by Subhaga Crystal Bacon
You were not conceived, despite the spent seed,
by Virginia Chase Sutton
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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It is always twilight when Gramma runs
a tepid bath for my sister and me, four inches
of amber water from the well. Through the window
she watches her luminous garden grow dim, past
the row of outhouses gone to honeysuckle, cabbage roses,
crinkly petunias, vines holding late afternoon
to the ground. In summer nightgowns, carrying
a cracked ceramic chamber-pot between us, we climb
to the one-bedroom apartment where our parents lived
their first married year. Mother drank gin and bourbon
from bottles hidden under the bed and their thick voices
vibrated down the varnished stairs, creased the crimson
rug in Gramma’s front room. When we all visit, they
do not sleep together the way they once did. I pull back
tight covers on the bed in the room beneath gabled windows,
rumpling sheets Gramma spent the morning ironing,
slide into the bed’s furrow. My sister clambers up
the four-poster where Great-grandfather Carter died,
arguing our early bedtime. I do not mind smoky light
pooling under window-shades. Across the highway
hundreds of birds line branches of an old oak, their
voices loud inside this space. My sister is asleep in the front
room. I wait for my parents’ footsteps, foggy silence.
Then a smooth scoop in my bed when my father pulls
soft blankets to his shoulders, rolls into me. Then he sleeps.
Birds settle the night. My father’s breath drones. The birds
wake early. At last, dawn, I fantasize their twittering songs.
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Virginia Chase Sutton, along with Airea Johnson, Liz Robbins, and Lauren Tivey, is the co-author of Fire Carousel, an enhanced chapbook (Main Street Rag, 2023) about varying aspects of mental illness. Poems have recently appeared in Glass: Poets Resist, Mom Egg Review, Drunk Monkeys, Stained: An Anthology, and many other publications. Nine times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Sutton has additionally published three full-length poetry books and a chapbook. Sutton lives in Tempe, Arizona.
by Rebekah Wolman
A mother and a child, I think, then reconsider.
It's a matter of perspective, of the angle and the distance,
whether one seems taller than the other, whether
one seems to take the lead as they tiptoe into
all that settles as the tide recedes.
It's where the light is coming from that elongates
their reflection. It's the direction and strength of the wind
that determines whether their mirror image
wobbles or stands still. There's little at this distance to differentiate them.
The slightest alteration yields regret,
a feeling that something should have happened differently.
I visit with my mother, who used to be
the taller one. Now time is what differentiates
who's the child from who's the mother. Each morning of my visit,
I sweep up Rose of Sharon blossoms, fallen furled
as if ready to begin again at their beginning.
As if ready to begin again at my beginning
I sweep up Rose of Sharon blossoms, fallen furled,
each morning of my visit—or as if she's the child and I'm the mother,
the taller one now. Time is what differentiates
this visit with my mother from what used to be,
a feeling that something could have happened differently.
Regret yields to the slightest alteration,
wobbles, then stands still. There's little at this distance to differentiate us
or determine whether our mirror image
is a true reflection. It's the direction and strength of the wind,
it's where the light is coming from, that elongates
all that settles as the tide recedes.
Who seems to take the lead as we tiptoe into
weather? One seems taller than the other, whether
it's a matter of perspective, of the angle or the distance.
A child and a mother, I think, then reconsider.
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Rebekah Wolman is an erstwhile middle-school principal based in San Francisco, California, on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people. Her poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Sixfold, Limp Wrist, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Orotone, The Hopper, Atticus Review, and Cultural Daily, where she is a 2021 winner of the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. She is the 2022 winner of the Small Orange Emerging Woman Poet Honor.
by Joan Kwon Glass
The billboard just before exit 21 displays a photo
of Rhonda, a middle-aged woman before weight loss surgery.
It promises that in one mile, we will meet a lighter version of her.
A church billboard asks if we have suffered enough.
I’ve started listening to audiobooks to distract myself
from the slow, painful, inching homeward. Today a narrator
explains the tendency of ancient peoples to form cultures
around rejection. Refusing the fishing canoe or superior
farming tool of a neighboring tribe–lineage determined
more by what is renounced than what is shared.
I am writing this poem about traffic instead of the love
poem my partner longs for, and I try not to wonder
what this says about me as a person. The truck behind me
edges closer, and I resist the urge to slam on my brakes.
At least once a week in my town, in spite of signs
warning them against driving beneath it, a four-wheeler
gets stuck under the overpass and has to be pried out,
and today a man in Florida was arrested for trying to roll
across the Atlantic in a giant hamster wheel.
Sometimes I wonder about evolution and whether
a species can regress. What would our ancestors think
of us in these terrible, metal machines, together
on this road every day, getting nowhere?
Something always holds us up—if it’s not
the weather, it’s an accident, and this highway
always seems to need repairs.
I turn my audiobook off and listen
to the sound of my car wheels spinning
against the broken road. A man in the Toyota
next to me clutches his steering wheel.
Staring ahead, he leans in, hard.
We do our best to adapt. I have been patient,
waiting for the lighter version of Rhonda to appear.
I want her to know I’m rooting for her.
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Joan Kwon Glass is the Korean American author of Night Swim, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022) & two chapbooks. She serves as Poet Laureate for Milford, CT; editor-in-chief for Harbor Review; and as a writing instructor for several writing centers. Joan’s poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, Poetry Northwest, Cherry Tree Lit, Ninth Letter, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Texas Review and elsewhere. She lives in coastal Connecticut with her family.
by Jennifer Blackledge
They were plucked out of the bleachers,
one by one, like a terrible piecemeal rapture
gone before the buzzer sounded
as if to get a jump on things.
They were all, as people say, good moms.
I didn’t know them well enough
to say goodbye
but I've known their kids
almost as long as mine.
In the hierarchy of grief
I can only send a card.
Sometimes I see them
out of the corner of my eye,
months or years after they were taken:
coming out of the Target dressing room,
in line at the grocery store. I almost say a name.
When I walk my dog during the restless hour—
the witching hour, we called it—
when everyone is hungry, unsettled,
the smell of dinner, almost ready,
wafts from every few houses.
It’s getting dark earlier,
a school night in late fall,
and I think I see one
in a window. She leans over the table,
and then turns away.
I don’t know what I owe them,
or why I was allowed to stay.
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Jennifer Blackledge lives just south of Detroit in an area the New York Times called "the vast suburban-industrial wasteland known as Downriver", a description she begrudgingly acknowledges as accurate. She works at a large automotive company and holds a B.A. from Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from Brown University. Her work has been or will be published in JAMA, I-70 Review, Scientific American, Medmic, The Lake, Verdad, Arboreal, and other places.
by Laura Read
which means most of the time no one knows
how much Marie is with me,
inside my right leg in particular,
behind the knee. After a while of standing,
it throbs and I have to shift
my weight and it is difficult for me to listen
to what someone wants from me
because I am in standing in my garden in Brooklyn
with a pair of scissors to trim the white rosebush
my apron splattered with sauce.
I called her Nanny, but her name was Marie.
I can’t say I don’t mind having her blood
running through her varicose veins
but if someone has to, I’m glad it is me.
I don’t garden, but I do make her sauce
and yesterday I accidentally bought four boxes
of lemon cake mix at Trader Joe’s
because I like to serve it in the summers
with berries but then I remembered there was only
me and my husband to serve it to now that the kids
are gone, and that’s a lot of cake.
I thought of Marie’s roses blooming
for no one and her sauce uselessly simmering.
Marie came to this country on a ship
called the Giuseppe Verdi
on December 17, 1920. She was nine.
I don’t know about you, but I like knowing this.
It adds a certain glamour to me sitting here
in these thigh-high compression hose
that I have to wear for three days
after my first round of sclerotherapy
like a cast, the doctor said, so on the third day
I stink like Sylvia’s Esther
who wore her green dirndl skirt and white blouse
that she borrowed from Betsy for three weeks straight.
The hose has grown a little
damp, and my legs are now things
I lug around, lifting them in and out of bed,
you know like all of history, like my poor Nanny
who lived before sclerotherapy,
with her husband Frank who was what they call
no good, drinking in the garage, throwing
plates, ripping the phone from the wall.
Google says sclerotherapy is a relatively
painless procedure for most people,
and I’d like to meet these most people
because I had to bite my knuckle each
of the twenty times the doctor shot
the medicine into my veins, which burns
as it travels, and still
I cried out, which then I had to apologize for,
and the doctor, whose name is Megan,
offering me a side of therapy,
said, It’s okay to cry out when I’m hurting you,
and I said, thank you, and she said,
It’s so cool, watching the medicine move through the vein.
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Laura Read is the author of But She Is Also Jane, Dresses from the Old Country, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You. She teaches at Spokane Falls Community College and in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.
by Tina Parker
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Ronda Piszk Broatch
I’m tired because of the way the country is running
around with its scissors pointed the wrong way.
There are people wandering the wilderness,
geo-caching lies, eating them like potato chips.
The fence around my ventricles is coming apart.
Somebody just sent a message sliding across my screen,
and I fell for it. Instead of a pizza,
Amazon delivers a baby.
I want to write poems, but the kettle calls to be boiled,
the eggs are boiling even after the water molecules have
rejoined the atmosphere, and someone’s burning gas
from the tank of a car that hasn’t run in five years.
Never mind what I’ve lived through—sleeping
beneath a pool table, clinging to my horse’s neck
in a pasture of cows, listening to an ex-boyfriend cry
about the time he made pasta for the mafia.
I don’t drink coffee
and still my cups are stained.
There’s a box full of letters that need translating.
There’s a collection of scissors in jars around my house,
petrified pizza crust in the back of my mother’s old Dodge.
When the babies cried, we drove and drove and drove.
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Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), finalist for the Sally Albiso Prize, and Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Greensboro Review, Blackbird, Sycamore Review, The Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News / KUOW’s "All Things Considered." She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.
by Michelle Bitting
My daughter was three and refused
to wear clothes. Naked on the living
room floor, she’d demand another round
of her favorite game, Pretty Pretty Princess,
then move the plastic rainbow markers
about the board—however, wherever
she pleased. Hair and legs wild, carefree,
splayed. She hated to lose and broke what
rules she had to while we laughed, astonished
at such nerve. Years later, she became a he,
and did what he had to, moving the markers
around wherever, however he needed,
winning the crown, himself, in the end.
Some rules are prettier, broken.
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Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She is the author of five poetry collections, including Broken Kingdom (2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize) and Nightmares & Miracles (2022 Two Sylvias Press, Wilder Prize). Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at LMU.
by Minnie Wu
I can barely remember
what I ate with her.
We had a large family
dinner two years ago, and I met
new relatives. My aunt’s sister, teaching
at her hometown college. The little brother
of my grandpa, owner of sprawling farmland.
I learned their names, tried to
pronounce them, but it was so hard
to stay focused. I was starving.
My grandma’s sister—the family’s oldest—she was
there, too. Her brothers and sisters
all passed away, except my grandma. She lost
her husband twenty years ago, once
champion swimmers together. After finishing
the bowl of rice, I began observing.
It was the second or third time I’d met her.
She looked just like my grandma, hair short and curly. Wrinkles
unfolding from the ends of her eyes. And her hands.
Like those crumpled medical history forms
covering her bones. All those crisp veins lining—
could I redraw the lines, once they faded?
When everyone was full, she hugged me.
Her grey sweater nesting my hair, I hugged
her back. Her hair held cooked rice—nothing
special, but it was.
I didn’t have her number, but often she swam
from my grandma’s phone. Her voice crisp
like rain on the kitchen windows.
I thought we would see each other again.
But next spring, my grandma lost
her sister, queen of rice.
Everyone came to the funeral, but I
felt like an outsider. The wind
covered the pool in petals.
April was full of rain and tears. I wasn’t sure
if I needed to cry. Outside, a hurricane
murmuring in the distance—I couldn’t
escape. So instead I watched my grandma blur
from her body into her sister’s, then back again.
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Minnie Wu is a high school sophomore at The Pennington School. Her poetry and prose have been previously published in Blue Marble Review, Teen Ink, and Pennyroyal, among other literary magazines. In the 2022 and 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Minnie was recognized as a Gold Key recipient and a Gold Medalist for her poetry and photography. She is an alumna of Iowa Young Writers’ Studio Summer Residential Program.
by Diane LeBlanc
Day begins with a ligature of moon and water.
Bring me nothing except sage and antler velvet.
Day ends with black bear sow leaking
evening milk on pasqueflower and gravel.
I follow her shining ellipsis
into a meadow of things unsaid.
In the hours between
I release an egg and begin to rust.
I pray for rain to paint my fence
yellow with hollyhock dust.
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Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She is the author of The Feast Delayed (Terrapin Books, 2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Poems and essays appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, and Mid-American Review, among others. Diane is a holistic life coach with emphasis in creativity practice. She is a professor and writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College. Read more at www.dianeleblancwriter.com.
by Sarah Stern
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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It stands up and
takes you on the bus.
Blue jay feather in grass—
summer in City Island.
The drawbridge.
Fishing off the side
and the kids running back
and forth. What d’yah catch?
Orchard Beach
two women dancing
on Saturday afternoon.
Tattooed boys look on.
Mother says keep
writing. It’s what you have.
I hear it in my gut.
Don’t worry it’s the words.
Give me the words that
grind us into meaning like
those two on the plaza:
forgiveness and wild gesture.
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Sarah Stern is the author of three poetry books: We Have Been Lucky in the Midst of Misfortune (Kelsay Books), But Today Is Different (Wipf and Stock Publishers), and Another Word For Love (Finishing Line Press). She is a five-time winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO Poetry Award, a recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations, and several Poets & Writers' Readings & Workshops Grants. Learn more: sarahstern.me.
by Annette Sisson
For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires.
Monster, Frankenstein
If computers expunge humanity,
would their pulsing motherboards
replicate human flaws?
Drones with nervous tics
scratching themselves in public,
or cluttered microchips multiplying
data, hoarding fragments
of cursive. Perhaps some
would dab watercolor light
onto rough press paper,
glide a bow, suffer
the trembling strings to mourn.
Would the warbler’s chipped
trill, the moon-white orchid,
stir their sensors, the Luna’s
lobed wing brush
mystery into code? And if
they chose a god to humble
them, prayed to their creators’
human ashes, would we
kindle ourselves, put on
the Godhead, breathe in translucence—
claim this progeny our own?
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Annette Sisson’s poems are published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Citron Review, Lascaux Review, Cider Press Review, Glassworks, Aeolian Harp Anthology (2023), and others. Her first book, Small Fish in High Branches, was published by Glass Lyre (May 2022), and she is finishing her second, Winter Sharp with Apples. Her poems have placed in Frontier New Voices, The Fish Anthology, and others; several have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
by LaDonna Witmer
I deserve to live
said the girl.
The bomb is falling
from such a height
it could be a seed
blown from a dandelion
surfing the stratosphere.
I am just a girl said the girl
I have barely begun to live
and I’d very much like
to keep doing it.
Everyone wants to keep living
said the bomb but what have you
done to deserve it? Convince me
you’re worthy
and maybe
I’ll fall somewhere else.
The bomb is nearer now
olive shaped and
heartless as gravity.
I don’t want you to fall
somewhere else said the girl
you could crush my cousins
my neighbors the hospital
the school.
Oh says the bomb. It is a fist now.
Would you rather I turn back
and fall upon your enemies?
No said the girl No
I do not wish you to fall
upon anyone anywhere at all.
Can’t you turn into a cloud?
The bomb is quite close and suddenly
so much bigger. You could say
it’s the size of a girl.
Ah says the bomb I see now
you are guiltless and kind and clearly
you deserve to live but
the problem is
you were born
in the wrong place
at the wrong time
and I cannot stop falling
for you.
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LaDonna Witmer is writing for herself after a couple of decades spent writing for other people (journalist, copywriter, editorial director). She has a poem forthcoming in a 2024 anthology from Flipped Mitten Press. Back in her slam poetry youth, she published three chapbooks and had a handful of poems printed in various zines. She writes prose at wordsbyladonna.substack.com and is 2/5 of the way through writing a memoir about her fundamentalist upbringing.
by Megan Merchant
by Jane Ann Fuller
“What’s a witness but a poem?” Remi Recchia
Her left breast, a shallow pool
where blue-tailed fish swim.
Wrist, a vermillion cactus flower.
Thigh’s white owl.
Scapula’s bat’s crooked wing.
Side winder slips through
the cage of her. A carmine heart
drums her chest.
**
In a restaurant called “That Lebanese Place,”
the young man behind the counter has her eyes,
large as figs, lids heavy, as if half asleep.
I can’t stop watching as he bags the falafel
and labneh, mouthing words to music
whose lyrics I do not understand. His beauty
before unknown to me, I fold a dollar into the tip jar.
**
Once I was a desert mother.
I drove through the desert without seeing
myself as desert. I drove through the red rock
of Utah, but all I could see was my suffering,
my son at Fish Lake, dope sick and trying
to recover. I drove his younger brother and sister
in a car so small we didn’t think we’d make it
up the mountain.
**
We were afraid we would never return home
with what we wanted.
**
A scorpion scurries out of my shoe.
A lizard performs push ups on my shoulder.
A hawk screams like a mother dying to her old self.
**
They have been keeping a happy secret from me.
Unafraid to speak, one of them makes a witty remark,
and we laugh together before saying our good-byes.
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Jane Ann Fuller is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and a recipient of the James Boatwright II Poetry Prize. Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2021) was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. Poems appear in Calyx, Verse Daily, On The Seawall, Shenandoah, BODY, All We Know Of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica By Women, and elsewhere. A collaboration REVENANTS: A STORY OF MANY LIVES was published with a grant from the Ohio Arts Council.
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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