by Robbi Nester
“you look just like/your mother, he says, “who looks like a fire/of
by Darby Lyons
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Annie Schumacher
While some orchids have blue flowers,
they are rare and troublesome to keep alive.
A florist has dyed this one blue, the blue bloom
will stay blue while it is on the plant. An injection
of dye to the base of the stem. At an online 12-step
meeting, I am told to look back without staring and
to replace suffering with gratitude to perceive
a better world. The blue orchid sits in a plastic cup,
the sky as empty as the inside of a wrist.
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Annie Schumacher is a poet and translator. She is Poetry Editor and Audio Editor at The Cortland Review. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a work-study scholar and by the Our Little Roses Poetry Fellowship. Her chapbook, Vineyard Elegy, was shortlisted for the 2023 Poetry London Pamphlet Prize. Recent publications can be found in On the Seawall, Sobremesa, The London Magazine, California Quarterly, and Poetry London. She is from Fresno, California, lives in Barcelona, Spain, and is at work on her first full-length poetry collection.
by Danielle Sellers
A year after my father died I drove with high school friends from other colleges
to a shitty motel on the outskirts of New Orleans that had green doors with busted locks
and brown stains on the fitted sheets. Not yet 21, all we could do was take a bus
to the city’s center, walk the streets and gather fallen beads that laced the ground,
order hurricanes through barside windows that opened like Scooby Doo passageways.
Holding frosted neon tubes, sucking fruit punch through crazy straws, we peopled the sidewalks,
a crush of glittered bodies. Women’s painted breasts brushed against my arms.
Old men in thongs spiraled my thighs, their beefy bulges flopping like sea cucumbers.
Music from everywhere thundered inside our bodies in one generic thrum and from behind me
someone’s strong fingers inched their way under my skirt, hooked me like a fish. I struggled
against the current of revelers that held me in place, lost the hand of my friend as she was pushed
down Bourbon. When we met up again, sticky and slick with sweat in the cold air, I didn’t dare tell,
wouldn’t break the spirit of fun the night was in. Couldn’t say how in order to free myself
I fought, punched, kicked, became the cartooned tornado of a Tazmanian devil scratching wildly,
how I learned to part a pulsing sea, learned how to walk in kitten heels on fetid water,
instead of what I really did which was to stand there and take it until his grasp was
broken by the barbed surf of the monstrous and dazzling crowd.
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Danielle Sellers’ poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, The Cimarron Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Bone Key Elegies (Main Street Rag 2009) and The Minor Territories (Sundress Publications 2018). She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.
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Danielle Sellers’ poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, The Cimarron Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Bone Key Elegies (Main Street Rag 2009) and The Minor Territories (Sundress Publications 2018). She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.
by Pamela Manasco
My aunt had a frame in her bedroom, three t-pinned
butterflies flattened under glass, and I coveted it
until one day I caught a real one, a black swallowtail.
Its wings rose and fell like clouds. After it flew away
flakes of skin, thin as mica, painted my fingers.
I read in a book that I'd killed it, or good enough;
it wouldn't survive because I'd touched it.
I didn't know then all touch does is wipe away
the camouflage. Take the mimicry some moths display,
an extra set of eyes painted on their wings, as if
a tanager will change its mind & swerve to dive elsewhere
because of those unblinking pupils. Take the walking stick,
Phasmatodea, the first I'd ever seen outside a picture.
Pumping gas before work the movement registered,
and a whittled brown leaf resolved into the insect
climbing the black hose of an unattended diesel pump.
Long past the click of my full tank I watched it explore,
wondering if it had hitched a ride on someone else's car,
if it could blend its small body into the pump somehow,
if it could find enough food to survive, how long their short
lives last. Ten days later a psychologist diagnoses
severe depression. She's conservative with medication,
she says, but not in my case. I get to choose: maybe
Celexa this time, Effexor? She sells hope a different drug
will help. I see the walking stick as I left it, I see myself
as the doctor must, pinned open, heavy weight darkening glass.
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Pamela Manasco is a poet living in Madison, Alabama. Her poetry has been published in New South Journal, Rust + Moth, Palooka, descant, and others, and she has work forthcoming in The Midwest Quarterly, Two Hawks Quarterly, Canyon Voices, and others.
by Kyle Potvin
This winter I need the bite of garlic.
Prepare dish after dish.
Sizzling shrimp with garlic (3 cloves, minced)
Garlic-butter steak (5 cloves, finely chopped)
Chicken curry (4 cloves, crushed)
Three of our mothers lost in as many months.
Requiem aeternam
Allium sativum
I swirl a raw clove around my mouth.
Smooth as a pebble
one should not swallow.
A pungency stays with my breath.
Garlic is pollinated by bees, moths and butterflies.
It does not have a mother.
Friends, we are the bees.
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Kyle Potvin’s debut full-length poetry collection is Loosen (Hobblebush Books, 2021). Her chapbook, Sound Travels on Water, won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Ecotone, SWWIM Every Day, The New York Times, and others. She is a peer reviewer for Whale Road Review.
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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NB: Click on the title to open a page which contains an audio version of today’s poem.
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.