Three Poems by Nancy Huggett

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Wake Me in a Silly Stupid Way
(our daughter’s request, post-stroke, most mornings)

My husband is a pirate,
a patch, a breach of laughter
in the morning. Stealing
our daughter’s memory
of what she’s lost
from her waking eyes
so what remains is this ocean
of love that amuses. He steers
the stolen ship of what might have been
around the rocks, through shark-infested
waters that roil when her brain recoils
at sound and wobbly stairs and boundaries
not set by her—the flash and flare
of fists that harm the ones she loves,
the contrition that plunders her days.
He peg-legs in and pulls a parrot
from his pocket, feathers ruffed
from the climb upstairs, squawking
in some raucous rum-punched tenor,
jigging with the sunlight as it streaks
across the pine planks of her bedroom floor.
Other days he’s a wizard in a pointy hat
or a jester with a bell, or his own sweet
grinning goofy self that he magics
from yesterday’s debacle or last
night’s unkempt sleep. He saves her
daily from her own laments.
Switch-baits regrets for buried
treasure—this day and all its charms.

*

When our daughter with Down syndrome is diagnosed
with a rare neurodegenerative disease, I think of the skunk
after Maggie Smith

who, three nights in a row,
woke us with the burning sulphureous sting
of a stink and I ran around closing windows.
Like all those midnight runs to the ER
when our daughter kept having “fainting spells”
and turned blue. Then someone told me

it takes almost two weeks for a skunk
to refill their glands after spraying,
that if it happens back to back to back
you’re dealing with a bigger problem.

*

I Believe in the Night: A Caregiver’s Credo
(lines from Rilke, Book of Monastic Life I, 11)

I believe in the night, creator
of mirrors and monsters,

and in the stars, dead now
but dangling direction.

I believe in shadow’s
embrace. Dusky lover

of all the nations of my heart—
their bicker of sadness,

canticles of delight. I believe
in unfinished hems, threads

trailing through dark,
thin ribbons of fiddle

for fingers searching,
rosaries lost long ago

in the backwoods of hope
where brambles catch

starlight, glimmer like fireflies
always moving. I believe

in the dirt, in cicadas’
vast slumber,

the emergence of lovers,
bulbs, dew worms inching

refuse into friable loam.
I believe in the soil—

that darkness can make you sing.

*

Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Published in Event, Poetry Northwest, SWIMM, and Whale Road Review, she’s won some awards (RBC PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.

Beads by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

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Beads

There are days I long for long-ago days
and crave the cackled song of her laughter.
Why did she have to leave us so soon?
I see her in every bloom of iris, purpling
my side yard each June. Grief is
a forever fading bruise, a reminder
of our Kodachrome days, all those little
snapshots we carry, trinkets we unbury
from the drawer of memory—
a bracelet full of charms reminding us
how lucky we are to find one another,
each of us, a shimmering bead
on life’s great, miraculous string.

*

Shawn Aveningo Sanders’ poems have appeared in journals worldwide, including Calyx, ONE ART, contemporary haibun online, Drifting Sands, Quartet, Timberline Review, Cloudbank, Sheila-Na-Gig, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and many others. Her new book, Pockets (MoonPath Press, 2025) was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest. Shawn is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Touchstone Award nominee. A proud mom and Nana, she shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon, where they run a small press, The Poetry Box. When she’s not writing, you might find her in a shoe store hunting for a new pair of red shoes. (redshoepoet.com)

Two Poems by Denise Duhamel

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POEM IN WHICH WE WERE YOUNG AND DUMB

When we moved into that teeny place
on Mulberry Street, a ceiling fan hung
in the middle of our miniscule living room.
Red wires, black wires. It jiggled from side to side.
I think it’s going to fall, I said. It scares me.
You thought I worried too much. I was afraid
to walk under the fan, even when it was off.
I called it a mistletoe of death. Sometimes
I stepped on the couch to avoid it
since the room was so small. One night as we slept
I heard a crash. The motor made a dent in the floor
and the blades spun off. It was the first time
I said I told you so. I hadn’t called the landlord
because I wanted to believe you. I wanted
to believe everything would be just fine.

*

POEM IN WHICH I RECONSIDER THE PASTORAL

I used to think nature poetry was dopey,
O’Hara and all that—I can’t even enjoy a blade
of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy…
But that’s before the trees started to disappear—
dead ocean pockets, hurricanes, and wildfires.
I am late to the party held in this forest,
but I am so glad all of you are still here,
bopping under the twinkle lights of fireflies,
the data-free clouds, the retro disco ball moon.

*

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, she lives in Dania Beach.

At Machu Picchu by Alison Luterman

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At Machu Picchu

Green fingers of the Andes point straight up.
Minty buzz of coca leaves chewed to a pulp
are supposed to help with altitude sickness.
They don’t. Far below, the brown river churns,
white with foam. We clamber over steep stones.
This is where Incan emperors came
for summer respite, high in cool clouds.
Here’s an outline of a granary.
And here’s where oracles
scried for omens. Did those wise ones foresee
the coming of Spaniards on horseback,
looking like great god-beasts
to ones who’d never seen riders before?
There’s a dizziness that comes
when worlds collide, like now,
when I’m in another country, half in another century,
imagining the sight of impossibly tall conquistadors
galloping up on a sleepy village.
I sink down on a warm boulder, easy mark
for an off-duty guard who tells me
he’s looking for an American wife
with lots of patience, because he wants to fly
“like a condor” to the U.S. But I’m already married,
and a sharp-tongued flatlander, alas.
He shrugs. Worth a try.
We watch a local woman, baby tied to her back
climb past, easy as water flowing uphill,
followed by a German with a selfie stick.
Since I landed in Cusco last week,
I’ve seen a bent-over old man
use a toilet plunger to haul himself along
steep streets, and a barefoot girl
in muddy rags, herding pigs in a ditch.
Mostly I’ve seen how mighty empires fall
and the descendants of kings are left
hustling tourists for tips.
The arc of history dissolves into mist.
“You can know every view by one view,”
my companion says, out of the blue.
He’s stuck in his life, as I am in mine,
and the terms are cosmically unjust.
High above us, condors circle the sacred mountain
cruising the updrafts like minor gods.

*

Alison Luterman’s five books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and Hard Listening. She also writes plays, song lyrics, and personal essays. She has taught at New College, The Writing Salon, Catamaran, Esalen and Omega Institutes and writing workshops around the country, as well as working as a California poet in the schools for many years.

not a letter to my father by Claire Jean Kim

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not a letter to my father

kremlin was your nickname at work
because of the secrets you kept.
well, they didn’t know the half of it.
the down-low trips to beijing and pyongyang,
the rolls of c-notes you handed mom:
we’ll be rich one day. your husband is going
to be famous. by day, a professor in d.c.
by night, a man of international mystery,
an asian james bond, with the obligatory côterie
of female hangers-on. but it all came
to naught, didn’t it? the machinations
and assignations? except the wreckage; that part
was real. then, poetically, infirmity,
with your second ex-wife and third daughter
guarding your carcass out of spite,
as if anyone, anywhere would want a bite.
yesterday, i looked you up online
and saw you had died.

*

Claire Jean Kim is on the faculty at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on racial justice and human-animal studies. She is the author of three award-winning scholarly books. She began writing poetry in 2021, and her poems have been published in or are forthcoming in Rising Phoenix Review, Terrain.org, Tiger Moth Review, Anthropocene, Bracken, The Ilanot Review, Ghost City Review, The Summerset Review, Great River Review, TriQuarterly, Anacapa Review, The Lincoln Review, Arc Poetry, Pinch, The American Poetry Journal, North American Review, The Indianapolis Review, and The Missouri Review. The Lincoln Review nominated her poem “Things to do on a Fullbright fellowship in Japan” for Best of the Net in 2025. Terrain.org nominated her poem “Mastodon” for the Best New Poets anthology in 2024. The Missouri Review featured her poem “Amsterdam” as a “Poem of the Week” in January 2025.

Two Poems by Daye Phillippo

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We shared a secret,

                                       the morning moon
and I, she who has just begun her wane
and I who am further along—waning
is not to be feared, it’s just the journey
toward being made new. Emptied to be
filled, and all, seasons on their wheel.
This morning’s sky, a faded, soft pastel
like the pink umbels of Joe Pye Weed
and the hostas’ lavender flutes, stirring
in the breeze. And out front, the pale
sweet pea blossoms, almost translucent
color of the moon, delicately edged
with lavender on vines that have, by July,
tendrilled to the top of their teepee
and now tumble over themselves, lavish
opulence of blossom and fragrance
in which I’m immersed as I clip flowers
to refresh the vases. Refuge of tendril
and vine where a hummingbird pauses
to rest, refresh herself before flying on.

*

Washing Your Face with a Pink Washcloth

      Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day.
      “Both Sides Now” – Joni Mitchell

Washing your face with a pink washcloth
dried on the line is like washing your face
with evening sky. Breathe it in before bed.
Blessed are those who walk to the barn
to secure chickens for the night, witness
a wide sky piled high with gray and white,
pink backdrop that didn’t last, dissolved
the way cotton candy and youth dissolve,
sugar away in the mouth, the way what you
expected this time of life to be is not,
yet, here you are, feet still on the ground,
head still in the clouds, washing your face
with sky and that song about clouds you
learned on piano when you were young,
only song you actually wanted to play.
Tonight you’ll rest your head on a cloud,
soft pillowcase fragrant with wind and
wondering, clouds and years, their colors
and shapes, trajectories, their brighten
and fade, accumulations and dispersals,
flashes and rumblings, just how much
clouds can hold back before the rain falls,
and their longstanding relationship with
wind that drives the storyline, beginning
to end. Stage right, stage left, third wall.
What will it all look like from the other side?

*

Daye Phillippo taught English at Purdue University. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected by ETS for inclusion in the AP English Exam. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Midwest Quarterly, LETTERS, One Art, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana where she hosts a Poetry Hour at her local library. Thunderhead, her first collection, was published by Slant in 2020. Her second collection of poems, Blue Between Owls, was awarded the 2024 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and is forthcoming from Codhill Press.

Two Poems by Andrea Potos

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WAITING FOR THE MAIL

This is the week
this might be the day

like I said
yesterday also–

maybe tomorrow
or the day after–

balancing on
anticipation’s tightrope–

I love the air up here–
freed of everything–

disappointment,
even joy.

*

ANXIETY MORNING

You’re open-ended,
some necklace
that has lost its clasp.

You might be ploughing
across bogland, ground
precarious beneath you.

You’d be a great cypress
overlooking the Pacific cliffs if you could–
wind-sculpted by centuries, still held.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem. You can find her at andreapotos.com

It’s 11:11 am on November 11 by David Colodney

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It’s 11:11 am on November 11

Dad rises from his armchair, the mauve one
he sits watching Mets games all summer.
This year for the first time, I must help him stand.
He’s at attention, thrusting his willowed chest,
raising his right hand to his forehead in salute.
He stands erect for precisely one minute,
as he has each year since his honorable
discharge, only this year he is not in his Army
dress greens. This year, his arm trembles
like leaves in autumn’s wind, a branch arriving
in the form of a nurse guiding him back
to his seat as Mom arrives & caresses his cheek.
Dad never talks about combat, never shares
war stories. What is he thinking as he pays tribute
to the fallen he fought with, & the dead whose names
he never knew yet considered brothers? I stand
beside him, my hand on his shoulder, a paperweight.

*

David Colodney is a poet living in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is the author of Gen X Redux, forthcoming in 2026 from Main Street Rag Publishing, and the chapbook Mimeograph (Finishing Line Press, 2020). A Best of the Net and three-time Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in multiple journals. David currently serves as an associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal and is an ardent supporter of Liverpool Football Club. If you are looking for him, he can often be found at the Lion & Eagle Pub watching Liverpool matches.

How to Construct a Soul by George Franklin

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How to Construct a Soul

First, you buy the kit from Target or Amazon.
I heard that Costco has them as well, and they
May be a little cheaper. There are people who
Say they all start out the same. I don’t know.
Mine looked like a hummingbird, and a friend
Told me his had blue feathers and a black beak.
There are even online discussion groups about
Ones with fur. Some of them are hard and
Shiny like volcanic rock—they may not

Have been shiny at the beginning though.
Most of it is what you do with them, the time
And care you put in, carving, combing,
Polishing. It’s not something everybody’s
Comfortable with, but it’s important to read
The instructions. Otherwise, you could make
A real mess of it. Let’s say you have one of
Them that’s part of a set. It’s not easy to figure
Out where the other could be. There are stories

About builders who travel as far as South Asia
Or Africa, just hoping to find it waiting for them,
Maybe in the gift shop of a museum, or in
A marketplace, hiding behind a stack of handknit
Rugs or a display of Turkish chess pieces. I try
Not to think how disappointed they must be
If it doesn’t happen. Whatever you start out with,
You’ve got to manage your expectations.
Start slow. Begin by holding your new soul in

Cupped hands. Don’t be surprised if you shake
A little. Let it get used to you, the warmth of
Your palms and fingers. When it trusts you, it
May let you start to groom it, smooth the sharp
Edges, give it small treats—understand, some
Will refuse food entirely. Those require extra
Patience. Others will make soft whining sounds.
Speak in a low voice and comfort them
Until they fall asleep. Sometimes, music helps,

Or you can show them paintings of landscapes—
Trees and green hillsides, cattle, sheep, maybe
A stream, silver brushstrokes on top of blue.
Building a soul isn’t a project to fill a dull
Afternoon. Realize, you’re going to be at this
For however long it takes, and you can’t
Hurry it up or force a soul to be anything
Other than what it is. Don’t expect it to look
Like the picture on the box.

*

George Franklin is the author of eight poetry collections, including A Man Made of Stories, and a book of essays, Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing (both Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Individual poems have been published in Nimrod, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, One Art, and New Ohio Review, among others. He practices law in Miami, is a translation editor for Cagibi, teaches poetry classes in Florida prisons, and co-translated, along with the author, Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day.

Comp Lit by Erik Reece

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Comp Lit

My middle school English teacher mounted a long dark paddle,
drilled with holes, over the chalkboard in front of his class.
He called it the Black Death or the Black Mariah, or something
like that. We had thick orange grammar books out of which
we endlessly diagrammed sentences, knowing that a misdirected
participle might mean the application of that heinous paddle to
our hind end. Somehow, I came to love literature anyway. I came
to love words like susurration and Ohio. When I discovered
the poet Anna Ahkmatova, I loved that her name meant daughter
of the oaks, a name she invented because her father didn’t want
a poet in the family. What father does? Mine seemed perplexed,
eternally so, each Sunday morning by the furious rebuttals I wrote
on the church program to our pastor’s innocuous sermons.
Two years later, it was a short drive to a drunk driving charge
after I flailed along to the Fleshtones one night at Café LMNOP.
Friends from the college paper couldn’t go my bail, so I sat
in a cell till morning and said over and over, Anna Ahkmatova,
as if she might come through the walls, as if I was her lost son
shivering in a Russian prison under false arrest. Such, I’m afraid,
was the grandiose self-pity of my youth. It didn’t serve me well.
My passion for John Berryman convinced a Rhodes Scholar
to sleep with me once, after I drank all the liquor in her house,
but it didn’t stop the trimmers when I landed in an unironic rehab
called The Ledge. I quit reading John Berryman. I quit living
like John Berryman. I quit thinking that my father’s suicide
was a door he left open for me. I gave up the long day’s journey
into oblivion and shame. Now I just like to recite Issa’s poem:
The man pulling radishes   /   pointed my way   /   with a radish.
There’s a pretty easy sentence to diagram, and it makes me smile
to think about those pink radishes dangling from a farmer’s hand
as he sent the poet off along the road of his enduring loneliness,
always craving the one thing that might bring an end to craving.

*

Erik Reece is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Utopia Drive and Lost Mountain, which won Columbia University’s John B. Oakes Award for Outstanding Environmental Writing. His prose and poetry have appeared in Harper’s, The Oxford American, the Atlantic, Orion, and elsewhere. His collection of poems, Kingfisher Blues, was published this year by the University Press of Kentucky. He teaches writing at the University of Kentucky and is the founder of Kentucky Writers and Artists for Reforestation.

Four Poems by Laurel Brett

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THE BAY AT BAR HARBOR

A life of never sleeping—
insomnia makes living
a disease.

I take up residence
on the balcony of the hotel,
glass doors only mute

sleeping sounds of breaths
rising and falling, the benedictions
of my family, oblivious to the night

I spend sitting on the chair buried
in the bowl of stars,
the bay breathing

in the darkness, too.
Silver begins
along the crevices of dawn

opening the curtain
to a hundred tiny islands,
mirrors of the firmament

shining in the curve of port,
a school of swimming fish,
flashing fins— birth of the morning

of the world. I can never explain
to the sleepers the vision
before me,

or my wild exuberance.
By the time they wake
the silver will have vanished.

*

MIMOSAS AND MILKWEED

How can you not adore the earth?
To love is to press your cheek against the ground
and lie on your back to gaze up
through mimosa flowers
becoming birds against the sky.

The milkweed I planted for monarchs
returned this year, and bloomed
pink as a surprise— a prayer against extinction.

*

DEATH CAN NOT CLAIM DAHLIAS

I’d been mourning dahlias—
another loss.

You, my gardener gone—
poison ivy an invading army.

Dahlias demand so much—
tubers dug up in autumn

stored in winter       replanted in spring.
JoAnn gives me a mason jar

of dahlias. One owns my heart—
the color of midnight

if midnight were maroon       the texture of joy
if ecstasy were velvet.

Larger than my palm —
petals a portal.

*

IN MONTREAL

I get lost in the bonsai
in the Chinese garden
at Le Jardin Botanique

until I can no longer tell
if the trees are huge or tiny.
My restless children

beg to see Le Biodôme
nearby — four habitats
of North America.

We huddle in the cold, watching
puffins and penguins
in their fake Antarctica.

We swelter in the rainforest
room, where my 12 year old son
points out a capybara, a mammal

with a blunt brown snout. He
imitates Tim Curry voicing
an old cartoon, English accent

and all— a large amphibious rat,
and adds in a joyful voice
the largest rodent in the world.

Later at dinner the waiter,
insists my daughter is Italian.
Je suis américaine, she insists,

practicing her New Yorker’s glare.
They have outgrown my habitat.
The lady concierge explains in French

that whales will rise tomorrow,
their glistening sunlit backs
will leap up from the St. Lawrence.

*

Laurel Brett is a novelist, essayist, and poet. Her work has appeared in SECOND COMING, EKPHRASTIC REVIEW, ECLECTICA among other outlets. She lives overlooking a harbor.

ONE ART’s December 2025 Reading

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ONE ART’s December 2025 Reading

Date: Sunday, December 7

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

Featured Poets: Amy Small-McKinney, Linda Laderman, Laurie Kuntz, Susan Michele Coronel

>>> Register Here <<<

FREE!

(Donations appreciated.)

About Our Featured Readers:

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

Learn more about Susan online at:

susanmichelecoronel.com/

Laurie Kuntz is an award-winning poet and film producer. She taught creative writing and poetry in Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. Many of her poetic themes are a result of her working with Southeast Asian refugees in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines after the Vietnam War years. In a past life, she was an ESL teacher and published two ESL texts that were used widely in ESL programs both nationally and internationally. She has published seven poetry collections. Her 8th book, a full length collection entitled Shelter In Place will be published in 2026 by Shanti Arts Press.

Learn more about Laurie online at:

lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Eclectica, The MacGuffin, SWWIM, Action Spectacle, The Westchester Review, and ONE ART. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online here. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University in Ohio. For nearly a decade she was a docent at the Zekleman Holocaust Center near Detroit.

Learn more about Linda online at: 

lindaladerman.com.

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others.  She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Learn more about Amy online at:

amysmallmckinney.com/

Piet Mondrian Does the Foxtrot by Susana H. Case

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Piet Mondrian Does the Foxtrot

It might seem inconsistent, this ascetic, celibate man
having a ball on the dance floors of 1920s Paris,
where he isn’t a stranger to the Charleston
or the foxtrot. But I feel the rhythm of the foxtrot
in my work, he says. A man obsessed with order
and grids could enjoy such a dance, its musical
geometry, as he maneuvers around a room
like one of his paintings unfolding. Mondrian loves

jazz rhythms—the foxtrot the first dance to use them—
and though initially that seems surprising, jazz
is not only freedom, but has structure too, musicians
returning to a lattice of chords, even as they improvise
within that framework. See him now, a wiry man,

as he enters the blank canvas of the floor
in round wire-rimmed glasses, his crisp white suit
without a splotch of paint. He’s desired
as a partner for his meticulous style, his joyful
expression. With every step he makes a line,
his movements formal, precise—like his brushstrokes.

*

Susana H. Case is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Books (2023), and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk & Cake Press (2022), Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award as well as Finalist for several awards. She won the Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition in 2002 for The Scottish Café, which was re-released in English/Polish as Kawiarnia Szkocka (Opole University Press, 2010) and in English/Ukrainian as Шотландська Кав’ярня (Slapering Hol Press, 2024).

Speaking To & Listening To Our Aging Bodies: A Workshop with Amy Small-McKinney

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Speaking To & Listening To Our Aging Bodies: A Workshop with Amy Small-McKinney

Workshop Leader: Amy Small-McKinney
Date: Tuesday, January 13
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern – Please check your local times.
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

>>> Register Here <<<

About The Workshop:

Aging does not mean becoming invisible. It is a transition with its own pain and gorgeousness. By letting poems surprise us, without censoring, we will listen to our aging bodies and speak to them.

About The Workshop Leader:

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others.  She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Riffraff by Gene Twaronite

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Riffraff

A casual, under-the-breath
comment, though she might as well
have shouted it in my face.

Too bad we have to walk
through all these riffraff,
she said, entering the library
as she pointed to the people
heading for the entrance
with their luggage and bedrolls.

I looked at her and quietly
repeated the word as a question
that hung uselessly in the air.
The meeting was about to start
and there were things to do,
but I could still hear the word
with its terrible effing riffs,
heavily breathing
like a diminished thing
crouching at our door.

*

Gene Twaronite is a Tucson poet and the author of five poetry collections. His first poetry book, Trash Picker on Mars, was the winner of the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. His latest poetry collection is Death at the Mall (Kelsay Books). A former Writer-in-Residence for Pima County Public Library, he leads a poetry workshop for University of Arizona OLLI. Follow more of Gene’s writing at: genetwaronitepoet.com & genetwaronite.bsky.social

Sketchbook by Beverley Sylvester

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Sketchbook

“If you were an animal, which would you be?”
“A puffin.” I say it unapologetically.
It is my favorite animal.

On the borderlands of womanhood
where neither girl nor woman fits comfortably
on my tongue I wonder what of this,
my immortality, will be cataloged as juvenilia;
an indulgence of believing one day I will be a body
of things worth cataloging.

I write a letter with a pink pen
and do not feel ashamed.

I make a list of things that resemble
skeletons. I share it with no one.
It is a rich magic to see my own human
form amidst so many other natural,
beautiful, terrible things.

Through the word “other” I include myself
among natural, beautiful, terrible things.

I draw myself a puffin in pink pen.
It is imperfect, and I do not throw it away.
I title the image: a portrait of God.
I write it unapologetically.

I write this unapologetically.

*

Beverley Sylvester is a writer, composer, dramaturg, and musician. Her work is often rooted in the Southern Gothic genre where she interrogates the sticky, uncomfortable, and lovely relationships we have to death and dying, sexuality, spirituality, race, love, earth, politics, gender, rot, and embodiment in the American Deep South. Her writing has received the Artistine Mann Award in Playwriting, the New South Young Playwrights Award, and publication of poetry in Yellow Arrow Journal, among other recognitions. You can find her on Instagram at @bsylvester_arts or at bfsylvester.com.

Two Poems by Francine Witte

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Elegy for Waiting for You

The dark clock by the old train station
where the people come and go and me,
I’d stand there and I’d see that clock
with its hands that wouldn’t stop
even though you’d think they’d be too
weighted down with all the time
those hands were holding.

It’s easy to wait for love when you
know it’s on the next train or even
the one after that. But that was the problem.
You were never on any of those. I must have

known that but sometimes we will do anything
to breathe love alive. We will stand there
in a too-thin coat, shivering in the almost
dark, waiting forever for the train I wanted
so much for you to be on and which always
seemed moments away.

*

That night, moonless,

there was enough room Inside me
for my heart to bulge up, rocket
up to the space where I could still
see your goodbye eyes, flat as a galaxy map
Where stars are pressed against black velvet.
And like a galaxy, remembering you went into
The billions, of matter, of time, of how
Many years do the light from any of those
Dull, finished stars take to reach the earth.

*

Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte.

Power Steering by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Power Steering

When I was six years old,
my mother bought a used
two-tone Chevy Impala
with power steering for $200.
Power steering.
She said the words as if they possessed
magical powers. She tingled as she
described in vivid detail the newfound
ease of parking and switching lanes
without the resistance of the ancient
Buick she had traded in.

As a child, I couldn’t appreciate
the power of steering.
Even now, I tend to forget
that I have the power to steer
my thoughts from the dark
cratered roads where I too often
get lost or stall out. I forget
the sheer power of steering
when my brain wanders from one
overwhelming thought to the next,
and I find myself dwelling
on past wrong turns and flat tires.

Now when I turn the key in the ignition,
I try to remember that my mind
is not a driverless vehicle.
I have the power to steer my thoughts
in the direction of gratitude,
in the direction of hope
in the direction of joy.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s most recent poetry collection is Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

On Matriphagy by Franziska (Franzi) Roesner

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On Matriphagy

          matri- (mother)
          -phagy (to feed on)

When Harry Harlow left
his monkeys with their cloth
mothers, quietly closing the door
on the lab for the night,
the handkerchief in his breast
pocket a heavy-handed metaphor,
he did not return home
to his own children.

When Saint Martin gave away
just half his cloak
it was enough
to become holy.

In some centipedes
the offspring consume
their own mother,
swarming her and yanking
the dark flesh from beneath
her pale exoskeleton.

They say a woman’s body
does not fully recover
for eighteen months after giving birth,
a plant growing
pale leaves in acidic soil.

Mother Earth, we call it,
and take what we need.

*

Franziska (Franzi) Roesner is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. She was a poet first, though, and has returned to poetry recently. Her poetry has appeared in Rust & Moth, Stonecoast Review, SWWIM, and others. She lives in Seattle with her husband, two daughters, and cat.

November waits for you in the parking lot after the bar closes by Jennifer Blackledge

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

November waits for you in the parking lot after the bar closes

because it likes to pick a fight
rattles around like the last two pills in
a bottle labeled zero refills

it dims the lights and
rolls its eyes when you object
invites you to dinner but clears your plate before you’re done

sneers and shakes your trees bare
opens your gate and lets your dog out
because it likes to hear you cry for lost things in the dark

scoffs when you put your lights up early
in the hope they’ll guide you back from the edge
November has warned you:
it scrabbles and scurries in your walls
every chilly night

November dangles the last handful of
red leaves over the abyss
and tells you to ask nice

*

Jennifer Blackledge is a Detroit-area poet who works in the automotive industry. She is the recipient of the 2025 Zocalo Public Square Poetry Prize and her work has appeared in publications like JAMA, Rattle, I-70 Review, Kestrel, and more. You can find her work at www.jenniferblackledge.com.

Life Cycle by CL Bledsoe

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Life Cycle

First, I was the wind, turbulent and unknown,
sneaking into gardens to steal shadows,
touching your hair while you rushed, late
for work, yearning only to be clear of here.
I would run through my days, eating the sun
and writing letters to the moon. It was bliss.
It was nothing at all. Then I hardened
into stone, loved and mean, I understood
nothing and wanted even less. After enough
years had passed, someone threw me
into the eye of beauty. I rippled, wanting
for the first time to know. Afraid of the wind
lest it steal something. When the sun came out,
I melted into sulfur, clean as a wound.
When you whispered my name, I suddenly
understood: there’s nothing to learn. Only be.

*

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than thirty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, The Bottle Episode, and his newest, Having a Baby to Save a Marriage, as well as his latest novels If You Love Me, You’ll Kill Eric Pelkey and The Devil and Ricky Dan. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his kid.

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of October 2025

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of October 2025 ~

  1. Karen Paul Holmes
  2. Molly Fisk
  3. Dick Westheimer
  4. Laurie Kuntz
  5. Donna Hilbert
  6. Alison Hurwitz
  7. Joshua Lillie
  8. Francesca Leader
  9. John Arthur
  10. Robbi Nester

Three Poems by Ann E. Wallace

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Funeral Director, Spring 2020

He bites his lower lip, clasps
his hands behind his back, and steels
his legs into a wide stance, knowing

one brimming tear holds power to unleash
the others welled up and waiting.
It used to be the unexpected

that disrupted his balance—the new suit
purchased two sizes too small
for a teen struck down in the road,

the calm words of a mother
to her grown child laid out before her, speaking
of tomorrow as if nothing had changed,

or the collapse and despair of another
who knew everything had.
But in these endless days

of horror when illness envelops
and makes a home in our city—
when the morgues are overflowing,

and the bodies are stacked and held
three weeks for burial, when the caskets
are closed and families could not kiss

or send off their dear beloved—he works
in solitude, carrying the grief of legions.
He removes the tubes and bathes

the bodies of the deceased, dresses
each one in clothing brought
by loved ones, set their hands

and combs their hair, placing them
in caskets their families would never open,
and the mounting waves of sorrow

swell high and higher, until they crest
and the rushing waters wash,
and wash, and wash over him.

*

Emergency Room Visits in March 2020

When they turned the pediatric emergency room
into a COVID triage area in the early days,

decals of monkeys with curling tails,
loping elephants, spotted giraffes grazed

the walls. The doctor who took my vitals
was tired, hadn’t seen his kids in two weeks.

The hospital prepared to admit me, then sent
me home after two rounds of bloodwork and testing.

They needed the bed. Three days later, I returned
on my 50th birthday, barely conscious,

bypassed the children’s unit, and was wheeled inside
where the serious cases were handled.

The aide hesitated to help me onto the bed,
offered a gloved hand only after I pleaded,

and my new doctor would not step inside
my curtain. He poked his masked face

through the gap in the fabric to ask
my cell number. He wrote it on a Post-it

and backed away like I was a caged tiger.
I never received his call.

*

Cleared to Leave

My face is pale and splotchy when my ex-
husband picks me up at home, like death
blooms within me. The weather, April

dreary. Jason drives me to the emergency room—
my third hospital this spring. I wear a pink
woolen cap, loop my oxygen line around my ears,

tuck it behind my glasses, hook the cannula
under my nose. I lug the tank inside
and sit in a folding chair in the makeshift

waiting room—the department had been under
renovation when the virus hit. The work
on the building has stopped. The work of saving

lives has not. My doctor called ahead
for a lung scan. The ER doctor takes my blood
and vitals but never orders the scan.

I rest in my thin, faded hospital gown,
in the overwhelmed ER, so much like the others,
each one unique in its chaos. Cleared to leave,

I dress slowly, layer by layer—shirt and pants,
sweater, jacket, hat. Untethered from the hospital
oxygen, reconnected to my emergency supply

from home, I hoist the tank. Alone, undirected,
I stumble through the halls, carry my heavy load,
search for the unmarked exit. Outside in the cold,

I realize I left my glasses on my hospital bed.
They are gone. Per pandemic policy, thrown
into the trash with all other personal effects.

*

Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey and host of The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants. Her second poetry collection, Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul, was published by Kelsay Books in 2024. She has previously published work in ONE ART, Thimble, Halfway Down the Stairs, Gyroscope Review, Wordgathering, and other journals. You can follow her online at AnnWallacePhD.com and on Instagram @annwallace409.

A Few Days After the Election I Woke Up in a Hamburg Jail Cell by Justin Karcher

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A Few Days After the Election I Woke Up in a Hamburg Jail Cell

my head throbbing as an officer handed me
a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich
like I was taking communion. He couldn’t
believe I got as far as I did on two tires.

Maybe I was trying to escape the light
because where I’m from, it can eat you alive.
A pincushion sun shining with the blood of birds.
When I black out, some friends call me
Ghost Justin. I’m just grateful nobody got hurt.

I went back to Buffalo in an Uber and as we drove
over the river, my dad’s last words to me echoed
in my head. “You’re a better man than I am.”
Suddenly I smelled lilacs and thought about
my mom who plants her garden in the gritty earth.

That night at my first A.A. meeting, nothing smelled
like flowers but people still dug up their roots
and talked about their pain. I learned that it takes
a community for any exorcism to work.

*

Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher, Bluesky: @justinkarcher.bsky.social) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright from Buffalo, NY. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). Recent playwriting credits include The Birth of Santa (American Repertory Theater of WNY) and “The Buffalo Bills Need Our Help” (Alleyway Theatre). https://www.justinkarcherauthor.com

I had a sister once. by Robbi Nester

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

I had a sister once.

But she was born dead. Her eyes stayed shut.
Ten tiny moons set on her fingernails.
I didn’t ask my mother how it happened, just
imagined a wax-pale doll who never answered
to her name. All my life, I took the full weight
of my father’s rage. It blew up like a sudden storm.
For years this sister spoke to me, saying Everything
you have is mine, perched on the edge of my bed,
no longer larval, a grown ghost child. Her fingernails
were long and sharp. She would pinch my arm
until it bled.

*

Robbi Nester is a retired college educator who has never stopped teaching in one way or another. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the most recent being About to Disappear, an ekphrastic collection that will be published by Shanti Arts. She has also edited 3 anthologies and curates and hosts two monthly poetry readings on Zoom, Verse-Virtual Monthly Reading and Words With You, part of The Poetry Salon Online. Learn more about her work at http://www.robbinester.net.

ONE ART’s 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

tc Wiggins – Like Lightning  

Moudi Sbeity – All Things Bloom  

James Diaz – I will not go to Darkness having known Nothing of the Light

Naila Francis – For my friend weeping at the coffee shop  

James Feichthaler – So Much Baggage  

Gary Fincke – The Far North

*

The annual Best Spiritual Literature awards are hosted by Orison Books.

“Orison Books publishes Best Spiritual Literature (formerly The Orison Anthology) every year, a collection of the best spiritual writing in all genres published in periodicals in the preceding year. […] Editors of literary periodicals (print or digital) may nominate work in a single genre or in multiple genres to be considered for inclusion in our annual anthology, Best Spiritual Literature, which will reprint the finest spiritually engaged writing from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.”

At the Crosswalk by Patrick Vala-Haynes

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At the Crosswalk

The cigarette butt
Smoldering
Like an uncut jewel

A mother shielding her son
From the spectacle
Of a man who stoops

The ember lighting his face
As he takes the boy’s hand
And waits for the threat to pass

*

Patrick Vala-Haynes lives within shouting distance of the Oregon Coast Range. His writing has appeared in Dulcet Literary Magazine, Sand, Split Rock Review, Sheepshead Review, Slate and elsewhere.

Two Poems by Heather Kays

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Rustmouth
Inspired by Jan Beatty

They said I grew wrong—
roots curling back into the dirt
like veins that refused to climb.
I say I grew sharp:
tongue rusted to a razor’s edge,
lungs lit with gasoline.

Your family dinners smell of linen
and garlic bread. Mine reeked of
ashtrays, vodka breath, the cracked leather
of a Buick backseat.

I learned love from the slam of a screen door,
from the bruised hush after fists
found a wall instead of me.

I don’t care about your inheritance—
my legacy is blood under the nails,
a cigarette still burning in the sink,
a voice that curdles milk in the glass.

Think of me when the lights cut out—
I’m the hum in the wires,
the shiver in the lock,
the taste of copper when
you bite down too hard.

You, with your polished prayers.
Me, with my rustmouth.
I was forged in scrapyards,
and I’ll drag you there with me,
if you ever try to call it love.

*

Ordinary Hours
For Beau

It isn’t roses or fireworks.
It’s the way your hand
finds mine on the console,
two lifelines pressed together
while traffic lights hum red.

It’s shaky legs in a cold waiting room,
where your smile softens
the antiseptic walls,
turns the ticking clock into something
almost kind.

It’s you across a chipped diner table,
plastic cutlery scattered like stars between us,
your thumb brushing the rim of your glass
as if it were a secret only I could hear.

It’s the sidewalks we claim,
step by step,
your shadow always folding into mine
like it knows where it belongs.

Love, for me, is this—
not grand gestures, not borrowed, not staged—
but the small and stubborn ways
the world feels less brutal
when you are beside me.

*

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author who has been passionate about writing since age seven. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, explores healing through unsent letters. She is currently seeking a literary agent and publisher for Pieces of Us, along with six chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections.

She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group and creative community, and is drawn to stories that explore survival, identity, and the complexity of being human.

Her work has recently appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Wild Thing by Alma Peek

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Wild Thing
I am in an interview, in a conference room, stuck in French
When the only sentence I know by heart is Est-ce que c’est
Possible de caresser votre chien? That is a wild thing
That happened and I am recalling this absurdity to you
When you say, I notice the sun is in your eye so let’s move.
You’ve said the similar generous thing before about hamsters
And their wheels and how it’s hard to get them to stop moving.
Outside it’s a setting sun and the air is insect-noisy and
When you tell me about your father growing wild blueberries,
I know I love him and it is really something to love a man’s father.
Did you know? We’ll all be eating live insects again
Just like early modern humans in ten years’ time.
We walk, and I hear, as if from childhood, the silence beyond
Millions of fluffing Fall field crickets. It is nightfall in October
And I love to be brought back by you
To the sound of the beginning of things.
*
Alma Peek is from San Antonio, Texas. She is overeducated, to the point of foolishness. One of the highlights of her career came in 2015 when she taught a research methods class at CELSA Sorbonne in Paris, France (2014-2015). She is currently submitting two novels (Camp and Through the Green) and a poetry collection (Wild Thing). In 2025, her poetry appeared in Frontier Poetry, Stirring: A Literary Collection, and she has two poems forthcoming (November 2025) in Eunoia Review. She is the founder of @SYLVdesigns, LLC, a jewelry design brand. Her IG: @_almapeek_

Dining Out by Barbara Fried

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Dining Out

We walked from my apartment
to the Argentinian restaurant on 89th

because I had never been there
and no one I knew had been there.

You ordered the lamb, tender, you
ordered, and it came out held high

in a steaming cloud of roasted meat
and hot paprika and crushed cayenne

with a side order of lentils that looked
like a mound of teardrops or the cut ears

of a small animal. I picked at my salad.
I was full—taut as a balloon with new love—

engorged to my throat. You ate with relish,
large, fast forkfuls—you cut your meat

with a savage saw, tender though it was.
We sat opposite each other in a darkness

as light as smoke. Our red wine glowed
lambent in curved glasses. The waiter had dark

hair and white teeth and was discreet in the shadows.
There were candles on tabletops that flickered,

and your full face for a moment took on a pumpkin’s
leering menace, but I laughed it off because I so

desperately needed to breathe the air you breathed,
to imbibe you, for later, when you would be
with your newly vanquished wife.

*

Barbara Fried is a lifelong 5 a.m. poetry writer and a long-term copywriter, copy editor, and marketing manager. She lives on Cape Cod where, in her back garden, there are deer, coyotes and shy white possums who do play possum and where she has just completed her first book-length collection of poems, The Virginia Poems.

Two Poems by Katie Kemple

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Read My Lips
—After George H.W. Bush

Looking at the inflated lips
of a billionaire’s wife on my phone,
I eat oatmeal prepared
in a motel’s coffee maker,
from a paper cup with a plastic spoon
saved from the night before.

I am grateful for the lows of my life;
the cancelled flight that landed me
in a room by the airport,
the blast of engines that shake
the windows that look at a weedy lawn;
these give my life texture.

It could be worse. The only thing
you can count on is death and taxes.
Now, just death in the U.S.,
but I miss taxes. That’s why I bought
the sixteen-dollar flight insurance.
I want assurances.

No guarantees that I wouldn’t inject
my lips with toxins if given
a billionaire’s budget. My old life
seems like that now, stuffed with haircuts,
and a clothing allowance.

Oatmeal is affordable, filling.
I loved it even as a kid. Back when Bush
asked us to read his lips. Now,
I watch the billionaire’s wife pucker.
Bet she can’t sip hot drinks comfortably.
I brew a pot of coffee,

start to file a claim for the room, hope
my insurance comes through.
Is this an act of God?
I hold tight to the things I can count on—
the coffee, not strong, but free.

*

Cecelia left her resume on my patio

weighed down
with a stone. Half the size
of a business card,
it invited me to call
for a cleaning estimate.

When I walked past
my neighbors’ homes,
I saw her message
on welcome mats.

Her card said:
12 years of experience.
Same number as me,
different industry.

I left my credentials
at virtual doors,
cold called strangers,
threw rocks at LinkedIn.

If I could hire Cecelia—
would I? But I can’t.
I leave her message in the shade
of a succulent plant.

Over weeks, the paper
curls shut
around the rock.

Cecelia might be in
in a house now
vacuuming to music
that doesn’t suck.

And work’s flown into
my inbox again,
spreadsheets, lists, meetings.

Maybe we’re in the field
of autonomy. Maybe unknown
doors thrill us a little.

Looking for work,
a reminder to unsettle
ourselves.

*

Katie Kemple is the author of Big Man (Chestnut Review Chapbooks, 2025), and Love in the Key of COBRA (winner of the 2025 Iron Horse Literary Review chapbook competition). This year, her work has appeared in Frontier, North American Review (Open Space), and Sixth Finch. More of her work can be found at katiekemplepoetry.com.

Two Poems by Jill Michelle

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Rite

n. A religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept or custom
with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it.
         —Ambrose Bierce

Two twenty-somethings
two years as honeys

under a gray-blue blanket
of Florida December sky

we stand—courthouse statue
looming over our too-thin

shoulders in this one photograph
of our wedding, snapped

by the justice of the peace in
St. Augustine, where we didn’t

need witnesses, so there was
no risk of offending any left

out relatives or friends.
You never asked if I was

one of those kids who’d
spun gauzy fantasies

cocooned teen dreams
of bank-breaking weddings.

I would have said, The vows
are all that matters. Maybe then

you would have kept them.

* 

I Spell out Divorce in Pixie-stick Sugar across Our Kitchen Floor
         after Jenny Holzer

You’ll be able to read it by
your own gaslight, so it won’t
matter that the power’s out
at the old country house to
which you’ve been booted
after unburdening yourself
across the dinner table tonight,
corduroyed mule, confessing
adultery before fixing a next
bite of the six o’clock supper
missed from the plate saved,
microwaved after kissing you
hello with half of my hair styled
by our four-year-old before I
tucked her into cartoon-covered
sheets alone, plastic menagerie
of Starburst-colored animal
barrettes forgotten until you’ve
left when brushing my teeth, I
startle at the mirror, can’t help
but laugh.

*

Jill Michelle is the author of Underwater (Riot in Your Throat, 2025) and Shuffle Play (Bottlecap, 2024) and winner of the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry from New Ohio Review. Her newest work is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Salamander Magazine and Scavengers Literary Magazine. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more at byjillmichelle.com.

Insomnia by Sydney Lea

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Insomnia

When I can’t sleep, I forge rough rhymes,
matching blindness, say, with timeless,
or almost matching popular
with poplar. Yes, it’s idleness,

and I concede I stretch the rules
as when I pair up misery
and pity– all a trick to find
a way to lie there worry-free.

No, don’t call it trick but mission
even passion, this urge to prise
away each fear, however small,
that blights me. But hard as I try,

my words do as they please. They scorn
resistance: I’ve just sought to link
bliss to something beside distress
but despite me the effort brings

not half-rhymed release but bereft.

*

Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Mango Languages by John Arthur

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Mango Languages

on his deathbed he lay
learning Italian one phrase
at a time from a free app
I downloaded for him
from the public library.

my daughter asked him why
learn something new now, grandpa?
what’s the point?
I think you mean perché he said
and that was his final word.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. He is the 2025 Grand Prize winner of The Poetry Box’s chapbook contest for Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide, which will be released early in 2026. His work has appeared in Rattle, DIAGRAM, Failbetter, trampset, ONE ART, Frogpond, and many other places.

The Beech Tree by Heather Hallberg Yanda

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

The Beech Tree

For weeks, all the trees on
Lockwood Road prepared
for absence. Now, in late
Autumn, they found it.  I

walk through a sepia
photograph.  Today
I think of my father —
my dad, my daddy — who

is fragile, who stumbles
easily.  For weeks, I
have felt his spirit, his
warmth fall away.  I have

walked this road many times
with him: every turned leaf
meant naming maples, ash,
dogwood. Now every rut

in the road is a new
chance to fall. I can still
hear his footfalls, his laugh.
Here, in the grief

before the grief, all is
vulnerable, a word
from the Latin, meaning
to wound.  Here, where Finley’s

fence opens to this
meadow, a beech tree I
never noticed still grasps
its bright leaves.  It teaches

what my dad taught: to stand
tall, and when it is time
to let everything go,
to let everything go.

*

Heather Hallberg Yanda teaches in the English Department at Alfred University, in the hills of upstate New York. After many years of sending poems out, her work has been published in such journals as Barely South Review, Comstock Review, Tar River Poetry, and (forthcoming) in The Yale Journal of Medical Humanities. In the midst of the pandemic, her first collection of poems, Late Summer’s Origami, was published by Ashland Poetry Press. She is currently seeking a publisher for her second collection, What the Stones Borrowed.

Tripping Over His Shadow by Todd Wynn

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Tripping Over His Shadow

Metallica pounded from his bedroom,
the pulse of every summer—
the beat in my chest
before I knew the words.

I stitched myself
to his right side,
adhesive as only
little brothers can be,
tripping constantly
over his shadow.

He turned our roof into a runway,
called the trash bag a parachute—
it wasn’t.
I rolled my ankle.
Didn’t try again.

He was five years ahead of me—
enough to outgrow things
before I grew into them.

One day, he traded
his rusted Huffy for car keys,
moved out at eighteen
with Metallica still playing.

His music stayed.
Everything else changed.

*

Todd Wynn is a pediatric nurse living in Mansfield, Ohio. He recently began writing poetry as a way of working through past grief and understanding how that has shaped the way he sees the world around him. His work has previously appeared in ONE ART.

The Undetonated Nazi Bomb Opens a Red Eye On the Ocean Floor by Mingyu 明宇 Brian Chan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Undetonated Nazi Bomb Opens a Red Eye On the Ocean Floor

and the starfish, believing the eye to be
the madreporite of another starfish,
or a sister,

punctures the metal-light
in search of companionship
or at least, sustenance. Forty thousand

other animals pile into a veil
over the bomb, as if seeking
its origin point.

Once other man-made machinery (and this time,
able to breathe underwater)
discover the animals, scientists
are shocked, the starfish
less so,

since there is little discovery in
excavation:

It is not unlike the wilderness
to feed on violence.
Remember:

the starfish acts by
instinct. Animals hunt
for food, humans
for rhetoric.

What do we make
of killing, or choosing
its abstention? We conduct massacres and end up only
with more explanations for living. Violence produces

life produces violence.

Yes, hunting is a sport. Yes,
war is too.

The starfish believes there is more
to life than humans know, but chooses
survival.

When exposed by the unmanned submarine,
the starfish holds one
of its five arms out—not as an offering,
but as if to say, no, no,
this is not a gun.

                       *In response to recent discoveries

*

Mingyu 明宇 Brian Chan is currently a first-year undergraduate studying at Princeton University. His work appears in Split Lip, wildness, The Emerson Review, and more.

The Clock Holds Its Heartbeat by Laura Ann Reed

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

The Clock Holds Its Heartbeat

              for Grant

Mid-March. Between seasons.
Rain so fine it never reaches the ground.

There is a word for this: Virga.
How did I not know it before?

Trying to remember my virga dream,
I press my cheek to your chest.

Touch rushes in, re-drawing
our boundaries.

During the crisis of pneumonia
I felt such sharp tenderness for common objects.

My favorite blue stoneware mug.
Its chipped rim making it almost mortal.

The hiatus from time was a gift
when the grandfather clock stopped ticking.

The winter hazel is suddenly green.
Just noticing alters my own coloration.

Nights, you go to bed first.
Alone, I sink into the deep meanwhile of my life.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her new chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published by The Poetry Box (July 2025). https://lauraannreed.net/

Singing in Dark Times: Trying to Praise the Mutilated World – A Workshop with Donna Hilbert

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Singing in Dark Times: Trying to Praise the Mutilated World – A Workshop with Donna Hilbert

Workshop Leader: Donna Hilbert
Date: Tuesday, November 18
Time: 4pm Pacific (7pm Eastern) – Please check your local time.
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

>>>  Register Here  <<<

~ About The Workshop ~ 

In this workshop, we will look at poems through the lens of Adam Zagajewski’s seminal poem, Try to Praise the Mutilated World, as well as poems in a similar vein. We’ll consider poets such as WS Merwin, Wendell Berry, and Danusha Lameris. Poets will be invited to reflect on words that aim to help us carry the weight of life in tumultuous times and then write our own words in conversation with these voices.

~ About The Workshop Leader ~ 

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press, 2025. Work has appeared in journals and broadcasts including Eclectica, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Cholla Needles, TSPoetry, VerseDaily, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, anthologies including Boomer Girls, The Widows’ Handbook, The Poetry of Presence I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, Love Is For All Of Us, What the House Knows, Poetry Goes The Movies. She writes and leads workshops from her home base in Long Beach, California.

Two Poems by Howie Good

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Au Courant

Just because I smile doesn’t mean I am happy. “All of life,” Buddha said, “is sadness.” Birds return from the hot countries full of excited chatter, unaware the Doomsday Clock has crept even closer to midnight. I keep up with the headlines as much as a person can and still remain sane. Minds have corroded, splintered, flamed out. For every opinion shared in the blogosphere, there is an equal and opposite opinion. I hope for truth to recover its legendary authority. Meanwhile, a tomato is also a child’s balloon.

*

Shadows and Ghosts

The CT scan machine is shaped like a donut. I am lying inside the hole of the donut on my back. Bugs lie on their backs when they are dying. I was injected only moments earlier with a special dye. A burning sensation immediately spread through my body. Now the machine, with a brilliant flash of light, scans my torso for new tumors. In an adjacent room, techs are monitoring the images on a screen. They see shadows and ghosts. They see mounds of rubble. They see the screams trapped in my lungs.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry book, True Crime, is scheduled to be published by Sacred Parasite in early 2026.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Dark Undercarriage of the Purple Packard

If I were to pray for my father
it wouldn’t be for him exactly
but for the shadow beneath
the purple Packard where
he crawled when I was six.
I followed him into the darkness
of machinery, a mystery
men love though he in particular
knew nothing about what drives
things forward, power
carried from the engine to
the strange wheels and wires
of this life. Men love certainty,
rules and laws that determine
how things work, but the stories
we live by end too quickly
with a moral almost always
wrong. He wanted me to be
the man men pretend to be,
a lion of fire, the man men
imagine their leaders to be.
The voice that held my father
was his father’s, a burly man
who wrestled in high school,
worked on derricks and settled
in a career as a statistician
for Illinois Power and Light.
A lost photograph comes to mind
of three men in gray suits and
fedoras walking toward the lens
believing they owned the world
because they kind of did.
Before smoking himself to death,
he gave his son a 1949 purple Packard
fading to gray. My father and I lay
on the driveway of the very house
I remember in the shadow
of the memory of his father
whose son pointed at the dark
undercarriage, explaining
things he knew nothing about

* 

Rippling Waves of Heat over the Wheat Fields of Kansas

Somewhere north of Kansas City,
my father disappeared in himself
as he often did
then returned and noticed the blacktop rolling through
the roiling center of America which he loved
with unquestioning ardor. In the long journey away
from my father, I’ve often remembered
the way he drove in a trance
and suddenly woke
surprised to be in his life, and I promised myself
to be here, wherever here is

We were passing through a dead zone
where Jack Brickhouse, the Voice of the Chicago Cubs,
was telling my dad the pain he feels at his mother abandoning him
is alright because he’s about to steal second

An Oldsmobile like ours, driven by
a middle-aged white man, passed us
his wife beside him, eyes wide in terror.
Dad stepped on the gas and we flew down the road, passing them,
so the other man stepped on the gas passing us,
his wife yelling at him to slow down. And my father
going over a hundred miles an hour roared past them
again. Dad smiled. He’d won. I turned to watch
the Oldsmobile shrinking in the distance

Then, as we drove through the dry shadow of a cloud
Dad wiped the sweat from his face
and pointed at a large burial mound ahead of us
beautiful in the piercing light

He was delivering me to a life he disapproved of.
He expected gratitude
but I was the son who aspired to be a poet
and kindness from this rough man was like a stone in my throat

*

Michael Simms lives in the old Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His poetry collections include Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025.) His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Plume, Scientific American and Poem a Day (Academy of American Poetry). He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. In 2011, the Pennsylvania legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.

Three Poems by Karen Paul Holmes

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

I Love It When

Someone fifteen or twenty
years my junior forgets
the same kinds of things I forget—
like the word cardigan, or
why they just walked into the kitchen.

I feel better about myself if
they trip a bit on a gnarled sidewalk
or go to dinner before seven,
squint and shine their cell phone lights
on the menu, order one entrée
split between them.

I’m oh so happy when Jamal—
a handsome-hardbody danseur—
substitute-teaches our Zumba class.
He doesn’t see us as seniors.
When he shouts, Let’s sex it up, ladies,
we do.

June with her titanium knee,
Beth standing by a chair for balance,
Dee on blood pressure meds,
Ellen who can’t reach overhead,
me and my misbehaving back.

Jamal makes us believe
we’re Beyoncé back-up dancers
or Rockettes.
Look at our Bob Fosse hands.
Watch our strut kicks.
Watch out when we swivel our hips.

*

Why I Write Poetry

Because the peace bell tolled for Jimmy Carter’s 98th birthday,
and I need to commemorate that commemoration.

Because I chuckled when I read a sign outside a church that said:
Grow a garden–
Lettuce praise him
Squash the doubt
Turnip at church

Because I’m bothered but amused by Instagram bots who want me. Profiles like:
I believe true love meets you in your mess, not your best.
Always thank God for giving me life in the land of the living.
I am looking for a real and trustworthy sugar baby to spoil with my riches.

Because The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced
a recall of wall beds due to serious crushing hazards, and it was horrible
but reminded me of a Three Stooges skit.

Because a harpist said in an interview it was love at first hear
when she encountered Mozart’s Flute & Harp Concerto. At age 22, she joined
the orchestra for L’Opéra de Paris.

Because an eagle cam showed me live action: A dandelion-fluff eaglet
growing bigger than the daddy and then fledging in 12 weeks. And both parents
bringing fish for lunch until then.

Because my Australian uncle at 96, during his last transfusion, asked for
the blood of a 19-year-old nymphomaniac.

Because I once saw a post on our neighborhood social media:
I need a good deep tissue message therapist, and I thought I’d better heed her call.

*

Beginning Tai Chi

I know rooms like this
       empty before class.
A mirrored wall multiplies it—
ballet barres going on forever
like sky. Sun gleams
the wood floor, inviting me to fill
the space with dance,
       Piqué turn, pas de chat, grand jeté.
I know how it feels to leap

but am no longer airborne.
My balancé, now
       Rooster stands on one leg.
In Tai Chi, We stay grounded,
the master says.
Part the horse’s mane.
Grasp the sparrow’s tail.

The twenty-four movements, not dance
but dance-like, he says, we flow,
undulating his hand
through air—a dolphin in water.
       A moving meditation.
Slow, relaxed,
not ballet’s hummingbird-power.

We each hold a chi ball—invisible,
soccer-sized—one hand underneath,
the other on top.
I focus on that seemingly
       empty space,
feel its unseen weight, its almost pulse.
Draw energy—chi—from the earth
into the dantian, seat of life essence,
he says.

       Wave hands like clouds,
And my own stale clouds loosen,
take on other shapes. Not old woman, but
Fair lady working the shuttle.
Not ballerina, but
Crane spreading its wings.

*

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books are: No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich, 2014). Poetry credits include The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, Glass, and Plume. Daughter of immigrants, she was the first gen to attend college and has an MA.

“We’re all stories in the end,” by Rebecca Ferlotti

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“We’re all stories in the end,”

the bar’s bathroom graffiti taunts:
grade school
scribbles, love proclamations.
I wrote my initials on a stall door
before I left school. And when I left the country,
I saw stalls in the middle of a Belgian red light district
on the way to an Irish pub.
I asked someone why
and they raised an eyebrow. I once saw a woman raise a glass of champagne
in a bathroom stall. She was kneeled
next to a hamburger. At a networking event, a man talked about hamburgers.
I asked him his favorite local spot
as we stood in the bathroom line.
“Definitely Wendy’s,” he said.
And stepped inside.

*

Rebecca Ferlotti (she/her) is a poet, nonfiction book editor, and chief content officer based in Ohio. Her work has been published in ELLIE, her local library’s poetry anthologies, and other magazines. She has presented at the Sigma Tau Delta conference both as a creative writing student at John Carroll University and as an alumna. Rebecca’s work also has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.

Elegy at the 7-Eleven by Jeff Cove

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Elegy at the 7-Eleven

The man at the register
doesn’t look up.
A forty-ounce beer in one hand,
cheap flowers in the other—
pink lilies curled like smoke,
wrapped in plastic.

For a moment,
he stands there holding both
like he isn’t sure
which one the night is for.

He sets the flowers down—
not with anger,
not regret,
just
a quiet return.

The cashier scans the bottle.
Outside, the light flickers.
There’s no one to bring flowers to.
Not tonight.

*

Jeff Cove lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He has been writing haiku since high school—seventeen syllables taught him how to compress meaning and leave space for silence. He works as a translator between the technical and the emotional, finding poetry in systems, silence, and the absurd. His work is forthcoming in Pictura Journal and has appeared in The Daily Drunk. He writes at https://jeffcove.com/

I almost said I’m sorry by Nilsa Mariano

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I almost said I’m sorry

wide and empty
the can lid stays open
after you take the trash out
the new bag is muddy green
to hide the smears we live
lottery tickets in your hand
failed faded paper thin
we lock eyes as you back up
crunching the numbers
over your head
mechanically you announce
we lost
as you jump in the air
aiming the paper toward the can
the arc of your throw
the days of our lives
the lid of the can falls
in a slow motion groan
you are gone before it clicks
my words hit the door
in a tedious echo

*

Nilsa Mariano is a graduate of Binghamton University with a Masters in Comparative Literature. At heart she is a Brooklyn girl. Nilsa was published in, Muleskinner, Five Minute, Wildgreens and Stone Canoe. She is proud of being published in the inaugural edition of Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul. Nilsa is owned by a spoiled pug.

Ode to Punctuation by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Ode to Punctuation

Comma,
Pause and connection,
gentle invitation to take a breath

Parentheses
(A brief distraction)
in the middle of everything

Ellipses
A suggestion of space…
but a clue that something is missing

Semi-colon
Grammatical homage to healthy relationships;
two independent clauses connected forever

Period
I tend to avoid this one
since I am not a great fan of endings.

So always, I return to the comma,
patient tour guide along the winding trail of thought
who says, take your time, follow me, I’ll get you there,
eventually.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s most recent poetry collection is Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

ONE ART x Keystone Poetry: Featured Reading — Sun. 11/2 at 2pm Eastern

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ONE ART x Keystone Poetry

Date: Sunday, November 2

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

Please Note: This is a virtual event held via Zoom.

>>> Tickets Available <<<

About The Reading

During this virtual event (held via Zoom), Featured Readers will share their poem selected for publication in Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press). Time permitting, we hope to take a few questions after readers share their poems.

Hosts:

Marjorie Maddox & Jerry Wemple, Co-Editors, Keystone Poetry

Mark Danowsky, Founder/Editor-in-Chief, ONE ART

Featured Readers:

Joseph Chelius is the author of three full-length poetry collections. His most recent collection, Playing Fields, was published earlier this year by Kelsay Books.

Grant Clauser is a Pennsylvanian. His sixth book, Temporary Shelters, was just published by Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a large media company and teaches poetry workshops.

Geraldine Connolly grew up in Westmoreland County and has published five poetry collections. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Maryland Arts Council and Breadloaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review and Poetry Ireland Review. Her new book is Instructions at Sunset, from Terrapin Books in September 2025. She lives in Alameda, California.

Brian Fanelli is the author of the poetry collections Waiting for the Dead to Speak (NYQ Books) and All That Remains (Unbound Content). His writing has been published in the LA Times, World Literature Today, Midnight Oil, Pedestal, Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere. Brian also writes frequently about horror movies and is a contributing writer to HorrorBuzz.com and 1428Elm.com. He has his M.F.A. from Wilkes University and his Ph.D. from SUNY Binghamton University. Currently, he’s an Associate Professor of English at Lackawanna College.

Jan Freeman is the author of three books of poetry and the founder and former director of Paris Press (1995–2018), which is now an imprint of Wesleyan University Press.  She is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships, the Spiral Shell Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts/Moulin a Nef, and an Associateship at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. More at www.janfreeman.net

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of the chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in ONE ART, Pangyrus, Post Road, Salamander, and The Sun. He is the poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, and he divides his time between Boston and Vermont.

Lynn Levin is a poet and writer. Called one of the most “poignantly witty voices of our time” (Bucks County Community College), she is the author of nine books, most recently the short story collection House Parties (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), named one of the best books of summer by Philadelphia Magazine. “Sleepless Johnston,” her ballad that appears in Keystone Poetry, is from her poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020). Lynn Levin teaches at Drexel University and for many years taught creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Her website is: lynnlevinpoet.com.

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

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others.  She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize; she’s the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks. She is a hospice volunteer, writing tutor, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at https://annemichael.blog/

Jerry Wemple has published four poetry collections. His most recent is We Always Wondered What Became of You from Broadstone Books. The collection of mostly prose poems centers on his secret transracial adoption within his biological family, growing up as a biracial child in rural Pennsylvania during an era when people of color were almost nonexistent there, and discovering the identity of his birth father as an adult. He is co-editor of the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, and the follow-up Keystone Poetry. He also co-edited the anthology Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania. His poetry and creative nonfiction work appear in numerous journals and anthologies, and have been published internationally in Ireland, Chile, and Sweden. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Commonwealth University in Pennsylvania.

Photograph of my Brother by Rob Cording

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Photograph of my Brother

Half-dressed, a pair of socks in my hand,
I’m looking at a photograph of my brother,
framed atop my dresser. Dead now five years,
he’s hunched over his phone, a beer nearby
on the table, looking up at the camera
with that grin that showed off his dimples.
I’m wondering who he was texting,
imagining his smart-ass reply to our mom,
so I don’t notice, at first, my daughter.
“Why do you like that picture so much?”
she asks. How to respond to such a question?
How to explain that I’m trying to imagine
the way his shoulders would’ve turned
as he looked up, to feel his strong hands,
clean in this picture, but usually flecked
with paint. How to say that I want
to remember the sound of his voice better
than I do? “Because he looks so happy,”
I tell her, closing the dresser drawer.
I sit on the edge of the bed, start
to put on my socks. My daughter is looking
at the picture now, when she turns and asks,
“But he doesn’t know he’s going to die, does he?”

*

Rob Cording teaches high school English in Boston, MA. Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from New Ohio Review, Tar River Review, and Here: a poetry journal.

Scattering by Rob Spillman

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Scattering

Like gods gathering
tiny psychedelic planets,
we brim the red bucket
with superballs

I and my boy, now a man,
just shy of twenty-three,
scoop up balls cracked
with age and love

On three we hurl the planets,
the superballs pinging
off white worn tiles,
tub, ceiling, ricocheting madly,
my boy a boy again,
bathtime chaos and joy

We will not miss
this small, crumbling space,
but see how we sob,
the decrescendoing superballs
slowly rolling to silence
one last time
in the only home
we’ve known
*

Rob Spillman was the editor of Tin House from 1999-2019. He is the author of the memoir All Tomorrow’s Parties.

After the Procedure, We Count Bottles by Brandon McNeice

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

After the Procedure, We Count Bottles

Amber lined like a little choir,
their childproof caps clicking in our hands,
press and turn, press and turn.

We tip them to the light to see
what’s left, what’s promised, what can be spared.
We read the labels aloud,
each word held,
slowly, so nothing drops.

When a bottle is finished, we stand it aside.
We carry them down the back steps,
the bin cold even in August.
One by one we give them back to glass.
They answer with a bright, small ringing,
a sound the day can hold.

*

Brandon McNeice is a writer and educator based in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared in Plough, Front Porch Republic, The Philadelphia Citizen, Well-Schooled, and he has work forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly.

Four Poems by Laurie Kuntz

~ ONE ART ~ 16 Comments

The Pre-Test

It’s the printer again,
like a body growing old,
the ink runs dry,
invisible paper jams,
lights that flash without reason,
and I call to you, and you fix it.

After a thankful hug, I ask
What will I do without you?
This is surreal to think about
when I count backwards to our beginnings
tapping ten fingers more than five times.
These days are like spelling pretests
preparing for those difficult words that defy
the i before e rule.

When I look toward an unreliable future
everything becomes a test:
I can mow the lawn,
pay estimated taxes
kill the spider, which is really practice
for the roach, recognize the flashing fuel light,
and know when to press Ctrl Alt Delete,
the list of can do’s can go on forever,
only because we will not.

I know without you, I can
and will pass these tests,
but fail miserably at the same time.

*

Searching for Gold

Bracing the wind, Laura, in a red sock hat,
reads the instruction booklet of this holiday gift,
the metal detector you’ve wanted since you were a child,
growing up in rural places, where treasures were part of the lore.

Now, on an urban beach in January,
you search and dig, sand blowing in your aging face.
You yell against the rising tide, hoping Laura can hear,

It is more the hunt than the treasure that I love,

because you can see clearly,
that the treasure is standing next to you,
reading the instruction booklet.

*

Friendship, Like Marriage

In celebration for every year
of marriage, there is a symbol
the fragility of paper,
the merge of time,
the burning passion of wood
and copper in its polished shine.

What elements symbolize friendship
in its stretch of years,
and isn’t friendship a marriage in kind,
with its own separations and secrets
splayed across wires,
promises untied while riding waves
of unbridled trust.

My friend, for all our time together,
nothing more can be said except:
I do, I do, I do.

*

A Mother’s Work

It was twenty years ago,
the night you graduated from high school.
Of course, there was the after party,
and you swaggered into the house way after curfew.
You turned to me and said:
“Well, your work is done.”
In tired irony, I replied:
“It is 3:00 A.M., and I am still up,
my work will never be done.”
Today, marks a month before your daughter is due
to enter the world, and I, as a soon to be Grandmother,
should be thinking of bassinets and bottles,
but the memory of your post curfew high school after party
comes to me, as I am still up and waiting.

*

Laurie Kuntz is a four time Pushcart Prize nominee and two time Best of the Net Nominee. In 2024, she won a Pushcart Prize. She published seven books of poetry. Her latest book published in 2025 is Balance, published by Moonstone Arts Center. In 2026, her 8th book, Shelter In Place will be published by Shanti Arts Press. Her themes come from working with Southeast Asian refugees, living as an expatriate in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brazil, and raising a husband and son.
Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Tremolo by Alison Hurwitz

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Tremolo

        After the painting by Agnes Martin

Three thousand miles away, I can’t go with my mother to the heart doctor, so
I wish myself beside her, distance blurred until the two of us sit chilled inside

an antiseptic room, glance up at squares in the suspended ceiling–a chess board
bleached, strange game with no opponent, geometry of separation.

My mother waits to see the specialist, one hand holding closed the crease and fold
of paper dress. Her blue-veined feet can’t reach the floor. She asks me to read

the printed card adjacent to the wall art and I do- a cross-hatched Agnes Martin,
titled Tremolo. My brilliant mother tilts her head, says she thinks the patterned grid depicts

the futile effort we all make to subdivide uncertainty, to tuck each breath in its own box.
The ticking clock divides our waiting. At last, the click of door. The nurse enters

on a schedule. She calls my mother Hon but makes no eye contact, checks off
the list on which my mother’s name is written, slips out. The self I’ve willed

across the country climbs up to sit beside her on the crinkle sheet, one arm
around her shoulders. Every shift, an aural shiver. She says again she hopes

the surgeon can insert the mesh, expand the tunnel to her heart. She retells
the news she heard last time: her arterial valve, which should be a silver dollar’s

width, has tightened to a strand of straw. She gestures, hand so light it might
be filled with hollow bones, as if at any second she could float away.

Time and distance spiral through a fluttering
through which we hear the rush and pull of her hardworking heart.

We sit together side by side- listen to the minutes
pass in silicates, their sound sifting through

three thousand miles
of hourglass.

*

Alison Hurwitz is a former cellist/dancer who finds music in language. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Alison hosts the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Published in South Dakota Review, Sky Island Journal, SWWIM and others, her work was named as a finalist for RockPaperPoem’s 2025 Poetry Prize. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorials, hikes, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com

ONE ART’s Fall Fundraiser

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~ ONE ART’s Fall Fundraiser ~

I’m hoping to raise $3,000 for ONE ART. This would be immensely helpful for me, personally. That being said, I don’t want anyone to feel obliged to donate. My intention is to have quarterly fundraisers with the aim of raising at least $12,000/year.

Here’s a link to the GoFundMe:

https://www.gofundme.com/manage/one-arts-fall-2025-fundraiser

Thank you for your consideration.

With Gratitude,
Mark Danowsky
Publisher / Editor-in-Chief
ONE ART: a journal of poetry

PS – I want to offer a few optional incentives.

For those who generously donate $100 or more, I will be happy to mail you a ONE ART sticker as a token of gratitude. (You’ll have to email me your physical address.) 

For those who donate $250 or more, you have the option to have a 30-minute phone call or Zoom with me.

For those who donate $500 or more, you have the option to have a 1-hour phone call or Zoom with me.

WHAT I WANT by Daniel Sklar

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

WHAT I WANT

Sometimes I want
to be out of touch.
I do not want to
know current events.
I do not want
information and
I do not want to give
information.
I want relationships.
I do not want to
believe one thing.
There are too many
things to believe.
I don’t want to
be more productive.
I want to walk
across Spain,
to come to some
little town where
men drink
small glasses of beer
at a café and sweat.

*

Daniel Sklar teaches Creative Writing at Endicott College, and has been published in the Harvard Review, English Journal, Beat Scene, and the New York Quarterly among other journals. His books include Flying Cats, Hack Writer, and Bicycles, Canoes, Drums. His play, “Lycanthropy” was performed at the Boston Theater Marathon in 2012 and was reviewed in The Boston Globe. He rides a bicycle to work.

An Enemy Within by Marc Alan Di Martino

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An Enemy Within

Each of us has an enemy within.
For some it’s that voice in back of the mind
rehearsing our shortcomings, assuring us

we’re not enough for this world. For others
it’s the barber, the shopkeeper down the block,
their esoteric powers of endurance

hinting at some gross imbalance in the scales.
For others still it’s both at once—an inferno
of adversaries unfurling with each uneasy step.

You disappear into a restroom, splash
your face with water but there’s no escape
from yourself. The ghoul in the glass is you,

the enemy that pollutes every breath.
The mosquito in your ear will never
cease its drilling, a torment worse than death.

*

Inspiration for this poem is addressed in Heather Cox Richardson’s post from September 30, 2025. Hegseth’s unprecedented demand that large numbers of America’s top military personnel meet on short notice and at great expense to the American public.

*

A Note from The Author

When a person sees enemies everywhere they look, one must come to the conclusion that their true enemy is in the mirror. America does indeed have ‘an enemy within’, but it isn’t the one the current regime thinks it is. The call, as they say, is coming from inside the house.

*

Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco (World Poetry, 2024—longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

Weights & Measures by Francesca Leader

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Weights & Measures

I still don’t know how
You can compliment a girl
Without infecting her,

Say she’s perfect
Without seeding worry
Of when she won’t be

Anymore, span her
Waist with hands
Amarvel at its minuteness

Without encoding
Lovability as the ability
To fit inside something

Else, submit to
Subsumption. I still don’t
Know how you can

Expect a girl’s soul
Not to snag on BMI charts,
Measurements, bodyfat

Ratios, celebrity weight
Loss and “Half My Size” stories,
Because they’re

Everywhere—number-shaped
Briars ensnarling all
Paths to self-acceptance—

Or tell her to inure,
Ignore, be tough but soft,
A paradox, like vanity sizing

That makes her crave
The labels that anoint her
A 2 and damn the brands

That brand her a 12,
As if she could be “S”
And “L” at once,

Survive the truth
Of weighing & measuring how
Much she matters in inverse

Proportion to how much
(Always too much) matter
She comprises, for bodies

Most loved are the
Bodies that least exist.
I still don’t know how

You can call a girl
Beautiful because she’s thin
Or ugly because she isn’t

Without engendering
Pathology, a fixation sickness
On what is visible

Instead of what is whole.

*

Francesca Leader has poetry published or forthcoming in Abyss & Apex, HAD, Broadkill Review, Stone Circle, The Storms Journal, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net (2025) and Best Spiritual Literature (2025). Her debut poetry chapbook, “Like Wine or Like Pain,” is available from Bottlecap Press. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.

Three Poems by Denise Duhamel

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

POEM IN WHICH I WRESTLE WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I always wanted to write what was true, True, true blue
to not only the facts, but my feelings about those facts,
which makes me wonder why I became a poet
whose mind could go anywhere. I mostly stayed
in the raw material of my life. One critic wrote
that my poems were too raw and, in shame,
I made my own simile—my poems were like a plate
of eggs. Even the whites were runny. Where was my artistry?
What came first? The chicken or my lousy poem?
A long time ago, a professor told me each verse should pass
the “so what?” test and for a while, in rebellion,
I added that question to the endings of famous poems.
I have wasted my life. So what? and Or does it explode? So what?
and Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. So what?
I was bratty and defensive. My life events were worse
than those of others, but better than many. I fetishized
my childhood trauma, maybe traumatizing my readers.
I became aloof, scared really, when a reader told me
about similar problems of her own. Her autobiography
seemed too real because it wasn’t in the form of a poem.

*

POEM IN WHICH MY ACHES ARE HIDING STORIES

My left pinkie goes numb—inside it
a tiny majorette twirls her baton.
She flips it into the air and it knocks her
head on its way down. She collapses
in all her spangles and I can’t wake her up.
The sciatic nerve runs down my right leg—
in my hip, a luau out of control.
One of the fire dancers misses his throw
and sets aflame a hula girl’s skirt.
Everyone sprints to the exit, panicked,
pushing and shoving in my calf.
And my sore shoulders?—this is where
I am inside myself carrying a backpack
full of rocks. Each one is engraved
with my sins, ungrateful, disloyal, selfish.
They clunk and clash and my therapist
is relieved. Finally a story about me.

*

POEM IN WHICH I REALIZE I AM NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

I notice shadows of swaying palms on concrete
seaweed clumping like tiny islands at the shore
a lime iguana on the stair
a sea grape squished by a bike tire
a woman crying        a rust stain under the gutter       the sky
an embryo cloud a dinosaur cloud
another woman crying as I disappear

*

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, she lives in Dania Beach.

Two Poems by Molly Fisk

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Salvation Menu

A biscuit with specks of black pepper.
Warm beets and cool plums together
under shaved fennel. Maybe you think
food is only fuel, as simple as shoveling
coal into the maw of a steamboat’s engine,
filling the brood mare’s trough with hay.

This isn’t wrong, but it misses so much.
Trout over steaming jasmine rice, crisp-fried
skin, the rosy flesh. A roasted red pepper sauce
swirled to coat the hollow-core lengths
of spaghetti, garnished with breakfast radish,
its sweet-hot circles magenta and white.

Broccolini, grilled onions. Maybe you think
food is merely domestic, utilitarian: good
for spouses, children, parents, cousins,
then clean the kitchen, that’s enough. But no,
there are places where sweet corn and meatloaf
are solace, comfort, illumination, where flavor

equals amazement, beauty, the whole an oasis,
a haven, a life where hands do the work of love
and plates are offered to everyone, spring
into summer, to fall, where the egg white
in a blackberry sour comes from a chicken
you may someday meet. This, too, is true

political action, devoted tenacious participation
in saving the world: every rinsed drinking glass,
each greeting to someone who drove quite a way
through an ancient landscape to get here, to sit
with strangers in company, weapons aside, joined
by slices of pear gingerbread doused in caramel.

                       — for Blake & Jen & Hells Backbone Grill

*

This is a Love Story

We are stripping lavender, two at the kitchen table,
thumbnails turning faintly green, while another shortens
the sleeves of a Chinese blouse at the shoulder seams,
close work, high summer, talking about whether kumquats
will freeze outdoors at our elevation and should be taken
in and he calls from the next room, having heard us
and looked it up: They’re good down to 20 degrees.
This is a love story. Shared work after a home-made lunch,
Saint André and fresh tomatoes, deviled eggs slightly
squashed on the drive through the river canyon,
our conversation threading among steady friends, needle
and golden embroidery floss, the lavender picked last week
and not quite dry so the oils explode as we pinch florets
from the square stems. Have you looked at lavender
closely, lately? English is better than French for scent,
French best for cooking. All four of us know that in nature
a grayer leaf means the plant tolerates drought, no one
has to look it up, we are well aware of the bigger picture,
our future balanced on El Niño and the continuing
bark beetle destruction of pines, hot north winds
and rainless midnight lightning. The ice melts in our glasses,
condensation beading to stream down the sides. Yes,
I asked him what the true name of lavender buds might be
and he looked that up, too, I wouldn’t have thought florets.
Some later day we will make sachets out of our cast-off
floral skirts, yard sale pillowcases from the ’40s, fill them
with lavender and millet to stretch it, eating whatever is ripe
at the time — maybe figs and pears — wondering when the first
rains are due, one of us wearing her beautiful Chinese blouse.

*

Molly Fisk is the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology as an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her book of linked historical poems, Walking Wheel, will be out in early 2026 from Red Hen Press.

IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems

ONE ART is pleased to announce IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems, Guest Edited by Julia Caroline Knowlton!

About The Guest Editor
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Julia has a PhD in French Literature (UNC-Chapel Hill) and an MFA in Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles). The author of one full-length poetry collection, three poetry chapbooks, a memoir and a children’s book, she has twice been named Georgia Author of the Year. Her work has also been recognized by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.

What We Are Seeking for This Anthology
We are particularly interested in very short poems (aka. micro-poems), 10 lines or less, that transcend ordinary language through sound/symbol/image/metaphor/simile. Like the sustenance of nutmeat within a nutshell, we seek micro poems that hold or contain compressed poetic language as sustenance.
Please note: We are not considering haiku for this anthology.

How to Submit
Submissions for this anthology will be made through Subfolio.
More information will appear on Subfolio as we approach the submission window.
Submissions will be open from November 1 to December 15.
Submissions are FREE.
Donations are appreciated.

Requirements
All work submitted to this anthology must be previously uncurated/unpublished, though poems shared on personal websites and social media are acceptable.

Submission Guidelines
Submit 1-5 micro-poems using Subfolio.
For this anthology, we are considering micro-poems that are 10 lines or less.
We are not considering haiku for this anthology.
Please reference the standard ONE ART submission guidelines for general best practices.
Submissions for this anthology will only be accepted via Subfolio. Please do not email poems.

Morning on my Deck in the New Regime by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Morning on my Deck in the New Regime

I see a chap I know, walking with two friends
on the boardwalk dividing my tall house
from beach below, and hear invoked with flourish,
the Bard of Avon’s holy name. Another fellow
proffers forth a fragment of a speech:
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men
I look then down, wave, and bellow so:
cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,

after which three walkers in unison unleash
this citation of the fateful foul decree:
Julius Caesar, Scene One, Act Three.
I treasure then this moment of delight
in bardic fellowship with passersby,
before my shroud of dread turns day to night.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press, 2025. Work has appeared in journals and broadcasts including Eclectica, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Cholla Needles, TSPoetry, VerseDaily, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, anthologies including Boomer Girls, The Widows’ Handbook, The Poetry of Presence I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, Love Is For All Of Us, What the House Knows, Poetry Goes The Movies. She writes and leads workshops from her home base in Long Beach, California.

Three Poems by Joshua Lillie

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

JUNK DRAWER

Mom said when you feel depressed,
clean the fridge. Organize the junk drawer. Spring clean.
I’ve rearranged the drawers to extinction.
There’s no junk left. The nuts and bolts
now live in their respective mason jars
and have graduated from drawer to the out and open,
up on the shelves where I call them modern art.
Dust gathers on the lids the same way time makes dust
of my mind, in a process I don’t even try to keep hidden
anymore. At Goodwill after my dog died, my sister called
and asked if I’d already made a Goodwill pile.
Devoid of clutter, I stalk the aisles of other’s grief
to look for trinkets to remind me
of mine. Mom said when your teeth fall out in a dream
to remember where you dropped them,
and when you wake up go there for clues
of where you might’ve lost something for real.

*

CLEAN BREAK

My first puzzle was a wooden map of the United States.
The states were the pieces, their names stamped on top,

and into the spaces where they fit, their capitals. To this day
I recall, almost reflexively, each state’s capital.

Growing up in Arizona but never crossing the border,
I was curious as a child why we didn’t spend more time at the beach.

I asked my grandma once, while pointing at the blankness
beneath our state, why don’t you ever take me to the beach?

She laughed because that’s Mexico, not an ocean.
But that only left me with broader questions.

Like well then what’s above Montana? Are there wooden maps
of everywhere? Where do I find the rest of the puzzles?

The next weekend she gifted me a paper map of the world.
I taped it by my bed and throughout elementary school I’d fall asleep

memorizing oceans. I put pins in the middles of the largest ones
and imagined wars between tankers and whales happening so far away

and far beneath us that they’d escaped my history books.
Later on I overheard a rumor that one day an earthquake

would snap California off the continent and it would drift
into the Pacific. I envisioned a clean break from the state lines

of Nevada and Arizona, the ocean rushing toward us
like through a slip’n’slide in a water park commercial.

That night I moved the pin I’d placed in the middle of the Pacific
between East and me one inch closer, in the hopes that Arizona

might have an ocean after all.

*

HEART-SHAPED HEART

Mom taught me young to scissor a heart face from a photograph,
in a way that showed my grandmother had taught her too when
she was a girl. She bent the photo but not so much to crease it,
then began cutting in a half-heart motion, one arching letter C
that drooped into a crook. This or you eyeball the heart shape flat
on the film. This way, though, you might have to trim the oblong
heart to fit more firmly in the locket. As a kid, I first closed
the dog’s face into mine, then when it ran away, the cat’s.
Then when the cat ran away, the rabbit’s that we rescued to
replace them. When the rabbit escaped, I fashioned a heart from
my grandmother’s face, and when she died, my mother’s. Years ago,
the clasp snapped and the cover went missing, so around my neck
my mother’s face was always visible. Eventually the chain snapped
too. For years I carried the small unshielded silver heart in my pocket
where her face was hidden again. In one box, I kept the photos
with loved one’s faces hearted away, in another, the heart-
shaped faces of pets and parents come and gone. To kids today,
one box won’t make sense without the other. Someone’s great grand-
mother will need to explain why we carried these faces around our necks,
why we held so tight the photos of the bodies with hearts where god
intended the face to be.

*

Joshua Lillie is a bartender in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the chapbook Small Talk Symphony (Finishing Line Press, 2025) and the collection The Outside They Built (Alien Buddha Press, 2025). In 2024, he was a finalist for the Jack McCarthy Book Prize Contest from Write Bloody Publishing. In his free time, he enjoys searching for lizards with his wife and cat.

Okay So Let Me Catch You Up by Kat Freeze

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Okay So Let Me Catch You Up

I try to keep the noise down but it comes as dull agony.

I’m going to have to learn to live with it.

Rubber soles slap the slick platform,

Hard heels kick back at the hollow.

I eye the broad-shouldered button-downs.

I spy so many nights and mornings.

It really does kick in at once, doesn’t it.

Suddenly there are leaves everywhere and I am wearing a light jacket.

You look around and begin.

Fuzzy edges hover, hang around hand-crafted.

I didn’t think about how I would feel in the morning.

Let the TV tell me more about what I’m missing.

I woke up high. I woke up like this.

A thin peel of translucent need. I lie

In the weeds of it. I feel my empty heat rattle.

Does this itch have no rub?

Full hem of smoke slipping past an archive of morning afters.

All I said was I love you!

I carry it like a shawl.

The pale leaves fold back to the lilac sky.

The vines shimmy in the vertical shadows of spring time —

Like, am I allowed to be out here right now?

I am exploring like you used to only now

I have time to chew at the sidewalk.

This morning I held my hand and it held back.

Gentle child waiting for the world to pull past

The veil of here and there waving in the early twitch of light.

What daybreak does this life return to?

Do you remember the lace I wore back when I thought I was fragile?

Before I found my fractures and framed them as road maps?

Don’t you see the coffins up ahead? The pavement that curves in?

Stop screeching at what won’t turn back.

He knows what I am and who

But he doesn’t know how I’ve become.

*

Kat Freeze is a poet and performer based in Chicago, IL. She was a 2023 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards Semifinalist and the 2018 Louder Than a Bomb College Edition Slam Champion. Her writing has appeared in BeyondWords, Motley Magazine and 14East. Her chapbook, Wow! This Identity Crisis Just Keeps Going! is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press. She studied Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul University.

Two Poems by P M F Johnson

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Fire

The comfortable enemy that warms us,
lulls us, kills the cat, smudges
the walls to the devil’s own darkness,
renders air unbreathable.

What you said that night
I believed. Hopes built
from straw and paste.

Up and down the canyon, the stench
of everything lost. How the couple
next door never got out.
A fishhook of doubt.

*

Known And Unknown

I want there to be answers, don’t you?
Little enigmas snuffle through the room
like eager piglets after acorns.
People argue on Friday nights, laugh
in disbelief at each other’s theories,
bang down their mugs. Uncertainty
makes us fear, fear makes us certain.

Sloughing off resentments, sticky mud
on the bottom of my shoes. Making a toy
of my feelings to change them.

A red-tailed hawk drifts out of view
behind oaks. An uneasy beauty,
this puzzle with no borders.
The woods familiar, but nothing
whispered prayers can map.
We don’t know what happens after,
who we are without each other.

I will not transplant my grievances
into larger pots, better lighting.
No amount of watering can
prevent such loss. They say gratitude,
but I’m not so good a farmer as that.

Where the mist gathers, ghost deer browse,
unaffected by their own non-existence,
nor by this new shadow that has joined them.
A few harrowed weeds tossed on the furrows,
their stems like question marks
on the wine-dark soil.

*

P M F Johnson has placed poetry with ONE ART, The Evansville Review, The Main Street Rag, Measure, Nimrod International Journal, The North American Review, Poetry East, The Threepenny Review, and others. He has won The Brady Senryu Award, been awarded Finalist in The Atlanta Review Poetry Contest, and been shortlisted for a Touchstone Award. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, the writer Sandra Rector.

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of September 2025

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ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of September 2025

  1. Leanne Shirtliffe
  2. Donna Hilbert
  3. Kate Hanson Foster
  4. Brian O’Sullivan
  5. Rob Spillman
  6. Michael Meyerhofer
  7. Andrea Potos
  8. Penelope Moffet
  9. Clint Margrave
  10. Melissa Fite Johnson

Before the Eulogy by Matthew Isaac Sobin

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Before the Eulogy

I am full of rebuttals
when the rabbi arrives, primed
for argumentation.

How can there be a holy word,
rituals whispered,
when you were made to live deep

within yourself? A machine
stammered on your behalf,
& you were essentially halved.

What remains is a shape
of absence & obstinance. I want
the rabbi to feel opposition

to a loving God, equivalent or more
to my love for you. But that’s wrong, too.
It took more than nine hundred days

to realize, I spoke not only from grief
but restrained rage.
There’s a politics of death

which is a little like
Darwinism, or waterfowl flying
in formation, navigating

distant points. Each pilgrimage swerves
a flight path toward a terminus. The rabbi
mines forgiveness, but mis–

understands. I cannot forgive
your life before decompressing
the blame for your death.

The process of death
was a winnowing,
refining a multifaceted core

to a diminished persona. Give me
all the disparate layers
composing your humanity. I forget death

is a form of accelerated erosion
& you were broken, storm–
torn strata. When the rabbi

exits, I’m drenched
in wonder, holding mercy close.
Mourners deserve

validation, a holy word. You were
a great man,
a perfect father.

*

Matthew Isaac Sobin’s (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. Recent poems have appeared in ONE ART, Stanchion, and ballast. His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Spiritual Literature. His chapbook Blue Bodies was published by Ghost City Press in their 2025 Summer Series. He received an MFA from California College of the Arts. When he’s not teaching high school, you may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California. He is on Twitter @WriterMattIsaac, Instagram @matthewisaacsobin, and Bluesky @matthewisaacsobin.bsky.social. His Linktree is linktr.ee/matthewisaacsobin.

Alone in the Age of Quantum Uncertainty by Dick Westheimer

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Alone in the Age of Quantum Uncertainty

         all verbs out-heaven death
                  —Katy Didden

It is such a tenderness
this disassembling.

I’d come here
intent on dying

but was shown what it’s like
for believers

when their gods call to them
through the gloom.

I had despaired with my children
about the future,

about hope, about their own children—
as the arc of the moral universe

bends backwards under the weight
of monstrous stones.

Thus, here I am, alone, ready
to be crushed—when I am undone

and then put back together
by the wind and dunes and shore,

told again that there is no better world
than this and no worse,

that the ocean waves are never finished
with their work and that the sky

repaints itself in shades of black and gray
and this improbable blue

every minute of every hour
of every unlikely day.

*

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in ONLY POEMS, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Abandon Journal, ONE ART and Vox Populi. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig.
More at www.dickwestheimer.com

Saving Face by Gary Fincke

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Saving Face

After I park, after I step out and close
my door behind me, I make certain not
to look back where my father, past eighty,
pushes off with his arms, gritting his teeth
through bone-on-bone contact in his knees.

For years, each day has welcomed him
by repeating its orders to limp and wheeze.
Dutiful, I have learned to walk slowly
and slightly ahead, an arrangement
that seeks to blind and deafen me.

Nearly overhead, trucks groan through
the upward curve to the express lanes
to Pittsburgh. The field he wants me to see
has lost thirty yards to a knot of overpass,
one end zone forested by stanchions.

Now, the century fresh, my father says
semi-pro meant being paid, game by game,
according to gate receipts, that he knew,
as they huddled, whether he was earning
as much as his baker’s-assistant wage.

All of us, he says, would have played
for nothing, dishing it out and taking it
on a surface baked so hard that grass
was a memory. So unforgiving, he says.
It taught you what a ballgame could be.

The beer garden we passed, he says,
that’s where my coach, Fats Skertich,
was shot and killed after an insult over
a baseball bet unpaid. The welsher that
Fats slapped left and returned with a gun.

My father has me lay hands upon the earth
between the ghosts of sidelines, test
the resilience of the soil with my shoes.
That fellow, he says, had time to think,
and still he shot, then lapses into silence

that lasts the field’s width as if we need
to reach the opponent’s sideline before
he adds, “Some, you should know, took
the shooter’s side. Then the war began,
swallowed most of us, and ended it.”

*

Gary Fincke’s latest collection is The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025
(Press 53, 2025). His most recent collection of new poems is For Now, We Have Been
Spared (Slant Books, 2025).

What Use? by Tim Snyder

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What Use?

Suppose today is a house
you inherit, full of sharpened saws
and drill-bits. The worn blade of the shovel
with its smooth oak handle
and the garden rake with its missing tine
converse (you imagine) and fill the house
with their voices, leaning
against the basement wall near the back door.

Fatherless now, is your house
a sort of meandering from thought
to thought all day until night
and the stars sing their lullaby
of in-between-moments?
Or does the darkness between the stars
report the consequence
of your father’s home?

*

Tim Snyder, originally from Rochester, New York, lives with his wife in a small house on a narrow road with a dog and six cats in Northwestern Ohio. He divvies his time up working on his house, teaching composition, and interpreting for Deaf folks in his adoptive home state. He has published his poetry in journals such as The Poet’s Billow, Heartwood Literary Magazine, and The Albatross.

Self-Portraits in a Broken Mirror by Kip Knott

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Self-Portraits in a Broken Mirror

When you break the mirror this morning
to celebrate turning 60, your ordinary

face shatters into a hundred cutting shards
like a running commentary on who you were,

who you’ve always been, and who you are
at this moment—just a person standing alone

in a pile of broken faces staring up at you
wondering who it is that you’ll become.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Father, after all these Years

         — I’m still waiting
for you to fade.
The way dark stars and sorrow
are known to do.
Or like the sky at dusk.
A rhyme from childhood, or a tune.

*

Eight Years Dead

—and never once coming
to me in dreams
begging forgiveness. Self-righteous
in the afterlife as you were in this one, Mother.
Only with the whole sky in yourself
approach me. The whole sky
where there may be air enough
for me to breathe.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her new chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published by The Poetry Box (July 2025). https://lauraannreed.net/

Three Poems by Melissa Fite Johnson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Estranged Villanelle

For forty years, I shared only the good—
my mother and I in a booth every Thursday,
long talks that avoided my childhood

memories. I left out the times she stood,
threatened to walk out, so I’d beg her to stay.
For forty years, I shared only the good—

antiquing in a charming neighborhood,
new bakery, bridal shower, Sunday matinee.
Long talks that pretended my childhood

didn’t color outside the lines of my baby book.
Why did I participate in her little stage play?
For forty years, I shared only the good,

unspoken agreement that some things should
be private. With friends I knew what to say,
long talks that amended my childhood.

Everyone loved my mother. Who would
believe this other side of her, anyway?
So for forty years, I shared only the good,
even with myself. I discounted my childhood.

*

Preexisting Conditions

My brother wouldn’t get the vaccine.
My mother’s partner wouldn’t let her see my brother.
My mother begged my husband and me to fix it.

We tried. Three years of this.

My brother said big pharma.
My mother’s partner uninvited us from his life.
My mother canceled Christmas but still texted

How about a phone call on Christmas to your mother?

I got the text in the car, passenger seat.
I pressed my hand flat against the cold window.
I knew I would never call my mother again.

My husband and I were driving to the zoo,
a pandemic tradition we kept when the world returned.
Every night-disappeared tree now outlined in color,
a reverse silhouette. The familiar made strange.
The sloth’s head on backwards. The owl upside down.

*

Am I the Asshole

I ask my husband, I ask my best friend. They say no.
I say I’m burning it all down. They say I’m cutting the rot.
I say this is a poem and it’s all clichés so far. They say
nothing because now I’m alone, writing this poem.

My mother’s frown. My brother saying I was her little doll.
My classroom ceiling collapsing after reporting a leak for a year.
My mother taught me politeness and quiet. She taught
my brother entitlement and demands. It scares me

how impolite I’m being, not talking to my mother or brother,
quitting my job. Writing this poem. I should smile
and sip tea. I should break cookies into fourths
so it takes half a week to eat one fucking cookie. I should

tell the therapist it’s fine, I don’t remember either.
I should forgive my mother because I should not remember.

*

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Pleiades, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Melissa, a high school English teacher, is a poetry editor for The Weight, a journal for high school students, and Porcupine Lit, a journal by and for teachers. She and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, KS.

We didn’t know the way to Lost Lake by Stephanie Striffler

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

We didn’t know the way to Lost Lake

when we set out that September day, my brother
and I. Dust gathered on the Volvo’s rear window
until we could barely see where we had been.

Ahead, the gravel road curved
and dropped into endless firs.
We didn’t know a stranger’s directions

would lead us at last to the lake,
surrounded by just-ripe huckleberries
at arm’s reach, to pluck

as we walked. So easy
to meet the bouldered path,
three miles around without a stumble,

Mount Hood flaring bare and bright,
cheering us on, as if no climber
had ever lost footing in a storm.

So easy, too, together,
after the years I’d let us stray off course.
We didn’t know our return to town

would bring the luck
of a riverfront table, the lowering sun
sparkling the rows of white boats

snug at their moorings. Or that it would turn out
to be the one summer’s-end evening
the Symphony boomed Tchaikovsky

beside the water. With fireworks
after dark. Why would we not go on
trusting in our good fortune?

We had found Lost Lake. We missed
the drag in my brother’s foot, his arm
no longer swinging.

*

Stephanie Striffler is a former lawyer for the people of Oregon. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including Calyx Journal, Tar River Poetry, San Pedro River Review, and Denver Quarterly. She finds joy and solace birding, and has observed eight species of sparrow in her Portland yard.

Two Poems by john compton

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side effects on insomnia

my dying
is a house

being unbuilt
—the frames are removed

before the roof.
the structure

collapses
under the weight

—i lie in bed
& watch the clock:

how many hours
to deconstruct

a body

*

side effects to eating

—i float
through the sky

until every pore
releases lightening

prayers
were never processed

no one set up
the answering machine

i won’t figure out
how to process the death

i requested

please sign this nda
—do not attach a poem

*

john compton (b. 1987) is a gay poet who lives in kentucky with his husband josh and their dogs, cats and mice. his latest full length book is “my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store” published with Flowersong Press (dec 2024); his latest chapbook is “melancholy arcadia” published with Harbor Editions (april 2024). you can find his books, some poems and other things here: https://linktr.ee/poetjohncompton

Two Poems by Lynne Kemen

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Cemetery at Sunset

Few visitors drift between the weathered
monuments, seeking something wordless
beneath evening light that pools
amber across marble and earth,
each soul carrying its particular solitude.

Here, among the dancing shadows,
bitter truths lie carved in stone,
and silence draws out like a blade.

Long ago, I learned I’m more comfortable
among the unliving, these stone-marked
souls who ask nothing.

* 

Snatched From the Sky

         After Joseph Cornell’s “Butterfly Habitat, 1940”

Inside a box, sealed and locked.
Wall after wall of suspended butterflies.
Colors—green, orange, yellow—
bright as fresh paint.

Butterflies boxed, mounted,
snatched midflight, and paralyzed.
Killed, captured, throttled, then pinned.

A casket of needles.
Navy wings, baby blue,
black backs, blue mountain
swallowtail, forever frozen
in flight.

*

Lynne Kemen is a poet whose full-length collection, Shoes for Lucy, was published by SCE Press in 2023. Woodland Arts Editions published her chapbook, More Than a Handful, in 2020. Her poetry appears in anthologies including The Memory Palace: An Ekphrastic Anthology (Ekphrastic Editions, 2024), Seeing Things (Woodland Arts, 2020), and Seeing Things 2 (Woodland Arts, 2024). Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024.

She served on the Board of Directors of Bright Hill Press from 2016 to 2025 and has been active on several other not-for-profit boards. She curates Word Thursdays, a twice-monthly reading series for Bright Hill Press. Lynne serves as an Editor and Interviewer for The Blue Mountain Review. Through her writing and editing, she continues to foster connections within the literary community. Libraries and literacy are another passion.

She lives in Delaware County (NY) with her husband in an old farmhouse that once belonged to her aunt’s aunt.

Website: http://lynnekemen.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lmkemen/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lynnekemen/

Beyond Wealth by Steve Deutsch

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Beyond Wealth

On the deserted boardwalk
at Coney Island,
just before a storm roared in,
gray-black clouds peeked
over the Ferris Wheel—
waves strained the imagination.

On our Sunday holidays,
my dad would eat
clams on the half shell.
He seemed so delighted
by his little routine—
lemon, hot sauce, slurp.
The rest of us
would stuff ourselves
on Nathan’s Famous hot dogs—
the best in the world.

Later we’d sit on the beach
with a thousand others
and bake.
How mom and dad loved
that they owned the sun
and the sand.
They’d never owned
anything as majestic.

Dad called
the subway home from the beach
the Calamine Express—
filled with working stiffs
heading home
for Sunday dinner,
sun-burnt children in tow.

Some would swell the colleges.
Some would patrol the rice paddies.
Some still remember
the sun and the sand.

*

Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and the first poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. Steve was nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times and once for Best of the Net. He has published six volumes of poetry. Brooklyn was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press. A new full length, Seven Mountains, was recently published.

Two Poems by Baskin Cooper

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Washerwoman at Dusk

The stream runs warm with the last of the light.
Her hands, red as radishes,
beat linen clean on the stone.

She hums.
Not for joy,
but to keep time.
A song her mother used to sing
while scattering feed for the geese.

No one calls her name.
She scrubs the fabrics,
dunks and dips again.

A glint upstream.
Caught between roots:
a scroll,
sealed in wax with a crest
no villager would know.

She lifts it from the water,
slips it open.
The ink holds fast.
The letters all there,
each one shaped like a thing she’s never owned.

She cannot read,
but smells rosemary,
and something like smoke—
the ghost of a kitchen
where a hand once held hers,
and a voice, soft as feather, called her beautiful.

She sets it
gently back on the water,
watches it drift
until the breeze takes it.

Then turns to the last shirt,
rinses twice,
wrings it hard
before the light is gone.

*

The Old Waynesville Mountaineer Press

They roll it out through the dock doors
in pieces,
like a body.

The man in charge stands on the stoop,
more interested in his coffee
than the men hauling the press.
He talks to no one in particular
about square footage
and modern upgrades.

Another man stands beside him,
matching his stance,
nodding with the same rhythm,
like an understudy learning the lines.
Says they’ll sell the scrap
or send it to a museum,
like it’s all the same.

Across the street,
an old man watches,
hands folded on a cane,
eyes fixed on the skeleton of the press
laid bare in the cold.
He’d always imagined it alive,
a single, pounding body.

Now it’s nothing but
scattered limbs,
once fluent in motion,
now strange and separate,
each piece meaningless alone.

He closes his eyes.
For a moment,
the cold is replaced by heat,
ink-slick steam rising
as the presses thunder.
Men in rolled sleeves,
laughing, cursing, shouting over the noise.
The thud of boots on concrete.
The tremble in his ribs
as the morning edition comes alive.

Stacks of newsprint warm from the press,
their inky scent thick in the air.
Sharp, metallic, almost sweet.

He remembers grabbing his stack
before the town had even stirred,
the weight of it
against his narrow chest,
the streetlamp flickering
as he swung his satchel into place.

A loud clank,
he opens his eyes.
The final hunk of the press,
a piece so large it takes three men to guide it,
vanishes into the back of the truck.
The lift groans.
The doors slam shut.
And just like that,
it is gone.

The haulers climb in.
The engine coughs.
The truck turns the corner.

The men from the newspaper building
disappear back inside,
talking about lunch
and supply chains
and square footage.

The press is simply gone,
its breath, its gravity
emptied from the street
like it had never been there at all.

The old man pulls his sleeves tight
against the sudden wind.
He watches the empty bay
where the press had stood
like something holy.

He stands slowly,
begins the walk home,
hands deep in his pockets.
The ink long gone
but lodged in the turning parts of him
The boy, the street,
the morning still waiting for news.

*

Baskin Cooper is a poet and visual artist based in Chatham County, North Carolina. His work often blends folklore, lyricism, and personal history. He lived in Cork, Ireland, and holds a PhD in Psychology. His poems have appeared in Rattle, and his debut manuscript, The Space Between Branches, is currently seeking publication. Beyond poetry, Cooper is also a screenwriter, songwriter, sculptor, and voice actor.

No Official Song This Summer by Tammy Smith

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No Official Song This Summer

Not one crowd-pleasing hit blares
from car windows. No chorus of
cool breezes serenades beachcombers.
No anthem hot enough to climb
to the top of Billboard’s chart.
Gayle sings “misty taste of moonshine,
teardrop in my eye,” an old tune
we once hummed at the park, pumping
our legs toward the sky on a rickety
swing. The lyrics are so catchy,
I can smell the Blue Ridge Mountain air
and hear the rushing Shenandoah roll by.
For a moment, I consider moving to
West Virginia. My playlist is a fusion
of every high school heartbreak—
bitter, broken, stuck on replay, caught
between the advent of AI and the patience
it once took to send snail mail, to wait
in line for concert tickets my parents swore
would ruin my hearing. Remember tossing
pennies into mall fountains, or feeding
tokens at toll booths—the plunking swish,
cha-ching! when loose change landed.
Music isn’t dead, I tell Gayle’s girls,
but the oldest—who laughed at us for
fixing a cassette tape with a pencil—
slips in her earbuds when I compare
algorithms to streaming tides. Don’t mix
music with politics and ditch the expired
sunscreen, Gayle reminds me.
Hawaiian Tropic is too expensive now.
She sprays her three kids with the
CVS brand, because inflation means more
than just blowing up floats and hoping
they’ll last the whole season.

*

Tammy Smith is a poet and licensed clinical social worker from New Jersey. Her work, shaped by professional and lived experience in mental health, has appeared in Grand Little Things, Merion West, The New Verse News, and Eunoia Review.

Two Poems by Brian O’Sullivan

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

To the Queasy Feeling in the Pit of My Stomach

You were with me the night before,
when I was prepping with big glasses
of Gatorade and Miralax.

But you weren’t there when I woke up
in the procedure room—not even
when the nurse asked if I had “passed gas”

yet and told me to try. You weren’t with me when
Jen came, smiling, to wait for the doctor with me.
As we sat there chilling and laughing,

we both thought we knew the drill—everything
would have looked pretty much ok, with maybe a touch
of that intestinal condition beginning with a “d”

that I can never remember the name of.
and maybe some polyps had been snipped,
but the biopsies would come back negative.

You started to come back to me
when the doctor arrived and we saw
the thinness of his smile and felt the clamminess

of his hand shaking ours. You were with me
for sure when he said “I don’t have good news”
and started using words like “malignant” and “colectomy.”

Speaking of words…let’s not mince them
—I’ve never liked you very much.
Sometimes you make me want to vomit.

But right then, you were welcome—so welcome.
You’ve always been with me–when I was taking an algebra test,
or smelling chlorine before I learned to swim—whenever

there was a burden I thought I couldn’t bear.
I don’t like you, but I know you,
and you are mine, and you are me—

not this other, hidden one, riding along.

*

Self-Portrait of a Breathless Reader

After the surgery, I felt more embodied
than I had thought possible. And I didn’t like it.

I could feel, with HD cinematic clarity, a tiny drop
of acid looming at the bottom of my right sinus,
slithering down, threatening to drop unto my epiglottis
and trigger another round of the violent
hiccups that ripped through my belly so hard that I might
tear my new seams open, even as liquid
boulders of phlegm began to block
my nose and throat. When I tried to breathe
deeply and slowly to calm myself, I could feel
the air slipping through a tiny crease at the base
of my septum, as if plunging into oblivion.

I imagined myself like the little sparrow that Jen and I
had once found in front of our door;
we didn’t know how to help, but we witnessed
as it released an impossibly graceful and soft
burp—surrendering its spirit.

In an oasis of logic
in my brain, I knew I was I wasn’t going to die of phlegm
and hiccups; but it was like how a bad
acid trip must feel—maybe the result
of all that fentanyl that poured through me during
seven and a half hours on the table. I didn’t’ trust
the oasis–for oases hold mirages–but I did know
that talking seemed to ease the hiccups,
and that if I was talking I must be breathing.

So, in the middle of the night, when even Jen,
my ever-vigilant love, had succumbed to sleep
and there was no one to talk to, I opened
Sean Hewitt’s Tongues of Fire and started reading,
stumbling through the hiccups at first, but feeling my throat
open as I moved through the poems, feeling Hewitt’s
voice move through me, reawakening my own voice,
my own spirit. And soon I was thinking not of surviving,
but of Hewitt’s mushroom field and dark abysses and sudden

stars. I never knew how spiritual poetry could be
until it became a way of keeping the mere body alive.

*

Brian O’Sullivan is an English professor and inaugural Chair of LEAD Seminars at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His poems and haiku have been published in ONE ART, Rattle, HOWL New Irish Writing, contemporary haibun online, Lighten Up Online and other journals. He wrote these two poems shortly before and after being operated on back at the end of April, and he wants you to know that he’s doing well now.

Death Valley, Before You Died by Will Falk

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Death Valley, Before You Died

Before Beatty, I never saw a truck flip like that.
You shrugged, said: only coyotes do stupid shit like that.

Your tongue was sweet with a warm wit. Your diagnoses, quick.
When you were diagnosed, I had never been hit like that.

I didn’t care if the visitor center thermometer read 124.
Melanoma or no, I needed your skin. I never tasted sweat like that.

We hid in the shade of an abandoned charcoal kiln.
In cool ash and shadows, we said we’d always live like that.

Before hard winters, you whispered, pinyon pines drop the most nuts.
The heat made you weak but I never saw you pick like that.

Pine nuts are pine seeds, little evergreen babies, you taught me.
Help the trees make love, you said. I’d never thought about it like that.

We did. Then, you leaned on me all the way up Coffin Peak.
When day gave up and died, you promised you’d never quit like that.

Will you toast these and remember me? you asked, cracking shells with your teeth.
We ate them raw together and I wish we could still spit like that.

*

Will Falk is a poet, activist, and attorney. His law practice is devoted to providing free legal services to Native American communities working to protect their sacred lands. His first collection of poetry When I Set the Sweetgrass Down was published by Wayfarer Books in 2023.

Two Poems by Clint Margrave

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Going Away

“Six months is a long time,” Fred says
at our last lunch together before I go abroad.

He says that one of his poetry books
is being translated and published in France
and they might even fly him out to Paris
which would be great because he really wants to do
more traveling himself.

He’s decided to wait another three years before retiring
at 75, that he just got a raise, and besides, they need him
at the machine shop until they can hire someone
new to do the tasks that only he knows how.

It’s a warm January on the coast,
and Fred drinks a cold beer,
his red and white Hawaiian shirt
complemented by sunshine
and the beach behind him.

In two weeks, his wife Joan will email me frantically
in the middle of the night,
my bags half-packed,
to tell me Fred is dead.

But that’s still in the future
and we’re here now,
sitting on the patio of the Belmont Brewing Company
thinking six months is a long time.

*

Monument to the Soviet Army, Sofia

I’ve always admired how someone
built a half-pipe
in front of the old Soviet army monument,
with its towering soldier
raising his rifle to former glory,
surrounded by a Bulgarian man
and a woman with her child.

A place where teenagers could gather
to ride skateboards and bikes
instead of praising the past,
eat sandwiches while sitting on the base,
feet dangling over the bronze reliefs
depicting more scenes of glory
with more soldiers
that in recent times
have been painted by artists
to look like superheroes
or Ronald McDonald
or Santa Claus, and more recently
the blue and yellow national
colors of Ukraine.

Two years ago, the city decided
to dismantle the monument
despite its symbolic power
already diminished,
the figures on the pedestal removed
and put in a Socialist graveyard,
the base fenced off
and covered by scaffolds,
where around it today
I notice they’ve built
a winter skating rink
for parents and children
to hold hands
and laugh and glide
over the ice.

*

Clint Margrave is the author of the poetry collections Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and most recently, Visitor, all from NYQ Books. He is also the author of the novel Lying Bastard and editor of Requiem for the Toad: Selected Poems of Gerald Locklin (NYQ Books). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Sun, Rattle, and B O D Y, among others. In 2024-2025, he served as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Bulgaria, living in Sofia, and teaching creative writing at Sofia University. He lives in Long Beach, California.

Flight Risk by Penelope Moffet

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Flight Risk

So you’ve packed up some books to send
to friends – a great Calyx issue, your favorite
Marge Piercy – and now your heart clutches,
says Unwrap them, put them back on their shelves,

and it’s only two books, so how can you think
you’ll easily release every treasured, eye-worn,
well-thumbed thing, ceramics chosen over decades
in thrift stores and at craft shows, mismatched, unchic

but yours, the etched brandy snifter from your nephew’s
wedding, the blue and purple hatchetfish painting
by your mother, a friend’s charcoal sketch of oaks,
the Queen Anne chairs with high curved backs

and hoof-like feet, the hummingbird-patterned
cotton sheets on your sleep number bed,
50 years of manuscripts and journals,
this high-ceilinged third-floor place you bought

in 2010, first and only home you’ve ever owned,
the furry orange being who lives with you
and oh – the people you might never see again –
how could you think you could let all of this go

if you must flee the country you were born in,
the land you love, the place you used to think you knew?

*

Penelope Moffet’s most recent chapbook is Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Calyx, Willawaw, Nerve Cowboy, Red Eft Review and other literary journals. She has poems upcoming at Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Eclectica, Silver Birch Press and an anthology of Southwestern writers to be published by Dos Gatos Press. A full-length collection of her poetry will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2026. She lives in Southern California.

Totaled by Cora McCann Liderbach

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments
Totaled A jolt—I check my rearview. A man with long grey hair jumps from his Ford, waves his arms, paces. Shouts My car is totaled—I have nothing! The grill of his Focus sits in its engine. The hood curls like a lip, headlights smashed in. I exit my Prius, rear bumper dangling, ask about insurance. Tossing I’m so sorry over his shoulder, he runs off, shedding jacket and fedora. I peer in his Ford: stuffed with black garbage bags. My world collapses, shrinks to the size of a compact car. I imagine hustling meals, showers, a bed. EMS arrives, rolls the wreck to the curb, checks my vision. All I see: a man roaming November streets in shirtsleeves.

*

Cora McCann Liderbach lives by Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio. Her first poetry chapbook, Throughline, was published in 2024 (Finishing Line Press). Recent work appears in The Roads at Night Looked Like Our Futures, a 40 Over 40 Anthology; Quartet; Unbroken; Light Enters the Grove Anthology; and The RavensPerch. She was a 2022 Best of the Net nominee (Impostor).

ONE ART’s October 2025 Reading

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We’re pleased to announce ONE ART’s October 2025 Reading!

Date: Sunday, October 5

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

Featured Poets: Susan Rich, Shawn Aveningo-Sanders, Faith Shearin

>>> Tickets Available <<<

Free!

(Donations appreciated.)

The official event is expected to run approximately 1-hour.

After the reading, please consider sticking around for approximately 30-minutes of Community Time discussion with our Featured Poets.

*

~ About Our Featured Poets ~

Susan Rich is the author of six collections of poetry and co-editor of two prose anthologies. Her most recent books include Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry). She co-edited Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems (Two Sylvias Press) and Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders (Poetry Foundation). Susan’s previous poetry books include Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue–Poems of the World–winner of the PEN USA Award. Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds is forthcoming from Raven Chronicles Press.

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poetry has appeared in journals worldwide, including Calyx, ONE ART, Quartet, Timberline Review, About Place Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and many others. She is the author of What She Was Wearing and her manuscript, Pockets, was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest, which is forthcoming from MoonPath Press. Shawn is two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. A proud mom and Nana, she shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon.

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

Halo by Sydney Lea

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Halo

     I have heard the Master say that on no occasion
     does a man realize himself to the full,
     though the mourning for a parent
     may be an exception.
                   –Tseng Tzu

Fields the color of stale tobacco,
water barely breaching the dam.
Like anyone, I look forward and back,
though chiefly back these days.
I’m seeing myself at ten.

It’s years, however short they’ll have seemed,
before my father’s coronary.
It’s Sunday. The regular grownups–
parents, grandmother, bachelor uncle–
convene in the dooryard yew’s slim shade.

I’ve never returned to my father’s grave.
His shrine’s within my soul.
He exhales his Camel smoke,
which blends with the general August miasma.
No grasshoppers rattle. They hide from the heat.

No matter. I wouldn’t be tempted
to catch them to bait the pond’s small sunfish.
I need to stay, though I’m an outsider.
The murmur of voices blends
with the hum of the fan just inside on its sill.

Do I exist? I feel disembodied.
Stymied, I search for something to say,
to that notably big-hearted father mostly.
That’s not a halo he wears.
Of course not. It’s only that I dream one today,

and it’ll be part of that scene forever–
which, granted, was nothing unique,
and yet I tasted tears of confusion.
I taste them now. No doubt what I saw
was some commingling of smoke

and haze and the clouds that feathered the ridge.
Is that all I’m made of, just timeworn mourning?
I’ve outlived my father by decades,
always hoping, always vainly,
to say what’s always needed saying.

                                             – in mem. Sydney L.W. Lea (1909-66)

*

Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Three Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

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At a Memorial Service, I Do Not Hold My Breath, But Sigh Air

Every word spoken out of grief enters my heart.
Grief contains praise.
I listen —

wind and rain tickling off leaves —
praise
for my trying to repair the brokenness of this earth.

Birdsongs create their daily practice
to get the tone just right,
just as perfect as sunrise.

This breath I have, I don’t want to waste it.
My lungs almost collapsed once,
and the lesson I learned was:

listen to my chest, my frantic heart
telling me, beat, beat heart, beat.
I keep working the soil,
try to heal it
as one breath.
Praise air.

Praise each morning needing repair,
needing replenishing,
tend to simple moments

when breath waits,
inhale
and exhale,

a great sigh of life
giving
and receiving.

*

The Journey

         For Alice Wood

Today, my wife’s sister died at eight o’clock in the morning,
and I swear,
this morning
birds stopped singing:

a kind of quiet that accompanies slight rain.

The kind of day that folds
like sheets fresh off the clothesline,
smelling of sunshine. The silence following
a body surrendering to sea. The way a sail can tilt
the wrong way in a sudden wind shift.

Some deaths
are measured by time, place, and circumstances.

Today,
when birds found their voices return,
they sang about hope.

Not hopelessness.
Not dirges.

But hope.

The kind of hope that arrives as a rescue in time,
or ease of dying in our sleep.
The kind of hope wanting to know
what we will find at the end of life.

*

I Wish There Was More Love in This World

A boy becomes a stillness hardly noticed,
fully up to his imagination, those moments
hiding beneath the surface, and able to vanish
into a trickle.

He’s in his environment studying some flat rocks,
hoping to find a fossilized impression of a fern.

Every object in these woods keeps secrets.

The sky darkens its face,
a quiet following trace evidences of silence,

because the boy has found his father’s loaded gun.

What the boy does next
depends on what the quiet tells him:
how close or far
the distance to the quiet
if he doesn’t have a map.

I wish there was more love in this world
of suddenness and grief. I wish he notices
light remains transient
on this river of troubles
being carried away. I wish he finds assurances
of the reeds whispering,
relax.

I wish the abundance of scents of pine,
calms him about fierce tenderness
of survival. I wish
that fossilized fern teaches him
more love
in this landscape with infinite possibilities.

What the boy does next
depends on what the quiet tells him.

*

Martin Willitts Jr, a retired Librarian that trained Librarians for New York State Public Libraries. He lives in Syracuse, New York. He is an editor for Comstock Review, and he is the judge for the New York State Fair Poetry Competition. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the National Ecological Award winner for “Searching for What You Cannot See” (Hiraeth Press, 2013) and the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr: Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024); and “Love Never Cools When It Is Hot” (Red Wolf Editions, 2025)

Two Poems by Allison Zhang

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Porcelain Theory

I collect broken things—
a teacup with no handle,
a mirror in four neat pieces,
a cello string I wore
as a bracelet.

My mother says
everything breaks
if you press too hard—
voice, faith,
the dial on the radiator.

There’s worship
in returning to what’s fractured.
Gold veins in bowls.
A bruise teaching
the body to be louder.

Today I broke
the last plate on purpose—
just to hear
what it sounds like
to start again.

*

Etymology of a Shrug

The neurologist says it’s non-progressive.
Which feels generous.

At breakfast, my grandfather lifts a spoon,
stalls midair, points at the cereal.
Calls it sky.

I nod. Sure.
Everything falls eventually.

He once told me
the first English word he learned was wait.
It was also the last thing he said to me.
Maybe that’s coincidence.
Or a loop.

At the DMV, he gave his birth year as 1857.
Said his job was “still becoming.”
The clerk didn’t blink. Typed it in.

When he was nine,
a soldier asked his name.
He said it. They laughed.
That was the year he stopped answering.

The MRI lit his brain like a city after rain.
One hemisphere fogged.
The other—
a grocery list in half-light:
eggs.
mercy.
something that starts with forgive.

Yesterday, he pointed at a crow and said God.
Then laughed,
like the punchline arrived late.
I wrote it down anyway.

At the root, shrug means “to writhe.”
Which might explain how I love—
and why I wear jackets
with sleeves past my knuckles.

*

Allison Zhang is a poet and writer based in Los Angeles. An immigrant and bilingual speaker of English and Mandarin, she writes about inheritance, memory, and the quiet ruptures of daily life. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, SWWIM Every Day, Sky Island Journal, and others. She is the author of An Everlasting Bond, honored by the BookFest Spring Awards and the International Impact Book Awards.

The Present by Gary D. Grossman

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The Present

We watered the neighbor’s plants
while he vacationed, and in appreciation
he gifted us a book on the local college
mascot. A bulldog, though we’re neither dog
people nor college fans. A professor of Hobbes
and Kant — I can’t see him purchasing the book,
unlikely that. But the episode brought
to mind regifting, a concept birthed,
like most twenty-first century ethics,
by Seinfeld & Co., where Elaine regifts
a label maker to Tim the physician,
who regifts it to Jerry, leading to
what can only be an infinite regress.
A single present passing from friend
to friend, in a chain of never-ending favors,
that aren’t. Regifting is real — eventually stores,
even Amazon, will feel the fate of dodos
and dinosaurs, because all that exists
in this stardust universe is seventeen
presents swapping countries and continents,
weddings and birthdays. As Seinfeld
and his posse excuse every bad behavior
with Well isn’t it the thought that counts,
as the last present in the world continues
to pass hand to hand, never to rest nor arrive.

*

Gary D. Grossman enjoys writing and sharing his work, published in 65+ literary reviews. His graphic memoir, three books of poetry and gourmet venison cookbook all may be purchased via his website or Amazon. Gary enjoys running, fishing, gardening and playing the ukulele. Website: https://www.garygrossman.net/ .

Suburban Psalm by Leanne Shirtliffe

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Suburban Psalm

I walk through the valley of suburbia
seeking no more evil. Two women,

stooped with back cracks over sidewalks,
collect the daily litter of others. Two

streets over, a multitude of child-painted
birdhouses sway from fledgling elms

planted in a boulevard, invisible to all
save nesting birds and slow walkers.

There’s a dream to carry
where we see goodness and mercy

comfort us through a single day. Look!
He braked so a car could merge. She

shovelled her neighbour’s walk. A stranger
stopped to say, “Your scarf is so beautiful.”

*

Born and raised in rural Manitoba, Leanne Shirtliffe is a writer and educator now based in Calgary, Alberta. Some of Leanne’s recent poetry appears in The Kenyon Review, The Baltimore Review, and Funicular. She writes the Substack, Chasing Wonder.

Two Poems by Elizabeth Vines

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Trigger Warning

Ever since trigger warnings became a thing,
I’ve been finding it hard to know what shouldn’t
be included in a trigger warning.
A honda civic, especially if it’s
green and sparkling.
Boots that crash into the floor,
the very sound of anger incarnate.
A certain back room in a laundromat
with a table for tarot.
I think of three women I used to live with.
Strong women. Smart women.
Satin, shiny, reflective.
Too tight ballet shoes.
Red, the color, seeing it.
Whiskey, the smell, the burn.
I think of my cousin and my mother and my aunt,
Women bound — and bound together.
The concepts of “lucky”
and “close call.”
The shoes I left at his house.
My missing bike light — or was it stolen?
The rear naked chokes I practice in Jiu-Jitsu.
I think of how many “almosts”
and “grey areas” there must be
sitting on top of my already present trauma —
here since childhood.
The owners of these triggers are beautiful people, wonderful people,
to use the triggering words of
a man we would all like to forget.
I prefer to think of us
as caretakers of our triggers.
The kind of caretaker you might find
on a quiet farm in Northern Ireland.
Each morning he carries a lantern to visit his goats,
softly humming their names.

*

everyone wants a poem about Pedro Pascal today

everyone wants a poem about Pedro Pascal today
because maybe, just maybe,
he gets it.
maybe if we saw Pedro in a cafe in rome,
we would spill our coffee because
we would be moving our hands too fast
to cover the gaping hole of our mouths.
maybe by the time we could step back into our bodies,
he would already be on his hands and knees,
mopping up the mess of our enthusiasm,
telling us
“it’s okay. everything is okay.”
maybe his jawline is etched with kindness.
and maybe when he tells us “everything is okay,”
the deeper meaning of these words
coats us like a blanket that
heals our trauma in a deeply somatic way.
maybe if we were to have sex with him,
it would be the kind of sex where we cry at the end,
and he would cry with us and tell us
what a beautiful thing it is to cry while existing in the world.
maybe when he uses his privilege to support
his sister, he is lifting up every one of us.
maybe his muscles move beyond gender.
maybe we want to deify him because it’s alluring to think
it could be safe to let our love transcend everything.
maybe we crave religion.
maybe he is the patriarchy’s apology — their aphrodite —
proving apodictically that compassion can reside within
the body of a cis-het man.

*

Elizabeth Vines is an emerging poet, as well as a painter and psychotherapist living in the Sierra Nevada Foothills. Her poetry explores identity, philosophy, emotional excavation, and power dynamics. This is her first publication.

On my Morning Walk, I think of Mr. Emerson by Donna Hilbert

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On my Morning Walk, I think of Mr. Emerson

        I don’t care what I see outside. My vision is within!
        Here is where the birds sing! Here is where the sky is blue!
                — E.M. Forster

I wish it were so with me,
but I do need A Room with a View
and also a walk on the beach,
where terns and all manner
of gulls swarm and squawk,
where pelicans fly in
to dive for breakfast,
and herons patiently wait.

If grace walks with me,
I might spot a dolphin or two,
or a shark surfacing for a moment,
and the purse of my heart
will widen with wonder enough
to hold fast another day.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press, 2025. Work has appeared in journals and broadcasts including Eclectica, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Cholla Needles, TSPoetry, VerseDaily, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, anthologies including Boomer Girls, The Widows’ Handbook, The Poetry of Presence I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, Love Is For All Of Us, What the House Knows, Poetry Goes The Movies. She writes and leads workshops from her home base in Long Beach, California.

Two Hearts by Liz Weber

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Two Hearts

I am not a woman who stays, growing roots with care,
but I remember the pull of the tides on that blue,
blue day when desire coated our limbs like sand.

We slipped in, fish returned to our headwaters. Two bodies
stirring up the sea until clouds mixed with riptides, jellies spun
into celestial beings.

My heart longed to drop over the horizon. Disappear like a ship
in the night. It pulled taunt against the promise of a man I could love.
His shadow swimming to shore. My face turned to the sky.
Or was it the sea?

*

Liz Weber is a writer born and raised in Kentucky, who now finds herself living in Idaho. She holds an MA in journalism from American University and her work has appeared in The Washington Post, High Country News, Beyond Words Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and various publications around the western U.S.

Two Poems by James Diaz

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

I will not go to Darkness having known Nothing of the Light

And so I refuse imagination
As many times as it takes to stake pure claim
That this is exactly where and how it all happened

I will not be sweetened
I will not soften
I’ll rage at it often
And speak its full darkness

How the situation unfurls
Like skin shedding at dawn
If a body go to light
That it not do so alone

I have smoked the bitter to the base of the mountain
In such dimness as is found in the creek bed bottom of life
My toes kick up universes of particles
Until the muddy water claims me right up to the ankles

And I know that what you don’t heal from will set itself up, base camp, in the soul of all you are,
And it’ll hurt, sputter, and howl
Split you right down the middle
And open you up into a thousand points of light
Headed like fugitives
For the trees
The trees.

I will not be sweetened
I will not be eaten

I am what survived
And what didn’t
In one wild heavy breath

And I will not go to darkness having known nothing of the light.

*

Good Things

What an incessant talker
My mind is
Trilling like a strange bird
Clumsy, wanting what it wants
What it doesn’t know it wants

Last night in the mirror I cried
A cry so deep it made
All I was shudder
Regret is a country
I have fought fiercely for
I never threw a single battle

I read today of a severely abused boy who one day disappeared from therapy (no one, not even the foster system, could find him) and re-emerged an adult
To leave a note for his therapist
At the hospital where she worked,
She who had spent much of their time together
Softly crying, because, she didn’t know why,
Only that she couldn’t reach the boy,
Felt so powerless to help or touch his pain

The note said: “Ms. J, you’re crying was everything. Fred.”

And then,

“Me too.”

He disappeared again.

We try to make the pieces work.
Our fingers do their dance.
What music, to put a thing
Where it don’t belong
And make it sing anyway

Something touches an ancient hurt in us. Crying, and we don’t know why. Don’t want to encircle or run down so big a thing, that mystery that is, that was. All dumb and beautiful, all terrifyingly real.

I want to forgive
And today I have
Unexpectedly someone
Who did not ask for it
But I felt my heart move a muscle
And softness comes to us
When it comes
It has no reason to
But there it so often is
Unreasonably at the door.

When I have this feeling that I can’t make sense of
I do a whole lot of nothing with it
But it’s a returner
A real soul burner

I think of what it means to love
Yourself, to stop hurting what you are,
Just like a kid again, waiting for rescue
But tag, you’re it man

You learn to run with it.

Pain don’t need a reason.
It just is. Like a loose tooth;
You play around with it long enough
It sets itself free.

I’m still learning
How to
Throw a few
Battles.

That you don’t have to be deserving
Of your own love.
That it happened because it happened.
And you lived because you didn’t die.

No reason why, you just are
Like a fact
Here in the world
And anything really can happen.

Good things, even.
Good things.

*

James Diaz is the author of four full length collections of poetry, the latest of which, Once More, Into The Light, will be out in the world shortly from Alien Buddha Press. Their work has appeared most recently in Resurrection Mag, Londemere Lit, Jelly Squid, Sophon Lit, and San Pedro Review.

Four Poems by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

AT THE NAIL SALON

High, bright ceilings,
two wall-sized video screens
showing lapis blue and white domes
and the red cliffs of Santorini–
beside it, two small signs are posted:
Kindness, Gratitude, the same words
my mother used when once my daughter
asked: Yaya, what would you say
is your life’s philosophy?

I’m thinking of her
sitting beside me on the soft pale chair
as quiet Elisabet files and trims
and buffs my nails,
applies one clear coat and another
and then another, all the way
to my chosen pink called Beloved,
and carrying a sheen like an opal
within it, like pearlescent sky
on the verge of summer sunset
as I hear my mother saying:
Beautiful, honey.

*

JUNE IS A WORD AND A MEMORY

I often roam inside, the glorious blooms
of peonies alongside the sorrowing
month of my mother’s leaving
on the same day and hour her baby brother
had gone seventy-seven years before.

When I told this to my mother’s
kind doctor, he stopped still:
This is profoundly important, as if he
understood in that moment
how sometimes the secret
resonances of the world come to light

and the perfect correspondences of this
world and the other shine like the June
sun that unabashedly blazed beyond
the window of her hospital room.

*

WHEN THE WOMAN ASKED: ISN’T IT TIME TO STOP
WRITING POEMS ABOUT MY MOTHER

I looked away,
seeing into memories
of Monet’s water lilies,
canvas after canvas
of shifting
reflections in water,
each moment
altering the whole.
And I remembered
how changed
his haystacks appeared
in noon light,
or in the snow,
or laying under the setting sun.

*

MY MOTHER AND LIPSTICK

I never thought about lipstick
until after my mother died
when I gathered them from
her bedroom drawers, bathroom shelves,
one or two still on her coffee table
from the morning she left for the hospital–
all the exuberant shades of pink or red she loved.

She wouldn’t go anywhere without pausing
to put some on
as I do now, standing
at my mirror in her name,
following the contours of my lips like hers,
seeing her face, wearing again
softsilver rose, hot coral, all heart.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem. You can find her at andreapotos.com

TO BE LIKE YOU by Lori Levy

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

TO BE LIKE YOU

In memory of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I want to be like you, RBG.
I want to ride an elephant in India
with my polar opposite.
I want to dine with this friend,
go to operas with him, pinch myself
to keep from laughing when his humor splits me
in a place as sober as the Supreme Court.
I want my family to gather with his
on holidays and birthdays,
putting politics aside for friendship.
I want to banish beliefs to another room,
muted for a while, so they won’t interfere
when a man whose opinions and conclusions
I fiercely oppose
sends me two dozen roses on my birthday.
I want to smile as gratefully as you did.

When I think of you, RBG, I see my mother,
the light in her eyes when she tells me the story—
how she and you were best friends in grade school
in Brooklyn, the two best students in the class.
How your parents took her to the opera with you.
How decades later, from her home in Israel,
she sent a letter to you at the Supreme Court.
I want to be like you, RBG: the kind of woman
who, no matter how busy, finds a moment
to read a letter from her childhood friend.
A woman who writes back.

*

Lori Levy’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Paterson Literary Review, Mom Egg Review, ONE ART, and numerous other online and print literary journals and anthologies in the U.S., the U.K., and Israel. Two of her chapbooks were published in 2023: “What Do You Mean When You Say Green? and Other Poems of Color” (Kelsay Books) and “Feet in L.A., But My Womb Lives in Jerusalem, My Breath in Vermont” (Ben Yehuda Press). Levy lives with her husband in Los Angeles, but “home,” for her, has also been Vermont and Israel.

Matthew Writes His Obituary in Red by Kate Hanson Foster

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Matthew Writes His Obituary in Red

Matthew, born 1969, died
(eventually) of an alcohol-related illness.
He is survived by lemon oil on pews, welts
of wax on holy cloth and an exhaled breath
of incense that had long pendulated inside his chest.

When he was an altar boy,
cassock flesh against his sneakers, Matthew
served faithfully: rung the bells,
prepared the host and wine. Once
he had the role of Jesus in the parish play,
and when his robe stripped from his shoulders,
the other kids laughed, and Matthew turned
a shade of red that would keep
claws in him for the rest of his life.

He helped with Easter egg hunts and talent
shows, mowed the church grounds, folded towels
for Father Mac’s wet body. In the back seat
of the priest’s white Buick, he remembered the tickle—
how it started in his stomach and never left.
Later, he would not say, “he touched me,”
he would say, “I remember how
his testicles hung like low fruit.”

The sacristy always smelled like alter wine,
aftershave, and something feral slinking
beneath the surface. The image of Father Mac’s
naked, wrinkled skin Matthew would spend
the rest of his life drinking away.
He left town with graduation money,
a ten-cassette case and an old Ford
exhausting across state lines. He held
jobs like beer bottles he’d later
return home to smash. A bottle cracked
on headstone was the closest thing he could
count as prayer. He baptized Father
Mac’s grave in piss, ran
it down with his car, screamed
into the ground and waited for God
to flinch. When he returned the next morning
to pick up the shards, still no one saw—
no outcry, no newspaper
story of a priest’s desecrated grave,
and so, he began again, praying,
baptizing—a ritual of rage.

Matthew was the second-fastest
runner in his family, possessed
by something raw and fevered,
he ran like forgetting lived at the end
of a mile. He told the truth
in blackouts, wrote the story in detox,
drank until his blood and body eventually
surrendered, and Matthew died, a red robe
still hanging in the back of his mind,
bright like fresh meat. And the world
carried on. And so did God.

*

In lieu of flowers, please donate to BishopAccountability.org

*

Kate Hanson Foster’s collection of poems, Crow Funeral was published in March 2022 by EastOver Press. She is also the author of Mid Drift, a finalist for the Massachusetts Center for the Book Award. Her writing has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Harper Palate, Poet Lore, Salamander, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the co-host of the poetry podcast Table for Deuce, and co-editor of The Seat along with poet, Michael Schmeltzer. A recipient of the NEA Parent Fellowship through the Vermont Studio Center, she lives and writes in Groton, Massachusetts.

AFTER READING ABOUT MY FRIEND’S HOMELESS SON SHOT AND KILLED BY POLICE by Michael Meyerhofer

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AFTER READING ABOUT MY FRIEND’S HOMELESS SON SHOT AND KILLED BY POLICE

         For Susan Vespoli

I remember my brother calling
from somewhere in South Dakota
to say he quit his job cleaning rooms
because they’re stealing his tips
and now he’s just wandering
along a sunburnt stretch of highway
and doesn’t give a fuck what happens,
maybe he’ll sleep in a park, maybe
a ditch or under a bridge, stop trying
to talk him into turning around.

Later, out of beer, he stopped
at some abandoned campground
and stared at muddy water until a cop
exited an inferno-crested cruiser
to ask if he’s okay, mentioned
dirty dishes and a help wanted sign
down the road – but by then, my brother
had changed his mind, maybe
he was wrong about the tips,
maybe it’s time he stopped running

from an abandoned law degree
and a mother whose kidneys he failed
to heal with a touch, so the cop
gave him twenty bucks and a ride
to the only bus station. I don’t see hope
as a flower – more like a bucket
that never gets washed. By hospice,
he was furious that I wouldn’t carry him
to the toilet, forgetting the tubes
already woven through his plumbing.

Then, five months after they told us
where we could stop to pick up
my brother’s clothes, phone, ashes,
I got another call from my father saying
my stepbrother had been killed
by some cop in Milwaukee, his back
too tempting a target as he ran
from a crashed car with broken glasses
and a handgun. They never met,
my brother and stepbrother – likewise

these cops from different states,
bulging hips and someone who worries
when they don’t answer. Yesterday,
my father confessed his newfound belief
in a flat earth – some nonsense
about wind speed, global conspiracies –
and I pictured a broad stairway
past melting bridges and rusty stars,
a sun that crisps the back of your neck
the moment you try to look away.

*

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

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of August 2025

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~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of August 2025 ~

  1. Susan Vespoli
  2. Linda Laderman
  3. Colleen S. Harris
  4. Marc Alan Di Martino
  5. Ellen Austin-Li
  6. Terri Kirby Erickson
  7. Betsy Mars
  8. Jennifer L. Freed
  9. James Davis
  10. Mark Williams

Signs and Portents While Delivering for the Food Bank in the Second Poorest County in New York State by Rob Spillman

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Signs and Portents While Delivering for the Food Bank in the Second Poorest County in New York State

No trespassing, I don’t call 911,
I call .358. J’s back is out still,
can’t work, is looking after
her daughter’s rescue rabbit
while she pulls a double at Lowes.
Coiled snake on yellow “Don’t
Tread on Me” flags in front
of trailers and campers permanently
parked in old campgrounds.
“We’re fine,” says N, eighty-
something, Covid-positive,
unvaxinated. The Irish Alps,
The Fun Place To Be, Friar Tuck’s
Lodge. The Rainbow Cabins.
A’s in the hospital, losing
her second leg, husband,
also diabetic, barricaded
by filth, says just leave
the bags by the door,
that they’re fine, thanks.
Wood $5 a bundle, Fresh
Eggs, Indoor Flea Market,
Smile—You’re on Camera.
L gives back some cans
from last week, has enough,
thanks, while her neighbor B,
with her soap operas and Chihuahua
guard, her room at the roadside
motel, once a classic Catskill
family summer destination,
now a May Peace Prevail
on Earth sign on the marquee,
and thanks to the generosity
of an elderly couple
that have done quite well
in real estate, thank you
very much, lets these refugees
of late capitalism—the jailed,
the slightly off, those battling
pills, smoke, bottles, needles—
lets them stay cheap, looks
after them as if they were
their own wayward children,
but B, her place is empty,
the super, painting the walls,
erasing all signs of B, says
she just vanished
without a trace

*

Rob Spillman was the editor of Tin House from 1999-2019. He is the author of the memoir All Tomorrow’s Parties.

Self Portrait with Mary Oliver at Ashfield Lake, Late Fall by Laura Sackton

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Self Portrait with Mary Oliver at Ashfield Lake, Late Fall

I bring my body
breathing
to greet
what the haunting
holds.

*

Laura Sackton is a queer poet who lives and writes in rural Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, Terrain.org, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. She’s known around the internet as an evangelist for earnestness.