Author: ONE ART

Feast by Jane Edna Mohler

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Feast

I love the fat of summer, flabby
green weeks when weeds lap

over the vague rims of back
roads, just as batter overtakes

a griddle. Poplar leaves wave
wide as cows’ tongues slurping

syrup-thick air. Here, summer spits
when it talks, gulps cold milk

and wipes a hand across its mouth.
I want to stuff myself full

with warm fields, hills tender
and round as yeast rolls bathed

in butter. Oh to scoop the ooze
of June’s soft eggs, consume

this season, lick its juices, chew
salty bacon days.

*

Jane Edna Mohler is a Bucks County Poet Laureate Emeritus (Pennsylvania). She won second place in the 2023 Crossroads Contest. Recent publications include Gargoyle, River Heron Review, and New Verse News. Her collection Broken Umbrellas was published by Kelsay. She is the Poetry Editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. www.janeednamohler.com

Two Poems by Ellen Rowland

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Cake

A stupid argument and I take it out
on the eggshells, seize them
in the palm of my hand and crush,
tearing the delicate inner lining.
Take it out on the baking chocolate
still in its wrapper. The recipe calls
for finely chopped but I slam the bar instead
again and again against the edge
of the counter. Crush the beaters into
the side of the bowl and whip, whip
a well of furious flour. Rip the baking paper
across the metal teeth edge and begin
the slow rise of regret, begin to fear
the cake will be infused with my ire–
yolks curdled, sugar grained, butter gone bad.
Like the daggered ice crystals that form when
still in water state, are told they are ugly and hated,
worthless and unloved, I worry I have sullied
the crumb, bittered the icing, muddied each layer.
So, before I take the first bite, I say, I’m sorry.
Forgive me. I love you. Both our mouths are full.
It is so, so good.

*

Endangered Pleasure
(after James Crews)

Add this to my list of small ecstasies:
the way honey creams together
with butter on freshly baked bread,
the innocence of its warm alchemy
as churn, as rise, as breaking down
of simple sugar. I swear, I can taste
the tantra of the hive, the tending to
of queen by drone, the dripping cone,
workers’ legs impossibly laden with
thick pollen, deposited and darned.
This, from the buttercups and purslanes
most would have condemned to the curb
as bothersome weed. This from the common
dandelions we left to riot just for the bees.
An entire patch of golden suns now radiating
as endangered pleasure on my tongue.

*

Ellen Rowland is the author of two collections of haiku/senryu, Light, Come Gather Me and Blue Seasons, as well as the book Everything I Thought I Knew, essays on living, learning and parenting outside the status quo. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and in several poetry anthologies, most recently The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy and Hope is a Group Project. Her debut collection of full-length poems, No Small Thing, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2023. She lives off the grid with her family on an island in Greece. Connect with her on Instagram and Facebook.

Betrayal by Valerie Bacharach

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Betrayal

After strokes corroded synapses, sent neurons flaring into nothingness.
After her body’s right side became unwilling.

Once, my mother clothed herself in ruby and obsidian,
harnessed the spinning world, drank scotch in a heavy glass.

After existing in assisted living, refusing to dress, to eat,
to sleep in the hospital bed, her own bed too big, too high off the ground.

Once, my mother begged me not to hate her, confessed
affairs with married men, her loneliness a halo.

After language decamped until only no remained.
Her frenetic heart, her stuttering lungs pinned me to earth.

Once, in the week before she died, my mother said
dying isn’t like it is in the movies.

Riddle: Who can laugh and cry at exactly the same time?
A daughter.

*

Valerie Bacharach’s writing has appeared or will appear in: Vox Populi, The Blue Mountain Review, EcoTheo Review, Minyon Magazine, One Art, The Ilanot Review, and Poetica. Her chapbook After/Life will be published by Finishing Line Press. Her book Ghost Recipe will be published by Broadstone Books.

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

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  1. Roseanne Freed – I Mention the Unmentionable In the Yoga Class
  2. Karen Paul Holmes – Two Poems
  3. Betsy Mars – A Fawn Has No Scent
  4. David Lee Garrison – Aloha
  5. Brent Martin – Three Poems
  6. Gail Thomas – Forgiveness, I am still working on it
  7. Robbi Nester – In the August of my eighth year, I started a business.
  8. Julie Pratt – Reclamation
  9. Alison Luterman – My Vibrato
  10.  Jennifer Garfield – Five Poems

Two Poems by Heather Truett

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Honey Stung

Time heals all wounds, but you gave her
the whole damn flu. So sick, so sad, so that girl
with the wailing scream. All her sweet dreams
drip with bees, and it doesn’t make a difference
if she’s naked, she’s got
old pandemics, and new
vaccines. Shattered rules and chiffon
wrinkles in her open and closed case
of the Mondays, the sundaes, the HIPAA
violations. A local doctor shoots
her with target radiation, all that money
for nothing and chips for free means
she’s just a virgin, touched

for the thirty-first time. She’s a Betsy,
she’s a bleeder, she’s broke
in a dam on a shame-damp day, trying like hell
to weave her bambi braid. Hello
millennium, she took her medicine,
a piece of your wrong connection. You’ll tune
in to find the light, spin the dial, gild the guide
to your guilty god, and bristle brush
away her pain through strands
of T-cells, gliding gold plaited placebos, and honey
stings. Gotta keep this girl

on a real short leash or she will ride
the wind on another planet, hop a plane and ask
what the plan is. She’s sick, she’s dying,
and if you’re too busy try try trying to make
her stay, she’ll slice those strands and fly
away, severed connection in the night.

She asks the bartender how
she might give you the slip, he curls
his lip and says, there’s a window
in that bathroom on the right.

*

Black Sabbath Hymn for My Brother

Shattered glass, yellow lines, you drank
from the chalice. I can’t drive
without seeing your absence.
The sun lifted you with her rising, swept
her skirt across your eyes and gave thanks
for broken body, spilled blood. The sky
and I accept Eucharist this morning, a fender
for a crucifix, red racing stripes and a crown
of shards amid soft brown hair. You were
an iron man, smelted in fire, baptized
in the creek water of our front yard. How did
you become a child of the grave, messiah
on a gravel throne? Disciples gather a fallen
feast, last supper on the asphalt, a red
stop light to wash your feet. Our family’s
Fraction Rite is made with empty
whiskey bottles and the wafting burn
of a cigarette still smoking in your hand.

*

Heather Truett holds an MFA from the University of Memphis and is a Ph.D. candidate at FSU. Her debut novel, KISS AND REPEAT, was released from Macmillan in 2021. She has work in Thimble, Hunger Mountain, Sweet, Whale Road Review, Jabberwock, and others. Heather serves on staff for Beaver Magazine and is an editor emeritus for The Pinch. Find out more at www.heathertruett.com.

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Susan Cossette

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Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
-after Casper David Friedrich

I climb to jagged crags
overlooking churning cauldrons
of swirling green mist and vague mountains
dotted with nameless pines.

I have ascended,
planted my splintered wooden cane
into each moist mossy crevice.

I have ascended,
at times on the backs of others,
a guilty, selfish insurgent.

You only see my worn green coat from behind,
petulant blonde curls
blown by indifferent winds.

My heart facing outward
is the center of this universe,
searching for signs of the divine.

*

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.

Of Course the World Still Spins by Hillary Nguyen

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Of Course the World Still Spins

But grief will latch onto bone once
Crossing the threshold one last time
These heavy wooden doors citadel
Threshold fortress protectors of home
How many sobs kisses deep belly laughs
Settled into these textured walls
The dust of dead skin in this grout
And windowsills know more
Of your memories than your skin
That renews itself every blind
Month or two this home has
You in its every nook– How
Could you leave like this?

*

Hillary Nguyen (she/her) is Vietnamese-American writer from the Bay Area who enjoys experimenting with new creative mediums (such as poetry, photography, and fiber arts), and exploring eclectic places. She creates spoken word as well as written poetry, and her work has been featured in LL Anthology: Circles, Hot Pot Magazine, and erato magazine.

Two Poems by Merna Dyer Skinner

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DAREDEVILS

We once held beads of mercury in our palms,
rolled them around our bowls of skin and bone,
ignorant of the poison at hand. I stored mine
in a wooden box on my bedroom shelf. No warning
on the vial sent from Michigan’s Farm Bureau—
one of three samples—the second, a tapeworm
floating in fluid, the third, I’ve forgotten.
That same summer, I climbed to the roof
of a picnic pavilion and jumped—unaware
of earth’s mass, my mass, and force.
No adults witnessed my leap—when my parents asked,
as the doctor wrapped my swelling ankle,
I couldn’t explain why I thought I might land softly,
or confidently assumed I could fly.

*

WHILE VIEWING THE BLACK MARBLE CLOCK

It’s not how Cézanne’s bright white linen upstages
the ebony clock without hands,
nor how the porcelain saucer and cup teeter
on the table’s edge, but how the ruby-lipped conch
might snarl, might grab my fingers
were I to reach in—

a Florida day—I’m standing in our skiff,
anchored in the shallows off Big Pine Island, sea
mirror-smooth, sky so bright my stinging eyes
squint. In that crystal water, my goggled sons snorkel.
My laughing mother calls to me—
Put down the camera. Jump in.

Warm water engulfs, softly
my foot lands on the sandy seafloor—
Barely a second passes before the blow.
Heavy and hot as gunshot—
two punctures, cut deep into my swim fin,
burning venom pulses up my thigh.

Blood-ribbons swirl to the surface,
wrap themselves around my wrists.
I roll onto my back, raise my foot skyward—
Overhead, a seagull floats on timeless air.
From beneath the seabed (my sons witness)
a stingray unburies its massive black wings.

*

Merna Dyer Skinner (she / her) is a poet, photographer, and communications consultant living in Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in: The Baltimore Review, Rust + Moth, Lily Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, Cirque, Sulphur Surrealist Jungle (Featured Poet), among other journals, and three anthologies. Her chapbook, A Brief History of Two Aprons, was published by Finishing Line Press. Merna holds an MA in Communication Studies from Emerson College. She’s lived in six U.S. states, and traveled to six continents.

GETTING OUT by Hershel Burgh

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GETTING OUT

June night air, a blanket, embracing.
Soft. Steady. The asphalt ugly to those
who refuse to paint a parking lot, layers
of cream, slate gray, blue, spiderweb cracks,
rivers on a map. Past ten now, the dog park
bare as the grass in the center of the square,
dusty residue of daily paws and beside,
there’s that tree you’re parked under,
and me coming towards you through
the perfect openness of the dark

*

Hershel Burgh is a queer, Jewish trans man based out of Northwest Arkansas. He lives with his partner in a one bedroom apartment that has no drawers and one cat. His poetry has previously appeared in Eighteen Seventy.

Two Poems by KG Newman

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Hot Rods

When the dragsters crash and burst into flames
with our love’s bad juju inside
the orange in the night sky reveals
the crinkled map where our past selves
are hidden. This is the next
testament: the footwork we’ve been working on

to jump with hope from the grandstand
down into the smoke. My love, there is no crater
like a crater of the soul. Perhaps the asphalt
can melt itself. Perhaps this cold
will pass. Perhaps the uphill shutdown
is not our harp after all.

*

My Time Dilation

I believed if I sweat, I could slow
the spin of the earth.

I figured the more hard-mowing,
the more moments of awareness,

and I thought an increase in jogs
through thinned parking lots

would preserve the mental movies
of my son learning to crawl.

I stacked my calendar. Had
another kid. Switched beer

for bench press and early-morning
pink incline hikes, where I

feared beads drying on
my temples when stopping

for drinks of water. With each
up-and-down I’d become

a little bit younger. I’d pause
the trajectory of the sun

to write down the exact
movements of a rabbit.

Use the dampness of my shirt
to delay my desiccation.

Collect my last sweat in a vial
to break later in my palm,

when I’m feeling off and like
a still, forgetful mortal.

*

KG Newman is a sportswriter who covers the Broncos and Rockies for The Denver Post. His first four collections of poems are available on Amazon and he has been published in scores of literary journals worldwide. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He is the poetry editor of Hidden Peak Press and he lives in Hidden Village, Colorado, with his wife and three kids.

Reserved by Hayley Mitchell Haugen

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Reserved

I confess I am suspicious of this fresh happiness,
worrying, perhaps, about depression sneaking

back in, stealing what is shining, like I should know
better than to flash all this brightness around.

When I retire for afternoon naps, more out of habit
now than a place to lay my sadness, I can’t nod off

in all that light, my new sheer draperies singing
the day. Might not my cheerfulness attract

some evil eye? Might not disaster follow
my good fortune? My neighbor quipped,

I know you’re not pregnant, but you’re glowing.
Soon after, he left his wife––I can’t help feeling

a little responsible. Now, when friends ask,
Are you happy, I save some of that sunshine

in reserve. I nod and smile, try to glow a little less,
say, yes, I’m good, I’m really doing okay now.

*

Hayley Mitchell Haugen is a Professor of English at Ohio University Southern. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag (2018) is her first full-length poetry collection, and her chapbook, What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To is from Finishing Line Press (2016). Her latest chapbook, The Blue Wife Poems, is from Kelsay Books (2022). She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Four Poems by Linda Laderman

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My Mother Holds Her Grief

like a collection of precious stones in a plum pouch. I watch her untie its silk strings & spread the stones across her satin sheets. She separates them by color & holds a cerulean blue with faceted edges up to the light. She rubs it over her body & lingers on her thigh, then takes a red thread & wraps it around. She hangs it from her neck, an amulet to hold her grief. She teaches me to hold her grief too, says it’s as easy as making a bed. Hold it there, fold it here, tuck the corners under. Always tuck the corners under. I sit beside her bed. She gives me a turquoise, cool and smooth. When she turns away, I rub it on my thigh & tuck it under the corner.

*

I should have left you first

but I waited until autumn’s red birds scattered
their seeds, giving way to a bitter winter, expected,

but holding out for a thaw. I waited for the peony,
pale pink, to emerge from the mound of dirt

near our doorstep, dependable, a return to life.
I waited for the blood moon to reveal itself, hopeful

it could be seen through earth’s hazy gaze—
I waited for spring’s rainy season to clear,

though June, being unseasonably stingy,
refused to cede a day without a downpour.

on summer’s cusp, I woke from a half sleep,
my skin drenched in knowing. still, my eyes

stayed shut, until the blue-black night found me.
I waited until the days stretched, the sun set late,

temperatures rose, and the duck in the Hosta
vanished, leaving a gap strewn with leaves and grass,

her batch of eggs hatched and ready to fly. I waited
until the children left, filled with illusions of time,

as if life was forever—a chance to do what I couldn’t.
I waited for your infatuations to wane, but they didn’t.

I waited for the first freeze, then blew my breath
into the icy vapor, kissing winter’s frosted air.

thinking, if I waited long enough, my haunted dreams
would disappear. and you did.

*

When We Dance

We dance on the hardwood floor. His white hair lays
        bare my memories. The nights that lasted until morning.

The sound of Detroit Jazz pushes us. Belgrave, Franklin, Carter.
        I turn it up. I’m wound. Our arms zig and zag, two old saws.

I hip bump him, snap my fingers. He lets out a surprised
        laugh and twists me around our kitchen. I let him do it.

We twirl. His face is red, shy, like a boy. I want to seduce him,
        but I don’t know. I’ve gotten used to not having.

My breath is hard. My hands sweat. I wonder if he took a Viagra.
        I take his arm. Purple blotches stain his skin. Mottled by time.

In the morning, I ask if he remembers when each day took its time.
        How we craved a chance to hear the silence.

Now, I store time in a stone. I step over its power to fool.
        When I feel regret, I sink into a place with no light.

*

Fine China

I worry that my last poem will be my last poem. Let’s talk about quatrains. I create a series of prompts, a list of lines. I’m exhausted from nothing. I list nothings. Nothing good can come from this. Can all this be for nothing? She has nothing on you, You know nothing about me. Only lines stacked, like my fine china, packed away, forgotten as the drop of dried cranberry stuck under the rim. I take the place settings out of the basement cabinet, sit on the cold concrete floor, and remove the felt separators. Nothing. I focus on the memories the dishes hold. An ekphrastic after the matching teapot? Nothing. Empty, like the dishes. I bring two place settings upstairs to soak. I shop for a roasting chicken, red potatoes, baby carrots, and a brown sugar pecan pie. If I can’t write, I’ll fill the damn plates.

*

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

Good Girls by Christina Kallery

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Good Girls

At 13, a friend and I crammed
into a hotel lobby phone booth
to call the boys we liked then hang
up when they said hello.

It was the year we lived by the ocean,
my stepfather’s welding gigs gone
from the dying iron mines
to a New England freighter’s hull.

Shrieking laughter, lips slick
with bubble gum gloss,
sucking in our cheeks to pout
like the MTV models sprawling
on yachts with Simon LeBon.
Then came the knock.

A 50-something man (at least)
outside the smudged glass gazing in
with seaglass eyes beneath the stiffened
brassy waves of his toupee.
A shark-toothed grin.

Are you good girls? he asked.
We smiled because we had to
smile, then saw the stack of bills
he fanned out like a pervert’s poker hand.

I’ll be in the bar he winked
and turned away. The knowing
crashing in his wake, a cold
black tide that swallowed all
the moment’s innocence
and spat us on a littered shore.

Our reflection in the sliding door
mirrored back our strip
mall haircuts, smeared mascara,
knock-off jeans. The shame,
as if our budding bodies
spilled a secret, something
men like him could buy and cast
aside—or worse.

By summer, I would never
see that town or friend again,
as seaside vistas faded back
to Midwest hills over the 12-hour drive.
But it took me years to learn that being bad
is how you stay alive.

*

Christina Kallery is the author of Adult Night at Skate World, now in its second edition from Dzanc Books. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Failbetter, The Collagist, Gargoyle, and Mudlark, among other publications, and has been included in several anthologies, including Best of the Web and Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. She has served as submissions editor for Absinthe: A Journal of World Literature in Translation and poetry editor for Failbetter. She grew up near the woods in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula before living in the Detroit area and then New York City. She currently resides in Ann Arbor, where she co-hosts a paranormal podcast called Shadowland.

Microcosm by Katy Luxem

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Microcosm

Once, the night moved around us,
rocking chair and eye contact,
a baby moon orbiting my solar plexus.
The days unspooled like crises, like
songs, spilled Cheerios, astonishment.
One moment my baby tied her shoes alone,
she told a truly funny joke, ate arugula
unprompted. Her teeth are all adult, straight
below her mascara-rimmed eyes.
They could be stars now, she is
golden and electric, unfaded jeans.
Her light got into everything.

*

Katy Luxem is a graduate of the University of Washington and has a master’s from the University of Utah. Her work has appeared in Rattle, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, SWWIM Every Day, Poetry Online, and others. She is the author of Until It Is True (Kelsay Books).

A BELATED THANK YOU TO MISS JOANNE MARTINS OF CATHEDRAL SQUARE PUBLISHING COMPANY IN MILWAUKEE WISCONSIN, CIRCA 1971. by Andrea Potos

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A BELATED THANK YOU TO MISS JOANNE MARTINS OF CATHEDRAL SQUARE PUBLISHING COMPANY IN MILWAUKEE WISCONSIN, CIRCA 1971.

You must have guessed how, at 11-years-old, I craved
to be Jo March, scribbling in my garret,
mice scuffling under the floorboards, a heap of apple cores
beside me while rain battered the windowpanes.
By hand I wrote my 103 page novel modeled
not secretly enough after Little Women,
and I mailed it off to you.
Bless you Miss Martin for writing me back
three weeks later, for your neatly typed
bullet points of advice: Keep this manuscript
in a safe place, every month re-read, you’ll be surprised
at the improvements you can make.
Read as much as you can, get a library card.
When you describe an object or person, pretend
you are talking to someone who is blind.
Save your money and invest in a typewriter–a must!
Or ask your parents for one for Christmas.
When you tell your story, write as if
you are talking to a friend, the way you would talk
about something that happened at school.
A writer must always remember
his best friend is the reader. Please do not be
discouraged at receiving your first rejection.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several full-length collections of poems, most recently Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press), Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books), and Mothershell (Kelsay Books). Her poems appear widely online and in print, most recently in Potomac Review, Braided Way, Poem, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.

Two Kinds of Silence by Martin Willitts Jr

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Two Kinds of Silence

My grandfather never spoke much —
he let his work speak for himself,
a part of the sacred silence,

whereas, my father could hardly hear,
and I wondered if this was the other part of silence.

I learned how to bend horseshoes from grandfather,
yet I never knew if my father could hear me.
I found myself in silence’s intersection,
like wheat tips in wind or lips moving without words.

Silence was the wrens swooping like the gate swinging;
cows moving their soft bodies into the far fields.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is a retired librarian. He 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).

Sentences 294-300 by Scott Ferry

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Sentences 294-300
294. It is rare when the house is quiet at night and both my wife and I are still awake.
295. We debrief the week’s harrowing escapes; we also recline in a ripe quiet.
296. When we are in bed I reach for her hand; and if she asks, I rub her back.
297. I comb my fingers through her hair and scratch her scalp; if we are still awake.
298. Soon she is still and the breathing has burrowed into a narrow cave.
299. Soon the moss covers over our bodies and our lights swing into the dark together.
300. My hand on her leg, our voices sweep across a lake of marrow.

*

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His latest book, each imaginary arrow, is now available from Impspired Press. More of his work can be found @ ferrypoetry.com.

Three Poems by CL Bledsoe

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Dirty Sink

A dirty sink with a flower-print background.
This is where I rinse off my thoughts
and prayers. A dog no one will pet.
Better a diamond with a flaw than
a Republican official. A saint is one
who knows mankind but loves us anyway.
There are many vacancies but few
applicants. Mostly, everyone wants
to work but they want to be able
to eat more. It’s shocking that you don’t
realize that. There are two kinds
of people: those who do the work
and those with good credit scores.
I would like to love myself, but I’m not
my type. You have to turn the faucet
on before the water starts to flow.

*

I Can Rise from the Ashes Like a Phoenix Only So Many Times.

I can no longer hop into your bed
without stretching and a hard drink
first. I’ve learned my lesson about you
and your daydream version of yourself
that exists nowhere outside of your
mind and a police report. I can see
the rivets in your concern. The seams
stretched to breaking. This is how
you care for the world; with a smirk
and nary a second thought for how
the flames will ruin the ceiling frescos.
I’ve listened to all of your dreams
and categorized them into wish fulfillment
or psychopathy, with a small percentage
left to grow flowers from. You can see
the scars on my arms from your suckers.
It was all a terrible misunderstanding
completely on my part. I’ve compiled
a categorical list of regrets and types of meat
I’d like to cut through to get to the soup.
Your name is at the top. Look, we’re
all falling apart. That doesn’t give us
the freedom to live in the liminal
when it comes to the heart. Put some skin
in the game or fold. Move over
into the slow lane for once in your life.
Some of us have places to be.

*

I Wish That I Could Cry Like You Cry

There’s a pile of grief on my living room table.
There’s a stack of old losses whose faces I’ve forgotten.
Somebody order some chicken nuggets, we’ve got mourning to do.
Somebody close the windows, the death stink’s getting out.
A layer of dust in which to draw rude pictures.
A layer of dust that is our own tribute paid to death.
I want to slap the sun’s face for looking too close.
I want to glare at the wind for copping a feel.
I’m never going to know what happens next or what happens now.
I’ll never remember to change the litter or get a cat.
I sleep all morning and lie awake at night.
I sleep in the sun and huddle through the night.
I don’t care what you said; none of it was true anyway.
I remember all the times you said what I wanted to hear.
Another drink so I can remember what I’m supposed to forget.
Another drink so I can tell this thing the way I want.
Everybody dies alone, but you’ll die alone more.
Everybody makes mistakes, but they don’t set up home there.

*

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novels Goodbye, Mr. Lonely and The Saviors. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

My Mother’s Decluttering Is Gumming up the Works by Sarah Carleton

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

My Mother’s Decluttering Is Gumming up the Works

I get rid of five teapots.
She mails me my great-grandmother’s tea seat, bubbled-wrapped.

I find new homes for plastic bins full of upholstery fabric.
She ships yards of stiff stuff too beautiful to refuse

but destined to sit uncut in a cabinet.
I give her three pairs of earrings

and she sends me three different pairs.
It’s a perfect barter of the things we cling to.

I tell her I don’t want that French clock
and she holds it for me anyway,

anchoring me to the earth’s rotation,
so I get sneaky, knit shawls for her, handmade treasures

she’ll feel obliged to keep, fixing her to this planet-sized
walk-in closet a little longer.

*

Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Cider Press Review, The Wild Word, Valparaiso, and New Ohio Review. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.

Lone Ranger by Julie L. Moore

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Lone Ranger

        He could shoot the left hind leg off of a contented fly sitting on a mule’s ear
        at a hundred yards and never ruffle a hair.
                — Oklahoma Yarn about the shooting prowess of Bass Reeves

He’d always been my father’s hero,
though he never knew his name,
couldn’t see that a Black man’s holster

held the Colt 45s butt-handle forward,
Winchester sleeved in his scabbard.
My father liked him the way he was portrayed:

White-on-white, riding his gallant Saddlebred
to perilous rescue, Tonto at his side, giving proof
of the narrative most Americans proudly hailed.

Dad didn’t know about the real ranger’s run
from slavery or his tongue’s impressive stream
of indigenous languages, couldn’t imagine

going home with him in dawn’s early light
to the land where Seminole & Creek,
Cherokee, Choctaw, & Chickasaw dwelt,

their tears trailing them.
Didn’t know he had a memory like a daguerreotype,
capturing every detail in each warrant read aloud

by officer or judge. Dad just loved how
the masked man always
drew first, a bright star outshining

outlaws by the thousands. Loved how
either hand would do, how he killed
desperadoes only when he had to,

each red glare his anthem to light.
Loved how he was both genius & blessing
in disguise, bursting with law

& order like, what else?, a bomb.
His radio & TV got the silver
all wrong—there was no Hi-Yo,

no unspent ammunition left behind
when his job was done. No.
Poor though he was, Bass Reeves

deposited silver dollars in victims’ wallets
as his claim to fame, flagging him
as brave as he was fierce.

Legend has it he knew no master but duty—
it was striped on his back like the Bible verses
he’d recite when cuffing criminals,

including his own murderous son.
Shoot, with his many deputies,
he tamed the whole godforsaken territory!

So by the end, he was neither hireling nor slave.
Oh, how Dad wanted to be him—the cheap
imitation, I mean—& so did every kid I knew,

as we all pretended to be larger than life,
cap-gun fire spangling summer days,
puffs of smoke dissipating in heat.

*

A Best of the Net and eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Book of the Year Award. Recent poetry has appeared in African American Review, Image, Quartet, SWWIM, Thimble, and Verse Daily. Learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.

Inwards by Lynda Allen

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Inwards

There’s an eyelash
that must have gotten bent while I slept.
It’s pointing inwards
creating an irritation with each blink
until it becomes a comfort
to close my eyes.

I wonder what other irritants
I close my eyes to
when they are pointing inwards.

*

Lynda Allen considers herself a life in progress and a listener. She is the author of four poetry collections, Grace Reflected, Wild Divinity, Illumine, and Rest in the Knowing, as well as the forthcoming mystery Flashes of Insight, The Rules of Creation (nonfiction), and her first novel, Sight to See.

All of Lynda’s work, whether it’s writing or art, begins with deep listening. She listens to her inner knowing and wisdom. She listens to the natural world. She listens to the still, small voice within. She listens. Then she creates.

In all of Lynda’s creations she strives to inspire others to open their hearts and embrace their journey, both the dark and the light, with gentleness, love, joy, and with a little bit of attitude. She proudly infuses her stories, and occasionally her poetry, with her Jersey Girl sensibilities, while at the same time always creating from the heart.

A Fawn Has No Scent by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

A Fawn Has No Scent

And so, like a deer mother, my parents left me curled up
on the doorsteps, in the flowerbeds, in the rumpus rooms
of others—those with fathers who worked 9-5,
and stay-at-home mothers who boiled hot dogs, fried bologna
for lunch. I stayed quiet, asleep inside my abandonment.
My mother went off to feed, to lure away danger, her scent
so strong. I wore her like an invisibility cloak. I was nothing
like a horse, a colt who could get on my feet. I was safe
without human interference.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, a photographer, and publishes an occasional anthology through Kingly Street Press. She is an assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Poetry publications include Rise Up Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Sky Island, and Minyan. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Betsy’s photos have been featured in RATTLE’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Spank the Carp, Praxis, and Redheaded Stepchild. She is the author of Alinea and co-author of In the Muddle of the Night with Alan Walowitz.

How I Learned Prophecy by Tom Barlow

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

How I Learned Prophecy
          after Oliver de la Paz’s
          “How I Learned Bliss”

Walking home from the shop I pass St. Michael’s and spy
a swastika spray-painted on the bell tower. The bald woman
is back working the High Street stoplight with her cardboard sign.
A Ford Ranger dragging its bumper stops, gives her a dollar.
Once home, I hop on my Harley Electra Glide to meet my buddies
at the clubhouse for a supper ride. Fifty miles of corn fields, the smell
of them like a fog. The bike handles better with no one on the back seat,
but the radio is still shit this far from Columbus. At supper in Xenia
I hold to a two-beer limit, as promised. On the way home the sun
is setting behind us. Rays of light pierce the overcast and set
the winter wheat aglow, as though we are riding through fire, and I want
to say, “Can you believe this?” but there’s no one back there to hear.
How can I express this more clearly? It’s like opening a letter when
you know by the handwriting it should go straight into the burn barrel.

*

Tom Barlow is an Ohio writer of novels, short stories and poetry whose work has appeared in many journals including Ekphrastic Review, Voicemail Poetry, New York Quarterly, Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many more. See tombarlowauthor.com.

Masculinity by David Hanlon

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Masculinity

I had to wear it every day
despite
how ill-fitted it was
how badly I reacted
to its rough material
like battery acid
on my tender skin
so easily cut and chewed
and spat out
by boys who wore it better
my costume so oversized
it hung
off my scrawny body
in foreboding drapes
trousers too wide and too long
falling
down and gathering at my feet
tripping over the excess
subjugation
countless cuts and bruises
14 years old and weeping
to 80’s power ballads
I listen to them now
and feel nothing
but shame
disrobing itself
my form exposed
able

*

David Hanlon is a poet from Cardiff, Wales. He is a Best of the Net nominee. You can find his work online in over 50 magazines, including Rust & Moth, Kissing Dynamite & Homology Lit. His first chapbook Spectrum of Flight is available for purchase now at Animal Heart Press. You can follow him on twitter @davidhanlon13 and Instagram @welshpoetd

Witness by Mary McCarthy

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Witness

At the mailbox
a woman I don’t know
paused to talk.
I don’t remember her name
or how the words began
but before she took her mail
and left, she told me
she had a daughter
who committed suicide
12 years ago.
And. she said, “No one knows
No one else can know.”
Dropping the weight
of her shame at my feet
taking her grief away with her.

I was not even surprised—
had been so many times
a witness
for some random stranger’s pain
at a bus stop, mailbox, train station,
anywhere we wait alone
for the next step,
part of an unplanned group
of incidental strangers
unlikely to meet again.

I’m never quite sure
what inspires them
to lay their strange gifts
in my arms—
stories of loss and shame
regrets and sour refusals.
I wonder what they saw
that told them it was safe
to leave their secrets with me
as though I could carry
some of that weight
without payment or penalty
shock or disbelief—
letting them rest
if only for a moment
if only for the length
of one deep breath.

*

Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including “The Ekphrastic World,” edited by Lorette Luzajic, “The Plague Papers,” edited by Robbi Nester, and recent issues of Gyroscope, 3rd Wednesday, Caustic Frolic, the Blue Heron Review, and Verse Virtual . Her collection How to Become Invisible will come out from Kelsay early next year.

Two Poems by Vivienne Popperl

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Velvet and Blue

          The Frenchman’s voice is velvet.
                    —Anthony Doerr

Chair tipped over, cracked
porcelain dishes stacked
in the sink. Pink negligee dangles
on a nail behind the door. Lily
of the valley, jasmine, roses
perfume the air. In the waste
basket, bent in half,
a pregnancy test strip,
two blue lines showing.

*

A Room
          -after Carolyn Forché

There is, on the windowsill,
a blue vase filled with yellow roses
and sprigs of rosemary. The window
is half open, its blue shutters flung back.
Early morning light flows in,
rests on the red tiled floor
where a rug lies quietly askew.
Chevron patterned, its colors are red and blue.
There is, on the desk, a wide bowl
of English porcelain; violets and hollyhocks
scallop its girth, each stem and leaf
a little off kilter where shattered porcelain
pieces were glued back together.
No trace remains of the fiery flare
of burning letters that shattered the bowl.
A young woman sits at the desk,
in one hand a fountain pen,
in the other a bound notebook. Lying open
before her is a paperback. A dictionary
sits within reach. Now and then
she transcribes an unknown word,
speaks both the English and French
into the quiet room. Words encircle her, thrum
beneath her fingers on the page, connect
the broken pieces of her heart.

*

Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Cirque, Rain Magazine, About Place Journal, and other publications. She was poetry co-editor for the Fall 2017 edition of VoiceCatcher. She received both second place and an honorable mention in the 2021 Kay Snow awards poetry category by Willamette Writers and second place in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Spring 2022 contest “Members Only” category. Her first collection, A Nest in the Heart, was published by The Poetry Box in April, 2022.

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Encounter at Gelson’s

On the first day we feel safe
touching another human being
outside of our tiny family pod,
I see a woman from my neighborhood
embrace a favorite box-boy. The kid
is on the spectrum, and super good
at his job. The hug is long. They pull back,
look at one another, hug again.

I kill time by the shopping cart carrel
to take in the scene, blow my nose
into an old mask, dab at my eyes
with my sleeve. I don’t want to be seen
bawling my head off at Gelson’s
fancy, prepared food counter.

*

Opening

They capture light, my neighbor says
of his many angled windows
fronting water on the bay side’s shore.

Who wouldn’t want to capture light
the way a child traps fireflies
on a summer night?

In the waning dark, I catch what I can
with my cell phone’s eager eye,
and greet again the great window opening,

*

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 www.donnahilbert.com

Two Poems by Karen Paul Holmes

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Bypass

He has no heart now and won’t
for the next hour. It’s in surgeon hands
while the heart-lung machine breathes/beats
for the body cooled to hypothermia.
Doctors graft a vein—like a branch of peace—
from his leg, building new paths:
bypassing the impassable.

How can a good man have a bad heart?
Scalpeled open twice in one life.
This go-round, it’s me in the waiting room,
the loneliest eight hours I’ve ever felt.
Nurses call me Mrs.,
though I’m not, nor could I be Widow.
Just Domestic Partner, Significant Other.
Now Caregiver. Living Will Agent.

My head jerks from my novel whenever
a name is called. I remember to pray
with each Code Blue: All personnel to 3-R!
At 9 pm, a friend brings me golden phở,
we slurp noodles and laugh, drugging my worry.

ICU: The screen’s red and green jags,
like a colored Etch A Sketch, spellbind me,
on guard for the flatline I’ve seen in movies.
I-Vs tick steady, until their warning beeps startle.

Chris wakes up, joyful. Breathing
tube out, he sings a few notes for the nurses.
They move him to a regular room, less vigilant.
I can’t not watch the bellows of his chest.
as he sleeps. Water gurgles, wets the oxygen tube.
For five days, lines and drains come out
until his body works on its own.
He walks the hall, stance almost his ballroom form.

He has come home on a day like this before,
sky a clean slate of blue.
I hover. He showers, turning his stitched chest
away from the water’s hard beat.
He’s singing Pink Floyd’s Learning to Fly.

*

He Only Liked Onions in Small Amounts

         for Chris, 1956-2017

Just a bit for flavor, he’d say, chopping
the white flesh as if it were precious, mindful
of the balance in stews, tacos or Low Country boils,
proud when I would ooh and aah.

Once he ordered a large Mega-Supreme pizza,
which was really mostly mega-onion.
Later, when we’d pass the place—Big Al’s—
he’d make a face and say let’s get an onion pizza
or I’d say how about some pizza with your onions?

Now I’m eating a Thai salad, picking out too-many
red ones, yet glad for the Chris-memory
flooding my taste buds.
It’s like he’s here as I try to right myself
on this seesaw-for-one, balancing between
the pungent grief of death and the sweetness of us.
The heavy thud. The weightlessness.

*

Karen Paul Holmes has two poetry books, No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich). Her poems have appeared on The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, and Verse Daily. Publications include Diode, Plume, and Valparaiso Review. She has twice been a finalist for the Lascaux Review’s Poetry Prize.

Memento Mori, Memento Vivere by Mary Rohrer-Dann

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Memento Mori, Memento Vivere
           (for Alice Fitch)

Too few days of thick star-bursts
of blush and cream. Then, rain.

The magnolia blossoms plummet
fast as my friend, gone

in a single hard-to-believe week.
Just yesterday, I thought,

I must ask Alice, “Come
look at my magnolia,”

its pink glory like tambourines
shivering fragrance across the lawn.

Hard to believe her voice won’t
exult over my tree, a poem, a painting,

goblet of wine, wedge of cheddar,
rap of a returning woodpecker,

that we cut the daffodils lavishing
her front walk with white, butter,

rainslicker yellow for bud vases
on tables the day we celebrated her.

Hard to believe her house, shuttered
now almost two months, isn’t Alice

just sleeping in on a Saturday, resting
from 3-days-a-week dialysis but planning

our Sunday afternoon jaunt to the greenhouse
where we’ll lust over snapdragons sweet peas

petunias verbena scented geraniums.
All we’ll buy once frost warnings are past

and my magnolia opens its dark emerald
leaves to her absence, to summer.

*

Mary Rohrer-Dann is author of Accidents of Being: Poems from a Philadelphia Neighborhood (Kelsay Books, 2023); Taking the Long Way Home (Kelsay, 2021); and La Scaffetta: Poems from the Foundling Drawer (Tempest). Her work also appears in Flash Boulevard, Clackamas Review, Five South, Slant, Third Wednesday, Indiana Review, Comstock Review, Orca, Stone Poetry Quarterly & elsewhere. A “graduated” educator, she paints, hikes, and works with several nonprofits in central PA. She is the totally enraptured grandmama of Elyse Amalie.

Three Poems by Lynne Knight

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Enough

The Japanese meadowsweet fades.
The grass brittles, the rain stays east
or north or south. The heron at the edge
of the strait just at dawn took off as I neared,
swooped low toward the end of the sand spit.
A friend says enough with herons in poems,
especially blue herons, because come on,
there are other birds if you must have birds.
On the way back, I hear a Swainson’s thrush,
the first notes the same as those my mother
would whistle to call me home. Maybe
enough with my mother, too. But oh, hearing
that call, how the heart comes running—

*

Silent Pianos

I remember thinking Oh please,
         stop going on about it, whenever
my grandmother mentioned
         her arthritis, lamenting no longer

being able to play the piano,
         her fingers so bent & crippled.
She’d had to forsake her rings,
         she’d say again until I longed

to get up, lift the lid & pound
         the repetition away. My mother
glared, so I stayed in my chair,
         bored, twenty. After a while

my mother would sigh Where
         does the time go, & while I drove her
home she’d say the one who could
         really play the piano was Mame,

her grandmother, & then
         her fingers would run the air
as she played a tune from
         childhood, & me not even born.

*

Memoir

Late in life, her first lover began to send her
chapters from a book he was writing on his travels
with his wife, recently dead, & each chapter alluded
to their making love, which he sometimes called
a “cuddle,” sometimes “noodling,” & sometimes
the hooting cry of a strange bird they’d seen in Egypt,

so she felt pangs of jealousy, or regret, she could never
be sure, but of course she said nothing of this to him,
even to herself, really, writing instead how the wife
had been so much bolder, so much more adventurous,
so much better suited to him than she would have been.

She believed this. But the pang was there like the sound
of love cries in another room in a hotel where you lie
sleepless, trying not to think of all you’re missing.

*

Lynne Knight has published six full-length poetry collections and six chapbooks. Her poems have been widely published in journals such as Poetry and The Southern Review; her awards include a Poetry Society of America Award, a RATTLE Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship. Although she lived in the United States for most of her life, she now lives on Vancouver Island.

The end of childhood by Ellen Stone

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The end of childhood

Your parent’s tightened
lips, their narrow love—
how it tipped & tilted
like the summer Ferris wheel
all smoke and burnt candy.
You, leaning over the edge
to see it all – old ball field,
swirling night bats, dogs
& beer faced fathers. Where
is your mother? Gone, again?
That question slow burning,
but here the lights
are twinkly, everyone
is gathering, rippled
& holding something
spooled loosely –
giant blue bears, a pinwheel,
caramel apples on sticks, silvery
balloons hovering on the midway.
Empty in this moistness, you
circling around, swooping
& knotted, your stomach,
your sinking heart.

*

Ellen Stone advises a poetry club at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is a co-host for the monthly poetry series, Skazat! and an editor at Public School Poetry which debuts in the fall of 2023. Ellen’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, Cold Mountain Review, The Museum of Americana, and River Heron Review. She is the author of The Solid Living World, Michigan Cooperative Press, 2013, and What Is in the Blood, Mayapple Press, 2020.

Folly Beach by Paige Gilchrist

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Folly Beach

I want to live like the glistening orb
of a jellyfish I saw on my first morning
at Folly Beach. No need for a brain or complicated
feelings. Just a flesh-colored four-leaf clover
of nerve net beneath thin, gelatin skin.
Able to take in what little breath I need by diffusing
through membrane from sea. Fewer barriers. Less striving,
too. How true to be all stomach and stinging strings. Whisper
threads that harbor baby fish who know my poison
can protect as well as stun. Heat lightning. Green
water. All of this without a heart or lungs. Watch me
hug in whatever food floats by. Watch me consume
only what I can swallow whole.

*

Paige Gilchrist lives in Asheville, NC, where she writes poetry and teaches yoga. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kakalak, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Amethyst Review, and The Great Smokies Review.

In the August of my eighth year, I started a business. by Robbi Nester

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

In the August of my eighth year, I started a business.

I never cared much about money. It was more about
the need to make connections. One year, that led me
to create a caterpillar sitting gig. All the other kids
in the neighborhood had plans to go off on vacation
with their families. Each one brought a shoebox full
of caterpillars, striped or green, occasionally, a fat
black one with bristles and an iridescent purple
belly, all clinging to half-eaten oak leaves. I laid
them in the basement shelter I made out of old
window screens. Some kids came back in a few
days and claimed their caterpillars, handing over
sweaty nickels or slick dimes. But most arrived
too late—after the creatures had pupated in
a corner of the screen, their chrysalises
shiny green or soft and brown as spoiled
bananas, white cocoons bound tightly to
the wire, factories of change no one could
explain. Some of them emerged as moths,
escaping into the basement of our house,
spawning on any surface they could find,
to my mother’s consternation, leaving me
with nothing but the spent cocoons,
like shotgun shells on an abandoned
target range, the flutter of dusty wings.

*

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 robbinester.net

Two Poems by Jennifer Abod

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Rethinking Pink

I hated pink.
It surrounded me
in my mother’s
Chicago kitchen:
bubble-gum pink tiles,
café curtains, counter tops,
the dial-up wall phone.
Pink, the color I ran away from,
my mother’s version
of who I was supposed to be.
In my kitchen, I fold
a muted pink bath towel,
remember, how it complimented
Angela’s wet brown shoulders,
her clear eyes,
reminds me why I keep
one frayed pink-cotton turtleneck,
in my closet,
Two pink-plastic flowered bottles,
on my bathroom shelf.

*

Dance Lesson

Angela and I
would dance
in the living room,
on a sidewalk,
at the beach

I had four decades
to memorize her dancing,
how it stirred the air

That last time,
her flowered dress,
legs at rest
in the wheelchair,
I sway her arms
high and wide
her eyes,
like pools of rain
in moonlight.

Now, wherever I am,
and a soulful beat
takes hold,
I dance,

She’d want me
to let sorrow go.

*

Dr. Jennifer Abod is an award-winning filmmaker and radio broadcaster. Her poems appear in Sinister Wisdom, ONE ART: a journal of poetry and The Metro Washington Weekly, and are forthcoming in Wild Crone Wisdom, and Artemis Journal. Jennifer was the singer in the pioneering New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band (1970-1976). For the past year, she’s been singing jazz standards and contemporary tunes every Thursday night at Chez Bacchus a restaurant, in Long Beach, CA.

Two Poems by Mary Ray Goehring

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

My Father Ate Robins

Born in an honest to God log cabin
on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
the youngest of seven children
in his mother’s second marriage
after she shot her first husband
in North Carolina for having another
family. His death in the hospital pushed her
to quickly answer an ad for a wife
placed by a French-Canadian lumber-
jack named Henry, my grandfather, who left
his family to fend for themselves while he
worked the lumber camps. Finally left all-
together when dad was 17. The hearth
always had a stew pot. They ate what they shot.

*

Luna Moth

Last evening, while our reticent son
visited, a Luna moth fluttered into

the glass of our living room window.
Such moths, I am told, mean new

beginnings, a quest for knowledge
and truth. Their only job

procreation. For this, they are blessed
with no mouths.          Silent,

stealth bomber shaped lime-green
wings made to avoid detection,

tapping over and over—
its purple headband, its false eyespots

on the clear pane trying
to get to the light

as I asked my son who he was dating.
He answered

I will tell you when you need to know.

*

Mary Ray Goehring is a snowbird traveling between her Central Wisconsin prairie and the pine forests of East Texas. She has been published internationally in journals and anthologies such as The Path To Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Blue Heron Review, Bramble, Your Daily Poem, The Rye Whiskey Review and others.

Summer Between Seventh and Eighth Grade by T. R. Poulson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Summer Between Seventh and Eighth Grade

I never liked the phone, the tin
and tone of voice, the slap of silence,
clamp of air when someone
called out It’s for you. I can still
hear the girl who’d best-friended
me, her voice soft as glitter, sweet
as night falling to stars smothered
beyond fog. Her words, not quite
a quiet whip, but a rope intended
to tie like wire and air. She listed
friends as unchecked squares
on a multi-choice test. She multiplied
her choices, any of the above. Even
now, the phrase you rang, still used
by my mother, replays like a song
stale with time. My friend said
she’d chosen everyone except me.

*

T. R. Poulson, a University of Nevada alum, currently lives in San Mateo, California. She supports her poetry habit by working as a UPS driver in Woodside. Her stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications including Best New Poets, Booth, Rattle, and Gulf Coast. Find her at trpoulson.com.

Three Poems by Lexi Pelle

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Ode To My Mother’s Thong

When she’d reach for the bargain bread
or to smooth the fanned bangs Kate cut

with craft scissors playing beauty parlor,
I’d see it: cotton Y peeking over her Levi’s—

I remember being mad that she’d do this,
be beyond me, not my mom, disco

the post-divorce dance of undressing
in front of the Winnie-the-Pooh

stickered mirror. Pink with printed
strawberries. Cotton gusset. Tiny bow.

It love lettered the laundry basket, slingshot
me into my life like the birds

I colored penciled onto computer paper,
arching the single-line strokes

to show they were very far away.
Now she’s behind me in the pink

dressing room while I try one on
for the first time, pull on my leggings,

and look at her in the 3-way mirror,
Are you sure you can’t see anything?

*

I Try On The Strapless Top

while my mother is at the store, probably
squeezing lemons or searching
in her oversized pocketbook for coupons.
It’s polyester, pop-star purple, and in it
I feel radiant, like the shine that coats Cassie’s
learner’s permit. All week it hung
in my mother’s closet, dangled from the
hanger’s trouser clips. God knows
where she planned on wearing it. I stand
in front of the full-length mirror that hangs
on the back of the closet door and marvel
at what my new breasts can do, can stop
from falling. The plush, perfect physics
of elastic and connective tissue. Two buoys
marking how far out into adulthood I can swim
before some lifeguard calls me back. Bandeau.
Tube top. Tunnel to privacy which I was
surprised to learn did not mean becoming
my mother. The dance of adjustment, lifting
the fabric back up after every breath—
the idea that someone somewhere could look
at a picture of me from the shoulders up
and think I was naked and be wrong about me.

*

Bleach and Tone

Taylor folds tin foil into my hair while the teenager
to my left talks about her lousy ex. The platinum
blonde on my right says her husband wants to know
what the hell Jessica plans on doing with all those
Irish Step Dancing lessons. In this room we meet
each other’s eyes in the mirror. Should I get a full
or a partial. Taylor doesn’t ask about my fiancé
because I’m not wearing the ring. The air a Bechdel
of bleach. I’m looking at timestamps on my phone
when a 6-ft-something man walks in, brushes past
the receptionist, and kisses me full on the mouth.
Sorry, wrong blonde, he laughs, and looks to my right
for his wife. She looks into her lap. No one says
anything over the blow dryers, the construction
of a new gym across the street, jackhammers
jackhammering. Someone behind me clicks her
acrylics on a counter. I want a full with bangs.

*

Lexi Pelle (she/her) was the winner of the 2022 Jack McCarthy Book prize. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, FreezeRay Poetry, Mixtape, Abandon Journal, and 3Elements Review. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming with Write Bloody Publishing.

Three Poems by Brent Martin

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True Stories of the Snow Hill Dead

The long line files from the dirt tumult
and heads east down Snow Hill Road,
their grey eyes focused on the cell towers
strewn across the chestnut ocean of Cowee Bald.

Others join in, their dispossessors,
and then those bred to dispossess.
No breath but wind and sigh
and birds come beholding from sky

where the curve begins and arcs away
from the confluence where the road narrows
and travels above the valley
into the darkening woods.

Sunlight subsides and the forest sometimes
opens to fresh arteries punctuating the coves,
blood roads for the eventual.
On they climb, gathering kin from the receding woodline

and the rock quarry cataracts,
past the quarry walls now covered in moss,
the line grown long at the cell towers
and the once sacred summit where they can see

the Tuckaseegee River Valley and Kanaghi
and feel some peace beneath their cold feet
before returning and descending into the mire
of state highway 28 and the digital beckoning

of the Baptist Church and the trinket filled convenience store
where the new traders stand, plastic in hand,
still looking for a deal.

*

Country Living Redux

My mother is dying.
It was a brilliant day of fishing the Little Tennessee,
splendor, an old couple by a fire
where we took out at the mouth of Tellico Creek.

Back home it was dark.
I’d had a few beers
when the cars came down the road.
It was too much, the speed, the disrespect –

who were these new people
running roughshod across the land?
I’d had enough, it was at last too much,
so I chased them at breakneck speed

through the dark valley.
I got a license plate off one of them
and the next morning one of the cars
came creeping back up the road.

I drove up the road looking for him
and found him at the house
where his girlfriend lives.
He didn’t know jackshit about mystery,

he didn’t know about the seven crows in the meadow,
and the Parula that pecks endlessly at our window.
But he did know how to turn it on me
in front of the girl’s mother,

who was single with all six kids in the house.
Said he was scared I was gonna hurt him
so he drove faster,
said I was a crazy old man,

which there was at least something
we could agree on.
If he’d had a daddy there he might have slapped him,
made him apologize.

A hundred years ago here
I could have slapped him for him.
There were bags of garbage in a pile
in front of the house,

broken down cars,
a large dog barking at me the entire time.
My mother is dying.
Nothing felt resolved.

I drove back down the road slow,
the road that was once not,
alone, a dangerous and crazy old man.

*

My Neighbor Buys Ammo on Payday

At the long line of rural mailboxes
a neighbor greets me with an angry expression
and says, I’ve got some of your mail.
It’s a magazine with a photograph

of Hillary Clinton on the cover.
He makes some disparaging comments,
damns the autumn storm surge,
the cost of road gravel and ammunition.

It’s Monday night, Italian night we call it,
and we drown out his gunshots
with Pavarotti’s, Nessun Dorma,
which apropos to the moment,

means none shall sleep.
I was not thinking that at the time though.
I was thinking instead of the high cost
of living in the sticks at the jittery age of fifty-six.

Coming home that afternoon
I’d seen a boy on a trampoline
surrounded by cows, jumping hard,
as if attempting to escape the place

he’d been born into.
He wasn’t though, he could only see cows,
and an old motorboat,
sitting as it had for years,

like an artifact of a sea gone dry.
It was just me on the trampoline,
too weak to jump high enough,
too scared of falling off the edge.

*

Brent Martin lives in the Cowee community in western North Carolina where he and his wife run Alarka Expeditions, a nature and place-based business offering a wide variety of workshops and events. He is the author of three chapbook collections of poetry and of The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present. His poetry and essays have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Pisgah Review, Tar River Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Eno Journal, New Southerner, Kudzu Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain News and elsewhere. He is a recipient of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Southern Environmental Leadership Award and served for two years as the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the West. He is the author of George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, winner of the 2022 Wolfe Memorial Literary Prize.

Forgiveness, I am still working on it by Gail Thomas

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Forgiveness, I am still working on it

after five decades. You’d think
it would be easier, now that some
of the players have died
and those who don’t
care live far away.
This labor is not love,
except the selfish sort which
is to say it may release
the small dirge without
words locked in
my chest.

I’m close
to turning the page
on lies and betrayal,
even the absent father
of my children.

But not
the country neighbor
who reached inside
his kitchen door to grab
a rifle and kill
my black dog
who was barking at
a rabbit under his porch.

Home from the hospital
with my first baby
I heard the blast mixed
with her cries
and ran across the yard
sprung with violets.
He stood his ground.

I crawled back to bed
where grief and anger
seeped into my milk.
She cried for days.
In court he remained silent.
I repeated his admission.
The judge let him walk away.

For twenty years I kept
my vow to never
home another dog
until the Wyoming sky
said, you have never
seen a sky vast enough
to crack open
a fearful heart.

Since then I have chosen
and buried companions,
and now my trusting girl,
belly exposed, shows
how to recognize
joy and
admit its shadow
which will surely come.
I am still working on it.

*

Gail Thomas’ new books of poetry are Trail of Roots, winner of the A.V. Christie award from Seven Kitchens Press and Leaving Paradise from Human Error Publishing. She has four other books, and her poems are widely published in journals and anthologies. Awards include the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press for Odd Mercy, Narrative Poetry Prize from Naugatuck River Review, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book’s “Must Read” for Waving Back. She teaches poetry for Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshops, and volunteers helping resettle refugees and visiting libraries and schools with her “Reading Buddy” dog, Sunny.

Reclamation by Julie Pratt

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Reclamation

After years of neglect, I resurrected my garden,
digging out overgrown bushes, bringing light
to the shadows, so the peonies once again
greet me in spring with ruby blossoms.

I love watching what I imagined taking form,
surprising me as it does. Look – the cascade
of white petunias in dappled light as
the sun slips behind leaves of tall trees.

It’s an existential thing, a friend said this morning
about the discontent that consumes him,
pulling him into a dark ravine of the mind.
I know this place, too, of being trapped there

until I feel something in me shift, nearly
imperceptible, but enough to trust that I can
slash and crawl my way through almost any thicket
to a place where I stand and remember

powerlessness is the seed of liberation,
freeing me from what I want so I can recognize
what is true, a radical neutrality that
allows clarity and peace to return.

*

Julie Pratt lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where she worked for many years as a writer and facilitator for non-profit organizations. The author of several award-winning poems, her poetry has appeared in ONE ART, Passager, Persimmon Tree, and other venues. She grew up in Wisconsin, where she earned a master’s degree in social work from UW-Madison. Later in life, she received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine. Her writing is inspired by nature and by people who are working to change themselves and the world for the better.

Aloha by David Lee Garrison

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Aloha

Our fiftieth reunion and I still miss Marie.

Vanilla complexion, black hair,
played French horn—you remember her.

What was the name of the guy
she married right after graduation?

Did you ever see a couple
so much in love?

And what kind of cancer
did she die of in her twenties?

Marie went by her middle name;
her first name was Aloha,

an untranslatable Hawaiian word
suggesting peace, love, and affection—

a greeting and also a farewell.
People were saying goodbye to her

the day she was born.

*

The poetry of David Lee Garrison has been read by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac” and featured by Ted Kooser in his column, “American Life in Poetry.” Named Ohio Poet of the Year in 2014, his most recent book is Light in the River (Dos Madres Press). A retired professor of Spanish and Portuguese, his translations of Spanish poets from Lope de Vega to Gloria Fuertes have been published widely.

I Mention the Unmentionable In the Yoga Class by Roseanne Freed

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I Mention the Unmentionable In the Yoga Class

Inversions this evening,
said the male teacher
at the beginning of the yoga class,
Is anyone on their period?
I put up my hand.
Eight men and six women
turned round to stare,
I’ll give you different exercises.

My convent educated mother,
would be horrified to know
I’d told a roomful of strangers
I was a woman who menstruated.
Mom, who taught me to call my vagina,
my down there, and menstruation
by the Hindustani words mina minna,
was taught the facts of life
—a.k.a how babies are made—
by my father. On their wedding night.

I was so embarrassed, But he was kind,
Mom said, I learned fast.
I got pregnant on our honeymoon.

In the African town where I grew up.
Menstrual pads were wrapped
in brown paper
and hidden behind the counter.
Unable to mention the unmentionable,
I’d walk out the drug store
if served by a man.

*

Roseanne Freed grew up in apartheid South Africa and now lives with her husband in California. A Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in ONE ART, MacQueens Quinterly, Naugatuck River Review, and Blue Heron Review among others.

The Splinter by Laura Ann Reed

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The Splinter

In late May she counts five of them, notices
the white tail-feathers when the birds rise
before disappearing over the fence.
As if such specificity helps bridge the distance
between what they are and what she is—
a woman with a splinter of someone remembered
lodged in her flesh. Who dreams of a large bird
lying on her kitchen floor. Head bent
at an odd angle. Dead, she hopes. For its own
sake. But no, it opens an eye, tries to move
its neck. She knows there is nothing to be done
but look on with pity while it beats a wing
against the cold, white tiles.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

Five Poems by Jennifer Garfield

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self portrait at 39

once, i was a tiny black dress
with the thigh slit high

like a ship’s prow.
made waves wherever

i sailed.
now, i wear my stomach

to the pool,
laced with dermal scars

purpled in sunlight –
shame of having a body.

shame of not having
a body –

it’s all lost in the water.
i gush,

my vessel a berth,
beat, boom, ballast,

i bight in all directions
and no body has drowned me

yet. how to become invisible?
become mother.

water everywhere
and nowhere.

become buckets.
buckets of holes.

buckets of thighs.
hold every body afloat.

and the slipping away?
don’t mention it.

let it tuck into the sea.
hold the sea, too.

didn’t your own mother
teach you how to sail.

*

dear algorithm, i have some questions for you
after Matthew Olzmann

there are 7,117 known languages
in the world today. you already

knew that. but did you know
i’ve been wearing the same

underwear for 3 days? you know
that question everyone asks

when they begin to understand
the limits of the mind – what if

my red is different than your
red? and what if we never find

the exact language to express
our exact shade of red to each

other? aka i am afraid i am
unknowable. enter you. enter

never again misunderstood.
enter can’t disappear

if we wanted to. is it too much
to say it feels my soul

has been air-tagged? did you know
i have a favorite child? have reimagined

intimacy many times? lately,
i’ve been thinking about Jonah.

like, what if, after 3 lonely days
wedged into the grooves

of a whale’s wet tongue,
he discovered something

about sonar. about the language
of love across distance. about

the relative nature of time
inside a whale. so close to

disappearing, there but for
the grace of god and all that.

all i’m saying is that before
we knew algebra or affiliate

marketing, we could escape
the sour breath of an enormous

whale with a little faith.
it occurs to me we have slid

deeper inside the underbelly.
hashem, it’s dark in here.

cavernous. but, like, what if
we are all in different caverns?

it would help me sleep
if you could understand

the exact dimensions
of my cavern and send

some comfort provisions.
ear wax removal hacks,

or adhd medication (for girls!),
to help me focus, and hear things,

like whale songs, if i ever went
to the sea, which i don’t.

but then you do hear this
sort-of, not-quite prayer

and send a video of some waves,
and a blazing sunset,

and peaceful music,
which is still a language

i understand after all.

*

need
after Gabrielle Calvocoressi

need food. coffee. hands. eyes.
10 more minutes. money. hope.
1-pot dinners. need science.
biologics. nurses to hold my
hand. need needles. pills.
passwords. better insurance.
need to levitate. to hold. to see
the future. need ancestors
to tell me which doctor
to choose. need chocolate.
zoom therapy. lexapro. a soft
mattress. need monthly mris.
blood work. constellations.
need that poem my 4th grade
teacher read after the shooting.
need truth or dare. dare you
to live to a ripe old age.
dare you to see the moon
with me each night. need
to be swallowed
by the vast black sky.
need you to live.
need you.

*

try not to worry
after Diane Seuss

here on this edge i have seen a herd of cows
in an unfamiliar meadow, grazing. tongue

to grass and grass to tongue, nursing
on the world and nobody to say it is too late

for all that. i say cows to nobody and continue
the drive, bluebells ringing alongside

my car’s dusty tunnel. i am remembering
how to live without worry. without remembering

yesterday’s shooting at the parade we went to
every year as kids. without remembering

my own kid’s mortality, there but for the grace
of science and the needle’s consonant warmth.

to think i worried about plastic in breastmilk
when she was born in a perfect cape of love.

was it then, first suckle, that we fell, our love
like raw knees kissing the ground. my oldest friend

who never left home texts to say the bullets
were coming from everywhere. from the sky

and the earth. i call her number from heart
but nobody answers. this isn’t the way we love

anymore. i call my people back from the edge
and who’s to say who hears. ears, after all,

a small slip of flesh between everything
and nothing.

*

something must burn

it’s like this every August
too hot for skin
something must burn
so why not let it
be me
save the forest
of your mouth
from matchstick
pressed to the neck
this world can be
so gentle
beneath a charred
sky
this year i lose
my ancestor’s word
for water
memory scorched
from dna
listen. even the fossils
singe beneath us
they say this fire
started in Canada
but i know it’s here
inside me,
rose-blood blaze
i’ll take to my grave
the earth’s ship
already burning.

*

Jennifer Garfield is a poet and teacher in the Boston area. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including The Threepenny Review, On the Seawall, Passengers, West Trestle Review, and Frontier. She is the recipient of multiple awards including an Illinois Arts Council Literary Grant and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant.

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

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

  1. Alison Luterman – My Vibrato
  2. Betsy Mars – Residual
  3. Susan Zimmerman – Two Poems
  4. Donna Hilbert – Two Poems
  5. John Amen – The 80s
  6. Jennifer L Freed – Five Poems
  7. Margie Duncan – If Found, Return to Store
  8. Robert Darken – Everyone Has Better Parents
  9. Lisa Zimmerman – Two Poems
  10. William Palmer – Four Poems

Five Poems by Ann E. Wallace

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The Empty Casing

Imagine this: if you have planters
of parsley or dill growing outside
in a sunny spot, odds are good
that you have tossed butterfly eggs
onto your pasta with the garnish
or mixed them into your salad.

Just imagine.

Have you ever seen the egg
of a butterfly? Before caterpillar,
before chrysalis. The miniscule sphere,
a perfect glassy orb deposited
by swallowtail or monarch or fritillary,
and perched so delicately on a leaf
or the whisper-thin stem
of your garden herbs.

I saw my first last summer.
I watched as the brilliant swallowtail—
she visited daily for a spell—found
my bed of parsley. I searched
for a week, leaf by leaf until
I spotted it: one perfect egg.

How small, how fragile.
How large my hands,
my garden shears—the egg stood
such small chance against a quick
snip at mealtime. Small chance
against hot sun that can wither
a wispy herb into the parched earth
over a few dry days of drought.

It is truly a wonder
we have any butterflies at all.
But my patio egg, it defied the odds—
it hatched under my protective gaze,
grew fat off the parsley I did not eat,
spun a home around itself.

I watched and waited as it grew strong
Then one morning I found
the empty dry casing still stuck
to the side of my clay planter.
The butterfly—it was gone, flown
away into its new life.

*

Note to Self: Two Kindnesses, or One

Do you get as frustrated as I
that some lessons do not come easy
or fast, that there are things we know
deep in our bodies, that we have learned
through trial and error and error
and error, and yet
we must learn them again?

I think you know,
this feeling of carving
out space, of creating
sanctuary within your home,
your body, of finding
the necessary beauty of silence,
but then inviting the noise to rush in
when a friend calls for help.

I struggle here, to find
the line between kindnesses—
between being a good human
and being good to myself. And truly,
why do those things feel at odds,
and how might I lift my eyes
upon myself if I held a line
here, between you and me?

But what I really want to say
is that I think our needs
are mutual and that maybe
this note to self is a reminder
to ask for help in claiming
silence.

*

Practice

I think I had the whole thing
wrong.

Again, again, again.
I thought it was about me,

that I was the end point
of these battles

through chemo and vertigo,
that three decades of knowledge

were meant to save
me.

Turns out, my dry run
held a different purpose:

when first one daughter,
and then a second,

fell sick and sicker,
I should have been ready.

*

Water World

The dreamy images flashed
in quick succession, on and on,
recognizable but too fast
for reading the endless
pages of fine print.

Awake, but not, I thought
I’d caught myself dreaming,
was sure that this medical flipbook
must be rapid eye movement.
Drifting back to sleep, I told myself,
I must remember this.

My next thought, upon waking—
do other people see medical bills,
one after the other, after the other,
inscribed within their eyes
while they try to sleep,
Do they dream of static images,
of text and debts?

While the numbers
and the fine print spread
before me,
my daughter, still sick
in her bed, dreamed
in fear and senses,
of waking to the pressure
of water trapped within her walls,
of the sheetrock growing soft
and moist to the touch,
of hazy thoughts that she could rest
just a few minutes longer, that she had
more time to act, more time
before the liquid pocket burst
like a balloon all over her bed,
soaking her, as she recounted later,
in dirty wall water.

But she was wrong, time was short,
and the walls in her dream gave way
before she could get out of bed.
And the documents in mine kept scrolling.

*

In Anticipation of an Elegy

I began mourning
my trees last year
with the first news
of the tall building
to rise behind my yard.

Neighbors fought
for our yards, and won
a stay of execution—
I mean, a rejection
by the planning board

But it was only a matter
of time, and they did not
actually understand
that trees and plants
mean life in this city,

sustain birds and other
creatures but also humans
who cannot fly from yard
to yard in search of sun
but must make do

with the patch of earth
in our small backyards
and beg the planners
to vote as if our lives
depend on the trees.

*

Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey. Her collection Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2024. She is author of Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag) and has published work in Huffington Post, Wordgathering, Gyroscope Review, Snapdragon and many other journals. You can follow her online at AnnWallacePhD.com and on Instagram @annwallace409.

Two Poems by Tami Haaland

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Dog Beach

A woman whispers to her partner
she will not go barefoot, yet shoes
are useless against sea and sand.

In low tide, kelp and barnacle-covered
rocks, creatures kept wet in shadowy
interiors seem to rise into the air.

One scientist theorizes that when
we die, we don’t leave but move on

to another layer of reality—some say
thirty-two or more folded like pastry.

Near a rock, I see what seems
like mussel shells crushed, but they are
clams making a broad swirl in sand.

A translucent blue crab circles
in this afternoon’s small tide. I find
no dogs here, but there are many tracks.

*

Bat at Noon

The swoop, skim, rise and slip over water,
almost bird-like. No coast, no glide.

A gulp of insect and up the craggy
cottonwood bark to a bat-sized crevice,

perfect color in the shadowy daylight
of late, late summer. We face each other.

How good to meet you, I say. It clicks
across the ragged bark into the space

between us, quick pulses of sonar
to find and map the other. It is

learning, as I am. It is a vague contour,
but I cannot see its skin, its slight fingers,

the fine-veined texture of its wings.
What allows me to feel how it

huddles in the crevice, looking down?
When I step away, it clicks again, and

I return to this conversation, if it is
a conversation. I see you, I say,

then listen through moist summer heat
for its barely audible reply.

*

Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections, including What Does Not Return, When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room, a Nicholas Roerich First Book Award winner republished by Red Hen Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ascent, Consequence, The American Journal of Poetry, december, The Ecopoetry Anthology, Cascadia, and have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Slowdown.

Glass Hammer Time by Patrick Meeds

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Glass Hammer Time

People used to like things
that were heavy. Sometimes
it was in fashion to be clean
shaven. Other times bearded
or mustachioed. For a while
keeping bees was in vogue.
Before high-definition it was
perfectly okay to be blurry
and a little out of focus.
Nobody held it against you.
Nobody cared. Now everyone
cares. All they do is care
all the time. Now angels tell me
we must engineer the shadows
to our advantage. Now angels
tell me we must slake our thirst
with crude oil. Inject our veins
with gasoline. Feed our souls to
vultures. It’s all just too much
for me. I prefer to do nothing.
Because when I say jump,
nothing says why?

*

Patrick Meeds lives in Syracuse, NY and studies writing at the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center. He has been previously published in Stone Canoe literary journal, the New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, the Atticus Review, Whiskey Island, Guernica, The Main Street Rag, and Nine Mile Review among others.

Two Poems by Cheryl Baldi

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THE DAY FALLING TO PIECES

An envelope of medicine arrives, then another with oxygen tanks, rubber sheets, a wheelchair, which we hide, because we’re not ready for this. By noon more meds, and we lose track of what needs to be kept cool, what to give her when, labeling and sorting pills into baskets. She asks for ham salad but the bread’s stale, and we’re out of juice. The oxygen tank, too close to the wall, overheats and shuts down. The kitchen fills with strangers—a hospice nurse, aide, a neighbor who walks in and suddenly looks scared, though not as scared as the rest of us. Phones keep ringing, a friend orders food for us—Can you please come pick it up? Then the doorbell–two men with a hospital bed we said we didn’t want. By 10 PM everyone’s left, and we forgot to get medihoney, and Cindy’s stuck on the sofa, too weak to walk, too weak even to stand, and she needs to pee, so we lift her, drag her up three stairs to the wheelchair and wheel her to her bed. I don’t know how to do this.

*

AFTERLIFE

The moon over the bay
          just before dawn. I wait
for the light to change,

          for the moon to fade,
disappear into blue. If only
          I could preserve

this moment, place it
          in a memory jar
with sea glass, a gold thimble.

          How else to remember a life?
Memory and its fragments
          always elusive,

even my grief, no matter
          the hold I have on it,
that, too, slipping away.

*

Poet, teacher, and editor, Cheryl Baldi is the author of the Shapelessness of Water (Kelsay Books, 2018) and a former Bucks County Poet Laureate. Her work has appeared widely including in One Art: a journal of poetry and Philadelphia Stories. She divides her time between coastal New Jersey and Bucks County where she volunteers for the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program and the Arts and Cultural Council.

Maple Street, Brevard NC by Carol Parris Krauss

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Maple Street, Brevard NC

With great difficulty we had located the house
renumbered by the county a while back.

The color remained the same, green
like the belly of a rhododendron leaf;

some shutters had been added.
For a mountain minute, I saw

myself at age ten, propelling the glider
with my dirty feet.

Pushing off faded slats to
the twang of the rusty springs,

Nanny rattling pans in the kitchen,
Pa-paw’s raspy cough.

We didn’t linger long. Just enough time
to notice the kitchen windows

smaller, double-paned, allowing for less
view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

It was harder for me to peer in,
to see more.

*

Carol Parris Krauss is a mother, teacher, and poet from the Tidewater region of Virginia. In 2018, the University of Virginia Press recognized her as a Best New Poet. This Clemson University graduate has work published in numerous online and print magazines such as Louisiana Review, Dead Mule, Broadkill Review, Schuylkill Valley Review, Storysouth, Amsterdam Quarterly, Hastings College Plainsongs, and the South Carolina Review. Her first book, Just a Spit down the Road, was published by Kelsay in 2021 and she was the winner of the Eastern Writers Association Crossroads Contest.

On it may stay his eye by Peter E. Murphy

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On it may stay his eye

In this cathedral of soil and stained glass I hear
songs composed by the dead and sung to the dead

they worship. Their voices move me the way certain
words move me—cleave, bound, censure, plug, refrain—

peculiar words that work overtime, like belief,
to mean themselves and what they oppose.

I sailed into this language under the flag
of a foreign tongue. There were far too many riches

for anyone to call their own. So I took the sounds
that pleased me most and turned them into song.

*

Author’s note: “On it may stay his eye” is part of a series of poems that take their titles from 19 etchings by David Hockney called “The Blue Guitar,” which was his response to Wallace Steven’s “The Man With The Blue Guitar,” which was his response to Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist,” which was his response to encountering a busker on the streets of Barcelona circa 1902. Whew! My poems are not intended to be ekphrastic, but if you’re curious, you can see Hockney’s etchings here.

*

Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York where he managed a nightclub, operated heavy equipment, and drove a taxi. Author of eleven books and chapbooks of prose and poetry, his work has appeared in The Common, Diode, Guernica, Hippocampus, The New Welsh Reader, Rattle, The Sun and elsewhere. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City where he runs workshops for writers and teachers in the US and abroad.

peteremurphy.com / murphywriting.com

The Trip to Bountiful by Gary Fincke

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The Trip to Bountiful

“When you’ve lived longer than your house and family,
you’ve lived long enough.”
          – Carrie Watts

For her last visit, my mother
arrived by bus. Conversation
was penance. Apology a charm.
The VCR worked a miracle
that fed the afternoon.
Downstairs, the weather
headed north, the house
six months old, surrounded
by infant shrubbery
and small, vulnerable trees.
Geraldine Page has died,
my mother said while
sorrow and wistfulness
settled in even before
the house in Bountiful
loomed catastrophic with loss.
My mother, throughout,
concentrated as if she had
fallen in love with longing
for the impossible.
And I, become companion,
allowed her, with rewind
and pause, to absorb
the expressive face
of a woman who wanted
nothing more than altering
the foreseeable future.
In the near dark, I allowed
the unspooling of credits,
extending her privacy
all the way to copyright
in what I believed was
generosity grand enough
to be labeled love.
Then we sat together as
empathy embraced us
like a shy, new arrival
until my mother settled
into her silence, the one
with rhythm so familiar
it was performed with no
accompanist but memory.

*

Gary Fincke’s collections of poetry have been published by Arkansas, Ohio State, Michigan State, BkMk, Lynx House, Jacar, and Serving House. His next collection, For Now, We Have Been Spared, will be published by Slant Books in 2024.

Revelation by Maree Reedman

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

Revelation
for my mother

Every Friday, you waited
for me to take you shopping.

You sat in your garage
on my old student chair;

the door was up, and you looked out
into the world with a fixed stare.

Were you ever late for anything?
You were even early for your funeral.

Younger, I used to worry
I’d turn out like you. Now,

I sit by the hotel window,
five minutes before my brother is due,

checking my watch and smiling,
staring at the mirrored sea.

*

Maree Reedman lives in Brisbane with one husband, two cockatiels, and five ukuleles. Her writing has been published in the United States and Australia in various magazines and journals such as Chiron Review, Naugatuck River Review, Unbroken, Stickman Review, Grieve, Hecate, StylusLit, and The Big Issue. She has won Ipswich Poetry Feast awards and was recently shortlisted in the inaugural Melbourne Ukulele Festival songwriting competition.

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Low Tide

I love the way the water pulls
the shoreline back
showing what lies beneath:

old stairway
next to the dock, a few steps
laced with barnacles and moss,

another pathway into the mystery.

*

Shade

I’m looking for lipstick
the shade, exact match
for my mimi’s lips,
whose color never faded
from illness, from age.
At the end, still peach,
still full, still sweet
as summer fruit.

*

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 www.donnahilbert.com

Five Poems by Jennifer L Freed

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How to Pack for the Move to Assisted Living

Feel once more the weight
of the little brass elephant
with the missing tusks.
Run your fingers along
the banister, the bedroom curtains. Listen
for the ticking of the antique clock
at the end of the hall.

*

Yellow Tags

At the parting edge
of ninety-four, my father
wonders what’s the point,
this accumulation of life
unspooling in Assisted Living,
while his home, so close,
a mere two streets away—
its wooded yard, its rooms
lined with books
and treasures—his home
is packed full

of people this very day, strangers
browsing shelves and closets,
burrowing in drawers, finding
the antique clocks and pewter mugs,
the Nikon camera he bought
in 1969, the Navy blanket
and hammock, boxed
in the basement, saved
for who knows what
but saved, nonetheless, a part
of his passing through
this life, and he wonders
how he got here—his past
now stickered with yellow tags.

*

My Father Helps My Mother with Her Compression Socks

He asks if she’s ready.
She sets her wheelchair brakes.
He kneels and she extends one leg.
He guides her foot to his knee, slides
the cuff of nylon over her heel, then yanks, hard.
The wheelchair wobbles.
Extra material hangs over her toes.
She does not offer her expertise
from years of putting on panty hose: how to
gather the nylon, pull gently, doling out fabric
through delicate fingers.
She thanks him.
He pats her leg, asks if the sock is too tight
below her knee. She always says it’s just fine.
Then they switch—her left foot on his right leg.
Sometimes he helps slide her feet into shoes,
the boxy, wide-mouthed pair with space
for swelling, before putting his hands on her
wheelchair arms, using them to tug himself back
up to standing. She pats his shirt into place
around his belt, makes sure he’s not dizzy
from rising too fast. Then he turns right, to the desk
with his computer, and she wheels herself left, to gaze
out the window while listening to the news.

*

Remote Control

My father, now 96—still spry, bright, quick-witted,
still learning yoga, climbing stairs, using his computer
to find etymologies, stock prices, names
of temples in ancient Greece—now

he asks me if—and this is not an urgent
request, he adds—but if, as my husband and I pack up
our home of 21 years, we should happen upon
the spare remote control for my parents’ TV,

which, my father explains, I would have found in the drawer
of the hutch by the den door of the house my parents left
two years ago, the house I emptied for them
when they moved into assisted living—

if I should come across that remote control now (I might not
have known it worked, my father says,
since it shared that drawer with other, outdated
remotes and garage door openers), or if I find it

in a few weeks, when my husband and I are unpacking
our lives in new, downsized rooms, then
could I please bring it next time I visit,
since the remote they’ve been using till now

isn’t responding anymore when he presses the buttons,
and he doesn’t think it’s the batteries, but
he’s ordering new batteries on-line, in case that’s all
that’s wrong.

*

Cutting My Father’s Hair

He’s still tough as leather, but so much shorter now.
He wobbles when he stands too quickly.
Why didn’t I realize sooner?
When I comment on his fringe of hair—a little fluffy,
I say—he waves a crooked hand
toward my mother, now maneuvering from wheelchair
to couch: She likes it that way.
Then, The damned clipper. Can’t get it to work right anyway.
And so I offer.
Why am I surprised that he agrees
so readily? That he brings out the electric clipper
almost immediately? He hands it over,
small and black with its little pronged comb, asks
if I know how to use it, then warns,
You might find it hard though.
It doesn’t cut as well as it used to.
And you can’t even find the damn power button.
Of course. The worsening neuropathy
in his fingers. His failing eyes.
They have the hairdresser here, but
I don’t know her, and why would I pay
all that money? I don’t even have that much hair.
He glances over at my mother, who catches my eye,
and winks. Your Mum always did it, he says. Before
her stroke.
So I sit him in the living room, under the light,
and he lets me turn his head this way and that.
I trim the patchy beard along his jaw, the grey scruff
brushing the back of his collar. He asks me
to thin his moustache, says the hair
curls into his mouth. I use a tiny scissors
for this, my fingers humming along smoothly
between nostril and lip. I think of the fine tuning
of my muscles, joints, nerves. How much
I have not yet lost. My mother
lies on the couch, watching us, smiling. My dead brother
hovers in my father’s face. My father’s eyes close
as I snip the long hairs of his eyebrows,
the fine whisps crowning his skull.

*

Jennifer L Freed’s full-length collection When Light Shifts (finalist, 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize) explores the aftermath of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage and the altered relationships that emerge in a family crisis. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Anthology. Other awards include the 2022 Frank O’Hara prize (Worcester County Poetry Association), the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club), and honorable mention for the 2022 Connecticut Poetry Award. Please visit jfreed.weebly.com to learn more.

Two Poems by Lisa Zimmerman

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Love is Invincible is What I Wrote

in my notebook. However,
it can only go so far
in terms of grief—
running parallel to the river,
kicking up dust, breathing hard,
never stopping to rest.
And the river of grief does not know,
is rushing so fast over stones,
bending its streaming tears
around fallen logs and tree roots—
Why do we pray? Why do we cry?
Love does not stop racing
beside our hurtling anguish,
won’t give up even though it knows
the galloping water is surging
to the sea of all grief. Why do I keep crying?
Love will be there too, not breathless,
not worn down or diminished,
but strong enough to hold
the whole cold ocean of grief
and never be drowned.

*

Things My Friend Mary Said Years Before She Died

She told me fear was just an acronym
for false evidence appearing real, as in
fabricating a future of tiny failures adding up
to disappointment in advance.
Fear is a lack of information, she said,
an absence—not of faith—but of trust.

Better to trudge the winter field this morning
with the dog, both of us unleashed among the dead
branches blown down from last night’s wind,
my mind empty of anything like knowledge
just a light scarf of sadness drifting behind me
like a broken aura, the white sky crimped
along its edge by mountains.

When my son was a boy he said, Fear is like a door.
I just have to walk through it.
Mary’s not here for me to ask, Who made the door?
And who made the other side?

*

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry and fiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Florida Review, Poet Lore, Hole in the Head Review, and Cave Wall. Her collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press), The Hours I Keep, and Sainted (Main Street Rag). She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado.

ONE ART’s 2024 Best of the Net nominations

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ONE ART’s 2024 Best of the Net nominations

Sandra Rivers-Gill – D’Anjou
Carol Boston – Great Lady Descending
Brett Warren – Origami of Shock
Sara Backer – After Fourteen Years
Tom Gengler – The Clinic Squares
John Amen – The 80s

*

Congratulations to all our nominees!

*

More information about Best of the Net here.

Everyone Has Better Parents by Robert Darken

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Everyone Has Better Parents

I drive with you beside me after you’ve bombed a math test.
You’re still and cold, like city statues after dark under street lamps,
the way public art at night shapes itself into familiar monsters.

You still want to go to college but maybe not engineering, you say,
feeling carefully for safe ground between us.

At the stoplight on Black Rock, birds pass over our car
and are gone forever.
The car engine hums, listening.

I’m taking you to a therapist. You asked Mom for someone new,
someone who is not a family friend so you can tell the truth
about us: the current of my fury that crackles
through our walls,

your mother’s shackling invasion of privacy,
her way of transmuting all experiences into life lessons
like the perpetual ringing of a hammer.

At two years old your eyes were blue as berries, your hair
platinum and fine at the temples, like a halo.
What if that was the time to impart wisdom,
Before you darkened into this baffling stranger?
What if it’s now–this moment
before the traffic light blinks green?

As we drive past the bank, sunset blazes in its windows–
your face lit like red gold–and it’s like a door opening
to welcome us: some other father, some other son.

*

Originally from the Midwest, Robert Darken now resides in Connecticut, where he teaches high-school English. His poems have appeared in The Orchards, Red Eft Review, and New Verse News.

The Artist’s Warbler by Sally Nacker

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The Artist’s Warbler

He saw a little blur
of yellow
high up in a tree
like a flower;

song came from it,
stirred the quiet air.
Lifting
his lens, there

he saw it, singing,
saw the warbler’s song
in how the air
was quivering.

*

Sally Nacker was awarded the Edwin Way Teale writer’s residency—Trail Wood— in 2020 where she enjoyed a week of solitude on 168 acres of nature. Since then she and her husband have moved to their own small house in the woods. Publishing credits include Canary, The Orchard’s Poetry Journal, Blue Unicorn, One Art, Mezzo Cammin, Quill and Parchment, and The Sunlight Press. She has her MFA in Poetry from Fairfield University. Kindness in Winter is her newest collection. Please visit her website at www.sallynacker.com.

Two Poems by Joshua Eric Williams

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[haiku]

no birds
to speak of
birthday rain

*

The dawn’s good

news: I’m glad,
though sorry for

the losses, cloudless
sky, and droughts

like dragging nights.
They’ll come again

with encased light
and shadow puppets,

but now, sunlight
dries the darkness

until I wish
for night again.

*

Joshua Eric Williams graduated with an MFA in Poetry and an M.A. in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University. His poetry has appeared in Measure, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Sonic Boom, Rattle, and many other print and online journals. In 2014, he won the Eclectic Poetry Prize. His recent honors include: the selection of his poem “Barriers” for publication in an anthology of pandemic writing, The Great Isolation, his collection, The Strangest Conversation (Red Moon Press, 2019), receiving an honorable mention in the Haiku Society of America’s 2020 Merit Book Awards, Rattle nominating his poem “haiku” for a 2022 Pushcart Prize, and The Haiku Foundation featuring his haiga for the month of March this year.

Sometimes there’s no freedom to love the world— by Judy Kronenfeld

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Sometimes there’s no freedom to love the world—

its slants of light,
its glancingness
requiring quick
open arms.

The sorrows of the body
hood your eyes.

Time places its heavy
stones steadily around
you—building, building—
until there is only
a small spot left
for your body
to curl into itself,
its own prisoner
in its cold hovel

where it dreams
of galloping through the dark
like a hero in a ballad,
drinking in the flash
and glint of dawn.

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s fifth full-length book of poetry, and seventh collection, Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022) came out in 2022. Previous books include Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017) and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books in 2024/2025.

Dried Flowers by Connie Soper

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Dried Flowers

My grandmother perfected the art of pressing flowers,
collecting them the way some people gather stamps

from countries they’ve never seen. There was Edelweiss
from Austria, Scottish bluebells, red poppies that blazed

the slopes of Corfu and Santorini. She ordered the rare
and exotic from catalogues, and when they arrived, wrapped

in tissue paper, she stuck them in encyclopedia pages next
to the places they came from. Cheek to jowl with images

of national monuments, presidents and kings.
After the blossoms were dried and flat and brittle,

she glued them onto velvet, arranged into shapes of gardens
and bouquets, boats sailing on a blue petalled sea.

Once, with nothing but a backpack and lust
for wander, I hiked Alpine meadows, the highlands and moors

where wildflowers perfumed an abundance next to the paths.
With the purity of youth, I left blossoms rooted, did not

want to pick them, not even for her. Now that I’m as old as she
when I was a child, I think of my grandmother

hunched over her kitchen table, surrounded by dried flowers,
peering through a magnifying glass to examine their fine markings,

the delicate whorls and patterns only nature could create.
She was happiest there, surrounded by flora from so many places.

She let the world come to her, with all its tiny blue flowers,
fiddlehead ferns, the soft-petalled pansies that grew in her own back yard.

*

Connie Soper’s poems have appeared in Ekphrastic Review, Catamaran, Cider Press Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and elsewhere. She divides her time between Portland and Manzanita, Oregon. Her first full length book of poetry, A Story Interrupted, was published by Airlie Press in 2022. She is currently at work on her second collection.

Somewhere Out There by Deron Eckert

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Somewhere Out There

My little cat,
how long
has it been
since you fled,
run off by
the swift swipe
of an old broom,
never to be seen
again?
Twenty-five,
thirty years?
Was your time
in this world
cruel?
Is it still?
Do you scrounge
for food left out
to the strays,
like you,
or did you
find comfort
in a welcoming
home,
one without swipes,
where the only
gesture your way
is a pat on the lap
you love,
asking you to come,
praying
you never leave?
Please know
I prayed, too.

*

Deron Eckert is a writer and poet who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Door is a Jar, Ghost City Review, Maudlin House, The Fourth River, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. He was a flash fiction finalist in New Millennium Writing’s 54th Writing Awards. He is currently seeking publication for his Southern Gothic, coming-of-age novel and his first collection of poetry. He can be found on Instagram at deroneckert and Twitter @DeronEckert.

Five Poems by KHD

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Ten-Deuce Offsuit Rain

“There’s no life like the life I’ve lived. You’re
free like a cloud floating up in the sky.”
—Doyle Brunson

In a world without good
guys, he was the good guy—
a collared shirt under that white
cowboy hat and his ten-gallon
smile posted above a shuffle
of chips. Only he could flip
breaking his leg into good luck—
instead of the NBA he gambled
his way with a super system,
zoomed through saloons
into the Bellagio’s room—
cracking one liners from the seat
of his scooter. How many times
did his hands graze the felt
as though it were grass?
The no-limit curve
of his shoulders raised
on through the years—
hunched puffy clouds
over the poker table, just
to teach us to look up.

*

Liberty

“America did not want the statue.
She took it because it was offered.”
—British journalist

Never has a face looked so forlorn as her giant
head displayed at the world’s fair for a fundraiser
to build her body. Yes, it’s easy to personify that
which is affixed with skin, even when it’s made
of copper. Made to sway in the breeze of the bay,
every ship must sail by her hips, spy the spikes
of her crown—a halo of bayonets, her eyes always
open, counting regrets. She thought she could be
a kind of lighthouse in a land that didn’t want her,
that if she learned to smile, the others would soon
orbit around her. She shone without fuel, glowed
a circle of light—and when the birds pummeled her,
for she’d grown too bright, she folded into her skeleton,
resolute to scowl, learn to blend in with the clouds. Polite.

*

A Pantoum Doesn’t Fall Far

Of course, there are horses everywhere,
when little by little, we unpainted fences—
as if the grass flashes green when I feel deja vu.
There are racetracks and fields and then you.

When, little by little, we unpainted fences
at the garage sale, a bruised copper apple.
There are racetracks and fields and now you.
How far must fruit fall just to seed truth?

At the garage sale, a bruised copper apple—
as if the grass flashes green. When I feel deja vu,
how far must fruit fall just to seed truth?
Of course there are horses everywhere.

*

Everyone Hates Flying Haibun

“Poetry: I, too, dislike it.”
—Marianne Moore

But what else am I supposed to do, when I am practically wearing an airplane’s wings, the tufts of clouds puffing up to greet me? I can’t even choke up a complaint about the pretzels—the tiny ones in a bag for a doll. Awww. I picture elves twisting the dough and in such a way have kneaded myself all the way to the North Pole. And just like Christmas—the truth is, I love it all, especially the parts I shouldn’t. Even the rage of a baby crying is woven in like how we’re knitted to our seats. Thinking Moore about it, aren’t we all a scarf—flying miles up in the air, desperate to pretend this isn’t spectacular despite the tassels trailing out behind us with golden thread?

                   a zigzag
                   through traffic—
                   poeming

*

Let Me Hold the Door For You

with both of my hands pressed on the glass—
your own hands too tied to clasp, the threat

of a door clapping closed right on your
only nose. I used to think time was a hinge.

That doors open and shut on the heels
of each second. As if I could simply grab

a rag and Windex my way through the
years. But even cracked glass can confuse

a cardinal, and I can’t stop opening all of these
windows. Sometimes, I forget to first pull

up the blinds, and the metal sails shuffle
around like timelines, smacking the frame.

I fly through. And out. And back in. And just like
the wind, time curls from the queues with no end—

*

KHD’s love of poetry first bloomed as a child. She memorized Robert Frost sitting on a tree stump and bathed in Edgar Allan Poe as an adolescent. While studying words at Florida State University, she played with chips and became a professional poker player. She’s passionate about the immense potential NFTs present for poetry, and enjoys helping onboard traditional poets primarily through Twitter (@Katie_Dozier). Her poetry has recently been published by Rattle, Frontier, and The Tickle. She maintains TheNFTPoetryGallery.com as a vehicle for showing the potential of CryptoPoetry, regularly speaks at NFT NYC conferences, and hosts “ThePoetrySpace_” weekly on Twitter.

Two Poems by Kip Knott

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Somebody Somewhere

           for Sam and Joel

Someday, when someone tells me
out of the blue that they love me,

somehow I’ll stop myself from turning
and walking away the way I sometimes do

when love threatens to blow apart my heart
with something too much for me to hold inside,

something like—but not exactly like—fullness,
something like an emptiness of emptiness,

something that I know we all deserve,
but something that far too many of us fear,

something that somebody somewhere
once told me was happiness.

*

When I Play Leonard Cohen the First Time for a Friend

Yeah, my friends are gone and my hair is gray
I ache in the places where I used to play . . . .
           — Leonard Cohen, “The Tower of Song”

She winces and grits her teeth. “Who is that?
His voice creeps me out!” she says, shaking
her head as if trying to cast out a nightmare.

She isn’t wrong. But she isn’t right, either.
Where she feels the unpleasantness that creepy
can cause, I feel the unease of someone

approaching the end of his life at the speed of death;
the unease of someone whose body has taken
over rather than be overtaken by its owner;

the unease reverberating like a cry behind every note
sung with a voice raw with knowing, raspy with regret,
yet somehow resolved to keep on singing

until every breath is gone and all that remains is
the long, slow, lingering fade out.

*

Kip Knott’s most recently full-length book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is available from Kelsay Books. A new poetry chapbook, Little Hiroshimas, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2024. You can follow him on IG at @kip.knott and read more of his work at http://www.kipknott.com.

If Found, Return to Store by Margie Duncan

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

If Found, Return to Store
-After Dean Young’s “New Restrictions”

It doesn’t matter that you earned
Employee of the Month twice in one year,

or that you’re the only Store Associate who knows
how to fix a wonky scanner on the fly.

It hardly matters about that time you were filling in
at the Service Counter and talked that guy into giving you

his fake gun, the one he pulled when the lottery machine was down
for almost 15 minutes, it doesn’t matter at all that you kept him busy

so the Manager had time to call the cops (and no one
even saw the guy smile at you while they led him out in cuffs).

It also doesn’t matter that you popped that unwashed grape
out of the little girl’s throat with a quick Heimlich in Produce

while her mother — big sister? — was screaming or maybe
crying, hard to tell over the speakers’ loud soft rock,

or the day you finally caught the serial Huggies thief
before she left the parking lot in her pearl-white Tesla.

It doesn’t matter, and not because they don’t know
about that ten-dollar bill you could hardly spare

from your pocket but added anyway to Register 6
when the bag lady who talks a lot and mostly to herself

didn’t have money for the Scooter Pies and Yoo-Hoo
in her gray hands, it doesn’t matter a bit, and you knew it,

you’re still not allowed to wheel that shopping cart home
to give your Yorkies, waiting for the end of your shift, a ride.

*

Margie Duncan lives in Kendall Park, New Jersey, with her husband, Brian, and two tuxedo cats. She recently retired from Princeton University and returned to writing poetry and looking out the window. She spends the rest of her time hiking in the woods and reading for pleasure. Her first published poem appeared recently in Thimble Literary Magazine.

Four Poems by William Palmer

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Dervish

Reaching for a small glass
of apricot juice, I first noticed
the tremble.

It stopped when I danced:
head tilted, right palm up, left palm down,
whirling round.

“Parkinson’s,” a doctor said.
I listened
and the sky turned lavender.

After a year,
a friend carved a cane for me
etched with phases of the moon.

When I walk with my cane
around the village, the tremble
disappears like a hummingbird.

*

After the Isolation

After the coughs that pulled
the insides out
of pumpkins, after
the three Paxlovid tablets
twice a day, the Z Pack,
the Prednisone,
after I can be
with my old throat
again as if in prayer,
I drive
to the market
and see forsythias
blooming—
their bright yellow stems reaching up and out
on both sides
of the road
all along the way

*

The Sound

When Lowell learned
he’d have a few more weeks,
likely, he asked me to come over.

We sat downstairs by the wood stove
and looked out at the steady waves
and the light gray sky.

He gave me a box
of his favorite lures
for lake trout and whitefish.

When Carolyn came down
and said she had to go to the store,
she leaned over and hugged Lowell—

I heard the sound of their wet kiss.

*

Pup

Trust in the Journey
was the pup’s name;
he’d be six pounds or so
his whole life, the seller said.

My wife and I tried calling him Trust
but the name felt engraved
on a building and loan.
We chose Ollie with its long e

trailing in the air—
like a kid sledding
down a hill of fresh snow
holding that note of glee.

He’s black and white
with a gray beard;
his face looks like a Van Gogh
self-portrait.

When he runs,
he skips,
swaying
his hips.

Sometimes at night
he’ll lick the inside
of my left ear
then disappear.

*

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in Braided Way, JAMA, J Journal, One Art, On the Seawall, Poetry East, and The Westchester Review. He lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

The Killdeer’s Cry by Joan Leotta

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Killdeer’s Cry

My neighbor’s empty lot,
grown over with
wild grasses, dandelions, clover,
was a draw for butterflies
bees, for unseen creatures
until the mowers came.
After they left, I saw her,
frantically skittering in circles
where her nest must have been.
I watched, listened
to her keening as she searched.
Her voice pierced my heart,
for I recognized her sorrow.
She was mourning chicks
lost with the nest.
As a mother who has
also lost a child, I joined my
tears to her cries.

*

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She performs tales of food, family, strong women. Internationally published as an essayist, poet, short story writer, and novelist, she’s a 2021 and 2022 Pushcart nominee, Best of the Net 2022 nominee, and 2022 runner-up in Robert Frost Competition. Her essays, poems, and fiction appear in Ekphrastic Review, Verse Visual, Verse Virtual, anti-heroin chic, Gargoyle, Active Muse, Silver Birch, Yellow Mama, Mystery Tribune, Ovunquesiamo, MacQueen’s Quinterly and others. Her poetry chapbooks are Languid Lusciousness with Lemon and Feathers on Stone.

The Unfolding of the Calyx by Nancy Sobanik

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The Unfolding of the Calyx

The buds have come,
first the beech then the aspen,
and catkin litter falls everywhere.
I pull it from the cowl
of the windshield,
wipe pollen off the glass;
the back of my sleeve yellow.

They’ll suddenly be gone in a week
as the crabgrass blades its way
through last year’s leaf mold,
parting like the Red Sea.
My own twisted sepals
are just beginning to unwind.

For four years,
a hurricane of death
flung my severed heart
onto stone strewn ground,
trampled the hollowed chambers
into a juiceless plum.

I contemplate the trees-
do they feel relief
at the end of battering
by unobstructed winter winds?
Do they hum a song
only they can hear
when the sap awakens
to flow like ice out on the river?

Trees will snap their leaves open
into green whispering fans.
I gather pale lemon daffodils
into a blue glass vase.
My fist that holds the flower
will unfold, palm open and up,
offering and receiving.
The blush of blood once more
will petal my cheeks.

*

Nancy Sobanik works as a Registered Nurse, is a poet who lives in Maine, and is active in the Maine Poet’s Society. Her poems have been curated by Triggerfish Critical Review, Sparks of Calliope, and upcoming in Verse-Virtual and the Maine Poet’s Society Stanza.

Communication by Martin Willitts Jr

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Communication

I never knew how stubborn my father was
until I tried to teach him sign language.

I know the universal sign for “stubborn”.
I fold my arms tight to my chest
and pout like a toddler.

To sign “refuse,” shrug,
open palms upwards.
It can also mean “I give up,”
or “I don’t know.”

I learned how to be stubborn from my father.

I persisted at trying, not wanting to quit.
The sign for “repetition” points
both index fingers at each other
which make small, tight circles.

People who don’t want to communicate
circle and don’t meet.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is a retired librarian. He 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).

Stacking Dishes at the Lipstick Hotel by Al Ortolani

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Stacking Dishes at the Lipstick Hotel

The head dishwasher smoked like a kid with a plan,
flicking ashes, picking tobacco
off his tongue, explaining
his next best job, how this
was nothing
compared to selling cars.

In the evening, after the kitchen closed,
we were left alone with supper’s
stock pots and room service trays.
We played a game with coffee cups,
pictured the women
who left lipstick
on the cups.
We judged
the color, the full lips.
We took liberties,
imagined one of them the call girl
rumored on the 5th floor.

We kept the water hot, scalding, wore
rubber gloves, scrubbed fast
with nylon bristles, polished
with steel wool. With the sink empty,
we cleaned the drain trap, smacked free
the beans and pork, the gristle into the trash.
We dried, stacked pots,
dishes, tumblers, coffee carafes.

Tomorrow needed a start fresh.
The cooks
arrived before the sun, maybe
as the call girl was closing her door
I owned a motorcycle.
Home in minutes. Studied algebra
to stay clear of Vietnam.

The head dishwasher waited

for the police to pick him up. He was
witness to something protected.
Some nights I waited with him.
He snuffed his cigarettes

in a coffee can, kept
his eye on the corner, the neon
Open
above the bar. He never talked
about the names he could name.
I could stack dishes, keep
my mouth shut. Happy
with a motorcycle that went
nowhere special.

*

Al Ortolani’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, poetrybay, New York Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. His most recent collections are The Taco Boat, released from New York Quarterly Books in 2022, and Swimming Shelter which was named a Kansas Notable Book for 2021 by the Kansas Library Association. Ortolani is the Manuscript Editor for Woodley Press in Topeka, Kansas, and has directed a memoir writing project for Vietnam veterans across Kansas in association with the Library of Congress and Humanities Kansas. He lives in the Kansas City area with his wife and Zen Buddhist dog, Stanley.

Two Poems by Clint Bowman

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Promise

The multiflora rose
by the back patio
is strangling
our lilac bush.

Ronnie, next door,
offered his Roundup—
but I told him,
“That stuff gives you cancer.”

Now I’m two feet deep
in the tangles,
and my white shirt
is slowly growing
red polka dots.

You gifted me this lilac
ten years ago for my birthday
with a card that read,
“Don’t let me die.”

I promised you I wouldn’t.

But I couldn’t save you
that night you huffed paint
and played with
your father’s pistol.

If I were there,
I would have told you,
“I’m keeping my promise.”

Like I am now,
crawling on my knees,
pulling weeds,
giving our lilac
my water.

*

Threads

Sometimes
I want to go back

to where the deer
don’t run in my presence,

and the frogs keep singing
as I stomp through the creek.

Back to where
closets are full

of shotguns—
locked and loaded,

and the old gas station
is run by a woman
who calls me baby
and takes the tax
off my bottles.

Where farmers
offer me cigarettes,
and even though
I don’t smoke,
I entertain the idea
over ramblings

about local roads
that stitch together
our kin—

threads so tightly knit,
all the heat stays in,
so those frogs
can’t stop singing,
and the deer have learned—
there’s nowhere to run.

*

Clint Bowman is a writer from Black Mountain, North Carolina. During the day, Clint works as a recreation coordinator leading hikes, river cleanups, and other outdoor programs throughout the Swannanoa Valley. In the evening, Clint facilitates the Dark City Poets Society- a free poetry group based out of the Black Mountain Library. More of Clint’s recent work has appeared in the Roanoke Review, Poetry South, and Louisiana Literature.

Politic by Michael Dwayne Smith

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Politic

Faced with being nailed to a cross, sure, you’ll bring
the money tomorrow— I’m in the wrong, you’ll say,
I’m not even listening, will come the reply but
you’re not listening, instead fixated on the sound
of a hammering future. Is love inconstant?
Kill him with his own gun. Is joy inconceivable?
Hang all hope from the scaffold. What kind of
opinion does the sun have, or a mutt, or some small
gathering of birds on a wire. You will pay your debt
with a chainsaw if you can get away with it.
You will keep your blade sharp. Pointless arguments
drift off, serene clouds of unreachable compromise,
as the grind of human supplication and mercilessness
sustains this unremitting tremble in the poisoned air.

*

Michael Dwayne Smith has work haunting many literary houses, including The Cortland Review, New World Writing, Third Wednesday, Heron Tree, Heavy Feather Review, and Chiron Review; he’s been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart and Best of the Net. A Professor Emeritus in Education and Educational Technology, he lives near a Mojave Desert ghost town with his family and rescued horses.

The Lucky Son by Sharon M. Carter

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The Lucky Son

First the war belonged
to my grandfather
before he left his ghost
in the trenches.
It clung to my father
returning home on leave—
death’s residues smothered
our pillows and sheets.
thinned my mother’s hair,
skin scuffed to confetti.

After discharge, he, the lucky son,
never imprisoned or wounded,
emerged broken by its shadow.
Born a child of that time
I inherited his story.
When it breathed, I breathed—
just as every child learns
to inhabit its parent’s myths.

*

Sharon M. Carter is a poet and visual artist originally from Lancashire, England. She lives on the Olympic Coast near Seattle. Her work has been published in magazines including Terra Nova, The Madrona Project, Pontoon, Ars Medica and the Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, anthology. Her poetry book, Quiver, was published last year.
www.sharonmcarter.com

Dear _, by Natalie Eleanor Patterson

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Dear _____,

I am no good / Goodness is not the point anymore / Holding on to things / Now that’s the point
                                    —Dorothea Lasky

You are the bloodstain on my neck & like a scar my body carries you everywhere. There are songs that sound like dirges & foods I cannot eat because, like me, they too have touched the wet edge of your teeth. I was the thing cleaved by your hard knife & I was the abscess of light falling over the wound from a star you could not see. I collect metaphors because I thought this was the only way I could talk about my body. I never told you that in the first week I knew you, I wrote I accept responsibility for the hurt you will do to me. & maybe if I never stop writing to you then nobody will hurt me that way again. If poetry is about holding on to things then I will be a fine poet after all. In me there’s a country on the verge of collapse & I’m about to discover where ruined girls go when the pleasure wolves have had their fill. Love, I’d like to say you left me lying on the killing floor, but really I saw the stun gun at my temple & set the slaughterhouse on fire. I needed to flush all the rabbits out of their holes. Love, I wrote you a story, but it’s about blood. Love, I wrote you a letter, but this isn’t it.

*

Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a poet, editor, and instructor from Atlanta, Georgia with a BA from Salem College. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured or forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, Hunger Mountain, CALYX, and elsewhere. She received awards in poetry from Salem College as well as Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations. She is Managing Editor of Jacar Press, an editor for One magazine, and a reader for the Julie Suk Award. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Oregon State University, where she serves as poetry editor of 45th Parallel and teaches creative writing.

UFOs in May by Marjorie Maddox

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

UFOs in May

May in Maine and either snow, mist,
or dandelion wisps hover above the lake,

shadow-follow a breeze chilly enough to pretend
March, phantom ice crackling below or maybe just

a loon rising, rising. But this is May in Maine,
and it could be swarms of no-see-‘ems gathering

for group think, hanging about a phantom Lakeshore Bar
relocated thirty feet above ripples not going anywhere

in this mid-season pause between hike and hunker down.
And this is May in Maine and it could be winter or summer,

the suddenly present sun tricking you once again
to head out into her best pretend weather of Welcome

to Beauty, to air you can hear with your whole body,
shores that recede into rugged, a month of black flies

beginning to migrate to your neck and ankles,
but not there yet; weeks of whether to keep wearing

the long sleeves and flannel or lounge in bright rays
with nothing but a foolish tourist T-shirt and Deep Woods

spray to save you. And it is May in Maine and you are so
deliriously content that you wave both hello and goodbye

to the snow, mist, or dandelion wisps out all morning
migrating above the lake as you walk out now to the deck

to greet them, welcome them no matter what
or in what form they are. As do they for you.

*

English Professor at Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 14 collections of poetry (most recently Begin with a Question [paracletepress.com] and the ekphrastic collections Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For [shantiarts.co] and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind + the prose collection What She Was Saying [amazon.com]; children’s books; an anthology on PA. www.marjoriemaddox.com [marjoriemaddox.com]

When Someone Dies, Make Potato Salad by Laura Tate

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When Someone Dies, Make Potato Salad

for my Aunt Isolde

Folks coming in for a funeral
need to eat, she’d say,
as small mountains of potato peels
grew, claiming territory across blue Formica.
She insisted on adding sliced hard boiled eggs,
and there was always discussion of onions,
how they make everything taste better.
I stayed on the outskirts, sometimes recruited
to chop the celery or to taste, once folded together
with two wooden spoons,
the final stage of what was never
just potato salad.
It was putting hands and minds to work,
a distraction from the grieving. It was
feeding the living while burying the dead.
Her second husband was a one-legged man
who loved sailboats and cats.
When he died she found another one-legged man
who did all the driving,
brought her glasses of brandy
in the middle of the night.
When those days arrived I hardly recognized her
and she hardly recognized me.
She would have liked her send off:
plates full, no hungry bellies,
children laughing.

*

Laura Tate’s poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Halfway Down the Stairs, Anti-Heroin Chic, Allegro Magazine, The Stray Branch, Sky Island Journal, and Arboreal Magazine. Her poem, “Requiem for a Young Boy,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. She was an elementary school reading specialist in rural central New York, working with many children in poverty. Now she’s a retired grandmother living in the northern Virginia/D.C. area with her writer husband and a small orange cat.

Felt Flowers by Kathy Kremins

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Felt Flowers

A 3000-piece puzzle left undone
on the coffee table for months
a ukulele played every day
for weeks now a doorstop
bouquet of felt flowers
green and peach, purple and pink
on my bookcase fading from sun
with life dust and dog hairs
a gathering of earthly delights.

Miscarriage hobbies, distractions litter
the house, discarded, but not forgotten.

The crafted arrangements now attract the child
who sings The Beatles’ songs, Let It Be
his favorite, rubs the fuzzy tulip to my face
asks if when the ice storm is over
can we go outside to find
the snowdrops “born yesterday.”

*

Kathy Kremins (she/her), born and raised in Newark, is a retired New Jersey public school teacher. She has two chapbooks of poems, Seamus & His Smalls (Two Key Customs, June 2023) and Undressing the World (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her first full-length book of poetry, The Curve of Things, will be published by CavanKerry Press in 2024. Recent poetry appears in When Women Speak Anthology, Soup Can Magazine, and Writers Resist. She is a member of the feminist collective, Write On! Poetry Babes.

My Vibrato by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

My Vibrato

My singing teacher says uncontrolled vibrato
is insecurity wearing a frilly blouse,
like the upspeak of a nervous student
peppering everything she says with kind of and you know.
He says commit to each note like you mean it,
and I agree, I want to make a pure tone
without apology or wavering,
or bleating like a nanny goat, but oh,
as I ascend past F and then G into the attic
of my upper register I feel things begin to throb
and not in a good way.
Here comes my vibrato
like a teetering pile of red Jell-O,
or a drunken ex-girlfriend at the wedding,
smeared lipstick and too much perfume.
And yes, I’m embarrassed to be wobbling around
like a little girl wearing her mother’s high heels,
but doesn’t everything on earth
vibrate with a mortal shudder?
Candle flickers, moonlight shivers the pond,
and even long-dead stars
pulsate in their inky firmament.
It’s only the angels who do not sweat or bleed,
whose pudenda are smooth as Barbie dolls,
whom you’ll find singing hosannas forever
each note steady as a laser beam,
never trembling or flinching.

*

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

In the Company of Silverfish by Amy Ralston Seife

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

In the Company of Silverfish

Our house is populated by horned
torpedoes of shimmering moonlight,

slippery commas that slither
into corners when I enter a room.

They nibble the silk of my routine,
gnaw holes in my concentration.

I’ve given up trying to disperse them.
When they appear, I settle into the ruined

sofa of myself, welcome them in.
Memories thrive in the darkness,

emerge in silence. I have become
lace, the holes of your absence

making beautiful the fabric
of what was once so ordinary.

*

Amy Ralston Seife is a poet and short story writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming
in Lumina, Inkwell, The Ekphrastic Review, Literary Mama, Quartet, MER Vox Folio, Indelible, Right Hand Pointing, The Five-Two, Plants & Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and Pushcart Prizes, and is the editor-in-chief of The Westchester Review.

Two Poems by Susan Zimmerman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

After the Diagnosis

Have questions? Ask me now.
Soon I’ll be working on
what day it is, what year,
hoping the baby learns my name
before I forget hers.

Apologies? Don’t wait.
I’m ready to forgive anything.
Time is running
through my hands.

Want the painting of pears,
the convex mirror from Venice?
Tell me now while
it means something.

Don’t save your praise for my funeral.
It’s my funeral now. Tell me.

*

Making Strange

The house changes. It is not yours anymore.
Tomorrow it may be yours again.

Who lives in this place?
you ask, like my aunt asked each time

we brought her back to the Home,
that shifting world.

People you ask for directions gaze through you,
ragtag old lady they directed only moments ago.

Who can you trust? How can you put yourself
in the hands of strangers, all

with the same face, the same voice?
No choice where every door is barred,

every corridor’s a maze.
Are you the strange one? Am I?

*

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.

Four Poems by Laura Ann Reed

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

How Triumph

She crawls across grass
to what unfolds golden among the green.
And becomes golden. Becomes silken.
Becomes petal, pistil, stamen. Becomes
the surprise of bitter on the tongue. Silent
but for random exclamations, she owns
the world. A few years later
from the back seat of an old Plymouth
she will cry out, flowers, pointing wildly
to the yellow mustard blooming
in an open field. Not knowing why
the triumph of her naming
is maybe also a kind of exile.

*

The Spell of It

Sometimes I think of the swing suspended
from a high limb and the child,
maybe five, who discovered transformation.
How her legs pumping were a kind of lulling.
Those movements trance-inducing.
The surrender of plummeting
low only to fling herself skyward. The spell of it.
The passage through the warm summer air
opening into a space where she could choose
to be a bird or visit the moon. She sings as if
the sky is listening.

*

Turning it Over

My father’s footprints, the safety
made by those shapes I stepped inside
as he led me to the water’s edge.
The polished bits of California jade
and carnelian placed in my open hand.
Pieces of rock I’ve kept locked away
long since I lost them. How his
dying would become another
stone I’d turn over and
over in my palm.

*

What Remains

That was the summer I lived in a plant-covered
house across the road from the ocean. The house
I remember is painted green and magenta
by the petals and leaves of a bougainvillea.
The vine climbs up to the second story
where I lie on a sagging mattress
reading a Life Magazine. I stare
at photographs of Norma Jean before
she became Marilyn Monroe. The sound
of gulls comes through the open window.
I can hear the surf pounding the stones
grinding down the sand into finer fragments.
I can hear everything changing into
something else.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

Residual by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Residual

My friend reminds me that we run
out of time, while the things we acquire –
that enormous roll of plastic wrap,
the multipack of whatever the 99 Cent store
had in stock, the forever stamps, all of it –
all the crap we accumulate, desired or not:
the bandages and toiletries, from hospital stays,
rehab finery, the things insurance cast
against our mortality, follow us home,
wanted or not. We paid for them,
consciously or in our delirium;
so they come back with us, in transparent bags,
labeled and contaminated for anyone
other than us. Waste not, want not
was the old decree and so they are stashed
under the bed or relegated to corners –
a reminder of that time in purgatory
when we did not know if our bodies
would recover enough, or go through that rot,
that decline into a state of “not” – we despaired
and sacrificed our dignity for a chance at what? –
a few more trips down the corridor, walker at hand,
the touch of a hand, one more chance to share,
to dare to love, to listen, soon to be outside of,
left at the curb of this conversation we call life.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, a photographer, and publishes an occasional anthology through Kingly Street Press. She is an assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Poetry publications include Rise Up Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Sky Island, and Minyan. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Betsy’s photos have been featured in RATTLE’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Spank the Carp, Praxis, and Redheaded Stepchild. She is the author of Alinea and co-author of In the Muddle of the Night with Alan Walowitz.

Fourth of July by Francine Rubin

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Fourth of July

Gun shots or firecrackers?
How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen
tells you to diffuse tantrums
by drawing rage,
attacking the page with color.
My children finally asleep,
I watch them on the monitor.
That sound again.
My chest a fist.
I grab a crayon.
“America, I am this mad,”
I whisper,
stabbing the sheet of paper
like bullets at a parade.

*

Francine Rubin is the author of the poetry chapbooks If You’re Talking to Me: Commuter Poems (dancing girl press), City Songs (Blue Lyra Press), and Geometries (Finishing Line Press). She is online at francinerubin.tumblr.com.

Two Poems by Sharon Whitehill

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GRADUATION DAY

On a golden June evening,
teens in dresses and suits
flaunt diplomas ribboned in red
from antennas and windows.

I am walking downtown
to visit my daughter in jail.

My firstborn, my treasure,
who dropped out of school,
failed to comply with probation,
fled to Miami to lie on the beach,
thinking, What can they do
to a girl of eighteen?

Sentenced to 30 days
on her return.

Now I am watching her cry,
and her bitter surprise
when, for the first time,
she sees me immune to her pain.
If those tears mean remorse,
as well as regret,
I am glad that she suffers.

My second visit’s the same:
her eyes swollen,
her face streaked with tears,
and no solace from me.
At least, in jail, she is safe from herself,
and from who-knows-what else.

No way to foresee her 21st birthday
at the fanciest restaurant in town,
no way to believe I would see her,
bibbed for a bucket of shellfish,
beaming at me across the table.

A moment, a pause,
a concordance.

*

SELF PITY

A downpour along the parade route,
the Scottville Clown Band

playing Sousa on his front porch
to delight his new family:

his daughter, my daughter (good friends),
and his lover from England.

Everyone in our small town
knows that he readied a room just for her

adorned with the ficus he took
when he broke up with me.

She is in, I am out,
a mere visitor now.

Slogging home in the rain
I weep in the bath before dinner with friends

who troop down to the harbor
for the fireworks I deplore.

I sit in candlelight on my screened porch,
my two doped-up dogs

still panting and shaking,
to wait out the explosions

that once caused the terrified husky
to claw her way over the fence.

When the air hangs heavy
with gunpowder brimstone,

the festive crowd streaming endlessly by,
I see myself sitting alone,

holding my glassy-eyed dogs:
a picture of misery I’m glad he can’t see.

*

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor from West Michigan now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. In addition to poems published in various literary magazines, her publications include two scholarly biographies, two memoirs, two poetry chapbooks, and a full collection of poems. Her chapbook, THIS SAD AND TENDER TIME, is due out winter 2024.

Two Poems by Bonnie Proudfoot

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the question is still the wind
                    (after Ada Limón)

and will branches hold or limbs fall
where they will and will outer branches
swirl in circles, shake like a skirt,
and then how hard will each blast
blow across the highest part of
the atmosphere, twirling
the treetops, and how much the
highest branches sway, whether
more or fewer leaves can buffer,
whether thin or thicker trunks can
bear the strain, and will we hear
that terrible sound, like drumming
and hoofbeats and howls of
a wounded creature, or the sharp
gunshot cracking of a thick trunk
or trunks splitting, then toppling,
crushing brush, raw wood gaping
and maybe it all depends on
whether roots have found
their way deep enough into
the earth or maybe it’s a mystery
whether substrate below topsoil
is shallow or deep, the ground below
the ground clay or silt or sand
and the question is still the wind
how lately it seems to blow
stronger and last longer,
and should these trees that you love
really be so close to your house
but what is the other option,
a bare lawn, every yard a golf
course, ride around in your electric
scooter, only a canvas top for shade?

*

Laminectomy

It was way worse for him than
it was for me, but pretty bad
either way. Pain is an idea
that I have to push out of my mind,
a force that has to be struggled with,
but I am used to compromising. He
flat out lost the battle. Shots in his
spine did not work, neither did pills,
he could barely sleep, barely sit,
barely walk. I never heard the word Lamin-
ectomy before. It is when a surgeon carves
tissue out of the spinal cord, to create
a wider space between backbone and nerve,
a slice so deep into the center of the spine
the cut looks like the aftermath of
a knife fight, like he’s the one who
tried to run away. He did not. I sat
in the waiting room of the hospital
watching a time-lapse video of a white-barked
tree as it changed from the green budding
of spring, to flowering, to fully flushed
and green-leaved, to foliage in bursts
of bronze and ruby, to swirly leaves
flying like birds off branches to
a leafless pale trunk. Five hours.
I wonder which stage he is in,
which stage I am in. A phone rings,
a nurse nods, and a surgeon’s voice
says things went well. No bending,
no lifting, no twisting, says
the discharge nurse. A week later,
we are home. His legs spasm,
they buckle under his
weight. He leans against
the bathroom sink. I clean this
soft flesh, careful to avoid staples,
I tape a bandage over the two lips
of the wound, hoping they will
clinch together.

*

Bonnie Proudfoot is the author of the poetry chapbook Household Gods, (2022, Sheila Na Gig), as well as a novel, Goshen Road, which was longlisted for the 2021 PEN Hemingway. She has received a Pushcart Nomination, and writes poems, fiction and essays, and has had work appear in anthologies as well as journals.

Having Aged Gradually As Trees Do by Ed Coletti

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Having Aged Gradually As Trees Do

I’ve begun telling people I’m old
doling activity sparingly as napkins
from small restaurant owners.

She wants nothing yet to do with aging
Fatigue the silt of activity
dawdles in moments wantonly spent

On my black leather couch
where black dog on my blue
jeans sleeps content.

Today’s fortune cookie my sacramental:
Act as if it were impossible to fall

That’s the way I first read it
through rapidly failing eyes

There a mountain me climbing
gravity-stuck/falling impossible

With my eyeglasses retrieved
its meaning diminishes to
impossible to fail,

Proof indisputable that metaphor
carries more of reality than
human experience easily imagines

Or according to Novalis,
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason

But what here of wounds when per Kerouac
no one falls off mountains and

Acting as though failure is impossible
each of us remains a rooted oak

Until such time as rivers from the sky
cascade down over and through us,
and roots rot, loosen and finally fail.

*

Ed Coletti is a poet widely published internationally. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and holds Masters Degrees in Creative Writing and in Business Management. Ed also is a painter and middling chess player. Previously, he served three years as an Army Officer, college English instructor, then as a Counselor and later as a Business Consultant. He has published a dozen books. Journals include ZYZZYVA, Volt, Spillway, North American Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. Ed curates the blog “No Money In Poetry.” https://edwardcolettispoetryblog.blogspot.com/

Riding Lesson by Michelle Menting

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Riding Lesson

Sit like a sack of potatoes. Your butt
is a pit is a stone fruit settled in its cup
of leather. Your knees turn in just slightly.
Your heels hang low just so. Show

compromise. You kick, she’ll kick. Think
of when you’re weighted with doubt,
or heavier: ownership. How obligation
can be the burden that mires you down

in the muck and manure of responsibility.
Translate work to duty to avoid any misstep
or be hobbled in permanence. Yes, take these
abstractions literally. Think of what it’s like

to cart such weight upon your back all at once,
knowing you shouldn’t gallop freely into low
hanging branches to brush that weight away.
Yes, I mean this literally too. Show trust:

let slack some rein. Don’t error on the bit
as a pestle in the mortar of the mouth.
You want to go, let go. Think ramifications.
A mare does, you know. Have empathy

for this horse that carries the full load of you.
Have respect. Learn to ride with rhythm,
with skill, this creature with the quiet strength
to doze while waking and brain capable

of plein air dreams of fescue grasses. Think
about that. Heavy are her hooves. Know this.
She does. She saddles her knowing
with every leadline trot, every bridled canter.

*

Michelle Menting is the author of Leaves Surface Like Skin (Terrapin Books) and two poetry chapbooks. Her most recent poems, lyric essays, flash fictions & nonfictions have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, Cincinnati Review, EcoTheo Review, SWWIM, About Place Journal, Tar River Poetry, and other places. She lives in rural Maine and teaches creative writing and poetry at the University of Southern Maine.

Three Poems by Connie Post

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Doing Dishes in the Dark

Maybe your eye is swollen shut
maybe there is no ice left
in the house.
maybe washing dishes
is easier than going to bed

maybe your lip is split
with all the sharp words
you held back

maybe your shadow self
gets the silverware cleaner
than the real you

maybe your brain
has tectonic plates
and you are the only one who knows
when they are shifting

nobody has to know
anything about you

nobody has to know
that you left
the grocery store today
because someone saw you
removing the skin
from an avocado
as if it were your own

nobody has to know
that you are insubordinate
to your own sorrows

nobody has to know
that your dreams
have a half life

all you have to say is
“I enjoy doing menial
tasks in the dark”

*

Cite your Source

I check Snopes all day
to see if my thoughts are real

I don’t know if
the dilapidated wall
in the periphery of my vision
is real
or just another place
to disappear

I check my sources
to see
if the barbed wire fence
surrounding
the front of the house
is an actual barrier
or an old shadow
I’ve always known

are my optical illusions
true or false
or just the ink spots
of a mangled life

are the words
coming out of my mouth
audible

am I falling inside
the mirage of my own language

am I
the placebo effect
of someone else’s life

*

The Descent

Your insomnia
is a maniac
who loves you
only when the moon
is diagnosed
as a hallucination

from down the hall
all the radio stations
play songs with lyrics
that are missing every
other word
this is the only time
they make sense

I want the arrogant sunrise
to forget how I’ve sinned
for the sake of my own syntax

I often pray
for the sun to bleed all over me
I won’t explain this
in my memoir later in life
so pay attention
to the sounds of smothering

pay attention to winter
when it leaves you
to burn your left-over fears
at the stake

and the flames
let them burn
let them burn your life
into the ashes
that descend upon you
appearing in vague patterns
like redemption

*

Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California (2005-2009). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Cutthroat, River Styx, Comstock Review, Slipstream, Spoon River Poetry Review, & Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her awards include the Crab Creek Poetry Prize, Liakoura Award and the Caesura Poetry Award. Her two full length collections “Floodwater” and “Prime Meridian” were published by Glass Lyre Press. Floodwater won the Lyrebird Award and Prime Meridian was named a distinguished favorite in the 2022 Independent Press Awards. Her most recent book “Between Twilight” was released by New York Quarterly Books in 2023.

For the First Girl I Loved by Helena Mesa

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For the First Girl I Loved

I lived across the street—across two streets.
The cemetery lay behind you, a field of stories

stretched behind a thin row of trees: there
this silence would mean a louder silence,

the sinking of stones, roots tracing their fists,
knuckling the soil. Someone could hover,

talk seemingly to no one—words meant
for someone else. You loved stories of

the past—pioneer girls doing the right thing
in flower nightgowns, a sister saved, a white lie

righted, and you always fell asleep to
whatever hands I whispered were reaching

through the window, the lie you never needed
to forgive. In the morning, you made instruments

for whatever surgery I imagined—a doll’s arm
scratched my stomach; a plastic fork

raked my shoulder, then spread salves.
Your fingers trailed the soft fold

of my elbow—skin and head
tingling, and then, a stillness

so unexpected I begged you not to stop.
And when the V of your collar dipped low,

the pink tip of your scar appeared
swollen, raised. I willed myself

not to finger the ridge
stitching your cracked chest shut.

*

Helena Mesa is the author of Where Land Is Indistinguishable from Sea (forthcoming from Terrapin books) and Horse Dance Underwater, and is an editor for Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The one time I wrote to Dear Abby by Sara Burant

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The one time I wrote to Dear Abby

I wish I could say I hadn’t been drinking
Bacardi & Coke with Mary Bartolone,
her mom at work at Numero Uno’s.
I wish I could say later that night I hadn’t
dragged a Christmas tree found on a curb
into Linda Nicholas’ basement where
the party was languishing, at least for me.
I wish I could say I’d felt playful, elvish,
but it was really a lonely awkwardness,
it was really wanting something, anything
to happen while my best friend Mary
made out with Paul DeStefanis whom
she would love unrequited for many years.
I wish I could say I commandeered
the stereo, putting on the album Wish
You Were Here carried at all times with
a spiral-bound notebook in my corduroy
satchel—I was always wishing someone
was there—was it Dear Abby? Dear reader
was it you? The tree was a marvelous,
disastrous sensation, not some dead thing,
not Charlie Brown’s pathetic little tree,
it was fragrant & shapely, strands of icicle-
tinsel still clinging to its boughs. After
being expelled from the party, I wish
I could say I took the tree down to the lake,
a small but meaningful journey, to listen
to waves slap & glug against the ice,
the wave-action molding ugly figures,
one of which turned to us, Rumpelstiltskin
exacting a promise it would be impossible
to keep in exchange for turning the tree
into someone I could wish for, even love.
I wish I could say the letter I wrote
to Dear Abby that night was coherent
& graceful & that she wrote back
on her personal stationery in a flowing
script, the start of a long correspondence
which made those years a little more ok.

*

Sara Burant’s poems and reviews have appeared in various journals, including Ruminate, Spillway, Quartet and Spry. The grateful recipient of a 2023 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she’s the author of a chapbook, Verge. She lives in Eugene with a red heeler named Penelope.

The Home I Abandoned by Bethany Jarmul

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The Home I Abandoned

I’d touch our home—
the red-brick house
at the end of a dead-end
street, with my heels,
our neighbor’s with my palms.

Scripture hanging on the walls.
My father’s fiddle atmospheric
in folk song, hymn.

A cracked alley, hills with oak,
maple, sycamore leaves loose.

The Appalachians as
makers, mothers, or
captors.

The girl who caught fireflies
in Tupperware, bare toes in moss,
marveled at hail clanging
against the tinny awning
over the porch.

*

Bethany Jarmul’s work has appeared in more than 50 literary magazines—including Salamander, Emerge Journal, Cease Cows—and been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Spiritual Literature. Her prose poem chapbook This Strange and Wonderful Existence is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press. Her nonfiction chapbook Take Me Home is forthcoming from Belle Point Press. She earned first place in Women on Writing’s Q2 2022 & Q2 2023 essay contests. Her essay “Intersections” earned the award for “Best in Show: Creative Nonfiction” for Winter 2023 from Inscape Journal. She lives near Pittsburgh. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on Twitter: @BethanyJarmul.

Two Poems by Corey D. Cook

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High School Yearbook Addendum #3

The flag is at half-mast
for my grandmother –
a well-known alumna.

And I am bleary-eyed
and inconsolable
in the hallway.

Absentmindedly carrying around
my Algebra 1 textbook –
its frivolous problems.

As I pass locker
after locker.

Each one a casket
waiting to be opened.

Waiting to be closed.

*

Visiting My Mentor and His Wife at the Nursing Home

He says, I am worried about Theresa.
She won’t eat.

And I find that her body
has become an anchor,
angular and unmoving,
at rest under a sea
of starched linen,
that her chin is raised,
that her eyes move
from one side of the room
to the other
as she clenches her teeth,
grimaces.

I speak to her,
reach out,
but she does not respond,
the pain all-consuming,
soul relinquishing.

The next time I visit…
her bed is empty.

I am all alone, he declares
as I sit by his side,
unsure of what to say,
what to do,
finally think to ask,
Remind me again how
the two of you met
and she comes back to us again.

*

Corey D. Cook’s sixth chapbook, Junk Drawer, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. His poems have recently appeared in *82 Review, Black Poppy Review, Duck Head Journal, Freshwater Literary Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, Nixes Mate Review, South Florida Poetry Review, and Spare Change News. Corey lives in East Thetford, Vermont.

Emergencies by Jo Angela Edwins

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Emergencies

In the hospital room
where no one can adjust
the broken blinds,
it’s hard to understand
the time of day.
My sister knows me
and little else.
She wants to borrow my phone
to call heaven, she says,
to tell our mother
how I won’t listen
to a thing she says.
She will not take the pills
from the nurse’s hand
or from mine.

On my way home I use
the phone I did not let her hold
to dial 911 when I see
a truck on the side of the road
in flames. The smoke reaches
into the afternoon blue
beyond the tops of the pines.
Even in my closed car
I can smell the chemicals burn.

People who know what to do,
or think they do,
are stopping. A woman runs
away from the truck. A man
runs toward it. I drive by slowly,
try to guess the distance
to the next marker. I tell the voice
on the other side of the line
what I’ve seen. He asks again
and again. Every time
I say the same thing, all the while
gunning my own engine,
putting distance between
myself and the growing fire
I can no longer see.

*

Jo Angela Edwins has had poems published in over 100 journals and anthologies and is a Pushcart Prize, Forward Prize, and Bettering American Poetry nominee. Her chapbook Play was published in 2016 (Finishing Line Press), and her collection A Dangerous Heaven is forthcoming this year from Gnashing Teeth Publishing. She is the poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina.

Condensed History, with Silver Pin by Lynne Knight

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Condensed History, with Silver Pin

He bought the tickets—he worked
in the city then. I was home for winter
break. I hadn’t seen him since September.

He was saving money to go to Europe
for a year. I was still a senior. In love
with someone else, I’d written to him

weeks before. He read the letter
in the lunchroom at work. But there
were the tickets, the plan. So we went

to the Garden, cheered for Michigan
(we lost). He left for Europe weeks later.
I married. He sent a silver pin

from Greece by way of congratulation.
Two decades later, two marriages each,
we found our way back to each other.

Doubts, still, but after many years,
marriage. I hardly ever wear the silver pin.
I’m afraid to lose it, it’s so delicate.

*

Lynne Knight is the author of six full-length poetry collections and six chapbooks. Her work has appeared many journals, including Poetry and The Southern Review. She lives on Vancouver Island.

A Former Patient Returns by Janet Ruth Heller

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A Former Patient Returns

Like an alumna to her college,
I return to your office
after five years
for more therapy,
check for changes
in your face, your voice,
your wardrobe.

You seem the same.
We two women
resume our journey.

But I stare at my own body, hear
my voice from a distance
like an echo across a canyon.

*

Janet Ruth Heller is the past president of the Michigan College English Association and a past president of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. She has a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. Heller has published four poetry books: Nature’s Olympics (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Exodus (WordTech Editions, 2014), Folk Concert: Changing Times (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012), and Traffic Stop (Finishing Line Press, 2011); a scholarly book, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (University of Missouri Press, 1990); a middle-grade fiction chapter book for children, The Passover Surprise (Fictive Press, 2015, 2016); and a fiction picture book for children about bullying, How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Arbordale, 2006; 7th edition 2022), that has won four national awards, including a Children’s Choices award. Her website is https://www.janetruthheller.com

Two Poems by John S. Eustis

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My First Obituary

Senior year, one of our high school teachers
gave us this assignment, to be finished
within the classroom hour: write your own
obituary—how you want your life recorded.

The idea must have been to get us thinking
about our place in the world beyond school.
Did we seek recognition, children, wealth?
How would we like to be remembered?

If only I had saved that one-page paper.
Surely it would prove illuminating now.
I don’t remember what I wrote that day,
but I do recall giving it a blaring headline.
“SENATOR EUSTIS ASSASSINATED!”

No doubt I was influenced by the murders
of King and the Kennedys in recent years.
Still, those three words reveal two conflicting
truths about my younger (and older) self.

First, that I possessed, at an early age,
a politician’s smoothness, a canny
ability to talk my way out of things
that might have gotten me in trouble,
coupled with a sense of civic-mindedness.

Second, that I knew I had a tendency
of being too blunt for my own good,
of saying the true but unpopular thing,
so much so that it would not be too
surprising if someday, somewhere,
someone would want to see me dead.

*

The Gift

Although my Uncle Jeff had been
briefly married a couple of times,
he never had children, and lived
alone in a trailer park not far from me.
He must have been there twenty years
before moving to a nearby nursing home.
I visited him now and then, in both places,
although we weren’t terribly close,
except geographically. I liked him.

After he moved, his trailer stood vacant
for a few years, and sometimes I would
go over there to check on the place
or to bring him some item that he wanted.
Eventually mice started finding their way in
and I had the unpleasant task of cleaning up
the mess they made and setting traps.

When my uncle passed, he left me the trailer
and all its contents in his will, something
I suppose I should have anticipated.
Of course I had no use for it, and now I had
the huge chore of getting rid of the thing.
Selling or even giving it away were options,
but it was old and not in very good shape.

Clearing out his belongings, I discovered
a wet spot under one of the bedroom walls,
coming from behind a small panel
where the hot-water heater was kept.
It looked like it’d been leaking for a long time.
Black mold had spread all through the alcove.
Now I was afraid to pass it on to anyone else,
for fear they would get sick and sue me.
At this point my wife and I started calling
my inheritance “the gift that keeps on taking.”

The original wheels of the trailer had sunk
into the ground, so hauling it away was not
an easy choice. In the end, I had to find
a demolition crew that could dismantle
and safely dispose of it, mold and all,
at a cost of many thousands of dollars.

Going through the trailer one final time,
clearing out drawers and cabinets,
Linda found a note my uncle
had scribbled to himself, tucked under
a salt shaker on the kitchen counter.
It contained just two words: “check leak.”

*

John S. Eustis is a retired librarian living in Virginia with his wife, after a long, quiet federal career. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Tar River Poetry, and other places.

Two Poems by Alan May

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MONSTER POEM

I moved the limp body
out of the road

to the frozen grass
felt the broken spine

of the stray who ate
our table scraps

I was a child
but still I knew

there was nothing
we could do

animals pass away
or go on moving

toward some new danger
I pet the orange cat

next to me now
one of many

here and gone
but all are the one

dark creature
I lay next to

dark body I left
mewing in the cold

*

THE ARTIST AT WORK

The morning ended as usual.
I painted with the color chartreuse.

I made a sandwich out of fire
and ate it as I was driving

around the room in an ancient golf cart.
My understudy, a retired

vice admiral, stared at me
as if I were an assassin

suddenly arriving
with a whole platoon of seahorses.

I stayed in the golf cart. I ate
my goddam sandwich made of flames.

*

Alan May holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama. He has published three books of poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Hollins Critic, The Idaho Review, New Orleans Review, Interim, The New York Quarterly, Willow Springs, The Laurel Review, and others. He hosts The Beat, a poetry podcast produced by Knox County Public Library. https://alan-may.com/

Res et Verba by Anthony DiMatteo

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Res et Verba

Words can say things quickly such as
your brother was murdered or you have
cancer or the old man down the block
just died. We’re lost beyond hope.

Could be good things said. Just married!
The storm went to sea. I hit the lotto.
But the point is what can last a lifetime
or change one can be stated in few words

though no words hazard all that’s involved
the way one can stand at canyon’s edge
a few miles deep and not hear a thing.
The fusion of near absolute silence

and immense space staggers the mind.
Just so two words can say more than one can
fathom, the earth itself tentative,
surrounded by infinity on all sides.

*

Anthony DiMatteo’s third poetry collection Secret Offices is just out. Why secret? One can’t take credit for an office dedicated to the pursuit of beauty and fairness as a poet must be. No one knows what one is doing in such a search, a prerequisite for it. His previous collection In Defense of Puppets explored the way we imagine things when we speak for others or they for us. A recent chapbook Fishing for Family charted the experience of language from infancy to senescence. Recent poems have appeared in The Connecticut River Review, Cimarron Review, The MacGuffin, North Dakota Quarterly and The Galway Review.