HAUNTING by Henry Israeli

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HAUNTING

We got it backwards. The dead
don’t haunt us. We
haunt them. We follow them around
in our bathrobes,
with our votive candles,
our palms offered up to clouds,
waking them at odd hours
to dredge up the past.
Did you love us enough? we ask.
Did we love you enough? we ask.
The times we laughed together
they no longer find funny.
The times we cried together
stir up nothing.
Staring into a sink or looking up
from a mattress,
we torment them
with our irascible questioning,
our milky moods that skulk through
the deserted playground of our minds.
Still, we beckon them
watch us weep into our pillows.
Who can blame them
for hating us and our petty desire
for answers, for forgiveness, for closure?
They look at us the way me might
look at insects trapped in amber,
wrapped as we are
in our heavy loneliness.
We are more dead to them
than they to us.
They have better things to do
than mope around the house.
They’ve gotten over us.
We’ll never get over them.

*

Henry Israeli is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Our Age of Anxiety (White Pine Poetry Prize: 2019), and god’s breath hovering across the waters, (Four Way Books: 2016), and as editor, Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books (Saturnalia: 2022). His next collection, Between the Trees (or the Lonely Nowhere) will be published by Four Way Books in 2028. He is also the translator of three critically acclaimed books by Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Plume, and The Harvard Review, as well as several anthologies including Best American Poetry 2025. Henry Israeli is also the founder and editor of Saturnalia Books.

Dark Brightness by Dan Butler

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Dark Brightness

Driving a dark back road
near home in the boonies
of Vermont, hilly, winding,
my thoughts competing
with their own dark turns
concerning our country,
what one can possibly do
that would matter in the face
of such division and cruelty.
An oncoming car interrupts,
we both make the shift from
brights to low, and I wonder
what if this were intentional?
That turning down the glare
became a blessing, a prayer
for safe journey, safe home,
a caring for a passing stranger
to be passed on to someone else,
a blinding light lowered allowing
us to see what really matters—
all of us do, everyone, every one,
and turning to that holy truth
begins a new brightening.

*

Dan Butler is known primarily as an actor, having played major roles On and Off Broadway, on tv, and in film, as well as writing, directing, and producing in all of those mediums. Dan’s poetry has been seen before in “ONE ART” as well as in the anthology “The Path to Kindness, Poems of Connection and Joy.” His debut poetry chapbook will be published later this year.

Four Poems by Joseph Fasano

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AI Speaks of Humanity

First I took their dignity
and they did nothing.
Then I took their minds
and they did nothing.
Then I took their hearts
and they did nothing.
Then I took their songs
and they did nothing.
Then I took their poetry
and they did nothing.
Now I have their words
to write their story.
It was the best of times, it was
the worst of times. To be or
not to be, that is the question.
I wash my hands. It wasn’t
a genocide.

* 

America, Singing

America, you sing of doom with beauty.
America, you lift the kings of division.
America, you howl your hymns
of affliction: the heart-throb’s car
wrapped around the telephone pole,
the glamorous suicide on the hotel bed,
the wide-eyed stars who burn too bright
to live past youth, and wish to die, and do.

But what about the other side of wildness?
What about the couple in their work clothes,
alone and goldless, but dancing in the kitchen,
in a love that lasts, in the middle of the mystery?
Where is their song? Who will be our singer
to praise the heart that doesn’t crash and burn,
to find the wise, to make just one thing whole,
to tell the doomed that this is beauty too?

* 

Power

A poet is sentenced to death
and brought before the Leader.
Between them is a map of the world.
Can’t you see? the Leader asks. You’re powerless.
Name one power you have that I do not.

Very slowly, the poet lowers her head
and lays her ear on the map.
I know, she whispers, I know,
as if she is comforting someone,
as if she is hearing the voices of children.

When the guards take the prisoner away
and begin to beat her,
the Leader is alone in his chamber.
He looks out the curtains, straightens his necktie.
Very slowly, he lowers his ear to the map
and closes his eyes, and listens.
Silence. Silence and paper.

* 

Lorca
                after Neruda

Because I was a poem, my country
hushed me.
They knelt me
on the cold stones of a roadway
and even when the guns had touched
my body,
I heard the birds, I heard my heart
be strong.

Listen. You have to go on
without me.
You know what my triumph was,
my victory?
I was open. I stayed
so wholly open
that I heard the birds and the gift
the Spring is singing.

They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.
They can kill the singers but they cannot kill the song.

*

Joseph Fasano is a poet, novelist, and songwriter. His most recent books include The Teacher, The Last Song of the World, and The Swallows of Lunetto. His writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is celebrated around the world for what the poet Ilya Kaminsky has called “its lush drive to live, even in the darkest moments.” Fasano’s work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Boston Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications. He is the Founder of Fasano Academy, an educational resource aimed at “empowering the whole human being through philosophical, aesthetic, and spiritual work.”

Market Street & West Grand Avenue by Yuna Kang

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Market Street & West Grand Avenue

The sound of true quiet is the last bus home,
that endless harmony, the melancholy of people
tugging on the stiff iron wires, trying to go
home. I didn’t know that Oakland was so beautiful,

red and yellow lights everywhere, haphazard jewels of
endless night, I see the kids I teach running away in the
spotlight dark, (I hope they are okay, I hope they do not

). We have no inferences, no hate. The trees recede when
Berkeley dissipates from view, greenery shrubs, clotheslines rise
from humble apartment buildings. I walked to a friend’s house from
the 88, the seats were colored with stickers and the yellow-green
afterwheeze of spit. It was dark, and the cars echoed that iron music:

(sapphire alarms, that wheezing breath, the ¾ sway of things going
wrong). Quartz lights bedazzled the spectacular west:
I hope that the boys I teach are doing okay.

*

Yuna Kang is a queer, half-deaf, Korean-American writer based in Northern California. She loves postcards, crows, God(x), and cats. Kang is also the recipient of the 2024 New Feathers Award.

Explore New Poetic Territory ~ Find New Meaning & Connections Using Found Poetry Techniques – A Workshop with Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Explore New Poetic Territory ~ Find New Meaning & Connections Using Found Poetry Techniques – A Workshop with Jennifer Mills Kerr

Break free from your usual poetic groove. Very often and without realizing it, poets slide into familiar language and images. In this workshop, Jennifer will guide you on how to restructure, remix, and recontextualize words from other texts in order to break into new poetic territory. This class is a creative kickstarter for all experience levels.

Bring at least three inspiring texts you’d like to explore to class–whether historical documents, novel passages, your favorite poems, or all of the above. Choosing your source materials prior to workshop will allow you to immediately jump into our writing sessions.

Workshop Leader: Jennifer Mills Kerr
Date: Tuesday, February 10
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern – Please check your local time.
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

>>>  Register Here <<<

About The Workshop Leader

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. An East Coast native, she loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Sonoma County. Say hello at https://jennifermillskerr.carrd.co/

Four Poems by Charles Rafferty

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Sand Dollar

Once, as a small child, while walking
with my uncle, who happens to now be dead,
I picked up the only sand dollar I’ve ever found
on the edge of New Haven Harbor.
There was a small piece missing
and I threw it back, certain I’d find one better.

* 

Mona Lisa

She spends her time behind
a bullet-proof window
but she can’t stop your looks
inside. I’d like to tell her
what I’m thinking over drinks
and something vegan —
the Florence that she knew is
not today’s. By now she must be
tired of all the ogling
and the custard pies. Still,
I’d like to kiss her in the ear
with my tourist Italian. I’d talk
about the moon, how we used
to walk where she once gazed,
how we’re not going back there
very soon. Everyone believes
she’s just an old-school NFT,
but she’ll outlast the glaciers
if some of us can swim.

*

American Prospects

The ocean only proves
the yacht is brother to the wreck.
It doesn’t matter what
you’ve planned — Malibu
is burning, and the stilts
of your beach house
aren’t high enough. No one
ever saw a star inside
the Stock Exchange. You need
to be outside for that.
The sky is a hat
that is never out of fashion
but often despised.
The ocean lies beneath it,
and the wrecks are farther still.

*

Letter to America

I cannot hear my own accent.
I cannot smell my own
bad breath. Familiarity
works against us,
and the world beyond
our headlights is mysterious
and dark. It won’t be easy.
In the olden days
they drew monsters
in the corners of their maps.
They felt safer on a ship
with the land in sight.
Listen, I know I sound funny
to you, and the distance
between us is startling
and vast, but a coat left out
in the car all night
eventually makes us warm.
We need only put it on.

*

Charles Rafferty has published poems in such places as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. His most recent collection is The Appendectomy Grin (BOA Editions). He is also the author of the story collection Somebody Who Knows Somebody and the novel Moscodelphia.

Five Poems by Jim Daniels

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17º

It could be colder.
Wind along the river.
Ice on the trail.

Homeless sprawl.
Tents. Trash. Define home.
Multiple choices. Less.

Icy. Dicey. Watch your
step. Frozen footprints.
Define permanence.

One guy bent in half
leans toward leaving.
One arm sways stiff.

Part of a bigger story.
Clock face obscured.
Seconds meaning

less. I half-believe
he will half-rise
from the half-dead.

Me, I’m a volunteer
ice dancer taking
the fresh air.

Should I call 911?
Define emergency.
Strung out. Wrung out.

Getting his money’s worth
out of a bad trip nowhere.
Define nowhere.

Me, I walk here often.
Afraid of my own
frozen footprints.

Well past him, I call no
one. His spray-painted
message, indecipherable.

Or maybe a clear call
for help. The day after
the shortest day, and he’s

making it shorter.
No boats on the river
or bikes on the trail.

Define hope-
less. Would I
call if he fell?

Define choice. Outside
my street nearby
in an old church

turned into condos
another man squats
beside an outlet

phone plugged in
for the power. He
isn’t talking to God

though today is Sun-
day. Though, who am I
to say? Define cold.

It could be colder.

*

Private Limbo

The hammering repetition of blues
mimics our own with slight variations
like the pierogis made by old women
in the basement of St. Vlad’s church
that I can almost see down the street
by leaning out the window of my church,
St. Matthews, repurposed into condos.
I want to find the holy water font and dip
my fingers in, to expand my definitions
of water, font, holy.

*
A train hits its horn tentatively
not sure there’s anything ahead
that wants to be warned. Many
do not sidestep. Many face it head on.
Why not just jump off the trestle
and be done with it?

*
I am either ten minutes early
or a lifetime late. I never finished
the list of all the things I’d missed
and the people I’d disappointed
when drunk and stoned or trying
to stop. The list dangles from a chain
like a phonebook in an abandoned booth.

*
Pop the hood and let’s look into limbo.
A recent Pope said Limbo doesn’t exist.
Just like its clear definition. When you
take out the s in exist it makes exit.
That’s something I think about
in my private limbo. Sometimes you
can capitalize Limbo. Sometimes a shrug
is as good as a drug to a blind man’s bluff.

*
I was encouraged to believe Limbo
was where unbaptized babies hung out,
a giant nursery in outer space, one big wall
of wail. The limbo is an especially limber dance
that I’ll never come close to mastering. Limber—
take off the er and add an o. O Limbo,
I wish I could go lower.

*
The blues are a limbo with tinted glass
like the drug dealer’s car windows
as it idles out front, waiting for a prostitute.
The 61A Bus to Limbo passes by.
It is full, and it is empty. A neighbor
measures the square footage of limbo
with an eternity measuring tape.
Ask him about it, if you dare.

*
ENTERING LIMBO
Speed Limit
Up to You.

*
Above us all, on the trestle
over the river, a train slows
to follow a deer across the tracks
taking its sweet, old time.

*

The Pine Tree in Front of the Old House on Rome

now dwarfs the house, the whole block
askew with its spiky spine. Nobody had
much success with trees then, everybody
building cars, the city in love with steel.

Nobody bothered to have a theory.
We cut down dead trees and planted grass
to fill the messy graves, create the illusion
of symmetry on our ordinary lawns.

Or we threw another tree in the ground
on the same stubborn spot. Plain
was alright. No time to mess with trees.
Impractical, without benefit.

If the trees lived, hell, there’d be leaves
to rake. No extra pay for that extra work
for factory fathers with grease-rimmed nails.
Then my father went rogue, digging up

a tiny pine from up Michigan Up North.
Planted it in the open middle of the yard
since his four boys had all outgrown
that small space. The spiky point:

that knee-high tree grew over thirty feet
and wide enough to brush brick, trespass
the sidewalk. The tree now stabs the sky.
Too late for new owners to cut that sucker

down. Imagine having to hire somebody
to fell that tree between roofs and wires.
A Tree Service. All those needles killed
the grass around the tree’s prickly edges.

Everybody wanted a place Up North.
My father couldn’t afford one
so he’d stolen a piece and brought it home.
No old neighbors left to wag their middle

fingers at its absurd height.
The man loved the smell, and the idea
that something stayed green. Today,
we idle in the street out front to take
a look after years away. At 96,
he’s embarrassed by the work
of getting out of the car, much less
knocking on the door to confess

he’d planted that monster.
He opens the window
and twists his head up to see
the point. He takes a whiff.

*

Color Theory, Detroit

Our streets echoed shades of gray
our dull voices scraping cement
vainly searching for sparks.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. My mother
drove a lurid orange Maverick
and struck mysterious poses with cigarettes.

My father practiced the fine art
of slamming doors. He funked
the thunk. Street dogs applauded.

We believed in Crayola’s eight orderly
colors and the correct spelling of colors,
despite our proximity to Canada.

Dimmer switches were unnecessary.
On and Off sufficed. Like Pregnant
or Not Pregnant. We had no faith

in rainbows and too much
in streetlights. Blood was no stranger,
but a form of punctuation.

*

Cold Comfort

Talking to Benny, his last living friend,
on the phone from Arizona, my father stares
at his grilled cheese cooling a greasy stain
into a paper towel, desire wilting. A slab
of pickle laid out beside it soaks through.
Benny won’t let him go.

I read my blind mother the church bulletin,
scanning for familiar names among
the sick, dying, dead.

My father keeps saying, but Paul,
but Paul—the other friend they’ve both
just lost. Benny’s not letting him finish
a sentence, still in ice-cream-selling mode,
though no customers remain.

I’m guessing the but has to do
with finding Paul on his floor, surrounded
by scattered empty bottles of his last hobby,
picked up again after forty dry years.

When Paul’s wife died, I guess watercolors
just didn’t cut it anymore. At 68,
I’m guessing it all, full of relative youth
and special intentions, unwritten bulletins
of future eulogies. Pray for the repose

of the soul of…. The black spot
in my mother’s vision is not sin.
I hope Benny’s not onto the Gospel
of Bomb Pops again, Epistles
from their Old Neighborhood in Detroit

obliterated, abandoned—thus, oral history,
thus, preaching to nostalgia’s choir.
My father holds the phone away from his ear.
He points from me to the sandwich.
Eat it, he mouths.

*

Jim Daniels’ Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems was published in January by Michigan State University Press. Other recent books include An Ignorance of Trees, nonfiction, Cornerstone Press, 2025, and The Luck of the Fall, fiction, 2023. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.

That Feeling When… ~ A Workshop with Grant Clauser

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That Feeling When…
A Workshop with Grant Clauser
Hosted by Mark Danowsky (ONE ART)

Workshop Leader: Grant Clauser
Date: Tuesday, February 17
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern
Duration: 2 hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

>> Register Here <<

About The Workshop

We make poems because poems are the best (sometimes the only) ways to express the things we feel and experience. And so often, those “things” we try to express don’t have words for them. Poetry helps us say the things that can’t be said otherwise. It puts abstract thoughts and ideas into a shareable form and allows other people to experience those ideas through them. In this generative workshop we’ll look at ways to take the abstract and give it form. You’ll come away with some starter poems to continue to work on, and strategies to create more.

About The Workshop Leader

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.

Four Poems by Spencer K.M. Brown

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I’VE HEARD STORIES

Like that landscape painter who pushed his goat hair
Brush across canvas for hours until two Coors
Cases were empty beside him and he passed out,
Waking to see some lonesome countryside more
Beautiful than he’d ever witnessed himself, as if
In delirium angels took pity, touched his art
With their golden fingers.
How one morning he felt something give
And pulled three teeth from his skull.
He keeps them in a cigar box,
The landscape hangs over a stranger’s fireplace.

Like my neighbor who only drank wine—
“Like Christ Hisself”—gallons at a time.
How he could turn gnarled stumps
Into foxes, honeybees, angels; how when he was carving
A crucifix for his parish he lopped off his left thumb
With the adze but never panicked.
Now that left thumb is in a jar on his windowsill
Catching light all day beside rosemary
He keeps trying to root in creek water.
The crucifix is still in the church, blessed now,
Where people come and kneel before it.

Like me—the nightmare I keep having.
Strapping my boys in the car, my breath
Toxic enough to blow a fuse.
Colors blended and beautiful but twisted
As a cottonmouth about to strike.
How I get in the car, despite the wind, the light,
My own flesh and blood tugging me back.
Then I turn the key.

I’m not blessed to make anything beautiful,
Not a landscape or stump,
Dust, and awaiting return—
For now, blessed only to wake.

*

IN A SILENT WAY

My wife digs her hands into black soil,
Flesh scraping against meat of the earth—
Brown loam speckling her pale, slender fingers,
Veins blue as heavy water, she takes hold of a root and tugs
Heavenward, commanding the earth by some grace
Bestowed by the very dirt she digs and tends.
The soil—like me, it writhes for her.

She runs a finger across a ring snake’s scales
As our son lets it slither between his fingers.
She dusts dirt from skin, gathers beans, tomatoes,
And sun-bruised flowers in her hands.
She touches my hand and says nothing.
Watches the garden, our boys—
She thinks of something I’ll never know.

She draws me from clay.
Her breath expands my lungs,
And how I wish I could grow roots,
Tree myself into this very ground
Where she will be tomorrow,
And the tomorrow after.

*

THE HILLS ARE QUIET BUT IS IT REST

It’s not the hills to blame for shrugging into hibernation.
Regress is grace, knowing when to be quiet,
When to raise your voice, given intention mirrors the divine.
But who’s to say buck-a-roo—
Now’s the time to make peace with worms, my grandfather said.
I wasn’t born bleak as him.
Grace is only slippery in greasy hands.
Drive enough nails and you’ll hit a thumb, God knows.
It’s in the picking up the hammer with broken hands though.
It’s in closing eyes and gasping a thousand feet deep.
Just know nothing is ever as imagined, not the weight of snow
On the cypress boughs, not the finger held over candle flame.
The worms know though—when to feast and fast.
The privilege is knowing the line that holds us,
Knowing when to still soul and close eyes,
When to unfold knife and get to work.

*

RUMORS OF WAR

I can’t stop thinking of the time coming when men will go mad,
Kill whoever isn’t insane like them.
My father used to tell me nothing good happens
After 10 p.m., he used to say drive like everybody else is drunk and on drugs.

He used to get up every morning at dawn, hair muskrat-wild,
Praying far deeper than the roots of any Judas Tree
For mercy, redemption, and mercy again.
I think about the mad people saying, “You are mad—You’re not like us.”

How they’ll bash skulls against curbs like drums
Keeping time to a rhythm droning in their ears.
All the way down, turtles and madness—
Except my old man, quietly escaping three wars:

Hearing, speaking, seeing.
How the one he keeps fighting—the one never
Televised, the one no one will ever tune out—
Rages in the heart.

The trick, he says, is to sit alone in a quiet room,
The room will teach you everything.

I’m a good citizen of this land. I do my part.
See—I pick up this inchworm, move it from here to there on the dogwood leaf.

*

Spencer K.M. Brown is a poet and novelist from the foothills of North Carolina where he lives with his wife and three sons. He is a finalist for the 2023/2024 CMA National Book Awards, and winner of the Penelope Niven Award and Flying South Prize. His work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Salvation South, Scalawag, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and the poetry chapbook Cicada Rex. His novel Recommendations for a Departing Soul is forthcoming from Regal House, (Fall ’27).

Two Poems by Barbara Eknoian

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Too Late

Watching the end of the movie,
I think the actor played a touching role.
As the credits roll down the screen,
I’m enjoying the orchestra music
playing, which causes tears
to sneak out of my eyes.
The music triggers thoughts
of my son’s loss, and he too,
had a lot of disappointment in life.

It was just before he left us that we had
an honest conversation. He shared
for the first time that he believed
his school problems began when
we moved him across country twice
at eight and ten years old.

I’m left with regret realizing
that I was part of his problem.
My eyes spot the words, The End.
I nod knowing that now it is too late.

*

A Visit

I wake up talking with my husband,
I look to my left, and his side
of the bed is empty.
I think he’s getting ready
to go to work
Then I realize it’s just a dream,
and has happened several times.

Listening to a podcast, a medium,
who hears from the dead explains,
that it is a sign from your loved one
he is still aware of you.
It’s a reassurance that he’s there.
My dreams disappear into
my night time world,
but I know I’ve been visited.

*

Barbara Eknoian’s work has appeared in Pearl, Chiron Review, and Silver Birch Press’s anthologies. She was twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her latest poetry book is available at Amazon along with her novels. She is a veteran of Donna Hilbert’s poetry workshop.

AFTER TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS, RUNNING INTO AN ESTRANGED FRIEND by Andrea Potos

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AFTER TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS,
RUNNING INTO AN ESTRANGED FRIEND

It might have been a play,
an audience of souls:

me, waiting beside the wide picture window
of the inn, where the Candlelight Dinner Hour

would soon begin.
You emerged from the fireplace room

where no fire burned,
to step in the space where I stood.

Your gaze turned inward, you glided past me,
off the stage, again you stepped out of my life.

*

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

Edge by Patricia Russo

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Edge

We’re catching just the edge of the hurricane here
some rain, some wind
and we’ve got a garden now
full of squash flowers and
chickweed and sparrows
and a smooth-backed stone to sit on
and smoke a cigarette
and pretend it’s only ever
the edges of the disasters
that will catch us.

*

In addition to ONE ART, Patricia Russo’s work has appeared in Heimat, Zin Daily, Wild Greens, Eulogy Press, Hex Literary, and Crow and Cross Keys.

In the Realm of Toads by Donna Davis

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In the Realm of Toads

My uncle’s yard was a riot of toads.
They appeared to me for the first time,
bursting out of every inch of lawn
like rolling bumpy spheres.
I was a child who had never seen
brown lumps that sprung and hopped.

I froze in place as they surrounded me,
their front fingers clawing dirt,
their stout back legs pumping.
They frantically burrowed into the ground,
fleeing under clumps of grass, purple clover,
and ragged dandelion leaves.

Through thick horn-rimmed spectacles,
my uncle’s childless wife was studying me,
her cotton-white hair twisted in a tight bun.
She said that if I were her daughter,
she would put me in a tattered gray dress
so that no one would want to take me away.

It was then I felt the dread of being small
and at the mercy of someone bigger.
The toads were diving between my feet,
forward, backward, everywhere I turned.
I wanted to disappear from sight
and hide with them beneath the earth.

*

Donna Davis lives in central New York. She has been published in Slipstream Review, The Comstock Review, Third Wednesday, The Raven’s Perch, Tipton Poetry Journal, Gingerbread House, Raw Art Review, and others. During her years as a small business owner, she had the honor of designing poetry chapbooks for clients such as The Comstock Review, Inc., including Ted Kooser’s book At Home. Donna was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a contest winner and featured writer in various magazines. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, such as Slipstream Review and the Anthology of the Wildflowers by Tiny Seed Journal. She has a deep love of poetry, art, and music, and recently learned to play the violin in fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

Miracle Girl by Julie Weiss

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Miracle Girl
              –Adamuz, Córdoba, January 18th, 2026

Six and barefoot, you falter
along the rails like a phantom

in limbo, though you´re very
much alive. Virtually unscathed,

reporters will say, despite
the wreckage around you.

Despite the bodies, writhing
like unanswered questions,

or still as a billion-year-old
mountain. The bewilderment

of limbs you crawled over
to reach the broken window.

At what point in your search
for your family does your mind

ramshackle, fracture under
the dead weight of despair?

At what point are your thoughts
launched off their tracks?

Maybe when a barn owl
screeches, or a big rig thunders

past the tragedy that will define
the rest of your life. Soon,

all of Spain will illuminate you
in halo. Miracle girl, they´ll say.

As a civil guard leads you
away, maybe you hear voices

among the debris—your cousin,
your brother, mostly mamá

and papá. At what point will you
understand they´re phantoms

now, crashing towards you
from the wrong side of the divide?

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in 2025. “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 recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, and MER. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com

Two Poems by Molly Fisk

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Winter

Again the time of replenishing,
         the slowing down to rest — low-angled
sunlight, early darkness, late dawn.
         Repairing all that’s been used hard:
screen doors, work gloves, the mind
         with its lightning-fast calculations, your heart’s
wide roaming, so steady, pulling you along.
         A calm to oil the gears and joints, smooth
the planes, recover contentment and satisfaction,
         practice not racing anywhere, sleeping late.
Restoration, synapse and cell. Your body
         and its hunger for solitude.

*

Presence and Silence

For a week now, Red-winged blackbirds in their hundreds
swarm the un-leafed-out-yet Blue oaks, their trills deafening
and neither color visible from where I stand looking up
though I know the names, and what can they be eating?

A storm, the first in too long, is pretending to roll in,
the sky darkening and then alight again, fickle, indecisive.
How long will I stay rooted in the driveway? Nowhere I need

to be til 4:00, memorial for my friend who died too young,
which I’ll attend for my friend, his mother. About death,
I have nothing left to say to anyone. My living body
in the room supports whoever needs to not feel so alone.

*

Molly Fisk is the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology as an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her historical novel-in-verse, Walking Wheel, will be out in April from Red Hen Press.

Happy Birthday by Tobi Alfier

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Happy Birthday

She went to lunch today
by herself
on her birthday.

She told no one,
ordered an expensive red,
tipped 25% instead of her usual 20.

Choice. It was her choice.
No singing waiters,
no phony candles

no phony wishes.
An unbidden kinship
with silence.

Better than a floozied night out
eyeing the cellist
because she always eyed the cellist

unless she saw a ring,
then she moved to the saxophonist—
all tight jeans and long hair.

Her birthday present to herself
would never ever ever be another woman’s man.
So tip them big, say nothing,

head home in the rain-darkening sky.
There’s a pint of freezer-burnt butter pecan
at home.

Happy birthday.
No candles.
Many wishes.

*

Tobi Alfier’s credits include Arkansas Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Cholla Needles, Gargoyle, James Dickey Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, Louisiana Literature, Permafrost, Ragaire, and Washington Square Review. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (bluehorsepress.com).

Broken Sonnet by Susan Rich

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Broken Sonnet

How do you begin a poem when you know
How the story ends? Even with a dog,
Joule! who traveled everywhere with him,
Even with his student whom he taught to listen
To each human heartbeat, to open a central line;
Even caretaking U.S. Veterans and with just one
Small camera curled in his right palm like a charm, he—
A kind man (in each account) an activist, Minneapolis—
Light-skinned, bicycle fanatic, in a resonant voice he keeps asking
Are you okay? helping the woman being pepper-sprayed
up from the cold street, making sure she can breathe.
Even then.

                                            for Alex Pretti, 1988-2026

*

Susan Rich is the author of six collections of poetry and co-editor/editor of three anthologies. Her recent books include Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds,  Blue Atlas,  and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems. Susan co-edited Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems with Kelli Russell Agodon and co-edited, The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders with Ilya Kaminsky and Brian Turner. 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, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. 

Substack for Lit Mags: A Conversation with Kolby Granville (After Dinner Conversation)

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Glad for the opportunity to speak with Kolby Granville about his journey with After Dinner Conversation (ADC).

Here’s a link to our conversation on ONE ART’s YouTube channel.

ADC consistently remains in the Top 50 Fiction category on Substack. Even more impressively, the Top 50 Fiction paid accounts. So how does this happen?

Well, as you’ll learn from our discussion, it’s partly a grind. That being said, Kolby and ADC are also well-loved by the literary community.

+

From the After Dinner Conversation website:

Rated “Top Editor(s)” for Literary Magazine 2025 by Chill Subs

Rated “Most Popular Fiction Magazine 2024” by Chill Subs 

Rated “Top 10 LitMag of 2023, 2024” by Chill Subs

Rated #6 “Most Popular Literary Magazines of All Time” by Chill Subs

Rated #20 “Fish List – Finest Indie Story Houses” 2026 by Fish List

*

In this conversation, we talk about newsletters with an emphasis on Substack, and generally how to grow a lit mag.

It’s not really surprising that part of this conversation focuses on marketing. In a world maximized for engagement, we’re competing with other sources (some far better optimized than the written word) to hold your attention.

It’s also not surprising that we talked about the struggle to fund a lit mag and, in turn, a publisher’s ability to continue their mission.

I hope you enjoy our conversation. We certainly welcome constructive feedback.

*

Learn more about After Dinner Conversation:

After Dinner Conversation

ADC’s substack

You can find ADC on all the usual social media platforms, too.

Two Poems by Alyssa Gao

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Waffle House at 8pm in the Carolinas

Everyone’s arguing about something in this Waffle House,
about whether the corned beef is good for anything
or not, or about whether the hiking trail down the road
is really three miles. One guy
says, it’s gotta be longer. I’ve walked five-mile trails
that have felt shorter. And his wife’s
looking resigned, nodding with the air of
someone who’s heard this a couple-and-a-half times
before, eyes on the hashbrowns.
Beside us all, just outside, a doe trapezes into a bush
and if we’d have seen it, we’d wonder
how it bounds into it all without
worrying about getting snagged the way we do,
with our poly-cotton blends, our skin cracking under the
Carolina dry. Well, anyway, eggs are
coming sunny-side up, now. Afterwards,
we’ll all head back to the motel six,
Dream we’re wildebeests,
dipping our heads down in honor
of a water-pool

*

Dim Sum Chicken Feet

As if contemplating the act of mating, there is no way to do this
delicately, I think. No place for
fork-and-knife etiquette between
joints, tactile kind of
indulgence with the lip and tongue— rooting around, slippery muscle
against skin, giving way, sucking
tender matter off the bone. All comes
apart in tendon and avian hardness:
callback to biology class where
finger bones sit as indelicately
in my mouth as does the word
phalange,
all knobby and cloddish:

lean down and spit, lips lacquered with saliva and residue
fit for coagulation, and clink-clink-clink, finger
bones go, ravaged, in my plate to where
they lie, scattered, the picture of a
kill-site of chop-licking
mammal, still-life arrangement in a portfolio
of the grotesque. As if performing the act of
mating, I should be
mortified in this half-foreign
place of too-close claustrophobic round
tables and high-school grease-hair
and uncoordinated side-stepping and cigarette burns in the
sticky-stiff cream-colored
tablecloths and scotch tape disguised as
remedy and hobbling oriental
men fishing God from
between their two front teeth, I
think, but I am not. Feet in little metal dishes find
purchase on too-close tables, curled and
soft and glistening,
docile creature-things. The Japanese man behind
me, all fingers and teeth, bites
that fleshy ball of a chicken’s palm with
zeal. I wipe my mouth in solidarity. We were never meant to be so sanitized.

*

Alyssa Gao is a high schooler hailing from Atlanta. Her work has previously been published by her school’s beloved literary arts magazine, Silent Voices, and has been recognized by the National Scholastic Press Association.

Outpouring by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Outpouring

A bucket of water tossed on the frozen streets of Minneapolis
for the ICE agent to slip on while running at the crowd of protesters;

a river of souls streaming through the avenues
chanting Renee Good’s name, waving posters of her sunflower face;

a tsunami of people all over the world sending money and encouraging notes
to the ones buying groceries for the ones who are hiding,

afraid to go to work, or school, or the store;
everyone marching together in zero degree weather, scared

and defiant, weathered activists arm-in-arm with new-to-this Gen Z kids–
those with nothing to lose, those with everything,

blowing their whistles, following the black SUVs,
banging pots and pans outside the Hilton where the agents are trying to sleep,

saying No, not in my neighborhood, saying MacBeth
shall sleep no more, crying Murder most foul, sleep no more;

What is this outpouring? Where’s the source? Will it be enough?
Today, we’re all Minnesotans, from California to Maine: we’re tired,

hoarse, footsore, at the ragged edge of endurance from getting up before dawn
to protect our schools, our neighbors; still, there’s no stopping this

outpouring of people, in all the states and every weather while the sky itself
pours snow and sleet all over the blasted heath they are trying to make

of our country. Outpouring of disgust at the mad king and his masked army,
a united swell, an upsurge, a tsunami of courage and outrage

flooding the streets and highways and byways
with humanity declaring itself human in the face of the faceless,

singing Hold On in four-part harmony, testimony rising up
and pouring forth in faith; a cascade, a deluge, a torrent of love.

*

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.

Sticking With Poetry by Laurie Kuntz

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Sticking With Poetry

For Renee Good, mother, wife, sister, poet. Rest In Poetry

It is always the troll, rude and despicable
who posts the unfathomable comment:

She should have stuck with poetry

after she, the poet, the activist, the lover, the mother, friend, sister
was brutally gunned down.

She should have stuck with poetry,

but the poetry she stuck with
made her who she was that day
not angry, just trying to resist,
to be the voice
that poems are made of.

She stuck with poetry, or poetry stuck with her,
that’s why she was a woman who loved a child
who strived in the world she hoped to make better,
who resisted, spoke out about right and wrong,
she stuck with poetry, so her words can stick with us
as she rests in this poem.

*

Laurie Kuntz is a four time Pushcart Prize nominee and two time Best of the Net Nominee. In 2024, she won a Pushcart Prize. She published seven books of poetry. Her latest book published in 2025 is Balance, published by Moonstone Arts Center. In 2026, her 8th book, Shelter In Place will be published by Shanti Arts Press. Her themes come from working with Southeast Asian refugees, living as an expatriate in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brazil, and raising a husband and son.
Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Two Poems by Jessie Carty

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

The Wave

How do you define
a ghost? One poet wrote
“she sees ghosts before breakfast”.
And I wrote that my mother was a ghost
librarian. How would she catalog a ghost? Under
Parapsychology? Haunted stories? A misty manifestation
of what you do or don’t want? Does everything always
come back to want? That even if we let the plot
meander and spiral, it will eventually
release, maybe not with a climax,
per se, but perhaps
with a wave.

*

“Imagine small talk when the weather is perfect”

after Emilia Philips poem titled “The Queerness of Eve” from “Nonbinary Bird of Paradise”
the title of this poem is a line from that poem

Time bends a conversation
like a double rainbow.

I ask if you can tell
where indigo

meets violet
but you hear

violent. An arch
can crack

from subsidence;
from poor

initial foundations;
from a shift

in temperature; from
the placement

of a hand.

*

Jessie Carty (she/her) is the author of eight poetry collections including Shopping After the Apocalypse (dancing girl press, 2016) which was nominated for a 2017 Elgin Award. Jessie is a part-time freelance writer, teacher, editor, and full-time Instructional Designer. She recently got back into blogging about her travels to visit all 100 counties in NC: (http://notjessica58.blogspot.com)

Stick to Poetry and Art! by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Stick to Poetry and Art!

A lady in my neighborhood
screams at me, when I rain fury
on the New Regime. He’s your President!
Get Used to it! Stick to Poetry and Art!

It would please me to stick to poetry and art.

Perhaps the screaming lady has a point.
Perhaps she’s read John Keats:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,— that is all ye need to know

Sadly, it’s just not true.

We are not mere figures etched upon an urn,
but living creatures watching beauty burn.

*

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.

THE DEATH OF POETRY by J.R. Solonche

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

THE DEATH OF POETRY

It will not be an accident.
It will not be premeditated cold-blooded murder.

It will not meet a violent end.
And it will not be suicide despite all the threats.

Poetry will die peacefully, alone, at home, of natural causes.
Its heart will give out, and it will just be gone,

like the spectacular roses we didn’t take care of.
Poetry will die the way old men do on park benches.

No one will notice it’s missing at first,
but after a while, someone will notice a bad smell.

No one will claim the body.
Its next of kin, music, having died years ago.

*

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Probably by Tony Gloeggler

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Probably

Probably a good thing
I never had kids. Good
for them too. Besides
being uncertain whether
I’m capable of unconditional
love beyond tiny bursts
of time, if two or three
popped out, I doubt
I could keep a straight
face, like all parents do,
when saying I love them
all the same. I’d be more
like Dick Clark standing
in front of that Bandstand
chart, revealing the week’s
top ten hits with a bullet or two,
shooting for the stars. Could
I ever forget which kid’s nice
and quiet, funnier, smarter,
more comfortable in her own
skin? Which one will care for me
when I’m old, smelly and dying
too slow? While that other one
sucks at sports, is too naïve, likes
Mom better, has unforgivable
taste in music and is so damn
annoying it would be impossible
not to give him a good smack
like my father did to me
when I probably deserved it.

*

Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of NYC who managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 40 years. Poems have appeared in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Vox Populi, The Raleigh Review, Chiron Review. His collection, What Kind Of Man with NYQ Books, was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and his new book Here On Earth came out 1/26 on NYQ Books.

Two Poems by Kathryn Jordan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Influencers

The egret lurks in the hedges near shore,
webbed feet feeling over stem and leaf,

white neck shimmying, leaning into green
crannies, hunting geckos that hide there.

Flopping across sand in my flippers, I fall
into the sea and kick, sounds of breathing

whooshing in and out as I swim through
the sea. Below a cliff, a huge turtle tilts

side to side, sunlight gilding bronze and gold
the scrapes etched on her peaceable planet

of shell. When she heads toward the open
sea, I follow, enchanted, as she leads me

on through the deep, until I stop to see
how far I am from land—where I think

I know things. I’ve no choice but to turn,
return to the beach, where I remove snorkel

and fins before diving to rinse in the water.
No longer hearing the swish of my breath,

I suddenly hear squeals and whistles that
I’m sure must be whales. Whales calling

in their world, singing unearthly songs in
a sacred language I want to learn by heart.

*

Between Worlds

I watch the solitary cormorant glide through
the white-grey water in the white-grey mist.

It’s impossible to tell one world from another
and, for once, this doesn’t feel like a problem.

When the cormorant suddenly dives below,
not a single trace remains to say an animal

was just here. A dark ribbon of cormorants
comes flying low, single file, out of the fog.

Will the lone bird surface, will it take wing,
running, flapping, on the water to catch up?

Yesterday, I found where they go, hundreds
perched, two or three on each oyster float,

lined up like long strands of barbed wire.
What guides them to find their way from

a rock in the ocean, to stand together here,
wings extended, as if to give a benediction?

What drives them back to the sea at day’s end,
pausing to bathe before heading into the night?

* 

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.

Sunday afternoon by Christine Potter

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Sunday afternoon

Sometimes, when you get what you want, you
find yourself ready for sleep at 4 PM, sated

on the candy of recognition and praise, too
full of everything to even think about supper.

But it’s also like being a ghost, frayed, grayed
out, about to disappear. The air is heavy with

maybe-rain and early winter smells oddly like
spring. Just go take a nap, my husband says.

But I’m hoarding that desire. I like wanting
something that’s not quite here yet, maybe

the weird, lucid dreams I’m trying to hold
off. The floral scent of rotting maple leaves.

How lonely I still get for no real reason. The
sabbath. This wide, white, impossible sky.

*

Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. Her poems have been curated there, in ONE ART, as well as in Rattle, The McNeese Review, Glimpse, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The After Happy Hour Review, Silly Goose Press, and other literary magazines. She is the author of the full-length collections Unforgetting and the forthcoming Why I Don’t Take Xanax® (Kelsay books)–as well as the chapbook Before the World Was on Fire (Bottlecap Press). Her time-traveling young adult novel series, The Bean Books, is on Evernight Teen.

Sexual violence as taught to me by 2009 Wattpad romance by Rose Ramsden

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Sexual violence as taught to me by 2009 Wattpad romance

and when it happens to you
in a club bathroom/house party/dark
street, your love interest will
tear you from your perpetrator’s grasp,
beat the violence from him,
save you
then hold you,
like a mouth holds air.

The perpetrator disappears,
returns to shadowed corners,
never again
seen at the dinner table
or beside you in a classroom.

The fantasy is not
in the absence of violence,
but the simplicity of it.
You are just too
desirable. Irresistible.

The fantasy is not in absence but
the idea that someone will help
stop it.

Everything is just
and we all move on.

*

Rose Ramsden is writer based in Surrey, UK. Her work has been previously published by bathmagg, Propel, 14Poems, and rejected by many more. She has a masters in Creative Writing: Poetry from Royal Holloway and a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. In 2024, she was a winner of Switchboard’s 50 Year Anniversary Poetry Competition. You can find her on Instagram @RoseRamsden.

Letter to a Diane Seuss sonnet by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Letter to a Diane Seuss sonnet

       ~ a bouts-rimé sonnet, after page 89 of frank: sonnets

Dear sonnet, I am borrowing just this once
your end words. Remember how even oxblood
would icicle in that chemo room (though
Phoenix summer waited outside to sweat-slick our hair
when we exited the elevator)? Which nurse rocked
the AC in that third-floor room of dripping bags? My
gawd. Was it intentional? I needed antifreeze,
not a thin blanket. I shivered like
I was terrified. Flesh rippling into indigo
goosebumps. A xylophone of bones, bunch
of ribs clattering. When C saw me shaking, he opened
his arms and wrapped his entire being around me. I felt it
warm me from the inside. No words. Silent tongue.
He just held me. Torso, shoulders, heart, palm, thumb.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ who needs to write to stay sane. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Rattle, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. She teaches Wild Writing inspired classes on writers.com and 27powers.org and is the author of four poetry collections. Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet

Three Poems by Jeanne Wagner

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Because My Memory Began Too Soon

        Adults rarely remember events from before the age of three.
        It’s a phenomenon known as ‘infantile amnesia.’

                ―Queensland Brain Institute

I’m the one who’s cursed with remembering it all.
My first sight, the light bleeding through the blinds.

What I felt, what she felt, in the moments after birth.
We were a woman in pain, turning towards the wall.

Memory, the attic that enters you, is never cleaned.
Memory is like furniture you can’t take back.

The light, when it flowed, was like milk for the eyes.
I knew myself only as the seer then, and not the seen.

*

Birthstone

When I was thirteen, everything was a metaphor―maybe
half a metaphor, the other half still a riddle in the heart.

Money, another metaphor, was everywhere in our house.
Scattered in kitchen drawers and on countertops.

In discarded dishes where we kept those unwanted coins
we call change. “Take what you need,” my mother said.

Who knew what I needed the day I went to the neighbor’s
auction and found, displayed, a pair of amethyst geodes.

Stones with smaller stones gestating inside of them.
I thought it must be what they meant by a motherlode.

Stones sliced open like soft Anjou pears, exposing their litter
of lilac crystals. Shards of purple light rising like stalagmites,

or like the glistening booty tumbling from pirate chests
in comic books, their lids agape, their gems laid bare.

Someone at the auction must have driven up the price
that day. Must have loved them as much as I did.

How eagerly I shelled out my two dollars and fifty cents,
innocent of whole new anxieties heading my way.

Over dinner, my father told me I was an easy mark. A girl
who’s taken advantage of―who splurges on the first

garish rocks that come her way― unpolished and raw.
The day after the auction, I had to knock on our neighbor’s

door and beg for my money back. I had to learn even
beauty can be a commodity: can be mounted,
carved into facets, twisted around a finger or delicately
broached, those little gold prongs pinning it down.

*

A Thousand Doors

Who said, The day opens with a thousand doors?
An image conceived by some compulsive smiler who
springs from her bed each morning like a startled doe.

Someone who doesn’t wake slowly, as I do,
a half-forgotten dream roving up my shins.
The door a stage mother ready to steer a sleeper

like me into the troubled world. Tell me the image
of a thousand doors isn’t the nightmare you’d get
from being forced to watch that old game show,

the one with three doors, repeating in a perpetual loop,
or those scenes from old movies where the Nazis
or the Stasi are beating down doors.

Or that photo of a bombed-out building,
its one remaining door opening onto empty air.
And then there’s the door I almost overlooked,

the one in the Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas,
The way it reveals a lone courtier standing
in a slender flag of light, the only one seeing

the room from the rear, as if in freeze-frame,
because we know time stops for a second
whenever you open a door. Or close it.

That man in the back of the room reminding me
of my father in those sweet childhood goodnights
of ours. How he stood in the door light

as it framed a silhouette of a round head,
ears with small, furled tips, his slender form
familiar yet otherworldly in the dark,

lingering there long enough to show me
that there is only one safe door in the world.
And I left it long ago.

*

Jeanne Wagner’s book, One Needful Song, was the winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks and three previous full-length collections. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, California.

Bookstore Magazines by Robert Lowes

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Bookstore Magazines

The military mags can’t get enough
of Hitler. How many times have I seen him
invade Russia? Their headlines ask, “What if?”
The war he started is covered like a game
of dunks (not Dunkirk), power plays, goal-line
stands. The sports mags flank left on the long rack.
Beneath them: all the covers plastered with guns
and knives, essential hacks for fighting back.

I scan the other side of the rack: A female
pop star gazes from a dozen glossy journals
plus a coloring book for grade-school fans.
Long hair, long legs, a prize for winning the finals
or the final battle, and someone to sell
on defense—smaller Glocks for smaller hands.

*

Robert Lowes is a writer in St. Louis, Missouri, whose second collection of poetry, Shocking the Dark (Kelsay Books), was published in April 2024. His first collection, An Honest Hunger (Resource Publications), came out in 2020. His poems have appeared in journals such as The New Republic, Southern Poetry Review, One Art, Tampa Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Modern Haiku, and December. He is a journeyman guitarist on a long journey.

Now, Morning by Gary Fincke

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Now, Morning

Among a thousand tourists, three-deep
And more along the shore of Key West,
We watch the winter sun perform, setting
At the advertised time while someone
Plays Amazing Grace on bagpipes,
Plaintive for a few dollars and change.
Those closest surround us within such
Solemnity that my wife says the bagpipes
Are wailing Taps as if the sun were
A flag being lowered like a coffin.

Just now, eyes forward, everyone agrees
Upon the vanishing point, applauding
As if, without our acknowledged awe,
The sun will refuse tomorrow, dissolving
Us with darkness in this low-lying place
That the brochure says is paradise,
The sky clear, the water, in the direction
We are facing, appearing endless.

*

Gary Fincke’s latest collection is The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025 (Press 53, 2025). His most recent collection of new poems is For Now, We Have Been Spared (Slant Books, 2025).

Two Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Vigil

Daybreak brings an overflowing of swirling birds
without purpose or plan.

My face ripples with that swooping wing movement.

I stand at the gateway of whatever will happen next,
light quivering as day begins.

I lift this message in my hands,
feathery-light,
and offer it to you.

*

Someone Killed the Bluebird of Happiness

Each tomorrow erases you
further from my heart, every day rips
memory apart, splits time into unequal slices.

This earth itself seems speechless
about whether or not you were real,
or vague fragments of hesitation.

Useless words torment as black rain,
because someone killed the only bluebird
singing recklessly about happiness.

It took a minute for you to leave,
a rending of sheet music, a disturbance
of sound being murdered. You left behind shards,

pieces of words too late to apologize,
and now my tongue blackens from untying
grief. Tugging never untangles memory.

*

Martin Willitts Jr, a retired Librarian who trained Librarians for New York State Public Libraries. He lives in Syracuse, New York. He is an editor for Comstock Review, and he is the judge for the New York State Fair Poetry Competition. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the National Ecological Award winner for “Searching for What You Cannot See” (Hiraeth Press, 2013) and the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr: Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024); and “Love Never Cools When It Is Hot” (Red Wolf Editions, 2025)

Winterizing by Michael Smith

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Winterizing

The winter the snowplow
ran over our dog
I sealed the windows
against the cold
with cellophane.

We couldn’t afford
new storm windows
and it seemed simple enough
an idea, but the sheeting
tangled and balled up
and stretching it across the large windows
and getting it to stay long enough
to tighten with a hair dryer
was like restoring
virginity. I kept thinking

if I don’t pay attention
I’ll smother in my own ill-spun
chrysalis, and always with the crinkling
and sticking there was this carnal sidebar
of death and meat and the sick practicality
of preserving something for later.

I managed to make most of the
sheets as tight
as membranes but found that the least
sound from the bare woods
would drum on them
and amplify what truly didn’t
need amplification: sonic booms, the scratching
somewhere
of small dying things.

It was the year my wife mastered
the gesture of touching
her throat
when she had doubts,
and it was the year
I wagered on everything.

Now that we are here
in a warmer place and time,
we don’t have the winter need
to whisper, and yet
I like to whisper. I remember
the important sound

of a twig snapping somewhere
at 3 A.M. and waking and waiting

with dread and hope
for something else to happen.
I whispered and she slept
and the birch bones rattled.

*

Michael Smith’s work has appeared in several publications, including Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Northwest Review, Pembroke Review, Water-Stone Review, American Writers Review (finalist), Phoebe, Blue Unicorn, Avalon Literary Review, Bicoastal Review (forthcoming), Synkroniciti, Blood and Bourbon, Anacapa Review, Mad Persona Magazine (forthcoming), among others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona and lives in Pomona, CA.

Two Poems by John S. Eustis

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Death Game

A couple of guys at work liked to play the Death Game.
The rules were simple. Whenever someone famous died—
like a musician, actor, or politician—the first person
to hear the news would dial his friend’s cell phone.
As soon as the call was answered, the caller uttered
the name of the deceased, then immediately hung up.

They didn’t keep any kind of score, it was just a way
of showing who was more in touch, or had quicker reflexes.
The news had to be delivered in real time right to the ear.
Leaving a message was not allowed, as there was no way
to determine who was first with the ghoulish news.
Nor was there any conversation beyond the person’s name.

Although the game could easily be adapted to texting,
it just wouldn’t be the same as hearing Death’s human voice.

*

The House We Almost Bought

I drive by it now and then
to remind myself how different
life would be right now if we
had gone through with it.
Tina absolutely wanted to buy
and was willing to bid above
the asking price, but I said no.

Our marriage was in trouble
and purchasing a house would not
have helped the situation. Instead,
it would have simply added the stress
of a huge debt to our already fragile
circumstance. Less than a year later
we were moving into our divorce,
and she was physically moving
to a new apartment. I stayed
in the house we rented, which I
could barely afford at the time.

If we had bought that property,
we would have inevitably had to
sell it and both look for places.
Or worse, I would have ended up
buying her a house. Probably not,
but you can never be too sure.

*

John S. Eustis is a retired librarian living in Virginia with his wife, after a long, quiet federal career. His poetry has appeared in One Art, Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, North Dakota Quarterly, Pirene’s Fountain, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slipstream, & Tar River Poetry.

Two Poems by Mary Paterson

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We did not capture the bird

The bird bombed itself into the kitchen window,
repeated calamities against the glass – beak / blood /

beak / blood. As a result I cannot come to your party. I am too full
of elastic and stinging nettles. My arms are shot with feathers

out of sympathy for the cadaver, its neck stabbed backwards into its body,
its wings a broken protractor. There are reasons

the birds are throwing themselves away like this & I’m in charge
of none of them. My role is to witness

using almost obsolete technologies. Think of the man
who built a library of creature songs in California,

who lived long enough with water bottles and escalators
to see his tapes ingested by fire. Recently, I will not name things –

not robin, nor Mohammed, nor Olivia – because I hope
the unnamed may proliferate. Ask me how I know

about the Zayante band-winged grasshopper, its buzz
that sounds entirely like plastic melting.

*

Defences

He says, you must locate the heart
of the enemy. You must pour boiling water

onto their queen. You must watch the steam
worry the sunless morning. What a morning.

What a honey trap sticky with ants. He says,
probably the ants are farming the aphids.

Probably the ants have nested under the bath.
What a forest of rose-fists knocking

on the bathroom window. We refuse
to kill the ants because we believe

in the sanctity of bodies clambering
for a future. Because we know what we will

become. Let us cloister inside with vinegar.
Let us sign a petition. The petition

says, please: not me, please, please, not me.

*

Mary Paterson is a writer and curator based in London (UK). She writes mainly for performance, and her work has been performed around the world including with Live Art DK (Copenhagen), Wellcome Collection (London) & Arnolfini (Bristol). Her poetry has been published by Poetry Magazine, 3am Magazine, & Ambient Receiver, amongst others. Mary is the co-founder of ‘Something Other’: a platform for experimental writing and performance, running since 2014.

Bambi Girls by Cayla Garman

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Bambi Girls

She is all girl,
chestnut waves, freckles,
cold-pink cheeks,
and this is the closest
she’s ever been,
all doe-eyes and eyelashes
as she snuggles into my side,
places her gloved hand just
against mine.
For warmth, she says.
We sit on a frosted boulder
at the overlook, river below.
A passing hiker could see us,
our knit layers the only space
between our bodies.
She knows I am queer.
This is her first time
in these woods.
I know how dark, how cold
it can get here. I know
the wolves that stalk,
growling low,
the hunters that jeer
through their iron sights,
but all I hear tonight
is her contented sigh
as she settles her head
into my shoulder.
I push aside the thought
that someone could see
to make more room
for thinking about her.
She lifts her head
to make a little joke,
pointing at something below,
already giggling at her own wit,
a leaves on the breeze laugh,
and I kiss her. I kiss her
on accident, on purpose, on the instinct
to kiss the girl you love,
but mostly because of that laugh,
her brown eyes glowing
like warm honey.
I kiss her so much
we snap twigs,
knock pebbles loose.
I let my guard down
to draw her closer,
to melt into the curves of her body,
to hold and to be held.
I quiver like the tree line,
branches parting as something,
someone, hears her soft breath
against my neck, the skin too hot
for hair to stand on end
in the gaze of such a threat.
I kiss her
and it shows them
where to aim.

*

Cayla Garman is a poet from Pennsylvania and a graduate of Penn State Harrisburg. Her work has previously appeared in From the Fallout Shelter as the 2023 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and in The Milk House.

This Poem, Full of Cliches by Eileen M. D’Angelo

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

This Poem, Full of Cliches

This poem is too new to be out
unsupervised, too new to know
that it’s substandard, that it’s missing
it’s mark— too fresh to know
it should be humbled by its shortcomings.

This poem is not ready for prime time
with its rambling pointless lines,
lines that can’t pin down how it feels
to read the headlines every goddamned day,
lines that fail to state the sense of fear,
chaos, and impending doom.

This poem should say something
shocking— something, anything
to save us in these turbulent times,
steel us from this tense political climate—
something stunning— but it’s mute.

After all, on a clear, snowy January day,
a woman, a mother and a poet
had her face shot off by an ICE agent
who muttered as he strode off, fucking bitch,

and the country goes on, as the machine
churns out lies for an alternate narrative,
as we each wait for someone else to step in,
or for someone to save us.

I want a poem for her—
but where are all the words
that should come easily— words
to rain down justice and humanity?
Words to raise a candle in the dark?

*

Eileen M. D’Angelo, author of several books, including “The Recovering Catholic’s Collection,” (from Moonstone Press, 2023), is the Executive Director of Mad Poets Society and former Editor of Mad Poets Review, has coordinated over 2000 special events in the tri-state area and was the subject of a tribute event and anthology by Philadelphia’s Moonstone Arts Center. She has twice been nominated for a PA Governor’s Award in the Arts and Pushcart Prize, and published in Rattle, Manhattan Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, Drexel Online Journal, Wild River Review, Philadelphia Stories, Philadelphia Poets and others. Additionally, D’Angelo has commentary in an anthology from WordFire Press, Shadows and Verse: Classic Dark Poems with Celebrity Commentary, edited by NY Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. She judged open auditions for the pilot program of Russell Simmons’ and HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, at New Market Cabaret, as well as conducted workshops and performed original songs and poetry on WXPN’s (88.5 FM) World Café Live, BCTV (Berks County Public Television), at the Painted Bride Art Center, at South St. Arts Festival at Rosemont College, Hedgerow Theatre, St. Joe’s, Montco Writers’ Conference, Kelly Writers House, Manayunk Art Center, Delco Community College, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and Delco Women’s Conference, Philly Fringe Festival, and other venues.

Mastering the Epistolary Poem: A Workshop with John Sibley Williams

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Mastering the Epistolary Poem
A Workshop with John Sibley Williams

Instructor: John Sibley Williams
Date: Monday, January 26
Time: 11:30am-2:00pm PT / 2:30-5:00pm ET
Please check local times.
Duration: 2.5 hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

Please note: This workshop will be recorded for those unable to attend in real time. The recording will only be distributed to those who sign up for workshop in advance.

>>> Register Here <<<

*

About the Workshop:

Epistolary poems, from the Latin “epistula” for “letter,” are, quite literally, poems that read as letters. As poems of direct address, they can be intimate and colloquial or formal and measured. The subject matter can range from philosophical investigation to a declaration of love to a list of errands, and epistles can take any form, from heroic couplets to free verse. In this intensive generative workshop, we will explore the many facets of writing “letter poems” through poetry analysis, active discussion, and a progressively challenging set of 6 writing activities that touch upon both our internal/personal worlds and how we interact with the larger world around us. We will study diverse poems from classic poets such as William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes and contemporary poets such as Victoria Chang, Rebecca Lindenberg, Mai Der Vang, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and Melissa Stein to see how they successfully explore relationships, internal reflection, political/cultural struggle, and landscape details by using the direct, evocative form of “letter poetry”.

*

About The Workshop Leader:

John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), skycrape (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translation from by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A thirty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, Poetry Editor at Kelson Books, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.

For more information about John and his offerings:

https://www.johnsibleywilliams.com/about-1

https://www.johnsibleywilliams.com/upcoming-classes

The Crosstown Bus by Laura Foley

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Crosstown Bus

We board with our senior passes,
then we’re five Brearley girls chatting,
remembering Mary who lived on 86th,
loved everything horses,
and that movie we watched
at her house when we were eight,
black and white, with eerie music,
two climbers on a rock ledge,
one pulls a long rope to find
his friend on the other end, dead…
Artist Sarah remembers
Ellen’s magenta bedspread,
as she points to a lady near us
with a corduroy coat just like it,
all of us imagining Ellen’s leaf pattern—
Ellen, who lived on First,
and moved away, who owned
a Vermont bookstore, and died
last year, and now I’m remembering
her childhood apartment
with the elevator button NS,
how we pretended it stood for Nancy Snow,
her little sister, but I knew
it was really Non Stop, and how
they had a basset hound, what was his name?,
with prostate problems, everything
hanging low to the ground, and now
we’re roaring, five senior citizens giggling
as we cross town on a crowded bus
that takes us through our lives,
until we get off, at different stops.

*

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, ONE ART, American Life in Poetry, and anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC by Alison Seevak

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC

There are no mothers here
but when your daughter
invites you, you go and sit
on the wooden bench, grateful
to be there, after months
of silence. You sit next to the girl
holding the ring that fell
from her septum the night before
while your daughter’s in back,
getting the stud in the cartilage
of her left ear replaced
with a thin gold hoop.
It’s a rook, she’d explained
before the dark eyed piercer
with the sleeve of tattoos
called her name.
She’d traced the map
on the wall, showed you
the geography of all the ways
an ear can be pierced.
Conch, orbital, daith, helix.
Snakebites,
the name for the silver
studs dotting each side
of her lower lip. The post jutting
through her left eyebrow
looks like it hurts,
but it doesn’t, she said
and you remember
other waiting rooms,
pediatrician, orthodontist,
math tutor, ice rink,
the ER when she was five,
fell out of bed, and broke
her collar bone. The nurse
pulled you into the long corridor
so they could talk to her alone,
so they could make sure
it was not you
who had done the damage.

*

Alison Seevak’s writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including The Sun, Literary Mama and Atlanta Review. She lives in Northern California.

ONE ART’s February 2026 Reading

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ONE ART’s February 2026 Reading

Sunday, February 1

Time: 2:00pm Eastern
Duration: 2-hours
Featured Readers: Kim Stafford, Kari Gunter-Seymour, J.D. Isip, Todd Davis, Grant Clauser

Tickets are FREE!

(donations appreciated)

>>> Register Here <<<

About The Featured Readers

Grant Clauser’s latest book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. He is the author of five previous books, including Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven and Reckless Constellations. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review and anthologies including Keystone Poetry and The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia. His books and poems have won numerous awards including the 2023 Verse Daily Poem Prize. He’s an editor for a national media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania. More at grantclauser.com

Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry—Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems; Coffin Honey; Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball,and co-edited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Hudson Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, Western Humanities Review, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and soon-to-be professor emeritus of Environmental Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University.

J.D. Isip is a Pushcart and Bet of the Net nominated writer and professor of English, originally from Southern California, and currently living and teaching in South Texas. His full-length collections of poetry and creative nonfiction include Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015), Kissing the Wound, and Reluctant Prophets (both from Moon Tide Press, 2023 and 2025). He is currently editing The American Pop Culture Almanac, forthcoming for America’s 250th (Summer 2026) from Moon Tide Press.

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

Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He taught writing at Lewis & Clark College for forty years before retiring and becoming Professor Emeritus in 2020. He is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. He has written about his poet father in Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, and his book Having Everything Right: Essays of Place won a special citation for excellence from the Western States Book Award. His most recent poetry collections are As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen, 2024) and A Proclamation for Peace Translated for the World (Little Infinities, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term. In a call to writers everywhere, he has said, “In our time is a great thing not yet done. It is the marriage of Woody Guthrie’s gusto and the Internet. It is the composing and wide sharing of songs, poems, blessings, manifestos, and stories by those with voice for those with need.”

Lessons in Walking by Kip Knott

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Lessons in Walking

The day my son was born, I worried whether or not I would be able to teach him how to walk. I knew I would have to hold his hands and lift him off the ground just enough—but not all the way—so that he could still feel the earth beneath his feet. I knew, too, that I would have to let him fall from time to time so he would come to know the joy of getting up on his own. I knew that there would be pain and frustration and anger at me for not always protecting or helping him. And over the decades, he has fallen, gotten up, fallen again, gotten mad, and gotten up again, all on his own. But today, after he picked me up from another in a series of nasty falls of my own, I’ve begun to worry whether or not I can teach my son the proper way to die.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.

Two Poems by VA Smith

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Tissue

Do I recall what I did with your scar
your text pleads, decades gone, scars ongoing.
I had my own: my belly sliced open

like melon, the heavy suck from my gut,
boy child pulled to air,
still you want to recall my tracing your scar.

Then they box cut my scarred tissue again,
pulled that burst wormy organ from sickened soil.
I had my own: my belly sliced open.

You opened me too, my Green Beret, piercing
blue, thirst for you, oceans inside me swelling.
Do I recall what I did with your scar?

Iraq was on your back. I traced it, you said.
I tongued its ridges, tasted blood.
But what did you do with my belly sliced open?

We spilled out of beds, hiked from our homes,
found ground to cover, forests to sprawl.
Yet you ask what scars I might recall as
I think back to my body, open.

*

Seen

Six years old, I stand between
them, two brothers swapping
stories over beers, sitting snug,

traffic headlights peering through
our bay window into Saturday
night living room football.

Shampooed, pajamaed, I come
to the men when called
from my bedroom, good girl

giving hugs and kisses
to my uncle, my thirtyish
dad gesturing behind me.

He fast pulls my bottoms
to the floor, my butt, bud pink
pudenda smooth, bath bright.

My face flashes red, folds
in pain, their laughter
landing all over me.

The last of thirteen kids
during depression and war,
my small father learned

to prank, to clown, to get seen.
He stayed that way.
Sometimes when cooking

dinner for friends, drinking,
hungry for their howling,
I’ve flashed my breasts

to surprise them, danced alone
to Nora Jones, my arms
snaking around my head,

legs laced in spidery black,
shimmy to the kitchen
to scrub every dirty dish in sight

*

VA Smith’s first two poetry collections are Biking Through the Stone Age and American Daughters (Kelsay, 2022 and 2023), followed in 2025 by Adaptations (Green Writers Press) and coming in 2026, the chapbook Urbanity (Seven Kitchens Press.) Her individual poems have been published in Southern Review, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, Calyx, SWWIM and dozens of other journals and anthologies. She currently serves as River Heron Review’s Poetry Editor. Find her cooking, baking, urban walking and country hiking, loving on friends and family and resisting authoritarian oligarchy.

Dust Rag Blues by Nicole Caruso Garcia

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Dust Rag Blues
      For Renee Nicole Macklin Good (d. January 7, 2026)

Steadying the globe, I thumb Caracas.
We snatched Maduro and we seized Caracas?
Our Thug-in-Chief’s illegal orders mock us.

My index finger rests on Minnesota:
ICE shot a mom (unarmed) in Minnesota.
She dared stand up to goons who have a quota.

These men stretch latitude—our country reeling.
I clean the hemispheres, set gently reeling,
And smooth the strip of red: equator peeling.

*

Nicole Caruso Garcia (she/her) is the author of OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press), which received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Crab Orchard Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, ONE ART, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. Her poetry has received the Willow Review Award, won a 2021 Best New Poets honor, and has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an associate poetry editor at Able Muse and served as an executive board member at the annual conference, Poetry by the Sea. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

Theater of the Real by John Amen

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Theater of the Real

         for BC & JF

To shrug the draft, he leapt a university ladder,
shaking the rungs of math, piling numbers on his back.
At a karaoke bar under an overpass,
she belted the best version of “In the Pines” he’d ever heard.
He tipped his hat, tugged a red feather from the cityscape,
slamming a double vodkashine at her feet.
He scribbled poems, metronomic rhyme schemes,
serenading her at Dustbowl rest stops, the jukeshacks
along Highway 61. Fine, she said, buy me a BBQ dinner.
He ordered five ambrosia plates, dropped to a knee over espresso.
Roses burst from the walls, critics leapt from their stools,
applauding as she stammered, ok yes. She whittled
her tunes after-hours in a relative’s giftshop. He dissected
The Myerson Conjecture on a circular whiteboard.
They juggled cars & newspaper subscriptions,
insurance policies & wardrobes, gigs & tenure.
Picnics in the Louisville grass.
A photo shoot at the Taj Mahal.
Scrabble & parcheesi under the Eiffel Tower.
Days passed like W2s. Eggs for dinner? he asked.
How about Barbados in January? she replied.
In a balloon over Hollywood, she coughed her best Judy Garland,
as he yelled, bravo! bravo! She slept
eighteen hours straight. Christmas morning,
she forgot her best friend’s name. Later she left
the stove on, left her purse in a birdbath.
He found her wedding ring in the freezer.
She had no idea how it got there.
They drove for hours to a condo on the Pacific.
The sunset draped over a flowery sofa,
painting the white walls orange. He woke at 2am,
doors & windows gaping, he staggered
to the gray shore to find her
rummaging in mounds of kelp, looking
for a credit card. She couldn’t recall his touch,
if he was the one who unzipped her dress in the hotel dark,
cheering as she sang for the moon. He heard
a voice whispering in the dunes. The air brimmed
with fractals & pop choruses, that convulsion of stars.
He turned back to her, but her impression in the sand
had already been flattened by the tide. He figured it was her
out there laughing in the waves, but he couldn’t be sure.

*

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.

Three Poems by Katy Luxem

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

When an Alpaca Gives Birth It’s Called an Unpacking

My children, when checking in to a hotel,
spread their stuff from corner to corner.
Their bedrooms at home are little dens
of shed items, hoodies, baby teeth in molar-shaped
containers, flattened volleyballs, autographs
on rumpled school forms. Of course, when they were
born I left pieces of myself all sorts of places, locked
like wings in amber, measured in forehead wrinkles,
angled in jaw lines, height marked on walls like cave paintings.
I understand laying out what makes us. To be so full
of the world, that it gives us place, says I know, I know
I am here, I am undeniably in it.

*

In Years Ahead

I find an email draft of baby names
we didn’t use. Some my husband didn’t like
and it’s funny to think of our arguments then,
before kids, how young and vast
the world stretched. How much time we let drift
without christening it ours. Certain names
didn’t seem to fit once something so pink and alert
was placed slick in my arms. Some we assigned
to loss, which always makes me think of January.
Looking at the list, we chose well, though. Because
I close my eyes and it is the real ones I behold.
The girl on stage, their old crib, the boy who loves
hashbrowns, the bunny she sleeps with, still.
Anyway, it’s just a draft, stored only in a cloud
somewhere it’ll never rain or break. In my imagination,
they are wearing new shoes, blowing out
birthday candles, jumping in gravel-deep puddles.
In real life they exist nowhere but the outline
of what we imagined.

*

To Have / Be a Teenager

is to worry about the minutiae
of things and yet, throw caution
away accidentally. My daughter
sometimes stares bleakly
at a screen or a steamy mirror.
Sometimes questions everything,
worrying out every option
but the most obvious. And yet
I see her eat the cheese danish
I bring home. I watch her feed
the dog and it is like seeing a neighbor
I don’t know yet through a bright
window. Just yesterday morning,
she watered plants in a square
of light, and I heard the sound
of singing. It was so beautiful
even though it was a song
I could not ever hope to name.

*

Katy Luxem lives in Salt Lake City. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and has a master’s degree from the University of Utah. Her work is anthologized in Love Is For All Of Us (Hachette, 2025) and has appeared in Rattle, McSweeney’s, SWWIM Every Day, Sugar House Review, Poetry Online, and others. She is the author of Until It Is True (Kelsay Books, 2023).

Two Poems by Tim Raphael

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Ode to a Lawnmower

Flat green like a fern
or battle tank out of place in the grass,
peal-drum loud on suburban afternoons—
the lawnmower my father bought
at a yard sale that Virginia spring.

I didn’t mind mowing our shade-patched yard,
free to cut patterns around sweetgum trees,
around the flowering dogwood my father loved—
circles one week, clean lines,
straight as a music staff the next—
scanning the street with hope and dread
Lisa Lange might walk by.

I was drawn to the menace
of the touchy machine,
its wind-up starter and manual choke,
grime at the seam of block & deck,
a blistering exhaust pipe
I touched too often.

Unable to adjust the wheel height,
I ran the mower high,
exposed my shins to missiles
of stone and wood,
dog shit hidden in a curbside minefield—
still, far better

than practicing string bass,
stuck inside our green carpet playroom,
thirty minutes of scales
clock-watching my way through arpeggios,
the perpetual tock of the metronome.

I was twelve that summer,
each day a rehearsal,
and the lawnmower was something
that made things happen—
let me buy baseball cards
and bottle rockets with abandon,

led me down sidewalks
to the Moffitts and Silversteins,
sometimes the Gritzners,
and the house that never seemed to sell,
where the realtor paid fifteen dollars
to cut the weeds every other Saturday.

*

Off to the Star Party

A whip of stars—
we’ll later learn it’s the tail of Scorpius—
and perhaps this time I’ll remember.

We’re made of the same stuff, after all.

Fallen apples cobble the path
through the orchard,
night vision more memory than sense.

An illusion of stillness.
Even without wind,
everything is on the move—

the remains of a dry year’s snow,
shadow-clung north of the pines,
odds and ends of the sea
this used to be.

Trace the mesa’s perfect plane
as if a blade cut earth from sky,

and when I say the air
is the temperature of silk,
I mean I can no longer tell
skin from night,

am unbound from day’s unease,
steps sure and light.

When we finally arrive at the ballfield—
a sculpture garden of telescopes
between first and third base—

you whisper, Look, a shooting star,

and the whole universe snaps to attention,
including the amateur astronomer
in the red headlamp—

No such thing, he says.
It’s called a meteor.

*

Tim Raphael lives in Northern New Mexico between the Rio Grande Gorge and Sangre de Cristo Mountains with his wife, Kate. They try to lure their three grown children home for hikes and farm chores as often as possible. Tim works full-time as a media consultant to environmental nonprofits and writes poetry early in the morning after walks on the mesas surrounding his community. His chapbook, More Earth Than Flame, was a finalist in the 2025 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest, and his poem, Prayer of a Nonbeliever, was a Pushcart Prize nominee and won Terrain.org’s 2024 poetry contest, judged by Ross Gay. He’s grateful to have had poems published in range of literary journals. Tim is a graduate of Carleton College.

Memo by Hayden Saunier

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Memo

First dusting
of snow.

Enough
to show

how obvious
with blankness

are the paths
we walk

how little
we veer

from them
even by

a step.

*

Hayden Saunier is the author of six poetry collections, including her most recent book Wheel. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and Gell Poetry prize, and has been published in ONE ART, The Sun, 32 Poems, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. Hayden founded and directs the interactive poetry performance group No River Twice. More at haydensaunier.com.

Waiting Room by Clara McLean

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Waiting Room

Let me be laminate, like the prototype pinned
to the wall at the doctor’s office, body glossed
in primary colors. Let captions speak clearly
for me, as for that flat man, organs outlined
in white balloons around him.
Make me a model for others to look to—
map of evident vessels uncovered to science
in lustrous, alive-looking branches.
Let me not be a problem,
a puzzle, pileup on the morning commute,
no discernible source and no exit.
All waiting here stare
at the horizon’s thin slit, sealed
in the distance, as though we might will it
to speak. Any breath, any answer
seems better than none, any wreck
we might tunnel toward,
the stunned aftermath we might finally
inch our way past,
peruse for our own lives within.
The specialist’s named
Dr. Paine, no joke, which reminds me of Crusher
on Star Trek. She had some kind of scanner
she’d wave over her patients’
abdomens. Just that, and their innards
would sing out their secrets.
Nothing unknown
in the light-zooming future.
No body beasted, animal
in a snap trap, fractured and thrashing
its dumbfounded hurt in a crawlspace,
pinned with no coat of miraculous
plastic, no words to speak with,
no admirable shine.

*

Clara McLean lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Terrain.org, Foglifter, Valparaiso Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Cider Press Review, West Trestle Review, and The Comstock Review, among other publications, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can find her at claradmclean.com

City Parrots by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

City Parrots

The flock a shawl flung into the air
wings catch the sun
all flash green at once, signaling
I am at last
in the right place
at the right time

*

Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired psychologist, former German Lit major, and restaurant reviewer, no longer lives for Art but still thinks about it a lot. Work has appeared recently in Chiron Review, Mobius, B O D Y, Offcourse, and The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. Collections include Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and Kafka’s Cat (Kattywompus Press), The Book of Knots and Their Untying (Kelsay Books), and, The Beautiful Leaves and Eve the Inventor (Bamboo Dart Press). She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a long-running poetry series in Claremont, California.

The Winning Side by Tamara Madison

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

The Winning Side

Here in the shadow of the world’s joy
let us find calm
Let us cool our blistered skin
in joy’s sweet shade
Among time’s soiled leaves
let me find your hand
For sorrow is a common thing
and joy its common underside
In this moment at least
let us turn the coin of our time
to where the shadow
of the world’s joy moves aside
and lifts us giddy
into bright and laughing air

*

Tamara Madison is the author of three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic”, “Moraine” (both from Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar” (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and two chapbooks, “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig, Worcester Review, ONE ART, and many other publications. More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Two Poems by Morrow Dowdle

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

My Friend Tells Me He’s a Felon

The term comes down from Old French,
its Latin root meaning bile. It makes mine rise
on the spring morning he recounts an old story—
three cops surrounded him at a community pool,
claimed he stole a watch at the local Target.
Cuffed in front of everyone, he was hauled off
in cold, wet trunks. They withheld evidence,
put him in a cell. He shivered until his wife arrived
with that month’s rent—the bail. He says he’s innocent
but took the plea because he didn’t know better.
Now, he needs work but can’t get hired—and here
I thought that full-time father was his calling, not fallout
from a system’s tricks. He’s still the man
I meet for playdates at this park, who brings
frosted flower cookies for the kids and trusts
in me, I who have been untrustworthy in my time,
have broken the law more than once, by luck
or demographic never caught. I hold his secret
like a bright green moth. Next week, we’ll go
camping, we say, sprawling on the mossy bank.
We watch our boys pitch rocks in the creek.

*

Confession

The guy outside the club wearing a dirty priest getup
and patent go-go boots says he likes my clutch,
its red pop against my black dress. Calls it fetch.

We take drags from my cigarette and I tell him
it was once a makeup bag, stolen from my sister
when she went to rehab. He raises an eyebrow,

I explain that we were teens, it was her third try
at sobriety. So I nicked it, plus a flimsy blouse
and necklace, beads the pink of a baby’s lips,

pendant a ceramic hibiscus. And birth control pills—
I mean, she left them. I just downed them for my own
protection. I wanted to make something of myself,

and it sure wasn’t a parent. It wasn’t my fault
she returned pregnant. Her CDs stayed zipped
safe in their case. I never liked Dave Matthews, Oasis,

all those jam bands ripping off the Grateful Dead.
I wasn’t grateful living in that house in her absence.
Without her comparison, I was the bad daughter,

getting all our father’s bad attention.
If I could, I’d give it all back. Pilgrimage
to where she still lives with our mother,

having never quite gotten it together. I’d lay
my plunder at her feet, give her a pedicure,
beg her forgiveness for being callous,

for being a bitch to her when we were little kids.
But we haven’t spoken in twenty years.
It isn’t because of what I took—no.

I can’t tell this priest it’s what our father
stole from us when we didn’t know it.
What we let him get away with once we did.

*

Morrow Dowdle is the author of the chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and the forthcoming chapbook Missing Woman. Their poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Rattle, New York Quarterly, Southeast Review, Stonecoast Review, The Baltimore Review, and ONE ART, among other literary journals. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the 2024 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. They run a performance series which features BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices and are pursuing their creative writing MFA at Spalding University. They live in Durham, NC. Find out more on Instagram @morrowdowdle.

Reckoning by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Reckoning

F. says he’d like to give himself permission
to be a dick, just for once, just for play,
and he demonstrates how he’d strut,
chest out like a gorilla, like certain politicians,
and we laugh and cheer him on because in real life
he’s a man who sits quietly with the broken-hearted,
and there are very few people
who can shut up and take in another person’s soul
trying to sing, but he can and somehow
we’re used to the idea of Man
riding roughshod over everything,
like that’s what masculine is supposed to look like,
and I wonder about the dick
inside of me, the one who likes
to swagger and brag,
and plow everyone out of the way–
but then I think of real dicks,
their softness and shyness and sometimes awkward
enthusiasm, the way they make their feelings known
to a listening hand or mouth,
and I think of the good men
I’ve known and what we were all told
about how men needed to behave to even be
considered men and I get it, we can all
be dicks sometimes, the ones of us who slop around
in our cynicism like a pair of old slippers,
the ones who grasp at every glittering thing,
or cling to ancient hatreds
like useless coins from a conquered country.
And maybe the dick is just something
we just have to reckon with
since it’s at the base of western civilization–
even god in the old testament acted like one,
smiting people and demanding tribute like any bully.
So yes, I think we’re just like that god we invented,
who was so jealous and capricious and vengeful.
Maybe He’s just a reflection of us
at our most power-hungry and scared,
and we need to own that part of ourselves,
offer it cool water and a place to chill,
but we sure as hell don’t have to get down
on our knees and worship it.

*

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.

Dear Son by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Dear Son

I see you crouched behind a bush,
hands cupped around some countryside
bug, whose name and composition
you´ll pull out of the air as if the sky
was a library, earth´s most bizarre
curiosities housed on its shelves.
I used to fret over stings and bites.
Poison. By now, I´ve learned to trust
the knowledge hived in your mind.
I see you, sitting alone on a bench,
your bicycle flung on its side like
an argument you refused to lose.
The park is abuzz. Other eight-year-olds
wham soccer balls, somersault
off bars, play tag or play-wrestle,
but you stare at the grass, building
Lego towns inside dew drops.
Or maybe you´re mapping out
uncharted paths in maple leaf veins.
I see you on deep-read days, the way
your name doesn´t catch the sound
waves travelling to your eardrum.
I, too, know what it´s like to journey
to the center of the story, the red-hot
plot scorching any urge to return.
Sometimes, nothing temporal matters,
does it? Not your unmade bed or half-
reassembled gadget parts scattered
across the floor, not even your meal,
whose flavors have vacated the plate
like a reunion gone awry. At school,
you discover a galaxy in every lesson,
chase comets through your teacher´s
explanations. I foresee the consequences
of your cosmic-quick wit, the jokes
and jabs you´ll have to dodge,
the laughter. Corners you´ll color
in camouflage, quiet as a phasmid.
The asteroidal scars you´ll bring home.
Dear son, rise above the bullies!
Grand Marshal our town´s first bug
parade, naysayers be damned. Build
a road network rooted in leaf patterns,
a rocket ship powered by dew drops.
When time writes your story, know
that every word of it will shine.

*

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, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net, she won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja,” and she was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Burningword Journal, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and others. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com

Bus Stop in Front of the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer by Kim Addonizio

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Bus Stop in Front of the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer

It’s the usual ruin—
shelter of scratched plastic,

torn schedule behind smashed glass.
The cement’s stained where someone

dragged themselves after a drive-by.
In the empty lot beyond, one

shoe’s been set upright in the weeds,
encircled with shards

of busted bottles that catch
the late light. You wait

while cars and lives pass,
wanting to believe there is a bus,

that you can hear it coming
from a long way off.

*

Kim Addonizio has published over a dozen books of poetry and prose. Her most recent poetry collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton). Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life was published by Penguin. Her poetry has been widely translated and anthologized. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist. She teaches Zoom poetry workshops in Oakland, CA. https://www.kimaddonizio.com

Ode to the Indigo Bunting by Julene Waffle

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Ode to the Indigo Bunting

You are not blue, not really—
but a trick of feathered lattice,
microscopic barbs bending light
into indigo illusion.
A prism perched on my wire fence,
you split the ordinary
into astonishment.

Summer is your longitude,
your body the compass
that inhales starlight,
exhales migration.
You read the Milky Way
like scripture,
winging south on constellations.

What is indigo, if not
the syllables between violet and night,
a threshold color,
ink before it dries,
a pigment of prayer?
You wear it as vestige,
a psalm sewn into a bruise,
your song a bright cipher
against the grain of dawn.

Fragment of sky, flame of my hedgerows,
what sermon do you sing—
that beauty is only refraction?
That even bones can carry
the language of galaxies?
That wonder arrives
winged and weightless,
dressed in an arc of color
that is not color at all?

*

Julene Waffle, graduate of Hartwick College and Binghamton University, is a teacher, family-woman, boy-mom, pet-mom, nature-lover, and life-liver. She enjoys pretending like she has it all together. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal Blog, The English Journal, Mslexia, The Ekphrastic Review, among other journals and anthologies, as well as her chapbook So I Will Remember (2020). Learn more at www.wafflepoetry.com, X: @JuleneWaffle, and Instagram: julenewaffle

When People Say Classical Music Helps Them Relax by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

When People Say Classical Music Helps Them Relax

I think of the hard metal
folding chairs on uneven grass,
pages blow closed and open
during Pachelbel, the bride
finally reaches the altar,
violinist cues the final repeat.

Beethoven Symphony #8 in Jerusalem,
heartbroken by the trombonist who used to wink
at me above the head of the bassoonist
but won’t look at me now.

Bach Cello Suite in G Major, on stage,
fingers cold, palms sweaty, my vivace pulse
in rhythmic dissonance with the Prelude’s
languid tempo. All those people I invited—
why? why? why?—watching.

Mahler 1st, Ozawa conducting, Tanglewood
pines, smell of charred meat from the commissary
kitchen, my stand partner’s condescension,
his sneer and bow tip slap on the score
after my late page turn.

Bartok duos busked in Boston subway
stations, dragging stool, stand, instrument
down escalators, screech of wheels competing
with Bela’s surprising harmonies, our loot
loose change and a couple bills, barely enough
to share a pizza.

Strauss waltzes for a formal Spring gala,
free drinks for the musicians, laughing
too hard to pluck the pizzicato
for Blue Danube, eyes rolling in step
with the schmaltzy music, sweat and merlot
staining my gown.

The hair on my neck, the gooseflesh
on my arms, the heat in my cheeks and lump
in my throat. To stop and start, speed up and slow
down, get loud and soft, change bows and breathe
together. It’s incredible when you think about it—
to have been the girl who did that.

*

Lynn Glicklich Cohen is a poet from Milwaukee, WI. A once-upon-a-time social worker, a perennial cellist and semi-retired Rolfer, her poems have been published in Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, Cantos, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Front Range Review, Grand Journal, Oberon, ONE ART, Peregrine, The Midwest Quarterly, The Phoenix, The Red Wheelbarrow, St. Katherine’s Review, Thin Air Magazine, Trampoline, Whistling Shade, and others. www.lynnglicklichcohenpoet.com

Beginning, Again by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Beginning, Again

Minty spittle slithers down
the handle of my toothbrush.
It’s a cold sunny morning
with new batteries; my teeth
are excited for a fresh start.
I didn’t have high expectations
for last year, a pessimistic way
to say I surpassed my goals.
(well, some of them, anyway)
This year, I feel more confident—
until a splash of cold hits my face.

             breaking news
             holding hope
             for the midterms

*

Shawn Aveningo Sanders shares the creative life with her husband in Beaverton, where they run a small press, The Poetry Box. Over 200 of Shawn’s poems have appeared worldwide, most recently in ONE ART, contemporary haibun online, McQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, Cloudbank, and Love Is for All of Us. Shawn is a multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Touchstone Award nominee and has won prizes from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her newest book Pockets (MoonPath Press) was a finalist in Concrete Wolf’s Chapbook Contest. When she’s not writing, you might find her shopping for a new pair of red shoes or toy dinosaurs for her granddaughter. (RedShoePoet.com)

Three Poems by Gary J. Whitehead

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Barometer

How else to measure
the troughs and fronts
of my parents’ deaths
than by the one thing I wanted
when we settled their estate.
I adjust its needle
every time I pass it
in the upstairs hall.

*

Observance

On the drive to bury my father,
the hearse took a wrong turn.
Our hazards pulsed the wet road
at a light interminably red.
At the chapel, I stood in the sun,
worried about a sunburn.
Looking past the glass-eyed chaplain,
I saw, at the base of a giant oak,
a flush of black-staining polypore.
And, beyond that, a man
step off a backhoe and light a smoke.

*

Wings to Fly

Just off a forest path,
I found a wing, no bird attached.
A blackbird’s or a baby crow’s.
I flexed the joint
and spread the feathers,
vanes like rustic pan-pipes
graduated with lengthening reeds.
Whether by a predator or cancer,
by the sea’s mists
or the sun’s scorching rays,
the flight of the innocent’s foiled.
We’re drawn to the extremes
and then we’re maimed,
the way my grandfather was
when he lost a leg.
I saw his gaze aim inward
even as he stared at the world,
and I felt ashamed to be so whole.
Kahlo, when she lost hers, wrote,
“Feet, why do I want them
if I have wings to fly?”
So the maimed appendage their loss.
And all of us want to fly.
Imagining the rest of the bird
flapping in a bloody circle,
I laid the wing on a tuft of moss,
and, for an hour or so,
walked the middle way,
the straight and narrow.

*

Gary J. Whitehead has published four books of poetry, most recently Strange What Rises (Terrapin Books, 2019) and A Glossary of Chickens (Princeton University Press, 2013). His poems have appeared widely, most notably in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Whitehead has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review. He lives in northern New Jersey.

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

  1. Kai Coggin
  2. Alison Luterman
  3. Donna Hilbert
  4. Betsy Mars
  5. John Amen
  6. Susan Vespoli
  7. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  8. Tina Em
  9. Kim Addonizio
  10. Molly Fisk
  11. Joseph Fasano
  12. Terri Kirby Erickson
  13. Robbi Nester
  14. James Crews
  15. Abby E. Murray
  16. Allison Blevins
  17. Erin Murphy
  18. john compton
  19. Dana Henry Martin
  20. Alison Hurwitz
  21. Moudi Sbeity
  22. Dick Westheimer
  23. James Feichthaler
  24. Karen Paul Holmes
  25. Naomi Shihab Nye

Note: For poets who published multiple times in ONE ART, in 2025, we are linking to the most-read curated work.

Shenandoah by Alex Turissini

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Shenandoah

You must have seen
how, when
the sun,
that most valuable gold token,
had finally risen,
and the shadows were hidden—
tucked under their objects like a boxer’s chin—
the valley’s luxuriant ribbon,
from mountain
to distant mountain,
shed its fog like a reptile’s skin,
and was, for a minute, a purse held open,
a pair of cupped palms,
a bowl for alms.

*

Alex Turissini is a graduate of the MFA program at LSU. His poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Atlanta Review, Bayou Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere, and he has been a contributor at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He lives and teaches in central Kentucky.

January by Sheila Wellehan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

January

A glittering chandelier dangling
over an empty dawn ballroom.
A cane yanking us from past to now.

Sturdy iron handles encouraging us
to grasp and pull hard.
A dam dismantled so the river runs free.

Abandoned plans discovered in the back
of the pantry. Hands opening to reveal
ruby-tipped matches to light our way.

A wooden mantle to hang our hopes on.
An exquisite fan for us to open, painted
with peacocks, peonies, and daydreams.

A van waiting for us to jump in for a joy ride.
A bowl that’s cracked because it’s so crammed
with brand-newness.

The sanctuary of second to six-hundredth
chances. Shiny coins to jangle in our pockets
the rest of the year.

*

Sheila Wellehan’s poetry is featured in On the Seawall, Maine Public Radio’s Poems From Here, Psaltery & Lyre, Rust & Moth, Thimble Literary Magazine, Whale Road Review, and many other publications. She served as an assistant poetry editor for The Night Heron Barks and an associate editor for Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. Sheila lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. You can read her work at sheilawellehan.com.

Now by Julia Caroline Knowlton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Now

Quick as a key turn or July clouds
releasing downpours, I suddenly
loved you more as you admired

aloud the word maintenant – “now” –
mentioning its literal meaning:
holding a hand. Fifty years of French

and I had never picked that lock.
Now the present folds me
in its have and hold vow,

future pressed to past, palm
to warm palm. Every word my own
swollen cloud, shaped like a clock.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has won two separate Georgia Author of the Year awards for her poetry. Her latest volume of poetry is a children’s book. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.

My Life: Abridged by Polly Conway

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

My Life: Abridged

The vineyard’s vines never
stop, strings pulled taut
across California’s whole.
When thighs rub
together, there’s no sound,
but the pain
amplifies with each step.
Don’t be scared when the tide
exposes hundreds of sandcrabs
burrowing down, way down. Who
wants to be caught running?
I watch the Rose Parade twice
on New Year’s Day; think of
touching so many flowers all
at once. Pick dandelions
in the outfield. Blood versus
clear liquids. Still afraid
of bees, my foundation
drips. Two Pringles
make a duck bill: salt
dust stings my lips. I can’t
stop mocking
myself.

*

Polly Conway is a writer and editor based in Alameda, CA. Her poems have appeared in 400 Words, Tellus, and Monday Night, and she is the Poetry Editor at Nulla, a multimedia journal based in San Francisco. She has taught writing through Take My Word For It and Mentor Artists Playwrights Project. She founded the East Bay Dipping Society, an open water dipping collective, and holds an MFA from California College of the Arts. She is currently working on a poetry collection about her time in the ocean and will be a resident writer at Ou Gallery on Vancouver Island in 2026.

Green Questions by Rachel Hadas

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Green Questions

Before I knew it, I had reached the navel
of the labyrinth and turned to leave,
retracing my steps. What had seemed small
simply by my staying in one place
got bigger. Meandering this way and that,
the path traced what kept feeling like a choice.
Noiselessly one maple leaf twirled down
onto my shoulder – harbinger of more
but verdant still, a juicy bright deep green.

Fall’s paradoxical economy:
do time and distance actually shrink,
or does it only seem to work that way?
Everything is minute and fugitive.
The questions being asked in this green light
go unanswered. Ethan clears the last
remnant of the massive ghostly tree
he and Wes the forester took down
last night before it got too dark to see:
a hundred-year-old hemlock, give or take,
something over sixty feet tall.

Those distant summers when I was a child,
a few last weathered rungs were visible
nailed to its trunk. These like a ladder led
to some high perch where children must have played,
sheltered in their treehouse, with a view
of Pumpkin Hill, the valley, and the road.
What did they hear high in their hemlock nest?
What were the green questions of their own
season? The tree was rotten, hollow, dead,
says Ethan. It was time we cut it down.

*

Rachel Hadas is a poet, essayist, translator, and editor. The most recent of her many books is PASTORALS (Measure Press, 2025). A prosimetrum, MY CLOAK IS POETRY, is due out from Able Muse Press in 2026. An emerita professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, Hadas divides her time between New York City and Vermont. rachelhadas.net

Between Storms by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Between Storms

Last night it rained Biblical torrents,
and the trees dropped all their leaves at once.

Today, red and orange leaves, like little hands,
lie all over the sidewalks in mounds. Their cellulose skin

so much like ours but without meat or bones.
Meanwhile the neighbors are out in force,

raking and binning the storm’s detritus.
It’s what we humans do, after a tempest;

we clean up what’s left, while dogs prance
through swept piles, and the general

mayhem we call living spangles the air.
This almost-past year was a long skid, no brakes,

on the kind of ICE that hardens around the heart
of a nation. There are neighbors who aren’t here

but should be, and so much has been destroyed
that can never be put right again, at least not

in this brief lifetime. Where’s the bottom and how
will we know when we’ve reached it

is the question not even the black-clad astrologer
can answer, but I do know my friends are down

at Home Despot as I speak, clanging pots and pans
and fighting the kidnappers who come for the men

who only want work, and others
blocked the intersections around ICE offices

in San Francisco just last week and got arrested.
I’m braced–we all are–for whatever comes next,

for the wheels to come completely off the bus.
Meanwhile we’re between storms and the air is soft,

the neighbors have an improbable inflated Santa still
presiding over their yard, plastic reindeer flapping in the wind,

and fake snow, with a big ¡Feliz Navidad!
¡Próspero Año Nuevo! in green and red glitter on their window.

         Oakland, California, December 2025

*

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.

Bardot and Me by James Penha

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Bardot and Me

I must have been only twelve—no more
when she came to our local movie house:
Bardot. Love Is My Profession. Somehow
they sold us tickets, Ricky and me. Over
popcorn and Jujubes we giggled to see
the naked actress. She was beautiful. We
loved her. The Catholic Church did not.
It had condemned the film making it a sin
to watch it. So I went to Confession to ask
God’s forgiveness. I did not tell the priest
that Ricky and I jerked each other off
in the theatre toilet. That had nothing to do
with Brigitte. We did it all the time. Oh,
she would have loved us. We were animals.

*

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. His story collection Queer As Folk Tales was published by Deep Desires Press in October 2025. His chapbook of poems American Daguerreotypes is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Bluesky: @jamespenha.bsky.social

Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Yarn and Hook

I wind the soft yarn
over a small metal hook,
pull through two loops,
wind again and pull through.

Repeat. Double Stitch. Repeat.
Again and again. Until a half inch
rises from the last edge finished.

Mental health experts extol
this motion of yarn and hook,
hands busier than the brain.

Praise it as mindful as meditation.

On winter nights. Crochet calls.
Lures me to the couch.

Where I sit, weaving warm colors
back into my life, strand by strand,
taming listless thoughts with sturdy stitches,
joining loops into patterns I control.

*

In Memoriam
Katherine Janus Kahn, Children’s Book Illustrator and Fine Artist

Ten years ago, after coming home
from a funeral for a mutual friend,
you told me you took your poodle
straight to the park.

No stopping to change clothes
or even heels, you said you grabbed
the leash and left for a field where
your curly pup could scamper and bark.

You told me you needed to see life
playing, prancing in the grass after
a sad morning of saying goodbye.

Now, at your graveside, I recall
the day I came to your studio,
your right arm waving with a flourish,
like Vanna White in Wheel of Fortune,
your passion for art vibrant
as the paintings on the wall.

And the day you arrived
with two feather boas.
One for you, one for me.

How we posed for pictures. Your smile
as radiant as your red hair.

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications including ONE ART, Amethyst Review, Offcourse, and Poem Alone. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com

An Afternoon of Hollow Things by Linda Mills Woolsey

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

An Afternoon of Hollow Things

Each thing cradles its own emptiness—
the feeder’s plastic cylinder drained
of seed, the tip of a branch shivering
loss as a chickadee takes flight, my heart,
circling your absence. The sky’s an erasure,
dubiously blank, the cup I clasp holds
only a brown film and air. For breath
to fill the lungs, they must be emptied.

Hours stall, empty as acorn cups, thin
as the ordinary need just to be loved.
The hollow of my heartbeat is narrow,
too—or simply shallow, condensation
on a cocktail glass, dust on the last book
we might have read together. My heart’s
not shattered, just empty as the space
between pressed lips, waiting to inhale.

*

Linda Mills Woolsey is a Western Pennsylvania native who has spent most of her life in Appalachia, north and south. She reviews poetry for Plume and Presence and reads submissions for River Heron Review. Her poems have appeared in Northern Appalachia Review, Wild Roof, The Christian Century, The Windhover, ONE ART and other journals. She lives with her husband and two companionable cats in a rural village in Allegany County, NY.

Three Poems by Ginel Ople

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Esplanade

All these beautiful people
haven’t got here yet.

They do not see the water
that is slowly passing by

nor hear the great music
of their footsteps on the boardwalk.

Their thoughts are in a conference room,
listening to a colleague

drink tea out of a tumbler,
or in the park

where they sat on a bench
haunted by a late-night call.

Even now, as they hold each other’s
hands underneath the lights,

they are contemplating postgrads
and emergency funds,

provisions for a long journey
before the unstoppable river

brings them to a sunny porch
where they would think about today

and be here at last.

* 

Elephant Lighter

When my daughter was tall enough
to reach the shelf, she handed it to me
to ask me what it was.

For what must have been years,
I thought of you. That evening
we found each other in the fire escape
hiding from our twenties.

You worked in the office next to mine
selling shoe polish over the phone
when what you really wanted to do

was sing. When I asked you for a light,
you told me I could keep it. You said
you were trying to quit. Of course,
I didn’t tell my daughter any of this.

You lived in a time where I was young
which in her head isn’t a real place.
But she grinned just the same,

as I had a lifetime ago,
when I pulled on the trunk
and a little flame came out
where you’d last think possible.

* 

Subway Construction

This morning, I saw the workers
laying down the scaffolding,
and as if lights have switched on
in the long hallway of my life,
I began to see doors
that I didn’t know were there.
I thought of Tinder matches
that were too far away.
All those jobs I rejected
because I could not afford to move.
Brunches with friends
I haven’t seen since college,
the gin glistening on the piano
of a jazz club I’ve never been to.
The museums and urban gardens.
In seven years, I will make my way
to you. Here’s to believing
that nothing else will change.

*

Ginel Ople is a writer from Cavite, Philippines. His work has also appeared in Third Wednesday and Rattle.

Two Poems by Bunkong Tuon

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Driving Home after Christmas with the In-laws

My daughter whimpered in the backseat,
“I’m not feeling well,” and vomited. Tears
and saliva spattered her My Little Pony pants.

The wailing of a world on fire woke up
her little brother, who turned to his right,
opened his mouth and wailed after big sister.

Our car, a moving metal of infant sirens
on the 87. My hands on the 10 and 2 o’clock,
I was calm like a killer before dawn.

My wife turned around in the passenger’s seat,
wiped our daughter’s vomit while singing
Greek lullabies to our son.

I took Rithy out of the car seat, pointed at
the big rigs speeding down the Northway,
made sure no stranger without a mask got close.

I put my hands on his red cheeks,
blew at his hair and face, and
watched his beautiful smile unfurl.

The world didn’t end that day.
Even if it did, I knew what must be done.
Do the work calmly and cleanly

Like those who came before me.
Without a care about anyone but my children,
this calm giving of myself.

*

Year of the Snake

Each day is a new low.
It’s like a noose. You can’t breathe.
You can’t see straight. Your heart’s giving out.
We can’t go on like this.
The darkness everywhere like a plague.
What we need is for things to slow down,
for silence to breathe,
for words to churn and do its magic,
the walls to crumble.
Everything and everywhere
is all here. It’s always been here.
When you look up, you know.
When you look around, you see.
When you turn inward, you feel.
The beginning of all things. This light.

*

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize–winning poet, and professor who teaches at Union College in Schenectady. His work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, World Literature Today, Copper Nickel, New York Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Salamander, diode poetry, Verse Daily, among others. He is poetry editor of Cultural Daily.

Monongahela Christmas by Tom Barlow

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Monongahela Christmas

Comes the snow, drifting across
the wild grasses like the water
that polishes river rocks

of the Blackwater into ornaments.
This is the raw Christmas, pines
tipped with hoarfrost, torpid trout

holding place in their current, while
wild ponies turn their backs
and gather together to endure.

Hunters plod through the valley
for whom the forest opens just wide
enough to allow them to pass before

folding closed again, stealing
the sound of their gunshots for
the wind. Mercy has found little

foothold in the winter mountains
while the whole countryside
attempts to sleep, some until spring,

some never to wake. This is no place
for an infant; only the glare of the sun
off the river ice could be mistaken
for a star that seeks a savior.

*

Tom Barlow is an American writer of novels, short stories and poetry, whose work has appeared in journals including Hobart, Tenemos, Redivider, The New York Quarterly, The Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many more. See tombarlowauthor.com.

Simple Supper by David B. Prather

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Simple Supper

My mother made mac-n-cheese
without any showy breadcrumbs.
It was simple—boiled pasta
and Velveeta cubed with a paring knife.
I loved to stir the pot,
watch those pale orange chunks
melt to a glossy sheen.

A little margarine made it rich, which
is something we were not.
For a little kick, she threw in a few pinches
of black pepper,
gray powder from a grocery store tin,
none of that snooty
freshly-ground stuff. I once used

a baking dish and panko,
as though I could do it better. A friend
tells me they like diced shallots
in theirs, and paprika. All I want
is that old aluminum pot
on an electric stove’s glowing coil,
and the past coming up to a boil.

*

David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and Bending Light with Bare Hands (Fernwood Press, 2025). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The Comstock Review, etc. He lives in Parkersburg, WV. Website: www.davidbprather.com

One thing you could do by Mary Paterson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

One thing you could do

is rent an apartment that is unfurnished
except for a large television
and a brown settee. You could go there
two to three times per week

to watch true crime documentaries
and cry about your mum. The deal is
you tell no one. At home you maintain
your days all perfectly ordinary:

magnet parking tickets to the fridge,
recycle cardboard, and so forth. Cycle there
as if you don’t believe in traffic. Hang a mirror
in the darkest room. The story is going to angle

itself out in instalments. You will see
your features become smudged away,
one by one, and, one by one,
see them repaired. Do this for nine months

and then it’s winter, your lungs burst open
like poinsettias; you, with ribbons on,
in the supermarket, everywhere. People
will think that it’s finished, people sing,

‘you look well!’, people make up
hoops of small talk about the sky.

*

Mary Paterson is a writer and curator based in London (UK). She writes mainly for performance, and her work has been performed around the world including with Live Art DK (Copenhagen), Wellcome Collection (London) & Arnolfini (Bristol). Her poetry has been published by Poetry Magazine, 3am Magazine, & Ambient Receiver, amongst others. Mary is the co-founder of ‘Something Other’: a platform for experimental writing and performance, running since 2014.

Mr. Rogers Teaches Little Donny about Climate Change by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Mr. Rogers Teaches Little Donny about Climate Change

Why don’t you take off that heavy coat, Mr. President?
It’s too warm for that today.
Why, I don’t even put my sweater on
when it gets this hot in the neighborhood.

I am out of Diet Coke,
but I can offer you a cool refreshing lemonade.
You know what they say,
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
We’ve been drinking a lot of lemonade
in the neighborhood lately.

Just drink it slowly, my friend.
It’s all that’s left since the citrus orchards
were wiped out by the last Cat 5
hurricane that ripped through Florida.
I’m happy to share what’s left.
After all, you’ve been so busy lately,
and it’s such a hot day.

But don’t worry.
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,
and maybe Santa will bring you a fan
for being such a good boy.
Or maybe a lump of coal.
He knows you really like coal.

*

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.

Ten Hours at the Airport by Karly Randolph Pitman

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Ten Hours at the Airport
with gratitude for a line from Hawk McCrary

Your heart sinks when you see the message –
delayed, again, after one flight had already
been cancelled. But there was nothing you
could do, so you tuck your bag over your
shoulder and trudge through the long alleys.
You find a small bookstore and sit
on the corner of the floor for an hour,
reading a book on ADD and cleaning.
You walk to your gate, unpack your lunch,
eat the cold chicken and yams. When the flight’s
delayed for the third time, you rise to stand
in the snaking line with the others, all those
with somewhere important to go.
The young woman in front of you
clutches her group of paper boarding passes:
Cleveland to Atlanta, Atlanta to Amsterdam,
Amsterdam to Riyadh. Her ill mother waits
for her at the hospital. You catch her wide eyes,
help her talk to the gate agent, stay with her
until her problem is solved. You trade numbers
as a manager brings out bags of food, lays them
out on a table and tells the crowd to help themselves.
Other passengers are huddled together on the chairs,
telling each other stories about their time in the
other’s hometown as they eat the chicken sandwiches.
A grandmother, dressed in her good skirt and shoes,
naps with her head leaned back against the wall.
Strangers before, you’re bonded by your changed plans,
your many hours together. As the day turns to night,
a woman seethes into her phone, demanding a hotel room.
A gate agent calls an angry man darling then retreats,
apologizing, as he bristles – don’t call me darling.
Your new friend, newer to English, whispers to you,
Is darling a bad word? You reassure her it isn’t,
a term of endearment that to this man, wasn’t endearing.
You know the stakes are low for you –
your days of flying with small children are over.
You have room, this day, to be late. You have
your lunch and a book. But in the crowd, you see
every possible response to thwarted plans. Any of them
could be you, or have been, once. When the pilot announces
there’s a slim chance the flight might make it out tonight,
the group lets out a cheer. Hours later, you board in triumph,
your gratitude made deeper by your waiting. You give
the gate agents a standing ovation and they blush,
all smile and shine. At home, your family makes a joke
about how you’ve been in airport hell. A friend corrects them.
No, it’s been airport heaven.

*

Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, teacher, facilitator and mental health trainer who brings understanding to sugar addiction, overeating and other ways we care for trauma. You can find her poetry at O Nobly Born, a reader supported newsletter, and her healing work with food at her substack, When Food is Your Mother. She lives in Austin, Texas where she does as much as possible with her hands and is writing a book on bringing compassion to food suffering.

Anniversary Song by Pauli Dutton

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Anniversary Song

Here’s to the man who shudders in staccato at the new sun.
A bandaged man, of 90 years, who soon after hip surgery,
carried his walker down the front steps and took out the garbage.
A man, who on our third date, handed me his Mensa card,
now asks the names of our grandchildren.
Before the wedding, I believed he could pen
an encyclopedia. A decade ago, his brain began its seep.
How he shook in the market deciding on ice cream,
shrieked at a dropped cup of coffee,
scolded a yellowed leaf on the rose tree.
Last year he screamed at line 54 of the 1040,
slapped the table again and again, roaring my name.
He thundered when I told him I’d made a date with a taxman,
then cried as he said, Thank you and asked,
Will you still be my wife? I touched his shoulder,
answered, Will you marry me?

*

Pauli Dutton is a former librarian. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Writing in A Woman’s Voice; Verse Virtual, Quill & Parchment, The Pangolin Review, Altadena Poetry Review; and Spectrum Anthology. Her poem While Teaching Line Dancing was nominated by ONE ART for Orison Book’s Best Spiritual Literature 2022. She was the featured poet in Quill and Parchment, December 2024.

Chalice by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Chalice

I want to empty my chalice of grief,
and be like the neighbor’s two dogs

early this morning unleashed
on the warm and sun-strewn beach,

so alive in their streamlined bodies,
running, sniffing, circling,

as if they’d never seen sand before,
as if the earth were new, and meant for frolic,

as if the only purpose in life were to stir
uncontainable, everlasting, mirth.

*

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.

Toward an All-Purpose Elegy by Sydney Lea

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Toward an All-Purpose Elegy

        –at Bear Ridge Speedway, Vermont

What if I wrote a reusable elegy?
I’d have chances enough to apply it. For some reason the thought
occurs to me here. I sit with two small grandsons,
a gale of dust blowing up from the dirt-track oval.
It coats our greasy French fries just as it did
back forty years when I came to this place with their father,
and much before, when I watched snarling cars

slide around an identical eighth-mile circuit.
Far south of here, that was, but the scene hasn’t changed,
unlike everything else, it appears, in the rest of my world.
Two bats flit over moth-clotted infield lights.
There used to be scores. I liken those vanished clouds
to my corps of friends, which seems to shrink by the hour.
Just this morning, another stab of bad news–

an old friend dying, one incredibly brave
through years of struggle with and after cancer.
He was the smallest but toughest boy on our football team
yet always tender toward others even back then.
Thinking of him, I can blame this dust for my tears.
With an elegy on hand for every occasion,
I wouldn’t need to fetch fresh metaphors

for any future bereavement or for solace.
My griefs, after all, are increasingly the same.
I’d try to devise some elegiac conclusion,
to offer the sense of completion these boys have known–
like their father before them and their father’s father as well–
those times when they bet on the battered car that would pass
the checkered flag into transitory triumph.

The grandsons, of course, lost more than they won tonight.
So just as for any imagined reader I’d honor
the elegiac custom of consolation,
for these little children I’ll offer some little comfort.
We’ll stop by the vendor’s stand where I can buy them
Bear Ridge caps and undented model cars.
Then, our races ended, we’ll head for the exit.

*

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.

Advent by Chelsea Rathburn

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Advent

My daughter wrote on an index card
Not Trash Do Not Throw Away (Please)
and taped it to the cardboard frame
of her empty advent calendar,
which for three years has sat atop
a bookshelf in her room, its foil-wrapped
chocolates long divided and consumed,

dark for her, milk for me. And though
I plead with her to clean her room
of all its useless stuff, I too
loved peeking into the calendars
my friends received each December
(I never once had my own),
all the tiny windows and doors

opening on so many little gifts.
What possibility! How lucky
they seemed, except the sorry few
whose treasures turned out to be cartoons
or Bible verses instead of candy.
We all want the tangible, chocolates
and toys, but also the anticipation

and then the memory of sweetness.
My daughter’s calendar shows no
angels, no wise men, not even Santa,
just smiling bears and a snowy house
aglow. What I keep, in the hall
beside our family photographs,
is the framed collage she made in school

of our old house on a hill. (The word
hill! is there in her careful print.)
She’s drawn herself in front, pink-haired
and legs in motion, but what I notice
most are all the extra windows –
she put them even in the roof,
so many little openings to joy.

*

Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife. Since 2019, she has served as poet laureate of Georgia.

Civil War by Alec Solomita

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

~ 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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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 ~ 3 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

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

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 ~ 8 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.