Month: October 2023

The Candle in the Mirror by Mary Simmons

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The Candle in the Mirror

Every good ghost story begins with a girl
in the dark. I count to ten,
but I do not close my eyes,
because I do not intend to find you.
The bath is still running.
The tile is littered with wet lilac petals.

The mirror swims in candles, a thousand
fires worth a dollar twenty-five, dying
faster than I am. I watch myself
dying each day, each of us dying each day.
The wax sputters. The bath is still running.
I am solving your riddles

on the back of my eyelids.
Parliaments of owls
melt down the fogged window.
I could reach into each beak,
draw out each handful of fire,
burn the feathers and call this creation.

Listen: this is the naming of corvids.
This is the morning of bones.
And I say, listen: there is nothing
but faces that do not belong to us.
The bath fills with glass, dripping
between my fingers, faucet leak

lullaby from the other room.
What is a woman if not a ghost?
What is a ghost if not a processional
of candles? We chant their names
in the dark. The bath overflows.
Wallpaper drinks, as though this is love.

*

Mary Simmons is a queer writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a poetry MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she is the managing editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from tiny wren lit, Moon City Review, Yalobusha Review, Whale Road Review, and others.

Dirt to Dirt by Brian Beatty

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Dirt to Dirt

Two times
I’ve lived
across the
road from
cemeteries.

More than those
sad families
coming and
going to bury
and remember,

I’m curious
about the grave
diggers with
their foul
language and

heavy equipment.
Every death
must be just
another boss
to them.

*

Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections: Magpies and Crows; Borrowed Trouble; Dust and Stars: Miniatures; Brazil, Indiana: A Folk Poem; and Coyotes I Couldn’t See. Beatty’s poems and stories have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Conduit, Cowboy Jamboree, CutBank, Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gulf Coast, Hobart, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Moth, The Quarterly, Rattle, RHINO, Seventeen, The Southern Review and Sycamore Review. In 2021 Beatty released Hobo Radio, a spoken-word album featuring banjo and guitar improvisations by Charlie Parr.

Two Poems by Jill Michelle

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Driven
after Papa Ibra Tall’s “Harlem”

We do this because
we cannot stop

can’t stop wanting both worlds
the one that pays

for food and rent
that fancy car

and the one that’s spent
conjuring beauty—

a chord structure instead
of a corporate one

that eyes-closed moment
of clock-stopped harmony

amid adult life’s trumpet-call
a reveille of worries.

Yes, for this stretch of song
we’ll forget

the parents, a pebble’s throw
from heaven

the kids, our rippling
worries over them.

For now, we play
play music

feel alive
live and feel

children ourselves
once again.

* 

Not Another One

You don’t want to read
another sexual

assault poem
and I never wanted

to be qualified
to write one

but here
we are.

*

Jill Michelle’s latest poems appear/are forthcoming in Brink, New Ohio Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Valley Voices. Her poem, “On Our Way Home,” won the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more of her work at byjillmichelle.com.

Sorting the Clothes by Gloria Heffernan

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Sorting the Clothes

When the time came
to clean out your apartment,
I was efficient.
Because efficiency was what was called for.
Because efficiency was what I could handle.

I filled the giant trash bags by category.
Some would be hand-me-downs –
Some donations –
Some, just the things you never got around to throwing out.

Simple enough, until I held each item
and remembered the time you wore this dress to the theater,
or when you bought that tee-shirt on vacation in Quebec
or when you purchased the too-big sweater on clearance because
For $19.99, there’s no such thing as too much cashmere!

Clothes that still carried your DNA,
Or the nearly forgotten scent of a perfume you used to wear,
Or the faint ghost of a stain left behind after a wonderful meal.

I bundled up all the cozy sweaters and flannel nightgowns
and the fluffy bathrobe you wore all winter,
and labelled them for the women’s shelter
just the way you told me to when you said,
Us girls have got to stick together.

And when the bags were just too heavy to lift,
I turned off the light and prepared to leave.
But first, I slipped the cashmere sweater
on top of the bag marked Shelter.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). Her forthcoming chapbook, Animal Grace, was selected for the Keystone Chapbook Series prize. Her work appears in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2).

IN CONVERSATION WITH MOURNING by Margo Berdeshevsky

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IN CONVERSATION WITH MOURNING

Whisper histories our
Grandmothers passed

like sugar cubes bitter and
sweet — tongue after

tongue so we would chant
louder — later —

Once upon wheat fields, color
of sun, once upon skies, color

of an infant’s breath —

Whispers of Babi Yar, pit
of slaughters kin to this year’s

landfill, kin to where my father
was spit from his mother’s depths —

where he said he was
Russian, to not have his own

tongue slit — dirt today where
Russia’s flames bury babies

who will never grow old —
Whispers of Odessa, once

for her song and colors, still now
for broken voices under moonrise

In a fist I’ve carried since
when, or then —

a grain of a cry the color
of iron — whispers

of thorns for gardens
that belong to none

but their interred,
and even so, their winter births—

*On Sept 29, 2023, Volodymir Zelensky visited the site of Babi Yar, on Ukranian soil—it was the 82nd anniversary of the massacre.

*

Margo Berdeshevsky, NYC born, writes in Paris. Her forthcoming book is: It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat from Salmon-Poetry. Just published: Kneel Said the Night (a hybrid book in half-notes) from Sundress Publications. Author of Before The Drought /Glass-Lyre-Press/finalist for National-Poetry-Series, Between Soul & Stone and But a Passage in Wilderness / Sheep-Meadow-Press, and Beautiful Soon Enough /FC2 /recipient of 1st Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award. Other honors: Grand prize for Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and the Robert H. Winner Award from Poetry Society of America. Widely published in international journals, kindly see her website: http://margoberdeshevsky.com

I Enter Fifty Cemeteries Looking for My Son by Dom Fonce

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I Enter Fifty Cemeteries Looking for My Son

I bring your daughter, too young to grieve, to your grave. We paint your
stone with I Love You words, I Miss You words, eat egg salad
sandwiches in the grass, on top of strangers—I hear their voices
bellowing below. The sun dances on our faces. Beetles crawl on our
legs. We make a normal day into a great day.

We sleep. In a dream, I enter fifty cemeteries alone. My arms spread,
the sky charcoal dust, and I am running between each plot—each soul
tells me their histories: Vietnam War veteran, trophy wife, child with
tuberculosis, firefighter, death row inmate. It goes on until the forest in
the back touches my nose. In another dream, you never died, but I can’t
picture it well.

In wish alone, I am alone by your side. You say, I forgive you. I say, I
must be a horrible mother. You say, No. This is how you lived. This is
how I choose to remember you. I have the pedal to your Indian
motorcycle in my pocket. I place it where your feet must be.

*

Dom Fonce is the author of the two chapbooks Here, We Bury the Hearts and Dancing in the Cobwebs. He holds an MFA from the NEOMFA. His poetry has been published in trampset, Gordon Square Review, Rappahannock Review, Delmarva Review, Jenny Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in Youngstown, Ohio. Find him at domfoncepoetry.com.

Two Poems by Bunkong Tuon

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My Daughter is Ecstatic for Halloween

She squeals in sweet delight, scrunching her face
         as she climbs the steps of a neighbor’s home,
rings their doorbell, decked in her monarch butterfly
         costume, ready to say “trick or treat” when the door
opens. For me, I was always tricked on Halloween night,
         eggs flying in my direction, one hit my shoulder
the other exploded near my feet, then came the chuckles
         from the dark corner. This was the way for me, dear
daughter, but I stood my ground, not once did I give in
         to the desire to belong that erases my brownness.
I stood firmly on the ground as those boys emerged from
         their darkness, bikes clanked on cement, fists swinging
at my face then at my skinny chest. When I fell they kicked
         my back and my behind. Spit landed before those boys
returned to their darkness. I didn’t say a word, not once
         thinking of crying or begging for mercy. I lay down on that
cold hard dirt and stared at their shadowy figures with
         an imploding silence that could detonate an atomic bomb.

*

Meditation on the State of the World Before My Fiftieth Birthday

Misinformation is the virus of the century.
Everybody has a platform and everyone is a star.

Wisdom finds herself embarrassed,
Drinks poison, and waits for the big sleep.

And Patience threw herself out
The twenty-third floor a decade ago.

The ego is a seven-headed dragon that hides
Behind an avatar. It feeds on itself until it implodes.

If we stop, we can hear earth’s warnings.
Truth drowns in the deluge of lies.

I can’t think without the thought
Of others thinking about my thoughts.

Everyone is fake news except us.
We collect likes, retweets, and views.

We now have a mask for every occasion.
We are a people without faces.

We are a people who forgot how to listen.
We are a people who forgot how to sing.

*

Bunkong Tuon is Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of several poetry collections. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming from World Literature Today, New York Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Massachusetts Review, The American Journal of Poetry, among others. He is poetry editor of Cultural Daily. His debut novel, Koan Khmer, is forthcoming from Curbstone Press. To read more about his life and writing, please visit: https://www.bunkongtuon.com/

Radical Therapy by Kenny Likis

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Radical Therapy

          for Tom

Last month my therapist retired.
I had visited him every two or three weeks

for eleven years. I counted on him
like gravity or eventual sleep.

Therapy can feel like bought friendship.
I mean where else can you get someone

to listen to all your crap, let you rattle on
about yourself. My therapist managed

to be both friend and guide.
He heard every secret, every slight,

every agony, nursed me through them,
invited me back. Towards the end, when

for the first time in thirty-five years
I started scribbling poems, he would read

my newest effort aloud and chat about it. I called it
radical therapy. He said he was just doing his job.

*

Long ago Kenny Likis wrote his master’s thesis on Robert Creeley. Early in the pandemic, he got the urge to write poems and has been hard at it since. His work has appeared in Caustic Frolic, Riddled with Arrows, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Paterson Literary Review. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Peter Rabbit in Rehab by Al Ortolani

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Peter Rabbit in Rehab

October ends
with a rabbit foot on
a chain, a keychain
of twirling leaves.
Nothing moves
except the spinning
on Farmer McGregor’s
finger. Peter Rabbit

is weekly in rehab
with a prosthesis, dogs
in the waiting room
leafing garden magazines,
watching the door
for his release. Peter
is slower today
than he was yesterday.
He supposes he’ll be slower
tomorrow. Without
his lucky foot, Peter
is just an old man
with yellow tennis balls
on his walker. No leaping.
No sudden turns
under the hedge. He needs

Beatrix Potter to turn
the page, to illustrate
an escape past
the vending machines
into the parking lot,
through the ornamental shrubs,
the spitting sprinklers, then home
past McGregor’s carrots.
Yes. It was always the carrots.

*

Al Ortolani’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, New York Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. His most recent poetry collection is The Taco Boat, published by New York Quarterly Books in 2022. His first novel Bull in the Ring will soon be released by Meadowlark Books in Emporia, Kansas. He currently lives in the Kansas City area.

Two Poems by Philip Jason

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The Deep Ka-Ching of the Heart

in the two-to-the-eighty-first-powerth version
of the bible, a genie
grants us the wish we have for
so long wanted; we have an infinite
number of wishes. We open
our mouths, ready to fill our lives with joy.
A parade of bees emerges,
each bee dragging behind itself
a small banner
bearing the name of a sneaker brand.

awash in the light of a billion television suns,
one is never truly naked.
Around us at all times, the ghosts
of fallen acreage,
each of which is a thousandth
of a Fahrenheit degree
haunting the atmosphere.
But everything’s ok. The Alchem X Corporation,
makers of Perfectachil and Gamurmurex,
are working on a new drug
that makes us happy
when seeing the heart for the first time in an X-ray
makes us sad.

We wish there was a drug
that would make other people happy for us.
The genie appears and gives us a paper bag
filled with coupons. Each of them
entitles us to remember
a single event from our lives.
The one we use
takes us back to the crib.
Above us, our mother sways gently, singing
what is either a bee song or a soft
commercial jingle. The dead trees
gather at her shoulders. we are confused
by the top of you, they whisper. we’ve never
seen its kind. is your head
a box filled with someone else’s branches
or a garden
growing wonder out of light?

*

Platonic Ambivalence, Offered Warmly

the second heart yearns for a home
built upon the principles of the second heart:
that no wild thing should be too wild
to comprehend, that the ocean waves
may only signify a shifting tranquility,
that there must always be occasion
for lost things to come groveling back, etc…
but two points: 1. the second heart
is wrong. I cannot pour
a love-like sludge
into the abandoned exoskeletons
of my childhood
and call the resulting form a life.
And 2. sometimes, a good day
is being brave enough on a bad day
to make room for other people in the world.

On another note,
in spaces where humans once read books,
there is now only the pleasure
of watching people lie to themselves
on television. Or maybe lie
is the wrong word. What is the word
for when people who have no truth
say anything?

*

Philip Jason’s stories can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and J Journal; his poetry in Spillway, Lake Effect, Hawaii Pacific Review, Palette, and Indianapolis Review. He is the author of the novel Window Eyes (Unsolicited Press, 2023). His first collection of poetry, I Don’t Understand Why It’s Crazy to Hear the Beautiful Songs of Nonexistent Birds, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. For more, please visit philipjason.com.

Blocked by Eric Heller

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Blocked

It’s a kind of laryngitis
a microscopic invader in the night
that creeped in while you were dreaming
to strangle the words
that once sang within you
like friends who moved away
when you were ten
and now you lie in the dark
wondering what’s become of them
how they’d toss rocks at your window
in the crickety twilight
to come out and play.

*

Eric Heller has been a teacher, technical writer, and marketing director. Eric’s poems have appeared in US1 Worksheets, Caduceus, Miller’s Pond Poetry, and YourDailyPoem.com, among others. His work has received two Pushcart nominations in the past. Eric lives in New Jersey with his two daughters, a strikingly handsome hound named Finn, and can be found online at https://www.eric-heller.net.

How Do You Be a Boy? by Richelle Lee Slota

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How Do You Be a Boy?

I call my older brother Bozo.
He calls me Faggot. At school

I’m hoping to do better for nicknames
like Slaughter, short for Slaughterhouse,

but Tommy Krause decides on Hot Lips,
which I hate, and which confuses me.

Maybe Tommy is only being accurate,
Maybe I am a girl, because,

boy do I have a kisser.
My mother’s friends keep saying,

“Will you look at the mouth on that kid?”
“What a waste on a boy. Heck,

don’t even need lipstick.
I’d kill for those eyelashes.”

“You can have them,” I say.
I suck in my lower lip.

I take scissors to my eyelashes.
How do you be a boy?

*

On July 17, 1955, Richelle Lee Slota (formerly known as Richard) was one of 200-3rd Graders selected to open Disneyland by running across the drawbridge into Fantasyland. She’s been running into Fantasyland ever since. She has published much poetry, a novel, Stray Son, and, with co-author, Yaw Boateng, the non-fiction, Captive Market: Commercial Kidnapping Stories From Nigeria. She earned BA’s in Psychology and Theatre Arts and a MA in Creative Writing. She serves as a Meter Mentor with Poetry Witch Community, online. She lives in San Francisco.

Normal by Nathaniel Gutman

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Normal

Hungry, Dad, she asked when she picked me up at the airport.
They spoiled me with an upgrade on Lufthansa,
polite, reserved flight attendants,
a chef with a Toque Blanche, inspecting a tiny guinea fowl breast,
carefully turning it skin-side down.
Hungry, I said.

She took me for pizza at a beachfront Tel Aviv restaurant.
Embraced by steamy air mixed with Mediterranean breeze,
I was instantly home.

Growing up here everything was crazy,
good-crazy but crazy,
and I always dreamt it would one day be normal.
I looked around, noisy, laughing, young people,
cool hair, designer t-shirts, loud music.
Is it finally a bit normal? I asked.

The war broke out the next morning,
a siren sent us to her saferoom.
We’re good here, she said,
even if there’s a chemical weapon attack,
except if it’s a direct hit.
Then, on TV, we saw the first images,
kids in the desert music festival
slaughtered by Hamas terrorists.

For a moment it looked almost normal, I said.
Looked, she responded.

*

Nathaniel Gutman is a filmmaker who has directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Witness in the Warzone (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen). His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Tiferet Journal, Pangyrus, LitMag, Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry.

The Dream by Judy Kronenfeld

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The Dream

For eons, we cannot talk, my brother, my sister.
I am one of them to you; you are one of them to me.
And we each know—knives held between our teeth—
how murderous the other is, or wants to be.
Our stories calcify in isolation, yours a holy shrine
visited only by your people, mine a holy shrine,
visited only by mine.

But then, as ages pass like clouds
in time-lapse video, something you say,
my sister, my brother, pierces my armor.
A small, surprising chink has already appeared
in yours, like the sun startling at dawn
on the Summer Solstice, behind the Heel Stone
at Stonehenge.

For many generations more, we live
with the inconvenience of incomplete
defenses. And now comes the point when
the dream wants desperately to pull
the rabbit of hope out of the black
hat of horror. But the dreamers
say to the dream There is no magic. Or, How arrogant!
You cannot possibly know my lived experience.

Still, the dream keeps beginning, dreaming itself,
fantasizing. One night, when I am dreaming,
one of my people names her first-born son
with two names, one in my language,
one in yours. One night, when you are dreaming,
one of your people names his first-born daughter
with two names, one in his language, one in mine.
Let us imagine Ezra Bassam, let us imagine Hanan Ahava—
each child born with an imaginary sibling,
a brother, or sister bound to him or her, with whom
each freely walks on the land they love,
practicing, practicing…

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s full-length books of poetry include Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and widely in journals. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books in 2024/2025. Her eighth collection, a chapbook of poems, If Only There Were Stations of the Air, will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in early 2024, and her ninth, another chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements!, will be released by Bamboo Dart Press in June, 2024. Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside.

That’s Right by Gus Peterson

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That’s Right

my father-in-law says, nodding.
We’re speculating again
about what’s wrong,
why rivers of lava are coursing
under the crust of your skin.
It’s autoimmune, the body’s friendly
fire, or not. A tick borne illness
until it isn’t. Still, we nod,
we who have never agreed on
what direction a country should take,
the state of our state. Only you.
That you deserve this world,
even this worst version of it,
the kind that agrees to disagree
until there is nothing left
but the ash in our mouths,
the blood that binds one tree
to another, what saps from
each name carved into
the bark of us.

*

Gus Peterson lives in Maine, where he serves on the board of the Maine Poets Society. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming with Bracken, Rust + Moth, Pirene’s Fountain, Panoply, and the Deep Water series edited by Megan Grumbling.

Autumn by Laura Ann Reed

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Autumn

Beyond a window, a stone’s certain surfaces
are dark with shadow, and each of the three
white blossoms on a rhododendron stem
opens to the wind in a different direction.
From between gray clouds light shines
on a crow’s wing as I turn and turn
in October’s yellow weather.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as 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.

Hungry for Nostalgia by Beth Dulin

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Hungry for Nostalgia

I saw it in a book about the seventies.
A picture of a man taking a picture.
He was holding a Kodak Instamatic

pointed at three children, all raising
ball gloves up in the air above their heads.
The click-blink of the flashbulb, leaving

you starry-eyed. Just pieces of the past.
Always the summers of childhood.
Long sunny days tumbling one into the next.

The low hum of the window fan at night.
Lightning bugs in the darkening fields.
A 1971 Ford pickup rolling up the dirt

lane in a cloud of diesel fumes and dust.
Pale lace curtains billowing outward in
the frenzied prelude to a thunderstorm.

*

Beth Dulin’s writing has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Atlanta Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, Little Patuxent Review, New York Quarterly, and Wigleaf, among others. In March 2021, she was featured as Yes Poetry’s Poet of the Month. She is the winner of Eastern Shore Writers Association’s 2023 Crossroads Poetry & Microfiction Contest. She is the author and co-creator of Truce, a limited edition artists’ book, in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. She lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Visit her online: https://www.bethdulin.com/

Passion by Ann de Forest

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Passion

After Simone Martini, The Carrying of the Cross, 1333

Brazen as those Technicolor poppies that lulled
The animate to sleep to keep the intrepid girl
From reaching the distant, keening city,
Mary Magdalene tumbles down from compact
Jerusalem pressed to near flatness by the crowd
She claims her space, livid scarlet spread
Above the fray of men who yank and elbow
Spears upright, intent on execution. Ruby-shod
Children tap her heated anguish forward
While beloved object of her frenzy, muted
Barely turns. Red dress blares. Her mouth smeared
Alarm of teeth and lips, flaming rivulets of hair
Unbound, exposed, a scandal. Voice sears. Who hears?
Even other women look askance when another woman wails.

*

Ann de Forest’s short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Quarter After Eight, Gyroscope Review, Coal Hill Review, Unbroken, Noctua Review, Cleaver Magazine, The Journal, Hotel Amerika, and PIF, and in Hidden City Philadelphia, where she is a contributing writer. Her most recent work is an anthology of essays WAYS OF WALKING (New Door Books, 2022), a project inspired by having twice walked the entire perimeter of Philadelphia, the city she’s called home for three decades.

Night Lessons by Kip Knott

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Night Lessons

1. Separation Agreement

Pallid and swollen,
the moon lifts itself
out of our fallow field
where we stand alone
together one last time.

2. Our First Meteor Shower

You made a point of telling me
that shooting stars were not
whole stars but shards
of light discarded by the night.

3. Astrology vs. Astronomy

We constructed a life together
the way ancient astronomers
constructed constellations out of myths
and legends and imaginary lines
connecting one emptiness to another.

4. Night Lessons

In the sky tonight, long dead stars
teach us Heaven begins with loss.

5. Nocturnal

The darkness cannot cast
a shadow without moonlight,
while the night only needs
the feathers of an owl.

6. Winter Farewell

When we finally say goodbye,
the moon hangs spider-like
for a moment in the silver
threads of our breath.

7. Waking to a Morning Moon

The night has come undone.
I find its lost, bright button
rolling across the dawn sky.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His most recent full-length collection of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is available from Kelsay Books. A new poetry chapbook, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.

Vegas Fireside Lounge by Oak Morse

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Vegas Fireside Lounge

Over fried calamari, your dark ambered Modelo, my rosé,
we cackle like schoolboys in a joaning match,
reckless down memory lane. Like when you wanted to sling
a thousand slurs at your Home Depot Manager
for reprimanding you for your life-length conversations
with customers and moving no faster than a snail. You say,
that wasn’t a real job; I slip you the side-eye because
I still work retail and you are the corporate guy,
even back when The Recession stung like a bunch
of bees ruining a picnic on a pretty afternoon.

You say white collar-money is sweeter than Janet Jackson’s
nipple ring at Half-Time. Classic shit-talking we did, we do,
but now you a bit more than me. You used to buy exotic women
off those expensive websites; you called them hot treats
after a long week. I called them call-girls. You still do that?
Nah, quit years ago, you say. Good, I mumble.

You vacation here, away from your home in San Diego,
convinced me to fly up from Atlanta where you swear
I am the future modern male Badu with my poetry
if I market myself like a maniac—will rally women like birds
to breadcrumbs. We chuckle, me faintly. Flag another round.

Neon lights illuminate from the ceiling.
A helpful kind of homie once, perhaps because you were older,
like your friend who, supposedly, was a mechanical magician,
who gabbed like a pack of preachers in fellowship, and fixed
the wrong thing in my car, starter motor instead of alternator.

All in your favorite city, Lithonia, the place where you said
it took you to find a lesbian to cut your hair the right way.
No one comes close on The West Coast where, you say
the breeze feels like silk on the skin—the reason you relocated
without a job, relied on your new sonic-silver Jeep Wrangler,
Ubering all types, smelling like a fertilizer factory,
decayed fish, but you said it had to do until you get back on your feet.

Seems as though you were always trying to get back
on your feet. You say, Tonight’s calling for cigars,
Padron 7000 Natural, lit with your good old torch lighter.
I say let’s close out this Sunday night in Vegas with it.

Then I walk off to the men’s room.
Linger over the urinal, thinking how these old jokes
are like the rosé I’m drinking, like this bond we seem to have.
They don’t age well, in the lounge blaring Bruno Mars,
near the cascade fountain. There you are, with your
debit card and phone out, buying time with Victoria
on a bright red site. And there I stand, looking at you,
the last line of an unfulfilling book I’m closing.

*

Oak Morse lives in Houston, Texas, where he teaches creative writing and theatre and leads a youth poetry troop, the Phoenix Fire-Spitters. He was the winner of the 2017 Magpie Award for Poetry in Pulp Literature, a Finalist for the 2023 Honeybee Poetry Award and a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. A Warren Wilson MFA graduate, Oak has received Pushcart Prize nominations, fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Twelve Literary Arts, Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay as well as a Stars in the Classroom honor from the Houston Texans. His work appears in Black Warrior Review, Obsidian, Tupelo, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Nimrod, Terrain.org, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, among others. oakmorse.com

The Road Regret Makes by J. C. Todd

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

The Road Regret Makes

Something was asked. I turned away then
from what turns up now—his face as it was,
not the face reshaped by twelve years

of regret. A day’s work undercut.
I head out to the stream with a black dog
who lives down the road. He sits when I sit,

ribs heaving into mine. Then off he goes,
uphill, following currents of odor.
I go too, surging against the stream’s flow,

mucky clay and rockfall, roots foot-twisters.
Leg muscles thickening, arms swinging
and hauling my body where the trail

has crumbled to nothing. Dog and I panting,
looking down into white rush, a hillside
of cascades, looking ahead to where

the stream shallows, pools, gathers into
its very first plunge. We plunge ahead, up
an abandoned logging road. I’m sweating,

canvas shirt-back wet, breathing hard. Eyes
itchy, flies swarming and my hair switching,
switching, dog hacking from spore he pawed at,

my cheek sticky with web—where’s the spider?
Here’s the razor spine of the ridge, forest
not thinning but blue sky, cloud spray

and I remember what she wrote
in her day-book, Miss Sarah Burton,
that genteel, ramrod spinster,

I would give all I had for a good road.

*

J. C. Todd is author of Beyond Repair (2021) and The Damages of Morning (2018). Honors include the Rita Dove Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Poems have appeared in Full Bleed, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals. www.jc-todd.com

Two Poems by Brett Warren

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Impetus
Midtown Manhattan

A woman runs up as we exit the coffee shop.
She’s wearing a black sleeveless dress
and a cross-body briefcase, and could pass
for an office worker if not for her bare feet.
She is crying. She wants to know if we know
where Georgia the state office of Georgia is.
When we say no, she zigzags to a security guard
coming onto his shift, asks him where is Georgia
the state office of Georgia. She doesn’t wait
for an answer, but careens down the wide
and mostly empty sidewalk. The security guard
watches her go, as if considering whether
to call someone, but she turns the corner
onto 5th Avenue, where a man who would later
be president said he could shoot someone
in the street and his followers wouldn’t care.
We turn the same corner, see the woman
lurch past a man pushing a broom.
He barely looks up, just keeps sweeping.
She pings from person to person, pleading
for an answer to her question. The last
we see of her, she’s darting across the street,
heading west, and the day carries on
the way the country does, one thing
sweeping the next thing away.

*

Laundry After Loss

The worst thing is the gaping red hole no one can see,
not even me. I keep looking down, expecting a crater

the size of a dinner plate in the center of my chest.
The worst thing is that my heart keeps pumping

blood anyway. I’ve willed it to stop, or at least
slow down, but it won’t. Blood soaks my shirt,

makes the fabric stick so there can be no healing.
I have to keep changing my clothes. All I ever do

is laundry anymore. When the wash cycle’s done,
I don’t look. I just shove everything in the dryer,

set it to run for the maximum time. The worst thing
is when the dryer bell dings. Then I know

I have to fold the clothes. Then I have to see
how every shirt comes out perfectly clean.

*

Brett Warren is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). She is a long-time editor whose poetry has appeared in Canary, The Comstock Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Harbor Review, Hole in the Head Review, and many other publications. She lives in Massachusetts, in a house is surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway. brettwarrenpoetry.com

Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

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Niju Hibakusha
Tsutomu Yamaguchi makes shadow puppets on the wall for his first daughter.
Hare, butterfly, dog. Airplane.
Sole vestige of the bicycle: the bicycle’s negative image
branded on the pavement. The rider, too, tattooed there:
Twin dharma wheels, spokes pickled in ink.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived Hiroshima in a silk skin sleeve and rode a bicycle
to report for work three days later
in Nagasaki.
In a wooden house, a catshaped blind spot floated across a paper wall
in the nanosecond before the shockwave spotlit her leap.
Heavy water shivered a teakettle.
Locomotive-steam incense appeased a valley.
Nagasaki whistled, twisting oblivious wisteria into her hair.
Black rain thick as hot tar pocked constellations onto Tsutomu Yamaguchi’s bandages,
inverted chart of stars that survived hydrogen fusion.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi inks a book of poems years after his hair grows back blacker
than the week he watched two earthborne stars crown,
blast crater follicles seeded each with the shadows of hairs that grew there once.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi feeds his second daughter with a spoon.
He makes airplane noises.
Outside, on the street: a bicycle’s thumb bell.
Tinnitus calling the kami to come.
Uranium, polonium, chrysanthemum.
In Hiroshima, after the plane passed overhead, he looked up
and, seeing a parachute open,
mistook in the nanosecond before the blast exposes his flesh like photographic film
Little Boy for an American paratrooper.
I hoped he would land without breaking his legs. But also that he would be promptly caught.
He vomited intestinal mucosa like inside-out snakeskin.
Burns, cataracts. If you count the leukemia, a triple survivor.
A malignant nucleus divides too wildly, setting off a chain reaction.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi vomits black tar once again, his stomach snakesloughing itself
in his granddaughter’s house
in a rhyme that hints at the cyclicity of time, the circular reasoning
of should we or shouldn’t we drop it.
Wheel of dharma. Centrifuge of dharma.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi at five years old learned to ride a bicycle.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi is teaching his granddaughter to ride a bicycle
in Nagasaki
in early August.
The dark urns of the clouds glow with rain. He looks up.
Thunder detonates, and a drop of rain targets the back of his hand.
And now a second drop. His mother
his grown daughter
his granddaughter calls to him, calls him indoors
to a concrete roof and walls of graph paper
inked, tattooed, branded with calculations of yield.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, fissioning into all his ages all at once,
shuts his eyes with their spokewheel irises.
Come in, grandfather.
He sees the black shadow of sight branded long ago on the insides of his eyelids.
Come in, son.
His eyelids never glow red anymore, not even when he faces the rising sun.
Come in from the black rain, father. Your memory has had decades to heal.
Wipe the black tar from the corner of your mouth.
Peel the snakeskin gauze from your burn.
*
Vibration
All things shiver, but some things shiver
more than others, shiver
with a tapped tuning fork’s
whole-body blur, like mountain ranges and desert
heat shimmers and psychedelic fires recognized
early on as sacred, our watering eyes
coated with a natural lacrimal
lens to let us see the shivering
in real time, that ringing in the ears
complained of in a doctor’s office
just the ossicles and eardrum catching some
cosmic engine-hum,
and that spotted knobby-knuckled hand
held out for inspection, stubbornly
wobbly, benign essential tremor,
or restless legs syndrome, the legs kicking
and twitching like a dreaming dog’s,
no cure for these things, sorry, it comes with age,
comes at the end, the skeleton
unstiffened, holding fast against the godgust
no longer, that leaflike
shaking honest for once about the approach
of death, no more faux-yogic
“stillness,” no, the teeth chatter in June,
knees knock, lips quiver
until the frequency speeds up,
the whole body blurs, and two elderly forked creatures
embrace, wife and husband desperate to stop
their cold bones, bodies pinched together
like breath-ruffled vocal cords
around a single word,
unless the shiver
catches her alone after midnight
on the threshold between bedroom and bathroom
where, standing on tiptoe, she floats
until her body’s plucked guitar string finishes its note.
*
Karma
She doesn’t have a dozen borzois
to thread the fog. No horse, no horn—
But her footfalls make the foxes go
as pale as hares, reborn.
She’s never flushed and shot a pheasant,
much less a weasel sinner.
No skinning knife, no kind of kit.
But she’s still got meat for dinner.
Of course, you’ll never see her coming.
But if you did, you’d find
a woman whistling to herself
with meadows on her mind—
a birder, maybe, thrilled by a finch,
by cobwebs jeweled with dew.
But don’t be fooled by her casual shoes.
She’s out here hunting you.
*
Amit Majmudar’s new books in 2023 include Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books) as well as Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books).

Khaki-Blue by Nathaniel Gutman

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Khaki-Blue

Where did I park?
I’m looking for my grey Subaru,
or is it green, don’t they call it khaki-blue?
In my dream I wander the streets but can’t find it.
I stop to ask a mother, standing with her daughter,
by her house,
I tell her about the wild pig in the back of the car,
yes, needed it for filming a scene in my movie.
The girl laughs and nods, makes total sense, right,
then, with the deep wrinkle forming on
her mother’s forehead, I wake up,
open my eyes, my love is lying by my side, sound asleep.
Sometimes we call each other “pig.” Fondly.

*

Nathaniel Gutman is a filmmaker who has directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Witness in the Warzone (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen). His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Tiferet Journal, Pangyrus, LitMag, Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry.

Cottagecore by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

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Cottagecore

There are wispy girls who love downpours
and spin coatless in the storm
stomping barefoot in pools of dirty water
in the jagged asphalt holes of the street.
I may wave to them all friendly-like
from a soft cushion beside a picture window,
wish them well in their endeavors in a noncommittal way,
but feel no need to join them now as they re-enact
some movie rated 86% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
I’m writing my own that no one will watch,
with cardigans and feather beds, candles and sconces,
beautiful panes between me and the rain.

*

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke lives in Florida. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah and Salamander. She is the winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Editor’s Choice Award for Fiction. Her zine about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, Fine, Considering, is available from Rinky Dink Press (2019). She serves as a reader for The Dodge and as a Meter Mentor in Annie Finch’s Poetry Witch Community. Her website is jenniferschomburgkanke.com.

Thursday, Bill, the Bay by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Thursday, Bill, the Bay

I hear “76 Trombones” coming up
behind me and know it’s Bill
with his little dog and a bag of scones
from a nearby bakery.
Bill turns his tinny transistor off,
and says, “I’m sorry,” showing me
his empty bag. “Late for my walk,” I say.
“Next Thursday,” Bill says, marching on.

I go back to watching two green herons
perched on neighboring boats,
facing one another, still as stone.

*

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

McCorkle’s Rock by Christine Yurick

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McCorkle’s Rock

You lead me through the field,
the dark green grass tall as my
shoulder, heads heavy with seeds.
We found an old trail that led to the creek,
up and over and down to a large rock
where you set down your camera. I
removed my clothes and waded into
the water. Behind me I heard click,
crank. Click, crank. I did not know
that there was a path on the other side
of the creek. I did not know that
somebody could walk along
and see me standing there. I did
not see anything.

*

Christine Yurick is the founding editor of Think Journal. Her poems have appeared in E-Verse, Angle, American Arts Quarterly, Tulane Review, and 823 on High, among other journals. Her chapbook At the End of the Day and other poems is available from Kelsay Books

It Happened by the Sea by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

It Happened by the Sea

I misread a line as the quills argue over someone’s sandwich crust
and envision disembodied pens jousting over some metaphorical food,
squawking while the hand goes about more important business,
like stroking the cat, watering, the long, quiet work of mending. The tips dip,
inked to the gills, drip their arbitrary ramblings on some thin thing
that once resembled bark. The gulls swoop for crabs emerging
as the waves recede along the shore, erasing footprints, writing,

castles made with pails of sand, bread crumb trails.

*

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.

The Party by Robert Bernard Hass

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The Party

She makes her way down the one-lane road,
Away from the music, to be alone.
Against a line of wind-tossed trees
She makes her way. Down the one-lane road
A thin moon rises. She feels the breeze.
No one she knows knows she has gone
To make her way down the one-lane road,
Away from the music, to be alone.

At the party, her lover dances and sings.
He fills up the room with laughter and jokes,
Then gathers his boys to hammer down shots.
At the party, her lover dances and sings
With women who’d like to unbutton his heart.
He’s too drunk for love, so he lights up a smoke,
Sways to the music, and dances and sings.
His friends fill the room with laughter and jokes.

As she walks down the road, a whip-poor-will calls,
As if to portend her destination.
The pastured horses beside her run
As she walks down the road. A whip-poor-will calls
While she and the night companion as one.
No one she knows knows she has gone.
As she walks down the road, a whip-poor-will calls—
Anywhere from here is destination.

*

Robert Bernard Hass is the author of the poetry collection Counting Thunder (Wordtech, 2008) and the critical monograph, Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science (Virginia, 2002), which was selected by Choice as an “Outstanding Academic Title” in 2004. With Donald G. Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Henry Atmore, his is co-editor of the Letters of Robert Frost (Harvard UP). His poems and critical essays on modern poetry have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Sewanee Review, Agni, Kenyon Review, Literary Matters, American Journal of Poetry, Vox Populi, and Poetry Northwest. He is currently professor of English at Pennsylvania Western University, where he teaches courses in American literature, British literature, classical literature, and Shakespeare. Since 2019, he has served as the executive director of the Robert Frost Society.

twin 2 by Jeannie E. Roberts

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twin 2

— inspired by Scott Ferry’s poem “twin”

messy hair / disheveled appearance / i was the child
quick to enter the day in her big brother’s plaid shirt /
visibly / i was a tomboy / a girl who expressed
herself as herself / nothing more / nor less / i was
the anomaly who manifested the union of twoness /
the duality of spirit / i didn’t notice difference /
played with dolls and trucks / race cars / too / drew
flowers and insects / mermaids and worms / made
mud pies and went fishing with Dad / i recall
my budding femininity as an embarrassment /
wore tight t-shirts beneath my dresses to flatten
the bloom / i remember waiting for the school bus /
how the boys ridiculed my figure / i longed to fit in
everywhere / with everyone / never saw myself
as anything but myself / i was naïve to sexuality /
unaffected by attraction / i just wanted to express
myself as myself / to learn about the world / observe
its wondrous beauty / when you’re groomed to be
attractive you become something else / a decorated
double / a contrived form of self / i was credulous
to the cues / the fleshly signals of intent / regardless /
my current was consistent / never wavered /
remained straight / oblivious to a colleague /
a woman half my age / unmoved by her advances /
her ardent aims weren’t mine / when you’re
pushed to be pretty / nothing more / nor less /
you’re stigmatized / infantilized / objectified /
at best / messy hair / disheveled appearance /
i was the child quick to enter the day in her big
brother’s plaid shirt / perhaps / i wished to be him /
i’m the union of two spirits / where fem meets masculine

*

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.

What’s in a Name? by Yvonne Zipter

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What’s in a Name?

It was his before it was mine,
and so I hated it, its initial initial

like an angry bee in one’s ear,
its hard consonants hard as kicks

with a boot. Once upon a time,
I wanted to discard it, to choose

a moniker unsullied by history.
But now that he’s gone, it’s mine.

And now that it’s mine,
I can hear the music in it,

like the chime of a typewriter bell,
recognize that it’s breezy as a zephyr,

assertive as a chili pepper. The Z, I see
now, is fearsome as a cobra, swaying

to the music of a pungi—charming despite
the hint of danger down its sinuous spine.

*

Yvonne Zipter is author of the poetry collections The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets, Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, The Patience of Metal (Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and Like Some Bookie God, the Russian historical novel Infraction, and the nonfiction books Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend and Ransacking the Closet. Her individual published poems are being sold in two repurposed toy-vending machines in Chicago, the proceeds of which support a local nonprofit organization.

Before by Jane Medved

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Before

Before my mother died, I avoided her. Oddly, the last thing she said to me was Thank You. Even then she wasn’t talking much. “Hot tea,” I had just told her caretaker. “Make hot tea with honey for her throat.” That was before the stomach tube. Before the cartons of Easy Drink, the suction catheters, the diapers and hospital bed, the smell of urine, the mattress we threw out. Before the leaks from every pipe in the apartment, the crews of plumbers, the stink of tar on the balcony, the swindler who left us to go on a pilgrimage, the burned door. It was after she left on the gas, but before the neighbors stopped visiting, when we no longer needed a paid companion, but before the private nurse, the boundary line between still trying and not pretending. It was the time of the couch, the lounger, the blanket and the wheelchair. The days of naps that blossomed into fog.

My brother calls. He’s discovered a box of old photos. A treasure trove! I tell him to throw them all out.

*

Jane Medved is the author of Deep Calls To Deep (winner of the Many Voices Project, New Rivers Press) and the chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh (Finishing Line Press) Recent essays and poems have appeared or are upcoming in The Laurel Review, Mason Street, Ruminate, The North American Review, and The Normal School. Her awards include winner of the 2021 RHINO translation prize and the 2021 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize – Honorable Mention. Her translations of Hebrew poetry can be seen in Cajibi, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Copper Nickel. She is the poetry editor of the Ilanot Review, and a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv.

Final Score by Linda Laderman

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Final Score

June’s heavy humidity held our breath in its hands.
We wondered if it was safe to sit through the heat,
but Cleveland was in town and the Tigers were on fire.

Street vendors kept cool with plastic fans.
You stayed in the car. I paced the parking lot.
C’mon we’ll miss the first pitch.

Your face paled when I ordered our usual—
two grilled kosher hot dogs. You shook your head
like I’d suggested a pig roast on Shabbat.

Instead you bought a beer and nursed it until we stood
to stretch—together ten years and that was the first time
I saw you drink beer in a ballpark.

The Tigers held their lead. You said nothing, not even
when we watched the parade of players’ wives climb
the stairs in stilettoes and miniskirts.

I pointed to the one in head-to-toe Gucci, hoping
you’d laugh and roll your eyes, then yell, like always,
for Charlie the singing Italian ice guy to come by.

You barely blinked when you caught a foul ball,
as if it flew from the sun into your open palm.
When you loosened your grip, it dribbled

down the steps until an usher grabbed it
and threw it back. Look, luck fell into your lap, twice.
For months, I’d lie awake and replay that day.

Why did I nudge you from the car? What else had I missed?
By the time the EMT’s reached us, your body was slack.
I ran behind the stretcher shouting questions.

I don’t remember what I did with our seasons tickets.
Maybe I gave the rest to a neighbor or shredded them.
I know the Tigers won, but I can’t recall the final score.

*

Linda Laderman is a Michigan writer and poet. She is the 2023 recipient of The Jewish Woman’s Prize from Harbor Review. Her micro-chapbook, “What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know” will be published online at Harbor Review in September, 2023. Her poetry has appeared in The Gyroscope Review, The Jewish Literary Journal, SWWIM, ONE ART, Poetica Magazine, and Rust & Moth, among others. She has work forthcoming in Thimble Literary Magazine and Minyan Magazine. For nearly a decade, she volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Find her at lindaladerman.com

There’s No Cure for a Broken Heart by Michael Minassian

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There’s No Cure for a Broken Heart

Not even that tattoo:
crushed needles,
colored ink—
an empty bottle of wine
jagged edges stained red.

The honey bee
knows which flowers
are heavy with sweetness,
which ones carry poison.

The cartographer steals
the last map he ever made.
Too many holes
in the earth, he said,
and no way back.

Cool sheets,
hot tattoos,
the road leading
away from love,
the sting of being alone.

*

Michael Minassian is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing as well as a new chapbook, Jack Pays a Visit, are all available on Amazon. For more information:
https://michaelminassian.com

I am my father’s daughter by Andrea Maxine

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

I am my father’s daughter

My father was born on a hot, sweat-clings-to-your-shirt-kind of day.
He weighed 10 pounds and had a full head of hair.
My grandmother said he never cried.
He liked to work with his hands,
they were so rough they felt like leather.
He gave me my first cigarette when I was 15.
He told me not to smoke too much or my teeth would turn yellow.
When I was 17, he got laid off from work.
I was young, wanting the world in so many ways,
and dressed like I meant it.
We got into the middle of it one night.
Afterward, my cheek was bright red,
but my pride stung more than anything else.
He had never ever laid a hand on me before this
and never laid a hand since.
He knocked on my door the next day
and left breakfast on the floor, he was gone when I opened it.
I left home when I was 19 and never looked back.
Last week, he called and asked how I was doing,
if I remembered to get the plumbing done,
if the back door in my kitchen still stuck,
if the Chevy I drove was still in one piece,
if I was happy.
I told him I found one of Mom’s old recipes last week,
and that I’d bring it over during visiting hours next Tuesday or Thursday.
He tells me he can’t wait.

*

Andrea Maxine is a content writer based in Manila. Her poetry explores the themes of womanhood, grief, love, darkness, and introspection.

Four Poems by Joan Mazza

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Kinchy*

That guilty feeling when you hear that a typhoon
and flood has killed hundreds, left thousands
homeless, and you realize you’re more concerned
about your book stacks collecting throughout
the house, becoming obstacles to cleaning.
You know people are running for their lives,
caught in crossfire, malnourished and cold,
but your petty concerns remain in foreground,
your small donations toward aid no more
than Band-Aids over shotgun wounds. Your guilt
simmers below your surface calm, turns you
irritable and angry without a focus or plan, yet
without the force to propel you take action or effect
a shift away from your part in climate change
or the dearth of science education. So you sit
in this discomfort, frozen, focused on the trivial,
pondering how to proceed with your library’s
reorganization, where to place another bookcase.

*From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

*

Nementia*

The effort you put forth as you scramble
mentally to pinpoint the source of your anxiety,
the dark feeling vibrating at the periphery
of your awareness as you go about your
ordinary tasks, wondering if the noise
in the heating system is the first sign
of a major breakdown, or mice moving
inside since the temps are below freezing.
That quickened heartbeat and sudden sweat
was perhaps caused by a word on the radio,
an adjective generating a cascade of associations,
triggering an old anger or alarm. It spurs
your jaw and shoulder muscles to tighten,
as if a stray crow were nesting, collecting
twigs on your shoulder, whispering a recitation
of all the harsh words you said to innocent
others you will never find to make apologies.
You try to retrace the progression of thoughts,
backtracking through a morass of sticky connections,
like trying to remove bubblegum from a child’s hair
when only scissors will help, an effort that leaves you
disoriented, bumbling, in need of a long nap
and three Milano mint cookies.

*From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

*

Jouska*

When it’s too quiet for too long,
when my mind isn’t full of worries
about characters in the latest novel
I’m reading— Will these college
boys be arrested or redeemed?
How will they live with guilt?

When I’m overtired or can’t sleep
past midnight or I’m alert at 3 AM,
I go back forty years, articulate
precise words, reply by saying
NO, hold onto my NO, no matter
the pressure to surrender

to his will, his demands for money
I don’t owe, favors he shouldn’t
be asking. In these conversations
I’ve rewritten and replayed
a thousand times, I say,

I’m your patient. You’re out of line.
What you’re asking is immoral,
unethical, and against the law.

and I walk out, never to return.
I’m on the edge of my final say,
on the cliff of resolution, letting go,
opening my fist to drop this fixation.
I hear the splash, watch it sink deep,
never to be heard again.

*Jouska. Noun. a hypothetical conversation you compulsively
play out in your head.

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.
Pronounced “zhoos-ka”

*

Liberosis*

I’d like to start a day uninterested in checking the news
on three sites, indifferent to what I missed while sleeping,
not wondering what human or planetary disaster unfolded
while I traversed dreamland. How easy it once was to be
absorbed counting my books and pairs of earrings,
at most worried about car problems instead of empathizing
with refugees and the homeless living in boxes. I’d like
to play Frisbee on the beach, walk for miles without
a destination, retrace my steps to find my way home
without a phone or map. I wish to be lifted from the pain
of past blunders of choosing critical, dominating men
because they felt familiar. I could become one of those
who says, “I have no regrets. Everything that happened
made me who I am,” as if they’re proud of turning into
a snobby tyrant. Wouldn’t it be lovely to wake each day
with a focus on hikes in the woods, painting en plein air
on the back deck, reading Dickens. No radio or podcasts
about managing grief or listing climate change horrors
to come, nothing about classified documents or cover-ups.
Oh, to be completely unperturbed by news of shootings,
mass graves discovered, sexual assaults, the cyclone
approaching a coastal community with a ten-foot
storm surge. I could buy a deluxe set of Wilton cake
decorating tips like the one I gave away years ago,
still new in the box. I could make chocolate cupcakes
look like roses, dahlias, and blooming cacti.

Liberosis.* Noun. The desire to care less about things;
to figure out a way to relax your grip on life and hold it loosely
and playfully.

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.

*

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and taught workshops nationally on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam). Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Potomac Review The MacGuffin, Slant, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The Nation, and many other publications. She lives in rural central Virginia.

To a Black Locust on the Autumnal Equinox by Daye Phillippo

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To a Black Locust on the Autumnal Equinox
Robinia pseudoacacia

This morning the weather is all you-can-trust-me, again,
      golden sunlight, blue-sky chill of autumn, and yet

the black locust tree lies broken, one bifurcated trunk
      hanging like an arm, useless after a sword fight, the wind

relentless yesterday, dawn to dusk, like someone saying, Turn
      your little clock hands back all you want; some things

write time. A tree, for instance, ring upon ring. Destroying it?
      No time at all. Black locust, tree I’ve loved, every season.

The twisting ridges of its bark, the deep fissures that reveal
      the inner layer, orange wood, sturdy fence posts settlers hewed.

In spring, white, acacia-like blossoms, draping sweet fragrance,
      scent like grape soda. Summer’s feathery blue-green leaves

that fold for “sleep” each night, breathes antediluvian. Nesting
      for songbirds, woodpeckers. In fall and winter, its crown is inked,

whimsical and Seussian. Sentinel where the drive turns west
      toward the house. This time of year I’ve loved that tree most,

its sharp calligraphy and negative space, branches that conceal
      nothing and yet, hold mystery. A cardinal’s in and out.

Once, a wood duck. Once, a flock of migrating bluebirds paused
      to rest their sapphire wings. Two nights ago, as if it knew

this tree’s fate, the haunting nocturne of a Great Horned Owl.

*

Daye Phillippo taught English at Purdue University and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Presence, Cider Press Review, Twelve Mile Review, One Art, Shenandoah, The Windhover, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana where she hosts a monthly Poetry Hour at her local library. Thunderhead (Slant, 2020) was her debut full-length collection.

Traumatic Amputation by W. D. Ehrhart

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Traumatic Amputation

I often walk on nearby Bryn Mawr campus.
Beautiful old college. Beautiful wooded campus.
Some of the trees older than the college.
Magnificent. Take-your-breath-away stately.

But just today, from way across the campus,
I noticed something odd, a vista out-of-place,
an empty space, a vaguely troubling something
I could not at first identify till I got closer.

Then I saw three fresh new tree stumps,
each at least a meter and a half across
and naked white, the cuts so recent that
the wood exposed had not begun to age.

What just a week ago had been three ancient
massive beech trees, home to birds and bugs
and squirrels and who knows what all else,
now were only amputated memories

that likely won’t last longer than my own.
I know that nothing lasts forever, and there
may have been good reason to remove these trees.
But their absence leaves our world much diminished.

*

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.

A Selection of Poems by Bracha K. Sharp

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§

Recalling the pond
turtles on a wooden plank
heron ascending

§

Muggy summer heat
the cats curling and stretching
their pink tongues lolling

§

Expanse of flowers
around a hollow tree trunk
a whole world inside

§

Small fly on my arm
coming in for a landing—
how big is your world!

§

Clinging and searching
In this everyday yearning—
Still, Your Faith in me

§

Silently watching
My mother make food for others;
This quiet Mitzvah

§

CONFLAGRATION

It’s like the tree was on fire,
a conflagration,

bursts of orange
and red shooting up above our
Japanese Maple, still green,

still waiting to change.

In the silence—

red leaves,
flowing,
the gasp of air,
the pause I needed to take.

There is nothing comparable to
a vision, so fleeting,
seen with eyes that
words try to express,
my own always trying to catch up to that moment,

over and over again.

*

Bracha K. Sharp was published in the American Poetry Review, the 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]), Wild Roof Journal, The Closed Eye Open, Rogue Agent, and the Thimble Literary Magazine, among others. 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

Three Poems by Christine Sikorski

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RABBIT SEASONS

Two tonight, resting in the grass, staring at me.
Why do they still surprise me? Even now the garden’s planted,
I take care not to scare them, gaze quietly at their splayed legs,
turning ears. Crave their wild silk touch.

After my brother died, rabbits seemed to be everywhere.
In the snow beneath the spruce, near a hedge behind the church,
while the two plush rabbits from his childhood sat propped
on my bedside table beside The Mill on the Floss—until

I finally re-shelved it, unable to read past the part
where the little girl forgets to feed her brother’s rabbits,
and they die. I lay on my bed and wept for the rabbits, for the sister,
for my brother, who, when we were children, would slap a toy rabbit

just to tease me, laughing when I cried stop, laughing
at how I mixed up what was real with what was not.
According to the Chinese zodiac, Rabbit is the luckiest sign.
The man I married, born in the Year of the Rabbit—how can I

make of his story, a story of luck? His bicycling with friends
that rainy September day, my brother overtaking him seconds before
the car that should not have turned, turned. His wait beside
the dying body for the useless ambulance. Then, our finding each other

at the funeral, burying our memories in each other’s hearts.
Is it possible to unbraid luck from sorrow?
We call our daughter to the window.
Look, sweetie, the bunnies are back.

*

WHEN I WAS YOUNG

The fields would call, and I would answer. Would walk
for an hour alone through tall grass, or visit the creek

between its lines of trees, sit quiet on the flat rock waiting
for ducks to light or tadpoles to rise through the murk.

Sometimes, the sun shone. Sometimes, I came after supper
and stayed until the first stars.

Did I say I was alone? A girl alone, allowed to wander?
I had with me a borrowed dog, who wandered, too,

nose to the ground. We kept each other in sight, kept close
the secrets of our grass and woods, the skinny creek and

the milkweed pods. Now I live far from that place, where
water oozed into my shoes when the way grew marshy,

where I swung a long stick through the cool air,
and the dog lifted her head to find me.

* 

SOLSTICE MORNING

I want to die on a summer day, like this one. Not in winter,
pressed down in dark and cold, despairing—but just when

a cardinal has zinged from our green-cherried tree and landed
in the neighbor’s overgrown lilac bush, just as a boy has jumped

high enough and straight enough to flip a ball into a basket
with his newly-trained right arm. While dandelions are blooming.

When, from somewhere within or beyond, my father extends
his hand to me, my brother laughs, and all I need to do is step

from summer into summer. Walk beside them again.

*

Christine Sikorski’s work has appeared in Waterstone, ArtWord Quarterly, Great River Review, the anthology This Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic Year, and elsewhere. She has been recognized with a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Gesell Award, and other honors. She has taught literature and writing at the University of Minnesota, University of St. Thomas, the Loft Literary Center, a homeless shelter, and other venues. She has been teaching the Monday morning creative writing workshop at the Minnesota JCC since 2012.

Three Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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If Not For The Ghosts

At first, I think it is a small bird stirring
in the dogwood. But no, it’s only the dead
colors falling through what is alive
and still ripening.
                 If not for what memory
holds it would be enough to love and die
quietly as do the quails under the bay trees.
It’s the ghosts that keep me at my desk
learning how to say that being with him
was the same as entering a field of wind naked.

*

Burning The Lover

I’ve been thinking about the letters
I send to the man in Lourmarin
and how, for years, I hear nothing
from him. His wife must be
burning my words. Most likely
in the fireplace. He would be close
to eighty now. Maybe warming
his bones the way my grandfather did.
Turning his back to the flames.

*

Where Words Can’t Go

An autumn night. Light poured through the café’s
open door. Outside, a waiter moved in shadow
with a tray of expressos. I saw a face in profile
a few tables away. The man turned. Want to go
dancing, he asked. Adding that there was a boîte
close-by. French for nightclub. Also for box.

As in a shape that contains what is invisible.
The story inside what happens.

Only the saxophone player knew what to do
after the power went out. The slow tunes
that danced us through the unlit room.
I can no longer hear that music, though
the small of my back recalls the hand
pressing me to a stranger’s chest.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as 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.

Two Poems by Marianne Szlyk

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The First Time I Rode on Blue Hill Avenue

We were heading back to Boston. You drove.
Monday I’d give my notice to the nursing home.

I watched for streets I knew from people at work:
the residents on the floors I brought mail to,

people not quite the age I am now,
about twice the age I was then.

On long afternoons that smelled of Lysol, lotion,
and cigarettes, boiled greens and bitter, sugary coffee,

men spoke to me of smoking weed at the Hi-Hat,
dropped names and songs I didn’t know. Women spoke

of quiet mothers who wore white gloves in August to shop
for cloth they’d sew into school dresses without patterns,

their new sewing machines shaking house walls as thin as paper.
Men spoke of quarries whose ghosts you could almost glimpse.

Women spoke of elm trees that once shaded their streets. Of
lost children raised by strangers. Of lost years in Mattapan.

Note: Mattapan refers to Boston State Hospital, a facility for individuals with mental illness, which closed in 1987.

*

Last Night

I thought of the desert we drove through that fall.
We could have been happy in a cinderblock
house at sunset, the fat, black cat our child.

We were visiting New York, so I did not
mind the hubbub and crowd in these narrow rooms
an upright piano pushed up against the wall.

I didn’t mind drinking tap water, talking
to that short man, watching you flirt with that girl.
We were tourists. None of this was real. Not to me.

But I thought of the ice-green river, Douglas fir
we sat beneath, metal-blue sky without words
for once, another place we could not belong.

*

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, Poetry X Hunger, and One Art. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and I Dream of Empathy are available from Amazon and Bookshop. She and her husband, the writer Ethan Goffman, now live with their black cat Tyler.

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

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

  1. Jane Edna Mohler – Feast
  2. Valerie Bacharach – Betrayal
  3. Julie Weiss – Dream in Which I Stop to Say Goodbye
  4. Jessica Goodfellow – Milk
  5. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer – Three Poems
  6. Dan Butler – Four Poems
  7. Matthew Murrey – Kindergarten
  8. Tammy Greenwood – Evacuation
  9. Robbie Gamble – To Anna, On Her Retirement
  10. Zeina Azzam – Losing a Homeland

Five Poems by Jane McKinley

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Small Talk

In 7th grade we learned the art
of talking small, avoiding
what loomed largest in our minds—
the river one girl’s older brother
walked into, tired of holding
everything together while their father
fell apart. Their mother had died
the year before. In 5th grade
we found out that one girl’s dad
had killed himself when she was two.
Rumors grew. A rope or a revolver?
The Clue game didn’t have a barn.
Our teacher wisely nipped us
in the bud. We never spoke of it again.
In 7th grade, the same girl’s older sister
was discovered—floating in a lake,
half-clothed, face down. A mystery.
That year my boyfriend’s mother died
of cancer. We laughed because his Jell-O
flopped. He hadn’t read directions, didn’t stir.
Our first-chair clarinetist lost her mother
late that spring. A diabetic, her sores
had turned to gangrene. Wasn’t that
what soldiers died from in the Civil War?
One evening that fall I overheard
two 8th-grade girls. I couldn’t help it.
I was curled up on our porch swing
with a book when they walked by.
One said my name. I raised my head
to peek through flames of burning bush,
saw her pointing toward our house,
heard the other answer,
But she wouldn’t have been chosen
if her sister hadn’t died.

*

Perfect Paul

My sister has signed on to match.com
to find a companion for Saturday nights,
but what her profile fails to mention
is that she cannot see, that she has lost
her appetite for light and shadow, that,
in a word, she is completely blind.

She fires off e-mails to prospective dates,
the ones who’ve caught her knowing ear
as she listens to replies. Their letters, turned
to speech, sped up, sound all alike
in Perfect Paul, a voice on her computer,
the only choice that she can stand.

The beauty is that none of them
have guessed the truth—or even part of it.
(Her history alone could occupy
a dozen writers for a lifetime.) Somehow
they can’t imagine that a wit who’s so
articulate is typing by touch alone.

There’s no photo posted. She hasn’t
seen herself for over twenty years so why
should they be privy to a visual. Besides,
the playing field would be uneven then.
She keeps her lack of vision to herself
until she knows she’s piqued their interest.

Anyway, it’s not something you’d blurt out
in an e-mail. Timing is everything,
so she waits until she’s drawn them in,
seduced them with her voice, her laugh,
until she feels secure, their fingers wrapped
around their cells or cordless phones.

A writer of memoirs, she keeps a log
of their reactions, which range from silence
so awkward the conversation stops to You
must be joking! to a sort of itching curiosity,
but what is strange is that not one of them
has ever known a person who was blind.

* 

Marcescent

I never knew there was a word for dead leaves,
for the way they hang on beeches and oaks
long after the raking is done, flying in the face
of deciduous—meaning falling down. Some trees
let go in a timely fashion, showing their true
colors once the chlorophyll’s gone, sealing off
the exit wounds before they drop their leaves.
Not this year. The maples kept their cool
green till the 10th of November when a cold snap
zapped them overnight, drying their leaves to a crisp
brown. As if that weren’t bad enough, these dead
leaves are stuck. The trees had no warning, no mild
early frost to trigger the process of letting go.
Sudden death is like that. No time to prepare
for the loss so the dead keep rattling on.

*

Fear

In what would become her final years,
she had a gig at the medical school,

discussing the complications of diabetes
with students in their 2nd year. She knew

her history inside out—oversized binders
filled two carts. She’d triumphed over

blindness, two kidney transplants,
three heart attacks, the loss of a foot.

Near the end of one class, an earnest,
twenty-something student asked,

“What are your fears for the future?”
“My match.com date on Saturday night!”

After the students left, the professor said,
“You know, you really shouldn’t be here.”

“What? In this room? Or on this planet?”

*

Patient is Blind

My old flip phone
used to open to a photo
I took of my sister
on the eve of
her amputation.
It never failed
to make me smile.
She’d complained
that some nurses
and doctors would enter
her room without
announcing themselves
and begin to touch her—
checking on her already
filleted foot or taking
her vitals—without
telling her what
they were doing,
so someone posted
a laminated sign outside
her room that read:
Patient is Blind.
My sister, afraid
it might tip off
would-be thieves,
asked me to take it down
and hang it beside
the white board near her bed.
That way, it was visible
to those who needed
a reminder, but not to passersby.
She asked, Which nurse
is on the board for tonight?
When I told her the name,
she said, Quick! Tape that sign
to my forehead. Apparently,
this nurse was the worst
offender. Minutes later,
without saying a word
or cracking a smile,
in she walked to take
my sister’s blood pressure
and hand her some meds,
as if she were the one
who couldn’t see
the sign. It was all
we could do not to laugh.

*

Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble, a professional chamber music group based in Princeton, New Jersey. Her poetry collection, Vanitas, won the 2011 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize and was published by Texas Tech University Press. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Great River Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, On the Seawall, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In March she received a 2023 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She lives with her husband in Hopewell, New Jersey.