by Lauren Camp
There was no moment apart from this stubbing self
by Sara Femenella
For years Quinn sat in a gymnasium
full of post-pubescent girls
so holy with hormones
that his own girlhood
must have felt unrelenting,
his Catholic schoolgirl uniform
a false cognate of cosplay
while a priest ordained all those
bodies perfect in their own images.
I admit, when he first came
to me, I loved the girl in him.
His she/her an abandoned bird’s nest,
whose beauty lies not only
in its painstaking construction
but in how easily that labor is left.
Quinn wanted to know
what makes a good man,
as if I could teach him
what he can better teach me.
His boyhood has been there
all along, a revelation
beneath all the bullshit,
a transcendent knowledge
that when he pronounces
his manhood his words will
emerge glittering formed
by the vestiges of dead legislations
and the joy of knowing what
he has always known. His manhood
will rhyme with nothing.
A brand-new word, unlike anything
we’ve ever heard. We’re listening.
Ready to repeat after him.
____________________________________________________________
Sara Femenella has recent or forthcoming poems in The North American Review, Palette Poetry, Pleiades, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, Denver Quarterly, Salamander, and Seventh Wave, among others. Her book, Elegies for One Small Future, has been a finalist or semi-finalist for a number of contests, including Autumn House Press' Poetry Prize and The Waywiser Press's Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.
by Jane McKinley
We’re talking on the phone, as we do now
several times each day, when my sister asks
if I’ve written a poem about her foot.
No, I say, it’s not the sort of subject
I would choose. She doesn’t know I specialize
in elegy, that she’d have to lose it first,
the way she lost a toe, a piece of bone,
an ounce of flesh, her own vision of the last
twenty-three years. She doesn’t hear me think
about the way she scrambled syllables
when she was small—tail nose for toenails—
or of the August she was two, parched by fever,
her body hollowed, when we played tea party,
sipping endless water from blue willow cups.
____________________________________________________________
Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble. She is the author of Vanitas (Texas Tech UniversityPress, 2011), which won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize, and Mudman, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In 2023 she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
by Corinna McClanahan Schroeder
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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From low chairs in the grass,
the heroines pass tiers
of cucumber sandwiches
and raspberry sponge cake.
The usual characters have convened—
grown daughters in muslin
and ribbons, heiresses yawning
diamonds. Teenage housekeepers
whose cupboard keys chime.
Governesses and quiet nieces
weathering tempest minds.
Clouds morph like a story overhead,
but the women pay no heed.
They are on break from the uses
of narrative. Crumbs spilling
from their lips, they don’t talk about
the next scene or when their weddings
will be. Not even the ever after,
happily though it’s promised
to be. For this hour, no one
blushes, no one’s made
to weep. The heroines just steep
in the pale sun, and no narrator
takes his stab at what they think.
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Corinna McClanahan Schroeder is the author of Inked, winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize (Texas Review Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
by Rachel Trousdale
Goldenrod, brambles. The yellow and black
spider zipping shut its web. We pass:
birches, maples, oaks. What have we taught
our son this sunny summer? Not to mind
the narrow bloody trace left on your shin
that wins you the blackberry. The French word
for orange, which is orange. Monarchs eat
only milkweed, and are named for kings.
Sometimes the king is bad, or mad, a word
which can mean angry, or that something’s wrong
in someone’s mind. Your mother likes to see
you kiss your sister, and your mother scares
you sometimes, when you won’t get into bed.
Pokeweed, tansy, Chinese lantern flower,
the poisonous profusion of the hill.
Pick it, don’t touch it, this one, yes, no, yes.
The great book of injunctions: we can start
to pick out, word by word, instructions for
our lives, which, as we live, we learn to read.
That purple flower like a magic wand?
I’m sorry—no, I’ve never learned its name.
____________________________________________________________
Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poems have appeared in the Yale Review, The Nation, Diagram, and a chapbook, Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone. Her book Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem won Wesleyan University Press's Cardinal Poetry Prize and will be published in 2025. See racheltrousdale.com and @rvtrousdale.
by Pam Crow
All summer long, the tomatoes
were a disappointment. They drooped
in their cages, leaves crisping at the edges.
Some carried green globes that refused
to ripen, or split skins that smelled of decay.
Only a few Brandywines. No Romas, no Early Girls.
Now it is October, and the garden is dead.
I grasp withered stems, yank plants out
as if they are evils to be crushed.
I whack root balls against the wooden planter,
naming catastrophes: Wildfires. Sickness.
Hunger; hurl each onto the compost pile.
I’ve grown too familiar with disaster.
Clenched against the wind, I turn toward home,
and glowing amid the heap of yard debris
I see survivors. Four Golden Sunrise, small orbs
that all fit in the palm of my hand. I rub them
on my jeans. Their blood in my mouth tastes sweet.
____________________________________________________________
Pam Crow is an award-winning poet who lives in Portland, Oregon. Pam’s work has been published in Green Mountain Review, Carolina Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and other national journals. She is the winner of the Astraea Emerging Lesbian Writers award and the Neil Shepard award for poetry. Her book, Inside This House, was published by Main Street Rag Press in 2008.
by Karen Hildebrand
A white utility truck pulls to the curb,
stiff as a nun in her wimple, its crane
lobbing a man into the air to clip
branches that fondle the wires.
To the delight of this city dweller,
a green tractor crawls up hitched
to eight spirals of hay. The moment these
behemoths cross paths, a sinkhole opens.
Anything is possible. I am my country
cousin, simmering broth, musk of fresh
love rising. At dusk, Mia and Pearl
prick up their ears when I call them in,
low light silvering their fur. Little
bobcats, they gallop to me, wild.
____________________________________________________________
Karen Hildebrand is the author of Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books). Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Braving the Body (Harbor Editions), LEON, Mom Egg Review, Scoundrel Time, Southern Poetry Review, Trailer Park Quarterly, Maintenant 18, and Beacon Radiant (great weather for MEDIA). Her writing on dance appears in Fjord Review and The Brooklyn Rail and she has hosted podcast episodes for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn.
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!
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.