by Martha McCollough
Digging, I wait to feel happy—
Martha McCollough is a writer living in Amherst, Massachusetts. She has an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bennington Review, The Bear Review, Tammy, Pangyrus, Barrelhouse, Crab Creek Review, and Salamander, among others. Her chapbook, Grandmother Mountain, was published by Blue Lyra Press. Martha's poetry collection, Wolf Hat Iron Shoes, is available from Lily Poetry Review Books.
by Risa Denenberg
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Olivia Piper
The nest on the may pole is shaped exactly like a horse’s head.
Ribbons of orchid and lemon drift in the wind,
like reins brushing a papery, wild mane.
I watch the wasps in the garden,
hovering, diving, each with a task,
each with a life.
And they live like we live:
they eat sweet things, have babies,
remember the ones they love.
They only sting if they’re girls,
and only then if you trap them
or press them against your skin—
When I was young
I dreamed I was a girl wasp—
with transparent wings, a stinger, a slender waist.
I could never learn to be scared of them—even as they advanced
with my bare legs parted by the unyielding back of a gelding.
Even as the horse I loved was swarmed and I was spared.
They circled my father and I was unmoved—
I heard him wail, watched him strike himself
as they stung and stung, dancing on his welted back.
I trusted them,
as I trust all girls—
I knew what they knew.
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Olivia is a writer, an educator, and a New Englander. She is an MFA candidate in creative writing and has been published in The Connecticut River Review, Funicular Magazine, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and Devastation Baby, among others. Her work is firmly anchored in a reverence for girlhood, queerness, and a love of love.
by Virginia Bell
by Carla Panciera
If I had put the stovetop near a window, I would not have missed
the coyotes traipsing through my yard, would not
have had to hear about them from a neighbor who will never die,
who drags out the surveyor’s string to warn me off.
See, I say to the cats. Be grateful you’re not off stalking songbirds.
How dare those predators appear as I crush garbanzo to release
their starch, as the broth thickens, gold as the ornaments Cathy
is teaching herself to make. Though she’s used to building bigger things.
Helicopter pads. Hospital wings. Now her workshop’s full of saw frames,
tiny anvils, a gas torch and flux. How do we develop any expertise?
So many things happen when we look away, things, even medicine
with its divinations, can’t catch a glimpse of.
Say if a tumor could just flit just once past the gnarled orchard
of our bones, then follow a scent elsewhere.
But there’s no fencing anything out. Only the meanest of us
will survive too long. In my kitchen full of turmeric, of vegetables
diced small as gems, the cats recline on the table, no matter
how often they’ve been warned off.
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Carla Panciera’s collection of short stories, Bewildered, received AWP’s 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award. She has also published two collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her work has appeared in several journals including Poetry, The New England Review, Nimrod, Painted Bride, and Carolina Quarterly. Panciera’s newest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir.
by Elisabeth Weiss
Patchouli oil and Sandolino’s coffee
drift down West 4th Street
past the sandal maker’s where
musicians jam on weekend nights
The crackling smell of new leather
reach upper level shops
where hand embroidered peasant tops
trade like contraband
and serve as entrance to a world
where no one yet wastes away
from a disease for which there
is no remedy or name.
Diagonally from the cigar shop
iron green rails hold cement stairs
and lead underground to the southbound.
In front of the old Stonewall’s it’s quiet,
just pigeons pecking at bagel scraps.
I work the cash register and fill the racks:
fantasy in the back, music by the door,
trade paper running down the middle.
On a plywood harvest table.
Holding my flowered skirt,
climbing ladders to reach overstock
I drink in a new sense of ownership:
Just back from Europe, no college degree.
Once the bookstore had been a pharmacy
with a swiveling rack of paperbacks
so popular the owners had to give in
to what the neighborhood wanted.
Unnumbered streets, a crisscross of skewed geography
where nothing rests parallel
except the edges of new type
drawn from box cut cartons with spines yet unopened.
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Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing. She’s taught in colleges, preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled. She has an MFA from The University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She’s published poems in London Poetry Review, Porch, Crazyhorse, Birmingham Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016. The Caretaker’s Lament was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.
by Paula Persoleo
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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The female mates
only once
with her mid-
Atlantic blue.
That doesn't mean
this decapoda
can't survive
without him.
True, before
she's mature,
she's carried
under
the weight
of his shell,
russet pincers scratching
the surface
of the bay's
brackish floor
as she stores him
inside her
to spawn
over and over
alone
with her egg sac.
But
carnivore,
omnivore,
detritivore,
claws crack
clams
to support
a million minions
tucked tightly
to her carapace.
Once winter's
cold water comes,
she burrows
in the sand,
insulating herself,
isolating herself,
a scavenging
specimen
in the salty
estuary.
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Paula Persoleo is a graduate of Stony Brook University’s MFA program in Southampton, NY. Her work has been accepted by Philadelphia Stories, Sheila-Na-Gig, Mantis, and Tulane Review. In 2018, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Beltway Poetry Quarterly. She teaches in the MALS program at the University of Delaware and works at a nonprofit organization in Newark, DE.
by Brooke Bovee
by Sandra Yannone
Years ago
now
I walked
among
the dying.
I was
already dead.
I was
a shroud
of skin
wrapped
around bones
no one
could touch.
This is
one version
of what
it means
to be
dead.
Around me,
often circling,
teetering
like metal
candelabra
angels,
were
too plenty
of the others
dying, who
in the moment
had outlived
me. Mostly
middle-aged
gay men
dying
into
their shadows.
We all walked
for miles,
for each other,
for liberation,
for purification,
for healing, for life.
The walks began
and ended
with swan boats
in the Boston
Public
Garden.
By the time
I crossed
the bridge
at the finish
line, under
a rainbow
of tethered
balloons,
more among me
were that many
steps closer
to death,
the air
exhausted
in their
lungs
labored
further
heaving,
sighing,
some pulsing
into oxygen
masks
while seated
in wheelchairs,
escorted
by lovers
and friends,
some who
would not
be
permitted
to witness
their beloved’s
final
grasps
for air
before
the lights
blew out
behind
their eyes.
But this day,
sunlight.
Every AIDS walk,
sunlight.
We would walk
into the sun
for miles
beaming
before
together
we
would burn
our skin
always
like flash
paper
ready
to combust.
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Sandra Yannone’s debut collection, Boats for Women, was published by Salmon Poetry (Ennistymon, Ireland) in 2019. Salmon published The Glass Studio in February, 2024. Her poetry and book reviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Lambda Literary Review, and numerous others. Since March, 2020, she has hosted the weekly reading series Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry on Zoom via Facebook. Visit her at sandrayannone.com.
by Paola R. Bruni
As we pull onto the coast highway,
she comes. Alone. Alights on glass,
robust in her dull flesh—plain as a Quaker.
What is velocity to the raw humping muscle
of abdomen, thorax? Or the eight gilded legs
that flatten against all odds to a pane of glass?
How we cling to what repels us!
Moth speak is a gibberish into wind,
her single bulging eye an alert periscope
watching me astonish at her herculean strength.
I want to be as earnest, fight for my life.
But I am a lowly creature by comparison
fraught with bouts of uncertainty—
the anti-hero to moth’s brandishing
courage. My husband pulls off at an exit. Offers
cupped palms, the moth climbing onto the soft
pads of flesh as if entering a chariot. She
is transported to a clump of scotch broom
where she takes flight among yolk-yellow
blossoms. Only then does the symphony
of white and black arrive, officers singing
commands to freeze, raise hands over head.
I try to explain about the bravery of a brown
moth, how it earned its freedom,
but am ordered to remain inside the car,
where I can only guilt-anguish as my brown
husband is made into a still life: hands splayed
in white air, legs spread, head bowed
in supplication.
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Paola R. Bruni’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous print journals as well as popular anthologies. Recent poems can be found in The Birmingham Review, The Adroit Journal, and SWWIM Every Day. Her work is also forthcoming in Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, Red Wheelbarrow, and Spillway. Her debut book of poetry is an epistolary collection titled how do you spell the sound of crickets (Paper Angel Press, August 2022).
by Cassidy McFadzean
Before bed, I count teeth slipping out,
calculate bodies in the high-rise above
As a child, who comforted you
when you woke from sleep?
Did you stand in the doorway,
watching softly snoring faces
too terrified to step inside a room?
Crying a little or a lot,
you run for me the white hot
You were flying home from Tehran
I was bleeding in the bathtub
at the start of the next decade
A toast to this and all other
odds and eclogues
Was it maggot or magnets?
Static or stagnant? No matter—
we cherished each fragment
clasped tight to our clavicles
You visited the Tower of Silence
and returned with copper bracelets
I wore clinking down the aedicula,
songbird ghoori glazed ash-white
*A Tower of Silence or dakhmeh refers to a circular burial tower in Iran where Zoroastrians would leave bodies of their deceased.
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Cassidy McFadzean is the author of two books of poetry with her third, Crying Dress, forthcoming from House of Anansi in 2024. Recent poems have appeared in Afternoon Visitor, Annulet, Hot Pink, Paperbag, and elsewhere.
by Hannah Cohen
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Nancy Huggett
by Tammy Greenwood
by Arnisha Royston
i want so bad to stop writing about the
brokenness. my friend said something earlier
about tending to the beautiful in a broken
world and i thought how different our worlds
must break. i’ve tried to imagine the words here
from someplace else. i am thinking about water
from a spring. walking barefoot in red dirt.
horses trailing behind me without saddles. i fell
mounting a horse in california a few years ago
my foot slipped between stool and stirrup.
my back flat against the ground. i could see under
the horse. how a belly extends down when a
body is long. when a butcher slaughters goats
or anything with a similar body they cut from
hind leg to throat. all four legs held tightly apart.
there isn't much more i can say about this. about
something being cut open so easily. i remember
waking up from surgery. trying to make out the
numbers on the clock. if i knew how long i was
under. i could make sense of the damage. the clock
too far. i whispered to the nurse i felt cold everywhere.
animals must feel cold after that first cut. my sister is
somehow standing between the nurse’s station and my
bed smiling. but not happy. i could see the worry
stuff itself into her hands then her hands in her pockets. i
asked if it was quick and she said no. and i knew then
what it meant to be slaughtered. to be cut from throat
to belly. only the parts needed taken from body to bag.
to some place i’ll never see again. yes, the world is broken.
my body a betrayal. sometimes still beautiful.
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Arnisha Royston is a poet from Los Angeles. She holds a BA from UCLA and a MFA from SDSU. Arnisha is currently the Tickner Writing Fellow at the Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland. Her poetry is published in literary journals such as Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Rhino, and Phoebe. Recently receiving nominations for a Pushcart and Best of the Net, Arnisha is excited to work towards the publication of her first manuscript.
by Lisa Rosenberg
by Sarah Browning
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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After Herbie Hancock & Wayne Shorter
How is it I imagine us older, already,
and walking in autumn to this song,
and we are beautiful, as we are now,
beautiful as you are now, when you
look at me. It is autumn, the city is
quiet and not quiet as the song is,
around us, kids on bikes, as we are
wrapped around each other like
the piano and the sax and the sudden
bikes but then the quiet and the yellow
leaves. My arm is through yours, my
hand in your pocket and it is autumn,
late afternoon. We’ve had a quiet good
day of work, each, then headed out
together and the song is the city we love
around us together and we are older but
not yet old and we are beautiful as the song.
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Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works). Co-founder and past Executive Director of Split This Rock, the poetry and social justice organization, she now teaches with Writers in Progress. Browning received the Lillian E. Smith Award and fellowships from DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, VCCA, Yaddo, Porches, and Mesa Refuge. She holds an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Rutgers Camden and lives in Philadelphia. More at sarahbrowning.net.
by Jessica Manack
My great-grandmother Tat birthed three girls and stopped,
said “No use cluttering up my yard trying for a boy.”
Her daughter Peggy was up for the challenge, stayed faithful,
had her four and was then blessed with Eddie one Christmas.
Tat’s daughter Patty, my grandmother, had boys
she didn’t want, a husband she didn’t want, and when she could,
she shed them all, taking up with ladies, so that, by the time
I came along, it was a given, her companions, begrudgingly accepted.
I knew how she felt because I felt the same: the big secret
I couldn’t tell anyone – not my parents, who’d be disgusted,
not my grandmother, who I rarely saw. But one summer, we all went
from the city down to Peggy’s house, a rare confluence of cousins.
It felt like anything could blossom there, like the blueberries
growing in profusion in her yard, something I had never seen.
I gorged myself, sneaking handfuls from the big glass bowl,
afraid of being greedy, worried I’d not find such comfort again.
That night, in one of the row of little Catholic bedrooms
full of little twin beds, I shared a room with my grandmother,
a breath’s width apart, something I never imagined happening,
and I thought, I could tell her. I could say,
I’m like you, something I had never been able to say
to anyone in my family of brutes, being bookish and blue-haired.
The hot dark closed in on us, the smell of mothballs
a blanket no one had asked for, and I pictured opening my mouth,
pictured how, if I told her, it would be the first in a long series
of tellings, each harder than the last.
The cicadas’ screeching made it hard to settle.
The silence I replaced it with made it even harder.
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Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has recently appeared in Still: The Journal, Litro Magazine, and Five South. She was the recipient of a 2022 Curious Creators Grant, and her work has been nominated for The Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. As the winner of the 2023 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions First Chapbook Contest, her first collection, GASTROMYTHOLOGY, comes out in Summer 2024.
by Alafia Nicole Sessions
by Jessica L. Walsh