Author: ONE ART

Memento Mori by Susan Zimmerman

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Memento Mori

No need for a skull on my desk.

All I see will survive me,
be handed on, arrive at last
in the Goodwill jumble,
handled or worn or read by strangers.
All things escape as if leaving me

when I am the one leaving.
Some things seem close in time
but far in distance. I cull my life.
Sheets of paper, so light, multiply,

grow heavy. If I try
to remember it all, I’ll go mad.
When rings melt down for gold—

Let go, let go, they sing
in their melting.

*

Susan Zimmerman’s chapbook, Nothing is Lost, was published by Caitlin Press in 1980. Her poems have more recently appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals such as Prairie Fire, Gyroscope Review, The Maynard, and SWWIM Every Day. A poem of hers is also included in the new anthology The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy, edited by James Crews.

Two Poems by Tim Moder

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Driving Home Across The Mackinac Bridge, Tired, Early Morning June 12, 2012
(after seeing Radiohead and Caribou in Chicago and Detroit)
I can’t dream when I’m not amazed. Hypnotic signals stretch the
skies feeling for a tower. Helpless in the driver seat I don’t sleep.
Today I thought I saw a bird’s nest in the trees, hanging, made
of grasses, threaded twigs and leaves. It turned out to be a giant
spider web that mulched abandoned missives collected by the wind.
It waited, gigantic, a hairy catcher’s mitt, for unaware ideas to arrive.
I can always be amazed while driving. I can hear them in the back
sleeping. Friends, and friends of friends, and family. When we were
kids, we dreamed of being out of control, leaving when we heard the
call, sworn to the moon as secret celebrants. I wait to hear the night.
I suppose the light of the moon is just reflection. I see it in the sky,
and in front of me on the mirror of two great lakes. I can’t tell
which isn’t real. I wait with the wind to liberate pinned places from
the names we printed in bold letters on unfolded wrinkled maps.
*
Low Gas Salton Sea, October 3, 2018
(on the way to Phoenix to see The Mystic Valley Band and Phoebe Bridgers)
You are playing Hot Fuss on the stereo.
The needle moves idly across the GPS.
I say “I’ll get the next gas.”
We have a quarter tank.
From the back seat I could see
boarded up/pulled up/dug up stations,
each with a listing on the internet.
Unplugged mid-day warning signs.
Leisure moved on. Commerce moved on.
I could see an empty cigarette machine
dials and grips play it like foosball.
An empty yard with an Astro-turf veranda,
bumpy with iridescent happiness.
An empty bucket of rain water
dripping with Osprey feathers.
I’ve been reading the diary of a Buddhist
Monk, written while visiting a Shinto shrine.
In this pure land are many mansions,
most of them abandoned.
Sand is wind-embraced along the naked highway.
I don’t mind being a passenger today
as the car comes to an inevitable rolling
stop near Desert Center
I say “I’ll get the next gas.”
*
Tim Moder is a poet living in northern Wisconsin. His poems have appeared in Native Skin, River Mouth Review, Free State Review, Coachella Review, and others. He is the author of the chapbooks All true Heavens (Alien Buddha Press 2022) and American Parade Routes (Seven Kitchens 2023) He is a member of The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

In the Margin by Jennifer L. Abod

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In the Margin

My purpose lost, I wander
into the living room.
One dusty bookcase
catches my eye.

I sit on the wood floor,
choose a fat book,
thumb pages, until
I reach a yellow stickie.

In the margins, in pencil,
Angela’s clear
handwritten notes.
here I find her,
hear her voice.

*

Jennifer L. Abod, PhD. Her poems appear in Sinister Wisdom, One Art Journal, The Metro Washington Weekly, Silver Birch Press, Wild Crone Wisdom, Artemis Journal, and forthcoming in Spillway Magazine. Dr. Abod is a jazz singer, award-winning documentary filmmaker, and radio broadcaster. She is a former assistant professor of Communications and Women’s Studies. www.jenniferabod.com

Farrier’s Work by Conor Gearin

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Farrier’s Work
After Gerard Manley Hopkins

I have never held the hammer and tongs,
smacked sparks from orange iron,
in fact it turns out I’m anemic,
not even enough iron in my blood—

so why am I thinking again of Felix Randal
the farrier, battering his horseshoes,
a blacksmith I heard of from another poet
who also couldn’t stop thinking about blacksmiths—

why do I keep returning to this place
where I explain my work to myself:
furnace-glow in the dark, the silence
of rhythm, turning over and over the red sickle

shaping the perfect question mark

*

Conor Gearin is a writer from St. Louis living in Omaha. He’s the managing producer of BirdNote Daily, a daily radio program and podcast. His work has appeared in The Atlantic online, Chariton Review, New Scientist, Mochila Review, MIT Technology Review, and Foliate Oak Literary Magazine.

The Flowers by Michael Hettich

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The Flowers

That first year in the tropics, we’d swim out farther
than we dared—though we did it—until we reached the sandbar
almost out of sight of land, where the gently-lapping water
was so shallow we could sit down and let its gentle rocking
soothe us until we were drowsy—not tired
exactly but half-dreaming, gazing at the vastly deeper
water beyond us and the darker currents running there.

We’d wade along that sandy ridge watching minnows scatter
and the bigger fish flash like flint and disappear.
Pelicans, anhinga and black skimmers let us come close—
somehow our human threat was almost vanished there.

We’d moved from the gray north; our bones still ached with cold.

That ocean smelled like flowers whose names we hadn’t learned yet,
and it was warm enough for us to take our suits off
and sing like little children, and talk like children back and forth,
not baby-talk but a kind of innocence—

then we’d push off to swim in, across the calm but teeming water
back to the city with its dancing and its rage
and its many kinds of flowers whose names we also didn’t know,
though we were determined to learn them.

*

Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poetry, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022 was published in May 2023 by Press 53. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in many journals and anthologies, and he has published more than a dozen books of poetry across four decades. His honors include several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize, a Florida Book Award, the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the inaugural Hudson-Fowler Prize from Slant magazine at the University of Central Arkansas. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Miami and taught for many years at Miami Dade College where he was awarded an Endowed Teaching Chair. His website is michaelhettich.com.

Three Poems by Betsy Mars

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Hawaiian Sunset

Before the house was turned over to renters,
still strangers, before the renovations,
before the turning over of the key
to the bank – before the trustee took pity
on my daughter and me, and left us
some privacy to say goodbye,
we spent a week with what was left:
a bed, two plates, two knives, two –
you get the idea. In the evenings
we sat in folding chairs and watched
the sun go down over the sea
where my mother’s ashes once eddied.

We said goodbye to the blood-stained carpet,
the puckering paint, the rusting window frames,
to the familiar view. Farewell to the presence
of the man we loved, moved to assisted living.
We even said goodbye to the flying cockroaches
surely skulking nearby, to the flip flop shoes
that we relied on to keep them at bay.
In the distance the volcano loomed, teasing
with inactivity. I learned that week how to let go.

The last morning they came for the bed,
the dresser, all that remained that could be of use,
and we drove away with our memories
packed, boarded the plane. I can’t say
we never looked back.

*

Inside my Mother’s Mind

Inside my mother’s mind there were rooms
her mother had decorated like a carnival
of doom, mirrors etched with venom.

The body that housed her mind was a place
her father had built from conditional love and guilt—
any flaws— imperfect nose, a mole
subject to surgical correction.
Her body ever on display,
staged and scented with perfection.

When my mother spoke there was a guarded space
inside her eyes; sometimes, when I was graced,
she let me see what cowered behind them.

*

Hospital Rest

My father’s breath rasps and bangs.
Wheeled beds bump down the corridor,
code blue over the intercom,
the ins and outs, button-pushing, chart-updating.
Pain on a scale of one through ten?

There is no rest for those of us undrugged.
Caffeine courses through veins in the shift’s eleventh hour,
the pulse so loud at times I can almost hear it
from the sofa bed where my head sorts its way
through the maze of sound, divining urgent from innocent.

The nurse administers morphine—
the word triggers an inner alarm:
images of death throes and agony, then
my father’s unnatural quiet, my stifled sobs.
Instead he settles, breath calmed.

The nurse returns, checks his pulse, turns him on his side.
He faces away from me toward the door.
The morning starts to creep through the dust-free blinds,
thick glass. There is no rush of traffic, no chirp of birds.

*

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.”

Four Poems by Luke Johnson

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Memory

of my dad
on the deck

with a blunt
& bottle of rum.

watch him
bop his

skinny hips
to Patsy Cline

then smile
when he sees

me staring
from my

bedroom window,
a loon

in the foreground
lifting.

*

Memory

of my nana
holding

a single pearl
in lavender light,

then spinning
it over and over,

as if somewhere
inside it

a whisper
is trapped,

the voice
of her stillborn son.

*

Memory

when my
sister was a pig

and the next
a snake,

and no matter
what the pastor

prayed,
would switch

each week
to a new animalia,

and sneak
out into the dark.

*

Memory

of dad
threshing brush
with a sickle

and the first
spark first snarl,

when smoke
would rise
like twisting

columns
from tinder

and carry his
baritone,
each dumb joke,

over
neighboring oaks

and once,
after his
brother died

of heart disease,
when both of us

wandered
acres deep
for chantarelles

and the chill
in the air a bouquet

of scalpels,
the way he’d reach
then I’d reach back,

the rain
our ritual song.

*

Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press), a finalist for The Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis Award, The Vassar Miller Prize and the Brittingham. His second book A Slow Indwelling, a call and response with the poet Megan Merchant, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions Fall 2024. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Lukesrant or through email: writerswharfmb@gmail.com

Two Poems by Homa Mojadidi

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Political Prisoner

My grandfather made
tasbih beads from the insides
of bread he was fed

while being held
at an undisclosed
prison in Kabul—

on his last days on earth
he chose to feed
not his body but his soul

I wish I could have seen him
praying on the bare moldy floor
the walls smeared with blood

dignified and self-composed
while his enemies plotted
how and when to kill him

and make his body disappear
so that his loved ones
would never find him—

*

Breath

The breath
a bridge—between
the tangible and the abstract

connecting the elusive strands
of memory

gluing thoughts to place
scents to sounds
the face of a loved one

calling to us
across the years
holding their outstretched hand

Time expanding—
and contracting
with every breath

We breathe—not to live
but to remember

*

Homa Mojadidi is an Afghan American poet and translator. Her translation of a Baidel ghazal appeared in the November 14 issue of the Asymptote blog. In her own poetry, Homa explores the themes of loss, exile, memory, and mysticism. She is fluent in English, Farsi, and Urdu. Homa has an M.A. in English Literature from the University of North Florida and is pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry from George Mason University. She has taught English Composition and Literature classes at the University of Florida where she was pursuing her Ph.D. in Postcolonial Literature and currently teaches English Composition at George Mason University.

Glassblowing Class by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Glassblowing Class

We pick our colors: I choose “gems.”
Staring at the furnace blaze
beyond white hot, beyond any word,
I think of my body after my death.

I drive the thought away.
It is my turn to blow air into
an ash-colored blob of viscous glass.
We are all middle-aged,

tired, on a cloudy afternoon.
We stand in a half circle. Pushing
every bit of air out of my lungs,
I push the death thought away.

At the end of the steel blowpipe
my fiery lump opens into secrets
of ruby and emerald, sapphire and amethyst,
a pure sphere blooming like a wish.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton teaches French and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Recognition for her poetry includes an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a 2018 GA Author of the Year award. She is the author of six books, including her 2023 chapbook Life of the Mind (Kelsay Books).

Mourning Doves by Donna Hilbert

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Mourning Doves

Because the potted plant
on the back porch needs water,
I come nose to beak
with a brooding dove,
too late to stop the water
pouring from my pitcher.
I flood the nest.

Her mate watches from powerlines.
She moves to a nearby ledge,
leaving the egg alone in the sodden pot.

Throughout the day, I go outside
and see the doves maintaining vigil.

By nightfall, the pair is gone.
I peer into the pot.
Nothing remains of nest or feather.
Not a trace of shell.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Threnody, from Moon Tide Press. Earlier books include Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. She is a monthly contributing writer to the on-line journal Verse-Virtual. Work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Braided Way, Chiron Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, ONE ART, and numerous anthologies. Poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and on Lyric Life. She writes and leads private workshops in Southern California, where she makes her home, and during residencies at Write On Door County. Learn more at donnahilbert.com

Hope Is the Thing in Emails by Marissa Glover

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Hope Is the Thing in Emails

I got an email the other day
with the subject line
“Bible Flower Heals Hemorrhoids.”

Don’t worry—I didn’t open it.

I checked to see the sender,
assumed it was my mother,
but it was spam (of course,
it was, you knew that).

But it got me thinking.

About hemorrhoids, sure,
but about Bible flowers too.
And healing. Namely healing.

So, while it’s true I didn’t open it—
I couldn’t bring myself to delete it either.

*

Marissa Glover lives in Florida, where she’s busy dodging storms and swatting bugs. Her poetry collection Let Go of the Hands You Hold was released by Mercer University Press in 2021. Box Office Gospel was published by Mercer in 2023. Follow her on Twitter at _MarissaGlover_.

Your Name by Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Your Name

Heavy on my tongue,
hard candy that doesn’t
melt or sweeten,
the taste of old pennies
in spring water.

Once I shared it with others–
and you sparkled, floating, dust
motes in light.

Many women miscarry,
my doctor says.
Within my silence
a tiny black coffin

Imagining your face–
at one, at ten, at thirteen–
anchors me–
then your features fade,
sand beneath salt waves

Shifting, half seen–
a ghost I create–
to give birth
to you again
and again

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr is the founder & lead teacher of A World in a Line, an organization that inspires poets from around the world through virtual workshops. Lit-amorous, she’s on a perpetual quest for the next amazing poem to read, savor, and share. Connect with her at JenniferMillsKerr.com

Two Poems by Iris Cai

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Bakersfield, CA

The entire drive, heavy rain gifts lightning
as a hairline fissure in the horizon.

Sixteen years ago, you shielded
your eyes with a baseball cap—crumpled
in the backseat, away from these roads. You thought
your smallness could hide you from the night.
You had other kinds of armor then.

They gave you a lucky bracelet for your first month,
wiry gold and tooth-marked. Swept into pieces
during an argument. For years, each time
you caught a glint in sidewalk rivulets, you imagined
another splintering.

Half-empty suitcases jangle with each turn
of the wheel. You never know exactly
how much to bring—once, your suitcase spilled its seams.
You packed so many clothes, it felt like
you were packing your life away.

Outside, the dark desert grass is cowless, untouched.
Every tree bent in wretched agony, reaching for
home. You suddenly knew your mother when she stood
in the doorway watching you leave. The clouds
can rain and rain but never touch the bleeding fields.
You pull into a gas station and weep.

Eventually, you gather your keys, unspooling
inside city lights, in the embrace
of a distant mountain. You are headed towards
the sun, a milepost somewhere along the road.

Somehow the sky is just big enough to hold the plains.
Know this, and drive.

*

Painted Bodies We Give Up

Single-swiped lottery tickets and late night
walks to the convenience store. America
striped with lakes and rolling hills, city upon
steel city. My father and I, we are sharp
and foreign as lightning rods, seeking out
Illinois’s tiny Chinatown despite driving
two thousand miles for a change of scenery. Here
are familiar voices. Every breath is a scattering
for a bird plucked dry. My skin is tough
now, seared by relentless California sun
and slurs at beer-stained street corners.
I stopped being angry years ago.
We climb Sears Tower and my father points
to cars on the highway, headlights a constellation
beneath us. In the sky, cowherd and weaver girl
join hands. I don’t tell him all I see is red
candy, a spangled prom dress. I wonder if
likening folklore to consumerism means
I have finally assimilated. I am mistaken:
the next day we are given wrong directions
at the mall. We wander through a gift shop
of patriotic paraphernalia. This handheld flag
for five dollars, this case of body paint. It will last
two hours in the sun, maybe three.

*

Iris Cai is a junior from the SF Bay Area. She is a 2024 YoungArts Award Winner with Distinction. Her poetry has also been recognized by the Poetry Society of America and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, and published in or forthcoming from On the Seawall, Neologism Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. An alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, she is co-editor-in-chief of Eucalyptus Lit. When she’s not writing, Iris plays piano and takes too many pictures of her cat.

A moment in Maui by LeeAnn Pickrell

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A moment in Maui

Setting out at 5 a.m. for the sea turtles’
morning march into the water at Kalepolepo Park.
The night is as inky dark as the water.
A man says he counted twenty-eight turtles
two days ago. Today I see only
one turtle pop its head above the water
before descending again. But the moon is full,
reflecting the sun and the day to come.
For almost a week, I’ve tried to silence
the world’s cruelty, really our cruelty,
our chaos, our wars, our hearts closed
to others’ suffering. Later, volunteers
will put up flags to keep us twenty feet
from the turtles that return to nap at low tide.
Everything needs to be protected from us.
The clouds slowly pinken as I wade into the ocean,
and the moon falls into my opened palms.

*

LeeAnn Pickrell is a poet, freelance editor, and managing editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print journals, including ONE ART, Loud Coffee Press, Atlanta Review, and MacQueen’s Quinterly. She has a book forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Richmond, California, with her partner and two fabulous cats.

Doubt by Bill Garvey

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Doubt

The movie triggers the memory –
Father Richard Lavigne inspecting us
while we sat obediently in pews,
touching our fingertips,
praying for that certain boy.

On his deathbed he confessed
to pushing that boy into the river –
fifty years later.

I avoided the river because
I was never one of his special boys.

I remember when my dad
found me in the woods
building a fort with my friends.
I was supposed to be at altar boy practice.

I told him, He wants me to buy a manicure kit.
I wish I could say he
looked very concerned. Truth is,
he gave me the silent treatment all the way home.

When Saturday came around again,
I was ready for practice. Dad said,
You’re not going. No explanation given.
But I’ve never doubted why.

*

Bill Garvey’s poetry has been or will be in Rattle, Cimarron Review, ONE ART, The New Quarterly, New Verse News, Connecticut River Review and several others. His most recent book of poetry, The basement on Biella, was published by DarkWinter Press in Fall 2023. He and his wife live in Toronto and Nova Scotia for equal parts of the year.

Baby Bird by Jessica Natasha Lawrence

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Baby Bird

There comes a time when hunger
surpasses the ability to devour,
when the ache confines you to the floor,
and you see that desperation
is a germaphobe
begging you to spit in her mouth.
I mean that hope is a flaky cereal
I’m asking you to chew for me,
I am asking you to cup me in your hands
and honor my newborn feathers,
I am saying that I will only survive
if you understand what I am.

*

Jessica Natasha Lawrence writes about chronic illness, realistic hope, and the beauty and trials of ordinary life. Her work has appeared in The Clayjar Review, Tiny Wren Lit, Write or Die Magazine, 50-Word Stories, and To Write Love on Her Arms. She also runs a Substack called Dust and Birdsong.

Restraint by Lake Angela

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Restraint

Opaque rooms fall in line behind four sets of metal doors
and twice the number of locks and keys. From the stale gray
cloud appears the imposing metal chair with weighted leather
straps for head, neck, wrists, waist, ankles, and two solitary feet.

The ground is graced with scuffs from shoes with laces removed,
scarlet nail polish scabs left by strangled bare toes thrashing
after the grass they will never again feel, no trace of the feet
swaddled in sticky-soled socks all hospitals issue except
the rancid scent of fear steeped in breathless acrylic sweat.

The silence is a grey smoke; the camera obscures your face.
In the room with padded, grey walls, any restraint is for your
safety. Still it seems that punishment is devoid of movement,
is, in fact, the lack thereof—the promise of perpetual stillness.

*

Lake Angela creates at the confluence of poetry and the language of dance movement. She holds a PhD in the intersemiotic translation of Austrian Expressionist poetry into dance and has her MFA in poetry. She is a medieval mystic, beguine, and nonhuman creature. Her books include Organblooms and Words for the Dead (FutureCycle Press), and Scivias Choreomaniae is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. Recent work appears in The Bitter Oleander, Seneca Review, filling Station, Poetry Salzburg Review, Passages North, Lotus-eater Magazine, and others. Lake is poetry editor for Punt Volat and neurodivergence advocacy writer for Brainz Magazine. As director of the poetry-dance group Companyia Lake Angela, she presents the value of schizophrenia spectrum creativity. She welcomes visitors at www.lakeangeladance.com.

Parole Denied by Ace Boggess

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Parole Denied

The victim spoke unforgiving words.
Now members of the Board won’t hear your pleas
or see redemption when the noise of loss re-grieves.
They tell you no, condemning you again
for actions seven years ago in drugged numb

of absent self-control. You should be home,
smoking a thin cigarette, telling your friends
your heart has filled with love.
Now you squeeze hurt into a stone.
Pity the head that rests on it—jagged, hard.

*

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.

Two Poems by Tony Gloeggler

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REMINDERS

I didn’t guess the 12 year old
girl in the novel I’m reading
would get chronic kidney disease,
didn’t expect it would remind me
too often of the endless medical
appointments, bad news turning
worse, strict diet, limited liquid
intake, weighing like penance,
the drudgery of dialysis, three days
a week for three and a half hours
a session, the light headedness,
cramping. At least my brother
offered me a kidney, tested
as a perfect match. We went
into the hospital that summer,
his teacher-wife taking care
of their 2 young kids. My father,
already dead, didn’t have to track
down my wayward mother, fail
to convince her to be a donor.
When the girl’s condition
plummeted, they ended up
using a recently car-wrecked
stranger for the transplant.
The girl contracted pneumonia
a day after, died while I sat
stunned in my rocking chair,
the reading lamp burning,
too shaken to try and sleep.

*

SPECIAL NEEDS

One of my facebook friends
has put up one of those post
and paste things about special
needs kids, that they’re not
weird or odd and just want
to be accepted. He’s asking
me to share the statement
and I’m thinking he never
hung out with Jesse or Larry.
One’s autistic and I spend
a weekend a month with him
in Vermont. The other’s down
syndrome, my favorite guy
at the residence since day one.
They both love ripping things.
One goes to school wearing
a sweater, winter coat, comes
home on the school bus, his balls
semi-secure in a knotted dish rag,
a bath towel half draped over
his shoulders, shoes thrown
out the window. The other hums
happily in his room, shreds books,
cooking magazines. One pirouettes
like a chunky ballerina every half
block or so, refuses to ever wear
socks, punches himself under
his left eye when he’s pissed off.
This one time actually missing
his spot and hitting himself
right in the eye while I couldn’t
stop laughing at the shock
his face showed. The other
tosses rocks in lakes, little leaps
of joy when the stone plops
into the water. Both repeat
phrases endlessly. One bites
his arm when frustrated. Both
love pizza and French fries.
Neither really gives a fuck
what anyone thinks about them
as long as they’re treated well
by the people around them,
just don’t get in the way
of their routines. One barely
acknowledges the existence
of strangers. One loves hugs,
snuggling, while I need to ask
the other for hello, goodbye
squeezes. He’ll repeat sque-ee-eze,
lightly hold me for less than ten
seconds. Both laugh boundlessly.
Not exactly sure why, but I always
feel good around these two, find it
fascinating and fun, like my day’s
instantly injected with a dose
of happiness, glad to help them
do any of the things they love.

*

Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of NYC and managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 40 years. His work has appeared in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Vox Populi, Gargoyle. His most recent book, What Kind Of Man with NYQ Books, was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and long listed for Jacar Press’ Julie Suk Award.

Resemblance by Donna Vorreyer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Resemblance

I never thought I looked like anyone
in my family, my hair red, my skin
dotted with freckles, so different from
my brown-haired parents, one brother’s
frame crowned with that same dark,
the other brother with features that
copied my grandfather’s face.

The first person who ever spoke of
a resemblance was the ambulance
attendant who brought my mother
home from hospice to die. You favor her,
she smiled, as she helped me adjust
the oxygen tubes. Then, at the wake,
each friend and neighbor echoed the same.

In the old photograph of the two of us,
we wear matching dresses and the same
conspiratorial smirk, and I see that I have
always carried her in me. Now that she is
gone, the mirror is where I find her.
Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of
my own face or hands and say hello.

*

Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her poetry, fiction, and essay work have appeared in Ploughshares, Cherry Tree, Poet Lore, Salamander, Harpur Palate, Booth, and many others. She lives and creates in the Chicago area and hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.

Three Poems by Kaothar Kadir

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Panadol Extra As An Heirloom

My mother used to swallow the two white
pills with a wince.
Now it dissolves like chalk onto her spotted tongue.
Jaws churning like the innards of a great ship.
A casual pet to the cat beneath the driver’s seat. What comes after,
is a yawn for water. Warm with a sting of steel,
of capped humidity, of sun-baked plastic.
The bottle is half-empty

sunk into the cup-holder where it rubs shoulders
with discarded jewelry.
We talk about the weather and
bad-mouth extended families.
A tiny yielding to the pain. An inch added to the mile of
‘you win this round today.’

Well, tomorrow comes.
And it’s the getting home after the long hot drive that does it.
Now its less about the pain
and more about the bargain.
Now its less about the headache,
and more about my brain stewing in its own fluid.
Now its genetic. An iron moistness haunts my taste-buds.
Now its my daughter licking the blackboard
and
the heat
melting the gold off my wristwatch.

*

A Mentos in Coke

The days line up like a set of dentist-fixed
ivory teeth. They are made of me and from me
in equal capacities. I wake up and its always morning.
I always want my bowl of pap, sugared lightly. The
pigeons are always cooing. I always wait for some
kind of chaos to barge in.

I am swimming through a pit of tar. The sky is black and
weeping above me. I am in my mind mind mind.
I am bubbling like a Mentos in coke. I am
my window, closing my blinds,
ashamed to see.

My hands are always empty.

I’d take up knitting, but then tomorrow, I’d have to knit. And
I’d murder a friend but then I’d have to deal with the body,
the thought, guilty or if I’m laughing it off.
And it would fit with a click. It is
everything I already do
and already did.

Everything has a red line, everything, a red smile.
I could die, but who knows
what awaits. More numbness,
more stillness, more undoing,
more days.

*

Lonely as a Fever

White-winged and feverish.
You always swooped in before I came
crashing. But I always liked teeth
bashed in. Smeared across the pavement
like ash across a forehead.

It’s a following. Rancid and green and
the ceiling goes further away the more you
stare at it. I tried to change the light-bulb once
and my toes pirouetted on their own accord. My
hands on the knob, before I could stop myself

and in came the outside air like a punch
to the face. So fresh, it ate my rot. So plenty,
it entered through the pores of my skin.
I see your shadow. Latching onto my marrow.
Black-winged. Frantic.

Swooping in before I come crashing. But I
always found the bottom and its skeletons inviting.
An open door. I hope it locks. And the outside
is kept in.

*

Kaothar Kadir is a twenty-one year old poet living in Nigeria. She began writing poetry at the age of seven. She was shortlisted in the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize in 2022. She’s currently in her final year of pursuing a bachelor’s degree in History and International Studies in the University of Ilorin. And when she’s not bent over her laptop writing, she can be found reading (or rereading) a book, watching A24 movies or dancing to her self-curated Spotify playlists.

Instructions for the Morning After the Terrible Haircut by Gloria Heffernan

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Instructions for the Morning After the Terrible Haircut

First, do not look in the mirror
until after you have had your coffee.
Everything looks better after coffee.
When it still does not look better,
do not drink a second cup of coffee.
It will not make your hair grow faster,
and it will make you jittery while wondering
if anyone would find it odd
if you showed up at work
wearing a bee-keeper’s hood.

Next, go to your jewelry box and take out
the largest pair of earrings you own—
the ones with peacock feathers and beads
to draw attention away from the terrible haircut.
Then dig out the tube of red lipstick
you bought last New Year’s Eve and swore
you would never wear again
because it made you look like a clown.
Nothing distracts from a terrible haircut
like a crimson neon sign across your face

Before heading out the door,
sit still for a little while
and listen to the morning news.
No, I mean really listen.
Then go back and wash your face.
Return to your usual
understated silver earrings.
Be thankful that this morning,
a terrible haircut
is your biggest problem.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 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). Her forthcoming chapbook, Animal Grace, was selected for the Keystone Chapbook Series. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). She teaches poetry at Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center and on Phillis Cole-Dai’s Substack platform, The Raft. To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Anthropology 101 by Susana H. Case

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Anthropology 101

Our professor, red-eyed, disheveled, blew her nose, announced to the class that her good friend—lover, I thought—charged with murdering his wife, and without an alibi, had just been found not guilty. The verdict, the professor was adamant, forgotten ethnographic text in hand, restored her confidence in criminal justice. Students nodded, closed their notebooks, looked up again when she admitted her certainty that he’d done it. Something roiling in him, she told us, whenever he talked about his marriage. I believed she was right: he probably did do it, femicide having such an intimate face. She told us it was a good thing a jury had erred on the side of innocence. Then she brushed her hair and applied red lipstick. We opened our books to the Ituri forest people, how these short-statured men climb more than 100 feet into the canopy to collect honey from the bees, the product they most prize.

*

Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Books, 2023 and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk & Cake Press, 2022. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in an English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and is forthcoming as an English-Ukrainian edition. Case is currently a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. susanahcase.com

Four Poems by Ann Kammerer

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Blackbird

Whenever Dad left
Mom sang,
sometimes in the kitchen,
sometimes in the living room,
sometimes outside hanging clothes,
anywhere,
anytime,
only when
he was gone.

Me and Janie joined in,
her teaching us songs and rhythms,
teaching us how to sing in parts.

“You’re just like those kids
in ‘The Sound of Music,’” she said.
“And I’m like Julie Andrews.”

Clad in a frilled apron,
Mom conducted
with a wooden spoon.
She tapped the dinette table,
waiting for us
to stand up straight,
then held her arms
angled and high,
pointing from me to Janie,
telling us when
to come in.

“You then you.”
She whispered lyrics
that slid across our tongues,
strange, lilting, and messy,
making spit bubble
on Janie’s lips.

“Frer-a-shau-ka,
Frer-a-shau-ka,” she sang.
“Door-may-voo.
Door-may voo.”

We scampered in verse,
singing something about
“son-na-may-na TINA,”
Janie clapping her hands,
shouting “where’s Tina?”
looking around for the little girl
who jumped rope in the alley,
wanting to play.

“That’s a French song,” Mom said,
saying it was about church bells,
big pretty ones
that woke up little girls,
just like the bells
on the Catholic church
down the street,
the ones that rang Sundays
commanding us to
don eyelet dresses,
cover our hair with veils,
and clutch change purses
filled with dimes
to give to usher boys
passing baskets
at the end of mass.

“Go play now.”
Mom glanced at the clock
nearing 4 p.m.,
returning her makeshift wand
to the silverware drawer.
“Your Dad’ll be home soon.
He’ll want dinner.”

We dashed out the screen door
and into the backyard,
me still singing,
Janie looking for Tina
through the rusted
chain-link fence.

“Tina, Tina,” Janie cried.
“Son-na-may-na Tina.”

I bounced a red ball
then stopped,
seeing Mom through
the back window,
pouring an amber drink
as she absently sang.

“Pack up all my cares and woe,”
here I go,
winging low,
bye, bye, blackbird.”

Her voice floated then broke,
mixing with Janie’s.
Picking up a piece
of sidewalk chalk,
I redrew my picture
of sun, flowers, and trees
Dad had swept away.

*

Jaywalking

When Mike left
and didn’t come home all weekend,
I jaywalked across the highway
to a neighborhood
with wood-sided ranches
and chain-link fences
dividing the lawns.

Girls in flared jeans
and sheer paisley shirts
stepped out in platform shoes,
their long parted hair
washed with twilight.
Guys in vinyl jackets
idled in Novas or Cutlasses,
peeling from blacktop drives
as girls hopped in.

I lit a cigarette
and stood on a curb,
transfixed by the glow
of Tiffany lamps
and console TVs
through picture windows.
A few women saw me,
their lipsticked mouths
skewed tight,
waving for husbands
to rise from La-Z-Boys
and close the drapes.

I crossed back to the trailer park
stopping first at the party store
for a six-pack
and Marlboro Lights.
George, the owner,
looked over his glasses,
asking about my man,
saying a girl like me
shouldn’t be out alone.

“Did he leave you with that?”
He touched his papery cheek,
then pointed to my black eye.

“No, no.”
I pulled up my hood
and dug for bills.
“I got hit.
By the door, I mean.
Last night.
When he swung it open.”

George muttered and rang me up.
He broke a roll of quarters
on the register drawer.

“What door?” he said.
“Your man.
He’s useless.”

I cracked a Busch
in the parking lot,
stepping through shadows
to my single-wide.
The silhouette of
the next-door neighbor
floated behind yellowed curtains,
his window tossing light
on my dark trailer.

I caught the tail end
of “All in the Family,”
then changed the channel
to a TV Movie about a boxer
with an Italian name.
I drank and smoked,
watching him duck
and weave,
his face swollen,
getting knocked down
and getting back up,
the bell ringing
before the network cut
to a commercial break.

My cheek throbbed
so I closed my eyes,
holding a cool can
to the bruise.
I took cold medicine
to help me sleep,
setting an alarm for 8 a.m.,
just in time to call in sick
to my job.

Curling on the sofa,
I drifted,
soothed by the murmur of TV.
I thought of my mom
and wondered where she was,
if she was still with the man
who rubbed my leg
and said not to tell,
trying not to think
of how she left me
for booze and pills,
remembering instead
how she held me
when I was little,
stroking my hair,
saying to be good
and not to be bad,
saying maybe then
she could love me
like other mommies did
with their girls.

*

Burnouts

Mom didn’t look for a job
for a few months.
She said she was too busy
to pound the pavement,
that she needed time
to unpack,
to get used to a new place,
and to get Janie situated
mopping floors
and wiping down tables
at Wendy’s.

“It’s exhausting,” she said.
“For both me and her.”

She and my sister
had moved to Battle Creek
after leaving Dad,
renting an apartment
in old military housing
not far from where
she grew up.
Post and Kellogg
were a few miles north
and over a hill,
the smoke from the factories
leaving skinny plumes
that changed from
gray to pink to orange
at sunset.

Her friend’s daughter
and a few guys
had moved her things,
loading up a caravan
of rusted pickups and vans,
doing something, Mom said,
I would never do.

“Shelley,” she said.
“She’s like my daughter.
And I’m like the mom
she wished she could have.”

Mom never called me
but Janie did,
mostly to ask
about girls from high school.
We’d joke a bit
about Friday night dances,
how “burn-outs” and “jocks”
never mixed,
and how our friend Scotty
always wore a poncho
and passed out
from too much tequila,
his long blonde hair
a mess of knotted tinsel.

“Yeah. Scotty,” she said.
“Scotty.
Like yeah. Scotty.”

Janie said his name
over and over.
She giggled and whispered
the way she always did
when she didn’t want Mom
to hear.
She talked endlessly
about the burnout kids,
the ones who took her along
when they skipped class,
giving her cigarettes
and sips of beer,
sometimes a nose hit,
but not microdot,
never making fun
of her stiff crooked walk
or her slow speech
and semi-crossed eyes.
Scotty even called her pretty,
asking her to slow dance
to “Stairway to Heaven”
beneath the colored lights.

“Yeah. Scotty.” I’d say
We’d talk a bit more
before I asked about Mom,
if she had a job yet,
Janie saying she didn’t know.

“Maybe ask Shelley,” she said.
“She’d know.”
Janie went on then
about Cindy and Debbie
and Patty and Angie,
about girls
in gauzy shirts
and bell bottoms
that dragged along the ground.

“Yeah,” I said.
“I remember them.
They were fun.”

We talked about
their boyfriends, too,
the Marks and Gregs
and Steves and Dougs,
the guys in leather jackets
and headbands
and open-neck shirts,
beads dangling
on their hairless chests.

“Yeah, yeah,” she tittered,
me lighting a cigarette,
thinking about
my old boyfriend Tim,
the one who blasted Hendrix
and took me to cul-de-sacs,
saying life was just a joke
when his pupils swelled
from acid,
making me wish
I was with Dave,
a quiet guy in wire rims
who listened to
the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band,
gave me cut zinnias,
and liked laying in the grass
to look at clouds
while we passed a joint
between us.

*

But Beautiful

One stands,
one sits,
another close by,
catching the shade
of a half-dead tree.

“You’re beautiful,” the standing man says.
He claps his hands
and tips a greasy ball cap,
his face smeared
with Hershey’s chocolate.

“Be quiet,” the sitting man says.
“No one wants to hear you.”
Squaring his pork-pie hat,
he leans into his cane,
his tarnished cufflinks
illuminating the sleeves
of a pinstriped shirt.

“All you. Shut up.”
A woman peers
from sunspots,
her hair curled,
her face cracked porcelain.
“Let her decide.”
She lifts her hand,
a brittle wafer,
nearly toppling
as she slaps
the standing man’s rear.

“Thank you,” I say,
“but I don’t mind.”

“You will,” she says,
her voice a rasp,
her eyes wide,
as I squint
into the blaze.

*

Ann Kammerer lives in Oak Park, Illinois, having relocated from her home state of Michigan. Her work has appeared in The Thoughtful Dog, Open Arts Forum, The Ekphrastic Review, Fictive Dream, and anthologies by Crow Woods Publishing and Querencia Press. She has received top honors and made the short list in several writing contests. Her debut chapbook of narrative poetry was published in 2023 by Bottlecap Press, with a collection forthcoming in 2024 from Kelsay Books.

Today I Imagined Your Face In Shadow by Rachael Mayer

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Today I Imagined Your Face In Shadow

Be with me in that place
where the sun’s rays shine so brightly on the tall grass
the earth is a child who feels understood

let the bed be made and unmade

imagine the world with me
imagine the world without me

some days I’m perched like a bird looking down at what we used to be

some days I’m so deeply rooted
the roots are frozen, impossible to pull from the earth
until spring
it’s just us rooted
in transactional weather

sometimes I’m intent on seeing the future,
I look to any body of water
to suggest
who we might become.

*

Rachael Mayer is a social worker, teacher, and poet who lives in Montclair, New Jersey. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Kenyon Review, The Hiram Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Avatar Review, Mothers Always Write, Street Light Press, and Typishly.

After a long dark night of grief by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

After a long dark night of grief

get out of bed. Step over the sleeping
dogs. Open all the shutters. Go outside
and look at the sky. Watch the fiery fried egg
rise from the horizon under gray puffball
clouds that suddenly turn pink, like an ocean
of cotton candy and you remember the young
woman at Tuesday’s Buddhist 12-Step meeting
who said something about a pink-cloud moment,
and you realize that this is a pink-cloud moment
as a ring of birds starts circling and circling
above the palm trees as if they are dancing.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Rattle, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gyroscope Review, and others. She is the author of Blame It on the Serpent (Finishing Line Press), Cactus As Bad Boy (Kelsay Books), and One of Them Was Mine (Kelsay Books). susanvespoli.com

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of December 2023

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of December 2023 ~

  1. Abby E. Murray – Three Poems
  2. Betsy Mars – Delivery
  3. Mick Cochrane – Dabbs Greer
  4. Roseanne Freed – My wet eyes stared into their lights
  5. James Diaz – Once More, Into The Light
  6. Linda Laderman – On Thanksgiving no one wants to hear poetry
  7. Dick Westheimer – CT Scan Assay
  8. Michelle Bitting – Poor Yorick
  9. Lynne Knight – Three Poems
  10. Karen Paul Holmes – Two Poems  

Grand Re-Openings by Ashley Steineger

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Grand Re-Openings

Love is another kind of open,
a café that never closes.
The sign is flipped, the lights inside

are blinked-out stars, the only
employee is an old man
running a mop again and again

over the mess. The walls are
your muted heart who beats under
the café’s shut eyelid, the chairs

scattered like debris after
a windstorm, functional
but dizzied, glass rims stained

with that one shade of dated
red lipstick, coffee drips as
fevered brown tears down

smooth ceramic. It’s quiet now
but never for long. Have you seen
the handsome stranger, there

at the clouded window with
a peace flag of white lilies?
Have you seen how they hold

each flower’s lithe stem? Can you
hear their whisper begging
you, open the door…please try again.

*

Ashley Steineger is a holistic psychologist who believes poetry is the language of healing. Her poetry has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Apricity Press, The Lumiere Review, and Palette Poetry, among others. She currently lives and writes out of Raleigh, NC, where she enjoys forest bathing, collecting tattoos, and untranslatable words.

Karaoke at the Artists’ Residency by Marjorie Maddox

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Karaoke at the Artists’ Residency
Ok, not exactly like a story you dreamed then started forgetting
as soon as you stretched your mouth in a yawn and each word
tumbled into the stark bright of day’s dementia, but, never-
theless, somehow any sweet and clear half-note you ever
claimed in morning’s showers—yes, any—now trip
on the hot mist of memory, crack all ribs, and end up
far off-key and stranded in this place of friendly strangers
crooning their lungs out with mic and screen. Artists, photographers,
writers not in the outside world of tavern, but instead here in the donor-
funded upscale living room, where they (no shower background necessary)
throw back their heads and wail gloriously, not a glint or glimmer
of “Whose skin do I live in?” flashing in the chorus. And bravo,
kudos, and all prize nominations! What good is envy
when they belt out with such joy their favorite
“oldies” (separated from yours by twenty years) both so
unabashedly beautiful and exuberantly shattered with drunken
crescendos—each millennial apologizing for “advanced” age, while your real
tail-end-of-baby-boomer generation and wallflower membership politely goes
noticed but un-mentioned. And for this you are grateful: when you stumble
repeatedly—not from drink but from late-hour self-consciousness—
every one of them waves their arms, opens wide their throats
to bellow the lyrics boldly, graciously buoying your attempts
with camaraderie and the night’s call-and-response
of kindness—your own belated harmony
this off-kilter poem, all
you have to offer.
*
Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 14 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (Paraclete, International Book Award and Illumination Book Award Winner); and the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind. In addition, she has published the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and 4 children’s and YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist International Book Awards), A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry; I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (a 2021 NCTE Notable Poetry Book), and Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems. She is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press) and is assistant editor of Presence. Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com

CT Scan Assay by Dick Westheimer

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CT Scan Assay

          Load every rift with ore.
               —John Keats

First, there is a body
then its soft parts.
From above a voice
says breathe, now
hold. Now
let go. No good
god would speak
such a thing.
She would say nothing
to be seen here
as the machine turns
its sensor, detects
tissue invisible
unless a tumor,
a mass attached
to the barium-lined,
the X-ray lit.

Now is the time
to look into darkness,
examine oneself
for impurities and for how
much must be smelted
from every last moment,
from each line
from the deep rift left
between now and when
I end, no matter what
the person with the loupe
sees examining
the ore of me,
determines
the denominator
of my days
remaining.

*

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have appeared or are upcoming in Whale Road Review, Tony Seed, Gyroscope Review, Minyan, Rattle, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com

Questions for the New Year by Michael S. Glaser

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Questions for the New Year

How do I recognize
the boundaries I have created
hoping they will keep me safe?

How do I leave
the wilderness
of my shoulds?

*

Michael S. Glaser is a Professor Emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2004 – 2009. The recipient of several awards for his teaching, his service to poetry and for his poetry, he has published several prize winning collections of his own poetry, most recently The Threshold of Light (Bright Hills Press, 2019) and Elemental Things, (The Poetry Box, 2022) . He has also edited three anthologies and co-edited The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA 2012). (more at michaelsglaser.com )

Hiking Cadillac Mountain at Sunrise by Carol Berg

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Hiking Cadillac Mountain at Sunrise
                For Rob Orrison

So much of it I don’t remember
except of course that you were alive
then, groom on his honeymoon and all of us
hungover and was it a gift to the bride?
She stopping in mid-hike, needing to be
whispered to convincingly continue—
the rest of us bewildered that you
could find the blue marks up the trail
in the pre-dawn dark merely with flashlight
to guide us. But on the way back down
you kept getting us lost: the whole mountain
in a daze of dayness, the blue marks disappearing
like breath. So we all wandered among
the boulders for a tired time, all of us bleary,
all of us in some kind of shared nuptial bliss.

*

Carol Berg’s poems are forthcoming or in Gyroscope, Crab Creek Review (Poetry Finalist 2017), DMQ Review, Hospital Drive (Contest Runner-Up 2017), Sou’wester, Spillway, Redactions, Radar Poetry, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her chapbooks, Her Vena Amoris (Red Bird Chapbooks), and “Self-Portraits” in Ides (Silver Birch Press) are available. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She was winner of a scholarship to Poets on the Coast and a recipient of a Finalist Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Delivery by Betsy Mars

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Delivery

In the night something changed, though I had never
delivered before and wondered how I would ever know
when labor came, but here it was, a dull pain in my back,
and I knew, played the music carefully chosen to guide me
through these hours, calm my fear of what was to come.

Van Morrison sang Take good care of your boy, and how I have tried
these thirty-plus years, to little or no avail.
You’re pointing a finger at me, but I have borne you as best I could,
and still I strive to keep you here.

I still get choked up when I hear Van sing about the little red shoes–
remembering the hospital preparations, the duffel bag,
the ice chips, the exhortations to resist the urge to push—
the insistent craving for expulsion, you,
one week overdue.

I was ready to come to terms, ready for the rush,
to finally arrive at this meeting, at this inevitable morning,
at this transformation of everything I thought I knew, of the day
to day, of the child I was before you slipped from my body
into the doctor’s hands,
and I was born again.

* with lines from Van Morrison’s song, Astral Weeks

*

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.”

Burdock by Jennifer Browne

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Burdock

The house cat swishes
her tail through burdock,
its insistent cling a tool
distributing seed. Back
home, she grooms burrs,
tail twitching, cast bracts
rasp the blanket. I have
latched onto you. In that
persistence, what spines
am I causing you to carry
back into the softness
of your bed. There’s no
growing ground, just a
warm, dislodging mouth
sleeking yourself clean.

*

Jennifer Browne falls in love easily with other people’s dogs. Her chapbooks—Whisper Song (tiny wren publishing) and The Salt of the Geologic World (Bottlecap Features)—range landscapes of her fascinations, which include landscapes. Her poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in the Poem for Cleveland anthology, the Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak 15th Anniversary Volume, Steel Jackdaw, Gargoyle, South Broadway Ghost Society, and Humana Obscura. She lives in Frostburg, MD.

Once More, Into The Light by James Diaz

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Once More, Into The Light

My brother, my sister, my other
Doubled over in spirit on the kitchen floor tonight
Doing the math all wrong
East of wherever that sweet tree of life falls
Into the clear blue yonder
Once more, Into this light

Shake your fists, your barrel of worries out in the night
We’re all counting backwards from a deep dark wound,
that pounding beautiful hurt in your ears
Pain brain, come on now
Let it rain
Turn them numbers inward
Wreck and weep, muscle through the drywall
Say your prayers with a hammer
Once more, Into this life

Hold that line
Until the divine bites the hook
We’re eating mercy tonight
Shell the peas, husk the corn
Save some room for the reckoning
For tomorrow’s fuckery and pain
And all them who never known it as bad as we coming at us
With the numbers and the due dates
And don’t you know it won’t stop
And neither can you
Once more, Into that light

Go bright burning in your god tongue
Tell em this life sent you
And one two three
And you and me
Scraping hell’s bottom for whatever serves as star shine
In the deep abiding dark of us
Once more, into this light.

*

James Diaz is a poet/learner/listener/struggler still very much figuring it all out. Author of three full length collections, the most recent being Motel Prayers (Alien Buddha, 2022,) Diaz lives in upstate New York where they edit the intentional literary arts journal Anti-Heroin Chic.

Serving Coffee in the ICU by Madeleine French

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Serving Coffee in the ICU

My supervisor said not to, my first day,
her face closing off the words
as if she were pulling a curtain around a bed.
Families would come to demand it, and
I was there to clean the room.

But the woman huddled in the recliner
clutching an e-reader
tears shining silver on her cheeks
accepted it graciously,
cradling the styrofoam cup like fine china.

Her eyes pooling depths of despair,
she mustered a smile to thank me.
Not just for the coffee, she said.
For your kindness.

Pushing my cart toward the door
I could read one word upside down:
Hope.

*

Madeleine French lives in Florida and Virginia with her husband. A Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in Dust Poetry Magazine, West Trade Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Door Is A Jar, San Antonio Review, and elsewhere. She is working on a full-length poetry collection.

Journal note by Paulette Laufer

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Journal note

Write out Gratitude
in large sprawling letters
whenever you feel well.
Let the start of G be good, curved,
the slight huddle of someone
deep in thought before
springing forward, middle letters
tumbling towards each other
like small acrobats of elation,
welcome them to carry you along
on their strong shoulders, let
the end “e” be your rejoicing.

*

Paulette Laufer’s poems have appeared in Blue Heron Review, Moss Piglet, Bramble Literary Magazine, Island Intersections (celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore through the intersections of science, art, and poetry), and the anthology Halfway to the North Pole: Door County in Poetry. She received an honorable mention from the Wisconsin Academy/Wisconsin People & Ideas 2017 poetry contest; her work has also been seen in several regional art and poetry exhibits. Now living in Sturgeon Bay, WI, she previously worked in theater in the Washington, D.C., area for many years.

Three Poems by Jessica Whipple

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For Erin

A mother can
watch a mare with its newborn foal
dozing in dusty sunlight
and remember earliest days
when all there was
was sleep.

She will nod in understanding
when later, the foal learns
about grass, water
because a mother can
never stop teaching.

And someday the mother
will watch her own offspring
riding together
maybe too far out
maybe into the brambles
but if there’s anyone
who can call them back,
a mother can.

*

Farm Couple on a Pyrex Bowl

In the wedding picture
they stood closer than they ever had.
She felt a tickle on her palm
his young hands dry already.¬

Every night she shook out her apron
hung it on peg rail in the bedroom
where between them something germinated.

When she worked, the rustling:
the shisk-shisk of desiccated husk
supplanted the silence in their valley

and with the tractor in the barn,
at night his mind was quiet
just enough to hear it, too.

How willingly resentment grows.
If only they had known
it’s nothing like wheat.

*

Lady in Church

Nobody minds
how loudly she proclaims
“I love you I love you”
white-haired, she is the child
we’re jealous of this vision
she has gained
where every day is Sunday
and nobody wonders,
“Is it sad,
or is it beautiful?”

*

Jessica Whipple writes children’s picture books and poetry, and has published two of the former this year. Her poetry has appeared in print and online literary magazines like ONE ART, Pine Hills Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Funicular, and others. She enjoys exploring domestic life, parenting, faith, and childhood in her work. To read more of her work, visit AuthorJessicaWhipple.com.

Math for Older Parents by Liona T. Burnham

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Math for Older Parents

Take the age at which your husband’s father died.
Young, yes, young.
Now, subtract your age from it.
Now, add the age of your preschooler
to the difference.
That age is the reason
you’re out running around the lake
on a fall day, tennis shoes splashing through puddles.
Red leaves rustle in the warm wind,
and the ducks stretch out straight
as they flap their wings and skim across the water.
You can feel the effort in your shoulder blades,
as if you, too, are putting the work into flying.

*

Liona T. Burnham teaches writing to community college students in the Pacific Northwest and Northern Virginia. She has poems published or forthcoming in Stone Poetry Quarterly, Sky Island Journal, and The Northern Virginia Review.

Dabbs Greer by Mick Cochrane

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Dabbs Greer

Who would play you in the movie
version of your life? A stupid question
I love to ask. My brother-in-law, a quiet
Minnesota man I’m always trying to draw
out, doesn’t hesitate. “Dabbs Greer,” he says.
Sixty years of supporting roles: Dabbs played
Angry Man, Impatient Postal Customer, Stoolie,
Tutor, Bus Driver, Night Elevator Operator, Seldom
Seen Slim, Motel Manager, Sheriff, Minister,
Parole Officer, Stoner, and Robbed Man.
Clair will earn no residuals for his performance
this season. He plays the guy who rubs his sick
wife’s feet. He appears several times a week as Waiting
Room Man and Chemo Companion. Today he’s driver
and dishwasher, guy who write checks and waits
on hold with an insurance provider. Late at night,
he plays anxious man in a recliner, solitaire fiend,
worried man who hums a worried song, cold
pizza and Diet Coke guy, maker of lists, reciter
of childish prayers to a God who never answers.
He says yes to every role, always shows up
on time and requires no direction. Doesn’t need
Stanislavsky to tell him. There are no small parts.

*

Mick Cochrane lives in Buffalo, NY, and teaches writing at Canisius University. He is the author of four novels and has published poems and stories in THE SUN, FIVE POINTS, CINCINNATI REVIEW, HIRAM POETRY REVIEW, and elsewhere.

On Thanksgiving no one wants to hear poetry by Linda Laderman

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On Thanksgiving no one wants to hear poetry

I ask my son; would you like to listen to a poem?
Not really, he says, do you want to hear football scores?

His newly divorced friend says you know I should read
poetry. I liked it in college, though he says he doesn’t recall

which poets he read. It’s too long ago, but I liked Frankenstein.
I remind him that it’s Mary Shelley’s novel, not Percy’s, the poet,

My granddaughter, the swimmer, scrunches her nose when
I mention how she could have fun with sonnets, write 14 lines,

or take lines from other poets and create your own poem, a cento.
Think of it like swimming, each stroke builds on the next one.

She rolls her eyes and takes another bite of mashed potatoes.
Everyone explains why poetry holds no metaphor for their lives—

how they never liked verse, except maybe Mother Goose,
and who has time to learn to read or write poetry when

they’re busy with work and kids? My daughter-in-law
says, I remember a poem by Emily Dickinson, about a feather.

That gives me hope, so I ask my grandson what he’s read.
We read Keats and Poe, sophomore year, but I’ve forgotten it all.

When the dishes are cleared, we sit near the fireplace.
I’m going to read a poem, I say, and pull a paper from my purse

After I’m finished, my daughter-in-law’s eyes well. My son fidgets
with his watch and asks if anyone knows who’s winning the game.

*

Linda Laderman is a Michigan writer and poet. She is the 2023 recipient of The Jewish Woman’s Prize from Harbor Review. Her micro-chapbook, “What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know” will be published online at Harbor Review in September, 2023. Her poetry has appeared in The Gyroscope Review, The Jewish Literary Journal, SWWIM, ONE ART, Poetica Magazine, and Rust & Moth, among others. She has work forthcoming in Thimble Literary Magazine and Minyan Magazine. For nearly a decade, she volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Find her at lindaladerman.com

Median by Brian Dolan

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Median

The tales Pop told
come back to me sometimes
like the one about his pal John
who lost his hair
when he stuck his finger into a socket
but now I know he fell asleep
on the couch smoking a cigarette
and the whole thing erupted in flames
and for a long time after
he had to wear
one of those compression suits
to keep all his skin from falling off.
Pop was funny like that
given to myth-making.
I couldn’t always tell
how much of what he said
he believed.
He didn’t drink
but occasionally when I went to visit
there’d be a bottle of Woodford Reserve
well preserved
in the otherwise barren refrigerator
and he’d say a friend who visited left it.
Years later a tractor-trailer ran that friend over
while he was wandering
down the center lane of Sunrise Highway.
That one is true. It was in the papers. You can read all about it.
Isn’t that proof enough?

*

Brian Dolan is a poet and fiction writer based in Brooklyn, NY. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Bangalore Review, the Bosphorus Review of Books, Plum Tree Tavern, the Beatnik Cowboy, and New Verse News.

ONE ART’s 2024 Pushcart Prize Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2024 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Abby E. Murray – What It’s Like to Wonder Whose Country It Was First (12.11.23)

Bonnie Naradzay – Bede’s Sparrow (11.1.23)

Linda Laderman – Final Score (10.9.23)

Hayley Mitchell Haugen – Reserved (8.27.23)

Jennifer Garfield – self portrait at 39 (8.2.23)

Cheryl Baldi – THE DAY FALLING TO PIECES (7.30.23)

Stargazing by Jill McCabe Johnson

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Stargazing

A normal star forms from a clump of dust and gas in a stellar nursery.
—NASA

I can’t stop thinking
about dust motes, how,
waking from a nap,
I watched them, a galaxy
of golden stars drifting
across the late afternoon
of my living room. That night
my mother-in-law texted:
Prognosis very bad.
The PET scan overlaid
with the CT scan, lit up
its own molecular cloud galaxy
of red giants, white dwarfs,
neutron stars: a universe expanding
through the lungs and lymph
nodes of her eldest daughter.
At any time, the air can be laden
with dust motes and pollen,
microbial yeast, mold spores,
and, yes, even star dust
so tiny they’re impossible
to spot with the naked eye.

*

Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including Tangled in Vow & Beseech (MoonPath Press), finalist in the Sally Albiso and Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prizes, plus two chapbooks, and editor of three anthologies. Recent poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in Slate, Diode, Waxwing, The Brooklyn Review, and Fourth Genre. Jill is editor-in-chief of Wandering Aengus Press.

Three Poems by Sonya Schneider

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Climbing Out Windows

For a while, I dyed my hair henna red,
wore old man pants cut off at the knee

and spent all my babysitting money
on a pair of 8-eye Doc Martens

that I never broke in. My friends
ditched class to smoke out

behind the teriyaki joint
while the boys ollied off curbs,

trying to impress the popular girl,
whose belly button stud sparkled

like a star above her low-rise jeans.
Once, when I was sleeping over

at a friend’s, we climbed
out her window and walked toward

the boardwalk lights and the salty smell
of dead fish. When we ended up

at the star-studded girl’s apartment,
her dad and brother sat hunched

at a table, cleaning handguns
in a haze of pot smoke,

their talk hushed and angry.
I spent that night stoned and listening

to the sound of rags wiping metal,
trying to hide behind a mask

of mauve lipstick. But once I climbed
back through my friend’s bedroom

window, the fear I’d hid rushed in.
When sleep finally came, it was swift,

and in my dream, I learned
to walk through doors.

*

Family Tree

The fall of my Uncle Rick was not his love
of taxidermy, rather the way he cut
his three siblings from his rib.
My father found a starving cat hiding
under a dead woman’s bed.
He gave her to me wrapped
in a red blanket—I named her Rainbow.
I was twenty when Aunt Ti swallowed
a bottle of Haloperidol – the sound
of her hitting the kitchen floor
still rings in my ears. Once,
on a full moon, Mom hunted
for seashells in the Negev.
Now she tucks in my aging brother,
their bedrooms connected by a narrow hall.
Zede’s birth name was Shlomo,
meaning peaceable. He changed it to Allan
when he enrolled in the war.
His mother was short but had hands
the size of sunflowers. Bubby kept
kosher plates on the top shelf.
All four of their kids have dark brown hair,
but only one believes in God. He lives
in Omaha, where his dogs roam
the shallow hills of snow.
Sometimes I remember to gaze
at the stars, but I’m always disappointed
if I don’t see one shooting across the sky.
I expect to witness startling encounters.
Like the Twin Towers toppling
just blocks from my work.
People walked north that day,
stopping at corner markets
for toilet paper, beer and bread.
I remember with crystalline detail
the time I met a clairvoyant,
but I don’t recall what she foretold
about my future.

*

My daughter explains the patriarchy

to my other daughter on the drive home from the beach.
The patriarchy is a society led by men, she says,
in which, sadly, women
are not allowed to hold power –
this is most societies.
I’ve never told them about the time my boss
pushed me against the wall, his breath reeking
of tuna fish. He held me pinned for just under
a second, long enough for fear and betrayal,
those twins some ancient woman birthed
and has spent a lifetime paying for. That was the last day
I worked for him. On the ride home, my youngest
has to pee. I pull the car to the side of the road
and guide her behind a Douglas fir,
but she is afraid someone might see her.
I pull down my shorts and squat,
legs grounded, bottom back.
Let them look, I say. If they dare.
For the rest of the car ride, they stare quietly
out the window. They make me think of the sea
anemones we saw last summer, luminescent
creatures who’ve learned to guard themselves
against every unwelcome touch.

*

Sonya Schneider is a playwright and poet living in Seattle, WA. Her poetry can be found in Catamaran Literary Reader, SWWIM Every Day, West Trestle Review and Mom Egg Review, among others. She was a finalist for the 2022 New Letters Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry and her micro chapbook, Hunger, was shortlisted for Harbor Review’s 2023 Jewish Women’s Prize. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Pacific University’s MFA in Poetry.

First Rise by Cindy Buchanan

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First Rise

Sixty-two years after I was lifted up
into the cab of my uncle’s farm truck,
I return to where my grandmother’s house
once stood. Only the light of the early morning sun
remains. What did I think I would find?

The start of that long ago trip north to Alaska
exists in a photograph someone took
as my grandmother, her back to the camera,
reached into the truck. Her hand on mine
will linger there until the photo fades.

The salty taste of missing can fill a mouth,
distort time the way a canyon
distorts sound. On this August morning,
I smell my grandmother’s bread baking,

feel her flour-dusted apron against my cheek.
I touch the rim of her ceramic bread bowl,
and I remember how bread rises before
it is punched down and shaped.

*

Cindy Buchanan grew up in Alaska, graduated from Gonzaga University, and lives in Seattle. Her work has been published previously in journals including Evening Street Press, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rabid Oak, The MacGuffin, Hole in the Head Review, and Chestnut Review. She is grateful to her monthly poetry groups and the community at Hugo House for their wisdom and support. Her first chapbook, Learning to Breathe, was published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press.

GI Joe by Sean Hanrahan

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GI Joe
The shape of war felt so foreign to me. He lacked the vitality
of synthetic hair I could cut. No lopsided bob to glam the girl
up. This brute had bulges that hurt when you tapped him
against your palm. The camo colors were so ugly—nothing
you would want to paint a room. I refused to airdrop him
into a war zone shooting everything in sight. I never dreamt
of combat. I liked adventure stories, but stopped short
of mass destruction. Killing fascinates boys.
Wooly mammoths and other large game must be roaming
the blood-soaked plains of their imaginations. They certainly
were not interested in tip-toeing to London or Paris as my
shoeless doll was. So excited flying through countertop clouds
her feet never touched the ground. Her feet formed for lofty
ambitions. My doll and I were going to Hollywood. I wanted
something more than the playfighting of ordinary boys. I wanted
to be myself, but I was cautioned out of it. I took the scissors
and placed them in a drawer alongside the construction
paper silhouette of a boy I knew I had to become in order to survive.
*
Sean Hanrahan (he, him, his) is a poet from Philadelphia. He is the author of the full-length collections Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt) and Ghost Signs (2023 Alien Buddha), and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, One Art, Poetica Review, Serotonin, and Voicemail Poems.

Three Poems by Lynne Knight

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Poem for My Daughter

The past is a country of windows.
In some of them, faces, their histories
sealed by glass. In others,
white curtains. Shadows without name.
Better to create your own history
out of longing and desire
than to mourn the loss of unknown
faces in the photographs your father left
to you. Better to take loss as part of
memory, that long wind blowing past you
with what’s retrievable, or not.
Remember all the times it snowed so hard
the apple tree would vanish
from your window? Yet it was there.
So with my love. His death. His love.
Keep sight of what’s essential.
How, even in the worst storms,
green and blossom travel from the roots.

*

Shifting

A friend says not to focus on the negative
           all the time. Open your eyes to the good,
she tells me on the phone, when my husband

calls out that there’s a dead rabbit
           under the deck, having lifted boards
to find out why the sliding glass doors

on the patio won’t close—not because
           of the dead rabbit, whose good-luck foot
lies there, all that’s left besides the rib cage

with its beautiful architecture, the fine spine.
           A joist has settled, or the piling under it,
evidence that things are always shifting,

nothing is static, not even grief or love.
           Nothing’s static but death, my friend says when
I call back with news of the rabbit. At least

once all the decomposing stops. I think of all
           the words I’ve written, or spoken, or thought.
Even the saved ones are shifting: a blessing

is not what it was when I was a kid and it came
           directly from God. Now it can come from rain,
or the wind, or a child’s sigh as she sleeps.

*

Letter I Should Have Written Years Ago

Neither of you has any idea of the pain ahead.
She’s almost seven, and earlier she cried

because you pulled her front loose tooth,
only your big hand got the other one,

too, the one that wasn’t even loose.
She had to change her shirt for the photo,

it was so bloody. But she’s smiling now,
happy she can sing the song, get a double

visit from the tooth fairy. You’re looking down,
contrite, maybe, or just trying not to laugh.

I’ve never stopped loving her, but when I saw
this old photo, I remembered how I loved you

then, loved your strong, star-athlete body,
the way it wanted me. Before the pain

of seeing how unsuited we were for each other.
I don’t remember when it first began, the falling

out, but no hint of it here. Summer, your skin
beautifully tanned, warm light even inside

the house before those long dark winters.
Forgive me for forgetting who we were then.

*

Lynne Knight has published six full-length poetry collections and six chapbooks. Although she lived in the United States for most of her life, she now lives on Vancouver Island.

Saturday by J.R. Solonche

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Saturday

Frank came to clean the place,
pick up branches, blow leaves.
My mother died last week, he said.
Oh, I’m sorry, Frank, I said.
She died in her sleep. She was 89,
he said. She lived a full life, I said.
It was peaceful in her sleep, he said.
That’s the best way. In your sleep,
I said. She lived a full life, he said.
I saw her more in the nursing home
than I saw her for thirty years,
he said. I understand. The yard
looks good, I said. But you have
to do something about this, he said,
pointing to the bare ground in front.
The rain coming down the back
is washing away the soil and the grass.
I see that. I should tend to that, I said.
You really need to or you’ll have
no lawn this summer, he said.
Thanks. I’ll tend to it. Sorry about
your mom, I said. Thanks. It’s okay.
I’m okay. We’re okay. She was 89.
She lived a full life. She died in her
sleep. Real peaceful. I hope I go
like that. In my sleep. Don’t forget
the lawn. And the garden needs
work, too. Don’t forget the garden,
he said. I won’t forget, I said.

*

Nominated for the National Book Award and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 35 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Two Poems by Lois Perch Villemaire

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Museum Visit

On a visit
to the Franklin Institute
my brother and I
run ahead
of our parents
skipping up the steps
to wait at the heavy front doors.

We ask to go first
to our favorite exhibit—
The Giant Heart,
constructed
two stories tall,
big enough
to walk through.

We are thrilled to be in this space
reading signs,
exploring paths
of each chamber,
valve, and ventricle—
trying to imagine
the workings of our own hearts.

We touch veins
painted on the walls,
bulging red and purple.
We laugh nervously
hearing echoes
of lub-dub, lub-dub
as we crawl
through a giant artery
following the trail
blood flows
in our own tiny hearts.

*

Big Girl

After my mother taught me
how to make a bed with hospital corners,
by tucking the sheets just so,
I felt helpful.

After my mother showed me
how to flip a grilled cheese sandwich,
I thought I could cook.

After my mother handed me
a library card, I carried home
a pile of picture books,
I was happy

After my mother took me
to West Side Story for my 11th birthday,
I fell in love with show music.

After my mother and I,
wearing a dress
and patent leather shoes,
sat with my grandmother
at the Crystal Tea Room
on the 8th floor
of Wanamaker’s Department Store,
the largest dining room in Philadelphia,
decorated with huge chandeliers,
flowered tea cups
matching saucers,
I knew I was grown up.

*

Lois Perch Villemaire is the author of “My Eight Greats,” a family history in poetry and prose published in 2023. Her work has appeared in such places as Blue Mountain Review, Ekphrastic Review, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Pen In Hand, Topical Poetry and an anthology entitled I Am My Father’s Daughter. She lives in Annapolis, MD.

Waxing Gibbous by Daye Phillippo

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Waxing Gibbous

We sit around the bonfire, watch the farmer
across the road pull the red auger
to yet another field, tractor growling
as it drags the heavy long-neck, slowly
down the gravel road while we stretch
beside the fire toasting marshmallows
and watching embers, the old sun settling
behind the trees like a fire going dim.
Night coming on. Jupiter rising
on the eastern horizon. Our son tends
the fire, speaks of being a Boy Scout,
but not of the possibility of deployment.
His wife holds the baby, her first bonfire.
All of us eagle eye and warn the three
older children who are, of course, drawn
to the blaze. We listen closely for coyotes
and hear a great horned owl’s lonesome
from the darker darkness of the pines.
The wise old barn cat is a shadow lingering,
edge of our circle, keeping his distance
from owls and unpredictable children
hepped on too much sugar and the thrill
of being outdoors at this hour. Stars
and a waxing gibbous moon, white light
that glows on our grandson’s blond head
and illuminates the water I pour, my cup
to his sippy cup, moonwater, I tell him,
cold and refreshing. Ahhhhhh! we say,
same time, same way after taking a swig.

*

Daye Phillippo taught English at Purdue University and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Presence, Cider Press Review, Twelve Mile Review, One Art, Shenandoah, The Windhover, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana where she hosts a monthly Poetry Hour at her local library. Thunderhead (Slant, 2020) was her debut full-length collection.

The Ungiving by Nadine Hitchiner

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The Ungiving

After your father texted, “the pigeons have hatched!

I felt the gift of life,
and the immediate counterpart of it

merge across the English Channel,
felt it even in the threads

of my nightgown, pulling
the silk back into the worm that spewed it,

and I stood in the bedroom, naked
of death. Ungiven it.

In your father’s garden, everything
is life, which sometimes means “memory”—

the pebbles, the rose
from your Nan’s garden.

The frogspawn growing their chirps,
and the goldfish spawning—between them

the small pathway, the lilies and roses.
My love, there isn’t a way in this world

a feather on a stone will make anything lighter.
And I know, sadness

has dressed me, and trumpeted on.
Each time, wish I were a beginner, again

at my own grief. Skill-less and accidental.
To know nothing, and live.

We brought a small plant back home
from your father’s garden, at our last visit.

When you stand there, hovering over it
as if to make another leaf grow,

I remember, you, too, grew in that garden.
When you dress me,

because I can’t, you are life,
dressing me.

*

Nadine Hitchiner is a German poet and author of Practising Ascending (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2023), as well as the chapbook Bruises, Birthmarks & Other Calamities (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2021). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2023 Best of the Net Finalist. Her work has been published in The Lumiere Review, Bending Genres, Hayden’s Ferry Review and others. She lives in her hometown with her husband and their dog.

ONE ART ranked #6 in Chill Subs’ Top Lit Mags of 2023

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

ONE ART ranked #6 in Chill Subs’ Top Lit Mags of 2023

Here’s what poets had to say about ONE ART (courtesy of the Chill Subs newsletter):

“Transparency, quick response, easy vibe.”

  • Stellar poetry. Clean design. The one poem a day model keeps it from being overwhelming; I don’t feel daunted by reading the journal. I can check in, read a great poem, and go one without feeling like I’m shortchanging the journal.
  • The editors care about your work and respond within days. They publish diverse voices and styles. Good editors to work with.
  • I love the content. I love the appearance of the journal, and I really love the speedy response time. The editor is kind and sometimes offers really helpful feedback.
  • ONE ART, even when they send rejections, takes pains to be kind, answer questions, communicate with their contributors. It’s a rarity among journal editors
  • Good poems, some brilliant, delivered every day, plus and editors as welcoming to poets as he is to poems. This journal links many communities into one sprawling community held together by poems an love for them.

Info about ONE ART (courtesy of Chill Subs):

ONE ART: a journal of poetry is a US-based magazine founded in 2020 that is fee-free, responds within 7 days.

ONE ART is a home for good poems. We aim to publish poetry that adds value to the life of our readers. We hope to offer, sustain, and nourish a kind, inviting, and thoughtful community.

  • They accept simultaneous submissions.
  • Submit via email.
  • Genres [Poetry. (5)]
  • They nominate work for Pushcart, BOtN.
  • Our records show that they are active on social media.
  • They are in the Top 10% of most popular magazines on Chill Subs.

Three Poems by Faith Shearin

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Telephone Booths

I shut the door and wept over failed math tests
and wayward boyfriends, told my mother
about bad cafeteria food, nosebleeds, my part
in the school play. At summer camp I found them

between cabins in a forest of old growth pines
and settled myself on a shelf-like seat, held the stiff
silver cord like something umbilical. Phone booths were
liminal spaces, both public and private —

a contradiction I loved. They were the size
of closets, confessionals, coffins. Though
mostly extinct I passed one
this summer in an open field — each pane of glass
reflecting swaying wildflowers — and remembered

the distant disembodied voice of my grandfather
and the way Clark Kent became Superman.

*

My Sister, Age Two

My sister, age two, stands with her back to the camera
dressed in a diaper and our mother’s high heeled shoes.
The image is grainy, low quality — some sort of instant

Polaroid with oversized white borders — but in the dim light
I can make out woven wallpaper, shag carpet and,
inside a wooden console, the fat TV we owned

in 1978 — antennae wrapped in aluminum foil
to improve the stormy reception. She is thin
with a thatch of unruly hair and one hand rests

on her hip, as if she’s already stepping into the wobbly
shoes of adulthood, preparing for the epic battles
with our mother and the year she will spend

at our father’s bedside. This is different from the prints
in which she rests like a doll in the arms of every vanishing
grandparent, different from the portraits in which she stands

beside our brother, a full head
shorter than he is though she is a year and a half older.
It is different even from the snapshots in which she wears

a t-shirt that labels all the bones of her skeleton
or has built herself a winged mosquito
costume for Halloween. She is nearly

naked except for the shoes, and alone,
and already herself in the shadowy frame: unaware
of the camera’s gaze, or too elated to care that she

has been caught stealing beauty from our mother’s closet.

*

My Father’s Cancer was like the Loch Ness Monster

The Loch Ness monster is a shape shifter:
a serpentine creature, sometimes pink,

sometimes black, her long neck and humps rising
from a misty lake in the Scottish Highlands; she slithers

in vague photos and sonar readings and might be
a swimming elephant from a visiting circus, a wind slick,

or some oversized eel. She may or may not have drowned
men and it is difficult to say

whether she is furry or scaly. Likewise my father’s
skin cancer began in his ear but metastasized —

masquerading as a cyst above his eye — and, in this way,
went undetected by scans until the full malignancy

uncoiled beneath the surface of his face; his cancer
travelled on nerves, eroding bones,

which was like drifting on hidden currents,
and still a late and painful biopsy

proved inconclusive. In Glen Mor, on the shores of River Ness,
which flows into Moray Firth

where deep waters rise and fall
there were unexplained sightings — a wriggling and churning, a large

stubby-legged animal resembling a salamander —
which was like my father seeing double

as his eyelid began to droop. The Loch Ness monster
continues to elude investigators who imagine her as a wooden head

attached to a submarine, or the leg of a hippo stuck
to an umbrella, or a moose

or camel, or as some ancient marine reptile — a dinosaur maybe —
that escaped the cretaceous period though this wasn’t

supposed to be possible.

*

Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have won awards from New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Two YA novels — Lost River, 1918 and My Sister Lives in the Sea — won The Global Fiction Prize, judged by Anthony McGowan, and have been published by Leapfrog Press.

Heirloom by Elisabeth Crago

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Heirloom
         After Zeina Hashem Beck

I come from a line of women who leave
but don’t. My mother’s mother left her husband,
moved from Ferrara to Rome, took him
back years later, forgave his other family.
She left me the taste of tortellini in brodo,
her rose scent, a winter coat with a fur collar.
My mother left twice. First she fled Italy
for Minnesota, an easy choice she claimed.
What was there to stay for?
She was in love until he turned out to be a drinker
so she flew to Italy. 1949. Brave woman leaving
with toddler on a transatlantic prop-plane flight.
Go back to your husband, her father said, and so she
left again, ground her teeth for five more decades.
Her mother visited once, her father never, leaving
the gulf between them more and more oceanic,
though each year she’d return, a moth caught
in their flickering light. Once she brought me a tapestry
embroidered with flame she’d found in her mother’s closet.
I hung it in my living room until the memory of all
I never knew burned to ash. When my mother
told me not to visit, I left, fled to the other side
of the world where trees with names
I couldn’t pronounce canopied the house.
When she declined to visit, I dug up roses
she would have loved. Every four months I shrunk
the 10,000 miles between us until greeted as if a stranger.
After I left her ashes in the ground, I, too, left
until my children’s children cried magnetic tears,
a force foreshortening distance. I’m telling you,
the road curves away before it returns.

*

Elisabeth Crago lives in Pittsburgh, PA. She holds an MFA from Carlow University and is also a graduate of the University of Michigan and Lehman College, CUNY where she received a Bachelor’s Degree in English literature and a Master’s Degree in Nursing. She has been published in Voices from the Attic, vols 21, 22 and 24, Eye to the Telescope, and Shot Glass Journal.

A Dream of Matzoh Ball Soup by Lana Hechtman Ayers

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

A Dream of Matzoh Ball Soup

My grandmother didn’t die of a stroke
when I was in college, no, no, no,

she rose up out of her wheelchair
& danced the hora with the nurses,

then came home to us & cooked
enough matzoh ball soup for an army

& forty years later, we’re still eating
that soup for supper, then raising hands

in the air in praise & later, after
she sings me to sleep with a Yiddish song

or two, I dream of her salt & pepper hair
blowing & glowing in the April light,

her eyes squinting to raisins
but when I wake it’s always raining

& she’s not here, not anywhere
but in the photo on my desk

& all that soup we’ve been consuming
is the ever salty broth of sorrow.

*

Lana Hechtman Ayers’ poems appear in Peregrine, The London Reader, and Rattle, among others. Her ninth poetry collection, The Autobiography of Rain is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.

Three Poems by Abby E. Murray

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

What It’s Like to Wonder Whose Country It Was First

It’s a bit like counting backward by last names
in search of one that’s never been claimed
by a man. You end up tallying centuries like beads
on a rosary, thousands of generations of names
owned and assigned by fathers and sons, fathers
and sons, until you see how we, the non-men,
survived before names even came to be.
Isn’t it likely that, pre-speech, we recognized land
as the body that grew us like flowers, or figs?
Isn’t each of us named after water and sun
in words only our mother can pronounce?
There have always been more than enough
weeds to pull and seeds to bury. What a waste
of energy it would have been then, to call a river
ours but not yours, to decide for a shoreline
which children it could hold on its hip. And yet,
it must have happened: a drink from a stream
so perfect it broke a man’s heart. In his grief,
he called it his, and we’ve been dying ever since.

* 

Ode to an Invasive Species

My friend reminds me cats
are an invasive species,
citing every songbird she’s found
disemboweled on her doorstep.
What she means is, feeding one animal
is the same as killing another,
and what I mean is, I don’t know
how to unlove a thing once I love it.
I used to think shame could teach me,
but here I am, still dumbstruck
by the generator in my cat’s tiny throat,
the one she cranks to life in exchange
for any kindness I show her,
offering me her own broken song.
Here I am, smacking a sparrow
from her mouth, then giving it water
and a shoebox where it can rest
because I want it all, my version of peace
everywhere, which I think
makes me an invasive species too.
I spend most days trying to be good
while knowing I’m not, not completely,
and trying not to be crushed even though
I couldn’t live without deserving it.

* 

On the First Day of School

I draw a wave that reaches
from the back of my daughter’s hand

up her arm, across her shoulders,
then down her other arm

to lap against the knuckles
of her opposite hand. I tell her

this is a river, and it belongs
only to her, for as long as she lives.

She likes this: the inheritance
of a body of water in lieu

of her own body, which harbors
many unnamed currents.

Her girl-not-girl-not-boy face
gleams like an agate among stones.

For now, she is her. I tell her
every word and glance she feels today

is a leaf, a spider, a lily, sometimes
a paper boat made just for her—

they float on the surface of her river.
Keep the ones you need, I say.

What about the rest? she asks.
She is trying to decide if the gift

I’m offering is too simple to be true,
or too true to be simple.

Reader, I am too. The river
sends the rest away, I say.

Her eyes are two pools
where memory twirls like a fish,

something bright in the dark—
a kindness she’s fed to some

thoughtful koi—but rejection
festers there too, aggressive

and determined as pike.
She’ll need to know them both.

I pack these metaphors
like firm mud for her to stand on

and she walks to school
where I can’t follow,

her hands empty as mine were
when I waded into my life,

ready to pick up what there is
to be found, to be held, or let go.

*

Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Her first book of poems, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Washington State Book Award. She served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.

Eight Nights by Emily Winakur

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Eight Nights

First my mother’s mother’s house: overstuffed
blintzes, gifts; my father’s admonitions;
cousins breaking up the distance. Night two,
his parents. Latkes and the news, darkness
amidst festival. The middle evenings
swung less to extremes: small gifts, smaller guilt.
Irony of shellfish fried in oil,
if they were off and we traveled coastward.
Moderation left in place the pattern’s
fundamentals, though: she knew from joy,
he from sorrow. Each year, each settled in
more rigidly. Each eighth night, the candles
spent themselves in one moment. My parents
kindled such illusions of agreement.

*

Emily Winakur is a writer and practicing psychologist based in Houston. Her poetry and prose have appeared or are upcoming in several journals, including, most recently, Literary Mama, Colorado Review, The Texas Observer, and The American Scholar. Emily has recently completed a coming-of-age novel that describes a teen’s journey with both mental health and poetry.

All American Superstore Pharmacy by Sara Cosgrove

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

All American Superstore Pharmacy

You know you’re in America when
The pharmacist asks if you’d like
To purchase your frozen burrito, chewing gum, and box of cheap wine
At the pharmacy counter.

It’s convenient, to be sure,
But isn’t it odd?

The person counting your pills,
Who’s prepared to discuss side effects and contraindications,
Is more likely to scan barcodes for candy bars
Than talk trazodone
And explain why, despite many modern conveniences,
You still have to cut your pills in half.

*

Sara Cosgrove is an award-winning journalist and emerging poet. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in The Seventh Quarry, Meniscus, Notre Dame Review, San Antonio Review, Osiris, and Roi Fainéant. She has worked as an editor for 15 years and has studied in the United States, Cuba, and France.

On Knocking the Head Off the Buddha Statue by Melinda Burns

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On Knocking the Head Off the Buddha Statue

An urge to re-position the hostas around
the plaster Buddha in the rock garden—
Stepping around and over him,
traversing the little hill,

the uncertain rocky places,
my foot catches—
           he tumbles forward,
                      his head hits the stone—

I thought it smashed and gone
but the break is clean,
head separated from body
as is my own some days

I carry the severed parts,
to the table,
squeeze the last bit
of Krazy glue along the edges

Then, clamping them together,
my fingertips rough with glue residue,
I place my hand on his head,
close my eyes and press down,
pray for wholeness

*

Melinda Burns is a poet from Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Melinda’s poems have appeared in the Fiddlehead, Fall 2023 issue; Textshop journal; Mothering magazine; and forthcoming in the New Quarterly, Winter 2024 issue.

Two Poems by Tamarah Rockwood

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A Voice in a Crowd

I held her hand because she was seven
And our family had walked
To the baseball stadium and,
Together, we were walking home.

There is a ferry we take to reach our home,
And I held my daughter’s hand
Because she was seven
And we were surrounded by a noisy crowd.

Thousands of shoes clacked on the metal planks.
Chatter echoed off of the walkway walls.
Conversations about the fumble
In the 4th inning — stuff like that.

Noise. Ferry engines. Rolling luggage.
Feet. Loud earbuds. Chewing.
Overhead announcements.
And, still, I heard the voice

Of the older man who walked
Next to me as I was holding
My daughter’s hand because
She was seven, and she was small.

And, still, I heard his voice —
And, still, I can hear his voice —
Tell my daughter, in the crowd
When she was seven —

I heard his voice tell her
That she was very pretty
And that she should go home
With him, instead.

And then he smiled at me.
As if he knew that one day
She would not be seven,
And I would not be holding her hand.

*

KKK in Indiana

In an incognito tab on my browser
I googled his name. I just wanted to know.
See, I was reading Gone With the Wind,
And I (honestly) didn’t know Ashley was in the Klan.
Which led me to Birth of a Nation.
This led me to wonder where the Klan resurrected
After its brief death in Georgia.
Turns out, it resurfaced in Indiana with vigor.
And then I realized that I had extended family there.
There is a farm in southern Indiana that was built
With funds from the Union; and then,
There were years of Masons and other
Gentleman society clubs – which is how Margaret Mitchell put it.
This led me to wonder if he had ties with them;
And then I wondered what my grandchildren
Will google about me,
Living in the time
that I am in.

*

Tamarah Rockwood graduated from Harvard in 2020 and has had many publications including short stories, screenwriting, and poetry in the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, among other published poetry. She is the CEO of Bainbridge Island Press’s publishing house, which publishes poetry chapbooks, collections, and anthologies. Rockwood is the manager of Ars Poetica in Washington state. Other than writing, she the former Wine Committee Chairwoman for the Rainier Club in Seattle; now the current Literary Committee Chairwoman. Along with living the literary life, she tends a small plump of ducks on Bainbridge Island with her husband of 20+ years, Ben, and their 5 children. She enjoys reading literature, she does not enjoy reading YA literature, she is in love with 1930-1950 movies from TCM, and, despite living in a PNW forest, she is not keen on long hiking.

Nudge by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice

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Nudge

Amy Winehouse’s mother used to call her
a nudge, I read in People magazine.
Hello dear, she’d say into the mall air
piping Rehab on holiday shuffle
after Amy died, the voice
a steady fuck you, love me
over shoppers seeking gifts
mid perfume spurt, hanger rasp,
mini meanness of mirrors.

Nudge, Yiddish for boundary breaker,
something I call my young son.

Head-butter, rooter, baby
of mine. When you crack the seal
and slip my hold, draw in your angers—
when you reach your late twenties—
I pray you will sing your song to me
late at night on the phone,
not back through the black.

*

Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice (she/her) has poems published or forthcoming in Witness, Psaltery & Lyre, Crab Orchard Review, Whale Road Review, Rogue Agent, Still: The Journal (2016 Judge’s Award), Literary Mama, and elsewhere. A long-time high school teacher with literature degrees from Brown and Indiana-Bloomington, she lives with her wife in Florida.

My wet eyes stared into their lights by Roseanne Freed

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

My wet eyes stared into their lights

During our family FaceTime call
at Chanukah last year,
we lit the fifth day candles
on the menorah,
and my seven-year-old granddaughter,
the image of her late mother,
asked us,

            Who misses Mama the most?

I’ve spent the whole year wondering
how to answer.

At a Shabbat dinner on Friday night
when the woman opposite me said,
Where are your children?
I could tell her my son lives in Canada.
But I don’t know where my daughter
is — she didn’t leave a forwarding address
when she left.

*

Roseanne Freed grew up in apartheid South Africa and now lives in Los Angeles, where she takes inner-city school children hiking in the Santa Monica mountains. A Best of the Net and a Pushcart nominee, her poems have appeared in ONE ART, MacQueens Quinterly, Naugatuck River Review, and Blue Heron Review among others.

Two Poems by William Welch

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Soup Season

zugzwang: noun (in chess) a situation in which the obligation to make a move in one’s turn is a serious, often decisive, disadvantage

I said zugzwang, not soup season, although
since you mention it, this is a good time

for soup, now that I’ve gotten into a bad position…
The days are shorter, they’re selling mums

at all the grocery stores, and some kids
in my neighborhood already carved jack-o-lanterns…

I know I’ve got beans in the kitchen, spinach,
a bottle of stock. There’s always a good onion

and garlic in the fridge, a wedge of Parmesan.
How can I get myself out of this mess?

For weeks I’ve been thinking about how much
I’d like a small place up in the Adirondacks—

just me and a few raccoons. Vita contemplativa—
a cross between St. Francis preaching to birds

and Tu Fu—lots of books, lots of beer,
which probably sounds boring to most people,

like soup, they might say, without beef or chicken—
but I live a simple life, and don’t want much…

That’s a double-edged, fingers-crossed assertion,
yes, and I keep reminding myself of Heraclitus,

who insisted in one of his lesser known sayings
that nothing is worse for a human being

than to achieve, or have granted,
the thing one wants most…

Typical American, I answer back, try me…
I’m ready. I understand why Duchamp turned away

from art to study the ten thousand lines of Ruy Lopez—
even though somewhere in the back of his mind

an old man kept playing accordion music
while reciting the rosary…Chess takes over from ethics

quite easily. Clear rules on a standardized board.
Each piece has a defined set of movements.

Tactics, strategies are all well explored,
the theory is sound. One can have, even from the first

exchange of pieces, not a premonition,
but a future-perfect sense—

the-will-have-done—of one’s situation…
Not everyone can be like Brutus at Philippi

after he saw Julius Caesar leaning against a tree,
his old friend, waiting for him…Of all the pieces,

only the knight doesn’t move in straight lines.
Still, one wants to gallop. Leap over pawns and queens.

Deliver a smothered mate. I am starting to crave
something warm and hearty, a thick stew,

something you can put a slice of dry bread in
to soak up the juice. I better start cooking…

It’s well known, but hard to accept—the most difficult
move to find is the one with the knight going back…

*

Camouflage

This world is too small for you. Maybe
your instinct agrees—a square room
with real plants, watered daily,
a real, but not living, tree—willow,
judging by its bark, though probably I’m fooled
by a zoo’s simulacrum. But the moss looks
genuine, green toupees
covering the branches. There you are…

It took me five minutes to find you.
Trios of children glanced in
your miniature jungle. Their reflections,
blurred at first, sharpened
as they approached the glass. I saw
bright colored clothes appear, left and right,
the opposite of camouflage,
and saw how the kids peered past
grayscale versions of themselves
that stood in their way, as mine did,
each of us confronted by a pale twin.
Behind us, casting smudged shadows
around our feet, the teachers waited,

hyper-vigilant, tense. I feel like an overgrown boy,
part of the field trip, but slow
to see what the others see. Finally, guided
by the girl beside me, who points in excitement,
I recognize you.

Fold on fold in loose coils, you hang from a branch,
as though lightning struck the tree,
and tangled around a limb.
Cool, supple, you provoke thunder
in my mind, even though you seem to be asleep.
Even though the charge that burst the air
and made you what you are
looks spent. Which side of the glass are we on?
Am I seeing only your reflection?
What if you are behind us, and if we turned,
we would see you as you really are,
a vibrant bolt of green diamonds.

With my face two inches from the glass,
I stand watching, the last one at your vitrine,
trying to avoid my reflection’s eyes. Hoping
you will wake. Change back into lightning,
I think, with just enough self-control to obey
signs that beg visitors not to tap the glass.

*

William Welch lives in Utica, NY where he works as a registered nurse. His poetry has appeared in various journals, including Little Patuxent Review, Stone Canoe, Rust+Moth, and Cider Press Review, and his collection Adding Saffron (Finishing Line Press) is forthcoming in 2025. He edits Doubly Mad (doublymad.org). Find more about him on his website, williamfwelch.com.

Four Poems by Meg Freer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

We Can Always Tell a Longer Story

Long-dead aloe and jade plants
remain on a window sill
like intricately carved sculptures,
more interesting than the dullness
of frosted window film upstairs.
The building’s immune system
doesn’t seem to be working well.

I have not seen the occupant
for weeks, have not smelled
the cannabis when I walk by,
although certain lights stay on
around the clock. Skipped town
for a while, perhaps, but no one
knows where to look or who to call.

I collect the tomatoes at least, before
the vines fall over from the weight.
An abundance of milkweed pods
and ‘kiss me over the garden gate’ flowers
dangle with green and magenta exuberance
over the barren driveway. Those plants thrive.
They don’t care if anyone lives there or not.

*

Watcher

Winter evenings, she watches
snow-covered rooftops, the factory’s white exterior,
and even the limestone walls of the historic church
turn lavender briefly at sunset.

Distorted nighttime sleep allows her to see
stranger things from her high apartment windows.
The man who stands on a bus stop bench,
rocks it back and forth while he entwines
willow branches into a large wreath for his head.

She keeps an eye on the tiny house that sold
but that no one moved into, watches for squatters.
Mostly she hopes for better sleep, or at least
that someday she will see something useful
like the man wanted for assaulting a woman
in the nearby park, or find out who does things like
pull up all the garlic in the community garden at night.

*

Tea Party

After the drama and mild trauma
of visiting the hospital’s locked ward
for the first time, entering the bare room
with neither table nor chair, where my friend
must subsist until her world stops turning on her,
I seek refuge with my neighbours,
my heart in need of a bath to wash away
all I saw and heard. We talk in their kitchen
with cups of ‘Irish tea’—whiskey,
in their house—because they say
I’m too pale. The ‘tea’ slows my heart rate,
and I gently close the door on that day
before it bangs shut.

*

Small, Weird Things
         in memoriam Bob M, poet

Breath combs the sides of my body,
clean lines of limbs between panes of glass.
Ginger and fig consort at the tip of my tongue.
I enter a secret room through the hole
in my pants pocket, discover bowls of silver coins.
Mountains lie down in submission at my feet.

Did I dream such things, or did you
send these images from the other side?
We wish you could see our celebration
of your life, then you enter the room
in the body of a squirrel—right on cue,
after a mention of “small, weird things,”
and we all cheer to know you made it.

Next morning at the bakery, a sign reads
Yesterday $3. Yes, I will take yesterday
for $3 if it means you will return again,
one more time. You always managed
to right yourself after falls of many kinds.
But even a squirrel will have one last fall.

*

Meg Freer teaches piano and writes poetry in Ontario. Her photos, short prose and poems have appeared in various North American anthologies and journals, and she has written two chapbooks of poems. She holds a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing with Distinction from Toronto’s Humber School of Writers.

Coronado, CA 1979 by Michel O’Hara

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Coronado, CA 1979

Everything about the day screams
summer. The bus fare I stole
to get home spent on a cherry
Slurpee at 7-Eleven. Skin and hair
caked with sand and salt. Swimsuit
still damp with seawater, soaked through
t-shirt, cut-off shorts. Cars loaded with
other people’s sun-stroked children roar
past my outstretched arm.

I remember it all. The way his sedan slowed
along the edge of the highway. How I sprinted
towards the only open door I saw. The way I braced
my bare feet against the dashboard. The angle
of my legs making a drawbridge between my body
and his car. The man driving – whatever his name –
is unimportant.

What matters, forty-three years later
I can still feel the sting of the hot leather
seat scorching the backs of my thighs.
As though, the car had been sitting in the sun
all day. As if, the man had been waiting
for me to finish swimming.

There must have been something
so feral in me that I could get in a car
with a stranger. How I wasn’t even afraid,
until he stopped in the middle of an overpass
and said, Get out before I do something
to you that both of us will regret.

*

Michel O’Hara is a poet and photographer living in Los Angeles, CA. She is currently completing her B.A. in Liberal Studies, Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles. Currently she is an editor at the literary journal Two Hawks Quarterly.

Two Poems by Martha Deed

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Ordinary Days

It is said he was determined to outlive her
though in hospice, wheelchair-bound, he sat
holding her hand, his words a secret whisper

binding them at
the end of their lives
not hiding what

seventy-seven years together drives
a once-active man to sit so still
catching light-beams but also gives

way to grief that will
not be denied, his family free
to reveal a love still

surviving a dying we do not see
while in Niagara Falls, public deaths in fire
stop trains, shut bridges, toss bodies, debris

and flames sky-high but no one knows where
they’re from or whether they intended
so public a demise, were careless, afire

with rage or a car malfunction portended
death at a moment where fourteen miles away
three deer rose off the lawn and descended

into nearby woods to hide ‒ hostages to a day
of dark events and imaginings. Then farther still
a brutal war gives way

to a Pause ‒ a single day or four. It is said we will
see women freed at night and ‒ rimmed by light ‒ a child.

*

The wet spring

wildflowers everywhere
pink and blue and white and yellow
fungi among the violets in the lawn

it is a year for digging and planting
catching rainwater in a barrel
watching a Mama Starling

attempt to feed three
barking fledglings
all at once

the old pines are stressed
their lower branches
brown

and across the street
down the road a bit
the developer

scrapes his lot of trees
grass
topsoil

builds patio houses
on top of a well-drained swamp
and the drainage ditch below

oblivious as the pines

*

Martha Deed lives on the Erie Canal in North Tonawanda, NY. Her poems have appeared in New Verse News, BlazeVox Journal, Earth’s Daughters, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily and dozens of other online and print journals. She is the author of three poetry collections from FootHills Publishing, including her most recent, Haunted By Martha (July, 2023).

Because you asked me to pray for you by Babo Kamel

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Because you asked me to pray for you

because I have nothing more to offer
because the ghost of your illness walks daily with me
because you cling so strongly to a god who cannot hear
because you swallow loss until your body swells
the emptiness making room for more emptiness

you cannot see how the sky drapes lower
where winter light seeks cracks in the clouds
barely, barely and the oaks standing stoic in their nakedness

tell us what we know, that you need more air
that each breath is a prayer

*

As a dual citizen Babo Kamel splits her time between Raleigh, North Carolina and Montreal, Quebec. Her work has appeared in the Greensboro Review, Lily, CV2, Poet Lore, and Best Canadian Poetry 2020 among others. She is a Best of Net nominee, and a seven time Pushcart nominee. Her chapbook, After, is published with Finishing Line Press. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson’s Program For Writers. Her book, What The Days Wanted is published with Broadstone Books.

Two Poems by Jade Han

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A Collection of Things I Only Know Because I Was Told Them
Jade is an unusual name
          Girls are not boys
할머니 and 할아버지 are ‘Grandmother’ and ‘Grandfather’ in Korean
          Girls aren’t supposed to be taking karate class
Kids think seaweed is disgusting
          A boy can’t hit a girl but he can hit other boys
There are other types of fish other than mackerel
          I’m not supposed to wear a white T-shirt and a leather jacket for 50s Day
Chorizo y papas is a Mexican food
          The boys in karate class don’t want to fight the girl
Putting a slice of lime in a beer is a Mexican thing
          The other girls aren’t also pretending to be girls
When people hear “mixed,” they expect half white
          There are boys who have been getting skateboards for Christmas
Korean and Mexican is an unusual mix
          There are boys who have been going to the skatepark this whole time
I don’t look like what I am
                              Boys have been allowed to exist while I have been forced to be a girl
*
If I Were a Painter
From afar, the crackling fire between us
would’ve been just a candle flicker and we
would’ve been just two silhouettes at three-quarter view,
appearing through darkness
and hiding behind a swaying screen of leaves.
From where I sit beside you,
the soft glow of the fire illuminates your face
and paints you warmth and comfort.
Your eyes bury themselves in your book
and I follow your eyes as they follow the lines
and oh, what a blessing the existence of this book is
so I can watch you read it.
I wander along the flutter of your eyelashes
down the slope of your nose
and the curve of your lips,
and what a blessing the existence of this fire is
so I can see your face lit by it.
And if I were a painter,
I’d paint the very tip of your nose
with a not quite white dot, but bright enough to be mistaken for it
and I’d paint the same color in
the highlights above your lip and on your cheekbone.
With a deep and burnt red that can deceive the untrained eye as a true black,
I’d paint the gentle shadows of your forehead
and the dark side of your knuckles, of the hands that hold that book
and oh, the painters should envy me
for I have seen you and they have not.
What a blessing this night is
so I can sit beside you and wish I were a painter.
*
Jade Han (they/them) is a mixed Korean and Mexican gender non-conforming poet from Buffalo Grove, IL. They were a featured poet in Papers Publishing, and have work published/forthcoming in The Afterpast Review, Flurry Magazine, Cool Beans Lit, and Outland Magazine. Han currently attends the University of San Francisco. Their work explores the different aspects of their identity and the ways they interact with one another. Alongside writing, they love skateboarding, drawing, and oat milk lattes.

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of November 2023

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~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of November 2023 ~

  1. Donna Hilbert – Tongues
  2. Luanne Castle – Traveling to Visit Mom with My Bad Knees
  3. Amy Small-McKinney – As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, Walt Whitman
  4. Kate Young Wilder – Three Poems
  5. Alison Luterman – Accompanying My Friend to Chemo
  6. Bonnie Proudfoot – Flight
  7. Robbi Nester – Feast
  8. Joan Mazza – Midnight Chaos
  9. Sarah Browning – Four Poems
  10. Deborah Bacharach – A Fine Appendix

Poor Yorick by Michelle Bitting

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Poor Yorick

On the lip of descent into chaos, my spirit
yearns for halcyon hours,
a longing for daisies, for excavated
jest, for the brother who slung me
like a cross over his shoulders
walking home from school, past
parochial lawns and gnarled
oaks, their old man steeple arms, past
Witchy Witchy Wilson’s house—
spinster lady with unkempt hair
we’d glimpse on occasion watering her pansies
with a droopy black hose, a broken-necked
swan regurgitating rivers
into the eyes of her violet blooms. Everyone
crossed the street to avoid contact,
in case she cast a spell
or tried to eat us—the irony being
that when she died
she wasn’t found for weeks
and rumor had it and neighborhood kids tattled
how her cats had nibbled away
at the decomposing flesh, alone
in a cruel world that doesn’t touch
or move you until the full dark duende
shovels your dankest soil up
and with it the skull you name Brother,
the one who went crazy
years after he piggy-backed you home
but a minute ago, wasn’t it?
I can hear his tender laughter
and I can touch the clown suit
made of many-colored squares mother sewed
that he loved to wear on Halloween,
big enough for a 6ft. man—the pleated
blue and white gingham collar
with pinking-sheared edges
that flared and circled his neck like a quilted corona,
his smile belying the pit
of goblins buried in his gut—
an inexplicably princely
and decaying gorgeous core
where worms grow fat as little gods
orbiting the dirt, or
thrumming and laughing beneath
sidewalks, the rotten marks
and hard-won steps
of brothers and sisters,
(and every living fool
when you think of it)
who eventually comes to pass.

*

Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, the 2021 Fish Poetry Contest judged by Billy Collins, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She won Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruminate Magazine, 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. She is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize and a recipient of a Starred Kirkus Review; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

Two Poems by Jenna Wysong Filbrun

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My Loves, the Earth, My Bones
         after a diagnosis of osteoporosis at age 33

Sometimes finitude screams in my head
even when I try to let it be.
Like I try to wear with serenity
the fact that my bones are hollowing.
But there is a desperate edge to the miles.
As if I could hallow the bones as they hollow –
fill them with enough mountaintop,
enough deep woods to last
past when they’re too gone to take me there.

I am not talking only of bones.
I want to hear how the good things last
if what holds us up
can’t outlast us.

That’s what I think as I traipse
down the mountain in the rain
or wake up panicked in the night.
I go deeper into the mists of love
I need like thunder to see
even as I cling to a horse
in a dream, galloping
through the dark
with no reins.

*

On Not Becoming Bitter
         to loneliness

Someone is sending you a message.
It says maybe we could be friends.

It says you do not have to bow to the gods
of What People Think and What People Say.

It says remember how the ruby-throated hummingbird
hung in the air to look you in the eye, and

wasn’t it just yesterday you were out
combing the maples for the owl

you thought you heard, whose hoots
rippled from deep in the leaves like a murmur?

It says if you let the questions unspool,
they will carry you down

their sparkling trails toward sleep.
The way through will come to you later.

It says don’t give up.
If it hurts, it is love.

What you think you see
is only the shadow of something more.

What you know
is a gift I would like to open.

It says things
come apart.

You have to let them
come apart.

*

Jenna Wysong Filbrun is the author of the poetry collection, Away (Finishing Line Press, 2023), and the chapbook, The Unsaid Words (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in publications such as Deep Wild, The Dewdrop, EcoTheo Review, and others. Find her online at www.jennawysongfilbrun.wixsite.com/poetry or on Instagram @jwfilbrun.

Imprecise Lament by Natalie Marino

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Imprecise Lament

I was very young
when I first wanted
to take the mask off.

When I was ten
I loved to look
in the mirror

until I became strange
to my own self.

When I was twenty
I wanted to be
an everblooming fruit tree.

Now that I am middle aged
I am the mask.

I want to know
my body’s gravity,

the beauty of falling leaves
disappearing on the ground.

Hearing the hot jazz
playing at my open window,

I think of the last
sultry days of summer,

of dark sparrows somewhere
littering the fading sky
with their small song.

*

Natalie Marino is a poet and physician. Her work appears in Gigantic Sequins, Mom Egg Review, Plainsongs, Pleiades, Rust + Moth, Salt Hill, South Florida Poetry Journal, West Trestle Review and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino.

Lunchbox by Christina Hennemann

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Lunchbox

You sliced the mealy apples from Aldi
into eight pieces, five days a week.
I didn’t like the taste, but I liked the shape.

You braided my hair, pulled hard
on my thick strands so they’d stay in place,
my scalp was burning with your worries.

The girls in school had croissants, cookies,
pitted cherries fitting the tips of their tongues,
their silky hair shining like a silver coin.

I wanted the plastic-packed toasties,
but you bought rye bread, ten cents per sole,
you put your foot down.

Just once, please buy me Nutella instead of Nussetti,
You wouldn’t believe I’d taste the difference,
your hazel eyes a shade lighter

when I passed the blind test five times at my aunt’s.
One more time, you laughed, incredulous.
But still, you’d spread Nussetti on those soles,

counting your copper coins on the kitchen table
as my tongue grew sour to you, only my strict
plait dragging me down from my high horse.

*

Christina Hennemann is a poet and prose writer based in Ireland. She’s a recipient of the Irish Arts Council’s Agility Award ’23 and she was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. Her work is forthcoming or appears in Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, The Iowa Review, Skylight 47, The Moth, York Literary Review, The Storms, Impossible Archetype, Ink Sweat & Tears, Moria, and elsewhere. Her debut pamphlet “Illuminations at Nightfall” appeared with Sunday Mornings at the River (2022). christinahennemann.com

Elegy Before Snow by Susan Cossette

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Elegy Before Snow

Today, the towering ash
tree stands watch,
leafless. Emerald borers
tunneled through bark, left
dry vertical cracks, green sprouts
huddle over roots –
children waiting for a dead parent.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

Three Poems by Tara A. Elliott

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At Bay

So here we are, you west, me east—
a brackish blue chasm between us. Nobody knows
what Chesapeake truly means, some say Mother of Waters,
others Great Shellfish Bay—all I know is that it breaches
our center. Struck mute across this body of thought,
we are two halves of the blue crab’s claw:
one dactyl, one fixed.

*

In the Wake

Again, the tide takes us without warning, swells crash in cadence,
breath of the sea. When those that leave us go, emptiness

caves in, footprints fading in wet sand. This time, let grief
carry us beyond mooring, beyond

meaning, beyond simple measure. Let us lie
upon the berm with faces upturned

toward sky. Like children, let us learn
to capture the taste on outstretched tongues,

fingertips sweeping the strand, making angels
of us all. Let each wave

grow heavy with its own weight—
and let love

break us, again.

*

This Loneliness

Once, I held the weight of an ocean in my hand—
a halved shell filled with a fat fringed mollusk.

Plumbing the tines of a small fork beneath its delicate depths,
I freed it, planting it in a lover’s open mouth.

Tongue trying not to probe its texture, he grimaced
before swallowing it, whole and still alive.

*

Tara A. Elliott’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Wildness, and Ninth Letter, among others. Community outreach includes her role as Executive Director of the Eastern Shore Writers Association (ESWA), and Chair of the Bay to Ocean Writers Conference. A former student of Lucille Clifton, she is a recent winner of Maryland State Arts Council’s Independent Artist Award for Literature.

Feast by Robbi Nester

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Feast

It’s not holiday banquets I hunger for, the turkeys my
mother labored over, the China that arrived with her
from England, with its grand platters and scalloped plates,
It’s not the gravy or mashed potatoes, piled high like clouds.
I miss those ordinary Sunday mornings, when I would wake
at sunrise to read the funny papers, walk the dog down
to the playground, startling the flocks of starlings settled
in the dew-damp field, tracing their hieroglyphic prints
in the soft ground. Every week, my mother slipped
a wrinkled dollar bill or two into my hand, some change,
and sent me to the deli for bagels and smoked fish.
We sat down at the cluttered table, didn’t speak,
devoted to our task of dividing still-warm bagels
into perfect halves, splitting golden whitefish
at the seam, picking off each fragrant shred
with the smallest silver forks I’ve ever seen.
Sometimes, there was a strip of velvety
smoked sable, unctuous and rich, fresh
squeezed orange juice so bright it hurt my eyes.
I can’t think of any other meal I’d rather have
again, especially if it means we’ll be together,
all quarrels stilled, as we so seldom were
at any other time.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry and editor of three anthologies. She is a retired college educator and elected member of the Academy of American Poets. Her website is at http://www.RobbiNester.net

Two Poems by Elizabeth Crowell

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SKATING AT MENOTOMY POND

Between Monotony and Metonymy
we make our rounds near night.
The snowless ice is the color of new ash.
The shift of blades cracks through the empty trees.
Our shoes lie as deserted villages on the bank.
The circle is swift and neat.
Our silhouettes glaze the blank air.
Call this the world.
Call our lives the time in it.

*

DECOMISSIONING NIELSEN LIBRARY, SMITH COLLEGE, AFTER RENOVATION

There is a five-dollar starting bid for the mid-century arm chairs
where I fell asleep trying to read 400 pages a week
of Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Here is one of the mahogany display cabinets
in which I gazed at the hand-wrought drafts
of Sylvia Plath’s “Bees” on pink Smith College memo paper,

and these are the lion-footed oak tables
where I began a poem about I don’t know what
under these two-armed, green-hooded, brass table lamps.

This tabletop statue of winged Nike, goddess of Victory,
seems not to have been inspirational, given my many failures.
Next, there is an odd mahogany-framed print

of the Waterfront of Antwerp, (who deemed that necessary?)
and the old, wooden chalkboard on wheels, dusty trayed,
with thirty bids by women who remember wistfully

the emphatic scrape of chalk erased by a professor’s sleeve.
Here is an etching of Chartres at which I stared
elbow on a book, composing myself.

Here are the three-shelved carts where women
who had enough ideas for a thesis gathered their books
on Robert Browning or the Bauhaus

while I sat at one of those heavy, lion-footed tables,
and began to work on that poem I finished just now.

*

Elizabeth Crowell grew up in northern New Jersey and has a B.A. from Smith College in English Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. She taught college and high school English for many years. Her work has been published in such journals as Bellevue Literary Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Paterson Literary Review and others. One of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize and original published in the Tipton Review. She lives outside of Boston with her wife and teenage children.

Triumph by Leslie Hodge

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Triumph

1.

Across rusted floorboards, bottles
of Bacardi rattle and roll under
the clutch. Small ones,
empty, airline-size.

Parked, dark night presses hard
on the fogged-up windshield.
Radio scratches out Paint It Black.

My hand grips the shift knob,
his slick fingers venture up
my thigh, entangled a moment
in the garter belt.

We do not sense the cop until
he flicks on his foot-long flashlight.

2.

Tonight, the moon
is a single headlight shining
on the asphalt night.

I ease the Volvo in cruise control
and remember me, seventeen,

embracing the risks
in that old Triumph ragtop—
no airbags, seatbelts, headrests.
No map in the glovebox, no
tread on the tires.

In the rearview mirror,
her eyes meet mine.

We grip the wheel
and lean into the highway.
I hear the grinding of the gears.

*

Leslie Hodge lives in San Diego. Her poems have appeared in the Arkansas Review, Pigeon Pages, South Florida Poetry Journal, Spank the Carp (where she was featured in The Mind of the Poet), Catamaran Literary Reader, and The Main Street Rag. www.lesliehodgepoet.com

Two Poems by Howie Good

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The Sincere Assassin

The world burned without being consumed. Other people were just shadows. I passed a woman on the street I only later realized might have once been somebody. God’s face would appear and then disappear and then reappear among drifting clouds, playing peek-a-boo with the abandoned babies shrieking on the ground. My phone rattled. I thought I was about to learn the secret of how clowns get inside very small cars in very large numbers. The message was that I had cancer.

                                                            &

Outside the entrance to the Cancer Center, a woman with pale, stringy hair and puffy eyes stands morosely contemplating her phone and smoking a cigarette. Inside, the chatter is all about a sincere assassin with a head like a Donatello angel’s. I’m enthralled and terrified when I catch sight of him stepping off the elevator into the main lobby, and while there’s no actual law against his presence, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a kind of crime. Only if you have ever seen for yourself his dark hands sparkle can you truly judge.

                                                            &

It’s hard to remember a time when I haven’t received radiation, lying face down and naked to the waist on a pallet and required to remain as still as a corpse while the massive appendages of a monstrously large and powerful X-ray machine, a linear accelerator, sweep invisible killing beams over me, and there’s nobody I can ask, “Who allowed this to happen? Who’s to blame?” but even if there was, they wouldn’t know, and I would submit to the cold ministrations of the machine anyway, my nothing life, for all its startling inconsequence, worth the anguish of living.

*

Pilgrim’s Progress

At the far end of the street, I found the door I had been told would be there and passed through it. My bones crunched and rattled with each step, and my eyeballs bounced in their sockets. The ground itself began to dance. Gravestones fell over and smashed. The messiah appeared like a parade float overhead. Those who had once waited in expectation of his coming were gone by then, some grown tired and disaffected, but others made into lamp shades.

                                                            &

Deadly new diseases had emerged now that weather operated without regard to the season. Even souls had a kind of leaf blight. The overflow of corpses from funeral homes and cemeteries were stacked on sidewalks. And the dead were all so young. I almost cried out, “I don’t belong here, I don’t!” Special points of interest represented by triangles on tourist maps turned out to actually be just triangles.

                                                            &

When I arrived back home, no one was there, though the radio was playing in the kitchen, tuned to a classical music station, Glenn Gould interviewing Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould. Reminder notes were stuck to walls and doors and tucked in the frames of mirrors. “The weasels are not in the sky” was cryptically written on one. I climbed the stairs, undressed, and fell exhausted into bed. I may have slept or I may have just thought I did, drifting on the treacherous surface of a vast emptiness and everyone everywhere dying by their own hand.

*

Howie Good’s newest book, Frowny Face, a synergistic mix of his prose poetry and handmade collages, is forthcoming from Redhawk Publications.

There Is No Wolf Inside The Dog by Chris Compton

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There Is No Wolf Inside The Dog

There is no wolf inside the dog and
its absence is not felt.
Not even by the pug,
wheeze though it does.

What can it learn from its ancestors?
It has survived where
they could not.

*

Chris Compton is a poet living in Rochester, NY. He is a full-time homemaker and part-time delivery driver.

Two Poems by Laurie Kuntz

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Kansha Sai

That’s Japanese for Thanksgiving,
“The festival of gratitude.”
Here I am in Japan
at the end of November
alone, giving thanks.

It was a poet that said “Alone is a stone.”
Today the stones are shimmering
under a fading fall sun
and to be alone allows the landscape of memory
to stir under this wizened sky.

My son was once afraid of the sky,
he never wanted to look up
thinking he would be swallowed.

Today, I am thankful
he has gotten over that fear.
Thankful for much on this day
when bombs are going off elsewhere.
But there are always bombs going off,
and we carry our own inner grenades
waiting to explode into a sullen sky.

Yet, I remain grateful:

For sons, for stones that shimmer,
for an ebbing autumn,
knowing that alone, I am together
with so many who are like scattered seeds
ripening into buds and waiting to bloom
in all the places I am not.

*

My Son’s Sweatshirt

Father and son come by,
tell me they are going camping.
into woods, bear country, past scorpion rock
to black lakes carpeted with lichen stones visible only by toe-touch,

and I worry about my son’s pearl tipped toes
scraping all things jagged in dark pools having no bottom.

I tell him what to pack for this time with his father,
remind my son that he was named for survival,
I open the drawer where he keeps his warm clothes.

The car disappears into a single lane leading to thinner air,
when I can no longer see the trail of exhaust,
I turn back into the house
and see my son’s sweatshirt—forgotten.

Its rumpled form, deserted by the body of my son,
this gift, I continuously give to his father—
a father who I hope remembers
that in the woods, there are no sonatas to perfect,
and long division is just a maze of Manzanita bush.

I hang up the sweatshirt,
its collar pinned to a hook,
tonight my son will know the cold
and the sound of high mountain wind,
the only whisper tucking him in.

*

Laurie Kuntz has published two poetry collections (The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press and Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press), and three chapbooks (Talking Me Off The Roof, Kelsay Books, Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press, and Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press). Simple Gestures, won the Texas Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, and Women at the Onsen won the Blue Light Press Chapbook Contest. Her 6th poetry book, That Infinite Roar, will be published by Gyroscope Press at the end of 2023. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Prize. Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila Na Gig, and many other literary journals. She currently resides in Florida, where everyday is a political poem waiting to be written. Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Gratitude on Thanksgiving

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Gratitude on Thanksgiving

Thank you to the ONE ART community for being lovely people and for your unwavering support of the journal and each other. A wonderful space has been cultivated together.

Special thanks to those who have donated to support ONE ART.

We look forward to curating exceptional work in 2024.

There is always room for improvement. Let us know what we can do better this coming year.

You can find regular updates from ONE ART on Facebook & Twitter (X).

What can yield more reasons for gratitude in the rearview in 2025?

Don’t be afraid to ask hard questions or suggest ideas that may not end up being feasible. Happy to have the conversation.

Sending good wishes,

Mark Danowsky & Louisa Schnaithmann
Editors
ONE ART

The Perfect Heart by Tere Sievers

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The Perfect Heart

I wait for the daily phone call
from my sister. She reports
from the Houston hospital
where her husband waits
for a new heart, a good heart.
It has been six weeks.

The call comes. They are in
pre-op waiting for the “go”
to move him into surgery,
He is wheeled in. She waits.
The surgeon comes out to report.
He is frowning, tells my sister,
“We checked the donor heart.
It has a defect. We have to abort,
wait for the perfect heart.”

Yesterday’s newspaper had a photo
of a man with his head on the chest of
another man, listening to his beating heart,
listening to the heart of his son, the donor.
Tears streamed down his face.
“That’s my boy.” he said.
His son had a perfect heart.

*

Tere Sievers writes in Long Beach, California and teaches at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at CSULB. She has been published in Pearl, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy. Silver Birch Press and others. Her chapbook, Striking Distance, is available from Arroyo Seco Press.

Home-Cooked Meal by Vitalia Strait

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Home-Cooked Meal

“Come on over; I’ll make you a home-cooked meal,”
But “home-cooked” meals never really exist.
They always come from stiff recipes
Meant to mask the way the home cooks
On evenings when a tired waiter’s holding back
Tears after a day of dealing with humans
Who forgot that they’re one, too.
“Home-cooked” meals don’t tell the story
Of the mother eating the burnt leftovers
While her unaware children feast.

But I can read and follow fixed instructions, too —

I want you to make me a home-cooked meal.
Put your hair into a messy ponytail,
Substitute the wrong ingredients,
Show me the way you never quite mastered
Your grandmother’s signature dish
(The way she never mastered hers).
Forget to turn the timer off,
Use your stained plates.
I’ll take a cramped place at your table;
We’ll savor the failed result.

*

Vitalia Strait is an aspiring writer currently pursuing a BA in English. Born and raised in Alaska, she has always been surrounded by beautiful inspiration, and intends to follow through on that calling as soon as she can find the time. You can find her on Instagram @vitaliastrait and Twitter @vsobaka05.

My Atheist Friend Asks Me to Pray by Bethany Jarmul

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My Atheist Friend Asks Me to Pray
         For the victims of the Lewiston, Maine shootings

By the time
I pray, 18 people
have prayed

their last prayers.

*

Bethany Jarmul is the author of two chapbooks and one poetry collection—This Strange and Wonderful Existence (poetry chapbook, Bottlecap Press, 2023), Take Me Home (nonfiction chapbook, Belle Point Press, 2024), and Lightning is a Mother (poetry collection, ELJ Editions, 2025). Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023, nominated for Best of the Net and Wigleaf Top 50, and published in more than 70 magazines. She lives near Pittsburgh. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul.

Flight by Bonnie Proudfoot

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Flight

It was one of those times I made
it to the bus to the airport
in plenty of time, one of those
flights that felt like it might also
be on time, my love, the gate boarding
going as well as it could, checking
boarding passes, ping, ping, squeezing
a suitcase into an overhead, squeezing
my butt into seat B, all this a regular weight,
but not too heavy, but then the wait
begins, rain delays on the runway,
a sudden feeling that home is further
than ever, as if the present I live through
might not lead to the future I imagine,
the mask digging into my ears,
the air darkening outside, then finally
lifting off, rising into deeper darkness,
the long droning slog through the air,
then landing, glint of rain, dim fog settling
as the highway narrows, the scratch
of windshield wipers interminable,
gauntlet of deer mostly still as statues,
then home, the house dark except
for odd little digital dials, it’s way past
4 am now, even the pets are groggy
and you’re sleeping so soundly, but
your arms open, and for the first time
in two weeks, I release the weight
of being who I imagine that everyone
needs me to be, I lie down beside you,
the air just beginning to glow, doves
starting to call the dawn, and now,
my love, I’m so light I could fly.

*

Bonnie Proudfoot’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net. She writes essays, fiction and poetry. Her novel, Goshen Road, (Swallow Press, 2020) was selected by the Women’s National Book Association for one of its Great Group Reads, Long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway Award, and in 2022 it won the WCONA Book of the Year Award. Her poetry chapbook, Household Gods, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2022. She lives in Athens, Ohio, and in her spare time she creates glass art and plays blues harmonica.

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, Walt Whitman by Amy Small-McKinney

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As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, Walt Whitman

I wake: Place my feet on the blue-gray rug.
Move slowly toward the bathroom, the sink

requiring cleaning. Then notice,
in the mirror, the miracle of aging.

Then notice, in my bed,
the miracle of you, who almost didn’t find me.

The white forest of your chest,
your thighs reminding me of baobab trees

that grow without buckling, that can live
for three-thousand years, can shelter

up to forty people inside the safety
of its trunk. We are old and in love.

And I thank the universe, thank whatever
I can thank, maybe trees, maybe that cloud

shaped like a basket filled with zinnias.
And know there is no end to this poem, no end.

*

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus, 2011. Small-McKinney is the author of two full-length books, Walking Toward Cranes (Glass Lyre Press, The Kithara Book Prize, 2016) and Life is Perfect (BookArts Press, 2013), as well as three chapbooks, including Body of Surrender (2004) and Clear Moon, Frost (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. Her most recent chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, was written during COVID and her husband’s illness and death (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, for example, American Poetry Review, Banyan Review, The Cortland Review, Comstock Review, Connotation Press, Inflectionist Review, Pedestal Magazine, Persimmon Tree, Tiferet, SWWIM, and Vox Populi, and is forthcoming in Verse Daily. Small-McKinney’s poems also appear in several anthologies, most recently, Rumors Secrets & Lies Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and Stained, an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, 2023). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian. Her book reviews have appeared in journals, such as Prairie Schooner and Matter. Small-McKinney has a degree in Clinical Neuropsychology from Drexel University and an MFA in Poetry.

Accompanying My Friend to Chemo by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Accompanying My Friend to Chemo

She shows me how she draws in her missing eyebrows
with the little make-up kit they give out–
two umber arches
over wide, dark, expressive eyes;
then sparkly earrings, some lip gloss,
a soft fleece cap over her bald head,
and bunny socks.

In Oncology, hooked into her port-o-cath,
blue chemicals dripping from a bag,
she asks the nurse how she’s doing,
how’s the situation with her car.

Across the room a radiant woman in a headscarf
sits smiling, surrounded by daughters.
This is what’s happening
all over the world,
bald, beloved women minus their breasts
holding faith together in the chemo den.

And it’s not good literary technique to say
that women’s bodies are battlegrounds
in a war we did not start.
It’s not artful and it doesn’t begin to tell
this intimacy. Here we are, sipping tea,
flipping through People,
letting the hours slip by like slow honey.

*

Alison Luterman has published four previous collections of poetry, most recently In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press,) and Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press.) Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Sun, Rattle, and elsewhere. She writes and teaches in Oakland, California. www.alisonluterman.net

A Fine Appendix by Deborah Bacharach

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A Fine Appendix

One day I looked up and saw
a v of wings over the plains
like a long oboe note and I was
helpless with love.

I want to thank the bonfire sex,
the banjo that is late kitchen evenings
baby asleep in my arms, all heat
and heartbeats visible.

I want to thank the hush
of ancient trees,
the anachronistic artifact
that is the appendix. How strange

I am not a heifer or a pumpkin.
How fine it would be.

*

Deborah Bacharach is the author of two full length poetry collections Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her poems, book reviews and essays have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters and The Writer’s Chronicle among many others. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

I Have Softened My Blows by Lenya Norea Wegener

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I Have Softened My Blows

I always thought of pain as a revolving door.
And I walked through it,
like a sinner walks through the gates of a church.
I thought I had to.
I can proudly say, however, I pushed the door hard enough
and it came off its hinges.
I also think I’m past the metaphors.
I am healing
and I am trying not to be sorry about that.
The flakes of my skin became scales.
I’m changing for the better, I think, and I stopped being angry about it
when I realised that everyone is running from something.
There are a thousand ways to return home.
I’m glad I chose this one.

*

Lenya Norea Wegener is an emerging 18-year-old poet from Germany. In a perfect world, she would spend the entire day in a cabin in the woods writing and reading everything from poetry to nonfiction. But, alas, she has to get her high school diploma first.

My fingers itch for Bach, so I chop vegetables instead by Sarah Daly

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My fingers itch for Bach, so I chop vegetables instead

The onions sting my eyes, and the potatoes strain my wrist.
But the pain fills the hours, in this chrome kitchen and sterile apartment.

I do not mind being secondary to squash and legal briefs,
and wives wrapped in Chanel and ermine.

This, I do not mind, for I never wanted to be them.
I only want to be here, in the days I have remaining.

So I cannot be distracted by Bach, for once I start, I cannot stop.
In every minute, every second I have left, I wait for him.

*

Sarah Daly is an American writer whose fiction, poetry, and drama have appeared in fourteen literary journals including The Olivetree Review, Blue Lake Review, Fixator Press, and Carmina Magazine.

torn by Eva Eliav

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torn

like skin from skin
purpose
tears away

who knew it was
detachable so

fragile

*

Eva Eliav studied English Literature at The University of Toronto and The University of Tel Aviv. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Eve (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2019) and One Summer Day (Kelsay Books, 2021). Her poetry and flash fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Room, Emrys Journal, Ilanot Review, Flashquake, The Apple Valley Review, Horizon Review, Variant Lit, Luna Station Quarterly, Fairy Tale Magazine, Stand, Constellations, Minyan, Fictive Dream, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Rogue Agent, Thimble, The Lake Magazine, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, and Dust

The Long Sorrow by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Long Sorrow

The unmoving clouds hang empty in the pale skies.
The yawning stilled branches of trees
lost their leaves too soon,
waving like a person surrendering
with hands becoming white flags.
It is already way too soon.
The clock groans at each passing.
The world departs in fits and starts, unraveling
life’s stitching. God made a thumbprint lake
and now, the water dwindles, gasping for breath.
Is it too much too say
we have spoiled and rotted this earth?
Voices grind like ax blades on a sharpening tool.
Ask the turkey buzzards circling.
Ask the old woman sobbing in the kitchen,
worrying her floors to the bone.
Ask the clouds rung dry. No wind for miles.
A great disturbance looms
with the giant scolding finger.
A desperate man cranks up a bucket from a well,
and inside floats empty excuses.
The trees are dying,
their branches are fingers ripping the sky open
hoping to find water.
The crazed birds do not know where to land,
where it might be safe, realizing,
maybe, all the safe places are decimated.
Tell the river trying to run away, not to flee.
Tell the girl with parched, cracked lips.
Tell the boy plowing beyond hope.
Tell the ships where all the water went.
How can I find solace in this sight,
this failure brought upon us
by many uncaring hands?
Hands with sawdust from trying to repair,
throw penny nails into the sky.
Today, the soil turns loosely from my hands,
grain of dust. I heard its song of sadness.
This song is the long sorrow
of animals lurking towards extinction.
How can I find solace in this sight?
The eyes of owls observe and inquire.
Where do I begin to repair when I am so small?
Problems shadow the land
like crows eating plants until nothing remains.
Many hands carry the weight of excuses.
No one can lift them, nor ignore them,
nor resolve them. Small steps across
the floor never covers much ground.
Each shifting piece of dirt turning the dust
shouts for me to do whatever I can.
Too much shouting,
and the simple voice cannot be heard.
Shoes leave us behind.
Soldiers salute flags with no purpose,
although leaders promise changes.
Those promises are as numerous
and as useless as the soil turning to dust.
A monstrous glow nearing
cannot be normal. When I say this,
My hands turn into dust.
I wish that was not true,
but my wishes are dust, too.
The ground knows my wishes
will not repair the damages of disrepair.
In my heart, a sad violin
forgets music. Its strings are strangled.
A dry throat cannot sing.
A bird without music flies into my face.
It writes questions on my face.
My face without reason.
My face with a thousand useless pacing.
My mouth full of dust when I try to speak.
Tell the abandoned why they are forgotten.
I can’t.
Dear monster, someone has fed you.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is an editor of Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Harvest Time” (Deerbrook Editions, 2021); “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022); “Not Only the Extraordinary are Exiting the Dream World (Flowstone Press, 2022); “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Press, 2023); and “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023).

Three Poems by Abby Caplin

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EXIGENCIES

A neighbor’s weighty package dropped
at the curb, their frantic call for help
to push it up their steps, two weeks

of back pain, a parking ticket
at the chiropractor’s office.
I’m restless. All around me graying trees

keep toppling, the acrid scent of a struck
match forgotten in the aftermath
of too much rain, turning mountain

roads dizzying, precarious.
Like the Flecha Roja bus I once took
from Mexico City to Cuernavaca,

catching other people’s baskets of melons
and chickens from sliding in the aisles.
I was hungry and headachy,

until a young woman, dressed in a huipil
she’d woven herself on a backstrap loom,
pulled a tortilla from a placket

in her skirt, kept warm and soft
from body heat, fresh maize and lime
mingling on my tongue.

I had never felt so alive. But something
is always trying to upend me—the contact lens
I finally found when it crunched under my shoe,

my wallet missing after a tussle on the subway,
the memory of understanding too late
that the woman my friends and I had observed,

laughing with her handsome date
at the restaurant table, had fallen asleep,
chin on her chest, perhaps too many

margaritas, the man gently removing
her gold earrings, poking through her purse,
vanishing as the waiter brought the check.

*

INTERMISSION
         for my daughter

I.

She walks out of the main feature and buys a car,
insurance, a rooftop suitcase, a camera, and drives herself
to the moon, sinks her tires into Swiss cheese, then,

climbing higher, captures the Continental Divide
from outer space.
She leaves a trail of moon tracks, bread crumbs

for future travelers, eating the Milky Way
as she drives through the night, stowaway stars
clinging to the fabric ceiling of her Subaru.

II.

After an incident involving bear spray and luggage,
she’s on the road again, stops to watch buffalos
seated in a circle and listening to a bald eagle

speculating from the top
of a cell tower. She paints lavender into the sunset
and patches of snow.

III.

At breakfast, sipping oolong from a mug,
she pulls a canopy of rain clouds
around her shoulders, spoons from a bowl

of mountaintop icing. Opens her arms wide
to let the gusts carry her, past the mouth
of a canyon, cascading moss, cotton-puffed

mountain goats singing from the cliffs,
and up to the sun pearling on a high lake,
where she drifts…

*

ODE TO A CORDLESS LIGHTWEIGHT STICK VACUUM CLEANER
         after Thomas Lux

Your lone plastic limb, the wet
neon red of Lux’s maraschino cherries,
stands tall in a storage closet near lightbulbs

and wine bottles. I connect leg
to torso, inspect your innards
through thick, clear polymer,

watch fascinated as tufts of hair,
fur, dead insects, crumbs, claw tips,
and candy

wrappers whip and spin in hot frenzy.
Your headlight highlights
debris strewn across the dining room

floor, like those frantic couples leaving
a trail of hastily discarded clothing.
Sometimes my husband finds me

stalking you in the dark, stroking the long line
of your physique, attracted to the growing
hairball circling inside you like cotton candy.

You are my amusement toy, a lady’s helper,
replacing the big lug that gave me
backaches and choked on his own cord,

and when you tire, I gently unsnap
your lid, tip your soft pellet into the trash,
wait in anticipation as you recharge…

*

Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Catamaran, The MacGuffin, Midwest Quarterly, Moon City Review, Pennsylvania English, Ponder Review, Salt Hill, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Southampton Review, Tikkun, and elsewhere. Among her awards, she has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award, a semi-finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award, and a nominee for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of A Doctor Only Pretends: poems about illness, death, and in-between (2022). Abby is a physician in San Francisco, California.

Three Poems by Kate Young Wilder

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Second Coming

As a girl, I worried
that any minute it could happen.
That’s what all the Baptist songs said:
Morning or noon or night.
Coming again. Coming again.
Sunday after Sunday we sang it.

But what if it happened while I was at school?
Would I have time to get from my desk in Miss Leavitt’s class
all the way up to my older brother on the third floor?
And what about our family?
My father, so often in the hospital,
and our baby brother, always sleeping:
How would they know what to do?

I imagined the crowds ascending to heaven—
I had seen the lovely renditions of how it will be:
Watery colors of heavenly skies
with golden beams of sunlight reaching for me.
I had always imagined the beams
a kind of holy escalator—
and escalators scare me.

There would be so many of us—
and I know what a crowd can do:
a six-year-old girl could be swallowed up, like that!
And what good are streets paved in gold
if you don’t have your mother?

Please, God, I used to pray,
don’t let it happen. It’s good here:

The smell of my dad’s worn shirt,
my mother’s voice harmonizing country songs
with him after supper.
We are moving soon to an old farm they just bought
and there is this barn and a cold brook and a warm pond.

My father says he’s going to fill that barn with animals.
And my mother says we can swim in the pond
if we don’t mind the muck.
We don’t mind at all. And God,
I love to swim.

*

The Pull

My father at the kitchen table:
his zippo lighter disassembled
before him.

A yellow and blue can of Ronsonol
lighter fluid flipped open.
And then the oily scent
as he soaks the felt pad
and pushes it back into place.
His large hands pince
the tiny brown flint, small as rice.

And all the pieces,
he fits back together,
slides into the outer case.
That familiar click of its hinge:
the sound of my childhood.

He scrapes his thumb
over the flint wheel
and it works on just one try.
Not the empty click, click,
click before.

The lighter fluid,
spilled on the case, flames
(too near the cuff
of his flannel shirt I warn him!)
but he tilts his hand,
and rolls his wrist,
burning off the oil
until the metal gleams,
silver and clean,
and all that remains
is the single necessary flame.

He grins at me
and I at him.
Or maybe his grin is not for me, at all,
but for his love
of this liturgy of lighters,
and the awaiting thrill
of the pull
of his next cigarette.

*

What One Drink Knows

Just one drink knows
it’s good to let those shoulders loosen.
Look, one drink isn’t hurting anybody.

And a few drinks know
everything is worth worrying about,
at least somewhat, at three o’clock in the morning.

A few drinks more
know that nobody should have to feel this bad;
and nobody appreciates all you do.
And that woman’s a bitch.
I mean, what the hell?

And I’ll tell you what they oughta do in the Middle East…
And I’ll tell you a story you oughta write…

But here’s the truth: cold and clear as an ice cube.
Many drinks—many, many drinks over many years—
they don’t know jack. They don’t know shit.
Never have. Never will.

*

Kate Young Wilder is a writer, artist, workshop leader, and spiritual director. She lives on a large pond in New Hampshire surrounded by old pines and the occasional fox and bear. She is the author of The House Where The Hardest Things Happened. (Doubleday, 2001).

Years Ago, in Morocco by Heidi Seaborn

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Years Ago, in Morocco
           ~for my daughter

We’ll always have Casablanca I thought on the train from Marrakech
even as my girl became a pocket turned out—emptying

the trinkets from the bazaar, the snake charmer in the plaza,
with the couscous and zaalouk—her fever blazing.

So that we missed the Argan trees—the feast of goats
in their branches. The surprise of hoof and horn amongst leaves.

We’re tree climbers, my burning girl and me.
The desire to disappear up into apple or avocado —

to see distance, seek the danger of gravity and air.
How often I look for myself in my daughter—

tangle of hair and lit green eyes—
as she struggles to climb higher, the limbs thinning, beyond me.

Only the goat can clamber up into the thorny Argan,
its branches barely bending as a dozen goats perch in each tree.

When a daughter cleaves from her mother, the roots remain—
like the Argan roots sleeping deep beneath Moroccan heat.

I wait years in the tree’s minimal shade
for my daughter to shimmy back down.

Standing eye to eye, I wonder if I know her, this remarkable goat.
As if we had both burned in the flame of her fever

in that hotel bed we shared in Casablanca, to return
years later blooming anew like an orchard after fire.

*

Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of the 2022 The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She is the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Blackbird, Brevity, Copper Nickel, diode, Financial Times of London, Penn Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com

Luthier by Rikki Santer

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Luthier

         For the last two decades, Israeli Amnon Weinstein
         has been locating and restoring violins that were
         played by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust.

Of and not of the habit of terror. Each violin
a door to the many. The many. The barbed

accounts, these unsung bodies, in bereft immensity,
surrendered to a past that won’t take them back.

In his workshop, the luthier planes the faces
of those hurled from cattle cars, buried under poppies,

human ashes still lingering in their inner chambers.
Each fragile restoration denounces the ribcage

of those gunmetal skies. Yahrzeit candles nest in pine
trees of Ponary, line the train tracks of Auschwitz, Sobibor,

Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt. In his workshop, he
resuscitates peg boxes, fingerboards, weary scrolls. Mother

of pearl inlays are revived for their Stars of David. Each holy
instrument a testimony, their strings learn to quiver again

with vowels that sing from collar bones of legacy for ghosts
of six million mouths that once ached for the ear of God.

*

Rikki Santer’s poetry has received many honors including several Pushcart and Ohioana book award nominations, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2023 she was designated as Ohio Poet of the Year. Her twelfth poetry collection, Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me, is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Please contact her through her website, rikkisanter.com.

Milkweed Pod by Lara Payne

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Milkweed Pod

Sharp billed husk, unopened. Winter cracked,
wind wheeled. Such possibility, waiting. Carried miles
or stuffed into the lifejackets of soldiers. Perhaps

even worn by my grandfather, fighting in the Pacific.
Milkweed pods open to a silky fluff. Twenty pounds of floss
to float one man. Insulation. Insect born.

Such weightlessness may have saved him, once, on the way
from ship to shore. He did not breathe a word. Silent return. If
every letter he wrote to my grandmother held two truths

and a lie, to calm and distract the military censors, how
will we find the truth? Husked, sharp billed
nestled gently in the palm, a shape he didn’t yet know

to desire: that split. All of his possible progeny.
He carried parachute silk home for her, to sew
into her wedding gown. Such economy, such abundance

coming from his duffle bag. Unending as a magic trick
yards spilling silk into her hands, both of them laughing.
Unrationed laughter, an almost mania of relief.

Radiation from that shore in Japan, a pinprick
in his brain. Waiting.

*

Lara Payne lives in Maryland. Once an archeologist, she now teaches writing at the college level, to veterans, and to small children. Her poem “Corn Stand, 10 ears for two dollars” was a winner in the Moving Words Competition. and was placed on buses in Arlington, VA. Recent poems have appeared in the Beltway Poetry Quarterly and on SWWIM Daily.

Tongues by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Tongues

I gouged my tongue
on the cruel edge of a carrot.
Yes, it bled.

I did not swallow the fly
that drowned in my coffee,
though it rested on my tongue
until I realized it was not a crumb,
but a creature, dead.

My nose did not break
when I dropped my phone
onto its bridge while reading
news from the war zone
in my safe, but troubled, bed.

Who could find sleep
while naming the dead?

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Threnody, from Moon Tide Press. Earlier books include Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. She is a monthly contributing writer to the on-line journal Verse-Virtual. Work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Braided Way, Chiron Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, ONE ART, and numerous anthologies. Poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and on Lyric Life. She writes and leads private workshops in Southern California, where she makes her home, and during residencies at Write On Door County. Learn more at donnahilbert.com