Month: March 2025

Two Poems by Bethany Jarmul

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Poem In Which I Bleed

for the first time at 13, at that charismatic church
up that gravel road in that rural Appalachian town
during youth group, with the four of us teens,
our fathers the church’s only deacons. I fled

the purple carpet & purple padded chairs
& purple banner with El Shaddai & a dove
hand-stitched & locked myself in the women’s room
with red & red & red. I thought to use my sock,

as I’d read in some preteen magazine, but I looked down
& saw my Old Navy flip flops. Some wadded up
toilet paper would have to do. In the sanctuary, I sat
cross-legged for an hour, stealing glimpses

at Jesus’ portrait, the blood dripping down his brow
from every thorn, as I squeezed my thighs
until they were sore. At home, I threw the soiled garment
in the trash. When I confessed to mom

she rescued the panties & scrubbed them
in the tub. Scolding me, for in that house
wastefulness was the darkest stain & blood
was how we were cleansed like snow.

*

When a Friend Tells Me I Look Beautiful Because I’ve Lost Weight Due to Prolonged Illness

Many things wither away—
a scorched tomato plant,

an orchid never watered,
a worm on hot cement,

a slug when salted,
a tire riddled with nails,

a balloon with a hole in its skin,
the runt kitten unable to suckle,

a miscarried twin.
They are beautiful too.

They remind me I’m not alone
in my diminishing.

*

Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of a poetry collection, Lightning Is a Mother and a mini-memoir, Take Me Home. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, and Salamander. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul

Rituals of Blood by Laurel Brett

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Rituals of Blood

Blood prodded me to resign as a Jew.
Our Hebrew School teacher told
17 boys and 3 girls that God forbids us
to make love when our blood flows.

The 17 boys tittered
and 3 girls blushed, but I knew
I would always want to make love,
even if it was my time of blood.

I don’t know how I knew it,
but it proved true and 3 months later,
my first period began. The ache never
dampened desire. Ten year later

policemen bloodied us, shoving
supporters for Roe v Wade and the ERA
down stairs, We broke bones.
One of us had a heart attack.

In red states, women are bleeding
and dying again. Always rituals of blood,
like old rituals of water against women
who drowned innocent, weighed down by rocks.

*

Laurel Brett began writing poetry at fifteen because she loved writing with her purple flair pen. Since that time, she has become a college teacher, mother, political activist, literary critic, essayist and novelist. Her novel, THE SCHRÖDINGER GIRL, was published by Akashic Books (2020). Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Lilith, The Nassau Review, the anthology SONGS FOR SEASONED WOMEN, edited by Patti Tana, and the writing text, COMPLEMENTS, among other places. Two of her poems will appear in subsequent issues of SECOND COMING in March and April. She considers herself a refugee from the sixties. Her love of poetry began in seventh grade on a rainy day when she read a poetry anthology found on her parents’ book shelf cover to cover.

My Theory of Everything About the ‘Houthi PC small group’ by Marc Alan Di Martino

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My Theory of Everything About the ‘Houthi PC small group’
My personal TOE is that this was an SOS,
a holler for help so dire it could only come
from inside the house, from someone
so paralyzed that their only hope of escape
was to cc the editor of The Atlantic
in a group chat on an unsecured app
and…let the tape roll. Maybe in this way
the outside world could intervene, call
their bluff, do something. My TOE is sound
and has been vetted. It has been confirmed
by the Senate. It has survived multiple
hearings and a couple of jittery visits
to the Supreme Court, where it won
in a 5-4 decision. My TOE is foolproof,
bulletproof, hundred proof grain alcohol,
Occam’s Razor-sharp, capable of shaving
the false beard off the baby face of Truth
revealing a lean, mean fact-checking machine.
These days it seems the Truth is under attack
from all sides—not unlike the Houthi pirates—
and many have come to the sad conclusion
that “truth” is merely a personnel [sic] opinion,
and that to lord one’s truth over another’s
is tantamount to flying your war plans [sic]
into the World Trade Center, which of course
was already destroyed by illegal immigrants
flooding our borders, and even J.D. Vance
giving a thumbs-up emoji is really just his way
of saying
I’m trapped
in a deep well please
somebody help—
*
Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco (World Poetry, 2024—longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

Three Poems by Karen Craigo

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Thanatopsis

There are so many ways
they can leave us, our people,
wired to monitors, swinging
from a tree, dropping
on a sidewalk. However
the universe selects,
they manage to find
the door—the one marked
exit, the single way away.

Sister, time is tricky.
I don’t believe moments
line up like beads in a row.
They seem more like a wad
of foil, building up as each
thin layer is tamped. Points touch
where we would not expect,
your loss, mine—pressed in,
they cleave to one another.

*

All you can think of is loss,

that crafty snake that slips in
at the neck and moves
to warm itself on any part
it touches. It slides down
to your sternum and beneath
your breast, and presses
so you won’t miss the fact
of it. That grief has made
Medusa of me is clear
when I sleep, dozens
of baby griefs curled up
beside my head, warming
my brain, that knot of vipers,
though I don’t know what
we have against vipers,
reduced as they are to nothing
but desire and a muscle
that pushes where it leads.
They’re a bit like we are,
feeling our way in absence
of a lodestar, snaking
through Earth’s ribs in search
of the hot red heart.
It’s cold down here, and we
don’t know how to back up
to that dazzling circle of light.

*

Grief as KitchenAid Mixer

It takes up space
on the counter, but I’ve learned
to look past it, to forget it’s even
there, red and obvious
as a body laid out
on a slab.

I’ll give it this—it’s
versatile, came standard
with hook, beater, whip,
and you can spiralize,
churn—whatever
the recipe demands.

Maybe one day I’ll make
a cake with it, though it’s fuzzy
with dust, and I’ll have to deal
with that—molecules of us
mottling every surface.

*

Karen Craigo, former Missouri Poet Laureate, has two full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks. She is also an essayist and writes for the Springfield (Missouri) Business Journal. She is nonfiction editor of Mid-American Review, prose poetry editor of Pithead Chapel, and poetry series editor for Moon City Press.

Dangerous Patterns by Michelle DeRose

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Dangerous Patterns

More snow for Kentucky, deadly
cold in Minnesota. Gusts, chill,
headwinds swirl. Already so many
limbs down, mountains of mud
poised. Most of the forecasters
fired, their maps erased.

*

Professor Emerita of English, Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find some of her most recent publications in The New Verse News, Dunes Review, Peninsula Poets, Midwest Quarterly, miniskirt magazine, and Sparks of Calliope.

Three Poems by Valerie Braylovskiy

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Shaving My Legs Before Surgery
to feel more like a woman
on a Cosmopolitan cover magazine
selling chocolate diet pills and soft
men. My sister’s vanilla cashmere cream says
I will glow better, scents pain
with supermarket cupcakes.
One day after, I am prescribed antiseptic skin
soap, used sparingly to sterilize
the body for cutting. I refuse to go under
as patient, chatting to my anesthesiologist
like two girls getting ready for prom.
My dreams last one blue
hued morning, noon sun sends
me back as a mannequin,
adorned and heavy.
*
Notes on RX
          Living is strange
          — C.D. Wright
Monday you shake three bottles, peer at cylinders with novelty.
One is rust, the other metallic blue. The biggest tastes
synthetic, screams illness.
Tuesday you think about your relationship
with Big Pharma.
You are due for a refill, chat with the robot
medical assistant.
Jolene, the nurse your age, says your insurance rejected
your needs.
Switches you to a generic brand, promises
it’s all the same.
Wednesday is pharmacy trip after daylight.
Small talk with striped purple hair looks-like-Nancy, bitching
about the economy.
She calls antidepressants placebo, tells you to enjoy
them while they work.
At the front of the line, you recite your identity.
Opt out of automatic refills, your bloodstream
revolting.
*
American Sonnet Of My Body’s Cross-Sectional Images On A Computed Tomography Scan
You’re going to feel like you have to pee
but don’t worry, the nurse says.
It tastes like the color blue, warmly
relentless. My throat makes a run
for it. My bad parts bathe in snow
colored mud. I’ve become a doctor
for killing what’s small. Faux plant
on my windowsill. Sickened fruit fly.
My own leaves—
blue enters me, bursting ice caps
melting cherry red. Paints me
aged magenta, leaves me unseen—
I swallow a kind of ending,
shimmery metal.
*
Valerie Braylovskiy is a poet from the Bay Area and the author of Half-Life, a chapbook by Alien Buddha Press. As a Canterbury Scholar at Santa Clara University, she is developing a poetry manuscript exploring chronic illness and womanhood.

Two Poems by Penelope Moffet

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Waking

          For Lynn Way

He didn’t like to wake up in the dark.
He needed light to seep in through the blinds.
Waking in the night was waking in prison,
mind and body pinioned to the bed.

He needed light to seep in through the blinds
or he woke into a nightmare from the past,
mind and body pinioned to the bed
beneath the car that crashed down a ravine.

He woke out of a nightmare of the past
into knowledge of the present, given light,
beneath the car that crashed down a ravine,
his arms still strong enough to lift himself.

In knowledge of the present, given light,
he could laugh, roll smokes, make love,
his arms still strong enough to lift himself,
swing his trunk and legs to the wheelchair.

He could laugh, roll smokes, make love
with his wild tongue, though nothing moved below,
swing his trunk and legs to the wheelchair,
roll forward into other rooms.

With his wild tongue, though nothing moved below,
he woke me from a too-long childhood,
rolled me into other rooms,
to pleasure so intense I levitated.

He woke me from a too-long childhood,
spoke to me of how he saw the world,
took me to pleasure so intense I levitated
then came to earth, and him, again.

He spoke to me of how he saw the world,
quoted the ancient Chinese poets,
then came to earth, and me, again.
He believed in nothing but erotic love.

He loved the ancient Chinese poets
and the spinning wood lathe in his shop.
He believed in nothing but erotic love,
relied on whisky and his work to get him through.

He loved the spinning wood lathe in the shop.
It was many years ago. I was so young.
He relied on whisky and work to get him through.
I’ve loved other men but now I sleep alone.

It was many years ago. I was so young.
Now waking in the night is waking in limbo.
I’ve loved other men but now I sleep alone.
I do not like to wake up in the dark.

*

A Friend for the Winter

The lizard moved indoors when the outside air
turned cold. He flickered here and there, found
hiding places in stacked wood, under the bed,
behind boxes. When sun came through French doors
he basked on the adobe floor, on gray days
calibrated his distance from the Franklin stove:
not too hot not too cold. Spiders, earwigs,
the last flies of autumn were his food.
Once those ran out he contemplated then ignored
carrot peel and broccoli florets that tumbled off
the cutting board. A friend to wild birds,
rosy boas, rattlers, the human didn’t mind
his presence, watched where she put her feet,
talked to him. They were a sort of family,
a mesh of solitudes. The weather warmed.
She left a door propped open.
Out he went for pushups on the stoop.
Quick as a flash a roadrunner was there
to grab him and run off.

*

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems appear in Eclectica, ONE ART, Calyx and other literary journals. A full-length collection of her poetry will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2026. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives in Southern California.

Three Poems by Jennifer Franklin

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments
TO VIRGINIA WOOLF IN WINTER—
You knew it never goes away—shame from childhood.
The fear of the face behind you in the dining room
mirror. The man who handed me history books
to harden my mind but instead made me too feeling.
I, too, was frozen in bed, petrified by the severe woman
in black, her raven hair pulled in a tight bun,
her disapproving stare. The letters and promises, lights
shut tight to hide the truth, threats writ large below my window.
The wine poured in my childhood glass as I ate
pounded chicken in a wood-paneled room
beside a cathedral. Thinking of the angels gilded wings
so I would not have to see his false face. The pretty things
he said to make me feel important. The walls and walls
of paintings he set before my hungry eyes.
*
VIRGINIA WOOLF KNOWS THE KEY TO LIFE BUT IS NOT ALLOWED TO USE IT
Most of the year had been filled with doctor’s appointments.
It did not count as leaving the house if the destination
was always another room where you were constantly
reminded how ill you were and that life is endlessly
on pause until you are healthy again. How can one
become healthy if one is prevented from walking,
from moving, from being part of the chaos and chatter
of the city and its citizens, knowing their purpose,
owning their various destinations, crisscrossing the city
and the river with the determination of birds of prey,
ready to descend at a moment’s notice? The unhealthy
are always excluded from the orchestra of daily life.
How unbearable to stand inside, listening to the swell
of music as it drifted across the Thames to her open window.
*
TO VIRGINIA WOOLF AS WE WATCH THE CHILDREN—
nieces and nephews— run the grounds,
chase rabbits, make crafts. The beautiful
sound grates our ears. Why can’t they see
suffering? How can they still think
the small self is the primary subject?
They trample grass as if it doesn’t feel
the abuse. Horrific—their twisted movement
and squeals rise into the clouds.
Outside they still want to scrape
my insides with their little shovels.
You were kinder than I am. You wrote
light verse for Vanessa’s children.
I am inviolate, in this burning garden,
the flowers share my fear of their unholy voices.
*
Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023), finalist for the Paterson Prize in Poetry and finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Poems from her manuscript in progress, A FIRE IN HER BRAIN, have been published in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Common, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology. Her work has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in The Bedford Guide to Literature (Macmillan, 2024), The Paris Review, The Nation, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion. She is the recipient of a 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2024 Jon Tribble Editing Fellowship from Poetry by the Sea, a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry, and a 2021 Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. She is Poetry Reviews coeditor of The Rumpus and coeditor, with Nicole Callihan & Pichchenda Bao, of the anthology Braving The Body (Harbor Editions, 2024). Jennifer teaches in the Manhattanville MFA Program, 24Pearl Street/Provincetown Fine Arts Center, and has been teaching manuscript revision workshops for over a decade.

I Had Such Complicated Feelings About My Mother’s Body by Tarn Wilson

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I Had Such Complicated Feelings About My Mother’s Body
I had such complicated feelings about my mother’s body.
So much softness and self-hatred, but I liked her collar bone.
Her collar bone is the only jewelry she left me, the statement
necklace I wear just under my skin, so pronounced it collects
pools of water that could hold icy jewels or little fish.
Clavicle. The only large vertical bone in our bodies. A hanger
on which to balance our head and dangle the rest. The first bone,
in the womb, to begin to ossify; the last to finish, early twenties.
In my early twenties my newly-finished collar bone was an elegant
curve. Now my skin is a rumbled suit and my collar bone whispers
too loudly of skeletons. In the end, my mother was mostly bone,
and in that hollowed shape I could see every face she’d ever had.
A montage that shifted as she turned her head. You can only
love a body that has so little left, that has worked so hard to live.
I’ve never feared skeletons, maybe because I’m in love with form.
The shapes of leaves. The architecture of dogs. The silhouette
of trees. The intricacies of animal feet. My soft and hard, wild
and difficult mother knew little of the structures children need.
She was always changing: her job, her city, her story, her beliefs,
who it was this week she hated most until there was no one left
to hate. But there it was: her essential shape–with me always
–smaller than I would have guessed–and braver.
*
Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (Wandering Aengus Book Award), and a craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. Her essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, and The Sun. She is currently taking a break from her long-term relationship with prose and has been shamelessly flirting with poetry. New work appears in Grey Matter, Imagist, Museum of Americana, One Sentence Poems, Pedestal, Porcupine Literary, New Verse News, Right Hand Pointing, and Sweet Lit and is forthcoming in Only Poems and Potomac Review.

To a Mother I Know by Alison Luterman

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To a Mother I Know

I have seen you lift
the whole car of your pain
and hold it above your head
with trembling arms.

Seen you bench-press
that two-ton rusted hulk aloft
for eighteen years
so that your daughter

could play in the open air
creating whole worlds, innocent
of the superhuman effort
you were making

to keep the weight
off her. It happens all the time,
mothers do this, they hoist
the unbearable and they bear it,

but witnessing you achieve
the impossible, breaks
something in me. Not
my heart, but the ice sheath

around it. I think
of my own mother, of course,
and how valiant her effort
at keeping me apart

from her suffering, though you can’t
really keep a daughter apart,
we are too much entwined
in one long umbilicus

reaching down
the generations like tree vines.
And this is what’s
the matter, mater, mother

of all truths: the weight
of what we try to carry
for each other will never
be fully known.

*

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

Two Poems by Emily Patterson

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Communion

My first cathedral was black sky
and stars. I sat on the garden wall
at fifteen, dwelling in wonder

and silence, our rural cul-de-sac
so recently a field—soil stripped
to bald clay an illusion of newness.

I didn’t try to decipher constellations,
describe the cool stone beneath me,
or map words to the expanse and glimmer.

I kept communion with my smallness
inside the world. I didn’t need to name
anything, not even myself.

*

My Daughter Gives a Master Class on Walking in the Rain

Opt for every puddle. Be kind
to fallen leaves. Weave a trail
of song along the sidewalk.

Feel each drop: cheek, nose,
eyelid. Hear them prick
the pavement and call it music.

Greet the half-petaled sunflowers.
Remember where you once saw
a dead raccoon. Say you loved

that raccoon. Use your pink t-shirt
as a tissue. Be the opposite
of hurried. Gift your attention

to the gift of the world.

*

Emily Patterson (she/her) is the author of three chapbooks, and her debut full-length collection, The Birth of Undoing, is forthcoming with Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2025. Nominated for Best Spiritual Literature and multiple Pushcart Prizes, Emily’s work is published or forthcoming in North American Review, SWWIM, Christian Century, Rust & Moth, Cordella Magazine, CALYX, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. Read more at emilypattersonpoet.com.

Speaking in Tongues by Barbara Eknoian

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Speaking in Tongues

Every Tuesday night for two years a small group of us
meet in the basement of the priest’s rectory.
It seems as though we’re undercover
as most of the traditional church doesn’t join us.

We learn how to be Charismatic Catholics
and read the Bible faithfully
not just the catechism book, and to believe
in spiritual gifts, like speaking in tongues
and being slain in the spirit.
Several of my friends begin to speak in tongues.
I worry that somehow I’m not worthy of this gift.

One afternoon, I sit on my bed with my tape recorder
since I have begun to utter strange syllables,
and I want to know if I actually received this gift,
or is it just my imagination?
I speak into the recorder to see how it sounds,
and it jams, so I shut it off.
Oh ye of little faith, if it’s meant to happen it will.

Later, at my son’s birthday party all the little cousins
go upstairs and find my recorder.
I’m unaware until they join us at the table.
I feel my face redden, when my niece announces,
We heard some lady speaking in another language.

*

Barbara Eknoian work has appeared in Pearl, Chiron Review, Cadence Collective, Redshift and Silver Birch Press’s anthologies. Her newest poetry book More Jerkumstances, New and Selected Poems, was recently published by Moon Tide Press. She lives in La Mirada, CA with daughter, grandson, two dogs, and two cats (one mild and the other full of mischief). There is never a dull moment.

Work Ethic by Tamara Madison

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Work Ethic

In Irish, sadness is a thing that is on a person:
Sadness is on me, grief upon me.

Yes, I feel it. Like a weight. But mine
surrounds me too, a fog that sunlight
can’t disperse; it’s not a coat I can shrug off
and hang in a closet. It’s more than just
upon me now; it dwells in me, part
of my aging self, like bunions, wrinkles,
arthritis. I’ve made a decision: Today,

I will garden. There are weeds to pull,
gutters to clean, storm debris to sweep.
Grief can sit in its bloody corner and do
as it must. I’ll pat its head from time to time.
But for now, I’ve got work to do.

*

Tamara Madison is the author of three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic”, “Moraine” (both from Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar” (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and two chapbooks, “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig, Worcester Review, ONE ART, and many other publications. More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Five Poems by Athena Kildegaard

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

St. Brigid’s Day

On the first day of the month,
for luck, my husband and I say
“Rabbit” before speaking another word,
Some months it works. “Calm
us into a quietness,” a prayer
to the saint asks. But now, with
sheer vulgarity the order of the day
in our nation’s capital, luck seems
insufficient. And there is a quiet today,
the first birthday my father does not
progress into his new year. Bad luck,
his heart said, and stopped. Now the first
February 1 in 93 years he has remained
silent, the first in my many decades
I have not sung to him. How he
liked to hear it, how even on the phone
he grinned and said in his abashed
and undeserving voice, Thank You.
That gratitude being a sort of luck.
Perhaps I’m too old for luck-seeking.
The echo of his words, maybe that’s enough.

*

Winter Passage

To teach myself to pray
I walk where deer walk,
brush against last summer’s
bluestem and sedge. Bend
past arbor vitae, careful
against branch, against
abandoned hive. How swift
deer are to shift and counter;
the ample world curls
and blossoms around them.
At crack or cough they do not
hide or feint but flash.
Here, too, is path of coyote.
Red squirrel and vole
cross quick. My breath rises
in puff and volt, impermanent
marks. Two blue jays,
a junco, skirt my passage,
good companions near lake
and rush, chirrup chirrup,
no need to hurry prayer.

*

Take Hold

         after “Petaluma Olive Trees” by JoAnn Verburg

Imagine a hand moving toward you
out of the tumult. Care must be taken.
It is a crone’s hand. Let’s say it is
your mother returned, her nails smooth,
knuckles like prayer beads, palm etched
in the sweep of contour lines.
This stranger’s hand emptied itself long ago.
Imagine replacing what has been lost.
Or chanting into it, your breath damp
and smelling of lemons. Any thought can be
sustained by the disposition of emptiness.
Imagine it is your hand—thick with lichen
the color of olives—arriving out of the future.
Do not be afraid when you do not recognize it.

*

Winter

         “The house yawns like a bear.” – Denise Levertov

Snow glides down the steel roof,
shreds and fidgets past the door,
so that, when we step into the diffuse
light of afternoon, the snow cheers
below our boots a high and goofy

skirl, and we step with a light
flourish, dance even, the penguin shuffle
that keeps us centered and upright.
Thanks to snowfall the world’s muffled
and sedate. Though it’s too cold to delight

in being outside for long.
We stack the tinder, light a fire,
and are ready to hunker down
with the dog, spend the entire
evening find ways to belong

to winter: hot toddy, torrid film,
foot massage, sliced pears and camembert.
Once the moon rises avuncular and trim
we’ll go up to bed, we mellowed pair
and there embrace in our snug hibernal realm.

*

Question

We’d just eaten rice
and Brussels sprouts,
roasted chicken with lemon

when someone asked
Let’s say we had all day
with someone who’s gone on,

who would you invite,
and why? Your mother,
my father said.

I’d been thinking Emily
or Walt, but my father dropped
his history onto the table.

He was sitting beside
his second wife. Why my mother,
I asked? He had

things to say to her—
apologies to make. For one sweet
moment, I knew him as I’d never done.

*

Athena Kildegaard is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Prairie Midden, which won the 2023 WILLA Literary Award for poetry. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.

GETTING THE EKG by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

GETTING THE EKG

Electrodes seem suctioned
to my skin while my stockinged feet
peek out from the thin blanket.
I chat with nurses Darva and Mackenzie,
notice a tone in my voice
I didn’t know was mine. I can hear
my mother speaking, her small giggling,
gentle conversation while sitting
each week in Infusion Bay, and later,
waiting for another test to see
if the cancer had spread.

I don’t have cancer, but my chest
has been hurting, a steady ache which,
it turns out today, is nothing drastic.
Muscle strain or stress they say, or maybe
the patient diligence of loss, all that is
past and impending, the sustaining
rhythm that holds it.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently Her Joy Becomes from Fernwood Press and Marrow of Summer from Kelsay Books. A new collection from Fernwood entitled Belonging Songs will be published in 2025. New poems are forthcoming in Women Artists’ Datebook 2025, The Healing Muse, Braided Way, Delta Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly, and the Paterson Literary Review.

Four Poems by Robbi Nester

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments
Vesuvius at Home
        I judge from my Geography
        Volcanoes nearer here
        — Emily Dickinson
I remember the clatter my mother’s pressure cooker made
on winter afternoons, how it spat steam, played a tune.
Sometimes she sang along. Once, the gauge shot off,
embedding like a bullet in the ceiling. She just stood there,
gazing, as green goo geysered, slight smile on her lips.
My mother loved her pot. I’d even say she was inspired
by its potential, and her own. She knew volcanos can be
still for years, though magma brews beneath. Maybe
she sensed they were alike, she and this pot, that she
could capture the force of the words that fueled her,
the ones she muttered under her breath all day in two
languages. She trained me to be her surrogate, to believe
my words had heft, taught me to embrace the danger,
learn the craft of channeling all the rich profusion
that nascent power might allow.
* 
Worm Farm
Near the end, you knew that you were dying,
though we never spoke of it, just went on
shopping for new socks and the special tidbits
you loved to snack on, though you had no more
than four teeth left to chew that crusty bread,
the Porterhouse we cut for you in ever-smaller bits.
You went on shredding peels and scraps to fertilize
your Meyer lemon and pomegranate trees, spoke to
the red wrigglers in your farm as though they were
your pets. “I can’t die,” you said, just a week before
you did. “What would happen to my worms?”
* 
Ambivalence
        Memory is / the past reversed
        — Catherine Bowman, “Duende”
When I mouthed off, defiant in the face of my father’s
sudden rage, he used to say “No one will ever love you
but your parents.” He said it ruefully, so I knew he’d heard it
many times when he was young. He complained his mother
held him back. She wouldn’t let him work as the apprentice
to a veterinarian or train to be a jockey because they wouldn’t
feed him Kosher food. He didn’t speak to her for years.
But I had to wonder what he meant by “love,” if it was love
he felt when he hit me with his belt, claiming all the while
it hurt him more than me.
* 
I have lived in many houses
but seldom think of them–except for the row-house on Stirling Street,
3 bedrooms, a garage, and basement, where laundry hung indoors
all winter on makeshift lines in the dark unfinished basement, haunt
of many nightmares, prison and sanctuary. I remember noisy radiators,
hyperactive poltergeists, rust-red brick exterior, steep flights of concrete
stairs, black and white tile in the bathroom, errant splotch of paint marring
the chessboard pattern of the floor. Neighbors like monarchs in their
lawn chairs watched every car and truck dodge dogs and children, balls
badly thrown. I sold it to an immigrant. Like almost everyone who lived
there, my parents were children of immigrants. All of them longed for
their community, but scarred beyond repair, turned on each other. I was glad
to leave that place, yet it’s still the house I always think of when I think of home.
*
Robbi Nester is a retired college educator who has never stopped teaching in one way or another. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the most recent being About to Disappear, an ekphrastic collection that will be published by Shanti Arts. She has also edited 3 anthologies and curates and hosts two monthly poetry readings on Zoom, Verse-Virtual Monthly Reading and Words With You, part of The Poetry Salon Online. Learn more about her work at http://www.robbinester.net.

Four Poems by Barbara Crooker

~ ONE ART ~ 13 Comments

THE COUPLE

Under a cloud of Covid restrictions,
ending up on the shores of hospice,
the couple set out in their canoe,

He was in the stern, steering as usual;
she was in the bow, looking for hazards.
The waves piled up; she began to bail,

while never letting go of his hand.
The journey lasted four nights; darkness
splashing over the gunwales. He grew

tired; she kept paddling. Eventually,
they started to drift with the current, which
took him out with the tide, then set him down

gently, on the farthest shore.

*

THE DREAM

          Mark Chagall, 1945, oil on canvas

The prone artist with a palette in the bottom of this painting
is conjuring up our wedding. A snapshot of us just floated up
on Facebook; it’s our anniversary. Were we ever really
that young? You in your powder blue leisure suit, me
in my Gunne Sax by Jessica McClintock prairie dress.
In this painting is what came later, le tour Eiffel, la Seine,
her arched bridges, us in la belle France. This is happiness
enclosed in the bubble of the full moon. Nobody thinks
about what comes next, how one day one of us will sleep
alone. But though I’m blue, sometimes you come to me
in dreams. And my heart is infused with the thousand petals
of the rose-colored dawn.

*

THREE YEARS LATER

I know you’re gone, but my body remembers,
especially at night when we curled into
each other, bears in a den, silverware
in a drawer. Plaid pajamas, worn flannel
sheets, we made our own sort of nest
in the winter dark. The moon, a ball of frost,
floated outside. Some nights, we heard
the ghostly notes of Great Horned Owls
as they courted, called to each other:
you you you. The way I hear you calling
my name, even though I know
you are not here.

*

PANTOUM IN WINTER

Gray day in January, and light snow is sifting,
shifting, fine white music, slanted lines.
No cars, delivery trucks, not even dog walkers.
Just this silence, and the hush of bird wings.

This shifting linear music, slanted white lines.
Notes from the leaden skies: tiny shooting stars.
There’s nothing but silence and the hush of wings.
How do we weather all these losses?

Messages from the sky: stray meteors burning white.
A stutter, a stammer, white delineating every twig and limb,
coating every tree. How do we weather these losses?
Snow geese pour out of the quarry, white shimmering

into white. A stutter, a stammer, covering branch and bark.
Gray day in January, and light snow is drifting,
snow so fine the line between visible and invisible blurs.
The difference, Nemerov says, between poetry and prose.

*

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
www.barbaracrooker.com

Spell for Good Fortune by Hayden Saunier

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Spell for Good Fortune

Wipe your windowsill clean
of desiccated insects hatched
from a dead poinsettia

with a folded fabric scrap
cut from your mother’s nightgown,
the one stitched through

with blue embroidery thread.
Summon a red-winged blackbird
with seed and suet, admire

the bright yellow slashes above
each scarlet shoulder patch,
the black glossy wink of its eye.

Most likely, no bird will show.
But by then you’ll know
that if you have a windowsill

and seed and fat, a mother
whose nightgown you possess—
the spell you seek was worked

like thread into your life
before you conjured up the bird
or spoke a single magic word.

*

Hayden Saunier is the author of six poetry collections, including most recently, Wheel. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda, Rattle Poetry, and Gell Poetry Awards and published in One Art, Southern Poetry Review, The Sun, 32 Poems, Thrush, Virginia Quarterly Review, among many others.

Gift by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Gift

O magnolia bloom

floating in a shallow bowl
adorning my window sill

glowing golden now
luminous in waning

a beauty
still

*

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

Two Poems by Sara Quinn Rivara

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Autobiography

I was born in the middle of America
to a mother whose mother put her on diet
pills at age eleven. My mother eyed
my teenage body and said you’re getting
a little round in the shoulders. What
was I supposed to have? Right angles? Wings?
She meant to protect me. Sometimes
I still cannot feel my body’s borders,
flesh soft and fragile over my waistband,
the round bulge over my bra strap, pooling
in my armpits. At seventeen,
I stuffed myself to the gills
with Pop Tarts and Doctor Pepper
then rode my bike until I puked
with exhaustion. With shame, for what
is hunger but desire? If I could want
nothing, then nothing could hurt me.
What I wanted was to disappear.
But I didn’t. I’m still here.
When it rained today, cherry
blossoms floated onto the ancient
dog’s swayed back. Hummingbirds
buzzed the flowering currant.
Oh! I thought. The world is sweet
and impossible to bear.

*

Persephone in Middle Age

Once I was a young divorcee alone
in my apartment, so afraid
I barely ate. I thought no one

will love me and I meant no man.
I thought I needed one. I thought
I knew hell: a small bedroom

in a closed-up house, windows nailed shut,
bog-marriage.
My body pinned to cheap sheets.

Divorcee stunk of cheap perfume.
Mothers pulled their husbands
away from me at the park,

my son on my hip. I was dangerous.
I had a tattoo. Most nights my toddler slept
in my bed. The others he

was gone, his father pealing
out in a plume of dust, gravel
kicked up from the wheels

of the truck.
I never regretted leaving
that marriage.

Each night he was home,
my son tucked his feet beneath
my hip. I called

him Bird.
All these years
later, I am surprised

at the softness of my body,
that we survived.

*

Sara Quinn Rivara is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently LITTLE BEAST (Riot in Your Throat), a 2024 Finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her work has appeared recently in CALYX, LEON Literary, Bluestem, Colorado Review and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.

Picture Day, First Grade by Julie Barton

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Picture Day, First Grade

This photo still evokes in me,
forty-five years later, a frail
sorrow–the little girl wanting
only to get it right, to do it well.
The arched rainbow design
on the dress I picked myself.
The hair disheveled as always
because mom left for work so early
and dad claimed no skill at hairdos.
My tooth missing, my smile unsure,
unconvincing. Sometimes when
I can’t sleep, I look at that photo
in my mind’s eye and whisper,
“You’re doing great. Nothing
you are doing is wrong. I love you.”
It’s nice to imagine little me
hearing that future me thinks of
this day so often, how I didn’t
understand why I felt so wrong.
Standing in the gymnasium,
waiting my turn to be photographed,
the thin black comb they handed out
only to the kids who had
something to fix.

*

Julie Barton is the New York Times Bestselling author of Dog Medicine, How My Dog Saved Me From Myself (Penguin, 2016). She publishes a poem every day at juliebarton.substack.com and can be found online at juliebarton.com. Her poems have appeared in The South Carolina Review, Caduceus, Art Place at Yale Medical School.

Three Poems by William Palmer

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Portal

I hear my phone ding.

There is a photo of the baby
swaddled, a pink wool hat,
her skin ruddy and scraped

as though she’s come through
a portal in the cosmos,
eyes closed, delicate nose, lips—

a sob shoots from me like a star.
I had been praying
for days.

Later, getting a haircut,
I tell Kristy
my granddaughter was born

that morning
and when I heard,
a sob burst from me.

Oh yes, she says.

At the counter
I give her twenty-five.
Just twenty, today, she says.

*

Rhonda Posts Our Photo on Facebook

At the end of her visit
Rhonda, my former student, asks me
to hold her new book of poems
as she takes a photo of us on her phone

and in that moment
I don’t have time
to think—so my smile opens
wide, my teeth crooked and a little gray

and I don’t care
how I look
holding Rhonda’s book
with her beside me,
the way
I remember feeling
in classes
all those years,
my smile unleashed.

*

Sighing

I sigh a lot.
My doctor calls it frequent involuntary sighing.
But isn’t all sighing involuntarily?

Does anyone say,
“I’m going to sigh now”?
We just sigh.

I kept sighing
after my friend Roseanne
hanged herself,

and I sighed between sobs
on the steps of her church
after a young priest claimed

she would not go to heaven.

*

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in Ecotone, I-70 Review, JAMA, One Art, Rust & Moth, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

Three Years After You Die, I Have My First Date by Roberta Spivek

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Three Years After You Die, I Have My First Date

because isn’t it time to stretch
limits, test waters, live

out all those clichés?
What do you do for fun

he asks and when I
blank he reveals

the sports teams he follows,
cardio workouts,

twisting spiritual path.
I’m a real beach nut, he says

but he’s lost me to you
at the water’s edge

in your black trunks,
that dive through

the breakers, your
effortless crawl.

Because didn’t it feel
we belonged to the

couple we made in the
Victorian town

with its bistros,
its roped-off

dunes of nesting plovers,
the red-haired guy

we rented bikes from,
its lagoons full of swans?

*

Roberta Spivek is a Philadelphia poet. Her poems have appeared in Friends Journal, Muleskinner Journal, Naugatuck Review, New Croton Review, Ritualwell, Women’s Studies Quarterly and other publications. She has spasmodic dysphonia, a speech disorder.

The Day I Got Fired from a Copywriting Job Because the Boss Said I was Too Good Looking by Terri Kirby Erickson

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Day I Got Fired from a Copywriting Job Because the Boss Said I was Too Good Looking

Decades ago, when women were considered
an accessory in the workplace—people to pinch
and poke and tell dirty jokes to, not colleagues
but play toys for all the men who liked to corner
us in the breakroom, trying to get a little kiss,
I was fired from my job for being a distraction.
The big boss called me into his ship-sized office
and proclaimed that since I’d been employed at
his radio station, his guy in charge of sales was
a useless idiot who couldn’t stop walking back
and forth in front of your office, trying to get
a load of you, he said, instead of doing his job.
And by the way, he told me, you can do a lot
better than Bob, like I, at nineteen, didn’t realize
a married, fifty-year-old chain smoker wasn’t
the best boyfriend for me. He sat there all smug,
kicking back in his giant leather chair, waxing
on about how there was a greasespot on my office
wall from his DJ’s leaning their heads against it
while trying to make time with a girl who was
too good looking for them, so he would have to
let me go. They know they haven’t got a shot, he
said, but they keep tryin’ so you gotta give ‘em
credit for that, chuckling like it was just a joke—
as if they deserved an atta boy from me. Then
he handed me a newly minted company calendar,
wished me luck in my future endeavors, and told
me to shut his big, boss-sized door on my way out.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including her latest collection, Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.

All My Relations by Nancy Huggett

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

All My Relations

have gone sour, even the one with my mechanic
who keeps toying with me—She’ll be ready at 2,

uh, make that 3. Or: Parts unavailable, come back
Monday. And that click when I hit the brakes

after replacing both rotors and pads—
that can’t be good. Last week a friend

raged at me for something she did.
Classic Narcissist! screams a meme

as I scroll social media, waiting for repairs.
But it’s more complicated than that, this trying

to untangle dead-end relationships that seem
to either overheat or stall. So I’m spending

money I don’t have to find out what skill set
I’m missing, where my engine needs grease.

My therapist says some relationships run out
of gas, others are clunkers, quick to break down.

But I never see it coming. I pay the insurance,
change the oil, schedule 52-point checkups.

And then the bottom rusts out.

*

Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant writing and caregiving on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Find her work in Event, ONE ART, Poetry Northwest, and Rust and Moth. She’s won awards (RBC PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.

Three Poems by Rachel Custer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

You: a Ghazal

Here’s the truth: you’re sick to the bone of you.
The whole world is selling you on the throne of you.

Better a shack in heaven than a mansion in this world;
The same ending awaits the most well-known of you.

A tsunami of sameness drenches all you meet
Even the stranger seems just a clone of you.

So much falseness demands your worship these days.
You grow weary of God sometimes, let alone of you.

Realize, Rachel, how little it all matters in the end,
How much of what’s true is overthrown – of you.

*

Repentance

Here is Mercy, Indiana,
a town you thought you knew.

Here is the room
behind the boarded door.

(To return is to repent
though you didn’t sin by leaving,

though you left
carrying nothing but regret.)

Some places kill with silence.
Some places kill with words.

Like cornstalks, gossips
crackle stories into the wind.

(to repent is to return)

Junkies inject the lies
they see in others’ eyes, the truth

nobody thinks they hear.
Mercy is a hard place to stay clean.

A child’s teeth rot for simple lack.

A mother trips along
toward the liquor store.

The fields hum a gathering song.

*

Malediction for the Madness in Me

Hard child, home
in my marrow, wildness

orbiting the eye of me,
may you live forever.

May you live forever cold,
wandering joint to joint

in search of burning,
purpling your bare arms

with desperate slaps (see, fever,
how the spell we need is never

the spell we cast? The reassuring
purr of pain?) and may

the fires you find be dying.
Despair, be a desert in me: entire

in your lifelessness, endless
in the pursuit of yourself.

May you never be loved
for what you are not: poet, lover,

woman, dancing alone
in your calloused feet. Be exile

in your own hallucinated homeland,
thumbing rides from men who promise

to feed you plums, so long as you lick
the stains from their thick thumbs.

Beg them to love you.
Beg them to love you again.

*

Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, 2003) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, One Art, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com and songsonthewaytogod.substack.com.

Write without Fear. Edit without Mercy. — A Workshop with Tresha Faye Haefner

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Workshop: Write without Fear. Edit without Mercy.
Instructor: Tresha Faye Haefner
Date: Thursday, April 10
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern

Please note: This is a Virtual Workshop held via Zoom.

*

To register:

Make a payment using one of the following methods:

Price: $25 (payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp / Zelle / Personal Check)

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

Contact: oneartpoetry@gmail.com

*

Workshop Description:

One reviewer said of Kim Addonizio’s work that not a word was unnecessary or out of place. How do poets write poems where every word feels essential? In this workshop, we will look at poets such as Addonizio, Hayes, Oxenhandler, Myles as examples. Then, we will generate some writing and edit it down without mercy. Participants will be challenged to both say the unsayable, and then murder many of their darlings* until their poems are trimmed down to the most surprising, essential language. (*no darlings will actually be harmed in the writing of these poems.)

*

About The Instructor:

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.

Illicit Affairs by Kristie Frederick Daugherty

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Illicit Affairs

Stop fucking around with me
and suggesting fresh watermelon
in the middle of winter.
Always wanting the fruits
that are out of season.
It was you who ate all
of my Rainier cherries last summer,
you fruit thief.
Their season is short
and they are up to nearly ten dollars
a pound. I saw pits under
your side of the bed when I looked
everywhere for my missing
red hoop earring at Christmas.
Thought the cat
might have dragged it under there.
I’m only saying this because
you will never read it.
I’m only breaking the fourth wall
because of how you
called me by my name
in a bedroom way that
you knew sounded like love,
texted my own name
to me over and over,
keeping me perched on
a windowsill of almost ripe.
The mistress of misdirections:
You must have eaten them
faster than you remember,
I did not touch them,
I’ve never cared for cherries.

*

Kristie Frederick Daugherty is a poet and a professor at the University of Evansville. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also a PhD candidate in Literature/Criticism at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of “Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift” which was published in December 2024 from Random House. Find her online at www.kristiefrederickdaugherty.com

Two Poems by Erin Murphy

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments
Insomnia Chronicles I
The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. I listened to a poetry podcast in the shower yesterday. A guy was reading a poem. I pumped shampoo into my hand and lathered my hair. He was still reading. I rinsed and conditioned. Still reading. The speaker was a father whose daughter was leaving for college. The relationship was complicated. There was a boyfriend. There were horses. I decided to shave my legs for the first time in two months (three months?), scraped the razor along rows of hair like a lawnmower. He was still reading. Man, I thought, this is a long poem. A long-ass poem. A good poem, but still. I stepped onto the bathmat and dried off. Twenty minutes and he was still reading. And that’s when I realized I’d mistakenly played a fiction podcast. It was a story, not a poem. But everything about it seemed like a poem. The precision, the images. I once wrote a poem called “18-Year-Old Daughter as Runaway Horse.” It’s like the Cliff’s Notes version of his story. Six lines. A short poem. A short-ass poem. What’s the difference between poetry and prose? my students ask and ask. I pretend and pretend to know.
*
Insomnia Chronicles XXV
The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. A solitary rain drop—pink!—on the tin trash can outside our window. And then: pinkpink…pishpishpishpish. Then: shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. What seems like the absence of sound is actually a thousand soloists singing the same song. My husband gave me a bone-colored mug that fits neatly in my palm. Every morning I fill it with hot tea and lift the rim to my lips. Day after day after month after year after years. What’s the difference between full of faith and faithful? What’s the difference between noise and sound? I think the loveliest word in the English language is shush. Imperative. Verb. Noun. Maybe we don’t learn how to swim—we learn how not to drown.
*
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

1986 in a Small Town in Ohio by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments
1986 in a Small Town in Ohio
We cruised, riding around in someone’s older Civic, or borrowing a parent’s Impala, or taking the beater that was on the verge of breaking down or rattled or needed a muffler but why bother now? We drove by the home of every boy we liked. It never took us long, a mile to East Enon Road, a mile to Fairfield Pike, through the few neighborhoods—IGA Land, College streets, the houses near Ellis Pond. We cruised by Ha Ha’s Pizza and Ye Olde Trail Tavern but mostly by the arcade where boys let quarters fall out of their pockets, and sometimes we joined them but often we tired of playing Ms. Pac-Man and wanted something more, something else, and we drove to Young’s Jersey Dairy where they sold day-old donuts after midnight and we squeezed into those red vinyl booths, and the boys would be there, the girls would be there, and we would buy Diet Coke and stay out late and eat day-old anything and carry whatever this was into our futures, some of us leaving home and never coming back, some of us going to college and working summers at Glen Helen or Carol’s Kitchen or washing dishes at The Wind’s, some of us never going far in the first place. But before the future, it was boys we longed for, boys we wanted to notice us, boys we wanted to change our lives—so much happens and never once happens in a small town—and death would come early to two of us and shift all the trees on Mills Lawn and none of us would take Route 68 to Xenia at night anymore, yet we still thought we would always have more of them—these days that back then never sped up, only slowed down, and in all the years we cruised, we never spotted one boy we liked through any house or apartment window, but we talked for hours about what might happen if we did, and we rolled down windows and the smell of seasons blew into the car, and we knew it, all of it—what was and what never would be—and our imaginations ran ahead of the car and behind it as we held in our breath and sped toward the edge of town and tomorrow, turning up the radio, ready to arrive.
*
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood teaches writing workshops, doodles with watercolors and metallic markers, and is raising two poodles and a dwindling number of orchids. She is the author of six books, including Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough (Press 53, 2023) and Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021), winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Sun, and Rattle. Learn more at shulycawood.com.

The Immigrant by Julie Standig

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

The Immigrant

My aunt’s apartment on Surf Avenue
was immaculate. I thought.
Until I had to clean it out. Shopping bags
overfilled, one on top of another—
in every closet, pantry, and storage bin.

I discovered old bank statements,
official letters from Germany—in German.
Letters from unknown-to-us people,
written in Polish.
Letters from Israel,
written in Hebrew.
Letters from lawyers that testified
what was taken, when, how much.
Her ketubah from Bergen Belson.

The linen closet was stuffed with towels,
and between those towels, more letters.
One took our breath away
           They took the kinder, put them on a train.
           We knew we would not see them again.
They took her father’s shoe factory.
They took the silver. The china.
Her hair. They sterilized her at Block 10.
They took her baby boy.

The bedroom closet was packed with racks
of shoes. Row after row after row.
A pair of slippers trimmed in fur. Size 5.
My aunt had small feet.

I clutched her nut-brown sweater to my heart.
It was the same one she wore
for her immigration photo.
She kept everything. And I unearthed it.

Stashed in a night-table drawer—
an evergreen marbled notebook
on dictation and grammar,
two accordion-folded rain bonnets,
in plastic sleeves with the ILGWU* stamp.

Small paperbacks:
Geography (for 7th and 8th grade)
Spelling
Mathematics
The D.A.R. Manual for Citizenship

And her porcelain plate with FDR
and Churchill’s side-by-side faces.
Written on the bottom—For Democracy.

*International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).

*

Julie Standig’s poetry has appeared in Schuylkill Journal Review, Sadie Girl Press, Gyroscope Review and online journals. She has a full collection of poems, The Forsaken Little Black Book and her chapbook, Memsahib Memoir. Lifetime New Yorker, she now resides in Bucks County with her husband and their springer spaniel.

Named by All by Cindy Buchanan

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Named by All

I’ve stood still—bereft—unable to remember
my name even when I search for it in the shrill
cry of an osprey, a stream rippling its banks,
the whisper of pine boughs. Too often,
all I hear is the muffled monotone of loss

droning between sky and rock, between my spine
and sternum, like the buzz a dying fly makes
as its legs claw air. In these moments,
when I am lost in an alien world with others
who yearn to reclaim their children from the realm

of hungry ghosts, I must unmask
and walk curious into here and now, attend only
to breath, lean into possibilities nascent
in the tight, pink buds on a rhododendron bush,
in the eggs of a song sparrow, and accept, no,

not merely accept, but comprehend, that I am not
trapped between is and isn’t. Ospreys and flies,
the ache for a lost child, the recurrence
of growth, bright and green, on the tips of boughs
in spring—I am named by all I encounter.

*

Cindy Buchanan grew up in Alaska, has a B.A. in English from Gonzaga University, and studies poetry with Jeanine Walker in Seattle, Washington. She is a member of two monthly poetry groups, is an avid runner and hiker, and splits her time between Seattle and the Baja. Her work has been published in ONE ART, Chestnut Review, Evening Street Review, Hole in the Head Review, The Inflectionist Review, and other journals. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her chapbook, Learning to Breathe (Finishing Line Press), was published in 2023. Find her at cindybuchanan.com

Aubade to Self by Robbie Gamble

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Aubade to Self

morning’s gray filaments
pry the curtains
as I lie still
floating a prayer
for a scant of endurance,
compassion, generosity—
selfishly, of course
but for all of us

because despair is
a husk of resistance
it means we are all still
counting the casualties
it means the pain
remains tender

*

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Post Road, Sheila-Na-Gig, Whale Road Review, Salamander, and The Sun. He is the poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and he divides his time between Boston and Vermont.

I Gave Up Chaos by Rachel Mallalieu

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

I Gave Up Chaos

In front of our house, crocuses erupt in a riot
of purple and yellow. For Lent, I gave up

chaos—the pervasive violence
of blue light.

Instead, I soak in the glow
of our grow lamps. In the basement,

tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers unfurl their fuzzy
heads. We are enlarging the garden this year.

When my fingers itch to flick between headlines
proclaiming wreckage and ruin, I will plunge

them into bread dough and shape our next meal.
And when that voice bleeds through the radio and TV,

I will attend to my children, who are still young
enough to laugh in the future’s face.

*

Rachel Mallalieu is an emergency physician and mother of five. Some of her recent work is published in Chestnut Review, Whale Road Review, Rattle and Westwind. Rachel is the author of the chapbook A History of Resurrection (Alien Buddha Press 2022).

What Do I Do Now? by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments
What Do I Do Now?
I am certain the ribcage pain I woke up with
is stage-four lung cancer; it would explain
the chronic cough doctors dismissed
as allergies or reflux for which they prescribed
over-the-counter pills that do nothing
but make me tired.
I plan my service: the poems—Glück, Pastan, Simic;
the music—Bach, Baez, bluegrass;
the food—bagels, lox, the works.
My sister will make a photo montage
of me at various ages as she did for our parents,
and some people will see me young for the first time.
Lovely things will be said about me. My brother
will crack jokes; the room will erupt in laughter.
I want my ashes mixed with those of my dogs—
the still-living one, too, once she passes—
and spread a mile out on Lake Michigan, along whose shores
she and I have known so much joy. On that beach. In that water.
Meanwhile, my sister, whose love I trust utterly, will adopt her
and take my place.
I’ll bequeath the inheritance my mother left me
to my friends whose money troubles have forced them
to work too hard, forgo basic repairs, deny themselves travel
and good health care. I imagine them with new HVAC,
in business class, getting mammograms…endowed by my will,
a power greater than any I’ve known in life.
Then, as hours pass, the pain improves, less like a dissonant chord
than an off-key melody. Mostly likely just a pulled muscle.
Why I don’t play Bach, eat bagels, read Glück,
I cannot say.
*
Lynn Glicklich Cohen is a poet from Milwaukee, WI. Her poems have appeared in Oberon, Red Wheelbarrow, Midwest Review, Evening Street Review, and numerous other journals. She was nominated for Best of the Net in 2024.

Two Poems by Louisa Muniz

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Long-Held Forgiveness

When he slapped me for answering back I was halfway
through Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind:

the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind
happiness not always being so very much fun.

At thirteen, born was a mute swan of unrest.

Years later, I’d dial his number, anxiously waiting
for him to answer, yet secretly hoping he wouldn’t

in order to avoid the awkward small talk
in the field of long silences between strangers.

If he did pick up, I’d affirm later to myself:
I am a good daughter, once the milkman’s daughter,

la hija del lechero, who rose daily before dawn
to deliver fresh eggs, butter & glass-bottled milk
to designated milk boxes on neighborhood porches.

At the end of it all, I visited him daily, in hospice.
Sat in the uneasy chair of a man orphaned at seven.

A man who never stayed around long enough
for a daughter holding absence in the hollow of her ribs.

Oh, how we ache for what is left whispering in us.
Oh, how we stumble through the mire, falter in the swale.

Slipping beneath the floating sheets before he passed,
he whispered, oigo musica Cubana.

I heard no Cuban music of danzon or rumba or son.
I heard no words of endearment, no words of regret
escape his slackened jaw in the slender hour.

What I heard was the weight of the rain.
How it pummeled the earth outside the window.

And how the earth embraced it.
Let it flow as runoff.
Let it go as long-held forgiveness.

*

Victory

Mother wasn’t a saint but she could’ve been sainted. Made holy. Exalted.
She was devoted to good in a way I never cared to be. Instead, I cared to be
saved by a blazing sunset while inhaling a Tango screwdriver. Father mistook
her heart for a secondhand rug, her hands for two empty jugs; a homemaker
in a housecoat. You could say I drank from the cup of resentment. You could say
it draped the house like a curtain of smoke. Through the cracked bedroom door
I watched Mother pray. Mouth salted in sorrow, she prayed to be seen in the moon’s
rosary of light, to be heard by the one who art in heaven. Ask me how I learned to
smokescreen sadness. Ask me how my body splintered, thin skinned, until every
muscle carried the weight of her name. When her mouth parched in enough,
she cut him loose. That was the year she discovered Elizabeth Taylor. Idolized her.
Framed Liz’s Life Magazine pictures on her bedroom and living room walls.
Painted a mole above her lip with an eyebrow pencil & cinched her waist to show-off
her curvaceous figure. Wore Victory Red lipstick as part of masking a brave face.
If she was looking for something glamorous in her ordinary life, I can’t say.

*

Louisa Muniz lives in Sayreville, N.J. She holds a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction from Kean University. Her work has appeared in ONE ART, Tinderbox Journal, Palette Poetry, SWWIM, Jelly Bucket, PANK Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic and elsewhere. She won the Sheila-Na-Gig Spring Contest for her poem Stone Turned Sand. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her debut chapbook, After Heavy Rains was released in December, 2020. Her chapbook, The Body is More Than a Greening Thing will be published in the spring of 2025 by Finishing Line Press.

Three Poems by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

GRANDSON AT TWO

He runs to me, falls in my arms, laughing
again and again—a game we play

while my daughter makes his lunch.
He never tires—

Each time his laughter clacks and clatters, leaps
from him like a mythical bird and rises wet-feathered

from the albumen of the egg,
then flies from his lips—

becoming many mythical birds
stringing themselves in the air,

and the explosions of pleasure seed
their own field somewhere

in the distance where he will return long after
I have gone, the tight tufts of purple

clover, the daisies and black-eyed Susans.

*

MY DAUGHTER, PREGNANT WITH HER SECOND CHILD

To grow a bunch of bananas, it takes nine months.

I see you in the banana’s pinkish-lavender blossom,
petals smooth as a silken sheet,

that appears in the sixth or seventh month,
shaped like an elongated human heart.

You are standing, hands clasped, arms straight,
centered in front of your belly,

and the cupola, the dome of fingers intertwined,
points towards the ground as though

your entire body stood in slender prayer.
From the banana blossom’s petals

spring tiny tubular flowers, each group
called a hand, each flower,

a finger—in her lifetime all that
your own daughter’s hands will hold, recoil from,

or just hang by her sides like indifferent vines.
The banana heart grows from a notched black

stalk that is straight and lengthens towards
the earth like your grandmother’s Sunday cane

beneath her white-gloved hand.
The heart’s petals will fall open

one by one until there is only a fringe
of yellow, decorative, like the hem of a skirt.

*

WOMEN’S VOICES

Ancient Greeks and Romans believed
women had two mouths, an upper and, in the genitalia,
a lower. Both led to a vacant chamber guarded by lips
that are best kept closed.

When women wailed, they were walled
outside the perimeter of the city.

The anatomical deck is stacked against us—
lower voices vibrate in the vocal folds
more slowly as though more

           certain of themselves.

I read that switchboard operators were instructed
to speak slowly to mimic this effect.

That when Margaret Thatcher took voice-
lowering lessons, she was told
to speak as if she had a penis and a cold.

I imagine the lush contours of my daughter’s voice,
vibrations churning through the small bones of her face
as she reads her three-year-old son a story,

the precise notes of my grandmother’s voice
finding their way through the steam as it rose
above her kettle of borscht.

Note: the quote is from Ann Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound”

*

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches at The 92nd Street Y and is Associate Editor at-large for Plume Poetry. Her poems appeared in The Dodge, New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, the NYT, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third book, ECHOLOCATION, was on the long list for the Julie Suk Award in 2019.

America’s Favorite Playground by John Arthur

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

America’s Favorite Playground

My daughter asks if she can see
a picture of gravity.
She’s four but before I can answer,
more questions come at me,
gleaned, it seems, from the TV—
What’s a tariff? What’s a trade war?
We buy most of what we own
from the local thrift store.
Just home from work,
I sit next to her, still wearing
my new old peacoat, only $9.99,
one button missing, but warm
enough to get me through
at least the rest of this winter.
Now the anchor is saying Canadians
are expected to boycott—
no more trips this summer
to the Jersey shore.
When I was a valet in AC,
I used to count the Ontario plates,
smoking on the top floor
of the parking deck,
looking out at the gold plated facade
of the Trump Taj Mahal
before it was demolished.
It only took a couple
of well placed explosives.
I show my daughter a video
of the building imploding.
That’s gravity, I say.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, DIAGRAM, ONE ART, trampset, Failbetter, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best of the Net.

ONE ART’s April Reading with Featured Poets: Kari Gunter-Seymour, Amit Majmudar, Chad Frame

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ONE ART’s April Reading with Featured Poets: Kari Gunter-Seymour, Amit Majmudar, Chad Frame

Date: Sunday, April 6

Time: 2pm Eastern

Featured Poets: Kari Gunter-Seymour, Amit Majmudar, Chad Frame

Tickets: Free or Donation

~ About The Featured Poets ~

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and the author of three award-winning collections of poetry, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) and Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press 2022). She is the Executive Director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series Women Speak, and the host of “Spoken & Heard” a seasonal reading series featuring poets, writers and singer/songwriters from throughout the country. Her work has been featured in a number of periodicals and journals including the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times. Find her at www.karigunterseymourpoet.com.

*

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

*

Chad Frame is the author of three books of poetry: Little Black Book, Cryptid, and Smoking Shelter. He is the Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program, a Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry/improv performance troupe, and the founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival. His work appears in Rattle, Strange Horizons, Pedestal, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth, on iTunes from the Library of Congress, and is archived on the moon with The Lunar Codex.

Three Poems by Laura Grace Weldon

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments
I Dream Of Hubble’s Law
I’m standing in front of my mother, head tugged
while she braids my hair as she does every morning.
I am seven years old, she must be late 30s.
Her lipstick is bright red, her hair nearly black.
Taster’s Choice freeze-dried coffee in her cup,
Cleveland news and weather on the radio.
My baby brother bangs his spoon,
smile-flinching each time it strikes.
My sister and father are at the table, all of us
unaware we’re in my dreamworld,
unaware we are inexorably moving away
from each other the way stars grow more distant.
Stand still she says as she fastens a tiny rubber band
at the bottom of each braid so I don’t turn around
to hug her as I long to in my dream. I want to hang on
for dear life as galaxies move apart ever faster
in a universe widening toward absolute zero.
*
Greenlings
They spring out the door,
compressed by inside rules:
slow down, lower your voice,
put away your toys. They whinny,
canter, jump, barely able to keep
to the confines of boots and coats.
The desire to inhabit themselves
is strong as a stream’s mandate to flow.
In them I see once-wobbly foals
grow into their knees, their power.
Three children radiant
as late winter light through eyelids
I close for an in-breath’s cherishing.
Their greenling calls stir the air, leaping
beyond whatever holds them in.
*
Hang In There
Memory summons the third-grade classroom
poster of a kitten, soft gray and white fur,
front paws desperately clutching a rope.
A silly font read Hang In There!
I tried to avoid looking at the wall
at all because I couldn’t bear
the kitten’s beseeching eyes, could
feel its desperation in my stomach,
my throat. It dangled over an abyss,
its weary claws my hands.
        Men in movies hung from building edges
        or helicopter skids. Any woman in the scene
        threw her hands over her mouth, helplessly
        pretty and pettable. In theaters, people clapped
        when the hero—against all odds— pulled himself up.*
I walk back in my mind to that classroom,
find the poster tidy as the day it was tacked up,
reach in, take that kitten into my nine-year-old arms
where I feel its tiny heart flutter
as it calms, finally, after all these years.
        *Mythbusters episode 138 demonstrated some adults can hold on from
        a three inch ledge for only about one minute, less for a one inch ledge.
        Not one participant could pull themselves up.
*
Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books.

On Mondays by Alexandra Umlas

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

On Mondays

We’ve been making our way to the small
Italian diner in the strip mall on Warner,

where two can sit without waiting,
where you can add a three dollar

side salad piled with mozzarella
and pickled vegetables.

This is what heaven is like, I think,
a glass of house chianti, enough bread,

balsamic, oil to last the night, the familiar
traffic half-humming, half-grunting by—

and God is the spaghetti and meatballs,
that is always enough for us,

whose blood and body we devour,
who both nourishes and fills us.

And praise be to the line-cook
who has cooked our God that night,

who has made the thing we cannot
articulate, and given it to us on a plate,

who portions out God after God
so that the little restaurant is filled

with them, who has made each taste
rich and salty as the beach-night air—

*

Alexandra Umlas is from Long Beach, CA and currently lives in Huntington Beach, CA. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection At the Table of the Unknown (Moon Tide Press).

Aperture by Valerie Bacharach

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments
Aperture
The sun not yet visible. Barbara’s photo on my phone,
she and I hold our first books. In March, she will be dead
four years. Future tense for a past event.
I read that the Earth’s magnetic north pole is shifting. Canada to Siberia.
As if my body drifts toward the cold land of my ancestors.
As if I’m not unsteady enough.
As if Barbara’s photo unleashes grief’s insistent music.
We liked to shop for shoes. Red ones.
When cancer returned with its rapacious mouth,
she shaved her head, left one wide swath of hair,
worn in a warrior’s topknot.
The aperture of her life narrowing.
*
Valerie Bacharach is a graduate of Carlow University’s MFA program and a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops. Her book, Last Glimpse was published by Broadstone Books in August 2024. Her poem Birthday Portrait, Son, published by the Ilanot Review, was selected for inclusion in 2023 Best Small Fictions. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net.

Fear Of Missing Out by Arlene Weiner

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Fear Of Missing Out

If you slept through the night of the meteor shower,
if you missed the eclipse, the aurora, the Supermoon,
you may still see the sun-shined spiderweb,
the dandelion in the sidewalk crack,
the raindrop making a path like a snail
on the window. You can still find the star
in the halved apple, brother of the rose.
You can see pigeons flaunt their bronze,
hear their murmur croom croom.

You can stand in the wind, fry pungent spices.
Feast on the unscheduled, unheralded, unnamed.

*

Arlene Weiner lives in Pittsburgh. She has been a Shakespeare scholar, a cardiology technician, an editor, a den mother, and a member of a group developing computer applications for education. Her poems have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Pleaides, Poet Lore, and Paterson Literary Review. She held a MacDowell fellowship. Ragged Sky published three collections of her poetry: Escape Velocity (2006), City Bird (2016), and More (2022). She also writes plays.

Two Poems by Robin Wright

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Where Does Love Go to Die?

To a bin next to old sweaters
impossibly out of style,
colors faded to pale

To a junkyard filled
with rusted spare parts,
piled together under
a diesel-smudged sun

To the basement of your heart
where brokenness curls
into a fetal curve

To the attic of my heart
where only dust survives

*

Spying on the Dead

While cleaning out our cousin’s house,
my sister & I linger on black & white photos.
Bride & groom smile with hope
not yet knowing that instead
of bearing children,
they will bear disappointment.

Mementos like a signed baseball,
ticket stubs make us smile,
but we want to turn away
from medications, Depends,
private correspondence.

As if on a plane flying
through constant turbulence,
the invasion of privacy
makes our stomachs lurch.

We focus instead
on the many flashlights
left behind. A blue one,
beam focused or broadened,
so that when it’s dark
we will always have their light.

*

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

Three Poems by Molly Fisk

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

Rest

She loved him most afterward,
late at night when his arguments
softened, drifted into wider
concentric circles, stone of his curiosity
flung haphazardly into the pond,
rippling out to an uneven shoreline
of cattails and willows. His breath
warming a single spot on her back,
his voice the sound of water making
its way across a stream bed’s mottled
gravel, catching the day’s last light.
The occasional chuckle, a half-finished
kiss, the way his fingers relaxed
along her folded arm: ease, balance,
companionship, safety, rest.

*

Who I Am in Twilight

Myself again, still, always different
from the day before but similar,
essential: the way a lake is mostly blue
but turns deep green, turquoise
at the shoreline, ruffled then glass,
steely under clouds, glinting copper
when the sun’s lengthening path leads
west into the pines, or white-capped
under April winds. Civil twilight,
that momentary stay from ill-will
and misbehavior as I imagine it,
the first six degrees our star disappears
below the horizon, a few sacred
moments before dark when we take
a long breath and let the complications
slide away, watch the shadows rise
and the vee widening behind a young
family of mergansers turn to mercury,
to sable, to blue-black, to night.

                *Al Young’s title

*

Cedar Waxwings

Here’s a day with so much
to do but no appointments,
an empty calendar,
blank, open, I didn’t hem
myself in by scheduling
look for cedar waxwings
and the recycling bin knows
I will not abandon it.
Where does the time go?
Do I really hear the basil
leaves calling for picking
and pine nuts knocking
around in the fridge?
I am waiting. Stalling. Ripe
to feel something but not
yet, my heartbeat calm
no trembling hands or shallow
breath. I want my brother
to wake from his coma,
lose his respirator and smile
despite a sore throat and a week
lost to twilight sleep, his body
slowly repairing itself
while the rest of us pray.

*

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection Walking Wheel is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Fisk, who lives in the Sierra foothills, has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

UnNamed by Rachel Neve-Midbar

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

UnNamed

Some days I ask how
did I survive them? Him
a tornado of loud throughout

the house, she quiet, feet
always up on an ottoman,
the only chatter

the TV’s endless bustle.
The windows rattle. The
dog growls, reveals her teeth.

Who am I? There is no
one here to ask. In her mouth
I am “Please Bring Me;”

in his “Poison.” Still. Clear.
The skull and the X that marks
it. There is no lyric here. Just

this dead and noisy air. Some
days I want to tattoo my name
onto their tongues, but I don’t

know what to write. Any answer.
Am I poison? A girl born
to give pleasure to others?

Was there ever a name? Did
anyone once look deep
into my face to see who I am?

*

Poet, essayist, translator, and Fulbright Scholar, Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook, What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014, winner of The Clockwork Prize). She is the co-editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, July 2023). More at rachelnevemidbar.com

Two Poems by Jennifer Espinoza

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

CRESTING WAVE

Water moves through rock
in prayer,
earth cracking open slowly.

A mind scatters outward
in silence.
Kaleidoscope of selves.

Color dreams itself
in light,
full of noise and confusion.

Lines break
apart, defying
the border of flesh,

becoming one other
in apology
for what they were born as.

No one knows how to take
the sound of
their own longing.

*

ITINERARY

Move a desk.
Sell a car.
Bury a dog.
Get to work.
Clock your hands.
Clock your body.
Drape the self.
Stop smiling.
Give away.
Keep going.
Dream big.
Don’t sleep.
Drink three cups of coffee.
Smoke one cigarette.
Disdain yourself.
Disown your visions.
Look at the sun.
Don’t stare.
Tear down old art on the walls.
Throw your face in the trash.
Drink several glasses of water.
Ignore the heavy weight pulling on the floor of your heart.
Count your blessings.
Cut your losses.
Don’t cry, not yet.
Wait til you get home.
Then, cry forever.

*

Jennifer Espinoza is a poet whose work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, the American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Poem-a-day @poets.org, and elsewhere. She is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks), THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (The Accomplices) and I Don’t Want To Be Understood (Alice James Books). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and currently resides in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog.

Three Years Later by Julia Kolchinsky

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Three Years Later

When it began, we feared the end
would come too quick, like summer rain, but war
leaves roots and heliotropes towards flame, a sunflower

weighed by grip and reaching. A Baba stuffed sunflower
seeds into an invading soldier’s pockets, you’ll end
up in our soil, she told him, but at least your war

will grow you, turn you into something beautiful. War
is water that drowns as it quenches. The sunflowers,
like open wounds or mouths, demand it doesn’t end

like this. War doesn’t end in sunflowers, it begins—

*

Julia Kolchinsky is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS, PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist of the Miller Williams Prize. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, with nonfiction in Brevity, Shenandoah, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.

Two Poems by Theresa Senato Edwards

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination Before a Cure can be Determined

         After Torrin A. Greathouse

As a little girl, I often
began counting my steps—
cat in a cage
designed to pace back and forth.
Easy to mistake cat for a child
fighting her own thoughts,
gathering fear
heavy into the day. My
illness, what’s
jammed into my brain:
kingdom of doubt.
Little girl always looking for
mother to help stop worries,
not real ones, mostly
ominous thoughts of
parents dying. Or
quiet repetition—touch doorknobs—
rituals to save the world.
Silent savior-child of woe,
the only way to grow
until she couldn’t
volunteer her stories
without her mother
xeroxing each one.
Young, precious mind
zoned—to trust nothing.

*

Your Last Months

We watched you watch
each wall in our oldest sister’s—

your caretaker’s—spare room,
look for children playing

in the paintings. Bedridden,
you were too weak to color

in the lines. Your torso lengthened;
fat that once cushioned your bones

fell invisibly, air revealed every
crack and crevice of what it was

to be a 69-year-old dying woman.
Grief kaleidoscoped into your stomach,

pain. You used your survival instinct
until you couldn’t eat anymore.

We forgot what your body could do before
all this: dance at weddings, kiss wildly,

hold your great niece on your wide hip.

*

Theresa Senato Edwards has published 3 poetry books—1, with painter Lori Schreiner, winning The Tacenda Literary Award—and 2 chapbooks. Nominated twice for a Pushcart, once for Best of the Net, and once for Best Small Fictions, Edwards is also a full-length poetry manuscript reader for Trio House Press. Her website is http://www.theresasenatoedwards.com.

Other People Explain My Sexuality to Me by Hannah Tennant-Moore

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Other People Explain My Sexuality to Me

My ex-girlfriend says
I’m not really gay.
I’m just into her.
Because she acts like a dude.

My ex-boyfriend says
I’m not really straight.
I’m just into him.
Because he fucks as good as a woman.

The father of my children says
I’ve always been gay.
That’s why we’re divorcing.
Not because he treats me like shit.

A guy I was sleeping with for a while says
he’s sorry he was so selfish.
I must not have liked being used like that.
Since I’m really gay.

My parents meet my girlfriend
who is beautiful and smart and makes me happy.
They say nothing.

An old friend says
I’m really into men
because I slept with
so many of them
after my first girlfriend
broke up with me
and I was sure
I would never get
another girl.
It seemed too miraculous,
too much to hope for:
two women in love.

My body says
yes
no
I want
I don’t want.

My life says
I’m nobody.
And that’s as queer as it gets.

*

Hannah Tennant-Moore is a queer novelist, essayist, critic, and emerging poet. Her novel Wreck and Order (Hogarth/Random House, 2016) was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a contributor to the New York Times Book Review; her writing also appears in The Sun, Tin House, The New Republic, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, the Sho Poetry Journal, and Josephine Quarterly. She is at work on a poetry collection called The Virginity I Should’ve Lost, which deals with queer desire and the prison of nuclear family life.

Two Poems by Patricia Davis-Muffett

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Lucky

In this version of the story, when you tell me
you’re starting hormone therapy because
you are 18 now and can make
your own decisions, I say “Good.
You know what’s best for you.” I do not ask
if you’ve found a therapist in California.
I do not ask if you are rushing into it.

In this version, my support lets you tell me
that your cis female roommate
is afraid testosterone will make you violent,
that she has made you unwelcome
and complained to the school’s housing office.

In this version, I tell you
we will support you,
that you will never have to worry
about where you will sleep.

In this version, I am not afraid
of losing the child I raised
and can see the adult
you are becoming
instead of learning
years later
how scared you were,
how alone.

Today, I count my luck
that you are there, on the other end
of the phone, to receive my apology,
to tell me it was ok even though we both know
it was not.

*

Election aftermath in the office cafeteria

“Can I sit down?” my younger colleague,
mother of two Asian-American girls, asks.
I welcome her, happy for the distraction
in this week where we are supposed to pretend
that everything is normal.

I promise I am trying.
I remind myself to smile and laugh,
but halfway through her sweet potatoes,
she stops and says, “You seem down.”
I am thinking of the CEO’s email
on Election Day, reminding us to
follow Community Guidelines [hyperlink]
and remember the Personal Political Activity Policy [link 2].

So I tell her the truth–
that I am exhausted. That I
have not been sleeping well.

I withhold that, before she arrived,
I was sitting at this table with the ghost
of the person who threw themselves
from the top of the 8th floor library.
And also the ghost of my trans daughter’s
friend who watched the victory laps
and swallowed a bottle of pills.
I withhold that my daughter’s cis friends
are telling her to get a gun for protection.

I can see she knows I withhold.
I can see she carries her own ghosts:
the epithets on the metro, what the coming
quadrennial may hold–and maybe
she wanted to tell me about them.
I wish I was less of a coward.

We finish our meals in silence
and when we stand to clear our trays,
we each lead our own procession
out the door and into our own
separate lonelinesses.

*

Patricia Davis-Muffett holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her chapbook, Alchemy of Yeast and Tears, was published in 2023. Her work has won honors including the Erskine J Poetry Prize, placing in the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest (selected by Marge Piercy) and nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in About Place, Smartish Pace, Calyx, Best New Poets and Best American Poetry. She lives in Rockville, Maryland.

State of the Union by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

State of the Union

A year ago, he was just my neighbor,
the guy down the street wearing a Yankees cap
that he would tip in greeting as he walked by.

That was before the dueling yard signs.
Before we were winners and losers.
Before we were us and them.

Now the votes have all been counted.
His red cap says we are on different teams.
And yet we must be more than bumper stickers and slogans.

So today we cast another vote.
Today we vote for peace. Today we do what we can
to make our neighborhood great again.

We vote to pause in the street,
and notice the red leaves on the maple tree,
and the blue sky overhead.

We ask about each other’s family.
We bend down to pet each other’s dogs.
We scratch their ears and call them by name.

Today we loosen our grip on the leash.
We watch the dogs greet each other
like old friends. Like we once did.

Today we fall into the old ways.
We meet each other’s eyes.
We call each other by name.

*

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. 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.

Smoke by Jerrice J Baptiste

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Smoke

She’d light a cigarette and let it wobble in the corner between her top and bottom lip as she spoke of the pain of birthing her five children, then raising them alone. Grandmother lay in bed, both feet hung off the edge and shook in cadence of a clock ticking, keeping time from midnight ’till dawn. Her body seemed ready to jump off as if she couldn’t trust that empty space behind her back. As if someone or something would invade it. As if her day was not done, and another task would summon her from rest. Her head leaned forward at an angle that allowed ashes of her newly lit cigarette to fall onto the cement floor. I’d watch her mind travel back from our city street in Port-au-Prince to the little island of La Gonave. The cows and goats had been milked. She had breastfed the newest baby before clouds appeared in cobalt sky above the barn. Root vegetables, pulled and gathered from her garden, filled her woven baskets. I’ve been smoking these things since age twelve, she says, taking her last drag of the cigarette as she lights the new one. A man couldn’t love me for long, even after his baby was born, she sucked her teeth before placing the new cigarette on the same spot where all of her rage laid dormant. Her restless feet continued shaking off of the bed over the fitted maroon sheet. They were like her long carrot stems in basket in the wind, when she walked the rough terrain to market. You must be happy you had children Manman? I said. Her eyes closed, I didn’t have any other choice.

*

Jerrice J Baptiste is a poet and author of nine books, Her most recent poetry book Coral in The Diaspora is published by Abode Press (August 2024). She’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize 2024 by Jerry Jazz Musician & Abode Press 2025, and Best of the Net 2022. Jerrice’s poems have been published in Artemis Journal, The Yale Review, Kosmos Journal, The Banyan Review, The Caribbean Writer and numerous others. Her collaborative songwriting and poems are featured on the Grammy nominated album: Many Hands Family Music for Haiti.

Lice by Lori Levy

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

LICE

It’s a rite of passage for mothers,
I tell my daughter when she calls in alarm
at what she’s spotted on her daughter’s head.
Most of us, it seems, have to learn
how to check for them, kill them, comb them out,
dead or alive, along with their stubborn nits
that stick to the hair. She’s a lice virgin:
it’s her first time raking a thin-toothed comb
through her daughter’s hair. Her daughter is 11—
the same age I was when a nurse
came into our classroom in Springfield, Vermont
to check our scalps. I thought it’s something
only poor kids get, only dirty kids. A mark of shame.
Years later, as a mother, I learn that these tiny invaders
don’t care how rich or clean or educated you are.
I become an experienced nit picker.

My granddaughter doesn’t know she has lice
when she goes to sleep at a new friend’s house
in the new town they’ve moved to.
Doesn’t know she’s bringing them with her
when she sleeps in the bed with her friend,
uses her hairbrush, her bike helmet.
As soon as she finds out, she warns her friend—
who stops texting and calling and says she’s not allowed
to invite her again for a sleepover.
As if my granddaughter has the plague.
No one wants lice, but what’s more harmful,
more contagious? A scalp full of crawling bugs—
or the verdicts, sometimes mistaken,
that clamor inside our heads?

*

Lori Levy’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod International Journal, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Paterson Literary Review, and numerous other online and print literary journals in the U.S., the U.K., and Israel. Two of her chapbooks were published in 2023: “What Do You Mean When You Say Green? and Other Poems of Color” (Kelsay Books), and “Feet in L.A., But My Womb Lives in Jerusalem, My Breath in Vermont” (Ben Yehuda Press). Levy lives with her husband in Los Angeles near her children and grandchildren.

Forceps Delivery by Pat Hale

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Forceps Delivery

You see, I could not push.

I was too hopeless, too exhausted.
Needed just a moment
to catch my breath, to rest,
but the doctor said, now, push.
There would be no resting.
She didn’t know my heart
was broken, that it was the source
of my utter weakness.
Nobody did. Not yet.

There are things you can’t see
unless you know where to look.
The doctor just grumbled and snipped
so I wouldn’t tear. Surgical scissors.
Too late. I was already broken.

She called the forceps “blades,”
a word that made me avert my eyes.
I told the nurses to turn the mirror
so I wouldn’t have to watch
those broad metal tongs enter into me
or see the blood flowing out.

I did not see my son being born,
just heard the doctor mutter,
don’t they teach these girls anything
in those childbirth classes?
She wanted to let me know I had failed
at this one simple task set before me.
You’ve left a big mess
for me to clean up, the doctor said.
Then she got to the stitching,
pulling the visible bits of me
back together.

*

Pat Hale’s publications include “Seeing Them with My Eyes Closed,” (published by Grayson Books) and “Composition and Flight” (published by the Hill-Stead Museum). Her prize-winning poems appear in Calyx, Connecticut River Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other journals, and have been anthologized in “Forgotten Women,” “Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis,” and elsewhere. She lives in Connecticut in a little house surrounded by tall trees, and serves on the board of directors for the Riverwood Poetry Series.

Girlhood by Emily Kedar

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Girlhood

I once was a mirror: no one saw me.
When I wept, my skin dampened

with other people’s tears. The body bent
at angles of replication, knew the steps

like ballet. The voice rose
and fell in a practiced cadence of comfort,

tumbled from the raven lodged inside my throat.
I moved like water, took the shape

of whomever contained me.
Some survivals go predawn blue

and stay there. Some beautiful girls
die in their disguise.

*

Emily Kedar is a poet and writer from Toronto, Canada. Her work has most recently appeared in The Malahat Review, The Maynard and The Bellevue Literary Review. She is currently pursuing an MFA from Pacific University.

Women by Ashley Kirkland

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment
Women
My friend and I are talking (we talk most mornings,
it’s one of those things that keeps us going) &
she’s telling me about her boss, how she makes her
feel like a small girl in trouble & yet her boss compares
women to the sun: constant, strong. My friend tells me she’s neither,
maybe she’s conflating women and mothers, she says, & I think
about the link between youth & shame, how the connection follows
us into adulthood, how even now I feel so small when I feel
shame. My friend says she’s more like a lake because she has boundaries
& depth. An ocean would be too big, she says. I don’t tell her,
but I think she could be an ocean if she wanted; a hurricane tearing
through the joint. I’m a poet so I think of the moon– bright & ever-
changing, guiding, pulling. She takes on all of the metaphors
then, and says, it’s funny, you know, that we have this urge to compare
women to part of nature when we are nature. She tells me about women
in the Bible, the word ezer, how the phrasing the first time it appears
is stronger than the male translators ever gave us credit for, which, I think,
is what we’ve always fought. Metaphors that underestimate us, make us
larger than life. Myth. The sun, the lake, the moon, when we’ve really
only ever been ourselves, which is to say, everything all at once.
*
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.