by Kristina Andersson Bicher
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
by Topaz Winters
Some things are obvious: I write my best poetry
when we’re not on speaking terms. The cellulite
on my thighs grows by the day, blubber
both weeping & whale song. I take pills to forget
that my father sounds his happiest when speaking
in Hindi. You ask whether I’ve eaten even
when I’m angry with you. My grandparents’ house
used to be magic, until I was fifteen & it was a house.
The way you grasp my hand smells like
cigarette smoke, patchouli, desire, map, so ordinary
I can forget how extraordinary all this is. I want you
to choose me more than I want you to love me.
Now you know everything I know about my father.
Rilke says go to the limits of your longing.
Janis Joplin says freedom is just another word
for nothin’ left to lose. I say I’m still mad at you,
you know, & you say shut up & fall asleep
on the other end of the phone. This is what it must
be like for people who believe in God: knowing
someone else is there, breathing, in the dark.
____________________________________________________________
Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022) & Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press & lives between New York & Singapore.
by Ruth Hoberman
First stop, CVS: cards for the grandkids. Red hearts
like catalpa leaves—is this what love looks like?
Nothing like the maroon mess inside me, with its
twittering valves and worry. Study its dimensions
(breadth, height, depth, by imagined disaster)
and you’ll see anything can happen—husband, dog,
daughter, grandkids crushed (toppling masonry, coyote,
truck)—though mornings, there they are unscathed.
So why still this slip of muskrat through the mind—
brown furred curve surfacing—quick swimmer, gone
but hunkered near? Even in daylight, I feel the hush
and sigh of its breathing. Holstered, ready:
call me the quick-draw master of panic. And here
in my hands two cards: animals holding hearts.
We love you says the unicorn.
We love you says the golden bear.
____________________________________________________________
Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and personal essays in (most recently) Salamander, Solstice, Ibbetson Street, and Nixes Mate.
by Lisa Zimmerman
After a photograph by Julie Adams
My neighbor says whenever she’s sad she sits down
with a cup of tea and writes a list of fifty things
she loves, you know, like chocolate chip cookies,
the fresh warmth of laundry spilled from the dryer,
the crescent moon held between tree branches.
I’m remembering this with my arms full of wet towels,
the petition to stop fracking in the far pasture
denied, my heart busted by that and other losses
with their many sharp points. I didn’t know I loved so much
of this vanishing world—early spring breeze rattling cattails
along the pond, bright sword of sunlight on mountain snow,
a toddler singing in the shopping cart, the boy who holds the door
open for me, the car that waits, the promised rain that comes—
and you, daughter, years before the fire that took the barn,
before the divorce, before you moved to the city
for work. I see you ambling home on your chestnut gelding,
your long hair and his long tail, swinging
the lasso as if you could capture the setting sun,
to keep a perfect day from disappearing, to hold it
like a flame inside your heart for the dark days to come.
____________________________________________________________
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award winner), The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press), and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Vox Populi, Cultural Daily, and many other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology.
by Michelle Matz
I watch the plane approach the gate,
the travelers disembark
weary & bedraggled
readjusting straps, shifting a bag’s weight
one hand to another.
A woman stops, abruptly
turns to her teenage son,
where is your bag?
I watch as the drama unfolds—
the bag left in the overhead compartment
fault angrily volleyed
though it’s clear it was the boy’s responsibility
to remember. It is a loss easily recovered—
the gate agent already on the phone—
but what broke is broken
still—
his mother’s hands
clenched, her voice
a blade,
while the boy
still learning the shape
of his life
quietly averts his eyes.
____________________________________________________________
Michelle Matz’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in numerous publications, including Mud Season Review, Atlanta Review, The Lascaux Review, Dodging the Rain, and Atticus Review. Her chapbook was a semifinalist in the Ledge Poetry Contest and was published in 2006. Her book, Acoustic Shadow, was recently published by Main Street Rag. Michelle lives in San Francisco where she is a high school dean.
by Kristin Ryan
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
____________________________________________________________
She is bruised by sunlight.
Uncertain hands
move towards
a tea cup full of grapes.
She remembers it being easier this way.
Bowls are simply too much:
they can trick you into filling them—
what if you can’t stop—
Listen: sometimes a girl can’t eat,
becomes afraid of kitchens and knives.
The way the air presses skin, through
blood into bone, into the marrow.
No, it’s better to stay here
in the living room where blues and yellows weep
from the starry nights, the sunflowers,
the wheat fields on the walls. She wonders if
this room will become her wheat field—
if his face will become her gun.
____________________________________________________________
Kristin Ryan is a poet and essayist working towards healing, and full sleeves of tattoos. She is a recipient of the 2017 Nancy D. Hargrove Editor's Prize in Poetry, and her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Her poems and essays have been featured in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Jabberwock Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Moonchild Magazine, Serotonin Lit, and SWWIM Every Day among others. She holds an MFA from Ashland University.
by Lesley Lambton
How could I
have forgotten
the dread
of having
to choose
between the dim
shaft of the stairs
and the bright
cage of the elevator?
____________________________________________________________
Lesley Lambton was born in the North of England but lived in Connecticut for many years where she worked at her local library organizing programs and events. She recently moved to the Isle of Man in the middle of the Irish Sea. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and journals including Connecticut River Review, The Worcester Review, and Right Hand Pointing. Her chapbook Crocus was published by the Collective Press in Wales.
by Jennifer K. Sweeney
I’m nostalgic for your brand of practice disaster,
your dress-up apocalypse pop-up shops
and school bus bunkers waiting with flats
of tin can dinners for the ball to drop,
nostalgic for the simplicity of your question:
whether modern life stood on nothing more
than strands of old code, a few worn fibers
holding up the whole frame.
Who knows? you seemed to say,
it was a good run, and maybe retracting
like an industrial tape measure back to yore
without electricity or running water
would be good for us, too soft, too
comfortable with our start-ups
and millennium pop songs. I confess, I liked
to say your initials, all caps like a license plate
on a Studebaker, hard K that signaled
a kitsch of danger. Like Oz
behind the curtain on its tinkered pulley,
you were all preface, setting up some high school
prank where we know it’s a stunt but go
along with the staging anyway because we love
a good strobe light and punch bowl.
Before txtng would consume language,
small towns slung into opioid stupor,
social media-eroded hours, before orange alerts
and orange tyrants, wars we couldn’t end,
school lockdown shooting sprees,
fire seasons that would parch the west,
hurricanes that would steal cities—the list is long,
Y2K, do you think you can stay up late enough?
Did you see it all coming in your lines of legacy code,
how the unraveling would be so slow we might
just miss it, doom-scrolling and doordashing,
rage-tweeting, masked and shutdown, 20/20, right
into a pandemic no one thought to be scared of?
I walked through a Midwest neighborhood
that last night—did we ever firmly agree
when the century officially ended and began?—
saw families in lawn chairs in their stockpiled
garages with coolers of beer casually rooting
for the ruins. If this was the apocalypse
they would go down quietly with hot wings
by the light of a mini antenna tv. Pitched toward
the futurama of flying cars and space pods and
freeze-dried meals, you offered up this Frankenstein
ruse at the rise of big tech, where we would
count down, zone by zone and some invisible binding
that held us would let go. I miss that
teenage melodrama, the metallic-painted amateur hour
you gathered the world around and did nothing
but usher us into the continuation of the story,
and when you died down and time was revealed
to be a construct that wouldn’t kill us, we resumed
living toward all the other things that would.
That night hospitals gave whistles to their patients
just in case the call-bells failed to ring nurses.
Y2K, I think we might be blowing them decades
too late and it turns out that we can’t hear
a cry for help the way we used to.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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
____________________________________________________________
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!
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________
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
____________________________________________________________
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
____________________________________________________________
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.”
____________________________________________________________
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