by Marg Walker
for my parents
by Lorena Parker Matejowsky
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
I am saying the road to happiness is through hell
I am saying this road hurts my heels
You arrived at the wrong time
You arrived when he wasn’t home
I can see how a forest falls down
I can see a sinkhole from its source
I am trying to make a map out of muck
I am trying not to walk on the water
There is a trail that tastes like ghost orchids
There is a swamp sitting here with my son
I am talking about taking slow wet steps
I am talking about birds that stand still
I do this so I can show you the scrub jay
I do this like he will die any day.
______________________________________________________________________
Lorena Parker Matejowsky lives in Central Florida but spent her first 30 years in Texas. She writes poems, essays, and comics about growing up as a teenager in Texas in the 1980s, working in corporate America, staring at birds to stay sane in Florida, and leaving religion late in life. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Central Florida. Her work has been included in Best New Poets Anthology 2018 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Reach out on Instagram @loriepm or lorenaparker.com.
by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Riding in the swan boat of my youth, I’m
suddenly entering the tunnel of
middle age where the billboards—shall we say—
targeted marketing—have changed. Every
ad is for wrinkle cream and undereye
masks. As if somehow the Ad Execs think
that is what I don’t want to lose: cat calls,
the preying swoop of eyes that wanted to
swallow me up. Cut me down into bite-
size chunks. No, freaks. These days it's Ovid I
can’t stop thinking about. How he was 50—
in his prime—when he pissed off some Roman
emperor who exiled him to Tomis.
He hated it. Kept writing letters home
to Rome, begging to be called for, to be
folded back in. Stuck on that island in
the Black Sea, no one was trying to sell
Ovid beauty products. Exile from the
Latin exul meaning banish. Oh, how
I wish to be banished.
______________________________________________________________________
Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s fourth collection of poems, West : Fire : Archive, was published by The Center for Literary Publishing in 2021. Her biographies include Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, 2024). Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College, UC Davis and Dominican University and is the Poetry and Translation Director of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.
by Merie Kirby
the Queen of Cups makes me
a drink. She does it all by eyeball,
as if she sees secret measurements
scored into the glass. All I can see
are etched tentacles of some
bathypelagic creature whose body
hides beyond the borders of the glass.
She knows what I like. Maker’s Mark,
sweet vermouth, the dark Italian cherries
almost candied in thick syrup.
I’ve been standing on the shore, I say,
trying to discern best practice, best
path, best philosophy. She pours
golden liquid over a glistening sphere of ice.
The ice cracks in the glass. She nods.
Not everything stays singular, she says,
not everything should. In goes
a cherry, a spoonful of ruby syrup.
She stirs the drink, sniffs it.
A small shrug. Another cherry.
You’re allowed more than one.
______________________________________________________________________
Merie Kirby earned her M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Grand Forks, ND and teaches at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of The Dog Runs On and The Thumbelina Poems. In 2016 and 2013 she received North Dakota Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grants. Her poems have been published in Mom Egg Review, Whale Road Review, FERAL, Strange Horizons, and other journals. See meriekirby.com.
by Lisa Rhoades
Even mown, the field shines gold,
grasses fanning up in a whorl—
reverse sunrays—pointing
to the overcast sky,
a halo hammered thin.
The field, the players,
the flattened baseline,
the ball sailing
to the wild edge of things—
all around you the world
makes itself right. The rose
continues its conversation
with the railing
you’ve lashed it to;
the black walnut spills
its fruit, a perfect gift
inside a bitter hull.
Even bruised,
your marriage plows on.
Why are you astonished
at the landmarks
you’ve been given:
the mulberry at the corner,
the dog’s head upon your thigh,
the sparrows below the feeder
scratching for something more?
______________________________________________________________________
Lisa Rhoades is the author of two full length collections of poetry, The Long Grass (Saint Julian Press, 2020) and Strange Gravity (Bright Hill Press Poetry Award Series, 2004), Currently a pediatric nurse in Manhattan, she lives on Staten Island with her spouse. Individual poems have appeared widely including in Calyx, Nimrod, Boulevard, and The Southern Review.
by Stefanie Leigh
Louise Hay, the late metaphysical teacher, described eczema as breath-
taking antagonism, mental eruptions.
The only other part of my body that used to bleed
with regularity is my hands. Every February, the skin
around my knuckles would crisp
and I would line up my tonics. The Houston humidity
and my mother watched in disbelief.
Thirty years later, estranged
from both, I rubbed a new solution into my palms
as my husband cleared his throat
in the other room, turned off the light, then asked me
to come find his wallet. I squinted, strained, spun—until
I fell. My hands buckled against the hardwoods, then
flattened, steadying my torso. I pushed
my feet and palms into the roots of my house until I was bent
in two, then I rolled through my spine so slowly
I was barely moving. Once vertical, I walked toward
the front door, turned on the porch light, and left—
my fingers leaving a trail of aloe on the steps.
______________________________________________________________________
Stefanie Leigh is a poet and ballet dancer based in Toronto. She holds a BA from Columbia University and was a dancer with American Ballet Theatre. Her work has been published in Rust & Moth, Syncopation Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She is working on her first poetry collection, Swan Arms.
by Sandra Marchetti
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
______________________________________________________________________
Smallest grey triangle
on my wrist bone—
I blow the moth
onto the sidewalk.
______________________________________________________________________
Sandra Marchetti is the 2023 Winner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Aisle 228 from Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2023), and Confluence from Sundress Publications (2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry appears widely in Poet Lore, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. Sandra’s essays can be found at The Rumpus, Whiskey Island, Mid-American Review, Barrelhouse, Pleiades, and other venues. She is Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine. Sandy earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from George Mason University and now serves as the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in Chicagoland.
by Sarah Carleton
We used to crouch in the hallway during hurricanes.
Now we lounge in the living room and respond to text messages:
Yes, we are okay. No, we are not worried.
From the couch, we listen to frogs ramp up as the wind dies down,
and we no longer jump at the grunt of a loose window
when a 119-mile-an-hour gust whips around
or flinch when a band of calm is punctured
by the bang of a transformer giving out.
We register the small silence when the A/C stops
before a chorus of generators rev like stubborn cars
around the neighborhood. Phones act as flashlights.
Bedtime’s at dusk—electricity is overrated.
As long as we have tortillas and nuts,
we can let lettuce liquify in the tepid fridge,
brew coffee overnight in tap water and wait.
These days we’ve seen chaos from lots of angles,
know which shelf to place it on while we figure out a fiddle tune.
We’re used to staying put while squalls
twist the treetops, and between the widening coils of storm
we breathe air sweetened by the absence of disaster.
______________________________________________________________________
Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Cider Press Review, The Wild Word, Valparaiso, Crab Orchard Review, As It Ought to Be, and New Ohio Review. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.
by Ellen June Wright
by Madison Whatley
In the last hour of Friday night,
I was on the first pole of a four-pole rotation
when money flew over me like Froot Loops
spilling from the box.
The stage had been dry all night,
but when someone makes it rain on me,
it’s a physical reminder
that I’m exactly where I should be.
If you see something you like, the DJ says,
put some money on that ass. He’s my favorite DJ.
He always puts me on stage just as money is thrown.
He’s a part of my home club. We’re family.
I’d told him I was going to try out some other clubs.
He said This ain’t no other club, Joy. This a party club.
You’ll be back. And he was right.
Stage money isn’t as good anywhere else.
Between my legs, I looked into the blue eyes
of the skinny blonde girl standing
next to my stage, shocked that she was the one
throwing me the most money I’d seen all week.
I’d seen her walk in hours prior
with a group that bought a section
for a young guy’s birthday.
She was wearing a Lululemon skirt
and jacket set with white Nike
Air Force 1s. She looked preppy
and out of place, I wondered why she was there.
She hadn’t approached the stage all night.
But she wasn’t being cheap or annoying,
like women usually are in the club.
She wasn’t climbing on the stage
or flashing us or whooping.
Why did she choose me?
She was standing confidently,
throwing money and smiling at me,
like she was exactly
where she was supposed to be.
______________________________________________________________________
Madison Whatley is a South Florida poet and 2023 graduate of Florida International University's MFA program. Her poetry has appeared in FreezeRay Poetry, SoFloPoJo, and Cola Literary Review. Her poetry manuscript was selected as a Semi-Finalist for the 2023 Berkshire Prize by Tupelo Press.
by Martha McCollough
Digging, I wait to feel happy—
like this sunlight is nice—that moment
when you realize you’ve felt some gleam of pleasure,
a thing people I know have experienced or so they claim.
Yesterday I picked a blue-black iris. Overnight it died, leaking sad flower
blood the color of mimeo ink
down the side of the white pitcher
______________________________________________________________________
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!
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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!
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________
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