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Waxing Gibbous by Daye Phillippo

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Waxing Gibbous

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

*

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

The Ungiving by Nadine Hitchiner

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The Ungiving

After your father texted, “the pigeons have hatched!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

“Transparency, quick response, easy vibe.”

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

Info about ONE ART (courtesy of Chill Subs):

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

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

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

Three Poems by Faith Shearin

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Telephone Booths

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

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

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

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

*

My Sister, Age Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

My Father’s Cancer was like the Loch Ness Monster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

supposed to be possible.

*

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

Heirloom by Elisabeth Crago

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Heirloom
         After Zeina Hashem Beck

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

*

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

A Dream of Matzoh Ball Soup by Lana Hechtman Ayers

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A Dream of Matzoh Ball Soup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Three Poems by Abby E. Murray

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

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

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

* 

Ode to an Invasive Species

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

* 

On the First Day of School

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

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

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

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

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

of her own body, which harbors
many unnamed currents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thoughtful koi—but rejection
festers there too, aggressive

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Eight Nights by Emily Winakur

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Eight Nights

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

*

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

All American Superstore Pharmacy by Sara Cosgrove

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All American Superstore Pharmacy

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

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

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

*

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

On Knocking the Head Off the Buddha Statue by Melinda Burns

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On Knocking the Head Off the Buddha Statue

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Tamarah Rockwood

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A Voice in a Crowd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

KKK in Indiana

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

*

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

Nudge by Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice

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Nudge

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

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

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

*

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

My wet eyes stared into their lights by Roseanne Freed

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

My wet eyes stared into their lights

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

            Who misses Mama the most?

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by William Welch

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Soup Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Camouflage

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Four Poems by Meg Freer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

We Can Always Tell a Longer Story

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

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

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

*

Watcher

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

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

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

*

Tea Party

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

*

Small, Weird Things
         in memoriam Bob M, poet

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

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

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

*

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

Coronado, CA 1979 by Michel O’Hara

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Coronado, CA 1979

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Martha Deed

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Ordinary Days

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

binding them at
the end of their lives
not hiding what

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

The wet spring

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

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

attempt to feed three
barking fledglings
all at once

the old pines are stressed
their lower branches
brown

and across the street
down the road a bit
the developer

scrapes his lot of trees
grass
topsoil

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

oblivious as the pines

*

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

Because you asked me to pray for you by Babo Kamel

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Because you asked me to pray for you

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Jade Han

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

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

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

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

Poor Yorick by Michelle Bitting

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Poor Yorick

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

*

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

Two Poems by Jenna Wysong Filbrun

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

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

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

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

*

On Not Becoming Bitter
         to loneliness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It says things
come apart.

You have to let them
come apart.

*

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

Imprecise Lament by Natalie Marino

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Imprecise Lament

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

When I was ten
I loved to look
in the mirror

until I became strange
to my own self.

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

Now that I am middle aged
I am the mask.

I want to know
my body’s gravity,

the beauty of falling leaves
disappearing on the ground.

Hearing the hot jazz
playing at my open window,

I think of the last
sultry days of summer,

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

*

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

Lunchbox by Christina Hennemann

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Lunchbox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Elegy Before Snow by Susan Cossette

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Elegy Before Snow

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

*

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

Three Poems by Tara A. Elliott

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At Bay

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

*

In the Wake

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

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

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

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

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

grow heavy with its own weight—
and let love

break us, again.

*

This Loneliness

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

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

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

*

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

Feast by Robbi Nester

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Feast

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

*

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

Two Poems by Elizabeth Crowell

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SKATING AT MENOTOMY POND

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

*

DECOMISSIONING NIELSEN LIBRARY, SMITH COLLEGE, AFTER RENOVATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Triumph by Leslie Hodge

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Triumph

1.

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

In the rearview mirror,
her eyes meet mine.

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

*

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

Two Poems by Howie Good

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The Sincere Assassin

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

                                                            &

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

                                                            &

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

*

Pilgrim’s Progress

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

                                                            &

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

                                                            &

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

*

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

There Is No Wolf Inside The Dog by Chris Compton

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There Is No Wolf Inside The Dog

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Laurie Kuntz

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Kansha Sai

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

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

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

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

Yet, I remain grateful:

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

*

My Son’s Sweatshirt

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Gratitude on Thanksgiving

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Gratitude on Thanksgiving

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

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

We look forward to curating exceptional work in 2024.

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

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

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

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

Sending good wishes,

Mark Danowsky & Louisa Schnaithmann
Editors
ONE ART

The Perfect Heart by Tere Sievers

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Perfect Heart

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

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

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

*

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

Home-Cooked Meal by Vitalia Strait

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Home-Cooked Meal

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

But I can read and follow fixed instructions, too —

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

*

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

My Atheist Friend Asks Me to Pray by Bethany Jarmul

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

By the time
I pray, 18 people
have prayed

their last prayers.

*

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

Flight by Bonnie Proudfoot

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Flight

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Accompanying My Friend to Chemo by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Accompanying My Friend to Chemo

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

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

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

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

*

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

A Fine Appendix by Deborah Bacharach

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A Fine Appendix

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

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

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

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

*

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

I Have Softened My Blows by Lenya Norea Wegener

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I Have Softened My Blows

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

*

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

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

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My fingers itch for Bach, so I chop vegetables instead

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

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

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

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

*

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

torn by Eva Eliav

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torn

like skin from skin
purpose
tears away

who knew it was
detachable so

fragile

*

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

The Long Sorrow by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Long Sorrow

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

*

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

Three Poems by Abby Caplin

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EXIGENCIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

INTERMISSION
         for my daughter

I.

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

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

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

II.

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

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

III.

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

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

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

*

ODE TO A CORDLESS LIGHTWEIGHT STICK VACUUM CLEANER
         after Thomas Lux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Three Poems by Kate Young Wilder

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Second Coming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

The Pull

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

What One Drink Knows

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Years Ago, in Morocco by Heidi Seaborn

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Years Ago, in Morocco
           ~for my daughter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Luthier by Rikki Santer

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Luthier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Milkweed Pod by Lara Payne

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Milkweed Pod

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Tongues by Donna Hilbert

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Tongues

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

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

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

Who could find sleep
while naming the dead?

*

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

Two Poems by Gene Twaronite

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The Burping Seal

A lone Tupperware with sky blue lid,
it lives on in my kitchen, a reminder
of all it once held—loving leftovers
of Mom’s greasy kugel or kielbasa,
mincemeat cookies, coleslaw or apple pie.

Its skin is worn soft from fifty years
of washing and handling. Back and forth
it went from her place to mine. I see
her sturdy hands placing morsels into its mouth
like a mother bird feeding its young.

The only piece of hers I still own, it is
a talisman of other days, though its lid
has long lost its patented burping seal.
But like a person, a product is
much more than a slogan.

*

Spiritual

A magic word
my brother
wanted to hear,
for now he says
I’m no longer
going to hell,
as if to
speak of
intangible things
made my
sinful body
suddenly
transfigure into
pure spirit,
speaking in
ineffable
tongues.

*

Gene Twaronite is a Tucson poet and the author of four poetry collections. His first poetry book Trash Picker on Mars, published by Kelsay Books, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Arizona poetry. His latest poetry collection is Shopping Cart Dreams. Gene leads a poetry workshop for the University of Arizona OLLI program. Follow more of Gene’s writing at his website: genetwaronitepoet.com.

a cappella by M. E. Walker

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a cappella

in the vicinity, their days knot up
like taut red ties: rush to join the traffic,
shove water through a clump of grounds,
shake the recalcitrant child awake. me,
i’m clocking in at the old dream job:
the day sprawling itself across my bed
like a dawdling spill of chamomile,
and me, the day’s grateful towel,
sopping it all into pink as the sparrows
sing my praises from the parking lot.

i once thought the work of a lifetime
was finding out what doesn’t hurt.
now i wonder if that’s just
a prelude to a new kind of victory,
if this speck of mercy i’ve built
is some kind of brilliant hush
in cavernous space, like a choir
savoring the breath before the downbeat,
before drawing harmony out of silence.

*

M. E. Walker (he/him) is a queer Jewish storyteller, educator, and proud lifelong resident of Texas. His poetry has previously been published in The Trinity Review and Cathexis Northwest Press. He can be reached at mewalker199@gmail.com, on Instagram @mewalkerpoetryplus, and in the wreckage of Twitter @texasnotranger.

Four Poems by Sarah Browning

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Our thing

is food – we talk of dinner –
zucchini with a little bite
bites of little chocolates for indulgence
to indulge in things takes money
money takes work and a lot of our friends
are friends our age we’re tired of work
though work makes dinner possible
and possibly chocolate though lentils
are cheap and so is rice, root vegetables roasted
in the roasting pans given to us as gifts
which are things given in love
and love is free though living isn’t
is it not life that warms me this January

a January hot and cold my honey still in bed –
we’ve joined our things in chorus –
bed a thing that holds us
as we hold each other, cradled, in our stone house
our house in a neighborhood of even bigger
stone houses in a city of bridges
and other less neighborly divides
in a country with borders drawn by imperium
an empire now everywhere designed
as designations go, its people now things
arranged for the sorting of things,
for the acquiring of things, things
that feed us, things we play with,
things we wear, drive
driven to take
it’s our thing our American thing

*

pain

pain the temporary lover
pain the bad boss
pain the mercurial father
absent lord
the withholding mother
pain the bully
mean girl
pain the jock
the brain
pain as 19th century novel
pain as surrealism
pain as neofuturism
signified and signifier
pain as French feminist
pain as absurdist
Monty Python sketch
pain as centrist pundit
as late-night host
pain as Judge Judy
pain as Jane Goodall
pain as Born Free
pain as Bob fucking Dylan
pain as chains in the sea
pain as sea glass
this American pain
this English pain
war-refugee pain
Great Depression pain
political pain
personal pain
pain as tragic early death
pain as rock star treatment
self-help book
facebook status pain
instapain
tweet fest pain
you may ask yourself pain
the king of pain my shepherd is
good morning, pain
thought we said goodbye last night

*

Quarantine, Final Days
          Early June, 2020

Yesterday you planted clover, love, and paced each foot
of the property with a hose careful and tending.
This morning we are lush with the dew.

Another sneering white man has brought his power
down vicious on another Black man in America and though
we’ve no TV here we witness

the brave marching, we listen to the chants, on our tiny
phone screens. We join our sorrow and our rage. Here
in the high mountains, spring is late

waking and the world has gone green – so impossibly
bursting beauty. The tear gas is nowhere near.

My privilege pounding in me, you tend me each day, arms
about me as I heave at the horror. Good morning, my sweet.
We came for a week and stayed

three months, as those who can have fled plague cities
for centuries. I try to listen for each bird’s morning song
to carry back with us to the uncertain city

of whirring choppers, wailing sirens. The wren trills a rising.

*

DrBigBeef, or Internet Dating Over 50

1. OkCupid

When I tell my 16-year-old son – inappropriately perhaps –
this user name I’d spied on OkCupid he asks, quite sensibly:
Is that just dick-related or is he also a butcher?

DrBigBeef      Lotsajunk4hottie

Gr8luvr2, which means, inexplicably,
that Gr8luvr was already taken.

Stormin2u      Reallygdlickin – I’ll be the judge of that

Gigglecomplex      TangosWithWolves      MeetGaryinaBox

Muthead, with just one T      PipeFitterforPussy

CoolInaCrisis sports a combover, early 60s glasses.
So… the Cuban Missile Crisis?

2. Match.com

Every last man on Match is just as comfortable
in a tux or jeans, out on the town or curled
on the couch with his sweetie or Special Lady.

Each one is Down to Earth. They pose over
and over with a recent catch, as if to say
Check out my enormous… fish.

Note to men on Match: do you all have to be so
fucking dull? Another thing: your relationship
with your Lord and Savior? Not my business.

51-year-old men seeking women, 29-40:
Fear death much? And dudes who seek women
of all ethnicities except Black: Go fuck yourselves.

3. Epilogue

Conservative men in shorts from McLean, who
golf and ski and like long walks on the beach:
I’ve had enough. I’m heading back to OkCupid.

There, at least, I know I’ll find
a well-endowed man who
procures for me the choicest cuts.

*

Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. Co-founder and past Executive Director of Split This Rock, the poetry and social justice organization, she now teaches with Writers in Progress. Browning received the Lillian E. Smith Award and fellowships from DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, VCCA, Yaddo, Porches, and Mesa Refuge. She holds an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Rutgers Camden and lives in Philadelphia. More at www.sarahbrowning.net

Masked Dancers at the Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, 2002 by Alison Hurwitz

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Masked Dancers at the Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, 2002
At work they have no names.
The beat heats up past fever pitch, past gilded balconies.
In pleather hot pants, they reflect too many mirrored balls, catch
stares and whistles, fishnets on the splintered stage, legs crosshatched,
grilled, their movements made for moistened lips.
Served up steaming for one more frenzied Silicon event, they’re
a Moulin Rouge-style fantasy for those more skilled with screens
and blue light than with flesh. Half their faces hidden under dominos,
they dance, blinded by the spotlights in their eyes. It is better this way.
For $80, they will whip the watchers dizzy with their spangled hips
and thighs, decolletage and driving syncopation. They shimmy scratchy tulle.
Chafing dishes, they set their incandescence spinning into spotlights, slick
the crowd before the chorus comes. Sizzle buys them Pad See Ew.
Breathing runway groin and sweat, they gyrate, smile and blister,
hot pants bunching where they can’t adjust. Bent to their task,
they lubricate the crowd, then disappear. All of them so good
at getting gone.
Home at 3 a.m. inside her tiny bathroom, one dancer scrubs
at greasepaint till it stings, until her lashes peel away, two rhinestoned
millipedes curled inward, winking and disfigured, skin stripped clean until
her naked face is no longer erased. The mirror cabinet’s been slammed
too many times, lost its magnet, cannot fully close. No matter: she owns
the eyes inside the glass. Safety waits until it spirals into exhale in the after-
shock of sound. She opens it, takes out her name, puts it back
into her mouth.
*
Alison Hurwitz has been featured in Rust and Moth, River Heron Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Shore, and Thimble, among others. Her work is forthcoming in Carmina Magazine, The South Dakota Review, and Black Fox Review. She is a 2023 Best of the Net Nominee. Alison hosts Well-Versed Words, a monthly online poetry reading. alisonhurwitz.com

The Oracle Can Only Promise Endurance by Ben Weakley

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The Oracle Can Only Promise Endurance

You push the boat from the sandbar,
flames licking at the lapping waves.

You will row until your arms no longer feel sore.
You will row until your arms no longer feel.

Until your open wounds crust in the salt air. Remember:
the ocean heals whatever it doesn’t kill.

You will know survival when your scars
spell sacred words
in a language you alone can speak.

You will know survival when you arrive,
carrying the dead on your tongue.

You will know survival when you no longer
remember the lines
that creased your mother’s face.

When the bright and brilliant sky
from one horizon to another
separates the old heart from the new,

when sleep takes you like an ambush. You will arrive
conquered in an unconquered land.
You will know survival because

you are here, and
there is nothing else to know
but the scent of your own skin.

*

Ben Weakley is a U.S. Army veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His first collection of poetry, HEAT + PRESSURE was published by Middle West Press in 2022. His work appears in Sequestrum, Cutleaf Journal, and Wrath-Bearing Tree, among others. He lives in Kingsport, Tennessee with his wife, two teenage children, and a well-meaning, but poorly-behaved hound-dog named Camo. Find him at https://jbenweakley.com

Two Poems by Kevin Ridgeway

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POEM FOR LATCHKEY CHILDREN

At nightfall, before Mom got home
from work, I wouldn’t turn on
any of the lamps. Our television
played old movies to light
the living room while I plopped
down into a beanbag chair on the floor,
duct taped in five different places.

Turner Classic Movies
and overdue library books
kept me company when
the rest of the living world failed me,
on dark noir screens without parents
where I felt safer than I ever did,
a warm place lit by celluloid dreams.

I grew up, my mother retired
and then she died—that’s when
they locked us out of the house
we used to lock ourselves in
after we had no choice but to sell it.
I looked in the window
I used to look out of,
the room empty because
we took everything in there
that we could and sold the rest,
so find a place to lock yourself in
while you can, lost in reels
of old movies and classic texts
until you find yourself out here
with the rest of the world,
when you no longer have a choice
but to unlock your fear and face it.

*

BABY’S FIRST NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

Mom gave birth
to a chainsaw nightmare:
a son who dresses as her
for Halloween,
a son who cleaned the house
in a teenaged manic episode
until it was spic and span
telling her not to make a mess
or she’s grounded
a son who complained
she wasn’t invested in his future
while he walked four miles
to school every goddamn day
to rescue himself from
breathing in hairball grime
to exhale white trash guilt
in primal screams of shame
against walls where
photographs of family
I never met in this life
all hung dead, an audience
for a kid who locked himself
inside alone long enough
to chop through all the scenery
my stay-at-home television father
influenced me to stage
my amateur hour around
until she found me there
bleeding out lost daydreams
the doctors told her
in the emergency room
that I inherited a shipwreck

*

Kevin Ridgeway’s latest books are Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and A Ludicrous Split 2 (with Gabriel Ricard, Back of the Class Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, Heavy Feather Review, Sho Poetry Journal, Trailer Park Quarterly and Beat Not Beat: California Poets Screwing on the Beat Tradition (Moon Tide Press), among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.

Midnight Chaos by Joan Mazza

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Midnight Chaos

Again I’m back at Twin Oaks,* wanting to fit in,
be useful. But I’ve spilled olive oil – a lot of it—
on a new rug and I’m trying to clean it up.
The soy sauce is in a flimsy plastic bag,
unmanageable and heavy. Someone’s pushing
cars out of a second story window to let them
crash below. A nearby shelf with old lanterns
shakes, about to fall and smash. Some people
are going swimming but the sea is in the shade.
I’m chilled, want to lie down on a picnic table
that’s in the sun, but too close to shore. Oh, no!
A cow and a goat are loose in the kitchen.
And now I’m working again as a microbiologist
in a hospital. No one trains me or tells me what
to do. I see urine cups on the counter and decide
I’ll plant them on agar, but I don’t see the book
for recording specimens, don’t know the next
number. Someone says they don’t use numbers,
but write the patients’ names on the Petri plates.
Even in this dream, I wonder how one would
distinguish the patient’s plates set up from different
sources. I’m to write a number on each patient’s
face, but the marker doesn’t work. A patient laughs
with me at this absurdity. What a mess the counters
are. No blood agar plates, no set procedures.
I’m confused, dismayed, but not afraid. Am I shunned?
I wake up tired, but I can’t be fired or evicted.

*Twin Oaks Community, www.twinoaks.org

*

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and taught workshops nationally on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam). Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Potomac Review The MacGuffin, Slant, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The Nation, and many other publications. She lives in rural central Virginia.

Memory of an attic room by Leen Raats

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Memory of an attic room

When the music hits
I feel no pain at all.
– Rancid

It’s the music that saved me
on long days underneath the roof window
of a drafty row house on a street
where no one wanted to know me.

At night I dissolved into crowds
like sugar in coffee. Invisible
but everywhere my shadow slipped
along facades, over thresholds where riffs

screamed in the wordless despair
only rockers and poets understand.

Back home I sneaked along the wall
behind which everyone slept, holding my breath
when the stairs creaked, my foot
hovering over a step.

*

Leen Raats (39) is a Belgian writer and freelance copywriter. She self-published a couple of books and won writing competitions, but so far only in Dutch. Her first publication in English will be The Solitary Man, a short story that will appear in the fall issue of 34 Orchard.

Two Poems by Olga Maslova

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Wolf Rondo

A week ago
a day ago
a phone call ago
I said “my darling dove”
I said “my silver wolf”
I said “my blue-eyed love”

All of it
a robin egg ago
your throaty laugh ago
a song by Suzy Solidor ago
an outline my body left
inside your bathrobe
tossed on the floor
was true

I warned you
a scream ago
a rain ago
your Engineer boot
flying at the door ago

My blue-eyed darling
my wild wolf mon coeur
don’t look for me
among the smoky autumn leaves
dried grass of our hikes
unsaved doc files
my hair pins scattered
by your bed

*

Dinner with French Lesbians

She says tonight I am having dinner with French lesbians She says
with whom I have absolument nothing in common She says
They do not like my poems and I don’t like theirs
Then why?
It is late November, the leaves are gone, and they are
the only three familiar faces I know in town She says

The leaves never fall off here on the West Coast
and there is no November
I think of that place, La Petit Pontoise,
where we ate after finally leaving the bedroom
There are no trains, planes or boats that will take me across the ocean:
The time difference between us sometimes nine hours
and sometimes seventeen years

I am looking at my watch, by now they are ordering dessert,
gateau au pommes, creme brûlée, or whatever
French lesbians in Paris prefer after dinner
She won’t have any, she takes her wine naked, sans vêtements

If I were there, she and I would muse about the taste of wine in its inception
I would quote the Zen koan about the sound of a fallen tree in an empty forest
Can one taste the wine while it’s still uncorked
the one before Eve, before the snake and the apple?

It’s 10 pm in Paris and they discuss one relatively well-known poet
all four of them dislike for completely different reasons

*

Olga Maslova is a Ukrainian-American writer and theatre designer. She is the librettist for several major vocal productions: the opera Black Square, the oratorio Last Day of an Eternal City and Venetian Cycle, an art song cycle for baritone, soprano and string quartet + harp, all with music by composer Ilya Demutsky. Olga is a 2021/2022 Fulbright Fellow for a musical libretto Russian Drafts. Olga’s poetry has been published in Plume Poetry and Beyond Queer Words. Olga teaches in the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Traveling to Visit Mom with My Bad Knees by Luanne Castle

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Traveling to Visit Mom with My Bad Knees

We’ve spent the night in the guest room
of my mother’s retirement community
and dress to meet Mom at the café
downstairs for eggs and buttered toast.
Her room is only four down, but Sunday
mornings are busy so she will hold a table.
I hadn’t argued because she likes a purpose.
The bathroom light goes off, the TV too.
My husband’s shaver is dead in his hand.
In the hall, a handful of women are peeking
out their doors or sliding their walkers
along the carpet. Their faces are question
marks, just as I imagine mine.
With his still-good knees, my husband
walks down two flights of stairs and back up
to share the news that the entire campus
is without power—even the nursing home.
The café is closed, the dining room is closed,
but the taunting scent of breakfast lingers.
Everyone is hungry, and one tiny woman
asks me what to do for her diabetes.
My husband helps her find the way down.
As time goes on, women wander the halls,
jam the only generator-powered elevator.
Some are grumblers, some frustrated:
With what we pay!! I can see myself in them.
Some are meek, and that would be me, too.

*

Luanne Castle’s award-winning full-length poetry collections are Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line 2022) and Doll God (Kelsay 2015). Her chapbooks are Our Wolves (Alien Buddha 2023) and Kin Types (Finishing Line 2017), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Luanne’s Pushcart and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Bending Genres, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Saranac Review, Verse Daily, and other journals.

Your Name Is a Wound Is a Song by Susan Shaw Sailer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Your Name Is a Wound Is a Song*

I saved your last message in my email, Sharon,
the one about Laurie Anderson, whose art and
voice we both admire. What sweetness lingers

in your wake—for me, sudden, unexpected.
When I said I’d phone again next month I thought
we’d have more time. Christmas came, New Year’s—

and then my daughter’s call—she’s gone, three
nights ago. I’ve spoken with you ever since.
You tell me death arrived just right—grabbed

you after pain mounted its high horse, held you
to the saddle, galloped where I can’t follow.
You’re ok with death—you did the myriad things

you meant to do, inspired 4,000 students to reach
beyond easy—to volunteer at food banks, stage
mock debates at election time—gave them tastes

of Shakespeare plays in Oregon. You made your
money work for justice, marched in protests, lived
the better part of nine decades mostly happy,

steamed around Drake Passage, Cape Horn, awed
by night sky’s billion stars, impoverished Cuba’s
murals, dancing, music night and day. But I’m

here and you’re not—emptiness when we had
full. This summer I’ll be in Washington State.
You won’t. April’s forsythias didn’t burst as bright

this spring. Red tulips barely moved past orange.
On the bush below my window, frost-damaged leaves.
We outlive ourselves, dear Sharon. We go on.

* The italicized portion of the title of this poem comes from a line in Zeina Hashem Beck’s “Ode to My Husband, Who Brings the Music.”

*

Susan Shaw Sailer lives in Morgantown, West Virginia. Her recent poems have appeared in One Art, Persimmon Tree, and Minerva Rising. Sailer has published three books of poems (The Distance Beyond Sight, The God of Roundabouts, Ship of Light) and two chapbooks (COAL and Bulletins from a War Zone).

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

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

  1. Betsy Mars – It Happened by the Sea
  2. Donna Hilbert – Thursday, Bill, the Bay
  3. Julie Weiss – Dream in Which I Stop to Say Goodbye
  4. J. C. Todd – The Road Regret Makes
  5. Andrea Maxine – I am my father’s daughter
  6. Nathaniel Gutman – Normal
  7. Linda Laderman – Final Score
  8. Bunkong Tuon – Two Poems
  9. Ann de Forest – Passion
  10. Brett Warren – Two Poems

Three Poems by Bonnie Naradzay

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Bede’s Sparrow

Had I not met the souls who gather at Miriam’s Kitchen
each morning for a meal, I could not have shared poems
that sway like sensate trees, that are not just standing there
stripped of leaves, nor could I have heard Carl, who sleeps
near the M Street Bridge, say he likes how the shadows
of birds’ wings pass over his heart. I would not have seen
the robin lying dead on the sidewalk. Did it fall from the sky,
unlike the geese that glide overhead trailing their legs in flight,
or the starlings appearing to wait in the wings only to vanish
from sight? But since then I have lifted my eyes to the rafters
and seen Bede’s sparrow fly through the church basement
where we linger before disappearing into the darkening light.

*

Poetry Salon in the Homeless Day Shelter

Today we read “Gin River,” a poem by Tyree Daye.
In it, Bill Broonzy is singing “When I Been Drinking,”
and people dance in the river, down in rural Carolina.

We end with James Wright’s persona poem, “Saint Judas.”
Now it’s time to write, and Ibrahim, in the voice of Moses,
dares the Pharaoh to make the sun go from west to east.

Chuck wears the chef’s jacket he found in a bag of donations.
On the pocket, stitched in blue cursive: “Ramon.”
It’s his nom de plume. Oh, Ramon – where are you now?

*

Gilgamesh at the Retirement Center

We conclude the annual poetry reading ritual for the residents,
and I delight in the bacon-wrapped scallops impaled on toothpicks.
Ecstatic to find two kinds of wine, I am feeling satisfied.

At some point during dinner, we talk about what we’re reading.
When I say I’m enjoying the epic of Gilgamesh, Celia asks me
what that ancient tale is all about. I launch into the highlights,

including the grand Sumerian city of Uruk, its meaningful bricks,
the faithful friend Enkido, his tragic death, the subsequent quest
for immortality, how Gilgamesh fails his test by falling asleep

instead of staying awake for a week and loses out on eternal life
(sleeping again) when a snake eats the fabled plant and sheds its skin.
Despite all this, Celia thinks I mean the Hindu elephant god, Ganesh.

For a moment I forget who I am, and where. Then I think of Odysseus,
asleep in the boat to Ithaka; Athena disguised the island with mist.
So I change the subject to Odysseus, that time he rises out of the sea

from his long swim, still clutching the rock Calypso gave him,
and he sees in the rock a mist parting to show the years ahead. His bed.
But the wine is wearing off. I’ll go, now, to sleep like Gilgamesh.

*

Bonnie Naradzay leads weekly poetry “salons” at day shelters for homeless people and at a retirement center, all in Washington DC. Twice nominated for a Pushcart prize, her poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Split This Rock, Dappled Things, and other sites. In 2010 she won the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize – a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary. While there, Bonnie enjoyed having tea with Mary, hiking in the Dolomites, and reading early versions of the Pisan Cantos. Her manuscript , “Invited to the Feast,” will be published by Slant Books.

The Candle in the Mirror by Mary Simmons

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The Candle in the Mirror

Every good ghost story begins with a girl
in the dark. I count to ten,
but I do not close my eyes,
because I do not intend to find you.
The bath is still running.
The tile is littered with wet lilac petals.

The mirror swims in candles, a thousand
fires worth a dollar twenty-five, dying
faster than I am. I watch myself
dying each day, each of us dying each day.
The wax sputters. The bath is still running.
I am solving your riddles

on the back of my eyelids.
Parliaments of owls
melt down the fogged window.
I could reach into each beak,
draw out each handful of fire,
burn the feathers and call this creation.

Listen: this is the naming of corvids.
This is the morning of bones.
And I say, listen: there is nothing
but faces that do not belong to us.
The bath fills with glass, dripping
between my fingers, faucet leak

lullaby from the other room.
What is a woman if not a ghost?
What is a ghost if not a processional
of candles? We chant their names
in the dark. The bath overflows.
Wallpaper drinks, as though this is love.

*

Mary Simmons is a queer writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a poetry MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she is the managing editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from tiny wren lit, Moon City Review, Yalobusha Review, Whale Road Review, and others.

Dirt to Dirt by Brian Beatty

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Dirt to Dirt

Two times
I’ve lived
across the
road from
cemeteries.

More than those
sad families
coming and
going to bury
and remember,

I’m curious
about the grave
diggers with
their foul
language and

heavy equipment.
Every death
must be just
another boss
to them.

*

Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections: Magpies and Crows; Borrowed Trouble; Dust and Stars: Miniatures; Brazil, Indiana: A Folk Poem; and Coyotes I Couldn’t See. Beatty’s poems and stories have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Conduit, Cowboy Jamboree, CutBank, Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gulf Coast, Hobart, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Moth, The Quarterly, Rattle, RHINO, Seventeen, The Southern Review and Sycamore Review. In 2021 Beatty released Hobo Radio, a spoken-word album featuring banjo and guitar improvisations by Charlie Parr.

Two Poems by Jill Michelle

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Driven
after Papa Ibra Tall’s “Harlem”

We do this because
we cannot stop

can’t stop wanting both worlds
the one that pays

for food and rent
that fancy car

and the one that’s spent
conjuring beauty—

a chord structure instead
of a corporate one

that eyes-closed moment
of clock-stopped harmony

amid adult life’s trumpet-call
a reveille of worries.

Yes, for this stretch of song
we’ll forget

the parents, a pebble’s throw
from heaven

the kids, our rippling
worries over them.

For now, we play
play music

feel alive
live and feel

children ourselves
once again.

* 

Not Another One

You don’t want to read
another sexual

assault poem
and I never wanted

to be qualified
to write one

but here
we are.

*

Jill Michelle’s latest poems appear/are forthcoming in Brink, New Ohio Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Valley Voices. Her poem, “On Our Way Home,” won the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more of her work at byjillmichelle.com.

Sorting the Clothes by Gloria Heffernan

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Sorting the Clothes

When the time came
to clean out your apartment,
I was efficient.
Because efficiency was what was called for.
Because efficiency was what I could handle.

I filled the giant trash bags by category.
Some would be hand-me-downs –
Some donations –
Some, just the things you never got around to throwing out.

Simple enough, until I held each item
and remembered the time you wore this dress to the theater,
or when you bought that tee-shirt on vacation in Quebec
or when you purchased the too-big sweater on clearance because
For $19.99, there’s no such thing as too much cashmere!

Clothes that still carried your DNA,
Or the nearly forgotten scent of a perfume you used to wear,
Or the faint ghost of a stain left behind after a wonderful meal.

I bundled up all the cozy sweaters and flannel nightgowns
and the fluffy bathrobe you wore all winter,
and labelled them for the women’s shelter
just the way you told me to when you said,
Us girls have got to stick together.

And when the bags were just too heavy to lift,
I turned off the light and prepared to leave.
But first, I slipped the cashmere sweater
on top of the bag marked Shelter.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). Her forthcoming chapbook, Animal Grace, was selected for the Keystone Chapbook Series prize. Her work appears in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2).

IN CONVERSATION WITH MOURNING by Margo Berdeshevsky

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IN CONVERSATION WITH MOURNING

Whisper histories our
Grandmothers passed

like sugar cubes bitter and
sweet — tongue after

tongue so we would chant
louder — later —

Once upon wheat fields, color
of sun, once upon skies, color

of an infant’s breath —

Whispers of Babi Yar, pit
of slaughters kin to this year’s

landfill, kin to where my father
was spit from his mother’s depths —

where he said he was
Russian, to not have his own

tongue slit — dirt today where
Russia’s flames bury babies

who will never grow old —
Whispers of Odessa, once

for her song and colors, still now
for broken voices under moonrise

In a fist I’ve carried since
when, or then —

a grain of a cry the color
of iron — whispers

of thorns for gardens
that belong to none

but their interred,
and even so, their winter births—

*On Sept 29, 2023, Volodymir Zelensky visited the site of Babi Yar, on Ukranian soil—it was the 82nd anniversary of the massacre.

*

Margo Berdeshevsky, NYC born, writes in Paris. Her forthcoming book is: It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat from Salmon-Poetry. Just published: Kneel Said the Night (a hybrid book in half-notes) from Sundress Publications. Author of Before The Drought /Glass-Lyre-Press/finalist for National-Poetry-Series, Between Soul & Stone and But a Passage in Wilderness / Sheep-Meadow-Press, and Beautiful Soon Enough /FC2 /recipient of 1st Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award. Other honors: Grand prize for Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and the Robert H. Winner Award from Poetry Society of America. Widely published in international journals, kindly see her website: http://margoberdeshevsky.com

I Enter Fifty Cemeteries Looking for My Son by Dom Fonce

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I Enter Fifty Cemeteries Looking for My Son

I bring your daughter, too young to grieve, to your grave. We paint your
stone with I Love You words, I Miss You words, eat egg salad
sandwiches in the grass, on top of strangers—I hear their voices
bellowing below. The sun dances on our faces. Beetles crawl on our
legs. We make a normal day into a great day.

We sleep. In a dream, I enter fifty cemeteries alone. My arms spread,
the sky charcoal dust, and I am running between each plot—each soul
tells me their histories: Vietnam War veteran, trophy wife, child with
tuberculosis, firefighter, death row inmate. It goes on until the forest in
the back touches my nose. In another dream, you never died, but I can’t
picture it well.

In wish alone, I am alone by your side. You say, I forgive you. I say, I
must be a horrible mother. You say, No. This is how you lived. This is
how I choose to remember you. I have the pedal to your Indian
motorcycle in my pocket. I place it where your feet must be.

*

Dom Fonce is the author of the two chapbooks Here, We Bury the Hearts and Dancing in the Cobwebs. He holds an MFA from the NEOMFA. His poetry has been published in trampset, Gordon Square Review, Rappahannock Review, Delmarva Review, Jenny Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in Youngstown, Ohio. Find him at domfoncepoetry.com.

Two Poems by Bunkong Tuon

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My Daughter is Ecstatic for Halloween

She squeals in sweet delight, scrunching her face
         as she climbs the steps of a neighbor’s home,
rings their doorbell, decked in her monarch butterfly
         costume, ready to say “trick or treat” when the door
opens. For me, I was always tricked on Halloween night,
         eggs flying in my direction, one hit my shoulder
the other exploded near my feet, then came the chuckles
         from the dark corner. This was the way for me, dear
daughter, but I stood my ground, not once did I give in
         to the desire to belong that erases my brownness.
I stood firmly on the ground as those boys emerged from
         their darkness, bikes clanked on cement, fists swinging
at my face then at my skinny chest. When I fell they kicked
         my back and my behind. Spit landed before those boys
returned to their darkness. I didn’t say a word, not once
         thinking of crying or begging for mercy. I lay down on that
cold hard dirt and stared at their shadowy figures with
         an imploding silence that could detonate an atomic bomb.

*

Meditation on the State of the World Before My Fiftieth Birthday

Misinformation is the virus of the century.
Everybody has a platform and everyone is a star.

Wisdom finds herself embarrassed,
Drinks poison, and waits for the big sleep.

And Patience threw herself out
The twenty-third floor a decade ago.

The ego is a seven-headed dragon that hides
Behind an avatar. It feeds on itself until it implodes.

If we stop, we can hear earth’s warnings.
Truth drowns in the deluge of lies.

I can’t think without the thought
Of others thinking about my thoughts.

Everyone is fake news except us.
We collect likes, retweets, and views.

We now have a mask for every occasion.
We are a people without faces.

We are a people who forgot how to listen.
We are a people who forgot how to sing.

*

Bunkong Tuon is Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of several poetry collections. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming from World Literature Today, New York Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Massachusetts Review, The American Journal of Poetry, among others. He is poetry editor of Cultural Daily. His debut novel, Koan Khmer, is forthcoming from Curbstone Press. To read more about his life and writing, please visit: https://www.bunkongtuon.com/

Radical Therapy by Kenny Likis

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Radical Therapy

          for Tom

Last month my therapist retired.
I had visited him every two or three weeks

for eleven years. I counted on him
like gravity or eventual sleep.

Therapy can feel like bought friendship.
I mean where else can you get someone

to listen to all your crap, let you rattle on
about yourself. My therapist managed

to be both friend and guide.
He heard every secret, every slight,

every agony, nursed me through them,
invited me back. Towards the end, when

for the first time in thirty-five years
I started scribbling poems, he would read

my newest effort aloud and chat about it. I called it
radical therapy. He said he was just doing his job.

*

Long ago Kenny Likis wrote his master’s thesis on Robert Creeley. Early in the pandemic, he got the urge to write poems and has been hard at it since. His work has appeared in Caustic Frolic, Riddled with Arrows, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Paterson Literary Review. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Peter Rabbit in Rehab by Al Ortolani

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Peter Rabbit in Rehab

October ends
with a rabbit foot on
a chain, a keychain
of twirling leaves.
Nothing moves
except the spinning
on Farmer McGregor’s
finger. Peter Rabbit

is weekly in rehab
with a prosthesis, dogs
in the waiting room
leafing garden magazines,
watching the door
for his release. Peter
is slower today
than he was yesterday.
He supposes he’ll be slower
tomorrow. Without
his lucky foot, Peter
is just an old man
with yellow tennis balls
on his walker. No leaping.
No sudden turns
under the hedge. He needs

Beatrix Potter to turn
the page, to illustrate
an escape past
the vending machines
into the parking lot,
through the ornamental shrubs,
the spitting sprinklers, then home
past McGregor’s carrots.
Yes. It was always the carrots.

*

Al Ortolani’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, New York Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. His most recent poetry collection is The Taco Boat, published by New York Quarterly Books in 2022. His first novel Bull in the Ring will soon be released by Meadowlark Books in Emporia, Kansas. He currently lives in the Kansas City area.

Two Poems by Philip Jason

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The Deep Ka-Ching of the Heart

in the two-to-the-eighty-first-powerth version
of the bible, a genie
grants us the wish we have for
so long wanted; we have an infinite
number of wishes. We open
our mouths, ready to fill our lives with joy.
A parade of bees emerges,
each bee dragging behind itself
a small banner
bearing the name of a sneaker brand.

awash in the light of a billion television suns,
one is never truly naked.
Around us at all times, the ghosts
of fallen acreage,
each of which is a thousandth
of a Fahrenheit degree
haunting the atmosphere.
But everything’s ok. The Alchem X Corporation,
makers of Perfectachil and Gamurmurex,
are working on a new drug
that makes us happy
when seeing the heart for the first time in an X-ray
makes us sad.

We wish there was a drug
that would make other people happy for us.
The genie appears and gives us a paper bag
filled with coupons. Each of them
entitles us to remember
a single event from our lives.
The one we use
takes us back to the crib.
Above us, our mother sways gently, singing
what is either a bee song or a soft
commercial jingle. The dead trees
gather at her shoulders. we are confused
by the top of you, they whisper. we’ve never
seen its kind. is your head
a box filled with someone else’s branches
or a garden
growing wonder out of light?

*

Platonic Ambivalence, Offered Warmly

the second heart yearns for a home
built upon the principles of the second heart:
that no wild thing should be too wild
to comprehend, that the ocean waves
may only signify a shifting tranquility,
that there must always be occasion
for lost things to come groveling back, etc…
but two points: 1. the second heart
is wrong. I cannot pour
a love-like sludge
into the abandoned exoskeletons
of my childhood
and call the resulting form a life.
And 2. sometimes, a good day
is being brave enough on a bad day
to make room for other people in the world.

On another note,
in spaces where humans once read books,
there is now only the pleasure
of watching people lie to themselves
on television. Or maybe lie
is the wrong word. What is the word
for when people who have no truth
say anything?

*

Philip Jason’s stories can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and J Journal; his poetry in Spillway, Lake Effect, Hawaii Pacific Review, Palette, and Indianapolis Review. He is the author of the novel Window Eyes (Unsolicited Press, 2023). His first collection of poetry, I Don’t Understand Why It’s Crazy to Hear the Beautiful Songs of Nonexistent Birds, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. For more, please visit philipjason.com.

Blocked by Eric Heller

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Blocked

It’s a kind of laryngitis
a microscopic invader in the night
that creeped in while you were dreaming
to strangle the words
that once sang within you
like friends who moved away
when you were ten
and now you lie in the dark
wondering what’s become of them
how they’d toss rocks at your window
in the crickety twilight
to come out and play.

*

Eric Heller has been a teacher, technical writer, and marketing director. Eric’s poems have appeared in US1 Worksheets, Caduceus, Miller’s Pond Poetry, and YourDailyPoem.com, among others. His work has received two Pushcart nominations in the past. Eric lives in New Jersey with his two daughters, a strikingly handsome hound named Finn, and can be found online at https://www.eric-heller.net.

How Do You Be a Boy? by Richelle Lee Slota

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How Do You Be a Boy?

I call my older brother Bozo.
He calls me Faggot. At school

I’m hoping to do better for nicknames
like Slaughter, short for Slaughterhouse,

but Tommy Krause decides on Hot Lips,
which I hate, and which confuses me.

Maybe Tommy is only being accurate,
Maybe I am a girl, because,

boy do I have a kisser.
My mother’s friends keep saying,

“Will you look at the mouth on that kid?”
“What a waste on a boy. Heck,

don’t even need lipstick.
I’d kill for those eyelashes.”

“You can have them,” I say.
I suck in my lower lip.

I take scissors to my eyelashes.
How do you be a boy?

*

On July 17, 1955, Richelle Lee Slota (formerly known as Richard) was one of 200-3rd Graders selected to open Disneyland by running across the drawbridge into Fantasyland. She’s been running into Fantasyland ever since. She has published much poetry, a novel, Stray Son, and, with co-author, Yaw Boateng, the non-fiction, Captive Market: Commercial Kidnapping Stories From Nigeria. She earned BA’s in Psychology and Theatre Arts and a MA in Creative Writing. She serves as a Meter Mentor with Poetry Witch Community, online. She lives in San Francisco.

Normal by Nathaniel Gutman

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Normal

Hungry, Dad, she asked when she picked me up at the airport.
They spoiled me with an upgrade on Lufthansa,
polite, reserved flight attendants,
a chef with a Toque Blanche, inspecting a tiny guinea fowl breast,
carefully turning it skin-side down.
Hungry, I said.

She took me for pizza at a beachfront Tel Aviv restaurant.
Embraced by steamy air mixed with Mediterranean breeze,
I was instantly home.

Growing up here everything was crazy,
good-crazy but crazy,
and I always dreamt it would one day be normal.
I looked around, noisy, laughing, young people,
cool hair, designer t-shirts, loud music.
Is it finally a bit normal? I asked.

The war broke out the next morning,
a siren sent us to her saferoom.
We’re good here, she said,
even if there’s a chemical weapon attack,
except if it’s a direct hit.
Then, on TV, we saw the first images,
kids in the desert music festival
slaughtered by Hamas terrorists.

For a moment it looked almost normal, I said.
Looked, she responded.

*

Nathaniel Gutman is a filmmaker who has directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Witness in the Warzone (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen). His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Tiferet Journal, Pangyrus, LitMag, Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry.

The Dream by Judy Kronenfeld

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Dream

For eons, we cannot talk, my brother, my sister.
I am one of them to you; you are one of them to me.
And we each know—knives held between our teeth—
how murderous the other is, or wants to be.
Our stories calcify in isolation, yours a holy shrine
visited only by your people, mine a holy shrine,
visited only by mine.

But then, as ages pass like clouds
in time-lapse video, something you say,
my sister, my brother, pierces my armor.
A small, surprising chink has already appeared
in yours, like the sun startling at dawn
on the Summer Solstice, behind the Heel Stone
at Stonehenge.

For many generations more, we live
with the inconvenience of incomplete
defenses. And now comes the point when
the dream wants desperately to pull
the rabbit of hope out of the black
hat of horror. But the dreamers
say to the dream There is no magic. Or, How arrogant!
You cannot possibly know my lived experience.

Still, the dream keeps beginning, dreaming itself,
fantasizing. One night, when I am dreaming,
one of my people names her first-born son
with two names, one in my language,
one in yours. One night, when you are dreaming,
one of your people names his first-born daughter
with two names, one in his language, one in mine.
Let us imagine Ezra Bassam, let us imagine Hanan Ahava—
each child born with an imaginary sibling,
a brother, or sister bound to him or her, with whom
each freely walks on the land they love,
practicing, practicing…

*

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 memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books in 2024/2025. 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. Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside.

That’s Right by Gus Peterson

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That’s Right

my father-in-law says, nodding.
We’re speculating again
about what’s wrong,
why rivers of lava are coursing
under the crust of your skin.
It’s autoimmune, the body’s friendly
fire, or not. A tick borne illness
until it isn’t. Still, we nod,
we who have never agreed on
what direction a country should take,
the state of our state. Only you.
That you deserve this world,
even this worst version of it,
the kind that agrees to disagree
until there is nothing left
but the ash in our mouths,
the blood that binds one tree
to another, what saps from
each name carved into
the bark of us.

*

Gus Peterson lives in Maine, where he serves on the board of the Maine Poets Society. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming with Bracken, Rust + Moth, Pirene’s Fountain, Panoply, and the Deep Water series edited by Megan Grumbling.

Autumn by Laura Ann Reed

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Autumn

Beyond a window, a stone’s certain surfaces
are dark with shadow, and each of the three
white blossoms on a rhododendron stem
opens to the wind in a different direction.
From between gray clouds light shines
on a crow’s wing as I turn and turn
in October’s yellow weather.

*

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

Hungry for Nostalgia by Beth Dulin

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Hungry for Nostalgia

I saw it in a book about the seventies.
A picture of a man taking a picture.
He was holding a Kodak Instamatic

pointed at three children, all raising
ball gloves up in the air above their heads.
The click-blink of the flashbulb, leaving

you starry-eyed. Just pieces of the past.
Always the summers of childhood.
Long sunny days tumbling one into the next.

The low hum of the window fan at night.
Lightning bugs in the darkening fields.
A 1971 Ford pickup rolling up the dirt

lane in a cloud of diesel fumes and dust.
Pale lace curtains billowing outward in
the frenzied prelude to a thunderstorm.

*

Beth Dulin’s writing has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Atlanta Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, Little Patuxent Review, New York Quarterly, and Wigleaf, among others. In March 2021, she was featured as Yes Poetry’s Poet of the Month. She is the winner of Eastern Shore Writers Association’s 2023 Crossroads Poetry & Microfiction Contest. She is the author and co-creator of Truce, a limited edition artists’ book, in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. She lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Visit her online: https://www.bethdulin.com/

Passion by Ann de Forest

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Passion

After Simone Martini, The Carrying of the Cross, 1333

Brazen as those Technicolor poppies that lulled
The animate to sleep to keep the intrepid girl
From reaching the distant, keening city,
Mary Magdalene tumbles down from compact
Jerusalem pressed to near flatness by the crowd
She claims her space, livid scarlet spread
Above the fray of men who yank and elbow
Spears upright, intent on execution. Ruby-shod
Children tap her heated anguish forward
While beloved object of her frenzy, muted
Barely turns. Red dress blares. Her mouth smeared
Alarm of teeth and lips, flaming rivulets of hair
Unbound, exposed, a scandal. Voice sears. Who hears?
Even other women look askance when another woman wails.

*

Ann de Forest’s short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Quarter After Eight, Gyroscope Review, Coal Hill Review, Unbroken, Noctua Review, Cleaver Magazine, The Journal, Hotel Amerika, and PIF, and in Hidden City Philadelphia, where she is a contributing writer. Her most recent work is an anthology of essays WAYS OF WALKING (New Door Books, 2022), a project inspired by having twice walked the entire perimeter of Philadelphia, the city she’s called home for three decades.

Night Lessons by Kip Knott

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Night Lessons

1. Separation Agreement

Pallid and swollen,
the moon lifts itself
out of our fallow field
where we stand alone
together one last time.

2. Our First Meteor Shower

You made a point of telling me
that shooting stars were not
whole stars but shards
of light discarded by the night.

3. Astrology vs. Astronomy

We constructed a life together
the way ancient astronomers
constructed constellations out of myths
and legends and imaginary lines
connecting one emptiness to another.

4. Night Lessons

In the sky tonight, long dead stars
teach us Heaven begins with loss.

5. Nocturnal

The darkness cannot cast
a shadow without moonlight,
while the night only needs
the feathers of an owl.

6. Winter Farewell

When we finally say goodbye,
the moon hangs spider-like
for a moment in the silver
threads of our breath.

7. Waking to a Morning Moon

The night has come undone.
I find its lost, bright button
rolling across the dawn sky.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His most recent full-length collection of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is available from Kelsay Books. A new poetry chapbook, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.

Vegas Fireside Lounge by Oak Morse

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Vegas Fireside Lounge

Over fried calamari, your dark ambered Modelo, my rosé,
we cackle like schoolboys in a joaning match,
reckless down memory lane. Like when you wanted to sling
a thousand slurs at your Home Depot Manager
for reprimanding you for your life-length conversations
with customers and moving no faster than a snail. You say,
that wasn’t a real job; I slip you the side-eye because
I still work retail and you are the corporate guy,
even back when The Recession stung like a bunch
of bees ruining a picnic on a pretty afternoon.

You say white collar-money is sweeter than Janet Jackson’s
nipple ring at Half-Time. Classic shit-talking we did, we do,
but now you a bit more than me. You used to buy exotic women
off those expensive websites; you called them hot treats
after a long week. I called them call-girls. You still do that?
Nah, quit years ago, you say. Good, I mumble.

You vacation here, away from your home in San Diego,
convinced me to fly up from Atlanta where you swear
I am the future modern male Badu with my poetry
if I market myself like a maniac—will rally women like birds
to breadcrumbs. We chuckle, me faintly. Flag another round.

Neon lights illuminate from the ceiling.
A helpful kind of homie once, perhaps because you were older,
like your friend who, supposedly, was a mechanical magician,
who gabbed like a pack of preachers in fellowship, and fixed
the wrong thing in my car, starter motor instead of alternator.

All in your favorite city, Lithonia, the place where you said
it took you to find a lesbian to cut your hair the right way.
No one comes close on The West Coast where, you say
the breeze feels like silk on the skin—the reason you relocated
without a job, relied on your new sonic-silver Jeep Wrangler,
Ubering all types, smelling like a fertilizer factory,
decayed fish, but you said it had to do until you get back on your feet.

Seems as though you were always trying to get back
on your feet. You say, Tonight’s calling for cigars,
Padron 7000 Natural, lit with your good old torch lighter.
I say let’s close out this Sunday night in Vegas with it.

Then I walk off to the men’s room.
Linger over the urinal, thinking how these old jokes
are like the rosé I’m drinking, like this bond we seem to have.
They don’t age well, in the lounge blaring Bruno Mars,
near the cascade fountain. There you are, with your
debit card and phone out, buying time with Victoria
on a bright red site. And there I stand, looking at you,
the last line of an unfulfilling book I’m closing.

*

Oak Morse lives in Houston, Texas, where he teaches creative writing and theatre and leads a youth poetry troop, the Phoenix Fire-Spitters. He was the winner of the 2017 Magpie Award for Poetry in Pulp Literature, a Finalist for the 2023 Honeybee Poetry Award and a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. A Warren Wilson MFA graduate, Oak has received Pushcart Prize nominations, fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Twelve Literary Arts, Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay as well as a Stars in the Classroom honor from the Houston Texans. His work appears in Black Warrior Review, Obsidian, Tupelo, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Nimrod, Terrain.org, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, among others. oakmorse.com

The Road Regret Makes by J. C. Todd

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

The Road Regret Makes

Something was asked. I turned away then
from what turns up now—his face as it was,
not the face reshaped by twelve years

of regret. A day’s work undercut.
I head out to the stream with a black dog
who lives down the road. He sits when I sit,

ribs heaving into mine. Then off he goes,
uphill, following currents of odor.
I go too, surging against the stream’s flow,

mucky clay and rockfall, roots foot-twisters.
Leg muscles thickening, arms swinging
and hauling my body where the trail

has crumbled to nothing. Dog and I panting,
looking down into white rush, a hillside
of cascades, looking ahead to where

the stream shallows, pools, gathers into
its very first plunge. We plunge ahead, up
an abandoned logging road. I’m sweating,

canvas shirt-back wet, breathing hard. Eyes
itchy, flies swarming and my hair switching,
switching, dog hacking from spore he pawed at,

my cheek sticky with web—where’s the spider?
Here’s the razor spine of the ridge, forest
not thinning but blue sky, cloud spray

and I remember what she wrote
in her day-book, Miss Sarah Burton,
that genteel, ramrod spinster,

I would give all I had for a good road.

*

J. C. Todd is author of Beyond Repair (2021) and The Damages of Morning (2018). Honors include the Rita Dove Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Poems have appeared in Full Bleed, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals. www.jc-todd.com

Two Poems by Brett Warren

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Impetus
Midtown Manhattan

A woman runs up as we exit the coffee shop.
She’s wearing a black sleeveless dress
and a cross-body briefcase, and could pass
for an office worker if not for her bare feet.
She is crying. She wants to know if we know
where Georgia the state office of Georgia is.
When we say no, she zigzags to a security guard
coming onto his shift, asks him where is Georgia
the state office of Georgia. She doesn’t wait
for an answer, but careens down the wide
and mostly empty sidewalk. The security guard
watches her go, as if considering whether
to call someone, but she turns the corner
onto 5th Avenue, where a man who would later
be president said he could shoot someone
in the street and his followers wouldn’t care.
We turn the same corner, see the woman
lurch past a man pushing a broom.
He barely looks up, just keeps sweeping.
She pings from person to person, pleading
for an answer to her question. The last
we see of her, she’s darting across the street,
heading west, and the day carries on
the way the country does, one thing
sweeping the next thing away.

*

Laundry After Loss

The worst thing is the gaping red hole no one can see,
not even me. I keep looking down, expecting a crater

the size of a dinner plate in the center of my chest.
The worst thing is that my heart keeps pumping

blood anyway. I’ve willed it to stop, or at least
slow down, but it won’t. Blood soaks my shirt,

makes the fabric stick so there can be no healing.
I have to keep changing my clothes. All I ever do

is laundry anymore. When the wash cycle’s done,
I don’t look. I just shove everything in the dryer,

set it to run for the maximum time. The worst thing
is when the dryer bell dings. Then I know

I have to fold the clothes. Then I have to see
how every shirt comes out perfectly clean.

*

Brett Warren is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). She is a long-time editor whose poetry has appeared in Canary, The Comstock Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Harbor Review, Hole in the Head Review, and many other publications. She lives in Massachusetts, in a house is surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway. brettwarrenpoetry.com

Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

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Niju Hibakusha
Tsutomu Yamaguchi makes shadow puppets on the wall for his first daughter.
Hare, butterfly, dog. Airplane.
Sole vestige of the bicycle: the bicycle’s negative image
branded on the pavement. The rider, too, tattooed there:
Twin dharma wheels, spokes pickled in ink.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived Hiroshima in a silk skin sleeve and rode a bicycle
to report for work three days later
in Nagasaki.
In a wooden house, a catshaped blind spot floated across a paper wall
in the nanosecond before the shockwave spotlit her leap.
Heavy water shivered a teakettle.
Locomotive-steam incense appeased a valley.
Nagasaki whistled, twisting oblivious wisteria into her hair.
Black rain thick as hot tar pocked constellations onto Tsutomu Yamaguchi’s bandages,
inverted chart of stars that survived hydrogen fusion.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi inks a book of poems years after his hair grows back blacker
than the week he watched two earthborne stars crown,
blast crater follicles seeded each with the shadows of hairs that grew there once.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi feeds his second daughter with a spoon.
He makes airplane noises.
Outside, on the street: a bicycle’s thumb bell.
Tinnitus calling the kami to come.
Uranium, polonium, chrysanthemum.
In Hiroshima, after the plane passed overhead, he looked up
and, seeing a parachute open,
mistook in the nanosecond before the blast exposes his flesh like photographic film
Little Boy for an American paratrooper.
I hoped he would land without breaking his legs. But also that he would be promptly caught.
He vomited intestinal mucosa like inside-out snakeskin.
Burns, cataracts. If you count the leukemia, a triple survivor.
A malignant nucleus divides too wildly, setting off a chain reaction.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi vomits black tar once again, his stomach snakesloughing itself
in his granddaughter’s house
in a rhyme that hints at the cyclicity of time, the circular reasoning
of should we or shouldn’t we drop it.
Wheel of dharma. Centrifuge of dharma.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi at five years old learned to ride a bicycle.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi is teaching his granddaughter to ride a bicycle
in Nagasaki
in early August.
The dark urns of the clouds glow with rain. He looks up.
Thunder detonates, and a drop of rain targets the back of his hand.
And now a second drop. His mother
his grown daughter
his granddaughter calls to him, calls him indoors
to a concrete roof and walls of graph paper
inked, tattooed, branded with calculations of yield.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, fissioning into all his ages all at once,
shuts his eyes with their spokewheel irises.
Come in, grandfather.
He sees the black shadow of sight branded long ago on the insides of his eyelids.
Come in, son.
His eyelids never glow red anymore, not even when he faces the rising sun.
Come in from the black rain, father. Your memory has had decades to heal.
Wipe the black tar from the corner of your mouth.
Peel the snakeskin gauze from your burn.
*
Vibration
All things shiver, but some things shiver
more than others, shiver
with a tapped tuning fork’s
whole-body blur, like mountain ranges and desert
heat shimmers and psychedelic fires recognized
early on as sacred, our watering eyes
coated with a natural lacrimal
lens to let us see the shivering
in real time, that ringing in the ears
complained of in a doctor’s office
just the ossicles and eardrum catching some
cosmic engine-hum,
and that spotted knobby-knuckled hand
held out for inspection, stubbornly
wobbly, benign essential tremor,
or restless legs syndrome, the legs kicking
and twitching like a dreaming dog’s,
no cure for these things, sorry, it comes with age,
comes at the end, the skeleton
unstiffened, holding fast against the godgust
no longer, that leaflike
shaking honest for once about the approach
of death, no more faux-yogic
“stillness,” no, the teeth chatter in June,
knees knock, lips quiver
until the frequency speeds up,
the whole body blurs, and two elderly forked creatures
embrace, wife and husband desperate to stop
their cold bones, bodies pinched together
like breath-ruffled vocal cords
around a single word,
unless the shiver
catches her alone after midnight
on the threshold between bedroom and bathroom
where, standing on tiptoe, she floats
until her body’s plucked guitar string finishes its note.
*
Karma
She doesn’t have a dozen borzois
to thread the fog. No horse, no horn—
But her footfalls make the foxes go
as pale as hares, reborn.
She’s never flushed and shot a pheasant,
much less a weasel sinner.
No skinning knife, no kind of kit.
But she’s still got meat for dinner.
Of course, you’ll never see her coming.
But if you did, you’d find
a woman whistling to herself
with meadows on her mind—
a birder, maybe, thrilled by a finch,
by cobwebs jeweled with dew.
But don’t be fooled by her casual shoes.
She’s out here hunting you.
*
Amit Majmudar’s new books in 2023 include Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books) as well as Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books).

Khaki-Blue by Nathaniel Gutman

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Khaki-Blue

Where did I park?
I’m looking for my grey Subaru,
or is it green, don’t they call it khaki-blue?
In my dream I wander the streets but can’t find it.
I stop to ask a mother, standing with her daughter,
by her house,
I tell her about the wild pig in the back of the car,
yes, needed it for filming a scene in my movie.
The girl laughs and nods, makes total sense, right,
then, with the deep wrinkle forming on
her mother’s forehead, I wake up,
open my eyes, my love is lying by my side, sound asleep.
Sometimes we call each other “pig.” Fondly.

*

Nathaniel Gutman is a filmmaker who has directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Witness in the Warzone (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen). His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Tiferet Journal, Pangyrus, LitMag, Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry.

Cottagecore by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

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Cottagecore

There are wispy girls who love downpours
and spin coatless in the storm
stomping barefoot in pools of dirty water
in the jagged asphalt holes of the street.
I may wave to them all friendly-like
from a soft cushion beside a picture window,
wish them well in their endeavors in a noncommittal way,
but feel no need to join them now as they re-enact
some movie rated 86% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
I’m writing my own that no one will watch,
with cardigans and feather beds, candles and sconces,
beautiful panes between me and the rain.

*

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke lives in Florida. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah and Salamander. She is the winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Editor’s Choice Award for Fiction. Her zine about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, Fine, Considering, is available from Rinky Dink Press (2019). She serves as a reader for The Dodge and as a Meter Mentor in Annie Finch’s Poetry Witch Community. Her website is jenniferschomburgkanke.com.

Thursday, Bill, the Bay by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Thursday, Bill, the Bay

I hear “76 Trombones” coming up
behind me and know it’s Bill
with his little dog and a bag of scones
from a nearby bakery.
Bill turns his tinny transistor off,
and says, “I’m sorry,” showing me
his empty bag. “Late for my walk,” I say.
“Next Thursday,” Bill says, marching on.

I go back to watching two green herons
perched on neighboring boats,
facing one another, still as stone.

*

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

McCorkle’s Rock by Christine Yurick

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McCorkle’s Rock

You lead me through the field,
the dark green grass tall as my
shoulder, heads heavy with seeds.
We found an old trail that led to the creek,
up and over and down to a large rock
where you set down your camera. I
removed my clothes and waded into
the water. Behind me I heard click,
crank. Click, crank. I did not know
that there was a path on the other side
of the creek. I did not know that
somebody could walk along
and see me standing there. I did
not see anything.

*

Christine Yurick is the founding editor of Think Journal. Her poems have appeared in E-Verse, Angle, American Arts Quarterly, Tulane Review, and 823 on High, among other journals. Her chapbook At the End of the Day and other poems is available from Kelsay Books

It Happened by the Sea by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

It Happened by the Sea

I misread a line as the quills argue over someone’s sandwich crust
and envision disembodied pens jousting over some metaphorical food,
squawking while the hand goes about more important business,
like stroking the cat, watering, the long, quiet work of mending. The tips dip,
inked to the gills, drip their arbitrary ramblings on some thin thing
that once resembled bark. The gulls swoop for crabs emerging
as the waves recede along the shore, erasing footprints, writing,

castles made with pails of sand, bread crumb trails.

*

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

The Party by Robert Bernard Hass

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The Party

She makes her way down the one-lane road,
Away from the music, to be alone.
Against a line of wind-tossed trees
She makes her way. Down the one-lane road
A thin moon rises. She feels the breeze.
No one she knows knows she has gone
To make her way down the one-lane road,
Away from the music, to be alone.

At the party, her lover dances and sings.
He fills up the room with laughter and jokes,
Then gathers his boys to hammer down shots.
At the party, her lover dances and sings
With women who’d like to unbutton his heart.
He’s too drunk for love, so he lights up a smoke,
Sways to the music, and dances and sings.
His friends fill the room with laughter and jokes.

As she walks down the road, a whip-poor-will calls,
As if to portend her destination.
The pastured horses beside her run
As she walks down the road. A whip-poor-will calls
While she and the night companion as one.
No one she knows knows she has gone.
As she walks down the road, a whip-poor-will calls—
Anywhere from here is destination.

*

Robert Bernard Hass is the author of the poetry collection Counting Thunder (Wordtech, 2008) and the critical monograph, Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science (Virginia, 2002), which was selected by Choice as an “Outstanding Academic Title” in 2004. With Donald G. Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Henry Atmore, his is co-editor of the Letters of Robert Frost (Harvard UP). His poems and critical essays on modern poetry have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Sewanee Review, Agni, Kenyon Review, Literary Matters, American Journal of Poetry, Vox Populi, and Poetry Northwest. He is currently professor of English at Pennsylvania Western University, where he teaches courses in American literature, British literature, classical literature, and Shakespeare. Since 2019, he has served as the executive director of the Robert Frost Society.

twin 2 by Jeannie E. Roberts

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twin 2

— inspired by Scott Ferry’s poem “twin”

messy hair / disheveled appearance / i was the child
quick to enter the day in her big brother’s plaid shirt /
visibly / i was a tomboy / a girl who expressed
herself as herself / nothing more / nor less / i was
the anomaly who manifested the union of twoness /
the duality of spirit / i didn’t notice difference /
played with dolls and trucks / race cars / too / drew
flowers and insects / mermaids and worms / made
mud pies and went fishing with Dad / i recall
my budding femininity as an embarrassment /
wore tight t-shirts beneath my dresses to flatten
the bloom / i remember waiting for the school bus /
how the boys ridiculed my figure / i longed to fit in
everywhere / with everyone / never saw myself
as anything but myself / i was naïve to sexuality /
unaffected by attraction / i just wanted to express
myself as myself / to learn about the world / observe
its wondrous beauty / when you’re groomed to be
attractive you become something else / a decorated
double / a contrived form of self / i was credulous
to the cues / the fleshly signals of intent / regardless /
my current was consistent / never wavered /
remained straight / oblivious to a colleague /
a woman half my age / unmoved by her advances /
her ardent aims weren’t mine / when you’re
pushed to be pretty / nothing more / nor less /
you’re stigmatized / infantilized / objectified /
at best / messy hair / disheveled appearance /
i was the child quick to enter the day in her big
brother’s plaid shirt / perhaps / i wished to be him /
i’m the union of two spirits / where fem meets masculine

*

Jeannie E. Roberts has authored eight books, six poetry collections and two illustrated children’s books. Her most recent collection is titled The Ethereal Effect – A Collection of Villanelles (Kelsay Books, 2022). She serves as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs.

What’s in a Name? by Yvonne Zipter

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What’s in a Name?

It was his before it was mine,
and so I hated it, its initial initial

like an angry bee in one’s ear,
its hard consonants hard as kicks

with a boot. Once upon a time,
I wanted to discard it, to choose

a moniker unsullied by history.
But now that he’s gone, it’s mine.

And now that it’s mine,
I can hear the music in it,

like the chime of a typewriter bell,
recognize that it’s breezy as a zephyr,

assertive as a chili pepper. The Z, I see
now, is fearsome as a cobra, swaying

to the music of a pungi—charming despite
the hint of danger down its sinuous spine.

*

Yvonne Zipter is author of the poetry collections The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets, Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, The Patience of Metal (Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and Like Some Bookie God, the Russian historical novel Infraction, and the nonfiction books Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend and Ransacking the Closet. Her individual published poems are being sold in two repurposed toy-vending machines in Chicago, the proceeds of which support a local nonprofit organization.

Before by Jane Medved

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Before

Before my mother died, I avoided her. Oddly, the last thing she said to me was Thank You. Even then she wasn’t talking much. “Hot tea,” I had just told her caretaker. “Make hot tea with honey for her throat.” That was before the stomach tube. Before the cartons of Easy Drink, the suction catheters, the diapers and hospital bed, the smell of urine, the mattress we threw out. Before the leaks from every pipe in the apartment, the crews of plumbers, the stink of tar on the balcony, the swindler who left us to go on a pilgrimage, the burned door. It was after she left on the gas, but before the neighbors stopped visiting, when we no longer needed a paid companion, but before the private nurse, the boundary line between still trying and not pretending. It was the time of the couch, the lounger, the blanket and the wheelchair. The days of naps that blossomed into fog.

My brother calls. He’s discovered a box of old photos. A treasure trove! I tell him to throw them all out.

*

Jane Medved is the author of Deep Calls To Deep (winner of the Many Voices Project, New Rivers Press) and the chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh (Finishing Line Press) Recent essays and poems have appeared or are upcoming in The Laurel Review, Mason Street, Ruminate, The North American Review, and The Normal School. Her awards include winner of the 2021 RHINO translation prize and the 2021 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize – Honorable Mention. Her translations of Hebrew poetry can be seen in Cajibi, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Copper Nickel. She is the poetry editor of the Ilanot Review, and a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv.

Final Score by Linda Laderman

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Final Score

June’s heavy humidity held our breath in its hands.
We wondered if it was safe to sit through the heat,
but Cleveland was in town and the Tigers were on fire.

Street vendors kept cool with plastic fans.
You stayed in the car. I paced the parking lot.
C’mon we’ll miss the first pitch.

Your face paled when I ordered our usual—
two grilled kosher hot dogs. You shook your head
like I’d suggested a pig roast on Shabbat.

Instead you bought a beer and nursed it until we stood
to stretch—together ten years and that was the first time
I saw you drink beer in a ballpark.

The Tigers held their lead. You said nothing, not even
when we watched the parade of players’ wives climb
the stairs in stilettoes and miniskirts.

I pointed to the one in head-to-toe Gucci, hoping
you’d laugh and roll your eyes, then yell, like always,
for Charlie the singing Italian ice guy to come by.

You barely blinked when you caught a foul ball,
as if it flew from the sun into your open palm.
When you loosened your grip, it dribbled

down the steps until an usher grabbed it
and threw it back. Look, luck fell into your lap, twice.
For months, I’d lie awake and replay that day.

Why did I nudge you from the car? What else had I missed?
By the time the EMT’s reached us, your body was slack.
I ran behind the stretcher shouting questions.

I don’t remember what I did with our seasons tickets.
Maybe I gave the rest to a neighbor or shredded them.
I know the Tigers won, but I can’t recall the final score.

*

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

There’s No Cure for a Broken Heart by Michael Minassian

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There’s No Cure for a Broken Heart

Not even that tattoo:
crushed needles,
colored ink—
an empty bottle of wine
jagged edges stained red.

The honey bee
knows which flowers
are heavy with sweetness,
which ones carry poison.

The cartographer steals
the last map he ever made.
Too many holes
in the earth, he said,
and no way back.

Cool sheets,
hot tattoos,
the road leading
away from love,
the sting of being alone.

*

Michael Minassian is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing as well as a new chapbook, Jack Pays a Visit, are all available on Amazon. For more information:
https://michaelminassian.com

I am my father’s daughter by Andrea Maxine

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

I am my father’s daughter

My father was born on a hot, sweat-clings-to-your-shirt-kind of day.
He weighed 10 pounds and had a full head of hair.
My grandmother said he never cried.
He liked to work with his hands,
they were so rough they felt like leather.
He gave me my first cigarette when I was 15.
He told me not to smoke too much or my teeth would turn yellow.
When I was 17, he got laid off from work.
I was young, wanting the world in so many ways,
and dressed like I meant it.
We got into the middle of it one night.
Afterward, my cheek was bright red,
but my pride stung more than anything else.
He had never ever laid a hand on me before this
and never laid a hand since.
He knocked on my door the next day
and left breakfast on the floor, he was gone when I opened it.
I left home when I was 19 and never looked back.
Last week, he called and asked how I was doing,
if I remembered to get the plumbing done,
if the back door in my kitchen still stuck,
if the Chevy I drove was still in one piece,
if I was happy.
I told him I found one of Mom’s old recipes last week,
and that I’d bring it over during visiting hours next Tuesday or Thursday.
He tells me he can’t wait.

*

Andrea Maxine is a content writer based in Manila. Her poetry explores the themes of womanhood, grief, love, darkness, and introspection.

Four Poems by Joan Mazza

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Kinchy*

That guilty feeling when you hear that a typhoon
and flood has killed hundreds, left thousands
homeless, and you realize you’re more concerned
about your book stacks collecting throughout
the house, becoming obstacles to cleaning.
You know people are running for their lives,
caught in crossfire, malnourished and cold,
but your petty concerns remain in foreground,
your small donations toward aid no more
than Band-Aids over shotgun wounds. Your guilt
simmers below your surface calm, turns you
irritable and angry without a focus or plan, yet
without the force to propel you take action or effect
a shift away from your part in climate change
or the dearth of science education. So you sit
in this discomfort, frozen, focused on the trivial,
pondering how to proceed with your library’s
reorganization, where to place another bookcase.

*From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

*

Nementia*

The effort you put forth as you scramble
mentally to pinpoint the source of your anxiety,
the dark feeling vibrating at the periphery
of your awareness as you go about your
ordinary tasks, wondering if the noise
in the heating system is the first sign
of a major breakdown, or mice moving
inside since the temps are below freezing.
That quickened heartbeat and sudden sweat
was perhaps caused by a word on the radio,
an adjective generating a cascade of associations,
triggering an old anger or alarm. It spurs
your jaw and shoulder muscles to tighten,
as if a stray crow were nesting, collecting
twigs on your shoulder, whispering a recitation
of all the harsh words you said to innocent
others you will never find to make apologies.
You try to retrace the progression of thoughts,
backtracking through a morass of sticky connections,
like trying to remove bubblegum from a child’s hair
when only scissors will help, an effort that leaves you
disoriented, bumbling, in need of a long nap
and three Milano mint cookies.

*From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

*

Jouska*

When it’s too quiet for too long,
when my mind isn’t full of worries
about characters in the latest novel
I’m reading— Will these college
boys be arrested or redeemed?
How will they live with guilt?

When I’m overtired or can’t sleep
past midnight or I’m alert at 3 AM,
I go back forty years, articulate
precise words, reply by saying
NO, hold onto my NO, no matter
the pressure to surrender

to his will, his demands for money
I don’t owe, favors he shouldn’t
be asking. In these conversations
I’ve rewritten and replayed
a thousand times, I say,

I’m your patient. You’re out of line.
What you’re asking is immoral,
unethical, and against the law.

and I walk out, never to return.
I’m on the edge of my final say,
on the cliff of resolution, letting go,
opening my fist to drop this fixation.
I hear the splash, watch it sink deep,
never to be heard again.

*Jouska. Noun. a hypothetical conversation you compulsively
play out in your head.

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.
Pronounced “zhoos-ka”

*

Liberosis*

I’d like to start a day uninterested in checking the news
on three sites, indifferent to what I missed while sleeping,
not wondering what human or planetary disaster unfolded
while I traversed dreamland. How easy it once was to be
absorbed counting my books and pairs of earrings,
at most worried about car problems instead of empathizing
with refugees and the homeless living in boxes. I’d like
to play Frisbee on the beach, walk for miles without
a destination, retrace my steps to find my way home
without a phone or map. I wish to be lifted from the pain
of past blunders of choosing critical, dominating men
because they felt familiar. I could become one of those
who says, “I have no regrets. Everything that happened
made me who I am,” as if they’re proud of turning into
a snobby tyrant. Wouldn’t it be lovely to wake each day
with a focus on hikes in the woods, painting en plein air
on the back deck, reading Dickens. No radio or podcasts
about managing grief or listing climate change horrors
to come, nothing about classified documents or cover-ups.
Oh, to be completely unperturbed by news of shootings,
mass graves discovered, sexual assaults, the cyclone
approaching a coastal community with a ten-foot
storm surge. I could buy a deluxe set of Wilton cake
decorating tips like the one I gave away years ago,
still new in the box. I could make chocolate cupcakes
look like roses, dahlias, and blooming cacti.

Liberosis.* Noun. The desire to care less about things;
to figure out a way to relax your grip on life and hold it loosely
and playfully.

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.

*

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and taught workshops nationally on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam). Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Potomac Review The MacGuffin, Slant, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The Nation, and many other publications. She lives in rural central Virginia.

To a Black Locust on the Autumnal Equinox by Daye Phillippo

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

To a Black Locust on the Autumnal Equinox
Robinia pseudoacacia

This morning the weather is all you-can-trust-me, again,
      golden sunlight, blue-sky chill of autumn, and yet

the black locust tree lies broken, one bifurcated trunk
      hanging like an arm, useless after a sword fight, the wind

relentless yesterday, dawn to dusk, like someone saying, Turn
      your little clock hands back all you want; some things

write time. A tree, for instance, ring upon ring. Destroying it?
      No time at all. Black locust, tree I’ve loved, every season.

The twisting ridges of its bark, the deep fissures that reveal
      the inner layer, orange wood, sturdy fence posts settlers hewed.

In spring, white, acacia-like blossoms, draping sweet fragrance,
      scent like grape soda. Summer’s feathery blue-green leaves

that fold for “sleep” each night, breathes antediluvian. Nesting
      for songbirds, woodpeckers. In fall and winter, its crown is inked,

whimsical and Seussian. Sentinel where the drive turns west
      toward the house. This time of year I’ve loved that tree most,

its sharp calligraphy and negative space, branches that conceal
      nothing and yet, hold mystery. A cardinal’s in and out.

Once, a wood duck. Once, a flock of migrating bluebirds paused
      to rest their sapphire wings. Two nights ago, as if it knew

this tree’s fate, the haunting nocturne of a Great Horned Owl.

*

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