence
in the Susquehanna River,
but silence shot back and started war.
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Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize, and Arkana Magazine's Editor’s Choice Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Best American Poetry, Palette Poetry, The Colorado Review, North American Review, and Los Angeles Review as well as other journals and anthologies. She is an Associate Professor, the Director of First-Year Writing, and a member of the LGBTQ+ Advisory Council at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
by Laura Ann Reed
Some wounds never close.
I only mentioned his necktie
in passing, then watched him
whip it off and drape it around
what was nearest to hand, saying
to the lamp post, Monsieur,
your taste is atrocious. Already
glorying in his strangeness
I didn’t know whether to laugh,
remain silent, or run away.
I call back through the years
because so much been lost
to silence. Because the place
no longer survives as what
it was when I loved it. This deep
need for what is gone. I keep seeing
it hanging green against gold
on the lamp post where I can
almost touch it.
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Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.
by Zia Wang
My mother cowers on our tattered couch
her long black hair a stage curtain
My father looms, disco mustache,
pompous pointed collar. His voice knifes
her. Words so well-honed.
I am three years old, standing off stage
in Wonder Woman Underoos.
I taste my father’s resentment,
its oily slick across my baby teeth,
but my mother’s helplessness
melting cold and wet in my palm
prompts me to leave my post.
I step on stage, hold out a tissue
to dab my mother’s cheek. My eyes widen–
Surprising sting of her slap. Together
we watch tissues flutter recklessly
between us. My mother whimpers
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
What else can she say?
Only the lines she was given.
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Zia Wang is Indian-American and part of the third generation of her family from East Africa. She completed her undergraduate degree in English at Princeton University and her medical degree at NYU. Her poetry has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, MORIA, and Wilderness House Literary Review and was selected as second-runner-up in the New Orleans Review Poetry Contest 2023. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
by Mary Beth Hines
They flee, half-obliterated
faces frozen flat to paper.
Behind them, a river careens.
Mountains slice sky lit by a siege
of flailing stars, scissored strips
of cloud, no cover.
They might be anyone, these haggard
travelers, a people marked, caught,
carved by a master, his plywood
blocks, inked, pressed, reproducible,
expulsion destined to occur
over and over though never
the same way twice—undulant wood grain,
colors, frenzy of dash, strength,
and the eyes, the myriad eyes
staring straight at you from the depths
of the dead page, waiting, waiting
for you to tire, to turn away.
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Mary Beth Hines lives and writes from her home in Massachusetts. Her work appears in Cider Press Review, SWWIM Every Day, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Kelsay Books published her debut collection, Winter at a Summer House, in 2021. See marybethhines.com.
by Pamela Epps
For my seventh birthday
before he stopped celebrating
anything but Jewish holidays,
my father sent a gold bracelet
speckled with my birthstone.
I was more comfortable in T-shirts
and baseball mitt. I loved to wrestle,
shock with vulgar words.
Such a mouth.
The delicate bangle
looked tiny in the white box
meant for girls in frilly dresses
with fathers who scoop them up.
How could it fit on this wrist
cocked for battle?
I stared down at the red stones
floating in the gold river.
Whose hand is this?
Whose father?
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Pamela Hill Epps’ work has most recently appeared in the anthology 101 Jewish Poems For The Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press) as well as in other literary publications such as Heartwood Literary Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, and Poetry Breakfast. She has published A Last Glance, a chapbook with YellowJacket Press. She is a psychologist, poet, and jazz musician living in Tampa, Fl. She spends a great deal of time looking out at the river.
by Hilary Sideris
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Every day
my love burns
down the house
almost, la moka
on the stove, then
off for a walk
or soccer match.
If I accuse him,
he admits I’m right:
why fight about
a fire not burning
anymore or yet.
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Hilary Sideris is the author of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press 2020), and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press 2022.) She works as a professional developer for the CUNY Start program at The City University of New York and lives in Brooklyn.
by Nik Moore
She was collected, eventually,
at the neighbor boy’s behest.
Back on the ground they smashed robin eggs
one by one into dirt—little monsters.
What it would have been like for them both
to be boys, to hold their fathers’ middle names.
Instead, her vulva—denying
at her birth some eager prayer.
The children showed themselves for the first time
in the side-yard near the broken yolks
and she saw for the first time
that difference on her body,
worked to slink out of the skin,
its slow ripening toward
that silhouette of a pregnant body
on her mother’s lotion bottle.
Today sees an unhealed wound
where the plum tree was years ago felled.
And how impossible it suddenly seems
to go back, to be the girl sitting up high
in those leaves—who were not yet sick, not yet
rotting, not yet asking questions of the yard.
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Nik Moore (they/them) is a Kentucky poet and an alum of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Montana. They work as a college writing instructor and as an editor at Many Nice Donkeys. Poems of Nik's have appeared in or are forthcoming from Olney, GASHER, Poetry Northwest, A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, and elsewhere.
by Emily Tuszynska
The day out of focus. Egg
on the floor half-wiped,
the dryer’s buzz.
What am I looking for,
I keep thinking,
as if it’s a thing I’ve set down
and forgotten, something I might
find again and take up in my hand.
I was just—going back up
to take out the meat to thaw
for supper. Underfoot,
my daughter. Snick, snick,
the snips fall from her scissors.
A fistful, a smear of glue.
Sometimes my life
seems so far way it’s almost
invisible. A blue dot
on my phone’s screen
tracks my sons’ ride to the lake.
Sidewalks. Leaves crushed
beneath bike tires. I’m half here,
half there where they are,
restless light off the water
flashing among trees
in a code I can’t decipher.
Upstairs my daughter
keeps picking out the same
six notes on the piano. Stopping.
Repeating. Waiting
for the song to take hold.
Daily I press against the familiar
hours, searching for a gap,
an opening. When the path
meets the water’s edge, the wind
gusts off the water like a draft
through some hidden door.
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Emily Tuszynska lives with her family in Virginia, just outside Washington D.C. Her poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and many other journals. Her first full-length collection will be published by Grayson Books in 2024.
by Elinor Ann Walker
by Devon Balwit
The pours look short, my need many-fingered.
Don’t worry. You can always order another,
I whisper, my own enabler, but all measures
prove insufficient to the thirst that conjures
them. Coming here, I saw two redtails copulating over
the freeway, a flutter of feathers on a pole, surely
they didn’t fret as they took again to air—
that a failing of marrow-boned creatures.
Twice today, I stumbled upon the same Millner
sonnet—IKEA, B & D, the narrator
younger than I, so presumably hipper.
Is that what fame requires—calling pain pleasure?
I close my tab, tip the bartender,
and, exiting, hug my misery tighter.
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Teacher Devon Balwit walks in all weather. In her most recent collection, Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023], she romps through Melville’s Moby Dick. For more, visit: pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet.
by Brook J. Sadler