by Jane Ann Fuller
by Theresa Malphrus Welford
Why remember that day in fifth grade
when the teacher left the room?
It was no big deal. It was just Mrs. Rowland:
her silver shoes, her gold shoes,
her shimmering beauty-parlor curls,
her odd aphorisms:
Cain’t is hiding behind the fence corner.
Nobody puts on airs when they’re about to vomit.
We were kids,
and we were on our own,
and someone prissy was taking names.
And we were wild.
And then one kid, tall for his age,
lanky, with greasy black hair,
jumped up on a table.
He danced a silly step, rolled his eyes, flicked
his tongue like a snake.
I’d seen that kind of silliness before.
But this was new:
he held his closed fist below his belt,
pumped it rhythmically,
back and forth, back and forth.
The other kids laughed and turned
in their desks to look at each other.
I laughed, too.
And I was ten years old,
and I knew I wasn’t getting it,
and I knew I couldn’t ask,
What’s funny about that?
And I knew I couldn’t say,
You make my skin crawl.
Why remember?
Because, when he was twenty,
this same kid went to the gas station
where his friend Mikey worked,
took him to Mud Turtle Pond,
made him kneel on the ground,
made him beg.
Because I imagine the night sky,
clear, black, spangled with stars.
Pine trees, frogs, cicadas,
a cold, bottomless pond.
Two cars parked haphazardly,
engines idling, doors open,
radios murmuring or pulsing or screeching.
Because I see Mikey on his knees,
sweating and pleading.
Because I hear the kid’s accomplices:
do it come on shoot him.
Because he did.
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Theresa Malphrus Welford, who grew up near Savannah, Georgia, has published poetry, creative nonfiction, book chapters, and academic articles, as well as The Paradelle, The Cento, and Trans-Atlantic Connections: The Movement and New Formalism (all published by Red Hen Press). Theresa and her husband, Mark Welford, happily share their home with countless rescued cats and dogs.
by Deborah Diemont
by Jennifer Stewart Miller
My dog wants to run off into the lit trees,
my 87-year-old mother wants to live on.
To a hungry goldfinch, want is huge—
and as tiny as a thistle seed. I wanted to visit
the hidden smallpox cemetery in Provincetown again,
so in fall I drove, then hiked through woods,
then slipped and slid down a steep hill
to kneel at these little numbered marble slabs.
I have been found wanting. I have been left
wanting. My wants have been distilled.
Fourteen souls carried off in outbreaks—
I longed to find this place, all the wanting
buried here. This plush dark moss, these whole
and broken stones. My wants are small like this.
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Jennifer Stewart Miller’s book Thief (2021) won the Grayson Books Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of a chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appeared in Poet Lore, RHINO, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
by Hannah Siden
The echo is more beautiful
than I anticipated: my heart
moving to its own rhythm,
surrounded by black & white
film grain. I imagine a diver
with her underwater camera,
eyes wide under a mask.
The muffled sounds of breath
& water pressure. Referencing
the images, the tech explains
my condition to me incorrectly.
He’s my age though & so earnest
that I nod along politely,
marvelling at the bioluminescence
on his screen: flashes of red
& green & blue across my
grey heart. Signs of light
at the bottom of the ocean.
My rate steadies, rises, steadies.
He tells me Breathe in, hold it,
release. The machine makes
a noise like a whale surfacing.
He says That’s the sound of your
blood. In the end, the test isn’t
enlightening in the way they’d
hoped. I need to come back
in two weeks for a bubble study.
I make the right noises of
approval & disappointment
& obligation but can I be honest
with you? I just learned my heart
is a creature of the deep. I am
drifting two miles down, in awe
of the radiance.
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Hannah is a writer and filmmaker living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC). Her poetry is published or forthcoming with PRISM International, The League of Canadian Poets, Metatron Press, and others. Find her on Twitter @hannah_siden or at hannahsiden.com.
by Kate Welsh
I read about an archaeological dig in Alaska
where they upturned multiple layers of earth
and began to smell something cooking.
Aroma, there in the dirt: acrid shadow
of a sizzle, silvery salmon skin crisping, nuts
cracking in high heat, seal meat dripping
fat over flame. Who knew. When
I imagined being Indiana Jones
I thought of arrowheads and jaw bones,
pottery shards and faceless dolls, fabric
scraps lovelier than anything I wear.
I thought treasure, not memory. I thought
there was a difference. I can’t help
but roll up my sleeves. I ask other people
to hand me their memories caked
in hard brown mud. They always hesitate
but then unpack an entire trove. I chip away
at each artifact with a sharpened trowel;
I find edges with a stiff brush. Everything
is more beautiful warmed in someone else’s
hands. I keep asking my father to sing
songs he learned on fishing boats, like I don’t
already know them by heart. I keep asking
my mother to tell me about that day she walked
into the ocean in a big fur coat. I wrote it out
years ago. I just like it in her voice.
______________________________________________________________________
Kate Welsh is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA from Warren Wilson in 2023 and a BA from Barnard College in 2013. She is the director of communications at the Guggenheim Foundation.
by Carlie Hoffman
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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When my sisters can’t scrub the oil
from the sick gull’s feathers, they clip
its wings, untie the cord that binds
the slow sheet of its body
and plant it into a wooden box
drilled with tiny holes. It is my turn
to bring the diseased bird
to the breeder across the bank:
his medicine knives, his hut occupied
with feeders and soap. But because I am
youngest, because a hunter’s moon
is how I locate heaven, I take the gull
down the wharf, kneel in an untouched
tract of snow, and quiet its skull with rock.
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Carlie Hoffman is the author of When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. She is the translator of White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2023) and Selma Meerbaum Eisinger's Blütenlese (Hanging Loose Press, 2024). Her honors include a 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Poet’s & Writers Amy Award, and the Loose Translation Prize, and her work has been published in POETRY, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Jewish Currents, Columbia Journal, New England Review, and elsewhere.
by Julia B. Levine
At first a rumble, then thunder cracks apart the morning
and suddenly I remember half-waking last night
to a heron shrieking
as a coyote made a meal of stilts and feathers—
though in my stupor, I misheard it as drunken boys
yelling Hooray! slowly over and over again,
as if death was jubilant
with a broken singing in her mouth.
Now lightning welds four forks of vanishing
into a sky that has, overnight, lost a bit of winged blue.
When we are lucky, we forget peril’s appetite.
But the August my daughter labored to bring her first child
here, a force and counterforce wrestled in the mystery
of her body and its absence still occupying mine.
Today the marsh steams, brightening green.
And there, further out along the brambled roadside,
I remember last summer, how blackberries
scattered behind a trio of women
as they carried their overfilled buckets home.
And I remember writing then, This baby will destroy the whole of her.
I should know. Speak to me of love and I’ll answer ruin
begins as a brimming sweetness, threatening to spill.
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Julia B. Levine’s recent awards include the Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU, 2014), a 2022 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the American Academy of Poetry, and first prize from the Bellevue Literary Review, the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, and Tiferet. Currently her work is appearing in Terrain, The Night Heron Barks, Blackbird, and The Southern Review. Her most recent collection is Ordinary Psalms (LSU Press, 2021).
Happy Holidays and New Year!
Dearest readers,
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.
Here at SWWIM, as the days begin to lengthen little by little, we are praying for peace and light to touch you all and everyone around the world.
Thank you for sharing every day with us. We remain grateful for your companionship and look forward to a bright new year. We’ll be back with poems on January 7.
xo
SWWIM Team
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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