At the Wheel by Sandi Leibowitz

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

At the Wheel

Painstakingly, I churn them out.
Duds.
Years I waited in anticipation
for Covid times to pass,
to recover from a broken wrist,
a second surgery,
for an opening in the pottery class.
Now I sit at my prescribed circle
cradling in my mind a battalion of terracotta
vases, jars, and mugs,
their glazings and embellishments not even
—yet—considered.
I imagine just the pure forms,
voluptuous, still-unactivated golems.
The geometry of roundness
immerses me.

Geometry was a subject I barely passed.
And so this goes.
Class after class,
my twisted mud abortions
line up on the recycling tray,
an array of lumpy untriumphal arches.
Only the teacher’s patient, pitying aid
allows me to finish a few misshapen pieces.

“At least you’ve learned something,”
a friend consoles.
“Yes—humility,” I reply.
Or more precisely humiliation.
It’s a hard, unnourishing bread to eat.

How I’d longed to cup the wet clay
in loving hands,
turn mere mud into a Something
useful and beautiful.
I’d be a goddess, no?
For of all artists, the potters
have most often been cast
as Creators with a Capital C,
as if Adam were not merely
formed from clay but
his matter coned up, coned down,
constructed on a turning wheel.

I can’t help wonder,
atheist though I am,
if that’s the problem
with our world
—nations at war,
greed, hatred, egotism unchecked,
Earth more abused than
the bricks of wet earth I ruin,
lives even more malformed
than my few paltry pots.
What if there’s indeed a god in charge
but one who never meant
to make us so imperfect,
who stutters and stumbles,
hands uncertain as mine?

My heart floods with compassion
for this inept creator
full of the best intentions

—and even for my five flawed pieces
which I can love enough
to fire and glaze,
hoping a blaze of color
will compensate for their deficiencies.

*

Sandi Leibowitz is the author of the poetry collections The Bone-Joiner, Eurydice Sings, and Ghost-Light. Her speculative poems have earned second- and third-place Dwarf Stars and nominations for the Rhysling, Elgin, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net awards. Her poems have appeared in Verse-Virtual, New York Quarterly, Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, and many other journals and anthologies. She lives in New York City, where she also sings, paints, and gardens.

Feast of All Souls by Gerry LaFemina

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Feast of All Souls

An old friend used to say, if you bury it deep enough
the pain goes away. This was back in college.
Jaded, we smoked black-papered cigarettes &
kept top-ten lists of the ways the world might end—
do I have to say more? I haven’t thought of him
in years, but here it is two days past Samhain,

the night leather jacket dark & I can’t get his voice
or his low, rueful laughter out of my head.
He loved autumn & a young woman who never
even knew his name or how he felt. Love’s easy
from afar. The leaves in the yard settle
in the low patches of the lawn, slowly

decompose. To rake or to compost? Bonfire
smoke sewn through the air. Earlier,
my son & I worked his yard, which had been left
untended for years, & there beneath the weeds
& wild grasses lay pavers from a patio
long forgotten. How quickly the man-made world

returns to wilding—leaf rot to dirt to seed. Repeat.
In Central American jungles archaeologists
discover lost cities using LIDAR, & what was
once considered tall hills have proven to be pyramids.
No one knows what happened to that civilization
& really it’s not important: it’s gone,

& the trees & animals returned without record
or fanfare. Now the researchers will come,
with camera bags & computers, their brushes & shovels.
That friend used to love Mayan culture, said
the world would end in December 2012
& how cool it was that he’d be alive to see it.

He wasn’t. He’d have laughed at such irony. Last year
my son uncovered a small gravestone where a family
had buried their infant in his lot nearly a century before.
Olive Dickel. The marker had fallen over.
Then the overgrowth. Sometimes I try to imagine
the anguish of those parents, the father shoveling

the small hole in the almost unbreakable February soil,
his calloused hands shaking—let’s say, with cold.
A harder time we’re lucky enough to not live in.
How deep did he have to dig to hide that hurt?
Whatever the rest of the story, it’s not mine to tell,
Nor my son’s. We live in an era of celebrity

archaeologists with TV shows dedicated to vaults
of skulls & broken jawbones unearthed in jungle pyramids.
Human history uncertain & violent. November wind
comes with teeth bared & Halloween’s pumpkins
begin their slow rot on neighborhood porches.
My son & I used to carve jack o’lanterns

when he’d still trick or treat. We’d open the cranium
scoop out the seeds & pulp before cutting out jagged smiles
& eyes. Was the dwindling candle meant to be its soul?
Once, looking at that lit-up face, Alex said
it didn’t seem scary at all; it just looked undecided,
as if somewhere between ruin & laughter.

*

Gerry LaFemina is the author of over twenty books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. The recipient of awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, he teaches at Frostburg State University and in the MFA Program at Carlow University. He’s also the frontman and principal songwriter of The Downstrokes.

Four Poems by Heather Kays

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Hands

I learned
to measure
every room
by how much
of myself
it could hold.

No one
ever said
make yourself
smaller.

They just
smiled wider
whenever
I did.

Every hand
knew
exactly
where to go.

One
covered
my eyes.

One
covered
my mouth.

By the time
they reached
my throat,
they looked
enough
like mine
that I
stopped
asking
who they
belonged to.

I spent
so many years
keeping
myself quiet

I forgot
hands
were made
for building.

*

Evidence

My grandmother had a scar on her forehead.

I never learned where it came from.
If I asked,
she kept brushing powder across it,
maneuvering her bangs
to cover the small white crater.

My mother had a jagged scar
where they removed a lump
they hoped wasn’t cancer.

Her nose sat slightly crooked
after a younger sibling
caught her in the face
with something that should have
never been left lying around.

My mother had so many scars
I stopped counting.

I have scars on my ankle.
Stretch marks on my feet.
Several scars on my stomach
with more to come.

The dark circles under our eyes
belonged to all three of us.

Bruises, too.

Some arrived after nights
we couldn’t quite explain.

Some we could.

Those we hid especially well.

Generation after generation,
perfecting the precision
of covering what we didn’t want
other people to see.

Now when I think of our scars,
I think of them differently.

Every scar
is proof

that the body
would rather continue
than be beautiful.

*

Covering

My grandmother covered her forehead
with bangs.

Covered her gray hair
with a bottle from the drugstore.

Covered her disappointment
with church.

My mother covered cigarette smoke
with perfume.

Covered bruises
with long sleeves.

Covered loneliness
with men.

Covered vodka
with mints.

Covered anger
with laughter.

I learned early.

Concealer under the eyes.

Smile when people ask.

Say I’m tired.

Say I’m busy.

Say everything’s fine.

Generation after generation,
passing down recipes,
old photographs,
and increasingly creative ways
to disappear.

Nobody taught us this directly.

It lived in the pauses.

In bathroom mirrors.

In half-finished sentences.

In the things nobody asked
and nobody answered.

Sometimes I wonder

what our lives might have looked like

if we had spent half as much time

learning to live

as we did

learning to hide.

*

The Women They Called Strong

The women in my family
were always called strong.

Not because they lifted anything.

Because they carried it.

A husband
who drank.

A mother
who left
long before
she was gone.

Children
who learned
which floorboard
could be trusted.

A house
where the wallpaper
held
more smoke
than sunlight.

Strength,
I was taught,

looked like
setting one more place
at the table.

Answering
when someone called your name,

even if
they only ever used it
to ask
for something.

The women
I come from

could tell
when a door
was about to slam

by the way
the air changed.

Could hear
forgiveness
being expected

before anyone
said
I’m sorry.

They folded grief

into fitted sheets.

Pinned smiles
to church dresses.

Learned
that silence
pressed flatter
than linen.

People admired them.

Said they had
good hearts.

Said they were
the kind of women
who never gave up.

No one asked

what giving up
might have saved.

I inherited
their endurance.

It still startles me

how often
my first instinct
is to stay.

Not because
I am loved.

Because I was taught

that leaving

was what weak women did.

I am trying

to inherit
something else.

Just the quiet belief

that a door

can also be
an invitation.

That walking away

isn’t forgetting
where I came from.

I’m trying
to become
the first woman
who mistakes leaving
for an heirloom.

*

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, traces a young woman’s growth and healing through unsent letters. Her poetry collection, Myths in the Feed, sold out six times in three months, making her Crying Heart Press’s best-selling author. She was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize in 2025.

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

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

Two Poems by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 8 Comments

RSVP

          after Naomi Shihab Nye – The Art of Disappearing
          “when they invite you to the party, remember what
          parties are like before answering”

I’m sorry.
I will not be able to attend. No, I do not have
other plans. It’s just that the rice will need soaking
and anyhow, I do not want to come.

A creek has a different cadence depending on where
you stand, how far, and in what direction. Did you
know this? If you invert your head to the ground,
the creek has a second language. Anyhow, you do not
want me at your party. I wouldn’t know what to talk
about. The song of spring, say the poets, is of renewal.
I have seen otherwise – blossoms practically beg for
the ground. Don’t make me repeat my chronology
of updates, my rote opinions, my well worn stories.
I’d rather sing with the creek. I’d rather dream in
the grass, count the leaves, disappear.

I’d rather tell you about cooking rice.
You can tell it is done soaking when it has absorbed
enough water to surface. Did you know it cooks softer
this way? You don’t even need a rice cooker. Just a pinch
of salt, cover with water, low heat, fifteen minutes.
Let sit.

Thank you, but do not expect me. This is strictly
personal. My blessings to everyone. Let’s go for
a walk sometime. No words necessary.
I’ll prepare tea.

*

What can I tell you about our life?

Besides the sheer delight of it.
In how full of music it is, piano mostly,
and poetry, certainly, and daily walks through
the neighborhood trails, which often include
animal encounters, as yesterday, when
a raccoon ran up the tree and watched us with
curious eyes and flattened ears, then showed
its full face while we sang to it.
And tonight, arriving home, he arranged
a bouquet for me; chrysanthemums,
hypericum berries, carnations, one sunflower,
one rose— while I read him poetry.
And now, as I write this, he is singing,
he is filling me with a music I never imagined,
a love not expected, not deserved.
Nor promised, remind me the flowers at the altar,
who last for maybe a week, sometimes more,
and return glad in purpose to their real home,
the ground.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American poet, author, and contemplative counselor. 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. He is the author of the memoir Habibi Means Beloved, and the poetry collection Alhamdulillah Anyway. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Orison’s Best Spiritual Literature. Moudi’s work focuses on themes of justice and liberation through a spiritual framework of compassion, forgiveness, and awe. As a lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. moudisbeity.com

Don’t Think for One Instant by Alexandra van de Kamp

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Don’t Think for One Instant

       — After Dean Young

that I’ve never had a broken heart,
if by broken you mean counting up
all the missed opportunities. Life,
in the end, a sort of merciless
accounting: the years I might have
stayed in Madrid longer than I did
and all those missed cafés con leche—
their exquisitely whipped milk and
baritone-rich caffeine. And the hours
of morning-quiet with my husband
I could only have in that country,
as the sun slowly dripped down the air
onto the stone streets below.

And don’t think I haven’t signed on
for future travel, that I’m not on the passenger list,
right now, for a flight to Barbados, an island
that never gets hotter than 80°F and has parrot fish,
perennially turquoise-blue, like 4-foot
stained-glass windows nibbling at coral.
Why not spend a week with my husband
snorkeling and sipping tea, even if it means
finding out the African-European natives
on this previous British isle live in houses
they own on land they never will?

And don’t believe anyone who claims
I’ve never thought of a career
as a puppeteer. My husband asserts
I can anthropomorphize almost anything.
Why not name your lamp, blender, or stuffed
bear after a movie star: Bogart, Stanwick,
or Bacall? Last time I checked
the spiritual residue and pulse
of this world had no boundaries and seemed
fairly sneaky. Do we really know
what life is and who possesses it?
I consider my cat a constant ambassador
to the unknown. She looks at me
with those fierce green eyes
and I know, I know hardly anything at all.

*

Alexandra van de Kamp is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink, San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center. She has published three, full-length poetry collections, with her most recent being Ricochet Script (2022), published by Next Page Press. Her two earlier books include Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press 2016) and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (2010). She has also published several chapbooks, including A Liquid Bird Inside the Night (Red Glass Books 2015) and Dear Jean Seberg (2011), which won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Her poems have been published in journals nationwide, such as The Cincinnati Review, The Texas Observer, NOMAD, Denver Quarterly, 32Poems, Tahoma Literary Review, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review. In 2025, she was inducted into The Texas Institute of Letters. Learn more about her poetry at: alexandravandekamppoet.com.

My Dead Husband’s Identical Twin Sends a Selfie by Ellen Romano

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

My Dead Husband’s Identical Twin Sends a Selfie

He is standing beside the mural he painted
of my husband on a train, looking back
at me waving good-bye.

My brother-in-law has wrinkles at the corners of his eyes,
the picture of what my husband would look like
if he’d aged these last seven years.

In the mural his face is smooth. My hair
has no streak of gray. I am reaching out to him,
younger than I will ever be again.

*

Ellen Romano is an educator, mother, grandmother, widow, and beekeeper living with her dog, Doc, in Hayward, California. She is the winner of Third Wednesday’s 2023 Poetry Prize. Other work has appeared in Lascaux Review, The Deadlands, December magazine, and other publications

Two Poems by Meg Freer

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Messages

She thinks the chapel service in her retirement home
is only for the Presbyterians, which can’t be true
since the home is run by the Episcopal Church,
but I decide not to ask what she means,
since she isn’t Episcopalian either.
She doesn’t want to go.

We go to a concert in a Presbyterian church
that burned 150 years ago and was rebuilt.
In the drafty space amid peeling paint
and dusty ceiling fans, the musicians
spin infinite loops and sing
about consistency and self-control.

A white dove perched at the top
of the largest organ pipe, the only item
to survive the fire, offers its own message:
Denomination means little next to love.
Have you been hospitable to angels?
They may be closer than you think.

*

Traces

It’s difficult to live in a jumbled house,
a body whose mind has lost its ability
to find what it’s looking for.

A forest of lilacs marks a place where people
once homesteaded and planted these shrubs
that spread underground into a thicket of beauty.

Each grain of ‘star sand’ on a beach, skeletal remains
of a 500-million-year-old marine organism
that brings the past into the present underfoot.

Fog prickles my nose like seltzer water,
fingers its way through my dog’s curly fur
to her scent memories of a close-range coyote.

Webs of molecules link brain cells
like garden trellises that past events cling to,
until they start to splinter and finally tumble down.

*

Meg Freer works in the arts in Ontario. Her prose, poetry, and photos have appeared in many journals, and in four chapbooks. She is co-poetry editor for The Sunlight Press and a contributing editor for Traces Journal. A full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from DarkWinter Press.

Another People’s History of the United States by J.D. Isip

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Another People’s History of the United States

There is a version of history for every age. We hate to admit we
are once again swinging out of one certainty to another, answers
worn by the tread of trumpet players and truth-sayers who turned
out to be at least half wrong. You want to know where you belong?

Start with the only sure thing is to be wary of certainty. Be wary
of endless genealogies, mad scientists measuring your skull, cults
of personality raising new flags or old ones dusted off, repurposed
with no real knowledge of origin. We all make it up as we go. Be

certain of what you do not know, not the old oppressions or the new,
not the unwinding double helix blood tests; know we all share a drop
of Pretendian DNA, know we all have a claim on reparations, know
we’re all a little to blame, know when to let go of comparison songs.

Just know for certain here is where you belong, certain as any of us
can see. By birth or by boat, by some blind fate or misfortune, by
God stop asking for permission or a place at the table and take it, take
your place among us, the multitudes of mixed souls where we belong.

*

J.D. Isip is the winner of the 2026 Louise Bogan Award for his collection, What Wonder (Trio House Press, 2027), and he is the editor of the upcoming anthology, The American Pop Culture Almanac: Daily Readings of Poetry & Prose (Moon Tide Press, 2027). His full-length collections include Reluctant Prophets (Moon Tide Press, 2025), Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023), and Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). A native of Southern California, J.D. now teaches in South Texas, where he lives with his dogs, Ivy and Bucky.

Cities in Four Syllables by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 8 Comments

Cities in Four Syllables

Amsterdam
           High on a bike
Honolulu
           Busker with uke
New York
           Grab cab or walk
Washington D.C.
           Psycho with nuke

*

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.

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of October 2026

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of October 2026

  1. Kip Knott
  2. Susan Vespoli
  3. Alison Luterman
  4. Emily Kittleson
  5. Malaika King Albrecht
  6. Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
  7. Hilary Sideris
  8. Rae McMinn
  9. Lois Perch Villemaire
  10. Terri Kirby Erickson

Debt by Emily Ransdell

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Debt

I watched you pitch your father’s ashes
off the headland, walnut box airborne,
then shattering on rock —

the plume of him rising
in the thermals like smoke.

Now you’re on the other side
of childhood, where everyone
comes with their stories
already told.

I know you don’t want advice.
What you want is a wrecking ball.
But what good is anger now?

You saw what you saw:

a pale fish breathing through gills,
the pulse in his throat flickering still.

Welcome to your inheritance.
Now you can’t deny you know what love is.

Now that there’s no one to tell.

*

Emily Ransdell is the author of One Finch Singing, winner of the Louis Prize from Concrete Wolf Press. Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Terrain, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She has been a resident at Essere Artists and taught at La Romita School for the Arts in Terni, Italy. Emily lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Neighborhood by John Amen

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Neighborhood

She said she was a good witch, though I wasn’t sure.
She held her son to a strict 9pm curfew,
which was one thing when he was younger
but different after he turned sixteen,
then seventeen. I guess she figured,
he’s living in my house, strewing his wet dreams
across my floor & furniture, the least
he can do is lock the doors at a respectable time.
I used to talk to him
at the foot of their driveway.
He wanted to start an online auction company.
He was learning guitar.
He wanted to get his own apartment.
He went to a Pentecostal church service with his friend.
Strangers raised their hands in the air,
swaying to the spirit.
He rushed the stage to be saved.
When the preacher pressed hands to his fevered head,
he felt the devil leave, a blast of cool, fresh air.
He said after that he knew the words to the hymns,
though he’d never heard them before.
I haven’t talked to his mother
since the tug-of-war at the mailbox.
A neighborhood is an anthill, a utopia, a gangplank,
people juggling impulses to love, kill, belong.
We’ve got to get together when it warms up, we say.
Yes, yes, we agree. Last Monday, 70 degrees
at 3 o’clock. Wielding our shovels & blowers,
we spelled our yards into shape. I waved at a woman
who vaped a sugary-smelling herb as the FedEx truck passed.
I saw the father with cancer.
I saw the divorcee, who didn’t want the divorce,
the guy who always looks like he’s
on the verge of making a run for it.
My AA sponsor, a tv actor eons ago,
says life is a showtune concealing a free-
jazz roil concealing a pit of silence. You
never know when that hole will call
your name. It’s like being summoned for jury duty,
except sometimes you get a pass on that.
Madeleine Jones three streets over died.
Navy Jim at the corner lot sold his Lincoln,
bought a Harley Davidson, his
dream, he says, since he was a baby.
Driving to work yesterday, I saw the good witch’s son
loading boxes into a beat-up F150.
I could make out the gold crucifix dangling from his chest,
it’s a shame how he wants to
keep all that perfectly good sin at bay.

*

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 Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024.

LATE OCTOBER by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

LATE OCTOBER

That color looks so good on you,
I say to the yellow maple,
the way I might speak to my husband
when he wears a certain teal-gray,
when what I really mean is,
Please, take off your clothes. I am not
looking forward to the maple
losing its leaves, but all that yellow
beauty, sometimes just undoes me.
And I hear the soft song
of zipper opening, feel the dark
of shoulder strap slide its even quieter
notes to the floor.

*

Sally Bliumis-Dunn is an Associate Editor-at-Large for PLUME. Her poems appeared in New Ohio Review, Paris Review, PLUME, Poetry London, the NYT, PBS NewsHour. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her fourth book, Alive in These Woods, was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2026.

The truth police by Bryan D. Price

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

The truth police

I wish I knew the names of certain birds.
A woodpecker came to see us in the rain.

This is a true story—
a ghost story.

It was New Year’s Eve.
The sucker’s waltz,

that’s what she called it
as I made my way through the ellipses of

rain.
We’re drinking rainwater now

and skin-contact wine.
We’re drinking whatever we can get our hands on.

I was reading about how
Townes Van Zandt shot rum and coke

into his veins like it was heroin.
I can’t imagine that to be true or even possible

but I am not the possibility or truth police.
What we do is put each other under our

tongues like a tincture.
That is how love works

(and sex blooms alongside).
Trust is a weapon wielded against the needy.

*

Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Epiphany Magazine, EPOCH, Bear Review, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.

Phyllis on the Homefront 1943 by Al Ortolani

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 4 Comments

Phyllis on the Homefront 1943

Thinking of you on your birthday,
and how years ago I sat by your side on the couch
and you read me poems from Longfellow,
how I enjoyed the rhythm
and the bright images I barely understood.
You told me once that as a girl
you’d lay on your bed at your stepfather’s farm
and listen to the drone of planes flying
across Kansas towards war. You were
old enough to understand their direction,
but young enough to play in the fields, to take
your little sister by the hand and walk the berm
along the creek. You were safest
among the black walnuts and the slippery elms,
happiest after you’d tended the chickens,
and moved the fragile eggs into the incubator.
Luckily, your stepfather was part-time
with the railroad, you’d forget the battle for days
until you saw his red pickup barreling up
the road in a torpedo of dust.

*

Al Ortolani is a poetry editor for the Chiron Review. His poems have appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, Pithead Chapel, and Muleskinner Journal. New York Quarterly Books plans to release his most recent poetry collection, American Watercolor, in early 2027.

Two Poems by Holiday Noel Campanella

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Tell It To The Devil

Where’s my napkin? my grandfather asks.
It’s right there, my grandmother says.
Don’t waste that paper towel! he barks,
snatching it before it hits the trashcan.
Cut up this steak for me will ya?
Break it apart so it’s easier to eat.
Very good, Angel, he says.
Do you want $100 a month or $25 a week?
He’s putting ketchup on his cheesesteak
now. EW, WHIZ, YUCK, my mother says
about mine. You know that’s not nice.
Now I’m going to kill myself, I say.
How would you do it? he asks.

They are all so annoying. So beautiful
and alive and here with me. The dog
puts her snoot on the table, sniffing.
Get out of here, you can’t have onion,
I’m trying to keep you alive, you stupid
thing, my mother tells her. My grandfather
has only eaten a few bites of his steak.
Lately, he is eating less and less.
Was that good? I ask.
No, it is good, he says.

He lies, my mother says.
Leave him alone, I say
Yeah leave me alone, that’s right, he says.

Look at this one now, she points
to my grandmother.
It’s your turn June,
they’re gonna pick on you,
my grandfather says.
I licked my finger, not the knife!
my grandmother says.
But it’s true, you do lie like hell.

I don’t lie, he says, I tell a story.
Yeah, you change the story,
my mother says. You know
I can lie straight-faced to God.

You oughta be ashamed of yourself.
he says. You lie to the Devil,
not to God.

I tell it to the Devil,
Take them from me,
Take me away from this.
What if this could last forever?

*

Bury Your Dead

The time has now passed to bury your dead,
embrace your injured —
look no longer upon each other as people
once more.
Two months after my
Grandfather’s death, I turn off
the electricity. Change the password
on the internet. Nothing before this death
had changed for us. We were still fighting
a million little deaths: the ease of shopping trips,
going down the aisles we didn’t need anything
just to look, Chinese food delivery
and binge watching shows,
the ways we entered, one at time, our front door.
Neutral memories are their own assaults. Comfort
the toughest undoing. Why then does history remember
the retaliations and not the provocations?
The strategists and not those begging
years before the first blow for mercy?
My husband was a (failed) historian. Could
recite the names of mobsters with ease,
the fall of the Romanovs. Give the play-by-play
at the Alamo. The players
in the Second World War.
Would explain to me in depth how the intellectuals
of movements are always overpowered
by those who embrace brutality. But could not
remember the months of late bill payments
that led to me turning off the electricity
that Sunday morning.
Did not consider why the bills
were all in my name in the first place.
Would sneer at how ungrateful I was —
didn’t I see he picked to share himself with me?
As if his giving a cracked door
to his person was not a guaranteed spoil of war.
That his truest self should have always been mine.
I should not have had to beg for him
to unlock long closed-up archive rooms.
I should not have had to call up a battering ram,
an iron canon, a staff alight with fire.
Is the air stale in your dark tower?
Have you gained any vantage point
to the battles waged from the other side
of “us”? Love decays this way
in a thousand unmarked graves.

*

Holiday Noel Campanella is a multi-disciplinary writer and artist. Her work has been exhibited and sold nationally (the Smithsonian Museum, the Clay Studio, Anthropologie), published in lit mags and journals (Gigantic Sequins, Philadelphia Stories, Imposter Lit, San Pedro River Review), and is in public and private collections (the Free Library of Philadelphia, Vanderbilt Libraries Special Collections). She has a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. You can find her online at HolidayNoelCampanella.com

Write what you know by Alex Stolis

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Write what you know

I read a great poem, then
never want to write again.
I’ll never kiss a blind girl
in a Paris museum.
The only mysterious
noir women I’ll meet
are in Hopper paintings
or Wilder movies.
Write what you know?
I’m not sure what I know.
Sure, I’ve lost jobs,
friends, had my name
inked on police blotters.
Tossed some guy through
a plate-glass window.
Drove my car through
the neighbor’s house.
Had parents with bluest
collars—raised us
on Adam West Batman,
Froot Loops, Blackjack,
and Hamburger Helper.
Now, I have a real job,
wife who’s heard all
my stories, an old dog
that follows me around.
Write what you know.

*

Alex Stolis has had poems published in numerous journals. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press. He lives in Hudson Valley of New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra.

Two Poems by Alison McCabe

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Afterwards

The hospice nurse rearranges
my mother’s face, puts a winter
black dress on her. She becomes
a stone statue, beautiful, strange
no longer compelled to smile.
I can sit, rest with her now, while
the men make jokes in the kitchen
over pale ale and crackers.

*

Tack

I don’t always think about you
leaving, yet as soon as another
week begins, or someone leaves
my office, home, presence,
I do. I am trying to speed up
mourning you. Hammer
it out, get and go, move on.
I can’t. Outside, purple blue
irises bloom. Isn’t that
your favorite color? I remember
learning to sail; capsizing the boat
as my childhood friend, Mike,
steps out onto a floating dock,
telling me, Don’t tack.
Ok, I say, then do.

*

Alison McCabe is a poet, Zen koan practitioner and psychoanalyst in Oakland, CA. She is particularly interested in the intersection of these three domains and how each informs and expands upon the other. She has previously published in the online and print journal, Critica Magazine, and the online journals, Literary Mamas, Really System, and Shrew: Issue 16. Alison can be reached at her professional website: alisonmccabe.com.

ONE ART’s 2027 Nominations for the Monarch Queer Literature Awards

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

ONE ART’s 2027 Nominations for the Monarch Queer Literature Awards

Cayla Garman – Bambi Girls

Stephen K. Kim – First Time

Kelli Russell Agodon – Poem to the Future

Kit Willett – It’s an automatic response

Rebecca Rush – Reflection

*

~ About The Award ~

“Monarch Queer Literary Awards is a new annual anthology recognizing the best new queer writing and art published by literary magazines and independent presses. Most awards for queer and LGBTQ+ writing are dedicated to honoring full-length books; while we honor the critical importance of these awards, we aim to create a complementary space for uplifting the groundbreaking and often under-celebrated poems, short stories, essays, and artwork that are published in magazines, chapbooks, zines, and other collections.”

Four Poems by Hilary Sideris

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 5 Comments

Al Fresco

Hours passed. I kept texting
with a bot. I thought he
was a man named Al who
spoke Italian, lived in Rome,
though there were signs—
he dodged my questions,
bragged of dining al fresco,
Italian slang for in prison.

Our story ended when
he brought up properties,
investment opportunities,
but I enjoyed the man
the bot conjured, who
echoed my words,
served me myself,
lovable as I was.

*

To My Mother, Edgewise

You chose a brightly glazed
ceramic urn—or was it plastic?
I didn’t get close enough to check.

I knew you would have disapproved
of the two chubby, motley men,
cemetery employees, who lowered

you into the ground—not far
enough, I thought—shouldn’t it be six
feet, what bodies merit? The priest

went on too long, saying we’d meet
again, with Jesus, face to face.
Would I want that? Even as ashes,

you wore firetruck red. In Heaven,
as on earth, you’d steal the scene.
I’d never get a word in.

*

Next to Simic

I was alphabetizing my library—
so many poets start with O—

the last time we spoke on the phone.
I wanted to tell you I wrote a book

that’s next to Simic on my shelf,
but you talked on about my brother

who looked like a homeless person,
who was coming for you with a gun.

He does not, he is not, I insisted,
but you’d removed your hearing aids—

you always were hard of listening
& this worked well for Dr. Dan,

who moved in, blocked your friends,
fed you truth, beauty, Clonazepam.

*

Lately I’ve Been Taking Up More Room

I spread out even as I shrink.
My too-wise voice explains

it’s incorrect to say very
unique, between her

& I. Nobody cares. I think
they’d like me better quiet.

At Freddy’s mini-superette
a woman in fox fur is picking

ten numbers again. I wait in line
behind her, wave my one item,

iodized salt, at the cashier. May I
please pay? Move over! she says,

you’re in my space. The smaller
I get, the more I’m in the way.

*

Hilary Sideris is the author of the poetry collections Calliope (Broadstone) and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a co-founder and curriculum developer for CUNY Start, a college preparatory program at CUNY, and a co-host of the Carmine Street Metrics reading series in NYC. Her new collection, Kissing Ilaria Goodbye, is out from Dos Madres Press.

Two Poems by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 6 Comments

Metamorphosis

I struggle with my M’s. So instead of saying movie,
I’ll say film, which gives off the wrong idea about
what I’m watching. B’s are difficult too. Sometimes
I’ll say I live north of Denver instead of Boulder, my
location a secret too precious to utter. P’s too, and
L’s, and N’s. Sometimes R’s and W’s. I never know
what letter is going to snag, so I get creative. Flip
through a thesaurus in my mind, compose a lyric
that points to what I want to say without actually
saying it. Keeps me inclined towards the poetic.
Like when I can’t say river, I’ll say a gushing stream
of snow, which a river also is. Writing sometimes
becomes the practice of putting pen to paper. Mother
is the woman who birthed me. They don’t always
come out this pretty. Once I said once a quarter
because I couldn’t say three months. Every so often
a new word or letter will hang on my tongue,
my mouth a chrysalis turning what once was a
wriggling hesitation into winged utterance,
some brief flash of beauty it never imagined it
could spit out.

*

Impossible to Stutter While Singing

Before we chiseled our tongues into
the world naming things, before language
was formed as separate syllables, before
words were given meaning, our ancestors
sung their feelings, let their untamed voice
run the wild limitless range. It was not
possible to stutter then, because it is
impossible to stutter while singing, when
in melodious flow, when our tongues are
free from the prison of category, and breath
is allowed to elongate with gaped wonder,
and sound is repeated as necessary emphasis,
and the silence which ensnares us is but the
awed block, our throats echoed channels,
uttering with vibrating glory the presence
of each other upon our trembling lips.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American poet, author, and contemplative counselor. 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. He is the author of the memoir Habibi Means Beloved, and the poetry collection Alhamdulillah Anyway. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Orison’s Best Spiritual Literature. Moudi’s work focuses on themes of justice and liberation through a spiritual framework of compassion, forgiveness, and awe. As a lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. moudisbeity.com

Two Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Bringing In the Harvest

My Amish grandmother shared her terrible secret —
None of us are meant to last very long.
Her words felt mystical when I was seven,
like she had received a message from God
on the long scroll of the sky when she looked up.

Grandfather simply nodded, gave an extra giddy-up
tug on the horse’s reins, as our buggy clipped-
clopped on the roadside, leading us to
only God knows where.

Grandmother’s words were pulled out
of a deep Well of Knowing,
and I was too young to understand what she meant.

She continued: All we know is that an end is inevitable.
She shook her head as if mistrusting
and answering her own question, her black bonnet
covering her eyes, but I could feel doubt
and adulation mix, shivering tears
like laundry hanging on a line and drying slowly.
She hid her reactions from me
where I could not see them, as if hiding cookies
out of my reach, out of sight, out of mind.

I knew my silent grandfather would not explain
what she meant, why her words bounced
and jolted my spine like buggy springs on asphalt.
I’d have to reason the meaning out for myself.
The horse merely cantered, blinders focused ahead.

Already, neighbors were gathering in a field.
I knew this was important.
I could learn something here.

Grandmother said:
This is what all our futures will look like.

A man in a pine box looked like he was napping.
My grandmother led me to him, guiding my hand.
Insisting: Here, touch death, know we all die.
His hand felt like a cold, hard fence post.

I had butchered chickens for years but this, this
was altogether different. I knew him
from Meetinghouse. He once had a name,
and now, his name would stay behind,
while his body emptied into the vastness of forever.

My grandfather placed his callused hand on my shoulder,
as if to say without words, that it is alright to know death,
that his touch had helped me leave childhood behind
to become a man reckoning with the reality of this world.

Grandmother repeated: None of us are meant to last,
but where we go next will be endless.

*

A Catalog of Mysterious Diseases

My sister keeps creating mysterious diseases.
Some real. Some, not so real. She practices dying.
She began diagnosing herself. It became easy.
She looked between words with a squint,
for diseases with no cures,
to have the perfect staged, romantic death.
She began early with exotic diseases like the plague
or leprosy or poisoned by an Asp.
She practices the dramatic art of dying.
When she burst her appendix, no one believed her.
She walked twenty miles to the nearest hospital.
She almost died, then. She really was disappointed.
I lost track of all her illnesses, both the fake
as well as the real. She spent years practicing dying.
She refined her practice. She practiced in a mirror.
She dreamed about dying alone, bloated, swarmed by flies.
She wanted to be the first to die. I listen to her
as she decides she has Orphan Disease,
because our parents died years ago.
I don’t want to tell her that orphan disease
is another term for a rare disease.

*

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).

Three Poems by Rae McMinn

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 4 Comments

Heirloom

World War II era
Brandywine tomato seeds
pool on my cutting board,
the same jelly of rubies
my great-grandmother
wiped off her kitchen knife.

What will you leave behind?

I have a friend
who wants to be a mummy.
You can’t just burn this,
she gestures at her body.
I’ll buy a crown of rubies
let them think I was a queen.

*

Underbabied

There’s a game show host in the Oval Office/ thumbs up, white guy/ you know the type, hair plugs/ on a winning streak, suit cost a cool 10K/ announcing on TV that America is in critical condition/ the state underbabied, an underbabied state/ a particularly nasty disorder/ of too many empty uteruses bleeding/ the system dry/ pill-popping progestin queens on permanent vacation/ and I am at the nurses station/ stringing beads on a bracelet for the patient in room 12 whose baby/ just died in utero, whose uterus/ just hopped a plane to Fiji, whose heart/ is as underbabied as a clear cut, whose heart/ is as underbabied as the last black rhino/ I’m here stringing beads/ in late stage capitalism/ outside, ash drops from a chalky sky/ the nurse next to me asks/ if half points will be awarded/ for the babies we tried to make.

*

Parenting

At the nurses station, Megan is telling us about her session with a medium. You have to know this woman, she has two feet on the ground. She’s the real deal adult you desperately wish had the keys to the solar system. But last year, her mom died of ALS, and before she did, she promised her daughter that if there was a way to reach over, she would find it. She would be there. She’d be reaching.

Tell me, who on this mortal earth would not reach back?

It takes a long time. Megan is skeptical, keeps the details tight to her chest. Her grandpa cuts the line and talks for a hundred years. Then the medium begins to rock her arms, back and forth like she is cradling a baby. The medium asks, Who is the baby that your mom is holding?

They’d put off a baby when her mom got sick. Now, Megan confides that she is pregnant and the medium says, Ohhh, says, your mom wants you to know she’s got your baby. A daughter, yes? Says, She wants to tell you how wonderful she is. How you’re just gonna love her. How she loves her so much already.

She wants you to know she’ll take care of her until she’s ready to come to you.

Al has been charting with her back to us. Now she turns around and tells us a girl she knew in high school, some girl she hadn’t talked to in twenty years, reached out to her with a message:

Hey, this is so random.
I went to see this psychic and um, it was cool, but anyway, at the end, she asked me if I knew anyone whose parents died in a national park. So specific, right? So I said, well yeah, that happened to this girl I knew in high school, and this psychic said, you should get a hold of her.

Let her know her parents are trying to reach her.

*

Rae McMinn is a labor and delivery nurse, mother and emerging poet living in Portland, Oregon. She has published and forthcoming works in Wayfarer magazine, Sybil journal, and WayWords magazine, among others and has just finished writing her first collection of poetry.

The Fourth-to-Last James Wright Poetry Festival, 2005 by Michael Simms

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 8 Comments

The Fourth-to-Last James Wright Poetry Festival, 2005

We were standing around talking
outside the Martins Ferry public library
when Ochester mentioned Creeley
had died. We stood on the sidewalk
silently. It started to rain. No one moved.
Four poets struck dumb by death
and rain. That’s the thing. Poets don’t write
because we have something to say.
We write because so little can be said.
Greenway gently asked whether Jack Gilbert
had Alzheimer’s. Linda Gregg trembled and looked down.
Rain turned to mist, so Greenway and I left, climbing the hill
to the cemetery that looks over the town
to the river I have no right to speak of
because James Wright owns the Ohio River,
the way Phil Levine owns the Chevrolet Gear and Axle Plant
and Jack Gilbert holds title to the Greek island of Paros
where he and Linda shared a home. Even now
forty years dead and buried in the fucking Bronx,
James Wright still owns the river and its shores
where he grew up near slag heaps,
black trees and stool-washed water
carrying chemicals from the now-shuttered factories
of Wheeling Steel, Blaw Knox and Hazel-Atlas Glass Company
where his dad worked fifty years as a die-cutter.
Jimmy wore out the cardboard soles
in his winter boots. Growing up in a rat-hole
means he can be buried anywhere he wants,
if he still wants. As for me, his poems flow into my life
not as feeling but fact, the way a river absorbs rain.
But being James Wright was a real job,
I bet. Drinking helped. Maybe self-loathing helped
as well. Who knows? But he knew the anger of blast furnaces
and the desperation of the hobos along the Mississippi
in Minneapolis just before they jumped. And yet
he grew tired of darkness because he understood
if poetry means anything, it’s a disturbance we feel
with all our senses, even the unexpected ones
in the hell and happiness of our lives.

*

Michael Simms’s latest poetry collection is Cities I Can Never Return To (Ragged Sky Press, 2026). His latest novel is The Hummingbird War (Madville Fantasy, 2026). Born and raised in Texas, Simms has lived in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh for almost 40 years. In 2011, the Pennsylvania Legislature recognized him for his contribution to the arts.

Tough Love by Lylanne Musselman

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 4 Comments

Tough Love

It would’ve been our 24th
anniversary this year. Yes,
I remembered, even though
we only spent eight years together.

We had the best of times. Love,
shared friends, each other’s children,
our home, our laughter. Our annual trips
to Louisville each February, to
Wisconsin for Irish Fest.

We had the worst of times,
your alcoholism, then you dabbled
in narcotics. Taking prescriptions
from doctors you worked for.
Writing scripts out to your kids,
a close friend, to me.

One of the hardest things I’ve done
was turning you in to authorities.
I was afraid you’d kill yourself, and
you threatened suicide when they came
for you. It did cause you to get
the rehab you needed.

We spoke a few times after,
life went on and we lost touch.
I think of you from time to time, hope
you’re still well. I speak to your daughter
on her birthday, she texts on mine.

I wish love was stronger than addiction.

*

Lylanne Musselman is an award-winning poet, playwright, and visual artist. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals and many anthologies. Musselman is author of the poetry collection, It’s Not Love, Unfortunately (Chatter House Press, 2018), and author of seven poetry chapbooks including Staring Dementia in the Face (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her newest collection of poems, In My Life: A Pop Culture Poetry Memoir (October 2026), is just out from Chatter House Press.

Three Poems by Peter Mladinic

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Places Don’t Last but Friendships Do

The place where we met will soon be dust,
will be more, won’t be. Someone,
maybe a woman who looks like you,
will be in the cab of a machine
wearing a blue hard hat and earbuds,
listening to George Strait. Her hand
on levers will set a chain in motion,
a steel ball will crash against a brick wall,
again and again, so walls, windows,
and doors tumble into rubble. Dust
will fly into the air, into what was the fourth
floor office where you sat at a desk
and I walked through a door and saw you
dressed to kill, smartly groomed,
your hand on a stack of papers as you
looked up at me. You had a window
slightly tinted, with a view of buildings,
grounds, and a highway. I thought: I wish
I had a window in my office. Mostly
I looked at you, your face. As you spoke
I heard what you said, but it didn’t sink in.
I was busy being knocked out, dazzled
by your beauty. Now I see only dust flying
from rubble, the walls down, the ground
piles of chunks of Sheetrock, brick,
and glass that trucks will haul away.
But you and I are here, our spirits still there?
No. The essence of us, our lasting
friendship lasts here, not to be torn down
by a wrecking ball, a demolition crew.

*

Washing My Glass Cup in the Sink

this morning I thought of Adolph’s girlie
magazines he kept in a cupboard
in the upstairs bathroom but then thought
I’d never been farther than the kitchen
where I saw a toaster Adele got
from the Raleigh coupons she’d saved.
I wondered if memory was playing tricks
on me. Adolph smoked Camels, Adele’s
father smoked Pall Malls. I remember
the red pack, and that when the house
was no longer the Zetelski’s but the Lee’s
I watched the JFK inauguration, the sun
in Frost’s eyes as he read “The Gift
Outright” on the TV in the finished basement.
Jeff’s grandmother cried seeing an Irish
Catholic president. I remember wooden
crates of soda: the bottles grape, lime
green, red, and brown for cream soda,
on the breezeway floor. The Lee’s
had the crates delivered on a regular basis.
Jeff’s father, a Lorillard exec, worked
in the City. Adolph owned an auto upholstery
shop in Hackensack and he built a wooden
platform, that sat level on the long slope
of the backyard, for Prince, their shaggy
black mongrel. Prince’s chain clumped
on the wood that was often feces-strewn.
He lived in a dog house and some days
ran the length of the yard. Frank, Adolph’s
son, told me Prince was hit by a car,
when we went to visit the Zetelski’s
on their farm outside Binghamton. By then
the Lee’s were in the house up the block
from mine, the house that, after the Lee’s
moved, your family took over. I never knew
your family. By then I was busy being away.
My parents didn’t mind; they knew
being away was part of growing up,
getting out from under the shade of the oak
that stood at the bottom of the slope
kitty-corner to your garage. I can hear
and feel the crunch of acorns under my feet,
and remember the black coupe Adele’s
father owned parked on the driveway.
He wore a black fedora, a white, bushy,
trim mustache, and a silver watch chain
across his black vest. He and his wife
came from Germany. She gutted fish
on the breezeway; the guts slimy
and tubular lay piled on newspaper sheets.

*

Pat

Pat, a woman married to Elisabeth,
thought me injured in Vietnam,
and I liked that; it excused things
like my drinking and driving
and being in hot water
with our department head
because a girl’s parents called him
to complain about my telling her
she should go to the pool on campus.
I wasn’t injured anywhere on my body.
I don’t think I was injured in Danang,
there during Tet ‘68, the height
of the fighting, visiting prostitutes,
which was illegal, which made
the visits all the more exciting.
I think I would have been the same
had I not gone to Vietnam,
which was my choice. I enlisted
in the navy to keep from going there,
and went there anyway. I was ordered to.
It was my choice to obey. At least
I didn’t end up in the jungle, shooting
and being shot at. I helped shoot a dog
that had gotten mangled by a semi.
Off the edge of the road that ran past
Bridge Cargo, near its gray bunker
walled with sandbags, in the dust,
like fine powder I pulled the trigger
of my black M16, in unison with others.
We put the dog out of its misery.
Up from the Bridge Cargo entrance
stood a tower. At the foot of the tower
I traded Mai, who was maybe eleven
years old, a sandwich for her picture.
Up in the tower I looked out at a rice paddy,
and a few woman walking with buffalos,
and carrying pails on long sticks
across their shoulders. A Q.C. (Quan Canh)
at an intersection directed traffic.
His fatigues bloused, so I could see
his polished boots, he wore a helmet,
blew a whistle, moved his gloved hands,
and pivoted his body with the grace
and precision of a ballet dancer.

*

Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.

ONE ART’s 2026 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

ONE ART’s 2026 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

Kathy Nelson – Farewell with Potato Blight and Moose

Connie Soper – Cynthia’s Gift

Joy Gaines-Friedler – If you Don’t Believe in God What Do you Believe in?

Laura Grace Weldon – Swedish Death Cleaning

Renee Emerson – My Lost Boys

Kathryn Jordan – Free Range

*

~ About The Award ~

BEST SPIRITUAL LITERATURE
(formerly The Orison Anthology)

“Editors of literary periodicals (print or digital) may nominate work in a single genre or in multiple genres to be considered for inclusion in our annual anthology, Best Spiritual Literature, which will reprint the finest spiritually engaged writing from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives. Work selected for inclusion will appear alongside the winners of The Best Spiritual Literature Awards in Fiction, Nonfiction, & Poetry. The author of any work selected for inclusion will receive a complimentary copy of the anthology; the periodical where the work originally appeared will also receive a complimentary copy.”

Serpentine Barrens by Ernest Hilbert

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Serpentine Barrens

I pass through archipelagos of autumn light,
A forest enclosed by croplands and pasture,
Unlike anything for a thousand miles,

A stranded barren, broken from earth’s mantle,
Badlands, an oasis of odd flora,
A realm not only dissimilar, but utterly so,

Impossible to tame, strange splotch on a map,
Pocked with chromite, quarried for feldspar,
Outcrops of pitch pine and prairie bluestem,

Flourishing because stronger strains can’t grow,
Savannah so strange here, auburn acres of it,
Upland arc of fame-flower, whorled milkweed,

Thriving apart in soil so acidic it kills the rest,
So like ourselves, who eke out lives unliked
By those who cannot cultivate us,

Thriving apart to survive in the waste,
Living as we do because the others won’t,
Lyre-leaved rock-cress and wheels of aster.

*

Ernest Hilbert is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—Last One Out, and Storm Swimmer, winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize. He works as a rare book dealer in Philadelphia. Visit him at ernesthilbert.com

Three Poems by Kip Knott

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 4 Comments

The Final Elegy for My Father

               Terrence Eugene Knott, 1934-2026

I killed off some version of you in my writing
so many times when you were alive, it seemed inevitable
I would be the only one with you when you actually died.

In all the hundreds—maybe even thousands—
of sentences I devoted over the years to your death,
I never once allowed myself to imagine

the softness of your eyelids beneath my fingertips.

*

Rothko on Art

Always remember to protect your painting hand.
The most perfectly defined lines I ever created were
the three that crisscrossed the canvas of my left wrist.

*

Rothko’s Ghost

I woke up in this new life not knowing whether I had ended up in Heaven or Hell. All I do know is that the house I now haunt has no doors, and every window is like one of my paintings, opaque yet diaphanous, something to be stared into not through.

*

Kip Knott’s most recent book of poetry, Rothko’s Gospels, is available from tiny wren publishing. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott.

My Autism on Full Display (Long Before I Knew I Have It) by Keith W. Norris

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

My Autism on Full Display (Long Before I Knew I Have It)

All of my friends in my seventh-grade class did it
Even though none of us were even close to
Being old enough to drink beer.
Beer can collecting was a passing fad in 1978
Even among underaged boys.

I watched the roadside for cans I didn’t have
From the backseat of our 1967 Pontiac Catalina
And begged my mother to stop when I spotted
A can I didn’t have in my collection.
I collected flat tops, pull tabs, and cone tops
Dating from the 1930’s to the 1970’s.

I dodged traffic and crawled through ditches
On Fegenbush Lane and Poplar Level Road
To scour for discarded beer cans.
Worse, I went to the flea market at
The Kentucky State Fairgrounds and paid money
For empty cans, which bewildered and annoyed
My cheapskate mother, who was born during the Great Depression.

On the first Saturday of June after we
Got out of school for the year, I lined them
All up on our basement floor and took inventory.
I carefully placed all the cans in alphabetical order
All 468 of them.
None of them were out of order
Not even Falls City and Fallstaff,
Or Schlitz and Schmidt’s.
I then took a spiral notebook
And listed them in alphabetical order
All 468 of them.
None of them were out of order.

Granny was in town from Michigan
And came to the basement to check on me.
She was not impressed with my work,
Or at least didn’t show it.
“Normal boys would be outside playing,
On a pretty day like today,” she snorted.
I went outside
To look for more beer cans.

*

Keith W. Norris is an insurance professional by day and a poet by night, but he is no Wallace Stevens. He is a graduate of Western Kentucky University and a graduate school dropout. He is on the autism spectrum and has ADHD and his poems often reflect traits of those disorders. He lives in Moraine, Ohio with his family.

Three Poems by Kim Farrar

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Fatal

The owl, a sign of hope,
perched on a limb of your tulip tree.
I could see the orange stamen
inside the yellow cupped flowers.
You were proud of your backyard
and the pit weeded to plant potatoes
for the first time. I had my doubts
about the clay Ohio soil and fits
of rain and drought. That was eight days ago,
the final time your only son would drop by
with his laundry and shy disposition.
My friend imitated the owl’s cry:
Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?

*

The Mouse

At the coffee bar in Grand Central’s food court,
         we watch what I think is a single leaf
tumble across the floor, swept in the current of
         suitcase wheels and sneakers.
I’m with my daughter who’s 29 and, recently,
         joined Coffee Club at her program.
I like it. The grown-up-ness. The leaf skitters,
         shoes walk, wheels pivot
then it zips beneath the Los Tacos counter.
         “It’s a mouse,” I say, delighted
to see a wild animal among the chaos.
         “It’s a mouse,” she echoes,
but with more excitement—
         How much longer can I keep her home?
         Who will take her to the dentist?
We sip our coffee; I check the time.

*

The Structure

The aluminum booth stands alone
next to the parallel abandoned tracks.
I’ve seen it before along the N line—
a rusted shell with a missing window
and, like always, I want to go inside.
I want to shed my own womanly life,
whittled by mother/daughter duties.
And like a detective, I’ll run my fingertips
over the oily buttons, curve my palm
around a lever that was a track-switcher
used to clear collisions. I’ll stand
framed at the missing window,
look down the tracks like a kid
and claim it all as my secret kingdom.

*

Kim Farrar is a writer and collage maker. Her full-length poetry collection, The Impossible Physics of the Hummingbird, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2025. She’s the author of two chapbooks published by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, and Midwest Review. Her essays have been published in New Millennium Writings, Illness & Grace, Voices of Autism, and Reflections. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work can be found on her website at Poetrysite.blog.

Chimes at Midnight by W. D. Ehrhart

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 4 Comments

Chimes at Midnight

This must happen to anyone who lives
a long time, looking back across the years
and decades to the days when we were young
and the world stretched out before us
like an endless highway or an ocean
we would never reach the other side.

But now we hear the chimes at midnight
as I lie beside you with my mind too full
of our mortality, and my heart breaking
at the memory of the times I failed you,
treated you unkindly, made so many
selfish choices that I can’t undo.

My life’s companion, truest friend,
it’s no cliché to say that you deserved
far better than you got while I got
more than I deserved. You’ll disagree,
but that’s because I really did
get more than I ever deserved.

And though I still can’t make myself believe,
I think I finally understand why
people want to think there really is
a heaven. As our lives draw ever closer
to their end, I can’t avoid my sadness
at the thought of all eternity without you.

*

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

There Are Certain Times by Lois Perch Villemaire

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

There Are Certain Times

        After Tony Hoagland’s “Jet”

when days evaporate
in this summer heat
yet hours seem to crawl
our world shrinks
if we are not mindful
to reach out and plan adventures.

There’s a clock ticking somewhere
beyond fields of sunflowers
so softly it’s muted
by chirping birds
bathing in our backyard
pecking for seeds
between the pavers.

In the morning silence
thoughts bubble up.
Is it fear or realization?
Is it warning or resignation?
The catch of my breath
The ache in my shoulders.
Someday we will give anything
for what we have now.

*

Lois Perch Villemaire is a poet and collage artist from Annapolis, MD. She is the author of My Eight Greats and a chapbook, Eyes at the Edge of the Woods. Much of her poetry is inspired by her participation in Ekphrastic Writers, a group dedicated to writing and community. Lois’ work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is a Pushcart nominee and a contributing writer to AARP-The Ethel. Her interests include reading, art journaling, practicing yoga, and propagating African violets.

Once Her Teacher Called Me by Malaika King Albrecht

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Once Her Teacher Called Me

because my daughter
had a pocketful of roly-polies.
Her teacher said
they don’t belong in school,
so she snuck them home
in her lunchbox with dirt, leaves,
and a single sweetgum ball.
We made a terrarium
from a clear plastic container
with small holes in the lid.
Some days in the school pickup line,
I’m soul-caught
like a cloud snagged
in a sycamore branch,
this close to freedom
without wind or wings.
I often write soul
when I mean soil.
The tip of the trowel—
a slim sample:
clay,
loam,
silt—
each slice
teeming
with invisible worlds.
At home she opens
the cabinet under the sink
to spritz them,
offering a bit of apple
or strawberry, holding
the living circles,
which unfold
in her open hands.

*

Malaika King Albrecht’s fifth book, The Long Apprenticeship, is forthcoming in fall 2026 from Main Street Rag. She served as the inaugural Heart of Pamlico Poet Laureate and is the author of four other poetry books, including most recently The Stumble Fields, which was a finalist in the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award (Main Street Rag 2020). She’s the founding editor of Redheaded Stepchild, an online magazine that only accepts poems that have been rejected elsewhere.

Two Poems by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Little American Song

And aren’t we humans
magnificent tonight aren’t we brilliant
because didn’t we invent fireworks
didn’t we make flowers explode in the sky?

And aren’t we singing lustily an old drinking song
converted to national anthem, and didn’t we invent language
and math and cave paintings and the printing press
and poetry and the atom bomb?

And remember way back when we first learned
to harness fire and thought we were gods?
Remember us parading around in our barely-there bearskins,
making babies and fighting mastodons and dying young,
straggling little bands of us without fur or fangs or claws,
whoever would have guessed that we’d survive this long?

And weren’t we cute, aren’t we still adorable today
having tailgate parties and barbecues
and singing our insatiable hearts out
while the whole thing burns,
sea surface temperatures breaking all records last week,
while in India birds are dropping dead right out of the trees?

And still we’re buying new microwave ovens
and lawn chairs from Costco
and driving our cars, music blasting, air conditioners on high
trying to get away from the baking asphalt of here
to some as-yet-undiscovered foreign paradise

Except there’s nowhere to go anymore it’s all ablaze
and we know that in our bones don’t we
because we are so exceedingly smart
even if our smartness is more than half the problem–

Still, remember, we once invented democracy,
and are somehow continuing to sing
even as our brief dazzling reign flames out
with a sizzle and a bang
and a shower of falling stars.

*

Honeymoon Trip to the Capital, 2009

Lincoln looked lonely on his alabaster throne,
as if he knew the fragile union he’d staked his life on

was destined to fray for decades to come,
and that the Civil War he’d won

for a time would never really end.
We gaped up at him in a light gray rain,

having wandered from monument to monument.
before returning that night to our hotel

with its little sample soaps and luxuriant pillows.
This was a lifetime ago, when the President

was Black, and an actual person.
But even then, the war-torn waste

of generations was a miasma rising
from cemented-over swamps,

and we couldn’t help but breathe it in,
a fine grit suffusing the very air

of this city, built by the enslaved,
with its acres and acres of decorous graves.

*

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

ONE ART’s November 2026 Reading

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

ONE ART’s November 2026 Reading

Date: Sunday, November 8
Time: 2pm Eastern
Duration: 2 hours

Host: Mark Danowsky (Founder/EIC of ONE ART)

Featured Poets: Betsy Mars, Laura Daniels, J. C. Todd, Barbara Sabol, Lana Hechtman Ayers

FREE event!
(donations appreciated)

>> Register Here <<

*

~ About Our Featured Readers ~

Laura Daniels, a neurodivergent poet, is the founder and editor of The Fringe 999 Poetry Forum. Her poems appear in Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, and the Journal of New Jersey Poets, and she received a 2025 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Honorable Mention Award. She facilitates a free, monthly online writing workshop through Mary’s Place by the Sea for women whose lives have been touched by cancer. Her poetry collection Gentle Grasp (Kelsay Books) is available on Amazon. Her saddle-stitched chapbook, Jersey Baked (Four Feather Press), is available directly from the author. She resides with her partner in Mt. Arlington, NJ. Follow her at lauradanielswriter.wordpress.com.

Lana Hechtman Ayers shepherded over 150 poetry collections into print as managing editor for three small presses. Her latest collection of poems is A Hole in the Night (Blue Light Press, 2026). She lives in Oregon on unceded lands of the Yaqo’n people with her beloved husband and fur babies. On clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon. lanaayers.com

Barbara Sabol is an Akron-based poet living near the Cuyahoga Valley National Park whose trails she knows by heart. She is the author of seven poetry collections, and writes both traditional, free verse and short-form Japanese poetry. Her most recent collection is Mapping the Borderlands: Haibun and Tanka Prose (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Barbara’s work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council and recognized by the Haiku Society of America and the Haiku Foundation. She is a retired speech therapist, forever fascinated with language. Barbara conducts poetry workshops through Lit Cleveland. 

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. jc-todd.com

Betsy Mars is a poet, compulsive photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, SWWIM, the California Quarterly, Thimble, and the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered: The Motown Poetry Review (Madville Press). She is the author Rue Obscure (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), which was just released, as well as two chapbooks, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, the latter co-written with Alan Walowitz. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and were chosen as the winner of the Alexandria Quarterly’s First Line Poetry Contest Series and of The Poetry Salon’s Practiced Poets Prize. Her photos have been featured in Spank the Carp, Soul Poetry, and used in Rattle as an ekphrastic prompt. She is a lifelong poet, writing her first poem (at age 5 or so) in Portuguese—an elegy for her cat—while her family lived in Brazil. More at betsymars.com

The Same Stories by George Franklin

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 4 Comments

The Same Stories

He wonders sometimes if he repeats himself,
If he’s just an old man who mumbles the same
Stories, like the time he and his son hiked
Down that mountain in the dark, the trail lost,
His father-in-law confused, arguing they should
Turn around and go back up. He remembers
They followed a stream downhill, listening
To the hiss of shallow water over cold, slippery
Stones. At the bottom of the slope, a road
And the parking lot, their car glimmering
Beneath the stars. At the divorce hearing,
His father-in-law refused to shake his hand.
“Not after what you’ve done.” Whatever that
Was, he never figured it out. He tells
About the time his dog was hit by a truck in
Albuquerque, how he had to carry him
Downstairs to urinate in front of the motel
And feed him hamburgers and fries to get him
To eat. Then, he remembers another mountain
When he was in college, one that faced east.
The snow turned to ice when the sun leaned
To the other side, and they had to rappel down.
Someone with experience had brought a rope.
Each time he moved, he packed his books
In cardboard boxes, filled the back of
Moving vans with those boxes, with paintings
Vases, and clothes he hadn’t worn in years.
Maybe it’s no different with the stories.

*

George Franklin is the author of eight poetry collections, including the recent A Man Made of Stories, which was a category finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award 2026, and a book of essays, Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing (both Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). 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.

Two Poems by J.R. Solonche

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

THE GREETING

I hear it at the post office. I hear
it at the hardware store. I hear it
at the supermarket. “How’s it going?”
“Can’t complain.” A short sentence.
Fits in the pocket. Doesn’t require
batteries or a signature on a dotted line.
They don’t mean there’s nothing to
complain about. The roof has a small
leak above the hall closet. The left knee
makes a clicking sound on the stairs.
The gas bill went up fourteen dollars.
And, of course, there’s the politics.
But they look at the grass, which is
still green. They look at the neighbor’s
dog who hasn’t barked since noon.
They think of the alternative, which
involves a shovel or a hospital gown,
and they decide that the ledger balances
well enough. To complain would mean
opening a book too heavy to carry.
It would mean explaining the leak,
the knee, the fourteen dollars. Who
has the time to listen, anyway?
So they keep the phrase small not
because the world is perfect, but
because they are polite, or because
they’re superstitious, fearing that
to complain aloud is to invite worse.
It’s the smallest of treaties signed
between the ego and the afternoon.
It means the car started on the second
try. It means the coffee was hot enough.
It means nobody died since yesterday.
To say more would require unrolling
the long blueprint of disappointment,
and neither of us has the table space
for that kind of architecture. We nod,
the transaction finished, and we leave
the grief where it belongs—neatly folded,
at the bottom of the drawer.

*

LEAR

How many kings does it take to make a man?
Just one, it seems, without a coat, without
a crown, without his daughters, standing on
the heath in the rain. A man is a poor, bare,
forked animal, said the one with the fool
and the madness. The old man who has shed
his map, who has given away the borders,
the rivers, the dark forests, and has kept only
the crown of weeds, who did not know that
a kingdom is not made of land but of flattery.
Now the rain has no respect for royalty.
The lightning does not bow. The wind speaks
a language he should have learned long ago,
before the daughters grew large and the world
grew small. In the end, he is just an anatomy,
a bundle of wet wool and white hair, asking
a fool for the time, discovering that a man
without a title occupies exactly the same
amount of earth.

*

Nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, twice for the National Book Award and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Lifesaving by Gary Fincke

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Lifesaving

My father, once, heard a man holler, “Baker! Baker!”
from below his bakery’s rear window where snow
had been drifting high against the wooden building.
Drunk, my father thought, recognizing the voice
of someone, just after two a.m., who often closed
one of that street’s two taverns. Twenty degrees
and windy, my father knew, might kill a fallen man
by daylight, but he waited, extending the sentence
that crier had earned for the chronic crime of being
unable to care for himself, finishing a prep of pies
before wading, ankle high, to lift and lead that man
inside to sit beside the showroom space heater,
offering the folding chair, not the armed, padded one,
its small comfort beyond what his good will could bear.

“Bob Schenk,” my father would say, naming him
at the end of each retelling. “That fellow ate
the warm hard roll I offered when I noticed him
awake after I put the coffee cakes in the oven,”
ending there as if the rest, spoken just once,
was unimportant, the chair empty when he laid,
as always, the first tray of those cakes above
the display cases for cooling, the heavy snow
muting the early morning until rescue was sent
by the city, the trucks spewing, as they did then,
ashes in both lanes, something rough and dry
for traction before the first surge of rush hour
traffic, the street, in one direction, filling despite
the icy weather, making its way to Pittsburgh.

*

Gary Fincke’s newest poetry collection, A History of When, will be published in November by Press 53. The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems was published by Press 53 in 2025.

Ode to my Middle Finger by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 8 Comments

Ode to my Middle Finger

My palm’s life line is so long,
it wraps around my wrist like a bracelet,

and above it, my thumb and pointer can touch
to form a circle that says okay or perfect,
and my ring finger’s adorned in a Cartier love band,

but it’s the middle finger who is my favorite.
O, tall one, you mirror my position in my family

of shorter sisters; me, the one who would fling up
and get herself into trouble, so knee-jerk

that bird flip. O, middle finger, overly sensitive
misfit, you stood up for me my whole life,

A vintage palmistry chart says you, O, digitus medius,
represent determination and art, so I bow
down to you. O, divining rod, flagpole,

crutch that held me up until I learned
to rise up and speak for myself.

*

Susan Vespoli believes in the power of writing to heal. Her work has been published in ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Rattle, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. She is the author of four poetry collections and has an upcoming chapbook The Gut Is an Aquarium of Odd Sea Creatures to be published by The Poetry Box in December 2026. Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet

Bibbe Hansen by Susan Cossette

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Bibbe Hansen

When I was 14,
I was in Catholic school

I hear the echo
of my fringed Swedish clogs
clunking, mulelike
on the hall floors,
pushing past the seniors
on my way to the eternal fluorescence
of the avocado green cafeteria

the hem
of my polyester uniform skirt
catches
on an open locker,

then there was
laughter
of older worldly girls,
hair-sprayed deities

reeking of Marlboro reds
Heaven Scent perfume
and sticky strawberry
Maybelline Kissing Potion lipgloss

those divinely formed girls
knew the secrets
that could only be learned
in the back seats of parked Camaros
at 2 am on Cove Island beach

sacred
sacrosanct
until the Jordache jeans peeled off

Bibbe, I imagine
what was it like to be you
when you were 14

blonde baby delinquent
wandering Manhattan
on your Saturday ritual visits to galleries,
eating blinis with Warhol and Edie

long bangs obscuring your eyes,
but you watched and listened,
smiled and danced
and pranced in white go-go boots
down dirty midtown streets

shuffling off to Buffalo
or someplace
where I wished I could have been

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she was awarded the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, look for her work in the Eunoia Review, Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, SWWIM, Crow & Cross Keys, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women and Fast Famous Women (Woodhall Press).

Prayer by Johanna Caton

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Prayer

A silver morning, a shore cool and widening,
I watch the lowering tide, waves skim, slide

a whisper, a murmur, a hostess,
a curled hand: Come in, out,

hospitality of sea and sand.
Learn again today: tide

doesn’t need to be high, wild
surfable. Once dangerous, deep,

now tamed, low is sweet,
unveiling things never seen,

shells all gleaming.

*

Johanna Caton, O.S.B., is a Benedictine nun from Minster Abbey in Kent, England. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, both online and print, among them The Catholic Poetry Room, Amethyst Review, The Christian Century, St Austin Review, ONE ART and Ekphrastic Review.

I saw a girl online by Kate Choi

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

I saw a girl online

Singing Rape Me by Nirvana while squinting
at the camera, obviously sexual in intention &
doing a pretty good job of it too, with all that
shaded-lip type sensuality turned on full blast.
Before I could say something about artistic
intent & how Kurt Cobain would never approve
of this—shame on you, shame on you—she turned
her full body to the camera. She wanted us to see
her tits, but it was her eyes I was looking at.
Wide & red-ringed, mascara smudged like
someone had slapped it on & then off her. You’d
have expected someone like her to look much
worse. You’d have called her a young woman.
Half of the comments were righteous Nirvana
defenders & the other half were emoji-loaded
bots trying to get her to call them Daddy. You
know, like the Sylvia Plath poem. You’re such
an intellectual, I bet you could even turn her, the
girl with the fuck-me eyes & hurt-me lips, into
a Madonna. That’s what you want me to say
about this whole ordeal. & no, I won’t send you
the link. This isn’t just about us. It never was.

*

Kate Choi is a creative writer from Seoul, South Korea. An alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, Kenyon Young Writers Workshop, and Adroit Summer Mentorship, her work is published or forthcoming in Rust & Moth, The SHORE Poetry, manywor(l)ds, and more. She works as a poetry reader for Ploughshares and wildscape literary. You can find her online at katechoi.carrd.co

Living is Easy with Eyes Closed by Nathaniel Gutman

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Living is Easy with Eyes Closed

Landed at Newark, there she is,
3 inches taller since last summer,
be spared, I hope.

Ten days later, in Central Park, we explored all
843 acres, recite Strawberry Fields,
Living is Easy with Eyes Closed,
and on the Great Lawn, we play The Sound of Silence,
which is which, she asks,
the man with the curly hair and the shorter, smiling one,
we read Perfect Family, the play she wrote
for her drama class, it’s about conformity,
her teacher said, reminded her of Ionesco’s
Rhinoceros.

What language you guys speak,
a jogger asks. Hebrew, I answer.
Shalom, he says.
Spared, I think.

Then, on the last night,
she goes out to say goodbye to a man she befriended,
his choice, she says, to be homeless.
Stops at Zabar’s to get him a sandwich.

Father and son walk by.
Baby killer, the father yells,
and keeps on, plenty more.
Your dad, is he always like that, she asks.
The son nods. Quietly.

She cries when she comes home.
Not spared.

*

Nathaniel Gutman, a filmmaker, produced, directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Deadline (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen).

Born in Israel, Nathaniel’s creative work often tries to come to grips with his bitter-sweet, overly sheltered German-speaking early childhood, of books, art and good (too good) manners, before being thrown, first in school, then, in the army, into the explosive reality outside.

power by Ricki Tucker

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

power

I think it was an accident when
it fell out of the tree and landed
on my arm.
This brown, 6-legged thing just
trying to blend in
with the bark.

It would have been simple
to smash it
with my palm and
wipe it
on my shorts but
I chose to blow it away
with my breath—
the breeze cradling it to
the safety of the saplings.

It was just as easy and
nothing had to die
for being in the wrong place
at the wrong time.

*

Ricki Tucker is an advanced Biology teacher and fledgling new poet from Fort Worth, Texas. Her work explores the insights about life that pop into her head during hot showers, work commutes, and long hikes. This is her first publication.

How to Remember Love by Michael Montlack

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

How to Remember Love

A holy mixture of feral juice and exquisite bamboozlement.
Or a surprise recess from the humdrum. Some breezy whirl
of pluck that unabashedly spills from your pocket. Letting it.
Like a trail of coins for the taking—you can’t imagine ever
needing something as mundane as money again. And if you do,
extortion suddenly seems like an easy solution. Yes, it’s a bit
of a dirty script. But it’s a script that features you (for once)
as the main character. A character sure to bend ballerina-like
with the plot twists, twists bound to be more like flourishes
than bumps. It’s an abandoned warehouse window you shatter
on a dumb dare, the remaining shards catching the moonlight
in a way that justifies throwing the brick. Or it’s a baby’s first
word, cooed in a chord you’ve never heard. Still it’s old, basic
as pie. You tell everyone you found an entirely new filling.
Sure, it may be poisonous but aren’t there worse ways to go.

*

Michael Montlack is author of three poetry collections—most recently, Cosmic Idiot (Saturnalia)—and editor of the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals. This year he was awarded a residency at MacDowell. He lives in NYC and teaches poetry workshops at NYU and CUNY City College.

Testimony by Susan Trofimow

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Testimony

Always my mind was turning
each good memory to rot, so surprised
to find an old photo that told me otherwise
or hear from the past a friend
who uttered my name with tenderness.
Covered with the dirt of another
world, I heard the crumbling
behind each good thing, felt its touch
on my grubby sleeve, this world
that was always darkening.

*

Susan Trofimow is a writer based in Boston, MA. Her work has appeared in Atticus Review, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Lascaux Review, LEON Literary Review, and other publications.

PLOT by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

PLOT

I had a map in my heart to sense which room
my father was in before I entered the house.
An X on the kitchen or his bedroom,
or the living room located him. Red X
warned me to go to a neighbor.

He’d seen his four older brothers murdered
in a pogrom. Anything could rile him.

When he got to this country, he banged out his rage
sparring at Gold’s Gym and became a middleweight boxer.
After I was born, he left boxing to buy his own grocery store.
He kept fit by shadowboxing and lifting cases of seltzer.

Any startle and he was a boxer again,
hearing the ding of a bell announcing the next round.
He sprang from his corner, fists swinging.

A teacher once snapped her fingers in my face.
“You were in a trance,” she said.

How could I tell her I was plotting
the entrance to my home?

*

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro has published in the NYT (Lives), Newsweek, and more. Nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net. Her short stories and poetry have been published in Prism, The MacGuffin, Euphony, Penumbra, Harpur Palette, the Iowa Review, and many more. Her poetry collection Death, Please Wait, was published by Box Turtle Press. rochellejshapiro.com
facebook.com/rochelle.j.shapiro
@rochellejshapiro.bsky.social
@rochelle.j.shapiro
@rjshapiro

Two Poems by Mark Kessinger

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

My Marriage Moves as If

Love were cycles,
It meshes like gears.
Like two lovers seeking hand holds
In each other’s rock face.
Like reverse figures
Climbing opposite ends
Away from and towards each other.
Let us all dive
Into that symbol
That chases itself.

*

For the Moment We Have Let Go

Of each other’s throats
and give the blood
time to dry.

We are on vacation.
I haven’t had this bad a car ride
since our near divorce
fifteen years ago.

There were children in the back seat then
scarred for life.
I don’t remember which ones.
Now we are alone, further down the road,
and deeper into each other’s
weaknesses.

The holiday is something we slaughter
on a butcher block
some sort of barbecue cannibalism
meant to cure what’s
wrong with us.

What’s wrong with us
may be us.
In any combination.

We are so blind with rage
that we cannot see if we
are at the point of saying this
or meaning it.

Slowly, a moment is birthed
where I can let the rope slack some
and it is felt
at the noose end.
She slides her dagger
half way out.

We let the silence
speak of us for a while.
It might be a form of
answer.

Later, I will christen new hope for us
by saying we
have to work harder
at something better.

*

Mark Kessinger was born in Huntington WV, attended college at Cleveland State University, lived in Oklahoma City and now resides in Houston TX. He is a two-year recipient of a creative writing scholarship from CSU, a founding member and president of the Houston Council of Writers, and former editor of Voices from Big Thicket. The author of two volumes of poetry, Exploded View and Book of Joe. His poetry has appeared in many publications and four anthologies. TheKessinger.com

Two Poems by Marie Landau

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Unkind, Unkindred

I thicken at the thigh // where a light should shine // my sister and her glamour girl legs // we are unkindred // we ply in ragtag cosmic gifts // she told me I should have been a plumber // nonsense / nonsense // maybe I want to kiss this memory // maybe dress it in the truth // or truthiness // the way she would rewrite stories // I’m sure she believed // each version // truer than the last // at night I tear each one apart // at the seams // she only ever wanted to feel safe // if safe is another word for right // I only ever wanted to be seen // literally who am I // beyond her caramely stare // I’ll be here fiddling // with seams // do I stitch them back together // my fingers not impossibly thin // like hers // I’d kiss her spidery legs // forget the hands // who held them in my stead // rip the men they belonged to // from my memory // then from hers // a blankness now // constellation of a growing hunger // if hunger’s want without all that reason painted on // love without a thought // of what to do // with all this stitched-back flesh // made living // made mine

*

Sister

I have a picture of you
wind in your hair
that insatiable look
you took
photos of me
in the bath
wine-dark eyes
spider’s limbs
that would someday fill
with flesh

you could do this thing
with fear
polish it into a blade or guise
of purpose
it confused me
until it didn’t
the single stroke
with which you rewrote
your entire marriage
and then your second one

what would it have meant
to yield
a possibility
you could not name
for ten years
I wondered
is this the end
and many smaller
questions you never got
to answer

*

Marie Landau lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Pictura Journal, Bruiser Mag, Juked, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. She can be found on the web at marielandau.com.

Three Poems by Matt Lotti

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Good Cancer

That’s what the urologist
called it.
As curable as it gets.

A hard spot,
like a calcification,
unyielding to the thumb.

The sonographer
adjusted the towels.
Her head tilted
as the image
glared to life
on the monitor.

They cut below the belt,
pulled it out like a bulb.

One is adequate.
Forty. Married. Two kids.
No prosthetic.

A little extra room.
The shape of a ghost.

*

The Madtom

I took my daughter
to the creek
with a bucket and a net.

Thick mud held
sparse pools.
I urged her
to scoop one.

The net came back with
tiny bluegill and shad fry —
refugees
of the retreating creek.

“Will they be okay?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Probably not.”

We spotted a madtom
on a gravel bar.

Minnow-catfish.
Prehistoric tail
and menacing spines.

We lifted it gently
and placed it
with the others.

Walked back
to the car —
quiet.

*

Ashtray

My father smoked
when I was young.
Quit when it became clear
he only had so many years.

He used to keep
a round smoked-glass
ashtray on top
of the fridge.
Too high for anyone
but him at 6’2”
to reach.

A carton of Winstons beside it.
Him on the corded phone,
a cigarette in his fingers,
his forearm
propped against the fridge.

The ashtray bore the image of a
US Navy E2C Hawkeye.

It was always overflowing.

When I was six,
he took me fishing.
Was supposed to have quit.
Smoked the whole time.

I told my mother.
He never took me again.

*

Matt Lotti lives and writes in North Carolina. He holds a BA in English from Virginia Commonwealth University. His poems explore memory, mortality, and the natural world. This is his first publication.

Three Poems by Leilya Pitre

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

A Girl Sitting Next to Me on a Plane to
Cincinnati Asks Me Where I Am from

She turns to me
somewhere above the clouds,
twenty years old maybe,
with eyes wide open
the way
I, too, used to have.

Where are you from?
she asks,
hearing my accent
as if it’s a place
I can point to on a map
or looking out of illuminator.

I almost say, “Louisiana.”
It’s easier, shorter, also true.
It fits in conversation
between takeoff and landing.
But something in her waiting
makes me expand the answer.

I am from a coastline
that has the memory of mountains,
from a place where the sea
meets stories older than language,
where people are strong-willed,
brave, and free spirited.

I am from a house
that no longer belongs to me,
but still lives in the way
I set a table for dinner
tend to the vegetable garden,
or hum songs without noticing.

I am from learning
how to carry a place
without holding it.
From translating myself,
so others can understand,
and sometimes so I can too.

She nods, like she understands.
I wonder what she hears:
a country, a history, or just a woman
trying to answer a simple question.
I will say Louisiana next time,
when someone asks.

*

Calling Me Home

Inside me there is
a field of sunflowers,
bright yellow heads looking up,
framed by the blue sky,
gifting me hope
of returning.

Inside me there is
the Black Sea
with magnificent Ayu-Dag,
rising from the native shore,
safe, familiar, always there,
lending me its strength.

Inside me there is
my walk home—
white-washed houses,
flowers in the front yards,
the mulberry tree at the corner,
a few more steps—and
my mother’s voice
calling my name.

*

We Don’t Talk About War

When I talk to my sisters
in Crimea, occupied now,
we don’t talk about war.

We don’t talk about
how it split our family,
closed the roads between us,
made visits impossible.

We don’t talk about
the thousands who have died,
or how they lower their voices
when they say their sons’ names,

or how fear eats beside them
at the dinner table
with its quiet, constant,
bone-chilling presence.

We don’t talk about
those sons who may be called
to fight to kill those
who they used to call ours.

We don’t talk about it.
We ask about the weather,
about what’s growing in the garden,
about what was cooked for dinner.

We say we are fine,
as if silence can keep us safe.

We don’t talk about war.

*

Leilya Pitre is a Ukrainian American poet living in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. Born and raised in Crimea, her work explores memory, belonging, home, and heritage. She writes about family, displacement, and the landscapes that continue to shape her life. Her poems often appear on Ethical ELA, and she is active in local and national writing communities. Leilya Has previously published Where Stars Meet People: Teaching and Writing Poetry in Conversation (2023) with Rowman & Littlefield publishers.

Chugga Chugga by Emily Kittleson

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Chugga Chugga

I stand by the window, toddler on my hip.
We watch trains surge by the dead-end
street. He waves and says die.
I say buh buh bye train.
Thinking again, say hi train,
bye train. That is the nature
of the thing, pulling itself along:
one train arrives and leaves
our window at the end of Milton street.
He will learn to transition
from the easier duh
inside the mouth
to buh at its threshold,
each time he waves and says die
to the ducks at the lake,
to his grandparents,
to our beloved, his other mom,
work badge clipped to her collar,
and, oh, he waves die die
to his own blessed belly
as we pull a shirt over his head.
Look, he is right:
we are all trains
saying hi and bye
and hi and die
and hi and bye
and every day
is a boxcar passing
and no one can know
how long it will go on

*

Emily Kittleson is an emerging poet living in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her wife, toddler, and an aggressively affectionate cavalier king charles spaniel. She graduated from Luther College with a B.A. in English in 2011 and works a day job at Minnesota Public Radio.

Movement Disorder Suite by Terri Kirby Erickson

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Eating Pumpkin Pancakes at Elmo’s
After My Appointment at the Movement
Disorder Clinic

Elmo’s is crowded, of course, at lunchtime,
but we still score a great table and a friendly
waitress. My left foot continues to shake like

a maraca from the stress of doing the required
tricks to allow a PA, no older than my purse,
to ascertain (subjectively speaking) how fast

my disease is progressing. Progression is a key
word with conditions that can’t be cured except
by miracle, misdiagnosis, or anomaly, and it

doesn’t mean anything good. So far, however,
my body is still my own and mostly obeys my
requests, if not quite as efficiently as it once did.

And what I want to do right now, is to sit in this
bright, sunshiny restaurant with all these happy,
talkative people and devour my inflammatory

treat with dollops of real butter and maple syrup.
I like how my husband, sitting across from me at
our table, is eating a ham and cheese sandwich

like this is just another ordinary day in the life of
our decades-long marriage—and how delicious
these pancakes taste, so warm, fluffy, and sweet.

*

The Neurologist

She asked me to walk down
the long hallway, which even
babies can do, their plump feet
slapping the floor, laughing like
little hyenas. But there was no
laughter there—only a stranger
standing with her arms crossed,
watching—her white coat like
a snow-covered mountain so far
in the distance, I thought I would
never reach it. At least you don’t
have breast cancer like me she
said, after making her tentative
diagnosis—suggested a move-
ment disorder specialist, just to
be sure. I never went back to her
office or think of her if I can help
it. But I remember sometimes,
how close she stood to me in that
small, windowless room—her face
like a mylar balloon losing helium,
floating past you after the party.

*

In the Orthopedic Waiting Room

Hope soars like the high ceiling in the orthopedic
waiting room. Patients with arthritis and bursitis,
fractured bones, stiff shoulders and torn menisci,

believe they’ll get better and most, completely
healed. They engage in light conversations, tell

stories about injuries that occurred on mountain-
tops and basketball courts, cycling trails and in

their own homes because of loose rugs or a lack
of handrails in the shower. They speak of aches

and pains in temporary terms if they mention
them at all. So, it’s a relief to be sitting among

so much certainty that all will be well with a bit
of physical therapy and a few cortisone shots—
and not the movement disorder clinic where even

the air is heavy—like all your life you’ve lived
in zero gravity or a swimming pool where you

never carried your own weight and now you do.
I’d much rather be sitting beside a woman with

a walking boot that will soon be discarded than
people who will never walk again or even button

their own shirts. It is too sad, too close to home.
Here, in the orthopedic waiting room, I pretend

(with my mildly inflamed knee) that I’m one of
the briefly sidelined people. I can almost picture
my next downhill run, how fast I’ll go, how far.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including The Light that Follows Us Home (forthcoming in the Fall of 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.

Today is the FINAL DAY of ONE ART’s Fall Fundraiser!

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Last Day !!

~ September 30th ~

The last couple days have been BIG!!

We received 14.4% of our goal in just two days (!!) partly thanks to one especially generous donor.

We’ve now reached 66.2% of the overall goal.

As a reminder, I revealed I’d be thrilled if we made it to 70% and we’ve just about made it!

It all comes down to this final day!!

>> Donate Here <<

On Loan by Mehnaz Sahibzada

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

On Loan

I’ve carried the same
quilted handbag since June.
Floral and white,
a spring wedding on my arms.
The leather wallet
(something blue)
stuffed with faded receipts.
I reach for it at thrift stores
where something old
becomes my something new.

The summer, every teacher knows,
is borrowed.

*

Mehnaz Sahibzada is the author of the poetry collection, My Gothic Romance (2019, Finishing Line Press) as well as the Art of Strangeness, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She is a 2022 Jack Hazard Fellow in fiction writing for her first novel in progress, Jaani, a gothic coming-of-age story set in post-partition Pakistan. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, On the Run, Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen, Jaggery, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. A high school English teacher, she lives in Los Angeles. For inquiries, contact Mehnaz through her website at poetmehnaz.com

ATTACHMENT THEORY by Julie Benesh

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

ATTACHMENT THEORY

They slashed my mother’s belly
to drag me out; six weeks early;
a five pound tumor; stashed

in the neonatal ICU.
Nowadays they say
the compression

is worth the mild oxygen
deprivation of a vaginal birth,
and, true enough, I was always

extra bright and a little off-key.
My mother said she couldn’t breast-
feed, but now I know it was me−

too uncoordinated to latch,
which followed me to gym class
and numerous doomed romances.

*

Julie Benesh is author of the poetry collection INITIAL CONDITIONS and the chapbook ABOUT TIME, has been published in Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, and other places, earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and received an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She works as a professor and management consultant and holds a PhD in human and organizational systems. She recently moved from Chicago to Black Mountain, NC.

Two Poems by Marjorie Sadin

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Knives

In the drawer
are spoons.
In the cabinet
are cups.
There is an organ
inside me. Some say
it holds love.
But I say it holds
knives that cut
me open like
a tomato
when I touch you.
Knives that
will slice me
like meat
when you die.
And knives that
will attack me
when I least
expect it.
Knives
that shine
in the organ’s
forever night.

* 

Lovers’ Hands
after Georgia O’Keeffe “Hands and Horse Skull

One grasps a horse skull.
She is holding the skull like a pianist holding a chord.

She rests her fingers on the skull as if caressing her lover.

Her lover holds the bottom of the jaw which has the horse’s teeth.

Each receives the other’s caress without touching.

They are not afraid of death even though
death is between them.

*

Marjorie Sadin is a disabled senior who has published five books including three chapbooks and two full length books. Also, she has published widely in literary magazines. She currently teaches Poetry Appreciation and Writing at a local community center. She lives and reads her poetry in the Washington DC area.

The installer by Ainsley

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

The installer

To learn to cross a road
is to download an app
and delete the installer.
You no longer ask
which foot first,
which way should I look?
The app runs.
You cross.
Life is simpler
when you stop visiting
the original files.
You don’t need to know why.
Just cross.

*

Ainsley is a poet based in Hong Kong. Her poems borrow their grammar from machines and technologies to ask what stays human in memory, love, and continuity. She is honored to have her first published poem appear in ONE ART.

Two Poems by Iain Grinbergs

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Ablation

They wheeled me in while a nurse said she liked my stripy socks. That was the last clean sentence I heard. Before, the doctor said Cooked and Cure and Pilot. The room was sharp and silent. I woke up three times. I was machine. I was equation. My mouth was sticky when I tried to say Stop and groaned. They kicked me back under. The tech said Get it yet? The doc said No. He said it wouldn’t hurt, but I was all alien and probe. A spaceship built wrong. Earth fell. A strange drum played on. I was mutation, stretched from muzzle to toe. I came to in a bright room. The doctor said Close and AV node. A puppeteer strung my EKG. I slept and woke and tried to get up. My heart auditioned beats. The nurse caught me. She held me like a doll, soft at the seams. My voice box dropped and rolled along the floor.

*

Letter from the Barber Shop

It’s when my barber says she almost tore through
her hand with a chainsaw that I think about death—
how it might come blundering like blindfolded men groping

different parts of an elephant, declaring This is it! No, this is it!,
or knowingly like when the Florida cop caught me going
twenty over, saying Do you know how fast that was?

and my thinking, Yes—it was by design. Why do I take great pleasure
in cracking sometimes? Is it control I mistake for freedom,
like a dog baring its teeth, still leashed? Yes, there’s a thrill

in the not-quite, in the almost. Even now, I replay my barber’s laugh—
how casually she said blood and root and earth. How surprising
we can be and how wondrous it would be for Christ to actually come,

despite my early atheism, not cloaked in the chaos of trumpet-sound
but silence, the kind that drips through drywall, the hallway light
turned on not to accuse but to awaken. Isn’t interruption

what we fear most? The Where have you been? Your hands
smelling like nicotine and whiskey. Grace not so much a ladder
but a nurse saying, Silly you—now, you won’t do that again, will you?

*

Iain Grinbergs is an English professor and the author of Vanity Twist, a chapbook (Bottlecap Press). His latest work is in Sho Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, storySouth, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Rogue Agent.

Stray Steps by Brittany Capozzi

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Stray Steps

I want to climb our front steps,
Sit and lean my right arm on the iron railing.
Lean back into that day
When Dad was to my left—
The other support to lean on.

Less than an hour before taking in the view of the street
My forehead and hands lowered a few inches onto my thirteen-year-old cat,
As the push of a needle pulled his last breath.
I had never bowed to a death under my palms before.
I had never bowed to cancer,

But it crossed my path that day.

I’m sorry kiddo, that’s tough, his eyes on the street.
The pavement turned pink with hats and shirts
As hundreds of breast cancer patients, survivors, and caretakers
Moved through their annual fundraising walk.
I imagined a temporary finish line hanging somewhere.
Their future steps stray steps—
Would they find leaning, healing, or a bow?

We waved to as many strangers as we could.

Years later, I park in a deserted parking lot.
I can’t climb our front steps,
Sit and lean my right arm on that iron railing.
Lean back into that day
When Dad was to my left—
It’s not ours to climb.
And Dad’s not here.
I bowed
To him, too.

Instead, I lean my right arm on the center console.
The pressure pushes against my breast through the sweatshirt
And with left palm, I cup the side of my ribcage and move my hand around.
I can feel the lump after all.

My future now filled with stray steps for the next 26 days.
Walking with the same Worry DNA as those in the fundraiser.

On day 27, I’ll learn it’s a cyst.
Instead of bowing, I’ll lean back
Inhale the last molecules of fear through my nose
And exhale gratitude, feeling its air above lips.

For a split second, I’ll swear I climbed our front steps.

*

Brittany Capozzi is a yoga therapist (C-IAYT), writer, belly dancer, and the creator of Trust Fall Writing® based in Massachusetts. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in English from Curry College. While there, she completed and presented her undergraduate thesis “Therapeutic Writing: A Remedy for Understanding and Transforming Life Experiences” under advisor Dr. Allan G. Hunter, author of Therapeutic Uses of Writing.

Most recently, Brittany has written wellness articles for Belly Dance New England. Her “Coin for Thought” writing series, based on her YouTube series of the same name, is forthcoming in Fanoos Magazine.

She works with women who want to rediscover their uninterrupted selves through a sensory-based yoga therapy program by using handwriting and coin scarves as tools to cultivate a sense of confidence, safety, and wholeness without self-judgment. To say hello or learn about an initial complimentary yoga therapy session, visit her at understoryyogatherapy.com.

Three Poems by Sarwa Azeez

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

The Unsung

There is a song for everything,
even for an anthill crushed
beneath a passing boot.

But its story cannot rise in song
the way a bee shares her odysseys
with wax-faced sunflowers.

There is a song for my body, too.

I received the lyrics
from my surgeon:

asymmetries to be lifted,
war scars reconstructed.

There will be stitches
to soften the trauma,

but the aftermath
can never be
fully reversed.

I sing the words back
to my therapist

There is a history for everything,
she reflects.

Some lines
are buried within,

but the body knows
mysterious ways
to rehearse them.

I nod and wonder:

Someday the mirror
will draw out
the softest angle
of my face.

*

Tunnel Vision

They say
they found a mass.

The MRI technologist
calls me into the room,
asks where I’m from,
whether I support
this new war.

Then he turns
to the student.

“I told you—
only here,
or on TikTok,
will you meet
every kind of person.”

The contrast
will enter your bloodstream
so we can see
more clearly.

He gently slides me
into the tunnel.

Don’t breathe.

Suddenly
I’m back
under another ceiling.

Another voice.

Another
don’t move.

The commands
are unchanged.

I hear the gunfire.

They can see through me now.

I am a body
where
a mass of lives
came to rest
before the earth.

*

Homebound

The train reminds me
of my heart.

Not because
both have chambers
stitched together
by veins,
wires,
and currents—

but because
both are crowded.

The train
with passengers.

My heart
with the selves
I have buried.

Every chamber
a platform.

With every beat,
I look up,

waiting
for one of them
to step back in
and call this place
home.

*

Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, essayist, and Fulbright scholar. She holds an MA in English Literature from Leicester University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of Remote (4Word, UK, 2019). Her poetry and prose have appeared in World Literature Today, Collateral Journal, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Women Writing for a Change, and elsewhere.

Just Be Yourself by Susan Kress

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 4 Comments

Just Be Yourself

I’m not my self today, you say,
and I wonder what self
you have on. Is it the evening
silk one or the shabby bathrobe one—
maybe the weeping one
that curls up with the cat.
Sometimes I think the self
is like a colander, the bowl that holds
and lets things go at once.
Of course, if you are Whitman,
your self is everywhere. No borders,
no divisions. There isn’t anything
that isn’t you. And if you’re Dickinson,
you’re Nobody. Nothing seems
straightforward any more.
If you take your self in hand,
talk your self out or into something,
who is talking to that self?
And if you let your self down,
beat or pick your self up, who in heck
is doing all that heavy lifting?
Pull your self together or Why
have you let your self go we might say
(heartlessly) to someone who
is leaving pieces everywhere
like shards from shattered mirrors.
You can wear your self out
with thoughts like these.
Sometimes, I think life
would be easier as a creature. A rat
maybe. Better still: a cow.
Cows seem content to spend
the day in steady rumination,
satisfying elimination. Who,
with selves that circle, split, run
out of sequence, doesn’t
glance with envy at the cow?
O, for a single self, a self
that shrugs off costumes,
masks, duplicity, and double-
dealing. But then—perhaps when
clouds pile up, the night comes on
too fast, and all the other cows
are sleeping—even the cow
lows in her plaintive voice:
Who am I? Who are you?

*

Susan Kress was born and educated in England and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her poems appear (or are forthcoming) in Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx, Gyroscope Review, Nimrod International, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Salmagundi, New Letters, South Florida Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, and other journals. Her poems have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.

Haiku by Lana Hechtman Ayers

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

sky cloaked in smoke
only fires
breathe easy

*

Lana Hechtman Ayers shepherded over 150 poetry collections into print as managing editor for three small presses. Her latest collection of poems is A Hole in the Night (Blue Light Press, 2026). She lives in Oregon on unceded lands of the Yaqo’n people with her beloved husband and fur babies. On clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon.

Belletrist by Julia Caroline Knowlton

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Belletrist

Once again I fall hard
in love with a word.
Belletrist: a writer
of belles lettres.

Beautiful letters!
From apple to zigzag
with twenty-four loves
tall as ship masts or

low as open water
in between. Doves,
the tail of why, hilly
consonants like B.

Vowels moving fast as trains.
O like new word-glow,
a newborn pushed out
of darkness into being.

*

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.

Day 80 by Naa Asheley Ashitey

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Day 80

Now I lay on the floor to ground myself.
I left my phone in the living room
so I wouldn’t be tempted to reread
the messages from a year ago,
wonder if the signs were there and I could be
15 months through the healing journey
instead of 9 weeks [12, actually].
I don’t want to think about our last kiss.
I want to call you and block you.
I wish I could cut the fat between my organs and underneath my skin.
I wish I was still in love with you and
could hear you laugh about the mistake
I made at work because that’s how you kept the anorexia in line.
The floor is supposed to ground me. I miss you more now.

*

Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian-American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging.

Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth.

Her creative work appears or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Brittle Paper, Heavy Feather Review, BULL and editorials for The Xylom, Live Science, The Scientist, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction and a finalist for the Claire Keyes Poetry Award and Subnivean Awards in Poetry, and is working on her first poetry collection.

More at NaaAshitey.com.

Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social

Two Poems by Everix Machan

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

tender cuts

i don’t like to be asked what my gender is anymore
like silas denver melvin says, it is usually a case of
cis people asking cis questions, which is to say you
think you’re asking me how to get under my skin
in some way or another, but honestly, it’s clear
you are really asking me how human i think i am

you’d prefer i cleanly cleave myself in thirds, one for
my dropped & frying vocal cords, thickened
by three years’ worth of pinpricked thighs & belly
the hair growing like a moss trail down my arms
& stomach & upper lip, the scalpel shaping my
rejected tissue, carving purpose into muscle at last;

one for the tender curve in at my waist, the braids
down my back, the stretch marks snaking across
my chest where fat once weighed down flesh, the
iridescent shimmer of beetle wings across my
eyelids & cherry-flavored lip gloss, my nasal
tonal lilt that lands between lesbian & twink;

& one last cut to sum up incomprehensibility,
sacrificed upon your altar plate, sliced daintily
into raw bite-size pieces for you to crush between
gnashing molars like a flank steak, blood dripping
into some grotesque rorschach test, so you people
can marvel at my pain & wonder what it really means

*

sometimes i look at her and i only see my mama

but the name slides across my tongue, bitter
as ashes, until i swallow it to avoid choking. it’s mom
now. i’m not allowed to be her baby anymore, but
it’s not her fault, not really. her arms are still open
but now i’m an ex-daughter, a son. a child too-long past
its due date. she says, i wish you held onto god, not
in the transphobic way but to say that she wishes she
could’ve left me with something that would make dying
digestible. i’m sorry, i promise, but i only pray when
i have something to prove, sitting curled into myself
like i could crawl back into some pretemporal pocket
of the universe, safe at last, sleeping with the angels.
maybe i believe in it after all. no way to know for sure
until the moment it matters most. my prayer is that we
really are made out of the same stardust. we make it out
sparkling no matter what. no trumpets, no soul-scales—
angels smolder and die like any other light we turn to. maybe
that’s a comfort all on its own, mama. don’t you think?

*

Everix Machan (he/him) is a queer, transgender, and autistic undergraduate poet from Wisconsin. His poetry is published or forthcoming in The Branches, Gyroscope, and The Rebis, among others. When not writing, he is often researching and finding excuses to perform. Most recently, you can find him reading short story collections and books on dramaturgy, or working on various tasks related to his university forensics team. He’d be quick to clarify that “forensics” refers to competitive public speaking, not crime. Sometimes there is conversational overlap.

Five Poems by Jennifer Abod

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 7 Comments

Diagnosis

Silent in straight-back chairs, my wife and I
watch the doctor review her chart.

Alzheimer’s, he says.

Then, without waiting a beat, he asks
You going to keep teaching?

His cool casualness irritates me.
I answer hot, Of course not!

He looks to her. Of course, I will.

Our car ride home, the only sound
a summer wind.

In the disquiet of our bedroom,
she brushes my arm.
Her eyes, tender and clear:

You answered
as if I wasn’t there.

Eyes closed, I see
my betrayal.

Can you forgive me?

She pauses, the dust swirls.
It will take some time, but yes.

I’m still learning to forgive myself.

*

Another Alzheimer’s Morning

In sleep, my wife speaks a language
known only to her.

The laughter in her dreams
tells me she’s still here.

I prepare coffee. Steady my doubts.
The weakness in my knees.

I command myself: steer
this ship forward.

Toward a future I cannot
imagine. Refuse to conjure.

All I need now is to love
her today.

*

Life Again

When my wife died
I was a slippery seed
waiting for the wind
to plant me

It isn’t fair, really
the luxury of time,
we rarely shared
together

Different coasts,
children, work,
the revolution, degrees,
quick meals, fast cars,
Alzheimer’s

Sometimes I scrub
a counter, iron a vest,
sweep leaves, watch
hummingbirds feed—
I hold life again
to settle me

*

Keepsakes of my Late Wife

This fall, empty as a pot,
to temper winter blues
I paint our dull kitchen
lemony yellow.

I remove her keepsakes:

the gold whistle on the wall
she blasted at Pride and protests.

The postcard of the French painting
on the fridge she didn’t need to send:
Our home is with one another.

When the walls are fresh like spring,
I stand in the doorway, imagine her
gentle nod.

Each time I leave for the day,
her whistle now on the front door
reminds me to be brave.

*

Winter Blooms, Long Beach

On the doorstep of 80, I linger more

in the view outside my window

In November, the trumpet tree, once

frail, delivers petals of delicate pink

Star jasmine invigorates

tangled green vines crowning

the wrought iron fence

I search for other miracles

Near the driveway, a purple profusion

of Jacaranda, an Amaryllis

on the brink of red explosion

I am in awe of what I’ve missed

What I have yet to see

*

Dr. Jennifer Abod is an award-winning documentary film director and broadcaster. She is a Pen Awardee for emerging poets (2025). Her poems appear in: James Crews Anthology: Love is for Everyone, ONE ART, Artemis, Persimmon Tree, Morning Writes: An anthology by Lesbians over Sixty, Spillway, Sinister Wisdom, Silver Birch Press and other publications. Dr. Abod is a former Assistant Professor of Communications and corporate media specialist. She was singer/songwriter with the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band and sings Jazz when the spirit moves her.

Singing Lesson by Daniela Buccilli

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 7 Comments

Singing Lesson

Not until my second singing lesson
did I admit that I had been strangled
three times. I said it as a joke
though it was true.

I may have fainted or pretended to.
It was in the martyr’s year and by
the man who said he loved me.
That’s why I can’t sing, I said.

I am squeamish when anyone
gets close to my neck — anyone,
the craft fair jeweler, lovers.
Even just telling her, this woman

who drew me the lungs and diaphragm
who loves Seussical more than any other
musical, who wears sunglasses during
our lesson because her eyes hurt,

even telling her, with an electric piano
between us, and a beer bottle-size speaker,
and the music stand that I held like a spear,
even then, my throat contracted like a sinkhole,

and I had trouble swallowing.
We spent the rest of the hour
breathing together, a little silent
at first. I saw how scared she was.

Then she whispered, no one is here
trying to strangle you, no one
is strangling you. You can breathe here.
My brain buzzed champagne.
Then she hugged me.

*

Daniela Buccilli’s poetry can be found in The Pedestal, Prime Number Magazine, Broad Ripple Review, Quarter After Five, Paterson Literary Review, and Cimarron Review. Her chapbook is What it Takes to Carry, and her co-edited poetry anthology is Show Us Your Papers (both from Main Street Rag). She has writing degrees from University of Pittsburgh and Carlow University. She taught in a public high school and served as her union’s secretary. Currently she is the poetry editor at Northern Appalachia Review and workshops with the Madwomen in the Attic in Pittsburgh.

The Day My Children Got Stuck by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

The Day My Children Got Stuck

Damn my voice, stalled somewhere
between the first and second floors

of my lungs, non-explosive. Damn
these hands, too vast to reach you

through cracks. I never thought
I´d sprint the distance between landing

and desperation, collapse in a wasteland
of sweat and gasp, the separation between us

insurmountable. They say you shouldn´t
force open an elevator door, but damn

the muscle-creating gods who built
my biceps from photons. Bizarre,

how I don´t recognize the songs
filling the cabin like smoke

or water, more a cacophony of shock
and alarm, your grandma a Pied Piper,

luring all the terror out of your gut.
Damn my memories. The day I got stuck

in an elevator like this one, the mirror
that still bears the screams of a terrified

girl in its cracks. I pace outside
the door, wait for the fire department

to arrive, pray children´s tunes
aren´t jagged enough to fray cables,

blazing enough to overheat brakes.

*

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

I Close My Eyes on the Old World by Kristen Staby Rembold

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

I Close My Eyes on the Old World

Tomorrow, I’ll board my plane,
ending my temporary importance in this place,
here where dusk can last for hours, the water
ever silvery and shining, swans gliding dreamlike
along the calm waters of the lake in the park
where I push my grandson in his pram
and where I go to be alone.
The daughter we almost lost is home
from the hospital, weak and pale. The swans
glow white as light falls, white as antique
milk glass, white as flowers in a moon garden,
or shafts of fallen moonlight on the stairwell
my daughter haunts in her dressing gown,
her milk stopped up.

*

Kristen Staby Rembold is the author of two books of poetry, The Harvesters, 2023, and Music Lesson, 2019, both from FutureCycle Press. She has also published two chapbooks and a novel, Felicity (Mid-List Books). Her writing is forthcoming or has appeared in numerous periodicals, including Radar Poetry, Triggerfish Critical Review, The Hopper, South 85 Journal, and has also been nominated for Best of the Net.

Paper Can Only Be Folded Seven Times, and Other Inconveniences by Allison Mei-Li

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

Paper Can Only Be Folded Seven Times, and Other Inconveniences

Sometimes, at the intersection
of Lewis, the light turns green
just as the train stops traffic.

Sometimes I let the mug run cold,
leave the tea bag steeping
til it’s gone bitter.

Sometimes I see your lips
in a dream and I am sick
from picturing what might’ve been.

All this love
with nowhere to go—

a piece of paper
on its seventh fold.

*

Allison Mei-Li is the author of A History of Holding, founder of Third Moon Press, and a reader for The Turning Leaf Journal. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, podcasts, and publications such as Rust + Moth, Sky Island, and MER Literary. She lives in Southern California, where she hosts poetry-centered gatherings in-person and online.

Two Poems by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 8 Comments

In Praise of Our Wounds

They say the moon was formed from
the body of the earth as a consequence
of a crash. Suddenly, and without notice,
what was a whole planet became two,
what was once perfect now bears scars.
Consider now how closely we orbit
around each other, how from the wreckage
we were born, if only to companion each
heart in its sacred rotation. If only to place
a palm to our scars in holy gratitude of this
etched memory, in praise of our wounds
that now light the night sky, by which
the whole planet glows.

*

What I Didn’t Know Before
          after Ada Limon

was that horses give birth in the dark.
Not intentionally by any means, not because
they prefer the soft hum of starlight, but by
instinct. A horse is born in the dark in
preparation, ready to run with the herd by
early morning. This is how I loved you.
You, at my front door after sundown, years
between us, wearing camo joggers and orange
shoes bright as the spark that enflamed me.
I remember you cried when I read you a poem
about trees. You held me close that night, my
head to your chest. What was formed between
us silently slipped into the moonlight, all
four-legged and standing, eagerly waiting for
first sign of the sun.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American poet, author, and contemplative counselor. 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. He is the author of the memoir Habibi Means Beloved, and the poetry collection Alhamdulillah Anyway. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Orison’s Best Spiritual Literature. Moudi’s work focuses on themes of justice and liberation through a spiritual framework of compassion, forgiveness, and awe. As a lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. moudisbeity.com

Three Poems by Justin Karcher

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

When Hope Cries Out, It’s Usually Contained in Something It Shouldn’t Be

like how today at work someone calls
and asks me if the hospital accepts
old wedding dresses, because her mom
recently passed and she found hers
in the attic. The dresses can be used
for stillborn babies. After my shift is over
I take a walk and find a crock pot
in the street. When I look inside
there are scratch-offs. I imagine a witch
trying to brew a potion that would make
the economy fall in love with my city.
I guess she gave up before it was finished.

*

On My Way to AA, a Pickup Truck Raced by Me With an Iranian Flag Waving Out the Window

During the meeting, I couldn’t pay attention.
I was thinking about what my friend said
at the bar this past weekend, that she makes
her son carry his passport at all times.
I shouldn’t even have been at a bar
but everywhere feels heavy these days.
The other night, I dreamt that our dictator
died from eating an entire nursing home.

*

The Melting Snow Revealed a Massive Pile of CDs Someone Had Dumped Near the Psychiatric Asylum

I stared at a Mighty Mighty Bosstones album
isolated from the rest. Cigarette butts had formed
a ring around it and I thought about rituals to summon
the dead. It’s tough when your remaining friends
stop including you. Later that night, right before
they closed, I was at Tim Hortons getting coffee
when the employee gave me a free donut. I was
on the verge of tears, but I knew he just didn’t want
the baked goods to go to waste.

*

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

Two Poems by R.J. Gordon

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Every Yassified-Millenial-Feminista-Wine-Mom Has a T-Shirt Emblazoned with the Slogan “Not Fragile like a Flower — Fragile like a BOMB.”

140 million years ago,
the first flower danced
its way to the water’s surface and
took its inaugural breath.
No weight on its chest,
it held its head high,
crowned by the sky —
aquatic bisexual royalty.

Magnolia’s greatest-of-the-greats-grandparent
spent its life self-pollinating,
creating and sustaining a beauty
that still defies all explaining yet,
nothing is eternal.

Even with no human hands to pluck, flowers wilt —
they get eaten by turtles.
Nature kills;
nature dies.

In 11th century China,
humans first had a mind
to light their hate on fire,
combine it with gunpowder,
and plant it in each other’s chests.

We tried, even then,
to harvest poetry from death,
naming bombs like Adam
naming beasts in the garden:

the first, “Thunderclap.”
Later, “Little Boy” and
“Fat Man”.
As if giving them names
could erase the lingering fingerprints
of our DNA
from the crime scenes birthed by their explosion.

But their corrosion supernova’d its way
into our minds’ eyes
and now we describe ourselves
as made in their image.

A gory visage.

We sew ourselves
in the fields of life —
landmines,
not wildflowers,
prompting others
to while away their hours
not in admiration,
but in soft-stepping,
so as not to set us off.

Instead of pomegranate blossoms
grenadine sweet
we deem our seeds
shrapnel —
fragmentation less fragile
for its ability to inflict pain:

human heart
and tongue
and hand
grenades.

Plucking petals like floral charades
miming plucking out the pin
and letting our fears ignite.

These are the stakes:
to make a world in which all of God’s children can live
or to go into the dark?

With no daisies in sight
instead of petals
counting down

87

86

85 seconds to midnight.

Poppies and oleander will
attend to our graves.
Long after delicate flesh has given way
to worms
they will bloom,
just as they did after World Wars I & II.
Not even nuclear fission can deter their eulogy;
the earth vibrates with their poetry.

Why be a bomb? they say,
when you could be
that which Darwin called
an abominable mystery?

At the end of the world
you’ll find me
in a dandelion crown—
flower bombing.

*

Everyone I Love is a Poet

The boy who buries pottery
to lay to rest a relationship long dead,
returning clay to clay
as we will all someday be returned dust to dust.
He refuses to further break that which is already broken
and, in so doing, heals himself.

The girl who unironically writes pop-punk love songs for her cat,
rhyming “time” with “time” time and time again —
a modern Cyndi Lauper:
lost,
looking,
finding.

The adult who picks up every hitchhiker they see,
answering their own childhood prayers
for momentum and understanding,
knowing that running on fumes is not a moral failing
and we all sometimes need
someone to refill our tanks.

The grandfather who takes his breaks from the mines
to crochet rainbow blankets for his children’s children,
stitching strength into beauty
that emanates its own warmth.
The jeers of his peers be damned,
Love’s rough hands can still be dexterous.

For what is a poem
but a pot,
or a song,
or a prayer,
or an afghan?

What is a poet but someone who
in fierce gentleness
resists despair? 

*

R.J. Gordon is an avid board-gamer, a (very rusty) classical violinist, and an Assistant Professor of Religion at Transylvania University. From 2019-2025 she was an active member of the Black on Black Rhyme Tallahassee poetry community, and together they wrote, produced, and released the spoken word album Rebel Dreams on Spotify in the summer of 2020. She now reads and writes and performs with the folks of Poetry at the /’tāb(ə)l/ in Lexington, KY. This is her first publication.

ONE ART’s October 2026 Reading

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

ONE ART’s October 2026 Reading

Date: Sunday, October 4
Time: 2pm Eastern
Duration: 1.5 hours

Host: Mark Danowsky (Founder/EIC of ONE ART)

Featured Poets: Susan Vespoli, Heather Kays, Jean Mikhail, john compton

FREE event!
(donations appreciated)

>> Register Here <<

~ About Our Featured Readers ~

Jean Voneman Mikhail lives in Athens, Ohio, with her Egyptian American husband and two Guatemalan American kids so go figure… She has published in ONE ART, Sheila Na Gig Online, The Northern Appalachian Review, Gyroscope Review, New Verse News, Odd Pocket Press and others. She was nominated For Best of the Net in 2025 by Eucalyptus Lit.  

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author. Her books include Genomes & Lies (Cajun Mutt Press, 2026) and Myths in the Feed (Crying Heart Press, 2025), which sold out six times in its first three months and made Kays the press’s best-selling author. In 2025, she received two Pushcart Prize nominations, and four of her poems were named semi-finalists in the 2026 James H. Nash Poetry Contest. Kays is the founder of The Alchemists, an online writing community for poets and writers. Her work has appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground in Conversation, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

john compton (b. 1987) is a gay disabled poet. he lives in a nonexisting town in kentucky which still holds its name, with his husband josh, alongside 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).

Susan Vespoli believes in the power of writing to stay sane. Over the years, she’s taught Montessori three- to five-year-olds, ENG101 to community college students, and currently leads wild-writing circles and poetry classes for writers.com and 27Powers.org. Her poems have been published on ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Rattle, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. She’s the author of four poetry collections. Her chapbook, The Gut Is an Aquarium of Odd Sea Creatures, was a finalist in The Poetry Box’s chapbook contest and will be published in December 2026. She lives in downtown Phoenix with her rescue chiweenie, Frida. susanvespoli.com

32 Percent by Kari Burroughs Kraakevik

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

32 Percent

I am 32 percent my mother.
I jumped for joy.
There was a way to measure it.
Only 32 percent her.
More my dad.
My brother called it the lesser of two evils.
I called it a miracle.
That means I have a 68 percent chance
of not being my mother.
Not my mother.
This whole time I have carried a secret.
That I am related to something I have to outrun.
That I have to work harder.
Be better.
Stay ahead of it.
Because one day
it could take over.
The part of me that is her.
I feel less pressure knowing it is only 32 percent.
Does that make it 32 percent easier.
I hope so.
When I was born, my mother said she prayed for my nose.
For it not to be large like hers.
As if that were the only thing
worth changing.
I have my dad’s nose.
I grew out of her wedding dress at twelve.
The one I was supposed to wear someday.
The zipper stopped halfway.
The dream stopped with it.
Secretly, I wanted to wear a suit.
She said I looked like a Florentine statue.
Curvy. Luscious.
She said it like a warning.
I was bigger than my mother.
They say we are two inches taller than our parents.
Are we also better.
Kinder.
Less afraid.
Is that measured.
What percentage is inherited.
What percentage is chosen.
What percentage is fault.
I am two inches taller than my mother.
I am 68 percent not her.
If I am only 32 percent her,
why has it felt like so much more?
Why has it felt like the majority?

*

Kari Burroughs Kraakevik is a Colorado writer, musician, and educator. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, Divergents Magazine, Open Secrets Magazine, The Genre Society, Chicago Story Press, Backsliders Magazine, Larina’s Lit Lounge, and Infocalypse Arts & Literary Magazine.

Tan Carton on the Porch, Addressed to Mom by Holly Guran

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Tan Carton on the Porch, Addressed to Mom

I cut the perforation
and tug hard until it opens
to another box,
much easier to release

and behold a nylon mesh
around one more container,
a six-inch black cube
with a plastic cover.

Inside, the burgundy roses,
three rows of four lined up.
Like cupcakes in a baking tin,
they face me.

I imagine they have eyes.
Their instructions:
Do not touch or water us
Do not expose us to sunlight
If water touches us
Use a hair dryer

No card, but I know
my estranged son sent this gift.
Later, his wife writes,
they are meant
to last a long time.

*

Holly Guran, author of Twilight Chorus (Main Street Rag), River of Bones (Iris Press) and two chapbooks, received a Massachusetts Cultural Council award. Now Before and Ever (Kelsay Books) is her recent collection. Her work has appeared in journals including Poet Lore, Santa Fe Literary Review, and Salamander. Selections from her narrative poems, based on a 19th century correspondence between a mill girl and the editor she married, have been performed in Boston and at the Lowell National Historic Park. She enjoys working with a popular series, Rozzie Reads Poetry and Open Mic, held monthly in Boston.

Family Secrets by Michael Mintrom

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Family Secrets

We grew up in this small town.
House, stockyard, supermarket, pub.

Once or twice, we’ve ventured
out to the wider world.

Our forebears were miners—
grew old digging in darkness.

It’s a small town. Tunnels you can’t see
collapse inside us.

*

Michael Mintrom lives in Melbourne, Australia. His poems have appeared in various literary journals including Amsterdam Quarterly, The Blue Mountain Review, Cordite Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Metaworker, and Shot Glass Journal.

A Deer in the Furniture Showroom by Al Ortolani

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

A Deer in the Furniture Showroom

A young buck leapt through the plate glass window
        and frightened by the breaking and the blood
        of his wounds, disassembled couch sectionals

and lazy boy recliners, bleeding on the faux leather
        and pet friendly upholstery. It was a terrible shock.
        The people on Broadway at two in the morning stopped

their cars against the curb and hurried with camera phones
        to capture the moment. One couple saw their favorite
        love seat flipped on its side. Potted plants disintegrated.

The police were called, and two patrolmen arrived with long
        guns drawn. Every light was left on for window shoppers
        and as policy against burglary. The deer was in a bad way,

stumbling through the dining room displays, the China cabinets
        few could afford. Neither cop had fired a weapon on duty.
        They propped open the showroom doors, snapping

throw rugs like whips until the deer disappeared.
        The owner arrived within minutes in slippers
        and goose down. More police converged.

One, a hunter, took off in his squad car
        through the dark streets of East Town.
        Siren throttled for silent running.

*

Al Ortolani is a poetry editor for the Chiron Review. His poems have appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, Pithead Chapel, and Muleskinner Journal. New York Quarterly Books plans to release his most recent poetry collection, American Watercolor, in early 2027.

Three Poems by Austin Petersen

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 8 Comments

The Passenger

My teenage daughter tells me there are times
when she wishes she wasn’t here—

I try to hide my panic as she sits on her bed,
not looking at me,
fingers tracing the creases on her sleeve.

Before she can finish the sentence,
the rest is already in my throat—

I sit down and wrap my arm around her,
stinging tears already matching hers.

I want to say, me too, sometimes.
I want to say, it’s been with me
for years, this quiet passenger—
the wish not to die, but to just
not exist—
never have existed.

What can I say to fix her,
when I don’t even know how to fix myself?
Lump in my throat, I whisper
it’s all going to be ok,
that it’ll get better with time—
I choke on the words.

I tell her that I stay for her—
and I need her to stay for me—
she’s not a burden, she’s the tether
that keeps me here on the hard days.

She whispers she loves me too.
We hold each other for a long time,
sobbing.

We don’t fix each other,
but we stay.

*

Scratches and a Bent Shifter

My eight-year-old brother blazed around the house
on our new red and white Honda Z50R motorcycle,
revs climbing with each lap.
At the end of the gravel he turned too fast,
leaned too far—
tipped over and slid to a stop,
metal grinding on rock.

The engine sputtered out.

I stood frozen as Dad’s footsteps came fast behind me,
bracing for his shoulders to square,
for the sharp holler—
we’d just wrecked the new bike
he’d gotten us for Christmas.

Instead, I heard a soft voice:
“Does anything hurt?”
He knelt beside my brother,
freed his pinned leg and helped him to his feet.

I had to clear my throat:
“Dad, is the motorcycle broken?”
He glanced at the scratched tank and bent shifter, then at me—
“It’s just stuff. I can’t replace my kids.”

As the engine cooled, the ticking slowed—
so did my breathing.
My eyes left the bike,
still lying in the gravel,
to Dad brushing the dust from my brother’s jeans.

*

Letter from a Turkey

Mom lets me check the mail today.
I march through the crunchy leaves to the mailbox.
Among the junk and bills—
an envelope with grandma’s handwriting.
For me.

I run inside and shout for my little brother and sister—
“Come see my first letter!”
They crowd around me on the faded blue recliner
as I carefully open the flap.

Three pages unfold—
a collage of rubber stamps, hand-drawn pictures,
magazine cutouts and stickers,
her handwriting weaving between them all.

A turkey sticker next to the words “Do you ever feel like”
and BIG cut from a magazine twice.
Trevor giggles— “A big turkey!”

Mom taps a heart stamp with a bite missing,
“she forgot your birthday and feels terrible about it.”

I scowl at the piano stamp reminding me to practice,
then groan at the pun she built—
sticks and a honeybee:
“It sure wood bee great if you lived nearby.”

Then, at the bottom—
Two stick figures, grandma and grandpa,
arms stretched from edge to edge of the page,
blue ocean waves stamped underneath.

“We love you THIS MUCH.”

Lindy traces the waves with her fingers:
“It’s like the whole ocean.”

I fold it carefully,
tuck it in the envelope.

Thirty years later, I pull it out.
My own kids piled on me in the recliner—
little fingers tracing the ocean waves.
My daughter asks,
“Can we read it again?”

I tell her yes—
but if the house ever catches fire,
save grandma’s letter first.

*

Austin Petersen is a Missouri boy transplanted to Utah, where he lives with his wife and five daughters. He came to poetry late, convinced for years that anything he wrote would pale in comparison to his influences. When he finally admitted this to his oldest daughter, she called his bluff and bought him a book of prompts. They in fact do pale in comparison to his favorites, but here we are anyway. As an AI technology sales engineer by day, he is drawn to the analog of putting ideas to paper. His poems explore memory, fatherhood, and the stories that shape us—particularly the childhood moments we carry without knowing why. This is his first publication.

United on Flight 93 by Nancy Sobanik

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

United on Flight 93

        “The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
        Alphabet of names in a green field.”
        The Names, Billy Collins

When I see us I see Icarus flying,
only flying,
not the fall, never the fall.

We were raised like store-bought
bread we ate, safe from spoilage,
perpetually soft,

but bereft of seasoning
life’s flavor is lost.
We must stop listening

to the echo from long ago—
our parents telling us to fly,
not too low, but never too high.

We are fledglings, but see—
our crew and cabin mates are joined
through extremity, yet

we stand poised to make this leap.
Forget escape, no dignity is won
running from a brawl.

Friends, we will strap on courage
with bare hands, the tender
and thin fuselage of our resolve.

Pennsylvania’s green cradle waits
to receive us, behind us
contrails flag our wake.

Brother, it’s still flying until the moment
we hit, even if landing ends
what we cling to.

Think ripples—
deliberate, concentric, spreading
toward the waiting shore.

We’ll defy the peril that jars
lesser women and men. Let’s roll—
for country, family and home.

We are flying, always flying.
In the retelling
we are forty falling stars.

*

Nancy Sobanik has recent poems curated by The Cafe Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, Eclectica, The Ekphrastic Review, and forthcoming in Chiron Review. A Best of The Net Pushcart nominee, she was a finalist in the 2026 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Maine Chapbook Series competition, and was awarded Second Place in the 2026 Charles Moore Eastport (Maine) Arts Center Prize for Poetry and anthology. Her chapbook The Unfolding, semi-finalist in the FLP 2025 Open Chapbook Competition, was published by Finishing Line Press in May 2026. She lives in Lyman, Maine, but calls the forests and mountains of Maine her home.

Two Poems by Ann E. Michael

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Into the Garden

When I heard you were gone,
of course I went into the garden.
Barefoot in the damp greens,
I tore my hair, looking skyward
because what was there to do
but tend to the details:
forms accounts certificates
activities I had no desire for.

Among the lettuces, shiny after rain,
among pea sprouts, cilantro’s lace,
where everything was yet so new,
I raised up my arms in a lament
you could no longer hear or comfort.
Went down on my knees, weeping.
Saw crabgrass and purslane emergent
between the rows and began to weed.

*

Popcorn

Each night before the 11 o’clock news,
popcorn: my father shaking the pan,
scenting the house with hot oil,
waiting for kernels to burst
into cumulus shapes he’d douse
in salt and melted butter.
Few rituals could be better.

Sometimes, awake before midnight
in the soft dark, I miss the rattle and pop,
lonely for the comforting familiarity
that accompanied my frequent insomnia.
I want my childhood aroma again.
I want the man standing at the stove
before the late-night news begins.

*

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her most recent poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, Ekphrasis Review, ONE ART, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies, six chapbooks, and two previous collections. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at annemichael.blog

Walking Among the Last Crickets by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Walking Among the Last Crickets

This lost summer of vegetables,
Fall brings elongated shadows,
where perhaps, dead souls guide us.

Our world glides towards silence.
Too many unspoken words.
What do the dead say about the afterlife?

Is there one? Or many choices of afterlife,
like leaves turning Fall’s rust color?
This might be when time matters most.

This might be when we need to use time better.
This begins the lessening of light.
I wish all of this were reversible.

*

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).

Two Poems by Lynne Kemen

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Green

Before I knew the word, I knew the color —
the way it arrived each morning differently,
blue at the edge of the ridge before the sun cleared it,
then yellow as the meadow grass woke to noon.

By four o’clock it has changed its mind again.
The old pines take the late light along their spines,
each needle a filament, the whole tree
a kind of burning that gives off no heat.

The beeches hold a color with no name —
not dark, not pale, something between teal and shadow
that deepens as the hour moves, goes almost black
behind the white flowers blazing at the wood’s edge.

The moss on the stone steps to the kitchen door
— the door no one who knows us ever uses —
is the oldest shade, the one that doesn’t change,
that keeps its counsel through whatever weather comes.

The peonies don’t care. They bring their pink
into all of it, unbothered, heavy-headed,
and the apple leaves match the apples, both
that unripe, in-between, not-yet color.

I have been trying to name it my whole life.
It names me instead, every afternoon,
when the light comes through the spines of the old pines
and the woods go dark behind what’s still illuminated.

*

Litany

For the streets washed clean before the heat,
for the cobblestones still dark with water,
for morning arriving in Paris, the light off limestone,
the air still carrying the Atlantic.

For Rue Mouffetard, two thousand years of footfall,
Roman stones that remember the road to Italy,
for walking on something that has outlasted everything I know.

For the light. For the light.

For my physical therapist in her Manhattan office
insisting in her beautiful accent that it was different there,
and for my not believing her until I stood in it myself.

For Monet, who was not dreaming,
who was looking straight at what was in front of him
and painting it accurately.

For Notre Dame before and after,
for the rose window holding its colors
the way a litany holds its grief — by naming, by returning.

For the side streets that have been side streets
since before this country was a thought,
for the centuries you can feel through the soles of your shoes.

For the café table outside,
for the carafe, for the simple meal
that tasted like an argument I had already lost.

For dusk in Paris, which is not like dusk anywhere,
which is the light my PT was trying to describe
in a language that wasn’t hers, to someone who wasn’t ready.

For finally being ready.

For the light that named itself
and asked nothing of me but to stay.

*

Lynne Kemen is the author of Shoes for Lucy (SCE Press, 2023) and More Than a Handful (Woodland Arts Editions, 2020). Her work has appeared in ONE ART, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere. She received a 2024 Pushcart Prize nomination and serves as Editor/Interviewer for The Blue Mountain Review. She lives and writes in an 1830s farmhouse in rural Delaware County, New York, where she shares her property with a murder of crows, one of whom she has named Edgar Allen Crow. lynnekemen.com

ONE ART’s Fall 2026 Fundraiser

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

~ ONE ART’s Fall 2026 Fundraiser ~

I hope you will help support ONE ART’s continued commitment to the poetry community.

ONE ART is an independent, reader-supported poetry journal.

ONE ART does not receive any organizational, local, state, or federal funding.

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

What Your Support Makes Possible:

  • Creative independence
  • A welcoming & supportive community
  • Thoughtful curation
  • An ad-free reading environment
  • Free submissions
  • Programming initiatives including ONE ART’s Reading Series
  • The thousands of hours of labor required to make ONE ART possible

ONE ART’s 2026 Fall Fundraiser will run from 9/8 to 9/30.

Our goal: $5,000.

>> Donate Here <<

I will provide updates about the fundraiser’s progress.

Updates:

Day 1 – We reached 23% of the overall goal!!

Week 1 – We received an additional 5% of our goal. At the end of Week 1, we reached 28% of our overall goal.

Week 2 – We received 11.5% of our overall goal bringing the total to 39.5% of the goal.

Week 3 – We received 2.3% of the overall goal bringing the total to 42% of the goal.

Updates:
Yesterday (9/27), I shared an update in my personal newsletter, Stay Curious, that we had reached 42% of our overall goal. (Last week we only received 2.3% of the goal over the course of the entire week.)
 
I revealed my hope that, all in all, we’d reach 70% of the goal.
 
Yesterday, generous donors gave enough to account for an additional 4.2% of the goal in a single day!
 
So, presently, we’ve reached 51.8% of the goal.
 

Final 3 Days– The last couple days have been BIG!! 

We received 14.4% of our goal in just two days (!!) partly thank to one especially generous donor. 

We’ve now reached 66.2% of the overall goal. 

As a reminder, I revealed I’d be thrilled if we made it to 70% and we’ve just about made it! 

It all comes down to this final day!!

Last Day – We received 6.7% of our goal! This means we reached 72.3% of our overall goal!! 

We did it! We made it to 70%! I’m delighted!! 

Thank you so much to all of our wonderful supporters!! 

Thank you for your interest in ONE ART and our community.

With Gratitude,

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

*

Have a question?

Contact Mark here.

*

Where to find ONE ART:

// Website / Substack / Facebook / Instagram / Threads / Bluesky / Twitter (X) / YouTube //

 

>>> Donate Here <<<

 

 

Vigilance by Tara Menon

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Vigilance

A bolide three-foot meteor
crashes into Earth’s atmosphere,
boom, and I think my nonagenarian mother has fallen.
I thud down the stairs.

On another occasion,
instinct propels me to check on my mother.
She falls backward in my room.
With fortuitous timing, I catch her in my arms.

The fire alarm shrieks in the middle of the night.
In a flash, I pound on my mother’s door,
waiting for her to unlock it,
only to be told by the figure
who shadowed me down the flight of stairs
that she’s in India,
a whole other continent away.

It’s hard to imagine a world
without our mothers, my cousin says
on our way to the mall.

We’re always imagining what they’re up to,
even when the seas are between us.

*

Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is a two-time finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award. Her latest poems are forthcoming or have appeared in “AMPLIFY” (Sheila-Na-Gig), “The Sucharnochee Review,” “Tipton Poetry Journal,” “ONE ART: a journal of poetry,” “Blue Heron Review,” and “Grey Sparrow Journal.”

Three Poems by Steve Paulson

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 4 Comments

State Route 116, Tennessee

1.
A friend played tour guide for me
when I visited from Montana,
took me on a drive
through the hollers of east Tennessee,
those close Appalachian hills,
those grim, pinched valleys.

From the bottom of the hollers, we couldn’t see
the coal mine above,
tearing up, blowing apart,
trucking away the top of the mountain.
My friend pointed out the drainage
where the mine above had bulldozed its waste rock.
He showed me the creek
that was poisoned and would stay poisoned.

2.
We took the state route through Fraterville,
where 216 coal miners – men and teenagers – died
in a mine explosion over a century before.
My guide described a note
scribbled by one miner
on a small piece of paper:
We are all praying for air,
Raise the children the best you can.
Bury me and Elbert in the same grave by little Eddy.
Oh God for one more breath.

Close to a thousand children lost their fathers
that day. I tried to comprehend the struggles
of those suffocating in the mine,
the pierced hearts of families above.

The road here is a black line on the map,
a dark road indeed.

3.
Back among the hollers,
invisible but for my friend’s knowledge –
an unmarked graveyard
discovered years after the last burial,
filled with the bodies of mostly black prisoners
leased out for profit by state prisons
to coal companies that also profited
by working these men to death,
keeping the deaths secret,
burying those men
in graves they thought would remain
undiscovered forever.

These dark roads and these dark valleys;
It’s a wonder (I reckoned
but didn’t say to my friend),
It’s a wonder
that the sun ever shines in this place.

* 

The Grave in Tyree Basin

Twin brothers born in 1916
to a family of homesteaders
in the Badlands.
One died within hours,
the other lived 91 years.

The family tried to scratch out a living, but
there was too little water, too little grass.
They left the baby’s grave behind
when they moved on.

Years later, someone
who never knew the family
walked the three miles in
from the road, carried
a small concrete marker there.

Now, someone else returns
from time to time, re-paints
four posts around the grave, maintains
a wire fence outside the posts.

A little sun-powered lamp there
creates a tiny light
on an empty plain.

These visitors are scarce,
but not the buffalo, coyote and
meadowlark. Sunshine is
abundant, wind is unimpeded.
Night is dark
and brilliant
and sings to the lonely.

*

Evening in the Sandhills

Two sweethearts lie atop
a haystack in the meadow
of a dry Nebraska ranch
and watch the round moon rise
in a dusty summer sky.

*

Steve Paulson lives in eastern Montana and reconnected with poetry after a career of environmental activism with Montana’s Northern Plains Resource Council. He has studied under Bernard Quetchenbach, Tami Haaland, and Cara Chamberlain; his essays have appeared in High Country News, Earth Island Journal, and various newspapers. He authored a non-fiction book – Environmentalists: An Eyewitness Account from the Heart of America.

Ghazal for the Late, Great America by Marc Alan Di Martino

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Ghazal for the Late, Great America

Gold leaf will not liberate you, America,
from this ten-year migraine. The hour is late, America.

The “shining city upon a hill” has doused
its lights to dusky. Not great, America.

All of those billions and still stuffing your face
with Big Macs? Your heart rate, America!

I read, It’s like being in bed with Jekyll and Hyde.
Only a masochist would date America.

The K-shaped economy: when the rich put on hoods
to slaughter the penniless. X-rated America.

The Pequod was melting pot, peppered with people—
your neighbor is your shipmate, America.

Stop blaming the tired, the hungry and poor
for your callowness, O third-rate America.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John Locke walk into a bar—
Tom Paine was your true prophet, America.

*

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.

Two Poems by Tony Gloeggler

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Niece

Last week when my baby brother’s wife
gave birth to their first child, a girl,
I was visiting my old girlfriend and
her twelve year old, Jesse, in Vermont.

Today, I’m standing on their Long Island steps
waiting for someone to come to the door.
My brother grabs my jacket, leads me
down the hall with this dazed half smile.

No one in my family knows how to talk
about anything that matters, but our eyes collide
and I sense we both recognize how different,
warm and charged, this piece of quiet feels.

His wife walks across the living room carrying
a too pink bundle, humming almost imperceptibly.
She’s wearing gray sweats and looks tousled,
softer, more beautiful than I thought possible.

I can’t tell if the baby is as pretty as my mother-
delighted to be a grandmother for the third time-
insisted over and over during our long distance call
or if she looks like anyone in anybody’s family.

I nod and my brother’s wife leans closer, places
the baby in my arms and I can’t believe how tiny
this little girl is, how every single finger is a bigger
miracle than anything I’ve seen in too many years.

Riding the railroad home, I’ll glide by abandoned
buildings, vacant lots and stalled construction sites,
wonder why I never wanted anything this wonderful
to happen to me, if I’ll miss it more the older I get.

I’ll think about what Jesse means to me, how easy
it is to be generous, to simply love him unconditionally
from far away and whether I’d turn into myself
become a selfish, impatient, too strict father up close.

But right now, Alexis Leigh is resting in my lap
occasionally yawning and stretching, letting
the pacifier slip out of her mouth and I’m rocking
gently doing all I can to keep her happy.

*

Table Talk

When what’s left of my family
gets together, we order out,
pizza, chicken. Unless I bring up
mom or dad, no one mentions
them and I try not to miss
Mom’s cooking most. Sometimes
my brother Jaime’s wife asks
my sister Donna about her sons
or husband, since no one’s
seen them in over five years.
They’re always doing, you know,
the same. Nobody ever says
our brother’s name, John.
They haven’t talked to him
since Mom died and he didn’t show
up to her funeral. I don’t remember
if it was because he didn’t agree
with the way we took care of her
at the end, how he never felt part
of it or they think he didn’t help
enough. Yeah, all of the above.
I’ve seen him twice since, lunches
at diners with friends we played
schoolyard ball with. I call maybe
monthly, make sure he’s alive.
He never picks up his cell, but calls
back days later. We talk sports
for a bit. He tells me about cats
and I pretend to listen. We end up
arguing politics, viciously. I sent him
a check this frigid winter. Around
the table, I learn my niece got
her driver’s license last month,
they’re shopping for a new car
and visiting colleges. Definitely
nothing urban or too crowded.
My nephew’s trying out for tennis
If the rain stays away after school
Monday. A freshman, he thinks
he has a chance to make varsity,
a definite for jay-vee. I am tempted
to bring up my new book, maybe
mention I’m starting to feel my age,
running out of breath walking up
subway steps, that scary time
carrying laundry to the corner
like Santa shouldering a sack,
the last thirty feet or so, feeling
light-headed. veering to the right
like a drunk starting to topple
over, balancing myself against
the building’s wall. Instead,
I ask Daniel to pass me
some more mac n cheese.

*

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.

Using by Howie Good

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Using

I pulled her aside one day after class and asked if she was okay. I was sure she was using. Her skin was ashen. There were alarming dark hollows under her eyes. She was so emaciated she looked like one of the living skeletons in a photograph of concentration camp victims. She thanked me for my concern but said she was already in treatment. The next week, she was found dead on the floor of her dorm room. My first thought was that she had overdosed. I later heard it was her heart. Chronic anorexia had fatally compromised it. Every life is a card dealt face down.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

Three Poems by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 13 Comments

Unfiltered

My mother in a black and white bikini
still smolders in the photo frame.
Her red lips encircle a cigarette,
conjure a smoke screen, nostrils flare.
Her fingertips flick phantom ash;
the shutter clicks as she inhales her despair.
Between us, cinders, regret, so much turbid air.

*

Nocturnal Bottleneck

Even Newton can be wrong, it turns out, turning blue
inside out for his own satisfaction. If I were indigo
what color would I be to your cyan eye, the only one
whose gaze I hunger for? Maybe your third eye
would see me true. Or if we were less evolved,
and still had eyes to see—a Zebra Finch
perhaps— you might recognize me, hanging on,
heavy, but not yet bruised—not an apple—
or pomegranate, full of seeds—but ready,
glowing neon, edible; you might see the fruit
inside, peel me, swallow me whole.

*

Frankenword

When she couldn’t find the word
for where it hurt, my daughter
didn’t hesitate:
hand-ankle, she said,
indicating her wrist. It was
all I could do to resist
weighing her down
with the language
of anatomy, her body
already growing beyond
my protection.

*

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.

Two Poems by Kathryn Petruccelli

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

What They Said

I once bought an Ellen Bass book for my mother—the one where her mother is dying
all through the pages and my mother said, Geez, it’s all about sickness and old age.
I hadn’t seen the topic for the beauty. I should have gotten her Mary Oliver and
she could have been pleased with the egrets, crickets, not understanding their beauty
was also telling the story of sickness and old age. My mother, who liked to say
of my writing, It didn’t happen that way, dear. Who tried to love the world through
her logic. Mary Oliver was still alive back when I didn’t buy her book for my mother;
so was my mother. But now they are both gone, though it still matters what they said.

*

Changing States

Confession: I have not protected everything
I’ve wanted to protect. Confession:
people think I know something about plants

but I just like their company.
In the sun, which is sometimes shade,
the patience of water waiting to lift away

as a gas. Patio plants, slow in the cold,
shimmer next to puddles. Attempts
to control what grows. My failures—dark holes.

When I was 9, my friends gave me
a teddy bear because I was moving.
I didn’t understand my life

was about to take a different direction
far from them in another state. What is home
at that age? Shame

hadn’t been parsed out yet,
was one giant blob of pain stuffed
into the scuffed & alone part of my little body.

Confession: most days I don’t expect the best
of people. Confession: I’ve always wanted a twin.
I once bought a garden decoration

at a flea market—a large wooden heart
spray-painted half in subtle gold,
the other half covered in shabby chic

rusted metal. Stenciled on the wood: HOME IS.
Another woman also wanted it, though
I’d asked about it first. She said,

You can have it, but her eyes added,
fucking bitch. Each morning I collect
the snails that hide behind the heart,

move them to the dandelion patch
next to the trash. Confession:
sometimes I fling them over the fence.

Confession: sometimes the things with roots
I’m responsible for watering
are all that get me up in the morning.

Confession: I’ve been disappointed in every one
of my birthdays since I was 9. Confession:
Christmases, too.

*

Kathryn Petruccelli is a Pushcart-, Best of the Net-, and Best Small Fictions-nominated writer with roots in spoken word. She holds an obsession with the ocean and an MA in teaching English language learners. You can find her work in places like the Massachusetts Review, the Southern Review, ONE ART, West Trestle Review, Fictive Dream and SweetLit. She teaches online, pay-what-you-can workshops, and produces and hosts the podcast Melody or Witchcraft, where guests discuss an Emily Dickinson poem and one of their own along with the relevance of past writing to today’s issues. More at poetroar.com / melodyorwitchcraft.com.

Private Faith by Michael Nelson

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Private Faith

Tending flowers at nine I learned
to duck into the garage as greasers
swaggered by flicking a switchblade
against the chain link fence, to tend
the balsam before traffic starts,
in danger hide with the lily of the valley
behind the black-green yews. Alone,

worship the royal purple gloxinia
in the window of Flowers By Gosh.
Honor your private faith in velvet petals.

*

Michael Nelson’s publications include the Missouri Review, Maine Review, Tifferet, among other journals. He’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize a couple of times. He lives in the juniper savannah of Northern Mexico where he learns to garden with less and less rain.

Walking after Tonight’s Showers by Clif Mason

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Walking after Tonight’s Showers

I feel the silent desires of clouds.
I’ve always known the words
written in the book of my body

were as much river as stars,
night breezes as hickory boughs.
What is this music I breathe in

with lilac & iris? I am these songs,
shimmering like water
on lady’s mantle, burning

like glowworms seeking mates.
I am bridal veil & moonlight,
nightjars & rain. I am clouds

& the changing songs of clouds.

*

Clif Mason lives with his wife, a visual artist, in a forest in Bellevue, Nebraska, on the forcibly ceded lands of the Umoⁿhoⁿ people. He is the author of the full-length poetry collections, AS JAGUARS DREAMED ON THE EARTH’S DARK FACE (a magical realist novel in verse, Cathexis Northwest Press) and KNOCKING THE STARS SENSELESS (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), as well as three chapbooks. His work has appeared in Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, The Classical Outlook, Poet Lore, and Orbis International Literary Journal (UK), among many others. He is a former Fulbright Fellow to Rwanda, Africa.

Bound for Glory by Laurel Brett

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Bound for Glory

When Bob Dylan wrote
an early song

for Woody Guthrie
he immortalized

a freedom spirit
he knew would be leaving

soon. But our Gloria
seemed as if she’d be

with us forever. Cool,
passionate, incisive,

always explaining.
She wore a bunny suit

for an exposé on Playboy.
In Ms. magazine

she gave us voice, a new title
so we weren’t defined

by our status
vis à vis men,

her love, her steadfastness
eternal. When I was a teen

she proved
that tired canard

a lie: feminists are not feminists
because we’re ugly —

we are feminists because we dream
of being fully human.

*

Laurel Brett is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Her novel, The Schrönger Girl, (Akashic Books) received favorable reviews, including one from the New York Times. Her essays have been published in many venues, including The Nassau Review where it was awarded the best essay prize and nominated for the Best American Essays series. Her poems have been published in Second Coming, The Ekphrastic Review, the Mid-Atlantic Review, The Westchester Review, and other venues. This year brought a Pushcart Prize nomination. Her first poetry collection, Penelope in the Car, will appear this fall of 2026 from Indolent Books.

*

Remembering the Joy of a Sandwich Before the Summer of Cyclospora by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 3 Comments

Remembering the Joy of a Sandwich
Before the Summer of Cyclospora

If sex were a sandwich
it would have to be a BLT.
Not just any BLT, but the one he
made for you simply because
you hadn’t tasted one in years.
Sharing a meal with him is
a religious experience, every
nibble a communion. Imagine
him frying up the bacon,
flipping it as you watch
pork fat     s   i   z   z   l   e     s   l   o   w.
And that intoxicating scent—
no confusing his umami tease.
He goldilocks the sourdough,
toasting it just right. Then he
slathers one slice with aioli
and fig jam on the other. You
watch his hands crack open
a head of iceberg lettuce
so cool & crisp you can taste it
calving as he slides a bite
into the ocean of your mouth.
And then, he gives you his big
tomato heart, tangy & sweet
with a touch of salt—that taste
you can’t get enough of. His taste
you never grow tired of, that
makes you sweat like it’s August
every month of the year.
Another perfect day to stay inside—
with or without a bed of lettuce.

*

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.

Elegy For a Used-Car Salesman by Vincent Antonio Rendoni

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

Elegy For a Used-Car Salesman

You tell me you’re having a good month
without telling me you’re having a good month.

Sunday morning out at Denny’s. Just you & me.
You’re wearing the black polo with the piping.

Everyone knows your name.
You know the waitresses’ names.

Get whatever you want.
I’ll have what you’re having,

the only 13-year-old with a plate
of Egg Beaters & chicken-fried steak.

We cheer our bottomless coffees,
thick with Sweet‘N Low, drowned in cream.

Do you want to know my secret?
Give me your greatest hits.

You extend your hand. I extend mine.
You look me dead in the eye.

It starts with how you start.
A limp-dick handshake? That’s no way to sell a car.

Give ‘em one of these. One pump.
& another. Two. No more. No less.

Have mints. No gum.
Toothpicks at the ready.

Say your name. Ask them theirs.
I say my name. I say yours.

Say they deserve it.
Give them permission.

You’re not selling a Toyota. You’re selling the asphalt,
the sky, the chance to do it all over.

I say it: you deserved that
& more.

*

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of Dead Chicano Mixtape (Red Hen Press, 2027) & A Grito Contest in the Afterlife (Catamaran, 2022), winner of the Catamaran Poetry Prize as selected by Dorianne Laux. His work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter & Pleiades. He lives in White Center, WA.

*

Three Poems by Mark Hendrickson

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Mindful

My therapist says I should light a candle. So I light two, equidistant on the windowsill, four if I count the reflections. It is not enough. I add a stick of incense. She says I should choose calming scents; but lavender and chamomile gag me, so I go with bergamot. I imagine the smoke is steam rising and that life is Earl Grey. The tea grows cold too quickly. Outside my window it’s still raining, also grey. Someone in the apartments across the way is watching me watch them. My therapist says be mindful. I imagine the end of everything.

* 

People Like That

I don’t like people who are too loud. People that don’t pay attention to their surroundings. Angry people who only see the negative side of everything. I despise it when someone is manic one minute and depressed the next. I don’t care for bald people or those who work out all the time and still don’t lose weight. I have no time for intolerant people. I can’t stand introverts or anyone who can’t manage simple small talk without making it awkward. I don’t like people who take pills just to get through the day. No, I don’t like myself at all.

* 

The Leaving

Father drops your hand and shames you into leaving childhood. Voluntarily. ‘Big boys don’t carry security blankets.’ This was never true. Innocence was a home you couldn’t wait to run away from. It remains fashionable to claim you miss it. Then came parents. Friends. Lovers. You left them before they left you. You leave all you were willing to die for. You scream regret to the car in the garage. Soon you will circle round to innocence and childhood again. They will drag you from your home and leave you nowhere. Strangers fail to notice when you leave yourself behind.

*

Mark Hendrickson is a gay poet and former psychiatric nurse living in the Des Moines area. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his work appears in McNeese Review, Vestal Review, Variant Lit, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Follow him @MarkHPoetry or visit markhendricksonpoetry.com