Month: May 2026

Three Poems by Jackleen Holton

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The Horse Returns

Woken from a dream, deep
as a black lake—
a familiar silhouette appears
in the doorway on the first
day of the new year,
my daughter, born in the horse
year, comes into our room,
afraid of the lightning
flashing in the high windows,
the whip-crack of thunder.
She crawls in between us
as she hasn’t done in years—
never has she known a storm
like this. The clock says
it’s the moment of the horse,
the eclipse that ushers in the year.
Bright fissures in the sky
illuminate the room as she burrows
in, her long, thin legs uncertain
as a foal’s, and cold against mine.
Lightning striking a person is rare,
my husband says. You have to be
the highest point for miles.
I remember my first raging
storm. I was near the same age
when I went to my mother
for the last time.
So, I lie awake, listening
to her breath as it softens,
the rain between thunderclaps
in the just-born year.

*

Challenger

The day the space shuttle exploded
over and over, its gray debris falling
like the feathers of a struck bird,
back down to earth,

I watched in one of the millions
of classrooms darkened
for the occasion,
our desks semi-circled

around a wheeled-in television
as the nation’s collective gasp
dissolved into breathless
silence, the bright

comet-stream of failure
unfurling in real-time.
And Mr. Warner,
eleventh grade English,

who had made it to the final
round of the competition
to be the teacher sent up
on that doomed flight,

slammed his fist down hard
on his desk, a guttural
cry escaping him
as he shot out of the room.

The rest of the semester,
after the explosion
of his rage—
against the government,

against incompetence
in all its myriad forms—
had been extinguished, only grief
loomed over the classroom

he mostly kept in darkness,
allowing us to do as we pleased
as he leaned back, staring up
past the ceiling.

Because what’s the point of anything
once you’ve seen the ashes
of a dream so nearly grasped
fall like a spent firecracker over the ocean?

Nineteen-eighty-six emerged again
the other day, with news of divers
pulling from the sea
a panel of that spacecraft.

While this week, another rocket
is readied for takeoff. NASA says
that soon a woman astronaut
will set foot on the moon.

I haven’t seen Mr. Warner in years,
but today at my kid’s school assembly,
on the playground on a windy
November morning,

I’m remembering him,
and for the first time in decades,
hand over my heart
like a child, I recite

the pledge, lips moving
silently as if in prayer
as I gaze up at the chalk rubbing
of a daytime moon, half-full.

*

Geometry

was simple, surprisingly,
as even the basic math classes
hadn’t been. So easy
that the thick-as-pigshit
footballers came to me for answers.
I tutored a few, enjoyed unparalleled
popularity, though most were content
with a crib sheet on their laps,
or bobbing up and down
behind me in the back of the room.
I was great at intersecting
shapes, they all praised me.
And there were moments
when it appeared, the geometry
of the sacred, clicking into place
and lighting up like a power grid
on the ceiling above us.
The rhombus, I knew instinctively
the parallelogram, the isosceles.
I remember it so clearly: that little study
room behind the library. I look into it now
as if it were an enchanted egg,
and there I am, shining
as I instruct two corn-fed boys
how to triangulate.
I got not one but several A’s that year.
But then came algebra, the numbers
nothing like the angles. I couldn’t
solve for x, didn’t know why the y
kept changing, kept jumping
around on the page,
but the worst thing was that nobody
came to me for the answers
I didn’t have anymore.

*

Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies “The Giant Book of Poetry”, “California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology”, and “Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life”. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Sun and others.

Anniversary by Sydney Lea

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Anniversary

           …the pride and confidence of an absolutely invulnerable stupidity.
                     Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel”

When I look through the glass in our kitchen wood stove’s door,
and when I’m sufficiently tired, as I often am
in my later years, shapes can suggest themselves
and despite myself, I imagine they’re telling me something.

This morning, for instance, I made out a bouquet of flowers.
hot-orange dahlias, I thought, the kind my mother
started raising in her young widowhood.
Last evening after supper, I pictured a church

like the Roman Catholic one commanding a hill
above Lake Memphremagog, its architecture
elegant, a sign that you’re close to Québec,
where you’ll leave the Protestants’ plain white clapboard behind.

On some fairly recent day, I saw forked tongues
of fire, like the ones described in the Book of Acts
that told the disciples their words now bore the spirit
of God. But it isn’t Pentecost here. It’s winter.

These visions, to glorify them by such a name–
I wonder where they come from. What connects them?
I assume they must have something in common because
I’m the one, after all, to whom they present themselves.

I know that I must ward off self-importance,
that mine are not some prophet’s promptings,
no matter my wishes. My father died today
precisely sixty years back. I’ve mourned him since.

If my tongue were cleft and ablaze with godly power,
I’d speak to him. Maybe those wood stove flowers
(were they lilies, not dahlias?) and the spire on that looming church
are what brought his funeral to mind. Mere speculation.

It’s sad that everything’s speculation now.
It wasn’t always that way. There was a time
when in blissful arrogance, I fancied
that I could label all my world’s components,

interpreting each and every one exactly.

*

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.

Three Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

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Bad News Comes in Threes

I found out my spine keeps narrowing into a funnel,
pinching my spinal cord, like pressing two fingers together,
cutting off blood circulation. I require surgery.
Can I handle surgery at my age? My spine pretzels
into a question mark like a contortionist,
asking questions only a surgeon can answer:

whatever happened to that boy
who climbed up the spine of a tree, into the whirlpool of light
and maple leaves? Or that boy swinging on a rope
over a curved river, letting go, ker-splashing,
surgically slicing open water, as it zipped up over me,

only to discover, much to my chagrin, the hard, recklessness
of boyhood that I could swim for the life of me.
I couldn’t float, and sank to rock bottom, Perhaps, I died,
fished out, spewing water out of my lungs.
Boys are notoriously born without sense of risk or caution.

I never noticed the wear and tear on my body, too manly
to admit defeat, to know when beaten into submission,
but when my primary doctor noticed my hands tremoring
like wind-tossed leaves, she sent me to a specialist.

Now, I have three diagnosis I never had before, each one
cascading worse than the first, like a river over rapids,
like the one I plunged into without thinking about my actions
or reactions. I believe all boys are born with jarred brains.

My nerves have bad and mixed messages, telling me
I am not worthy of this body. My muscles twitch and buckle,
and earthquake with epilepsy. I feel like drowning in currents
of electrical displacement, body jumbling and thrashing.

I recall, once, watching as a car was unable to stop,
smacked a dog, snapping its spine. I could hear the sudden,
sickening thump-whack, a sound lasting weeks afterwards,
the body, crying and promising to taking it to a vet.
As far as I knew, the dog had no owner, no one to return it to,
no known address. From there, the road never went straight.

I’m half-listening to my doctor about the second worse news, ever,
and I’m still wondering about that nameless dog.

*

Kingfisher

A kingfisher’s eyes peers deep
into the mystery of water and the illusion
for a fish’s actual location,
knowing patience rewards those that seek inward.

How quiet its strike, and the more intense quiet afterward.
Patience begins with mindfulness,
intense concentration, and seeing beyond this world.

The blue gill doesn’t stand a chance.
Nature contains both violence and calm.

When the bird’s beak thrusts into the aquamarine water,
its spear finds center mass.
Its beak’s spear shows no mercy,
the water does not shiver with grief.

This disturbance ends abruptly, and quickness crests.
Even my attention focused through binoculars
gets startled by swiftness and resolve.

Water covers up the evidence of death.

My intake and released breath make the kingfisher’s glance,
daring me to judge it
or its need and purpose.

The kingfisher goes back to work, studying for movement.

This world maintains its strange balancing act.

As a medic, I had to gauge who to rescue during war.
I had to decide who wouldn’t make it.
Am I any better than nature?
Is it always about trading one life for another?
Is it about solitude getting re-distributed elsewhere?

This world can include risk or survival.

Everywhere has an element of the quickening,
when moments happen too fast and we’re forced to decide.

*

Why Fishing Lures Are Alluring

I found a tackle box at a garage sale,
and my first thought was to go fishing,
even though I lived miles from water.
The water I knew was a swollen creak
that ran faster than deer from a hunter.
The water ran like it was in panic.
It looked as massive as the Mississippi River.

I never wanted to fish until I saw the box,
opening it like a pirate’s treasure chest,
finding lures flashing back light and colors.
I never considered their hooks dangerous.
All I needed included a fish pole, fishing wire,
a can of worms, an empty bucket to fill with fish.

The box cost a dollar, and I had one
burning a hole in my pocket.

I begged my dad to take me to the lake.
Dad, it’d be fun, we can go fishing together.
When he refused, I deflated like a balloon,
however, no one could stop my stupidly.
I peddled all the way to the state park,
and saw the toll collector, chose a deer trail,
sneaked in. I was bound and determined.

I blanched and almost passed out
trying to hook a worm. I thought I heard
it screaming in pain. It turns out the lake
had no fish when it’s out of season,
and water was about to freeze over. It turns out
I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is editor for Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022; He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize. His 24 full-length collections include Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024). He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize for “One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away in Search of Peace”. Forthcoming is “Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence” (Bainbridge Island Press, 2026).

Life Coach by Greg Stewart

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Life Coach

Once I met with a life coach
whose first hour was 100% free!
During this time my car was towed

The guy at the impound lot suggested
“Next time maybe read the fucking signs”
which was not free

As it turns out
the most useful advice
I heard that day.

*

Greg Stewart is a Canadian poet based in British Columbia. He writes and performs regularly, and has twice been a featured poet at Poetry Floodlight in New Westminster, where he continues to be active in the local poetry community. This is his first publication.

Left Turn by Kevin J. Fellows

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Left Turn

Ever since the accident, I refuse
to make left-hand turns.
It’s always my fault.

The oncoming: unseen, speeding
to strike me; retribution
against my presence,
spins me against the world,
frightening the dog.
No one hurt, but the marks remain.
The turn is always my fault.

*

Kevin J. Fellows is a former technologist but has always been a writer. His poetry is forthcoming in 300 Days of Sun, and has appeared in 34 Orchard, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and others. Kevin also writes fiction and essays.

Baby Hairs by Abigail Wasserman

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Baby Hairs

I study each unruly flyaway,
trace it back to its rooted center—
to the weaning of each child,
the gut punch of the hormone drop,
hair clumping in the shower drain,
my heart
spilled with all that love.

Now I hold each of your small hands—
trace the gentle creases.

I could match each wisping strand
to a morning spent with you
warm in my lap,
or when I cradled your
soft baby fuzz in my palm.

I could mat the hairs down gently,
handle them
like fragile artifacts,
hope they never grow out—
no, hope
I’m ready
when they do.

*

Abigail Wasserman is a writer and educator based in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the New York Times “Tiny Love Stories” and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, wildscape. literary journal, and little somethings press.

MY MOTHER IN MAY by Andrea Potos

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MY MOTHER IN MAY

As the crabapple blossoms
blazed pink and more pink,
she began her leaving.
As the lilacs and honeysuckle
began spreading their perfumes into air–
her fatigue deepening,
her steps slowing, the undetected
lesions in her brain burgeoning,
her conversation lessening
as if she needed to be still, listen
for another door opening
as the evening light kept lengthening.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Presence of One Word, and Her Joy Becomes, both from Fernwood Press. A new book entitled The First Good Poem is forthcoming from Fernwood in late 2027. andreapotos.com

My Daughter with MS Has Another MRI by Terri Kirby Erickson

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My Daughter with MS Has Another MRI

For Gia

Soon my daughter will slip into those loose
pajamas sans her silver earrings, necklaces,
and bracelets, as well as the funky shoes she
often finds in thrift stores. She will lie down
on a narrow table which slides into an MRI
with an IV filled with contrast dripping into
her vein. And surrounding her beloved body
that was once part of my body and still feels
that way, is a giant magnet making intermit-
tant loud noises that sound just like a herd
of stampeding horses. So my daughter will
close her eyes and pretend she’s someplace
else—perhaps a beach in Corolla where wild
mustangs roam, as images of her brain and
spinal cord are magically recorded. For me,
this is a time for prayer, for wanting to trade
places with her, for asking that she be healed.
I will approach the throne of my God on my
knees, every part of me a supplicant, a beggar
for mercy. New lesions, if there are any, may
mean more disability, pain, and suffering for
my throwback sixties yet born in the eighties,
bread-baking, bead-wearing flowerchild with
her dreamcatcher collection, piercings, and
colorful tattoos—and the kind of inner light
that no amount of contrast could ever capture.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Light That Follows Us Home (Fall, 2026, Press 53). Her work has received multiple honors, including the International Book Award for Poetry, Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Atlanta Review International Book Award, Gold Medal in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award, Board of Regents Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and many more. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including Aethlon, “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, JAMA, ONE ART, Poetry Foundation, Poet’s Market, Rattle, Sport Literate, The Christian Century, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily among many others. She lives with her husband in North Carolina.

Voyeurism by Lisa Jensen

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Voyeurism

The fog is singing. It might be
a love song. It might be
that every droplet of water

has lungs
and wings
and a heart

pounding

just for this
piece of ground.

Clouds kiss the mud.
I’m caught

between,

trying not to gape,
unable to turn away,
unable to still

my thrumming heart,
unwilling to clip
my sudden wings.

*

Lisa Jensen is a poet and novelist from Nicholasville, KY. She writes the poetry Substack “Wild Ground,” and her debut novel, “All Is Well,” was published in 2025.

Leaving the Music Behind by Yvonne Morris

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Leaving the Music Behind

On occasional Saturdays, my father made pancakes
the size of dinner plates. Sometimes, he’d take down
a harmonica from the kitchen cabinet, play a perky tune
and bounce along to its jittery notes. A break for him
from his workweek at the glass factory. I asked him
on one such morning where the harmonica had come
from as my mother stood nearby. Her eyes narrowed
and her voice barbed, she answered for him. He took it
from an abandoned house in Germany during the war.
Dad’s face shifted into shadow. In that moment, I pictured
another family gathered, listening to a song I didn’t recognize
but knew. I wondered where they were now. Where had they
gone, leaving the music behind?

*

Yvonne Morris’ poetry has appeared in Beach Chair, Eclectica, ONE ART, The Galway Review, The Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. She is the author of Busy Being Eve (Bass Clef Books) and Mother was a Sweater Girl (The Heartland Review Press). She lives in Kentucky.

The Red Piano by Barbara Daniels

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The Red Piano

Something rattles the windowpanes,
flings noisy bursts of gold, red, gold.
I can’t tell gunfire from fireworks.

At a bar, my friend Al lived through
armed robbery, no problem he thought.
Sirens veer into my neighborhood,

amping my heartbeat. But what I hear
as emergency is only the township’s Santa
waving from a slow-moving firetruck.

One year Al set off New Year’s explosions
in our backyard. I have old photographs—
a drink in Al’s hand, his wife Jeanne and me

in our fluffy hairdos, the men not gray yet,
not really. The neighbor who bragged
about guns moved away, leaving his son

and a rotating team of girlfriends.
Another neighbor had her dog
on a leash when a car hit and killed it.

In his last year, Al climbed to the roof
to clean gutters. Let’s go to Paris,
he said then. Perhaps if I kneel and press

my ear to a heating vent, I’ll hear
the old red piano, everyone singing,
toasting, the only explosion our laughter.

*

Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas. She also wrote Rose Fever and four chapbooks: Moon Kitchen, Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and The Woman Who Tries to Believe. Her poems have appeared in Good River Review, Book of Matches, Neologism, Rust & Moth, Lake, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere.
She received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Three Poems by Connie Soper

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Cynthia’s Gift

Sometimes, when the grains of my own private grief
sift through me like sand,
or I am saddened again by the loss of her, I remember
how she gifted me this purple glass
for no reason at all.
It has no use, she said—
won’t hold flowers, can’t pour wine—
yet it pools a lavender essence, mellow
and dusky by the end of the day, color of creeping violets
on their way to summer.
It mirrors itself in the window,
veined with shades of a Murano sunset—
tender on the eyes, bathed in an amethyst wash.
She was luminous that way, bright as the lip of an orchid,
elegant in dress and demeanor.
A lilac-perfumed aura wafted in her wake,
until she slowly faded from herself
and no longer knew my face or name, forgetting, too
what she had given me.
Just something beautiful to look at, she said.
That’s all.

*

Threshold

When I ask where she wants me to leave
her earthly remains, she won’t say, as if

naming a place will take her there sooner.
My mother won’t speak of unpleasantries,

such as the inconvenience of dying.
She won’t talk of hymns, prayers, or the afterlife

she’s bound to enter. Yet here she is,
wearing the weathered skin of a century,

hovering in the purgatory of half-life,
one foot wedged into the other side.

I could shake her ashes onto the beach
where she’ll blend into beige, becoming

the landscape itself. I could recycle her
to nurture a tree, leaving a greener planet.

An urn on the mantle, a crypt, a proper chiseled stone.
It doesn’t matter where she’s left—

she’ll come back. Not in the resurrection
of tulip bulbs proving spring,

but in the stubborn roots of dandelions
I can never yank out.

In her handwriting scrawled on a recipe—
the pie crust only she could make.

I’ll see her face reflected in the mirror, my features
softening into hers.

I can take her to the threshold, karma-kissed and letting go.
Then it’s up to her.

*

Junk to Treasure

Nobody looks at old slides anymore,
those little squares rotating on a Kodak carousel—
Grand Canyon to nameless bridge to yet another monument.
Now boutique shops repurpose them
into found art—lamps with a retro glow,
vintage Christmas ornaments next to the bell-bottoms
in a secondhand store. Junk to treasure.

I take a box from the closet shelf,
hold a slide to the light. Delphi in December—
sky a blue flamboyance over Mt. Parnassus.
Such a tiny image for an enormous place.
I am stepping off the bus from Athens,
knapsack full of books, sweater and apples.
I wonder now who snapped this memory,
then handed the camera back. That’s his shadow,
a dark blotch on the sidewalk,
just before he disappeared into the vortex
of his own epiphany.

Whatever I saw, wherever I stood—
crumbling columns at the ancient temple,
taverna, plaza, dusty paths pocked
with goat hooves—I wanted nothing more
than to hold those moments close, like a face
memorized by touch, one you think will never change.
Here she is, that girl I had forgotten,
arriving all over again.
Ready to become something new.

*

Connie Soper is a poet living and writing in Portland, Oregon. She likes to visit small towns, hike, and walk along Oregon’s public beaches. Many of her poems are inspired by these experiences as well as other travels, and have appeared in Ekphrastic Review, Catamaran, Cider Press Review, Sky Island Journal, ONE ART, and elsewhere. Her first full-length book of poetry, A Story Interrupted, was issued by Airlie Press in 2022.

Three Poems by Betsy Mars

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Gentrification

Upon the brick wall,
a word.
Five quick passes
of the paint roller
and it became
a nasturtium, an assertion,
an asterisk, a footnote.

*

Mexico City

the Matador swings his cape
my eyes at thirteen
looking for an exit

*

Tooth Fish

In the news one gristly story
takes me back to Brazil,
and me, five or six—the first time
I imagined a world of threat –
an eddy of piranhas, all teeth,
beneath dark water, just waiting
for a small girl to dip in a toe.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Betsy’s poems are widely available online and in print, most recently in ONE ART, Calul, Book of Matches, and the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered The Motown Poetry Review (Madville Press). Her photos have appeared in various journals, including Spank the Carp and Rattle. Betsy has had two chapbooks published, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-authored with Alan Walowitz. Additionally, through her publishing venture (Kingly Street Press) she released two anthologies, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife and Floored. A full-length book, Rue Obscure, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Living Cave by Lisa Angelella

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Living Cave

Given moisture
and time, even limestone
oozes like squeezed fruit
or hot candles
into stalactites,
that hard rock dripping
like summer off
a wet bathing suit
into puddled stone,
that rigid ceiling
reaching down
like melting
scoops over the cone,
or clumping along
the walls and ground
in karst-hard gobs,
though the shifting’s
so slow, loosening
just half an inch
per hundred years,
that our mammal eyes
can never watch
that budge within the rock.

*

Lisa Angelella’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Willow Springs, Tar River Poetry, Rust+Moth and Stoneboat. She teaches English at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa.

The World was moving and she was right there with it and she was— by Victoria Nordlund

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The World was moving and she was right there with it and she was—

here in Bridgeport at the Hartford Healthcare Amphitheater
right behind the 7 ft man at the David Byrne concert
& he was the only one standing in Section 202
& he was raising his hands high in the air,
Drifting this way and that & he reminded her
of that waving inflatable tube creature in front of
used car dealerships & his shirt had ill-drawn clouds with an orange sky
& she was starting to rise but didn’t want to disrupt
the rows behind her & she was wanting to say her piece,
but he had all the rights,
& he was part of every one of her videos
so she stopped recording, wished she had a pleasant elevation
& she was outside & she couldn’t believe it was already May
& she could only see his sunset
& she could almost hear the highway breathing
beyond the Metro North train that she was
watching go by & she almost talked herself into giving up
her tickets for tonight because she heard
it was going to rain & it was a long drive up I95 & the Hantavirus had become a thing
& she was comfortable making excuses & letting her days go by
& she was trying to float now above the anger she felt for this fool
because she heard David Byrne say love & kindness
are the most profoundly punk things we can do
& she was like damn the world sucks so bad right now
& he was turning around & around & shouting the wrong lyrics
& when he sat down between song 11 and 12
& everyone beside her & behind her cheered,
& she realized she hadn’t laughed like this in a long time
& she began moving into the universe of the stage that she could finally see,
started to forget his head was ever in the way,
& when he bolted back up a few songs later,
the same as it ever was,
she knew he heard Section 202’s collective groan
& she was confident he didn’t care.
She decided this was Life During Wartime,
& she was singing along to every verse,
Hey Hey Hey— & she was
recognizing this was once in a lifetime, & she was
missing enough to feel alright—

*

Victoria Nordlund’s poetry collections Wine-Dark Sea and Binge Watching Winter on Mute are published by Main Street Rag. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize Nominee, whose work has appeared in Rust+Moth, Chestnut Review, trampset, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com

Perfection by Ann Kriselle

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Perfection

Why do you crave to be whole?
We don’t call the moon ugly,
When it’s not full

*

Ann Kriselle is a full-time Marketer and part-time Writer from India. She is also a trained singer who has competed in multiple national-level competitions. You can find more of her works on instagram.com/ann_kriselle and annkriselle.substack.com

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

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Morning at the Jetty

Between the deluge
and the storm to come,
I pause to praise the blue
leaking through dank clouds.

Praise too, the pelicans
diving for breakfast,
the neighbors who wave hello,
fishermen casting lines
into the roiling sea below.

Between the deluge
and the storm to come,
I praise this life as given,
to quell my daily fear
the worst may yet appear.

* 

Progress (Post Intraocular Surgery)

The fruit flies
I swat from my eyes

are smaller sized
than the house flies

from yesterday, which
were smaller sized

still than the crows
from the day before.

*

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.

Icarus by Ellen Rowland

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Icarus
                   After Bryony Littlefair

When you feel better from this someday— and you will— you’ll stop blaming the sun. A wide morning ray will slant through the window, turning rain spots to sequins, and you’ll name the colors. The million greens of the tree line will seem sharper against the white sky. You’ll feel the comfort of the cat against your back and the weight of the blanket in blessed sleep, the scald and steam of shower as it wakes you to skin. You’ll lay out a proper breakfast, open the bright bergamot jam, spread it with a shiny spoon. And you’ll taste again. You’ll taste sun. In the play of light, you’ll see two guitars on the wall—one wooden, the other its shadow—each beautiful. Though there is still no music, there is the memory of a strum. Not that any of this will rewind the fall or heal the distance, but maybe the dust motes suspended in light will dance slowly enough for you to forget, even for a moment, that he had no wings.

*

Ellen Rowland is a writer and editor who leads small, generative poetry workshops on craft and form. She is the author of two collections of haiku and a bi-lingual book of haiku and tanka. You can find her writing in places like One Art, Sheila-Na-Gig, Braided Way, Humana Obscura, and several anthologies, including “The Path to Kindness” and “The Wonder of Small Things” edited by James Crews. Her full-length poetry collections include No Small Thing (Fernwood Press 2023) and In Search of Lost Birds, recently published by Kelsay Books. She lives off the grid with her family on a small farm in Greece. Connect with her on Instagram , Facebook, and Substack.

Two Poems by Alina Kalontarov

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ACROBATICS

In the underbelly of grief
is more grief and beneath that
lies the pit of your stomach.
Daylight brings the catastrophe
of thought and you think
you are always just a thin veil
away from the unthinkable.
But you rise and rinse
the silt from your hair,
your teeth, your bones.
You bottle the balm
of your body and get to work
kicking death like a stone
further down the road.
You come to believe it
somehow wise to chart out
the future with old maps.
(A carousel must be a metaphor
for something, after all.)
You get so deft at the acrobatics
of survival that you learn
to abandon a place
without ever leaving.
You do not notice the sunbeam
that has crawled all day
across the floor just to sit
at your feet.

*

RATIONALE FOR A KISS YOU DIDN’T WANT

Because the air was thick as spit
and he groped your left breast with butter
fingers during a matinee so you took that
to mean he’s laid a claim to your heart.
Because this is how you practiced opening
yourself in the cheap mirror tacked
to your closet door, its silver lick plastic
and pushing back against your softest parts.
Because your father left you stranded
in a man’s world and humility gathered
her skirts the day your mother named you
slut. Because why not. Because you’d slurp
just about anything to dislodge the terror
from the mauve of your throat and if you keep
his face busy he might forget to reach
for the other breast. Because you think
this time it’ll work, and no one ever taught you
to drink from the well of your two hands
and no one ever showed you a better use
for the fire in your mouth.

*

Alina Kalontarov is an educator, poet, and amateur photographer from New York. She collaborates on the editorial teams of various publications and is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee with work that can be found or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, ONLY POEMS, Sky Island Journal, Gather, Thimble, Sand Hills, and elsewhere.

Write a Demi-Sonnet! ~ A Workshop with Erin Murphy

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Write a Demi-Sonnet!
A Workshop with Erin Murphy
Instructor: Erin Murphy
Date: June 11, 2026
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM Eastern

Price: $25 (sliding scale)

>>> Register Here <<<

Readings are recorded and shared with all who sign up.

~ About The Workshop ~ 

In this generative workshop, you will learn to write a demi-sonnet, a form invented by the instructor, Erin Murphy. Demi-sonnets are seven lines (half a sonnet!) and end with a full or slant rhyme. Poet Susan Rich calls the demi-sonnet “a gorgeous and important form,” while Claire Bateman describes demi-sonnets as “small but alarmingly penetrative” and James Allen Hall says they “go by quickly but their staying power is immense.” Read sample demi-sonnets here and here. And here is a prize-winning demi-sonnet by Jennifer Wang written in response to a Rattle magazine prompt. During the workshop, you’ll read and discuss sample demi-sonnets, write one (or several) yourself, and learn how practicing the compressed form has applications for composing and editing both poetry and prose. NOTE: Participants should bring to the workshop 3-5 original poems of 20-60 lines each.

~ About The Workshop Instructor ~

Erin Murphy is the author or editor of sixteen books, most recently Swoon: New and Selected Poems, Human Resources, Mother as Conjunction: Lyric Essays, and Fluent in Blue, winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry. Her collections of demi-sonnets include the new work in Swoon (2026); Taxonomies (2022), Assisted Living (2018), and Word Problems (2011). Her latest anthology is The Book of Jobs: Poems About Work (ONE ART and Penn State University Libraries); a volume of documentary poetry is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Her work has appeared in Ecotone, New World Writing, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, and Bedford/St. Martin’s. Her awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Foley Poetry Award, the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence, and the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award. She is poetry editor of The Summerset Review and professor of English at Penn State University where she has been named the 2026-27 Penn State Laureate. Website: erin-murphy.com

Trebuchet by CL Bledsoe

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Trebuchet

I don’t know much, but I know this:
the flow of wind through your hair just
before the brick wall is the best it gets.
I’m up and not crying, as the Norwegians
say. I’m perched on the wall’s edge like
a fat egg. Call it summer. Call it when
you have no one else to call. My friend
says the flaws in one’s poetry
are the flaws in yourself. That’s why
my poems sleep alone. They talk
too much. They don’t appreciate
how bad it could be.

*

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe’s poetry collections include Riceland, and his newest, Banana for Scale, as well as his latest novel The Moon On My Back. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his kid.

pr nightmare by Matthew Toth

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pr nightmare

each august i plan a sound bite for my dentist
because my mom taught his children 25 years
ago, the school where she discovered me
thanks to a free test from the faculty lounge.
we tend to diagnose most absence as
infinite— my first gender the ultrasound
misread. in between my suicide attempts,
we couldn’t speak to each other, so i took
to wandering the streets without sidewalks,
though it hailed once and she picked me up
before i had to ask. all that year in a mask,
i sat through group therapy in a park during
sunset three times a week, in those plastic
chairs that fold up into slim bags to be worn
on one’s back, passing the long second hours
whispering my lamentations into a lantern,
counting the dim stars of the altadena sky,
wishing only to ride home in silence and
wake up in the driveway of a different
house. i can’t remember what i said to him
when i was 16, resenting the project of
brushing my teeth, anything that reminded
me, i was alive, there was another fire to put out.

*

Matthew Toth (he/they) is a writer and editor from Pasadena, CA. As a student at Kenyon College, Matthew has worked with the Kenyon Review and Sunset Press, a student-run publisher of chapbooks. His poetry can be found in Tinderbox Poetry Magazine, Exposed Bone, and Vagabond City Lit.

Bullet Ant by David B. Prather

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Bullet Ant

          —Paraponera clavata

Pain is a type of initiation, a boy
plunging his hands into gloves
woven from leaves and stinging
ants, followed by twenty-four hours
of agony. If the body survives
paralysis and uncontrollable
spasms, a warrior is born.

The name Bullet comes from
survivors, those who suffered
both venom and gunshot.
But, today, I think only of those
who didn’t make it. And those of us
who couldn’t give a damn about
the comparison. This world is
already too full of warriors.

*

David B. Prather recently won the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize from Madville Publishing for his forthcoming fourth collection, A Heart that Stretches the Length of the Body. His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Chiron Review, Prairie Schooner, etc. He currently serves as the Annual Spring Conference Director for West Virginia Writers, Inc. Website: davidbprather.com

Two Poems by Ann Kammerer

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Little Veils

When we were little,
me and Janie
wore veils to mass—
white ones,
lacy ones,
triangular ones
that Mom
pinned in place
with thin metal clips
so they’d stay put
and wouldn’t slip
from our fine yellow hair.

We wore percale dresses, too—
the same one every Sunday,
matching ones from Sears
with tiny white flowers,
a Peter Pan collar,
and a deep blue sash
with a fake satin sheen.

Mom said to hurry
so I helped Janie dress.
She said Dad got mad
when we dawdled
and made him late
to church.
When we were done—
our sashes bow-tied
and our white Mary Janes
all buckled and shined—
we went to find Mom
as she smoked
in the bathroom,
a hairbrush, bobby pins,
and veils on the sink.

“About time.”
She took a last puff
and tossed her Viceroy
into the toilet,
making it singe.
“Janie first.”

Janie backed away.
Mom grabbed her arm
and pushed her down
on the edge of the tub.

“Good little girls
do what they’re told
Hold still.”

Mom laid the veil
over a knot of snarls,
wedging bobby pins
over and under
each side.

“There,” she said.
“All done.”

Janie sobbed.
I wiped her face
with toilet paper.
Mom stood behind me,
pinning down my veil,
poking my scalp,
telling me to be quiet
when I said it hurt.

“There,” she said.
“You’re done, too.”

She touched my cheek,
then Janie’s,
saying it was OK now.
Fiddling with a loose button
on her faded rose dress,
she draped a black veil
over her wavy brown hair,
smoothing the lacy ends
over her shoulders.

“See,” she said.
“I have to wear one, too,
just like you.”

Mom put on lipstick
and feathered on rouge.
She dabbed tan make-up
on the deep gray circles
beneath her eyes,
then over the
green-purple bruises
on her wrists—
the ones she got when Dad
slammed down his drink
and grabbed her,
pushing her
against the wall.

“We were just
dancing,” she had said later
when she tucked us in bed,
her hair falling over her eyes
as she kissed us goodnight.
“He does that sometimes.
With me. After he has
a bad day at work.”

*

Communion

We always sat
in the same order
in the same pew
at the same mass
at St. Lucy’s.

Dad slid in first,
Mom second,
holding Janie’s hand.
I got in next,
my bare legs sticking
to the unvarnished pew.
My big brother Freddie
sat beside me and
my other brother Charlie
sat at the end,
his head swiveling
as he looked for Theresa,
the Italian girl whose dad
owned Armando’s,
Dad’s favorite bar.

“Quit fidgeting.”
Mom poked me
as I fiddled with my veil
and clicked the beaded latch
on my vinyl purse.
Janie wiggled, too,
kicking the back of the pew.
Dad winced and bent over,
one hand on his stomach,
the other pressed
to his forehead.

“He doesn’t
feel good,” Mom sighed.
“I don’t either.”

Her breath smelled
fruity and sour,
just like it had last night
when she tucked
me and Janie in bed.

“We should’ve skipped
mass,” she said.
“Your dad.
He’s in no condition.”

Mom rubbed her eyes
and licked her dry lips.
The pipe organ echoed
as a boy in a white robe
carried a jeweled crucifix
down the center aisle.
Two boys followed
clutching lit candles.
A third swung
an ornate brass bowl
on a chain,
spewing spicy smoke.
The priest came last,
draped in brilliant sateen,
his hands clasped
atop the copper filagree
embroidered on his robe.

Sun poured through
the stained-glass windows
as the boys reached the altar
and placed the cross
and candles beside
a small, pearled tabernacle
with a golden dome.
The priest stepped up
and raised his arms.
We all stood
in prayer.

“Stand up.”
Mom kicked Dad
in the shin,
but he didn’t move,
mumbling we’d all
be sitting back down
anyway.

“See.”
He muttered prayers
as we all sat and stood
then sat again,
just like he said.
Opening our hymnals,
we sang and prayed
to a father and son
and holy ghost,
then knelt
to bow our heads.

The priest chanted.
The altar boys rang bells.
People rose
from their pews
to walk single file
and kneel at a railing
by the altar.
Folding their hands
they closed their eyes
and opened their mouths,
the priest placing wafers
on their tongues
before they got up
and filed back
to their seats.

“It’s our turn now, right?”
Freddie nudged Charlie.

“Yeah, yeah,” Charlie said.

They stumbled out,
webbing their hands
beneath their chins.

“Wait for me,” I said.
“I want a cookie, too.”

When I started to scooch,
Mom grabbed my sash,
tugging me back.

“No,” she said.
“You can’t go.”

She said I was
too little,
that Janie was
too little, too,
that the boys
were the only ones
who could go
to communion
since she and Dad
had been bad
and missed confession.

“We’ll go next Sunday,” she said,
“after we say a few
Hail Marys and Our Fathers
to get rid of our sins.”

*

Ann Kammerer lives near Chicago, and is from Michigan. Her short fiction and poetry is typically set in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, and examines the tensions and ideals of people living in the rustbelt. She has published fiction and poetry in literary magazines and anthologies, and has five poetry collections through independent small presses. You can find her recent or upcoming work in Fictive Dream, ONE ART, Chiron Review, The Broken Spine, 10 by 10 Flash, Open Arts Forum, Cold Caller Magazine, Cajun Mutt Press, and at annkammerer.com

Not My Circus by Mary Whitlow

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Not My Circus

I was raised on shouting,
learned early to read a room
by the angle of a slammed door,
how to live at the edge
of someone else’s storm.

I grew up a specialist
in everybody’s business,
a magnifying glass for a heart,
stitching stories from half‑heard phone calls,
scrolling Facebook like a crime scene—
searching clues, keeping score,
finger on the pulse
of every cousin’s chaos.

One day I clicked “delete account”
like cutting a wire.
Silence bloomed on my screen.
I whispered a new commandment:

Not your circus
Mind your own business
Stay in your lane

Then the new neighbors moved in downstairs.
Voices rose through the floorboards,
sharp as broken plates.
Old alarms went off in my bones—
that old reflex flaring up again.
I was halfway down the stairs,
barefoot, heart pounding.

I stopped—
I turned around,
climbed back to my own front door,
to the quiet I’ve learned to keep.
On the way, I whispered it,
like beads on a rosary:

Not your circus
Mind your own business
Stay in your lane

*

Mary Whitlow’s work has been published in Mid-Atlantic Review, Philly Chapbook Review and Virginia Writers Project.

Three Poems by Len Kuntz

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Kin

We ran like soiled sheets
haunted by the wind.
There was kin
we’d never heard of
and uncles we knew too well.
At the end of that scabby cliff
there sat a junk tractor, a
black and blue
John Deere rusting in
the sun’s fist.
One of us hopped on,
cranked hard,
as if there was gold
under the hood.
The other pushed it over
the edge without
saying a word.

* 

Seventh Grade

My mother’s new wig is
the carrot color of a robin’s breast,
stiff instead of bouncy.

She hunches over the steaming
oven in our trailer,
topless again, two full moons
drooping during daytime.

It’s been a summer of
forest fires yet she’s smoking
an ashy Tareyton, holding a spatula
with ragu or blood
splattered on the rough end of the spoon.

I have a friend finally. It’s
my first one since moving
to this new park where I’ve
learned there are different
kinds of smoke, all of them
loitering like ghosts with
too much time on their hands.

I feel like coughing
but swallow the scratchy fist
inside my throat instead.

I haven’t looked at her since
she first appeared though
I know it’s almost 3:30 because
the little Pocahontas clock says so.

When I ask Mom if she can
please put a shirt on, I see her
out of the corner of my eye,
chopping air, as if the spatula
is a tomahawk, shooing two horseflies
into the broken window.

Just you wait, she says.

*

Rushmore

We were cemetery kids
unafraid of anything
but our impulses or luck
like how Gordy took out every
car windshield in our
middle school parking lot
that fall when it felt
like summer cheated us again
or how Eddy used a pair of
brass knuckles them heavy
ones that feel lighter
than they look to beat the cousin
his sister said raped her

We drank our beers
cold or warm it didn’t matter
because we knew what others didn’t
that the world was flat as a marine’s high-top
with a drop off ledge that sucks
you off it same as a pastor talking sin
while going on and doing
what he did to some of us

And me I knew I always
blinked too much or too fast when
they asked about my mom how
she was feeling while never
mentioning the bruises or lost teeth
but that’s years gone by now
before the fire and these bars
the bare wall staring back at me
like a headstone someone made too large
like Rushmore with no faces on it

*

Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State and the author of six books, most recently, THINGS I CAN’T EVEN TELL MYSELF out from Ravenna Press. You can find more of his writing at lenkuntz.blogspot.com

Chronic by Sandra Marchetti

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Chronic

You might be called
the twisted blade, a grating
noise, the withdrawn lift.
I can’t inhale without

feeling this. It has become
a being to me, the child-
less woman who still
manages cries. A skeleton

key, the get out of jail
free card—never used.
What would happen if I
could do anything?

Without the tightened reach,
weeping seams, I might see
only sky. At fixed sights,
perhaps I’m just light

in ascent, yielding to goodbye.

*

Sandra Marchetti is the author of three full-length books of poetry, DIORAMA (Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2025); Aisle 228 (SFA UP, 2023); and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015) as well as four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry appears in Ecotone, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. Essays and stories can be found in AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Pleiades, Mid-American Review, Barrelhouse, The Account, and other venues. She is Poetry Editor Emerita for River Styx Magazine. She identifies as a poet of chronic pain and disability.

ONE ART’s June 2026 Reading for Pride Month

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ONE ART’s June 2026 Reading for Pride Month

Date: Sunday, June 7
Time: 2pm Eastern

Duration: 2 hours

Featured Poets: Julie Weiss, Ren Wilding, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Moudi Sbeity, Abby E Murray, Kai Coggin

>> Register Here <<

(donations appreciated)

~ About Our Featured Readers ~

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, AR, and a recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. She is the author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). Her work has been published in TIME Magazine, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, American Poetry Review, Best of the Net, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Coggin is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, a CATALYZE and INTERCHANGE Grant Fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.  www.kaicoggin.com

Nicole Caruso Garcia (she/her) is the author of OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press), which received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Crab Orchard Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, ONE ART, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. Her poetry has received the Willow Review Award, won a Best New Poets honor, and has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an associate poetry editor at Able Muse and served as an executive board member at the annual conference, Poetry by the Sea. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and was released by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. For now, they live in the Pacific Northwest and teach writing to military officers.

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American poet, author, and contemplative educator. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by the New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. His memoir, Habibi Means Beloved (University of Utah Press), and poetry collection, Alhamdulillah Anyway (Fernwood Press), are set to be published in the fall of 2026.

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty (Kelsay Books, 2021), her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II (Bottlecap Press, 2023 and 2024). Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in 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 Chestnut Review, MER, ONE ART, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Variant Lit, among others, and is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, and SWWIM. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.

Ren Wilding (they/them) is a trans, queer, neurodivergent poet. They are the author of Trans Artifacts: Bones Between My Teeth (Porkbelly Press, 2026) and Trans Archeology (Lily Poetry Review, 2027). Their work appears in Braving the Body (Harbor Editions), Nixes Mate, ONE ART, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. They were a finalist for Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Prize, are a two-time Pushcart nominee, and are co-curator of the Words Like Blades reading series. They hold an MA in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Missouri and live in St. Louis.

A Selection of Aphorisms by Yahia Lababidi

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§

Aphorisms are like seeds, carrying entire orchards.

§

To write is to eavesdrop, to translate silence, to become porous to the Unseen.

§

The human condition? Crossing a bridge of light over a trembling abyss.

§

The soul learns in flashes. Most of the time, we’re just trying not to look away.

§

Half of seeing ourselves in everyone is compassion, the other half is arrogance.

§

We are taunted by the distance between our best insights and our foolishness.

§

Exiles speak a language that only other exiles can understand.

§

The secret exerts a gravitational pull.

§

Pain has its own time zone.

§

The punishment of the oppressor is that they are denied poetry.

§

Yahia Lababidi is an Arab-American writer, poet, and aphorist, author of twelve books. His recent titles include Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024) and On the Contrary: Wilde and Nietzsche (Fomite Press, 2025). His work appears in Liberties, Salmagundi, The New Statesman, Sojourners, and The Threepenny Review.

Two Poems by john compton

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

how we speak

sitting silent in the stillness of birds—
i break the dead air with a clap

& they become
a disorder of wings.

their dense bodies
bound towards the sky
like an upsurge of dust.

they don’t understand
that in their distress
carries a bliss.

*

hunting season

the bullet drums
through the house
startling us

as if it were the dog’s bark
at 3 a.m. at an opossum
wandering onto the porch

to eat the remainder
of cat food.
we run like a group

of spooked deer
into the field
of locked doors.

*

john compton (b. 1987) is a gay poet who is the author of 20 books/chapbooks, who lives in kentucky with his husband josh and their dogs and cats, and mice. his latest full length book is “my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store” published with Flowersong Press (dec 2024); his new full length book “house as a cemetery” published with Rebel Satori Press (march 2026) & is nominated for the national book award.

Two Poems by Laura Grace Weldon

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Swedish Death Cleaning

“You can’t have everything.
Where would you put it?” ~ Steven Wright

My black hole of a bedroom closet
still holds long-impossible size eights,
tattered protest posters, slumped purses,
homemade Halloween costumes,
and hopeful eyes facing the future
from a box of black and white portraits.
Each object a doorway into realms
Where light no longer escapes.

I’ve already donated the strappy red dress
I never wore, the tie-dyed jumpsuit I did.
I gave stacks of sweaters to a friend who felts.
Sewed a sturdy quilt out of old jeans.
Cut squares from shirts too torn to donate
to patch shirts I still wear.
Time here distorts.
Decades seem mere seconds.

My arms are full with an enormity
possessions never encompass.
There’s no packing for an event horizon
but, oh look, here’s a child-decorated pillowcase
and there, a poncho I made from a shower curtain.
From this dense gravitational field
I work to excavate my own buried self
from all the women I didn’t become.

*

Look At Them Fly

My grown children may as well be
prop planes pulling banners
I squint to read
as they loop high in the sky.
They land for a bit, accept hugs,
tolerate a meal or two, some even
take leftovers I urge on them.

My love is larger than
any of us can fully bear.
It’s a fact immutable as the moon
drifting farther from Earth
at the same rate fingernails grow.

Before they were born in the usual way
I calculated with the wrong variables,
equated love with grief, but becoming
a mother to these exact marvels
erased all that. I cannot do the math,
only exult in these four.

Here I am on the ground they fly from,
my hands out offering tomatoes I’ve grown,
hot sauce I fermented, the pie I hope
is the one they still like.

*

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, leads writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura is the author of four books and was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year. Her background includes teaching nonviolence, writing poetry with nursing home residents, facilitating support groups for abuse survivors, and writing sardonic greeting cards. Laura lives on a small Ohio homestead where she and her husband host occasional art parties and house concerts. lauragraceweldon.com

Evening News by Jeff McRae

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Evening News

Mother spent the last years throwing
out family objects. You’ll have less to
suffer over when the time for suffering
comes, she says like she’s describing
the good sense of cleaning your pots
and pans while cooking. When I visit
we wash and dry the dishes after dinner
then drink tea on the couch, feet sharing
the tiny table her father made she found
when they emptied out her childhood
home in 1977. Her parents were dead
before she turned thirty. You never get
to know them as adults, she says and still
calls them Mumma and Daddy. Now
she says things like, Area rugs are the
bane of the elderly. She says, I love you,
to her old friend when she calls to say
her husband has decided to drink
the juice the doctor gave that will put
him to sleep for good. I am a stranger
to her life of friends falling in the living
room, fracturing femurs; friends who
can’t remember their meds or take a
deep breath; friends calling it quits,
who can’t do it even one more day.

*

Jeff McRae lives in Vermont and is a general news reporter for Vermont News and Media. His collection, The Kingdom Where No One Dies, published by Pulley Press, is a finalist for the Vermont Book Award for poetry.

Happy Mother’s Day to My Mother* by Veronica Tucker

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Happy Mother’s Day to My Mother*

The asterisk does what I can’t
holds the part I keep stepping around

like a wet tile in a hallway
no one marked

*my mother is dead

and also
she is still the woman who labeled everything
clean block letters on masking tape
drawers, bins, the quiet logic of a house
where nothing was ever misplaced

*my mother is dead

no one will call me today
to ask if I remembered sunscreen
or if the children are wearing enough layers
or if I am sleeping at all

*my mother is dead

and the store is full of cards
printed with soft pink cursive
words that assume a living address

I pick one up
like a pulse I can’t quite find

*my mother is dead

into the space above the sink
where she used to stand
hands in warm water
watching something out the window
I never asked about

into the car she drove
too carefully
both hands at ten and two

into the last voicemail
I cannot bring myself to delete
her voice already thinning
like light through late afternoon blinds

*my mother is dead

and I am a mother now

I look for her in small decisions
how to answer from the other room
when someone calls Mom like it might break
if I don’t come fast enough
how to keep track of who needs what
before they ask
how to say no
and still mean I love you

*my mother is dead

but sometimes
when the house is quiet
between chaos and sleep

I swear
there is a presence
not words
just a steadiness
placed gently in my hands

as if to say
continue

*my mother is dead

I wear her gold bangle every day
the small, constant weight of her
resting against my wrist

and also
everything she touched
is still touching me

even now
even this morning
even as I write her name
inside a card
that has nowhere to go

*

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and lifelong New Englander. Her writing explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, memory, and the human experience. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in ONE ART, The Berlin Literary Review, and Rust & Moth, among others. Her debut chapbook, The House as Witness, is forthcoming in spring 2026. Find her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com and on Instagram: @veronicatuckerwrites

Three Poems by Dana Henry Martin

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

No Mental-Health Narrative in My Town

There is no narrative in my town. Just lights
near the bridge that’s been dubbed a suicide
hot spot. Every weekend, nearly, those lights.
Adults. Teens. Nobody who makes the news.
Locals expect the living prophet who speaks
to and for God to fix us here in canyon country,
in cliff country. People on vacation slip while
taking pictures, while hiking and, sometimes,
alongside the person they love or their pet.
People slip. People fall. When I was in a state
of high mania, which meant I thought I might be
the devil, my therapist had me sit in a chair.
She started touching me to release the pain.
Her hands traveled over my neck, across
my shoulders. You’re in the glass house,
she said, the one above the creek, before you
were raped. God can see everything you do.
He sees you now. She wiped my arms
downward as if sloughing death from me.
Let God touch you. Let him wash through you.
Jesus is calling you to him. Don’t resist.
Two days later, I was in the psychiatric ward
at the hospital. They call it B Med.
Until I was admitted, I knew it as the name
a local poet used because he struggled
with depression. B Med. A joke. People
who are manic run in circles like animals
in the zoo or patients in B Med. That’s what
a doctor said during my appointment
when I told him I live with bipolar.
Sometimes there aren’t sirens. Just flowers
and signs that say things in threes, like
It’s not over and We love you and Don’t give up.
The city tears it all down, doesn’t want tourists
to know what happens here, what God either
can’t say or isn’t able to hear. When I stand,
the therapist is crying. This is love, she says.
Can’t you feel it? There’s no narrative
in my town. There’s just whatever this is.

*

The Knave

What if instead of talking in tongues, they’d called it
Voicing what the body needs that can’t be held in language.

What if instead of saying This is proof you love God,
they’d muttered, No matter what they do to us, every little girl

wails when her father dies. Sounds rushed from my mouth
like bees, swarming the nave. The girl of me escaped,

like so many cast-off clones, and stung congregants
whose hands were touching me, an everywhere touch

like his fingers on my back, my shirt pulled up at his orders,
the skin between us shared, mine belonging to him first,

my flesh his flesh, my fingers, my nails. We were nailed
together in life and in death, him in his anthropoid coffin,

me in the one place where I thought I might loosen his hold,
this inverted Pandora’s box of wood and fancy glass. What if

instead of talking about eternity or the trinity, they’d confessed
We knew we knew we’re sorry before drowning me in their despair?

*

I’m a Wake

I’m a wake, funerary. They prop me up
between expensive flowers and
the cheapened dead. I’m open casket,

open book, brittle as paper, lonely
as the printed word. I’m a thesaurus
of blessings and condolences,

pencil skirts and skinny, filtered
cigarettes. I’m pacing and handshakes.
I’m shuffling and stammering.

I’m satin, mahogany, charcuterie boards.
I’m the death announcement and
the estate sale. Oh, what I wouldn’t give

to be the wedding or the graduation,
even the birth with all its blood
and feces, and the bated everlastingness

of the moment before the first breath.
I’m a wake. Let me sit beside you.
There, there. It’s all right. Here I am.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, CALYX, Cider Press Review, Laurel Review, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble Literary Magazine, Trampoline, and other journals. Their chapbooks include Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press), and Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books).

Ashes by Roxanne Doty

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Ashes

When I scattered your ashes
along the banks of the Mississippi
I thought of the time you
and your high school friend swam
across from East River Road
to West River Road, tripping
on acid, your bodies young
and strong, invincible
the way we all were, the demons
dimmer, further away you said
the water shimmered that night
looked like scattered stars
and you were breast-stroking
through the heavens, all the saints
on your side, how car lights
moving along Franklin Avenue
bridge were psychedelic flowers
blowing in the summer breeze
and I remembered the way
your eyes looked when you
told me of that night
I could see it all
before beauty and silence
plunged so deeply into despair
before I knew how much ashes
a human body would leave behind
how yours were so much heavier
than I could have imagined.

*

Roxanne Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her debut novel, Out Stealing Water, was published by Regal House Publishing, August 30. 2022. Her chapbook, Hours of the Desert, was published by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2024 and her poetry collection, What Surrounds You, is forthcoming in 2026. She has published stories and poems in various journals including Third Wednesday, Quibble Lit, Superstition Review, Espacio Fronterizo, Ocotillo Review, Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, The Blue Guitar, Anti-Heroin Chic, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, Flash Fiction Magazine, NewVerseNews, Cloudbank, and International Times.

I Go Back to May 1973 by Mary Keating

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

I Go Back to May 1973
To the night I crashed

and see myself, a long tender lily unaware
of her grace as she’s about to get
into a Mustang to leave a party
with someone she barely knows
because her boyfriend is ignoring her.

She hasn’t learned yet how oak
doesn’t bend at 120 miles
per hour. How her spine can snap,
wilt those long green stems forever.
I want to run to her on legs I got to use

my whole life, not just until fifteen.
Tell her to turn back. Say to her boyfriend
she wants to go home, to skip
up the stairs to her bedroom,
shed her clothes, jump into the shower,
then snuggle into bed with her teddy bear
with the whisper of dreams that sleep inside—

what would our life be like
if I did go home that night and the next
day was like every other day—

I leave her as she opens the door,
allow her the time to come find me.

*

Mary Keating writes at the intersection of myth, resilience, and disability. She is the author of Recalibrating Gravity, a memoir in verse published by Woodhall Press. Her work appears in Rattle, Wordgathering, and in the One Art 2024 Haiku Anthology, with new work forthcoming in The Fiddlehead. A three time Pushcart Prize nominee, she serves as the poetry editor of ScribesMicro. Paralyzed at fifteen, she went on to become an attorney, disability advocate, and graduate of Yale Law School.

Two Poems by Judy Kronenfeld

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

“Senior Living”

Sometimes it seems like a Dantean limbo
of the walking dead—the bent at 90 degrees,
the shaking whose forks trip on the way
to their lips, the halt who shuffle tortoise-pace,
and those whose maladies escape
naming—the tongue rolled upwards
spasmodically filling a mouth,
like pink porridge in a pot
rising over and over to a boil.

Sometimes it feels like
the theater of redemption.

Here, in the crepuscular hour,
where skin gathers
on the face in crepey folds,
hair withers like leaves
revealing bareness underneath,
I rush to carry a new friend’s
laden plate from the buffet
while she Rollators back to our table;
I offer her my water
when the waiter’s late.
Here HELLO! follows Hi!
Everyone greets unknown others
in the halls—like bonded passengers
in the same relentless boat, traversing
the pitch-dark river.

*

Moment, Registered

On a stark strange-to-us
persistently clouded day
in our new still alien
senior home we don’t yet
call home, my husband,
with his sieve memory, and I—
bundled in the “winter clothes”
once kept at the back of our closets
“back home in California”—
hold gloved hands for a short walk.

Just ahead of us on the path,
a chubby gray squirrel
velvet-white of chest sprints
down a brown grassy hill and leaps
into a bare tree, balancing
on a jiggling twig-thin branch.
We both watch, but only I file.

Then the round bundle bounds up
into the air again, springing
from one bouncing spindly limb
to another, as if for the sheer green
glee of it—like a kid on a trampoline—
and my husband claps his hands.

Joy! For the present-minded,
even among the beasts.
If not in my heart
just yet.

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, One (Jacar Press), ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her newest book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2025). Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside. In another life, she produced scholarship on her English Renaissance loves, George Herbert, John Donne, and Shakespeare, including King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Duke UP, 1998).

Hierarchy by Porsche Jones

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Hierarchy

I heard the tale of a chicken named Diesel
Whose farmer had to put a handmade cone on her head
To keep her from diving headfirst into the active exhaust pipe
Of their blue Toyota Tacoma.
Best guess, by the farmer
Was that the pipe resembled the feed dispenser
And the chicken thought herself the discoverer
Of a secret and private restaurant.
All were in awe of Diesel’s passionate enthusiasm
For carbon monoxide
Her single minded pursuit of suicide
In a quest for some small comfort.
It is my ambition not to go hurling myself into tailpipes
In the next decade, but really—
What else is there to do in life?
One can only spend so much time pecking corn
And any hobby will kill you slowly.
Repeatedly copying
What activities brought me pleasure in the past
has been my strategy
For surviving domestication.
I guess the only other role model in this story
Is a farmer who made a plastic cone
To save a feathered renegade from herself.
Perhaps, that will keep me busy.
And if I profit from an egg or two
That I didn’t lay—perhaps, that will extend my life
Such as it is.

*

Porsche Jones is a writer and artist living in Manchester NH. In 2025 she was published in Death Wish Poetry Magazine, Wayfarer, 100subtexts and Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Recently she has won the 2025 Slam Free or Die Wheel Poetry Slam Championship. Her work deals with queer love and nightlife, womanhood, being an artist, class issues, disability, and her relationship to the earth.

Why I Want To Be a Black Hole by Edith-Nicole Cameron

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Why I Want To Be a Black Hole
after Martha Silano

Because we cannot fathom the vastness concentrated within,
how much they handle, no time no matter.
Because, speaking of matter, and time,
no one knows how either works
in a black hole, so we accept their distortions.

Because we like how they make waves.

Because black holes are engulfed by the light they engulf;
they bend and grab and twist,
luring stars into their lullaby swirl.
Because NASA says they are “among the most mysterious
cosmic objects, much studied but not fully understood.”

Because black holes have no need to be understood.

Because black holes are undercover introverts, exposing
themselves by disturbing the neighbors.
Because black holes don’t have cancer or capitalism or guns,
but if they did they’d seal them properly
and save us from ourselves.

Because relativity offers a degree of freedom.

Because if I were a black hole, and space were falling inwards,
I’d embrace every paradox I embodied
and harness my own momentum
to matter.

*

Edith-Nicole Cameron (she/they) writes, teaches, and parents in Minneapolis. Their work is featured in journals including Literary Mama, elsewhere magazine, Brevity Blog, and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things. They are working on their first chapbook.

Two Poems by Ariel Tovlev

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Praying in the Police Precinct

the warehouse a house of worship
our tallits tucked away in plastic
bags along with our belongings
but no prayer shawls needed for
our prayers

our bodies boundaried by a
makeshift mechitza down the middle
a segregating separation of perceived sex
(though I am no traditional Jew)
“women” on the left, “men” on the right
my t4t spouse and I straddling the line

we begin with ashrei
“how good it is to dwell in Your house!”
as if we weren’t zip-tied
as if we weren’t a kind of captive

we made it all the way
to “God is gracious and compassionate
slow to anger and abounding
in kindness” before being warned:
               it is illegal to sing in the precinct
               continue and get charged
               additional crimes

“it’s prayer!” we protested
               only silent prayer is allowed
never mind that even our
silent prayer is voiced
(God spoke the world
into being – we speak
our prayers into being)

a protestant privilege precluding us

our unfinished prayer of
gratitude lingered
in the air and in our ears
defiance welled up in
me like a birthday balloon

I sought my spouse’s
eye from across the aisle
on my lips another prayer
I wanted to share
the shehecheyanu
(prayer of firsts)
thank You God for giving
us life, sustaining us, bringing
us to this moment
even in this moment

it took three
tries to mouth
“shehecheyanu”
before they understood
under our breath audible to us
alone we prayed
in the police precinct

how good it is
to protest and pray!
how good it is
to feel our hands go numb
in our restraints
and hear our bellies grumble
with complaint
and know our misery
is only for a day!

how good it is
to be anything at all
alive, alive!
and how often I’ve forgotten
how stupid lucky we are
even in this moment

*

The Joy Planter

one does not cultivate joy
like a garden: store-bought soil
packed with manufactured nutrients
cedar planters’ scent
warding off insects and other pests
garden hose precisely placed (perhaps timered)
water flowing from an unknown source
chicken wire for the rabbits
who would nibble your joy away

one cultivates joy
like a scattering of seeds
precariously planted with a full fist
and your best non-athlete’s pitch
like a plant you continue to water
even after it’s already dead
like the succulent you ignored too well

and if you’re lucky
joy can grow like the forgotten acorn
a squirrel buried last spring
which it fully intended on eating
and is now sprouting into a tiny oak seedling

sometimes with sights set
on flower pots or garden beds
I miss the accidental plantings
from seeds squirreled away
and the surprise is half the joy

*

Ariel Tovlev (he/they) is a poet, educator, and rabbi. He has a BFA in Poetry from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Chapman University. They have been published in Wayfarer Magazine, Pensive Journal, ONE ART, and various CCAR Press titles. They live in the Maryland suburbs of DC with their spouse, four cats, and a multitude of houseplants.

Five Poems by Erin Hoover

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Poem I Wrote for Our Life Together

Born on a bed of eggshells, I broke them
by virtue of my body’s weight, by moving.
Soon I grew used to their give and crack.

My parents fed me eggshells. My tongue
licked the hard protective bloom. My teeth
ground down thin layers of calcium carbonate.

Those proteins were all I had. With a brush
and albumen glue, I painted the crystals
from crushed shells on the mold of my body.

The clothes I made creased and fractured
at my elbows and knees, split when I sat,
so I learned to stay still, straight leg standing.

Beneath me, the eggshell floor splintered
with each step. Helpless, I called my lover
who climbed through the jagged holes

we called windows. I could have predicted
he would break everything he touched
and then accuse me of carelessness, and he did.

I felt myself cleave under him in the way
I was taught to want. The membranes
of my body collapsing, reminding me of birth.

Our gentle thrashing destroyed the house.
I no longer cared for the bed, the clothes
whose delicate remnants I stuffed in my mouth.

After, I woke up naked, alone, and hungry.
Of course, I wear regular clothes and live
in a regular house, my diet varies, and I leave

when I please. I was never crushed, not
like this, but the eggshells say what I mean:
that no matter how careful I am, grief will come.

* 

The Apartment

              after “Dream House as World Building,”
              from In the Dream House: A Memoir
              by Carmen Maria Machado

My unit looked like every other unit, or close,
more than one hundred copies, but to explain,
it was on the third floor, new apartment in a brand-new
building. Safer, I thought, before I understood
being unsafe. It was the first new place I’d ever lived.
No broken plumbing or fat roaches scuttling
from kitchen drawers, scaring my daughter, our first
like that. You need to know that I cried happy tears
when we moved in, not everyone would rejoice,
but we did. My daughter did. Two floors below,
his apartment was laid out exactly the same. When
he first moved in under me, I felt déjà vu
in those bare rooms. A tenant for years, I’d known
the families in that place before him, but it must
be said, I hardly knew him when he moved in
as my boyfriend, this close proximity never
my wish, whatever you want to believe. Our primary
bedrooms had four large windows, and mine
on the third floor overlooked a small engineering firm
whose employees took lunch hour walks or on cold days,
dusted snow from their windshields in the parking lot,
warm exhaust plumes, visible puffs of breath.
I don’t know if he ever looked out his windows
except at me, but I kept my blinds open, so anything
I felt—my fear—I projected on this scene. Visitors
doted on the size of my primary bedroom, spacious
like the bedroom of a house. Like his bedroom,
this space would become a site of violence. I tried
to describe to my lawyers, to the judge, the suffocating
closeness of the landing and stairs, too narrow
for two-way traffic. We could only walk single file
as I held my daughter’s hand, shushing her,
because we lived on top of each other, tripping over
one another, peering inside one other’s units,
and I had no way to bypass the lower doors,
his door, but he could have avoided coming upstairs
to mine. Nobody asked him to treat those stairs
or my door like an extension of his home. Outside,
a walkway led from the building to our cars,
situated so no one approached our building without
being seen. It was grand—to the degree that it could be—
but it afforded no privacy. We all knew who came
or went. After I left him, that walkway became
a problem, like the pet waste stations, excuse
for anyone, but especially him holding his leashed dog,
to stand staring up at my balcony. When I imagine
him, and I sometimes still do, he is looking up.

* 

You Need to Connect with the Heroine of Your Story

The cards say it. The pointer on every spinning wheel.

What’s that meme? You are the one who is coming to save you.

Inside me lives a connoisseur of risk that for a time I chose not to heed.

Such finely tuned intuition moves beyond awareness of predator or prey.

I’m not innocent but I forget catalogues of lessons in order

to get through the day. She never left me. Rather I turned

from knowing. I thought I chose love, but it was a facsimile, a pack

of torture devices bundled in gauze. The heroine says one day you’ll see

this relationship as a vehicle for creative growth. We could have gone

on longer, my friends know. I stopped us. His friends might

have scoffed, he wouldn’t hurt you, but he had no friends and he had already

hurt me. The heroine isn’t writing about bruises but a topography of pain.

What is it they say? Some things you can’t unsee. You can’t unfeel.

The low voice at the table, wise hands on my shoulders.

The heroine says don’t think about all you ignored, but that you finally saw.

* 

The Universe Wants

The universe wants me to change the locks.
The universe wants me to take his things to Goodwill.
The universe wants me to wipe his fuck off with a guy I meet online.
The universe wants this story to be personal but not too personal.
The universe wants me to petition the court.
The universe wants the police to be unable to enforce the order due to proximity.
The universe wanted him to be my neighbor though I never wanted it.
The universe wants every lawyer I meet to tell me I’m fortunate we aren’t married. That we have
                            no children or property together.
The universe wants his new girlfriend to smudge stick his apartment.
The universe wants him to subpoena our neighbors.
The universe wants all of the people he subpoenaed to have nothing to say.
The universe wants me to have to move because I am truly afraid and the order is unenforceable.
The universe wants me to apply for tenure and submit my application while moving.
The universe wants me to lose two dress sizes walking off my anger for hours a day.
The universe wants my telogen effluvium.
The universe wants this story to be relatable.
The universe wants our hearing continually delayed.
The universe wants my nervous breakdown outside the courthouse.
The universe wants my dosage doubled.
The universe wants my mother to break her back when visiting me for the hearing he delayed.
The universe wants my mother to do the nine hour car ride again on a broken back.
The universe wants my father to ask to try reasoning with my abuser and for me to stop him.
The universe wants me to help others understand the threat is actual.
The universe wants the hearing—is ravenous for the hearing.
The universe wants my neighbor who was going to testify for me to get Covid.
The universe wants my best friend to have laryngitis during her testimony.
The universe wants people to keep telling me they know this will teach my abuser a lesson.
The universe knows I didn’t want the order to punish him.
The universe knows what happened between us.
The universe knows what love is and is not.
The universe wants the judge to grant the order without a scratch on me.
The universe wants my abuser to have to pay my lawyer’s fees.
The universe wants him to move away.
The universe wants my head to begin to clear.
The universe wants to know whether this story will save anybody.
The universe tells me I am watched over by ancestors.
The universe wants me to feel creative.
The universe wants this story reborn into another form.
The universe wants me to transform.
The universe has been telling me all along. I am close.

*

A Year Out

I woke and showered and readied for work,
but I don’t remember what I ate or whether
I ate. I think I was bracing myself, knew
what was coming, but who can know,
and I can only speak from retrospect, it’s all
I have in this moment. I might not have eaten.
I might have dreamed the night before,
but that I don’t know that, either. So much
of this process is understanding which facts
matter. It matters that my daughter was in
her second week of second grade, precise age
she’ll never know again. Does it matter
that she carried the bag she wore to school
before that morning, and for many days after,
and that he bought it for her? I might recall
the bag bouncing against her legs as she ran,
the sun reflected white on her blond skull,
or I might have made it up, but regardless,
I know that one morning about a year ago
after my former partner tried to assault us,
I went to a shelter, and then, I told my story
to a judge, and more, I said what happened
to anyone who would listen. It’s true, of course,
but so much more is true, like any big feeling
barely contained, there is this tenuous
courting of disaster behind it. Even so,
a story took shape, solidified. So what
if it was only adrenaline, the heat I felt course
through me, my arms frozen to the chair,
my legs crossed, for months, the shallow
breaths I took as I loaded the dishwasher
or taught a class, packed a sandwich or applied
for tenure. I gave up my words to advocates
a few hours after it happened, offered them forth
to build a story, in the rounded longhand
of the woman who wrote it down for me, for
the judge, yes, but also the person in the chair
who had to go home that night and protect
her daughter. I’m no fool. What really happened
is true but also manufactured. A document.
A year since I first began that delicate
piecework, that shaping, I can bend my story
at will. Flimsy, made up of sensations I pulled
from my deeper parts, and a year out, I want
to access that realm of my body, my insensible,
living-outside-of-narrative self, more than
posture or breath but the part of me that
moves or stays still, that acts. The self
returned from elsewhere that says, you are safe.
It’s August, a year later, and broiling hot.
Before sense retreats, I let the sun touch me.

*

Erin Hoover is the author of three poetry collections: Barnburner (Elixir, 2018), No Spare People (Black Lawrence, 2023), and Consent (Black Lawrence, 2027). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and The Sun. Hoover lives in Tennessee and teaches creative writing at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts a poetry reading series, Sawmill Poetry, and serves as the Poet Laureate of Cookeville, Tennessee, in 2026-2027.

Two Poems by Anna Lowe Weber

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Love Poem After Divorce

Four years after the split, we still,
every morning, send the day’s Wordle score.
Solved in three guesses, five, four.
Rarely, but it does happen– two.
Six gets a Phew from the New York Times Wordle bot,
and we echo it in our text: Phew!
And– that’s it. Sometimes our only communication
for the day. I can’t explain why.
We didn’t do this when we were married.
No easy back and forth; no morning ritual.
Of course, we shared inside jokes– probably thousands.
But most days, it’s difficult for me now
to remember what they were. When I try,
they evade. I squint hard, then harder–
it’s like that stress dream where you can’t read a bit of simple writing.
The more you force it, the more you try to focus,
the blurrier the text becomes. Infuriating.
So many memories are just out of reach,
a ghost I’m always trying to catch in my eye’s corner.
Look full on and it’s gone. But relax the vision,
soften the gaze, and sometimes, every now and then,
something will present itself, clearly, through the fog. Little scraps
of that former life, a tattered kite no longer fit to sail.
Songs about the dog, long dead. A fight about a Christmas card.
The night, so early into our marriage, two rats ran out of the fireplace,
and my screams, equal parts terror and glee. Snow. Oceans. Wasn’t that all of it?
Four years later, people still want to know what happened.
I want to say: everything and nothing. I want to say:
your guess is as good as mine. I don’t say much.
The time for explanation has come and gone.
I plug letters into the little blocks, morning after morning.
Grey; yellow; green. Impressive, the Wordle bot tells me.
I want to say: yes. After all this, and maybe just in this moment
(but can’t that be enough?) I will let myself be impressed too.

*

Sipsey River, Alabama; September

Lake winnows to river, river winnows to creek.
Watery branches trickle and wing like roots spreading
through soil, like veins spreading under skin,
like watercolor bleeding into paper. You have come
to the cabin for a long weekend. You have come
to be nowhere, to be gone. You find leftover fireworks
in a cupboard and light them without fanfare.
Two months too late; USA. Still, it feels good
to write your name with a sparkler.
Childhood wasn’t wrong about everything. It feels good
to say, with low-level gunpowder: I exist. I am.
You watch as the letters blaze, tiny stars furling and unfurling.
There is brief spangle then a vanishing act, only the ghost
of the word left behind. Where is the applause
when you need it? Where is the validation?
Where is your mother? Where are any of us?
Off the map; off the grid. Earlier, you watched from the dock
as a snake zipped through the water, cocksure and insolent.
He was daring you to say something. You can’t stop
anthropomorphizing. Two dogs show up at the cabin’s back door,
panting with country drawls. They are hitting on you.
They are off color, making bad jokes from the bushes.
Country Dog One and Country Dog Two, like a traveling bit.
The porch light has attracted every insect
from a five mile radius and you swear they are
humming, singing, every bit as American as
anybody else. Sweet land of liberty, sweet land
of dried river banks and no wake zones; boats blasting
Kenny Chesney songs about trucks and shimmying
out of cutoffs; Trump reimagined as a steroid-pumped warrior
on a gas station’s flag. You had pulled over for ice,
but from behind the machine, one kitten emerged,
and then two, and then five. Mewling, crying for all the m’s–
mama; milk, more. You would have liked
to take the smallest one home–
he was orange and a loudmouth. The joke writes itself.
Instead, you traveled on, highway-bound and kittenless,
dazed by their sweetness in an ugly world,
a vulnerability insisting upon itself in a way that felt brave,
or maybe just stupid. It’s hard to tell these days.
You can’t remember what’s true. You didn’t even remember
to buy that ice that you stopped for.

*

Anna Lowe Weber, originally from Louisiana, lives in Huntsville, Alabama, where she teaches at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her poetry and fiction has been published in the Iowa Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, Tar River Poetry, and the Idaho Review, among other journals.

Tips by Mark Williams

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Tips

He thought it would be quiet in the corner,
that we could talk, away from all the talk,
the laughter, the music closer to the bar.
He knew his voice had weakened. It’s the ozone
or the pollen in the air, he said. He sipped
his beer before he spoke, but still
I had to watch his lips. They barely moved.
I leaned in close to hear.

He said they called him Beer Boy at Dade Park,
the Kentucky racetrack where he worked
the summer he was twelve. The ice
was cold against his fingers as he pulled
longnecks from the bin. Champagne Velvet,
Falls City, and Sterling cost ten cents.
When customers paid with a quarter, he would
quietly slide their change across the counter

instead of slapping it down. If he was lucky,
the trumpet would sound, calling horses
to the track and customers to the grandstands,
leaving forgotten dimes and nickels
for him to scoop across the counter
into the pocket of his apron.
My tip, he said, smiling,
as he left this story to his son.

*

Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in ONE ART: a journal of poetry, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Rattle, and other journals and anthologies. He is the author of the collections, Carrying On (Kelsay Books) and Life (forthcoming at Aldrich Books). His fiction has appeared in Eclectica, Cleaver, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and several Running Wild Press collections. He lives in Evansville, Indiana, with his wife, DeeGee.

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of April 2026

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~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of April 2026 ~

  1. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  2. Ruth Bavetta
  3. Susan Vespoli
  4. Kelli Russell Agodon
  5. Timothy Green
  6. Magin LaSov Gregg
  7. Roseanne Freed
  8. Valerie Bacharach
  9. Dolo Diaz
  10. Joseph Chelius

Three Poems by Abby E. Murray

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Political Love Poem

for my political love: I wanted to get you
       something apolitical, but all I could find
were roses and the socialist movement.
       All I could find was chocolate and colonialism.
I wanted to give you something untouched
       by human mistake and cruelty—no diamonds,
no flights to countries safer than this.
       A friend suggested I offer you mathematics,
the objective truth of numbers. Did you know
       Pythagoras was murdered? Did you know
Einstein discovered refuge in New Jersey?
       Is there even such thing as harmless small talk?
If there was, I’d buy a coat made of its fur for you,
       each hair some creamy comment about the weather:
here is a blue sky, warmed by manmade drought.
       Here is a mountain you can climb to see
just some of what’s been stolen. My love,
       I’d give you nothing if it wasn’t also ruined,
if it wasn’t its own long history of lack. I’d put my hand
       in yours, if only its bones and tendons
weren’t brought to you by so much more than devotion:
       theft and injury, centuries of trespass,
the wallop of our humanity on a breakable earth.

*

To the Man Who Could Shoot Me and Get Away With It

When I first realized I was a pacifist—I was a teenager—
a great mentor I didn’t have at the time told me,

you should learn how to be hated by the ones you love most.
It wasn’t terrible advice. I might’ve held it in my mind

awkwardly, the way I hold my husband’s Kevlar now
when he hands it to me between deployments,

sorting through our basement, saying, here, hold this,
and because my instinct is to reach for what needs holding,

I do. Maybe getting away with what we do in this life
is the worst that could happen. Maybe to be furious is to love.

A friend recently asked me why I thought men
had so much power. I offered the only truth I had:

because they’ll kill their children for it. I grew up to become a poet
with pronouns in my bio. Pacifism is more labor-intensive than war.

A mentor I really did have once told me, a poem isn’t a poem
unless it’s hurting someone. I thought about how the sun

can’t love anything constantly without killing it, unless
what it loves can figure out how to shield itself,

how to be loved from the safety of millions of miles away.
The sun is probably just as interested in survival as the earth.

A now-dead man-poet once told his now-dead woman-student
to make every poem her last poem, like she hadn’t already,

like we aren’t all being shot at by systems constructed
just for him. I would like every worm I’ve ever stepped over

to go back underground and tell that dead man-poet
I am no longer writing my last poems. I can only write

beginnings. See, I’m ending this one with a seed
no bigger than the sound of your name being called

from another room. You stop to listen. Who was it, calling?
Is there something you can do? If you hear it again, you’ll answer.

*

Hearing Test

I sit in a booth with the single-button clicker
in my hand and think about whether my husband
       would or would not get a kick out of this:
me, ears muffed, listening to an artificial man’s voice
tell me what to say, and I actually say it. Say cowboy.
       Cowboy. Say airplane. Airplane. At no point
does the man ask me to name what I hear
around his voice: the sound of birds flying far away
       from where I am, the sound of two eyes rolling,
the sound of the ocean if the ocean quit its storms
and married itself to carrying a man’s voice
       across it on a precious shell. Say shift. Shift. Say take.
Take. Here’s an example: the men behind AI
want to answer my emails using my voice.
       When I am asked to teach a workshop,
the men behind AI suggest I call myself definitely interested.
The only thing I am definitely interested in
       is the location of my voice: my throat, my skull,
my hands. It cannot survive elsewhere.
The audiologist discovers a small rock garden
       growing in each of my ear canals, which she describes
as petite, in a not-good way. My laugh is either
a gunshot or a car backfiring. Say hot dog. Hot dog.
       Say mousetrap. Mousetrap. The fluid that should be
where my rock gardens are can, in some people,
become so salty it crystalizes, which explains why
       solid ground feels like the surface of the ocean to me.
When I explain this to my mother, she brightens
and says, does this mean you are—what is it? a salty bitch?
       Everything my mother knows about profanity
she has heard from me. I gaze at her and shine,
a star and its moon, a river learning to swim in the sea.
       And even though I’m more of a dick
than a salty bitch, I hug her, tell her I’m proud of her,
and we listen to the sound of knowing
       the noises our voices make have been heard.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and was released by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. For now, they live in the Pacific Northwest and teach writing to military officers.