by Jennifer K. Sweeney
I’m nostalgic for your brand of practice disaster,
Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of four poetry collections: Foxlogic, Fireweed (Backwaters Press/Univ. of Nebraska), Little Spells, James Laughlin Award-winner How to Live on Bread and Music, and Salt Memory. The collaborative chapbook, Dear Question, with L.I. Henley, was published in late 2024 from Glass Lyre Press. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she teaches poetry at University of Redlands in California.
by Sati Mookherjee
It occurred to me this morning, that it is we, the living, who haunt
the places where our loved ones are lost. —SDP, text message
I sat with you among driftwood wrists
and wrought, stone-clutching bull kelp roots.
The morning unsunned by a clotted mist,
that slicked the rock and wadded the bay mute.
We watched the logs rocked as if by a hand,
keeping meter of indifferent lullaby.
Looked out, at the mainland. To the dark band
floating way offshore, a twitching skein
of … scoters? Brants? We couldn’t tell.
But only watched the quivering knot
thicken improbably, then unravel itself,
an engine, thousand-stroke and monoglot.
A wake swelled just then, the boat long passed.
And all the fists rose up still holding fast.
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Sati Mookherjee is the author of Eye (Ravenna Press, 2022) and Ways of Being (Albiso Award, MoonPath Press, 2023). Her collaborations with contemporary classical composers have been performed or recorded by ensemble and solo musicians. Recent work appears/is forthcoming in journals including Gulf Coast, RHINO, and Quarterly West. Recipient of an Artist Trust/ Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship Award, she presently serves on the Board of Directors of the Cascadia International Women’s Film Festival. See satimookherjee.com.
by Tanya Young
On a hot Saturday morning
Aunt Sugar packs us all up
Into her long green 1959 Pontiac
July whipping through the windows
Four children squirm in the back seat
When Aunt Beulah suddenly shouts
She sees Jesus in the light of
The passenger seat mirror
We pull up to the tiny
Hebron Baptist Church
Two Magnolia trees, large and proud
Framing a much-used white tent
There’s Aunt Snookie with her
Dyed too-black hair
Wildly haloing her shoulders
Clip-on earrings hanging like purple grapes
Close beside her is Cousin Zippo
In his bulging tight pants
With a little James Brown swagger
He helps us with our picnic basket
In the stale summer heat
The preacher gathers us all up
For a short walk to Croatan Sound
To give us a taste of what is holy
Along the path dripping
With hanging grey moss
I spot a snake in its sleeve of heat
Eye-slits ajar taking a good look
Now, we are all Methodists
Used to a little sprinkling
And this dunking business is all new
But Aunt Beulah insists she needs it
The preacher leads Aunt Beulah to the water
She holds her nose and back she goes
For the cold immersion
New Testament words flung over the water
Aunt Beulah’s skirt bellows like a blow fish
Her feet start kicking like she might drown
She hovers a little above the earth
Even flies a little—a single blurred moment
But by her own strength she pops up
Coughing spitting gasping cursing
You SOB, that was too long
You about drowned me, Aunt Beulah shouts
Aunt Sugar quickly gathers us all up
We take off running— Kicking it into high gear
Cousin Zippo close to busting his pants
Aunt Snooki’s hair bringing up the rear
We snatch up our deviled eggs
Corn and still-warm fried chicken
Cover it with tinfoil and the
Un-reborn Methodists scatter for home
We leave the lemon pound cake
That sunny yellow circle
Its center missing like a mouth leaking
Bless your heart
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Tanya Young spent most of her life in North Carolina and is currently retired and writing poetry in Sarasota, Florida. She says, "I do think you have to take what comes to you and write it. Take your heart out for a ride—take your experiences and pack them into a poem offering the magic and mysterious power of storytelling with words that surprise you, move you, heal you."
by Erin Wilson
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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My mother did not bear me to metaphysical platitudes.
She pushed me out like a package through her purple crucifix,
her luxurious black fur a bramble at earth's door.
I spend my years recycling energy through this flesh flap.
And yet somewhere in the branches of the greenish-white sycamore
that grows stubbornly from the crescent of my mind, sings a bird.
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Erin Wilson's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Manhattan Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Bear Review, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Lake Effect, Verse Daily, Pembroke, and elsewhere internationally. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet; her second, Blue (whose title poem won a Pushcart), is about depression, grief, and the transformative power of art. She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory, in Northern Ontario, Canada, the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek, devoted to a handful of things, all of them poetry. Some of her best friends are trees. She refuses to carry a cell phone.
by Alyssa Sinclair
by Cindy Veach
At twenty-one he gets a Freedom Quilt.
She gets to make thirteen quilts for her dowry
but will never marry
if she sews hearts on a quilt.
A dowry is no guarantee.
If she takes the last stitch
or sews hearts on a quilt
or doesn’t finish a quilt
or puts in the last stitch
or breaks a needle on her wedding quilt
or doesn’t finish a quilt
or quilts the thirteenth quilt
or breaks a needle on her wedding quilt
or quilts the top before she’s engaged
or quilts the thirteenth quilt
or breaks a thread
or quilts the top before she’s engaged
or gives him a Wandering Foot quilt
or breaks a thread
or breaks a vined border
he’ll never settle down
and she’ll be an old maid
a broken border of vines
and misfortune.
She'll be an old maid,
never to marry.
He'll have the fortune
to have a Freedom Quilt.
The poem was inspired by a lecture by Lisa Erlandson as reported in The Gainesville Daily Register by Heather Pilkington, February 29, 2012. https://www.gainesvilleregister.com/community/quilting-myths-busted/article_0193c469-705b-53e1-a99c-4e94ef4ddedd.html
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Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press), a 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist, and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book Must Read. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, she is poetry co-editor of MER.
by Janet Jennerjohn
My son, a new cop in a middle-sized city
in the Midwest, sends me a text, a video
of him mirandizing a little lost puppy. The
video is filmed in the middle of his mid-
night shift, it’s grainy and night-vision red.
The juvey pitbull mix pads toward my son’s
voice: “You have the right to remain silent.”
He does, the screen turns to black as his
tiny nose approaches me. I imagine it is wet
and cold. He is only a baby, abandoned in a
waste water tunnel, or left among the un-
homed beneath a train trestle, or alone and
shivering, his shadow large amid the mosaic
of puddles populating an underpass. My son’s
voice is kind, and reflective, a little playful. He
knows that puppy better than any of us. When
he was found, in Barrio Kennedy, a poor neighbor-
hood in a large South American city, I hope
that Colombian cop whispered to him in a kind voice:
Buenas noches, Muchachito.
Ven aca, mijito;
Ven aca.
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Janet Jennerjohn is a recently retired college English instructor who now enjoys working with the children at her neighborhood Milwaukee public elementary school. She is the author of a bilingual chapbook, Cara dividida/Divided Face, and has had writing published in Sheltering with Poems, New Growth Arts Review, and Studies in the Humanities, among others.
by Carol Dorf
I said at dinner, When I was immortal then . . .
A guest interrupts, when were you immortal?
so yes, I back track because she’s a philosopher.
She’s a philosopher, so yes I back track
and say before I knew, before waiting for the tests.
Before I knew, before the tests, before the waits,
mortality belonged to another generation, or a book.
In the book mortality belonged to another generation
though somehow I made it to the front of the line.
Somehow I made it to the front of the line
so I told the philosopher, ok, I forgot.
I forgot the disconsolations of philosophy—
the long distance between rage and miracle.
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Carol Dorf is a Zoeglossia fellow, whose books include Theory-Headed Dragon. Their writing appears on the Poetry Foundation website, and in journals including Pleiades, About Place, Cutthroat, The Museum of Americana, Exposition Review, Unlikely Stories, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, and Maintenant. They are founding poetry editor of Talking Writing and taught math in Berkeley USD. They have led poetry workshops in venues that include Berkeley City College, conferences, and science museums.
by Crystal Stone
There are yellow skies and no
storm sirens. The hail bursts
large enough to break my window
and I think about letting nature in,
to clean my carpet. The thunder is
a heartbeat, mine. My eyes June
with longer days. They warm
and lengthen. The prairie grasses
outside look blue because my eyes
want them to water beaches
instead of streets. I want my bed
to boat my body on the coast I miss.
My hair is spring, blooms flyaways.
I’ve lost so much. Many poems, always
listening to others. They tornado my mind
empty of my words. I don’t want
to sound like the men I’ve talked to.
Only the women. Only the earth.
Only the grasses, wind, hail and sky.
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Crystal Stone is author of six collections of poetry including Knock-Off Monarch (2019), All the Places I Wish I Died (2021), Gym Bras (2022), Civic Duty (2022), This is Not a Poem (2023), and White Lies (Forthcoming, Fernwood Press 2024). Her poems have been published in numerous national and international poetry journals including The Threepenny Review, Salamander, Poetry Daily, and many others. She received her MFA from Iowa State University, where she gave a TEDx talk entitled 'The Transformative Power of Poetry.'
by Nylah Lyman
after Charles Brooks
imagine a room
of rich brown wood
scrolled f-holes for windows
conducting light and sound
walls like hourglass hips
curved maple ribcage
polished to a high gloss
an interior world of planking
shattered and reshaped
by skillful hands
a body restored to wholeness
dedicated to one art
a series of exquisite notes
those perfect throaty fifths
the breathless glissandi
a box of quivering music
singing your life so beautifully
that you can’t even tell
where it once hurt
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Nylah Lyman’s first collection of poetry, Frail Union, was published by Encircle Publications in 2021. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, the minnesota review, and other journals. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program.
by Dana Tenille Weekes
i prefer empty paper towel rolls
to film daddy when we cook hot dogs
for dinner. daddy takes the marigold
apron blushed with bleach in two spots.
it’s the one i always give him & he gives
Julia Child a beard & Bajan accent
his tenor breaking both our funny bones:
& once dey have boiled you must take dem
& slice each into triangles like dis. you see?
you see is daddy’s cue for me to hold tight
onto that paper towel roll, tilt
my braided ponytail & zoom in
to the rubbed-away cutting board
as rice gripes in a pot’s humidity & onions
perspire to the finish on a back burner.
daddy tells me, we never need much salt.
he says often, we never need much.
reminds me, you can cook good without salt
(and butter).
the things he says would rile the real Julia.
bottle clanking bottle in the cupboard. its oak
-knotted belly binged with curry & cumin
& grounded sorts whose names
i am still learning. the sort of things
ships once risked their hulls for in vexed
seas & occupied ambitions, i would soon learn.
each bottle past my tippytoed arms on otherwise
unoccupied shelves i never notice
as daddy tells me, zoom in
come closer & closer & closer
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Dana Tenille Weekes lives in the swirl of Washington, DC, where she navigates the worlds of law, policy, and politics. Some of her poems can be found, or are forthcoming, in A Gathering of the Tribes, Apogee, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Elevation Review, and Torch Literary Arts. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist in Rhino Poetry’s 2022 Founders’ Prize.
by Emily Blair
"I-Special” is the title
of a charcoal drawing by Georgia O’Keeffe.
“If that’s not what’s inside us I don’t know what is,”
says one woman gallery-goer to another,
who replies that she was thinking the same thing.
To me it looks like the letter “I,”
which seems even more bold and embarrassing.
That’s why in poetry we call it “the speaker.”
A little symbolic distance, like when the gynecologist
drapes a paper cloth over my thighs.
A friend reminds me that all poems
are persona poems, including this one.
“I” is a fiction, “you” is a fiction,
and so is “the speaker,” popping up
out of the ground like the undead
at the poem’s start. I’m reminded of
a video I checked out of the library
years ago. Actors in chunky sweaters
walked around the Lake District
reciting the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth
as if they thought it up on the spot.
How can you tell the lyric I from the confessional I?
Does it depend on who’s talking?
And if we think we know what’s inside them?
The figure in “I-Special” has a little loop at the top.
It could be a sardine can key, or a tent stake.
It could be a vagina.
It could be a shape
saying something
we have no words for.
Note: Alfred Stieglitz is supposed to have said upon first seeing Georgia O’Keeffe’s work, “Finally, a woman on paper!” Georgia O’Keeffe herself said of her work, “I found I could say things with colors and shapes I couldn’t say in any other way—things I had no words for.”
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Emily Blair lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poetry has appeared in The Iowa Review, Sixth Finch, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, and The Gettysburg Review, among many other places. She has received New York Foundation of Arts Fellowships in both Poetry and Fiction.
by Barbara Sabol
by Cara Waterfall
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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by Shara McCallum
I grow weary of not using the word cunt.
Hers is the hairy mess I want, precisely that cunt.
Don’t offer me a neatly trimmed or, God forbid,
shaved, depilated, waxed, exfoliated cunt.
I disavow the ones still posing as virgins,
won’t suffer lightly those ever-prepubescent cunts.
Nor even wyfe or witch, reeking of myth, burned
for the crime of possessing her human cunt.
The one I need, the one I’m calling on now, is she
of the cuntiest-ways-of-knowing-herself cunt.
She, the alpha and omega, unshackled
by the chaos of the universe cunt.
She, the OG, motherfucking cunt come
to rain down fire on all our cuntishness.
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From Jamaica and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including Behold (forthcoming in 2026), No Ruined Stone (winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry), and Madwoman (winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize). In her youth, Miami was her old stomping grounds. McCallum now lives in Pennsylvania and teaches at Penn State University.
by Jesse Curran
On a street named Sea Cove
there stands a Japanese maple.
It’s called an orange dream.
It halts me. It ceases
the stride I’ve long used
to steady the buzzing inside me.
It’s been a full year
since he slipped away
into the soft sleep of a cold night.
I haven’t seen him in any red birds
on the porch, nor in any blue birds
on the sill, nor in any doves in the gutter.
I haven’t felt his ghost
fluttering in the breeze
or shifting the curtain.
There’s been no glimpse
in the mirror, the other world
hovering inside this one.
Instead, just this.
I’m here. My body
warm and streaming.
Here, the damp gray dawn
breath surging
cells swirling.
The tree is on fire.
Living
is so searing.
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Jesse Curran is a mother, poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals including About Place, After the Art, Allium, Blueline, and Ruminate. She teaches in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury. www.jesseleecurran.com
by Luci Huhn
by Jessica Furtado
Investigation: Therapist’s Notes
(an erasure from Stephen King’s Carrie)
The victim of wild talent, we suspect
she was put into an extreme situation
of guilt and stress; an advent
of terrible events worn as a corsage.
Herself, a prayer;
her voice, a full-length mirror
bright with tea roses.
No one could understand
the brute courage it had taken
to leave herself open
to a creeping existence,
restless with tiredness or headache.
She kept waning, a strain
as if smiling inside
another’s body, forcing
her to run and run and run;
a terrific drain on the body’s resources.
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Jessica Furtado is a multi-passionate artist whose visual work has been featured in Grub Street, Muzzle Magazine, Waxwing, & elsewhere, and whose writing has appeared in Qwerty, Rogue Agent, & Stirring, among others. Jessica’s poetry was a finalist in Best of the Net (2020), and her debut chapbook, A Kiss for the Misbehaved (2023), is available from BatCat Press. To see what she’s up to next, visit Jess at jessicafurtado.com.
by Marjorie Maddox
if I’m someone she should know,
pay attention to, bother having coffee with,
talk with about the father who raped her at twelve,
about my father, about the slant of rainy light after
you’re weeping for half a life and then some and
when/if you leave the toilet paper unwinding from the top
or bottom, and what our papas said the two days after,
and avocados and kumquats, and the strange
geometric shapes that cascade into our dreams
five days each year before the equinox, and if
I’m well known enough for her to pry open my palm
and slice my lifelines with an X-Acto knife—would I
do that for her?—and have I won a Pulitzer yet, and
what color were the eyes of God when I looked straight
at Him for three minutes without blinking once, Ok
maybe once, and may she have that last bottle of wine,
could she borrow a glass, and how much does The New Yorker
pay, do I think they would consider her work, she’s started
writing, too, have I slept with anyone there, and does the mold
in my studio make my eyes itch in the morning—or evening,
she’s heard both—because she really wants to know about the time
the London editor who knew the New York editor who knew me
from someone at the colony or raved about my work on Eskimos or
transplants or something like that and later sat on a committee
that judged that really important prize—she can’t remember
which one right now because, thanks again, she had a bit too much
of my Merlot, but am I that writer, the one she’s heard
something about, the one she should know?
No, I say, no, though I am someone
writing, trying to write, someone.
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Poetry Moment host for WPSU-FM, Presence assistant editor, and Professor Emerita of English at Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry—most recently How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled?, In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, Small Earthly Space, and Seeing Things—plus a story collection, four children’s books, and the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone Poetry (co-editor). See marjoriemaddox.com.
by Christy Prahl