by Sara Burnett
A teacher of mine once said every writer
by Christine Poreba
A tiny bird appears at the hole
of his house, as a waxing
crescent moon appears at its appointed hour.
We in the human house behind
have witnessed his parents prepare
for this arrival flying in, flying out.
And now this singular eye
as it first sees the dark become
green become sky
through the hole my son helped
his father carve. Today he wrote
his first set of recognizable words:
Mama Love. The letters sweep
in erratic flight across the page,
their lines intersect like leaves.
We heard his baby sounds at night
become vowels become letters sung
out of the order of their alphabet,
become questions made of words
strung together in a line like a trapeze.
This bird will begin to answer
the question tugging at its wing
when we are not watching the door,
a round opening with nothing to close.
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Christine Poreba is a New Yorker who lived for more than a decade in North Florida and now lives in Chicagoland. Her book, Rough Knowledge, won the Philip Levine Prize and her manuscript, This Eye is for Seeing Stars, won the 2023 Orison Poetry Prize and will be published in 2025. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and numerous journals, including Barrow Street, The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Sun.
by R.B. Simon
I have, really, no recollection of existence
prior to moving to the two-story redwood
house on Middle St. before first grade.
But in one hazy, sunflower-shaded memory,
painted by the late afternoon sun filtering
through an upper story window, I can
almost feel the tips of my soft, pink and brown fingers
pulling the sill, the stretch and bend of my tiptoes
seeking a better view.
Outside the window is a yard.
A back yard, I think, with patchy sepia and yellow-green grass.
There may have been other things in the yard,
I don’t recall. My straining eyes are pinned to
the small, royal purple sport convertible.
What, I wonder now, made that car so enthralling
to a toddling girlchild? Perhaps, it's smallness, shiny wheels
and chrome bumpers flashing like silverfish in the sun.
Or the two bucket seats that seemed just right-size for me.
Or maybe the curve of the panels, plump like plums,
that gave the whole thing a somehow supple appearance.
I know he is in the apartment, the man my mother would marry,
but his bell bottom jeans, scruffy beard under a gravity-defying bounce
of frowzy curls are out of sight. Out of mind.
I remember nothing of their courtship. Nothing of the wedding,
or the move, nothing but a snapshot moment of standing
in my first-grade classroom, adoption judge in a stern dress suit,
declaring him my father. We did not celebrate, or embrace,
just thanked the judge and left.
I was never allowed as a passenger in the purple coupe,
even after the adoption. I would simply sit
in our greening new yard each spring, watching
while he waxed and waxed, until his face
shone back at him in the sun.
____________________________________________________________
R.B. Simon (she/her) is a queer, black, disabled writer whose work has found homes in multiple literary publications. She is a Senior Poetry Editor for the Harbor Review. Her full-length collection, Not Just the Fire, was released March 2023 from Cornerstone Press, and her next work, Bird Bone Blood, is forthcoming from Milk & Cake Press in 2025. She is currently living in Madison, WI with her spouse and young daughter.
by Suzanne Edison
by Kelly R. Samuels
What are late nights for
but worry? The gravel drive
absent of the one car.
She works at a scarf
for colder seasons.
He said she was a—.
Said he was leaving her to it.
Thoughts of flatter places
with no birches, fields still
not full throated, but soon.
She walks only so far
so as to hear if the baby cries.
The lake is oil.
The mosquitoes, thick, loiter
near the ear. Little tune.
The goldenrod won’t bloom
for another two months.
When this is due.
And that is due.
And she will count out too few
ones, smoothing them
on the table.
In her grandmother’s garden:
delicate peonies.
Later: a different, windswept snow
that covers windows with a different light.
____________________________________________________________
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two full-length collections—Oblivescence (Red Sweater Press) and All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books)—and four chapbooks: Talking to Alice (Whittle Micro-Press), Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited Press), To Marie Antoinette, from (Dancing Girl Press) and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line Press). She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO, River Styx, Denver Quarterly, and Court Green. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
by Katrinka Moore
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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by Katie Kemple
I made Dad a plate of sunny-side-up eggs,
brought it to him on the overstuffed sofa.
His condo a miniature of his life with mom.
Furniture crammed in, not meant for a place
that small. The hutch behind his shoulder
contained Bermuda cottages, swizzle sticks
in Irish shot glasses, Hummel figurines.
In front of him: reruns of Seinfeld, election
coverage, incontinence ads. Only the glass
coffee table dared reflect his new life back.
He hid it beneath newspapers. He ate off
a dish with a village painted on it. People
laughing. Festive houses. The runny yolks
provided a sunny sort of day. He ate
watching TV. I left him that way. I left
him because he liked it that way. Closed
his door slowly, peering through the crack.
An aperture: I took his final photograph.
____________________________________________________________
Katie Kemple's work has been published by Ploughshares, Chestnut Review, and The Night Heron Barks. You can find more of her work at katiekemplepoetry.com.
by Arielle Kaplan
by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza
What does it mean that I’ve been dreaming
about sunlight moving through old houses
again? Vine-shadow on wood floors, endless
rooms, the sound of wingbeats without birds.
Pittsburgh wisdom says you need a week in Florida
when you can’t get out of bed. I up or down
my dose of antidepressants when the clocks change.
In the dreams, I wear a white dress, dust dragged
along its hem. The houses are dis-inhabited
but I know I’ve lived in some version of them.
In real life I try to leave the past empty, open;
a good mother haunts her life only in forward motion.
When the nerves at my right hip shriek down my leg,
I know it means my body needs to stretch.
I should exercise, drink more water, rest—
but I get through winter reading Gothic horror;
I trust myself with only so much selfishness.
In this city, potholes become a sign of character
as much as of neglect. I remind my children all is still well
when the bridges sway. In traffic, we count turkey vultures
circling in the steel gray and call it soaring.
____________________________________________________________
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, teacher, and suburban wildlife photographer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, and in 2022, she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops at Carlow University. Violeta lives with her husband, teenage children, and pack of rescue dogs on a small certified wildlife habitat in western Pennsylvania. Songs for the Land-Bound is her debut collection.
by Patricia Caspers
by Amy Katzel
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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after Natalie Scenters-Zapico
1. When the sun pulls your shade low, when you can’t tell if it’s your belly or throat that hungers—
2. Find your largest pot.
3. Remember, as a girl, you’d practice guitar and the dog would cry, except your parents said he was singing, tea kettle whistle perched at the edge of the living room steps:
4. Fill it with sink water, like rocks filling a pail.
5. Your room, carpet pulsing stereo, liner notes at your thumbs; lyrics like thick soup, but the chords’ harmonies,
6. Those seemed inside you,
7. Girl body running on electric wire—
8. Hold the dry noodles, thick as hay, as dynamite, hold the stack in both hands
a. and break. The break is never clean and that’s
b. the best part, the little twigs that straggle along the burners,
c. hiss of the water,
d. steam on your face.
9. CD cases clacking in your hands, the walls changing shape.
10. No basil, no onion at your careful hand at the cutting board,
11. Instead, string a single, hot tendril high in the air and down into your mouth like a sword swallower
12. —No chopping’s cadence, whole things becoming smaller things,
13. No, your mother’s recipe not so much a recipe as a prayer:
14. How she used to leave the strands to bunch together in the strainer, twisted eucalyptus from the roots, or how she’d pull back
15. Your hair in her hands when you leaned to blow out birthday candles, certain you were capable of catching fire.
____________________________________________________________
Amy Katzel Adler is a writer and communications strategist. Her poems have appeared in Hunger Mountain Review, SWWIM Every Day, The GW Review, Moment Magazine, and South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and lives in Delray Beach, Florida with her husband and two beautiful children.
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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