Three Poems by John Amen

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After

The AC groaned in the weeds, reporters
paced the street, hoping to snatch a photo,
my brother, the famous outlaw, reloading his gun,
counting his cash in the backyard.
Next day, my brother vanished in the ivy,
leaving behind his loafers, empty wallet, a subway map.
My mother spent the weekend crying, then gave away his suits.
Detectives asked if I knew where he was.
I didn’t. After, my brother was different. He wore
sweat pants & a yellow cap, strummed
pop tunes on a ukelele, reciting
statistics & famous proverbs, his way of
demanding forgiveness. Waking up was
my way of not giving it. Remember, though,
the play unfolded on its own terms, I couldn’t edit the script.
I rode the scene until I buckled,
trying to recall what my brother said.
When I turned back to the text, I could never find
the lines I was looking for. The dead are coy,
stashing tax forms in a calendar, dropping hand-
written notes in the flophouses of your grief.
I spent months searching garages, tenement
basements, I took buses to the countryside,
determined to unearth some secret file. Once,
in a storage unit off the interstate, I found a
dry-cleaning receipt, a turntable, his favorite necktie.
These days I have to read my brother’s lips,
yank riddles from his blistered mouth.
I’m a cave raider, stealing his wet, green wishes,
carting his treasure up those watery stairs.
When I reach the light, I rummage in shallow pools,
ink & blood in the current, his words are gone.

*

Birdman
         after the 2014 film

He gobbled three aspirins for a backache,
the sun trickling over the dais. The proud
mayor unveiled the state-funded statue,
council members & pedestrians politely applauding.
He adjusted his mask, remained in his seat
to see what would happen.
Of course, nothing happened.
The photographer caught him at a good angle,
he looked triumphant, trustworthy.
Already ten years had passed, he was
amazed by the stickies on his been-there map.
Thank-you notes from the governor hung from his wall.
Soon he’d need to renegotiate his contract.
He was weary, though, his memory a cluttered basement.
He usually felt irritable until around noon.
He didn’t know how age happened, where
it came from. But still he saw himself
as an immortal flapping against the night,
a born-again hero, vigilante in a bright limbo
sharpening his beak, gearing up for an encore.
Surely he could save the city one more time.

*

Barbie, 1978
         for Janet Buck

Barbie was tired of catalogs, sick of her mother’s
bridal gown, honeymoon-talk, the closetful of

handbags & blouses. Frat boys in their top-
down convertibles trolled Calico Street, tapping

their horns. Love was a footnote at the end of a long
boring essay, & she was still stuck in the first paragraph.

She turned off the 8-track & removed her watch.
When she pressed her fingers to the smooth plastic

between her legs, it caved. A small pump delivered
three warm, sticky squirts. She spent the evening

searching for paradise, surges of want, demand,
even then, flares of guilt. She woke the next morning,

hair chopped into a bob, & couldn’t find her plat-
form shoes. She grabbed a glass apple, pretending

to take a bite. She imagined herself enduring a scandalous
affair, smashing a hotel tv, arrested, exiled, years spent

wandering desert towns looking for adventure. It sounded
great, but there was an intern party she couldn’t miss.

Suddenly the blue of the sky wasn’t so blue. The rainbow
looked like a bad painting. Were bulls stampeding in the

backyard? Was that what they called thunder? Had she
caught the bug of melancholy? She hurled a vase

against the wall. Eyes clenched, she ground her heel into
a shard, streaking blood across her immaculate floor.

*

John Amen was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024.

Market Fluctuation by Sarah Rosengarten

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Market Fluctuation

Time is what happens when nothing else does.
I find the pennies around my house and stack them
like little monuments and find the value
in building things is finding an object
in which to stuff yourself. Take this

wonky side-table, abused by so many movers
and owners and excited dogs, knocking
their loving tails. I found it on the street,
buffeted by broken down cardboard boxes.
I called no friend, I hauled it up my stairs

to prove I could. Now it’s mine. I don’t take
care of the things I have. It’s a failure
of character, though not as bad as one of those
could be. The table is a useful story about
my greatness. When it becomes garbage

it’s garbage. It’s always been that anyway.
It doesn’t know any other life because it is
a table. I fill its drawers with pennies. “I am
sort of like God,” I tell it, before realizing I’m
in a room talking to no one. Will I ever be satisfied.

*

Sarah Rosengarten is from New York. She has work forthcoming in Stanchion Magazine. She lives in Inwood with two cats.

The War by Brandon Shane

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The War

My father yells we won the war built it all concrete electric
sewage classrooms hospitals water pipes what are you complaining
about and I say all those people died then as people die now
but people hang new calendars and grow quieter
plant coffee on tables atop green carpets
what else can be done but grow and my father yells
we won the war we won the war we won the war
and I say yes we won the war we won the war
he says pick up a history book and I say we wrote
the history books and he says so what
are you complaining about we
voted for the same guy.

*

Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in Rattle, trampset, Variant Lit, The Chiron Review, Stone Circle Review, IceFloe Press, The Marrow Poetry, ONE ART, among others. He graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English.

Two Poems by Sara Eddy

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Going to Seed

I left lettuce flouncing out in container boxes
ready for picking. I was on the road, ready
for the expansion of travel. Lettuce can’t hold me.

You want a pretty big container for head-growth
and root-spread. It’s almost too on the nose: harvest
leaves from the outside to encourage inner growth.

Lettuces shouldn’t sit next to apples or bananas.
Ethylene causes rapid decay, like too much time
in the city, your feet on concrete.

Lettuce must be eaten fresh, taken as it is, demands
fealty to its moment. It will go to seed before I get back,
and I’ll toss it on the compost for the rabbits and worms.

*

Uphill

I’m driving around looking for a farm stand when my doctor calls.
You don’t know how to be alive she says, something like that.

I don’t really hear her. I’m thinking about hills, where they come from,
whether they feel us scrambling up and down. Whether all the hills

I’ve climbed add up to a mountain, and when it is I’ll be over the hill.
Everything about hills. Now she’s saying you’ve forgotten how to sleep.

I wake up 45x an hour, she says, which isn’t really sleeping at all, is it?
I feel like arguing: that’s the way I’ve always slept, and no one ever complained.

But truly it is harder now to get up these hills. Maybe she’s right,
I don’t know how to be alive. I do know that fresh vegetables

are good for poetry. Hills are good for poetry. And lying awake in bed wondering
how it has come to this, that we don’t even know how to sleep in our tired bodies.

*

Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, and her chapbook of poems about plants, Jewelweed, is forthcoming from Finish Line Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.

Moving Objects by Marc Frazier

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Moving Objects

How can I be so inappropriate? I think riding the Green Line to my therapist Simon’s office. At a writers’ conference I had unleashed my rage at a staff member. The director of the conference gave me an official warning like I was a three-year-old: if I didn’t behave, I would have to leave. What causes my rudeness? It’s easy to blame chemistry, genetics, or my parents’ upbringing for things. We have pretty much ruled out brain damage and other odd and sundry neurological disorders like Oliver Sacks wrote about. I didn’t mistake my wife for a hat. Simon rarely, if ever, buys my theories. But I guess that’s what I pay him for. I’m just blunt like my parents. Then it hits me: my mother had recently died and my anger could have been at anyone. I missed her. I always leave therapy thinking of what people say at the end of AA meetings: Keep Coming Back. Going home, I take stock of my fellow el passengers. Whenever I do this kind of people scanning, a Joni Mitchell line rattles in my head: A thunderhead of judgment was gathering in my gaze. Sometimes I forget where I’m going. Sometimes I wonder how these trains move so fast considering the weight we carry inside—sufficient to throw off something in the universe.

*

Marc Frazier has published poetry in nearly a hundred fifty journals. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry, he has also been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two “Best of the Nets.” His four books are available online. Marc has also published memoir pieces, photographs, essays, fiction, flash fiction, and essays. His latest poetry book If It Comes To That recently won Silver in the Florida Writers Association contest. Marc, an LGBTQ author in Fort Lauderdale can be found on his website marcfrazierwrites.com. X @marcfrazier45, Insta mcfj45.

Anticipatory grief by Lyanne Wang

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Anticipatory grief

My chest readies. I no longer know if it’s asthma, or the weather warming, again. I tap my fingers to count the years: the thumb slides back to the index. Five years, almost. Grief measures itself in cycles, and I steady my wishing by feeding the wild, wild spirals. The curl of her hair, rounding the noose. The circle of fireflies in the Minnesotan sky, where I had escaped in June. The way I count time, a winding path to August, and then, a straight line to Boston: 3,110 miles away, away until — April, the fifth since her death. I am waiting, now, in March. The moon is waning, as it always does. The grief, becoming, again.

*

Lyanne Wang is a writer based in the Bay Area and a poetry editor at Pithead Chapel.

Free Range by Kathryn Jordan

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Free Range

                     She walks these hills in a long
                     black veil…Nobody knows but me.
                                   — Johnny Cash

The rest of the song
meant nothing
to me, a child.
I only cared
about the hills,
long veil of sorrow.
Father gone,
mother leaving,
always leaving.
Days alone
were my own.
I took to the woods.
How did I find them?
I wore my veil inside;
nobody knew but me.

*

Kathryn Jordan’s poems have been recognized in the Steve Kowit, Muriel Craft Bailey and Connecticut Poetry Review contests, among others. Her work can be found in The Sun, New Ohio Review and Atlanta Review. She likes her poems to be of service. kathrynjordan.org

come to me by john compton

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come to me

there are certain things
that remind you—
their face cloned in every face.

the curvature of light glistens.
sensing the ripple: a wave
crashes into the eyelash.

your emotions begin to unravel;
there is a nakedness underneath
i cannot hide.

i try to scratch his name off stone.
why is he there?
why is he there?

he left as quickly as a dream—
a bombing, all at once:
i cannot comprehend a half empty bed.

*

john compton (b. 1987) is a gay poet. he lives in a nonexisting town in kentucky which still holds its name, with his husband josh, and their dogs, cats, & mice. his latest books are: my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store published with Flowersong Press (dec 2024); & house as a cemetery published with Rebel Satori Press (march 2026).

The Smell of Rain on Supermarket Concrete by Sakina Jabrayilova

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The Smell of Rain on Supermarket Concrete

There are some evenings that never really leave you.
They sit quietly inside ordinary things —
inside the smell of wet pavement,
inside the flicker of a streetlamp,
inside songs you stopped listening to years ago because they knew too much.

I still remember the supermarket near our apartment,
how automatic doors opened like tired sighs,
how fluorescent lights turned everyone pale and distant.
My mother would compare prices in silence while I wandered toward the candy aisle,
believing adulthood was something glamorous and impossibly far away.

Now I stand in similar supermarkets alone,
holding bread and shampoo and batteries,
and suddenly I am mourning a version of myself
that did not yet know how quickly life could collapse into routine.

Back then, evenings felt enormous.
The future was a glowing city somewhere beyond the horizon.
I thought there would always be time —
time to become beautiful enough,
talented enough,
important enough
to outrun the quiet fear growing in me.

But nostalgia is strange.
It does not miss the truth.
It misses the lighting.

It turns old bedrooms into sacred places.
It softens arguments heard through thin walls.
It wraps loneliness in gold ribbon
until even sadness begins to look cinematic.

Sometimes I wish I could walk back into one of those forgotten evenings
hear the television humming from another room,
feel rainwater soaking the edges of my shoes,
watch the city glow through fogged car windows
without knowing anything about grief or time or failure.

Just for five minutes.

Just long enough to believe again
that life was still about to begin.

*

Sakina Jabrayilova is an emerging writer from Azerbaijan drawn to themes of nostalgia, quiet longing, and the emotional textures of everyday life. ‘The Smell of Rain on Supermarket Concrete’ is her first published poem.

Four Poems by Meg Pokrass

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Purplish Bluebells

When I forgive the man who offers
me happy nothingness and then takes it away again,

he smiles through his computer,
teeth like uncultured pearls.

I imagine stepping over the broken bridge
of his faded handsomeness, delivering a bouquet

of cash-and-carry roses.
Thanks for not being here, I say,

touching my cloudy hair,
contemplating an evening of almost promises.

No problemo, he says,
then zips me a video of the beautiful sunrise in Dorset.

It’s Spring, birds are chirping like crazy.
I imagine purplish bluebells

hanging their heads, unable
to open their faces.

*

Arrival

(after W.S. Merwin)

We have come with our slender ages,
our knowledge such as it is,

our hopes, such as they are.
We have come after rushing around

our mother’s house, smudging eyeliner.
We have come with terrible

shoes for the weather. We have come
after checking the mirrors compulsively,

putting on our outdoor faces,
deciding which extravagant hats to wear.

We have come with a doggish smell
after hugging the Labrador too many times.

We have come after warming ourselves
up by practicing in the mirror, after

slouching around on our mother’s empty
loveseat, thinking this is not a life.

We have come to knock ourselves
off the wall backwards like Humpty Dumpty

hiding the cracks in our smiles.

*

Irish Spring

A girl like her will rise early
then later, go back to sleep
with a snug feeling

in her belly. A girl like her,
having recently learned
that she can give herself pleasure

before the sun comes up,
will luxuriate in the wilderness
of her sheets. A girl like her,

hiding a found paperback copy
of The Happy Hooker underneath
her bed with the resident

dust bunnies. A girl like her
meeting up with a neighbour girl
so wild, it makes her feel tall.

A girl like her becoming friends
with the girl, believing herself
to have achieved cool. A girl

like her in the neighbour’s
shower, smashed against glass
by the girl’s brother, staring

at dead mosquitos on a bar
of Irish Spring soap.

*

Snow

Your house deflated so quickly.
There were only three of you now.
You, the dog, and your sad-haired mom
who distrusted dating, yet had no trouble
coaxing approval in the meat section,
affirmation in the flavoured canned fruit aisle,
eye contact near the honey.

You stalked her dark kitchen, burnt toast
but you buttered it anyway, moved
it into your mouth, sucked it til it softened.
Played with the dog by chasing him
around the living room, teaching him
how to chase you back.

When he peed on the floor, you hugged him.
I’m sorry, you said. Mopped up the mess
with an old t-shirt, crammed it into
the Hover twin tub washer that vomited
soap granules. Wore white flecked clothing
as if you were spit on by snow.

*

Meg Pokrass is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of prose and prose poetry. Her work has been published in RATTLE, DoDo Erasure, Plume, Waxwing, Hunger Mountain, New England Review and Electric Literature. Meg is the Founding Editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series.

536 A.D. by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

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536 A.D.

        “The sun gave forth its light without brightness.”
                —Procopius, 6th Century

On that election night, I didn’t want to imagine
how life in America could be 536 [days] After Donald
took his seat, round & resolute at the ceremonial desk,
his blunt-tipped Sharpie in hand, ready to sign
life, as we know it, away. They say it was the worst

year in history to be alive, when in 536 A.D.,
a volcano erupted and a fog of ash engulfed Europe
to Asia. An 18-month-long eclipse, where men
grieved their shadows and prayed to the sky
for their gods not to abandon them.

The people endured 536 [days] Absent Daylight—
Wars that wouldn’t cease. Seeds of disease flourishing
among fallow fields. The death toll climbing higher
by the hour. Do you remember the refrigerated trucks,
those makeshift morgues, parked along New York streets?

It took 536 [days] After Disease paralyzed the world,
until I could visit my widowed mother. The bags
under her eyes—a steamer trunk jam-packed
with memories. Her voice cracked, hot tea spilling
details of the fall, the ventilator, the iPad goodbye.

We’ve all seen the videos of banned books burn
to ash. Will we ever learn from our history?
After bedtime stories and snuggles, I tucked
my granddaughter into her big-girl bed,
as the ‘Red Wave’ rolled in like a fog.

536 [minutes] After Doomscrolling all night,
I woke my husband, made eggs for breakfast,
sunny side up. I opened the refrigerator door,
where my world was still a crayon-drawn sun, held
by two toy letters: a blue A and a red D.

~ ~ ~

* 536 days since After Donald’s inauguration is July 9, 2026

~ ~ ~

Shawn Aveningo Sanders shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon, running The Poetry Box press. Her poems have recently appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, contemporary haibun online, Sheila-Na-Gig, Jackdaw Review, Gyroscope Review, and the award-winning anthology, 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 not writing, find her shopping for a new pair of red shoes or toy dinosaurs for her granddaughter, RedShoePoet.com.

Navy Yard Rush by David Lee Garrison

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Navy Yard Rush

The whole town shifted into high gear
at four thirty-five
when the whistle shrieked three times

to signal the end of the day
at the Navy Yard.
Workers who repaired and refitted

warships, some of them
the largest afloat,
thronged through the gates,

their talk and laughter rolling
ahead of them down the streets.
Their faces darkened with fatigue

and glistening with sweat,
they piled into buses,
lunch pails clinking and jangling;

those in cars revved their engines
and honked at the line ahead
as soon as the light changed.

The Seaside Tavern earned
its money between five and eight,
and on Friday, the line

at the Marine National Bank
stretched out the door.
Everyone not in the Rush

tried to avoid it,
even though it reminded us
who we were.

The town did not exist
without the Yard,
and in that daily migration

homeward,
we flowed together
like the incoming tide.

*

The poetry of David Lee Garrison, an emeritus Wright State University Professor, has been published widely, read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, and featured by Ted Kooser in American Life in Poetry. He won the Paul Laurence Dunbar Prize for Poetry in 2009 and was named Ohio Poet of the Year in 2014. His chapbook, Tailfins, will come out in November of 2026 from Finishing Line Press.

Thursday, Taxi from Linate by Gabriele Micozzi

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Thursday, Taxi from Linate

The driver hears my accent and says
Le Marche? —
the way some men say the name
of a woman they once knew.
Yes. My grandfather. The Conero,
the white road that drops to the sea
between two olive trees.
Mine too, he says,
though I doubt it,
and I love him for the lie. So I tell him a smaller one back:
that I’m only in Milan for one night,
when I know it will be three.
We are even now.
He laughs — a big, wet, southern laugh
that belongs to no consultant I have ever met —
and turns up the radio:
some old Battisti song
about a woman waiting in a yellow house. For ten minutes
I do not think about the keynote at seven.
The Milan traffic parts
like a slow book opening.
I notice everything fast, the way I always have:
the woman on the scooter with the dog in her jacket,
the boy reading Pavese at the red light,
the smell of pizza al taglio from a doorway
I will think about all evening.
Past the cathedral, past the bank towers,
past the Italy that pays my fees
and forgets my name. When we arrive
I tip him more than I should
for a reason that has nothing to do
with the keynote,
and everything to do
with two men who have just agreed
to misremember the same coast.

*

Gabriele Micozzi is an Italian poet, writer, professor, and consultant from the Marche region of Italy. He has published poetry with Transeuropa, AttraVerso, and GFE, and essays with FrancoAngeli and Dario Flaccovio. His recent work explores work, travel, family, identity, and the quiet fractures of contemporary life.

The Doorway by Michael J. Kolb

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The Doorway

Tea going cold on the sill.
The screen door open,
not decided.

The yard holds its light
the way yards do:
without opinion,
without rush.

A bird lands on the fence post,
considers,
leaves.

This is the life
that accumulated
while I was looking
for another one.

The tea.
The light.

The door
that could go either way.

I have learned to stand here
without asking
what it means.
Most mornings
that is almost true.

*

Michael J. Kolb is a writer, educator, and archaeologist based in Colorado. He writes across disciplines, exploring nature, memory, and illness, asking what we carry and what we leave behind. His collection What Keeps Me Looking Out the Window was a finalist for the 2026 Press 53 Award. His poems appear in Third Wednesday, The Shore, Sky Island Journal, Eunoia Review, Defenestration, Trampoline, San Antonio Review, Speckled Trout Review, and Moss Piglet. Instagram: @michaeljkolb; substack.com/@michaeljkolb.

800 Grit by Jeff Cove

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800 Grit

When I came to visit,
I brought the ukulele—

the one with the cedar top
you sanded for weeks.

You asked me what it was.

*

Jeff Cove lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in ONE ART, Defenestration, and Pictura Journal. His debut collection, The Controls Are Not Responding, is seeking publication. He blogs at jeffcove.com.

Self-Portrait in Iron by J. C. Todd

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Self-Portrait in Iron

        after Frida Kahlo, Autoretrato Hierro: La Columna Rota

I paint to pound nails into flesh
into the fetish of high breast and sternum

the fetish of carved and wracked trunk, to display
the central stack of vertebrae, bone link

chinked, shattered and restacked
I paint to nail fear back into wreckage

it thrusts off from, broken and inconsolable
as a temple unroofed and plundered

the earth, dry and cracked, fissuring behind it
this pain I drive into each day

*

J. C. Todd is co-editor of Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Books, May 2026). She is author of three poetry collections, most recently the bilingual (English/Lithuanian) What Kept Me Awake/Kas neleido užmigti? and Beyond Repair. Before retiring, she taught in the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Program at Rosemont College.

Curiouser and Curiouser ~ A Workshop with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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Curiouser and Curiouser: A poetic invitation to write into wonderment
A Workshop with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Instructor: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Date: Thursday, July 16
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern (Please check your local time)
Price: $25 (sliding scale)

>>> Register Here <<<

Workshops are recorded and shared with all who sign up.

~ About The Workshop ~
Let’s read poems that make us wonder about the gap between what we think we know and what I, talk about them and light into our own writing. Let’s disobey the rule “write what you know.” Instead, let’s leap off the edge of the known and write into what we don’t know. How does this change our process? A generative workshop based in play.

~ About The Instructor ~
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker and writing facilitator who co-hosts Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, Washington Post’s Book Club, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her recent collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding. In 2024, she became poet laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief and love through poetry. Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day, sharing them on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Her son by Bill Garvey

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Her son

The woman ringing up my groceries
had a date tattooed on her arm.

I asked about it and she paused,
The day my son died.

I said I was very sorry.
She shook her head the way

people do to let you off
an awkward hook.

Her finger lingered over
the raised ink.

She looked up from it and said—
My son’s ashes.

*

Bill Garvey grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and is a dual citizen of Canada and the USA. He is the author of two poetry collections from DarkWinter Press: The basement on Biella (2023) and his latest, Leaning in the same direction, released this month. Nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize and Best of the Net, his work has appeared in The Queen’s Quarterly, Rattle, Cimarron Review, and The New Quarterly and others. His short fiction appeared in Close To The Bone Press in June 2026. He currently resides in Nova Scotia and Toronto.

Plain and Simple by Gene Twaronite

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Plain and Simple

… he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery.
—Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

he liked it
hard as ironwood
no medals pinned to its chest
no stars and stripes
or fancy ribbons to
hide its true nature
an eagle stripped of
arrows and olive branches
soars high above
the shifting winds
of freedom
to see more clearly
all the peaks and valleys
of we the people

*

Gene Twaronite is the author of six poetry collections. His first poetry book, Trash Picker on Mars, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. His latest collection is Watch Us Burn: Poems for a Lost Earth (Kelsay Books). Follow more of Gene’s writing at: genetwaronitepoet.com & instagram.com/genetwaronite

WARGAMES by Spencer K.M. Brown

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WARGAMES

I’m too astonished
At how still the knife’s tip is
That pain doesn’t register.

Copper bb’s blaze
Through the trees cutting
Perfect circles through fresh leaves.

My brother gently pushes the bb out
Through the entry hole in my
Knuckle with the knife tip.

I pick it up from the dirt,
Eyeing it, turning it round
Before loading it into my gun.

He slaps me on the back,
Reminds me, The life of man
Upon earth is warfare.

We’re pinned down,
The rusted fire barrel tinks
Hollowly every other second.

I’m the better shot.
My brother covers me,
And I stand and squeeze the trigger,

Hitting the new kid
In the corner
Of his eye.

He yells stop,
And so we all yell stop,
And we all go to look.

The ball bulges under
Bloody skin, quarter inch
From his watering eye.

Hold still, my brother says,
And we all gather
Over the new kid

As he lies on leaves,
Staring astonished
At my brother’s steady knife.

*

Spencer K.M. Brown is an award-winning poet and novelist from the foothills of North Carolina where he lives with his wife and three sons. His work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines. His debut collection of poems, “The Salvation of Me”, will be published by Press 53 in Fall 2026.

The Watchers by Cathy Hollister

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Watchers

I paused on the bank of the Thames,
eyes raised to St. Paul’s across the river,
sunset clouds billowed like smoke
escaping the steeple.

I imagined the watchers of St Paul,
volunteers filled the high rafters
protecting British pride from
falling flames
that would consume the spire

I praised the brave and selfless acts
of those who
from evensong to matins
extinguished the blazes
of the Blitz

Back home in Tennessee, the Volunteer state,
fear and rage shoot through safe havens
of neighborhood, school, park, church
a small, frightened child, crying for her mother

Alone, I can watch but not extinguish
the inferno in the streets of the land
of the free carry, free assault, free pain.

I live in America
on fire.

*

~ Author’s Note ~

St Paul’s watch formed in 1915 to protect the cathedral from bombing raids during the First World War. The Watch disbanded in 1918 but reformed in 1939 at the start of World War 2. A photo of St Paul’s surrounded by smoke became a symbol of “togetherness, survival, and suffering” for the British people.

*

Cathy Hollister is a poet from Tennessee. Her work has appeared in Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Eclectica, The Ekphrastic Review, and is the author of Seasoned Women, published by Poet’s Choice.

Reorganizing by Tony Gloeggler

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Reorganizing

Even though he knows exactly
what he wants every time,
Jesse loves browsing random
aisles. If it’s our first time
in the store, clerks shadow us
as if we’re black or homeless.
Jesse always ends up stopping
by the chips and pretzels, bending
down or reaching up and touching
different packages, tracing
his fingers lightly over the bright
labels, scrunching his face
as if he’s thinking, struggling
with a life-altering decision, finally
grabbing the biggest bag of Extra
Spicy Doritos. If the clerk starts
to say something, I’ll tell Jess
it’s time to go, mention our next
planned stop, but sometimes
he’ll move his face real close
to mine, give me those widened,
pleading blue eyes and say

Re       Or       Gon       NIze

In a sing song tone. I’ll hang
my arm around his shoulder
as Jesse hums some homemade
melody and aligns the remaining
pretzels, crackers and chips
in straighter lines, a more perfect
order, propped closer to the front
of the shelf, easier for customers
to view, choose. I try to ignore
the clerk when he changes
his posture, moves his hands
and makes impatient sounds.
When he walks away, satisfied
Jesse won’t steal or damage
anything, I think about my place.

Anything left in the fridge worth
eating? Maybe time for a new
mattress, a new frying pan?
At 72, do I need to install a steel
bar to grab when stepping in,
out of the tub? Should I begin
getting rid of the CDs I’ll never
play again, and that bookcase
by the door, stocked with journals
and all my published poems?
Will they wind up left on the curb
like my shoe boxes full of baseball
cards and gold-plated trophies
of figures cast in batting stances
when I moved out of my parents’?
Probably time to find a lawyer
specializing in people like Jesse,
set up a special fund for him
that won’t affect, take away,
the SSI/Medicaid benefits
that provide the support staff
he will need as long as he lives.

*

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.

Four Poems by Renee Emerson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Ode to Trees Along the Power Line

Line of pine shaved on one side
like a punk-rock princess.
A round gap ice-cream scooped
from the top of a crabapple grown too tall.

Any limbs that laze too close
to wires strung along the road
are crew-cut, a lop-sided buzz.

Haven’t these trees been taught
never to let growth interrupt
the double-stitch of power and danger?

The electric company sends their men,
and they make short work of it.

*

When I Was Still Pregnant

Each first Tuesday
of the month, I loved
to solve the crossword

in the Midriver News,
addressed “to resident,”
all ads, local events,

then the hopscotch grid,
punnish clues, sponsored
by Lou Fusz Ford.

The words dovetailed,
a fitted brickwork.
I couldn’t argue with

the logic of it—sundog,
alcove, Degas—a lead
to a single answer.

*

My Mother’s Clothes

Never fit us, though we tried. Too small,
too long, she always bought
in the Talls. She told us to trash it all
when we went back a weekday for the lot
thrown in a heap at the door or hung
in the attic of what was now dad’s place.

Together we sisters filled black bags like lungs—
shirts, pants, shoes flung in at a runner’s pace.
One last look around, we found the wedding dress
filed between sweaters, a silk specter in the attic,
hand-sewn, buttercream with age, an anchoress.

We set it in the front seat, silent, enigmatic,
asking its tailored questions of whose we were.
Never fit any of us; never gave it back to her.

*

My Lost Boys

I took no pictures
of you, dear soldiers,

lost on the front line
of myself. There was no
knock at the door, grim
smile in a smart uniform,
no medal, no honor.

The hospital bed
was a white shroud. I
lost your faces in a crowd
of hope, coins slipped
down a grate.

Lost the tune to the song
I sang you before a child
can hear a mother’s voice.

Lost each age you never were
like a star burnt out while light
still touches my skin. All

lost the days you never arrived,
the calendar ripped bits
of my heart I fed you, plucked
from my chest, red
feather and beak.

Today, alone,
lost on a country drive, I saw
a home I wished I owned
solitary in a harvested field.

Lost threshold never crossed,
three rooms in a hallway, locked.

*

Renee Emerson is the author of the poetry collections Keeping Me Still (Winter Goose Publishing 2014), Threshing Floor (Jacar Press 2016), and Church Ladies (Fernwood Press 2023). She is also the author of the chapbook The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants (Belle Point Press), and the middle grade novel Why Silas Miller Must Learn to Ride a Bike (Wintergoose Publishing 2022). She lives in the Midwest with her husband and children.

Two Poems by Joanna Fuhrman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Walking Through

I’ve had enough of phone-hold music
       blasting through galaxies of deserted
planetariums, of pinkie ring pledges
       and nude panty hose lies. Enough
of parties without hard liquor and hotel beds
       with overly soft pillows. I don’t want
to polish my car’s hubcaps only to see
       my image distorted by its curves.
I’ve had more than enough of the stench
       of train elevators and of people who don’t
understand the clairvoyance of cats.
       I’ve had it with those who think
their indifference makes their hair resemble
       the wind in a lost Douglas Sirk melodrama.
I’m sick of dreams, both daydreams and
       the 2 am visits that turn one’s heart into
a falling ax. I’m tired of things not being dreams,
       of how the orange dusk keeps vibrating
with the television’s violence. I’m sick
       of political poetry and anti-political poetry.
I hate how time has turned my skin inside out,
       how the glowing outlines of the missing
keep haunting the newspapers’ edges.
       Instead of this neon noise, I want
my bones’ silence amplified, then sliced
       into ribbons of sky. I want to wake up
and hear my own brain shaking the rafters
       of my own small thoughts.

*

Old Year

On the first day of the Fire Horse
Lunar New Year, a woman holds twenty
tulips to her chest, pink ones

on the inside, yellow on the edges.
Every day is some kind of new year.
On December 31st, I watched flamenco

dancers stomp a backroom stage,
their red fans blocking drunk revelers
on the restaurant’s giant screens.

On Rosh Hashanah, I stuffed my face
with honey cake, then next morning
as if it were any other day took

the train to teach. At lunch, instead
of throwing my sins in the river, I dunked
hard bread in a plastic container

of Thai chicken soup. Each day I wake up,
and instead of regret I feel hopeful I will
discover a new new year, a new way to feel

how it feels to feel new, but at today’s
morning Zoom I sprinted to the kitchen
when I realized I was sipping yesterday’s

cold coffee not today’s hot. Honestly,
they both tasted equally good. Makes me
think instead of always going gaga

for the new we need a holiday
for praising the old. I want a ritual for
old year’s day, a time to grab the least

pilled sweater from the slightly dirty pile,
to rub arthritis cream on the crease
between midnight and now.

*

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of seven poetry books, including Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press 2024.). Her poems have appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Slowdown podcast, and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry 2023 and 2025 anthologies. An Assistant Teaching Professor in creative writing at Rutgers University, she first published in Hanging Loose Magazine as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.

Too Much by Amy Holman

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Too Much

One week she did not place the empties
in the tin box, but still received the new bottles,
she told me. The milkman never said anything.

She was under thirty, trying to meet expectations,
with two small children. It was too much.
The next week she did not place the empties

because she was embarrassed about
the double amount, her failure to exchange.
She told me the milkman never said anything.

I think she hid from the windowed back door.
Did he care why we needed the bottles
each week she did not place the empties,

each month her incapacity bloomed and shamed
her? Was this when she was afraid of wide open spaces,
she told me? My dad definitely said something

when he looked under the kitchen sink and saw
nothing but glass. Irritable, confused. What’s the deal?
One week Mom began to not feel her own emptiness,
she told me, and the milkman never returned.

*

Amy Holman is a poet, literary consultant, and artist. She is the author of six small press poetry books, most recently Captive (Saddle Road Press, 2023). She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

A Body Wholly Body by Jeff Newberry

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

A Body Wholly Body

There is order in the way the nurse calls
me back to the scale, where I step
up to be weighed and therefore judged.
I’m taken to a small room to await
the coming doctor—sans plague mask—
who enters with on light feet
and sits, taps a clipboard, and prophesies
my future of fat, my heart, my veins
thick with cholesterolled sludge.
The heart beats. The blood pumps.
The pricked index tells my story
of late-night snack cakes and long
afternoons spent, legs crossed, a book
on my lap instead of placing one foot
in front of the other on a track or street.
My body is bonded and printed
on neat white paper. My body
is signed and directed to a lab
where a bored nurse draws more blood.
Everything lined, sketched, and charted.
Tell me, if you know, my doctor,
why the pale light of this exam room
and the cold steel of the exam table
call to mind a chilly January
when they laid my father in a coffin.
Tell me why when I look back
on that day, I remember nothing
save silence and the weight of a body
laid low, sinking down into the earth.

*

Jeff Newberry’s most recent book is the hybrid collection Frames: A Memoir (Another New Calligraphy). His writing has appeared in a number of print and online publications, recently appearing in Stone Circle Review, Sursurrus, and Sugar House Review.

Three Poems by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

PHOTOGRAPH

It’s almost Giacomettish of you,
your rather persistent disinclination

toward the up-close photo
of us that I often ask for as we travel.

As though it held less truth
than untruth as we lean against a sycamore,

or sit across a white linen table
where the great invisible

distance that is alive and well between
any two people, no matter how much love,

has once again slipped past undetected
by the dull instrument of the camera.

That great invisible distance
that Giacometti wanted to show

when he positioned his models standing
a few feet from him as he worked

but strove to make viewers perceive them
as from a point farther away.

And that these dual perspectives
hold each other in perfect balance

like two children on a seesaw,
neither pair of feet

touching the dusty ground. It’s almost
Giacomettish of you,

when I ask a friendly tourist
to snap a picture of us,

a once in a lifetime shot to remember
the two of us overlooking

the giant maw of Vesuvius
that erupted those

many millennia ago,
and you once again, refuse.

*

On The Swimmer by Pablo Picasso

Orange figure in blue water,
arms flung out like wings,

female, in freefall, letting the water
hold you any way it wants.

The paint brushed thinly
as if it too were floating. And after

swimming, when you lie
on sun-warmed shale,

I imagine each drying water bead
as the remains of that second skin

that had held you, everywhere,
as only the water can,

loved even your miserable parts.
Stuck its wet tongue all over

into the very smallest spaces,
those most difficult

to open that you had allowed
yourself to forget.

*

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

after a painting by Rose Wylie

Before they razed the hedge, I did not see it.
What I saw—just the warm brown
of wood-slatted fence and reaching green

from the other side. I’m a painter. I was held
by those colors, did not even imagine
a domicile with other humans.

Each morning, the wrens, round as notes
in the dry brush from last autumn.
The house is yellow. It does not cheer me

with its single black window
like an eye gone dark.
But oh, how I love the brown

tall tree that leans towards the house next door.
And that I can paint away from the truth:
that this tree is rooted firmly

on my side of the fence and could not
crush that house were it to fall.

*

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches at the 92nd Street Y and is Associate Editor-at Large for Plume Poetry journal. Her poems have appeared the New York Times, Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, Plume, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, RATTLE, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third book, Echolocation, was published by Plume Editions/MadHat Press in March of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Award, a longlist finalist for the Julie Suk Award and Runner Up for the Poetry By the Sea Best Book Award.

Two Poems by Robbi Nester

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

My Mother Refused to Cook with Garlic

preferred her food sedate, polite.
She made the same meals every week,
with takeout on the weekends– Monday:
pot roast and mashed potatoes, Tuesday:
salmon cakes and corn, Wednesday: roast
chicken and potatoes, Thursday: spaghetti,
Friday: fish and chips. She seldom tried
new dishes, lest some foreign taste slip in,
some suspect new ingredient.

When the scent of neighbors’ dinner
penetrated our thin walls, reminding
everyone of where we came from, the past
we tried to hide, she wrinkled up her nose.
That smell exposed deep roots in Russian
shtetls, raw onion sandwiches on thick
black bread, like the ones my paternal
grandmother used to snack on.

Far enough away in time, I taste only
with my tongue, and not my memory.
It’s complicated tastes that I prefer,
garlic’s sweet aroma when I roast the bulb,
squeeze it over crusty bread, just baked,
inhale the scent of asafetida, cumin,
fenugreek, and dream of other places.

*

House

A line of red brick rowhomes clung to one another in a chorus line
on both sides of a narrow one-way street, children jumping rope
or roller skating, popping wheelies in the middle of the road.
Drivers had to blast their horns just to get by. We had
a playground, ice rink, and a pool, a library across the street,
yet I dreamed of living in a wood-paneled ranch
with a front yard full of fruit trees, horses in a field.
No trees grew on my block, shedding cool shade
in the summer. Tiny lawns, sometimes cemented over.
Even crabgrass could seem lush. I wanted something
other than I had. The house I dreamed of nestled
among oaks and pines on a twisty stretch near Tookany,
salmon pink, with a driveway of patterned stone.
I’ve moved many times from one house to another,
but never one with horses, standing all alone
among the trees.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of 5 books of poetry, the most recent of which, About to Disappear (Shanti Arts, 2025), was just named an Eric Hoffer Finalist in its category. Learn more about her work at robbinester.net

Selected Books by Robbi Nester:
About to Disappear
Balance
The Liberal Media Made Me Do It

Irreconcilable differences by Ezra Solway

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Irreconcilable differences

She had a funny feeling even then
that something was off

after she pointed: Oh god, my mother!
to a flock of cardinals circling their chuppah.

It was the tone, it was always the tone
in which he responded: Those are just birds, honey.

*

Ezra Solway is a writer based in New York. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, appearing in many print and online journals, including Philadelphia Stories, Identity Theory, and Bending Genres. He enjoys table tennis, independent bookstores, and cooking for his lovely wife. Follow along on Instagram @EzraSolway.

ONE ART’s July 2026 Reading

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ONE ART’s July 2026 Reading

Date: Sunday, July 12
Time: 2pm Eastern

Duration: 1.5-2 hours
Featured Poets: Jo Taylor, Connie Post, Christina Kallery, Tresha Faye Haefner, Nathalie Anderson

Tickets are FREE!
(donations appreciated)

>> Tickets Available <<

***

>> Books for Sale! <<

ONE ART’s partner The Poetry Shop has a number of books by our Featured Readers available for purchase. An opportunity to support a poetry-only online bookseller as opposed to Amazon/Bookshop.org

***

~ About The Featured Readers ~

Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. In 2021, she published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire, and in 2024, she published her second book, Come before Winter (Kelsay Books). She enjoys traveling, attending her grandsons’ basketball and baseball games, and reading old cookbooks when she is not practicing her craft. She has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net. Connect with her on Facebook or at jotaylorwrites.com

Christina Kallery is the author of Adult Night At Skate World, now in its 2nd edition from Dzanc Books.  Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, Gargoyle and Rust & Moth, among other publications, and has been included in several anthologies, including Best of the Web and Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Tresha Faye Haefner is an award-winning poet, performer, educator and general facilitator of the fun times. Her work has been widely published and garnered several awards, including the Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and the Pangea Prize. Her first book, When the Moon Had Antlers (Pine Row Press, 2024) was a finalist for the Glass Lyre Poetry Prize. She is best described as an eco-poet, travel-poet, and performance poet. She writes words for the stage, page, coffee shop, words for sitting under a tree alone, and words for reading to someone you love while rowing them down a river towards dawn.

In addition to writing her own poems about nature and other mysteries, her most important role is to help others feel safe and inspired to write work of their own. Most importantly, she is founder of The Poetry Salon, an online learning community where poets meet to share inspiration, education and support as they write together and cheer one another on! You can get new information, updates and invitations to events at The Poetry Salon by joining The Poetry Salon on Substack at ThePoetrySalonStack.Substack.com. 

Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California (2005-2009). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Cutthroat, River Styx, Slipstream, Spoon River Poetry Review, & Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her awards include the Crab Creek Poetry Prize, Liakoura Award and the Caesura Poetry Award. Her second full length book, Prime Meridian was released in January 2020 (Glass Lyre Press) and was a finalist for the 2020 Best Book Awards. Her most recent books are Between Twilight from New York Quarterly Books and Broken Metronome from Glass Lyre Press.  Broken Metronome was the winner of the American Fiction Award and NYC Big book award for a poetry chapbook.

Nathalie Anderson’s books of poetry include Following Fred Astaire, Crawlers, Quiver, Stain, Rough, and the chapbook Held and Firmly Bound.  She collaborated in 2021 with artist Susan Hagen and poet Lisa Sewell on Birds of North America.  Anderson’s poems have appeared in such journals as Atlanta Review, DoubleTake, Natural Bridge, The New Yorker, Nimrod, and Plume.  She has also authored libretti for five operas, in collaboration with Philadelphia composer Thomas Whitman.  Anderson manages the list-serv Lit-Philly that informs about 500 members about literary events in the Philadelphia area.  She has recently retired from Swarthmore College, where she taught as Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Literature, and served as Director of the Program in Creative Writing.

Two Poems by Tony Magistrale

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Aging

After I gave the old woman an overdue shower—
forced her under water might be the truer fact
as she had not wished to be bathed,
her hair matted, sour bits of dead skin flaking off
legs and arms, she emerged not with gratitude
but meanness: why did you do this to me?

After I dressed her in fresh linens
and fluffed her white hair with warm currents of air,
it occurred to me I had performed this task
forty years ago, helping to arrange a pregnant
version of her for our date night together,
finishing the evening’s preparation
with a wisp of perfume.

*

View from My Train

In open fields west of Venice,
olive-clad hunters wait patiently for game

eyes averted from the ground and its trail
only long enough to acknowledge

the sound of this passing train. Crows
seek their breakfast in the aftermath of human threshing

scouring corn fields, swooping low,
dropping sharply to disappear

among ravaged pale-yellow stalks.
In the cool breath of late autumn,

the sky slate gray horizon to horizon
blackened trees shorn of all color,

I trace again the deathless patterns of repetition
the inexorable journey into winter.

*

Tony Magistrale is professor of English at the University of Vermont. He is the author of three books of poetry, the most recently published is titled More Fun Than Pretty (Moon Pie Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Spillway, Chiron Review, Green Mountains Review, South Florida Poetry Review, The Cape Rock, Slipstream, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other places.

Two Poems by Joli Huelskamp

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Tech Support

He should have retired years ago,
this pale old man at his laptop.
I’m here to help as I always am
when he forgets his password.

Glory days framed on his walls,
awards and photos, a brilliant engineer,
impressive on the masthead,
shaking hands with the governor.

He should have retired years ago.
Is he an old dog stuck on routine?
Has he no golf buddies to hang with?
No hobbies? No grandchildren? No sunny patio?

Password reset done; he thanks me.
And I must move on to my next call.
Zachary in Accounting
just got the Blue Screen of Death.

*

Loose Cannon

He doesn’t buy Girl Scout Cookies
or popcorn or oranges or raffle tickets.
A framed photo of a jet ski
has pride of place on his desk.

He lunches with the custodians,
wears baggy pants and misshapen tees.
A hula dancer and palm tree grace the faded tie
he wears at mandatory conferences.

Management can’t peg him.
Transferred, demoted, reassigned,
asks the hard questions in meetings,
states facts they’d rather not hear.

Consultants in custom suits
correct the misspellings on his report,
dress it in their logoed presentation folder
and charge us 50K.

Can I help? he asks me,
the newbie with more zits than savvy.
Solves the problem, shows me how,
and won’t take any credit.

Too bad he’s such a loose cannon,
he could really be somebody here,
they cluck, diving deeply
into the synergy of their paradigm.

*

Joli Huelskamp lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Bewildering Stories, The Bluebird Word, and Brilliant Flash Fiction.

Stuff by Paul Bavister

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Stuff

There’s a catalogue of things
you’re meant to own.

That week we focused
on a fridge, a kettle, a toaster.

Not just any toaster –
six slots, duck egg blue,

brioche rack included.
When it arrived, too big

for the worktop, we imagined
a bigger kitchen, then

a bigger house.
The loans outlived the toaster.

Maybe it helped us
get through the slow grey of work –

but if we’d spent less,
we’d have worked less.

We chose that toaster.
And when we got it home,
it settled in so well
with all our other stuff

it felt like it had chosen us.

*

Paul Bavister has published three collections of poetry with Two Rivers Press. His work has appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Dark Winter and Dream Catcher. His poem, Starlings came highly commended in the RSPB/Rialto poetry competition.

How Bad Can Blueberry Pie Be? by Peter Schireson

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

How Bad Can Blueberry Pie Be?

I remember one time
over dessert in a roadside diner,
my father asked out loud,
“How bad can blueberry pie be?
Because that’s how bad this is.”

I miss him.
Recollections huddle up—
In response to me asking
what he thought he’d feel
in his last moments of life,
he said he thought he’d be angry.
I asked what he thought he’d say.
“Shit,” he said.

There is a word in Portuguese,
saudade, for the ache of things
that you cannot get back to.

The night is unimpressed,

the silence solid and black,
only the blinking
bulletin of stars,
and a few scraps of sound
somewhere nearby—

two crows having a brief chat.
Crows say what they have to say,
then quiet.
I have tried to learn this skill for years.

* 

Peter Schireson grew up in California, studied at UC Berkeley, University of Victoria, and Harvard University. After retiring from a career, first in education and later in business, he returned to school to earn an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He has published six volumes of poems. He has trained in Zen in both the US and Japan, and is married to the psychologist and Zen teacher, Grace Jill Schireson. They live in Palm Springs, California with their small dogs, Dewey and Thomas.

From 19th and Snyder (a haiku sequence) by John Arthur

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

From 19th and Snyder
In Memory of John Paul Arthur, Jr.
June 8, 1964 – June 11, 2026

picking his urn
would he have wanted
these blues?

My father’s nightstand
The Great Gatsby
so much unfinished

lucky chip
his final final table
“shuffle up and deal”

strumming the chords
to Old Man, I add
an extra refrain

first fatherless Father’s Day
my daughters pull me
to their present

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His debut chapbook Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide was grand prize winner of the 2025 The Poetry Box Chapbook contest and was released in February 2026. His work has appeared in Rattle, Diagram, ONE ART, Frogpond, trampset, and many other places. His band is The Deafening Colors.

The Bloodgood Maple Growing in My Front Yard by Michael J. LaFrancis

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Bloodgood Maple Growing in My Front Yard

I made a vow on my first Father’s Day
to be like this tree; hardy, comfortable
enough in my own bark,
a fashionista wearing burgundy,
showing passion in scarlet red,
or dressing down in basic brown.

I will be connected to fresh air,
roots that provide nourishment for growth
beyond my scars; badges that mark
lessons learned, injuries forgiven,
keeping branches supple enough
to bend and flow with all kinds of wind.

I will be open hearted as its leaves,
those tender hands with long fingers,
palms up willing to give or receive
sunshine or rain, willing to let go,
trusting a legacy of seedlings
present, attentive, fully engaged.

*

Michael J. LaFrancis is an author, advocate, advisor and connector. Writing poetry is a contemplative practice providing insight and inspiration for living a creative life. His poems appear in Amethyst Review, Avalon Literary Review, CT Bards, City Key, Friday Night Library, Mocking Owl, Northeast Coast, One Art, Last Leaves, Seraphic Review, Synkroniciti, and Orenaug MT.

He and his partner, Sharon, have two sons and were recently promoted to Nani and Popi for their two granddaughters. Michael and Sharon recently published their autobiography: Our Wonderful Life. They live in Windsor, CT.

Instagram: @michaeljlafrancis
LinkedIn: @michael-j-lafrancis

Pink Flamingos by W. D. Ehrhart

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Pink Flamingos

I have this thing for pink flamingos;
had one on my lawn for twenty-eight years
in Philadelphia. When it finally
died of old age—so weathered that it
simply fell apart—my dear friend Dale
sent two more from Waukesha, Wisconsin.

But a dozen years ago, we downsized
to a condo, and of course the courtyard
was common ground, so I couldn’t
put my pink flamingos on the lawn.
I’ve really missed them. Silly, I suppose,
but I’ve missed my pink flamingos.

Meanwhile, on my most recent birthday,
my daughter said she had a present,
but we had to have some time to spend
together. Several hours, she said. It took
a couple weeks to find the time,
but we finally sat down together
at her kitchen table, and she handed me
a Lego pink flamingo kit: a couple hundred
little plastic pieces with an illustrated
booklet of instructions. And together we
assembled my flamingo. It’s sitting
on the shelf in front of me right now.

*

W. D. Ehrhart’s newest collection of poetry is Smart Fish Don’t Bite (Moonstone Arts, 2025). His 5th essay collection, Getting Shot At, is forthcoming from McFarland in July.

THE SECURITY GUARD by Jeff Ryan

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

THE SECURITY GUARD

Dad retired last week after 30 years
He got no standing ovation
No career highlights playing on a scoreboard
No statue or plaque
No one asked him to say a few words
Nothing was named after him
And they didn’t retire his uniform
They just threatened legal action if he didn’t return it

*

Jeff Ryan has a B.A. in English from Geneva College and has been a professional writer for 43 years. His work has appeared in more than 20 publications, including The Village Voice and Sports Illustrated, and his poetry will be featured in WestWard Quarterly this summer.

Dad’s Cotton Handkerchief by Laura Daniels

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Dad’s Cotton Handkerchief

He pulls it from his pants pocket. Curled up stiff and crunchy from spit and sputum caught in his right-handed quick withdrawal. Within a day, it is transmuted from bleached white to rusty bronze, necessitating multiple runs through the washing machine before restoration. If only his health could have been restored as easily.

deep in disquiet
the afflicted trembles—
fighting to breathe

*

Laura Daniels (she/her) is a neurodivergent writer and editor of The Fringe 999 Poetry Forum. Recently curated in Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, and Journal of New Jersey Poets, and a 2025 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Honorable Mention Award recipient. She facilitates a free monthly online writing workshop through Mary’s Place by the Sea. Her poetry collection Gentle Grasp (Kelsay Books) is available on Amazon. She resides in Mt Arlington, NJ. Follow her at lauradanielswriter.wordpress.com.

Four Poems by Kevin Ridgeway

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

FINE DINING AT CHINO MEN’S PRISON

I push all of my leftover cash
into the change machine at the laundromat
to stock up on quarters for the vending machines
at Chino Men’s Prison tomorrow where
I’ll visit and feed my ailing Dad snack cakes,
ten dollar TV dinners and enough caffeinated
beverages to keep him going strong
throughout the six hours
we’ll have to talk with zero distractions,
buzzed on each other and the past,
present and uncertain future together,
talking about everything and anything
but the illness he’ll succumb to,
enjoying the hours when I go out there
to serve time right alongside him.

*

STANDING IN A LONG LINE
OUTSIDE OF CHINO MEN’S PRISON

Old World War fighter planes
fill the sky above a group
of orange desert mountains
and open brown fields who dot the land.
Before you reach the grounds of the prison,
the electric fences stretch along the street,
a warehouse of men crawling like ants
between different structures in the distance
until we reach the gate: VISITING CENTER
a line of mostly women of different ages
wait for husbands, lovers, sons
and brothers, airing their grievances
amongst themselves for crimes
they didn’t commit other than the crime
of still loving those who did, or children
like me who were born into this life
to become more angry numbers
with lost freedom written in the grit
of clenched teeth, but I grew up soft.
I’m at a loss for words as the ladies
speak and I nod politely, waiting
for the deputies to open the doors,
doing my best to avoid eye contact
from a complete lack of innocence—
my worst impersonation of a saint.

*

INMATE #F-05859

Six feet and one inch tall
and a hundred and twenty pounds:
my frail, incarcerated father
has to get up from his wheelchair
to disrobe in front of officers
before he can come out to visit me–
his hug the grip of a dying lion,
dwindled down but still
a mountain of a man to me,
his love for me only one
of his many felonies in a life
misspent but never in vain
when he sees me standing there,
waiting for him to come out.

*

PLAYING SCRABBLE WITH MY FATHER
DURING A VISIT AT CHINO MEN’S PRISON

I let him get away
with a few misspellings,
but he’s a formidable opponent
from years spent with nothing else
to pass the time but read more
voraciously than I do—
it feels good to impress him
with all of the ten dollar words
I know, and letters on tiles
arranged that aren’t riddled
with too many clues
from our painful past,
in silent bewilderment
of our shared language—
including the profanity
uttered whenever we pull
one too many vowels.

*

Kevin Ridgeway’s books include Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press), Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and Death of the Coppertone Girl (Luchador Press). His work has been published in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Slipstream Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, Gargoyle, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Trailer Park Quarterly and Talking River Review, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, California.

My Father the Repo Man by Philip Terman

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

My Father the Repo Man

The used car he’d sell
on lien, way past
the payback— late, long
after the day spent
its aggravated course.
He’d rise, sit on the edge
of the bed, head down,
stare at the floor, begin
to fit one sock at a time
over his size 13 feet,
phone Mike the bodyman
to meet him at such
and such an address
in the depths of Cleveland.
What my father was happy
to be rid of, another sale,
one more victory for food
on the table in the struggle
for survival, his heart sinking
into the next attack. Who knows
how the customer would react
to what was his was no longer his?
Down the hall I was awake
to his footsteps, first slow,
then more steady, pacing
through the living room
and out the front door.

*

Philip Terman’s books include The Whole Mishpocha (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024), My Blossoming Everything (Saddle Road Press, 2024)) and, as co-translator, Tango Beneath a Narrow Ceiling: The Selected poems of Riad Saleh Hussein (Bitter Oleander, 2021). A selection of his poems, My Dear Friend Kafka (Nimwa Press, Damascus) was translated into Arabic by Saleh Razzouk. His poems and essays appear in many journals and anthologies, such as Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Poetry International, The Sun, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry, and Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine. He directs The Bridge Literary Arts Center, a regional writers’ organization in western, PA, and is co-curator of the Jewish Poetry Reading Series, sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Buffalo. Terman conducts poetry workshops and coaches writing hither and yon. He’s collaborated with composers, visual artists, and performs his poetry with the jazz band Catro. philipterman.com

I am sister to the rain. by Alison Hurwitz

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

I am sister to the rain.
~Dorothy Parker, “Rainy Night,” 1925

For years we scanned horizon, touched on desiccated things.
I tried to give a little limestone. You offered back a sky

devoid of cloud. Hummock, husk. A dry hill. For a time,
we swallowed powdered milk, tried to whisper to the walls

we were not water sisters. We tried gifting yellow grasses,
cacti, cracks. In the dust, we wrote each others’ names.

Our elbows, pinched, retained their ridges. Soon, the open
mouths of reservoirs silted, empty. Riverbeds forgot they

had held water, renamed themselves. In the city, sidewalks
hoarded refuse, cardboard boxes, the stench of urine.

Apologies, reunions, elopements, funerals. No one could cry
and every faucet ran with sand. Yet yesterday, when you called

and named the desert, clouds returned, and it began to rain.
We held the telephone receiver of our childhood stretched

across the continent till it worded into watering can. Oxalis
and trout lilies sprouted everywhere. I could not stop

singing. That night, I slept inside the wind, silvered with rain.
I woke to deeper green. Across a water color sky, the cry

of barred owl by the pond. In the trees a deer lifted up
its eyes from where it drank, and knew me.

*

Alison Hurwitz (she/her), alisonhurwitz.com, is a former cellist and dancer who finds music in language. Her work has been featured in SWWIM, Vox Populi, South Dakota Review, Sky Island Journal, and others. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Alison hosts a monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Her chapbook, Undersight, (Bottlecap Press, 2026), is available now. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings, takes long walks in the woods with her dog, and dances in her kitchen.

widow by john compton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

widow

she danced
so ferally

the twirl
ripped

a boy
from her

skin—
a stork

flung
from his mouth.

she reached out
but both were gone.

the flowers
cut themselves

& arranged
for a eulogy.

*

john compton (b. 1987) is a gay poet who is the author of 20 books/chapbooks, who lives in kentucky with his husband josh and their dogs and cats, and mice. his latest full length book is “my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store” published with Flowersong Press (dec 2024); his new full length book “house as a cemetery” published with Rebel Satori Press (march 2026) & is nominated for the national book award.

Three Poems by Sarp Sozdinler

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Potpourris

In the airport’s lost
and found, a woman
asks if we’ve seen
her husband. She says
he’s medium height,
business casual,
smells faintly
of cinnamon gum
and panic.

I tell her we only
found scarves, passports,
a child’s retainer.
Last week somebody
turned in a wedding cake
with one slice missing.
A man came looking
for his left shoe
he lost a decade ago.

Under the counter,
tags flutter from everything
like little white flags.
Umbrella. Headphones.
A stuffed wolf.
A jar of teeth
we’re not allowed
to open.

At lunch I eat
my sandwich beside
a box of keys.
All afternoon
they shine at me
as if they still believe
they can belong
somewhere.

*

The Ministry of Small Horses

At the ministry, they said
no, a soul cannot
be returned without its packaging.
What packaging, I said,
I was born like this.
A woman in the queue
laughed so beautifully
the windows shook as
if to laugh back. Then God came in
wearing the face of a man
who has just recovered all
his passwords, and everyone
became suddenly interested
in Him. I wanted
to tell you something
about desire, but desire
had gone awol
with a minor angel. Typical,
I said, although
you weren’t there, which
has never stopped me
before. There is no outside,
only another room
with worse paintings
and a horse in it,
small enough to be
a feeling, large enough
to disappoint
a dead kid.

*

The Bestiary

That was the Duke’s son for you,
always betting
on the wrong horse. He put
his money on the dogs
when it should’ve been the bear,
and his money on the bear when
it should’ve been the dog.
How big was it this time—
the horse, the dog, the bear
—in your stories?
How many beasts
did you slay?

Give me
a few years and it will be bigger
than an elephant,
and have bested ten dogs.

*

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals. His work has been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region. He can be found online @sarpsozdinler or at sarpsozdinler.com

Delivered in a Single Dose by Mick “Micki” Topham

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Delivered in a Single Dose

As estrogen sprouts
I find myself crying
out my testosterone—

I broke like a raincloud.

& my eyes
are opening
to who i am:

Since when did sobbing feel so affirming?

My capacity to feel love has expanded.

To hug too tightly
hurts my budding breasts,
but it reminds me
that I belong in this skin.

*

Mick “Micki” Topham (she/her) is a spoken word artist and poet in Washington DC. She has participated in countless poetry events, slams, and competitions including The Charm City Slam. She has taught poetry workshops and performed across the nation, including featuring at an official 2025 World Pride poetry reading. She was a finalist in the 2025 DC Poet Project, a citywide competition uplifting local poets. You can find her most weeks at an open mic, passionately snapping for the incredible poets and performers across the district. Instagram: @the.trans.panic

Knitting by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Knitting

She taught me how to cast on, knit, purl,
but all I ever made were misshapen scarves,

rows of too few, too many stitches and when it was long

enough, I could never remember how
to cast off, like a highway whose exit

was closed. Her sweaters had thick

foldable collars and button-holes, her blanket
throws had textured panels in raised cabled rows.

“I just follow the pattern,” she said.

I became someone who didn’t make things.
I wonder if I was afraid of being good.

*

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. lynnglicklichcohenpoet.com

Four Poems by George Franklin

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Getting Away

The Long Trail up Vermont was all
Tree roots and mud. I had a raincoat,
A monk’s cowl made from plastic
The color of bricks. It covered
Everything, my backpack, legs,
Hair soaked with sweat, windblown
Rain. I was carrying too much weight.
The cans of tuna went first, the eggs
In their blue carton. Pasta and graham
Crackers didn’t weigh much. At night,
I used my flashlight for reading,
The Mayor of Casterbridge and
The Duino Elegies, both chosen
Almost at random—in the morning,
Oatmeal, instant coffee mixed with
Powdered milk and sugar. The shelters
Smelled of mice droppings and woodsmoke.
When I walked, I just looked at the ground,
Where to put my right boot, my left. I
Didn’t think about the apartment in
Cambridge, those fights that I never
Remembered afterwards, the uncertainty
About who I wanted to be, the shame that
Nothing mattered enough to claim me.
Outside of Bennington, there were stone
Steps leading down a mountain, one
Of those green hills ridging their way
Toward Canada. I hitchhiked into town
For dinner and a shower, then took out
All the stuff I’d brought along, extra
Clothes, camping gear, parmesan cheese—
Threw away whatever I didn’t need.

* 

Columbus Avenue

I don’t know why I didn’t recognize it
Sooner, that vague shape made up of
All the lives I could have had and
Didn’t choose and the one I did choose—
All asking for me to remember them.
In Manhattan, there were sidewalks
Where I passed couples having lunch
In the old Cuban-Chinese restaurants,
Banana omelets and avocados, wonton
Soup with corn, café con leche and flan.
I was walking back to work near
Lincoln Center, teaching Whitman and
Christina Rossetti to students retired
From years of hard labor in department
Stores and the garment district—their
Pasts overstuffed suitcases, cities
In Europe before the war, photographs
Of boys in buttoned suits, girls
In white dresses standing next
To their mothers, books in Hungarian
Or Polish. There was nothing I could
Teach them about poetry. Each
Was an epic, an Odyssey, but one
Where Odysseus never makes it
Back to Ithaca. He spends his life
In a foreign city where no one
Recognizes him. He eats Cuban-
Chinese congee instead of Greek
Avgolemono or a sheep roasted
On a spit and dreams in English
With a New York accent. Home
Was in poems they would probably
Never write. The epics wouldn’t
Be finished because that wasn’t
Something I knew how to teach.
I watched ballet dancers walk
Out of the studios in mid-afternoon
Sunlight, priests and priestesses of
A religion of the body, of movement—
There was a famous choreographer
Who limped badly, an old injury,
While the Chagall murals windowed
At the Met hung like a blue sky
Above tragedy. That was all forty
Years ago. Now, Cuban-Chinese places
Are returning to Manhattan—I saw
One on Amsterdam the other day. I don’t
Know what happened to my students, but
I doubt any are still alive. I divorced,
Married, and divorced again. Only
Christina Rossetti still sits in her room,
Writing, her heart breaking for a little love,
And patient Whitman still watches from
Brooklyn Ferry.

* 

When We First Met

When we first met, there was a café
Down the block from your building where I’d
Wait for you, drink coffee, then drink more,
And try to understand what love meant,
What we wanted when we kissed and held
Each other beneath the quilt in your
Bedroom, the light from the street slipping

Between your curtains, and our faces
Slowly growing visible, outlined
By pillows and desire. I’d drift off
Thinking about it, your white shoulder
Illuminated for a second
By that line of dim light, my lips pressed
Hard against your back. What I wanted

Then I couldn’t name, and I still can’t
Name. Desire is always incomplete—
It can’t be satisfied by skin pressed
To skin, by the body’s exhaustion.
I wanted to make you part of me,
Be part of you as well. I wanted
To disappear in you, utterly,

Then return as someone different,
Changed by you in a way I couldn’t
Change myself, become someone unknown
To me. Our lives before unravel,
A ball of string in a labyrinth,
A flash of light crossing the night sky.
They’re of no help to us. Whoever

We were with other people is not
Who we are now, knowing that hearts stop,
That bodies grow cold, insensible,
That we have this time and no other.
Or maybe we’ve been changed by desire
Itself, maybe desire is its own
Object, something we can’t express but

Can become. Tomorrow night, I’ll grill
Some fish and potatoes and green beans.
I’ll pick you up at the train station,
And I’ll sit in the car the way I
Used to sit in that café, thinking
About words we say to each other,
The warmth of your hand against my cheek.

*

After a Rain
            For Nathan Horowitz

It’s been raining all day, and now I’m tired.
I want to brush my teeth and stretch beneath
Dry, smooth sheets. The dog is sleeping
On his back on the couch I bought on sale
At Costco—an ugly, off-white color with nibs
That scratch at any exposed skin. But the dog

Loves it. I understand, sort of. There are old
Sweaters that make me feel good. I relax
When my shoulders slip into place, and my
Elbows bend the fabric exactly where
They should. I talked this evening with friends

From Maryland and New Mexico, New Hampshire
And Canada. No one feels relaxed or happy
With how their lives are slipping into place. We’re
All older—most protested Vietnam or the war
Reagan planned for Nicaragua and could only
Carry out in secret. The country then was less

“Compliant” and less used to … what?
Paramilitaries shooting our neighbors? One
Friend described poetry as “urgent thought”
And said that thought generates its own music.
I hope that’s true, but I’m afraid my urgency,

If not my thought, is lost in disappointment.
I was naïve, for sure. I wouldn’t have
Admitted it, but I believed in that “arc of history”
That “bends toward justice.” Now, every news
Website says the opposite. This afternoon, I read
Shelley for reassurance, not that everything would

Turn out well, but that we could still respond.
George III was certainly mad—forget his porphyria.
He probably thought the massacre of farmers
At Manchester was fit and just punishment for
Complaining. Somewhere, a prince-regent waits

For his cue. I wake the dog and take him for
A walk before I go to bed. The houses are
Dark. Worries about wars and presidents
Are not visible, and the next election is
Months away. In an apartment high rise
Across the street, someone is standing on

A balcony looking out. From up there, he—
I think it’s a man—can see the lights
Of the shopping center and the YMCA.
From up there, everything must look
Almost normal.

*

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

Three Poems by Lucy Griffith

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

What is saving me

How the tracks of turkey
in the talcum dust
show the joints of his middle toe
as if a piece of rebar
went for a walk.

I’m two-syllable
tired of the chaos―
so I take my own hand,
like a toddler,
bend low to the ground,

see the spider take cover
in the tiny cap of an acorn.
I want to crawl in with her,
to share
her makeshift cave,
her sheltered outlook.

To soften towards the world,
I watch an armadillo plow
for bugs in the powdered earth.
Notice her nose, white with age and industry,
wonder the sad story
of that round hole in her left ear.

* 

Living by Ear

One May midnight, a million wings overhead stirred the air, flowing south. Nearby the aching volta of loon cry. Camp in the desert, the sound of no sound. The whistle of mourning dove wings. A nighttime prayer of calling owls. The sharp retort of buck fight, skirmish after skirmish. Black vultures soft wingbeats sound like the shake of a loose-skinned hound. Their cousins, turkey vultures, glide on thermals in utter silence. Porcupines purr in the trees after dark. Carolina wren stakes his claim with a stuttering sound like a thumb running down a comb.

at dawn the moon set
in the lap of attention
a shard of opal

* 

Knowing that this can’t go on forever

We joke It’s datenight day
Mostly Saturdays, taking turns.
Plan, shop, pick a theme, type a menu,
add a relevant soundtrack.
Our house aromatic for hours.
No TV. No phone. Shower. Dress up a bit.
Take each other’s pulse.
Weekly report: Sightings of roadrunner, coachwhip, brushfire.
What made us laugh: a back and forth with raven,
the fox’s post-nap yoga. Shared worries: fragile democracy,
ethnic cleansing of the neighborhood, cruelty and
shocking depravities. How to cope or how we’re not.
Perhaps a dance: one swing, one slow.
Then leaning against each other
in front of the fire, its own prolonged sunset.
Listening on the porch for owls, or
turkeys laughing on their way to roost.
Ask fresh questions.
I share where to toss my ashes,
not there, the next rock over.
You share I want to go first and fast.
We reach for each other’s hand―
because we can―
hoping to brake the speed of time.

                             ~ title from Jason Isbell’s “When We Were Vampires”

*

Lucy Griffith lives beside the Guadalupe River near Comfort, Texas. As a retired psychologist, she explored the imagined life of the Burro Lady of West Texas in her debut collection, We Make a Tiny Herd, earning both the Wrangler and Willa Prizes. Her second collection, Wingbeat Atlas, pairs her poems with images by wildlife photographer Ken Butler, to celebrate our citizens of the sky. The Place the Spiders Waved, a memoir in verse, was a Willa Finalist. She’s been a Bread Loaf scholar, a Certified Master Naturalist and is known to stare at the river for long periods of time.

HIT ME! by Grace Alvino

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

HIT ME!

The man who juggles in
Rittenhouse Square stabbed
two people in 2020. He calls
my dog a scavenger when he
sees her at the fountain. It is
her favorite place to sit so I
don’t make her move.

I tell my mom about him
but not what happened to
my neighbor. She was walking
her dog when a man hit
them with his cane.

I have always wanted to
get in a fight.

I asked an ex to hit me
once, which he thought
was very funny. He could get
angry, so no one believed
he treated me well.

A man has started bringing
me gifts at work. He pays
someone to paint a picture
of my dog and I don’t know
what to do so I keep it
in my backpack.

It rides back and forth
with me on the subway.
My counselor would tell
me, Remember: you
got out.

That is, unbelievably, true.
I closed the door and left
their house by myself. I can
change my face so no one
bothers me on the subway.

You shouldn’t call yourself
crazy, my boyfriend says.

I have told him how, when I
lived in Charlottesville, there
were months when I was
afraid to go outside. I would
walk my dogs and there would
be no one around me.

I moved to the city to see
people on the street. I don’t
know what I expected them
to do: the other men in
the house had laughed
when I left.

Someone at work calls
me a people-pleaser. I
agree because I want to
keep my job.

What I should have said
is, How are you so sure?
I have never wanted to
make anyone else happy.

When I get angry, my
boyfriend says I should
beat him up. I don’t hit him
in case it doesn’t hurt.

I have started telling him
about the things men have
said to me in public. A few
years ago, in Rittenhouse
Square, a man told me he
wanted to fuck my dog.

Keep walking, my mom
would’ve said. Her favorite
piece of advice is, It’s not
worth it.

Once, at a Christmas
party, her friend tried to
kiss me. I told her and she
said that he was drunk.

When I mentioned it,
years later, to an ex, he
asked if I would still drink
if I had not been raped. It is
remarkable how easy it was
to answer.

In June, I took an early train
to work. I didn’t realize
there were cops a block
away; that after, I would
hear them laughing.

I thought I was alone on
the street. I only felt the
man when he tried to
smell my hair.

He said something that
I did not hear. It was not
an apology and I did not
back up.

I was not afraid of anything
he could do. I have only been
hurt by people who feel safe.

Move, I said, and it sounded
like, Hit me. I stepped forward
and it sounded like, Hit me.

I wanted what no one had
asked me for: permission.

*

Grace Alvino’s work has been or will be featured in Four Way Review, Barrelhouse, Cleaver Magazine, Mudroom, The Ex-Puritan, Grist, and more. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Virginia, and she lives in Philadelphia with her boyfriend and their dog and cat. You can find her on Instagram at @gray_cious.

Together Downtown by Lois Perch Villemaire

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Together Downtown

Mom held my hand
along the streets
of Philadelphia
making our way
through the crowd
from Wanamaker’s
to The Automat for lunch.

She placed coins in my hand
allowing me
to unlock a glass cubbie
displaying my choice:
an egg salad sandwich,
slice of lemon meringue pie

Walking back to the train,
side-stepping metal grates
on the inner edge of the sidewalk
leading to basement areas
afraid if they gave way
I would tumble into a dark abyss.

My eyes turned from
unfortunate souls
disabled in some way
sitting beside buildings
with a bowl and a cardboard sign.
Mom took my hand
leading me along to Reading Terminal.

*

Lois Perch Villemaire is a poet from Annapolis, MD. She is the author of My Eight Greats, a family history in poetry and prose and a chapbook, Eyes at the Edge of the Woods. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Spillwords, Third Street Review, and elsewhere. Villemaire, a Pushcart nominee is a contributing writer to AARP-The Ethel. She enjoys art journaling, works at the library, and propagates African violets.

Three Poems by David Chaudoir

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The Anthropologist: Arrival Trope

I came to study the grief of others
and found I already spoke the language.

The notebook. The measured distance kept like a clean
wound. I wrote: the men sing when the nets come in empty.

I did not write what the singing did to me. How I stood
at the useful edge of their sorrow, making it useful.

The tropics are always sad. Even the light arrives
gold and slow, the way memory works

on a life you meant to observe. I had methods. I had a tent.
I thought: I will not be changed by this. I took very good notes.

* 

Moose

Not often seen in captivity: that enormous,
improbable head, the wide-splayed hooves,
a body so large it seems assembled from surplus parts—
built not for display but for sheer endurance
of difficult places.

Its great bulk tuned so precisely to the cold
that warmth becomes a kind of illness.
To keep one is to ask the impossible:
a sky that stays grey and biting,
an earth that thaws only halfway,
an air that carries woodsmoke
and the cold of a northern November.

I have been told I am like this.
That I require conditions no one can sustain.
That I materialize and vanish,
that I will not suffer the indignity of being known
at regular hours, in good light,
by people who mean well.

Maybe. But consider what I’m built for:
the frozen lake, the dense stand of birch,
a world that asks endurance and gets it.
Not every large thing should be kept warm.

*

Wyoming

Turn in now, brother,
lay down your name
in the sage and the silence—
let the sky take it.

Out here the dark has teeth.
The dinosaurs knew
this dark.
Stars from here to gone.

You are small.
Feel how good
that is.

Lay down with me here
where the Tetons
were still ocean.

*

David Chaudoir is a writer and anthropologist. His work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Notre Dame Magazine, El Portal, and Third Wednesday. He won the 2025 Perkoff Prize in poetry. He translates Arabic and Tajik literature and lives in Indiana.

Too Many Bicentennial Pens by Betsy Mars

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Too Many Bicentennial Pens

That summer after junior year Kathy and I had our first job
in a building full of mostly empty rooms. What is it about 17?
On the edge of adulthood, nearly there at last.

Here at least, we were equal to cheerleader Debbie
with her shiny Dorothy Hamill wedge cut
as we worked side by side. Now we were only voices
on the phone dulling her beauty’s brighter edge.

We met in the dark in the parking lot each morning
before 5 (to get cheaper telephone rates), our targets
the eastern states, were done by 8.

We grabbed phone books from the pile,
flopped in bean bags with our dial phones,
dialed businesses out of state—Dave’s Auto Glass
or Bob’s Barber Shop—and got the owner on the line.

If our pitch worked, we’d transfer them to the waiting salespeople,
always men, in the other room, preparing their bait.

The story was always the same: we’d had an overrun of pens
for a place with the same name and, lucky for them,
they could have those pens at a bargain rate, take them
off our hands, prevent waste—a nice bit of publicity, a gift.

It was the Bicentennial and at seventeen what did we know
of grift? We were heartless and loved to get a bite.

When our shift was over, we’d head to the beach to sleep it off,
dream of fireworks, dread the coming of the fall
when we would no longer be glamorous secretaries,
à la Mad Men, but back to class, once again

invisible in the halls.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Betsy’s poems are widely available online and in print, most recently in ONE ART, Calul, Book of Matches, and the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered The Motown Poetry Review (Madville Press). Her photos have appeared in various journals, including Spank the Carp and Rattle. Betsy has had two chapbooks published, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-authored with Alan Walowitz. Additionally, through her publishing venture (Kingly Street Press) she released two anthologies, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife and Floored. A full-length book, Rue Obscure, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Stopping at the Chinese Grocery Store in Sanxiantai, Taiwan by Jean Voneman Mikhail

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Stopping at the Chinese Grocery Store in Sanxiantai, Taiwan

There lies the sea slug—bucketed.
All foot and travel, all hungry
suck of the cave’s dusk-lung.
Forlorn-ness enlarged,
but when sunken
a shrinking under the cold
eye-white wave caps.
We’ve spent the night at
a guest house nearby.
Our eyes becoming one big blur.
A shape of sleep, the cliff
drops rocks, as in easy sleep
your foot breaks off from the bed.
Your shallow dreams follow
an alluvial thread, circling
around your brain as around
a sea anemone. We are hungry—
but not for it.
Our faces’ loose fire.
Our hair, cliff-wind-rock combed through.
Having climbed high above the sea
near Sanxiantai, we descend
to find some good seafood.
Here, at the Chinese market,
we stand and stare into the bucket,
where the eyes of the creature
are next to impossible to see.

*

Jean Voneman Mikhail is a former librarian and Composition Instructor who lives in Athens, Ohio. She has published in One Art, Gyroscope Review, New Verse News, Sheila Na Gig Online, Autumn Sky Daily and other journals and anthologies. In 2025, she was nominated for “Best of the Net” by Eucalyptus Lit.

Orientation by Jacob Butlett

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Orientation

During my first week as a sales associate
at the Kennedy Mall, the assistant manager,
a white woman in a tight black blouse,
told me in a low voice, I’m not racist,
but many of the customers who steal
from us are Black, so keep that in mind.
I was speechless. Behind me, lava lamps
glowed bright red, as if blood were oozing
in their cylindrical prisons. I was seventeen.
A closeted white boy from Iowa. My high school
teachers warned me about casual racism—how it
can come across as benign but is really evil.
I looked at my assistant manager as she hurried off
to ring up a customer, & I wondered whether
my co-worker was evil for saying such a thing.
I stood stock-still by the lava lamps, not knowing
whether to be offended, glancing at the luminous
blobs drooping again & again. I felt like that,
melting from the inside out, burning hot.

*

Jacob Butlett has an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He teaches first-year composition at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and works as the Head Poetry Editor at Blue Earth Review. Jacob’s creative works have been published in many journals, including Colorado Review, The Hollins Critic, Crab Orchard Review, and Lunch Ticket. Jacob received an Honorable Mention for the Academy of American Poets Prize (Graduate Prize). He is the author of the poetry book Stars Burning Night’s Quiet Rhapsody (Kelsay Books, 2024).

Four Poems by Leila Abeni Jackson

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IN THE TIME OF GLASS CAPTIVES

Days were measured in indices of refraction. I woke with a fever and, inexplicably, bleeding toes, as though I had been dancing. An ocean of sweat, its tendrils the sheets. I ran a cold shower. Days were measured in millimeters thick. It started with a watchtower, a bottomless brunch, a discussion of Guantanamo Bay. Around me, people were eating and regurgitating and so I did the same. They spoke of faceless men, palm trees, salt flats. Days were measured in relative efficiency. They piled their plates high and I thought of Kilimanjaro. I excused myself to the bathroom, sweaty and hotcold. When I looked in the mirror, I had a fly’s thousandfold eyes, each surface its own wide and wriggling creature. In the time of glass captives, days were measured in ghosts, in depth of stomach, in eighty-five seconds to midnight. Back at the table, Guantanamo was old news. They were discussing sponsorships and calling for more mimosas. I saw peristalsis thousandfold, villi swaying tirelessly like kelp forests. Like a snake, something in me unhinged its jaw for more.

*

MANY SMALL CRESCENDOS

I was born with my eyes wide open, milky and dark, or so the story goes. In this way, I took the minutes. I bet on black. They shot her in the middle of a busy street, the sun washing its chyme out of her hair, touching her mouth like it intended to climb inside. She spoke charitably about it afterwards: I would tell young girls to follow their dreams, that you can do anything you set your mind to. Magnified and scraping the sky, lips parted. There were clothes, but there weren’t. There were faces, but not really. The next day I went to the body shop. Really, I didn’t know better. I wanted to see it for myself: whose hand, whose cheek, whose swath of knee, which small crescendos went where. They shimmered in the low light. Some of them grew legs. In that moment, it was just somebody’s horrifying basement, some collagist gifting my face to a new naked body. My same forehead. My new hands. It was the same but it was different. Every day the same liver, every night a new vulture. It was a thunderstorm stealing my face, she said, rolling over my body. But it wasn’t real, and anyway, it happens to everyone. You get over it; you move on. This was the radio on a Sunday afternoon, while I was washing the sun’s vomit out of my favorite skin. Supposedly they shot her on a balcony, back to the stars, Venus peeking out from behind her neck like an earring. It wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter. In this way, I took note. I bet on black. The Milky Way beheld us wide open, or so the story goes. I wouldn’t know; I closed my eyes.

*

PULMONARY EMBOLISM

How a bubble in a hose can kill the diver to whom it rushes
To deliver its gifts. How sometimes pain is mistaken
For progress. How I, thinking I would not wake, woke—
Flushed with cold and pressed to a stranger, who said,
With no mouth, you could have died. I chose to take it
As a welcome back, then changed my mind and went with
A simple hello. Until then, I’d had recurring dreams about
This waking up. The curious business of being rearranged
With my eyes closed, like a repeated loser of the shell game,
Never guessing which one hides the stone. It seemed too
Simple to be true—I lived, and so I won—when really,
I’d guessed wrong again and had no idea where the stone
Had hidden itself away. It was too soon to tell, they said,
Whether it was in fact out of my lungs, or whether it was
Giggling somewhere I’d forgotten to check, a hidey-hole
I’d thought was out-of-bounds. I had recurring dreams
About guessing wrong again, though at each moment
You were there to find the right shell, squirreled away.
Oh, love. How I’d laughed with you, felt the air shoot
Up and out, bellies pressed together like rounded drums
When meanwhile, up north, that stray dog in all its
Ravenous beauty scavenged for the most comfortable
Front porch it could find, and my lungs, ever the hosts,
Opened the back door wide.

*

THE TESTAMENT OF ANARCHA

                 I
Shuffled first by my boy—at least I thought
he was a boy, because I once heard
that boys sit higher up—he shuffled me then ran,
giggling, to some light-dark place I knew
I could not follow. After the second day of pushing,
they whispered, she might die, and I thought, good.
I could hold his hand on the way there.
Maybe there would be music.
Shuffled a second time by the doctor,
though he looked more like a grave-robber
to me. Couldn’t imagine what he was possibly doing
except robbing the grave of my grave.
Didn’t stop the blood or the whatever else,
but may have made something entirely new.
Not a child but a monster. He said
you are loathsome, disgusting.
The girls whispered—they said this monster
has thirty faces and all of them are cold
with metal teeth here to chew me up
from the inside. The girls held me down.
I was shuffled twenty-nine more times
and they held my shoulders, my hair,
stuffed a sand-white rag between my teeth
so that I could not speak or scream.
Was it normal? To sweat this much?
Was it normal not to know four years had passed
and yet know I was still loathsome, disgusting?
Littered with debris like some stray animal,
I had long ago accepted that this was hell.
Some days I was a tilled field,
others an axed tree. Often I was the moon,
waiting to be plucked from the sky
by the next steel trap. The girls were all my age.
Sometimes I wondered if their sons ever giggled at them
from behind a light-dark veil every night.
Though we weren’t friends, they wiped my sweat.
Sometimes they cupped my face, like mothers.

                 II
I woke engulfed in tongues of sand, swathed
carefully like a newborn. There was music.

A hundred hands touching me—not to stuff rags between
my lips, but to gently carry away the sobs and spit

born there. An old woman lay on my left, a stranger
whose name I somehow knew, her brown skin sagging

and flaking from its home like paper. She held my hand.
The women whisper-chatted amongst themselves,

breasts all bared like new mothers who had forgotten
their shame. They helped me to my feet, bathed

me in the surf until I stopped saying loathsome, disgusting,
until I forgot the shape of the words in my mouth.

There was music. There were hands in my hair,
teasing it into shapes. I thought there would be fire, I said.

The women laughed, as a bird laughs when staring down a rifle:
as though carrying the knowledge that only a chosen few are blessed

with flight. I had no pain, and whether or not I had scars
didn’t seem to matter. My dead skin snowed off in sheets

below the buttery and unplucked moon. I did not tell them
that I had met the Devil, the endless hollowings,

the deaths of all I’d never owned. I didn’t have to.
They already knew. When I held still, there was music.

*

~ Author’s Notes ~

“In the Time of Glass Captives” is after Evan Antonakes’ “Crack”.

“Many Small Crescendoes” is dedicated to the increasing number of women who, due to advances in artificial intelligence, have had their face and likeness used without their consent. AI pornography is a deeply violating reality. Like other concerns addressed in this collection, it robs people of ownership over their bodies.

“The Testament of Anarcha” pays homage to Anarcha, a seventeen-year-old enslaved girl who underwent over thirty gynecological surgeries without anaesthesia to treat her vaginal fistula and to serve as a test subject for research in the field. Her tormentor, J. Marion Sims, is still honored today as the “father of gynecology”. In his autobiography, he repeatedly describes her body as “loathsome” and “disgusting”.

*

Leila Abeni Jackson is a proud DC native and a Pushcart-nominated Harvard undergraduate studying English and History of Science. Her work appears in the Harvard Advocate, Rattle, Sixteen Rivers Press, and elsewhere. She is the former poetry editor of the Harvard Advocate and her most recent work includes her senior thesis, Uncharted Song, a poetry collection which explores Blackness and the medical body through time.

Two Poems by Enas Suleiman

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Run

Pick up your dress and run
if you trip over your slip
remove your dress.
As you run
collect love poems on the way,
put them in the biggest jar you find.
Keep the jar by your bedside
so when the morning light
begs your eyes to open,
you will find it all there –
safe and intact.

*

Dust

The window is shut,
orange curtains drawn
yet dust finds its way
into the drawers
I have reserved for you.
Come.
Help me fix the cracks
so we can be.

*

Enas Suleiman is a Sudanese poet and author of Tidal Waves (2019). Growing up in Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, her writing often explores themes of identity, migration, social injustice and the complexities of grief. Residing in Dubai, she is currently editing her second poetry collection.

Golden Oldies by Marc Alan Di Martino

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Golden Oldies

The way I talk to you is this:
I tune my car radio

to the local oldies station
kill the engine and listen

as your voice traverses
the distance between us

resurfaces as a tune—
the Drifters, the Platters—

“This Magic Moment”,
“The Great Pretender.”

It’s then I recognize you.
You’ve come for me

with a little nudge to say
it’s all ok—and though

I don’t believe in afterlives
I know better than to look away.

Who needs cemeteries?
We control the airwaves.

*

Marc Alan Di Martino is a poet and translator whose books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco (World Poetry, 2024 – Winner of the 2025 Joseph Tusiani Italian Translation Prize & 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation finalist), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Apple Valley Review, Bad Lilies, The Shore and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best Literary Translations 2027. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

Early Bird by Julia Caroline Knowlton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Early Bird

So glad I got
a good spot

parallel parked
in a secret part of sky

near your heart
(right in front

of the entrance in fact)
waiting for it to open

*

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

Knowlton is Guest Editor of ONE ART’s In a Nutshell: an anthology of micropoems.

Three Poems by Clint Margrave

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

House Hunters

Always at dinner, we watch
an episode of House Hunters International,
dream about leaving our jobs
and moving abroad:
Prague, Costa Rica, Helsinki,
Australia, Mexico.

We guess which of the three places offered
the featured couple will pick.
Make our own selections.
We always agree
we like the best one
and are often wrong
about the one they choose.

We gasp at the deals you can get
on a spacious apartment
in Spain, Portugal
or just about anywhere
outside of LA.

Last night it was Lyon
and we dreamt of sipping
a bold Bordeaux
on the tiled terrace of a house
the couple considers
then rejects.

Nearly all the couples
are younger than us,
mostly in their late twenties
or early thirties,
some with kids,
some without.

Both of us over fifty,
we wonder if it’s too late
to pack up and leave
for another country.

We know this is the youngest
we’ll ever be again.
We met when we were
no longer kids and too old
to have kids
which sometimes we regret.

And, of course, not once in 150 episodes
has anyone ever said,

“We hate this place,”
“the biggest mistake of our lives,”
“we are getting divorced.”

And I suppose it’s better
that way. We don’t always want
to see too much reality
in a reality show.
I suppose it’s better to just dream
of living a different life,
as we finish our plates.

*

The Timeless Café, Sofia

It can be a bit mysterious to find,
Tom says. The entrance is down a ramp
behind a building, by an empty garden.

At the door, no hours are posted. Inside,
the lights are kept low, candles flicker
on wobbly tables, chairs old and rickety

like the grandmothers with canes
you pass on the streets, backs bent,
carrying bags of vegetables and yogurt.

On the menu, no extra sides of time
or desserts sweetened by the promise
of eternity, just the usual fare.

* 

Night Guard

The dentist suggests I wear
a night guard on my teeth.
She can see little cracks forming.

She pulls up an image
of the inside of my mouth
and projects it on a screen.

I’m here for a routine checkup,
after months of cancelling
and rescheduling appointments.

“It’s important to take care
of your teeth as you age,” she says.

I don’t argue. I know she’s right.
There is a lot to take care of as I age,
a lot of little cracks forming.

Not to mention the need
for something to guard me
against the night.

*

Clint Margrave is the author of three poetry collections: The Early Death of Men, Salute the Wreckage, and Visitor, all from NYQ Books. He is also the author of the novel Lying Bastard (Run Amok Books) and editor of Requiem for the Toad: Selected Poems of Gerald Locklin (NYQ Books). Some of his poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, B O D Y, and New York Quarterly, with nonfiction in The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review and Los Angeles Review of Books. He recently served as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Bulgaria, living in Sofia, and teaching creative writing at Sofia University.

Two Poems by J.R. Solonche

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MILKWEED

I miss the milkweed that stood
in the ditch like dusty soldiers,
their stems full of thick white blood.
Their leaves were rough tongues
licking the air. Their flowers were
clusters of small pink bells ringing
for the monarch who travels alone.
I miss the scent of heavy honey in
the noon heat, and the pods, green
boats carrying cargos that grew
until the seams could no longer hold.
I miss how they broke open into clouds
of silk, spilling brown coins with white
wings. I miss how the air was suddenly
full of floating ghosts, drifting low over
the earth. They are gone. I miss them.
They’ll never be back. That’s the law.

*

SUPERMAN

I wasn’t interested in Superman comics
as a kid until I learned he was Jewish,
until I learned that Siegel and Schuster,
two Jewish guys in Cleveland, invented
him, until I learned his birth name, Kal-
El, is Hebrew for the voice of God and
his father, Jor-El, means God will uplift,
until I learned they were sons of the Pale
of Settlement, knew the story of the clay
man in Prague, built a savior out of ink
and paper whose strength was the hope
of the persecuted and changed his name
to Clark to sound like everyone else, put
an “S” on his chest as a sign of the law.
He was a Moses. In a cradle built from
the ruins of home, he crossed the dark
sea of the stars alone. His Egypt was
Kansas where the Kents found a boy
who grew up on corn. He wore the suit
his mother sewed for him. The red cape
was a piece of his father’s shroud. It was
an old prayer—the only prayer Yahweh
has ever answered.

*

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.

Between Catch and Release by Pam Crow

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Between Catch and Release

                     Playa Blanca, Mexico

The man’s fishing pole looks like it might bend in half as he struggles
        to reel it in, knee-deep in the tide. Early morning,

no one else on the wide swath of sand but two young men
        setting up the beachfront restaurant. The same two men

who laughed with us last night about a crocodile they caught,
        made into tacos. One presented my wife with one white tooth.

Now they come running. No words are spoken as they help
        haul this stingray to shore, one holding down the dangerous tail.

The fisherman takes his time working free each treble hook barb
        from the pale underside. The belly? The face?

The eyes are on top, watching, when it is turned over,
        an exotic creature that does not belong on dry land.

He slides his hands under it the way my mother
        would lift a rolled out pie crust to lay it over a pan of fruit,

spreading his arms wide to cradle each wing-like fin.
        These days in our country, I can forget such tenderness exists.

He wades into the ocean to release the ray and it slips into the waves,
        rippling like silk as it swims away.

*

Pam Crow is an award-winning poet who lives in Portland, Oregon. Pam’s work has been published in Green Mountain Review, Carolina Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and other national journals. She is the winner of the Astraea Emerging Lesbian Writers award and the Neil Shepard award for poetry. Her book Inside This House was published by Main Street Rag press in 2008.

boeing 737-900 from oregon to minnesota, 6:35am by Everix Machan

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boeing 737-900 from oregon to minnesota, 6:35am

forehead against frost-blossoming windows
headphones rattling against glass, tapping
faster than a sewing machine’s needle &
silence descends despite the flickering light strip
i wonder how to compose poetry about
something other than dying or isolation
so i don’t mention the ancient craftsmanship
of land felted in dirt—instead i watch as
quilted velvet pinks & greens drape softly
over 1700 miles of rolling cleaved farmland
surged together by pavement & rushing water
gleaming silver seams sundering the land
like carved edges of softened fondant
i don’t point out how the mountains look
like styrofoam box corners buried in cotton
surrounded by lakes of ripped tin foil &
buildings scattered like spilled shards of glass
littering the only home we’ll ever know
i watch the sun kiss the snow with blush-orange
& imagine sitting cross-legged on the plane wing
reaching out to carve my fingertips through
the mist of early morning over the peaks
but a migraine is blooming in my temples,
sleep staining the underside of my eyelashes
bluer than stirring night skies in april—your
knee is centimeters from mine and yet i just
can’t tell you to look how the lakes look like
spilled mercury burrowing into the earth
so maybe this is more about being alone
than i ever intended it to be

*

Everix Machan (he/him) is a queer, transgender, and autistic undergraduate poet from Wisconsin. You can find his poetry published or forthcoming in None of the Above, DYONYZINE, Flowermouth Press, The Gentian, Yīn Literary, The Sandy River Review, The Branches, and The Rebis.

Pride by Irene Axel

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Pride

There is a gentle glow

that comes of

a task well done

or a song well sung

or accomplishing

what you set out to do

or even—

accomplishing what you didn’t.

When they talk about a coming out

as if it’s a singular occurrence,

they usually mean

to those important to you,

such as your parents.

I’ve had an equal number of crushes

on boys and girls

(then men and women)

over the years,

and you would think

my parents would have noticed.

And they probably did,

but if it didn’t fit

their view of me,

then it didn’t happen.

So when I “liked”

my friend,

named for a flower,

and to me—

in my hormone haze—

as beautiful as one,

especially

when she sweat enough

that her glasses slid down her nose

in chemistry class

and she tried and failed

to blow the tendrils

of hair

off her sticky forehead,

and we went on outings

and hung out

and talked about our hopes and dreams,

and then tried

to keep in touch

through college

and the military,

until she got married

and changed her name

(the first one too),

and I hoped she was happy,

and what was left in my chest

for her

was aching

for a different life

where we may

have been together.

And later,

when I brought home a man

and we hung out

and talked about our hopes and dreams

and kept in touch—

but even then,

to me,

he was only ever

a friend.

My mom—

drunk again—

told me she was so glad

I hadn’t “turned out” gay.

And into my stunned disbelief

(which shouldn’t have contained surprise,

but did)

she walked this back

by saying,

“That would make life harder for you,”

as if

my life wasn’t made hardest

by her

and her lack

of ability

to see me.

So when I tell my friends

in passing conversation,

or when I talk with my husband

casually

about the people

I’ve dated,

and he responds

with neutral pronouns,

or when I sing

a love song in public

and leave the words alone,

letting she stay she,

these small moments

are flashes of fireflies

coming together to glow.

And while I never confronted my mom—

which honestly

would never have been received,

since she had already

made up her mind about me—

the smaller moments

of choosing authenticity

with people

who actually matter

feel

like

Pride.

*

Irene Axel is a California based poet whose work explores the complexity of loving those who hurt us. This is her first publication.

Three Poems by Jackleen Holton

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Horse Returns

Woken from a dream, deep
as a black lake—
a familiar silhouette appears
in the doorway on the first
day of the new year,
my daughter, born in the horse
year, comes into our room,
afraid of the lightning
flashing in the high windows,
the whip-crack of thunder.
She crawls in between us
as she hasn’t done in years—
never has she known a storm
like this. The clock says
it’s the moment of the horse,
the eclipse that ushers in the year.
Bright fissures in the sky
illuminate the room as she burrows
in, her long, thin legs uncertain
as a foal’s, and cold against mine.
Lightning striking a person is rare,
my husband says. You have to be
the highest point for miles.
I remember my first raging
storm. I was near the same age
when I went to my mother
for the last time.
So, I lie awake, listening
to her breath as it softens,
the rain between thunderclaps
in the just-born year.

*

Challenger

The day the space shuttle exploded
over and over, its gray debris falling
like the feathers of a struck bird,
back down to earth,

I watched in one of the millions
of classrooms darkened
for the occasion,
our desks semi-circled

around a wheeled-in television
as the nation’s collective gasp
dissolved into breathless
silence, the bright

comet-stream of failure
unfurling in real-time.
And Mr. Warner,
eleventh grade English,

who had made it to the final
round of the competition
to be the teacher sent up
on that doomed flight,

slammed his fist down hard
on his desk, a guttural
cry escaping him
as he shot out of the room.

The rest of the semester,
after the explosion
of his rage—
against the government,

against incompetence
in all its myriad forms—
had been extinguished, only grief
loomed over the classroom

he mostly kept in darkness,
allowing us to do as we pleased
as he leaned back, staring up
past the ceiling.

Because what’s the point of anything
once you’ve seen the ashes
of a dream so nearly grasped
fall like a spent firecracker over the ocean?

Nineteen-eighty-six emerged again
the other day, with news of divers
pulling from the sea
a panel of that spacecraft.

While this week, another rocket
is readied for takeoff. NASA says
that soon a woman astronaut
will set foot on the moon.

I haven’t seen Mr. Warner in years,
but today at my kid’s school assembly,
on the playground on a windy
November morning,

I’m remembering him,
and for the first time in decades,
hand over my heart
like a child, I recite

the pledge, lips moving
silently as if in prayer
as I gaze up at the chalk rubbing
of a daytime moon, half-full.

*

Geometry

was simple, surprisingly,
as even the basic math classes
hadn’t been. So easy
that the thick-as-pigshit
footballers came to me for answers.
I tutored a few, enjoyed unparalleled
popularity, though most were content
with a crib sheet on their laps,
or bobbing up and down
behind me in the back of the room.
I was great at intersecting
shapes, they all praised me.
And there were moments
when it appeared, the geometry
of the sacred, clicking into place
and lighting up like a power grid
on the ceiling above us.
The rhombus, I knew instinctively
the parallelogram, the isosceles.
I remember it so clearly: that little study
room behind the library. I look into it now
as if it were an enchanted egg,
and there I am, shining
as I instruct two corn-fed boys
how to triangulate.
I got not one but several A’s that year.
But then came algebra, the numbers
nothing like the angles. I couldn’t
solve for x, didn’t know why the y
kept changing, kept jumping
around on the page,
but the worst thing was that nobody
came to me for the answers
I didn’t have anymore.

*

Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies “The Giant Book of Poetry”, “California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology”, and “Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life”. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Sun and others.

Anniversary by Sydney Lea

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Anniversary

           …the pride and confidence of an absolutely invulnerable stupidity.
                     Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel”

When I look through the glass in our kitchen wood stove’s door,
and when I’m sufficiently tired, as I often am
in my later years, shapes can suggest themselves
and despite myself, I imagine they’re telling me something.

This morning, for instance, I made out a bouquet of flowers.
hot-orange dahlias, I thought, the kind my mother
started raising in her young widowhood.
Last evening after supper, I pictured a church

like the Roman Catholic one commanding a hill
above Lake Memphremagog, its architecture
elegant, a sign that you’re close to Québec,
where you’ll leave the Protestants’ plain white clapboard behind.

On some fairly recent day, I saw forked tongues
of fire, like the ones described in the Book of Acts
that told the disciples their words now bore the spirit
of God. But it isn’t Pentecost here. It’s winter.

These visions, to glorify them by such a name–
I wonder where they come from. What connects them?
I assume they must have something in common because
I’m the one, after all, to whom they present themselves.

I know that I must ward off self-importance,
that mine are not some prophet’s promptings,
no matter my wishes. My father died today
precisely sixty years back. I’ve mourned him since.

If my tongue were cleft and ablaze with godly power,
I’d speak to him. Maybe those wood stove flowers
(were they lilies, not dahlias?) and the spire on that looming church
are what brought his funeral to mind. Mere speculation.

It’s sad that everything’s speculation now.
It wasn’t always that way. There was a time
when in blissful arrogance, I fancied
that I could label all my world’s components,

interpreting each and every one exactly.

*

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.

Three Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Bad News Comes in Threes

I found out my spine keeps narrowing into a funnel,
pinching my spinal cord, like pressing two fingers together,
cutting off blood circulation. I require surgery.
Can I handle surgery at my age? My spine pretzels
into a question mark like a contortionist,
asking questions only a surgeon can answer:

whatever happened to that boy
who climbed up the spine of a tree, into the whirlpool of light
and maple leaves? Or that boy swinging on a rope
over a curved river, letting go, ker-splashing,
surgically slicing open water, as it zipped up over me,

only to discover, much to my chagrin, the hard, recklessness
of boyhood that I could swim for the life of me.
I couldn’t float, and sank to rock bottom, Perhaps, I died,
fished out, spewing water out of my lungs.
Boys are notoriously born without sense of risk or caution.

I never noticed the wear and tear on my body, too manly
to admit defeat, to know when beaten into submission,
but when my primary doctor noticed my hands tremoring
like wind-tossed leaves, she sent me to a specialist.

Now, I have three diagnosis I never had before, each one
cascading worse than the first, like a river over rapids,
like the one I plunged into without thinking about my actions
or reactions. I believe all boys are born with jarred brains.

My nerves have bad and mixed messages, telling me
I am not worthy of this body. My muscles twitch and buckle,
and earthquake with epilepsy. I feel like drowning in currents
of electrical displacement, body jumbling and thrashing.

I recall, once, watching as a car was unable to stop,
smacked a dog, snapping its spine. I could hear the sudden,
sickening thump-whack, a sound lasting weeks afterwards,
the body, crying and promising to taking it to a vet.
As far as I knew, the dog had no owner, no one to return it to,
no known address. From there, the road never went straight.

I’m half-listening to my doctor about the second worse news, ever,
and I’m still wondering about that nameless dog.

*

Kingfisher

A kingfisher’s eyes peers deep
into the mystery of water and the illusion
for a fish’s actual location,
knowing patience rewards those that seek inward.

How quiet its strike, and the more intense quiet afterward.
Patience begins with mindfulness,
intense concentration, and seeing beyond this world.

The blue gill doesn’t stand a chance.
Nature contains both violence and calm.

When the bird’s beak thrusts into the aquamarine water,
its spear finds center mass.
Its beak’s spear shows no mercy,
the water does not shiver with grief.

This disturbance ends abruptly, and quickness crests.
Even my attention focused through binoculars
gets startled by swiftness and resolve.

Water covers up the evidence of death.

My intake and released breath make the kingfisher’s glance,
daring me to judge it
or its need and purpose.

The kingfisher goes back to work, studying for movement.

This world maintains its strange balancing act.

As a medic, I had to gauge who to rescue during war.
I had to decide who wouldn’t make it.
Am I any better than nature?
Is it always about trading one life for another?
Is it about solitude getting re-distributed elsewhere?

This world can include risk or survival.

Everywhere has an element of the quickening,
when moments happen too fast and we’re forced to decide.

*

Why Fishing Lures Are Alluring

I found a tackle box at a garage sale,
and my first thought was to go fishing,
even though I lived miles from water.
The water I knew was a swollen creak
that ran faster than deer from a hunter.
The water ran like it was in panic.
It looked as massive as the Mississippi River.

I never wanted to fish until I saw the box,
opening it like a pirate’s treasure chest,
finding lures flashing back light and colors.
I never considered their hooks dangerous.
All I needed included a fish pole, fishing wire,
a can of worms, an empty bucket to fill with fish.

The box cost a dollar, and I had one
burning a hole in my pocket.

I begged my dad to take me to the lake.
Dad, it’d be fun, we can go fishing together.
When he refused, I deflated like a balloon,
however, no one could stop my stupidly.
I peddled all the way to the state park,
and saw the toll collector, chose a deer trail,
sneaked in. I was bound and determined.

I blanched and almost passed out
trying to hook a worm. I thought I heard
it screaming in pain. It turns out the lake
had no fish when it’s out of season,
and water was about to freeze over. It turns out
I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is editor for Comstock Review. 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; He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize. His 24 full-length collections include Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024). He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize for “One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away in Search of Peace”. Forthcoming is “Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence” (Bainbridge Island Press, 2026).

Life Coach by Greg Stewart

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Life Coach

Once I met with a life coach
whose first hour was 100% free!
During this time my car was towed

The guy at the impound lot suggested
“Next time maybe read the fucking signs”
which was not free

As it turns out
the most useful advice
I heard that day.

*

Greg Stewart is a Canadian poet based in British Columbia. He writes and performs regularly, and has twice been a featured poet at Poetry Floodlight in New Westminster, where he continues to be active in the local poetry community. This is his first publication.

Left Turn by Kevin J. Fellows

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Left Turn

Ever since the accident, I refuse
to make left-hand turns.
It’s always my fault.

The oncoming: unseen, speeding
to strike me; retribution
against my presence,
spins me against the world,
frightening the dog.
No one hurt, but the marks remain.
The turn is always my fault.

*

Kevin J. Fellows is a former technologist but has always been a writer. His poetry is forthcoming in 300 Days of Sun, and has appeared in 34 Orchard, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and others. Kevin also writes fiction and essays.

Baby Hairs by Abigail Wasserman

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Baby Hairs

I study each unruly flyaway,
trace it back to its rooted center—
to the weaning of each child,
the gut punch of the hormone drop,
hair clumping in the shower drain,
my heart
spilled with all that love.

Now I hold each of your small hands—
trace the gentle creases.

I could match each wisping strand
to a morning spent with you
warm in my lap,
or when I cradled your
soft baby fuzz in my palm.

I could mat the hairs down gently,
handle them
like fragile artifacts,
hope they never grow out—
no, hope
I’m ready
when they do.

*

Abigail Wasserman is a writer and educator based in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the New York Times “Tiny Love Stories” and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, wildscape. literary journal, and little somethings press.

MY MOTHER IN MAY by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

MY MOTHER IN MAY

As the crabapple blossoms
blazed pink and more pink,
she began her leaving.
As the lilacs and honeysuckle
began spreading their perfumes into air–
her fatigue deepening,
her steps slowing, the undetected
lesions in her brain burgeoning,
her conversation lessening
as if she needed to be still, listen
for another door opening
as the evening light kept lengthening.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Presence of One Word, and Her Joy Becomes, both from Fernwood Press. A new book entitled The First Good Poem is forthcoming from Fernwood in late 2027. andreapotos.com

My Daughter with MS Has Another MRI by Terri Kirby Erickson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

My Daughter with MS Has Another MRI

For Gia

Soon my daughter will slip into those loose
pajamas sans her silver earrings, necklaces,
and bracelets, as well as the funky shoes she
often finds in thrift stores. She will lie down
on a narrow table which slides into an MRI
with an IV filled with contrast dripping into
her vein. And surrounding her beloved body
that was once part of my body and still feels
that way, is a giant magnet making intermit-
tant loud noises that sound just like a herd
of stampeding horses. So my daughter will
close her eyes and pretend she’s someplace
else—perhaps a beach in Corolla where wild
mustangs roam, as images of her brain and
spinal cord are magically recorded. For me,
this is a time for prayer, for wanting to trade
places with her, for asking that she be healed.
I will approach the throne of my God on my
knees, every part of me a supplicant, a beggar
for mercy. New lesions, if there are any, may
mean more disability, pain, and suffering for
my throwback sixties yet born in the eighties,
bread-baking, bead-wearing flowerchild with
her dreamcatcher collection, piercings, and
colorful tattoos—and the kind of inner light
that no amount of contrast could ever capture.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Light That Follows Us Home (Fall, 2026, Press 53). Her work has received multiple honors, including the International Book Award for Poetry, Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Atlanta Review International Book Award, Gold Medal in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award, Board of Regents Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and many more. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including Aethlon, “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, JAMA, ONE ART, Poetry Foundation, Poet’s Market, Rattle, Sport Literate, The Christian Century, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily among many others. She lives with her husband in North Carolina.

Voyeurism by Lisa Jensen

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Voyeurism

The fog is singing. It might be
a love song. It might be
that every droplet of water

has lungs
and wings
and a heart

pounding

just for this
piece of ground.

Clouds kiss the mud.
I’m caught

between,

trying not to gape,
unable to turn away,
unable to still

my thrumming heart,
unwilling to clip
my sudden wings.

*

Lisa Jensen is a poet and novelist from Nicholasville, KY. She writes the poetry Substack “Wild Ground,” and her debut novel, “All Is Well,” was published in 2025.

Leaving the Music Behind by Yvonne Morris

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Leaving the Music Behind

On occasional Saturdays, my father made pancakes
the size of dinner plates. Sometimes, he’d take down
a harmonica from the kitchen cabinet, play a perky tune
and bounce along to its jittery notes. A break for him
from his workweek at the glass factory. I asked him
on one such morning where the harmonica had come
from as my mother stood nearby. Her eyes narrowed
and her voice barbed, she answered for him. He took it
from an abandoned house in Germany during the war.
Dad’s face shifted into shadow. In that moment, I pictured
another family gathered, listening to a song I didn’t recognize
but knew. I wondered where they were now. Where had they
gone, leaving the music behind?

*

Yvonne Morris’ poetry has appeared in Beach Chair, Eclectica, ONE ART, The Galway Review, The Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. She is the author of Busy Being Eve (Bass Clef Books) and Mother was a Sweater Girl (The Heartland Review Press). She lives in Kentucky.

The Red Piano by Barbara Daniels

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The Red Piano

Something rattles the windowpanes,
flings noisy bursts of gold, red, gold.
I can’t tell gunfire from fireworks.

At a bar, my friend Al lived through
armed robbery, no problem he thought.
Sirens veer into my neighborhood,

amping my heartbeat. But what I hear
as emergency is only the township’s Santa
waving from a slow-moving firetruck.

One year Al set off New Year’s explosions
in our backyard. I have old photographs—
a drink in Al’s hand, his wife Jeanne and me

in our fluffy hairdos, the men not gray yet,
not really. The neighbor who bragged
about guns moved away, leaving his son

and a rotating team of girlfriends.
Another neighbor had her dog
on a leash when a car hit and killed it.

In his last year, Al climbed to the roof
to clean gutters. Let’s go to Paris,
he said then. Perhaps if I kneel and press

my ear to a heating vent, I’ll hear
the old red piano, everyone singing,
toasting, the only explosion our laughter.

*

Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas. She also wrote Rose Fever and four chapbooks: Moon Kitchen, Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and The Woman Who Tries to Believe. Her poems have appeared in Good River Review, Book of Matches, Neologism, Rust & Moth, Lake, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere.
She received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Three Poems by Connie Soper

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Cynthia’s Gift

Sometimes, when the grains of my own private grief
sift through me like sand,
or I am saddened again by the loss of her, I remember
how she gifted me this purple glass
for no reason at all.
It has no use, she said—
won’t hold flowers, can’t pour wine—
yet it pools a lavender essence, mellow
and dusky by the end of the day, color of creeping violets
on their way to summer.
It mirrors itself in the window,
veined with shades of a Murano sunset—
tender on the eyes, bathed in an amethyst wash.
She was luminous that way, bright as the lip of an orchid,
elegant in dress and demeanor.
A lilac-perfumed aura wafted in her wake,
until she slowly faded from herself
and no longer knew my face or name, forgetting, too
what she had given me.
Just something beautiful to look at, she said.
That’s all.

*

Threshold

When I ask where she wants me to leave
her earthly remains, she won’t say, as if

naming a place will take her there sooner.
My mother won’t speak of unpleasantries,

such as the inconvenience of dying.
She won’t talk of hymns, prayers, or the afterlife

she’s bound to enter. Yet here she is,
wearing the weathered skin of a century,

hovering in the purgatory of half-life,
one foot wedged into the other side.

I could shake her ashes onto the beach
where she’ll blend into beige, becoming

the landscape itself. I could recycle her
to nurture a tree, leaving a greener planet.

An urn on the mantle, a crypt, a proper chiseled stone.
It doesn’t matter where she’s left—

she’ll come back. Not in the resurrection
of tulip bulbs proving spring,

but in the stubborn roots of dandelions
I can never yank out.

In her handwriting scrawled on a recipe—
the pie crust only she could make.

I’ll see her face reflected in the mirror, my features
softening into hers.

I can take her to the threshold, karma-kissed and letting go.
Then it’s up to her.

*

Junk to Treasure

Nobody looks at old slides anymore,
those little squares rotating on a Kodak carousel—
Grand Canyon to nameless bridge to yet another monument.
Now boutique shops repurpose them
into found art—lamps with a retro glow,
vintage Christmas ornaments next to the bell-bottoms
in a secondhand store. Junk to treasure.

I take a box from the closet shelf,
hold a slide to the light. Delphi in December—
sky a blue flamboyance over Mt. Parnassus.
Such a tiny image for an enormous place.
I am stepping off the bus from Athens,
knapsack full of books, sweater and apples.
I wonder now who snapped this memory,
then handed the camera back. That’s his shadow,
a dark blotch on the sidewalk,
just before he disappeared into the vortex
of his own epiphany.

Whatever I saw, wherever I stood—
crumbling columns at the ancient temple,
taverna, plaza, dusty paths pocked
with goat hooves—I wanted nothing more
than to hold those moments close, like a face
memorized by touch, one you think will never change.
Here she is, that girl I had forgotten,
arriving all over again.
Ready to become something new.

*

Connie Soper is a poet living and writing in Portland, Oregon. She likes to visit small towns, hike, and walk along Oregon’s public beaches. Many of her poems are inspired by these experiences as well as other travels, and have appeared in Ekphrastic Review, Catamaran, Cider Press Review, Sky Island Journal, ONE ART, and elsewhere. Her first full-length book of poetry, A Story Interrupted, was issued by Airlie Press in 2022.

Three Poems by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Gentrification

Upon the brick wall,
a word.
Five quick passes
of the paint roller
and it became
a nasturtium, an assertion,
an asterisk, a footnote.

*

Mexico City

the Matador swings his cape
my eyes at thirteen
looking for an exit

*

Tooth Fish

In the news one gristly story
takes me back to Brazil,
and me, five or six—the first time
I imagined a world of threat –
an eddy of piranhas, all teeth,
beneath dark water, just waiting
for a small girl to dip in a toe.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Betsy’s poems are widely available online and in print, most recently in ONE ART, Calul, Book of Matches, and the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered The Motown Poetry Review (Madville Press). Her photos have appeared in various journals, including Spank the Carp and Rattle. Betsy has had two chapbooks published, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-authored with Alan Walowitz. Additionally, through her publishing venture (Kingly Street Press) she released two anthologies, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife and Floored. A full-length book, Rue Obscure, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Living Cave by Lisa Angelella

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Living Cave

Given moisture
and time, even limestone
oozes like squeezed fruit
or hot candles
into stalactites,
that hard rock dripping
like summer off
a wet bathing suit
into puddled stone,
that rigid ceiling
reaching down
like melting
scoops over the cone,
or clumping along
the walls and ground
in karst-hard gobs,
though the shifting’s
so slow, loosening
just half an inch
per hundred years,
that our mammal eyes
can never watch
that budge within the rock.

*

Lisa Angelella’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Willow Springs, Tar River Poetry, Rust+Moth and Stoneboat. She teaches English at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa.

The World was moving and she was right there with it and she was— by Victoria Nordlund

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The World was moving and she was right there with it and she was—

here in Bridgeport at the Hartford Healthcare Amphitheater
right behind the 7 ft man at the David Byrne concert
& he was the only one standing in Section 202
& he was raising his hands high in the air,
Drifting this way and that & he reminded her
of that waving inflatable tube creature in front of
used car dealerships & his shirt had ill-drawn clouds with an orange sky
& she was starting to rise but didn’t want to disrupt
the rows behind her & she was wanting to say her piece,
but he had all the rights,
& he was part of every one of her videos
so she stopped recording, wished she had a pleasant elevation
& she was outside & she couldn’t believe it was already May
& she could only see his sunset
& she could almost hear the highway breathing
beyond the Metro North train that she was
watching go by & she almost talked herself into giving up
her tickets for tonight because she heard
it was going to rain & it was a long drive up I95 & the Hantavirus had become a thing
& she was comfortable making excuses & letting her days go by
& she was trying to float now above the anger she felt for this fool
because she heard David Byrne say love & kindness
are the most profoundly punk things we can do
& she was like damn the world sucks so bad right now
& he was turning around & around & shouting the wrong lyrics
& when he sat down between song 11 and 12
& everyone beside her & behind her cheered,
& she realized she hadn’t laughed like this in a long time
& she began moving into the universe of the stage that she could finally see,
started to forget his head was ever in the way,
& when he bolted back up a few songs later,
the same as it ever was,
she knew he heard Section 202’s collective groan
& she was confident he didn’t care.
She decided this was Life During Wartime,
& she was singing along to every verse,
Hey Hey Hey— & she was
recognizing this was once in a lifetime, & she was
missing enough to feel alright—

*

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 Rust+Moth, Chestnut Review, trampset, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com

Perfection by Ann Kriselle

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Perfection

Why do you crave to be whole?
We don’t call the moon ugly,
When it’s not full

*

Ann Kriselle is a full-time Marketer and part-time Writer from India. She is also a trained singer who has competed in multiple national-level competitions. You can find more of her works on instagram.com/ann_kriselle and annkriselle.substack.com

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

Morning at the Jetty

Between the deluge
and the storm to come,
I pause to praise the blue
leaking through dank clouds.

Praise too, the pelicans
diving for breakfast,
the neighbors who wave hello,
fishermen casting lines
into the roiling sea below.

Between the deluge
and the storm to come,
I praise this life as given,
to quell my daily fear
the worst may yet appear.

* 

Progress (Post Intraocular Surgery)

The fruit flies
I swat from my eyes

are smaller sized
than the house flies

from yesterday, which
were smaller sized

still than the crows
from the day before.

*

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.

Icarus by Ellen Rowland

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Icarus
                   After Bryony Littlefair

When you feel better from this someday— and you will— you’ll stop blaming the sun. A wide morning ray will slant through the window, turning rain spots to sequins, and you’ll name the colors. The million greens of the tree line will seem sharper against the white sky. You’ll feel the comfort of the cat against your back and the weight of the blanket in blessed sleep, the scald and steam of shower as it wakes you to skin. You’ll lay out a proper breakfast, open the bright bergamot jam, spread it with a shiny spoon. And you’ll taste again. You’ll taste sun. In the play of light, you’ll see two guitars on the wall—one wooden, the other its shadow—each beautiful. Though there is still no music, there is the memory of a strum. Not that any of this will rewind the fall or heal the distance, but maybe the dust motes suspended in light will dance slowly enough for you to forget, even for a moment, that he had no wings.

*

Ellen Rowland is a writer and editor who leads small, generative poetry workshops on craft and form. She is the author of two collections of haiku and a bi-lingual book of haiku and tanka. You can find her writing in places like One Art, Sheila-Na-Gig, Braided Way, Humana Obscura, and several anthologies, including “The Path to Kindness” and “The Wonder of Small Things” edited by James Crews. Her full-length poetry collections include No Small Thing (Fernwood Press 2023) and In Search of Lost Birds, recently published by Kelsay Books. She lives off the grid with her family on a small farm in Greece. Connect with her on Instagram , Facebook, and Substack.

Two Poems by Alina Kalontarov

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ACROBATICS

In the underbelly of grief
is more grief and beneath that
lies the pit of your stomach.
Daylight brings the catastrophe
of thought and you think
you are always just a thin veil
away from the unthinkable.
But you rise and rinse
the silt from your hair,
your teeth, your bones.
You bottle the balm
of your body and get to work
kicking death like a stone
further down the road.
You come to believe it
somehow wise to chart out
the future with old maps.
(A carousel must be a metaphor
for something, after all.)
You get so deft at the acrobatics
of survival that you learn
to abandon a place
without ever leaving.
You do not notice the sunbeam
that has crawled all day
across the floor just to sit
at your feet.

*

RATIONALE FOR A KISS YOU DIDN’T WANT

Because the air was thick as spit
and he groped your left breast with butter
fingers during a matinee so you took that
to mean he’s laid a claim to your heart.
Because this is how you practiced opening
yourself in the cheap mirror tacked
to your closet door, its silver lick plastic
and pushing back against your softest parts.
Because your father left you stranded
in a man’s world and humility gathered
her skirts the day your mother named you
slut. Because why not. Because you’d slurp
just about anything to dislodge the terror
from the mauve of your throat and if you keep
his face busy he might forget to reach
for the other breast. Because you think
this time it’ll work, and no one ever taught you
to drink from the well of your two hands
and no one ever showed you a better use
for the fire in your mouth.

*

Alina Kalontarov is an educator, poet, and amateur photographer from New York. She collaborates on the editorial teams of various publications and is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee with work that can be found or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, ONLY POEMS, Sky Island Journal, Gather, Thimble, Sand Hills, and elsewhere.

Write a Demi-Sonnet! ~ A Workshop with Erin Murphy

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Write a Demi-Sonnet!
A Workshop with Erin Murphy
Instructor: Erin Murphy
Date: June 11, 2026
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM Eastern

Price: $25 (sliding scale)

>>> Register Here <<<

Readings are recorded and shared with all who sign up.

~ About The Workshop ~ 

In this generative workshop, you will learn to write a demi-sonnet, a form invented by the instructor, Erin Murphy. Demi-sonnets are seven lines (half a sonnet!) and end with a full or slant rhyme. Poet Susan Rich calls the demi-sonnet “a gorgeous and important form,” while Claire Bateman describes demi-sonnets as “small but alarmingly penetrative” and James Allen Hall says they “go by quickly but their staying power is immense.” Read sample demi-sonnets here and here. And here is a prize-winning demi-sonnet by Jennifer Wang written in response to a Rattle magazine prompt. During the workshop, you’ll read and discuss sample demi-sonnets, write one (or several) yourself, and learn how practicing the compressed form has applications for composing and editing both poetry and prose. NOTE: Participants should bring to the workshop 3-5 original poems of 20-60 lines each.

~ About The Workshop Instructor ~

Erin Murphy is the author or editor of sixteen books, most recently Swoon: New and Selected Poems, Human Resources, Mother as Conjunction: Lyric Essays, and Fluent in Blue, winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry. Her collections of demi-sonnets include the new work in Swoon (2026); Taxonomies (2022), Assisted Living (2018), and Word Problems (2011). Her latest anthology is The Book of Jobs: Poems About Work (ONE ART and Penn State University Libraries); a volume of documentary poetry is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Her work has appeared in Ecotone, New World Writing, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, and Bedford/St. Martin’s. Her awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Foley Poetry Award, the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence, and the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award. She is poetry editor of The Summerset Review and professor of English at Penn State University where she has been named the 2026-27 Penn State Laureate. Website: erin-murphy.com

Trebuchet by CL Bledsoe

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Trebuchet

I don’t know much, but I know this:
the flow of wind through your hair just
before the brick wall is the best it gets.
I’m up and not crying, as the Norwegians
say. I’m perched on the wall’s edge like
a fat egg. Call it summer. Call it when
you have no one else to call. My friend
says the flaws in one’s poetry
are the flaws in yourself. That’s why
my poems sleep alone. They talk
too much. They don’t appreciate
how bad it could be.

*

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe’s poetry collections include Riceland, and his newest, Banana for Scale, as well as his latest novel The Moon On My Back. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his kid.

pr nightmare by Matthew Toth

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pr nightmare

each august i plan a sound bite for my dentist
because my mom taught his children 25 years
ago, the school where she discovered me
thanks to a free test from the faculty lounge.
we tend to diagnose most absence as
infinite— my first gender the ultrasound
misread. in between my suicide attempts,
we couldn’t speak to each other, so i took
to wandering the streets without sidewalks,
though it hailed once and she picked me up
before i had to ask. all that year in a mask,
i sat through group therapy in a park during
sunset three times a week, in those plastic
chairs that fold up into slim bags to be worn
on one’s back, passing the long second hours
whispering my lamentations into a lantern,
counting the dim stars of the altadena sky,
wishing only to ride home in silence and
wake up in the driveway of a different
house. i can’t remember what i said to him
when i was 16, resenting the project of
brushing my teeth, anything that reminded
me, i was alive, there was another fire to put out.

*

Matthew Toth (he/they) is a writer and editor from Pasadena, CA. As a student at Kenyon College, Matthew has worked with the Kenyon Review and Sunset Press, a student-run publisher of chapbooks. His poetry can be found in Tinderbox Poetry Magazine, Exposed Bone, and Vagabond City Lit.

Bullet Ant by David B. Prather

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Bullet Ant

          —Paraponera clavata

Pain is a type of initiation, a boy
plunging his hands into gloves
woven from leaves and stinging
ants, followed by twenty-four hours
of agony. If the body survives
paralysis and uncontrollable
spasms, a warrior is born.

The name Bullet comes from
survivors, those who suffered
both venom and gunshot.
But, today, I think only of those
who didn’t make it. And those of us
who couldn’t give a damn about
the comparison. This world is
already too full of warriors.

*

David B. Prather recently won the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize from Madville Publishing for his forthcoming fourth collection, A Heart that Stretches the Length of the Body. His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Chiron Review, Prairie Schooner, etc. He currently serves as the Annual Spring Conference Director for West Virginia Writers, Inc. Website: davidbprather.com

Two Poems by Ann Kammerer

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Little Veils

When we were little,
me and Janie
wore veils to mass—
white ones,
lacy ones,
triangular ones
that Mom
pinned in place
with thin metal clips
so they’d stay put
and wouldn’t slip
from our fine yellow hair.

We wore percale dresses, too—
the same one every Sunday,
matching ones from Sears
with tiny white flowers,
a Peter Pan collar,
and a deep blue sash
with a fake satin sheen.

Mom said to hurry
so I helped Janie dress.
She said Dad got mad
when we dawdled
and made him late
to church.
When we were done—
our sashes bow-tied
and our white Mary Janes
all buckled and shined—
we went to find Mom
as she smoked
in the bathroom,
a hairbrush, bobby pins,
and veils on the sink.

“About time.”
She took a last puff
and tossed her Viceroy
into the toilet,
making it singe.
“Janie first.”

Janie backed away.
Mom grabbed her arm
and pushed her down
on the edge of the tub.

“Good little girls
do what they’re told
Hold still.”

Mom laid the veil
over a knot of snarls,
wedging bobby pins
over and under
each side.

“There,” she said.
“All done.”

Janie sobbed.
I wiped her face
with toilet paper.
Mom stood behind me,
pinning down my veil,
poking my scalp,
telling me to be quiet
when I said it hurt.

“There,” she said.
“You’re done, too.”

She touched my cheek,
then Janie’s,
saying it was OK now.
Fiddling with a loose button
on her faded rose dress,
she draped a black veil
over her wavy brown hair,
smoothing the lacy ends
over her shoulders.

“See,” she said.
“I have to wear one, too,
just like you.”

Mom put on lipstick
and feathered on rouge.
She dabbed tan make-up
on the deep gray circles
beneath her eyes,
then over the
green-purple bruises
on her wrists—
the ones she got when Dad
slammed down his drink
and grabbed her,
pushing her
against the wall.

“We were just
dancing,” she had said later
when she tucked us in bed,
her hair falling over her eyes
as she kissed us goodnight.
“He does that sometimes.
With me. After he has
a bad day at work.”

*

Communion

We always sat
in the same order
in the same pew
at the same mass
at St. Lucy’s.

Dad slid in first,
Mom second,
holding Janie’s hand.
I got in next,
my bare legs sticking
to the unvarnished pew.
My big brother Freddie
sat beside me and
my other brother Charlie
sat at the end,
his head swiveling
as he looked for Theresa,
the Italian girl whose dad
owned Armando’s,
Dad’s favorite bar.

“Quit fidgeting.”
Mom poked me
as I fiddled with my veil
and clicked the beaded latch
on my vinyl purse.
Janie wiggled, too,
kicking the back of the pew.
Dad winced and bent over,
one hand on his stomach,
the other pressed
to his forehead.

“He doesn’t
feel good,” Mom sighed.
“I don’t either.”

Her breath smelled
fruity and sour,
just like it had last night
when she tucked
me and Janie in bed.

“We should’ve skipped
mass,” she said.
“Your dad.
He’s in no condition.”

Mom rubbed her eyes
and licked her dry lips.
The pipe organ echoed
as a boy in a white robe
carried a jeweled crucifix
down the center aisle.
Two boys followed
clutching lit candles.
A third swung
an ornate brass bowl
on a chain,
spewing spicy smoke.
The priest came last,
draped in brilliant sateen,
his hands clasped
atop the copper filagree
embroidered on his robe.

Sun poured through
the stained-glass windows
as the boys reached the altar
and placed the cross
and candles beside
a small, pearled tabernacle
with a golden dome.
The priest stepped up
and raised his arms.
We all stood
in prayer.

“Stand up.”
Mom kicked Dad
in the shin,
but he didn’t move,
mumbling we’d all
be sitting back down
anyway.

“See.”
He muttered prayers
as we all sat and stood
then sat again,
just like he said.
Opening our hymnals,
we sang and prayed
to a father and son
and holy ghost,
then knelt
to bow our heads.

The priest chanted.
The altar boys rang bells.
People rose
from their pews
to walk single file
and kneel at a railing
by the altar.
Folding their hands
they closed their eyes
and opened their mouths,
the priest placing wafers
on their tongues
before they got up
and filed back
to their seats.

“It’s our turn now, right?”
Freddie nudged Charlie.

“Yeah, yeah,” Charlie said.

They stumbled out,
webbing their hands
beneath their chins.

“Wait for me,” I said.
“I want a cookie, too.”

When I started to scooch,
Mom grabbed my sash,
tugging me back.

“No,” she said.
“You can’t go.”

She said I was
too little,
that Janie was
too little, too,
that the boys
were the only ones
who could go
to communion
since she and Dad
had been bad
and missed confession.

“We’ll go next Sunday,” she said,
“after we say a few
Hail Marys and Our Fathers
to get rid of our sins.”

*

Ann Kammerer lives near Chicago, and is from Michigan. Her short fiction and poetry is typically set in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, and examines the tensions and ideals of people living in the rustbelt. She has published fiction and poetry in literary magazines and anthologies, and has five poetry collections through independent small presses. You can find her recent or upcoming work in Fictive Dream, ONE ART, Chiron Review, The Broken Spine, 10 by 10 Flash, Open Arts Forum, Cold Caller Magazine, Cajun Mutt Press, and at annkammerer.com

Not My Circus by Mary Whitlow

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Not My Circus

I was raised on shouting,
learned early to read a room
by the angle of a slammed door,
how to live at the edge
of someone else’s storm.

I grew up a specialist
in everybody’s business,
a magnifying glass for a heart,
stitching stories from half‑heard phone calls,
scrolling Facebook like a crime scene—
searching clues, keeping score,
finger on the pulse
of every cousin’s chaos.

One day I clicked “delete account”
like cutting a wire.
Silence bloomed on my screen.
I whispered a new commandment:

Not your circus
Mind your own business
Stay in your lane

Then the new neighbors moved in downstairs.
Voices rose through the floorboards,
sharp as broken plates.
Old alarms went off in my bones—
that old reflex flaring up again.
I was halfway down the stairs,
barefoot, heart pounding.

I stopped—
I turned around,
climbed back to my own front door,
to the quiet I’ve learned to keep.
On the way, I whispered it,
like beads on a rosary:

Not your circus
Mind your own business
Stay in your lane

*

Mary Whitlow’s work has been published in Mid-Atlantic Review, Philly Chapbook Review and Virginia Writers Project.

Three Poems by Len Kuntz

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Kin

We ran like soiled sheets
haunted by the wind.
There was kin
we’d never heard of
and uncles we knew too well.
At the end of that scabby cliff
there sat a junk tractor, a
black and blue
John Deere rusting in
the sun’s fist.
One of us hopped on,
cranked hard,
as if there was gold
under the hood.
The other pushed it over
the edge without
saying a word.

* 

Seventh Grade

My mother’s new wig is
the carrot color of a robin’s breast,
stiff instead of bouncy.

She hunches over the steaming
oven in our trailer,
topless again, two full moons
drooping during daytime.

It’s been a summer of
forest fires yet she’s smoking
an ashy Tareyton, holding a spatula
with ragu or blood
splattered on the rough end of the spoon.

I have a friend finally. It’s
my first one since moving
to this new park where I’ve
learned there are different
kinds of smoke, all of them
loitering like ghosts with
too much time on their hands.

I feel like coughing
but swallow the scratchy fist
inside my throat instead.

I haven’t looked at her since
she first appeared though
I know it’s almost 3:30 because
the little Pocahontas clock says so.

When I ask Mom if she can
please put a shirt on, I see her
out of the corner of my eye,
chopping air, as if the spatula
is a tomahawk, shooing two horseflies
into the broken window.

Just you wait, she says.

*

Rushmore

We were cemetery kids
unafraid of anything
but our impulses or luck
like how Gordy took out every
car windshield in our
middle school parking lot
that fall when it felt
like summer cheated us again
or how Eddy used a pair of
brass knuckles them heavy
ones that feel lighter
than they look to beat the cousin
his sister said raped her

We drank our beers
cold or warm it didn’t matter
because we knew what others didn’t
that the world was flat as a marine’s high-top
with a drop off ledge that sucks
you off it same as a pastor talking sin
while going on and doing
what he did to some of us

And me I knew I always
blinked too much or too fast when
they asked about my mom how
she was feeling while never
mentioning the bruises or lost teeth
but that’s years gone by now
before the fire and these bars
the bare wall staring back at me
like a headstone someone made too large
like Rushmore with no faces on it

*

Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State and the author of six books, most recently, THINGS I CAN’T EVEN TELL MYSELF out from Ravenna Press. You can find more of his writing at lenkuntz.blogspot.com

Chronic by Sandra Marchetti

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Chronic

You might be called
the twisted blade, a grating
noise, the withdrawn lift.
I can’t inhale without

feeling this. It has become
a being to me, the child-
less woman who still
manages cries. A skeleton

key, the get out of jail
free card—never used.
What would happen if I
could do anything?

Without the tightened reach,
weeping seams, I might see
only sky. At fixed sights,
perhaps I’m just light

in ascent, yielding to goodbye.

*

Sandra Marchetti is the author of three full-length books of poetry, DIORAMA (Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2025); Aisle 228 (SFA UP, 2023); and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015) as well as four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry appears in Ecotone, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. Essays and stories can be found in AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Pleiades, Mid-American Review, Barrelhouse, The Account, and other venues. She is Poetry Editor Emerita for River Styx Magazine. She identifies as a poet of chronic pain and disability.

ONE ART’s June 2026 Reading for Pride Month

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ONE ART’s June 2026 Reading for Pride Month

Date: Sunday, June 7
Time: 2pm Eastern

Duration: 2 hours

Featured Poets: Julie Weiss, Ren Wilding, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Moudi Sbeity, Abby E Murray, Kai Coggin

>> Register Here <<

(donations appreciated)

~ About Our Featured Readers ~

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, AR, and a recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. She is the author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). Her work has been published in TIME Magazine, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, American Poetry Review, Best of the Net, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Coggin is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, a CATALYZE and INTERCHANGE Grant Fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.  www.kaicoggin.com

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 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.

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and was released by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. For now, they live in the Pacific Northwest and teach writing to military officers.

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American poet, author, and contemplative educator. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by the New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. His memoir, Habibi Means Beloved (University of Utah Press), and poetry collection, Alhamdulillah Anyway (Fernwood Press), are set to be published in the fall of 2026.

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty (Kelsay Books, 2021), her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II (Bottlecap Press, 2023 and 2024). Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in 2025 by Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears in Chestnut Review, MER, ONE ART, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Variant Lit, among others, and is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, and SWWIM. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.

Ren Wilding (they/them) is a trans, queer, neurodivergent poet. They are the author of Trans Artifacts: Bones Between My Teeth (Porkbelly Press, 2026) and Trans Archeology (Lily Poetry Review, 2027). Their work appears in Braving the Body (Harbor Editions), Nixes Mate, ONE ART, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. They were a finalist for Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Prize, are a two-time Pushcart nominee, 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 and live in St. Louis.

A Selection of Aphorisms by Yahia Lababidi

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§

Aphorisms are like seeds, carrying entire orchards.

§

To write is to eavesdrop, to translate silence, to become porous to the Unseen.

§

The human condition? Crossing a bridge of light over a trembling abyss.

§

The soul learns in flashes. Most of the time, we’re just trying not to look away.

§

Half of seeing ourselves in everyone is compassion, the other half is arrogance.

§

We are taunted by the distance between our best insights and our foolishness.

§

Exiles speak a language that only other exiles can understand.

§

The secret exerts a gravitational pull.

§

Pain has its own time zone.

§

The punishment of the oppressor is that they are denied poetry.

§

Yahia Lababidi is an Arab-American writer, poet, and aphorist, author of twelve books. His recent titles include Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024) and On the Contrary: Wilde and Nietzsche (Fomite Press, 2025). His work appears in Liberties, Salmagundi, The New Statesman, Sojourners, and The Threepenny Review.

Two Poems by john compton

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

how we speak

sitting silent in the stillness of birds—
i break the dead air with a clap

& they become
a disorder of wings.

their dense bodies
bound towards the sky
like an upsurge of dust.

they don’t understand
that in their distress
carries a bliss.

*

hunting season

the bullet drums
through the house
startling us

as if it were the dog’s bark
at 3 a.m. at an opossum
wandering onto the porch

to eat the remainder
of cat food.
we run like a group

of spooked deer
into the field
of locked doors.

*

john compton (b. 1987) is a gay poet who is the author of 20 books/chapbooks, who lives in kentucky with his husband josh and their dogs and cats, and mice. his latest full length book is “my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store” published with Flowersong Press (dec 2024); his new full length book “house as a cemetery” published with Rebel Satori Press (march 2026) & is nominated for the national book award.

Two Poems by Laura Grace Weldon

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Swedish Death Cleaning

“You can’t have everything.
Where would you put it?” ~ Steven Wright

My black hole of a bedroom closet
still holds long-impossible size eights,
tattered protest posters, slumped purses,
homemade Halloween costumes,
and hopeful eyes facing the future
from a box of black and white portraits.
Each object a doorway into realms
Where light no longer escapes.

I’ve already donated the strappy red dress
I never wore, the tie-dyed jumpsuit I did.
I gave stacks of sweaters to a friend who felts.
Sewed a sturdy quilt out of old jeans.
Cut squares from shirts too torn to donate
to patch shirts I still wear.
Time here distorts.
Decades seem mere seconds.

My arms are full with an enormity
possessions never encompass.
There’s no packing for an event horizon
but, oh look, here’s a child-decorated pillowcase
and there, a poncho I made from a shower curtain.
From this dense gravitational field
I work to excavate my own buried self
from all the women I didn’t become.

*

Look At Them Fly

My grown children may as well be
prop planes pulling banners
I squint to read
as they loop high in the sky.
They land for a bit, accept hugs,
tolerate a meal or two, some even
take leftovers I urge on them.

My love is larger than
any of us can fully bear.
It’s a fact immutable as the moon
drifting farther from Earth
at the same rate fingernails grow.

Before they were born in the usual way
I calculated with the wrong variables,
equated love with grief, but becoming
a mother to these exact marvels
erased all that. I cannot do the math,
only exult in these four.

Here I am on the ground they fly from,
my hands out offering tomatoes I’ve grown,
hot sauce I fermented, the pie I hope
is the one they still like.

*

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, leads writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura is the author of four books and was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year. Her background includes teaching nonviolence, writing poetry with nursing home residents, facilitating support groups for abuse survivors, and writing sardonic greeting cards. Laura lives on a small Ohio homestead where she and her husband host occasional art parties and house concerts. lauragraceweldon.com

Evening News by Jeff McRae

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Evening News

Mother spent the last years throwing
out family objects. You’ll have less to
suffer over when the time for suffering
comes, she says like she’s describing
the good sense of cleaning your pots
and pans while cooking. When I visit
we wash and dry the dishes after dinner
then drink tea on the couch, feet sharing
the tiny table her father made she found
when they emptied out her childhood
home in 1977. Her parents were dead
before she turned thirty. You never get
to know them as adults, she says and still
calls them Mumma and Daddy. Now
she says things like, Area rugs are the
bane of the elderly. She says, I love you,
to her old friend when she calls to say
her husband has decided to drink
the juice the doctor gave that will put
him to sleep for good. I am a stranger
to her life of friends falling in the living
room, fracturing femurs; friends who
can’t remember their meds or take a
deep breath; friends calling it quits,
who can’t do it even one more day.

*

Jeff McRae lives in Vermont and is a general news reporter for Vermont News and Media. His collection, The Kingdom Where No One Dies, published by Pulley Press, is a finalist for the Vermont Book Award for poetry.

Happy Mother’s Day to My Mother* by Veronica Tucker

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Happy Mother’s Day to My Mother*

The asterisk does what I can’t
holds the part I keep stepping around

like a wet tile in a hallway
no one marked

*my mother is dead

and also
she is still the woman who labeled everything
clean block letters on masking tape
drawers, bins, the quiet logic of a house
where nothing was ever misplaced

*my mother is dead

no one will call me today
to ask if I remembered sunscreen
or if the children are wearing enough layers
or if I am sleeping at all

*my mother is dead

and the store is full of cards
printed with soft pink cursive
words that assume a living address

I pick one up
like a pulse I can’t quite find

*my mother is dead

into the space above the sink
where she used to stand
hands in warm water
watching something out the window
I never asked about

into the car she drove
too carefully
both hands at ten and two

into the last voicemail
I cannot bring myself to delete
her voice already thinning
like light through late afternoon blinds

*my mother is dead

and I am a mother now

I look for her in small decisions
how to answer from the other room
when someone calls Mom like it might break
if I don’t come fast enough
how to keep track of who needs what
before they ask
how to say no
and still mean I love you

*my mother is dead

but sometimes
when the house is quiet
between chaos and sleep

I swear
there is a presence
not words
just a steadiness
placed gently in my hands

as if to say
continue

*my mother is dead

I wear her gold bangle every day
the small, constant weight of her
resting against my wrist

and also
everything she touched
is still touching me

even now
even this morning
even as I write her name
inside a card
that has nowhere to go

*

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and lifelong New Englander. Her writing explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, memory, and the human experience. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in ONE ART, The Berlin Literary Review, and Rust & Moth, among others. Her debut chapbook, The House as Witness, is forthcoming in spring 2026. Find her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com and on Instagram: @veronicatuckerwrites

Three Poems by Dana Henry Martin

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

No Mental-Health Narrative in My Town

There is no narrative in my town. Just lights
near the bridge that’s been dubbed a suicide
hot spot. Every weekend, nearly, those lights.
Adults. Teens. Nobody who makes the news.
Locals expect the living prophet who speaks
to and for God to fix us here in canyon country,
in cliff country. People on vacation slip while
taking pictures, while hiking and, sometimes,
alongside the person they love or their pet.
People slip. People fall. When I was in a state
of high mania, which meant I thought I might be
the devil, my therapist had me sit in a chair.
She started touching me to release the pain.
Her hands traveled over my neck, across
my shoulders. You’re in the glass house,
she said, the one above the creek, before you
were raped. God can see everything you do.
He sees you now. She wiped my arms
downward as if sloughing death from me.
Let God touch you. Let him wash through you.
Jesus is calling you to him. Don’t resist.
Two days later, I was in the psychiatric ward
at the hospital. They call it B Med.
Until I was admitted, I knew it as the name
a local poet used because he struggled
with depression. B Med. A joke. People
who are manic run in circles like animals
in the zoo or patients in B Med. That’s what
a doctor said during my appointment
when I told him I live with bipolar.
Sometimes there aren’t sirens. Just flowers
and signs that say things in threes, like
It’s not over and We love you and Don’t give up.
The city tears it all down, doesn’t want tourists
to know what happens here, what God either
can’t say or isn’t able to hear. When I stand,
the therapist is crying. This is love, she says.
Can’t you feel it? There’s no narrative
in my town. There’s just whatever this is.

*

The Knave

What if instead of talking in tongues, they’d called it
Voicing what the body needs that can’t be held in language.

What if instead of saying This is proof you love God,
they’d muttered, No matter what they do to us, every little girl

wails when her father dies. Sounds rushed from my mouth
like bees, swarming the nave. The girl of me escaped,

like so many cast-off clones, and stung congregants
whose hands were touching me, an everywhere touch

like his fingers on my back, my shirt pulled up at his orders,
the skin between us shared, mine belonging to him first,

my flesh his flesh, my fingers, my nails. We were nailed
together in life and in death, him in his anthropoid coffin,

me in the one place where I thought I might loosen his hold,
this inverted Pandora’s box of wood and fancy glass. What if

instead of talking about eternity or the trinity, they’d confessed
We knew we knew we’re sorry before drowning me in their despair?

*

I’m a Wake

I’m a wake, funerary. They prop me up
between expensive flowers and
the cheapened dead. I’m open casket,

open book, brittle as paper, lonely
as the printed word. I’m a thesaurus
of blessings and condolences,

pencil skirts and skinny, filtered
cigarettes. I’m pacing and handshakes.
I’m shuffling and stammering.

I’m satin, mahogany, charcuterie boards.
I’m the death announcement and
the estate sale. Oh, what I wouldn’t give

to be the wedding or the graduation,
even the birth with all its blood
and feces, and the bated everlastingness

of the moment before the first breath.
I’m a wake. Let me sit beside you.
There, there. It’s all right. Here I am.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, CALYX, Cider Press Review, Laurel Review, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble Literary Magazine, Trampoline, and other journals. Their chapbooks include Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press), and Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books).

Ashes by Roxanne Doty

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Ashes

When I scattered your ashes
along the banks of the Mississippi
I thought of the time you
and your high school friend swam
across from East River Road
to West River Road, tripping
on acid, your bodies young
and strong, invincible
the way we all were, the demons
dimmer, further away you said
the water shimmered that night
looked like scattered stars
and you were breast-stroking
through the heavens, all the saints
on your side, how car lights
moving along Franklin Avenue
bridge were psychedelic flowers
blowing in the summer breeze
and I remembered the way
your eyes looked when you
told me of that night
I could see it all
before beauty and silence
plunged so deeply into despair
before I knew how much ashes
a human body would leave behind
how yours were so much heavier
than I could have imagined.

*

Roxanne Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her debut novel, Out Stealing Water, was published by Regal House Publishing, August 30. 2022. Her chapbook, Hours of the Desert, was published by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2024 and her poetry collection, What Surrounds You, is forthcoming in 2026. She has published stories and poems in various journals including Third Wednesday, Quibble Lit, Superstition Review, Espacio Fronterizo, Ocotillo Review, Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, The Blue Guitar, Anti-Heroin Chic, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, Flash Fiction Magazine, NewVerseNews, Cloudbank, and International Times.