by Deborah Hauser
Dear Sir/Dear Parental Unit/No/Dear Sperm Donor/No/Dear
by Adela Najarro
by Donna Vorreyer
Of course, someone has named it “apron” belly.
You know. The kind that women of a certain
age begin to show, a pouch of weight below
the navel that resists attempts at flattening.
Apron. As in part of the road where the slow
or damaged pull aside. As in dinner on the table
when the man gets home. As in domestic, tamed.
As in expected to toil and remain unstained.
As in tradition. As in remember your place. It could
be called prosperous. Could be shield. Could be
creator, battlefield, but it needs no label.
A body is a body. A woman already has a name.
____________________________________________________________
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (forthcoming, 2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her poetry, fiction, and essay work have appeared in Ploughshares, Cherry Tree, Poet Lore, Salamander, Harpur Palate, Booth, and elsewhere. She lives and creates in the Chicago area and hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
by Mercedes Rodriguez
1.
The apartment is dangerously cold at night.
The hearth is a perimeter too far from my body.
I’ve taken to freezing a glass of milk before bed
And using it as a doorstopper.
2.
Some days, the heat tickles my toes. Others,
I’m peering through a crack, half-expecting
The neighbor’s nativity scene to come alive—
How long is too long when conspiring?
3.
After saying yes to a sleepover, I wake to a lover
Carelessly making his way to the bathroom.
He reassures me he’s not an angry drunk.
I never told him to pack a pair of slippers.
____________________________________________________________
Mercedes Rodriguez is a poet from Los Angeles, CA. They are an MFA poetry candidate at North Carolina State University.
by Lindsay Rockwell
the rooks and hives have gone quiet
what appears to be the ear of God
is a small boy's palm
catching the rain
a woman begs
to be felled by this rain
the sound it makes
silence gone drumming
a cello lifts from a high up window
there's a pool before the temple
and she before the pool
weeps in her scarf and shoes
I lost my mother to a surgeon's slip
hers to the sea
smoke purls from a chimney
winter's coming—the wait for sorrow
she lost her mother to the sea
mine to a surgeon's slip
before the pool I weep
in my scarf and shoes
from the temple's high up window
a cello lifts
the sound it makes—gone silence
I beg to be felled
by this rain that soothes the boy
his small palm
mistaken for the ear of God
the rooks and hives are quiet
____________________________________________________________
Lindsay Rockwell is poet-in-residence for the Hartford Connecticut’s Episcopal Cathedral Church. She has recently published or forthcoming work in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Tupelo Quarterly, Radar, SWWIM Every Day, among others. Her collection, Ghost Fires, was published by Main Street Rag, April 2023. She is the recipient of the Andrew Glaser Poetry Prize, fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, and Edith Wharton/The Mount residency.
by Jennifer Markell
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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It isn’t green at all, this suit
you call Dress Greens,
not the color of living things
but what remains when a river
of ice is drained. You align
your shirt buttons with the front
fly seam, straight gig line
with the belt buckle’s edge.
Pin a grenade to your lapel,
sallow eagle, frozen in flight.
Turning to face the mirror,
you catch your reflection taking aim.
____________________________________________________________
Jennifer Markell’s first poetry collection, Samsara (Turning Point, 2014) was named a "Must Read Book" by the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her second collection, Singing at High Altitude, was published in 2022 by The Main Street Rag. She has received awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, The Comstock Review, The New England Poetry Club, and the Rita Dove Prize in Poetry (Finalist, International Literary Awards.) Her poems have been included in numerous publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Consequence, Diode, RHINO, Storm Cellar, and The Women's Review of Books.
by Roey Leonardi
Because the man at the fruit stand knows Mama
from a lifetime ago, he fetches her a basket
fresh off the tractor’s back. Leaving the orchard,
she tells me what the trees have seen.
The spring before she arrived,
one Skinner boy shot the other
through a clearing in their boughs
which at that time of year were blossom-blushed
such that when buckshot rang through the boy
it dotted the peach petals with scarlet
not unlike the mark on a dogwood flower
which my grandmama says is a kind of stigmata,
though she wouldn’t put it like that,
too lofty a word for a thing as solid as faith, or a tree.
Why? I ask Mama and she looks at me the way
Grandmama looks at her new husband
when he asks if Carolina wrens live round these parts,
bewildered, as if to say, Don’t you know where you are?
Here where cousin Dewey killed a man in a bar fight
with a single punch.
Here where Mama’s junior prom date died at age sixteen
beneath a tractor wheel.
Here where grandmama divided the serpent’s head from its spine
with the blade of her gardening hoe.
Here where something was done to Aunt Lorraine
that she won’t speak of, even now,
except to say the body remembers what the mind lets go.
Here where everything and nothing grows.
Land of red clay, kudzu, whitetail, lightning bug.
Mama says due to development
the orchard gets smaller each year.
We cling to the earth’s jaw even as it yawns shut,
knowing all the same that we will be undone.
We were born with a taste for undoing.
____________________________________________________________
Roey Leonardi is a poet and writer from South Carolina. She is currently an MFA candidate at Indiana University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Bat City Review, Epiphany, The Harvard Advocate, and Pleiades.
by Traci Brimhall
Fool that I am, I confuse dust motes for angels
heralding my failures. Anxiety strokes my brain
with commandments. I predict the sinking
darkness that will someday call your name.
I forecast the way moonlight will fall from
the sky like a ladder and lift you away.
I’ve been dying to tell you the skull is an icon
of time and a black halo howls around you
in my thoughts, but you roll your eyes and undress
my confessions. Watching you water the garden is
a master class in a theology of happiness, but
no matter how the generations of roses bloom,
I lift each honeycomb like a reliquary from its box.
I forecast disaster at each internet search, every
tea stain in my cup. Each bite of dried apple
deepens the belief that darkness is coming soon.
You kiss my eyelids and ask me to become an oracle
of sunsets, foretell gorgeous and unborn days,
call out the best hilltops for a beautiful tomorrow.
I promise to try if you promise the next kiss will
deserve the stars’ gossip. Let what happens next
be sacred and overlooked, like the missing teeth
of saints. Before the waiting angel falls from
the sky to behold you, my love, let’s make
a tomorrow of our hands, a dawn of our mouths,
our bodies the one future of light that matters.
____________________________________________________________
Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing and narrative medicine at Kansas State University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Love Prodigal (published November 2024 by Copper Canyon). She’s received fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, the National Park Service, and the Academy of American Poets. She’s the Poet Laureate for the State of Kansas.
by Jessica Cuello
What if your name is not yours
but the absent father, a stranger
written on your worksheet,
a glyph on your face
carried through the halls
of West Street Elementary
where the teachers gaze
out the great glass doors longingly,
perpetual pale light at either end,
and you carry a giant French Horn,
the school’s horn on loan,
its swirl a beautiful coil of gold
opening like a bell and it calls to you
though it is heavy
bigger than you
and you stop every block to rest
to change hands and deep inside
the case the dark velvet form
holds the instrument
and you are quiet as survival
walking dreamlike
past the crossing guard
on a street you think of
as your journey
because you walk alone
and everything that happens to you
happens on this route
between name and apartment,
the grey one that leans
sideways and gets Condemned
in a pale paper
pasted over a window
and when you live there
you listen through the walls,
your whole body an ear,
and though you quit later
because you have
the wrong embouchure
and don’t practice enough,
the horn glints
behind your shoulder
in silent wait.
____________________________________________________________
Jessica Cuello’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book, Liar, was selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize. Cuello is the recipient of a 2023 NYSCA Artist Grant and is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review. She teaches French in Central NY.
by Elizabeth O’Connell-Thompson
by Tina Mozelle Braziel
never fruits. Yet each March blossoms burst
along every branch raised over our neighbors’
bed of daffodils and glinting windmill art.
Its pale petals screen dark limbs, a bridal veil
drawing attention to what’s obscured.
Alive and flowering, it’s unlike the windthrows
or widow-makers Nick usually offers us to cut
and haul to our woodpile. Generous to a fault,
he grins as if we’re doing him the favor.
He says it has been pretty and still is. Tells us
they planted it on their wedding day. But now
that Judy says it’s invasive, it has to go.
Married four years to their twenty, what do we know
of when to hew and root out a beginning,
of how to save all that has been cultivated since?
We know oak burns steady. Dogwood catches quick.
Sweetgum is nearly impossible to split. Poplar
puts out too little heat. And flowering pear?
What else can we say? But that we need fire
and wood to feed it. We’ll haul it home,
fill our stove, learn something of how it burns.
____________________________________________________________
Tina Mozelle Braziel won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for Known by Salt (Anhinga Press), and her book, Glass Cabin (Pulley Press), co-authored by her husband James Braziel, was named Southern Literary Review’s 2024 Poetry Book of the Year. A meditation on hope, on frustration, and on people’s places in the wilder parts of the world, Glass Cabin chronicles the thirteen years the Braziels spent building their home by hand in rural Alabama.
by Geraldine Connolly
I treasured that tiny dormer room.
When I opened the window, my hair blew into the night
and across the yard above the howls of beagles
as the moon splintered, the wind creaked.
Insects spoke to me, birds knew my dreams.
Beneath a wool blanket my flashlight shone,
lantern by which I read through the night, hungry
for stories. There was no broken glass,
no tanks and coffins, no boys going off to war.
I loved being snug in that room, while outside
wild onions grew among prickly fir trees, briar roses.
The rumbling of trucks from the interstate echoed.
Cooing doves, everyday birds made their
daily music on the patio rinsed with rain.
Nothing sparkled yet nothing was dim
there in the tangled paradise, my own.
Not yet a death. Not yet a funeral.
Where daffodils rose up like lions.
____________________________________________________________
Geraldine Connolly has published Food for the Winter, Province of Fire, Hand of the Wind, and Aileron. She taught at The Writers Center, Chautauqua Institution, and University of Arizona Poetry Center and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland Arts Council, and Breadloaf Writers Conference. Her work appears in many anthologies including Poetry 180: A Poem A Day for High School Students, Keystone Poets, and The Sonoran Desert: A Field Guide.
by Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett tr. Paolina Secco-Suardo Grismondi
To temper an obstinate and wicked
Pain that has been burrowing into me for some time
I try, now and again, to cry out piteously
To the one who, oh miserable me, preys upon my heart.
But, a disciple of desire, my voice
Is scarcely heard, and already it moans and shouts.
What a harsh refrain, and so inimical to my longings,
I am deterred from begging for mercy.
And a thought says to me: fool, do you not see
That you always receive both scorn and injury
If you throw yourself meekly at the feet of someone cruel?
Thus, in silence, I breed a poorly concealed
Affliction in my heart, which is where the seed
Of that cruel love that gives me such despair took root.
Per alleggiar un’ostinata e ria
Doglia che da gran tempo in me si annida,
Talor tento mandar pietose grida
A chi, lassa, il mio cor tiene in balìa!
Ma seguace al desir la voce mia
È fatta appena, e già si lagna, e grida.
Che dura tema, e alle mie brame infida
Dal dimandar pietà ratta mi svia.
E mi dice un pensier: folle non vedi
Quale ognora ti acquisti e scorno e danno
Se umile ad un crudel ti getti ai piedi?
Così tacendo il mal celato affanno
Cresco nel petto, ove locò le sue sedi
Quel fiero amor che mi dà tanto affanno.
____________________________________________________________
Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator who increasingly finds herself in a nudiustertian mode. Her recent work has appeared in The Stillwater Review, ANMLY, Cagibi, carte blanche, The Laurel Review, Broad River Review, La Piccioletta Barca, The Fourth River, and Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, among others. She is currently working a collection of villanelles as well as a series of translations from Medieval French, Portuguese, and Italian literature. Born and raised in Bergamo, Italy, Paolina Secco-Suardo Grismondi (1746-1801), was hugely successful in the literary world of her time. As a member of literary academies, she published under the name Lesbia Cidonia. Her poetry bears the stamp of her multi-lingual education and her appreciation of classical literature and classical literary forms, and she frequently enlivens pastoral and arcadian tropes with commentary revealing her personal experience and exploration of gendered embodiment.
by Paula Finn
We find a bench.
I sit with him as if I can barely recall
what he did to me in bed that night.
I let it go for now so we can talk.
We’ve always been good at that.
He tries out his loony theory
about the masculinity of red wine,
unaware that since his death
the word has holed itself up
in a cabin in the woods, loaded for bear.
I let it pass. He turns
to asking questions freighted
with the wish my life’s gone well.
I see the old blue kitchen.
One Sunday after breakfast,
my chin cupped in his palm,
his index finger tapping my face
to count aloud the freckles, one-by-one.
A hundred and two, he beams,
as if I’ve won a prize.
____________________________________________________________
Paula Finn is the author of the chapbook, Eating History. Her work has appeared widely in journals. Finn’s poetry is also featured in From the Fire, a piece of musical theater capturing the historic tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the ensuing female immigrant worker organizing. This dramatic oratorio won the Best New Musical Theater award at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. Finn is a graduate of the NYU Poetry Program.
by Autumn Newman
by Gail Goepfert
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
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—I paint flowers so they will not die.
Frida Kahlo
We are watchers, Frida—
aching but obedient to light,
resurrected by shocks of color.
Mornings you pluck
bougainvillea or pearly
gardenias, plait them in your hair
above your brow. I shadow
the fire of spring poppies
and the profusion of lilacs
and pink hydrangea.
With the organ pipe cactus,
you spike a sage-green fence
on the borders of La Casa Azul
tuned to the rhythms of sun
and rain—its lavender-white
flowers tint while you sleep.
Our love-eyes like greedy
tongues lick the rare-red
of wild angel trumpets.
We are aficionados. Pregnant
with joy in the garden’s cosmos.
We pursue hues like lovers’
lips, stalk columns of yellow
calla-lilies, praise the allure
of honey-petalled sunflowers
and the lobes of violet irises.
We thrive on iridescence—
our eyes attuned to its blessing.
Watchers. We bend near
in reverence to the bloom—
all pain humbled, stilled
for a time by beauty.
____________________________________________________________
Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, authored books that include A Mind on Pain (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Tapping Roots (Kelsay Books, 2018), Get Up Said the World (Červená Barva Press, 2020), and Self-Portrait with Thorns (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). This Hard Business of Living, a collaborative chapbook with Patrice Boyer Claeys, was released in 2021 from Seven Kitchens Press, and two photoverse books, Honey from the Sun, 2020, and Earth Cafeteria, 2023, celebrate fruits and vegetables with Claeys’s centos and Goepfert’s photography. Recent work appears in Ran Away with the Star Bassoon and Tiny Moments. She has been a lifelong educator of junior high through college; her quest is to seek beauty.
by Lisa Bellamy
by Dana Henry Martin
The tree is a tree and it has a soul just as the body does. —Rabbi Amnon
The tree is a tree and it has a soul just as
the body does. I touch its bark the way
I used to touch your hips, torso.
I gather scattered leaves and press them
in your favorite book because they are
of the tree the way your hair was of you,
the way your fingernails were of you, even
after they’d been cut off and discarded.
I water the tree and hope the water seeks
roots which in turn open to accept water,
the way we spent a lifetime learning to accept
matters of faith. I imagine the roots
being shaped like fingers that fan and grip
the soil, each one with a distinct curve
so they can be identified by feel
in the endless dark. When twigs fall,
I weave them into wreaths and hang them
along the road where we lived,
and all the way out to the nearest field,
so they might lead you to open space
where you can breathe. When branches fall,
I treat them the way I would your limbs,
lowering them into a hole near those that have
already fallen, shoveling dirt on top
in the tempo of a dirge. When winter comes
and the tree is bare I imagine your body,
its life turned inward. I tell myself the soul
is a soul and it has a body just as the tree does.
____________________________________________________________
Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Stirring, Willow Springs, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press). Their chapbook, No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press), is forthcoming.
by Mary Sauer
The river may run away with us, but we wade into the shallowest water and
watch a boy climb the bluff on the other side:
Let go, a call from the water, and he drops into the deep center of the
mountain stream where we will spend two nights sleeping on sandstone glade
in the rain. We can’t put down roots here—
But you will learn to fly fish for largemouth, bluegill, sunfish, brook trout, and
throw them back into their second chance
And you take between finger and thumb waxy, blue berries of Eastern Red
Cedar growing there next to our tent
Where we lay on your grandmother’s quilts, folded in half and layered one on
top of the other, and cup hot hands in gloved palms while we sleep
After I read to you the article in Taproot about what happened to the
landscape of the Pacific Northwest when we still hunted beavers as pests and
how we’re reintroducing them, hoping dry creek beds will re-saturate if we
make amends—you fall asleep before I reach the second page, but I read all
five aloud
Before pulling on secondhand duck boots and your dad’s rain jacket to return
to the fire where I swap out dry wool socks with wet, so they hang over the
flame
At the morning goodbye before you drive east and I north, there is sun on our
faces and things we hadn’t noticed in the rain: little bluestem, tickseed,
churchmouse threeawn’s plum forks and splits, growing in shallow soil.
____________________________________________________________
Mary Sauer is a writer and mother living in Kansas City, Missouri, and the managing editor of the upcoming Salt Tooth Press. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her work often touches on caregiving, complicated family dynamics, and neurodiversity, and she has published or upcoming work in Glassworks Magazine, MER Literary, Arc Poetry, The Washington Post, and Popula.
by Amritha York