Month: October 2024

Two Poems by Vincent Casaregola

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Night at the Convenience Store

It’s not like there’s something wrong,
not like you’d think—no inner demon
willing me to kill or be killed, inspiring
some direct-to-video tragedy—

what I hear is softer, a whisper
of secrets and the sound of shadows
sliding slowly over hollow space,
someone else’s ghosts, not mine.

Some people broadcast themselves,
and I, despite myself, receive
an endless chain of repetitious fears,
the plainsong of pathetic histories.

At home, at night, the soft sounds
of furnaced air surrounding me,
I’d still find no peace, deafened almost
by the family’s atonal dreams.

So now I work the graveyard shift at the
convenience store, as ghosts come and go,
some in awkward bodies, some in minds,
and a few, just a few, carried on the wind.

*

In the Sunlight

Black letters, “Do Not Cross,”
on shiny yellow tape, rising and
falling on the afternoon breeze,
rustling, surrounding the site

Bright yellow, with black numbers,
the bent plastic markers, just like
what restaurants use to tag the order,
scattered randomly on black asphalt

Brass casings, cast like seed
on hard ground, some still smooth,
some dented, but each one shining
in the hot, late-summer sun.

*

Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing, and rhetorical studies at Saint Louis University. He has published poetry in a number of journals, including 2River, The Bellevue Literary Review, Blood and Thunder, The Closed Eye Open, Dappled Things, The Examined Life, La Piccioletta Barca, Lifelines, Natural Bridge, Please See Me, WLA, Work, and The Write Launch. He has also published creative nonfiction in New Letters and The North American Review. He has recently completed a book-length manuscript of poetry dealing with issues of medicine, illness, and loss (Vital Signs) that has been accepted by Finishing Line Press.

EASTHAM by Royal Rhodes

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EASTHAM

Here on the outer Cape
near the last windmill
are scrub pine and sand bars
near tide pools we walked
in ankle-deep warm water,
and found horseshoe crabs,
moon snails, razor clams,
and tangled knots of seaweed.
This is the flung-out arm
of the bay that beckoned
the hungry pilgrims and Nauset
in their first encounter,
where both, surprised,
ran off, over round stones
rubbed smooth by tides.
The gray heavens or clouded
blue air fills with low
flotillas of observant gulls,
as if visiting ghosts
from some invisible realm.
Here understanding grows
and stuttering love
outlasts the soon altered.
In each summer season
mourning doves croon
love from the few trees
with hours wearing away
where we have sat still,
here with the world’s weight
as night comes too soon.

*

Royal Rhodes is a poet who lives in retirement in rural Ohio. His poems have appeared in: ONE ART, Last Stanza, Amethyst, Ekphrastic Review, The Montreal Review, and others. His poem, “Solstice”, was issued as a poetry and art collaboration broadsheet by The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.

The Naked Truth by Robert Nordstrom

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The Naked Truth

I stand naked inside the closet
where my costumes hang,

each more authentic than the others
when buttoned and zipped

into today. But here, before the mirror,
the naked body sags into tomorrow,

offering pause and gratitude
dressed in breath

before the light switch clicks
and the door blows shut.

*

Robert Nordstrom has published poetry in numerous regional and national publications, including upstreet, Main Street Rag, The Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, Chiron Review, Third Wednesday, ONE ART and various others. Several poems have garnered awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Oregon Poetry Association. His poem “Old Lovers” won the 2014 Hal Prize, and his 2016 poetry collection, The Sacred Monotony of Breath, received honorable mention from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. His latest collection, Dust on the Sill was published in 2023.

Two Poems by Jenna Wysong Filbrun

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Illness

When a windstorm
blasts in from the north
with a sudden
and desperate rage,
even the cottonwoods bow
to the white sheets of rain.

Behind the single
silver-green leaf
plastered to the glass
of the patio door, you can see
the awful flailing
of the trees flying apart
like someone drowning.

When all you can do
is keep your heart
close to the hurt,
you keep it close.

*

Like It Was

Yesterday, a finch
flutter-flapped from the barn
like the sound of a horse
clearing its nose.
I could smell the sweet
sweat smell of the horse
coming around the corner.
Hear ripe grass ripping
into crunch and chew,
snort and stomp,
swish swish toss of tail.
Sometimes the old life
passes over this way, smooth
and warm like a neck,
like a velvet nose
lipping my hair.

*

Jenna Wysong Filbrun is the author of the poetry collection, Away (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in publications such as The Dewdrop, Gyroscope Review, Wild Roof Journal, and others. Find her on Instagram @jwfilbrun.

The Day Chandler Died by Eithne Longstaff

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The Day Chandler Died
after Frank O’Hara

I drink a cocktail with an orange
slice moon on the roof terrace
of our hotel and watch the street
sellers in Piazza della Rotonda throw
blue lights high and one lands
on the dome opposite and pulses
in the gutter      going       going       gone

then the American lady in pyjamas
comes up for her 8pm roll-up
and we take the elevator down
and outside dolphins gush
and Maggie nearly gets
knocked down by a Piaggio –
she is on her phone –
and she says Matthew Perry

is dead and I think
could that be any more sad
then we walk to Ivo for pizza
and watch the one where
he meets Jill Goodacre
in a vestibule and I text
the boys don’t swim on your own
after dark and I cry a little

because the funny guy
shouldn’t stage exit first
and on the way back Maggie
does a cartwheel in the Pantheon
portico and I imagine soft
rain falling like glitter on its marble
floor and how even in the dark
it would look like there is a light on inside

*

Eithne Longstaff is originally from the North of Ireland and now lives in England. She is studying for an MA in Creative Writing and her poems have been published in Dreich and online in Rattle and The Ekphrastic Review.

Preservationist by Edie Meade

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Preservationist [American sonnet in American sentences]
for WD
what do you call a man, old, unmarried and outliving his children?
do you call him, do you let him send your children his old belongings?
I know he doesn’t want anyone to feel sorry for him, it’s just
he lives alone there, no heirs, with a library of biology
guides to spiders, venomous snakes of Tennessee, wildlife of the south
every week they arrive mummified in packing tape and grocery bags
estate sale preemption, keepsakes widowed into the arms of strangers
he sends each book wrapped more tightly than the last, handwriting unraveled
to index card, thumbprint smudge notarized, legacy the task at hand
let the kids lay into it, their excitement breaking safety scissors
this is the natural order of things, this is the future, this is it
I saw him on the news, nearly eighty, snatching a timber rattler
shirtless in the woods, all tendons and lightning and ferocious smile
he said, preserving a habitat means caring for the hard to love
*
Edie Meade is a writer in Petersburg, Virginia. Recently published in Room Magazine, Invisible City, The Harvard Advocate, JMWW, The Normal School, and Litro.
Twitter: @ediemeade
Instagram and Threads: @edie_thee_meade
Website: https://ediemeade.com/

Phone Call from a Brown Son by Vicki Boyd

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Phone Call from a Brown Son

My son calls driving home from work
in the dark, with one headlight,
he mentions too casually.
My heart the beating wings of a trapped thing,
I manage the smallest sips of air.

In the dark he casually mentions one headlight,
and I am a deer standing in my kitchen
choking in a trickle of air.
When do you think you might get that fixed?
I try for nonchalance.

I am a deer standing in my kitchen, suffocating
in the floodlamp of a single imagined headlight.
It’s OK. They can’t stop you for that, he says,
my feigned dispassion a failure.
We don’t say what we’re both thinking.

They can’t stop you for that, he repeats.
In my chest a trapped thing’s beating wings,
kitchen crackling silence, we can’t say
what we’re both thinking when my son calls
driving alone in the dark.

*

Vicki Boyd has made a professional life in education and publishing. She owes her writing life to Mrs. Williford, first grade teacher, who coached her in composing her first sentence, a dictation. When Vicki added embellishments, Mrs. Williford delighted in that, enough to set Vicki writing for life. Vicki has only recently begun writing for publication, her first piece appearing in Teach.Write: A Writing Teachers’ Literary Journal. She lives and walks and kayaks with her wife and their dog Rosie in and around Portsmouth, NH.

That’s on you by Sophie Frankpitt

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That’s on you

watch her fade away
her gaunt cheeks and
hollowed eyes, once
bouncing hair now in
tendrils, cheekbones
jut in sharp lines and
wrists that look too
fragile to touch, watch
her punish herself for
all she is not

that’s on you
all you taught us
all the pictures
the waist-touching,
leering, the men on
the street who shouted
at fifteen-year-old us,
the boys who lined us
up on the playground,
the dates women didn’t
come home from, the
streets we can’t walk
down, the live location
always on, hit by hit –

hit by hit –

scream by scream
deafened by other
women’s pleas
she fell to her knees
praying that her own pain –
the pain you so ironically
call self-made –
would distract her
from lifetimes of yours

*

Sophie Frankpitt is a poet and linguist from Somerset, England, having recently graduated from the University of Warwick with a Linguistics degree. She is a newly emerging poet, though she regularly performed spoken word in Amsterdam during the year she studied there.

Broken Wishbone by Steven Concert

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Broken Wishbone

The sum total of everything
brought you to me. We used

to break wishbones together.
Each time you let me win,

knew my wish would
be for us, not me,

and the happiness
of a lifetime together.

Two haiku, we were the words
that made it to the page,

and together we were divisible
only by the nothing that remained.

*

Steven Concert, gay American poet, resides in northeastern Pennsylvania. In June, Steven was elected 1st Vice President of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. His work has been published by Discretionary Love, Agates, Common Threads, Cracked Walnut, and Mad Poets Society. Steven can be found on Facebook @ Paperless Poets.

Buddy & Skippy by John Dorsey

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Buddy & Skippy

as a boy
my cousin steve
had a pair of imaginary friends
just in case
one of them
was ever out sick
just so neither of them
would ever have to feel lonely
35 years later
i think about how
none of us
have any friends at 3 am
unless we’re dying
& at a certain point
we all grapple with loneliness
& i wonder if steve’s imaginary friends
had imaginary friends of their own
the kind you can call
any time
for any reason
day or night.

*

John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems: 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022, and Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023). He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

Upcoming Reading: Sunday, 10/27 — 7pm Eastern

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Sunday, October 27 — 7pm (Eastern)
Featured Poets: Ace Boggess, CL Bledsoe, Anton Yakovlev, Jason Gordy Walker
Tickets available here (Free or Donation)

~ About The Featured Poets ~ 

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novels Goodbye, Mr. Lonely and The Saviors. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

Anton Yakovlev’s poetry collection One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean was published in 2024 by Redacted Books, an imprint of ELJ Editions. His chapbook Chronos Dines Alone (SurVision Books, 2018) won the James Tate Poetry Prize. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Yesenin, came out from Sensitive Skin Books in 2019. Yakovlev is also the author of Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017) and two prior chapbooks: The Ghost of Grant Wood (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Neptune Court (The Operating System, 2015). Originally from Moscow, Russia, Anton is a graduate of Harvard University and a former education director at Bowery Poetry Club. More info here.

Jason Gordy Walker’s poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Confrontation, Measure, ONE ART, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. X: Alabama, among other places. His reviews and interviews can be found in Birmingham Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, and the blogs of Dos Madres Press and NewPages. He has received scholarships from the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Poetry by the Sea, and other institutions, and he earned his MFA from the University of Florida and his MA from the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Currently, he lives in Alabama and practices translating Norwegian poetry.

Two Poems by Jean Voneman Mikhail

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Breath

Tent of my kid pitched in the backyard,
blown over, collapsing in on himself.
Tent stake through his heart.

I’ve left him to the rain, again,
grass blades stuck to his back,
huffing a billowy paper bag of breath.

A baggie of cut triangular sandwiches.
A baggie of blow. A baggie of weed.
Holy trinity of school lunches.

I have fed him to live to build
fingers for sandwiches and fiddle.
I have opened his Oreo black eyes

when they wouldn’t open.
I’ve unscrewed the lids,
and looked into the frosted eye whites

and scraped him of sweetness.
I fear I’ve made a mess of him.

I gave him sippy cups with blow holes.
Juice boxes with snorting straws.
Straws to stick up a turtle’s nose.

Once, he cared about
all the animals.

He cried for the neighbor’s kitten dead
in winter, fed on snowy moonlit milk.

He wanted the world to be kinder.

Is there any way to save him, now,
from chasing that washed up baggie
turning inside out in the waves

long ago down a stretch of beach,
a baggie filled with ocean water,
safety locked, zipped full of air?
His breath.

* 

LGLG

Dear God, with your capital G,
I see what you’re up to,
counting bodies down in Portsmouth,

Ohio, of all places to leave him.
God, listen to me, you can’t
have him all to yourself in an alley.

Your wrought iron doors,
windowless eyes bricked in,
having ceased watching over him,
haven’t you? How

would I ever know? Quietly,
cable wires cross this city,
trains rock themselves
to sleep at the end of the line.

But where is he, where is my son?

If he must die, if he must die,
how with dignity, how—
with forgiveness, how without shame?
How do I keep him from death
if death is what he chooses?

Should I lie down with him
and die, too, on the crescent moon
sidewalk of what was to be
our first total solar eclipse,

For my son, for my son’s life,
I’d give just about anything
except what I can no longer give.
No shelter. No food. No more.

God, no.

What kind of insanity is this?
Let go, let God. LGLG.
Give me a break.
I’ve given enough.

*

Jean Voneman Mikhail lives in Athens, Ohio, where she first came to study for a Masters in Creative Writing. Many years and a few kids later, she now writes more than ever. She has published in Sheila Na Gig Online, The Northern Appalachian Review, Pudding Magazine and other poetry journals and anthologies.

The Muse Commands by Tamara Madison

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The Muse Commands

We stop at the end of the pier,
where the full moon spreads its path
across the sea. Our little son gasps
at the sight, claps his hands, looks up at us
and says in a voice that is like a swoon
I want to draw that! I have to draw that now!

I know the feeling. We hurry to the market
before it closes, buy the only art supplies there.
Back at the hotel he sets to work, pink tongue
peeking from the corner of his mouth.
But crayons and rough paper are not enough
to capture his sense of it, the way the moon
stroked the water like a mother.

And I remember the time my brother
found me writing and insisted I share
my poem with him. Who could be closer
to you than me, your own brother?
Because he was older, I handed it over.
He read it silently, then left the room.
I read it again, but the feeling was gone.

*

Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbooks “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press), and three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine” (Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar (Sheila-Na-Gig). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, the Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, One Art, the Writer’s Almanac and many other publications. A swimmer, dog lover and native of the southern California desert, she has recently retired from teaching English and French in a Los Angeles high school. Read more about her at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Four Poems by Justin Karcher

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For About Three Minutes and 45 Seconds the Dead Come back to Life

while the eclipse shrouds all of Buffalo.
My mom tells me she sees the ghost of my dad
parking the car across the street.
I don’t try to redirect her eyes to the sky
because grief is its own kind of eclipse.
A sudden darkness covering up our hearts.
If someone is ready to look, you let them look.

*

East of Eden in Western New York

It’s midnight and I’m returning a book
to the library. Carl is standing near
the drop box and lifts up his shirt
to show me the spot where he got shot
all those years ago. He hides the wound
after I give him a couple bucks and hurries
into the street where a car has to swerve
to avoid hitting him. I toss the book
into the abyss and notice a crowd
in front of this house. There’s a cellist
on the top porch playing beautiful lullabies.
Some trees turn into snakes. They shed
their leaves like tears as complete strangers
hold hands to keep warm as summer
starts to slither away.

*

Life Is Learning How to Live Inside a Broken Poem

During the poetry workshop, we spend
a lot of time wondering how it would feel
waking up with your skin turned inside out.
“Like an alien,” I say, my mouth
half-filled with cheese. Julio quickly replies
“Half the country thinks I already am one.”
There’s some uncomfortable laughter
and I look out the window at twentysomethings
hurrying toward the busy queer bar
at the end of the block
looking for that feeling of home.

I remember smoking there on the patio one night
listening to a woman tell her friend
about a dream she keeps having
where she locks her newborn son in the car
and as she’s trying to figure out how to free him
an angry crowd appears just to scream at her.
When she wakes up, there are always tears on her pillow
and she wonders why she never breaks the glass.
“I’m here for you” is all her friend says and I realize
that sometimes that’s all anyone ever has to say.

*

It Can Take Years to Understand Denial if You Ever Do

I find a nearly dead man on Carolina St
barefoot and shirtless and lying on the concrete
inside a circle of mismatched sneakers.

An elderly couple comes out of their home
to see what’s going on. They make the sign
of the cross and I call 911. I can hear the bags

under the dispatcher’s eyes blowing in the wind
of broken faith. But she does what she has to.
When first responders arrive, they perform

what looks like a miracle.

Later in the night I’m at an open mic and I notice
all the girls wearing Hozier shirts from his concert
earlier this week. When the café closes, they walk

across the street to Bidwell Pkwy and start singing
“Take Me to Church.” Between a clearing of trees
a unicorn carcass is rotting in the moonlight.

I tell my friends that a group of unicorns
can be called a blessing but they’re not listening.
I’m scared they’re not seeing anything at all.

*

Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright from Buffalo, NY. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). Recent playwriting credits include The Birth of Santa (American Repertory Theater of WNY) and “The Buffalo Bills Need Our Help” (Alleyway Theatre). https://www.justinkarcherauthor.com

Two Poems by Shannon Frost Greenstein

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Your Hands
When you play music for me, I watch
the nimble joints of your practiced fingers
curl over the faded piano keys
like diaphanous wings unfolding in the heat of sunrise
and I feel something I did not feel before.
You play a chord and I see
a web developer, fabricating a brand-new reality
from a Lego pile of ones and zeroes; and
a surgeon, hands holding mastery
over the cellular processes of life itself; and
God, mixing the soundtrack of the cosmos
like a DJ high on bass and MDMA.
When you play music for me, your wrists
dance like Baryshnikov between sharps and flats and perfect fifths,
percussion as choreography as language as song,
and as your entire body resonates with music you yourself have scripted
I remember what it was like to fall in love with you.
You write me a song and I reflect
on tempo and poetry and heartbeat and joy, the privilege of immortality
captured in something beautiful and heretofore unknown –
art that exists where art previously did not exist,
a Big Bang birthing matter from the seeds of nothing at all –
and everything because I was lucky enough to meet a musician and my soulmate
one summer night at a bar.
When you play music for me, I forget all about how
I used to yearn for the touch of tragic artists
who sow the sort of lust and mystery
I would later reap as heartbreak
and instead picture the silk of your palms against the landscape of my naked back
as you soothe my restless body when I am unable to sleep.
You compose and I watch your fingertips
sculpting notes into paths and layers and staircases and peaks,
thousands of hours of work culminating in this very moment and,
in an act of primal validation orchestrated by Darwin himself,
a rush of neurotransmitters through my blood affirms my choice
that this is indeed the mate to father my young.
When you play music for me, I cannot look away
from your hands.
*
She Gave Me Her Last Diet Coke
I blame my mother, of course,
for conceiving
and birthing
my own addiction to Diet Coke.
They say eating disorders are a family disease;
they say an eating disorder is like a gun.
The pistol is the genetic predisposition
to seek out control when things feel uncontrollable;
the bullet is a culture that venerates thin
and praises the anesthetic of becoming less.
The trigger is unbearable anxiety or distress,
so is it any wonder that childhood trauma leads to eating disorders?
Screwed by both nature and nurture,
my mother’s eating disorder was planted in my genome
before I even had a say.
Ballet and abuse and mental illness and assault
germinated my Anorexia by the time I was eight.
And the rest of my life has been spent
grappling with the one firearm
I never wanted to fire.
They say recovery from an eating disorder can take over a decade;
they say maybe it isn’t even possible to recover at all.
After three decades of punishing myself
for requiring the fuel of food
I still don’t know if I will ever be free
from the voices that inform me I am worthless
deep within the bowels of my broken brain.
For years I have worked, and cried,
and done my best to get where I am today.
But my Diet Coke addiction remains a vestigial artifact
of the times it would take two twenty-ounce bottles
just to quench my hunger.
I eventually forgave my mother
for loading the gun that became my cross to bear;
after a lifetime of estrangement,
she was finally my friend
by the time she passed last November.
And I know she loved me
because the last time I saw her before she died
she gave me her last Diet Coke.
*
Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of “Only as Sick as Your Secrets: Notes from Residential Eating Disorder Treatment,” a forthcoming memoir with Watertower Hill Press, “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novelette with Emerge Literary Press, and “Pray for Us Sinners,” a collection of short fiction from Alien Buddha Press. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee, with work in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks

My Mother Could Write Lines for Fortune Cookies by Barbara Krasner

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My Mother Could Write Lines for Fortune Cookies

Your father may think you’re a genius.
I know you’re not. #77

You have many outfits that make you look thinner.
What you’re wearing now isn’t one of them. #206

Dye your hair. Go much lighter. #95

You don’t make any mistakes,
but marrying the village idiot?
That was a lollapalooza. #89

Only you have the strength
to withstand divorce. #91a

Only you have the strength
to raise a toddler on your own. #91b

You need more color.
Wear make-up. #86

Dying people always reach
out for their mamas.
You will too. #208

*

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the author of three novels in verse for young readers. Her work has also appeared in Nimrod, Michigan Quarterly Review, Consequence Forum, The Ekphrastic Review, Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.

Two Poems by Michael Robins

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Keep Mississippi Beautiful

All the way until the magnolia state to finally see the cows hotfooting
their field & we too were undoubtedly grateful having missed the
accident by minutes, livelihoods & lifetimes bent in the awkward
angles. A hundred miles earlier, the kids wanted to know if driving is
hard. I did my best, which feels like the middle lane when a tree falls
across the interstate, no one waiting around to say, When you next
travel this road your wife of a decade will be dead, your children will
have grown, you’ll mostly leave what you thought you’d love for good.

*

See You Next Time

Whispering to the hours among the corners of grief. Like an animal
curled in the middle of the floor & such symbols everywhere, wishing
but rooms with separate bowls of ice cream, just kids & some six
hundred miles apart, a long shot if we ever met. Early morning
showers, even the fish taking sides by skipping meals. I miss you, &
later these late goodbyes until there’s nothing left to say. A little
hungover, I know, & a single strand of hair. The half-eaten cicadas &
enough. It’s been a rough summer, I think aloud before writing it down.
To be everywhere at rest. To be at once. I mean September flying.

*

Michael Robins is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Bright Invisible (2022) and People You May Know (2020), both from Saturnalia Books. He lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State University and serves as editor of The McNeese Review.

Two Poems by Craig Kirchner

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Size

I’m a 7 hat, a 10 ½ shoe and a large shirt.
We need sizes, rankings and ratings
for everything. Is it center, left of center,
far right. Is your hospital 1-star or 5-star,
how about your choice of restaurant?
I’m wondering, where would I stack up
in a personality ranking, 1-10,
how about on a dating site?

The business card scene in American Psycho,
the office stature ranked by location and view,
all with a number, pride and self-esteem.
What would you rank your parents, childhood,
the girth of your education?
I had an office once, it was about as big
as a queen-sized bed and had no windows.
I lasted 2 weeks, borrowed money, and bought a store.

The job, had I stayed would have been a 10,
the liquor store almost killed me.
I’m projecting next Friday will be an 8,
the cleaning lady is coming, I have a tee time,
a dinner date, and it’s not supposed to rain.
This number could jump up depending on sex,
but do the numbers really mean anything,
do we really need them?

These shoes fit, they’re a 10 ½ to me
and the rest of the world but they’ll still fit
when the size designation wears out.
Numbers are as important as we make them,
it’s 2 PM because the clock says so,
but our bodies know what time it really is
and that number is only important
if you have an appointment.

I’m 75, age is only a number, you’re only
as old as you feel. I never wore a watch,
don’t remember ever being late.
I’m looking to buy a hat,
no matter what the tag says,
I’ll try them on until one feels right,
fits nicely on my head and around my ego
which I’m sure is about a 7, or an 8.

*

Cognition

It’s Monday, I have an appointment
to get a thing, looks like a tiny pinecone
zapped off my forehead,
and my dermatologist wants to look at my Mohs scar.
Tuesday, early, first of the day I see my cardiologist.
I tell him of my AFib episode and my guess as to the trigger.
He says the EKG is perfect, my blood pressure was good,
and that all his patients should be doing so well.

It’s Wednesday, I’m to meet and greet my new GP.
My last two left, one to a big title job,
the other went to South Carolina to be a missionary.
The girl weighing me and taking my blood pressure
tells me they all just call him Dr. V.
He’s young, seems efficient and smiles,
we go over medications, which takes a while
and no, I don’t still take Vicodin.

Two were prescribed for a root canal,
but I tell him he can renew that if he’d like.
He doesn’t mention that my blood pressure is 105
over some ridiculously low second number,
just that I should keep taking the two blood pressure meds.
Does anyone ever come off these?
We finish meds and he asks me how I am in general.
This is where I could have just said ‘fine’
but the storyteller in me went off.

He heard about the skin cancer, the bad knees
and phlegm, clearing my throat all the time,
and the lack of activity due to too hot to go outside
or its raining buckets,
or the gel shots only last 4 months, not 6,
and I realize I must sound like an ungrateful
hypochondriac, because poor thing can’t play golf.

I finish with so that’s me, and he asks if I’m depressed.
I tell him the skin cancer thing stressed me
and I was miserable for two weeks
but I didn’t want to kill myself.
Then he explains that Medicare requires a
cognitive test, I smile thinking of Trump.
He asked me my birthdate – I got it right.
what state are we in? Florida. Right.

What day is it? I said Thursday. Its Wednesday,
oh yeah Wednesday, I knew that.
Tell me as many animals as you can in one minute.
He looks at his watch and says go.
Dog, cat, elephant, I list about 10 more
and start thinking about getting the day of the week wrong,
unless it’s Thursday night football, it could be Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, what do I care or know.

Jaguars, bears, falcons, lions. I already said lions, didn’t I?
He says you have 20 seconds left.
Alligators, crocodiles, lizards, and then I think
does anyone think of these as animals, they’re reptiles.
He says the questions will get harder now
and I get the addition and subtraction right.
He then tells a story about Jill the stockbroker,
who got married, had kids and went back to work as a teenager.

Keep in mind he’s sitting all the way across the room,
and I realize a lot of what I hear is convoluted
unless I can read lips. He asks me her name. Jill.
What did she do for a living? She was a stockbroker.
When did she go back to work?
As a teenager, but that doesn’t make sense, but it’s what I heard.
Listen again, he tells the whole story.
I’m feeling as useless as Jack, her husband.

Turns out she went back to work when the kids
became teenagers. She was middle age.
Interesting answer.
Can you repeat the words I listed when we started?
Apple, pen, tide, house, car.
I didn’t know when he listed them
if the middle word was tie, tied or tide,
but I repeated tide, and he said good.

That’s when it hit me. He wasn’t going to tell me
that I had not done well, or why Medicare needed to know
there was one more candidate for dementia.
He was just going to smile, give me a Flonase prescription,
let me keep the keys, see me in six months,
and send me on my way.
I asked him if I could write about our meeting.
He said he didn’t see why not.

*

Craig Kirchner thinks of poetry as hobo art, loves storytelling and the aesthetics of the paper and pen. He has had two poems nominated for the Pushcart, and has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels. Craig houses 500 books in his office and about 400 poems in a folder on a laptop. These words tend to keep him straight. After a hiatus he was recently published in Decadent Review, Chiron Review, The Main Street Rag, Hamilton Stone Review, The Wise Owl, Dark Winter and several dozen other journals.

Unbody by Rukan Saif

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Unbody

                    For Alia Ansari

My mother has started wearing the hijab again
on the anniversary of Alia’s death. Her murder

a cruel and trodden pilgrimage for all my people.
For this journey, I relinquish the body.

I was never there. Neither was my mother.
Instead, we are two October birds

dragged by our collars and flightless.
We predict the coming of rain,

which, too, has relinquished the body and pooled
into a shoebill’s halved cry: a ringing

gunshot. The instant
between a door slamming & its padlock & a blackened pistol

cocked from the earth’s insides.
It happens quickly. Aching talons uncouple

the clouds to cleave the earth
with a silver bullet, blood-hungry.

Here, the earth is not the earth
the same way a mother is not an orbed target, and the same way

her daughter cannot be a lucky witness, brought to that beaten cliff.
When she was found bloody and veiled, did you come

with questions or nocked arrows for blame: its own
scriptured body? Tell me why

the word hijab appears only twice in the Qur’an but is written
all over Alia’s body. She didn’t ask for this

remembering. Overhead, the last dove zips the sky closed.
I must confess: this memory is not about dying

but about a mother’s strength and dipping
into her wreckage. That she left this dunya a rustling

of feathers: glowing and everywhere.

*

Rukan Saif is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins University living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in The Penn Review and Furrow Magazine.

Grief by Rose Gubele

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Grief

I wrote a note to myself: “Remember to grieve.”
I don black, turn my eyes down.
I need a minute to untangle my past,
mourn the girl who could have been.

Monsters are real:
not embodied evil, stalking silver screens,
not experiments performed by
unethical inventors who drink their own toxins.

Monsters have logic, though not excuse.
They can be kind, if it suits the goal:
manipulation, control, power.
Corrupted by pride, arrogance, greed.

I still remember the monster in the hallway:
no sharp claws, no pointed fangs,
just a boy with a knife,
trying to make his own life better.

*

Rose Gubele is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Missouri where she teaches courses in rhetoric and writing. She received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition at Washington State University. She has previously published poems in Red Ink and Penumbra.

Ode to the rainstorms that keep my friends close by M.J. Young

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Ode to the rainstorms that keep my friends close

Bless my friends
who, when I came
out to them, said
deadass not because
they didn’t believe
me but because
I had finally said
I’m gay, bless
their hooting after
I confirmed
with my own deadass
even though I don’t
like using profanity
but their happiness
overpowered my guilt
so it was okay
even if
the librarians inside
were wondering why
five young
twenty-somethings
were huddled under
the covered patio
in the butterfly garden
when it’s raining
so thickly, laughing,
but it wasn’t as if it
was raining
when we got there
and when it started
to rain we figured
that it would stop
in a few minutes
because it’s summer
and the rains
are usually frequent
but quick,
spits, as my mother
says, but I don’t
because it reminds
me of having saliva
in my face
and the accompanying
words I’d rather forget
and I’d rather be happy
when thinking about
the little dash
of summer rain
we’re gifted, laugh
with my friends
who were scrambling
to pick up the pieces
of our board game
as the wind tried to
claim them for itself,
me hugging
a copy of The Goldfinch
to my chest
because even though
I wondered
if Tartt would make
Theo canonically gay
or bi or something
before remembering
that this book was popular
so that wouldn’t happen
I still like
her writing style
and besides,
I was with my friends
so who cares about
Theo who doesn’t
even exist
when the wind
made us hysterical
in a giddy way
because in that
moment
the most important thing
was to make sure
that none of
the character
or room or
weapon cards
or score sheets
got too wet or were taken
by the wind
which was a nice worry
to have
compared to everything
it is we were dealing
with on our own,
but under the patio
in the middle of
the butterfly garden
walled in by the rain
that smalled
our worlds,
we could laugh
with each other
and not look past
the problem
of getting out
of the rain unwetted.

*

M.J. Young is a writer and MFA student at Florida International University. His poetry can be found in Vagabond City Lit, Stone of Madness Press, and more. In his free time he enjoys listening to Philip Glass and exploring bookstores. He can be found on Instagram @mjyoungwrites.

March Birthday by Jeanne Griggs

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March Birthday

I knew it was your birthday
as soon as I woke
so I told your father,
called your grandparents to come,
took your sister out with a friend,
packed my bag and smoothed the sheet
on the bassinet, ready for you.
All these years later I still wake
knowing it’s your birthday. I sent
a cake and a text
because you don’t know
how you’re still part
of the circulation of my blood,
your fetal cells still in my marrow,
and that the thought of you
is like sunshine on the forsythia
outside my bedroom window,
the same twigs suddenly showing
blooms as on that first morning.

*

Jeanne Griggs is a Pushcart nominated poet; her poems have appeared in the Mid-Atlantic Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Inquisitive Eater, Thimble Literary Magazine and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Jeanne is the author of Postcard Poems (Broadstone Books).

Three Poems by Jeanne Wagner

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The Homing Instinct
         ―Princeville, Kauai

The guide tells us Laysan albatross look
the same at seventy as they do at seventeen,

Except to another albatross I think, but stop
short of saying, not wanting to spoil

the exception which proves the rule, every
rule a law made to be broken, a law

much like gravity, which is why all good
escape artists want feathers on their arms.

I envy migratory birds, the way they navigate
the same sky I always want to get lost in.

The albatross chicks waiting, solitary, a little
sullen, resting on their snug circles of dirt.

The first story always one of place, of hunger,
or being hungered for, like their prey,

squid or krill, or the eggs of the flying fish
with their built-in longing to break into sky.

The albatross almost became extinct because
women wanted feathers in their hats.

But how lovely I felt at seventeen when I wore
my new hat to Mass, the feathers all dyed

that pink we mistake for innocence, and me
just sitting there, barely dreaming of flight.

*

One Person

Peter Sellers said, I do not exist. There used to be a me,
but I had it surgically removed.

We laugh, yet who doesn’t feel pain remembering some
layer of skin

flayed by a casual remark, and afterwards the air, without
even a breeze, raking the spot raw.

We are always one person, no matter how many times
we’ve been effaced.

See how even the moon suffers its monthly mutilations.
This goddess of a sphere

left like a slice of lemon peel garnishing an empty plate.
But now a whole new moon

floats over the dawn redwood in the frame of our skylight.
Who else will ever see it,

the nexus of this place, these seconds, with these eyes?
Who will ever know you as I do?

*

After a Stroke, the Doctor Asks Me to Describe the Cookie Theft Picture

         ―The Cookie Theft Picture, a cartoon of a retro family
         in the kitchen, is a common diagnostic tool for aphasia.

She looks like my Fifties mother asking me to turn down the heat.
Our leg of lamb, forgotten in the oven, was beginning to overcook.
A boy is reaching for the cookie jar, the stool slipping from his feet.
The girl lifts her hand. The boy starts to fall. His falling overlooked.

My mother overcooked the leg of lamb, her body helpless on the floor.
This mom is drying dishes, ignoring the water cascading from the sink.
The girl lifts up her hand to her brother, but I’m not that girl anymore.
This isn’t my dysfunctional family, but I keep searching for some link.

This mom is drying dishes. The overflowing water a symbol of tears,
Every kitchen is an engine room, is a hearth, the heart of the home.
My dysfunctional family must be at it again; the meaning isn’t clear.
I fell on the kitchen floor, where once I found my father, already gone.

Every kitchen is an engine room, but I long for the heart of the home
where once my Fifties mother kept asking me to turn down the heat.
Falling is a family trait. Like gravity. Something I’ve always known.
This boy, he just keeps on reaching. The stool slipping from his feet.

*

Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections: The Zen Piano-mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize, In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and Everything Turns Into Something Else, published as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize. Her manuscript, One Needful Song is the recent winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. Her more recent awards include the 2020 Joy Harjo Award and the 2021 Naugatuck Prize. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review.

Picture Strip in My Underwear Drawer by Cynthia Ventresca

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Picture Strip in My Underwear Drawer

You, in a photo booth at a wedding reception,
wearing that navy-blue suit.
There are four frames and I study them: tilt
of your head, toy ukulele in your hands—
wonder where I was when light flashed
in your face. Because I cried
in the bathroom that night, after our fight,
balled up napkin in my fist, listening
to high heels click on the cold tile. I wanted
to disappear. And that feeling. Like the scar
I’ve had since I was a child, beneath my chin—
I’m forever touching it. The wound, it’s sear,

and always, the years. A counting of.
How many, how many now, have I loved you?

*

Cynthia Ventresca wrote her first poem at seven years old after receiving a typewriter as a Christmas gift. Publication credits include American Life in Poetry, Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal, 3rd Wednesday, Dreamstreets, Glassworks, The Main Street Rag, Sky Island Journal and One Sentence Poems. Pending publication in SWWIM Every Day, the Bay to Ocean Journal, and Eunoia Review. She was longlisted for the 2023 Palette Poetry Rising Poet Prize and serves as an assistant poetry editor for Narrative Magazine. She is currently working on her first manuscript of poems.

The Family I Just Met by Marianne Szlyk

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The Family I Just Met

Having seen only old country portraits
in the parlor, graduation pictures
without smiles, hectic-colored prints of saints
and martyrs, eyes rolling, hands clasped in prayer,

I thought that Dad’s side of the family
was grim. They came from behind the Curtain,
iron folds falling, about to slam shut.
Left behind, Dad’s uncle Alex was shot.

In the boxes of snapshots to unpack,
I found my grandfather’s laughter. He sat
in his low armchair, roaring at the show
Mom’s card-playing, movie-going folks loved.

It was Christmas. The war was long over.
He didn’t have to open his market,
butcher meat still in short supply, sweep floors
until you could have eaten off of them.

He could sit by the radio and snort
at the show my friends’ families in the Bronx
loved, laugh at the snapshots his children took:
Bobby throwing snowballs, my dad leaning,

taking a smoke break, dark sunglasses on,
Bobby a cowboy on the horsehair couch
while his sister Irene rolls her eyes, smokes,
and Rita sits close to Henry, her beau,

the young Polish man just home from the war.

*

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, Green Elephant, and ONE ART. Her fiction has appeared in Mad Swirl, Impspired, and Storyteller Poetry Review. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and I Dream of Empathy are available from Amazon and Bookshop. She and her husband, the writer Ethan Goffman, live with their black cat Tyler who likes to hang out with them while they write.

Highland Boulevard by Bruce Morton

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Highland Boulevard

I do not know if it was conceived as a grand design
Or the work of someone who had an appreciation
For metaphor and science, or who had just a sense
Of humor, because it is kind of funny in its naturally
Morbid way. Down the boulevard it is all progression
As gravity and life conflate, each a force doing what
It does. Sometimes you cannot help but be struck
By how things are laid out, a plot set to play out.
Be it plan or coincidence, it is genius nevertheless.
Not to mention logical in its simple elegance.
You make your way to the top of the hill,
Where the water tank looms large, a sentinel,
A monument to quench the thirst of affluence,
A resource that greedily absorbs the landscape,
Which from there flows down hill, sloping to
Main Street and the hum and drum of our daily
Life. It unfolds in order, as if by some divine
Invention, or intervention. Here, newly built, are
The upscale homes for senior citizens,
Then the apartments for those who desire
And can afford independent living nestled close
Up against the building for assisted living—as if
Anyone has ever lived unassisted. Next there
Are the offices that house the doctors, all specialties
Stacked for diagnosis and prognosis, each enjambed
To the hospital with its red-roofed emergency room,
A veritable medical smorgasbord. It is a complex
Thing this inevitable slide down the boulevard,
Nature at work, no control to the roll—such is
The nature of it. Until we must cross over
The street to the mortuary-crematorium, funereal
With its black smoke rising above its black hearse,
A dark cloud polluting our small universe.
Conveniently, we need only drive back across
The boulevard to Sunset Hills Cemetery, a misnomer
Because it is located at the east end of town.
Perhaps in consideration of reincarnation?
Situated between mortuary and cemetery is
A pre-school, its children loud with play,
A seeming incongruence. We sometimes see them
Cheerfully queued, plodding on the sidewalk
Up the boulevard, blissfully defying gravity.

*

Bruce Morton divides his time between Montana and Arizona. He is the author of two poetry collections: Planet Mort (2024) and Simple Arithmetic & Other Artifices (2014). His poems have appeared in numerous online and print venues. He was formerly dean at the Montana State University library.

Rattlesnakes by Sarah Mackey Kirby

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Rattlesnakes

The young folk came from Nashville,
from the Bronx, and Carolinas.
To the land of rattlesnakes,
of cotton,
of wildflowers,
and tomato sandwich picnics.
To the land of burning crosses. Lynchings.
Crickets playing Mississippi blues.

The 1960s Delta. And my dad,
raised in a Brooklyn housing project,
nervous, poor, but proud,
felt a calling to Atlanta.
Then to Freedom Summer’s promise.
Hattiesburg, where mosquitos
were never short on blood.

They were young women. Young men.
Black and white together,
filled with fear and courage.
In cars. On buses. Walking miles
to sign folk up to vote.
My dad was beaten in his back
with a police baton in Jackson.
Many times arrested.
Chased by the Klan
one magnolia afternoon.

They were workers.
They were students.
Singing songs
of freedom,
praying grace
would rise up
from the clay.

He’s dead now.
Like so many of the rest.
I think about him as a boy,
listening. Ear to his transistor.
Rooting on Pee Wee Reese
and Jackie Robinson.
Hopeful the Dodgers would
take the Series in ’55.

I think about the hissing
nine years later.
Rattlesnakes warning danger
if he stepped foot
where he didn’t belong.
The cypress and pecan trees.
The grasses and the stars.
History’s grit turned into songs
that if not sung and sung,
will lay untold and dormant.
Stuck like old truck tires
in the Mississippi mud.

*

Sarah Mackey Kirby is the daughter of Ira Grupper. Her father was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and lifelong civil rights, disability rights, and labor rights activist who passed away July 23, 2024. Like her dad, she loves to write. She hopes this poem honors him. And all the people who walked through this hell to effect change.

Two Poems by Cora Schipa

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Hotel Room

The granite is cold on my bare feet the way expensive things are,
crystal heirlooms and heavy pens,
probably lugged here from Venice by a hundred calloused hands
and fitted snugly amongst its ancient sister slabs
seven stories above a strange buzzing earth
of dry-cleaned suits and damp cardboard,
days two-sided as coins rattling in old Tupperware.

Maybe because I’ve just eaten diver scallops
butter-drowned in their own shells
and gulped my rent’s worth of bubbly,
its spilled residue sticky down my throat and chest like jewels,
the night swells with that precise joy of the lavish,
that spoiled, unsatiated joy, the kind that always wants more.
Could this be life? This could be life.
I lean close to the hard floor
in a dress he bought me liquid as gin,
knees purple-cold, churning bruises,
palms forming auras of heat,
and stare into the tiny stone-veins
until they wiggle. How old are you? I ask.
How much have you seen? Who
has touched you?

And at the same time I am a child in the grass
with plaid cutoffs and a body
that hasn’t yet learned how to numb itself,
digging a hole in the sweet earth and hovering
my sunburned face above it, breathing in,
not wanting anything more than to inhale that alive smell
in the balmy elbow of a too-long Southern summer day.

The toilet flushes.
His gravity enters, stiffens the air-conditioned room.
When he sees me he laughs,
always half-jovial, half-like finding a dog chasing its tail,
asking, What on earth are you doing?
and I look at the pressed bed skirt,
the claw-foot chair in the corner,
the wide wide windows opening to a starless night,
and my body on its hands and knees
and I tell him
I don’t know, looking up at him,
I don’t know.

*

Heirlooms

I imagine my grandmother
bound by paper-bag lunches
and unreciprocated love,
watching divorce shimmer
like heat in the distance,

tucked away
in a Pacific-ocean
house made of glass,
china bright as mirrors,
laundry rolling endlessly,
lacquered wood, kitten heels,
whiskey in the linen closet,
candle-lit dining table.

Sometimes I think I remember her,
the cool sharpness of her rings,
the quiet sounds they made as she
fit a bottle between my gums.

I wonder about her, if she ever sat still enough
to feel the earth’s plates moving,
slow and achingly wise, if she felt
gravity
like that, so much it hurts.
I wonder if she ever felt like a forest, burning
its rot to survive.

I know her heart, I have
it, arrhythmic, rolling
over itself like
going under a wave too late, thrashing against
the sand, dizzy, bottom-up;
it’s congenital, they say,
and I think of heirloom pain,
of women tethered down to what they love most
of alcoholism and second chances
and curses and genes and the promises
our bodies make
but cannot keep.

In a photograph of us—
suspended in that in-between space before
anything happens,
my tiny cheek pressed against hers,
the two of us utterly unknowing—
she’d been sober for 6 months.
I turn it over.
The cursive reads “first sleepover”
as if there would be more.
I feel her salt
stuck to my face.

*

Originally from the West Coast, Cora Schipa is a poet and writer now residing in the marshland of Charleston, South Carolina, where she holds degrees in creative writing and sociology from the College of Charleston. She works as a creative writing mentor and tutor for girls and gender-expansive youth, and plans to continue her literary career at an MFA program in the coming years.

Elegy for Dewey Stone by Bonnie Proudfoot

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Elegy for Dewey Stone

Last May, Dewey died from diabetes after
a slide into dementia, not fully, just enough
to lose nouns, verbs, to ache with the loss.
Did I mention his name was not really Dewey?
That once, hitchhiking from Buffalo to Woodstock,
someone named Louie picked him up, and
in the car was another guy named Hughie.
“I’m Dewey,” he said, and then he was. We
rolled joints on album jackets, listened to Santana
and watched cartoons. He sang, “I got a black
magic marker.” Did I mention that once when he
was away, while I was watching his husky, she
darted across the road into an oncoming car.
I held her broken body, watched her blue eyes
go blank. Didn’t Roadrunner take a magic marker
out of his invisible pocket and draw a tunnel
into a mountain? Is that where the dog is?
Are they together, with their shining blue eyes?
Does he still stop on the sidewalk every time
a girl says, “Beautiful dog.” Does he say, “yes,
I know. Her name is Yahweh.” I still listen to Santana.
If I had a black magic marker, I could block out
a portal through time and gravity, someplace between
11:30 and midnight. He called from the hospital.
“It’s fucked up,” Dewey said. “I cry a little every day.”
I never asked whether he forgave me for killing
his dog. I never wanted to hear him say he did.
Did I mention how much we used to laugh?

*

Bonnie Proudfoot’s fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies. Her novel, Goshen Road (Swallow 2020) received WCONA’s Book of the Year and was long-listed for the PEN/ Hemingway. Her poetry chapbook, Household Gods, can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig editions, along with a forthcoming book of short stories, Camp Probable. She resides in Athens, Ohio. bonnieproudfootblog.wordpress.com/

Clavicles by Susanna Stephens

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Clavicles

I knew two children
who fractured their collarbones.

One tried to fly
like a scene from E.T.

The other was on skis
and more like Steve-O

from Jackass.
Both recall seasons of naked

quiet, not the vibrant cackling
with chums,

but the blankness that comes
when time loses

shape. The curtains
drawn all afternoon.

Crisps and apple
juice on the nightstand.

Clavicles come in pairs,
one boy explained.

Like flesh and what
rattles inside.

When one breaks,
the other collapses too.

*

Susanna Stephens, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and poet living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is published in Rust & Moth, Red Eft Review, Eunoia Review, ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, and DIVISION/Review. In addition to writing, she maintains a private practice in Manhattan.

Shoveling by Jill Moses

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Shoveling

What is this life anyway
but an accumulation
of sitting in a kitchen
with a china cup of tea
a small breeze moving
the white gauze curtain
you barely notice or remember
or an overheard conversation
where voices get louder
and someone’s feelings get hurt
over soup and red applesauce.
Perhaps you were reading
“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”
overlooking the golf course
or perhaps it was a card game,
11-card gin with a plate of change
on top of a bowl
or a stripe of sunlight
on the formica
where you sit in the afternoon
with an aunt or an uncle
eating cheese bread
and you learn a card trick
or a few words of Yiddish.
Perhaps you see the black and white photograph
on the matching end tables
that resemble large encyclopedias on their side
or the photograph appears later in a shoebox
perhaps when you watch your cousin
put on her makeup
or during a funeral
as you’re shoveling dirt
on top of the casket
not doing it properly
trying not to think about
how deep the grave goes
how grave it is
to be alive
to be the archive
of the generation
speeding down the tracks
its final train car
disappearing into the distance.

*

Jill Moses earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, where she received the Graduate Award in Poetry. Other awards include the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, and honorable mentions through the Lane Literary Guild, the Chester H. Jones National Poetry Competition, and the San Diego Book Award for Best Unpublished Poetry Chapbook. She is currently the assistant director of the first-year writing program in the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Young Lady Auto Mechanics 1927 by M. Nasorri Pavone

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Young Lady Auto Mechanics 1927

        From a vintage photo of high school girls in shop class

Were we brazen or that curious?
We were certainly teased
for putting our hands at risk.

Anyone with a beef about it
blamed the school for our folly.
But what if we didn’t grow out

of our interests? We guessed why
we had to read The Scarlet Letter.
We learned what was expected.

Some killjoy compared us to Eve
with the snake rolling out
an auto-size apple.

From where you sit we look
as united as an all-girl garage band
posing for an album cover,

our blunt bobs, our Mary Janes
beneath our rolled up cover-all cuffs.
The boys called us degenerates.

So? What we’ll never know is
how you came to love us in a way
we’ll never get to share.

At left there’s me, Grace Hurd. That’s
Evelyn Harrison, Corinna DiGiulian,
and Grace Wagner under the car

at Central High in Washington D.C.
We weren’t kidding. We got in there,
got greasy, made that engine sing.

*

M. Nasorri Pavone’s poetry has appeared in River Styx, One, b o d y, Sycamore Review, New Letters, The Cortland Review, The Citron Review, Innisfree, Rhino, DMQ Review, Pirene’s Fountain, I-70 Review, 86 Logic, and others. She’s been anthologized in Beyond the Lyric Moment (Tebot Bach, 2014), and has been nominated several times for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.

Who Shot Mr. Moonlight by CL Bledsoe

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Who Shot Mr. Moonlight
          after a song by Bauhaus

Someone shoot nostalgia
in the back so I can get some sleep.
Its chattering never stops.
A constant comparison that never
existed. The future is coming
and I can’t find my pants. I’m hiding
in the bushes while all the cars go by.
Families walk past while I sit
and read. It’s exhausting, all this dying.
But better days will surely come.
I just have to try harder.
Consider the mundaneness of clocks;
I can’t turn my eyes away. We’re
all looking for something nobler. Kierkegaard
said we settle for the level of despair
we can tolerate. Wouldn’t that be nice?
To turn off the struggle and snuggle in.
The blind door in the background
of the soul, behind which there is nothing
except cheesecake. It’s better
than telling strangers about your backsplash.
I was so young, then. Fat and soft. I still am.
Watch me roll down this hill. Watch me run.

*

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novels If You Love Me, You’ll Kill Eric Pelkey and The Devil and Ricky Dan. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

Ekphrastic Poetry: A Meeting of Art and Words — A Workshop with Ellen Rowland

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Ekphrastic Poetry: A Meeting of Art and Words

Instructor: Ellen Rowland

Wednesday, November 6, 10:00am (Eastern)

Length: 2 hours 

Price: $25 (payment options)

Note: Participants capped at 15 for this workshop.

Workshop Description:       

Ekphrastic poetry is a written response to a work of art— a painting, drawing, photograph, sculpture or other type of rendering. Since the age of Homer, poets have devised various ways to interact with art, including analyzing the work, exploring symbolic meanings, inventing stories, or even creating dialog and dramatic scenes. The artwork often leads the poet to new insights and surprising discoveries. 

In the first half of this two-hour workshop, we’ll go over the history of Ekphrastic poetry, discuss different approaches to and examples of ekphrastic works. Then, we’ll use our dedicated writing time to create a draft poem inspired by one of three different images provided.

Attendees are invited and encouraged to engage, discuss and share their poems with the group, although this is not mandatory. This workshop is limited to 15 participants so that everyone has a chance to share their work in a safe and intimate space.

Limited to 15 participants

About The Workshop Leader:

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

THE ONLY DRESS YOU’LL EVER NEED by Ronda Piszk Broatch

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THE ONLY DRESS YOU’LL EVER NEED

Turn to sideview, it takes your breath away. It swings.
That the narrative your internal critic weaves begins

to fade is no illusion. This dress drips blue deep notes.
Wrinkles time. Pour your body like hot wax into its

merciful stitches. This shift thistles any suitcase, loads
a pack like thunder, takes to task the naysayers, owns it.

Icicle shards from every cliff, this is not your mama’s frock,
solid and pocketful. It shocks. Slips like the membrane you

were born in, nurtures your most internal desires. Full on
juicy, this gown bleeds pomegranate, cherry and plum.

Where sun and ocean horizon, this skintight caress of a
dress throws light-coins on the water at your feet. Go on,

sonnet with random abandon! Queen in it! This robe rocks
atomic, pulses glory in the most quantum way.

*

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), finalist for the Sally Albiso Prize, and Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Greensboro Review, Blackbird, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, Moon City Review, and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.

Life Span by Ann E. Michael

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Life Span

Isn’t it a fine strange thing
how little information we can glean
about our future surely-numbered days?
How many snowfalls? How many
restless nights, or long drives
to how many friends’ homes?
Is it possible to count
the scores of leaves that fell
in each of the witnessed autumns?
Can these be measured: the light
sun shower that startles midday,
fox leaping like a lamb in the meadow,
someone’s recording of Rigoletto
distantly woven into the drone
of a diesel engine?

We are born and find that we live
in a world of water-bears and
wolverines, tire irons and railroad
tracks, shale, gas, stem cells,
sycamore trees. We categorize.
We kiss. We weather our own climate,
mark out our joys. We span everything
resembling a ravine, pleased with our
ingenuity. And then comes death,
which, like the hermit thrush,
has whistled all along, half-hidden,
as though it knew a fine strange thing.

*

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize; she’s the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks. She is a hospice volunteer, writing tutor, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at https://annemichael.blog/

 

Two Poems by Katie Hartsock

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Etiologies and Other Satisfactions

Many years ago, a travelling circus—
my friend will remark, passing
         a certain hill in his flat city—

performed in this park, and an elephant,
Cricket, died. Instead of a grave, they piled earth
         around her, and soon the grass

got mown, soon children climbed toward the sky.
An elephant named Cricket! My friend and his son
         imagine as if remembering her.

What’s true: the parks commission built a hill
for sledding next to the cricket field.
         What would you rather have—

a graph to track how Cricket Hill acquired
its origin story, so that my friend grew up
         believing it, or, his belief?

A beast, a burial, a beloved elevation—
and yet some would choose the curse of correction.
         In the prologue to The Last Crusade,

we meet a boy still unafraid of snakes; a few scenes
later, he’s running the roofs of a steaming circus train
         and falls through a hatch into a crate

unlidded, unlikely, full of writhing scales
that girt the horror on his face like Scylla’s
         first glimpse of dogs barking below her waist.

A few scenes after that, he gets his hat.
Meanwhile, his father works at a desk,
         his back to the world as he translates it.

Old man not yet so old, you’re like one who knows
each moment suffers for another—
         one day your boy will admire

how you locked your heart and time
up tight. How long ago you had to start
         to get this ending right.

*

Thrones

My son picks up the roll of white
paper tape I’ve kept out
for my bandage. What is this?
Oh, it’s nothing—

so close to bedtime, everything
feels like nothing. He hears the dismissal.
His perfect shoulders grow like he’s
an offended god,

an imbroglio of a superhero
about to reveal his angered self,
aggrandized in size and strength
just by breathing.

At the preschool Christmas concert tonight,
his teacher told the story, with Herod
so angry, so angry—Can you make
your best angry face?

he asked the dozens of kids arranged
on risers, who glowered, showed their teeth,
and snarled. And we all laughed at our children
mimicking Herod.

My son about to brush his teeth
holds the roll of tape. WHAT IS THIS?
he demands, from his far-off crystal fortress,
his secret cave.

One of my jobs is to define;
not to mimic, not to mock.
Definition is not mockery
except those moments,

in spacious chambers warm with people,
when mockery unmakes, dethrones
the terrible. When it tells terror,
You are nothing.

*

Katie Hartsock’s second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse Press), was listed as one of Kirkus Review’s Best Indie Books of 2023. Her work has recently appeared in the Threepenny Review, Plume, The New Criterion, Tupelo Quarterly, Image, Literary Matters, and elsewhere. She teaches at Oakland University in Michigan.

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

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

  1. Betsy Mars
  2. Robbi Nester
  3. George Franklin
  4. Linda Blaskey
  5. Terri Kirby Erickson
  6. Le Hinton
  7. Liz Marlow
  8. Kim Addonizio
  9. Sue Ellen Thompson
  10. Michelle Meyer

Two Poems by Andrea Potos

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MY MOTHER’S NAME

Two days before the last, after
the seizure had rearranged
my mother’s bearings,
I sat beside her while
the young dark-haired nurse
fluffed her pillow, measured her pulse,
offered to apply
my mother’s signature lipstick,
the Revlon Hot Coral we both loved.
I listened as the nurse asked my mother
to say her name out loud,
and in a gravelly almost-whisper my mother
chose Penny Kosmos—her maiden name
spoken so readily as if she were already
winding back to her beginnings
without us, before me
or my sister, before my father,
back to her girlhood
even to the origin of space
and time, of a world
that so loved her in it.

*

FOR MY COLLEGE BOYFRIEND KILLED IN A PRIVATE PLANE CRASH AT AGE TWENTY-NINE

I see you tall and handsome still,
chestnut hair cut extra short
for your Navy duties those last years.
From the photo you sent me, I noted
a hairline receding just a little;
I like to think you’d eventually be balding
as your tall, professorial father was bald.
I like to think of you again, as my own still-long hair
thins and loses some dark sheen; I like to think of you
as one of us now—some added weight around the middle
perhaps, lines around the eyes and the mouth that maps
a generous life—an older man who once loved so well
an insecure girl-woman of nineteen whose long dark hair
whirled delightfully in the air while you drove her around the city
in your dashing red convertible.

*

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.

Two Poems by Mary Lou Buschi

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Fire

            After Marianne Moore

Burned you didn’t it, my mother used to say.
Nowhere near a stove or flame but the accusation
hung there, in the air like refraction waves.
Burned you, you who should have known better.
You who stuffed a short skirt, two panties
in your purse after tracing Kit Fever, not your name
on a frequent flyer ticket. You who barely flew – came
the minute he said so.
No phone, no media, no way to track
the Landcruiser bouncing
over the Grand Tetons. Burned you.
Once. Twice. Shame on you.
Love, was it? Girl alone on a barstool at the Gaslight Saloon.
A dog with three legs curled under the rungs.

*

To the Ninth Grade Girl Crying in the Nurse’s Office During Lunch

You will be invisible in your 50s. Cheese will always be delicious. One day you will drive past a row of trees and name them: Sumac, Walnut, Tulip, and know which ones are invasive. You will become concerned with all things invasive as you stare out the window at a yard too large for your diminishing energy. People will be less interesting, but you will love more of them than you ever thought you could, deeply, finding flaws that enact that velvet kind of love that softens your eyes and warms the curves of your ears. Let–it–go. All of it. Not much matters. Not the stop sign you hit during your driving test. Not the Great Lash you lifted in middle school, or the date you ditched at Lucky Strike. Not the way you organize your closet by color, bookshelves by imagined dinner parties. It all gets left behind for someone to sort. It may be an unassuming couple that throws what you held dear into a rented dumpster. Dear Ninth Grade Girl, you will try to step off this world many times. Many times, I hope you fail.

*

Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) is the author of 3 chapbooks and 3 full length poetry collections. Her 3rd book, BLUE PHYSICS was published in February 2024. (Lily Poetry Review books). PADDOCK, her second book was also published by (LPR). Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Willow Springs, On the Seawall, among many others. Mary Lou is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and holds an MS in Urban Education from Mercy University. Currently, she is a special education teacher working with students on the spectrum in the Bronx.