by Louisa Schnaithmann
I want a woman the way birds, sick
Louisa Schnaithmann is an autistic poet and the author of Plague Love (Moonstone Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, The Summerset Review, tiny wren lit, and elsewhere. She is the consulting editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry and lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
by Nicole Callihan
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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Born, I cried,
and growing, I cried.
Gathering the broken egg, I cried.
Making the pancakes, eating the pancakes,
cleaning up after the pancakes, I cried.
Watching you swim to the deep area, I cried.
Watching you return to the shallows, I cried.
When my husband could not love me
like I wanted, I cried.
When I could not love my husband
as he needed, I cried.
When we loved each other anyway, I cried.
And then, there was the pulling of the weeds,
which I did all morning, crying,
and the watching them return,
which I did all afternoon, crying.
Now, evening, and what am I to do
but pull the weeds again,
and let the mosquitos suck on me,
and watch the stars come out, one by one?
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Winner of the 2023 Tenth Gate Prize and a 2023 Alma Award, Nicole Callihan has two forthcoming poetry collections: chigger ridge (The Word Works 2024) and SLIP (Saturnalia 2025). Other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023) and the 2019 novella, The Couples. She also co-edited the Braving the Body anthology published by Harbor Editions in March 2024.
by Callie Plaxco
Someone I can’t remember who told me
how to fold into a bird. It made no sense
at the time but now that I am sitting in
this sunlight I begin to understand the way
an arm might one day flatten to a wing
if beat down hard enough, creased and pierced
and strung with beads pretend they’re
feathers. Yes, I can imagine taking flight
right through that window. Probably at first
the jagged edges of glass would hurt
as they slice through skin but the blood
will drip away as my pretend wingspan flumes
higher towards these tallest trees, the ones
hovering above the roofline. Listen, I say,
I’ve been having bird dreams my entire life.
In fact, I think I’ve written this precise poem
on a shitty desktop with a mouse and a hum
and a floppy disk while sitting in a portable
classroom. I was in high school, remember,
I was so entirely broken. Really, I was incredibly
sad. I’d sit in the sun wishing I was someone
else. Had you told me then how to bend
every piece of myself into something other,
I would have snapped each bone in my body
to reconfigure. And then I would have kept folding.
Where’d she go, you’d wonder at the osseous
pearl perched in the doorway. I wouldn’t answer,
of course, my voice now furled and forgotten.
Thank God I didn’t know you then, whoever
you are, folder of things that shouldn’t be folded.
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As her grandmother once said, Callie Plaxco flew the coop when she left South Carolina to journey west to the University of Wyoming for her MFA. Still in Wyoming, Callie lives with her husband, two small boys, and two big dogs. Her chapbook, Dear Person, is available at Dancing Girl Press and individual poems are published by in Carve Magazine, Tinderbox, Gingerbread House, and Sugar House Review.
by Francesca Bell
I find myself on the floor, surprised to be crying,
the way my FBI-agent friend was surprised
to find himself shot through the thigh.
A bullet travels so fast it can enter and exit your body unnoticed.
Fear lives so big in me it can go undetected
but comes shaking out.
When I speak with the principal,
she says thank you, over and over.
If you see something, say something, they tell us, and I do.
I think she is a very nice woman.
Like all the other very nice women,
the dead ones
and the one in Uvalde
who stepped into the hall with the gunman
to test if her classroom door was locked.
I think of that woman from my floor
and quake like a person riven by gunfire.
In the video, the gunman has swagger.
He is, I would say, of excellent cheer,
and his gun sounds like a good American
movie. Automatic, semiautomatic—
what is the difference among friends
and fellow countrymen?
The sound of children screaming has been removed from this video.
The gunman fires in bursts and then pauses,
like a child checking his work.
Officers mingle in the halls, like guests at a funeral.
The gunmen don’t kill themselves anymore, I’ve noticed.
They decline to remove themselves from the video.
They ask for rides home.
They drop their weapons and surrender.
They hide in closets and wait for police
to breach the unlocked classroom door.
The way my child breached my body then left me forever ajar.
The way the gunmen breach with their bullets even those they don’t hit,
even the mothers at a great remove from the video,
safe on their kitchen floors but crying.
And the principals say thank you,
thank you for removing the weeping of mothers,
for scrubbing the sound of children screaming from the video,
for rendering them all silent,
as if they are already dead.
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Francesca Bell is author of Bright Stain, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and What Small Sound, and translator of Max Sessner’s Whoever Drowned Here, all from Red Hen Press. Her work appears in ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Rattle. She is Poet Laureate of Marin County, Events Coordinator for Marin Poetry Center, Translation Editor at Los Angeles Review, and Arts Program Coordinator for the Friends of the San Quentin Prison Library.
by Leonora Simonovis
My great-grandfather
knew to take what was
needed. Today his trade
would be called sustainable.
Barcelona, my father’s
hometown, had a fish
market where head-wrapped
women sang while cleaning
and quartering the catch
of the day. They let scales
and bones onto a tarp, later
offered them to the Goddess.
I loved those days: buying
fish, root vegetables, herbs
for sancocho. I was transported
to a time and place before my father
and my father’s father and his father
before, of men who knew Yemayá’s
swells and rhythms whose nets fed
a whole village. Sky aglow, they
whistled until fish surfaced, the sun’s
fontanelle crowning the horizon.
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Leonora Simonovis is a Venezuelan American poet, editor and educator, living on unceded Kumeyaay territory, colonially known as San Diego. Her debut poetry collection, Study of the Raft, won the 2021 Colorado Prize for poetry and her work has appeared in DMQ Review, The Hopper, About Place Journal, River Mouth Review, and others. She received fellowships and residencies from The Poetry Foundation, VONA, the Vermont Studio Center, and Sundress Academy for the Arts.
by Mary Fontana
How many dictionaries’
worth of words have
we exchanged and they
taught me nothing, I
know now, having just
committed the whites
of your eyes, the nonsense
you uttered, to memory
as we waited for the
ambulance to come,
as I waited. Now some
technician brandishing her
wand stands witness
to an architecture
that ought to remain
hidden, yours to
disclose to none or
one—yet here onscreen
it materializes. Now I’m
the one who can’t
breathe, it’s so
beautiful, my God: Venus
flytrap gulping its
blood meal, cathedral
arches in cross-
section buttressed
by lung, flaps of the mitral
valve high-fiving, over.
And over. And over. So
this is your
heart: object of long
study. Only now,
staring down the double
barrel as it loads
and fires, loads
and fires, words
having failed us both, do
I know it fully.
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Mary Fontana is a scientist and writer who lives in Seattle with her parents, husband, two children, and eight-to-ten pet fish. She is currently writing a narrative history about the migrant house of hospitality where she has volunteered for the past 20 years. Her poems have appeared in journals including Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, The Seattle Review, Rust + Moth, and Moss. See her on Instargram at @maryfontanawrites.
by Amy Watkins
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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An osprey beats the wind with bowed wings,
steady till it drops and shakes in flight.
The wind catches and it rises again.
I watch from the porch where I’ve come early
to stop avoiding our father’s call. Last night,
I turned the ringer off then on then off again,
swiped down to ignore but texted back.
There are two birds in the tree across the street
and a third circling and circling, rising and falling
in the wind from a distant hurricane.
The phone rings. He wants to talk about you.
They say each bird attends to just seven others, and,
in this way, a thousand starlings turn together
like one creature. I’ll try not to make this a metaphor.
Once, you and I climbed the hills outside
Florence, Italy. Our dearest ones climbed with us
and, because we were few and each one loved
by all the others, I thought we made a kind of net
that might hold the breaking world together.
A murmuration of starlings unfurled like the aurora
borealis, a sheer curtain caught in wind,
twisting, tracing a path through twilight.
A hawk swoops low over the osprey nest.
I think it might land, but it doesn’t. You ask to meet
for coffee. Our father calls, and I don’t answer.
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Amy Watkins is the author of the chapbooks Milk & Water, Lucky, and Wolf Daughter. She lives in Orlando with her husband and a large, cuddly, mixed-breed dog.
by Erin Murphy
The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. How old is Taylor Swift? I
ask my phone. 33. Her Jesus year—the age Jesus was when he died. The
Austrian poet Georg Trakl died at 27. No one worships him except writers
trying to resurrect the silent dead. But he died by cocaine, not crucifixion.
Whoa—I just realized it sounds like fiction. That could be the atheist’s motto:
CruciFICTION. Wednesday I told a colleague his comparison of small colleges
and big universities was “like apples and orangutans.” I paused mid-debate to
say “I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that phrase before. I need you to take
a beat and appreciate it.” He smiled. But he probably didn’t change his mind.
When was the last time someone changed my mind, shook me out of my smug
bubble? We’re all self-driving cars weaving through city streets. The moon
looks for herself in every puddle.
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Erin Murphy’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2024, Ecotone, Waxwing, Guesthouse, Rattle, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry) and Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, April 2024). She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and poetry editor of The Summerset Review. See erin-murphy.com.
by Katy E. Ellis
We couldn’t see blood hemorrhaging across the grasslands
of our father’s right brain hemisphere like a fiery
saw blade on the horizon, separating
land/smoke
father we know/don’t know.
No time for us to dig a moat around the family
history built on a one-way train ticket from Duluth to Seattle
and the oldest Luedtke girl cashiering at Schrader Drugs.
No choice what’s saved/what’s lost
of his memory store.
He recalled a love of cold milk but couldn’t name the thing
that tells time that you wear on your wrist. Lost
the steps for tying shoes, yet in capital letters
he wrote and correctly spelled
the name of each grandchild.
To fend off the scorch of his forgetting, we had to trust
the small fires we lit when our father knew us as his children.
Pray our flames burned ground enough to keep
the father who remains/
the father we mourn.
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Katy E. Ellis is the author of the novel-length prose poem, Home Water, Home Land (Tolsun Books) and three chapbooks: Night Watch, winner of the Floating Bridge chapbook competition; Urban Animal Expeditions; and Gravity, a single poem also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Mom Egg Review, Pithead Chapel, Rise Up, American Journal of Poetry, Literary Mama, MAYDAY Magazine, Burnside Review, and in the Canadian journals PRISM International, Grain, and Fiddlehead.
by Brenda Cárdenas
by Marg Walker
for my parents
I came by breeding to the far meadow
where sheep—as they will—milled,
bewildered, ruminant and insatiable.
My tender lambs strayed like thoughts
across the thistled fields. I knew the names
of each danger: howl and blizzard, fur and wire.
I kept them at bay. I heard sounds in the night
I could ignore, and silences I could not,
close as they were.
I rested on the ridge where I could see
great distances and all wanderings,
where I could run as if free,
my lean body rinsed with clean air
and the scent of flowers unattainable
below. When the storm came
there was more of everything—
sky, harsh wind, a wildness in the eyes
of those who needed me.
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Marg Walker pursues her abiding interest in the human voice through poetry and music. Her poems have appeared in Minnesota Monthly, Tishman Review, Wilderness House Review, Red Wolf Journal, and other publications. Marg co-hosts the Midstream Reading Series, a monthly live poetry reading series in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Her first full-length poetry collection, Sitting in Lawn Chairs After a Complicated Day, was published by Nodin Press in February 2020.
by Lorena Parker Matejowsky
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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