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Two Poems by Marianne Szlyk

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The First Time I Rode on Blue Hill Avenue

We were heading back to Boston. You drove.
Monday I’d give my notice to the nursing home.

I watched for streets I knew from people at work:
the residents on the floors I brought mail to,

people not quite the age I am now,
about twice the age I was then.

On long afternoons that smelled of Lysol, lotion,
and cigarettes, boiled greens and bitter, sugary coffee,

men spoke to me of smoking weed at the Hi-Hat,
dropped names and songs I didn’t know. Women spoke

of quiet mothers who wore white gloves in August to shop
for cloth they’d sew into school dresses without patterns,

their new sewing machines shaking house walls as thin as paper.
Men spoke of quarries whose ghosts you could almost glimpse.

Women spoke of elm trees that once shaded their streets. Of
lost children raised by strangers. Of lost years in Mattapan.

Note: Mattapan refers to Boston State Hospital, a facility for individuals with mental illness, which closed in 1987.

*

Last Night

I thought of the desert we drove through that fall.
We could have been happy in a cinderblock
house at sunset, the fat, black cat our child.

We were visiting New York, so I did not
mind the hubbub and crowd in these narrow rooms
an upright piano pushed up against the wall.

I didn’t mind drinking tap water, talking
to that short man, watching you flirt with that girl.
We were tourists. None of this was real. Not to me.

But I thought of the ice-green river, Douglas fir
we sat beneath, metal-blue sky without words
for once, another place we could not belong.

*

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, Poetry X Hunger, and One Art. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and I Dream of Empathy are available from Amazon and Bookshop. She and her husband, the writer Ethan Goffman, now live with their black cat Tyler.

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

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

  1. Jane Edna Mohler – Feast
  2. Valerie Bacharach – Betrayal
  3. Julie Weiss – Dream in Which I Stop to Say Goodbye
  4. Jessica Goodfellow – Milk
  5. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer – Three Poems
  6. Dan Butler – Four Poems
  7. Matthew Murrey – Kindergarten
  8. Tammy Greenwood – Evacuation
  9. Robbie Gamble – To Anna, On Her Retirement
  10. Zeina Azzam – Losing a Homeland

Five Poems by Jane McKinley

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Small Talk

In 7th grade we learned the art
of talking small, avoiding
what loomed largest in our minds—
the river one girl’s older brother
walked into, tired of holding
everything together while their father
fell apart. Their mother had died
the year before. In 5th grade
we found out that one girl’s dad
had killed himself when she was two.
Rumors grew. A rope or a revolver?
The Clue game didn’t have a barn.
Our teacher wisely nipped us
in the bud. We never spoke of it again.
In 7th grade, the same girl’s older sister
was discovered—floating in a lake,
half-clothed, face down. A mystery.
That year my boyfriend’s mother died
of cancer. We laughed because his Jell-O
flopped. He hadn’t read directions, didn’t stir.
Our first-chair clarinetist lost her mother
late that spring. A diabetic, her sores
had turned to gangrene. Wasn’t that
what soldiers died from in the Civil War?
One evening that fall I overheard
two 8th-grade girls. I couldn’t help it.
I was curled up on our porch swing
with a book when they walked by.
One said my name. I raised my head
to peek through flames of burning bush,
saw her pointing toward our house,
heard the other answer,
But she wouldn’t have been chosen
if her sister hadn’t died.

*

Perfect Paul

My sister has signed on to match.com
to find a companion for Saturday nights,
but what her profile fails to mention
is that she cannot see, that she has lost
her appetite for light and shadow, that,
in a word, she is completely blind.

She fires off e-mails to prospective dates,
the ones who’ve caught her knowing ear
as she listens to replies. Their letters, turned
to speech, sped up, sound all alike
in Perfect Paul, a voice on her computer,
the only choice that she can stand.

The beauty is that none of them
have guessed the truth—or even part of it.
(Her history alone could occupy
a dozen writers for a lifetime.) Somehow
they can’t imagine that a wit who’s so
articulate is typing by touch alone.

There’s no photo posted. She hasn’t
seen herself for over twenty years so why
should they be privy to a visual. Besides,
the playing field would be uneven then.
She keeps her lack of vision to herself
until she knows she’s piqued their interest.

Anyway, it’s not something you’d blurt out
in an e-mail. Timing is everything,
so she waits until she’s drawn them in,
seduced them with her voice, her laugh,
until she feels secure, their fingers wrapped
around their cells or cordless phones.

A writer of memoirs, she keeps a log
of their reactions, which range from silence
so awkward the conversation stops to You
must be joking! to a sort of itching curiosity,
but what is strange is that not one of them
has ever known a person who was blind.

* 

Marcescent

I never knew there was a word for dead leaves,
for the way they hang on beeches and oaks
long after the raking is done, flying in the face
of deciduous—meaning falling down. Some trees
let go in a timely fashion, showing their true
colors once the chlorophyll’s gone, sealing off
the exit wounds before they drop their leaves.
Not this year. The maples kept their cool
green till the 10th of November when a cold snap
zapped them overnight, drying their leaves to a crisp
brown. As if that weren’t bad enough, these dead
leaves are stuck. The trees had no warning, no mild
early frost to trigger the process of letting go.
Sudden death is like that. No time to prepare
for the loss so the dead keep rattling on.

*

Fear

In what would become her final years,
she had a gig at the medical school,

discussing the complications of diabetes
with students in their 2nd year. She knew

her history inside out—oversized binders
filled two carts. She’d triumphed over

blindness, two kidney transplants,
three heart attacks, the loss of a foot.

Near the end of one class, an earnest,
twenty-something student asked,

“What are your fears for the future?”
“My match.com date on Saturday night!”

After the students left, the professor said,
“You know, you really shouldn’t be here.”

“What? In this room? Or on this planet?”

*

Patient is Blind

My old flip phone
used to open to a photo
I took of my sister
on the eve of
her amputation.
It never failed
to make me smile.
She’d complained
that some nurses
and doctors would enter
her room without
announcing themselves
and begin to touch her—
checking on her already
filleted foot or taking
her vitals—without
telling her what
they were doing,
so someone posted
a laminated sign outside
her room that read:
Patient is Blind.
My sister, afraid
it might tip off
would-be thieves,
asked me to take it down
and hang it beside
the white board near her bed.
That way, it was visible
to those who needed
a reminder, but not to passersby.
She asked, Which nurse
is on the board for tonight?
When I told her the name,
she said, Quick! Tape that sign
to my forehead. Apparently,
this nurse was the worst
offender. Minutes later,
without saying a word
or cracking a smile,
in she walked to take
my sister’s blood pressure
and hand her some meds,
as if she were the one
who couldn’t see
the sign. It was all
we could do not to laugh.

*

Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble, a professional chamber music group based in Princeton, New Jersey. Her poetry collection, Vanitas, won the 2011 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize and was published by Texas Tech University Press. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Great River Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, On the Seawall, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In March she received a 2023 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She lives with her husband in Hopewell, New Jersey.

Postcard from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife by Alex Stolis

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Postcard from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife
August 10 – Hamilton, Ontario

Today I felt the rain before it came. It was
a premonition. A quickening. A flash of light
from nowhere. Once, when I was not more
than ten, I almost drowned. Could feel my
body sinking. I closed my eyes tight as if
that very act would cause me to float back
to the surface. I spread my arms winglike
hoping to become an angel. When I finally
came up for air what felt like minutes had
been mere seconds. I laughed, half choked
on a mouthful of water and within moments
splashed ashore. Now, I feel the drops fall
one by one by one. I know without looking
there is a bird in flight. Can feel the beat of
it’s heart. Can feel it bank towards the edge
of the sky. Now, the drops fall two by three
by four by five. You hum softly to yourself,
peel an orange, suck the pith from under
your nail; that sky a perfect shade of blue.

*

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has had poems published in numerous journals. The full length collection, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower was runner up for the Moon City Poetry Prize in 2017. Two full length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Eunoia Review, and Star 82 Review.

When earth gives way to bulb, by Darcy Pennoyer Smith

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When earth gives way to bulb,

snowdrops remind me
of brighter days to come.

Delicate white bells bob and
bask in cool air and the winter sun’s kiss,
making their debut.

In third grade, the chasm widened when
my father said no to Sara’s slumber party.

Instead, we watched Jeopardy.
“Mom would have let me go,” I mustered.

My cheek stung from the slap,
my arm burned from the grab,
my heart grew numb.

“I can’t let you go,” he stammered, and then
“Psychology for 200, Alex.”
So went my tween years.

Now, as his coffin lowers and settles next to hers,
the earth warms as it swallows his anger.

*

Darcy Pennoyer Smith is a poet and high school English teacher from New Canaan, CT. Although she is a lifelong writer, she is just venturing into the realm of submitting her poems for publication.

1am Going Home by Julia Bindler

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1am Going Home

The road pulled taut
ahead of me, stretched
like black elastic.

Snow rippled above it
like a black and white photo
of sunlight in a pool.

There went the dark nursery
where our ghosts walk, asking
the names of plants.

The philodendron’s corpse still lives
in my house, under a window,
no longer eating sunlight.

A glowing racoon
turned out to be
a toppled traffic post.

I considered the positives
of having nothing to lose.

*

Julia Bindler lives in Minneapolis with her dog, Lenny. She is currently participating in The Loft’s poetry apprenticeship program.

Fattoush by Valeria Vulpe

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Fattoush

The recipe called for
tomatoes, cucumbers,
radishes, onions, and
pomegranate seeds,
pomegranate seeds!
but not in a made-up
way like a slice of
orange on a cocktail
glass or a sprinkle of
himalayan salt from
way too high,
but like a
“good afternoon passengers”
as you buckle up kinda way,
or a brushing your teeth
in the morning kinda way,
and it made me so hungry,
this fruits on vegetables
bravery, this matter-of-fact
asking for something
that doesn’t belong
and mixing it in

*

Valeria Vulpe grew up in Moldova and started writing as a child in her native Romanian. After a 20 year break from writing as she was busy moving, ticking boxes and collecting credit cards, she joined the Writing Salon in San Francisco and began writing in English. Her poems have neither appeared nor disappeared.

Cute As by Karen Poppy

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Cute As

Oh! Boots! I’m—your Princess Anne—(as you call me) who only wants to be your button […]

— Letter from Anne Sexton to her husband, Alfred Sexton, Venice, Italy, September 27, 1963

I am as cute as volcanic flames,
Each leap symbolic—muscled
Flanks lather and foam, fire
Jumping fire, my darling.

Sweated out, head tossing.
Beaded button thirsty, feisty.
Swollen red by your words,
I love you more than I love

This shifting dream in flight,
Crackling and opening,
Lifting and welcoming—
Yes, and galloping, galloping

Galloping home to you.

*

A non-binary poet, Karen Poppy’s debut full-length poetry collection, Diving at the Lip of the Water, is published by Beltway Editions (2023). An attorney licensed in California and Texas, Karen Poppy lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Photographic Documentation by Kevin Canfield

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Photographic Documentation

The boy brought to school a very old photo,
black and white and brittle, gently scalloped
on the borders; it showed three military vehicles
and a few soldiers with their backs to the camera;
in the sky above the men, the boy informed his
teacher and his classmates, god was plainly visible,
looking down on a battlefield in the Pacific,
just before an important Second World War battle;
look, you can see his beard, the boy said of a
cloud resembling an equilateral triangle
made of feathers; and those are his eyes,
he added, pointing at two dark clefts of sky;
one of the boy’s ignoramus classmates insisted
that there were no such battles in Asia,
and another demanded to know where the boy got
the photo in the first place; the boy ignored his
detractors and continued with his monologue;
the photographer was killed not long after he
took this picture, the boy said, and though he offered
no proof that this was the case, he said it with
tremendous conviction, his voice quavering by the
end of his presentation, and when he sat down,
the teacher confessed that although she was not
a believer, at least not today, she was certain that
she would think about his photo again, today
or tomorrow, or whenever someone says god

*

Kevin Canfield lives in New York City. His writing has appeared in Cineaste, the Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today and other publications.

Dream in Which I Stop to Say Goodbye by Julie Weiss

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Dream in Which I Stop to Say Goodbye
         ~In memory of my father, Gerald Weiss (January 26, 1942 – September 14, 2023)

Gather your tears like a fistful of pebbles.
Drop them on the doorstep before entering

the gallery of my life. Toss off the drab
mourning attire, stiff hat, the pain veiling

your face. Toss the regrets, the words
never spoken, into a daffodil field

and do the twist with someone you adore,
someone whose legs haven´t yet

buckled under the gravity of so many
accumulated joys. Smile as though

a jokester dwelled in your belly!
Everyone knows I loved a good joke.

Think not of me but of children.
From the vantage point of stars, the world

is a sparkling clarinet, billowing out
the laughter of every child on earth.

Honor me by not forsaking those who need
the seeds in our full hands to flourish.

When I alighted on the shore of your dream
to say goodbye, what I meant was

I vow to spend my eternity collecting
all these moments of indescribable beauty

for your sake, stacking them in my heart´s
jar as you would seashells or precious stones.

For now, if you wake in a fret, know that
I haven´t wandered far. I´m the glorious

dawn colors adrift on an eagle´s wings.
The sunlight winking across the Bay.

A swirl of butterflies caught, for a second,
in an unexpected tease of wind.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and a chapbook, The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, published by Bottlecap Press. Her “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a finalist for Sundress´s 2023 Best of the Net anthology. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her recent work appears in Random Sample Review, Wild Roof Journal, and ONE ART, among others, and is forthcoming in Chestnut Review. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children.

Gone by Laura Goldin

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Gone

I lost my mother and then my metro card. A black pen,
single earring, more than the usual number of socks.

Where in the five-stage model is confusion –
dropping and breaking things, reading without

comprehension? Anger is there, but what of the rage
that shows up out of order, takes the corner chair and settles in,

preparing to eat everything: well-meaning people,
beloved people? I don’t sleep much anymore, but sleep

was never my forte. Three times in over sixty years
I disobeyed her: ate chocolate before dinner,

slept with my college boyfriend, stole what remained
of her lucidity when someone young enough

to be my child asked permission and I nodded, let them drip
the morphine she’d refused. A few times more I lied to her,

the last one when I said we’d take a short ride,
get the medicine, check out right afterward.

Go home again.

*

Laura Goldin is a publishing lawyer in New York. Five of her recent poems appear in the Spring 2023 issue of The Brooklyn Review; one is forthcoming in Driftwood Press 2024 Anthology, and one was a finalist for Best of the Net 2023. Others have been published or are forthcoming in a variety of journals including Apple Valley Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Mom Egg Review, and RHINO.

Evacuation by Tammy Greenwood

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Evacuation

We could see the smoke billow
beyond the ridge. The car packed

with fire escapes of mementos,
each choice an act of judgement day.

Now with room for only half the artwork
on the walls, I was sure I heard the sigh

of houseplants as I closed the door.
And that heavy Gray’s Anatomy book

filled with pressed wildflowers I collected
and labeled the spring of lockdown —

purple nightshade, wild Canterbury bells,
California poppy, silver lupine, presuming

they needed me as much as I needed them.
Now rescuing them a second time,

I fill the birdbaths like chaliced offerings
hoping for another reprieve.

*

Poet and Printmaker, Tammy Greenwood is a Louisiana native residing in California. Her work is heavily influenced by the varying landscape and culture of both states she calls home. Since graduating from California State University, San Bernardino, she continues her studies while working on her upcoming book of poetry. Her work appears in or is forthcoming in Door is a Jar, Rust & Moth, Orange Blossom Review, San Pedro River Review, Under the Radar, California Quarterly, Poetry South, Emerge Literary Journal, FERAL, and elsewhere.

Night Music by Mary Beth Hines

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Night Music

Mayhem made me. Rum
& Terrapin Station playing all night
on the common room stereo, and I fell
for it. Crushed velvet, wavy glass
and a cardinal pecking at its own
reflection. Bedlam. Heaven
forbid my Saturday night trespasses
torque back to haunt me—the men,
the moon, sows jumping over, my plunge
from the cradle into rosa rugosa
where I lit on all fours, before hush
could ambush me, fled from the lure
of Kyrie eleison soaring at cockcrow
from St. Cecelia’s organ. Heaven
forgive my come-on and surrender
into the blur of allegro, vibrato.

*

Mary Beth Hines lives and writes from her home in Massachusetts. Her work appears in Cider Press Review, SWWIM, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso and elsewhere. Kelsay Books published her debut collection, “Winter at a Summer House,” in 2021. (https://www.marybethhines.com)

haiku by A.R. Williams

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Hiking in Appalachia
a massive black bear
gobbles down a turkey club

*

A.R. Williams is a poet from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (USA), and has been published in Black Bough Poetry, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Neologism Poetry, among many others. He is also the editor of East Ridge Review and can be found on twitter @andrewraywill

BRAND LOYALTY by Alyson Gold Weinberg

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BRAND LOYALTY

I made a Pledge to Cheer with Joy whenever my little
Dove(s) are near. To caress their Downy heads. To keep
Tab(s) on them—and spend many a Summer’s Eve
When the Nerds are asleep—L’eggs open, welcoming the Soft

Scrub of your beard on my Crest. You’re Charmin. You’re Fantastik.
Head and Shoulders above the rest, but these days I don’t
Comet in a Jiff—a bit of my libido has gone down the Drano.
Fancy a foursome with Mr. Clean and Mrs. Butterworth—?

We can get Miracle Whip(ped) until Dawn when they gotta Bounce.

*

Alyson Gold Weinberg is the author of Bellow & Hiss, A New Women’s Voices finalist, forthcoming in September, 2023 (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in december, Halfway Down the Stairs, Poetica, among others. She was a 2021 Jeff Marks Memorial Prize finalist (judged by Carl Phillips) and a 2022 Harbor Review Jewish Women’s Poetry Prize Finalist. When not writing poetry, Alyson is a speechwriter and the ghostwriter of five non-fiction books.

Two Poems by Tresha Faye Haefner

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Self Love Poem
After you left I started writing love
letters to myself.
The kind of over-the-top things you would have said to me
if you had stuck around.
My god, I say to myself in the mirror, you’re glowing.
Your hair a yellow stream full of diamonds.
Your eyes Terabytes of Blue Data. A promise from space aliens. Instructions
on how to build the color blue, in case we forget.
I send myself nude photos of myself. Pictures where I’m looking myself
directly in the eye, daring a response.
Sometimes I worry I’ll get caught. Sometimes I close my laptop quickly
so I don’t see what I’m doing behind my back.
It’s tricky, loving yourself this hard, without anyone getting suspicious,
accusing me of being arrogant or self indulgent, selfishly lavishing all this time
on planning trips to Europe with myself. The hotel I’ll rent, the hats I will buy
for my glorious head.
I take time away from work to sneak myself messages. Promise crazy things.
I’ll take myself on
a cruise to Greece and Turkey.
Throw whole olives in my mouth, the pitted kind so they go down soft.
Grapes, peaches, all the stone fruit I can eat.
Eventually this kind of ebullience gets old though.
The pressure to be the recipient of so much adoration.
I suggest a quiet night at the movies. Take myself
to watch independent films.
Pretend I’m interested
even though I hate subtitles, and was never a fan of the French New Wave.
Make an excuse to go home early, get enough sleep
for work the next day. Anything to avoid my own company.
I know something is off. It’s a distortion. There’s someone else
I’ve been seeing. But I won’t admit it. Try to cover.
The lies become tiresome. The effort to get myself
to like myself this way.
I miss the simple days of taking a road trip down the 405.
Pulling over to the side of the road to stare at cows,
or watching a butterfly land on my windshield while I’m stuck
in traffic. At night I turn off the radio,
listen to the sound of the earth.
Crickets in bushes. Fruit falling and splitting against the ground.
The sound of the earth, so quietly supportive.
So casually giving me everything I’ll ever need.
I try to resettle myself like the center of a Tibetan Singing Bowl.
I spend whole afternoons in silence now.
Tonight I will turn off all sounds, make a meal of lion’s mane mushrooms,
morel spores mixed with rice, white wine, parsley and herbs,
and then go take a long shower with lavender soap
and spend all night staring at my reflection in silence
as I pat my ordinary skin dry,
and deliriously comb my hair.
*
Letter Home
In the Northeast
the ice is everywhere,
black and invisible.
schoolyards are lowered
by flags. The teachers don’t know
what to do. When I arrived
I was naïve as paper.
A dress walking
through snowstorms.
You tried to warn me,
there were not enough words
to describe the love
between a man
and his money.
Why someone would shoot
a naked photo of a child.
A classroom of kindergarteners,
an insulting email to HR.
I tried to pump the breaks.
The screech of an empty
bank account slammed me
to snowbank.
I thought I would be better. But
I am only a girl. Break me
in case of emergency.
Be careful. When they tell you
You are a match
for any danger,
You will be the one
they strike.
The newest thing
they have to burn.
*
Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and a 2012, 2020, and 2021 nomination for a Pushcart. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear” was a finalist for prizes from both Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. It was published by Pine Row Press under the title When the Moon Had Antlers in 2023. Find her at www.thepoetrysalon.com.

Four Poems by Dan Butler

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A Picnic in Golden Gate Park

Sunny, shirts off, he newly moved
to San Francisco, me at the end of
a solo cross-country bike trip, we’re
making out on a blanket in the midst
of kids playing, families and friends
having a good time. I’ve never kissed
a man like this, outside, among other
people, but he seems so comfortable
that I follow his lead, amazed how it
feels so easy, natural, sublime.

And now he tells me he felt the very
same thing, that he’d been raised never
to show affection of any kind in public.
And I laugh, ‘So I was leading you?’
We’re on the phone, connected for
the first time in 40 years, reliving that
day. “You were so fucking cute” he says,
the thickness of his Minnesota accent
surprising me, the memory of his beauty
still bowling me over. “An elderly couple
was on the bench beside us,” he says,
and the gratitude, realizing that this day
was as indelible for him as it has been for
me all these years, is beyond words.

And I still can feel the brush of his leg on
the back of mine, momentous and ordinary,
40 years ago and now at the same time,
basking in the newfound happiness of being
more completely me.

*

Father Son Talk

My mom and dad dated again
after their second spouses died,
some 30 years after their divorce,
and they’d call me up giving their
versions of how it went. I could
only utter single syllables like
‘oh,’ ‘wow,’ ‘good,’ the kinds of
words I was trained to use on the
suicide prevention line where you’re
urged to never challenge any of the
callers’ delusional voices they might
be dealing with. Dad had all these
plans for their future while mom
was reminded why they had split up
in the first place. He was excited, she
found herself getting depressed.
The dating only lasted a few months
when mom finally called it off and
afterwards every time I’d visit, dad
would pour over conspiracy theories
of who had poisoned her thoughts
against him. “It was all going so well,”
he’d repeat and I’d mostly nod, try
to steer the topic off in another direction,
avoid giving advice or hurting him further,
thinking of all the plans, romantic and
otherwise, that hadn’t turned out even
near the place I’d intended. ‘Sometimes
there isn’t a reason, dad. Things just
don’t work out.’ And we drive in silence
for a while, on our way to Smokey Bones
for a little barbeque, corn fields spreading
out forever on either side of the interstate,
silos standing sentinel in the distance.

*

Mom in the Nursing Home

          Where or When – from “Babes in Arms” by Rodgers and Hart

I sit by her wheelchair. We listen to a jazz duet
entertaining the memory unit. She’s all smiles.
The keyboardist is me and I’m a guy hitting on her.
When we’ve held hands, it’s been a death grip; now
it’s soft, intimate. Her Estee Lauder is all for “me.”

          And so it seems that we have met before
          and laughed before and loved before
          but who knows where or when?

She’ll know me again in the morning, but for now
it’s getting late, so I kiss her goodbye on the cheek
and tell her that I’ll see her tomorrow. Pleased, she
fixes me with a look I’ve never seen before and asks,
“And what’s going to happen then?”

*

Early December Farm Breakfast with my Grandpa, 1962

Why do I keep coming back to this kitchen?
What dark nourishment do I seek?
I sit at the oil-cloth covered table watching him
fix breakfast, the meal I’ve watched him make
a million times before.

The grease sizzles and pops in the cast iron skillet,
smelling of smokehouse and slaughter. He has
his back to me, focused on the task at hand.
The eggs are hard for him to break. He tries to
work the arthritis out, opening and closing his
thickly calloused hands that smell of lava soap
and work, a life of work. He takes turns rubbing
each hand, trying to bring life back. Useless,
useless, he whispers, as if I’m not even there.
He leans against the counter near where his
cane is hooked, near where his birthday cake
sits, barely eaten though it’s apricot, his favorite.
He wears faded bib overalls and flannel to keep
the December chill out. He’s kept the heat off
because it costs dear. He’s a man of few words,
but I wish he’d talk to me. It’s all on his terms.

Outside it’s dark, down in the coal mines dark.
Inside too. Eggs sunny side up, though the sun
won’t be up for a good while now and he won’t
be here to see it. The ground outside the breezeway
waits, as does the hunting rifle. Ground he plowed
and planted and harvested, all grey corn stubble now.

Breakfast made, he places a plate over it to keep it
warm. He’s not hungry. Down the hall, Uncle Bob,
who will find him, dreams of robbers. And as Grandpa
makes his way out of the room toward the inevitable –
a smile on his face, something I didn’t expect – he turns
to look at me. He sees me, years older than he was then.
And he leaves. Again.

*

Dan Butler is known primarily as an actor whose credits include major roles On and Off Broadway, on television, and film where he has also written, directed, and produced. In 2011, Dan adapted and directed a screen version of Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s verse poem “Pearl” starring Francis Sternhagen and himself which had a great life on the film festival circuit. In addition to being published in ONE ART last April, Dan’s poems have been seen on the Poetry of Resilience site, on the “Commissary,” a creative artist’s collective, as well as in the anthology “The Paths to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy” edited by James Crews.

Two Poems by Laura Foley

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My State

At daycare, she says, Sue serves us spoiled eggs.
Oh, you mean boiled?
No. Spoiled. And I don’t like them.

Later I ask Sue, who elucidates, Scrambled.

In the parking lot, we talk license plates.
Mine has a loon, she explains,
And yours is green.

Yes, yours is a loon because you’re from Maine.
Yes, Grandma, but I’m from License Plate too.

I squint into space,
trying to imagine the state of License Plate,
but find a mind of scrambled eggs.

*

Someone

I once lived on a great wide river,
a time of deep aloneness, after loss.
How soothing it was to watch waters passing,
sunlight reflected in circular currents,
a white moon cresting
above the shadowed mountain.
I miss the river, though not
the hushed quietness of that time,
the endless plumbing of depths
I never guessed, which nonetheless
led me to choose—a wife
calling me from another room,
as she is now, to come downstairs for tea,
steeped to the color of the river.

*

Laura Foley’s most recent collection is: It’s This (Fernwood Press, 2023). Her poems have won many awards and appeared in many journals such as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso, Poetry Society London, Atlanta Review, and included in anthologies such as: Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Laura’s poems have been turned into choral music and performed in venues such as the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Carnegie Hall in New York. She lives with her wife, Clara Giménez, and their two romping canines, among the hills of Vermont.

Three Poems by Lois Perch Villemaire

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Hot Tea and Hamantaschen

A cup of hot
vanilla caramel tea
with a cherry
hamantaschen
takes me back.
No, it’s not Purim.
My local bagel shop
bakes them all year round.

The tea—
a reminder of my mother,
faithful tea-drinker;
the hamantaschen—
a reminder of the time
one of my daughters
brought home a recipe
from pre-school.

Sipping on my tea
I see my little girls
as we baked together,
mixing and rolling dough,
spooning cherry pie-filling
then folding just so—
into the shape of Haman’s
triangular hat.

*

Happiness

is not handed out
like Halloween candy.
If there is none
where you wish to find it,
feel the loss then rejoice
in fortuitous discoveries.

The deep purple bloom
of an African violet
created from a single leaf,
the taste of a fresh banana,
the company of someone you love,
the encouragement of a friend,

a book you long to return to,
music—an arrow to your heart,
baby birds with open beaks
in a nest outside your window,
and a blossoming hydrangea
you planted seven years ago
in memory of your sister.

*

Calling All Poets
         After June Jordan

Slow down
look around
there’s something
impressive to see.

Feel the silent breeze
watch the wisdom
of the birds
building nests
with precision.

Listen to their calls
rhythmic chirping
rings through the air.
I wonder—
what is the message?

Notice how swiftly
trees convert
from naked
to full bloom,
barely time to
grasp
the transformation.

*

Lois Perch Villemaire writes poetry, flash memoir, and fiction. Her work has appeared in such places as Blue Mountain Review, Ekphrastic Review, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Pen In Hand and Topical Poetry. Anthologies, including I Am My Father’s Daughter and Truth Serum Press – Lifespan Series have published her memoir and poetry. Her first book, “My Eight Greats,” a family history in poetry and prose, will be published in September. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Lois lives in Annapolis, MD, where she enjoys yoga, researching family connections, fun photography, and doting over her African violets.

Two Poems by Eileen Pettycrew

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I Couldn’t Do What the Pedicure Lady Does

All day bending toward disagreeable
outcroppings, operating
with a surgeon’s precision—
especially not the way she does it,
always trying to catch my eye,
while I, already squirming
from the intimacy of the procedure,
try to stay inside
the separate station of my book.

I think of feet, how they tether me
to this world, how one day
they’ll be reduced to nothing,
and she will no longer take them,
naked as mole rats,
into her hands, rubbing the heels
and between the toes
with her lotioned fingers.

Now as I wait for the polish to dry,
she sweeps nail clippings
and clumps of skin into a dustpan.
Someday everything in this salon
will be gone—fake poinsettia wreath
on the door, the oversized calendar
printed with Bui’s Natural Tofu.
Box fan in the corner ruffling
a strand of my hair.

I think seven years into the future,
when my skin will have renewed itself.
I like to think I’ll reinvent myself
with whatever warmth
she carries in her hands
as she kneads my calves,
her fists pounding look up, look up.

*

First Week in April

Already the azaleas
are in bloom, the rhodies
busting out too.
Everything’s moved
up a month, as if time
has rolled up the rug
and left town. What will
happen to the Mother’s Day
rhododendron show?
Maybe folks will learn to love
the delicate skeletons
left behind.
          Last night
at the square dance, I loved
others’ attire—window-pane
fishnets, a hot-pink shirt.
I slid into do-si-dos,
swing your partner.
I think of my father’s
artificial hips, how he quit
dancing for fear
of falling. He and my mother
out on the floor,
suede soles gliding
across the wood as if
they could go on forever.
          I think I know
of loss, but I don’t.
Or it’s been here so long
it seems normal,
like browned-out grass.
The days
mean something,
don’t they?
Rising as they do
when the sun returns
after a cloudburst.
Fleeting as steam.

* 

Eileen Pettycrew’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, CALYX Journal, Cave Wall, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. In 2022 she was one of two runners-up for the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry and a finalist for the New Letters Award for Poetry. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Eileen lives in Portland, Oregon.

Losing a Homeland by Zeina Azzam

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Losing a Homeland

It’s as if we are reading a book
with too many unfamiliar words
and keep having to look them up.
If only it were that easy to understand the story
of how one loses a homeland,
how a young couple flees
with only a suitcase to fit their life’s belongings.
In their minds the sentences shortened,
certain words disappeared, some things
were unspoken until their hair grayed, fell.
Maybe they would never be uttered or heard.
How will our family story live?

*

Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. She is the poet laureate of the City of Alexandria, Virginia, for 2022-2025. Her poems appear in literary journals, webzines, and anthologies, and her full-length poetry collection, Some Things Never Leave You, was published in July 2023 by Tiger Bark Press. Zeina’s chapbook, Bayna Bayna, In-Between, was released in 2021 by The Poetry Box. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. www.zeinaazzam.com

White Gloves by Mary Sesso

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White Gloves

Yesterday a katydid was keeping me company
on the patio when a praying mantis snatched it.
That must be why my dreams are scary—
I’m afraid the clock might run out while I’m enjoying
the sun, and suddenly it’s dark black with no
leftover green bits of summer.

Time, like a butler in white gloves doesn’t care
if I’m katydid gentle or if my bite doesn’t hurt.
Last night I dreamed he brushed sand
off his fingers, and suddenly I was filled with a fear
of the dark. Then I watched him exit with a murmur
of sun in his eye.

*

Mary Sesso is a retired nurse who lives in Bethesda, MD with her dog, Beau. Her latest work appeared in Lock Raven Review, Cardinal Sins and Cutbank Literary Review. She’s the author of 2 chapbooks, The Open Window and Her Hair Plays With Fire.

Undone by My Own Hands by Angela Hoffman

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Undone by My Own Hands
-After Mary Oliver, “It Was Early”

I’m in grade five. I notice a snag in my tights.
I pull the loose thread. The unraveling begins.
I try in vain to leave it alone, but I continue to pick at the flaw
until one half of my tights sags around my ankle,
leaving the other half to rest above my knee.

I try everything to close the gap:
knotting, self-pity, paper clipping, hiding,
but come to terms that the only way out is to stand,
allowing all in the room to gaze upon this mess I’ve made.
Sometimes things have to fall apart in order to see
the blessedness hiding underneath.

*

Angela Hoffman’s poetry collections include Resurrection Lily and Olly Olly Oxen Free (Kelsay Books). She placed third in the WFOP Kay Saunders Memorial Emerging Poet in 2022 and was a runner up in the 2023 Wisconsin Sijo competition. Her poems have been published in Agape Review, Amethyst Review, As Surely As the Sun, Blue Heron Review, Braided Way, Bramble, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Moss Piglet, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Muleskinner Journal, Of Rust and Glass, Poetica Review, Solitary Plover, The Orchards Poetry Journal, The Poet Magazine, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ Museletter and Calendar, Whispers and Echoes, Wilda Morris’s Poetry Challenge, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, and Your Daily Poem. Her poems have also appeared in Amethyst Review Poetry Anthology: All Shall Be Well and The Poet Anthology: Our Changing Earth. She writes a poem a day. Angela lives in rural Wisconsin.

Two Poems by Gaby Bedetti

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Civil Suit

We assemble in the hall
eager to administer justice and pick
an amount fair to both sides.

The plaintiff’s back is said to be
blotched by light therapy
despite smiling cruise photos.

Her attorney
approaches her in the witness box,
and offers a packet of Kleenex.

Hands resting on hip,
her counsel locks eyes
and presses for compensation.

The litigant meets our verdict with
a blank stare. The settlement
mitigates her suffering.

Outside the courthouse a man
sleeps on a steel bench. Snowflakes fall
on his head.

Citizens turn to look
at the pink blanket-draped
body.

*

Tricky Notes

The choir director prays for us to abandon
fear, yet by the fifth verse I forget my one note.
What I would do if I were not afraid:
make the swamp oak shudder like thunder,
disrupt the cheeping that holds the flock together,
let my hair fly free and tangle in the wind,
eat hot wings and listen to dance tunes,
go to sea with the owl and the pussycat,
tango with my sage, battle my saboteurs,
pop the infant off my breast,
smudge the love letter,
commission a raise, chip
the china, leave a sandwich for the man
under the bridge,
sing tall the tricky notes.

*

Born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, Gaby Bedetti is the American translator of Henri Meschonnic’s work, a contributor to Lexington’s poetry blog and a professor at Eastern Kentucky University. She has published in Off the Coast, Poet Lore, Italian Americana, Cold Mountain Review, and elsewhere.

Kindergarten by Matthew Murrey

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Kindergarten

“It’s boring, boring,
boring. I hate school,”
he said near tears
on the way over in the car.

Big hand, small hand:
I walked him to class,
then turned my back
and left, though he begged
in a raspy whisper—
chin and lips quivering,
eyes brimming and blinking,
“Stay longer—please
don’t leave, please.”

Like a doctor who lost
his patient, or a priest
who lost his faith,
I headed off to my job.

Before lunch at work
I was thinking of angels;
“Pity us,” I whispered
as if there were pity,
as if there were angels.

*

Matthew Murrey’s poems have been in One Art and other journals. Poems have recently appeared in The Shore, Whale Road Review, and EcoTheo Review. He’s an NEA Fellowship recipient, and his collection, Bulletproof, was published in 2019 by Jacar Press. He was a public school librarian for over twenty years and lives in Urbana, Illinois. His website is at https://www.matthewmurrey.net/ and he is still on Twitter @mytwords.

Carrying Water by Mike Bagwell

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Carrying Water

The year of the sheep got lost in an airport
and just bounced from shoulder to shoulder.
The crowds left blurred vapor trails of themselves
and the whole place swirled in light browns
and the faded azure of jeans.
Everywhere I went crows called
themselves Adam, crawling
out of pitch-black pools and drying off their feathers.
I never quite grasped the significance of this,
no matter how many times they demanded
I pull out one of their ribs.
“I’m not God,” I told them, even though
I was having clear, frictionless thoughts.
At 1 p.m., a sheep becomes insecure about
anything with the color purple.
Suitable gifts:
bathrobe, broach, peppermint oil, seashells,
massage, theater tickets.
Maybe the soul is joined to the body by deep pits of water:
you pull feathers out of your mouth
and walk around a crowded airport.
Instead of diving back in,
you just get comfortable.

*

Mike Bagwell is a writer and software engineer based in Philly. He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and his work appears or is forthcoming in trampset, Halfway Down the Stairs, HAD, BULL, Bodega, Whiskey Island, and others. Some editors have kindly nominated him for a Pushcart. He is the author of the chapbook A Collision of Soul in Midair (forthcoming from Bottlecap Press). He was the founding editor and designer of El Aleph Press and his work can be found at mikebagwell.me.

Two Poems by Lois Roma-Deeley

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For All the Little Lost

If today you should find yourself staring into the blue
fluorescent lights swinging overhead
at the Wal-Mart store, just leave
the half-full shopping cart
in the middle aisle. Go and find

the boy standing under a street light
looking up at his stolen shoes
hanging around the metal pole.
Tell him there will be other days

filled with unasked-for kindnesses, like a kiss
waking him from sleep. Now turn your thoughts

to sea flowers waving their tentacles.
Cast a spell in his direction.

What will it cost you?
Remember the cashier at the Circle K
who thinks you might have a secret life?
The one in which you’re loved and perfectly whole.

But you, Reader of Signs, know better.
Like the five pointed star tattooed over your wrist
or the three rings of bruised grass on which you stand
try to interpret the designs of each life,
the context of desire.

Open the Book of a Thousand Titles,
where vermillion snakes and indigo lions
wave to you from the edge of every page.
Study the illuminations….Like this

—oh just mouth these words—

reach into the future and take hold,
for whatever it is that comes for us,
like a lightning bolt striking open water,
don’t let go.

*

My Heart, A Broken Compass

When giant Saguaros lift their hallelujah arms
and creosote bushes weep sweetly
for the brief relief of monsoon rain,
I take to wandering in circles, my heart
a broken compass in a wilderness of despair.

Then before the sun rises, once again,
over Windgate pass, mercy notes
rise up from wide city streets,
float over the tops of olive trees
settling in the tallest branches.
And now I find myself

standing on a crowded sidewalk.
surrounded by familiar sounds,
the push and pull of steady voices
echoing in and around small shops
and mountain passes. The city hums—
but do I hear it?
better days are coming.

*

Lois Roma-Deeley’s poetry collections include Like Water in the Palm of My Hand, The Short List of Certainties, High Notes, northSight, Rules of Hunger. She’s published in numerous poetry anthologies and journals, is Associate Poetry Editor of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry. and is Poet Laureate, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA. www.loisroma-deeley.com

Connections by Sharon Waller Knutson

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Connections

Michael is missing, his mother tells me
as she buys Louis Lamour novels
in my Idaho Falls used bookstore
while the sky is streaked with black clouds.

Although we lived in the same small
town briefly and were the same age,
Michael and I never met but his mother
was a longtime friend of my father’s.

Michael’s hound howls from her Jeep
Cherokee. The dog was discovered
on the road between Blackfoot
and Pocatello where we drive often.

Her son was last seen with two strangers
in a bar across from the bus station
where my grandmother met the Greyhound
carrying me as a child to Idaho from Montana.

A month later, cops arrest two cowboys
driving Michael’s Ford Explorer
with blood in the trunk in Billings
where I was a reporter in the sixties.

His mother won’t stop until she finds
her son and puts his murderers in prison.
Michael’s body is found near Whitehall
where my father rodeoed in the fifties.

The murderers will die in a prison
near Deet Lodge where we spent the summer.
I understand the grief etched on her
face many years later when I lose my son.

*

Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist who lives in Arizona. She has published eleven poetry books including My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields (Flutter Press 2014,) What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say and Trials & Tribulations of Sports Bob (Kelsay Books 2021) and Survivors, Saints and Sinners (Cyberwit 2022,) Kiddos & Mamas Do the Darndest Things (Cyberwit 2022,) The Vultures are Circling (Cyberwit 2023) and The Leading Ladies in My Life (Cyberwit June 2023.) Her twelfth collection, My Grandfather is a Cowboy is forthcoming from Cyberwit in January 2024. Her work has also appeared in more than 50 different journals. She is the editor of Storyteller Poetry Journal, dedicated to promoting narrative poetry.

Postpartum by Tamara Kreutz

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Postpartum
                after “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins

Just when I thought I’d be myself
again, my belly flops beside me in bed—
stretched, gelatinous,
an upper lip at the smile of my pelvis,

And standing before the mirror
I find my body has forgotten who she was—
my hips sway wide, my feet ache from falling flat.

Stripped of sensuality, my breasts, stiff and dimpled, drip
like garden hoses—twin milk stains through my cotton shirt.
They throb for the creature who spends most of her hours
with her mouth latched onto me.

Slumping through the house, half asleep
in daytime, I’m half awake at night,
listening to the rhythm of my baby’s breath.

I hate my husband beside me.
He’s stolen my sleep and hoarded it all
for himself. His body and brain seem so unchanged

while a stranger lives in my pendulous skin,
and memories of me before birthing are shelved
in gated-off corners of my mind.

No wonder my phone lights my face up in blue, as I nurse
and scroll through timelines on bouncing back
No wonder I watch the moon each night,
as it drags me through the dark into each new day.

*

Tamara Kreutz lives with her husband and three young children in Guatemala, where she works as a high school English teacher at an international school. Poetry gives her grounding in a life full of moving pieces. She is currently working towards her MFA at Pacific University and has had her work featured in Rattle – Poets Respond, Stonecoast Review, and Verse-Virtual among others.

2 Meters Down by Brian Duncan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

2 Meters Down

Nearing the end of a hike one day,
I overtake a man and his young son.
Their little white dog busies
himself sniffing bushes
at the side of the trail.
The boy pokes a mushroom with a stick.

We chat, the man and I,
and he extolls the virtues
of his dog’s breed.
In a heavy Slavic accent, he says:
Did you know that a Jack Russell Terrier
Can dig 2 meters down in the earth?
Some day he will dig my grave.

*

Brian Duncan lives in Kendall Park, New Jersey. He has poems out this year in ONE ART and Thimble, and in an upcoming issue of Whale Road Review.

Two Poems by Daniel Edward Moore

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Small Obsessions

Moved as I am,
          to love little things,
like a mote in the eye
             of a blinking god
or the spider whose life
          depends on my foot,
marrying a ballerina
                    or soldier.
What is it about
          the intensity of small,
beating my chest like
       a handsome paramedic,
breaking my ribs as
    the hummingbird’s beak
pokes me with the meaning
          of pierce and release?

The older I get the
                    more torn I am
by how tenderness
      looks like a tiny house
built by the starfish
            of rugged hands,
big and wide as the
         ocean that made them,
my heart, a million pieces
    of shells, happy
to hold those rays
   of light from which
I am bound to burn.

*

I am Not the Face

If you’re living in a
warehouse of secret rooms

find a face you can trust,
to tell you what is real.

You forgot your address years ago.
Make sure they know that.

Make sure your ghostly breath
stumbling through lips

on a Sunday morning
reminds you of the way a

soldier kissed after laying
his gun before God.

Then ponder the
question of trust.

How its absence
has a seductive power

to harm tender things,
forcing wrinkles to open

so words may die
peacefully under the skin.

All it takes is a face.
I am not the face.

*

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work is forthcoming in I-70 Review, Passengers Journal, Watershed Review, Flint Hills Review, Sugar House Review, The Main Street Rag Magazine and Impossible Archetype. His book “Waxing the Dents,” is from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Two Poems by Jhilam Chattaraj

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Hampi, Karnataka

In Hampi,
streets are not interrupted
by delivery boys.

Apps are merely cosmetic.
Cyber rhizomes meld
into the antique sun.

Boulders rise from brambles —
quiet colossal remnants
of a jeweled empire.

Women — their hair,
heavy with the musk of jasmine
occupy smooth, winding roads.

Children wait for the school bus.
Men carry goats on bicycles.
Stones break into gods.

Everybody obeys to seasons of stillness.
There’s mercy in Hampi’s brick-red dust.
Faith fascinates life.

*

Hunger

Once I saw papa
eat boiled papaya with bread —
raw, bland, edgy.

I could not fathom.
My teenage tongue
would not allow me to.

Now, I know.
Each day, after work,
anything edible is delectable.

Hunger is perhaps a burden.
A task to be settled
with the swiftness of fighter jets.

On days, when despair
creeps out of wrinkled bills,
I eat bread with mango pickle.

It’s late in the evening.
My fingers are fixed to the keyboard.
Sun storms erupt in my belly.

I order tandoori chicken,
lemon coriander soup,
and warm up last night’s tomato-rice.

*

Jhilam Chattaraj is an academic and poet based in Hyderabad, India. Her works have been published at Calyx, World Literature Today, Colorado Review, Asian Cha among others.

Milk by Jessica Goodfellow

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Milk

Because we were waiting for the end of days, we drank
only powdered milk, rotating out the old stuff stock-

piled in the basement, date coming due, as we bought
its replacement boxes, the new expiration dates.

I’d wake sometimes after midnight to the whirring
of the blender, my mother having also woken panicked

that she’d forgotten to mix up milk for the next day’s breakfast.
Bluish, thin as water, suspicious in its froth, it flooded

our sugarless cereal, it fluffed our dehydrated potato flakes,
but we rarely drank it from a glass. Or cup. Or mug.

Sometimes we’d swallow a clot of undissolved powder
and gag. Once a friend’s mother apologized, ‘Sorry,

we’ve only got 1%,’ and handed me a glass—one gulp
and my tongue and throat were coated and I almost couldn’t

breathe. The canned peas, the reconstituted soy-based meat
substitute we swallowed docilely, waiting for the end. For

an end. To the stories. Of a land that flowed with milk
and honey. For I had drunk the milk. And there was no honey.

*

Jessica Goodfellow’s poetry books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala, and The Insomniac’s Weather Report. A former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she’s had poems in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, Verse Daily, Motionpoems, and Best American Poetry. Jessica lives and works in Japan. www.jessicagoodfellow.com

Five Poems by Aly Allen

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Auditory Processing Disorder

I listen closely
so my response sounds
less like bullshit.

I never know what
I say, until after
someone else hears it

first. My speech mimics
whomever speaks most
in proximity to me. I look

like I’m thinking, mostly
I’m plotting a response
to conversations had.

I don’t know what
you said. Now I
didn’t hear you. I said

something of an echo.
I can sprinkle in and hypothesize
layers of ideas. Undo

the desire to be exclusive.
I don’t want to be
unique, I want to be like everyone.

*

Now I Study Metaphor

Spent three decades learning
what words meant
only to find
people say one thing
to mean another

still get confused
about whether I am
an expert on bugs
or origins and elision

Cicada molts crack
turn to powder under wind
they scream not from shedding

it’s the forgetting
how to fly

the best way to thresh

* 

Color by Number

I always use the inverse
color on the color wheel,
in correlation to coordinated
numbers. The scheme is fine,
I’m sure. Your results
always the same. I’m trying
to remain sane. Following directions,
after all, is why we need to pause.

* 

Same Food

Every day since a Monday
some twenty-three years ago
I’ve prepared and eaten
a bowl of oatmeal:
boiled on the stove,
cold from the fridge,
hot in the chow hall.
Always mix in peanut butter first.
Won’t eat more than a bite
if the banana slices are missing,
raisins seal the trinity, add
broken pecans and honey occasionally.
Milk makes it feel too rich.
Black coffee on the side.
I bought a full container of oats
and this morning
peeled them open.
I tilted the cannister, but before
I could pour, my taste buds
changed my mind. I’m not sure
what else to consider for breaking
fast. I stuff the oatmeal silo behind
the bread, position pasta boxes
to make my routine incorporeal.
I make stir-fry, with chicken and veggies,
which heat while the teriyaki congeals
in the pan. Bitter sips between bites.

*

It Wasn’t a Date But…

I have issues
with object permanence,
so, I wrote your name
on my wall. I read it
aloud whenever I remember.
The wall reminds me
of your steady gaze.
The giddiness to get
to know you as more than
a smattering of patterns. I could see
how it might be awkward
when you come over,
it’s not a shrine, though,
don’t worry,
it’s more a spell.

*

Aly Allen is a trans poet. Her writing focuses on family, trauma, and identity. Her first full-length collection, Paying for Gas with Quarters, debuts this October from Middle West Press. Recent publications appear in Two Hawks Quarterly, new words (press), and Press Pause. She holds an MFA creative writing from Oklahoma State University, where she now teaches composition. Find her on Instagram and Threads @notasquirrel

It was the 80s and gay girls at our high school got the hell beat out of them by Marcy Rae Henry

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It was the 80s and gay girls at our high school got the hell beat out of them

Too much truthtelling in poetry. It ain’t lyrical.
Stick with your own kind. Smoldering
and unwashed and looking for the nearest spigot.

That’s more like life.
But the thing is, there was a drama teacher.
Asymmetrical haircut. Glasses on a long chain of beads.
And a love scene: You have to kiss whoever I pair you with.

She looked at me and added, Even if you have a boyfriend.
Wasn’t the first time she looked. Or threatened to fail me.
And in her Birkenstocks and floral scarves, she failed me
alright, as only our kind can do.

The day of my kiss the boyfriend and I ditched to do our own
scene. Truant officers in those days. And everything happened
before I understood the success of arranged marriages.

Back in class, We’ve raised the stakes, she said meaning just her.
Now you have to kiss a girl in order to pass.
People love stakes when it doesn’t concern them.

That is to say, the class was in on it. A peahen trying to be a peacock
stood up. There are times when I’d ask god WTF if I could find him.
But then, just No, no, no. I can’t.

They were in the center of the room, iridescent as soap bubbles.
I was red and looking for the nearest spigot. It wasn’t even
the beginning of full circle. Just years of what did she see in me?

*

Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary artist, una Latina/x/e and an advocate/member of the LGBTQ community. Her writing has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination and first prize in Suburbia’s 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest. DoubleCross Press is publishing her chapbook We Are Primary Colors. M.R. Henry is an associate editor for RHINO.

To Anna, On Her Retirement by Robbie Gamble

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

To Anna, On Her Retirement

Is this what you’ve been
imagining you could discard:
the petty supervisors clucking
about their neurotic fiefdoms;
rubrics, memos, misogyny,
emails, emails, more emails?
A friend described her passage
as “rewirement,” and it’s amazing
the difference a letter makes,
all your beleaguered neurons
shedding buckets of cortisol—
see how they unclench from
“doing, doing, doing” into simply
being. The mountain across
the valley isn’t doing anything,
it just is, a gorgeous astonishment
every sunrise when I open
my eyes. As are you. The trees
in the orchard, sure, they bear
fruit, but mostly they radiate
gratitude for having found
a home here, on this hillside
as you have too, reveling
in healthful elements: air,
water, rich soil, good friends
the churn of seasons, a circle
of community. You have always
been loveable, but now you have
time to savor this hard-won truth.
Taste it, Beloved, let it wash
over you like a sunset’s tender
afterglow. And welcome!

*

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Lunch Ticket, Poet Lore, RHINO, Salamander, and The Sun. He divides his time between Boston and Vermont.

Buzzword by Howie Good

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Buzzword

The committee in charge of such things must have voted overnight, for when the sun came through the window in the morning, “iconic” was the newest buzzword. Anyone who could read was now pretty much guaranteed to encounter “iconic” this and “iconic” that in print or online. A frozen daquiri would be dubbed the “iconic summer drink,” Monopoly the “iconic board game,” 7-Eleven the “iconic convenience store.” Meanwhile, more young people were adding .com to their names. They yearned to escape emotional strife, acquire a certain aloofness, the equanimity of machines. Or that may have been in a movie I saw. I don’t know, I can’t remember, but despite the early hour and our advanced age, we were exchanging long, slow, sticky kisses as if just prior to launch we had shared an iconic Eggo waffle in warm syrup in bed.

*

Howie Good’s newest poetry collection, Heart-Shaped Hole, which also includes examples of his handmade collages, is available from Laughing Ronin Press.

Two Poems by Dick Westheimer

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Ghazal For a Fallen Nation

It’s tough when it’s all just conspiracy shit
that they’ve beamed down from the mothership.*

In America friendships are split when friends
raise the flag on the wrong color ship.

The neighbor boy whose suicide we lament
idolized his granddad’s warriorship.

My bluegrass buddy wound up on a vent,
he mistook reading Facebook threads for scholarship.

It is forbidden to speak of politics when in bed
rocking the waves of my lover’s hips.

My dad sang God Bless America at every event.
Like Irving Berlin he treasured his citizenship.

* Quote from the August 1, 2023 filing indicting former President Trump

* 

Another Fucking Poem About Insomnia

I pass the night picking digits off the clock
in ones and twos, counting cricket chirps on my fingers,
trying to remember a line from a poem I’d yet to write,

not remembering if I took out the trash. By 3 AM,
the covers strewn and sheets tangled at my knees,
my head hurts from thoughts like squirrels scritching

at each other, bounding off walls, like a thousand pingpong
balls. At four I stick the numbers back on the clock—the five
and then the six—and when the alarm goes off at seven, I am

grateful I don’t remember falling asleep. Outside my office
window the drone of bees in the hibiscus flowers drowses me,
makes me think I could nap. I can’t nap.

I don’t know how to let things happen without me—
what if I miss a breaking news headline or the flash
of that line of poetry I’ve waited for? And here it is midnight,

again, and I am afraid—to go up to bed, knowing I will be obsessed
picking those red-hot digits from the clock again. And as the bee
sleeps in the hive and the hibiscus petals

are wrapped tight for the night, I am kept awake,
listening for that drone of sleep that never comes.

*

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have recently appeared in Whale Road Review, Innisfree Journal, Gyroscope Review, Banyan Review, Rattle, Ritual Well, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com

Summer Means Cover Bands in the Park by Hilary King

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Summer Means Cover Bands in the Park
(Ode to Fleetwood Masque)

And we don’t wait to dance, rising
from our camp chairs with an oof

as soon as the first chord lands,
stampeding slowly past blanket buffets

of charcuterie boards, brownies,
and sweating bottles of sauv blanc.

We rock out to every song, even dance
to Landslide, early August sun still high

over this silver-haired ocean. When
the band takes a break, the tall grass

calls us back, but we remain swaying,
humming to our own distant echoes.

*

Hilary King is a poet originally from Virginia and now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared or will appear in Ploughshares, Salamander, TAB, Belletrist, SWWIM, Fourth River, The Cortland Review, and other publications. She is the author of the book of poems, The Maid’s Car, the founder of Bay Area Poets, and an editor for DMQ Review.

Feast by Jane Edna Mohler

~ ONE ART ~ 12 Comments

Feast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Ellen Rowland

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Cake

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

*

Endangered Pleasure
(after James Crews)

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

*

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

Betrayal by Valerie Bacharach

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Betrayal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

Two Poems by Heather Truett

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Honey Stung

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

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

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

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

*

Black Sabbath Hymn for My Brother

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

*

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

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Susan Cossette

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Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
-after Casper David Friedrich

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Of Course the World Still Spins by Hillary Nguyen

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Of Course the World Still Spins

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

*

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

Two Poems by Merna Dyer Skinner

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

DAREDEVILS

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

*

WHILE VIEWING THE BLACK MARBLE CLOCK

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

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

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

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

*

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

GETTING OUT by Hershel Burgh

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GETTING OUT

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

*

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

Two Poems by KG Newman

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Hot Rods

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

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

*

My Time Dilation

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

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

and I thought an increase in jogs
through thinned parking lots

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

I stacked my calendar. Had
another kid. Switched beer

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

feared beads drying on
my temples when stopping

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

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

to write down the exact
movements of a rabbit.

Use the dampness of my shirt
to delay my desiccation.

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

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

*

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

Reserved by Hayley Mitchell Haugen

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Reserved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Four Poems by Linda Laderman

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My Mother Holds Her Grief

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

*

I should have left you first

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

When We Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Fine China

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

*

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

Good Girls by Christina Kallery

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Good Girls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Microcosm by Katy Luxem

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Microcosm

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Kinds of Silence by Martin Willitts Jr

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Two Kinds of Silence

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

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

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

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

*

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

Sentences 294-300 by Scott Ferry

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

*

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

Three Poems by CL Bledsoe

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Dirty Sink

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

*

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

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

*

I Wish That I Could Cry Like You Cry

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

*

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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

My Mother’s Decluttering Is Gumming up the Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Lone Ranger by Julie L. Moore

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Lone Ranger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Inwards by Lynda Allen

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Inwards

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

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

*

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

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

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

A Fawn Has No Scent by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

A Fawn Has No Scent

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

*

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

How I Learned Prophecy by Tom Barlow

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

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

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

*

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

Masculinity by David Hanlon

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Masculinity

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

*

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

Witness by Mary McCarthy

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Witness

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Vivienne Popperl

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Velvet and Blue

          The Frenchman’s voice is velvet.
                    —Anthony Doerr

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

*

A Room
          -after Carolyn Forché

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

*

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

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Encounter at Gelson’s

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

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

*

Opening

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Karen Paul Holmes

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Bypass

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

He Only Liked Onions in Small Amounts

         for Chris, 1956-2017

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

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

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

*

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

Memento Mori, Memento Vivere by Mary Rohrer-Dann

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Memento Mori, Memento Vivere
           (for Alice Fitch)

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

The magnolia blossoms plummet
fast as my friend, gone

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

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

its pink glory like tambourines
shivering fragrance across the lawn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Three Poems by Lynne Knight

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Enough

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

*

Silent Pianos

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

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

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

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

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

*

Memoir

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

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

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

*

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

The end of childhood by Ellen Stone

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The end of childhood

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

*

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

Folly Beach by Paige Gilchrist

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Folly Beach

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Jennifer Abod

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Rethinking Pink

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

*

Dance Lesson

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

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

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

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

She’d want me
to let sorrow go.

*

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

Two Poems by Mary Ray Goehring

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My Father Ate Robins

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

*

Luna Moth

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

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

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

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

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

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

on the clear pane trying
to get to the light

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

I will tell you when you need to know.

*

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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Summer Between Seventh and Eighth Grade

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

*

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

Three Poems by Lexi Pelle

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Ode To My Mother’s Thong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

I Try On The Strapless Top

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

*

Bleach and Tone

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

*

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

Three Poems by Brent Martin

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True Stories of the Snow Hill Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Country Living Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

My Neighbor Buys Ammo on Payday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Forgiveness, I am still working on it by Gail Thomas

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Forgiveness, I am still working on it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Reclamation by Julie Pratt

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Reclamation

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Aloha by David Lee Garrison

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Aloha

Our fiftieth reunion and I still miss Marie.

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

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

Did you ever see a couple
so much in love?

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

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

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

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

the day she was born.

*

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

I Mention the Unmentionable In the Yoga Class by Roseanne Freed

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

I Mention the Unmentionable In the Yoga Class

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

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

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

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

*

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

The Splinter by Laura Ann Reed

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The Splinter

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

*

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

Five Poems by Jennifer Garfield

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

self portrait at 39

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

like a ship’s prow.
made waves wherever

i sailed.
now, i wear my stomach

to the pool,
laced with dermal scars

purpled in sunlight –
shame of having a body.

shame of not having
a body –

it’s all lost in the water.
i gush,

my vessel a berth,
beat, boom, ballast,

i bight in all directions
and no body has drowned me

yet. how to become invisible?
become mother.

water everywhere
and nowhere.

become buckets.
buckets of holes.

buckets of thighs.
hold every body afloat.

and the slipping away?
don’t mention it.

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

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

*

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

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

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

underwear for 3 days? you know
that question everyone asks

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

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

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

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

never again misunderstood.
enter can’t disappear

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

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

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

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

of a whale’s wet tongue,
he discovered something

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

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

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

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

marketing, we could escape
the sour breath of an enormous

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

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

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

it would help me sleep
if you could understand

the exact dimensions
of my cavern and send

some comfort provisions.
ear wax removal hacks,

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

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

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

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

and peaceful music,
which is still a language

i understand after all.

*

need
after Gabrielle Calvocoressi

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

*

try not to worry
after Diane Seuss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a small slip of flesh between everything
and nothing.

*

something must burn

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

*

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

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

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

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

Five Poems by Ann E. Wallace

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The Empty Casing

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

Just imagine.

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

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

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

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

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

*

Note to Self: Two Kindnesses, or One

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

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

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

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

*

Practice

I think I had the whole thing
wrong.

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

that I was the end point
of these battles

through chemo and vertigo,
that three decades of knowledge

were meant to save
me.

Turns out, my dry run
held a different purpose:

when first one daughter,
and then a second,

fell sick and sicker,
I should have been ready.

*

Water World

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

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

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

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

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

*

In Anticipation of an Elegy

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Tami Haaland

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Dog Beach

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Bat at Noon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Glass Hammer Time by Patrick Meeds

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Glass Hammer Time

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

*

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

Two Poems by Cheryl Baldi

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

THE DAY FALLING TO PIECES

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

*

AFTERLIFE

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Maple Street, Brevard NC by Carol Parris Krauss

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Maple Street, Brevard NC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

On it may stay his eye by Peter E. Murphy

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On it may stay his eye

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

peteremurphy.com / murphywriting.com

The Trip to Bountiful by Gary Fincke

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Trip to Bountiful

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

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

*

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

Revelation by Maree Reedman

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

Revelation
for my mother

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

You sat in your garage
on my old student chair;

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Low Tide

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

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

another pathway into the mystery.

*

Shade

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

*

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

Five Poems by Jennifer L Freed

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

How to Pack for the Move to Assisted Living

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

*

Yellow Tags

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

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

*

My Father Helps My Mother with Her Compression Socks

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

*

Remote Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Cutting My Father’s Hair

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

*

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

Two Poems by Lisa Zimmerman

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Love is Invincible is What I Wrote

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

*

Things My Friend Mary Said Years Before She Died

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

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

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

*

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

ONE ART’s 2024 Best of the Net nominations

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ONE ART’s 2024 Best of the Net nominations

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

*

Congratulations to all our nominees!

*

More information about Best of the Net here.

Everyone Has Better Parents by Robert Darken

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Everyone Has Better Parents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

The Artist’s Warbler by Sally Nacker

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The Artist’s Warbler

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Joshua Eric Williams

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[haiku]

no birds
to speak of
birthday rain

*

The dawn’s good

news: I’m glad,
though sorry for

the losses, cloudless
sky, and droughts

like dragging nights.
They’ll come again

with encased light
and shadow puppets,

but now, sunlight
dries the darkness

until I wish
for night again.

*

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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Sometimes there’s no freedom to love the world—

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

The sorrows of the body
hood your eyes.

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

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

*

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