by Karen Hildebrand
by Maggie Rue Hess
for Taylor
Do you say anything but [names you couldn’t choose]?
Do you hold your [grief] like a [train whistle]
through which the [laughter] escapes
you, a [candle flicker] of the blood heat
in your [wisher’s] heart?
Do you dream in the language of [mothers]?
Do you call this [candle flicker]
a [wish] for the memory blanketing
your [laughter] like the ineludible [grief]
echoing each [train whistle]?
Do you think about the [ ]?
____________________________________________________________
Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a graduate student living in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her partner and their two crusty white dogs. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Minnesota Review, Connecticut River Review, and other publications; her debut chapbook, The Bones That Map Us, was published by Belle Point Press in February 2024. She likes to share baked goods with friends and can be found on Instagram as @maggierue_.
by Maryann Corbett
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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The clear amber scent in its bottle. Its glint from the top of the vanity:
cut-crystal flutes with a frosted-glass stopper, catching the sun, on her vanity.
The glamorous dreams of our mother, unspoken to curious children,
were sharp as the quarter-moon curve of that bottle enshrined on the vanity.
What were they guarding, what secrets? And how would a child understand them?
And what was I thinking, small magpie lured on by the glitter of vanity?
Wreckage of beauties: the spill. The wet, the gray film on the rosewood.
I was the firstborn, the first to drive thorns through the heart of her vanity.
Painfully, mothers forgive. (On the mountain with seven stories,
how long will the granite of penitence weigh on the spine of my vanity?)
(And what do my children remember? what hauntings by anger and tears
does my memory hide from itself in the metal-bound chest of my vanity?)
Sixty years on, and the stain-mottled dresser now broods in my bedroom,
breathing regret, and my name, and the words of the Preacher: Vanity!
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Maryann Corbett is the author of six books of poems. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in journals on both sides of the Atlantic: in The Dark Horse, PN Review, and the New Statesman in the UK, and in Beloit Poetry Journal, Ecotone, Image, Literary Imagination, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rattle, and others in the US. Her poems are included in anthologies like Best American Poetry and Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Paraclete, 2024), and have been featured on Poetry Daily and American Life in Poetry. She is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. New work is forthcoming in Raritan and J Journal, among others. Her most recent book—which includes the poem “Ghazal for a Bottle of Shalimar, 1956”—is The O in the Air (Franciscan University Press, 2023).
by Cate Peebles
by Cynthia Atkins
(After The Zone of Interest)
Woman snaps door shut //
a glance over her shoulder//
something like shame// in a gesture//
// like a dismal secret //meant only for her//
She lifts the coat//from the sturdy hook//
it’s the fur of a being // that once had eyes
and teeth // A being now sewn// with pearl buttons //
We watch the woman// dare herself // to slip// into the dense
fold of underfur// It must feel like the warm embrace//
of an enemy// Her ivory hands // tuft up the collar//
She gazes at herself in the mirror// and reaches inside //
the left pocket // expecting a foreign habitat //
to find the satin soft //as an infant’s earlobe//
She pulls a stick of lipstick// from the pocket//
//puckers and dabs her papery lips///with another
women’s shade//like the wine stain her husband
spilled on the pristine tablecloth //in the greenery
of her garden// The maids would be working out //
the stains until dawn//She gazes at her image //
//wide as a regal estate//There were smells
of other women// on his clothes// not dead women //
Down the hall// she hears her children laughing//
while counting//gold fillings// the brothers keep in a box //
// like voodoo talismans //Outside a dog is barking//
Behind the woman// the window is gray// the barracks over
the wall // expire plumes of smoke // no sirens// utter silence
//The woman hangs// up the coat// Closes the door//
____________________________________________________________
Cynthia Atkins (She, Her) is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In the Event of Full Disclosure, Still-Life With God, and a chapbook from Harbor Editions, 2022. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, I, LEON Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Permafrost, SWWIM Every Day, and Verse Daily. Atkins lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, Virginia. See cynthiaatkins.com.
by Tara Ballard
by Tresha Faye Haefner
The moon was still full
as a bottle of un-spillable milk.
I worked the late shift at an all-night diner.
I had blond hair. A righteous ponytail.
A pad of paper and a pen that could decipher
every need in America.
Cravings for creamy and sweet,
salty and satisfying. I fed
the truckers and late-night drinkers.
Even the man in the alley
Who came up short by two quarters
And apologized for not leaving a tip.
Once someone asked for extra
whipped cream on pancakes.
I made a mountain,
a whole Himalaya
with one cherry on top.
He left me a twenty.
What is a job, but knowing
the secret desires of strangers?
How we budget
for our pleasures, ask strangers
for what we need. I could
be that someone,
Samaritan. Saint.
Goddess of a small universe, floating
towards your table with free coffee.
I balanced this world
like a plate of mercy
against my palm.
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Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears in many journals, including Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and three nominations for the Pushcart. Her first manuscript, When the Moon Had Antlers, is out from Pine Row Press. See thepoetrysalon.com.
by Sara Burnett
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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A teacher of mine once said every writer
has only four or five subjects.
There’s happiness in repetition
if you don’t hear the seconds ticking.
What’s worse? Dedicating yourself
to failure or denying it again and again?
Pacher’s pupil, a Renaissance carver, perfected
the pine folds of Saint Margaret’s robes
using a large axe, then
several smaller ones, then
sanded and painted her in fine detail.
Did he ever think where did the time go?
She stands at the back of a church in Tyrol,
a dragon writhing under her feet.
What do you live for? The quiet
before sunrise or the moments after.
The baby coos in her pram.
I’ve always wanted to use the word pram
at least once in a poem.
Now that I’m a mother,
I’ve a better understanding of terror
and the miraculous.
Who will she be when she’s grown?
Do I have time to shower?
If, as a famous writer decreed, it takes 10,000 hours
to achieve mastery,
I’ve perfected rocking my hips from side-to-side,
changing a diaper in dim dawn light.
My baby practices sitting up even in her sleep—
her head bobs like a buoy, her eyelids shudder.
My teacher said sometimes your first line
is your last line.
What’s more? The moment she walks
or the moment she falls down.
Looking again at the photo, the dragon
lies curled at Margaret’s feet.
I’m holding an image of an image
someone else carved in my hands.
She loves it when I sprinkle my fingers
down on her like rain.
I’m holding the rain in my hands
and in my hands, the rain holds her.
____________________________________________________________
Sara Burnett is the author of Seed Celestial (2022), winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. She has been published in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, PANK, RHINO, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland, and a MA in English Literature from the University of Vermont, and is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In addition to writing poetry and essays, she also writes picture books. She lives in Maryland with her family. See sararburnett.com.
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
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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