Month: August 2022

Time Travel by Erin Block

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Time Travel

Where would you go
if you could go anywhere.
That’s what people ask.
From the time we’re born,
desperate to get away
like a coyote in a trap.
And I’ve never known what to say
until just now after the rain’s stopped,
just before dark,
just before I knead tortilla dough
with the hands I use to braid my mother’s hair
down her back to childhood—
do I know the answer—
and it’s up the mountain
to where the ravens are cawing.
Because it’s never not something:
a bear, a turkey, a body
cached by a lion.
They’re better than a bloodhound
for a missing person
and if you’re looking for a reason,
they have it.
Tucked in tailfeathers;
held in beaks like splintered bone
that rain down ash when they speak.
I’ll bring my mother with me,
walking over the ridge to find them.
There she’ll remember where she’s gone
and how to get back home.

*

Erin Block works as a librarian and lives in a cabin in Colorado where she hunts, fishes, forages, and gardens. Her writing has been published in CutBank Literary Journal, The Rumpus, Guernica, River Teeth, and Gray’s Sporting Journal, among others.

Counting on Climate Change by Wynne Brown

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Counting on Climate Change

Forty-one seconds
of voice mail

forty-one seconds
of his voice

Hi, Mom.
It’s me.
I don’t know
exactly
what to say?
But
I want to talk to you—

Five years
six months
two whole days

of icy silence

broken

A glacier
tempered
by grief
begins
to melt

calving

into a warming sea

*

Wynne Brown writes from the Arizona lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. Her work has appeared in Persimmon Tree, Wild Roof Journal, Blue Guitar, Oasis Journal, The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide by Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos (University of Arizona Press), and Spilled: A Collection by the Dry River Poets (Casa Luna Press). Her most recent book, The Forgotten Botanist: Sara Plummer Lemmon’s Life of Science and Art (2021, University of Nebraska Press), won a 2022 Spur Award for Best Western Biography. She was the 2022 Spring Pima County Public Library Writer in Residence in Tucson. Her website is wynne@wynnebrown.com.

Attic Drummer by Claire Keyes

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Attic Drummer

Where else could he practice
and not drive us all mad? Then the sad quiet
when he disappeared. In the attic,
he could let it rip playing the drums.
When he no longer played, we all felt his absence.
I was just a child. He played in the school’s marching band.
His story came to me in pieces. I knew, without saying,
that when he practiced at home, something freed up
in him, something hidden released.

I struggled to learn his story.
A girl snatched from the street? the call to the police?
Whatever freed up in him, hidden urges released.
My playful brother found guilty of a crime
and sent to jail. Later, much later, I learned
he and his pals grabbed the daughter of the chief
of police. My mom visited him in jail.
Back home, she cried in disbelief.

My father, grim and sad, took the blame as his.
Around the house, shame and the painful void
of a son and brother deeply missed.
We counted the months until his release.
And that girl? Nightmares. Questions about trust. Fears
about boys, about cars. About boys in cars.

*

Claire Keyes is the author of two collections of poetry: The Question of Rapture (Mayapple Press) and What Diamonds Can Do (WordTech). Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. A second chapbook, One Port, was recently published by Derby Wharf Books. She is Professor emerita at Salem State University and her poems and reviews have been published recently in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Turtle Island, Gyroscope Review and Tipton Poetry Journal. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts where she conducts a monthly poetry salon.

Two Poems by Rachel Custer

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Birthright

Fear will make a man
lie about how he loves you
and Sally knows just how to scare a man. (Beneath her summer clothes,
her belly swells. A song,
sudden as dark, overtakes the day.)
Mercy wells up inside her
like the flood a girl becomes
in the basement of a cruel man’s need. Fear will make a woman
dream of another country,
the motherland a woman can become.
Sally dreams vast fields of desperate eyes. Hope: a mother will never be left
alone with a dangerous dream.
Mercy: a daughter
born to cut glances from men.

*

Seeing Too Much is Seeing Nothing

Sally stands at the sink, training
her eyes on the following day
and missing
the girl following her around.
Sally’s saving all her faith for silences, these days. Summer
mornings in Indiana
are a lie that’ll catch you out later.
An unanswered question,
a shame that’ll soak your clothes.
What happened to Mercy? a truth
you don’t know how to say
is the same as a truth you don’t know. One more little girl
who couldn’t be saved. Mercy
split the county-line crick
and walked through on dry ground.
Sally swore she never saw the day.

*

Rachel Custer is an NEA Fellow (2019) and the author of The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, The American Journal of Poetry, The Antigonish Review, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (OJAL), among others.

Splendor by Paula J. Lambert

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Splendor

The fig wasp, born pregnant,
offers herself back to the fig
and dies. My every day feels like this:
clambering out of my dreams, laden,
flitting about the world
collecting what the earth and air offer—
sunlight, the vast blues and linen whites of sky
(some days, only moist air and gray
all around me), the pain of purpled iris
exploding from the tips of their slender green spears.

I never asked for this life, what it gives,
what it takes away,
its every moment of cruelty
and joy. Still, I move through the day
greedy with want,
aching with what must be love—
what other word for this pull to return
to the slim cavern of sleep that,
entering, takes my wings
and shreds my senses
into the crazed stomping
of my daily death, letting go
of everything this day has burdened me with
and sleeping—truly, like the dead—
then waking, laden with more.

*

Paula J. Lambert has published several collections of poetry including The Ghost of Every Feathered Thing (FutureCycle 2022) and How to See the World (Bottom Dog 2020). Awarded PEN America’s L’Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship, Lambert’s poetry and prose has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist.

HOW GORILLA GLUE COULDN’T SAVE MY MARRIAGE by Brett Elizabeth Jenkins

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HOW GORILLA GLUE COULDN’T SAVE MY MARRIAGE

When I got married, my friend
got me a gift certificate to Williams & Sonoma.
I used it to buy a butter dish, a bread knife,
and some fancy cheese I didn’t end up liking.
Two years later, she jumped
off a bridge in Boston into the Mystic River.
A few years later, my husband broke
the handle off the butter dish,
and then he left me, too. He didn’t break
the butter dish on purpose, but I think about it
all the time—the way he used Gorilla Glue
to put the knob back on after I threw
myself on the kitchen floor, crying.
It’s just a butter dish, he said, and he wasn’t wrong,
I guess, but he was. If it’s stupid
to have an emotional attachment
to a butter dish, that’s okay.
But I’ve loved it longer
than my husband could love me,
and I’ll let you decide what that means.

*

Brett Elizabeth Jenkins lives and writes in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Look for her work in The Sun, Beloit Poetry Journal, AGNI, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.

Tenderness by Yuliya Musakovska

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Tenderness

The sun kisses my face. I want so much to save
at least a sip of this height, so blue, for later.
The animal song of reddened leaves,
a swirl of wild grapevines, exploding from roofs.
We seem unperishable as if no one after us
will divide a yellow pear in half as in communion,
will forgive one another while hugging the whole world,
not allowing petals to fall from numb blossoms.
A movement of a green dragonfly’s wings,
a tremble of eyelashes,
a children’s toy, abandoned in the grass,
a flock of honey mushrooms that hatched around stumps.
This emergence is witness to a new day coming.
How long should we pull before realizing—the cord is strong?
Tenderness, a rope that keeps us from falling out of the boat.
You hold so many treasures in your hands, my love.
We have no time for disbelief, and no right to it.

— Translated from Ukrainian by Olena Jennings and the author

Yuliya Musakovska is the award-winning author of five poetry collections in Ukrainian, The God of Freedom (2021), Men, Women and Children (2015), Hunting the Silence (2014), Masks (2011), and Exhaling, Inhaling (2010). Her poems have been translated into over twenty languages. Recent works appeared in AGNI, The Apofenie Magazine, Life and Legends, The Springhouse Journal, and Red Letters. She lives in Lviv, Ukraine.

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection Songs from an Apartment (2017) and the chapbook Memory Project (2018.) Her novel Temporary Shelter was released in 2021 from Cervena Barva Press. Her translation from Ukrainian of Vasyl Makhno’s collection Paper Bridge is forthcoming from Plamen Press. She is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series.

After Googling Your Name I by Julie Weiss

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After Googling Your Name I
                –for Purple Pam

Plod to the kitchen, gather all the ingredients
and build a sandwich you would have extolled,
my knees weakening under the shock of lost
time. I´m famished for fifteen, for my first job,
how the earth never stopped orbiting your smile,
even when customers stained our aprons with complaints.
For one of your hugs, its galactic blaze, I´d slip my finger
under the meat slicer again. I remember how you
numbed my fear, wrapping your voice around my wound,
kindness everflowing like the hip hop lyrics you mixed, breast-
scratching your path from Foster City catering queen
to Bay Area DJ supernova. Every stage you crossed
radiated in your wake, I read. But I´m fifteen again, life
endless as the salads we scoop, chill as the swimming
soiree at our boss´s house, where you pull me in, your laughter
sparking mine. We glide side by side in a universe that never dies.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s Editor´s Choice Award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series, and was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her recent work appears in Sky Island Journal, ONE ART, and Feral, among others, and is forthcoming in Rust + Moth and Trampset. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children.

Two Poems by Miriam Levine

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November

These days when wind wears itself out and sun warms the sidewalk,
bare-throat days, when silver floss bulges from milkweed pods
but does not blow away, and leaves float like scattered thoughts,
when the hinge between fall and winter does not move,
and those nights, too, when long past midnight, windows
are flooded with light, and it seems everyone on this street is awake,
tuned to something we cannot see, something I imagine faith to be.

*

Pigeons at the Condo

Though some say kill them, the words you love
are shadow, twilight, flood. They come with mist
and drift in dreamlike states that free other words,
like lilac, ocean, wing—a conspiracy.
In whispers. Know thyself, the ancients say,

and you obey, hearing words as breath
laurels breathe. When wind releases a leaf
you are released from the insistent
throaty call of pigeons turning and turning
in a balcony dance among excrement.

CDs you string on long strings from the rail
swing, flash, twirl blue and silver violet.
Light as they are, they knock when wind drives them.
Light as they are, they shock and terrify.
Where pigeons once turned there’s only a flash.

*

Miriam Levine is the author of Saving Daylight, her fifth collection of poetry. Another collection, The Dark Opens, was chosen by Mark Doty for the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Other books include: Devotion, a memoir; In Paterson, a novel. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares. Levine, a fellow of the NEA and a grantee of the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, lives in Florida and New Hampshire. For more information about her work, please go to miriamlevine.com.

Anniversary, Again by Laurie Kuntz

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Anniversary, Again

I don’t know a love that does not chip away
at the day to day of what couples us.
Every act of creation, also an act of destruction,
and memory is history’s great reviser.

The years pass, the regrets mount,
but so does the shared light
we both enjoy at sunset.
And, there’s the song of the brown thrasher
hidden in our magnolia tree.

We strain to catch a glimpse before it flies–
this memory implanted on its wingspread
soaring away with a piece of what’s been shared.

Things we mark as love
belong in no engraved setting,
but seen in the dusting of grey hairs off the vanity,
the sweeping of the dead
palmetto bug from under the porch light,
ripe pears in a bowl placed on the table,
all marking the tart juice of our shared years.

The days pass as starlings ignore
the boundaries of the skyway.
We remain together under the weight
of every season, standing some days
on a stark precipice weaving stories
into our own private landscape,
all we let in under the presence
of every necessary ripening thing
like these collected years.

*

Laurie Kuntz is a widely published and award-winning poet. She has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net prize. She has published two poetry collections (The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press, Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press), two chapbooks (Simple Gestures, Texas Review, Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press). Her 5th poetry collection, Talking Me off the Roof, is forthcoming from Kelsay Press in late 2022. Recently retired, she lives in an endless summer state of mind. Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/

Two Poems by Julie Pratt

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And Still They Came

rain and more rain
the wet whisper of
rubber on road
the river rising
and still they came

sea of umbrellas
bobbing below the dome
rain and more rain
washing away years of
their hard-won rights

and still they came
the young woman
with a sign: I’m here
to restore what my
grandmother fought for

stories upon stories
of resilience and grit
the river rising
breaching the bank
and still they came

defying all bounds
as lawmakers plotted
rain and more rain
they swelled onto
the streets of
every town

*

Afterword

There will come a time when
you wake up and don’t curse the sun
for its cheerfulness.
You’ll make the bed again
like the stowed-away man you are.
You won’t admit it, but you’ll
look forward to cleaning out the garage
and building that new workbench.
And maybe the next week, you’ll work on
the story you abandoned because
you’d convinced yourself you weren’t a writer.
Perhaps you’ll find yourself calling
an old buddy, who is happy to hear
you want to golf again after you swore
your arthritis made it too hard to play.
Trust me on this – when the day comes that
you fear you’ve forgotten the sound of my voice
or the scent of my bodywash and you’re
startled by the attraction you feel toward
the woman checking your groceries,
you will pause and smile
because you’ll know in your soul
that mine rests on your happiness.

*
Julie Pratt is a poet, storyteller, photographer, hiker and gardener. Originally from Wisconsin, she has a graduate degree in social work from UW-Madison and worked for many years with nonprofit organizations. Later in life, she earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine. Her first published poem appeared in Persimmon Tree this spring and another is upcoming in Passager this fall. She lives with her partner in Charleston, West Virginia.

Stargazing Where “Stop” Means “Yield” by Kara Dorris

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Stargazing Where “Stop” Means “Yield”

The law is the law, some might say,
a fixed constellation, & yet,
who gazes into the black-out of absolute
& what gazes back? Without witness,
is anything alive? Without witness,
is anyone to blame for rolling through
a four-way stop sign?

By which I mean, who listens
to sagebrush or asphalt, thin yellow lines
beneath our tires, tank top straps
or closed eyelashes, the lies our eyes invent
(all that long-dead light we wish on).
Tell me, my friend, when we interpret
stop as yield, who gets harmed?

Is it like calling shotgun, touching noses
in not it, whoever is first wins?
Yield as a reluctant stop
or a reluctant politeness. Is stop only
conditional if unchallenged?
What of the female body drunk
& passed out?

Do stars yield to daylight, wildflowers
to wind force? Does grass yield to our weight?
Our weight to choice?
Don’t tell me context is only an excuse.
I won’t believe you.

*

Kara Dorris is the author of two poetry collections: Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press. She has also published five chapbooks including Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me] co-written with Gwendolyn Paradice (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, Hayden Ferry Review, RHINO, Tinderbox, Tupelo Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, and Crazyhorse, among others literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Her prose has appeared in Waxwing and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (2016). For more information, please visit karadorris.com.

Two Poems by Sharon Charde

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CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?

I think that a lot of girls and young women have this yearning
that is part desire to have a man and part desire to be him
–Rebecca Solnit

Light comes and goes in the story of us.
Out here in Wyoming, the deer are different

and I don’t know the names of the birds,
but I do know I am happy without you.

This landscape forgives me my sins, too huge
for them to matter though someone has hung

skulls on the cottonwoods, path by the creek
I walk every day. But soon I will return to our

bed and the dog, the Amazon packages, the dead
dahlias. We’ve been assigned to each other,

you said marriage was a one-way ticket
with no transfers, remember? That throng

of fantasies we shared, a plunder. You try
to teach me mortal lessons, I walk ahead

of you, believing I have no need of salvation.
But when I can’t open a jar or figure out why

my car won’t start, I immediately imagine
what life would be like as a widow. Things

seem so singular out here but then I see sheep
flocked, birds charging each other in the wide sky,

think how necessary it is to belong somewhere,
how I belong to you.

*

casualty

enough of blackbirds, bluebirds, sparrows, the pricey seeds
my husband fills feeders with, enough of the squirrels
and mice that eat them instead, enough of falling in love
and out, of what got us here, what will get us elsewhere,
enough of his leg, my back, lost friends, lost minds, enough
of me me me poor me, the dead mother, the never-enough
girl, our country ‘tis of thee, purple mountains and fruited
plains, graphs and shootings, rising seas and men in suits,
stupid hope, confines of the body, murkiness of the soul,
forecasts of snow, detachment and prognosis, the night
between us, the absence of you.

*

Sharon Charde practiced family therapy for twenty-five years as a licensed professional counselor, and has led writing groups for women since 1992. She has won numerous poetry awards, has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, and has been nominate seven times for the Pushcart award. The BBC adapted her work for an hour-long radio broadcast in June 2012, and she has seven published collections of poetry, the latest in September 2021, “The Glass is Already Broken,” from Blue Light Press.

From 1999 to 2016, she volunteered at a residential treatment facility teaching poetry to adjudicated young women, creating a collaborative group with a local private school for eleven of those years, and her memoir about that work, “I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent,” was published by Mango in 2020. Charde has been awarded fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, Ucross Foundation and The Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Lakeville, Connecticut with her husband John.

One Poem by Erica Anderson-Senter

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TO THE RED-BELLIED WOODPECKER IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD

The drumming out my window announces your presence and I swear,
I don’t want that small miracle to become common-place.
I want to think sweetly of your industry:
rhythm of finding food, cadence of life. I want to think
of my own heart, in its wet cavity, beating for the same reasons:
food,life, food,life, food,life—blood all wishy-washy
through my small shell—never even contemplating
what it means to love. Let my heart be a heart; let’s not
tether it to the well-spoken, big grinned man who saunters
in slowly but leaves abruptly. Let my work, my incessant
drumming, my movement, be a tiny revolution.
I, shaking my fist under the moon, praise the heart (my heart),
the drumbeat and lilt of work: living and such.

*

Erica Anderson-Senter lives and writes in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She teaches high school Creative Writing. Her first full length collection, Midwestern Poet’s Incomplete Guide to Symbolism, is available through EastOver Press. Her work has also appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the once CrabFat Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, Off the Coast, and Dialogist among others. Her chapbook, seven days now, was published by The Dandelion Review. Erica hosts free literary events throughout her city to bring poetry to the public. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing through the Writing Seminars at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.

Two Prose Poems by Howie Good

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The Visitation

I heard a massive thump. Alarmed, I went to the sliding glass door and looked out, expecting to see a seagull lying there dead after crashing into the glass. Instead, a juvenile sand shark was flailing on the back deck. I couldn’t have been more astonished if I’d been visited by an angel clothed in light or a neighbor wearing no clothes at all. The shark was just a foot long and battleship gray. As it thrashed about, I called to my wife, “Barbara, quick, bring a bucket!” I half-filled the bucket from the hose. Then Barbara, using a gardening trowel, managed to drop the shark into the bucket. This is the world. Whatever the hour, there’s always a rendezvous going on.

*

Murderers on Holiday

I was born with holes in me. “These things happen,” the doctor told my mom with a resigned smile. I can’t visualize the love of our fellow man that the Bible preaches with the detail that I can baseball on the radio. If there were actually angels, would they fly in a V-formation like geese, you think? Crows can hold a grudge for a year or more against someone who has mistreated them. No one should feel particularly safe. I love cats, but even a cat, when it’s starving, could eat a person.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry collection, THE HORSES WERE BEAUTIFUL, is forthcoming from Grey Book Press.

Blueberry by Tamara Madison

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Blueberry

They say there is no blue food.
Is the blueberry not blue?
It is navy, yes. And navy
is a kind of blue. True, inside
the berry is green
like the churning surf,
green as the newest leaf.
And at its base, a puckered
crown, a navel, a monument
to the fallen flower.
At the crown where a stem
once grew, there’s a firm
and plucky mark, brave scar
proudly won, badge
of independence, of readiness
to face the world alone,
a will to be eaten.

*

Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbook “The Belly Remembers”, and two full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine”, all published by Pearl Editions. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, the Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, the Writer’s Almanac and many other publications. A swimmer, dog lover and native of the southern California desert, she has recently retired from teaching English and French in a Los Angeles high school. Read more about her at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Armadillos Sought for Leprosy Studies by Al Ortolani

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Armadillos Sought for Leprosy Studies

The armadillo crosses rivers by expelling
the oxygen from its lungs, then sinking,
walks below the surface on the riverbed.
If the river is too wide, often the case,

it drowns, and is eventually swept
to the shallows where it bobs in body gas,
bleaches like a Clorox bottle, the buoy
of a jugline. Armadillos are migrants

with few skills beyond eating insects.
They are neither turtle, nor rabbit.
They leap into the air when scared, spread
their short legs, hiss. They can wander

into a campfire’s light and stand confused,
as if transfixed by their pointed noses.
Some are made into handbags, or taxidermic
baskets. At a farm auction, I got into

a bidding war with an old woman over
the only armadillo at the sale. As a teacher,
I used it in my classroom for holding
dry erase markers. Contrary to the chili

cook’s joke, they seldom end up in the pot
although ‘begrudged as Hoover Hogs’ in the 30s.
They are killed by rivers, but mostly by trucks
on state highways. We count their dead

as we drive through Texas. It would become
a game if we weren’t sensitive liberals,
woke to the small brain, the leathery shell,
the leprosy of the folks Jesus knew.

*

Al Ortolani is the Manuscript Editor for Woodley Press in Topeka, Kansas, and has directed a memoir writing project for Vietnam veterans across Kansas in association with the Library of Congress and Humanities Kansas. He is a 2019 recipient of the Rattle Chapbook Series Award. He has been a Kansas Notable Book recipient in 2017 and 2021. His poetry has appeared in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. His poems have appeared in Rattle, The New York Quarter, the Chiron Review, and others.

13 by Jane Zwart

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13

A contractor does not build a tall hotel,
then Jenga from the stack of floors
the layer after twelve. This fact shocks no one.
Yet superstitious travelers blithely rest
their heads in fourteenth-story suites. Little
is more literal than the magical thinker’s mind.
Or more exacting: my great-aunt refused
the extra bun in the baker’s generous dozen.
I have brought back your Iscariot roll, she told
the kid behind the till—and that woman loved
both bread and thrift. Some of the credulous
are like that, though; raised on wrath, they think
that the only luck must be lightning.

*

Jane Zwart’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.

Crayons by Richard Bloom

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Crayons

Maples in the yard, sycamores in the
fields, elms on the way to work.
Yellow and red and orange and brown,
scarlet and blue-green side by side,
like in a box of crayons.
As we climb the Alleghenies,
the car strains to reach the look-out,
where we can see, veiled by hills and trees,
a hundred miles of towns and cities.
At the local diner,
the children connect the dots
and draw their own notion of Autumn.
Mountains full of bare limbs, skeletons.
Some hold on to what they’ve got,
and keep their beauty
a little longer.
We want everything to last
a little longer.
Like a box of crayons.
Broken, they work.

*

Richard Bloom has worked as an advertising creative, a seller of men’s suits, a caregiver, and a public school substitute teacher. He has taught children as young as five how to write poetry. His poems have appeared in various literary magazines, including ONE ART and FEED. Home is New York, where he has been involved for several years assisting in the rehabilitation of injured birds.

Two Poems by Sakina Qazi

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When I Was Nine, I Craved an Orange

Oranges grew sparsely
and far from us. I knew someone
with tired joints and argent hair
who went miles
through dust
for a bag. A mild man, friend
of my father. His voice was soft,
a lake in the wildwood clearing
where horses drink, gentle
wavelets rolling in
a ballet of water.

He overheard me on Wednesday and
on Thursday in the bated daylight
he left a nosegay of bright citrus,
the centerpiece on our dining table.
I feasted on the miracle fruit
for days, shearing the rind
from the flesh, in savagery.
Adam must have clawed at the apple
with the same frantic violence.

He who brought the oranges,
friend of my father,
was always gentle. Too gentle lungs
bent beneath some
fit of force one winter. Like
weeping willows, bowed.
Now, when I bite into
a clementine and the juice
clings to my throat, the
feral bliss is gone.

*

Sleepless

I guard twilight
weakly

Two birds recite
their opera

A congress of deer
gathers

Cloud nectar
thickens in the dark

And like every night
I hold the moon still

But tonight it trembles
in my grasp

*

Sakina Qazi is a senior at the University of Miami. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, Wilder Things Magazine, Morning Fruit Magazine, and Nymphs Literary Journal.

When I’m Gone by W. D. Ehrhart

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When I’m Gone

          “When I’m gone, I hope I live in the low lying fog that
          blankets the tops of the little mountains around here in
          the mornings.”
                         —Arle Bielanko

Or maybe in among the leaves of those
magnificent old trees you love so much.
Wouldn’t that be something? Just a whisper,
but enough to let you know I haven’t
really gone so far away, and I still
love you even now, even forever.

So let me be a whisper in the trees,
a gossamer wisp of fog, a twinkling
star in the heavens of your heart
to guide you through the years ahead
until we’re both where we belong,
arm in arm, out there in the cosmos.

*

W. D. Ehrhart is an ex-Marine sergeant and veteran of the American War in Vietnam. His latest book is Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems, McFarland & Company.

On Your Birthday by Abby E. Murray

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On Your Birthday

When it isn’t a milestone
but some odd number
between multiples of ten,
when it falls on a Tuesday
and you celebrate by eating
yogurt alone at the sink
or cooking for those
who ought to feed you,
when it disguises itself
as any cold, damp day
and arrives like junk mail,
unconcerned with
the hundreds of thousands
of hours you’ve survived
on a temperamental planet
with a temperamental species,
when the anniversary of you
looks nothing like a gift
and brings you only
the absence of wonder,
find the nearest bit of light
in the room. Any scrap
will do, that sliver pressed
beneath the bathroom door,
maybe, or the quarter-sized
warmth in the palm of your hand
when you stand just so
at the kitchen window at noon—
it needn’t be bright or even
visible to seem impossible,
waves of energy through
nothingness, since nothingness
itself is a kind of space reserved
for brilliance. All this tiny shine,
the light you can reach
right now, is for you, from me,
because I say so. Take it.
What better way to accept a gift
than with empty hands?
Doesn’t it seem to blush
deeper when you know it is yours?
On your almost forgotten birthday,
I claim all that glows or flares
right here for you. It’s outrageous,
I know, but who’s to stop me?
Let’s get drunk on rights
no one suspected we’d claim.
Who will tell you a streetlamp’s gleam
on the hood of a neighbor’s Honda
can’t be yours? Nobody. So it is.
Enjoy it, secretly if you want,
and notice you’ve been noticed,
know somebody loves you
the way daylight loves
a windowpane, consistently,
the way a yellow lamp loves
an otherwise darkened room.

*

Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington. After serving as poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, she recently (and temporarily) relocated to Washington DC.

ONE ART’s 2023 Best of the Net nominations

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ONE ART is pleased to announce this year’s Best of the Net nominations!

Eligible poems were published between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022. As a poetry journal, we had the opportunity to nominate six poems.

The nominated poems (in no particular order) are as follows:

Ona Gritz – Dear Advice Columnist
CL Bledsoe – Working from Home
Whitney Hudak – ISLAMORADA
Donna Spruijt-Metz – Sarah Returns to Me as a 100% Organic Cotton Round
Kaitlyn Spees – Bloodmeal
Claire Taylor – Here Lies a Woman

Thank you for these poems!

On Visiting My Psychologist by Jason Gordy Walker

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On Visiting My Psychologist

“I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”
— Emil Cioran

The man inside my head preferred me dead.
I thought I would never write poetry again.

My dishes piled up like regrets in the sink.
I had nowhere to turn for love or help—

all my friends were workaholics or dead.
Instead of calling them, I smoked and wrote

an obituary for myself. What could I say?
The frost blinding my windows never went away—

day after day there was nothing but snow. I tended
to leave my stuffy home, to walk alone while I kidded

myself about such things. Hope felt like a ghost
my years would never know. I’m sorry

how I never called you back, those days you called
and called. I felt fine. My hands, dry and cracked,

flipped pages for hours. The birds packed
the dark green trees. And somehow,

somehow the sun was brighter, almost enthralled.

*

Jason Gordy Walker (he/him/his) has published poems in Broad River Review, Cellpoems, Confrontation, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Measure, One Art, Poetry South, Think, and other journals; his book reviews and interviews have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Newpages, Subtropics, and the Dos Madres Press Blog. A recipient of scholarships from The New York State Summer Writers Institute, Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference, and The West Chester University Poetry Conference, Walker is an MFA student at the University of Florida.

How Lip Balm was Invented by Lauren Zhu

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How Lip Balm was Invented

Shards of plastic splinter
in a broken pile underneath
my nightstand. When,
I ask, did plastic
cleave so fragile? These
shards reel like dust in the
corners of my room.

I march along burning asphalt, bare footed
and a pompous church hat
atop my head. My feet dyed
with black ink and
decomposing things.

Tomorrow, my fingers blush glinting piano keys with sweat.

Tomorrow, I wash my body of scabs and grit until my skin and memory are buffed smooth.

Tomorrow, I tongue sweet ointment that smells of old lavender.

I loosen the knot of hair that weighs
my head back. This is the moment
of silence before the dogs begin
to wail and this house
begins to shake. I will ask

my diary if my skin
is enough. She hands me
a pot of lip balm and
tells me to heal.

*

Lauren Zhu is a rising senior at Shaker High School. She has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and National Council of Teachers of English; her poetry is forthcoming in Eunoia Review. She reads for Polyphony Lit as an Executive Editor.

Two Poems by Merie Kirby

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Notes on geography

We never spoke of weather
in California except in fire season,
hot Santa Ana winds blowing. Or to call
each other outside to see heat lightning
stippling the sky off towards the mountains,
so far away we never heard thunder.
Rain came without fanfare, seasons
marked by subtle shifts in gardens.

Here in North Dakota, we would never
just say that we opened the backdoor to hear
robins singing. We want you to know
it is mid-April, another snowstorm is arriving
just after noon; at 10am it is 29 degrees,
the sun spring-weak but shining, and
after months of only hearing crows,
in the bare-limbed elm nine robins
faced east and sang.

*

What I share with the crocodile

My own toothed mouth
the safest place
for my child. I file
each tooth with data
& statistics, numbers
sharper than diamonds.
I’ve learned
how to speak
with my mouth full.
To offer refuge
is to go about
with my mouth
always open.

*

Merie Kirby grew up in California and now lives in North Dakota. She teaches at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Dog Runs On and The Thumbelina Poems. Her poems have been published in Mom Egg Review, Rogue Agent, Orange Blossom Review, FERAL, Strange Horizons, and other journals. You can find her online at http://www.meriekirby.com.

Learning to Dress Myself by Sierra Golden

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Learning to Dress Myself

Touch the fondue pot, antique lamp,
jean jacket, platform wedge-heeled
sandals, pencil skirt, China teacup—

my fingers develop a light film—
sweat or dirt or whatever it is
that makes our things ours.

I jockey through the crowd. Race,
wait with a blue basket
at the dressing rooms. Breathe.

Check for stains, loose threads, split
seams, holes, tears, elbows or knees
worn bare, lost buttons, fallen hems.

I remember the bus ride. The moment
my head turned to look at Luly Yang’s
window: silk the color of late spring.

Let my body sing. Let my clavicle
jump from a plain v-neck tee. My hair
curl itself into a good French twist.

Oh may I be as crafty as Luly, here
in Goodwill. May I set my body ablaze,
may I buy the royal purple dress:

strapless lace bodice, sweetheart neckline,
décolletage, bow as big as my face,
satin skirt frothy with tulle.

I wear it twice. Once in suede pumps
with leather rosettes, a velvet handbag.
Man I’m supposed to marry but won’t

saying he could only like the dress more
if it were on the floor—and once
when the man I’m forbidden to love

photographs me amongst bunkers and dead
grass, wearing thick-soled brown rubber boots,
my skin goose-pimpled with cold, the wind.

The purple skirt floating up, galloping like a flag.

*

Sierra Golden graduated with an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her debut collection The Slow Art was published by Bear Star Press and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Golden’s poems appear in literary journals such as Prairie Schooner, Permafrost, and Ploughshares.

Three Poems by Kip Knott

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It’s Just Human Nature

          “Death. It’s inevitable. There’s a hole you come out of
          and there’s a hole you’re gonna go in. . . . Being dead
          is a liberating experience.”
                    — from an interview in 2021 with Gary Betzner,
                    who faked his own death in 1977

Who knows what compels a man to jump off the edge
of a bridge in the middle of nowhere Arkansas,
wife and kids in the car, engine running,
churning river currents below whispering,
The water will save you. Come on in.

Drugs? Smuggling? Underworld kingpin? Spy?
The mind loves the unknown, the mysterious,
the impossible equation, the riddle left unsolved;
podcast fodder that draws the casual listener in
with what ifs, whodunits, and new clues.

If the world we live in today has shown us anything,
it has shown that we secretly crave catastrophe
when we watch the evening news, that we pray
for the hurricane to exceed expectations and destroy
everything—someone else’s everything.

After years of conjecture, the truth about the man
on the bridge reveals itself to be nothing
more than a hoax, an escape we secretly hoped
would keep our antihero free from 20-to-life behind bars.
We breathe a sigh of relief and let out an inaudible cheer.

But the real truth is this: we all hide secrets
deep beneath flesh, muscle, and bone; secrets
that eventually become too heavy to carry;
secrets that are just heavy enough to pull us under
roiling river water to a grave of silt and mud

where clouds of catfish wait to pick our bloated bodies clean.

*

Photophobia

                    May 24, 2022

I used to believe in the spirit animals
and gods that I found in constellations
of stars. But when I look at the sky tonight,

I see only bullet holes piercing the dark,
one for every child we’ve lost,
two for all the children we will keep losing

until constellations bleed together
and the night sky becomes something
other than night, something

horribly empty and horribly full.

*

Post-it Notes to a Young Poet

                    based on Post-it Note drawings by Aron Wiesenfeld

1. Post-it Note Drawing #28

Learn to wait. Rain won’t.
The bus isn’t a sure thing.
You are the rain. And the rain is.

2. Post-it Note Drawing #29

Be content to carry the burden
of all the words you plan to write
throughout your life.

3. Post-it Note Drawing #26

Feel free to worship anything.
Prayers are nothing
more than poems waiting to be written.

4. Post-it Note Drawing #25

Never forget: Shadows
have the power to cut
through more than light.

5. Post-it Note Drawing #38

A poem exists in that moment
after you’ve climbed atop the slide
and before you take the plunge.

6. Post-it Note Drawing #20

Learn to accept those moments
when your words become
someone else’s burden to carry.

7. Post-it Note Drawing #37

And learn to accept other moments
when poems slip formless as smoke
from your lips when you speak.

8. Post-it Note Drawing #40

Always remember that smoke carries
some part of you away as it rises up.
Be truthful in everything you say.

9. Post-it Note Drawing #22

If ever you lose the will to write,
burn all these notes and harvest
new words from the ashes.

*

Kip Knott’s debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, was released earlier this year from Alien Buddha Press. His newest book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. He spends most of his spare time traveling throughout Appalachia and the Midwest taking photographs and searching for lost art treasures. You can follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.

Because it is Spring in Appalachia by Bonnie Proudfoot

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Because it is Spring in Appalachia

and the rain has stopped pummeling
the solar panels on my roof,
I begin noticing things,
the rush of green outside hits me
like a fanfare, the sun
sparkles in every droplet,
and then I realize
the applause I thought I heard
was not applause at all,
it was a pair of small birds
pecking away at the inside
of my walls because they decided
that their new nesting place
could be that little hole
in the space between the eaves.
And there it is, the outside world
has come home to roost. And me,
I couldn’t pull the trigger of the 22
on the groundhog in the blueberries,
I try to save the planet,
not just for me, alone, but so I
can share it, but not my house,
I think, yet that is
what is happening now
and here I am,
still hoping to return
to Aaron Copeland in my mind,
but the wide world has other ideas,
like a new station on the dial,
these little syncopated taps,
call on me to act or be acted upon,
and isn’t that what I secretly wanted
from this ragged, unfinished life?

*

Bonnie Proudfoot has had fiction and poetry published in the Gettysburg Review, Kestrel, Quarter After Eight, the New Ohio Review, and many other journals. Her first novel, Goshen Road, published by Ohio University’s Swallow Press (2020) was selected by the Women’s National Book Association for one of its Great Group Reads for 2020. It was Long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway Award for debut fiction, and in 2022 it won the WCONA Book of the Year Award. Her poetry chapbook, Household Gods, is forthcoming on Sheila-Na-Gig this summer. She lives in Athens, Ohio, and in her spare time she creates glass art and plays blues harmonica.

In Tall Grasses by Sally Nacker

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In Tall Grasses

Fuzzy bees
dip into purple henbit,
hover low

by the clover
all day long
in my wild yard,

quietly drinking.
Such gladness
in tall grasses.

*

Sally Nacker was awarded the Edwin Way Teale writer’s residency in 2020 where she enjoyed a week of solitude on 168 acres of nature. Since then she and her husband have moved to a small house in the woods. Publishing credits include The Orchard’s Poetry Journal, Blue Unicorn, One Art, Mezzo Cammin, Quill and Parchment, and The Sunlight Press. She has her MFA in Poetry from Fairfield University. Kindness in Winter is her new collection. Visit her website at www.sallynacker.com.

Procrastination by Susan Cossette

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Procrastination

Next summer I will plant flowers
in a perfect circle around the towering pine–

Carve tiny cradles for each pink impatiens,
pat flat the cool damp mulch.

Next summer I will tame wild ivy
on the hundred-year wall,
coerce it into tidy compliance.

The soaring rhododendrons stand guard,
old wise, twisted roots.
The stories they can tell.

Next summer I will hang a suet feeder
outside the kitchen window and await red cardinals.

It is August, and next summer is a long way off.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.