Civil War by Alec Solomita

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Civil War

The Union soldiers were all blue
including their faces and hands.
Confederates were all gray.
Infantry on both sides, crouched
or standing, aimed muskets,
as James called rifles, at the foe,
as James called the enemy.
Others marched, muskets
slung over their shoulders.
And the cavalry rode red horses.
Both sides had a flag bearer.
And there were wagons, cannons,
tents, boats, buglers: the greatest
set of toy soldiers I’d ever
seen, even in Macy’s windows.

James had recently moved into the
neighborhood. His large, brick
house was catty-cornered
to ours across a weedy
lawn. He was a round pale boy
with light brown girly curls
and he was older than me by a couple
of years. I had just turned nine.
He was called James, not Jim or Jimmy.
We played with his soldiers for hours.
And we could make as much noise
as we wanted — bombs, guns, horses.
I’d laugh when he made a horse sound.

His mom, he said, was his stepmother
and he said he would sometimes visit his
real mother who lived in her own place.
He had a sister, too, a baby, who was
his real sister, he said, not his step.
And he took singing lessons once a week
but “I won’t be singing for you,” he laughed,
shaking his long hair, and snorting
like one of the plastic toy horses.

There were four metal soldiers, painted
by hand. They were, James explained,
antiques. They led their armies into
battle and could never be killed.
But when the plastic soldiers were shot
we had to lay them down. He was pretty
strict about that, but always nice.
He called me a “talented tactician.”
I don’t know who I liked more, James
or his beautiful Civil War set.

After one long visit to his mother
during spring vacation, he didn’t
come back. My parents said he
moved away but I didn’t understand
because his family was still in the
big brick house. So that evening,
I snuck halfway down the front
stairs to listen to mom and dad talk.

“Despondent?” my mother said
kind of loud. “Despondent!”
And dad said, “Well, I guess
there’s despondent and despondent.”
“Yes,” she said, “there’s despondent
and despondent.” They said the word
so many times it began to sound strange.

“There’s a good cry,” said Dad,
“and then there’s the postman seeing
mail pile up in front of the apartment
and the police finding two bodies
inside and a gun next to the woman
lying on her son’s bedroom floor.”

More baffled than bereft,
all I could think was
that it wasn’t a musket.

*

Alec Solomita is a writer working in Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in the Southwest Review, The Mississippi Review, and Southword Journal, among other publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal. His poetry has appeared in many journals, including Poetica, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Lake, ONE ART, and several anthologies. His chapbook “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press. His full-length poetry book, “Hard To Be a Hero,” was released by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2021. He’s just finished another, titled “Small Change.”

AROUND AND AROUND by Brooke Herter James

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AROUND AND AROUND

My mother died on Thanksgiving Day,
my father had his own November departure.
A close friend exited in mid-December,
soon after the birthday of my now deceased sister.
Let’s just say this is not the side of the game board
I look forward to. Starting with Halloween I roll for doubles
to hurry me past all those costly stops,
maybe a Chance card to get me to free parking,
better yet a railroad station where I can climb aboard,
chug safely past all those avenues of grief.
Christmas Eve is where I want to disembark
with packages under my arms, a roast tied with string,
a jug of eggnog to pour for my grandsons
as they set up their favorite game at the kitchen table
in the warmth of the busy-ness all around—
dogs underfoot, supper cooking, Santa coming—
I’m okay being the top hat, the scotty or even the iron.
Hell, I made it through another year. I’m ready to play again.

*

Brooke Herter James is a Vermont poet. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Rattle, Orbis and other online and in print journals. She is the author of several poetry chapbooks and the winner of the 2024 Fish Poetry Prize.

Two Poems by Marlena Brown

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Babies
for Lori

It was a year of great change.
My nervous system exploded.
Fluids got inserted.
I got an iconic French bob
and my life was saved
by a woman named Kimberly.

When I entered the salon
Lori saw my will.
She had known
the kingdom of my childhood.
I sat still while she cleared away
the late-blooming sun
colored mantle.

Meanwhile snow made holes
in the “New You Salon.”
Through them was the other
white ceiling. The strip mall clinic
with the diagram
of my supposed body. When I laid down
Kimberly said, This is easier
because you’re so thin.

Then she drew the curtain
between my mother and me.

Or sometimes I went to Karen’s office,
which was dim and I wasn’t
getting much sleep, so while
hickies appeared along my spine
I became very still,
a dog under a blanket.
She constantly asked what I wanted,

unlike Lori who wouldn’t listen
and each month raised the hem
off an inch of my lower forehead.
All year we fought
over my lower forehead.
She said I had what was called
baby bangs.

One night I stood outside the strip mall
and prayed.
My mood ring said ‘sensual’
but I swear I wasn’t.
Only the cool hand of night
against my embarrassment.
The things I could no longer
refuse to allow.
Today I wore the babies

down my street. Under them
I was as beautiful as she believed.

*

Winter Sun

January 27. Three men love me this week. None of them
are the man I love. He and I loved summer but we were born into nights
like a closed mouth. When I got laid down by stomach pains I thought,

Maybe I’m gathering strength for my birthday. But the blood
was only going. Room for new blood? Three women want me
to throw them around but all I want is to be held down

and done-to, like compression therapy, or when I got a fever
and was defeated by the thought that my life is soft,
and will remain soft forever. I want to make decisions,

take my neighbors, when those fire alarms kept going
they simply moved next door. Maybe my life isn’t soft it’s a series of walks
to other people’s rooms. Each time we broke up, for example, I had a fit

when I looked around the room I would never again enter. Bevel
of his back muscle, chiming of her wall. In place of those omens, I repeat
Something big is going to happen. But when the moment comes,

I say nothing. Still my decision looks good on me,
hangs well like heavy jeans. All I want is to get looked at
or else to be two eyes floating in a room.

If I was, could I still say something? My mother says
when I was born the flakes came down in shiny white tufts,
and the sun was white, the snow emitting that blinding white brightness
that renders you speechless and leaves your heart clean.

*

Marlena Brown is a poet from Michigan. Her work has appeared in HIKA and SWAMP and won the Brown University Rose Low Rome Prize for Poetry. She previously served as managing editor at The Round out of Providence, Rhode Island. She writes about lamps and dogs.

Ode to a Crystal Dreidel by Liz Marlow

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Ode to a Crystal Dreidel

Throughout the year,
you wait
in the curio cabinet—
sunlight’s fingers

grab at you
through the window
every afternoon.
We adore you

from behind glass doors,
your blue viscera
held tight like leaves
trapped in ice.

But today,
my son watches
you in wonder
like a great miracle.

You spin
from delicate fingers,
maple seed in the game.
How you land

determines win or loss
instead of anchor
to become life.
O how your confetti glows,

fills the room
as the chandelier
catches, presents us
with what you are

meant to be,
with what you have
waited all year
to become.

*

Liz Marlow is the author of They Become Stars (Slapering Hol Press 2020) and The Ground Never Lets Go, forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in 2026. Additionally, her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best Small Fictions, The Greensboro Review, The Idaho Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the editor-in-chief of Minyan Magazine.

Two Poems by Grant Clauser

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To the Carol Singer at the End of the Anthropocene Mall

A week until Christmas and the mall mostly
ghost town, one Macy’s still struggles
on like a steam engine against new highways.
Even the store manager buys his gifts online.
I stop in the rotunda while my wife browses
past empty boutiques. Teenagers searching
for irony pose for photos with a jaundiced Santa.
On the small stage, a lone singer with piano
pokes through an app for carols she knows,
settles on White Christmas, then slides into
I’ll Be Home… while an audience of three
stare into our phones or Starbucks cups.
We’re all a mess of distraction and regret.
And how can we not be? The season trying hard
to cheer us into a new year. Signs for lease
and loss all around. Trauma so common
it becomes a kind of faith. She sings like she knows
none of this. She sings like an evening campfire,
like snow over a plowed field, like a table
set for the whole family. She sings
as they say, her heart out, which takes
all her strength to carry home.

*

The Last Christmas

Eventually the weather turns
on all of us, and then
you find yourself in a forest
without recognizing the trail.
Every tree older or broken by winter.
Loved ones gone or going
dawn by dawn.

It’s harder now to get back.
Children grown, and the days
imitate water flowing over falls.
We say that creaking in the foundation
is ground settling and not decay
in the heart’s bedrock

breaking apart.

*

Grant Clauser’s sixth poetry book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a news media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania.

Two Poems by Sean Wang

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Small Knife

I carry the cheap bag from Aldi.
At the sink an apple bleeds a red thread,
metal on tongue. Light grits the glass;
the room pulls in.

Grandpa pared rot, set wedges in our hands.
Mother kept a tally in the fruit.
I kept score by silence.
I rinse the basin; the water pinks.

Cold climbs the frame. I lay newsprint,
press tape to the pane, a quick dressing,
corners lifting like scabs in dry wind.
I call Mother at work; her knife is steady.

On the line, I hear her turn the peel.
“Take it,” she says. I lift a wedge
to the window, bite the white, taste iron;
the basin blushes again, my tongue nicked.

Skins buckle in the bowl.
Sun stripes the cracked pane where the tape lifts.
We eat around the cut, the bruise we spare.
Care is a small knife.

Her blade finds brown, keeps the rest bright.
I taste the room, the cheap glue, the cold.
Slow as a scab, the corner rises.

With a thumbnail I pare the lifting edge.
At the cut, the pane works a little—
a thin cold entering, just enough to show the wound.
We press there.

* 

Visitor Window

The screen wakes; the glass is ringing.
One pane won’t take two faces.
The laminate on my chest says VISITOR.
Facility rule: contact through glass only.

We raise our hands to its lit skin
and practice touch the window can read.
The room answers in glare: a bleached vase,
a mattress slid into the corner,
our photo clouded under taped plastic.
I say yes, yes, to steady the hairline
in the glass. Fourth move since school,
leases curl; a fingertip lifts the dust.
Between panes, a stripe of shine
the mop can’t reach. I pull the chain;
the blinds stutter to a stop.

Hallway: once a phone bright as a lure
opened, my mother’s voice folded in it.
Today the receiver is the window.
I grip my side of the glass and try not to shake.

Downstairs: from her room I shoulder
a clear trash bag past the rentals;
the weight slides back.

Courtyard: a rooster in a red helmet
pecks his mirror until the sensor chirps,
the indicator goes red; the glass stays shut.

Visitor hours end. The window keeps its rule.
A guard nods. The laminate sits with me.
My hands stay clean on this side, except the print
warming where we spoke, then cooling at the latch.

*

Sean Wang is a PhD student. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, wildscape literary journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Pictura Journal, Soul Forte Journal, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L), where his work was selected for the Broadside Series, among others.

Jennie Garth claims she’s an Elder Millennial & I am totally taken aback by Victoria Nordlund

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Jennie Garth claims she’s an Elder Millennial & I am totally taken aback

because 90210 is so iconically Gen X
because my kids are Millennials & do not know that Jennie Garth exists

because I videotaped 90210 in 1991 & 2 & 3
because I wanted to be Kelly Taylor and always Choose Me

because I totally had Jennie Garth & Jennifer Aniston haircuts
because Jennifer is the most Gen X name ever

because aren’t Nirvana & Heathers & Buffy so much cooler
than The Backstreet Boys & Gossip Girl & Superbad?

because Garth was 36 & played a guidance counselor in the 2008 reboot
Because I aged out of the remake & my kids were way too young

because Geriatric Millennials were born in 1981 & MTV was launched
in 1981 & I bet Jennie remembers watching Video Killed the Radio Star too

because there’s only Boomers and the Silents left ahead of Jennie & me
because we are already the forgotten ones

because Luke Perry & Shannen Doherty are no longer here to call her out

because I had to Google that the Greatest Generation came before Silent
because Jennie & I can remember a time before anyone had the power to Google anything

because when I searched Jennie Garth today, I discovered she was born in 1972,
got a hip replacement in 2020, started HRT for menopause the same year as me

because the reel after Jennie’s of a 38-year-old influencer facing her mid-life
crisis head-on with a deep plane facelift in Turkey made my eyes roll

because, whatever

*

Victoria Nordlund’s poetry collections Wine-Dark Sea and Binge Watching Winter on Mute are published by Main Street Rag. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize Nominee, whose work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Rust+Moth, Chestnut Review, trampset, and elsewhere. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com

Then There is This by Kari Gunter-Seymour

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Then There is This

But it’s only a dog, she blathers,
and I am fingering a brick,

metaphorically,
aimed at her vacuous brain,

my Band-Aid of propriety
ripped clean off,

my storage unit
of fuck-you’s laid bare.

My office window frames
a stand of shagbark hickories,

statues of dark gods lopping
off the sky, their mawkish gold robes

fading to autumn’s wither, promising
nothing but bitterness and bite.

Maybe my mother was right
all along, maybe

I’ll never be satisfied
until I poke out someone’s eye.

*

Kari Gunter-Seymour (she/her) is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and the author of three award-winning collections of poetry, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) winner of the IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. She is the Executive Director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series Women Speak. Her work has been featured in a variety of journals and the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.

karigunterseymourpoet.com
I: karigunterseymour

The Thousands of Us Who Clean Shit Off the Floor by Sarah Mackey Kirby

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The Thousands of Us Who Clean Shit Off the Floor

I don’t drink into the night
like Bukowski, etching “Bluebird”
into the literary canon as
a breathtaking fuck you to
the elbow patch cocktail parties
and academic writing conventions.
I’ve never lived dangerously
or marched to the drum
of a drummer in some
indie band lighting
cigarettes by the dozens.

I am one of thousands
tucked behind an old porch,
behind brick,
on a street lined with
joggers, barking dogs,
and magnolia blossoms
drooping into fall.
I clean shit off the floor
when my momma can’t
get to the bathroom in time
and her Depends aren’t enough.

I write only before the morning light
and stop to pour divided medicines
into a cup, get her coffee,
make her yogurt, stir powdered fiber
into ice-cold ginger ale,
help her onto a shower chair,
wash her feet.

Writing, itself, is rebellion.
Against the monotony,
the daily navigation
of another’s confusion
and memory jumbles.
Driving her to doctors.
Waiting during tests and surgeries.
Making sure her dinner
is hot, but not too hot.

I am no saint. No one to
feel sorry for. And
I am no outsider. It’s
been years since I’ve
worn black knee-high boots
with a leather skirt
and gone out dancing.
I am one of thousands
lost inside this love.

We live in the crevices,
folding laundry once
stained with tomato soup.
We hug as tightly as we can.
Because the only thing more
heartbreaking than this hell
will be the day hell ends.

*

Sarah Mackey Kirby was born and raised among fat bumble bees and redbud trees in Louisville, Kentucky. She taught middle and high school social studies, which brought her incredible joy and hilarious moments. Her poems appear in Chiron Review, ONE ART, Ploughshares, Third Wednesday Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s the author of the poetry collection, The Taste of Your Music (Impspired, 2021) She loves to cook, dig in garden dirt, and root for University of Louisville basketball. Find Sarah’s work at https://smkirby.com/

ONE ART’s Winter Fundraiser

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~ ONE ART’s Winter Fundraiser ~

This is ONE ART’s 2nd Fundraiser. During our 1st Fundraiser, we were very close to receiving enough donations to reach our goal of $3,000.

We received donations from about 50 individuals, overall. Many were extra generous and gave significant donations. A little back-of-napkin math reminds that we would reach $3,000 in donations if 300 individuals donated $10.

I remain committed to keeping submissions to ONE ART free and ONE ART’s website ad-free. I’m committed to continuing the monthly ONE ART Reading Series and regularly hosting low-cost workshops. I aim to continue to find new opportunities to better serve the literary community.

ONE ART does not have any organizational, state, or federal grant funding.

All of ONE ART’s support comes from donations by generous individuals like you.

Please consider a donation to help support my ability to focus my efforts on ONE ART’s daily operations and contributions to the poetry community.

If you believe that ONE ART contributes to your life and the vitality of the poetry community, I hope you will consider a small donation.

>>> GoFundMe <<<

>>> Standard Donation Methods <<<

With Gratitude,

Mark Danowsky
Founder / Editor-in-Chief
ONE ART: a journal of poetry

Five Poems by Ren Wilding

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Chase All the Ghosts from Your Head

In high school, I recorded a Liz Phair song
off the radio on a cassette— the only love
song I’d heard that didn’t specify gender.
I only played it late at night, volume
so low I had to put my ear against
the speaker. I didn’t know who I wanted
to love me. The first person I fell in love with
burned me a CD of love songs,
the front decorated with sharpie rainbows,
first track The Power of Two by the Indigo Girls
I played it on repeat in my car for months after
we broke up, trying to replace
the heart I forgot on the nightstand
beside their bed where we slept.

* The title is taken from the lyrics of “The Power of Two” by the Indigo Girls.

* 

Bite

You told your boyfriend
to bite you as we watched
The Twilight Zone in your
dorm room. You said he should
bite me too if I wanted. I always
did what you said, and the thought
of you wanting me bitten
made my skin slither. Your
boyfriend’s teeth made rows
of little crescents on my forearm.
I watched your face. You asked
how it felt. I don’t remember
what I said, only that I left
thinking you loved me.

*

Fisherwoman

I forgot my lungs
when I swam from her—
fish scales shiver
my skin

My lips pass seawater,
as barbs
hook me by the jaw.
She reels me from the water—

a dread of air
passes over my gills
in a lacework of burning.

Seaweed strands weigh
me down—
her hands
on my skin again.

She needs to do it right
this time. Scrape
my scales—
become covered
in the sequins
of my body.

Slice and strip my belly
until all that’s left
is the sweetness of me
she wants in her mouth.

I am flotsam
I am gills.
I am gasped air.

*

Origami Dragon

A green-haired girl made me
a paper dragon so small

my hand became its lair.
It couldn’t stop keeling

over on its curled talons—
with each fall, my hand sparked

to think of her fingers folding.
When she gave me a ride

after art class, gold filled
the cavern of my chest.

But I didn’t yet know
I liked girls— no fire

on my breath
to burn her back.

* 

Valentine’s Performance

My belly was full of crackling
eggshells as I helped the girl
working on the student production
of the Vagina Monologues
pass out fliers and ply students with cake.
But I had to leave the carnival
of vulvas to meet my bicurious
art major girlfriend who barely
touched me. I gave her a note
with a pressed violet inside,
and she gave me nothing. All I wanted
was to kiss the theater girl,
our mouths smeared with frosting.

*

Ren Wilding (they/them) is a trans, queer, neurodivergent poet. They are the author of Trans Artifacts: Bones Between My Teeth (forthcoming from Porkbelly Press, 2026) and Trans Archeology (forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review, 2027). Their work appears in Braving the Body (Harbor Editions), Comstock Review, Does It Have Pockets, ONE ART, Palette Poetry, Pine Hills Review, The Second Coming, and elsewhere. They were a finalist for Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Prize, have received a Pushcart nomination, and are co-curator of the Words Like Blades reading series. They hold an MA in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Missouri.

Learning Stillness by Robbin Farr

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Learning Stillness

Rereading a friend’s poems,
a gentler time, a time after

my mother’s hospitalizations
for such ailments as trouble

the very old. Yet I am certain
this peace will not last.

Certain restlessness lingers, waits
for the midnight phone to ring,

voice on the other side terse,
anxious with bad news.

Her poems instruct, warn
the wariness of me. Coax me

to learn from the vulnerable
bloodroot that leans into the just

thawing creek to crack open
the bud. Attune my ear

to the water chimes that ring
in this field only. Rest

like the bee asleep in the flower
among the sweet perfume

of its labor. To attend to breath
and song and hum. To stop

searching other worlds
for the inevitable.

*

Robbin Farr writes short form: poetry and brief lyric nonfiction. In addition to writing, she is the editor of River Heron Review poetry journal. Robbin’s work has been published in Cleaver, Citron Review, The MacGuffin, Sky Island and elsewhere. She is the author of two books of poetry, Become Echo (2023) and Transience (2018). She is most happy when revising and submitting. Writing terrifies her. More about Robbin at robbinfarr.com.

I’m taking a holiday by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

I’m taking a holiday

from headlines, and I’m not the only one.
I walk through a nearby neighborhood,
the kind with a community pool
and a new elementary school
between row after row of houses.
Cul-de-sacs of cocoa & cookies,
lights adorn rooftops down each street,
everyone saving each other a seat
for the big Holiday Parade. Scouts
setting up for a bake sale, tables of
treats their moms helped make sweet.
I stop at a house with one blue spotlight
and a red bucket hung on a hook,
where a plaque invites me to Take One.
Hoping to find a little poem inside,
there’s a handwritten prayer instead.
And though I didn’t feel the need,
I was grateful for the offering, this
token of kinship from a stranger—
and how I found myself believing
maybe—just maybe—We the People
can still turn things around.

*

Shawn Aveningo Sanders’ poems have appeared in journals worldwide, including Calyx, ONE ART, contemporary haibun online, Drifting Sands, Quartet, Timberline Review, Cloudbank, Sheila-Na-Gig, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and many others. Her new book, Pockets (MoonPath Press, 2025) was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest. Shawn is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Touchstone Award nominee. A proud mom and Nana, she shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon, where they run a small press, The Poetry Box. When she’s not writing, you might find her in a shoe store hunting for a new pair of red shoes. (redshoepoet.com)

POEM IN WHICH GOD TALKS TO ME by Denise Duhamel

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POEM IN WHICH GOD TALKS TO ME

I’m working really hard
up here. Everything I do
is for the family. I’ve heard
your prayers. Enough
already. Stop
being such a damn nag.

*

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, she lives in Dania Beach.

Three Poems by Donna Spruijt-Metz

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Severed

This far into your death—I am most functional
in the mornings.

By afternoon, I have faded—
no direction.

I trim the wilting flowers—give them
new water—an extra day.

Time, for flowers,
must work differently. Perhaps

I have given them a whole new life
with my water, my scissors,

my opposable thumbs
—my brief power—

*

What rises from the quiet

is the noise
of your absence. The roar of your sudden
departure—constant reminders
that I am on my own.

For instance, the water bill—the long
conversation with the lady at the
Department of Water and Power—
where they have all the power

and we have a mysterious leak.
But it is my leak now. Just mine.

Oh, you—son of a master plumber—
you would have tracked it down
with the residue of your father’s glee.

I am the daughter of a jazz pianist—
all I can do is listen for a rhythmic dripping.

I can’t fix the sound system—
it gave out last night. You had MacGyvered it—
daisy-chained remote to remote to remote.

Now all that’s left of your secret system
are the colorful buttons, the dead
little rectangles.

* 

The Retelling

I have a new friend—she’s halfway
across the world.
She asks good questions, about before
the after of you—and so I retell old stories.
They take new shapes in her listening.

I sit at the morning table
—poached egg and widowhood
for breakfast—dictating
into my phone,
I falter, erase, retrace.

Memory is like that—retreating into it
is like that—a strange man
backing my newly dead father’s Torch Red
Thunderbird out of our garage—
my mother, wild—ferocious, screaming,

“Get that car out of here!
I never want to see it again!”
I’m the small girl who doesn’t
understand. The car was so pretty.

I loved it.
It smelled of him—
and it was just like him—showy
and always leaving.

*

Donna Spruijt-Metz’s second collection, ‘To Phrase a Prayer for Peace’, was published in March 2025 (Wildhouse Publishing). Her debut poetry collection is ‘General Release from the Beginning of the World’ (2023, Free Verse Editions). She is an emeritus psychology professor, MacDowell fellow, rabbinical school drop-out, and former classical flutist. Her chapbooks include ‘Slippery Surfaces’, ‘And Haunt the World’ (with Flower Conroy), and ‘Dear Ghost’ (winner, 2023 Harbor Review Editor’s prize). Her translation from the Dutch of Lucas Hirsch’s ‘Wu Wei Eats an Egg’ (Ben Yehuda press) and her full-length collaboration with Flower Conroy, ‘And Scuttle My Ballon’ (Picture Show Press) were both released in 2025. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, Tahoma Literary Review, One Art, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She’s an emeritus professor, MacDowell fellow, rabbinical school drop-out, and former classical flutist. She gets restless.

The last time I saw Richard by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The last time I saw Richard

I discuss Richard with Richard
during a therapy session. Imagining.
The old Gestalt Empty Chair Technique.

He sits in the chair opposite me,
so gangly, like he’s always been,
six foot five, legs too long
to ever be at ease, frame
meant for basketball, brain meant
for math, calculating the distance
to the hoop. His sudden stroke at seventeen
like a swoosh through the net, game-ending.

The last time I saw Richard, Joni sings,
and every time I wonder if it was.
The last time.

He was in the hospital with the bed tray
between us, and nothing much
to say. I had done him wrong,
as his father had, eloping
with his aunt. As his mother had
for favoring him. As his brother had
for forgiving him.

Was I to blame for not loving him,
beyond the cookies we baked for the team
and the occasional make-out sessions
when I gave in to my own loneliness
and his longing?

But where was I?
He sits across from me, no
longer in control of his limbs,
and I can hardly look at him,
even this projection. I didn’t
expect this solidity. But here he is,
waiting.

His face is twisted, his tongue
is re-learning to talk. He regards me
with bitterness. Tell me about despair, I long
to say. I will tell you about mine. He unlocks
his wheels and rolls away.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in Minyan, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which served as the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. In addition, she also frequently collaborates with San Diego artist Judith Christensen, most recently on an installation entitled “Mapping Our Future Selves.”

Three Poems by Terri Kirby Erickson

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Ballet Class

I tried not to envy the ponytailed waifs
in my ballet class whose ten-year-old bodies
weighed less than dandelions.

I was as thin as they were, but my limbs
were like lead weights compared
to the willow branches of their arms, the bird-

like bones in legs that seemed stronger,
lighter—able to pirouette and plié
with so much ease. At least I make good grades

in school, I’d say to myself while holding
on to the barre like a ship’s mainmast
in a roiling sea. But I knew the ballet teachers

expected better of me—the only daughter
of a Prima Ballerina. It didn’t take long,
however, to see I had none of my mother’s talent.

I would never leap into the air and land like a swan
on the water, dip and sway like a sapling
in the wind. Though I liked wearing the black

leotard and pink tights, my soft, peony-colored
shoes, I couldn’t bend and touch
my toes, let alone twirl on them. So I shed

the ballet slippers and took up writing—
hoping to pen one day, a pirouetting poem,
a pas de chat of words that danced across a page.

*

Woman on the Beach

The woman pacing the rocky beach is no ghost
but a mother whose little boy rose
from his bed and wandered down to the water

while his parents were sleeping. Not quite three,
her only child was red-cheeked and plump
as a baby penguin, with black curls and a winning

smile that made his mother’s heart thump
in her thin chest just to think of it. She knew
he was gone but year after year she rented the same

cottage on the same shore on the same day her boy
disappeared—presumed drowned they said—
and now she is old. Widowed, white-headed

and frail, her body is blown this way and that by
the wind, but still she walks and sometimes
calls his name as if any minute, he’ll come running,

his flushed skin hot against her own cool flesh,
wriggling like a puppy that wants down but she will
not put him down. She will hold him

in her arms and keep him safe like she didn’t do
before, though nothing she says or does
or prays for will ever wake her from a sleep so deep

she never heard his feet hit the floor or the screen
door slam or his cries for help, her beautiful
boy whose mother failed him.

* 

How to Shop with Your Mother

Never make her feel like she’s slowing
you down. Even when she meanders

into the shoe department, running her
hands over the soft leather, admiring

one pair or another for what seems like
forever, you do have time to wait. Then,

when the funeral director tells you they
need clothes for her to wear, a pair of

shoes, you will not open your mother’s
closet door and find, jumbled into a pile,

her worn out sandals, dress shoes with
dented heels, her faded thin-soled flats—

and feel such a wave of sorrow you can’t
catch your breath. You won’t be the one

who hurried her mother along, who kept
on sighing because she was holding you

up when there were so many places you
needed to go and things you needed to do.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.

ONE ART’s January 2026 Reading

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ONE ART’s January 2026 Reading

Sunday, January 11
Time: 2:00pm Eastern
Duration: ~ 1.25 hours
Featured Readers: Katie Dozier & Timothy Green

>>> Register Here <<<

About The Featured Readers

Timothy Green has been the editor of Rattle, managing its operations since 2004. He hosts Rattlecast and Critique of the Week and co-host of The Poetry Space_. He is the author of American Fractal (Red Hen Press) and co-author of Hot Pink Moon and Have You Seen the Moon Honey (both Fungible Editions) with his wife, Katie Dozier. He holds a masters in professional writing from USC, has been a contributing columnist for the Press-Enterprise newspaper, and co-founder of the Wrightwood Arts Center. He lives in The Woodlands, Texas, with Katie and their family.

Katie Dozier, a former professional poker player, is the author of All That Glitter (forthcoming with The Poetry Box Press), and Watering Can (Alexandria Labs). She’s the co-author of Hot Pink Moon: A Crown of Haibun, and Have You Seen the Moon Honey with her husband, Timothy Green. She loves long conversations about short poems. Katie is the creator of the top-rated podcast The Poetry Space_, the Haiku Editor for ONE ART, and an editor at Rattle.

Still, Resilience by Susan Rich

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Still, Resilience

On the night of 14 April 2014, exactly 276 female students were kidnapped from the Government Secondary School in the town of Chibok, Borno State, Nigeria. The Jihadist group, Boko Haram took full responsibility.

Called back for their Physics final
the girls return

with their sharpened pencils,
no one wanting to fail,

no one able to imagine
anything worse than an F.

In the imagined classroom,
I watch the students

take their exams—
heads bent over small desks.

Teaching across the border
In the pink earth of Niger, what did I know?

How could they know
anything beyond their assigned

problem sets, too intent
on memory to hear the slap-drop

of worn boots, smell
bitter dust rising around

the armed boys who appeared
more like lost extras

from an independent slasher film
than soldiers of Boko Haram.

And how did the girls react?
Did they spiral down

the stairwells holding their slender
blue notebooks?

Or were they so intent
on their hopes, our hopes,

that they simply kept on writing—

*

Susan Rich is the author of six collections of poetry and co-editor of two prose anthologies. Her recent books include Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry). Susan co-edited Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems (Two Sylvias Press) with Kelli Russell Agodon and co-edited, The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders (McSweeney’s) with Ilya Kaminsky. Her other poetry books include Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue–Poems of the World, winner of the PEN USA Award. A winner of the Crab Creek Review Prize, Times Literary Supplement Award (London), and a Fulbright Fellowship, Rich’s poems appear in the Harvard Review, Ploughshares, VQR Online and elsewhere. Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds is forthcoming from Raven Chronicles Press. Blue Atlas was a Finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

Three Poems by Abby McCartney

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Self Portrait as Crossword Puzzle

The sign of a beginner is their loyalty
to their first answer. Once you’ve banged
your head against the grid for four
or six months, trying to earn sleep,
you realize: do it in pencil.
Most days I try to pack too many letters
in the same box. Sometimes
that’s allowed – another thing I
had to learn the hard way. I remember
the first time I realized the answer
could spill over the edge, up the sides.
I want the gold star, the answers
clicking into place like a seatbelt.
My favorites, though, are the puzzles
that make their own rules, crossing
YELLOW down with RED across to
make the Orange Bowl. My grandmother
did a Monday crossword every night
before bed, one family pattern
I don’t mind repeating. When she
fought with my mother, it was always
in pen. It’s the work of a lifetime
to learn to erase.

*

Elegy with Summer Rain

The thing about an untimely death is
overnight your recipes became holy.
Your voicemails are relics, your
Cowboys sweatshirt a talisman.
Now I can say your name without
crying. Usually. Sometimes I want
to complain about you as my friends
complain about their mothers:
She never called me, but she assumed
I had been kidnapped if I didn’t call home
by Sunday noon. Sometimes
I want the last book you gave me
to be a book and nothing
more. After the summer storm
the city is bathed in an eerie pink
light, even past sunset, refracting
off the bouldering clouds, making
the bricks glow like jewels,
making everything look wrong.

*

When my mother visits my dreams

When my mother visits my dreams
she wants to know what happened
to all her stuff.
We gave your loaf pans away, I say.
Sorry. Why did you have four of them?
We sent one to my cousin
for their first apartment, I tell her.
She nods. She is glad.

I worry how I will explain the rest:
TikTok, hybrid meetings, Wordle,
The new house my dad lives in
full of a woman she barely knows.
You were gone a long time,
I say.
We didn’t think you were coming back.

I wake and remember
all the things I forgot to ask.

*

Abby McCartney (she/her) is an emerging poet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work explores themes of grief, motherhood, and lineage. She spends her days working on education finance policy at the state and local levels and previously served as an aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is also an active lay leader at Kol Tzedek Synagogue. In her spare time, she enjoys baking, reading, crossword puzzles, and walking her dog around South Philly. She holds an M.P.A. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a B.A. from Yale University, where she was a Truman Scholar.

Two Poems by George Franklin

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Talking to Myself

It’s 9 p.m. I’m taking the dog
For an evening walk, up by the mall,
Then following the canal. The moon
Won’t rise till later, and the clouds streak
Like white chalk against an enormous
Black sky. This is one of the first nights
Of autumn. There’s a breeze, and my shirt
Isn’t sticking to my back. I should
Feel happy. I could be walking on
A sidewalk in Barcelona or
Madrid, Mexico City, Paris,
Or Bogotá—the air would touch
My face the same way. The headlights of
Cars would sweep across the darkened trees
In those cities just as they do here,
The car radios releasing a
Few notes of music before the night
Swallows them. I watch the red taillights
Until they disappear and think of
The things I could’ve done and didn’t,
The places I could have lived and been
A different person, worn a hat
Like my father’s—I wrote a poem
About that once, the gray fedora
He’d put on to go to the office.
I found it in his closet when he
Died. It smelled of hair tonic and sweat.
It’s sad how we leave these things behind.
They’re the poems everybody writes
And forgets about. They line the shelves
Of thrift shops, then reincarnated
Into other lives, start all over.
It’s strange to think that someone else wore
My father’s hat, that someone else’s
Fingers lifted it by the crown,
Tried it on, and pulled down the soft brim.
My closet is full of stuff like that,
Shirts Ximena gave me, my jacket
That reminds me of Spain, blue jeans, and
Shoes with worn-down heels, missing laces,
So many things that go unnoticed.
The dog has spotted a yogurt cup
In the grass and is fascinated.
I pull him away, and we walk down
The hill to the street and the narrow
Sidewalk we follow on our way home.

*

Raphael’s Skull

The smooth, white skull on Goethe’s desk
Did not, as he thought, belong to Raphael.
It was the skull of a man with a brain disorder.
The salesman must have lied. Who knows
The posthumous destiny of bones? Donne’s
Lovers buried together, he imagined dug up
To make room for one more recently dead
And hoped they’d be spared disturbance.
They probably weren’t.
                                             I look at the paintings
On my wall and think about the previous
Owners, how the portraits’ expressions
Never changed, no matter the scenes they
Saw and didn’t reflect, the seductions,
The arguments, how my grandfather fell
To the rug, his heart pausing unexpectedly,
How we ran for the small oxygen tank
And put the mask over his face—or the vases
That came from China by ship, crated,
Wrapped in paper, print that no one here
Could understand, and the books waiting
On my own shelves, impatiently I suppose,
Especially the ones that have gone unread.

My grandfather kept a fine-edged knife
For cutting the pages, thick ivory paper
With firm bindings. Southern humidity
And gas heat turned those bindings dry
And brittle. I mostly bought paperbacks
That yellowed within a decade or two.
Some had cost a quarter each from remainder
Tables, bookstore basements in Cambridge
Or New York. In Canto LXXXI, Pound
Remembers when “books cost a peseta,
Brass candlesticks in proportion.”
My parents lit candles at dinner on
Friday nights and recited a blessing.
I don’t remember if the candlesticks
Were brass. The past is an ossuary
Of broken things, books in dumpsters
Covered by garbage from restaurants,
Sauce gone rancid, debris from construction,
Demolition, copper pipes ripped out, taken
For scrap, luggage no longer fit to travel.

When my father died, we had an estate sale.
A pocketknife sold for a dollar, and his
Shirts fifty cents each. The dining room
Table and chairs, the blue sofa, the marble-
Topped table in the living room—they were
All gone by noon, and at six o’clock,
A man arrived with a truck to make an
Offer on everything else. I kept all sorts
Of things I should have left, porcelain
Plates—themselves made from bones
And white clay—fluted glasses, a pocket
Watch, and a soup tureen. All here to remind
Of things that aren’t.

*

George Franklin is the author of eight poetry collections, including A Man Made of Stories, and a book of essays, Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing (both Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Individual poems have been published in Nimrod, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, ONE ART, and New Ohio Review, among others. He practices law in Miami, is a translation editor for Cagibi, teaches poetry classes in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day.

Shards of Light by Elizabeth Burk

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Shards of Light

I have lunch with a younger friend
whose beard is turning to iron—
in compensation, his ponytail
grows longer. We talk and I wonder
if he had ever desired me. I try to keep
such narcissistic preoccupations
tucked away from my awareness,

but they glow now in the dim light
of this restaurant at noon,
that murky gray of a rainy day,
shards of light streaking oblique and harsh
through unwashed windows,
turning everything ashen and pasty.

The young waitress sashays back
and forth, appears to flaunt
her lithe body while I sit lumpy
on the booth banquette. I’ve lost height
from what used to be my waistline up—
the spine undoubtedly collapsing—
it feels like the table between us
is at the level of my chin. I squelch
the urge to ask for a booster seat.

I turn my attention back to my friend,
listen as he recounts his adventures
traversing the country solo
in his new minivan, realize his true desire
lies in his need to tell me his stories.
As for my need to feel desired,
I’m hoping that tiresome burden
will diminish with age—
will it bring mourning or relief?

*

Elizabeth Burk is a psychologist who divides her time between her native New York and a home and husband in southwest Louisiana. Her first full-length collection, Unmoored, was recently published by Texas Review Press (Nov 2024). She is the author of three previous collections: Learning to Love Louisiana, Louisiana Purchase and Duet—Poet & Photographer, a collaboration with her photographer husband. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Atlanta Review, Rattle, Naugatuck River Review, Louisiana Literature, Passager, Pithead Chapel, ONE ART, PANK, Museum of Americana, MER and elsewhere.

Waiting for My Medicine by Judy Kronenfeld

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Waiting for My Medicine

In the pharmacy a man sits down across from me,
dragging a long green tube of oxygen
on little wheels; it looks like a torpedo on one of those
collapsible shopping carts or luggage carriers.

He’s got transparent tubing stapling
his nostrils, like the fangs of a snake,
but, as if leaning over a fence, nattering,
he strikes up a conversation with another customer.
He’s not out of breath. He laughs. He jokes.

I want him to stay like that, talking unthroatily,
his long still young legs blazing in front of him,
to prove that things aren’t always
how they seem. But he hears his name.
He shuffles to the pharmacist’s window,
takes out his wallet, shakes his head.
“Costs a hell of a lot to die,” he says.

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, One, ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her newest book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2025). Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside. In another life, she produced scholarship on her English Renaissance loves, George Herbert, John Donne, and Shakespeare, including King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Duke UP, 1998).

The 3rd Annual Chill Subs Community Favorites Best Lit Mag Awards

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The 3rd Annual Chill Subs Community Favorites Best Lit Mag Awards
Have you voted yet? There are still a few days remaining.

Voting closes December 7th!

*

I’m pleased to say that ONE ART: a journal of poetry made the list in both 2023 and 2024!

Here’s hoping we make the 2025 list!!

>>> Vote Here <<<

+

2024: Community Favorites (Poetry)

ONE ART ranked #4!

+

25 Best Lit Mags of 2023: Chill Subs Community Favorites

ONE ART ranked #6 (across genres!!)

*

I hope you will vote for the lit mags that you most value for your own personal reasons.
Thank you for the time that you dedicate to ONE ART.
I’m grateful to have you as a member of our wonderful community.

With Gratitude,

Mark Danowsky
Editor
ONE ART

Two Poems by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

A New Mythology

I want to live in a world that trains poets instead
of soldiers, that invents words for experiences too
complex to define, the kind that fracture your bones
and bloom in a thousand petaled symphony to cup
the ache in your chest. A world that drills us on how
to march towards each other bearing wild flowers,
standing silent at the break of dawn. Want a world in
where explosion is understood as a metaphor for awe
pouncing at the edge of exhale, and war a state of
self-denial, and occupation meaning that thing which
grips your attention in ever widening circles of prayer.

I want to live in a world in where the vocabulary of
ownership is a relic we visit in museums, and a stranger
is someone you feed, and dirt the reason for devotion.
A world that targets food deserts with a rainfall of
seeds, which routes rivers to parched villages, then
brigades an army of palms to harvest light ripening
on lush vines, that invade your dreams with instructions
on how to implode ripe berries between the skin of
your teeth, how to armor yourself with bare thin leaves.
Want a world that authors a new mythology for being,
one in where the only deity worth worshiping is the
ground you stand on, and to become a hero you must
not leave on a journey, but surrender yourself a witness
to the pulse within.

*

The Space Between Us

I don’t know how to save the world.
I’ve bent my tongue in half trying.
What I do know is how to tend to the space
between us. How to feel into that one eternal
pulse that keeps us together. Lean into the one
echoing breath that threads yours into mine.
Touch on this one expression of love, to that
one primordial seed from which we sprout.
When I say I Love You, what I mean is
I Am You, is your liberation is my joy is
my peace dwelling. The question isn’t how
do we remind each other of our indelible
belonging. The soul already knows.
The question is how do we remove the
obstacles towards it. How do we rip off
the tarp preventing the seed from sprouting,
the sprout from growing, the tree from licking
the light, the light from unfurling across your
chest, bellowing up your throat, settling into
your eyes like God looking at God, like love
is between I and you, between you and
everything else.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American author, poet, and transpersonal psychotherapist. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by the New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, Moudi is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. Their first poetry collection, Want A World, and their memoir, Habibi Means Beloved, are set to be published in 2026. They now call the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado home.

Three Poems by Hilary King

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A Lesson from Inflatables.

Mornings, let’s nap on the lawn.
Let our plans become puddles
of red, green, and reindeer-colored plastic.
Late afternoon, we’ll plug back in,
fill ourselves with air, sway a little
as the stars come out to see us.
If we topple over, knocked
by winter winds,
have faith that every season
strength needs help to rise,
the sun, a song, a friend
to flip the switch, pull you upright,
tall and beaming on the winter grass.

*

How to Do Holiday Mail

Pluck from the crush of bills
and catalogs the stiff squares
and rectangles, gold embossing
making every return address
an elegance.
Do not open them–
Stack them instead.
Wrap them in red.
Add to the pile every day.
Late Christmas morning,
after the gifts have been pillaged
and the floor tumbleweeded
with boxes and tissue,
sit near the tree, near the family
installing batteries or reading new books,
Sit with your glass or holiday mug
and unwrap the gift of the familiar and beloved.

*

Holiday Calendar

Nevermind the garland sparkling
over the Butterballs
or the panettone crenellated
over discounted bags
of Halloween candy.
Keep your own calendar:
A day saved for baking or
an afternoon of wrapping,
on the floor with ribbon and tape,
a bow stuck to the dog’s paw.
The night time car ride with the kids,
milkshakes thick with peppermint,
Mariah Carey on the radio.
Look at those lights!
Stores, ads, all the oiled machines mean
to spin your time into coin.
Toss the catalogs. Stay away from stores,
keep your hand in your own pocket,
on your own golden hours.

*

Originally from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, ONE ART, Salamander, Fourth River, and other publications. She is an editor for DMQ Review, and has been nominated for multiple awards. Her book Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024.

The Field in Relief by Margaret Taylor-Ulizio

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Field in Relief

I see my shadow stretching out long and thin
along the surface of the plowed ground,
and I wonder how I have grown fivefold

in the waning of the light.
I ask an old man on a tractor
if I can take his photo, and
he wonders where it will

end up. The photo lives on
without him now,
and the tractor sits in stillness.
I walk my dog and am startled
by a young coyote, curious on its path.
I catch his eye for a moment,

and he runs away. I tread among
the giants, their heads bowed
above me, growing tall in the
plowed ground. And the birds feast,
not on the eyes of hanging men,
but on the smiling faces

of the sunflowers, now turned in the evening
away from where shadows run big. The cleared
field shows a snake in monochrome
against the brown earth and the slanted
light, where my husband plots the ground for
the harvest he hopes will come, himself
a silhouette in granite, standing against the
sky of burning orange.

*

Margaret Taylor-Ulizio is a poet from New Jersey. Margaret’s poems have appeared in the San Antonio Review, Amethyst Review, Orchards Poetry Journal, Merion West (forthcoming) as well as local anthologies.

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of November 2025

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of November 2025

  1. Jennifer Blackledge
  2. Dana Henry Martin
  3. Betsy Mars
  4. George Franklin
  5. Julie Weiss
  6. Francine Witte
  7. Julia Caroline Knowlton
  8. Karen Paul Holmes
  9. Daye Phillippo
  10. Nancy Huggett

Idioms by John Amen

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Idioms

My mother loved that saying, the devil’s in the details.
As a kid, I somehow figured that if the devil’s there,
god must be there, too. That would mean, as I saw it,
that the holy & unholy are tucked into the invisible,
playing tug of war or wrestling or high-fiving in the atoms,
in the sprawling fog you find when you
twist & twist that knob on a microscope,
infinite white sea emerging.
I asked my father about it once.
I’m not sure about devils & gods, he said,
that’s more your mother’s department.
Which didn’t tell me much, other than
highlighting the difference between my parents:
my mother who read a poem each morning,
my father who once told me that mythology annoyed him.
What peninsula did they meet on,
waltzing a thin line before veering
to opposite sides of the world,
stamping in their own private tides?
I pray, but I don’t know to whom,
perhaps some cauterized sense of self, a mind removed
from memory & habit. I still dream a small room
where my parents share a kiss & drop their weapons,
my father tossing his boxcutter, my mother her paring knife.
They could both land a cut that didn’t heal easily.
I have the scars from their respective
swipes, & I’m sure my own blade is a cross
between the two: a prop you can dice
logic with, retractable steel you can deny
having used when your lover is bleeding in the sheets.
& speaking of logic, a throatful of proofs
is gathering dust in a bathtub. On the other
side of the house, tomes, magazines never read,
tapped for the yard sale. I’m culling, clearing,
fattening a dumpster that stretches in the backyard,
a black hole oozing its own sensible music.
My parents would be dismayed & proud, they’d
hover over my shoulder, each telling me what I
should keep & discard. These decades later,
I still pace a line between my mother
lost in her galloping verse & my father
muttering over a blueprint. But something,
yes, something writhes in that white streak,
that mist I dive & dive into, groping to find
the silver dollar, the hidden gem. If a god’s there,
so is a devil, & now look, the three of us
splashing like tourists in an empty pool.
Or maybe it’s just me, in the depths, the heights,
alone, thinking the universe is mine.

*

John Amen was a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.

Two Poems by Todd Wynn

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

A Quiet Kind of Violence

Reason combs through wreckage
looking for order
where none exists.

Reason has never bled,
never slept in chairs
beside a diagnosis,
planned a funeral
like shopping from a catalog.

A soft word, reason
like fate, used to explain
the pain of others—
never its own.

The sky stills.
The world collapses
with no lesson
carved into the aftermath.
Just whispers from
those untouched by tragedy:

“It all happens for a reason.”

* 

Her Sky

I sit next to her bed.
Machines powered down—
failed saviors turned spectators
shoved in the corner.
I squeeze a hand
that can’t squeeze back
as goodbye splinters
behind my teeth.
I stare through a window
as if the sky has answers.

Her sky—
wrung out and trembling—
holds ash like an urn
until it fractures,
spilling embered hues
into the hush.
The sun falls—
a funeral at noon.

*

Todd Wynn is a pediatric nurse living in Mansfield, Ohio. He recently began writing poetry as a way of working through past grief and understanding how that has shaped the way he sees the world around him. His work has previously appeared in ONE ART.

Two Poems by Kathryn Jordan

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

“Invasion From Within”

One of the 600 generals is my father.
There he is, furrowed brow, staring

at the back of another general’s head.
My father likes to think about value.

He said he had a lot invested in me
once, after I dropped out of school.

When he couldn’t make a living
selling insurance, he joined the Navy.

In return for obedience, in exchange
for bombing a country, my father didn’t

have to consider the questions. Now,
he’s over-invested— his medals shine.

Who is this fatherman, first man, lost
boy who always said he never got

enough respect, who spanked me
for crying when I was a baby?

Will my father do as he’s told, will he order
military maneuvers to my dangerous city?

Will he send soldiers in polished black boots
to the street, to the little house where I live?

*

Corn Hole

As soon as I saw it, I wanted one:
gigantic skeleton, larger than life.

Moveable joints, easy to arrange
in cadavalier poses, lounging on

lawn chairs, leaning on fenceposts,
leering from holes in the ground.

But I didn’t invest in a mannequin.
A year later and there’s a skeleton

with a cigar on every porch swing,
some houses with even five or six

out on the lawn playing corn hole.
And if this little town’s population

boom is any indication, and I think
it is, there must be literally hundreds

of thousands of white skeletons in
America, taking our jobs, applying

for federal assistance, messing up
our big, beautiful American project!

Make no mistake, this is all thanks
to some oil baron with an agenda

for boosting the business while
making Halloween great again—

which it never was, in my opinion.
I mean, isn’t Halloween for kids?

*

Winner of the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, Kathryn Jordan’s other honors include placement and finalist positions in the Atlanta Review, New Ohio Review, Steve Kowit, Muriel Craft Bailey, Connecticut Poetry, Sidney Lanier, and Patricia Dobler poetry contests. Her poems are published in The Sun, New Ohio Review, and Atlanta Review, among others. She loves to hike the trails, listening for birdsong to transcribe to poetry.

SUMMER HEAT by Doug Fritock

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

SUMMER HEAT

— after ‘When I Was Conceived’ by Michael Ryan

It was 1976, and July. America
was celebrating its birthday.
Bicentennial flags were draped
from porches, and our national bird
had been liberated from the quarter,
set free by the Treasury,
while a Continental drummer
wearing a tricorn hat had taken
its place, although whether
he was playing a drumroll or hitting
a rimshot still remained to be seen,
at least as far as I was concerned.
My father was working in a lab
in Glenolden, my mother taking
the train to her job in the city.
They used to argue about breakfast.
Whether my mother should rise
early and have it ready on the table—
eggs and bacon, coffee and juice—
like the wives of my father’s
colleagues, or whether my father
could toast his own damn slice
of bread. On Sundays, they watched
Alice on their new Sony Trinitron,
my mother telling my father
to Kiss my grits and my father
responding Stow it, a subtle smirk
curling beneath his moustache.
In three years’ time, they’d be
divorced. But still, buried deep
in this shoebox in my father’s garage,
there’s a polaroid of my mother
reclining on a chaise lounge
in the backyard, her blouse un-
buttoned, her hair mussed, her shorts
shorter than any I’ve ever seen
gracing her thighs. I guess it was
a real scorcher in the suburbs
of Philadelphia that summer.
Steamy. Sultry. Oppressive.
And the house didn’t have A/C.

*

Doug Fritock is a writer, husband, and father of 4 living in Redondo Beach, California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Prime Number Magazine, and Whale Road Review among others. He is an active member of Maya C. Popa’s Conscious Writers Collective.

ONE ART’s Nominations for the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards

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ONE ART’s Nominations for the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards

Kai Coggin – I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW

Abby E. Murray – I Can’t Find My Gender

Julie Weiss – Dear Daughter, 

Sean Glatch – Having a Gay Awakening at the Elm Grove Public Pool

Hannah Tennant-Moore – Other People Explain My Sexuality to Me

*

Learn more about the Monarch Queer Literary Awards.

Plastics by Christy Prahl

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Plastics

My mother throws
a Tupperware party.

Only two women come,
eating their body weight

in deviled eggs, listening
to a consultant pitch them

canister sets, colanders,
lemonade pitchers.

The fish aren’t biting.
The pond barely

eddies. My sister and I
pool our birthday money

and ask to buy a set
of nesting bowls.

We will free them
like Matryoshka dolls,

load their cavities
with marbles,

coins, barrettes, and stones.
Fill up our containers.

*

Christy Prahl is an Illinois Arts Council grant recipient and the author of the poetry collections We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023), With Her Hair on Fire (Roadside Press, 2025), and Catalog of Labors (Unsolicited Press, fall 2026). A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work has been featured in Poetry Daily as well as many national and international journals, including the Asheville Poetry Review, CALYX, Rattle, Louisville Review, Penn Review, Sugar House Review, Salt Hill Journal, and others. She was a featured poet on the Hive Poetry Collective podcast in April 2025, and two of her poems have been set to music by post-punk musicians. She splits her time between a small workers’ cottage in Chicago and refurbished Quonset hut in southwest Michigan. More at https://christyprahl.wixsite.com/christy-prahl.

Fortune Cookie by Kari Gunter-Seymour

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Fortune Cookie

Who knows how long that crisp-wannabe
confection huddled in the side pocket
of my car door, or what karmic labyrinth

brought me to this piebald prophesy,
my delight at my find bordering
on ridiculous, a gaggle of words

shrugged together like a kiss for luck
and damn if there isn’t a QR code
hoping to further enhance my fascination.

Hope can be a tough sell when so many
are suffering in the world. It’s easier to notice
what’s wrong than what’s right.

Across the street my neighbor’s wife
is dying, so, too, democracy
according to the media.

A paper strip of quivering letterforms
predicting the future is a hoot, right?—
a shameless self-indulgence,

a distraction from sorrow, a frivolity
to share with a friend, a cheeky
infatuation of farcical futility.

*

Kari Gunter-Seymour (she/her) is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and the author of three award-winning collections of poetry, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) winner of the IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. She is the Executive Director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series Women Speak. Her work has been featured in a variety of journals and the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.

www.karigunterseymourpoet.com
I: karigunterseymour

And in the end, what does a life add up to? by Jen Soong

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

And in the end, what does a life add up to?

Birthday candles, sacred wishes,
surprise thunderstorms, impromptu
dance parties, surreptitious kisses under the
bleachers, skinned knees, scars only you can
identify, the number of times your heart
has been broken, hushed farewells, gifts
you did not know were gifts at the time

It’s uncertain, this calculus, you count
the days, mark the calendar, add and
subtract memories and in the end, what
does a life add up to?

You see, I’m neither mathematician nor
mortician. I like to make lists. I keep
a word bank in my pocket with favorites,
the ones skimming your tongue
like a kingfisher: accordion, archipelago,
bounty, chittering, flotsam, gossamer, lodestar,
mollusk, nocturne, tributary, vestige, yearling

I gift them to you in alphabetical order. Whisper
them like prayers, my friends. Count the days.
Let the tears spill from your eyes like
rivulets. Look for the moments that feel like
divination. Remember: Jane Goodall said not to
lose hope. She knew how to listen, truly listen

You see, in the end, you piece together
a life with what’s in front of you: butter knife,
honey jar, apricot marmalade squeezing
out whatever sweetness you can and never
forgetting to lick each trembling finger

*

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Jen Soong is a writer, artist and educator based in Northern California. She is the author of Extra Ordinary Days, a collection of poems and art, and the creator of See You See Me, a collage book exploring Asian identity and acts of resistance. An alum of Tin House and VONA, her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Audacity, Black Warrior Review and Best Small Fictions. She received her MFA in creative writing from UC Davis. Find her work at jensoong.com.

Free from Want by Lana Hechtman Ayers

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Free from Want

I never understood why my mother ordered less
pastrami than corned beef for Thanksgiving,
since it was pastrami, oozing grease like a Texas
oil derrick, that was more popular, devoured first
from our Kuck’s delicatessen spread—sour pickles
big around as my wrist, potato salad with hard-boiled eggs,
mustard and mayonnaise, plus carrot shavings for crunch,
my favorite, and coleslaw with purple cabbage strands,
always too sweet and swimming in a pool of vinegar,
plus fresh baked rye bread laced with carraway seeds,
sliced thick enough to load sandwich stuffings that could
rival the size of a turkey, I mean an entire intact bird,
not that I knew from family experience because
my mother would rather gargle lighter fluid
than deign to cook one of those creatures whose meat
she claimed stank like my father’s grimy work shirts,
but this was the one day of the year we could pig out
in public, I mean eat and eat and eat ourselves
into a sleep coma if we wanted to, and I did because
other days I had to be good, pretend I could stop
before my plate was empty, be full on half a meatball
and ten spaghetti strands carefully counted out,
being slopped on my plate with a ladle of watery red
gravy and a smidgen of mushy Green Giant canned
peas, as if these meager portions were enough to fill
the hole in my belly, the hole in my soul that ached
to be served the gooey chocolate confection of a single
I love you from my mother’s luscious, Kool-cigarette-bearing lips—
smoke and ash, that was what I gobbled every other day of the year.

*

Lana Hechtman Ayers is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press). Sky Over, her newest chapbook, is forthcoming in 2026. Recent poems appear in Peregrine, Blue Heron Review, and Bracken. Say hello online at lanaayers.com.

Like Schrödinger’s Cat by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 12 Comments

Like Schrödinger’s Cat

he both was and wasn’t
dead, when we walked by,
children in tow, and he curled up,
blocked the sidewalk, either passed out

drunk from too much the night
before, or maybe just gone,
slipped away in plain sight,
while the tourists, all of us,

came and went, looked away,
intent on beignets and chicory coffee,
powdered sugar mounded on our plates.
He was still on the ground

when we returned from the Café du Monde,
vampires gone to bed, saxophones resting
in their velvet cases. He lay undisturbed
in the same position, not dead we thought,

though we didn’t check for breath,
but a composition, a still life, or not.
We skirted him, discussed the day to come,
decided he’d had too much,

shook our heads, walked on
to catch the trolley, preferred to think
he was still in the box, on this side
of life, for the children’s sake

we kept our pace, we didn’t slow,
just another man we‘d never know.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in Minyan, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which served as the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. In addition, she also frequently collaborates with San Diego artist Judith Christensen, most recently on an installation entitled “Mapping Our Future Selves.”

The Knot by Gloria Heffernan

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The Knot

A writhing lock of Medusa’s hair
erupts from the center of the skein.
Unruly strands clenched like a fist,
stand between the crochet hook
and the almost-finished blanket.
It would be so easy to snip it,
tie the two ends together,
weave them neatly into the stitches.

But the knot draws my fingers
deeper into the tangled web—
not the one we were warned about,
no deception here,
just a ball of yarn
tangled like seaweed
around a swimmer’s ankle.

Just cut it. Here are the scissors.
Why all the fuss?
But I am determined to conquer
the yarn’s wild mane,
laboring to unravel it,
eager to restore order,
seduced by the lure of a problem
I can actually solve.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s most recent poetry collection is Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). To learn more, visit: gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

ONE ART’s 2026 Best Microfiction Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2026 Best Microfiction Nominations

Erin Murphy – Insomnia Chronicles XXIII
Howie Good – Shadows and Ghosts
John Amen – Hide & Seek
Linda Laderman – A morning with my dead father
Laura Daniels – Artillery Shelling

*

A Note from The Editor

Although, of course, ONE ART identifies as a poetry journal, the name of the lit mag was partly chosen to allow for precisely this sort of gray area. Many “prose poems” published in ONE ART walk a line between poetry, flash fiction, flash creative nonfiction (CNF), or “micros” by any other name. After all, writing is writing is writing.

*

“Best Microfiction 2026 will be published by Pelekinesis in the summer of 2026. The Best Microfiction anthology series considers stories of only 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O’Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology will have Pulitzer Prize winning poet Diane Seuss serve as final judge.”

Learn more about Best Microfiction here.

*

The One Story by Philip Terman

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

The One Story

Little League all-star game,
I hit a homerun over the fence.
My father abandoned the bleachers

for the sidelines and after I crossed home plate
lifted me up onto his six foot four shoulders
and pranced me around the field

before my teammates and coaches
and all the other parents in the stands,
as if I were royalty.

And I was never closer to the sky
where the rabbi told us heaven was.
Do I recall this story because

it was our few minutes of glory?
Or because it was the only time
my father showed me off like a trophy?

Or is it because each time
I’m called upon by my daughters
to tell them a story about

the grandfather they never met
I tell them this tale, though
after a few words they stop me

to say they’ve heard it before.
Tell us another one. But I continue
the same words in the same order:

Little League all-star game,
I hit a homerun over the fence
and my father abandoned the bleachers

for the sidelines and after I crossed home plate
lifted me onto his six foot four shoulders
and pranced me around the field

before my teammates and coaches
and all the other parents in the stands,
as if I were royalty.

*

Philip Terman’s recent books include My Blossoming Everything, The Whole Mishpocha and, as co-translator, Tango Below a Narrow Ceiling: The Selected Poems of Riad Saleh Hussein. He directs the non-profit Bridge Literary Arts Center in Venango County, PA. bridgeliteararyartsartscenter.org

A Pangolin Rolls Up in a Box at Airport Customs by Dana Henry Martin

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A Pangolin Rolls Up in a Box at Airport Customs

       More than a million pangolins were caught from the wild
       between 2000 and 2013, making the species
       the most trafficked mammal in the world

His long tail wraps around his body
as every abdominal muscle works itself
tighter. He’s balancing on his head now,
front arms tucked into his stomach, stocky
back legs clawing the air, eager to settle.
He unfurls to adjust his head once more
then lies as if frozen with only his scales
to protect him. They aren’t designed
to keep humans at bay. He’s lucky
he was transported live and not
as a bag of scales, already reduced to
a hangover cure or a remedy for itching
and asthma. The box is empty except for
the pangolin, who occupies a small corner
of the relatively vast interior, like a ball
thrown into an empty room and left there,
forgotten. His abdomen rises and falls.
The exquisite armor of his back spreads
and contracts as agents talk and laugh
in the near distance. Just another day
for them. He may die from stress
before he reaches safety. He’s one
of hundreds of thousands each year
who meet this end or worse, never
making it to customs alive. His name
comes from the Malay word penggulung,
which means roller and describes
what he’s doing, rolling under threat
in self-defense. I want to tell you
that I’ve felt like a pangolin, that I’ve
curved my back and tucked my head
and limbs inside to protect my soft
center, that I’m not being metaphorical,
that humans get trafficked, too, even
when we don’t know the word because
we’re young and we aren’t poached
as much as harvested within our families
so even if we had scales, we wouldn’t
expose them because the man reaching
for us is our father or one of his friends.
But mostly I want you to save this pangolin
and every pangolin on Earth, and that’s not
a metaphor either, but it’s also a metaphor.
It’s both at once, like a living being who’s
also a cure for someone else’s suffering
even though they aren’t and never will be.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Laurel Review, Mad in America, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Trampoline, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press).

Red Things by Ann Kammerer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Red Things

Right before
Mom left Dad
and moved out-of-town,
she started buying
all sorts
of red things,
things like
red shoes,
red earrings,
red shirts,
red dresses,
and a single-breasted
red pea coat
with black buttons
trimmed with
zirconia.

Dad asked why
she was getting
so dolled up,
why she was
wearing clothes
meant for
high school girls
like me.

“Never mind,” he said.
“I know why.
You’re catting about.
Aren’t you?”

Mom ignored him.
She fluffed her hair
in the hallway mirror
and put on red lipstick,
color-keyed
with her dress.
Elevated in heels,
she clicked past him
as he watched TV
and drank.

“Answer me.”
Dad grabbed her.
She swatted him
and pulled away.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“You know I can’t
stand it.”

They argued.
Dad stomped
to the kitchen
to get more beer.
Mom slipped on
her red coat
and went out,
her bright form a blur
as she passed by
the front window.

“Get back here.”
Dad shouted through
the open door.
The cold air blew in.
Mom revved
her Maverick
and backed
from the drive,
the headlights
glaring in Dad’s face,
making him squint.

“Goddamn it,” he said.
“I’ll find you.”

Dad yanked a sport coat
from the closet
and pulled it over
his untucked oxford.
He stumbled outside
in his rumpled pants,
one foot falling heavy,
the other dragging,
a felt cap set crooked
over his thinning hair.

After they left
and the house
grew quiet,
my little sister Janie
came out
to the living room.
She asked
where Mom was,
but didn’t ask
about Dad.
I told her
they went somewhere,
probably down
to Armando’s
or maybe over
to Monty’s.

“We should probably
go to bed,” I said.
“Before they get back.”

Janie sat down.
She covered her lap
with a dirty afghan
that Mom had knit
with red and white
acrylic yarn.

“I want to watch
The Waltons,” she said.
“We always do.
Me and Mom.
On Thursdays.”

I said OK,
we could do that.
Kneeling,
I flipped through
the channels,
landing on
the opening credits,
Janie telling me
to stop.

“There, there.”
Leaning forward,
Janie hummed
the theme song,
clapping out the waltz
of Appalachian rhythm,
the tiny screen filling
with a gabled house,
then John Boy
in a second-floor
window,
his father pulling up
in a flat-bed truck,
his mother
standing serenely
on the porch,
as a cluster of children
in overalls and gingham
bounded barefoot
across grass and pebbles,
a fawn-colored hound
not far behind.

*

Ann Kammerer lives in the Chicago area, and is a native of Michigan. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Fictive Dream, ONE ART, Open Arts Forum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Chiron Review, BlazeVOX, The Broken Spine, and elsewhere, and in anthologies by Workers Write!, Querencia Press, and Crow Woods Publishing. Her chapbook collections of narrative poetry include Yesterday’s Playlist (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Beaut (Kelsay Books, 2024), Friends Once There (Impspired, 2024), Someone Else (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and At the Cleaners (Bottlecap Press, 2025). You can find her here: annkammerer.com

After Placing My Husband in Care I Visit the Serengeti by Carla T. Griswold

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

After Placing My Husband in Care I Visit the Serengeti

Three black headed herons stand atop an acacia bush
over the hippos’ pool as the sun begins to drop.

Their feet fit between thorns. The acacia leans
as though to catch its own reflection.

Suspended from its branches are cups of nests
male weaver birds began threading

this morning in an intricate pattern of grass.
Each nest, an upturned teacup, warming.

Yellow weavers flash above the thorns protecting
these suspended shelters swaying over the pool.

Only the eyes and nostrils of twenty hippos are above water,
their mud purple skin slippery as they snort.

The herons watch the quickness of the weavers
and the slow slide of the hippos now moving

to climb the muddy bank as the sun retreats.
I won’t lose this love. I know what I have.

*

Carla T. Griswold is a literary artist whose work has appeared in journals, anthologies and on public radio. She holds an MFA from Pacific University, Oregon. Her work has been published in Prairie Schooner, San Pedro River Review, Community of Writers Review and Peregrine Journal. Her chapbook Missing Women: 1969-1993, was published by CJ Ink. She writes from an island in the Salish Sea where she cycles to find the best views of Mt. Rainier.

ONE ART’s 2026 Pushcart Prize Nominations

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s 2026 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Moudi Sbeity – Whale Shark
Morrow Dowdle – And Then, We Hear It
Veronica Tucker – Once, on the Oncology Floor
Hilary Sideris – Net Worth
Francesca Leader – Weights & Measures
Anne Starling – Conversations with My Son

§

Whale Shark

A whale shark, according to the five year old at
the climbing gym, is what happens when a whale
eats a shark. Just like that. It’s simple. Everything
is separate and when two things join they just
add to another. The shark doesn’t die in this story.
Nothing changes. The world is still safe, predictable.
The whale shark was his favorite tattoo, but now it’s
erased. My full sleeve tattoos don’t erase though,
and they’re the biggest ones he’s seen. Like really big.
Like really really big. I thought of how when sorrow
consumes joy they don’t simply add to each other,
but become poignant. And when gratitude spills
into grief together they create the conditions for
surrender. Or even how water and flour make bread,
not Water Flour. Some things get lost along the way.
But I didn’t tell him this; that a whale shark is actually
a shark, just a really big one. I wanted more to believe
in the simplicity of his world, in the authenticity of
how things join, then come apart, and in the process
nothing is changed, no one dies. We just continue to
appear and disappear into each other’s lives unaffected,
our innocence not yet capable of breaking.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a first-generation Lebanese-American currently enrolled in the Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling masters program at Naropa University. Prior to attending Naropa, they co-owned and operated a Lebanese restaurant in Salt Lake City, which served as a queer safe space. Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah in 2014. As a person who stutters, they are passionate about writing and poetry as transpersonal practices in self-expression.

Moudi’s poems have appeared in the following anthologies; Irreplaceable by Nan Seymour and Terry Tempest Williams (Moon In The Rye Press, 2025), Love Is For All Of Us by James Crews (Storey Publishing, May 2025), The Nature Of Our Times by Luisa A. Igloria (Paloma Press, Fall 2025). Moudi’s first book, Habibi Means Beloved, a memoir on growing up queer and stuttering in Lebanon, is expected to be published in late 2026 by University of Utah Press.

§

And Then, We Hear It

That is, I hear it, and then
she enters my bedroom.
Face stricken.

I heard it, she says. Something
booming. I don’t correct her,
don’t say shooting.

The book of essays stays
open on my lap. I’m reading
the scholar’s message

to the would-be confessional poet.
Their recommendation? Your verse
should be more gospel

than gossip. The only hymn
at present a ringing in my ears.
Aren’t you scared?

she asks. I tell again the saddest
lie—No, I reply. I cut her
loose in her fear, make

my face maddeningly flat.
And what could I say about
the stray bullet that found me

in Chicago. Or the ones
that fly by no accident
into a brother’s or sister’s

chest or head. Men do kill,
whether it’s bird or deer
or a queer who’s been known

to hold a red card, sitting
out here in the country
with my daughter,

where the KKK still lurks
in corners. Then there’s
the adrenaline of executive
orders, the line not far
from Klan to militia.
It’s probably someone

hammering, she says.
Yes, I say. I like that
explanation. I like us

to think that someone’s
out there in the dark
on a silver ladder, nails

sprouting from their mouth.
So eager to build a house
they could not wait for morning.

*

Morrow Dowdle is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the micro-chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Their work can be found in New York Quarterly, The Baltimore Review, Pedestal Magazine, and other publications. They run a performance series which features BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices. They are an MFA candidate at Pacific University and live in Durham, NC.

§

Once, on the Oncology Floor

A teenager asked
if he’d ever drive again.
No one knew what to say.
So I showed him
how to press the nurse call button
like it was an ignition switch.
He laughed,
and for a minute,
the hallway turned
into an open road.

That night
I dreamed of him
parallel parking
between stars.
I woke with the memory
of his hand
gripping the rail
as if it were
a steering wheel.

*

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, as well as a mother of three. Her work appears in redrosethorns, Red Eft Review, and Medmic, with additional pieces forthcoming. Find her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com or on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.

§

Net Worth

I watch the news & file
my statement of net worth,
sign a retainer stating I won’t date
until divorced. Mom loves Sam,

a man my age who lives with her
(locked out of his wife’s house,
his name not on the deed).
No one has ever treated her so well.

Ecstatic to have someone to cook for,
she wonders what sex will be like.
My father wasn’t nice. I have his eyes,
& the bags under them. At church

folks talk. Sam promises he’ll build
a mansion soon, maybe they’ll move
to Spain. Incredulous, she tells me
He even finds my phone.

*

Hilary Sideris is the author of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press 2020), and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press 2022.) Her new collection, Calliope, is now available from Broadstone. Sideris works as a professional developer for CUNY Start, a program for underserved, limited-income students at The City University of New York. She can be found online at hilarysiderispoetry.com

§

Weights & Measures

I still don’t know how
You can compliment a girl
Without infecting her,

Say she’s perfect
Without seeding worry
Of when she won’t be

Anymore, span her
Waist with hands
Amarvel at its minuteness

Without encoding
Lovability as the ability
To fit inside something

Else, submit to
Subsumption. I still don’t
Know how you can

Expect a girl’s soul
Not to snag on BMI charts,
Measurements, bodyfat

Ratios, celebrity weight
Loss and “Half My Size” stories,
Because they’re

Everywhere—number-shaped
Briars ensnarling all
Paths to self-acceptance—

Or tell her to inure,
Ignore, be tough but soft,
A paradox, like vanity sizing

That makes her crave
The labels that anoint her
A 2 and damn the brands

That brand her a 12,
As if she could be “S”
And “L” at once,

Survive the truth
Of weighing & measuring how
Much she matters in inverse

Proportion to how much
(Always too much) matter
She comprises, for bodies

Most loved are the
Bodies that least exist.
I still don’t know how

You can call a girl
Beautiful because she’s thin
Or ugly because she isn’t

Without engendering
Pathology, a fixation sickness
On what is visible

Instead of what is whole.

*

Francesca Leader has poetry published or forthcoming in Abyss & Apex, HAD, Broadkill Review, Stone Circle, The Storms Journal, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net (2025) and Best Spiritual Literature (2025). Her debut poetry chapbook, “Like Wine or Like Pain,” is available from Bottlecap Press. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.

§

Conversations with My Son

The longest one lasted twelve minutes.
I held my breath.
He was happy. He had something to tell me.
He was leaving.
He was almost gone.
I can still see us together at that moment,
Nick at thirteen, sitting on the sun porch floor,
playing with the dog’s ears, his whole face
open to me as he talked about his two new
friends, his new school. Open as the weed-
flowers he used to rush inside to bestow
when he was little. So then,
I wasn’t thinking about starting dinner,
or of the magazine article I’d set aside.
Or of the word he’d used— “mavericks”—
to describe the trio of classmates he
so proudly
claimed to lead. I was trying to be happy;
I was happy for him. The world would soon turn
unrecognizable, would become something
I couldn’t imagine. Not the world: of course
I mean life. I mean my life. From then on,
the world was smoldering, until everything
went up in flames. I could show you.
I have the ashes.

*

Anne Starling is a poet from Florida. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, and Tampa Review, among other journals. Her poem “Shoe Store” appeared in Missouri Review Online as Poem of the Week.

§

Smoke Inhalation by Samn Stockwell

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Smoke Inhalation

I give extra money to the workers
at the laundromat
because one died at 24 and
in remembering the contusions of her past
and the gap of her future,
I am pretending to believe
in the possibility of relief
for the other young women
folding my clothes.

Once a construction worker
gave me a dollar
as I dragged a cardboard
suitcase along the sidewalk.
He saw the utterness of my defeat
despite the childishness of my face.
Then as now, a dollar’s not enough
to buy respite from an empty sky.
It’s more like getting a postcard
showing the long loneliness
of the path ahead.

*

Samn Stockwell has published extensively. Her new book Musical Figures is published by Thirty West Publishing House. Previous books won the National Poetry Series and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir. Recent poems are in Pleiades and others.

Pennies by Julia Caroline Knowlton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Pennies

Now that none will be minted anymore,
what will I give you for your thoughts?

How will I know what is saved and earned,
how to be wise compared to pound foolish?

Will I give two of something else, lacking cents?
And what will fall from our coppery heaven?

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Julia has a PhD in French Literature (UNC-Chapel Hill) and an MFA in Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles). The author of one full-length poetry collection, three poetry chapbooks, a memoir and a children’s book, she has twice been named Georgia Author of the Year. Her work has also been recognized by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Atlanta and Paris. Julia is Guest Editor for ONE ART’s IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems.

September Like Sunflowers At Sunset by Joemario Umana

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

September Like Sunflowers At Sunset

I do not know how to hold endings,
so I open the window and let September out
and another month in. The wind heavy with wingbeat
reminds me of all the days I have lent my body
to reclusion. In the field, sunflowers turn their faces
toward what is leaving, as if beauty is a lesson
in surrender. Memory unfolds the words of a friend, that
every dusk is a gate and the soul must walk through
it with open palms. Now look at my trembling hands
being a testimony. I want to believe that every goodbye
carries a seed, that even silence can bloom yellow
inside the throat of grief. That’s why I lean into this
evening light and whisper my ache into the fading air,
let the wind carry it like a secret and lay it among the petals
of sunflowers already leaning into sleep, as I learn
to gather light in my chest even as darkness
sharpens its knives. And maybe when night
finally comes, it will find me open,
my body a field where even sorrow
leans toward the sun.

*

Joemario Umana, Swan XVII, is a Nigerian creative writer and a performance poet who considers himself a wildflower. His works have appeared in trampset, Strange Horizons, LOLWE, Chestnut Review, Isele Magazine, Orange Blossom Review, Frontier Poetry, Uncanny Magazine, Poetry Sango-Ota, Poetry Column-NND and elsewhere. He tweets @JoemarioU38615.

SET THE BONE by Jillian Stacia

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

SET THE BONE

My great-grandmother fell off the roof
and broke her leg when she was six.
It would’ve been easier if you just died,

her mother said. A fractured leg
was a week’s worth of breakfast.
Hospitals are expensive. So are daughters.

Decades later, I still feel the throbbing
of that story. The ache locked inside
the ligament. The way it tenses in the rain.

Is it any wonder she ran into the shelter of a man
returning from war? Didn’t notice the blood
on his hands till she slid on a ring

and recognized the view from that old roof,
the sky another shade of the same bruised blue.
No one ever heals.

We don’t think to count the cracks,
the small breaks
that make up the women who raise us.

If a mother is a mirror, then the glass
is always cracked. All we see
is our warped reflection,

the twisted way we learn to weather.
Grind our teeth. Set the bone.
Every daughter throws stones

from the glasshouse her mother built.
I hold these legacies inside my hips.
I feel each storm before it falls.

Tell me, who among us doesn’t walk with a limp?

*

Jillian Stacia is the author of the upcoming poetry collection, SET THE BONE, published by Arcana Poetry Press. She was selected as an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize and short-listed for the 2026 Central Avenue Poetry Prize. She has been nominated for several awards, including 2025 Best of Net and the 2025 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has been featured in several literary magazines and anthologies. Find her online @jillianstacia to read more of her work.

Broken by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Broken

At the park, you stagger your way
through shrieks and shenanigans,

crying. Your arm, once a smooth
stroll from shoulder blade to fingertip,

now a mountain hike, its slopes
insurmountable. My heart landslides,

tumbles over the edge of your pain.
Whatever I was holding in my hand

jolts the earth. You walk towards us,
your mothers, trying not to cry, to tough

the bones back into place as though
your fortitude wore scrubs and a mask.

When children fall in films,
parents always falcon on the scene,

but not me. For a few fractured
seconds, I´m all knees and vertigo,

hanging upside down from a bar
of shock, unable to drop.

How many times have I, searching
for the rewind button, pressed

remorse instead? You, halfway
to the hospital by now. Your sister

plunged in friends´ hugs, inconsolable
as a skeleton. The sky birdless,

hunched in facepalm, my cheeks
slap-red. Your arm will heal, son,

but know this: there are moments
in a mother´s life that never

fuse back together.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in February 2025 by Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears in ONE ART, Variant Lit, The Westchester Review, Up The Staircase Quarterly, and others. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.

Navel Gazing by Kat Lehmann

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Navel Gazing

You are my first and most perfect
scar. As a child I wondered how deep
you went. Were you Mariana Trench
or river eddy? I would try to unfold you,
find the bottom of your wrinkles, unravel
your lint magic, but you remained
a wrapped gift, an endless tease.

When I was pregnant, you popped out
proud as a performer who practiced
for years to sing an aria onstage. It turns out
you were just a modest knob, crinkles
smoothed, and, dear cul-du-sac, you led
nowhere. Shallow pit. Fallow. Season passed.
But long ago we drifted, suspended

in the thick gel of the universe. Without care,
I sipped the surrounding syrup as if sampling
the atmosphere, the basin of my chest
coddled in density, my four limbs plus your one.
You were the tether to my floating balloon,
the bridge to a new physics. And in those days,
you led everywhere.

*

Kat Lehmann is a founding co-chief editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. She is a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize for her haiku collection no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song. Her mini-chapbook of sudo-ku (the multi-haiku form that she created) and is available as a free download from Ghost City Press. A former research biochemist, Kat lives in Connecticut with her family. https://katlehmann.weebly.com

Three Poems by Nancy Huggett

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

Wake Me in a Silly Stupid Way
(our daughter’s request, post-stroke, most mornings)

My husband is a pirate,
a patch, a breach of laughter
in the morning. Stealing
our daughter’s memory
of what she’s lost
from her waking eyes
so what remains is this ocean
of love that amuses. He steers
the stolen ship of what might have been
around the rocks, through shark-infested
waters that roil when her brain recoils
at sound and wobbly stairs and boundaries
not set by her—the flash and flare
of fists that harm the ones she loves,
the contrition that plunders her days.
He peg-legs in and pulls a parrot
from his pocket, feathers ruffed
from the climb upstairs, squawking
in some raucous rum-punched tenor,
jigging with the sunlight as it streaks
across the pine planks of her bedroom floor.
Other days he’s a wizard in a pointy hat
or a jester with a bell, or his own sweet
grinning goofy self that he magics
from yesterday’s debacle or last
night’s unkempt sleep. He saves her
daily from her own laments.
Switch-baits regrets for buried
treasure—this day and all its charms.

*

When our daughter with Down syndrome is diagnosed
with a rare neurodegenerative disease, I think of the skunk
after Maggie Smith

who, three nights in a row,
woke us with the burning sulphureous sting
of a stink and I ran around closing windows.
Like all those midnight runs to the ER
when our daughter kept having “fainting spells”
and turned blue. Then someone told me

it takes almost two weeks for a skunk
to refill their glands after spraying,
that if it happens back to back to back
you’re dealing with a bigger problem.

*

I Believe in the Night: A Caregiver’s Credo
(lines from Rilke, Book of Monastic Life I, 11)

I believe in the night, creator
of mirrors and monsters,

and in the stars, dead now
but dangling direction.

I believe in shadow’s
embrace. Dusky lover

of all the nations of my heart—
their bicker of sadness,

canticles of delight. I believe
in unfinished hems, threads

trailing through dark,
thin ribbons of fiddle

for fingers searching,
rosaries lost long ago

in the backwoods of hope
where brambles catch

starlight, glimmer like fireflies
always moving. I believe

in the dirt, in cicadas’
vast slumber,

the emergence of lovers,
bulbs, dew worms inching

refuse into friable loam.
I believe in the soil—

that darkness can make you sing.

*

Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Published in Event, Poetry Northwest, SWIMM, and Whale Road Review, she’s won some awards (RBC PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.

Beads by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Beads

There are days I long for long-ago days
and crave the cackled song of her laughter.
Why did she have to leave us so soon?
I see her in every bloom of iris, purpling
my side yard each June. Grief is
a forever fading bruise, a reminder
of our Kodachrome days, all those little
snapshots we carry, trinkets we unbury
from the drawer of memory—
a bracelet full of charms reminding us
how lucky we are to find one another,
each of us, a shimmering bead
on life’s great, miraculous string.

*

Shawn Aveningo Sanders’ poems have appeared in journals worldwide, including Calyx, ONE ART, contemporary haibun online, Drifting Sands, Quartet, Timberline Review, Cloudbank, Sheila-Na-Gig, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and many others. Her new book, Pockets (MoonPath Press, 2025) was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest. Shawn is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Touchstone Award nominee. A proud mom and Nana, she shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon, where they run a small press, The Poetry Box. When she’s not writing, you might find her in a shoe store hunting for a new pair of red shoes. (redshoepoet.com)

Two Poems by Denise Duhamel

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

POEM IN WHICH WE WERE YOUNG AND DUMB

When we moved into that teeny place
on Mulberry Street, a ceiling fan hung
in the middle of our miniscule living room.
Red wires, black wires. It jiggled from side to side.
I think it’s going to fall, I said. It scares me.
You thought I worried too much. I was afraid
to walk under the fan, even when it was off.
I called it a mistletoe of death. Sometimes
I stepped on the couch to avoid it
since the room was so small. One night as we slept
I heard a crash. The motor made a dent in the floor
and the blades spun off. It was the first time
I said I told you so. I hadn’t called the landlord
because I wanted to believe you. I wanted
to believe everything would be just fine.

*

POEM IN WHICH I RECONSIDER THE PASTORAL

I used to think nature poetry was dopey,
O’Hara and all that—I can’t even enjoy a blade
of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy…
But that’s before the trees started to disappear—
dead ocean pockets, hurricanes, and wildfires.
I am late to the party held in this forest,
but I am so glad all of you are still here,
bopping under the twinkle lights of fireflies,
the data-free clouds, the retro disco ball moon.

*

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, she lives in Dania Beach.

At Machu Picchu by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

At Machu Picchu

Green fingers of the Andes point straight up.
Minty buzz of coca leaves chewed to a pulp
are supposed to help with altitude sickness.
They don’t. Far below, the brown river churns,
white with foam. We clamber over steep stones.
This is where Incan emperors came
for summer respite, high in cool clouds.
Here’s an outline of a granary.
And here’s where oracles
scried for omens. Did those wise ones foresee
the coming of Spaniards on horseback,
looking like great god-beasts
to ones who’d never seen riders before?
There’s a dizziness that comes
when worlds collide, like now,
when I’m in another country, half in another century,
imagining the sight of impossibly tall conquistadors
galloping up on a sleepy village.
I sink down on a warm boulder, easy mark
for an off-duty guard who tells me
he’s looking for an American wife
with lots of patience, because he wants to fly
“like a condor” to the U.S. But I’m already married,
and a sharp-tongued flatlander, alas.
He shrugs. Worth a try.
We watch a local woman, baby tied to her back
climb past, easy as water flowing uphill,
followed by a German with a selfie stick.
Since I landed in Cusco last week,
I’ve seen a bent-over old man
use a toilet plunger to haul himself along
steep streets, and a barefoot girl
in muddy rags, herding pigs in a ditch.
Mostly I’ve seen how mighty empires fall
and the descendants of kings are left
hustling tourists for tips.
The arc of history dissolves into mist.
“You can know every view by one view,”
my companion says, out of the blue.
He’s stuck in his life, as I am in mine,
and the terms are cosmically unjust.
High above us, condors circle the sacred mountain
cruising the updrafts like minor gods.

*

Alison Luterman’s five books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and Hard Listening. She also writes plays, song lyrics, and personal essays. She has taught at New College, The Writing Salon, Catamaran, Esalen and Omega Institutes and writing workshops around the country, as well as working as a California poet in the schools for many years.

not a letter to my father by Claire Jean Kim

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

not a letter to my father

kremlin was your nickname at work
because of the secrets you kept.
well, they didn’t know the half of it.
the down-low trips to beijing and pyongyang,
the rolls of c-notes you handed mom:
we’ll be rich one day. your husband is going
to be famous. by day, a professor in d.c.
by night, a man of international mystery,
an asian james bond, with the obligatory côterie
of female hangers-on. but it all came
to naught, didn’t it? the machinations
and assignations? except the wreckage; that part
was real. then, poetically, infirmity,
with your second ex-wife and third daughter
guarding your carcass out of spite,
as if anyone, anywhere would want a bite.
yesterday, i looked you up online
and saw you had died.

*

Claire Jean Kim is on the faculty at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on racial justice and human-animal studies. She is the author of three award-winning scholarly books. She began writing poetry in 2021, and her poems have been published in or are forthcoming in Rising Phoenix Review, Terrain.org, Tiger Moth Review, Anthropocene, Bracken, The Ilanot Review, Ghost City Review, The Summerset Review, Great River Review, TriQuarterly, Anacapa Review, The Lincoln Review, Arc Poetry, Pinch, The American Poetry Journal, North American Review, The Indianapolis Review, and The Missouri Review. The Lincoln Review nominated her poem “Things to do on a Fullbright fellowship in Japan” for Best of the Net in 2025. Terrain.org nominated her poem “Mastodon” for the Best New Poets anthology in 2024. The Missouri Review featured her poem “Amsterdam” as a “Poem of the Week” in January 2025.

Two Poems by Daye Phillippo

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

We shared a secret,

                                       the morning moon
and I, she who has just begun her wane
and I who am further along—waning
is not to be feared, it’s just the journey
toward being made new. Emptied to be
filled, and all, seasons on their wheel.
This morning’s sky, a faded, soft pastel
like the pink umbels of Joe Pye Weed
and the hostas’ lavender flutes, stirring
in the breeze. And out front, the pale
sweet pea blossoms, almost translucent
color of the moon, delicately edged
with lavender on vines that have, by July,
tendrilled to the top of their teepee
and now tumble over themselves, lavish
opulence of blossom and fragrance
in which I’m immersed as I clip flowers
to refresh the vases. Refuge of tendril
and vine where a hummingbird pauses
to rest, refresh herself before flying on.

*

Washing Your Face with a Pink Washcloth

      Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day.
      “Both Sides Now” – Joni Mitchell

Washing your face with a pink washcloth
dried on the line is like washing your face
with evening sky. Breathe it in before bed.
Blessed are those who walk to the barn
to secure chickens for the night, witness
a wide sky piled high with gray and white,
pink backdrop that didn’t last, dissolved
the way cotton candy and youth dissolve,
sugar away in the mouth, the way what you
expected this time of life to be is not,
yet, here you are, feet still on the ground,
head still in the clouds, washing your face
with sky and that song about clouds you
learned on piano when you were young,
only song you actually wanted to play.
Tonight you’ll rest your head on a cloud,
soft pillowcase fragrant with wind and
wondering, clouds and years, their colors
and shapes, trajectories, their brighten
and fade, accumulations and dispersals,
flashes and rumblings, just how much
clouds can hold back before the rain falls,
and their longstanding relationship with
wind that drives the storyline, beginning
to end. Stage right, stage left, third wall.
What will it all look like from the other side?

*

Daye Phillippo taught English at Purdue University. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected by ETS for inclusion in the AP English Exam. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Midwest Quarterly, LETTERS, One Art, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana where she hosts a Poetry Hour at her local library. Thunderhead, her first collection, was published by Slant in 2020. Her second collection of poems, Blue Between Owls, was awarded the 2024 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and is forthcoming from Codhill Press.

Two Poems by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

WAITING FOR THE MAIL

This is the week
this might be the day

like I said
yesterday also–

maybe tomorrow
or the day after–

balancing on
anticipation’s tightrope–

I love the air up here–
freed of everything–

disappointment,
even joy.

*

ANXIETY MORNING

You’re open-ended,
some necklace
that has lost its clasp.

You might be ploughing
across bogland, ground
precarious beneath you.

You’d be a great cypress
overlooking the Pacific cliffs if you could–
wind-sculpted by centuries, still held.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem. You can find her at andreapotos.com

It’s 11:11 am on November 11 by David Colodney

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

It’s 11:11 am on November 11

Dad rises from his armchair, the mauve one
he sits watching Mets games all summer.
This year for the first time, I must help him stand.
He’s at attention, thrusting his willowed chest,
raising his right hand to his forehead in salute.
He stands erect for precisely one minute,
as he has each year since his honorable
discharge, only this year he is not in his Army
dress greens. This year, his arm trembles
like leaves in autumn’s wind, a branch arriving
in the form of a nurse guiding him back
to his seat as Mom arrives & caresses his cheek.
Dad never talks about combat, never shares
war stories. What is he thinking as he pays tribute
to the fallen he fought with, & the dead whose names
he never knew yet considered brothers? I stand
beside him, my hand on his shoulder, a paperweight.

*

David Colodney is a poet living in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is the author of Gen X Redux, forthcoming in 2026 from Main Street Rag Publishing, and the chapbook Mimeograph (Finishing Line Press, 2020). A Best of the Net and three-time Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in multiple journals. David currently serves as an associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal and is an ardent supporter of Liverpool Football Club. If you are looking for him, he can often be found at the Lion & Eagle Pub watching Liverpool matches.

How to Construct a Soul by George Franklin

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

How to Construct a Soul

First, you buy the kit from Target or Amazon.
I heard that Costco has them as well, and they
May be a little cheaper. There are people who
Say they all start out the same. I don’t know.
Mine looked like a hummingbird, and a friend
Told me his had blue feathers and a black beak.
There are even online discussion groups about
Ones with fur. Some of them are hard and
Shiny like volcanic rock—they may not

Have been shiny at the beginning though.
Most of it is what you do with them, the time
And care you put in, carving, combing,
Polishing. It’s not something everybody’s
Comfortable with, but it’s important to read
The instructions. Otherwise, you could make
A real mess of it. Let’s say you have one of
Them that’s part of a set. It’s not easy to figure
Out where the other could be. There are stories

About builders who travel as far as South Asia
Or Africa, just hoping to find it waiting for them,
Maybe in the gift shop of a museum, or in
A marketplace, hiding behind a stack of handknit
Rugs or a display of Turkish chess pieces. I try
Not to think how disappointed they must be
If it doesn’t happen. Whatever you start out with,
You’ve got to manage your expectations.
Start slow. Begin by holding your new soul in

Cupped hands. Don’t be surprised if you shake
A little. Let it get used to you, the warmth of
Your palms and fingers. When it trusts you, it
May let you start to groom it, smooth the sharp
Edges, give it small treats—understand, some
Will refuse food entirely. Those require extra
Patience. Others will make soft whining sounds.
Speak in a low voice and comfort them
Until they fall asleep. Sometimes, music helps,

Or you can show them paintings of landscapes—
Trees and green hillsides, cattle, sheep, maybe
A stream, silver brushstrokes on top of blue.
Building a soul isn’t a project to fill a dull
Afternoon. Realize, you’re going to be at this
For however long it takes, and you can’t
Hurry it up or force a soul to be anything
Other than what it is. Don’t expect it to look
Like the picture on the box.

*

George Franklin is the author of eight poetry collections, including A Man Made of Stories, and a book of essays, Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing (both Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Individual poems have been published in Nimrod, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, One Art, and New Ohio Review, among others. He practices law in Miami, is a translation editor for Cagibi, teaches poetry classes in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day.

Comp Lit by Erik Reece

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Comp Lit

My middle school English teacher mounted a long dark paddle,
drilled with holes, over the chalkboard in front of his class.
He called it the Black Death or the Black Mariah, or something
like that. We had thick orange grammar books out of which
we endlessly diagrammed sentences, knowing that a misdirected
participle might mean the application of that heinous paddle to
our hind end. Somehow, I came to love literature anyway. I came
to love words like susurration and Ohio. When I discovered
the poet Anna Ahkmatova, I loved that her name meant daughter
of the oaks, a name she invented because her father didn’t want
a poet in the family. What father does? Mine seemed perplexed,
eternally so, each Sunday morning by the furious rebuttals I wrote
on the church program to our pastor’s innocuous sermons.
Two years later, it was a short drive to a drunk driving charge
after I flailed along to the Fleshtones one night at Café LMNOP.
Friends from the college paper couldn’t go my bail, so I sat
in a cell till morning and said over and over, Anna Ahkmatova,
as if she might come through the walls, as if I was her lost son
shivering in a Russian prison under false arrest. Such, I’m afraid,
was the grandiose self-pity of my youth. It didn’t serve me well.
My passion for John Berryman convinced a Rhodes Scholar
to sleep with me once, after I drank all the liquor in her house,
but it didn’t stop the trimmers when I landed in an unironic rehab
called The Ledge. I quit reading John Berryman. I quit living
like John Berryman. I quit thinking that my father’s suicide
was a door he left open for me. I gave up the long day’s journey
into oblivion and shame. Now I just like to recite Issa’s poem:
The man pulling radishes   /   pointed my way   /   with a radish.
There’s a pretty easy sentence to diagram, and it makes me smile
to think about those pink radishes dangling from a farmer’s hand
as he sent the poet off along the road of his enduring loneliness,
always craving the one thing that might bring an end to craving.

*

Erik Reece is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Utopia Drive and Lost Mountain, which won Columbia University’s John B. Oakes Award for Outstanding Environmental Writing. His prose and poetry have appeared in Harper’s, The Oxford American, the Atlantic, Orion, and elsewhere. His collection of poems, Kingfisher Blues, was published this year by the University Press of Kentucky. He teaches writing at the University of Kentucky and is the founder of Kentucky Writers and Artists for Reforestation.

Four Poems by Laurel Brett

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

THE BAY AT BAR HARBOR

A life of never sleeping—
insomnia makes living
a disease.

I take up residence
on the balcony of the hotel,
glass doors only mute

sleeping sounds of breaths
rising and falling, the benedictions
of my family, oblivious to the night

I spend sitting on the chair buried
in the bowl of stars,
the bay breathing

in the darkness, too.
Silver begins
along the crevices of dawn

opening the curtain
to a hundred tiny islands,
mirrors of the firmament

shining in the curve of port,
a school of swimming fish,
flashing fins— birth of the morning

of the world. I can never explain
to the sleepers the vision
before me,

or my wild exuberance.
By the time they wake
the silver will have vanished.

*

MIMOSAS AND MILKWEED

How can you not adore the earth?
To love is to press your cheek against the ground
and lie on your back to gaze up
through mimosa flowers
becoming birds against the sky.

The milkweed I planted for monarchs
returned this year, and bloomed
pink as a surprise— a prayer against extinction.

*

DEATH CAN NOT CLAIM DAHLIAS

I’d been mourning dahlias—
another loss.

You, my gardener gone—
poison ivy an invading army.

Dahlias demand so much—
tubers dug up in autumn

stored in winter       replanted in spring.
JoAnn gives me a mason jar

of dahlias. One owns my heart—
the color of midnight

if midnight were maroon       the texture of joy
if ecstasy were velvet.

Larger than my palm —
petals a portal.

*

IN MONTREAL

I get lost in the bonsai
in the Chinese garden
at Le Jardin Botanique

until I can no longer tell
if the trees are huge or tiny.
My restless children

beg to see Le Biodôme
nearby — four habitats
of North America.

We huddle in the cold, watching
puffins and penguins
in their fake Antarctica.

We swelter in the rainforest
room, where my 12 year old son
points out a capybara, a mammal

with a blunt brown snout. He
imitates Tim Curry voicing
an old cartoon, English accent

and all— a large amphibious rat,
and adds in a joyful voice
the largest rodent in the world.

Later at dinner the waiter,
insists my daughter is Italian.
Je suis américaine, she insists,

practicing her New Yorker’s glare.
They have outgrown my habitat.
The lady concierge explains in French

that whales will rise tomorrow,
their glistening sunlit backs
will leap up from the St. Lawrence.

*

Laurel Brett is a novelist, essayist, and poet. Her work has appeared in SECOND COMING, EKPHRASTIC REVIEW, ECLECTICA among other outlets. She lives overlooking a harbor.

ONE ART’s December 2025 Reading

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ONE ART’s December 2025 Reading

Date: Sunday, December 7

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

Featured Poets: Amy Small-McKinney, Linda Laderman, Laurie Kuntz, Susan Michele Coronel

>>> Register Here <<<

FREE!

(Donations appreciated.)

About Our Featured Readers:

Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. She has received two Pushcart nominations and won the 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival First Poem Contest.  Her poems have appeared in publications including Spillway 29, Plainsongs, Redivider, and Fourteen Hills. In 2021 her full-length manuscript was a finalist for Harbor Editions’ Laureate Prize, and in 2023 another version of the manuscript was longlisted for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.

Learn more about Susan online at:

susanmichelecoronel.com/

Laurie Kuntz is an award-winning poet and film producer. She taught creative writing and poetry in Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. Many of her poetic themes are a result of her working with Southeast Asian refugees in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines after the Vietnam War years. In a past life, she was an ESL teacher and published two ESL texts that were used widely in ESL programs both nationally and internationally. She has published seven poetry collections. Her 8th book, a full length collection entitled Shelter In Place will be published in 2026 by Shanti Arts Press.

Learn more about Laurie online at:

lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Eclectica, The MacGuffin, SWWIM, Action Spectacle, The Westchester Review, and ONE ART. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online here. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University in Ohio. For nearly a decade she was a docent at the Zekleman Holocaust Center near Detroit.

Learn more about Linda online at: 

lindaladerman.com.

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others.  She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Learn more about Amy online at:

amysmallmckinney.com/

Piet Mondrian Does the Foxtrot by Susana H. Case

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Piet Mondrian Does the Foxtrot

It might seem inconsistent, this ascetic, celibate man
having a ball on the dance floors of 1920s Paris,
where he isn’t a stranger to the Charleston
or the foxtrot. But I feel the rhythm of the foxtrot
in my work, he says. A man obsessed with order
and grids could enjoy such a dance, its musical
geometry, as he maneuvers around a room
like one of his paintings unfolding. Mondrian loves

jazz rhythms—the foxtrot the first dance to use them—
and though initially that seems surprising, jazz
is not only freedom, but has structure too, musicians
returning to a lattice of chords, even as they improvise
within that framework. See him now, a wiry man,

as he enters the blank canvas of the floor
in round wire-rimmed glasses, his crisp white suit
without a splotch of paint. He’s desired
as a partner for his meticulous style, his joyful
expression. With every step he makes a line,
his movements formal, precise—like his brushstrokes.

*

Susana H. Case is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Books (2023), and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk & Cake Press (2022), Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award as well as Finalist for several awards. She won the Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition in 2002 for The Scottish Café, which was re-released in English/Polish as Kawiarnia Szkocka (Opole University Press, 2010) and in English/Ukrainian as Шотландська Кав’ярня (Slapering Hol Press, 2024).

Speaking To & Listening To Our Aging Bodies: A Workshop with Amy Small-McKinney

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Speaking To & Listening To Our Aging Bodies: A Workshop with Amy Small-McKinney

Workshop Leader: Amy Small-McKinney
Date: Tuesday, January 13
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern – Please check your local times.
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

>>> Register Here <<<

About The Workshop:

Aging does not mean becoming invisible. It is a transition with its own pain and gorgeousness. By letting poems surprise us, without censoring, we will listen to our aging bodies and speak to them.

About The Workshop Leader:

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others.  She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Riffraff by Gene Twaronite

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Riffraff

A casual, under-the-breath
comment, though she might as well
have shouted it in my face.

Too bad we have to walk
through all these riffraff,
she said, entering the library
as she pointed to the people
heading for the entrance
with their luggage and bedrolls.

I looked at her and quietly
repeated the word as a question
that hung uselessly in the air.
The meeting was about to start
and there were things to do,
but I could still hear the word
with its terrible effing riffs,
heavily breathing
like a diminished thing
crouching at our door.

*

Gene Twaronite is a Tucson poet and the author of five poetry collections. His first poetry book, Trash Picker on Mars, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. His latest poetry collection is Death at the Mall (Kelsay Books). A former Writer-in-Residence for Pima County Public Library, he leads a poetry workshop for University of Arizona OLLI. Follow more of Gene’s writing at: genetwaronitepoet.com & genetwaronite.bsky.social

Sketchbook by Beverley Sylvester

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Sketchbook

“If you were an animal, which would you be?”
“A puffin.” I say it unapologetically.
It is my favorite animal.

On the borderlands of womanhood
where neither girl nor woman fits comfortably
on my tongue I wonder what of this,
my immortality, will be cataloged as juvenilia;
an indulgence of believing one day I will be a body
of things worth cataloging.

I write a letter with a pink pen
and do not feel ashamed.

I make a list of things that resemble
skeletons. I share it with no one.
It is a rich magic to see my own human
form amidst so many other natural,
beautiful, terrible things.

Through the word “other” I include myself
among natural, beautiful, terrible things.

I draw myself a puffin in pink pen.
It is imperfect, and I do not throw it away.
I title the image: a portrait of God.
I write it unapologetically.

I write this unapologetically.

*

Beverley Sylvester is a writer, composer, dramaturg, and musician. Her work is often rooted in the Southern Gothic genre where she interrogates the sticky, uncomfortable, and lovely relationships we have to death and dying, sexuality, spirituality, race, love, earth, politics, gender, rot, and embodiment in the American Deep South. Her writing has received the Artistine Mann Award in Playwriting, the New South Young Playwrights Award, and publication of poetry in Yellow Arrow Journal, among other recognitions. You can find her on Instagram at @bsylvester_arts or at bfsylvester.com.

Two Poems by Francine Witte

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Elegy for Waiting for You

The dark clock by the old train station
where the people come and go and me,
I’d stand there and I’d see that clock
with its hands that wouldn’t stop
even though you’d think they’d be too
weighted down with all the time
those hands were holding.

It’s easy to wait for love when you
know it’s on the next train or even
the one after that. But that was the problem.
You were never on any of those. I must have

known that but sometimes we will do anything
to breathe love alive. We will stand there
in a too-thin coat, shivering in the almost
dark, waiting forever for the train I wanted
so much for you to be on and which always
seemed moments away.

*

That night, moonless,

there was enough room Inside me
for my heart to bulge up, rocket
up to the space where I could still
see your goodbye eyes, flat as a galaxy map
Where stars are pressed against black velvet.
And like a galaxy, remembering you went into
The billions, of matter, of time, of how
Many years do the light from any of those
Dull, finished stars take to reach the earth.

*

Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte.

Power Steering by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Power Steering

When I was six years old,
my mother bought a used
two-tone Chevy Impala
with power steering for $200.
Power steering.
She said the words as if they possessed
magical powers. She tingled as she
described in vivid detail the newfound
ease of parking and switching lanes
without the resistance of the ancient
Buick she had traded in.

As a child, I couldn’t appreciate
the power of steering.
Even now, I tend to forget
that I have the power to steer
my thoughts from the dark
cratered roads where I too often
get lost or stall out. I forget
the sheer power of steering
when my brain wanders from one
overwhelming thought to the next,
and I find myself dwelling
on past wrong turns and flat tires.

Now when I turn the key in the ignition,
I try to remember that my mind
is not a driverless vehicle.
I have the power to steer my thoughts
in the direction of gratitude,
in the direction of hope
in the direction of joy.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s most recent poetry collection is Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

On Matriphagy by Franziska (Franzi) Roesner

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On Matriphagy

          matri- (mother)
          -phagy (to feed on)

When Harry Harlow left
his monkeys with their cloth
mothers, quietly closing the door
on the lab for the night,
the handkerchief in his breast
pocket a heavy-handed metaphor,
he did not return home
to his own children.

When Saint Martin gave away
just half his cloak
it was enough
to become holy.

In some centipedes
the offspring consume
their own mother,
swarming her and yanking
the dark flesh from beneath
her pale exoskeleton.

They say a woman’s body
does not fully recover
for eighteen months after giving birth,
a plant growing
pale leaves in acidic soil.

Mother Earth, we call it,
and take what we need.

*

Franziska (Franzi) Roesner is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. She was a poet first, though, and has returned to poetry recently. Her poetry has appeared in Rust & Moth, Stonecoast Review, SWWIM, and others. She lives in Seattle with her husband, two daughters, and cat.

November waits for you in the parking lot after the bar closes by Jennifer Blackledge

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

November waits for you in the parking lot after the bar closes

because it likes to pick a fight
rattles around like the last two pills in
a bottle labeled zero refills

it dims the lights and
rolls its eyes when you object
invites you to dinner but clears your plate before you’re done

sneers and shakes your trees bare
opens your gate and lets your dog out
because it likes to hear you cry for lost things in the dark

scoffs when you put your lights up early
in the hope they’ll guide you back from the edge
November has warned you:
it scrabbles and scurries in your walls
every chilly night

November dangles the last handful of
red leaves over the abyss
and tells you to ask nice

*

Jennifer Blackledge is a Detroit-area poet who works in the automotive industry. She is the recipient of the 2025 Zocalo Public Square Poetry Prize and her work has appeared in publications like JAMA, Rattle, I-70 Review, Kestrel, and more. You can find her work at www.jenniferblackledge.com.

Life Cycle by CL Bledsoe

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Life Cycle

First, I was the wind, turbulent and unknown,
sneaking into gardens to steal shadows,
touching your hair while you rushed, late
for work, yearning only to be clear of here.
I would run through my days, eating the sun
and writing letters to the moon. It was bliss.
It was nothing at all. Then I hardened
into stone, loved and mean, I understood
nothing and wanted even less. After enough
years had passed, someone threw me
into the eye of beauty. I rippled, wanting
for the first time to know. Afraid of the wind
lest it steal something. When the sun came out,
I melted into sulfur, clean as a wound.
When you whispered my name, I suddenly
understood: there’s nothing to learn. Only be.

*

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novels If You Love Me, You’ll Kill Eric Pelkey and The Devil and Ricky Dan. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his kid.

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of October 2025

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of October 2025 ~

  1. Karen Paul Holmes
  2. Molly Fisk
  3. Dick Westheimer
  4. Laurie Kuntz
  5. Donna Hilbert
  6. Alison Hurwitz
  7. Joshua Lillie
  8. Francesca Leader
  9. John Arthur
  10. Robbi Nester

Three Poems by Ann E. Wallace

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Funeral Director, Spring 2020

He bites his lower lip, clasps
his hands behind his back, and steels
his legs into a wide stance, knowing

one brimming tear holds power to unleash
the others welled up and waiting.
It used to be the unexpected

that disrupted his balance—the new suit
purchased two sizes too small
for a teen struck down in the road,

the calm words of a mother
to her grown child laid out before her, speaking
of tomorrow as if nothing had changed,

or the collapse and despair of another
who knew everything had.
But in these endless days

of horror when illness envelops
and makes a home in our city—
when the morgues are overflowing,

and the bodies are stacked and held
three weeks for burial, when the caskets
are closed and families could not kiss

or send off their dear beloved—he works
in solitude, carrying the grief of legions.
He removes the tubes and bathes

the bodies of the deceased, dresses
each one in clothing brought
by loved ones, set their hands

and combs their hair, placing them
in caskets their families would never open,
and the mounting waves of sorrow

swell high and higher, until they crest
and the rushing waters wash,
and wash, and wash over him.

*

Emergency Room Visits in March 2020

When they turned the pediatric emergency room
into a COVID triage area in the early days,

decals of monkeys with curling tails,
loping elephants, spotted giraffes grazed

the walls. The doctor who took my vitals
was tired, hadn’t seen his kids in two weeks.

The hospital prepared to admit me, then sent
me home after two rounds of bloodwork and testing.

They needed the bed. Three days later, I returned
on my 50th birthday, barely conscious,

bypassed the children’s unit, and was wheeled inside
where the serious cases were handled.

The aide hesitated to help me onto the bed,
offered a gloved hand only after I pleaded,

and my new doctor would not step inside
my curtain. He poked his masked face

through the gap in the fabric to ask
my cell number. He wrote it on a Post-it

and backed away like I was a caged tiger.
I never received his call.

*

Cleared to Leave

My face is pale and splotchy when my ex-
husband picks me up at home, like death
blooms within me. The weather, April

dreary. Jason drives me to the emergency room—
my third hospital this spring. I wear a pink
woolen cap, loop my oxygen line around my ears,

tuck it behind my glasses, hook the cannula
under my nose. I lug the tank inside
and sit in a folding chair in the makeshift

waiting room—the department had been under
renovation when the virus hit. The work
on the building has stopped. The work of saving

lives has not. My doctor called ahead
for a lung scan. The ER doctor takes my blood
and vitals but never orders the scan.

I rest in my thin, faded hospital gown,
in the overwhelmed ER, so much like the others,
each one unique in its chaos. Cleared to leave,

I dress slowly, layer by layer—shirt and pants,
sweater, jacket, hat. Untethered from the hospital
oxygen, reconnected to my emergency supply

from home, I hoist the tank. Alone, undirected,
I stumble through the halls, carry my heavy load,
search for the unmarked exit. Outside in the cold,

I realize I left my glasses on my hospital bed.
They are gone. Per pandemic policy, thrown
into the trash with all other personal effects.

*

Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey and host of The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants. Her second poetry collection, Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul, was published by Kelsay Books in 2024. She has previously published work in ONE ART, Thimble, Halfway Down the Stairs, Gyroscope Review, Wordgathering, and other journals. You can follow her online at AnnWallacePhD.com and on Instagram @annwallace409.

A Few Days After the Election I Woke Up in a Hamburg Jail Cell by Justin Karcher

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A Few Days After the Election I Woke Up in a Hamburg Jail Cell

my head throbbing as an officer handed me
a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich
like I was taking communion. He couldn’t
believe I got as far as I did on two tires.

Maybe I was trying to escape the light
because where I’m from, it can eat you alive.
A pincushion sun shining with the blood of birds.
When I black out, some friends call me
Ghost Justin. I’m just grateful nobody got hurt.

I went back to Buffalo in an Uber and as we drove
over the river, my dad’s last words to me echoed
in my head. “You’re a better man than I am.”
Suddenly I smelled lilacs and thought about
my mom who plants her garden in the gritty earth.

That night at my first A.A. meeting, nothing smelled
like flowers but people still dug up their roots
and talked about their pain. I learned that it takes
a community for any exorcism to work.

*

Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher, Bluesky: @justinkarcher.bsky.social) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright from Buffalo, NY. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). Recent playwriting credits include The Birth of Santa (American Repertory Theater of WNY) and “The Buffalo Bills Need Our Help” (Alleyway Theatre). https://www.justinkarcherauthor.com

I had a sister once. by Robbi Nester

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

I had a sister once.

But she was born dead. Her eyes stayed shut.
Ten tiny moons set on her fingernails.
I didn’t ask my mother how it happened, just
imagined a wax-pale doll who never answered
to her name. All my life, I took the full weight
of my father’s rage. It blew up like a sudden storm.
For years this sister spoke to me, saying Everything
you have is mine, perched on the edge of my bed,
no longer larval, a grown ghost child. Her fingernails
were long and sharp. She would pinch my arm
until it bled.

*

Robbi Nester is a retired college educator who has never stopped teaching in one way or another. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the most recent being About to Disappear, an ekphrastic collection that will be published by Shanti Arts. She has also edited 3 anthologies and curates and hosts two monthly poetry readings on Zoom, Verse-Virtual Monthly Reading and Words With You, part of The Poetry Salon Online. Learn more about her work at http://www.robbinester.net.

ONE ART’s 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

tc Wiggins – Like Lightning  

Moudi Sbeity – All Things Bloom  

James Diaz – I will not go to Darkness having known Nothing of the Light

Naila Francis – For my friend weeping at the coffee shop  

James Feichthaler – So Much Baggage  

Gary Fincke – The Far North

*

The annual Best Spiritual Literature awards are hosted by Orison Books.

“Orison Books publishes Best Spiritual Literature (formerly The Orison Anthology) every year, a collection of the best spiritual writing in all genres published in periodicals in the preceding year. […] Editors of literary periodicals (print or digital) may nominate work in a single genre or in multiple genres to be considered for inclusion in our annual anthology, Best Spiritual Literature, which will reprint the finest spiritually engaged writing from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.”

At the Crosswalk by Patrick Vala-Haynes

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At the Crosswalk

The cigarette butt
Smoldering
Like an uncut jewel

A mother shielding her son
From the spectacle
Of a man who stoops

The ember lighting his face
As he takes the boy’s hand
And waits for the threat to pass

*

Patrick Vala-Haynes lives within shouting distance of the Oregon Coast Range. His writing has appeared in Dulcet Literary Magazine, Sand, Split Rock Review, Sheepshead Review, Slate and elsewhere.

Two Poems by Heather Kays

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Rustmouth
Inspired by Jan Beatty

They said I grew wrong—
roots curling back into the dirt
like veins that refused to climb.
I say I grew sharp:
tongue rusted to a razor’s edge,
lungs lit with gasoline.

Your family dinners smell of linen
and garlic bread. Mine reeked of
ashtrays, vodka breath, the cracked leather
of a Buick backseat.

I learned love from the slam of a screen door,
from the bruised hush after fists
found a wall instead of me.

I don’t care about your inheritance—
my legacy is blood under the nails,
a cigarette still burning in the sink,
a voice that curdles milk in the glass.

Think of me when the lights cut out—
I’m the hum in the wires,
the shiver in the lock,
the taste of copper when
you bite down too hard.

You, with your polished prayers.
Me, with my rustmouth.
I was forged in scrapyards,
and I’ll drag you there with me,
if you ever try to call it love.

*

Ordinary Hours
For Beau

It isn’t roses or fireworks.
It’s the way your hand
finds mine on the console,
two lifelines pressed together
while traffic lights hum red.

It’s shaky legs in a cold waiting room,
where your smile softens
the antiseptic walls,
turns the ticking clock into something
almost kind.

It’s you across a chipped diner table,
plastic cutlery scattered like stars between us,
your thumb brushing the rim of your glass
as if it were a secret only I could hear.

It’s the sidewalks we claim,
step by step,
your shadow always folding into mine
like it knows where it belongs.

Love, for me, is this—
not grand gestures, not borrowed, not staged—
but the small and stubborn ways
the world feels less brutal
when you are beside me.

*

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author who has been passionate about writing since age seven. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, explores healing through unsent letters. She is currently seeking a literary agent and publisher for Pieces of Us, along with six chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections.

She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group and creative community, and is drawn to stories that explore survival, identity, and the complexity of being human.

Her work has recently appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Wild Thing by Alma Peek

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Wild Thing
I am in an interview, in a conference room, stuck in French
When the only sentence I know by heart is Est-ce que c’est
Possible de caresser votre chien? That is a wild thing
That happened and I am recalling this absurdity to you
When you say, I notice the sun is in your eye so let’s move.
You’ve said the similar generous thing before about hamsters
And their wheels and how it’s hard to get them to stop moving.
Outside it’s a setting sun and the air is insect-noisy and
When you tell me about your father growing wild blueberries,
I know I love him and it is really something to love a man’s father.
Did you know? We’ll all be eating live insects again
Just like early modern humans in ten years’ time.
We walk, and I hear, as if from childhood, the silence beyond
Millions of fluffing Fall field crickets. It is nightfall in October
And I love to be brought back by you
To the sound of the beginning of things.
*
Alma Peek is from San Antonio, Texas. She is overeducated, to the point of foolishness. One of the highlights of her career came in 2015 when she taught a research methods class at CELSA Sorbonne in Paris, France (2014-2015). She is currently submitting two novels (Camp and Through the Green) and a poetry collection (Wild Thing). In 2025, her poetry appeared in Frontier Poetry, Stirring: A Literary Collection, and she has two poems forthcoming (November 2025) in Eunoia Review. She is the founder of @SYLVdesigns, LLC, a jewelry design brand. Her IG: @_almapeek_

Dining Out by Barbara Fried

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Dining Out

We walked from my apartment
to the Argentinian restaurant on 89th

because I had never been there
and no one I knew had been there.

You ordered the lamb, tender, you
ordered, and it came out held high

in a steaming cloud of roasted meat
and hot paprika and crushed cayenne

with a side order of lentils that looked
like a mound of teardrops or the cut ears

of a small animal. I picked at my salad.
I was full—taut as a balloon with new love—

engorged to my throat. You ate with relish,
large, fast forkfuls—you cut your meat

with a savage saw, tender though it was.
We sat opposite each other in a darkness

as light as smoke. Our red wine glowed
lambent in curved glasses. The waiter had dark

hair and white teeth and was discreet in the shadows.
There were candles on tabletops that flickered,

and your full face for a moment took on a pumpkin’s
leering menace, but I laughed it off because I so

desperately needed to breathe the air you breathed,
to imbibe you, for later, when you would be
with your newly vanquished wife.

*

Barbara Fried is a lifelong 5 a.m. poetry writer and a long-term copywriter, copy editor, and marketing manager. She lives on Cape Cod where, in her back garden, there are deer, coyotes and shy white possums who do play possum and where she has just completed her first book-length collection of poems, The Virginia Poems.

Two Poems by Katie Kemple

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Read My Lips
—After George H.W. Bush

Looking at the inflated lips
of a billionaire’s wife on my phone,
I eat oatmeal prepared
in a motel’s coffee maker,
from a paper cup with a plastic spoon
saved from the night before.

I am grateful for the lows of my life;
the cancelled flight that landed me
in a room by the airport,
the blast of engines that shake
the windows that look at a weedy lawn;
these give my life texture.

It could be worse. The only thing
you can count on is death and taxes.
Now, just death in the U.S.,
but I miss taxes. That’s why I bought
the sixteen-dollar flight insurance.
I want assurances.

No guarantees that I wouldn’t inject
my lips with toxins if given
a billionaire’s budget. My old life
seems like that now, stuffed with haircuts,
and a clothing allowance.

Oatmeal is affordable, filling.
I loved it even as a kid. Back when Bush
asked us to read his lips. Now,
I watch the billionaire’s wife pucker.
Bet she can’t sip hot drinks comfortably.
I brew a pot of coffee,

start to file a claim for the room, hope
my insurance comes through.
Is this an act of God?
I hold tight to the things I can count on—
the coffee, not strong, but free.

*

Cecelia left her resume on my patio

weighed down
with a stone. Half the size
of a business card,
it invited me to call
for a cleaning estimate.

When I walked past
my neighbors’ homes,
I saw her message
on welcome mats.

Her card said:
12 years of experience.
Same number as me,
different industry.

I left my credentials
at virtual doors,
cold called strangers,
threw rocks at LinkedIn.

If I could hire Cecelia—
would I? But I can’t.
I leave her message in the shade
of a succulent plant.

Over weeks, the paper
curls shut
around the rock.

Cecelia might be in
in a house now
vacuuming to music
that doesn’t suck.

And work’s flown into
my inbox again,
spreadsheets, lists, meetings.

Maybe we’re in the field
of autonomy. Maybe unknown
doors thrill us a little.

Looking for work,
a reminder to unsettle
ourselves.

*

Katie Kemple is the author of Big Man (Chestnut Review Chapbooks, 2025), and Love in the Key of COBRA (winner of the 2025 Iron Horse Literary Review chapbook competition). This year, her work has appeared in Frontier, North American Review (Open Space), and Sixth Finch. More of her work can be found at katiekemplepoetry.com.

Two Poems by Jill Michelle

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Rite

n. A religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept or custom
with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it.
         —Ambrose Bierce

Two twenty-somethings
two years as honeys

under a gray-blue blanket
of Florida December sky

we stand—courthouse statue
looming over our too-thin

shoulders in this one photograph
of our wedding, snapped

by the justice of the peace in
St. Augustine, where we didn’t

need witnesses, so there was
no risk of offending any left

out relatives or friends.
You never asked if I was

one of those kids who’d
spun gauzy fantasies

cocooned teen dreams
of bank-breaking weddings.

I would have said, The vows
are all that matters. Maybe then

you would have kept them.

* 

I Spell out Divorce in Pixie-stick Sugar across Our Kitchen Floor
         after Jenny Holzer

You’ll be able to read it by
your own gaslight, so it won’t
matter that the power’s out
at the old country house to
which you’ve been booted
after unburdening yourself
across the dinner table tonight,
corduroyed mule, confessing
adultery before fixing a next
bite of the six o’clock supper
missed from the plate saved,
microwaved after kissing you
hello with half of my hair styled
by our four-year-old before I
tucked her into cartoon-covered
sheets alone, plastic menagerie
of Starburst-colored animal
barrettes forgotten until you’ve
left when brushing my teeth, I
startle at the mirror, can’t help
but laugh.

*

Jill Michelle is the author of Underwater (Riot in Your Throat, 2025) and Shuffle Play (Bottlecap, 2024) and winner of the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry from New Ohio Review. Her newest work is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Salamander Magazine and Scavengers Literary Magazine. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more at byjillmichelle.com.

Insomnia by Sydney Lea

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Insomnia

When I can’t sleep, I forge rough rhymes,
matching blindness, say, with timeless,
or almost matching popular
with poplar. Yes, it’s idleness,

and I concede I stretch the rules
as when I pair up misery
and pity– all a trick to find
a way to lie there worry-free.

No, don’t call it trick but mission
even passion, this urge to prise
away each fear, however small,
that blights me. But hard as I try,

my words do as they please. They scorn
resistance: I’ve just sought to link
bliss to something beside distress
but despite me the effort brings

not half-rhymed release but bereft.

*

Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Mango Languages by John Arthur

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Mango Languages

on his deathbed he lay
learning Italian one phrase
at a time from a free app
I downloaded for him
from the public library.

my daughter asked him why
learn something new now, grandpa?
what’s the point?
I think you mean perché he said
and that was his final word.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. He is the 2025 Grand Prize winner of The Poetry Box’s chapbook contest for Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide, which will be released early in 2026. His work has appeared in Rattle, DIAGRAM, Failbetter, trampset, ONE ART, Frogpond, and many other places.

The Beech Tree by Heather Hallberg Yanda

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The Beech Tree

For weeks, all the trees on
Lockwood Road prepared
for absence. Now, in late
Autumn, they found it.  I

walk through a sepia
photograph.  Today
I think of my father —
my dad, my daddy — who

is fragile, who stumbles
easily.  For weeks, I
have felt his spirit, his
warmth fall away.  I have

walked this road many times
with him: every turned leaf
meant naming maples, ash,
dogwood. Now every rut

in the road is a new
chance to fall. I can still
hear his footfalls, his laugh.
Here, in the grief

before the grief, all is
vulnerable, a word
from the Latin, meaning
to wound.  Here, where Finley’s

fence opens to this
meadow, a beech tree I
never noticed still grasps
its bright leaves.  It teaches

what my dad taught: to stand
tall, and when it is time
to let everything go,
to let everything go.

*

Heather Hallberg Yanda teaches in the English Department at Alfred University, in the hills of upstate New York. After many years of sending poems out, her work has been published in such journals as Barely South Review, Comstock Review, Tar River Poetry, and (forthcoming) in The Yale Journal of Medical Humanities. In the midst of the pandemic, her first collection of poems, Late Summer’s Origami, was published by Ashland Poetry Press. She is currently seeking a publisher for her second collection, What the Stones Borrowed.

Tripping Over His Shadow by Todd Wynn

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Tripping Over His Shadow

Metallica pounded from his bedroom,
the pulse of every summer—
the beat in my chest
before I knew the words.

I stitched myself
to his right side,
adhesive as only
little brothers can be,
tripping constantly
over his shadow.

He turned our roof into a runway,
called the trash bag a parachute—
it wasn’t.
I rolled my ankle.
Didn’t try again.

He was five years ahead of me—
enough to outgrow things
before I grew into them.

One day, he traded
his rusted Huffy for car keys,
moved out at eighteen
with Metallica still playing.

His music stayed.
Everything else changed.

*

Todd Wynn is a pediatric nurse living in Mansfield, Ohio. He recently began writing poetry as a way of working through past grief and understanding how that has shaped the way he sees the world around him. His work has previously appeared in ONE ART.

The Undetonated Nazi Bomb Opens a Red Eye On the Ocean Floor by Mingyu 明宇 Brian Chan

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The Undetonated Nazi Bomb Opens a Red Eye On the Ocean Floor

and the starfish, believing the eye to be
the madreporite of another starfish,
or a sister,

punctures the metal-light
in search of companionship
or at least, sustenance. Forty thousand

other animals pile into a veil
over the bomb, as if seeking
its origin point.

Once other man-made machinery (and this time,
able to breathe underwater)
discover the animals, scientists
are shocked, the starfish
less so,

since there is little discovery in
excavation:

It is not unlike the wilderness
to feed on violence.
Remember:

the starfish acts by
instinct. Animals hunt
for food, humans
for rhetoric.

What do we make
of killing, or choosing
its abstention? We conduct massacres and end up only
with more explanations for living. Violence produces

life produces violence.

Yes, hunting is a sport. Yes,
war is too.

The starfish believes there is more
to life than humans know, but chooses
survival.

When exposed by the unmanned submarine,
the starfish holds one
of its five arms out—not as an offering,
but as if to say, no, no,
this is not a gun.

                       *In response to recent discoveries

*

Mingyu 明宇 Brian Chan is currently a first-year undergraduate studying at Princeton University. His work appears in Split Lip, wildness, The Emerson Review, and more.

The Clock Holds Its Heartbeat by Laura Ann Reed

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The Clock Holds Its Heartbeat

              for Grant

Mid-March. Between seasons.
Rain so fine it never reaches the ground.

There is a word for this: Virga.
How did I not know it before?

Trying to remember my virga dream,
I press my cheek to your chest.

Touch rushes in, re-drawing
our boundaries.

During the crisis of pneumonia
I felt such sharp tenderness for common objects.

My favorite blue stoneware mug.
Its chipped rim making it almost mortal.

The hiatus from time was a gift
when the grandfather clock stopped ticking.

The winter hazel is suddenly green.
Just noticing alters my own coloration.

Nights, you go to bed first.
Alone, I sink into the deep meanwhile of my life.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her new chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published by The Poetry Box (July 2025). https://lauraannreed.net/

Singing in Dark Times: Trying to Praise the Mutilated World – A Workshop with Donna Hilbert

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Singing in Dark Times: Trying to Praise the Mutilated World – A Workshop with Donna Hilbert

Workshop Leader: Donna Hilbert
Date: Tuesday, November 18
Time: 4pm Pacific (7pm Eastern) – Please check your local time.
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

>>>  Register Here  <<<

~ About The Workshop ~ 

In this workshop, we will look at poems through the lens of Adam Zagajewski’s seminal poem, Try to Praise the Mutilated World, as well as poems in a similar vein. We’ll consider poets such as WS Merwin, Wendell Berry, and Danusha Lameris. Poets will be invited to reflect on words that aim to help us carry the weight of life in tumultuous times and then write our own words in conversation with these voices.

~ About The Workshop Leader ~ 

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press, 2025. Work has appeared in journals and broadcasts including Eclectica, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Cholla Needles, TSPoetry, VerseDaily, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, anthologies including Boomer Girls, The Widows’ Handbook, The Poetry of Presence I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, Love Is For All Of Us, What the House Knows, Poetry Goes The Movies. She writes and leads workshops from her home base in Long Beach, California.

Two Poems by Howie Good

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Au Courant

Just because I smile doesn’t mean I am happy. “All of life,” Buddha said, “is sadness.” Birds return from the hot countries full of excited chatter, unaware the Doomsday Clock has crept even closer to midnight. I keep up with the headlines as much as a person can and still remain sane. Minds have corroded, splintered, flamed out. For every opinion shared in the blogosphere, there is an equal and opposite opinion. I hope for truth to recover its legendary authority. Meanwhile, a tomato is also a child’s balloon.

*

Shadows and Ghosts

The CT scan machine is shaped like a donut. I am lying inside the hole of the donut on my back. Bugs lie on their backs when they are dying. I was injected only moments earlier with a special dye. A burning sensation immediately spread through my body. Now the machine, with a brilliant flash of light, scans my torso for new tumors. In an adjacent room, techs are monitoring the images on a screen. They see shadows and ghosts. They see mounds of rubble. They see the screams trapped in my lungs.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry book, True Crime, is scheduled to be published by Sacred Parasite in early 2026.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Dark Undercarriage of the Purple Packard

If I were to pray for my father
it wouldn’t be for him exactly
but for the shadow beneath
the purple Packard where
he crawled when I was six.
I followed him into the darkness
of machinery, a mystery
men love though he in particular
knew nothing about what drives
things forward, power
carried from the engine to
the strange wheels and wires
of this life. Men love certainty,
rules and laws that determine
how things work, but the stories
we live by end too quickly
with a moral almost always
wrong. He wanted me to be
the man men pretend to be,
a lion of fire, the man men
imagine their leaders to be.
The voice that held my father
was his father’s, a burly man
who wrestled in high school,
worked on derricks and settled
in a career as a statistician
for Illinois Power and Light.
A lost photograph comes to mind
of three men in gray suits and
fedoras walking toward the lens
believing they owned the world
because they kind of did.
Before smoking himself to death,
he gave his son a 1949 purple Packard
fading to gray. My father and I lay
on the driveway of the very house
I remember in the shadow
of the memory of his father
whose son pointed at the dark
undercarriage, explaining
things he knew nothing about

* 

Rippling Waves of Heat over the Wheat Fields of Kansas

Somewhere north of Kansas City,
my father disappeared in himself
as he often did
then returned and noticed the blacktop rolling through
the roiling center of America which he loved
with unquestioning ardor. In the long journey away
from my father, I’ve often remembered
the way he drove in a trance
and suddenly woke
surprised to be in his life, and I promised myself
to be here, wherever here is

We were passing through a dead zone
where Jack Brickhouse, the Voice of the Chicago Cubs,
was telling my dad the pain he feels at his mother abandoning him
is alright because he’s about to steal second

An Oldsmobile like ours, driven by
a middle-aged white man, passed us
his wife beside him, eyes wide in terror.
Dad stepped on the gas and we flew down the road, passing them,
so the other man stepped on the gas passing us,
his wife yelling at him to slow down. And my father
going over a hundred miles an hour roared past them
again. Dad smiled. He’d won. I turned to watch
the Oldsmobile shrinking in the distance

Then, as we drove through the dry shadow of a cloud
Dad wiped the sweat from his face
and pointed at a large burial mound ahead of us
beautiful in the piercing light

He was delivering me to a life he disapproved of.
He expected gratitude
but I was the son who aspired to be a poet
and kindness from this rough man was like a stone in my throat

*

Michael Simms lives in the old Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His poetry collections include Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025.) His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Plume, Scientific American and Poem a Day (Academy of American Poetry). He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. In 2011, the Pennsylvania legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.

Three Poems by Karen Paul Holmes

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

I Love It When

Someone fifteen or twenty
years my junior forgets
the same kinds of things I forget—
like the word cardigan, or
why they just walked into the kitchen.

I feel better about myself if
they trip a bit on a gnarled sidewalk
or go to dinner before seven,
squint and shine their cell phone lights
on the menu, order one entrée
split between them.

I’m oh so happy when Jamal—
a handsome-hardbody danseur—
substitute-teaches our Zumba class.
He doesn’t see us as seniors.
When he shouts, Let’s sex it up, ladies,
we do.

June with her titanium knee,
Beth standing by a chair for balance,
Dee on blood pressure meds,
Ellen who can’t reach overhead,
me and my misbehaving back.

Jamal makes us believe
we’re Beyoncé back-up dancers
or Rockettes.
Look at our Bob Fosse hands.
Watch our strut kicks.
Watch out when we swivel our hips.

*

Why I Write Poetry

Because the peace bell tolled for Jimmy Carter’s 98th birthday,
and I need to commemorate that commemoration.

Because I chuckled when I read a sign outside a church that said:
Grow a garden–
Lettuce praise him
Squash the doubt
Turnip at church

Because I’m bothered but amused by Instagram bots who want me. Profiles like:
I believe true love meets you in your mess, not your best.
Always thank God for giving me life in the land of the living.
I am looking for a real and trustworthy sugar baby to spoil with my riches.

Because The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced
a recall of wall beds due to serious crushing hazards, and it was horrible
but reminded me of a Three Stooges skit.

Because a harpist said in an interview it was love at first hear
when she encountered Mozart’s Flute & Harp Concerto. At age 22, she joined
the orchestra for L’Opéra de Paris.

Because an eagle cam showed me live action: A dandelion-fluff eaglet
growing bigger than the daddy and then fledging in 12 weeks. And both parents
bringing fish for lunch until then.

Because my Australian uncle at 96, during his last transfusion, asked for
the blood of a 19-year-old nymphomaniac.

Because I once saw a post on our neighborhood social media:
I need a good deep tissue message therapist, and I thought I’d better heed her call.

*

Beginning Tai Chi

I know rooms like this
       empty before class.
A mirrored wall multiplies it—
ballet barres going on forever
like sky. Sun gleams
the wood floor, inviting me to fill
the space with dance,
       Piqué turn, pas de chat, grand jeté.
I know how it feels to leap

but am no longer airborne.
My balancé, now
       Rooster stands on one leg.
In Tai Chi, We stay grounded,
the master says.
Part the horse’s mane.
Grasp the sparrow’s tail.

The twenty-four movements, not dance
but dance-like, he says, we flow,
undulating his hand
through air—a dolphin in water.
       A moving meditation.
Slow, relaxed,
not ballet’s hummingbird-power.

We each hold a chi ball—invisible,
soccer-sized—one hand underneath,
the other on top.
I focus on that seemingly
       empty space,
feel its unseen weight, its almost pulse.
Draw energy—chi—from the earth
into the dantian, seat of life essence,
he says.

       Wave hands like clouds,
And my own stale clouds loosen,
take on other shapes. Not old woman, but
Fair lady working the shuttle.
Not ballerina, but
Crane spreading its wings.

*

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books are: No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich, 2014). Poetry credits include The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, Glass, and Plume. Daughter of immigrants, she was the first gen to attend college and has an MA.

“We’re all stories in the end,” by Rebecca Ferlotti

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“We’re all stories in the end,”

the bar’s bathroom graffiti taunts:
grade school
scribbles, love proclamations.
I wrote my initials on a stall door
before I left school. And when I left the country,
I saw stalls in the middle of a Belgian red light district
on the way to an Irish pub.
I asked someone why
and they raised an eyebrow. I once saw a woman raise a glass of champagne
in a bathroom stall. She was kneeled
next to a hamburger. At a networking event, a man talked about hamburgers.
I asked him his favorite local spot
as we stood in the bathroom line.
“Definitely Wendy’s,” he said.
And stepped inside.

*

Rebecca Ferlotti (she/her) is a poet, nonfiction book editor, and chief content officer based in Ohio. Her work has been published in ELLIE, her local library’s poetry anthologies, and other magazines. She has presented at the Sigma Tau Delta conference both as a creative writing student at John Carroll University and as an alumna. Rebecca’s work also has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.

Elegy at the 7-Eleven by Jeff Cove

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Elegy at the 7-Eleven

The man at the register
doesn’t look up.
A forty-ounce beer in one hand,
cheap flowers in the other—
pink lilies curled like smoke,
wrapped in plastic.

For a moment,
he stands there holding both
like he isn’t sure
which one the night is for.

He sets the flowers down—
not with anger,
not regret,
just
a quiet return.

The cashier scans the bottle.
Outside, the light flickers.
There’s no one to bring flowers to.
Not tonight.

*

Jeff Cove lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He has been writing haiku since high school—seventeen syllables taught him how to compress meaning and leave space for silence. He works as a translator between the technical and the emotional, finding poetry in systems, silence, and the absurd. His work is forthcoming in Pictura Journal and has appeared in The Daily Drunk. He writes at https://jeffcove.com/

I almost said I’m sorry by Nilsa Mariano

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I almost said I’m sorry

wide and empty
the can lid stays open
after you take the trash out
the new bag is muddy green
to hide the smears we live
lottery tickets in your hand
failed faded paper thin
we lock eyes as you back up
crunching the numbers
over your head
mechanically you announce
we lost
as you jump in the air
aiming the paper toward the can
the arc of your throw
the days of our lives
the lid of the can falls
in a slow motion groan
you are gone before it clicks
my words hit the door
in a tedious echo

*

Nilsa Mariano is a graduate of Binghamton University with a Masters in Comparative Literature. At heart she is a Brooklyn girl. Nilsa was published in, Muleskinner, Five Minute, Wildgreens and Stone Canoe. She is proud of being published in the inaugural edition of Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul. Nilsa is owned by a spoiled pug.

Ode to Punctuation by Gloria Heffernan

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Ode to Punctuation

Comma,
Pause and connection,
gentle invitation to take a breath

Parentheses
(A brief distraction)
in the middle of everything

Ellipses
A suggestion of space…
but a clue that something is missing

Semi-colon
Grammatical homage to healthy relationships;
two independent clauses connected forever

Period
I tend to avoid this one
since I am not a great fan of endings.

So always, I return to the comma,
patient tour guide along the winding trail of thought
who says, take your time, follow me, I’ll get you there,
eventually.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s most recent poetry collection is Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

ONE ART x Keystone Poetry: Featured Reading — Sun. 11/2 at 2pm Eastern

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ONE ART x Keystone Poetry

Date: Sunday, November 2

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

Please Note: This is a virtual event held via Zoom.

>>> Tickets Available <<<

About The Reading

During this virtual event (held via Zoom), Featured Readers will share their poem selected for publication in Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press). Time permitting, we hope to take a few questions after readers share their poems.

Hosts:

Marjorie Maddox & Jerry Wemple, Co-Editors, Keystone Poetry

Mark Danowsky, Founder/Editor-in-Chief, ONE ART

Featured Readers:

Joseph Chelius is the author of three full-length poetry collections. His most recent collection, Playing Fields, was published earlier this year by Kelsay Books.

Grant Clauser is a Pennsylvanian. His sixth book, Temporary Shelters, was just published by Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a large media company and teaches poetry workshops.

Geraldine Connolly grew up in Westmoreland County and has published five poetry collections. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Maryland Arts Council and Breadloaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review and Poetry Ireland Review. Her new book is Instructions at Sunset, from Terrapin Books in September 2025. She lives in Alameda, California.

Brian Fanelli is the author of the poetry collections Waiting for the Dead to Speak (NYQ Books) and All That Remains (Unbound Content). His writing has been published in the LA Times, World Literature Today, Midnight Oil, Pedestal, Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere. Brian also writes frequently about horror movies and is a contributing writer to HorrorBuzz.com and 1428Elm.com. He has his M.F.A. from Wilkes University and his Ph.D. from SUNY Binghamton University. Currently, he’s an Associate Professor of English at Lackawanna College.

Jan Freeman is the author of three books of poetry and the founder and former director of Paris Press (1995–2018), which is now an imprint of Wesleyan University Press.  She is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships, the Spiral Shell Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts/Moulin a Nef, and an Associateship at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. More at www.janfreeman.net

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of the chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in ONE ART, Pangyrus, Post Road, Salamander, and The Sun. He is the poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, and he divides his time between Boston and Vermont.

Lynn Levin is a poet and writer. Called one of the most “poignantly witty voices of our time” (Bucks County Community College), she is the author of nine books, most recently the short story collection House Parties (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), named one of the best books of summer by Philadelphia Magazine. “Sleepless Johnston,” her ballad that appears in Keystone Poetry, is from her poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020). Lynn Levin teaches at Drexel University and for many years taught creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Her website is: lynnlevinpoet.com.

Professor of English at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 16 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (International Book and Illumination Book Award Winners); and the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, a collaboration with her artist daughter, Anna Lee Hafer (www.hafer.work) and others. How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks (Kelsay) and Seeing Things (Wildhouse) will be available in 2024. In addition, she has published the story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and 4 children’s and YA books. With Jerry Wemple, she is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press) and is assistant editor of Presence. She hosts Poetry Moment at WPSU. See marjoriemaddox.com

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others.  She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize; she’s the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks. She is a hospice volunteer, writing tutor, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at https://annemichael.blog/

Jerry Wemple has published four poetry collections. His most recent is We Always Wondered What Became of You from Broadstone Books. The collection of mostly prose poems centers on his secret transracial adoption within his biological family, growing up as a biracial child in rural Pennsylvania during an era when people of color were almost nonexistent there, and discovering the identity of his birth father as an adult. He is co-editor of the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, and the follow-up Keystone Poetry. He also co-edited the anthology Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania. His poetry and creative nonfiction work appear in numerous journals and anthologies, and have been published internationally in Ireland, Chile, and Sweden. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Commonwealth University in Pennsylvania.

Photograph of my Brother by Rob Cording

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Photograph of my Brother

Half-dressed, a pair of socks in my hand,
I’m looking at a photograph of my brother,
framed atop my dresser. Dead now five years,
he’s hunched over his phone, a beer nearby
on the table, looking up at the camera
with that grin that showed off his dimples.
I’m wondering who he was texting,
imagining his smart-ass reply to our mom,
so I don’t notice, at first, my daughter.
“Why do you like that picture so much?”
she asks. How to respond to such a question?
How to explain that I’m trying to imagine
the way his shoulders would’ve turned
as he looked up, to feel his strong hands,
clean in this picture, but usually flecked
with paint. How to say that I want
to remember the sound of his voice better
than I do? “Because he looks so happy,”
I tell her, closing the dresser drawer.
I sit on the edge of the bed, start
to put on my socks. My daughter is looking
at the picture now, when she turns and asks,
“But he doesn’t know he’s going to die, does he?”

*

Rob Cording teaches high school English in Boston, MA. Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from New Ohio Review, Tar River Review, and Here: a poetry journal.

Scattering by Rob Spillman

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Scattering

Like gods gathering
tiny psychedelic planets,
we brim the red bucket
with superballs

I and my boy, now a man,
just shy of twenty-three,
scoop up balls cracked
with age and love

On three we hurl the planets,
the superballs pinging
off white worn tiles,
tub, ceiling, ricocheting madly,
my boy a boy again,
bathtime chaos and joy

We will not miss
this small, crumbling space,
but see how we sob,
the decrescendoing superballs
slowly rolling to silence
one last time
in the only home
we’ve known
*

Rob Spillman was the editor of Tin House from 1999-2019. He is the author of the memoir All Tomorrow’s Parties.