Month: May 2023

The dreamery by Annie Stenzel

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The dreamery

Such an odd thing to see on Sleep-o-Vision. Wall-to-wall
nuance, bursting at the seams with classic symbols.
Wasn’t there a great horned owl? Definitely a door giving way
into a glade, a path edged with primroses, various colors.

And then, to have the dream twice the same night, barely
altered after a brief awakening. Same owl? Maybe
a different door. But dreams are flimsy—too
delicate to survive the microscope. The light of day

dispels them the way fog on the Bay shifts
from thin to gone once the sun walks in.
Fruitless to wonder why this? why that? where
dreams are concerned. Science has tried for years

to hammer theories into submission. But that reminds me
of what happens when you try to nail water onto water.

*

Annie Stenzel (she/her) was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her full-length collection is The First Home Air After Absence (Big Table Publishing, 2017). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in print and online journals in the U.S. and the U.K., including Atlas and Alice, Chestnut Review, Galway Review, On the Seawall, Rust + Moth, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM, and UCity Review. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.

Paradox by Lauren K. Carlson

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Paradox

Fallen flicker the small hand discovers at dusk.
Limp, not heavy, perhaps unconscious, if not dead.
The sun’s orange alighting the child’s fingers.
Bright fingertips, miniature vivid orbs (think E.T.)
which caress the wild carcass. Two boys, my son
and my son’s best friend, late into summer’s night
they play. It doesn’t get dark at all. The evening, between
them, a fine line pulled tight. And the flicker volleys
between both. Their give and take reanimating the wing’s
distinctive yellow flash, an arc which imitates flight.
But the bird isn’t brought to the lips, the bird’s breath
not blown back. There is only the thrower’s arm
bent like a bow. The receiver running.
What mimics life in the pass.

*

Lauren K. Carlson is the author of the chapbook Animals I Have Killed (Comstock Review’s Chapbook Prize 2018). Her work has recently appeared in Crab Creek Review, Salamander Magazine, Terrain, The Windhover and Waxwing. In 2022 she won the Levis Stipend from Friends of Writers for her manuscript in progress. Her writing has been supported by Tin House, Napa Valley Writers Conference and Sewanee Writers Conference. Lauren currently serves as editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

ancestors by Michael Haeflinger

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ancestors

here I am someplace in this massive shift

do you feel too across history?

you, in the past, are you with me?

——-

in the spirit world things happen
we don’t see

that’s not such a big deal

in Arkansas things happen
we don’t see

——-

spirit world is a term I learned
from a tv show I watched earlier

it doesn’t belong to me or mine

my people lived in mud houses
and died of head colds

if they believed in an afterlife
before the Romans got to them

I can’t name it

——-

my people died of starvation
when the winter or the king
wouldn’t let up

they ate their meat well done

they dug the earth
for potatoes and metals

they lived to be thirty
until they lived to be forty

and so on

it’s magic enough,
this world

be afraid of the woods

haunted
with imagination

——-

and here I am someplace in this massive shift

my world consists of uncompleted missions

bread lines, cars out the parking lot – believe me
when I tell you

beautiful geniuses starve, too

some of my people died
trying to escape

the living ended up here
inside me a thousand generations
of scrappers howling for their gods

living off the fat of the land

waiting for someone to pass the pitcher

waiting for someone to shut the blinds

*

Michael Haeflinger is the author of Low Static Rage (Blue Cactus Press, 2019). He lives in Tacoma, WA where he works for a literary nonprofit that teaches creative writing and printmaking to teens.

Market Day by Karly Randolph Pitman

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Market Day

On market day
my father unfolds himself
inside his plaid coat
and his black ball cap.
Vietnam Veteran, it spells
across the brim
dotted with army pins and buttons.

We walk the stalls. The fruit
vendor offers a slice of
orange and he takes me to the
deli that makes his favorite
sandwich. He’s interrupted in line
by a stranger’s handshake:
“Thank you for your service.”
My father nods and replies,
twice, “Thank you.”

Sometimes a man will bound up
and grasp his elbow, forearm
to forearm. He smiles wide and finds my
father’s eyes – “Welcome home, brother!”

I was born after my father’s war.
It was not his war, either.
Was it anyone’s? Yet he went.
He arrived in country in November.
When he returned the following year
his mother’s hair had turned white.

On the flight home, in his battle fatigues,
the other passengers ask
to be moved to another part of the
plane. Each trip to the market
he gets back on that plane.
Fifty-three years later, the
passengers have returned
to their seats. They see
the uniform and see what he saw,
now buried deep: “Thank you
for your service.”

Another piece of him returns.
His mother’s hair turns grey,
then ash, then brown:
radiant, alive.

*

Karly Randolph Pitman is the founder and steward of Growing Humankindness, a soul sangha of the heart. She’s a mother and mental health advocate, wonderer and writer, teacher and craftswoman who does as much as possible with her hands. She lives in Austin, Texas where she walks among gnarled oak trees and tends her ancestors, those kin of family and community. Through each trip to the underworld, she remains in awe of the human heart.

Two Poems by Rachel Custer

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In Kozy Valley Estates

a trailer capsizes. Two women almost die. Somebody’s mother is convinced a derecho is a conspiracy: I never heard o’ that before. It was a tornado or it wasn’t. The difference between one kind of wind and another kind of wind: belief. Between an almost-dead poor woman and a silence: one can be easily borne. After the wind, you’re alone. Staring for five minutes at a tree. Call a thing an estate and you can pretend it’s livable, can charge an extra hundred bucks for rent. A Bible hangs over a pine tree’s stripped branch. It was a tornado or it wasn’t. They were lovers or they weren’t. Is or isn’t: that’s how the truth goes. Death makes some people care about the truth. Those women were good people, good friends, good workers, they would have given you the shirts off their backs if you asked. Death makes other people lie. Call a real thing love and a lie can’t touch it. Call it love and make of truth an estate.

*

Deanna Reads The Velveteen Rabbit

and cries. Big, gulping cries until she can hardly speak. She’s not a woman to cry at just anything. Deanna wants a love to make her real. On her lap, her children giggle at her tears. They haven’t grown old enough to be made afraid. Once, after love, she found herself threadbare, pretending again to be new. She sees now it wasn’t fair. Her children paw at her like little cats. It’s like the book was put there just for her. Once, when she was small enough to hold, she felt that way about her mother’s lap. She hadn’t grown old enough to be unmade. A soft little rabbit whispering in the night. A wise old rocking horse. Seven children slept in the same bed with her (this was when they still had a bed). Deanna finds herself unstitched by time. Here is what a book can do: untether you. Tether you again to what is real. Her in the doorway, small enough to carry on a hip. Her tattered mother, thumbing a ride away.

*

Rachel Custer the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, One Art, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com.

Two Poems by David James

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LISTEN AND YOU’LL HEAR IT
“Inside many of us/is a small old man/who wants to get out.”
                                                         “Rumpelstiltskin,” Anne Sexton

And inside that small old man
is a smaller old woman who can’t believe
she’s in this mess.
Of all things, to be inside a man
is her biggest pet peeve.

                   But inside the woman, under that blue dress,
is a baby, sucking its thumb,
kicking both legs. The woman
hopes for a girl
but will take, and love, whatever comes.

                                      Inside the baby, blooming like a plant,
is the future, yelling from a distance
that we must change our ways.

                                                                            Inside many of us, that voice
comes through loud and clear only in moments of silence.

*

THE LOUD CRYING

Sounds like five banshees
out there, growling in the rain,
tossing their hair
in the tree branches and spitting
on everything in sight.
Like waves on a rough sea,
the wind rises and pounds,
barrels into the ground.

I’m here alone tonight as my wife
stays with her dying mom up north,
doing the needful. Maybe
the banshees are just passing through
on their way to Caseville to pull
a few strings, cut some ties, break a heart.
I imagine the spirits staring with hollow eyes,
mouths open, wailing away with teeth that bleed.

Whether it’s legend or it’s real,
the winds blow, people die
and in the sad hearts of those left behind,
the world sighs,
bows its head, takes a knee.

*

David James has published seven books, six chapbooks and has had more than thirty one-act plays produced. After forty-five years of working in higher education, James recently retired and is loving it.

After Fourteen Years by Sara Backer

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After Fourteen Years

I confess to my best friend that when he abruptly stops
snoring and lies with his back to me, weirdly quiet, I fear
he might no longer be alive. Not wanting to wake him,
I strain to hear his breath. I raise my head and squint
in the dark to see if his breath is stretching his ribs. Failing that,
I touch his neck, my fingers reassured by his slight motion.
I expect him to reply with a joke. I know if he says yes,
I’m dead, don’t bother me he means he is afraid to voice
the truth dressed up in mawkish clothes for fear we’ll start
to wear them. But sensed truth untold is slippery—apt to flip
flop or go askew—much the same as expectations, because
he says, I do that, too, when you are sick, your body so still—

—and I think but don’t say maybe I die, but I come back for you.

*

Sara Backer’s first book of poetry, Such Luck, follows two chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt, and Bicycle Lotus, which won the Turtle Island Chapbook Award. Her honors include a prize in the Plough Poetry Competition, nine Pushcart nominations, and fellowships from the Norton Island and Djerassi resident artist programs. Recent publications include Lake Effect, Slant, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry Ireland. She currently lives in New Hampshire and reads for The Maine Review.

To Blend, or Not to Blend, That Is the Question by Jeannie E. Roberts

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To Blend, or Not to Blend, That Is the Question

—vignettes from the blended family diaries

Stools

You got the worst one
Your son got the second worst
She saved the chairs
for real family

*

Back Burner

For decades
you warmed on low heat
a slow burn
reduced to char

*

Wallflowers

As if a garden
they gazed at one another
fawned and gushed
In vigilant silence
we stood motionless
stems to the wall
mere weeds

*

The Walk Around

Gatherings—
Weddings
Holidays
Reunions—
meant avoidance
They walked around the oddities
the ones with a different last name

*

The Double Standard

DNA opens hearts
No babies
no acceptance
Sadness sits in the heart
of the one who can’t deliver

*

Cuisinart

a dependable brand of blender
You tried every setting
It got stuck on ICE CRUSH

*

Jeannie E. Roberts has authored eight books, six poetry collections and two illustrated children’s books. Her most recent collection is titled The Ethereal Effect – A Collection of Villanelles (Kelsay Books, 2022). She serves as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs.

One Poem by Cati Porter

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Climbing into the Ambulance at Midnight with My Teen-aged Son,

what strikes me first is the missing shoe, then the hole
in the big toe of the black sock on his foot poking out
from beneath the blanket at the end of the gurney,
the other clad in one checkered Van (can I even
make it plural, Vans, when one is missing?) my mind
zeroing in on the singular detail before I can take
the rest in. Meanwhile, in a parallel scene just feet away,
my teen’s best friend also lies on a gurney, his own
mother hovering. Less than an hour since both boys
were pushed out of the moving car reeking of
Jägermeister, after which she called 911, then me.
It’ll be hours before I notice his glasses are also missing.
Against the glow of the ambulance, his lanky frame,
mouth agape, eyes closed. (Is he asleep? Is he dreaming?)
Slurry of green bile and god-knows-what-else
slicks his shirt. Later in the ER, our sons lie
in twin gurneys while we mothers wait.

*

Cati Porter’s most recent poetry collections are Novel and The Body at a Loss. Her latest collection, small mammals, is forthcoming from Mayapple Press in 2023. Her poems can be found in Rattle, VerseDaily, Terrain, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She is founder and editor of the long-running Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and is executive director of Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit and publisher. She lives with her family in Inland Southern California. Find her on the web at www.catiporter.com

Three Poems by Richard Levine

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Teaching and Learning

I asked a colleague who’d been out,
“Are you feeling better, today?”
“I wasn’t sick. I was in jail,”
he said. “Jail! Why?” I asked. “Police
arrested me for driving at night
with a broken headlight.” “They
can’t do that; can they?” I asked.
He smiled, and patted me on the back.

We were teachers. All but five of us were
black. The principal and staff were
black. Most of the neighborhood was
black. Our students were
black. I was a good teacher, young,
white and with much to learn.

*

The Southern Cross

There are so many ways to die in war.
You can be sniped out of your life, walking
a trail, or trip a string that holds a grenade
waiting for yours or anyone’s last step.
And in that at-any-moment tension,
you learn to breathe while holding your breath.

The night we heard that Martin Luther King
had been shot, I was on perimeter
watch, in Phu Bai, alert to an enemy
we knew surrounded us. The story
said he was outside the Lorraine Motel,
in Memphis. Under Vietnam’s starry
sky and Southern Cross, I wondered.

*

To Forget a War

It’s easy to forget a war
made of paper and screens, a war
you can fold and tuck under an arm
when you’ve arrived at your stop,

the doors closing behind you
as you walk away; a war that won’t
bleed into your coffee or dreams,
or on your colleagues in a meeting,

a war that won’t rival all other
intimacies in your life, so you
have to introduce it to your wife
and your children; a war that will never

have to offer you its left hand to shake,
because its right one is only a sleeve.

*

Richard Levine, a retired NYC teacher, is the author of Now in Contest, Selected Poems, Contiguous States, and five chapbooks. An Advisory Editor of BigCityLit.com, he is the recipient of the 2021 Connecticut Poetry Society Award, and was co-editor of “Invasion of Ukraine 2022: Poems.” A Vietnam veteran, his review “The Spoils of War” appears in the current issue of American Book Review. website: richardlevine107.com.

After a Long Absence, I Return by Constance Brewer

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After a Long Absence, I Return

I pass a flock of red winged blackbirds.
They startle, rise and fall like breath,
arrow away across an open field,
disappear into fine river mist.

Alone in a shrouded world,
hills rise from thinning fog.
After so long away, the road is new.
I trust the GPS, drive to our old house,
an approaching specter in the fog.

Hellhounds erupt out the back door.
My brother follows, an apparition—
heavier, beard tinged gray—deep voice
calling off the dogs, greeting me.

He looks like our father.

The missed time evaporates.
Morning sun hammers at clouds
as my heart rises and rises again,
following the path of blackbirds,
whirling, an exhalation of haze.

*

Constance Brewer’s poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She is the editor for Gyroscope Review poetry magazine, the author of Piccola Poesie: A Nibble of Short Form Poetry, and an upcoming co-authored chapbook, Prayer Gardening (Kelsay Books 2023). Constance is a big fan of Welsh Corgis and whiteline woodcuts. constancebrewer.com

Two Poems by Mark Williams

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Scars

Thanks to successful cataract surgery, I look into my mirror
and see a sickle-shaped scar I haven’t noticed in years.
But there it is, smiling back as if to say,
I haven’t gone anywhere.

Where I go is to my yard on Lombard Street
in Evansville, Indiana, where my six-year-old buddy
Tommy Weatherby and I are tossing my model TWA Jetstream
back and forth across our shared drive. Only this time,
instead of landing in my yard, it flies into my face,
sending me past my collie, Lassie (it’s 1957,
what did you expect?), into my house, crying.

What are the odds that Tommy’s father, Jim Weatherby,
is interning at the ER down the street, where he stitches me up
and sends me on my way? What are the odds that,
after Tommy dies from Childhood Hodgkin’s Lymphoma,
Jim and June divorce, Jim leaves town, and I grow up
and get a job playing bumper pool, Ping-Pong, and Rook
at a psychiatric hospital in Nashville,
I discover Jim Weatherby is the head man?

In the eighteen months I worked there,
Jim always seemed uneasy around me—
in the elevator, the canteen. I don’t recall
him ever mentioning Tommy or June. Sometimes,
he passed me in the hall without speaking. Now I realize
that when Jim saw me, I took him back to Lombard Street
where Tommy and June stood waiting
for him to come home.

*

December

How did it get so late so soon?
It’s night before it’s afternoon.
December is here before it’s June.
My goodness how the time has flown.
How did it get so late so soon?
—Dr. Seuss

I’d been traveling out West with my father.
We’d hiked in Glacier Park, bathed in Iceberg Lake.
In a campsite near Banff, he’d shouted, “Don’t move!”
as he ran to our car for his camera
and a bear charged the rock where I sat.

We’d taken mountain climbing instructions in the Tetons,
where our classmate, Carol Lawrence (as in
West Side Story Carol Lawrence), what with her small feet,
put Dad and me to shame. We’d climbed Hallet Peak
in Rocky Mountain Park, descended on a glacier.
But Dad had a business to run in Indiana
and I had a summer to spend.

That first night, alone in Denver, I watch Joe Buck
and Ratso Rizzo on their way to Miami.
Not exactly what you want to see, a movie
about friendship when you’re alone. Next morning,
I hitchhike south to Colorado Springs. I’m offered
LSD in the Garden of the Gods (“no, thank you”)
and find a campground a few miles west, empty
but for a few men in hard hats getting into trucks.
“Just be out of here in the morning by seven,”
one man tells me, pointing to a nearby rock face.
“We’re blasting a road through here.”

I don’t sleep well.

The next morning, just after seven, I’m walking
down a gravel road that leads to the highway—
on my way to Buena Vista
to apply for a job at a youth camp—
when at my back, an explosion,
and fifty-two years pass by.

*

Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Nimrod, Rattle, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Kelsay Books published his collection, Carrying On, in 2022. His fiction has appeared in Eclectica, The First Line, The Write Launch, and Cleaver. He lives in Evansville, Indiana.

What to Say by Susannah Sheffer

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What to Say

Sometimes there is nowhere to go
but the shelter of our own need

to believe in a way to care for each
other, remembering how we do that

when we need to. That’s what I said
when I had to say something

about how to tell a child that people do
terrible things to other people sometimes.

I said tell her we do know          we do still know
how to care for each other afterward.

Is the sky an example? No, but looking at it is.
I mean one person pointing out the specific beauty

to another, that could be an example, yes. But not
the birch tree or the wren or the mountain range,

not all by themselves. We are talking here about
human hands and what they can do.

Someone will find the right vase for the flowers.
Someone will have started those flowers from seed.

*

Susannah Sheffer is the author of the chapbook This Kind of Knowing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2013) and the full-length collection Break and Enter (Kelsay Books, 2021), and her nonfiction books include Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys (Vanderbilt University Press, 2013). She is a clinical mental health counselor and directs the Texas After Violence Project’s Access to Treatment Initiative, and she lives in Western Massachusetts.

Two Poems by Kip Knott

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Dendrochronology

             after the painting Divorce by Todd Rector

How many growth years can be counted
in the light and dark concentric rings that mark
our life together? Thicker rings prove
that we flourished for a time—mostly early—
while thinner rings show the wear and tear
seasons of drought wrought upon the two of us.
It’s those later years where the wedge slips in,
splitting us all the way down to our roots.

What’s left of us, splintered kindling and logs
already weathered by years of neglect,
will burn hot, but will also burn too briefly,
sending our smoke high into the air entwined
until the wind dissipates us into the atmosphere,
separate parts of one inescapable whole.

*

Early Onset Ghost Town

The ghost town where I have lived my life
is a cage full of air. All the birds flew away
in search of other trees or other skies beyond this sky.
There’s nothing left but weathered ribs and hollowness.

For years I have been a cage full of all the birds that flew away.
But now feathered memories have broken through my chest,
and soon there will be nothing left but weathered ribs and hollowness.
There’s no stopping them. I watch as they take flight one by one,

feathered memories flapping out of my chest
in search of other trees or other skies beyond my sky.
There’s no stopping them. I watch as they take flight one by one,
leaving only the ghost town of my body. I have lived my life.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, teacher, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His third book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is due later this year from Kelsay Books. His debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches (Alien Buddha Press), is available on Amazon. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.

Evening Light by Penelope Moffet

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Evening Light

It has been eighteen months
and still she weeps when she enters
the house of their happiness, ramshackle
low desert home that he owned, hers now.
This could go on for years although
she moves ably from task to task
except when grief stops her.
She does not sleep in his house
but stays at her own high desert home,
haven for fox and deer, white-crowned
sparrows and dark-eyed juncos,
on land as wild as she can keep it.
Only when she paints does sorrow leave her.
Then nothing exists except shapes and colors:
mountains layered in distance, evening
light, a spill of boulders, the cougar
who hunts on nearby hills,
scolded in daylight by ravens
who won’t let him rest.

*

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022), It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). Her poems have been published in many journals, including One, ONE ART, Natural Bridge, Gleam, The Rise Up Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review and Gyroscope.

In Praise of Ordinary Words by Kris Spencer

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In Praise of Ordinary Words

I said spillover, containing ill and pill
and lover, because I wanted
things to flood—
meaning too much.
For dissipate, I said leak.
For moment, I said gesture.

When? she said;
sitting on the wooden floor
in my white shirt. We took
photographs—waiting
a week for the contact sheets
from the shuttered shop.
The man bought the camera from me,
for the magic in the old lens.

She said, I have been like a bird,
and words in a book. We took to
the flow and tumble of the river,
and stayed—living on the flood plain
above mud and gravel. Sometimes
we were things washed up and found,
sometimes things held broken as precious.
The words recover. Words like birdsong,
rising. When I say, complete; she says,
the whole world.

*

Kris Spencer is teacher and writer. Brought up in Bolton, he now lives in London. A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a thread running through his written work is a sense of place. Kris has written seven books. His poems have been published in the UK, Eire, Europe, the US and Australia. His debut collection, Life Drawing (2022), is published by Kelsay Books.

Kris tweets at @KrisSpencerHead

All Vows by Philip Terman

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All Vows

I was not ready to chant the Kol Nidre,
yet nevertheless I was called up
to stand before the open Ark
and find within myself the voice
that was required of me, the voice
hidden in the deep down, below

my errors, my words spoken
in haste, my actions taken
without thought, the hurts I caused.

The fast had begun.
The Ark was open,
the Scriptures revealed,
the worshippers risen
in their white garments,
the cantor nodding it is time,

and, though I was not noble,
or virtuous, and though
my wrongs were a weight
I could barely hold, the way,
at the dawn of my adulthood—

almost another lifetime ago,
my muscles tightened to lift the Torah
and carry it around the shul,
pausing at each row of pews
for the congregants to touch
the scrolls with the fringes
of their tallises then
their tallises to their lips—

something about the circumstances
of my life brought me to face
the sanctuary and the souls
who stood waiting
for me to confess
release from our flaws,
and rejoice, with trembling.

*

Philip Terman’s most recent books are This Crazy Devotion, Our Portion: New and Selected Poems and, as co-translator with the Syrian writer and translator Saleh Razzouk, Tango Beneath a Narrow Ceiling: The Selected poems of Riad Saleh Hussein. Poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry Magazine, The Sun Magazine, 99 Poets for the 99 Percent, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine. He directs The Bridge Literary Arts Center in Franklin, PA, co-directs the Jewish Poets Reading Series, sponsored by the Jewish Community Center at Buffalo, co- directed the writing festival: Poetry Life: Celebrating Heritage in Sarasota, Florida and conducts workshops and writing coaching hither and yon. On occasion, he performs his poetry with the jazz band Catro. https://www.philipterman.com/

Autumn’s Signal by Terrie Joplin

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Autumn’s Signal

Oh yes, I see them—there at the utmost
branch of the maple in the strip between
our yard and our neighbors’—their vibrant
cloak of green just beginning to fade, their
crimson fingernails flicking their tips
against the sky’s cerulean cheek. I see
the reddest leaf. I can’t help watching it
sway, its stem still flexible, color-fed. My
eyes water under the brightness. My throat
closes. I remember when, after twenty-four
years, you said you were unhappy, and tears
sprang from my every pore as if I could
water your love for me, flood our pain, as if
they could absolve my sarcastic slights,
your impatient shoutings, our warped pleasure
in knowing the mortal damage—our tender
shoots dying in darkness. I wrote in journals,
in letters, but the sugars and chlorophyll
of that leaf still flowed red—my anger and
guilt needing to recede, to let the stem harden
over like it does, sealing in the vibrant scarlet.
Then, an amnesty—a bending toward our roots’
pale warmth—our pledge to sheathe our words,
feather our tones, tilt a smile to the other, while
making the week’s grocery list or handing over
the evening cups of Darjeeling. Eight months
of waving in light—of curling around our best
selves in their slow, unwinding gestations—
a set of seasons I’ve watched in this yard,
looking at our full-limbed maple—before
I could paint the words to offer, just like
that topmost crimson leaf to the breeze—

*

Terrie Joplin has taught language and literature in public schools in Washington, Illinois, and North Carolina. She is a member of the Poetry Craft Collective and currently resides in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Phone

“There are two types of reactors,”
my grad-school-psych professor said,
“when hearing the phone, one says
yay who’s calling me! The other says
shit who’s bothering me.” But I say
there are three. The third is me.
I say, Who’s dead?

*

The Wait

I waken to your hand
holding mine,
you, on the floor by the bed,
the morning after I said
we are through.
Your tender vigil coaxed
the buds of love to sprout again
after the dormant season
when I had ceased belief
in anything but grief.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Threnody, from Moon Tide Press. Earlier books include Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. She is a monthly contributing writer to the on-line journal Verse-Virtual. Work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Braided Way, Chiron Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, One Art, and numerous anthologies. Poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and on Lyric Life. She writes and leads private workshops in Southern California, where she makes her home, and during residencies at Write On Door County. Learn more at www.donnahilbert.com

Kraken by Merie Kirby

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Kraken

From the depths, where no
fingers of sunlight stir water,
1925, two great tentacles
found in the belly of a sperm whale.

Barest evidence that tales
might yet be trusted.
Online, a colossal squid,
mantle mottled blood orange,

largest eyes of any animal,
dead in a shallow tank, defrosting.
Wrecker of ships,
maker of whirlpools,

poor monster.

Swiveling hooks of tentacles
battled for survival,
author of raked scars
across backs of whales,

signs of existence
no one read before.
This new female specimen
weighs 770 pounds,
her mantle full of eggs,

she swam the Southern Ocean
water filling her mantle
as air fills a parachute,
tentacles reaching for toothfish,

large eyes watchful.
The scientists are disappointed.
They hoped to find a male. The Kraken,
they say, escapes again.

*

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, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, FERAL, Strange Horizons, and other journals. You can find her online at www.meriekirby.com.

Conspiracy Theory by Charles Hensler

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Conspiracy Theory

Like you I believe in swimming
upstream, even numbers, the colors blue,
orange and gray.

I’m less watchful in the morning. Afternoons
are disappearing chalk. I know you agree.

If you show me a box of crows
I’ll become the shadow of a wing, or shout

like a stone. Already I’m a bag of peeled
sticks, a can of last year’s special oil.

Tell me again the story of the boy
left in the well, a house on fire, the stars
gone missing—I need a thing to grip

in the wet grass, I need strangers in the trees
(you’ll know the right ones by their titanium rings).

When the ground rises, when the current
turns around, we’ll float upriver like children
in a child’s dream:

the stars bright silver coins falling
on black water:

the stars becoming our own.

*

Charles Hensler lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Shore, West Trade Review, Pidgeonholes, Parentheses, River Heron Review, ballast, boats against the current and others.

Two Poems by Erin Murphy

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Ghazal for Irvo Otieno

               For Irvo Otieno who graduated from my high school in
               Richmond, Va. Seven sheriff’s deputies and three hospital
               workers were charged with second-degree murder in his
               death which occurred during intake at a state mental health
               facility in March 2023.

You and I walked the same halls of a school
named for Douglas Southall Freeman,

famed editor and Pulitzer winner
who chanted “integration never” as a mantra.

Our mascot back then was the Rebel,
a cartoonish blue & gray Confederate man.

And to this day in social media threads,
his replacement—“Maverick”—is mentioned

with scorn by those who miss rooms
filled with likeminded white men.

You were an honor student, musician,
and varsity football defensive lineman.

But naked, shackled, and cuffed, you were
no match for so many armed men.

A scrum of uniforms tackled you
like a rabid animal, not a man.

Irvo Otieno, Irvo Otieno, Irvo Otieno.
Brother, son, fellow alum, fellow human.

Soon your name, like the others, will grow
dim. Which city, which murdered Black man?

Which one had a bag of candy, a cigarette, a toy
gun in his hand? Which one tried to manifest

a long-gone mother? Which one couldn’t
breathe? Which one was not yet even a man?

*

Dear Rita

               In July 1971, Rita Curran, 24, was found strangled in her
               apartment in Burlington, Vt. More than fifty years later,
               authorities used DNA from a cigarette butt to identify her killer:
               her upstairs neighbor.

You were born the same year as my mother
and like my mother became a schoolteacher,

the language from today’s news frozen in the 70s
like you. One of three careers open to girls—

yes, girls—back then: teacher, secretary, nurse.
Or, for the lucky ones, stewardess with its fantasy of soaring

far from the New England factory town where summers
were spent screwing caps onto toothpaste tubes

for a fraction of minimum wage. Your killer
was cooling off after a fight with his wife

and likely took his rage out on you. Maybe your red hair
reminded him of her. Or maybe any woman would do,

any body he could break. And then what, a smoke
in your room before trudging upstairs to crawl

in bed beside his alibi? He died decades ago, taking
these answers to his grave. In the photo, you wear

a black choker. Choker: a necklace or ornamental band
of fabric that fits closely around the neck. Choker:

one who chokes. If you had lived, you’d be retired
like my mother who texts me pictures of hummingbirds

at her feeder. Always the teacher, she explains
that the male’s ruby throat—gorget—is named

for a knight’s breastplate. The pale wings of females
blur against the gray sky as if they’ve been erased.

*

Author’s Note: In “Ghazal for Irvo Otieno,” I take liberties with the ghazal form; I like the idea of breaking free of the form the way I wish Otieno had been able to break free.

*

Erin Murphy’s latest book of poems, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Southern Poetry Review, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Waxwing, Guesthouse, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her awards include The Normal School Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award. She is editor of three anthologies from the University of Nebraska Press and SUNY Press and serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review. She is Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Website: http://www.erin-murphy.com

At Kohl’s Jewelry Counter by Eileen Pettycrew

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At Kohl’s Jewelry Counter

I want to put them on myself
my mother said of the clip-ons
she beheld like a glittering prophecy,
while I held her purse thick with Kleenex
and the aches and pains of the old.
But she struggled to slide the earrings
onto her lobes and close the clips,
letting them hang halfway, barely,
like spent seed pods,
and the small oh that escaped her mouth
each time one slipped off
was like the faint coo of a distant dove,
as if she had flown toward a horizon
beyond the foothills, and I was alone
on a dirt road listening
for her call. She taught me
how to feel sorry for people,
call them poor things,
like the stocky girl in my class who wore
a miniskirt and knee-high boots,
her thighs like bread dough.
Earrings of loss
falling to the floor, and me,
my mother’s only witness,
the familiar bag of pity ballooning
in my chest, crowding out
anything else I might have felt.

*

Eileen Pettycrew’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, CALYX Journal, Cave Wall, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. In 2022 she was one of two runners-up for the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry and a finalist for the New Letters Award for Poetry. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Eileen lives in Portland, Oregon.

Two Poems by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson

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What I Love About Mondays in the Spring

I love how there is birdsong, urgent and lovely,
as we walk before sunrise, one dog
beside each of us.
I love how the light spreads behind the neighbor’s red pines,
creating incandescent tree silhouettes.
I love how bustle fills our kitchen like an embrace:
dishes clink, cereal rustles, coffee gurgles to its finish.
I love how butter pools into little golden oases
on my dry toast, how you brush your lips on my cheek
when my mouth is full.
And I love how, when you leave,
the silence afterwards is soft, not final.

*

Mothers Understand Each Other

She wakes, adrift between sad and nostalgic,
happy and anxious.
She thinks of the new wedding dress
her daughter will wear in six months
when all traces of little girl will be scrubbed away.

Outside, her husband and dog
stare at a fox in the driveway.
He whispers through the open bedroom window.

Come here! You need to see this.

She peeks out the window, surfaced from sleep
enough to reach for her camera,
goes outside barefoot in pajamas.

The fox watches them all,
sits tall next to the garden,
bushy tail splayed behind,
swollen teats distinct.
A mama fox.

She leans forward, wishes she could speak fox,
one mother to another.

Your babies will be gone too soon.

She adjusts her camera for low morning light.

They’ll have babies of their own,
mates not of your choosing.
You’ll become irrelevant.

The fox blinks, yawns, stretches out in the grass,
mindful of the two humans, the dog,
the hungry kits hidden nearby.

She takes a few more photos,
tiptoes back inside. Her husband and dog follow.
She glances back, but the fox is gone,
a wild mother who knows exactly when to take her leave.

*

Kathleen Cassen Mickelson (she/her) co-founded the quarterly poetry journal Gyroscope Review and acted as co-editor until 2020. She is the author of How We Learned to Shut Our Own Mouths (Gyroscope Press), and her work has appeared in journals in the US, UK, and Canada. Prayer Gardening, a poetry collection co-authored with Constance Brewer, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books at the end of 2023.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Susan Cossette

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Wide Sargasso Sea
August 2000, Darien CT

I do not remember my son’s third birthday.

But the photographs stuffed in my mahogany night table
show a too-thin frantic girl with untamed curls
serving drinks and cake to family,
my mother and father in ecstasy.

I was a mother. I was married.
Oh, how I wanted to please them,
their supplicant, their sacrifice.

Look at the crazy girl,
her father’s daughter.
Crazy like her aunt,
crazy like her grandfather,
beat into tacit submission.

She is safe, for now.

Later, my child clutched two tiny wooden trains,
chubby hands, face smeared with sticky cake icing
regarding sailboats in the harbor
and white clapboard mansions by the sea.

My small house was supposed to be
a sanctuary, but the ocean closed in on me–
marooned among twisted seaweed
and ragged grey oyster shells.

Everything was either brightness, or dark.

Floating face up, palms up to the blood moon
illuminating the grey harbor.

Look at the crazy girl,
her father’s daughter.
Crazy like her aunt,
crazy like her grandfather.

Then came the flames,
then my streaming hair,
tangled and strangled.

The girl caught in a gilt frame,
crooked pirate smile.

*

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.

Three Poems by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Redeemer
Rio de Janeiro, 1964

From atop the hutch in our rented apartment near Ipanema Beach
a congregation of saints and Jesus figurines attended me.

My father gathered these statues here and there,
who knows why, he an atheist and Jew.

Outside that enormous statue stood above the city,
a lightning rod upon the hunchback hill,
a view of Sugarloaf and the placid bay in his purview.

His wing-like soapstone arms encompassed everything:
the favelas, me at five years old eating fondue
in a honey-lit restaurant like a pharaoh.

We skirted beggars on our way back home,
rats the size of the cat who waited, snug and warm,
never wanting, basking in the shine
of Jesus and his obsidian eyes.

*

I Play Words With Friends Before Bed

Then I dream of words:
consonants before vowels:
qi, jo, xu, zed. And I build:
dojo, exude, dozed.

And still we play on,
completing each other’s thoughts,
making space or crowding in a corner of the board
until someone makes a sacrifice to open up the game

so we can go on shuffling our tiles,
fitting words to words,
no longer keeping score.

*

Death and Pedicures*

Once I feared fungi,
hang nails, cuticle clippers,
an overly enthusiastic callous removal;

now it’s breath,
despite the privilege of status,
the ability to look away

at the static on my phone
while someone kneels, pretends
devotion to the anointment of my feet.

I wince
at my newly sensitive heel.
My foot after all

this time
too tender for the touch of a stranger.
No matter how well-intentioned,
how in need of the work.

*written after listening to an interview with Ocean Vuong

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, a photographer, and publishes an occasional anthology through Kingly Street Press. She is an assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Poetry publications include Rise Up Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Sky Island, and Minyan. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Betsy’s photos have been featured in RATTLE’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Spank the Carp, Praxis, and Redheaded Stepchild. She is the author of Alinea and co-author of In the Muddle of the Night with Alan Walowitz.

A Short Game of Catch, Then Back to Bed by Bryce Johle

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A Short Game of Catch, Then Back to Bed

We played catch once
with the baseball mitt I got
when Mom and I were movie extras
in our little Pennsylvania town.
You taught me how to throw

straight up sky high, keeping
my eye on the ball, and catch
my own pitch. That way, even if
you aren’t here because your back
and mind ache and it’s just me,

beside my forgettable forty-eight
frames of fame, I can still practice.

*

Bryce Johle is from Williamsport, PA and earned a B.A. from Kutztown University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Parentheses Journal, Litbreak Magazine, Eunoia Review, Literary Yard, October Hill Magazine, and Maudlin House, among others. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife and stepdaughter.

Four Poems by Luke Johnson

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Memory

of my mother
with a sponge

and a bucket
of a bleach.

How she’d
weep

while scrubbing
words

from white tile
my mute

sister scrawled
in crayon

and ask
for a melody,

the pitch
of a bird,

to rise
from my lips

and lead
her out,

into the
radiant snow.

*

Memory

of my sister
losing

words
like miniature

combs
and my

mother
behind

her
picking up

pieces.
But never

the right
color

right comb,
always

the wrong
word:

happy instead
of help

wither
instead

of water,
the not

of her
tongue

turned
to know.

*

Memory

of my ear against
the ground
& my mother
above me
begging for answers.
How the nest
began
with a crack
in the concrete
then moved
up the walls,
like fears
in the form
of a question.

*

Memory

of the ghostly
croon of Emmylou

while my mom
clipped mint

and pruned bovine
and collected

peas so sweet
I thought

of the fair
and cold coke

and cotton candy
shared between

my sister’s
hands and mine,

while we circled
sky in summer

and saw nothing
but blue

nothing but birds,
weaving

their blurred
calligraphy.

*

Luke Johnson’s poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Frontier, Cortland Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press, The Vassar Miller Award and is forthcoming fall 2023 from Texas Review Press. You can find more of his poetry at lukethepoet.com or connect at Twitter at @Lukesrant.

A THOUSAND PAPER CUTS by Mon Malanovich-Gallagher

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

A THOUSAND PAPER CUTS

dearest
you fear the purple bird of my desire
will fly the nest one day
untamed
untempted
by your love

little do you know that it lies here
beaten
glorious wings crushed
feathers plucked
no cage needed
just indifference

*

Mon Malanovich-Gallagher (they/them) is queer, non-binary immigrant based in London, UK. Their poems appeared in Queer Writing for the Brave New World, Beyond Queer Words, Aurora, Inklette, Beyond Words, Powders Press, Wild Roof Journal, Viewless Wings and numerous other publications in print and online.

Tapestry by Bracha K. Sharp

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

TAPESTRY

When I say “hidden,”
I mean the way that the body
Hides, until ready to break free,
The way that I hold these petals against
My face, kept anchored, only
By their scent.

When I say “held,” I mean
That even the contours of the
Canopy above me hold my
Brain and cradle my spine,
That too quickly to bloom and

The stem will break, that too
Little soil and I am afraid of what
Will not expose itself, will be kept
dormant and closed.

I have forgotten,
Misplaced the key to the door
Behind me, I have held the jar of
Blooms close to my face to protect
What I don’t yet know will emerge,
I am ready, here, to extend to

Your reach.

But when I say “brain” and “holding”
I speak of the flowers in
My skirts,
embroidered in stasis,
And the columns that surround us;
because geometricity has taken my hand and held me
There.

And when I say “emerge” I speak
Of the unlocking and I invite the
Brain to undo, unkink, the way that
Even the seeds revivify, the way
That my skirts now reach out
To you to punch through columnar constructs, the

Way that my face emerges
From moon-shadow and glances
At flowered columns, wrapping vines—

The way that my eyes see yours and my brain blooms into green,
As it opens, magnified, the way that
The body
Breaks free, and unites with the
Brain, the steps that are taken

To open the stone door.

*Note: An ekphrastic poem after Ms. Danelle Rivas’s painting, “El Camino De Esmeralda”

*

Bracha K. Sharp was published in American Poetry Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, Sky Island Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry (where she was a nominee for ONE ART’s nominations for Orison Book’s Best Spiritual Literature [formerly The Orison Anthology]), and Wild Roof Journal, among others. Her poetry is forthcoming in The Closed Eye Open, Rogue Agent Journal, and Thimble Literary Magazine. She placed first in the national Hackney Literary Awards; the poem subsequently appeared in the Birmingham Arts Journal and she was a finalist in the New Millennium Writings Poetry Awards. She received a 2019 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards Silver Medal for her debut picture book. As her writing notebooks seem to end up finding their way into different rooms, she is always finding both old pieces to revisit and new inspirations to work with. She is a current reader for the Baltimore Review. You can find out more about her writing by visiting: www.brachaksharp.com

The Depression by Miriam Manglani

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The Depression

When I visited your grave this year,
fifteen years after your death,
I noticed the ground had sunk,
the length of the depression
about the length of your coffin.

Your burial had entered
an advanced state of decomposition.

Your coffin had disintegrated.

Below me, only dirt surrounded your bones.
The air your body had in its former wooden home—gone.

I stood in the depression.
My footing wobbly.
My roots—decayed.

*

Miriam Manglani lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and three children. She works full-time as a Technical Training Manager. Her poems have been published in various magazines and journals, including Sparks of Calliope, Red Eft Review, One Art, Glacial Hills Review, and Paterson Literary Review. Her poetry chapbook, Ordinary Wonders, was published by Prolific Press.

Three Poems by Bruce Morton

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The Things We Carried

Sure, we wore the instruments of war:
The rifle, the bayonet, the pack, canteen,
And trenching tool. But these could be shed
For respite or based on assignment. But
What was always a burden, always wearing,
Was memory of home, the meals, aromas,
The holidays, the hugs, the warmth that did not
Make you sweat bullets, the worry about what
Jodie was doing with your girl back on the block.
Then there was the sense of self daily eroded,
Challenged and threatened, and always the fear,
The fear of loss of control, of loss of identity,
Of the unknown and the olive-drab known.
It was all this that we bore as we carried on.

*

Dog Tags

First things first. The dog tags.
A poor man’s poor excuse
For fashion, a kick in the teeth
As far as aesthetics go. But better
By far than a leash or collar,
Which in their own way they were.
Certainly much better than a tattoo.
Their cheap jingle-jangle dead give-
Away when stealth is essential. So
We wrapped them with rubber or tape
To conceal our presence, if not
Identity. Name and serial number,
Lest I forget. Blood type: Red, A-plus.
Faith: None. All there is to know.

*

M-16

It was a weapon
Not a gun, he said.
I did not see the difference—
Weapon gun, gun weapon.
Either way somebody was dead.
But it seemed an important
Distinction to the drill sergeant
As he instructed us to strip
The weapon while naming parts.
Caress them with light oil, slowly,
Eyes closed, carefully inserting
Rod and cleaning patch into
The barrel moving it back and forth.
Learn to love your weapon, he said.
You will sleep with it. Treat it right
It would love you, save your life.
Make you a killer. Fucking gun.

*

Bruce Morton divides his time between Montana and Arizona. His poems have appeared in many magazines. He was formerly dean at the Montana State University library.

Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

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Dr. Tonkin’s Model of Grief

After I finish the five stages with Kubler-Ross
I try Tonkin’s model, depicted in graphic terms
as a gray circle gradually taking less
space in an expanding sphere.

I picture my grief inside a glass jar.
It stays the same size, while the jar
grows, becoming a vessel
larger than my loss.

A nicer image, I think,
than climbing steps
in a stadium until my grief is only
a tiny figure on the floor below.

I will always live in the house
where you took your last breath.

But since then, I’ve added rooms.
One has a picture window. Another
a cozy fireplace. A third where I
entertain friends you’ve never met.

And when I talk about you
in this bigger house, I know
I haven’t left you behind,
just given us both more space
to comfortably exist.

*

Idioms to Manage Worry

If I try to “let it go,” as is often advised,
I think of a leaf floating down a brook
or a dragonfly buzzing away—
something that leaves my sight,
never to return.

Not every grief can disappear.

Not every worry is light enough
to drift away.

But I can envision “letting it drop.”

Like a rucksack filled for a two-day hike,
slipped off my shoulders for the night.

Or a pocketful of stones
collected on a cloudy day at the beach
and emptied into the garden
where they will smother the weeds
for a week or two.

*

Jacqueline Jules (she/her) is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications including One Art, Amethyst Review, The Sunlight Press, and Gyroscope Review. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com

Three Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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What She Wanted

She chides her father’s ghost
for his failure
to outlive her mother.
For going along
with her mother’s decision
that what the furnace refused to take of him
would be carried out in a boat
and scattered in the bay under the Golden Gate.
She’d wanted to have a metal vessel filled
with what remained of her father
to empty into the waters near her home.
She knows that to let go of these grievances
would be to lose him. (I only
wanted, she tells him, to hold onto you,
only wished you’d let
me be the one to know you.)

*

Ostinato

Let me go, my father says.
And when his doctor pulls the tubes
he’s a fish flailing on a riverbank.
How strange it is to stand
so close to this.
When wrenched from its world
does a fish know sorrow?
That summer at the lake
I reeled in a bluegill,
a single fin pinned by the hook.
I couldn’t bear the beauty,
the staring eye. Its belly cool
against my palm I lifted
out the barb, felt the heart’s alarm.
Then I watched the disturbance
on the water’s surface
disappear. Absence holds the music
of a lake lapping at the shore—
a low note that goes on and on.

*

Fear

Older now, what she fears
is the gate swinging open
in a distant field grown nearer.
It’s not her own footsteps
across the stones and windblown grass
that fill her with dread, but those
of the man who positions
his chair next to hers on the porch
to look at the moon.
She can’t say what frightens her more—
the thought of seeing him approach
the weathered boards,
or the vision of herself alone
under an uncertain sky.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

Three Poems by Dick Westheimer

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

The Word for Darkness is Light

I went out tonight
under the lantern hung stars

took a bucket to collect
the light poured

from their quantum hearts
and drank until

I was tipsy, bewitched
by their hymns,

greedy for more,
of their secrets

which I promised
to keep.

But how can I
not tell

all who will listen
the news:

From here I can see
the dark between

the stars
and it contains

more stars.

*

The Companionship of Stars

These are the first
clear skies in ninety days.

The stars are impatient
children tugging

at my sleeve.
I tell them

they each
are my favorite

but I must choose
one to let into

the close home
of my scope.

The longer
I stay out

among them,
on the frost

breath of this
late winter night,

the brighter
each seems to shine.

They must know
about waiting well—

each hung like
an old lantern

in the shed waiting
to be lit by me

looking at it.

*

The Universe and I are Made from Shattered Space and Time

They say that space-time has
more than once, fractured

like a pane of glass,
like a block of ice run through

with cracks, like a wave
come undone on the shore,

and that at each epoch, the universe
has reformed from what remains.

And so the same for me, that I know
of my dying just by tracing my finger

along the seams of my space-time life,
like the line from my first kiss to the last,

from my firstborn child and my last grand,
all the moments I’ve cried so hard that

I shake the world like a temblor,
the hours I lay on my side, you and I

fitting like two spoons, me
saying as I have ten thousand times,

I like lying with you, and of course,
the nights like now that we’re apart.

Each is a small dying, a gift
of being alive, and here’s

the epiphany:
the end will come

when all my fault lines merge
back at their epicenter, when this

grim and shimmering world
is shattered and

out of its fragments,
the next one is formed.

*

Dick Westheimer has—with his wife and writing companion Debbie—lived in rural southwest Ohio for over 40 years. He is a Rattle poetry prize finalist. His most recent poems have appeared or are upcoming in Whale Road Review, Minyan, Gyroscope Review, The Patterson Review, Rattle, The Banyan Review, Ritual Well, and Cutthroat. His recent chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by Sheila Na Gig Books.

Two Poems by Lilly Perry

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Prayer at Central Park

reading the wikipedia page for a blonde folk singer
on my phone and the dry grass is poking me.
I want more than this but not by much,
the sky is regular-degular blue and I’m addicted to looking
things up.
I’m missing someone in a good way,
we’re kissing in my dreams again.
I was opening a can of seltzer
when a mosquito landed on my arm
and all it took was a little puff of air from my lips to send it away,
sweet world, is this gentle enough?
I forgot my headphones and my sweatshirt and even my keys
I forgot mercy can come back to bite me, please god
let me be soft & dumb always/ bringing my mouth close
to the fragile thing, assuming the best.

*

little red watering can as: flower-gardener relationship theory

first I was empty
then I was full
then I was empty again
then I was full again

you live and I react to you living.
you’re fond of saying how much you’ve grown
since you met me.
call me little vessel,
I am heavy with your need.
I feed you with an open mouth,

call you big baby.
you love my long neck
and asking me to bring you back from the dead.
I thought I lived in a century
where partnership was about love and not utility
but my friends keep asking,
what am I getting out of this?

anyway
don’t you have somewhere more wild to be?
hasn’t anyone told you about rain?

*

Lilly Perry is a New York-based poet and educator. Her written work is published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Bluff and Vine, Foundlings Press and elsewhere; her spoken word has been performed on stages across the globe. Find her work at Lilperry.com.

Reading a Memoir Takes Me Back by Joan Mazza

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Reading a Memoir Takes Me Back

I knew before buying—
this memoir was authored
by the elder daughter of my
high school best friend, my maid-
of-honor, a mother who disappeared
from her daughters’ lives
to follow Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
How heartbreaking to read
of what it felt to be a child
shuttled to live with
a single father, a man
I remember, also unprepared
for parenting, but who stepped
up to do his best. How did
my friend fall for that carrot
of enlightenment? How
was she bamboozled
into believing going to India¬
and leaving her children
was a good idea?

It was the 1970s,
era of false promises
in tie-dye and disco dancing,
gurus and expanding freedoms
like a widening tornado
lifting us up into
what?
I flew only as far as Florida
to be psychoanalyzed
and made whole, not
re-broken. I didn’t know
it was a cult. Neither of us
landed safely until decades
later. I write to the author,
send her photos of her
tall and beautiful mother
in high school.

*

Joan Mazza worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self. Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Prairie Schooner, Slant, Poet Lore, One Art, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia and writes every day.

Three Prose Poems by Howie Good

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The Origins of Classic Nursery Rhymes

I didn’t grow up surrounded by art and culture. There were newspapers scattered around the house but few books on the shelves or paintings on the walls. One day I sat drawing in my room – I must have been 12 or 13 years old, just starting to figure shit out – when my mom stuck her head in. She watched me for a moment, then she said, “Why are you wasting paper?” I have had kind of a bad feeling ever since, like the farmer’s wife is still back there in the kitchen torturing three blind helpless mice with a knife.

*

Deadland

Once or twice the angel of death has thrust his face perilously close to mine. I can still smell his lurid breath, in fact, when the wind blows across green scummy water. Although it seems longer ago, it was only last year that he climbed into bed and cuddled with you. The survivors cope as best they can. One walks all around the car and checks under it for signs of tampering before getting in. And so I ask him, Whatever happened to the right to be lazy? The tattered white clouds scattered above might be fistfuls of hair a furiously grieving God has torn from his beard.

*

Old Couple

The young people watch us with a look of pain in their eyes, maybe sometimes a look of pity. They watch uneasily as we take up residence in the lost jungle ruins of disposable culture. I share their skepticism of the long-term significance of greased-back hair and a shiny gold suit. Extinction beckons. The next life cycle is likely to be crucial. And then what? If love is an evolutionary dead end, it’s still your favorite dinosaur, the spiky, armor-plated one with the murderous clublike tail.

*

Howie Good’s newest poetry collection is Heart-Shape Hole (Laughing Ronin Press), which also includes examples of his handmade collages.

Two Poems by Ashwini Gangal

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Vegetarian Breakfast

When the four-legged beauty lactates,
does the man who touches her teats have her consent?
When the feathered lady ovulates,
does she know she does it for the factory?
Easy there, ninja. We are superior
to our pig slaying neighbours, aren’t we?

*

Tourists

Come winter and they travel to our lands to see our lovely locales, learn about our monuments, bargain in our bazaars, soak our warm climes, taste our spiced food, speak to strangers in our exotic languages…

Come summer and we go to theirs, to live the very lives they escaped for a few days.

*

Ashwini Gangal is a psychologist by training, journalist by profession, fiction writer at heart, and has the soul of a poet. Ashwini worked at a business daily in Mumbai, India, as managing editor for over a decade. Now, with her stint as journalist behind her, she is chasing greener pastures in the world of words, rhymes, stories, poetry and make believe.

She recently moved to Sunnyvale, California, so she’s currently an early-stage migrant and a high functioning neurotic.

The 2020 pandemic turned Ashwini into a passionate reader of medical anthropology and plague-themed literature. Her deep interest in the way microbes, pathogens, bacteria and germs shape human lives and history has bled into her fiction and poetry.

An insatiable reader, Ashwini is passionate about mental health and all animals except humans.

One Poem by Marda Messick

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His Bees Fly to the Front Line
Soon it May Come to Him
The New York Times, 9/8/22

The beekeeper will not leave
his home or his children, the bees.

For him they fly into the firestorm
to the frontline fields, shock
of shells near-missing their wings,
fly to sunflowers trembling yellow
in bombarded earth, concussive air.

They return in the evening,
pollen-heavy, to the blue hives.

The bees are angry, quick to sting;
the booming infuriates them,
he must calm them with smoke.

The beekeeper spins the comb,
filters gun dust from amber;
artillery honey pours thick as pain,
slow as another year of danger.

Fierce honey on the tongue
tastes of home, the yellow fields,
sweet like the hum
of all he loves and keeps,
refuses to leave.

But also bitter. A tang of fury.
The outrage of bees.

*

Marda Messick is a poet and theologian living in Tallahassee, FL. Her work has appeared in Delmarva Review, Speckled Trout Review, The Christian Century, Literary Mama and other print and electronic publications.

dinner by Catherine Grossman

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dinner

it seems impossible now
I knew my lines so well

not actual lines mine
was not a speaking part

I’d walk down the hall
toward the dining room

its eight place settings
I’d approach the door

meet my father’s eyes
who’d raise a finger

circle it in the air and I’d turn
180 degrees walk back out

to comb my unruly hair

*

Catherine Grossman’s work can be found in Lilith, Tipton Review, Flying Island, Apricity, Claw and Blossom, Lit Pub and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Golden Key Graduate Award and studied poetry at Warren Wilson College. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Two Poems by Jane Edna Mohler

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Dad Had Levels

Some say death is the great equalizer.
Sam Colt claimed it was his forty-five
caliber Peacemaker. Dad had tools.

Dirt crumb by dirt crumb, he labored,
his heavy oak level grading a perfect
slant beside our home.

Even then its wood was serious,
dark as barn plank.
Dad liked to make things line up.

Now his Sears Torpedo Level gleams,
its small bubble still directing
perfection from inside an amber tube.

I keep his cement trowel too, blackened
steel, the worn handle smoked with time.
Dad wanted everything smooth.

These tools rest beside red pens and my pica
rule from a typesetting job, where daily
I made nearly invisible adjustments to type.

*

Forbidden Colors

The pool luxury
of cerulean
skies, buttercup
full-belly gold

both light dispersed, segregated
by wavelengths.

We used to file colors
in separate
folders, as if one gender
owned them.

And so much talk
of color
fractures like ice
when we speak
of skin.

Physicists define forbidden
as a state that won’t
conform.

They labor,
that we might perceive
red-green
or blue-yellow.

Those forbidden colors exist,
but their differences
align
in perfect opposition.

They leave a void
for want of our better vision.

*

Jane Edna Mohler is the 2020 Bucks County Poet Laureate. She was the 2016 winner of Main Street Voices. Recent publications include Gargoyle, River Heron Review, and Quartet. Her book, Broken Umbrellas, (Kelsay) is available on Amazon or from the author. She is the Poetry Editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of April 2023 ~

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

  1. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer – Ambition
  2. Donna Hilbert – Bad Weather
  3. Jim Daniels – Five Poems
  4. Linda Laderman – Burnt Toast
  5. Robbi Nester – The Inheritance
  6. Betsy Mars – Leveling
  7. Bella Barbera – Five More Minutes For One More Lifetime 
  8. Paula J. Lambert – Spring
  9. Carol Parris Krauss – Pretty Bottles All in a Row
  10. John Amen – The 80s

Ritual for the New Ancestors by Heather Swan

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Ritual for the New Ancestors

As the moon wanes, watch
         for the raft of coots

floating on the water
         too frigid to swim in,

small bodies clustered
         close together the way

we humans might gather
         in our grief when

it is possible to gather.
         Let the strong wind

pass through you––
         have you seen the wind

comb a field of bluestem?––
         and wait to feel something

untangle, your sharpnesses
         suddenly smoothing. An owl

will call out above your head;
         let it fill your hollows.

There will be stars
         caught in the water;

let your dark eyes
         mirror that shine.

A white stag will appear
         at the edge of a wood,

and you will know again
         your own heart.

What I tell you
         is not a fairy tale.

*

Heather Swan’s creative nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, ISLE, Edge Effects, Emergence, and Minding Nature. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Her poems have appeared in About Place, Cold Mountain Review, The Hopper, One Art, Phoebe, Poet Lore, Midwestern Gothic, The Raleigh Review, and Terrain, and have been included in several anthologies. Her collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books) was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. Her chapbook, The Edge of Damage (Parallel Press) won the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Award. She teaches writing and environmental literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Two Poems by Daniel McGinn

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Tick Tick

The air conditioning sort of works. I can hear the whoomph
of the fan when it turns on, but it doesn’t work for very long.
The cooling system in this modified trailer-classroom
is like a runner who walks and jogs but never actually runs,
which is better than nothing.

I became a classroom aide because it’s difficult for me
to completely retire. It’s the first day of preschool for one
of the children who just turned three. She begins walking
around and around the edges of the room randomly
picking up toys and tossing them on the floor
with a casual disinterest, like this is what she was born to do.

She steps around a boy who just dropped down on the carpet,
to loudly grieve the life he left behind. The preschool girl
with the perfectly parted hair and pigtails, stops walking in circles
and starts to cry. This is empathy. Her nose begins to run.
I bring her a tissue. She tries to bite me, then tries to pinch me.

I step back and wait. She thinks better of it and puts her hand
on my arm. It’s small, it looks like a baby’s hand. She lets me
wipe her nose. She pulls on my arm hairs, one hair at a time,
absent mindedly, looking off into space with a disinterest
that’s not unlike tossing toys and wooden blocks on the floor.

She turns and returns to walking along the edges of this room
that is free of parents and grandparents. It must be strange to her,
to be left alone in this place with other children with special needs.
She doesn’t want to sit in a chair or join in any group.
She’d rather go home where it’s safe and familiar.

On the third day of school, she sits down with us during circle time
as the teacher shows the class pictures of objects that are blue.
Then the teacher encourages the children to join her as she sings
The Wheels on the Bus. They listen and move to the music but
nobody sings along. It’s so quiet I can hear the clock ticking.
Clocks don’t tick any more, but I’m an old man. I can hear it.

*

What Little I Know About Lori

She likes portraits of saints, lit from above,
heads tilted towards the light, palms lifted,
hands empty.

Lori’s great-grandmother was always old,
always gray, stern about religion, never danced,
never cussed, never understood why the world
was never nice, or at least polite.

Teenage Lori was parking lot popular, she stood
outside the schoolyard gate, stayed as far away
from desks as possible, she looked stoned even
when she wasn’t, maybe she always was.

I didn’t know babies would change her until
she was holding twins, one on each arm. Suddenly,
Lori was different. She swore she’d keep them
innocent. She did what she could to show them
nice things and keep the world away from our door.

If Lori sees a hummingbird at the feeder in our garden,
she assumes that bird is her mother, grandmother,
or great grandmother stopping by the house for a visit.

Lori has a candle altar with little statues and flower
petals. If you move away she won’t let you go.
She will text and call and pray for you.

Lori is always planning a vacation, or at least
the next event. When she has a moment, alone
with her thoughts, her thoughts start packing bags
and wondering what she’s going to wear.

Lori dreams about the end of the world, every night
there’s pestilence and earthquakes, giant ocean
waves sweep the children into the water, people
lift their hands, look up and pray, everyone starts
running, filling the streets, searching for higher ground.

*

Daniel McGinn received his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts at the age of 61. His work has appeared in The MacGuffin, Nerve Cowboy, SurVision, Spillway, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. His recent chapbook, Drowning the Boy, won The James Tate Poetry Prize for 2021 (SurVision Books). He is also the author of 1000 Black Umbrellas (Write Bloody) and The Moon, My Lover, My Mother & the Dog (Moon Tide Press.)