by Traci Brimhall
Traci Brimhall’s newest book, Love Prodigal, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2024. She is also the author of Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press), Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Parks Service, and is currently the Poet Laureate of Kansas.
When I Was Straight
by Caridad Moro-Gronlier
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Day to watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 2 pm, Room 8303
_____________________________________________________________________________________
After Maureen Seaton
I married a straight man & stayed
married for sixteen straight years.
I said I love you straight-faced, but I knew
the truth—I was no straight arrow.
My parents thought I held a straight flush
when I brought home a boy with straight blonde hair
& blue eyes, a real straight shooter who asked Papi
if he could take me off his hands. Straightaway,
Papi said yes. I was 20 & it was time to straighten
me up & out of his house. He thought that straightlaced
Americano would make me walk the straight
& narrow, straitjacket my mouth, & remove
the straight edged razor from my demeanor,
but that boy thought I was straight up awesome
even though I felt straight up awful that I wasn’t
straightforward about kissing my best girlfriend
or just how dire the straits of my desire for her
were, a want I was not straightbred for.
For sixteen years I tried, but I was never straight
with him until I walked straight out the door.
____________________________________________________________
In April 2024, Caridad Moro-Gronlier was appointed the second Poet Laureate in County history by Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. She is the author of Tortillera, the winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize published by Texas Review Press (2021), and Visionware (Finishing Line Press, 2009) as well as the editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing (Beacon Press, 2020). Her work has been featured in The Best American Poetry Blog, Verse Daily, NPR, The Hive, Split This Rock, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, and others. She is the recipient of a Julia Peterkin Literary Award, an International Latino Book Award Honorable Mention, an Eric Hoffer Book Award Honorable Mention, First Horizon Award Finalist, three Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs Miami-Dade Individual Artists Grants, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry.
_____________________________________________________________________________
This poem first appeared in Pleiades: Literature in Context, Pleiades 441, Spring 2024.
_____________________________________________________________________________
by Kate Northrop
At the bottom of the aquarium,
I am arranged like a note.
At the bottom of the aquarium,
tucked by a pile of loot, I hang
while voices stop overhead,
then vanish. Constellations, floors
soaring with stars, mean nothing
to me, nothing the loaded trees
pinpointing a street. But this
knocking on walls? This
is my heart, this my fury
turned low inside, like sunlight
stuck afternoons in red drapes.
____________________________________________________________
Kate Northrop's recent poetry collections are Homewrecker (New Letters vol. 88, 2022) and cuntstruck (C & R Press, 2017). New poems are forthcoming in MER, Terrain.org and Glacier. She teaches at the University of Wyoming.
by Heidi Seaborn
~inspired by Natasha Trethewey’s “Elegy”
where rivers slough beneath the bank,
round the stones, eddy in the slow run
home—
an alluvial fan of sediment and sentiment.
My mother needed to say goodbye
to the rivers—Bitterroot, Yellowstone,
Flathead, Blackfoot, Bighorn, Gallatin—
where her fly once teased the brown and cutthroat,
once cast into the light of my father.
Morning mist sifting off the meadows
like steam rising from the coffee brewed
over their camp stove.
Wading hip-deep in the currents,
their lines whipping through the weather—
whatever that day offered.
Catching a silver glimmer then
releasing, as if each fish was a child
held for the instant.
If I was there, it was as a trout—
a fluorescence in motion. The stream
coursing, coursing past.
A river seeks weakness, the unrooted—
My mother had brought her fly rods,
renewed her license. But the rivers
were thick with memory and she is an old
river—resisting, then changing
direction.
____________________________________________________________
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She’s the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. She has recent work in Agni, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times of London, Poetry Northwest, Plume, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU. See heidiseabornpoet.com.
by Jane Medved
by Jennifer A Sutherland
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
____________________________________________________________
Twilight, and I hear
her voice, familiar
kettle-hiss.
Quiet, girl,
she commands; then
my childhood rooms
are here, each
one dark as pitch,
bulls-eyed, red-
end cigaretted.
In the center
Mother sits,
seething.
Labyrinthine lady
fulcrum : rattle
preening. Tiny
importuning click/
click/click of gas
as she warms
the morning’s
coffee, aluminum
saucepan tap
and pour. Snap
of air trapped inside
her. Cricket clatter.
The house, its grid
of trenches, of gangrene
and defilade,
unacknowledged.
Rainbow-sheen halo
of puff and smoke,
her whisper-drab
devotional,
her pieta. Membrane
contracting, clutching
fibrous wall
and sinew.
Lung, spasming
and black,
immobile,
wheeze and block.
I must
have frailed her,
asked too much
of her thin-stretched
décolletage,
engendered
a reaction.
When she died the
aperture swelled to many times
its anxious size.
____________________________________________________________
Jennifer A Sutherland is the author of Bullet Points: A Lyric, from River River Books, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur and Foreword Indies Poetry Book of the Year. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, EPOCH, Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at Hollins University and she lives and works in Baltimore.
by Deirdre O’Connor
the one who picked another wife, another life
on the other coast. The one who chose
the one nearby, the younger one, the one
who had a son. Praise them for toughening us,
for bracketing the time we shared, sticking it
in footnotes, in envelopes on which we wrote
their names, a birthday card their kid found
in a book on native plants, their name
inscribed above ours, love comma our name.
Their handwriting, we know it decades on,
can’t unrecognize it, the slope and paraph,
even the marginal squiggle in Keats
or Derrida will go to the grave with us.
It is wrought in the iron of our brains.
Praise our brains for keeping them out
of our hearts, for letting them go where they went.
____________________________________________________________
Deirdre O’Connor is the author of two books of poems, most recently The Cupped Field, which received the 2018 Able Muse Book Award. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Bennington Review, On the Seawall, Rust + Moth, JAMA, Cave Wall, and other journals. She directs the Writing Center at Bucknell University.
by Lauren Camp
There was no moment apart from this stubbing self
and its newest habit
to hurt. Rapid, what we battered about.
In the courtyard, a boy in embroidered turquoise held a small rack
of candy strapped to his chest.
It was a sweet estate. Summer: blurred and distracted.
We had fought all week. Shut in
to greater, deeper, no response. Missed
the plane, which lengthened its vibration.
Stephen Hawking spoke of three different times that converge.
Walking into darkness, we found the darkness
a history of bat wings pushed to pinwheel.
That city wrapped in its buds. Its curbs and dogs
soaked to concrete. Did you see around us those careless
with joy all those hours
we shadowed? Such shame to need
what I can’t remember: the communion, or red skirts, the drench
as citrus let out its juice. Filled
with the reflex to find what is holy, we went—
root and plaster, doorways,
similar flowers, ghosts and cactus spines. In each place, I looked
through a lens as the sun
dispersed to its mirrors. And in some frames I found
God or salt, some high-pitched singing.
The church served its bells
as if to sound what I feared. How little I know myself. I love you.
We will die, live; these are our options.
The bats slanted, concealed.
They never stopped. You carried what we need.
____________________________________________________________
Lauren Camp serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). A former Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, she is a recipient of the Dorset Prize, finalist commendations for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. See laurencamp.com.
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!
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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!
____________________________________________________________
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