by Kerrin McCadden
In the country of Bed,
by Stella Brice
In third grade after lunch, Mrs. Joseph tells us to
alphabetize ourselves into a straight line. We take
satisfaction in the knowledge of our 31 names—of all
the names, both the first one and the last.
Lunch boiling in our stomachs, we line up in the order
of the knowledge of these names.
We live the alphabet: flesh made word.
On a scraped floor, Mrs. Joseph perfects us. She
shuffles a body here to there. She forms a kind of
library—each child bound and placed.
Now we march towards homeroom. We are mesmerized by
the back of the kid in front of us; mesmerized by the
swirling patterns of their hair.
Then we rest our heads on our desks and Mrs. Joseph
reads us a book about a girl who lives alone in the
forest; who grinds acorns for bread; who survives
winter; who has her fox; who has her owl; who has
her wounded dog for company.
We drink this book in the darkness of our triangles
of arms as the girl’s father searches for her entire
seasons in his airplane but we don’t want her to be
found.
We want her crawling down
difficult trails where there
is barely any light.
She takes another breath.
Her belly distending with cold water,
she crawls on the school of the ground.
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Stella Brice is the author of five books of poetry, including Urged and Wait ‘Til I Get Fatter (both by VAC/Purple Flag Press) and Creatures (INKira Press). She is a Pushcart and a Best of the Net nominee and a winner of the John Z. Bennet Prize. For several years, she served as a mentor and literary advisor for the PEN Prison Writing Program.
by Amy Thatcher
I grew my mind
with the work
ethic of a weed—
eating baked beans
and canned asparagus.
Learned to fix
my mind’s thick
accent, fit in
with a clique,
snap and screwtop, spill-proof
and shatter-free.
I rolled with the kind
of knack it took
to pull up
a decorative bootstrap
with a borrowed degree,
bold as an albino
deer in the open,
ears alert
to the drawn bow.
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Amy Thatcher is a native of Philadelphia, where she works as a public librarian. Her poems have been published in Guesthouse, Bear Review, Rhino, SWWIM, Rust + Moth, Iron Horse Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Palette Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Shore, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets 2024 and is forthcoming in The Journal and Denver Quarterly.
by Ferral Willcox
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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In the place of cisterns
swaddled in cobra lilies
spawn of cloud seed heals
the moon of its infected swelling.
A heat dissipates to crystal, gaslit
in the aging night. You were
a slip of a boat set off in a slit
of wild waters, two down
no rudder, no oar. One love
travels in tides, in elliptic swirls
hot to cold, then back again.
The other, a faucet, a cup
a tinseled lake warming
in a metronome of sun.
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Ferral Willcox is a U.S.-born poet and musician currently living in Pokhara, Nepal. Ferral’s work can be found in Per Contra, concis, Peacock Journal, Rat’s Ass Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry was featured in the Q-Street venue of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and she is a regular contributor to the Plath Poetry Project.
by Robbie Nester
“Ars longa, vita brevis” --Hippocrates
The noodle master Peter Song once said
a chef must make 100 bowls of noodles
a day, all by hand, to learn the craft,
to knead the pyramid of flour and water
from a pile of disparate dust till it
comes together in a ball, until it shines,
to stretch and pull it, twist it into a rope,
an umbilicus pulsing with life. Only then
can the chef bring it down hard
onto the butcher block like a cat-of-nine-tails,
whack it till it separates into strands,
long fibers that weren’t there before.
It doesn’t matter how many times
I watch it, I can’t see how it’s done.
He doesn’t estimate how many pounds
of flour, how many hours and days
I will need to stand over this table
before the noodles finally unfold
in my hand, spring to life in the roil
of the steaming water, tender as clouds.
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Robbi Nester is a retired college educator and author of four books of poetry (plus a few manuscripts currently making the rounds). She hosts two poetry reading series on Zoom per month. You can learn more about this and her work on her website: robbinester.net.
by Amy Lemmon
“To write these days is to avoid telling people how angry I am.”
—Daniel Nester
Behold the Rottweiler in its cage, behold homemade cornhusk
ornaments, behold the photo of a Jaymar miniature piano,
behold the galaxy of knees at noon, facing the maestro’s
fragrance. Behold, behold, I stand at the door and knock-knock-knock
Answer the call, be real now, be here & calculate
cost vs. bennies, don’t be that person who waits
until the last chorus to join in. Makes you look careless.
Care less. Rejection is a state, like catalepsy, to move through.
Behold the scroll, the wretched bankroll, the double tongue
summoning his minions to court, calculate the chorus
and ford the spring, a small thing, mysterious as amaryllis—
a little water, a little sun. Behold my process of (pre)tending.
Sweetpea, the voice will always call, a murmur or hum,
a spring burbling or a dammed-up flood. Locally sourced,
unforced, double-spaced & tortured into shape. Copyright
the Year of Our Lord blank blankety-blank, Amen.
Behold the ample galaxy, a naked miracle through the blinds.
Clean your damn windows and the bulb will bloom.
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Amy Lemmon is the author of five poetry collections, including Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press) and The Miracles (C&R Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Court Green, The Journal, Marginalia, and many other magazines and anthologies. Amy is Professor of English at the Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY, where she teaches writing, literature, and creativity studies. She lives in Astoria, Queens.
by Indu Parvathi
by Dion O'Reilly
I have no great fluency, but I love the cloud-sounds
the chords make when I push the una corda pedal,
the strange power of the black keys, every note,
a little person with a head—empty or full. I love
the confidence of the right hand and the shady
misgivings of the left, the practice pieces
I’ve tried, for years, to master. This time, I’m also
lying in my unwashed bed, listening to Sister
attempt “Für Elise” for the twentieth time. With every
discordant note, my mother knocks her off the bench—
The smack, the fall, the cry, then a faulty “Für Elise.”
On and on. This is how she taught us
to ride bikes, wash dishes, weed the endless lawn. It’s how
she drilled spelling, forced hotel corners. It’s how
I learned to look in the mirror, my ugliness working her up
for the next gut-punch, the next backhand to the head. It’s a miracle I love
piano, love to sing, love how it lifts me, most of the time, from my dark
churn of thoughts. I wait till no one’s home in case I break
when I get it wrong, or even when I get it right. There it is
again, the same blunt fist, the same ritual
of excoriation, the same aching crescendos and adagios
in every imperfect song I won't stop playing.
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Dion O'Reilly is the author of Sadness of the Apex Predator, Ghost Dogs, and Limerence, a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition, forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, The Slowdown, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran. She splits her time between a ranch in California and a residence in Bellingham.
by Jan Steckel
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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She dreams of comfrey and burdock,
feels through skin and spasmed muscles,
waits for marrow to hit the heart.
Pulls the stalks that serve for splints,
boils the tea that lays down bone,
mixes in ground egg- and oyster-shells.
They come for her father,
but after the crack, the scream,
he leaves the mending to her.
They give him a chicken, a hare,
or a passed-down brooch,
their gratitude mixed with suspicion.
To her he leaves the slow accretion
of the months, the strength
of calluses, the ache of rain.
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Jan Steckel’s fiction collection, Ghosts and Oceans, came out from Zeitgeist Press in 2023. Her poetry book, The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011), won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards for poetry. Her chapbooks Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her writing has appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus, and elsewhere.
by Angie Minkin
A flamboyance of slate-blue history—
these eyebrow-penciled water bearers,
these tales twice-told flock over cobblestones,
revolve around each other, faster and faster.
An end game looms.
Stone-faced, they recite odysseys of lost mates,
woven mud nests, tangled mangrove roots.
They haven’t lost their fancy footwork.
Not yet.
They dance together or alone, on one leg or two.
How straight they fly into the offing, the sun.
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Angie Minkin is a San Francisco-based, award-winning poet. A volunteer poetry reader with The MacGuffin, her work appears in that journal, Rattle, Unbroken Journal, The Poeming Pigeon, Rise Up Review, Birdy, and several others. Angie’s chapbook, Balm for the Living, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2023. She is also the co-author of Dreams and Blessings: Six Visionary Poets, published in 2020 by Blue Light Press. Angie travels to Oaxaca, Mexico whenever possible. See angieminkin.com.
by Merna Dyer Skinner
by Anya Kirshbaum
by Bleah Patterson
by Martha Silano
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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When the contours of mountains resemble coliseums.
Cathedrality of mountains.
Relief of roadlessness.
That there are lakes impossible to reach by car.
That from this window just behind the wing, 20F,
there are no signs of life.
Once I packed a bag with cheddar goldfish.
Once my son threw up before we even boarded the plane.
Cracks and fissures, cuneiform of rock. Backbones and capillaries,
the snaking green edged with bluffs (long-ago ocean?).
He will turn eighteen next week.
Brain-like contours—cerebral cortex or cerebellum?
Contours thin like the veins of leaves, fronds of a sword fern, feet of a coot.
Time passed like a silent rail in the reeds.
The folds very Egyptian, mummies reposed in their tombs.
Like an alligator’s enormous tail, though lacking snout and teeth.
Once I sang La crocodile il est malade, il est malade a Singapour.
All those years, I thought I was singing sangue a peu—a little blood.
Clouds less cumulus, more cumulonimbus.
Towns scattered with houses like paint chips.
From the ground he would wave to the passengers in the sky: Bye-bye, babies!
Claw-like hills, afghan of cloud not like fresh snow but snow a few days old,
the occasional indentation where a foot or tire met asphalt.
The crocodile is sick. A little mercy, a little blood.
Between fluffy swirls, black holes.
When the binky and the sippy cup.
When the diaper bag and the teething ring.
Cottoned from above
like first tracks on Lynx Pass,
a pristine path through aspen, lodgepole, spruce.
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Martha Silano has authored seven poetry books, including The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award finalist, and most recently, This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize. Acre Books will release Terminal Surreal, her book about living with ALS, in September 2025. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Paris Review, AGNI, North American Review, American Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Her poem "Love" appears in The Best American Poetry 2009.
by Sherry Fraser
by Meghan Sterling
Something about the way a mother
can keep herself from falling. Having
children ruins your life, my mother raised
her glass and toasted after my baby shower.
Something about the way the river turns, its
sunken blue like a stone in place of a doll’s eye.
Something about the myth of a mother’s love.
Love is not an automatic thing, my mother said.
What was it that ground us down to dirt? Something
about my head tilting up in the dark, cracking my
mother’s nose with my chin. My lips are lucky
to find her cheek, still smooth, still scented with leaves. Something about the turned back. Nothing drives
love away like loving too much, my mother said
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Meghan Sterling (she/her) is a bi/queer writer whose work is published in Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Rhino Poetry, Hunger Mountain, and many journals. Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize) came out in 2023. Her next collection, You Are Here to Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review Press), is forthcoming in 2025. Read her work at meghansterling.com.
by Kashiana Singh
by Tracey Knapp
by Chloe N. Clark
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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Today, someone I love told me
a joke. It wasn’t even that funny
but I laughed, let the sound fill my mouth
until it spilled out, made my lungs ache
with the push push of air
until even my bones hurt. Today,
one of my students told me to have
a lovely day, not even just a good
one, but a lovely one. I can imagine
that as a blessing, though the air was
cold and the sky was gray and I’ve been
holding a sense of dread under my skin
for days, no weeks, no I’ve been holding
it there for years. Today, I worked out
until my muscles tingled under my skin,
today I laid on the floor like this,
closed my eyes, and it was the closest feeling
to flying I might ever get. Today, I still
said “might” about impossible things. Today,
a friend and I made plans for the future and
the world felt like something I could hold
in the palm of my hand. Today, no one I loved
died. Today, I woke up breathing. Today,
I thought how much I wanted to give you
this day. Today, if I could, I’d push it
into your hands, say, here, here, here,
I’m here, you’re here. Today is going
to be good.
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Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Patterns of Orbit, Escaping the Body, and more. Her short story collection, Every Galaxy Is a Circle, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press.
by Lea Marshall