Month: August 2024

On the Cusp of Equinox by Joan Mazza

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On the Cusp of Equinox

Summer ends with a chill over the garden,
breath of coolness to make the spinach
and lettuce happy. I pick another bucket
of tomatoes, more chewed each harvest,
and welcome the wildlife to this messy table

of green beans and ragged rapini.
For this season, I’m all canned out. Done
with boiling jars in a steamy kitchen,
done with tomatoes bubbling, and washing
seeds from the food mill. I’m giving away

the rest of the squash and tomatoes.
Go ahead, call me wasteful, Ma.
You can say I’m crazy. Again. This time
I mean it when I shake my head. I can’t eat
another tomato. The freezer is loaded

with green beans and squash soup.
Let the deer and groundhogs feast.

*

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

Two Poems by Sean Webb

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It is Snowing. My Country is Dying.

Those are two states of things
among countless states occurring
at once. Trees stand stripped.

All insects dead or dormant.
People hustle through deepening
snow accumulating in Love Park.

Up the street, the Liberty Bell sits
behind unbreakable glass. The shops
on Jewelers Row are closing down.

I want to believe we are wrapped
in a chrysalis; some coming spring
we will unfold into better selves.

Meanwhile, unseen overhead,
an asteroid named Akhmatova
drifts silently through the void.

*

Letter to the Doomed

Riding a train over the Schuylkill river
tilting a bottle to my lips
I am a body of water
drinking water over a body of water.

There is nothing but temporality in that.

I hope at the end
I have enough willing personal energy,
enough functioning body systems, enough
spiritual accord with a grand internal acceptance
of all vaguely understandable universal systems
to defy my inherent fear,
that I might find the power of perambulation
to carry myself out to an open sea, tundra, plateau,
whatever cycling biome is nearby
to find beautiful the relentlessly tangled
wilderness and give my solitary self to the rigors
of death and the continuing struggle
of countless enduring life forms that will
propagate from the end of my being.

*

Sean Webb has received many honors for his work. Most recently, he won the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Prize for Poetry, the Asheville Poetry Review William Matthews Poetry Prize, the Gemini Magazine Poetry Open, and was a finalist for the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a past Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, december magazine, The Seattle Review, Nimrod, and two chapbooks, What Cannot Stay Small Forever and The Constant Parades. He currently lives in Wilkes-Barre with his wife, the artist Colleen Quinn. More information can be found at seanwebbpoetry.com.

What Inspiration Looks Like by Brian Beatty

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What Inspiration Looks Like

The fat orange stray that appears
to live in the woods behind my house
shows no interest in civilization.

I’ve not once seen him look hungry
or lost.

He’s got my vote.

*

Brian Beatty is the author of five small press poetry collections and a spoken word album. His poems and short stories have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Appalachian Journal, BULL, Conduit, Cowboy Jamboree, CutBank, Dark Mountain, Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, Floyd County Moonshine, Gulf Coast, Hobart, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Moth, ONE ART, The Quarterly, Rattle, Seventeen, The Southern Review and Sycamore Review.

Poems by Aidan Coleman

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Election

Bees polling
every flower.

*

7 Poems

cold morning –
the bus shuddering

In the quiet house
I love my kids
again

hum of traffic
a blotting paper moon

birds chatter
the cat sunning itself
leaves them to it

in the schoolyard
a dozen sons
without my glasses

above neat houses
even the sun bored

*

Aidan Coleman has published three collections of poetry, Avenues & Runways (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005), Asymmetry (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2012), and Mount Sumptuous (Wakefield, 2020).

Two Poems by Martin Vest

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Life Is Tough

          For Patricia

Outside, a late-summer rainstorm
makes a marsh of the block
while the little neighborhood gods,
nine, maybe ten years old,
ride their skateboards
through the flooded streets.
Still wearing the Fall-Risk bracelet
attached at the hospital,
my own half-dead legs make me
more cautious than usual.
I want to yell through the window
and warn those kids
of the thousand dangers that lurk
beneath the surface—
ringworm, E. Coli, the little pebbles
that grab wheels and throw riders.

Convalescing at my mom’s,
it’s strange to be back in this house
where I was raised—
Same distant mountain, same begonias,
this one window-frame of world to inhabit.
Skeletal and aphasic,
I walker my way from bathroom to bed,
the hallway hung with cross-stitched
affirmations cheering me on—
Hope Is All You Need;
Life Is Tough, But So Are You;
Dream Big, Work Hard—
But like hell.
The little wheels
bark to a halt–
The gods fall.
Freezing, they slosh home
to their mothers.

*

Memento

Who could fault you
for losing the way.
For as long as the dead
have risen and walked
the righteous have been
mistaking incisions
for wounds.

*

Martin Vest’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, Slipstream, Salamander, The New York Quarterly, Spillway, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the high desert of Eastern Idaho.

Road Trip by Eileen M. D’Angelo

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Road Trip

            for Missy & Veronica

From the Northeast Extension to Route 380,
the road to the Catskills was paved with exorcisms
of dark secrets, fragmented dreams, nightmares,
fears and phantoms; a home movie that snaps
before the final frame. Safe in the car,
we let the dam burst, long-buried memories
swept over us. We gasped for breath.
Strange how he beat the love right out of me, said one.

No one could hear us tell our stories.
We let them tumble from our mouths like angry bees,
stinging us, the three of us exhausted by the telling
and retelling, as we gave voice to half-forgotten truths
we deny, wondering what held us in ourselves, saved us
from screaming out of our own skin.

*

Eileen M. D’Angelo, author of The Recovering Catholic’s Collection (Moonstone Press), is the Executive Director of Mad Poets Society and former Editor of Mad Poets Review, has been published in Rattle, Manhattan Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, Drexel Online Journal, Wild River Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Poets, and other publications.

To Unravel, to Shatter by Carolyn Adams

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To Unravel, to Shatter

As I come to bury you,
to carry out that ritual,
I rehearse walking
into your empty house.

I prepare myself.

You’ll be everywhere,
in the stale air
of three days gone.

In this airport’s gray morning,
I’m alone at the gate,
hours from departure.
I arrived early.
To unravel, to shatter,
then to repair – this takes time.

Outside, dawn breaks
rising on the window wall.
The tree horizon slowly
gains color.

A plane that isn’t mine
waits on the tarmac.
Others lift into a
quiet mist. Passengers
drift from their seats.

I’m still here,
alone, for my turn.

*

Carolyn Adams’ poetry and art have appeared in Steam Ticket, Cimarron Review, Evening Street Review, Dissident Voice, and Blueline Magazine, among others. She is the editor and publisher of the Oregon Poetry Calendar. Having authored four chapbooks, her full-length volume, Going Out to Gather has been published by Fernwood Press. She has been nominated multiple times for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart prize.

All I Want by Sharon Charde

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All I Want

             after Raymond Carver

today is not to remember everything I’ve
done wrong. I’m eighty-two and the list
is long. I can’t bear to hear the clang of bad
decisions, to claw back the days I broke things,
woke up scared, drove to New Hampshire,
Cape Breton, New York. The time I asked
my son to tell me what it was like growing up
with us and he did and I could not stop crying
even during the birthday dinner. The mistake
of that question, all of them before it. My husband
says I was a great mother but I doubt him. I
yearn to return those boys to my womb. Start over.
All I ask is to be unplugged from this ragged
remembering, this catalogue of redecoration,
raise one son from the dead, the other from
wherever he’s gone, to wrap us all in restoration.
Until then I’ll try to stride through my next years,
maybe learn more about what love isn’t, how to
look straight at the terrible and sing.

*

Sharon Charde practiced family therapy for twenty-five years as a licensed professional counselor and has led writing groups for women since 1992. She has won numerous poetry awards, has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, and has been nominated ten times for the Pushcart award. The BBC adapted her work for an hour-long radio broadcast in June 2012, and she has seven published collections of poetry, the latest in September 2021, “The Glass is Already Broken,” from Blue Light Press. Her newest collection, “What’s After Making Love,” will be published by Fernwood Press in 2025.

From 1999 to 2016, she volunteered at a residential treatment facility teaching poetry to adjudicated young women, creating a collaborative group with a local private school for eleven of those years, and her memoir about that work, “I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent,” (Turner Publishing) was published in 2020. Charde has been awarded fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, Ucross Foundation and The Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Lakeville, Connecticut with her husband John.

Summer Afternoon by Cindy Buchanan

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Summer Afternoon

blossoms on the red buckeye tree
droop detach fall they do this
every year and yet every year
        I am surprised by dying

already my hands miss the way
I’ve cupped upturned faces
of petals marveled how
        the bright red panicles

jutting from tall stems thrust their ruby
throats through foliage thirst
for the tongue of a bee to whisper
        honeyed promises

of splendor eternal but what if
everything clung stubborn forever
unchanged can we really cherish
        what cannot die

*

Cindy Buchanan grew up in Alaska, graduated from Gonzaga University, and lives in Seattle. Her work has been published previously in journals including Evening Street Press, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rabid Oak, The MacGuffin, Hole in the Head Review, and Chestnut Review. She is grateful to her monthly poetry groups and the community at Hugo House for their wisdom and support. Her first chapbook, Learning to Breathe, was published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press.

Two Poems by Tami Haaland

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What to Call This Embrace

One ponderosa leans inward where
         a slice of granite tips the trail as if
the tree compensates for the lurch,
         creates a curve to hold onto, and I do.

I feel something in my center, call it
         love for the younglings, the elders,
the twisted dead topping and edging the cliffs.
         Now, with you no longer ahead

on the trail, I hold to their steadiness
         and brace my weight.

*

Over Home

When we lived together, when my mother
and father, my brother and I still lived

in our house, my mother would say she was
going over home, meaning back to her parents,

to their two-story white farmhouse. Now,
when I dream of it, the roof opens to sky,

doors line a hallway and rooms hold
generations of treasures—stylish chairs,

strange musical instruments, layers of disorderly
potential if only someone could keep it straight.

*

Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections: What Does Not Return, When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room. Her poems have recently appeared in Fugue, Cutthroat, december, Cascadia, Healing the Divide and have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Slowdown.

Lifecycle by Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt

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Lifecycle

I keep relearning what it means to be
human, collapse the myth we are
always to live as happy or sad or grief

ridden, that it’s okay to break camp,
extinguish the embers from last night’s fire,
return home to rediscover our own grove,

native black oak and magnolia, nurture
new and flexible veins, branches, beliefs,
wait for winter when, together, we turn

more accepting, allow them to seep back
into root and trunk and stem, hold them
close enough for shelter, regrow once more

our lives. Our very own forest.

*

Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, a Gen X poet with disabilities, has a publishing history that began in the early 1990s. Her earlier poetry appeared in Yankee magazine, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Frogpond and dozens of others throughout the decades. Some of her more recent work has appeared in BigCityLit, The Southern Quill, and Miracle Monocle’s anthology You Blew It. Her chapbook of micropoems, We All Might be Witches (MacKenzie Publishing 2023), was inspired by Gotthardt’s neurodivergent son. The book was nominated for a Library of Virginia Literary Award. Gotthardt is the author of 11 other books and has won several national and Virginia regional awards. Learn more at KatherineGotthardt.com.

The Only Photo by Arvilla Fee

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The Only Photo

There’s a picture of me and my mother
I mean, technically, you can’t see me,

although you can see the outline of my form
curled as I was in utero;

but my mother—you can clearly see,
tall, legs like a giraffe, standing on the front porch

near a trellis of plump red roses, dressed in a t-shirt
and shorts; she has a sprinkle of freckles on her nose,

(which I inherited) and long strawberry-blonde hair;
her hand is tented across her forehead, shading

her gray-green eyes from the glare of the sun, and
she’s grinning like a cat who swallowed the canary—

perhaps because my father told one of his pre-dad
jokes—or perhaps because she was still snickering

about putting a plastic snake beside his coffee cup
(a story my dad has told me a thousand times),

or perhaps her sunlit smile was because she knew
I would push my way into the world in just one week;

but no one could know, of course, least of all her,
this would be the only picture I’d ever have of us.

*

Arvilla Fee lives in Dayton, Ohio, teaches English, and is the managing editor for The San Antonio Review. She has had poems, photography, and short stories published in Mudlark, North of Oxford, Drifting Sands Haibun, Triggerfish Critical Review, Cholla Needles, Havik, October Hill Magazine and many other presses. Her poetry books, The Human Side and This is Life can be found on Amazon. To learn more, visit Arvilla’s website.

Relics by Sandra Kohler

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Relics

I come to the window onto Tonawanda Street
as dusk seems to be gathering. The sun won’t
set for another two hours but daylight’s fading,
the sky grey, muted like distant birdsong, like
the memory of a melody you’re humming which
captures a lost time, an era in your life different
from the present, but lost now, gone, and because
gone, mourned, mournful. Mournful as these
mornings when I wake alone, alone and lonely.

I have memories of a past, but they’re remains,
dried up leaves in autumn, spent blossoms.
Today when I opened the box on the bureau
we shared, in our bedroom, I thought I’d find
relics of you, a pocket protector, pens, a small
compass — devices you’d use to orient yourself,
measure your morning world. I was wrong.
I take the box — lovely wooden box with roses
painted on its top, but with a deep gash, a crack
in its surface — start opening the sheets of paper
in it. They’re in my handwriting, all of them.

I begin to read and realize they are love letters.
Letters I wrote to you on your birthday, on our
anniversary, on random mornings or evenings
when I found myself thinking of the ways in
which I loved you, rehearsing the reasons for
my love. I never knew you had kept them.
They are precious, precious as the desiccated
finger of a saint, as the fringe on the shawl
of a rabbi, handed down to him by his father’s
fathers, from generation unto generation.

I am undone, scarred and wounded, gashed
by grief like the lid of this box. I want to
encase these letters in a golden reliquary,
to preserve them forever. I will mend this
scarred box, wear it like a habit, a sacred
garment. I will weep tears of joy, of sorrow,
those precious relics of our marriage.

*

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.

Memorial to Scarcity by Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Memorial to Scarcity

I keep a whisky bottle inside the cupboard,
depleted except for a tiny bit, the golden
liquid glimmering, a magical snake
caught within glass. So little left.

This scarcity, a memorial to my mother,
one I visit, tilting the bottle back and forth,
remembering our vacant conversations.
My mother loved whisky, but what I have
would never be enough–she always made
sure to tell me that. The scant amount I keep,
a reminder of her endless thirst, circling
our days, a hissing snake, poisonous,
striking the soft spots until they hardened
into rock.

Now that I’m sober, this creature slithers
safely behind glass–
look how it sheds its skin, a frayed memory,
paper thin. Look how it eats its own tail,
a life holding emptiness, zero, always
the place to begin.

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Northern California. She leads virtual creative writing & reading groups for poets. After twenty years publishing fiction, she has recently “come out” as a poet, thanks to encouraging friends and editors. Say hello at www.JenniferMillsKerr.com.

Have You Ever Been in a Fight? by Sara Eddy

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Have You Ever Been in a Fight?

When you date a man
one of the first things
is to find out how many fights
he’s been in, how many times
he’s put up his fists,
put his hard hands
on another man.

When they talk about this
they reveal themselves.
There are men who hate
themselves and the world.
Men who invite violence
to fall down on them.

Who take pride
in having broken
someone’s nose, who take
grim pride in having
broken someone’s nose.
There are men who see no difference
between world violence

and home violence, who know
the stages of bruise, broken
bone, concussion. They carry
weapons they’ve bought,
weapons they’ve made.
They look for weapons in the world.

What they’re telling you
is whether they can love you.

*

Sara Eddy’s full-length collection, Ordinary Fissures, was released by Kelsay Books in May 2024. She is also the author of two chapbooks (Tell the Bees, A3 Press, 2019, and Full Mouth, Finishing Line Press, 2020), and her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.

Two Poems by Patricia Russo

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Invisible Man

My friend, who wasn’t at the memorial, called me.

“Do you remember that August it rained every day
and Billy spent all his afternoons
making life preservers for our imaginary friends
so they wouldn’t drown?”

I said I did, and she said,
“I think he’s home.
Not his last place, but the other one
that converted garage he painted lemon yellow,
do you know the place I mean?”

I said I did, and she said,
“My car got totaled, so I got to take the bus,
and now I’m walking past it twice a day
and I hear noises inside
like someone bumping into a table
or latching and unlatching a window.
There is a window, in the back wall,
do you remember?”

I said I did. And then I said,
It’s probably the wind
I’m sorry, but that’s what it is
I’ve been past the yellow garage, too
and no one lives there
No one can
They snagged the landlord for illegal conversion.

“That wouldn’t stop Billy and you know it,” she said.
“Not landlords or cops or locked doors
when he wanted to get something
or get something done. You know what I’m saying.”

I said I did, and then I said,
You haven’t seen him, though
because if you had, that would have been
the first thing you told me

“I don’t need to see him to know he’s there,”
she said, “I thought you would understand that.”

I said I did, but she sighed
and muttered something I didn’t hear
and said she’d talk to me later.

But I did understand.
That August of the interminable rain
No one had drowned, imaginary or not
And how do you know
the invisible man isn’t home?
It’s easier to blame the wind.

*

Time and Time Again

You need to keep it bandaged
until a scab forms

then treat it gentle
while the skin underneath
toughens to scar

this may take years
or centuries
or forever

but gentleness
does not have
an expiration date

*

Patricia Russo has had poems in Acropolis Journal, The Turning Leaf Journal, The Twin Bird Review, and Metachrosis Literary.

Two Poems by Judy Kaber

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Crow Cento*

The way a crow shook down on me,
such an awkward dance, these gentlemen
in their spottled-black coats, how peaceable.

Crows startle the clouds with grievances
never resolved, it seems. For lonely men to see
a crow fly in the thin blue sky, picking through trash

near the corral; that fool crow, understands the center
of the world as greasy scraps of fat caught at last
in their black beaks. Crow nailed them together.

How the crow dreams of you, flying the black flag
of himself. He tried ignoring the sea, but it was bigger
than death, just as it was bigger than life.

Each of them thought far more than he uttered.

*Lines from: Ted Hughes, Judith Barrington, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, John Clare, Vachel Lindsay

*

Duplex: Slippage

I am most at home on my own.
My heart moves in constant give and take.

         I give and take, keep more than I dish out.
         So many dishes I’ve dropped have broken.

Broken dishes dropped, cry out.
Harsh, rough edges. Bowl emptied

         into a harsh, empty world.
         When there’s no one to spread the glue,

cracks spread. Nothing holds together.
My first husband took my son away.

         My first husband took my heart away
         on the back of a Honda motorcycle.

Back and back, the growl of the bike.
I am most at home on my own.

*

Judy Kaber is the author of three chapbooks, most recently, A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, Poet Lore, Hunger Mountain, Comstock Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her poem, “Sword Swallowing Lessons,” was featured on “The Slowdown.” Judy won the 2021 and 2023 Maine Poetry Contest. She received a Maine Literary Award in 2024. Her book, Landscape With Rocks, Sky, Nails, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2025. She is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Maine (2021-2023).

Four Poems by James King

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Halfhearted

            After Ada Limón
            For James

It happened, didn’t it? A human I knew
announced dead on the internet. He had my name,
too. A year creeps at the speed of a year
and it’s been so many since I loved him
I can only grieve half-heartedly.
I picture the heart in two halves
on a plastic cutting board, hollow as a bell pepper.
The heart with little white pips of feeling, extracted
cleanly with an expert knife. That knife’s this poem—
that knife’s the world. They say
the brain is in halves, too—uneven halves,
that whichever hemisphere contains your thoughts
contains your thoughts, designates you—
artist or engineer. Does the heart work
like that, too? Do the right-hearted
mourn in watercolor? Do the left-hearted
love like Pomodoro? This heart is reading
all the latest scientific studies, papers and names
strewn along the ribcage’s hardwood floor.
It’s been cutting its thumbs on every corner.
This heart wants to know itself. It wants to know
which half it should remember him by.

*

Controlled Burn

            “Massive wildfire burning at NC coast after ‘controlled burn’ goes out of control”
                        —FOX8 News: June 16th, 2023

From a ten-dollar boat
in the middle of the lake,
I see the sky turn hot,
plural, gray, let soft
white flecks land upon me,
the weight of an eyelash.
This flame does not rage.
This flame has only rediscovered
hunger, sucked the pines
like chicken bones.
It’s abandoned the usual ritual,
swelled its borders five times farther
than the firemen had planned for
and kept on growing, its own
small nation of ruin.

Whether we know it or not
we live there. I was not supposed to go out
today—it’s on the loose,
they say, like one would talk
about a criminal—but
I followed the ash, floating
like a cartoon character
toward fresh pie on a windowsill.
I must have lost control, myself,
but you can’t get this shit at home.
I drift, dust coats the water’s surface
like a forgotten thing.
If the flame does not care for me
I will not care for the flame.
I’ll breathe, control the smoke.
I’ll grip my paddle, become
muscle. I won’t wait
to eat up all this world.
I’ll burn my tongue on it.

*

To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self on My Twenty-Fifth Birthday

To you, who’s passed, ghost
of a lightbulb after it’s just gone out—
you will never see snow again.
Don’t be sad. There are some good things
that will come out of this.
This is that time of life when
there’s no greater gift
than having your teeth cleaned
by a gentle hygienist, roots
be damned. This is the year
when you find out
grapefruit can kill you,
with the drugs you’re on, and
what a life. Now I am at last
complete and singular, now that I am done
with the revisions of
my past, you may ask me
anything you like. This passive
curiosity, a chain on the arms
of my glasses—I traded my fear for it.
The color of the sky
is the symptom
you always thought it was.
Two days ago, when
you saw a kid with his head under
the wheel of a truck,
not moving, his friends
craned like ibises into their phones—
despite what you might think,
that kid was never you.
You are the one that drove away.
Will I ever get to stay
somewhere, you ask—yes,
you did once. Your whole life.
That was a bad house
in a good neighborhood, oozing
with wood ants and moss, rock walls
that snaked the woods
like centuries old-spines.
There is one inside your back
which explains all your stiffness
and pain, and a creaky empty house
in your head which explains
your general vacancy. Actually,
I lied with what I said before—
you are not so empty.
And it was a good house.

*

In the Carnivorous Plant Garden

Your new lover leads the way,
past knee-tickling ferns to where
the whole point of it is. You

almost don’t see the flytraps until she pulls back
the strands of thick grass, showing you
their tiny mouths, scarlet coin-purses.

Flytrap flowering is supplemental.
They bite but three times in a life—
all the rest anticipation. You don’t know yet

you will only make love on two more afternoons.
You just know the shorts she wears are navy-blue
and that she somehow loves the pitcher plants,

their mouths pimpled in sapphire flies.
It’s the end of season and so
the biggest ones are dying, crinkling,

tearing brown, papery holes (is this
what it will be like?) The younger ones,
purple, veined with white, still grow.

Five steps ahead, she says something
you cannot hear over the song
of their blood-colored flutes.

*

James King is a poet from New Hampshire. He holds an MFA from UNCW, and his poems have appeared in Exposition Review, Bear Review, The Shore, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. Find him online at jamesedwardking.net.

ONE ART’s 2025 Best of the Net Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2025 Best of the Net Nominations

Tina Barry – Because I was Lonely

James Diaz – Once More, Into The Light

Callie Little – Headstone

Tamara Madison – Letter to Earth

B. Lynne Zika – Truce

Jane Zwart – Two Points Define a Line

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Congratulations to all our nominees!

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More information about Best of the Net here.

Two Poems by Stefanie Leigh

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The Stilling of Movement

After your class ended, and all the dancers bled
into gossip, fouettés, stretches,
and Band-Aids, you sauntered over to the corner,
lifted my fingertips and pulled, so my hips slid
further, further, further over
the box of my pointe shoe, and I hovered

over an abyss. My back
leg extended long, high, quivering. If you let
go, I would fall. So, your words
held my waist like a corset and sweat
pooled at my neck as I gulped down the echo
of the now-empty studio—

How eighty dancers evaporated—my mind
and eyes laid down on the Marley. I lowered
my leg, came off pointe, and you released
my hand, but not my presence, and my knees
knocked together beneath your breathing
and I wondered what else you expected me to do.

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My Therapist Said, No Amount of Healing Will Make a Toxic Environment Safe

Sixteen years after leaving my ballet career—my soul
and bones no longer bleeding—I was back at the barre

three times, then four, then five times a week, angled in,
balancing in passé. Now forty, my chest eventually

remembered how to stack above my pelvis, arms
extended, my left ankle anchoring me to the Marley.

I was perfectly still, the piano pedaling through my
intestines, when a fog I didn’t know was covering

my gaze dissipated. I breathed forward,
not even an inch, expanded from the inside, into

a world I had only ever watched from behind
a scrim. After barre, one of the elderly ladies came over,

Dear, you always look gorgeous, but something
is different. Like you have a full outline—for the first time.

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Stefanie Leigh is a poet and ballet dancer based in Toronto. She was a dancer with American Ballet Theatre and is currently working on her first poetry collection, Swan Arms. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rust & Moth, SWWIM, Frozen Sea, Thimble Lit and elsewhere.

Coming of Age by Matt Escott

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Coming of Age

I was twelve when my friend started lifting weights
Building strength to fight his dad
A closed fist at home inside a chasm
Of bone, newly formed
By shifting plates moved by metronome
Spasms, olympic anchors
Weighing him to a river floor.

We’d stand in front of the fridge, primed
Like mice waiting for the snap
Of singing floorboards
Me spotting him cardboard reps –
Strong bones he’d say and grin –
His pinched palms rubbing not
Muscle aches but the phantom pains
Of future breaks
He couldn’t escape
Even when fleeing his own party early,
Flush with birthday money to buy new fishing gear
The aberdeen he’d later dig out of his palm
His father looking on, clean and angry for it
The pint glass only half filled with milk
His son stole like fire from a mountain.

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Matt Escott lives in Toronto with his wife and 5 year old twins. For the past 10 years he has worked with youth experiencing homelessness, and is currently developing a mentorship program for youth in foster care.

What We Carried by Dianna MacKinnon Henning

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What We Carried

We were two sisters
hefting pails of brook water,
trucking them back to camp,

both of us barefoot,
water swelling over the pail’s rim,
me fighting for an even keel

or all’s lost, one side heavier,
dare I say my sister’s side
since she was shorter

and gravity being gravity,
the pail tilted her way
water sloshing her feet.

How many other things
had she carried, that I,
at the time, hadn’t a clue?

Her eyes, sorrow eyes,
spare as sand blown bird tracks.
Not once did she confide

how our drunken father
plied her legs apart, how
she cried long into the night.

Months later, reading her diary
after she left, I divorced Father,
abandoned home, and did

what any reasonable daughter
would do. I chronicled our childhood,
told how he forced my mouth shut,

warning, “Don’t say anything.”

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Dianna MacKinnon Henning taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several California Arts Council grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program and has run The Thompson Peak Writers’ Workshop in Lassen County. Publications, in part: Poet News, Sacramento; Worth More Standing, Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees; Voices; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Artemis Journal, 2021 & 2022, 2023; The Adirondack Review; Memoir Magazine; The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester; Pacific Poetry and New American Writing. 2021 Nomination by The Adirondack Review for a Pushcart Prize. MFA in Writing ’89, Vermont College.

HOW TO BECOME A MOTHER WHILE FALLING OFF A BUILDING by Carlin Katz

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HOW TO BECOME A MOTHER WHILE FALLING OFF A BUILDING

Accept that you are both falling. Understand neither of you will survive. Spit out the sweetness of your life. Hold his head against your breast. Remember when he was pulled from under your ribs. Recall the gasp—the wide-eyed uncoupling of what was once whole. Feel the cold air strip you of your selfishness. Rotate your body so you will go first. Hold him above your head, your heart. Hold him away from the ground which is coming closer and closer. Preserve him, as long as you can. Now, imagine him without a mother, if even for a split second. Feel the unforgivable lurch of that. Refuse to abandon him. Twist your body again, more difficult this time against so much gravity, so that he lands first. Be willing to endure this loss. Smile at him. Let the last thing he sees be his mother’s face: whole, and beautiful, and his.

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Carlin Katz (she/her) is an animist, student herbalist and mother living with her family on traditional Chinook land in Washington State. Her non-fiction is forthcoming in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.

Two Poems by Robin Wright

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A Lovely Evening for a Dance

After Cypresses by Vincent van Gogh

The Cypresses stand in line,
greenery fluffed, spines straight,
wait for soft clouds to envelope.
The pinks and blues swirl
towards them. The grass below
sways to the wind’s whispers.
No one left without a partner,
the dance floor full of grace
and gratitude.

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Watching Over It

After Mount Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne

The snow-capped mountain transforms
into the lined face of an old man,
right eye hides in shadow,
left eye watches the land, trees,
and house tucked into greenery,
trapped as if a child not allowed
to leave. A serpent head spews
from the old man’s mouth,
a guard to keep the house in place.
The old man’s arm tattooed
with the colors of disobedience,
blue for submersion, pink
for blood diluted but not gone.

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Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, ONE ART, Loch Raven Review, Panoply, Rat’s Ass Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, Spank the Carp, The New Verse News, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best New Poets 2024 nominee. Her first chapbook, Ready or Not, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.

Four strong winds by Steven Deutsch

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Four strong winds

swirl the gathering clouds
like vapors
from a witch’s cauldron.

The road is out, car stuck
in a forest of hemlock
bordering West Virginia.

And as the moonlight
and starlight go out
under the thickening clouds,

I question my leaving—
although we talked of it
so many times before.

Tempest tomorrow
but tonight will be
the blackest

night of a black year.
No light from the sky
can pierce the clouds

and the forest
darker than night.
I try my guitar for comfort—

but there is no comfort
in the simple notes
that hang heavy in the swollen air.

How fine and simple
we were once.
How our summer stole by.

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Steven Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and was the first poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum, helping to create Stanza, a room dedicated to poetry. His Chapbook, Perhaps You Can, was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full-length books, Persistence of Memory and Going, Going, Gone, and Slipping Away were published by Kelsay. In 2022, his full-length book, Brooklyn, was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press. Seven Mountains will be published this summer.

Bandstand by Linda Laderman

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Bandstand

I loved the after-school quiet in our apartment. No one to tell
me what to do or watch. I’d find my mother’s Camels, light up
and turn on American Bandstand. Dick Clark was my touchstone.
There, in black and white, I pictured my curly brown hair straight
and blonde, my body, thin and lithe, like the girls called regulars.
I coveted their sweaters, some with bedazzled Peter Pan collars,
their shirts trimly tucked inside their pleated plaid skirts. I had power
when Bandstand was on. I’d dance the Pony or the Twist, and dream
the boy with the Elvis hair picked me to join him on the dance floor.
One afternoon Dion was on the show. He sang his hit, Run Around Sue.
I spread my arms, danced and spun. It was just me, Dick, and Dion.
In that minute, I was a skinny rich girl from Philly, a Bandstand regular,
living my life as if I had all the time in the world to figure it out.

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Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. A former college instructor and journalist, her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Rats Ass Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, Action-Spectacle, Scapegoat Review, Rust & Moth, The Jewish Writing Project, Rise Up Review, Adanna Literary Journal, and MER. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online here. Find her at lindaladerman.com.

ELEGY FOR A BASSOONIST by Jane McKinley

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ELEGY FOR A BASSOONIST

for J. B. (June 3, 1952 – June 4, 2004)

I woke up with your number on my tongue,
still dreaming, fingers reaching for a phone.
Some contractor had needed a bassoon—
Rameau’s Les Indes galantes. And then it stung
me, you were dead, had died while fairy roses
bloomed by your back door. You’d blown out candles
hours before, left jobs to colleagues—Handel’s
Fireworks, a Rite of Spring—loath to expose
how sick you were. You’d wished to fade away
on your own terms, had hoped to spare us yet
another death. Last night I heard the fourth
Bach suite and felt regret—sassy bourrée
with your part rumbling down below. I’ll bet
it’s swell to hobnob with the reed god at his court.

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Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble. She is the author of Vanitas (Texas Tech University Press, 2011), which won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize, and Mudman, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, ONE ART, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In 2023 she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Two Poems by Kim Addonizio

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Upstate

Nature’s a beautiful bitch.
Nightshade along the Hudson & in

an old stone house the floorboards
warp with nostalgia.

I have friends with hearts that stutter,
one going slowly blind.

Nature says Love me
or don’t, I don’t care.

Woods full of deer ticks & felled
trees from last year’s ice storm.

Poppies emblazoning a field.
Bean-sized shadow on an x-ray.

Deep red, & flowering—
Slut. Slit. Opening

& blackening the day.

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Aria Di Sorbetto

Welcome to the abattoir.
The opera is ending soon.
Get a taste of this raspberry tart
before the bad odor starts.
We’ll all get our ears pierced, then burst into tears.
I just want to take off this fucking bra
and stare drunkenly at the shining Mediterranean.
Don wants to come back as a whale, but careful
what you wish for: you might find yourself entangled
in old fishing gear, strangled by a crab trap,
dragging your enormous, exhausted heart for years
until you succumb. Sort of like the human you already are.
Missing the gelato in that little Italian village.
Ah, ah, opera! It sounds like a whale that swallowed a musical
and I loathe musicals. But that time Josh suddenly
broke into song in the Eighth Avenue subway
beside the bronze Otterness sculptures—the workers
and politicians, the alligator swallowing a businessman
whose head is a moneybag—a thin shiv of joy
slipped under my ribs and undid me, and Aya took my hand
as the train shrieked in and yes, if you ask me yes, oh yes,
I will.

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Kim Addonizio is the author of over a dozen books of prose and poetry. Her latest poetry collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton, September 2024). Her memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress, was published by Penguin. Addonizio’s work has been translated into several languages and honored with fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, and her collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Oakland, CA and teaches poetry workshops on Zoom. kimaddonizio.com

Drinking Alone at a Bed & Breakfast on the Eve Before My Wedding by Beverly Hennessy Summa

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Drinking Alone at a Bed & Breakfast
on the Eve Before My Wedding

The eve before my wedding,
and I sit alone on this canopied bed.

Tomorrow my new husband will lie here next to me.
We’ll besottedly whisper about the crudité
& crabcakes, we didn’t get to eat,

the speech that read more like a eulogy
& how his Uncle Dan drank too much again.
I pour a glass of wine—
wish for something stronger.

It was eight months ago when I found this bed & breakfast.
Historic, charming old structure, temperate, refined—
everything I’m not.

Handsomely traditional
from the delicate crocheted bedspread,
to the his & hers monogrammed robes.

It must be right I remember thinking
as I entered the foyer. I felt myself recoil
like a heretic entering a Mass.

From the closet door my silk, white wedding dress
hangs like a headless bride. The bodice stuffed
with the crumpled fronds of pale, pink, tissue paper.

The dress knows who I am, I think, but will do its best.
I refill the wine glass; raise it to a toast.

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Beverly Hennessy Summa’s poems have appeared in the New York Quarterly, Rust + Moth, Chiron Review, Book of Matches, Nerve Cowboy, Anti-Heroin Chic, Trailer Park Quarterly, Hobo Camp Review, Buddhist Poetry Review and elsewhere. Beverly grew up in New York and New Hampshire and currently lives in the Lower Hudson Valley with her family. She can be found at beverlyhennessysumma.com.

Three Poems by Gabby Gilliam

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I Don’t Usually Believe in Omens

but last night the hermit crab
you bought for Oskar

abandoned his shell to drag
his naked body into the sand.

Indecision and inaction fill
the silence of this shrinking house

my steady pulse whooshing
like a trapped ocean in my ear.

I wonder if pet hermit crabs still hear
waves echo in their store-bought shells

or if that gentle rush is absent––maybe
that’s why ours was never content

constantly swapping shells until the night
it chose to expose itself––the night before

the police called to tell us you too
had cast off your outer husk

––let your energy and stardust
escape into the open air.

We Googled what to do with a shell-less crab
and it said to wait. They may burrow and molt

or slowly rot like ours did before we buried it
beneath the tree in our backyard.

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Nothing Wasted

My grandmother would eat
the ugliest fruit first. “They grow
from the same roots,” she’d say
and she’d shake them
from the same branches.

She’d set the normal fruit
aside for me and my sisters
apples, peaches, apricots, plums.
She collected their mangled brethren

hidden explosions of flavor
more delectable to her because
they should have been undesirable
sweet flesh and juice buried
beneath their malformed skins.

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It Doesn’t Go Down Easy

Truth settles into my jaw like stone
and my teeth grind it into pieces
almost small enough to swallow

which causes my eyes to water
when I force each bite down
like the gel capsules I had to take

for asthma flare-ups, but choked on
and spit onto the kitchen floor
so my parents filled a spoon with water

and emptied the pill contents––
tiny white balls that would trick
my body into breathing again––

that left me with a bitter tongue
and lungs still gasping for air.

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Gabby Gilliam is a writer, an aspiring teacher, and a mom. She lives in the DC metro area with her husband and son. She is a founding member of the Old Scratch Short Form Collective. Her first chapbook, No Ocean Spit Me Out, was released in June 2024 from Old Scratch Press. Her poetry and fiction has appeared online and in multiple anthologies. You can find her online at gabbygilliam.com.

Circumference by Kip Knott

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Circumference

Night consists of circles
that together add up to nothing
but the absence of sunlight.

The circle that holds the most
nothingness is called a new moon;
circles that hold the least are called stars.

I used to take night for granted,
like air, and didn’t notice
all the absences. As I’ve grown older,

I’ve learned to accept those absences
like ghost limbs that need scratching.
I’ve learned to begin each day

with three blinks of my eyes to clear
the nightmares that circle my mind
and one deep breath to remember the air.

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Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His writing has recently appeared in Best Microfiction 2024 and The Wigleaf Top 50. His most recent book of poetry, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.

Two Poems by Charles K. Carter

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The Impact of Gravity

Rumor has it that in the 1950s,
two couples stopped here after prom
to have a couple of drinks.
They passed the brown-bagged bottle
and they danced to the staticy car radio,
blasting race music from the city across the Ohio
– that music the school board made sure
wasn’t allowed to be played at school dances.
A truck going too fast down the hill didn’t have time to stop
and struck all four teenagers dead in their dancing shoes.


As teenagers, we drove out to Hatch Road,
took a left turn, left turn, right,
and then six miles down the curvy gravel
we stopped at the unnamed narrow bridge.

If you put the car in neutral, B said,
the ghosts of those kids
will push the car up the hill
and off to the side of the road,
saving you from the possibility of
reliving their tragedy.

Bullshit, I said, always the naysayer,
always the Dana Scully in our group.

B dropped the car in neutral,
lifted his hands in the air
as if he were submitting to a man with a gun.

Your feet, I pointed.

He brought his feet up
and rested them on top of the dash.

After a few tense moments,
the car slowly crept backwards,
up the hill
and off to the side of the road,
where it came to a stop.

We tested it out with the car facing up the hill – same results.
I got behind the wheel – same results.
M said she came out once by herself.
We all came back a week later.
A month later.
Three years later – same results.


And I admit defeat in the limits of my own mind.
I don’t know how a car could defy the weight of gravity to climb up a hill.

I guess there are forces out there I just don’t understand
and they aren’t all malevolent.
There are gentle hands to guide us.
There is unnamed goodness in this world.

And I want those gentle hands to guide me now
because my own hands are unreliable.
They are calloused and rough
and always reaching for the sharp edge of oblivion.

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The Gift

He could sing from within the womb.
No joke. His mother would tilt her head back
and open her mouth like the horn of an old phonograph
and an angelic voice would ring out from deep within.
They say when he was born, he entered the light of our world
with a fortissimo Hallelujah!

A singing baby turned into a singing toddler
and his talents afforded his family fortune and attention
but this was merely his fifteen minutes of fame.
As his frame grew taller and lankier,
the novelty of his appeal faded and they all worried
about what would happen when puberty reared its ugly head his way.
But his voice was not shredded by adolescence,
it quickly evolved into a tender tenor, then a boisterous baritone,
an angel still locked away somewhere in the cage of his voice box.

In time, he became overwhelmed by the attention
so he moved to the big city to blend in
but his neighbors, who didn’t even know his name, kept their windows open
all day and all night, through all seasons, even in the dead of winter,
just to hear his song.

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Charles K. Carter is a queer poet who lives in Oregon. They are the author of If the World Were a Quilt (Kelsay Books) and Read My Lips (David Robert Books). Carter is the creator of the video podcast series #SundaySweetChats. He can be found on Instagram and Twitter @CKCpoetry.

Two Poems by Tom Snarsky

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Fast Talk

I heard
a beautiful bird
while I was loading
the trash into
the back of the truck

as I turned
to find the bird
whose song sounded
like nothing I
had ever heard

I realized
it was my
zipper against
the metal
of the wheel well

oh well
will you sing it again

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Death, or the Chromaticism of Elliott Smith

There’s always the Bitter Tears
of Petra von Kant problem: we want them
to think of us, more than anything

else, but if they do—if they add even a layer
of aragonite to the sandgrain idea
they might care back,

it’s bags packed & off
wordless into the night. An adjudicator
moon stays for a few

daylight hours, just to hear
both sides. You can’t hide
a horse in a closet, the mother

of a little girl quotes her on TikTok
as saying. This is the reason
she gives for why her horse cannot be

the school pet, in the event her class
actually needs to use that
locked-away bucket, their hands

full of things to throw: I wouldn’t be able to
protect him. I don’t want him
to die. Why

lie to a child
when the truth is right there,
all its collisions

& day-drinking insurance
assessors, pretending they remember
what to do. In “Alameda” Elliott sings

Shuffling your deck of trick cards
Over everyone,
Over, like the verb was Lord

or Hang rather than Shuffle—
a random act
you can lie about, like anything.
*

Tom Snarsky is the author of the chapbooks Threshold (Another New Calligraphy) & Complete Sentences (Broken Sleep Books), as well as the full-length collections Light-Up Swan & Reclaimed Water (both from Ornithopter Press). His book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in 2025, and the title poem is available to read on Metatron Press’s GLYPHÖRIA platform. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats. You can find him on Twitter, Instagram, & Bluesky @tomsnarsky.

Glosa #3 by Peggy Liuzzi

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Glosa #3

          Mother, be with me.
          Today on your birthday
          I am older than you were
          When you died

                    by May Sarton, “August Third”

Today I made a plea – Mother, be with me,
not like you used to be, but transformed
into the mother I needed and wanted,
a mother who loved me whole-hearted.

Today on your birthday I remember
how disappointment haunted you,
how the things you wanted slipped
away and left you counting losses.

I am older now than you will
ever be. I’ve had time to heal
the bruises that came with loving
a mother worn thin by sadness.

When you died, I couldn’t grieve
you, couldn’t embrace your brokenness.
I wrapped and stored my memories,
delicate as bone china cups, until

I opened them today
on your birthday.

*

Peggy Liuzzi lives in Syracuse, NY where she walks her beagle Maizie, practices Tai Chi and finds community and support at the YMCA Downtown Writers Center. Peggy’s poems have appeared in Stone Canoe, Nine Mile Magazine, Slippery Elm Literary Journal, Gyroscope Review and other publications.

I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?” by Karen Paul Holmes

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I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?”

He answers I am dying.
I can’t imagine typing I am dying,
like stating I’m finishing War and Peace.

Calendars full of treatments, ending.
Two surgeries nearly taking him.
He told me last year he had three years left—
maybe—but was fighting to see
his last child graduate.

Today, he says his last reading next month—
in a state where he used to live—
is a chance to say goodbye.
He lists all he’s grateful for. A big list,
and it comforts me. I’m a faraway friend,
and this dying man is comforting me.
I want to ask Has knowing been better
than not knowing?

It seems unbearably real to say
I am dying. To be on the other side of hope,
no longer seeing past the earth’s edge.
Do we all have that kind of brave in us?

Or is there still hope, but of a different kind?
A hope for the light at a shaded path’s end—
like those near-death have seen.
A glimpse of that shining.
That beautiful beaconing.

*

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her two books are: No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot. Poetry credits include The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, and Plume.

Practice by Aubrey Brady

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Practice

I practice grief every day

as if
pulling all these possibilities
lifting layers of loss
shuffling through frantically
scribbled sheaves

as if I can stop whatever tragedy I can predict

because
while I slipped my feet into
sands warmth flooding
my being with gold
listening to largeness
of water
coming and going
I also let slip
the memory of grandaddy’s
fading health
how he was slowly
disappearing into cold
blue beds and white walls
how
when i turned
he was gone

and because
when I am pulling belts
around fragile bodies
propelling us towards distances
I know
that if I can prepare myself
for a car’s swerve
the rush of metal that can slice
through bone
and all that’s dear
it will not
or has not

and because
each joy
turns eventually
tragedy launching itself
into every tender moment
spinning soft wool
into spikes

because
the body always betrays
either through its plush fragility
or brain bleeds
or heart’s assault
or cells turned rogue
or if lucky
entropy,

and so I practice
each note
each line
and prepare
so busy hoarding preserves
I miss how the light holds
the peach fuzz curve
of shoulder blade
how laughter
breathless and unrelenting
feels the same as sorrow.

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Aubrey Brady studied music at Covenant College and is working on her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry at Lindenwood University. Her work has appeared in Solum Press, Book of Matches, Ekstasis, Moria, and Barbar. She lives in Montana with her husband, Matthew, and their two children.

BURNISHED by Tim Suermondt

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BURNISHED

         for Eddie

The art house is playing a documentary
on the war in Vietnam—as if I needed
to be reminded. I’ll let the ghosts
have peace today. I walk across the park,
the entire grounds and the people
burnished by the sunlight. I even decide
to stroll along the river, and I admit it—
thinking of the waterlilies in the Mekong.

*

Tim Suermondt’s sixth full-length book of poems A Doughnut And The Great Beauty Of The World came out in 2023 from MadHat Press. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Smartish Pace, Barrow Street, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Thich Nhat Hanh Instructs by Ken Craft

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Thich Nhat Hanh Instructs

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s books,
words fall like soft-petaled koans
against the dense earth of my brain:
“There is no birth; there is no death.”

Put through an on-line English-to-Buddhist
translator, this means,
“There is no past; there is no future,”
leaving me where the Buddha wants me:

in the moment, trying to fathom no-fear
of no-death because it lurks in the no-future.
Newly-minted fugitive from doom, I am
free to learn terms in Hanh’s books (but not

my Western Webster’s) like “non-self”
and “interbeing,” which connect disparate
elements so neatly I want to slow-pour their
syllables over that stubborn sense of me.

“There cannot be a sheet of paper without
clouds, forest, and rain,” Hanh offers
by way of example; I realize this poem
cannot be without the clouds, forest,

and rain I write it on, the interbeing
of unseen readers, the forecast every poem
clings to in the brevity between now
and the nothingness that consumes it.

*

Ken Craft’s poetry has appeared in The Writer’s Almanac, The Pedestal, Spillway, and numerous other journals and e-zines. His poem “The Pause Between” will appear in the Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses 2025 Edition. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Reincarnation & Other Stimulants (2021).

The Leafhopper by Robbi Nester

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Leafhopper

In my city neighborhood, most things are the color
of concrete, or the dull tar black of the street,
red brick rowhomes, strictly functional. No trees
grew on our block—too messy, my mother said,
too much trouble to maintain. But she allowed
my father, with his farmer’s hands, a tiny patch
of lawn where he could plant, and I could study
whatever lived there, cabbage whites or skippers,
ants and sowbugs, bees, nightcrawlers like thin
lengths of copper wire, and the occasional leafhopper,
a bit of the tropics, with its aqua and red body,
angular as a sail, yellow legs and belly, face like
an African mask. It perched on a rose leaf,
anomalous as a bird of paradise. Then I collected
him—I was sure it was a he, bright as a male bird—
dropped him with some leaves into an empty
Hellman’s jar with a punctured lid, and set off
to the library. I discovered that his colors were
a warning. He was a parasite sucking the sap
out of the garden’s plants, spreading disease.
He even did it to the trees on other blocks.
It was the first time, but not the last I learned
to question beauty, to ask why something so
distinctive took this form, and to distrust it,
so that, drawn by the rose, I may not grasp the thorn.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry and editor of three anthologies. She is a retired college educator and elected member of the Academy of American Poets. Her website is at RobbiNester.net

A Voice I Heard Not Too Late to Make a Difference by Martin Willitts Jr

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A Voice I Heard Not Too Late to Make a Difference

A voice flies out of an unseen place
holding a glassful of promises and memories,
in the way many people can see
from many different viewpoints.
We do not need to be disconnected from this world,
even when we are sad.
This doesn’t have to be a dark, dark world.
I practice being small and quiet,
walking into our world with new eyes,
to feel belonging. I belong
to the now, where imagination opens
the strangeness of a wing
belonging to a hatchling
trying to feel secure enough to launch into air,
to trust success. Is this so very hard?
I want to face what is hard in this world.
I recall when oranges arrived in a wooden crate,
smelling citrus, how it belonged to a place
of orchards that I never saw as a child but could imagine.
I live in this world of startled energies, its aliveness,
until it appears too quickly, like a hornet’s nest
or the impossible deer shadows
running after the doe has been killed.
A heron stands at water’s edge, unmoving,
its reflection wavering on water.
I vanish without knowing it, after dreaming too long.
I keep translating this into sign language
so that each word takes more time for someone
to understand each image and finger spelling of action words,
so that someone has to slow down too.
Slowing down becomes important. Noticing takes focus,
and before anyone realizes it, a thin spike of light
comes begging at our window,
with its stunning intense stare, like forsythia blooming,
trembling before rain or when you pass by
bringing your dreams, and your questioning mind.
This is when I began hearing voices.
But, perhaps, you hear something different
and it takes you out of the ordinary,
makes you turn a different direction,
taking you to a place sacred only to you.
There’s room for many possible voices to hear.

*

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).

Two Poems by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Ode to the Modified Serenity Prayer

      “Grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change,
      the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it’s me.”

Your daughter camps near the methadone
clinic in a sea of bench and canal sleepers.

She’s lost another phone or charger or backpack,
wears a ball cap over her sunburnt face.

You could tell her to go back to the hospital
or sober living or Soul Surgery Treatment Center

or the 90-day rehab she left after four days.
You could drive her to Walmart, the Dollar Store,

buy her a phone charger, more clothes, shoes,
instant coffee, oatmeal, peanut butter, candy,

wring your hands, feel sick to your stomach
as she smiles, climbs out of your car, saying, “Yes,

I’d rather live on the street.” You could pretend
she’s gone to Woodstock, that it’s 1969, that addicts

are just kids passing through a phase where they drop
acid, wear tie-dye, dance in the rain to Canned Heat.

Or you could repeat the modified serenity prayer
            over and over and over and over,

then drive home, park your car, kiss your own
goddamn good life just as four geese fly over
your flowered front yard and honk.

*

Driving to pick up my daughter while wearing a purple T-shirt graphic-ed with Edvard Munch’s The Scream

      ~ “Do whatever you can do to support her healthy choices, not enable.” ~
            — my grief therapist

Head down, hands on the wheel,
breathe in the screeching bus, the careening
light rail, the two lanes of traffic closed
by a row of orange cones.

Breathe in 19th Ave. – a street
to avoid when you can.
Overflowing trash cans,
people lost or stumbling
or sleeping on a bench under a tarp.

Breathe. Breathe. Look up

at the unexpected flash of palm trees,
maybe 30 of them. Tall thin bristle-up
paint brushes that have caught the end-
of-the-day sun and they glow

like taper candles or hope:
this oasis of thrive rising above
billboards, asphalt, sirens,
rooftops and all the gas pumps at the Circle K.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Rattle, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. Susan is the author of Blame It on the Serpent (Finishing Line Press), Cactus as Bad Boy (Kelsay Books), and One of Them Was Mine (Kelsay Books). Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet

Postcard from the Knife-Thrower — May 29 — Bellingham, WA by Alex Stolis

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Postcard from the Knife-Thrower
May 29 – Bellingham, WA

I don’t know what’s happening, I’m losing
myself, maybe I’m already gone. Life and
memory are fragile, I’ve been gutted more

than a few times; I don’t want to forget then
stop loving the dead. I’m being taken apart
incrementally, smaller yet so much heavier;

like rivets popping off a tinman. Navigating
my own extinction, there’s no cross to bear,
no saints to string rosaries, nothing in the stars

to solve. I write letters, post them with no return
address, send them adrift, hope they hit a distant
shore. Every sleep is a death, a small yielding

to pain. I’ve become used to gaps and distances,
didn’t realize I’d lost parts of myself until pieces
of me were strewn about being pecked by crows.

The air reeks of kerosene, I’ve got a brand new
set of steel. Take a deep breath, sister. I’m ready
to strike the match.

*

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal, One Art Poetry, Black Moon Magazine, and Star 82 Review. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife is forthcoming from Louisiana Literature Press in 2024. He has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize.

Daffodils in February by Vivienne Popperl

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Daffodils in February

Some February days,
breathing in Portland
is like inhaling
champagne bubbles.
The sky is a sheer
innocent blue,
crocuses purple
in the sun, daffodils
coaxed golden,
play the wind.

February in Cleveland
the soil is still so cold.
New life is pressed
deep underground.
The sky spreads so thin,
a fragile skin,
stretched between
indifferent clouds.

My mother breathed
her last breath
in Cleveland
in February.
I was not at her side.
I sent daffodils.

*

Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Cirque, Rain Magazine, About Place Journal, and other publications. She was poetry co-editor for the Fall 2017 edition of VoiceCatcher. She received both second place and an honorable mention in the 2021 Kay Snow awards poetry category by Willamette Writers and second place in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Spring 2022 contest “Members Only” category. Her first collection, A Nest in the Heart, was published by The Poetry Box in April, 2022.

Two Poems by Anna M. Evans

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Piper Goes Blind Aged Eight

The new reality—our dog is blind—
has struck us like a rock thrown at a pane
of glass. We once saw clearly. Now we find
ourselves in darkness. We have got to train
her, fix the layout, keep things off the floor,
teach her words like left, right, up and down.
We miss the carefree pup she was before,
her countenance more bright-eyed smile than frown.
And yet, the vets have said that we will know
a different closeness with our little girl.
Her new reliance on us makes her curl
up closer, look much sadder when we go.
We’re patient with her, accept her need to fuss.
Our love is steadfast as her trust in us.

* 

Orion Blesses My Blind Dog

Now that my dog is blind, she often rises
unsteadily from the bed at four a.m.
and wanders, groggily crashing into things,
searching for an exit from the dark.

My job is to surface from my dream,
get up quickly, hustle into clothes,
and lead her, with my voice and finger snaps
down the stairs and out the kitchen door.

The night, then, is vast and otherworldly,
our footfalls crunching through the new-formed frost.
She scampers around, gratefully harvesting smells
as Orion looks on, clear and benevolent.

Afterward, she settles back in bed,
her little body warm against my own,
and I lie there, half-awake in the shadows,
dazzled by a love as pure as stars.

*

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, she currently teaches poetry at West Windsor Art Center and English at Rowan College at Burlington County. Her books include her latest chapbooks, The Quarantina Chronicles (Barefoot Muse Press, 2020) and The Unacknowledged Legislator (Empty Chair Press, 2019), along with Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic (Able Muse Press, 2018), and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans (White Violet Press, 2014). Her new collection, States of Grace, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in the fall of 2024. She is the Board President of the Poetry by the Sea Conference, an annual 4-day conference which takes place in Madison, CT, and the editor of the online poetry journal for women formalists, Mezzo Cammin.

The Prodigal Son Departs by Patricia Nelson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Prodigal Son Departs

It isn’t right, that look
that tries to hold me here.

My father: loud behind his eyes,
that tall-eyed stare

in which a duty overlaps a man
and both brighten.

My footsoles move along the ground,
a sound as quiet as a thumb on cloth.

I stand, as if on small rocks,
on the brim of what I see from here.

I edge toward some greener place
that holds the noise of who I am.

The leaf sound of a forest
that can’t stop itself from moving.

*

Patricia Nelson is a retired attorney who is writing poetry with the “Activist” group of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her new book, Monster Monologues, is due out from Fernwood Press in December 2024.

A Tuesday in My Twenties by Melinda Clemmons

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

A Tuesday in My Twenties

I asked the robin nesting
in the bottlebrush tree
if love would find me more easily
if I wore the red scarf.

In that era of wanting,
I’d pluck the morning’s loneliness
like stones from my pockets
to set along the windowsill.

My mother used to arrange shards
of pottery like that to catch the light.
Make your own luck, she would say,
yet the clouds kept shifting.

On a different day, without the scarf,
I tumbled into love at the Elbo Room,
his dark leather jacket cool beneath
my palms on the dance floor.

That was the beginning
of everything—the luck
we made and all the rest
we could do nothing about.

*

Melinda Clemmons’ first full-length manuscript was a finalist for the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and a semi-finalist for both the Word Works Washington Prize and the Red Mountain Press Discovery Award. Her poems and stories have appeared in Rust + Moth, Cimarron Review, the Midwest Review, West Trestle Review, Shrew, 300 Days of Sun, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California.

Two Poems by Sara Clancy

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Instead of Xanax

I want this age to be over and gone,
down bridle paths where ponies

wander with riders on foot
and reins dragging. I want peaches

put by, remedies renewed, a dog
in the car and enough sugar to cover

the bills. I want an hour of sleep
in a hammock under appaloosa light.

I want reason, apples and a book
playing all night long. I want decency,

mercy and the kidnapped returned.
Mercy. Mercy in the breath between

the righteous scream, the anthem
and the rebar scraped sky.

*

Last Night I Googled Your Name

It’s been ten years since we spoke,
me holding the phone two feet from
my ear, you scooping every imagined
slight from the cat box of your
childhood temper. If you were dead
or in jail, I would have heard, so it wasn’t
that. It wasn’t the pull of genetics, either,
as we’ve had a decade to prune the twisted
boughs off our family tree. Last night
I found a photo of us when we were
kids. You were laughing and goofy
with your eyes crossed, brandishing
a wooden spoon. I thought I was
in on the joke but had no idea
what was simmering.
I guess that’s why.

*

Sara Clancy a Philadelphia transplant to the Desert Southwest. Her chapbook Ghost Logic won the 2017 Turtle Island Quarterly Editors Choice Award. Among other places, her poems have appeared in Off the Coast, The Linnet’s Wings, Crab Creek Review, The Madison Review, and Verse Wisconsin. She lives in Arizona with her husband, their dog, two normal cats and a psychotic cross-eyed one.

Treasure by T. R. Poulson

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Treasure

Tractor tire tracks like unbroken arrows
flanked the dull drag mark in parallel
lines along the lane we’d named Lake Road.

My favorite cow, dead. My grandma, dead
vaulted in a neat rectangle. At the service
I’d asked where the dirt for her came from.

I followed the arrow tracks—my first
time riding my yellow bike to the bleached
bones scattered in a gully like story drafts.

Twoee was flesh, dark among the stray
alfalfa plants and thistles that purpled
her resting place. Dandelions like toy suns.

She lay on her side, hips angled as though
still in pain, her tail’s black and white
tassel curved and tangled in bright briars.

Her head heavied one eye to dust. Her other
eye socket gaped upward, black. Her ear
with tag 32 pointed to the sky. Bugs glinted.

I twisted the tag from her, took it home
and paper toweled it clean. Kept it inside
my jewelry box with Grandma’s gold locket.

Everyday after school I held a warm bottle
for Twoee’s orphan heifer. Listened. Buried
my face in her fur to feel her life.

Why was life not enough? I returned to watch
the wreck of flesh. Beyond her, whitecaps
slapped dirt cliffs and ravaged everything.

*

T. R. Poulson, a University of Nevada alum, currently lives in San Mateo, California. Her work has appeared in various publications including Best New Poets, Booth, and Gulf Coast. She is seeking a publisher for her first poetry collection, tentatively titled At Starvation Falls. Find her at trpoulson.com.

Wood Glance by Sally Nacker

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Wood Glance

Clouds thin and part a little—
suddenly, a flash of sun
rinses the darkened wood
like thrush song or a rush
of memory from long ago
and all the new spring green
flourishing things quiver
with the light of a glance.

*

Sally Nacker lives in a small house in the woods of Redding, CT with her husband and two cats. Recent publishing credits include Canary, The Orchard’s Poetry Journal, ONE ART, Third Wednesday, and The Sunlight Press. Kindness in Winter is her newest collection.

Election Year by Nancy Sobanik

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Election Year

This is a year with no escape
hatch, by July Quackgrass
and Sowthistle hem roadsides,

knee-high weeds root in flinty gravel,
then the flail mower rumbles closer.
Since morning I’ve heard

its approaching drone, ominous
as an enormous hive on high alert,
the sound of swarm fills my ears.

I once thought winter would not pass,
now I wonder if this ludicrous,
over-the-top debacle will ever end?

Summer brings it on, carnival huckster
stoked by a massive infusion of green.
The blizzard comes in autumn this year.

Flail drum blades arrive to shear
thin-skinned saplings into headless pikes,
shave Sweetfern and Yarrow to late-day stubble.

Cut Japanese Knotweed and it returns
with a vengeance, tenacious as black flies
drawn to exhalation for their blood meal.

An ugly business, all this destruction
caused by a flail mower, but without it
roads narrow, and line of sight is gone.

A car needs a shoulder to cry on
when it goes wild, to justify all this ruin,
all this compost spat out and left moldering.

*

Nancy Sobanik is a poet whose work can be found upcoming in Frost Meadow Review, Vol. 12, Triggerfish Critical Review; Sparks of Calliope- Best of The Net Nominee 2023 and Pushcart Nomination 2024; Verse-Virtual; Sheila-Na-Gig; The Ekphrastic Review and ONE ART. She was awarded second place in the Maine Postmark Poetry Festival Contest 2023.

Two Poems by Elizabeth Marie Young

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Pow! Poof! Whiz!

The moon smells like firecrackers.

Have you been paying attention?

You can either wish it away or inject
yourself with saline solution.

Either way, oh well.

Either way, oh boy.

We know three things for sure
and you’re not one of them.

So what, you have no predators.

Your cell phone conversations belong
to someone else.

If these stones could talk, they’d probably
say nothing.

Either that or they’d say thump and deliver
us from evil.

Well then, what are you worried about?

The moon tastes like Reddi-Wip.

Whenever the moon goes plop you gear up
for a legal battle because you lack imagination.

Because you’re maybe just some kind of sissy.

Whenever you open your mouth the darkness
within stumbles out in an unbuttoned shirt
in search of a vodka martini.

*

Awe and Wonder

I wish I were a constellation that could
coalesce into a rhinestone heart.

I wish the flawed experiments funded
by our government would reveal some
sacred truth.

I’m concerned about the boom in DNA analysis.

I worry about the nature of time.

Sometimes I wonder about dirt.

Must I inject myself with the blood of human
teenagers to be astonishing?

Must I have a pig’s heart beating in my chest?

I want to conquer death, like the mega rich,
then I’d be worthy of your love.

Your smartphone’s now connected
to my Bluetooth speaker.

You are my everything.

Galaxies, galaxies everywhere.

I wish I could stop thinking about Neanderthals
touching each other.

I wish you were touching me.

At least the bot thinks I am cute.

The bot thinks I’ll live forever.

The bot’s holding its breath.

*

Elizabeth Marie Young is a Boston-based poet and educator. She spent a decade as a professor of ancient Greek and Roman languages and literature and has published widely on the poetry and culture of ancient Rome. Her first book of poems, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, won the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books. She is also the author of Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome, a book about the ancient Roman understanding of lyric translation and literary creativity. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center and the Squire Foundation. Her poems have recently appeared in journals including The Chicago Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and Sugar House Review.

The Flyer by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

The Flyer

I want to be as brave as the 14-year-old cheerleader,
a flyer they call her. How she rubber-bands her body
taut in a split second, trained to be tossed up into
the stadium’s stratosphere. How in mid-air, she strikes
her lightning-quick arabesque and then softens
her adolescent sinew to fall into her partner’s cradle.
Always landing feet-first on a faded rubberized track
to cushion the impact that’s bound to ricochet up
through her young knees. I want to shake off pain
like a pompon, let the sun irradiate my fears and turn
them into glittery-gold streamers to cheer me on. I can
almost hear the fans chanting from the stands—
Yes, you are enough…You got this…You can!

*

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poems have appeared worldwide in literary journals including Calyx, Eunoia Review, Blue Heron Review, Tule Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, About Place Journal, and Snapdragon, to name a few. Author of What She Was Wearing, she’s co-founder of The Poetry Box press and managing editor of The Poeming Pigeon. Shawn is a proud mother of three amazing humans and Nana to one darling baby girl. She shares the creative life with her husband in Portland, Oregon.

Figs by Marc Alan Di Martino

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Figs

By mid-July, the figs are purple-green
and yearn for you to twist their delicate necks,
pluck their swollen sweetness off the branch.
Feel for the softest, highest fruit, concealed
behind a cluster of verdant teardrops.
You could lose yourself in a place like this—
a palace of sugar, a motherly embrace
of tender giving tendrils, mouth bloodied
and silent. You could forget yourself here.

*

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 Gyroscope Review, Welter, 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.

Two Poems by Erinola E. Daranijo

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gone boy

How the word stands like an inverted igi,
a refusal to obey the laws that birthed it.
Or is it a proper igi with its top
chopped off? All my life I’ve wondered
if my brain’s inverted, improper, asterisked
with defects. Be honest bro, you straight ọkọ
or bent òpò? Bent like a branch or straight
like a trunk? Like a man? You like men?
Mama said don’t stand slanted òwò like a girl.
Òwò like kí. Not proper. A man’s spine
should be trunk-strong. Once, after a fight,
she sat me down with a cup of tea.
Tell me you’re not like those defective men.
I looked her straight in the eye and lied.

Glossary:
igi: tree
ọkọ: straight
òpò: bent
òwò: crooked
kí: crooked

*

going through my notes app, i am reminded of all the boys i once loved

My màmá wouldn’t let me go to the village square
when I was younger, so I jet off with my babe
on his okada to a Fela Kuti song. It’s in our cosmology
to chase the tails of goats over the hills.
The sky stretches, map of strange stars.
I list the star signs of my exes, none of them
from my village. We cheers our palm wine.
Almost all sacred things are blue. Baby blue,
Baby blue. You joke that you’ll never date a city boy,
eh, you sing a love song to natural hair and midnight
eyes. The compass needle stays glued to the moon.
I catch your eyes in every mirror.
There was once a prehistoric river all around us,
even crocodiles. We puff out
the great swimming shapes
of their bodies.
This layer of rock, ancient fossils.
This layer, some ancient eel. How small we are,
how funny. Massive fish-ghosts
vibrate to Fela Kuti. Time is read backwards
in the rock-body: oldest to the top, magma pushing
what’s fresh to the surface. Your hand
skims the deep blue
sandstone, these long-cooled shells.
Tear drop, turquoise sliver of horizon, the creeping river
invisible in the dark. Here’s to you,
here’s to you, ancient and alive.
The sky stretches, full of old and older ghosts,
our once and forever wading pool.

*

Erinola E. Daranijo (he/him) is a Nigerian writer. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Akéwì Magazine, and the author of the micro-chapbooks, ‘An Epiphany of Roses’ (Konya Shamsrumi Press, 2024) and ‘Every Path Leads to the Sea’ (Ghost City Press, 2024). He splits his time between the ‘cities’ of Ibadan, Lagos, and Cape Town. Say hi on X (formerly Twitter) at @Layworks.