by Kelly Madigan


The neighbor calls
about the feral swine he killed,
tells us that in the half light
he first thought it was a calf, then,
because of the way it was moving, a bear.
Says it took five shots to drop it. It’s extra dark
in the field by the time we’ve come to extract samples
for the state research lab, but our headlamps
reveal him, on his side, covered in wiry bristles.
His feet are off the ground, so I count
four toes on each stubby leg. It’s twice my size,
tusked, eyes closed. I put my boot next to it
to shoot a photo, for size. We’ll bring
the samples home, and keep them cool until
they can be delivered.

The neighbor has lived here
a long time but can’t remember a wild boar
in this area, ever. He points out
the places in the field disturbed by the animal.

When the wildlife biologist cuts
open the heart to retrieve the liquid sample
the protocol requires, I ask him, and the neighbor,
if they remember pigs’ hearts being placed
in humans, and they do, and they note this heart
is smaller than they might’ve guessed, the first
any of us has seen, and all three of us
are staring at it, in a black field near a pack
of very vocal coyotes. And I’m thinking
of my dad, and his damaged heart,
how he wanted to save enough money
to pay for a transplant himself
if insurance denied it.

In the end he wasn’t
a candidate, and I can’t recall now
why they used pigs’ hearts in people
or if they still do, and I’m in this field
with two men, one holding the heart—
my pledge, my vow maker—the other
part neighbor, part stranger, and the pig
splayed open, alive and wild an hour ago,
every last one of us with a heart
that will eventually give way,
curious and marveling, mortal.

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Kelly Madigan has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Distinguished Artist Award from the Nebraska Arts Council. Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, Terrain.org, Prairie Schooner, Flyway, and Calyx. Her books include The Edge of Known Things (SFASU Press) and Getting Sober (McGraw-Hill.)


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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

by Gabrielle Brant Freeman

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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I

Most of the women I know sleep with a weapon.
A crowbar between the headboard and the bed,
a hammer just under the mattress. Truth?
We’ve been women all our lives. Baby,
we know our misogyny.
Our trust has a honed edge, always woke.

Because we’ve lain awake,
insomnia as much a weapon
as a curse, listening in the dark, a mass
of sibilant shadow, lain awake in our beds
listening for the floorboard creak, the debate
raging in our heads. It’s safe now, trust.

But. We know everything’s a weapon. Best learn the truth
early. Sweetheart? Wake up. Your mouth is full of teeth.


II

You bite. You kick. You scream. This is a truth
we teach our daughters. I feel like I am just now waking
up. This America says girl babies
turn from children to objects in a minute. Weaponized
bodies overnight. As I tuck my pre-teen into bed,
I wonder exactly how much misogyny

it took for me to reach middle age with a mess
of defensive lessons right behind my eyes. Don’t trust
any man. Keys between your fingers to gouge. Best
stay sober. Yell fire, not rape. Our boy babies wake
one sudden morning as licensed weapons.
Each and every one, somebody’s baby.

It’s true. Every morning, mothers wake their babies,
lock and load for the bed that has been made.  


III

Hush little baby,
don’t say a word. Papa’s gonna miss
the point. The mockingbird’s voice is a weapon
for which a diamond ring is no substitute.
I am a grown woman. I am a little girl awake
in the dark tucked in to my bed

and quiet. Something lurks in the dark, and my bed
crouches. My ears are trained to hear my babies’
breathing, to hear each distinct footfall. I am awake
in my own bed in my own house, mistress
to fear. Papa’s gonna teach you a truth:
the weapon that you know is better than the weapon

you miss. Evening is to girl as silence is to truth.
They tell you you better hush? Baby, choose your weapon.

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Gabrielle Brant Freeman is an award-winning poet and artist whose poetry has been published in many journals including Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Scoundrel Time, Shenandoah, storySouth, SWWIM Every Day, Waxwing, and Whale Road Review. Most recently, Gabrielle’s work was featured along with three other poets in a choreopoem titled "A Chorus Within Her" at Theater Alliance in Washington ton DC. She teaches at East Carolina University, and she lives with her two awesome kids in Eastern North Carolina.


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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

by Emily Patterson

Upstairs in the stone church
at night, we gather once each month,
and not to pray. At the center

of the table, tiny cupcakes cluster
like an offering: light pink icing,
soft blue sugar, left untouched.

Instead, a circle of stories unfolds,
each of us reciting her chapter, so often
unchanged month after month

after month. We are a chorus of grief
in metal folding chairs; we are a collective
hush: here for the holiness

of being heard, for the echoes bearing
into the emptiness like a cathedral
of children, singing.

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Emily Patterson is the author of So Much Tending Remains (2022) and To Bend and Braid (2023). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Spiritual Literature and appears in Sweet Lit, Rust & Moth, The Shore, tiny wren, Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. She received her B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University and her M.A. in Education from Ohio State University. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.


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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.

by Fabienne Josaphat


I see myself in her in photos, and see her in myself. Lately it seems I see her everywhere. Sometimes she is the woman pushing her shopping cart down the aisles hunting for canned olives and mackerel to fill her pantry, shopping with her eyes first, and then weighing and smelling candles, the ultimate luxury in this American life, one a nurse’s aide cannot afford. I recognize her in the way she slumps over the frame of the cart for support, unable to carry the weight of her own body, heels clapping in clogs with each step, applauding her survival. My mother endured too much and that is the miracle and this is what I tell myself too when I look in the mirror, for this is where I find her the most: in the double chin of motherhood, creased with fear of my own failure, in the wrinkles on my forehead that I massage with anti-time creme, in the way I push the cart down the aisle and lean in for support, barely holding up my own body under the weight of this country, what it has done to me, her, us—in the way I emotionally down an entire bar of chocolate as I sit in the car, swallowing shame, in the gray hairs I now count in each brittle braid. I too am falling. I too am failing. I too am afraid.

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Fabienne Josaphat is the 2023 PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and the author of the forthcoming novel Kingdom of No Tomorrow (Algonquin). Her first novel, Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow, was published by Unnamed Press. Her publications include poems in Kitchen Table Quarterly, Grist Journal, Hinchas de Poesia, and Eight Miami Poets, and essays in The Washington Post and Teen Vogue. She is currently at work on a third novel.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio recording of today’s poem.

by Brett Warren

He watches his wife push open the door
of the campground bathroom, take a step in,
check to make sure someone isn’t hiding
in the single stall. The maneuver takes all

of three seconds, but the hesitation is at odds
with her vigor on the trail. When he asks,
she says she hardly thinks of it—most women
do some variation of the same thing, or at least

it crosses their minds, to be ready. Decades
married, he’s only just noticing this vigilance—
unspoken, subterranean, intuitive. The door
swings shut with a thud, startling a barn swallow

who nests above it every spring. The bird
swoops out from under the overhang, up again
to perch on a branch until it’s safe to return.
How many times a day does she do this?

He remembers another bird he saw once,
nesting on a restaurant’s outdoor fire alarm—
the curve of her taupe feathers, dry thatch
of twigs a surprise, so jarring atop the flame-

red box. He wonders what it is with these birds,
why they don’t find somewhere safer.

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Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Harbor Review, ONE ART, Rise Up Review, and elsewhere. A triple poetry nominee for Best of the Net 2024, she lives in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway. See brettwarrenpoetry.com.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio recording of today’s poem.

by Amber Adams


Your name starts with the subject
of torque. The way childhood twists
with the fraught numbering

of birth order. The subtracted state
of sister, breezy second to the sun.
Then air moved by so fast. Suddenly you were

in high school drag racing cars
for sport. My money was always on the Mustang
because of its horsepower—the calculation

at which you can move 550 lbs—and its low
profile pony zip. Sometimes, I wonder
if you were ever really here.

I walked with your apostle name
knowing its fraudulence, its missing “t.”
A crucifix taken out for posting. I want

this to mean something but I’ve never
been the cross-carrying kind.
Your name tries to sell me on it though.

The day after you died, your name
really took me for a ride. I said it over
and over until it appeared on the news.

But just like that, it was gone again,
My flyaways still waving in a gust
of syllables.

I chased my tail a while
looking at the aftermath. Nothing
added up. I wanted a somewhere

to vanish like you had. A city gone.
And the dumbfounded gapes of people
open like a gift horse. I do not have

that kind of power. But I think about
leaving sometimes. Hang a cross
from my rearview mirror,

simply for the way it catches the sun,
and watch the dash lines roll,
this time leaving, not being left.

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Amber Adams is a poet and counselor living in Longmont, Colorado. Her debut collection, Becoming Ribbons (Unicorn Press, 2022), was a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and semifinalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. She received her MA in Literary Studies from the University of Denver, and her MA in Counseling from Regis University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, Witness, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.

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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio recording of today’s poem.

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 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 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.”