by Amber Adams
Your name starts with the subject
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by Kim Roberts
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Tori Reynolds
by Lesléa Newman
The small arrow-shaped bird nestled
among the other pins in my jewelry box,
is smooth, shiny, and red as the hard candy
apples sold at the local cider mill
that my mother never let me eat,
I could break my teeth or worse grow
fat, and my glamorous mother would
never have that. My fashion
plate mother who made me
this tiny bird one summer in the Catskills
when we lived in a cabin and swam
in a lake and all the moms took morning
art classes where they painted pins,
an orange leaf, a yellow swan, a red bird,
this red bird, its ruby lacquer sleek
as the cherry patent leather three-inch heels
my stylish mother slipped on
her size six high-arched ballerina feet
or the glossy scarlet polish she wore on her fingers
and toes every day of her life even
at the very end when she lay in a hospital bed
in a hospice, all twenty nails growing
brighter and brighter as she shrunk
further and further into herself,
the skin on her hands and feet mottled,
puffy, and blue as the jeweled eye
of the tiny stoplight-colored bird
now perched on my palm and staring
at nothing the way my dying mother,
whose name Faigl means Little Bird, curled
on her side and stared at nothing, not me,
not my broken father slumped
in his seat, sniffling and sobbing,
not the tree outside her open window
where a robin puffed out her red breast
and sang her heart out, the nurse stepping
silently as only nurses can into the room to listen,
her hand landing softly on my shoulder
her voice, a whisper gentle as the wind
reminding me that hearing is the last to go
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Lesléa Newman's 85 books for readers of all ages including I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father (memoirs-in-verse) and October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard (novel-in-verse). She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, two National Jewish Book Awards, two American Library Stonewall Honors, and the Sydney Taylor Body-of-Work Award. From 2008 - 2010, she served as the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio recording of today’s poem.
by Ellen June Wright
after Alice Coltrane’s harp solo 1970
Under the waterfall
music’s cataract streams down
hands a flurry of grace
fingers cast spells
deftly move among strings
pull sound out—head tilted
watch the winged notes lift and fly
coaxes each reverberation
she could be in a wood
summoning angels to dance
or Alice Tully Hall
showing the white folks
she can fix jazz like gumbo
like shellfish after the shucking
on an instrument so old pharaohs heard it
and David played one too
his music medicine for a king
John was dead three years
I wish he could listen the way I do
bathe in his wife's onslaught once more
but this is my history month
And while I'm on this grave’s side
every month will be Black history
I’ve got nothing else to do
I'm coming with a shovel
I'm coming with a spade
to unearth what's long buried
I might find diamonds, I might hit oil
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Ellen June Wright consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work has been featured by Verse Daily, Rappahannock Review, The Good Life Review, Passengers Journal, Scoundrel Times, Banyan Review, and others. She’s a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and a 2021 and 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee.
by Phyllis Klein
by Alison Jennings
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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The miniature pink rose is brightly blooming now,
but its spent flowers bow: she pinches these by hand.
This “tool” is banned by Sunset Gardening, which tells us how
to cut with clippers (a sacred cow), yet Alison can’t stand
to, when, you see, it’s grand to feel the plant allow
such gentle nips—anyhow, fingers crave a verdant land.
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Alison Jennings is a Seattle-based poet who worked as a journalist, accountant, and teacher before returning to poetry. She’s had over 100 poems published, including a mini-chapbook, in numerous places, such as Amethyst Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meat for Tea, Mslexia, Poetic Sun, Red Door, Society of Classical Poets, Sonic Boom, Stone Poetry, and The Raw Art Review. She has also won 3rd Place/Honorable Mention in several contests. See airandfirepoet/home.
by Lindsay Rockwell
Each loss fits inside the others.
Each loss folds itself
neatly inside, then quietly
clears its throat of shame.
Holds its eyes up toward day
as my eyelashes dust the floor
again. Again, I count my losses.
Six. Seven. Eight. Sniff
their soft bodies. Watch
their hands reach toward
the tiny gate my pain opens.
My tiny pain gate opens
and each loss scuffles through
hobbling on all fours. Small
mammal. Each with chin up
in hopes to lick a drop of rain.
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Lindsay Rockwell is poet-in-residence for the Episcopal Church of Connecticut and hosts their Poetry and Social Justice Dialogue series. She's recently published, or forthcoming in Calyx, EcoTheo Review, Gargoyle, Radar, and The Dewdrop, among others. Her first collection, Ghost Fires, was published by Main Street Rag in April 2023. She’s received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and Edith Wharton/The Mount residency. Lindsay is also an oncologist.
by Dana Raja Wahab
Golden Shovel after Natalie Diaz
I.
It’s always a love poem with cookies, as if
I am, in fact, my mother’s daughter, although I
fought not to be. I thought love should
be free of tradition, should not come
from service—but a rare rib eye steak set upon
a bed of spinach and those sweet potatoes, your
favorite—they do the trick. Your cupped hands wander into my yellow-lit house
looking to be filled with butter and chipotle, and the lonely
saltshaker spilling with kindness, mixing it in
with blood and love and blood and love; the
recipe always calls for blood and love, like a mid-century West-
ern soap opera filmed on a small set in Texas,
where prickly pears peak in through the stone windows of the desert.
II.
Here I am again, writing about food! So let’s eat
fish this week, or shrimp—anything but steaks. My
body is craving lemon and salt and capers. Mediterranean meals
laid on brown ceramic plates with black olives beside us and a strawberry Jarritos between us; at
least it’s got real sugar, though I’ve never cared much for sugar at all. The
real pleasure lies in sampling the savory: tomatoes not yet red,
quartered and salted and soaked in olive oil, that which sits at the head of our table
and the center of our kitchen hearts; a dark bottle of
remembering, my mother standing there, but now you, sprinkling on your
plate a dash of black pepper, onto a fish from a foreign, warmer sea—the new home of your heart.
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Dana Raja Wahab is a writer, illustrator, and educator from Miami. She worked for seven years as a teaching artist at The Cushman School and now teaches in O, Miami's Sunroom program, in addition to managing and editing O, Miami book projects. Dana holds an M.A. in Children's Literature and Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London.
by Marcela Sulak
Shopping on Friday F tells his wife
about the animals. There is a mouse
that’s made a nest in the sea chest
where he keeps the paper napkins
and rum. And a rat is chewing the feet
of the furniture. He forgets its name.
It is a rat or a mouse, he feels very
certain, and there is a roach in the
bathroom. Well, it isn’t in the bathroom,
it is at the foot of his wardrobe, but
his wardrobe is near the bathroom.
If he sees it again he will spray. There
are gecko stars upon the screen but
those are just their feet, not really
stars, and guinea pigs in the garden,
but we knew that before. On Sunday
F enters the bathroom, poison bottle
in hand. But the only thing in the bathroom
is his wife, who looks up from the mirror.
On her fingertip is a long thin whisker,
or possibly a hair.
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Marcela Sulak has authored four poetry collections, including the National Jewish Book Awards Finalist City of Skypapers (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and the memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). She's co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres (Rose Metal Press, 2016) and translated four poetry collections from Czech, French, and Hebrew. Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.
by Emily Lake Hansen
by Amanda Moore
Pretend it was a different adventure:
we traveled in our Chrysler down
8 Mile Road as if in a dinghy
gliding from the bright layer cake of yacht
toward an undiscovered port. Pretend
we were prepared for the awkwardness
of being foreign, of seeking flimsy familiarity
and the perfect snapshot to send home.
We pictured white sheets and hand-holding,
new scenery and our faces changed.
But really it was like the tropics in July: sweaty
and panting, private and primal.
Paradise to one traveler is often hell for another,
so I won’t bore you with the hours passed
watching the ocean swell and retreat,
the tall grasses bend and part in the wind
and some crazy, hooting monkey pulling itself up and down
impossibly straight tree trunks.
When we left at last we had a souvenir,
a golden idol shaped by heat
and meant to be worshipped.
"Labor as an Exotic Vacation" from Requeening by Amanada Moore. COPYRIGHT YEAR ©2021 by Amanda Moore. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
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Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong and was published by Ecco in 2021. It was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and featured in Oprah's O Magazine Favorite Things issue. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, ZZYZVA, Catapult, Ploughshares, and LitHub. A high school teacher who also leads poetry workshops and freelance edits and teaches, Amanda lives near the beach in San Francisco, California with her husband and daughter. More at amandapmoore.com.
by Ann Weil
At least I think it’s Banksy—
he’s graffiti-ing our corner booth
with little girls reaching for red heart balloons.
Our server gives him the stink-eye,
but Hillary’s stomach growls, distracting us all.
Hil orders a tempeh Reuben and a side
of sweet potato fries. Banksy’s not hungry,
but when the food comes, he turns
puppy-dog eyes on Hillary
and she shares her spuds. I offer him
a pull on my matcha-mango smoothie,
but the straw is soggy. Such is life.
Banksy is surprised that Hil
has taken up Bill’s vegan lifestyle—
apparently, she heard the grass
is always greener on the other side
of the fence, and in this case,
she reports, it actually is.
Hillary asks Banksy what it’s like
to be wildly famous without being known.
Banksy whispers in her ear,
mentioning her time as First Lady.
I order a slice of carrot cake
topped with cashew crème. Three forks.
Hillary wipes walnut dust from Banksy’s chin.
On the way out, Banksy paints a big blue
Hillary 2028 on the restaurant’s door.
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Ann Weil writes at her home on the corner of Stratford and Avon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat at Snipe’s Point Sandbar off Key West, Florida. Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears in Pedestal Magazine, DMQ Review, New World Writing Quarterly, The Shore, 3Elements Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman, was released in April 2023 from Yellow Arrow Publishing.
by Mukethe Kawinzi
Italian thistle has tithed most
to my cuttings these last days.
In later Junes, rough touch
recalled, I’ll spoor less bare.
I ask Charles Darwin: come
eye the goats with me, and how
they eat spined things.
Charles Darwin picks up a rock. He tells me the present is the key to the past.
I want Charles Darwin to know I know something. I want Charles Darwin to
remember me. I speak to him of beetles that bore earth. I tell Charles Darwin
that we have rollers here. I say to him: Charlie, I’ve watched them roll dung
face down/ass up. Do not question me for using 2 Live Crew as a way to
Charles Darwin’s heart. I have learned, in life: there is no slicker way to charm
whitefolk than to let them into blackness. Charles Darwin finishes the lyric.
Charles Darwin and I squat into the royalled ripgut, and count morning
spiderwebs.
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Mukethe Kawinzi is a shepherd who has appeared in Obsidian, Puerto del Sol, and HOBART. She is the author of saanens, nubians, one lamancha (Winner, 2022 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest) and rut (2022 Ghost City Press Summer Series). She herds goats on the open range in coastal California.
by Lisa Rosinsky
On the patio of the bar, with my notebook / and a glass of cabernet and a
thick slice of chocolate cake, it was all soft summer twilight and table to
myself / until two guys said you don’t mind if we join you do you / and since I
small-town knew the redhead, as in / met him at a party that one time, I said
okay / even though I was trying to write
The redhead pulled my cake across the table, you can’t finish all of this can
you, skinny thing like you? and I did want it / but he ate it without waiting for
an answer while his friend talked about their job putting up tents, pounding in
stakes and then pulling them out again, and his eyes / were the color of a tidal
pool, and I sipped my wine wishing you’d given me a ring already / so they
would have left me alone with my cake and my solitude
Wedding tents mostly, he said, you wouldn’t believe how they can transform
them with curtains and whatnot / it turns out nicer than a church, and they
both nodded, yes nicer than a church, and the blue-eyed one / who hadn’t
eaten my cake / showed me where on his arm the muscles tensed up after a
day of sledgehammering, and I laughed / but suddenly saw how in another
life, one without you in it, I might have wanted / to touch those arms, which
made everything go blurred and flimsy
Sometimes I do bounce houses too, he said, but they’re dangerous, did you hear
about the one that blew away, and I closed my notebook / and said what blew
away
The bounce house the redhead said, there were two kids in it / and a big gust of wind blew it fifty feet up into the sky, pulled the stakes right out of the ground
With the kids inside? I said, listening now, yeah with the kids inside he said, a
boy and a girl, they tumbled around at fifty feet up / and made it back down safe
/ only the boy had a broken arm but otherwise they were fine
And we sat there in silence picturing that, the three of us, with the cake
crumbs / and the wineglass and the unfinished / poem I’d been working on,
and within me the waiting seed of the son I’d have one day with you / though
I didn’t know that yet, that night, sitting there, it was just me and the
strangers and I ached / for those children carried by the wind, tumbling in a
house made of rubber and air.
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Lisa Rosinsky has been a finalist for the Slapering Hol Chapbook Prize, Fugue Poetry Contest, and Morton Marr Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Her poems appear in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. In 2016, she won the Writer-in-Residence fellowship at the Boston Public Library, where she completed her debut novel, Inevitable and Only, named one of Barnes & Noble’s “Most Anticipated Indie Novels of 2017.”
by Courtney Bambrick
I.
The girls sleepy, warm, milk-fed—
patient under the avuncular gaze of the artist. You say,
I love the way he works with hair and clothing.
You nose up to the canvas, admire craft.
My eyes are on the floor, the shoes
some women squeak through the hall.
II.
Renoir had young children in his 50s
and he painted them—
You could do that—
is all I can think in this room.
Let me bear you your Jean and Claude
and Gabrielle. Let me sit for you with a baby
at my breast. Let your gaze settle, then,
on what could be here: in my arm, my belly.
Let the whole of the universe open to you
in the rabbit breath of a sleeping baby.
III.
Large Bather. Hours since my shower, but
you sniff behind my ear and say
how great my hair smells. And,
Some of these nudes look like you.
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Courtney Bambrick serves as poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories. Her poetry is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, and has appeared in New York Quarterly, Beyond Words, Invisible City, The Fanzine, Philadelphia Poets, Apiary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Mad Poets Review, and Certain Circuits. Chapbooks have been semi-finalists and finalists in contests for Iron Horse and Pavement Saw. She teaches writing at Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus in Philadelphia.
by Jenny Molberg
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I go to the museum and sit before Robert Motherwell’s
Elegy to the Spanish Republic with three black holes in my head.
One for the way I hated the poet when he called me stupid.
Another black hole because I felt like a child, carsick
and chicken. I don’t care what day it is, he said on my birthday.
Was he an aperture, opening inside me?
Or was he a bullet I must dodge for the rest of my life.
At the Cash America Pawn, I waited in line, the ring box
white as ivory, a severed tusk singeing a hole through my hand.
One more black hole, there, in the middle. The question
I asked in my head for a year: How can he think
he owns other people? Him, in the dark, calling my body
his. My breasts, my hair, my hips. I shout leave
into Motherwell’s circles. I know I can’t help it, the ring
in its strange case, cold as a head with no body.
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Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, VCCA, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.
by Kathy Jiang
by Caroline Earleywine
I now pronounce you your own. Give you back
your names, put down those titles: Mother, Father,
Wife, Husband. I pronounce you whole. Better
apart, but still better for once having found each
other. I pronounce you human. Both the stove
and the hand that touches it, if only to learn
what burns. I pronounce your every scar
well earned, roads on a worn map you used
to find your way home. I pronounce you home
and road. Minute and hour hand, together
briefly, moving forward. I pronounce you
the golden leaf and its inevitable
fall. I pronounce you deserving of space
to change, the hydrangea moved
from its pot into earth, roots stretched out
like an unclenched fist. I pronounce you worthy
of looking back with gentle eyes. Both the one
who held me in the backseat, my bleeding
knee in your lap, and the steady hand that drove
us to the hospital. I pronounce you both free
and forever bound, your four children stitched
between you like the binding of a book sewed
together by hand. I pronounce you the pages
and the cover that encases them.
Both the story I know
and the one you wrote without me.
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Caroline Earleywine is a poet and educator who taught high school English in Central Arkansas for ten years. She earned her MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, and Sibling Rivalry Press published her chapbook, Lesbian Fashion Struggles, in 2020. She is a Jack McCarthy Book Prize winner and her debut full-length collection, I Now Pronounce You, will be out with Write Bloody Publishing in April 2024. She lives in Little Rock with her wife and two dogs. You can keep up with her work at carolineearleywine.com.
by Shiyang Su