Two Poems by John S. Eustis

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The Death Game

A couple of guys at work liked to play the Death Game.
The rules were simple. Whenever someone famous died—
like a musician, actor, or politician—the first person
to hear the news would dial his friend’s cell phone.
As soon as the call was answered, the caller uttered
the name of the deceased, then immediately hung up.

They didn’t keep any kind of score, it was just a way
of showing who was more in touch, or had quicker reflexes.
The news had to be delivered in real time right to the ear.
Leaving a message was not allowed, as there was no way
to determine who was first with the ghoulish news.
Nor was there any conversation beyond the person’s name.

Although the game could easily be adapted to texting,
it just wouldn’t be the same as hearing Death’s human voice.

*

The House We Almost Bought

I drive by it now and then
to remind myself how different
life would be right now if we
had gone through with it.
Tina absolutely wanted to buy
and was willing to bid above
the asking price, but I said no.

Our marriage was in trouble
and purchasing a house would not
have helped the situation. Instead,
it would have simply added the stress
of a huge debt to our already fragile
circumstance. Less than a year later
we were moving into our divorce,
and she was physically moving
to a new apartment. I stayed
in the house we rented, which I
could barely afford at the time.

If we had bought that property,
we would have inevitably had to
sell it and both look for places.
Or worse, I would have ended up
buying her a house. Probably not,
but you can never be too sure.

*

John S. Eustis is a retired librarian living in Virginia with his wife, after a long, quiet federal career. His poetry has appeared in One Art, Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, North Dakota Quarterly, Pirene’s Fountain, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slipstream, & Tar River Poetry.

Two Poems by Mary Paterson

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We did not capture the bird

The bird bombed itself into the kitchen window,
repeated calamities against the glass – beak / blood /

beak / blood. As a result I cannot come to your party. I am too full
of elastic and stinging nettles. My arms are shot with feathers

out of sympathy for the cadaver, its neck stabbed backwards into its body,
its wings a broken protractor. There are reasons

the birds are throwing themselves away like this & I’m in charge
of none of them. My role is to witness

using almost obsolete technologies. Think of the man
who built a library of creature songs in California,

who lived long enough with water bottles and escalators
to see his tapes ingested by fire. Recently, I will not name things –

not robin, nor Mohammed, nor Olivia – because I hope
the unnamed may proliferate. Ask me how I know

about the Zayante band-winged grasshopper, its buzz
that sounds entirely like plastic melting.

*

Defences

He says, you must locate the heart
of the enemy. You must pour boiling water

onto their queen. You must watch the steam
worry the sunless morning. What a morning.

What a honey trap sticky with ants. He says,
probably the ants are farming the aphids.

Probably the ants have nested under the bath.
What a forest of rose-fists knocking

on the bathroom window. We refuse
to kill the ants because we believe

in the sanctity of bodies clambering
for a future. Because we know what we will

become. Let us cloister inside with vinegar.
Let us sign a petition. The petition

says, please: not me, please, please, not me.

*

Mary Paterson is a writer and curator based in London (UK). She writes mainly for performance, and her work has been performed around the world including with Live Art DK (Copenhagen), Wellcome Collection (London) & Arnolfini (Bristol). Her poetry has been published by Poetry Magazine, 3am Magazine, & Ambient Receiver, amongst others. Mary is the co-founder of ‘Something Other’: a platform for experimental writing and performance, running since 2014.

Bambi Girls by Cayla Garman

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Bambi Girls

She is all girl,
chestnut waves, freckles,
cold-pink cheeks,
and this is the closest
she’s ever been,
all doe-eyes and eyelashes
as she snuggles into my side,
places her gloved hand just
against mine.
For warmth, she says.
We sit on a frosted boulder
at the overlook, river below.
A passing hiker could see us,
our knit layers the only space
between our bodies.
She knows I am queer.
This is her first time
in these woods.
I know how dark, how cold
it can get here. I know
the wolves that stalk,
growling low,
the hunters that jeer
through their iron sights,
but all I hear tonight
is her contented sigh
as she settles her head
into my shoulder.
I push aside the thought
that someone could see
to make more room
for thinking about her.
She lifts her head
to make a little joke,
pointing at something below,
already giggling at her own wit,
a leaves on the breeze laugh,
and I kiss her. I kiss her
on accident, on purpose, on the instinct
to kiss the girl you love,
but mostly because of that laugh,
her brown eyes glowing
like warm honey.
I kiss her so much
we snap twigs,
knock pebbles loose.
I let my guard down
to draw her closer,
to melt into the curves of her body,
to hold and to be held.
I quiver like the tree line,
branches parting as something,
someone, hears her soft breath
against my neck, the skin too hot
for hair to stand on end
in the gaze of such a threat.
I kiss her
and it shows them
where to aim.

*

Cayla Garman is a poet from Pennsylvania and a graduate of Penn State Harrisburg. Her work has previously appeared in From the Fallout Shelter as the 2023 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and in The Milk House.

This Poem, Full of Cliches by Eileen M. D’Angelo

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This Poem, Full of Cliches

This poem is too new to be out
unsupervised, too new to know
that it’s substandard, that it’s missing
it’s mark— too fresh to know
it should be humbled by its shortcomings.

This poem is not ready for prime time
with its rambling pointless lines,
lines that can’t pin down how it feels
to read the headlines every goddamned day,
lines that fail to state the sense of fear,
chaos, and impending doom.

This poem should say something
shocking— something, anything
to save us in these turbulent times,
steel us from this tense political climate—
something stunning— but it’s mute.

After all, on a clear, snowy January day,
a woman, a mother and a poet
had her face shot off by an ICE agent
who muttered as he strode off, fucking bitch,

and the country goes on, as the machine
churns out lies for an alternate narrative,
as we each wait for someone else to step in,
or for someone to save us.

I want a poem for her—
but where are all the words
that should come easily— words
to rain down justice and humanity?
Words to raise a candle in the dark?

*

Eileen M. D’Angelo, author of several books, including “The Recovering Catholic’s Collection,” (from Moonstone Press, 2023), is the Executive Director of Mad Poets Society and former Editor of Mad Poets Review, has coordinated over 2000 special events in the tri-state area and was the subject of a tribute event and anthology by Philadelphia’s Moonstone Arts Center. She has twice been nominated for a PA Governor’s Award in the Arts and Pushcart Prize, and published in Rattle, Manhattan Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, Drexel Online Journal, Wild River Review, Philadelphia Stories, Philadelphia Poets and others. Additionally, D’Angelo has commentary in an anthology from WordFire Press, Shadows and Verse: Classic Dark Poems with Celebrity Commentary, edited by NY Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. She judged open auditions for the pilot program of Russell Simmons’ and HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, at New Market Cabaret, as well as conducted workshops and performed original songs and poetry on WXPN’s (88.5 FM) World Café Live, BCTV (Berks County Public Television), at the Painted Bride Art Center, at South St. Arts Festival at Rosemont College, Hedgerow Theatre, St. Joe’s, Montco Writers’ Conference, Kelly Writers House, Manayunk Art Center, Delco Community College, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and Delco Women’s Conference, Philly Fringe Festival, and other venues.

Mastering the Epistolary Poem: A Workshop with John Sibley Williams

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Mastering the Epistolary Poem
A Workshop with John Sibley Williams

Instructor: John Sibley Williams
Date: Monday, January 26
Time: 11:30am-2:00pm PT / 2:30-5:00pm ET
Please check local times.
Duration: 2.5 hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

Please note: This workshop will be recorded for those unable to attend in real time. The recording will only be distributed to those who sign up for workshop in advance.

>>> Register Here <<<

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About the Workshop:

Epistolary poems, from the Latin “epistula” for “letter,” are, quite literally, poems that read as letters. As poems of direct address, they can be intimate and colloquial or formal and measured. The subject matter can range from philosophical investigation to a declaration of love to a list of errands, and epistles can take any form, from heroic couplets to free verse. In this intensive generative workshop, we will explore the many facets of writing “letter poems” through poetry analysis, active discussion, and a progressively challenging set of 6 writing activities that touch upon both our internal/personal worlds and how we interact with the larger world around us. We will study diverse poems from classic poets such as William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes and contemporary poets such as Victoria Chang, Rebecca Lindenberg, Mai Der Vang, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and Melissa Stein to see how they successfully explore relationships, internal reflection, political/cultural struggle, and landscape details by using the direct, evocative form of “letter poetry”.

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About The Workshop Leader:

John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), skycrape (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translation from by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A thirty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, Poetry Editor at Kelson Books, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.

For more information about John and his offerings:

https://www.johnsibleywilliams.com/about-1

https://www.johnsibleywilliams.com/upcoming-classes

The Crosstown Bus by Laura Foley

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The Crosstown Bus

We board with our senior passes,
then we’re five Brearley girls chatting,
remembering Mary who lived on 86th,
loved everything horses,
and that movie we watched
at her house when we were eight,
black and white, with eerie music,
two climbers on a rock ledge,
one pulls a long rope to find
his friend on the other end, dead…
Artist Sarah remembers
Ellen’s magenta bedspread,
as she points to a lady near us
with a corduroy coat just like it,
all of us imagining Ellen’s leaf pattern—
Ellen, who lived on First,
and moved away, who owned
a Vermont bookstore, and died
last year, and now I’m remembering
her childhood apartment
with the elevator button NS,
how we pretended it stood for Nancy Snow,
her little sister, but I knew
it was really Non Stop, and how
they had a basset hound, what was his name?,
with prostate problems, everything
hanging low to the ground, and now
we’re roaring, five senior citizens giggling
as we cross town on a crowded bus
that takes us through our lives,
until we get off, at different stops.

*

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, ONE ART, American Life in Poetry, and anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC by Alison Seevak

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Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC

There are no mothers here
but when your daughter
invites you, you go and sit
on the wooden bench, grateful
to be there, after months
of silence. You sit next to the girl
holding the ring that fell
from her septum the night before
while your daughter’s in back,
getting the stud in the cartilage
of her left ear replaced
with a thin gold hoop.
It’s a rook, she’d explained
before the dark eyed piercer
with the sleeve of tattoos
called her name.
She’d traced the map
on the wall, showed you
the geography of all the ways
an ear can be pierced.
Conch, orbital, daith, helix.
Snakebites,
the name for the silver
studs dotting each side
of her lower lip. The post jutting
through her left eyebrow
looks like it hurts,
but it doesn’t, she said
and you remember
other waiting rooms,
pediatrician, orthodontist,
math tutor, ice rink,
the ER when she was five,
fell out of bed, and broke
her collar bone. The nurse
pulled you into the long corridor
so they could talk to her alone,
so they could make sure
it was not you
who had done the damage.

*

Alison Seevak’s writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including The Sun, Literary Mama and Atlanta Review. She lives in Northern California.

ONE ART’s February 2026 Reading

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ONE ART’s February 2026 Reading

Sunday, February 1

Time: 2:00pm Eastern
Duration: 2-hours
Featured Readers: Kim Stafford, Kari Gunter-Seymour, J.D. Isip, Todd Davis, Grant Clauser

Tickets are FREE!

(donations appreciated)

>>> Register Here <<<

About The Featured Readers

Grant Clauser’s latest book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. He is the author of five previous books, including Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven and Reckless Constellations. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review and anthologies including Keystone Poetry and The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia. His books and poems have won numerous awards including the 2023 Verse Daily Poem Prize. He’s an editor for a national media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania. More at grantclauser.com

Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry—Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems; Coffin Honey; Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball,and co-edited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Hudson Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, Western Humanities Review, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and soon-to-be professor emeritus of Environmental Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University.

J.D. Isip is a Pushcart and Bet of the Net nominated writer and professor of English, originally from Southern California, and currently living and teaching in South Texas. His full-length collections of poetry and creative nonfiction include Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015), Kissing the Wound, and Reluctant Prophets (both from Moon Tide Press, 2023 and 2025). He is currently editing The American Pop Culture Almanac, forthcoming for America’s 250th (Summer 2026) from Moon Tide Press.

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

karigunterseymourpoet.com

I: karigunterseymour

Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He taught writing at Lewis & Clark College for forty years before retiring and becoming Professor Emeritus in 2020. He is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. He has written about his poet father in Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, and his book Having Everything Right: Essays of Place won a special citation for excellence from the Western States Book Award. His most recent poetry collections are As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen, 2024) and A Proclamation for Peace Translated for the World (Little Infinities, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term. In a call to writers everywhere, he has said, “In our time is a great thing not yet done. It is the marriage of Woody Guthrie’s gusto and the Internet. It is the composing and wide sharing of songs, poems, blessings, manifestos, and stories by those with voice for those with need.”

Lessons in Walking by Kip Knott

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Lessons in Walking

The day my son was born, I worried whether or not I would be able to teach him how to walk. I knew I would have to hold his hands and lift him off the ground just enough—but not all the way—so that he could still feel the earth beneath his feet. I knew, too, that I would have to let him fall from time to time so he would come to know the joy of getting up on his own. I knew that there would be pain and frustration and anger at me for not always protecting or helping him. And over the decades, he has fallen, gotten up, fallen again, gotten mad, and gotten up again, all on his own. But today, after he picked me up from another in a series of nasty falls of my own, I’ve begun to worry whether or not I can teach my son the proper way to die.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.

Two Poems by VA Smith

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Tissue

Do I recall what I did with your scar
your text pleads, decades gone, scars ongoing.
I had my own: my belly sliced open

like melon, the heavy suck from my gut,
boy child pulled to air,
still you want to recall my tracing your scar.

Then they box cut my scarred tissue again,
pulled that burst wormy organ from sickened soil.
I had my own: my belly sliced open.

You opened me too, my Green Beret, piercing
blue, thirst for you, oceans inside me swelling.
Do I recall what I did with your scar?

Iraq was on your back. I traced it, you said.
I tongued its ridges, tasted blood.
But what did you do with my belly sliced open?

We spilled out of beds, hiked from our homes,
found ground to cover, forests to sprawl.
Yet you ask what scars I might recall as
I think back to my body, open.

*

Seen

Six years old, I stand between
them, two brothers swapping
stories over beers, sitting snug,

traffic headlights peering through
our bay window into Saturday
night living room football.

Shampooed, pajamaed, I come
to the men when called
from my bedroom, good girl

giving hugs and kisses
to my uncle, my thirtyish
dad gesturing behind me.

He fast pulls my bottoms
to the floor, my butt, bud pink
pudenda smooth, bath bright.

My face flashes red, folds
in pain, their laughter
landing all over me.

The last of thirteen kids
during depression and war,
my small father learned

to prank, to clown, to get seen.
He stayed that way.
Sometimes when cooking

dinner for friends, drinking,
hungry for their howling,
I’ve flashed my breasts

to surprise them, danced alone
to Nora Jones, my arms
snaking around my head,

legs laced in spidery black,
shimmy to the kitchen
to scrub every dirty dish in sight

*

VA Smith’s first two poetry collections are Biking Through the Stone Age and American Daughters (Kelsay, 2022 and 2023), followed in 2025 by Adaptations (Green Writers Press) and coming in 2026, the chapbook Urbanity (Seven Kitchens Press.) Her individual poems have been published in Southern Review, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, Calyx, SWWIM and dozens of other journals and anthologies. She currently serves as River Heron Review’s Poetry Editor. Find her cooking, baking, urban walking and country hiking, loving on friends and family and resisting authoritarian oligarchy.

Dust Rag Blues by Nicole Caruso Garcia

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Dust Rag Blues
      For Renee Nicole Macklin Good (d. January 7, 2026)

Steadying the globe, I thumb Caracas.
We snatched Maduro and we seized Caracas?
Our Thug-in-Chief’s illegal orders mock us.

My index finger rests on Minnesota:
ICE shot a mom (unarmed) in Minnesota.
She dared stand up to goons who have a quota.

These men stretch latitude—our country reeling.
I clean the hemispheres, set gently reeling,
And smooth the strip of red: equator peeling.

*

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 2021 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.

Theater of the Real by John Amen

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Theater of the Real

         for BC & JF

To shrug the draft, he leapt a university ladder,
shaking the rungs of math, piling numbers on his back.
At a karaoke bar under an overpass,
she belted the best version of “In the Pines” he’d ever heard.
He tipped his hat, tugged a red feather from the cityscape,
slamming a double vodkashine at her feet.
He scribbled poems, metronomic rhyme schemes,
serenading her at Dustbowl rest stops, the jukeshacks
along Highway 61. Fine, she said, buy me a BBQ dinner.
He ordered five ambrosia plates, dropped to a knee over espresso.
Roses burst from the walls, critics leapt from their stools,
applauding as she stammered, ok yes. She whittled
her tunes after-hours in a relative’s giftshop. He dissected
The Myerson Conjecture on a circular whiteboard.
They juggled cars & newspaper subscriptions,
insurance policies & wardrobes, gigs & tenure.
Picnics in the Louisville grass.
A photo shoot at the Taj Mahal.
Scrabble & parcheesi under the Eiffel Tower.
Days passed like W2s. Eggs for dinner? he asked.
How about Barbados in January? she replied.
In a balloon over Hollywood, she coughed her best Judy Garland,
as he yelled, bravo! bravo! She slept
eighteen hours straight. Christmas morning,
she forgot her best friend’s name. Later she left
the stove on, left her purse in a birdbath.
He found her wedding ring in the freezer.
She had no idea how it got there.
They drove for hours to a condo on the Pacific.
The sunset draped over a flowery sofa,
painting the white walls orange. He woke at 2am,
doors & windows gaping, he staggered
to the gray shore to find her
rummaging in mounds of kelp, looking
for a credit card. She couldn’t recall his touch,
if he was the one who unzipped her dress in the hotel dark,
cheering as she sang for the moon. He heard
a voice whispering in the dunes. The air brimmed
with fractals & pop choruses, that convulsion of stars.
He turned back to her, but her impression in the sand
had already been flattened by the tide. He figured it was her
out there laughing in the waves, but he couldn’t be sure.

*

John Amen was a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.

Three Poems by Katy Luxem

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When an Alpaca Gives Birth It’s Called an Unpacking

My children, when checking in to a hotel,
spread their stuff from corner to corner.
Their bedrooms at home are little dens
of shed items, hoodies, baby teeth in molar-shaped
containers, flattened volleyballs, autographs
on rumpled school forms. Of course, when they were
born I left pieces of myself all sorts of places, locked
like wings in amber, measured in forehead wrinkles,
angled in jaw lines, height marked on walls like cave paintings.
I understand laying out what makes us. To be so full
of the world, that it gives us place, says I know, I know
I am here, I am undeniably in it.

*

In Years Ahead

I find an email draft of baby names
we didn’t use. Some my husband didn’t like
and it’s funny to think of our arguments then,
before kids, how young and vast
the world stretched. How much time we let drift
without christening it ours. Certain names
didn’t seem to fit once something so pink and alert
was placed slick in my arms. Some we assigned
to loss, which always makes me think of January.
Looking at the list, we chose well, though. Because
I close my eyes and it is the real ones I behold.
The girl on stage, their old crib, the boy who loves
hashbrowns, the bunny she sleeps with, still.
Anyway, it’s just a draft, stored only in a cloud
somewhere it’ll never rain or break. In my imagination,
they are wearing new shoes, blowing out
birthday candles, jumping in gravel-deep puddles.
In real life they exist nowhere but the outline
of what we imagined.

*

To Have / Be a Teenager

is to worry about the minutiae
of things and yet, throw caution
away accidentally. My daughter
sometimes stares bleakly
at a screen or a steamy mirror.
Sometimes questions everything,
worrying out every option
but the most obvious. And yet
I see her eat the cheese danish
I bring home. I watch her feed
the dog and it is like seeing a neighbor
I don’t know yet through a bright
window. Just yesterday morning,
she watered plants in a square
of light, and I heard the sound
of singing. It was so beautiful
even though it was a song
I could not ever hope to name.

*

Katy Luxem lives in Salt Lake City. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and has a master’s degree from the University of Utah. Her work is anthologized in Love Is For All Of Us (Hachette, 2025) and has appeared in Rattle, McSweeney’s, SWWIM Every Day, Sugar House Review, Poetry Online, and others. She is the author of Until It Is True (Kelsay Books, 2023).

Two Poems by Tim Raphael

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Ode to a Lawnmower

Flat green like a fern
or battle tank out of place in the grass,
peal-drum loud on suburban afternoons—
the lawnmower my father bought
at a yard sale that Virginia spring.

I didn’t mind mowing our shade-patched yard,
free to cut patterns around sweetgum trees,
around the flowering dogwood my father loved—
circles one week, clean lines,
straight as a music staff the next—
scanning the street with hope and dread
Lisa Lange might walk by.

I was drawn to the menace
of the touchy machine,
its wind-up starter and manual choke,
grime at the seam of block & deck,
a blistering exhaust pipe
I touched too often.

Unable to adjust the wheel height,
I ran the mower high,
exposed my shins to missiles
of stone and wood,
dog shit hidden in a curbside minefield—
still, far better

than practicing string bass,
stuck inside our green carpet playroom,
thirty minutes of scales
clock-watching my way through arpeggios,
the perpetual tock of the metronome.

I was twelve that summer,
each day a rehearsal,
and the lawnmower was something
that made things happen—
let me buy baseball cards
and bottle rockets with abandon,

led me down sidewalks
to the Moffitts and Silversteins,
sometimes the Gritzners,
and the house that never seemed to sell,
where the realtor paid fifteen dollars
to cut the weeds every other Saturday.

*

Off to the Star Party

A whip of stars—
we’ll later learn it’s the tail of Scorpius—
and perhaps this time I’ll remember.

We’re made of the same stuff, after all.

Fallen apples cobble the path
through the orchard,
night vision more memory than sense.

An illusion of stillness.
Even without wind,
everything is on the move—

the remains of a dry year’s snow,
shadow-clung north of the pines,
odds and ends of the sea
this used to be.

Trace the mesa’s perfect plane
as if a blade cut earth from sky,

and when I say the air
is the temperature of silk,
I mean I can no longer tell
skin from night,

am unbound from day’s unease,
steps sure and light.

When we finally arrive at the ballfield—
a sculpture garden of telescopes
between first and third base—

you whisper, Look, a shooting star,

and the whole universe snaps to attention,
including the amateur astronomer
in the red headlamp—

No such thing, he says.
It’s called a meteor.

*

Tim Raphael lives in Northern New Mexico between the Rio Grande Gorge and Sangre de Cristo Mountains with his wife, Kate. They try to lure their three grown children home for hikes and farm chores as often as possible. Tim works full-time as a media consultant to environmental nonprofits and writes poetry early in the morning after walks on the mesas surrounding his community. His chapbook, More Earth Than Flame, was a finalist in the 2025 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest, and his poem, Prayer of a Nonbeliever, was a Pushcart Prize nominee and won Terrain.org’s 2024 poetry contest, judged by Ross Gay. He’s grateful to have had poems published in range of literary journals. Tim is a graduate of Carleton College.

Memo by Hayden Saunier

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Memo

First dusting
of snow.

Enough
to show

how obvious
with blankness

are the paths
we walk

how little
we veer

from them
even by

a step.

*

Hayden Saunier is the author of six poetry collections, including her most recent book Wheel. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and Gell Poetry prize, and has been published in ONE ART, The Sun, 32 Poems, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. Hayden founded and directs the interactive poetry performance group No River Twice. More at haydensaunier.com.

Waiting Room by Clara McLean

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Waiting Room

Let me be laminate, like the prototype pinned
to the wall at the doctor’s office, body glossed
in primary colors. Let captions speak clearly
for me, as for that flat man, organs outlined
in white balloons around him.
Make me a model for others to look to—
map of evident vessels uncovered to science
in lustrous, alive-looking branches.
Let me not be a problem,
a puzzle, pileup on the morning commute,
no discernible source and no exit.
All waiting here stare
at the horizon’s thin slit, sealed
in the distance, as though we might will it
to speak. Any breath, any answer
seems better than none, any wreck
we might tunnel toward,
the stunned aftermath we might finally
inch our way past,
peruse for our own lives within.
The specialist’s named
Dr. Paine, no joke, which reminds me of Crusher
on Star Trek. She had some kind of scanner
she’d wave over her patients’
abdomens. Just that, and their innards
would sing out their secrets.
Nothing unknown
in the light-zooming future.
No body beasted, animal
in a snap trap, fractured and thrashing
its dumbfounded hurt in a crawlspace,
pinned with no coat of miraculous
plastic, no words to speak with,
no admirable shine.

*

Clara McLean lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Terrain.org, Foglifter, Valparaiso Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Cider Press Review, West Trestle Review, and The Comstock Review, among other publications, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can find her at claradmclean.com

City Parrots by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

City Parrots

The flock a shawl flung into the air
wings catch the sun
all flash green at once, signaling
I am at last
in the right place
at the right time

*

Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired psychologist, former German Lit major, and restaurant reviewer, no longer lives for Art but still thinks about it a lot. Work has appeared recently in Chiron Review, Mobius, B O D Y, Offcourse, and The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. Collections include Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and Kafka’s Cat (Kattywompus Press), The Book of Knots and Their Untying (Kelsay Books), and, The Beautiful Leaves and Eve the Inventor (Bamboo Dart Press). She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a long-running poetry series in Claremont, California.

The Winning Side by Tamara Madison

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

The Winning Side

Here in the shadow of the world’s joy
let us find calm
Let us cool our blistered skin
in joy’s sweet shade
Among time’s soiled leaves
let me find your hand
For sorrow is a common thing
and joy its common underside
In this moment at least
let us turn the coin of our time
to where the shadow
of the world’s joy moves aside
and lifts us giddy
into bright and laughing air

*

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

Two Poems by Morrow Dowdle

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

My Friend Tells Me He’s a Felon

The term comes down from Old French,
its Latin root meaning bile. It makes mine rise
on the spring morning he recounts an old story—
three cops surrounded him at a community pool,
claimed he stole a watch at the local Target.
Cuffed in front of everyone, he was hauled off
in cold, wet trunks. They withheld evidence,
put him in a cell. He shivered until his wife arrived
with that month’s rent—the bail. He says he’s innocent
but took the plea because he didn’t know better.
Now, he needs work but can’t get hired—and here
I thought that full-time father was his calling, not fallout
from a system’s tricks. He’s still the man
I meet for playdates at this park, who brings
frosted flower cookies for the kids and trusts
in me, I who have been untrustworthy in my time,
have broken the law more than once, by luck
or demographic never caught. I hold his secret
like a bright green moth. Next week, we’ll go
camping, we say, sprawling on the mossy bank.
We watch our boys pitch rocks in the creek.

*

Confession

The guy outside the club wearing a dirty priest getup
and patent go-go boots says he likes my clutch,
its red pop against my black dress. Calls it fetch.

We take drags from my cigarette and I tell him
it was once a makeup bag, stolen from my sister
when she went to rehab. He raises an eyebrow,

I explain that we were teens, it was her third try
at sobriety. So I nicked it, plus a flimsy blouse
and necklace, beads the pink of a baby’s lips,

pendant a ceramic hibiscus. And birth control pills—
I mean, she left them. I just downed them for my own
protection. I wanted to make something of myself,

and it sure wasn’t a parent. It wasn’t my fault
she returned pregnant. Her CDs stayed zipped
safe in their case. I never liked Dave Matthews, Oasis,

all those jam bands ripping off the Grateful Dead.
I wasn’t grateful living in that house in her absence.
Without her comparison, I was the bad daughter,

getting all our father’s bad attention.
If I could, I’d give it all back. Pilgrimage
to where she still lives with our mother,

having never quite gotten it together. I’d lay
my plunder at her feet, give her a pedicure,
beg her forgiveness for being callous,

for being a bitch to her when we were little kids.
But we haven’t spoken in twenty years.
It isn’t because of what I took—no.

I can’t tell this priest it’s what our father
stole from us when we didn’t know it.
What we let him get away with once we did.

*

Morrow Dowdle is the author of the chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and the forthcoming chapbook Missing Woman. Their poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Rattle, New York Quarterly, Southeast Review, Stonecoast Review, The Baltimore Review, and ONE ART, among other literary journals. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the 2024 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. They run a performance series which features BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices and are pursuing their creative writing MFA at Spalding University. They live in Durham, NC. Find out more on Instagram @morrowdowdle.

Reckoning by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Reckoning

F. says he’d like to give himself permission
to be a dick, just for once, just for play,
and he demonstrates how he’d strut,
chest out like a gorilla, like certain politicians,
and we laugh and cheer him on because in real life
he’s a man who sits quietly with the broken-hearted,
and there are very few people
who can shut up and take in another person’s soul
trying to sing, but he can and somehow
we’re used to the idea of Man
riding roughshod over everything,
like that’s what masculine is supposed to look like,
and I wonder about the dick
inside of me, the one who likes
to swagger and brag,
and plow everyone out of the way–
but then I think of real dicks,
their softness and shyness and sometimes awkward
enthusiasm, the way they make their feelings known
to a listening hand or mouth,
and I think of the good men
I’ve known and what we were all told
about how men needed to behave to even be
considered men and I get it, we can all
be dicks sometimes, the ones of us who slop around
in our cynicism like a pair of old slippers,
the ones who grasp at every glittering thing,
or cling to ancient hatreds
like useless coins from a conquered country.
And maybe the dick is just something
we just have to reckon with
since it’s at the base of western civilization–
even god in the old testament acted like one,
smiting people and demanding tribute like any bully.
So yes, I think we’re just like that god we invented,
who was so jealous and capricious and vengeful.
Maybe He’s just a reflection of us
at our most power-hungry and scared,
and we need to own that part of ourselves,
offer it cool water and a place to chill,
but we sure as hell don’t have to get down
on our knees and worship it.

*

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

Dear Son by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Dear Son

I see you crouched behind a bush,
hands cupped around some countryside
bug, whose name and composition
you´ll pull out of the air as if the sky
was a library, earth´s most bizarre
curiosities housed on its shelves.
I used to fret over stings and bites.
Poison. By now, I´ve learned to trust
the knowledge hived in your mind.
I see you, sitting alone on a bench,
your bicycle flung on its side like
an argument you refused to lose.
The park is abuzz. Other eight-year-olds
wham soccer balls, somersault
off bars, play tag or play-wrestle,
but you stare at the grass, building
Lego towns inside dew drops.
Or maybe you´re mapping out
uncharted paths in maple leaf veins.
I see you on deep-read days, the way
your name doesn´t catch the sound
waves travelling to your eardrum.
I, too, know what it´s like to journey
to the center of the story, the red-hot
plot scorching any urge to return.
Sometimes, nothing temporal matters,
does it? Not your unmade bed or half-
reassembled gadget parts scattered
across the floor, not even your meal,
whose flavors have vacated the plate
like a reunion gone awry. At school,
you discover a galaxy in every lesson,
chase comets through your teacher´s
explanations. I foresee the consequences
of your cosmic-quick wit, the jokes
and jabs you´ll have to dodge,
the laughter. Corners you´ll color
in camouflage, quiet as a phasmid.
The asteroidal scars you´ll bring home.
Dear son, rise above the bullies!
Grand Marshal our town´s first bug
parade, naysayers be damned. Build
a road network rooted in leaf patterns,
a rocket ship powered by dew drops.
When time writes your story, know
that every word of it will shine.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net, she won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja,” and she was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Burningword Journal, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and others. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com

Bus Stop in Front of the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer by Kim Addonizio

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Bus Stop in Front of the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer

It’s the usual ruin—
shelter of scratched plastic,

torn schedule behind smashed glass.
The cement’s stained where someone

dragged themselves after a drive-by.
In the empty lot beyond, one

shoe’s been set upright in the weeds,
encircled with shards

of busted bottles that catch
the late light. You wait

while cars and lives pass,
wanting to believe there is a bus,

that you can hear it coming
from a long way off.

*

Kim Addonizio has published over a dozen books of poetry and prose. Her most recent poetry collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton). Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life was published by Penguin. Her poetry has been widely translated and anthologized. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist. She teaches Zoom poetry workshops in Oakland, CA. https://www.kimaddonizio.com

Ode to the Indigo Bunting by Julene Waffle

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Ode to the Indigo Bunting

You are not blue, not really—
but a trick of feathered lattice,
microscopic barbs bending light
into indigo illusion.
A prism perched on my wire fence,
you split the ordinary
into astonishment.

Summer is your longitude,
your body the compass
that inhales starlight,
exhales migration.
You read the Milky Way
like scripture,
winging south on constellations.

What is indigo, if not
the syllables between violet and night,
a threshold color,
ink before it dries,
a pigment of prayer?
You wear it as vestige,
a psalm sewn into a bruise,
your song a bright cipher
against the grain of dawn.

Fragment of sky, flame of my hedgerows,
what sermon do you sing—
that beauty is only refraction?
That even bones can carry
the language of galaxies?
That wonder arrives
winged and weightless,
dressed in an arc of color
that is not color at all?

*

Julene Waffle, graduate of Hartwick College and Binghamton University, is a teacher, family-woman, boy-mom, pet-mom, nature-lover, and life-liver. She enjoys pretending like she has it all together. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal Blog, The English Journal, Mslexia, The Ekphrastic Review, among other journals and anthologies, as well as her chapbook So I Will Remember (2020). Learn more at www.wafflepoetry.com, X: @JuleneWaffle, and Instagram: julenewaffle

When People Say Classical Music Helps Them Relax by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

When People Say Classical Music Helps Them Relax

I think of the hard metal
folding chairs on uneven grass,
pages blow closed and open
during Pachelbel, the bride
finally reaches the altar,
violinist cues the final repeat.

Beethoven Symphony #8 in Jerusalem,
heartbroken by the trombonist who used to wink
at me above the head of the bassoonist
but won’t look at me now.

Bach Cello Suite in G Major, on stage,
fingers cold, palms sweaty, my vivace pulse
in rhythmic dissonance with the Prelude’s
languid tempo. All those people I invited—
why? why? why?—watching.

Mahler 1st, Ozawa conducting, Tanglewood
pines, smell of charred meat from the commissary
kitchen, my stand partner’s condescension,
his sneer and bow tip slap on the score
after my late page turn.

Bartok duos busked in Boston subway
stations, dragging stool, stand, instrument
down escalators, screech of wheels competing
with Bela’s surprising harmonies, our loot
loose change and a couple bills, barely enough
to share a pizza.

Strauss waltzes for a formal Spring gala,
free drinks for the musicians, laughing
too hard to pluck the pizzicato
for Blue Danube, eyes rolling in step
with the schmaltzy music, sweat and merlot
staining my gown.

The hair on my neck, the gooseflesh
on my arms, the heat in my cheeks and lump
in my throat. To stop and start, speed up and slow
down, get loud and soft, change bows and breathe
together. It’s incredible when you think about it—
to have been the girl who did that.

*

Lynn Glicklich Cohen is a poet from Milwaukee, WI. A once-upon-a-time social worker, a perennial cellist and semi-retired Rolfer, her poems have been published in Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, Cantos, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Front Range Review, Grand Journal, Oberon, ONE ART, Peregrine, The Midwest Quarterly, The Phoenix, The Red Wheelbarrow, St. Katherine’s Review, Thin Air Magazine, Trampoline, Whistling Shade, and others. www.lynnglicklichcohenpoet.com

Beginning, Again by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Beginning, Again

Minty spittle slithers down
the handle of my toothbrush.
It’s a cold sunny morning
with new batteries; my teeth
are excited for a fresh start.
I didn’t have high expectations
for last year, a pessimistic way
to say I surpassed my goals.
(well, some of them, anyway)
This year, I feel more confident—
until a splash of cold hits my face.

             breaking news
             holding hope
             for the midterms

*

Shawn Aveningo Sanders shares the creative life with her husband in Beaverton, where they run a small press, The Poetry Box. Over 200 of Shawn’s poems have appeared worldwide, most recently in ONE ART, contemporary haibun online, McQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, Cloudbank, and Love Is for All of Us. Shawn is a multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Touchstone Award nominee and has won prizes from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her newest book Pockets (MoonPath Press) was a finalist in Concrete Wolf’s Chapbook Contest. When she’s not writing, you might find her shopping for a new pair of red shoes or toy dinosaurs for her granddaughter. (RedShoePoet.com)

Three Poems by Gary J. Whitehead

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Barometer

How else to measure
the troughs and fronts
of my parents’ deaths
than by the one thing I wanted
when we settled their estate.
I adjust its needle
every time I pass it
in the upstairs hall.

*

Observance

On the drive to bury my father,
the hearse took a wrong turn.
Our hazards pulsed the wet road
at a light interminably red.
At the chapel, I stood in the sun,
worried about a sunburn.
Looking past the glass-eyed chaplain,
I saw, at the base of a giant oak,
a flush of black-staining polypore.
And, beyond that, a man
step off a backhoe and light a smoke.

*

Wings to Fly

Just off a forest path,
I found a wing, no bird attached.
A blackbird’s or a baby crow’s.
I flexed the joint
and spread the feathers,
vanes like rustic pan-pipes
graduated with lengthening reeds.
Whether by a predator or cancer,
by the sea’s mists
or the sun’s scorching rays,
the flight of the innocent’s foiled.
We’re drawn to the extremes
and then we’re maimed,
the way my grandfather was
when he lost a leg.
I saw his gaze aim inward
even as he stared at the world,
and I felt ashamed to be so whole.
Kahlo, when she lost hers, wrote,
“Feet, why do I want them
if I have wings to fly?”
So the maimed appendage their loss.
And all of us want to fly.
Imagining the rest of the bird
flapping in a bloody circle,
I laid the wing on a tuft of moss,
and, for an hour or so,
walked the middle way,
the straight and narrow.

*

Gary J. Whitehead has published four books of poetry, most recently Strange What Rises (Terrapin Books, 2019) and A Glossary of Chickens (Princeton University Press, 2013). His poems have appeared widely, most notably in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Whitehead has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review. He lives in northern New Jersey.

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

  1. Kai Coggin
  2. Alison Luterman
  3. Donna Hilbert
  4. Betsy Mars
  5. John Amen
  6. Susan Vespoli
  7. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  8. Tina Em
  9. Kim Addonizio
  10. Molly Fisk
  11. Joseph Fasano
  12. Terri Kirby Erickson
  13. Robbi Nester
  14. James Crews
  15. Abby E. Murray
  16. Allison Blevins
  17. Erin Murphy
  18. john compton
  19. Dana Henry Martin
  20. Alison Hurwitz
  21. Moudi Sbeity
  22. Dick Westheimer
  23. James Feichthaler
  24. Karen Paul Holmes
  25. Naomi Shihab Nye

Note: For poets who published multiple times in ONE ART, in 2025, we are linking to the most-read curated work.

Shenandoah by Alex Turissini

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Shenandoah

You must have seen
how, when
the sun,
that most valuable gold token,
had finally risen,
and the shadows were hidden—
tucked under their objects like a boxer’s chin—
the valley’s luxuriant ribbon,
from mountain
to distant mountain,
shed its fog like a reptile’s skin,
and was, for a minute, a purse held open,
a pair of cupped palms,
a bowl for alms.

*

Alex Turissini is a graduate of the MFA program at LSU. His poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Atlanta Review, Bayou Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere, and he has been a contributor at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He lives and teaches in central Kentucky.

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

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

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

  1. John Amen
  2. Betsy Mars
  3. Donna Hilbert
  4. Bunkong Tuon
  5. Donna Spruijt-Metz
  6. Terri Kirby Erickson
  7. Sarah Mackey Kirby
  8. Kari Gunter-Seymour
  9. Liz Marlow
  10. Alison Luterman

January by Sheila Wellehan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

January

A glittering chandelier dangling
over an empty dawn ballroom.
A cane yanking us from past to now.

Sturdy iron handles encouraging us
to grasp and pull hard.
A dam dismantled so the river runs free.

Abandoned plans discovered in the back
of the pantry. Hands opening to reveal
ruby-tipped matches to light our way.

A wooden mantle to hang our hopes on.
An exquisite fan for us to open, painted
with peacocks, peonies, and daydreams.

A van waiting for us to jump in for a joy ride.
A bowl that’s cracked because it’s so crammed
with brand-newness.

The sanctuary of second to six-hundredth
chances. Shiny coins to jangle in our pockets
the rest of the year.

*

Sheila Wellehan’s poetry is featured in On the Seawall, Maine Public Radio’s Poems From Here, Psaltery & Lyre, Rust & Moth, Thimble Literary Magazine, Whale Road Review, and many other publications. She served as an assistant poetry editor for The Night Heron Barks and an associate editor for Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. Sheila lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. You can read her work at sheilawellehan.com.

Now by Julia Caroline Knowlton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Now

Quick as a key turn or July clouds
releasing downpours, I suddenly
loved you more as you admired

aloud the word maintenant – “now” –
mentioning its literal meaning:
holding a hand. Fifty years of French

and I had never picked that lock.
Now the present folds me
in its have and hold vow,

future pressed to past, palm
to warm palm. Every word my own
swollen cloud, shaped like a clock.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has won two separate Georgia Author of the Year awards for her poetry. Her latest volume of poetry is a children’s book. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.

My Life: Abridged by Polly Conway

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

My Life: Abridged

The vineyard’s vines never
stop, strings pulled taut
across California’s whole.
When thighs rub
together, there’s no sound,
but the pain
amplifies with each step.
Don’t be scared when the tide
exposes hundreds of sandcrabs
burrowing down, way down. Who
wants to be caught running?
I watch the Rose Parade twice
on New Year’s Day; think of
touching so many flowers all
at once. Pick dandelions
in the outfield. Blood versus
clear liquids. Still afraid
of bees, my foundation
drips. Two Pringles
make a duck bill: salt
dust stings my lips. I can’t
stop mocking
myself.

*

Polly Conway is a writer and editor based in Alameda, CA. Her poems have appeared in 400 Words, Tellus, and Monday Night, and she is the Poetry Editor at Nulla, a multimedia journal based in San Francisco. She has taught writing through Take My Word For It and Mentor Artists Playwrights Project. She founded the East Bay Dipping Society, an open water dipping collective, and holds an MFA from California College of the Arts. She is currently working on a poetry collection about her time in the ocean and will be a resident writer at Ou Gallery on Vancouver Island in 2026.

Green Questions by Rachel Hadas

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Green Questions

Before I knew it, I had reached the navel
of the labyrinth and turned to leave,
retracing my steps. What had seemed small
simply by my staying in one place
got bigger. Meandering this way and that,
the path traced what kept feeling like a choice.
Noiselessly one maple leaf twirled down
onto my shoulder – harbinger of more
but verdant still, a juicy bright deep green.

Fall’s paradoxical economy:
do time and distance actually shrink,
or does it only seem to work that way?
Everything is minute and fugitive.
The questions being asked in this green light
go unanswered. Ethan clears the last
remnant of the massive ghostly tree
he and Wes the forester took down
last night before it got too dark to see:
a hundred-year-old hemlock, give or take,
something over sixty feet tall.

Those distant summers when I was a child,
a few last weathered rungs were visible
nailed to its trunk. These like a ladder led
to some high perch where children must have played,
sheltered in their treehouse, with a view
of Pumpkin Hill, the valley, and the road.
What did they hear high in their hemlock nest?
What were the green questions of their own
season? The tree was rotten, hollow, dead,
says Ethan. It was time we cut it down.

*

Rachel Hadas is a poet, essayist, translator, and editor. The most recent of her many books is PASTORALS (Measure Press, 2025). A prosimetrum, MY CLOAK IS POETRY, is due out from Able Muse Press in 2026. An emerita professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, Hadas divides her time between New York City and Vermont. rachelhadas.net

Between Storms by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Between Storms

Last night it rained Biblical torrents,
and the trees dropped all their leaves at once.

Today, red and orange leaves, like little hands,
lie all over the sidewalks in mounds. Their cellulose skin

so much like ours but without meat or bones.
Meanwhile the neighbors are out in force,

raking and binning the storm’s detritus.
It’s what we humans do, after a tempest;

we clean up what’s left, while dogs prance
through swept piles, and the general

mayhem we call living spangles the air.
This almost-past year was a long skid, no brakes,

on the kind of ICE that hardens around the heart
of a nation. There are neighbors who aren’t here

but should be, and so much has been destroyed
that can never be put right again, at least not

in this brief lifetime. Where’s the bottom and how
will we know when we’ve reached it

is the question not even the black-clad astrologer
can answer, but I do know my friends are down

at Home Despot as I speak, clanging pots and pans
and fighting the kidnappers who come for the men

who only want work, and others
blocked the intersections around ICE offices

in San Francisco just last week and got arrested.
I’m braced–we all are–for whatever comes next,

for the wheels to come completely off the bus.
Meanwhile we’re between storms and the air is soft,

the neighbors have an improbable inflated Santa still
presiding over their yard, plastic reindeer flapping in the wind,

and fake snow, with a big ¡Feliz Navidad!
¡Próspero Año Nuevo! in green and red glitter on their window.

         Oakland, California, December 2025

*

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

Bardot and Me by James Penha

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Bardot and Me

I must have been only twelve—no more
when she came to our local movie house:
Bardot. Love Is My Profession. Somehow
they sold us tickets, Ricky and me. Over
popcorn and Jujubes we giggled to see
the naked actress. She was beautiful. We
loved her. The Catholic Church did not.
It had condemned the film making it a sin
to watch it. So I went to Confession to ask
God’s forgiveness. I did not tell the priest
that Ricky and I jerked each other off
in the theatre toilet. That had nothing to do
with Brigitte. We did it all the time. Oh,
she would have loved us. We were animals.

*

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. His story collection Queer As Folk Tales was published by Deep Desires Press in October 2025. His chapbook of poems American Daguerreotypes is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Bluesky: @jamespenha.bsky.social

Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Yarn and Hook

I wind the soft yarn
over a small metal hook,
pull through two loops,
wind again and pull through.

Repeat. Double Stitch. Repeat.
Again and again. Until a half inch
rises from the last edge finished.

Mental health experts extol
this motion of yarn and hook,
hands busier than the brain.

Praise it as mindful as meditation.

On winter nights. Crochet calls.
Lures me to the couch.

Where I sit, weaving warm colors
back into my life, strand by strand,
taming listless thoughts with sturdy stitches,
joining loops into patterns I control.

*

In Memoriam
Katherine Janus Kahn, Children’s Book Illustrator and Fine Artist

Ten years ago, after coming home
from a funeral for a mutual friend,
you told me you took your poodle
straight to the park.

No stopping to change clothes
or even heels, you said you grabbed
the leash and left for a field where
your curly pup could scamper and bark.

You told me you needed to see life
playing, prancing in the grass after
a sad morning of saying goodbye.

Now, at your graveside, I recall
the day I came to your studio,
your right arm waving with a flourish,
like Vanna White in Wheel of Fortune,
your passion for art vibrant
as the paintings on the wall.

And the day you arrived
with two feather boas.
One for you, one for me.

How we posed for pictures. Your smile
as radiant as your red hair.

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications including ONE ART, Amethyst Review, Offcourse, and Poem Alone. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com

An Afternoon of Hollow Things by Linda Mills Woolsey

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

An Afternoon of Hollow Things

Each thing cradles its own emptiness—
the feeder’s plastic cylinder drained
of seed, the tip of a branch shivering
loss as a chickadee takes flight, my heart,
circling your absence. The sky’s an erasure,
dubiously blank, the cup I clasp holds
only a brown film and air. For breath
to fill the lungs, they must be emptied.

Hours stall, empty as acorn cups, thin
as the ordinary need just to be loved.
The hollow of my heartbeat is narrow,
too—or simply shallow, condensation
on a cocktail glass, dust on the last book
we might have read together. My heart’s
not shattered, just empty as the space
between pressed lips, waiting to inhale.

*

Linda Mills Woolsey is a Western Pennsylvania native who has spent most of her life in Appalachia, north and south. She reviews poetry for Plume and Presence and reads submissions for River Heron Review. Her poems have appeared in Northern Appalachia Review, Wild Roof, The Christian Century, The Windhover, ONE ART and other journals. She lives with her husband and two companionable cats in a rural village in Allegany County, NY.

Three Poems by Ginel Ople

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Esplanade

All these beautiful people
haven’t got here yet.

They do not see the water
that is slowly passing by

nor hear the great music
of their footsteps on the boardwalk.

Their thoughts are in a conference room,
listening to a colleague

drink tea out of a tumbler,
or in the park

where they sat on a bench
haunted by a late-night call.

Even now, as they hold each other’s
hands underneath the lights,

they are contemplating postgrads
and emergency funds,

provisions for a long journey
before the unstoppable river

brings them to a sunny porch
where they would think about today

and be here at last.

* 

Elephant Lighter

When my daughter was tall enough
to reach the shelf, she handed it to me
to ask me what it was.

For what must have been years,
I thought of you. That evening
we found each other in the fire escape
hiding from our twenties.

You worked in the office next to mine
selling shoe polish over the phone
when what you really wanted to do

was sing. When I asked you for a light,
you told me I could keep it. You said
you were trying to quit. Of course,
I didn’t tell my daughter any of this.

You lived in a time where I was young
which in her head isn’t a real place.
But she grinned just the same,

as I had a lifetime ago,
when I pulled on the trunk
and a little flame came out
where you’d last think possible.

* 

Subway Construction

This morning, I saw the workers
laying down the scaffolding,
and as if lights have switched on
in the long hallway of my life,
I began to see doors
that I didn’t know were there.
I thought of Tinder matches
that were too far away.
All those jobs I rejected
because I could not afford to move.
Brunches with friends
I haven’t seen since college,
the gin glistening on the piano
of a jazz club I’ve never been to.
The museums and urban gardens.
In seven years, I will make my way
to you. Here’s to believing
that nothing else will change.

*

Ginel Ople is a writer from Cavite, Philippines. His work has also appeared in Third Wednesday and Rattle.

Two Poems by Bunkong Tuon

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Driving Home after Christmas with the In-laws

My daughter whimpered in the backseat,
“I’m not feeling well,” and vomited. Tears
and saliva spattered her My Little Pony pants.

The wailing of a world on fire woke up
her little brother, who turned to his right,
opened his mouth and wailed after big sister.

Our car, a moving metal of infant sirens
on the 87. My hands on the 10 and 2 o’clock,
I was calm like a killer before dawn.

My wife turned around in the passenger’s seat,
wiped our daughter’s vomit while singing
Greek lullabies to our son.

I took Rithy out of the car seat, pointed at
the big rigs speeding down the Northway,
made sure no stranger without a mask got close.

I put my hands on his red cheeks,
blew at his hair and face, and
watched his beautiful smile unfurl.

The world didn’t end that day.
Even if it did, I knew what must be done.
Do the work calmly and cleanly

Like those who came before me.
Without a care about anyone but my children,
this calm giving of myself.

*

Year of the Snake

Each day is a new low.
It’s like a noose. You can’t breathe.
You can’t see straight. Your heart’s giving out.
We can’t go on like this.
The darkness everywhere like a plague.
What we need is for things to slow down,
for silence to breathe,
for words to churn and do its magic,
the walls to crumble.
Everything and everywhere
is all here. It’s always been here.
When you look up, you know.
When you look around, you see.
When you turn inward, you feel.
The beginning of all things. This light.

*

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize–winning poet, and professor who teaches at Union College in Schenectady. His work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, World Literature Today, Copper Nickel, New York Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Salamander, diode poetry, Verse Daily, among others. He is poetry editor of Cultural Daily.

Monongahela Christmas by Tom Barlow

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Monongahela Christmas

Comes the snow, drifting across
the wild grasses like the water
that polishes river rocks

of the Blackwater into ornaments.
This is the raw Christmas, pines
tipped with hoarfrost, torpid trout

holding place in their current, while
wild ponies turn their backs
and gather together to endure.

Hunters plod through the valley
for whom the forest opens just wide
enough to allow them to pass before

folding closed again, stealing
the sound of their gunshots for
the wind. Mercy has found little

foothold in the winter mountains
while the whole countryside
attempts to sleep, some until spring,

some never to wake. This is no place
for an infant; only the glare of the sun
off the river ice could be mistaken
for a star that seeks a savior.

*

Tom Barlow is an American writer of novels, short stories and poetry, whose work has appeared in journals including Hobart, Tenemos, Redivider, The New York Quarterly, The Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many more. See tombarlowauthor.com.

Simple Supper by David B. Prather

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Simple Supper

My mother made mac-n-cheese
without any showy breadcrumbs.
It was simple—boiled pasta
and Velveeta cubed with a paring knife.
I loved to stir the pot,
watch those pale orange chunks
melt to a glossy sheen.

A little margarine made it rich, which
is something we were not.
For a little kick, she threw in a few pinches
of black pepper,
gray powder from a grocery store tin,
none of that snooty
freshly-ground stuff. I once used

a baking dish and panko,
as though I could do it better. A friend
tells me they like diced shallots
in theirs, and paprika. All I want
is that old aluminum pot
on an electric stove’s glowing coil,
and the past coming up to a boil.

*

David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and Bending Light with Bare Hands (Fernwood Press, 2025). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The Comstock Review, etc. He lives in Parkersburg, WV. Website: www.davidbprather.com

One thing you could do by Mary Paterson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

One thing you could do

is rent an apartment that is unfurnished
except for a large television
and a brown settee. You could go there
two to three times per week

to watch true crime documentaries
and cry about your mum. The deal is
you tell no one. At home you maintain
your days all perfectly ordinary:

magnet parking tickets to the fridge,
recycle cardboard, and so forth. Cycle there
as if you don’t believe in traffic. Hang a mirror
in the darkest room. The story is going to angle

itself out in instalments. You will see
your features become smudged away,
one by one, and, one by one,
see them repaired. Do this for nine months

and then it’s winter, your lungs burst open
like poinsettias; you, with ribbons on,
in the supermarket, everywhere. People
will think that it’s finished, people sing,

‘you look well!’, people make up
hoops of small talk about the sky.

*

Mary Paterson is a writer and curator based in London (UK). She writes mainly for performance, and her work has been performed around the world including with Live Art DK (Copenhagen), Wellcome Collection (London) & Arnolfini (Bristol). Her poetry has been published by Poetry Magazine, 3am Magazine, & Ambient Receiver, amongst others. Mary is the co-founder of ‘Something Other’: a platform for experimental writing and performance, running since 2014.

Mr. Rogers Teaches Little Donny about Climate Change by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Mr. Rogers Teaches Little Donny about Climate Change

Why don’t you take off that heavy coat, Mr. President?
It’s too warm for that today.
Why, I don’t even put my sweater on
when it gets this hot in the neighborhood.

I am out of Diet Coke,
but I can offer you a cool refreshing lemonade.
You know what they say,
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
We’ve been drinking a lot of lemonade
in the neighborhood lately.

Just drink it slowly, my friend.
It’s all that’s left since the citrus orchards
were wiped out by the last Cat 5
hurricane that ripped through Florida.
I’m happy to share what’s left.
After all, you’ve been so busy lately,
and it’s such a hot day.

But don’t worry.
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,
and maybe Santa will bring you a fan
for being such a good boy.
Or maybe a lump of coal.
He knows you really like coal.

*

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

Ten Hours at the Airport by Karly Randolph Pitman

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Ten Hours at the Airport
with gratitude for a line from Hawk McCrary

Your heart sinks when you see the message –
delayed, again, after one flight had already
been cancelled. But there was nothing you
could do, so you tuck your bag over your
shoulder and trudge through the long alleys.
You find a small bookstore and sit
on the corner of the floor for an hour,
reading a book on ADD and cleaning.
You walk to your gate, unpack your lunch,
eat the cold chicken and yams. When the flight’s
delayed for the third time, you rise to stand
in the snaking line with the others, all those
with somewhere important to go.
The young woman in front of you
clutches her group of paper boarding passes:
Cleveland to Atlanta, Atlanta to Amsterdam,
Amsterdam to Riyadh. Her ill mother waits
for her at the hospital. You catch her wide eyes,
help her talk to the gate agent, stay with her
until her problem is solved. You trade numbers
as a manager brings out bags of food, lays them
out on a table and tells the crowd to help themselves.
Other passengers are huddled together on the chairs,
telling each other stories about their time in the
other’s hometown as they eat the chicken sandwiches.
A grandmother, dressed in her good skirt and shoes,
naps with her head leaned back against the wall.
Strangers before, you’re bonded by your changed plans,
your many hours together. As the day turns to night,
a woman seethes into her phone, demanding a hotel room.
A gate agent calls an angry man darling then retreats,
apologizing, as he bristles – don’t call me darling.
Your new friend, newer to English, whispers to you,
Is darling a bad word? You reassure her it isn’t,
a term of endearment that to this man, wasn’t endearing.
You know the stakes are low for you –
your days of flying with small children are over.
You have room, this day, to be late. You have
your lunch and a book. But in the crowd, you see
every possible response to thwarted plans. Any of them
could be you, or have been, once. When the pilot announces
there’s a slim chance the flight might make it out tonight,
the group lets out a cheer. Hours later, you board in triumph,
your gratitude made deeper by your waiting. You give
the gate agents a standing ovation and they blush,
all smile and shine. At home, your family makes a joke
about how you’ve been in airport hell. A friend corrects them.
No, it’s been airport heaven.

*

Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, teacher, facilitator and mental health trainer who brings understanding to sugar addiction, overeating and other ways we care for trauma. You can find her poetry at O Nobly Born, a reader supported newsletter, and her healing work with food at her substack, When Food is Your Mother. She lives in Austin, Texas where she does as much as possible with her hands and is writing a book on bringing compassion to food suffering.

Anniversary Song by Pauli Dutton

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Anniversary Song

Here’s to the man who shudders in staccato at the new sun.
A bandaged man, of 90 years, who soon after hip surgery,
carried his walker down the front steps and took out the garbage.
A man, who on our third date, handed me his Mensa card,
now asks the names of our grandchildren.
Before the wedding, I believed he could pen
an encyclopedia. A decade ago, his brain began its seep.
How he shook in the market deciding on ice cream,
shrieked at a dropped cup of coffee,
scolded a yellowed leaf on the rose tree.
Last year he screamed at line 54 of the 1040,
slapped the table again and again, roaring my name.
He thundered when I told him I’d made a date with a taxman,
then cried as he said, Thank you and asked,
Will you still be my wife? I touched his shoulder,
answered, Will you marry me?

*

Pauli Dutton is a former librarian. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Writing in A Woman’s Voice; Verse Virtual, Quill & Parchment, The Pangolin Review, Altadena Poetry Review; and Spectrum Anthology. Her poem While Teaching Line Dancing was nominated by ONE ART for Orison Book’s Best Spiritual Literature 2022. She was the featured poet in Quill and Parchment, December 2024.

Chalice by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Chalice

I want to empty my chalice of grief,
and be like the neighbor’s two dogs

early this morning unleashed
on the warm and sun-strewn beach,

so alive in their streamlined bodies,
running, sniffing, circling,

as if they’d never seen sand before,
as if the earth were new, and meant for frolic,

as if the only purpose in life were to stir
uncontainable, everlasting, mirth.

*

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.

Toward an All-Purpose Elegy by Sydney Lea

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Toward an All-Purpose Elegy

        –at Bear Ridge Speedway, Vermont

What if I wrote a reusable elegy?
I’d have chances enough to apply it. For some reason the thought
occurs to me here. I sit with two small grandsons,
a gale of dust blowing up from the dirt-track oval.
It coats our greasy French fries just as it did
back forty years when I came to this place with their father,
and much before, when I watched snarling cars

slide around an identical eighth-mile circuit.
Far south of here, that was, but the scene hasn’t changed,
unlike everything else, it appears, in the rest of my world.
Two bats flit over moth-clotted infield lights.
There used to be scores. I liken those vanished clouds
to my corps of friends, which seems to shrink by the hour.
Just this morning, another stab of bad news–

an old friend dying, one incredibly brave
through years of struggle with and after cancer.
He was the smallest but toughest boy on our football team
yet always tender toward others even back then.
Thinking of him, I can blame this dust for my tears.
With an elegy on hand for every occasion,
I wouldn’t need to fetch fresh metaphors

for any future bereavement or for solace.
My griefs, after all, are increasingly the same.
I’d try to devise some elegiac conclusion,
to offer the sense of completion these boys have known–
like their father before them and their father’s father as well–
those times when they bet on the battered car that would pass
the checkered flag into transitory triumph.

The grandsons, of course, lost more than they won tonight.
So just as for any imagined reader I’d honor
the elegiac custom of consolation,
for these little children I’ll offer some little comfort.
We’ll stop by the vendor’s stand where I can buy them
Bear Ridge caps and undented model cars.
Then, our races ended, we’ll head for the exit.

*

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.

Advent by Chelsea Rathburn

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Advent

My daughter wrote on an index card
Not Trash Do Not Throw Away (Please)
and taped it to the cardboard frame
of her empty advent calendar,
which for three years has sat atop
a bookshelf in her room, its foil-wrapped
chocolates long divided and consumed,

dark for her, milk for me. And though
I plead with her to clean her room
of all its useless stuff, I too
loved peeking into the calendars
my friends received each December
(I never once had my own),
all the tiny windows and doors

opening on so many little gifts.
What possibility! How lucky
they seemed, except the sorry few
whose treasures turned out to be cartoons
or Bible verses instead of candy.
We all want the tangible, chocolates
and toys, but also the anticipation

and then the memory of sweetness.
My daughter’s calendar shows no
angels, no wise men, not even Santa,
just smiling bears and a snowy house
aglow. What I keep, in the hall
beside our family photographs,
is the framed collage she made in school

of our old house on a hill. (The word
hill! is there in her careful print.)
She’s drawn herself in front, pink-haired
and legs in motion, but what I notice
most are all the extra windows –
she put them even in the roof,
so many little openings to joy.

*

Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife. Since 2019, she has served as poet laureate of Georgia.

Civil War by Alec Solomita

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Civil War

The Union soldiers were all blue
including their faces and hands.
Confederates were all gray.
Infantry on both sides, crouched
or standing, aimed muskets,
as James called rifles, at the foe,
as James called the enemy.
Others marched, muskets
slung over their shoulders.
And the cavalry rode red horses.
Both sides had a flag bearer.
And there were wagons, cannons,
tents, boats, buglers: the greatest
set of toy soldiers I’d ever
seen, even in Macy’s windows.

James had recently moved into the
neighborhood. His large, brick
house was catty-cornered
to ours across a weedy
lawn. He was a round pale boy
with light brown girly curls
and he was older than me by a couple
of years. I had just turned nine.
He was called James, not Jim or Jimmy.
We played with his soldiers for hours.
And we could make as much noise
as we wanted — bombs, guns, horses.
I’d laugh when he made a horse sound.

His mom, he said, was his stepmother
and he said he would sometimes visit his
real mother who lived in her own place.
He had a sister, too, a baby, who was
his real sister, he said, not his step.
And he took singing lessons once a week
but “I won’t be singing for you,” he laughed,
shaking his long hair, and snorting
like one of the plastic toy horses.

There were four metal soldiers, painted
by hand. They were, James explained,
antiques. They led their armies into
battle and could never be killed.
But when the plastic soldiers were shot
we had to lay them down. He was pretty
strict about that, but always nice.
He called me a “talented tactician.”
I don’t know who I liked more, James
or his beautiful Civil War set.

After one long visit to his mother
during spring vacation, he didn’t
come back. My parents said he
moved away but I didn’t understand
because his family was still in the
big brick house. So that evening,
I snuck halfway down the front
stairs to listen to mom and dad talk.

“Despondent?” my mother said
kind of loud. “Despondent!”
And dad said, “Well, I guess
there’s despondent and despondent.”
“Yes,” she said, “there’s despondent
and despondent.” They said the word
so many times it began to sound strange.

“There’s a good cry,” said Dad,
“and then there’s the postman seeing
mail pile up in front of the apartment
and the police finding two bodies
inside and a gun next to the woman
lying on her son’s bedroom floor.”

More baffled than bereft,
all I could think was
that it wasn’t a musket.

*

Alec Solomita is a writer working in Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in the Southwest Review, The Mississippi Review, and Southword Journal, among other publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal. His poetry has appeared in many journals, including Poetica, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Lake, ONE ART, and several anthologies. His chapbook “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press. His full-length poetry book, “Hard To Be a Hero,” was released by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2021. He’s just finished another, titled “Small Change.”

AROUND AND AROUND by Brooke Herter James

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

AROUND AND AROUND

My mother died on Thanksgiving Day,
my father had his own November departure.
A close friend exited in mid-December,
soon after the birthday of my now deceased sister.
Let’s just say this is not the side of the game board
I look forward to. Starting with Halloween I roll for doubles
to hurry me past all those costly stops,
maybe a Chance card to get me to free parking,
better yet a railroad station where I can climb aboard,
chug safely past all those avenues of grief.
Christmas Eve is where I want to disembark
with packages under my arms, a roast tied with string,
a jug of eggnog to pour for my grandsons
as they set up their favorite game at the kitchen table
in the warmth of the busy-ness all around—
dogs underfoot, supper cooking, Santa coming—
I’m okay being the top hat, the scotty or even the iron.
Hell, I made it through another year. I’m ready to play again.

*

Brooke Herter James is a Vermont poet. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Rattle, Orbis and other online and in print journals. She is the author of several poetry chapbooks and the winner of the 2024 Fish Poetry Prize.

Two Poems by Marlena Brown

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Babies
for Lori

It was a year of great change.
My nervous system exploded.
Fluids got inserted.
I got an iconic French bob
and my life was saved
by a woman named Kimberly.

When I entered the salon
Lori saw my will.
She had known
the kingdom of my childhood.
I sat still while she cleared away
the late-blooming sun
colored mantle.

Meanwhile snow made holes
in the “New You Salon.”
Through them was the other
white ceiling. The strip mall clinic
with the diagram
of my supposed body. When I laid down
Kimberly said, This is easier
because you’re so thin.

Then she drew the curtain
between my mother and me.

Or sometimes I went to Karen’s office,
which was dim and I wasn’t
getting much sleep, so while
hickies appeared along my spine
I became very still,
a dog under a blanket.
She constantly asked what I wanted,

unlike Lori who wouldn’t listen
and each month raised the hem
off an inch of my lower forehead.
All year we fought
over my lower forehead.
She said I had what was called
baby bangs.

One night I stood outside the strip mall
and prayed.
My mood ring said ‘sensual’
but I swear I wasn’t.
Only the cool hand of night
against my embarrassment.
The things I could no longer
refuse to allow.
Today I wore the babies

down my street. Under them
I was as beautiful as she believed.

*

Winter Sun

January 27. Three men love me this week. None of them
are the man I love. He and I loved summer but we were born into nights
like a closed mouth. When I got laid down by stomach pains I thought,

Maybe I’m gathering strength for my birthday. But the blood
was only going. Room for new blood? Three women want me
to throw them around but all I want is to be held down

and done-to, like compression therapy, or when I got a fever
and was defeated by the thought that my life is soft,
and will remain soft forever. I want to make decisions,

take my neighbors, when those fire alarms kept going
they simply moved next door. Maybe my life isn’t soft it’s a series of walks
to other people’s rooms. Each time we broke up, for example, I had a fit

when I looked around the room I would never again enter. Bevel
of his back muscle, chiming of her wall. In place of those omens, I repeat
Something big is going to happen. But when the moment comes,

I say nothing. Still my decision looks good on me,
hangs well like heavy jeans. All I want is to get looked at
or else to be two eyes floating in a room.

If I was, could I still say something? My mother says
when I was born the flakes came down in shiny white tufts,
and the sun was white, the snow emitting that blinding white brightness
that renders you speechless and leaves your heart clean.

*

Marlena Brown is a poet from Michigan. Her work has appeared in HIKA and SWAMP and won the Brown University Rose Low Rome Prize for Poetry. She previously served as managing editor at The Round out of Providence, Rhode Island. She writes about lamps and dogs.

Ode to a Crystal Dreidel by Liz Marlow

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Ode to a Crystal Dreidel

Throughout the year,
you wait
in the curio cabinet—
sunlight’s fingers

grab at you
through the window
every afternoon.
We adore you

from behind glass doors,
your blue viscera
held tight like leaves
trapped in ice.

But today,
my son watches
you in wonder
like a great miracle.

You spin
from delicate fingers,
maple seed in the game.
How you land

determines win or loss
instead of anchor
to become life.
O how your confetti glows,

fills the room
as the chandelier
catches, presents us
with what you are

meant to be,
with what you have
waited all year
to become.

*

Liz Marlow is the author of They Become Stars (Slapering Hol Press 2020) and The Ground Never Lets Go, forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in 2026. Additionally, her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best Small Fictions, The Greensboro Review, The Idaho Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the editor-in-chief of Minyan Magazine.

Two Poems by Grant Clauser

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

To the Carol Singer at the End of the Anthropocene Mall

A week until Christmas and the mall mostly
ghost town, one Macy’s still struggles
on like a steam engine against new highways.
Even the store manager buys his gifts online.
I stop in the rotunda while my wife browses
past empty boutiques. Teenagers searching
for irony pose for photos with a jaundiced Santa.
On the small stage, a lone singer with piano
pokes through an app for carols she knows,
settles on White Christmas, then slides into
I’ll Be Home… while an audience of three
stare into our phones or Starbucks cups.
We’re all a mess of distraction and regret.
And how can we not be? The season trying hard
to cheer us into a new year. Signs for lease
and loss all around. Trauma so common
it becomes a kind of faith. She sings like she knows
none of this. She sings like an evening campfire,
like snow over a plowed field, like a table
set for the whole family. She sings
as they say, her heart out, which takes
all her strength to carry home.

*

The Last Christmas

Eventually the weather turns
on all of us, and then
you find yourself in a forest
without recognizing the trail.
Every tree older or broken by winter.
Loved ones gone or going
dawn by dawn.

It’s harder now to get back.
Children grown, and the days
imitate water flowing over falls.
We say that creaking in the foundation
is ground settling and not decay
in the heart’s bedrock

breaking apart.

*

Grant Clauser’s sixth poetry book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a news media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania.

Two Poems by Sean Wang

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Small Knife

I carry the cheap bag from Aldi.
At the sink an apple bleeds a red thread,
metal on tongue. Light grits the glass;
the room pulls in.

Grandpa pared rot, set wedges in our hands.
Mother kept a tally in the fruit.
I kept score by silence.
I rinse the basin; the water pinks.

Cold climbs the frame. I lay newsprint,
press tape to the pane, a quick dressing,
corners lifting like scabs in dry wind.
I call Mother at work; her knife is steady.

On the line, I hear her turn the peel.
“Take it,” she says. I lift a wedge
to the window, bite the white, taste iron;
the basin blushes again, my tongue nicked.

Skins buckle in the bowl.
Sun stripes the cracked pane where the tape lifts.
We eat around the cut, the bruise we spare.
Care is a small knife.

Her blade finds brown, keeps the rest bright.
I taste the room, the cheap glue, the cold.
Slow as a scab, the corner rises.

With a thumbnail I pare the lifting edge.
At the cut, the pane works a little—
a thin cold entering, just enough to show the wound.
We press there.

* 

Visitor Window

The screen wakes; the glass is ringing.
One pane won’t take two faces.
The laminate on my chest says VISITOR.
Facility rule: contact through glass only.

We raise our hands to its lit skin
and practice touch the window can read.
The room answers in glare: a bleached vase,
a mattress slid into the corner,
our photo clouded under taped plastic.
I say yes, yes, to steady the hairline
in the glass. Fourth move since school,
leases curl; a fingertip lifts the dust.
Between panes, a stripe of shine
the mop can’t reach. I pull the chain;
the blinds stutter to a stop.

Hallway: once a phone bright as a lure
opened, my mother’s voice folded in it.
Today the receiver is the window.
I grip my side of the glass and try not to shake.

Downstairs: from her room I shoulder
a clear trash bag past the rentals;
the weight slides back.

Courtyard: a rooster in a red helmet
pecks his mirror until the sensor chirps,
the indicator goes red; the glass stays shut.

Visitor hours end. The window keeps its rule.
A guard nods. The laminate sits with me.
My hands stay clean on this side, except the print
warming where we spoke, then cooling at the latch.

*

Sean Wang is a PhD student. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, wildscape literary journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Pictura Journal, Soul Forte Journal, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L), where his work was selected for the Broadside Series, among others.

Jennie Garth claims she’s an Elder Millennial & I am totally taken aback by Victoria Nordlund

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Jennie Garth claims she’s an Elder Millennial & I am totally taken aback

because 90210 is so iconically Gen X
because my kids are Millennials & do not know that Jennie Garth exists

because I videotaped 90210 in 1991 & 2 & 3
because I wanted to be Kelly Taylor and always Choose Me

because I totally had Jennie Garth & Jennifer Aniston haircuts
because Jennifer is the most Gen X name ever

because aren’t Nirvana & Heathers & Buffy so much cooler
than The Backstreet Boys & Gossip Girl & Superbad?

because Garth was 36 & played a guidance counselor in the 2008 reboot
Because I aged out of the remake & my kids were way too young

because Geriatric Millennials were born in 1981 & MTV was launched
in 1981 & I bet Jennie remembers watching Video Killed the Radio Star too

because there’s only Boomers and the Silents left ahead of Jennie & me
because we are already the forgotten ones

because Luke Perry & Shannen Doherty are no longer here to call her out

because I had to Google that the Greatest Generation came before Silent
because Jennie & I can remember a time before anyone had the power to Google anything

because when I searched Jennie Garth today, I discovered she was born in 1972,
got a hip replacement in 2020, started HRT for menopause the same year as me

because the reel after Jennie’s of a 38-year-old influencer facing her mid-life
crisis head-on with a deep plane facelift in Turkey made my eyes roll

because, whatever

*

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 PANK Magazine, Rust+Moth, Chestnut Review, trampset, and elsewhere. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com

Then There is This by Kari Gunter-Seymour

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Then There is This

But it’s only a dog, she blathers,
and I am fingering a brick,

metaphorically,
aimed at her vacuous brain,

my Band-Aid of propriety
ripped clean off,

my storage unit
of fuck-you’s laid bare.

My office window frames
a stand of shagbark hickories,

statues of dark gods lopping
off the sky, their mawkish gold robes

fading to autumn’s wither, promising
nothing but bitterness and bite.

Maybe my mother was right
all along, maybe

I’ll never be satisfied
until I poke out someone’s eye.

*

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

karigunterseymourpoet.com
I: karigunterseymour

The Thousands of Us Who Clean Shit Off the Floor by Sarah Mackey Kirby

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

The Thousands of Us Who Clean Shit Off the Floor

I don’t drink into the night
like Bukowski, etching “Bluebird”
into the literary canon as
a breathtaking fuck you to
the elbow patch cocktail parties
and academic writing conventions.
I’ve never lived dangerously
or marched to the drum
of a drummer in some
indie band lighting
cigarettes by the dozens.

I am one of thousands
tucked behind an old porch,
behind brick,
on a street lined with
joggers, barking dogs,
and magnolia blossoms
drooping into fall.
I clean shit off the floor
when my momma can’t
get to the bathroom in time
and her Depends aren’t enough.

I write only before the morning light
and stop to pour divided medicines
into a cup, get her coffee,
make her yogurt, stir powdered fiber
into ice-cold ginger ale,
help her onto a shower chair,
wash her feet.

Writing, itself, is rebellion.
Against the monotony,
the daily navigation
of another’s confusion
and memory jumbles.
Driving her to doctors.
Waiting during tests and surgeries.
Making sure her dinner
is hot, but not too hot.

I am no saint. No one to
feel sorry for. And
I am no outsider. It’s
been years since I’ve
worn black knee-high boots
with a leather skirt
and gone out dancing.
I am one of thousands
lost inside this love.

We live in the crevices,
folding laundry once
stained with tomato soup.
We hug as tightly as we can.
Because the only thing more
heartbreaking than this hell
will be the day hell ends.

*

Sarah Mackey Kirby was born and raised among fat bumble bees and redbud trees in Louisville, Kentucky. She taught middle and high school social studies, which brought her incredible joy and hilarious moments. Her poems appear in Chiron Review, ONE ART, Ploughshares, Third Wednesday Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s the author of the poetry collection, The Taste of Your Music (Impspired, 2021) She loves to cook, dig in garden dirt, and root for University of Louisville basketball. Find Sarah’s work at https://smkirby.com/

ONE ART’s Winter Fundraiser

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~ ONE ART’s Winter Fundraiser ~

This is ONE ART’s 2nd Fundraiser. During our 1st Fundraiser, we were very close to receiving enough donations to reach our goal of $3,000.

We received donations from about 50 individuals, overall. Many were extra generous and gave significant donations. A little back-of-napkin math reminds that we would reach $3,000 in donations if 300 individuals donated $10.

I remain committed to keeping submissions to ONE ART free and ONE ART’s website ad-free. I’m committed to continuing the monthly ONE ART Reading Series and regularly hosting low-cost workshops. I aim to continue to find new opportunities to better serve the literary community.

ONE ART does not have any organizational, state, or federal grant funding.

All of ONE ART’s support comes from donations by generous individuals like you.

Please consider a donation to help support my ability to focus my efforts on ONE ART’s daily operations and contributions to the poetry community.

If you believe that ONE ART contributes to your life and the vitality of the poetry community, I hope you will consider a small donation.

>>> GoFundMe <<<

>>> Standard Donation Methods <<<

With Gratitude,

Mark Danowsky
Founder / Editor-in-Chief
ONE ART: a journal of poetry

Five Poems by Ren Wilding

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Chase All the Ghosts from Your Head

In high school, I recorded a Liz Phair song
off the radio on a cassette— the only love
song I’d heard that didn’t specify gender.
I only played it late at night, volume
so low I had to put my ear against
the speaker. I didn’t know who I wanted
to love me. The first person I fell in love with
burned me a CD of love songs,
the front decorated with sharpie rainbows,
first track The Power of Two by the Indigo Girls
I played it on repeat in my car for months after
we broke up, trying to replace
the heart I forgot on the nightstand
beside their bed where we slept.

* The title is taken from the lyrics of “The Power of Two” by the Indigo Girls.

* 

Bite

You told your boyfriend
to bite you as we watched
The Twilight Zone in your
dorm room. You said he should
bite me too if I wanted. I always
did what you said, and the thought
of you wanting me bitten
made my skin slither. Your
boyfriend’s teeth made rows
of little crescents on my forearm.
I watched your face. You asked
how it felt. I don’t remember
what I said, only that I left
thinking you loved me.

*

Fisherwoman

I forgot my lungs
when I swam from her—
fish scales shiver
my skin

My lips pass seawater,
as barbs
hook me by the jaw.
She reels me from the water—

a dread of air
passes over my gills
in a lacework of burning.

Seaweed strands weigh
me down—
her hands
on my skin again.

She needs to do it right
this time. Scrape
my scales—
become covered
in the sequins
of my body.

Slice and strip my belly
until all that’s left
is the sweetness of me
she wants in her mouth.

I am flotsam
I am gills.
I am gasped air.

*

Origami Dragon

A green-haired girl made me
a paper dragon so small

my hand became its lair.
It couldn’t stop keeling

over on its curled talons—
with each fall, my hand sparked

to think of her fingers folding.
When she gave me a ride

after art class, gold filled
the cavern of my chest.

But I didn’t yet know
I liked girls— no fire

on my breath
to burn her back.

* 

Valentine’s Performance

My belly was full of crackling
eggshells as I helped the girl
working on the student production
of the Vagina Monologues
pass out fliers and ply students with cake.
But I had to leave the carnival
of vulvas to meet my bicurious
art major girlfriend who barely
touched me. I gave her a note
with a pressed violet inside,
and she gave me nothing. All I wanted
was to kiss the theater girl,
our mouths smeared with frosting.

*

Ren Wilding (they/them) is a trans, queer, neurodivergent poet. They are the author of Trans Artifacts: Bones Between My Teeth (forthcoming from Porkbelly Press, 2026) and Trans Archeology (forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review, 2027). Their work appears in Braving the Body (Harbor Editions), Comstock Review, Does It Have Pockets, ONE ART, Palette Poetry, Pine Hills Review, The Second Coming, and elsewhere. They were a finalist for Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Prize, have received a Pushcart nomination, 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.

Learning Stillness by Robbin Farr

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Learning Stillness

Rereading a friend’s poems,
a gentler time, a time after

my mother’s hospitalizations
for such ailments as trouble

the very old. Yet I am certain
this peace will not last.

Certain restlessness lingers, waits
for the midnight phone to ring,

voice on the other side terse,
anxious with bad news.

Her poems instruct, warn
the wariness of me. Coax me

to learn from the vulnerable
bloodroot that leans into the just

thawing creek to crack open
the bud. Attune my ear

to the water chimes that ring
in this field only. Rest

like the bee asleep in the flower
among the sweet perfume

of its labor. To attend to breath
and song and hum. To stop

searching other worlds
for the inevitable.

*

Robbin Farr writes short form: poetry and brief lyric nonfiction. In addition to writing, she is the editor of River Heron Review poetry journal. Robbin’s work has been published in Cleaver, Citron Review, The MacGuffin, Sky Island and elsewhere. She is the author of two books of poetry, Become Echo (2023) and Transience (2018). She is most happy when revising and submitting. Writing terrifies her. More about Robbin at robbinfarr.com.

I’m taking a holiday by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

I’m taking a holiday

from headlines, and I’m not the only one.
I walk through a nearby neighborhood,
the kind with a community pool
and a new elementary school
between row after row of houses.
Cul-de-sacs of cocoa & cookies,
lights adorn rooftops down each street,
everyone saving each other a seat
for the big Holiday Parade. Scouts
setting up for a bake sale, tables of
treats their moms helped make sweet.
I stop at a house with one blue spotlight
and a red bucket hung on a hook,
where a plaque invites me to Take One.
Hoping to find a little poem inside,
there’s a handwritten prayer instead.
And though I didn’t feel the need,
I was grateful for the offering, this
token of kinship from a stranger—
and how I found myself believing
maybe—just maybe—We the People
can still turn things around.

*

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

POEM IN WHICH GOD TALKS TO ME by Denise Duhamel

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

POEM IN WHICH GOD TALKS TO ME

I’m working really hard
up here. Everything I do
is for the family. I’ve heard
your prayers. Enough
already. Stop
being such a damn nag.

*

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

Three Poems by Donna Spruijt-Metz

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Severed

This far into your death—I am most functional
in the mornings.

By afternoon, I have faded—
no direction.

I trim the wilting flowers—give them
new water—an extra day.

Time, for flowers,
must work differently. Perhaps

I have given them a whole new life
with my water, my scissors,

my opposable thumbs
—my brief power—

*

What rises from the quiet

is the noise
of your absence. The roar of your sudden
departure—constant reminders
that I am on my own.

For instance, the water bill—the long
conversation with the lady at the
Department of Water and Power—
where they have all the power

and we have a mysterious leak.
But it is my leak now. Just mine.

Oh, you—son of a master plumber—
you would have tracked it down
with the residue of your father’s glee.

I am the daughter of a jazz pianist—
all I can do is listen for a rhythmic dripping.

I can’t fix the sound system—
it gave out last night. You had MacGyvered it—
daisy-chained remote to remote to remote.

Now all that’s left of your secret system
are the colorful buttons, the dead
little rectangles.

* 

The Retelling

I have a new friend—she’s halfway
across the world.
She asks good questions, about before
the after of you—and so I retell old stories.
They take new shapes in her listening.

I sit at the morning table
—poached egg and widowhood
for breakfast—dictating
into my phone,
I falter, erase, retrace.

Memory is like that—retreating into it
is like that—a strange man
backing my newly dead father’s Torch Red
Thunderbird out of our garage—
my mother, wild—ferocious, screaming,

“Get that car out of here!
I never want to see it again!”
I’m the small girl who doesn’t
understand. The car was so pretty.

I loved it.
It smelled of him—
and it was just like him—showy
and always leaving.

*

Donna Spruijt-Metz’s second collection, ‘To Phrase a Prayer for Peace’, was published in March 2025 (Wildhouse Publishing). Her debut poetry collection is ‘General Release from the Beginning of the World’ (2023, Free Verse Editions). She is an emeritus psychology professor, MacDowell fellow, rabbinical school drop-out, and former classical flutist. Her chapbooks include ‘Slippery Surfaces’, ‘And Haunt the World’ (with Flower Conroy), and ‘Dear Ghost’ (winner, 2023 Harbor Review Editor’s prize). Her translation from the Dutch of Lucas Hirsch’s ‘Wu Wei Eats an Egg’ (Ben Yehuda press) and her full-length collaboration with Flower Conroy, ‘And Scuttle My Ballon’ (Picture Show Press) were both released in 2025. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, Tahoma Literary Review, One Art, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She’s an emeritus professor, MacDowell fellow, rabbinical school drop-out, and former classical flutist. She gets restless.

The last time I saw Richard by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

The last time I saw Richard

I discuss Richard with Richard
during a therapy session. Imagining.
The old Gestalt Empty Chair Technique.

He sits in the chair opposite me,
so gangly, like he’s always been,
six foot five, legs too long
to ever be at ease, frame
meant for basketball, brain meant
for math, calculating the distance
to the hoop. His sudden stroke at seventeen
like a swoosh through the net, game-ending.

The last time I saw Richard, Joni sings,
and every time I wonder if it was.
The last time.

He was in the hospital with the bed tray
between us, and nothing much
to say. I had done him wrong,
as his father had, eloping
with his aunt. As his mother had
for favoring him. As his brother had
for forgiving him.

Was I to blame for not loving him,
beyond the cookies we baked for the team
and the occasional make-out sessions
when I gave in to my own loneliness
and his longing?

But where was I?
He sits across from me, no
longer in control of his limbs,
and I can hardly look at him,
even this projection. I didn’t
expect this solidity. But here he is,
waiting.

His face is twisted, his tongue
is re-learning to talk. He regards me
with bitterness. Tell me about despair, I long
to say. I will tell you about mine. He unlocks
his wheels and rolls away.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in Minyan, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which served as the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. In addition, she also frequently collaborates with San Diego artist Judith Christensen, most recently on an installation entitled “Mapping Our Future Selves.”

Three Poems by Terri Kirby Erickson

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Ballet Class

I tried not to envy the ponytailed waifs
in my ballet class whose ten-year-old bodies
weighed less than dandelions.

I was as thin as they were, but my limbs
were like lead weights compared
to the willow branches of their arms, the bird-

like bones in legs that seemed stronger,
lighter—able to pirouette and plié
with so much ease. At least I make good grades

in school, I’d say to myself while holding
on to the barre like a ship’s mainmast
in a roiling sea. But I knew the ballet teachers

expected better of me—the only daughter
of a Prima Ballerina. It didn’t take long,
however, to see I had none of my mother’s talent.

I would never leap into the air and land like a swan
on the water, dip and sway like a sapling
in the wind. Though I liked wearing the black

leotard and pink tights, my soft, peony-colored
shoes, I couldn’t bend and touch
my toes, let alone twirl on them. So I shed

the ballet slippers and took up writing—
hoping to pen one day, a pirouetting poem,
a pas de chat of words that danced across a page.

*

Woman on the Beach

The woman pacing the rocky beach is no ghost
but a mother whose little boy rose
from his bed and wandered down to the water

while his parents were sleeping. Not quite three,
her only child was red-cheeked and plump
as a baby penguin, with black curls and a winning

smile that made his mother’s heart thump
in her thin chest just to think of it. She knew
he was gone but year after year she rented the same

cottage on the same shore on the same day her boy
disappeared—presumed drowned they said—
and now she is old. Widowed, white-headed

and frail, her body is blown this way and that by
the wind, but still she walks and sometimes
calls his name as if any minute, he’ll come running,

his flushed skin hot against her own cool flesh,
wriggling like a puppy that wants down but she will
not put him down. She will hold him

in her arms and keep him safe like she didn’t do
before, though nothing she says or does
or prays for will ever wake her from a sleep so deep

she never heard his feet hit the floor or the screen
door slam or his cries for help, her beautiful
boy whose mother failed him.

* 

How to Shop with Your Mother

Never make her feel like she’s slowing
you down. Even when she meanders

into the shoe department, running her
hands over the soft leather, admiring

one pair or another for what seems like
forever, you do have time to wait. Then,

when the funeral director tells you they
need clothes for her to wear, a pair of

shoes, you will not open your mother’s
closet door and find, jumbled into a pile,

her worn out sandals, dress shoes with
dented heels, her faded thin-soled flats—

and feel such a wave of sorrow you can’t
catch your breath. You won’t be the one

who hurried her mother along, who kept
on sighing because she was holding you

up when there were so many places you
needed to go and things you needed to do.

*

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

ONE ART’s January 2026 Reading

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ONE ART’s January 2026 Reading

Sunday, January 11
Time: 2:00pm Eastern
Duration: ~ 1.25 hours
Featured Readers: Katie Dozier & Timothy Green

>>> Register Here <<<

About The Featured Readers

Timothy Green has been the editor of Rattle, managing its operations since 2004. He hosts Rattlecast and Critique of the Week and co-host of The Poetry Space_. He is the author of American Fractal (Red Hen Press) and co-author of Hot Pink Moon and Have You Seen the Moon Honey (both Fungible Editions) with his wife, Katie Dozier. He holds a masters in professional writing from USC, has been a contributing columnist for the Press-Enterprise newspaper, and co-founder of the Wrightwood Arts Center. He lives in The Woodlands, Texas, with Katie and their family.

Katie Dozier, a former professional poker player, is the author of All That Glitter (forthcoming with The Poetry Box Press), and Watering Can (Alexandria Labs). She’s the co-author of Hot Pink Moon: A Crown of Haibun, and Have You Seen the Moon Honey with her husband, Timothy Green. She loves long conversations about short poems. Katie is the creator of the top-rated podcast The Poetry Space_, the Haiku Editor for ONE ART, and an editor at Rattle.

Still, Resilience by Susan Rich

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Still, Resilience

On the night of 14 April 2014, exactly 276 female students were kidnapped from the Government Secondary School in the town of Chibok, Borno State, Nigeria. The Jihadist group, Boko Haram took full responsibility.

Called back for their Physics final
the girls return

with their sharpened pencils,
no one wanting to fail,

no one able to imagine
anything worse than an F.

In the imagined classroom,
I watch the students

take their exams—
heads bent over small desks.

Teaching across the border
In the pink earth of Niger, what did I know?

How could they know
anything beyond their assigned

problem sets, too intent
on memory to hear the slap-drop

of worn boots, smell
bitter dust rising around

the armed boys who appeared
more like lost extras

from an independent slasher film
than soldiers of Boko Haram.

And how did the girls react?
Did they spiral down

the stairwells holding their slender
blue notebooks?

Or were they so intent
on their hopes, our hopes,

that they simply kept on writing—

*

Susan Rich is the author of six collections of poetry and co-editor of two prose anthologies. Her recent books include Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry). Susan co-edited Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems (Two Sylvias Press) with Kelli Russell Agodon and co-edited, The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders (McSweeney’s) with Ilya Kaminsky. Her other poetry books include Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue–Poems of the World, winner of the PEN USA Award. A winner of the Crab Creek Review Prize, Times Literary Supplement Award (London), and a Fulbright Fellowship, Rich’s poems appear in the Harvard Review, Ploughshares, VQR Online and elsewhere. Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds is forthcoming from Raven Chronicles Press. Blue Atlas was a Finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

Three Poems by Abby McCartney

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Self Portrait as Crossword Puzzle

The sign of a beginner is their loyalty
to their first answer. Once you’ve banged
your head against the grid for four
or six months, trying to earn sleep,
you realize: do it in pencil.
Most days I try to pack too many letters
in the same box. Sometimes
that’s allowed – another thing I
had to learn the hard way. I remember
the first time I realized the answer
could spill over the edge, up the sides.
I want the gold star, the answers
clicking into place like a seatbelt.
My favorites, though, are the puzzles
that make their own rules, crossing
YELLOW down with RED across to
make the Orange Bowl. My grandmother
did a Monday crossword every night
before bed, one family pattern
I don’t mind repeating. When she
fought with my mother, it was always
in pen. It’s the work of a lifetime
to learn to erase.

*

Elegy with Summer Rain

The thing about an untimely death is
overnight your recipes became holy.
Your voicemails are relics, your
Cowboys sweatshirt a talisman.
Now I can say your name without
crying. Usually. Sometimes I want
to complain about you as my friends
complain about their mothers:
She never called me, but she assumed
I had been kidnapped if I didn’t call home
by Sunday noon. Sometimes
I want the last book you gave me
to be a book and nothing
more. After the summer storm
the city is bathed in an eerie pink
light, even past sunset, refracting
off the bouldering clouds, making
the bricks glow like jewels,
making everything look wrong.

*

When my mother visits my dreams

When my mother visits my dreams
she wants to know what happened
to all her stuff.
We gave your loaf pans away, I say.
Sorry. Why did you have four of them?
We sent one to my cousin
for their first apartment, I tell her.
She nods. She is glad.

I worry how I will explain the rest:
TikTok, hybrid meetings, Wordle,
The new house my dad lives in
full of a woman she barely knows.
You were gone a long time,
I say.
We didn’t think you were coming back.

I wake and remember
all the things I forgot to ask.

*

Abby McCartney (she/her) is an emerging poet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work explores themes of grief, motherhood, and lineage. She spends her days working on education finance policy at the state and local levels and previously served as an aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is also an active lay leader at Kol Tzedek Synagogue. In her spare time, she enjoys baking, reading, crossword puzzles, and walking her dog around South Philly. She holds an M.P.A. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a B.A. from Yale University, where she was a Truman Scholar.

Two Poems by George Franklin

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Talking to Myself

It’s 9 p.m. I’m taking the dog
For an evening walk, up by the mall,
Then following the canal. The moon
Won’t rise till later, and the clouds streak
Like white chalk against an enormous
Black sky. This is one of the first nights
Of autumn. There’s a breeze, and my shirt
Isn’t sticking to my back. I should
Feel happy. I could be walking on
A sidewalk in Barcelona or
Madrid, Mexico City, Paris,
Or Bogotá—the air would touch
My face the same way. The headlights of
Cars would sweep across the darkened trees
In those cities just as they do here,
The car radios releasing a
Few notes of music before the night
Swallows them. I watch the red taillights
Until they disappear and think of
The things I could’ve done and didn’t,
The places I could have lived and been
A different person, worn a hat
Like my father’s—I wrote a poem
About that once, the gray fedora
He’d put on to go to the office.
I found it in his closet when he
Died. It smelled of hair tonic and sweat.
It’s sad how we leave these things behind.
They’re the poems everybody writes
And forgets about. They line the shelves
Of thrift shops, then reincarnated
Into other lives, start all over.
It’s strange to think that someone else wore
My father’s hat, that someone else’s
Fingers lifted it by the crown,
Tried it on, and pulled down the soft brim.
My closet is full of stuff like that,
Shirts Ximena gave me, my jacket
That reminds me of Spain, blue jeans, and
Shoes with worn-down heels, missing laces,
So many things that go unnoticed.
The dog has spotted a yogurt cup
In the grass and is fascinated.
I pull him away, and we walk down
The hill to the street and the narrow
Sidewalk we follow on our way home.

*

Raphael’s Skull

The smooth, white skull on Goethe’s desk
Did not, as he thought, belong to Raphael.
It was the skull of a man with a brain disorder.
The salesman must have lied. Who knows
The posthumous destiny of bones? Donne’s
Lovers buried together, he imagined dug up
To make room for one more recently dead
And hoped they’d be spared disturbance.
They probably weren’t.
                                             I look at the paintings
On my wall and think about the previous
Owners, how the portraits’ expressions
Never changed, no matter the scenes they
Saw and didn’t reflect, the seductions,
The arguments, how my grandfather fell
To the rug, his heart pausing unexpectedly,
How we ran for the small oxygen tank
And put the mask over his face—or the vases
That came from China by ship, crated,
Wrapped in paper, print that no one here
Could understand, and the books waiting
On my own shelves, impatiently I suppose,
Especially the ones that have gone unread.

My grandfather kept a fine-edged knife
For cutting the pages, thick ivory paper
With firm bindings. Southern humidity
And gas heat turned those bindings dry
And brittle. I mostly bought paperbacks
That yellowed within a decade or two.
Some had cost a quarter each from remainder
Tables, bookstore basements in Cambridge
Or New York. In Canto LXXXI, Pound
Remembers when “books cost a peseta,
Brass candlesticks in proportion.”
My parents lit candles at dinner on
Friday nights and recited a blessing.
I don’t remember if the candlesticks
Were brass. The past is an ossuary
Of broken things, books in dumpsters
Covered by garbage from restaurants,
Sauce gone rancid, debris from construction,
Demolition, copper pipes ripped out, taken
For scrap, luggage no longer fit to travel.

When my father died, we had an estate sale.
A pocketknife sold for a dollar, and his
Shirts fifty cents each. The dining room
Table and chairs, the blue sofa, the marble-
Topped table in the living room—they were
All gone by noon, and at six o’clock,
A man arrived with a truck to make an
Offer on everything else. I kept all sorts
Of things I should have left, porcelain
Plates—themselves made from bones
And white clay—fluted glasses, a pocket
Watch, and a soup tureen. All here to remind
Of things that aren’t.

*

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

Shards of Light by Elizabeth Burk

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Shards of Light

I have lunch with a younger friend
whose beard is turning to iron—
in compensation, his ponytail
grows longer. We talk and I wonder
if he had ever desired me. I try to keep
such narcissistic preoccupations
tucked away from my awareness,

but they glow now in the dim light
of this restaurant at noon,
that murky gray of a rainy day,
shards of light streaking oblique and harsh
through unwashed windows,
turning everything ashen and pasty.

The young waitress sashays back
and forth, appears to flaunt
her lithe body while I sit lumpy
on the booth banquette. I’ve lost height
from what used to be my waistline up—
the spine undoubtedly collapsing—
it feels like the table between us
is at the level of my chin. I squelch
the urge to ask for a booster seat.

I turn my attention back to my friend,
listen as he recounts his adventures
traversing the country solo
in his new minivan, realize his true desire
lies in his need to tell me his stories.
As for my need to feel desired,
I’m hoping that tiresome burden
will diminish with age—
will it bring mourning or relief?

*

Elizabeth Burk is a psychologist who divides her time between her native New York and a home and husband in southwest Louisiana. Her first full-length collection, Unmoored, was recently published by Texas Review Press (Nov 2024). She is the author of three previous collections: Learning to Love Louisiana, Louisiana Purchase and Duet—Poet & Photographer, a collaboration with her photographer husband. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Atlanta Review, Rattle, Naugatuck River Review, Louisiana Literature, Passager, Pithead Chapel, ONE ART, PANK, Museum of Americana, MER and elsewhere.

Waiting for My Medicine by Judy Kronenfeld

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Waiting for My Medicine

In the pharmacy a man sits down across from me,
dragging a long green tube of oxygen
on little wheels; it looks like a torpedo on one of those
collapsible shopping carts or luggage carriers.

He’s got transparent tubing stapling
his nostrils, like the fangs of a snake,
but, as if leaning over a fence, nattering,
he strikes up a conversation with another customer.
He’s not out of breath. He laughs. He jokes.

I want him to stay like that, talking unthroatily,
his long still young legs blazing in front of him,
to prove that things aren’t always
how they seem. But he hears his name.
He shuffles to the pharmacist’s window,
takes out his wallet, shakes his head.
“Costs a hell of a lot to die,” he says.

*

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, 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).

The 3rd Annual Chill Subs Community Favorites Best Lit Mag Awards

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The 3rd Annual Chill Subs Community Favorites Best Lit Mag Awards
Have you voted yet? There are still a few days remaining.

Voting closes December 7th!

*

I’m pleased to say that ONE ART: a journal of poetry made the list in both 2023 and 2024!

Here’s hoping we make the 2025 list!!

>>> Vote Here <<<

+

2024: Community Favorites (Poetry)

ONE ART ranked #4!

+

25 Best Lit Mags of 2023: Chill Subs Community Favorites

ONE ART ranked #6 (across genres!!)

*

I hope you will vote for the lit mags that you most value for your own personal reasons.
Thank you for the time that you dedicate to ONE ART.
I’m grateful to have you as a member of our wonderful community.

With Gratitude,

Mark Danowsky
Editor
ONE ART

Two Poems by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

A New Mythology

I want to live in a world that trains poets instead
of soldiers, that invents words for experiences too
complex to define, the kind that fracture your bones
and bloom in a thousand petaled symphony to cup
the ache in your chest. A world that drills us on how
to march towards each other bearing wild flowers,
standing silent at the break of dawn. Want a world in
where explosion is understood as a metaphor for awe
pouncing at the edge of exhale, and war a state of
self-denial, and occupation meaning that thing which
grips your attention in ever widening circles of prayer.

I want to live in a world in where the vocabulary of
ownership is a relic we visit in museums, and a stranger
is someone you feed, and dirt the reason for devotion.
A world that targets food deserts with a rainfall of
seeds, which routes rivers to parched villages, then
brigades an army of palms to harvest light ripening
on lush vines, that invade your dreams with instructions
on how to implode ripe berries between the skin of
your teeth, how to armor yourself with bare thin leaves.
Want a world that authors a new mythology for being,
one in where the only deity worth worshiping is the
ground you stand on, and to become a hero you must
not leave on a journey, but surrender yourself a witness
to the pulse within.

*

The Space Between Us

I don’t know how to save the world.
I’ve bent my tongue in half trying.
What I do know is how to tend to the space
between us. How to feel into that one eternal
pulse that keeps us together. Lean into the one
echoing breath that threads yours into mine.
Touch on this one expression of love, to that
one primordial seed from which we sprout.
When I say I Love You, what I mean is
I Am You, is your liberation is my joy is
my peace dwelling. The question isn’t how
do we remind each other of our indelible
belonging. The soul already knows.
The question is how do we remove the
obstacles towards it. How do we rip off
the tarp preventing the seed from sprouting,
the sprout from growing, the tree from licking
the light, the light from unfurling across your
chest, bellowing up your throat, settling into
your eyes like God looking at God, like love
is between I and you, between you and
everything else.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American author, poet, and transpersonal psychotherapist. 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, Moudi is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. Their first poetry collection, Want A World, and their memoir, Habibi Means Beloved, are set to be published in 2026. They now call the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado home.

Three Poems by Hilary King

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A Lesson from Inflatables.

Mornings, let’s nap on the lawn.
Let our plans become puddles
of red, green, and reindeer-colored plastic.
Late afternoon, we’ll plug back in,
fill ourselves with air, sway a little
as the stars come out to see us.
If we topple over, knocked
by winter winds,
have faith that every season
strength needs help to rise,
the sun, a song, a friend
to flip the switch, pull you upright,
tall and beaming on the winter grass.

*

How to Do Holiday Mail

Pluck from the crush of bills
and catalogs the stiff squares
and rectangles, gold embossing
making every return address
an elegance.
Do not open them–
Stack them instead.
Wrap them in red.
Add to the pile every day.
Late Christmas morning,
after the gifts have been pillaged
and the floor tumbleweeded
with boxes and tissue,
sit near the tree, near the family
installing batteries or reading new books,
Sit with your glass or holiday mug
and unwrap the gift of the familiar and beloved.

*

Holiday Calendar

Nevermind the garland sparkling
over the Butterballs
or the panettone crenellated
over discounted bags
of Halloween candy.
Keep your own calendar:
A day saved for baking or
an afternoon of wrapping,
on the floor with ribbon and tape,
a bow stuck to the dog’s paw.
The night time car ride with the kids,
milkshakes thick with peppermint,
Mariah Carey on the radio.
Look at those lights!
Stores, ads, all the oiled machines mean
to spin your time into coin.
Toss the catalogs. Stay away from stores,
keep your hand in your own pocket,
on your own golden hours.

*

Originally from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, ONE ART, Salamander, Fourth River, and other publications. She is an editor for DMQ Review, and has been nominated for multiple awards. Her book Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024.

The Field in Relief by Margaret Taylor-Ulizio

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Field in Relief

I see my shadow stretching out long and thin
along the surface of the plowed ground,
and I wonder how I have grown fivefold

in the waning of the light.
I ask an old man on a tractor
if I can take his photo, and
he wonders where it will

end up. The photo lives on
without him now,
and the tractor sits in stillness.
I walk my dog and am startled
by a young coyote, curious on its path.
I catch his eye for a moment,

and he runs away. I tread among
the giants, their heads bowed
above me, growing tall in the
plowed ground. And the birds feast,
not on the eyes of hanging men,
but on the smiling faces

of the sunflowers, now turned in the evening
away from where shadows run big. The cleared
field shows a snake in monochrome
against the brown earth and the slanted
light, where my husband plots the ground for
the harvest he hopes will come, himself
a silhouette in granite, standing against the
sky of burning orange.

*

Margaret Taylor-Ulizio is a poet from New Jersey. Margaret’s poems have appeared in the San Antonio Review, Amethyst Review, Orchards Poetry Journal, Merion West (forthcoming) as well as local anthologies.

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

  1. Jennifer Blackledge
  2. Dana Henry Martin
  3. Betsy Mars
  4. George Franklin
  5. Julie Weiss
  6. Francine Witte
  7. Julia Caroline Knowlton
  8. Karen Paul Holmes
  9. Daye Phillippo
  10. Nancy Huggett

Idioms by John Amen

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Idioms

My mother loved that saying, the devil’s in the details.
As a kid, I somehow figured that if the devil’s there,
god must be there, too. That would mean, as I saw it,
that the holy & unholy are tucked into the invisible,
playing tug of war or wrestling or high-fiving in the atoms,
in the sprawling fog you find when you
twist & twist that knob on a microscope,
infinite white sea emerging.
I asked my father about it once.
I’m not sure about devils & gods, he said,
that’s more your mother’s department.
Which didn’t tell me much, other than
highlighting the difference between my parents:
my mother who read a poem each morning,
my father who once told me that mythology annoyed him.
What peninsula did they meet on,
waltzing a thin line before veering
to opposite sides of the world,
stamping in their own private tides?
I pray, but I don’t know to whom,
perhaps some cauterized sense of self, a mind removed
from memory & habit. I still dream a small room
where my parents share a kiss & drop their weapons,
my father tossing his boxcutter, my mother her paring knife.
They could both land a cut that didn’t heal easily.
I have the scars from their respective
swipes, & I’m sure my own blade is a cross
between the two: a prop you can dice
logic with, retractable steel you can deny
having used when your lover is bleeding in the sheets.
& speaking of logic, a throatful of proofs
is gathering dust in a bathtub. On the other
side of the house, tomes, magazines never read,
tapped for the yard sale. I’m culling, clearing,
fattening a dumpster that stretches in the backyard,
a black hole oozing its own sensible music.
My parents would be dismayed & proud, they’d
hover over my shoulder, each telling me what I
should keep & discard. These decades later,
I still pace a line between my mother
lost in her galloping verse & my father
muttering over a blueprint. But something,
yes, something writhes in that white streak,
that mist I dive & dive into, groping to find
the silver dollar, the hidden gem. If a god’s there,
so is a devil, & now look, the three of us
splashing like tourists in an empty pool.
Or maybe it’s just me, in the depths, the heights,
alone, thinking the universe is mine.

*

John Amen was a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.

Two Poems by Todd Wynn

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

A Quiet Kind of Violence

Reason combs through wreckage
looking for order
where none exists.

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

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

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

“It all happens for a reason.”

* 

Her Sky

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Kathryn Jordan

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

“Invasion From Within”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Corn Hole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

for boosting the business while
making Halloween great again—

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

*

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

SUMMER HEAT by Doug Fritock

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

SUMMER HEAT

— after ‘When I Was Conceived’ by Michael Ryan

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

*

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

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

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

Kai Coggin – I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW

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

Julie Weiss – Dear Daughter, 

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

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

*

Learn more about the Monarch Queer Literary Awards.

Plastics by Christy Prahl

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Plastics

My mother throws
a Tupperware party.

Only two women come,
eating their body weight

in deviled eggs, listening
to a consultant pitch them

canister sets, colanders,
lemonade pitchers.

The fish aren’t biting.
The pond barely

eddies. My sister and I
pool our birthday money

and ask to buy a set
of nesting bowls.

We will free them
like Matryoshka dolls,

load their cavities
with marbles,

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

*

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

Fortune Cookie by Kari Gunter-Seymour

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Fortune Cookie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

www.karigunterseymourpoet.com
I: karigunterseymour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Free from Want by Lana Hechtman Ayers

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Free from Want

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

*

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

Like Schrödinger’s Cat by Betsy Mars

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Like Schrödinger’s Cat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in Minyan, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which served as the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. In addition, she also frequently collaborates with San Diego artist Judith Christensen, most recently on an installation entitled “Mapping Our Future Selves.”

The Knot by Gloria Heffernan

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The Knot

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

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

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

*

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

ONE ART’s 2026 Best Microfiction Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2026 Best Microfiction Nominations

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

*

A Note from The Editor

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

*

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

Learn more about Best Microfiction here.

*

The One Story by Philip Terman

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The One Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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A Pangolin Rolls Up in a Box at Airport Customs

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

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

*

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

Red Things by Ann Kammerer

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Red Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

After Placing My Husband in Care I Visit the Serengeti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

ONE ART’s 2026 Pushcart Prize Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2026 Pushcart Prize Nominations

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

§

Whale Shark

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

*

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

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

§

And Then, We Hear It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

§

Once, on the Oncology Floor

A teenager asked
if he’d ever drive again.
No one knew what to say.
So I showed him
how to press the nurse call button
like it was an ignition switch.
He laughed,
and for a minute,
the hallway turned
into an open road.

That night
I dreamed of him
parallel parking
between stars.
I woke with the memory
of his hand
gripping the rail
as if it were
a steering wheel.

*

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, as well as a mother of three. Her work appears in redrosethorns, Red Eft Review, and Medmic, with additional pieces forthcoming. Find her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com or on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.

§

Net Worth

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

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

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

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

*

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

§

Weights & Measures

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

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

Anymore, span her
Waist with hands
Amarvel at its minuteness

Without encoding
Lovability as the ability
To fit inside something

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without engendering
Pathology, a fixation sickness
On what is visible

Instead of what is whole.

*

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

§

Conversations with My Son

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

*

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

§

Smoke Inhalation by Samn Stockwell

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Smoke Inhalation

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

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

*

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

Pennies by Julia Caroline Knowlton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Pennies

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

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

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

*

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

September Like Sunflowers At Sunset by Joemario Umana

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

September Like Sunflowers At Sunset

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

*

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

SET THE BONE by Jillian Stacia

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

SET THE BONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Broken by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Broken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fuse back together.

*

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

Navel Gazing by Kat Lehmann

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Navel Gazing

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

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

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

*

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

Three Poems by Nancy Huggett

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

and in the stars, dead now
but dangling direction.

I believe in shadow’s
embrace. Dusky lover

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

canticles of delight. I believe
in unfinished hems, threads

trailing through dark,
thin ribbons of fiddle

for fingers searching,
rosaries lost long ago

in the backwoods of hope
where brambles catch

starlight, glimmer like fireflies
always moving. I believe

in the dirt, in cicadas’
vast slumber,

the emergence of lovers,
bulbs, dew worms inching

refuse into friable loam.
I believe in the soil—

that darkness can make you sing.

*

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