by Jessica Manack
My great-grandmother Tat birthed three girls and stopped,
by Alafia Nicole Sessions
by Jessica L. Walsh
The string of things I haven’t done could reach
from here to every place I’ve never been:
New York, Golden Corral, an orgy, Rome.
They say that’s a bucket list. My great-grandfather
worked his neighbors’ farms to keep his own,
carrying the tin lunch pail that’s now on my shelf.
Some days he probably swung it empty from dark to dark
hoping someone could toss in day-old bread or a nickel.
My guess is he would be awed by all we have. Or mad at what he didn’t.
My dad griped that we barely had a pot to piss in, but barely
does a lot there. We had a pot to piss in, I’m saying, even Pizza Hut
on paydays, a quarter for Pac-Man if we were good and lucky.
Ain’t no hole in the washtub, sang my mom,
and she was right, though there was once a hole in the back room ceiling
that filled the chili pot when it rained hard and long.
So I’ve never been to Brazil but I’ve never gone hungry,
always had bread, bologna, a coffee can full of grease
way at the back of the fridge, second shelf.
I think I’d like to finish my life with whatever it takes to endure it.
Beyond that, I don’t know. The smell of his pillow. A dog.
Maybe a vodka to close it out. Enough.
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Jessica L. Walsh is the author of Book of Gods and Grudges (Glass Lyre, 2022) as well as two previous collections. Her poetry has appeared in Guesthouse, Lunch Ticket, Crab Creek Review, and more. A nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, her work has also been featured on the Best American Poetry website. A native of small-town Michigan, she lives outside of Chicago and teaches at a community college.
by Karen Earle
by Emily Hockaday
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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In Viking sagas, language is
roundabout. A sword is a blood
worm; blood battle sweat. Is it this
that made me a poet? Around
my finger: a ring of Frejya’s tears bind
us. Your blood is also of Viking
descent. In Iceland we blend in
with the locals, drinking heavy
beers, eating fish stew, until they hear
us speak: Is this also where my gift
for circumlocution stems? You tell me
you love me and I describe all the ways
in which I would have made a good
conqueror. You don’t argue. We
look out over the glacial mountains
(stone teeth, ice trolls, snow knives)
and beneath, the lava (Earth’s blood,
Surtr’s misery, liquid flame) lies
in wait; there is always seismic
activity here, no matter how stable
or frozen the land appears.
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Emily Hockaday's second full-length collection, In a Body, was published by Harbor Editions in 2023. Her first, Naming the Ghost, debuted with Cornerstone Press in 2022. Emily is a De Groot Foundation Writer of Note and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation, NY City Artist Corps, and NYFA Queens Art Fund recipient. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in print and online, including Electric Literature and the North American Review. She is the editor of Heartbeat of the Universe (Interstellar Flight Press 2024). Emily writes about ecology, parenthood, the urban environment, and chronic illness. She can be found online at emilyhockaday.com and @E_Hockaday.
by Eugenie Carabatsos
by Yosra Bouslama
by Mary Morris
Stray cats in the attic,
the high bridge
we jumped from
into the river of frogs
and water moccasin.
We no longer ask
if she imagines
our childhood home—
no longer probe
about a life spent together.
Our mother nursed us
seventeen months apart.
We shared a room,
camped in Mexico,
launched a boat to Sardinia.
Witnessed the births
of each of our children.
I am not sure when
we first noticed her memory
migrating away.
Now I could say
maybe that wasn’t betrayal
but plaques and tangles.
When did she neglect
to turn off the stove?
Bake a cake without flour
and eggs? Lose the way home,
a block from her lane?
Sister, you no longer retain
a history of us, remember less
and less, but the more you forget
the further back I reminisce.
Sleeping together.
Talking too late.
Dancing into oblivion.
Swimming in the lake.
Sometimes you need a sister like a drink of water.
Sometimes you feel you are dying of thirst.
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Mary Morris is the author of three books of poetry: Late Self-Portraits (selected by Leila Chatti for the Wheelbarrow Book Prize), Dear October (Arizona-New Mexico Book Award), and Enter Water, Swimmer (runner-up for the X.J. Kennedy Prize). Morris received the Rita Dove Award and has been invited to read her poems at the Library of Congress which aired on NPR. Her poems are published in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, and North American Review. See water400.org.
by Jessica Q. Stark
by Jules Jacob
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Kendall Turner
We all want to hook the big ones: caught from rough waves,
twenty pounds of fins beating against taut, transparent lines.
We all want to go home and tell a tale: how we nearly
lost our lives catching dinner, how a monster lives beneath
the ocean’s surface, how the glint of its scales hide
in the sun’s reflected rays. Who knows if anyone believes us.
Who knows if that’s why we tell stories anyway.
One time you were reeling in a trout, a bucket of worms
wincing at your feet, and the silver fish flew out of the water
and smacked you in the face, its body flapping against your lips,
leaving the hook lodged inside your cheek.
Look, you said, look what the bastard fish did to me.
I pulled the hook out slowly, the tip catching on your skin,
leaving behind a double-pointed wound, a tail and a head,
as if you’d been kissed by some too-affectionate beast.
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Kendall Turner lives alone with cats in the almost-woods. Her writing has appeared or will appear in Femspec, Prism, Ms. Magazine, and other publications. A long time ago, she won a poetry award from Princeton University and also clerked and argued at the U.S. Supreme Court. She currently teaches with the Bard Prison Initiative.
by Hyejung Kook
I don’t know what to say. The sun is shining directly in my eyes, but I am driving.
Risk blindness. Borges is muttering in my ear about Homer. The sun balanced
on the upper edge of the traffic light, concentric circles dancing like a Kandinsky.
Did you know that if you blow hard enough, the parts of a Calder mobile will move?
Glaring at me, the docent doesn’t speak. I haven’t touched anything. Only the air
moving. I haven’t done anything wrong. Anything right. Anything at all. For days
without first checking the temperature in the room. Sometimes I can’t read
the room at all. I can’t look at you. It’s the kids talking incessantly. Mom. Mom.
Mom. Why aren’t you listening to me? You don’t care about me. Nobody cares
about me. The tendons of the neck distended, torturously clear as they scream.
Risk tears. You wield silence like a knife. Only the air moves. My throat hurts.
At night the air wheezes through the swollen branches of my lungs but no words.
All the leaves fallen. Is this dreaming or reality, my son asks upon waking.
In mine, water is rising, the kids are trapped below deck, I take the deepest breath
I can, try to remember how many turnings, wake before I dive. Wake shaking.
I don’t know what to say.
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Hyejung Kook’s poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Verse Daily, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Hyphen Magazine, and elsewhere. Other works include essays in The Critical Flame and Poetry as Spellcasting (North Atlantic Books, 2023) and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Hyejung now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. She is a Fulbright grantee, a Kundiman fellow, and co-editor of Barahm Press.
by Rosa Sophia
We live at the edge of a flood plain, on the bank of a creek. In the evening my mother drinks,
falls asleep in the woods under the oak trees. It’s so hard to wake her, to get her home.
Summer rain falls. We leave the house and come back to find water.
The flood surrounds us. We park down the street and walk.
I am ten. At my grandmother’s house, I learn the creek can carry sound.
My grandmother says, I hear you kids and your mother all night, screaming at each other.
I’ve never seen anything like it: The flood lodges a car in the arms of a tree.
I try to imagine how this happened as my mother pours another glass of whiskey.
We walk in the woods and hear a rattlesnake before we see it, thick and coiled beneath a boulder.
My mother says it must’ve washed down from the mountains. It readies its venom.
My mother empties the glass. She picks the lock on the bathroom door with a kitchen knife.
She says she will kill herself. I decide my body can be a barrier between her and death.
The water rises. Red and blue lights flash. The cops knock on the door again.
We’re always so close to drowning.
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Rosa Sophia’s poetry has been published in Philadelphia Stories Magazine, Sentience Literary Journal, Limp Wrist, and others. She was the recipient of the 2023 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She holds a degree in automotive technology and is the managing editor of Mobile Electronics magazine.
by Kathryn Moll
There is sadness
in the snap of the maid’s navy smock
I have arrived
too late. La mesa ya está
puesta, the sideboard set
all thoughtful with flowers—your sick bed
now vacant
and unwound. Groups of waiting
stems struggle
to keep their musky summer
blooms—auras azules
en órbita
and limes are left wanting
to be sliced into cups
whose handles are turned
A las diez
A las dos
A dios—arms
Your useless legs
ya no pueden bailar
yet the soul still
creeps. I can see it
clustered
with butterflies
Mariposas borrachas
are silvering the soil
of dogs—they are browsing the blood-
red terracotta
tile
You are
ready to greet the sun
por ventanas abiertas
que cuadran la luz
breathe into the harmonic
bobble of bees
on the vine—to reach for blooming
stalks beyond the eve
Más allá
Más allá
Let us leave this
insect churn—the mourning
that is beating like living
gold leaf
blessing the windfall
fruits
where they lay in the road
ripe with worms
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Kathryn Moll is an architect and California native. Her text-based drawings—collaborative works created under the name modem—have been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Cooper Union in New York City. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
by Jane Ellen Glasser
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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She said goodbye
to alarm clocks,
appointment books
bank accounts,
cell phones,
welcome mats,
she scrubbed
guilt and regret
from the floorboards,
evicted troublesome
guests, opened
windows and doors
to let her house breathe
till she was clean
as a wind-stripped thicket,
airy as the left-
open spaces of a
Henri Moore sculpture,
the essence of form
(a face, a chest, an arm)
so clearly defined
by being absent.
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Jane Ellen Glasser’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, such as The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Georgia Review. In the past she served as the poetry critic for The Virginian-Pilot, poetry editor for the Ghent Quarterly and Lady Jane’s Miscellany, and co-founder of the nonprofit arts organization and journal New Virginia Review. She won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for Light Persists (2006), and the Poetica Publishing Chapbook Contest for The Long Life (2011). Her recent collectios are Jane Ellen Glasser: Selected Poems (2019), Staying Afloat during a Plague (2021) and Crow Songs (2021). Visit janeellenglasser.com.
by Marina Hope Wilson
And so it was I tumbled nightly
from the window after sliding it quietly open
and snuck through the abandoned schoolyard
to the field where we met and drank
stolen Bartles & James, or made out
in someone’s trashed trailer,
or what counted as making out
at twelve or thirteen, then riding on
the handlebars of the cop’s son’s bike
just as the sun was coming up, and him saying,
I hella like you now, and his breath on the back
of my neck combined with the surprise of daylight,
and how earlier he had laughed with his friends
about a girl he knew, and how wet she got,
and how disgusted he was, and
a hot feeling rose up in me
of everything it meant to be poor,
and a girl, and in a body,
with no one seeming to be watching,
or to be visible only in the worst ways,
and the shame of those unalterable facts filling me
while they laughed at the girl’s singular desire,
which I knew not to be singular at all.
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Marina Hope Wilson’s poems have appeared in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, Mulberry Literary, Kissing Dynamite, Jet Fuel Review, $, The Racket, Broad River Review, Bodega, and Stirring. She won the 2023 Rash Award in Poetry for her poem, “Origin.” Her poem, “Dilemma,” was nominated for the 2023 Best of the Net anthology. Her chapbook, Nighttime, was published via Cooper Dillon Books in January, 2024. Marina lives in San Francisco with her husband, stepdaughter, and two cats, and makes her living as a speech-language therapist.
by Erica Miriam Fabri
We do not pretend this makes sense:
eating peanuts while suspended inside a cloud?
My wing-less self, moving through the blue,
flying higher than birds do?
My body is not bigger than a mountain,
I am not meant to be more than a mountain away
from the dirt floor where the bodies I Love
are eating breakfast, kicking rocks.
You wouldn’t share a toothbrush
with your best friend, but you trust a stranger
to pilot two-hundred tons of metal
through a cold kind of air that will make you
breathless if it gets to you; you have handed over
your entire life: you know, you might only
get one: your whole wild body is being
gambled; Are you not afraid of this?
Are you also the kind of person who Loves
silently? Is your mouth a monastery?
Do you never moan? Has a surge of heartache
never gushed out from the burning inside part of you?
Do you sing? Do you scream? Do you know
that my great aunts waited until the casket
was lowered halfway into the rectangle hole
before they threw themselves on top of the box
that held their brother, father, husband.
Their wailing was an unkempt orchestra of noise,
a monster’s symphony; Where did they think
he was going? Were they afraid he might fly?
They were trying to hold him fast against
the only rock they have ever known
to be home.
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Erica Miriam Fabri’s first book, Dialect of a Skirt, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and included on the bestseller lists for Small Press Distribution and The Poetry Foundation. She has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and has worked as a writer, and educator for Urban Word NYC, The New York Knicks, and Nickelodeon Television. She teaches Performance Poetry and Fiction Writing at Pace University. See ericafabri.com.
by Lexi Pelle
Something my stepfather said to see
if my mother would believe it.
She did. She’s been to the Vatican.
How blessed the Basilica must be
that some tourist’s enthusiastic
hand gestures never punctured
its pillars, Bernini’s baroque
canopy never collapsed by an old
Catholic’s fainting awe. A miracle
the mosaics still marvelous despite
centuries of storms. She was pissed
when he laughed, thought he wanted
to make her seem stupid, gullible—
I only believed you because
I love you, she said weeks later when
he repeated the story to his bandmates.
Who doesn’t want the world to be
made of softer material? Who isn’t
waiting for truth to transubstantiate
the hours spent scrubbing
sticky spaghetti from the pot.
Say the statue of David is
swiss cheese, wouldn’t you want
to bite a sculpted thigh
until beauty felt a little less
unattainable? Stick a finger in
the wound of truth
like Caravaggio’s Thomas
fishing around in Jesus’s flesh,
tell me what you feel.
______________________________________________________________________
Lexi Pelle was the winner of the 2022 Jack McCarthy Book prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Ninth Letter, One Art, Abandon Journal, and 3Elements Review. Her debut poetry book, Let Go With The Lights On, will be released in May.
by Robbi Nester
“you look just like/your mother, he says, “who looks like a fire/of
suspicious origin.”
from “A Violence,” Nicole Sealey
My mother looked like a woman, a nicely made
woman in her neat turquoise slacks and size 4 shoes,
buttons never hanging by a thread, her face bearing
evidence of everything she feared—up escalators,
finding her way in a strange place, leaving the house.
But she was a fire, an earthquake, an electric storm—
battering the roof with hail, sending blue balls of light,
unraveling skeins of static yarn rolling across the room.
She sent the poltergeist trudging up the stairs, stopping
outside my door like a persistent sleepwalker.
Most of all, she was a voice, telling stories, singing,
teaching me to get the language right,
pin the world in place with words.
Every workday, my father climbed the cellar stairs
at evening, saying “Shut up Lydia. You too, bitch,”
meaning me. All the power of her words couldn’t
keep my father’s belt from lashing at my legs and back.
She spoke less and less, mostly muttered to herself
under her breath in two languages. I saw it all.
I was the message in a bottle sent into the world
to speak her truth. It was my job to plot escape.
She filled me with the family lore. Her silence
turned her to a force that could not be contained,
especially in that small a space, the pressure
mounting underground, voice trapped
behind those perfect teeth, behind the fear
of uttering the unacceptable, the dangerous—
how my father’s family left us to our fate,
wanting to hide the shame, the family
madness, truth that everyone could see
but didn’t want to hear or say.
When a woman is stifled for so long,
the voice will curdle in her chest
and make of her a fire of suspicious origin,
smelling of gasoline and melted plaster.
Her face becomes a crime scene, evident
to anyone who reads the signs, speaking
all the outrage of those who outwardly
accept their fate. Broken wires spark
a conflagration. I must trace the fire
to its origin. I am the arsonist. I am the match.
______________________________________________________________________
Robbi Nester is a retired college educator and author of 4 books of poetry, editor of 3 anthologies. She hosts two poetry series on Zoom--Verse Virtual's monthly reading and Words With You. Her website may be found on robbinester.net.
by Darby Lyons