by Amy Katzel
by Cynthia Ventresca
I found a baby sparrow by a flowerpot
of dark purple pansies. It looked sweet in death,
creamy yellow fuzz just sprouting, eyes
hard peas cased in perfect pods. I buried it
in the waking earth of April under a statue of Buddha,
his plump hands folded
on his lap. The afternoon was quiet except
for a plane so far into the ether regions it left only
the sound of its leaving and the rain came down hard
as I sat back, legs crossed beneath me, watching
glass bob in the gutter’s current. All jagged,
all fearless, the pieces held to nothing
as they disappeared, and it seemed for a second
a diamond had shattered.
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A resident of Wilmington, Delaware, Cynthia has been writing poetry since the age of seven. Retired from a busy corporate career, she is currently focused on writing, reading, and serving as an assistant poetry editor for Narrative Magazine. Publication credits include American Life in Poetry, Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal, 3rd Wednesday, Glassworks, The Main Street Rag, Sky Island Journal, and One Sentence Poems. She has been longlisted for the 2023 Palette Poetry Rising Poet Prize.
by Lory Bedikian
The great-great aunt plays dead
When he tries to pull the gold tooth
Out of her mouth. Not a pursing
Of the eyes. Not a sound when
He finally yanks the tooth out
From root. Who knows how much
Blood bled. Most things will never
Have answers. For example, why
Exactly Father perfectly developed
Camptocormia, his right-angled
Walk down the hall to answer
Mother’s frustrated call. Her
Refusal to help him with the cane
Or walker. Just get to the damn
Table, she most probably thought
In her own language. Armenian
Is not easy to translate when
You love someone who never
Told you their secrets. It remains
A question of the pharynx, how
Much was swallowed instead
Of spoken. A throat can become
Sand dune. If enough circulation
Or wind rules the surroundings
Anything can move. Even that
Vertebrae that we thought
Damaged for good could bring
Itself back to stand at pier’s edge.
Father, what were you looking
For at the end of your life? What
Made you think the rug, the tile
Had answers? The phonology
Of being bent seemed fair.
Avoidance began to sing. I, too,
do this all to avoid the thought:
That if you looked any of us
In the eyes, something might
Extract itself, even violently.
Even your death would suddenly
Be pronounceable and alive.
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Lory Bedikian’s collection, The Book of Lamenting, won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her forthcoming book, Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body, won the 2023 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, and is forthcoming September, 2024 from the University of Nebraska Press. Bedikian’s poems received the Neruda Prize for Poetry in the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. Her work is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration (KNOPF, 2020) and her manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.
by Rachael Sevitt
in hebrew we don’t just say my love
we say my life
we say my soul
why stop there
why not my breath
my blood my veins my arteries
why don’t we embrace after a long day my bowel
exclaim in glee at a surprise gift my liver
lay in bed late at night and whisper my spleen hands in her hair
tugging my gallbladder and when we fall out of love there would be warnings
first it would be my kidney when she comes home and pecks him on the cheek
after a day of passionless silence yes my appendix he says when she asks him
to pick up his socks the fourth time that day my tonsils she whines
my little toe he grunts back
Rachael Sevitt is a Scottish-Israeli writer, poet, and editor. She is the recipient of the
2023 Andrea Moriah prize in Poetry, and an MA student in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University. Rachael lives near Tel Aviv, Israel. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Passengers Journal, Squawk Back, Write-Haus Magazine, and elsewhere. Find more of her work at rachaelsevitt.com and @rachael.sevitt on Instagram.
by Shaun R. Pankoski
You would think
they were gene splicing,
the way the two of them
huddled over the three inch square,
deciding exactly
how to slice it into twin rectangles.
Four deft hands
wrapped a clear sleeve
around each, nested them,
collared and tidy, like little birds
in a fluff of tissue,
flanked on each side
by the tiniest spoons,
suspended over a miniature ice pack,
(in case we were traveling)
accompanied by fragrant
hand towels upon which
to dab our fingers and lips.
I bowed to them
as they bowed to me—
she solemn, he grinning.
A smile as surprising and cheery
as the lemon yellow box
I carried out into the rain-spattered street.
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Shaun R. Pankoski (she/her) is a poet most recently from Volcano, Hawaii. A retired county worker and two-time breast cancer survivor, she has lived on both coasts as well as the Midwest as an artist’s model, modern dancer, massage therapist, and honorably discharged Air Force veteran. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Gargoyle, Sheila-na-Gig, Gyroscope, and Anacapa Review, among others.
by Minadora Macheret
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Marianne Kunkel
After Annie Leibovitz’s side-by-side portraits of Susan McNamara, 1995
You haven’t changed, though change is what you do.
Tank top, wire glasses, pixie cut by day;
at night you wear a spider-crown of jewels.
You Vegas showgirl, I first gazed at you
at age 12. Now 40, I absorb your gaze.
You haven’t changed, though change is what you do.
At left, in black and white, thin lips askew,
you smirk—your makeup-less face on display.
At right, you wear a golden crown of jewels
with 18 spikes. This helmet locks your hairdo
in place, chestnut extensions to your waist.
You haven’t changed, though change is what you do
for hours—affix shell-shaped bikini with glue,
paint eyelids ombre mauve, iron silk cape,
hoist up that 25-pound crown of jewels.
At 12, I found your scarlet pout aloof;
now, my own lips stained, I see a power play.
I haven’t changed, though change is what I do—
students know me by my spider-crown of jewels.
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by Emily Rose Cole
When you called my classroom safe for vulnerability,
my blood hitched. I could think of nothing except how safe
you aren’t. The old stories oversimplify—claws & isolation
in the forest, lanterns & family in the village. As if families
can’t sour, or protract their own claws. As if were ever
such a place as safe. But while I’ve got you still
under this scant protection, my sonnet’s salted circle,
I’ll give you my still-unmastered secret: you don’t owe anyone
your trauma. You can write it plain, or chiaroscuroed,
or not at all. Write, if you want, about tulips or tetherball
or the after-scent of a peach orchard, post-storm. Don’t
be afraid to take joy by the forelock & stroke her rippling neck.
This is your chance to slake the fox’s unreachable longing,
to hang the grapes at eye-level, ripe & incalculably sweet.
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Emily Rose Cole is the author of the collection Thunderhead and the chapbook Love & a Loaded Gun. She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Orison Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Best New Poets 2018, Poet Lore, and the Los Angeles Review, among others. She holds a PhD in poetry and disability studies from the University of Cincinnati.
by Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum
The daughter moves the mother from home to nursing home.
In each suitcase are purple garments of dying.
The daughter folds lavender garments into drawers.
The old woman is fed and folded into clean sheets.
To be old is to be rolled and diapered like a baby daughter.
On blush pink sheets a baby daughter is begun and born.
A daughter grows old in sorrow for her mother’s death.
Death’s luminous violet haloes grieving eyes.
The old woman’s milk-blue eyes yearn for her daughter.
The daughter holds her mother’s hand too tightly.
Old hand, paper and bone, letters blur into cobalt dusk.
The old woman has no home except her daughter’s touch.
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Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum was born, raised, and educated in New York. Mary’s translation of poet Felix Morisseau-Leroy has been published in The Massachusetts Review and the anthology Into English (Graywolf Press). Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Lake Effect, Spoon River Poetry Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere.
by Merrill Oliver Douglas
by Majda Gama
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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“Strange Stars Pulsate According to the Golden Ratio”
The BBC headline & a snapshot of Lindsay Lohan
carrying a copy of the holy Quran run parallel on a news site.
Perhaps raw, almond-milk chai was too ordinary for her
so she turned to the book of a more exotic people.
Can America ever forgive her for reaching beyond yoga & rehab
into the terrain of the enemy? I mean, Jane Fonda is still
paying the price for looking eastward.
I like my life dry, like the lips an aesthetician told me she could fix,
use sugar-based fillers to fill in lines from smoking,
fill up the rosy skin browning with middle age.
Sure, the corners are downturned, someone needs to walk
around looking angry & I’m angry that the plump face of youth
is now the face I’m expected to buy back, just as my cheekbones
are emerging. FFS, Lindsey’s now allowed her lips to deflate.
After thinking all this through, I see The Archdruid Report
proclaim we are at peak meaninglessness.
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Majda Gama is the author of The Call of Paradise, selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2022 Two Sylvias chapbook prize. Her full-length poetry manuscript won the 2023 Wandering Aengus Book Award and will be published in 2025. She is the 2023 Shenandoah Graybeal-Gowen award recipient for Virginia poets. Her poems have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, where she is a 2024 Gregory Djanikian scholar, Ploughshares, POETRY, Shenandoah, Tahoma, and We Call to the Eye & the Night (Persea Press) an anthology of love poems by Arab Anglophone poets. They are forthcoming from Prairie Schooner and TriQuarterly.
by Katherine Riegel
Diving across the concrete patio, I grab
one dog’s collar while keeping hold
of the other. The fledgling—so small
I can’t tell what species it is—chirps
and hops away into the grass. Fifty-
something isn’t an age to be hurling
one’s body down. Elbow, knee, ankle
bruise and swell like rising bread dough.
We had a horse when I was growing up
who loved my mother so much
that if she had a seizure and fell
he would stand over her and bare his teeth
at anyone approaching. This fierce chestnut
lowered his head so at six I could push his bridle
over his ears, opened his mouth for the bit.
I knew I could save the baby bird
even though the first dog—a retriever—
had scooped it up in his mouth
because I could still hear it, muffled
but somehow echoing inside that toothy cage.
When my mother opened her eyes
to the sight of her horse’s belly
she’d say Move, you silly oaf,
and he’d step over her as carefully
as you carry a brimming cup to the table,
never spilling a drop.
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Katherine Riegel’s lyric memoir, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in summer 2025. She is also the author of Love Songs from the End of the World, the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth, and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Catamaran, One, Orion, and elsewhere. She is managing editor of Sweet Lit and teaches online classes in poetry and creative nonfiction. Find her at katherineriegel.com.
by Melissa Studdard
But I’ve tried several doors anyway. Once, my grandmother
found me next to an empty bottle of pills and pumped me
clean herself. Come morning, churches had popped up
inside the problem. Self-harm, preacher said, was yanking
my Christ-self from my body like a tooth. Grandmother’s
face was a fragile piece of China. One more helping
of sorrow, and she would crack beneath the weight. She
taught me how patience didn’t weigh anything. Rubbed
my back all night like I was still six, though I was sixteen
and still afraid to fall asleep. Her two hands limped like
wounded deer across a frozen field. Her two hands holding
all of misery, or life, or hope, or religion. It was hard to tell.
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Melissa Studdard’s most recent book is the poetry collection Dear Selection Committee. Her awards include The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Award, the Tom Howard Award, and more. Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Lambda Literary, The Guardian, the Best American Poetry blog, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. You can find her at melissastuddard.com.
by Jessica Gigot
by Amy Ash
Once, my daughter moved inside me like the memory of music,
cradled in bulge and curve. She was born
in a mosaic of moans, torn from cleaved belly,
abdomen opened, tendon and fascia flayed like strings.
Hammer and damper and wire.
I heard the reverberation of an impossible cry. The curtain
kept her face from mine. As an infant her small fists would play
their way into my mouth, guided by wonder and want.
Now, at the piano bench, skirt fanned wide behind her like a wake,
she reaches into jawbone, ease along the mouth ridge of a whale shark.
Tooth, ivory, tusk, and bone.
My daughter’s posture recalls music played low among lilies
and lace, the fear of peering too close into the open lid of the casket.
Fingers already fluent in the language of loss, she resists song,
refuses to lean into the lift and give of it. I want to hold her
on my lap awhile longer. I want to crawl into this hollow of sound I’ve born.
As she bends her head to read the score, I frame her face in reflection.
I am all shine and swerve, glossy and forgotten. Only an echo
of loss. I collect fingerprints, recording the evidence of her hands.
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Amy Ash is the author of The Open Mouth of the Vase, winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Book Award and the 2016 Etchings Press Whirling Prize post-publication award for poetry. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Stirring: A Literary Collection, I-70 Review, Erase the Patriarchy, and Rogue Agent. She is Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Indiana State University.
by Jennifer Wolkin
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Andrea Jurjević
by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice
by Pichchenda Bao