Month: December 2024

For This, I Walk Outside by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

For This, I Walk Outside

Not to escape the world,
but to be more wholly in it.
Sharp cold stings my cheeks—
not like a slap, but like the thrilling burn
of whiskey as it blazes down the throat—
the kind of wild aliveness
that brooks no choice
but to wake up to life,
to champion it, to know life
as the most wondrous thing
even as I steep in the ugliness
we humans commit.
This is what life asks of us.
I walk outside to be more wholly here,
here the way the Stellar’s jay is here.
Even on the coldest day,
its every fluffing, every peck, every head bob,
every flight is in service to life.
It’s never confused about its purpose.
I want to be in service.
Outside, everything is teacher:
the cold, the snow, the bird, the day,
this fallible, fabulous human race,
this improbable, beautiful planet in space.
To serve life, I must inhabit it wholly
and be inhabited by it, too.
As if it all could end tonight.
As if it goes on forever.

*

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.

Late Afternoon by Michelle Bitting

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Late Afternoon

Beyond the limits
of longing
a patchwork
of shadows and light
because winter
and a window
and the other side
of the pane
a frozen sun
its trembling, dappled display
where leaves are dropping
what you have been
you have
the potential to become
again, I said
I want to travel the world
he said
imagining the country
a French chateau
a girl in a room
lifting her chapeau
thick with books
thick as a forest
lullaby
and thought
an alchemy
warming his cheeks
to Rosicrucian
where I have seen fire
inside the walls
and a message
burning
it says— thou art God

*

Michelle Bitting is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in July 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Catamaran, SWWIM, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

Four Poems by Whitney Waters

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Extraterrestrial

June bugs swarm the grass like a platoon
of drunk helicopters. Metallic jade,
oil slick. When their bodies ricochet
from my forehead, my chest, they fly
on as if we didn’t touch, as if one being
is the same as the next, all one swirling
cacophony. Alien ship, alien skin.
How unburdened they are
in flight. Behind the wing
of my shoulder, a recurring pinch, knife
that slices clean to the other side
some days. My only relief is for my love
to dig his thumb into the edge of the blade,
one pain alleviating the other. The muscle’s slide
and recoil. How badly we want to be pressed
into where it most hurts.
                                               Most days I cry
at little things— the Olympics, podcasts,
pop songs, the fact that night comes
on earlier and earlier as August closes.
I watch the women’s marathon—hours
of arms and limbs shimmering with effort
and elation—and when one woman bursts
forth in the last minute, dodges
the elbow, breaks the tape, I think
this is what it means to disregard
pain for flight, and I’m all teary as if
I’m the one who’s won something. Here
is my body— common, earthbound.
This world is abundant in disaster.
Drape me in iridescence. Make me that green.

*

Letter to the Daughter I Don’t Have

I don’t want you afraid of this world. I don’t want you to fear men or copperhead bites or AK 47s or dark parking garages or cancer. I don’t want you careful. I want the bad things of the world to ricochet off you like you’re made of steel. I don’t want you made of steel. I want you riverwater. I want you sunny 70 degree days. I want you oceans and orcas and hawksbill turtles and red wolves. I want you feeding the sea turtles salad. I want you reveling fresh-picked blackberries. I want you swimming through coral reefs and florescent blue fish. Did you know more than 90% of coral reefs are expected to die in my lifetime? I want you to call out of work to watch ducks dive and reemerge. I want you to quit your job. I want you to have truly great sex. I don’t want you to know you’ll never exist. That you had a chance to exist, but I eliminated it. Or how many other animals soon won’t exist. This is not an apology. Forgive me. I don’t want you small and fragile. I don’t want you suckling or tottering. I don’t want the bulbous belly, my skin pulled taught over your own. The morning sickness. My insides tearing open. The sleepless nights. The heavy breasts. I like my breasts as they are, small pale slopes. I want you to know you have a name, a secret name I call you in my head. And perhaps, I want you to tell me that it isn’t scary not to exist. That it’s not dark there.

*

My mother would have loved feeding you her deviled eggs

and you would have loved eating them— southern style,
insides milky buttercups sprinkled with paprika, cradled
in her handmade blue ceramic platter— how proud

she was of that platter, how it matched her kitchen.
She would have delighted at how many you scarfed down,
would send you home with all the leftovers—

potato cheese casserole, country ham and biscuits, asked
what can I fix you and you sure you had enough? She’d refill
your glass with anything you wanted, sweet tea,

whiskey, wine. My mother would have loved your appetite
for southern cooking, for butter and meat, everything her daughter
did not would not touch. She would not have to ask what can I make

that you’ll eat, because you would gladly eat everything
she heaped on your plate. She would have said so tall
so handsome those shoulders why didn’t you bring

this one home sooner? Sooner—the word that echoes back
at me, and I want to answer, longer. Let’s stay out here longer—
we’ll sit on the back porch in the suspended evening,

the hummingbirds will sip sweet nectar, the magnolias
will bloom, the September sky will be blameless.
My plate, still full. I’ve asked for too much.

*

Resourceful Woman

         She is also just a very good, plain, resourceful woman.
         – Sylvia Plath on “Lady Lazarus”

My mother was on the cusp
of forty, and I was ten when
I found her lying stiff
on the bed in the light
of the lampshade,
her featureless face, fine-lined, teeth
straight and full of fillings, vomit-stained
white bowl and bottle of pills
on the nightstand, her chest, rounded
and hard as a seashell—

I did not call
anyone.

I snapped shut,
crept back down
the carpeted stairs.
My father called her sister
and I overheard
an accident.

There was no spectacle,
just murmurings. I’m certain
he never knew I knew.

How many times had it been?

Married to her high school sweetheart,
the quarterback, did she feel trapped
as pearls clasped around her slender
neck? The girl in her yearbook,
a smiling, identical woman
in a cheerleading uniform.

She didn’t manage it—

not that time. And two decades later,
I’m sure it was an accident
of the heart. The machine that forgot
to beat for her. She was asleep and stayed
that way. This time, she meant to sleep.
No theatrics. No comeback.

*

Whitney Waters is a poet and educator living in Asheville, NC. She teaches writing at Western Carolina University and teaches workshops through the Great Smokies Writing Program. Her poems have been published in Penumbra, The Shore, About Place Journal, Twelve Mile Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. You can find her on Instagram @whitneywaters.poet.

Division by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Division

My father’s ashes bloom
as I pour them into a jar
once used for pickles,
the smell of spice and brine
embedded in the lid. He
liked his food “sharp,”
with a kick—black pepper
on oatmeal, hot sauce
on everything else, years
of smoking having blunted
his tastebuds. Now his dust
clings to my hands, settles
like spilled flour on my granite
countertops. How did I end up
in possession of his remains?

His stepdaughter, a woman
I met only twice
in thirty years, the eldest
of Wife Number Two,
(the one my father left
my mother for), wrote
to request a portion
so she and her kids—
who call him “Grandpa”—
could make a special trip
to the lake he loved, scatter
him where he’d taken them
sailing and for ice cream,
full family time every summer
of their youth.

I knew a different man
than the one they remember.
He worked late, arrived home
angry, spoke rarely. Family
vacations were long hot days
in a crammed station wagon,
siblings bickering, our private
miseries disguised by covert
slaps and jabs. Hotel pools
never cool enough, ice the only
thing we got for free.

Yet every time I smell
pipe smoke I reel, spun
by a need to pinpoint
the source of this longing
I was foolish enough
to think I’d outgrown.

Now I tighten the jar lid,
rinse my hands,
sponge the countertop,
the messy dust, the blowback,
the unburied residue of love.

*

Lynn Glicklich Cohen lives in Milwaukee. Her poetry has been published in Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, Cantos, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Front Range Review, Grand Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, The Phoenix, The Red Wheelbarrow, St. Katherine’s Review, Thin Air Magazine, Trampoline, Whistling Shade, and others.

How to O’Keeffe by Ruth Hoberman

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

How to O’Keeffe

Hold a bone to the sky
and blue unfurls its grace.
Forget scale. Nothing
is low or high, whole or half.

Spine, tree, cliff: seams
sewn into space.
Ears, first cousin to snails,
whirl rivers in circles;

fingers, rightly seen, are ferns.
Speak, and petals fall,
not words. This bleached light
strips chaos clean, corrects

our idle worry, our mistaking
burial for dead.

*

Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and essays in various journals, most recently Salamander, RHINO, and Nixes Mate.

my throat hurts by Eva Eliav

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

my throat hurts

perhaps a scream
withheld
a knotted grief

I’ve listened to
my morning meditation

a man pushes his walker
past my table

moving forward
past all he has endured

*

Eva Eliav received her BA in English Language and Literature from The University of Toronto. Since 1970 she has made her home in Israel. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Eve (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2019) and One Summer Day (Kelsay Books, 2021). A new chapbook is forthcoming in 2025 from Red Bird. Her poetry and flash fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Room, Emrys Journal, JewishFiction.net, Ilanot Review, Flashquake, The Apple Valley Review, Horizon Review, Variant Lit, Luna Station Quarterly, Fairy Tale Magazine, Stand, Constellations, Minyan, Fictive Dream, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Rogue Agent, Dust, Thimble, The Lake Magazine, ONE ART, Panoplyzine, and The Ginosko Review. You can find a selection of her poetry, fiction, and art at www.evaeliav.com.

DROPPING OFF TOYS by Vern Fein

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

DROPPING OFF TOYS

Our first son was born, forty-eight years ago,
a deluge of plastic and cloth
poured into our home, piled up,
broke, lost and found again,
abused over the years by our privileged kids,
unlike the urchin in Baudelaire’s
prose piece who enticed his
rich friend with a rat toy in a wire cage.

This week, I drove to get a prescription
for my aging body. I hastily
dropped boxes of assorted toys
at the charity Center of a local church,
convinced our seven-year-old grandson
that he needed to sort through the last batch,
keep a few precious ones and share
most of them with poor kids.

The volunteer happily lugged
the packed boxes inside
filled with toys and books,
not left outside in the bins where
rain would wash away memories.

I thanked him, started my car,
pulled around the corner,
but grief stopped me in the alley,
an unexpected sob escaped,
nostalgia for those toys and boys.

Images of dragons and trucks,
Ernie, Bert, Big Bird, and Oscar,
transformers, Star Wars figures,
scads of little people, swords and knights,
loads of action figures flew through my mind,
charity and good will no panacea.

I drove on for my meds,
tiny pills that keep me alive,
but they are not toys,
only reminders.

*

A recent octogenarian, Vern Fein, has published over 300 poems and short prose pieces in over 100 different sites. A few are: Gyroscope Review, Young Raven’s Review, Bindweed, *82 Review, River And South, Grey Sparrow Journal, and Rat’s Ass Review. His second poetry book—REFLECTION ON DOTS—was released late last year.

Two Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

For When We Greet Each Other

I want a new ritual for when we meet each other—
strangers or beloveds, friends or rivals, elders or children.
It begins by holding each other’s eyes
the way we behold sunrises or the first cherry blooms,
which is to say we assume we’ll find beauty there.
And perhaps some display of open hands—
a gesture with palms up—that suggests both
I offer myself to you and I receive you.
There should be a quiet moment in which
we hear each other breathe—
knowing it’s the sound of the ocean inside us.
If there are words at all, let them be formed
mostly of vowels so they’re heard more as song
than as spitting, more like river current and less
like throwing stones, words that mean something like
I do not know what you carry, but in this moment
I will help you carry it. Or something like,
Everything depends on us treating each other well.
And if we said it enough, perhaps we’d believe it,
and if we believed it enough, perhaps we’d live it,
treating every other human like someone
who holds our very existence in their hands,
like someone whose life has been given us to serve,
even if it’s only to walk together safely down the street,
hold a door, pass the salt, share a sunset,
offer a smile, and say with our actions you belong.

*

Big Lesson

Today it feels so simple:
we are here to take care of each other.
How could we ever forget?
As if soil could forget
it is here to feed the trees.
As if trees could forget
they are here to feed the soil.
How could anything
ever get in the way of generosity?
How could we ever greet each other
with any words besides,
How can I help you?
As if light could forget
it is here to help illuminate.
As if dark could forget
it is here to help us heal.

*

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.

The Bike Ride by Naomi Pliskow

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

THE BIKE RIDE

Lifting the bikes down from the carrier was easy
the two of us riding away from the church in the sunshine
wearing helmets like powerful charms,
past squatting suburban houses
with red and yellow plastic tricycles
lying on their sides in front yards like tipsy horses,
expensive dogs tracking us between upright slats
as we sped like fleeing antelopes from one year to another,
past excited teenagers
wearing bright blue robes and tasseled hats
like costumes for adulthood
before disappearing into their own lives,
as age whispered its first insults in our ears
and my husband, always ahead of me,
faded into the distance,
Time’s dogs snarling in his wake.

*

Naomi Pliskow has been writing poetry since childhood, but only recently has begun to share it with others. Her nonfiction writing has been published in several medical journals. Her poetry has been accepted for publication or been published in Adanna, Canary, evermore, and the Schuylkill Valley Journal. Her satirical song lyrics appeared in The New York Times in October of 2024. She lives in Philadelphia, where she is working on her first chapbook.

She Wanted Purple Jeans for Christmas by Kalina Smith

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She Wanted Purple Jeans for Christmas

They say purple people really love purple.
And that is so true of my Grandma Carolyn.
If she could, she’d dye all she owns with orchil,
And put food coloring in her chicken-and-dumplings.

Grandma loves her irises, but I hope
One day she’ll have violets, lilacs, and bellflower
Because she’s faithful, loving, gracious, and gold.
Maybe she’ll get those with this spring’s showers.

I hope she knows that to me, she is mulberry.
Healing, protecting amethyst and devoted lavender.
A serene periwinkle and strong like my pawpaw’s plum trees.
On her irises, rests a purple emperor.

*

Kalina Smith is a writer of gothic and literary fiction and confessional nonfiction and poetry. She is a high school English teacher in Arkansas. She has previously been published in Nebo, A Literary Journal, Free Spirit, The Ignatian, FLARE: The Flagler Review, and the Cackling Kettle.

sleeping things by Amrita Skye Blaine

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sleeping things

required, rest—
maybe not sleep
bullfrogs go dormant
butterflies have torpor
but for those
who sleep
all sleeping things
are children
even the assassin,
eyelashes dusting
his cheeks
mouth-softening
breath-easing
guileless sleep

         the phrase “all sleeping things are children”
         is from “The Sleeping Pig” by Jenny George

*

Amrita Skye Blaine develops themes of aging, disability, and spiritual awakening. She received an MFA from Antioch University. Her poems have been accepted by Soul-Lit, Braided Way Magazine, The Merton Seasonal, The Penwood Review, Soul Forte, Delta Poetry Review, the New English Review, and Chiron Review. Her poetry collection, every riven thing, is being published by Finishing Line Press mid-2025.

Alban Arthan by Kari Gunter-Seymour

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Alban Arthan

There are magics to behold
in the dark, on winter’s longest night,
if we’ve the verve to herald them.
I huddle, umbrellaed
beneath a thick-pinioned stand
of pitlolly pine, bundled in Carhartt,
wool cap tugged low.

The temperature dips as twilight ebbs.
Breathy winds set the tone—
a confluence of feminine whispers,
then rain, dainty droplets
swelling into two/three beats—
a council of charcoal-faced warriors
crouching their drums.

A junco lands slapdash, barely
two feet from mine, head swiveling
side to side, breastplate heaving.
Our histories balance precariously
in the seeing. I hold
still as stone until he’s flown,
invoke traveling mercies.

Somewhere south a coyote
yips, his canticle laced
in arctic threads. I picture him
pacing under ice-coated oaks,
nose in the air, divining his options.

Without pomp or pageantry,
snow tiptoes in,
turns down the sound,
piles up gestures,
conjures tales only told in the cold.

Stiff-legged, I wriggle from my burrow,
cup tiny vestiges in mittened hands,
swoon at the moon’s silvery rise
as I slow-foot homeward,
the landscape a cauldron
of glitter, flake and revenants.

*

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

On the White Hill by Sally Nacker

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On the White Hill

On the white hill—moonlight
bright on the hemlocks
drooping with snow, bright
on the hill where deer tracks go.

The trees toss their snow
in the wind on the hill,
and the prints vanish now—
one by one, they go.

*

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

Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Water Lilies

Large pancake-shaped leaves
hover in clusters on water
as still as an oil painting.

Monet spent years in a garden
like this, capturing the light
and the color on canvas.

I stand on a stone bridge,
remembering Monet,
and wishing I could paint myself
as a floating flower, anchored
by a long stem firmly rooted
beneath a surface
that never ripples.

*

I’ve Never Liked Roller Coasters

So I shouldn’t be surprised
by how miserable I am
riding with him now
in a rickety car destined
to plunge at high speed.

His cancer twists and turns
at 300 feet above the ground.
Each time it slows, the pace picks up,
and we’re tossed from side to side,
too dizzy to scream.

“Be grateful,” my cousin says.
“He’s doing better.”

For how long?

Will we have a full week this time?
Each day delighting us, by eating more,
walking more, staying alert longer,
before he’s suddenly feverish again.

No, I’ve never liked roller coasters,
never found a racing heart to be a thrill,
not even the relief of stepping out of the car,
shaken but okay, has ever pleased me.

So my knuckles stay white
as I grip the safety bar, wishing—
not wishing—for the ride to end.

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com

Two Poems by Sarah Carleton

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Guerilla Gardener

       “Guerrilla gardening is the act of gardening…on land that the gardeners
       do not have the legal rights to cultivate such as abandoned sites, areas
       that are not being cared for, or private property.” – Wikipedia

The almanac says rough weather’s
on the way, so I plant a phrase here,

a link there, and shore up my shed.
I weed out invasive species—

watch me not buy books and dongles
from the company with a name

stolen from a race of female warriors.
Hear me sharpen my shovel,

sing to coneflowers, and share tips
with my comrades about rolling seeds

into clay balls to protect them as they
sail and germinate. We lob poems

at playgrounds under cover of night.
We feed and water a sense memory

of normal—that field of colors, scrappy
and chaotic and full of bees

—as we toss our words into gray places,
seedbombing the desolation.

*

Renovation

The student earned her stay in the Irish manor house
by scraping paint and cleaning dust

side-by-side with someone she’d never met before,
an American—the one thing they had in common—

from Philly, with thin legs, straight blond hair,
a daily makeup regime, and nonstop chatter.

Hiding from cold stone bedrooms, they filled
the little kitchen with whiskey, tea, and giggles

late into the night and cooked eggs in the morning,
the side effects of nocturnal drinking

brushed away like crumbs of drywall.
The Philadelphian—wolfing chicken and noodles—

would laugh about her own reputation as a big eater.
The student would stuff herself with cauliflower

and echo this in-joke about her new friend,
learning her special language,

until the last day, when she repeated, “big appetite,”
once more, and the Philly girl snapped,

“You don’t exactly eat light,”
the barb bursting their bubble just in time

for them to part, no addresses exchanged,
confusion and hurt dangling like bits of broken balloon

amid the sudden knowledge
that instant friendship was a rickety scaffold.

*

Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Cider Press Review, ONE ART, Valparaiso, SWWIM Every Day, and New Ohio Review. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.

Two Poems by Marc Alan Di Martino

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

New study finds

there is no real difference
between playing 17-dimensional chess
and acting perfectly at random.

To find meaning in things
where none exists
is called ‘apophenia’.

Jesus’ visage in a slice of burnt
toast, for example,
or the Man in the Moon

for another. These are projections
of our fears and desires.
So when you hear, next week

or the week after,
amid the firestorm of ‘breaking news’
that Hulk Hogan or Kid Rock

has been tapped
for high office—likely one
requiring bona fides

beyond a hit single
from 1999, or a signature
flex of the bicep—

remember that sometimes things
are what they seem
and any group of primates

ululating loud enough can shatter glass.

*

Victor’s

A restaurant once stood on this spare lot,
its scampi sizzling for a local crowd,
its Wednesday Specials and barroom loud
with swingers swapping numbers, the lights hot.

Now Victor’s is a sign along the road,
its fancy lettering in black and gold
conjuring late nights clad in silk and pearl—
each furtive tryst absolved in time’s slow whirl.

*

Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco (World Poetry, 2024 – translator), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

Parallels: A Pseudo Cento by Jean Voneman Mikhail

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Parallels: A Pseudo Cento

          Texts between a son struggling
          with addiction and his mom.

i.

I am 21 years old. Stop tracking me.
I told you already,
I am somewhere on a huge bridge.
I walked out of Poetsmouth into Kentucky. Portsmouth, I mean.
I can see these huge fish in the river.
There’s this one really big fish.
I can see him on the bottom.
Then rain in my eyes.
I’m sorry, mom. I love you.
Can you Venmo me some water, Mama?
Can you Venmo me some Taco Bell, Mama?
No, I have not been doing meth.
No. I’m not on jack shit.
I am crying and my head hurts.
I can’t cry most of the time.
I am out of breath and sweating.
I don’t see any street signs.
I am so tired. I only see stop signs.
My eyes are so red and blurry.
No. I’m not high.
No. I haven’t taken klonopin
in like forever.
The lights are hurting my eyes.
I am scared to be alone, mom,
so I am begging on my knees.
Please, can I come home?
I know you don’t want me to.
I am so ready to get out of here.
I’m so tired of sober living.
I am so ready to be free.
My bed has been tilting.
I never have food.
I feel like I’m never
going to get out of here.
I just want to die.
Don’t worry if I don’t answer.
I am so scared to be alone.
I need friends. Like, Jesus Christ.
I’ve been calling him. He won’t answer.
Did he change his name, or what?

ii.

Maybe you’ve been grinding your teeth.
You need a nightguard.
Call the doctor again.
Call the court again.
I would try calling them again.
Just leave a message.
I wish I knew how to help you.
Just cry it out. You will be ok.
He will help you figure it out.
You’re not really alone.
You just need to decide.
I don’t know why you can’t see that.
Either you want to live or die.
Since you are using right now,
I can’t be around you.
I can’t be around drugs.
I’m sorry. I love you.
I’m not buying you anything.
But water? Ok.
Why are you on a bridge?
Can you stay in one place?
Like go somewhere and stay?
I will come get you.
Wait for me there. Please,
don’t go anywhere.

*

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.

A Reading with Featured Poets Ona Gritz, Heather Swan, and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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A Reading with Featured Poets Ona Gritz, Heather Swan, and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Date: Sunday, January 5
Time: 4pm Eastern
Duration: 1 to 1.5 hours

Tickets: Available here (Free or Donation) 
*

Ona Gritz is the author of Geode, a Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award finalist, and On the Whole: a Story of Mothering and Disability. Ona’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, River Teeth, The Bellevue Literary Review, and Catamaran Literary Reader. In 2020, she won The Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 Project. Her new memoir, Everywhere I Look, won the Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book, the Independent Author Award in New Nonfiction, the Independent Author Award in True Crime, and is an Independent Book Review 2024 Must-Read.

*

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 published in 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.

*

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.

*

The reading will be recorded and made available on ONE ART’s YouTube Channel.

Three Poems by Rachel Trousdale

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Life Insurance

                             ads look like this;
also detergent, nineteen-sixties politicians,
investment firms; there in the golden field
is our golden-haired daughter, milkweed
spiraling in the updraft about her. Beauty
in beauty, intent on the peculiar lightness
of the seeds. When our son was born,
I said, well, now I guess I can’t
kill myself. Then our daughter, and I said,
I don’t even want to. Those featherlike
bubblelike comas, the parachutes
that waft beyond sight in the field,
brighter than fairy glitter
on store-bought gauze wings. She’s between
us and the sun; we can’t look directly,
the camera can’t fathom, it is all
sparkle and float. Farther and farther,
to the trees lining the meadow, to plant
those tough-stalked weeds that propel
butterflies—don’t touch them, their wings
will dust off on your hands—thousands of windy miles.

*

Someone Should Teach You Better Manners

You greedy bastard, Death, always
reaching for the next cookie on the plate. Leave
some for the rest of us—you’ve just
had a whole woman; washed her down
with a few children. Where do you think you’re going
to put that birch sprawled in the lake? How
can you fit a hummingbird, an ant,
the clippings from my fingernails
into your craw? Keep your hands
to yourself; let someone else have a bite
of the last fifty minutes of this gasping year.
To hell with you, and your determination
to spoil a nice evening. No matter what
you do next, we were off flying kites—
an upward tug, exaltation, vanishing
into blue—the day the house burned down.

*

Mammogram

To hell with Mithridates, and that killjoy ant. Today
I’m stockpiling happiness, gorging on sun
like a grizzly on salmon. There isn’t any hope
like my hope: I’m the only expert, the testator.
All of you listen: it doesn’t matter that the most beautiful
walk you know is through the graveyard. You can ignore
the stones. Climb them like the children’s play towers. Who cares
what’s under that golden carpet of ginkgo leaves? If
you don’t already know you’re going to die, there’s nothing
I can tell you; listen; that’s the sound of jackhammers
as six men in hard hats build my children a library.
On the way home from the hospital I’ll stop
to buy muhammara, coffee, earthquake cookies.
I’m waiting my turn, stuck behind a van that delivers
new glass for windows, on my way to the place
I delivered two babies. It takes what it takes.
There’s no news you can give me that changes the light.

*

Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Yale Review, and Diagram, among other places. Her first book of poetry, Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem, was selected by Robert Pinsky for the Cardinal Poetry Prize and will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2025.

Missing Pearls by Lucy Dale

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Missing Pearls

I feel tension between my brows,
my mother smiles in the wedding
photo, perched upon our duo washer
and dryer. I’ve lost the pearl necklace
that lines her collar bone. I see
church ceremonies as taboo, I hate
the idea of wearing white, I do
not tell my mom about the pearls.
Observers say I am an image
of my mother. We have the same
eyes and the same crooked tooth.
Wiping dust from her smile, I reach
for the missing pearls, tightening
around my neck.

*

Lucy Dale is a sophomore at Denison University studying Creative Writing and Women’s & Gender Studies. She graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy, where she studied Creative Writing. Lucy is originally from Cleveland, OH. Her writing has been published in literary magazines such as Sink Hollow, Nebo, and The Allegheny Review. In 2024, she was the third-place recipient of the Annie MacNeill Poetry Competition.

Three Poems by Ann Kammerer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Robin

We sat around
my kitchen table,
my brothers in town
for Christmas,
Mom and Dad
long divorced
and dead
for decades.

They talked about
high school.
They talked about
sports.
They talked about
being All-Region
in baseball,
and how
they could’ve been
All-State,
if only Mom
had married
someone else.

“We would’ve
been better,” Freddie said.

“Yeah,” Charlie said.
“We would’ve been
All-Stars.”

Charlie drank.
Freddie smoked.
They went
back and forth
calling Mom an idiot
for not marrying
a college player
named Robin Roberts,
a stand-out pitcher
recruited by the Phillies
and enshrined
in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“She dated him you know.”
Charlie leaned in,
his head tipped,
his eyebrows raised
just like Dad
used to do
when he tried
to make a point.

“I doubt it,” I said.
“Like Mom made
things up.
You know.
To get Dad mad.”

Freddie leaned in, too,
his jaw squared.

“She wouldn’t lie
‘bout that.” he said.

Charlie nodded.
He rapped the table
with his knuckles.

“Yeah,” he said.
“She wouldn’t do that.
Never.”

They fixed
on each other,
their eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Freddie said.
“It could’ve been perfect.”

Reseating their baseball caps,
they listed the keepsakes
they found tucked away
in Mom’s dresser drawer,
the college programs
with Roberts’ name underlined,
the ’49 rookie card,
the mint condition
Topps and Bowmans,
and the ‘53 baseball mag,
with “Wonder Boy” Roberts
on the color cover,
sizing up his pitch.

“She had
everything,” Freddie said.
“All his cards,
all those stories,
all those things
about him,
about his kids,
about his wife.”

Freddie paused.
He blinked and looked
out the window.

“Like that could’ve
been us,” Charlie said.
“Imagine it.”

Chugging their beers,
they opened two more,
saying they could’ve had
a star-quality Dad,
someone who taught them
how to throw,
catch, and hit,
someone who
coached them,
instead of a dad
in worn suits
and scuffed wingtips
who never even
tossed them a pitch
when they played ball
with neighbor kids
in a fenced back yard.

*

Curation

Mom needed money.
Dad wouldn’t give
her any.
He said she spent
whatever she got
on stupid things
instead of what
she should.

Her friend Charlotte
told her to have
a garage sale.
She said Mom
would be surprised
at how much money
she could make.

“People like to buy
other people’s junk,” she said.
“I’m sure your husband
has a lot of it.”

Mom emptied cupboards
and rummaged through
dresser drawers.
She pillaged closets
and dug deep
into crannies
and crawl spaces.
She gathered anything
deemed useless
or useful,
not caring
whose it was,
just as long
as it would sell.

“No one’s gonna miss
this stuff,” she said.
“Especially your brothers.”

Freddie and Charlie
had moved out
the summer I finished
seventh grade,
getting an apartment
and taking college classes,
vying to avoid
the Vietnam draft.
They left stuff behind,
their closets jammed,
saying they’d come get things,
as soon as they were ready.

“If they wanted
this crap so bad
they would’ve taken it,” Mom said.
“Finders Keepers, right?”

We cleared their closets
and set things on
the scuffed plank floor,
creating a line-up
of boxes and bags.

Mom split the tape
and opened
a small cardboard box
labeled “CHARLIE’S CARDS.”

“Well looky here.”
Her eyes reflected
a colorful collection
of rectangular cards,
the ones paid for
with nickels and dimes,
originally packaged
with a stale stick
of pink powdery gum.

“I betcha there’s
a Mickey Mantle
in here,” Mom said.
“Or a Willie Mays.”

She held up each card,
looking for bends
or worn edges,
making stacks
of MVPs,
sluggers,
and pitchers,
a few catchers
in between.
Lopsided frowns
crossed her face
as she discarded
dispelled prospects
and hopefuls
in a jumbled pile.

“Help me,” she said.
“Let’s see
what we got.”

I set down my Coke
and stood beside her,
a light breeze
carrying the roar
of the distant highway.
Our fingers nimble,
our eyes fixed,
we worked in sync,
silently sorting
the cardboard portraits,
a curated gallery
of young men
in pinstripes
and ball caps,
poised on green fields
against the bluest of skies.

*

Rookie

My brother Charlie
got fired from his sales job
after getting too drunk
at a Christmas party
and spouting off.

“My boss had it
in for me,” he said.
“Everyone says
it’s bullshit.”

Charlie sat around
for a month.
He went to bars
and sat around
some more.
He got drunk
and called me
all the time,
ranting about
his ex-wife,
ranting about
some college girl
he picked up,
calling her a slut.

“I don’t want
to hear it,” I said.

Charlie got foul mouthed.
I hung up.
He called back.

“Hey.
Listen to me,” he said.
You’re supposed
to be my sister.”

I hung up again.
He kept calling back.
I turned off the phone.

Six months later,
Charlie ran out
of money,
his prospects dry,
his savings thin.
His phone got
disconnected
so I went by his house,
the lawn overgrown,
the front door
kicked in.

I found him
in the back room
sunk in a vinyl recliner,
ringed by beer cans,
empty chip bags,
and crusted-over bowls
of beans and franks.

“Why you here?”
Charlie stared
at an ancient TV
coated with dust.
“The Tigers,” he said.
“They’re on.”

A sour smell
hung in the air,
the carpet squishy
beneath my feet.
I pulled over
a folding chair
and sat for a minute
on the torn sticky seat,
asking how he was.

He lifted his filthy ball cap
and smoothed his
gray-blonde hair,
his skin sallow
with tungsten light.

“Doing good,” he said.
He dunked his hand
in a Styrofoam cooler
filled with melting ice
and Miller Light.
“You know, though,
I still can’t believe it.”

He looked at me
and shook his head.
I asked him what.

“You know what.”
Charlie slurred,
starting in again
about his baseball cards,
how he could’ve
cashed them in,
been rich,
if only Mom
hadn’t sold them
at that garage sale
years ago
when he was away
at college.

“Man oh man,” he said.
“Mickey Mantle.
Rod Carew.
Hank Aaron.
Plus all those
rookie cards.
Goddamn her.”

Charlie picked
at the cracked vinyl
on the arms of his chair.
He bit his dry lip
and said yepper yep,
once, then twice.

“Goddamn it.”
Rising in his seat,
his eyes blistering,
Charlie threw his beer
as a Tiger struck out,
ending the inning
one run behind,
with two men stranded
on base.

*

Ann Kammerer lives in the Chicago area, having relocated from her home state of Michigan. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are coming in Fictive Dream, One Art, Open Arts Forum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Major 7th Magazine, Workers Write!, Chiron Review, Thoughtful Dog, and Ekphrastic Review, and in anthologies by Crow Woods Publishing and Querencia Press. Her chapbook collections of narrative poetry include “Yesterday’s Playlist” (Bottlecap Press, 2023), “Beaut” (Kelsay Books, 2024), “Friends Once There” (Impspired, 2024), and “Someone Else” (Bottlecap Press, 2024). You can find her here: annkammerer.com

Loneliness by Jane C. Miller

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Loneliness

When you grow up on a farm, the farm
never leaves you, the handle of a bucket
heavy in your palms, the dipper’s metal
cool on your lips, the pitchfork’s lug
& heave, corn tossed row by row into
muscled memory’s ache. Even hay-
stacks sweated the morning dew.
Dirt caked hands, overalls, boots.
Sitting was lazy man’s work. Even
in retirement, you made reading
a task, your tongue-dampened thumb
paging through the news still fresh
at sunrise, your favorite time even
in frost, its hard grass crunch, barn door
creaking open the enclosed smells
of animals, their nicker & snort
made large in the quiet, you & the mule
smoking winter’s breath. Before hunger
made fast the hard work of chores, you
hungered for more. What was I then but
a vague wish, a witness only of
what came after, after you left.

*

Jane C. Miller’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals. A winner of the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest and two state fellowships, she is author of the debut collection Canticle for Remnant Days (2024) and co-author of Walking the Sunken Boards (2019), both published by Pond Road Press. She coedits the online poetry journal, ൪uartet. www.janecmiller.com.

Jingxian Diptych by Xingyu

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Jingxian Diptych

I.
I remember riding the rusty bus from Nanjing
to Jingxian when I was sixteen. My father beside me,
we were thrown around our seats, like stowaways
on a capsizing ship. Snow-flecked mountains,
slanted redwoods and dogwoods around us, I
slept in their grey-green shadows.
A Chinese action film flickered on the screen
while people flicked ashes out of the window.
Persimmons and peaches rolling on the floor,
skin slimy and blackened, their owners drooling,
dreaming, cranes returning home. When we arrived
at my father’s hometown, I could smell the crisp
air of Huangshan. A small river carved the town
into two, orbs of light dancing on the water
like lanterns bobbing by. Tai chi masters wave
at us, radios perched on marble, humming
the notes of a Chinese opera. Above us, bulbuls
and thrushes land on wooden beams,
watching people on stools slurping noodles
and sipping osmanthus wine. The needles
of pine trees drift into the cracks of cobblestones,
red ink on Xuan paper, the careless calligraphy
of winter.

II.
Now, no bus goes to Jingxian.
In my father’s car, I see shiny asphalt oozing
out of the earth like phlegm, snaking towards
the horizon, smothering the pale blue sky.
Chalk-white tree stumps jut out, the crooked teeth
of ghosts, fading in the half-light.
Overhead, trains speed past us. Progress
hurls itself into a partridge, its cry drowned
out by a shrieking horn. We enter tunnel
after tunnel, the concrete echoing the screech
of car tires, see the dammed Qingyi river,
waves of purple struggling to break down walls
of metal. I imagine schools of angelfish
and arowana helpless against the current,
blinded by the silt and sediment, the sudden,
sickening crash. Back in Jingxian, the heat ebbs
under glass and steel moons. Mountains of sand
submerge the cobblestones, and excavators
whirr around the town’s first mall. Iron rebars
of KFC, Starbucks and Nike stores take root
into the earth, unshakeable. By a yellowed river,
oleanders wilt, praying for the butterflies to return
by spring.

*

Xingyu is reading literature at NTU. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Portside Review, QLRS and Cordite Poetry Review.

Alone in the Library Stacks by Al Ortolani

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Alone in the Library Stacks

One morning the sky turns to charcoal,
the wind gusting until the leaves expose
their silver underbellies. You crank
open the window and smell the rain,

the elms, the catalpas, the split melon
of summer. You are alone with
the forgotten books, Gandalf
in the Eddas, the whirling Sufi,

Madame B’s Victorian theosophy.
You run your finger along the spines,
read the checkout cards, the names
inked as if from a séance of fountain pens

and Palmer cursive. With the croon
of mourning doves, the drumming shower,
the window creaking on its hinge,
you click on the light above your carrel.

You puzzle over unfamiliar pages,
the Fat Lady as Christ in Salinger, the dung
beetle in Kafka. The day gone quiet,
the library desk waxing with possibility.

*

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

Talk is cheap but it still packs a punch by Marissa Glover

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Talk is cheap but it still packs a punch

If I told you the things he said
you wouldn’t believe me—sure,
you’d understand his growl
of loneliness dressed as desire,
each catch and release
of throaty breath resonating,
especially if you’ve seen
Allie leap into Noah’s arms
on a dock in the pouring rain
or heard Springsteen sing
about sheets soaking wet,
a freight train pounding
in the middle of his head.
But the specifics, every word
and syllable in perfect concert—
you wouldn’t believe me.
Not even if I told you, which
I can’t. Not because I don’t want
to. I’d write them here if
I could remember. Instead,
it’s like a bruise that rises
to the surface weeks after impact,
a submarine breaking for air
after being rammed underwater.
You can point to the place,
a cacophony of blues and purples,
an abstract painting of concrete pain,
proving something happened.
You just don’t know what.

*

Marissa Glover lives and writes in Florida, where she’s busy swatting bugs and dodging storms. Her poetry collections Let Go of the Hands You Hold and Box Office Gospel are published by Mercer University Press. You can follow Marissa on social media at MarissaGlover_

Two Poems by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Gone to the Dogs

My body riddled with dot-to-dot
blood bursting through the thinning skin,
already a map of bruises on my shins
from who knows where. My scalp now visible
with all its lumps and bumps
formerly hidden beneath the glory of my hair—
the hair I once saw as a misbehaving dog
scampering here and there. My fingers locked,
unable to grip—who will open my jars,
write my words when my hands begin to slip?
Feet flattened by too much weight,
bones bulging where they don’t belong,
metatarsals over-marched. Who will piggyback
me when I can no longer walk and I slump
benignly in my bed? When my wants
are few and my needs are many, who
will diaper me, spoon me soft food
between my toothless gums, read me a story,
carry me through my second infancy?

* 

Density

My feet, strapped at an awkward slant,
make a triangle with the base of the exam table,
childbearing hips flat, scanned
as the machine shoots its x beams at my bones.
I imagine my brain in full swing: osteoporosis
of the mind, gray matter crumbling, the spine
of my brain leaking essentials: fluids, sanity.
The cheap construction I built swept away
on a tide of shame, desiccated hope,
structural failure, vanity.

*

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.”

Kitchen Talk by Claudia Gary

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Kitchen Talk

Both born in war’s shadow,
you and I received
different messages.

For me the shade was smaller,
the truth distant. But you
lived among its traces.

Your mother said, “Waste nothing.”
“The last bite,” said your father,
“will always be the best.”

“Finish up your dinner,”
my grandma would say. “Children
are starving now in Europe.”

When I tell you I’m leaving,
you take my vegetables
and place them in your fridge.

We must have a famine
in order to talk.

*

Claudia Gary lives near Washington DC and teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also a health/science writer, visual artist, composer of tonal songs and chamber music, and an advisory editor of New Verse Review. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music is online at https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html. See also pw.org/content/claudia_gary

Ten Years Later in the Graveyard at Dusk by Richard L. Matta

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Ten Years Later in the Graveyard at Dusk

I stare at windblown leaves, hear them
crackle in corridors between headstones.
Memories patter like rain. How long
does one shamble through rifts of night,
praise with spite what another deplored,
snarl at vines of constellations for time
you insisted be spent on celestial studies.
I search for your engraved name, unsure
what to say. How you suddenly returned
to the stars. I seek the counsel of trees,
seek disclosure in a rising moon, feel
for the rhythm of night, but the granite
is cold and motionless and the breeze
carries your secrets like unspilled tears.

*

Richard L. Matta’s poetry has appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Stirring, Gyroscope, Molecule, Watershed Review, and haiku journals including Modern Haiku, Heron’s Nest, Acorn, and elsewhere. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart, and is an award-winning short form poet. Editor of the 2024 Southern California Haiku Study Group’s Annual Anthology, Matta has also served as short-form poetry contest judge and guest editor.

Elegy for Jim Cory by Sean Lynch

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Elegy for Jim Cory

Above a horse cemetery
on a wall that is no longer there

were faces meant to be immortalized.
Faces of literary giants in art deco style

whether apropos or not including
Shaw, Joyce, Dickinson, Frost

and I would stare at the mural as I would steam
dozens of lattes and cappuccinos for minimum wage

and on smoke breaks in Rittenhouse Square
I would listen to Jim tell me of a mythical Philly

from the 80’s and 90’s not knowing that the twenty teens
would one day become ancient history

that the bookstore would be gutted
replaced by another expensive star

that the wall of literary giants would no longer be there
and those moments under trees fed

by bones of colonial steeds would transform into memories.
Yet somehow, somewhere he’s still there,

perhaps as a kind of bird flying between canopies
like a train cutting through rays of light on the landscape.

*

Sean Lynch is a writer and editor who lives in Philadelphia. His latest poetry collection, Halo Nest: Poems on Grief is available for purchase here. Previous books are, the city of your mind (Whirlwind Press, 2013), Broad Street Line (Moonstone Press, 2016), 100 Haiku (Moonstone Press, 2017), and On Violence (Radical Paper Press, 2019). He is the founding editor of Serotonin Press and has been the editor of various magazines, journals, anthologies, and books, including Rocky Wilson’s The Last Bus to Camden, Chidi Ezeobi’s Remind the World: Poems from Prison, and Beyond the White Stone Lions by Lamont Steptoe. He’s also worked for non-profit literary organizations such as Moonstone Arts Center and the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association.

Two Poems by Rachel Custer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Arid the Valley Through Which I Worry My Faith

Mornings I wrap my hand
around my pocketknife

& walk the fourteen steps

from my front door
to the driver’s-side door of my car

the small animals caged inside my gaze

scrabbling
before this snake of a place

A girl is pinned behind the wooden mask

of what you believe
you know

(sometimes to hold something deadly can be a prayer)

in the nave of my undoing
in the hard pew of my teeth

you are the word amen

spilling again & again
from the grave of my mouth

*

God’s Country

Out beyond the industrial park
a graveyard of cars

rusts toward the new
millennium. A girl

is running away from everything.

(What would you do
with the weight of a thousand eyes?)

This town like the nightshirt
clenched inside her fists.

The handmade sign beside the highway
ripples in the wind: Son we still love you

Jesus will take you back.

*

Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, forthcoming 2023). The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). An NEA arts fellow (poetry, 2019), she has previously published poetry, personal essays, and flash fiction in many literary journals. She lives in Indiana, and her work is constantly informed by and wrestles with the values and struggles of the rural Rust Belt. Her Christian faith is vital to her understanding of the world and her art.

Two Poems by Liz Alani

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Pet Therapy

Sometimes a cat is enough to keep you going
When struggling forward seems pointless.
Sage-eyed and downy-furred
Purring your name like an emperor:
Love me, feed me, entertain me.
Twelve years ago I rescued a sable bundle of charm
And named him Badu.
He reached his paw through the shelter cage and Claimed. Me. Whole.
The adoption counselor said, “Oh honey, you don’t choose your pets,
They choose you!”
And a love story was born.

Sometimes being needed by someone anything is lifeblood.
My mother said before she died, “Liz you find a way to be needed.
You’re at your best when you’re needed.”
And so I manned crisis lines where the hopeless called for reasons to live.
For decades I helped the unhoused feel seen and heard and fed.
And now, every day, I don the great mantle of feline caregiver.
I tend to this four-pawed wonder, this soulful companion
Who depends on my love and presence
And hangs out with me to binge Netflix and popcorn,
To Facetime and read poems and other childless cat lady pursuits.

Sometimes Badu is the gossamer thread of purpose
That keeps me woven into life’s tapestry.
Sometimes in a whole day,
He is the only one who gazes deeply into my eyes,
Unblinking, disarming, conveying— You are my person.
I admire his empathy and intuition and play.
I could do worse than sprawling in a patch of sun
Purring a melody at twilight
Sensing the stir of glittered dust floating in the air.

Sometimes when the stuff that keeps me going—
Community and meaning and hope—
When those lifelines are too over the rainbow
Too pixelated on a tiny screen
Too underground or in-crowd
A feline is my consolation prize.
When I am too tender to brave this world
With its din and glamour and madness
And I crave an abiding solace to sing me home to myself
A cat is enough.

*

The Object

When I was nearly twenty
I discovered a sure way to keep myself the thing
The mere object
The gazed upon:
I gatecrashed a world where girls glance haughty at a lens
And stride to client after client
In Milan Paris London
Backpacks slung over fluted shoulders
Presenting their portfolios like offerings
To the fashionista gods
Who dissect their bodies, their hearts

And in that mythic world
The gazelles and white teethed sirens
Were a riot of skin and swagger and shine
Their confidence a riddle to me—
But I had a secret weapon
I was the girl with something to prove
The scrappy walking wound
The clown from a ruinous yellow house
I was nothing if I couldn’t be special
I was determined to come true

Sure, I had height and bone structure
But you can go a long way on defiance
And not enough-ness
I used shame as a catalyst
Not to be a designer’s muse or one of the supers
But to get out of my skin and step into her:
The Model
That parsed and glorified product
Until one day I could inhabit something truer
Something full-throated and innermost
And walk through the world without armor
Without the mirage of perfection

*

Liz Alani is an award-winning author who spent two decades as a nomadic model. Her poetry and prose explore selfhood and objectification, trauma and grief, the power of aging, and the pursuit of peace. She lives in Austin. lizalani.com

There’s Always Something by Carlin Corsino

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There’s Always Something

            After his near death experience,
Al Pacino confirms “there’s nothing there” after we die –
            “you’re gone”

He confirms as if
we’d all already agreed
the afterlife didn’t rock a little bit
like a chair on the porch
of a country store, air
smelling softly of apple spice
straw brooms and the candle
whose wax drips slowly
onto the floor pressing
its seal on the stamped
envelope of our lives. As if
we all already believe that
when we depart we will not
enter a foyer and hear
a knock when answered
the stomping heels
of flamenco dancers
and brass band
hung brightly all night above
us like string lanterns.
How may we believe you,
carte blanche, Al Pacino
who visited death
like a factory tour
and returned like a door
to door salesman peddling
an end to the miracle akin
to that nothing of when
we were children hiding
quietly under old blankets
in grandmother’s attic so long
we feared they forgot about us
in that pitch black as lungs
filled with must and all
we could hear was that empty
suck in the walled pipes
as the last little bit of liquid
light slipped in its vortex
down the claw foot tub of life.
So how can we believe you, Al
because even that nothing
was something, right?

*

Carlin Corsino is a poet from North Carolina who writes about the everyday and absurdities of American life. They are recently featured or forthcoming in 3ELEMENTS and KAKALAK.

Two Poems by Tresha Faye Haefner

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments
Why I Write About Flowers in a Time of War
Because so many can’t write
about the jasmine blooming
in the flowerpot this morning.
Because they can’t see
the sun rise over a window box of mint
or go looking in the pantry for coffee and dried figs.
The blood is still wet on bowling shoes,
on camouflage book bags,
and patches of dried earth under the olive trees.
There are people who will never know
the peace of a red-bud breaking open
or the helplessness of roses drying in a neighbor’s yard.
But if a flower fights for anything
It’s only for the right to live, in a forest or field
Where it will feed dragonflies and pollinate more of itself.
Tigerlily spreading its yellow self, swallowtail landing
On a patch of purple lantana.
Because nature is not a distraction, but an instruction.
Rivers feed oceans. Dying logs feed
grubs who recreate the soil.
The soft liver of any dying animal
responds to its collapse by giving back
whatever it had. The only response to violence
is to throw your body as deep as you can
into the darkness, until something takes hold
of you, and uses your dying sorrow
to bloom.
*
One Day A Bird
Ate the last hate in your heart.
Plucked it out like an oily black sunflower seed
and flew away.
You went for a walk in your neighborhood, past the church
That wasn’t yours, past the signs for political candidates
You didn’t much care for. You didn’t mind.
There was really no time anymore to be angry at your last lover
Or the one before that. Or to send bad feelings to the mayor of your city,
Or the governor of your state.
You liked this feeling of being cloudlike and unencumbered.
You learned to like your neighbors,
Even the ones who flicked cigarette butts on their lawn.
And the woman at the grocery store who never smiles at you.
Even the fences didn’t bother you anymore. They were ugly, yes,
But they belonged to someone hungry, someone who liked being warm
on cold nights and drinking hard-cider
and the feel of clothes out of the laundry machine.
Everyone, you realize, is the same when they are watching
YouTube videos of a cat, or sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting for news.
You had been angry before, at all the people who wouldn’t worship
your thoughts, or pray to your private wishes. But that was before.
Before that bird came and plucked the last hatred out of your heart.
And where was it now, you wondered?
As you stared at the sky, waiting for it to circle back
and land on the ugly, ugly house
that once had been a collection of trees
and now was somebody’s home.
*
Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and a 2012, 2020, and 2021 nomination for a Pushcart. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear” was a finalist for prizes from both Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. It was published by Pine Row Press under the title When the Moon Had Antlers in 2023. Find her at www.thepoetrysalon.com.

$56,800 by Robert Fillman

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

$56,800

       “Over 1,057,000 people have been killed by guns in the USA
       since John Lennon was shot and killed on 8 Dec 1980.”
       — from a Tweet published by Yoko Ono

for John Lennon’s first pair
of Windsor spectacles,
sold at Sotheby’s London
to the highest bidder,
an investment in glass
and wire, the auctioning
of short sightedness, John’s
fragile nature, one man’s
blurred vision of the world
retrofitted into
a conversation piece.

His bloody glasses too
are on display, encased
beside a crumpled brown
bag of blood-drunk clothing
at the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame, a perverse kind
of show-and-tell, Yoko
helping us to rehearse
his dying. Imagine

those bullets hissing through
bone and flesh, one lodging
in the aorta, how
John inched forward. Last thing
he saw maybe Yoko
screaming, a policeman’s
horror, a doctor or
nurse fumbling for vitals,

maybe nothing at all,
the frames already whipped
from the bridge of his nose,
the street a carnival
of psychedelic haze,
his own essence smudging
out the windows of sight
before his eyes were closed.

*

Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin, 2022) and the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). His collection The Melting Point will be published in 2025 by Broadstone Books. Individual poems have appeared in Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He teaches at Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania.

Dog Story by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Dog Story

Perhaps because I’d finished a book
the night before, about a dog
who’d pulled a woman
from the sea of grief,
on my morning walk when I see a dog,
that looks like the first dog
I ever wanted, I put out my hand
for a lick.

The dog of memory walks
up the street to sit beside me
while I pull weeds
from shaggy grass.
The boys are small. When they see the dog,
they want to keep him too.

“It’s only right to take him to the shelter,”
my husband says, while hustling the dog into the car,
“in case the owner comes to claim him.”

Husband returns from the shelter, reports
“The dog can be adopted Saturday
if the owner hasn’t come by then.”

On Saturday morning, “Go get our dog,” I say.
“After tennis,” he says.
“Go now,” I say, “If I had a car,” I say.
“There’s time,” he says, “after tennis.”
“Please go now,” I say.

On Saturday afternoon, after tennis, after the shelter,
“Where’s our dog?” I ask.
“Too late,” Husband says.
“If I had a car,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Too late,” I say.

*

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

Two Poems by Hana Damon-Tollenaere

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Gas Station Slurpee

About the time the hills bloom purple, it all falls
apart again, but don’t bother rebuilding, with plastic
straws and Poptart wrappers, five loose nickels and a fat
blue pill, haven’t you heard? For every biggest fish, there
comes a bigger one to eat it, so even vetch can’t survive
the winter, like uncareful tires crush lizards
on the asphalt, sure, we can listen to Sublime,
I know a thing or two about
doing it the wrong way.

*

Negotiations

If you’re lucky you can make this all
stop, if you write enough birthdays
in the calendar, and test the mattresses
at IKEA, I solemnly swear to buy only
white pressboard furniture, or map out
a life in grease pencils, like sectioning
a corpse of pork, crossing out the hole
in the kitchen wall, then a smudged
and dotted arrow, god forbid we
forget, the pair of green lamps
goes over there.

*

Hana Damon-Tollenaere lives in California with her girlfriend and a variety of reptiles and amphibians. Her published work can be found at hanadamontollenaere.carrd.co

The Longitude of Erosion or the Meridians of Insouciance by Melissa Eleftherion

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The Longitude of Erosion or the Meridians of Insouciance
When you stood me up at Penn Station after our fling in Florence
that summer, I’d never have imagined I’d be laughing
years later, watching your life unfold on a screen in a series of snapshots
revealing a revolving door of blondes and babies added to your brood
When we met and backpacked together from Rome to Florence
it was a bliss of days I seized that mid-night I knocked on your door
Giddy from dancing on a table with new friends at that little bar
How we talked about our dreams on the hostel veranda until the sun came up
Burnishing our unwashed faces with its hue & lament for I was leaving that morning
Impetuously, you decided to take time off work to come with
We ran for the train & missed it
Ate strawberry gelato in Termini as the guards chastised us
We kissed on every corner and ducked behind fountains
Listened to Canadian death metal at the record store
Trekked and lingered on winding lines at the Duomo, the Uffizi
Camped at the hostel drunk on jug wine under the stars
When you stood me up, I mocked myself for trusting
in a love that light, that graceful, for trusting in you
Now I’m grateful we didn’t taint our tryst with relationship dramas
Midlife crises and whose turn it is to clean the bathroom
Grateful we didn’t ruin our time together with bitter resentments
or an accounting of life’s mundane daily tasks,
This memory of feeling free in Florence at last
unencumbered by relationships, & hiking up hills in a pair of flip flops
This memory of myself, how it remains
Braids twisted up to see the sun, & laughing outside Dante’s little house
*
Melissa Eleftherion (she/they) is a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. Born & raised in Brooklyn, she holds degrees from Brooklyn College, Mills College, and San Jose State University. They are the author of the full-length poetry collections: field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & gutter rainbows (Querencia Press, 2024), as well as twelve chapbooks including abject sutures (above/ground press, 2024). Her work has been widely published & featured in venues like Quarter after Eight, Sixth Finch, Entropy, & Barren Magazine. Melissa now lives in Northern California where she manages the Ukiah Branch Library, curates the LOBA Reading Series, and serves as Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Ukiah. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.

What has Become of the First Marriage by Carolynn Kingyens

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What has Become of the First Marriage

Whenever I see a mature-looking couple,
between early-to-mid sixties,
walking hand-in-hand with that obnoxious
look of late, middle age love,
I immediately know, stronger
than suspicion, that this is a second marriage,
possibly, a third.

Their bodies, still spry,
with the exception of their backs
now weary and slightly leaning
into the semblance
of a cursive C.

It’s at the garish, fluorescent-lit diner,
known for their early bird specials,
where I spot them next;
sitting side-by-side in the same
maroon-colored polyurethane-pleather
booth reminding me, for a moment,
of that yellow-tinged photograph
from a history book
back in middle school
of a pioneering couple,
sitting side-by-side as the husband
mans a dust-covered wagon
while his wife holds a long,
double barrel shotgun
across her lap during the era
of the California Gold Rush.

I ponder, wondering why
they just can’t sit across
from each other like the rest
of us disgruntled, cynical couples
well-seasoned in realism and romance,
knowing full well the value
of separate booths and bedrooms;
the value of personal space.

Perhaps we can blame it on
raising multiple children
notwithstanding the later care
of elderly parents
before the unexpected crash
and subsequent depletion
of your Roth IRA and 401K,
and our failure to launch,
rage-filled man-child, who’d turn us
prematurely gray in our thirties,
and who still keeps us
up at night with endless worry.

This is the kind of tumult
that depletes and desolates
first marriages into abysmal
shreds.

It’s as if some imaginary, sci-fi
vortex has sucked every
ounce of lust and desire
clean from the depths
of our loins, leaving our love
cagey and bone-dry.

Now when you reach out
your retired, manicured
hand across the tabletop;
across the universe;
it feels oddly foreign
and cold as a dead fish
with that thousand-yard
glaucoma-cloudy gaze,
finally yielding to its fate.

*

Carolynn Kingyens was born and raised in Northeast Philadelphia. She is the author of two poetry collections, BEFORE THE BIG BANG MAKES A SOUND and Coupling, both published by Kelsay Books. In addition to poetry, she writes short fiction and narrative essays. Two of her short stories were selected for Best of Fiction 2021 and 2023 by Across the Margin, a Brooklyn arts & culture webzine. The audio version of the stories are available on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify. And two of her essays, “There’s A Tiffany In Every Dysfunctional Family” (about the youngest sister of David and Amy Sedaris) and “How Creative Resilience Saved Me From Childhood Trauma” were recently republished by YourTango, a large, female-led NYC publisher. You can read some of her narrative essays on Medium, where she dives into a myriad of topics from The Royal Family to true crime.

Divorce Rat by WIFE X

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Divorce Rat

When my husband and I thought we would stay together,
we decided to landscape the front, tear out the weeds,
pull out a row of shrubs and one big tree.
The shrubs had been planted back in the 80s when the house was built.
Upon quick glance, you might think they were fine—the tops green,
like a toupee. But all of them were half or three-quarters dead.
Brittle by their pudgy middles, desiccated and brown from their waists
down into the ground. We chain-sawed each one at the base,
not realizing the sweaty months, the hatchet hacking,
what sweat and pleading and burns on the palms
to pull out the roots. Into drilled holes, we poured soap
and salt, soaking the roots. Then burning, hand-sawing off
some of the larger roots like taking off an octopus’s legs
one by one, until my husband could use a large pole as a lever,
and you heard the tear. To tear a tree from the Earth
sounds like you’re ripping God’s thick fabric.
When we pulled out the last one, the biggest,
not a shrub but an actual pine tree, taller than either of us
and dead to the height of our heads. Amid its dead roots,
we saw a tunnel in the soil, and a big fat rat body
rolled out and lay on its back on the gravel driveway in the sun.
Once during a fight, I told my husband my affair was his fault.
Not in those words exactly, but it’s true, I blamed him.
I realize now how much this was like the times he had told me
his being suicidal was all my fault. Excuses, how much
I loved the baby compared to him. Once the weeds and tree
were gone, we could see the dry dirt, full of the kind of grubs
that indicate the soil is gone, containing little to no nutrients.
My husband later claimed my affair was to punish him.
I can see the way in which I was, indeed, indecent, an eye for an eye—
not with the affair exactly, because I thought I loved that other man—
but with the blame. The rat lay there. Then, amazingly, sprung up.
Ran into the woods. Terrifying to see a country rat, larger than
a chihuahua, spring into action. Terrifying and thrilling.
A rat is a creature that can survive a dry, dead burrow
filled with chemicals and illness. To think, its belly warmed
from the sun. To pretend to vanquish your foes: a shovel, a chainsaw.
To pretend to reanimate, your own Firebird
from the ash, your own springtime, to begin again.
I am a rat, I might tell my next lover. A rat is a creature
that can play dead for eons until it nearly forgets it is alive.
A rat is a creature who knows how to get by.

*

“All is fair in love and war,” the saying goes. WIFE X disagrees. Pat Benatar sang, “Love is a battlefield.” And with the statistics about intimate partner violence, household labor, and more–WIFE X agrees with Benatar, which is why she is using this nom de guerre as she writes from her home somewhere on the East Coast.

Foamhenge by FM Stringer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Foamhenge

“Come one, come all to the marvelous Foamhenge! Foamhenge is our famous full-size Stonehenge replica made entirely of styrofoam!”

Summer 2012—

Was it your turn behind the wheel
when we pulled off the highway
at Natural Bridge, Virginia,
to stretch our legs, snap a photo,
or was it mine? Two weeks
in an ‘03 Jetta in an oil slick
of an August, finding out how much
of the long country we could see
before the apocalypse—It must have been
yours. I loved you then. Did I
tell you so as you leaned into the dash
and peered over your knockoff Ray-
Bans, as though to better see the road
turn primitive? O to be a fly
splattered to that windshield. To live
in this honeyed account. The dirt parking lot
staining our sneakers copper. The path
uphill, flanked by pines. These things
don’t last. An unseasonable storm
darkened a corner of sky, hurrying us.
Miles away, the ocean licked
an archipelago higher
than it ever had before. Up close:
The stones’ gray latex paint, weathered
in broad patches. The white
styrene pellets underneath, stuck
mid-spill. A ruin of a monument
to a ruin of a monument,
nevertheless, in its way,
spellbinding. Perhaps in part due
to the figure on the grassy fringe, a life-
size Merlin, also showing wear, posed
reaching to summon lightning, or to lift
the megalithic stones himself by magic.
His face, according to a sign nearby, cast
from a mold of a friend’s, a death mask.
One day, something’s here. The next—

In four years it would all come down,
migrate 170 miles northeast, the pieces
repaired, repainted, and re-placed
to align with the Summer solstice,
like its inspiration in England—
a temple, observatory, or tomb.
We didn’t know that then. And I
didn’t know that it would be, for us,
the last stop, the end of the road.
But from the parking lot, looking up
the hill, facing the sun and
the standing stones, from that distance
I could almost see it perfectly:
the persistence of it, thereness—
its character a holiness,
set among the dead—its having been
conceived, quarried, heaved—
its being of the same blue earth that was
nearing an ending all around us.

*

FM Stringer’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in The Penn Review, North American Review, West Trade Review, RHINO, and elsewhere. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and dogs.

Retrospective by Ace Boggess

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Retrospective

You needed a normal life; I needed attention—
both of us negligent drivers of intersecting cars,
adjusting radio knobs as one light reddens,
another greens. I couldn’t build a stable base
with sunlit gardens, a shade tree at one corner
of the property; I kept a cluttered junkyard in me,
flash-mobbed by rats & wild dogs.

You needed a normal life; I needed something
intangible like success or universal love.
I was a snow globe shattered on the street, & you,
you worked each job until it broke you more,
then moved on to the next, leaving you little time
to observe my fragments.

You needed children; I needed to be taught
the rate of decay of hope. I was a grocer who dreams, &
you were a shopper demanding to get your vegetables
scanned. I couldn’t place your produce in a sack
without reciting Shakespeare in dramatic pauses, &
you, who already heard soliloquies of tragic men,
didn’t see yourself waiting for the curtain.

*

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes, watches Criterion films, and tries to stay out of trouble. His forthcoming books include poetry collections, My Pandemic / Gratitude List from Mōtus Audāx Press and Tell Us How to Live from Fernwood Press, and his first short-story collection, Always One Mistake, from Running Wild Press.

Between by Laurie Kuntz

~ ONE ART ~ 14 Comments

Between

If our lives were lived in a straight line
like holding ends of a jump rope–
one turner madness, the other magic,
we would learn to rise in rhythm
with each arc of the rope and all that happens
in a moment of becoming airborne.

Between the landing and next jump
are the daily interactions that prove us human:

The nod of passing hikers scaling an uphill trail.
The placing of coins in a palm by the shopkeeper
after asking how your elderly mother is doing.
A screen door held open or gently shut
after shared cups of chamomile tea on a rainy day.
The manicurist who shapes your nails into a spring color palette.
A pitanga bush overhanging the bridge
never failing to drop its red dappled berries into the lap of April.

Each handshake, hug, and embrace
is a life in the telling, stories that will end
in a skip, jump, and final landing
between madness and magic.

*

Laurie Kuntz loves when her work finds a home in ONE ART. Other places her poetry has appeared are: Sparks of Calliope, Sheila Na Gig, Gyroscope Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, 3rd Wednesday, Ibbetson Street and others. After four previous nominations, she won a Pushcart Prize in 2024.

Canyon by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Canyon

R is steering her way toward a canyon in Colorado–
she warns me we may get cut off–
while I’m circling my neighborhood
like a dog on a leash. Same old ten blocks. She tells me
how a friend of hers, sick unto death
with no cure, chose her own departure date.
R was part of the party that gathered to sing her out,
and all went as planned–still, she says,
it’s weird, the aftermath of it,
echoing inside her. Death is a mindfuck
I say and R laughs so hard
I’m afraid she’ll drive right off the road,
and I laugh back, because it is,
no matter how much we try, no one
can really wrap their heart around eternal
disappearance. R tells me how her friend
loved the party, how she was singing
up till the very end and I say
That’s how I’d like to go,
and she says Me too, and there’s a universe
of things we could add but don’t,
because just then she disappears
into the canyon as forewarned.
I remember a time, not that long ago,
when for any two to talk like this,
wirelessly connected through empty air,
would be considered its own
kind of miracle. Which it is.
Amidst all the other terror
and beauty happening out there.
A minute later, the thing buzzes in my hand
and we pick right up where we left off.

*

Alison Luterman has published four previous collections of poetry, most recently In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press,) and Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press.) Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Sun, Rattle, and elsewhere. She writes and teaches in Oakland, California. www.alisonluterman.net