Month: November 2024

Falling Leaves by Nolo Segundo

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Falling Leaves

I always feel a little sad
watching dying leaves
tumble to the ground,
each bravely making
the journey alone as
it dances its final dance
until it lands with grace
on the ground, joining
the fallen myriad

Leaves are lucky —
they die fulsome with beauty,
red or yellow or orange,
and the tree always
left lesser

*

Nolo Segundo, pen name of retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] L.j Carber, 77, became a published poet in his 8th decade in over 220 literary journals in 18 countries on 4 continents and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, thrice for Best of the Net. Cyberwit.net has published 3 collections in paperback, the latest titled ‘Soul Songs’.

Passage by Helga Kidder

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Passage

Wind whispers frost through the forest,
sun dabs her light on branches.

A lone leaf sails over the driveway.

In the garden, black-eyed susans peer
at drooping grasses.

The birdbath offers leaves under glass.

Something scuttles beneath hollies.

Morning grabs each detail greedily,
gathering the day to be weighed
by the heart.

*

Helga Kidder lives in the Tennessee hills with her husband. She was awarded an MFA from Vermont College and leads a monthly poetry group. Her poems have recently been published in Orbis, Atlanta Review, Dragonfly and others. She has five collections of poetry, Learning Curve, Loving the Dead, which won the Blue Light Press Book Award 2020, Blackberry Winter, Luckier than the Stars, and Wild Plum.

Samaritan by Annette Sisson

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Samaritan

Empty stomach, too much to drink,
I abandoned my coworkers, fled the party

to sprint home—to my parents’ house
cradled in a suburb twenty miles away.

I studied the car keys, assumed my feet
the safer choice. Blocks later, beside

the interstate ramp, I tripped face down,
too broken to rally before a convertible

sped toward me. You pulled over,
folded me into the passenger seat, covered

me with your coat. At the complex we paced
the parking lot, followed a long wall

to the streetlamp and back, you bracing me
under the arm. In patches of grass I vomited

wine, raved about my life, boyfriend
on the east coast, mother just diagnosed,

my plans for grad school unraveling.
Inside the condo you spread a herringbone

blanket, steered me to the couch, untied
my shoes. When morning poked through blinds,

I surveyed a room I’d never seen.
You emerged, dressed and clean-shaven,

early thirties—brought toast, a glass
of water, phoned your office to say

you’d be late, waited until my friends made it
to work. I called, reported I was found,

your face as blurred to me as your name.
Was it John? Brian? Hard to recall,

but when you asked me to choose jelly for toast,
reciting options like pop songs with hopeful

titles, your voice lifted me like an engine
humming, leather jacket around my shoulders.

*

Annette Sisson’s poems appear in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, and many other journals and anthologies. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, was published by Terrapin Books in October 2024. Her first book, Small Fish in High Branches, was published in May 2022 by Glass Lyre Press.

Three Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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Inviting Obama for Thanksgiving Dinner

I no longer remember much of etiquette
from reading White Gloves and Party Manners,
so when Obama doesn’t come to our house
for Thanksgiving dinner, I needn’t worry
that I’ve forgotten how to address a former president
in an informal setting. I do, however, remind my kids
that if Obama were sitting with us,
they would want to remember to put their napkins
in their laps. They do.
And you probably don’t want to lick the serving spoon,
I add, as it goes from the cranberry sauce
into an eager mouth. And we don’t talk about farting.
The whole time Obama isn’t eating mashed potatoes with us,
we wonder what he is eating with his family
and what they are talking about,
and if he might not just accept an invitation
to our home for dinner. If he did,
we agree we would refrain from using the knife
with the butter dish to butter our own bread.
And, uncertain how to address him,
we’d just ask him personally how he’d like be called.
I’d like to believe that Obama might actually show up.
He’d knock at the door in his elegant and humble way,
no fanfare, holding a side dish of roasted brussels sprouts,
and we’d listen as he told us what he’s up to these days.
As it is, it’s kinda fun when he doesn’t show up
and we act like ourselves. I eat my green beans
with my fingers—they taste better that way.
My daughter plays with the candlewax.
Sometimes, I lick my plate.

*

Grace

Though the world is dented and dinged
and scuffed and scorned,
we trim the beans and peel the potatoes,

and the kitchen is warm and full
of laughter. We hum as we work
and break into scraps of song.

All day our hands are joyful
as they prepare the meal to come.
Even now, there are wars and battles,

not all of them fought with guns,
some waged intimately in our thoughts,
our scraped up hearts. And still,

this scent of apple pie, sweetening
as it bakes, this inner insistence
that love is not only possible,

it is every bit as real as our fear.
Whether the host has brought
out his best wine and his best crystal glasses

or water in chipped clay cups,
there is every reason to be generous,
to serve not only our family, our friends, ourselves,

but also those we don’t yet know how to love
and those parts of ourselves we have tried
to keep separate. Tonight,

the host has hidden bait in the dinner—
we all are caught. Scent of sage,
scent of mushrooms and cream. The bite of cranberry.

Never mind the potatoes cooked too long.
Blessings seep into all the imperfect places,
even if you can’t name the blessings—

consider them secret ingredients.
The point is not to understand the feast,
but to eat, to eat it together.

*

What the Sky Knows

Before the feast,
I slip outside
into the rose glow
of evening and
talk to my loves
who no longer
walk this earth,
and I thank them
for being in my life
and I cry and cry.
How is it possible
at the same time
to hold so much grief
and so much gratefulness?
And the sky holds me
and the rooftops, the
streets and the fields,
the factories and forests,
it holds it all, holds
what is most beautiful,
holds what is most foul.
It doesn’t try to change
anything. Like that,
it seems to say
as it turns a deeper
rose. Like that.

*

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

Two Poems by Christiana Doucette

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Affirmations of the Powerless: A Villanelle after Helene

We are ok. We are alive.
The streets are full of trees and wires.
We have a house. We sleep inside.

The autumn trees that still survive
drop leaves instead of limbs. Mud’s mires
dry, ok. We are alive.

Without power we contrive
hot meals: pizzas baked right on the fire.
We have a yard. We eat outside.

I wonder on the morning drive
which houses still have occupiers.
Which are ok? Which still hold lives?

At the airport when I arrive
a Lake Lure guard justifies
“I have a house to sleep inside,

my neighbors don’t.” She confides.
We repeat our mollifiers.
“We are ok. We are alive.
We have a house to live inside.”

*

Stand of Birches

There’s an air of Eden in the Autumn,
a gold-gilded glow of sun through leaves.
The paper trees whisper presence
as we tread the thin red path between them.
Baby hands reach toward brilliant blue.
It peeks through the cathedral arches
and she coos, and tries to catch light columns
leaning between the trees from the stained glass roof.
She has not known the fall. The way the leaves
brown and crumble, soiling the forest floor
covering caterpillar chrysalises where
crawling bellies unmake themselves,
to build wings from nature’s sweetness.
She only knows summer’s verdant green
and now the sheen of all earth shimmering.

*

Christiana Doucette builds miniatures, because details create scenes. She brings that attention to her verse. As 2024 Kay Yoder Scholarship for History recipient and a judge for San Diego Writer’s Festival, her poetry has been performed on NPR. Leslie Zampetti represents her. You can find some of her recent poetry in Rattle Poet’s Respond, County Lines, and Wild Peach.

Two Poems by Tere Sievers

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Left Behind

One of us will stay,
the other will leave.
If you are first, I will hold
your knitted cap and red cup
to feel a trace of you.

If it’s me first,
what will you hold–
handles on the soup pot?
trowel from the garden?
the empty ring
from my finger?

*

Before You Are Gone I Miss You

I miss your half asleep voice
in the morning,
the pull of the blanket
as you get out of bed,
your shoelaces snapping
on the hardwood floor,
the half smile on your face
that isn’t a smile.
Each time you walk
out the door I miss
the tips of our fingers
touching in a long goodbye,
the feel of my hand
on the back of your sweater.

*

Tere Sievers lives in Long Beach California with her husband and four chickens and teaches in the OLLI program at CSULB. She attends a weekly poetry workshop run by her friend and gifted poet, Donna Hilbert. In that place she has learned to see clearly the joys of a long life as well as how to survive its losses. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, Picture Show Press and others.

Two Poems by Tony Gloeggler

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NOW AND THEN

After my youngest brother talked
it over with his wife, he tested
as a perfect match for my kidney
transplant. When his cholesterol
lowered and her summer vacation
vacation from teaching first grade
began, we entered the hospital.
I knew I was lucky not having
to worry, think of potential
donors, wait, hope for friends
to offer, find ways to crowbar
it casually into conversations,
lucky never needing to ask
anyone straight out, never beg
desperately hooked up to dialysis,
growing sicker. No prepared sales
pitch, how it wouldn’t cost them
a cent, mention the quick, easy,
two week recovery. Any problems
with the remaining kidney?
They would bullet straight
to the top of the treatment chart
like a newly released, second
rate Beatles single. Three
friends stepped up. Thanks
again: Erica, Michael, Elisa.

No one else said a word. Maybe
they hoped, prayed, I’d find
a more suitable donor. Maybe
they’d race in, a last second
caped super-hero, rescue me
as time dwindled down. Maybe
they never considered it, too
scared or simply didn’t care
enough to save someone’s life.
Mine. Maybe I need different
friends. Maybe It’s easy for me
to say, but I would have stepped-
up for most of them. Maybe
that makes me a better person.
Maybe my sister was the worst,
sitting on the front stoop of the house
we grew up in, smoking a cigarette,
telling me she couldn’t be a donor,
wouldn’t try to meet the health
requirement, stop smoking. Since
she could never stop for herself,
she wouldn’t try to stop for anyone,
a kind of justified logic, something
she thought I’d accept, understand,
carry to the cemetery. Thanks
to Jaime, I never think about it.
Really. Only now and then.

*

AT MY AGE

It really helps to get
a subway seat. Especially
for the hour ride home,
Brooklyn to Queens. Today
I squeeze in a corner two-
seater next to a homeless
guy with a filthy rag draped
over his head. The smell
of booze, stale tobacco,
sweat gets worse every
stop and he’s nodding
off, wobbling like a Weeble

While I pray to the subway
saints he doesn’t tip
over, nestles comfortably
on my shoulder, starts
to snore and I end up
featured on somebody’s
social link as today’s
compassionate New Yorker,
instead of a worn out old
guy with aching knees
cringing at the thought
of him touching me.

*

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

Mantis by Howie Good

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Mantis

So there I was, marooned on a remote island, the Academy of Lifelong Learning. I had what the doctors called an “oddball cancer,” one of the 14,000 cases of liposarcoma annually in the U.S. Down in the basement, behind a steel door, is a special X-ray machine, a linear accelerator, that resembles a giant praying mantis poised to devour her sex partner. The radiation burned up the cancer cells, but also healthy tissue. I am mostly empty space on the long car ride home.

*

Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.

After the Pulse shooting, a bullet was taped to the sign of our church by Brooke Lehmann

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After the Pulse shooting, a bullet was taped to the sign of our church
               Shotgun shell, racial note taped to Charlotte church sign
The stars were dimly stitched together at night,
fear needling a staccato breath. I stopped
attending service, instead, watched nature
strike like sixteenth notes, quarter beats
of that awful year. The goldfinches hung upside
down, eating seed and thistle. Monarchs perched
on milkweed growing in the wild as the heat swelled,
cicadas shaking like sleighbells. Fawns followed
their mothers around like the born do. At the turn
of the season, I braved the blessing of the animals
on the lawn. We sprinkled holy water on bichons
and shepherds, tawny cats, rabbits, even jade beetles
crawling up jars. We held hands and sang hymns
drifting into the thick air, the leaves of the heavy green
trees clinging to each other, the last light of summer.
*
Brooke Lehmann’s poems have been featured in Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry, Pedestal Magazine, and others. She was longlisted for the 2022 Palette Poetry Sappho Prize for Women Poets, and her chapbook manuscript, Pillar of Exquisite Sorrows, was named a finalist in Tusculum Review’s 2023 Chapbook Prize. Her poem, “Thanksgiving Psalm” was awarded first place in the 2024 Charles Edward Eaton contest for Pinesong. Her debut collection, Of Salt and Song, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2025. Brooke holds a B.S. from Purdue University and is an Arts and Science Council Cultural Leadership Training program graduate. She serves as Poet-In-Residence for Charlotte Center for Mindfulness.

Four Poems by Robbi Nester

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Grass

That spring, my parents were trying to mend the lawn,
all crabgrass, wild garlic, and dandelion, tangled stalks
that came up on their own. The neighbors had complained,
saying that our lawn made the block seem shabby,
attracted rats. I helped my father choose from a catalog,
containing bluegrass, fescue, rye. He chose Zoysia, hoping
it would, as promised, reduce the need for weeding, but he
never weeded, loving whatever came up, whether from
scattered seeds or slips of root or of unknown origin.
He didn’t know that much about his ancestors, but you
could tell he came from farmers by the way he held each
seedling, tucked it into the ground. I watched the workmen
roll out the new green lawn, like an ancient tapestry, roots
dangling in loose threads below each heavy strip. Still,
what was underneath thrived—those twisted stems,
hardy and resilient—like the past you know and the one
you don’t, neither of which will ever go away.

*

In my memory my mother speaks again

about the loquat tree that grew outside her window
in Capetown, at the very tip of Africa. She wanted me
to spread the seeds of her lost life, to make them grow.
She fed me all the fruits she used to know, the alligator pear
(AKA the avocado). She would breakfast daily on it, and
in season, pomegranates, bright with ruby seeds, bursting
like a hive. She was Persephone, at least in her own mind,
dragged to the underworld by that dark man, my father.

*

Traces

It’s been two decades since I’ve been in my old neighborhood,
once the haunt of Jewish families not quite middle class.
They built a quasi-suburban enclave, with schools and shops
and synagogues, a library, public transportation, even its own
newspaper. When we moved in, the ground was raw, unplanted.
I remember stores opening on Castor Ave: the Gingham House,
where everybody’s mom shmoozed with groups of friends, the delis
and the kosher bakeries, two movie theaters. Gone, the last time
I was there, to empty out my parents’ house and sell it. Was I still
the child netting fireflies in the high grass, riding my bike around
the block? I didn’t recognize any of the people. Where was
Mr. Moskewitz, the blind man, with his guide dog? The kind librarian?
The trolley, shooting sparks as it jolted down the track? Gutted.
In their place, empty storefronts, overflowing garbage cans.

*

Explorer

In 1980, I came to California as a transplant, stunned
by the brightness, spiky palm trees, brown hills.
It surprised me that everything came from somewhere else,
like me, exotic backdrop to some movie scene I could not
identify. Busloads of gawking tourists, squawking parrots,
escapees, in motley flocks, picking dark fruits from the
olive trees, bright lemons. So much to see—the blue of sky
and sea. White line of beach, offering an opportunity to fill
each space with words, to take root in the arid soil and grow,
set seed among orange groves, twisted eucalyptus, The desert,
which reminded me of an abandoned parking lot, with its
tumbleweed and Joshua trees, starved moon. But California
had another face, a place of redwood and sequoias. Standing
in their damp half-light, I became a child again, distracted
by the distant sky’s bright mirror, the sun’s familiar face.
Now I’ve settled in, my explorations mostly limited to plate
and page, I’m still trying new ideas, cuisines, sniffing spices
at the Farmer’s market, taking on a shape I didn’t have before.

*

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

Two Poems by Melissa Surrette

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Walking a chair home from the Clark Community Thrift Store

One hypotenuse across
the Saint Peter’s parking lot
was the trip from our apartment
to the thrift store that once
was Monihan’s Pharmacy.
“Have you seen that chair
they have over there?”
My dad swooned on our
trip a few blocks beyond
to Tedeschi’s market
“I’m gonna ask to sit in it.”

Dad oscillates from his couch-
made-bed to a cracked dining
chair to watch the news.
In secondhand socks and shoes,
he skips at the sight of
weighty wooden
slabs for arms (3ft. x 3ft)
sandwiching slightly scratchy cushions,
bistre brown—color of my hair.
Dad’s perfection, kept at bay
“If only I had forty bucks,” he’d say.

“How much do you have?”
Danielle asks.
“I’ll do twenty-five,
if you do fifteen.”

Comfy chair, but more so
comforting to fulfill
Dad’s humble indulgence.
Two teens with summer
jobs and City money.
A flutter from diaphragm
to the back of my nose
when I imagine him in
a tweed-upholstered throne.

“I need a break,”
I sigh to Danielle
and rub blood back into
my throbbing fingers
a few parking spaces
from the sidewalk.

“Twenty bucks and I’ll take
that anywhere you want,”
says a truck driver on Main street.
We wave him off,
pick up our cargo.

“You go girls!” from the woman
who sits at the bus stop, but
never boards. She watches
us shuffle down a mulched slope
and past three doorways.

“For me?” asks my dad
as he helps us labor
down landing stairs
his considerable chair.

*

Two-player Rummy with Mom

A deck split in half
a riffle shuffle
a bridging back together.

Soap opera marathon on
The bureau mounted TV. Mountain
Dew bottle sits on the plastic
tote bucket made side table

to Mom’s king size bed set:
two twin box springs under a
mattress for one.
On her bed, she sits sidesaddle.

I sit on my left ankle. Right leg
dangles, not yet long enough
to touch the rose and cream
rug. Seven cards dealt per person

on Merlot sheets pulled
and tucked taut between
my knee and where she sits
facing me.

Her Five-Star spiral notebook
sits open beside us. She keeps
score between neat lists in
blue ink, strickenthrough to-dos:

Laundromat: Four basketball
jerseys for this week’s game
Family physicals: 3 youngest Thursday,
4 middles Friday.
Food pantry Wednesday:
Request Parmalat milk.
Cash Welfare checks: Stop
by housing authority afterward

*

Originally from Worcester, Massachusetts, Melissa Surrette is currently a PhD student at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) engaging in and researching teacher education. Before that, she earned her Master of Arts in Teaching at Clark University in Worcester, MA. She has contributed chapters to edited volumes such as Qualitative Inquiry in the Present Tense: Writing a New History and in the Demystifying Social Justice Education book series. Melissa has also co-authored a forthcoming article in the “International Review of Qualitative Research”. Melissa is a member of the Poem Works poetry group as well as the Round Table Poetry Workshop.

ONE ART’s 2025 Nominations for The Pushcart Prize

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ONE ART’s 2025 Nominations for The Pushcart Prize

Kari Gunter-Seymour – A History of Fireworks

Ronda Piszk Broatch – The Only Dress You’ll Ever Need

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders – The Flyer

Penelope Moffet – Pirates

Olga Livshin – Blowout

T. R. Poulson – Treasure

*

Learn more about The Pushcart Prize.

Two Poems by David Hanlon

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On coming out

Watch how I Anna’s hummingbird
in disclosing sunlight
my crown & throat
all magenta iridescence
from which I unburden
from which I sing

*

If I saw myself then as I do now

I’d see not a child
flailing
but a baby walrus
already wrinkled
a baby walrus needing
to speed-grow
adult tusks
long & pointed
longer than his own body

I’d see
just how often
he digs them
into the sea ice
of his small life
to make breathing
holes in it
to haul his weighted body
out of those frigid
& predatory waters

*

David Hanlon is a poet from Cardiff, Wales. You can find his work online in many magazines and journals, including Rust & Moth, Barren Magazine, The Lumiere Review & trampset. His first full-length collection Dawn’s Incision was recently published with Icefloe Press. You can follow him on twitter @davidhanlon13 and Instagram @hanlon6944

The Stage by Kate Peper

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The Stage

            He tells her it’s a secret place,
only for her. For them. Just follow me,
he says, and she does, up the pitched river bank.

            Sitting in a hidden dell
they lace fingers and gaze at the willows
dragging their fronds in the water’s silk.

            And when he kisses her,
her body lifts, shifts from solid
to shimmer for the first time.

            It isn’t until they lie down
in the loam she notices plastic forks, chicken
bones and the shrivelled balloon of a condom.

            Now the woman understands
she’s not special but will pretend she is.
As the willowed curtain lifts it reveals

            two actors on a stage of sand.
She even cries a little when the man touches
her cheek and on cue, kisses her eyes.

*

Kate Peper’s chapbook, Dipped In Black Water, won the New Women’s Voices Award from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have been nominated five times for a Pushcart and have appeared in Gargoyle, Green Hills Lantern Review, Pedestal, Rattle, Tar River Review and others. Also a watercolor painter, her work has been featured in The Adroit Journal, phoebe and Nostos. You can read more of her work here: www.peperpoetry.com

Dad Says His Gravestone Will Say He Did What He Had to Do by Charlotte Maiorana

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Dad Says His Gravestone Will Say He Did What He Had to Do

He hates seeing other people’s
vacation photos. Cobblestones,
small plates, good for them.

If their luggage was lost
for three days or they got sick
from street vendors then good.

He’s trying to get to the beach
but the wheelchair won’t fit
in the trunk.

Let the Mustang run her engine
from time to time, he says he doesn’t
want to feel his hip when he runs.

You know, he hopes they aren’t going
to the hospital again. Before the icy
commute he used a hair dryer on the pipes

made sure they didn’t freeze. Mom
thawed dinner when she could still stand
long enough to open the door.

Now every day he’s up at four to check
her CPAP machine; needing sleep less
than needing worry.

He doesn’t want to deal with a barbeque
so he doesn’t grow tomatoes anymore.
Leaves the piano open, plays Celluloid Heroes

after the closing bell, sometimes he thinks
about digging through boxes in the garage
to bring the old accordion out,

hang grandpa’s wedding photo on the wall.
He’s been calling all afternoon.
I put the knife down.

*

Charlotte Maiorana is an American-Italian writer and mother of two young boys. She is a current MFA student at Randolph College and lives in her hometown of Staten Island, New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Thrush Poetry Journal, Querencia Press, The Rumen, and elsewhere. You can find her at charlottemaiorana.substack.com and @charlotteccm on Instagram.

Admission by Livia Meneghin

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Admission

The mourning doves returned this May. Despite
last summer’s shooing & ammonium poured

onto the terrace floor. Despite a ramshackle
bicycle as the only shelter to roost beneath.

They first came the year our home was vacated.
I went north. My sister went south. My mother,

away in her own way, tended to her dying
parents a ten minute drive down the Bronx River.

I admit, I was angry with my mother for leaving
our apartment. The words taste of guilt

because so had I. She chose to stay in her
childhood home instead—where her parents,

one at a time, over countless sleepless nights
& all the love a daughter could give, left her.

When my mother returned, the doves joined her,
knowing she would admit them a nest. Now,

two eggs await life in a shallow swirl of twigs
& dry leaves. We, her daughters, build lives

elsewhere, slowly learn to give her permission
to grieve how she needs, & imagine—

she does not wish to disturb the birds
on the terrace, so she looks out the window, hoping

they will come into view.

*

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Reads Editor. She has won fellowships and awards from Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, the Writers’ Room of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA, she teaches college literature and writing. She is a cancer survivor.

Making Garage Doors by John Davis

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Making Garage Doors

Tell me I wasn’t lowered down to scoop up
buckets of sperm oil, muck among blood
and guts, blurred by tendons and waxy knobs
of bones. Might as well have been swallowed

in the boom of blubber gouging for oil in that
factory—belly of the beast, making garage doors.
Slivers in our fingers, Rodney and I pounded

our mallets—those harpoons we gripped daily.
Might as well have bashed in skulls of whales
the way we pounded mutts into rails

panels into rails more panels more rails.
Might as well have worn oilskins hitched
to our thin bellies, legs sunk into long tombs

so the doors would unfold effortlessly, remote
control so she could back out her BMW, turn
into the glared dimension of the world
sunlight on the garage door smooth as oil.

*

John Davis is the author of Gigs, Guard the Dead and The Reservist. His work has appeared in DMQ Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and Terrain.org. He lives on an island in the Salish Sea and performs in several bands.

Lost by Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Lost
        post-election, 2024

This is where I live now: clutching
a nest of thorns and spent blooms.

Last night, an intruder opened every
window of my home to startling cold.

No wood for fire. No socks or coat.
My closets hold spring dresses, thin

cotton, paltry, owned by another woman.
In this strange country, I search empty

rooms for blankets, matches, candles,
an exile, holding dead flowers. Even

their broken bits I pick up, to clasp
what’s fallen, cradling what’s gone.

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. Say hello through her website or connect through her newsletter, Poetry Inspired.

Two Poems by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Aubade

What do you do when dreams
and memories tangle, flash
scenes of stifling, whispers
of deceit, glimpse of incest?

Where do you draw the line,
unearth the truth when morning comes
and memory breathes fog, draws air?
On waking, a hangover of dread:

decipher the dream,
part the curtain
veiling the stash
of terrors in your head.

*

Peanuts

We all disappoint each other.
Nothing goes the way we hope.

In our secret inner expectation-
making chamber we weave
our dreams: the elephants
and their thick hides, strong tusks
circle the calf we are
huddled in the center of everything
eating our lavish grass and lapping
at a stream-fed turquoise pool.
The herd trumpets our survival,
no one breaks rank. Tough gray
flanks form an impermeable wall.

This is what I want.
Is it too much to ask?

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in Minyan, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which served as the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. In addition, she also frequently collaborates with San Diego artist Judith Christensen, most recently on an installation entitled “Mapping Our Future Selves.”

Grief Drops In by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Grief Drops In
         in memory of my friend

Dinner with your husband–
easy conversation and tall tales,
old-time jazz on the jukebox.
In the center of the table,
a basket of fries to share–
his hand reaching for one,
his ring finger bare.

*

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.

Dear Daughter, by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Dear Daughter,

I see you in the store, rummaging
through a display of tacky hibiscus
hairclips, our town´s new fad
among fourth graders. You ask me
which color bedazzles above
all the rest. I was nine once, too.
I know you want to buy the one
that will garner the most compliments
on the playground, or a nod from a girl
who swatted you out of her path
like a delirious September wasp.
I know the stings you´ll bring home
again and again, deem unbearable.
I see you, shushing me when I speak
too loudly in the language everyone
in Spain is trying to learn. Tweaking
your American accent in English class
to sound like your friends. I know
all the gifts you´ll toss in your closet,
the smile you´ll wipe off your cheeks
like a ruby red lipstick print
when I drop you off half a block
from the school gate. At your age
I, too, tried on seven different attitudes
a week, all of them as becoming
as an elephant beetle. I see the gluten-thick
birthday cakes you can´t taste,
the gapes when you mention your two
moms. I know how you regard your
differences—a weird gang of gargoyles
marring an otherwise beautiful garden.
I want to shout, “You´re wrong!”
Dear daughter, slam the fads
on the counter and tornado away. Wild
your hair into a style that will drop
this decade´s jaw. Catwalk through town
in a hodgepodge, expletives be damned.
Cartwheel past the gatekeepers like
a carnival act. Learn the word for perfection
in 7000 different languages.

*

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

How (Not) to Die by Abby E. Murray

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

How (Not) to Die

She says that today, during recess,
they played dying. Basically, she says,
dying is when all the kids crowd

onto the slide until someone falls
over its side, and you cling to the edge
because the chipped rubber turf below

is death. A friend has to save you,
she says, and if they fail—if you’re lost
to the ground despite the hands

of your friend outstretched—you die.
But, she adds, if you die, you get
to come back as a ghost, climb

up the slide, and pull the socks off
your friend. In other words, you get
to haunt the one who tried hardest

to prevent your demise, take a little
of their warmth with you, leave them
less complete than they were, set

a fraction of their own body beyond
their understanding. And this strikes me
as unfair before it registers as accurate

too—so true, in fact, that it explains
survivor’s guilt in a way that makes
humans seem reasonable. Every ghost

will have its due. No one who lives
will remain completely whole. Friends,
who needs dreams or the cryptic ways

of the unconscious mind when there are
children on playgrounds, processing
what it is to exist in a world built

only by hands that cannot survive
or save it? When I tell my daughter
what I, a grownup, think is fair in life

and death, she looks at me with the same
pity any god might show me, as if to say
thinking has only ever gotten us so far.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.

Three Poems by Jane Edna Mohler

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Rare Beasts

The surface is broken
by my boat,
the hard heads
of turtles, fish stretching
their limits,
and dead branches
that have nothing left to defend.
Then a snake.
I understand
those better-safe-
than-sorry turtles leaping
from their logs; curious carp
that briefly visit our dimension.
But this snake,
this nonchalant
swimmer with such composure
decides that I’m
of no concern.
Yet my heart pounds,
as when holding my breath
for scans of my organs,
or listening for what to expect
while counting backwards.
So when do I get
that devil-may-care spirit,
the glassy eyes
of that scarce species that never worries?
Maybe that snake’s heart
beat a little too fast
when he saw me coming.
And why do I hope that’s true?
Our kind
is always crashing
in the calm between two thorned
shores: the threat
we feel or the threat we are.
I raised my paddle high.

*

Ornithology Lessons

I.

My yard ripples
with blue jays, a throng
of little tyrannosaurs

screeching and shuffling
seed. Before consulting
Peterson’s, I offered

apple and peach parings.
All spurned. Now I know
those jays want berries.

Is it a trivial thing to learn
what pleases
another?

II.

Whenever Mother deemed
some effort worthless,
she’d wave an arm and say,

That’s for the birds.
With no propensity for parenting,
cowbirds leave their eggs

to the care of others. Yet
how those fledglings
strut, it’s all

sweet feed
and what’s right
now.

* 

She’s Always Hungry

Winter arrives with the blank
face of a runway model, languid

and sheer as the chiffon scarf
that drifts across her shoulders.

Bored by the heat of living,
she abhors the goo and mess.

Old German named her
the time of water.

She makes my lake crack
and groan. That crisp

look she gives, so alluring
you’ll ignore the chilly

clues of flat infatuation.
You don’t stand a chance.

An empty retreat that never serves
meals; she wants us to learn

the difference between hunger
and greed. Praise the rare blue sky,

the weak brushstrokes of charcoal
trees, but don’t fall for those sharp

bones that grin from under
her waxen skin. Prepare

a bed of crocuses, anxious
to spring from her grave.

* 

Jane Edna Mohler is the 2020 Bucks County Poet Laureate (Pennsylvania). Recent publications include MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Verse News, and Verse Virtual. Her collection, Broken Umbrellas was published by Kelsay (2019). She is Poetry Editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. www.janeednamohler.com

Three Poems by Renee Williams

~ ONE ART ~ 11 Comments

Bad Boys and Johnny Cash

How many times can you listen
to Folsom Prison Blues
at the request of a whiny five-year-old,
on the drive home from a trip to Florida,
who’s forgotten her Tatters doll,
left at the hotel a hundred miles back,
who’s crying nonstop, still demanding
to listen to Johnny Cash,
stomping and slamming her sticky,
snot-encrusted fists against the back
of the head rest so many times
that everyone in the cars feels
like they are in prison and just wants
to toss her out on the highway?

My Dad caved, went back,
got the doll. Growing up, I’d
cut out photos of Cash,
and stick them on my bedroom walls
because I could never get enough
of the Man in Black.
Probably the start of something not good,
never any good…

My father is to blame for all of this,
for indulging me
and introducing me to motorcycles
and dragging me on the back
of that dilapidated dirt bike
into Snake Holler and having it break down
on us when we ran out of gas
and had to walk home,
Walk of Shame, clean home
to Mom, who wasn’t amused,
just wanting us to wash
off the mud, so we could
have a proper dinner.

The flurry of bad boys hit
until I straight up married a proper fellow,
who became an accountant and had tax season,
but I just wanted to party, so I found
a better one, the love of my life.

We married, and he got a bike,
and then several more,
multiplying like rabbits.
He even got me one
for my own self.

But I couldn’t tell Dad.
Because I knew he’d be jealous,
because he couldn’t ride anymore,
because he thought I was getting
CPR training to save his life,
when I was really taking
my motorcycle safety class.

But I wasn’t there
when the CPR was needed.

When I go to see Dad now,
I’m greeted by Hoss,
the sexton’s Old English bulldog pup,
who nearly knocks me down
with his 70 pounds of bad boy exuberance,
the therapy dog for the ones
who still have imprisoned pulses
who still have teary blues
who still have tattered hearts
walking among the headstones.

*

Unmoored

They say that grief comes in waves,
but I find it lapping at my feet
as ocean waves tease the shore,
ripples small and steady for so long,
until one plows into me,
nearly knocking me off my feet.

Bobbing like a buoy in rough surf
I’m staggering through this life
no longer chained to commitments
and now I don’t know what to do.
Maybe the saddest thing in the world
is a caregiver
who no longer
has anyone to care for.

Tears won’t stop no matter how I try,
but lies come easily.
Everyone will believe I’m just suffering
from those darned allergies, right,
or maybe raging sinuses?
It’s been over a month.
Shouldn’t I be moving on by now?

I seek messages and meaning
in feathers and foliage,
creatures and constellations.
And I am left
as befuddled as I was
when my feet hit the floor
this morning.

*

We Know You Here

Our priest asks us to step into the light,
not to hide in the darkness.
I understand the metaphor,
but the reality horrifies me.
I recoil.

The sun, beautiful muse of goodness,
is not where I belong.
Please leave me here in the dark
and let the messages
come to me. In the shaded woods
illuminated only by moonlight
I am comforted, nurtured, restored.
Deer peek at me from the brush
eyes aflame, yet they do not fear me.
The chorus of spring peepers reminds me
this is my home. Safety is here.
Yes, coyotes prowl these hills at night
but they, too, will avoid me.
Ancient opossums traipse through the lawn
and sometimes a raccoon or rabbit or two
may join them. Nuisances, annoyances,
problems to so many, but here, they have a place.

I dance with Luna moths,
letting them light on my fingertips,
precious butterflies of the night.
Stay with me, I urge them.
The light is not your friend.
It will hurt you as it has me
mutilating and maiming.

But the sunlight beckons me forth
the highest card in the Tarot
the child astride a stallion
beams of light surrounding him.
I am drawn to that beacon of warmth.
I want to bask in those soothing rays.
But it’s an illusion.

I step back into the night and breathe.
Crisp night air fills my lungs.
Stars fall from the sky, as if offering me gifts
to welcome me home.
Stay, they tell me.
We know you here.

*

Renee Williams is from Nelsonville, Ohio. She is a retired English instructor whose poetry has appeared in Of Rust and Glass, Alien Buddha Press zines, Verse-Virtual, Deep South Magazine, Panoply, Impspired, Sein und Werden, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, and Beatnik Cowboy among others. She has written interviews and concert reviews for Guitar Digest, as well. Her photography has been featured in the Corolla Wild Horse Fund calendars, the Santa Fe Review, Moss Piglet, Anti-Heroin Chic, Swim Press, Lumineire as well as several others. She enjoys spending time with her family and dogs; she takes orders from her cranky cat who bosses her around daily.

Two Poems by Nicole Caruso Garcia

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Song of Solidarity
        For Dustin Brookshire, after reading his book To the One Who Raped Me

No matter I’m a woman, you’re a man,
and yours hurt you one night and mine one morning;
although we’ve yet to meet, our poems touch:

We hate to say the word…yet say it.
Why didn’t we fight back against those traitors?
When nailed upon a cross, it’s hard to run.

How is it we eschew the label victim,
yet crown ourselves with something sharp as shame?
How can we tell our parents we are stillborn?

Some artifacts must burn (for you, the mattress);
are these our proxies for self-immolation?
A smile, a joke, a lyric, or a movie

may be a landmine, yet we’re told, Calm down.
We can’t, not with calm so close to claim.
So let us conjure no more images

of dogs, for even Fido learns to yield
to No, a word conditioned out of some men.
They’re neither dogs nor monsters. Just ordinary.

Now are you not self-salvaged, welded, wrought
from wreckage, as am I, a makeshift dreadnought?
Archimedes says, displace your trauma.

It costs so dearly, the luxury of softness,
so while we sleep, our red, red books take aim.
New lovers learn our sovereign terrain.

*

After Explaining to My Mother Why We Need
Solar Eclipse Glasses, I Recall My Childhood
        For my mother, April 8, 2024

In trouble, dead to rights, at first I would
avert my gaze, not out of deference
when, not unlike a beautiful Medusa,
you’d stop and grab me by the sassy chin:
Look at me when I’m talking to you.
Obedient, I stared into the sun:
the sun so very disappointed in me,
the sun that wished to low-key murder me.

Your glowing hydrogen and helium
a constant source of warmth, you helped me grow,
yet gave no quarter from your gamma rays.
All other punishments weren’t half as wise.
Mother star, you forged me, don’t forget.
There’s no stare that I can’t meet now. No sweat.

*

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

I hear you can drown in just an inch of water by Shana Ross

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

I hear you can drown in just an inch of water

I get caught up in my own shit and text my friend
on the anniversary of her rape. She calls immediately.
I answer and she gives me grief. It feels good
to yell at you right now so thanks. My friend has become
a tin can and string. Telephone, telephone. Better this
than a living body. All that voice can pass through.
She says fuck off I’m playing video games today
because they can be won. A body needs to remember
what victory feels like. My friend says I do not
have time for your petty bullcrap when she sees
my litany of paper cuts and office pissing matches,
milk gone bad and who will find time to buy more and
why is it me, the plumber come and gone with expensive
warnings, a literal stubbed toe and my hand out for sympathy.
She says are you fucking kidding me right now?  But also
she will listen if I want to scream into the phone – no words
from me, no reply from her. I shrug and offer the same terms
back, and yes, she wants to wail. To be heard, even
when there is nothing she can say. I take in the scream,
dissolve it into my blood. My heart pumps salt and sour,
like a pickle plugged in and lit up, tinfoil compressing
in your molars as you chew it like gum. She hangs up first.

*

Shana Ross is a recent transplant to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty Six Territory. Qui transtulit sustinet. Her work has recently appeared in Great Weather for MEDIA, Ilanot Review, Ninth Letter, Quarter After Eight and more. She is the winner of the 2022 Anne C. Barnhill prize and the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition. She prefers walking in the woods to social media, and budgets her time accordingly.

Weird Up Your Language: A Workshop with Grant Clauser

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

 

Weird Up Your Language
Instructor: Grant Clauser
Wednesday, December 11, 7:00pm Eastern
Duration: 2 hours
Price: $25 (payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp)

Workshop Description:

As poets, sometimes it feels as if we’re stuck in the mud, unable to get out of our imaginative rut. That’s when it pays off to stir things up, get weird. In this workshop, we’ll explore techniques to get outside of our routine patterns, make strange connections, find insights in incongruities, and create metaphors from mud. These techniques are great for starting new poems or adding fuel to drafts you’re stuck on.

If Only by Shaun R. Pankoski

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

If Only

If only
someone would invent love
in powdered form.
I’d sprinkle that shit
everywhere.
I’d cut big, fat lines of it,
invite everyone to the party.
I’d put it in the food,
the water, in the gas tanks.
Hell, I’d make bombs with it,
drop it from planes.
I’d do anything, anything
to make us love
one another
again.

*

Shaun R. Pankoski (she/her) is a poet most recently from Volcano, Hawaii. A retired county worker and two time breast cancer survivor, she has lived on both coasts as well as the Midwest as an artist’s model, modern dancer, massage therapist and honorably discharged Air Force veteran. A 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared here, Quartet, SWIMM, Thimble, Mackinaw Journal and MockingHeart Review, among others. She was selected as a finalist by Lefty Blondie Press for her chapbook manuscript, Tipping the Maids in Chocolate: Observations of Japan.

Gone by Barbara Eknoian

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Gone

The flowers are disappearing now
that it’s fall. Soon my property
will be covered with leaves, gone
will be the cheery yellow flowers.

My two grandsons have returned
to their home in Tennessee.
It was a short visit, but a happy one.
I make their beds until next time.

My oldest grandson has scheduled
his wedding for next autumn;
he has been here since he’s eleven.
The time will fly, and he’ll be gone.

I fell in June and broke my hip.
I’m alone most of the time. I’m learning
to walk again, but my phone stopped
ringing with invitations to go anywhere.

Hopefully, in time family and friends
will return, except for my son,
who I lost without warning.
He can’t return like the flowers.

*

Barbara Eknoian’s work has appeared in Pearl, Cadence Collective, Redshift, and Your Daily Poem. Recently, her New & Selected Poems, More Jerkustances, has been published by Editor Eric Morago. She lives in La Mirada, CA, with her daughter, grandson, two dogs, and two cats (one is mild and the other is full of mischief). There’s never a dull moment at her house.

Small Rocks by Ann E. Michael

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Small Rocks

At the park’s playground
I fumed in my loneliness
sad and angered
at what, I can no longer recall.
But I remember the way
I flung small rocks
across the field
the ache in my right arm
a relief, an expulsion,
pitching away at the fury
that gnawed at my neck
and grappled with my ribs—
jealousy, sorrow, fear.
Wildly I whirled my unspent
anger until one of those
quartzite missiles struck
my sister’s best friend
behind the ear.
How the rage in me emptied
my body drained into
stillness, cold with horror,
shuddered at what
anger does, knowing I
could not undo that damage.

*

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 David B. Prather

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Caring for Someone Who Won’t Care for Themselves

My parents drop by again today,
and when I say today, I mean to put you in my frame
of mind, this moment. My father
              doesn’t even come into the house.
It’s the middle of summer. It’s morning,
and it’s already ninety degrees.
              He sits in the breezeway
while my mother opens the kitchen door
and enters. She’s just had her hair cut,
but she tugs on a few strands that were missed.
I get the scissors and clip the strays.
Have you ever trimmed your mother’s hair?
I foresee a time when this will be a weekly show
of affection, which will then become washing
              and toweling and brushing
every day. Putting her purse on the counter,
the one I bought her for Christmas,
she tells me my father still won’t take care of himself
the way he should. And when he’s my father, I know,
              and I’m sure you understand,
my mother is frustrated with him.
She wants him to live as long as possible.
I’ve begun to think of the world without my father.
I can’t say when the clock in my brain started
that countdown. Are you the kind of person
              who wakes before the alarm?
I have a habit of tapping the snooze button,
sleeping through those warnings.
I don’t want to imagine the worst, but I am unable to stop.
My mother says he’s troublesome, that he ignores
his own heart, the way it beats like a trapped bird.
How is your heart these days? Mine is a mourning dove.
              Mine calls out under the threat of rain.

*

When my mother asks why

I spend the entire day in bed,
I tell her I’m a dog who’s lost
his master, my paws stretched

across the grave, unmoved
when called by name, unresponsive
to that come-home whistle.

I tell her I am a tree fallen
in the forest, heartwood rotted out,
food for the parasites that brought me down.

I tell her the blankets are too heavy,
made of an element so dense
they drag me down

to the center of the earth.
I tell her the air is so oppressive, a giant
pressing down on my body, this body

I don’t even know anymore.
I tell her I want to be done
with this life, but I don’t want to be done,

but I do, then I don’t, and I do, I don’t.
I tell her I don’t know anyone
who wouldn’t want a day alone

under the covers with their dreams
tangled up in the sheets.
I tell her I’m adrift on a raft

over the deepest trench in the ocean,
and all around me is only horizon,
the line that divides one life from another.

*

David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2023), and the forthcoming Bending Light with Bare Hands (Fernwood Press). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, Gyroscope Review, etc. He lives in Parkersburg, WV. Website: www.davidbprather.com

It’s Going to Be Okay by Abby E. Murray

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

It’s Going to Be Okay

I know it will be okay
because NASA has confirmed
Stephen Hawking was right
and the world will end
probably by the year 2600,
which means we are celebrating
the birth of our children
into oblivion with instructions
to make their own children
in the path of oblivion,
as if to hope someone’s children
at some point, and therefore
all of us, will live to be
obliterated, but the children
keep being born, keep entering
the world as if it is a relief
to finally be here, screaming
from the terrible joy of it,
and we all know children
carry wisdom from a universe
none of us can revisit
or reclaim, where our pre-sight,
pre-form, pre-human, pre-vengeance
and pre-war selves may still exist
as the perfectly contented
and eternally miserable dust
of stars, and the way back
to that place is printed inside
a pocket of the brain that’s been
sewn shut one fatal stitch
at a time, one earth-day
at a time by a divine and quiet
needle that does not ask
our permission, which explains
how we begin as children
but grow into grimness
then end up desperately needing
to understand how okay it will be,
and I know it will be okay
because there was a double rainbow
glowing against a heavy storm
as it fattened and purpled
over my city this morning
and all my friends took pictures
before the power outages
and fallen trees were noted
on living maps and grids,
and now we have proof
of the irreverence of light waves
and the indiscriminate
appearance of hope to look at
on dying screens tonight,
and I know it will be okay
because I overheard a crying man
in the lobby of an animal hospital
telling the shivering one-eyed dog
beside him that it would be okay,
he promised, it would be okay,
and when I asked what the dog’s
name was, the man said
my name, said Abby,
and isn’t that ominous,
isn’t it meaningful whether I like it
or not, and isn’t it true
that it happened and my dog self
was alive and visibly comforted
by his words, shivering less,
maybe awake more, loved more,
even though dogs are dual citizens
of this universe and the one
we can’t reach back to, where
wisdom is still just another type
of common matter, which is to say
dogs—animals—consistently know
it is not okay, has never been okay
will not become okay
and yet they gather with us
in the path of disaster after disaster,
purring or playing or burrowing
happily into our warmth
because it is not survival
to pursue anything otherwise,
and I know it will be okay
because I keep dreaming
that my daughter and I are falling
through the atmosphere toward
the very real stone earth
and when she yells what’s happening to us
I take two equally crucial steps:
first, I put my body between hers
and oblivion, and second, I shout
through the guiltless but roaring silence
that it will be okay
because even in my dreams
I am learning that another answer
would be death before impact
and I contain the residue
of asteroids, I am part animal,
so are you, and so is my child,
and we have been going on
for millennia through the awful
and the sometimes okay
without ever knowing how.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.

Three Poems by Justin Carter

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Bachelor Party Dunk Contest

My bachelor party wasn’t at some
         seedy strip club or

a casino across the Louisiana border.
         I got BBQ with old friends

who drove six hours
         for short rib Frito pies.

My wife was there, though I suppose
         she wasn’t my wife yet. It wasn’t

the conventional thing.
         A craft beer bar in town

was having a dunk contest
         in its side alley

so we headed over to see
         if any of us could dunk. The rim

was low enough for me to dream,
         but high enough that my best attempt

found my fingers just grazing
         the fringe of the net.

None of us made the final.
         Not that we expected to.

I had this whole plan: pull my phone out,
         mid-dunk, take a selfie

of that triumphant moment. Maybe,
         I thought, the judges

would give me extra points
         for the trick. But I couldn’t

make that leap—sometimes the mind
         gets ahead of the body.

*

Everyone In Des Moines Wants To Talk About Caitlin Clark

& they don’t want to talk about the dissonance
of loving women’s sports at a time
when the governor is pushing the whole state
to the right, an acceleration
toward limiting so many things. This guy
walks up to me in a bar & asks if I
can tell him something he doesn’t know
about Caitlin Clark. I could have said
anything. I could have told him
that birds shoot from her hands when she releases
the logo three. Could have said
she knocked one in off the jumbotron.
Everything’s believable if you have
the right subject matter. My in-laws
complain that the game is on ESPN tonight
& they don’t have ESPN. We could fix that—
I could log them in so they could watch
what might be her collegiate swan song,
but I’m not sure they want that,
to potentially witness her end. No one
does. On Twitter, the sports business guy
makes another uninformed post about NIL
like that might change something,
a different decision. His words
fork no lightning. Tell me, the man says again
because I have stood there & said nothing.

* 

The ROMCO Super Late Model Series

I told my father I wanted to be a racer
at a car show in Houston,
which of course we couldn’t afford,

but we could afford the free tickets
one booth was giving out to something
called the ROMCO Super Late Model Series,

which was running at a track
on the northwest side of the city. That place
had the best cheeseburger I’ve still

ever eaten, my first onion bun. “Play
That Funky Music” blared
from a busted speaker. My parents

made friends with one driver’s wife.
I can’t tell you who won,
but after the checkered flag, when we went

back to the garage, that driver let me
sit in his car &, for a moment,
it felt like dreams might

be attainable. What’s it matter
that he’d finished near the back.
That we’d go there once more,

to see him run an even bigger race
& he’d finish worse than before.
He gave me a signed hat

for the 18-wheeler parts company
he ran up in Oklahoma. Years later,
I was watching a documentary

about a man & his tigers,
& in the background, that hat,
& I thought about that onion bun.

*

Justin Carter is the author of Brazos (Belle Point Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.

Three Poems by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments 





I close my eyes

                                      and I see him 
wearing a pale-green hospital gown, ready 
to receive my kidney. A forever hug and
our See ya after the surgery, I love you. I
close my eyes and see him wearing a black
rented tuxedo, fighting tears to usher me into
my new life as a wife. I close my eyes and 
he is sitting in the front row of my dance 
recital beaming for his little hippity-hoppity 
tapdancing frog. I close my eyes, and he is 
telling me, in that heartbreaking tone, how 
I’ve disappointed him. I close my eyes, and he is
wearing a smile of approval and boasting how 
proud I make him. I close my eyes, and he is
wearing that crocheted, beer-can hat I made
for him in Girl Scouts, trying to put the worm 
on the hook at the father-daughter fish rally. I
close my eyes and he’s holding his pink swaddled
girl for the very first time and handing out cheap
cigars, announcing to a roomful of strangers he has
a new “tax deduction,” with his trademark dry wit. 
I close my eyes and he’s naming me after the first 
girl he ever kissed. I close my eyes. I close my eyes. 
I close my eyes. I keep trying to forget the memory
that comes rushing when my eyes open—the one
where he’s wearing a dark suit, in a casket, and I’m 
tucking a goodbye poem into his pocket.

*
 
Two Questions

           Fully aware that there is no adequate answer. 
            We offer a tattered, inadequate little bouquet of language…
                                    —George Bilgere, Poetry Town 


When they learn he lived for two years 
after the transplant, they always ask me 
the same two questions: Was it worth it? 
Do you have any regrets? 
                                            And every time, 
I am gobsmacked. Such audacity slaps me 
like February wind whipping the Mississippi 
under the old Eads Bridge. And then, I see
the innocent curiosity in their eyes. How
could they know?— 
			           About that day we spent 
at Butterfly House, Dad’s first summer sporting 
my kidney like a new pair of Bermuda shorts. How 
when he tried on the silly caterpillar cap, I giggled 
like a four-year-old little girl. Or the home-run taste 
of Budweiser at our last Cardinal game when Holliday 
rounded third base. 
                               How when confessing his mistakes, 
he found forgiveness in my eyes, and could finally drop 
the stone he carried in his heart pocket. 
                                                                   Or how success 
of the operation isn’t measured by mere years. Rather, 
by grains of sand, each one adding to the castle a girl built 
with her dad, how the low tide of his passing could never 
wash it away. 
                       An old man walks into the room. With him—
the scent of my father’s aftershave. 

*

 
Tomato

She kneels before her altar, this
modest garden box of leftover
lumber, filled with entangled 
varietals of heirloom fruit. Each orb 
lush with blush-a-bursting, begging 
to be plucked. A plant’s desire to share 
the juicy tangy-sweet, that it alone
could offer in this sacred moment
under a blistering sun. When she carries
one to her kitchen, she brings generations
worth of struggle and adaptation, not
unlike its Cherokee namesake—its purple
bruise of heartache and a fullness ripe 
with the tenacity of survival. A single
slice brought to her tongue with a trail
of salt left upon a cutting board. Her tears
fall for this harvest. Her love no longer
beside her, to relish this bounty with her. 

*

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poems have appeared worldwide in literary journals including ONE ART, Calyx, Eunoia Review, Naugatuck River Review, Poemeleon, Sheila-na-gig, About Place Journal, and Snapdragon, to name a few. She is the author of What She Was Wearing, and her manuscript Pockets was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest. She’s co-founder of The Poetry Box press and managing editor of The Poeming Pigeon. Shawn is a proud mother of three and Nana to one darling baby girl. She shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon. 



			

	


				
					


	

		
Abecedarian for the Friend with Chronic Soul Injury by Agnieszka Tworek
	

				

			 ~ ONE ART			 ~ 4 Comments					

				

		
Abecedarian for the Friend with Chronic Soul Injury


Although albatrosses’ wings are covered with soot and oil,

Bears wheeze dreaming of bulletproof bones,

Castaways crave the freedom of clouds,

Dreams you raised have been plucked,

Extricate yourself from fear’s arms.

Forgive yourself for wrong turns and falls.

Grow gardenias, zinnias, and geraniums.

Hide the hints of light in an unbreakable vault.

Ice the bruised areas on the feverish earth.

Jot down the lark’s morning song on your palm.

Kick back a ball to a lonely kid in the park.

Listen to waves while lighthouses beckon toward the lost boats.

Make marionettes out of magnolia leaves and linen threads.

Name all the trees on your daily walks.

Orient yourself toward the sun even when it’s camouflaged by gray.

Praise the tenacity of perennial plants.

Quiet the quivering poplar’s twigs with your touch.

Remember your way home even when your home is no longer there.

Serenade your worries to sleep.

Try to learn a poem by heart each month.

Unlock the cage with your past and release it into the wild.

Visit headstones forgotten in the tall grass.

Wave to a woman sitting in front of her house.

X-ray humanity and strive to heal its heart.

Yield the way to bees because they came here first.

Zoom in on hope despite, despite, despite…


*


Agnieszka Tworek was born in Lublin, Poland. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Rattle (Poets Respond), The Shore, Third Wednesday, Mobius, Lake Effect, The Indianapolis Review, and in other journals.

			

	


				
					


	

		
Take Me There by Andreas Treki Dohtdong
	

				

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Take Me There


There are no asylums for the restless souls

Lost in a world not of their own.

Half a universe away

There could be a town

Where all our dreams blossom

Like some rare wildflowers spreading

In between all the shrubs and space invading trees.

There, where each spot of light is not fought for

But given by some guiding hand,

Take me there.

Where a new sun births a new love,

Not of this earth,

But of something more.


*


Andreas Treki Dohtdong was born and raised in the city of Shillong, Meghalaya, India. He is a member of the Khasi community. Some of his favourite poets are Ovid, Auden, Rilke and Cavafy. He is an aspiring writer and filmmaker.

			

	


				
					


	

		
Two Poems by Heather Swan
	

				

			 ~ ONE ART			 ~ 4 Comments					

				

		
What the Potter Knows


The way water bends the stem

of the daffodil as you

look through the vase

to the window where

the yard has suddenly

filled with birds––the doves

who only eat seeds

from the ground, and clouds

of sparrows who move together

suddenly like the ripples that

form on water after you

throw the stone––


Believe it––there is a different way

to know and see.


The woman with clay

in her hands and the sea

in her eyes knows more

than the man who believes

the daily kaleidoscope

of numbers spooling across

the screens are what to be

banking on. She spins

the wheel, a tale not

of woe, in spite of it all. Watch

as the birds return and return to her

as she bends down briefly

to touch the head of a violet

rising from the uneven ground.


*


Your Grandfather Loved Birds My Mother Said


In the dark, he’d wake his daughters

and lead them to the pickup truck,

hand them hot cocoas,

and drive them to the edge

of the arboretum to find birds

they didn’t know the names of

that he needed like stitches

to hold his day together, bright bits

of halcyon beauty.


This, rather than fold

under the weight of the war

he’d endured while the others

in his ski troup died in the same

room he had to hide in to

survive. So many days with

their bodies disappearing until

finally someone came for him.


As girls, they did not

understand this need

to get there at first light

to hear that fabric of song.

Years later, when they poured

bird seed into feeders to

invite the brightness, the flight,

the miracles, they understood:


It is worth it,

despite the horror,

to be alive another day.


*


Heather Swan is a poet and nonfiction writer. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Hopper, ONE ART, Terrain, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, and Cold Mountain. Her most recent collection Dandelion was released from Terrapin Books in 2023. Her first book, A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), published in 2020, was a finalist for both the ASLE Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. Her nonfiction book Where Honeybees Thrive (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. A companion book, Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, was just released in May 2024. She has been the recipient of the August Derleth Poetry Award, the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Best Chapbook Award, the Wisconsin Center for the Book Bookmark Award, the Martha Meyer Renk Fellowship in Poetry at UW Madison, and an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing at UW Madison.

			

	


				
					


	

		
Two Poems by Heather Kays
	

				

			 ~ ONE ART			 ~ 2 Comments					

				

		
Never Yours


They call me monster,

stone-hearted, serpentine queen—

but look deeper.

I was once tender, soft,

until the world taught me

hardness was survival.


Medusa, they say,

cursed by gods and scorned by men,

but what of the girl who loved?

What of the woman left shattered

beneath the weight of cruel desire?

The snakes are my protection,

not my punishment.

I did not turn men to stone,

I merely reflected what was already there.


I see Lilith in the shadows,

cast out for her refusal to bow.

A woman who dared to claim

her body as her own,

her voice as more than a whisper.

She chose to be free—

they called it rebellion,

I call it righteous.


Eve, they say, started it all,

but what choice did she have

in a garden full of silence?

Her bite was a hunger

for more than Eden’s cage—

it was her way to know herself.

In her shame, I see strength.

In her sin, I find salvation.

She did not fall,

she rose.


And then there’s Pandora,

blamed for every sorrow.

They never speak of the hope

she clutched in her trembling hands,

the last thing she saved

when all else was lost.

Even in chaos, she chose light.


We, the women of darkness,

the sisterhood of the misunderstood,

the ones they fear but never know,

We bear the weight of their myths,

yet we are so much more.


Medusa’s gaze wasn’t meant to harm,

but to hold the world accountable.

Lilith’s flight wasn’t defiance,

but the first act of courage.

Eve’s apple wasn’t betrayal,

but the taste of freedom.

Pandora’s box wasn’t her curse—

it was her power.


Call us monsters,

call us wicked,

but know we are heroes

in a story you’ve never learned to read.


You call us cursed,

but we are creators.

You name us temptresses,

yet it is you who are tempted.

We never sinned for you,

we simply sinned.


How do your sins make you human…

and our sins make us villains?

Can you taste the hypocrisy in your judgments?


We are not your scapegoats,

not your nightmares,

not your excuses.


We are the ones who stood,

broke the silence,

chose the fire over the chains.

We are the breath of storm winds,

the hands that tilt the scales.

Each of us, a force untold,

each of us, a reckoning.


We are Medusa,

we are Lilith,

we are Eve,

we are Pandora.

Our stories are not your warnings—

They are your reminders

that we were never yours to name.


*


The Matador’s Skin


My former stepfather is a bull of a man.

Filled with rage and misunderstanding —

He stomps, breaks, and smashes,

Never fulfilled by the carnage. Always craving more.


I tried to play matador.

I put on my bravest face and waved a red flag,

Trying to coax that bull away from my mother and siblings.

I purposefully wore a target,

Hoping my distraction and subterfuge

Might save the rest of my family some hurt.


Every bruise a declaration of war,

My skin now the only ground left to fight on.

Beneath the surface, the fault lines tremble,

Waiting for the next eruption, the next battle scar.

Blood pooled beneath the skin like silent rebellions,

Each one a promise that peace was never an option.


I am not the kind of woman

Who wants to hold hate in her heart.

I want to forgive, to grow, to love.

But I can’t love or forgive a bull of a man

Who treated my family like a china shop

He lived to destroy.


*


Heather Kays memoir/family saga, Pieces of Us, explores her mother Emma Mae’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her upcoming YA novel, Lila’s Letters, follows a young woman finding strength and healing through unsent letters. Writing has been her passion since she was 7, and she also runs The Alchemists, an online writing group. Heather enjoys discussing storytelling, complex narratives, and the balance between creativity and marketing.

			

	


				
					


	

		
Forgotten Landscape by Joan McNerney
	

				

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Forgotten Landscape


I am driving down a hill

without name on an

unnumbered highway.


This road transforms into

a snake winding around

coiled on hairpin turns.


See how it hisses though this

long night. Why am I alone?


At bottom of the incline

lies a dark village strangely

hushed with secrets.


How black it is. How difficult

to find what I must discover.


My fingers are tingling cool, smoke

combs the air, static fills night.


Continuing to cross gas lit streets

encountering dim intersections.


Another maze. One line

leads to another. Dead ends

become beginnings.


Listening to lisp of the road.

My slur of thoughts sink as

snake rasps grow louder.


See how the road slithers.

What can be explored? Where

can it be? All is in question.


*


Joan McNerney’s poetry is published worldwide in over thirty-five countries in numerous literary magazines. She has received four Best of the Net nominations. The Muse in Miniature, Love Poems for Michael, and At Work are available on Amazon. A new title Light & Shadows has recently been released.

			

	


				
					


	

		
After the News of Your Passing by Bunkong Tuon
	

				

			 ~ ONE ART			 ~ 6 Comments					

				

		
After the News of Your Passing


1.

I went out of my way to tell people about you:

                                                Do you remember him?

He hired me straight out of graduate school.

        What did this refugee kid from Cambodia know

about teaching at a private liberal arts college?

        He must have seen in me a fawn trapped

in a well, eyes pleading, crying

        in the cold dank dark. He had my office

next to his. Every morning, we talked about classes,

        students, he reminding me of the good things

I already had: a wife and, years later, kids.

        He was my wisdom coffee, waking me up

with a clarity of mind to the magic

        and the good work before us.

He continued to teach in retirement.

        That was his calling. Kind teacher.

I told people, man,

        that man could disarm a bomb with his humor.

And he could converse on any topic

        meandering over valleys and rivers

then turning back to the original points

        with a new-found clarity.


Afterward you felt seen, lifted & loved.


2.

I was almost gleeful,

        eerily excited

to talk about you after your passing.

        Was it my way of honoring you?

My way of keeping you alive—

        Which has always been the domain of stories,

of poetry, and of songs?

        Was the mind in denial?

Whatever it was, it certainly beat

        driving alone to a grocery store at night,

pulling over on the side of the road,

        weeping in the dark


saying your name over and over.


*


Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize–winning poet, and professor who teaches at Union College in Schenectady, in NY. His work has appeared in World Literature Today, Copper Nickel, New York Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, diode poetry, Verse Daily, among others. He is the author of several poetry collections. In 2024, he published What Is Left, a Greatest Hits chapbook from Jacar Press, and Koan Khmer, his debut novel from Northwestern UP/Curbstone Books. He lives with his wife and children in Upstate New York.

			

	


				
					


	

		
The Election
	

				

			 ~ ONE ART			 ~ 9 Comments					

				

		
After the presidential election on November 5th, regardless of the outcome, ONE ART will publish poems the following day, the day after that, and the day after that.


In certain ways, November 6th will be just another day. So will January 6th, 2025. So will January 7th. Each day, there will be poetry. That much I can guarantee.


Mark Danowsky

Editor

ONE ART

			

	


				
					


	

		
Two Poems by Heidi Seaborn
	

				

			 ~ ONE ART			 ~ 4 Comments					

				

		
I’ve Been Thinking About Love


as I read the news

gunning its engine


as it muscles

over the streets at night


as my neighbor tends

the rare rose of four percent

remission hope


as her wife touches

the belly of her cancer

and considers death—


as the soft sand of land

beneath our homes

slowly erodes.


Yes, I’ve been thinking

how love arrives like a bird

then becomes


a burden—

difficult to hold,

impossible to let go. Yet


as the world howls,

it is the bird I hear.


*


On the September Day I Help My Mother Move into Senior Living


Am I too quick? The days already foreshortened.

A glass of rosé passé.


We unwrap each plate, goblet, tureen—

a final shelving.


Yet, a vase of dahlias—.

Light traces the rooms


we sift through like memories.

The gleaming silver tea set—


heirloom doomed for crucible and torch.

I lift a file box marked IMPORTANT.


For when I die you say—

I place it beyond


reach. Then fold the linens,

make the bed, carry the empty boxes


out into a tarnished evening—

returning to the shimmer of you.


*


Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She’s the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Agni, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times of London, Poetry Northwest, Plume, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi degrees from Stanford and NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com

			

	


				
					


	

		
Omnipotence by Loralee Clark
	

				

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Omnipotence


The dress, a hollyhock curling around itself,

blossoming on the bedroom floor

as the raw energy of death wakes

like frost slipping into a room;

morning’s companion, a hook of star.


How comforting to know we are the same,

boxes without companion lids.

Alike after all; tired of being emptied

like a pocket, a poor woman’s wallet.


*


Loralee Clark is a writer who grew up learning a love for nature and her place in it, in Maine. She resides in Virginia now as a writer and artist. Her Instagram is @make13experiment. She has a book forthcoming, “Solemnity Rites”, with Prolific Pulse Press LLC and has been published most recently in Choeofpleirn Press, Wingless Dreamer, Washington Writer’s Publishing House, Heart on Our Sleeves, The Taborian, Superpresent, Thimble Literary Magazine, Impossible Task, Studio One, Cannon’s Mouth, and Big Windows Review.

			

	


				
					


				
					


	

		
These hints and clues by Lee Potts
	

				

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These hints and clues


might have led me

like a river if I had been able

to stitch them together:


Unpacking after

a drawn-out journey

to find nothing

was lost or left behind.


How little thought we gave

to cutting out everything

the last owner planted.


The stiff rope knot

stuck in my gut

most mornings.


The spider plant cuttings

that would not drop roots

into a jar of water.


Finding myself

holding onto prayer

like a kite string

beside the sea.


*


Lee Potts is founder and editor-in-chief of Stone Circle Review. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, UCity Review, Firmament, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He is the author of two chapbooks – And Drought Will Follow (Frosted Fire Press, 2021) and We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning (Bottlecap Press, 2024). He lives just outside of Philadelphia with his wife and daughter.