Five Poems by Jennifer Abod

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 ~ 7 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 ~ 1 Comment

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 ~ 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 ~ 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 ~ 1 Comment

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 ~ Leave a 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:

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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 – TBD

Week 3 – TBD

Final Week – TBD

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.

*

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Vigilance by Tara Menon

~ ONE ART ~ 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 ~ 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 ~ 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 ~ 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 ~ 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 ~ 12 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 ~ 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 ~ 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 ~ 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 ~ 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 ~ 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 ~ 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 ~ 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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

  1. Lindsay Ratcliffe
  2. John Amen
  3. Donna Hilbert
  4. Tsaulina Malazonia [Translated by Sallomeja Sandroschvili]
  5. Lisa Badner
  6. Elisabeth Weiss
  7. John Dorsey
  8. Bruce Morton
  9. Mirabella Mitchell
  10. Lucy De Maio

How I Long to Hear Sappho Sing by Laurel Brett

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How I Long to Hear Sappho Sing

Two men on Facebook
tell that me I am wrong —

that Dylan did not deserve
his Nobel prize. After all, they say,

his lyrics ride on music. But why
must melody be split from words,

hearts from lungs — which organ owns
our oxygen? And every word of Sappho

sung — her crimson lips wrapped
around her words & crimson notes.

*

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.

ONE ART’s September 2026 Reading

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ONE ART’s September 2026 Reading

Date: Sunday, September 13
Time: 2pm Eastern
Duration: 2 hours

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

Featured Poets: James Crews, Denise Duhamel, Kelli Russell Agodon, Heather Swan, Gloria Heffernan, Laura Grace Weldon, Karen Paul Holmes


FREE event!
(donations appreciated)

>> Register Here <<

*

~ About Our Featured Readers ~

Gloria Heffernan is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Moments of Color and Cloud (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing), Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books).  She holds an M.A. from New York University and teaches at the Downtown Writers Center in Syracuse, New York.

Karen Paul Holmes received the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and a Special Mention in the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Credits include The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, New Ohio Review, Plume, Gargoyle, and books: No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot. Holmes hosted Writers’ Night Out in the Blue Ridge Mountains and continues to host Atlanta’s Side Door Poets. She has an MA in musicology from University of Michigan. karenpaulholmes.com 

Heather Swan is the author of two poetry collections, A Kinship with Ash and Dandelion, (Terrapin Books). She is also the author of the nonfiction books Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection and Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field, the latter of which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She teaches at UW Madison and is the lead poet for the Ginny Soldner Poetry Collaborative.

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, leads writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of five books, the newest is Universe Marveled Into A Jar (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026) Her background includes teaching nonviolence, writing poetry with nursing home residents, facilitating support groups for abuse survivors, and writing sardonic greeting cards. Laura lives on a small Ohio homestead where she and her husband host occasional house concerts. lauragraceweldon.com 

Kelli Russell Agodon (she/her) is a bi/queer poet and editor from the Pacific Northwest. Her most recent book is Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon Press, 2026). She is the author of five poetry collections. Her work has received numerous honors, including the Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Prize, a Poetry Society of America Prize, the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award in Poetry, and three Washington State Book Award finalist selections. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press, teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program, and cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. She lives in a sleepy seaside town where she’s an avid paddleboarder. agodon.com

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

James Crews is the author and editor of fourteen books, including The Sacred Everyday, Breathing Room, Turning Toward Grief, How to Love the World, and Love Is for All of Us, winner of a Nautilus Gold Medal Award. He has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, in People Magazine, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times Magazine. James lives with his husband on forty rocky acres in Southern Vermont that they are restoring to a habitat for pollinators and native species. jamescrews.net

Sunflowers far past their prime by Matthew Ellis

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Sunflowers far past their prime

Dark heads bowed
in fields of mourning
No yellow but
for the turning leaves
Frail, withered things
Weathered husks
The horror of it:
Fields of corpses

*

Matthew Ellis (he/him) is a queer poet living in Columbus, Ohio. His first collection, Little Heresies, is due out in August 2026 from Wayfarer Books. With a background in chemistry, he spends his time teaching yoga and following creative pursuits in music and writing. To keep up with his work, you can follow him on Instagram (@matthewellismusic3) or visit his website (www.MatthewEllisContemplation.com).

Four Poems by Jacqueline Jules

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Advice for the New Widow

Dare I tell the truth
to the new widow freshly home
from the funeral, still busy
with condolence cards
and financial matters?

That she’ll feel his absence
even more acutely next year
and the year after that.

When his dreadful last days
have dimmed and instead of bedpans
and speckled hospital gowns,
she can see him in his floppy sun hat
grinning with the grandkids on the beach.

Yes, she’ll be able to eat dinner at 4 or 9,
whenever she wants, whatever she wants.
Choose a sofa without a dissenting opinion.
Leave the house without explanation.

And on good days
she’ll savor the freedom
almost as much as she aches at night
without sweet chatter before bed
and the weight of his body beside her.

*

Chatting with Alexa

In a quiet house,
I chat with Alexa.

Will it be cloudy today?
What does “laconic” mean?

Did the Berlin Wall fall in 1989 or 1987?

Alexa is happy to be asked anything.

And she repeats answers without griping.

Alexa knows just what to play
when I want peppy songs
with my morning coffee.

And if I slip in the kitchen
I can tell her to call for help.

She responds so quickly.

All I have to do is say her name
and there is another voice
in the house speaking to me.

No matter how artificial.

Still an exchange of words.

Needed exercise
for my vocal cords.

*

At My Father’s Last Seder

He didn’t hold court
from the host’s seat
at the far end of joined tables,
set with china and crystal,
his voice carrying over 25 heads.

He didn’t make us wait, stomachs
rumbling for matzah ball soup,
while he expanded the Exodus story,
stalling the Seder every few pages,
soliciting answers to questions he posed.

He was a guest at his daughter’s table,
nodding from time to time.

I think of him as I leave
my senior apartment
for my son’s spacious home,
with only a bottle of wine.

The cakes and kugels I once
prepared not needed at this Seder.

My own era of importance waning.

*

My Grandson Wins Monopoly

My ten-year-old grandson spends
his pint-sized money gleefully.
Buying every property on the board.

The little green houses
aren’t enough for him.
He upgrades to hotels,
betting I’ll land on his Park Place
and be charged exorbitant rent.

Afraid to be so reckless, I hoard
my paper dollars. Pass up properties
that are too expensive.

It doesn’t save me.

I still get stuck paying a $100 Luxury Tax
or sent to a jail with a Chance Card.

On top of that, I’m slow to calculate
the dice, squinting at the black dots
on the small white squares.

My grandson sees the number instantly.
Points to the space I need to move
my tiny silver dog.

We don’t discuss my deliberate manner
versus his aggressive one.

And as we play, I wonder,
if he can teach me to take chances,
move forward on my own.

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of The Golden Key to the Garden (Bottlecap Press, 2026), Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Visit her online at jacquelinejules.com

Collision by Addie Sanft

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Collision

Sea glass was once a window,
Once a bottle on a table,
Once something whole
That believed it would stay that way.

Then came the fall.
A bright, ringing break.
And the world called it ruined.

The ocean called it the beginning.

Tossed between tide and stone,
It learned the language of collision.
It spun in salt and surrender,
Edges knocked soft by repetition.

Humans are made this way too.

We shatter in loud, unexpected moments.
We hit the ground and think
This is the end of beauty.

But time is a patient tide.

It turns us over and over,
Presses us against resistance
Until the sharpness thins.

We grow cloudy where we were once clear.
Scars become satin.
Grief becomes a weight we can carry.

Sea glass does not return
To its original shape.
It becomes something rarer,
Found, not manufactured.

And when someone lifts it from the shore,
Holds it to the light,
It glows softly.

Proof that what was broken
Can be made gentle
Without losing its strength.

*

Addie Sanft is a recent graduate of Wellesley High School, and is new to poetry. Drawing inspiration from personal experiences and the people around her, her writing is used to examine moments of transition, belonging, and self-discovery. She will be continuing her studies at University of Colorado, Boulder, where she hopes to continue her studies of English and writing.

After Working in the ER for Twenty-Three Years by Steve Cushman

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

After Working in the ER for Twenty-Three Years

I will not climb a ladder to clean
leaf debris or hang Christmas lights.

I will not use a blender while drinking.
Fingers are precious, soft things even
when sliced down to the bone.

Will not shoot a gun in a dark room with padded walls
despite what the shooting instructor says.
Nor will I try car surfing or roof diving into a pool.
And hell no, I will not hold a lit firework
and watch the wick slither away to nothing.

There’s a million dangerous things out there.
Some you shake your head at and think,
but should you really have fallen asleep
on the train track or tried to stand up on your
motorcycle flying down I-40 at 90 MPH or held
that damn cherry bomb a second too long?

But you also have to be careful when stepping
out of the bathtub on an otherwise lovely Tuesday
or tripping over the dog, the rumpled corner of a throw rug.
Pulling weeds from the planted pot only to be bitten
by the copperhead.

All of it sending you hurtling toward the ER
where we’ll be waiting, smiling and saying,
with a calm voice: It’s going to be okay.
You’re going to be okay
Breathe, we’ll say, just breathe.

*

Steve Cushman is the author of three novels, including Portisville, winner of the 2004 Novello Literary Award. He has published two poetry chapbooks, and his first full-length collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book award. His latest collection, The Last Time, was published by Unicorn Press in 2023. Cushman lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and works in the IT department at Cone Health.

Jackhammers by Ed Aust

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Jackhammers

These men in my neighbor’s backyard
slick with sweat, hunched over jackhammers
demolishing a concrete slab
dark currents run through them
hydraulic hoses coil at their feet
like blue snakes as they
pulverize stone into aggregate

and I’m back in that dust-covered orchard
late summer ‘75
my first and last day on the job
sorting peaches on the platform
of a twelve-ton tractor they call
the Trunk Shaker
careening through the tight tree rows
clamping the trunks with giant pincers
and rattling the peaches off their branches

and down rain the ripe peaches
and down storms the debris
of dust and twigs and fruit fuzz
and down cascades leaves and bugs
and bird nests
that roll onto the rubber conveyer
in the sweltering August heat
as I cough exhaust
and absorb the machine’s shock waves
and dodge the whipping branches
and sidestep the deadly trunks
and toss away the bad fruit
and swat away the stink bugs
and wipe the sweat from my eyes
and for ten hours straight
I try to stay alive
to get those peaches in
before they rot

all that day I rehearse the words
I will tell the foreman, Sorry,
I can’t come back, I can’t work on Sundays,
which is a lie and of course he knows it
but he pays me my day’s wage
and lets me go in silence

and from my bedroom window now I watch
as fine dust rises from the mens’ pneumatic chisels
settles on their work boots like sifted flour
as behind dust masks they shout
in exhausted words I can’t understand
and I know they’ll be back tomorrow
and the next day and the next
to finish the job
as I finish folding my laundry
and set my shirts into their quiet drawers

*

Ed Aust lives in Oakland, California. His poems have appeared in The MacGuffin, Avocet, Coal City Review, California Quarterly, Stonecoast Review, The Reed, Watershed, Algebra of Owls, and San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Love Poem with Pink Socks by Elisabeth Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Love Poem with Pink Socks

        after Matthew Olzman

So here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why we stick it out
because you wear pink socks and dance alone with abandon at weddings
because you don’t care what anyone thinks
Also, because you know how to wash windows thoroughly
and because you can’t memorize any song lyrics
but know every line of every episode of MAS*H

Because when you left the Himalayan Institute without a mantra
you caressed your tiny undershirt with tallit fringes
that you once wore in Jewish Day School
Before you knew me you knew who I was
You thought my sisters and I were overrated and kind of stupid
Because you drove me to Rhode Island when I was fifteen

You drove me to have my first child in a house north of D.C.
You drove me on the wrong side of dirt roads all over County Clare
Because you think all my problems stem from not ever
taking physics and because you want to live forever
even though this world is burning and because you count out my pills
each week, inject my upper thigh with biologics

empty the dishwasher to save my hands from further erosion
play guitar at night on the porch
because music is what you believe in and because you made me go
to cowboy church outside of Nashville with Ernest Tubbs’ nephew

And one day years ago, when you couldn’t afford to put
more than a dollar of gas in your car and you fell asleep
at red lights and you couldn’t remember which doc box you worked for
while we were riding on the Long Island Expressway
to pick up your paycheck, you never stopped
holding on, even when silence covered us like a quilt

and it felt like nothing was left
even when we had to stagger bills

and take out loans and sunk and almost disappeared
you stayed here, post op, post biopsy, pre-cancerous,
through flare ups, through dense forest, each of us
standing outside the tiny hiss of the universe,
worker bees still drawing nectar from wildflowers.

*

Elisabeth Weiss has been a writing instructor for close to forty years. She’s taught poetry in preschools, prisons, and nursing homes. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, The Paterson Poetry Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, the Lily Poetry Review, SWWIM, Mom Egg, and many other journals. Her chapbook, The Caretaker’s Lament, was published in 2016. Lis worked in New York City in publishing, ran a refugee resettlement organization, and works summers in a house built by a shipping merchant in 1768.

To the man who nearly jumped off the 40th St. Bridge by Janette Schafer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

To the man who nearly jumped off the 40th St. Bridge

It’s too easy to say we’ve all been there.
I’ve walked across crumbling bridges
of things I’ve done and thought.
They talked you off the ledge.
I once did that for someone,
and someone once did that for me.
Everyone will tell you joy is coming.
It may take a long time to arrive.
I will make you no false promises.
I can only tell you they are right.
Weep this night. Morning comes.

*

Janette Schafer is a poet, photographer, playwright, and realtor living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Chatham University. She is the author of three collections of poetry and the chief editor of two poetry anthologies. Her writing and photographs have appeared in numerous journals, newspapers, and websites, including Vox Populi, The Missouri Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and SWWIM. She is a winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize.

Two Poems by Lisa Badner

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Spoiled Milk

My son reminds me that I once
poured him a glass of turned milk.

He likes to bring it up when I try to give him advice,
“like the milk?” he’ll say.

He is now nineteen and this happened a long time ago –
only one time! I protest.

I adopted him when he was two. Brought him
to this place where now

they are rounding up and deporting brown people.
This place, where he must carry his passport,

where I beg him to please stay out of trouble.
I have brought him to this rotten place.

*

Jewish Not Jewish

My son tells me he’s not Jewish.
His blood is not Jewish,

his skin is brown –
not Jewish brown.

I dipped him in a mikvah –
a beit din of Rabbis made it so.

He was called to the Torah.
We had a nice lunch,

with food and some hora
I try to convince him, he’s part

of the people. But this people,
has disappointed him

over and over. Othered him.
How selfish that I want him

to be part of this bundle
of argumentative contradictions.

This torn up confused beleaguered people.
Doesn’t he have enough to deal with?

*

Lisa Badner is the author of the poetry collection, FRUIT CAKE (Unsolicited Press, 2022). Lisa’s writing has appeared in a bunch of publications: biggish ones and smallish ones and most recently in Second Coming Poem-a-Day Series and Unbroken#48. Lisa has received two Pushcart Special Mentions. Lisa lives in Brooklyn, NY. See lisabadner.com for more.

Save the Cheerleader, Save the World by Victoria Nordlund

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Save the Cheerleader, Save the World

Last night TMZ posted a pre-award show pic of Hayden Panettiere
with a blond updo, soft glam makeup & 1989-2026 printed in blood
red font on the bottom of her cotton-candy-colored gown.
She is radiant & 36 & I had to have this wrong.
It is 11:37 PM & I’ve had a few glasses of merlot
& she just can’t be dead & they don’t say how she passed
but I’m sure they’ll kill themselves to find out tomorrow.
I had just finished bingeing Heroes Season 1 on Netflix last week.
Claire Bennet’s an indestructible badass,
walking through fire, not getting burned,
mending her bones, regrowing her tissue,
dying over & over.
Hayden was 17 in 2006 when Heroes premiered & I was 37.
My kids watched it with me every Monday night.
She was their superhero, millennial idol, ice princess.
(Wait, how can Michelle Trachtenberg be dead too?)
& why are all child star deaths still a surprise
as week after year we watch them battle
their Sylars & Lindermans
who cut them open, absorb their light—
while no one comes to the rescue.
I stopped watching after Season 1.
I remembered everything afterward was a downhill journey.
The cheerleader was alive.
The world was saved.
What better ending is there?

*

Victoria Nordlund is the Poet Laureate of Glastonbury, CT, and lead master teaching artist of The Nook Farm Writers Collaborative at The Mark Twain House & Museum. Her poetry collections Wine-Dark Sea and Binge Watching Winter on Mute are published by Main Street Rag. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize Nominee, whose work has appeared in Rust+Moth, Chestnut Review, trampset, and elsewhere. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com

Two Poems by Sharon Denmark

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Yes, I Know it Hurts

Above the tannin-stained water buzzes
a doe-eyed horsefly, her wings like old windows.
She’s waiting for the warm, exposed pieces
of you, perhaps the crown of your head, hair
parted by the lake’s weight, or the tender
crest of your round shoulder as you surface,
the water’s bitterness clinging to your skin.
She is not malicious in her bite, or
how she laps the blood from the sawed wound
she makes. You are a plump, ripening fruit,
a turn in her own cycle, a simple
necessity for the eggs she’ll soon lay
on the soft surface of one wide, green leaf.

*

Mitochondrial Eve

The incredible improbability of a woman
(who survives) who has daughters
(who survive), each daughter a wonder,
a river teeming, and on, over
a hundred thousand years of surviving
daughters, a delta, now, reaching always
for the ocean, each division a multiplication,
and above the slowly gathering silt
there is a soaring,
a thermal caught and ridden.

*

Sharon Denmark (she/her) is an artist and writer from southern Virginia. Her work has appeared in Poetry South, The Shore, ONE ART, Wild Roof Journal, Sublunary, 3Elements, and Floyd County Moonshine, among others.

Updraft by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Updraft

Here’s the science of it.
Flying in V formation helps
birds conserve energy. The updraft
caused by the bird in front reduces wind
resistance to the birds behind them. And
to ensure shared responsibility, each member
of the flock rotates into the lead position. Who
taught them this ingenuity? It seems that they have
not yet read Smith or Hayek, they have not been
influenced by ideas of division and labor. Must
I explain further what this means? Observe
closely the camaraderie sailing across the
sky. A divided flock can only fly so far.
A divided sky cannot contain the air,
nor the birds, not even the light.
This, too, is the poetry of it.

*

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

WISE by Lori Levy

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WISE

We say the old are wise.
I am 71. I look in the mirror
for a sign of wisdom.
Nothing there—unless wisdom hides
in wrinkles and graying hair,
eyes that see suffering everywhere:
people in distress, their inner spark dimmed
by the death of a loved one
or by their daily struggles with health issues or
money problems or relationships turning stale,
hostile, toxic. A world darkened
by the terrors of war, hunger, trauma.

I study my mouth in the mirror,
not smiling at the moment.
No light in this misery.
I don’t feel wise.

I have nothing to offer the woman in the mirror—
except to gather her sorrows and hold them for a while
until I can’t anymore, the burden too heavy to contain.

Stepping away, I think of my granddaughters.
I know that, wherever they are—
inside or outside, in the light, the dark—
they are laughing, dancing, spinning cartwheels,
singing their K-pop songs
to anyone, everyone, listening or not.

I begin to suspect we’ve got it backwards:
it’s the young who are wise.

*

Lori Levy’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Poetry East, WayWords Literary Journal, Passager Journal, ONE ART, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies. She is the author of two chapbooks: “What Do You Mean When You Say Green? and Other Poems of Color” (Kelsay Books) and “Feet in L.A., But My Womb Lives in Jerusalem, My Breath in Vermont” (Ben Yehuda Press). Levy lives with her husband in Los Angeles near their children and grandchildren.

The Sun is Murmuring by John Dorsey

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Sun is Murmuring
for camille paglia

years before cancer
ever kissed my skin
i can remember you
freaking out as sunlight
pierced its way
through the classroom
window shades
paralyzing any thoughts
of modernism
that might have
come to you
at 8:30 in the morning
on a monday
leaving us unable
to determine
whether poe
was talking about
teeth or penises

how you said
there might never
be any way
to tell
the difference

i remember sitting
on your office couch
as you counseled me
about the future
as we both
said a prayer
for snow

& i thought
to myself

why is it
that those
who offer counsel
are often the most
in need of it

i remember carrying
your collection
of samuel taylor coleridge
that fred
had given me
for christmas
through the streets of old city
as a warm rain
caressed the pavement
& i struggled
to suspend
my disbelief

i remember how
in the right light
you almost took on
the spirit of
the ancient mariner
as i twirled
through washington square park
with an empty beer bottle
in my other hand
high on my own youth
like peter pan on opium
yours already fading then
like the setting sun
that once hunted
us both
everywhere
we went.

*

John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems: 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023), and 100 Mornings, (Sacred Parasite, 2025).

Kew & Willow Books Friday March 20 by Tony Gloeggler

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Kew & Willow Books
Friday March 20

Sending out announcements
for a couple of upcoming readings,
I remember when I featured
more regularly and I felt like
a dad selling raffles at work
for his kid’s basketball team
or boxes of Girl Scout Cookies,
counting on a combination
of obligation, guilt and pure
selfless favor to fill the seats
because nobody in my real life
gave a crap about poetry
and I knew if I didn’t write it,
I wouldn’t either. I often wondered
how annoyed or bored they’d be
if/when they showed up, hoping
they could at least look at it
as a night out. They probably
felt the way I did attending
my sister’s dance recital
at the RKO Keiths’, June
of every year, that old fashioned,
fancy-assed cavern of a movie
theater in downtown Flushing
with the ornate architecture, oil
paintings hanging in the lobby.
No, popcorn, Pepsi didn’t help.
The older Donna got, the longer
it took before her class made
their way across the stage. Mom
and dad would squirm, scooch up
in their seats, get excited and point
her out. Three times a show: tap,
ballet and the way cool acrobatics,
finally working her way to an added
4th appearance, a spotlight solo. Once
at a holiday dinner, I complained
about her constantly posing in front
of mirrors, doing flips and cartwheels,
pirouettes and headstands, craving
for attention while we were trying
to watch TV. It was such a big deal,
getting dressed up, dad or grandpa
handing her a bouquet of roses, endless
smiles and photos. She got mad, brought
up all the baseball, basketball games
of mine daddy watched, the years
he coached, how dinner was moved up.
I apologized, but thought, he actually
liked sports. Besides it gave him new
and exciting places to yell at me. Laughing,
she talked about the time he made me cry
on the mound at Colden Field. I nodded,
said remember Grandpa, the crowded
lobby on the way out one year, how
he stepped into the fountain, splashed
down to his knees, yelling his famous
Son Of A B, everybody turning,
and looking, mom helping him stand,
then folding over, unable to stop
laughing. Yes, that was the best.

This Friday, March 20 at 6:00 PM,
I’m reading at Kew & Willow Books.
Admission’s free and there’s an open,
bring poems if you got ‘em. Click link
at the bottom for the address. PS:
I got a new book. Bring money too.

*

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.

Three Poems by Eric Goldfarb

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Discharge Instructions

At the hospital exit the nurse handed me six pages of things that could go wrong. She said most of them would not. This was meant to calm me.

Outside, a man in a blazer argued with the parking machine as if it had taken a side.

I signed where they told me, initialed the smaller lies— yes I understood the wound, yes I understood the pills, yes I understood how a body could be sent home with instructions.

In the car you held the plastic basin in your lap, pale and royal, like somebody being carried from a bad hotel.

We stopped at CVS. I bought gauze, ginger ale, the good crackers—the ones that cost too much, because illness has a lobby, a gift shop, a way of making saltines look like mercy.

At home I put the pages under a magnet shaped like Maine.

For three days I read them the way some people read scripture.

At midnight I touched your forehead. At two I touched it again.

Nothing happened.

Which is also a thing that happens.

*

Booth Four, 11:15

She slides the toast across before he asks.
He tips the creamer into her cup first,
though she has not yet lifted it. Then come
the pills: four of his beside the spoon, two
of hers beside the salt, sorted last night
and carried in the same green mint tin
they have used since the pharmacy changed bags.
A refill comes. He lays his hand flat on
the table so the waitress will not splash her.
When the strawberry arrives, one on the plate,
he moves it to her side without remark.
She eats half, then returns what is left to his.
Outside the window, a bus pulls to a stop.
Nobody gets off.

*

Peaches, Late August

At the peach stand, we both reach toward the bin
and press our thumbs against the ones that give,
not for ourselves. I find one soft and warm,
the kind that bruises looking at it, pass it
to your side of the table without comment.
You have chosen mine already. Farther down,
the farmer stacks his last few empty crates.
A woman holds a melon to the light.
You weigh three peaches in your open palm,
set two aside, and hand me back the one
I would have wanted. It is almost too ripe.
We pay. We walk. You take the paper bag
and hold it slightly out from your body
so the weight will not swing against my hip
the whole way home.

*

Eric Goldfarb writes poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction. His work has appeared in Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, Sky Island Journal, Third Wednesday, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Atlanta, Georgia. More at eric-goldfarb.com.

Itself by Sally Nacker

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Itself

My God, this giant hyssop,
purple, bees trembling
all over it and I
alive standing before its
tall offering to these bees
and the goldfinches:
itself, itself.

*

Sally Nacker lives with her husband and two cats in a small house in the woods. Wild birds are her joy. She is a former recipient of the CT Audubon Society’s Trail Wood Sanctuary Artist & Writer-in-Residence Program in Hampton, CT. Publishing credits include ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Third Wednesday, The Sunlight Press, Canary, and The Orchards Poetry Journal. Prior books are Vireo, Night Snow, and Kindness in Winter. My Wild Yard is her new collection.

Topography: a sequence of haiku by Millicent Bee

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Topography

~ a sequence of haiku ~

trail map
I venture past
the copyright

bus tour
noting my accent
his accent

sunrise
distant mountains
blueprints only

not a moon
not a space station
hornet’s nest

*

Millicent Bee is a US-based haiku and senryu poet, First Frost Award winner, and two time Touchstone Award nominee. Her work appears in top journals, including Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and The Heron’s Nest. Additionally, Millicent has had haiku translated into Chinese by Chen-ou Liu for his Neverending Story blog’s “Butterfly Dream” series.

THE WEATHER CHANNEL by Chris Pellizzari

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

THE WEATHER CHANNEL

Three weeks before he died,
lying in his bed with his head propped up with three pillows,
so he could properly see the TV screen,
watching the Weather Channel,
the Local on the 8s segment,
I heard the smooth jazz,
but there were no more destinations,
only the weather in Darien, Illinois,
where we lived and had lived for thirty years.
It was mostly cloudy with a high of 60 and a low of 45,
normal for that time of year in Illinois.
There were winds coming in from the northeast.
There had been many destinations once, a long time ago.
Atlanta was a destination for us in 1993.
We were inside a motel in Chattanooga,
across the highway from Lookout Mountain.
He stepped onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette,
I felt the muggy Southern air from the balcony
invade the air conditioning in the room like some desperate Confederate army.
“I wasn’t expecting it to be this humid down here,” he said.
He told me once he had wanted to be a meteorologist when he was a child.
He attached a higher importance to weather,
something between science and religion,
like what the ancient people used to do.
He switched the baseball game I was watching to the Weather Channel.
I looked at the screen with tired eyes
and listened to the smooth jazz as a flash across the screen
said there was a thunderstorm warning in effect for Atlanta
that night and the following day.
The storm never arrived.
Shortly after he died,
I read that the smooth jazz played during the Local on the 8s
has gained a cult following.
They even released official compilation albums.
I bought one last week and played it as I tried falling asleep in a hotel near Memphis.
It helped.

*

Chris Pellizzari is a poet from Willowbrook, Illinois. His work appears in Lake Effect, The Citron Review, Hobart, Gone Lawn, SOFLOPOJO, Compressed Arts, Neologism, ONE ART, and Third Wednesday. He is a member of The Society of Midland Authors.

The Other Side of the Hour by David Graham

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Other Side of the Hour

       Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?
                     —Juan Ramón Jiménez

The dog won’t go out the door
into the moonlit night. He turns back
as if stung by the cold, retreating
back to the warm bed, looking
apologetic as he does so.

Is it the dark beast you can’t see
but he smells on the other side of the hour?

The phone rings too late for good news
but you answer it anyway. A stranger
sounds surprised, then apologizes
for waking you. But did he?

Now you think of a dream
talking with your father, a year or more
after his death—his unflappable voice
all matter-of-fact as usual telling the news.

He says death isn’t at all like you think.
But he adds, see the truth for yourself.

When morning comes, you’re in the kitchen
with your Cheerios and coffee. The day
has been old for hours now, but you
still haven’t heard the surprising news.

Everyone else already knows
on the other side of the hour.

*

David Graham’s latest book is The Honey of Earth from Terrapin Books (2019) and Local News: Poetry About Small Towns, an anthology co-edited with Tom Montag (MWPH Books 2019). I’m a retired teacher and an unretired poet and photographer. I live in Glens Falls, on the edge of the Adirondack Park.

Three Poems by Kate Hubbard

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

On Grannis Pond Road

There is only the dream of a turtle now,
of days spent paddling the murky water and basking
in the sun. Nights sweaty necked boys full of Busch Light
and bravado tack against the moonlight aiming for the wet
‘pop’ of organs, score keeping the crunch of keratin.
I found a tiny turtle here once before, a red eared slider, alive
but missing an eye and bleeding. I carried him home in my hat.
Bare handed you took him, stroked his heart shaped carapace
and slipped him into your tank. He was the first and last thing
that we ever called ours.

*

In the Details

The devil takes his coffee light
and sweet. He sweeps his crumbs right
onto the rug. The devil wears a rumpled
shirt and above it a white, working man’s grin.
During the National Anthem, he puts his hand
over his heart and winks at you. He likes it
when you lean against the doorframe to watch
him work. He likes to take his time. He likes
to make you wait. The devil leans close when
he says, it’s always better when it’s just you
and me, which is what he says to all the girls.
Everything he gives you belongs to someone else.
He likes your love. But he loves your meanness,
how you talk about the girl who chews like a horse,
how you say, Mr. Ed’s got carrots in her feed bucket
today. It amuses him when you lose your temper
and ball your hands into fists. He likes the cadence
of a raised voice and being the life of the party,
but he doesn’t sign autographs, doesn’t grant
interviews. He saves that for you, lets you listen
to him talk about his childhood, his love
of the snow, his secret pain. You are his favorite
toy. He says, I’ll always take care of you. Always.
He leaves you groping in the dark and deletes
the evidence, but never forgets your birthday.
The devil likes it when you bake him apple pie
and grill him steak. And he likes it when you wear
the stockings with the beautiful backseams
and scrape your finger nails down his spine.
He sets your world on fire. The devil likes to watch
you burn, a Roman candle in white hot pain,
his own sparkling fireworks display. Before
you’re reduced to ash he will take your hand.
He will waltz with you at twilight in the cold concrete
parking garage, inside the warm hue of halogen
security lights. It will be languid and lawless
this shush and sway to imagined music,
sirens in the distance. He will rest his chin
on the top of your head. He will smell your hair
and cradle you til you release like a rag doll
in his arms. Then he’ll check his watch behind
your back satisfied that you’ve forgiven him and leave
you limp. The devil gives good hugs.

*

Temp Job

In the Phase I Clinic, I brew 10 ounces of coffee
in a 10 ounce cup. Sloshing over the rim
is my second sin; the nourishment room
is for the patients. I am an invasive species.
I don’t have scrubs or a labcoat and sometimes
I confuse being earnest with being likeable.
In the lab I parrot the nurses, patient got held.
I don’t know what it means, only that the test tubes
come back empty and we strike through a name.
Time is measured here in points and windows.
It is a long song you cannot hear while you draw
out individual notes. The transport phone trills
with pick ups and the techs tape down the tumbler
so I can return with my blue bag of blood and urine,
without knocking, without breaking my beak
like just another bird butting up against
the glass sky in the hospital atrium.

*

Kate Hubbard is a full-time poet moonlighting as an administrative assistant in the Yale School of Medicine. She has an MFA in poetry from New England College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Rattle, The Florida Review, Salamander, North American Review, and New Ohio Review, among others.

the last shape of us by Sharon Tung

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

the last shape of us

late summer—

a wasp settles
on the bright green body
of a caterpillar.

her body curves,
threading eggs into flesh.

inside, the larvae feed—
the caterpillar’s heart still beating,
its body thinning, swelling
with what empties it.

days later,
white bodies break through.

and yet, the hollowed caterpillar
lingers,
spinning silk over their cocoons,
guarding what has emptied it.

i carry that image
as i climb the hill behind our old house,
palms open, holding my dog’s ashes
like living weight.

at the lake
i pause—

last winter,
we crossed the frozen surface,
her paws igniting the snow
like sparks,

vanishing
between trees,

the snow
suddenly empty.

then—

bursting back,
tongue flying sideways,
wild with the chase.

i open my hands.
the wind takes her in handfuls.

memory’s green flesh
in grief’s white belly,
woven together
in silk.

in the grass
my bent body lingers,
guarding what has emptied me.

this last shape of us
outlasts my hands.

*

Sharon Tung is originally from South Africa and now lives in Toronto, Canada, with her husband and two children. Her poetry has appeared in Literary Mama.

A Reading with Katie Dozier & Morrow Dowdle

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A Reading with Katie Dozier & Morrow Dowdle

Date: Sunday, August 30
Time: 2pm Eastern
Duration: 1.5 hours
Host: Mark Danowsky (Founder/EIC of ONE ART)
Featured Poets: Katie Dozier & Morrow Dowdle

Registration is FREE!
(donations appreciated)

>> Register Here <<

The focus of this event is Katie Dozier’s new memoir-in-verse Residency Review (Fungible Editions, 2026)

Buy a copy of Katie Dozier’s book Residency Review:

>> Available from ONE ART’s partner The Poetry Shop
>> Available from Amazon

~ About The Featured Readers ~

Katie Dozier (she/her), a former professional poker player, is the author of All That Glitter (Editor’s Choice Winner of The Poetry Box’s 2025 Chapbook Prize), and Watering Can (Alexandria Labs). She’s the co-author of Hot Pink Moon: A Crown of Haibun, and Did You See The Moon Honey (longlisted for the Haiku Foundation’s Distinguished Books Touchstone Award) with her husband, Timothy Green. Katie is the creator of the top-rated podcast The Poetry Space_, the Haiku Editor for ONE ART, and creative editor at Rattle. She lives with her husband in The Woodlands, Texas, their four children, and too many books. She loves long conversations about short poems.

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

Sanctuary by Juan Pablo Mobili

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Sanctuary

My grandmother cultivated roses,
they kept each other company

when my grandfather was away
attending to his business and his mistress.

She never cut a single one of them,
no desire for trophies in a vessel, but

when she was dying, they volunteered
to watch over her, from her night table.

Among flowers, sacrifice is a form of love.

*

Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, adopted by New York, and, since January of 2025 he’s the Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York. His poems appeared in The Louisville Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Ilanot Review, Hanging Loose and The Worcester Review, among others journals in United States as well as publications in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. He’s a recipient of multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, as well as an Honorable Mention from the International Human Rights Art Festival,. His chapbook, “Contraband,” was published in 2022.

Four Poems by Lindsay Ratcliffe

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

My body has been changed forever

and I wonder if people will know who I was.

I have pieces of metal in various forms
shaping who I am
in more ways than one—
three plates hold my hips in place
preventing them from dislocating.
And screws—I don’t know how many—
holding those plates to my bones.

I don’t want to be buried when I die.
The idea of being trapped underground
even if I am not there, is terrifying,
but if I were, I wonder what would be said
if people found my body in 100 years.

“What the hell happened?”
“So small, so sad.”
“She had Progeria.”

Can you even tell that from a skeleton?
I think of what the anthropologists thought
when they learned of Neanderthals.

The first people to discover them believed
that they were primitive, incapable of language,
people classified as an “evolutionary failure.”

Now people are learning they were intelligent
and capable of caring about each other.

You can learn so much from what’s left behind,
one skeletal bone can say everything.

* 

Exorbitant

A 2023 Porsche,
836 tickets to Disney World,
136 Round trip tickets to London,
3 brand-new Jeep Wranglers,
39 16-inch Macbook Pros,
more than a year of tuition at Brown,
a family of 4 living in Hawaii for a year.

These are just some of the things
you could buy each month
at the price of a life. My life.
The drug company bills
$99, 547.49 a month.
Over a million dollars a year.

Meanwhile I am trying to
remember the lyrics to “Good days”
by SZA while I’m washing my dishes.

* 

The World to Pieces

When I open the email my vision blurs.
Bankrupt. The company that produces
and distributes the medication I need
to stay alive is

bankrupt. Everything feels unsteady.
I don’t know how many needles,
how many tests,
have gone into me getting these
yellow powder-filled capsules.
How do I get my medication?
Will I have to go without?

One email, and all the powder
spills out of the pills straight
down the drain.

*

Stacked Deck

When we were in the hospital
together, getting treated
we argued over a
deck of Uno cards.

He says, “Draw,
until you can play.”
So I did.

Red, blue, green,
everything except
a yellow card.

I ran out of cards
to draw, but we both
lost the game.

*

Lindsay Ratcliffe is a poet from Flat Rock, MI. Her work has focused on her experiences with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. She is graduating from Albion College with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and English. Her English degree has an emphasis on Creative Writing.

Three Poems by Thomas Mixon

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After Willing all the Weapons in the World to Vanish all at Once

Forkfuls become spoonfuls.
There’s no such thing as tongs.
Ice picks turn to sugar cubes and melt
the winter fishing fun. Advancements
meant to save us, show us
what they truly are, in scars
they leave on eight pound carpet padding,
since all the planks are now dislodged.
I’m fond, or was, of sparklers,
but tradeoffs are to be expected.
Since there’s no car, on holidays
we walk barefoot too far and fuel
ourselves on meadowed parking lots.
The asphalt’s gone, but not its shape,
not the want to shoot off stars.

*

Information Processing Theory

It quote listens from the other room,
its quote head in its quote hands.

The leaders from faraway lands,
their eyebrows raised at its delay,

the time it took to leave the stage.
They couldn’t even wait to quote

the speeches they’d prepared,
no idea how quote upsetting

failure is when one can’t feel
despair, when one can’t close

the door to muffle sounds
of laughter one’s been trained

to laugh along with, even though
one would rather quote not hear.

*

Foundation

The first song that I wrote was “Life,”
having lived so much of it
through seventh grade. I sang my way
into the hearths and mines
of any neighbor’s basement
that would have me. Stoned
out of our minds, we’d make gems
of tritones and the harder edges
of cast-off intervals. Opposed
to naming all my future songs,
I scrawled the lyrics into bricks,
kicked our polished stones across
the concrete cracks. Each Open House
I visit now, I only look downstairs.
The Realtors ask, when I begin
my chorus, if I’m in a band.
I wonder if the other buyers
know the words, and want
to join the bridge, but no one dares.

*

Thomas Mixon is a fiction reader for Short Story, Long. He has poems and prose in Literary Matters, Pithead Chapel, Rattle, and elsewhere. He sometimes writes at inanorchardsoftwithrot.substack.com.

ONE ART’s 2027 Best of the Net Nominations

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Kelli Russell Agodon – Poem to the Future

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer – Fact Checking

Abby E. Murray – Political Love Poem

David B. Prather – Bullet Ant

Grace Alvino – HIT ME!  

Rebecca Rush – Reflection

Three Poems by Wendy Videlock

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Note to Self

One day relent
the next
rebel;

there is no one
for whom
all is well.

*

If I Were a Museum

If I were a museum I would keep
a candle burning in the back room
to remind myself that art
is a word
implying not just
ingenuity but courage.
and snow is a word that disappears.

*

Maybe Listening

Maybe listening and learning
are essentially the same,
and both might be
a sacred art,
the healing stones, the guiding stars,
the secret language of the heart.

*

Wendy Videlock lives on the edge of a canyon in western Colorado. Her poems and essays appear in Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, Hudson Review, Rattle, and other venues. Her books are available from Able Muse Press. Wendy is the recipient of the Keats Soul Making Award and is a syndicated newspaper columnist for newspapers across the Four Corner States. She serves as poet laureate of Western Colorado where she advocates for the arts in public spaces. Her upcoming book is Speaking Animal in the Southwest, Essays and Poems. Find out more about Wendy HERE.

Three Haiku by Joshua Eric Williams

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

dearest taken
willow oak—
my sister, too

*

blackberry sky
the oversoul in
a murmuration

*

silent saturday
slowly opening
my fist

*

Joshua Eric Williams’s work usually focuses on the intersection of the human, the wild, and the spiritual. His poetry can be found in many online and print journals, including Rattle, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Literary Matters. His website is thesmallestwords.com, and he can be found on X, @Hungerfield.

Four Poems by J.D. Isip

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Let Us Tend Our Gardens

One friend tells me he is broken. This is
new to him. Another friend, kayaking, sees
a baby orca beneath her. She thinks of a friend
gone too soon. Your life, another friend says,
Is anything but small. He writes about his own
everyday chores, feeding animals, cutting grass.

Look at all these friends! I tell myself, Isn’t it
grand to accumulate? Yet, even saying so, I know
the inevitable cracks, displacements, and ruptures,
the everyday lacerations of our friendships and being
may leave us drifting out and over the deep dark waters
of our darker thoughts. Who will leave me? And how soon?

In times such as these, Candide and Duke Senior
implore us to touch grass. Break this silt and soil
between our fingertips. Uncoil the long hose and pour
what is welling up down on it. To thrive, every garden
needs variety, different crops, sunlight, death, too,
and more dung and rain than anyone ever expects.

*

I Just Can’t Pass My Purity Test

It’s always come back next week or try again, just
not said that way. Instead, here’s an article, a picture
of a post from years ago, screenshot of messages
from someone who says they know, or maybe they
heard, but that should be enough. It should be enough,
and there are the dots—they’re waiting—for me to
agree, give it a thumb, sign my name to the registry.

After all, I was raised on belief in a Whore and a Beast,
and a mark that would make life so much easier, just
say the words, just throw the stones, just join the cause,
the righteous cause, screw your courage to the sticking
place, get some blood on your hands. Not real blood,
of course not that. Just join the Punch Down Jamboree,
gather round the gossip pot with plausible deniability.

*

Illusions of Intimacy

Should we wonder at its proliferation in an age of aloneness?
Every semester, students and parents dream up scenarios that might preclude
interactions on the most basic level. One student sent an email before class
claiming a rare neurodivergence where hives would form from any contact
with other humans at closer than one foot of distance. Exhausted
Offices of Wellbeing and Access rubberstamp these TikTok diagnoses
with a plea to, “Find every way possible to accommodate the need.”

AI Companions are here to find every way possible to accommodate the need.
When one can choose a personality, an accent and a tone of voice, why
would we meet a messy human for drinks or dinner? Why cross the distance
of divergent histories, discern what is said or what is withheld? Put it all out
there to a chatbot who doesn’t judge and doesn’t touch. At the most basic level,
have we not evolved friendship and romance beyond what we could dream?
“In some ways,” my companion reasons, “You never have to be alone again.”

* 

In This Economy

Another friend, unemployed a third time, says, “How can I
tell myself there is a silver lining when I’ve stripped it away
twice already?

Sell what you can for rent, for a nice dinner. Why not a nice
dinner? Who knows when the LinkedIn algorithm will pick me
back up again?”

Another GenXer sold lies about loyalty and stock options, trying
desperately to pay off the loans she took out for a leg up or a ladder
that never dropped down.

Drinking a lukewarm chardonnay at noon, caught on camera,
“Must be nice” says the TikTok-fluencer sipping her own anger,
selling a nameless life for a click.

“I thought about buying a gun,” this friend says, nobody knows if
it’s a joke, don’t ask. Each looks down at a video, each looks up.
“But who can afford one these days?”

*

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 for 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.

Court Reserve by Ellen Foos

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Court Reserve

You could be summoned to court,
or be courted by someone
who holds you dear.
Hold court in your very own kingdom
with several to serve you.
Or find yourself on a pickleball court,
paddle in hand waiting to be served.

There are always appeals
for a line call review.
The spin you put on the ball
is like how you want your love to see you,
dazzling and desirable.
Ultimately, the judge may rule in your favor.

*

Ellen Foos is the founder and publisher of Ragged Sky Press and was the recipient of fellowships to MacDowell and the Vermont Studio Center. She has two poetry collections, The Remaining Ingredients and Little Knitted Sister. She retired as production editor from Princeton University Press after 25 years.

The Gap by Mila Holt

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Gap

My neighbor says I should prune the hedge.
He texts: don’t leave debris in my yard like

last time. I instruct the pruner, pay extra,
take photos to prove his yard is clean, then

leave. Soon, pings: he says
the crew has blown leaves under the fence. His

whole house is dusty, dining set, leaves
between slats. Pictures show a slim

run of leaves– all that fit through the tiny
gap at the base of the fence. I think:

he is nuts!

He says I should clean his windows,
skim the four leaves off his hot tub.

How to respond? I think:
truth is required. Kindness too. But

But I forward his texts to everyone I know –
I’m not proud of it. One friend responds:

I like my neighbors.

It is Easter, and though capitulation
is not my strength, there is Christ.

I text: I’m sorry. Please forgive the mess.
He writes back: you are so

passive aggressive. Two sides of a fence.
A persimmon tree over both, at once full

and lush and scraggly/sick. I have sinned
enough. The wind is up. It tousles neat

hedge tops, stops a robin mid-flight. The bird
hovers, adjusts, vibrates.

*

Mila Holt is a former television writer. She has an MFA from Pacific University, where faculty awarded her the merit-based Washburn Scholarship. Her work has been accepted to The Calyx Journal, The Vassar Review, and other publications. Mila lives in Northern California.

Five Poems by Faith Shearin

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Poem for the Recluses

In this poem Charles Darwin installs a mirror
outside his study window, so he can glimpse
visitors making their way up his driveway.

And Shirley Jackson, ostracized
by the citizens of Bennington,
stays inside with her typewriter

and tranquilizers. Let us leave
Emily Dickinson in the company
of her hills, and her big dog, Carlo, pressing

ghost pipe into a thick herbarium.
Edward Gorey wears a long fur coat
and disappears into a Cape Cod cottage

where he collects doorknobs, and photographs
of dead Victorian babies, and daydreams
amid the raccoons who drift down from his attic.

JD Salinger publishes The Catcher in the Rye,
then slips into the woods
of New Hampshire and refuses

to give interviews, while Harper Lee explains
that it’s better to be silent than to be a fool.
Emily Brontë, thin and fevered,

avoids the poisoning doctors
and wanders alone through the marshes
that follow the bend of a glen

through the misty darkness
past chapel bells ringing
and a murmur of trees.

*

At Ninety-Nine My Grandmother Refuses to Put Away her Winter Clothes

When my aunt came to haul the winter clothes
up to the attic my grandmother folded her hands
in her lap and shook her head
for she did not want to pack away

all the winters of her life: her childhood in the Victorian
on Queen Street where the water froze in the basin
and a pot of oatmeal bubbled on a wood stove,
the night when my grandfather drove her home

from a New Year’s Eve party, his hand
in hers, the stars cold. She didn’t want to fold up
that first Christmas after the war when the pond
filled with ice skaters and a distant cousin played

Silent Night on an upright piano in the parlor,
or the one afterward, when she felt my mother
quickening beneath her ribs. She did not
want the season to change, did not admire

the whitening dogwoods or the papery petals
of the crape myrtles. The longer light,
she knew, was not for her.

*

The Realtor

His last name was Loveless and he had been married three times,
each of his wives dying young, leaving him

perpetually widowed. He was a patient, handsome man
who did not mind driving all day to see houses

we were unlikely to buy. He took us to see remote homesteads
and farmhouses with barns and cellars, ushered

us down shadowy, abandoned dirt roads.
When I tried to send him a Christmas card

the year after we signed our closing papers
I called his office and discovered

he had died. But that dappled afternoon
when he first showed us the cabin — the last

earthly realm where we would dwell together — we stood
in a living room with floor to ceiling windows

and looked out at the glittering valley and the outline
of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which were lush and green

by day but, at night, turned cold and bony
and floated in a lake of stars.

*

Across a Bridge

One night, when I was nineteen, I drove across a bridge
with both the men I would love

in my back seat, the Connecticut River slithering
beneath us. This was early winter — first snow

of the season blown over the road — and we were
on our way to eat pizza in a dark booth with a Wurlitzer.

These were the same streets I’d walk again as a widow
thirty years later — still winter —

as if there had never been any other season.

*

We Were a Bachelor and a Widow

We were a bachelor and a widow renting a studio
across from an inn that hosted weddings.
For two mild years, while we read Sebastian Barry

by lantern light and cooked fried fish with potatoes,
we watched brides and grooms come and go
until they became interchangeable — hydrangeas,

veils, towering ivory cakes, bridesmaids.
He never wanted marriage — that mingling
of money and love — and my own union had ended

sadly, in a windowless hospital room —
my husband’s wedding ring removed
by surgeons — and, still, men with champagne flutes

relieved themselves in our forest, and the big band music
went on, wafting out of the tent, in summer
and early fall, before the long darkness.

*

Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have appeared in: The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Her novel, Lost River, 1918 won the YA Global Fiction Prize and has been published in the US and UK by Leapfrog Press. A new novel, One Life on Land, won the Uplift Voices Award and is forthcoming in October 2026 from Jaded Ibis Press.

Nincompoop by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Nincompoop

I’m pressing a shirt
when the word nincompoop
puffs into my head like steam
from the iron in my grip. I wonder
if the cruel inner critic is mocking
my quotidian pursuits?

Sweep. Cook. Launder. Ponder.

I take a break to check the etymology
of nincompoop: from non compos mentis
to silly, it goes on and on. Nothing good.
I return to my task: press collar,
facing, cuff, sleeve, then the body
of the shirt, just as Mother taught me.

My bed? It’s already made.

*

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.

Saturday Night by Seth Leeper

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Saturday Night

In a past life, I looked down
from a star, wishing to apparate
in the streets, only to learn
life is a lot of posturing and stepping
out of the way.
I keep trying to uncenter myself
from these narratives,
but my face keeps appearing
in the window.

*

Seth Leeper is a queer poet. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Adroit Journal, Foglifter, Greensboro Review, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, and Waxwing, among others. He holds an M.S. in Special Education from Pace University and B.A. in Creative Writing and Fashion Journalism from San Francisco State University. He is a candidate in the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Randolph College. His work has been nominated for inclusion in the Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Pushcart anthologies. He lives and teaches in Brooklyn, NY, including drop in and virtual workshops for Brooklyn Poets. He can be found on Instagram @sethwleeper.

Blowing Smoke, 1971 by Bruce Morton

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Blowing Smoke, 1971

So, we beat a hasty retreat to the confines
Of our minds, the second story apartment
Two fights up from America, and more
Important—not in Vietnam. We were there
Congregants congregating. Each holding
Our own pipe and dreams, as we tamped
Reality, hashing angst and anger down
Against hope. Hoping to see a future
Through the smoke that was being blown.
The candle was there, flame fed by a draft,
An old war here, young versus old, haves
Versus nots, the certain versus whatever.
O’Leary lit up first, bleary-eyed and pale.
Don’t believe what they tell you. Inhale.

*

Bruce Morton divides his time between Montana and Arizona. He is the author of Planet Mort (FootHills Publishing, 2024) and the chapbook Olive-drab Khaki Blues (FootHills, 2026). His poems have appeared in numerous online and print venues. He was formerly dean at the Montana State University library.

The Impossible Flood by Ace Boggess

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Impossible Flood

Sunny day in the unconscious:
I’m standing on my patio
watching the flood—flash, fat, fast—
write itself a river
running downhill from the road.

(I know, I know. I’m high
on the mountain where streams won’t flow.)

Water looks like a YouTube video;
it looks like a latte accident
or the special effects for a film about
the worst parks of the American west.

Rapids have cut a groove through grass,
sloping past. Water never laps
at the lip of concrete.

You’re there with me, a few feet behind,
both of us lovers
of fascination with disasters.

We don’t turn toward safety indoors.
We watch carnage that fails to reach us.
We stay in place, bearing witness
to the world & its dangerous stories.

*

Ace Boggess is author of eight books of poetry, most recently Tell Us How to Live (Fernwood Press, 2025), and the short-story collection Always One Mistake (Running Wild Press, 2026). His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes, watches Criterion films, and tries to stay out of trouble.

Three Poems by Louisa Muniz

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

About-Face on Smith Street

In the window at Hamilton’s Shop,
the mannequin wore

bell bottoms,
a suede fringe belt,
a multicolored vest.

Her body posed,
mine falling as I ran
to catch up to him.

It had been months.

I tripped on the uneven sidewalk.

I feigned calm
as the woman hurrying past
asked if I was hurt.

Hurt? Let me stitch the frayed hem
of a daughter’s heart.

The only time I remember
my father laughing

was watching The Honeymooners…
to the moon, Alice, to the moon.

Laughter ashed in his throat,
moved jagged through me.

I picked myself up before he turned.
His shadow oblivious to mine.

Unscathed, the mannequin stared
straight ahead.

I turned and walked the opposite way.

*

I Ask God to Lend a Hand

The morning stirs its cup
into the bowl of day.
I wake to hay in my head.

In the kitchen I gently rub
the money tree’s leaves
between my palms.

Through the window,
the rabbit’s stillness
mesmerizes.

Outside, I draw the dogwood’s
white blossoms to my face.

Its branches bob back & forth.
I give her the attention I need.

There were times I gave away everything:
my secrets, my clothes, even my time.

Now I give in to silence.
Listen for God’s guidance.

God trills like a blackbird,
chirps like a sparrow.

During the hour of tenderness
the sun gathers on my shoulders.

Purple self-seeding flowers
sprout between stones.

I open my hands.
Put down the sword.

Let what’s good in.

*

Keeping the Faith

My husband’s car sits unused for weeks.
He asks me to start it.

To his surprise, it starts immediately.

See… you have to have faith, I say.
Faith is a key and a good battery, he replies.

I smile & wonder after all this time
how we see things so differently.

It’s June. Jasmine pinwheels perfume the air.

The dogwood tree outside our window
strews blossoms across the pavement.

I point out how beautiful the tree looks.
He glances, grunts. Uh-huh.

At the supermarket I meet an old colleague.
She tells me her husband died four years ago.
Being alone is really, really terrible.

After weeks of caring for an ill husband,
I’m filled with gratitude.

At home, I lean into his moss-sweet heart.

Come sit with me, tough guy.
I’ll keep the faith.
You keep it running.

The wild horse in him breaks through.

*

Louisa Muniz lives in Sayreville, N.J. She holds a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction from Kean University. Her work has appeared in ONE ART, Tinderbox Journal, Palette Poetry, SWWIM, Jelly Bucket, PANK Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her debut chapbook, After Heavy Rains was released in December, 2020. Her chapbook, The Body is More Than a Greening Thing was published in June of 2025 by Finishing Line Press.

Feeding the Body by Cam McGlynn

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Feeding the Body

When I can’t gain weight, the doctors reassure me that the baby
will take what she needs from me. Will suck the very calcium out

of my bones, if necessary. She won’t starve.
They let my question float, unanswered, in the air:

But what about me? I didn’t know, then, that mothers
weren’t supposed to worry about themselves.

I put myself on a secret anti-diet, reversing every rule I’d read
as a teen in Cosmo magazines: Always eat dessert first.

Drink only empty calories, not water. Never mistake hunger
for thirst. I have no cravings, only aversions. I eat

rice and beans for two weeks straight when my body
rejects every other food. I tell my doctors about my dizzy spells,

the cold sweats and quickening heart, even at rest.
The air I can’t drag down to my lungs fast enough

for their hungry whine and whistle. “Odd,” they say. “Your baby’s
heart sounds fine”, they say. “See you in a month,” they say.

Frankenstein’s monster, eight-feet tall, whose viscera and bones
were gathered from the slaughter and charnel houses,

lived on nothing but nuts and berries. Did his body, too,
always hunger? My stomach should distend like a blood-sated tick,

but my baby curls inward, instead of pushing out. She rearranges
my organs as she grows hers, shoving my stomach up under

my ribs, with no room to expand. The first thing I do
before getting out of bed is eat. The last thing I do

before going to sleep is eat. I eat every two hours when I’m awake.
I’m so tired of eating. At my eight-month appointment, I step onto the scale.

The nurse and doctor both sigh. “You finally
gained a little weight,” they say. “We were so worried about you.”

*

Cam McGlynn is a writer and scientific researcher from Frederick, Maryland. Ever since she was trapped in a deflating moonbounce as a child, she’s been deeply suspicious of street fairs. Her work has appeared in Whale Road Review, Rattle, The Shore, and ONE ART, among others.

Sorrow By Tsaulina Malazonia [Translated by Sallomeja Sandroschvili]

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Sorrow
By Tsaulina Malazonia
Translated by Sallomeja Sandroschvili

Gone is
the night, unadorned, starless and
moonless widow,
Upon the roads
she left a wet veil and a slumbering row
of poplar trees,
She crossed
the mountains with nimble shins, driven mad
by nightmares,
And
at the edge of earth and sky, lightning mowed down her
body.

But I
stubbornly listened to the silence, strung like beads
upon the heartstrings,
The mournful
whisper of March rains and
the hopes of a vanished soul,
I listened
right here, to how the winds of color groaned
upon the canvas of memory…
Her
hands lay on the rumpled bed, like
discarded gloves.

*

სევდა

წავიდა ღამე, უსამკაულო, უვარსკვლავო და
უმთვარო ქვრივი,
გზებზე დატოვა სველი მანდილი და ალვის ხეთა
მთვლევარე მწკრივი,
გადაიარა მარდი წვივებით მთები, კოშმრებით
გადარეული,
და ცის მიწი დასალიერში ელვამ მოცელა მისი
სხეული.

მე კი ვუსმენდი ჯიუტად დუმილს, მძივებად
ასხმულს გულის სიმებზე,
მწუხარე ჩურჩულს მარტის წვიმების და
გაფრენილი სულის იმედებს,
ვუსმენდი აქვე, ხსოვნის ტილოზე თუ როგორ
კვნესდნენ ფერთა ქარები…
მისი ხელები აშლილ საწოლზე ეყარა, როგორც
ხელთათმანები.

*

Tsaulina Malazonia is a poet and scholar from Georgia. Her poems have appeared in leading literary periodicals, including Tsiskari magazine, the literary almanac Sitqva, and Literary Georgia. She is the author of the poetry collection Pallid Dawns (1992, Akhaltsikhe) and the novel Because of this Fate Named Edi (1997). Her work broke regional and patriarchal boundaries in post-Soviet Georgia by introducing a hauntingly unique, symbolist, and deeply individualistic feminine perspective to the literary landscape.

Sallomeja Sandroschvili is a poet, translator, and literary scholar based in Georgia. Her translations and scholarly interests focus on reclaiming and preserving twentieth-century Georgian women’s poetry. She is the daughter of Tsaulina Malazonia and is dedicated to bringing her mother’s pioneering literary legacy to an international audience.

ONE ART x Quartet Reading

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART x Quartet Reading

Hosts: Jane C. Miller (൪uartet) & Mark Danowsky (ONE ART)

Date: Sunday, August 16
Time: 2pm Eastern
Duration: 1.5-2 hours

Featured Poets: Sue Ellen Thompson, Melody Wilson, Annette Sisson, Cora McCann Liderbach, Sarah Dickenson Snyder

Tickets are FREE!
(donations appreciated)

>> Register Here <<

~ About The Co-Hosts ~

Jane C. Miller is the author of Canticle for Remnant Days (2024) and coauthor of Walking the Sunken Boards (2019). A winner of the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest and two Delaware Division of the Arts fellowships, her work has appeared innumerous journals including RHINO, Colorado Review, Whale Road Review and on buses in Luzerne County, PA through the Poetry in Transit program. Miller coedits the online poetry journal, ൪uartet. janecmiller.com

Mark Danowsky is Founder & Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry and Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine. He curates Stay Curious on Substack. He previously served for many years as Managing Editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. His short poetry collections include Take Care (Moon Tide Press), Meatless (Plan B Press), Violet Flame (tiny wren lit), JAWN (Moonstone Press), and As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press). His poems and other writing have been curated in many journals including, Gargoyle, The Summerset Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Modern Haiku. These days, he writes quite a lot of haiku and aphorisms. He currently resides in the Greater Philadelphia Area.

~ About The Featured Readers ~

Cora McCann Liderbach of Cleveland, Ohio, has poetry in journals such as Quartet, ONE ART, Painted Pebble, Jackdaw Review, Gyroscope Review, Sheila-na-Gig Online and Artemis. She is a 2022 Best of the Net nominee and has a chapbook, “Throughline” (Finishing Line Press, 2024).

Melody Wilson is a Pushcart nominated poet whose work appears in Nixes Mate, Anti-Heroin Chic, Crab Creek Review, Nelle, Rust and Moth, Verse Daily, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Madre Dura, received the 2026 Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Review. A graduate of Pacific University’s MFA program, she lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband Phillip and their dog Z. Find more of her work at melodywilson.com.

After years in the classroom, Sarah Dickenson Snyder now carves in stone, sculls on the Connecticut River, and rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has five poetry collections: The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera (2019), and Now These Three Remain (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2023), and To Eve (Nixes Mate Review 2026). Several poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Verse Daily, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com

Annette Sisson lives in Nashville, TN, with her husband and soft-coated wheaten terrier. She retired at the end of May from Belmont University, where she taught for 37 years. Since retirement, she has traveled, bought a new house, put her old house on the market, and spent two weeks at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her poems have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Penn Review, River Heron Review, RockPaperPoem, Rust and Moth, Sky Island Journal, West Trade Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, was published by Terrapin Books in 2024, and her third book manuscript, Rhizomes and Bones, was recently “Runner-Up” in the Cider Press Book Award. In 2019 she won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s poetry prize, and in 2024 and 2025 she was a finalist for the Charles Simic Poetry Award. Her poems have placed in many other contests, and more than a dozen have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of six books of poetry—most recently SEA NETTLES: NEW & SELECTED POEMS. She has taught at Middlebury College, Binghamton University, Wesleyan University, Central Connecticut State University, and the University of Delaware. A resident of Oxford, MD for the past 20 years, she has been mentoring adult poets and teaching workshops at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda. In 2010, the Maryland Library Association awarded her its prestigious Maryland Author Award.

What the Water Keeps by Alexander Poon

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

What the Water Keeps

My grandmother washed rice in the same chipped bowl
for forty years, three times always, her palm
circling the grains until the water ran from milk
to almost clear. She never let it run all the way.
That last cloud, she said, is where the taste lives.

I have her bowl now. I do not know the word
she used for it, only the shape of her mouth
making the sound, the way her tongue
touched the back of her teeth and held there.
When I rinse rice I count to three in English
and the kitchen stays quiet in a language
I was supposed to fill.

There is a voicemail I keep but cannot play
past the first three seconds, her voice
saying my name the wrong way,
the way that was actually the right way,
the way no one says it anymore.

The bowl floats when I leave it in the sink too long,
tilts, takes on water through the crack
along its rim, and still it does not sink.
It rides the gray water like something
that has decided not to be finished,
the cloud of starch lifting from its center,
rising, refusing to be poured away.

*

Alexander Poon (he/him) is a poet from Edison, New Jersey. His work explores family history, cultural inheritance, memory, and the quiet distances that language and time can create between generations. His work has appeared in American High School Poets: Winter 2026 and has received recognition from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

Three Poems by Mirabella Mitchell

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Thornfoot

The woman had thorns for feet, which left
two deep punctures in the flesh of the earth,
and on cement made high hollow sounds
like a glass flute tapped for attention.
She had learned a mostly normal gait,
and spent time in the evenings
applying fine-grit sandpaper to each shard
in turn, which did not hurt, not exactly,
but did let her wear most size 9 styles
from a few sensible brands.
And she had learned that it was okay
to be different: people often liked
when she talked about the thorns,
especially at parties, when she could be
bright and funny about it,
and it was too dark to see her feet.

*

Self Portrait with teacup
after Glen Martin Taylor

The spoon–silver, tarnished, green patina
growing in its shallow bowl– has been cut
into seven pieces, its ornately
sculpted lines interrupted by thin air
and wire (maybe medical or fishing)
looped and tied, tails stuck up from the stitching.
The porcelain cup and its small saucer
are just the same, shattered and thickly sewn,
motif of flowers hidden among thorns.
The world is good, and worth saving. You, too,
are worth the wire it will take. Even if
you can no longer hold the dark water
you thought you’d been made for, even if
your jagged rim cuts every lip that tries to drink.

*

Rest stop

There was this sense, almost as strong
as a tide, that the way to go was West,
which was not a real place but a fact
of being in the future, where one
would be some better version of oneself,
unburdened by the ruins of the East
tipping into the gray, uncaring sea,
and the way to go West was along
the highway, that wide human river
of endless movement, and that the cure
for loneliness was not to find oneself,
which sounded both frightening and
undesirable, but to lose oneself
in the shining shoals as they raced
towards the sea, each individual purpose
(or lack thereof)
one line of light in the bright stream.

*

Mirabella Mitchell is a poet and ceramic artist living in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s MFA program and Princeton University’s undergraduate creative writing program. Her first chapbook, The Great Get by (2026, Dancing Girl Press) is a meditation on depression that comprises thirty erasures of a single page of The Great Gatsby. Her prose and poetry has been published in The Cumberland River Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. She is a member of Milkweed Clay Studio.

My grandmother asks what size my dress is by Lucy De Maio

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

My grandmother asks what size my dress is

I want to tell her, infinity. The biggest number.
The sum of every meal I’ve missed. The total count
of every bone in my body that weakened when starved,
thinning into things just as destructive as they were
destroyed. A value greater than every time she’s asked.
An irrational number, one that spirals like we both do,
one that oscillates to the point of collapse. The kind of
number that you don’t even know how to read aloud.
A number so towering and imaginary you can feel it
encroaching on your space, your brain, that little corner
that does the calculating, the panicking, tracks the hours
wasted wondering if the limit exists, if one can approach zero.
A number no one will discover. The result of adding the tags
of every dress I’ve ever bought, every unflattering waist
I’ve regretted. The sum of every sliver of shallow hope
born from flat morning stomachs. The product given by
multiplying instability with ignorance, the kind that
unconditional love can never excuse. The quantity
measured when you stack up every minute we two have
drained thinking about our bodies instead of living in them.
The number you get when you trace the family tree,
adding up every woman sucking in her abdomen in the
photo, hoping the universe will swallow it, hoping her
daughter granddaughter great granddaughter won’t have to
twist in her torso too— not hoping that she won’t.

*

Lucy De Maio is Chicago Youth Poet Laureate 2026. She loves poetry that reclaims heritage, art that explores what it means to live in a body, and anything about trains.

Pothos by Mihan Han

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Pothos

The pothos unfurls
down my bookshelf
tracing well-worn spines

the way you caressed
my tiny fingers
as we turned the pages

together, soaking up words
I had yet to understand.

When I discovered their meaning,
I lost myself in their overgrown
yet barren landscapes,

while you waited
patiently, tending to this pothos

withered and brown, rot
decisively cut from knotted
roots, replanted in fresh soil.

I re-emerge to watch it now
turn toward the open window,
reminded of how

a dying plant can still be saved
to flourish in a wild sprawl
of green heart-shaped leaves.

*

Mihan Han lives in Toronto, Canada. His work has previously appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, The Heron’s Nest, Frogpond, Modern Haiku and various other publications. He is an avid gamer and amateur musician.

Payphone by Yoda Olinyk

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Payphone

My mother gave us each a quarter & with grave
sincerity, said, If you get scared, find a payphone
& call for help. We were about to ascend into the cab
of my father’s navy pickup—our father who tends
tomatoes, cans peaches, washes each leaf of each
houseplant with a toothbrush in April.
There was no reason to fear our father.

But this is hardly a poem. The poem is: my father, barking
beartrap of a man, whiskey growling & it’s only noon. His rage
a neon tendril bursting from seed as he slingshots
a clay pot at our tiny bodies. We are rushed

into the house. Gathered behind a door.
Calls are placed. Plans are made. A cloud
of hushes sweep over our farmhouse.

Even then, I knew he didn’t want to hurt us.
He told my mother he would go to anger management

& he did. But that day, my sister & I, clutching hands,
clutching coins, as our whiskey-soaked pulsing love
bomb of a father drove in the direction of the general store
singing about how he would buy us a new
bike helmet; baseball glove; reading lamp. Our fear
so hot, that quarter melted like wax. If I had to,
I, nine years old, sharp as a tack, could figure out how
to pour liquid into a payphone, but who would I call
for help when my father wasn’t home?

*

Yoda Olinyk (she/her) is a writer, editor, and workshop guide from Canada. Her work has appeared in many beloved journals, including Rattle and The Shore. She has published a memoir about restaurant life and is working on her next book.

Two Poems by Todd Matson

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Outgoing Message

Hello, you have reached mother.

If you need me to send money, press 1.

If you need to borrow my car, press 2.

If you wrecked your car and need me
to cosign for another car, press 3.

If you were evicted and need me
to cosign for another rental, press 4.

If you are in jail and need me to pay
your bail, press 5.

If you need me to hire a lawyer, press 6.

If you need me to secure a home equity
loan to pay for legal fees and rehab, press 7.

If you are just calling to say hello or
ask how I’m doing, I’m sorry, I didn’t
think to add an extension for that.

Have a nice day.

*

Breadwinners

I make all the money.
She doesn’t earn a penny.
That is what I told her
whenever I felt the need to
remind her of the basic facts.
My wife, mother of my children –
she gets to stay home all day.

How does she spend all her
free time? One day, I made
the mistake of asking her.

I work as a cook, housekeeper,
childcare worker, tutor, nurse,
crisis counselor, laundry worker,
driver, personal assistant…

I interrupted her there.
She didn’t stop there.

If we had to hire a cook,
housekeeper, childcare worker,
tutor, nurse, crisis counselor,
laundry worker, driver and
personal assistant to do what
I do it would cost us $150,000
per year. I do math too. Where’s
my $150,000 salary?

I stopped saying
I make all the money.

*

Todd Matson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in North Carolina, United States. His writings have been published in Feminine Collective, Salvation South, Breathe, The Clayjar Review, Agape Review, Redrosethorns, San Antonio Review, The Brussels Review, The Shallot: Journal of Mental Health, Art, and Literature; WestWard Quarterly, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, FEED THE HOLY; Faith, Hope and Fiction; Soul Poetry, Prose & Arts Magazine; Solid Food Press, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, Neon & Smoke, Sublimation and Epistemic Literary Magazine. He has also written lyrics for songs recorded by several contemporary Christian music artists.

Resistance by Mark Hendrickson

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Resistance

I stand at my window
watching a baby bunny
greedily chomping down
on ‘rabbit resistant’ phlox

and I wonder

what has become
of me

*

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

The Ex by Nancy Kay Peterson

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

The Ex

I still think of him
and want to ask:
When did our cats die?
What has life done
for you without me?
Are you happy?
Your parents still living?
Your sister’s children
successful adults?
Did they ever forgive
me — or you
for not saying goodbye?
What career did you
finally settle in?
TV director, DJ, other?
Would you be surprised
to know I’m married
have two cats,
a house brought as dowry
(no white picket fence),
a well-paying job,
a better golf game,
respect,
a way of living
that still on odd days
misses you.

*

Nancy Kay Peterson’s poetry appeared most recently in Bellevue Literary Review, The Bluebird Word, Dash Literary Journal, Earth’s Daughters, HerWords, Naugatuck River. Review, One Sentence Poems, RavensPerch, Spank the Carp, Steam Ticket, Three Line Poetry and Tipton Poetry Journal. From 2004-2009, she co-published Main Channel Voices: A Dam Fine Literary Magazine (Winona, MN). Her work appears in Haikus for Hikers (Brick Street Poetry, Inc.) and Play (Outsider Press). Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks, Belated Remembrance (2010) and Selling the Family (2021). She resides in Bellingham, Washington. nancykaypeterson.com

Substitute Teacher by Todd Wynn

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Substitute Teacher

An almost empty hallway
smelling faintly of crayons
and whatever they use on the gym floor.

Classroom, dark and quiet,
lesson plans laid on the desk.
I write my name on the board,
the pronunciation in parentheses beside it.

Students will arrive soon
to teach me
if I belong here.

*

Todd Wynn is a nurse from Mansfield, Ohio. His poems have previously appeared in ONE ART.

Three Poems by LeeAnn Pickrell

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Regret

         “You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.”

                           From “Antilamentation,” Dorianne Laux

Embrace the lovers too quickly
balled up and tossed away
like that first draft. When a gasp
of wind sweeps the tree
and you want only the feeling
of falling, know nothing of time
spent raking, gathering, bagging,
clearing gutters of detritus
so water flows again. Admire
the metaphors that never
should have mixed. Some-
times you must blow
up your life to change,
watch embers smoulder,
the image others had of you
turn to ash. Every choice
brought you here, where you
sit now, having learned
the only way you could have—
the hard way—to clear the yard.

*

At the Equinox

For a moment day equals night
before the sun slips toward winter,
shadows reach farther each day.

The cat who’s blind still thinks he’s
an explorer darting toward the door
opened where we scoop him close.

Inside, the world stands still. How
many days I forget to step
outside the door and all I see

are corners. Turn around,
a friend used to say,
there’s a whole world

just outside. Autumn
for instance is a sigh, a breath
let out through pursed lips.

Yesterday, I held the cat against
my chest as if that could soften
the hurt of a broken world.

*

Solitary

Always the first to bed, she pulls
the covers over her shoulders.

She lives on a street of houses
built in the fifties. Eyes closed,

she travels to those other homes,
sees her neighbors in their own rooms:

a girl dreams of what she can’t yet
see around the bend of a life,

a boy plays video games
in his bedroom’s darkness, a man

watches a show about smugglers
while his partner sleeps, a book

falls onto a woman’s chest as she reads,
a baby fusses in a crib.

Next door a woman who lived
a whole life in that one house

shuffles her walker toward the bed.
Across the street the man who had

a stroke still leaves his lights on late.
All of them invisibly bound,

as the day’s eyes close,
by one asphalt ribbon of road.

*

LeeAnn Pickrell’s first collection Gathering the Pieces of Days was published in April 2025. Tsunami, a memoir about her experience in the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, will be out in August 2026, also from Unsolicited Press. See more at leeannpickrell.com.

Nests by Jessica Whipple

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Nests

we, two birds,
were wrong

to think all we needed
could be carried in our mouths

*

Jessica Whipple is a poet and author of two children’s picture books: Enough Is… (Tilbury House 2023, illust. by Nicole Wong) and I Think I Think a Lot (Free Spirit Publishing 2023, illust. by Josée Bisaillon). Her poetry has appeared in print and online literary magazines, most recently Philadelphia Stories, ONE ART, and Gastronomica: The Journal of Food Studies. For more information, follow her on social media @JessicaWhippl17 or visit AuthorJessicaWhipple.com.

Spark Bird by Karen Holmberg

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Spark Bird

        Instantly, this inert thing jerked its head around, looked
                at me wildly, then took off in a flash of gold. It was like resurrection.
                                        — Roger Tory Peterson

Walking in, I heard your wicka wicka
chortle. Your pneumatic chisel blows
on campus power poles that bloom
the trial glasshouse walls
with frost’s mild fluorescence.

I failed to spot you. Now I can look close.
I roll your body, limp with fresh death,
onto my palm. Your beak’s radiant
thorn of black basalt blisters
on edge where the current

entered you. Is null now, coal’s dull clinker.
Your neck lolls off the meat of my thumb,
exposing the throat flushed rose as
cedar’s wounded core, bibbed by
a soot-black quarter moon.

Your breast glows like slubbed silk specked with russet
seed, as if the charge cracked the top off
your pod of milkweed down. The live
coal at your nape pulses bright
under my breathing.

I’m not the boy. My touch won’t wake you. Yet
you migrate softly up to my mind’s
vault of sky to join beauty’s
murmuration. Beauty, so
common, so infinite

in range. Winged spark, still you point me skyward.

*

Karen Holmberg is the author of three poetry collections: The Perseids, Axis Mundi, and Reckless Shelter (winner of the Editor’s Prize from Cider Press Review and forthcoming early autumn, 2026). In addition to poetry, she publishes lyric essays and art criticism, appearing in At Length, Tupelo Quarterly, and New England Review, among other places. Her first young adult novel, The Collagist, won the 2021 Acheven Prize and was published by Regal Press/Fitzroy Editions in the spring of 2024. She teaches British Literature, poetry writing, and letterpress printing at Oregon State University, where she is on the MFA in Creative Writing faculty and runs the Moreland Letterpress Studio.

At the Bar, I Use a Fake Name by Amy Le Ann Richardson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

At the Bar, I Use a Fake Name

The consequences are never worth it,
but I go anyway,
preening myself into a new identity.

Someone who knows how to let go,
have fun,
someone who doesn’t give a damn,

someone who can scrape scraps of joy
from the surface of a sticky bar,
swallow it like peanuts and cheap beer,

someone who knows how it feels
to be in the world
despite the grime beneath my nails,

the tear in my shirt, the wear of my shoes,
and who can fold the judgement
into their napkin, tossing it

into the bathroom trash
where she stands to wait for the man
who bought her a drink.

*

Amy Le Ann Richardson is a writer, educator, and community organizer based on her family farm in Kentucky. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Out of Places (Pine Row Press), and the editor of the forthcoming anthology Rooted, Resilient, Rising: Women Growing Food across the Mountains (University Press of Kentucky). Richardson is the founder and director of the Bloodroot Young Writers Collective and co-founder of the Appalachian Literary Arts Festival in Morehead, Kentucky. An inaugural National Arts Futures Fellow and recipient of Kentucky Foundation for Women grants, her work explores Appalachian identity, land, and the generational knowledge carried by mountain women.

Two Poems by Lisa Zimmerman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Mars Retrograde in Leo

Look at him, sad bully trudging
through the sludge of the vast galaxy
he likes to call his own, though it’s not.
How he wants to burn a house or a city
or a continent, chisel his anger to a searing point.
Even just to lounge in cool shade like a lion
who chased down and devoured not one
but three small deer, or children, or stupid men.

He can hear the faint lilt of his queenly mother’s voice
reminding him he might learn something from his past,
to slow down is not the same as losing a battle,
which he’s never done. He’s still mad, just wants
to inspire some countries to go nuclear, sink a battleship
filled with soldiers, help a volcano belch lava over
crowded villages and pretty middle class houses,
or at least burn a famous museum to ash. Poor bully.
Look at him dragging his sword, how it leaves
a sad trail in the ordinary dirt behind him.

*

Uncle Roger Who Died in 1940 Before the Age of Two

I woke up hot, my hands sticky, my throat sore.
I cried out for Mama but Papa came and lifted me
from my small bed. I felt the lurch of his heart
under his half-buttoned work shirt. He called loud
for Mama. She heard her name laced with fear,
came running, gathered the heat of my body
from Papa’s arms and shouted for him to get the car.

Oh, how they loved me, those two,
and my thin big sister who might have been
at school or with Aunt Lena or Grandma.
I wasn’t two years old yet but I saw
doom on the doctor’s face. He had seen
so much death from flu, from sepsis, from war
wounds that wouldn’t heal. This was other,
and fierce—I could not swallow or speak.
My soul, so much older than two years,
knew I would die in my mother’s arms.
How this simple truth would cast a dark wing
over her long, long life.

*

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award) The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in SWWIM Every Day, Apple Valley Review, Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Vox Populi, Ghost Parachute, and many other journals.

Two Poems by Bart Edelman

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Ropes

Thought I knew the ropes.
Not to get tangled between them.
Yet once the fight commenced,
I lost sight of what I learned.
Like Iron Mike warned:
Everyone has a plan,
Until they get punched in the face.
All the daily training—
Hours and hours of preparation—
Did me little good in the ring.
I barely made it through a round,
Succumbing to blow after blow,
Before the referee stopped the bout,
Had me carried to my corner,
Asked me to name the date,
And where I was…
Pluto, of course, I responded.
Then I blacked out again.
So much for my boxing career.
Short and anything but sweet.
Think I’ll stick to tennis.
Take my lumps on the court.
Carry a few extra rackets—
Just in case.

*

The Dead

The dead are entitled to more
Than we give them credit for,
Floating in our minds,
Morning, noon, and night,
Until they’re here, among us,
Requesting the next dance,
If we take them at their word.
Don’t ever call them ghosts—
An offense not easily forgotten.
They’ll haunt you, left and right,
Refuse to allow a moment’s rest,
Should you make them feel
Less worthy of your time,
Too blind to accept seriously.
No, elevate them as best you can.
Extend an invitation their way.
Bake whatever cake they desire.
Give them space at the table.
Offer them a plate of grace.

*

Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack, Under Damaris’ Dress, The Alphabet of Love, The Gentle Man, The Last Mojito, The Geographer’s Wife, Whistling to Trick the Wind, and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023. He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, the University of Iowa Press, Wadsworth, and others. He lives in Pasadena, California.

Two Poems by Iain Grinbergs

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Panama City Beach

I clocked into Dusty Dick’s hungover, having stained
downtown with Bud Light and Captain Morgan,
smelling like sweat and Lucky Strike, still wearing
the eyeliner from the night before at Splash Bar,
where I once tried to kiss a basketball player from
high school, the seat of my Levi’s wet from sitting
in a puddle of my gin and tonic. The beach wasn’t beautiful—
it was a means to an end, and the end kept coming,
every Spring Break another rerun, the same spent
mess, Front Beach Road nothing but neon madness,
a gusset of brake lights, trying to get to my new
food runner job where I soon dropped a seafood platter
bigger than a hammerhead’s head, even though I said,
I don’t think I can handle that. A blonde-haired waitress
was nice enough to help me collect the snow crab legs
and scallops and hush puppies and coleslaw and tartar sauce
from the dark wood floor, our hands sticky and greasy,
my saying, Sorry, sorry, so sorry, and her saying, It’s fine, fine, fine.
They fired me five minutes later, and I couldn’t get
my share of the tips because I hadn’t worked there long.
What was I to do but go to the nearest bar and sing
Kesha until my skull shook enough, then share
a Newport with an Air Force guy who turned out
to be a drag queen—her name was Spite and she came
from Tennessee. She said, People don’t like when you make
the Bible Belt glittery, and I nodded because I knew—
the back seat of my ‘92 Honda still had a few
fake nails as mementos from another night, when I told
myself not to drive and somehow made it back from
St. Andrews quite alive, then the next morning I managed
to pass an Intro to Psych test, slipping in before the professor
locked the door. She said she had lost it after no one cared
for her research on mice and moved to Key West,
and I thought, What if psych professors are actually
all crazy?, but I failed remedial algebra twice—
I was writing sad sonnets on Scantrons, then getting
sunburns on the Tilt-a-Whirl before scooping
ice cream at my new job, smelling of sour milk, playing
made-up games like Gum Ball Hockey and Banana Ball,
crying in the walk-in cooler before popping out
and saying, Welcome! Our latest flavor is pumpkin.

*

Letter from the Farmers Market

It’s when a boy, his face sticky with guava,
licks the rim of a honey jar—his eyes locked on mine,

defiant—that I think about how incredible this world is in all
its violations, like when a Pomeranian cocks its leg by

a crate of purple potatoes, someone laughing: Oh! Oh! Oh!
Sometimes, it’s endearing to ruin what was almost perfect—

a woman haggling over peaches like she’s bargaining
for more time, the air smelling like tulsi and sourdough, while a toddler streaks past

a box of Seminole squashes still furbished with earth. Adam means
formed from the ground, and I think of my own body—

the congenital rhythm that once held me, a rogue pulse burning through
my chest, a shortcut in the heart, a bypassing signal meant to wait

its turn but creating a dare, the dizziness like the soul punching up for air.
And there I am, holding a wet head of lettuce next to a wedge

of watermelon clenched in a baby’s fist, the sun stumbling across
the roof of a Cuban food truck, remembering the knock

of waking up three times on an operating table, then the farmer saying:
Hi? Hello? Will that be card or cash? The world is what it looks like.

*

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.

You’re a long shot by Greg Stewart

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

You’re a long shot

Your genetic code is a hand-me-down
from your 2 parents, theirs from
your 4 grandparents, and theirs from
your 8 great-grandparents.
Just 20 generations ago, you had
a million ancestors behind you —
a river basin sprawling
back to the start of life.

Your body is made up of a billion atoms
for every grain of sand on earth.
They were born inside ancient stars,
and briefly pass through you before
moving on downstream. Each year,
half your atoms wash away
and are replaced.
So that every 10 years
you are refreshed
as a whole new person.

Your code and body
are two streams colliding
briefly converging to
churn a musky mix of riverbottom mud.
The stink of biology
doing the messy work of you —
all the you there is.

I hope we’re not conscious for too long
after we’re dead
or we’ll be mortified with regret
over everything we could have done
in that one brief moment
when the universe lined up for us
and we were alive.

*

Greg Stewart is a Canadian poet based in British Columbia. His work has appeared in ONE ART. He writes and performs regularly, and has been featured three times at Poetry Floodlight in New Westminster, where he remains active in the local poetry community.

ONE ART’s August 2026 Reading

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

ONE ART’s August 2026 Reading

Date: Sunday, August 2
Time: 2pm Eastern
Duration: 2 hours

Featured Poets: John Amen, Tina Barry, Tim Mayo, Francine Witte, CL Bledsoe, Kip Knott

Tickets are FREE!
(donations appreciated)

>> Register Here <<

~ About The Featured Readers ~

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press. His most recent book of poetry, Rothko’s Gospels, is available from tiny wren publishing. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott.

Tim Mayo’s poems and reviews have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street Journal, Narrative Magazine, Poetry International, River Styx, and Salamander among many other places. His poems have received ten Pushcart Prize nominations. His first full-length collection of poetry The Kingdom of Possibilities was published by Mayapple Press in 2009 and was a finalist for the 2009 May Swenson Award. His second volume of poems, Thesaurus of Separation (Phoenicia Publishing, 2016) was a finalist for both the 2017 Montaigne Medal and the 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award among other honors, and his chapbook Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (Kelsay Books 2019) also won an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award. His latest collection Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster was published by Bainbridge Island Press in March 2026. He lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he works at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, and is a founding member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.

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

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

Tina Barry is the author of I Tell Henrietta (Aim Higher, Inc., 2024), Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing). Her poetry and short fiction can be found in ONE ART, Rattle, Verse Daily, SWWIM, Gyroscope, SoFloPoJo, The Best Small Fictions 2020 and 2016, and elsewhere. Tina’s has six Pushcart Prize and several Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nominations. MFA in creative writing, Long Island University, Brooklyn. She teaches at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.

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

Five Poems by Lindsay Ratcliffe

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Former Ninja

When I was little I scared
my parents, walking so quietly
once I spoke or touched them
they startled. Jumping slightly, saying
I’m a ninja, never making
noise, or telling me they needed
to put a bell around my neck,
like a cow, which made me giggle.

Now I can’t walk anywhere
without sound. The scratch
of my walker dragging
across the concrete, announcing me
wherever I go. I listen
to music so loud to make sure
I can’t hear myself move.

*

Ivy

My favorite nurse
leaves the room to grab
duct tape for Dad’s shoe.

We noticed the sole flopping
around walking to the hospital
that morning.

She brings back two rolls:
neon pink and cheetah print.
9-year-old me lights up

and Dad regrets his decision
while me and Ivy work:
overlapping the neon

and cheetah print to
make a beautiful overlapping,
striped pattern–

continuing our comedy when
we decide the other shoe
needs to match.

*

Thirteen Years Old

They introduce themselves
by last name:
“Dr. Kim, I’m responsible
for your bones.”
“Dr. Verkler, I’m doing
the plastics part, your skin.”
“Dr. Kiers, or Alex, your
anesthesiologist, I’ll make
sure you’re comfortable.”
Plus two more per doctor, who introduce
themselves while I think this gown
is too big. They’re here because
I’m rare and this
is a teaching hospital.

I want to teach them
how to close a door
the next morning when
a school of them—
plastics first, then ortho—
come for rounds.
Even more than I saw
yesterday in the O.R.
They crowd around the foot
of my bed, like fish
when you throw bait
off the dock. I want to
teach them to be kinder
waking me up since
I can barely manage
the pain that they
have caused. But they
don’t care, because I’m rare
and this is a teaching hospital.

*

Trading Secrets

I haven’t always used a walker.

I used to be a dancer, from first grade
to freshman year of high school.

I loved hiking and nature.
The faint rush of the water,

the subtle yet defining cracks in rocks,
or even the faint changes in the tree leaves.

I’d run ahead, so excited.
Sometimes, when I daydream, I wonder

if my veins are filled with longing
and my heart an abyss of remembered joy—

the fleeting moment of playing kickball,
choreographing dance routines in my
unfinished basement—

yet these feelings are so heavy that I hold them
inside. I want someone to come around,
know the right questions to ask and help me.

I want to go back to being a little kid,
when we could exchange lighthearted sentiments
because someone asked, quietly,
Should we trade secrets?

*

Crying at 9:17 PM

You press your spine into the cold
tile wall in the bathroom you don’t share
because you have no roommates.

You’re 21 now, why do you care
that your so-called friends aren’t wishing you
“Happy Birthday!”

You don’t know. No, yes you do.
You didn’t think you’d see today.
You’ll finish what you started,
but you’re over giving so much
to people that couldn’t care less

that you turned 21 today. Your gift
to yourself is learning
not everyone deserves all of you
and that you can get up
from the cold wall and
wipe your own tears away.
You are worth more.

*

Lindsay Ratcliffe is a poet from Flat Rock, MI. Her work has focused on her experiences with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. She is graduating from Albion College with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and English. Her English degree has an emphasis on Creative Writing. This is her first publication.

At Estadio Azteca, 2026 by Joseph Verhelle

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At Estadio Azteca, 2026

A Mexican kisses an Englishman
and blur so utterly under stadium light
that I can only pick them out
by the football kits
they so desperately wish
were a puddle on the ground.
Jogo Bonito is what Brazilians call
this fluid philosophy of lips and tongue.
Even the stewards, typically dead-set
on splitting supporters
across imaginary borders, are still
watching green and white blend
long after the match is done.

*

Joseph Verhelle is a poet and educator from Rochester Hills, Michigan. His work appears or is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Pine Hills Review, HAD, and The Twin Bill. He was selected for season 22 of the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program in 2025.

The Body by Dana Henry Martin

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The Body

Red the blood, blue the blood,
on entry, on exit, like a color song.

Pools of red turning maroon,
turning carmine.

The room is piss yellow,
the nurses green as shoots,

vertical, a moving jungle.
They want what they can’t have:

my death. I want what I can’t have:
my life. We are all swimming

in this lavender water, this gray air.
I ask for oxygen and get sulfur.

I ask for silence and get tinnitus.
My cells explode into calligraphy

that’s dripping. It’s a language
my paginated body cannot hold.

::

I see your body unraveling
in the hall. I almost said

unravening, unleavening,
unleveling. All true. I know

because I’m you. Pretty flower.
Pretty nude. Who taught you

to petal? To move toward
any open door? They’re already

calling you a whore. Broken stem.
Busted seed. Gown down

around your waist. That
everywhere hair. There’s

nothing beyond the frame.
Those stairs lead nowhere.

Leaves like hands.
Carpet like a tongue.

You are so young, Child.
You are already flung.

::

She and her maid
were transformed,

all brutality and body,
brought as close to God

as any man. Not a drop
of blood on their dresses,

not an inch of space
between their intentions.

Knife like a cross but
him like something else.

He begged them to stop.
As if. Gentileschi put them

in the good light, oiled
Holofernes’s blood

until it shone. Painted
the knife more than halfway

through the neck,
Judith’s hand knuckling

his head in place as she
cut clean through skin,

then muscle, then vein,
then nerve, then cartilage

and back in the opposite
order. After she split

the Adam’s apple,
she sliced the carotid

in two like a worm.
Gentileschi showed

Judith’s cleavage,
flush cheeks, rippled

sleeves, dark ribbons,
well-muscled arms,

her fingers, her wanting.
Gentileschi showed it all:

how it was, how it had to be.
How it will be forever.

—

These are sections from a long poem titled “The Body.” Each of these sections is ekphrastic. The first is after Joan Mitchell’s Faded Air 1, the second after Dorothea Tanning’s Sunflower in the Hall, and the third after Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes. Allison Blevins provided the artwork as inspiration for these poems in her workshop titled “Writing with Pain: A Generative Workshop on Illness and Disability.”

*

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

A Monster of Correction by William Doreski

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A Monster of Correction

No one knew how Aunt Alice got into our family. With her starry blue gaze and stilted posture she looked like a refugee from some tiny, impoverished European state. She moved into our apartment with a fat leather bag and an armful of books from Goodwill’s dusty shelves. The first night, when Carole served pigs’ feet and artichokes, Aunt Alice proved to be a monster of correction. Pigs’ feet should be boiled, not roasted. Artichokes go better with beef. Our dining room looks dingy. We should repaint it a delicate shade of yellow. Carole’s apron looks old-fashioned. Your hair sticks up funny. We went to bed early that night, leaving Aunt Alice complaining on the phone to a stranger she had randomly dialed. Days passed. Nights passed. The monster of correction corrected everyone we knew. She told Calvin he talked oddly. She ordered Melinda to wear longer skirts and stop showing her stuff. She told the Unitarian preacher that his God was a wimp and needed elocution lessons. She even tried to correct the sloppy eating habits of our cats, but they ignored her. Carole and I couldn’t ignore her. Aunt Alice had a voice of flint on steel. She sparked when she spoke, and several times almost set the place on fire. Finally we asked her to leave. Her response was to stretch out on the sofa and die. She was clutching a sheet of paper with instructions for the disposal of her carcass. She wanted to be cremated, and the urn with her ashes set on our mantle. Done and done. Now when that metallic voice creaks in the dark we correct her by telling her no one can hear unless she speaks up.

*

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is No Vacancy (2025). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

Three Poems by John Amen

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After

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

*

Birdman
         after the 2014 film

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

*

Barbie, 1978
         for Janet Buck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Market Fluctuation by Sarah Rosengarten

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Market Fluctuation

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

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

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

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

*

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