Month: November 2025

Two Poems by Todd Wynn

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A Quiet Kind of Violence

Reason combs through wreckage
looking for order
where none exists.

Reason has never bled,
never slept in chairs
beside a diagnosis,
planned a funeral
like shopping from a catalog.

A soft word, reason
like fate, used to explain
the pain of others—
never its own.

The sky stills.
The world collapses
with no lesson
carved into the aftermath.
Just whispers from
those untouched by tragedy:

“It all happens for a reason.”

* 

Her Sky

I sit next to her bed.
Machines powered down—
failed saviors turned spectators
shoved in the corner.
I squeeze a hand
that can’t squeeze back
as goodbye splinters
behind my teeth.
I stare through a window
as if the sky has answers.

Her sky—
wrung out and trembling—
holds ash like an urn
until it fractures,
spilling embered hues
into the hush.
The sun falls—
a funeral at noon.

*

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.

Two Poems by Kathryn Jordan

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“Invasion From Within”

One of the 600 generals is my father.
There he is, furrowed brow, staring

at the back of another general’s head.
My father likes to think about value.

He said he had a lot invested in me
once, after I dropped out of school.

When he couldn’t make a living
selling insurance, he joined the Navy.

In return for obedience, in exchange
for bombing a country, my father didn’t

have to consider the questions. Now,
he’s over-invested— his medals shine.

Who is this fatherman, first man, lost
boy who always said he never got

enough respect, who spanked me
for crying when I was a baby?

Will my father do as he’s told, will he order
military maneuvers to my dangerous city?

Will he send soldiers in polished black boots
to the street, to the little house where I live?

*

Corn Hole

As soon as I saw it, I wanted one:
gigantic skeleton, larger than life.

Moveable joints, easy to arrange
in cadavalier poses, lounging on

lawn chairs, leaning on fenceposts,
leering from holes in the ground.

But I didn’t invest in a mannequin.
A year later and there’s a skeleton

with a cigar on every porch swing,
some houses with even five or six

out on the lawn playing corn hole.
And if this little town’s population

boom is any indication, and I think
it is, there must be literally hundreds

of thousands of white skeletons in
America, taking our jobs, applying

for federal assistance, messing up
our big, beautiful American project!

Make no mistake, this is all thanks
to some oil baron with an agenda

for boosting the business while
making Halloween great again—

which it never was, in my opinion.
I mean, isn’t Halloween for kids?

*

Winner of the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, Kathryn Jordan’s other honors include placement and finalist positions in the Atlanta Review, New Ohio Review, Steve Kowit, Muriel Craft Bailey, Connecticut Poetry, Sidney Lanier, and Patricia Dobler poetry contests. Her poems are published in The Sun, New Ohio Review, and Atlanta Review, among others. She loves to hike the trails, listening for birdsong to transcribe to poetry.

SUMMER HEAT by Doug Fritock

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SUMMER HEAT

— after ‘When I Was Conceived’ by Michael Ryan

It was 1976, and July. America
was celebrating its birthday.
Bicentennial flags were draped
from porches, and our national bird
had been liberated from the quarter,
set free by the Treasury,
while a Continental drummer
wearing a tricorn hat had taken
its place, although whether
he was playing a drumroll or hitting
a rimshot still remained to be seen,
at least as far as I was concerned.
My father was working in a lab
in Glenolden, my mother taking
the train to her job in the city.
They used to argue about breakfast.
Whether my mother should rise
early and have it ready on the table—
eggs and bacon, coffee and juice—
like the wives of my father’s
colleagues, or whether my father
could toast his own damn slice
of bread. On Sundays, they watched
Alice on their new Sony Trinitron,
my mother telling my father
to Kiss my grits and my father
responding Stow it, a subtle smirk
curling beneath his moustache.
In three years’ time, they’d be
divorced. But still, buried deep
in this shoebox in my father’s garage,
there’s a polaroid of my mother
reclining on a chaise lounge
in the backyard, her blouse un-
buttoned, her hair mussed, her shorts
shorter than any I’ve ever seen
gracing her thighs. I guess it was
a real scorcher in the suburbs
of Philadelphia that summer.
Steamy. Sultry. Oppressive.
And the house didn’t have A/C.

*

Doug Fritock is a writer, husband, and father of 4 living in Redondo Beach, California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Prime Number Magazine, and Whale Road Review among others. He is an active member of Maya C. Popa’s Conscious Writers Collective.

ONE ART’s Nominations for the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards

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ONE ART’s Nominations for the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards

Kai Coggin – I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW

Abby E. Murray – I Can’t Find My Gender

Julie Weiss – Dear Daughter, 

Sean Glatch – Having a Gay Awakening at the Elm Grove Public Pool

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

*

Learn more about the Monarch Queer Literary Awards.

Plastics by Christy Prahl

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Plastics

My mother throws
a Tupperware party.

Only two women come,
eating their body weight

in deviled eggs, listening
to a consultant pitch them

canister sets, colanders,
lemonade pitchers.

The fish aren’t biting.
The pond barely

eddies. My sister and I
pool our birthday money

and ask to buy a set
of nesting bowls.

We will free them
like Matryoshka dolls,

load their cavities
with marbles,

coins, barrettes, and stones.
Fill up our containers.

*

Christy Prahl is an Illinois Arts Council grant recipient and the author of the poetry collections We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023), With Her Hair on Fire (Roadside Press, 2025), and Catalog of Labors (Unsolicited Press, fall 2026). A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work has been featured in Poetry Daily as well as many national and international journals, including the Asheville Poetry Review, CALYX, Rattle, Louisville Review, Penn Review, Sugar House Review, Salt Hill Journal, and others. She was a featured poet on the Hive Poetry Collective podcast in April 2025, and two of her poems have been set to music by post-punk musicians. She splits her time between a small workers’ cottage in Chicago and refurbished Quonset hut in southwest Michigan. More at https://christyprahl.wixsite.com/christy-prahl.

Fortune Cookie by Kari Gunter-Seymour

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Fortune Cookie

Who knows how long that crisp-wannabe
confection huddled in the side pocket
of my car door, or what karmic labyrinth

brought me to this piebald prophesy,
my delight at my find bordering
on ridiculous, a gaggle of words

shrugged together like a kiss for luck
and damn if there isn’t a QR code
hoping to further enhance my fascination.

Hope can be a tough sell when so many
are suffering in the world. It’s easier to notice
what’s wrong than what’s right.

Across the street my neighbor’s wife
is dying, so, too, democracy
according to the media.

A paper strip of quivering letterforms
predicting the future is a hoot, right?—
a shameless self-indulgence,

a distraction from sorrow, a frivolity
to share with a friend, a cheeky
infatuation of farcical futility.

*

Kari Gunter-Seymour (she/her) is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and the author of three award-winning collections of poetry, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) winner of the IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. She is the Executive Director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series Women Speak. Her work has been featured in a variety of journals and the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.

www.karigunterseymourpoet.com
I: karigunterseymour

And in the end, what does a life add up to? by Jen Soong

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And in the end, what does a life add up to?

Birthday candles, sacred wishes,
surprise thunderstorms, impromptu
dance parties, surreptitious kisses under the
bleachers, skinned knees, scars only you can
identify, the number of times your heart
has been broken, hushed farewells, gifts
you did not know were gifts at the time

It’s uncertain, this calculus, you count
the days, mark the calendar, add and
subtract memories and in the end, what
does a life add up to?

You see, I’m neither mathematician nor
mortician. I like to make lists. I keep
a word bank in my pocket with favorites,
the ones skimming your tongue
like a kingfisher: accordion, archipelago,
bounty, chittering, flotsam, gossamer, lodestar,
mollusk, nocturne, tributary, vestige, yearling

I gift them to you in alphabetical order. Whisper
them like prayers, my friends. Count the days.
Let the tears spill from your eyes like
rivulets. Look for the moments that feel like
divination. Remember: Jane Goodall said not to
lose hope. She knew how to listen, truly listen

You see, in the end, you piece together
a life with what’s in front of you: butter knife,
honey jar, apricot marmalade squeezing
out whatever sweetness you can and never
forgetting to lick each trembling finger

*

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Jen Soong is a writer, artist and educator based in Northern California. She is the author of Extra Ordinary Days, a collection of poems and art, and the creator of See You See Me, a collage book exploring Asian identity and acts of resistance. An alum of Tin House and VONA, her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Audacity, Black Warrior Review and Best Small Fictions. She received her MFA in creative writing from UC Davis. Find her work at jensoong.com.

Free from Want by Lana Hechtman Ayers

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Free from Want

I never understood why my mother ordered less
pastrami than corned beef for Thanksgiving,
since it was pastrami, oozing grease like a Texas
oil derrick, that was more popular, devoured first
from our Kuck’s delicatessen spread—sour pickles
big around as my wrist, potato salad with hard-boiled eggs,
mustard and mayonnaise, plus carrot shavings for crunch,
my favorite, and coleslaw with purple cabbage strands,
always too sweet and swimming in a pool of vinegar,
plus fresh baked rye bread laced with carraway seeds,
sliced thick enough to load sandwich stuffings that could
rival the size of a turkey, I mean an entire intact bird,
not that I knew from family experience because
my mother would rather gargle lighter fluid
than deign to cook one of those creatures whose meat
she claimed stank like my father’s grimy work shirts,
but this was the one day of the year we could pig out
in public, I mean eat and eat and eat ourselves
into a sleep coma if we wanted to, and I did because
other days I had to be good, pretend I could stop
before my plate was empty, be full on half a meatball
and ten spaghetti strands carefully counted out,
being slopped on my plate with a ladle of watery red
gravy and a smidgen of mushy Green Giant canned
peas, as if these meager portions were enough to fill
the hole in my belly, the hole in my soul that ached
to be served the gooey chocolate confection of a single
I love you from my mother’s luscious, Kool-cigarette-bearing lips—
smoke and ash, that was what I gobbled every other day of the year.

*

Lana Hechtman Ayers is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press). Sky Over, her newest chapbook, is forthcoming in 2026. Recent poems appear in Peregrine, Blue Heron Review, and Bracken. Say hello online at lanaayers.com.

Like Schrödinger’s Cat by Betsy Mars

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Like Schrödinger’s Cat

he both was and wasn’t
dead, when we walked by,
children in tow, and he curled up,
blocked the sidewalk, either passed out

drunk from too much the night
before, or maybe just gone,
slipped away in plain sight,
while the tourists, all of us,

came and went, looked away,
intent on beignets and chicory coffee,
powdered sugar mounded on our plates.
He was still on the ground

when we returned from the Café du Monde,
vampires gone to bed, saxophones resting
in their velvet cases. He lay undisturbed
in the same position, not dead we thought,

though we didn’t check for breath,
but a composition, a still life, or not.
We skirted him, discussed the day to come,
decided he’d had too much,

shook our heads, walked on
to catch the trolley, preferred to think
he was still in the box, on this side
of life, for the children’s sake

we kept our pace, we didn’t slow,
just another man we‘d never know.

*

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.”

The Knot by Gloria Heffernan

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The Knot

A writhing lock of Medusa’s hair
erupts from the center of the skein.
Unruly strands clenched like a fist,
stand between the crochet hook
and the almost-finished blanket.
It would be so easy to snip it,
tie the two ends together,
weave them neatly into the stitches.

But the knot draws my fingers
deeper into the tangled web—
not the one we were warned about,
no deception here,
just a ball of yarn
tangled like seaweed
around a swimmer’s ankle.

Just cut it. Here are the scissors.
Why all the fuss?
But I am determined to conquer
the yarn’s wild mane,
laboring to unravel it,
eager to restore order,
seduced by the lure of a problem
I can actually solve.

*

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: gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

ONE ART’s 2026 Best Microfiction Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2026 Best Microfiction Nominations

Erin Murphy – Insomnia Chronicles XXIII
Howie Good – Shadows and Ghosts
John Amen – Hide & Seek
Linda Laderman – A morning with my dead father
Laura Daniels – Artillery Shelling

*

A Note from The Editor

Although, of course, ONE ART identifies as a poetry journal, the name of the lit mag was partly chosen to allow for precisely this sort of gray area. Many “prose poems” published in ONE ART walk a line between poetry, flash fiction, flash creative nonfiction (CNF), or “micros” by any other name. After all, writing is writing is writing.

*

“Best Microfiction 2026 will be published by Pelekinesis in the summer of 2026. The Best Microfiction anthology series considers stories of only 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O’Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology will have Pulitzer Prize winning poet Diane Seuss serve as final judge.”

Learn more about Best Microfiction here.

*

The One Story by Philip Terman

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The One Story

Little League all-star game,
I hit a homerun over the fence.
My father abandoned the bleachers

for the sidelines and after I crossed home plate
lifted me up onto his six foot four shoulders
and pranced me around the field

before my teammates and coaches
and all the other parents in the stands,
as if I were royalty.

And I was never closer to the sky
where the rabbi told us heaven was.
Do I recall this story because

it was our few minutes of glory?
Or because it was the only time
my father showed me off like a trophy?

Or is it because each time
I’m called upon by my daughters
to tell them a story about

the grandfather they never met
I tell them this tale, though
after a few words they stop me

to say they’ve heard it before.
Tell us another one. But I continue
the same words in the same order:

Little League all-star game,
I hit a homerun over the fence
and my father abandoned the bleachers

for the sidelines and after I crossed home plate
lifted me onto his six foot four shoulders
and pranced me around the field

before my teammates and coaches
and all the other parents in the stands,
as if I were royalty.

*

Philip Terman’s recent books include My Blossoming Everything, The Whole Mishpocha and, as co-translator, Tango Below a Narrow Ceiling: The Selected Poems of Riad Saleh Hussein. He directs the non-profit Bridge Literary Arts Center in Venango County, PA. bridgeliteararyartsartscenter.org

A Pangolin Rolls Up in a Box at Airport Customs by Dana Henry Martin

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A Pangolin Rolls Up in a Box at Airport Customs

       More than a million pangolins were caught from the wild
       between 2000 and 2013, making the species
       the most trafficked mammal in the world

His long tail wraps around his body
as every abdominal muscle works itself
tighter. He’s balancing on his head now,
front arms tucked into his stomach, stocky
back legs clawing the air, eager to settle.
He unfurls to adjust his head once more
then lies as if frozen with only his scales
to protect him. They aren’t designed
to keep humans at bay. He’s lucky
he was transported live and not
as a bag of scales, already reduced to
a hangover cure or a remedy for itching
and asthma. The box is empty except for
the pangolin, who occupies a small corner
of the relatively vast interior, like a ball
thrown into an empty room and left there,
forgotten. His abdomen rises and falls.
The exquisite armor of his back spreads
and contracts as agents talk and laugh
in the near distance. Just another day
for them. He may die from stress
before he reaches safety. He’s one
of hundreds of thousands each year
who meet this end or worse, never
making it to customs alive. His name
comes from the Malay word penggulung,
which means roller and describes
what he’s doing, rolling under threat
in self-defense. I want to tell you
that I’ve felt like a pangolin, that I’ve
curved my back and tucked my head
and limbs inside to protect my soft
center, that I’m not being metaphorical,
that humans get trafficked, too, even
when we don’t know the word because
we’re young and we aren’t poached
as much as harvested within our families
so even if we had scales, we wouldn’t
expose them because the man reaching
for us is our father or one of his friends.
But mostly I want you to save this pangolin
and every pangolin on Earth, and that’s not
a metaphor either, but it’s also a metaphor.
It’s both at once, like a living being who’s
also a cure for someone else’s suffering
even though they aren’t and never will be.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Laurel Review, Mad in America, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Trampoline, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press).

Red Things by Ann Kammerer

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Red Things

Right before
Mom left Dad
and moved out-of-town,
she started buying
all sorts
of red things,
things like
red shoes,
red earrings,
red shirts,
red dresses,
and a single-breasted
red pea coat
with black buttons
trimmed with
zirconia.

Dad asked why
she was getting
so dolled up,
why she was
wearing clothes
meant for
high school girls
like me.

“Never mind,” he said.
“I know why.
You’re catting about.
Aren’t you?”

Mom ignored him.
She fluffed her hair
in the hallway mirror
and put on red lipstick,
color-keyed
with her dress.
Elevated in heels,
she clicked past him
as he watched TV
and drank.

“Answer me.”
Dad grabbed her.
She swatted him
and pulled away.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“You know I can’t
stand it.”

They argued.
Dad stomped
to the kitchen
to get more beer.
Mom slipped on
her red coat
and went out,
her bright form a blur
as she passed by
the front window.

“Get back here.”
Dad shouted through
the open door.
The cold air blew in.
Mom revved
her Maverick
and backed
from the drive,
the headlights
glaring in Dad’s face,
making him squint.

“Goddamn it,” he said.
“I’ll find you.”

Dad yanked a sport coat
from the closet
and pulled it over
his untucked oxford.
He stumbled outside
in his rumpled pants,
one foot falling heavy,
the other dragging,
a felt cap set crooked
over his thinning hair.

After they left
and the house
grew quiet,
my little sister Janie
came out
to the living room.
She asked
where Mom was,
but didn’t ask
about Dad.
I told her
they went somewhere,
probably down
to Armando’s
or maybe over
to Monty’s.

“We should probably
go to bed,” I said.
“Before they get back.”

Janie sat down.
She covered her lap
with a dirty afghan
that Mom had knit
with red and white
acrylic yarn.

“I want to watch
The Waltons,” she said.
“We always do.
Me and Mom.
On Thursdays.”

I said OK,
we could do that.
Kneeling,
I flipped through
the channels,
landing on
the opening credits,
Janie telling me
to stop.

“There, there.”
Leaning forward,
Janie hummed
the theme song,
clapping out the waltz
of Appalachian rhythm,
the tiny screen filling
with a gabled house,
then John Boy
in a second-floor
window,
his father pulling up
in a flat-bed truck,
his mother
standing serenely
on the porch,
as a cluster of children
in overalls and gingham
bounded barefoot
across grass and pebbles,
a fawn-colored hound
not far behind.

*

Ann Kammerer lives in the Chicago area, and is a native of Michigan. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Fictive Dream, ONE ART, Open Arts Forum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Chiron Review, BlazeVOX, The Broken Spine, and elsewhere, and in anthologies by Workers Write!, Querencia Press, and Crow Woods Publishing. Her chapbook collections of narrative poetry include Yesterday’s Playlist (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Beaut (Kelsay Books, 2024), Friends Once There (Impspired, 2024), Someone Else (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and At the Cleaners (Bottlecap Press, 2025). You can find her here: annkammerer.com

After Placing My Husband in Care I Visit the Serengeti by Carla T. Griswold

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After Placing My Husband in Care I Visit the Serengeti

Three black headed herons stand atop an acacia bush
over the hippos’ pool as the sun begins to drop.

Their feet fit between thorns. The acacia leans
as though to catch its own reflection.

Suspended from its branches are cups of nests
male weaver birds began threading

this morning in an intricate pattern of grass.
Each nest, an upturned teacup, warming.

Yellow weavers flash above the thorns protecting
these suspended shelters swaying over the pool.

Only the eyes and nostrils of twenty hippos are above water,
their mud purple skin slippery as they snort.

The herons watch the quickness of the weavers
and the slow slide of the hippos now moving

to climb the muddy bank as the sun retreats.
I won’t lose this love. I know what I have.

*

Carla T. Griswold is a literary artist whose work has appeared in journals, anthologies and on public radio. She holds an MFA from Pacific University, Oregon. Her work has been published in Prairie Schooner, San Pedro River Review, Community of Writers Review and Peregrine Journal. Her chapbook Missing Women: 1969-1993, was published by CJ Ink. She writes from an island in the Salish Sea where she cycles to find the best views of Mt. Rainier.

ONE ART’s 2026 Pushcart Prize Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2026 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Moudi Sbeity – Whale Shark
Morrow Dowdle – And Then, We Hear It
Veronica Tucker – Once, on the Oncology Floor
Hilary Sideris – Net Worth
Francesca Leader – Weights & Measures
Anne Starling – Conversations with My Son

§

Whale Shark

A whale shark, according to the five year old at
the climbing gym, is what happens when a whale
eats a shark. Just like that. It’s simple. Everything
is separate and when two things join they just
add to another. The shark doesn’t die in this story.
Nothing changes. The world is still safe, predictable.
The whale shark was his favorite tattoo, but now it’s
erased. My full sleeve tattoos don’t erase though,
and they’re the biggest ones he’s seen. Like really big.
Like really really big. I thought of how when sorrow
consumes joy they don’t simply add to each other,
but become poignant. And when gratitude spills
into grief together they create the conditions for
surrender. Or even how water and flour make bread,
not Water Flour. Some things get lost along the way.
But I didn’t tell him this; that a whale shark is actually
a shark, just a really big one. I wanted more to believe
in the simplicity of his world, in the authenticity of
how things join, then come apart, and in the process
nothing is changed, no one dies. We just continue to
appear and disappear into each other’s lives unaffected,
our innocence not yet capable of breaking.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a first-generation Lebanese-American currently enrolled in the Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling masters program at Naropa University. Prior to attending Naropa, they co-owned and operated a Lebanese restaurant in Salt Lake City, which served as a queer safe space. Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah in 2014. As a person who stutters, they are passionate about writing and poetry as transpersonal practices in self-expression.

Moudi’s poems have appeared in the following anthologies; Irreplaceable by Nan Seymour and Terry Tempest Williams (Moon In The Rye Press, 2025), Love Is For All Of Us by James Crews (Storey Publishing, May 2025), The Nature Of Our Times by Luisa A. Igloria (Paloma Press, Fall 2025). Moudi’s first book, Habibi Means Beloved, a memoir on growing up queer and stuttering in Lebanon, is expected to be published in late 2026 by University of Utah Press.

§

And Then, We Hear It

That is, I hear it, and then
she enters my bedroom.
Face stricken.

I heard it, she says. Something
booming. I don’t correct her,
don’t say shooting.

The book of essays stays
open on my lap. I’m reading
the scholar’s message

to the would-be confessional poet.
Their recommendation? Your verse
should be more gospel

than gossip. The only hymn
at present a ringing in my ears.
Aren’t you scared?

she asks. I tell again the saddest
lie—No, I reply. I cut her
loose in her fear, make

my face maddeningly flat.
And what could I say about
the stray bullet that found me

in Chicago. Or the ones
that fly by no accident
into a brother’s or sister’s

chest or head. Men do kill,
whether it’s bird or deer
or a queer who’s been known

to hold a red card, sitting
out here in the country
with my daughter,

where the KKK still lurks
in corners. Then there’s
the adrenaline of executive
orders, the line not far
from Klan to militia.
It’s probably someone

hammering, she says.
Yes, I say. I like that
explanation. I like us

to think that someone’s
out there in the dark
on a silver ladder, nails

sprouting from their mouth.
So eager to build a house
they could not wait for morning.

*

Morrow Dowdle is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the micro-chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Their work can be found in New York Quarterly, The Baltimore Review, Pedestal Magazine, and other publications. They run a performance series which features BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices. They are an MFA candidate at Pacific University and live in Durham, NC.

§

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.

*

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.

§

Net Worth

I watch the news & file
my statement of net worth,
sign a retainer stating I won’t date
until divorced. Mom loves Sam,

a man my age who lives with her
(locked out of his wife’s house,
his name not on the deed).
No one has ever treated her so well.

Ecstatic to have someone to cook for,
she wonders what sex will be like.
My father wasn’t nice. I have his eyes,
& the bags under them. At church

folks talk. Sam promises he’ll build
a mansion soon, maybe they’ll move
to Spain. Incredulous, she tells me
He even finds my phone.

*

Hilary Sideris is the author of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press 2020), and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press 2022.) Her new collection, Calliope, is now available from Broadstone. Sideris works as a professional developer for CUNY Start, a program for underserved, limited-income students at The City University of New York. She can be found online at hilarysiderispoetry.com

§

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.

§

Conversations with My Son

The longest one lasted twelve minutes.
I held my breath.
He was happy. He had something to tell me.
He was leaving.
He was almost gone.
I can still see us together at that moment,
Nick at thirteen, sitting on the sun porch floor,
playing with the dog’s ears, his whole face
open to me as he talked about his two new
friends, his new school. Open as the weed-
flowers he used to rush inside to bestow
when he was little. So then,
I wasn’t thinking about starting dinner,
or of the magazine article I’d set aside.
Or of the word he’d used— “mavericks”—
to describe the trio of classmates he
so proudly
claimed to lead. I was trying to be happy;
I was happy for him. The world would soon turn
unrecognizable, would become something
I couldn’t imagine. Not the world: of course
I mean life. I mean my life. From then on,
the world was smoldering, until everything
went up in flames. I could show you.
I have the ashes.

*

Anne Starling is a poet from Florida. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, and Tampa Review, among other journals. Her poem “Shoe Store” appeared in Missouri Review Online as Poem of the Week.

§

Smoke Inhalation by Samn Stockwell

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Smoke Inhalation

I give extra money to the workers
at the laundromat
because one died at 24 and
in remembering the contusions of her past
and the gap of her future,
I am pretending to believe
in the possibility of relief
for the other young women
folding my clothes.

Once a construction worker
gave me a dollar
as I dragged a cardboard
suitcase along the sidewalk.
He saw the utterness of my defeat
despite the childishness of my face.
Then as now, a dollar’s not enough
to buy respite from an empty sky.
It’s more like getting a postcard
showing the long loneliness
of the path ahead.

*

Samn Stockwell has published extensively. Her new book Musical Figures is published by Thirty West Publishing House. Previous books won the National Poetry Series and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir. Recent poems are in Pleiades and others.

Pennies by Julia Caroline Knowlton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Pennies

Now that none will be minted anymore,
what will I give you for your thoughts?

How will I know what is saved and earned,
how to be wise compared to pound foolish?

Will I give two of something else, lacking cents?
And what will fall from our coppery heaven?

*

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. Julia is Guest Editor for ONE ART’s IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems.

September Like Sunflowers At Sunset by Joemario Umana

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

September Like Sunflowers At Sunset

I do not know how to hold endings,
so I open the window and let September out
and another month in. The wind heavy with wingbeat
reminds me of all the days I have lent my body
to reclusion. In the field, sunflowers turn their faces
toward what is leaving, as if beauty is a lesson
in surrender. Memory unfolds the words of a friend, that
every dusk is a gate and the soul must walk through
it with open palms. Now look at my trembling hands
being a testimony. I want to believe that every goodbye
carries a seed, that even silence can bloom yellow
inside the throat of grief. That’s why I lean into this
evening light and whisper my ache into the fading air,
let the wind carry it like a secret and lay it among the petals
of sunflowers already leaning into sleep, as I learn
to gather light in my chest even as darkness
sharpens its knives. And maybe when night
finally comes, it will find me open,
my body a field where even sorrow
leans toward the sun.

*

Joemario Umana, Swan XVII, is a Nigerian creative writer and a performance poet who considers himself a wildflower. His works have appeared in trampset, Strange Horizons, LOLWE, Chestnut Review, Isele Magazine, Orange Blossom Review, Frontier Poetry, Uncanny Magazine, Poetry Sango-Ota, Poetry Column-NND and elsewhere. He tweets @JoemarioU38615.

SET THE BONE by Jillian Stacia

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

SET THE BONE

My great-grandmother fell off the roof
and broke her leg when she was six.
It would’ve been easier if you just died,

her mother said. A fractured leg
was a week’s worth of breakfast.
Hospitals are expensive. So are daughters.

Decades later, I still feel the throbbing
of that story. The ache locked inside
the ligament. The way it tenses in the rain.

Is it any wonder she ran into the shelter of a man
returning from war? Didn’t notice the blood
on his hands till she slid on a ring

and recognized the view from that old roof,
the sky another shade of the same bruised blue.
No one ever heals.

We don’t think to count the cracks,
the small breaks
that make up the women who raise us.

If a mother is a mirror, then the glass
is always cracked. All we see
is our warped reflection,

the twisted way we learn to weather.
Grind our teeth. Set the bone.
Every daughter throws stones

from the glasshouse her mother built.
I hold these legacies inside my hips.
I feel each storm before it falls.

Tell me, who among us doesn’t walk with a limp?

*

Jillian Stacia is the author of the upcoming poetry collection, SET THE BONE, published by Arcana Poetry Press. She was selected as an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize and short-listed for the 2026 Central Avenue Poetry Prize. She has been nominated for several awards, including 2025 Best of Net and the 2025 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has been featured in several literary magazines and anthologies. Find her online @jillianstacia to read more of her work.

Broken by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Broken

At the park, you stagger your way
through shrieks and shenanigans,

crying. Your arm, once a smooth
stroll from shoulder blade to fingertip,

now a mountain hike, its slopes
insurmountable. My heart landslides,

tumbles over the edge of your pain.
Whatever I was holding in my hand

jolts the earth. You walk towards us,
your mothers, trying not to cry, to tough

the bones back into place as though
your fortitude wore scrubs and a mask.

When children fall in films,
parents always falcon on the scene,

but not me. For a few fractured
seconds, I´m all knees and vertigo,

hanging upside down from a bar
of shock, unable to drop.

How many times have I, searching
for the rewind button, pressed

remorse instead? You, halfway
to the hospital by now. Your sister

plunged in friends´ hugs, inconsolable
as a skeleton. The sky birdless,

hunched in facepalm, my cheeks
slap-red. Your arm will heal, son,

but know this: there are moments
in a mother´s life that never

fuse back together.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in February 2025 by Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears in ONE ART, Variant Lit, The Westchester Review, Up The Staircase Quarterly, and others. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.

Navel Gazing by Kat Lehmann

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Navel Gazing

You are my first and most perfect
scar. As a child I wondered how deep
you went. Were you Mariana Trench
or river eddy? I would try to unfold you,
find the bottom of your wrinkles, unravel
your lint magic, but you remained
a wrapped gift, an endless tease.

When I was pregnant, you popped out
proud as a performer who practiced
for years to sing an aria onstage. It turns out
you were just a modest knob, crinkles
smoothed, and, dear cul-du-sac, you led
nowhere. Shallow pit. Fallow. Season passed.
But long ago we drifted, suspended

in the thick gel of the universe. Without care,
I sipped the surrounding syrup as if sampling
the atmosphere, the basin of my chest
coddled in density, my four limbs plus your one.
You were the tether to my floating balloon,
the bridge to a new physics. And in those days,
you led everywhere.

*

Kat Lehmann is a founding co-chief editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. She is a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize for her haiku collection no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song. Her mini-chapbook of sudo-ku (the multi-haiku form that she created) and is available as a free download from Ghost City Press. A former research biochemist, Kat lives in Connecticut with her family. https://katlehmann.weebly.com

Three Poems by Nancy Huggett

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

Wake Me in a Silly Stupid Way
(our daughter’s request, post-stroke, most mornings)

My husband is a pirate,
a patch, a breach of laughter
in the morning. Stealing
our daughter’s memory
of what she’s lost
from her waking eyes
so what remains is this ocean
of love that amuses. He steers
the stolen ship of what might have been
around the rocks, through shark-infested
waters that roil when her brain recoils
at sound and wobbly stairs and boundaries
not set by her—the flash and flare
of fists that harm the ones she loves,
the contrition that plunders her days.
He peg-legs in and pulls a parrot
from his pocket, feathers ruffed
from the climb upstairs, squawking
in some raucous rum-punched tenor,
jigging with the sunlight as it streaks
across the pine planks of her bedroom floor.
Other days he’s a wizard in a pointy hat
or a jester with a bell, or his own sweet
grinning goofy self that he magics
from yesterday’s debacle or last
night’s unkempt sleep. He saves her
daily from her own laments.
Switch-baits regrets for buried
treasure—this day and all its charms.

*

When our daughter with Down syndrome is diagnosed
with a rare neurodegenerative disease, I think of the skunk
after Maggie Smith

who, three nights in a row,
woke us with the burning sulphureous sting
of a stink and I ran around closing windows.
Like all those midnight runs to the ER
when our daughter kept having “fainting spells”
and turned blue. Then someone told me

it takes almost two weeks for a skunk
to refill their glands after spraying,
that if it happens back to back to back
you’re dealing with a bigger problem.

*

I Believe in the Night: A Caregiver’s Credo
(lines from Rilke, Book of Monastic Life I, 11)

I believe in the night, creator
of mirrors and monsters,

and in the stars, dead now
but dangling direction.

I believe in shadow’s
embrace. Dusky lover

of all the nations of my heart—
their bicker of sadness,

canticles of delight. I believe
in unfinished hems, threads

trailing through dark,
thin ribbons of fiddle

for fingers searching,
rosaries lost long ago

in the backwoods of hope
where brambles catch

starlight, glimmer like fireflies
always moving. I believe

in the dirt, in cicadas’
vast slumber,

the emergence of lovers,
bulbs, dew worms inching

refuse into friable loam.
I believe in the soil—

that darkness can make you sing.

*

Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Published in Event, Poetry Northwest, SWIMM, and Whale Road Review, she’s won some awards (RBC PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.

Beads by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Beads

There are days I long for long-ago days
and crave the cackled song of her laughter.
Why did she have to leave us so soon?
I see her in every bloom of iris, purpling
my side yard each June. Grief is
a forever fading bruise, a reminder
of our Kodachrome days, all those little
snapshots we carry, trinkets we unbury
from the drawer of memory—
a bracelet full of charms reminding us
how lucky we are to find one another,
each of us, a shimmering bead
on life’s great, miraculous string.

*

Shawn Aveningo Sanders’ poems have appeared in journals worldwide, including Calyx, ONE ART, contemporary haibun online, Drifting Sands, Quartet, Timberline Review, Cloudbank, Sheila-Na-Gig, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and many others. Her new book, Pockets (MoonPath Press, 2025) was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest. Shawn is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Touchstone Award nominee. A proud mom and Nana, she shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon, where they run a small press, The Poetry Box. When she’s not writing, you might find her in a shoe store hunting for a new pair of red shoes. (redshoepoet.com)

Two Poems by Denise Duhamel

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

POEM IN WHICH WE WERE YOUNG AND DUMB

When we moved into that teeny place
on Mulberry Street, a ceiling fan hung
in the middle of our miniscule living room.
Red wires, black wires. It jiggled from side to side.
I think it’s going to fall, I said. It scares me.
You thought I worried too much. I was afraid
to walk under the fan, even when it was off.
I called it a mistletoe of death. Sometimes
I stepped on the couch to avoid it
since the room was so small. One night as we slept
I heard a crash. The motor made a dent in the floor
and the blades spun off. It was the first time
I said I told you so. I hadn’t called the landlord
because I wanted to believe you. I wanted
to believe everything would be just fine.

*

POEM IN WHICH I RECONSIDER THE PASTORAL

I used to think nature poetry was dopey,
O’Hara and all that—I can’t even enjoy a blade
of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy…
But that’s before the trees started to disappear—
dead ocean pockets, hurricanes, and wildfires.
I am late to the party held in this forest,
but I am so glad all of you are still here,
bopping under the twinkle lights of fireflies,
the data-free clouds, the retro disco ball moon.

*

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.

At Machu Picchu by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

At Machu Picchu

Green fingers of the Andes point straight up.
Minty buzz of coca leaves chewed to a pulp
are supposed to help with altitude sickness.
They don’t. Far below, the brown river churns,
white with foam. We clamber over steep stones.
This is where Incan emperors came
for summer respite, high in cool clouds.
Here’s an outline of a granary.
And here’s where oracles
scried for omens. Did those wise ones foresee
the coming of Spaniards on horseback,
looking like great god-beasts
to ones who’d never seen riders before?
There’s a dizziness that comes
when worlds collide, like now,
when I’m in another country, half in another century,
imagining the sight of impossibly tall conquistadors
galloping up on a sleepy village.
I sink down on a warm boulder, easy mark
for an off-duty guard who tells me
he’s looking for an American wife
with lots of patience, because he wants to fly
“like a condor” to the U.S. But I’m already married,
and a sharp-tongued flatlander, alas.
He shrugs. Worth a try.
We watch a local woman, baby tied to her back
climb past, easy as water flowing uphill,
followed by a German with a selfie stick.
Since I landed in Cusco last week,
I’ve seen a bent-over old man
use a toilet plunger to haul himself along
steep streets, and a barefoot girl
in muddy rags, herding pigs in a ditch.
Mostly I’ve seen how mighty empires fall
and the descendants of kings are left
hustling tourists for tips.
The arc of history dissolves into mist.
“You can know every view by one view,”
my companion says, out of the blue.
He’s stuck in his life, as I am in mine,
and the terms are cosmically unjust.
High above us, condors circle the sacred mountain
cruising the updrafts like minor gods.

*

Alison Luterman’s five books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and Hard Listening. She also writes plays, song lyrics, and personal essays. She has taught at New College, The Writing Salon, Catamaran, Esalen and Omega Institutes and writing workshops around the country, as well as working as a California poet in the schools for many years.

not a letter to my father by Claire Jean Kim

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

not a letter to my father

kremlin was your nickname at work
because of the secrets you kept.
well, they didn’t know the half of it.
the down-low trips to beijing and pyongyang,
the rolls of c-notes you handed mom:
we’ll be rich one day. your husband is going
to be famous. by day, a professor in d.c.
by night, a man of international mystery,
an asian james bond, with the obligatory côterie
of female hangers-on. but it all came
to naught, didn’t it? the machinations
and assignations? except the wreckage; that part
was real. then, poetically, infirmity,
with your second ex-wife and third daughter
guarding your carcass out of spite,
as if anyone, anywhere would want a bite.
yesterday, i looked you up online
and saw you had died.

*

Claire Jean Kim is on the faculty at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on racial justice and human-animal studies. She is the author of three award-winning scholarly books. She began writing poetry in 2021, and her poems have been published in or are forthcoming in Rising Phoenix Review, Terrain.org, Tiger Moth Review, Anthropocene, Bracken, The Ilanot Review, Ghost City Review, The Summerset Review, Great River Review, TriQuarterly, Anacapa Review, The Lincoln Review, Arc Poetry, Pinch, The American Poetry Journal, North American Review, The Indianapolis Review, and The Missouri Review. The Lincoln Review nominated her poem “Things to do on a Fullbright fellowship in Japan” for Best of the Net in 2025. Terrain.org nominated her poem “Mastodon” for the Best New Poets anthology in 2024. The Missouri Review featured her poem “Amsterdam” as a “Poem of the Week” in January 2025.

Two Poems by Daye Phillippo

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

We shared a secret,

                                       the morning moon
and I, she who has just begun her wane
and I who am further along—waning
is not to be feared, it’s just the journey
toward being made new. Emptied to be
filled, and all, seasons on their wheel.
This morning’s sky, a faded, soft pastel
like the pink umbels of Joe Pye Weed
and the hostas’ lavender flutes, stirring
in the breeze. And out front, the pale
sweet pea blossoms, almost translucent
color of the moon, delicately edged
with lavender on vines that have, by July,
tendrilled to the top of their teepee
and now tumble over themselves, lavish
opulence of blossom and fragrance
in which I’m immersed as I clip flowers
to refresh the vases. Refuge of tendril
and vine where a hummingbird pauses
to rest, refresh herself before flying on.

*

Washing Your Face with a Pink Washcloth

      Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day.
      “Both Sides Now” – Joni Mitchell

Washing your face with a pink washcloth
dried on the line is like washing your face
with evening sky. Breathe it in before bed.
Blessed are those who walk to the barn
to secure chickens for the night, witness
a wide sky piled high with gray and white,
pink backdrop that didn’t last, dissolved
the way cotton candy and youth dissolve,
sugar away in the mouth, the way what you
expected this time of life to be is not,
yet, here you are, feet still on the ground,
head still in the clouds, washing your face
with sky and that song about clouds you
learned on piano when you were young,
only song you actually wanted to play.
Tonight you’ll rest your head on a cloud,
soft pillowcase fragrant with wind and
wondering, clouds and years, their colors
and shapes, trajectories, their brighten
and fade, accumulations and dispersals,
flashes and rumblings, just how much
clouds can hold back before the rain falls,
and their longstanding relationship with
wind that drives the storyline, beginning
to end. Stage right, stage left, third wall.
What will it all look like from the other side?

*

Daye Phillippo taught English at Purdue University. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected by ETS for inclusion in the AP English Exam. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Midwest Quarterly, LETTERS, One Art, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana where she hosts a Poetry Hour at her local library. Thunderhead, her first collection, was published by Slant in 2020. Her second collection of poems, Blue Between Owls, was awarded the 2024 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and is forthcoming from Codhill Press.

Two Poems by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

WAITING FOR THE MAIL

This is the week
this might be the day

like I said
yesterday also–

maybe tomorrow
or the day after–

balancing on
anticipation’s tightrope–

I love the air up here–
freed of everything–

disappointment,
even joy.

*

ANXIETY MORNING

You’re open-ended,
some necklace
that has lost its clasp.

You might be ploughing
across bogland, ground
precarious beneath you.

You’d be a great cypress
overlooking the Pacific cliffs if you could–
wind-sculpted by centuries, still held.

*

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

It’s 11:11 am on November 11 by David Colodney

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

It’s 11:11 am on November 11

Dad rises from his armchair, the mauve one
he sits watching Mets games all summer.
This year for the first time, I must help him stand.
He’s at attention, thrusting his willowed chest,
raising his right hand to his forehead in salute.
He stands erect for precisely one minute,
as he has each year since his honorable
discharge, only this year he is not in his Army
dress greens. This year, his arm trembles
like leaves in autumn’s wind, a branch arriving
in the form of a nurse guiding him back
to his seat as Mom arrives & caresses his cheek.
Dad never talks about combat, never shares
war stories. What is he thinking as he pays tribute
to the fallen he fought with, & the dead whose names
he never knew yet considered brothers? I stand
beside him, my hand on his shoulder, a paperweight.

*

David Colodney is a poet living in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is the author of Gen X Redux, forthcoming in 2026 from Main Street Rag Publishing, and the chapbook Mimeograph (Finishing Line Press, 2020). A Best of the Net and three-time Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in multiple journals. David currently serves as an associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal and is an ardent supporter of Liverpool Football Club. If you are looking for him, he can often be found at the Lion & Eagle Pub watching Liverpool matches.

How to Construct a Soul by George Franklin

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

How to Construct a Soul

First, you buy the kit from Target or Amazon.
I heard that Costco has them as well, and they
May be a little cheaper. There are people who
Say they all start out the same. I don’t know.
Mine looked like a hummingbird, and a friend
Told me his had blue feathers and a black beak.
There are even online discussion groups about
Ones with fur. Some of them are hard and
Shiny like volcanic rock—they may not

Have been shiny at the beginning though.
Most of it is what you do with them, the time
And care you put in, carving, combing,
Polishing. It’s not something everybody’s
Comfortable with, but it’s important to read
The instructions. Otherwise, you could make
A real mess of it. Let’s say you have one of
Them that’s part of a set. It’s not easy to figure
Out where the other could be. There are stories

About builders who travel as far as South Asia
Or Africa, just hoping to find it waiting for them,
Maybe in the gift shop of a museum, or in
A marketplace, hiding behind a stack of handknit
Rugs or a display of Turkish chess pieces. I try
Not to think how disappointed they must be
If it doesn’t happen. Whatever you start out with,
You’ve got to manage your expectations.
Start slow. Begin by holding your new soul in

Cupped hands. Don’t be surprised if you shake
A little. Let it get used to you, the warmth of
Your palms and fingers. When it trusts you, it
May let you start to groom it, smooth the sharp
Edges, give it small treats—understand, some
Will refuse food entirely. Those require extra
Patience. Others will make soft whining sounds.
Speak in a low voice and comfort them
Until they fall asleep. Sometimes, music helps,

Or you can show them paintings of landscapes—
Trees and green hillsides, cattle, sheep, maybe
A stream, silver brushstrokes on top of blue.
Building a soul isn’t a project to fill a dull
Afternoon. Realize, you’re going to be at this
For however long it takes, and you can’t
Hurry it up or force a soul to be anything
Other than what it is. Don’t expect it to look
Like the picture on the box.

*

George Franklin is the author of eight poetry collections, including A Man Made of Stories, and a book of essays, Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing (both Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Individual poems have been published in Nimrod, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, One Art, and New Ohio Review, among others. He practices law in Miami, is a translation editor for Cagibi, teaches poetry classes in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day.

Comp Lit by Erik Reece

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Comp Lit

My middle school English teacher mounted a long dark paddle,
drilled with holes, over the chalkboard in front of his class.
He called it the Black Death or the Black Mariah, or something
like that. We had thick orange grammar books out of which
we endlessly diagrammed sentences, knowing that a misdirected
participle might mean the application of that heinous paddle to
our hind end. Somehow, I came to love literature anyway. I came
to love words like susurration and Ohio. When I discovered
the poet Anna Ahkmatova, I loved that her name meant daughter
of the oaks, a name she invented because her father didn’t want
a poet in the family. What father does? Mine seemed perplexed,
eternally so, each Sunday morning by the furious rebuttals I wrote
on the church program to our pastor’s innocuous sermons.
Two years later, it was a short drive to a drunk driving charge
after I flailed along to the Fleshtones one night at Café LMNOP.
Friends from the college paper couldn’t go my bail, so I sat
in a cell till morning and said over and over, Anna Ahkmatova,
as if she might come through the walls, as if I was her lost son
shivering in a Russian prison under false arrest. Such, I’m afraid,
was the grandiose self-pity of my youth. It didn’t serve me well.
My passion for John Berryman convinced a Rhodes Scholar
to sleep with me once, after I drank all the liquor in her house,
but it didn’t stop the trimmers when I landed in an unironic rehab
called The Ledge. I quit reading John Berryman. I quit living
like John Berryman. I quit thinking that my father’s suicide
was a door he left open for me. I gave up the long day’s journey
into oblivion and shame. Now I just like to recite Issa’s poem:
The man pulling radishes   /   pointed my way   /   with a radish.
There’s a pretty easy sentence to diagram, and it makes me smile
to think about those pink radishes dangling from a farmer’s hand
as he sent the poet off along the road of his enduring loneliness,
always craving the one thing that might bring an end to craving.

*

Erik Reece is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Utopia Drive and Lost Mountain, which won Columbia University’s John B. Oakes Award for Outstanding Environmental Writing. His prose and poetry have appeared in Harper’s, The Oxford American, the Atlantic, Orion, and elsewhere. His collection of poems, Kingfisher Blues, was published this year by the University Press of Kentucky. He teaches writing at the University of Kentucky and is the founder of Kentucky Writers and Artists for Reforestation.

Four Poems by Laurel Brett

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

THE BAY AT BAR HARBOR

A life of never sleeping—
insomnia makes living
a disease.

I take up residence
on the balcony of the hotel,
glass doors only mute

sleeping sounds of breaths
rising and falling, the benedictions
of my family, oblivious to the night

I spend sitting on the chair buried
in the bowl of stars,
the bay breathing

in the darkness, too.
Silver begins
along the crevices of dawn

opening the curtain
to a hundred tiny islands,
mirrors of the firmament

shining in the curve of port,
a school of swimming fish,
flashing fins— birth of the morning

of the world. I can never explain
to the sleepers the vision
before me,

or my wild exuberance.
By the time they wake
the silver will have vanished.

*

MIMOSAS AND MILKWEED

How can you not adore the earth?
To love is to press your cheek against the ground
and lie on your back to gaze up
through mimosa flowers
becoming birds against the sky.

The milkweed I planted for monarchs
returned this year, and bloomed
pink as a surprise— a prayer against extinction.

*

DEATH CAN NOT CLAIM DAHLIAS

I’d been mourning dahlias—
another loss.

You, my gardener gone—
poison ivy an invading army.

Dahlias demand so much—
tubers dug up in autumn

stored in winter       replanted in spring.
JoAnn gives me a mason jar

of dahlias. One owns my heart—
the color of midnight

if midnight were maroon       the texture of joy
if ecstasy were velvet.

Larger than my palm —
petals a portal.

*

IN MONTREAL

I get lost in the bonsai
in the Chinese garden
at Le Jardin Botanique

until I can no longer tell
if the trees are huge or tiny.
My restless children

beg to see Le Biodôme
nearby — four habitats
of North America.

We huddle in the cold, watching
puffins and penguins
in their fake Antarctica.

We swelter in the rainforest
room, where my 12 year old son
points out a capybara, a mammal

with a blunt brown snout. He
imitates Tim Curry voicing
an old cartoon, English accent

and all— a large amphibious rat,
and adds in a joyful voice
the largest rodent in the world.

Later at dinner the waiter,
insists my daughter is Italian.
Je suis américaine, she insists,

practicing her New Yorker’s glare.
They have outgrown my habitat.
The lady concierge explains in French

that whales will rise tomorrow,
their glistening sunlit backs
will leap up from the St. Lawrence.

*

Laurel Brett is a novelist, essayist, and poet. Her work has appeared in SECOND COMING, EKPHRASTIC REVIEW, ECLECTICA among other outlets. She lives overlooking a harbor.

ONE ART’s December 2025 Reading

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ONE ART’s December 2025 Reading

Date: Sunday, December 7

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

Featured Poets: Amy Small-McKinney, Linda Laderman, Laurie Kuntz, Susan Michele Coronel

>>> Register Here <<<

FREE!

(Donations appreciated.)

About Our Featured Readers:

Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. She has received two Pushcart nominations and won the 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival First Poem Contest.  Her poems have appeared in publications including Spillway 29, Plainsongs, Redivider, and Fourteen Hills. In 2021 her full-length manuscript was a finalist for Harbor Editions’ Laureate Prize, and in 2023 another version of the manuscript was longlisted for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.

Learn more about Susan online at:

susanmichelecoronel.com/

Laurie Kuntz is an award-winning poet and film producer. She taught creative writing and poetry in Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. Many of her poetic themes are a result of her working with Southeast Asian refugees in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines after the Vietnam War years. In a past life, she was an ESL teacher and published two ESL texts that were used widely in ESL programs both nationally and internationally. She has published seven poetry collections. Her 8th book, a full length collection entitled Shelter In Place will be published in 2026 by Shanti Arts Press.

Learn more about Laurie online at:

lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

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.

Learn more about Linda online at: 

lindaladerman.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.

Learn more about Amy online at:

amysmallmckinney.com/

Piet Mondrian Does the Foxtrot by Susana H. Case

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Piet Mondrian Does the Foxtrot

It might seem inconsistent, this ascetic, celibate man
having a ball on the dance floors of 1920s Paris,
where he isn’t a stranger to the Charleston
or the foxtrot. But I feel the rhythm of the foxtrot
in my work, he says. A man obsessed with order
and grids could enjoy such a dance, its musical
geometry, as he maneuvers around a room
like one of his paintings unfolding. Mondrian loves

jazz rhythms—the foxtrot the first dance to use them—
and though initially that seems surprising, jazz
is not only freedom, but has structure too, musicians
returning to a lattice of chords, even as they improvise
within that framework. See him now, a wiry man,

as he enters the blank canvas of the floor
in round wire-rimmed glasses, his crisp white suit
without a splotch of paint. He’s desired
as a partner for his meticulous style, his joyful
expression. With every step he makes a line,
his movements formal, precise—like his brushstrokes.

*

Susana H. Case is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Books (2023), and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk & Cake Press (2022), Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award as well as Finalist for several awards. She won the Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition in 2002 for The Scottish Café, which was re-released in English/Polish as Kawiarnia Szkocka (Opole University Press, 2010) and in English/Ukrainian as Шотландська Кав’ярня (Slapering Hol Press, 2024).

Speaking To & Listening To Our Aging Bodies: A Workshop with Amy Small-McKinney

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Speaking To & Listening To Our Aging Bodies: A Workshop with Amy Small-McKinney

Workshop Leader: Amy Small-McKinney
Date: Tuesday, January 13
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern – Please check your local times.
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

>>> Register Here <<<

About The Workshop:

Aging does not mean becoming invisible. It is a transition with its own pain and gorgeousness. By letting poems surprise us, without censoring, we will listen to our aging bodies and speak to them.

About The Workshop Leader:

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.

Riffraff by Gene Twaronite

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Riffraff

A casual, under-the-breath
comment, though she might as well
have shouted it in my face.

Too bad we have to walk
through all these riffraff,
she said, entering the library
as she pointed to the people
heading for the entrance
with their luggage and bedrolls.

I looked at her and quietly
repeated the word as a question
that hung uselessly in the air.
The meeting was about to start
and there were things to do,
but I could still hear the word
with its terrible effing riffs,
heavily breathing
like a diminished thing
crouching at our door.

*

Gene Twaronite is a Tucson poet and the author of five poetry collections. His first poetry book, Trash Picker on Mars, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. His latest poetry collection is Death at the Mall (Kelsay Books). A former Writer-in-Residence for Pima County Public Library, he leads a poetry workshop for University of Arizona OLLI. Follow more of Gene’s writing at: genetwaronitepoet.com & genetwaronite.bsky.social

Sketchbook by Beverley Sylvester

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Sketchbook

“If you were an animal, which would you be?”
“A puffin.” I say it unapologetically.
It is my favorite animal.

On the borderlands of womanhood
where neither girl nor woman fits comfortably
on my tongue I wonder what of this,
my immortality, will be cataloged as juvenilia;
an indulgence of believing one day I will be a body
of things worth cataloging.

I write a letter with a pink pen
and do not feel ashamed.

I make a list of things that resemble
skeletons. I share it with no one.
It is a rich magic to see my own human
form amidst so many other natural,
beautiful, terrible things.

Through the word “other” I include myself
among natural, beautiful, terrible things.

I draw myself a puffin in pink pen.
It is imperfect, and I do not throw it away.
I title the image: a portrait of God.
I write it unapologetically.

I write this unapologetically.

*

Beverley Sylvester is a writer, composer, dramaturg, and musician. Her work is often rooted in the Southern Gothic genre where she interrogates the sticky, uncomfortable, and lovely relationships we have to death and dying, sexuality, spirituality, race, love, earth, politics, gender, rot, and embodiment in the American Deep South. Her writing has received the Artistine Mann Award in Playwriting, the New South Young Playwrights Award, and publication of poetry in Yellow Arrow Journal, among other recognitions. You can find her on Instagram at @bsylvester_arts or at bfsylvester.com.

Two Poems by Francine Witte

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Elegy for Waiting for You

The dark clock by the old train station
where the people come and go and me,
I’d stand there and I’d see that clock
with its hands that wouldn’t stop
even though you’d think they’d be too
weighted down with all the time
those hands were holding.

It’s easy to wait for love when you
know it’s on the next train or even
the one after that. But that was the problem.
You were never on any of those. I must have

known that but sometimes we will do anything
to breathe love alive. We will stand there
in a too-thin coat, shivering in the almost
dark, waiting forever for the train I wanted
so much for you to be on and which always
seemed moments away.

*

That night, moonless,

there was enough room Inside me
for my heart to bulge up, rocket
up to the space where I could still
see your goodbye eyes, flat as a galaxy map
Where stars are pressed against black velvet.
And like a galaxy, remembering you went into
The billions, of matter, of time, of how
Many years do the light from any of those
Dull, finished stars take to reach the earth.

*

Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte.

Power Steering by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Power Steering

When I was six years old,
my mother bought a used
two-tone Chevy Impala
with power steering for $200.
Power steering.
She said the words as if they possessed
magical powers. She tingled as she
described in vivid detail the newfound
ease of parking and switching lanes
without the resistance of the ancient
Buick she had traded in.

As a child, I couldn’t appreciate
the power of steering.
Even now, I tend to forget
that I have the power to steer
my thoughts from the dark
cratered roads where I too often
get lost or stall out. I forget
the sheer power of steering
when my brain wanders from one
overwhelming thought to the next,
and I find myself dwelling
on past wrong turns and flat tires.

Now when I turn the key in the ignition,
I try to remember that my mind
is not a driverless vehicle.
I have the power to steer my thoughts
in the direction of gratitude,
in the direction of hope
in the direction of joy.

*

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.

On Matriphagy by Franziska (Franzi) Roesner

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On Matriphagy

          matri- (mother)
          -phagy (to feed on)

When Harry Harlow left
his monkeys with their cloth
mothers, quietly closing the door
on the lab for the night,
the handkerchief in his breast
pocket a heavy-handed metaphor,
he did not return home
to his own children.

When Saint Martin gave away
just half his cloak
it was enough
to become holy.

In some centipedes
the offspring consume
their own mother,
swarming her and yanking
the dark flesh from beneath
her pale exoskeleton.

They say a woman’s body
does not fully recover
for eighteen months after giving birth,
a plant growing
pale leaves in acidic soil.

Mother Earth, we call it,
and take what we need.

*

Franziska (Franzi) Roesner is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. She was a poet first, though, and has returned to poetry recently. Her poetry has appeared in Rust & Moth, Stonecoast Review, SWWIM, and others. She lives in Seattle with her husband, two daughters, and cat.

November waits for you in the parking lot after the bar closes by Jennifer Blackledge

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

November waits for you in the parking lot after the bar closes

because it likes to pick a fight
rattles around like the last two pills in
a bottle labeled zero refills

it dims the lights and
rolls its eyes when you object
invites you to dinner but clears your plate before you’re done

sneers and shakes your trees bare
opens your gate and lets your dog out
because it likes to hear you cry for lost things in the dark

scoffs when you put your lights up early
in the hope they’ll guide you back from the edge
November has warned you:
it scrabbles and scurries in your walls
every chilly night

November dangles the last handful of
red leaves over the abyss
and tells you to ask nice

*

Jennifer Blackledge is a Detroit-area poet who works in the automotive industry. She is the recipient of the 2025 Zocalo Public Square Poetry Prize and her work has appeared in publications like JAMA, Rattle, I-70 Review, Kestrel, and more. You can find her work at www.jenniferblackledge.com.

Life Cycle by CL Bledsoe

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Life Cycle

First, I was the wind, turbulent and unknown,
sneaking into gardens to steal shadows,
touching your hair while you rushed, late
for work, yearning only to be clear of here.
I would run through my days, eating the sun
and writing letters to the moon. It was bliss.
It was nothing at all. Then I hardened
into stone, loved and mean, I understood
nothing and wanted even less. After enough
years had passed, someone threw me
into the eye of beauty. I rippled, wanting
for the first time to know. Afraid of the wind
lest it steal something. When the sun came out,
I melted into sulfur, clean as a wound.
When you whispered my name, I suddenly
understood: there’s nothing to learn. Only be.

*

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novels If You Love Me, You’ll Kill Eric Pelkey and The Devil and Ricky Dan. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his kid.

Three Poems by Ann E. Wallace

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Funeral Director, Spring 2020

He bites his lower lip, clasps
his hands behind his back, and steels
his legs into a wide stance, knowing

one brimming tear holds power to unleash
the others welled up and waiting.
It used to be the unexpected

that disrupted his balance—the new suit
purchased two sizes too small
for a teen struck down in the road,

the calm words of a mother
to her grown child laid out before her, speaking
of tomorrow as if nothing had changed,

or the collapse and despair of another
who knew everything had.
But in these endless days

of horror when illness envelops
and makes a home in our city—
when the morgues are overflowing,

and the bodies are stacked and held
three weeks for burial, when the caskets
are closed and families could not kiss

or send off their dear beloved—he works
in solitude, carrying the grief of legions.
He removes the tubes and bathes

the bodies of the deceased, dresses
each one in clothing brought
by loved ones, set their hands

and combs their hair, placing them
in caskets their families would never open,
and the mounting waves of sorrow

swell high and higher, until they crest
and the rushing waters wash,
and wash, and wash over him.

*

Emergency Room Visits in March 2020

When they turned the pediatric emergency room
into a COVID triage area in the early days,

decals of monkeys with curling tails,
loping elephants, spotted giraffes grazed

the walls. The doctor who took my vitals
was tired, hadn’t seen his kids in two weeks.

The hospital prepared to admit me, then sent
me home after two rounds of bloodwork and testing.

They needed the bed. Three days later, I returned
on my 50th birthday, barely conscious,

bypassed the children’s unit, and was wheeled inside
where the serious cases were handled.

The aide hesitated to help me onto the bed,
offered a gloved hand only after I pleaded,

and my new doctor would not step inside
my curtain. He poked his masked face

through the gap in the fabric to ask
my cell number. He wrote it on a Post-it

and backed away like I was a caged tiger.
I never received his call.

*

Cleared to Leave

My face is pale and splotchy when my ex-
husband picks me up at home, like death
blooms within me. The weather, April

dreary. Jason drives me to the emergency room—
my third hospital this spring. I wear a pink
woolen cap, loop my oxygen line around my ears,

tuck it behind my glasses, hook the cannula
under my nose. I lug the tank inside
and sit in a folding chair in the makeshift

waiting room—the department had been under
renovation when the virus hit. The work
on the building has stopped. The work of saving

lives has not. My doctor called ahead
for a lung scan. The ER doctor takes my blood
and vitals but never orders the scan.

I rest in my thin, faded hospital gown,
in the overwhelmed ER, so much like the others,
each one unique in its chaos. Cleared to leave,

I dress slowly, layer by layer—shirt and pants,
sweater, jacket, hat. Untethered from the hospital
oxygen, reconnected to my emergency supply

from home, I hoist the tank. Alone, undirected,
I stumble through the halls, carry my heavy load,
search for the unmarked exit. Outside in the cold,

I realize I left my glasses on my hospital bed.
They are gone. Per pandemic policy, thrown
into the trash with all other personal effects.

*

Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey and host of The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants. Her second poetry collection, Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul, was published by Kelsay Books in 2024. She has previously published work in ONE ART, Thimble, Halfway Down the Stairs, Gyroscope Review, Wordgathering, and other journals. You can follow her online at AnnWallacePhD.com and on Instagram @annwallace409.