Three Poems by Anna Gayle

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landscape with sex and middle school hallways
after Lynn Melnick

mostly men keep singing
and I do not know what to call
the space between my legs
until they tell me—thigh gap
pussy

mostly men keep singing
and I remember the blue-striped
wall of the tiled hallway
and I remember
rows of lockers blurring

mostly men keep singing
and I was a girl
when I learned to run
a song chasing me
in some major key
because there is so much
to be glad about

*

blessed are the meek

the hallways behind the sanctuary kept our secrets tucked under their orange
carpet. the games of giving

birth: we laid our girl bodies on freshly
vacuumed lines and opened our legs and

squeezed a hand. we understood babies needed fathers but did not know how
fathers became themselves.

we did not ask questions: we brought boys to the back of the church to play
house and sometimes

let them kiss our mouths and sometimes
let them tackle us to the ground and sometimes

let our skirts gather at our waists, cotton lifting like halos over our heads.

we knew our shoulders were as secret as our knees; we knew sin began wit
sight and once we were seen

we could be touched, but not forgiven.
we knew Jesus died with his body on display,

so we let the boys undo our buttons and pin our palms to the stucco walls and
we took turns sacrificing.

*

in the beginning

            The man said, “The woman you put here with me—
                        she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” Genesis 3:12

truth be told, Adam was the first body
violated in his sleep.

God dipped holy hands
between clay flesh and out of a rib

made permission
for men to do as he did.

the men I know say they are faithless,
but if they did not believe in Adam’s God

they would not know practices
as ancient as these:

entering an unconscious body.
breaking skin to see it bleed.

making soil of a wound
and naming each bloom

(even the weeds, even their seeds)

demanding a body, any body,
warm and thirsty.

molding miracles in cavities
and calling it good.

ending stories with words
like asking for it

and calling it good.

               Note: this poem borrows part of its first line
                           from “Confession” by Leila Chatti

*

Anna Gayle is a poet, educator, and artist whose work explores themes of black womanhood, collective femininity, and chronic illness. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Oregon State University where she serves as the arts & comics editor for literary magazine 45th Parallel. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in Rogue Agent, The Mantle, Thimble Lit Magazine, and Empty House Press. Anna’s work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize.

Distant by Alina Macneal

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Distant

When you don’t come home for dinner
I check the calendar.

Boston. Oh. San Diego. Oh.
Or nothing. I like nothing. I like losing track of you.

I let dishes pile in the sink. Pour a vodka tonic.
Put on Lucinda Williams.

If you opened the door now, jacket over your elbow,
I’d be disappointed.

Did you remember I was going out? I’d say.
And I’d go.

Sometimes we touch along the edges
where our circles overlap,

then spin away, silent
like planets.

*

Alina Macneal is a Philadelphia-based educator, writer, and architect. Her poems have appeared in Apiary, Poems for the Writing, The World to Come, Poetry 24, Welcome to the Resistance, and other publications. Born in Poland, she came to the US with her family as a child, growing up bilingual in the mono-lingual suburbs of St. Louis. She lives in University City and has been on the faculty at Drexel University for 30 years.

Ordinary Substance by Laura Grace Weldon

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Ordinary Substance

Our implausibly tough luck
suggests the floor is lava,
the apple is poison,
the underbed monster
is on the loose

yet proves, time after time,

benevolent strangers,
enchanted gardens, and
magic potions are also real
each entirely made of
an ordinary substance—

Gratitude.

Don’t imagine some
sweet scented gauzy thing
held together with whispers.

Her power grows muscled
with use. It can be summoned
instantly, even during the most
wretched trials.
Especially then.

Gratitude’s face may be bittersweet,
but her feet
are on the ground.
Try to knock her down,
she will rise for another round.
She will rise and rise and rise.
You will rise with her.

*

Laura Grace Weldon lives on a small ramshackle farm where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card each week. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Connect with her at lauragraceweldon.com and on the twits @earnestdrollery.

How to Prep for the Next Apocalypse by Vernita Hall

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How to Prep for the Next Apocalypse
Stockpile toilet paper.
Make amends. Hurry.
Avoid snakes religiously. That apple a day—a banana instead?
Pack a deck of cards. The Cherubim is a fiend for solitaire.
Hoist two flags: Stars and Stripes, Confederate. What the hell.
Pascal’s wager on belief in God? (Three out of four, you win.) Hedge your bet: believe.
Light a candle. Say a prayer. Toss salt over your left shoulder.
Place sugar cubes in your pockets for those pale horses parading past. Couldn’t hurt to
get on their good side.
If you spy moon-eyed, slow-mo marchers slide your way, stiff-armed like sleepwalkers,
don’t shake their hands, don’t offer them candy. They are not trick-or-treaters.
Draft contingency plans. Perhaps reincarnation, as a cockroach or tardigrade.
When you hear the chorus sing, hold your applause until the end.
Should you feel your body rising, yes—do go into the light. You’ll be eternally grateful.
If not, better luck next time.
*
Vernita Hall is the author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color, winner of the Willow Books Grand Prize and of the Robert Creeley Prize from Marsh Hawk Press; and The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians, winner of the Moonstone Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, American Poetry Review, African American Review, Barrow Street, The Common, River Styx, The Hopkins Review, Arts & Letters, and Obsidian. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College and serves on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories.

four ‘Memory’ poems by Luke Johnson

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Memory

of my mother
with a sponge

and a bucket
of a bleach.

How she’d
weep

while scrubbing
words

from white tile
my mute

sister scrawled
in crayon

and ask
for a melody,

the pitch
of a bird,

to rise
from my lips

and lead
her out,

into the
radiant snow.

*

Memory

of my sister
losing

words
like miniature

combs
and my

mother
behind

her
picking up

pieces.
But never

the right
color

right comb,
always

the wrong
word:

happy instead
of help

wither
instead

of water,
the not

of her
tongue

turned
to know.

*

Memory

of my ear against
the ground
& my mother
above me
begging for answers.
How the nest
began
with a crack
in the concrete
then moved
up the walls,
like fears
in the form
of a question.

*

Memory

of the ghostly
croon of Emmylou

while my mom
clipped mint

and pruned bovine
and collected

peas so sweet
I thought

of the fair
and cold coke

and cotton candy
shared between

my sister’s
hands and mine,

while we circled
sky in summer

and saw nothing
but blue

nothing but birds,
weaving

their blurred
calligraphy.

*

Luke Johnson’s poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Frontier, Cortland Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press, The Vassar Miller Award and is forthcoming fall 2023 from Texas Review Press. You can find more of his poetry at lukethepoet.com or connect at Twitter at @Lukesrant.

johnny got his gun by Marsha Owens

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johnny got his gun*

as leaves fall into brown piles splashed
with red and while the wind romps across
my yard, i drink coffee and read about troops
marching through headlines in Ukraine
leaving behind corpses just like in the U.S.,
but the bodies here are at the mall where she
went shopping and was gunned down,
and at the school where children squirmed
in their desks, not having learned yet they
will never get old because on this day—
pick a day, any day—someone has a gun
bought at the gun show and someone needs
to kill because he’s mad because she, the bitch,
refused to have sex or because baby cried
all night. . .so johnny got his gun, sits now
at the stoplight, pissed and driven to kill
anybody because he can, and not until later
do we see the video surveillance, how he pulled
slowly into the school parking lot, stepped out
of his car, calm, like he was just coming home
from work, something slung over his shoulder,
like it was just his day to take out the trash.

*(Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo)

*

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA,. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The Sun, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Dead Mule, and Streetlight Anthology. She co-edited the poetry anthology, Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook, She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning, is available at Finishing Line Press.

I Started Early, by Carolyn Miller

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I Started Early,

took my dog, the one that has been dead now
for more than sixty years, and I took some Duncan Hines
blueberry muffins tied in a bandanna, and
my TWA bag and the itinerary for my bicycle trip
to Europe in 1961 and the pop-up card that Bill Henry
made to celebrate my trip, and a baby nightgown
that ties at the bottom, a silver bracelet,
my mother’s diamond ring, and my white suitcase
with a lining of blue taffeta, and we set out toward
Big Piney by way of the German village
my great-grandfather escaped from, the one
that is no longer there, and we looked around
at the empty fields and wondered where
my cousins were, the grandchildren
of my grandfather’s brother, but no one came
along the road and no doors were there
to knock on. Then we set out for Ireland,
though I didn’t know how to find the place
Peter and Bridget Kelley fled from, what county,
what low house, what blasted fields they left behind,
so we sat in a green field, my dog and I, and thanked them
for their courage and their desperation, and I sang
a little song to the ocean Emily never saw,
and to the journey and my dog, who even then
was digging in the dirt, still hoping for a groundhog,
and finally I struggled to my feet and started off
for Big Piney Township and the farm, the lost town
and the lost farm, the lost cave and the spring
and the bullfrogs in the spring branch, calling.

*

Carolyn Miller is a poet, painter, and freelance writer/editor living in San Francisco. Her books of poetry are Route 66 and Its Sorrows (Terrapin Books), Light, Moving (Sixteen Rivers Press), and After Cocteau (Sixteen Rivers Press), and her essays have appeared in The Sun and The Missouri Review. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and American Life in Poetry, and have appeared in Smartish Pace, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Georgia Review, among other journals.

The Boy by Karen Friedland

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The Boy

Was 7 or 8 years old,
only wanted to kill the baby, tiny fish
that idyllic summer day—

to gather them in warm runnels,
then throw down armloads of sand,
then stomp them
with all his might.

His mother sat placidly nearby,
reading a book;
his baby sister
dug industriously with a tiny trowel.

I sat feet away,
aghast
at this gleeful mass murder,
but mute.

Because on beautiful summer days,
all the world over,
boys will be boys.

*

A nonprofit grant writer by day, Karen Friedland’s poems have been published in Constellations, Nixes Mate Review, Vox Populi, and others. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received the 59th Moon Prize from Writing in a Women’s Voice, and had a poem hanging for a year in Boston’s City Hall for a year. Her books are Places That Are Gone and Tales from the Teacup Palace. She lives in West Roxbury, MA and is currently duking it out with incurable ovarian cancer.

Hunger Is the Opposite of the First Dandelions in the Grass by Lisa Zimmerman

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Hunger Is the Opposite of the First Dandelions in the Grass

The rumple of discarded baggage is my exhaustion upon waking.
How can a suitcase carry more darkness when closed?
It is a sad cave left on an empty train platform.

The darkness stands between snowy tree branches,
watching the sparrow who watches the birdfeeder.
Somewhere there is a sparkle. The light
presenting itself just before nightfall is useless,
even with its golden seam, its momentary fanfare.

Darkness is helpful, and not, depending on where
you don’t look, or how you imagine birds and seeds.
Darkness against anyone’s body is so complete,
so quiet, until they’re touched by someone.
Then—where does that bright white singing come from?

*

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award winner) The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Redbook, The Sun, SWWIM Every Day, Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Vox Populi, Book of Matches, and many other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Northern Colorado and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

for luck: an Arkansas Sonnet by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

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for luck: an Arkansas Sonnet

There is no new weather here /so close to the well of being
wasp in the lampstand tick in the beard /moon visible day and night
but I’m grateful for azaleas /coming back grateful for muck boots
for folks who fix things/ for hummingbirds’ full feeders
and dead carpenter ants for gardens and hoes and summer
tomatoes above all grateful for /walking the train tracks
with two new pennies/ you and me looking for luck.

*

Wendy Taylor Carlisle was born in Manhattan, raised in Bermuda, Connecticut and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and lives now in the Arkansas Ozarks in a house she built in 1980. She has an MA from The University of Arkansas and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, 2019), Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Press, 2008) and Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Press, 2000.) Chapbooks include They Went to the Beach to Play (Locofo Chaps, 2016), Chap Book (Platypus Press, 2016), Persephone on the Metro (MadHat press, 2014), The Storage of Angels (Slow Water Press, 2008), and After Happily Ever After (Two River Chapbooks, 2003.) Her work appears in multiple anthologies.

Second Marriage by Daniel Romo

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Second Marriage

Everyone knows sequels are usually worse
than the original and second-guessing isn’t

preferable to simply going with your gut.
I’m all for stars being stuck to the top of

the page noting a child’s best efforts, but
why is gold the standard when silver’s so

much prettier? I have loved and lost and
learned that beating oneself up only ends

in a draw. Gladwell says to become an
expert at something it takes 10,000 hours

of practice, but I wonder how many hours
it takes to become just okay at something

you need simply to get by and if one can
just fake it until they break it. I’m still

learning the value of domesticity—how to
maximize dishwasher space and when to

confess to my wife that my soul feels like
it’s been forgotten in the dryer and keeps

tumbling with each new load. Rocky loses
in the first film but wins in the next because

I imagine he vowed he and Adrian will never
throw in the towel and in the process has

learned how to how do his own laundry,
how to separate the light from the dark,

the pain from the stain.

*

Daniel Romo is the author of Bum Knees and Grieving Sunsets (FlowerSong Press 2023), Moonlighting as an Avalanche (Tebot Bach 2021), Apologies in Reverse (FutureCycle Press 2019), and other books. His writing and photography can be found in The Los Angeles Review, Yemassee, Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. He received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, and he lives, teaches, and rides his bikes in Long Beach, CA. More at danieljromo.com.

Camera Man by Ethel Rackin

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Camera Man

I had to swim part way there because the land was submerged
or maybe hadn’t been there in the first place, for all I knew.
The stripes of blue and gold were the same for both of us—
gender neutral? Not exactly, but close enough.
You wore your best encampment and I wore the jeans
I had left. I couldn’t help myself
from falling asleep: the waves, the paddling,
the fatigue, treated (not very well) by 30 mg.
It was a miracle but only if you could afford it.
All of the new thinking is like…. Anyway, just as
someone stole the only photo I had left of that
time, a photo simultaneously sad and magical,
I lit a fire under us. You wouldn’t have minded
except now you and everyone you knew
had to get involved, to which I responded
by asking exactly who you were and what
business you had taking my picture after all.

*

Ethel Rackin is the author of three books of poetry: The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013); Go On (Parlor Press, 2016); and Evening (Furniture Press, 2017). Her new teaching text is Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing (Broadview Press, 2022).

Our 3-Ring Kitchen by Jessica D. Thompson

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Our 3-Ring Kitchen

mother did the laundry
in our eat-in kitchen

like a trained circus animal
the wringer-washer

sat in a corner
waiting to be led

to the arena
linoleum patchwork

of green and white squares
marked with trails

from years of migrations
to a porcelain sink

the rubber hose
a curious trunk

this was the room
where my sister would sit

alone long after
the dishes were done

like a feral girl
refusing to eat

everything on her plate
her bible-black eyes

a flashing stampede
toward the ring leader

who ruled
from the head of our table

*

Jessica D. Thompson’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Appalachian Review, Still: the Journal, the Midwest Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and the Southern Review as well as in anthologies such as “Women Speak, Vol. 7,” Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. One of her short poems was nominated for a Rhysling Award in 2007. Her chapbook, “Bullets and Blank Bibles,” (Liquid Paper Press) was published by Nerve Cowboy in 2013. She was a finalist in the Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize (Heartland Review) in 2012 and 2022. Her first full length poetry collection, “Daybreak and Deep,” (Kelsay Books, 2022), was a finalist in the American Book Fest Best Books of 2022 for Narrative Poetry. She lives with her husband, Phil, and their rescue dog, Gloria, on 25 acres in Southern Indiana.

The Hummingbird by Kaecey McCormick

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The Hummingbird
            under the umbrella on the back patio, after Rilke

From flying the merry-go-round of umbrella ribs,
she has grown so panicked she cannot see
anything else. It seems to her a shroud
that allows no passage; yet beyond it,
the world awaits her return.

She brushes up against the cloth, again and again,
until the bright flashing of her wings
becomes a zoetrope, telling the same story
over and over; in it, another beautiful creature
becomes caged.

Only when she slows to rest, tiny feet perched
on a wooden spoke, does the ending appear—
to set herself free, all she need do is fly
in a different direction.

*

Kaecey McCormick is a writer and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has found a home in different journals, including SIXFOLD, Red Earth Review, and Clockhouse as well as her chapbooks Sleeping with Demons (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and Pixelated Tears (Prolific Press, 2018). When not writing, you can find her climbing a mountain, painting, or curled up with a book and a mug of hot tea. Connect at kaeceymccormick.com.

Ghost period by Wendy Kagan

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Ghost period

Then the heat vanished
      and she was here again:

my maidenhood, a vestige of her,
      come for one more visit

(six months after
      what I thought was her last)

to leave behind
      her pale pink plush—

barely there, translucent
      as a moth’s wing-print.

Just as the tattered heads
      of asters, on warm

November days, peek out late
      then get snowed over,

she was out of
      step with the order of things

but I flickered up to see her anyway
      as if meeting an old flame

who’d given no end of trouble
      yet still brought stirrings.

She came without throbs
      that some might feel

the pelvis a bowl of fire
      empty as a phantom limb.

No, this body
      declared it was

a kid again, all day
      I felt the old currents

cartwheel through

*

Wendy Kagan lives and writes in a converted barn in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Her poems have appeared in The Baffler, Chronogram, and Poetry Distillery. She was named a finalist for the David Wade Hogue Poetry Scholarship “Martha Award” in 2022.

numb by Giana Longo

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numb

atta girl is not what the fathers
belt to the daughters in cleats

jogging over poorly cut grass
and avoiding contact.

it’s what they yell to the ones
who brace themselves for impact

hip-checking opponents
falling to the ground with hard bruises

and getting up as if there were not
grass stains, bright green and brown

streak marks like tire treads
from unstopping cars, along their sturdy legs,

outstretched arms and tender sides
pain too real for anything but stifling.

those are the girls who hear the praise
for taking on hell, pretending to feel nothing

*

Giana Longo is a writer of creative nonfiction and poetry from Philadelphia. Her poetry has appeared in Blue Marble Review and Adanna Literary Journal, and her articles have been featured in Philadelphia Magazine. Currently, she is working as a copy editor and freelance writer while completing her MA in Writing Studies at Saint Joseph’s University.

Paper Dolls by Bonnie Proudfoot

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Paper Dolls

I used to sit on the floor of the screened-in porch
with my favorite cousin, ten years older,

watch her cut paper dolls, linked bodies tumbling
out of their paper frame. As soon as I was old enough,

I wanted scissors in my hand. The best ones
were my grandmother’s sewing scissors, so sharp,

I could fold over paper, cut side to side to make a family
of girls holding hands, as I got older, cut head-to-head,

the dolls all joined at the top, made a star, like when
the camera looked down on the June Taylor dancers

on the stage of the Jackie Gleason show. I watched
my cousin’s hands, so careful at cutting on the line,

how she knew how to fold, where to begin and end,
and I wanted to see the outline, the left-over paper,

how the grain of the table or pattern of a skirt
filled the gaps where the dolls used to be. I love how

scissors make a noise a little like chewing, and how
my young sons made chewing faces when they

learned how to snip. I did it too, watching them
twitch their noses, work their jaws and teeth,

and I realize I’m also talking about memory,
not about watching the self tumble into the world,

but about how the mind holds time, moments folded
like paper, linked and tumbling out of their frame.

*

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

Two Poems by Sandra Kohler

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Alive

Walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, a friend says to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” [and] Beckett answers, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”

How far would you go? Odysseus
went as far as one can to find
a different answer: descending
to the underworld he meets
Achilles, who tells him he would
rather be the lowliest living serf
that king of all the dead.

I think of my dead brother’s widow,
who in her anger at the awfulness
of the current state of the world,
announces at one new horror
that she’s happy her husband
isn’t alive, doesn’t have to see
this latest outrage. Is my brother,
somewhere in the kingdom
of the dead, happy to be dead?

*

Riddled

On the fourth day of the first month of the year
2020, first or last of a decade, my granddaughter
hands me a perfectly unused spoon of rhetorical
questions. All of them stump me, I know answers

to none. If I were a stump, I’d show my age in
rings, not by my ignorance when questioned.
All of the rings I wear come down to one. It is
not the ring that triggers the door to all matter.

All that matters is the ring, the spoon, the question.
The child who asks it. No, that is not all. There is
a world elsewhere. A world here and there, here
and here, in each question, each object, answer,

perception. No one can know them all. All
one can do when asked is stump for replies,
replay, repicture the elements which pose
the riddles, demand their one answer.

*

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

Two Poems by Michelle Wiegers

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Membership Card

A letter arrives with his name on it,
a request to join the American Legion.
Honey, they want me to be a member,
to honor me for my Naval Service–
only twenty-five dollars, he asks.
An invitation addressed only to him,
twenty-five dollars to once again belong.

He cuts out the sample membership card,
forgetting there is any fee to pay,
like a small child pretending
to be grown up, he tucks it inside his wallet,
an anchor to keep him in this life
even as the ship of his mind
drifts on towards the next.

*

Pressed

There’s a sterile beauty
in this small purple flower
pressed between
two panes of glass,
its yellow center
still holding onto a wisp
of translucent green stem,
illuminated in the sunlight.

His wife, once a wildflower
blowing in the wind,
is a permanent display
in the museum
of his incessant demands.
He’s plucked her over and over,
pressed her between his panes
of perfection and displeasure
until all that is left
is a flattened viola bloom
he hangs, perfectly framed.

*

Michelle Wiegers is a poet, creative writer and mind-body life coach based in Southern Vermont. Her poems are inspired by her mind-body recovery from decades of chronic symptoms, the Vermont landscape and her own backyard. Her work has appeared in How to Love the World, The Path to Kindness, Birchsong and Third Wednesday, among others. In her coaching and teaching work, she is a passionate advocate for helping chronic pain and fatigue sufferers heal. michellewiegers.com

STEADY by Anne Whitehouse

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STEADY

There are ways of being steady—
unmoving, like a rock,
or in an even motion,
like metronome or clock.

Practicing balance, like a tree
rooted and branching.
With intention, I found my place
and held it, trembling.

Another form of steadiness
is simply not to fall.
Be ready to flee or stay.
Change happens to us all.

*

Anne Whitehouse’s most recent poetry collection is Outside from the Inside (Dos Madres Press, 2020), and her most recent chapbook is Escaping Lee Miller (Ethel Zine and Micro Press, 2021). She is also the author of a novel, Fall Love, and has recently published several essays about Edgar Allan Poe. www.annewhitehouse.com

Memories are rose petals by Beth Oast Williams

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Memories are rose petals

how they drop like the outline
of angel wings, words mis-spelled
trying to be something
they are not. I close my eyes
and the ping, prod, knock
on the door of my mind
says Wake up. How it’s impossible
to sleep when someone wants
to reach you. What pricks
the skin is thorn, but the way it rubs
the edge of imagination
is often velvet.
Here my mother’s smoke
is nothing but a lung memory,
drowned out by piano.
How her fingers ran laps
around Rhapsody in Blue,
how I lingered to hear
if she stumbled. What it meant
to her, I never learned.
Sometimes I imagine her soul
in an Outer Banks breeze,
how that last month she bundled
up and sat on the sand.
Other times I embrace
the idea of hurricane,
how every way out of this life
is storm. I ask the weather
to hear me and all I get
are fallen leaves.
I realize I do not sleep
on a pea, but something deep
underneath keeps bothering.

*

Beth Oast Williams’s poetry has been accepted for publication in Leon Literary Review, SWWIM Everyday, Wisconsin Review, Glass Mountain, GASHER, Fjords Review, and Rattle’s Poets Respond, among others. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Riding Horses in the Harbor, was published in 2020.

Let’s Go Out for Breakfast, I Say to Myself by Laura Foley

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Let’s Go Out for Breakfast, I Say to Myself

I rush my card for the famous poet’s birthday
to the biggest Post Office at eight on Monday
so it won’t arrive late,
card with a green bamboo jungle,
a panda bear looking content,
which I wrote reminded me of him.
At the hipster café, I order a latte,
but it’s bitter, the bagel too salty to eat.
I spend the morning on a stool,
watching strangers on the street,
March winds buffeting their eyes
with winter dust. At lunch I meet my beloved,
her teaching gig done,
but the cool taco truck’s closed,
Not enough staff, explains the handmade sign.
We make our hungry way home,
in separate cars,
and I stop at the railroad crossing.
Last November, her student backed onto the tracks,
didn’t see the oncoming train.
I pause at the makeshift shrine—
a wooden cross, piles of basketballs,
plastic flowers, teddy bears.
Though the postman told me the card will arrive late,
though the coffee was undrinkable,
the bagel inedible,
the taco place closed,
though everyone has dust in their eyes,
for one moment I saw it:
a single ash leaf lifting upward,
spiraling over the railroad tracks,
brown, but somehow catching the light,
so it gleamed in passing,
spinning out of sight.

*

Laura Foley is the author of eight poetry collections. Everything We Need: Poems from El Camino was released, in winter 2022. It’s This is due out in Spring 2023. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, One Art Poetry, Poetry Society London, Crannog Magazine (Ireland), DMQ Review, Atlanta Review, Mason Street, JAMA, and many others. Her work has been included in many anthologies such as: Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Laura lives with her wife, Clara Gimenez, among the hills of Vermont. http://www.laurafoley.net

Child Fears, 1956 by Laura Ann Reed

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Child Fears, 1956
                       —After Jim Harrison

Jellyfish. Egg whites. False teeth.
Undertows. Mean kids. Bomb drills.
The neighbors’ dog that bit off my kitten’s head.
Old T.V. newsreels of Nazis. Polio.
My aunt with the goiter and bulging eyes.
Snakes on the fire trail. Bobcats in the canyon.
Bees in the grass. Cat poop in the sandbox.
Walk-in closets. Rip tides. The circus.
My grandfather’s open coffin.
The flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.
Mussorgsky’s The Night on Bald Mountain.
Pictures of missing children on milk cartons.
The shadow of my hand on the wall.
Falling into the hole they dug for my grandfather.

*

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

It’s Not Despair by Daniel Brennan

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It’s Not Despair
A house sale on Fire Island uncovered approximately 200 ‘lost’ tapes of music mixes, dated from 1983-1999. The music, which was made during the height of the AIDS crisis, lives as a history for a lost generation of gay men.

It’s not despair or loss yet it’s
the creak of the spiral staircase
under pool-slicked feet
it’s the wisping kimono catching an
August breeze through the cracked
door it’s his & his & his
heart thundering onto the tape’s
B side it’s Donna and she has
spread her arms wide for them
she has cast her spell and sent
them swirling in a dervish of
sweat of lips of vodka in cheap
plastic cups it’s two men keeping
their embrace despite the summer
heat infiltrating their bedroom it’s
the boulevard clapping with
sun it’s deer wandering onto
the path despite the buzzing throngs
of boys with eyes cut into jewels
mid-high it’s the way the ocean
laps at their exposed thighs bronzed
and taught as a piano wire
it’s them howling at the moon
as they climax well into the dark
with a house party growling
below them it’s knowing they
are not alone here it’s not
despair it’s not
loss it’s not
the end
yet it’s this moment where they are still
the lost boys, singing deep into
the night.

*

Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a resident of New York City, but grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania (ultimately serving as a focused source of ecology-based inspiration). As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Brennan’s work aims to capture both the vastness we feel in the face of our ever-changing planet, while confronting our own bodies and the daunting elements of intimacy we feel every day. His work has appeared in CP Quarterly, Grand Little Things, Feral Poetry, with forthcoming work in the Garfield Lake Review and New Verse News. He currently lives in Manhattan, and works full-time in advertising.

Praise Poem for the Ordinary by Marjorie Maddox

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Praise Poem for the Ordinary

For the pebble, the worm, the clothesline,
the warm bread, the simple turn of head
that says, “I hear you,” the burr that lets go
on its own, the bluebird that returns to perch
where the dogwood’s blossoms glow, the dim
light outside, the bright light within, the low
hum of hope when the unseen grows deep
in the hole you’ve dug in dry dirt
on an ordinary afternoon
just this side of Eden’s
repeated hallelujahs.

*

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

Lying Is a Feeling by Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes

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Lying Is a Feeling
           after Julian Comeau

I wake up & feel worse,
text my friends with compliments
to make them blush,
& fill me with some sugar I can’t
otherwise touch. I let my body vacillate
between oppressive heat & canned cold
of A/C. Shifting sensation to distract
from the gurgling vibrations,
the sick feeling no doctor seems to understand.
Two years into it & I think all we can wish for are blankets
of decadence over every day’s little death.

I’ve started drinking Coke again,
when I get out of the pool the sweetness
in harmony with the heat.
I guess in the end I’d rather we all burn
then take off our clothes & crawl
into some hollow of ice to dream of the sun & die.

& am I worth the effort? No one wants
to hear maybe we’d be more useful dead,
so concerned with themselves. I’m concerned
about you, plural. All I want is to be taken care
of, each touch, each live nerve a marvel.
Until then, I’ll fold in you in close.

Just let me love you, this flame bright at the end of a match.

How many people died so I could eat my breakfast
in the plastic Adirondack chair in the yard
of the perfectly good neighborhood of the house
we can afford to rent but never to own?

I’m not even depressed right now;
sometimes I just can’t lie anymore.

My kid sings to herself,
Lying is a feeling.
Lying is a feeling.

Whether she means collapsing flat or untruths,
I don’t know, but the words in her voice shimmer,
light reflecting off a glass.

In my headphones, he sings,
I’m sorry I’m a downer.
I’m a mess now; it’s true.
Searching for a feeling

& the feeling is you, I sing,
replacing his fourth line.

When I search for sugar
to flood me, I’m searching for a feeling.

When my love unfolds
to the edge, lying is a feeling.

When my existence seems heavier
than my use, I’m searching for a feeling,
(lying is a feeling,)
& the feeling is you.

*

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes was born in Harrisburg, PA and has a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA from George Mason University. She has appeared in The Rumpus, Cartridge Lit, Gulf Stream Lit, Crab Fat Magazine, and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her book, Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, is out from Mason Jar Press.

Finding a Split Pod by M. Nasorri Pavone

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Finding a Split Pod

The sunlit gold of its concavity
gleamed treasure to me
in the smoothly paved alley
behind a high-rise and two motels.
I thought jewelry case.
It could have slipped out
of Room 7 with the two lovers
who went through it like they did
the sheets and the towels,
the sealed cups and the soap.
The treasure humbled in my hand:
one half of a split pod,
feather canoe, a seed vessel
sent forth to find earth
by the mother vine
up against a white wall.
The pod cradled its gold
with a shell as carved
and wrinkled as a walnut.
I looked for the other half
and there it was, but why
do that? And you know
I married the two and they fit.
So, here’s their story. They began
as one and grew together.
There was falling and a force
that wrenched them in two,
but their splitting up,
as unfavorable as that sounds
from a narrative standpoint,
did expect a birth.
If he and I ever began
somewhere as one it makes sense
that we’d have no memory of it,
no awareness of each other
because no other
would have existed then.
In his embrace I am sealed.
We fasten to each other
with eyes, lips, bellies.
When we pull away
it may be for a brief
or the longest while
but there it is: the wide open space.
What rattles between us
will break out, get some air,
find other ways in.

*

M. Nasorri Pavone’s poetry has appeared in River Styx, One, b o d y, Sycamore Review, New Letters, The Cortland Review, The Citron Review, Innisfree, Rhino, DMQ Review, Pirene’s Fountain, I-70 Review and others. She’s been anthologized in Beyond the Lyric Moment (Tebot Bach, 2014), and has been nominated for Best of the Net and twice for a Pushcart Prize.

Guilt by Timothy Green

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Guilt

A black bear lounges in the cheatgrass,
chewing at our trash. It must have found
the chicken we’d forgotten in the freezer.
Five pounds of free range meat, meaning
that when the meat could move, the bird

had its own two square feet in which
it could turn its two feet. That if it so chose,
it didn’t have to touch its neighbor. At one
end of the grow-house was a door to the sky.
How the brighter light must have beckoned.

By law, that door must be open half the day.
The dirt run on the other side must have one
living plant. But the birds don’t care. Bred
for their size and stupidity, they spend their
40 days at the feed trough, gaining strength

in the constant jostle for premium space.
It’s not unlike the bears in Alaska who fight
for the right to have salmon leap into their
mouths. But also it’s different. For three years
in our freezer, water from that warehouse

that was stored in the muscle of our chicken
sublimated and refroze, forming ice where
the ice shouldn’t be. Now the meat isn’t tender.
But the black bear doesn’t care, and its fur
is a cinnamon. It looks so soft in the sunlight

that it calls us all to sleep. Soon we’ll call
our bravest neighbor, who will run at the bear
with a pair of pots. From a distance we’ll join
in the banging. It’s for his own good.
A problem bear might be shot. But for now,

let him eat. Body numb with impossible pleasure,
only his mouth is moving, his muzzle buried
in the grease and the goo of the garbage bag,
as if these were the fallen shards of heaven.
For a black bear in the dry grass, they are.

*

Timothy Green works as editor of Rattle and is the author of American Fractal (Red Hen Press). He also serves on the board of the Wrightwood Arts Center and is a contributing columnist for the Press-Enterprise.

The Stranger by Roseanne Freed

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

The Stranger

At my mother’s funeral the rabbi asked,
Who wants to see the body before we close the coffin?
It was good to see her. Wrapped

in a white cloth, she looked peaceful,
like the nun she’d always wanted to be.
I even kissed her cold forehead.

To help us accept our daughter had died
I knew her father and I had to see her,
had to see the body.

We didn’t recognize the person
in the coffin, arms folded across her chest,
at our private viewing. Pain

deeply etched on this stranger’s
face, her cheeks fevered, and her belly
—oh god her belly — inflated

from the total bowel blockage
looked nine-months pregnant.
I hoped my husband didn’t notice.

We stared silently, suffocated
by the truth
of how much she’d suffered.

I touched her hand,
and kissed her cold forehead.
It didn’t comfort.

I don’t know how people take pictures
or cut off locks of hair
from their beloveds’ bodies.

I lit the candles on the table,
held my spouse’s hand,
and we both wept.

*

Poet Roseanne Freed was born in South Africa. After the death of her daughter she turned to poetry to help with her grief. Her poetry has been published in ONE ART, Verse-Virtual, and MacQueen’s Quinterly among others. She’s a Best of the Net 2022 nominee. She and her husband live in Los Angeles.

Redundant Negation: A Bilinguacultural Paradox by Yuan Changming

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Redundant Negation: A Bilinguacultural Paradox

Since in both English and Chinese
Negatives can be redundant rather
Than negate anything or anybody
As in, say, I don’t know if it’s not busy
Or 好不热闹 [how not busy it is]

Why must English & Chinese speakers
Keep rejecting, denying, refusing, negating
Each other even when they use no
Negatives in their “speech acts,” especially
When they talk across the pacific?

*

Yuan Changming hails with Allen Yuan from poetrypacific.blogspot.ca. Credits include 12 Pushcart nominations & 15 chapbooks, most recently Sinosaure (Redhawk Publications). Besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline, Poetry Daily and nearly 2,000 others, across 49 countries, Yuan served on the jury, and was nominated, for Canada’s National Magazine Awards (poetry category).

Listening to Etta by Carolyn Miller

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Listening to Etta

What is love, anyway?
It must be this pain, this joy,
this wanting the lover’s body,
then the touch of his skin. Like rain
falling on the burned trees
and dry land. Like the salmon
coming back, the white hellebore
blooming on the kitchen table.
That kind of mercy, that kind of grace.
The sense of finally coming home
amid the world’s festival of sorrows,
its carnival of loss. It must be
the moments we can grasp
in the stream of longing,
my new/old love, my lost and found.
Have mercy, baby.

*

Carolyn Miller is a poet, painter, and freelance writer/editor living in San Francisco. Her books of poetry are Route 66 and Its Sorrows (Terrapin Books), Light, Moving (Sixteen Rivers Press), and After Cocteau (Sixteen Rivers Press), and her essays have appeared in The Sun and The Missouri Review. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and American Life in Poetry, and have appeared in Smartish Pace, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Georgia Review, among other journals.

D’Anjou by Sandra Rivers-Gill

~ ONE ART ~ 14 Comments

D’Anjou
— for George Floyd

I had forgotten its coolness I carry
from ice box to counter slab.

A pear’s taste is a hot commodity,
crisp and sweet.
Its body bares a certified label —
the inspector’s choice.

Its unbroken skin sits silent
on my countertop.

The greenish-gold of its silhouette
does not wobble or
collapse like a cracked egg.

Funny how present tense
can worm its way into a memory.

When I was a young girl,
the white woman next door grew pear trees —
littered the ground with their fruit.

I had forgotten.
By summer’s end she donned a straw hat,
climbed the ladder to her constellation of crops,
shared them with my brother and me.
The pears sat in our kitchen windowsill.
Our noses pressed against the scent
till they were ripe enough.

Now I stand at my kitchen counter
paring the skin from its flesh.

Its fresh tears stream in my hands.

I had forgotten pears ripen
at room temperature,
in their cultural climate.

I remember the instructions
that guarantee a pear’s ripeness:
simply press its neck.

*

A native of Toledo, Ohio, Sandra Rivers-Gill is a writer, performer, and playwright. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies, including Of Rust and Glass, Common Threads, Poetry X Hunger, Death Never Dies, Kissing Dynamite, Mock Turtle, and Braided Way Magazine.

Social Distancing by Diane Averill

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Social Distancing

The face of a news anchor on my big-screen TV
turns emoji-sad. “And now we’ll focus on “The Homeless Problem.”
An earnest young reporter in a Patagonia jacket appears on the screen while
A blood-red geranium petal falls,
floats from my window box to the concrete below
as I look down at him from my sixth-floor condo.
He tells viewers that more and more people appear each day,
making it sound like a magic trick.

A shadow steps out of a blue tarp tent
right behind him.
A woman curled on a curb cries under shifty clouds.
The reporter zooms in to ask her why.
“I was raped one night and am afraid to go to sleep.”
He nods sympathetically then turns away,
showing us three men fighting with sticks
and I know this happens every day.

Avoiding them,
he sweeps along the concrete, showing the detritus of human tragedy:
used needles, Styrofoam plates and cups. Such a public nuisance.
People sit crowded around eating from brown paper bags
given to them by shelters where they no longer are able
to eat or shower inside. He shakes his head in dismay.

I slide under my flowered comforter,
click the remote: blank screen.
I don’t know if I’ll get my old job back,
or what is coming next,
so I count my Gratitudes one more time.

*

Diane Averill’s first book, Branches Doubled Over With Fruit, (University of Florida Press) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award as was her second book, Beautiful Obstacles, (Blue Light Press). Her latest book is Among Pearls Hatching, (Dancing Moon Press). In addition, she has had three chapbooks published. Her work appears in many literary magazines and anthologies. In 2009 Beautiful Obstacles and her chapbook, For All That Remains, were chosen as part of a list of the best 150 best books in Oregon. She has also won an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. Diane is a graduate of the M.F.A program at the University of Oregon, where she won the annual award for the best poem by a graduate student. She taught in the English Department of Clackamas Community College from 1991 until her retirement in 2010.

Next Exit by Robert Lowes

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Next Exit

Should I regret my hours on the interstate,
the manic weaving of high-speed metal,
to shop for walking shoes, disrobe for doctors?
Pigeons swirl above the cloverleaf.
A dog carcass stains the asphalt shoulder.
Bumper stickers proclaim schools of thought.

I’m thinking thoughts, slower than the traffic,
shaped like wheels, nickels, puddle-struck ripples,
orbits, the wedding bands of Saturn. Each thought
hides a nucleus, a sweet spot, a seed.
A straight shot to the center pleases me
more than endlessly surfing circumferences.

My white-line fever breaks at thirteen miles.
If I saw flashing lights, I can’t recall.

*

Robert Lowes is a writer in St. Louis, Mo, whose first collection of poetry, An Honest Hunger, was published in 2020. His work has appeared in journals such as The New Republic, Southern Poetry Review, December, The Christian Century, the American Journal of Poetry, and Tampa Review. Samples of his poetry and journalism are available at robertlowes.com. Lowes also plays rhythm guitar with whomever has patience with a journeyman musician. He loves the opening chords of David Bowie’s Moonage Daydream.

Entering the Auction Barn by Al Ortolani

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Entering the Auction Barn

There’s no place left to sit in the auction barn.
One woman has her coat next to her on a chair.
She’s either saving it for someone, or keeping it
for herself as a safe space. A man with a wool cap
and a black Patagonia coat comes in out of the cold,
stamps his feet free of last week’s snow. He sizes
up the room, the auctioneer’s ring worker, holding
a flintlock. The auctioneer chants, hunting
for the first bite. The man, tilts the brim of his cap,
raises his hand. A trio of bids follow.
The man in the Patagonia walks to the woman
and leans to her ear. She moves her coat to her lap.
He slides the chair to the front of the auction barn,
motions to see the rifle. He examines the stock,
the brass lock plate, the frozen trigger. He shakes
his head no, waves it away. The auctioneer
moves on to the back of the barn.
The man unzips his coat, pulls it away from his chest,
and extends his legs easily into the aisle.

*

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

Five poems from ‘First Father’ by Melissa Joplin Higley

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Five poems from First Father
(a thematic chapbook manuscript)

1.

Did they tell you your birth story:

abandoned, adopted to fill the space
of one born still? Could you

discern the mother who wouldn’t
from the one who would? When

she held you, did her grief become
yours, or did your fledgling body

only crave warm milk,
a steady heart?

2.

Couldn’t you tell she was rattle-boned
when she carried your first-born, who took
for himself the calcium from her teeth

while she starved? What did you do
with the money she hid in the flour tin?
What happened to her winter coat?

I didn’t cry when Mom told me you died.
I was 7 years old. I asked her, Is it okay
to not be sad?

3.

This week, I read the letters you wrote
in prison, the ones to your sister,
that drifted through 45 years of hands

before reaching mine—these letters,
one of only four things in this world
both our hands have held. I searched

your looped, back-tilting script for a sign
you thought of us, your first family—not a word.
Even on my second birthday, nothing.

4.

You missed my birth, my baptism,
my first smile, step, word.
You missed my graduations,
my wedding, my son’s birth. Yes,
you were long dead by then.

I know how you surrendered me
as an infant, resigned yourself
to collecting my childhood: preserved
in Kodachrome, stored in darkness.

5.

I dreamt I held your stocking hat.
I wanted to try it on, to see if it would fit me, too.

When I was an infant, my head was so large
the doctors thought I had “water on the brain.”

I didn’t cry until I was one. When I found
my voice, they called it a “miracle.”

Did you know?

I dreamt I opened that dark wool,
wondered if I could fill your vacancy.

*

Melissa Joplin Higley’s poems appear, or are forthcoming, in Anti-Heroin Chic, Feral, MER, Sleet Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, The Night Heron Barks, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-facilitates the Poetry Craft Collective. She lives in Mamaroneck, NY with her husband and son. Visit her at: melissajoplinhigley.com.

One Poem by Brooke Herter James

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THE GREAT REVELATION MAY NEVER COME, VIRGINIA WOOLF REMINDS ME

           Instead, there are little daily miracles

The poppy petals that drift
this morning over the lawn
after winds troubled the night
and set them free—

there can be no earthly reason
(when simply pink would do)
for the raspberry peach coral tangerine
floating over this emerald sea.

           Life stand still here

for the poppy petals, yes,
but also, for you – cartwheeling
across summer’s open palm,
your five-year-old self –
“Watch this!” there, in midair.

           Then the old question which traverses the sky of the soul…
           What is the meaning of life?

This morning, perhaps—
Honeybees in the rugosa,
hummingbirds in the petunias
(there is that pink, again!)

           matches struck unexpectantly in the dark

And you, always and no longer five,
a brushstroke of exuberance
certain to fade. But look, here, now,
between the inhale and the exhale.

*

Brooke Herter James’ poems have appeared in Rattle, Orbis, Tulip Tree Review and other publications. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks and one children’s picture book. She lives on a hillside in Vermont with her husband, two donkeys, a mess of chickens and a dog.

Exhibit ‘A’ by Roseanne Freed

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Exhibit ‘A’

newly married
on our European Grand Tour—
six months in a VW van
during that long ago time
of Europe on $5 a day,
we go to the Black Forest
to visit the German family
we’d met camping in the Transkei,
and us two South African hippies
become Kurt’s exhibit ‘A’—
the Jewish friends.

*

Poet Roseanne Freed was born in South Africa. After the death of her daughter she turned to poetry to help with her grief. Her poetry has been published in ONE ART, Verse-Virtual, and MacQueen’s Quinterly among others. She’s a Best of the Net 2022 nominee. She and her husband live in Los Angeles.

Three Poems by James Crews

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

At Grand & Arsenal

When we pulled up to the stoplight,
he leaned over and kissed my arm,

keeping his lips pressed hard against
the skin and hair as if needing to taste

all the salt there. I thought the moment
might never end, but the light changed,

and then we drove on, and when I asked,
What was that for? he shook his head

and smiled, though I cupped my hand
over the place he had kissed just in case

the kiss might catch on the wind, leap
from the window like an ember and burn

in someone else instead of me.

*

After Burnout

You finally decide to do no more
than is necessary, relishing each new
gulp of air drawn into your lungs,
when out of the flavorless mush
of days, even weeks without sun,
it happens again: life calls you back.
With a hint of chocolate in the cup
of coffee taken alone at the table,
or the needles of coneflower seeds
sticking to your fingertips as you
spread them around in autumn earth.
How all living things want to go on,
attaching themselves to whatever body
or breath of wind will carry them home.
Now stop in the driveway and listen
as amber-gold leaves, one by one,
break off with a simple snap of stem
from branch, that sound just shy
of silence saying to you: it’s time
to release all the relentless reaching
for the light. Rest is not death,
though it may feel like it at first.

*

Compassion

Compassion sat quietly beside me
that December night with my father
in the dim light of his ICU room,
then led me by the hand to the end
of the hallway where I bought him
a cold bottle of Coke which I placed
sweating on his tray, unwrapping
a straw and bending the end until
it faced him. Now I see it was only
compassion that kept my voice steady
as I said goodbye to him, sensing
it would be the last time, even as nurses
hustled me out, said to go home
and get some rest. Only compassion
that made me linger by his bed,
gripping the callused hand that had
fixed so much for me over the years,
then moving that bottle of soda
a little closer, so he could reach it
once I was gone.

*

James Crews is the editor of several bestselling poetry anthologies: Healing the Divide, The Path to Kindness, and How to Love the World, which has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, as well as in The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. He is the author of four prize-winning collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment, and his poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and Prairie Schooner. James teaches writing in the Poetry of Resilience seminars (www.thepoetryofresilience.com), and in the MFA program at Eastern Oregon University.

haiku by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Paris catacombs
skulls arranged in big heart shapes
love even in death

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is a poet and Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Recognition for her poetry includes an American Academy of Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She is the author of four books. She is writing a new book of poems in the form of biographical sonnets.

Two Poems by Karen Paul Holmes

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

At Least Two People I know Take Photos of Hearts in Nature

Morning glory leaves, rocks, clouds,
a horse’s fur, an upturned pear
that grew oddly so.
Or manmade by chance—
oil swirls on pavement,
an accidental heart in marbled rye.
These shapes—symbols
for the human heart,
its beats and chambers linked
with love since Sappho’s mad heart
quaked with it, and Venus
gave Cupid his bow.

The seekers aren’t looking for
a weeping Mary or Jesus
for thousands to bow down before,
just reminders to be mindful,
like when my Buddhist chime
sprinkles the quiet with silver.
Once I look, I begin to see.
Valentines in the unexpected universe,
small doses of hope.
A broken cockle shell tangled in kelp,
the grain of a cedar bench,
pollen on a still pond.

*

Adult Daughters

1.
A friend tells me about her flight last week:
She watched a grown daughter fall asleep—
head on her mother’s shoulder,
mother’s cheek on her head—like puzzle pieces.

As if grabbing my lapel, she implores,
How does this closeness happen?
My daughter and I have PhDs, but we don’t have this,
nor did my mother and I.

I want to mark a route and hand her the map.
But it’s a map—instinct I can’t explain—
mothers pass on to daughters. Blue lines, sinew, heart.
I begin to write. Stories I can’t share with my friend.

2.
My 75-year-old mother and I carry armloads
into the Macy’s dressing room.
She wears new black pants—lint-covered hem to knee.
Eyeing the mirror, says
Gee, I thought I bought pants not a vacuum cleaner.
We laugh and can’t stop, tears dripping.
We retell the story often among sisters and daughters.

3.
Singapore: My daughter and I lie on her bed.
I arrived last night, a 33-hour flight. Eyes barely open,
we enjoy the myna bird’s many songs before city noise thrums.
Something reminds us of the vacuum cleaner pants,
and we laugh. She rolls over, hugs me
I’m glad you’re here, Momma.
Let’s have tea. I bought you gluten-free muffins
and a mango that just now gives to the touch.

*

Karen Paul Holmes has two poetry books, No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich, 2014). Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, and Verse Daily. Journal publications include Plume (forthcoming), Diode, Glass, and Prairie Schooner. She founded the Side Door Poets in Atlanta and a monthly open mic in the North Georgia mountains.

Two Poems by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Triskaidekaphobia

So many hearts and none
anatomical: small boxes
and pendants, ceramic
and amethyst, fused glass,
and silver, gold. Paper-
weights, jackets festooned
in pink and hotter pink.
Mugs. Mugs. Mugs.
And my mother’s heart

when on that night
I dropped, water bursting
before its time. Three weeks
early, she held me in one more day,
confined in her narrow hospital bed,
birthing a story as well as me,
my life framed in hearts and love,
or at the very least, the idea
of it, a messenger delivering me
arrows that graze me every birthday.

*

Rainy Day Box

Some days, when I feel more child
than adult, raining or not, I remember

that box of special things my parents
put aside— a cardboard chest

holding macaroni, glitter, string—
that they withheld on sunny days,

a child’s treasure. I lift the lid
of memory seeking what I need, find

space and time.

*

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.

Two Poems by Gerry LaFemina

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It Was the Start of Spring and Anything Felt Possible

You can sit there
on the bust stop bench like at your desk
in sixth grade, squirming
with not wanting
to work or else longing for attention.

Dusk the only bus coming down the avenue.

Ear buds broadcast the same five albums
you’ve listened to this month,
more songs about heartache,
more songs about absence,

so many such songs by now, it’s a wonder

anything more can be said on the subjects.
Lights appear in high rise windows,
bright yellow faces
like daffodils, how hopeful, how happy
those fragile visages

particularly in early April
particularly in a city like yours—
so much cement & steel, & still

those flowers for a few short weeks.

*

After the Divorce

That day a boy climbed
the monkey bars higher, he believed,

than anyone had before
because he’d heard the story about

the tower of Babel & had wanted
to be struck down, too, by god

not for hubris but for solace,
but even the divine didn’t seem to be

watching, so he stayed put
until night pulled on

its dark sweater with silver buttons
& the crickets began chatting in

their alien dialect, & the boy
became too frightened or too tired

to climb down even though
his mother’s call echoed

& echoed, worry italicizing
his name in her mouth, so

he let go, finally, to hunger
& the chill that crept from the metal

into his fingers; how he fell through
the steel lattice—despite

the foam layer above it,
the ground remained firm, unforgiving,

ungiving, & thus the warm air
in his lungs was pushed out

in a long exhalation
of vapor, & it wasn’t ‘til later that

we found, like flotsam after a storm,
his crumpled body, not quite

lifeless, but fractured
so that when he tried to answer

our inquiries while we waited
for the EMTs (we could already

hear the angel wail of an ambulance)
we couldn’t understand a word

he uttered, couldn’t even decipher
the shapes made by his pale lips.

*

Gerry LaFemina’s next collection of poems, AFTER THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE, will be released later this year from Stephen F. Austin University Press. His other books include THE PURSUIT: A MEDITATION ON HAPPINESS (CNF) and BABY STEPS IN DOOMSDAY PREPPING (prose poems). LaFemina teaches at Frostburg State University and in the low-residency MFA program at Carlow Univerisity, and fronts the four piece punk band, The Downstrokes.

Railroad Tracks by Timothy Green

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Railroad Tracks

Side by side, we lie level
on a bed of stone.

When you, my other rail,
pull me to the right,

I pull you back.
But when I’m bending far,

I too feel the tug of the ties
beneath me.

In this way
we cross the desert.

Hot to the touch
in the heat of the day,

the children lay coins
on our backs. Soon,

the weight of the world
will be rushing

between us
in screeching sparks.

But first the thundering
hum of our harmony,

and then how long
it lingers after.

*

Timothy Green works as editor of Rattle and is the author of American Fractal (Red Hen Press). He also serves on the board of the Wrightwood Arts Center and is a contributing columnist for the Press-Enterprise.

For my mother by Elizabeth McConnell

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For my mother

Within a deep slice of cove, along this ragged coast
straddling the gateway to a labyrinth
of cordgrass and tannin-rich water,
I stand before that driftwood and pine shingled cabin
enchanted by tall and thick pickets of rosemary.

In the evening, breezes weave through
needled branches and her scent beckons
for the shine of golden lemons,
whispers of lavender.
And I promise, in the morning
to snip some sprigs,
take them home to culture.

*

Elizabeth McConnell lives in Morgantown, WV. She earned a BA in English from Hollins University. She has worked with the Morgantown Public Library Children’s Programs and served on the Morgantown Public Library Board of Trustees. Elizabeth participates in the WV Master Naturalist Program, WV Writers, Morgantown Writers Group and the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic Workshops.

To My Sister on the Anniversary of Her Death from Covid by Margaret Dornaus

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To My Sister on the Anniversary
of Her Death from Covid

It’s been two years, and there are
those who still ask me to believe
you’re in a better place. Or
that we all are now that all is
said and done. Now that life is
back to normal, or at least
back to a semblance of the life
we once knew. Remember
how you liked to say you were

our mother? How you’d take us all
on weekend outings to bowling
alleys and drive-ins. The larger than
life images of good and evil projected
on a big screen. How we’d watch
Kong battling Godzilla, wide-eyed,
sure of nothing more than our own story.
The way summer nights embraced us,
the way starshine followed us home.

*

Margaret Dornaus holds an MFA in the translation of poetry from the University of Arkansas. A semifinalist in Naugatuck River Review’s 13th annual Narrative Poetry Contest, she had the privilege of editing and publishing a pandemic-themed anthology—behind the mask: haiku in the time of Covid-19—through her small literary press Singing Moon in 2020. Her first book of poetry, Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose, won a 2017 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in I-70 Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Minyan Magazine, MockingHeart Review, ONE ART, Silver Birch Press, and The Ekphrastic Review.

Two Poems by Charles K. Carter

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Barter
A crow fashions a nest of shiny aluminum foil scraps to blind a mate to fulfill his urges.
A dog trades tricks for a treat.
A little boy collects golf balls for a quarter each at the country club.
His sister trades candy for paints to better tell her story when her vocabulary just doesn’t cut it.
The farmer trades a goat for seeds.
The teens trade dares for kisses.
A ticket is needed for a ride.
I learned to barter my labor for Melissa Etheridge concert tickets.
A handjob for a drink.
A book for advice.
A credit line or two for an escape.
I bought a cat for company.
Picked up a man for better company.
Adopted a dog for even better company.
But I would trade it all for you.
You know who you are.
*
In Response to Alex (Pencil & Oil Pastels, 2007)
My grandma wanted a piece of artwork I created,
a moody surreal drawing of the first man I loved
colored in warm tones, his orange and red-hot body
staring at a cool blue-violet reflection.
She thinks it’s a self-portrait.
I guess in a way she’s right,
his hot blood staring at my cold cold core.
No wonder he couldn’t love me.
Whenever I come to visit,
while she always has to pack me a bag of groceries
from her bargain-bought overstocked overstuffed pantry,
while she throws in jars of peanut butter and expired snack cakes,
all I can see is the first man I loved staring me down,
the grown man who told me he loved me
but never let me grow up
so I could grow warm in his gaze.
*
Charles K. Carter (he/him) is a queer poet from Iowa who currently lives in Oregon. He holds an MFA from Lindenwood University. His poems have appeared in several literary journals. He is the author of Read My Lips (David Robert Books) and several chapbooks. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @CKCpoetry.

The 80s By John Amen

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The 80s

At first, the beast had no name.
Then we whispered that acronym,
as if by speaking the unspeakable
we might explode in our shoes.
My friend’s sister died in her aunt’s guest room,
skin bruised, eyes like a newborn’s,
an ancient child with a shrinking memory.
New wave sparked in the eastside clubs,
a bartender named Richard dove from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Crucify them! the preacher screamed.
Lock them up! the protester said.
Millions reduced to ash, a tireless enemy
flitting from blood to blood, corpses
& corpses in that sinister game of tag.
I stuffed my backpack, descending the steepest stairs I’ve known,
so many red handprints on the banister,
bus tires pounding like a cocaine dream.
I’ll never go back, I said. By the time I reconsidered,
I looked like the glowering strangers
in those shoe-box photos, relatives whose names
were scrawled in Mom’s worn bible.
Hello Hudson, hello East River, hello Joralemon Street.
Every door I slammed I had to reopen,
scratching letters to the deceased, burning them
in cemeteries, at busy intersections. & while
that strobe of angels mostly moved on
to wherever angels finally go, a few
still linger. They track the new flood
as it swells in the dark, bracing for its arrival.

*

John Amen is the author of five collections of poetry, including Illusion of an Overwhelm, finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award, and work from which was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and Los Angeles Review, and his poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew.

Two Poems by Jennifer R. Edwards

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Watching Wolverine (Again) with my Second Husband

Only here, I admit I still double-take mildly muscular men in filthy wife-beater tank tops. I’m a sucker for dark, deep sideburns; those coursing creeks into a cool river mouth. Though I love a silver fox or shaved head hiding a historic hairline receding too soon, it’s the random spike that makes me want every angle of light. Cowlicks random & irreverent, the sheen of a day’s exhausting desire. Some consistent curiosity in me, watching, still & oblivious, as if every story loops to some evident ending. Those hands massive & metal glinting so beautifully unbroken. Not every story is chronological, but they’re linked & lovely with loneliness, the entering of an endless forest, a hardened man pushing back the gross overgrowth creeping along a barely visible path. There is something to be said for gravel-voiced men with animal instincts, finding me by impulse alone despite my awkward pains to cover every track. I’m there too, riding shotgun in an old, freezing car on a desolate shit-town road with a man saying you’re finally safe. I’m there asking what I should have, what I still need to know: when the claws come out, does it hurt? I still love him; how he answers like a can coming down, like a phone finding the wall, like the sun punishing the snow, saying every time. Oh, beautiful brawler, I thought there was heroism in desire. I confuse eagerness & appetite. Wanting won’t ever be enough. You don’t know your body is a weapon. Some genetic codes can’t be removed or rewired. Your healing is pure mutation.

*

The Well-Published Writer Doing My Tarot Reading Says It’s Harvest Time
         For C.J. Hauser and my Colgate crew

What grows best is what lets me baby it. It’s true, I’m not good at pruning or reducing. Lately, I’m deducing it’s OK things leave me. I love what lets me clip & hover & rearrange & putter. I admit, I have favorites but it’s every individual person & plant & animal at some point. How is it something or someone knows you? The proof: three iconic pictures of wheat & judgment & a man with a wand & world on his back. She tells me to be kinder to myself & my work is in fruition though there’s more ahead. The third card is different & it’s true my attention wanes & maybe that’s the whole point. I don’t really get it. She can’t exactly summarize. The bountiful sun is limited but still full for its dwindling time. Lately, I wonder what won’t survive me; clipping plants two nodes up from the end because it helps the roots. Growth is always starting & startling. Anyone who says they don’t have favorites is lying. I was lying when I started this, thinking things grow because of what I give. It might always find its own simple stretch toward light.

*

Jennifer R. Edwards (Unsymmetrical Body, Finishing Line Press, 2022) won the 2022 New England Poetry Club Amy Lowell Prize. Her poems have received Pushcart nomination, support from Palm Beach Poetry Festival and Colgate Writers Conference, and appear in many anthologies and literary magazines recently including Mom Egg Review, Gyroscope Review, Passengers Journal, Terrain, Literary Mama, and Snapdragon. She’s a speech-language pathologist in Concord, NH, residing with her family and pug. Twitter @Jennife00420145, Instagram Jenedwards8 https://linktr.ee/JenEdwards

Two Poems by Hilary Sideris

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Katerina

You’re in 6A. I’m in 6B.
We make trash-chute small talk.
I know by how you pronounce
chute like soot you must be

Greek, keep my mouth shut.
My mother discovered philo
sheets at Spiro’s in downtown
Des Moines. Agnew resigned.

If I wanted baklava, Dad said,
I wouldn’t have married you,
using the past conditional
to capture the impossible.

Nixon turned over his tax returns.
Ford pardoned him. His lawyers
went to jail. One spring she baked
Greek Easter bread, tsoureki,

three sweet braids that signify
the Trinity, never again.
Since Dad died I’ve felt this need
to ethnically identify. I want to ask

how you got here. I came as a Nanny
from Iowa, lived in a limestone
Upper East Side mansion
with two British HBO execs

who wanted an American
for their newborn, Christian.
You burn church incense
when you smoke, but I don’t care.

Likewise, I hope you don’t abhor
Sotiria Bellou belting from
my laptop, I want your cheek
for my pillow.

*

Monarchs

They elicit reflection on cycles of rebirth, renewal, or resurrection, owing to their mysterious emergence, in radically altered bodily form, from a tomb-like chrysalis.
          –Lisa Sideris

Imported, tropical milkweed
hosts petaloudes, flying flowers,
psyches in Ancient Greek,
named after William, Prince

of Orange. Its long bloom time
means females stay, lay
surplus eggs, and don’t embark
on their iconic, pollinating odyssey.

Monsanto makes amends, plants
non-native species. When they are
gone and monarch means again
only an inbred king, spots will emerge

on the clear paper of my hands,
souls flutter by like floaters
as I wait for sleep, see the red
field inside my lids.

* 

Hilary Sideris’s poems have appeared recently in Anti-Heroin Chic, Right Hand Pointing, Southern Poetry Review, and The Westchester Review. She is the author of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press 2020), and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press 2022.) Sideris lives in Brooklyn and works as a professional developer for CUNY Start, a program for underserved, limited income students at The City University of New York.

Two Poems by Robin Arble

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Passage
One night, sitting on a wobbling stool in a basement bar, I went shot for shot with
my father to prove my rage. I liked the jolt of euphoria, the slow burn coating my
throat, but I knew I needed water more than whiskey. I remember arching my head
back in the joy of a good piss, and I remember my head smacking concrete. Nothing
was more rewarding than the double headache the next morning, my first and last
gifts for turning 21. I never told him. Both hungover, he drove me back to campus
as I pretended to sleep.
*
I announce my deadname every time I pick up my hormones
in the same breath
I give my voice to a woman
who takes my name and date
of birth to access the two
prescriptions waiting for me
on the shelves behind her.
just once I want her
to lean forward and whisper
through the glass
if there’s anything else
I want to be called
to feel the shame
of knowing she knew
enough to ask.
*
Robin Arble is a poet and writer from Western Massachusetts. Her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Oakland Arts Review, Beestung, Door Is A Jar, Pøst-, Brazos River Review, Overheard Magazine, and Your Impossible Voice, among others. They are a poetry reader for Beaver Magazine and the Massachusetts Review. She studies literature and creative writing at Hampshire College.

Lapsed by Kip Knott

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Lapsed

At ten years old I prayed
every night before I closed my eyes

that I would live a long life.
By twelve I had come to know death

was not the empty robin’s nest
just outside my bedroom window,

but the desiccated hatchling
lying on the ground below

curled into itself forever.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, teacher, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His third book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is due later this year from Kelsay Books. His debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches (Alien Buddha Press), is available on Amazon. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.

White Walls by Lois Perch Villemaire

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White Walls

With determination
she turned the page
started over
with a new address
an escape from
the painful pattern
a search for peace
without complexity.

How fitting—
new construction
with bare white walls
new shrubbery in place
by the front door
promising to grow
with direct sunlight.

Nearby—
he too settled
feeling uncertain
in his white space
with an echo
as the front door shut
without anyone else
coming home.

Perhaps the gods
placed them close enough
for a chance meeting
knowing until
that magical day
they each needed
a measure of time
without stripes
without colors
without questions.

*

Lois Perch Villemaire, originally from the Philadelphia area, is a longtime resident of Annapolis, MD where she is inspired by the charm of a colonial town and the glorious Chesapeake Bay. After retirement from a career in local government, she concentrated on her love of writing. Dabbling in family research has inspired poetry, memoir, and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in a number of journals such as Ekphrastic Review, Flora Fiction, and One Art: A Journal of Poetry, and has been included in several anthologies. Lois was a finalist in the 2021 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry. She enjoys yoga practice, amateur photography, and raising African violets.

First Day of Winter by Michael Northen

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First Day of Winter
           after Jane Kenyon

Orange has fled the marigolds
Sparrows search the remains of sunflower heads.
Fresh bread fills the kitchen

And on the stove soup bubbles
from the last of the turkey bones.
Let winter come.

Ribbons and wrapping paper put away
What can be wrapped is wrapped.
What can be tied is tied.

After fall’s final flourish
What is there left to do
but let winter come?

All is in readiness.
Our heavy coats hang in the hall.
The cane leans by the door.

The husks that rattle in the furrows now
were resting in the corn we sowed in spring.
Let winter come.

*

Michael Northen is the past editor of Wordgathering, A Journal of Disability and Poetry. He was co-editor of the anthology Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, the disability short fiction anthology, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked, and is currently editing a new anthology of disability poetry.

How It Ends by Joan Mazza

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How It Ends

Think of those scenes I’ve wanted to replay,
to talk back, set him straight. Yes, to defend
my outrage without being called defensive.
He wanted me on call all night and day:
Take care of my dogs. Go check on my mother!
I wonder how many patients and other
saps were taken in, apprehensive
of his spouted diagnoses. Who sends
condolences to his beleaguered wife
after a long illness has taken his life?
What about his live-in girlfriend, Kathy?
From photos, you’d guess they all were happy.
Now the argument ends inside my head.
No more obsessing? I know he’s dead.

*

Joan Mazza worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self. Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Prairie Schooner, Slant, Poet Lore, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia and writes every day.

The Pool by Joy Gaines-Friedler

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Pool

Light floats in the maples above the pool.
A pair of mallards we’ve named
Carl & Anita crash-land in the shallow end.

They do us no harm.
We let them swim.

A book lies prone on the swing,
the potted petunias are watered,
a bee hums as it leaves each center.

A mower in the distance hums its work ethic;
We suppose a kind of faith—

when the sun spills through the trees
and spotlights a spider on the coping.

This morning, before first light,
an owl called from the distance.

I went out to the pool, spooked a feral cat,
then sat in the dark to listen.

We’ve lived through the dying. And
there will be more. For now

Carl is happy
to follow Anita to the deep end.
They move easily together.

They are not going anywhere.

*

Joy Gaines-Friedler’s most recent book, Capture Theory is a Forward Review Indiefab Finalist. Her chapbook Stone on Your Stone is co-winner of the 2021 Friends of Poetry Chapbook Contest. Published in over 80 literary magazines and anthologies, Joy’s work is included in The Path To Kindness Edited by James Crews. Joy teaches Creative Writing for non-profits, and communities at risk, including the prison in Lapeer Michigan where she taught poetry to male-lifers, Freedom House Detroit where she taught refugees from western Africa, Common Ground, where she worked with parents of murdered children.

Two Poems by Douglas Cole

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Brakeman Swinging the Lantern Down

On a back street off West Marginal Way, a collision,
red lights, police and aid car driving off, no siren.

He stands in the rain, but he doesn’t feel cold.
People are talking, but their voices are low.

Backed up commuters, windshield wipers going,
radios tuned to the news, to this very situation.

Imagine the frustration lined up and contained
like cancer cells, the guilt he feels, forgotten days,

as he turns in the weeds on the railroad tracks,
the big engine and the light coming fast.

*

Fugitive

These junk yards at the edge of cities,
towers of wrecks, cars with blood
still on the driver seat, the windshield—
I am looking for a water pump, a new heart.

The raw road, the gravel pit,
the trailer where I get my insurance
from a salesman heavy with gold chains.
No one around here remembers rain.

I am a drive-through ghost.
Aren’t we all? This isn’t even,
now, a little kumquat garden,
an electric pool you can dive into
and feel the eel-tingle of skin.

Throw the couch and the bones
into the dumpster—there is no
universal law that says you must
divulge your whereabouts.

So we fly on—imagine mist
inventing a new identity to escape
the investigators, so that when
a registered letter arrives say
you don’t know, that it’s a mistake
that person hasn’t lived here for years.

*

Douglas Cole published six poetry collections and the novel The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has been anthologized in Best New Writing (Hopewell Publications), Bully Anthology (Kentucky Stories Press) and Coming Off The Line (Main Street Rag Publishing). He is a regular contributor to Mythaxis, providing essays and interviews with notable writers, artists and musicians such as Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), Darcy Steinke (Suicide Blond, Flash Count Diary) and Tim Reynolds (T3 and The Dave Matthews Band). He also writes a monthly piece called “Trading Fours” for Jerry Jazz Musician and was recently named the editor for “American Poetry” in Read Carpet, an international, multi-lingual journal from Columbia. In addition to the American Fiction Award, he was awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Editors’ Choice Award for fiction by RiverSedge, and has been nominated three time for a Pushcart and seven times for Best of the Net. He lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington. His website is https://douglastcole.com/.

Three Poems by Beth Oast Williams

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Confession

Tell me if holding
my breath counts
as silence. I admit
to not crying enough
at graves. And yet,
I suffer with this
aftertaste of eating
embers. What makes
sense at midnight
evaporates into dream.
Frost on the car blocks
my morning view.
I admit that loving
him is hard as January
dirt. Witness my knuckles,
bloody from boxing
with the earth. I confess
this is just another poem
struggling to miss him.

*

Split

You believe the earth
turns around your words.
But a poem is not space
to fill with stars. Let’s not argue
about rotation. Tonight’s sky
lights up with what
no longer exists. In anger,
you leave the room
like a candle fighting wind
that sneaks in from an open
door. You forget how it all slips
through cracks in the wall.

*

Eve Is Always The Day Before It Happens

Lost in a forest, our voices
share stories, as if reciting a poem
is evidence I exist. You taste
forgiveness each time you swallow

my name. This is the day mechanical
clocks would have stopped
but we are too in love
with the depths of longing. Admit

there is one way to keep this myth
from dying. Let the world
believe I made its first mistake.
Don’t call this poem a confession.

This stanza is a porch swing.
We sit here, allowing hair on the back
of my neck to bristle. You push us
with one foot, lift it, and we drift

forward. How easy it is to whisper.
A car turning down the road
signals this moment will soon be over.
Gravel like the clearing of a throat.

Listen as time breaks into twigs,
the tenor of tomorrow’s fog.

*

Beth Oast Williams’s poetry has been accepted for publication in Leon Literary Review, SWWIM Everyday, Wisconsin Review, Glass Mountain, GASHER, Fjords Review, and Rattle’s Poets Respond, among others. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Riding Horses in the Harbor, was published in 2020.

Top 25 Most Read ONE ART Poets of 2022

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#1 – Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
#2 – Rachel Custer
#3 – Ona Gritz
#4 – Betsy Mars
#5 – Sean Kelbley
#6 – Donna Hilbert
#7 – Daniel Simpson
#8 – Margaret Dornaus
#9 – Carla Sarett
#10 – Roseanne Freed
#11 – Donna Spruijt-Metz
#12 – Erin Murphy
#13 – Jacob DeVoogd
#14 – Kari Gunter-Seymour
#15 – Leanne Shirtliffe
#16 – Terri Kirby Erickson
#17 – J.C. Todd
#18 – Hayden Saunier
#19 – William Palmer
#20 – Anne Graue
#21 – Kip Knott
#22 – Julie Weiss
#23 – Karen Paul Holmes
#24 – Robin Turner
#25 – Gary Metras

Two Poems by Frances Klein

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Guide to Interpreting Dreams

The owl represents your mother.

The cypress in which the owl perches
also represents your mother.

The shadow-veiled snake laying
between the tree’s roots?
That, too, is your mother.

The owl snatching the snake
and bringing it to the branch
to devour is your mother turning
her back on own impending grief.

You are the half-moon, tepid light
settling on the tree’s branches.

You are the field mouse
shivering behind a fence-post,
guilt warring with gratitude
at having been passed over.

*

Estradiol the Mimic
Estradiol, like many fertility drugs, induces side effects that mimic the symptoms people often feel in early pregnancy.

Like the Milk Snake, robed
in lapping bands of sandstone, salt,
and sable to imitate its cousin Coral,
hiding in plain sight from the hawks
and skunks that would make of it a meal.

Like the Walking Stick, segmented
length blending with the detritus of the forest
floor to offer shelter from the curious birds
and rodents who might spy its movements
and know it to be more than wind.

Like the Robber Fly, camouflaged assassin,
robed in marigold and shade, coiled behind
the flower petals to catch anything
that moves, be it beetle, lacewing, butterfly
no mercy even for its own cousins.

Like the Death’s Head Hawkmoth,
which perfumes itself with the scent
of the bees it robs, waved on
by the hive-guards to the inner sanctum
where it feasts without reproach.

All of this mimicry a drive for survival,
for safety, for sustenance, for one
more moment on this earth. From what,
then, do the chemicals flooding my
body think they are saving me?

*

Frances Klein (she/her) is a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She is the 2022 winner of the Robert Golden Poetry Prize, and the author of the chapbooks New and Permanent (Blanket Sea 2022) and The Best Secret (Bottlecap Press 2022). Klein currently serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review. Readers can find more of her work at https://kleinpoetryblog.wordpress.com/.

Two Poems by Brandon Thein An Vu

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Love Language
Before her 2nd shift

She stretches out her arms
Sighs
Then
gets up from bed. Almost immediately

The kitchen is covered with a smoky haze
Filling the nostril with
Caramelized pork belly
And jasmine rice. Across the table are

Bean sprouts,
green onions, and
Sriracha
For Mi Quảng later. Softly,

She calls
Honey go eat.
Those were the same words
I heard. After

I failed my driver’s test
After my 1st heartbreak
And after small
Disagreements. I’ve been told

There are 5 love languages
But
she’s taught me
there are six.

*

Contents of the Curriculum

the educator steps back
carefully observing the room
scanning every student
a kaleidoscope of cultures

his classroom
a symposium of sound
where students celebrate inexperience
and persist with gossip overhear:

Today, we’ll be going over Vietnamese literature.
is what the educator wanted to say.
instead, he lets out a sigh:
Today, we’ll be going over Catcher in the Rye.

*

Brandon Thein An Vu is an educator who holds an MA in Education from UC Davis and a BA from San Francisco State. He currently teaches in the Bay Area and has a cat named Raymond.

Autumn Migration by Allen Helmstetter

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Autumn Migration

Every autumn, flocks of blackbirds sheltered
in the two elms at the corner of my street
until the wind finally blew them south.
When they migrated, I envied them.
They got to go to places I had never been—
and for free; it seemed unfair to me.
Aunt Laura died during last year’s migration.
She had never traveled far from home,
but I knew she traveled inwardly—
to places blackbirds never see.
Then she’d come back and seeing me,
would ask if I, too, had been traveling.

*

Allen Helmstetter lives in rural Minnesota. He loves the rivers, woods, and fields there, and after hiking the trails is often inspired to write about the relationships between nature, technology, and the human spirit. His poems have been published in North Coast Review, Willawaw Journal, Ariel Chart, and Bulb Culture Collective.

Sixteen at the Spa by Deborah Bacharach

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Sixteen at the Spa

In the hushed low
lit locked room, back when
no one but sailors and sluts
strutted with tattoos, I watch a butterfly shimmer
droplets above
the nipple of a stranger’s
pale smooth breast.

The cook sears
meat raw to ready.
Steam fills me before
I bite any flesh.

We all can strip.
From my treasure chest, a thousand
mourning cloaks and monarchs
lift and hum.

*

Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her poems, essays and book reviews have been published in Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Ireland Review, Vallum, Cimarron Review, New Letters and Poet Lore among many others. She is a college writing instructor, editor, and tutor and teaches poetry workshops for children. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Loft on 56th by J-T Kelly

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Loft on 56th

The way you’d say things—
Hey, for example—

Well, it makes me lonely
the way you don’t say it anymore.

*

J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis. He lives in a brick house with his wife and six children, his two parents, and a dog.

Credo in the Age of Facebook by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Credo in the Age of Facebook

I believe friend is a noun, not a verb—
          and unfriend is a contradiction in terms.

I believe it takes a volcanic eruption to unmountain a mountain
          and unfriending a friend should take no less seismic an event.

I believe in the utter beauty of the unuttered opinion
          that takes the time to marinate in the brine of thought
          instead of being served up instantly and indisputably as fact.

I believe a sumptuous meal is meant to be eaten, not uploaded
          so please don’t bring your smart-enough-to-know-better phone
          to my table. I have not set a place for Siri.

I believe the most social of media is still a knock on the door
          and shared laughter over a cup of coffee
          that 643 people do not have to read about in real time.

I believe my beliefs make me the anachronism
          I have always believed myself to be,
          and friend, that’s okay. It’s just who I am…

                    “Like” it or not.

*

Gloria Heffernan is the author of the poetry collection, What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books), and Exploring Poetry of Presence: A Companion Guide for Readers, Writers and Workshop Facilitators (Back Porch Productions). She has written two chapbooks: Hail to the Symptom (Moonstone Press) and Some of Our Parts, (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Columbia Review, Stone Canoe, and Yale University’s The Perch. For more information, please visit her website at www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Origami of Shock by Brett Warren

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Origami of Shock

The first time was the worst: how graciously
he opened the door to welcome me in,

saying I had just missed them—the figurines
who like to run back and forth across the carpet.

How he made a little running motion
with his fingers, adding that if I’d come earlier,
I’d have seen a tiny version of myself

perched on the bookshelf among knick-knacks
and a fine layer of dust. How his eyes
kept darting over to see if I/she was still there.

How a life-sized version of me began to edge
toward the door, feeling my way along the wall
with my shoulder.

How I couldn’t take my eyes off him,
couldn’t break free from the terrible trance
of his smile. How the thing

that brought me back was my left hand,
which had been in my coat pocket

the whole time, folding a grocery list
into smaller and smaller squares.

*

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

A Sonnet in Recession by KHD

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A Sonnet in Recession

Some metaphors are too obvious—we all fell off
a stationary bike. My daughters pop bubbles

and we read a book about bears—a canoe crashes off
a waterfall’s chart. The playgrounds are parents pushing

their phones on swings—conversations sink to a chorus of lyrics
lamenting the price of gas. Fortunes lost as fast as blowing out

birthday candles. We forget to be Banksy’s red balloons
instead of shredded paintings. There is no such thing

as a free lunch—not even a squiggly square of ramen noodles
stuffed into a wrinkled brown sack. But they still haven’t found

a way to tax us for our thoughts. The best brains are antifragile—
they’ll patch our cracked AI commodities with molten gold.

What first presents as plunging could be the biggest swing of all.

*

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

In the Breaking by Rebecca Doverspike

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In the Breaking

A woman with shears contemplates the next cut.
Somewhere a satellite is recording
all of this—time and the time-keeper, bells
like a mouth, the darkening dusk inside.

Perhaps in old age we are like leaves, holes
bitten through by small hungers: watch it go
the tender-hearted afternoon I want
to hold onto. Now it is freezing rain.

Now it is memory. The buds begin
for so long I forget they are flowers
waiting to go home and please stop with the
cleverness: set down all the swords, our faces

do not look anything like we thought
they would. The startling beauty of any
voice, like the woman screaming in the hall:
Why won’t they let me go home. So I sit.

This is your home, I want to say. This hospital
hallway is your desert. People walk through.
They’re re-telling stories of exodus. This
is your sacred pilgrimage—

each you the only you of its kind— here—
where the clocks work differently, where people see right through.
Each one unveiling its mystery,

and no one turns to look. Saying goodbye,
a patient, a painter, a woman says: I was going
to get you flowers but they die. She hands me a card
in permanent marker, the scent still wet.

*

Rebecca Doverspike works as an Interfaith Chaplain in Boston, drawing from Zen Buddhist practice. She holds an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, an MFA from West Virginia University, and BA from Beloit College. Her chapbook, Every Present Thing a Ghost, was published by Slapering Hol Press in 2019. Other works can be found in: Peripheries, Midwest Review, Valley Voices, 5×5 Literary Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Diagram, Ruminate, and others. She loves hiking with her partner and dog.

Walking by Sid Gold

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WALKING

Fortunately, you can go out walking.
You expect very little, only dusk
foreshadowing night, the murmur
of animal life at the ready, & a breeze,
its edge honed sharper than expected.
For now, solitude is desire without
fanfare. You can take stock, see things
for what they seem without the burden
of intellect or wit. You could explain
all this, make sense of it, if surrounded,
threatened, coaxed, enticed. Oh yes,
an audience—close friends or passersby,
lovers, perhaps—all suitably intrigued
enough to stick around. What could be
better? You might tell them the night
is yours alone & loneliness a form
of joy that doesn’t advertise. They may
chuckle & swear they understand.
Yo comprendo, says one, as Spanish
is a loving tongue. Do come with us,
they urge, walking toward the bright
lights, your protests, heard as little other
than the rustle of dry leaves, of no use.

*

Sid Gold is the author of four books of poetry, including “Crooked Speech” (Pond Road Press, ’18) and a twice recipient of an MSAC Individual Artist Award for Poetry. His work has appeared recently in the anthology “This Is What America Looks Like,” Backbone Mountain Review, Gargoyle and Loch Raven Review. He also has poems forthcoming in BMR, Gargoyle, Maryland Literary Review, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. His first book, “Working Vocabulary,” was reissued by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 2021.

Coming to Terms by Rhett Watts

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Coming to Terms

A pair of crows swoop down on a young rabbit.
Wings explode, furred hind legs kick high.
I throw a stone to disrupt the hunt, for now.

Local crows also dive bomb my husband.
They do not like his baseball cap.
Remember faces. Are not fans of masks.

What would they make of a Plague doctor’s
leather top hat, black robes and the beaked mask
filled with herbs against miasmas? Would they

recognize it as Corvid-like or might it merely
appear monstrous? More than a character in
Commedia dell Arte, plague doctors donned early
PPE, let blood, witnessed wills, counted dead bodies.

Later, we drive by crows pecking at roadkill—
a cottontail chased onto asphalt. I sigh. Breathing in,
imagine the savory scent of rosemary and juniper.
My husband tugs at his cap. We drive on.

*

Rhett Watts has poems in Sojourners Magazine, The Worcester Review, Canary, Naugatuck River Review, San Pedro River Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Lyric, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review among others and in the book The Best Spiritual Writing 2000. She won the CT Poetry Award and the Rayne Arroyo Chapbook Award for No Innocent Eye. Her books of poems are: Willing Suspension (Antrim House Books) and The Braiding (Kelsay Books). Rhett facilitates writing workshops in CT and MA and lives feet from a brook with her husband and Maine Coon cat.

The Give & Take by Molly Fisk

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Give & Take

Sitting with my friend, each deep in our thoughts,
the timer set, pens in hand, the cacophony ebbing
& rising around us. Rumble of baritone & soprano

descant not in time but still their own music, the way
an ocean will greet its shore, off-rhythm, impossible
to replicate. Beyond the plate glass, a blue California

November sky. I think I’ll try to stay alive a little longer,
despite cars, Covid, wildfire, the black widow spider
laying her eggs under the lid of my turkey pan again.

Ill-designed kitchen cabinetry probably kills more people
than is reported. And the tripping over cats suddenly
stopped cold in a hallway. Private, quiet dangers

of a country pretending it’s not at war, pretending to address
looming disaster & the accumulated damage of unkindness
without admitting greed. I wince even at the 12-Step motto

Take what you like and leave the rest. However
well-meaning, it’s colonial thinking, and me a daughter
of colonizers from way back. Take care, instead.

Take it easy. Takes one to know one. Even Take a hike!
but other than that, stop taking, give generously, give it
everything you’ve got, your best shot, give it up,

give it your all, go on: give it away with both hands,
God give us strength to break trail as we head into a new
world of chaos, more equality, uncertainty.

*

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She’s won grants from the NEA, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her most recent poetry collection is The More Difficult Beauty; her latest book of radio commentary is Everything But the Kitchen Skunk. Fisk lives in the Sierra foothills. mollyfisk.com

Two Poems by Susan Barry-Schulz

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Elemental

I don’t know what I’m doing I need help
with physical things I can’t keep my son
from heartbreak I miss my blonde hair and I am
embarrassed about missing my blonde hair how shallow
that is I am both angry and afraid to be angry I can’t
get my breathing right when I try to swim freestyle
in the lake I’ve never read Ulysses although I picked
up a decent copy at the Newburgh Vintage Emporium
last weekend if you ever want to borrow it masked
& unmasked coughing babies everywhere and everything
ruined forever I don’t know the names of the Greek Gods
and what they are the god of I am disappointed in humanity
like the jumbled mess on the floor of a teenager’s room and tired
of pretending everything is fine I have a lot of accumulated
knowledge about candy at least would you like to share a package
of Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews with me I’ll tell you what it’s the molasses.

*

Poem with a Line from Lost & Found

I am shy in the presence of my own
watched breath. Unsure of the intentions

of the breather. Have we met. Does such close
attention not skew the arc of the universe?

In the photo I am five and dressed in daisies,
still haloed in soft curls. Barefoot on the front

lawn, holding hands with my cousin Peggy—
the sun so bright it’s washed away our faces.

The verb ‘to lose’ has its taproot in sorrow.
I can’t explain the way my five-year-old self

recognized the safety of her soul. When she
was lost I felt the absence although I hadn’t

kept her close. I am left here now, still wonder-
ing. Be in. Be out. Be on and on and on.

                              (line from Lost & Found; A Memoir; Kathryn Schulz, 2022)

*

Susan Barry-Schulz grew up just outside of Buffalo, New York. She is a licensed physical therapist living with chronic illness. Her poetry has appeared in SWWIM, Barrelhouse online, Rogue Agent, New Verse News, Nightingale & Sparrow, Shooter Literary Magazine, The Wild Word, Bending Genres, B O D Y, Gyroscope Review, Quartet, West Trestle Review, and in other print and online journals and anthologies.

Three Poems by Tom C. Hunley

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

My Guardian Angle And Other Cosmic Typos

is the title of my unfinished poem about abandonment.

When Lou Reed and Johnny Ramone first met, Lou advised Johnny
to sell his favorite guitar to buy a better one, so Johnny
dismissed Lou as a snob.

In middle school, my future wife agreed to be secret friends
with a more popular girl whom she embarrassed.

My eldest son loves his cat, Sarah, who hides
under the bed whenever he enters the room.

I’m saying I love my wife and kids
but often hide from them in the basement.

I prefer sports movies to sports,
and what does that say about me?

I watch sports movies in my basement
while diffusing essential oils, which calm me down.

I’m saying lavender, sandalwood, frankincense,
and blends with names like mood boost and brain aid.

I wisecrack when nervous or upset.
I hate that about myself,
though on balance, I love myself,
or try to.

I’m saying I believe in God but doubt myself.

At church people pray for me.
At poetry conferences, poets mine my pain for images.
Not sure which is worse.

^An example of one of my wisecracks.

Lou Reed’s parents paid for electric shocks
to fry the gay out of him when he was a teen.

I’m saying my wife and I love our three sons.

That my wife and I love our adopted daughter
but turned her over to state guardianship
after she said she loves the man who hurt her
and that she hates us.

My fear of flying leapt off my fear of bridges
is another example of one of my wisecracks.

Basho wrote a haiku about an abandoned child
but didn’t rescue the child, so I wrote this haiku:

          Basho’s sad haiku
               About a child abandoned—
          Youtuber films a stickup.

I’m saying that we’ve all seen YouTube videos by bystanders who could have
been heroes but Basho got there first.

That I mourned when Norm McDonald died and when Lou Reed died.

“As a child, I laughed a lot…now it seems I cry a lot”
is a lyric by Marc Bolan, whom I revere
as much as I revere Lou Reed.

My eldest son stocks shelves for a living
and is the best there is at it.

My other sons work as a tennis instructor for Parks & Rec
and a shift leader at Little Caesar’s, respectively.

I’m saying I love all of my kids
but my daughter
is like the poem about abandonment
that I never finished.

*

In 2021, The Naked Baby From The Nirvana Album Cover, Now Thirty, Sues The Remaining Band Members & Courtney Love For Showing The Whole World His Baby Penis
          “Don’t Try.”
          ―inscription on Charles Bukowski’s tombstone

I wanted to be a drummer who wanted
to be a drum but I always felt more
like the broken string that ruined the song
& scared off the Sub Pop execs.
Wound up tight until I snapped.
Nostalgia, you dirty window.
Look, my first grunge show, Seattle 1991,
hairy head & skinny arms taking a dive
from the stage at The Off Ramp
deciding then & there not to try
any more lest I be called poser.

At University of Washington I wrote
essays, but I found that too trying.
Also tiring. My kids have never
heard the word poser but if one studies
too much the others call him a try-hard.
It would be a bummer to become a bum
& I wish I could go back and mosh
at the Moore Theater to live Nirvana
but first I’d shout into the mic that 2021 smells
like Teen Spirit mixed with the unwashable
funk of old age & sounds like the moment

after the encore & before the applause.
Time is a wind that will pick your pocket
especially if you’re a screaming tree
in a garden of sound, a peaceful battlefield
after the casualties on one side rise
from their bodies and help up the casualties
on the other side like sweaty moshers
clad in black concert tees lifting
fallen fellow moshers in the pit.
None can remember why they started
shooting & they’d hug if they still had bodies.

Naked baby in that pool, I’d trade places.
You too, thirty-year-old with your hand out.
And Kurt, twenty-seven years after
you joined the twenty-seven club,
wouldn’t you trade places with me?

*
Skinny Dipping
(after Ocean Vuong)

My god, my body
has changed as if my old place of business
has been shuttered.
Thank you, Lord, for my body,
how it resembles a car that resembles
a coffin with wheels,
dented but not yet totaled.
My body a drowned treasure chest
picked clean by pirates. Thank you,
Gravity, for keeping me grounded,
but just once I want to be a helium balloon.
To be naked with no shame
no matter how many people point.
There’s an American Association for Nude Recreation
but I’m not a joiner. I don’t have any friends
that would be into skinny dipping
and maybe that’s what’s missing.
But I won’t go skinny dipping alone.
I’ll be a stream that’s made peace with the ocean.

I want to sing into Van Gogh’s severed ear
and let him paint me nude and blue,
my face unfinished, my body a temporary address
in a town you never hear about except
when fugitive criminals get tracked down there.
I’ll learn to swim in the body I have.
I promise I was young once, but too self-conscious
to dance. I should have danced, music or no music.
Now I’m the lake I dog-paddle in.
Now my body is a doorway into a room on fire.
Now my body is a framed painting that my children colored over.
Sometimes I lie in my bed and dream that my body is new.
Sometimes I lie in my bed and dream of never waking.
Sometimes I write aubades that want to be gunshots.
Sometimes I think there should be more of me.
Someone in every group of skinny dippers thinks
it’s funny to hide other people’s clothes.
Someone always takes pictures.
The cops always arrive but never join in.

*

Tom C. Hunley has published poems in Oregon East, The Oracle, and previously in One Art. In 2023, one of his poems is slated to be reprinted in Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft (Pearson Education) ed. Janet Burroway, fifth edition.

Three Poems by Kate Sweeney

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Intangible

When our dog was in heat my mother would yell at us
about her blood getting all over the house, claiming
their hormones were synchronized. We would chase her
around & put her in my brother’s old Underoos. One
of us left to spot clean the green shag carpet. He always
seemed sad about this, not that we ruined his discarded
underwear, or cut a hole out of the back for her tail, or
that we put a bulky pad in the lining where his balls
once felt secure–but the tethering of him to her period
somehow, embarrassed him. No one ever talked to us
about our bodies. The summer she got pregnant
they took us to Woods Hole to adopt a whale.
That same year we purchased stars & named them after
ourselves. I remember thinking it a strange thing to buy
gifts we were never able to touch. The volunteer
who filled out my Certificate of Adoption told me
a blue whale’s heart weighs 400lbs when it’s not beating,
but everything is an approximation. We are unable
to weigh the human heart while it still works in our chest.

*

*

Post-Post Script

No one is talking about the Mississippi flowing
backward, the swell of delta and what will be left

of the graves below sea-level, buried above ground.
In the pine barrens boys load machetes on their backs

and set-off each morning to hunt the rabbit that infest
the high cane of industrial sugar plantations. For food.

Their mother, still pregnant for no other reason than urge
not her own. And beneath an underpass on Cahuenga a man

sweeps a carpet that reads WELCOME in frilly script, the same
mat on my mother’s door-step. It breaches an invisible doorway

a mattress on a wooden frame, an orderly hutch filled
with porcelain figures of children playing cards.

There are no barriers to contort our viewing. Just pictures
of families hanging off the cement. In the latest series

of repeating nightmares, I watch as women from all corners
of my past raise my daughter, shuffle her from place

to place. In each near miss, I feel the smooth skin of her palm
and the small callus on her fourth finger where she rests

her pencil. Her delighted laughter repeats like the bleat
of sheep awaiting slaughter in the slow heat of a metal silo

in May. My mind chases her hollow sound through tunnels
tubed in late sun, washed out into blinding unutterable god-light.

*

The Children Throw A Funeral

Out back by the pool, the children throw a funeral
for Grandmother. They set up chairs in neat rows
with an aisle cut clear through the center. My daughter
wears a black veil, a vampire queen costume she saves
for birthday parties, my beige patent heels, gaudy
gold hoops, and a plush crystal ball around her neck.
I can’t remember buying it. They are solemn, but not
sad, as if they understand the gravity of this kind
of event. Neither has ever been to a funeral. My son
carries our dead cat ashes in two smooth wooden boxes,
both palms up, like an offering. Down, down the long
aisle he marches until he reaches an altar of sticks,
dusty leaves, a sixteen-inch LEGO figure of baby Yoda
that took a week to make, is missing his feet, and has
a dream catcher strung around his neck which they
light on fire and wave over the boxes like a censer.
I watch from the window, they laugh hysterically,
a bead melts onto one of Yoda’s fingers. Later,
we talk about spreading the cat’s ashes before we
leave California. Everyone starts to cry. We’ve now
had the ashes longer than we had the cats. How
many ways can we be made to say goodbye.

*

Kate Sweeney is pursuing an MFA at Bennington College. She has poems most recently appearing or forthcoming from Northwest Review, Muzzle Magazine, Birdcoat Quarterly & other places. Kate has a chapbook, The Oranges Will Still Grow Without Us [Ethel 2022]. She lives in New York.

Difficult Times by Meg Freer

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Difficult Times

“No! NO! Absolutely not!” the older man in front of me
yells at the grocery clerk when she asks him
if he wants to donate $2 to our local Food Bank,

such anger first thing in the morning,
and he’s just infused the clerk’s day and mine
with whatever bitter sauce his life has sunk into,

he doesn’t know that another man the day before
had told the clerk she wasn’t worth her hourly wage,
and she had to tell him, “The door is right over there,”

he doesn’t know she might have to make use
of the Food Bank herself, with her husband off work
long-term from an injury, and food prices rising,

with her elderly parents over a thousand miles away
who might need her to take time off work
to travel there to help them.

Would it make a difference if he knew?

*

Meg Freer grew up in Montana and now teaches piano in Kingston, Ontario, where she enjoys the outdoors year-round. Her prose, photos, and poems have won awards in North America and overseas and have been published in journals such as Ruminate, Juniper Poetry, Vallum Contemporary Poetry, Arc Poetry, Eastern Iowa Review, and Borrowed Solace.

Two Poems by J.R. Solonche

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HAIRCUT

“He was the best president
in our history,” I heard him
say, the elderly man I thought
was talking about Lincoln, or
Washington, or FDR. As a boy,
he could have remembered FDR.
He could have heard him on the
radio giving a Fireside Chat. He
could have remembered the funeral
train. But when he said, “He’s a
self-made millionaire,” I knew
he was talking about Trump, and
all I wanted to do was grab a towel
and shove it down his throat. Shit,
I wish I had. I’ve always wanted
to write a poem sitting in jail.

*

I HAD ROSES

I had roses.
I have no roses now.
I did not take care of my roses.
My roses were red.
My roses looked spectacular by the yellow lilies.
My roses looked spectacular by the front door.
Of my roses visitors would say, “Your roses look spectacular.”
This was years ago.
This was about the time my wife got sick.

*

Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY Orange, J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 500 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s, including The New Criterion, The New York Times, The American Scholar, The Progressive, Poetry Northwest, Salmagundi, The Literary Review, The Sun, The American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, Poetry East, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Free Verse. He is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Invisible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Five Oaks Press), The Black Birch (Kelsay Books), I, Emily Dickinson & Other Found Poems (Deerbrook Editions), In Short Order (Kelsay Books), Tomorrow, Today and Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions), True Enough (Dos Madres Press), The Jewish Dancing Master (Ravenna Press), If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (Kelsay Books), In a Public Place (Dos Madres Press), To Say the Least (Dos Madres Press), The Time of Your Life (Adelaide Books), The Porch Poems (Deerbrook Editions , 2020 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie Book), Enjoy Yourself (Serving House Books), Piano Music (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Serving House Books), For All I Know (Kelsay Books), A Guide of the Perplexed (Serving House Books), The Moon Is the Capital of the World (WordTech Communications), Years Later (Adelaide Books), The Dust (Dos Madres Press), Selected Poems 2002-2021 (nominated for the National Book Award by Serving House Books), and coauthor with his wife Joan I. Siegel of Peach Girl:Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Obits by Jayne Benjulian

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Obits

My first job was an internship
At the New Rochelle Standard Star.

I called the bereaved and asked
About the deceased. Intruding

On grief was terrifying,
But I was good at it.

I interviewed Gloria Steinem
& Andy Warhol.

I heard how someone’s father
Turned to the wall,

Someone’s mother said,
Take care of—

A lover blew bubbles
With his last breath.

I began my own obit,
She interned in death.

*

Jayne Benjulian is the author of Five Sextillion Atoms (Saddle Road Press, 2016). Her poems, widely published, have been shortlisted for the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Fish Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize. She served as chief speechwriter for Apple and investigator for the Public Defender in King County, WA . She lives in the Berkshire Hills and coaches a speech and debate team in Western Massachusetts. www.jaynebenjulian.com

Two Poems by Nicole Yurcaba

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Ode to a US Army Special Forces Soldier Educating Me about My Homeland’s Literature

Tell me again how you want to fight
Zabuzhko’s sentences into philosophies
bound by proper punctuation. You don’t know
what it is like spending your life lost
in translation, how one language wrestles
a second or third face-down into mud
& forces it to swallow handful after handful–
dirt, grass, gravel, piss, shit, & blood
until you no longer remember
how to say bird or sky or death,
so you could wake up one day to learn
your pregnant cousin who stayed behind
in your family’s homeland burned alive
in a car bombed by occupiers who clip
phone wires & mail them home believing
the internet’s entirety exists within. Tell me
again my homeland’s history, how our nation’s
bard lived in exile, how when my family escaped
we had no home yet home is a mosaic
6,000 miles from where I stand, squinting
in wonder that you think Lemko
is merely a former team mate’s surname.

*

Ode to Drinking at QXT’s in Newark with Franz Kafka

A friend advises I stay wary
of the Existentialists. He knows
damn well I am in too deep
with Kafka, who sits beside
me on a Saturday night,
sipping a cosmopolitan.
Franz, I say. We were born
beautifully dead inside.
Kafka weighs our insignificance
in his right hand.
Your heart weighs an ounce
too little, Franz says. You
are awarded the precipice’s edge.
The DJ spins Blutengel’s
“Forever Young.” My phone
Buzzes–a message from my friend:
Nikola, I wish you didn’t think
of yourself as other. Kafka’s drink
trembles in his hand. He leans
into me, his lips hot on my ear.
His finger’s cold sinks through
my fishnets. We spend too much
time together, Franz states.
Another night, and I may not
be able to keep myself
from pushing you. I take
Kafka’s hand, lead him
to the dancefloor, place his hands
on my chest. His fingers
tap      tap      tap     
the bass rhythm
the policy of truth
known only by the darkness
thrumming beneath my bodice’s ties.

*

Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба–Nikola Yurtsaba) is a Ukrainian American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, West Trade Review, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University. Nicole teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and is a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and The Southern Review of Books.

Communal Erosion by Michael Garrigan

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Communal Erosion
          Prince Edward Island

We live on an island shaped by sea;
our edges crumble with every wave
that reaches us. Wind is our currency.

We plant potatoes hoping their tubular
roots grow long enough to keep our red
clay together. Every season there is mud.

We watch the ocean’s slow hunger and build
our houses among the gnarled spruce slowing
our communal erosion; we siphon lobsters.

What we do with the earth we are born
on is a matter of understanding the time
it needs to tell us the answers we seek.

*

Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and believes that every watershed should have a Poet Laureate. He is the author of Robbing the Pillars and his next book — River, Amen — will be published in April 2023. His writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, River Teeth, and North American Review. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence for The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area and you can find more of his work at www.mgarrigan.com.

Three Poems by Hilary King

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Meeting the Woman Who Saved Donkeys

We meet late. She’s been so busy
being my mother. Now, there is no
husband to wipe up after, no children
to turn an ear to, no horizon sunny enough
to lure her from her three-roomed world.
Appetite opens windows long-nailed shut.
Key lime pie for breakfast, tubs of chocolate frosting
in the fridge, a whip-sharp tirade when I remove
from the grocery cart cinnamon rolls, cookies, more frosting.
She savors the junk mail, carefully reading each slick letter
begging her to help the environment, the veterans,
the long-eared donkeys. I hide her checkbook.
After breakfast, she returns to bed, lays herself
on the pendulum between sleep and dreaming,
a book in one hand, memories in the other.
Waking one day, she smiles when she sees me.
I thought you were my mother, this woman says to me,
smiling. I smile back and I don’t say, Same.

*

Edgestitch

First you were the thread.
Now you are the needle, easing
your mother’s arms into her jacket
as she stands in the doctor’s office,
docile as a child.
Once you chafed in her grip,
mornings she combed out your wildness,
seasons she harvested your flaws,
years you gave her only silence.
She trimmed your hair to above your ears,
you learned how to return her call,
but it took her slow unspooling
to weaken the knots between you.
When she trails off over lunch,
staring silently at her soup, your turn
to talk up the weather, friends, the waitress.
Never huggers or proclaimers of affection,
there was between you, only this fabric.

*

The Cutting

What’s the difference between a tree
and a bush and a happy life
or a wasted one?
I take little credit for this growth except
that I when I saw the opportunity
sitting at the end of a driveway,
I grabbed it to my chest and ran,
the yucca’s spiky leaves pricking my hands,
its thick root a fist banging against my heart.
At home I gauged the sun, the way
we made a list of pros and cons, stay or go.
Planted, the yucca stood upright, alone.
When we arrived here, we were strangers
to everyone but each other.
Was this the trimming we needed?
New dirt and every few years
the pain of sharp shears?

*

Hilary King is a poet originally from Virginia and now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Salamander, TAB, Door Is a Jar, and other publications. She is the author of the book of poems, The Maid’s Car and is currently studying for her MFA degree at San Jose State University.

Two Poems by Amy Small-McKinney

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A Widow Opens Her Window

Crepe Myrtle leaps out from behind the fence.
Red lips. Wide open, wet from rain.

A revolt of hues refuses to turn away.
Antonyms of refuse: allow, accept, meet.

I see my new lover walking the path to my house.
Where we’ll meet, not a pristine fence. The blood

oranges inside. The wild luggage of our hearts.

*

By Laurel Lake

Tell me again—

The shape of the wave
is like a half-tube on top of the water
concentrating light into the shape you see.

You see at the bottom of the lake, that curvy line,
as the wave moves, the line of light
moves with it.

Oh, the lines of light, that concentration along the wave—

Look now, the lines of light no longer short
against the floor of the lake but diagonal
changing as the wind changes.

Look, now the lines have become nesting eggs—
Like us, half-moon inside half-moon.

*

Amy Small-McKinney’s third chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, was written during COVID and her husband’s death (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). Her second full-length book, Walking Toward Cranes, won The Kithara Book Prize (Glass Lyre, 2016). Small-McKinney has been published in numerous journals, for example, American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Baltimore Review, Connotation Press, and Comstock Review, among others. Several of her poems are also forthcoming in the December issue of Banyan Review. Most recently, she is a contributor to Anhinga Press’s new anthology Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice. Her poems have also been translated into Romanian and Korean. Her book reviews have appeared in journals, such as Prairie Schooner and Matter. Her current manuscript, still looking for a home, was a finalist with Trio House Press, White Pine Press, and Barrow Street Press. Small-McKinney was the 2011 Montgomery County (PA) Poet Laureate, judged by poet Chris Bursk. She has a degree in Clinical Neuropsychology from Drexel and an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Small-McKinney resides in Philadelphia.

Two Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

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The Story of Absence

In watercolors, it is helpful to leave blank spaces
for the viewer to fill in, splash in their own colors.

An empty net needs filling, says the fisherman,
to the silent reflective lake. Grandma says, leave
one imperfect stitch, and an eye will balance it.
The hint of absence is important in jazz.
My father tangled in deaf silence,
pieced together meaning.

In watercolors, it is helpful to move fast,
let colors collide, let dry, hope the impression lasts.

A hummingbird
left behind the impression of here-and-gone,
emptiness and filling.

Mother says my imagination is bedeviling,
Sometimes, in life, it is better leaving some blanks.

*

Rain and Afterwards

The sound of rain — the hammering of roofing nails.
The cold, purple sky shivers
and broods,
prowls over us, blocking sunlight.
Rain’s haggard face tells both a new and old story,
as tender as first love
entering the brick house of our hearts,
making us sing for no reason,
singing loudly, not caring
if our song disturbs complete strangers.
My soul eats up this music, can’t get enough of it.

*

Martin Willitts Jr, edits the Comstock Review, judges New York State Fair Poetry Contest. Nominated for 17 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, 2020. His 25 chapbooks include the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 21 full-length collections including Blue Light Award “The Temporary World.” His new book is “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022).

Three Poems by Michelle Hendrixson-Miller

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As If I Could Warn You, As If It Would Change Things

After 50, like before, you worry
about your body, but more

about its disappearance. You swear,
at some point, you hear

the vibration of the male gaze choke
and shut off like a fan in the night.

You think I’ll get used to that. Besides
every negative mammogram feels

like a winning ticket. A near-miss
you commemorate with sex.

Sex won’t feel the same, but you
suck it up. Every pressure, pull, slip, release

might be the last. Up late,
in the mirror, in moonlight,

you’ll catch your mother’s face.
Remember, you thought her silly.

In her hospital bed, barely able to sip water,
how she gestured and whispered,

insistent that you
draw her eyebrows, find her lipstick.

*

What I Understood About Being a Milk-Carton Kid, Before there were Milk-Carton Kids

I slept in a pink bedroom
in a princess bed,
with my cousin Juanita I’d only just met.

An older girl. Her body a mountain range
with the setting sun
of the nightlight behind it.

I thought living in the south meant
learning to be okay
with cockroaches — everywhere.

Medjool dates with legs.
I’d watch some, the size of beads
make a serrated line up the wall beside the toilet.

Dad said it was child-napping, not kidnapping
because he was our father, and we went willingly.

My brother left me alone. Our other cousin,
a blond boy his age became his friend.

I owned two pairs of jeans. I liked
the way my butt looked in my Mavericks—
M’s stitched on the back pockets like my name.

There were plenty of books to read.
And I was warm.

No one hurt me there, or tried to
wish me away.

Gladly, I bowed my head to offer thanks
when all the meals were served.

*

October Eclipse

Blackbirds, like shiny boxes, peck the grass.
Sun falls through the kitchen glass and makes fog.

Yesterday, you said the azalea leaves are dry as crisps,
fish bones rattling in the wind.

The squirrels are frantic in wet trees now. Their mouths full
of walnuts fat as hearts turned hard and brown.

Tonight, you’ll be Father Time. I’ll be Mother Earth,
a wreath of plastic flowers in my hair.

November will round the corner soon enough,
like a dark carnival or flood.

For now, though, wet leaves and sun mango the light.
And we are still part young.

*

Michelle Hendrixson-Miller received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, where she served as poetry editor of Qu Literary Magazine. Her poems have appeared in Thrush, One, Josephine Quarterly, Poems and Plays, The Moth, Adirondack Review, Still, The Fourth River, Harbor Review, Mudfish, The Museum of Americana,2River View, and others. https://mraehendrixsonmill.wixsite.com/mhmpoems

Two Poems by Karen A VandenBos

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Even Loss Can Be Beautiful

Loss comes quietly.
It surprises us as we look in the mirror, turn on the news,
answer the phone, open an email, look out the window
or spin around.
What was once a forest of golden leaves has faded into a
grove of muted browns and empty cathedrals.
The pure white of snow has been stained by the mud of
spring, no longer inviting.
Some lost things are found to have taken on new shapes:
a mitten without a thumb, a feather with a broken spine,
ashes with no fire.
They ask us to see the beauty in being broken, messy. Let
them surprise you with what they have to offer.
Let once shining blue eyes, now dulled by all they have
witnessed reopen in wonder.
Loss becomes rivers accepting the melting ice, forests
resurrecting into sanctuaries of green light and new life
awakening from a long winter nap.
In the way of the seasons, there is no word for loss, only
a continuous ebb and flow, a cycle of death and rebirth
where beauty can be found in the tiniest flaws.

*

Autumn in the Rear View Mirror

Our small lives rise and fall as
another November recedes in the
rear view mirror.

It has been a season of few mercies.
Bones worn down to the marrow and
hope vanishing like smoke from an
extinguished match.

The sun’s light grows softer as
the days grow shorter and shadows
lengthen. There is a new chill in
the air.

Night drapes us in her black robe
before the chime of the evening
church bells ring a call to vespers.

The trees are bare and the north
wind carries us inside.
Inside where we sit by the fire
dreaming of things that cannot last.

*

Karen A VandenBos was born on a warm July morn in Kalamazoo, MI. She can be found unleashing her imagination in three online writing groups and her writing has been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Blue Heron Review and others.

‘Aubade For My 18-Year-Old Son As I Wonder What He Will Do With His Life Besides Playing Video Games’ by Susan Michele Coronel

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Aubade For My 18-Year-Old Son As I Wonder What He Will Do With His Life Besides Playing Video Games

He says college is a waste of time,
& maybe it’s true if it takes ten hours
to write a paragraph about why college
is valuable. The irony. But he stays up
all night to make a hundred bucks helping
others level up on Destiny. I want him to
level up in life, but the keyboard is glued
to his fingers, mouse clicking like termites
scratching under the floor. Brain pulses
confine him to his room, warmed not by
electricity or the moon’s afterglow, but
by dopamine hits every game bestows. The sun
streams in, but can’t interrupt the divine blue
that soothes, that affirms I know, I know.

*

Susan Michele Coronel was nominated twice for a Pushcart. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including Spillway 29, TAB Journal, Inflectionist Review, Gyroscope Review, Prometheus Dreaming, and Thimble. Her first full-length manuscript was a finalist in Harbor Editions’ 2021 Laureate Prize. She lives in New York City with her children.

Detour by Lori D’Angelo

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Detour

Nothing has gone as planned,
but I’m not dead, so I guess,
there’s that. Afternoon, after
the kids have left for school,
haven’t yet returned, it’s middle
of everything. Middle of the day,
middle of my life, middle of no
-where. We live out here with
the rabbits and the possums
and the tombstones, see more
animals than people who come
up this way, most days. It’s weird
up here, when we hear a knock
at the door, think who goes there,
and why? Couldn’t they just leave
us alone, living by the creek. Quiet.
I like watching the fish sometimes
more than I like the sight of people.

*

Lori D’Angelo earned her MFA in creative writing fiction from West Virginia University in 2009, the same year she had her oldest son. She is a grant recipient from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a fellow at the Hambidge Center for Creative arts, and an alumna of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Recent publications include stories in Black Moon Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Magazine, JAKE, and Suburban Witchcraft.

ruins of war by Ayòdéjì Israel

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ruins of war

i sat still. my soul on the run, my heart,
hung on a burning stick. i kept my mind
in the beginning of my body & swallowed
everything that comes around into my
brain. a boy sat with his mother, half-
burnt; himself, half-baked in the fiery sun
that kept on bellowing. i was also
a victim. i lost one of my arms while trying
to figure out where my mother died, or
where she was fried. i lost an eye also–
i am a ruin of war. i am the remnant
of a deflowered city. it is the boy, again,
calling on me. beckoning, at my dangling hand.
i sat there, and stared at him. what does a boy
deserve in a moment of disarray? what
chisels the soul of a boy when everything human
goes astray? this boy called me hope. he
called me help. he called me believe. he
said i am everything good that comes from
the west! again, i asked myself: why are boys
so ignorant? when i am everything that comes
from the west! i saw him. he grabbed his pale mother
& searched her eye sockets, as if hope had
a way of hiding itself inside them.

*

Ayòdéjì Israel is a student at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan. He is a Nigerian and he writes from there. He is known for being a poet, writer, a political activist, and many other things. His works have appeared/forthcoming on Livina Press, Kreative Diadem Magazine, and Arts Lounge Magazine. You can find him on Twitter @Ayo_einstein.

Sonnet Upon What I Am Not by Rita Quillen

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Sonnet Upon What I Am Not

I am not winged or gilded or graceful
or a decoupaged box of childhood happy.
I hold no keys to heaviest doors,
no maps to caves or graves or pathways.
My invitation to sing long lost,
I am no scaly siren on the cliffs,
luring admirers with hypnotic trills.
No one calls on the white courtesy phone.
My name’s nowhere in parade confetti.
No chariot stops to offer a ride.
I tell myself I’m not a ghost or smoke
alone in woods or traffic, trapped by words.
I almost write I am no one’s mother
but for another thing I am not: liar.

*
Rita Quillen’s new novel WAYLAND, a sequel to HIDING EZRA, published by Iris Press in 2019, is the March 2022 Bonus Book of the Month for the International Pulpwood Queens and Timber Kings Book Club. She also has a new and selected poetry collection, SOME NOTES YOU HOLD, (Madville Press) published in 2020.. Her full-length poetry collection, The Mad Farmer’s Wife, published in 2016 by Texas Review Press, a Texas A & M affiliation, was a finalist for the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature from Berea College. One of six semi- finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she has received three Pushcart nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination in 2012. She lives, farms, writes songs, and takes photographs at Early Autumn Farm in southwestern Virginia. Read more at www.ritasimsquillen.com.

Pop Culture Writer Calls Taylor Swift’s song Anti-Hero Self Loathing by Jaime Jacques

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Pop Culture Writer Calls Taylor Swift’s song Anti-Hero Self Loathing

and I wonder why. I mean —
has she never drank herself so blind
that she threw up into her own lap?

Haven’t we all skipped a few meals
to fit into the dress?
Left somebody on read?

She says the song is dark,
and I wonder why to be
real is to be considered ruinous?

Just kidding.
I know why.
If they can’t keep us begging for Botox
they better call us the problem.

Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
and I’m a monster on the hill.

The writer says these lyrics are confounding
and I wonder why.
Has she never been highjacked by hormones,
held hostage by her own blood?

Maybe she’s numb to herself, or
under the thumb of the paper that pays her.
In that case I believe the label
of self-loathing might be misplaced.

Thousands will read her column this week,
regurgitate the ideas on social media feeds,
dismiss the song as music for teenaged girls.

And the rest of us
we carry Taylor’s chorus like an inverted prayer
while looking at airbrushed models in underwear
reading the news about roe v wade
being cat called on the street
headphones on as we repeat

It’s me,
Hi.

I’m the problem, it’s me.

*

Jaime Jacques is an itinerant writer who currently calls the east coast of Canada home. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Birdcoat Quarterly, Cagibi, Anti-Heroin Chic, Brazos River Review and others. She is the author of Moon El Salvador and her reporting and travel writing can be found in Salon, NPR, Narratively, and Roads and Kingdoms among others. Find her on Instagram @calamity__jaime.

More by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

More

I want more pages in my day planner
with its tidy squares and room on the side
for “to dos” to be checked off, and I want
that list to never end. I want one page
after another and another to appear
in unending supply, the way peanut
butter jars appear in the cupboard and I’m
aghast at their number, and know you’ve
been to that big box store once again,
so, it takes me forever to find the tiny
jar of saffron stuck in the back.
I want more dreams of falling
for the joyful relief at awakening
from the chasm of sleep to consult
my day planner and tick off tasks
that annoy me. I want more days
to gripe in my mind about tiny hillocks
of crumbs, you’ve left on the counter
while slicing bread from Gusto’s
on Fourth Street, bought in such quantity
and stuffed in the freezer, that I can’t find
my tiny pint of mint chip ice cream.
Then the drip drop of red wine, the drip drop
of tomato from the salad you made
for me last night—I want more of that
on the counter. I want more mornings
when your heavy breathing wakens
me from sleep, when your five-pillow chateau
threatens to topple and smother me,
and I get up with the sun and head
out for my walk when the glorious
unfolding of the day is waiting.

*

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

I Was Diane DiPrima in Another Life by Susan Cossette

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I Was Diane DiPrima in Another Life

I was one of the boys.
I dropped acid with Timothy Leary.
Ginsberg hit me up for weed,
Kerouac for wine and typing paper.

I sewed stars in my hair,
spoke golden truths from other planets.
Buddhist monks chanted my poems like sacred wisdom.

I wanted every electric experience,
the eternal wisdom of peyote and Shiva,
my words to churn and blaze.
Goddess of destruction, purveyor of mercy.

I am really a middle-aged refugee from New York,
living semi-anonymously in the Midwest.
I have a mortgage, a day job, and landscapers.
Two cats, two dogs, and boxes of old memories
packed high in the garage, after the divorce.

Diane, all I have for you tonight
is Muskrat Love on the Legion Hall jukebox,
Christmas music in October,
and monolithic credit card debt.

My brain a thick concrete brick,
dank mud-filled swamp.
Paralysis by analysis.

The letters and syllables buried with old tires,
rusty license plates, plastic six pack rings,
and visions of what I could have been
had I been born thirty years earlier.

It’s not too late, Diane, right?

*

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.

Everything’s Rosy by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Everything’s Rosy

               Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

Her preferred lipstick color was “Everything’s Rosy”
by Revlon, her favorite makeup brand. Polio weakened
her body at age six. At eighteen she was a passenger on
a bus that collided with an electric trolley car in Mexico City:
an iron handrail impaled her pelvis “the way a sword pierces
a bull.” She sustained a punctured uterus and thirty broken bones.
A fellow passenger was traveling to the National Theater
carrying pure gold leaf; the impact of the collision scattered
flecks of gold all over Frida’s devastated body. Nothing was rosy.
She said, “I now live on a painful planet, transparent as ice.”
Frida adorned herself with traditional dresses and regal coiffures
from a matriarchal Oaxaca society. A lone vision in her own Eden,
she dreamed and consumed fiery alcohol and painkillers to excess
while spider monkeys and vines climbed her gold-flecked soul.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is a poet and Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Recognition for her poetry includes an American Academy of Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She is the author of four books. She is writing a new book of poems in the form of biographical sonnets.

Coyote Bush by Penelope Moffet

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Coyote Bush

In the field also known as lawn
in front of the suburban house
I grew all manner of things
to the neighbors’ dismay –
cilantro near the curb, sage
and buckwheat and woolly blue curls
in the planter near the house,
creeping boobialla on the main lawn.
Near the sidewalk a coyote bush
formed a rising mound
about the length and shape
of a human grave.

The house was worn,
wood peeling from the front door.
A Mountain Ash
clung to the foundation,
threatened to fall over,
but the front yard glowed in spring:
lavender’s purple fingers,
woolly blue curls,
a volunteer wild rose,
creamy buckwheat flowers,
white whirls of black sage.

Indoors we moved like ghosts
through dim coolness.
I was more and more outside.
Whose body nourished
the coyote bush, what
dream was buried there?

*

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems have been published in One Art, Natural Bridge, Permafrost, One by Jacar Press, Gleam, The Rise Up Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Gyroscope and other literary journals. She has been the recipient of fellowships at Dorland Mountain Arts, The Mesa Refuge, The Helen R. Whiteley Center and Alderworks Alaska. She lives in Southern California.

Winter Remains by Mary Simmons

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Winter Remains

When waking, the dream
is lost. When opening a door,

winter peals: is there warmth enough
to flood these ghosts?

Numbness changes color
in a kitchen with the oven cracked.

Ice thaws in eyelashes, through hair,
on lips that failed to catch snowflakes

between them, on coats, turning to pearls.
In artificial light, a body transforms

back into a body, and the lost no longer
look through us. I seek shelter

in the spaces where even I cannot find
anonymity and those footfalls belonging to—

what? I am drawing circles around us, creating
our private universes and naming them

friend to all and she who wants to
understand too much.

I open a window to invite winter in
in branches only, in those arms

that may have loved us once.
The window open all night, I dream

snow, drifting down the hall,
and never grow cold.

*

Mary Simmons is a queer poet from Cleveland, Ohio. She is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she also serves as an assistant editor for Mid-American Review. She has work in or forthcoming from Exist Otherwise, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Shore, and The Santa Clara Review.

Two Poems by Barbara Eknoian

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Gift

He sits on the edge
of the couch
hoping his niece
will like the gift
purchased
at the thrift store.
She smiles,
makes a fuss
over the watercolors
in tarnished frames,
showing houses
on a street strewn
with orange leaves.
At the bottom
of the Christmas tree,
she props the prints up
to rest against gifts
bought with Visa
and Mastercard,
and the lovely shades
of autumn outshine
the tinsel and lights.

*

Sentimental

In a lucid moment,
I wonder why I keep
the black steamer trunk
in the corner of my room
crammed with letters
from girl scout camp
and high school friends,
who have forgotten me
like an old sneaker
hanging from a wire,
along with every letter
from former neighbors,
who meant a lot to me.
I revere the correspondence
as though they’re prayers,
but realize I’m too sentimental
valuing the friendships
for more than what they were.
I contemplate a huge bonfire
and see the letters burning up,
yet I need to hold on to them
like artifacts in a museum
to prove that I was here,
and we were once.

*

Barbara Eknoian’s work has appeared in Pearl, Chiron Review, Cadence Collective, Redshift, and Silver Birch Press’s anthologies. Her recent collection of short stories published by Amazon is Romance is Not Too Far From Here. She lives in La Mirada, CA with daughter, grandson, one cat and a kitten. The kitten is full of mischief and keeps the whole family on their toes.

Maeve by William Palmer

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Maeve

She is wrapped
in a blanket with a blue glow
under her

to reduce her jaundice,
backlit like a small bough
on a Christmas tree.

My son changes her,
then lays her tenderly
in the curve of my arm.

She wears only a diaper,
her cord above it
hardened dark.

As I speak to her, her eyes move
on me, her tiny lips pushing out
in perfect circles, as if kissing air.

I touch her ruddy feet,
skim the soft skin
of her chest and cheeks.

I have forgotten
how my son felt newborn,
as if that part of me had fallen off.

Just a year ago,
my darkness black,
I thought of leaving.

And here, now,
I am holding Maeve,
her name Irish for joy.

*

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in Braided Way, Innisfree, JAMA, J Journal, One Art, On the Seawall, Poetry East, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The Westchester Review. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

Lost Cove Wildfire by Beth Copeland

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Lost Cove Wildfire

After weeks without rain in the Blue Ridge,
a fire spreads on Christmas Eve, then smolders
under snow but snags and smoke remain

as firefighters in California find ghost trees
on the forest floor, scorched imprints
of fallen trunks, branches, and twigs.

Meanwhile, my sister builds a fire in her house,
tosses kindling on logs and, in lieu of a bellows,
blows on the blue blaze to keep it burning.

How thin is the wire between the flaring flame
in the hearth —the heat, the heart!—and the wildfire
that starts with a single spark?

*

Beth Copeland is the author of Blue Honey, 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize winner; Transcendental Telemarketer (BlazeVOX, 2012); and Traveling through Glass, 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award winner. Her chapbook Selfie with Cherry is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. She owns Tiny Cabin, Big Ideas™, a retreat for writers in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Great Lady Descending by Carol Boston

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Great Lady Descending

Three weeks before our son tells us she is our daughter
I have this dream:
I am standing at the bottom of a staircase and bowing like a court herald.
From that position I gesture with a flourish and announce:
The Great Lady is descending.
And there, at the top of the stairs, she pauses:
A woman dressed in white with a holly sprig tucked into her red sash.

Before that, I woke one morning, as I sometimes do, with a whole sentence in my head:
If you don’t know what she sounds like, don’t just say anything–
listen to the sound of her voice.

Now it strikes me that that those words, that image
Were sent from the future to the present to help me
So I could recognize the new woman who had already entered the room
So I could call her by the name she had already picked out.

*

Carol Boston works in higher education and holds a Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She grew up in the rural Midwest and now lives with her husband and aged cat in Silver Spring, Maryland. This is her first appearance in a poetry journal.

Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel by Howie Good

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Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel

After 30 minutes of Christmas music, the high school choir broke into the Hanukkah song “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” at the holiday concert. The person seated beside me began to complain under her breath. Jesus Fucking Christ! I thought. I examined her out of the corner of my eye. She wasn’t an obvious Nazi. Somewhere in her fifties, she was trying hard to look younger, a frosted blonde with the sharp features of the obsessive dieter. I didn’t say anything, though I might have let out a sigh. The song changed to something Christmassy. I focused on my daughter up on stage. She was heedlessly singing, her face all alight.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry books are The Horse Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press, and Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems from Redhawk Publications.