Self Portrait with Mary Oliver at Ashfield Lake, Late Fall
I bring my body
breathing
to greet
what the haunting
holds.
*
Laura Sackton is a queer poet who lives and writes in rural Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, Terrain.org, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. She’s known around the internet as an evangelist for earnestness.
As I Contemplate Precarity, the Dogs Eat Their Breakfast
I would forget,
if it weren’t for the crunch
of kibble over the quiet
light as it awakens
from gray
to white,
how to keep on.
Each moment
is an invitation
extended for an instant—
the hunger of life
for itself, the heart
of souls resting
in my care.
Why can’t I be tender with myself?
Life moves through me,
asking me in,
opening the present
like a window.
If I can accept, fresh air
flows like breath.
I want to keep
my loves forever
just like this,
and I hope like hunger
the moment,
as it passes,
will never be gone.
*
Jenna Wysong Filbrun is the author of the poetry collection, Running Toward Water, forthcoming from Shanti Arts in 2026. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in Deep Wild Journal, Gyroscope Review, Wild Roof Journal, and other publications. She practices poetry to deepen her awareness of connection and loves to spend time at home and in the wild with her husband, Mike, and their dogs, Oliver and Lewis. Find her on Instagram @jwfilbrun.
Etiquette for Choking in an Applebee’s
I heard somewhere that most women who die
from choking in restaurants are found
on the bathroom floor
presumably because they don’t want
to make a scene as they labor
for air and I’ve wondered
what they think about
in the moments before their bodies fold
on the tile, if they know
they were taught to choose death
inside a graffitied stall
over sharing their most basic need
to breathe
and then I look around and start to see
choking women everywhere.
*
Kristen Rapp is a poet and sociologist from Roanoke, Virginia. She is an associate professor of Sociology and Public Health at Roanoke College, where she studies and teaches on the topic of social inequalities in health. Her poetry explores themes of motherhood, queer identity, feminism, and politics. Kristen’s poems have appeared in the North Meridian Review and in a forthcoming anthology titled If You Ever: Poems Inspired by Kim Addonizio.
Rabid Omnivores
Once asked, “What are you made of?”
I said want. I am made of want.
I am on the apps
and I’ve left-swiped my entire city.
I don’t try to equivocate, but sometimes
every word seems to mean
at least two other words.
Six hours away, a gorgeous man
writes dark stories about lonely men
in bars, and says we might as well be
in different dimensions. “Well, then,
there’s a world
where we have an amazing first date.”
He’d like to read that one,
some day. When I say
I fear rejection: In high school,
a boy asked me out
as a prank. The water polo team
watched and laughed. This Fall,
poems fell from me in threes.
I write them to men who don’t read
poems. It used to be
you got a slug of whiskey
and a stick to bite
when they cut off your fucking leg,
and here I am—
felled by my feelings.
*
Another Poem About
I want to be the person who takes
what another can give, and notes the datapoints
to calibrate my own expectations. Instead,
I am whatever this is. I was asked again today
for the poem about my mother.
Not today. I’ve folded away everything
left to say. While I cook for you,
I think how I haven’t done this for someone
since my husband, and I don’t tell you,
so you don’t know. Do I mind
if you go for a run? While the Bolognese
simmers? No. If you stay, I could say something
true. When I cook for you, and you eat
without realizing it’s my heart—
My heart in a fed belly. In knowing
there is not a single person
I would hide you from—maybe
every poem I write
about a man who cannot love me,
is a poem about my mother.
*
Melissa Strilecki has been previously published in Sugar House Review, Fugue, West Trade Review, The Shore, and several others. She lives in Seattle with her two children.
Battle of the Bulge
1960. I’m 15 watching Dad size up the used car dealer,
not a stalwart man but he does wear a vest, smokes Luckies
like my old man. We walk his lot; he carries a chamois
to buff the chrome trim of each car we pass until we
come upon a red ’57 Ford Galaxie. The guy opens
the front door, waves Dad inside. He slides the seat back,
takes the key, fires it up. The exhaust is a little blue,
but the interior, immaculate. Even the ash tray is clean;
I’ve never seen that before.
The guy offers to sacrifice the car, with seventy thousand
on the odometer, for a grand and a half. My old man scoffs
at first but then the guy offers a ten percent veteran’s discount,
which allows him to mention he was in the Battle of the Bulge,
spent a winter in a foxhole outside Bastogne. Young
as I am I can tell he’s sold a shitload of cars by introducing
that little fact, true or not. It’s obvious Dad believes him
and figures even if the car is a little overpriced General Eisenhower
would say this guy has earned the sale. Now, my old man
had a rough time in his Navy hitch, suicidal from malaria while
guarding the Panama Canal from U-boats, sent home early with
a general discharge that some folk look upon with contempt.
In the office Dad glances at me, trying to gauge if I
understand that the check he is about to write is part of a
far-off battle he will be fighting the rest of his life.
He seals the deal for the Ford and as we drive away I can see
the salesman throw his feet up on his desk and clasp his hands
over his belly, obviously no longer even thinking about that
foxhole, probably doing some mental math to see how close he
is now to a speedboat of his own he’ll name Battle of the Bilge.
*
Tom Barlow is an American writer whose work has appeared in many journals including Ekphrastic Review, Voicemail Poetry, Hobart, Tenemos, ONE ART, Redivider, The New York Quarterly, The Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many more. He writes because he finds conversation calls for so much give and take, and he considers himself more of a giver. See tombarlowauthor.com.
Woof, Woof
I’m taking a walk in August. It’s hot.
Did you know the guy who invented the heat index
was eighty-five years old at the time?
He felt like he was ninety, three degrees shy
of what my phone reads when I hear, woof, woof.
To my left, where normally two, sometimes three
small dogs run to their fence to greet me,
I only see a swing-set and two trees. Three blocks later,
woof, woof. A kind of muffled, beagle bark. Sad-like,
as though a dog were left out in this heat. Woof, woof.
By this time, I have walked six blocks. It seems
a dog is on my trail. One night, an owl attacked me.
DeeGee patched the claw marks on my head.
Could I be hearing hoots, not woofs?
Is something spooky going on?
Who knows what is possible?
Usually, I say, Hi, Dad or Hi, Mother
when a cardinal lands on my windowsill.
I wouldn’t put this past Dad. The first time he met DeeGee,
he was wearing giant, plastic ears. Woof, woof:
knee level, to my left again. But this time,
I notice that my phone, in my left hand,
is open to an app I haven’t used in years. One that,
when you swing your arm a certain way, as in walking, say,
goes a muffled woof, woof just loud enough
to drown out a father’s laughter.
*
Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in ONE ART, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Rattle, and other journals and anthologies. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, Happiness, and the book of poems, Carrying On. His fiction has appeared in Eclectica, Cleaver, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and Running Wild Press anthologies. He lives in Evansville, Indiana, with his wife, DeeGee.
When is a dining table not a table?
Around the kitchen table
all the chairs are tucked in,
unused, except for the cat
resting there.
The surface is buried
under this and that:
unopened mail, remnants
of holidays past.
Now mostly a repository
for everything:
a place keeper, a war zone,
a waiting room for mail
or groceries or whatever
might be passing through.
No family gathers here
and hasn’t done for years—
the lingering fear of shared breath,
the cloud of shared trauma.
At this table no one lingers,
each cocooned in our own drama.
*
Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in Minyan, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which served as the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. In addition, she also frequently collaborates with San Diego artist Judith Christensen, most recently on an installation entitled “Mapping Our Future Selves.”
Inside the Singing
The beech tree, she says, is sick
and she feels bad for it. The stresses
of the trees as Hopkins felt
so she feels. The red-eyed vireo
high in the canopy, unseen,
is heard by her, even
as we sit inside the loud
house wrens’ singing. We sit
inside the singing in the wood.
*
Sally Nacker lives in a small house in the woods of Redding, CT with her husband and two cats. Wild birds are her joy. Recent publishing credits include Canary, ONE ART, Third Wednesday, and The Sunlight Press. Kindness in Winter is her newest collection.
Take Five
The tempo changes. Rain in late August.
Wildfire season extinguished.
As my email clutters with democratic emergencies, I play
Brubeck’s Take Five on loop like when I was seventeen
driving through green, green, green. Untarnished by sunlight.
Listen to the drum solo. An enjambment.
Off-kilter. Giddy. Like love.
Yes, let’s say its love.
Such an unstable, impromptu gesture.
The rhythm hesitating—
a syncopation, teetering.
I plant a yard sign, phone bank, donate the small change
of eighth notes. Each beat,
a brightening. Again, the brush over drum,
shuffle, shuffle over cymbal.
I’m vowing to stay alive with the man I love—
as the horn sheds its clothing on the floor.
*
This poem is discussed in Heidi Seaborn’s craft essay Writing to the End: Artistic Choices in Apocalyptic Times published in Cleaver Magazine.
*
Heidi Seaborn is the author of three books of poetry tic tic tic (2025), An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and three chapbooks. She’s won numerous awards including The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. Recent work in Agni, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU and is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal. heidiseabornpoet.com
Worm Wisdom
The cut worm forgives the plow.
—Blake
This morning I refuse to read the news,
allow it dominion over my attention
as I’ve grown accustomed to. Rather,
I’m attending to those rowdy blackbirds
in the elms, making their usual ruckus
over blackbird politics, the mottled
tabby belly up on the paving stones
stoned on the sunlight of a cloudless noon,
the worm inching its way across the lawn
on its long, slow journey to worm wisdom.
See that pile of leaves over near the fence
my wife raked yesterday, her perfect hands
gathering up order out of chaos?
I watched her kneel down to pull up a root
from the soil, pluck out a pesky weed
doing her part to make space in this world
for beauty, bequeath us the gift of herself—
the best of herself, the best of all of us.
*
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.
Deer At the Hosta
The deer never ate the hosta buds
before you died. Now they don’t bloom.
Hostas bloom so late in summer
I’d be impatient for white billows.
No dahlias this year without you either,
and the irises went haywire—
offering so few flowers,
and not the dark purple lit by apricot,
the fuchsia poppies
blooming now alone.
Back to the deer—
how did you keep them at bay?
They eat so precisely, headless shoots
remain on the flourishing plant.
Everything is different
since you’ve gone.
Everything is different
each time I consider it—
I have a thousand and one narratives
of how I could have saved you.
Sometimes you are the villain.
Sometimes I am the monster.
Sometimes we just fumble
together hopelessly in love.
I should dig up the hostas,
or the deer will come each year,
taking more and more each season.
I could leave them as a dream.
Someday the late bright white
perfection will return.
*
Laurel Brett, essayist, novelist, and poet feels the responsibility to do her tiny part to heal the world. She is inspired by awareness and love, and their expressions, and nature. Her novel, The Schrödinger Girl (Akashic Books, 2020) was called a page turner by the New York Times. Her work has appeared before in ONE ART, and in Second Coming, The Ekphrastic Review, Lilith, The Nassau Review among other outlets.
Breakfast in a Hotel in Västerås
There are no Styrofoam cups here, no plastic
spoons. The plates, still warm from washing,
are solid in your hands. There’s so much food
in bowls, warming trays, and platters, you don’t
know what to choose first. From pillowy piles
of rapeseed-yellow scrambled eggs and fruit
that looks fresh-picked from a field or recently
plucked, still glistening with drops of rain—to
assortments of sliced meats and cheeses locally
sourced—you have never seen such an opulent
display of buffet-style breakfast delights. And
your fellow guests look like hikers and cyclists
who have just awakened, flushed and refreshed,
from a solid eight hours of restful sleep. But the
sounds in this gym-sized, though somehow still
intimate room are as good as the sights. There
is the muted hum of conversations—everyone
as polite to one another as a boy raised by his
grandmother. Civilization has reached its zenith
here. And I like the clink of metal spoons hitting
the walls of sturdily constructed coffee cups, the
clatter of shiny silverware unfolding from cloth
napkins as soft and white as trumpeter swans. I
wish everyone could have such a delicious meal
among so many beautiful, benevolent strangers—
people I will never see again who can say good
morning in multiple languages as if they mean it.
*
Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including 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.
One August Afternoon
The birds gather at my birdbath,
bathing and drinking as if it were a pool party.
The chickadees and sparrows
flit and twitch, alight and leave.
That chickadee there, never rests, pecks
at the water, her head moving, always alert.
One wren flutters in, splashes about,
chittering the entire time.
Sit here long enough, and you’ll notice
how the sun filters through the oak leaves,
moves across the yard highlighting:
a blue hydrangea, a pine bough, patch of ferns.
One little sparrow, after some hesitation
sits on the rim, sips, throws her head back.
I see the rippling
of her delicate white throat.
The rippling of her throat
is enough and too much,
in the same way a fiddlehead
resembles a baby’s curled fist,
or when one considers the
tessellation of a honeycomb.
In our neighbor’s yard,
two teenage girls are in the pool again.
I hear them splashing and arguing.
They’ve been bickering all week.
*
Mary Ellen Redmond’s poems have appeared in The Drunken Boat, Free State Review, Comstock Review, Cape Cod Review, Rattle, ONE ART, and The Cortland Review, but the publication she is most proud of is the poem tattooed on her son’s ribcage. A former slam poet, she represented Cape Cod at the National Poetry Slam Competition in Providence, RI. She has been featured twice on WCAI’s Poetry Sundays and her interview with poet Greg Orr was featured in The Drunken Boat. Her poem “Fifty-Six Days” earned a Best of the Net Nomination in 2016 and “Joy is not made to be a crumb” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024. She recently placed second in the 2024 Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest judged by Marge Piercy. The Ocean Effect, her second chapbook, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her third chapbook I Have One Student will be published in June 2026.
A Friend Complained on the Internet about Repetition in Taylor Swift’s Lyrics
how she’s
always singing
about midnight,
but to me
the ubiquitous lyrics
are about dancing
in the kitchen –
though maybe
it’s about us,
sidestepping with knives
and spinning alliums,
avocados, sugar jars,
twisting tops
and saucepans
and gliding
around each other,
structured by touch
and the spaces
between it –
maybe we’re
two rhythms
reaching for each other
like the hands
of a clock
striking midnight.
*
We Were Girls Together
for H.S.B.
We were indelible magnets,
poles turning over & over to pull
& repel moments or weeks at a time.
That last campus spring we drank
a mix & match 6 pack of beer on the roof,
giggling rebels about to graduate
from the small town, small school lore
of our own importance. Our days together
spread like our picnic blankets, pale
thighs & pages sunning. Girls then
& now, girls still, proclaimers
of fierce affection unworn by adulthood
or routines. Each of us moth & flame,
soft, dusty wings with a hunger
to rend. Flung North & South,
we constellate the petty needs that drove us
apart with the gentle knowing
that drives us back.
*
Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a PhD student living in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her partner and their crusty white dog. She serves as a Poetry Co-Editor for Grist: A Journal of Literary Arts. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Connecticut River Review, SWWIM, and other publications; her debut chapbook, The Bones That Map Us, was published by Belle Point Press in February 2024. She likes to share baked goods with friends and can be found on Instagram as @maggierue_.
Masked
Going outdoors for the first time after surgery,
I don’t marvel at the pretty neighborhood
nor the flanking snow nor nature at her starkest,
but at the restorative power of fresh air
combined with walking.
No one sees a woman recovering from surgery,
only a walker ambling with her husband by her side
to catch her if she falls.
He has been gallantly saving her
from her mistakes ever since they married.
No one reads her thoughts
that the birthday she reached
could have been her last or penultimate one.
A surrealistic feeling,
though she intuited she’d be diagnosed
with breast cancer one day,
especially in the terrain of her sixties.
The snowscape feels unreal like it does
when it blankets the area every year.
We walk without masks, our faces masks.
No one knows the worries others carry,
but everyone loves to say, Hi, how are you?
A kindness passed from stranger to stranger.
*
Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is a two-time finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award. Her latest poems are forthcoming or have appeared in ““Blue Heron Review,” “Grey Sparrow Journal,” “AMPLIFY” (anthology published by Sheila-Na-Gig), “ArLiJo,” and “The Queens Review.”
ONE ART’s September 2025 Reading
We’re pleased to announce ONE ART’s September 2025 Reading!
Date: Sunday, September 7
Time: 2:00pm Eastern
Featured Poets: James Crews, Gloria Heffernan, William Palmer, Michael T. Young, Andrea Potos
>>> Tickets Available <<<
Free!
(Donations appreciated.)
The official event is expected to run approximately 1-hour.
After the reading, please consider sticking around for approximately 30-minutes of Community Time discussion with our Featured Poets.
*
~ About Our Featured Poets ~
James Crews is the author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Courage & Self-Compassion, and editor of several bestselling poetry anthologies, including Love Is for All of Us, a collection of LGBTQ+ love poems. He is also the author of four poetry collections and lives in Southern Vermont with his husband. For more info: www.jamescrews.net
*
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.
*
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.
Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, Mid-Atlantic Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Vox Populi.
*
Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem. You can find her at andreapotos.com
*
Hypochondriac
You rarely feel the symptoms
of an inside-out shirt.
Maybe a stray itch sprouts at your nape
as you back out of the driveway.
A tug under your arm
when you reach for the top shelf.
But you carry on just fine.
You won’t feel it coming, that swift sting
of awareness: tag wagging like a tongue,
caught by a mirror or a mouthy colleague.
A collar of flush spreads across your neck
at having felt clear as water, looking like mud.
Frantic fingers check —
jacket arms, pant seams,
sock cuffs, pant seams again —
long after the mirror reassures you.
But you know better
than to trust glass.
You dress.
Redress.
Undress.
Stand in the clouded bathroom,
steam beading your neck,
trying to tell yourself
that you’re zipped up right.
But it’s too late.
You already know,
clothed or not,
you may never believe
your body again.
*
Flight Path
Weeks after my mother says not to tell anyone
about the colitis,
I sit in seat 29B,
five hours and thirty-five minutes
from the fog necklace around San Francisco.
Beside me, a boy my age.
As the horizon tilts, we open each other’s lives
like pumpkins: lids sliced clean,
then suddenly, elbows plunged into pulp and string.
What strange costumes we wear,
ones that mask only our peels
but lay bare our guts. My gut.
An hour in, we’ve scooped
its ulcered flesh clean,
onto the tray table between us. We devour it.
When the eating uncorks me,
I say bathroom.
I watch how swiftly
those knees swing aside,
faster than my mother’s ever have.
*
Preeti Talwai writes from California, where she’s also a research leader in human-centered technology. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, 100-Word Story, Diode Poetry, HAD, and Typehouse Magazine, among others. She is the author of a chapbook, Chronic (Bottlecap Press). Find her at preetitalwai.com
Leaving Home
This is how our family works.
We girls have moved out.
We are in our 20s, 30s –
we are living in Brooklyn, India,
dark basement apartments, bamboo huts.
We are still young.
We have left boxes and photographs
in our closet at home. They are on
high shelves, the boxes talk to each
other and pay no rent. A good life.
Then our parents decide
it is enough. They want their space back.
First they ask politely, Can you come get your
boxes? No response. Later they get tough.
Take your stuff. But the stuff is insurmountable.
It must be “gone through.” Young people
do not have time for this delicate
sorting of their own layers.
The pleading stops.
Our parents do the only thing left to do.
They remove the closet.
Poof, no more high shelves. Just a wall.
We come home and the space is rearranged
like a face on mushrooms.
There, they say, pointing to the hallway.
There are your boxes.
*
Tula Francesca (she/her) is a writer, artist, editor, and zine maker in Petaluma, California. Her work has appeared in Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, Crab Creek Review, FENCE, Feral, FLARE, Fron/tera, The Inflectionist Review, RHINO, and other places. She is the author of chapbook If There Are Horns, and microchap This Was Like I Said All Gone. Francesca is a left-handed, bipolar, animist creator. web: francescapreston.com instagram: @francescalouisepreston
Allison Blevins – Earlier, Jane Kenyon
Kai Coggin – I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW
Abby E. Murray – I Can’t Find My Gender
Alison Luterman – To a Mother I Know
Joseph Fasano – To the Insurance Executive Who Denied My Heart Procedure
Dana Henry Martin – Window Strike at Highlands Behavioral Health
After the Firestorm
Longing, we say, because desire
is full of endless distances.
—Robert Hass
She was away when the flames blossomed
across the hillsides, the inferno fueled
by the eucalyptus and the easterly winds.
But I did not kneel in gratitude on the barren slope
where my mother’s house had been.
I knelt to sift through the soot and ash,
the heaps of debris.
The image of what I was seeking
so clear behind my eyelids:
the blood-red stone
set in its bezel of gold, a rosebud
on a twining vine—
the ring I’d begged for since I was a child
passed down from my great-aunt Bea
who had smuggled it out of Russia.
How long had I imagined
my mother was only waiting
for the right moment
to hand me the box,
to watch as I sprung open the lid?
Yet now, as of their own volition
my fingers stopped raking the dust.
Better to take the blackened spoon,
the half-melted knife.
Tarnished, ruined, my mother’s table utensils
unsuited to the task of lifting food
to the lips, reminders
that what was served up as love
failed to feed any part of my heart’s deep appetite.
The sun inched closer to the horizon
while I studied the sparrows that were circling
and reversing overhead. I was determined to know
why they wove intricate patterns in the air,
the shadow-glyphs thrown
down around me. Was their manic flight
brought on by the vanished trees
and nests, or by what autumn itself foretells?
After the last bird swerved and disappeared
into the dusk, the sky was strangely still.
I stayed on unmoved by the absence
of ceiling and walls, scanning
the charred dirt
for signs of what might be stirring
under the surface: the green shoots of a seedling,
a beetle’s six diminutive legs, each bending
at the knee.
*
Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her new chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published by The Poetry Box (July 2025). https://lauraannreed.net/
Maintaining World Order
Jesse’s clear about yesses
and nos, picking what to do,
where to go, hardly any
hesitation involved when given
choices, and though he doesn’t
know what always or never means,
I can tell what not to bring up
ever again. He prefers patterns,
routine. Comfortable with schedules,
he looks forward to, cozies up
to calendars made a month
in advance, the boxes filled
with names of staff members,
time slots and activities fitting
neatly into place. Frequently
when walking, he repeats names,
days, months, years, seeking
reassurance that his world
will remain in proper order
from whoever’s working
with him at any given moment.
Maybe, let’s play it by ear,
we’ll see when we get there
brings minor, major disturbances.
Tony Friday October 11, 2024,
two nights, go home Sunday
October 13 10 AM. That’s me,
his mom’s once upon a time,
long ago boyfriend who’s known
him since he was 5 years old,
combination step-father, older
brother, death till we part friend.
Sometimes he’ll find a smooth
groove, verbally map out monthly
visits through the year 2027,
each date out of his mouth
landing savant-like on a Friday
for my typical weekend visit.
If I show up, walk in the door
a half hour early, he’ll look
away without a greeting, go
back to finishing next week’s
shopping list with Sawyer
while I drop my knapsack
on the floor, hit the bathroom.
He helps put everything
where It belongs, follows
Sawyer out to the porch,
asks when he’ll be back-
Monday October 14-until
the car door shuts, the motor
starts. Then, I’ll open my arms
for a less than ten second
hug, sit across the table, talk
about today’s schedule, write
it down starting with City
Bus to Bruegger’s Bagels,
ending with evening routine
7:30 PM. He then recites
my November return date,
waits to hear yes for sure.
On the walk to the bus stop,
he brings up Nick, a long time
worker who recently moved
out of state. He wants Nick
to take him to Jay’s Peak,
his favorite water park,
Thursday October 23, 2024.
Not Sawyer. He wants me
to tell him Nick’s name
will be back on November’s
calendar. I try to think of a way
to explain that he may never
see Nick again without upsetting
him too long when the bus
comes into view and we both
break into a trot. I hand Jesse
his pass, thank the driver
for waiting. He finds a seat,
stares out the window, hums
like a well-tuned engine.
If my name stopped appearing
on his calendar, I wonder
how long before he’d forget
about me? Jesse’s unable
to understand abstractions,
express feelings, and I’m left
to guess about things like that.
He always asks about mom’s
car, when will it be back
in the driveway, concern
crinkling his brow, panic
making its way down
his face if it’s gone too long.
I know she thinks about him
incessantly and at 62 years old
she worries what will happen
when she dies. Financially.
he’ll be sound, the house
in his name, but who will
take care of him, love him
like she does, will he
learn to move through
his world without her?
*
Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of NYC who managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 40 years. His poems have appeared in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Raleigh Review, BODY, Chiron Review. His most recent collection, What Kind Of Man with NYQ Books, was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and Here on Earth is forthcoming on NYQ Books.
Rebirth
It wasn’t an immediate awakening
after I had my first child, but a gradual
dawning, the way the night’s black sky lightens
to silver before hints of the sun appear
above the horizon, sooner than the streaks of gold
rising. There was the morning I woke
to a silent house, an empty crib. The gone baby,
removed by my husband for one night
not enough to pull me out of the chaos
of blackout drinking. The void of not knowing
what I had said, what I had done, how
the house could have burned down
with my son in it. The light entered
with my child’s return, and I added one
sober day to another, until I could remember
the sunrise and my need to see it.
*
Ellen Austin-Li’s debut poetry collection, Incidental Pollen—a 2023 Trio Award finalist and 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series semi-finalist—is the runner-up to the 2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize from Madville Publishing. Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks Firefly and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic. Ellen is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee whose work appears in many places, including SWIMM, Salamander, The Maine Review, Lily Poetry Review, and ONE ART. Ellen holds an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice program. She lives in Cincinnati, OH, where she hosts Poetry Night at Sitwell’s. More info @ https://ellenaustinli.me/
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For the Friend Who Died Before We Could Reconcile
for Shara
I step slowly, taking rising water
inch by inch against my reluctant body.
It was always this way: you the river,
and the silt, and the weeds tangling
my ankles, me the supplicant, a sacrifice
of gooseflesh and good sense moving
through the murk toward drowning.
No matter how I entered the river,
I would have always gotten drenched.
If you were here, I would have still
stumbled my way through a field
of terrible lovers with your laugh
steering me past the worst of the regrets.
You might have turned me away from
the used car parts manager in Hixson,
sold me instead the false promise
of that beautiful blue-eyed Chattanooga
boy with no sense of self-preservation
and hands one firework shy of a full fist.
These waters are deep and still. I cannot
swim here where there are no waves,
this stagnant water tastes like copse
and corpse and waterlogged leaves and
the cigarette butts we threw behind us
back in 1998. I dive, and the deeper I go,
the better I can see who we nearly were:
Thursday nights, merlot-soaked, howling
on a Louisville balcony, making love
to our many ghosts, resurrecting old loves
only to drown them again, and again, laughing.
*
Colleen S. Harris holds an MFA from Spalding University and works as a university library dean. Author of four books and three chapbooks, her most recent collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025), and These Terrible Sacraments (Doubleback, 2019; Bellowing Ark, 2010). Follow her writing via Bluesky (@warmaiden) and at https://colleensharris.com
It’s an automatic response
to dance in the shadows,
to perform for myself,
to say—to think—I’m straight,
tongue tripping on the word
like rubbing two storm clouds together
in search of a rainbow.
It’s an automatic response to be the norm
and hold otherness at arm’s length.
I am the echo in the glass: almost there
and not quite queer enough.
*
Kit Willett is a bisexual poet, English teacher, and executive editor of the Aotearoa poetry journal Tarot. His debut poetry collection, Dying of the Light, was published by Wipf and Stock imprint Resource Publications in 2022.
Learner’s Permit
When I was learning to drive,
Dad and I shared the cabin
of a cream-colored pickup
with an NRA sticker on the rear windshield
and a lightly used mattress
tied down in the flatbed
winding along the Columbia River
to my runaway brother,
who slept in a bag
on Portland linoleum.
Dad’s turn at the wheel
left my eyes to the Gorge,
my ears to the charismatic
preacher on yet another tape.
He spoke of pleasure,
how the climaxing brain
exudes a mental superglue
that fuses beholder to beheld.
“Which explains why semen
and cement sound so similar,”
he reasoned. “If you come
to porn, you’ll fall in love with porn.
If you come looking at a man,
you’ll fall in love with men.”
I stared at the glittering water,
its billion impurities invisible,
and figured Dad knew
my fusions, how desire
forged a path forward, forward,
every day widening,
wearing away. He’d chosen
this voice for me. My body
created an image of the speaker:
creased khakis, wedding ring,
lavalier clipped to white oxford
barely buttoned over his chest.
I wanted this image
to take off its shiny brown belt
and use it as my leash.
I wanted this image
to fall in love with me.
*
James Davis is the author of the poetry collection Club Q, which Edward Hirsch selected for the Anthony Hecht Prize. His writing has been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio and anthologized in Best New Poets 2011 (selected by D. A. Powell) and 2019 (selected by Cate Marvin). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, The Gettysburg Review, Barrelhouse, Salamander, and Gulf Coast. He teaches English at the University of North Texas.
ON FORGIVENESS
I’ve long been told
its chief benefit is a gift
to oneself most of all.
Suspicious of ease,
stingy as I am to give it,
forgive me when I say:
the clutching of my tight heart
has been talisman
warding off the hurt to come.
*
Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem. You can find her at andreapotos.com
Coffee Frother
My upper lip is hugged by sea foam,
frothed by fluff-capped coffee sipped from today’s cup
and I think of Christopher who recently gifted
me this magic Nespresso machine that whips
2% milk into ocean waves of cream
that my tongue licks. A new ritual, this lace
moustaching the beach of my face.
This morning he will arrive to drive
me to another doctor appointment, be by my side.
Tall, calm prompt man, who holds my hand,
kisses my lips, says, “It’ll be alright.”
I click my tongue, then sigh. A new ritual,
to be held by one as reliable as the tide.
Breathe. Let go of fear, lean in.
You’re not alone. Smile at clouds
of foam. Love. New daily rituals.
*
The gut is an aquarium of odd sea creatures
Gauze walls hang between
ER cubicles. Surprise!
You have won a weekend
dancing with machines;
tethered by cords, beeps, drips;
twirls to the toilet.
Orange Jell-O, orange Jell-O,
orange Jell-O, Ginger Ale,
salty brown veg broth.
Blood pressure cuffs
poof and deflate. Needled
clear tube sunk in vein,
duct taped. Wheelchair,
gurney. Short tempered
nurses, some saints.
Big storm blows in.
Christopher leaves you his sweater,
runs to find car in wind.
*
Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ who needs to write to stay sane. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Rattle, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. She teaches Wild Writing inspired classes on writers.com and 27powers.org and is the author of four poetry collections. Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet
On the continent of mothering
At twenty-five, I stood in my kitchen
my body still being healed by turmeric-ginger
prescribed by my mother-in-law, continents afar—
boiling milk bottles and nursing guilt over bottled baby food—
listening to my daughter wail in her crib—too proud
to summon her father only a phone call away
even as I felt the great tug of worry that only
a mother can feel.
My daughter is that age now—
an entire length of continent away
on the other coast.
Sometimes, at dead of night, as her father sleeps
I awaken from dreams propelled by
some piece of news I’ve heard earlier
in the day—hearsay or authentic—
and let me tell you this—
I am alone again, in my mother-worry—
always alone on the continent of mothering.
*
Ritual
When it comes to silk sarees, elders advise
against draping them on hangers
or else gravity will pull at the zari
ruining the very ground, the field
that holds everything.
I fold them into neat squares and lay them
on top of each other on almirah shelves—
each stack a stratified rock—each layer
telling its own story. this one the day before
the wedding, this on the first trip back
to my parents’, and this, bought on a whim.
the gray and gold acquired when my taste
shifted to muted tones. and this one I’ve
yet to wear—see the zari darkened from age?
pull this one out, be gentle.
notice the brittle fabric, the deep onion color
that was popular once. how it bears
the strong naphthalene scent of my
mother’s iron chest—unfold with care
or else it might tear along the folds.
twice a year I air them out, refold them
so that the crease lines may breathe.
no crease is ever smoothed away and
old creases get in the way of new ones
like stubborn habits. and sometimes
the silk is willful and refuses to yield.
I fold and refold, coddle and corral. I wonder
how long before any ritual will prove futile.
*
The kitchen, your temple
Vivid, your kitchen, down to the way dust motes swirled
in the ray of slanted afternoon light. The lit triangle of the tablecloth.
The sweetmeat that arrived out of nowhere, which is to say
you made them without fuss. You never urged us to enjoy them
yet your silent yearning took on the curvature of the perfect
mowa and the pristine white of the coconut nadu. In midlife
I find recipes inscribed into your husband’s book of scriptures.
A scrupulous man, not devout, but who thrived on routine.
How he had taken to writing everything in that book towards
the end of his life. Names of five ancestors that preceded him –
all men. Addresses of sons and the one grandson who
became a doctor. Then ingredients started popping in between
odes to the divine. Poppyseeds and bitter melon—
banana blossom and the oddball spice. In your girlish hand
that was never invited to hold a pen. The learned man and his
unschooled wife. Empty vessel he called you once—
the woman who bore him seven children.
*
Sayantani Roy works out of the Seattle area. Her work appears or is forthcoming in several journals, including Alan Squire Publishing, Emerge Literary Journal, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather, Grist, Ruby, TIMBER, West Trestle Review, and Wordgathering. She was a 2024 AWP fiction mentee and was placed as a semifinalist in the 2025 Adroit Journal Anthony Veasna So Scholars in Fiction. She reads poetry for Chestnut Review and Palette Poetry.
Room at the Inn
“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.”
— from a speech given by Teddy Roosevelt in 1915 *
My great grandfather was a coal miner
in the Pennsylvania mountains. When
the miners went on strike, they didn’t eat.
The Red Cross brought my great grandmother
rice and butter which she buried in the yard.
If they’d brought her flour and olive oil
she could have cooked a feast. At Ellis Island
Zaccagnini become Zack. At the grammar school
Damasiewicz became Demser. At the Ford
Motor Company Poles and Slovaks were told
to abandon their traditional clothing in a giant pot.
They came out reborn, dressed in suits
and carrying American flags. Today a woman
in a worn head scarf stands at the stoplight,
her daughter in a stroller beside her. Another
daughter hides her face from the too fast traffic.
Between her halting English and my broken Spanish
we say hello. As I hand her the cash in my wallet
I picture the women who brought my grandparents rice.
Whatever kindness was given to them, I pray,
shower it on this family. Let them know
there is welcome in this land.
* The quote from Teddy Roosevelt and the story of the melting pot at the Ford plant come from David Dean’s essay, Roots Deeper than Whiteness. Thank you, David.
*
Growing Sweet Potatoes
It was the first time we’d planted sweet potatoes –
slips of flesh with eyes and fingers, tiny beings
of promise. We planted and prayed for just enough
sun, just enough wet, just enough microbe to sprout
our seeds into harvest. It rained and then it stopped.
It stopped for one hundred days and the sun baked
the earth brown. It stayed hot and became hotter.
The plants wilted and I dreamt they cried for rain.
We decided: what do we let die? What do we save?
If the potatoes die we can buy them at the store.
But I wanted the potatoes to thrive – to create
something useful and good, something as sturdy
as a potato. So I prayed for rain. I sang to the vines.
And months later, when it rained, I stood in my yard
and let the water pour down my face – planted
like the potato, watered like the vine, open in my thirst.
Today we dug into the warm earth searching
for pink orbs. We found five perfect potatoes
and dozens of silvery roots no thicker than a pencil.
I can’t bear to throw any of them away. Six months
of toil and six months of hope that I can’t let go to waste.
Who am I to say the harvest is a failure? That more
should have grown in dusty soil? Who am I to say
that I, sweet potato vine, rain and soil, humus
and hot sun, should be any more than I am now?
*
Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, teacher, poet, presenter, and mental health facilitator who helps people nurture a more compassionate relationship with their struggles. She’s the founder of Growing Humankindness, a gentle approach towards overeating, writes a reader supported poetry newsletter, O Nobly Born, and offers writing and mindfulness workshops to nurture self awareness and self compassion. She lives in Austin, Texas where she’s cared for the underbelly of long covid and autoimmune illness for the past five years. Her journeys through depression and illness continue to soften, teach and open her. In all she remains in awe of the human heart.
SPECIAL MISSION 16, SECONDARY TARGET NAGASAKI, AUGUST 9, 1945
Imagine men in suits and uniforms inspecting planes.
No visit to the city bombed—
too much devastation. They hear reports.
The next bomb supposed to be the 11th but weathermen predict rain.
They plan the site of Kokura but waste time waiting to rendezvous
with the plane Big Stink set to photograph the operation & clouds
roll in. Bockscar will make the drop. Early reports are wrong
and say The Great Artiste carries the plutonium almost absent
in nature. The Bockscar auxiliary fuel tank pump on inspection
fails, but no one wants to waste the payload in the ocean
close to Okinawa. The brass who knows of buildings
marked by a soot silhouette, the entire residue
of one of us, aim now for Nagasaki,
the city we don’t speak of the way we do
Hiroshima. Hannah Arendt calls decision makers
banal. They don’t look like lizards,
but disassociation blinds, deafens
& insulates from atoms of love—
undercover agents sitting next to us,
watching the latest Mission Impossible.
*
Laurel Brett, essayist, novelist, and poet feels the responsibility to do her tiny part to heal the world. She is inspired by awareness and love, and their expressions, and nature. Her novel, The Schrödinger Girl (Akashic Books, 2020) was called a page turner by the New York Times. Her work has appeared before in ONE ART, and in Second Coming, The Ekphrastic Review, Lilith, The Nassau Review among other outlets.
Untethered
In the first one I am four, a summer visit
to Cicero Grandma from Iowa City. Our car falls
from the bridge with force that peels
my sticky thighs from the vinyl, my brother
and I flung upwards in the roomy blue womb
of the LeSabre’s back seat. Our baby brother,
clamped in Mom’s arms but she, too, lurches
above her perch. Dad’s hands latch the wheel
like anchors, all of our mouths tunnel-dark
O’s, our displacement in space gauged
in our stomachs. It halts before we hit
the water below. Next time, the river is frozen,
the dream updated for the season. But always
the fall, the sudden-squeezed and squirting stomach
mark its finale. Later I drive, so fright
and guilt fight in that knot, heat or freeze it
with what I did wrong—sped too fast up a hill
whose crest morphs to the I-80 bridge over
the Mississippi, drove with abandon the damp road
linking mother to daughter, moved too swiftly
from one sturdy bank to appreciate the surface
grip on the treads. My fault now for the floating
family hurled from the rounded earth.
*
Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College, Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her most recent publications are in Months to Years, The New Verse News, Panoply, The Dunes Review, and The Midwest Quarterly.
Once, on the Oncology Floor
A teenager asked
if he’d ever drive again.
No one knew what to say.
So I showed him
how to press the nurse call button
like it was an ignition switch.
He laughed,
and for a minute,
the hallway turned
into an open road.
That night
I dreamed of him
parallel parking
between stars.
I woke with the memory
of his hand
gripping the rail
as if it were
a steering wheel.
*
In the Absence of Fever
When you said
she was stable,
I nodded.
But my hands
stayed clenched
as if the storm
was only
paused.
We celebrated
with applesauce
and the hum
of an IV pump.
I told her
she looked strong
when what I meant was
please stay.
I never asked
how long she had
before the numbers slipped again.
There are days
when stability
is the most fragile thing
in the room.
*
Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, as well as a mother of three. Her work appears in redrosethorns, Red Eft Review, and Medmic, with additional pieces forthcoming. Find her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com or on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.
Paper Lanterns
Imagine
over one hundred thousand
paper lanterns
inscribed
with names
of the dead
floating down
the Ohita River
towards the ocean
quiet
and lit
edges
flaking
into ash
imagine
your name
on one of them
after Hiroshima
imagine
silence
burning
*
Martin Willitts Jr, a retired Librarian that trained Librarians for New York State Public Libraries. He lives in Syracuse, New York. He is an editor for Comstock Review, and he is the judge for the New York State Fair Poetry Competition. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the National Ecological Award winner for “Searching for What You Cannot See” (Hiraeth Press, 2013) and the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr: Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024).
A morning with my dead father
The morning air is all awash with angels
— Richard Wilbur
This is the morning I’ll spend with you. I’ll have the conversation I’ve been putting off, the way a child sheds the coat her mother insists she wear despite the April sun, warm like the nape of a newborn’s neck. This is the morning I’ll say what it was like to live inside a widow’s weeds, how it tangled my breath, stole my words. This is the morning I’ll think of what’s possible and make space for you to enter. When I hear the leaves rustle I’ll believe you’re listening. I’ll rest on a rock near the lake and throw pebbles in the water and consider each ripple as thoughts that bounce between us. This is the morning I’ll reimagine you as the young man in the snapshot I found—you leaning against a 1938 Dodge sedan, fedora tipped to the side, smiling, with a hint of a swagger, confident that the ground beneath you would hold. I’ll talk like I remember you cradling my baby body, how you called her song of my heart in the love letters you wrote from Kentucky. Who were you then? This is the morning I want to know.
*
Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Eclectica, The MacGuffin, SWWIM, Action Spectacle, The Westchester Review, and ONE ART. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online here. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University in Ohio. For nearly a decade she was a docent at the Zekleman Holocaust Center near Detroit. More work and information at lindaladerman.com.
Murderers
“Meditate che questo è stato.”
—Primo Levi
Let’s make a deal: for every time you ask me
how ‘my people’ could do such a thing—
bomb an apartment building, starve innocent
children, shoot journalists—I get to ask
how ‘your people’ were able to herd ‘my people’
for centuries into ghettos, cattle cars,
ovens. We can make it a game of poker
between God and the Devil, only
they’re wearing disguises so no one knows
who’s who, as if it made any difference
anyway, God or Devil, Israeli or Palestinian,
gentile or Jew. We’ll play this psychotic hand
with a stacked deck for the rest of our lives
and then our children’s lives, our children’s children’s,
tweaking the muscles in our poker faces
until the flesh tightens into a mask
and tongues become poisonous little vipers
concealed behind our teeth, stretched
to the thin shield of a smile, perfectly white
and malicious.
*
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.
This poem was written in response to the following news story.
HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE
“Urban-design strategy,”
the article reads, after
looking up why my city,
in the palm of the desert,
would install metal benches.
My friend walking beside me
as we sweat in summer heat
says, it is designed for pain.
*
Dylan Webster lives and writes in the sweltering heat of Phoenix, AZ. He is the author of the poetry collection Dislocated (Quillkeepers Press, 2022), and his poetry and fiction have appeared, and are forthcoming in journals such as Pennine Platform, Amethyst Review, The Cannons Mouth by Cannon Poets Quarterly, Ballast Journal, Hush: A Journal of Noise, Wild Roof Journal, Rise Phoenix College Journal, Ghost City Review, Resurrection Mag, 5enses Magazine, Last Leaves, and The Chamber Magazine. He has also been included anthologies by Quillkeepers Press, Neon Sunrise Publishing, and The Words Faire. He can be found @phoenicianpoet
THE RAIN
The rain gave what we asked of it.
It was generous, too generous.
It gave more than we asked of it.
Today it is enough. Today we ask it
to stop. Today we ask it to go away,
to bestow its blessing where it is
really needed, to a field parched,
to a lake too low, to a river crawling
on its knees, to a streambed with
the ghost of water, to a reservoir
starving for attention. The rain gave
generously. It poured its heart out
to us. It is we who have the greener
pastures, who have the greener grass,
who are embarrassed to be so envied.
*
A VERY BELATED LETTER TO ROBERT BLY
The first poet I wrote a letter
to was Robert Graves. He
didn’t answer. That was 45 years
ago. It might still be in the Dead
Letter Office on Majorca.
The second was to A.R. Ammons.
I told him about my letter to Graves.
He answered. He congratulated me
on improving my taste. He sent
me an unpublished poem called
“Zero and Then Some.” The third
letter is this one to you, Robert Bly.
Please don’t tell me you’re dead
and have been since 2021.
I won’t hear it. I know you’ll receive
this. You already have. I know
you’ll answer. You already have.
*
THE BUDDHA ON MY WINDOWSILL
has a big belly, a big cloth sack
on a stick over his shoulder,
a full bowl of rice in his hand,
and a big laugh on his face.
I, too, was fooled at first, but
later I found out that Budai’s
belly was full of laughter and his
cloth sack was full of laughter
and his begging bowl was full
of laughter and that his laughter
was his way of teaching fullness,
so I laughed and was with fullness full.
*
IN THE BEAUTY PARLOR
The woman in the beauty parlor
was talking about the people
she knows who just died, all
women. “Don’t you know any
men who died?” asked the hair
stylist. “You mean the husbands?
They all died years ago,” the woman
said. “That’s right, I remember you
told me,” said the hair stylist. “Yes,
God’s in His Heaven and all’s right
with the world,” said the woman.
*
Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
Broken Chain
As we walk these old roads, we won’t look toward the elephant
walking between us. We speak of the puppies
your dog is expecting, of our children,
our backaches, our husbands—yours,
in a wheelchair, mine, finally home
from the hospital. The elephant
has fever, a dry cough we pretend
not to hear, a rash that spreads
to those who come near. Only one of us
dreads the air we all share.
We go back forty years.
Isn’t it strange, we say, that we are somehow, already,
here—soft jaw lines, wrinkles, memories
older than the grown-up girls we thought we were
when we spent babysitting money on Levi’s
and pizza. We rode our bikes everywhere, no helmets
required, the wind whispering our hair.
Remember peddling through the woods
all day, those mossy trails, the boulders
we stopped to climb, bigger than elephants? Remember
that slope straight down to the lake—the jutting root,
me whipped over the handlebars, my breath
knocked out?
You dabbed blood from my nose,
then pushed your good bike beside me
and my broken one, three hours
to get home. Remember how close
the air felt, both of us dripping
with August sweat. How you didn’t leave
me behind, and I didn’t worry you might.
How we laughed as we walked, the whole world
on our tongues.
*
Jennifer L Freed’s collection When Light Shifts, exploring themes of identity, health, and care-giving, was a finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize and, in the 2025 Eric Hoffer Awards, was a finalist for the Medal Provocateur, was short-listed for the Grand Prize, and earned second place in the Legacy Non-fiction category. Recent poetry appears in Atlanta Review, ONE ART, Rust and Moth, Sheila-Na-Gig, Vox Populi, and the anthology, What The House Knows. Please visit Jfreed.weebly.com
~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of July 2025 ~
two haiku
*
playing me
by heart
birdsong
*
empty swing
still swaying
wildflowers
*
Joshua Eric Williams’s work usually focuses on the intersection of the human, the wild, and the spiritual. His poetry can be found in many online and print journals, including Rattle, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Literary Matters. His website is thesmallestwords.com, and he can be found on X, @Hungerfield.
Lovestruck
All the arrows go
through me—sharp and gold.
Joy enters
(blind, uninvited violation)
as pure presence
from an innate place within.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has won two separate Georgia Author of the Year awards for her poetry. Her latest volume of poetry is a children’s book. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.
