by Kyle Potvin
This winter I need the bite of garlic.
by Laurie Kolp
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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She kissed as if to breathe you inside her
(but) from the waist down, she was never there.
In her garden, the lies were shaking out moist silks.
To endure the endless walk through self,
pride pumped in like poison.
Cento credits: L1-Ocean Vuong, Kissing in Vietnamese; L2-Claudia Emerson, Early Elegy: Headmistress; L3-Sylvia Plath, The Detective; L4-Molly Peacock, Altruism; L5-Anne Sexton, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
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Laurie Kolp is an educator, avid reader, runner, and nature lover living in Southeast Texas. She is the author of Upon the Blue Couch and Hello, It's Your Mother. Her poems have appeared in Whale Road Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Inflectionist Review, and more. Laurie’s found poetry has been published online and in journals such as North Dakota Quarterly, Prelude, Dream Pop Press, and more. Laurie is currently working on a project to honor her late father.
by KC Trommer
All around the island I feel her ghost
and wonder what more she would’ve made—
There’s flaking lead paint, vines,
trees growing inside buildings
and under the asbestos.
There is a girl, only 22, half shadow,
one arm crisp, still in the frame,
getting herself on paper.
Alone in the house, I expect Francesca
every time I turn a corner,
expect her eyes soulful and sullen,
half caught/half deserting,
mooning up at me.
Adjust the aperture, let it all in.
In the summer, there’s a suicide
in my family, not the first. That decision
to exit so heavy on everyone left behind.
Some ghosts weigh a ton, heave
themselves on your back, never leave.
Others whisper you into the next day.
Francesca, I never knew you.
Come close. Come back.
Let all of you be seen.
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KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019). A Spanish-language translation is forthcoming in 2024 from Cuarto Propio, translated by the Chilean poet Elisa Montesinos. KC is founder of the online poetry mapping project QUEENSBOUND. Since 2021, she has been poet-in-residence on Governors Island, through LMCC's Residency Program, Works on Water, and the NYU Gallatin WetLab. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son.
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
I want to say it has rained for weeks.
Rain, such an easy metaphor for grief.
All those stages, storms
spinning up from distant dust—
emotional whack-a-mole.
Aren’t we all equal parts tender and not?
What about clouds of irrational hoopla
creeping unbridled up the spine,
anchoring inside the throat,
lodging countless bids to break free—
one careless slip loosing a shriek
of crazed birds skyward?
Nights, I replay footage—
time travels torn from my marrow,
mirages gone rogue and sour,
curse the wisps of nostalgia I cannot touch.
I wear my mother’s predilections,
my sister’s thirst, answer
to the hunger of being left behind,
Hard as I try, I cannot love these storms,
their beaded duplicity of air
wagging a wet finger in my face.
Death convolutes what’s ill faring,
the creek bitter cold with last year's snow.
I can’t stop holding my breath.
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Kari Gunter-Seymour, Poet Laureate of Ohio, focuses on lifting up underrepresented voices including incarcerated adults and women in recovery. She is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology Women Speak. Her poetry collection, Alone in the House of My Heart, received the "2023 Book of the Year Award" from American Book Fest. Find her work in Verse Daily, World Literature Today, The New York Times, and Poem-a-Day.
by S.A. Leger
match my arrhythmic dialect—
three syllables become two
ky oat
now transform a watershed—
praying mantises latched onto your tongue
crick
draw a sonogram of me
with the catechism lodged part way
between my crop & gizzard
my frequency range a wrong smell
ringing off my hollow bones
their scaffolding an impossible Fibonacci
senses poor development in me
commits infanticide to stop
my infernal buzzing
massacre a field of vowels
inject them slantwise into your gumline
ev dent
pr t nearly
watch as mosquitoes take away
small parts of me raising my pitch
my altitude—pine needles
bowing over me like a soft cradle
sap across my lips
shhhhhhh
now pinch my syrinx
watch a kaleidoscope
of nonlinear phenomena
jump off the terminus of my throat
deeper into the hardening clay
my restless bronchi
see ment
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S.A. Leger is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and scientist from Newfoundland, Canada. Her poems have most recently appeared in or are forthcoming from Conduit, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Fourteen Hills, The Dodge, Storm Cellar, and Dunes Review, among others. She spends her days exploring the 47th parallel with her wife and dachshund.
by Danielle DeTiberus
by Jessica Lee
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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When does cohabitation become co-possession?
You bat my hand away
from my own fingers, tell me
to quit picking at the layer of skin I’m peeling
back from the bed around my thumb. I nod
submissive, suck the blood, then sit
on my own hands—a show of moderation.
Like a child, I pay pretend reverence
as if you were a parent, my part-creator.
We switch roles at night over the sink:
I tell you to be more gentle
with your gums, use a lighter hand
for brushing teeth. I’d argue
oral health matters more than
bitten cuticles, long-term,
but what’s the use? Your body
matters to my body and vice versa.
Still, our hands are ultimately
our own. We show love
in the ways the ways we know how.
Concern, a bird twittering just beyond
the window. We look up, smile
at her song, then go on drawing
our own blood.
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Jessica Lee’s poems have been published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Narrative, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. She holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University. Find her online at readjessicalee.com.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
by Heidi Seaborn
You have bought the wrong light bulbs again—
too bright this time. This time you brought
the receipt but first you travel the well-lit aisle
of lighting fixtures. There’s a notice about a ban
on fluorescence which reminds you
of Ben’s offer for a bioluminescence
paddle in the Salish Sea. You want that—
to glide out into a wash of light, stars and sea
bedazzled. But here in the West Seattle True Value,
you are confused by wattage, the question
of dimming and LED. How many hours
of light should you expect? The time changed
this week and you hustle home to walk the dog
before nightfall, his vision dimming with age.
In the dark, he runs into lamp posts even as
they cast a glow and as the neighbors’ televisions pulse
a spectrum of the evening news, the wars brightening
their big screens. You can see into their living
rooms—in a way you never do
during the long summer evenings when you wave
to one another, stop to chat about the weather.
Walking the dog in the gloaming, you feel
an unexpected tenderness for your neighbors,
a desire to enter their darkened rooms and sit
beside them watching the televised world.
Maybe you would be silent together.
Or perhaps, someone would turn on a light,
offer a glass of wine. You want that—
to be a reason for light.
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Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of the 2022 The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She is the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Blackbird, Brevity, Copper Nickel, diode, Financial Times of London, Penn Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Plume, Rattle, and elsewhere. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
by Amie Whittemore
After Chen Chen
Learning the light
switches is the first
trick—each time
I palm the wall
by accident I stay
longer in the dark.
Then, where to put
the spoons and
where to put
my heart? Not
the highest shelf
in the closet,
not among
shoes shucked
by the front door.
Not below
my tongue—
that old home
its outgrown.
Not pressed
in the pages
of a novel—
never again
in her hands.
I throw it
to the cat who
tosses it
between
her paws
and teeth,
another toy
she mistakes
for meat.
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Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books) and Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and directs MTSU Write, a from-home creative writing mentorship program.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
by Tina Barry
Mother knows nothing of fall’s fickleness,
only the smog of medicine, tang of tired diapers.
To reach her, I pass nurses deluged in data,
residents wheelchair-dozing.
One summer, a mourning dove smashed
into my bedroom window, and died.
I was told the birds mate for life,
and its partner sang of heartbreak,
an innate awareness of loneliness.
Mother defines loneliness as a husband
too briefly known: Her great love. Or a scoundrel.
She’s a tsunami threatening tulips,
fitful as weather. I am too.
I’m young again, steering
a stroller, sleepy baby inside,
both of us dreaming of dinner.
A dove hurtling against the pane,
stunned by its sudden end.
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Tina Barry is the author of Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower. Her writing can be found in Rattle, Verse Daily, The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, Trampset, The American Poetry Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Gyroscope Review, the Fourth River, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere. Tina has several Pushcart Prize nominations as well as Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nods. She teaches at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.
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by Shannon K. Winston
What did you say?
My mother asks me every day.
She tunes her hearing aids:
one millimeter up, half a one down,
a musician with a tuning fork.
Walking down the street,
I crank up the music, a conductor
of a concerto, a jam session,
or a pop refrain. Louder, louder—
notes flower in my ear buds.
What did you say? I ask
my mother almost every day.
Some would call it inattention,
but meaning blooms
between quietness and cadence.
A musician and conductor
meander through a field.
They press their ears to the ground.
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Shannon K. Winston’s book, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press), was published in 2021. Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, On the Seawall, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She lives in Bloomington, IN. Find her here: shannonkwinston.com.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
by Kelle Groom
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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I remember sleeping with the Ballad for Metka
Krasovec over my head for years in Florida, white
cover with people crowded together
and their ghosts above their black print selves,
pink too like shells, book small enough
to hold comfortably in a hand,
the ballad singing over my head all night
long, while I slept close to the floor, train
shaking as if trying to rouse me.
I remember shaking Tomaz Salamun’s
hand in St. Marks, I’d asked strangers
in the dark, where is St. Mark’s, laughing
because they’d been to St. Mark’s
or wanted to go but couldn’t,
or we asked strangers on the street
where is Tomaz Salamun
reading, and the strangers were poets
or lovers of poetry, and pointed us
toward St. Marks, their arms raised
like parentheses, like waves, but it was
almost over, and this was clear when we
arrived, and everyone stood in one of many
little circles, a large medieval door
shut. It was over. Dejected,
I climbed stairs to another floor,
down a hall, a restroom where I
stood in front of the glass examining
my face, my newly shorn
hair, and Teresa ran in, Hurry,
Hurry, she cried. Simen is holding
Tomaz Salamun hostage downstairs.
Simen said he can’t leave until
he meets you. She loves you, Simen said
to Tomaz Salamun, as if this would convince
him to stay until I ran out the bathroom door,
down the stairs, into the vast hall
to find Simen from Sweden
by way of Norway who doesn’t even like
people all that much, holding Tomaz
Salamun hostage for me because
I’d said I loved him. Like the cold
spark in a violet on a winter sill,
alive and unexpected. I remember
my hand in Tomaz Salamun’s, like a hand but
also like bread rising around
my hand, warm, tremendously
comforting, Who are you,
he asked, who are you?
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Kelle Groom is the author of four poetry collections, Underwater City, Luckily, Five Kingdoms, and Spill; a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, a B&N Discover selection and New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice; and How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays (Tupelo Press, October 2023). An NEA Fellow, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, and winner of two Florida Book Awards, Groom’s work also appears in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She is currently director of communications and foundation relations at Atlantic Center for the Arts, an international artists-in-residence facility in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
by Chloe Martinez
After Dorianne Laux
I’m in love with you, coffee,
and with you, green ink in my pen,
and with you, imaginary reader.
I’m in love with you, recirculated office air
that gets a little too warm, then
a little too cold, because now I am
putting on and taking off repeatedly
this shawl I got long ago
when I was a student,
living in India for the first time,
and it still smells like incense
in Mount Abu, where the lake
was named Nakki, fingernail,
and the surrounding mountains were said
to be holy fragments of the body
of a goddess who fell to earth there.
I was a little in love with her.
I climbed long flights of stone stairs
to visit the mountain cave shrines
where she accepted flowers, coconuts, and cash.
Shawl, I’m in love with your pattern of vines.
Your border that runs wild. I’m in love with you, memory
of how my body felt then: curious
and excited, shy and defiant.
Also you, knowledge of how it feels
now: sometimes tired, or heavy
with sadness and experience,
which are often the same thing,
but other times, electric, connected
back to that person. She didn’t
know much. I wasn’t in love with her
then, but now I see her better.
How she stood unsure on a rural road.
Nowhere she had to be, and the forest
lush and loud all around her.
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Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College. See more at chloeAVmartinez.com.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
by Arah Ko
I want to speak about bodies that changed into new forms. And you,
gods, who altered them… -Ovid
Zeus walks by in a three-piece suit,
smelling like ozone, casual thunder,
money. You remember how he came
to you in the apple orchard, bright
face of a boy, swan feathers in
his hair, how fingers skimmed your
skin and you cried when he crawled
inside. Now his silhouette has shifted,
hard-nosed and high-cheeked, trunk
of marble, feet of stone. Silver
cufflinks separate the animal from
the man. And no, you don’t want
to talk about bodies that change forms,
or the lightning in flesh bottles keeping
them there. The conqueror storms
through glass office doors, ignores
your complaints, knowing he’ll never
sweat or bleed, tear or be changed, not
like you have.
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Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai'i and the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books, 2025) and Animal Logic (Bull City Press, 2025). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Arah was nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets and received her MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University. Arah edits at Surging Tide Magazine. Catch her at arahko.com.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
by Christine Potter
Among the red bell peppers that aren’t even organic,
Ziplock bags and detergent and cube steak, fake
butterscotch chips for holiday baking, and Christmas
wrap out way early, this! This hug, this smile, this old
friend who didn’t ghost you after all, this Yes. This
Yes, of course as unseen nozzles mist the fresh herbs.
Really Diz, really Bird, really Slam Stewart on bass.
In this shadowless place of milk so homogenized
it won’t cottage cheese your coffee for weeks. In this
place where everything crinkles in cellophane, happy
ghosts blowing joy: Oh, yeah, it’s cool, it’s cool. And
then a few days later in the same store: Caravan, “All
The Way,” from Blind Dog At St. Dunstan’s: synth,
drums, prog rock from 1976, nameable only by total
obsessives but sweet as dulce de leche ice cream and
the encouraging scent of fresh celery! In a world so
well-married to woe that even the wars have to line up
and vie for your attention each morning, a complex
secret handshake, a compliment on the cool hat you
forgot you’d worn. The President of the World
flashing a peace sign. Three green lights going home.
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Christine Potter ‘s poetry has been curated by Rattle, Kestrel, Third Wednesday, Thimble, Eclectica, The Midwest Quarterly, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily—and featured by ABC Radio News. She has work forthcoming in The McNeese Review. Her young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen, and her third full-length collection of poetry, Unforgetting, Kelsay Books.
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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
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