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Two Poems by Patricia Russo

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Invisible Man

My friend, who wasn’t at the memorial, called me.

“Do you remember that August it rained every day
and Billy spent all his afternoons
making life preservers for our imaginary friends
so they wouldn’t drown?”

I said I did, and she said,
“I think he’s home.
Not his last place, but the other one
that converted garage he painted lemon yellow,
do you know the place I mean?”

I said I did, and she said,
“My car got totaled, so I got to take the bus,
and now I’m walking past it twice a day
and I hear noises inside
like someone bumping into a table
or latching and unlatching a window.
There is a window, in the back wall,
do you remember?”

I said I did. And then I said,
It’s probably the wind
I’m sorry, but that’s what it is
I’ve been past the yellow garage, too
and no one lives there
No one can
They snagged the landlord for illegal conversion.

“That wouldn’t stop Billy and you know it,” she said.
“Not landlords or cops or locked doors
when he wanted to get something
or get something done. You know what I’m saying.”

I said I did, and then I said,
You haven’t seen him, though
because if you had, that would have been
the first thing you told me

“I don’t need to see him to know he’s there,”
she said, “I thought you would understand that.”

I said I did, but she sighed
and muttered something I didn’t hear
and said she’d talk to me later.

But I did understand.
That August of the interminable rain
No one had drowned, imaginary or not
And how do you know
the invisible man isn’t home?
It’s easier to blame the wind.

*

Time and Time Again

You need to keep it bandaged
until a scab forms

then treat it gentle
while the skin underneath
toughens to scar

this may take years
or centuries
or forever

but gentleness
does not have
an expiration date

*

Patricia Russo has had poems in Acropolis Journal, The Turning Leaf Journal, The Twin Bird Review, and Metachrosis Literary.

Two Poems by Judy Kaber

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Crow Cento*

The way a crow shook down on me,
such an awkward dance, these gentlemen
in their spottled-black coats, how peaceable.

Crows startle the clouds with grievances
never resolved, it seems. For lonely men to see
a crow fly in the thin blue sky, picking through trash

near the corral; that fool crow, understands the center
of the world as greasy scraps of fat caught at last
in their black beaks. Crow nailed them together.

How the crow dreams of you, flying the black flag
of himself. He tried ignoring the sea, but it was bigger
than death, just as it was bigger than life.

Each of them thought far more than he uttered.

*Lines from: Ted Hughes, Judith Barrington, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, John Clare, Vachel Lindsay

*

Duplex: Slippage

I am most at home on my own.
My heart moves in constant give and take.

         I give and take, keep more than I dish out.
         So many dishes I’ve dropped have broken.

Broken dishes dropped, cry out.
Harsh, rough edges. Bowl emptied

         into a harsh, empty world.
         When there’s no one to spread the glue,

cracks spread. Nothing holds together.
My first husband took my son away.

         My first husband took my heart away
         on the back of a Honda motorcycle.

Back and back, the growl of the bike.
I am most at home on my own.

*

Judy Kaber is the author of three chapbooks, most recently, A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, Poet Lore, Hunger Mountain, Comstock Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her poem, “Sword Swallowing Lessons,” was featured on “The Slowdown.” Judy won the 2021 and 2023 Maine Poetry Contest. She received a Maine Literary Award in 2024. Her book, Landscape With Rocks, Sky, Nails, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2025. She is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Maine (2021-2023).

Four Poems by James King

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Halfhearted

            After Ada Limón
            For James

It happened, didn’t it? A human I knew
announced dead on the internet. He had my name,
too. A year creeps at the speed of a year
and it’s been so many since I loved him
I can only grieve half-heartedly.
I picture the heart in two halves
on a plastic cutting board, hollow as a bell pepper.
The heart with little white pips of feeling, extracted
cleanly with an expert knife. That knife’s this poem—
that knife’s the world. They say
the brain is in halves, too—uneven halves,
that whichever hemisphere contains your thoughts
contains your thoughts, designates you—
artist or engineer. Does the heart work
like that, too? Do the right-hearted
mourn in watercolor? Do the left-hearted
love like Pomodoro? This heart is reading
all the latest scientific studies, papers and names
strewn along the ribcage’s hardwood floor.
It’s been cutting its thumbs on every corner.
This heart wants to know itself. It wants to know
which half it should remember him by.

*

Controlled Burn

            “Massive wildfire burning at NC coast after ‘controlled burn’ goes out of control”
                        —FOX8 News: June 16th, 2023

From a ten-dollar boat
in the middle of the lake,
I see the sky turn hot,
plural, gray, let soft
white flecks land upon me,
the weight of an eyelash.
This flame does not rage.
This flame has only rediscovered
hunger, sucked the pines
like chicken bones.
It’s abandoned the usual ritual,
swelled its borders five times farther
than the firemen had planned for
and kept on growing, its own
small nation of ruin.

Whether we know it or not
we live there. I was not supposed to go out
today—it’s on the loose,
they say, like one would talk
about a criminal—but
I followed the ash, floating
like a cartoon character
toward fresh pie on a windowsill.
I must have lost control, myself,
but you can’t get this shit at home.
I drift, dust coats the water’s surface
like a forgotten thing.
If the flame does not care for me
I will not care for the flame.
I’ll breathe, control the smoke.
I’ll grip my paddle, become
muscle. I won’t wait
to eat up all this world.
I’ll burn my tongue on it.

*

To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self on My Twenty-Fifth Birthday

To you, who’s passed, ghost
of a lightbulb after it’s just gone out—
you will never see snow again.
Don’t be sad. There are some good things
that will come out of this.
This is that time of life when
there’s no greater gift
than having your teeth cleaned
by a gentle hygienist, roots
be damned. This is the year
when you find out
grapefruit can kill you,
with the drugs you’re on, and
what a life. Now I am at last
complete and singular, now that I am done
with the revisions of
my past, you may ask me
anything you like. This passive
curiosity, a chain on the arms
of my glasses—I traded my fear for it.
The color of the sky
is the symptom
you always thought it was.
Two days ago, when
you saw a kid with his head under
the wheel of a truck,
not moving, his friends
craned like ibises into their phones—
despite what you might think,
that kid was never you.
You are the one that drove away.
Will I ever get to stay
somewhere, you ask—yes,
you did once. Your whole life.
That was a bad house
in a good neighborhood, oozing
with wood ants and moss, rock walls
that snaked the woods
like centuries old-spines.
There is one inside your back
which explains all your stiffness
and pain, and a creaky empty house
in your head which explains
your general vacancy. Actually,
I lied with what I said before—
you are not so empty.
And it was a good house.

*

In the Carnivorous Plant Garden

Your new lover leads the way,
past knee-tickling ferns to where
the whole point of it is. You

almost don’t see the flytraps until she pulls back
the strands of thick grass, showing you
their tiny mouths, scarlet coin-purses.

Flytrap flowering is supplemental.
They bite but three times in a life—
all the rest anticipation. You don’t know yet

you will only make love on two more afternoons.
You just know the shorts she wears are navy-blue
and that she somehow loves the pitcher plants,

their mouths pimpled in sapphire flies.
It’s the end of season and so
the biggest ones are dying, crinkling,

tearing brown, papery holes (is this
what it will be like?) The younger ones,
purple, veined with white, still grow.

Five steps ahead, she says something
you cannot hear over the song
of their blood-colored flutes.

*

James King is a poet from New Hampshire. He holds an MFA from UNCW, and his poems have appeared in Exposition Review, Bear Review, The Shore, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. Find him online at jamesedwardking.net.

ONE ART’s 2025 Best of the Net Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2025 Best of the Net Nominations

Tina Barry – Because I was Lonely

James Diaz – Once More, Into The Light

Callie Little – Headstone

Tamara Madison – Letter to Earth

B. Lynne Zika – Truce

Jane Zwart – Two Points Define a Line

*

Congratulations to all our nominees!

*

More information about Best of the Net here.

Two Poems by Stefanie Leigh

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The Stilling of Movement

After your class ended, and all the dancers bled
into gossip, fouettés, stretches,
and Band-Aids, you sauntered over to the corner,
lifted my fingertips and pulled, so my hips slid
further, further, further over
the box of my pointe shoe, and I hovered

over an abyss. My back
leg extended long, high, quivering. If you let
go, I would fall. So, your words
held my waist like a corset and sweat
pooled at my neck as I gulped down the echo
of the now-empty studio—

How eighty dancers evaporated—my mind
and eyes laid down on the Marley. I lowered
my leg, came off pointe, and you released
my hand, but not my presence, and my knees
knocked together beneath your breathing
and I wondered what else you expected me to do.

*

My Therapist Said, No Amount of Healing Will Make a Toxic Environment Safe

Sixteen years after leaving my ballet career—my soul
and bones no longer bleeding—I was back at the barre

three times, then four, then five times a week, angled in,
balancing in passé. Now forty, my chest eventually

remembered how to stack above my pelvis, arms
extended, my left ankle anchoring me to the Marley.

I was perfectly still, the piano pedaling through my
intestines, when a fog I didn’t know was covering

my gaze dissipated. I breathed forward,
not even an inch, expanded from the inside, into

a world I had only ever watched from behind
a scrim. After barre, one of the elderly ladies came over,

Dear, you always look gorgeous, but something
is different. Like you have a full outline—for the first time.

*

Stefanie Leigh is a poet and ballet dancer based in Toronto. She was a dancer with American Ballet Theatre and is currently working on her first poetry collection, Swan Arms. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rust & Moth, SWWIM, Frozen Sea, Thimble Lit and elsewhere.

Coming of Age by Matt Escott

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Coming of Age

I was twelve when my friend started lifting weights
Building strength to fight his dad
A closed fist at home inside a chasm
Of bone, newly formed
By shifting plates moved by metronome
Spasms, olympic anchors
Weighing him to a river floor.

We’d stand in front of the fridge, primed
Like mice waiting for the snap
Of singing floorboards
Me spotting him cardboard reps –
Strong bones he’d say and grin –
His pinched palms rubbing not
Muscle aches but the phantom pains
Of future breaks
He couldn’t escape
Even when fleeing his own party early,
Flush with birthday money to buy new fishing gear
The aberdeen he’d later dig out of his palm
His father looking on, clean and angry for it
The pint glass only half filled with milk
His son stole like fire from a mountain.

*

Matt Escott lives in Toronto with his wife and 5 year old twins. For the past 10 years he has worked with youth experiencing homelessness, and is currently developing a mentorship program for youth in foster care.

What We Carried by Dianna MacKinnon Henning

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What We Carried

We were two sisters
hefting pails of brook water,
trucking them back to camp,

both of us barefoot,
water swelling over the pail’s rim,
me fighting for an even keel

or all’s lost, one side heavier,
dare I say my sister’s side
since she was shorter

and gravity being gravity,
the pail tilted her way
water sloshing her feet.

How many other things
had she carried, that I,
at the time, hadn’t a clue?

Her eyes, sorrow eyes,
spare as sand blown bird tracks.
Not once did she confide

how our drunken father
plied her legs apart, how
she cried long into the night.

Months later, reading her diary
after she left, I divorced Father,
abandoned home, and did

what any reasonable daughter
would do. I chronicled our childhood,
told how he forced my mouth shut,

warning, “Don’t say anything.”

*

Dianna MacKinnon Henning taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several California Arts Council grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program and has run The Thompson Peak Writers’ Workshop in Lassen County. Publications, in part: Poet News, Sacramento; Worth More Standing, Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees; Voices; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Artemis Journal, 2021 & 2022, 2023; The Adirondack Review; Memoir Magazine; The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester; Pacific Poetry and New American Writing. 2021 Nomination by The Adirondack Review for a Pushcart Prize. MFA in Writing ’89, Vermont College.

HOW TO BECOME A MOTHER WHILE FALLING OFF A BUILDING by Carlin Katz

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HOW TO BECOME A MOTHER WHILE FALLING OFF A BUILDING

Accept that you are both falling. Understand neither of you will survive. Spit out the sweetness of your life. Hold his head against your breast. Remember when he was pulled from under your ribs. Recall the gasp—the wide-eyed uncoupling of what was once whole. Feel the cold air strip you of your selfishness. Rotate your body so you will go first. Hold him above your head, your heart. Hold him away from the ground which is coming closer and closer. Preserve him, as long as you can. Now, imagine him without a mother, if even for a split second. Feel the unforgivable lurch of that. Refuse to abandon him. Twist your body again, more difficult this time against so much gravity, so that he lands first. Be willing to endure this loss. Smile at him. Let the last thing he sees be his mother’s face: whole, and beautiful, and his.

*

Carlin Katz (she/her) is an animist, student herbalist and mother living with her family on traditional Chinook land in Washington State. Her non-fiction is forthcoming in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.

Two Poems by Robin Wright

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A Lovely Evening for a Dance

After Cypresses by Vincent van Gogh

The Cypresses stand in line,
greenery fluffed, spines straight,
wait for soft clouds to envelope.
The pinks and blues swirl
towards them. The grass below
sways to the wind’s whispers.
No one left without a partner,
the dance floor full of grace
and gratitude.

*

Watching Over It

After Mount Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne

The snow-capped mountain transforms
into the lined face of an old man,
right eye hides in shadow,
left eye watches the land, trees,
and house tucked into greenery,
trapped as if a child not allowed
to leave. A serpent head spews
from the old man’s mouth,
a guard to keep the house in place.
The old man’s arm tattooed
with the colors of disobedience,
blue for submersion, pink
for blood diluted but not gone.

*

Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, ONE ART, Loch Raven Review, Panoply, Rat’s Ass Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, Spank the Carp, The New Verse News, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best New Poets 2024 nominee. Her first chapbook, Ready or Not, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.

Four strong winds by Steven Deutsch

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Four strong winds

swirl the gathering clouds
like vapors
from a witch’s cauldron.

The road is out, car stuck
in a forest of hemlock
bordering West Virginia.

And as the moonlight
and starlight go out
under the thickening clouds,

I question my leaving—
although we talked of it
so many times before.

Tempest tomorrow
but tonight will be
the blackest

night of a black year.
No light from the sky
can pierce the clouds

and the forest
darker than night.
I try my guitar for comfort—

but there is no comfort
in the simple notes
that hang heavy in the swollen air.

How fine and simple
we were once.
How our summer stole by.

*

Steven Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and was the first poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum, helping to create Stanza, a room dedicated to poetry. His Chapbook, Perhaps You Can, was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full-length books, Persistence of Memory and Going, Going, Gone, and Slipping Away were published by Kelsay. In 2022, his full-length book, Brooklyn, was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press. Seven Mountains will be published this summer.

Bandstand by Linda Laderman

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Bandstand

I loved the after-school quiet in our apartment. No one to tell
me what to do or watch. I’d find my mother’s Camels, light up
and turn on American Bandstand. Dick Clark was my touchstone.
There, in black and white, I pictured my curly brown hair straight
and blonde, my body, thin and lithe, like the girls called regulars.
I coveted their sweaters, some with bedazzled Peter Pan collars,
their shirts trimly tucked inside their pleated plaid skirts. I had power
when Bandstand was on. I’d dance the Pony or the Twist, and dream
the boy with the Elvis hair picked me to join him on the dance floor.
One afternoon Dion was on the show. He sang his hit, Run Around Sue.
I spread my arms, danced and spun. It was just me, Dick, and Dion.
In that minute, I was a skinny rich girl from Philly, a Bandstand regular,
living my life as if I had all the time in the world to figure it out.

*

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. A former college instructor and journalist, her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Rats Ass Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, Action-Spectacle, Scapegoat Review, Rust & Moth, The Jewish Writing Project, Rise Up Review, Adanna Literary Journal, and MER. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online here. Find her at lindaladerman.com.

ELEGY FOR A BASSOONIST by Jane McKinley

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ELEGY FOR A BASSOONIST

for J. B. (June 3, 1952 – June 4, 2004)

I woke up with your number on my tongue,
still dreaming, fingers reaching for a phone.
Some contractor had needed a bassoon—
Rameau’s Les Indes galantes. And then it stung
me, you were dead, had died while fairy roses
bloomed by your back door. You’d blown out candles
hours before, left jobs to colleagues—Handel’s
Fireworks, a Rite of Spring—loath to expose
how sick you were. You’d wished to fade away
on your own terms, had hoped to spare us yet
another death. Last night I heard the fourth
Bach suite and felt regret—sassy bourrée
with your part rumbling down below. I’ll bet
it’s swell to hobnob with the reed god at his court.

*

Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble. She is the author of Vanitas (Texas Tech University Press, 2011), which won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize, and Mudman, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, ONE ART, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In 2023 she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Two Poems by Kim Addonizio

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Upstate

Nature’s a beautiful bitch.
Nightshade along the Hudson & in

an old stone house the floorboards
warp with nostalgia.

I have friends with hearts that stutter,
one going slowly blind.

Nature says Love me
or don’t, I don’t care.

Woods full of deer ticks & felled
trees from last year’s ice storm.

Poppies emblazoning a field.
Bean-sized shadow on an x-ray.

Deep red, & flowering—
Slut. Slit. Opening

& blackening the day.

*

Aria Di Sorbetto

Welcome to the abattoir.
The opera is ending soon.
Get a taste of this raspberry tart
before the bad odor starts.
We’ll all get our ears pierced, then burst into tears.
I just want to take off this fucking bra
and stare drunkenly at the shining Mediterranean.
Don wants to come back as a whale, but careful
what you wish for: you might find yourself entangled
in old fishing gear, strangled by a crab trap,
dragging your enormous, exhausted heart for years
until you succumb. Sort of like the human you already are.
Missing the gelato in that little Italian village.
Ah, ah, opera! It sounds like a whale that swallowed a musical
and I loathe musicals. But that time Josh suddenly
broke into song in the Eighth Avenue subway
beside the bronze Otterness sculptures—the workers
and politicians, the alligator swallowing a businessman
whose head is a moneybag—a thin shiv of joy
slipped under my ribs and undid me, and Aya took my hand
as the train shrieked in and yes, if you ask me yes, oh yes,
I will.

*

Kim Addonizio is the author of over a dozen books of prose and poetry. Her latest poetry collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton, September 2024). Her memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress, was published by Penguin. Addonizio’s work has been translated into several languages and honored with fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, and her collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Oakland, CA and teaches poetry workshops on Zoom. kimaddonizio.com

Drinking Alone at a Bed & Breakfast on the Eve Before My Wedding by Beverly Hennessy Summa

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Drinking Alone at a Bed & Breakfast
on the Eve Before My Wedding

The eve before my wedding,
and I sit alone on this canopied bed.

Tomorrow my new husband will lie here next to me.
We’ll besottedly whisper about the crudité
& crabcakes, we didn’t get to eat,

the speech that read more like a eulogy
& how his Uncle Dan drank too much again.
I pour a glass of wine—
wish for something stronger.

It was eight months ago when I found this bed & breakfast.
Historic, charming old structure, temperate, refined—
everything I’m not.

Handsomely traditional
from the delicate crocheted bedspread,
to the his & hers monogrammed robes.

It must be right I remember thinking
as I entered the foyer. I felt myself recoil
like a heretic entering a Mass.

From the closet door my silk, white wedding dress
hangs like a headless bride. The bodice stuffed
with the crumpled fronds of pale, pink, tissue paper.

The dress knows who I am, I think, but will do its best.
I refill the wine glass; raise it to a toast.

*

Beverly Hennessy Summa’s poems have appeared in the New York Quarterly, Rust + Moth, Chiron Review, Book of Matches, Nerve Cowboy, Anti-Heroin Chic, Trailer Park Quarterly, Hobo Camp Review, Buddhist Poetry Review and elsewhere. Beverly grew up in New York and New Hampshire and currently lives in the Lower Hudson Valley with her family. She can be found at beverlyhennessysumma.com.

Three Poems by Gabby Gilliam

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I Don’t Usually Believe in Omens

but last night the hermit crab
you bought for Oskar

abandoned his shell to drag
his naked body into the sand.

Indecision and inaction fill
the silence of this shrinking house

my steady pulse whooshing
like a trapped ocean in my ear.

I wonder if pet hermit crabs still hear
waves echo in their store-bought shells

or if that gentle rush is absent––maybe
that’s why ours was never content

constantly swapping shells until the night
it chose to expose itself––the night before

the police called to tell us you too
had cast off your outer husk

––let your energy and stardust
escape into the open air.

We Googled what to do with a shell-less crab
and it said to wait. They may burrow and molt

or slowly rot like ours did before we buried it
beneath the tree in our backyard.

*

Nothing Wasted

My grandmother would eat
the ugliest fruit first. “They grow
from the same roots,” she’d say
and she’d shake them
from the same branches.

She’d set the normal fruit
aside for me and my sisters
apples, peaches, apricots, plums.
She collected their mangled brethren

hidden explosions of flavor
more delectable to her because
they should have been undesirable
sweet flesh and juice buried
beneath their malformed skins.

*

It Doesn’t Go Down Easy

Truth settles into my jaw like stone
and my teeth grind it into pieces
almost small enough to swallow

which causes my eyes to water
when I force each bite down
like the gel capsules I had to take

for asthma flare-ups, but choked on
and spit onto the kitchen floor
so my parents filled a spoon with water

and emptied the pill contents––
tiny white balls that would trick
my body into breathing again––

that left me with a bitter tongue
and lungs still gasping for air.

*

Gabby Gilliam is a writer, an aspiring teacher, and a mom. She lives in the DC metro area with her husband and son. She is a founding member of the Old Scratch Short Form Collective. Her first chapbook, No Ocean Spit Me Out, was released in June 2024 from Old Scratch Press. Her poetry and fiction has appeared online and in multiple anthologies. You can find her online at gabbygilliam.com.

Circumference by Kip Knott

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Circumference

Night consists of circles
that together add up to nothing
but the absence of sunlight.

The circle that holds the most
nothingness is called a new moon;
circles that hold the least are called stars.

I used to take night for granted,
like air, and didn’t notice
all the absences. As I’ve grown older,

I’ve learned to accept those absences
like ghost limbs that need scratching.
I’ve learned to begin each day

with three blinks of my eyes to clear
the nightmares that circle my mind
and one deep breath to remember the air.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His writing has recently appeared in Best Microfiction 2024 and The Wigleaf Top 50. His most recent book of poetry, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.

Two Poems by Charles K. Carter

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The Impact of Gravity

Rumor has it that in the 1950s,
two couples stopped here after prom
to have a couple of drinks.
They passed the brown-bagged bottle
and they danced to the staticy car radio,
blasting race music from the city across the Ohio
– that music the school board made sure
wasn’t allowed to be played at school dances.
A truck going too fast down the hill didn’t have time to stop
and struck all four teenagers dead in their dancing shoes.


As teenagers, we drove out to Hatch Road,
took a left turn, left turn, right,
and then six miles down the curvy gravel
we stopped at the unnamed narrow bridge.

If you put the car in neutral, B said,
the ghosts of those kids
will push the car up the hill
and off to the side of the road,
saving you from the possibility of
reliving their tragedy.

Bullshit, I said, always the naysayer,
always the Dana Scully in our group.

B dropped the car in neutral,
lifted his hands in the air
as if he were submitting to a man with a gun.

Your feet, I pointed.

He brought his feet up
and rested them on top of the dash.

After a few tense moments,
the car slowly crept backwards,
up the hill
and off to the side of the road,
where it came to a stop.

We tested it out with the car facing up the hill – same results.
I got behind the wheel – same results.
M said she came out once by herself.
We all came back a week later.
A month later.
Three years later – same results.


And I admit defeat in the limits of my own mind.
I don’t know how a car could defy the weight of gravity to climb up a hill.

I guess there are forces out there I just don’t understand
and they aren’t all malevolent.
There are gentle hands to guide us.
There is unnamed goodness in this world.

And I want those gentle hands to guide me now
because my own hands are unreliable.
They are calloused and rough
and always reaching for the sharp edge of oblivion.

*

The Gift

He could sing from within the womb.
No joke. His mother would tilt her head back
and open her mouth like the horn of an old phonograph
and an angelic voice would ring out from deep within.
They say when he was born, he entered the light of our world
with a fortissimo Hallelujah!

A singing baby turned into a singing toddler
and his talents afforded his family fortune and attention
but this was merely his fifteen minutes of fame.
As his frame grew taller and lankier,
the novelty of his appeal faded and they all worried
about what would happen when puberty reared its ugly head his way.
But his voice was not shredded by adolescence,
it quickly evolved into a tender tenor, then a boisterous baritone,
an angel still locked away somewhere in the cage of his voice box.

In time, he became overwhelmed by the attention
so he moved to the big city to blend in
but his neighbors, who didn’t even know his name, kept their windows open
all day and all night, through all seasons, even in the dead of winter,
just to hear his song.

*

Charles K. Carter is a queer poet who lives in Oregon. They are the author of If the World Were a Quilt (Kelsay Books) and Read My Lips (David Robert Books). Carter is the creator of the video podcast series #SundaySweetChats. He can be found on Instagram and Twitter @CKCpoetry.

Two Poems by Tom Snarsky

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Fast Talk

I heard
a beautiful bird
while I was loading
the trash into
the back of the truck

as I turned
to find the bird
whose song sounded
like nothing I
had ever heard

I realized
it was my
zipper against
the metal
of the wheel well

oh well
will you sing it again

*

Death, or the Chromaticism of Elliott Smith

There’s always the Bitter Tears
of Petra von Kant problem: we want them
to think of us, more than anything

else, but if they do—if they add even a layer
of aragonite to the sandgrain idea
they might care back,

it’s bags packed & off
wordless into the night. An adjudicator
moon stays for a few

daylight hours, just to hear
both sides. You can’t hide
a horse in a closet, the mother

of a little girl quotes her on TikTok
as saying. This is the reason
she gives for why her horse cannot be

the school pet, in the event her class
actually needs to use that
locked-away bucket, their hands

full of things to throw: I wouldn’t be able to
protect him. I don’t want him
to die. Why

lie to a child
when the truth is right there,
all its collisions

& day-drinking insurance
assessors, pretending they remember
what to do. In “Alameda” Elliott sings

Shuffling your deck of trick cards
Over everyone,
Over, like the verb was Lord

or Hang rather than Shuffle—
a random act
you can lie about, like anything.
*

Tom Snarsky is the author of the chapbooks Threshold (Another New Calligraphy) & Complete Sentences (Broken Sleep Books), as well as the full-length collections Light-Up Swan & Reclaimed Water (both from Ornithopter Press). His book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in 2025, and the title poem is available to read on Metatron Press’s GLYPHÖRIA platform. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats. You can find him on Twitter, Instagram, & Bluesky @tomsnarsky.

Glosa #3 by Peggy Liuzzi

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Glosa #3

          Mother, be with me.
          Today on your birthday
          I am older than you were
          When you died

                    by May Sarton, “August Third”

Today I made a plea – Mother, be with me,
not like you used to be, but transformed
into the mother I needed and wanted,
a mother who loved me whole-hearted.

Today on your birthday I remember
how disappointment haunted you,
how the things you wanted slipped
away and left you counting losses.

I am older now than you will
ever be. I’ve had time to heal
the bruises that came with loving
a mother worn thin by sadness.

When you died, I couldn’t grieve
you, couldn’t embrace your brokenness.
I wrapped and stored my memories,
delicate as bone china cups, until

I opened them today
on your birthday.

*

Peggy Liuzzi lives in Syracuse, NY where she walks her beagle Maizie, practices Tai Chi and finds community and support at the YMCA Downtown Writers Center. Peggy’s poems have appeared in Stone Canoe, Nine Mile Magazine, Slippery Elm Literary Journal, Gyroscope Review and other publications.

I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?” by Karen Paul Holmes

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?”

He answers I am dying.
I can’t imagine typing I am dying,
like stating I’m finishing War and Peace.

Calendars full of treatments, ending.
Two surgeries nearly taking him.
He told me last year he had three years left—
maybe—but was fighting to see
his last child graduate.

Today, he says his last reading next month—
in a state where he used to live—
is a chance to say goodbye.
He lists all he’s grateful for. A big list,
and it comforts me. I’m a faraway friend,
and this dying man is comforting me.
I want to ask Has knowing been better
than not knowing?

It seems unbearably real to say
I am dying. To be on the other side of hope,
no longer seeing past the earth’s edge.
Do we all have that kind of brave in us?

Or is there still hope, but of a different kind?
A hope for the light at a shaded path’s end—
like those near-death have seen.
A glimpse of that shining.
That beautiful beaconing.

*

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her two books are: No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot. Poetry credits include The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, and Plume.

Practice by Aubrey Brady

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Practice

I practice grief every day

as if
pulling all these possibilities
lifting layers of loss
shuffling through frantically
scribbled sheaves

as if I can stop whatever tragedy I can predict

because
while I slipped my feet into
sands warmth flooding
my being with gold
listening to largeness
of water
coming and going
I also let slip
the memory of grandaddy’s
fading health
how he was slowly
disappearing into cold
blue beds and white walls
how
when i turned
he was gone

and because
when I am pulling belts
around fragile bodies
propelling us towards distances
I know
that if I can prepare myself
for a car’s swerve
the rush of metal that can slice
through bone
and all that’s dear
it will not
or has not

and because
each joy
turns eventually
tragedy launching itself
into every tender moment
spinning soft wool
into spikes

because
the body always betrays
either through its plush fragility
or brain bleeds
or heart’s assault
or cells turned rogue
or if lucky
entropy,

and so I practice
each note
each line
and prepare
so busy hoarding preserves
I miss how the light holds
the peach fuzz curve
of shoulder blade
how laughter
breathless and unrelenting
feels the same as sorrow.

*

Aubrey Brady studied music at Covenant College and is working on her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry at Lindenwood University. Her work has appeared in Solum Press, Book of Matches, Ekstasis, Moria, and Barbar. She lives in Montana with her husband, Matthew, and their two children.

BURNISHED by Tim Suermondt

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BURNISHED

         for Eddie

The art house is playing a documentary
on the war in Vietnam—as if I needed
to be reminded. I’ll let the ghosts
have peace today. I walk across the park,
the entire grounds and the people
burnished by the sunlight. I even decide
to stroll along the river, and I admit it—
thinking of the waterlilies in the Mekong.

*

Tim Suermondt’s sixth full-length book of poems A Doughnut And The Great Beauty Of The World came out in 2023 from MadHat Press. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Smartish Pace, Barrow Street, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Thich Nhat Hanh Instructs by Ken Craft

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Thich Nhat Hanh Instructs

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s books,
words fall like soft-petaled koans
against the dense earth of my brain:
“There is no birth; there is no death.”

Put through an on-line English-to-Buddhist
translator, this means,
“There is no past; there is no future,”
leaving me where the Buddha wants me:

in the moment, trying to fathom no-fear
of no-death because it lurks in the no-future.
Newly-minted fugitive from doom, I am
free to learn terms in Hanh’s books (but not

my Western Webster’s) like “non-self”
and “interbeing,” which connect disparate
elements so neatly I want to slow-pour their
syllables over that stubborn sense of me.

“There cannot be a sheet of paper without
clouds, forest, and rain,” Hanh offers
by way of example; I realize this poem
cannot be without the clouds, forest,

and rain I write it on, the interbeing
of unseen readers, the forecast every poem
clings to in the brevity between now
and the nothingness that consumes it.

*

Ken Craft’s poetry has appeared in The Writer’s Almanac, The Pedestal, Spillway, and numerous other journals and e-zines. His poem “The Pause Between” will appear in the Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses 2025 Edition. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Reincarnation & Other Stimulants (2021).

The Leafhopper by Robbi Nester

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Leafhopper

In my city neighborhood, most things are the color
of concrete, or the dull tar black of the street,
red brick rowhomes, strictly functional. No trees
grew on our block—too messy, my mother said,
too much trouble to maintain. But she allowed
my father, with his farmer’s hands, a tiny patch
of lawn where he could plant, and I could study
whatever lived there, cabbage whites or skippers,
ants and sowbugs, bees, nightcrawlers like thin
lengths of copper wire, and the occasional leafhopper,
a bit of the tropics, with its aqua and red body,
angular as a sail, yellow legs and belly, face like
an African mask. It perched on a rose leaf,
anomalous as a bird of paradise. Then I collected
him—I was sure it was a he, bright as a male bird—
dropped him with some leaves into an empty
Hellman’s jar with a punctured lid, and set off
to the library. I discovered that his colors were
a warning. He was a parasite sucking the sap
out of the garden’s plants, spreading disease.
He even did it to the trees on other blocks.
It was the first time, but not the last I learned
to question beauty, to ask why something so
distinctive took this form, and to distrust it,
so that, drawn by the rose, I may not grasp the thorn.

*

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

A Voice I Heard Not Too Late to Make a Difference by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

A Voice I Heard Not Too Late to Make a Difference

A voice flies out of an unseen place
holding a glassful of promises and memories,
in the way many people can see
from many different viewpoints.
We do not need to be disconnected from this world,
even when we are sad.
This doesn’t have to be a dark, dark world.
I practice being small and quiet,
walking into our world with new eyes,
to feel belonging. I belong
to the now, where imagination opens
the strangeness of a wing
belonging to a hatchling
trying to feel secure enough to launch into air,
to trust success. Is this so very hard?
I want to face what is hard in this world.
I recall when oranges arrived in a wooden crate,
smelling citrus, how it belonged to a place
of orchards that I never saw as a child but could imagine.
I live in this world of startled energies, its aliveness,
until it appears too quickly, like a hornet’s nest
or the impossible deer shadows
running after the doe has been killed.
A heron stands at water’s edge, unmoving,
its reflection wavering on water.
I vanish without knowing it, after dreaming too long.
I keep translating this into sign language
so that each word takes more time for someone
to understand each image and finger spelling of action words,
so that someone has to slow down too.
Slowing down becomes important. Noticing takes focus,
and before anyone realizes it, a thin spike of light
comes begging at our window,
with its stunning intense stare, like forsythia blooming,
trembling before rain or when you pass by
bringing your dreams, and your questioning mind.
This is when I began hearing voices.
But, perhaps, you hear something different
and it takes you out of the ordinary,
makes you turn a different direction,
taking you to a place sacred only to you.
There’s room for many possible voices to hear.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is an editor of Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Harvest Time” (Deerbrook Editions, 2021); “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022); “Not Only the Extraordinary are Exiting the Dream World (Flowstone Press, 2022); “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); and “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024).

Two Poems by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Ode to the Modified Serenity Prayer

      “Grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change,
      the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it’s me.”

Your daughter camps near the methadone
clinic in a sea of bench and canal sleepers.

She’s lost another phone or charger or backpack,
wears a ball cap over her sunburnt face.

You could tell her to go back to the hospital
or sober living or Soul Surgery Treatment Center

or the 90-day rehab she left after four days.
You could drive her to Walmart, the Dollar Store,

buy her a phone charger, more clothes, shoes,
instant coffee, oatmeal, peanut butter, candy,

wring your hands, feel sick to your stomach
as she smiles, climbs out of your car, saying, “Yes,

I’d rather live on the street.” You could pretend
she’s gone to Woodstock, that it’s 1969, that addicts

are just kids passing through a phase where they drop
acid, wear tie-dye, dance in the rain to Canned Heat.

Or you could repeat the modified serenity prayer
            over and over and over and over,

then drive home, park your car, kiss your own
goddamn good life just as four geese fly over
your flowered front yard and honk.

*

Driving to pick up my daughter while wearing a purple T-shirt graphic-ed with Edvard Munch’s The Scream

      ~ “Do whatever you can do to support her healthy choices, not enable.” ~
            — my grief therapist

Head down, hands on the wheel,
breathe in the screeching bus, the careening
light rail, the two lanes of traffic closed
by a row of orange cones.

Breathe in 19th Ave. – a street
to avoid when you can.
Overflowing trash cans,
people lost or stumbling
or sleeping on a bench under a tarp.

Breathe. Breathe. Look up

at the unexpected flash of palm trees,
maybe 30 of them. Tall thin bristle-up
paint brushes that have caught the end-
of-the-day sun and they glow

like taper candles or hope:
this oasis of thrive rising above
billboards, asphalt, sirens,
rooftops and all the gas pumps at the Circle K.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Rattle, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. Susan is the author of Blame It on the Serpent (Finishing Line Press), Cactus as Bad Boy (Kelsay Books), and One of Them Was Mine (Kelsay Books). Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet

Postcard from the Knife-Thrower — May 29 — Bellingham, WA by Alex Stolis

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Postcard from the Knife-Thrower
May 29 – Bellingham, WA

I don’t know what’s happening, I’m losing
myself, maybe I’m already gone. Life and
memory are fragile, I’ve been gutted more

than a few times; I don’t want to forget then
stop loving the dead. I’m being taken apart
incrementally, smaller yet so much heavier;

like rivets popping off a tinman. Navigating
my own extinction, there’s no cross to bear,
no saints to string rosaries, nothing in the stars

to solve. I write letters, post them with no return
address, send them adrift, hope they hit a distant
shore. Every sleep is a death, a small yielding

to pain. I’ve become used to gaps and distances,
didn’t realize I’d lost parts of myself until pieces
of me were strewn about being pecked by crows.

The air reeks of kerosene, I’ve got a brand new
set of steel. Take a deep breath, sister. I’m ready
to strike the match.

*

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal, One Art Poetry, Black Moon Magazine, and Star 82 Review. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife is forthcoming from Louisiana Literature Press in 2024. He has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize.

Daffodils in February by Vivienne Popperl

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Daffodils in February

Some February days,
breathing in Portland
is like inhaling
champagne bubbles.
The sky is a sheer
innocent blue,
crocuses purple
in the sun, daffodils
coaxed golden,
play the wind.

February in Cleveland
the soil is still so cold.
New life is pressed
deep underground.
The sky spreads so thin,
a fragile skin,
stretched between
indifferent clouds.

My mother breathed
her last breath
in Cleveland
in February.
I was not at her side.
I sent daffodils.

*

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 Anna M. Evans

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Piper Goes Blind Aged Eight

The new reality—our dog is blind—
has struck us like a rock thrown at a pane
of glass. We once saw clearly. Now we find
ourselves in darkness. We have got to train
her, fix the layout, keep things off the floor,
teach her words like left, right, up and down.
We miss the carefree pup she was before,
her countenance more bright-eyed smile than frown.
And yet, the vets have said that we will know
a different closeness with our little girl.
Her new reliance on us makes her curl
up closer, look much sadder when we go.
We’re patient with her, accept her need to fuss.
Our love is steadfast as her trust in us.

* 

Orion Blesses My Blind Dog

Now that my dog is blind, she often rises
unsteadily from the bed at four a.m.
and wanders, groggily crashing into things,
searching for an exit from the dark.

My job is to surface from my dream,
get up quickly, hustle into clothes,
and lead her, with my voice and finger snaps
down the stairs and out the kitchen door.

The night, then, is vast and otherworldly,
our footfalls crunching through the new-formed frost.
She scampers around, gratefully harvesting smells
as Orion looks on, clear and benevolent.

Afterward, she settles back in bed,
her little body warm against my own,
and I lie there, half-awake in the shadows,
dazzled by a love as pure as stars.

*

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, she currently teaches poetry at West Windsor Art Center and English at Rowan College at Burlington County. Her books include her latest chapbooks, The Quarantina Chronicles (Barefoot Muse Press, 2020) and The Unacknowledged Legislator (Empty Chair Press, 2019), along with Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic (Able Muse Press, 2018), and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans (White Violet Press, 2014). Her new collection, States of Grace, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in the fall of 2024. She is the Board President of the Poetry by the Sea Conference, an annual 4-day conference which takes place in Madison, CT, and the editor of the online poetry journal for women formalists, Mezzo Cammin.

The Prodigal Son Departs by Patricia Nelson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Prodigal Son Departs

It isn’t right, that look
that tries to hold me here.

My father: loud behind his eyes,
that tall-eyed stare

in which a duty overlaps a man
and both brighten.

My footsoles move along the ground,
a sound as quiet as a thumb on cloth.

I stand, as if on small rocks,
on the brim of what I see from here.

I edge toward some greener place
that holds the noise of who I am.

The leaf sound of a forest
that can’t stop itself from moving.

*

Patricia Nelson is a retired attorney who is writing poetry with the “Activist” group of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her new book, Monster Monologues, is due out from Fernwood Press in December 2024.

A Tuesday in My Twenties by Melinda Clemmons

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

A Tuesday in My Twenties

I asked the robin nesting
in the bottlebrush tree
if love would find me more easily
if I wore the red scarf.

In that era of wanting,
I’d pluck the morning’s loneliness
like stones from my pockets
to set along the windowsill.

My mother used to arrange shards
of pottery like that to catch the light.
Make your own luck, she would say,
yet the clouds kept shifting.

On a different day, without the scarf,
I tumbled into love at the Elbo Room,
his dark leather jacket cool beneath
my palms on the dance floor.

That was the beginning
of everything—the luck
we made and all the rest
we could do nothing about.

*

Melinda Clemmons’ first full-length manuscript was a finalist for the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and a semi-finalist for both the Word Works Washington Prize and the Red Mountain Press Discovery Award. Her poems and stories have appeared in Rust + Moth, Cimarron Review, the Midwest Review, West Trestle Review, Shrew, 300 Days of Sun, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California.

Two Poems by Sara Clancy

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Instead of Xanax

I want this age to be over and gone,
down bridle paths where ponies

wander with riders on foot
and reins dragging. I want peaches

put by, remedies renewed, a dog
in the car and enough sugar to cover

the bills. I want an hour of sleep
in a hammock under appaloosa light.

I want reason, apples and a book
playing all night long. I want decency,

mercy and the kidnapped returned.
Mercy. Mercy in the breath between

the righteous scream, the anthem
and the rebar scraped sky.

*

Last Night I Googled Your Name

It’s been ten years since we spoke,
me holding the phone two feet from
my ear, you scooping every imagined
slight from the cat box of your
childhood temper. If you were dead
or in jail, I would have heard, so it wasn’t
that. It wasn’t the pull of genetics, either,
as we’ve had a decade to prune the twisted
boughs off our family tree. Last night
I found a photo of us when we were
kids. You were laughing and goofy
with your eyes crossed, brandishing
a wooden spoon. I thought I was
in on the joke but had no idea
what was simmering.
I guess that’s why.

*

Sara Clancy a Philadelphia transplant to the Desert Southwest. Her chapbook Ghost Logic won the 2017 Turtle Island Quarterly Editors Choice Award. Among other places, her poems have appeared in Off the Coast, The Linnet’s Wings, Crab Creek Review, The Madison Review, and Verse Wisconsin. She lives in Arizona with her husband, their dog, two normal cats and a psychotic cross-eyed one.

Treasure by T. R. Poulson

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Treasure

Tractor tire tracks like unbroken arrows
flanked the dull drag mark in parallel
lines along the lane we’d named Lake Road.

My favorite cow, dead. My grandma, dead
vaulted in a neat rectangle. At the service
I’d asked where the dirt for her came from.

I followed the arrow tracks—my first
time riding my yellow bike to the bleached
bones scattered in a gully like story drafts.

Twoee was flesh, dark among the stray
alfalfa plants and thistles that purpled
her resting place. Dandelions like toy suns.

She lay on her side, hips angled as though
still in pain, her tail’s black and white
tassel curved and tangled in bright briars.

Her head heavied one eye to dust. Her other
eye socket gaped upward, black. Her ear
with tag 32 pointed to the sky. Bugs glinted.

I twisted the tag from her, took it home
and paper toweled it clean. Kept it inside
my jewelry box with Grandma’s gold locket.

Everyday after school I held a warm bottle
for Twoee’s orphan heifer. Listened. Buried
my face in her fur to feel her life.

Why was life not enough? I returned to watch
the wreck of flesh. Beyond her, whitecaps
slapped dirt cliffs and ravaged everything.

*

T. R. Poulson, a University of Nevada alum, currently lives in San Mateo, California. Her work has appeared in various publications including Best New Poets, Booth, and Gulf Coast. She is seeking a publisher for her first poetry collection, tentatively titled At Starvation Falls. Find her at trpoulson.com.

Wood Glance by Sally Nacker

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Wood Glance

Clouds thin and part a little—
suddenly, a flash of sun
rinses the darkened wood
like thrush song or a rush
of memory from long ago
and all the new spring green
flourishing things quiver
with the light of a glance.

*

Sally Nacker lives in a small house in the woods of Redding, CT with her husband and two cats. Recent publishing credits include Canary, The Orchard’s Poetry Journal, ONE ART, Third Wednesday, and The Sunlight Press. Kindness in Winter is her newest collection.

Election Year by Nancy Sobanik

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Election Year

This is a year with no escape
hatch, by July Quackgrass
and Sowthistle hem roadsides,

knee-high weeds root in flinty gravel,
then the flail mower rumbles closer.
Since morning I’ve heard

its approaching drone, ominous
as an enormous hive on high alert,
the sound of swarm fills my ears.

I once thought winter would not pass,
now I wonder if this ludicrous,
over-the-top debacle will ever end?

Summer brings it on, carnival huckster
stoked by a massive infusion of green.
The blizzard comes in autumn this year.

Flail drum blades arrive to shear
thin-skinned saplings into headless pikes,
shave Sweetfern and Yarrow to late-day stubble.

Cut Japanese Knotweed and it returns
with a vengeance, tenacious as black flies
drawn to exhalation for their blood meal.

An ugly business, all this destruction
caused by a flail mower, but without it
roads narrow, and line of sight is gone.

A car needs a shoulder to cry on
when it goes wild, to justify all this ruin,
all this compost spat out and left moldering.

*

Nancy Sobanik is a poet whose work can be found upcoming in Frost Meadow Review, Vol. 12, Triggerfish Critical Review; Sparks of Calliope- Best of The Net Nominee 2023 and Pushcart Nomination 2024; Verse-Virtual; Sheila-Na-Gig; The Ekphrastic Review and ONE ART. She was awarded second place in the Maine Postmark Poetry Festival Contest 2023.

Two Poems by Elizabeth Marie Young

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Pow! Poof! Whiz!

The moon smells like firecrackers.

Have you been paying attention?

You can either wish it away or inject
yourself with saline solution.

Either way, oh well.

Either way, oh boy.

We know three things for sure
and you’re not one of them.

So what, you have no predators.

Your cell phone conversations belong
to someone else.

If these stones could talk, they’d probably
say nothing.

Either that or they’d say thump and deliver
us from evil.

Well then, what are you worried about?

The moon tastes like Reddi-Wip.

Whenever the moon goes plop you gear up
for a legal battle because you lack imagination.

Because you’re maybe just some kind of sissy.

Whenever you open your mouth the darkness
within stumbles out in an unbuttoned shirt
in search of a vodka martini.

*

Awe and Wonder

I wish I were a constellation that could
coalesce into a rhinestone heart.

I wish the flawed experiments funded
by our government would reveal some
sacred truth.

I’m concerned about the boom in DNA analysis.

I worry about the nature of time.

Sometimes I wonder about dirt.

Must I inject myself with the blood of human
teenagers to be astonishing?

Must I have a pig’s heart beating in my chest?

I want to conquer death, like the mega rich,
then I’d be worthy of your love.

Your smartphone’s now connected
to my Bluetooth speaker.

You are my everything.

Galaxies, galaxies everywhere.

I wish I could stop thinking about Neanderthals
touching each other.

I wish you were touching me.

At least the bot thinks I am cute.

The bot thinks I’ll live forever.

The bot’s holding its breath.

*

Elizabeth Marie Young is a Boston-based poet and educator. She spent a decade as a professor of ancient Greek and Roman languages and literature and has published widely on the poetry and culture of ancient Rome. Her first book of poems, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, won the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books. She is also the author of Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome, a book about the ancient Roman understanding of lyric translation and literary creativity. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center and the Squire Foundation. Her poems have recently appeared in journals including The Chicago Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and Sugar House Review.

The Flyer by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

The Flyer

I want to be as brave as the 14-year-old cheerleader,
a flyer they call her. How she rubber-bands her body
taut in a split second, trained to be tossed up into
the stadium’s stratosphere. How in mid-air, she strikes
her lightning-quick arabesque and then softens
her adolescent sinew to fall into her partner’s cradle.
Always landing feet-first on a faded rubberized track
to cushion the impact that’s bound to ricochet up
through her young knees. I want to shake off pain
like a pompon, let the sun irradiate my fears and turn
them into glittery-gold streamers to cheer me on. I can
almost hear the fans chanting from the stands—
Yes, you are enough…You got this…You can!

*

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poems have appeared worldwide in literary journals including Calyx, Eunoia Review, Blue Heron Review, Tule Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, About Place Journal, and Snapdragon, to name a few. Author of What She Was Wearing, she’s co-founder of The Poetry Box press and managing editor of The Poeming Pigeon. Shawn is a proud mother of three amazing humans and Nana to one darling baby girl. She shares the creative life with her husband in Portland, Oregon.

Figs by Marc Alan Di Martino

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Figs

By mid-July, the figs are purple-green
and yearn for you to twist their delicate necks,
pluck their swollen sweetness off the branch.
Feel for the softest, highest fruit, concealed
behind a cluster of verdant teardrops.
You could lose yourself in a place like this—
a palace of sugar, a motherly embrace
of tender giving tendrils, mouth bloodied
and silent. You could forget yourself here.

*

Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City Press, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Gyroscope Review, Welter, Rattle and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His translation Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco will be published by World Poetry Books in 2024. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

Two Poems by Erinola E. Daranijo

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gone boy

How the word stands like an inverted igi,
a refusal to obey the laws that birthed it.
Or is it a proper igi with its top
chopped off? All my life I’ve wondered
if my brain’s inverted, improper, asterisked
with defects. Be honest bro, you straight ọkọ
or bent òpò? Bent like a branch or straight
like a trunk? Like a man? You like men?
Mama said don’t stand slanted òwò like a girl.
Òwò like kí. Not proper. A man’s spine
should be trunk-strong. Once, after a fight,
she sat me down with a cup of tea.
Tell me you’re not like those defective men.
I looked her straight in the eye and lied.

Glossary:
igi: tree
ọkọ: straight
òpò: bent
òwò: crooked
kí: crooked

*

going through my notes app, i am reminded of all the boys i once loved

My màmá wouldn’t let me go to the village square
when I was younger, so I jet off with my babe
on his okada to a Fela Kuti song. It’s in our cosmology
to chase the tails of goats over the hills.
The sky stretches, map of strange stars.
I list the star signs of my exes, none of them
from my village. We cheers our palm wine.
Almost all sacred things are blue. Baby blue,
Baby blue. You joke that you’ll never date a city boy,
eh, you sing a love song to natural hair and midnight
eyes. The compass needle stays glued to the moon.
I catch your eyes in every mirror.
There was once a prehistoric river all around us,
even crocodiles. We puff out
the great swimming shapes
of their bodies.
This layer of rock, ancient fossils.
This layer, some ancient eel. How small we are,
how funny. Massive fish-ghosts
vibrate to Fela Kuti. Time is read backwards
in the rock-body: oldest to the top, magma pushing
what’s fresh to the surface. Your hand
skims the deep blue
sandstone, these long-cooled shells.
Tear drop, turquoise sliver of horizon, the creeping river
invisible in the dark. Here’s to you,
here’s to you, ancient and alive.
The sky stretches, full of old and older ghosts,
our once and forever wading pool.

*

Erinola E. Daranijo (he/him) is a Nigerian writer. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Akéwì Magazine, and the author of the micro-chapbooks, ‘An Epiphany of Roses’ (Konya Shamsrumi Press, 2024) and ‘Every Path Leads to the Sea’ (Ghost City Press, 2024). He splits his time between the ‘cities’ of Ibadan, Lagos, and Cape Town. Say hi on X (formerly Twitter) at @Layworks.

Two Poems by Tracey Knapp

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Piece by Piece

November and the pumpkin on the porch
     has collapsed inward on itself. Only a biopsy
          of my breast tissue this afternoon
could drain the blue from the sky today.
     If only my mother could find remission after years
          of surviving. Her hair grows back
thicker on the sides, but no one
     can tell if her fingerprints will return,
          if the nerve pain in her feet will diminish.
She sits alone in her house on the other side
     of the country, snoozing in her armchair
          while Judge Judy delivers verdicts in favor
of the wrongfully accused on TV. If only
     there was a way to win my mother’s life back
          from the time she’s spent in treatment.
Treat me with some dignity when I must lie on my face
     with my arm and breast pitched through a hole
          in the table. One mammogram after another
until they locate the spot, take a bit to test.
     My mother reminds me I must do it, despite any dread,
          after a lumpectomy in her breast, lymph nodes
removed. I take the dry gulp that must have come for her.
     Piece by piece, I stand a little closer
          to her fear.

*

Long Season

Can’t shake winter this year.
Skipped supper again and still I’m hunched
over my desk as if I’m someone of substance
and determination. If only a cigarette
was hanging out of my mouth, and why not?
A lot has changed: the wine foresworn,
and whatever version of love I might have
hoped for has lost its wick in the wax.

The trees’ leafless frames wobble against
remnants of Pacific wind. Might as well
pull on some jeans and hit the coffee shop,
ask them for a flower in the foam, maybe
summon Spring that way. The barista says, “sure”
but I get a fern. I say nothing, foam on my nose.

The sky looms low over the parking lot. But look—
the trees along the curb are showing signs of yellow,
and the bees stir in their winter clusters.
Give me a bulb about to pop through
the muck. A little green wouldn’t hurt.
Promise me something is about to grow,
and it better be goddamn beautiful.

*

Tracey Knapp lives in the California Bay Area. Her first collection of poems is Mouth (42 Miles Press, 2015). Recent work has appeared in Pinch, Cream City Review, and The Shore. Find her at traceyknapp.com

Three Poems by Marcia Trahan

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MERCILESS SEASON

Even a mild winter is a violent time.
I can’t undo its damage, my darkness.

Sunrise, early spring. The lake silvers
the horizon, leaving me to calculate my crimes.

My voice is a rasp, cold in its husk.
Don’t ask it questions, it won’t answer.

Darling, I deserted you in a merciless season,
I abandoned you like a stray dog
chained to a stump in the snow.

The sky in its spreading reds and golds
will return my kindness to me,
but too late to save you, it seems.

I only know I am wildly ready
to be good and sweet again,
ready to take all the sun’s medicines now.

*

SOLITUDE

The sun sets fire to the mountains at dusk.
A pickup shudders past on the highway,
the driver alone in the cab. My house is silent,
utterly still, and I wonder about the driver,
if he’s heading home to someone, or
if he luxuriates in living by himself.
My love is coming back, this much I know.
We won’t list the dark days. We won’t
argue about the arguments. He’ll return,
hungry for me again. It always goes this way.
It will go this way until it doesn’t, and then I
will weigh my solitude, maybe refashion myself,
no longer the one detained but the one who
stops counting the hours like fathomless stars.

*

TRUE

When the storm was over,
I felt an unutterable stillness.

I survived, having
come close to death. I waited for a
moment, took stock. Yes, I was unscathed.

Then I saw a window
and climbed through it for light, for life,

for the good of my restive aging spirit.
The sky gilded me, the water blued my horizon,
the wet dirt waited for my bare feet.

Maple leaves drifted to me as if
the path at my feet was their correct address.

All of my years gathered like a shield,
defending me from errors.

Nothing followed me. I was
delivered from the shadows of old wars.

I ran, every heartbeat shivering my skin,
my destination gauzy in the distance.

I am still running, but not away.
I am aiming true. I know this voiceless road.

*

Marcia Trahan is the author of Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession (Barrelhouse Books). Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Cathexis Northwest Press, Two Hawks Quarterly, The Write Launch, Wild Roof Journal, Every Day Poems, Cloudbank, Clare, Anderbo, and Kansas City Voices. Her essays have been published in HuffPost, The Rumpus, Catapult, the Brevity Blog, Fourth Genre, and other publications. Marcia works as a freelance book editor and holds an MFA from Bennington College. To learn more, visit https://marciatrahan.com/

Two Poems by Lily Jarman-Reisch

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The Delta

I speed down I-40, hazy with heat,
pocked by seared gullies,
pass raptors perched on power lines

far from Baltimore’s sirens
and wee hour whimpering
of the snubbed spaniel upstairs,
next door couple grunting
like my ex rutting
the lover he left me for,
their groans cresting
while I lie in the dark,
hands over my ears,
burning to bolt for the last cliffs
of the furthest coast, for the silence
of a pathless peak or deep canyon floor

as I blaze through this sun-flayed
flatland, car window lowered
hoping for westerlies scented with creosote,
rare duet of rain on rock,

heading for the border
where the Colorado is supposed to pool,
imagining a mayhem of marsh wrens,

but reach the delta,
dried and dead
of sound,
save for a yowling
dog, zippered voice of a desert fly
on a breeze of benzene.

*

Stalking Maryland’s fugitive zebra,

I park on some cul-de-sac,
strain to listen,
head craning out the car window,
waiting
far too long
for a nicker, a snort,
a glimpse of a striped hide
hidden in the suburb,
black/white bands of a runaway
from a livestock auction in Tennessee, escaped
as the bidding began like a breakaway
stallion that throws his jockey,
jumps the fence, bolts away,
leaving the rider splayed in dirt,
betrayed by one he knew so well,
gaping after the disappeared beast
like a stray sniffing for a phantom
scent, wishing the dull air would swell
with the sound of hooves,
a thrown over longing for a lover’s return,
I keep waiting
for a wild African horse to gallop
through a subdivision, wondering
if I am in the right spot
on the right day,
if I hear huffing
on a puff of wind,
hoofbeats
above the hiss
of insects in the grass.

*

Lily Jarman-Reisch is a 2024 Pushcart Prize recipient, poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review, and a Contributing Editor for Pushcart Prize XLIX. Her poems appear in Amsterdam Quarterly, CALYX, Collateral, Mobius, One, Pangyrus, Plainsongs, Pushcart Prize XLVIII, San Pedro River Review, Slant Poetry, among others. She was a journalist in Washington, D.C., and Athens, Greece, where she lived aboard a small boat she sailed throughout the Ionian and Aegean Seas, and has held administrative and teaching positions at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland.

Tulip by Megan Rahm

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Tulip

Break me.
Knock me down.
Every heartache is a stepping stone
and my future is under construction.
Pick me like tulips in spring
and watch me wilt.
I come back every year
stronger, steadfast.
I’m grounded in my roots,
nourished by the storm,
and at dawn, I flourish again.
Remember my beauty
in the long winter months.

*

Megan Rahm (she/her) is a restless mom from Toledo, Ohio who has found her voice in art and writing. Her spirited eight-year-old daughter often inspires her work and she never leaves her house without her Chromebook and Sharpies. She loves Toledo’s weather and hates Costco on a Saturday afternoon. Her debut poetry collection, Free to Roam: Poems from a Heathen Mommy, was released in 2021 by Freethought House. She also publishes frequently on her blog, From the Ashes of Faith.

Their Mother Was the Light of the Family by Lois Perch Villemaire

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Their Mother Was the Light of the Family

The yahrzeit candle burning in a tiny glass
had been lit at sundown in her memory.

The flame threw shadows around the kitchen,
reflected light gleamed against the stainless appliances.

Gone twelve years, she had held them together—
all accepting, all understanding, all forgiving.

Differences and squabbles disappeared in her presence.
She spoiled them for other relationships in their lives.

There came a time when the light in her eyes
began to dim, throwing shadows on the pages

she strained to read. Book readers with larger print
and brighter light became ineffective.

Her skies began to darken like a brewing storm,
her love of reading stolen, she never complained.

They grew to understand no one held a candle to her,
too late to bestow enough appreciation.

*

Lois Perch Villemaire is the author of “My Eight Greats,” a family history in poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in such places as Blue Mountain Review, The Ekphrastic Review, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, and The Ravens Perch. Anthologies, including I Am My Father’s Daughter have published her memoir and poetry. She was the winner of the Haiku Challenge in Pen in Hand July 2023. Lois lives in Annapolis, MD, where she volunteers at the local library, researches family connections, enjoys fun photography and doting over her African violets.

When You’ve Lived in a House for Fifty Years by Judy Kronenfeld

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

When You’ve Lived in a House for Fifty Years

it breathes with you in your sleep;
it lights your lucky way
from morning bed to kitchen
of blessings–the filled
pantry, the humming fridge
committed to keeping the berries
you love for breakfast
firm and delicious.

It lets you move freely through
its pleasant rooms, as you water your
peace lilies and philodendrons,
and after a slightly scary check-up
at the doctor’s, and some fill-in shopping,
welcomes you again for dinner
and a little non-alarming TV, watched
with your spouse from the soft settee.
It vouchsafes both of you
a quiet passage to untroubled dreams,
guarded as it is by ancestors
assembled in multiple albums
in its cabinets, pressed
against each other in phalanxes.

You want to pray to this house’s
lares and penates. You want to
beg them to never let you
leave it, never make you sort
the dust-encrusted plastic bins
entrusted with hundreds of letters
you and your husband wrote to each other
in an almost mythical past.
You want to entreat the household gods
to keep them forever reachable
and uncorrupted on their sagging shelf
in the garage of inexhaustible mysteries.

*

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of nine collections of poetry. Her six full-length books include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was recently released by Bamboo Dart Press. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slant, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad, and Your Daily Poem and four dozen of them have appeared in anthologies. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Judy has also published criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998), short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, will be published by Inlandia Books in 2025. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, University of California, Riverside.

Jingle by Tom Barlow

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Jingle

       three demisonnets

1955

The white boy with the tousled hair
on the TV won’t eat his cereal
he needs a jingle to change his mind
or maybe a cartoon character.
I’m drinking it all in like my dad with
his cold Stroh’s. At five I’m unaware
I’m an idiot. But television knows.

1968

I grew up in the days of angry flags
we carried in our mobs, when guitar riffs
and fatuous lyrics stuck to me like the leeches
the less fortunate were picking off their uniforms.
By burning my apron strings I learned
that if I screamed an idea loud enough
I could convince myself of anything.

2024

Lately a string of geezers my age
have been hawking a pill that will clear
the fog in my memory. I want to tell them
they needs a good jingle and a cartoon
character. I would suggest the mayfly,
an insect that emerges in its adult stage
to couple and die in the same day.

*

Tom Barlow is a widely published author of poems, short stories and novels. He writes because conversation requires give and take, and he’s always thought of himself as more of a giver.

Marvel by Alicia Hoffman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Marvel

Can I, at the tree? The same one I’ve seen for ten years
slowly growing before me? Can I, at the light? The red
one that glows green every fifteen seconds? Go, I say
to myself as a child. Believe once more in the field.
Believe in the uncut hay. The wild strawberry. The grave.

Something inside myself is hardening. I’m a bell, tin thick.
Can I, at the moon? For two nights straight, it has bellowed
its ivory tune. Thin as a nail. Curved as an aperture. Inside
me a fountain unruptured. I walk the path as a worn thing
thrumming. Can I, at invisibility? Can I, at criticism?

I bloom like snow clearing the valley of trees. Each day,
wash what needs washing and put to bed the rest.
Here, a happy accident. An arrest. A designation carved
in the porcelain bark of cells. Can I, at earth? At gravity?
Without skin, I’d prism into fragments. I have. I can.

*

Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop and is the author of three collections, most recently ANIMAL (Futurecycle Press). Her poems have been published in a variety of journals, including Thrush, Trampset, The Night Heron Barks, Tar River Poetry, The Penn Review, Glass: A Poetry Journal, Typishly, Radar Poetry, and elsewhere. Find her at: www.aliciamariehoffman.com

AUTISTIC EVENING ROUTINE by Tony Gloeggler

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AUTISTIC EVENING ROUTINE

Jesse walks through the living room,
grabs a broom to sweep the floor
before evening routine at 7:30 PM
when he sees mom coming around
the back, her part of the duplex, closing
the garden gate with the leather strap,
walking Oreo. Jesse dashes out the door,
skips across the blinking, Christmas lit porch
and she asks if he wants to come for a walk.
Yes, of course he does. So, go get dressed.
No, Tony doesn’t mind. Jesse hurries, finds
a long-sleeved shirt, socks, ski jacket, sneakers

Mom yells where’s your hat and Jesse turns around,
rushes back through the door, down basement
stairs. I hear whines, grunts, the way he says
where’s my blue hat, I always leave it here, before
I trudge down, ask what’s going on. We both start
looking, run all around the house. I say maybe
we left it on the bus. He says no on bus, makes
louder sounds. Mom comes in, searches too. When
we give up, she asks me to write information down.

We sit at a table. I ask for a few sit and breathes,
slow deep breaths please, then I print out big block
letters while reciting blue hat lost, blue hat gone,
goodbye blue hat, that’s it in my calm, level tone,
not my annoyed, cranky, end of the day voice. Just
put the orange one on, the one with polka dots and snow
flurries, they’re all the same. Jesse. do you even
like the dog? Jesse speed reads the note, pushes
it away, gets louder. I write down new hat tomorrow.
He says no tomorrow, stomps his feet. Me, mom,
exchange looks, worry an explosion’s near: teeth marks
on his forearm, head banging on the floor. She mouths
Target. We shrug shoulders and off they happily go.

Fifteen, twenty minutes, they’re back. He tosses a bag
on the table, a gray hat with a pack of briefs he opens.
Immediately he wants to cut off every tag from everything–
go get your scissors Jess–before anything else. Then,
all the briefs must go in basement bins. When mom asks
are you ready to walk Oreo, Jesse’s answer is a deep,
husky-throated no to show he means business: 7:30,
evening routine, brush teeth. I repeat evening routine,
7:30. He strides away satisfied. I start cracking up. Mom
looks at me funny. I say no walk dog tonight, point at Oreo
who looks like he’s got to pee real bad. Mom starts laughing.

*

Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of NYC and managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 40 years. Poems have been published in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Vox Populi, Gargoyle, B O D Y. His most recent book, What Kind Of Man with NYQ Books, was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and Here on Earth will be published by NYQ
Books in 2024.

Phanatic by John Arthur

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Phanatic

the day you swung my Louisville
Slugger at me and I caught it
with my bare hands
you smacked my bare ass
while Jimmy held my pants
at my ankles and I was
getting hard, harder
each week from dead
lifts, lunges, and power cleans
until mom poured a gallon
of milk on my head,
the lactose sticky on my skin
as I let it soak in
laying there on the dogsmell couch
where dad drunkslept during Phillies
games. we were there at Citizens
Bank Park when they broke
the record for most
innings played in a game,
at infinity, and everyone
left the stadium except for us.
They’re still playing.
We’re still there.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared in Rattle, trampset, Maudlin House, Third Wednesday, and other places. His band is called The Deafening Colors.

Time and Space by Maria McDonnell

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Time and Space

“Swore I could feel you through the walls, but that’s impossible.”
               ~ Phoebe Bridgers

The trees are always on the cusp
            an ending & an entrance
warm winter       cold spring.

Light in the window brings soft morning
in a smoky rented room        galley kitchen overlooking the yard
            bike fallen near the shed        basketball in the garden.

Tonight could be a night on Magnolia Drive—
baby swimming in my bed—
a night on a chair in a private room
crash carts racing by the door.
Night alone in a king-sized bed
burning from within
phone on the pillow
everything is electric.

Stone steps from the Hall
chapel bells tell the hour but not the year.
This could the time they boarded up the library
or the day I fell and skinned my knees.
Today is four years ago        my son is on the line
saying that people are dying in Italy
and I should lock the doors.

Today is tonight
and my son is on the other side
of the moon        he’s sleeping in the room behind my bed.
He’s shooting a basketball that never stops arcing over the backboard
burning as it moves across the sky.

*

Maria McDonnell lives in Pennsylvania with her family and dogs. She works at Albright College where she teaches English classes and works as a student success coach. She has published poems and essays in various print and online journals including Motherwell, Rat’s Ass Review, The Elephant Journal, Paradigm, Steel Point Quarterly, and Parlor. She was included as a featured reader in a 2019 production of Listen to Your Mother. In 2009, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry book, First I Learn My Name, was published by Foothills Publishing in 2008.

Two Poems by Jackleen Holton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

In the Recovery Room After the Biopsy

Once, a friend told me that his mother’s
hospice agency offered an early exit
option, though they didn’t call it that,
or use the phrase assisted suicide.
I was surprised, so I wrote it down,
the name they gave it, something
transition, maybe? Peaceful
departure? No, but something to do
with travel, velocity.
Not exactly pre-boarding,
but that’s the gist of it. His mom
said no, it was too expensive,
and they’d already gone
through all her money,
so they waited, though he
had started to say he’d be happy
to pick up the tab, but stopped himself
because he was already thinking
about the curtains, how he’d replace
them with something lighter,
maybe a new coat of paint.
My mother’s already gone.
She spared us the long drawn-out adieu,
tubes and sunken eyes.
So why did I need to know the name?
Had I been stroking my cancer scar
again as he spoke, thinking
about my nine-year-old who came home
from school the other day, angry
that all her friends’ parents were thirty,
not fifty like us. I wrote down the price,
too, I’m sure of it. Twenty-five hundred?
That’s not so bad for an upgrade.
How to say it? Put me on the redeye
to L.A. I’ll be there before
I open my eyes, the flight
attendant making the rounds, leaning
in to whisper we’re here, gently
touching my arm as if to wake me.

*

Al-Anon

There’s a church down the street
where I can go when I start to feel
those little pangs of judgment
about all the ways that other people
choose to lick their wounds.
For example, my childhood friend whose liver
must scream in that high-pitched way
that neglected plants do, a friend last seen
on Facebook, perched on the rim
of a birdbath-sized margarita.
Or my husband, coughing up pieces of lung,
then sticking another goddamn
cigarette in his gob
first thing every morning.
See, I’m doing it in real time.
I need another meeting.
Because there’s something
comforting about the aroma of burnt
coffee well past my caffeine curfew,
and the little wicker basket
that goes around, only asking
for a dollar, the clichés and rhymes
we read aloud, and the ones we say
to one another absent any sense of irony,
after all it’s not a poetry reading,
no pressure to be dazzling.
And then there are the stories.
People’s kids who’ve overdosed,
terrible spouses coming home blotto,
most of the stories so much sadder
than mine, that I’d feel a little better,
if there weren’t this competing need
to fit in, or one-up that sometimes
makes me feel duty-bound
to dramatize. Like the one time
I narrated my friend into the hospital
on the liver transplant list.
And usually someone brings a box
of donuts or store-bought sugar
cookies, and if there’s a few
that nobody else has eaten, I fold
them up in a napkin, tuck it
into my purse for later.
And then there’s the end of the meeting,
the circle, holding hands with strangers,
repeating the incantation, then raising
our clasped hands up to send the spell
out into the ethers, the exodus
to the dark parking lot, buzzing
with hope, and a little more
of that coveted serenity, a firefly
light in my soul as I let go and let
my headlights float me all the way home.

*

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

Radish by Katie Kalisz

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Radish

The pleasure of finding one red radish
in the dense green foliage my father called
a garden was a ticket into his just praise,
my small system of effort, reward,
accomplishment I could finally arrange.
We’d sit at the table in the kitchen, look
for birds he told us were rare, and wait for him
to bite into our plucked radish, halfway through
his sandwich that mom had made, again.
We waited for the way his eyes would close
just after the crunch into it, then the glimpse
of white meat inside the thin red skin, so exotic
to the three of us who still held close our naïve
palates for foods, thoughts, acts. Imagine
the taste we conjured from his face
wrinkled in tan content, to be home for lunch
eating food he had grown, harvested by his children
and given to him like jewels we had formed
in our sandbox.

*

Katie Kalisz is a Professor in the English Department at Grand Rapids Community College, where she teaches composition and creative writing. Quiet Woman, her first book, was a finalist for the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She is the recipient of a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her second book, Flu Season, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She lives in Michigan with her husband and their three children.

Two Poems by Lisa Low

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LATE IN THE DAY

Late in the day when my father lay dying,
he called me to his cot and told me of
a time when I saved his life. Saved your life?
I said, not believing him. Then he said:
do you remember that time at Widow’s
Lake when, like a fool, I got in water,
thinking it would make my bad back better,
but as I lay on my side, unable to move,
and felt myself tipping, back side up,
face down in water, I saw you walking
on water beside me and called out your
name and asked for your hand. You were
only five. If you hadn’t been there that
day, that would have been the day I died.

*

MY NEIGHBOR GETS A CANCER DIAGNOSIS

What’s it like to know cancer sneaks like
a tongue of smoke around the back doors
of your life, peeking in windows between
the shadows, snaking around corners,
sniffing and moaning; wanting your suffering.
My neighbor at sixty retires, done with chemo
for now, decides to babysit his three-year-old
granddaughter, Daisy. Days, I watch them
totter down the street, his bulky hand sunk
sealed to the fresh flesh of her reached-up hand.
Or see him mowing the grass, going over and
over the bright, green stalks, not knowing when
that menace will force its fierce, forked tongue
up from soft ground to take him down again.

*

Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Pennsylvania English, Phoebe, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Tusculum Review.

Three Poems by Diane Martin

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Birthday

Walking the dogs on the trail
after the storm, we pause
for a crew trimming a large oak.
Look out! I don’t want that limb
to get me our friend says—

—unless it’s quick. It’s her 90th
birthday and she’s perfectly
aware of her trajectory. The
crew member signals to us:
It’s safe. For now. So far.

Seated in the booth for the
birthday lunch, we comment she’s
as old as Willie Nelson, ask her
whether she’s gleaned any
wisdom from her harvest of years.

She looks down: If you wait
twenty years for a married man,
you’ll end up with exactly nothing.
We order drinks, a big dessert,
her life spilling out on the table.

*

Epistle after the Fires

I’m o.k. now. / I’m back at the primal source of poems: wind, sea / and rain, the market and the salmon. …
      — Richard Hugo

Hugo’s letter to Kizer apologizes for his behavior.
Maybe my poem can outweigh Netflix, cat antics, politics.

I am slowly working my way through a bag of Snickers
bought for trick-or-treaters. No one really tricks, though

last year a seven-year-old said he couldn’t fuckin’ believe
we ran out. The Day of the Dead party was postponed

for evacuation. Death takes a rain check! Still, I’m pissed at
those who wouldn’t leave. A nasty way to die, I think.

We are looking forward to getting together at Thanksgiving.
But the delicata squash is not some special dish. Its only

claim to fame is surviving the ash. We’ll also bring some wine
and pickled green tomatoes—not to be consumed together.

*

Hurricane Mindy

Breaking News was your old girl’s storm,
a category 4, I think. These kinds of squalls
are never really over

force and velocity, jealousy and envy
—snapshot in my folks’ living room—
I can still see

your arms your striped sweater
her contours, her smile with dimples,
maybe I snapped the picture

*

Poems by Diane Martin have appeared in ONE ART, American Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, diode, Field, Harvard Review, Narrative, Plume, and many other journals. One poem received a Pushcart Special Mention, another won a prize from Smartish Pace, and another took second place in Nimrod’s Neruda prize. Her first collection, Conjugated Visits, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published by Dream Horse Press and her second collection, Hue & Cry, was published by MadHat Press. She lives in western Sonoma County, California.

grass bows… by Joshua Eric Williams

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grass bows
around my rotten fence
the church of now

*

Joshua Eric Williams’s work usually focuses on the intersection of the human, wild, and the spiritual. His poetry can be found in many online and print journals, including Rattle, Modern Haiku, and Literary Matters. His website is thesmallestwords.com, and he can be found on X, @Hungerfield.

Two Poems by Jesse Breite

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After the Tulip Sale at the North Carolina Arboretum

Soon they’ll be undressed,
petal-shriveled, disappearing—
as light or smoke, shaped
and potted as they were
to dollar decimals, sold.
We’ll forget how—flashing
pictures—we tried to join them
as if we were the same—
our bulbed heads rising
like snakes from a slumber,
how we too were top-heavy,
falling apart, as laughter
dangled out our throats,
how we sent them to our
mothers, fathers as gestures
of devotion—we yearned
to give back our origins
to our origins with this flung
constellation of fluorescence,
how we never knew if
such spectacular whispers
would come back.

*

Arabesque Orb Weaver

October comes like a call to arms.
And they crawl out of the woods—
what you most wanted to forget.
They lace a lucent architecture
on every right angle available,
and their dreamcatchers wake
in windows. Invisible parachutes
arrive at dawn around the knot,
ornamental and fine-furred, endless
weaver and spool of silver thread.

Suddenly, I’ve walked through
the strung fabric—tangled up
in the elastic and winding rope.
I brush it off, but it’s never gone.
Memory’s like that—you can be
rapt in its quivering strands—
what you tried to erase then escape.
And this webbed edifice has you,
dazzles you, envelops every move,
spins your limbs with light, reminds
again—how fugitive is human skin.

*

Jesse Breite’s recent poetry has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, River Heron Review, Tar River Poetry, and Rhino. His first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Jesse teaches high school in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two kids. More at jessebreite.com.

In Praise of Gravity by Robert Okaji

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

In Praise of Gravity

Which bestows weight
or slings me around
some other heavenly

body, a version of you
wondering whether
I’ll rise from my next

plummet, victim
of curvature and infinite
range held in place,

attractive in nature,
bent, perhaps, and
scarred, proud to have

survived but never wiser.
Cleansed, we continue
our orbit, our mirrored fall.

*

Robert Okaji holds a BA in history, served without distinction in the U.S. Navy, toiled as a university administrator, and no longer owns a bookstore. He was recently diagnosed with late stage metastatic lung cancer, and lives, for the time being, in Indiana with his wife—poet Stephanie L. Harper— stepson, and cat. His first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, will be published by 3: A Taos Press in the fall of 2024 (not posthumously, he hopes). His poems may be found in Book of Matches, Threepenny Review, Only Poems, Vox Populi, Shō Poetry Journal, The Big Windows Review, Verse Daily, Indianapolis Review, and other venues.

Alone in the ER by Rob Greene

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Alone in the ER

Hooked to the electrolyte bag,
the cold IV drip shivers and shakes my shanks
under the stiff sheets,
salmon-colored upchuck tub at my side,
pain scaling up to an 8.5.
Dozing in and out of the room like I normally do,
I briefly focus in on an expecting mother
nervously holding a urine cup. My eyelids fold
then open to her empty chair. I feel
the breeze from the toilet flushing,
shiver some more, and wonder
which bridge my own mother sleeps under.

*

Rob Greene is the founder of Raleigh Review and a father of four. He received his PhD from the University of Birmingham in England and his BSc in microbiology and his MFA from NC State University, where he taught as a graduate student. Rob Greene also previously taught at Louisburg College and SAU.

Two Poems by Gary Fincke

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Exact Likeness for Grief

Swinging a pitching wedge, my father lofts
Seven golf balls over my mother’s grave.
To spare the grass, he hits from the shoulder,
Picking them clean from the thin lie of dirt.

It’s forty yards, I’m guessing, to the woods
Where all but one of seven disappear
In yardage he can manage, length to spare,
At eighty-eight, his knees beyond repair.

He limps to her grave site, his love an arc
That ends among trees. The flowers he’s picked
Follow him in my hands; he turns the club
Upside down and uses it as a cane.

“Some day you’ll know,” my father says, meaning
His knees, and then again, “Some day you’ll know,”
Meaning, this time, the grave, this selection
Of flowers, orange ones I cannot name.

My father, the prophet, bends to the vase
Of wilted stems. My father, who’s warned me,
“You’ll see” a thousand times, lifts the fresh buds
From my hands, steadies himself on my arm.

My father, who was a maintenance man,
Sends the old stems to the woods in my hands,
Seats the flowers by height like a teacher
While I kick the short ball into the trees.

*

Peace, a Flightless Bird

Algorithms are sending me ads
for cremation services, ones that
save money through pre-need purchase.

The world gives daily birth to flags;
They shriek their certainties
In foster homes they will grow to burn.

All myths have become biographies.
Every war is undeclared.
Even our secrets are undeserved.

Peace, a flightless bird, is extinct, war
So ordinary we show up for work
Like soldiers, our anger expected.

In the museum of memory
We inspect the webbed footprints
Sunk so far into the earth

We nearly remember the shape
Of a bird so large it must have
Believed there was nothing it need fear.

*

Gary Fincke’s poetry collections have been published by Arkansas, Ohio State, Michigan State, Lynx House, BkMk, and Jacar. His newest collection For Now, We Have Been Spared will be published by Slant Books late this year.

Two Poems by Karin Bevilacqua Fazio Littlefield

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

There’s a mass in your chest

Mass is a Mack truck
that blasts you off the road
obliterates fall days with coffee and
philosophical discussions on the roof.

It’s an atom bomb,
flattening the world.
It’s the twilight zone
and the upside down.

Mass is an extinction level event,
an asteroid headed to earth.
It’s the last cry of a triceratops
65 million years ago.

Did you hear me?

Mass is my aunt’s friend
with no hair and sunken cheeks
who gives me a book
that I don’t read.

I’m scared to touch her book,
like it’s contagious, like
the moment I open it,
I’ll fall in.

*

Intervals of Time

Time is an isolated woman.
Time wakes with the bird of life.
Time can consume tides but never
becomes full; its belly is an open window.
Time gives the woman a dying garden.
Time grows in winter, runs in summer.
Time rules as a woman, but not the woman herself.
Time is oracular.
It continually replenishes the tide the woman invented
to keep her sins hidden.
She is without saving grace.

*

Karin Bevilacqua Fazio Littlefield is a Queer Disabled Sicilian-American poet and playwright from Brooklyn, NY. Her plays have been performed across the United States as well as in Canada, France, and Sicily. She has been published in Clockhouse Review, EAB Publishing’s Midnight Circus, and Lotus-eater. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the Mississippi University for Women.

Every Woman by E.C. Gannon

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Every Woman

I deserve to have someone paint a nude portrait
of me, I really do. I deserve to disrobe in someone’s
studio, to lie on a vintage couch with my tattooed
arm draped limply over my head. I deserve to have
someone study the contour of my neck, the lopsided
proportions of my tits, the right pushed upward
by the armrest, the extra cartilage beneath my ribs.
I deserve to have someone run their hand down
my torso to fully understand the way it rises until
the peak of my child-bearing hips. I deserve to have
someone objectively study the curls of my pubic hair,
the constellation of freckles on my inner thigh.
I deserve to have someone recognize the artistry
of this bare body, the nicks on my calves, the
bruises on my forearms, the muscle in my thighs.

*

E.C. Gannon’s work has appeared in Peatsmoke Journal, Assignment Magazine, SoFloPoJo, Olit, and elsewhere. A New England native, she holds a degree in creative writing and political science from Florida State University.

Two Poems by Penelope Moffet

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Pirates

I peel a banana, cut it into pieces
I can spear into my mouth on knife-tip
like a pirate, as my boss Max used to say,

laughing as he passed from his bear’s lair
through the outer office. Max is dead two years
and it’s the vernal equinox again. Hummingbirds

chase each other when I walk on ocean bluffs
wild with bush sunflowers – dark chocolate hearts,
banana-colored petals. I like my chocolate dark,

dark as those sunflower hearts, but Max loved
milk chocolate with orange centers.
The sweeter the better, he said.

Lilac blooms of low-growing ceanothus
vibrate with bees. Tiny lizards bask on dirt,
race off. While I breathe warm salty air

a friend stumbles, his head strikes concrete,
he’s taken to the E.R. with a deep gash in his scalp.
Max didn’t know his cancer would return.

People fall apart, even me, bumbling
on painful feet and knees. We’ll come back
not as ourselves but as young and healthy creatures

basking on dirt paths, frisking through the air,
as flowers that make other people think
bananas, chocolate, orange.

*

Keepsake

         For Max Gest

The clock ticks softly
on the shelf below the TV
like a deathwatch beetle.
Late at night I hear it.

Round face full of Roman numerals,
rimmed with gold, set in mahogany,
it graced the law office desk
where I worked a quarter-century

until the boss died.
Huddled in dust,
the timepiece governs nothing
but summons Max,

who often forgot how well
his workers knew their jobs
but would stop lecturing
if I made him laugh.

In the heart of the pandemic
we kept the office going,
each laboring alone
through designated hours.

We spoke only on the phone.
More and more his voice
was wracked with coughing
as the tumors ate his lungs.

His hair grew long.
With a walker and an oxygen tank
he came in nights and weekends,
faithful as the clock that ruled my desk.

Once when I stayed late
and he came early
his smile was radiant,
the skin so taut across his face

it was like listening to a skull:
Every day I wake up
happy I’m still here.
I did not want the clock,

I turned it down three times
but on the last day
as workers came
to haul away boxed files,

donation piles and trash,
I put it in my bag.
It whispers to me
when the world is still.

*

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems have been published and are upcoming in many literary journals, including Calyx, Halfway Down the Stairs, ONE ART, Poemeleon, The Rise Up Review, Sheila-Na-Gig Online and Willawaw Journal. She has been awarded artist residencies at Alderworks Alaska, Dorland Mountain Arts, The Mesa Refuge and the Helen R. Whiteley Center. She lives in Los Angeles and has worked as a freelance journalist, a publicist for non-profits, an editor and a legal secretary.

THE CONDITIONS by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

THE CONDITIONS

Feeling ornery enough, I try to remember
what the popular Buddhist monk claimed:
Conditions for Happiness he called them, or was it
Conditions of Happiness?
Everywhere all the time, he said, entrances
are within us—a breath, a pause, to begin to notice

the air, even a sideways rain, that sustains us;
the ground, even the choppy asphalt, that holds us—
the cardinals in the springtime with their near
continuous song waking us by 5 a.m., just because
they know no other way to be—
alive and ready to sing.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently Her Joy Becomes from Fernwood Press and Marrow of Summer from Kelsay Books. A new collection from Fernwood entitled Belonging Songs will be published in 2025. New poems are forthcoming in Women Artists’ Datebook 2025, The Healing Muse, Braided Way, Delta Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly, and the Paterson Literary Review.

Short & Sweet — A Workshop with Donna Hilbert

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Short & Sweet: Writing the Short Poem

Instructor: Donna Hilbert
Date: Thursday, August 22, 2024
Time: 5:00-7:00pm (Pacific) / 8:00-10:00pm (Eastern)
Tickets: $25 (payment options)

To register, contact ONE ART’s Editor-in-Chief, Mark Danowsky, at oneartpoetry@gmail.com

~ Overview ~

Short & Sweet: Writing the Short Poem

I love poems short enough to memorize, to learn by heart, as teachers once said to children. Poems with talismanic power have become for me like prayers. Some poems offer comfort—as in the 23rd Psalm. Other poems show the way—how to put disappointment into perspective, survive tragedy, or face inexorable mortality. In Short & Sweet we will look at poems from two to sixteen lines and spend time writing together. You will receive a handout with sample poems before the class begins.

*

~ About The Workshop Leader ~

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Threnody, Moon Tide Press, 2022. Enormous Blue Umbrella is forthcoming from Moon Tide in early 2025. Work has appeared in numerous journals and broadcasts including Cultural Daily, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, Lyric Life, and anthologies including The Poetry of Presence volumes I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing.

The Hawk and the Octopus by Laura Foley

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The Hawk and the Octopus

        for Brenda Phillips, in memory

A hawk flies in the blue sky she painted,
over a bright green house
I recognize as hers.

An oak tree shadows the yard,
the hawk’s shadow too small to see,
small as the tumor shadowing her brain.

A preying hawk and malignancy,
the oak tentacled, lobed,
dark as octopus ink,

shadowing a brain I recognize as hers—
until it belonged to shadows
we never imagined.

*

Laura Foley is the author of nine poetry collections. Sledding the Valley of the Shadow (Fernwood Press) is forthcoming in 2024. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, The Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Award, The Common Good Books Poetry Prize, the Bisexual Book Award, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize and others.

Are You Looking at Us by Hayley Phillips

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Are You Looking at Us

           the appeal is in being in two places
at once, the attacker and the attacked,
           the strain and the relief, the long
directionless river and the sea it finds,
           the parent and the hard stone of a child,
the voice the throat the air they’re
           buried in, the beginning and the end,
the body of the self and the body of
           the body, the inside, the falling out,
the weapon the weapon the weapon

*

A Virginia native, Hayley Phillips received her MFA from Randolph College in 2021 and is now a PhD student at Louisiana State University. Her work has been included in Blue Earth Review, Whale Road Review, Appalachian Review and elsewhere. She currently lives in Baton Rouge with her husband and two dogs.

Four Poems by Charles Rammelkamp

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

It Takes a Minyan

When Seth Berman recruited me
for the midday minyan at work,
fifteen minutes set aside at noon,
I felt honored to participate.
Not a particularly observant Jew,
still it made me feel virtuous,
the choreography of devotion,
reciting the prayers in a group,
a meditative oasis in the middle of the day,
but I especially relished being welcomed
as a member of the club.

The agency granted us use
of one of the myriad conference rooms
in our sprawling office building.
I looked forward to the impromptu service,
stored a kippah and a prayerbook in my desk.

One day we could only muster nine,
all of us milling around Room 502
as if waiting for an airline boarding announcement.
When I saw Sheila Rosen walking down the corridor,
kosher casual in headscarf and shin-length skirt,
I suggested she could complete our minyan,
but Modern Orthodox Seth frowned.
“Isn’t there anyone else we can ask?”

“Bernie’s at his usual pinochle game in 505,”
Ben Lippman suggested, nodding across the hallway.
I went across the corridor, knocked on the door,
whispered in Bernie’s ear.

“Hold my beer,” Bernie Netzer told his mates,
only too glad to perform this mitzvah.
I looked around the table at the other three,
cards fanned in front of their faces, a can of coke
at Roger Strickler’s elbow. Just an expression, of course.

Later, when I saw Sheila schlepping a sheaf of papers
into her boss’s office, like a sacrificial offering,
I felt as if I’d been part of a conspiracy
to exclude her from our community.

*

Identifying Wildlife

“See anything this morning?” the young man asked.
We’d just come across one another,
walking the wooded path by the Stony Run creek,
coming from opposite directions.

“Might have seen a red-bellied woodpecker,”
Abby offered, tentatively.

“The ducks are over in the pond,” I gestured.
Mid-December, not a lot of wildlife about.

“We wondered if we were going
to run into you,” the man went on.

The girl he was with laughed.
“That sounds creepier than it was,
but we did have that conversation!”

We all laughed at that,
made jokes about stalkers.
Then we wished each other a good day,
and we all continued on our way.

“Did you recognize either of them?”
Abby asked in a low voice
a minute later.

“Not sure,” I confessed.
“Maybe we saw them a while ago?
They knew we were birders, after all,
and we didn’t have our binoculars with us.”

*

Re-Imagine

I keep hearing the word –
“re-imagining” the news, “re-imagining” Shakespeare,
“re-imagining” your life.
A whole new promotional gimmick,
buzzword du jour.

It makes me think of the toilet paper package
that says one roll lasts one week.
How can you even say that?
How many people are using it?
How many squares a tear?
Can you really measure toilet paper in terms of time?
Re-imaging toilet paper.

Which also reminds me of the cancer patient
given six months to live.
“Re-imagine” your life.
What was that TV show with Ben Gazzara?
Run for Your Life.
A terminally ill patient tries to make the most
out of the two years he has to live.
A pretty sketchy premise for a character as fit as Gazzara –
the character’s name was Paul Bryan, an attorney –
but I was in high school when it aired,
and I probably watched every episode
of its three-year run.

Bryan was given no more than 18 months to live,
which you always heard the doctor say
in a voiceover at the start of each episode,
though the show ran for 86 episodes –
87, if you count the pilot.

Which makes me think of the “permanent” crown
I got for a lower right molar in 2018,
which popped out of my mouth in 2022.
For some impenetrable insurance reason,
I could only get a “temporary” crown
until I was eligible for a “permanent” one
a few months down the road.
I’ve been re-imaging my teeth ever since,
re-imagining dental insurance, too.

*

The Sound of the Struggle

“It means the sound of the struggle,”
my father told me when I asked
if our German surname had a meaning.
Kampf, as in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. His struggle.

I always saw our name
as a wave coming in to shore,
the curl of the r, the undulant m’s,
the finality of the p lapping the beach.

But he also hinted at another,
less salubrious meaning,
becoming vague, evasive, when pressed.
We settled on “the sound of the struggle,”
left it at that.

But years later, browsing through a bookstore,
I found a book called
International Dictionary of Obscenities,
a guide to dirty words and indecent expressions –
Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian.
I came upon the word “rammeln”:
“to screw, copulate with [‘to buck, rut’]”
and a lightbulb went off in my head.

“Nuptial chambers,”
my linguistic friend Marcus confirmed,
and I thought, more along the lines
of farm animals in a field – a camp –
“rammen” the German for “ram.”

But when we visited distant cousins
in Nordhorn, Germany, they took us
to a small creek that formed a border with Holland
On one side of the Rammelbeek River,
Germany, on the other, the Netherlands.
“This is the source of the family name,”
Dietmar asserted with confidence,
and who was I to disagree?
I wasn’t going to fight it.

* 

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.

Woven by Brett Stuckel

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Woven

My family sold towels
with flat-weave trims,

rough scrubbers built in.
The border seam,

a tool for clearing a stye
or toothpick in a pinch.

Don’t leave
your towels alone,

draped on mildew glass.
Don’t weaponize

them in a locker room.
The towel smothers blood

without question.
The towel weeps

for each of us,
alone in a bucket.

*

Brett Stuckel’s writing has appeared in Wordgathering, Electric Literature, Hobart, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and is online at www.brettstuckel.com.

INSENSATE by Michelle Reale

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INSENSATE

If I wanted to make certain proclamations I’d speak them into empty rooms, on cold nights, devoid of all sound. I would quiver for effect. I would generate my own predictions, but would refuse private readings, even if implored to do so. I can claim knowledge of certainties, but they come from the past, not the future, which feels like cheating, but it isn’t. If I wanted to give advice, that’s another story. Still, it might sound like this: If you have known hardship like a boot on the back of your neck, your solitude will feel like your very own fingers scratching your very own back— dissatisfying. If you have to imagine a space for love, not even a big space, maybe just a small space where emotions might fold up like an envelope and slip under your door, you will practically ensure that those eligible will suit themselves first and then wash their hands of you. No explanations will be forthcoming. A Buddhist will tell you “That’s life.” If when you move forward a bit it feels a lot like what afterward feels like, you have probably rescued yourself one time too many. Sympathetic gestures wear the right clothes, but are fraudulent and you gave up reading minds and murmuring agreement long ago. See this room, devoid of human sound? It is like a vessel that is in perpetual motion. You stand on the deck but cannot tell if what you see or feel is moving away from you or coming closer. Let yourself feel the force of gravitational desolation. The trapped fly knows it well. How it enters a room with such ease, knows it isn’t wanted, then exhausts itself to utter death trying to find an exit.

*

Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry and flash collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and Blood Memory (Idea Press), and In the Year of Hurricane Agnes (Alien Buddha Press). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Arcadia University.

Buzzfeed by James Croal Jackson

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Buzzfeed

how high the article points
my hygge hungry clickbait
kitchen rant clean the hilt
of paper towel roll yuck
mayo on the rye oh
why did we buy the grill
we can’t afford the home
as such I love to speak
ill of the dead so static
in their forever photo
synthesis please share

*

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023) and Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022). Recent poems are in Ghost City Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Pirene’s Fountain. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (jamescroaljackson.com)

The Online Dating Profile of a Vain Poet by Rick Swann

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The Online Dating Profile of a Vain Poet

I like hand-written letters, good wine
and late-night discourse. I can always
turn a phrase. I love fiercely, with great
passion. I will worship you and capture
our love so sublimely that we, perhaps,
will become immortal. If this moves you,
please contact me and be my muse.

*

Rick Swann is the author of the children’s book of linked poems Our School Garden! which was awarded the Growing Good Kids Book Award from the American Horticultural Society. His poems have been appeared in English Journal, Windfall, Autumn Sky Poetry, Typehouse, Last Stanza, Superpresent, Rockvale Review, and other publications as well as the anthologies Sing the Salmon Home and Washington Poetic Routes. He lives in Seattle where he is a member of the Greenwood Poets.

Laughing Yoga Time Travelers by Mary Ray Goehring

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Laughing Yoga* Time Travelers

Six 60 somethings
hold hands, swing arms,
snort, snicker, chortle,
cachinnate,
and find long forgotten
6-year-old selves still here.

We gather to laugh
with a friend undergoing chemo.
No clever jokes,
no judgement allowed.
Just crazy gestures, goofy faces.
While moving our bodies, our bellies laugh
and afterwards, deep restorative breaths.

We strut like chickens.
Giggle like school girls.
Bellies bounce in hoots and hollers.
Our mood rising like rainbow sunrises
lighting the room in lifted spirits.
Magical. Transported to a time
we remembered how to laugh
for no other reason
than it felt good.

*Laughing Yoga is part of a holistic therapy discovered by Madan Kataria in 1995 and is now offered by MD Anderson Cancer Center of patients receiving chemo. “Laughter yoga brings a unique element to the Place…of wellness,” says Moshe Frenkel M.D. medical director of the Integrative Medicine Program at M D. Anderson. “We know from multiple studies that laughter causes a positive physiological response and above all reduces stress and anxiety. This complementary therapy allows us to incorporate humor in cancer care and help patients discover a playfulness that reduces stress and anxiety while increasing their pain tolerance.”

*

Mary Ray Goehring, a snowbird, migrates seasonally between her prairie in Central Wisconsin and the pine forests along the border between East Texas and Louisiana. Grateful to be learning about the flora and fauna throughout the country, she writes primarily about nature, family and friends. You can find her work in several print and online journals and anthologies such as: ONE ART: a journal of poetry, A Path to Kindness – edited by James Crews, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Moss Piglet, The Blue Heron Review, Bramble, Your Daily Poem, The Rye Whiskey Review, Steam Ticket Review and others.

“Stealth Formalism”: Formal Verse for Free Verse Poets — A Workshop with Nicole Caruso Garcia

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“Stealth Formalism”: Formal Verse for Free Verse Poets

Instructor: Nicole Caruso Garcia
Date: Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Time: 6:00-8:00pm (Eastern)
Price: $25 (payment options)

To register: email Mark Danowsky at oneartpoetry@gmail.com 

*

Overview

“Stealth Formalism”: Formal Verse for Free Verse Poets

How do the most skilled formalists of today craft poems that sound fresh and contemporary, poems that read as naturally as free verse? Some poets are such ninjas of sound and sense that readers might reach the end of a sonnet before even realizing it is a sonnet. On the other hand, formal poems can be proficient and technically correct, yet still sound forced, archaic, stilted, or unintentionally humorous. Bad poetry, oh noetry! In this workshop, we will explore examples to demystify the common pitfalls of formal verse, learning techniques for leaping over them and onto the solid footing of effective poems. (Participants may wish to bring a poem draft “just in case” there’s time to review a few as samples for future revision.)

*

About The Workshop Leader

Nicole Caruso Garcia’s full-length debut OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press) recently received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Best New Poets, Light, Mezzo Cammin, ONE ART, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. She serves as associate poetry editor at Able Muse and as an executive board member at Poetry by the Sea, an annual poetry conference in Madison, CT. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

my body as youth by john compton

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my body as youth

my hair is thinning. my eyes depend
on lenses. my noise is feeble.
my ears no longer understand sound.
my lips have shriveled, small & weak.
my mouth is still scared
to eat. my neck has almost given up
its strength. my shoulders lug around dead weight.
my elbows burn like a gas stove.
my wrists tunnel into my hands. my fingers are cracked
at each bend. my heart
is wrapped in onion. my lungs have been beaten
beyond repair. my stomach is no more a victim
than the tongue itself. my liver has always been
a failure. my kidneys compete like strangers.
my intestines are knotted with agony.
my bladder has no hold, lets it all go.
my colon stores without payment.
my penis is slack. my ass sags.
my hips are on the verge of displacement.
my thighs still contain proof of stretched skin.
my knees are crippled as are my ankles.
my feet are islands sinking. my toes are their navigator.

*

john compton (he/him) is a gay poet who lives with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. his latest book: my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store (Flowersong Press; dec 2024) and latest chapbook: melancholy arcadia (Harbor Editions; april 2024).

Lost by Allison Thung

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Lost

I

Find my hand
in a crowd like
cold, running water
finds a paper cut
so minute it is
unfelt until
unforgotten.

II

If every over-
shoulder glance
only furthers
and shrinks you,
then the only
way to keep you
close and larger
than life is to
never look back;
only inward.

III

My fingertips
yellow in cold
or under stress.
The doctor
agrees it’s likely
Raynaud’s. The
doctor will not
agree it’s also
my grip
on the past.

IV

After a bout
in the sun,
your face is a
constellation,
every now-
distinct mole
and freckle
guiding me
home to
safety.

*

Allison Thung is a Singaporean poet and project manager. She is the author of Reacquaint (kith books, 2024) and the forthcoming Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified ‘you’ (Hem Press, 2025). Her poetry has been published in ANMLY, Heavy Feather Review, Cease, Cows, The Daily Drunk, and elsewhere, and nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Allison reads poetry for ANMLY. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @poetrybyallison, or at www.allisonthung.com.

Three Poems by Christina Kallery

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Tell Me

Hamlet Act V, Scene 1:
I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum.

At 22, I thought Hamlet hit peak
romance when he leaped into her grave.
I wanted to be loved that way, I said,
imagining some frenzied ex whose heart
would finally crack open, cascading tears
over my corpse. Those days we’d dress up
all in black and stroll the graveyard
talking Kierkegaard, Camus, The Cure—
death distant as a Denmark tomb.

This was years before
my mother’s lungs filled with the sea,
her body twined with tubes like lily stems
ascending from her metal bed;
before I’d sprint to reach her room and find
the blinking cosmos of the monitor gone black.
And my father then confessing
he had wanted to return—2000 miles,
40 years and two ex-wives in tow.

Yes, sometimes love is far
too long and late. But fuck
this keeping secrets for the dead,
the power ballad bombast,
the sepia-toned regret,
the last glance back
as the subway doors meet.

Here’s what I know tonight:
the sum of our near misses
is silence. So lie here, lean close,
tell me everything before we sink.

*

Poem for the Closing Scene of Every Incredible Hulk Episode

Poor David Banner always ended up the same.
After someone made him angry,
turned him avocado green,
pecs popping through his last clean button down
(but at least lucking out that his pants stayed on).

After tossing drug lords through a glass gazebo,
upending a sedan or two, occupants
suspended while the wheels still spin.
After hurtling a jukebox into the wall of booze,
bartender ducking just in time, or lobbing
leisure-suited playboys into the swimming pool,
sending them slo-mo shrieking from the hotel
balcony. Main street now in ruins, bad guys
cuffed and packed into the backs of Dodge
patrol cars, PG cussing over minor injuries.

Those wan piano notes would sound,
final credits toll his time, again, to exit town.
Condemned to walk the highway
in a crisp new shirt, thumb outstretched as happy
families whoosh past in their wood paneling.
D minor sob crescendoing as a semi
brakes to let him climb aboard.

Even then, watching from my grandma’s
velvet couch I knew that knot of sorrow
in my chest was for my dad
who looked like David Banner,
but less tall and more Hungarian;
who’d loaded up a white VW bus
and headed off into some desert sun,
sending gifts of fossils, petrified wood,
three rattles from the snakes he’d shot.
Leaving me back here to clean things up.

*

How I Would Haunt You

Not only in the ways you would expect—
With flickering lights, an obscure Smiths song
to halt your cart from a Costco intercom.
I’d haunt you hard, send 3 am texts.

I’d pick the oddest times to show my face:
the DMV just as your number’s called,
the last sogged Cheerios circling your bowl,
a billboard on the M-10 overpass.

And forget the nightgown, long and white.
I’d go sexy into that good night, slut
it up just so you’d know exactly what
it is you’re missing in the afterlife.

And when you’re drowning in some fever dream
I’d wake you with a kiss that fucking might have been.

*

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, Rust & Moth, 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 currently resides in Ann Arbor, where she co-hosts a paranormal podcast called Shadowland.

First Date by Mariana Llanos

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First Date

It was just a first date–
two nervous strangers meeting for the first time.
The place was full, I think,
but I can’t clearly remember
‘cause I couldn’t take my gaze off of you.
And I don’t know exactly what drew me into you.
Perhaps the singsong of your country accent,
or your stories and mischievous smile,
or your blunt sincerity, almost as if
you couldn’t stop the truth from shooting
out of your mouth.
We didn’t eat much
–you had a beer, I munched on sweet potato fries–
and we left
to saunter under the stars on a calm and unusually pleasant
early November night.
We chatted lively,
like two people who had a lot to share
and even more to learn from each other.
You asked, “What do you miss most about
not being single?”
I thought for a brief moment because I had a long list,
but I only said, “I miss the company. Watching TV with someone.”
You smiled like you knew I was keeping some things to myself.
“And you?”
“I miss waiting,” you said.
“Outside the mall, while she’s out shopping.
Just sitting down, and waiting.”
And time went by unhurriedly,
and there was much more to say, but it was late.
We strolled toward our cars and you held my hand–
my heart pumped faster but you didn’t notice.
You showed me your truck while you told me
more work stories.
Then you walked me to my car
and as I searched for my keys
–I really didn’t want to leave–,
you bent down, and pressed
your lips on mine.
And I didn’t care about passersby, or the time,
or that I never kiss on the first date,
because I wanted your lips too.

When we talked the next day
I could feel you smiling even without seeing you
or perhaps it was me who beamed for both of us.
And there was that awkward moment
when you don’t know what the other person is thinking
or if anything each of us felt was reciprocated.
But you dared and said, “I wanted you to kiss me on my truck.”
A wave of desire engulfed my skin.
“I wanted you to kiss me longer,” I said.

And at that moment,
I knew that I had known you for a long time.

*

Mariana Llanos is a Peruvian born writer and poet. Her poetry has been included in independent journals and in Poetry Magazine Young People’s Edition. She is a recipient of a Pura Belpré Honor for her children´s book Benita y las criaturas nocturnas. She lives in Oklahoma.

Conversations with my uber-driver by Lydia la Grange

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Conversations with my uber-driver

The slightly scratched Toyota pulls up to my house
I wave to the driver: a young black man, with an easy smile.
As I get in, I notice the isiphandla, a band of animal skin
hanging from his rear-view mirror.
So, I greet him in Zulu:
“Sawubona”
(Knowing I probably butchered the pronunciation
even though I’ve lived in South-Africa all my life.)
He repeats the word and we start driving.

He asks about my life and I ask about his.
He tells me that he is working for a hotel-chain
Ubering on the side, to support his family.
He used to study electrical engineering after getting a scholarship,
but had to work and ended up dropping out.
He says all this, without any hint of self-pity or regret,
as if he never expected more from life.

I ask if he wants to go back to university one day.
He replies that he probably won’t be able to,
but hopes to do a math-course and become a tutor
since he used to help tutor his friends in school and enjoyed it.

We arrive at my destination. I thank him and leave.
I wonder at the unfairness of it all:
This young man, with his positivity and intelligence
has had to give up on a dream
just because he was born on the wrong side of Apartheid.
(which lives on 30-years after it was ended)
And I have everything I need in life
just because I wasn’t.

*

Lydia la Grange is a South-African poet and playwright. Her work includes: Afskeid ‘n Musiekblyspel, Liewe Anna and F-Woord. She has published poems in Die Helpie Flitse and has had slam poems performed at the National Eisteddfod Academy’s national competition.

Two Poems by Alicia Rebecca Myers

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The Surprise

My father died two weeks before
his 48th wedding anniversary. What ate up
my mother was the fact that he had
planned a special dinner for it
but never told her details, just a sweet
allusion: It’s a surprise. I must have
called every restaurant in the days
following for proof of reservation,
strange to ask, Do you have record
of a past name?, wondering where
they would have sat, his order, if
acute leukemia would have stopped
him from drinking beer or
pointing to the slabs of beef
wheeled out on a silver cart and
saying, That one. But no one
could find him: not the Peddler
Steakhouse, not the Angus Barn, not
Mandolin. Not even Red Lobster.
What a bureaucratic waste my grief
made of time. I held my breath
whenever a person answered.

*

Easy

I qualify every search with easy.
Easy bean stew. Easy angel food cake.
What is easy to fix. What is healthy.

Easy training techniques for a needy
dog. Easy way to cross grief like a lake.
I qualify every search with easy.

Easy to understand recent study
on the brief fluke prints left in a whale’s wake.
What is easy to fix. What is healthy.

Easy day trips from here. Easy journey
to see varying degrees of light break.
I qualify every search with easy.

Easy slumber. Easy to tell funny
jokes. Easiest way to conceal an ache.
What is easy to fix. What is healthy.

Easy upward trajectory. Dressy
pretend ease followed by the sharp intake.
I qualify every search with easy.
What is easy to fix. What is healthy.

*

Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist who holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Best New Poets, Creative Nonfiction, River Styx, Gulf Coast, december, Sixth Finch, and The Rumpus. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press, 2016), was winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series. Her first full-length book, Warble, was chosen by former Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg as winner of the 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize and will be published in fall ‘25 (Meadowlark Press). She lives with her husband and their nine-year-old in upstate NY.

Shophouse Dreaming by Ping Yi

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Shophouse Dreaming

In a pre-war shophouse they sold charcoal,
breaking bulk into sacks and sewn, carbon
coating wall, ceiling, bench and fingernail.
They used to be They – He ran off with some
woman or drink or both, fled from his kids.

She flipped to trading gas in canisters
blue and grey, higher margins – ahead of
her time. Seven to feed upstairs, creaking
floor for beds, the boys asleep before girls,
always. Beneath casement windows, ferals
and mongrels duelled, warbled and bred in
the pungent alleyway to palm-thatched huts.

Weekends we visited Grandma in the
shophouse – still selling her gas, still fuelling
working households. Radio squawking in her
Teochew dialect, second uncle & co.
shipped the gas, fixed valves and stoves, ran the shop.
The clan came, bartered pears, pomfret, make-up
and gossip while we raced the staircase and
back lanes, as amok as village chickens.

She moved into public housing, handed
the business to her son, and then passed on.
I retrace my steps inside the new arts
academy, standing where the house stood:
there the storm drain took sis’s pillow doll,
there I bathed from the giant earthen pot,
there the nightsoil man harvested the spoils.

And here, by the national orchestra,
I suddenly remember her.

*

Ping Yi writes poetry, travelogues and fiction, and is in public service. His work has appeared in Litro, London Grip, Meniscus, La Piccioletta Barca, Sideways and Vita Poetica, and is forthcoming in Poetry Breakfast and Harbor Review. Ping Yi is from Singapore, and has also lived in Boston, MA, and Cambridge, UK.

Woman with Piano by Donna Pucciani

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Woman with Piano

They don’t tickle the ivories
the way they used to—
once-nimble fingers typing
the musical alphabet of Bach,
running like new lambs on a hillside
of sixteenth notes, but now like old sheep
becoming mutton, plodding mud-wise
through pastures of Mozart minuets.

I dog-ear the pages of slow movements,
leaving untouched the rest of the sonata,
abandoning allegros, now unplayable.

I close my eyes, hearing harmonies
for the first time, seventh chords
unresolved forever, languishing
in the hammock of largo, lolling sweet
and idle among the sambas of Jobim.

I feel my fingers, slow and sure,
not needing the flash and glitter of Scarlatti,
the gymnastics of Liszt, but reclining
unapologetically under the falling leaves
of Moonlight in Vermont.

The pleasures of old age linger
in every chord, unable to leap
from the tension of ninths to the final triad,
for resolution is not as important as desire.
And listening, always listening.

*

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, The Pedestal, Journal of Italian Translation and other journals. Her latest book of poetry is EDGES.

Immortal One by Shaun R. Pankoski

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Immortal One

The peacock at the Buddhist temple
is anything but humble.
He struts and screams of his magnificence
to anyone who will listen.
Flapping prayer flags
cannot compete with his glorious colors―
emerald, cerulean and glints of bronze,
opulent in the sun,
that follows him like a manservant,
casting him in his best light.
He weaves his way among the bamboo clumps,
the eucalyptus groves,
the pale, upturned faces of the Japanese iris.
While a holy breeze
nudges the brooms of the red-robed monks,
quietly sweeping the temple stairs.

*

Shaun R. Pankoski (she/her) is a poet most recently from Volcano, Hawaii. A retired county worker and two time breast cancer survivor, she has lived on both coasts as well as the Midwest as an artist’s model, modern dancer, massage therapist and honorably discharged Air Force veteran. Her poems have appeared here and other lit mags, including Gargoyle, Gyroscope and MacQueen’s Quinterly.

AI, Basic Income, and the Buddhist Agenda by Katherine Riegel

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

AI, Basic Income, and the Buddhist Agenda

I’m too old to learn a new way of earning,
to navigate bleak wastelands where artificial
intelligence makes glaciers calve with a great
violence and splash. The waters are rising and soon

everyone will be selling to everyone else 24/7
and who will have time to read
anything? Even to myself, I sound like doom

in a sandwich board ringing a bell in the town square
and I’m not proud of that, nor of the weakness
that keeps me from leaving every comfort I know

to live by the sun’s schedule and grow my own
food—corn, beans, and squash, the sacred trio
indigenous people knew well before my ancestors came
with their grim monoculture. The strands of my hungers

tangle and clash and I do get it, the temptation
to walk away and leave the oven on a timer, something
else in charge, since we’ve burned dinner so many times

the house smells of ash and surrender. I want more
than I should and definitely more gentleness for everyone:
grasses bending in the wind on a bluff overlooking
the sea, salt air scouring the darkness from our lungs,

no hint of our words scooped up and repurposed
by some inscrutable code. I want to believe
myself worthy, that none of us have to earn the right

to be, that wherever we existed before we were born here
we belonged so completely we had no doubt
this world would open its lush arms to us.

*

Katherine Riegel’s lyric memoir, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. She is also the author of Love Songs from the End of the World (Main Street Rag), the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth (Sundress), and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Catamaran, One, Orion and elsewhere. She is managing editor of Sweet Lit and teaches online classes in poetry and cnf. Find her at katherineriegel.com.

EMT by Sherry Abaldo

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EMT
We joke about it: Mom has to go throw up when I talk about work.
The one about the nine-year-old home alone, taking care of a dying baby
hooked up to machines in a back room, who swallowed a bottle cap.
The one about the morbidly obese old man in a collapsing trailer
whose bloated feet teemed with maggots. The one about the drunk
woman who kept wrecking property and cutting herself with glass who
could never get over the loss of her baby. The one about the guy on meth
with a hidden switchblade who got checked into ER only to stab another
guy on meth strapped to a gurney in the same ER to death. Blood
everywhere. Blood painted all over the clean white church of the hospital.
The bureaucracy of giving a crazed patient a K bomb. The 20-year-old
gang member shot 22 times, my daughter’s first intubation procedure she
beams. The 94-year-old first of his kind Navy SEAL being jostled over high
Vegas speed bumps who told her, It’s ok. I just wish I could dance with you.
*
Sherry Abaldo splits her time between Las Vegas and rural Maine where she grew up. Her writing has appeared in Rattle, The New York Times, Down East Magazine, Northern New England Review, and other literary journals and anthologies as well as on The History Channel and PBS. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Southern California. A two-time Dibner Poetry Fellow, her awards include a Regional Emmy and winner of The Ekphrastic Review’s Erotic Ekphrastic Poetry Contest. Her website: sherryabaldo.com.

Two Poems by Olga Livshin

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A Tulip in a Besieged City

Like a soft bomb.

Like a clock,
if the clock knew
it might not go on.

It holds one petal to the side,
an ethereal skirt.

The dark, furry pistil,
fit to create, to mess something up.
The bloom, ready to croon its orange-black insides out.

A smattering of sand falls from the sky.

Petals remain
bright gathered flags.

*

Blowout

Our reading about the war in Ukraine
is tonight, here in morning-washed Miami.

I said to Julia: At least we will have beautiful hair!
Aching for our homeland, I paid strangers in a salon
to comfort our hair.

Or maybe I wanted to cover up
our knee-bent, back-curved, salty-eyed content
with presentable form,
and prettiness is an ally.

Or maybe, in the room next to my mind –
five thousand miles away –
an explosion killed a three-year-old boy
in his bed, in the night.
My phone shook with this news.
But why am I getting curled
when I have to straighten myself out?

Julia’s hair is like a river of dark metal
brushed aglow. My girl’s big laughter,
a yearning flame. Love this blowout!
she says to her stylist. Her love of love,
and voice like a beautiful animal.
She stands up, spins around,
sweeps me into a hug,
not compressed by gender or history,
amplified by what we must endure.

*

Olga Livshin’s work is recently published in the New York Times, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and other journals. She is the author of the poetry collection A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (2019). Livshin co-translated Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (2023) and A Man Only Needs a Room by Vladimir Gandelsman (New Meridian Arts, 2022). As a consulting poetry editor for Mukoli: A Journal for Peace, she reviews poetry from conflict-affected communities across the world, with a focus on Eastern Europe. She lives in a suburb of Philadelphia.

A History of Fireworks by Kari Gunter-Seymour

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

A History of Fireworks

It’s July 1st. Whose idea it was to wait
I can’t remember, but me, my son
and two granddaughters, nine and ten,
are at the fireworks warehouse,
along with scads of other pyromaniacs,
sorting out scenarios for night sky panoramas,
shelves heaped to the ceiling with firepower.

I do my best to maneuver the cart. My son
considers tube launchers, skyrockets, mortars.
A particularly hearty woman standing her ground
near the Roman candles cackles,
these flaming swords are the bomb,
it’s my third trip back, my kids love’em.

Flaming swords? I envision “Star Wars”
or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,”
ER visits, burn salve at best, but when I mention
what I overheard, my son says, Awesome!

I pick up a petite pink sword, offer it
to my sweet baby girls.
The first says, I want that black sword.
The second looks up at the top shelf, stacked
to the hilt with Thor’s hammer look-alikes,
says, I want one of those conk busters.

Night of, dusk closing in,
the sword tip is lit, sparks fly—
a fountain of reds, greens and golds.
My grandgirl lunges and parries, the granddog
darts in/out of spark showers, barks,
oohs and ahhs abound—applause, applause.
Then comes the hammer,
held high and fierce.
For a few magnificent seconds
sparks fly, the dog dances,
then silence and a wee sputtering flame.

We scratch our heads, grumble,
give in to lost cause.
But my warrior girl persists,
Mjölnir aloft, double gripped,
feet planted firm and wide,
shouts her warrior oath—
then all hell breaks loose.

Flames shoot, whistles whine,
colorful spheres escape containment.
We clap and hoot, amazed at the splendor,
each of us sporting bits of confetti and soot,
the expressions on our faces hilarious,
my granddaughter’s the best face of all,
agog in the wonder of her power.

*

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio. Her current poetry collections include Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022), winner of the Legacy Book Award and Best Book Award. She is the executive director and editor of the Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak anthology series. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, World Literature Today, American Book Review, The New York Times and Poem-a-Day.

Two Poems by Max Heinegg

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

North Shore on the 4th

              We draw lines and stand behind them.
              That’s why flags are such ugly things.
                            – Fugazi, “Facet Squared”

A shirtless boy drags Old Glory
down the cracked road leading to the quarry
where another drowned a week ago.
Should I tell him a flag should never touch the ground?

I remember teenage me, singing Fugazi
and what irony privilege enjoys. Youth
and ideals rot. I haul my half-century up
to a yard teeming with legal pot and sunflowers,
a seeded pumpkin patch and a wilderness
behind a house whose hold teems with deer
a stone’s throw from a one-floor elementary.

The local working-class elitism ranks How long
have you lived here? None born here could buy here.
America in relief: energetic patriotism, the messiah
of youth in scout uniforms, good neighbors gathered
to belt the hits of what they still call country
in unison. So much easier than trying the harmony.

*

Florida Man

The librarian wants to know why we’re headed,
as does my chiropractor. All three of us Jewish,
I joke, to be reunited with our people. Not the retired
erudite, dining on fried grouper & margaritas,
(too sweet by twice), but the pot-bellied swagger
of white hair, palming Modelo cozies. It’s June
& Pride, mid the madness of DeSantis. The highway
signs are all guns & ammo, vape shops, personal
injury, COVID test results & how evolution ain’t.

We tour a destroyed botanical garden & gators lurk.
We take selfies with a digital Dali, smirking in St. Petersburg.
We sink shin-splinted legs into the tide, then steaming sand,
& sight the ibis hovering on the shore like cursive,
& observe boys skimboard three seconds, psyched.
Near sunset, on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend,
approached by a veteran, tattooed, collarbone down.
Skulls on his sleeves, bloodied Jesus, his shorts read Anti-Hate.
He offers to take a photo before the sun goes down.

*

Max Heinegg is the author of Going There (2023), and Good Harbor (2022), which won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize; a chapbook, Keepers of the House, is forthcoming in March 2025, all published by Lily Poetry Books. His work has appeared in 32 Poems, The Cortland Review, Thrush, Asheville Poetry Review, and Borderlands, among others. He lives, teaches, and makes records in Medford, MA. Connect with him @ www.maxheinegg.com

Generosity by Hayley Mitchell Haugen

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Generosity

for James Crews

There are some for whom chores are sacred;
they accept each gift of laundry—weeks of dorm grime
schlepped home in molding duffle bags—
fold reverence into each fresh-from-the-dryer seam.

They bake their own bread—meditate while it proves,
or whip up seven different kinds of salads,
each family dinner, a communion of leafy greens.
A firmly tucked sheet, a gleaming guest tub—

all acts of domestic devotion, an enlightenment
I’ve failed to achieve. I remain agnostic,
scoff even, at the notion of grace awaiting
in the depths of the daily grind.

When the grey mouse arrives during the cold snap,
I am unmoved by any spirit of cleanliness
to lay out sticky-traps, cannot face that moment
of anointing his little paws with vegetable oil

to set him free. Instead, I listen to him scritch
his way across countertops—crackle of cellophane,
clink of spoons in an unwashed bowl. Sometimes,
I’ll offer up a strawberry, a cheddar Triscuit—

just a little something for comfort in the night.

*

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.

GLOBAL MUSTARD SHORTAGE LOOMS AHEAD OF SUMMER BARBEQUES by B.L. Pike

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

GLOBAL MUSTARD SHORTAGE LOOMS
AHEAD OF SUMMER BARBEQUES

We’re short of everything these days—
grace for instance, reason, joy.
And now it’s mustard.

Smooth or grainy, Cajun style, dilled,
neon yellow, brown, that Grey Poupon.
We used to slap it freely on

most anything. Burgers, dogs,
our griefs and grievances,
the brutal, constant pain of our discordance.

Or was that all some other salve we used to slather?
I don’t remember anymore.
The taste is gone—that zing.
That mustard.

*

B.L. Pike is a poet from Arizona. Being new to all this, her poetry has only appeared on Rattle’s Critique of the Week and Tim Green’s submission pile, where it has earned any number of helpful suggestions that I trust are reflected in this poem.

Pinky Promise by Julie Weiss

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Pinky Promise

         after Maggie Smith

Any day now, they’ll reach the border
of my hands, peer at a terrain that would break
the most seasoned travelers. Given another
way, no sane mother would surrender
her children to the world’s atrocities, just like
no sane mother would unlock the gate
and let go, knowing the path is ticking
with landmines. Wandering off,
they’ll come across bodies no bigger
than their own, wrapped in sheets
of thoughts and prayers. Predators on the prowl,
crouched behind candied smiles, waiting
for the earth to blink. Where, my children will ask,
are the pretty ponies grazing in golden pastures?
The faery clans arrayed in petals and sparkle,
where? You pinky promised. It’s true.
I’ve slinked into pawn shops on every corner
of time, bartered away the lucky trinkets,
the dreamcatchers hung over their windows
like suns rising in another galaxy, but when
I looked over my shoulder, as they’re doing now,
all I saw was a cemetery swarming
with blood and bones, a million unclasped hands.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. Her “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. Her recent work appears in ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, and Last Syllable, among others. Originally from California, she lives in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/

Two Poems by Angie Blake-Moore

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Beaks Full

an anniversary poem for D

Our rental car shooting down
the tight Irish country roads lined with
the greenest of hedgerows, we see
a seagull fly overhead—
a whole piece of bread in its beak
and we both exclaim our happiness for it.

We are that bird.
Pleased with the lucky find, the unexpected
wish come true—all that we asked for
has already happened: our beaks full
of good fortune and someone to share it with.

* 

Romance

Think of Carson McCullers
and the 3-legged Italian
teacup. She craved it something awful,
pictured it nesting
in her palm, awkward
yet lovely. But she made no move
to get one, knowing romance
is in the wanting
while possession’s as dry as Georgia grass
in the ardent August sun.

*

Angie Blake-Moore has been a teacher of 3- and 4-year-olds in Washington, DC for nearly 30 years. She has been writing poetry since she was in high school and has had the opportunity to learn from poets such as Hilary Tham and Matthew Lippman. She’s had work published in Potomac Review and Green Mountains Review among others and recently had a poem chosen for Moving Words in Arlington, VA where her poem is displayed in county buses.

Crash Course by Holly Woodward

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Crash Course

“You cannot nail grief,”
the moon whispered
on the short leash
I kept her,
hooded, silent
with her private weather.

I told her, “Your father
is dead.” She shook her dusty head.
She warned me,
“Love will cost you
something you’re not prepared to pay.”
Venus snorted, “I’m not
here to make friends.”

Safer to drown in one’s own desires
than in a stranger’s, right?
(Though more lonely.)

Things I won’t understand until too late:
You either grace time or waste time.
You can never have too many wings.
Death can see through lies,
even your silent lies.

Death leaves voice messages
but I don’t play
them. I am not done
with my dead.
I am never
done with them.

I ask, “Want to hear my funny nightmare?”
No takers. The clown stutters, “But, seriously.”
The problem with masks is
it inscribes its price
on the inside of our skin.

A scar is a locked door. A door is
a stranger in two rooms.
To see clearly, I have to rip off
my false face. At least loneliness you don’t
have to fake.

There’s nothing dreamy about my dreams.

How old can you get without dying of it?

*

Holly Woodward is a writer and artist. She served as writer in residence at St. Albans, Washington National Cathedral, and was a fellow for four years at CUNY Graduate Center’s Writers’ Institute. Woodward enjoyed a year as a doctoral fellow at Moscow University. She also studied at Leningrad University and has an MFA from Columbia. Her poetry and fiction have won prizes from Story Magazine, the 92nd Street Y, and New Letters, among other honors.

The Mosasaur Capital of the World by Adrianna Gordey

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment
The Mosasaur Capital of the World
The Tylosaurus skeleton spirals to the ceiling, a corkscrew
of ribs & vertebrae & teeth. AC weaves through its bones
while a heat wave quilts Kansas. Squares of sunlight smother
the college campus, but the fossilized apex predator’s shadow
protects me. The mosasaur’s terrestrial ancestors returned
to the Western Interior Seaway, & I wish I could follow
their flippers. The risky reinvention of their DNA
inspires me. In a million years, my offspring could dominate
what’s left of the world with unhinged jaws perfect
for swallowing. I won’t wallow in the land-locked misery,
but I wonder if my sun scorched bones will hang as a mobile
above cribs, a warning to future generations. The asteroid
that ended the dinosaurs was a mercy; global climate change
is a slow, sticky march towards extinction. Meteorologists forecast
heat indexes of 125° once a year in the KC metro. Although Tylosaurus
is Kansas’ official marine fossil, I prophesize we won’t acclimate
to the smog or power outages. No one will award 600 bottles
of wine for my skeleton because the long-necked bottles
will be buried beside me in landfill graves. The mosasaurs
were satiated with giant sea turtles & sharks, but humanity’s
hunger & heat indexes will unravel the double helix of our DNA.
*
Adrianna Gordey (she/her) is a writer based in Kansas. When she isn’t writing, Adrianna can be found daydreaming about the Atlantic ocean and assembling overly ambitious Halloween costumes. Her work has appeared in Passengers Journal, Hunger Mountain Review, and elsewhere. Follow her on Instagram @by_adrianna_gordey.

I DANCE WITH A MAN WHO HAS A GIRLFRIEND AT MY LOCAL KARAOKE JOINT by Erica Anderson-Senter

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

I DANCE WITH A MAN WHO HAS A GIRLFRIEND AT MY LOCAL KARAOKE JOINT

and I swear, I come undone when he touches my ribs, says—
mmm, girl, you’re so skinny— and I am, it has been weeks
since I’ve feasted on a man and I swoon under those dirty
hands: oil worked into his skin, brutal from wrench-wear.
Here, warm under spotlights in this packed bar, I come alive
from empty bed syndrome and dark-ocean grief— my skin
hasn’t been touched for months and honestly, given
the state of affairs and politics of my contemplative
heart—I give no shits that he belongs to a woman named Natalie.
I apologize to chaste gods—thread of the moon
shaking her head—but with strange hands on my bright body, I
come into power. I empty the jars of guilt and eat the fruit
he feeds me, my face shimmering under disco ball confetti.
Yes, another woman’s lover wants to taste my sweat—
I blossom under his calloused hands.

*

Erica Anderson-Senter writes from Fort Wayne, IN. Her first full length collection of poetry, Midwestern Poet’s Incomplete Guide to Symbolism, was published by EastOver Press in 2021. Her work has also appeared in Midwest Gothic, Dialogist, Anti-Heroin Chic, and One Art. She has her MFA from Bennington College.

Two Poems by Michael Meyerhofer

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

THE PROTESTS OF THE UNWASHED MASSES

Not once have I witnessed it:
the calculation that must proceed
every rotten cabbage,
every egg launched like Greek fire
at some dumb passing noble
pilloried for his misdeeds.
But I like to imagine the mob
gathering reasonably that morning
at their separate tables, so many
fruits of the garden laid out
in that first slant of light,
their stomachs still rumbling
from an inadequate breakfast.
Perhaps they called in
the children to help them decide
which radish was too far gone,
which turnip would be better thrown
than mashed into a bitter stew.
Later, there will be shouting,
lips glistening with spittle.
But for now, they turn each apple
in their hands, like a judge.
Which one looks sick?
Which one can still be saved?

*

THE LAMENTATION OF FUSED ANKLES

In the annals of human suffering,
not being able to wear shorts in public

might not rank as high as it seemed
those childhood afternoons

when my classmates moved about
as one sun-washed muscle,

circling pools, backstroking
through ballparks, a little less

separating them from what made
nuns scowl like wet kites –

amidst all that clenched laughter
not one single pair of feet

like womb-mangled T-squares
blooming into broomstick calves,

nothing to be done at the gym
though I tried with what moved,

as though it were possible to lift
all those red-wrapped bones at once

and somehow hold them steady,
and somehow spill nothing.

*

Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five books of poetry – including What To Do If You’re Buried Alive (free from Doubleback Books). His work has appeared in The Sun, Missouri Review, Southern Review, Brevity, Rattle and other journals. He’s also the author of a fantasy series and Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. For more info and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit troublewithhammers.com.

Maybe in the Space of Dreams by Linda Mills Woolsey

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Maybe in the Space of Dreams

On the first anniversary of my mother’s death I dream
a long hallway of closets overflowing. She’s there,
at my shoulder complaining
that Dad has hoarded every suit he ever bought—
if he’d just clean them out, we’d have room
for everything.

I wake to dust everywhere—debris of stars
and forests, faint traces of other bodies, other lives
dull every surface of the real. Wings
pierce my reverie—
crows worry something by the hedge
while some invisible air traffic control keeps
gangs of sparrows and finches
from colliding at the feeder.

Three doves eye me from the power lines.
Evenly spaced at first, two
edge closer together till their folded wings
touch. They have the look of women
who watch me from their deaths, still curious
about my life, Nana and Aunt Mildred,
or Aunt Margie, maybe.
It’s hard to tell.

The dead prefer ambiguity, the space
of dreams. And I always fall short
of clarity—my cluttered days undusted,
unintelligible, filled with
maybe. I can’t shake off
these visitants, can’t escape clouds
of witness who won’t let go of this life,
who worry me with ghosts
of their unfinished obsessions,
with the leftover glances of their love.

*

Linda Mills Woolsey (she/her) lives in rural Western New York. Her work has appeared in The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Windhover, Wild Roof Journal, St. Katherine Review, Northern Appalachia Review and other journals.

Two Poems by Lily Jarman-Reisch

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Affairs in Order

We were so thorough,
giving our kids instructions,
account names and passwords
should we suddenly die
while on this island for so long
trying to weave ourselves back together.
Even noted who to invite to our funeral.
Except, I realize,
shaded next to my husband
under a beach umbrella,

maybe she should be on that list.
He’d want her to know,
to be there. She might attend,
with me gone. But then she’d see
photos of our life together –
Soul kissing in the high Sierra
or when I was chemo bald,
my face in his hands. That time we
made the most of a blizzard,
piggy-backed on a sled.
Would she wonder
if she really knew him,
still mourn their romance?
And him?

When he deleted their texts,
did his phone, a hive
sheltering their intimacies,
become a shrine,
her name and number sacred relics?
Does he return to her on a breath
of rosemary, grieve
for lost things that won’t happen –
his fingers braided with her hair,
hers mapping the marriage
line of his palm?

*

Reunited

I still think you’ll rise from the floor
you collapsed on, your wine glass,
its shards rejoined, brought back
to your open lips.

Even on our wedding day, I wondered
who would go first,
if I’d wake one night
to your stopped
rhythm, if you’d wake to mine,
your arm on my mute chest.
And all the what if’s since:
if each clink of raised glasses was the last.
If I was laughing at your final
one-liner before you were downed
by a mass shooter, a speeding truck,
or I was.
If each word was the parting one–
the voice in my head yelling Stop! Stop!
as I yelled at you for leaving
your shoes where I would trip on them,
irritated when you talked too much,
my last thought
while one of us still breathed.

They tell me to choose clothes for your burial.
I picture the suit you wore to marry me
sagging, rotting in a dirt-smothered box.
I clutch your comb, your slippers,
gut the laundry for your socks, a t-shirt
still sour, damp with your sweat.
I put them all on,
curl under covers
on your side of the bed,
find a hair on your pillowcase
and swallow it.

*

Lily Jarman-Reisch is a 2024 Pushcart Prize recipient, poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review, and a Contributing Editor for Pushcart Prize XLIX. Her poems appear in Amsterdam Quarterly, CALYX, Collateral, Mobius, One, Pangyrus, Plainsongs, Pushcart Prize XLVIII, San Pedro River Review, Slant Poetry, among others. She was a journalist in Washington, D.C., and Athens, Greece, where she lived aboard a small boat she sailed throughout the Ionian and Aegean Seas, and has held administrative and teaching positions at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland.