Month: October 2025

A Few Days After the Election I Woke Up in a Hamburg Jail Cell by Justin Karcher

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A Few Days After the Election I Woke Up in a Hamburg Jail Cell

my head throbbing as an officer handed me
a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich
like I was taking communion. He couldn’t
believe I got as far as I did on two tires.

Maybe I was trying to escape the light
because where I’m from, it can eat you alive.
A pincushion sun shining with the blood of birds.
When I black out, some friends call me
Ghost Justin. I’m just grateful nobody got hurt.

I went back to Buffalo in an Uber and as we drove
over the river, my dad’s last words to me echoed
in my head. “You’re a better man than I am.”
Suddenly I smelled lilacs and thought about
my mom who plants her garden in the gritty earth.

That night at my first A.A. meeting, nothing smelled
like flowers but people still dug up their roots
and talked about their pain. I learned that it takes
a community for any exorcism to work.

*

Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher, Bluesky: @justinkarcher.bsky.social) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright from Buffalo, NY. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). Recent playwriting credits include The Birth of Santa (American Repertory Theater of WNY) and “The Buffalo Bills Need Our Help” (Alleyway Theatre). https://www.justinkarcherauthor.com

I had a sister once. by Robbi Nester

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I had a sister once.

But she was born dead. Her eyes stayed shut.
Ten tiny moons set on her fingernails.
I didn’t ask my mother how it happened, just
imagined a wax-pale doll who never answered
to her name. All my life, I took the full weight
of my father’s rage. It blew up like a sudden storm.
For years this sister spoke to me, saying Everything
you have is mine, perched on the edge of my bed,
no longer larval, a grown ghost child. Her fingernails
were long and sharp. She would pinch my arm
until it bled.

*

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.

ONE ART’s 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

tc Wiggins – Like Lightning  

Moudi Sbeity – All Things Bloom  

James Diaz – I will not go to Darkness having known Nothing of the Light

Naila Francis – For my friend weeping at the coffee shop  

James Feichthaler – So Much Baggage  

Gary Fincke – The Far North

*

The annual Best Spiritual Literature awards are hosted by Orison Books.

“Orison Books publishes Best Spiritual Literature (formerly The Orison Anthology) every year, a collection of the best spiritual writing in all genres published in periodicals in the preceding year. […] Editors of literary periodicals (print or digital) may nominate work in a single genre or in multiple genres to be considered for inclusion in our annual anthology, Best Spiritual Literature, which will reprint the finest spiritually engaged writing from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.”

At the Crosswalk by Patrick Vala-Haynes

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At the Crosswalk

The cigarette butt
Smoldering
Like an uncut jewel

A mother shielding her son
From the spectacle
Of a man who stoops

The ember lighting his face
As he takes the boy’s hand
And waits for the threat to pass

*

Patrick Vala-Haynes lives within shouting distance of the Oregon Coast Range. His writing has appeared in Dulcet Literary Magazine, Sand, Split Rock Review, Sheepshead Review, Slate and elsewhere.

Two Poems by Heather Kays

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Rustmouth
Inspired by Jan Beatty

They said I grew wrong—
roots curling back into the dirt
like veins that refused to climb.
I say I grew sharp:
tongue rusted to a razor’s edge,
lungs lit with gasoline.

Your family dinners smell of linen
and garlic bread. Mine reeked of
ashtrays, vodka breath, the cracked leather
of a Buick backseat.

I learned love from the slam of a screen door,
from the bruised hush after fists
found a wall instead of me.

I don’t care about your inheritance—
my legacy is blood under the nails,
a cigarette still burning in the sink,
a voice that curdles milk in the glass.

Think of me when the lights cut out—
I’m the hum in the wires,
the shiver in the lock,
the taste of copper when
you bite down too hard.

You, with your polished prayers.
Me, with my rustmouth.
I was forged in scrapyards,
and I’ll drag you there with me,
if you ever try to call it love.

*

Ordinary Hours
For Beau

It isn’t roses or fireworks.
It’s the way your hand
finds mine on the console,
two lifelines pressed together
while traffic lights hum red.

It’s shaky legs in a cold waiting room,
where your smile softens
the antiseptic walls,
turns the ticking clock into something
almost kind.

It’s you across a chipped diner table,
plastic cutlery scattered like stars between us,
your thumb brushing the rim of your glass
as if it were a secret only I could hear.

It’s the sidewalks we claim,
step by step,
your shadow always folding into mine
like it knows where it belongs.

Love, for me, is this—
not grand gestures, not borrowed, not staged—
but the small and stubborn ways
the world feels less brutal
when you are beside me.

*

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author who has been passionate about writing since age seven. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, explores healing through unsent letters. She is currently seeking a literary agent and publisher for Pieces of Us, along with six chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections.

She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group and creative community, and is drawn to stories that explore survival, identity, and the complexity of being human.

Her work has recently appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Wild Thing by Alma Peek

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Wild Thing
I am in an interview, in a conference room, stuck in French
When the only sentence I know by heart is Est-ce que c’est
Possible de caresser votre chien? That is a wild thing
That happened and I am recalling this absurdity to you
When you say, I notice the sun is in your eye so let’s move.
You’ve said the similar generous thing before about hamsters
And their wheels and how it’s hard to get them to stop moving.
Outside it’s a setting sun and the air is insect-noisy and
When you tell me about your father growing wild blueberries,
I know I love him and it is really something to love a man’s father.
Did you know? We’ll all be eating live insects again
Just like early modern humans in ten years’ time.
We walk, and I hear, as if from childhood, the silence beyond
Millions of fluffing Fall field crickets. It is nightfall in October
And I love to be brought back by you
To the sound of the beginning of things.
*
Alma Peek is from San Antonio, Texas. She is overeducated, to the point of foolishness. One of the highlights of her career came in 2015 when she taught a research methods class at CELSA Sorbonne in Paris, France (2014-2015). She is currently submitting two novels (Camp and Through the Green) and a poetry collection (Wild Thing). In 2025, her poetry appeared in Frontier Poetry, Stirring: A Literary Collection, and she has two poems forthcoming (November 2025) in Eunoia Review. She is the founder of @SYLVdesigns, LLC, a jewelry design brand. Her IG: @_almapeek_

Dining Out by Barbara Fried

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Dining Out

We walked from my apartment
to the Argentinian restaurant on 89th

because I had never been there
and no one I knew had been there.

You ordered the lamb, tender, you
ordered, and it came out held high

in a steaming cloud of roasted meat
and hot paprika and crushed cayenne

with a side order of lentils that looked
like a mound of teardrops or the cut ears

of a small animal. I picked at my salad.
I was full—taut as a balloon with new love—

engorged to my throat. You ate with relish,
large, fast forkfuls—you cut your meat

with a savage saw, tender though it was.
We sat opposite each other in a darkness

as light as smoke. Our red wine glowed
lambent in curved glasses. The waiter had dark

hair and white teeth and was discreet in the shadows.
There were candles on tabletops that flickered,

and your full face for a moment took on a pumpkin’s
leering menace, but I laughed it off because I so

desperately needed to breathe the air you breathed,
to imbibe you, for later, when you would be
with your newly vanquished wife.

*

Barbara Fried is a lifelong 5 a.m. poetry writer and a long-term copywriter, copy editor, and marketing manager. She lives on Cape Cod where, in her back garden, there are deer, coyotes and shy white possums who do play possum and where she has just completed her first book-length collection of poems, The Virginia Poems.

Two Poems by Katie Kemple

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Read My Lips
—After George H.W. Bush

Looking at the inflated lips
of a billionaire’s wife on my phone,
I eat oatmeal prepared
in a motel’s coffee maker,
from a paper cup with a plastic spoon
saved from the night before.

I am grateful for the lows of my life;
the cancelled flight that landed me
in a room by the airport,
the blast of engines that shake
the windows that look at a weedy lawn;
these give my life texture.

It could be worse. The only thing
you can count on is death and taxes.
Now, just death in the U.S.,
but I miss taxes. That’s why I bought
the sixteen-dollar flight insurance.
I want assurances.

No guarantees that I wouldn’t inject
my lips with toxins if given
a billionaire’s budget. My old life
seems like that now, stuffed with haircuts,
and a clothing allowance.

Oatmeal is affordable, filling.
I loved it even as a kid. Back when Bush
asked us to read his lips. Now,
I watch the billionaire’s wife pucker.
Bet she can’t sip hot drinks comfortably.
I brew a pot of coffee,

start to file a claim for the room, hope
my insurance comes through.
Is this an act of God?
I hold tight to the things I can count on—
the coffee, not strong, but free.

*

Cecelia left her resume on my patio

weighed down
with a stone. Half the size
of a business card,
it invited me to call
for a cleaning estimate.

When I walked past
my neighbors’ homes,
I saw her message
on welcome mats.

Her card said:
12 years of experience.
Same number as me,
different industry.

I left my credentials
at virtual doors,
cold called strangers,
threw rocks at LinkedIn.

If I could hire Cecelia—
would I? But I can’t.
I leave her message in the shade
of a succulent plant.

Over weeks, the paper
curls shut
around the rock.

Cecelia might be in
in a house now
vacuuming to music
that doesn’t suck.

And work’s flown into
my inbox again,
spreadsheets, lists, meetings.

Maybe we’re in the field
of autonomy. Maybe unknown
doors thrill us a little.

Looking for work,
a reminder to unsettle
ourselves.

*

Katie Kemple is the author of Big Man (Chestnut Review Chapbooks, 2025), and Love in the Key of COBRA (winner of the 2025 Iron Horse Literary Review chapbook competition). This year, her work has appeared in Frontier, North American Review (Open Space), and Sixth Finch. More of her work can be found at katiekemplepoetry.com.

Two Poems by Jill Michelle

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Rite

n. A religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept or custom
with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it.
         —Ambrose Bierce

Two twenty-somethings
two years as honeys

under a gray-blue blanket
of Florida December sky

we stand—courthouse statue
looming over our too-thin

shoulders in this one photograph
of our wedding, snapped

by the justice of the peace in
St. Augustine, where we didn’t

need witnesses, so there was
no risk of offending any left

out relatives or friends.
You never asked if I was

one of those kids who’d
spun gauzy fantasies

cocooned teen dreams
of bank-breaking weddings.

I would have said, The vows
are all that matters. Maybe then

you would have kept them.

* 

I Spell out Divorce in Pixie-stick Sugar across Our Kitchen Floor
         after Jenny Holzer

You’ll be able to read it by
your own gaslight, so it won’t
matter that the power’s out
at the old country house to
which you’ve been booted
after unburdening yourself
across the dinner table tonight,
corduroyed mule, confessing
adultery before fixing a next
bite of the six o’clock supper
missed from the plate saved,
microwaved after kissing you
hello with half of my hair styled
by our four-year-old before I
tucked her into cartoon-covered
sheets alone, plastic menagerie
of Starburst-colored animal
barrettes forgotten until you’ve
left when brushing my teeth, I
startle at the mirror, can’t help
but laugh.

*

Jill Michelle is the author of Underwater (Riot in Your Throat, 2025) and Shuffle Play (Bottlecap, 2024) and winner of the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry from New Ohio Review. Her newest work is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Salamander Magazine and Scavengers Literary Magazine. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more at byjillmichelle.com.

Insomnia by Sydney Lea

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Insomnia

When I can’t sleep, I forge rough rhymes,
matching blindness, say, with timeless,
or almost matching popular
with poplar. Yes, it’s idleness,

and I concede I stretch the rules
as when I pair up misery
and pity– all a trick to find
a way to lie there worry-free.

No, don’t call it trick but mission
even passion, this urge to prise
away each fear, however small,
that blights me. But hard as I try,

my words do as they please. They scorn
resistance: I’ve just sought to link
bliss to something beside distress
but despite me the effort brings

not half-rhymed release but bereft.

*

Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Mango Languages by John Arthur

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Mango Languages

on his deathbed he lay
learning Italian one phrase
at a time from a free app
I downloaded for him
from the public library.

my daughter asked him why
learn something new now, grandpa?
what’s the point?
I think you mean perché he said
and that was his final word.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. He is the 2025 Grand Prize winner of The Poetry Box’s chapbook contest for Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide, which will be released early in 2026. His work has appeared in Rattle, DIAGRAM, Failbetter, trampset, ONE ART, Frogpond, and many other places.

The Beech Tree by Heather Hallberg Yanda

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The Beech Tree

For weeks, all the trees on
Lockwood Road prepared
for absence. Now, in late
Autumn, they found it.  I

walk through a sepia
photograph.  Today
I think of my father —
my dad, my daddy — who

is fragile, who stumbles
easily.  For weeks, I
have felt his spirit, his
warmth fall away.  I have

walked this road many times
with him: every turned leaf
meant naming maples, ash,
dogwood. Now every rut

in the road is a new
chance to fall. I can still
hear his footfalls, his laugh.
Here, in the grief

before the grief, all is
vulnerable, a word
from the Latin, meaning
to wound.  Here, where Finley’s

fence opens to this
meadow, a beech tree I
never noticed still grasps
its bright leaves.  It teaches

what my dad taught: to stand
tall, and when it is time
to let everything go,
to let everything go.

*

Heather Hallberg Yanda teaches in the English Department at Alfred University, in the hills of upstate New York. After many years of sending poems out, her work has been published in such journals as Barely South Review, Comstock Review, Tar River Poetry, and (forthcoming) in The Yale Journal of Medical Humanities. In the midst of the pandemic, her first collection of poems, Late Summer’s Origami, was published by Ashland Poetry Press. She is currently seeking a publisher for her second collection, What the Stones Borrowed.

Tripping Over His Shadow by Todd Wynn

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Tripping Over His Shadow

Metallica pounded from his bedroom,
the pulse of every summer—
the beat in my chest
before I knew the words.

I stitched myself
to his right side,
adhesive as only
little brothers can be,
tripping constantly
over his shadow.

He turned our roof into a runway,
called the trash bag a parachute—
it wasn’t.
I rolled my ankle.
Didn’t try again.

He was five years ahead of me—
enough to outgrow things
before I grew into them.

One day, he traded
his rusted Huffy for car keys,
moved out at eighteen
with Metallica still playing.

His music stayed.
Everything else changed.

*

Todd Wynn is a pediatric nurse living in Mansfield, Ohio. He recently began writing poetry as a way of working through past grief and understanding how that has shaped the way he sees the world around him. His work has previously appeared in ONE ART.

The Undetonated Nazi Bomb Opens a Red Eye On the Ocean Floor by Mingyu 明宇 Brian Chan

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The Undetonated Nazi Bomb Opens a Red Eye On the Ocean Floor

and the starfish, believing the eye to be
the madreporite of another starfish,
or a sister,

punctures the metal-light
in search of companionship
or at least, sustenance. Forty thousand

other animals pile into a veil
over the bomb, as if seeking
its origin point.

Once other man-made machinery (and this time,
able to breathe underwater)
discover the animals, scientists
are shocked, the starfish
less so,

since there is little discovery in
excavation:

It is not unlike the wilderness
to feed on violence.
Remember:

the starfish acts by
instinct. Animals hunt
for food, humans
for rhetoric.

What do we make
of killing, or choosing
its abstention? We conduct massacres and end up only
with more explanations for living. Violence produces

life produces violence.

Yes, hunting is a sport. Yes,
war is too.

The starfish believes there is more
to life than humans know, but chooses
survival.

When exposed by the unmanned submarine,
the starfish holds one
of its five arms out—not as an offering,
but as if to say, no, no,
this is not a gun.

                       *In response to recent discoveries

*

Mingyu 明宇 Brian Chan is currently a first-year undergraduate studying at Princeton University. His work appears in Split Lip, wildness, The Emerson Review, and more.

The Clock Holds Its Heartbeat by Laura Ann Reed

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The Clock Holds Its Heartbeat

              for Grant

Mid-March. Between seasons.
Rain so fine it never reaches the ground.

There is a word for this: Virga.
How did I not know it before?

Trying to remember my virga dream,
I press my cheek to your chest.

Touch rushes in, re-drawing
our boundaries.

During the crisis of pneumonia
I felt such sharp tenderness for common objects.

My favorite blue stoneware mug.
Its chipped rim making it almost mortal.

The hiatus from time was a gift
when the grandfather clock stopped ticking.

The winter hazel is suddenly green.
Just noticing alters my own coloration.

Nights, you go to bed first.
Alone, I sink into the deep meanwhile of my life.

*

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/

Singing in Dark Times: Trying to Praise the Mutilated World – A Workshop with Donna Hilbert

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Singing in Dark Times: Trying to Praise the Mutilated World – A Workshop with Donna Hilbert

Workshop Leader: Donna Hilbert
Date: Tuesday, November 18
Time: 4pm Pacific (7pm Eastern) – Please check your local time.
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

>>>  Register Here  <<<

~ About The Workshop ~ 

In this workshop, we will look at poems through the lens of Adam Zagajewski’s seminal poem, Try to Praise the Mutilated World, as well as poems in a similar vein. We’ll consider poets such as WS Merwin, Wendell Berry, and Danusha Lameris. Poets will be invited to reflect on words that aim to help us carry the weight of life in tumultuous times and then write our own words in conversation with these voices.

~ About The Workshop Leader ~ 

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press, 2025. Work has appeared in journals and broadcasts including Eclectica, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Cholla Needles, TSPoetry, VerseDaily, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, anthologies including Boomer Girls, The Widows’ Handbook, The Poetry of Presence I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, Love Is For All Of Us, What the House Knows, Poetry Goes The Movies. She writes and leads workshops from her home base in Long Beach, California.

Two Poems by Howie Good

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Au Courant

Just because I smile doesn’t mean I am happy. “All of life,” Buddha said, “is sadness.” Birds return from the hot countries full of excited chatter, unaware the Doomsday Clock has crept even closer to midnight. I keep up with the headlines as much as a person can and still remain sane. Minds have corroded, splintered, flamed out. For every opinion shared in the blogosphere, there is an equal and opposite opinion. I hope for truth to recover its legendary authority. Meanwhile, a tomato is also a child’s balloon.

*

Shadows and Ghosts

The CT scan machine is shaped like a donut. I am lying inside the hole of the donut on my back. Bugs lie on their backs when they are dying. I was injected only moments earlier with a special dye. A burning sensation immediately spread through my body. Now the machine, with a brilliant flash of light, scans my torso for new tumors. In an adjacent room, techs are monitoring the images on a screen. They see shadows and ghosts. They see mounds of rubble. They see the screams trapped in my lungs.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry book, True Crime, is scheduled to be published by Sacred Parasite in early 2026.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

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The Dark Undercarriage of the Purple Packard

If I were to pray for my father
it wouldn’t be for him exactly
but for the shadow beneath
the purple Packard where
he crawled when I was six.
I followed him into the darkness
of machinery, a mystery
men love though he in particular
knew nothing about what drives
things forward, power
carried from the engine to
the strange wheels and wires
of this life. Men love certainty,
rules and laws that determine
how things work, but the stories
we live by end too quickly
with a moral almost always
wrong. He wanted me to be
the man men pretend to be,
a lion of fire, the man men
imagine their leaders to be.
The voice that held my father
was his father’s, a burly man
who wrestled in high school,
worked on derricks and settled
in a career as a statistician
for Illinois Power and Light.
A lost photograph comes to mind
of three men in gray suits and
fedoras walking toward the lens
believing they owned the world
because they kind of did.
Before smoking himself to death,
he gave his son a 1949 purple Packard
fading to gray. My father and I lay
on the driveway of the very house
I remember in the shadow
of the memory of his father
whose son pointed at the dark
undercarriage, explaining
things he knew nothing about

* 

Rippling Waves of Heat over the Wheat Fields of Kansas

Somewhere north of Kansas City,
my father disappeared in himself
as he often did
then returned and noticed the blacktop rolling through
the roiling center of America which he loved
with unquestioning ardor. In the long journey away
from my father, I’ve often remembered
the way he drove in a trance
and suddenly woke
surprised to be in his life, and I promised myself
to be here, wherever here is

We were passing through a dead zone
where Jack Brickhouse, the Voice of the Chicago Cubs,
was telling my dad the pain he feels at his mother abandoning him
is alright because he’s about to steal second

An Oldsmobile like ours, driven by
a middle-aged white man, passed us
his wife beside him, eyes wide in terror.
Dad stepped on the gas and we flew down the road, passing them,
so the other man stepped on the gas passing us,
his wife yelling at him to slow down. And my father
going over a hundred miles an hour roared past them
again. Dad smiled. He’d won. I turned to watch
the Oldsmobile shrinking in the distance

Then, as we drove through the dry shadow of a cloud
Dad wiped the sweat from his face
and pointed at a large burial mound ahead of us
beautiful in the piercing light

He was delivering me to a life he disapproved of.
He expected gratitude
but I was the son who aspired to be a poet
and kindness from this rough man was like a stone in my throat

*

Michael Simms lives in the old Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His poetry collections include Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025.) His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Plume, Scientific American and Poem a Day (Academy of American Poetry). He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. In 2011, the Pennsylvania legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.

Three Poems by Karen Paul Holmes

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I Love It When

Someone fifteen or twenty
years my junior forgets
the same kinds of things I forget—
like the word cardigan, or
why they just walked into the kitchen.

I feel better about myself if
they trip a bit on a gnarled sidewalk
or go to dinner before seven,
squint and shine their cell phone lights
on the menu, order one entrée
split between them.

I’m oh so happy when Jamal—
a handsome-hardbody danseur—
substitute-teaches our Zumba class.
He doesn’t see us as seniors.
When he shouts, Let’s sex it up, ladies,
we do.

June with her titanium knee,
Beth standing by a chair for balance,
Dee on blood pressure meds,
Ellen who can’t reach overhead,
me and my misbehaving back.

Jamal makes us believe
we’re Beyoncé back-up dancers
or Rockettes.
Look at our Bob Fosse hands.
Watch our strut kicks.
Watch out when we swivel our hips.

*

Why I Write Poetry

Because the peace bell tolled for Jimmy Carter’s 98th birthday,
and I need to commemorate that commemoration.

Because I chuckled when I read a sign outside a church that said:
Grow a garden–
Lettuce praise him
Squash the doubt
Turnip at church

Because I’m bothered but amused by Instagram bots who want me. Profiles like:
I believe true love meets you in your mess, not your best.
Always thank God for giving me life in the land of the living.
I am looking for a real and trustworthy sugar baby to spoil with my riches.

Because The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced
a recall of wall beds due to serious crushing hazards, and it was horrible
but reminded me of a Three Stooges skit.

Because a harpist said in an interview it was love at first hear
when she encountered Mozart’s Flute & Harp Concerto. At age 22, she joined
the orchestra for L’Opéra de Paris.

Because an eagle cam showed me live action: A dandelion-fluff eaglet
growing bigger than the daddy and then fledging in 12 weeks. And both parents
bringing fish for lunch until then.

Because my Australian uncle at 96, during his last transfusion, asked for
the blood of a 19-year-old nymphomaniac.

Because I once saw a post on our neighborhood social media:
I need a good deep tissue message therapist, and I thought I’d better heed her call.

*

Beginning Tai Chi

I know rooms like this
       empty before class.
A mirrored wall multiplies it—
ballet barres going on forever
like sky. Sun gleams
the wood floor, inviting me to fill
the space with dance,
       Piqué turn, pas de chat, grand jeté.
I know how it feels to leap

but am no longer airborne.
My balancé, now
       Rooster stands on one leg.
In Tai Chi, We stay grounded,
the master says.
Part the horse’s mane.
Grasp the sparrow’s tail.

The twenty-four movements, not dance
but dance-like, he says, we flow,
undulating his hand
through air—a dolphin in water.
       A moving meditation.
Slow, relaxed,
not ballet’s hummingbird-power.

We each hold a chi ball—invisible,
soccer-sized—one hand underneath,
the other on top.
I focus on that seemingly
       empty space,
feel its unseen weight, its almost pulse.
Draw energy—chi—from the earth
into the dantian, seat of life essence,
he says.

       Wave hands like clouds,
And my own stale clouds loosen,
take on other shapes. Not old woman, but
Fair lady working the shuttle.
Not ballerina, but
Crane spreading its wings.

*

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books are: No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich, 2014). Poetry credits include The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, Glass, and Plume. Daughter of immigrants, she was the first gen to attend college and has an MA.

“We’re all stories in the end,” by Rebecca Ferlotti

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“We’re all stories in the end,”

the bar’s bathroom graffiti taunts:
grade school
scribbles, love proclamations.
I wrote my initials on a stall door
before I left school. And when I left the country,
I saw stalls in the middle of a Belgian red light district
on the way to an Irish pub.
I asked someone why
and they raised an eyebrow. I once saw a woman raise a glass of champagne
in a bathroom stall. She was kneeled
next to a hamburger. At a networking event, a man talked about hamburgers.
I asked him his favorite local spot
as we stood in the bathroom line.
“Definitely Wendy’s,” he said.
And stepped inside.

*

Rebecca Ferlotti (she/her) is a poet, nonfiction book editor, and chief content officer based in Ohio. Her work has been published in ELLIE, her local library’s poetry anthologies, and other magazines. She has presented at the Sigma Tau Delta conference both as a creative writing student at John Carroll University and as an alumna. Rebecca’s work also has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.

Elegy at the 7-Eleven by Jeff Cove

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Elegy at the 7-Eleven

The man at the register
doesn’t look up.
A forty-ounce beer in one hand,
cheap flowers in the other—
pink lilies curled like smoke,
wrapped in plastic.

For a moment,
he stands there holding both
like he isn’t sure
which one the night is for.

He sets the flowers down—
not with anger,
not regret,
just
a quiet return.

The cashier scans the bottle.
Outside, the light flickers.
There’s no one to bring flowers to.
Not tonight.

*

Jeff Cove lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He has been writing haiku since high school—seventeen syllables taught him how to compress meaning and leave space for silence. He works as a translator between the technical and the emotional, finding poetry in systems, silence, and the absurd. His work is forthcoming in Pictura Journal and has appeared in The Daily Drunk. He writes at https://jeffcove.com/

I almost said I’m sorry by Nilsa Mariano

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I almost said I’m sorry

wide and empty
the can lid stays open
after you take the trash out
the new bag is muddy green
to hide the smears we live
lottery tickets in your hand
failed faded paper thin
we lock eyes as you back up
crunching the numbers
over your head
mechanically you announce
we lost
as you jump in the air
aiming the paper toward the can
the arc of your throw
the days of our lives
the lid of the can falls
in a slow motion groan
you are gone before it clicks
my words hit the door
in a tedious echo

*

Nilsa Mariano is a graduate of Binghamton University with a Masters in Comparative Literature. At heart she is a Brooklyn girl. Nilsa was published in, Muleskinner, Five Minute, Wildgreens and Stone Canoe. She is proud of being published in the inaugural edition of Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul. Nilsa is owned by a spoiled pug.

Ode to Punctuation by Gloria Heffernan

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Ode to Punctuation

Comma,
Pause and connection,
gentle invitation to take a breath

Parentheses
(A brief distraction)
in the middle of everything

Ellipses
A suggestion of space…
but a clue that something is missing

Semi-colon
Grammatical homage to healthy relationships;
two independent clauses connected forever

Period
I tend to avoid this one
since I am not a great fan of endings.

So always, I return to the comma,
patient tour guide along the winding trail of thought
who says, take your time, follow me, I’ll get you there,
eventually.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s most recent poetry collection is Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

ONE ART x Keystone Poetry: Featured Reading — Sun. 11/2 at 2pm Eastern

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ONE ART x Keystone Poetry

Date: Sunday, November 2

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

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

>>> Tickets Available <<<

About The Reading

During this virtual event (held via Zoom), Featured Readers will share their poem selected for publication in Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press). Time permitting, we hope to take a few questions after readers share their poems.

Hosts:

Marjorie Maddox & Jerry Wemple, Co-Editors, Keystone Poetry

Mark Danowsky, Founder/Editor-in-Chief, ONE ART

Featured Readers:

Joseph Chelius is the author of three full-length poetry collections. His most recent collection, Playing Fields, was published earlier this year by Kelsay Books.

Grant Clauser is a Pennsylvanian. His sixth book, Temporary Shelters, was just published by Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a large media company and teaches poetry workshops.

Geraldine Connolly grew up in Westmoreland County and has published five poetry collections. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Maryland Arts Council and Breadloaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review and Poetry Ireland Review. Her new book is Instructions at Sunset, from Terrapin Books in September 2025. She lives in Alameda, California.

Brian Fanelli is the author of the poetry collections Waiting for the Dead to Speak (NYQ Books) and All That Remains (Unbound Content). His writing has been published in the LA Times, World Literature Today, Midnight Oil, Pedestal, Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere. Brian also writes frequently about horror movies and is a contributing writer to HorrorBuzz.com and 1428Elm.com. He has his M.F.A. from Wilkes University and his Ph.D. from SUNY Binghamton University. Currently, he’s an Associate Professor of English at Lackawanna College.

Jan Freeman is the author of three books of poetry and the founder and former director of Paris Press (1995–2018), which is now an imprint of Wesleyan University Press.  She is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships, the Spiral Shell Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts/Moulin a Nef, and an Associateship at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. More at www.janfreeman.net

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of the chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in ONE ART, Pangyrus, Post Road, Salamander, and The Sun. He is the poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, and he divides his time between Boston and Vermont.

Lynn Levin is a poet and writer. Called one of the most “poignantly witty voices of our time” (Bucks County Community College), she is the author of nine books, most recently the short story collection House Parties (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), named one of the best books of summer by Philadelphia Magazine. “Sleepless Johnston,” her ballad that appears in Keystone Poetry, is from her poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020). Lynn Levin teaches at Drexel University and for many years taught creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Her website is: lynnlevinpoet.com.

Professor of English at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 16 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (International Book and Illumination Book Award Winners); and the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, a collaboration with her artist daughter, Anna Lee Hafer (www.hafer.work) and others. How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks (Kelsay) and Seeing Things (Wildhouse) will be available in 2024. In addition, she has published the story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and 4 children’s and YA books. With Jerry Wemple, she is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press) and is assistant editor of Presence. She hosts Poetry Moment at WPSU. See marjoriemaddox.com

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others.  She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize; she’s the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks. She is a hospice volunteer, writing tutor, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at https://annemichael.blog/

Jerry Wemple has published four poetry collections. His most recent is We Always Wondered What Became of You from Broadstone Books. The collection of mostly prose poems centers on his secret transracial adoption within his biological family, growing up as a biracial child in rural Pennsylvania during an era when people of color were almost nonexistent there, and discovering the identity of his birth father as an adult. He is co-editor of the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, and the follow-up Keystone Poetry. He also co-edited the anthology Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania. His poetry and creative nonfiction work appear in numerous journals and anthologies, and have been published internationally in Ireland, Chile, and Sweden. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Commonwealth University in Pennsylvania.

Photograph of my Brother by Rob Cording

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Photograph of my Brother

Half-dressed, a pair of socks in my hand,
I’m looking at a photograph of my brother,
framed atop my dresser. Dead now five years,
he’s hunched over his phone, a beer nearby
on the table, looking up at the camera
with that grin that showed off his dimples.
I’m wondering who he was texting,
imagining his smart-ass reply to our mom,
so I don’t notice, at first, my daughter.
“Why do you like that picture so much?”
she asks. How to respond to such a question?
How to explain that I’m trying to imagine
the way his shoulders would’ve turned
as he looked up, to feel his strong hands,
clean in this picture, but usually flecked
with paint. How to say that I want
to remember the sound of his voice better
than I do? “Because he looks so happy,”
I tell her, closing the dresser drawer.
I sit on the edge of the bed, start
to put on my socks. My daughter is looking
at the picture now, when she turns and asks,
“But he doesn’t know he’s going to die, does he?”

*

Rob Cording teaches high school English in Boston, MA. Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from New Ohio Review, Tar River Review, and Here: a poetry journal.

Scattering by Rob Spillman

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Scattering

Like gods gathering
tiny psychedelic planets,
we brim the red bucket
with superballs

I and my boy, now a man,
just shy of twenty-three,
scoop up balls cracked
with age and love

On three we hurl the planets,
the superballs pinging
off white worn tiles,
tub, ceiling, ricocheting madly,
my boy a boy again,
bathtime chaos and joy

We will not miss
this small, crumbling space,
but see how we sob,
the decrescendoing superballs
slowly rolling to silence
one last time
in the only home
we’ve known
*

Rob Spillman was the editor of Tin House from 1999-2019. He is the author of the memoir All Tomorrow’s Parties.

After the Procedure, We Count Bottles by Brandon McNeice

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

After the Procedure, We Count Bottles

Amber lined like a little choir,
their childproof caps clicking in our hands,
press and turn, press and turn.

We tip them to the light to see
what’s left, what’s promised, what can be spared.
We read the labels aloud,
each word held,
slowly, so nothing drops.

When a bottle is finished, we stand it aside.
We carry them down the back steps,
the bin cold even in August.
One by one we give them back to glass.
They answer with a bright, small ringing,
a sound the day can hold.

*

Brandon McNeice is a writer and educator based in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared in Plough, Front Porch Republic, The Philadelphia Citizen, Well-Schooled, and he has work forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly.

Four Poems by Laurie Kuntz

~ ONE ART ~ 16 Comments

The Pre-Test

It’s the printer again,
like a body growing old,
the ink runs dry,
invisible paper jams,
lights that flash without reason,
and I call to you, and you fix it.

After a thankful hug, I ask
What will I do without you?
This is surreal to think about
when I count backwards to our beginnings
tapping ten fingers more than five times.
These days are like spelling pretests
preparing for those difficult words that defy
the i before e rule.

When I look toward an unreliable future
everything becomes a test:
I can mow the lawn,
pay estimated taxes
kill the spider, which is really practice
for the roach, recognize the flashing fuel light,
and know when to press Ctrl Alt Delete,
the list of can do’s can go on forever,
only because we will not.

I know without you, I can
and will pass these tests,
but fail miserably at the same time.

*

Searching for Gold

Bracing the wind, Laura, in a red sock hat,
reads the instruction booklet of this holiday gift,
the metal detector you’ve wanted since you were a child,
growing up in rural places, where treasures were part of the lore.

Now, on an urban beach in January,
you search and dig, sand blowing in your aging face.
You yell against the rising tide, hoping Laura can hear,

It is more the hunt than the treasure that I love,

because you can see clearly,
that the treasure is standing next to you,
reading the instruction booklet.

*

Friendship, Like Marriage

In celebration for every year
of marriage, there is a symbol
the fragility of paper,
the merge of time,
the burning passion of wood
and copper in its polished shine.

What elements symbolize friendship
in its stretch of years,
and isn’t friendship a marriage in kind,
with its own separations and secrets
splayed across wires,
promises untied while riding waves
of unbridled trust.

My friend, for all our time together,
nothing more can be said except:
I do, I do, I do.

*

A Mother’s Work

It was twenty years ago,
the night you graduated from high school.
Of course, there was the after party,
and you swaggered into the house way after curfew.
You turned to me and said:
“Well, your work is done.”
In tired irony, I replied:
“It is 3:00 A.M., and I am still up,
my work will never be done.”
Today, marks a month before your daughter is due
to enter the world, and I, as a soon to be Grandmother,
should be thinking of bassinets and bottles,
but the memory of your post curfew high school after party
comes to me, as I am still up and waiting.

*

Laurie Kuntz is a four time Pushcart Prize nominee and two time Best of the Net Nominee. In 2024, she won a Pushcart Prize. She published seven books of poetry. Her latest book published in 2025 is Balance, published by Moonstone Arts Center. In 2026, her 8th book, Shelter In Place will be published by Shanti Arts Press. Her themes come from working with Southeast Asian refugees, living as an expatriate in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brazil, and raising a husband and son.
Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Tremolo by Alison Hurwitz

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Tremolo

        After the painting by Agnes Martin

Three thousand miles away, I can’t go with my mother to the heart doctor, so
I wish myself beside her, distance blurred until the two of us sit chilled inside

an antiseptic room, glance up at squares in the suspended ceiling–a chess board
bleached, strange game with no opponent, geometry of separation.

My mother waits to see the specialist, one hand holding closed the crease and fold
of paper dress. Her blue-veined feet can’t reach the floor. She asks me to read

the printed card adjacent to the wall art and I do- a cross-hatched Agnes Martin,
titled Tremolo. My brilliant mother tilts her head, says she thinks the patterned grid depicts

the futile effort we all make to subdivide uncertainty, to tuck each breath in its own box.
The ticking clock divides our waiting. At last, the click of door. The nurse enters

on a schedule. She calls my mother Hon but makes no eye contact, checks off
the list on which my mother’s name is written, slips out. The self I’ve willed

across the country climbs up to sit beside her on the crinkle sheet, one arm
around her shoulders. Every shift, an aural shiver. She says again she hopes

the surgeon can insert the mesh, expand the tunnel to her heart. She retells
the news she heard last time: her arterial valve, which should be a silver dollar’s

width, has tightened to a strand of straw. She gestures, hand so light it might
be filled with hollow bones, as if at any second she could float away.

Time and distance spiral through a fluttering
through which we hear the rush and pull of her hardworking heart.

We sit together side by side- listen to the minutes
pass in silicates, their sound sifting through

three thousand miles
of hourglass.

*

Alison Hurwitz is a former cellist/dancer who finds music in language. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Alison hosts the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Published in South Dakota Review, Sky Island Journal, SWWIM and others, her work was named as a finalist for RockPaperPoem’s 2025 Poetry Prize. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorials, hikes, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com

ONE ART’s Fall Fundraiser

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~ ONE ART’s Fall Fundraiser ~

I’m hoping to raise $3,000 for ONE ART. This would be immensely helpful for me, personally. That being said, I don’t want anyone to feel obliged to donate. My intention is to have quarterly fundraisers with the aim of raising at least $12,000/year.

Here’s a link to the GoFundMe:

https://www.gofundme.com/manage/one-arts-fall-2025-fundraiser

Thank you for your consideration.

With Gratitude,
Mark Danowsky
Publisher / Editor-in-Chief
ONE ART: a journal of poetry

PS – I want to offer a few optional incentives.

For those who generously donate $100 or more, I will be happy to mail you a ONE ART sticker as a token of gratitude. (You’ll have to email me your physical address.) 

For those who donate $250 or more, you have the option to have a 30-minute phone call or Zoom with me.

For those who donate $500 or more, you have the option to have a 1-hour phone call or Zoom with me.

WHAT I WANT by Daniel Sklar

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

WHAT I WANT

Sometimes I want
to be out of touch.
I do not want to
know current events.
I do not want
information and
I do not want to give
information.
I want relationships.
I do not want to
believe one thing.
There are too many
things to believe.
I don’t want to
be more productive.
I want to walk
across Spain,
to come to some
little town where
men drink
small glasses of beer
at a café and sweat.

*

Daniel Sklar teaches Creative Writing at Endicott College, and has been published in the Harvard Review, English Journal, Beat Scene, and the New York Quarterly among other journals. His books include Flying Cats, Hack Writer, and Bicycles, Canoes, Drums. His play, “Lycanthropy” was performed at the Boston Theater Marathon in 2012 and was reviewed in The Boston Globe. He rides a bicycle to work.

An Enemy Within by Marc Alan Di Martino

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An Enemy Within

Each of us has an enemy within.
For some it’s that voice in back of the mind
rehearsing our shortcomings, assuring us

we’re not enough for this world. For others
it’s the barber, the shopkeeper down the block,
their esoteric powers of endurance

hinting at some gross imbalance in the scales.
For others still it’s both at once—an inferno
of adversaries unfurling with each uneasy step.

You disappear into a restroom, splash
your face with water but there’s no escape
from yourself. The ghoul in the glass is you,

the enemy that pollutes every breath.
The mosquito in your ear will never
cease its drilling, a torment worse than death.

*

Inspiration for this poem is addressed in Heather Cox Richardson’s post from September 30, 2025. Hegseth’s unprecedented demand that large numbers of America’s top military personnel meet on short notice and at great expense to the American public.

*

A Note from The Author

When a person sees enemies everywhere they look, one must come to the conclusion that their true enemy is in the mirror. America does indeed have ‘an enemy within’, but it isn’t the one the current regime thinks it is. The call, as they say, is coming from inside the house.

*

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.

Weights & Measures by Francesca Leader

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Weights & Measures

I still don’t know how
You can compliment a girl
Without infecting her,

Say she’s perfect
Without seeding worry
Of when she won’t be

Anymore, span her
Waist with hands
Amarvel at its minuteness

Without encoding
Lovability as the ability
To fit inside something

Else, submit to
Subsumption. I still don’t
Know how you can

Expect a girl’s soul
Not to snag on BMI charts,
Measurements, bodyfat

Ratios, celebrity weight
Loss and “Half My Size” stories,
Because they’re

Everywhere—number-shaped
Briars ensnarling all
Paths to self-acceptance—

Or tell her to inure,
Ignore, be tough but soft,
A paradox, like vanity sizing

That makes her crave
The labels that anoint her
A 2 and damn the brands

That brand her a 12,
As if she could be “S”
And “L” at once,

Survive the truth
Of weighing & measuring how
Much she matters in inverse

Proportion to how much
(Always too much) matter
She comprises, for bodies

Most loved are the
Bodies that least exist.
I still don’t know how

You can call a girl
Beautiful because she’s thin
Or ugly because she isn’t

Without engendering
Pathology, a fixation sickness
On what is visible

Instead of what is whole.

*

Francesca Leader has poetry published or forthcoming in Abyss & Apex, HAD, Broadkill Review, Stone Circle, The Storms Journal, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net (2025) and Best Spiritual Literature (2025). Her debut poetry chapbook, “Like Wine or Like Pain,” is available from Bottlecap Press. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.

Three Poems by Denise Duhamel

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

POEM IN WHICH I WRESTLE WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I always wanted to write what was true, True, true blue
to not only the facts, but my feelings about those facts,
which makes me wonder why I became a poet
whose mind could go anywhere. I mostly stayed
in the raw material of my life. One critic wrote
that my poems were too raw and, in shame,
I made my own simile—my poems were like a plate
of eggs. Even the whites were runny. Where was my artistry?
What came first? The chicken or my lousy poem?
A long time ago, a professor told me each verse should pass
the “so what?” test and for a while, in rebellion,
I added that question to the endings of famous poems.
I have wasted my life. So what? and Or does it explode? So what?
and Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. So what?
I was bratty and defensive. My life events were worse
than those of others, but better than many. I fetishized
my childhood trauma, maybe traumatizing my readers.
I became aloof, scared really, when a reader told me
about similar problems of her own. Her autobiography
seemed too real because it wasn’t in the form of a poem.

*

POEM IN WHICH MY ACHES ARE HIDING STORIES

My left pinkie goes numb—inside it
a tiny majorette twirls her baton.
She flips it into the air and it knocks her
head on its way down. She collapses
in all her spangles and I can’t wake her up.
The sciatic nerve runs down my right leg—
in my hip, a luau out of control.
One of the fire dancers misses his throw
and sets aflame a hula girl’s skirt.
Everyone sprints to the exit, panicked,
pushing and shoving in my calf.
And my sore shoulders?—this is where
I am inside myself carrying a backpack
full of rocks. Each one is engraved
with my sins, ungrateful, disloyal, selfish.
They clunk and clash and my therapist
is relieved. Finally a story about me.

*

POEM IN WHICH I REALIZE I AM NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

I notice shadows of swaying palms on concrete
seaweed clumping like tiny islands at the shore
a lime iguana on the stair
a sea grape squished by a bike tire
a woman crying        a rust stain under the gutter       the sky
an embryo cloud a dinosaur cloud
another woman crying as I disappear

*

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, she lives in Dania Beach.

Two Poems by Molly Fisk

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Salvation Menu

A biscuit with specks of black pepper.
Warm beets and cool plums together
under shaved fennel. Maybe you think
food is only fuel, as simple as shoveling
coal into the maw of a steamboat’s engine,
filling the brood mare’s trough with hay.

This isn’t wrong, but it misses so much.
Trout over steaming jasmine rice, crisp-fried
skin, the rosy flesh. A roasted red pepper sauce
swirled to coat the hollow-core lengths
of spaghetti, garnished with breakfast radish,
its sweet-hot circles magenta and white.

Broccolini, grilled onions. Maybe you think
food is merely domestic, utilitarian: good
for spouses, children, parents, cousins,
then clean the kitchen, that’s enough. But no,
there are places where sweet corn and meatloaf
are solace, comfort, illumination, where flavor

equals amazement, beauty, the whole an oasis,
a haven, a life where hands do the work of love
and plates are offered to everyone, spring
into summer, to fall, where the egg white
in a blackberry sour comes from a chicken
you may someday meet. This, too, is true

political action, devoted tenacious participation
in saving the world: every rinsed drinking glass,
each greeting to someone who drove quite a way
through an ancient landscape to get here, to sit
with strangers in company, weapons aside, joined
by slices of pear gingerbread doused in caramel.

                       — for Blake & Jen & Hells Backbone Grill

*

This is a Love Story

We are stripping lavender, two at the kitchen table,
thumbnails turning faintly green, while another shortens
the sleeves of a Chinese blouse at the shoulder seams,
close work, high summer, talking about whether kumquats
will freeze outdoors at our elevation and should be taken
in and he calls from the next room, having heard us
and looked it up: They’re good down to 20 degrees.
This is a love story. Shared work after a home-made lunch,
Saint André and fresh tomatoes, deviled eggs slightly
squashed on the drive through the river canyon,
our conversation threading among steady friends, needle
and golden embroidery floss, the lavender picked last week
and not quite dry so the oils explode as we pinch florets
from the square stems. Have you looked at lavender
closely, lately? English is better than French for scent,
French best for cooking. All four of us know that in nature
a grayer leaf means the plant tolerates drought, no one
has to look it up, we are well aware of the bigger picture,
our future balanced on El Niño and the continuing
bark beetle destruction of pines, hot north winds
and rainless midnight lightning. The ice melts in our glasses,
condensation beading to stream down the sides. Yes,
I asked him what the true name of lavender buds might be
and he looked that up, too, I wouldn’t have thought florets.
Some later day we will make sachets out of our cast-off
floral skirts, yard sale pillowcases from the ’40s, fill them
with lavender and millet to stretch it, eating whatever is ripe
at the time — maybe figs and pears — wondering when the first
rains are due, one of us wearing her beautiful Chinese blouse.

*

Molly Fisk is the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology as an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her book of linked historical poems, Walking Wheel, will be out in early 2026 from Red Hen Press.

IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems

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IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems

ONE ART is pleased to announce IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems, Guest Edited by Julia Caroline Knowlton!

About The Guest Editor
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Julia has a PhD in French Literature (UNC-Chapel Hill) and an MFA in Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles). The author of one full-length poetry collection, three poetry chapbooks, a memoir and a children’s book, she has twice been named Georgia Author of the Year. Her work has also been recognized by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.

What We Are Seeking for This Anthology
We are particularly interested in very short poems (aka. micro-poems), 10 lines or less, that transcend ordinary language through sound/symbol/image/metaphor/simile. Like the sustenance of nutmeat within a nutshell, we seek micro poems that hold or contain compressed poetic language as sustenance.
Please note: We are not considering haiku for this anthology.

How to Submit
Submissions for this anthology will be made through Subfolio.
More information will appear on Subfolio as we approach the submission window.
Submissions will be open from November 1 to December 15.
Submissions are FREE.
Donations are appreciated.

Requirements
All work submitted to this anthology must be previously uncurated/unpublished, though poems shared on personal websites and social media are acceptable.

Submission Guidelines
Submit 1-5 micro-poems using Subfolio.
For this anthology, we are considering micro-poems that are 10 lines or less.
We are not considering haiku for this anthology.
Please reference the standard ONE ART submission guidelines for general best practices.
Submissions for this anthology will only be accepted via Subfolio. Please do not email poems.

Morning on my Deck in the New Regime by Donna Hilbert

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Morning on my Deck in the New Regime

I see a chap I know, walking with two friends
on the boardwalk dividing my tall house
from beach below, and hear invoked with flourish,
the Bard of Avon’s holy name. Another fellow
proffers forth a fragment of a speech:
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men
I look then down, wave, and bellow so:
cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,

after which three walkers in unison unleash
this citation of the fateful foul decree:
Julius Caesar, Scene One, Act Three.
I treasure then this moment of delight
in bardic fellowship with passersby,
before my shroud of dread turns day to night.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press, 2025. Work has appeared in journals and broadcasts including Eclectica, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Cholla Needles, TSPoetry, VerseDaily, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, anthologies including Boomer Girls, The Widows’ Handbook, The Poetry of Presence I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, Love Is For All Of Us, What the House Knows, Poetry Goes The Movies. She writes and leads workshops from her home base in Long Beach, California.

Three Poems by Joshua Lillie

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

JUNK DRAWER

Mom said when you feel depressed,
clean the fridge. Organize the junk drawer. Spring clean.
I’ve rearranged the drawers to extinction.
There’s no junk left. The nuts and bolts
now live in their respective mason jars
and have graduated from drawer to the out and open,
up on the shelves where I call them modern art.
Dust gathers on the lids the same way time makes dust
of my mind, in a process I don’t even try to keep hidden
anymore. At Goodwill after my dog died, my sister called
and asked if I’d already made a Goodwill pile.
Devoid of clutter, I stalk the aisles of other’s grief
to look for trinkets to remind me
of mine. Mom said when your teeth fall out in a dream
to remember where you dropped them,
and when you wake up go there for clues
of where you might’ve lost something for real.

*

CLEAN BREAK

My first puzzle was a wooden map of the United States.
The states were the pieces, their names stamped on top,

and into the spaces where they fit, their capitals. To this day
I recall, almost reflexively, each state’s capital.

Growing up in Arizona but never crossing the border,
I was curious as a child why we didn’t spend more time at the beach.

I asked my grandma once, while pointing at the blankness
beneath our state, why don’t you ever take me to the beach?

She laughed because that’s Mexico, not an ocean.
But that only left me with broader questions.

Like well then what’s above Montana? Are there wooden maps
of everywhere? Where do I find the rest of the puzzles?

The next weekend she gifted me a paper map of the world.
I taped it by my bed and throughout elementary school I’d fall asleep

memorizing oceans. I put pins in the middles of the largest ones
and imagined wars between tankers and whales happening so far away

and far beneath us that they’d escaped my history books.
Later on I overheard a rumor that one day an earthquake

would snap California off the continent and it would drift
into the Pacific. I envisioned a clean break from the state lines

of Nevada and Arizona, the ocean rushing toward us
like through a slip’n’slide in a water park commercial.

That night I moved the pin I’d placed in the middle of the Pacific
between East and me one inch closer, in the hopes that Arizona

might have an ocean after all.

*

HEART-SHAPED HEART

Mom taught me young to scissor a heart face from a photograph,
in a way that showed my grandmother had taught her too when
she was a girl. She bent the photo but not so much to crease it,
then began cutting in a half-heart motion, one arching letter C
that drooped into a crook. This or you eyeball the heart shape flat
on the film. This way, though, you might have to trim the oblong
heart to fit more firmly in the locket. As a kid, I first closed
the dog’s face into mine, then when it ran away, the cat’s.
Then when the cat ran away, the rabbit’s that we rescued to
replace them. When the rabbit escaped, I fashioned a heart from
my grandmother’s face, and when she died, my mother’s. Years ago,
the clasp snapped and the cover went missing, so around my neck
my mother’s face was always visible. Eventually the chain snapped
too. For years I carried the small unshielded silver heart in my pocket
where her face was hidden again. In one box, I kept the photos
with loved one’s faces hearted away, in another, the heart-
shaped faces of pets and parents come and gone. To kids today,
one box won’t make sense without the other. Someone’s great grand-
mother will need to explain why we carried these faces around our necks,
why we held so tight the photos of the bodies with hearts where god
intended the face to be.

*

Joshua Lillie is a bartender in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the chapbook Small Talk Symphony (Finishing Line Press, 2025) and the collection The Outside They Built (Alien Buddha Press, 2025). In 2024, he was a finalist for the Jack McCarthy Book Prize Contest from Write Bloody Publishing. In his free time, he enjoys searching for lizards with his wife and cat.

Okay So Let Me Catch You Up by Kat Freeze

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Okay So Let Me Catch You Up

I try to keep the noise down but it comes as dull agony.

I’m going to have to learn to live with it.

Rubber soles slap the slick platform,

Hard heels kick back at the hollow.

I eye the broad-shouldered button-downs.

I spy so many nights and mornings.

It really does kick in at once, doesn’t it.

Suddenly there are leaves everywhere and I am wearing a light jacket.

You look around and begin.

Fuzzy edges hover, hang around hand-crafted.

I didn’t think about how I would feel in the morning.

Let the TV tell me more about what I’m missing.

I woke up high. I woke up like this.

A thin peel of translucent need. I lie

In the weeds of it. I feel my empty heat rattle.

Does this itch have no rub?

Full hem of smoke slipping past an archive of morning afters.

All I said was I love you!

I carry it like a shawl.

The pale leaves fold back to the lilac sky.

The vines shimmy in the vertical shadows of spring time —

Like, am I allowed to be out here right now?

I am exploring like you used to only now

I have time to chew at the sidewalk.

This morning I held my hand and it held back.

Gentle child waiting for the world to pull past

The veil of here and there waving in the early twitch of light.

What daybreak does this life return to?

Do you remember the lace I wore back when I thought I was fragile?

Before I found my fractures and framed them as road maps?

Don’t you see the coffins up ahead? The pavement that curves in?

Stop screeching at what won’t turn back.

He knows what I am and who

But he doesn’t know how I’ve become.

*

Kat Freeze is a poet and performer based in Chicago, IL. She was a 2023 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards Semifinalist and the 2018 Louder Than a Bomb College Edition Slam Champion. Her writing has appeared in BeyondWords, Motley Magazine and 14East. Her chapbook, Wow! This Identity Crisis Just Keeps Going! is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press. She studied Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul University.

Two Poems by P M F Johnson

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Fire

The comfortable enemy that warms us,
lulls us, kills the cat, smudges
the walls to the devil’s own darkness,
renders air unbreathable.

What you said that night
I believed. Hopes built
from straw and paste.

Up and down the canyon, the stench
of everything lost. How the couple
next door never got out.
A fishhook of doubt.

*

Known And Unknown

I want there to be answers, don’t you?
Little enigmas snuffle through the room
like eager piglets after acorns.
People argue on Friday nights, laugh
in disbelief at each other’s theories,
bang down their mugs. Uncertainty
makes us fear, fear makes us certain.

Sloughing off resentments, sticky mud
on the bottom of my shoes. Making a toy
of my feelings to change them.

A red-tailed hawk drifts out of view
behind oaks. An uneasy beauty,
this puzzle with no borders.
The woods familiar, but nothing
whispered prayers can map.
We don’t know what happens after,
who we are without each other.

I will not transplant my grievances
into larger pots, better lighting.
No amount of watering can
prevent such loss. They say gratitude,
but I’m not so good a farmer as that.

Where the mist gathers, ghost deer browse,
unaffected by their own non-existence,
nor by this new shadow that has joined them.
A few harrowed weeds tossed on the furrows,
their stems like question marks
on the wine-dark soil.

*

P M F Johnson has placed poetry with ONE ART, The Evansville Review, The Main Street Rag, Measure, Nimrod International Journal, The North American Review, Poetry East, The Threepenny Review, and others. He has won The Brady Senryu Award, been awarded Finalist in The Atlanta Review Poetry Contest, and been shortlisted for a Touchstone Award. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, the writer Sandra Rector.

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of September 2025

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ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of September 2025

  1. Leanne Shirtliffe
  2. Donna Hilbert
  3. Kate Hanson Foster
  4. Brian O’Sullivan
  5. Rob Spillman
  6. Michael Meyerhofer
  7. Andrea Potos
  8. Penelope Moffet
  9. Clint Margrave
  10. Melissa Fite Johnson

Before the Eulogy by Matthew Isaac Sobin

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Before the Eulogy

I am full of rebuttals
when the rabbi arrives, primed
for argumentation.

How can there be a holy word,
rituals whispered,
when you were made to live deep

within yourself? A machine
stammered on your behalf,
& you were essentially halved.

What remains is a shape
of absence & obstinance. I want
the rabbi to feel opposition

to a loving God, equivalent or more
to my love for you. But that’s wrong, too.
It took more than nine hundred days

to realize, I spoke not only from grief
but restrained rage.
There’s a politics of death

which is a little like
Darwinism, or waterfowl flying
in formation, navigating

distant points. Each pilgrimage swerves
a flight path toward a terminus. The rabbi
mines forgiveness, but mis–

understands. I cannot forgive
your life before decompressing
the blame for your death.

The process of death
was a winnowing,
refining a multifaceted core

to a diminished persona. Give me
all the disparate layers
composing your humanity. I forget death

is a form of accelerated erosion
& you were broken, storm–
torn strata. When the rabbi

exits, I’m drenched
in wonder, holding mercy close.
Mourners deserve

validation, a holy word. You were
a great man,
a perfect father.

*

Matthew Isaac Sobin’s (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. Recent poems have appeared in ONE ART, Stanchion, and ballast. His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Spiritual Literature. His chapbook Blue Bodies was published by Ghost City Press in their 2025 Summer Series. He received an MFA from California College of the Arts. When he’s not teaching high school, you may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California. He is on Twitter @WriterMattIsaac, Instagram @matthewisaacsobin, and Bluesky @matthewisaacsobin.bsky.social. His Linktree is linktr.ee/matthewisaacsobin.

Alone in the Age of Quantum Uncertainty by Dick Westheimer

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Alone in the Age of Quantum Uncertainty

         all verbs out-heaven death
                  —Katy Didden

It is such a tenderness
this disassembling.

I’d come here
intent on dying

but was shown what it’s like
for believers

when their gods call to them
through the gloom.

I had despaired with my children
about the future,

about hope, about their own children—
as the arc of the moral universe

bends backwards under the weight
of monstrous stones.

Thus, here I am, alone, ready
to be crushed—when I am undone

and then put back together
by the wind and dunes and shore,

told again that there is no better world
than this and no worse,

that the ocean waves are never finished
with their work and that the sky

repaints itself in shades of black and gray
and this improbable blue

every minute of every hour
of every unlikely day.

*

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in ONLY POEMS, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Abandon Journal, ONE ART and Vox Populi. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig.
More at www.dickwestheimer.com