Month: April 2024

One of Those Nights by Michael Akuchie

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One of Those Nights

In the plot of a dream,
I wished the sand outside
the house would divorce
its lifelessness and suddenly
put on the weight of some
monster that only feeds
on the stench of sinners.
But then I awoke in a room
with a window too tiny to watch
the stars bleed a distinct light
that folks on a night stroll can
cultivate into a way home.

*

Michael Akuchie’s poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Cosmonauts Avenue, Lost Balloon, Drunk Monkeys, Ecotheo Review, Whale Road Review, and Gordon Square Review. His debut chapbook of poems, Wreck (The Hellbore Press), was published in 2021. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

Heirlooms by John Walser

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Heirlooms

When you come home
the lanterns of the evening

the crush and exhale
of summer swelter
has yet to come:
this heatless August:
or at least not
the cardinal feather
early morning burn.

Still the careworn lawns
the drought grass
tongueless:
baked clay cracked
brown grey.

When the sun goes down
let’s sit outside
under the hawk call moon
let’s light the trees
and near midnight on fire

I’ve watered the tomatoes
I’ve watered the herbs
I’ve watered the peppers
as though steeping:

the drying ground
the shoot shadows:
a gift for you.

*

John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Spillway, Water-Stone Review, Plume, Posit and december magazine. His manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Prize, the Ballard Spahr Prize and the Zone 3 Press Prize as well as a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, as well as a Best New Poets, a Pushcart and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie.

Three Red Foxes on a Gray Day by Faith Paulsen

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Three Red Foxes on a Gray Day
I hear it – returning from my mailbox–
how ragged in the wind-torn winter
the raw shriek–
scan field, woods, yard for bird or dog –
But no– one, two,
three sparks
lit matches flare
prance bark
coats thick and ruddy scatting beasts
trick me in the homegrown meadow
in my own backyard
near Philadelphia.
Their calls, their ack-ack-ack’s
stormy confab indecipherable
on this property
which our recent college graduate turned into a meadow
using sustainable skills learned on his study abroad.
Planned it, smothered grass, left oak leaves where they fell.
Planted butterfly weed and shade perennials,
digging bare-chested into soil
dreaming of earthworms,
frogs and butterflies to be enumerated next spring.
Then moved to Chicago
leaving us and our new meadow to process by neglect.
Today a snow day two years into pandemic
the pandemic itself an endless snow day minus
snowy bootprints, wet mittens
and wonder. Instead
mostly boredom and fear.
Still, today, The bleak meadow – cold, hard ground
under leaves under snow
where sometimes deer bed down in the brush –
renders up, now, here,
these little wildfires.
The one on the slope cries out open-mouthed ack
ack-ack-ack.
The other two bow their heads
as if a rock and not a bark
had been hurled at their flattened ears.
One prances, paws the ground, each step its own meaning.
(Male or female? Why are there three?)
Birth, death, mating, earths warm with kits. On land once tameless,
then Lenape, later farmland, woods.
In myth, the fox, fire-bringer. emerges
at times of great and unpredictable change.
Suddenly brave, the two rear up
chase the one through my meadow
into the un-owned woods,
leaving what they came to bring me: Their dance.
Mystery enacted.
*
Author of three chapbooks and mother of three sons, Faith Paulsen’s day job is in insurance, Her work appears or is upcoming in Scientific American, Poetica Review, Poetry Breakfast, Milk art journal, Philadelphia Stories, Book of Matches, One Art, Panoply, Thimble, Evansville Review, Mantis and others. faithpaulsenpoet.com/

Cathie by Linda Laderman

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Cathie

Sunday morning. The line is long. I walk to the hostess stand to check the wait. Thirty-five minutes. It’s worth it. The food is good and cheap. Three thick slices in an order of French toast. I look for Cathie, our regular waitress. She knows our order by heart. I start back towards the end of the line when I notice a 5×7 framed photo on the shelf behind the stand. I move closer to get a better look at the picture. A headshot of a woman. Her blonde hair touches her bare shoulders. A smile I think I recognize. I read the words under the picture. Cathie, waitress—died. I pry details from the girl at the counter—when, how, who found her? I consider my reaction. I didn’t see her out. And almost anyone who meant anything is gone. In a dream, I scratch the bluebells off my black wallet and put them in a red pot. I never touch another piece of French toast.

*

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Gyroscope, SWWIM, ONE ART, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Scapegoat Review, Rust &Moth, Minyan Magazine, 3rd Wednesday, and Mom Egg Review. She has work forthcoming from Action, Spectacle and The Argyle Literary Magazine. She is the 2023 recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her mini-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online at https://www.harbor-review.com/what-i-didnt-know-i-didnt-know. Find her at lindaladerman.com.

Radio Observatory by Dane Karnick

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Radio Observatory

Before the quiet zone
Patsy Cline is singing
Walking After Midnight

As my Dodge Omni
Sputters closer to
The giant metal ears

My AM station is
Searching for you near
Allegheny Mountains

Until I encounter
Radio silence and
Leave the car behind

To walk among machines
Which can hear a snowflake
Fall on their steel membranes

Amplifying stellar buzz
Like audio goliaths
Which strain to eavesdrop

On galactic tenants
Murmuring across space
Beyond our senses

Striving to interpret
Those private light years
Just as friendships tether us

Around curious worlds
Of unguarded voices
That tremble on inspection

Noisy as quasars
When listening too close
To what is kept from earshot

*

Dane Karnick was influenced by poet, Tony Moffeit while attending Colorado State University. Dane’s poetry has appeared in publications such as Gravel, El Portal and Bookends Review. He grew up by the Colorado “Rockies”, lived in the Seattle area for 30 years, and resides in Treasure Valley, Idaho.

Cinnabar by Melody Wilson

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Cinnabar

He comes home after dark
from his long day at the mine
way out in the Panamint Valley.
Sometimes he unpacks four or five
rocks onto the table, turns off the lamp
and calls us into the kitchen.
He plugs in the blacklight, waves it
one end to the other—all of us
peer into the dark. The red one is calcite,
he points, willemite the green.
We are looking for tungsten, for blue.
Very rare, he says. Eventually
Mama switches on the lights
pulls his dinner from the oven
complains about the lateness of the hour.
We jostle each other to bed
listen to the screen door bang
as he walks out to the yard,
brushes cinnabar from his boots.
Swoosh, swoosh,
swoosh swoosh swoosh.
Flashes of red and green pulse
behind my eyelids as I try
to imagine blue.

*

Melody Wilson is a pushcart nominated poet whose poems appear in Pangyrus, VerseDaily, The Fiddlehead, Crab Creek Review, San Pedro River Review and elsewhere. She is pursuing her MFA at Pacific University. Her chapbook, Spineless: Memoir in Invertebrates came out in 2023. Find more of her work at melodywilson.com.

Gift of Crows by Adam Haver

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Gift of Crows

Forty years with crows,
throwing kernels and
not looking back as they

caw. Time is only forward,
staccato, so we lunge
ahead with the sound,

but the bright night of
birds, this murder din,
will always recall you.

*

Adam Haver’s writing has been featured in Popshot Quarterly, Poetry Scotland, Ballast, and other journals. He received the 2022 Willie Morris Award for Poetry and an award from the Utah Division of Arts & Museums for a collection of poems addressing wolf conservation. You can connect with him on X: @ac_haver.

Two Poems by Barn Brand

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Lost
I find myself sitting at a hard used grimy kitchen table with a green and white checkered tablecloth that leaves half the table exposed
The table is surrounded by four chairs, three clearly are set mates to the table sharing a four leaf clover design carved into their upright, the fourth, the one I’m sitting on, looks more like a junk store giveaway, its ripped green vinyl seat cushion pox marked with cigarette burns
I don’t know this place
I don’t know why I am here or what is expected of me
I’m not sure I know exactly who I am
My name is on the tip of my tongue, it just won’t let me spit it out
I keep trying but it refuses to budge
I’m afraid I will swallow it
And lose my name forever
I’d like to go home, but I really don’t know what that means
I’m scared, no I’m frightened, no I’m terrified
*
Mud
Bob said he did not come from dust
Of this he was certain
His life was too difficult to trace back to dust
Dust floats in the lightest sweet breath of the wind
Dust can leave the gravity of pain and witness the cosmos reborn
No, Bob was the descendant of mud, thick deep wet, boot sucking mud
Add a little lightning
Add a little DNA
Add a halfway decent sculptor
and you got Bob
When Bob passed away, my broken heart and Bob’s ashes waited for a thunderstorm
After the ground was soaked and puddling, I took the tractor out beyond the farm line and poured Bob into a mud filled trench and ground him in with my work boots. It was a slow process, every time I raised my leg, I was at war with the mud that wanted to pull me down to join Bob
I waited there for lightning, used Bob’s Bowie knife to draw blood from my wedding ring finger, watched my DNA join Bob and his mud and prayed that he would come back to me
But the mix was not right
I turned back to the farmhouse that Bob built by hand during the first 3 years that we farmed, and started the journey of living with my memories
*
Bronx born and raised Barn Brand, age 77, has been writing poetry since the age of 12. He feels that his words have now come of age and are ready to be read. Barn is a member of the poetry circles of West Milford, N.J. and Yuma, AZ. – the two communities where he lives his life. When not reading or writing or gardening Barn pedals down the road averaging 4,500 miles each year. His work has appeared on The Recovering Self, and in the MasterLink. His work will also appear later this year in the Paterson Literary Review.
*
Author’s Note:
To me, the writing of poetry is an attempt to bridge a feeling from one mind to another – sometimes we transfer intense emotions that attach to the reader’s core, sometimes what we offer is more lightly felt, but always it is the emotion rather than the story that is paramount.
Grief, lust, depression, love, hate, forgiveness, reverence, humor, and harmony – our emotional history, how we integrate it and how we share it makes us who we are – and that is why poetry matters.

Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

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Sleeping Swans

I pause by the water to stare
at white feathered bodies
floating so peacefully limp
they appear to be dead.

How can swans sleep
with their heads tucked
beneath their wings?

Another question I can’t answer
as I amble along a path
winding past boats on one side
and cruising cars on the other.

The day is dense with clouds
consuming the light I need
to see what lies ahead.

How long will the sky remain
overcast without pouring rain?

I don’t even know if my legs
will last another mile.

I could trip or get a cramp,
anything could happen
between now and the time
I reach my favorite bench
to view the missing horizon.

Just like my beloved could fall
again or have another fever
in the house where he waits for me,
too frail to join my walks.

When he drifts off during the day,
I watch him like these swans, afraid
his awkward slouch means
he will not wake from his chair.

*

I’ll Be There Now

“Are you afraid of lice?” my son asks,
informing me he just treated the kids
he needs me to babysit.

Am I? Afraid of bugs a shampoo can kill
after three years of dodging an airborne virus
which shut down the world for months on end?

Keeping six feet apart was sensible once.
Until isolation became an ingrained habit.

At the height of it, I asked for
backwards hugs, avoiding droplets
from little noses and mouths

So now that they’re back in school,
kissing hair, not cheeks is risky too.

I’m at an age when the muscle that pumps
my blood could fail with less warning
than a sore throat progressing to a cough.

How long can I wait to embrace the life
I stayed alone in my house to protect?

“Don’t worry,” I tell my son.
“I’ll be there as planned at 6.”

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications. jacquelinejules.com

Immune to Nostalgia by Joan Mazza

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Immune to Nostalgia

I’m not. I go back to ride
memories as if they were
peak experiences
of transcendence, pleasure—
the old summer bungalow
in Sound Beach, alone
with mother,
unlimited time to read
and read, and walk
the wooded paths
that are no longer.
Time to linger and watch
squirrels. No car or phone,
nowhere to be
except home for supper
and my mother’s cooking.
Clams or scungilli,
fresh from the sea,
over linguine. Wild
raspberries picked
in a thicket on the next
property, boiled into jam
and jarred for sweetness
during Brooklyn winters.
Even now, I try to grasp
that flavor in the air.
Some insomniac nights,
from the screened porch
I ride the thermals,
inhale the warm scent
of wet summer’s dark
and watch fireflies
flash in synchrony.
My button pendant
Life Protect 24/7
blinks back
with equal ardor.

*

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

MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON by Stephen Ruffus

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MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON

This is not the world.
No longer so green
and sweet.

Memory is a contusion,
an enlarged heart, blood
rampant against the vein.

This is not the world
without him in it.
Nor will it ever be or was.

*

Stephen Ruffus’ work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, 3rd Wednesday, the American Journal of Poetry, The Shore, Poetica Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Stone Poetry Quarterly, among others. Also, he will have a piece in a forthcoming issue of the I-70 Review and in Hanging Loose Magazine. Ruffus was a semifinalist for the 2022 Morgenthau Prize sponsored by Passenger Books, and has had two poems nominated in 2023 for a Pushcart Prize. He was a founding poetry editor of Quarterly West and twice a recipient of a Utah Original Writing Competition Award. While he has lived in Colorado, California, and Utah where he studied writing at major universities and held fellowships and teaching positions, he is originally from New York City and still considers himself a New Yorker in many respects. Currently, he lives in Salt Lake City with his wife.

Two Poems by A. Kahn

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Pressure

to play with boys instead of dolls
or pressure from boys
who treated me
like a doll instead of a person

*

Carry

I am sorry
I could not carry you
in my arms
because
I could not carry you
in my body.

*

A. Kahn creates raw, emotional poetry and creative nonfiction. Her prose has been published in Of Rust and Glass, and artwork in the horror anthology Café Macabre II.

Two Poems by Katey Funderburgh

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Babycake

Winter sun taunted tendrils through my mother’s blinds
on the day she brought me home to no one but herself.
Pressing me to her, peeling back another daughter
with worry coiled in her chest, eyes that saw and saw
each other. Women are snakes: you inside me inside
her inside her mother who died on purpose before
the snows came. I handfed bits of cake to mine, slept
against her until the mirage left her eyelids,
until she started making the coffee again.
Unending rain the whole summer we poured concrete
into the holes we dug in the backyard, erecting
a barn where once there stood nothing but a field and
my mother’s heatvisions of horses we would feed
every morning. This is what saved her— not the bedsheets
I changed but the buckets of grain and hot water
steaming in each stall. She put me in a saddle
when I was still diapered. You were already burrowed
at my spinal center, watching how we almost broke
the tether, severed and sighed in the grass between
the teeth of our horses— the heads always growing back,
the shed skin always returning its need to blink us
back open into ourselves, every daughter
mixing the batter with her hands. I do, she does,
she did, you will— worry it’s not enough.

*

Sappho at the Gay Bar

Here, the Gods are kin to ink on a girl’s arm.
Love, I hear your voice on their tongues.
They print fauna on their bodies. Flora
speaks between fingers

of thin-skinned girls who ask about you.
I have read what remains of us. The same
fire under my skin, the same anger.
I am taught sin.

Here, they are named of me.
Their unmade beds, their grass-gentle hands—
they hold my undead body.
Body I wrote

to worship you, yet here we breathe, among them—

*

Katey Funderburgh is an emerging poet from Colorado. She is a current MFA Poetry student at George Mason University, where she is also a reader for phoebe and SoToSpeak literary journals, as well as for Poetry Daily. Katey’s earlier work has appeared in Josephine Quarterly, samfiftyfour, and Jet Fuel Review, among others. When she isn’t toiling over poems, Katey can be found laying in the sun with her cat, Thistle.

Allure by Clela Reed

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Allure

“A domesticated cow [French Limousine]
has been found living among a herd
of gigantic bison in a Polish forest.”
       — Ornithologist Adam Zbyryt

Maybe what first caught her eye
were the elegant black noses, sculpted,
with the oiled sheen of crow feathers
so unlike the pale, flat ones of her herd
whose insipid brownness filled her days.

Or perhaps, it was the way they stood
silently at the edge of the field, watching,
their stoic eyes shining like berries tucked into fur.
Maybe it was their ancient forms—muscular, dark—
or the beautiful upward curve of their horns.

It could have been the way they kicked away
the wolves at the edge of the primeval forest.
Maybe it was musk. Or the curly coats
or the shaggy beards their proud heads tossed
as they turned to go. No one knows, but something

urged her to follow the mystery that stirred
and called, leave the old familiars to chew
blandness, to blink their stolid, long-lashed eyes
as they watched her walk away
and not look back.

*

Clela Reed is the author of seven collections of poetry. The most recent, Silk (Evening Street Press, 2019), won the Helen Kay Chapbook Prize and then a 2020 Georgia Author of the Year award. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had poems published in The Cortland Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, Valparaiso Review, The Literati Review, Clapboard House, Red Door, and many others. A former English teacher and Peace Corps volunteer, when not traveling or chasing deer from her garden, she lives and writes with her husband in their woodland home near Athens, Georgia.

Letter to Earth by Tamara Madison

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Letter to Earth

I know you suffer. It’s an old story.
But I believe the day will come

when your rivers will run pure again,
when your seas will be clean and dazzled

with fish. Nights will be black again
and crackle with starlight. For every

living thing that went extinct, new ones
will take their place. In your marrow,

the memory of us will turn again to carbon
and remain there, finally harmless.

Air will flow sweet around the trunks
of trees, waterfalls will pound

the river rocks, and the sky will fill
with insects and birds, wild and loud

*

Tamara Madison is the author of three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic”, “Moraine” (both from Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar” (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and two chapbooks, “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig, Worcester Review, ONE ART, and many other publications. More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Two Poems by David O’Connell

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Starter Home

Before us, others called our house our house.
We know their names, met their grown children.
At the closing, they said mom’s house, dad’s house,

but we were not confused. In one day, our house
was empty, full. If possible, it was more our house

because we thought, these walls should be blue,
not green, and we were right. Later, we returned
with the baby, and then years became these rooms

where she once and the times that we all. Now,
there is our house, and our house, and our house,

so that often when we speak, three doors open
on three rooms where what happened happens
almost as it happened in our house, which we agree

will always be our house, even when it’s theirs.

*

How to Tell the One About Fatherhood

A man and his daughter walk into a drugstore.
That he won’t know best is the twist. The setup
relies on a tacky Grim Reaper, its skull white

as disposable utensils, a plastic black cowl
hiding the wire it hangs from above them.
Explain it’s October and how the decoration,

triggered by their entrance, shimmies and moans
so that the daughter, just four, buries her face
in her palms. Jump then to bedtime: the girl

in tears, afraid of the dark, the man at a loss.
Understand that the story you’re telling
is less joke than trial, that its outcome

will mean one thing to the man and another
to this girl who’ll remember her whole life
what comes next. It’s death, of course,

that upset her, though she doesn’t know one day
she’ll die. As will her father. And the father,
through all his It can’t hurt you, I’d never let…

doesn’t think he’s lying. This is the time now
to pause, leaving space for your listener
to feel for a man who struggles for answers

as he gets in the car and drives his daughter
back to the store in her pajamas. Nearing
the end, take time to sketch the empty aisles,

the long fluorescents humming as if angry
with the night. Take care. Bring them
to this moment cautiously. Not so much

allegory as anecdote. Less anecdote than
ephemera: a father lifting up his child,
saying, trust me, there’s nothing to fear.

*

David O’Connell is the author of Our Best Defense (Červená Barva Press) and the chapbook A Better Way to Fall (The Poet’s Press). His work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Poetry Review, among other journals. More of his work can be found at davidoconnellpoet.com.

Four Poems by Ann Kammerer

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Red Coat

The night I went to find her
she was wearing the red coat,
the one she got
at Burlington Coat Factory
for her 40th class reunion.

“I always wanted a red coat,”
Mom had said.
“They’re so youthful.”

She wore it proudly,
tossing it over pilled sweaters
and filthy sweatpants,
cinching the belt
to accent a waistline
starved by gin
and Percocet.

Now, under streetlamp,
she was vibrant,
the coat ever dazzling.
Seated on a frayed blanket,
wedged between wizened men,
Mom broke through the clutter
of black bags and bottles,
her coat a billboard
amidst cardboard signs.

“Time to go Mom.”
I nudged her peeling flats
and lifted her face
from a man’s nubby shoulder.
Her eyes quivered,
her irises soft pink.

“They need cigarettes.”
She groaned as I pulled her up,
her body a collapse
of boney arms and legs.
“Give them some.”

“I quit,” I said.

She swatted me
with limp paper hands.

“You would,
Wouldn’t you?”

Lowering her into the car,
I drove away,
passing weedy lots,
a Rite-Aid,
then a McDonald’s,
two blocks from a burned-out house.

“I always loved Chicken McNuggets,”
she mumbled,
the glow from the Golden Arches
striping her coat.
“You know I wouldn’t be like this
if your dad had just got me
what I wanted.”

*

Pancakes

Mom was propped up
with pillows
the last day I visited
the hospital.

She was leaning,
her balding head
touching the bed rail.
One leg was covered
with bleached white sheets,
the other bony and extended
with a sock hanging
from the toe.
Clutching a rosary
in her bent lumpy hand,
she stared at the TV,
her mouth gaping
over her brown stubby teeth.

“Put your toys down,” Mom said.
“Get to the table now.”

I set my purse
on the floor
and laid my coat
across the back
of a red vinyl chair.
Stepping to her bedside,
I pulled the sock back
around her crusted heel,
and smoothed the sheet
over her cold, grey legs.
I sat down and slipped off
my work shoes,
the smell of hospital food
from a hallway cart
seeping into her room.

“We’re almost ready
for dinner,” Mom said.
“The frying pan.
It should be
nice and hot.”

Mom dropped her rosary.
She centered her head
on her brittle neck,
her eyes rolling
behind half-closed lids.
Lifting one arm in a semi-circle,
she rotated the other in mid-air,
thin folds of transparent skin
dangling from her underarm.

“We’re having pancakes tonight.”
Her swollen tongue clacked,
elastic bands of spit
forming on the sides
of her mouth.
“Just like every Monday.”

Mom blended batter,
her withered fist spiraling.

“Come on,” she said.
“Set the table now.
We’re almost ready.”

The more she stirred,
the more her hospital gown
slid from one shoulder,
revealing a purple hole
near her breastbone
where nurses dribbled medicine
through plastic tubes.

“Come on,” she said.
“Be a good girl and help.”

I reached over the bed rail,
touching her bony arm.

“Mom.
How’s it going?”

Her arms collapsed
on her distended belly.

“Is that you?”
Her voice warbled
as her cheek pulsed.

“Yes. It’s me Mom.”

Mom looked past me
with glassy yellowed eyes.

“Did you come for dinner?”
Her breath pushed her words
through papery lips.

“Yes,” I said.
You were making pancakes,
weren’t you?”

Mom blinked.
Her head tilted
as if she heard something
faint and far away.

“You like pancakes,
don’t you?”

I stroked a wisp of hair
on her temple.

“Yes.
I love pancakes.”

Mom’s mouth curved,
breaking the stillness
of her face.
Her eyes shuttered
and she began to shake,
her arms fluttering
as her legs
made the sheets
move like ghosts.

*

Candy Counter

I always thought
I’d go to college,
but when the time came,
I didn’t.

After high school,
my only ambitions
were to get an apartment
and do something aside
from selling hotdogs
at a mall kiosk.
Teachers said
I was good at math
and science
and even writing.
Mr. Bonfiglio said
my future was bright.
I didn’t see that,
and figured he was just
trying to get me
to stay after school,
go out to some park,
drink wine,
and run his hands
all over me
like he had
with my friend Mary.

Mom wasn’t big
on jobs or college
and wasn’t much help.
She had gone straight
from high school
to work the candy counter
at a department store.
Dad had worked there, too,
selling appliances.
They double-dated for a while
with a guy from automotive
and a girl from lingerie.
Shortly after they married,
Dad made her quit,
saying no wife of his
was going to sell sweet things
for a living.

“Just work a while,” Mom told me.
“Maybe you’ll be lucky
and meet Mr. Wonderful.
You could quit then,
have a kid.”

I told Mom
that wasn’t my plan,
that I wanted to do more,
that people said
I was smart.

“I’m thinking about
getting a better job,” I said.
“You know, maybe down
at the dry cleaners,
make a little more money,
see if they’ll teach me
how to tailor,
or something like that.”

Mom poured a drink
and sat down
at the kitchen table.
She lit a cigarette
and called me smarty-pants.
Crossing her legs,
she smoothed her bare calf,
kicking off one shoe
to rub her foot.

“Better watch your fanny
if you do that,” Mom said.
“I hear that Rod guy
who runs the place
gets pretty friendly
with counter girls.
Customers, too.”

I took one of her Viceroys
and slumped on the couch
to watch reruns of “Medical Center.”
Chad Everett filled the screen,
the scene cutting
between him and a blonde nurse,
his eyes technicolor blue,
his bangs gelled
in a perfect crescent,
his lean body draped
in a white doctor coat.

“Well look at him.”
Mom drew on her cigarette,
her lipstick ringing the filter.
She recrossed her legs
and ran her fingertips
over her other calf.
“He can take my pulse any day.”

*

Fugue

A cloud of swearing
seeped into my room
a few hours after
I went to bed.
Dad had missed dinner,
never calling,
coming home late,
making Mom mad,
both of them drunk,
Dad throwing things
and punching walls,
making her yell
and break things, too.

Their shouts rose
in vicious rhapsody,
fading in somber fugue.
Falling asleep,
I woke to the lapping
of curtains on the sill,
a slice of pink sun
spilling on the sheets.

The morning was still,
the living room
strewn with bottles
and upended chairs.
The TV was on,
Phil Donahue
caressing a mic,
immersed in a sea
of middle-aged women
in double knits
and stretch floral shirts,
their necklines bridled
with ascots.

I stood and watched,
drinking warm Coke
and eating cereal from the box.
The sink was jammed
with crusted-over plates,
so I loaded the dishwasher
then got ready
for my 10 o’clock shift
at the dry cleaners.

Walking to work,
I tried not to think
about where Dad went
most nights,
or why Mom didn’t
call her friend Ruth Ann
like she used to.
She was happier then,
or maybe I was littler,
not understanding their exchanges
over Jim Beam and cigarettes,
bemoaning how men
could slip around
and they couldn’t,
that it just wasn’t fair
that they caught a raw deal.

“Men,” Mom would say.
“They’re either obsessed
or they’re womanizers.”

She took a drink
and slammed her glass.

“Well how about this?”
Ruth Ann slapped the table.
“You could just shorten it,
say ‘All men are obsessed.’
That ‘bout says it.”

They’d laugh and smirk
and clink their glasses.
I’d laugh, too,
jumping and twirling,
half-repeating their words,
mom grabbing my ponytail,
telling me to go play.

“Quit listening,” she’d say.
“Go away. Be a good girl.”

When I got to the cleaners,
my boss Rod
was at the front counter,
leaning close and talking
to an olive-skinned woman
in a filigreed dress.
His mom Ruby
was there, too,
finishing up orders,
getting ready to go
for the day.

“Good morning.”
Rod stood up straight.
So did the woman.
Ruby peered over her glasses
as she ran a tape
on the calculator.

“This is Mrs. Carras.”
Rod gazed at Mrs. Carras
but talked to me.
“She’s, well, one of our regulars.”

Mrs. Carras held out
her slim hand,
her rings sparkling
with fluorescent light.

“Are you Rod’s new girl?”
Her sleek red lips broke a smile.
“You’re Millie and Frank’s
daughter, right?”

I said yes.
She squeezed my forearm,
her touch silky,
her eyes traveling
up the center of my blouse,
descending to the hemline
of my skirt.

“You’re a perfect doll.”
Her fingertips lingered
as she pulled her hand away.
“I’m sure we’ll talk more
someday.”

*

Ann Kammerer lives in Oak Park, Illinois, having relocated from her home state of Michigan with her husband and daughter. Her work has appeared in Fictive Dream, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, Open Arts Forum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Thoughtful Dog, The Ekphrastic Review, and anthologies by Crow Woods Publishing and Querencia Press. She has received top honors and made the short list in several writing contests. Her chapbook collections of narrative poetry include “Yesterday’s Playlist” (Bottlecap Press 2023), “Beaut” (forthcoming 2024 from Kelsay Books), and “Friends Once There (forthcoming 2024 from Impspired).

My Mother Gets a Can Opener and Roses for Her Birthday by Marjorie Maddox

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

My Mother Gets a Can Opener and Roses for Her Birthday

The man she loves surprises her
by not giving what she needs
around her finger. On her birthday, the metal ring
from the green bean can
clangs on the counter. She laughs
nervously, runs her finger
along the long stems of new roses
arranged traditionally in the vase
my dead father gave her,
though she would never take his flowers, expensively bought.
And this love, spontaneous in its practicality,
practical in its spontaneity, she wears proudly
everywhere, polished, shiny
as the kitchen her cans still whir in
while the two cook, hungrily, together.

*

Professor of English at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 16 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (International Book and Illumination Book Award Winners); and the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, a collaboration with her artist daughter, Anna Lee Hafer (www.hafer.work) and others. How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks (Kelsay) and Seeing Things (Wildhouse) will be available in 2024. In addition, she has published the story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and 4 children’s and YA books. With Jerry Wemple, she is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press) and is assistant editor of Presence. She hosts Poetry Moment at WPSU. See marjoriemaddox.com

Gift Card by Mark Williams

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Gift Card

I’m getting into my car at Starbucks
when a man appears out of somewhere. Says
he needs to go to Evansville (where I’m going),
ten miles away from where we are. “Sorry,
I can’t take you,” I say with cowardly shame.

“I’m not asking you to take me,” he says.
And with the flash of a $25 Schnucks gift card,
he says he doesn’t need groceries,
he needs a ride, and he’ll pay for it
with the twenty-five dollars I should give to him.

“You can understand why I might be suspicious,” I say.
Flipping the card, he says, “Call this number.
You’ll see. What do you take me for anyway?”
Though I’m more inclined to believe he is taking me,
I hand him a twenty and five ones.

I’ve been hacked on Facebook at least three times.
My wife’s health insurance was billed five thousand
seven hundred dollars by a provider who hadn’t provided.
Spam Risk always calls when I’m eating.
“You owe me an apology,” he says. “You’ll see.”

Four days have passed. I haven’t called the number.
I haven’t gone to Schnucks. The card, still in my car
beside the gear shift, stares up at me as if
asking me to think the best of people.
I think I’ll leave it in my car a few more days.

*

Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in ONE ART, The Southern Review, Rattle, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and other journals. Kelsay Books published his collection, Carrying On, in 2022. His fiction is forthcoming in BULL, Gargoyle, The Main Street Rag, and Valparaiso Fiction Review. He lives in Evansville, Indiana.

Gorse by Marcia Cardelús

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Gorse

The Northeast corner of
of our local organic food store
Wild by Nature
has that smell.
You know the one.
The one you don’t exactly like
but are attracted to
a kind of witchy brew
of dried herbs,
essential oils, vitamins and incense.

It was there I saw the
“Discover Your Remedy” display,
built of wood, promoting nature.
It was divided into seven sections,
and each of the sections
was divided into subsections
that housed sets of small brown bottles
of labeled remedy.

Only one sub-section was sold out.

Gorse.

I wondered what it was about Gorse
That made it so needed.

I opened the small
drawer of descriptions
in the display,
thumbed down the list
to see.

It said:
The Positive Effect of Gorse is Hope.

*

Marcia Cardelús is an 83-year-old poet from New York. She has been writing for most of her life but has never submitted her poems until now. A chance encounter resulted in her first published poem — The Señora in the Blue Sweater — that appeared in Res Magazine in April, 2023.

The ONE ART 2024 Haiku Anthology

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

The ONE ART 2024 Haiku Anthology

A Note from the Editor:

Since discovering contemporary haiku just a few years ago, I’ve become fascinated by its power. As a practice, every day it teaches me deeper gratitude and heightens my ability to find connections in an often-fractured world.

In curating this anthology, I hoped to showcase the immense range of emotion that our form captures through both newer and revered voices. In reading thousands of haiku for our anthology, the strength and depth are even more than I imagined.

Furthermore, I’m proud of the submission guidelines that encouraged the inclusion of poems that have appeared on the poet’s social media. This is Timothy Green’s term of art “curation,” as we discussed on The Poetry Space_, which actively encourages the sharing of poetry. I think we can agree that none of these apples are bruised just by having hung on a tree before.

Lastly, I ask you to share our anthology with a friend that doesn’t normally read poetry.

Best,

Katie Dozier

*

warm spring day
through an open window
the neighbor’s violin

~ Stephen A. Allen

*

slowly filling up with stars inflatable pool

~ Billy Antonio

*

dead butterfly on our stoop—
              this time for sure, you promise

~ Lana Hechtman Ayers

*

dancing between
conscious & subconscious
dolphins

~ Joe Barca

*

peace talks
the consensus
of cherry blossoms

~ Roberta Beary

*

her silence
guiding a songbird
to its nest

~ Jaundré van Breda

*

another cuppa tea
more questions
than answers

~ Randy Brooks

*

peace garden poppies blown away

~ Helen Buckingham

*

breaking the wax seal
on a spring letter
tulip bulb

~ Ingrid Bruck

*

arcade day I jingle all the way

~ Susan Burch

*

peas and carrots
I never know
what they’re saying

~ petro c. k.

*

I sleep
in his t-shirt
night shift

~ Sharon Ferrante

*

anniversary
on my parents’ gravestone
my reflection

~ Jim Fowler

*

turkey buzzards
hunched over the carcass
autumn deepens

~ Joshua Gage

*

your mind
a lukewarm bowl
of nothing

~ Barbara Anna Gaiardoni

*

crabby neighbor’s apples rotting on the branch

~ Robbie Gamble

*

windy day
reading on park bench
          page-turner

~ Cindy Gore

*

at the library
a conference call
we are listening

~ Adam Haver

*

dead son
I leave his many addresses
in my book

~ Cindy Guentherman

*

loosening
the violin strings
winter hospice

~ Jennifer Hambrick

*

their promise:
her lotus
lips

~ Ed Higgins

*

New Year’s Eve—
that last sweet lungful
of smoke

~ Ruth Holzer

*

winter ocean waves rejection slips

~ Sangita Kalarickal

*

I reach for you
the space between
stars

~ Mary Keating

*

everything
in its place—
toilet paper

~ Julie Bloss Kelsey

*

another mother’s day band aid for the exit wound

~ Kat Lehmann

*

winter hike
a dry streambed
running with leaves

~ Robert Lowes

*

same flowers back home Stone Mountain

~ paul m.

*

all lake mist cloud in one

~ Anna Maris

*

spilled grass seed
grows on garage shelves
escapees

~ Jenny Middleton

*

old song
on car radio
how far I have come!

~ Biswajit Mishra

*

on the forest floor
a nest without eggs
unbroken

~ Tina Mowrey

*

Pluto frozen in orbit—
meatball
buried in freezer

~ Brian O’Sullivan

*

dusk reedbed
a starling
starts a movement

~ Ben Oliver

*

his laugh hanging in the air stale smoke

~ John Pappas

*

mimosa leaves
shy away if touched—
uncommon sense

~ James Penha

*

log-jammed river
what exactly
is holding me back

~ Bryan Rickert

*

new construction
above an old outcropping—
rotting acorns

~ David Rosenthal

*

a naked birch
announces
here i am

~ Colin Sandberg

*

the punctuated pauses
in his confession
sunset thunderbolts

~ Kelly Sargent

*

magnetic kisses
sharing
a cold

~ Carla Schwartz

*

within permissible limits
microplastics
in her breast milk

~ Julie Warther Schwerin

*

star slippage
the cartoon draws out
its nightgleam sky

~ Alan Summers

*

bedtime story
slipper orchids drop off
one by one

~ Margaret Tau

*

first spring blossoms
she plucks the white one—
chin whisker

~ Shelly Reed Thieman

*

sturgeon moon
               fish leap to dance in the air

~ Nancy Tinnell

*

stubbing my toe
the whole world
becomes toe

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

*

first day of summer—
my daughter begs
for a higher underdog

~ Michael Dylan Welch

*

wedding haiku
two worlds
one kiss

~ Dick Westheimer

*

crown of thorns
the dogwood blooms
restoration

~ Joshua Eric Williams

*

Editor Bios

Katie Dozier’s love of poetry first bloomed as a child. She memorized Robert Frost sitting on a tree stump and bathed in Edgar Allan Poe as an adolescent. While studying words at Florida State University, KHD also played with chips and became a professional poker player. The author of Watering Can, she’s passionate about encouraging others to discover and share contemporary poetry, through her X account (@Katie_Dozier), as curator of The NFT Poetry Gallery, host of the weekly podcast The Poetry Space_, Haiku Editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry, and as an editor for Rattle.

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry and Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine. His most recent poetry collection is Meatless (Plan B Press). His poetry collection Take Care is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in Spring 2025.

Louisa Schnaithmann is Consulting Editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry. She is the author of Plague Love (Moonstone Press).

Contributor Bios

Stephen A. Allen was born in Vermont and currently lives in Michigan. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and also studied poetry at Amherst College and the University of Notre Dame while pursuing unrelated degrees. He writes in both Western and Eastern forms, and in the latter has been published most recently in Modern Haiku, contemporary haibun online, and MacQueen’s Quinterly.

Billy Antonio is a poet, writer, and public school teacher. He is the author of “where it was” (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York, 2020). His poetry has won international recognition including first places in the European Kukai and Shiki Kukai. He is a Dwarf Stars Award nominee. He lives in Laoac, Pangasinan, Philippines with his wife, Rowena, and his daughters, Felicity and Asiel Sophie.

Lana Hechtman Ayers has shepherded over a hundred poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere.

Joe Barca is a poet from the Boston area. He has a partner, two children, and a wheaten terrier named Brady. He is a reader for Whale Road Review and a regular contributor to the The Poetry Space_ podcast. Some of his favorite poets are Mai Der Vang, Kevin Young, and Li-Young Lee. He is a fast talker and a slow runner.

Roberta Beary identifies as genderfluid and lives in County Mayo, Ireland and Washington DC. In 2023 their sonnet was one of 10 finalists in the Rattle Poetry Prize, and in 2022 their prose poem was awarded joint 1st place in the Bridport Prize. They are the longtime haibun editor for Modern Haiku. Carousel, their fourth collection of short poems, is available from Snapshot Press.

Jaundré van Breda is a poet from South Africa. Several of his poems are published on the AVBOB Poetry Competition website. Jaundré is the author of Ask the Vultures, A Heart Beats in the Dirt, And Something Grows That Will Not Die, and Something Too Holy to Be Holy. These titles are available at amazon.com

Dr. Randy Brooks is Professor of English Emeritus at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, where he teaches courses on haiku, tanka, and Japanese poetics. He and his wife, Shirley Brooks, are publishers of Brooks Books and co-editors of Mayfly haiku magazine. His most recent books include Walking the Fence: Selected Tanka and The Art of Reading and Writing Haiku: A Reader Response Approach.

Helen Buckingham’s haiku and senryu have been published throughout the world. Her work features in Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013) and her most recent collection is Two Haiku Poets (Iron Press, 2023) co-authored with fellow UK haikuist, Annie Bachini.

Ingrid Bruck lives in Amish country, a landscape that inhabits her poetry. She enjoys writing haiku and short poems. She serves on the editorial team of Between These Shores and produces a monthly BTS column called “Pearl Diving” with online writer resources. Some current work appears in Verse-Virtual, Poetry Hall and SpillWords. Embrace more of Bruck’s published poetry: ingridbruck.com

Susan Burch is a good egg.

petro c. k. is a temporal being living on a spinning rock in a vast universe who writes tiny haiku about infinitesimally small moments of time. His debut book “Waiting for an Oracle” is now out at Nun Prophet Press (available thru Amazon).

Sharon Ferrante lives in Daytona Beach, Florida, her work is rooted in myth, fancy, and whimsy, and love for the short form. She has appeared in many anthologies, online journals and magazines.

Jim Fowler spent 25 years in the US Navy, and 19 of those years stationed in Japan or on ships homeported out of Japan. Read and wrote a number of haiku during those years or since retirement. He had had haiku published in numerous places including, Haiku Headlines, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and others. His book “Falling Ashes” is primarily haibun and a few pages of haiku.

Joshua Gage is an ornery curmudgeon from Cleveland. He is the editor of The Ohio Haiku Anthology, the first collection of haiku by Ohio poets in over twenty years. His newest chapbook, blips on a screen, is available on Cuttlefish Books. He is a graduate of the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Naropa University. He has a penchant for Pendleton shirts, Ethiopian coffee, and any poem strong enough to yank the breath out of his lungs.

Barbara Anna Gaiardoni received two nominations for the Touchstone Award 2023, recognized on the Haiku Euro Top 100 list for 2023 and on The Mainichi’s Haiku in English Best 2023. Her Japanese-style poems has been published in The Mainichi, Asahi Haikuist Network, The Japan Society UK and in one hundred and thirty other international journals.

Robbie Gamble’s short-form poems have appeared in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, bottle rockets, Acorn, and other journals. He lives above an apple orchard in Vermont.

Cindy Gore is a retired educator and lifelong poetry reader from Texarkana, Texas. A stroke survivor, Cindy reads and writes poems as part of her daily rehabilitation practice to make meaning out of her second chance at life.

Adam Haver’s writing has been featured in Popshot Quarterly, Poetry Scotland, Ballast, and other journals. He received the 2022 Willie Morris Award for Poetry and an award from the Utah Division of Arts & Museums for a collection of poems addressing wolf conservation. You can connect with him on X: @ac_haver.

Cindy Guentherman has been writing poetry since 1952. She was poetry editor of The Rockford Review for many years, and general editor for several issues. She has been writing haiku for about 50 years.

Six-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee Jennifer Hambrick is the author of the poetry collections In the High Weeds (NFSPS Press) winner of the Stevens Award; Joyride (Red Moon Press), winner of the Marianne Bluger Book Award; and Unscathed. Hambrick’s poems appear in Rattle, The Columbia Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Santa Clara Review, Maryland Literary Review, San Pedro River Review, POEM, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, NOON: journal of the short poem, The Heron’s Nest, Mayfly, Kingfisher, Contemporary Haibun Online, and in numerous invited anthologies. Hambrick was featured by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser in American Life in Poetry and has received many awards and prizes, including First Prize in the Martin Lucas Haiku Award Competition (U.K.), First Prize in the Haiku Society of America’s Haibun Award Competition, the Sheila-Na-Gig Press Poetry Prize, and many others. A classical musician, public radio broadcaster, multimedia producer, and cultural journalist, Jennifer Hambrick lives in Columbus, Ohio. jenniferhambrick.com.

Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including: Under the Basho, Ekphrastic Review, and Modern Haiku, among others. Ed is Asst. Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction. He has a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals—including a rooster named StarTrek. A collection of his poems, Near Truth Only, has recently been published by Fernwood Press, 2023.

Ruth Holzer’s haiku and other short form Japanese style poems have appeared in journals including Acorn, bottle rockets, cattails, Frogpond, Hedgerow, Kingfisher, Modern Haiku, Ribbons and Red Lights. She lives in Virginia.

Sangita Kalarickal’s work touches the realms of poetry and fiction, and appears in several well reputed journals and anthologies. Her poetry ranges in different forms and her free verse and haikai poems are widely published. Sangita is a Pushcart Prize and Touchstone award nominated wordsmith, and her first chapbook Mamina (Kavya-Adisakrit, 2023), with poetry ranging from free verse to haiku has been well received. She is currently an associate editor of Drifting Sands Haibun Journal and conducts the podcast Ripples in the Sand. Dr. Kalarickal lives in the midwest USA with her family, her little garden, and the fantasy characters she writes about.

Mary Keating is a poet, lawyer, and disability advocate. She’s the Poetry Editor for ScribesMICRO, a three-time Pushcart nominee, and runs her own law firm in Darien, CT. Her writing appears in several journals, including Wordgathering, Poetry for the Ukraine, and SFWP. Mary became a paraplegic at fifteen. Her memoir in verse, “Recalibrating Gravity,” will be published September 2, 2024 by Woodhall Press. Visit marykeatingpoet.com to learn more.

Julie Bloss Kelsey’s haiku have been published worldwide. She is the author of three books of haiku and related forms: The Call of Wildflowers (Title IX Press, 2020), the award-winning Grasping the Fading Light: A Journey Through PTSD (Sable Books, 2023), and After Curfew (Cuttlefish Books, 2023). Julie writes a bi-monthly column, New to Haiku, for The Haiku Foundation, where she is on the Board of Directors.

Kat Lehmann is a founding co-editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem and serves as a panelist for The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. She is a winner of The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for an Individual Poem (2020) and is included in the New Resonance community of haiku poets. She lives in Connecticut.

Robert Lowes’s first collection of poetry, An Honest Hunger (Resource Publications), came out in 2020. His second collection, Shocking the Dark (Kelsay Books) is scheduled for publication later this year. His poems have appeared in journals such as Southern Poetry Review, The New Republic, Modern Haiku, and December. He is a retired journalist who lives with his wife Saundra in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Lowes has been playing the guitar—electric and acoustic—since 2017, having been inspired by John Lennon on rhythm guitar.

paul m. is the penname of Paul Miller, an internationally awarded and anthologized short-form poet and essayist. He is the editor of Modern Haiku, the longest running English-language haiku journal outside of Japan, and has served on the boards of the Haiku Society of America, Haiku North America, and the Haiku Poets of Northern California. He is the author of four award-winning collections. His latest, Witness Tree, is available from the U.K.’s Snapshot Press. A native Californian, he lives with his wife in the Florida panhandle.

Anna Maris is a Swedish haiku poet. Her collection Life Death Etc is published by Red Moon Press.

Jenny Middleton is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. Her poetry is published in several printed anthologies, magazines and online poetry sites. Jenny lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats. You can read more of her poems at her website: jmiddletonpoems.com

Biswajit Mishra writes poems predominantly in English and sporadically in his native language Odia writing generally about nature, animals, plants, spiritual concepts, families, and travel experiences. Born in India and having lived in Kenya, Biswajit and his wife Bharati currently live in Calgary, Canada.

Most recently, Tina Mowrey has been writing short form poetry, which has been published in the following journals: Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, Mayfly, Presence, Wales Haiku, Poetry Pea, Trash Panda, Modern Haiku, and Folk ku. She is also the author of two picture books (What A Prickly Pear, 2020 & My Family Tree Has Roots, 2022) and an avid reader of banned books.

Brian O’Sullivan teaches literature and rhetoric at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His poems have been published in ONE ART, Rattle, HOWL New Irish Writing and other journals. He is a poetry reader for Chestnut Review.

Ben Oliver lives in the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire with his wife, Michelle, and two children, Aurelia and Linden. As a child he grew up on (and in) the River Thames, where he developed a deep affinity with nature. Having studied Biology at the University of Manchester, he works at Westonbirt National Arboretum, helping people engage with the majesty of trees. He has been fortunate to have had poems published in many haiku journals, including Frogpond, Heron’s Nest, Modern Haiku, Presence, Kingfisher and Failed Haiku.

John Pappas is a poet and teacher whose work has appeared in Handsome, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, cold moon journal, Failed Haiku, Nick Virgilio’s Haiku in Action, tinywords, Presence, The Mainichi, bottle rockets and many other journals. His haiku have been included in the anthologies Seed Packets: An Anthology of Flower Haiku and the forthcoming Bird Whistle: An Anthology of Contemporary Bird Haiku (bottle rockets press), and his poetry has twice been selected for the Mayor of Boston’s Poetry Contest (2016 and 2020). He has been nominated for a Touchstone Award and for inclusion in Red Moon Press’s annual anthology. As drummer and lyricist of the punk rock band Heather Hates You, he has recorded two albums: Operation Suckerpunch (2003) and A Scar is Born (2006). A graduate of the College of the Holy Cross and the Boston College Graduate School of Education, John lives in Boston, MA with his wife and two daughters, and has taught literature and general semantics in the Boston area for over 25 years.

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Twitter: @JamesPenha

Bryan Rickert, current President of the Haiku Society of America, has been published in many fine journals. He is the Editor of Failed Haiku Journal of Senryu and edits The Living Senryu Anthology. Bryan has two books: Fish Kite (Cyberwit Publishing) and Dust and Stone, co-written with Peter Jastermsky (Velvet Dusk Publishing). His work was selected for inclusion in A New Resonance, Volume 12. He was also the recipient of the Touchstone award for individual poems in 2023.

David Rosenthal is a public school teacher in Berkeley, California. His haiku and senyru have appeared in journals such as Modern Haiku, FrogPond, Lilliput Review, and The Heron’s Nest. His other poems have appeared in Rattle, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rising Phoenix Review, Change Seven, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and other journals. He has been a Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award Finalist and a Pushcart Prize Nominee. His collection, The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things, was published by White Violet Press (Kelsay Books).

Colin Sandberg is an emerging poet residing in Vancouver, Wa. This is one of his first curated works. He might be found reading his poems at Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in Vancouver or staring at a tree with a moleskine in hand.

A significantly hearing impaired writer and artist adopted in Luxembourg, Kelly Sargent is the author of two memoirs in verse (Kelsay Books) and a collection of haiku and senryu entitled Bookmarks (Red Moon Press, 2023). Her short form poetry appears regularly in haiku and senryu journals online and in print. She is a two-time Touchstone Award for Individual Poems nominee, and has won or placed in a number of international haiku and senryu competitions. She resides in Vermont, where the picturesque beauty and four distinct seasons often serve as her inspiration.

Filmmaker and photographer Carla Schwartz’s poems have been widely published, including in The Practicing Poet (Diane Lockward, Ed) and in her collections Signs of Marriage, Mother, One More Thing, and Intimacy with the Wind. Her CB99videos youtube channel has 2,400,000+ views. Learn more at carlapoet.com. Recent publications and acceptances include Banyan Review, The Ear, Channel, California Quarterly, Cutthroat, Gone Lawn, The Poet’s Touchstone, Ibbetson Street, Inquisitive Eater, Paterson Literary Review, New-Verse News, Remington Review, Shelia-Na-Gig, Triggerfish Critical Review, The MacGuffin, Verse-Virtual Online, and Leon. Schwartz is a 2023 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant. Her poem, “Pat Schroeder Was Our Mother,” won the 2023 New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.

Julie Warther Schwerin (she/her – Sun Prairie, Wisconsin) is an associate editor at The Heron’s Nest (theheronsnest.com) and a member of the Red Moon Anthology editorial team. She was instrumental in establishing several haiku installations in the Midwest including, most recently, Words in Bloom: A Year of Haiku at the Chicago Botanic Garden which featured the work of haiku poets throughout the garden.

Alan Summers is from the South West of England, and founder/editor of the Pan Haiku Review.

Margaret Tau resides in New Bern, North Carolina. She spends much of her time writing haiku and tanka along with other short forms of poetry. Margaret appreciates the challenge of capturing a moment in time with just a few words and inviting others to experience it with her. Her poetry has appeared in Frogpond, Under The Basho, and Right Hand Pointing among others. She was awarded a 2021 Honorable Mention by the Haiku Society of America

Shelly Reed Thieman writes to connect with the wounded. She is a messenger of imagery, a mistress of montage. Her work is heavily influenced by the discipline of haiku. Her poems have appeared in Modern Haiku, The Haibun Journal, Humana Obscura, and december. Shelly is a two-time Pushcart nominee.

Nancy Tinnell lives and writes in Louisville, KY. She has published two chapbooks: murmurs (2020), followed by the sum of all my parts in 2023. She enjoys reading poetry aloud and organizes events featuring readings and music. When she is not writing, you may find her in the kitchen, experimenting with new recipes.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts the Emerging Form podcast. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her new collection is All the Honey. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Michael Dylan Welch has been investigating haiku since 1976. This includes reading thousands of haiku books and publishing and editing more than 70 of his own. He is or has been an officer of the Haiku Society of America, Haiku Northwest, and Haiku North America, and is founder of National Haiku Writing Month (nahaiwrimo.com), the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, and the Tanka Society of America. He was also poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, near where he lives in Sammamish, Washington. Michael’s personal website, devoted mostly to haiku, is graceguts.com.

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, and a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or are upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, ONE ART, Abandon Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at dickwestheimer.com

Joshua Eric Williams is from Carrollton, GA. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, Literary Matters, Modern Haiku, Rattle, The Heron’s Nest, and many other print and online journals. His poem “silent after” was selected for a 2022 Touchstone Award from The Haiku Foundation and nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize from Rattle Magazine. Check out his website (thesmallestwords.com) or follow him on Twitter (@Hungerfield).

Two Poems by Gary Fincke

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Blueprints

Yesterday, my sister begged me to box
and keep thousands of photographs
and souvenirs she had hauled home
from our father’s house after he died.
It’s been fourteen years, time enough
that her husband has also succumbed,
prompting her to gather and stack
a half-room of dried memorabilia
as if preparing to set fire to the past.

She hovers, leans closer when I pause.
Our father is in very few photographs,
our mother barely there. None are from
the century in which we are living.
What you don’t take, gets pitched,
my sister says, and despite dust
and asthma, I keep looking. Which
of these would be irreplaceable? Which
would I risk myself to save from fire?

A neighbor, after her house was leveled
by fire, had it rebuilt exactly as it was before,
cloned from photographs and blueprints
that survived in a fireproof, padlocked box.
This afternoon, her house has been filled
with furniture matched by memory.
Her elderly mother, that neighbor says,
is comforted by the television,

its familiar faces and voices
visiting each day at the same time.
When alone, I rummage through family
photographs as if they were exotic
playing cards to be used for solitaire,
arranging until every person ages
from bottom to top, a fortunate stack
of spades or clubs, diamonds, hearts.

*

The Job Icons

On their first birthdays, babies of the Thais of Vietnam choose their vocations
by grasping, from among many choices, a symbol of that work.

All those objects look like toys—a push broom,
A plow, stacked books and an intricate wrench.
These parents, right now, recall boys who picked
Product samples, insurance policies,
A miniature, unreadable lease.
They worry about the icon artist,
What intentions he might have captured while
Shaping for eyes so close to the carpet.
He’s formed blackboards and pulpits, small scalpels
With edges rounded for safety, but there,
Beside them, are the beautiful logos
Of the service industry, a soldier,
The telephone for a million cold calls.

After all that wishing, there’s no telling
What a baby, unguided, will crawl to.
For example, all three of my children
Plunged both hands into their first birthday cakes,
But only two of them smeared their faces
And flung their filthy hands into their hair.
The youngest threw his high and cried, afraid
Of crumbs or terrified at the swift change
In his fingers, how something like disease
Was sticking to him. Chocolate, we said,
Sugar, delicious, making the gestures
Of licking and sucking, babies ourselves,
Although nothing we did could quiet him
As he held them up like a prisoner.

*

Gary Fincke’s poetry collections have been published by Ohio State, Michigan State, Arkansas, Jacar, and Serving House. His next collection For Now, We Have Been Spared will be published by Slant Books late this year.

After Another School Shooting, I Walk To The Mailbox by James Dickson

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After Another School Shooting, I Walk To The Mailbox

Dusk descends like ginkgo leaves
kissing a pond. Slow breeze
foreshadows rain. Nineteen
children dead, two teachers.

Under the magnolia, two fireflies.
The first I’ve seen this season.
Harbingers of summer, of rest.
Empty mailbox. I walk back, carrying

so much.

*

James Dickson teaches English and Creative Writing at Germantown High School, just outside of Jackson, MS. An MFA graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars, he is the recipient of Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships, was named High School Literary Magazine Advisor of the Year by the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association, and was invited to speak at the National Educators Association 50th anniversary celebration “The Promise of Public Education.” His poems, book reviews, and essays appear in The Common, Ruminate, The Louisiana Review, Spillway, Slant, Poetry Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and other publications, and his debut collection, Some Sweet Vandal, was published by Kelsay Books. He lives in Jackson, MS, with his wife, their son, and a small menagerie of animals.

The Chibok Schoolgirls by Janice D. Soderling

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Chibok Schoolgirls

(Nigeria, 2014-04-14)

Yellow jerry cans abandoned by the wayside.
Dirt roads, clay houses, another year of dust.
The world has forgotten its kidnapped girls.

Nothing remains of footprints in dried mud,
Except their contours in the mother’s heart.
Bring back our girls.

Everything the father eats tastes gray
And bitter as raw hate.
Bring back our girls.

Young sisters reach out in their sleep,
Only to wake in terror.
Bring back our girls.

Gaunt brothers go but come back empty-handed
From thorny shrubs and jagged rocks.
Bring back our girls.

The harmattan whips dry sand to a haze.
Hyenas laugh.
For the world has forgotten its girls.

*

Janice D. Soderling has published many poems in international journals, print and online. Her most recent collection is Rooms & Closets. This poem is from a forthcoming chapbook, Names.

Sharing the Pool by Michael R. Evans

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Sharing the Pool

Sweltering, I sit under a mulberry,
listening to the stream’s crisp chorus

burble into emerald pools, the largest
spanned by a service road bridge

where two brown cubs emerge,
shuffling, swaying toward water.

Nearby mother’s gleaming coat
magnifies the sun like a glass.

Should I stand?
Speak?
Run?

Mother huffs, admonishing
them against descent—

shoving them back with paws,
claws like paring knives.

I brandish
my walking stick.

I stand.
She rears up.

I turn.
She approaches.

I drum a water bottle, throw up
my arms, summon a howl.

She pauses.
They retreat.

A reunion of feet
and mind, I scramble

uphill
              as they wade in.

*

Michael R. Evans, a full-time academic editor and writing tutor, lives in Los Angeles with two cats. He began writing poetry at Houghton University three decades ago while earning a BA in communication and writing. He has published poems and articles in small-format media, including newspaper travel articles about living in Russia in 1996. He has earned an MA in theology and the arts and authored Jesus, Fads, and the Media in 2006.

Deer Season by Kip Knott

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Deer Season

Sycamore shadows spread over the world
as I sit next to the dry tongue of Sunday Creek
and watch for shooting stars. Above me,

the moon climbs into its night-time blind
to hunt the cloudless dark for meteors.
A screech owl sails silently over furrows

freezing rabbits in the fallow field below.
Silo lights from surrounding farms blink on
as thickets whisper the approach of deer.

Suddenly, distant gunshots pepper the air.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His most recent book of poetry, 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 kipknott.com.

Rage Against Ennui by Aaron Poochigian

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Rage Against Ennui

I could explode from wanting more and more
excitement in these dog days of the year.
Someone be brash. I need to roar and cheer.
Give me a spectacle worth hooting for.
Give me a quest, a test, an epic something
Herculean and exhilarating,
anything but interminable waiting,
waiting with yawns and umbrage. What a dumb thing
it is to wait.

                    I know, I know, my shelf
offers up Huck’s larks and Achilles’ rage,
but they are tired from leaping off the page
so many times already. I myself,
it seems, will have to make my own distraction.
Quiet on the set! Lights! Camera! Action!

*

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest poetry collection, American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous translations with Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and POETRY.

Grief by Robin Wright

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Grief

sits beside you, but doesn’t
draw you a bath or mix
a margarita, put its hand
on yours, rub your shoulders.
It runs off to the beach once
in a while but always comes back.
At first you want to lay your head
on its shoulder, find comfort
you know has to be there somewhere,
but it’s hidden deep in the bottom
of a closet or on a shelf
in the basement behind cans of paint.
The search a scavenger hunt
with no end and no prize.

*

Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Loch Raven Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, Spank the Carp, The New Verse News, Rat’s Ass Review, Fevers of the Mind, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her first chapbook, Ready or Not, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.

I Hope You Like the Card by Eugene Datta

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I Hope You Like the Card

The teardrops in this Man Ray photograph
look like drops of fresh rain, don’t they?

That’s how the message starts. It’s a card
she made with a black-and-white

photograph she’d found in an old calendar—
blobs of silver paint around the picture

to mirror the teardrops on the woman’s face.
I want you to know, she writes, how I’m feeling.

And I hope you like the card.

*

Eugene Datta is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Water & Wave (Redhawk, 2024). His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, Main Street Rag, Common Ground Review, Rust & Moth, Hamilton Stone Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in India, he lives in Aachen, Germany.

walking bishop back to moonlight by john compton

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walking bishop back to moonlight

i foreclosed on two homes & a lover

then found this man
with thick brown hair, scalp buried
beneath a jungle—

with a mind, black as a night full of rain.

filled with ghosts, from east & west,
he animated & elevated
into a manic suitor
which called       to me      like a siren’s mouth.

we made temptation into a game:
our bodies confided,
knowing we already knew
how to play,

though by the end
forgetting
the other’s name:

i let him leave a mystery.

*

john compton (he/him) is a gay poet who lives with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. he is the poet with 14 published chapbooks/books, with the latest book: the castration of a minor god (Ghost City Press; december 2022) and next chapbook: melancholy arcadia (Harbor Editions; april 2024)

Ancestral by Ivy Raff

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Ancestral

On the good days, my grandmother’s kitchen
smelled of cloves baking in batter.

On the bad days – acrid of cabbage. She’s dead
ten years or eleven. I’m sad to say we beat her

into submission, at some point in her sixties, with
our Amyerikan tastes. Our loathing for borscht

ultimately smacked down Russian staunchness.
She survived genocide and ghettoization but not

her grandchildren refusing her food.
The sweet things, we wanted

to keep: butter-streaked Pyrex
pans of noodle kugel, rugelach nestled

like plump jammy babies in Tupperware.
She stopped baking eventually too – doctors warned

of the gale-force that pressured my grandfather’s
vessels. Now that I’m a middle aged Eastern European

woman myself I know too intimately our certainty our men
grow sick because of us. I know too intimately my grandmother’s

guilt, convicted for Marvin’s medical pressures.
The great clanging dough mixer stood silent, pristine,

glinting on the counter like old Cadillacs I saw once
at a design museum in Detroit. Relics. Perfect. Useful –

except they’d kill you, crash your skull or arteries.
My grandfather outlived her, resurrected rugelach,

picked it with knotted fingers out of flimsy deli plastic.
You know the kind.

*

Ivy Raff is a nomadic poet who calls Queens, New York home. Her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies including Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Midway Journal, West Trade Review, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award Annual, and the London Independent Story Prize Anthology. Ivy is the author two poetry collections: What Remains / Que queda (Editorial DALYA, bilingual English/Spanish edition forthcoming 2024), winner of the Alberola International Poetry Prize; and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024), hailed by Bruce Smith as “lacerating, fearless.”

Two Poems by KG Newman

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The Stopwatch Gene

My father becomes gears
and during one of his
carefully scheduled visits
he whispers that
I’ll inherit the clocks
plus his short-listed days,
the ripples in the river,
trees wearing trench coats
in heavy Colorado snow.
This without any

particular brokenness
in his tone and a cold
downtown deserted,
nothing too early except
in our expectations
of a difficult talk, maybe
late into the night, while
raccoons spill a trash can
and we pretend
to not hear a thing.

*

Puddles

The air tasted like pennies
the rainy day I realized
blueberries are purple
and we weren’t gonna work.

Before that, we drove on thin roads
to rage rooms, where
sledgehammers could not help us.
Glass everywhere a reminder

of the present-past and how
we planted roses in random fields
only to occasionally drive by
and watch their various stages of wilt.

Someone must have tooth-picked
our air hoses — maybe us.
Maybe we are why the elixir is missing
from the liquor cabinet:

Our pathology inexact and the only things
we do know is both of our stethoscopes
were broken in a crash; we’ve been
kissing through a glass door.

The dogs ate our steak.
The path around the side of our house
circles back to the front. Inside the kids
are growing so quick and

the mouse trap is missing its marble.
Only a theophany can save us now,
our origin untethered from consequence,
a bright light from the sky

as our fragments get multiplied,
and again by zero, the fresh-cut trees
blessing an axe, the vines creeping
up our fence, lighting up, blowing

smoke rings, trying to tell us something.
Even our couches are sad. Our smart phones
turned anger lines. Our kids, adhesive.
Our hands meaning well but caught

in bicycle spokes, glistening with blood
under perceived sun so hot
it could melt us on the pavement
as the whole neighborhood watched.

*

KG Newman is a sportswriter for The Denver Post. His first four collections of poems are available on Amazon and he has been published in scores of literary journals worldwide. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He is the poetry editor of Hidden Peak Press and he lives in Hidden Village, Colorado, with his wife and three kids.

Talisman by John Repp

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Talisman

Jamie-on-Parole stood the teak
figurine bought in Sudan
with his last hundred bucks
on the get-to-know-you
talisman table. After his house—
well, his grandmother’s house—
burned down, he joined
the merchant marine. “I’m sorry,”
said Josh, “but that’s bullshit.”
Tamika said, “Yeah.” Jordan said,
“Where’s Sudan?” Jamie jumped ship
in Marseille, tramped around Egypt
& ended up in Sudan, the best
people he’d ever met. Maddy’s
“Bob” Clemente baseball, the binky
Jasmine chewed till second grade,
Josh’s grandfather’s pipe wrench
& now a teak warrior, oblong shield
from neck to knee. A hundred bucks
would feed a whole Sudanese
province, no? Maybe that’s an old
National Geographic talking. “Facts are
slippery things,” quoth the cliché.
Facts are fire ants or maybe termites
& that’s a fact. Right now, Mobile,
Alabama is home, but you can pine
for hot red dust anywhere. Jillie said,
“Who’d you mug?” “I named him
“Starting-Over Guy,” Jamie said.

*

John Repp is a poet and fiction writer living in Erie, Pennsylvania. Seven Kitchens Press will soon publish his twelfth chapbook of poetry, Star Shine in the Pines.

Two Poems by Grant Clauser

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Epistemology VIII

Despite my field guides, I forget the names
of most trees, the fourteen varieties of fern
that fringe this lake. Even the talk of birds
is over my head, yet I can tell a distant shower
from a thunderhead by the smell, a campfire
from a lightning scorch by its whisper or wail.
If I call the scent of spice bush ground
between my fingers the wrong time
of year it’s still sweeter than magpies,
and the steel string voice a bird makes
from marshland at the meadow’s edge
is not a band I listened to in college,
but strikes a note of longing I understand
better than the shapes stars make
on a clear night in the mountains.
Their anonymous pairing with Greek myths
part of the mystery of what keeps them
in the sky.

*

Epistemology IX

Tonight’s campfire is mostly decorative,
something to conjure ghosts and hold back mosquitoes.
If bats twist overhead, I don’t see them.
If a large shadow comes down the mountain
to drink from the lake, it doesn’t ask permission.
What do I know about why nations crash
into each other with the regularity of rain?
Tonight in the woods I try for a kind of peace
that can watch smoke rise from kindling,
that talks back only to the voices in the heart.

*

Grant Clauser is a Pennsylvanian. His sixth book, Temporary Shelters, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a large media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College.

The Bunny Hill by John S. Eustis

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Bunny Hill

Never having skied before, I spent
almost the entire first day of our
three-day vacation on the Bunny Hill,
getting used to the rented skis, learning
how to maneuver and come to a stop.

Carefully, I advanced to the slopes
marked Easy, then Moderate, avoiding
those deadly double diamonds.
That second day was more fun
and less scary than I had expected,
and I began to regret wasting
so much time being overcautious.

It rained on the third day there, so we
were confined to the warm lodge,
doing quiet things and packing up
for the four-hour drive back home.

That ski trip sixty years ago
seems symbolic to me now,
because I’ve come to realize
it wasn’t just that one weekend.
Too many years of my life were spent
safely sticking to the Bunny Hill.

*

John S. Eustis is a retired librarian living in Virginia with his wife, after a long, quiet federal career. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, One Art, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, and Tar River Poetry.

early morning interlude by Trishala Vardhan

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early morning interlude

lately,
i find myself pulled
to
the pulse of the world:
the push
of my dog’s wet nose
against my hand.

come play,
she whines,
and
i do:
i savor the sweet bite of the wind
against my cheek,
the soft brush
of paws pressed to my leg.

i cling
to the crushed earth,
soil and sentiment
stored
in the synapses of my silence.

i welcome
the wisps of breath
in
the wintry air:
the warmth an exhalation,
a flicker of fleeting
heat
in coarse fur:
the flame-tongued hope
of my dog’s open
mouth.

look,
there is still beauty,
says the fresh white
of her coat,
the clean green of the grass
gripping my toes.
there is still silence you can sing to.

i blink
past the burn in my eyes.
curl my fingers
to capture
the cadence of the cold.

yes,
i think to myself.
yes.

there is still beauty.
there is still song.

there is still hope.

*

Trishala Vardhan is a 26-year old (Asian) Indian who has lived in the lap of language for as long as she can remember. She is a poet who believes in precious little save the gravity of grief, love and memory. Words (and the silences that serve and surround them) have always been her way of life. Her work has been featured in SwimPress, PinkHeart Magazine, and Stone Circle Review

Daddy’s Girl by Julie Benesh

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

DADDY’S GIRL

I wanted to run away
with my mother.
She and I could date
around, compare (love)
notes, and always
have each other.

But she and my father
stayed together.
I grew up, went to college,
got married. Since her death

we’ve grown apart. The world
has changed yet part of me
is stuck at 26, the age
I was when I lost her.

I monitored my female body
for mother’s ailments: glaucoma,
arthritis, metastatic tumors,
but I got instead his bad skin
and silent reflux, his work anxiety,
things of his I’d once blamed
on alcohol and cigarettes
that I eschewed.

My father lived another 18 years.
One time with relatives, we looked
at each other and knew we’d both
had enough of the chatter.
and fled like adolescents.

With my rival and nemesis
I had more in common
than I knew, but why
was I surprised?

We had
the same
great love.

*

Julie Benesh (juliebenesh.com) authored the chapbook ABOUT TIME from Cathexis Northwest Press. She published work in Tin House, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New World Writing, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program and recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant and her full-length poetry collection, INITIAL CONDITIONS, is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press.

Three Poems by Michael T. Young

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Birds that Migrate

I love the idea of how far they travel,
their ability to find their way over such distances
impresses those of us who tend to stay put.

And yet their noncommittal ways are unsettling.
How it seems as if they always have a bag packed
and ready to go. So, I feel a need to hold back,

to keep something of myself secret, just in case
I wake to find the other side of the bed cold
and their part of the closet clean. We never really

came to know each other, both of us long ago,
elsewhere, imagining how much better
life would be if the other were here.

*

Market

What is the price of a past I wondered
as we walked long aisles of crafts and antiques
dusted in what seemed an even more
antique light, history’s discards stacked on tables,
in stalls, beside old lamps, bowls and plates,
coins and stamps spread among clocks, cabinets,
chests, and racks of books. As we browsed
these prized marketable memories, we
nibbled Dutch cakes, cookies, brittle, and jerky.
Here we paused at a table of rings.
Rows of silver circles, knobbed and knotted
with different designs and images. My daughter
fished out one with a mushroom, reminder
of Alice coiled in smoke rings of Wonderland.
My son discovered a sleeping dragon.
I thought of the name of this old farmers market:
Green Dragon. When young and growing up
not far away, I imagined it a place of fire and danger,
and a gold burning light, the heat of a magic
that could transform anything into a shield
against different kinds of cold. In the ‘50s
it was the site of a cold war exercise called
“Operation Disaster.” Patrol planes strafed
the parking lot targeting people with fake bombs,
emergency personnel tended the fake wounded,
and a crowd of thousands gathered to see
who wouldn’t make it. But like a movie,
even the dead escaped alive. Now, among
descendants of the survivors, I sorted
through rings wanting to find something
meaningful in the heaps, something
I could see stamped there in the image
on its metal, even if I couldn’t name it. But
there was nothing that meant enough, and
we left for the long drive home, everyone else
content with what they found and carried away.
It was autumn, trees along the interstate
had turned yellow. The road climbed up
through a valley, lifting us toward the sunlight,
its gold threads cross stitched by birds flying
from tree line to tree line, until the air became
a curtain of gold and I looked up into it,
feeling myself rising into its radiance.

*

The Shapes of Loneliness

At first I think of footsteps
echoing down an alley or hallway,
a door clicking shut, maybe even
the sound of clippers snipping a bush.
Some isolated moment. But
it’s various, and even highly textured
like a scallop shell, ridges segmenting
space into discrete feelings,
separate ideas of how things
should have been before life split
into you and me, the time before
and the time after a friendship,
a marriage, a life. Now what’s left
retreats into the spiral recess
of a nautilus, so even when found
on a beach among crowds
of other shells, what can be heard
in any one of them is the distance
that can never again be traveled.

*

Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Pinyon, Talking River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Vox Populi.

The Singing Birds by Marianne Worthington

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The Singing Birds

In the graveyard the singing birds were all
you thought you needed. Grief makes you

want to rend your clothes like some histrionic
character from the Old Testament.

There is a violence to sadness: the force
of sorrow unwashed from the body, penetrating

your very scalp. Yet decorum dictates that you hold
it together while you stand over the dead when we

should be smashing our doubts and slapping each
other’s faces. Wake up. This is the hammering

injury that never heals. This is the time of day
when people should have tea, not bury their dead.

This is the moment when the singing birds follow
the wind and leave us stranded on a hill too big

to scale down without ropes and life support.
This is when you must face it: your loved one

in a box in the ground instead of dancing
with you on a Saturday night at the VFW.

Tonight, even the moon will be too cold to come out.

*

Marianne Worthington is author of The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Zone 3, and Swing, among other places. She cofounded and is poetry editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia since 2009. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in southeastern Kentucky.

Two Poems by Rachel Mallalieu

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How to Survive a Crowded ER Waiting Room

Be grateful for this insider view.
Unless you’ve been stabbed or shot, do not
crumple to the ground and scream help me
help me. The triage nurses have seen it all

and will remain unmoved, possibly hostile
in the face of your histrionics. Do not shake
your fist at the staff and threaten to call
the CEO or the local news or write a bad

review of the hospital on Yelp. Those of us
who withstood the scourge of Covid
and stuck around are no longer swayed by fear.
Here’s what you should do. Put the hood

of your jacket up and withdraw your chin
into your collar so only your eyes are showing.
Observe the chaos. Be pleased you are not the addict
nodding off in the corner, his arms more wound

than skin. Consider thanking god that you are better
off than the man with the matted beard
who dresses the tree trunks of his leaking
legs with garbage bags.

Last shift, a man figured out how to skip to the front
of the queue. After quietly waiting for six hours, he walked
towards the bathroom, and the clot which nestled
in his lungs finally caused his heart to halt,

then he collapsed in the doorway with one leg
bent beneath him and the other extended into
the waiting room. We all went running—started CPR,
pushed the medications, shocked him—everything.

We tried, tried for over an hour.
His wife had gone home to sleep because the wait
was so long. No one wanted her to wreck
the car so we didn’t tell her he was dead

when we called and asked her to return to the ER,
and told her in person instead. Her wails
echoed all the way into the back. Know this,
it’s not the worst thing if you wait awhile.

*

Penumbra

The geese flew south and promptly
returned, floating in a pond
that should be frozen.

In this disordered February,
starlings blanket the oak like leaves
and half the cherry tree blossoms.

When I was young, my father
was rarely home; when he arrived,
his gift of presence forged a corona

more luminous with each absence.
Not long ago, my mother called
and screamed he was unconscious,

likely dying. I raced the ambulance
to the hospital and arrived to find
him alive, but eclipsed behind the eyes,

both here and there. As his halo dims,
shadow remains and it still hasn’t snowed
this winter. Rain displaces worms

who writhe on the sidewalk.
These days, I pray for a glimpse
of the cardinal’s ruby breast.

*

Rachel Mallalieu is an emergency physician and mother of five. Some of her work is featured or forthcoming in Rattle, Chestnut Review, Whale Road Review and Superstition Review. Rachel is the author of A History of Resurrection (Alien Buddha Press 2022).

How Hometowns Work by Brian Beatty

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How Hometowns Work

A bent old woman
wrapped in two coats

drags a folding cart
full of groceries

through a crosswalk.
A blaring freight train

blasts across
another intersection

at the far end
of the same street.

Every other soul
in town, including mine,

sits trapped between
in idling cars belching smoke.

You can read all about it
in the yellowed newspaper pages

that cover the windows
of out-of-business

flower shops
and storefront churches.

*

Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections and a spoken word album. Beatty’s poems and short stories have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Appalachian Journal, Conduit, Cowboy Jamboree, CutBank, Evergreen Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Moth, The Museum of Americana, ONE ART, Phoebe, The Quarterly, Rattle, The Southern Review, Strange Horizons, and Sycamore Review.

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2024

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~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2024 ~

  1. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  2. Donna Hilbert
  3. Terri Kirby Erickson
  4. Betsy Mars
  5. Nancy Huggett
  6. Meredith Stewart Kirkwood
  7. Timothy Green
  8. Wendy Kagan
  9. Andrea Potos
  10. Robert Nordstrom