Month: June 2024

Crash Course by Holly Woodward

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Crash Course

“You cannot nail grief,”
the moon whispered
on the short leash
I kept her,
hooded, silent
with her private weather.

I told her, “Your father
is dead.” She shook her dusty head.
She warned me,
“Love will cost you
something you’re not prepared to pay.”
Venus snorted, “I’m not
here to make friends.”

Safer to drown in one’s own desires
than in a stranger’s, right?
(Though more lonely.)

Things I won’t understand until too late:
You either grace time or waste time.
You can never have too many wings.
Death can see through lies,
even your silent lies.

Death leaves voice messages
but I don’t play
them. I am not done
with my dead.
I am never
done with them.

I ask, “Want to hear my funny nightmare?”
No takers. The clown stutters, “But, seriously.”
The problem with masks is
it inscribes its price
on the inside of our skin.

A scar is a locked door. A door is
a stranger in two rooms.
To see clearly, I have to rip off
my false face. At least loneliness you don’t
have to fake.

There’s nothing dreamy about my dreams.

How old can you get without dying of it?

*

Holly Woodward is a writer and artist. She served as writer in residence at St. Albans, Washington National Cathedral, and was a fellow for four years at CUNY Graduate Center’s Writers’ Institute. Woodward enjoyed a year as a doctoral fellow at Moscow University. She also studied at Leningrad University and has an MFA from Columbia. Her poetry and fiction have won prizes from Story Magazine, the 92nd Street Y, and New Letters, among other honors.

The Mosasaur Capital of the World by Adrianna Gordey

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The Mosasaur Capital of the World
The Tylosaurus skeleton spirals to the ceiling, a corkscrew
of ribs & vertebrae & teeth. AC weaves through its bones
while a heat wave quilts Kansas. Squares of sunlight smother
the college campus, but the fossilized apex predator’s shadow
protects me. The mosasaur’s terrestrial ancestors returned
to the Western Interior Seaway, & I wish I could follow
their flippers. The risky reinvention of their DNA
inspires me. In a million years, my offspring could dominate
what’s left of the world with unhinged jaws perfect
for swallowing. I won’t wallow in the land-locked misery,
but I wonder if my sun scorched bones will hang as a mobile
above cribs, a warning to future generations. The asteroid
that ended the dinosaurs was a mercy; global climate change
is a slow, sticky march towards extinction. Meteorologists forecast
heat indexes of 125° once a year in the KC metro. Although Tylosaurus
is Kansas’ official marine fossil, I prophesize we won’t acclimate
to the smog or power outages. No one will award 600 bottles
of wine for my skeleton because the long-necked bottles
will be buried beside me in landfill graves. The mosasaurs
were satiated with giant sea turtles & sharks, but humanity’s
hunger & heat indexes will unravel the double helix of our DNA.
*
Adrianna Gordey (she/her) is a writer based in Kansas. When she isn’t writing, Adrianna can be found daydreaming about the Atlantic ocean and assembling overly ambitious Halloween costumes. Her work has appeared in Passengers Journal, Hunger Mountain Review, and elsewhere. Follow her on Instagram @by_adrianna_gordey.

I DANCE WITH A MAN WHO HAS A GIRLFRIEND AT MY LOCAL KARAOKE JOINT by Erica Anderson-Senter

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I DANCE WITH A MAN WHO HAS A GIRLFRIEND AT MY LOCAL KARAOKE JOINT

and I swear, I come undone when he touches my ribs, says—
mmm, girl, you’re so skinny— and I am, it has been weeks
since I’ve feasted on a man and I swoon under those dirty
hands: oil worked into his skin, brutal from wrench-wear.
Here, warm under spotlights in this packed bar, I come alive
from empty bed syndrome and dark-ocean grief— my skin
hasn’t been touched for months and honestly, given
the state of affairs and politics of my contemplative
heart—I give no shits that he belongs to a woman named Natalie.
I apologize to chaste gods—thread of the moon
shaking her head—but with strange hands on my bright body, I
come into power. I empty the jars of guilt and eat the fruit
he feeds me, my face shimmering under disco ball confetti.
Yes, another woman’s lover wants to taste my sweat—
I blossom under his calloused hands.

*

Erica Anderson-Senter writes from Fort Wayne, IN. Her first full length collection of poetry, Midwestern Poet’s Incomplete Guide to Symbolism, was published by EastOver Press in 2021. Her work has also appeared in Midwest Gothic, Dialogist, Anti-Heroin Chic, and One Art. She has her MFA from Bennington College.

Two Poems by Michael Meyerhofer

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THE PROTESTS OF THE UNWASHED MASSES

Not once have I witnessed it:
the calculation that must proceed
every rotten cabbage,
every egg launched like Greek fire
at some dumb passing noble
pilloried for his misdeeds.
But I like to imagine the mob
gathering reasonably that morning
at their separate tables, so many
fruits of the garden laid out
in that first slant of light,
their stomachs still rumbling
from an inadequate breakfast.
Perhaps they called in
the children to help them decide
which radish was too far gone,
which turnip would be better thrown
than mashed into a bitter stew.
Later, there will be shouting,
lips glistening with spittle.
But for now, they turn each apple
in their hands, like a judge.
Which one looks sick?
Which one can still be saved?

*

THE LAMENTATION OF FUSED ANKLES

In the annals of human suffering,
not being able to wear shorts in public

might not rank as high as it seemed
those childhood afternoons

when my classmates moved about
as one sun-washed muscle,

circling pools, backstroking
through ballparks, a little less

separating them from what made
nuns scowl like wet kites –

amidst all that clenched laughter
not one single pair of feet

like womb-mangled T-squares
blooming into broomstick calves,

nothing to be done at the gym
though I tried with what moved,

as though it were possible to lift
all those red-wrapped bones at once

and somehow hold them steady,
and somehow spill nothing.

*

Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five books of poetry – including What To Do If You’re Buried Alive (free from Doubleback Books). His work has appeared in The Sun, Missouri Review, Southern Review, Brevity, Rattle and other journals. He’s also the author of a fantasy series and Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. For more info and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit troublewithhammers.com.

Maybe in the Space of Dreams by Linda Mills Woolsey

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Maybe in the Space of Dreams

On the first anniversary of my mother’s death I dream
a long hallway of closets overflowing. She’s there,
at my shoulder complaining
that Dad has hoarded every suit he ever bought—
if he’d just clean them out, we’d have room
for everything.

I wake to dust everywhere—debris of stars
and forests, faint traces of other bodies, other lives
dull every surface of the real. Wings
pierce my reverie—
crows worry something by the hedge
while some invisible air traffic control keeps
gangs of sparrows and finches
from colliding at the feeder.

Three doves eye me from the power lines.
Evenly spaced at first, two
edge closer together till their folded wings
touch. They have the look of women
who watch me from their deaths, still curious
about my life, Nana and Aunt Mildred,
or Aunt Margie, maybe.
It’s hard to tell.

The dead prefer ambiguity, the space
of dreams. And I always fall short
of clarity—my cluttered days undusted,
unintelligible, filled with
maybe. I can’t shake off
these visitants, can’t escape clouds
of witness who won’t let go of this life,
who worry me with ghosts
of their unfinished obsessions,
with the leftover glances of their love.

*

Linda Mills Woolsey (she/her) lives in rural Western New York. Her work has appeared in The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Windhover, Wild Roof Journal, St. Katherine Review, Northern Appalachia Review and other journals.

Two Poems by Lily Jarman-Reisch

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Affairs in Order

We were so thorough,
giving our kids instructions,
account names and passwords
should we suddenly die
while on this island for so long
trying to weave ourselves back together.
Even noted who to invite to our funeral.
Except, I realize,
shaded next to my husband
under a beach umbrella,

maybe she should be on that list.
He’d want her to know,
to be there. She might attend,
with me gone. But then she’d see
photos of our life together –
Soul kissing in the high Sierra
or when I was chemo bald,
my face in his hands. That time we
made the most of a blizzard,
piggy-backed on a sled.
Would she wonder
if she really knew him,
still mourn their romance?
And him?

When he deleted their texts,
did his phone, a hive
sheltering their intimacies,
become a shrine,
her name and number sacred relics?
Does he return to her on a breath
of rosemary, grieve
for lost things that won’t happen –
his fingers braided with her hair,
hers mapping the marriage
line of his palm?

*

Reunited

I still think you’ll rise from the floor
you collapsed on, your wine glass,
its shards rejoined, brought back
to your open lips.

Even on our wedding day, I wondered
who would go first,
if I’d wake one night
to your stopped
rhythm, if you’d wake to mine,
your arm on my mute chest.
And all the what if’s since:
if each clink of raised glasses was the last.
If I was laughing at your final
one-liner before you were downed
by a mass shooter, a speeding truck,
or I was.
If each word was the parting one–
the voice in my head yelling Stop! Stop!
as I yelled at you for leaving
your shoes where I would trip on them,
irritated when you talked too much,
my last thought
while one of us still breathed.

They tell me to choose clothes for your burial.
I picture the suit you wore to marry me
sagging, rotting in a dirt-smothered box.
I clutch your comb, your slippers,
gut the laundry for your socks, a t-shirt
still sour, damp with your sweat.
I put them all on,
curl under covers
on your side of the bed,
find a hair on your pillowcase
and swallow it.

*

Lily Jarman-Reisch is a 2024 Pushcart Prize recipient, poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review, and a Contributing Editor for Pushcart Prize XLIX. Her poems appear in Amsterdam Quarterly, CALYX, Collateral, Mobius, One, Pangyrus, Plainsongs, Pushcart Prize XLVIII, San Pedro River Review, Slant Poetry, among others. She was a journalist in Washington, D.C., and Athens, Greece, where she lived aboard a small boat she sailed throughout the Ionian and Aegean Seas, and has held administrative and teaching positions at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland.

Two Poems by Claudia Gary

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Elegy for Our Own Words

Our words would tumble heavily onto the page
but get up, walk across and back, remembering
our days—unlike the words spelled out by an AI,

their artifice purporting to be human. Ours
contained deep memories of beauty, ugliness,
sensation of all kinds—however awkward—not

the pseudo-elegance proffered by the AI.
We were allowed to fail, revise, begin again,
elucidate, restate quirky humanity.

One day our words no longer dared to walk across
the page, since an AI could always dance around them.
It had soundly sabotaged, then conquered us.

Oh little words, large words, our own words spinning off
into the ether: let’s regenerate our words,
in memory of our selves fashioned out of words.

*

On Being Asked to Pray for You After Your Stroke

“Base 3 [as used in ternary computing] offers the most economical way of representing numbers.”

I told them I would. Will I follow through?
Maybe is not a brokenness
between Yes and No, you’ve said, but a blue

haze that surrounds them. No and Yes
emerge from it, float. So I’ll pray to Maybe,
ask it my questions, ask it to guess

where you are now, what you will see
when the prayer’s over. Leave it to you
to complicate things. Yes/No would agree.

*

Claudia Gary teaches workshops on the Villanelle, the Sonnet, Natural Meter, Freedom With Forms, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center and elsewhere. Author of Humor Me (David Robert Books, 2006) and several chapbooks—most recently Genetic Revisionism (2019)—her poems are internationally published and anthologized. She has been a semifinalist for the Anthony Hecht Prize (Waywiser), a Pushcart Prize nominee, an Honorable Mentionee in the Able Muse book contest, and a three-time finalist in the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Contest. Claudia has chaired panels on Poetry and Music, Poetry and Science, and The Sonnet in 2016, at the West Chester University (Pa.) poetry conference; and on Poetry and Music at the Frost Farm poetry conference. She is also a health journalist, visual artist, and composer of tonal songs and chamber music. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music, based on her presentation at the 2022 ALSCW conference. For more information, see Claudia’s P&W profile; you can follow her at @claudiagary or @claudiagarypoet.

The Heron by Michael Neal Morris

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The Heron

All the lakes
diminished
by an irrational summer
and even this made pond
its aorta a creek
that brings its blood
from somewhere under the highway
has shrunk, deceptive green
where perch swam,
ducks begged, and geese waited
to torture joggers.

A heron is hiding
in the yellowing grass,
at the bank. Her pale gray feathers
her thin, unsure neck,
her small eyes,
remind me of an old woman
alone in her assisted living room
too lonely for television
waiting for a dinner of cold fish.

*

Michael Neal Morris has published several stories, poems, and essays in print and online. His most recent books are Based on Imaginary Events (Faerie Treehouse Press), Haiku, Etc., and The Way of Weakness. He lives with his family just outside the Dallas area and teaches Composition and Creative Writing at Dallas College’s Eastfield campus.

The Music of the Line: Rhythm, Rhyme and Repetition in Poetry — A Workshop with Ellen Rowland

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The Music of the Line: Rhythm, Rhyme and Repetition in Poetry

Hosted by: Ellen Rowland
Day: Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Time: 11:00AM-1:00PM (Eastern)
Price: $25 (payment options)

To register: email Mark Danowsky at oneartpoetry@gmail.com 

Overview

Understanding and practicing the structure of formal poetry can often inform our free verse poems in beautiful and surprising ways. In this intimate, generative workshop, we’ll explore how the use of poetic devices relying on “the three Rs” can help us become better listeners when we read poetry and write our own. Through specific examples, we’ll learn to tune in to the music of the lines we create and the patterns and melodies of our word choices, while maintaining freedom of theme, expression and poetic voice. The second hour will be dedicated to discussion, prompt-based writing and optional sharing of our poems.

Limited to 15 participants

About The Workshop Leader

Ellen Rowland is a writer and editor who leads small, generative poetry workshops on craft and form. She is the author of two collections of haiku, Light, Come Gather Me and Blue Seasons, as well as the book Everything I Thought I Knew, essays on living, learning and parenting outside the status quo. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and in several anthologies, most recently The Wonder of Small Things, edited by James Crews and Facing Goodbye by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press. Her debut collection of full-length poems, No Small Thing, was published by Fernwood Press in 2023. Her poem within, “When the World Was Whole,” was nominated for Best of Net by Braided Way Magazine. She lives off the grid with her family on an island in Greece. Connect with her on Instagram and Facebook.

Two Poems by Howie Good

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Night of the Following Day

The person I went to sleep
as wasn’t the same person
I woke up as, half-drowned
in sweat after traveling
on motherless roads all night,
seeing plants and animals
bombed into submission,
families forced to dig
their own graves at gunpoint,
tears evaporate on contact
with the air, only for me
to arrive some six hours later
back where I started
but feeling barely present,
like I was still miles and miles away
from the redwing blackbird
on the black branch.

*

A La Descartes

I felt the tightness in my chest that usually presaged a panic attack, and first thing in the morning, too. But that’s me, always anticipating something that might never happen or that perhaps already has. When I walked into the kitchen to make coffee, I was just this side of hell. The chalk outline of a body had been drawn on the floor. A sulfurous smell as of the damned lingered in the air. With the times on the clocks on various appliances in conflict, there was much I could doubt. Instead, looking out the window at the sky, I said to myself, “I think it’s going to rain, therefore I exist.”

*

Howie Good’s latest book, Frowny Face (Redhawk Publishing, 2023), is a synergistic mix of his prose poems and handmade collages. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

Bad Luck Shirt by Dan Berick

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Bad Luck Shirt

I have a bad luck shirt.
It’s not the shirt’s fault, I
know.
I shouldn’t blame the shirt for
the very stupid thing
I said
the last time that I wore it.

It’s fine.
(The shirt, I mean.)

They made it in a factory
ten thousand miles away. They didn’t weave
the bad luck in.

It has stripes. And barrel cuffs.
And a straight point
collar.

It’s a nice shirt,
that one.

The bad luck part is mine.
I said the stupid thing,
the shirt
doesn’t talk.

It’s not the shirt’s fault, but
I can’t wear it again.

It’s sitting in a pile of clothes that I
will give away
for someone else to wear,

and maybe they will have
some good luck
wearing
my bad luck shirt.

*

Dan Berick is a writer based in Cleveland, Ohio, whose poetry and fiction have appeared in The Storms and The Interpreter’s House, among others. Dan is also a lawyer, a husband, a father, and a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago.

You Who Arrived Late by Shama

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You Who Arrived Late

           After Rilke’s ‘You Who Never Arrived’

If I could compress Fifth Avenue
across all time—all the visitors of The Met
would fall onto each other, stacked like leaves
in fall—turn it into a flipbook without time,
where you’d look up at me and smile,
people fade out and we’d meet,
as a new universe would stem and rapture.

Instead, you brush away a feeling
in the spring air of the nineties
and walk down the steps, while I look up
at the sky of the new millennium not knowing why
it was more than azure and continue my sketch
of the couple at the hot dog stand;
a fig tree shudders somewhere
as we fall back onto these separate futures
along the branches of our lives which never
entwined until now,

when my roots have taken knots,
and you heave firewood readied for winter
as fog fills up our offing.

*

Shama has work published in ‘The Pierian’, ‘Gyroscope Review’, and elsewhere. She writes from an old dusty corner of the earth but like Diogenes identifies as Cosmopolitan, and unlike him can be found sometimes on X @EntangledRhyme and IG @entangledrhyme.

WHEN IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK by Royal Rhodes

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WHEN IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK

A cloud surveyor is what I became
as the tree line accumulates
darkness and merges.

The land north of here
is geometrically flat,
awaiting the tracking birds
but still seeing itself lovely.

Perhaps it is best not to end
a poem with a memory
or the gradual shift of light –
a space full of erasures.

But if you sit long enough,
something calculates these things
like an equilibrium of breaths.

And that may be the secret –
to wait at the crossroads
where we can watch for hours
seeing each other walk and
approach in the five o’clock light,

where love becomes only a single body,
a language largely untranslated
that keeps its distance, and
promises delight it cannot keep.

*

Royal Rhodes is a poet and retired educator who lives in a rural village amidst the rolling farmland of Ohio. His poems have appeared in: Last Stanza, Quaci, Grey Sparrow, Lighten-Up Online, Ekphrastic Review, The Montreal Review and a number of other journals and anthologies. He has been twice-nominated for a Pushcart prize.

The Rhythm of the Blues by Taylor Mallay

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The Rhythm of the Blues

She pushes a pink pin
across the table; it reads,
Groupies wanted,
no experience necessary.
I laugh, now knowing
she noticed me, my gaze
going soft over her body
against that steel-stringed guitar,
the bar’s blue lights blessing
the smooth precision
of her steady rhythm.
She smiles, says softly,
Aren’t you just aching
to be taken
by someone like me?
And perhaps it’s the gin
or the way my skin thrums
to the hum of her strumming,
but I breathe in
and open my hand, sighing
the moment her fingers slide
like a long-held note
into mine.

*

Taylor Mallay is a proud Michigander who enjoys tinkering away with poems here and there. Her work has previously appeared in Chestnut Review, The Dewdrop, and West Trade Review, among other publications.

Three Poems by E. Laura Golberg

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“The Terrible Man on the Plane”

My mother on the phone, complaining,
voice thick with cold, nasal passages thick,
resonating. “I should be in Hawaii,” she said.
“But I’m too ill. Flying back from Indiana,
last week, I sat next to this terrible man
on the plane who coughed and sneezed
all over me. He should not have been flying.
Now he’s ruined my holiday.”

I hung up, went to York Florist, ordered
a summer bouquet, signed it:
“Feel better soon, with many apologies,
The Terrible Man on the Plane.”

Two hours later, the phone rings.
She sounds like a young girl being courted,
coy, voice light and airy.
“I got flowers.” she said. “I looked at the note
and thought ‘How did he know?’”

*

Why I Didn’t Talk in the On-Line Class

The poetry class, sixteen of us,
was unusually silent–long pauses
where the teacher would ask
a question and no-one would answer.

I, myself, didn’t talk because out of one
of the little windows, peered the marriage
counselor I fired while my husband
and I were having terrible troubles.

That was ten years’ ago this summer.
We’d met with four different shrinks,
either he liked one or I did, but
we couldn’t agree. So, we stopped

looking. Now, still married and happy,
I was silent in class. I wonder
how many of the silent others
were former clients, too.

*

Stroke

Two different meanings, one: loving
caress over skin or fur; the other:

a blood clot somewhere in the brain.
Mine is in my occipital lobe. No soft

cuddle for me, just a harsh blind spot.
I thought I’d get used to it but three

weeks later, it’s just getting me down.
I tell myself ‘Getting used to it.’ will

take months, if not several years.
In my mind, I gently stroke my eyes.

*

E. Laura Golberg is a poet, originally from England, who has lived in Washington DC for over 50 years. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Birmingham Poetry Review, Spillway, RHINO, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, among other places.

Redemption by Ken Poyner

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Redemption

I stepped into this Antique store
And was trapped.
A blue tag was hung on my sleeve.
It has since been modified now and again
With red or white marks. Occasionally
I shuffle around to a different part of the store,
Mix in with fresh traffic.
An elderly lady appearing
As though she were born
Into the gray coat she wears
Has been by twice to look me over.
A young couple twiddled the rough of my coat
And I protested I was not to be sold in pieces.

Why do I not just leave, you ask?

I have not been pondered over this much
In years, nor, no matter the mark down,
Have I been this valued in near memory.
And the young red-head in short-shorts
Who thinks I might be an interesting novelty
Leaning in a corner of her living room has given me
My first hope of purpose in a decade.

*

Ken Poyner’s four collections of brief fictions, four collections of speculative poetry, and one mixed media collection, can be found at most online booksellers. He spent 33 years in information systems management, is married to a world record holding female power lifter, and has a family of several cats and betta fish. Individual works have appeared in “Café Irreal”, “Analog”, “Danse Macabre”, “The Cincinnati Review”, and several hundred other places. Find out more at: www.kpoyner.com

Turning Seventy-five by W. D. Ehrhart

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Turning Seventy-five

It isn’t that I fear
growing older—such things as fear,
reluctance or desire
play no part at all
except as light and shadow sweep a hillside
on a Sunday afternoon,
astonishing the eye but passing on
at sunset with the land
still unchanged: the same rocks,
the same trees, tall grass gently drifting—
merely that I do not understand
how my age has come to me
or what it means.

It’s almost like some small
forest creature one might find
outside the door some frosty autumn morning,
tired, lame, uncomprehending,
almost calm.
You want to stroke its fur,
pick it up, mend the leg and send it
scampering away—but something
in its eyes says, “No,
this is how I live, and how I die.”
And so, a little sad, you let it be.
Later when you look,
the thing is gone.

And just like that these
seventy-five years
have come and gone,
and I do not understand at all
why I see an old gray-haired man
inside the mirror when a small
boy still lives inside this body
wondering
what causes laughter, why
nations go to war, who paints the startling
colors of the rainbow on a gray vaulted sky,
and when I will be old enough
to know.

*

W. D. Ehrhart is author of Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems (McFarland). His most recent collection is At Smedley Butler’s Grave (Moonstone).

The SFPD Said It Would No Longer Release Mug Shots b/c They Reinforce Racial Biases by Shifra Shaman Sky

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The SFPD Said It Would No Longer Release
Mug Shots b/c They Reinforce Racial Biases

It wasn’t indoctrination
but a lesson in perpetuation
offered to my younger self,
how they try to teach us that
a black face is a bad face,
paging through that morning’s paper,
pointing out the stacked reports of
robbery and mayhem, murder, some
partnered with small dark squares,
the smudge of a black man’s face.

“When there’s no picture,” he told me,
“you know a white man did it.”

That was my Jewish father, long dead.
And what would he make of our century,
to which he looked ahead with hope;
would he stoop to construct
a life based on ancient wisdom,
imagine accounts of mercy and
truth meeting together, accompanied
by harp, a bright space created by
the kiss of peace and righteousness?

“If it’s not easy,” he’d tell me,
“you’ll know that God is in it.”

Or is that a dream, a false memory?
My father was, or claimed to be, an atheist
but, truth be told, if he were here,
he’d be shaking his fist at the sky.

*

Shifra Shaman Sky is a poet living in Kew Gardens NY. She holds an MFA from New York University, but her experience spans many disciplines, from textile design to website administration. Shifra has contributed to publications as varied as Voices Found: Women in the Church’s Song (Church Publishing) and Letters to J.D. Salinger (University of Wisconsin Press); her chapbook, Touching the Nooksack, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021.

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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The Unfolding

— For Emir Alajbegovic̈

With only the ocean
And a mere stretch of continent

To divide us, this brief eyelessness
Of time

The seven roses of your voice
Once more open in the vase

And on the mantelpiece the menorah
No longer candleless.

*

And Now, Your Silence

canted at an angle to the archives of our past.
         Like the wall in old Jerusalem
that leans against an air so dense
         with the white, six-sided particulate
of human woe that one can’t tell
         where the stone begins, where
the salt-stiffened fingers end. And no way
         of knowing which holds
the other up. The seven roses
         bend and darken on their stems.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native whose work has been published in the UK, Ireland, Canada and the USA, taught dance at the University of California prior to her role as Leadership Development trainer at the Environmental Protection Agency. Now retired, she lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest. Her poems have been included in seven anthologies. Shadows Thrown, her debut chapbook, was published in February, 2023. lauraannreed.net

Where It’s Going, and Where It’s Been by Andi Stout

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Where It’s Going, and Where It’s Been

Blackwater sits torn, divided—
between the Ohio and Potomac,
no room to grow,
no boundaries to call its own,
so it pushes north, then west,
winding recklessly, rejecting gravity
only to swan dive 57 feet,
fighting frozen to form the Falls.

It’s a long way down to the canyon,
but water keeps moving—no regrets,
because change is always messy.

Steady echoes softly erode stone—
reclaiming Canaan Valley, resisting
solid even in the harsh bite of winter.

Soon, it will join the Mississippi,
leave pieces of itself in humidity,
spill into the Gulf of Mexico.
Even now it remembers the urge to leap,
twisting the body to climb five salt box stories,
fractures ingrained,
like soot stains on a seasoned miner’s skin.

Miles away, it knows the mountain spring is home,
a necessary part of identity, which fills the cracks.
Rising up into the atmosphere, its journey begins again.

*

Andi Stout is an Appalachian writer and author of Pushcart-nominated, Tiny Horses Don’t Get A Choice. Her work has appeared in Mulberry Literary, Variant Literature, The Aerial Perspective, Northern Appalachian Review, Fire Poetry, Still: The Journal, among others. Andi earned her MFA at West Virginia University and lives in Pennsylvania.

Four Poems by Harriet Levin Millan

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

An Updated Definition of Rape

I am the girl who trusted her math tutor
when we sat side-by-side. Picture

the equation, up until this point,
I was not strong enough to prove.

I am the girl who thrusted forward negligible answers
on paper, a calculator wedged between my thumbs.

I acted on all the right answers. Girl who heard no singing
from upstairs. No landlady to offer tea or biscuits.

Girl who trusted math, whose father is a math whiz,
blackboards overrun with formulas in his downtown office.

I am the girl who once asked her father how gravity works
and why we don’t fall off the tilted side of the earth.

What keeps us here? I still need to know
how the earth holds me when I want to go.

Girl getting up from her seat. Girl facing wall,
tutor, his questions not having to do with math.

There are stars that have less and less to do with light
strewn across the sky in the shape of bears, belts, horseshoes.

She drove to his apartment with her new license.
Edging sixty mph on the Schuylkill.

Passing trucks with their headlights blinking.
Girl sitting on a pillow for her feet to reach the pedals.

Girl wearing braces on her teeth.
Morning girl who climbs up on the sink to clean the food

trapped beneath the silver. Evening girl whose boyfriend is waiting
for her to come over in her blue Toyota after this lesson. Girl

who is attracted to her tutor, but would not park
her Toyota outside his house for an indefinite amount of time,

distance or speed. Clearly getting up to leave. Pushed
down in her seat. Math tutor who knows the answers,

throwing her heavy textbooks off the table, slicking his black hair
back, wrinkling the clean white paper

where she scribbled her beautiful equations. Math tutor
wrestling her logic, his mind on numbers, the formulas

he reverses to apply to this situation: Loyal to your boyfriend, he says,
what are you, his dog? Girl who is attracted to tutor,

but that doesn’t mean she wants to fuck him,
plus, his breath smells,

too many cigarettes, too much coffee.
Girl who misses the cues when handed

a little clay pipe. Girl whose lungs fill with smoke, who at first
laughs when he chases her around the dining room table.

Are you kidding? But he’s not.
Stubs her toe. He pushes her down onto the shag carpet,

his hand too heavy on her back to rise.
This is when all the trouble with that toe began,

the nail detached from the skin
under her sock where she’s hidden it,

troubled this many years. Now that she’s exposed it,
what will happen? Will it heal?

*

In a Spider Web’s
Last Remaining Thread

Your forever touch,
thrumming in wind,
edging the circumference
of my purplish-brownish areolas
inherited from my Ladino line
fleeing the Inquisition,
the wick of the eternal
flame still taut in my blood.
This creepy dimensionless grip
hanging off the rain gutter
is not chiseled from stone
like the monuments in Tikal
set against the horizon
but is charged with the prophecies
you uttered and will ramble on
diffused in shreds
until I meet you
once again at the world’s end.

* 

All Real Communication is Vascular

We were once zooxanthellae living inside coral.
Love was a branching, leaning over sideways,

spilling out, sexy and sloppy—
hair in my eyes, my bra straps loosened in a spiraling breeze.

We spawned. The currents carried us.
We drifted away and surfaced on land

where we uttered vulgarities in our throaty dialect.
Uneasy on our feet, we became

filaments of our dreams.
We brought fruit to our god

instead of a blood-offering from our flocks.
We who were once sugared in rocky seabeds,

our eyes a bristling. No, it was never anger
smashing through us, calcifying our skin.

It was our tissue-like softness,
always our fragility that protected us.

* 

An Apology

It’s called making up, as if to say I’m
sorry is only imaginary, plucked

from an inner lining, silt-like
immersing this planet. And yet

making up dwells in solid constructions,
It’s what the slant in roofs do in snowstorms.

Piled-up insults slip to the ground
and melt, leaving another

raw winter gust to the eaves. It’s how
a trellis buffs up a rose bush. Yesterday,

as the gardener planted these roses,
he bent down low to inhale their scent. Not

a strong scent, he whispered.
Someone offers a thimbleful,

as the wind chime spins
from a hook a little higher up

to make a space.
I open my eyes, take the first step.

*

Harriet Levin Millan is the author of three books of poetry, The Christmas Show, which Eavan Boland chose for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and also won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, Girl in Cap and Gown, a National Poetry Series finalist, and My Oceanography. Her debut novel, How Fast Can You Run, was excerpted in The Kenyon Review. She holds a MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches writing at Drexel University.

Two Poems by Al Ortolani

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Confetti Cannons

My favorite television anchor
takes cover below the media stage,
arms protectively over his colleagues,
the camera on its swivel,
the fountain, the hill to Liberty Memorial.
My phone begins to fill with texts
until I can account for my family, all
except for my oldest grandson. He’s sixteen
with a girlfriend at his side. I hope
to catch them jaywalking Pershing Avenue
towards Crown Center. Both
are athletes and can run without tiring.
They have drilled for active shooters
since grade school.

When my grandson learned to walk,
I let him climb the stadium wall
at the university. I kept my hands
around his waist like a belay.
I gave him a boost over the lip
so he could sit and see the field,
empty in November, a cotillion of colors:
green turf, white hash marks,
red and gold endzone paint.
Game papa, he said,
a bluejay, a crow, a late autumn bee.
I kept my grip on his legs,
his small gravity of muscle.

Today, in front of the television,
there is nothing to hang onto
except parade coverage, audience
running east, police running west
with guns drawn. My arms are not
long enough to reach him.
My hands hold a smartphone
without answers.

*

Cuban Missiles for Children

My grandfather frightens me,
building a concrete bunker in his backyard.
He fills 5-gallon cans with water.
My father donated a first-aid kit.

Yankee, my hyper-active dog,
is hit by a car. At the new school,
I walk myself to the playground,
and try to blend with other children.

They all have missile stories.
We make a game of hiding. One boy
learns to open his mouth so wide
that he can swallow himself.

Soon, he is just a mouth
on the blacktop. We kick him around
like a rubber ball. One day he lands
in the bushes and no one can find him.

The teacher is frantic. The boy
has been coloring brilliant rockets.
She carries his portfolio to the counselor
and they telephone his parents.

When the mouth is brought back
into the classroom, the teacher tells us
it is impolite to stare. Tight-lipped,
he colors flames on his missiles.

*

Al Ortolani’s newest collection of poems, The Taco Boat, was recently released by NYQ Books. His first novel, Bull in the Ring, was just published by Meadowlark Press. Ortolani, a husband, father, and grandfather, is currently entertaining the idea of becoming a hermit. However, his wife prefers the company of the neighborhood feminists, and his dog Stanley refuses to live without treats.

Two Poems by Victoria Nordlund

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment
Wh_ _l of Fortun_
Back in ‘81, you viewed Wheel
devoutly with Grandma
in her in-law suite
attached to your living
room, on a couch that smelled
like cabbage.
The remote clicked
when she changed
the channel.
Back when Vanna
was 24 & still turned
the letter tiles. Back when Pat
was 35 & you thought everyone
was ancient.
You lost interest
somewhere in your 20’s,
but Mom and Dad continued
tuning in at top volume,
solving puzzles
for two decades more in their condo.
& Pat & Vanna were forever
smiling widely at 7:00 pm
& you swore they’d never get old.
& Mom never turned
the Game Show Network off after
she moved to her assisted
facility & started sleeping
in her gray La-Z-Boy recliner.
Pat Sajak taped his last
episode on Friday.
You’re also retiring soon,
comforted Vanna’s staying
for a bit longer. You still call
your remote a clicker.
*
Questions while weeding through wedding albums at Brimfield Antique Flea Market
Why would you want to put strangers on your coffee table?
Did my parents have a wedding album?
When was the last time I watched my wedding tape?
Owned a working VCR?
How have I been married for thirty-four years?
What are the last names of my bridesmaids?
My great-grandparents first names?
Will anyone sell the stacks of black and whites in my basement after I go?
How come these albums all smell the same?
Why did Grandma Kitty marry my Grandpa Walter twice?
Why don’t we talk about Grandpa’s other family?
What is my Dad’s sister’s name?
Does she know my Dad passed?
Did she?
Does anyone notice I am crying?
How many other husbands did Grandma Sandra have? 3? 4?
What happened to them?
Did Mom attend those weddings?
Why have I never seen those photos?
Maybe they are somewhere here in this pile—
*
Victoria Nordlund’s poetry collections Wine-Dark Sea and Binge Watching Winter on Mute are published by Main Street Rag. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize Nominee, whose work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Rust+Moth, Chestnut Review, trampset, and elsewhere. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com

Self-love Letter by Kit Willett

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Self-love Letter

I love the way you laugh
when nobody is looking.
I love your voice, that rich
and mellow timbre
as it searches
for the right note.
I love your voice,
                  that melodic,
handwritten style that,
at times, can be both
casual and profound.

I am proud of your creativity;
I know you work for it.
                  I am proud of you
for not giving up on so many things,
and I am proud of you for giving up
on just as many. I am proud of you
for reading so much this year.

                  I love your hands:
piano fingers with alternating
pink and starry blue nail polish;
I never thought I would see
painted nails on myself—
or pierced ears—or a tattoo.

God, I love your tattoo.
                  I love every star
in every constellation
                  on your back,
even if I seldom see them.

I love being you,
even when it is hard.
I love closing my eyes
with you, and having you
with me when I open
                  them again.

*

Kit Willett is a bisexual poet, English teacher, and executive editor of the Aotearoa poetry journal Tarot. His debut poetry collection, Dying of the Light, was published by Wipf and Stock imprint Resource Publications in 2022.

Nature and Ecopoetry Workshop with Grant Clauser

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Nature and Ecopoetry Workshop
Instructor: Grant Clauser
Day: Wednesday, July 10
Time: 6:00-8:00pm (Eastern)
Price: $25

>>> Buy Tickets <<<

Nature and Ecopoetry Workshop
Nature has long been used as setting and inspiration for poems, and as metaphors for exploring the personal and social issues. This workshop will explore how the non-human world can provide language, metaphors, and models for examining our place in the universe. We’ll look at classic and contemporary models, discuss theories and poetic practices for using nature as a subject in poetry, and work together on some strategies for writing new poems.

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.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

~ ONE ART ~ 16 Comments

Ecstasy

Someone offered me Ecstasy
And I wondered what they had in mind.
Perhaps lying on a beach on the island
of Antigua, the sun on my skin, a red sail
in the distance soon to arrive?
Cooking a marinara sauce while listening
To Pavarotti reach the high notes?
Waking in bed next to you, light
Slanting across the bed, our love
Awake again after sleeping too long?
Watching you push our daughter
Into the midwife’s hands, the tiny face
squinched against the new day,
an old soul among us again? Sledding
with our son down the long hill
Of his childhood, and years later
Holding him in my arms after
He emerged from the darkness
Still alive? My falling on my knees
After the years of worry, thanking
What-is for delivering this miracle?
What is Ecstasy, but a blue pill
Of gratitude, a recognition
all I love is an undeserved gift
slipping away even now?

*

Envy

I hear on NPR an interview
with my friend from grad school
who won a Presidential Medal
and stood on the White House lawn
with other luminaries of our age.
My friend is appropriately
modest about her accomplishment
so I say to my wife Good for her
no one deserves fame more
but an ugly little corner of my soul
hates my friend’s success
because it makes me feel small
untalented and undeserving. I spend
the rest of the day brooding about
my trifling pathetic life, writing for
a handful of indulgent friends and
former students. After a day of staring
at the white screen of my failure
I hear you come through the door
home at last from the trauma workshop
you teach. You tell me of a young man
who held his dying brother in his arms
after a drive by and how the family
is still grieving years later and how
the workshop has given the young man
a few tools to help his family recover
and then we read an email from a friend
who now lives with her two children
in a refugee shelter in Poland
while her husband is fighting
somewhere near the Russian border
and I think of my own brave brother
in Houston who discovered the provost
of his university has been lying
and stealing and Jack went
on television to speak truth to power
and lost his job… And even my dog Josie
faces each day with the thrill of play,
the joy of long walks through the alleys
and faith I’ll place a bowl of her favorite foods
on the floor. And then you pull pasta
out of the pantry, I dress a green salad
with care and my self-pity fades
into the evening ritual of loving gestures
and I feel joy and gratitude for the gifts
I’ve been given in this one small life

*

Michael Simms is the founder of Vox Populi and Autumn House Press. His poetry collections include American Ash, Nightjar and Strange Meadowlark. His speculative fiction novels include Bicycles of the Gods and The Talon Trilogy. His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Poem-a-Day published by The Academy of American Poets, ONE ART and Plume Poetry. In 2011, Simms was awarded a Certificate of Recognition from the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his service to the arts.

Two Poems by J.R. Solonche

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT WHAT I DON’T KNOW

I want to write about what I don’t know.
I want to write a sequence of sonnets, for instance,
on the mysteries of the mind, one for each mystery or so.

I want to write about what I don’t know.
On botany, macroeconomics, quantum gravity,
I want to compose elaborately complex odes.

I want to write about what I don’t know.
The secret language of deaf Babylonians, let’s say,
or how nocturnal plants use moonlight to grow.

I want to write about what I don’t know.
An epic about my heroic great ancestral father
and how he found my great ancestral mother in the Russian snow.

I want to write about what I’ll never know.
What will the world be like in a thousand years?
Will there still be birds called eagle, puffin, hawk, flamingo?

*

SHORTCUTS

“Remember, there are no shortcuts,”
he used to say. He was my father,
and he used to say that a lot. I think
he said that more than he said anything.
I knew what he meant. He didn’t need
to spell it out. So, of course, I took all
the shortcuts I could find. The shortcut
to the ball field. The shortcut to the
candy store. The shortcut to the deli.
The shortcut to the pizza place. The
shortcut to the junior high school.
The shortcut to the high school. The
shortcut to the B average in high
school. The shortcut to the college
across town. The shortcut to dropping
out. The shortcut to the woman I
married. The shortcut to becoming
a poet. I never told him he was right.

*

Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY Orange, J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 500 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s, including The New Criterion, The New York Times, The American Scholar, The Progressive, Poetry Northwest, Salmagundi, The Literary Review, The Sun, The American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, Poetry East, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Free Verse. He is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Invisible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Five Oaks Press), The Black Birch (Kelsay Books), I, Emily Dickinson & Other Found Poems (Deerbrook Editions), In Short Order (Kelsay Books), Tomorrow, Today and Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions), True Enough (Dos Madres Press), The Jewish Dancing Master (Ravenna Press), If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (Kelsay Books), In a Public Place (Dos Madres Press), To Say the Least (Dos Madres Press), The Time of Your Life (Adelaide Books), The Porch Poems (Deerbrook Editions , 2020 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie Book), Enjoy Yourself (Serving House Books), Piano Music (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Serving House Books), For All I Know (Kelsay Books), A Guide of the Perplexed (Serving House Books), The Moon Is the Capital of the World (WordTech Communications), Years Later (Adelaide Books), The Dust (Dos Madres Press), Selected Poems 2002-2021 (nominated for the National Book Award by Serving House Books), and coauthor with his wife Joan I. Siegel of Peach Girl:Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.

The Portal of the Page by Daniel Seifert

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The Portal of the Page

We are all time
travelers,
though most of us don’t know it.
We place one day before the next
like the footsteps of a drunkard.
Strapped into the future while now
sneaks past, unseen.

Something must be done, and can:
a journal is an anchor.
Its function, to bend
your neck to yesterday and ask
what needs setting down.

Do this.
1. To feel ink flow and leave a screen untapped,
if only for a moment.
2. To interrogate what matters and
let it feel the texture
of a waiting page.
3. To look back (how could you
forget that night,
that storm,
that drink that killed its bubbles,
that thought you thought
you’d never think again).

This thought matters:
let your history be
graffiti on a wall
and not a black hole.
Get your pen.

*

Daniel Seifert’s writing is published or forthcoming in The New York Times, Consequence, The Poetry Society of New York, and Chiron Review. In 2023 he was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and longlisted for the Letter Review Prize. He is currently undertaking a Masters in Creative Writing at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore. He tweets @DanSeifwrites

After class by Elizabeth Joy Levinson

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After class

Cleaning the science classroom,
I came across a bin of stethoscopes.
I never have before, so I slipped one
over my head and was immediately struck
by how loud the world became.
I placed it over my heart,
imagined my mother, a nurse, listening
to so many heart stories and then, coming home
and listening again. How little room
there was for thought
while my blood rushed in and out,
the way a wave knocks you down,
the sound you hear
when you are trying to right your body,
bring your head above the water,
how rarely we stop to hear it
even though it is a song always playing.

*

Elizabeth Joy Levinson is a high school biology teacher in Chicago. Her work has been published in Whale Road Review, SWWIM, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gyroscope, and others. The author of two chapbooks, As Wild Animals (Dancing Girl Press) and Running Aground (Finishing Line Press), her first full length collection, Uncomfortable Ecologies, is available from Unsolicited Press.

Span by Jeff McRae

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Span

She was there, silent as a rag doll.
I unpinned her calendar from the wall.
A busy year until early May—
a hair appointment the very day
someone took her out in a bag.
Years were crumbs, absence sound.
She didn’t say a word. I heard her
everywhere. You watched
from the window but she
didn’t appear. When we arrived
and opened the door
for a second I believed
she’d just run to the store.
She wasn’t coming back.
Or hadn’t completely gone,
I couldn’t tell. With my finger
I upset the little bells on the porch,
expecting to hear her call my name.
Instead, the kids wanted to know—
Dad, can we watch a show?
and scattered to the blue corners
of her couch. I occupied
an empty chair, surveyed the room:
wool blankets she threw
over the bannister, the quiet
Baldwin upright in the corner.
Her collection of keys
in a basket on the piano bench.
She never told me what they meant.

*

Jeff McRae’s poems have appeared in The Maynard, Massachusetts Review, Antioch Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, The Briar Cliff Review, Mudfish, Rattle, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont.

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

This Boat
            for TE

Were you two or three?
Strapped to my lap in the kayak
I paddled into the wetlands
past the sign that read “Go Back.”

Herons, pelicans, cormorants
flew close enough to touch,
and sun dazzled the murk below.

“In this boat, we can go anywhere,”
you said, then pressed your cheek
to my breast, and slept.

You were almost grown,
when you chose the unknown water.
If there were signs ahead,
I failed to heed, or even see, them.

*

New

That time in the park
at the end of the street

our dogs off leash
and we are off leash too

our love so new
we kiss and kiss

not caring for once
who sees us

what might be said
or be construed.

*

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

Of Havens by Tricia Knoll

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Of Havens

            …the wide open door/Means nothing if it cannot be closed.
            – May Sarton

Rock caves vent
smoke, baby cries
and boasts, but

my love’s home has windows
to see ins and outs –
stops for barefoot still-point.
Sun bounces on glass,
fingers follow rain trails.

Doors crack for walk-aways
from chores and overhearing
hard stories not my own.
This leaving-for-living
until I come back
to shed my shoes.

Within open and closed,
I know where you are,
what you need.

Sometimes
where you go when
your dreams touch a blue door
until the softest click,
(not a lock twist) lets it
hang and you find home
here. With me, reading
whispers on the ceiling.

*

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who in 2024 welcome two new collections into publication: Wild Apples (poems of downsizing and moving 3,003 miles) and The Unknown Daughter (a chapbook exploring the voices of people who interact with the Tomb of the Unknown Daughter). She is a Contributing Editor to Verse Virtual. Website: triciaknoll.com

Skylight by Marc Alan Di Martino

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Skylight

Everything you do, I did
at your age: the tousled
bangs draped over your
eyes shielding you from
scrutiny, the oversize
sweatshirts, the baggy
jeans, the unassailable
scowl, the quiet allure
of darkness & the stark
conviction that life
is royally unfair
to all—but mainly you.
I get it. I do. We too
had indecipherable
slang and snickered
at others’ inability to read
our thoughts, emitted
through cryptic tics
of the nervous system,
black holes of significance
behind the iron event
horizon of each mono-
syllabic moan, each groan
of disapproval. I’m here
to tell you all of this
is normal, fine, okay,
copacetic, kosher, chill.
It will run its course
like a cold, so common
is it to the species. Life
is precious (yes, I know
you’ll laugh at this
so be my guest), an old
saying that never loses
its sting. Nothing
matters to me more
than you and I really
think you need to hear
this now, as it’s been
hit-or-miss lately
between us. Maybe if
I can manage to crack
your skylight open
a bit I’ll let some sun
in. Just don’t forget
to look up
or you’ll miss it.

*

Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City Press, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Autumn Sky, Orange Blossom Review, Rattle and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His translation Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco will be published by World Poetry Books in 2024. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

After Watching World News by Louisa Muniz

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

After Watching World News

Some days my body carries less of the holy
more of the grief it can’t help but hold.

On days I don’t know how to take
one more of the world’s sorrows

I make of myself a light, needle-colored
under a moon threaded in funeral cloth.

When my fifteen year old granddaughter tells me,
I’m working on becoming a kinder, better person,

last night’s news lingers in my head: hostages,
bodies, guns, the thistle & thrum of all we’ve done.

Why do we hold back our good will?
The one thing we could give of ourselves.

Who knew despair could be a palpable thing?
Yet, the heart allows both light & dark to enter it

as it commits & contracts to the ocean of its wants.
On any given bankrupt morning I might finally stop asking,

where’s my stuff to the universe.
Do I really think I’m owed something?

But, if it’s still a thing, I’m in the marketplace for gratitude.
Isn’t the enough I have, more than enough?

As for hope, I position it mid-height on my tongue,
mid-day in my body, mid-prayer in my burning hands.

*

Louisa Muniz lives in Sayreville, N.J. She holds a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction from Kean University. Her work has appeared in SWWIM, ONE ART, Palette Poetry, Gyroscope, Tinderbox Journal, PANK Magazine, Shark Reef and elsewhere. She won the Sheila-Na-Gig 2019 Spring Contest for her poem Stone Turned Sand. Her work has been nominated a few times for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her debut chapbook, After Heavy Rains by Finishing Line Press was released in December, 2020. She is presently working on her second chapbook.

Four Poems by Karen Friedland

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

This Gracious Planet

Try to align yourself
with the brilliance of the morning.
Take in the new green leaves
and delve deeply into this day.

Say your own kind of prayer
every morning
to the life force
that animates this gracious planet—
to beauty,
to freshness.

This languid morning,
with its blown-about wind-chimes,
will never come your way again.

So savor the sunlight,
dappling trees,
and let cool breezes wash you clean—

glory in being on this side
of the sod.

*

Another Woman Down

Another woman down—
another Jewish woman—
the second in as many days—
this one with my same rare cancer subtype—
damn.

I ate an edible
to help quell the panic
rising from my tender gut
like bile.

“It’s like a slasher movie,”
I tell my husband,
with ovarian cancer
the killer.

Another woman down—
who not long ago
was vibrant and alive.

* 

Watching Animal Rescue Videos Has Become My Bag

Vicariously,
I’m the tiny, pink pig
fallen through the slates of the slaughterhouse-bound truck,
nursed back to life
by a loving young couple;

I’m the abused dog, the donkey,
the impossibly small baby bird
miraculously healed
through great love and care.

I’m the whole world right now,
bombed, massacred, waiting for cease-fire,
waiting for spring,
for the grass to grow back.

Enraptured by the universe, the dog’s heavy sigh,
I lay abed,
dying while hoping.

Despite everything,
I like it right here.

*

The Lady in the Wicker Basket

I will be buried
in the Garden of Faith
at the Gardens of Gethsemane,

buried in a wicker casket
under a lush green field,
in a green burial—
and to the soil I’ll go,
rich and loamy,
feeding the trees I love.

I’ll snuggle up to the earth—
fleet deer and foxes will amble over me.

I don’t believe in heaven,
while my neighbors seem to,
but I do believe in the cosmos—
that maybe I’ll be out there.

And my words—
I’ll leave them behind, too.
Little brightly colored shards,
breadcrumbs.

*

Once a nonprofit grant writer by trade, Karen Friedland had poems published in the Lily Poetry Review, Nixes Mate Review, Constellations, and others. She was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her books include Places That Are Gone, Tales from the Teacup Palace, and a posthumous third volume to be published in 2024. Karen lived in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston with her husband, two dogs and a cat. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in November 2021, two days before her 58th birthday, and died on April 14, 2024.

*

Please note: Karen was a previous contributor to ONE ART. Her poem, The Boy, appeared in ONE ART on March 15, 2023.

Three Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

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Emptying Time

While I was asleep, my father died,
slipped into that great coda, when memory passes
from one person to another person,
and I became a gatekeeper of his life.

And since there were gaps in his history,
I began filling them.

On my way to my father’s funeral,
a large whooping crane wafts across the bay
where a lavender light floats on water.

Before the dead releases,
breath becomes one door closing,

another one opening.
That strange lyric
of a life that continues
when someone starts sharing a memory.

I wasn’t there when he died,
but I have witnessed others at their last sigh
as a field medic in Vietnam. I remember
each of them like a slick country road
I must maneuver/drive in the dark.

The crane lifts its impossible weight,
its head matching crimson morning-break,
its whoop-whoop trumpets my loss.

How heavy a crane looks, large wingspan
almost tipping both edges of the sky,

endlessly suspended in air,
an aimless cloud, always present,
untouchable as thought.

*

I Had Been Expecting This Phone Call Since January

I hoped I was wrong.
Unfortunately, his voice on the other end
confirmed what I knew had to be true.

“Mom died in her sleep.”

I felt sorry for my son
passing on this information.

At least she died in her sleep,
someone would say, eventually. This
kind of news I expected.

Some would say
it was a relief she died;
painless, in her sleep.

People always say this
when they do not know what else to say.

I do not know what to say to my son
to ease his pain,
when often I lack the necessary words.
Some experiences in life
are not explained easily.

Life’s hardest lessons
leave no rational justifications.

We muddle through trauma
hoping sadness eventually fades away.
And it’s hard work;
often memory-pain returns at the worst moments.

Yes, she died in her sleep.
It was expected, and then
it happened, quietly.

Unfortunately, my son witnessed her death.
It will hover in his heart for a long time.

I cannot tell him how long his sadness will last,
or how sadness ebbs and flows,
boomerangs back,
because each person enters grief differently,
and it has no set time limit
how long suffering will last.

There’s no manual to explain how grief works.
Loss is experiential.

I held onto the silence in the telephone call
like a lifeline to my son.
I knew he was drowning
and there are no words
to soothe this kind of pain.

Silence lasted for a long time.

*

Lastness of Silence

This world does not know true meaning of silence:
it disturbs, tears hearts. My son, my son,
where are you in this orange-red world? You left

         unsettling news. What could I do differently
         to change this terrible mockingbird song?

How could I have placed my thumb on these scales?
I find a distance between snapped hearts and no maps.
I walk as silent as this night, searching, searching,

         and you are not there. My son, my lost son,

lost within his own explanations. Answers are not here,
or in blank places in this sad jazz. My world empties.

You have not spoken to me since, my son, my son
of awful distances. This world cannot explain
true meaning of this silence, its haunting melody.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is an editor of Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Harvest Time” (Deerbrook Editions, 2021); “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022); “Not Only the Extraordinary are Exiting the Dream World (Flowstone Press, 2022); “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); and “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024).

Ceremony After the Ceremony by Lisa Morin Carcia

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Ceremony After the Ceremony

               — Miramar National Cemetery

Young woman striding over the grass
down the newest row of graves,
bearing a gold-flecked urn. Left hand
underneath, right hand on top. Sober
green coat and slacks, sturdy black shoes.
Two workmen waiting for her.
Turf peeled back, ground opened.
Family not permitted. After the service
at the committal shelter, after “Taps,”
after the mourners have driven away—
this ceremony after the ceremony.
How she holds the urn close to her body.
How it feels to carry that weight.

*

Lisa Morin Carcia’s poems have appeared in Whale Road Review, Eunoia Review, Sheila-Na-Gig online, SWWIM Every Day, Talking River Review, North American Review, Floating Bridge Review, and elsewhere. She lives near Seattle, Washington.

Sanctuary by Ann Boaden

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Sanctuary

Blue-skinned with tattoos over
packed muscles twisting under
tee sweat-stained black as
3 a.m., shouting “Pastor! Pastor! Pastor!”
he crashes into the church
just as the sermon’s ending.
He’s one of ours. A fragile giant, and now
he’s using again.
Thirsty so thirsty.
Tip water to my mouth,
I can’t reach the cup and
my bones are fire.
The minister,
black-robed, stretches arms to him,
places fingers strong as light on the
shaved and scarred head he bows over
her lectern, murmurs words
like cool water. She is tall, slender,
her hair the color of morning. People
rise, come forward from pews, surround the
not-yet-pieta.
They circle me the wolves the lions to tear to devour.
No, child, the minister says. These are the faces of love.
How the story turns back again and again
asking to be rewritten.

*

Ann Boaden lives and writes in MidAmerica, where she received master’s and doctoral degrees in English from The University of Chicago and taught literature and writing at her undergraduate school, Augustana (Illinois). Her work appears/is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Big Muddy, Blue Unicorn, From SAC, Ginosko, litbreak, Penwood Review, Persimmon Tree, Sediments, South Dakota Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and The Windhover, among many other journals.

A Unique Opportunity Courtesy of Faith Shearin

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Faith Shearin has been amazingly generous and given us a packet of 30 Writing Exercises to sell as part of ONE ART’s fundraising campaign. This 39-page document (PDF) offers a wide range of inspiration! The packet is being sold for $50.

But wait, there’s more! As an added bonus, those who buy the packet have an opportunity to work 1-on-1 with Faith in the coming weeks and months ahead. How does this work? If you buy the packet, you can share 3-4 poems with Faith via email or snail mail for the price of $15 per poem. This is a rare opportunity to receive personalized feedback from a prominent contemporary poet.

Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have won awards from New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Two YA novels — Lost River, 1918 and My Sister Lives in the Sea — won The Global Fiction Prize, judged by Anthony McGowan, and have been published by Leapfrog Press.

Payment Options.

Reach out to us directly at oneartpoetry@gmail.com with questions or to be added to the list of those who wish to work 1-on-1 with Faith later this summer.

[last updated _ 8.7.24

Two Poems by Judith Sornberger

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

What Is Essential

I fell for him even before he called me
his flower the first time we made love.
But how little we knew of each other
when we married at eighteen. Not long after,
I learned he didn’t believe in squandering
our earnings—mine from the accounting
job I hated, his from the mattress factory—
on anything inessential.

Our second February, someone at work
was selling five-dollar daffodil
bouquets for the Heart Association.
Without asking his permission, I bought one,
and all the way home I hardly noticed
the black slush I trudged through
for the brightness I carried. Sprinting
up the steps to our tiny apartment,
I hoped the tight buds, as they opened,
might melt what had frozen between us
that ice-bound winter. Silly, I suppose,
as splurging on something so unnecessary.

The next morning, we awoke to a wide swathe
of sunlight spread across the kitchen table
and one brave bud splayed open. Given his
disapproval, my husband refused to see
how the frilly gold center resembled
a gramophone speaker—the kind of contraption
I imagined always playing love songs.
All day, into the elegiac light of late afternoon,
it broadcasted the scent of an awakening,
the blaring silence of an ending.

*

The Return of the Upside-down Bird

I lay myself out on the chaise longue,
inviting sunshine to ease my shoulders.
My treat this first warm day is reading outside,
but the pain in my crumbling right knee
Shrieks so loudly I can’t concentrate.
Deep sigh. Close your eyes.

When we first moved here, I loved how the woods
kept creeping ever closer to the deck. Pines, juniper,
and honeysuckle still approach, but the ashes
are a dead and dying tribe, stumbling down,
one by one, like so many I’ve loved.

Any day one may crash through the roof.
But damn, I didn’t come out here to muse
on one more thing falling apart. Opening again,
my eyes flit to the petite red-breasted nuthatch
I’ve watched for all winter among the birds
braving the hawk’s keen eye to partake
at my feeder. The one my long-dead love
called the upside-down bird.

Who knows how it survived the winter?
But here it is, spiraling, head first,
down the dead trunk, pecking at insects
in the shredding bark. And in the next second—
I can hardly believe it—another appears
on the trunk next door. Maybe its mate?
Maybe they’re grateful for the death
that so abundantly feeds them. Maybe
they’ll weave a nest from its peeling strands,
lay a handful of hope for the rest of us.

*

Judith Sornberger’s most recent poetry collection is The Book of Muses (Finishing Line Press). Her full-length poetry collections are I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock), Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas (Shanti Arts), Practicing the World (Shanti Arts), and Open Heart (Calyx Books). She is also the author of five other chapbooks, including the award-winning Wal-Mart Orchid. Sornberger is professor emerita of Mansfield University of Pennsylvania where she taught English and, many years ago, created the Women’s Studies Program. She is involved in community theater in Wellsboro, PA—producing, writing, and acting regularly in productions. Living on the side of a mountain in the northernmost tier of the Appalachians is a constant source of inspiration for her. www.judithsornberger.net

Two Poems by Shannon K. Winston

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments
The Maidenhair Fern On Her Own Endangerment
          -Inspired by the Maidenhair Fern entry on the United Plant Savers website.
The maidenhair reads her endangerment score is 52.
She checks to see if her fingers are all there. Yes,
but there is less and less land for her in Appalachia. Feeling
useless, she closes her eyes. Half in shade,
darkness shallows her. She slips her fingers into loam
and whispers more. The maidenhair knows her
endangerment score is 52, but she ignores it. Best
to pretend she doesn’t know what she’s known
for a long time. Water drips off of her: she’s unwetted.
That is, she sheds water but never gets wet. Her magic
trick still leaves even her breathless. There’s no one around—
just a silky silence she could slip on like a dress.
The maidenhair can’t believe her endangerment score is 52.
She slinks around limestone, rubs her green-black
against the mouths of caves. The other ferns might call
this indulgence, giving up. Abdication is sexier so she likes
it better, but that’s not what she’s doing: she’s easing into
the past tense. How bad will the end be? 52,
a number she whispers to the tiny spores under her leaves.
She hopes they’re tough. She promises them a moist, soft landing.
*
Flip Flops
Forget the runway, I strut up and down
library aisles in the loudest flip flops I can find.
One might think big, thick wedges would do the trick,
but the thin drug store ones are best.
They suck my heel and let out the sweetest
Thack. Thack. Flip. Flop. That usually does it:
Emily Dickinson wakes from her slumber
and I ask her about the weather. No doubt, she thinks
it’s too hot. Proust is more verbose, so I shuffle past.
Thack, thack. In summer, my feet turn black from the dye.
I stare at my heels’ impression against the rubber.
In the library, I prefer works by people I’ve never heard of.
I flip through the pages of their books.
We all try to leave our mark.
*
Shannon K. Winston’s book, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press), was published in 2021. Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, On the Seawall, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Find her here: shannonkwinston.com.

Spider’s Love by Achilles Villwock

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Spider’s Love

Despite the connotations
in flower language
when it comes to spider lilies,
I love you like one.
You’re not dead
but something delicate.
Spindly and soft,
something that survives
through all else.
And if we were in love
then I’d be the sun,
excited to see your face.
And even if you were death incarnate
I’d leave my heart and soul in your hands.
I’d let you poison me
while I nurture you,
for in the end
it’s love.

*

Achilles Villwock is a senior in high school at Coral Academy of Science. They participated in a poetry contest in 2023. They also enjoy reading classical literature like Dostoevsky.

STEP 1: SAND, CLAY, FIRE by Allison Wall

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STEP 1: SAND, CLAY, FIRE

I used to think faith
was built on heavy things
that could not be moved

but everything can be moved

lay your palm
on this sun-warmed boulder
feel the atoms shifting

one day it will be sand

I clung to The Cornerstone
it fell through
my fingers

I dug out the pieces
hard, sweaty work
each pebble a weight
these clay hands
measured, bore,
and cast away
into primordial fire

*

Allison Wall is a queer, neurodivergent writer. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University, and she has published short speculative fiction, personal essays, and book and film reviews. Her poetry is forthcoming in Thimble Literary Magazine. Connect with Allison on her website, allison-wall.com.

Age Before Beauty by Jerl Surratt

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Age Before Beauty

You’re so handsome, yet you have eyes for me.
And you’re the right size for me, your face upturned
for kisses, my back bent as to a fountain.

I hope you’ll stay, I guess, through all my days
though that would mean you’d have to face an end
you’ll come to see one day from miles away.

Right now it seems limitless, our time together,
you talking to me about anything but the weather,
me mining myself for reminiscences that you’re
as hungry for as you are for the helpless attention

I pay you, so pleasantly uncomfortable for us both.
You see our future in the world as it is. My last
impressions of love you’ve made my first. We don’t
care to know how to get out of this.

*

Jerl Surratt’s poems have been published in The Amsterdam Quarterly, The Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review and in other journals and two anthologies. He is a 2025 Pushcart Prize nominee and was awarded the Robinson Jeffers Foundation’s annual poetry prize by final judge Marie Howe.

The Testimony of White Tulips by Crystal Taylor

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The Testimony of White Tulips

I was eight
when Sandy first
came for dinner.
She ate raw meat
from her palm,
on a dare.
Maybe it was
a mating ritual,
peacocks’ feathers
fanning kitchen air.

Mom caught Evelyn,
two lips
tickling Sandy’s ear.
Curtains agape,
a spotlight
above the sink
lit a stage
for strange neighbors—
a flower-box of tulips
as witness.

Mom and Dad
smothered her belonging—
in a trash bag
with her things,
drop-kicked them
into weeds.
The porchlight cast
flying shadows
on golf balls where
her eyes once lived.

Our father gave
my sister away,
under Orion’s belt.
Invisible streamers
trailed our street.
Tiered cake
melted on the seat.

*

Crystal Taylor is a neurodivergent poet and writer. When not writing, she spends time with her partner of 20 years. Her most recent work lives in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Tiny Wren Lit, Rust + Moth, and other sacred spaces. Follow her on X @CrystalTaylorSA and Instagram @cj_taylor_writes.

Five Poems by Sandra Kohler

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Your Absence

Your absence is
presence this morning
when I wake, when
I rise, when I face
the day without you

after fifty years
of being with you
each day, each night
every day, every night
all day, all night.

How can I learn
to live without
your presence, to live
with your absence,
to live again?

*

Tonawanda Winter #2, Missing

Morning’s tropical: wet, warm;
rain’s fallen, temperatures soared.
There are no doves on the crest
of 83. No one’s afoot. Wrong –
there’s one youngish black man
slowly walking up the other side
of the street. And now in front of
85, Dennis’ truck lights go on.
A sudden spray of doves alights

on the balcony of 83, flurries,
flies off. There are sparrows in our
lilac. Straggling walkers appear,
vanish, there’s someone I’ve not seen
before on the porch of a house two
up from 83. One small piece of matter
– ort, crumb – is picked up then spat
out by three sparrows one at a time.
They dislike the taste of this day.

I miss the dead. My brothers, my
friends, They’re gone. I feel their
absence, their presence. Shirley, Steve,
Susan – each so alive for me. A breeze
stirs, gusts. Dennis’ truck is back, he
gets out, goes inside carrying a small
paper bag. Now the street is empty of
everything but wind. The lilac’s empty
of sparrows. My stay here is over.

*

Afternoon Aubade with Cathedral

I lie in bed in the middle
of the afternoon in a strange
hotel in a strange city,

my husband/lover/partner’s
arm lying across my body as it
has for thirty years, weighted

with time, with hours of the
evenings mornings afternoons
we’ve laughed and quarreled,

made love and told each other
some truths about ourselves,
spoken or allowed our souls to

be silent. Today our bodies
are weighted with these hours,
with years of our presence

in a space holy and unbounded
as La Sagra Familia, the space
Gaudi would not finish.

*

Tonawanda Winter #5, Fears

The morning brings a mystery. Does each day’s
dawning? There’s a police car parked in front of
83, just across the street. My husband watches it
pull away – neither of us sees whether the officer
in it gets out, goes up to the house. Around here,
a police car augurs bad news: either its being
delivered, or that something’s happened within
the house for which help has been summoned.

The day’s brilliant, winter fresh. Stillness, sun,
light breezes stirring. I am astir, I’m alive, awake.
I check the time. I need to shower and dress and
leave. Someone walks up the street, a complete
stranger. Young man? boy? in an orange jacket,
phone in hand. Then stillness again. Even the pin
oak leaves aren’t moving – no, wrong, they’re

starting to tremble. The street, the sidewalks
are empty of walkers and cars, the blue sky
of clouds. Once again I have allowed anxiety
to shape what I am able to see of the morning.
How I wish I could empty my heart of these
fears. Could I? How? Will I? When?

*

Time At Last?

The day after what would have been
your eighty-ninth birthday, I am thinking
again about you, sister, brooding once
more about your failures, your cruelty,
bravery, the strange cocktail of attributes
you carried into all your relationships as
daughter, sister, wife, mother, daughter-
in-law, mother-in-law, friend.

What were you like in the years before
our mother’s illness, before her death?
I don’t know, I remember little. What I
do know, do still remember, although with
memories transformed by time’s perspective,
is the fabulous tale you taught me about
those early days, about myself, about
my loss, about my motherlessness.

In your version of my childhood, I was
not motherless. You were motherless,
but I was not, because when she died,
you became mother to me. I believed
your invention for decades, until I was
older than our mother was when she died.
Your lie kept me from seeing that I was
in mourning, yet not allowed to mourn.

Not allowed to mourn, how could I
recover from mourning, heal? How can
I forgive you? If I cannot, how can I
forgive myself? For not having mourned,
for not recognizing that I was in fact
mourning then, despite all our denials,
yours and mine, of that. Is it time at
last to forgive you, forgive myself?

*

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, (Word Press) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including The New Republic, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many others over the past 50 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia.