Month: July 2024

Two Poems by Tracey Knapp

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Piece by Piece

November and the pumpkin on the porch
     has collapsed inward on itself. Only a biopsy
          of my breast tissue this afternoon
could drain the blue from the sky today.
     If only my mother could find remission after years
          of surviving. Her hair grows back
thicker on the sides, but no one
     can tell if her fingerprints will return,
          if the nerve pain in her feet will diminish.
She sits alone in her house on the other side
     of the country, snoozing in her armchair
          while Judge Judy delivers verdicts in favor
of the wrongfully accused on TV. If only
     there was a way to win my mother’s life back
          from the time she’s spent in treatment.
Treat me with some dignity when I must lie on my face
     with my arm and breast pitched through a hole
          in the table. One mammogram after another
until they locate the spot, take a bit to test.
     My mother reminds me I must do it, despite any dread,
          after a lumpectomy in her breast, lymph nodes
removed. I take the dry gulp that must have come for her.
     Piece by piece, I stand a little closer
          to her fear.

*

Long Season

Can’t shake winter this year.
Skipped supper again and still I’m hunched
over my desk as if I’m someone of substance
and determination. If only a cigarette
was hanging out of my mouth, and why not?
A lot has changed: the wine foresworn,
and whatever version of love I might have
hoped for has lost its wick in the wax.

The trees’ leafless frames wobble against
remnants of Pacific wind. Might as well
pull on some jeans and hit the coffee shop,
ask them for a flower in the foam, maybe
summon Spring that way. The barista says, “sure”
but I get a fern. I say nothing, foam on my nose.

The sky looms low over the parking lot. But look—
the trees along the curb are showing signs of yellow,
and the bees stir in their winter clusters.
Give me a bulb about to pop through
the muck. A little green wouldn’t hurt.
Promise me something is about to grow,
and it better be goddamn beautiful.

*

Tracey Knapp lives in the California Bay Area. Her first collection of poems is Mouth (42 Miles Press, 2015). Recent work has appeared in Pinch, Cream City Review, and The Shore. Find her at traceyknapp.com

Three Poems by Marcia Trahan

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

MERCILESS SEASON

Even a mild winter is a violent time.
I can’t undo its damage, my darkness.

Sunrise, early spring. The lake silvers
the horizon, leaving me to calculate my crimes.

My voice is a rasp, cold in its husk.
Don’t ask it questions, it won’t answer.

Darling, I deserted you in a merciless season,
I abandoned you like a stray dog
chained to a stump in the snow.

The sky in its spreading reds and golds
will return my kindness to me,
but too late to save you, it seems.

I only know I am wildly ready
to be good and sweet again,
ready to take all the sun’s medicines now.

*

SOLITUDE

The sun sets fire to the mountains at dusk.
A pickup shudders past on the highway,
the driver alone in the cab. My house is silent,
utterly still, and I wonder about the driver,
if he’s heading home to someone, or
if he luxuriates in living by himself.
My love is coming back, this much I know.
We won’t list the dark days. We won’t
argue about the arguments. He’ll return,
hungry for me again. It always goes this way.
It will go this way until it doesn’t, and then I
will weigh my solitude, maybe refashion myself,
no longer the one detained but the one who
stops counting the hours like fathomless stars.

*

TRUE

When the storm was over,
I felt an unutterable stillness.

I survived, having
come close to death. I waited for a
moment, took stock. Yes, I was unscathed.

Then I saw a window
and climbed through it for light, for life,

for the good of my restive aging spirit.
The sky gilded me, the water blued my horizon,
the wet dirt waited for my bare feet.

Maple leaves drifted to me as if
the path at my feet was their correct address.

All of my years gathered like a shield,
defending me from errors.

Nothing followed me. I was
delivered from the shadows of old wars.

I ran, every heartbeat shivering my skin,
my destination gauzy in the distance.

I am still running, but not away.
I am aiming true. I know this voiceless road.

*

Marcia Trahan is the author of Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession (Barrelhouse Books). Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Cathexis Northwest Press, Two Hawks Quarterly, The Write Launch, Wild Roof Journal, Every Day Poems, Cloudbank, Clare, Anderbo, and Kansas City Voices. Her essays have been published in HuffPost, The Rumpus, Catapult, the Brevity Blog, Fourth Genre, and other publications. Marcia works as a freelance book editor and holds an MFA from Bennington College. To learn more, visit https://marciatrahan.com/

Two Poems by Lily Jarman-Reisch

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

The Delta

I speed down I-40, hazy with heat,
pocked by seared gullies,
pass raptors perched on power lines

far from Baltimore’s sirens
and wee hour whimpering
of the snubbed spaniel upstairs,
next door couple grunting
like my ex rutting
the lover he left me for,
their groans cresting
while I lie in the dark,
hands over my ears,
burning to bolt for the last cliffs
of the furthest coast, for the silence
of a pathless peak or deep canyon floor

as I blaze through this sun-flayed
flatland, car window lowered
hoping for westerlies scented with creosote,
rare duet of rain on rock,

heading for the border
where the Colorado is supposed to pool,
imagining a mayhem of marsh wrens,

but reach the delta,
dried and dead
of sound,
save for a yowling
dog, zippered voice of a desert fly
on a breeze of benzene.

*

Stalking Maryland’s fugitive zebra,

I park on some cul-de-sac,
strain to listen,
head craning out the car window,
waiting
far too long
for a nicker, a snort,
a glimpse of a striped hide
hidden in the suburb,
black/white bands of a runaway
from a livestock auction in Tennessee, escaped
as the bidding began like a breakaway
stallion that throws his jockey,
jumps the fence, bolts away,
leaving the rider splayed in dirt,
betrayed by one he knew so well,
gaping after the disappeared beast
like a stray sniffing for a phantom
scent, wishing the dull air would swell
with the sound of hooves,
a thrown over longing for a lover’s return,
I keep waiting
for a wild African horse to gallop
through a subdivision, wondering
if I am in the right spot
on the right day,
if I hear huffing
on a puff of wind,
hoofbeats
above the hiss
of insects in the grass.

*

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.

Tulip by Megan Rahm

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Tulip

Break me.
Knock me down.
Every heartache is a stepping stone
and my future is under construction.
Pick me like tulips in spring
and watch me wilt.
I come back every year
stronger, steadfast.
I’m grounded in my roots,
nourished by the storm,
and at dawn, I flourish again.
Remember my beauty
in the long winter months.

*

Megan Rahm (she/her) is a restless mom from Toledo, Ohio who has found her voice in art and writing. Her spirited eight-year-old daughter often inspires her work and she never leaves her house without her Chromebook and Sharpies. She loves Toledo’s weather and hates Costco on a Saturday afternoon. Her debut poetry collection, Free to Roam: Poems from a Heathen Mommy, was released in 2021 by Freethought House. She also publishes frequently on her blog, From the Ashes of Faith.

Their Mother Was the Light of the Family by Lois Perch Villemaire

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Their Mother Was the Light of the Family

The yahrzeit candle burning in a tiny glass
had been lit at sundown in her memory.

The flame threw shadows around the kitchen,
reflected light gleamed against the stainless appliances.

Gone twelve years, she had held them together—
all accepting, all understanding, all forgiving.

Differences and squabbles disappeared in her presence.
She spoiled them for other relationships in their lives.

There came a time when the light in her eyes
began to dim, throwing shadows on the pages

she strained to read. Book readers with larger print
and brighter light became ineffective.

Her skies began to darken like a brewing storm,
her love of reading stolen, she never complained.

They grew to understand no one held a candle to her,
too late to bestow enough appreciation.

*

Lois Perch Villemaire is the author of “My Eight Greats,” a family history in poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in such places as Blue Mountain Review, The Ekphrastic Review, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, and The Ravens Perch. Anthologies, including I Am My Father’s Daughter have published her memoir and poetry. She was the winner of the Haiku Challenge in Pen in Hand July 2023. Lois lives in Annapolis, MD, where she volunteers at the local library, researches family connections, enjoys fun photography and doting over her African violets.

When You’ve Lived in a House for Fifty Years by Judy Kronenfeld

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

When You’ve Lived in a House for Fifty Years

it breathes with you in your sleep;
it lights your lucky way
from morning bed to kitchen
of blessings–the filled
pantry, the humming fridge
committed to keeping the berries
you love for breakfast
firm and delicious.

It lets you move freely through
its pleasant rooms, as you water your
peace lilies and philodendrons,
and after a slightly scary check-up
at the doctor’s, and some fill-in shopping,
welcomes you again for dinner
and a little non-alarming TV, watched
with your spouse from the soft settee.
It vouchsafes both of you
a quiet passage to untroubled dreams,
guarded as it is by ancestors
assembled in multiple albums
in its cabinets, pressed
against each other in phalanxes.

You want to pray to this house’s
lares and penates. You want to
beg them to never let you
leave it, never make you sort
the dust-encrusted plastic bins
entrusted with hundreds of letters
you and your husband wrote to each other
in an almost mythical past.
You want to entreat the household gods
to keep them forever reachable
and uncorrupted on their sagging shelf
in the garage of inexhaustible mysteries.

*

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of nine collections of poetry. Her six full-length books include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was recently released by Bamboo Dart Press. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slant, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad, and Your Daily Poem and four dozen of them have appeared in anthologies. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Judy has also published criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998), short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, will be published by Inlandia Books in 2025. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, University of California, Riverside.

Jingle by Tom Barlow

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Jingle

       three demisonnets

1955

The white boy with the tousled hair
on the TV won’t eat his cereal
he needs a jingle to change his mind
or maybe a cartoon character.
I’m drinking it all in like my dad with
his cold Stroh’s. At five I’m unaware
I’m an idiot. But television knows.

1968

I grew up in the days of angry flags
we carried in our mobs, when guitar riffs
and fatuous lyrics stuck to me like the leeches
the less fortunate were picking off their uniforms.
By burning my apron strings I learned
that if I screamed an idea loud enough
I could convince myself of anything.

2024

Lately a string of geezers my age
have been hawking a pill that will clear
the fog in my memory. I want to tell them
they needs a good jingle and a cartoon
character. I would suggest the mayfly,
an insect that emerges in its adult stage
to couple and die in the same day.

*

Tom Barlow is a widely published author of poems, short stories and novels. He writes because conversation requires give and take, and he’s always thought of himself as more of a giver.

Marvel by Alicia Hoffman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Marvel

Can I, at the tree? The same one I’ve seen for ten years
slowly growing before me? Can I, at the light? The red
one that glows green every fifteen seconds? Go, I say
to myself as a child. Believe once more in the field.
Believe in the uncut hay. The wild strawberry. The grave.

Something inside myself is hardening. I’m a bell, tin thick.
Can I, at the moon? For two nights straight, it has bellowed
its ivory tune. Thin as a nail. Curved as an aperture. Inside
me a fountain unruptured. I walk the path as a worn thing
thrumming. Can I, at invisibility? Can I, at criticism?

I bloom like snow clearing the valley of trees. Each day,
wash what needs washing and put to bed the rest.
Here, a happy accident. An arrest. A designation carved
in the porcelain bark of cells. Can I, at earth? At gravity?
Without skin, I’d prism into fragments. I have. I can.

*

Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop and is the author of three collections, most recently ANIMAL (Futurecycle Press). Her poems have been published in a variety of journals, including Thrush, Trampset, The Night Heron Barks, Tar River Poetry, The Penn Review, Glass: A Poetry Journal, Typishly, Radar Poetry, and elsewhere. Find her at: www.aliciamariehoffman.com

AUTISTIC EVENING ROUTINE by Tony Gloeggler

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

AUTISTIC EVENING ROUTINE

Jesse walks through the living room,
grabs a broom to sweep the floor
before evening routine at 7:30 PM
when he sees mom coming around
the back, her part of the duplex, closing
the garden gate with the leather strap,
walking Oreo. Jesse dashes out the door,
skips across the blinking, Christmas lit porch
and she asks if he wants to come for a walk.
Yes, of course he does. So, go get dressed.
No, Tony doesn’t mind. Jesse hurries, finds
a long-sleeved shirt, socks, ski jacket, sneakers

Mom yells where’s your hat and Jesse turns around,
rushes back through the door, down basement
stairs. I hear whines, grunts, the way he says
where’s my blue hat, I always leave it here, before
I trudge down, ask what’s going on. We both start
looking, run all around the house. I say maybe
we left it on the bus. He says no on bus, makes
louder sounds. Mom comes in, searches too. When
we give up, she asks me to write information down.

We sit at a table. I ask for a few sit and breathes,
slow deep breaths please, then I print out big block
letters while reciting blue hat lost, blue hat gone,
goodbye blue hat, that’s it in my calm, level tone,
not my annoyed, cranky, end of the day voice. Just
put the orange one on, the one with polka dots and snow
flurries, they’re all the same. Jesse. do you even
like the dog? Jesse speed reads the note, pushes
it away, gets louder. I write down new hat tomorrow.
He says no tomorrow, stomps his feet. Me, mom,
exchange looks, worry an explosion’s near: teeth marks
on his forearm, head banging on the floor. She mouths
Target. We shrug shoulders and off they happily go.

Fifteen, twenty minutes, they’re back. He tosses a bag
on the table, a gray hat with a pack of briefs he opens.
Immediately he wants to cut off every tag from everything–
go get your scissors Jess–before anything else. Then,
all the briefs must go in basement bins. When mom asks
are you ready to walk Oreo, Jesse’s answer is a deep,
husky-throated no to show he means business: 7:30,
evening routine, brush teeth. I repeat evening routine,
7:30. He strides away satisfied. I start cracking up. Mom
looks at me funny. I say no walk dog tonight, point at Oreo
who looks like he’s got to pee real bad. Mom starts laughing.

*

Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of NYC and managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 40 years. Poems have been published in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Vox Populi, Gargoyle, B O D Y. His most recent book, What Kind Of Man with NYQ Books, was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and Here on Earth will be published by NYQ
Books in 2024.

Phanatic by John Arthur

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Phanatic

the day you swung my Louisville
Slugger at me and I caught it
with my bare hands
you smacked my bare ass
while Jimmy held my pants
at my ankles and I was
getting hard, harder
each week from dead
lifts, lunges, and power cleans
until mom poured a gallon
of milk on my head,
the lactose sticky on my skin
as I let it soak in
laying there on the dogsmell couch
where dad drunkslept during Phillies
games. we were there at Citizens
Bank Park when they broke
the record for most
innings played in a game,
at infinity, and everyone
left the stadium except for us.
They’re still playing.
We’re still there.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared in Rattle, trampset, Maudlin House, Third Wednesday, and other places. His band is called The Deafening Colors.

Time and Space by Maria McDonnell

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Time and Space

“Swore I could feel you through the walls, but that’s impossible.”
               ~ Phoebe Bridgers

The trees are always on the cusp
            an ending & an entrance
warm winter       cold spring.

Light in the window brings soft morning
in a smoky rented room        galley kitchen overlooking the yard
            bike fallen near the shed        basketball in the garden.

Tonight could be a night on Magnolia Drive—
baby swimming in my bed—
a night on a chair in a private room
crash carts racing by the door.
Night alone in a king-sized bed
burning from within
phone on the pillow
everything is electric.

Stone steps from the Hall
chapel bells tell the hour but not the year.
This could the time they boarded up the library
or the day I fell and skinned my knees.
Today is four years ago        my son is on the line
saying that people are dying in Italy
and I should lock the doors.

Today is tonight
and my son is on the other side
of the moon        he’s sleeping in the room behind my bed.
He’s shooting a basketball that never stops arcing over the backboard
burning as it moves across the sky.

*

Maria McDonnell lives in Pennsylvania with her family and dogs. She works at Albright College where she teaches English classes and works as a student success coach. She has published poems and essays in various print and online journals including Motherwell, Rat’s Ass Review, The Elephant Journal, Paradigm, Steel Point Quarterly, and Parlor. She was included as a featured reader in a 2019 production of Listen to Your Mother. In 2009, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry book, First I Learn My Name, was published by Foothills Publishing in 2008.

Two Poems by Jackleen Holton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

In the Recovery Room After the Biopsy

Once, a friend told me that his mother’s
hospice agency offered an early exit
option, though they didn’t call it that,
or use the phrase assisted suicide.
I was surprised, so I wrote it down,
the name they gave it, something
transition, maybe? Peaceful
departure? No, but something to do
with travel, velocity.
Not exactly pre-boarding,
but that’s the gist of it. His mom
said no, it was too expensive,
and they’d already gone
through all her money,
so they waited, though he
had started to say he’d be happy
to pick up the tab, but stopped himself
because he was already thinking
about the curtains, how he’d replace
them with something lighter,
maybe a new coat of paint.
My mother’s already gone.
She spared us the long drawn-out adieu,
tubes and sunken eyes.
So why did I need to know the name?
Had I been stroking my cancer scar
again as he spoke, thinking
about my nine-year-old who came home
from school the other day, angry
that all her friends’ parents were thirty,
not fifty like us. I wrote down the price,
too, I’m sure of it. Twenty-five hundred?
That’s not so bad for an upgrade.
How to say it? Put me on the redeye
to L.A. I’ll be there before
I open my eyes, the flight
attendant making the rounds, leaning
in to whisper we’re here, gently
touching my arm as if to wake me.

*

Al-Anon

There’s a church down the street
where I can go when I start to feel
those little pangs of judgment
about all the ways that other people
choose to lick their wounds.
For example, my childhood friend whose liver
must scream in that high-pitched way
that neglected plants do, a friend last seen
on Facebook, perched on the rim
of a birdbath-sized margarita.
Or my husband, coughing up pieces of lung,
then sticking another goddamn
cigarette in his gob
first thing every morning.
See, I’m doing it in real time.
I need another meeting.
Because there’s something
comforting about the aroma of burnt
coffee well past my caffeine curfew,
and the little wicker basket
that goes around, only asking
for a dollar, the clichés and rhymes
we read aloud, and the ones we say
to one another absent any sense of irony,
after all it’s not a poetry reading,
no pressure to be dazzling.
And then there are the stories.
People’s kids who’ve overdosed,
terrible spouses coming home blotto,
most of the stories so much sadder
than mine, that I’d feel a little better,
if there weren’t this competing need
to fit in, or one-up that sometimes
makes me feel duty-bound
to dramatize. Like the one time
I narrated my friend into the hospital
on the liver transplant list.
And usually someone brings a box
of donuts or store-bought sugar
cookies, and if there’s a few
that nobody else has eaten, I fold
them up in a napkin, tuck it
into my purse for later.
And then there’s the end of the meeting,
the circle, holding hands with strangers,
repeating the incantation, then raising
our clasped hands up to send the spell
out into the ethers, the exodus
to the dark parking lot, buzzing
with hope, and a little more
of that coveted serenity, a firefly
light in my soul as I let go and let
my headlights float me all the way home.

*

Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies The Giant Book of Poetry, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Florida Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Slipstream, The Sun and others.

Radish by Katie Kalisz

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Radish

The pleasure of finding one red radish
in the dense green foliage my father called
a garden was a ticket into his just praise,
my small system of effort, reward,
accomplishment I could finally arrange.
We’d sit at the table in the kitchen, look
for birds he told us were rare, and wait for him
to bite into our plucked radish, halfway through
his sandwich that mom had made, again.
We waited for the way his eyes would close
just after the crunch into it, then the glimpse
of white meat inside the thin red skin, so exotic
to the three of us who still held close our naïve
palates for foods, thoughts, acts. Imagine
the taste we conjured from his face
wrinkled in tan content, to be home for lunch
eating food he had grown, harvested by his children
and given to him like jewels we had formed
in our sandbox.

*

Katie Kalisz is a Professor in the English Department at Grand Rapids Community College, where she teaches composition and creative writing. Quiet Woman, her first book, was a finalist for the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She is the recipient of a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her second book, Flu Season, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She lives in Michigan with her husband and their three children.

Two Poems by Lisa Low

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

LATE IN THE DAY

Late in the day when my father lay dying,
he called me to his cot and told me of
a time when I saved his life. Saved your life?
I said, not believing him. Then he said:
do you remember that time at Widow’s
Lake when, like a fool, I got in water,
thinking it would make my bad back better,
but as I lay on my side, unable to move,
and felt myself tipping, back side up,
face down in water, I saw you walking
on water beside me and called out your
name and asked for your hand. You were
only five. If you hadn’t been there that
day, that would have been the day I died.

*

MY NEIGHBOR GETS A CANCER DIAGNOSIS

What’s it like to know cancer sneaks like
a tongue of smoke around the back doors
of your life, peeking in windows between
the shadows, snaking around corners,
sniffing and moaning; wanting your suffering.
My neighbor at sixty retires, done with chemo
for now, decides to babysit his three-year-old
granddaughter, Daisy. Days, I watch them
totter down the street, his bulky hand sunk
sealed to the fresh flesh of her reached-up hand.
Or see him mowing the grass, going over and
over the bright, green stalks, not knowing when
that menace will force its fierce, forked tongue
up from soft ground to take him down again.

*

Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Pennsylvania English, Phoebe, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Tusculum Review.

Three Poems by Diane Martin

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Birthday

Walking the dogs on the trail
after the storm, we pause
for a crew trimming a large oak.
Look out! I don’t want that limb
to get me our friend says—

—unless it’s quick. It’s her 90th
birthday and she’s perfectly
aware of her trajectory. The
crew member signals to us:
It’s safe. For now. So far.

Seated in the booth for the
birthday lunch, we comment she’s
as old as Willie Nelson, ask her
whether she’s gleaned any
wisdom from her harvest of years.

She looks down: If you wait
twenty years for a married man,
you’ll end up with exactly nothing.
We order drinks, a big dessert,
her life spilling out on the table.

*

Epistle after the Fires

I’m o.k. now. / I’m back at the primal source of poems: wind, sea / and rain, the market and the salmon. …
      — Richard Hugo

Hugo’s letter to Kizer apologizes for his behavior.
Maybe my poem can outweigh Netflix, cat antics, politics.

I am slowly working my way through a bag of Snickers
bought for trick-or-treaters. No one really tricks, though

last year a seven-year-old said he couldn’t fuckin’ believe
we ran out. The Day of the Dead party was postponed

for evacuation. Death takes a rain check! Still, I’m pissed at
those who wouldn’t leave. A nasty way to die, I think.

We are looking forward to getting together at Thanksgiving.
But the delicata squash is not some special dish. Its only

claim to fame is surviving the ash. We’ll also bring some wine
and pickled green tomatoes—not to be consumed together.

*

Hurricane Mindy

Breaking News was your old girl’s storm,
a category 4, I think. These kinds of squalls
are never really over

force and velocity, jealousy and envy
—snapshot in my folks’ living room—
I can still see

your arms your striped sweater
her contours, her smile with dimples,
maybe I snapped the picture

*

Poems by Diane Martin have appeared in ONE ART, American Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, diode, Field, Harvard Review, Narrative, Plume, and many other journals. One poem received a Pushcart Special Mention, another won a prize from Smartish Pace, and another took second place in Nimrod’s Neruda prize. Her first collection, Conjugated Visits, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published by Dream Horse Press and her second collection, Hue & Cry, was published by MadHat Press. She lives in western Sonoma County, California.

grass bows… by Joshua Eric Williams

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

grass bows
around my rotten fence
the church of now

*

Joshua Eric Williams’s work usually focuses on the intersection of the human, wild, and the spiritual. His poetry can be found in many online and print journals, including Rattle, Modern Haiku, and Literary Matters. His website is thesmallestwords.com, and he can be found on X, @Hungerfield.

Two Poems by Jesse Breite

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

After the Tulip Sale at the North Carolina Arboretum

Soon they’ll be undressed,
petal-shriveled, disappearing—
as light or smoke, shaped
and potted as they were
to dollar decimals, sold.
We’ll forget how—flashing
pictures—we tried to join them
as if we were the same—
our bulbed heads rising
like snakes from a slumber,
how we too were top-heavy,
falling apart, as laughter
dangled out our throats,
how we sent them to our
mothers, fathers as gestures
of devotion—we yearned
to give back our origins
to our origins with this flung
constellation of fluorescence,
how we never knew if
such spectacular whispers
would come back.

*

Arabesque Orb Weaver

October comes like a call to arms.
And they crawl out of the woods—
what you most wanted to forget.
They lace a lucent architecture
on every right angle available,
and their dreamcatchers wake
in windows. Invisible parachutes
arrive at dawn around the knot,
ornamental and fine-furred, endless
weaver and spool of silver thread.

Suddenly, I’ve walked through
the strung fabric—tangled up
in the elastic and winding rope.
I brush it off, but it’s never gone.
Memory’s like that—you can be
rapt in its quivering strands—
what you tried to erase then escape.
And this webbed edifice has you,
dazzles you, envelops every move,
spins your limbs with light, reminds
again—how fugitive is human skin.

*

Jesse Breite’s recent poetry has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, River Heron Review, Tar River Poetry, and Rhino. His first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Jesse teaches high school in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two kids. More at jessebreite.com.

In Praise of Gravity by Robert Okaji

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

In Praise of Gravity

Which bestows weight
or slings me around
some other heavenly

body, a version of you
wondering whether
I’ll rise from my next

plummet, victim
of curvature and infinite
range held in place,

attractive in nature,
bent, perhaps, and
scarred, proud to have

survived but never wiser.
Cleansed, we continue
our orbit, our mirrored fall.

*

Robert Okaji holds a BA in history, served without distinction in the U.S. Navy, toiled as a university administrator, and no longer owns a bookstore. He was recently diagnosed with late stage metastatic lung cancer, and lives, for the time being, in Indiana with his wife—poet Stephanie L. Harper— stepson, and cat. His first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, will be published by 3: A Taos Press in the fall of 2024 (not posthumously, he hopes). His poems may be found in Book of Matches, Threepenny Review, Only Poems, Vox Populi, Shō Poetry Journal, The Big Windows Review, Verse Daily, Indianapolis Review, and other venues.

Alone in the ER by Rob Greene

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Alone in the ER

Hooked to the electrolyte bag,
the cold IV drip shivers and shakes my shanks
under the stiff sheets,
salmon-colored upchuck tub at my side,
pain scaling up to an 8.5.
Dozing in and out of the room like I normally do,
I briefly focus in on an expecting mother
nervously holding a urine cup. My eyelids fold
then open to her empty chair. I feel
the breeze from the toilet flushing,
shiver some more, and wonder
which bridge my own mother sleeps under.

*

Rob Greene is the founder of Raleigh Review and a father of four. He received his PhD from the University of Birmingham in England and his BSc in microbiology and his MFA from NC State University, where he taught as a graduate student. Rob Greene also previously taught at Louisburg College and SAU.

Two Poems by Gary Fincke

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Exact Likeness for Grief

Swinging a pitching wedge, my father lofts
Seven golf balls over my mother’s grave.
To spare the grass, he hits from the shoulder,
Picking them clean from the thin lie of dirt.

It’s forty yards, I’m guessing, to the woods
Where all but one of seven disappear
In yardage he can manage, length to spare,
At eighty-eight, his knees beyond repair.

He limps to her grave site, his love an arc
That ends among trees. The flowers he’s picked
Follow him in my hands; he turns the club
Upside down and uses it as a cane.

“Some day you’ll know,” my father says, meaning
His knees, and then again, “Some day you’ll know,”
Meaning, this time, the grave, this selection
Of flowers, orange ones I cannot name.

My father, the prophet, bends to the vase
Of wilted stems. My father, who’s warned me,
“You’ll see” a thousand times, lifts the fresh buds
From my hands, steadies himself on my arm.

My father, who was a maintenance man,
Sends the old stems to the woods in my hands,
Seats the flowers by height like a teacher
While I kick the short ball into the trees.

*

Peace, a Flightless Bird

Algorithms are sending me ads
for cremation services, ones that
save money through pre-need purchase.

The world gives daily birth to flags;
They shriek their certainties
In foster homes they will grow to burn.

All myths have become biographies.
Every war is undeclared.
Even our secrets are undeserved.

Peace, a flightless bird, is extinct, war
So ordinary we show up for work
Like soldiers, our anger expected.

In the museum of memory
We inspect the webbed footprints
Sunk so far into the earth

We nearly remember the shape
Of a bird so large it must have
Believed there was nothing it need fear.

*

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

Two Poems by Karin Bevilacqua Fazio Littlefield

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

There’s a mass in your chest

Mass is a Mack truck
that blasts you off the road
obliterates fall days with coffee and
philosophical discussions on the roof.

It’s an atom bomb,
flattening the world.
It’s the twilight zone
and the upside down.

Mass is an extinction level event,
an asteroid headed to earth.
It’s the last cry of a triceratops
65 million years ago.

Did you hear me?

Mass is my aunt’s friend
with no hair and sunken cheeks
who gives me a book
that I don’t read.

I’m scared to touch her book,
like it’s contagious, like
the moment I open it,
I’ll fall in.

*

Intervals of Time

Time is an isolated woman.
Time wakes with the bird of life.
Time can consume tides but never
becomes full; its belly is an open window.
Time gives the woman a dying garden.
Time grows in winter, runs in summer.
Time rules as a woman, but not the woman herself.
Time is oracular.
It continually replenishes the tide the woman invented
to keep her sins hidden.
She is without saving grace.

*

Karin Bevilacqua Fazio Littlefield is a Queer Disabled Sicilian-American poet and playwright from Brooklyn, NY. Her plays have been performed across the United States as well as in Canada, France, and Sicily. She has been published in Clockhouse Review, EAB Publishing’s Midnight Circus, and Lotus-eater. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the Mississippi University for Women.

Every Woman by E.C. Gannon

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Every Woman

I deserve to have someone paint a nude portrait
of me, I really do. I deserve to disrobe in someone’s
studio, to lie on a vintage couch with my tattooed
arm draped limply over my head. I deserve to have
someone study the contour of my neck, the lopsided
proportions of my tits, the right pushed upward
by the armrest, the extra cartilage beneath my ribs.
I deserve to have someone run their hand down
my torso to fully understand the way it rises until
the peak of my child-bearing hips. I deserve to have
someone objectively study the curls of my pubic hair,
the constellation of freckles on my inner thigh.
I deserve to have someone recognize the artistry
of this bare body, the nicks on my calves, the
bruises on my forearms, the muscle in my thighs.

*

E.C. Gannon’s work has appeared in Peatsmoke Journal, Assignment Magazine, SoFloPoJo, Olit, and elsewhere. A New England native, she holds a degree in creative writing and political science from Florida State University.

Two Poems by Penelope Moffet

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Pirates

I peel a banana, cut it into pieces
I can spear into my mouth on knife-tip
like a pirate, as my boss Max used to say,

laughing as he passed from his bear’s lair
through the outer office. Max is dead two years
and it’s the vernal equinox again. Hummingbirds

chase each other when I walk on ocean bluffs
wild with bush sunflowers – dark chocolate hearts,
banana-colored petals. I like my chocolate dark,

dark as those sunflower hearts, but Max loved
milk chocolate with orange centers.
The sweeter the better, he said.

Lilac blooms of low-growing ceanothus
vibrate with bees. Tiny lizards bask on dirt,
race off. While I breathe warm salty air

a friend stumbles, his head strikes concrete,
he’s taken to the E.R. with a deep gash in his scalp.
Max didn’t know his cancer would return.

People fall apart, even me, bumbling
on painful feet and knees. We’ll come back
not as ourselves but as young and healthy creatures

basking on dirt paths, frisking through the air,
as flowers that make other people think
bananas, chocolate, orange.

*

Keepsake

         For Max Gest

The clock ticks softly
on the shelf below the TV
like a deathwatch beetle.
Late at night I hear it.

Round face full of Roman numerals,
rimmed with gold, set in mahogany,
it graced the law office desk
where I worked a quarter-century

until the boss died.
Huddled in dust,
the timepiece governs nothing
but summons Max,

who often forgot how well
his workers knew their jobs
but would stop lecturing
if I made him laugh.

In the heart of the pandemic
we kept the office going,
each laboring alone
through designated hours.

We spoke only on the phone.
More and more his voice
was wracked with coughing
as the tumors ate his lungs.

His hair grew long.
With a walker and an oxygen tank
he came in nights and weekends,
faithful as the clock that ruled my desk.

Once when I stayed late
and he came early
his smile was radiant,
the skin so taut across his face

it was like listening to a skull:
Every day I wake up
happy I’m still here.
I did not want the clock,

I turned it down three times
but on the last day
as workers came
to haul away boxed files,

donation piles and trash,
I put it in my bag.
It whispers to me
when the world is still.

*

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems have been published and are upcoming in many literary journals, including Calyx, Halfway Down the Stairs, ONE ART, Poemeleon, The Rise Up Review, Sheila-Na-Gig Online and Willawaw Journal. She has been awarded artist residencies at Alderworks Alaska, Dorland Mountain Arts, The Mesa Refuge and the Helen R. Whiteley Center. She lives in Los Angeles and has worked as a freelance journalist, a publicist for non-profits, an editor and a legal secretary.

THE CONDITIONS by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

THE CONDITIONS

Feeling ornery enough, I try to remember
what the popular Buddhist monk claimed:
Conditions for Happiness he called them, or was it
Conditions of Happiness?
Everywhere all the time, he said, entrances
are within us—a breath, a pause, to begin to notice

the air, even a sideways rain, that sustains us;
the ground, even the choppy asphalt, that holds us—
the cardinals in the springtime with their near
continuous song waking us by 5 a.m., just because
they know no other way to be—
alive and ready to sing.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently Her Joy Becomes from Fernwood Press and Marrow of Summer from Kelsay Books. A new collection from Fernwood entitled Belonging Songs will be published in 2025. New poems are forthcoming in Women Artists’ Datebook 2025, The Healing Muse, Braided Way, Delta Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly, and the Paterson Literary Review.

Short & Sweet — A Workshop with Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Short & Sweet: Writing the Short Poem

Instructor: Donna Hilbert
Date: Thursday, August 22, 2024
Time: 5:00-7:00pm (Pacific) / 8:00-10:00pm (Eastern)
Tickets: $25 (payment options)

To register, contact ONE ART’s Editor-in-Chief, Mark Danowsky, at oneartpoetry@gmail.com

~ Overview ~

Short & Sweet: Writing the Short Poem

I love poems short enough to memorize, to learn by heart, as teachers once said to children. Poems with talismanic power have become for me like prayers. Some poems offer comfort—as in the 23rd Psalm. Other poems show the way—how to put disappointment into perspective, survive tragedy, or face inexorable mortality. In Short & Sweet we will look at poems from two to sixteen lines and spend time writing together. You will receive a handout with sample poems before the class begins.

*

~ About The Workshop Leader ~

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Threnody, Moon Tide Press, 2022. Enormous Blue Umbrella is forthcoming from Moon Tide in early 2025. Work has appeared in numerous journals and broadcasts including Cultural Daily, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, Lyric Life, and anthologies including The Poetry of Presence volumes I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing.

The Hawk and the Octopus by Laura Foley

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

The Hawk and the Octopus

        for Brenda Phillips, in memory

A hawk flies in the blue sky she painted,
over a bright green house
I recognize as hers.

An oak tree shadows the yard,
the hawk’s shadow too small to see,
small as the tumor shadowing her brain.

A preying hawk and malignancy,
the oak tentacled, lobed,
dark as octopus ink,

shadowing a brain I recognize as hers—
until it belonged to shadows
we never imagined.

*

Laura Foley is the author of nine poetry collections. Sledding the Valley of the Shadow (Fernwood Press) is forthcoming in 2024. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, The Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Award, The Common Good Books Poetry Prize, the Bisexual Book Award, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize and others.

Are You Looking at Us by Hayley Phillips

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Are You Looking at Us

           the appeal is in being in two places
at once, the attacker and the attacked,
           the strain and the relief, the long
directionless river and the sea it finds,
           the parent and the hard stone of a child,
the voice the throat the air they’re
           buried in, the beginning and the end,
the body of the self and the body of
           the body, the inside, the falling out,
the weapon the weapon the weapon

*

A Virginia native, Hayley Phillips received her MFA from Randolph College in 2021 and is now a PhD student at Louisiana State University. Her work has been included in Blue Earth Review, Whale Road Review, Appalachian Review and elsewhere. She currently lives in Baton Rouge with her husband and two dogs.

Four Poems by Charles Rammelkamp

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

It Takes a Minyan

When Seth Berman recruited me
for the midday minyan at work,
fifteen minutes set aside at noon,
I felt honored to participate.
Not a particularly observant Jew,
still it made me feel virtuous,
the choreography of devotion,
reciting the prayers in a group,
a meditative oasis in the middle of the day,
but I especially relished being welcomed
as a member of the club.

The agency granted us use
of one of the myriad conference rooms
in our sprawling office building.
I looked forward to the impromptu service,
stored a kippah and a prayerbook in my desk.

One day we could only muster nine,
all of us milling around Room 502
as if waiting for an airline boarding announcement.
When I saw Sheila Rosen walking down the corridor,
kosher casual in headscarf and shin-length skirt,
I suggested she could complete our minyan,
but Modern Orthodox Seth frowned.
“Isn’t there anyone else we can ask?”

“Bernie’s at his usual pinochle game in 505,”
Ben Lippman suggested, nodding across the hallway.
I went across the corridor, knocked on the door,
whispered in Bernie’s ear.

“Hold my beer,” Bernie Netzer told his mates,
only too glad to perform this mitzvah.
I looked around the table at the other three,
cards fanned in front of their faces, a can of coke
at Roger Strickler’s elbow. Just an expression, of course.

Later, when I saw Sheila schlepping a sheaf of papers
into her boss’s office, like a sacrificial offering,
I felt as if I’d been part of a conspiracy
to exclude her from our community.

*

Identifying Wildlife

“See anything this morning?” the young man asked.
We’d just come across one another,
walking the wooded path by the Stony Run creek,
coming from opposite directions.

“Might have seen a red-bellied woodpecker,”
Abby offered, tentatively.

“The ducks are over in the pond,” I gestured.
Mid-December, not a lot of wildlife about.

“We wondered if we were going
to run into you,” the man went on.

The girl he was with laughed.
“That sounds creepier than it was,
but we did have that conversation!”

We all laughed at that,
made jokes about stalkers.
Then we wished each other a good day,
and we all continued on our way.

“Did you recognize either of them?”
Abby asked in a low voice
a minute later.

“Not sure,” I confessed.
“Maybe we saw them a while ago?
They knew we were birders, after all,
and we didn’t have our binoculars with us.”

*

Re-Imagine

I keep hearing the word –
“re-imagining” the news, “re-imagining” Shakespeare,
“re-imagining” your life.
A whole new promotional gimmick,
buzzword du jour.

It makes me think of the toilet paper package
that says one roll lasts one week.
How can you even say that?
How many people are using it?
How many squares a tear?
Can you really measure toilet paper in terms of time?
Re-imaging toilet paper.

Which also reminds me of the cancer patient
given six months to live.
“Re-imagine” your life.
What was that TV show with Ben Gazzara?
Run for Your Life.
A terminally ill patient tries to make the most
out of the two years he has to live.
A pretty sketchy premise for a character as fit as Gazzara –
the character’s name was Paul Bryan, an attorney –
but I was in high school when it aired,
and I probably watched every episode
of its three-year run.

Bryan was given no more than 18 months to live,
which you always heard the doctor say
in a voiceover at the start of each episode,
though the show ran for 86 episodes –
87, if you count the pilot.

Which makes me think of the “permanent” crown
I got for a lower right molar in 2018,
which popped out of my mouth in 2022.
For some impenetrable insurance reason,
I could only get a “temporary” crown
until I was eligible for a “permanent” one
a few months down the road.
I’ve been re-imaging my teeth ever since,
re-imagining dental insurance, too.

*

The Sound of the Struggle

“It means the sound of the struggle,”
my father told me when I asked
if our German surname had a meaning.
Kampf, as in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. His struggle.

I always saw our name
as a wave coming in to shore,
the curl of the r, the undulant m’s,
the finality of the p lapping the beach.

But he also hinted at another,
less salubrious meaning,
becoming vague, evasive, when pressed.
We settled on “the sound of the struggle,”
left it at that.

But years later, browsing through a bookstore,
I found a book called
International Dictionary of Obscenities,
a guide to dirty words and indecent expressions –
Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian.
I came upon the word “rammeln”:
“to screw, copulate with [‘to buck, rut’]”
and a lightbulb went off in my head.

“Nuptial chambers,”
my linguistic friend Marcus confirmed,
and I thought, more along the lines
of farm animals in a field – a camp –
“rammen” the German for “ram.”

But when we visited distant cousins
in Nordhorn, Germany, they took us
to a small creek that formed a border with Holland
On one side of the Rammelbeek River,
Germany, on the other, the Netherlands.
“This is the source of the family name,”
Dietmar asserted with confidence,
and who was I to disagree?
I wasn’t going to fight it.

* 

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.

Woven by Brett Stuckel

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Woven

My family sold towels
with flat-weave trims,

rough scrubbers built in.
The border seam,

a tool for clearing a stye
or toothpick in a pinch.

Don’t leave
your towels alone,

draped on mildew glass.
Don’t weaponize

them in a locker room.
The towel smothers blood

without question.
The towel weeps

for each of us,
alone in a bucket.

*

Brett Stuckel’s writing has appeared in Wordgathering, Electric Literature, Hobart, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and is online at www.brettstuckel.com.

INSENSATE by Michelle Reale

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

INSENSATE

If I wanted to make certain proclamations I’d speak them into empty rooms, on cold nights, devoid of all sound. I would quiver for effect. I would generate my own predictions, but would refuse private readings, even if implored to do so. I can claim knowledge of certainties, but they come from the past, not the future, which feels like cheating, but it isn’t. If I wanted to give advice, that’s another story. Still, it might sound like this: If you have known hardship like a boot on the back of your neck, your solitude will feel like your very own fingers scratching your very own back— dissatisfying. If you have to imagine a space for love, not even a big space, maybe just a small space where emotions might fold up like an envelope and slip under your door, you will practically ensure that those eligible will suit themselves first and then wash their hands of you. No explanations will be forthcoming. A Buddhist will tell you “That’s life.” If when you move forward a bit it feels a lot like what afterward feels like, you have probably rescued yourself one time too many. Sympathetic gestures wear the right clothes, but are fraudulent and you gave up reading minds and murmuring agreement long ago. See this room, devoid of human sound? It is like a vessel that is in perpetual motion. You stand on the deck but cannot tell if what you see or feel is moving away from you or coming closer. Let yourself feel the force of gravitational desolation. The trapped fly knows it well. How it enters a room with such ease, knows it isn’t wanted, then exhausts itself to utter death trying to find an exit.

*

Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry and flash collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and Blood Memory (Idea Press), and In the Year of Hurricane Agnes (Alien Buddha Press). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Arcadia University.

Buzzfeed by James Croal Jackson

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Buzzfeed

how high the article points
my hygge hungry clickbait
kitchen rant clean the hilt
of paper towel roll yuck
mayo on the rye oh
why did we buy the grill
we can’t afford the home
as such I love to speak
ill of the dead so static
in their forever photo
synthesis please share

*

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023) and Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022). Recent poems are in Ghost City Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Pirene’s Fountain. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (jamescroaljackson.com)

The Online Dating Profile of a Vain Poet by Rick Swann

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

The Online Dating Profile of a Vain Poet

I like hand-written letters, good wine
and late-night discourse. I can always
turn a phrase. I love fiercely, with great
passion. I will worship you and capture
our love so sublimely that we, perhaps,
will become immortal. If this moves you,
please contact me and be my muse.

*

Rick Swann is the author of the children’s book of linked poems Our School Garden! which was awarded the Growing Good Kids Book Award from the American Horticultural Society. His poems have been appeared in English Journal, Windfall, Autumn Sky Poetry, Typehouse, Last Stanza, Superpresent, Rockvale Review, and other publications as well as the anthologies Sing the Salmon Home and Washington Poetic Routes. He lives in Seattle where he is a member of the Greenwood Poets.

Laughing Yoga Time Travelers by Mary Ray Goehring

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Laughing Yoga* Time Travelers

Six 60 somethings
hold hands, swing arms,
snort, snicker, chortle,
cachinnate,
and find long forgotten
6-year-old selves still here.

We gather to laugh
with a friend undergoing chemo.
No clever jokes,
no judgement allowed.
Just crazy gestures, goofy faces.
While moving our bodies, our bellies laugh
and afterwards, deep restorative breaths.

We strut like chickens.
Giggle like school girls.
Bellies bounce in hoots and hollers.
Our mood rising like rainbow sunrises
lighting the room in lifted spirits.
Magical. Transported to a time
we remembered how to laugh
for no other reason
than it felt good.

*Laughing Yoga is part of a holistic therapy discovered by Madan Kataria in 1995 and is now offered by MD Anderson Cancer Center of patients receiving chemo. “Laughter yoga brings a unique element to the Place…of wellness,” says Moshe Frenkel M.D. medical director of the Integrative Medicine Program at M D. Anderson. “We know from multiple studies that laughter causes a positive physiological response and above all reduces stress and anxiety. This complementary therapy allows us to incorporate humor in cancer care and help patients discover a playfulness that reduces stress and anxiety while increasing their pain tolerance.”

*

Mary Ray Goehring, a snowbird, migrates seasonally between her prairie in Central Wisconsin and the pine forests along the border between East Texas and Louisiana. Grateful to be learning about the flora and fauna throughout the country, she writes primarily about nature, family and friends. You can find her work in several print and online journals and anthologies such as: ONE ART: a journal of poetry, A Path to Kindness – edited by James Crews, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Moss Piglet, The Blue Heron Review, Bramble, Your Daily Poem, The Rye Whiskey Review, Steam Ticket Review and others.

“Stealth Formalism”: Formal Verse for Free Verse Poets — A Workshop with Nicole Caruso Garcia

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

“Stealth Formalism”: Formal Verse for Free Verse Poets

Instructor: Nicole Caruso Garcia
Date: Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Time: 6:00-8:00pm (Eastern)
Price: $25 (payment options)

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

*

Overview

“Stealth Formalism”: Formal Verse for Free Verse Poets

How do the most skilled formalists of today craft poems that sound fresh and contemporary, poems that read as naturally as free verse? Some poets are such ninjas of sound and sense that readers might reach the end of a sonnet before even realizing it is a sonnet. On the other hand, formal poems can be proficient and technically correct, yet still sound forced, archaic, stilted, or unintentionally humorous. Bad poetry, oh noetry! In this workshop, we will explore examples to demystify the common pitfalls of formal verse, learning techniques for leaping over them and onto the solid footing of effective poems. (Participants may wish to bring a poem draft “just in case” there’s time to review a few as samples for future revision.)

*

About The Workshop Leader

Nicole Caruso Garcia’s full-length debut OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press) recently received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Best New Poets, Light, Mezzo Cammin, ONE ART, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. She serves as associate poetry editor at Able Muse and as an executive board member at Poetry by the Sea, an annual poetry conference in Madison, CT. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

my body as youth by john compton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

my body as youth

my hair is thinning. my eyes depend
on lenses. my noise is feeble.
my ears no longer understand sound.
my lips have shriveled, small & weak.
my mouth is still scared
to eat. my neck has almost given up
its strength. my shoulders lug around dead weight.
my elbows burn like a gas stove.
my wrists tunnel into my hands. my fingers are cracked
at each bend. my heart
is wrapped in onion. my lungs have been beaten
beyond repair. my stomach is no more a victim
than the tongue itself. my liver has always been
a failure. my kidneys compete like strangers.
my intestines are knotted with agony.
my bladder has no hold, lets it all go.
my colon stores without payment.
my penis is slack. my ass sags.
my hips are on the verge of displacement.
my thighs still contain proof of stretched skin.
my knees are crippled as are my ankles.
my feet are islands sinking. my toes are their navigator.

*

john compton (he/him) is a gay poet who lives with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. his latest book: my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store (Flowersong Press; dec 2024) and latest chapbook: melancholy arcadia (Harbor Editions; april 2024).

Lost by Allison Thung

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Lost

I

Find my hand
in a crowd like
cold, running water
finds a paper cut
so minute it is
unfelt until
unforgotten.

II

If every over-
shoulder glance
only furthers
and shrinks you,
then the only
way to keep you
close and larger
than life is to
never look back;
only inward.

III

My fingertips
yellow in cold
or under stress.
The doctor
agrees it’s likely
Raynaud’s. The
doctor will not
agree it’s also
my grip
on the past.

IV

After a bout
in the sun,
your face is a
constellation,
every now-
distinct mole
and freckle
guiding me
home to
safety.

*

Allison Thung is a Singaporean poet and project manager. She is the author of Reacquaint (kith books, 2024) and the forthcoming Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified ‘you’ (Hem Press, 2025). Her poetry has been published in ANMLY, Heavy Feather Review, Cease, Cows, The Daily Drunk, and elsewhere, and nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Allison reads poetry for ANMLY. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @poetrybyallison, or at www.allisonthung.com.

Three Poems by Christina Kallery

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Tell Me

Hamlet Act V, Scene 1:
I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum.

At 22, I thought Hamlet hit peak
romance when he leaped into her grave.
I wanted to be loved that way, I said,
imagining some frenzied ex whose heart
would finally crack open, cascading tears
over my corpse. Those days we’d dress up
all in black and stroll the graveyard
talking Kierkegaard, Camus, The Cure—
death distant as a Denmark tomb.

This was years before
my mother’s lungs filled with the sea,
her body twined with tubes like lily stems
ascending from her metal bed;
before I’d sprint to reach her room and find
the blinking cosmos of the monitor gone black.
And my father then confessing
he had wanted to return—2000 miles,
40 years and two ex-wives in tow.

Yes, sometimes love is far
too long and late. But fuck
this keeping secrets for the dead,
the power ballad bombast,
the sepia-toned regret,
the last glance back
as the subway doors meet.

Here’s what I know tonight:
the sum of our near misses
is silence. So lie here, lean close,
tell me everything before we sink.

*

Poem for the Closing Scene of Every Incredible Hulk Episode

Poor David Banner always ended up the same.
After someone made him angry,
turned him avocado green,
pecs popping through his last clean button down
(but at least lucking out that his pants stayed on).

After tossing drug lords through a glass gazebo,
upending a sedan or two, occupants
suspended while the wheels still spin.
After hurtling a jukebox into the wall of booze,
bartender ducking just in time, or lobbing
leisure-suited playboys into the swimming pool,
sending them slo-mo shrieking from the hotel
balcony. Main street now in ruins, bad guys
cuffed and packed into the backs of Dodge
patrol cars, PG cussing over minor injuries.

Those wan piano notes would sound,
final credits toll his time, again, to exit town.
Condemned to walk the highway
in a crisp new shirt, thumb outstretched as happy
families whoosh past in their wood paneling.
D minor sob crescendoing as a semi
brakes to let him climb aboard.

Even then, watching from my grandma’s
velvet couch I knew that knot of sorrow
in my chest was for my dad
who looked like David Banner,
but less tall and more Hungarian;
who’d loaded up a white VW bus
and headed off into some desert sun,
sending gifts of fossils, petrified wood,
three rattles from the snakes he’d shot.
Leaving me back here to clean things up.

*

How I Would Haunt You

Not only in the ways you would expect—
With flickering lights, an obscure Smiths song
to halt your cart from a Costco intercom.
I’d haunt you hard, send 3 am texts.

I’d pick the oddest times to show my face:
the DMV just as your number’s called,
the last sogged Cheerios circling your bowl,
a billboard on the M-10 overpass.

And forget the nightgown, long and white.
I’d go sexy into that good night, slut
it up just so you’d know exactly what
it is you’re missing in the afterlife.

And when you’re drowning in some fever dream
I’d wake you with a kiss that fucking might have been.

*

Christina Kallery is the author of Adult Night at Skate World, now in its second edition from Dzanc Books. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Failbetter, Rust & Moth, Gargoyle, and Mudlark, among other publications, and has been included in several anthologies, including Best of the Web and Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. She has served as submissions editor for Absinthe: A Journal of World Literature in Translation and poetry editor for Failbetter=. She currently resides in Ann Arbor, where she co-hosts a paranormal podcast called Shadowland.

First Date by Mariana Llanos

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

First Date

It was just a first date–
two nervous strangers meeting for the first time.
The place was full, I think,
but I can’t clearly remember
‘cause I couldn’t take my gaze off of you.
And I don’t know exactly what drew me into you.
Perhaps the singsong of your country accent,
or your stories and mischievous smile,
or your blunt sincerity, almost as if
you couldn’t stop the truth from shooting
out of your mouth.
We didn’t eat much
–you had a beer, I munched on sweet potato fries–
and we left
to saunter under the stars on a calm and unusually pleasant
early November night.
We chatted lively,
like two people who had a lot to share
and even more to learn from each other.
You asked, “What do you miss most about
not being single?”
I thought for a brief moment because I had a long list,
but I only said, “I miss the company. Watching TV with someone.”
You smiled like you knew I was keeping some things to myself.
“And you?”
“I miss waiting,” you said.
“Outside the mall, while she’s out shopping.
Just sitting down, and waiting.”
And time went by unhurriedly,
and there was much more to say, but it was late.
We strolled toward our cars and you held my hand–
my heart pumped faster but you didn’t notice.
You showed me your truck while you told me
more work stories.
Then you walked me to my car
and as I searched for my keys
–I really didn’t want to leave–,
you bent down, and pressed
your lips on mine.
And I didn’t care about passersby, or the time,
or that I never kiss on the first date,
because I wanted your lips too.

When we talked the next day
I could feel you smiling even without seeing you
or perhaps it was me who beamed for both of us.
And there was that awkward moment
when you don’t know what the other person is thinking
or if anything each of us felt was reciprocated.
But you dared and said, “I wanted you to kiss me on my truck.”
A wave of desire engulfed my skin.
“I wanted you to kiss me longer,” I said.

And at that moment,
I knew that I had known you for a long time.

*

Mariana Llanos is a Peruvian born writer and poet. Her poetry has been included in independent journals and in Poetry Magazine Young People’s Edition. She is a recipient of a Pura Belpré Honor for her children´s book Benita y las criaturas nocturnas. She lives in Oklahoma.

Conversations with my uber-driver by Lydia la Grange

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Conversations with my uber-driver

The slightly scratched Toyota pulls up to my house
I wave to the driver: a young black man, with an easy smile.
As I get in, I notice the isiphandla, a band of animal skin
hanging from his rear-view mirror.
So, I greet him in Zulu:
“Sawubona”
(Knowing I probably butchered the pronunciation
even though I’ve lived in South-Africa all my life.)
He repeats the word and we start driving.

He asks about my life and I ask about his.
He tells me that he is working for a hotel-chain
Ubering on the side, to support his family.
He used to study electrical engineering after getting a scholarship,
but had to work and ended up dropping out.
He says all this, without any hint of self-pity or regret,
as if he never expected more from life.

I ask if he wants to go back to university one day.
He replies that he probably won’t be able to,
but hopes to do a math-course and become a tutor
since he used to help tutor his friends in school and enjoyed it.

We arrive at my destination. I thank him and leave.
I wonder at the unfairness of it all:
This young man, with his positivity and intelligence
has had to give up on a dream
just because he was born on the wrong side of Apartheid.
(which lives on 30-years after it was ended)
And I have everything I need in life
just because I wasn’t.

*

Lydia la Grange is a South-African poet and playwright. Her work includes: Afskeid ‘n Musiekblyspel, Liewe Anna and F-Woord. She has published poems in Die Helpie Flitse and has had slam poems performed at the National Eisteddfod Academy’s national competition.

Two Poems by Alicia Rebecca Myers

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

The Surprise

My father died two weeks before
his 48th wedding anniversary. What ate up
my mother was the fact that he had
planned a special dinner for it
but never told her details, just a sweet
allusion: It’s a surprise. I must have
called every restaurant in the days
following for proof of reservation,
strange to ask, Do you have record
of a past name?, wondering where
they would have sat, his order, if
acute leukemia would have stopped
him from drinking beer or
pointing to the slabs of beef
wheeled out on a silver cart and
saying, That one. But no one
could find him: not the Peddler
Steakhouse, not the Angus Barn, not
Mandolin. Not even Red Lobster.
What a bureaucratic waste my grief
made of time. I held my breath
whenever a person answered.

*

Easy

I qualify every search with easy.
Easy bean stew. Easy angel food cake.
What is easy to fix. What is healthy.

Easy training techniques for a needy
dog. Easy way to cross grief like a lake.
I qualify every search with easy.

Easy to understand recent study
on the brief fluke prints left in a whale’s wake.
What is easy to fix. What is healthy.

Easy day trips from here. Easy journey
to see varying degrees of light break.
I qualify every search with easy.

Easy slumber. Easy to tell funny
jokes. Easiest way to conceal an ache.
What is easy to fix. What is healthy.

Easy upward trajectory. Dressy
pretend ease followed by the sharp intake.
I qualify every search with easy.
What is easy to fix. What is healthy.

*

Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist who holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Best New Poets, Creative Nonfiction, River Styx, Gulf Coast, december, Sixth Finch, and The Rumpus. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press, 2016), was winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series. Her first full-length book, Warble, was chosen by former Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg as winner of the 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize and will be published in fall ‘25 (Meadowlark Press). She lives with her husband and their nine-year-old in upstate NY.

Shophouse Dreaming by Ping Yi

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Shophouse Dreaming

In a pre-war shophouse they sold charcoal,
breaking bulk into sacks and sewn, carbon
coating wall, ceiling, bench and fingernail.
They used to be They – He ran off with some
woman or drink or both, fled from his kids.

She flipped to trading gas in canisters
blue and grey, higher margins – ahead of
her time. Seven to feed upstairs, creaking
floor for beds, the boys asleep before girls,
always. Beneath casement windows, ferals
and mongrels duelled, warbled and bred in
the pungent alleyway to palm-thatched huts.

Weekends we visited Grandma in the
shophouse – still selling her gas, still fuelling
working households. Radio squawking in her
Teochew dialect, second uncle & co.
shipped the gas, fixed valves and stoves, ran the shop.
The clan came, bartered pears, pomfret, make-up
and gossip while we raced the staircase and
back lanes, as amok as village chickens.

She moved into public housing, handed
the business to her son, and then passed on.
I retrace my steps inside the new arts
academy, standing where the house stood:
there the storm drain took sis’s pillow doll,
there I bathed from the giant earthen pot,
there the nightsoil man harvested the spoils.

And here, by the national orchestra,
I suddenly remember her.

*

Ping Yi writes poetry, travelogues and fiction, and is in public service. His work has appeared in Litro, London Grip, Meniscus, La Piccioletta Barca, Sideways and Vita Poetica, and is forthcoming in Poetry Breakfast and Harbor Review. Ping Yi is from Singapore, and has also lived in Boston, MA, and Cambridge, UK.

Woman with Piano by Donna Pucciani

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Woman with Piano

They don’t tickle the ivories
the way they used to—
once-nimble fingers typing
the musical alphabet of Bach,
running like new lambs on a hillside
of sixteenth notes, but now like old sheep
becoming mutton, plodding mud-wise
through pastures of Mozart minuets.

I dog-ear the pages of slow movements,
leaving untouched the rest of the sonata,
abandoning allegros, now unplayable.

I close my eyes, hearing harmonies
for the first time, seventh chords
unresolved forever, languishing
in the hammock of largo, lolling sweet
and idle among the sambas of Jobim.

I feel my fingers, slow and sure,
not needing the flash and glitter of Scarlatti,
the gymnastics of Liszt, but reclining
unapologetically under the falling leaves
of Moonlight in Vermont.

The pleasures of old age linger
in every chord, unable to leap
from the tension of ninths to the final triad,
for resolution is not as important as desire.
And listening, always listening.

*

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, The Pedestal, Journal of Italian Translation and other journals. Her latest book of poetry is EDGES.

Immortal One by Shaun R. Pankoski

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Immortal One

The peacock at the Buddhist temple
is anything but humble.
He struts and screams of his magnificence
to anyone who will listen.
Flapping prayer flags
cannot compete with his glorious colors―
emerald, cerulean and glints of bronze,
opulent in the sun,
that follows him like a manservant,
casting him in his best light.
He weaves his way among the bamboo clumps,
the eucalyptus groves,
the pale, upturned faces of the Japanese iris.
While a holy breeze
nudges the brooms of the red-robed monks,
quietly sweeping the temple stairs.

*

Shaun R. Pankoski (she/her) is a poet most recently from Volcano, Hawaii. A retired county worker and two time breast cancer survivor, she has lived on both coasts as well as the Midwest as an artist’s model, modern dancer, massage therapist and honorably discharged Air Force veteran. Her poems have appeared here and other lit mags, including Gargoyle, Gyroscope and MacQueen’s Quinterly.

AI, Basic Income, and the Buddhist Agenda by Katherine Riegel

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

AI, Basic Income, and the Buddhist Agenda

I’m too old to learn a new way of earning,
to navigate bleak wastelands where artificial
intelligence makes glaciers calve with a great
violence and splash. The waters are rising and soon

everyone will be selling to everyone else 24/7
and who will have time to read
anything? Even to myself, I sound like doom

in a sandwich board ringing a bell in the town square
and I’m not proud of that, nor of the weakness
that keeps me from leaving every comfort I know

to live by the sun’s schedule and grow my own
food—corn, beans, and squash, the sacred trio
indigenous people knew well before my ancestors came
with their grim monoculture. The strands of my hungers

tangle and clash and I do get it, the temptation
to walk away and leave the oven on a timer, something
else in charge, since we’ve burned dinner so many times

the house smells of ash and surrender. I want more
than I should and definitely more gentleness for everyone:
grasses bending in the wind on a bluff overlooking
the sea, salt air scouring the darkness from our lungs,

no hint of our words scooped up and repurposed
by some inscrutable code. I want to believe
myself worthy, that none of us have to earn the right

to be, that wherever we existed before we were born here
we belonged so completely we had no doubt
this world would open its lush arms to us.

*

Katherine Riegel’s lyric memoir, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. She is also the author of Love Songs from the End of the World (Main Street Rag), the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth (Sundress), and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Catamaran, One, Orion and elsewhere. She is managing editor of Sweet Lit and teaches online classes in poetry and cnf. Find her at katherineriegel.com.

EMT by Sherry Abaldo

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment
EMT
We joke about it: Mom has to go throw up when I talk about work.
The one about the nine-year-old home alone, taking care of a dying baby
hooked up to machines in a back room, who swallowed a bottle cap.
The one about the morbidly obese old man in a collapsing trailer
whose bloated feet teemed with maggots. The one about the drunk
woman who kept wrecking property and cutting herself with glass who
could never get over the loss of her baby. The one about the guy on meth
with a hidden switchblade who got checked into ER only to stab another
guy on meth strapped to a gurney in the same ER to death. Blood
everywhere. Blood painted all over the clean white church of the hospital.
The bureaucracy of giving a crazed patient a K bomb. The 20-year-old
gang member shot 22 times, my daughter’s first intubation procedure she
beams. The 94-year-old first of his kind Navy SEAL being jostled over high
Vegas speed bumps who told her, It’s ok. I just wish I could dance with you.
*
Sherry Abaldo splits her time between Las Vegas and rural Maine where she grew up. Her writing has appeared in Rattle, The New York Times, Down East Magazine, Northern New England Review, and other literary journals and anthologies as well as on The History Channel and PBS. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Southern California. A two-time Dibner Poetry Fellow, her awards include a Regional Emmy and winner of The Ekphrastic Review’s Erotic Ekphrastic Poetry Contest. Her website: sherryabaldo.com.

Two Poems by Olga Livshin

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

A Tulip in a Besieged City

Like a soft bomb.

Like a clock,
if the clock knew
it might not go on.

It holds one petal to the side,
an ethereal skirt.

The dark, furry pistil,
fit to create, to mess something up.
The bloom, ready to croon its orange-black insides out.

A smattering of sand falls from the sky.

Petals remain
bright gathered flags.

*

Blowout

Our reading about the war in Ukraine
is tonight, here in morning-washed Miami.

I said to Julia: At least we will have beautiful hair!
Aching for our homeland, I paid strangers in a salon
to comfort our hair.

Or maybe I wanted to cover up
our knee-bent, back-curved, salty-eyed content
with presentable form,
and prettiness is an ally.

Or maybe, in the room next to my mind –
five thousand miles away –
an explosion killed a three-year-old boy
in his bed, in the night.
My phone shook with this news.
But why am I getting curled
when I have to straighten myself out?

Julia’s hair is like a river of dark metal
brushed aglow. My girl’s big laughter,
a yearning flame. Love this blowout!
she says to her stylist. Her love of love,
and voice like a beautiful animal.
She stands up, spins around,
sweeps me into a hug,
not compressed by gender or history,
amplified by what we must endure.

*

Olga Livshin’s work is recently published in the New York Times, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and other journals. She is the author of the poetry collection A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (2019). Livshin co-translated Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (2023) and A Man Only Needs a Room by Vladimir Gandelsman (New Meridian Arts, 2022). As a consulting poetry editor for Mukoli: A Journal for Peace, she reviews poetry from conflict-affected communities across the world, with a focus on Eastern Europe. She lives in a suburb of Philadelphia.

A History of Fireworks by Kari Gunter-Seymour

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

A History of Fireworks

It’s July 1st. Whose idea it was to wait
I can’t remember, but me, my son
and two granddaughters, nine and ten,
are at the fireworks warehouse,
along with scads of other pyromaniacs,
sorting out scenarios for night sky panoramas,
shelves heaped to the ceiling with firepower.

I do my best to maneuver the cart. My son
considers tube launchers, skyrockets, mortars.
A particularly hearty woman standing her ground
near the Roman candles cackles,
these flaming swords are the bomb,
it’s my third trip back, my kids love’em.

Flaming swords? I envision “Star Wars”
or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,”
ER visits, burn salve at best, but when I mention
what I overheard, my son says, Awesome!

I pick up a petite pink sword, offer it
to my sweet baby girls.
The first says, I want that black sword.
The second looks up at the top shelf, stacked
to the hilt with Thor’s hammer look-alikes,
says, I want one of those conk busters.

Night of, dusk closing in,
the sword tip is lit, sparks fly—
a fountain of reds, greens and golds.
My grandgirl lunges and parries, the granddog
darts in/out of spark showers, barks,
oohs and ahhs abound—applause, applause.
Then comes the hammer,
held high and fierce.
For a few magnificent seconds
sparks fly, the dog dances,
then silence and a wee sputtering flame.

We scratch our heads, grumble,
give in to lost cause.
But my warrior girl persists,
Mjölnir aloft, double gripped,
feet planted firm and wide,
shouts her warrior oath—
then all hell breaks loose.

Flames shoot, whistles whine,
colorful spheres escape containment.
We clap and hoot, amazed at the splendor,
each of us sporting bits of confetti and soot,
the expressions on our faces hilarious,
my granddaughter’s the best face of all,
agog in the wonder of her power.

*

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio. Her current poetry collections include Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022), winner of the Legacy Book Award and Best Book Award. She is the executive director and editor of the Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak anthology series. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, World Literature Today, American Book Review, The New York Times and Poem-a-Day.

Two Poems by Max Heinegg

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

North Shore on the 4th

              We draw lines and stand behind them.
              That’s why flags are such ugly things.
                            – Fugazi, “Facet Squared”

A shirtless boy drags Old Glory
down the cracked road leading to the quarry
where another drowned a week ago.
Should I tell him a flag should never touch the ground?

I remember teenage me, singing Fugazi
and what irony privilege enjoys. Youth
and ideals rot. I haul my half-century up
to a yard teeming with legal pot and sunflowers,
a seeded pumpkin patch and a wilderness
behind a house whose hold teems with deer
a stone’s throw from a one-floor elementary.

The local working-class elitism ranks How long
have you lived here? None born here could buy here.
America in relief: energetic patriotism, the messiah
of youth in scout uniforms, good neighbors gathered
to belt the hits of what they still call country
in unison. So much easier than trying the harmony.

*

Florida Man

The librarian wants to know why we’re headed,
as does my chiropractor. All three of us Jewish,
I joke, to be reunited with our people. Not the retired
erudite, dining on fried grouper & margaritas,
(too sweet by twice), but the pot-bellied swagger
of white hair, palming Modelo cozies. It’s June
& Pride, mid the madness of DeSantis. The highway
signs are all guns & ammo, vape shops, personal
injury, COVID test results & how evolution ain’t.

We tour a destroyed botanical garden & gators lurk.
We take selfies with a digital Dali, smirking in St. Petersburg.
We sink shin-splinted legs into the tide, then steaming sand,
& sight the ibis hovering on the shore like cursive,
& observe boys skimboard three seconds, psyched.
Near sunset, on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend,
approached by a veteran, tattooed, collarbone down.
Skulls on his sleeves, bloodied Jesus, his shorts read Anti-Hate.
He offers to take a photo before the sun goes down.

*

Max Heinegg is the author of Going There (2023), and Good Harbor (2022), which won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize; a chapbook, Keepers of the House, is forthcoming in March 2025, all published by Lily Poetry Books. His work has appeared in 32 Poems, The Cortland Review, Thrush, Asheville Poetry Review, and Borderlands, among others. He lives, teaches, and makes records in Medford, MA. Connect with him @ www.maxheinegg.com

Generosity by Hayley Mitchell Haugen

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Generosity

for James Crews

There are some for whom chores are sacred;
they accept each gift of laundry—weeks of dorm grime
schlepped home in molding duffle bags—
fold reverence into each fresh-from-the-dryer seam.

They bake their own bread—meditate while it proves,
or whip up seven different kinds of salads,
each family dinner, a communion of leafy greens.
A firmly tucked sheet, a gleaming guest tub—

all acts of domestic devotion, an enlightenment
I’ve failed to achieve. I remain agnostic,
scoff even, at the notion of grace awaiting
in the depths of the daily grind.

When the grey mouse arrives during the cold snap,
I am unmoved by any spirit of cleanliness
to lay out sticky-traps, cannot face that moment
of anointing his little paws with vegetable oil

to set him free. Instead, I listen to him scritch
his way across countertops—crackle of cellophane,
clink of spoons in an unwashed bowl. Sometimes,
I’ll offer up a strawberry, a cheddar Triscuit—

just a little something for comfort in the night.

*

Hayley Mitchell Haugen is a Professor of English at Ohio University Southern. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag (2018) is her first full-length poetry collection, and her chapbook, What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To is from Finishing Line Press (2016). Her latest chapbook, The Blue Wife Poems, is from Kelsay Books (2022). She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

GLOBAL MUSTARD SHORTAGE LOOMS AHEAD OF SUMMER BARBEQUES by B.L. Pike

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

GLOBAL MUSTARD SHORTAGE LOOMS
AHEAD OF SUMMER BARBEQUES

We’re short of everything these days—
grace for instance, reason, joy.
And now it’s mustard.

Smooth or grainy, Cajun style, dilled,
neon yellow, brown, that Grey Poupon.
We used to slap it freely on

most anything. Burgers, dogs,
our griefs and grievances,
the brutal, constant pain of our discordance.

Or was that all some other salve we used to slather?
I don’t remember anymore.
The taste is gone—that zing.
That mustard.

*

B.L. Pike is a poet from Arizona. Being new to all this, her poetry has only appeared on Rattle’s Critique of the Week and Tim Green’s submission pile, where it has earned any number of helpful suggestions that I trust are reflected in this poem.

Pinky Promise by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Pinky Promise

         after Maggie Smith

Any day now, they’ll reach the border
of my hands, peer at a terrain that would break
the most seasoned travelers. Given another
way, no sane mother would surrender
her children to the world’s atrocities, just like
no sane mother would unlock the gate
and let go, knowing the path is ticking
with landmines. Wandering off,
they’ll come across bodies no bigger
than their own, wrapped in sheets
of thoughts and prayers. Predators on the prowl,
crouched behind candied smiles, waiting
for the earth to blink. Where, my children will ask,
are the pretty ponies grazing in golden pastures?
The faery clans arrayed in petals and sparkle,
where? You pinky promised. It’s true.
I’ve slinked into pawn shops on every corner
of time, bartered away the lucky trinkets,
the dreamcatchers hung over their windows
like suns rising in another galaxy, but when
I looked over my shoulder, as they’re doing now,
all I saw was a cemetery swarming
with blood and bones, a million unclasped hands.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. Her “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. Her recent work appears in ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, and Last Syllable, among others. Originally from California, she lives in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/

Two Poems by Angie Blake-Moore

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Beaks Full

an anniversary poem for D

Our rental car shooting down
the tight Irish country roads lined with
the greenest of hedgerows, we see
a seagull fly overhead—
a whole piece of bread in its beak
and we both exclaim our happiness for it.

We are that bird.
Pleased with the lucky find, the unexpected
wish come true—all that we asked for
has already happened: our beaks full
of good fortune and someone to share it with.

* 

Romance

Think of Carson McCullers
and the 3-legged Italian
teacup. She craved it something awful,
pictured it nesting
in her palm, awkward
yet lovely. But she made no move
to get one, knowing romance
is in the wanting
while possession’s as dry as Georgia grass
in the ardent August sun.

*

Angie Blake-Moore has been a teacher of 3- and 4-year-olds in Washington, DC for nearly 30 years. She has been writing poetry since she was in high school and has had the opportunity to learn from poets such as Hilary Tham and Matthew Lippman. She’s had work published in Potomac Review and Green Mountains Review among others and recently had a poem chosen for Moving Words in Arlington, VA where her poem is displayed in county buses.