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MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON by Stephen Ruffus

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MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON

This is not the world.
No longer so green
and sweet.

Memory is a contusion,
an enlarged heart, blood
rampant against the vein.

This is not the world
without him in it.
Nor will it ever be or was.

*

Stephen Ruffus’ work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, 3rd Wednesday, the American Journal of Poetry, The Shore, Poetica Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Stone Poetry Quarterly, among others. Also, he will have a piece in a forthcoming issue of the I-70 Review and in Hanging Loose Magazine. Ruffus was a semifinalist for the 2022 Morgenthau Prize sponsored by Passenger Books, and has had two poems nominated in 2023 for a Pushcart Prize. He was a founding poetry editor of Quarterly West and twice a recipient of a Utah Original Writing Competition Award. While he has lived in Colorado, California, and Utah where he studied writing at major universities and held fellowships and teaching positions, he is originally from New York City and still considers himself a New Yorker in many respects. Currently, he lives in Salt Lake City with his wife.

Two Poems by A. Kahn

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Pressure

to play with boys instead of dolls
or pressure from boys
who treated me
like a doll instead of a person

*

Carry

I am sorry
I could not carry you
in my arms
because
I could not carry you
in my body.

*

A. Kahn creates raw, emotional poetry and creative nonfiction. Her prose has been published in Of Rust and Glass, and artwork in the horror anthology Café Macabre II.

Two Poems by Katey Funderburgh

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Babycake

Winter sun taunted tendrils through my mother’s blinds
on the day she brought me home to no one but herself.
Pressing me to her, peeling back another daughter
with worry coiled in her chest, eyes that saw and saw
each other. Women are snakes: you inside me inside
her inside her mother who died on purpose before
the snows came. I handfed bits of cake to mine, slept
against her until the mirage left her eyelids,
until she started making the coffee again.
Unending rain the whole summer we poured concrete
into the holes we dug in the backyard, erecting
a barn where once there stood nothing but a field and
my mother’s heatvisions of horses we would feed
every morning. This is what saved her— not the bedsheets
I changed but the buckets of grain and hot water
steaming in each stall. She put me in a saddle
when I was still diapered. You were already burrowed
at my spinal center, watching how we almost broke
the tether, severed and sighed in the grass between
the teeth of our horses— the heads always growing back,
the shed skin always returning its need to blink us
back open into ourselves, every daughter
mixing the batter with her hands. I do, she does,
she did, you will— worry it’s not enough.

*

Sappho at the Gay Bar

Here, the Gods are kin to ink on a girl’s arm.
Love, I hear your voice on their tongues.
They print fauna on their bodies. Flora
speaks between fingers

of thin-skinned girls who ask about you.
I have read what remains of us. The same
fire under my skin, the same anger.
I am taught sin.

Here, they are named of me.
Their unmade beds, their grass-gentle hands—
they hold my undead body.
Body I wrote

to worship you, yet here we breathe, among them—

*

Katey Funderburgh is an emerging poet from Colorado. She is a current MFA Poetry student at George Mason University, where she is also a reader for phoebe and SoToSpeak literary journals, as well as for Poetry Daily. Katey’s earlier work has appeared in Josephine Quarterly, samfiftyfour, and Jet Fuel Review, among others. When she isn’t toiling over poems, Katey can be found laying in the sun with her cat, Thistle.

Allure by Clela Reed

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Allure

“A domesticated cow [French Limousine]
has been found living among a herd
of gigantic bison in a Polish forest.”
       — Ornithologist Adam Zbyryt

Maybe what first caught her eye
were the elegant black noses, sculpted,
with the oiled sheen of crow feathers
so unlike the pale, flat ones of her herd
whose insipid brownness filled her days.

Or perhaps, it was the way they stood
silently at the edge of the field, watching,
their stoic eyes shining like berries tucked into fur.
Maybe it was their ancient forms—muscular, dark—
or the beautiful upward curve of their horns.

It could have been the way they kicked away
the wolves at the edge of the primeval forest.
Maybe it was musk. Or the curly coats
or the shaggy beards their proud heads tossed
as they turned to go. No one knows, but something

urged her to follow the mystery that stirred
and called, leave the old familiars to chew
blandness, to blink their stolid, long-lashed eyes
as they watched her walk away
and not look back.

*

Clela Reed is the author of seven collections of poetry. The most recent, Silk (Evening Street Press, 2019), won the Helen Kay Chapbook Prize and then a 2020 Georgia Author of the Year award. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had poems published in The Cortland Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, Valparaiso Review, The Literati Review, Clapboard House, Red Door, and many others. A former English teacher and Peace Corps volunteer, when not traveling or chasing deer from her garden, she lives and writes with her husband in their woodland home near Athens, Georgia.

Letter to Earth by Tamara Madison

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Letter to Earth

I know you suffer. It’s an old story.
But I believe the day will come

when your rivers will run pure again,
when your seas will be clean and dazzled

with fish. Nights will be black again
and crackle with starlight. For every

living thing that went extinct, new ones
will take their place. In your marrow,

the memory of us will turn again to carbon
and remain there, finally harmless.

Air will flow sweet around the trunks
of trees, waterfalls will pound

the river rocks, and the sky will fill
with insects and birds, wild and loud

*

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

Two Poems by David O’Connell

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Starter Home

Before us, others called our house our house.
We know their names, met their grown children.
At the closing, they said mom’s house, dad’s house,

but we were not confused. In one day, our house
was empty, full. If possible, it was more our house

because we thought, these walls should be blue,
not green, and we were right. Later, we returned
with the baby, and then years became these rooms

where she once and the times that we all. Now,
there is our house, and our house, and our house,

so that often when we speak, three doors open
on three rooms where what happened happens
almost as it happened in our house, which we agree

will always be our house, even when it’s theirs.

*

How to Tell the One About Fatherhood

A man and his daughter walk into a drugstore.
That he won’t know best is the twist. The setup
relies on a tacky Grim Reaper, its skull white

as disposable utensils, a plastic black cowl
hiding the wire it hangs from above them.
Explain it’s October and how the decoration,

triggered by their entrance, shimmies and moans
so that the daughter, just four, buries her face
in her palms. Jump then to bedtime: the girl

in tears, afraid of the dark, the man at a loss.
Understand that the story you’re telling
is less joke than trial, that its outcome

will mean one thing to the man and another
to this girl who’ll remember her whole life
what comes next. It’s death, of course,

that upset her, though she doesn’t know one day
she’ll die. As will her father. And the father,
through all his It can’t hurt you, I’d never let…

doesn’t think he’s lying. This is the time now
to pause, leaving space for your listener
to feel for a man who struggles for answers

as he gets in the car and drives his daughter
back to the store in her pajamas. Nearing
the end, take time to sketch the empty aisles,

the long fluorescents humming as if angry
with the night. Take care. Bring them
to this moment cautiously. Not so much

allegory as anecdote. Less anecdote than
ephemera: a father lifting up his child,
saying, trust me, there’s nothing to fear.

*

David O’Connell is the author of Our Best Defense (Červená Barva Press) and the chapbook A Better Way to Fall (The Poet’s Press). His work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Poetry Review, among other journals. More of his work can be found at davidoconnellpoet.com.

Four Poems by Ann Kammerer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Red Coat

The night I went to find her
she was wearing the red coat,
the one she got
at Burlington Coat Factory
for her 40th class reunion.

“I always wanted a red coat,”
Mom had said.
“They’re so youthful.”

She wore it proudly,
tossing it over pilled sweaters
and filthy sweatpants,
cinching the belt
to accent a waistline
starved by gin
and Percocet.

Now, under streetlamp,
she was vibrant,
the coat ever dazzling.
Seated on a frayed blanket,
wedged between wizened men,
Mom broke through the clutter
of black bags and bottles,
her coat a billboard
amidst cardboard signs.

“Time to go Mom.”
I nudged her peeling flats
and lifted her face
from a man’s nubby shoulder.
Her eyes quivered,
her irises soft pink.

“They need cigarettes.”
She groaned as I pulled her up,
her body a collapse
of boney arms and legs.
“Give them some.”

“I quit,” I said.

She swatted me
with limp paper hands.

“You would,
Wouldn’t you?”

Lowering her into the car,
I drove away,
passing weedy lots,
a Rite-Aid,
then a McDonald’s,
two blocks from a burned-out house.

“I always loved Chicken McNuggets,”
she mumbled,
the glow from the Golden Arches
striping her coat.
“You know I wouldn’t be like this
if your dad had just got me
what I wanted.”

*

Pancakes

Mom was propped up
with pillows
the last day I visited
the hospital.

She was leaning,
her balding head
touching the bed rail.
One leg was covered
with bleached white sheets,
the other bony and extended
with a sock hanging
from the toe.
Clutching a rosary
in her bent lumpy hand,
she stared at the TV,
her mouth gaping
over her brown stubby teeth.

“Put your toys down,” Mom said.
“Get to the table now.”

I set my purse
on the floor
and laid my coat
across the back
of a red vinyl chair.
Stepping to her bedside,
I pulled the sock back
around her crusted heel,
and smoothed the sheet
over her cold, grey legs.
I sat down and slipped off
my work shoes,
the smell of hospital food
from a hallway cart
seeping into her room.

“We’re almost ready
for dinner,” Mom said.
“The frying pan.
It should be
nice and hot.”

Mom dropped her rosary.
She centered her head
on her brittle neck,
her eyes rolling
behind half-closed lids.
Lifting one arm in a semi-circle,
she rotated the other in mid-air,
thin folds of transparent skin
dangling from her underarm.

“We’re having pancakes tonight.”
Her swollen tongue clacked,
elastic bands of spit
forming on the sides
of her mouth.
“Just like every Monday.”

Mom blended batter,
her withered fist spiraling.

“Come on,” she said.
“Set the table now.
We’re almost ready.”

The more she stirred,
the more her hospital gown
slid from one shoulder,
revealing a purple hole
near her breastbone
where nurses dribbled medicine
through plastic tubes.

“Come on,” she said.
“Be a good girl and help.”

I reached over the bed rail,
touching her bony arm.

“Mom.
How’s it going?”

Her arms collapsed
on her distended belly.

“Is that you?”
Her voice warbled
as her cheek pulsed.

“Yes. It’s me Mom.”

Mom looked past me
with glassy yellowed eyes.

“Did you come for dinner?”
Her breath pushed her words
through papery lips.

“Yes,” I said.
You were making pancakes,
weren’t you?”

Mom blinked.
Her head tilted
as if she heard something
faint and far away.

“You like pancakes,
don’t you?”

I stroked a wisp of hair
on her temple.

“Yes.
I love pancakes.”

Mom’s mouth curved,
breaking the stillness
of her face.
Her eyes shuttered
and she began to shake,
her arms fluttering
as her legs
made the sheets
move like ghosts.

*

Candy Counter

I always thought
I’d go to college,
but when the time came,
I didn’t.

After high school,
my only ambitions
were to get an apartment
and do something aside
from selling hotdogs
at a mall kiosk.
Teachers said
I was good at math
and science
and even writing.
Mr. Bonfiglio said
my future was bright.
I didn’t see that,
and figured he was just
trying to get me
to stay after school,
go out to some park,
drink wine,
and run his hands
all over me
like he had
with my friend Mary.

Mom wasn’t big
on jobs or college
and wasn’t much help.
She had gone straight
from high school
to work the candy counter
at a department store.
Dad had worked there, too,
selling appliances.
They double-dated for a while
with a guy from automotive
and a girl from lingerie.
Shortly after they married,
Dad made her quit,
saying no wife of his
was going to sell sweet things
for a living.

“Just work a while,” Mom told me.
“Maybe you’ll be lucky
and meet Mr. Wonderful.
You could quit then,
have a kid.”

I told Mom
that wasn’t my plan,
that I wanted to do more,
that people said
I was smart.

“I’m thinking about
getting a better job,” I said.
“You know, maybe down
at the dry cleaners,
make a little more money,
see if they’ll teach me
how to tailor,
or something like that.”

Mom poured a drink
and sat down
at the kitchen table.
She lit a cigarette
and called me smarty-pants.
Crossing her legs,
she smoothed her bare calf,
kicking off one shoe
to rub her foot.

“Better watch your fanny
if you do that,” Mom said.
“I hear that Rod guy
who runs the place
gets pretty friendly
with counter girls.
Customers, too.”

I took one of her Viceroys
and slumped on the couch
to watch reruns of “Medical Center.”
Chad Everett filled the screen,
the scene cutting
between him and a blonde nurse,
his eyes technicolor blue,
his bangs gelled
in a perfect crescent,
his lean body draped
in a white doctor coat.

“Well look at him.”
Mom drew on her cigarette,
her lipstick ringing the filter.
She recrossed her legs
and ran her fingertips
over her other calf.
“He can take my pulse any day.”

*

Fugue

A cloud of swearing
seeped into my room
a few hours after
I went to bed.
Dad had missed dinner,
never calling,
coming home late,
making Mom mad,
both of them drunk,
Dad throwing things
and punching walls,
making her yell
and break things, too.

Their shouts rose
in vicious rhapsody,
fading in somber fugue.
Falling asleep,
I woke to the lapping
of curtains on the sill,
a slice of pink sun
spilling on the sheets.

The morning was still,
the living room
strewn with bottles
and upended chairs.
The TV was on,
Phil Donahue
caressing a mic,
immersed in a sea
of middle-aged women
in double knits
and stretch floral shirts,
their necklines bridled
with ascots.

I stood and watched,
drinking warm Coke
and eating cereal from the box.
The sink was jammed
with crusted-over plates,
so I loaded the dishwasher
then got ready
for my 10 o’clock shift
at the dry cleaners.

Walking to work,
I tried not to think
about where Dad went
most nights,
or why Mom didn’t
call her friend Ruth Ann
like she used to.
She was happier then,
or maybe I was littler,
not understanding their exchanges
over Jim Beam and cigarettes,
bemoaning how men
could slip around
and they couldn’t,
that it just wasn’t fair
that they caught a raw deal.

“Men,” Mom would say.
“They’re either obsessed
or they’re womanizers.”

She took a drink
and slammed her glass.

“Well how about this?”
Ruth Ann slapped the table.
“You could just shorten it,
say ‘All men are obsessed.’
That ‘bout says it.”

They’d laugh and smirk
and clink their glasses.
I’d laugh, too,
jumping and twirling,
half-repeating their words,
mom grabbing my ponytail,
telling me to go play.

“Quit listening,” she’d say.
“Go away. Be a good girl.”

When I got to the cleaners,
my boss Rod
was at the front counter,
leaning close and talking
to an olive-skinned woman
in a filigreed dress.
His mom Ruby
was there, too,
finishing up orders,
getting ready to go
for the day.

“Good morning.”
Rod stood up straight.
So did the woman.
Ruby peered over her glasses
as she ran a tape
on the calculator.

“This is Mrs. Carras.”
Rod gazed at Mrs. Carras
but talked to me.
“She’s, well, one of our regulars.”

Mrs. Carras held out
her slim hand,
her rings sparkling
with fluorescent light.

“Are you Rod’s new girl?”
Her sleek red lips broke a smile.
“You’re Millie and Frank’s
daughter, right?”

I said yes.
She squeezed my forearm,
her touch silky,
her eyes traveling
up the center of my blouse,
descending to the hemline
of my skirt.

“You’re a perfect doll.”
Her fingertips lingered
as she pulled her hand away.
“I’m sure we’ll talk more
someday.”

*

Ann Kammerer lives in Oak Park, Illinois, having relocated from her home state of Michigan with her husband and daughter. Her work has appeared in Fictive Dream, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, Open Arts Forum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Thoughtful Dog, The Ekphrastic Review, and anthologies by Crow Woods Publishing and Querencia Press. She has received top honors and made the short list in several writing contests. Her chapbook collections of narrative poetry include “Yesterday’s Playlist” (Bottlecap Press 2023), “Beaut” (forthcoming 2024 from Kelsay Books), and “Friends Once There (forthcoming 2024 from Impspired).

My Mother Gets a Can Opener and Roses for Her Birthday by Marjorie Maddox

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My Mother Gets a Can Opener and Roses for Her Birthday

The man she loves surprises her
by not giving what she needs
around her finger. On her birthday, the metal ring
from the green bean can
clangs on the counter. She laughs
nervously, runs her finger
along the long stems of new roses
arranged traditionally in the vase
my dead father gave her,
though she would never take his flowers, expensively bought.
And this love, spontaneous in its practicality,
practical in its spontaneity, she wears proudly
everywhere, polished, shiny
as the kitchen her cans still whir in
while the two cook, hungrily, together.

*

Professor of English at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 16 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (International Book and Illumination Book Award Winners); and the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, a collaboration with her artist daughter, Anna Lee Hafer (www.hafer.work) and others. How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks (Kelsay) and Seeing Things (Wildhouse) will be available in 2024. In addition, she has published the story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and 4 children’s and YA books. With Jerry Wemple, she is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press) and is assistant editor of Presence. She hosts Poetry Moment at WPSU. See marjoriemaddox.com

Gift Card by Mark Williams

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Gift Card

I’m getting into my car at Starbucks
when a man appears out of somewhere. Says
he needs to go to Evansville (where I’m going),
ten miles away from where we are. “Sorry,
I can’t take you,” I say with cowardly shame.

“I’m not asking you to take me,” he says.
And with the flash of a $25 Schnucks gift card,
he says he doesn’t need groceries,
he needs a ride, and he’ll pay for it
with the twenty-five dollars I should give to him.

“You can understand why I might be suspicious,” I say.
Flipping the card, he says, “Call this number.
You’ll see. What do you take me for anyway?”
Though I’m more inclined to believe he is taking me,
I hand him a twenty and five ones.

I’ve been hacked on Facebook at least three times.
My wife’s health insurance was billed five thousand
seven hundred dollars by a provider who hadn’t provided.
Spam Risk always calls when I’m eating.
“You owe me an apology,” he says. “You’ll see.”

Four days have passed. I haven’t called the number.
I haven’t gone to Schnucks. The card, still in my car
beside the gear shift, stares up at me as if
asking me to think the best of people.
I think I’ll leave it in my car a few more days.

*

Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in ONE ART, The Southern Review, Rattle, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and other journals. Kelsay Books published his collection, Carrying On, in 2022. His fiction is forthcoming in BULL, Gargoyle, The Main Street Rag, and Valparaiso Fiction Review. He lives in Evansville, Indiana.

Gorse by Marcia Cardelús

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Gorse

The Northeast corner of
of our local organic food store
Wild by Nature
has that smell.
You know the one.
The one you don’t exactly like
but are attracted to
a kind of witchy brew
of dried herbs,
essential oils, vitamins and incense.

It was there I saw the
“Discover Your Remedy” display,
built of wood, promoting nature.
It was divided into seven sections,
and each of the sections
was divided into subsections
that housed sets of small brown bottles
of labeled remedy.

Only one sub-section was sold out.

Gorse.

I wondered what it was about Gorse
That made it so needed.

I opened the small
drawer of descriptions
in the display,
thumbed down the list
to see.

It said:
The Positive Effect of Gorse is Hope.

*

Marcia Cardelús is an 83-year-old poet from New York. She has been writing for most of her life but has never submitted her poems until now. A chance encounter resulted in her first published poem — The Señora in the Blue Sweater — that appeared in Res Magazine in April, 2023.

The ONE ART 2024 Haiku Anthology

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

The ONE ART 2024 Haiku Anthology

A Note from the Editor:

Since discovering contemporary haiku just a few years ago, I’ve become fascinated by its power. As a practice, every day it teaches me deeper gratitude and heightens my ability to find connections in an often-fractured world.

In curating this anthology, I hoped to showcase the immense range of emotion that our form captures through both newer and revered voices. In reading thousands of haiku for our anthology, the strength and depth are even more than I imagined.

Furthermore, I’m proud of the submission guidelines that encouraged the inclusion of poems that have appeared on the poet’s social media. This is Timothy Green’s term of art “curation,” as we discussed on The Poetry Space_, which actively encourages the sharing of poetry. I think we can agree that none of these apples are bruised just by having hung on a tree before.

Lastly, I ask you to share our anthology with a friend that doesn’t normally read poetry.

Best,

Katie Dozier

*

warm spring day
through an open window
the neighbor’s violin

~ Stephen A. Allen

*

slowly filling up with stars inflatable pool

~ Billy Antonio

*

dead butterfly on our stoop—
              this time for sure, you promise

~ Lana Hechtman Ayers

*

dancing between
conscious & subconscious
dolphins

~ Joe Barca

*

peace talks
the consensus
of cherry blossoms

~ Roberta Beary

*

her silence
guiding a songbird
to its nest

~ Jaundré van Breda

*

another cuppa tea
more questions
than answers

~ Randy Brooks

*

peace garden poppies blown away

~ Helen Buckingham

*

breaking the wax seal
on a spring letter
tulip bulb

~ Ingrid Bruck

*

arcade day I jingle all the way

~ Susan Burch

*

peas and carrots
I never know
what they’re saying

~ petro c. k.

*

I sleep
in his t-shirt
night shift

~ Sharon Ferrante

*

anniversary
on my parents’ gravestone
my reflection

~ Jim Fowler

*

turkey buzzards
hunched over the carcass
autumn deepens

~ Joshua Gage

*

your mind
a lukewarm bowl
of nothing

~ Barbara Anna Gaiardoni

*

crabby neighbor’s apples rotting on the branch

~ Robbie Gamble

*

windy day
reading on park bench
          page-turner

~ Cindy Gore

*

at the library
a conference call
we are listening

~ Adam Haver

*

dead son
I leave his many addresses
in my book

~ Cindy Guentherman

*

loosening
the violin strings
winter hospice

~ Jennifer Hambrick

*

their promise:
her lotus
lips

~ Ed Higgins

*

New Year’s Eve—
that last sweet lungful
of smoke

~ Ruth Holzer

*

winter ocean waves rejection slips

~ Sangita Kalarickal

*

I reach for you
the space between
stars

~ Mary Keating

*

everything
in its place—
toilet paper

~ Julie Bloss Kelsey

*

another mother’s day band aid for the exit wound

~ Kat Lehmann

*

winter hike
a dry streambed
running with leaves

~ Robert Lowes

*

same flowers back home Stone Mountain

~ paul m.

*

all lake mist cloud in one

~ Anna Maris

*

spilled grass seed
grows on garage shelves
escapees

~ Jenny Middleton

*

old song
on car radio
how far I have come!

~ Biswajit Mishra

*

on the forest floor
a nest without eggs
unbroken

~ Tina Mowrey

*

Pluto frozen in orbit—
meatball
buried in freezer

~ Brian O’Sullivan

*

dusk reedbed
a starling
starts a movement

~ Ben Oliver

*

his laugh hanging in the air stale smoke

~ John Pappas

*

mimosa leaves
shy away if touched—
uncommon sense

~ James Penha

*

log-jammed river
what exactly
is holding me back

~ Bryan Rickert

*

new construction
above an old outcropping—
rotting acorns

~ David Rosenthal

*

a naked birch
announces
here i am

~ Colin Sandberg

*

the punctuated pauses
in his confession
sunset thunderbolts

~ Kelly Sargent

*

magnetic kisses
sharing
a cold

~ Carla Schwartz

*

within permissible limits
microplastics
in her breast milk

~ Julie Warther Schwerin

*

star slippage
the cartoon draws out
its nightgleam sky

~ Alan Summers

*

bedtime story
slipper orchids drop off
one by one

~ Margaret Tau

*

first spring blossoms
she plucks the white one—
chin whisker

~ Shelly Reed Thieman

*

sturgeon moon
               fish leap to dance in the air

~ Nancy Tinnell

*

stubbing my toe
the whole world
becomes toe

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

*

first day of summer—
my daughter begs
for a higher underdog

~ Michael Dylan Welch

*

wedding haiku
two worlds
one kiss

~ Dick Westheimer

*

crown of thorns
the dogwood blooms
restoration

~ Joshua Eric Williams

*

Editor Bios

Katie Dozier’s love of poetry first bloomed as a child. She memorized Robert Frost sitting on a tree stump and bathed in Edgar Allan Poe as an adolescent. While studying words at Florida State University, KHD also played with chips and became a professional poker player. The author of Watering Can, she’s passionate about encouraging others to discover and share contemporary poetry, through her X account (@Katie_Dozier), as curator of The NFT Poetry Gallery, host of the weekly podcast The Poetry Space_, Haiku Editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry, and as an editor for Rattle.

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry and Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine. His most recent poetry collection is Meatless (Plan B Press). His poetry collection Take Care is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in Spring 2025.

Louisa Schnaithmann is Consulting Editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry. She is the author of Plague Love (Moonstone Press).

Contributor Bios

Stephen A. Allen was born in Vermont and currently lives in Michigan. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and also studied poetry at Amherst College and the University of Notre Dame while pursuing unrelated degrees. He writes in both Western and Eastern forms, and in the latter has been published most recently in Modern Haiku, contemporary haibun online, and MacQueen’s Quinterly.

Billy Antonio is a poet, writer, and public school teacher. He is the author of “where it was” (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York, 2020). His poetry has won international recognition including first places in the European Kukai and Shiki Kukai. He is a Dwarf Stars Award nominee. He lives in Laoac, Pangasinan, Philippines with his wife, Rowena, and his daughters, Felicity and Asiel Sophie.

Lana Hechtman Ayers has shepherded over a hundred poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere.

Joe Barca is a poet from the Boston area. He has a partner, two children, and a wheaten terrier named Brady. He is a reader for Whale Road Review and a regular contributor to the The Poetry Space_ podcast. Some of his favorite poets are Mai Der Vang, Kevin Young, and Li-Young Lee. He is a fast talker and a slow runner.

Roberta Beary identifies as genderfluid and lives in County Mayo, Ireland and Washington DC. In 2023 their sonnet was one of 10 finalists in the Rattle Poetry Prize, and in 2022 their prose poem was awarded joint 1st place in the Bridport Prize. They are the longtime haibun editor for Modern Haiku. Carousel, their fourth collection of short poems, is available from Snapshot Press.

Jaundré van Breda is a poet from South Africa. Several of his poems are published on the AVBOB Poetry Competition website. Jaundré is the author of Ask the Vultures, A Heart Beats in the Dirt, And Something Grows That Will Not Die, and Something Too Holy to Be Holy. These titles are available at amazon.com

Dr. Randy Brooks is Professor of English Emeritus at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, where he teaches courses on haiku, tanka, and Japanese poetics. He and his wife, Shirley Brooks, are publishers of Brooks Books and co-editors of Mayfly haiku magazine. His most recent books include Walking the Fence: Selected Tanka and The Art of Reading and Writing Haiku: A Reader Response Approach.

Helen Buckingham’s haiku and senryu have been published throughout the world. Her work features in Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013) and her most recent collection is Two Haiku Poets (Iron Press, 2023) co-authored with fellow UK haikuist, Annie Bachini.

Ingrid Bruck lives in Amish country, a landscape that inhabits her poetry. She enjoys writing haiku and short poems. She serves on the editorial team of Between These Shores and produces a monthly BTS column called “Pearl Diving” with online writer resources. Some current work appears in Verse-Virtual, Poetry Hall and SpillWords. Embrace more of Bruck’s published poetry: ingridbruck.com

Susan Burch is a good egg.

petro c. k. is a temporal being living on a spinning rock in a vast universe who writes tiny haiku about infinitesimally small moments of time. His debut book “Waiting for an Oracle” is now out at Nun Prophet Press (available thru Amazon).

Sharon Ferrante lives in Daytona Beach, Florida, her work is rooted in myth, fancy, and whimsy, and love for the short form. She has appeared in many anthologies, online journals and magazines.

Jim Fowler spent 25 years in the US Navy, and 19 of those years stationed in Japan or on ships homeported out of Japan. Read and wrote a number of haiku during those years or since retirement. He had had haiku published in numerous places including, Haiku Headlines, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and others. His book “Falling Ashes” is primarily haibun and a few pages of haiku.

Joshua Gage is an ornery curmudgeon from Cleveland. He is the editor of The Ohio Haiku Anthology, the first collection of haiku by Ohio poets in over twenty years. His newest chapbook, blips on a screen, is available on Cuttlefish Books. He is a graduate of the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Naropa University. He has a penchant for Pendleton shirts, Ethiopian coffee, and any poem strong enough to yank the breath out of his lungs.

Barbara Anna Gaiardoni received two nominations for the Touchstone Award 2023, recognized on the Haiku Euro Top 100 list for 2023 and on The Mainichi’s Haiku in English Best 2023. Her Japanese-style poems has been published in The Mainichi, Asahi Haikuist Network, The Japan Society UK and in one hundred and thirty other international journals.

Robbie Gamble’s short-form poems have appeared in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, bottle rockets, Acorn, and other journals. He lives above an apple orchard in Vermont.

Cindy Gore is a retired educator and lifelong poetry reader from Texarkana, Texas. A stroke survivor, Cindy reads and writes poems as part of her daily rehabilitation practice to make meaning out of her second chance at life.

Adam Haver’s writing has been featured in Popshot Quarterly, Poetry Scotland, Ballast, and other journals. He received the 2022 Willie Morris Award for Poetry and an award from the Utah Division of Arts & Museums for a collection of poems addressing wolf conservation. You can connect with him on X: @ac_haver.

Cindy Guentherman has been writing poetry since 1952. She was poetry editor of The Rockford Review for many years, and general editor for several issues. She has been writing haiku for about 50 years.

Six-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee Jennifer Hambrick is the author of the poetry collections In the High Weeds (NFSPS Press) winner of the Stevens Award; Joyride (Red Moon Press), winner of the Marianne Bluger Book Award; and Unscathed. Hambrick’s poems appear in Rattle, The Columbia Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Santa Clara Review, Maryland Literary Review, San Pedro River Review, POEM, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, NOON: journal of the short poem, The Heron’s Nest, Mayfly, Kingfisher, Contemporary Haibun Online, and in numerous invited anthologies. Hambrick was featured by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser in American Life in Poetry and has received many awards and prizes, including First Prize in the Martin Lucas Haiku Award Competition (U.K.), First Prize in the Haiku Society of America’s Haibun Award Competition, the Sheila-Na-Gig Press Poetry Prize, and many others. A classical musician, public radio broadcaster, multimedia producer, and cultural journalist, Jennifer Hambrick lives in Columbus, Ohio. jenniferhambrick.com.

Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including: Under the Basho, Ekphrastic Review, and Modern Haiku, among others. Ed is Asst. Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction. He has a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals—including a rooster named StarTrek. A collection of his poems, Near Truth Only, has recently been published by Fernwood Press, 2023.

Ruth Holzer’s haiku and other short form Japanese style poems have appeared in journals including Acorn, bottle rockets, cattails, Frogpond, Hedgerow, Kingfisher, Modern Haiku, Ribbons and Red Lights. She lives in Virginia.

Sangita Kalarickal’s work touches the realms of poetry and fiction, and appears in several well reputed journals and anthologies. Her poetry ranges in different forms and her free verse and haikai poems are widely published. Sangita is a Pushcart Prize and Touchstone award nominated wordsmith, and her first chapbook Mamina (Kavya-Adisakrit, 2023), with poetry ranging from free verse to haiku has been well received. She is currently an associate editor of Drifting Sands Haibun Journal and conducts the podcast Ripples in the Sand. Dr. Kalarickal lives in the midwest USA with her family, her little garden, and the fantasy characters she writes about.

Mary Keating is a poet, lawyer, and disability advocate. She’s the Poetry Editor for ScribesMICRO, a three-time Pushcart nominee, and runs her own law firm in Darien, CT. Her writing appears in several journals, including Wordgathering, Poetry for the Ukraine, and SFWP. Mary became a paraplegic at fifteen. Her memoir in verse, “Recalibrating Gravity,” will be published September 2, 2024 by Woodhall Press. Visit marykeatingpoet.com to learn more.

Julie Bloss Kelsey’s haiku have been published worldwide. She is the author of three books of haiku and related forms: The Call of Wildflowers (Title IX Press, 2020), the award-winning Grasping the Fading Light: A Journey Through PTSD (Sable Books, 2023), and After Curfew (Cuttlefish Books, 2023). Julie writes a bi-monthly column, New to Haiku, for The Haiku Foundation, where she is on the Board of Directors.

Kat Lehmann is a founding co-editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem and serves as a panelist for The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. She is a winner of The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for an Individual Poem (2020) and is included in the New Resonance community of haiku poets. She lives in Connecticut.

Robert Lowes’s first collection of poetry, An Honest Hunger (Resource Publications), came out in 2020. His second collection, Shocking the Dark (Kelsay Books) is scheduled for publication later this year. His poems have appeared in journals such as Southern Poetry Review, The New Republic, Modern Haiku, and December. He is a retired journalist who lives with his wife Saundra in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Lowes has been playing the guitar—electric and acoustic—since 2017, having been inspired by John Lennon on rhythm guitar.

paul m. is the penname of Paul Miller, an internationally awarded and anthologized short-form poet and essayist. He is the editor of Modern Haiku, the longest running English-language haiku journal outside of Japan, and has served on the boards of the Haiku Society of America, Haiku North America, and the Haiku Poets of Northern California. He is the author of four award-winning collections. His latest, Witness Tree, is available from the U.K.’s Snapshot Press. A native Californian, he lives with his wife in the Florida panhandle.

Anna Maris is a Swedish haiku poet. Her collection Life Death Etc is published by Red Moon Press.

Jenny Middleton is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. Her poetry is published in several printed anthologies, magazines and online poetry sites. Jenny lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats. You can read more of her poems at her website: jmiddletonpoems.com

Biswajit Mishra writes poems predominantly in English and sporadically in his native language Odia writing generally about nature, animals, plants, spiritual concepts, families, and travel experiences. Born in India and having lived in Kenya, Biswajit and his wife Bharati currently live in Calgary, Canada.

Most recently, Tina Mowrey has been writing short form poetry, which has been published in the following journals: Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, Mayfly, Presence, Wales Haiku, Poetry Pea, Trash Panda, Modern Haiku, and Folk ku. She is also the author of two picture books (What A Prickly Pear, 2020 & My Family Tree Has Roots, 2022) and an avid reader of banned books.

Brian O’Sullivan teaches literature and rhetoric at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His poems have been published in ONE ART, Rattle, HOWL New Irish Writing and other journals. He is a poetry reader for Chestnut Review.

Ben Oliver lives in the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire with his wife, Michelle, and two children, Aurelia and Linden. As a child he grew up on (and in) the River Thames, where he developed a deep affinity with nature. Having studied Biology at the University of Manchester, he works at Westonbirt National Arboretum, helping people engage with the majesty of trees. He has been fortunate to have had poems published in many haiku journals, including Frogpond, Heron’s Nest, Modern Haiku, Presence, Kingfisher and Failed Haiku.

John Pappas is a poet and teacher whose work has appeared in Handsome, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, cold moon journal, Failed Haiku, Nick Virgilio’s Haiku in Action, tinywords, Presence, The Mainichi, bottle rockets and many other journals. His haiku have been included in the anthologies Seed Packets: An Anthology of Flower Haiku and the forthcoming Bird Whistle: An Anthology of Contemporary Bird Haiku (bottle rockets press), and his poetry has twice been selected for the Mayor of Boston’s Poetry Contest (2016 and 2020). He has been nominated for a Touchstone Award and for inclusion in Red Moon Press’s annual anthology. As drummer and lyricist of the punk rock band Heather Hates You, he has recorded two albums: Operation Suckerpunch (2003) and A Scar is Born (2006). A graduate of the College of the Holy Cross and the Boston College Graduate School of Education, John lives in Boston, MA with his wife and two daughters, and has taught literature and general semantics in the Boston area for over 25 years.

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Twitter: @JamesPenha

Bryan Rickert, current President of the Haiku Society of America, has been published in many fine journals. He is the Editor of Failed Haiku Journal of Senryu and edits The Living Senryu Anthology. Bryan has two books: Fish Kite (Cyberwit Publishing) and Dust and Stone, co-written with Peter Jastermsky (Velvet Dusk Publishing). His work was selected for inclusion in A New Resonance, Volume 12. He was also the recipient of the Touchstone award for individual poems in 2023.

David Rosenthal is a public school teacher in Berkeley, California. His haiku and senyru have appeared in journals such as Modern Haiku, FrogPond, Lilliput Review, and The Heron’s Nest. His other poems have appeared in Rattle, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rising Phoenix Review, Change Seven, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and other journals. He has been a Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award Finalist and a Pushcart Prize Nominee. His collection, The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things, was published by White Violet Press (Kelsay Books).

Colin Sandberg is an emerging poet residing in Vancouver, Wa. This is one of his first curated works. He might be found reading his poems at Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in Vancouver or staring at a tree with a moleskine in hand.

A significantly hearing impaired writer and artist adopted in Luxembourg, Kelly Sargent is the author of two memoirs in verse (Kelsay Books) and a collection of haiku and senryu entitled Bookmarks (Red Moon Press, 2023). Her short form poetry appears regularly in haiku and senryu journals online and in print. She is a two-time Touchstone Award for Individual Poems nominee, and has won or placed in a number of international haiku and senryu competitions. She resides in Vermont, where the picturesque beauty and four distinct seasons often serve as her inspiration.

Filmmaker and photographer Carla Schwartz’s poems have been widely published, including in The Practicing Poet (Diane Lockward, Ed) and in her collections Signs of Marriage, Mother, One More Thing, and Intimacy with the Wind. Her CB99videos youtube channel has 2,400,000+ views. Learn more at carlapoet.com. Recent publications and acceptances include Banyan Review, The Ear, Channel, California Quarterly, Cutthroat, Gone Lawn, The Poet’s Touchstone, Ibbetson Street, Inquisitive Eater, Paterson Literary Review, New-Verse News, Remington Review, Shelia-Na-Gig, Triggerfish Critical Review, The MacGuffin, Verse-Virtual Online, and Leon. Schwartz is a 2023 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant. Her poem, “Pat Schroeder Was Our Mother,” won the 2023 New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.

Julie Warther Schwerin (she/her – Sun Prairie, Wisconsin) is an associate editor at The Heron’s Nest (theheronsnest.com) and a member of the Red Moon Anthology editorial team. She was instrumental in establishing several haiku installations in the Midwest including, most recently, Words in Bloom: A Year of Haiku at the Chicago Botanic Garden which featured the work of haiku poets throughout the garden.

Alan Summers is from the South West of England, and founder/editor of the Pan Haiku Review.

Margaret Tau resides in New Bern, North Carolina. She spends much of her time writing haiku and tanka along with other short forms of poetry. Margaret appreciates the challenge of capturing a moment in time with just a few words and inviting others to experience it with her. Her poetry has appeared in Frogpond, Under The Basho, and Right Hand Pointing among others. She was awarded a 2021 Honorable Mention by the Haiku Society of America

Shelly Reed Thieman writes to connect with the wounded. She is a messenger of imagery, a mistress of montage. Her work is heavily influenced by the discipline of haiku. Her poems have appeared in Modern Haiku, The Haibun Journal, Humana Obscura, and december. Shelly is a two-time Pushcart nominee.

Nancy Tinnell lives and writes in Louisville, KY. She has published two chapbooks: murmurs (2020), followed by the sum of all my parts in 2023. She enjoys reading poetry aloud and organizes events featuring readings and music. When she is not writing, you may find her in the kitchen, experimenting with new recipes.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts the Emerging Form podcast. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her new collection is All the Honey. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Michael Dylan Welch has been investigating haiku since 1976. This includes reading thousands of haiku books and publishing and editing more than 70 of his own. He is or has been an officer of the Haiku Society of America, Haiku Northwest, and Haiku North America, and is founder of National Haiku Writing Month (nahaiwrimo.com), the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, and the Tanka Society of America. He was also poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, near where he lives in Sammamish, Washington. Michael’s personal website, devoted mostly to haiku, is graceguts.com.

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, and a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or are upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, ONE ART, Abandon Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at dickwestheimer.com

Joshua Eric Williams is from Carrollton, GA. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, Literary Matters, Modern Haiku, Rattle, The Heron’s Nest, and many other print and online journals. His poem “silent after” was selected for a 2022 Touchstone Award from The Haiku Foundation and nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize from Rattle Magazine. Check out his website (thesmallestwords.com) or follow him on Twitter (@Hungerfield).

Two Poems by Gary Fincke

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Blueprints

Yesterday, my sister begged me to box
and keep thousands of photographs
and souvenirs she had hauled home
from our father’s house after he died.
It’s been fourteen years, time enough
that her husband has also succumbed,
prompting her to gather and stack
a half-room of dried memorabilia
as if preparing to set fire to the past.

She hovers, leans closer when I pause.
Our father is in very few photographs,
our mother barely there. None are from
the century in which we are living.
What you don’t take, gets pitched,
my sister says, and despite dust
and asthma, I keep looking. Which
of these would be irreplaceable? Which
would I risk myself to save from fire?

A neighbor, after her house was leveled
by fire, had it rebuilt exactly as it was before,
cloned from photographs and blueprints
that survived in a fireproof, padlocked box.
This afternoon, her house has been filled
with furniture matched by memory.
Her elderly mother, that neighbor says,
is comforted by the television,

its familiar faces and voices
visiting each day at the same time.
When alone, I rummage through family
photographs as if they were exotic
playing cards to be used for solitaire,
arranging until every person ages
from bottom to top, a fortunate stack
of spades or clubs, diamonds, hearts.

*

The Job Icons

On their first birthdays, babies of the Thais of Vietnam choose their vocations
by grasping, from among many choices, a symbol of that work.

All those objects look like toys—a push broom,
A plow, stacked books and an intricate wrench.
These parents, right now, recall boys who picked
Product samples, insurance policies,
A miniature, unreadable lease.
They worry about the icon artist,
What intentions he might have captured while
Shaping for eyes so close to the carpet.
He’s formed blackboards and pulpits, small scalpels
With edges rounded for safety, but there,
Beside them, are the beautiful logos
Of the service industry, a soldier,
The telephone for a million cold calls.

After all that wishing, there’s no telling
What a baby, unguided, will crawl to.
For example, all three of my children
Plunged both hands into their first birthday cakes,
But only two of them smeared their faces
And flung their filthy hands into their hair.
The youngest threw his high and cried, afraid
Of crumbs or terrified at the swift change
In his fingers, how something like disease
Was sticking to him. Chocolate, we said,
Sugar, delicious, making the gestures
Of licking and sucking, babies ourselves,
Although nothing we did could quiet him
As he held them up like a prisoner.

*

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

After Another School Shooting, I Walk To The Mailbox by James Dickson

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

After Another School Shooting, I Walk To The Mailbox

Dusk descends like ginkgo leaves
kissing a pond. Slow breeze
foreshadows rain. Nineteen
children dead, two teachers.

Under the magnolia, two fireflies.
The first I’ve seen this season.
Harbingers of summer, of rest.
Empty mailbox. I walk back, carrying

so much.

*

James Dickson teaches English and Creative Writing at Germantown High School, just outside of Jackson, MS. An MFA graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars, he is the recipient of Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships, was named High School Literary Magazine Advisor of the Year by the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association, and was invited to speak at the National Educators Association 50th anniversary celebration “The Promise of Public Education.” His poems, book reviews, and essays appear in The Common, Ruminate, The Louisiana Review, Spillway, Slant, Poetry Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and other publications, and his debut collection, Some Sweet Vandal, was published by Kelsay Books. He lives in Jackson, MS, with his wife, their son, and a small menagerie of animals.

The Chibok Schoolgirls by Janice D. Soderling

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Chibok Schoolgirls

(Nigeria, 2014-04-14)

Yellow jerry cans abandoned by the wayside.
Dirt roads, clay houses, another year of dust.
The world has forgotten its kidnapped girls.

Nothing remains of footprints in dried mud,
Except their contours in the mother’s heart.
Bring back our girls.

Everything the father eats tastes gray
And bitter as raw hate.
Bring back our girls.

Young sisters reach out in their sleep,
Only to wake in terror.
Bring back our girls.

Gaunt brothers go but come back empty-handed
From thorny shrubs and jagged rocks.
Bring back our girls.

The harmattan whips dry sand to a haze.
Hyenas laugh.
For the world has forgotten its girls.

*

Janice D. Soderling has published many poems in international journals, print and online. Her most recent collection is Rooms & Closets. This poem is from a forthcoming chapbook, Names.

Sharing the Pool by Michael R. Evans

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Sharing the Pool

Sweltering, I sit under a mulberry,
listening to the stream’s crisp chorus

burble into emerald pools, the largest
spanned by a service road bridge

where two brown cubs emerge,
shuffling, swaying toward water.

Nearby mother’s gleaming coat
magnifies the sun like a glass.

Should I stand?
Speak?
Run?

Mother huffs, admonishing
them against descent—

shoving them back with paws,
claws like paring knives.

I brandish
my walking stick.

I stand.
She rears up.

I turn.
She approaches.

I drum a water bottle, throw up
my arms, summon a howl.

She pauses.
They retreat.

A reunion of feet
and mind, I scramble

uphill
              as they wade in.

*

Michael R. Evans, a full-time academic editor and writing tutor, lives in Los Angeles with two cats. He began writing poetry at Houghton University three decades ago while earning a BA in communication and writing. He has published poems and articles in small-format media, including newspaper travel articles about living in Russia in 1996. He has earned an MA in theology and the arts and authored Jesus, Fads, and the Media in 2006.

Deer Season by Kip Knott

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Deer Season

Sycamore shadows spread over the world
as I sit next to the dry tongue of Sunday Creek
and watch for shooting stars. Above me,

the moon climbs into its night-time blind
to hunt the cloudless dark for meteors.
A screech owl sails silently over furrows

freezing rabbits in the fallow field below.
Silo lights from surrounding farms blink on
as thickets whisper the approach of deer.

Suddenly, distant gunshots pepper the air.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. 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 kipknott.com.

Rage Against Ennui by Aaron Poochigian

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Rage Against Ennui

I could explode from wanting more and more
excitement in these dog days of the year.
Someone be brash. I need to roar and cheer.
Give me a spectacle worth hooting for.
Give me a quest, a test, an epic something
Herculean and exhilarating,
anything but interminable waiting,
waiting with yawns and umbrage. What a dumb thing
it is to wait.

                    I know, I know, my shelf
offers up Huck’s larks and Achilles’ rage,
but they are tired from leaping off the page
so many times already. I myself,
it seems, will have to make my own distraction.
Quiet on the set! Lights! Camera! Action!

*

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest poetry collection, American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous translations with Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and POETRY.

Grief by Robin Wright

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Grief

sits beside you, but doesn’t
draw you a bath or mix
a margarita, put its hand
on yours, rub your shoulders.
It runs off to the beach once
in a while but always comes back.
At first you want to lay your head
on its shoulder, find comfort
you know has to be there somewhere,
but it’s hidden deep in the bottom
of a closet or on a shelf
in the basement behind cans of paint.
The search a scavenger hunt
with no end and no prize.

*

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

I Hope You Like the Card by Eugene Datta

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I Hope You Like the Card

The teardrops in this Man Ray photograph
look like drops of fresh rain, don’t they?

That’s how the message starts. It’s a card
she made with a black-and-white

photograph she’d found in an old calendar—
blobs of silver paint around the picture

to mirror the teardrops on the woman’s face.
I want you to know, she writes, how I’m feeling.

And I hope you like the card.

*

Eugene Datta is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Water & Wave (Redhawk, 2024). His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, Main Street Rag, Common Ground Review, Rust & Moth, Hamilton Stone Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in India, he lives in Aachen, Germany.

walking bishop back to moonlight by john compton

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walking bishop back to moonlight

i foreclosed on two homes & a lover

then found this man
with thick brown hair, scalp buried
beneath a jungle—

with a mind, black as a night full of rain.

filled with ghosts, from east & west,
he animated & elevated
into a manic suitor
which called       to me      like a siren’s mouth.

we made temptation into a game:
our bodies confided,
knowing we already knew
how to play,

though by the end
forgetting
the other’s name:

i let him leave a mystery.

*

john compton (he/him) is a gay poet who lives with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. he is the poet with 14 published chapbooks/books, with the latest book: the castration of a minor god (Ghost City Press; december 2022) and next chapbook: melancholy arcadia (Harbor Editions; april 2024)

Ancestral by Ivy Raff

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Ancestral

On the good days, my grandmother’s kitchen
smelled of cloves baking in batter.

On the bad days – acrid of cabbage. She’s dead
ten years or eleven. I’m sad to say we beat her

into submission, at some point in her sixties, with
our Amyerikan tastes. Our loathing for borscht

ultimately smacked down Russian staunchness.
She survived genocide and ghettoization but not

her grandchildren refusing her food.
The sweet things, we wanted

to keep: butter-streaked Pyrex
pans of noodle kugel, rugelach nestled

like plump jammy babies in Tupperware.
She stopped baking eventually too – doctors warned

of the gale-force that pressured my grandfather’s
vessels. Now that I’m a middle aged Eastern European

woman myself I know too intimately our certainty our men
grow sick because of us. I know too intimately my grandmother’s

guilt, convicted for Marvin’s medical pressures.
The great clanging dough mixer stood silent, pristine,

glinting on the counter like old Cadillacs I saw once
at a design museum in Detroit. Relics. Perfect. Useful –

except they’d kill you, crash your skull or arteries.
My grandfather outlived her, resurrected rugelach,

picked it with knotted fingers out of flimsy deli plastic.
You know the kind.

*

Ivy Raff is a nomadic poet who calls Queens, New York home. Her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies including Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Midway Journal, West Trade Review, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award Annual, and the London Independent Story Prize Anthology. Ivy is the author two poetry collections: What Remains / Que queda (Editorial DALYA, bilingual English/Spanish edition forthcoming 2024), winner of the Alberola International Poetry Prize; and Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2024), hailed by Bruce Smith as “lacerating, fearless.”

Two Poems by KG Newman

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The Stopwatch Gene

My father becomes gears
and during one of his
carefully scheduled visits
he whispers that
I’ll inherit the clocks
plus his short-listed days,
the ripples in the river,
trees wearing trench coats
in heavy Colorado snow.
This without any

particular brokenness
in his tone and a cold
downtown deserted,
nothing too early except
in our expectations
of a difficult talk, maybe
late into the night, while
raccoons spill a trash can
and we pretend
to not hear a thing.

*

Puddles

The air tasted like pennies
the rainy day I realized
blueberries are purple
and we weren’t gonna work.

Before that, we drove on thin roads
to rage rooms, where
sledgehammers could not help us.
Glass everywhere a reminder

of the present-past and how
we planted roses in random fields
only to occasionally drive by
and watch their various stages of wilt.

Someone must have tooth-picked
our air hoses — maybe us.
Maybe we are why the elixir is missing
from the liquor cabinet:

Our pathology inexact and the only things
we do know is both of our stethoscopes
were broken in a crash; we’ve been
kissing through a glass door.

The dogs ate our steak.
The path around the side of our house
circles back to the front. Inside the kids
are growing so quick and

the mouse trap is missing its marble.
Only a theophany can save us now,
our origin untethered from consequence,
a bright light from the sky

as our fragments get multiplied,
and again by zero, the fresh-cut trees
blessing an axe, the vines creeping
up our fence, lighting up, blowing

smoke rings, trying to tell us something.
Even our couches are sad. Our smart phones
turned anger lines. Our kids, adhesive.
Our hands meaning well but caught

in bicycle spokes, glistening with blood
under perceived sun so hot
it could melt us on the pavement
as the whole neighborhood watched.

*

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

Talisman by John Repp

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Talisman

Jamie-on-Parole stood the teak
figurine bought in Sudan
with his last hundred bucks
on the get-to-know-you
talisman table. After his house—
well, his grandmother’s house—
burned down, he joined
the merchant marine. “I’m sorry,”
said Josh, “but that’s bullshit.”
Tamika said, “Yeah.” Jordan said,
“Where’s Sudan?” Jamie jumped ship
in Marseille, tramped around Egypt
& ended up in Sudan, the best
people he’d ever met. Maddy’s
“Bob” Clemente baseball, the binky
Jasmine chewed till second grade,
Josh’s grandfather’s pipe wrench
& now a teak warrior, oblong shield
from neck to knee. A hundred bucks
would feed a whole Sudanese
province, no? Maybe that’s an old
National Geographic talking. “Facts are
slippery things,” quoth the cliché.
Facts are fire ants or maybe termites
& that’s a fact. Right now, Mobile,
Alabama is home, but you can pine
for hot red dust anywhere. Jillie said,
“Who’d you mug?” “I named him
“Starting-Over Guy,” Jamie said.

*

John Repp is a poet and fiction writer living in Erie, Pennsylvania. Seven Kitchens Press will soon publish his twelfth chapbook of poetry, Star Shine in the Pines.

Two Poems by Grant Clauser

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Epistemology VIII

Despite my field guides, I forget the names
of most trees, the fourteen varieties of fern
that fringe this lake. Even the talk of birds
is over my head, yet I can tell a distant shower
from a thunderhead by the smell, a campfire
from a lightning scorch by its whisper or wail.
If I call the scent of spice bush ground
between my fingers the wrong time
of year it’s still sweeter than magpies,
and the steel string voice a bird makes
from marshland at the meadow’s edge
is not a band I listened to in college,
but strikes a note of longing I understand
better than the shapes stars make
on a clear night in the mountains.
Their anonymous pairing with Greek myths
part of the mystery of what keeps them
in the sky.

*

Epistemology IX

Tonight’s campfire is mostly decorative,
something to conjure ghosts and hold back mosquitoes.
If bats twist overhead, I don’t see them.
If a large shadow comes down the mountain
to drink from the lake, it doesn’t ask permission.
What do I know about why nations crash
into each other with the regularity of rain?
Tonight in the woods I try for a kind of peace
that can watch smoke rise from kindling,
that talks back only to the voices in the heart.

*

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

The Bunny Hill by John S. Eustis

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The Bunny Hill

Never having skied before, I spent
almost the entire first day of our
three-day vacation on the Bunny Hill,
getting used to the rented skis, learning
how to maneuver and come to a stop.

Carefully, I advanced to the slopes
marked Easy, then Moderate, avoiding
those deadly double diamonds.
That second day was more fun
and less scary than I had expected,
and I began to regret wasting
so much time being overcautious.

It rained on the third day there, so we
were confined to the warm lodge,
doing quiet things and packing up
for the four-hour drive back home.

That ski trip sixty years ago
seems symbolic to me now,
because I’ve come to realize
it wasn’t just that one weekend.
Too many years of my life were spent
safely sticking to the Bunny Hill.

*

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

early morning interlude by Trishala Vardhan

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early morning interlude

lately,
i find myself pulled
to
the pulse of the world:
the push
of my dog’s wet nose
against my hand.

come play,
she whines,
and
i do:
i savor the sweet bite of the wind
against my cheek,
the soft brush
of paws pressed to my leg.

i cling
to the crushed earth,
soil and sentiment
stored
in the synapses of my silence.

i welcome
the wisps of breath
in
the wintry air:
the warmth an exhalation,
a flicker of fleeting
heat
in coarse fur:
the flame-tongued hope
of my dog’s open
mouth.

look,
there is still beauty,
says the fresh white
of her coat,
the clean green of the grass
gripping my toes.
there is still silence you can sing to.

i blink
past the burn in my eyes.
curl my fingers
to capture
the cadence of the cold.

yes,
i think to myself.
yes.

there is still beauty.
there is still song.

there is still hope.

*

Trishala Vardhan is a 26-year old (Asian) Indian who has lived in the lap of language for as long as she can remember. She is a poet who believes in precious little save the gravity of grief, love and memory. Words (and the silences that serve and surround them) have always been her way of life. Her work has been featured in SwimPress, PinkHeart Magazine, and Stone Circle Review

Daddy’s Girl by Julie Benesh

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

DADDY’S GIRL

I wanted to run away
with my mother.
She and I could date
around, compare (love)
notes, and always
have each other.

But she and my father
stayed together.
I grew up, went to college,
got married. Since her death

we’ve grown apart. The world
has changed yet part of me
is stuck at 26, the age
I was when I lost her.

I monitored my female body
for mother’s ailments: glaucoma,
arthritis, metastatic tumors,
but I got instead his bad skin
and silent reflux, his work anxiety,
things of his I’d once blamed
on alcohol and cigarettes
that I eschewed.

My father lived another 18 years.
One time with relatives, we looked
at each other and knew we’d both
had enough of the chatter.
and fled like adolescents.

With my rival and nemesis
I had more in common
than I knew, but why
was I surprised?

We had
the same
great love.

*

Julie Benesh (juliebenesh.com) authored the chapbook ABOUT TIME from Cathexis Northwest Press. She published work in Tin House, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New World Writing, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program and recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant and her full-length poetry collection, INITIAL CONDITIONS, is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press.

Three Poems by Michael T. Young

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Birds that Migrate

I love the idea of how far they travel,
their ability to find their way over such distances
impresses those of us who tend to stay put.

And yet their noncommittal ways are unsettling.
How it seems as if they always have a bag packed
and ready to go. So, I feel a need to hold back,

to keep something of myself secret, just in case
I wake to find the other side of the bed cold
and their part of the closet clean. We never really

came to know each other, both of us long ago,
elsewhere, imagining how much better
life would be if the other were here.

*

Market

What is the price of a past I wondered
as we walked long aisles of crafts and antiques
dusted in what seemed an even more
antique light, history’s discards stacked on tables,
in stalls, beside old lamps, bowls and plates,
coins and stamps spread among clocks, cabinets,
chests, and racks of books. As we browsed
these prized marketable memories, we
nibbled Dutch cakes, cookies, brittle, and jerky.
Here we paused at a table of rings.
Rows of silver circles, knobbed and knotted
with different designs and images. My daughter
fished out one with a mushroom, reminder
of Alice coiled in smoke rings of Wonderland.
My son discovered a sleeping dragon.
I thought of the name of this old farmers market:
Green Dragon. When young and growing up
not far away, I imagined it a place of fire and danger,
and a gold burning light, the heat of a magic
that could transform anything into a shield
against different kinds of cold. In the ‘50s
it was the site of a cold war exercise called
“Operation Disaster.” Patrol planes strafed
the parking lot targeting people with fake bombs,
emergency personnel tended the fake wounded,
and a crowd of thousands gathered to see
who wouldn’t make it. But like a movie,
even the dead escaped alive. Now, among
descendants of the survivors, I sorted
through rings wanting to find something
meaningful in the heaps, something
I could see stamped there in the image
on its metal, even if I couldn’t name it. But
there was nothing that meant enough, and
we left for the long drive home, everyone else
content with what they found and carried away.
It was autumn, trees along the interstate
had turned yellow. The road climbed up
through a valley, lifting us toward the sunlight,
its gold threads cross stitched by birds flying
from tree line to tree line, until the air became
a curtain of gold and I looked up into it,
feeling myself rising into its radiance.

*

The Shapes of Loneliness

At first I think of footsteps
echoing down an alley or hallway,
a door clicking shut, maybe even
the sound of clippers snipping a bush.
Some isolated moment. But
it’s various, and even highly textured
like a scallop shell, ridges segmenting
space into discrete feelings,
separate ideas of how things
should have been before life split
into you and me, the time before
and the time after a friendship,
a marriage, a life. Now what’s left
retreats into the spiral recess
of a nautilus, so even when found
on a beach among crowds
of other shells, what can be heard
in any one of them is the distance
that can never again be traveled.

*

Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Pinyon, Talking River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Vox Populi.

The Singing Birds by Marianne Worthington

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

The Singing Birds

In the graveyard the singing birds were all
you thought you needed. Grief makes you

want to rend your clothes like some histrionic
character from the Old Testament.

There is a violence to sadness: the force
of sorrow unwashed from the body, penetrating

your very scalp. Yet decorum dictates that you hold
it together while you stand over the dead when we

should be smashing our doubts and slapping each
other’s faces. Wake up. This is the hammering

injury that never heals. This is the time of day
when people should have tea, not bury their dead.

This is the moment when the singing birds follow
the wind and leave us stranded on a hill too big

to scale down without ropes and life support.
This is when you must face it: your loved one

in a box in the ground instead of dancing
with you on a Saturday night at the VFW.

Tonight, even the moon will be too cold to come out.

*

Marianne Worthington is author of The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Zone 3, and Swing, among other places. She cofounded and is poetry editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia since 2009. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in southeastern Kentucky.

Two Poems by Rachel Mallalieu

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How to Survive a Crowded ER Waiting Room

Be grateful for this insider view.
Unless you’ve been stabbed or shot, do not
crumple to the ground and scream help me
help me. The triage nurses have seen it all

and will remain unmoved, possibly hostile
in the face of your histrionics. Do not shake
your fist at the staff and threaten to call
the CEO or the local news or write a bad

review of the hospital on Yelp. Those of us
who withstood the scourge of Covid
and stuck around are no longer swayed by fear.
Here’s what you should do. Put the hood

of your jacket up and withdraw your chin
into your collar so only your eyes are showing.
Observe the chaos. Be pleased you are not the addict
nodding off in the corner, his arms more wound

than skin. Consider thanking god that you are better
off than the man with the matted beard
who dresses the tree trunks of his leaking
legs with garbage bags.

Last shift, a man figured out how to skip to the front
of the queue. After quietly waiting for six hours, he walked
towards the bathroom, and the clot which nestled
in his lungs finally caused his heart to halt,

then he collapsed in the doorway with one leg
bent beneath him and the other extended into
the waiting room. We all went running—started CPR,
pushed the medications, shocked him—everything.

We tried, tried for over an hour.
His wife had gone home to sleep because the wait
was so long. No one wanted her to wreck
the car so we didn’t tell her he was dead

when we called and asked her to return to the ER,
and told her in person instead. Her wails
echoed all the way into the back. Know this,
it’s not the worst thing if you wait awhile.

*

Penumbra

The geese flew south and promptly
returned, floating in a pond
that should be frozen.

In this disordered February,
starlings blanket the oak like leaves
and half the cherry tree blossoms.

When I was young, my father
was rarely home; when he arrived,
his gift of presence forged a corona

more luminous with each absence.
Not long ago, my mother called
and screamed he was unconscious,

likely dying. I raced the ambulance
to the hospital and arrived to find
him alive, but eclipsed behind the eyes,

both here and there. As his halo dims,
shadow remains and it still hasn’t snowed
this winter. Rain displaces worms

who writhe on the sidewalk.
These days, I pray for a glimpse
of the cardinal’s ruby breast.

*

Rachel Mallalieu is an emergency physician and mother of five. Some of her work is featured or forthcoming in Rattle, Chestnut Review, Whale Road Review and Superstition Review. Rachel is the author of A History of Resurrection (Alien Buddha Press 2022).

How Hometowns Work by Brian Beatty

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How Hometowns Work

A bent old woman
wrapped in two coats

drags a folding cart
full of groceries

through a crosswalk.
A blaring freight train

blasts across
another intersection

at the far end
of the same street.

Every other soul
in town, including mine,

sits trapped between
in idling cars belching smoke.

You can read all about it
in the yellowed newspaper pages

that cover the windows
of out-of-business

flower shops
and storefront churches.

*

Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections and a spoken word album. Beatty’s poems and short stories have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Appalachian Journal, Conduit, Cowboy Jamboree, CutBank, Evergreen Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Moth, The Museum of Americana, ONE ART, Phoebe, The Quarterly, Rattle, The Southern Review, Strange Horizons, and Sycamore Review.

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2024

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~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2024 ~

  1. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  2. Donna Hilbert
  3. Terri Kirby Erickson
  4. Betsy Mars
  5. Nancy Huggett
  6. Meredith Stewart Kirkwood
  7. Timothy Green
  8. Wendy Kagan
  9. Andrea Potos
  10. Robert Nordstrom

Two Poems by Bracha K. Sharp

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

I AM REMINDED

I don’t always remember
how many prayers
are being said
by this world,

but it is enough
to lift up the window-latch
and watch, enough
to be with these dark vines

vibrating with wind,
to watch the clever squirrel
and the darkening sky—

and I am an observer
with eyes never
wide enough to see what
cannot be seen—

but I am reminded,
that somehow,
this world is always
praying.

*

TREASURE

I cannot tell you
how beautiful it is
to look at the world
aqueous, upside down,

how glancing
at puddles reveals
another world—

trees swimming
on the wet deck,
reflections from a sky
dripping with mystery,

this view that deserves
only hushed silence
and the full, unmeditated
understanding of closed eyes
that see so much now—

and will never come again.

*

Bracha K. Sharp was published in the American Poetry Review, the Birmingham Arts Journal, Sky Island Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Wild Roof Journal, The Closed Eye Open, Rogue Agent, and the Thimble Literary Magazine, among others. She placed first in the national Hackney Literary Awards; the poem subsequently appeared in the Birmingham Arts Journal and she was a finalist in the New Millennium Writings Poetry Awards. She received a 2019 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards Silver Medal for her debut picture book. As her writing notebooks seem to end up finding their way into different rooms, she is always finding both old pieces to revisit and new inspirations to work with. She is a current reader for the Baltimore Review. You can find out more about her writing by visiting: www.brachaksharp.com

At the MoMA, With My Sister and Without My Glasses by A. A. Gunther

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

At the MoMA, With My Sister and Without My Glasses

I say
I love the way—
You grab my wrist:

Don’t put it into
words, don’t get it
twisted,

It just needs to exist.

So here I am, unmoored at the
museum,
Squinting at shapes arising in my vision
Like clifftops in the mist,
My eyes unlensed, imbibing the horizons
Of oddly-lighted rooms.
Of wire looms festooned with metal scraps,
Of dangled circuits lapsing into lassos,
Of crosshatched gray and black,
Of persons in long jackets
who murmur words like “angular” at the Picassos,

Trying to stop my words
From tangling round the things before I see them—
Their imprecision, their syllabic gallop,
The sleaze of them, like greasy bacon wrapped around a scallop,
Negating what they promise to enhance
With appetizer’s, advertiser’s, ease:
The cunning of them, running interference
Between the naked eye and the appearance,
Subtracting the refraction of a glance.

*

A. A. Gunther is a legal writer living in Long Island, New York. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and Literature from the Harvard University Extension School, and her short story “Baby Teeth” appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of Dappled Things. No art museum will be the same to her until her sister comes back from Germany.

Thanatosis by Timothy Green

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Thanatosis

My daughter won’t share a room with a spider but cups the giant stink
beetle in her own two hands, shows me how the shell is strong, how it’s
light as the air around it. Bigger than her thumb, she loves how they
move with a slow grace. It’s only playing dead, she tells me, setting it
down on the side of the footpath as if it were a game.

              morning dew
              every blade
              bows to you

*

Timothy Green is editor of Rattle magazine, host of the weekly Rattlecast, and co-host of weekly The Poetry Space_ with Katie Dozier. He’s the author of a book of poems, American Fractal, and lives in Wrightwood, California.

Shadows by Daye Phillippo

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Shadows

          for Jan

She called to say that the shadow they saw
     is esophageal cancer. A life-long smoker,

she’s not surprised, but is shaken. I ask
     what I can do. Pray, honey, just pray.

Late February mud and ice, rivulets of snow-melt.
     On the way up from the barn last night, coyotes,

high-pitched yip and sing from the back fencerow,
     leafless trees inked on the fiery horizon,

the howls growing louder, their shrieking lope
     coming closer. It’s breeding season, the males

aggressive, unhinged and one-thing.
     In the dark woods, border north of the house

that slopes to the creek, the leafless trees
     stand as close as soldiers shoulder-to-shoulder

or the posts of a frontier enclosure. There, a coyote,
     dark shape appearing, disappearing

among trees, its narrow hips tucked under,
     body low, elongated, a dark shadow, skulking.

*

Daye Phillippo taught English at Purdue University and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Presence, The Midwest Quarterly, Cider Press Review, One Art, Shenandoah, The Windhover, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana where she hosts a monthly Poetry Hour at her local library. Thunderhead (Slant, 2020) was her debut full-length collection. You may find more of her work on her website: dayephillippo.com

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Chocolate Milk

That day I feared
I’d never stop crying,
my tears a torrent
taking me out to sea,
Dr. Helene asked what soothed me
as a sad, and scared, small kid.
Chocolate milk, I said.
Drink that, she said.
Drink until you stop the crying.

I drove to the drive-in dairy,
bought a can of chocolate syrup
and a gallon of milk,
and drank, and drank, and drank,
until my life was sweet
enough to greet my children
skipping through the door from school.

*

Good Start

A good start to a regular day,
is pulling into Gelson’s parking lot,
when the store opens at seven.
“It’s my favorite time, too,”
the young clerk says,
“because this early, nobody’s mad.”

Muffins are fresh and warm
from the oven, shelves neat, laden
with promise, produce glistens
like straight from the garden,
and for once—Hallelujah—
there’s a bin of organic potatoes,
and nary a spud sprouts an eye!

*

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

Hunter’s Moon with Grandson by Kelly DuMar

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Hunter’s Moon with Grandson

I am breading skinless breasts,
All Things Considered is on, children
of war, numbering them. Tug of my
shirt, a hushed voice, turn
the volume down.

I want to show you something.

Everyone’s hungry. My fingers
are glopped with flour and egg.
Dining room’s unlit, table’s not set.
It’s a test. My answer counts.

He shows me a window.
October is late. Ascending from
evergreen tops, imprinted on dusk––
a heroic globe of uncaptured light.

*

Kelly DuMar is a poet, playwright and workshop facilitator from Boston. She’s author of four poetry collections, including jinx and heavenly calling, published by Lily Poetry Review Books, March 2023. Her poems, images and nonfiction are published in Bellevue Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Thrush, Cleaver, Glassworks, and more. For decades Kelly has taught a variety of creative writing workshops, including monologue play labs with showcases for the International Women’s Writing Guild and the Transformative Language Arts Network. Kelly produces the Featured Open Mic for the Journal of Expressive Writing. Reach her at kellydumar.com

Inclemency by Linda Perlman Fields

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Inclemency

We all survived the day when the world didn’t end
with the Mayan calendar a week after Sandy Hook.

They said it was a sure thing but the thrum of
daily life filtered up like muffled heartbeats

from the cold cement, or maybe it was someone
softly strumming the gut strings of a harp.

Still the children were present, each name on a stocking,
their mothers with hearts seared from an iron of grief.

Then a neighbor tossed a dead Christmas tree
on the fire escape and sparked a blazing branch

of dry pine in the back of my mind and set it
on fire until my eyes burned.

The world didn’t end one week in winter but a
promissory note of protection was issued and is

aging, unlike the children. It hasn’t been discharged,
unlike the bullets from an assault rifle.

The coldest season in the northern hemisphere
can be snowflake beautiful or sleet storm bitter.

*

Linda Perlman Fields is a poet and Peabody-winning journalist from Milford, Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sunlight Press, Front Porch Review, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Poetica Magazine, Two Hawks Quarterly and in anthologies.

Two Poems by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

EMERGENCY FAMILY MEETING
                  In memory

I was called to attend, my father
still breathing under the mask after
three weeks, his flesh seized
by a whole body infection.

What I remember now is the perfect
smoothness of my tires on the interstate,
their even sounds of rubber on asphalt
along the ninety-plus miles,

an in-between I could carry
before I’d trace again my steps
along the polished, sterile hallways–
nothing yet decided, no proclamation
issued yet by the doctor, my father still
lying in his present tense

while I sped into the future.

*

ON NO LONGER MOURNING MY 19-YEAR-OLD SELF

Girl-woman with the prairie-flat tummy
and creaseless skin, not one dream of one grey
strand on her flowing river of dark hair;
wearing tube-top and short shorts, or denim jacket
and swirling skirt, the girl whirled around the city streets
by her dashing boy-man in his British convertible.
She could so easily stay out until dawn.

Let her be where she dwells, in her glistening,
unreachable realm, without the astonishing
daughter she would later bear,

her hands that had not yet found their path
to the making of poems, her heart
still so unrescued and unformed.

*

Andrea Potos’ recent collections of poetry are Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press), and Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books). A new book from Fernwood Press entitled Belonging Songs is forthcoming in 2025. Her poems are forthcoming in Poetry East, The Windhover, Amethyst Review, Paterson Literary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Rosebud and The Healing Muse. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, surrounded by books.

September by Rose Mary Boehm

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September

Years wrapped into a handkerchief
of forgetting. Lover, husband, friend,
father of my children—an enigma forged
by your father and those who came before you.
I looked at you in the embers of our promises,
misread needs you didn’t understand,
mislabelled instances of extreme sadness.
How could I not recognize gentleness when
you reached out, time and again, shy as a mimosa.
“Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow”
They were singing your song, my tender friend,
and only now I realise that behind the wall
you built from cynicism and laughter,
were tears I failed to dry.

*

Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was three times nominated for a ‘Pushcart’ and once for ‘Best of Net’. DO OCEANS HAVE UNDERWATER BORDERS? (Kelsay Books July 2022), WHISTLING IN THE DARK (Cyberwit July 2022), and SAUDADE (December 2022) are available on Amazon. Also available on Amazon is a new collection, LIFE STUFF, published by Kelsay Books November 2023. rose-mary-boehm-poet.com

Brunch with Missing Mother by Cynthia White

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Brunch with Missing Mother

To have at first missed the man’s you’re ugly,
my mind must have been on coffee
and cream. I must have been dreaming
of eggs with spinach and feta
as he shoved past me and out the café.
I ordered a fat cinnamon roll
to demolish, outer ring first,
working my way to the sticky heart.
My mother often told me,
Looks aren’t everything, though we both
loved a mirror. I needed her that day,
needed to see, in her
generous mouth and elegant
bones, my own beauty, resurrected.

*

Cynthia White’s poems have appeared in Adroit, Massachusetts Review, Southern Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA and Poet Lore among others. Her work can be found in numerous anthologies, including the recent leaning toward light, Poems for gardens & the hands that tend them. She was a finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize and the winner of the Julia Darling memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Drag King by Terri Kirby Erickson

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Drag King

So, my granddaughter is a drag king
and that’s okay by me. I never liked dresses,
myself. Too breezy. They—which is their
preferred pronoun according to their partner
Clarisse, a nice girl from Poughkeepsie—
live two doors down from a fella who got
arrested last Wednesday for flashing his you-
know-what at the dry cleaners on Fifth. The
owner said she thought the old man’s junk
needed a good steam press, which I think
is pretty funny. Anyway, my granddaughter’s
stage name is Bradford Pair, and they have
a huge following. People seem to love them
almost as much as I do. She, I mean they,
look great as a guy. Their sideburns could
use a trim, but other than that, their look
is pure perfection. The act is a hoot, too, if
maybe a bit raunchy for my taste. What can
I say? My typical Saturday night includes
watching The Lawrence Welk Show or
I Dream of Jeannie on YouTube and hitting
the sheets by 9 p.m. Last time I saw my
granddaughter perform was on my eighty-
fifth birthday. They put me right up front
at the VIP table, so I’m the one who caught
the sequined jock strap they like to toss
into the crowd at the end of their show.
But, I have to admit—I reached for it.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of award-winning poetry, including A Sun Inside My Chest, winner of the International Book Award for Poetry, and her latest collection, Night Talks: New & Selected Poems, both published by Press 53. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Poet’s Market, Sport Literate, storySouth, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Nautilus Silver Book Award. She lives in Pfafftown, NC, with her husband and his extensive array of Loudmouth golf pants.

Two Poems by Jody Hartkopp

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Loess Hills

I climb the hills next to the highway remembering
my brother in the dunes formed by glaciers
ground to dust in the floods and thaws of the prehistoric
river Mí-ní-sho-she, now Missouri. The bluffs overlook
the Corner Pocket where we got drunk.
It used to be Grandpa’s Passion Pit, with a stage
and girls my brother said wouldn’t wear pasties,
where bluestem grass still catches along the field fence.
Always—I picked fights, my brother said he would stop
coming with me, said I ruined his buzz. Once
I threw a drink in some girl’s face to get his attention,
him shouting at me, chasing me across the highway.
I remember grabbing at brome stalks and scrub trees. Calvary Cemetery
is up there. The dirt unstable; the coffins sliding away
that one time in heavy rain. I wanted to see the tops of things,
see the depression of the river, but my brother found me first.
He told me I was just like our mom. My brother with blue eyes,
the edges crinkled like our dad’s, the one he grew up with. The day
they took him, the babysitter drove me home.

*

Many Sparrows

         Do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
                  – The Book of Matthew

Which is why I’m afraid, there’s so many of us and we keep falling. It’s not so hard to count sparrows if that’s all you do. I can do it right now, they’re gathered at my feet. Sparrows take care of sparrows, pick crumbs off the pavement. It’s not so easy with me. I have a lot left to do. Down here, sparrows get a full buffet if they can stomach the salt and hydrogenated oil. Even the prodigal son got a party in the end and yes (to the waitress), I’m quite finished. Scatter the birds when I rise. Edge out the sun.

*

Jody Hartkopp is a midwestern poet who frequently writes about growing up in Iowa and her Lithuanian heritage. She is a recent MFA graduate from Boston University. Her work can be found in the Briar Cliff Review, The Adroit Journal and most recently in the Schuylkill Valley Journal. She is a recipient of the Leslie Epstein Global Fellowship.

But Still the Trout Lilies by Nancy Huggett

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But Still the Trout Lilies

(for K.D.)

I’ve only ever known you dying,
like the world you love so much —
the forest of your knowing
turning to ash. The bison,
the red wolf, the spotted turtle.
You. But still the trout lilies

push up through the mat of winter,
through the sodden mesh
of doctors’ appointments
where your small declines and
holdings on are measured —
incremental losses and delights.

I’ve only ever known you dying. No,
I know you living. Here, you greet me,
hat askew, crooked smile lighting up
the screen and I can hear the peepers
in your pond, a contrapuntal song

of life, your laughter a tremolo of lodgepole
pine seeds dispersing through flames.

*

Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Thanks to Firefly Creative, Merritt Writers, and not-the-rodeo poets, she has work published/forthcoming in Event, Gone Lawn, One Art, Pinhole, Rust & Moth, SWWIM, and The New Quarterly.

To the roommates of my youth by Kaitlyn Newbery

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To the roommates of my youth

I miss you most when I see a picture
of you in a dress I don’t recognize.
In a necklace your husband probably gave you
but I’ve never seen.

We used to assemble our outfits
from the collective closet—her
dress, my scarf, your bracelet—
we’d all give pieces to each other
before entering the world.
Somewhere in my closet, I still
have that sweater you wore to an interview.
The shoes from your second date.

I have a few grey hairs now, do you?
My hands have begun to look like my mother’s
did when I was a girl. Slightly softer. Slightly looser.
Children changed my body
              (and probably yours too).
Children changed my closet
              (and probably yours too).

But I see your picture and I’m sad
for a dress I’ve never felt and proud
of the outfit you’ve assembled
on your own.

*

Kaitlyn Newbery is an adjunct English professor at University of the Cumberlands. She enjoys exploring questions about her faith through metaphors and storytelling. Her works have recently been published by Amethyst Review, Calla Press, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, Sunlight Press, and forthcoming in Thimble Magazine.

Mice in the Walls by Vicki Wilson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Mice in the Walls

Mice run
along the edges
of rooms,
my husband tells me
while we put out traps
to catch the critters
we think are making
the noise in our walls.

I suddenly understand mice
so much better.
I, too, prefer a wall,
always choosing
the seat at a table
that puts my back to one.

I need to reduce
the angles
that trouble can
come at me from.

For instance, He’s dead
came from the left.
It’s cancer
came from the right.
She’ll continue to decline
came from the front.

I’m as timid as a mouse, I guess.
Except: No.
Careful as a mouse.
Smart as a mouse.
Securing at least one side
from which I can’t be hurt.

*

Vicki Wilson is a freelance journalist who also writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Smokelong, The Southampton Review, and Literary Mama, and is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online. She lives in upstate New York with her husband, son, and dog, Ellie, who’s also known as Elle-Belle, Puppernutter, or Floofter.

Two Poems by Patricia Russo

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It Was the Snowbank I Longed For

We lay in the snow, waiting to die
The dog and I

And all I wished for
Was that I’d gotten my glasses fixed when I’d had the chance

This blurriness at the end
Was not in the plan

The dog was fogging up my face with his breath
And barking into my chest

Go home, I said
But instead he picked me up in his slender arms

And put me back into bed
Saying, I remember you shared your canned spaghetti with me

And those dollar store butter cookies
And that I take to be love

So? Indeed, then, does no good deed go unpunished?
Because it is the snowbank I long for

No, he said, Rather, what you lose in the fire
You find in the ashes

Which made no sense to me at all.
Since when do dogs talk? I asked

Oh, it happened the same day
We figured out how to pack snow in a bucket, he said

And set down a freezing metal pail
Next to my pillow, next to my head

So I could smell the new snow
Even though my glasses were broken

And I could not see it.

*

Salad

The pain is in a different place today, she said.
Higher, and less in the middle.
I don’t know what that means.
It’s not better, or worse.
It’s just not the same as yesterday.

I want a salad, she said,
Not looking at me,
Or at the tv.
Crisp, and green,
With oil and vinegar dressing.

And though the days of crispness and greenness
Had long since passed away,
I went into the kitchen
To scrub and slice and toss
The vegetables that we had.

Because I could do that, more or less.
A salad, at least, I could do.

*

Patricia Russo has had stories in Fantasy, The Dark, Clockwork Phoenix, Chizine, Podcastle, among other places, and poems in Not One of Us and Persephone’s Fruit.

Baptism at Twenty-Three by Laura Donnelly

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Baptism at Twenty-Three

My skin was mirror and glass and wanted
to break. The waitresses lined the back porch
after work, smoking and letting our sweat evaporate
into the midnight air. We drank Red Stripe and PBR
and G&Ts in tall, sweaty glasses. I smoked
as if I were a person who actually smoked.
When my skin burnt and wanted to split
my friends said to slather aloe
on my shoulders but the heat
had already become a hand pressing
my throat. That summer, I kept falling
for firestorm and it was summer
every day that year. Once, a man brought me
to the lake to have sex, the moon
so bright every cottage could have seen. The sand
rubbed my shoulders raw but I didn’t notice
until the next morning. I went into the lake
to wash off that char and it felt like Assumption,
it felt like coming home. I set a timeframe for falling
the way you set a timer on the stove.
When the year was up, I set the timer again.

*

Laura Donnelly is the author of two collections of poetry, Midwest Gothic (Ashland Poetry Press) and Watershed (Cider Press Review) and her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, SWWIM, EcoTheo Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York where she teaches and directs the creative writing program at SUNY Oswego.

Empanadas by Elizabeth Miller-Reyes

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Empanadas

because I have patience to cut butter
into salted flour, my vocation is one
my father can brag about.

A tablespoon or two of iced water
form a ball after the crumble and eggs
have joined together. Let the dough rest.

I fill these crescent envelopes
with lean ground beef, mozzarella,
questions of my sexuality
crimp with tines and release them into scorching oil.

You are only as good as the number of bubbles
that rupture the surface of the dough as it fries.

I want my father to know
he is insulation against burning.

Empanadas are only what he asks of me:
never that I marry a good man,
believe god or care for my mother;

but that I see him parade his Skechers oxford shoes,
indulge him in a walk and hear him practice his I love yous.

That I pop afloat high temperature
a pocket of air stuffed with accomplishments
savored by a previous generation.

*

Elizabeth Miller-Reyes resides in the Southwest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous places, including Tin House Online, La Libreta and Downtown Magazine. Some of her poems will be featured in the upcoming LGBTQ Anthology Pajaros, lesbianas y queers a volar! from Dominican Writers.

My Promise by David P. Kozinski

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My Promise

I won’t drag an old myth out of the scrolls
and doll it up in today’s clothes and I won’t sit

by any campfire singing how bright
was the old bulb before we tossed it out,

either. This, our year, our time, dribbles away
like a rain-slicked ball skidding out of bounds

and cold hands and bent spines won’t reel
that runaway piggy back to the bank.

We’re all good at tossing things out – food and thought,
words and children. Yesterday’s word was amass

and today it’s de-clutter, but dust will collect
while we stab and shovel each new hole,

locked in the footsteps of others, penned in place
with no wax for what we took as our wings.

*

David P. Kozinski’s poems have appeared most recently in the Bay to Ocean Journal and New World Writing Quarterly. His full-length books are “I Hear It the Way I Want It to Be,” which was a finalist for the Inlandia (California) Institute’s Hillary Gravendyke Prize, and “Tripping Over Memorial Day” (both Kelsay Books). His chapbook, “Loopholes” (Broadkill Press) won the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. Kozinski is Poet in Residence at Rockwood Park & Museum, near Wilmington, Delaware and has been a mentor with Expressive Path, a non-profit that fosters arts participation for underserved youth in Montgomery and Philadelphia Counties, since its inception. He received a Delaware Division of the Arts poetry fellowship.

A Woman’s Fable by Vikki C.

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

A Woman’s Fable

Start alone, the vast lake a vanity mirror
frozen after a famous flood,
the animals, content, afloat in their pairings.

And I, a struggling singularity,
combing history for the source —

a lush garden in the depression of your chest.
The cosmos coughed up by some infectious god.

They say naming things makes it intimate —
but I refuse to grow attached.
Not to men or lilacs beneath the hard frost.

You knew after me, nothing is ever free.
The cost of a bare canvas, the gleaming skin of an apple.

To live beyond the mind, an art.
In this frame or that, straining to paint us —

faith, a fine stroke of gold on the iris,
before meltwater displaces effort.

Love, like this fickle cascade of hair
— already changing shape on its way out.

*

Vikki C. is a British-born ‘Best of The Net’ nominated author, poet and musician whose literary work explores the intersections of science, ecology, existentialism and the human condition. She is the author of THE ART OF GLASS HOUSES (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) – a chapbook reimagining the liminal spaces of memory, heritage and the metaphysical. Vikki’s first full-length collection WHERE SANDS RUN FINEST (DarkWinter Press), is forthcoming in February 2024. Vikki’s poetry and prose appear or are forthcoming in places such as EcoTheo Review, The Belfast Review, Ice Floe Press, Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale & Sparrow, Acropolis Journal, Boats Against The Current, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Origami Poems, Jerry Jazz Musician, Mythic Picnic, Fevers Of The Mind Poetry & Art, Ellipsis Zine, Across The Margin, The Write-In (National Flash Fiction Day), Literary Revelations, Loft Books, Lazuli Literary Group, Salò Press, Igneus Press and other venues. She was a finalist in the Jerry Jazz Musician 63rd Short Fiction Contest (August 2023). Follow her on Twitter at @VWC_Writes

Said & Meant: Blighted Ovum by Meredith Stewart Kirkwood

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Said & Meant: Blighted Ovum

When the doctor said
“a blighted ovum isn’t really a loss”
she meant my daughter
weighed less than
a leaf’s last breath before fall

I meant that made her
more unique
than the doctor’s fingerprint pressed
into the morning fog
of an east-facing windowpane

She meant my uterus was tricked
by an accidental switch
and my body became
a farm feeding food
to the air

I meant a weave of cells
me and not me and now
I am both more and less
and how is that not always
what loss looks like?

She meant a line on a lab report
what can only be known
from a microscope

I meant loving is knowing
and has no size

*

Meredith Stewart Kirkwood lives and writes in the Lents neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Her poetry has been published in The Atlanta Review, The Eastern Iowa Review, Right Hand Pointing, MAYDAY Magazine, and others. meredithkirkwood.net

LUCK by Katherine Smith

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LUCK

Maybe you must be a mother
who’s raised a child to adulthood
a woman living in the kingdom
of her back yard, sweat bees,
hosta, the cool mist rising
from the holly tree,
to feel as much
time and solitude as anyone could wish for
is never enough. All it took
was a lifetime, a thousand moments
of luck and here I am
in possession. I believe
it’s a grand thing to sell
nothing. How easily satisfied I am
with my nearly paid-off mortgage,
my dog, the mourning doves
cooing on the roof, this backyard I love
as much as the rooftops of Paris.

*

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Ploughshares, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her books include, Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2003), Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press, 2014), and Secret City (Madville Press, 2022). She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

What I’m Thinking About this Morning by Valerie Bacharach

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

What I’m Thinking About this Morning

That I have outlived my younger son.

That when I rise, the tendon
or ligament or muscle
behind my left knee hurts,
which makes me think about my mother
and her arthritic knees.

That the holidays hold too many memories, too many ghosts.

That my older son has outlived his brother,
and I worry about his grief,
but don’t ask because then he worries
about mine, and my husband
doesn’t ask because he too worries.
All this unshared grief
will crush us, flatten us,
so we move in quiet shadows
around each other.

That I am so tired, even after sleeping through the night.

That my husband moans
in his dreams, despairing,
searching for ways
to alter time,
bend it,
plant a different ending.

*

Valerie Bacharach’s book, Last Glimpse, will be published by Broadstone Books. Her chapbook After/Life will be published by Finishing Line Press. Her poem Birthday Portrait, Son, published by the Ilanot Review, was selected for inclusion in 2023 Best Small Fictions. Her poem Shavli has been nominated for Best of the Net 2023 and a Pushcart Prize by Minyan Magazine. Her poem Deadbolt has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by RockPaperPoem.

Rising to Surface by Robbin Farr

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Rising to Surface

It is Sunday and I am chopping onions
as I’ve been taught, perpendicular through
the onion half. The root holds the layers

in place. My chef’s knife slices clean cuts
across the heart, then chop. Chopping
a fine mince. The small pieces fall away

ready for sauté where they will shimmer
in two tablespoons of olive oil.
My grandmother simmered her tomatoes

over a low flame. From my tall stool
pulled up close, I surveyed kitchen,
grandmother, sauce. Watched

bubbles break the surface with a barely
audible plop. Stood watch for boil-overs,
wooden spoon ready. Felt the solid spin

of earth as family gathered from church
driving crosstown in their Oldsmobiles
and Pontiacs. A chorus of car doors slammed

and my cousins ran across the mown
grass despite my grandfather’s glance
of consternation. The screen door slapped

in its frame, sent vibrations through
the kitchen where the boys tumbled in,
fresh scrubbed, still suited in Sunday best.

These days. Before the divorces, before
losing boys to war, to unaccounted lives.
These days when all that was needed

was gathered in my grandmother’s kitchen.
This Sunday will be chili, small cubes
of beef tossed in cumin, red pepper,

oregano, flavors adjusted with each taste.
I will watch a slow boil, heat rising in bubbles.
The sound of the past surfaces, breaks.

*

Robbin Farr writes short form: poetry and brief lyric nonfiction. In addition to writing, she is the editor of River Heron Review poetry journal. Robbin’s work has been published in Cleaver, Citron Review, 2River View, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of two books of poetry, Become Echo (2023) and Transience (2018). She is most happy when revising and submitting. Writing terrifies her. More about Robbin at robbinfarr.com. Follow her on X: @robbinfarr.

Plan Ahead by Virginia Watts

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Plan Ahead

Now that I am 60 friends are ominous
Downsize now. Sell your house
Decide where you want to ride it out
No stairs. It’s a one level life for you
Sort out those Medicare options pronto

My hair is thinner, teeth less tight
A flatline waits for me like horizon
Still, I don’t listen, haunt my favorite bars
Sip Prosecco on ice. Order yummy shit food
Fried chicken sliders. Potato skins. Nachos.
Bask in the glow of overweight off-key bands
who perform billboard hits of the 70s and 80s

What are some of my favorites?
Best of My Love
Corny, romantic, heart swelling
Lyrics like that undead me
Our House births my truest smile
Cozy room, cats (2) mew, frolic of fire
Summer Breeze’s screen door slaps a kiss
Window curtains breathe jasmine in, out

Why not ride it out humming inside
a sticky wooden world, wobbly stools
laminated menus, tilt of tap, chink of glass
neon lights to flash in teeth like the sun’s
teasy wink in a sideview and voices
yours and mine, all of humankind
the gentle drone of pollinating bees
sudden laughter to sting the eardrum
with the miracle of a grazing bullet

*

Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in Epiphany, CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost Magazine, Sky Island Journal among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for Best of the Net. Her work in five anthologies and a debut short story collection Echoes from The Hocker House can be found at https://www.amazon.com/author/virginiawattswrites. Please visit her at virginiawatts.com

Sanctification or The Ongoing Saga of my Inheritance of Prunes by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Sanctification or The Ongoing Saga of my Inheritance of Prunes

In the 3082 days since my father died
prunes have accompanied me
to the East Coast and Midwest
and Northwest and Southeast,
to Lisbon and Sydney, Hawaii,
and Paris. I carry an emergency
stash in my go to work bag in case
in my hurry to leave I forget to taste.
Sometimes I swallow them nearly whole like an oyster.
Sometimes I chew them more thoughtfully
as if at a tasting.
Sometimes they sit on my tongue
like a sanctified wafer, the host
decomposing, my body finishing
the work the Sun began. Occasionally
my teeth hit a sharp bit the pitter missed,
and I flinch as if hit, remember the bitter,
the pain that sometimes even the softest
sweetest things hold within.

*

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

Mother’s Day by Mary Makofske

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Mother’s Day

         “I am not a mother, and I don’t have one.”
               Posted on Facebook on Mother’s Day

One can choose, or be fated, not to be
a mother. But every woman alive
must be a daughter. Surely she meant
that her mother is dead. One can lose
a mother, but not lose her.
From what she’s shared, I see she’s kept
her mother’s story, a family heirloom.
Her mother’s spirit, sweet and sour, a taste
she’s beginning to acquire, a ghost she tries
to summon or banish at will.

And here’s the corollary she might have said:
Though I’m a daughter, I don’t have one.
So the long line of daughters ends here,
with her. And her shadow daughter—
does she dream she would braid and brush
her hair, watch with trepidation her body
grow and change, deflect with love and grief
the arrows her daughter slings at the flesh that bore her?
Grown, would her daughter speak with her
every day, or never? Idle thoughts,
fantasies drifting and changing like clouds,
weather completely under her control.

Not like the hard-edged memories
of her mother. You cannot erase a mother.
You cannot divorce her, though you may
separate with amity or enmity. Still,
she’s under your skin, in your DNA,
she’s set up a junkyard or castle in your mind.
Her words or voice may spill from your mouth.
In your body her fragile bones may break.

*

Mary Makofske’s latest books are No Angels (Kelsay, 2023), The Gambler’s Daughter (The Orchard Street Press, 2022); World Enough, and Time (Kelsay, 2017); and Traction (Ashland, 2011), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize. Her poems have appeared in more than 70 journals including Poetry East, American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Glassworks, Louisville Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and in 22 anthologies. She has received first prizes in poetry from Atlanta Review, New Millennium Writings, Littoral Press Broadside Contest, Lullwater Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Quiet Diamonds, The Ledge, and Cumberland Poetry Review. marymakofske.com

Dear Mother by Robert Nordstrom

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Dear Mother

I’ve written about you
but not of you. When
you lost your memory
60 years ago, you took mine
with you, left me with
the sepia moments: pressure
cooker meals on the table
4:30 sharp, Kool Aid
in the kitchen, telephone tucked
between ear and shoulder
as you ironed our lives
into tomorrow,
the car your escape
onto roads that always circled back—
a cage with no exit out. And later,
the dark years,
pious friends trumpeting
presumptuous prayers
to exorcise the demons
guarding treasures
I found buried at the bottom
of the old cedar chest:
fancy girls in fancy dresses
dancing to love songs
you played to the blank walls
of the cell where you fell asleep
and I finally awoke.
I am sorry. You did not know
how to say.
I am sorry. I did not know
how to listen.

*

Robert Nordstrom has published poetry in numerous regional and national publications, including upstreet, Main Street Rag, The Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, Chiron Review, Third Wednesday, and various others. Several poems have garnered awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Oregon Poetry Association. His poem “Old Lovers” won the 2014 Hal Prize, and his 2016 poetry collection, The Sacred Monotony of Breath (Prolific Press), received honorable mention from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. His latest collection, Dust on the Sill (Kelsay Books), was published in 2023.

The Great Blue Heron by Johanna Caton

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The Great Blue Heron

was as still as a hermit praying, so dusk-blue
that he seemed to be a shadow among shadows

of trees, where he stood at the edge of the brown
wood by the browning pond, behind the grey,

metal, mobile home where my nephew lived now
since his divorce, after his wife sold the house

he’d built and gave him nothing. The heron
looked an eccentric creature, with that kink

in his long noodle-neck and that dagger-shaped
head and beak. His flying thrilled us though, like

an acrobat: the sailing waves of his flight-path,
the rippling blades of wide wings. He was pure

drama – he could have declaimed Hamlet. My
nephew felt it, too. We named him Shakespeare.

He outclassed everything else, lifting the tone
of our existence, of our very seeing, our breathing.

The pond was the heron’s territory, but we stood
together: my nephew and I – and the heron at the edge

of sight. Then he flew again. His wings carried us,
their movement like the undulations of our losses.

*

Johanna Caton is a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey in Kent, England. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and reviews, including Ekphrastic Review, Leaping Clear, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Amethyst Review, St Katherine Review, The Catholic Poetry Room, The Christian Century.

Quest by Susan Michele Coronel

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Quest

No chain mail for breakfast,
no syrup, no toast, just white light
bleeding from ships that scud past
the shore, dragging me into a chasm of thought.
Yoga & meditation tamper the running stream.
An axe won’t alter my course like an ex,
but chopping will curse & bless the memory
of beautiful befores—crowns of all I ever did
& ever wanted. I aim to write for writing’s sake,
to savor snow & sea shadow & never change
my passwords, but I forget them as swiftly
as I forget first names & the last day it rained.
Life’s not a race but an unpeeling of layers
that reveals at its core a sweet kernel—
acceptance—& with it, something more.

*

Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. She has received two Pushcart nominations and won the 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival First Poem Contest. Her poems have appeared in publications including Spillway 29, Plainsongs, Redivider, and Fourteen Hills. In 2021 her full-length manuscript was a finalist for Harbor Editions’ Laureate Prize, and in 2023 another version of the manuscript was longlisted for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.

Ironing My Father’s Clothes by Sara Pirkle

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Ironing My Father’s Clothes

Sundays while my father slept,
my mother wrangled us girls
into tights and French braids,
slicked my brother’s cowlick
with a wet comb, slid a roast

in the oven for after church,
then ironed my father’s good shirt,
sprayed Niagara starch on the collar,
and hung it like a preacher’s robe

on the bathroom door. When
I turned twelve, I took over
this chore, and he thanked me
each time, thinking I did it for him,
when I was doing it for my mother.

*

Sara Pirkle is an identical twin, a breast cancer survivor, and a board game enthusiast. Her first book, The Disappearing Act (Mercer University Press, 2018), won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. She also dabbles in songwriting and co-wrote a song on Remy Le Boeuf’s album, Architecture of Storms, which was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY in the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album category. She is an Associate Director of Creative Writing at The University of Alabama.

Pot Roast by Fran Schumer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Pot Roast

Of course I threw out the pot
this heavy old rusty pot I bought
before I was married, a mother
a person, anything —
what was I thinking?
I was thinking I’ll never cook again
moving is dying
we were selling the house
where we raised our children
where I cooked the pot roast
in this heavy pot
that I tossed into the dumpster
bequeathed to Joe Junk
our recyclable lives.
And here we are years later
and I need the damned pot
to make the same roast
that made my husband smile,
gave pleasure to our children,
now grown and gone.
A friend says it’s the same great roast
and I smile because I know
I didn’t use the same pot.
We moved and I didn’t die.

*

Fran Schumer’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in The North American Review, The Nation, various sections of The New York Times and other publications. In 2021, she won a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing poetry fellowship. Her Chapbook, Weight, was the first runner up in the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest and was published in 2022. New poems are forthcoming in The Paterson Literary Review and an anthology published by Spell Jar Press. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., she studied political science at college but wishes she had spent more time studying Keats.

Two Poems by Andrea Maxine Recto

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

I was, I am a mother

I held you in my arms for ten hours.
It wasn’t long enough.
But the nurses told me they had to take you away.
I could barely get the words out.
I’m not ready. Just a little bit longer. Please.
My husband was sitting in the chair beside me.
Hunched over, his eyes were red and puffy
and his lips were trembling something fierce.
And he was rubbing his hands, over and over,
a habit I hadn’t seen since the day I got into a car accident
and they had to call him at work.
When the drugs wore off,
I woke up to him rubbing his hands raw.
Today, he was rubbing them so hard,
I was surprised I didn’t see any bone.
He got up to put his hand over mine.
It’s time, honey.
Our little girl.
Mere moments of air when we had already imagined a lifetime with her.
I had tried my best to keep her in,
to keep her safe and warm in her cocoon,
but my belly wasn’t having it.
When they delivered her, I was so sure I heard her cry.
The doctor who delivered her said softly but firmly
that our little girl made no sound at all.
I wanted to scream, A mother always knows!
What did he know about motherhood?
My grief was almost too much to carry that first year.
So much so that when people referred
to my pregnancy, my being a mother, or my baby girl
in the past tense, I corrected them.
I sometimes still do.

*

Lesson

I was 12. You had left your door slightly ajar,
so I stopped to watch you, careful not to disturb the floorboards
or make a sound. You sat at your dresser mirror,
brushing your long, dark hair. I hoped one day,
mine would be just as long and beautiful. But today,
something was wrong. You were brushing so hard that clumps of hair
were gathering around your feet.
You finally stopped, slammed your brush down,
and, to my horror, struck the right side of your face.
It went red immediately. I covered my mouth,
hoping you didn’t hear me gasp. Idiot, you said through gritted teeth.
And I could hear the pain in your voice.
Grabbing your favorite red lipstick, you angrily
swipe it across your lips, only to smear it off
with disdain moments later.
Last week, you brought a boy home
and said you had never been happier. Mama’s brows
were furrowed, and Papa’s face was wrinkled, but I smiled.
You were happy. I remember how you
had your hair curled that day, how the soft ringlets bounced
when you spoke, how they framed your face.
You kissed me on the cheek when I said you looked pretty.
I don’t know what’s going on. If I should run in
and put my arms around you. If your cheek needs some ice.
If I need to call someone.
You start to cry, grabbing the sweater draped across your chair
to bury your mouth in, a feeble attempt at drowning
out the wounded sounds you made. I don’t think I can
ever forget them. I run to my bedroom, my chest tightening,
and curl up underneath the blankets to cry. I don’t know why
it hurts so. But I hope one day you’ll tell me.

*

Andrea Maxine Recto is a Spanish-Filipino writer and poet living in Manila. Her poetry explores the themes of womanhood, grief, love, darkness, and introspection. She was recently published in TurnAround’s 14th Purple Poetry Book, with more forthcoming in the Santa Clara Review and elsewhere.

Choosing the Sorrow by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

~ ONE ART ~ 19 Comments

Choosing the Sorrow

In my heart today, a river of love for you—
sparkling, clear, easy to wade in.
Some may not understand
why I sometimes reach down
to pick up a smooth stone of sorrow,
not because I have stumbled on it,
but because I want to know its weight again.
I search beneath the glossy currents,
and always I find what I seek.
There are thousands of such stones,
enough to cover the whole river bed.
Every one of them precious.
Every one of them, a memory
of how it was to love you when you were alive.
Stone of you waking in your crib, pointing to light.
Stone of you doing tricks on your bike.
Stone of hiking up cliffs. Stone of undone dishes.
Stone of your eyes. Stone of long fingers.
Stone of you whistling across the room.
The river of love is no less powerful
for all this sorrow. When I am still,
often I choose to go wading here.
I notice how beautiful they are, all these stones,
worn as they are by the currents of love.
I notice how the current never stops.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is poet laureate for Evermore. She co-hosts the Emerging Form podcast. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her new collection is All the Honey. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Imaginal by Penelope Moffet

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Imaginal

Now I must give up
the idea of you, who
with your gentle jokes
your bursts of passion
the unexpected sweetness of your notes
upended me. Never really here
although my home felt
habited by you, your spirit
has moved on
and I must close my door
because the door in you
has closed.

*

Penelope Moffet lives in Southern California. She is the author of three chapbooks, Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022), It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). Her poems have been published in many journals, among them One by Jacar Press, ONE ART, Natural Bridge, Verse-Virtual, The Rise Up Review, The Ekphrastic Review and Sheila-Na-Gig. She has worked as a freelance journalist, a publicist for non-profits, an editor and a legal secretary. She is currently enjoying the freedom to do whatever she damn well pleases most days.

Ode to My Miscarried One by Wendy Kagan

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Ode to My Miscarried One

You, remote as a star—
all you knew was a kind of

floating.

Undulant, slight
as a comma

mote, iota, seedling.

You, magnolia blossom
silken, blush-colored cup
already fringed with brown
before yawning fully open.

You roomed in me just six weeks.
Those days, I called to you
hushed, staticky transmissions
returned to sender.

You, thought bubble
zealots’ unborn
sanctity without a face.

The world is exhausting—
no wonder you retreated
into a sloop of the uterus
that had shored up its moorings
to protect you.

Time was a dream you never woke to.

You simply stopped
growing
then spilled out in a red rush, curdled and thick
as mother’s milk gone bad.

You, soaker
though in that crimson river I saw
nothing of you.

Life sped on without you
who had best expressed its lavish excess:
bright cellular confetti.

Oh, nature’s spare
understudy

I fell in love a little
when your hazy half-light being
brushed against mine.

Why else would I find myself
after the terrible, echoey ultrasound
crying in chrome stirrups
riding your reachless
void, my womb
hollow as a death bell?

*

Wendy Kagan lives in New York’s Catskill mountain foothills. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as The Poetry Distillery, Eunoia Review, Chronogram, and The Baffler. Wendy holds an MA in English from Columbia University. Her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition.

Three Poems by Kathy Nelson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Adoption Agency, June 11, 1987

Nothing was as I’d thought, the baby not
a bundle but a brink, the day not a rainbow
but a tremor under the diaphragm. I should
have picked her up—the little red knots
of her balled fists, her limbs rigid with sorrow.
The squall. The chasm of her scarlet face. I could

do nothing (did she breathe?) but contain my own wail
and count the sheet’s dancing elephants (yellow)
and sum the ledger of my mistakes. Was I good
enough for this? I was afraid to fail.
But I stayed put.

*

In Carson City the Deer Walk on the Sidewalks

The way the young deer startles at sunrise
to see a human approaching—

the quiet constellation of eyes, nose, ears,
the crown of his antlers.

Boulders rise like molars out of the gums
of suburban yards. Yucca blooms
like white fountains.
And fences, everywhere fences.

O emissary of the oracular…

I set one foot off the curb, making way.
His hesitation to come closer,
then, his graceful, unhurried passing.

I wake up god-hungry and anorexic,
my fears clacking, a bag of bones.

As a prince strolls beggar-lined streets,
velveted and luminous,
blessing the scab-ridden and the cripple,

the deer proceeds like a promise
through his kingdom of pavement,
among the irrigated, blooming roses.

*

After Seeing The Help, My Mother Looks
through a Box of Photos for Cora Washington

         She will ask & you will answer.
               —Lucie Brock-Broido

An archeology. She sifts through the scree
of her childhood, unearthing bone after bone,
searching, searching for the one slender clue.

She leaves behind the fragments of a past—
her father’s smirk, her grandmother’s washboard
posture, the slant of evening across a barn.

Have you been waiting seventy years
for her to find you here, standing like a tree,
witnessing wordlessly, bearing secrets?

You face the camera straight on, powerful arms
at your sides, ready to wring the feathered neck
of any one of the black chickens at your feet,

or to soothe the white child beside you.
Hands that could as easily make fists as biscuits.
As she looks at you, she becomes yours again.

She will ask: Who was I? You will answer.

*

Kathy Nelson, recipient of the James Dickey Prize, MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and Nevada Arts Council Fellow, is author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books) and two previous chapbooks. Her work appears in About Place, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

“incapable of her own distress” by Susan Grimm

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“incapable of her own distress”
In that painting where Ophelia half-floats on her accidental stream
(like the stream of consciousness perhaps buffeting along–not a hurling
but a push with some muscle in it). Flowers bestowed on her
lightly. That dark water, the dark light, the spirit that surrounds
her body with its own wills. Her mouth a little open. A shine
on her eyes and teeth. Six Acre Meadow. 1851-52. John Everett
Millais on the bank of the river, sheltering in his windy hut. Poppies.
A chain of violets. The pooling of his dark oils. Auburn-haired
in an old court dress–the model reclining in a warm bath. Close
observation. The woman lay in bed coming in and out of her voice, not
confused but delayed. Not a person but a landscape. Still singing.
*
Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, South Dakota Review, and Field. She has had two chapbooks published. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Gran

“Lick Me Again with Fire” by Grace Massey

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

“Lick Me Again with Fire”

                   ~ for Louise Labé, 1524-1566

I ride through Lyon with only my plaited hair
for cover, lap cream from a broken bowl,
eat peacocks stuffed with their own flesh, swallow
a throbbing mouse. I wear a black opal
between my breasts, clutch a raptor’s feather
between my teeth. I lie with a man not
my husband, legs entwined like my father’s
golden rope. Unbind me that I may succumb
to the Sirens’ song, women, yes, and bursting
with lust. I am the comet’s tail, mistress
of burning coals. A meteor breathes within me.
I divine the future from the wind. I am
the lioness licking her blood-stained claws.

*

Grace Massey is a poet, classical ballet dancer, and socializer of feral cats who lives in Newton, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Quartet, Thimble, Lily Poetry Review, and a number of other print and online journals.

Dictionary, 1950 by Gail Thomas

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Dictionary, 1950

The year I was born
Orwellian, McCarthyism and brain-
washed darkened the air
as the H-bomb hatched. Post-
nuclear declared, we’re done.
Beautiful people with spray
tans sought head shrinkers
and homosexuals were booted
to funny farms. Post war boom
birthed suburbs, the charge card
and money market. Even BLT
and DJ joined the rush to normalcy
while LSD and DWI said
not so fast. Don’t make a federal
case out of it, we’re just antsy,
kvetching, bugging out.
Don’t blame us, we’re busy
making a baby boom.
Don’t blame us, it’s them
with a switch knife, zip gun,
assault rifle. Wait, we need
to protect ourselves
from ourselves.

*

Gail Thomas’ books are Trail of Roots, Leaving Paradise, Odd Mercy, Waving Back, No Simple Wilderness, and Finding the Bear. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies including CALYX, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, North American Review, Cumberland River Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. Among her awards are the Seven Kitchens Press A.V. Christie Award for Trail of Roots, the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press for Odd Mercy, the Narrative Poetry Prize from Naugatuck River Review, the Massachusetts Center for the Book’s “Must Read” for Waving Back, and the Quartet Review’s Editor’s Choice Prize. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and Ucross, and several poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She teaches poetry with Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshops, visits schools and libraries with her therapy dog Sunny, and works with immigrant and refugee communities in Western Massachusetts.

Two Poems by Susie Aybar

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Daylight Saving

The snowman in the backyard lingers
leaning with the weight of winter
facing the ground, stick arms out
bent in prayer and delight
daylight saving comes in three weeks

The brown-bodied goose balances
one-legged on the icy basin
with its head turned
black bill and white chinstrap
tucked inside its back

Would I love winter
if I didn’t have to warm my whole body
could just stand on one leg
shaking out the melancholy
sheltered in feather down?

Would I be less numb
wearing scales on my feet
so it wouldn’t sting
skating on frozen patches
buoyed by the sleet?

Long, gleaming days ahead
the snowman will be sacrificed
the grass will surface
geese will forage
we will unfreeze

*

Boundaries

The maple tree, red-orange leans
against the larger one beside it
they’ve thrived together
sharing dappled sunlight
protected by the parachute
of overgrown leaves
their roots tangling together
sometimes strangling
sometimes stronger
from the squalls
their chestnut branches
have intertwined
the changed leaves and
stems overlap now
there are pruning wounds
from trying to trim them
but they encroach on each other
like some twins in utero
competing for blood
when the stronger one steals
the nutrients, leaves
the other malnourished
crowding out the water, the soil
stealing the light
stifling the soul

*

Susie Aybar has an MFA from Manhattanville College. Her prose can be found in Literary Mama, Tiny Molecules, and Honeyguide Literary Magazine. Her poetry has appeared in The San Pedro River Review, The London Reader, Medical Literary Messenger, and others. She lives in North Salem, NY with her husband and sons. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @saybar12 or connect with her at susieaybar.com.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Plagiarism by W. D. Ehrhart

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Plagiarism

1. My mom helped me a little.
2. Thomas Jefferson wrote that?
3. I did not use ChatGPT.
4. I’m not allowed to use ChatGPT?
5. I don’t know who put my name on this.
6. Well, yes, that does look like my handwriting.
7. What’s the big deal, anyway?
8. What are you, a Communist?
9. What are you, a Republican?
10. It’s not like I robbed a bank or something.
11. The cat’s got my tongue.
12. May I have a glass of water?
13. The dog ate my homework.

*

W. D. Ehrhart is author of Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems (McFarland). His most recent collection is At Smedley Butler’s Grave (Moonstone).

It Rains Memory by Martin Willitts Jr

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It Rains Memory

Rain pours grief among the silhouette length of trees,
hammers or tap-dances on my roof,
or sending Morse code for help.

Both yesterday and tomorrow are dreams.
Yesterday reminds me about missed opportunities,
bad decisions, screwed-tight angry faces.
Tomorrow whispers promises. Today, rains
makes piano chords of sorrow in my heart.
My face drenches on a window.

It rains body bags.
Rain never falls twice the same way
sounds of gunfire, collateral damage reports.

I keep reminding myself
about the commonness of rain.
No flashback lightnings. No burials.
A normal rain Gene Kelly danced in,
kicking street puddles,
tossing away a broken umbrella.

Rain raising new flower shoots.
No gunshots. No identified bodies,
matching them with dog tags during war.
No messages for rescue; rescue arriving too late.

In the deluge, sparrows chatter.
I tell myself this is normal. They’re excited.
I tell myself, I’m home,
not sending bodies back from Vietnam.
I repeat, I’m home, not believing it,
pinching myself.

No. It’s rain on my arms.
This is normal.
I made it home.

*

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

Synonyms for Joy by Grant Clauser

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Synonyms for Joy
           after Bird Language by W H Auden

Mornings when a fox has visited
in the night, my dog will race out the back door
to roll in fox pee, his pupils disappearing
behind his brow in trance though he must know
this means a bath, and if I’m being ambitious,
a nail trim too, but just like my diabetic grandfather
who would risk a day of illness for five minutes
with an apple pie, he wheels in the fresh pee
anyway. And I’m forced to admit again
that dogs aren’t so different from us,
rolling our eyes at consequences,
near-sighted to regret.

*

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

Wonky Sonnet on Death by Bob Lucky

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Wonky Sonnet on Death

What a responsibility to be alive,
and then we start looking for a purpose.

We want to save something
thinking it will save our souls — whales,
stray dogs, turtles, antique quilts, bottle caps,
comic books, owls, condors, any number
of frogs, family recipes, photo albums.
I could go on — elephants and tigers too.

Watching the news, it’s clear
everyone’s on trial and our souls
are the least of our worries.
How many of us fail to turn in
the room key when we check out?

We’ve forgotten how to die,
and what a responsibility that is.

*

Bob Lucky lives in Portugal. He is the author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), and My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019).

Two Poems by JC Alfier

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Dream Narrative with Mother and Others

I fall back on a memory decades old.
My mother slapping me
with the back of her hairbrush

for wetting it to groom myself.
Her hand fervidly pulled at the bristles
as if they were victims of drowning.

I swear I’d dried every shadow of dampness.
But no matter, for I thought back then
her swung hand was God’s vengeance

for my sixth-grade lust over a substitute teacher.
I believed back then no substitute
could possess the glamor that young woman did.

Tonight in the city’s falling dusk,
I shunned the overtures of a stripper
who offered what she named a friction dance.

She leaned into me, her skin the scent of a paradise lost.
Good friend, believe me: I’m solely here
to gawk the likes of her slinking down poles,

and for happy hour swill. So I turned her down.
And through a neon sneer she whispered
faggot, licked her fingers,

swept them across my cheek, then tapped
my lips, leaving trace evidence
that dared me to prove she was here at all.

*

She Speaks of Her Town — Parrish, Alabama

Her clothes hold the grainy scent of feedstores
and autumns yet to arrive. Sparrows

dive low across her yard where wind
troubles clover in a child’s hands.

Sidewalks thin into open country.
The damp air breathes with fumes

and wet rust, turns daylight stale.
Someone leaves a market stall

with a mess of collards bundled in newsprint.
A breeze pulls notes from chimes

hung from her eaves.
We watch a hawk fix a zone of vigilance,

wait to leap with a single note
through a clean orbit of hunger.

At night she tells me This is an ugly town
to miss a lover from, and hums

a hymn to the pulse of freight engines
miles off in the ambient distance.

A windfelled branch thumps
against her door, like a startled horse.

*

JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Raleigh Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work.

Alone by Sally Nacker

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Alone

Alone, pausing to appreciate
the snow, I hear a train— its whistle blow—
in the near distance. The sound
through falling snow, through white
air (even in rain I have heard it so),
a carving through the atmosphere
like string music, or nostalgia. And I
so small here in the wood,
inside the sound inside the snow.

*

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.

Rereading Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete by Clint Margrave

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Rereading Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete

The same copy
I first read twenty years ago
with only one
sentence underlined:

It is our misfortune that we always decide
in favor of something
that turns out to be contrary
to our wishes.

And I wonder about
the young guy who marked this,
if he still agrees with it
and what he wished for
and whether or not
he got it.

*

Clint Margrave is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including the novel Lying Bastard (Run-Amok Books), and three poetry collections Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and most recently, Visitor, all from NYQ Books. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, The Moth, ONE ART, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.

Fresh Water by Josette Akresh-Gonzales

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Fresh Water

“Here, only the narrowest line separates life from death.”
           —Planet Earth, episode 3

Our neighbor died without explanation.
On the receiving line, his wife said nothing.

Nothing—a tremor rivered out the door
and down the hall, into the wilderness—

thirst, hunger, all directions. She snapped
in charge of things. I would find her poised

outside, clipping hedges, winding out hose,
her silver bob bent over her task, her hips

perpetually young, in black jeans, black boots.
My husband went to her husband’s wake

and held me closer with his heart emojis
than he had in weeks.

*

Josette Akresh-Gonzales is the author of “Apocalypse on the Linoleum” (Lily Poetry Review Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review, JAMA, The Pinch, The Journal, Breakwater Review, PANK, and many other journals. A recent poem has been included in the anthology Choice Words (Haymarket). She co-founded the journal Clarion and was its editor for two years. Josette lives in the Boston area with her husband and two boys and rides her bike to work at a nonprofit medical publisher. Website: josettepoet.com.

Passport Stamps from Narnia by Avery Chu

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Passport Stamps from Narnia

I, who never fell through mirror to Wonderland, who never
sailed in tornado to Oz, who never paddled across acetate oceans.

I, who never found Narnia. I, who seek. I catalog childhood
fibs as incantations. Paper fairies shuttered my blinds last night:

I was staring at halogen bulbs, tungsten on retina, when one trembled
past. I glued my own wings from candlewax and magazine clippings.

I jumped from rooftop to trampoline, springs shuddering as I
collided. I was not floating in shipwreck debris in the Aegean.

I narrate subway commutes as Shakespearean. Mundanities heap.
Narnia is not through this doorway, nor through the turnstiles.

I wait for the express, the summons. I wait for the wardrobe.

*

Avery Chu is a high school student. Her poems have appeared in Filter Coffee Zine.

Ode to the Memories I’ve Made in Boston by Annalisa Hansford

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Ode to the Memories I’ve Made in Boston

Some days I want to decay. Rot away in bed
until my sheets are littered with dead skin cells

and strands of unwashed hair. My memories
could fill up hundreds of rolls of film, and I’m afraid

of the day I’ll forget them. Every year that goes
by, I lose a reel. In ten years, I won’t remember

the Bostonian singing Phoebe Bridgers in the park
across my junior dorm. How she whittled someone

else’s sadness down to a chord progression. Days before,
me in the backseat of an Uber, trying to act sober

after two margaritas and two shots of tequila. Failing,
then telling my ex-lover how much I miss my dead friend.

How she would’ve loved the city if she had lived long enough
to visit. If her ex-boyfriend didn’t stab her on that July morning

three years ago. Didn’t leave her lying on the concrete
of the abandoned train station parking lot to bleed and bleed

and bleed in that deadly heat. In eight years, I won’t remember
abandoning a Halloween party with my roommate five minutes

after arriving. How we couldn’t find any alcohol in the house,
just empty bottles of Chardonnay and cigarette butts. We went

back to our dorm, ordered pizza and vegan cheesy bread, watched
The Great Pumpkin instead. In six years, I won’t remember

walking through a New England blizzard with my partner
to the nearest Dunkin Donuts. Wind whipping against our faces,

hail hammering onto our winter coats, just for a cup of matcha.
My tongue turning the color of August, the month I met her. Boston,

I’m sorry I resented you for so long. All this time, you were just
trying to understand the loneliness within me without unraveling it.

*

Annalisa Hansford (they/them) studies Creative Writing at Emerson College. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in The West Review, The Lumiere Review, and Heavy Feather Review. They are the co-editor-in-chief of hand picked poetry, a poetry editor for The Emerson Review and Hominum Journal, and a reader for Sundress Publications.

Two Poems by Callie Little

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Headstone

The text was three words:
Your mom passed.

My fifteen minute break.
Break like: my last baby tooth hits cement.

And then I was
back on the sales floor
where everything was plastic-wrapped perfection
where I did my best have-a-great-day smiling
impression of myself.

My coworker said they’d just gotten the worst text.
I wanted to say I bet I can top it, but I folded the tissue
paper behind the register, instead. Buried it.
And you might think that I wanted to go home,
but I wanted to stay tucked into the name tag
that was holding me together.

And then I was
outside.
It isn’t beautiful and poetic to tell you it was raining—
it just was. The rain pours in Seattle no matter how you feel.
I said the impossible words into my phone
The my and the mom and the died
And my spouse came to me.

And then I was
at a restaurant.
I bought us dinner. I bought us drinks.
I spent every minimum-wage dollar I had
and bought every appetizer on the menu
and too much dessert. A mudslide.
A warm apple pie a la mode,
the all-American mother ice cream dream.
I wanted to say, your mom only dies once
to the waiter but I didn’t feel like seeing him hurt for me
so I just said it to the person who loves me most.

And then I was
home.
And the grief only sat beside me, waiting.
I thought it might leave me in the night
like I might wake up
and it would just be another day.
I’d gone two years without hearing her voice
so it wouldn’t be any different.

And then I was
awake
and it was
cement.

*

Every Other Tuesday

Therapy begins at the same time as it always does
this morning, and it’s not the first time my voice
is all stone truth: “I think I might be cursed.”

My licensed therapist who is also secretly a witch
sees the light in my eyes flicker, and their hair stands on end.
They say, “that’s a sign that there’s truth there.”

This is how it works, therapy: I hand them a tangle
made of all my smallest pieces, they point to it
and say, “what a mess.”

Sometimes, this is enough magic to feel
a little bit like sanity— just being told
I’m not imagining it all.

*

Callie Little (she/they) is an artist and author from the Pacific Northwest. Her writing has appeared in VICE, Harper’s BAZAAR, Architectural Digest, and many more fine publications. Her debut non-fiction book, Every Little Thing You Do Is Magic, and its coordinating tarot deck featuring her illustrations will be published by Clarkson Potter in August 2024.

Mind-too-full-ness by Judy Kronenfeld

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Mind-too-full-ness

With every fragment of my one precious,
dwindling life, I am trying to focus
on these strawberries I bought for breakfast
as I wash them—enormous berries,
that look as if they’ve been given hormones,
like steers and heifers, and a little too crisp
on my knife, I notice, as I quarter them
into a bowl—unlike the miniscule
and profoundly sweet wild ones I would like
to find in a hilltop patch in some idyllic future—
berries that would stain my hands as I stuff them,
three after two in my mouth, whose juices
would dribble down my chin.

I drag my attention, kicking, back to the present,
marvel at the multitude of strawberry
seeds on each piece—tiny slightly quizzical
eyebrows all over the red flesh—which lead me
away to nature’s contingency plans,
her overcompensation for bad odds:
the leathery pomegranate pouch packed
with hundreds of arils bejeweled in glistening,
delicious ruby pulp; frogs that produce thousand-egg
clouds; fish that release millions at one go.
And oh! the hundred little turtle hatchlings
I watched on a video last week. Cheered
by onlookers, they clambered out of the nest,
then flippered laboriously over mountains
and valleys of sand to the sea, where maybe
one in a thousand (on a good day) or one
in ten thousand (on a bad) won’t be scooped up
by a barracuda or plucked by a gull.

I’m trying to tug my eyes back
to the cheerful strawberries in their white bowl,
trying to haul myself with gratitude back
to the warmth of my kitchen, back to my right arm—
almost healed from a fracture months ago—
actually lifting the bowl, back to your brightening
eyes as I set the berries on our breakfast table
next to the buttered toast.

But, love, I can’t not see the ruined world—
how it empties of deliciousness, brightness
and warmth, how it fills with the sounds
of annihilation by enormous bombs, dulls
to the uniform grey of destroyed cities,
how irrevocably it numbs the starving and stunned,
sitting on the mutilated ground hunched
over their fires—trying to bake a little
ashen bread with the last of the flour.

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s full-length books of poetry include Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and widely in journals. Her eighth collection, a chapbook of poems, If Only There Were Stations of the Air, will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in early 2024, and her ninth, another chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements!, will be released by Bamboo Dart Press in June, 2024. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books in 2024/2025. Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside.

Drought by Lisa Shulman

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Drought

Brown hills hunker down
parched soil hardens,
the land pants
under a merciless sun
vernal pools once loud with frog song, silent.
The weary world waits for rain.

I dream men burn bridges
over dry riverbeds,
crush thin bright bones of trout
beneath their boots.
Then awaken to lush lawns soft as moss
tended by those far from home.

Corn withers on cracked stalks
limp squash leaves wilt,
roots of fruit trees brittle in their search.
Swollen-tongued deer flee flames, singed coyotes
pad down city streets
lost while the earth thirsts.

We see and don’t see
families camped by roaring rivers
of cars, in sagging tents and flapping blue tarps,
we see and turn away
sail past those tattered flags,
our own lucky wallets stuffed like fat fish.

Dressed in ashflakes beneath a burning sun
children stand silent,
their eyes flat dry stones
hard as hearts.
They watch us, waiting
like the land, longing for our tears.

*

Lisa Shulman is a writer, children’s book author, and teacher. Her work has appeared in Catamaran, Minnow Literary Magazine, California Quarterly, The Best Small Fictions, and a number of other magazines and anthologies. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a winner in the Jessamyn West Creative Writing contest, Lisa’s poetry has also been performed by Off the Page Readers Theater. Her chapbook Fragile Bones, Fierce Heart is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Lisa lives in Northern California where she teaches poetry with California Poets in the Schools. lisashulman.com

Until I Saw Photos from Bahkmut by Cathryn Essinger

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Until I Saw Photos from Bahkmut

I didn’t care much for the surrealists,
those artists who have no use for reason’s

steady narrative, preferring the gut punch
of the injured psyche, the bruise of a dream

that leaves us wounded even when awake.
But today, this photograph of a country town,

a photo journalist’s image taken quickly–
no time for composition, no time to shape

our common reality–has changed my mind.
It was just a hamlet really, before the bombs

fell, leaving steeples and cottages in ruin.
The focal point a soldier working a backhoe,

clearing rubble from the town square,
digging around the roots of an ancient oak

that was supposed to anchor this scene
in a fairy tale. In the foreground, a blood

stained pillow and lace curtains tangled
in the mud, and closer still, a child dangling

a stuffed rabbit by its paw and a woman in
a fur coat adjusting her pink cashmere hat.

*

Cathryn Essinger is the author of five books of poetry–A Desk in the Elephant House, from Texas Tech University Press, My Dog Does Not Read Plato, and What I Know About Innocence, both from Main Street Rag. Her most recent collections are The Apricot and the Moon and Wings, Or Does the Caterpillar Dream of Flight?, both from Dos Madres Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, The Southern Review, Rattle, New Directions anthologies, Ecotone, Terrain and other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcarts and “Best of the Net,” featured on The Writer’s Almanac, and reprinted in American Life in Poetry.

Oh Mia Patria Sì Bella e Perduta by Hilary Sideris

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Oh Mia Patria Sì Bella e Perduta
                                          — Nabucco

What can he say? His mom loved
Mussolini, not only as a girl,
but when she died at ninety-two.
Did she romanticize her Fascist gioventú?
Was she ecstatic about Addis Ababa?
Vincenzo says she was hungry.
Il Duce put pane on her plate,

carne in her pan. Amore,
your country, too…Vincenzo
argues as Verdi’s chorus sings
of a homeland. Shhh, I say,
zitto. He understands, has pietà.
It happens at all! he smiles,
meaning all empires fall.

*

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

Sixth Blessing by Lois Perch Villemaire

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Sixth Blessing

It was a floral and satin wedding.
I was honored to be asked
by my niece and her husband-to-be
to recite one of the seven blessings.
I was number six.

As number five concluded
I floated to the chuppah
The rabbi lifted his chin
and motioned,
I stepped to the designated spot
noticing the sea of guests,
bride and groom beaming,
intoxicated with joy.

I felt calm,
but my Apple Watch
tapped my wrist,
I glanced down at the message—
heart rate high.

*

Lois Perch Villemaire is the author of “My Eight Greats,” a family history in poetry and prose published in 2023. Her work has appeared in such places as ONE ART, The Ekphrastic Review, Pen In Hand, and anthologies including I Am My Father’s Daughter. Lois lives in Annapolis, MD. where she enjoys researching family history connections, fun photography, and doting over her collection of African violets.

Snow Parable by Audrey Hackett

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Snow Parable

The world grows
smaller the way company
narrows a room.

A crack of smoke rises,
a pavement
drawn in air.

Snow laid down
like linen
makes a light-filled bed.

We pass through
the needle, not rich

but lavishly poor.

*

Audrey Hackett lives and walks in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Her poems have appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Alba, Right Hand Pointing, Green Ink Poetry, and ONE ART, and have been aired on NPR affiliate WYSO. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and currently works as a communications consultant.

a change in weather by Michael Liu

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a change in weather

My father pulls off I-38
three hundred miles east of Omaha.
I grew up on this fringe of tornado alley.

When I was younger I would imagine
the winds that colonized
these yellow fields were radio waves
sent by extraterrestrials. Aliens,
I was in the land of their prophecies.

As flatness elongated the torque
of the Earth, my father would tell
me stories from his world.
He handed me a photo from the 1980s.
He was biking through a market in Changsha.

These memories that are not mine
linger with the half life of uranium.
The sun is lucid in that image,
like it has been replaced,
different from the one in Iowa
as it reflects the humid sky on
my fathers face that is odd
and disturbed by a different radiation.
He is the ancient moon, craterless,
before eons of meteors.

*

Michael Liu is a writer from Naperville, Illinois. He is a junior at Naperville Central High School. His works have been recognized by Foyle Young Poets and Scholastic Art & Writing Awards along with having been published in the Daphne Review, Bow Seat, Polyphony, among other journals.

Two Poems by Taylor Mallay

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Hard Water

My mother said we had hard water,
and that was why our fine, ash blonde
locks broke off like lizard tails,
day-by-day settled into a simmering
copper color.

But then
I didn’t mind climbing out
of the tub with knots
at my roots, brass-toned
strands wiry as
a chain link fence.
At 12, that moment
of full, flushed warmth,
head submerged, hearing only
a heartbeat, a breath—
I was sure that was worth
even the slow, dry death
of my prepubescent tresses.

Later, after my stepfather left,
and my mother lost her job,
and all the faucets quit,
my brother and I
would make the trek into town,
bear-hugging big plastic bottles
against our hips.

One by one, we filled them
at a fountain by the park.
Sometimes shrieks of laughter
would float our way, and we’d glance
at each other instead of at the kids
criss-crossing through the monkey bars,
lifting themselves up on the swings
as high as they could,
clouds in their eyes.

But then
winter came,
and the fountains froze.
For a while, I tried leaving
the largest tupperware we had
in the backyard overnight,
praying, please,
give me rain,
give me snow—

the sting of the morning air,
the basin caked with frost,
and me—hurrying to dip my head
in a bucket of slush
before the bus arrived,
my heart in my throat
as I shuffled into school with hair
still slick from the thick
dollar store conditioner
I could never fully rinse.

* 

Following the Tide

We walked the winding path
to the lake in darkness,
cicadas pulsing in the pines above,
flashlight guiding our way.

Peeling off sweat-soaked clothes,
we slid naked into cool black water.
I allowed myself to drift; you pulled me close.
We stayed like that for a while.

When our fingers pruned,
we swam back to shore,
water sliding down our shoulders, hair dripping.
The flashlight cast long shadows behind us—

your hand in my hand,
barefoot in the damp grass,
your steps sure
as I stumbled into sunrise
with you.

*

Taylor Mallay is a Vermont-based Midwesterner who enjoys tinkering away at poems here and there. Her work has previously appeared in The Dewdrop, The Write Launch, and West Trade Review, among other publications.

What Love Feels Like by Alejandro Escudé

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What Love Feels Like

If a single dad loses his teaching career, he loses
Everything. So I work out. I start with the bicep curl

Machine. I hear the grunts of the man five machines
Down. I think about my Corolla in the dark lot.

The gray things and the shadows up there. I think
Too much, and then at the gym I think no more.

The towels are white and stiff. I drink tap water
From a middle school fountain near the restroom.

Both my kids fill my heart in my small apartment,
Especially when my tween daughter asks to watch

The Amazing World of Gumball. I record it for her.
Long ago, I long-term subbed for a chemistry class.

The teacher kept a bearded dragon. It ate when I ate.
I remember thinking this is what love feels like.

*

Alejandro Escudé’s latest book of poems, “The Book of the Unclaimed Dead,” published by Main Street Rag Press in 2019, is now available. He received a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis.

Love In the Time of a Two Year Renovation by Laurie Rosen

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Love In the Time of a Two Year Renovation

For you I would go down to the depths
of our foul basement with the dead mice
and dripping water that may or may not be sewage.

I would dig through the damp, dust covered boxes
for your copper pots, blue ceramic bowls
and stainless steel spatulas.

Although you can find any recipe online
I’d happily herniate my L5 disc carrying
the book-filled crates upstairs so you could

sift through dank covers till you find
your Sicilian lamb, eggplant cacciatore
and ginger cookie recipes.

I’d unearth the plastic tubs tangled in webs,
covered in sawdust and mouse droppings
to find dishes, silverware and wine glasses,

wash it all in the makeshift sink, head back
down to locate the linen and candle sticks.
Good-bye paper plates, plastic forks and cups,

for you babe, I’d scrub the table,
vacuum the wood shavings,
make a setting worthy of your delicacies––

the aroma of rosemary, garlic and just baked cookies
masking the stench of wet paper, rotted flesh
and mold.

*

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in Peregrine, Gyroscope Review, Zig Zag Lit Mag, New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater: a journal of The New School, ONE ART and elsewhere. Laurie won first place in poetry at the 2023 Marblehead, MA Festival of the Arts.

Anniversary Memento by Cathryn Shea

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Anniversary Memento

I throw on my housecoat
so before breaking the fast
I can fetch the morning paper,
that archaic medium for news.
Then time to remove accumulations
of body and soul. I mean bathe.
The long détente of parenting
and employment years behind us.
It’s our anniversary.
Instead of a bejeweled gift
I will settle for a carafe
or crockpot. An inverse memento mori,
interlocking cells of marriage spilling.
I know my husband in our housewares.
Having brushed him with my tongue
many years during our misdemeanor
home life, era more like error,
with its dabbling in booze and drugs,
and slamming of doors.
There was a brief Paradiso Terrestre,
fleeting cataracts of Edens.
Now our routine is forgiving,
my conscience feels swaddled.
I resist anxiety. Never mind remorse
that we didn’t behave better
in this earthly life, as I dream we did
in a nocturnal shadow life.
I cede to acceptance, this bundle of years.
*

Cathryn Shea’s second full-length poetry collection, “Ghost Matinee,” will be published in 2025. Her first is “Genealogy Lesson for the Laity” (both with Unsolicited Press). A Best of the Net nominee, Cathryn’s poetry has been in several anthologies and appears in Rust + Moth, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Gargoyle, and widely elsewhere. Cathryn served as editor for Marin Poetry Center Anthology, and she’s a fourth-generation northern Californian living with her family in Fairfax, CA. See cathrynshea.com

Life with Fish by Henry Stimpson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Life with Fish

1.
Struck mute, my father points
his thumb to his parched mouth,
takes one sip of apple juice, gags
and coughs, sweat beading his face.
I feel awful, but then
he reaches for Suzanne’s hand.
“We love you!” I say. He nods off
in his reclining wheelchair.

2.
A social worker disguised as the mailman
was spying on him, Dad muttered.
He slammed the salt shaker on his plate,
shattering it, then skulked into the basement
to hone his hunting knives
on his whining power grindstone.
My supper turned to ashes. I was eleven.

After more breakdowns and shock treatments,
Dad was too fragile to keep a job for long
but still fished for bass, scup, tautog,
bluefish, flounder, trout and perch
he fileted expertly, dusted in cornmeal
and pan-fried to golden succulence.

3.
Handsome and poker-faced at 29,
Dad holds up a mottled gray-black tautog
with one hand and with the other
cradles me and his lethal speargun.
Forever six in my striped T-shirt,
I’m thrilled to be with him.

4.
Seventeen years later in the same tiny kitchen,
Dad, balding and mustached,
and I, bearded, with a dark curly nimbus,
grin showing off two fierce big bluefish.

He’s 83, a widower.
I anxiously shadow him
as he hops goat-like across boulders
to a fishing ledge above the sea.
No fish for the camera that day.

5.
I wheel my bony dad
out into the chill winter sun
and soon roll him back inside
by the tropical fish tank, his theater
in the nursing home. The cast includes
a small slow urchin, a shy red shrimp,
and “the boss,” a beaky fluorescent-yellow tang
that chases off the darting blue damsels
and made him chuckle.

He’s 93 today. He’s still asleep,
so I tuck in next to him a birthday card
with a popup trout and a joke
about its exaggerated size.

Two hours later they call me.
Now I’m a fish out of water.

*

Henry Stimpson’s poems have appeared in many publications, including Poet Lore, Rolling Stone, Lighten Up Online, Atlanta Review, Delmarva Review, On the Seawall, Scientific American (forthcoming) and others. A diehard Boston Celtics fan, he lives in Eastern Massachusetts and also writes essays and humor. Stimpson is a semi-retired public relations practitioner and a longtime volunteer ESOL tutor, currently helping a fine Moldovan man speak English better.

Two Poems by Martha Silano

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment
Postcard from Some Unknown Part of My Brain
that may be missing an enzyme. Missive from I believed
my version of ruse and ruin. It’s true: at boulevards I seek out
the craziest donuts, Bear Mountain Bavarian, Triple Blitz Crunch.
Everywhere I turn, the tulips are redder than the Spanish word
for blood. Everywhere the curbs are crumbling (don’t go barefoot).
Everywhere: prosecco fountains empty into cruise-able rivers.
I want the dead to be what pops when I shake the bottle,
aim the cork at the hedges. What I promise is the tenderness
of a tamed tiger, a small gray cat crawling under your duvet.
Did you say permission or persimmon? Either way,
I will be your plankton, what keeps you phosphorescent.
Together let’s venture into imperishable brightness,
dimness suddenly strobing. Find a seat beside a bed
of crocuses, which you’ll remind me is where we get saffron.
Dine on and shine on. Become more than a chainsaw
and its log. At our feet the space junk of the 60s and 70s,
scraps of the lunar module that carried Neil and Buzz.
It’s true: I get mean when I don’t get my way, when I’m forced
to build a nest in the future tense, when I’m forbidden
the call of an osprey. When heat gives way to dusk.
*
Self-Appraisal at 62
Sometimes, it’s okay to ask which cracked terracotta pot,
what about this place called Earth, though sometimes
it’s okay to not ask permission to appear
in a low-cut gold-lame dress higher up the thigh than someone, somewhere,
considers appropriate. Mainly, it’s staying in your reclined movie seat
till the very last credit, till you find out who wrote every song,
including “What Was I Made For?” Such a good question! Ask yourself,
and I will too. But mostly? Adventures in vexing. Dostoevsky-ishly
nuanced. Feeling more at home in my bosom-buddy body,
yet wrapped in every glass of Pinot Grigio, every oops-no-SPF suntanning afternoon.
Something like inexorably, not to be discouraging. As I often say to my life partner,
would you rather the alternative? Despite juicy maggots and blowflies,
I carry on with the bubbly, my plate piled high with Pasta alla Norma,
always stop at that bakery in Cashmere with the baguette straight out
of Anjou. It’s too soon to know how bad it will get,
but for now there are sexual pleasure tools out the wazoo. I mean,
the MRI revealed a white spot on my right frontal lobe,
so I Dr. Googled: possible early sign of dementia.
SO fun! (as I like to text), but today all my Nutter Butters and Lorna Doone’s
are exactly where they belong, and I’m coming and going
like a subway line to Queens.
It’s not quite a choose your own adventure, though I do make sure
to roll down grassy hills, to stand in line for an ice cream novelty
when the rainbow van pulls up, to make a little lotus blossom
with my fingertips. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to take a long, good look
in the mirror, ask Change? Why would I change? To give the future
both the finger and a thumbs up.
*
Martha Silano is a poet living with ALS. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Missouri Review, among others. Martha’s most recent collection is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019).

Two Poems by Sandra Kohler

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Tonawanda Street Scene #6, Mourning

Will you live for days, dear friend, or weeks ¬–
you whose doctors had given you at most six
months something like a year ago? Today,
hearing that you’d fallen four times in less
than an hour after you’d been moved into
a new facility, ostensibly compassionate,
for the incurably ill, I began to wish for your
death, to imagine a death more conscious,
more accepting, than the one into which
you seem to be blundering. I want you able
to say goodbye to those you love, fully
yourself, rational, though tender at heart;
not confused, struggling, fighting your fate.
I have no power to make any of this real.
I grieve for you while you are still alive,
struggling. The best in you is your enemy:
that will to live, fight on, betraying you
now. All I can do is mourn for it, for you.

*

Realization

Dreaming, I am trying to imagine how to console
my two grandchildren, Kit almost thirteen, Sam
just turned eleven, for my death, for my husband’s,
their beloved grandfather. We are alive but so old
that surely they will have to endure our loss; what
can I do or say to teach them how to suffer that?

Thirteen, eleven. In the dream I realize that when
my mother died I was nine. For most of my life I’ve
believed that I did not mourn her, that my sister’s
narrative of how she had lost a mother, but I had
not, because she would mother me, was the true
story. True story indeed –a fake tale, a makeshift,
shift that for all its lack of substance blinded me:
I believed I never mourned, suffered. Dreaming,

I am reliving that time, recognizing my own agon,
passion, loss. For years, I conspired with my enemy,
robbing my child self of the reality of her pain.
In dream I am given back what was taken from me:
I know what I suffered. Is there some kind of
forgiveness in this dream? Not of my sister, but
of my child self, whom I had judged for decades.
If so, it is not forgiveness, it is healing at last.

* 

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music (WordTech) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, Illuminations, Tar River Poetry and many others over the past 45 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the new Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia.

Two Poems by Christopher W. Smith

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Let’s go to a venue from our college days and see a band we don’t know.

We’ll spend the night
talking about what has changed
and what little has changed.

We’ll tell the other attendees
that they’ve been robbed–This band
is better live.–and see if they get the reference.

We’ll regale the bartenders about
how we used to drink PBRs with our
fake IDs, and hold the cans up at a song’s end.

Now, it’s just phones raised up and
recording. We’ll start slapping them out
of their owners’ hands. We’ll scream

You don’t need proof you were
here. Enjoy the moment for your
self. No one gives a fuck anyway.

Maybe we’ll be bounced. Or maybe
we’ll reconcile over rounds of White Claw. Or maybe
we’ll find an excuse not to go in the first place.

*

Let’s scream at the waitstaff

and we’ll time how
long it takes for a
manager to appear at
Applebee’s vs. Alinea,
for someone to tell us to fuck

off and escort us
by squeezing our arms, above
our elbows. But we’ll wait
until our appetizer arrives,
one drink, so it’s not without

reason we forgot that
Kenneth or Alessandra or Kimi
has their own mouth to feed
and needs a Xanax before coming
to work and having us spit

out bullshit simply
because we can.
And it always comes as a surprise
that it takes so so long
for someone to intervene.

*

Christopher W. Smith is a poet from rural Georgia. His poems are forthcoming from North Dakota Quarterly and have appeared in Peanut Butter Shrimp. He is the founder of Quarter Press, and you can find out more on Instagram @quarterpresspics.