Month: February 2025

Dear California by Eileen Pettycrew

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Dear California

          after the fires

Yesterday I passed a utility pole plastered
with leaflets so old they formed a dress

the color of fog, and I thought of you, my California,
the way you used to be, your chain-reaction pileups

on old highway 99 and two-hour school delays,
your fog a room in which I could hide,

my hands gone, my feet gone,
your sun hung on a clothesline to dry.

Now you are my faraway sorrow,
reaching so high with your mirror and smoke

I can’t tell if you’re still breathing,
California; I have no advice to give.

Birds fly over your great valley
but they cannot stop the wind.

For you, I choose a black dress,
the hem taking on dust. A straw hat

with the brim pulled low and sandals
made of ash. California, I travel anywhere

but still I find you, your tricks and magic,
your small noise through the wires.

*

Eileen Pettycrew’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, CALYX Journal, Cave Wall, ONE ART, SWWIM Every Day, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Blue Heron Review, and elsewhere. In 2022 she was one of two runners-up for the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry and a finalist for the New Letters Award for Poetry. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at Pacific University. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Eileen lives in Portland, Oregon.

Two Poems by Hilary King

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Persimmon Tree in Winter

Grand dame in orange diamonds.
Library with a hundred copies
of the same delicious book.
Last guest to leave the wedding
pocketing the leftover favors.
She poses by the pine tree,
Ignores the evergreen.
I hold my fruit late like that,
certain another summer
will reveal my good. It won’t.
I too shine best in ice.

*

How to Haunt Someone You Love

Fill a kitchen cabinet with coffee mugs.
Plain, fancy, handmade, ceramic,
Santa-faced, jacked-up jack o’lantern,
covered in flowers or cats, quotes from books,
Gifted from work, or swiped.
Fill two shelves of the cabinet.
Stack them on top of each other
so they tilt like trees in a storm
or tombstones in a very old cemetery.
Then die without telling anyone
which was your favorite,
which fit your hand just right.
Make us examine each
of your morning vessels for answers.

*

Originally from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, TAB, Salamander, Belletrist, Fourth River, and other publications. Her book Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024. She loves hiking, travel, and ribbon.

Two Poems by Jennifer L Freed

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Heavy Clouds

On the morning radio, our nation
breaks softly on the news.
Upstairs, the tile guy is singing
off-key as he works on the bathroom floor.
He warned us before he started, “Hope
you don’t mind my old songs.
It’s how I get through the days.”
Snatches of his voice float down to my desk, lift
my mood.

When I go for a walk, I stop to watch
a robin perched atop a hedge. He lets me get close
enough to see his chest move when he chirps,
close enough to see him pluck a red berry,
lift up his chin, let it roll down his throat.
A bent, leathery man in a MAGA cap
stops beside me, and the robin turns an onyx eye
to watch us watching, and the man and I smile
at each other. He says, “Such little things
brighten my day.”

I want to believe this is a good sign.
But I don’t believe in signs.
Lately, I find in myself a new impulse
to guard my tongue, my text messages.
Years ago, in Prague, I met a woman
who turned on her kitchen tap before whispering
her opinions. I met a man
who’d been jailed in his youth
for performing “degenerate” songs.

I wish I could still hear Tile Guy
singing his way through the day.
But he’s clumping down the stairs now,
going out to his battered truck for a smoke.
He leans against the hood, takes a long drag,
gazes up at the empty blue sky.

*

Geometry 350: Questions of Repair

          for Alessandra

If the January light is cold and clear, and the man
with the cardboard sign at the intersection
of Pleasant and Main seems close
to tears when you hand him the twenty
your mother just gave you,
what is the volume of his words
when he says he’s been waiting
for something good to happen
since his boots were stolen while he slept?

And what is the measure of your gaze
greeting his, staying long enough
for him to tell you he borrowed
a pair of size sevens, but his feet
are size nine, and he couldn’t
keep walking, so thank you, thank you, this
makes his day.

And if you now see his stocking feet,
how he lifts them in turns
off the concrete as he speaks,
what is the circumference of the afternoon
yawning wide and idle ahead of you?

If, an hour later, the man is still there, still working
his way down the street in his socks
as the sun withdraws and the ice
tightens its grip on the sidewalks,
what will be the trajectory of your voice
calling, Sir! Sir! till he turns, and you say,
You’re size nine, right?
and his eyes take in the bag
you are holding out toward him.

*

Jennifer L Freed’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Writers Resist, Bellevue Literary Review, ONE ART, and other journals. Her collection When Light Shifts (finalist, 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize) explores themes of identity, health, care-giving and parent-care in the aftermath of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage. She teaches writing programs from Massachusetts. Please visit jfreed.weebly.com

Everything is Connected by Martin Willitts Jr

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Everything is Connected

It’s pointless to regret what might have been.
Just ask my father about the Second World War,
when his cannon backfired,
killing everyone else immediately, and leaving him deaf.
He knew what it was like to be covered in blood splatter.

I can picture my father, limp on red ground,
when some field medic, checking for pulses,
brings him back to safety. War explodes time.

I know the loneliness of choices,
as a field medic in Vietnam,
how survivors feel guilty making it alive,
other men never going home.

I can almost see my father
waking up on a cot in a hospital, unable to hear
some doctor asking, “Can you follow my finger?”
The doctor’s lips moving silently,
my father not responding.

I also know this story:

my father had a war buddy
who promised to fix him up with a woman he knew.
She worked in a factory where they made weapons
that helped increase killing.
When she witnessed all those wounded men
next to my father, she quit her job.
She became my mother.

When I received my draft notice for Vietnam,
my mother hid the mail. She knew war subtracts,
leaves some wounds you never see.

I volunteered to be a medic. I couldn’t imagine killing.

War numbs many of us. I know what it’s like
to walk through fields of dying and wounded men,
needing to leave the dying behind.
I touched death. It felt human.

My mother never forgave me for being that close to death.

My father never told me what it was like to be a survivor;
I had to learn the hard way.

My mother tip-toed around problems, biting her tongue,
frustrated with his deafness.

I could never tell my son about war,
although he loved playing with toy soldiers.
He might have thought it odd when I suggested
needing a toy medic, although he never said anything.

We never know where life goes,
and choices narrow into vanishing points.
Not being able to talk out issues
leaves scabs on a heart.

And, I have to admit,
I could not tell him the toll war had taken on me.
I could not talk about Vietnam for years.
I kept those secrets inside me,
a locket of misery.

I still have problems talking about it.

War creates another type of deafness.
I am trying to remove those bandages of silence.

It’s time to carry out the wounded.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He was nominated for 17 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review’s William K. Hathaway Award; 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; 2014 Broadsided award; 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, November 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award and provided “Poetry on The Bus” which had 48 poems in local buses including 20 bi-lingual poems from 7 different languages.

He has over 20 full-length poetry collections including “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Still Point Press, 2024); “Not All Beautiful Things Need to Fly” (Silver Bow Publishing, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Collected Works” (FutureCycle Press, 2024); and forthcoming, “Bone Chills and Arpeggios” (March Street Press, 2025).

Three Poems by tc Wiggins

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Failure

Light lifts from the lake at dawn
then leaves his face by dusk.
The waterfall is both chorus
of song and silence.
Some days I am like Elijah
ascending on horses into heaven.
Other days are different, so different.

*

Likely Gone

It is yet another afternoon in January.
Convincing again an almost lover to love
herself while reading the book of Job.

Currently he’s in the thick of the whole ordeal.
Of losing everything. Children, servants, sheep—
his wife cooking in the dim silence of the kitchen.

Outside the snow stretches west for miles.
Or would, if houses were not propped up
like tombstones for the living. Suddenly I

can’t help but recall the burrow of bunnies
we years ago had found in our backyard
filled to the brim with marble-eyed babies

shivering inside their patches of brown-white fur.
Outside the snow stretches west for miles. Many
of them are likely gone now. Likely long gone.

*

Morning Sex

How do our knees not buckle
beneath the immense weight

of their own body? What
force does the horse see

that compels her, even from birth,
to keep running away from herself

always? My god. Was the equation
wrong this whole time? Do swans

sing of love before death
or is it the song

which kills them? I fear madly
for the ouroboros. Has he

ever been taught how
to not swallow himself

whole? It is early morning
when pleasure leaves me

and a woman nearly out of love
asks if I am

still doing okay. And I say yes,
yes dear. I am still doing okay.

*

tc Wiggins is an African American poet residing in Cincinnati, Ohio who has been writing since the August of 2022. His poems have appeared in Red Noise Collective, Every Writer, Small World City, Big Windows Review, Door is a Jar, and Diode.

What Is by J.D. Isip

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What Is

Suffering, Seneca tells us, happens on a loop
in hours we imagine. We imagine a blood red sun,
a beast rising from the sea, a creature we created
to punish us our sins of our past, to punish ourselves
on a regular rotation of what we think we deserve.

The kids outside, climbing the trunk of our tallest
tree, triumphant in mounting the lowest of its arms,
smiling in the last pink light shafts of early winter.
My hound asleep belly up, her leg kicking a little,
dreaming of the chase. What is requires no chase.

There are stores of soup in our cupboards, coffee
percolating in the kitchen, pictures of lost loved ones
in the ages where what I imagined was never losing
anyone or anything, their happy eyes knowing then,
posing for a portrait, how easy we miss what is.

*

J.D. Isip’s collections include Reluctant Prophets (Moon Tide Press, 2025), Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023), and Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). J.D. teaches in South Texas where he lives with his dogs, Ivy and Bucky.

ONE ART’s March Reading — Featured Poets: Joanne Leva, Tresha Faye Haefner, Jennifer Browne, Ethel Rackin, Dana Knott, Allison Blevins

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~ The ONE ART Reading Series ~

ONE ART’s March 2025 Reading! 

Sunday, March 2 — 2pm Eastern (via Zoom)

Tickets are FREE or Donation

>>> Tickets Available Here <<<

Featured Poets: Joanne Leva, Tresha Faye Haefner, Jennifer Browne, Ethel Rackin, Dana Knott, Allison Blevins

Joanne Leva, author of Eve Heads Back and Eve Would Know (Kelsay Books) and an advocate for creative writing and community service. Joanne is founder and executive director of the Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Program (MCPL), directed by Chad Frame (who is an upcoming Featured Poet!! So, I hope you’ll plan to tune in to ONE ART’s future readings). She also oversees the new Montgomery County PA Youth Poet Laureate program (YPL), directed by Evan Wang. Leva founded and has coordinated the Forgotten Voices Poetry Group and workshop, the first Saturday of every month from the Indian Valley Public Library, in Telford, for over 34 years. 

Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Peace is a Haiku Song, 50 Over Fifty, Apiary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Rag Queen Periodical, Mad Poet’s Review, Bucks County Writer, Transcendent Visions, among others. Her poem, God Walks into a Bar, was featured in a Philadelphia Calligraphers Society Exhibit and Poetry Reading and companion publication entitled, Scripta. Her poem, Looking Back on the Mountain, was featured in an exhibition and companion publication entitled, Making Magic: Beauty in Word and Image, at the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA.

Ask me about the Caesura Poetry Festival & Retreat!

The MCPL is a program of the Indian Valley Arts Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit corporation. Please consider supporting our efforts with a donation.

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Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and the author of five chapbooks and four collections. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com. If you would like to support the Blevins family during their current health crisis, you can donate to their Meal Train or purchase an item off their wishlist.

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Tresha Faye Haefner is an award-winning poet, performer, educator and general facilitator of the fun times. Her work has been widely published and garnered several awards, including the Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and the Pangea Prize. Her first book, When the Moon Had Antlers (Pine Row Press, 2024) was a finalist for the Glass Lyre Poetry Prize. She is best described as an eco-poet, travel-poet, and performance poet. She writes words for the stage, page, coffee shop, words for sitting under a tree alone, and words for reading to someone you love while rowing them down a river towards dawn.

In addition to writing her own poems about nature and other mysteries, her most important role is to help others feel safe and inspired to write work of their own. Most importantly, she is founder of The Poetry Salon, an online learning community where poets meet to share inspiration, education and support as they write together and cheer one another on! You can get new information, updates and invitations to events at The Poetry Salon by joining The Poetry Salon on Substack at ThePoetrySalonStack.Substack.com.

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Dana Knott’s writing has recently appeared in The Selkie, Moss Puppy, Minerva Rising, Cosmic Daffodil, and Dust Poetry Magazine. Her micro chapbook “Funeral Flowers” was published by Rinky Dink Press in 2024. Currently, she works as an academic library director in Ohio, and is the editor of tiny wren lit, which publishes micro poetry and micro chapbooks. Check out her profile on Chill Subs: https://www.chillsubs.com/user/dana.a.knott.

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Jennifer Browne falls in love easily with other people’s dogs. She is the author of American Crow (Beltway Editions, 2024) and the poetry chapbooks Before: After (Pure Sleeze Press, 2025), In a Period of Absence, a Lake (Origami Poems Project, 2025), whisper song (tiny wren publishing, 2023) and The Salt of the Geologic World (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Her work has recently appeared in Poets for Science, Humana Obscura, Trailer Park Quarterly, and One Sentence Poems. Find her in Frostburg, MD and her poems at linktr.ee/jenniferabrowne.

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Ethel Rackin is the author of four books of poetry: The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013); Go On (Parlor Press, 2016), a National Jewish Book Award finalist; Evening (Furniture Press, 2017); and In Time (Word Works Books, May 2025). In addition, she is the author of the text Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing (Broadview Press, 2022).

Her collaborative lyric sequence, “Soledad,” written with Elizabeth Savage, was awarded the 2016 Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred by Elizabeth Robinson, and another collaborative sequence, “Silent e,” is included in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Volt, and other journals.

She earned her MFA from Bard College and her PhD in English Literature from Princeton University. A MacDowell fellow, she has taught at Penn State Brandywine, Haverford College, and Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, where she is a professor of English.

Earlier, Jane Kenyon by Allison Blevins

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Earlier, Jane Kenyon

entered a conversation, both omen and curse.
So many poems begin after diagnosis, many of yours,
and now, all of mine. Lady Jane, our oracle of otherwise,
remind me to slow down. I am in no hurry—any longer—
to get where I am going.

*

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and the author of five chapbooks and four collections. Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com

VIDDUI by Lisa Badner

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VIDDUI

I never heard my father utter “god”
except in rote Hebrew prayers.

Yeshiva of Flatbush bred – he insisted on two sets of dishes
two cutleries, kosher meat.

My mother – a German Jew, obliged.
Sneaking me out for crispy bacon on Saturdays

while dad went to shul. But at home
we went through the motions.

For a while, I even recited the shema before going to sleep,
kneeling at the bed, like the Christian kids on TV –

I said the words –
Eventually, being in the kosher baking business, my father

fed up by the scamming koshering rabbis –
stopped caring about kosher meat (so expensive!);

The cutlery and dishes in their house got mixed up
and dad only went to Shul on the high holidays.

When he was dying, I arranged for a Rabbi
to visit him – laminated viddui prayer in hand –

hoping to bring some kind of comfort, to him
or maybe to me. To be enveloped

in that end-of-life blanket that only belief can bring.
Come on dad, I implored,

but he waved them away.
And I sat alone with him at the end

watching his body actively dying,
with nowhere to go.

*

Lisa Badner’s debut poetry collection, FRUIT CAKE, was published in 2022 by Unsolicited Press. Lisa’s writing has appeared in Rattle, the New Ohio Review, The Satirist, PANK, Fourteen Hills, Unbroken, The Fruit Slice, the Mid-Atlantic Review, among others, and forthcoming in Pine Hills Review. Lisa has been nominated for a Pushcart and made once it to “special mention.” Lisa lives in Brooklyn. See https://lisabadner.com/ for more.

WRITING THE CATASTROPHE: SINGING IN DARK TIMES — A Workshop with Donna Hilbert

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WRITING THE CATASTROPHE: SINGING IN DARK TIMES

“Redemption depends on the tiny fissure in continuous catastrophe.” – Walter Benjamin

“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.” – William Stafford

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.” – Bertolt Brecht

About his own work, Stanley Kunitz has said: “The poem comes in the form of a blessing— ‘like rapture breaking on the mind,’ as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years, I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.”

“As more and more of contemporary life is forced into the present moment, there seem to be fewer mechanisms which allow the past to be fully absorbed and lived once it has
happened. It has become harder to experience grief since it is a retroactive emotion which requires subsequent returns to the loss over a period of time. Only through such returns
may one hope for the very real gain of transforming losses of various kinds into meaningful contributions to our own becoming . . . . Here I am speaking not only of the loss one experiences in the death of a loved one, but also of those diminishments of being which become known gradually, as when child or parent or lover discovers piecemeal the signs of neglect and lost trust.
Poems have long been a place where one count on being able to feel, in a bodily sense, our connection to loss. I say bodily to emphasize the way poems act not only upon the mind and spirit, but also upon the emotions which release the bodily signs of feeling—so that we weep, laugh, are brought to anger, feel loneliness, or the comfort of companionship . . . .”
– Tess Gallagher from “The Poem as a Reservoir for Grief” The American Poetry Review

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About The Workshop Instructor

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

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Tickets & Registration

WRITING THE CATASTROPHE: SINGING IN DARK TIMES
Instructor: Donna Hilbert
Date: Thursday, March 20, 2025
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern (3:00-5:00pm Pacific) via Zoom
Price: $25 (payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp)

To register for this workshop, please email Mark Danowsky (ONE ART’s Editor-in-Chief) —  oneartpoetry@gmail.com 

How Old Do You Feel? by Roseanne Freed

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How Old Do You Feel?

How old do you feel?
she asked. What a stupid
question I thought.

I’d just turned fifty
and felt fifty.

Twenty years later
I still feel fifty, but when
I look in the mirror,

I don’t recognize
the one who looks at me.

When I first heard
about video phone calls,
I thought,

What a stupid idea.
Why would anyone

want to see the person
they’re talking to?
I’d have to brush my hair.

That was before
I discovered FaceTime,

and the joy of real-time
chats with grandchildren
in Canada,

and before your death
left me with unfixable
unbearable longing.

O to see you,
to hear your voice
even in a silent dreamtime.

When you left us
you were forty-one.

How old do you feel?

*

Roseanne Freed lives in Los Angeles. Poetry helped her survive Mahalia’s death so she knows it will help her survive the fires which surround her home in the San Fernando Valley. Her debut chap book “Your Name Is A Poem” published this summer by Picture Show Press, is available on amazon. She is honored to be a member of ONE ART’s poetry community.

Why We Sing by William Taylor Jr.

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Why We Sing

The universe is forever
indifferent to our sorrow

and this is why we
make a music of it.

We are god-forgotten
and this is why we dance
the way we do

why we reach for fire
and other things
that burn

why we learn the language
of everything gone
and turn it into song.

Each day we wake
into a world already lost

and this is why we sing.

*

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in literary journals, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award, and edited Cocky Moon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline (Zeitgeist Press, 2014). His latest poetry collection, A Room Above a Convenience Store, is available from Roadside Press.

Crossing the Green Bridge with Jerry by Lynn Levin

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Crossing the Green Bridge with Jerry
             In memory of Gerald Stern
We were walking across the green bridge from Lambertville
to New Hope, and you were 72, the age that I am now.
You called it stinking New Hope because it was full
of shops and tourists and that brought out the vehemence
in you. But you loved the little shul there and Sandy the rabbi.
As for walking across the bridge, you did not love that.
It was a truss bridge lacy and airy. Cars passed over
a metal grating and drivers could look to the river below.
Nothing very solid between a car and the great drop,
though the walkway for foot traffic was paved
and there were handrails and guard rails. Being in the air
over the Delaware pleased me. I would watch the flycatchers
and swallows swooping, look down at the turtles congregating
on the bases of the piers. You told me you feared bridges
because you feared heights, that horses, too, feared bridges,
and that people covered them to make the horses feel safe.
Between you and beasts there was always a brotherhood
and for humans you reserved your love and rage and sadness.
Looking back across the bridge now toward Lambertville,
I almost see you. How young you were then and in your prime.
*
Lynn Levin is a poet and writer. She lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and teaches English and creative writing at Drexel University. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Plume, Rattle, on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and other places. Her most recent books are the short story collection House Parties (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) and the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020). Her website is lynnlevinpoet.com.

Two Poems by Joyce Sutphen

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Polar Vortex

That’s when we hear the names of places
never mentioned on the 10 O’clock News:

Tower, Embarrass, Warroad, and Baudette.
Suddenly they are legendary; one after

another they report their astonishing
numbers: -45, -56, -60! How low can

they go? It’s a Polar Vortex! Happens
every twenty or thirty years up here in

the North, and for a few days, it’s all
we talk about. Where were we the last time

the temperature dropped to a gazillion below
zero? Will the Governor close down

the whole state? Will the car start?
Next day, when we hear the schools

and airports are closed, we start to relax.
Nothing is going to happen for a while,

and there’s nothing we love more than that.

*

On Wednesday

When we woke, we heard
the sound of rain—constant rain—

a whisper along the edges of
the roof, a steady threading

through in the air.
We leaned on pillows

and remembered
the night before the night before.

We planned (even though we knew
such things must come as naturally

as leaves to a tree). Then you got
the pangram in one, and the wordle

in two. You beat the bot, but
when the skies cleared, it was just

another day, filled with worries,
little gray donkeys packed and

ready, carrying enough supplies
to last us into winter and beyond.

*

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Stearns County, Minnesota. Her first book of poetry, Straight Out of View, won the Barnard New Women’s Poets Prize Press,1995). Her second book of poems, Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and her third book, Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press, 2004), won the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Her recent books are Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), This Long Winter (Carnegie Mellon Press 2021), and That Other Life (2023). She served as the Minnesota Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2021, succeeding Robert Bly, and she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

VANITY by J.R. Solonche

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VANITY

I’ve been walking around
mumbling the word vanity.
I can’t get it out of my head
or off my lips. “Vanity,” I say,
shaking my head, when I see
the cardiologist drive off in his
new Mercedes. “Vanity,” I say,
shaking my head, when I watch
the woman in the supermarket
ostentatiously display her Gucci
bag. “Vanity,” I say, shaking my
head when the teenage lovers
walk down the street wearing
matching Jordans and aviators.
“Vanity,” I say to my reflection
as I pass in front of the book
store window. “All is vanity,”
I say, shaking my head.

*

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Two Poems by Erin Murphy

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Insomnia Chronicles XXIII

The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. My husband swears that every time he looks at a clock, it’s a palindrome: 9:19 or 12:21. What are the odds, I wonder, and ask my phone How many times a day are palindromes? But before I type the last word, AutoComplete reveals the most common search is How many times a day are you supposed to poop? A digital clock has 44 palindrome times in a 24-hour period. About 3 percent of the 1,440 times in a day. Admit it—you want to know how often you should be pooping, don’t you? At least once every three days, but your mileage may vary. I squint at the red numbers on my bedside table: 5:38 AM. Not a palindrome. It’s Electoral College o’clock. Ha. I wonder if this sentence has ever been uttered before. Like Johnny Carson’s bit, “Phrases You’ll Never Hear.” My favorite: That’s the banjo player’s Porsche. I once had a student walk into my office her freshman year and say, “My dream is to become a technical writer”—a sentence I’d never heard before. I get teacher, novelist, librarian. One advisee wanted to be the editor of Random House, which seemed not so random. But no technical writers right out of the gate. I heard that the Space Shuttle Challenger crashed in part because of a technical communication error, something about politeness downplaying the potential O-ring dangers. I was in high school. They wheeled AV carts into classrooms so we could watch the first teacher launch into space. Suddenly there was a ball of fire and a Y of smoke against the sky. Mrs. Byrd scurried to turn off the TV and launched us to lunch, then home. Every generation has its Challenger. Every generation has its challenges, some version of routine, routine, routine, disaster, routine, routine, routine. A palindrome.

*

Insomnia Chronicles XXVIII

The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. My phone says it’s 3° but feels like -2. I learned how to make the degree symbol. You press the 0 until a tiny porthole pops up. Go ahead, try it. I wonder when meteorologists replaced windchill with real feel. Such a cheesy full rhyme. The assonance was cooler IMO. I used to think FTW—For The Win—meant Fuck The World. My colleague just spent 29 hours flying back from a friend’s wedding in India. The air quality was above 500. Severe plus, they called it. Literally off the charts. Literally never means literally anymore. Literally. The wedding cost $20 million. Every guest had a private butler for the week. Fuck The World. At least 1.8 million Indians are unhoused. That’s the preferred term now: unhoused instead of homeless. It shifts the focus from the person to the system. But it still defines people by what they lack. Fuck The Word. The ceasefire feels as fragile as a premature baby in an abandoned hospital. Fuck The War. I got an email notice from an academic journal that tracks its readership. The 39th person just read my poem published three years ago. This should probably make me sad. 1.08 people per month. Or person—is 1.08 even plural? It’s a poem about the inhumane treatment of Mexican migrants. We are sending 10,000 troops to the border. And by “we” I mean “he.” Fuck The 90 Million Eligible Voters Who Sat Out The Election. Yes, I realize this ruins the acronym. Fuck Acronyms. Every now and then a gust shakes the windowpane above my bed. It sounds like a single coin rattling in a tin cup. One person. One person will cozy up in a fleece throw and click the link to a poem. What do we mean when we say enough?

*

Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, 2024) and Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). Her recent work has appeared in Ecotone, Rattle, North American Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfiction 2024, and in anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, Bedford/St. Martin’s, and other presses. Her awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, two Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence, and a Best of the Net award. She serves as poetry editor of The Summerset Review and professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Website: www.erin-murphy.com

Houdini by Tim Moder

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Houdini

Now you see me, life of parties,
hand on bottles, now you don’t.
I could double as a sunrise, or as
a half-life. Tonight, I lay in parking
lots, on glass, on gravel, turning
rags to other rags. Remember home
tomorrow, invest in seven brand
new sins tonight. A constant bull
with pottery necklaces. A performing
jester leering on a crowded city
street. At bar close sell me flowers.
I saw this girl smile as she went
down hard, on her elbow, on the
ice. Presto, she inflated as she rose,
and could not wait to stand in line
for chicken. Her drunk friends
breathed with laughter. She and I
have long advertisements written
into our genetic codes. We live in
packed theaters. There are no
soundproof rooms. Everyone is on
display. Now you see me.

*

Tim Moder is a poet from northern Wisconsin. He is an enrolled member of The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. He lives with his cat in a house that is too big. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Cutthroat, South Florida Poetry Journal, Freshwater Review, and others. He is the author of the chapbooks All True Heavens (Alien Buddha) and American Parade Routes (Seven Kitchens). His poems have been nominated for Best Of The Net and The Pushcart Prize. Find him at timmoder.com

Three Poems by Ariel Tovlev

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Res(is)t: Rest is / Resist

somewhere between neglected and obsessive
between passive and active
you can find rest
nestle in its nest
let your body lay fallow
let your hair grow like tangled weeds
sunshine slumbering
freckles appear like honeybees
precisely scattered among the clover
cheeks like cherry blossoms crinkled in the heat
let the fruits of your labor go unpicked
let the sickly sweet flesh rot and return
to the earth
let yourself be for no one
let yourself be

*

Empathy

empathy is not an exhaustible resource
although it is at times exhausting
we are our only limiting factor

the heart is never so open
as when it is broken
let it break, let it break

hate is never a prerequisite for love
the only requirement for love is love
and perhaps a broken heart

the heart is never so open
as when it is broken
let it break, let it break

love for one does not negate love for another
we must believe that love is a multiplier
we can give and give and never run out

the heart is never so open
as when it is broken
let it break, let it break

empathy is an infinite well
a spring that is freely flowing
if we’re empty we need only check our taps

the heart is never so open
as when it is broken
let it break, let it break

* 

Is this Nature Too

commotion in the bushes
a cardinal flees to a nearby tree
other nameless birds take flight
the bushes continue their rattle

a common grackle stands her ground
calling out over and
over and
over

are they cries
of warning
or despair

the frantic shriek of the bird
the continued rustle in the bushes
I cannot see the crisis but imagine
a fox eating her eggs for breakfast

I know this is nature too
it is nature for the fox to kill
it is nature for even a bird to cry for her young

but what of our nature

I can see our crises clearly
live-streamed videos and pictures posted
mass shootings on social media
smiling portraits of missing and dead
simultaneous mourning and celebrating loss of life
grackle and fox at once

is this nature too

I do not think
we are either
grackle or fox

we are neither

I hear the grackle cry
but I do not see the fox gloat

*

Ariel Tovlev (he/they) is a poet, educator, and rabbi. He has a BFA in Poetry from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in Poetry from Chapman University. As a trans/queer religious leader, they are passionate about creating spaces of belonging for those who have been historically excluded from spiritual spaces. He has been published in TQ Review, Vermillion Literary Project, Queer Voices, and various CCAR Press titles. They live with their spouse, four cats, and 30+ houseplants in the Maryland suburbs of DC.

Purple by Jessica Purdy

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Purple

is round in the mouth
like a plum dusky with mist
on the skin tart and crisp thin
as an elderly bruise under an IV
marking fluid injection
into yellow flesh that pulps
in the teeth. A harp plucked
and dragged with spirits says
there’s golden light and juice
to miss once you’re gone.
The blush-blue crepe
of a grandmother’s chest
in your memory. Like film of her
a ghost of her voice returning.
And wasn’t it always this way?
Where you think you have a grasp
on where your body resides this time.
Where your blood and flesh
makes other blood that could kill you
without a shot in the buttock.
And you are only a summer visitor
in the life you’ve been given.

*

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA from Emerson College. She is the author of STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate, 2017 and 2018), and The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), and You’re Never the Same (Seven Kitchens Press). Her poems and micro-fiction have been nominated for Best Spiritual Literature, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Micro-Fiction. Her poetry, flash fiction, and reviews appear in About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, The Night Heron Barks, SoFloPoJo, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Exeter, NH.

Two Poems by Ted Kooser

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

At Walmart

The glass doors to the store’s garden center,
boxed in by a chain link fence open on top,
have been locked for the winter, all the plants
gone, all that color, that strong geranium

fragrance wafted away, the long folding tables
nobody noticed when covered with flowers
now folded and stacked, the only things out there
in a light blowing snow this cold morning.

Why is it that winter looks so much more
like winter when fenced in, confined like this,
two or three inches of light snow on the stacked
tables, a wrapper from something or other

skittering over the white, untracked expanse,
nobody out there peering in under the leaves
or holding a pot at arm’s length to see it,
turning it into the light, whereas only a few

moments before, you came in out of the same
winter, not paying much attention to it,
but now you stand transfixed, looking out
into the snow sweeping over the emptiness.

* 

A Man Walking

Next into our lives comes a man walking,
head down, perhaps seeing the cracked sidewalk
under his feet, perhaps not, more likely
caught up in his thoughts, bare head butted
into wherever he’s going, the wind from there
fallen still as he stops at a street corner
and waits for the light to change, not looking
up at the light, perhaps reading the movements
of people around him, long coat fallen slack,
his hands stuffed in his pockets, and then
with the rest, starting across, setting his pace
to their pace, no doubt trusting in them to know
when to walk, when to slow, when to stop,
as with the others he leans into what’s next,
wherever he’s going, what he’s entering into,
one with everyone else as, all together, they
shoulder into what’s coming, but our man,
who looks to be nobody’s man, is not meeting
the eyes of all those who’ve already been there
and are on their way back, as they side-step
around him, not touching him, glancing at him
for only that instant, then letting him go.

*

Ted Kooser is a former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner who lives in retirement in Rural Nebraska. His most recent collection of poems is “Raft” from Copper Canyon Press (2024). Forthcoming is his sixth children’s book from Candlewick Press and a book of interviews from University Press of Mississippi, “Conversations with Ted Kooser.”

Squirrels by Joseph Chelius

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Squirrels

In their gray custodians’ uniforms,
they clean up under the feeder.
Or, hanging upside down, suspend themselves
from the pest-proof grill
they make sway on the pole—
the seed we’d intended for the juncos and finches
spewing like coins from a bank.

But today, instead of rapping on the panes
to drive them away,
let us praise them for their tenacity.
Let us marvel at the pistons
of their industrious jaws,
their way of darting across a yard or street,
quick starts, then stops
as if suddenly remembering a chore.

Let us celebrate how pervasive they are—
like kudzu, those shaggy-maned dandelions
that on tall stalks bob in the breeze
as if to taunt our best efforts
to banish them from view—
that return to our lawns and gardens.

*

Joseph Chelius is the author two collections of poems with WordTech editions: The Art of Acquiescence and Crossing State Lines. His new collection, Playing Fields, is forthcoming with Kelsay Books.

Song by Lynne Thompson

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments
Song I’ve learned to look forward to the things I don’t know. Terrance Hayes “Everyday Mojo Letters to Yusef” For such a smart girl, I’m not such a smart girl. I’ve gone everywhere but where shall I go to next? I’ve learned languages and clouds and flags and the myriad ways to cook a good duck l’orange, rice pilaf on the side because look, we all try to game this treadmill, to find shortcuts forward & past the planet we’ve fucked up, past all our venalities to days we can ride a Murphy chestnut in a meadow, look to the seas and skies and wild lands as everyone’s bonus, to things for which political brawls get low ratings, a place where I respect your pronouns, you embrace my allusions and don’t disparage the days I genuflect then sing, joyously: I don’t know Note: Issac Burns Murphy (1861-1896), son of a slave, was a legendary African American jockey.

Lynne Thompson is Poet Laureate Emerita for the City of Los Angeles and received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She’s the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024). Thompson is President of the Cave Canem Board of Directors and also sits on the Boards of the Poetry Foundation and Los Angeles Review of Books.

Slip by Dana Henry Martin

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Slip

If my hand misses,
I cut something

other than throat.
Maybe I graze

the animal’s neck
or slice to bone.

Maybe the knife
comes back on me.

All these years
as death’s fellow,

my cuts loosening
the earth’s brutes

from the flesh
that roots them.

I tire of this tool’s
rough handle, its

steel that blood
alone can warm.

It never asked
for my palm,

my psalm, my
sworn devotion—

not to the lives
I’ve made but to

the ones I’ve made
slip away.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, FRiGG, Muzzle, New Letters, Willow Springs, and other journals. Martin’s chapbooks include No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press).

2025 ONE ART Haiku Anthology

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2025 ONE ART Haiku Anthology (Online Issue) 

How to Submit: Please email up to five haiku/senyru in the body of an email to:
onearthaiku2025@gmail.com and include a brief bio for use if accepted for curation.

Submission Window: March 1st-31st, 2025

Curation Decision From Katie Dozier by: April 7th, 2025

Anthology Publication Date: April 17th, 2024, National Haiku Day

Requirements: Previously uncurated, though sharing on personal sites (including social media) is great! Simultaneous submissions are also good; just please reply to your own emailed submission to let me know if it was accepted elsewhere.

What I’m Looking For: Despite what so many of us were taught in school, a three-line poem composed of five, then seven, then five syllables is not an accurate nor a complete definition of the art form of haiku. (For more on why, please read this article by Michael Dylan Welch.) Haiku cannot be distilled to being a short poem of a designated number of syllables; contemporary English haiku are constantly evolving and stretching the bounds of how much poem can be packed into a tiny package.

So what are haiku? As he outlined on our episode of The Poetry Space_, Timothy Green defines haiku as “two worlds in one breath,” which I haven’t been able to improve upon! Excellent haiku hinge upon the juxtaposition between two entities in an astonishingly quick amount of time—without the need to arbitrarily count syllables. The best haiku enable you to see both of the two worlds with a deeper understanding.

With that in mind, please do not submit 5-7-5 haiku that lack the juxtaposition at the heart of what makes haiku beat. Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and Rattle are excellent sources for what constitutes the fascinating scope of contemporary English haiku; and they are a great representation of the kind of poems I am excited to curate for ONE ART’s 2025 Haiku Anthology.

For examples of haiku that will be a good fit, check out ONE ART’s 2024 Haiku Anthology.

I can’t wait to read your haiku and, in the meantime, find me over on X (aka. Twitter).

Best of Luck,

Katie Dozier
Haiku Editor

Patricia for Winter by Sofia Bagdade

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Patricia for Winter

Once whole cherry
pie wet with knuckles
pressed to crust

careful in the
kitchen,
bowls crooked

in dishwater and
silverware glints
with promise of

tomorrow’s tasks:
our pistachio ice
cream and key lime whip,

your hands purple
with longing, ever
green on the terrace

bent to bricks
in a straw hat,
your back to

fresh labor
in daffodils, flashes
of your laughter

or the radio
knobs twisting
as our arms

bare to air—
You teach me to stay up
late and study snowflakes

for their delicate
bones press the
pavement

and we skate
the floorboards
in wool socks

You say at
this hour the
torrent is bright

and the skyline
is silent, but
just a second

this thud of
blue ice against
the panes

might melt to the
screech of a
signal, red

peppers dangling
bright from the
eaves, you spin

and release me
right as the chords
polish melody

pastry shell rises
and holds
your timing.

The one
trick you taught
me: to keep
your stove warm

when absence
scrapes as
spoons do
the empty plate

*

Sofia Bagdade is a poet from New York City. Her work appears in The Shore, Red Weather, and The Basilisk Tree. She finds joy in smooth ink, orange light, and French Bulldogs.

KWONG MING by Alyson Gold Weinberg

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

KWONG MING

My brother came to take our father’s car.
Shaky with Parkinson’s and 80, Dad had

rear-ended a Honda while texting. No one
was injured but there was some light denting.

Brandywine Senior Living has a waterlily
koi pond. It was their 60th wedding

anniversary. Cane tucked under one arm
dad sprinted around the lobby. Mom

trailed pokily. We ordered Chinese, a Proustian
return to our favorite take-out place in Wantagh.

Chowed down on shrimp toast and egg foo young,
spareribs and lemon chicken. Dad siphoned hot

and sour soup straight from the container. “Aly,
remember when you burned your hand on the

Pu Pu Platter?” Actually, it was nice,

this anniversary dinner, the first in
years the four of us ate together.

*

The author of Bellow & Hiss, A New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition finalist (Finishing Line Press), Alyson Gold Weinberg’s work appears in literary magazines and anthologies, including Quarter After Eight, December, ONE ART, Halfway Down the Stairs, Silver Birch Press, and Yellow Arrow, among others. Her prose poem “Gwen’s Luncheonette” was runner-up for the 2023 Robert J. De Mott Contest, and her poem “War/Torn Sonnet” was a finalist for the 2024 Midway Journal -1000 Below Flash Contest. When not writing, Alyson loves binge-watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race with her family.

Three Poems by Lisa Rhoades

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Cling

What will you want at the end?
Perhaps cling peaches–
their brilliant gold tongues speaking
the language of your childhood,
whispering a story about your mother
and sugar, a kitchen alchemy.
Paring knife in hand, she separates
velvet skin from flesh, flesh
from crimson stone, spooning fruit
and syrup into wide-mouthed jars.
Do the drapes billow? How long
will you stay at this threshold?
The key is to leave before
her smile slips, the key
is to fix the memory to the fruit–
warm and luscious and calling you.

* 

Scoured

At 5 pm, dad starts fidgeting
his hands–stroking his shirt collar, gripping
the remote. He presses buttons but
nothing connects. He’s undone from his mind
more each day but will still wash his hands
like the clinician and surgeon he was.
He works up a lather, he takes his time
building ribbons of foam on his knuckles
and palms, until a glistening carpet
of soapy fireflies and curlicues
climbs to his wrists before disappearing
down the drain, a muscle memory
of skill and pride and care and love and self
otherwise scoured clean.

*

The Bees in the Asters

How did I not know that Asters will mound
from their branching habit and weight in a net.

In a net branched from habit and weight
I’m caught up in my father’s dying.

My dad’s dying caught me unready,
unable to ease anything for him.

Unable to ease anything. For him,
I clean, for his caregivers, too. I scrub

and scrub, and the caregivers, too.
All morning I bag pants that no longer fit,

all morning I bag shoes he can’t slip on.
Will the bees in the asters outlive him?

What if the bees in the asters outlive him?
Without him, what do I know? Mounds of Asters.

*

Lisa Rhoades is the author of two collections of poetry, The Long Grass, (Saint Julian Press) and Strange Gravity, (Bright Hill Press). She currently works as a pediatric nurse in Manhattan. Her poems have appeared recently at Rogue Agent, Rust+Moth, and the Southern Review and she is a 2025 SWWIM writer in residence at the Betsy.

America, We Hope This is A Mammogram by Alison Hurwitz

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments
America, We Hope This is A Mammogram
America, it’s clear you’ve gone without deodorant,
driven into inquisition, arrived on time and tried
to find distraction in the waiting room.
America, we know you are half hoping they will never
call your name, hope that they forget to lead you
to a cell and strip. They don’t. You fold your bra,
try to tuck it underneath your shirt and sweater,
as if anyone would check, or for that matter, care.
America, you’ll tell yourself that this is routine screening,
discomfort best endured with equanimity. In the
examination room, a politician helps insert your tender parts
into the rack, the press, the radiation squeeze, then drape
your uterus away from inconvenient expression. They say
some soreness now prevents ineptitude or populist disquiet from
becoming angry subdivision. We hope this is your method here:
that after you are 3D screened and hold your breath, you will exhale,
emerging bruised and blotched with red, contused but cancer free.
We hope it isn’t already too late, hope you’ve not metastasized beyond
the reach of intervention. We’ll wait for your results. Fingers crossed.
*
Alison Hurwitz is a former cellist and dancer who now finds music in language. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and for Best of the Net in 2023 and 2024, Alison is the host of the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Published in South Dakota Review, SWIMM, Sky Island Journal and others, her work is forthcoming in The Westchester Review and Poetry in Plain Sight. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorial services, walks in the woods, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com

Three Poems by Catherine Gonick

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Why I Couldn’t Believe in Revolution

The young just want a revolution, total change,
a young man’s mother explained. When I was young
I couldn’t answer Revolution’s call, but didn’t know
why until I first heard Bernie, his Brooklyn accent
so familiar from my college days in Berkeley.
It was the accent of young men who gathered
in the sun daily on the terrace of the Student Union
to drink coffee and who never stopped talking
about the coming Revolution, in that accent.

As a Californian I had no accent, only the same
Russian Jewish revolutionary grandparents
as those men. I had no idea what they even meant
by Revolution, only that it involved a lot of meetings,
at which silent women made and served the coffee
and did a lot of cranking of the mimeograph machine.
Out on the terrace where the men talked, I sat alone
and read not Che but Roethke. Like the rotund poet,
I liked to take my waking slow, but overhearing
those men I couldn’t help thinking of The Terror,
of what happened to Marie Antoinette and my relatives
who had listened to Stalin way too long.

I waited to hear What Came After the Revolution’s
joyful, violent climax, which in a play or bed,
must be followed by dénouement, and perhaps ennui.
I was already there, sad and bored since that time
my father, a longtime ACLU supporter, remarked
that, alas, female citizens were still second-class,
in a tone that showed he wouldn’t fight for me.
Decades later, I had nothing against Bernie,
even liked him and what he had to say.
I just couldn’t take his voice, the same way
some people hated Kamala’s laugh, and others
believed whatever Trump promised.

*

Into the Woods

Once when a friend and I were out in the woods,
stoned on LSD, we saw a man looking at us
as he played with himself, and discussed
how we should react. I’m trying not to laugh,
I whispered. My friend asked whether
we should say something to him.

I wasn’t afraid, because the man
was on the other side of a wide creek
and my friend was also a man.
A woman and a man, really high,
we looked at the other man showing us
his goods and could not think what to do.

In patriarchy, it’s said, what a woman
fears most from a man is being hurt,
while what he most fears from her
is being laughed at. It’s said that a man
is either a woman’s rapist or her defender.
These two men were neither.

My friend and I couldn’t stop looking
at that bird-in-the-hand, as it asked
to be appreciated, and seemed delighted
to be noticed, from a safe distance.
Freud said civilization began with upright
posture, which made genitals visible.

*

Merging

Now you have lost the sight of one eye
as well as the hearing stolen

long ago from one ear
on the opposite side

Your losses are symmetrical

and I can’t stop imagining your head
full of holes

Sometimes I feel that I am you

the way I did that day we met
by surprise in a clothing store

and in that first moment thought
you were me and I you

Now I am a waterfall that can’t stop
falling and I feel you falling too

I remember how as children
we sometimes dreamed the same dreams

wondered in the morning if they began
with me or you

You hadn’t wanted to see me
for a long time

but emailed to let me know
because, you said, You’re my sister

I cover one eye with one hand
use the other to stop hearing in one ear

*

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in a wide range of journals, including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Pedestal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She has a book forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in the spring, and lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, with whom she works in a company attempting to slow the rate of global warming.

A Rose Dipped in Gold by April Lindner

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A Rose Dipped in Gold

Because he knows cut flowers make me sad—
watching the bruised petals swoon
gauging when to toss out the bouquet,

not so soon its beauty is wasted,
not so late it’s a pathetic
litter of pollen and pistils–

he bears me home one white rose
dipped in gold
caught at full ripeness,

a bud just gasping open, each soft curve
edged in gilt, the whole of it frozen
In sparkly polymer. Worse somehow

for being white as a first communion dress,
or a pope encased in his glass coffin.
I turn its hardness in my hand

and see a loved celebrity’s
changed face, features
newly strange. For its offenses

the skin pinned back
uncanny, smooth, and nearly blank
as a badly erased page.

*

April Lindner is the author of two books of poetry, Skin, which received the Walt McDonald First Book Prize from Texas Tech University Press, and This Bed Our Bodies Shaped (published by Able Muse Press). She has edited and co-edited a number of anthologies, including Contemporary Catholic Poetry (with Ryan Wilson) and Contemporary American Poetry with R. S. Gwynn. She has written three Young Adult novels, all published by Poppy. A professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, she lives in Stockton, New Jersey.

Collecting Stones by Leslie St. John

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Collecting Stones

Stalactite quartz I found in Ozark.
Gray galet with intersecting lines
I carried from Nice to Amsterdam.
And another from the afternoon
we ferry to Bellagio like lovers
in a silent film. I wonder,
crisscrossing Lake Como,
cypress trees to gazebo, terrace
to port, if we are those lovers?
Our hands wrap as we walk
cobbled, narrow streets
to the back of Hotel Serbelloni,
past candy stripe umbrellas
and garden statuary, gelato
and Limoncello, church bells
and window shoppers, down
a desire path to the rocky shore,
where we strip in daylight,
and a silver of skywater paints
your back as we crawl in shallows
until we are floating timeless.
You are not yet my husband.
I am still deciding who to be,
each of us a mirage to the other,
but our want holds us in that glacial
carving, a day so blue the edge
of my gaze blurs, histories
collapse, and like a fish mouthing
toward light my future splits
into a forward-reaching Y,
two bodies of water,
lover, not mother.
I do not know
the seed planted
this day, nor the weight
of an unspoken agreement,
but leaving the shore, I stop
to pick up a stone—
dark as a womb, light as a dream.

*

Leslie St. John is a poet with Arkansas roots and California wings. Her poems and essays have appeared in Apersus Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Indiana Review, Linebreak, Oxford American, Rebelle Society, Elephant Journal, and Verse Daily. She is author of Beauty Like a Rope (Word Palace Press) and Art of Letting Go, a freelens photopoem. Connect with her at proseandposes.com.

Gardens of Tulips by Rebecca Macijeski

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Gardens of Tulips

The way I feel about my mother is an old lilac bush
with robins gathering in the blossoms.

The way I feel about my cat is a child’s hands filled,
dripping with ice cream.

The way I feel about work is a dinosaur who forgot
she’s supposed to be dead, roaming downtown
hungry for cheeseburgers and fries. Moths gather
at her back like wishes.

The way I feel about myself is a library,
shelves so deep they fade past the horizon,
past the world, past the circulation desk,
past the sweatered children
with their book reports and jelly sandwiches.

The way I feel about you is fresh-cut flowers
waving from their water tank, colors more alive
than the brightest undiscovered stars.

*

Rebecca Macijeski is the author of Autobiography (Split Rock Press) and Apocryphal Girl (Pinhole Poetry). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, The Cincinnati Review, Puerto del Sol, and many others.

Two Poems by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments
THE VOLTA
There I was
making a basket
with the hem
of my T-shirt pulled up
to carry the fallen apples.
& then
a distance
shortened.
I’ll tell you what
I don’t remember—
something fell
out of me
when I found out
we all leave.
What was carefree
dropped its shiny seeds
into the sad
of not-forever.
A loneliness,
this anguish—
like moving through
a wideness of air
wingless.
*
DECEMBER 13TH
Taylor Swift & I have the same
birthday. Everyone loves her,
her lyrics so specific: the red scarf
she left in her ex-boyfriend’s sister’s drawer,
her pain finding a page & lifting into a song
to fill a car, like a murmuration of memories
whose underwings catch the sun & so the sky
glistens with them, feathered & swelled over the bridge
as I wait for the light to change. Now that I’m retired
I slow down at yellow lights, have time to wait, I might
see a bald eagle or find the perfect prime number
on a license plate, time to look for saints & think
about the close-to-gone, the snow’s forgiveness
or string theory—there might be even smaller particles
than the electrons we cannot see, tiny strings to name
inside the tiniest thing—a raw almost-nothing vibrating.
                                   Sometimes I think I feel it or hear it.
The way when I was five, I sat with Mrs. Stewart
at her desk during nap time because I couldn’t sleep,
the two of us in a dimmed, breathing room,
a green gooseneck lamp arced between us,
our pencils making marks, a small sound
of lines & curves unearthing. Her face
bent down, the pillow of breasts
in a flowered dress. That infinitesimal
vibration between us, between the page
& me, between a gliding eagle & me,
between the falling snow & me,
between Taylor’s voice & me
in this car on this Earth,
everything a part
of every string.
*
Sarah Dickenson Snyder carves in stone & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has four poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera (2019), and Now These Three Remain (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2023). Poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Verse Daily, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com

Three Poems by Lailah Shima

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments
The root of free,
as in not in bondage
may mean love, but hurtling
down I-94, my mind spins in freefall.
All day, no time passes. Sky stays white
as smoke and I remember black ice,
shattered ribs. I almost don’t believe
humans continue
hurling our soft bodies forward.
Still, on these Wisconsin hills
the gravest hazards lurk in my head:
if I alone edge past a ledge
who would notice? My daughter
glances up from her phone,
says, this world of winter looks fake.
White crystals feather every line
every needle of pine, what’s real
too wondrous to fathom. Fiery eyes
gleam through silvered lids, pink hair
as her head tips onto my shoulder.
A sedge of cranes trumpets
over the freeway, hundreds upon hundreds,
still north, so late. Soaring, unworried.
I roll down my window to listen.
*
Intima
All year I hear in my vessels
susurrations like summer dusk.
But now as dawn seeps into day
I can’t parse threads of song—
breath upon breath, moth wings
against wings, shushing edges
of leaves— or sound the depth
of silence holding us, or fathom
how close we are to everything
dying.
*
Hope Is a Discipline
      Hope is a discipline, an ongoing commitment to action.
      On a daily basis, I decide to begin anew. —Mariame Kaba
While crows perch on sunflowers.
      As we slide seeded loaves onto hearth bricks.
When my midwife proclaims me complete.
      Before my neonate son’s lungs stop.
As we plant his placenta under a cedar sapling.
      While my daughter anchors me in her world.
Until biopsy results blare from my phone.
      When we see another phone-video of another killing.
Before wildfire reaches my friend’s mountain town.
      Beyond space my excised organs open.
After a third scan, a fourth infusion.
      When a neighbor brings jasmine tea and honey.
Meanwhile, the woodcock’s sky dance.
      Beyond the twilit sky, dark moon.
Between our hands, heat.
      While we reach. While we hold.
While we face forward.
*
Lailah Shima is a death doula who writes and walks among the lakes of Madison, Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in CALYX, Terrain, and Anti-Heroin Chic, as well as in The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy (ed. Jam es Crews). She is an MFA candidate at Pacific University.

The Wringer by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

The Wringer

A household demon gave me this scar—
the one finally fading from the fleshy side
of my right hand. I was, I am sure,
trying to help, feeding the damp garments
through the mangle. The wringer hummed,
water flowing to a tub below. The clothes
untangled, flattened like my small hand
one day long ago, pressed within its grip,
wringing out whatever pride I felt at five.
My fascination with this machine evaporating,
crushed between the rollers, and I wonder:
who was turning the crank?

*

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.”

Slump by Emily Lake Hansen

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Slump

In California they named misfortune,
blamed everything on the sweltering
Santa Ana, the off-year winds
that carried dry heat into October.
The year they were worst, I was 9
and I sat in the backyard for hours
fanning myself with schoolbooks.
Lizards scurried on the hot cement,
and I watched the dog chase them,
their tails lollipop sticks protruding
from his mouth. Here I’m at a loss
for what to call it: the record heat
that killed the clover, that browned
resilient moss. Our dog lays out
on what’s left of the grass. Is there
a name I can give this slumping?
Last night I fell to the floor
and couldn’t move. I touched
my face tenderly — nothing else
to do — pressed my hands like ice
to the hurting spaces of my body.

*

Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, bisexual, and invisibly disabled writer and the author of the poetry collection Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as two chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, CALYX, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, So to Speak, SWWIM, and The South Carolina Review among others. Emily lives in Atlanta where she is Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech.

Moral Clarity by Amy Wise Rothschild

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Moral Clarity

Sometimes I try to drive my childlessness like a Prius,
a grand gesture towards a clean future.
I imagine myself on open road, Sheryl Crow.
I pretend I am not green with envy, just green,

like, sustainable.
I don’t understand the first thing
about why we say what we say,
who we are trying to become by saying it.

I tickle a little socked foot
and even I know I am wild with wanting —
the sweaty press of baby bound to me,
the heat, just unbearable.

*

Amy Wise Rothschild’s writing has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Atlantic, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the 2024 winner of the Bellevue Literary Review Prize for Poetry. Originally from Maryland, Amy lives and writes in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Aunt Sarah Rejoiced in Being Cynical by Ewen Glass

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Aunt Sarah Rejoiced in Being Cynical

‘The only person you can rely on is yourself,’
she’d say until her body let her down as well.
Cancer though made her quite happy.
‘How good it is to be alive!’
she’d say until her body let her down again.
Care by care, rhythm in medicine,
she became cynical again, sad, reluctant even
to go to the bathroom at night;
it was the light at the end of a dark hallway.
I laughed when I got it, little understanding fear.
Aunt Sarah had been scared her whole life,
but before she died, medicated and terrified,
she gave us a final story to dress as defiance:
‘you just want my fucking Eames Lounge Chair.’

*

Ewen Glass (he/him) is a screenwriter and poet from Northern Ireland who lives with two dogs, a tortoise and lots of self-doubt; his poetry has appeared in the likes of Okay Donkey, Maudlin House, HAD, Poetry Scotland and Ex-Puritan. His debut chapbook ‘The Art of Washing What You Can’t Touch’ is published by Alien Buddha Press.

Midwestern Holiday by Ashley Kirkland

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Midwestern Holiday

There is nothing
           quite like walking up
to a house with

the front door open,
           looking through
the storm door, into

someone else’s world
           even for just a moment
before entering, before

the aroma of funeral potatoes
           and butter wafts
in from the kitchen, the crack

of a beer, uncle’s
           laughter rising
above it all.

*

Ashley Kirkland writes in Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in Cordella Press, Boats Against the Current, The Citron Review, Naugatuck River Review, HAD, Major7thMagazine, among others. Her chapbook, BRUISED MOTHER, is available from Boats Against the Current. She is a poetry editor for 3Elements Literary Review. You can find her at lashleykirkland.bsky.social and lashleykirklandwriter on Instagram.

You Break It, You Bought It: A Villain-elle by Erin Murphy

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

You Break It, You Bought It: A Villain-elle

       January 2025

Our nation’s fate is a retail rule—
You break it, you bought it.
But the metaphor is broken, too.

They is what we mean by you.
It’s the it that’s slippery as a fish.
Our nation’s fate is a retail rule.

Is the it the country they overthrew
or the people, splintered and split?
The metaphor is broken, too.

Capitol, capital—a free market coup,
human rights sold to the highest bid.
Our nation’s fate is a retail rule.

A poet said it so it must be true:
The record keepers are the poets.
Unless the metaphor is broken, too.

When it’s life & death, not Family Feud,
who’ll be left to write the obit?
Our nation’s fate is a retail rule.
And the metaphor is broken, too.

*

Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, 2024) and Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). Her recent work has appeared in Ecotone, Rattle, North American Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfiction 2024, and in anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, Bedford/St. Martin’s, and other presses. Her awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, two Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence, and a Best of the Net award. She serves as poetry editor of The Summerset Review and professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Website: www.erin-murphy.com

Two Poems by Joyce Sutphen

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Counting My Losses

First I lost a little sleep, lost some
papers, lost the sunglasses
you gave me that were like the ones
I lost in London. That was my deal—
losing mittens, losing keys.

Then I lost interest in theories
and conundrums; I would begin
the latest article on Lacan and find
myself drifting, without whatever
it was that used to make me care.

Along the way I lost my dreams,
my hat, and the sails to the little
boat I kept in the harbor.
I lost my handwriting—which some
said was beautiful but few could read—

and then I began to lose my balance.
I lost my voice and my smile,
lost my place in the line,
in the book I was reading, lost my fear
at the airplane’s open door.

* 

Down in the Word

When we turned the corner, we were coming
into words, sprouting syllables the way

branches turn to leaf, and one of us was
humming an old song, something cool, jazzy—

the kind of song that helped us through the last
few years. This is how we began: pulling

chairs up to the table, letting the day
fall away, hearing night come slowly on,

watching words (worlds!) slide down the margins, space
between the stanzas, our breath drawn in lines

of ink, our fingers tapping paragraphs
to the sound of long riffs, tempo set by

the drum that is this room, that is this page
where you listen, playing it over now.

*

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Stearns County, Minnesota. Her first book of poetry, Straight Out of View, won the Barnard New Women’s Poets Prize Press,1995). Her second book of poems, Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and her third book, Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press, 2004), won the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Her recent books are Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), This Long Winter (Carnegie Mellon Press 2021), and That Other Life (2023). She served as the Minnesota Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2021, succeeding Robert Bly, and she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

Chalk Drawings in Summer by Matthew Johnson

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Chalk Drawings in Summer

I see policemen,
Haggling with the neighborhood children.

The cops are offering them free ice cream
If they could use some of their chalk.

The kids just don’t get their bartering,
And we’re both thankful for that.

The police had run out of theirs
From their own drawings in the street.

*

Matthew Johnson is the author of the poetry collections, Shadow Folks and Soul Songs (Kelsay Books), Far from New York State (New York Quarterly Press), and the chapbook, Too Short to Box with God (Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The African American Review, Heavy Feather Review, London Magazine, and elsewhere. He has been recognized with several nominations and recognitions, including from the Best of the Net, Grand View University, Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Pushcart Prize. He’s the managing editor of The Portrait of New England and poetry editor of The Twin Bill. https://www.matthewjohnsonpoetry.com/

Two Poems by Sandra Rivers-Gill

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Post Vogue

is what currently hangs unchanged
in a closet full of classics.

Something is trending outside.
Ready-to-wear whispers, Wear Me.

The cold shoulder wants to flatter itself—
expose skin pressed tight against
the heat of due season.

Styles are seen but loop like the news.
Reminds me I have nowhere to go—
nowhere to cut a rug.

I could go to Krogering—
wear my little black dress,
sing in Aisle 14 like a mic check.

This season of sensations
hems up the music in our voices.

Modern fashion fits into masks
gaping at the sides of its mouth.

* 

Twilight

        — An expired registration tag operates
        with daylight restrictions

This is no fictional film.
Daylight has yet to spring.
A brooding sky is a raised brow
trailing across suspicion.

It is nine-twenty-two p.m.—
not quite black-dark.

I warn myself while steering
miles from my home.
A crescendo of blues and reds
surround my unarmed car.

Reminds me of my namesake—
lassoed by a Lone Star.

I stop to gaze into the edge of night.
The long silence of my tears. I know
the ways a black body can
be broken into. Still—

grace gifts me a bad-tag citation, and
I make it home in the lore of ambient light.

*

Sandra Rivers-Gill is a teaching artist and an award-winning poet. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies, with recent work in Sheila-Na-Gig online, Silver Birch Press, Spark: Celebrities, Representation and Decisive Moments, and Traitor Patriot: A Reflection of January 6th. She is the author of As We Cover Ourselves With Light (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), a 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award Category Finalist. www.sandrariversgill.com.

Crossing Thresholds: A Workshop With Gloria Heffernan

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Crossing Thresholds: Poetry and Mindfulness

Gloria Heffernan, Facilitator
Presented by ONE ART

Join us for an evening of exploring poetry as a tool for mindfulness.

Date: Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Time: 7:00-9:00pm Eastern

Please Note: This is a a virtual workshop held via Zoom.

In this two-hour workshop, we will
• read and discuss poems
• respond to generative writing prompts
• practice centering exercises

This workshop offers a safe and inviting atmosphere.
All levels of experience are welcome.

Registration fee: $25.00

Payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp

Please contact Mark Danowsky, Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART, with any questions and to confirm registration.

Contact: oneartpoetry@gmail.com 

 

About The Workshop Leader

Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

America 2025 by Kelly Fordon

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

America 2025

I have made enemies. My neighbor
just wrote to tell me all my suppositions
are wrong, that she somehow knows
better. Here we are, living in rural America,
with access to no one of any import. What
are we on about? Well, there’s my son,
for one–his safety. Also, the folks who run
the Mexican restaurant–the only good one
in town. What of them? And the eagles
circling now; searching for sustenance–back
when I was young, they were almost done.
My neighbor wants to drill under the lake,
and that’s the least of her infractions.
All week, I’ve planted myself in the window.
It’s January 2025 in America. We’re living
through a deep freeze. The only people
I’ve talked to since Monday are the waiter
at the Mexican restaurant and the librarian
as I was checking out Bunk by Kevin Young.
No news, no radio, no humans. I’ve started
to go mad. A little. Desolation. I don’t know.
At least I have the window. Monday went by
like the hours leading to an execution. On Tuesday,
I sat down in the window again. A few epochs in,
a red fox appeared, light-footing it over the ice—
so close to the edge. How she was managing
sub-zero temperatures—I can’t fathom.
Let me tell you what I did—so lonely, so
unnerved, still reeling, I ran for the door and
opened it wide. Hello, Fox! I yelled. Hello!
Of course, I scared her. She took off fast.
Soon, she was out of sight. It was a mistake;
but in the whole scheme of things,
one of the minor ones. I know she’s
out there now, and it helps. I’m not alone.
We’re not alone. I watched a small red fox
get the best of it–remember that next time
you’re facing down ice.

*

Kelly Fordon’s latest short story collection, I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was chosen as a Midwest Book Award Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Her 2016 Michigan Notable Book, Garden for the Blind (WSUP), was an INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019), was an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. It was later adapted into a play by Robin Martin and published in The Kenyon Review Online. Her new poetry collection, What Trammels the Heart, will be published by SFASUPress in 2025. She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and has received a Best of the Net Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in three different genres. She teaches at Springfed Arts in Detroit and online, where she runs a fiction podcast called “Let’s Deconstruct a Story” at https://letsdeconstructastory.substack.com/

Poem Written in Christianese on the Occasion of My Spontaneous Abortion by Melissa Holm Shoemake

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments
Poem Written in Christianese on the Occasion of My Spontaneous Abortion
I am covered in the blood of Jesus
and my inner thighs are covered in the blood
of my uterus from the spiritual warfare in my womb.
I held the idea of my child like a mass of bubbles in a bath
but He only washes with living water.
Thank God for this reminder to look for the supernatural
in the ordinary like pee stick tests, wand ultrasounds, pills
that dispel tissue, to not dwell in my seething
but His omniscience and omnipresence and omnipotence
even when the medical scientific facts were ominous.
If grief is an internal burn then I am on fire for the Lord!
Please make every vice grip of false labor a prayer
to forgive my vices, let this blood too cleanse me from sin.
I trust in His Word because fear is binding—
I am as free from bondage as I am empty,
more sanguine with each stick and unstick of my pad.
The Holy Ghost is with me as I wrestle my body, shed
my own flesh. I am made in his image, bleeding for my children
grateful to trade my trauma as currency for salvation.
God has a plan and it’s the perfect plan so
I embrace the circle of thorns wringing this leftover life
while I wait for my tomb to empty.
*
Melissa Holm Shoemake lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband and two sons where she works in college administration at Emory University. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi and her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including The Southern Humanities Review, The Shore, Harpur Palate, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology and Best New Poets 2024. Her chapbook, Ab.Sin.The. is available from Dancing Girl Press.

Stand by Tina Em

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments
An erasure poem of Trump's deferred resignation letter he sent to federal employees. Poet Tina Em has created an erasure poem that speaks truth to power. Link to the letter: https://www.opm.gov/fork

Tina Em (she/her), born in poverty, raised in a bi-racial family, serves others through her professional life as an engineer and innovator in federal public health workforce, and in her personal life as a volunteer, tutor, and writer.  Her first published poem, A Time to Rest, commemorated the bicentennial of Harriet Tubman in The Ekphrastic Review in 2022. Her recent work will appear in the 2023 Maryland Bards Poetry Anthology. Tina was awarded Honorable Mention for flash nonfiction essay in the Bethesda Local Artist Showcase in 2023. Tina co-led the Bethesda Poetry Group sponsored by The Writer’s Center, where she has been an active member since 2019. Tina is currently writing a poetry manuscript and a novel. She lives with her family in Rockville, MD.

Three Poems by Leen Raats

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Plant blindness

This morning I woke up in the dark.
With pain in my stomach and the voice of the radio newsreader.
Yet the day felt clean. Birds sang along the railway track.

At Brussels Central Station I saw a beggar with a bloodstained face
who no one seemed to see. I asked if I could help. I couldn’t.
Even though I know all about being invisible.

Later, a woman standing in front of me
at the red light fainted, falling into my arms.
She, too, refused my help.

Tonight, in this room where the walls
are creeping up on me
between houseplants on soggy saucers

I wonder how even people
you think you know all too well
look different from day to day.

*

Agoraphobia

I don’t understand loneliness. Maybe that’s the reason
I can’t seem to get rid of it. Like that song
of which you know just one line and not even the title
but that sticks in your head like syrup on children’s hands

the well-intentioned remarks from friends
that I shouldn’t take so personally
the questions nobody asks.

That’s why I hardly sleep these days
spilling coffee as I bump into walls
and side tables, slowing down like an old movie,
faltering.

In the evening, I study the fragile spots
the table lamp casts on my skin.

*

Stream

Deep inland we soon
forget the infinity of the sea.

Today I follow rivers
ruthlessly heading for their end

as I carry sorrow like an old backpack
that shaped itself to the curve of my back
and a smile that is not mine.

I walk until my shadow
touches those of trees
in a strong wind which

from the northeast
never blows my way.

In this land of a thousand hills
I search for a dale.

*

Leen Raats (born in 1984) lives in Belgium. She runs a copywriting business, writing about nature, landscapes, and history. She self-published books in Dutch and won several writing contests in Belgium and the Netherlands. So far, she has published in Europe, the USA, Africa and Asia. Her publications include Pleiades, 34 Orchard, Crannóg, and Rathalla Review. Find out more at leenwrites.com

Two Poems by tc Wiggins

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

I knew our love had faded

when the patch of land you picked for our picnic
was littered with insects—crawling and buzzing—
knowing my fear. But all was still pleasant then.
We sat under the long oak tree splitting in two
overlooking the lake and the loading dock
that settled into that silent view of everything.
Nothing had moved or mattered for some time.
Not the water clouding, the children, the skipping
of their stones. Not the geese or fish swimming gently
in their separate countries. Occasionally, we chatted
in our short phrases and held the other’s hand
like a stranger’s under the dimming sun.
Then a silence once more. It came and buried us
for many minutes and I believe it was then
we knew. At some point,
for some reason, I had asked you something
stupid, but true, at least true to me, along the lines of
Why do think that we—as people throughout history—
stake so much of our importance on our dead things?
and you, looking to the shallows of the lake, had said
nothing, but laughed
in a soft routine.

*

From the Bench Meant for Two, I Sat and Watched

as the four ducks—siblings, I presumed—
waddled through the whole length of
the public park. In their synchronous step.
Each head turning when one turned;
each resting when one paused to rest.
Them quacking and rocking and marching
until they had vanished into bush
as if it were air. I do not understand
my own division from life. Or
how even the feathered know family.
What I do know is of this silent
weight—of always watching, of always
writing. Of never walking with.

* 

tc Wiggins is an African American poet residing in Cincinnati, Ohio who has been writing since the August of 2022. His poems have appeared in Red Noise Collective, Every Writer, Small World City, Big Windows Review, Door is a Jar, and Diode.

Featured Reading: Sunday, February 9, 2pm Eastern

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ONE ART’s February 2025 Featured Reading

 

Featured Poets: Alison Lubar, Sean Kelbley, Jacqueline Jules, Dick Westheimer, Julie Weiss

Sunday, February 9, 2pm Eastern

Tickets available here (Free or Donation)

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Reading format:

The reading is expected to 1.5 to 2 hours, followed by approximately 30 minutes Q&A / Community discussion. 

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Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary, biracial femme whose life work has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices to young people. Their poetry collection, The Other Tree, was the recipient of Harbor Editions’ 2024 Laureate Prize, and is set to be published in September 2025. They’re the author of four chapbooks: Philosophers Know Nothing About Love (Thirty West, 2022), queer feast (Bottlecap Press, 2022), sweet euphemism (CLASH!, 2023), and It Skips a Generation (Stanchion, 2023), as well as one full-length, METAMOURPHOSIS (fifth wheel press, 2024). Find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison.

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Sean Kelbley lives on a farm in Appalachian Ohio and works as a primary school counselor. In addition to ONE ART, his poetry has appeared in Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Still: The Journal, Sugar House Review, and other wonderful journals and anthologies.

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Jacqueline Jules is a former librarian who was intrigued by every book she put on the shelf. As a reader and as a writer, she doesn’t restrict herself to one topic or genre. She 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), Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023), and over fifty books for young readers including My Name is Hamburger, the Zapato Power series, and Never Say a Mean Word Again. Her poetry has appeared in over one hundred publications. She has received the Library of Virginia Cardozo Award, the Spirit First  Poetry Award,  the  Sydney  Taylor  Honor  Award,  an Aesop Accolade, the SCBWI Magazine Merit Award, and the Arlington Arts Moving Words Award. She lives on Long Island near Manhasset Bay and walks along the water every chance she gets. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com

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Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have appeared in Only Poems, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Gasmius, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com

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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,” and she was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Burningword Journal, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and others. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.

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Two Poems by Lisa López Smith

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Compost

It’s a sort of magic
making life and vitality
out of waste and the dead:
heavy branches on the bottom
let the liquid drain;
manure from sheep, horses, cows—
in that order—followed by smaller
branches, twigs, hopes and leaves
crumpled, dead and dry.
Layers, like a lasagna of shit,
grass, wood, ashes
from Vic’s roasted chicken
on the corner. Green material—
nitrogen, dry material—carbon.
Sprinkle generously with water
like your grandmother
serving you more beans.
Waste products, dead things
we can’t bury during the dry season
because the ground is too hard—
whatever expired, dump it in,
let the alchemical fairies,
mycelium, worms, beetles,
microorganisms have their way with it.
That’s the way of the cosmos
after all—there’s only transformation,
resurrection, rebirth.
If that’s not magic, what is?

*

I dreamt

of a certain light-
heartedness in
the yawning deep-dark
of the forest, shotgun
in the red Ford pick-up,
Willie Nelson at the wheel,
as we were escaping the narcos—
the same who occasionally haunt
my daylight and my neighbourhood:

Beckoning onwards
through the yawp—
uncoiled expectations,
turned to brazen gladness;
Willie Nelson somewhat
unconcerned by the unfolding
events, the sheer
bounty of honey
in the bowl on the seat
the bees humming along—
those purveyors of liquified sunlight,
despite the wreckage,
despite the chase—
emboldened, sweetness
enough, goodness to grant
us wings, but instead
we stayed—fear
gnarled through bones,
but joy at the marrow.

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Lisa López Smith is a shepherd and mother making her home in central Mexico. When not wrangling kids or rescue dogs or goats, you can probably find her working on her next novel. Her poems and essays have been published in over fifty literary journals and nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart prize. Her first chapbook was published by Grayson Books in 2021, and besides her non-writing related degrees, she is a graduate of Humber College’s Creative Writing program.

Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

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Harpsichords

Hollowed-out shoulderblade
of a musical pterodactyl,

strung with strings of gut.

The fingers touch
like blind twins in adjacent gestational sacs
learning the face of their captivity.

You, with your flight of ideas—
isn’t language, for you,
a ten-ton tungsten harpsichord?

Angelically ungainly, swung
absurdly through closing subway doors,

or propped beside your place at Starbucks
in the way of anybody
trying to get to the restroom,

or angled into a back seat
to block the rear view mirror
of anyone
who’s ever given you a ride….

how can they know how dear it is to you?

You’ve drawn its every gut string out yourself,
clenched teeth, blue pills, hours of hissing—

your navel still bleeds sometimes.

What do the doctors know of verbal labor,
of gulped-down decibels of childbirth?

Every so often,
you leap off a cliff
with harpsichords
taped to your flapping arms.

Metaphors, like the long bones, so hollow
gravity can whistle through them.

You were born a pterodactyl—
you, with your winged words.

These gut strings, heart strings, living
wires that electrocute you
feel alive to no one else.

This world is an observation unit,
and you’re on the hospital roof—

IV pole your prophet’s staff,
your gown of glory
open at the back.

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Not To Exceed 5 Doses in 24 Hours

Shaking out a chewable pink pill for my daughter’s fever,
I thought again about the other girl
whose stepdad took her to the basement
and tied a rope around her neck and tied
the other end around a crossbeam.
He entered standing up, his hands behind his back.
She had to cling to him because she knew
if she let go she would fall and
hang herself. It turned him on, how she clung to him.
She was ten when it happened. She was fourteen
when I did her intake interview
on my Child and Adolescent Psych rotation.
She had emptied a childproof bottle of pills
over the hollow in herself
at the fairy tale stroke of midnight.
This was a yearly thing for her.
“One of these times,” she said, “I’ll get it right. These pills,
they’re supposed to kill
pain, aren’t they? One of these times they’ll kill
what they’re supposed to kill.”

*

Twin-Twin Transfusion

My brother redrew the lines on his palm
with an X-acto knife.
Shaved his right eyebrow, shaved
lightning zigzags into his buzzcut temples.
Pierced the nipples that would give
blood but not milk.
Headphones jackhammered the pavement
of his birth body
to reveal an underground city
where he was secretly a native.
I think about him sometimes, I wonder
about the underground scene.
We never hear from him.
He moved there at seventeen
tossing fifty Valium
into the tollbooth coin basket
as he gunned his body home.
He went to war with his birth.
I know how I must seem to you
with my side part and my three kids,
but I had a twin brother whose bunk
lay empty every couple months
while he slept with gravewrapped forearms
in the child and adolescent psych unit downtown.
Excuse my double knotted shoelaces
and my model-minority smile,
but my temples ache when I remember him.
My palm lines tingle and turn to ants
carrying all the sweetness out of my life.
I hold the dripping razor
to my eyebrow,
daring him to grip my wrist and guide it.

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Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and the poetry collection Things my Grandmother Said (Knopf, 2026). More information at www.amitmajmudar.com

Five Poems by Erica Dawson

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Once you go Black (you know the rest)

In most photos of me as a child
I’m smiling. Two dimples and a gap
between my front teeth. I can think
of one departure—a school picture
around age four. I wouldn’t call it angry
or indignant. Maybe poker-faced, as if
I know something everyone else
doesn’t. I am born, Mom says,
stubborn. One foot lodged in her ribs
I kick it back when she massages her belly
to move it away. She says, Now aren’t you quite
the force to reckon with. I say, We are,
meaning just me. As soon as conception
she’s done her part and nature takes over
with all its splitting. The blastocyst.
The embryo. Perhaps that’s what I know
in the photograph:
I constellate into a sting of moods.
Ask me, Smile, watch my top lip curl in
against the gum, bearing all my teeth.
You can’t handle the sum of so much aura,
I tell a man. I’ve inherited the utmost.

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Love poem after starting to use the word neurodivergent

We underplay our love with words
like love. We mean viscera. Heart, belly.
When I’m on top of you
bent at the waist to get a taste
of your hairline’s sweat, let’s talk
of ganglia, occipital.
Testosterone and dopamine.
The more precise we are, the more
we trust the cost of us is worth
the tenderness of thin skins
easily bruising. Tell me again
how you saw me, once, deviate
from my body, how I left my form
for something far more faithful.

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Ovation

What should my body say, I ask myself
before getting my first tattoo. I choose
a big black sempiternam requiem
above my ass. I’m into requiem—
the word, the Mozart mass, the way he dies
before finishing. I sing along
to kyrie. I’m higher than the Lord.
Loud as a choir. Neighbors pound the walls.
Eventually somebody calls the police.
I am disturbance. Like it’s a dare
I sing harder. What if I don’t finish
this poem before dying, this poem about
my tramp stamp, singing, Jesus Christ the broad-
side could be scandalous. Someone fill in
the middle part—bend me over a desk,
the man behind me clueless when it comes
to Latin, clumsy in his lovemaking,
trying to reach around and grab my breasts
but not getting their rhythm. Get
the Best American ready. Then this: Proofread
my body for the loveliness of woman.
Highlight each fold and flaw and mole and sag.
Just put me in the casket naked. Turn
me over on my stomach. Read the skin,
the scar tissue which means the artist digs
too deep. Say I could’ve been the next
Sexton. Agree that I go on too long.

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At the doctor’s request

         after CAConrad

I stop caressing the ceiling.
Give my attention to the floor
arching its back like a cat leaning
into scratches. Cheek against
the hard-hearted I say Love ya
like you do when really it’s not
love but baby blue instead
of azure, warmth and not fervor.
The floor will hold my weight as water
does a leaf as long as I stay tense.
If I release my heft I’ll fall
fast as rocks. Skin is the heaviest
part of the body. Remove it
and the body still senses cold.
It’s not only our surfaces.
Trust muscles, too, can suffer pain.
Our aptitude for hurt goes all
the way into the marrow.
Agenda for tomorrow—press
my nose against the dining room
breakfront, keep my eyes closed, pretend
to have aphantasia and, watch,
tears form anyway. Nothing is real
lovely. The condensation of
my breath, on my whole face, kisses.

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Someone says write about the trees

and not myself. I write a poem
about white oaks, a clearing,
a fortress from rain’s taunting thrum.
Conspiracies of spring threaten. The brazenness
of azaleas. The poem is only black and white,
though, retro almost in its delicacy.
Clouds like lace curtains moving about a window
opened at night. A screaming fox. I title
the poem “Creation.” There’s an epigraph—
Donne’s little world made cunningly
of elements. To be a world you have
to have people, the dictionary suggests.
So I can’t help but add myself as God
saying to the fox, Run on. Run on.
It leaves the scene and then is never there.
Mushrooms down at the roots, one oak’s trunk rots.
This is what happens when you have a master.

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Erica Dawson is a Black neurodivergent poet living in the Baltimore-DC area. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Orion, Revel, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals and anthologies.