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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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 ~ 8 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

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

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.

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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.

As I Contemplate Precarity, the Dogs Eat Their Breakfast by Jenna Wysong Filbrun

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

As I Contemplate Precarity, the Dogs Eat Their Breakfast

I would forget,
if it weren’t for the crunch
of kibble over the quiet
light as it awakens
from gray
to white,
how to keep on.

Each moment
is an invitation
extended for an instant—
the hunger of life
for itself, the heart
of souls resting
in my care.

Why can’t I be tender with myself?
Life moves through me,
asking me in,
opening the present
like a window.
If I can accept, fresh air
flows like breath.

I want to keep
my loves forever
just like this,
and I hope like hunger
the moment,
as it passes,
will never be gone.

*

Jenna Wysong Filbrun is the author of the poetry collection, Running Toward Water, forthcoming from Shanti Arts in 2026. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in Deep Wild Journal, Gyroscope Review, Wild Roof Journal, and other publications. She practices poetry to deepen her awareness of connection and loves to spend time at home and in the wild with her husband, Mike, and their dogs, Oliver and Lewis. Find her on Instagram @jwfilbrun.

Etiquette for Choking in an Applebee’s by Kristen Rapp

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Etiquette for Choking in an Applebee’s

I heard somewhere that most women who die
from choking in restaurants are found
on the bathroom floor
presumably because they don’t want
to make a scene as they labor
for air and I’ve wondered
what they think about
in the moments before their bodies fold
on the tile, if they know
they were taught to choose death
inside a graffitied stall
over sharing their most basic need
to breathe
and then I look around and start to see
choking women everywhere.

*

Kristen Rapp is a poet and sociologist from Roanoke, Virginia. She is an associate professor of Sociology and Public Health at Roanoke College, where she studies and teaches on the topic of social inequalities in health. Her poetry explores themes of motherhood, queer identity, feminism, and politics. Kristen’s poems have appeared in the North Meridian Review and in a forthcoming anthology titled If You Ever: Poems Inspired by Kim Addonizio.

Two Poems by Melissa Strilecki

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Rabid Omnivores

Once asked, “What are you made of?”
I said want. I am made of want.
I am on the apps

and I’ve left-swiped my entire city.
I don’t try to equivocate, but sometimes
every word seems to mean

at least two other words.
Six hours away, a gorgeous man
writes dark stories about lonely men

in bars, and says we might as well be
in different dimensions. “Well, then,
there’s a world

where we have an amazing first date.”
He’d like to read that one,
some day. When I say

I fear rejection: In high school,
a boy asked me out
as a prank. The water polo team

watched and laughed. This Fall,
poems fell from me in threes.
I write them to men who don’t read

poems. It used to be
you got a slug of whiskey
and a stick to bite

when they cut off your fucking leg,
and here I am—
felled by my feelings.

*

Another Poem About

I want to be the person who takes
what another can give, and notes the datapoints
to calibrate my own expectations. Instead,
I am whatever this is. I was asked again today
for the poem about my mother.
Not today. I’ve folded away everything
left to say. While I cook for you,
I think how I haven’t done this for someone
since my husband, and I don’t tell you,
so you don’t know. Do I mind
if you go for a run? While the Bolognese
simmers? No. If you stay, I could say something
true. When I cook for you, and you eat
without realizing it’s my heart—
My heart in a fed belly. In knowing
there is not a single person
I would hide you from—maybe
every poem I write
about a man who cannot love me,
is a poem about my mother.

*

Melissa Strilecki has been previously published in Sugar House Review, Fugue, West Trade Review, The Shore, and several others. She lives in Seattle with her two children.

Battle of the Bulge by Tom Barlow

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Battle of the Bulge

1960. I’m 15 watching Dad size up the used car dealer,
not a stalwart man but he does wear a vest, smokes Luckies
like my old man. We walk his lot; he carries a chamois

to buff the chrome trim of each car we pass until we
come upon a red ’57 Ford Galaxie. The guy opens
the front door, waves Dad inside. He slides the seat back,

takes the key, fires it up. The exhaust is a little blue,
but the interior, immaculate. Even the ash tray is clean;
I’ve never seen that before.

The guy offers to sacrifice the car, with seventy thousand
on the odometer, for a grand and a half. My old man scoffs
at first but then the guy offers a ten percent veteran’s discount,

which allows him to mention he was in the Battle of the Bulge,
spent a winter in a foxhole outside Bastogne. Young
as I am I can tell he’s sold a shitload of cars by introducing

that little fact, true or not. It’s obvious Dad believes him
and figures even if the car is a little overpriced General Eisenhower
would say this guy has earned the sale. Now, my old man

had a rough time in his Navy hitch, suicidal from malaria while
guarding the Panama Canal from U-boats, sent home early with
a general discharge that some folk look upon with contempt.

In the office Dad glances at me, trying to gauge if I
understand that the check he is about to write is part of a
far-off battle he will be fighting the rest of his life.

He seals the deal for the Ford and as we drive away I can see
the salesman throw his feet up on his desk and clasp his hands
over his belly, obviously no longer even thinking about that

foxhole, probably doing some mental math to see how close he
is now to a speedboat of his own he’ll name Battle of the Bilge.

*

Tom Barlow is an American writer whose work has appeared in many journals including Ekphrastic Review, Voicemail Poetry, Hobart, Tenemos, ONE ART, Redivider, The New York Quarterly, The Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many more. He writes because he finds conversation calls for so much give and take, and he considers himself more of a giver. See tombarlowauthor.com.

Woof, Woof by Mark Williams

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Woof, Woof

I’m taking a walk in August. It’s hot.
Did you know the guy who invented the heat index
was eighty-five years old at the time?
He felt like he was ninety, three degrees shy
of what my phone reads when I hear, woof, woof.

To my left, where normally two, sometimes three
small dogs run to their fence to greet me,
I only see a swing-set and two trees. Three blocks later,
woof, woof. A kind of muffled, beagle bark. Sad-like,
as though a dog were left out in this heat. Woof, woof.

By this time, I have walked six blocks. It seems
a dog is on my trail. One night, an owl attacked me.
DeeGee patched the claw marks on my head.
Could I be hearing hoots, not woofs?
Is something spooky going on?

Who knows what is possible?
Usually, I say, Hi, Dad or Hi, Mother
when a cardinal lands on my windowsill.
I wouldn’t put this past Dad. The first time he met DeeGee,
he was wearing giant, plastic ears. Woof, woof:

knee level, to my left again. But this time,
I notice that my phone, in my left hand,
is open to an app I haven’t used in years. One that,
when you swing your arm a certain way, as in walking, say,
goes a muffled woof, woof just loud enough

to drown out a father’s laughter.

*

Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in ONE ART, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Rattle, and other journals and anthologies. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, Happiness, and the book of poems, Carrying On. His fiction has appeared in Eclectica, Cleaver, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and Running Wild Press anthologies. He lives in Evansville, Indiana, with his wife, DeeGee.

When is a dining table not a table? by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 14 Comments

When is a dining table not a table?

Around the kitchen table
all the chairs are tucked in,
unused, except for the cat
resting there.

The surface is buried
under this and that:
unopened mail, remnants
of holidays past.

Now mostly a repository
for everything:
a place keeper, a war zone,
a waiting room for mail
or groceries or whatever
might be passing through.

No family gathers here
and hasn’t done for years—
the lingering fear of shared breath,
the cloud of shared trauma.

At this table no one lingers,
each cocooned in our own drama.

*

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

Inside the Singing by Sally Nacker

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Inside the Singing

The beech tree, she says, is sick
and she feels bad for it. The stresses
of the trees as Hopkins felt
so she feels. The red-eyed vireo
high in the canopy, unseen,
is heard by her, even
as we sit inside the loud
house wrens’ singing. We sit
inside the singing in the wood.

*

Sally Nacker lives in a small house in the woods of Redding, CT with her husband and two cats. Wild birds are her joy. Recent publishing credits include Canary, ONE ART, Third Wednesday, and The Sunlight Press. Kindness in Winter is her newest collection.

Take Five by Heidi Seaborn

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Take Five

The tempo changes. Rain in late August.
Wildfire season extinguished.

As my email clutters with democratic emergencies, I play
Brubeck’s Take Five on loop like when I was seventeen
driving through green, green, green. Untarnished by sunlight.

Listen to the drum solo. An enjambment.
Off-kilter. Giddy. Like love.
Yes, let’s say its love.
Such an unstable, impromptu gesture.
The rhythm hesitating—

a syncopation, teetering.
I plant a yard sign, phone bank, donate the small change
of eighth notes. Each beat,

a brightening. Again, the brush over drum,
shuffle, shuffle over cymbal.

I’m vowing to stay alive with the man I love—
as the horn sheds its clothing on the floor.

*

This poem is discussed in Heidi Seaborn’s craft essay Writing to the End: Artistic Choices in Apocalyptic Times published in Cleaver Magazine.

*

Heidi Seaborn is the author of three books of poetry tic tic tic (2025), An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and three chapbooks. She’s won numerous awards including The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. Recent work in Agni, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU and is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal. heidiseabornpoet.com

Worm Wisdom by Marc Alan Di Martino

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Worm Wisdom

The cut worm forgives the plow.
—Blake

This morning I refuse to read the news,
allow it dominion over my attention
as I’ve grown accustomed to. Rather,

I’m attending to those rowdy blackbirds
in the elms, making their usual ruckus
over blackbird politics, the mottled

tabby belly up on the paving stones
stoned on the sunlight of a cloudless noon,
the worm inching its way across the lawn

on its long, slow journey to worm wisdom.
See that pile of leaves over near the fence
my wife raked yesterday, her perfect hands

gathering up order out of chaos?
I watched her kneel down to pull up a root
from the soil, pluck out a pesky weed

doing her part to make space in this world
for beauty, bequeath us the gift of herself—
the best of herself, the best of all of us.

*

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.

Deer At the Hosta by Laurel Brett

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Deer At the Hosta

The deer never ate the hosta buds
before you died. Now they don’t bloom.

Hostas bloom so late in summer
I’d be impatient for white billows.

No dahlias this year without you either,
and the irises went haywire—

offering so few flowers,
and not the dark purple lit by apricot,

the fuchsia poppies
blooming now alone.

Back to the deer—
how did you keep them at bay?

They eat so precisely, headless shoots
remain on the flourishing plant.

Everything is different
since you’ve gone.

Everything is different
each time I consider it—

I have a thousand and one narratives
of how I could have saved you.

Sometimes you are the villain.
Sometimes I am the monster.

Sometimes we just fumble
together hopelessly in love.

I should dig up the hostas,
or the deer will come each year,

taking more and more each season.
I could leave them as a dream.

Someday the late bright white
perfection will return.

*

Laurel Brett, essayist, novelist, and poet feels the responsibility to do her tiny part to heal the world. She is inspired by awareness and love, and their expressions, and nature. Her novel, The Schrödinger Girl (Akashic Books, 2020) was called a page turner by the New York Times. Her work has appeared before in ONE ART, and in Second Coming, The Ekphrastic Review, Lilith, The Nassau Review among other outlets.

Breakfast in a Hotel in Västerås by Terri Kirby Erickson

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Breakfast in a Hotel in Västerås

There are no Styrofoam cups here, no plastic
spoons. The plates, still warm from washing,
are solid in your hands. There’s so much food
in bowls, warming trays, and platters, you don’t
know what to choose first. From pillowy piles
of rapeseed-yellow scrambled eggs and fruit
that looks fresh-picked from a field or recently
plucked, still glistening with drops of rain—to
assortments of sliced meats and cheeses locally
sourced—you have never seen such an opulent
display of buffet-style breakfast delights. And
your fellow guests look like hikers and cyclists
who have just awakened, flushed and refreshed,
from a solid eight hours of restful sleep. But the
sounds in this gym-sized, though somehow still
intimate room are as good as the sights. There
is the muted hum of conversations—everyone
as polite to one another as a boy raised by his
grandmother. Civilization has reached its zenith
here. And I like the clink of metal spoons hitting
the walls of sturdily constructed coffee cups, the
clatter of shiny silverware unfolding from cloth
napkins as soft and white as trumpeter swans. I
wish everyone could have such a delicious meal
among so many beautiful, benevolent strangers—
people I will never see again who can say good
morning in multiple languages as if they mean it.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.

One August Afternoon by Mary Ellen Redmond

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

One August Afternoon

The birds gather at my birdbath,
bathing and drinking as if it were a pool party.

The chickadees and sparrows
flit and twitch, alight and leave.

That chickadee there, never rests, pecks
at the water, her head moving, always alert.

One wren flutters in, splashes about,
chittering the entire time.

Sit here long enough, and you’ll notice
how the sun filters through the oak leaves,

moves across the yard highlighting:
a blue hydrangea, a pine bough, patch of ferns.

One little sparrow, after some hesitation
sits on the rim, sips, throws her head back.

I see the rippling
of her delicate white throat.

The rippling of her throat
is enough and too much,

in the same way a fiddlehead
resembles a baby’s curled fist,

or when one considers the
tessellation of a honeycomb.

In our neighbor’s yard,
two teenage girls are in the pool again.

I hear them splashing and arguing.
They’ve been bickering all week.

*

Mary Ellen Redmond’s poems have appeared in The Drunken Boat, Free State Review, Comstock Review, Cape Cod Review, Rattle, ONE ART, and The Cortland Review, but the publication she is most proud of is the poem tattooed on her son’s ribcage. A former slam poet, she represented Cape Cod at the National Poetry Slam Competition in Providence, RI. She has been featured twice on WCAI’s Poetry Sundays and her interview with poet Greg Orr was featured in The Drunken Boat. Her poem “Fifty-Six Days” earned a Best of the Net Nomination in 2016 and “Joy is not made to be a crumb” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024. She recently placed second in the 2024 Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest judged by Marge Piercy. The Ocean Effect, her second chapbook, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her third chapbook I Have One Student will be published in June 2026.

Two Poems by Maggie Rue Hess

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

A Friend Complained on the Internet about Repetition in Taylor Swift’s Lyrics

how she’s
always singing
about midnight,
but to me
the ubiquitous lyrics
are about dancing
in the kitchen –
though maybe
it’s about us,
sidestepping with knives
and spinning alliums,
avocados, sugar jars,
twisting tops
and saucepans
and gliding
around each other,
structured by touch
and the spaces
between it –
maybe we’re
two rhythms
reaching for each other
like the hands
of a clock
striking midnight.

*

We Were Girls Together

        for H.S.B.

We were indelible magnets,
poles turning over & over to pull
& repel moments or weeks at a time.
That last campus spring we drank
a mix & match 6 pack of beer on the roof,
giggling rebels about to graduate
from the small town, small school lore
of our own importance. Our days together
spread like our picnic blankets, pale
thighs & pages sunning. Girls then
& now, girls still, proclaimers
of fierce affection unworn by adulthood
or routines. Each of us moth & flame,
soft, dusty wings with a hunger
to rend. Flung North & South,
we constellate the petty needs that drove us
apart with the gentle knowing
that drives us back.

*

Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a PhD student living in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her partner and their crusty white dog. She serves as a Poetry Co-Editor for Grist: A Journal of Literary Arts. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Connecticut River Review, SWWIM, and other publications; her debut chapbook, The Bones That Map Us, was published by Belle Point Press in February 2024. She likes to share baked goods with friends and can be found on Instagram as @maggierue_.

Masked by Tara Menon

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Masked

Going outdoors for the first time after surgery,
I don’t marvel at the pretty neighborhood
nor the flanking snow nor nature at her starkest,
but at the restorative power of fresh air
combined with walking.

No one sees a woman recovering from surgery,
only a walker ambling with her husband by her side
to catch her if she falls.
He has been gallantly saving her
from her mistakes ever since they married.

No one reads her thoughts
that the birthday she reached
could have been her last or penultimate one.
A surrealistic feeling,
though she intuited she’d be diagnosed
with breast cancer one day,
especially in the terrain of her sixties.
The snowscape feels unreal like it does
when it blankets the area every year.

We walk without masks, our faces masks.
No one knows the worries others carry,
but everyone loves to say, Hi, how are you?
A kindness passed from stranger to stranger.

*

Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is a two-time finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award. Her latest poems are forthcoming or have appeared in ““Blue Heron Review,” “Grey Sparrow Journal,” “AMPLIFY” (anthology published by Sheila-Na-Gig), “ArLiJo,” and “The Queens Review.”

ONE ART’s September 2025 Reading

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ONE ART’s September 2025 Reading

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

Date: Sunday, September 7

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

Featured Poets: James Crews, Gloria Heffernan, William Palmer, Michael T. Young, Andrea Potos

>>> 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 ~

James Crews is the author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Courage & Self-Compassion, and editor of several bestselling poetry anthologies, including Love Is for All of Us, a collection of LGBTQ+ love poems. He is also the author of four poetry collections and lives in Southern Vermont with his husband. For more info: www.jamescrews.net

*

Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books).  Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

*

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in Ecotone, I-70 Review, JAMA, ONE ART, Rust & Moth, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.  

*

Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, Mid-Atlantic Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Vox Populi.

*

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

*

Two Poems by Preeti Talwai

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Hypochondriac

You rarely feel the symptoms
of an inside-out shirt.
Maybe a stray itch sprouts at your nape
as you back out of the driveway.
A tug under your arm
when you reach for the top shelf.
But you carry on just fine.
You won’t feel it coming, that swift sting
of awareness: tag wagging like a tongue,
caught by a mirror or a mouthy colleague.
A collar of flush spreads across your neck
at having felt clear as water, looking like mud.
Frantic fingers check —
jacket arms, pant seams,
sock cuffs, pant seams again —
long after the mirror reassures you.
But you know better
than to trust glass.
You dress.
Redress.
Undress.
Stand in the clouded bathroom,
steam beading your neck,
trying to tell yourself
that you’re zipped up right.
But it’s too late.
You already know,
clothed or not,
you may never believe
your body again.

*

Flight Path

Weeks after my mother says not to tell anyone
about the colitis,
I sit in seat 29B,
five hours and thirty-five minutes
from the fog necklace around San Francisco.
Beside me, a boy my age.
As the horizon tilts, we open each other’s lives
like pumpkins: lids sliced clean,
then suddenly, elbows plunged into pulp and string.
What strange costumes we wear,
ones that mask only our peels
but lay bare our guts. My gut.
An hour in, we’ve scooped
its ulcered flesh clean,
onto the tray table between us. We devour it.
When the eating uncorks me,
I say bathroom.
I watch how swiftly
those knees swing aside,
faster than my mother’s ever have.

*

Preeti Talwai writes from California, where she’s also a research leader in human-centered technology. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, 100-Word Story, Diode Poetry, HAD, and Typehouse Magazine, among others. She is the author of a chapbook, Chronic (Bottlecap Press). Find her at preetitalwai.com

Leaving Home by Tula Francesca

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Leaving Home

This is how our family works.
We girls have moved out.
We are in our 20s, 30s –
we are living in Brooklyn, India,
dark basement apartments, bamboo huts.
We are still young.
We have left boxes and photographs
in our closet at home. They are on
high shelves, the boxes talk to each
other and pay no rent. A good life.
Then our parents decide
it is enough. They want their space back.
First they ask politely, Can you come get your
boxes? No response. Later they get tough.
Take your stuff. But the stuff is insurmountable.
It must be “gone through.” Young people
do not have time for this delicate
sorting of their own layers.
The pleading stops.
Our parents do the only thing left to do.
They remove the closet.
Poof, no more high shelves. Just a wall.
We come home and the space is rearranged
like a face on mushrooms.
There, they say, pointing to the hallway.
There are your boxes.

*

Tula Francesca (she/her) is a writer, artist, editor, and zine maker in Petaluma, California. Her work has appeared in Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, Crab Creek Review, FENCE, Feral, FLARE, Fron/tera, The Inflectionist Review, RHINO, and other places. She is the author of chapbook If There Are Horns, and microchap This Was Like I Said All Gone. Francesca is a left-handed, bipolar, animist creator. web: francescapreston.com instagram: @francescalouisepreston

ONE ART’s 2026 Best of the Net Nominations

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s 2026 Best of the Net Nominations   

Allison Blevins – Earlier, Jane Kenyon

Kai Coggin – I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW

Abby E. Murray – I Can’t Find My Gender

Alison Luterman – To a Mother I Know

Joseph Fasano – To the Insurance Executive Who Denied My Heart Procedure

Dana Henry Martin – Window Strike at Highlands Behavioral Health

After the Firestorm by Laura Ann Reed

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

After the Firestorm

                Longing, we say, because desire
                is full of endless distances.
                        —Robert Hass

She was away when the flames blossomed
across the hillsides, the inferno fueled
by the eucalyptus and the easterly winds.
But I did not kneel in gratitude on the barren slope
where my mother’s house had been.
          I knelt to sift through the soot and ash,
the heaps of debris.
The image of what I was seeking
so clear behind my eyelids:
the blood-red stone
set in its bezel of gold, a rosebud
on a twining vine—
the ring I’d begged for since I was a child
passed down from my great-aunt Bea
who had smuggled it out of Russia.
          How long had I imagined
my mother was only waiting
for the right moment
to hand me the box,
to watch as I sprung open the lid?
          Yet now, as of their own volition
my fingers stopped raking the dust.
Better to take the blackened spoon,
the half-melted knife.
Tarnished, ruined, my mother’s table utensils
unsuited to the task of lifting food
to the lips, reminders
that what was served up as love
failed to feed any part of my heart’s deep appetite.
          The sun inched closer to the horizon
while I studied the sparrows that were circling
and reversing overhead. I was determined to know
why they wove intricate patterns in the air,
the shadow-glyphs thrown
down around me. Was their manic flight
brought on by the vanished trees
and nests, or by what autumn itself foretells?
          After the last bird swerved and disappeared
into the dusk, the sky was strangely still.
I stayed on unmoved by the absence
of ceiling and walls, scanning
the charred dirt
for signs of what might be stirring
under the surface: the green shoots of a seedling,
a beetle’s six diminutive legs, each bending
at the knee.

*

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/

Maintaining World Order by Tony Gloeggler

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Maintaining World Order

Jesse’s clear about yesses
and nos, picking what to do,
where to go, hardly any
hesitation involved when given
choices, and though he doesn’t
know what always or never means,
I can tell what not to bring up
ever again. He prefers patterns,
routine. Comfortable with schedules,
he looks forward to, cozies up
to calendars made a month
in advance, the boxes filled
with names of staff members,
time slots and activities fitting
neatly into place. Frequently
when walking, he repeats names,
days, months, years, seeking
reassurance that his world
will remain in proper order
from whoever’s working
with him at any given moment.
Maybe, let’s play it by ear,
we’ll see when we get there
brings minor, major disturbances.

Tony Friday October 11, 2024,
two nights, go home Sunday
October 13 10 AM. That’s me,
his mom’s once upon a time,
long ago boyfriend who’s known
him since he was 5 years old,
combination step-father, older
brother, death till we part friend.
Sometimes he’ll find a smooth
groove, verbally map out monthly
visits through the year 2027,
each date out of his mouth
landing savant-like on a Friday
for my typical weekend visit.
If I show up, walk in the door
a half hour early, he’ll look
away without a greeting, go
back to finishing next week’s
shopping list with Sawyer
while I drop my knapsack
on the floor, hit the bathroom.

He helps put everything
where It belongs, follows
Sawyer out to the porch,
asks when he’ll be back-
Monday October 14-until
the car door shuts, the motor
starts. Then, I’ll open my arms
for a less than ten second
hug, sit across the table, talk
about today’s schedule, write
it down starting with City
Bus to Bruegger’s Bagels,
ending with evening routine
7:30 PM. He then recites
my November return date,
waits to hear yes for sure.

On the walk to the bus stop,
he brings up Nick, a long time
worker who recently moved
out of state. He wants Nick
to take him to Jay’s Peak,
his favorite water park,
Thursday October 23, 2024.
Not Sawyer. He wants me
to tell him Nick’s name
will be back on November’s
calendar. I try to think of a way
to explain that he may never
see Nick again without upsetting
him too long when the bus
comes into view and we both
break into a trot. I hand Jesse
his pass, thank the driver
for waiting. He finds a seat,
stares out the window, hums
like a well-tuned engine.

If my name stopped appearing
on his calendar, I wonder
how long before he’d forget
about me? Jesse’s unable
to understand abstractions,
express feelings, and I’m left
to guess about things like that.
He always asks about mom’s
car, when will it be back
in the driveway, concern
crinkling his brow, panic
making its way down
his face if it’s gone too long.
I know she thinks about him
incessantly and at 62 years old
she worries what will happen
when she dies. Financially.
he’ll be sound, the house
in his name, but who will
take care of him, love him
like she does, will he
learn to move through
his world without her?

*

Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of NYC who managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 40 years. His poems have appeared in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Raleigh Review, BODY, Chiron Review. His most recent collection, What Kind Of Man with NYQ Books, was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and Here on Earth is forthcoming on NYQ Books.

Rebirth by Ellen Austin-Li

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Rebirth

It wasn’t an immediate awakening
after I had my first child, but a gradual

dawning, the way the night’s black sky lightens
to silver before hints of the sun appear

above the horizon, sooner than the streaks of gold
rising. There was the morning I woke

to a silent house, an empty crib. The gone baby,
removed by my husband for one night

not enough to pull me out of the chaos
of blackout drinking. The void of not knowing

what I had said, what I had done, how
the house could have burned down

with my son in it. The light entered
with my child’s return, and I added one

sober day to another, until I could remember
the sunrise and my need to see it.

*

Ellen Austin-Li’s debut poetry collection, Incidental Pollen—a 2023 Trio Award finalist and 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series semi-finalist—is the runner-up to the 2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize from Madville Publishing. Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks Firefly and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic. Ellen is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee whose work appears in many places, including SWIMM, Salamander, The Maine Review, Lily Poetry Review, and ONE ART. Ellen holds an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice program. She lives in Cincinnati, OH, where she hosts Poetry Night at Sitwell’s. More info @ https://ellenaustinli.me/

Rescheduled: Visibility and Book Sales: Marketing Your Small Press Book (Thursday, 8/28/25)

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>>> Rescheduled for Thursday, August 28th. <<<

Visibility and Book Sales: Marketing Your Small Press Book
Instructor: John Sibley Williams
Date: Thursday, August 28, 2025
Time: 3:30-6:00pm Eastern

>>> Tickets available <<<

For the Friend Who Died Before We Could Reconcile by Colleen S. Harris

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

For the Friend Who Died Before We Could Reconcile

             for Shara

I step slowly, taking rising water
inch by inch against my reluctant body.
It was always this way: you the river,

and the silt, and the weeds tangling
my ankles, me the supplicant, a sacrifice
of gooseflesh and good sense moving

through the murk toward drowning.
No matter how I entered the river,
I would have always gotten drenched.

If you were here, I would have still
stumbled my way through a field
of terrible lovers with your laugh

steering me past the worst of the regrets.
You might have turned me away from
the used car parts manager in Hixson,

sold me instead the false promise
of that beautiful blue-eyed Chattanooga
boy with no sense of self-preservation

and hands one firework shy of a full fist.
These waters are deep and still. I cannot
swim here where there are no waves,

this stagnant water tastes like copse
and corpse and waterlogged leaves and
the cigarette butts we threw behind us

back in 1998. I dive, and the deeper I go,
the better I can see who we nearly were:
Thursday nights, merlot-soaked, howling

on a Louisville balcony, making love
to our many ghosts, resurrecting old loves
only to drown them again, and again, laughing.

*

Colleen S. Harris holds an MFA from Spalding University and works as a university library dean. Author of four books and three chapbooks, her most recent collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025), and These Terrible Sacraments (Doubleback, 2019; Bellowing Ark, 2010). Follow her writing via Bluesky (@warmaiden) and at https://colleensharris.com

It’s an automatic response by Kit Willett

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

It’s an automatic response

to dance in the shadows,
to perform for myself,

to say—to think—I’m straight,
tongue tripping on the word

like rubbing two storm clouds together
in search of a rainbow.

It’s an automatic response to be the norm
and hold otherness at arm’s length.

I am the echo in the glass: almost there
and not quite queer enough.

*

Kit Willett is a bisexual poet, English teacher, and executive editor of the Aotearoa poetry journal Tarot. His debut poetry collection, Dying of the Light, was published by Wipf and Stock imprint Resource Publications in 2022.

Learner’s Permit by James Davis

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Learner’s Permit

When I was learning to drive,
Dad and I shared the cabin
of a cream-colored pickup
with an NRA sticker on the rear windshield
and a lightly used mattress
tied down in the flatbed
winding along the Columbia River
to my runaway brother,
who slept in a bag
on Portland linoleum.
Dad’s turn at the wheel
left my eyes to the Gorge,
my ears to the charismatic
preacher on yet another tape.
He spoke of pleasure,
how the climaxing brain
exudes a mental superglue
that fuses beholder to beheld.
“Which explains why semen
and cement sound so similar,”
he reasoned. “If you come
to porn, you’ll fall in love with porn.
If you come looking at a man,
you’ll fall in love with men.”
I stared at the glittering water,
its billion impurities invisible,
and figured Dad knew
my fusions, how desire
forged a path forward, forward,
every day widening,
wearing away. He’d chosen
this voice for me. My body
created an image of the speaker:
creased khakis, wedding ring,
lavalier clipped to white oxford
barely buttoned over his chest.
I wanted this image
to take off its shiny brown belt
and use it as my leash.
I wanted this image
to fall in love with me.

* 

James Davis is the author of the poetry collection Club Q, which Edward Hirsch selected for the Anthony Hecht Prize. His writing has been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio and anthologized in Best New Poets 2011 (selected by D. A. Powell) and 2019 (selected by Cate Marvin). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, The Gettysburg Review, Barrelhouse, Salamander, and Gulf Coast. He teaches English at the University of North Texas.

On Forgiveness by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ON FORGIVENESS

I’ve long been told
its chief benefit is a gift
to oneself most of all.

Suspicious of ease,
stingy as I am to give it,
forgive me when I say:

the clutching of my tight heart
has been talisman
warding off the hurt to come.

*

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

Two Poems by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Coffee Frother

My upper lip is hugged by sea foam,
frothed by fluff-capped coffee sipped from today’s cup

and I think of Christopher who recently gifted
me this magic Nespresso machine that whips
2% milk into ocean waves of cream

that my tongue licks. A new ritual, this lace
moustaching the beach of my face.

This morning he will arrive to drive
me to another doctor appointment, be by my side.

Tall, calm prompt man, who holds my hand,
kisses my lips, says, “It’ll be alright.”

I click my tongue, then sigh. A new ritual,
to be held by one as reliable as the tide.
Breathe. Let go of fear, lean in.

You’re not alone. Smile at clouds
of foam. Love. New daily rituals.

*

The gut is an aquarium of odd sea creatures

Gauze walls hang between
ER cubicles. Surprise!
You have won a weekend

dancing with machines;
tethered by cords, beeps, drips;
twirls to the toilet.

Orange Jell-O, orange Jell-O,
orange Jell-O, Ginger Ale,
salty brown veg broth.

Blood pressure cuffs
poof and deflate. Needled
clear tube sunk in vein,

duct taped. Wheelchair,
gurney. Short tempered
nurses, some saints.

Big storm blows in.
Christopher leaves you his sweater,
runs to find car in wind.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ who needs to write to stay sane. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Rattle, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. She teaches Wild Writing inspired classes on writers.com and 27powers.org and is the author of four poetry collections. Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet

Three Poems by Sayantani Roy

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

On the continent of mothering

At twenty-five, I stood in my kitchen
my body still being healed by turmeric-ginger
prescribed by my mother-in-law, continents afar—
boiling milk bottles and nursing guilt over bottled baby food—
listening to my daughter wail in her crib—too proud
to summon her father only a phone call away
even as I felt the great tug of worry that only
a mother can feel.

My daughter is that age now—
an entire length of continent away
on the other coast.

Sometimes, at dead of night, as her father sleeps
I awaken from dreams propelled by
some piece of news I’ve heard earlier
in the day—hearsay or authentic—

and let me tell you this—

I am alone again, in my mother-worry—
always alone on the continent of mothering.

*

Ritual

When it comes to silk sarees, elders advise
against draping them on hangers
or else gravity will pull at the zari
ruining the very ground, the field
that holds everything.
I fold them into neat squares and lay them
on top of each other on almirah shelves—
each stack a stratified rock—each layer
telling its own story. this one the day before
the wedding, this on the first trip back
to my parents’, and this, bought on a whim.
the gray and gold acquired when my taste
shifted to muted tones. and this one I’ve
yet to wear—see the zari darkened from age?
pull this one out, be gentle.
notice the brittle fabric, the deep onion color
that was popular once. how it bears
the strong naphthalene scent of my
mother’s iron chest—unfold with care
or else it might tear along the folds.
twice a year I air them out, refold them
so that the crease lines may breathe.
no crease is ever smoothed away and
old creases get in the way of new ones
like stubborn habits. and sometimes
the silk is willful and refuses to yield.
I fold and refold, coddle and corral. I wonder
how long before any ritual will prove futile.

*

The kitchen, your temple

Vivid, your kitchen, down to the way dust motes swirled
in the ray of slanted afternoon light. The lit triangle of the tablecloth.

The sweetmeat that arrived out of nowhere, which is to say
you made them without fuss. You never urged us to enjoy them

yet your silent yearning took on the curvature of the perfect
mowa and the pristine white of the coconut nadu. In midlife

I find recipes inscribed into your husband’s book of scriptures.
A scrupulous man, not devout, but who thrived on routine.

How he had taken to writing everything in that book towards
the end of his life. Names of five ancestors that preceded him –

all men. Addresses of sons and the one grandson who
became a doctor. Then ingredients started popping in between

odes to the divine. Poppyseeds and bitter melon—
banana blossom and the oddball spice. In your girlish hand

that was never invited to hold a pen. The learned man and his
unschooled wife. Empty vessel he called you once—

the woman who bore him seven children.

*

Sayantani Roy works out of the Seattle area. Her work appears or is forthcoming in several journals, including Alan Squire Publishing, Emerge Literary Journal, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather, Grist, Ruby, TIMBER, West Trestle Review, and Wordgathering. She was a 2024 AWP fiction mentee and was placed as a semifinalist in the 2025 Adroit Journal Anthony Veasna So Scholars in Fiction. She reads poetry for Chestnut Review and Palette Poetry.

Two Poems by Karly Randolph Pitman

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Room at the Inn

         “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.”
         — from a speech given by Teddy Roosevelt in 1915 *

My great grandfather was a coal miner
in the Pennsylvania mountains. When
the miners went on strike, they didn’t eat.
The Red Cross brought my great grandmother
rice and butter which she buried in the yard.
If they’d brought her flour and olive oil
she could have cooked a feast. At Ellis Island
Zaccagnini become Zack. At the grammar school
Damasiewicz became Demser. At the Ford
Motor Company Poles and Slovaks were told
to abandon their traditional clothing in a giant pot.
They came out reborn, dressed in suits
and carrying American flags. Today a woman
in a worn head scarf stands at the stoplight,
her daughter in a stroller beside her. Another
daughter hides her face from the too fast traffic.
Between her halting English and my broken Spanish
we say hello. As I hand her the cash in my wallet
I picture the women who brought my grandparents rice.
Whatever kindness was given to them, I pray,
shower it on this family. Let them know
there is welcome in this land.

* The quote from Teddy Roosevelt and the story of the melting pot at the Ford plant come from David Dean’s essay, Roots Deeper than Whiteness. Thank you, David.

* 

Growing Sweet Potatoes

It was the first time we’d planted sweet potatoes –
slips of flesh with eyes and fingers, tiny beings
of promise. We planted and prayed for just enough
sun, just enough wet, just enough microbe to sprout
our seeds into harvest. It rained and then it stopped.

It stopped for one hundred days and the sun baked
the earth brown. It stayed hot and became hotter.
The plants wilted and I dreamt they cried for rain.
We decided: what do we let die? What do we save?
If the potatoes die we can buy them at the store.

But I wanted the potatoes to thrive – to create
something useful and good, something as sturdy
as a potato. So I prayed for rain. I sang to the vines.
And months later, when it rained, I stood in my yard
and let the water pour down my face – planted
like the potato, watered like the vine, open in my thirst.

Today we dug into the warm earth searching
for pink orbs. We found five perfect potatoes
and dozens of silvery roots no thicker than a pencil.
I can’t bear to throw any of them away. Six months
of toil and six months of hope that I can’t let go to waste.

Who am I to say the harvest is a failure? That more
should have grown in dusty soil? Who am I to say
that I, sweet potato vine, rain and soil, humus
and hot sun, should be any more than I am now?

*

Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, teacher, poet, presenter, and mental health facilitator who helps people nurture a more compassionate relationship with their struggles. She’s the founder of Growing Humankindness, a gentle approach towards overeating, writes a reader supported poetry newsletter, O Nobly Born, and offers writing and mindfulness workshops to nurture self awareness and self compassion. She lives in Austin, Texas where she’s cared for the underbelly of long covid and autoimmune illness for the past five years. Her journeys through depression and illness continue to soften, teach and open her. In all she remains in awe of the human heart.

SPECIAL MISSION 16, SECONDARY TARGET NAGASAKI, AUGUST 9, 1945 by Laurel Brett

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SPECIAL MISSION 16, SECONDARY TARGET NAGASAKI, AUGUST 9, 1945

Imagine men in suits and uniforms inspecting planes.
No visit to the city bombed—

too much devastation. They hear reports.
The next bomb supposed to be the 11th but weathermen predict rain.

They plan the site of Kokura but waste time waiting to rendezvous
with the plane Big Stink set to photograph the operation & clouds

roll in. Bockscar will make the drop. Early reports are wrong
and say The Great Artiste carries the plutonium almost absent

in nature. The Bockscar auxiliary fuel tank pump on inspection
fails, but no one wants to waste the payload in the ocean

close to Okinawa. The brass who knows of buildings
marked by a soot silhouette, the entire residue

of one of us, aim now for Nagasaki,
the city we don’t speak of the way we do

Hiroshima. Hannah Arendt calls decision makers
banal. They don’t look like lizards,

but disassociation blinds, deafens
& insulates from atoms of love—

undercover agents sitting next to us,
watching the latest Mission Impossible.

*

Laurel Brett, essayist, novelist, and poet feels the responsibility to do her tiny part to heal the world. She is inspired by awareness and love, and their expressions, and nature. Her novel, The Schrödinger Girl (Akashic Books, 2020) was called a page turner by the New York Times. Her work has appeared before in ONE ART, and in Second Coming, The Ekphrastic Review, Lilith, The Nassau Review among other outlets.

Untethered by Michelle DeRose

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Untethered

In the first one I am four, a summer visit
to Cicero Grandma from Iowa City. Our car falls
from the bridge with force that peels
my sticky thighs from the vinyl, my brother
and I flung upwards in the roomy blue womb
of the LeSabre’s back seat. Our baby brother,
clamped in Mom’s arms but she, too, lurches
above her perch. Dad’s hands latch the wheel
like anchors, all of our mouths tunnel-dark
O’s, our displacement in space gauged
in our stomachs. It halts before we hit
the water below. Next time, the river is frozen,
the dream updated for the season. But always
the fall, the sudden-squeezed and squirting stomach
mark its finale. Later I drive, so fright
and guilt fight in that knot, heat or freeze it
with what I did wrong—sped too fast up a hill
whose crest morphs to the I-80 bridge over
the Mississippi, drove with abandon the damp road
linking mother to daughter, moved too swiftly
from one sturdy bank to appreciate the surface
grip on the treads. My fault now for the floating
family hurled from the rounded earth.

*

Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College, Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her most recent publications are in Months to Years, The New Verse News, Panoply, The Dunes Review, and The Midwest Quarterly.

Two Poems by Veronica Tucker

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Once, on the Oncology Floor

A teenager asked
if he’d ever drive again.
No one knew what to say.
So I showed him
how to press the nurse call button
like it was an ignition switch.
He laughed,
and for a minute,
the hallway turned
into an open road.

That night
I dreamed of him
parallel parking
between stars.
I woke with the memory
of his hand
gripping the rail
as if it were
a steering wheel.

*

In the Absence of Fever

When you said
she was stable,
I nodded.
But my hands
stayed clenched
as if the storm
was only
paused.

We celebrated
with applesauce
and the hum
of an IV pump.
I told her
she looked strong
when what I meant was
please stay.

I never asked
how long she had
before the numbers slipped again.
There are days
when stability
is the most fragile thing
in the room.

*

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, as well as a mother of three. Her work appears in redrosethorns, Red Eft Review, and Medmic, with additional pieces forthcoming. Find her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com or on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.

Paper Lanterns by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Paper Lanterns

Imagine
over one hundred thousand
paper lanterns
inscribed
with names
of the dead
floating down
the Ohita River
towards the ocean
quiet
and lit
edges
flaking
into ash

imagine
your name
on one of them
after Hiroshima

imagine
silence
burning

*

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).

A morning with my dead father by Linda Laderman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

A morning with my dead father

                       The morning air is all awash with angels
                                     — Richard Wilbur

This is the morning I’ll spend with you. I’ll have the conversation I’ve been putting off, the way a child sheds the coat her mother insists she wear despite the April sun, warm like the nape of a newborn’s neck. This is the morning I’ll say what it was like to live inside a widow’s weeds, how it tangled my breath, stole my words. This is the morning I’ll think of what’s possible and make space for you to enter. When I hear the leaves rustle I’ll believe you’re listening. I’ll rest on a rock near the lake and throw pebbles in the water and consider each ripple as thoughts that bounce between us. This is the morning I’ll reimagine you as the young man in the snapshot I found—you leaning against a 1938 Dodge sedan, fedora tipped to the side, smiling, with a hint of a swagger, confident that the ground beneath you would hold. I’ll talk like I remember you cradling my baby body, how you called her song of my heart in the love letters you wrote from Kentucky. Who were you then? This is the morning I want to know.

*

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. More work and information at lindaladerman.com.

Murderers by Marc Alan Di Martino

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Murderers

“Meditate che questo è stato.”
—Primo Levi

Let’s make a deal: for every time you ask me
how ‘my people’ could do such a thing—
bomb an apartment building, starve innocent
children, shoot journalists—I get to ask
how ‘your people’ were able to herd ‘my people’
for centuries into ghettos, cattle cars,
ovens. We can make it a game of poker
between God and the Devil, only
they’re wearing disguises so no one knows
who’s who, as if it made any difference
anyway, God or Devil, Israeli or Palestinian,
gentile or Jew. We’ll play this psychotic hand
with a stacked deck for the rest of our lives
and then our children’s lives, our children’s children’s,
tweaking the muscles in our poker faces
until the flesh tightens into a mask
and tongues become poisonous little vipers
concealed behind our teeth, stretched
to the thin shield of a smile, perfectly white
and malicious.

*

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.

This poem was written in response to the following news story.

HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE by Dylan Webster

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HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE

“Urban-design strategy,”
the article reads, after
looking up why my city,
in the palm of the desert,
would install metal benches.
My friend walking beside me
as we sweat in summer heat
says, it is designed for pain.

*

Dylan Webster lives and writes in the sweltering heat of Phoenix, AZ. He is the author of the poetry collection Dislocated (Quillkeepers Press, 2022), and his poetry and fiction have appeared, and are forthcoming in journals such as Pennine Platform, Amethyst Review, The Cannons Mouth by Cannon Poets Quarterly, Ballast Journal, Hush: A Journal of Noise, Wild Roof Journal, Rise Phoenix College Journal, Ghost City Review, Resurrection Mag, 5enses Magazine, Last Leaves, and The Chamber Magazine. He has also been included anthologies by Quillkeepers Press, Neon Sunrise Publishing, and The Words Faire. He can be found @phoenicianpoet

Four Poems by J.R. Solonche

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

THE RAIN

The rain gave what we asked of it.
It was generous, too generous.
It gave more than we asked of it.
Today it is enough. Today we ask it
to stop. Today we ask it to go away,
to bestow its blessing where it is
really needed, to a field parched,
to a lake too low, to a river crawling
on its knees, to a streambed with
the ghost of water, to a reservoir
starving for attention. The rain gave
generously. It poured its heart out
to us. It is we who have the greener
pastures, who have the greener grass,
who are embarrassed to be so envied.

*

A VERY BELATED LETTER TO ROBERT BLY

The first poet I wrote a letter
to was Robert Graves. He
didn’t answer. That was 45 years
ago. It might still be in the Dead
Letter Office on Majorca.
The second was to A.R. Ammons.
I told him about my letter to Graves.
He answered. He congratulated me
on improving my taste. He sent
me an unpublished poem called
“Zero and Then Some.” The third
letter is this one to you, Robert Bly.
Please don’t tell me you’re dead
and have been since 2021.
I won’t hear it. I know you’ll receive
this. You already have. I know
you’ll answer. You already have.

*

THE BUDDHA ON MY WINDOWSILL

has a big belly, a big cloth sack
on a stick over his shoulder,
a full bowl of rice in his hand,
and a big laugh on his face.
I, too, was fooled at first, but
later I found out that Budai’s
belly was full of laughter and his
cloth sack was full of laughter
and his begging bowl was full
of laughter and that his laughter
was his way of teaching fullness,
so I laughed and was with fullness full.

*

IN THE BEAUTY PARLOR

The woman in the beauty parlor
was talking about the people
she knows who just died, all
women. “Don’t you know any
men who died?” asked the hair
stylist. “You mean the husbands?
They all died years ago,” the woman
said. “That’s right, I remember you
told me,” said the hair stylist. “Yes,
God’s in His Heaven and all’s right
with the world,” said the woman.

*

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Broken Chain by Jennifer L Freed

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Broken Chain

As we walk these old roads, we won’t look toward the elephant
walking between us. We speak of the puppies
your dog is expecting, of our children,
our backaches, our husbands—yours,
in a wheelchair, mine, finally home
from the hospital. The elephant
has fever, a dry cough we pretend
not to hear, a rash that spreads
to those who come near. Only one of us
dreads the air we all share.
                          We go back forty years.
Isn’t it strange, we say, that we are somehow, already,
here—soft jaw lines, wrinkles, memories
older than the grown-up girls we thought we were
when we spent babysitting money on Levi’s
and pizza. We rode our bikes everywhere, no helmets
required, the wind whispering our hair.
Remember peddling through the woods
all day, those mossy trails, the boulders
we stopped to climb, bigger than elephants? Remember
that slope straight down to the lake—the jutting root,
me whipped over the handlebars, my breath
knocked out?
                          You dabbed blood from my nose,
then pushed your good bike beside me
and my broken one, three hours
to get home. Remember how close
the air felt, both of us dripping
with August sweat. How you didn’t leave
me behind, and I didn’t worry you might.
How we laughed as we walked, the whole world
on our tongues.

*

Jennifer L Freed’s collection When Light Shifts, exploring themes of identity, health, and care-giving, was a finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize and, in the 2025 Eric Hoffer Awards, was a finalist for the Medal Provocateur, was short-listed for the Grand Prize, and earned second place in the Legacy Non-fiction category. Recent poetry appears in Atlanta Review, ONE ART, Rust and Moth, Sheila-Na-Gig, Vox Populi, and the anthology, What The House Knows. Please visit Jfreed.weebly.com

two haiku by Joshua Eric Williams

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

two haiku

*

playing me
by heart
birdsong

*

empty swing
still swaying
wildflowers

*

Joshua Eric Williams’s work usually focuses on the intersection of the human, the wild, and the spiritual. His poetry can be found in many online and print journals, including Rattle, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Literary Matters. His website is thesmallestwords.com, and he can be found on X, @Hungerfield.

Lovestruck by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Lovestruck

All the arrows go
through me—sharp and gold.
Joy enters

(blind, uninvited violation)
as pure presence
from an innate place within.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has won two separate Georgia Author of the Year awards for her poetry. Her latest volume of poetry is a children’s book. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.

ONE ART’s August 2025 Reading

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

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

The reading will be held on Sunday, August 17 at 2pm Eastern.

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

After the reading, please consider sticking around for Community Time discussion with our Featured Poets.

About Our Featured Poets:

Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Among her publications are a memoir, a children’s book and three poetry chapbooks. She was twice named a Georgia Author of the Year in the poetry category. Julia offers private instruction online in addition to her full load of college teaching.

Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grantee and is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Heavy Feather Review, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Fall, 2025. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

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.

Her debut poetry collection, Myths in the Feed: Poems of Performance, Pain & Perseverance, was just released from Crying Heart Press!

Sonia Greenfield (she/they) is the author of four poetry collections: All Possible Histories (Riot in Your Throat), Helen of Troy is High AF (Harbor Editions), Letdown (White Pine Press), and Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market (Codhill Press). Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Southern Review, Willow Springs and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College, edits the Rise Up Review, and advocates for neurodiversity and the decentering of the cis/het white hegemony. More at soniagreenfield.com.

Cashew Gatherers by Ranudi Gunawardena

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Cashew Gatherers

Waking to borrow gunny sacks
from the firewood-shed, we set out
on April mornings along the winding
trail to the cashew trees stretching
on the horizon of grandpa’s garden.
The branches, lifting to split the sky,
wove with their leaves, an elaborate
roof. So, sunlight, when it entered,
was sifted, and spiraling, made puddles
at our feet, where we discovered
like small commas, the soot-shelled
cashew-nuts, waiting. Camouflaged
against tree-trunks, the bats hung
from branches, their stomachs swollen
ripe with cashew-apples. In their cavern,
we were only silent gatherers, bending
to fill our sacks with nuts, and the occasional
bat-bitten fruit, which we carried to the well
and washing, ate before returning home.
On evenings, seated in his sling chair,
grandpa split with his long paring knife
the shells into two, wiping the blister
-milk in his hands with a piece of cloth.
When each black shell fell, exposing
the white seed within, pair after pair,
we closed our eyes and thought of the bats
awakening, their wings opening,
black and blind, to the fruit of night.

*

Ranudi Gunawardena is a Sri Lankan poet whose work explores the wombscape, childhood in rural landscapes, and the uncanny in nature among others. Her work has appeared in literary magazines such as Action, Spectacle, Chestnut Review, Magma, and Shō. She studies at Williams College.

What I Remember of You Alive by Zander Crowns

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

What I Remember of You Alive

On some sticky summer evening,
you wore a black shirt, were bald, and
walked down a hall with wood floors and white walls.
You liked pickle relish.
You went by Grumpy, a nickname
you made to set you apart from my
other grandpa (Well, I didn’t know
that last part until your urn had
rested in a crypt for four years).
I remember the night before you died.
I wasn’t with you (I didn’t know why at the time).
My mom gathered my siblings and me in a room with blue walls
(I don’t remember the floor color).
The ceiling fan light draped a sleepy white glow over us.
Mom said you were going to
die soon and that we should say a prayer.
So we did (I don’t remember the words).

All the rest, how your two bombing runs ran awry,
how you stole a box of staplers during your
college tenure, how you voted for Wonder
Woman in every presidential election since 1962, how
your dad wished he had not given you his name,
is a patchwork sewn together
by those who knew you longer than I did.

*

Zander Crowns hails from the hills of Spicewood, Texas, but presently lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He is a student at Southern Methodist University, pursuing a major in both English and film.

The Apartment Below by Tara Vassallo Consiglio

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

The Apartment Below

A body was wheeled out of the apartment downstairs yesterday.
Shiny black van in my parking space,
practiced precision,
stark silver stretcher,
red leather cushion —
disappearing into the apartment below.

Was it the one under me,
where I’ve seen children
and that man who smokes in his sandals?
Or the one next door,
where once I saw an old woman
who complained about peanut shells
left by crows I secretly fed?

In black uniforms —
bearing out their practiced proficiency —
on just one of many pilgrimages.

Their quarry draped in red velvet
with a brass zipper,
my neighbor I’d never seen
until now,
ferried across sunlight and bright green grass
on a hired gurney,
these two shepherds of the dead.

Who are you? Who were you?
So long I’ve lived here,
and not even know.
Were you the one who cursed my crows,
or some other?

People move in and out so often, you see —
I don’t bother to know.
Behind my door is a world
where my cat watches the neighbors
and judges them,
and I am in meeting after meeting,
or preparing for each storied routine.

The world could pass —
these walls are the same.
But I never thought
who comes for us
in the end.

Still, my neighbor died
beneath my floorboards,
their soul rising
through the ceiling where I trod the other side,
and could have paused —
looked at me in my bed,
wondering at me instead.

*

Tara Vassallo Consiglio is a poet from California now living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work explores inheritance, myth, desire, and memory—drawing from her Sicilian roots, fire-scarred landscapes, and the quiet legacies that linger after rupture. “The Apartment Below” is her first published poem and is part of a debut collection-in-progress.

Hellifino by Todd Wynn

~ ONE ART ~ 12 Comments

Hellifino

We were lost in Indiana—
no signs,
just jotted directions
ending in cornfields.

Dad unfolded the map
as he unfolded his legs
getting out of the car,
wondering if we’d passed
this cornfield before.
My sister, nine—
all pigtails and purpose—
asked, “Where are we?”
Dad muttered,
“Hell if I know.”

She blinked, grinned wide,
snatched the map and whispered,
“Hellifino… Hellifino…”
tracing roads with her finger,
convinced she’d find it.

The car erupted in laughter.

For a moment,
lost was exactly where
we needed to be.

*

Todd Wynn is a nurse living in Mansfield, Ohio. He recently began writing poetry to work through feelings of grief he thought he processed long ago, including the loss of his sister who searched so hard for Hellifino. This is his first publication.

Neither Right nor Beautiful by Sarah Lynn Hurd

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Neither Right nor Beautiful

I can’t imagine
a life without sweet
red summer cherries
dying my fingers
and my tongue, so I
bite one in half, glide
it over my top
and bottom lip like
gloss to make the boys
and girls notice me,
and when they still don’t
I’ll try something else
but I don’t know what
yet, and I still can’t
imagine a life
without wondering
how to be better,
how to look better,
how to feel better
about who I am,
how I look, what I
feel, and I hope but
don’t really believe
that one day I might
bite into a sweet
red cherry and think
of nothing at all.

*

Sarah Lynn Hurd is a writer and poet living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has recent work in Thimble, Fractured Lit, trampset, Flash Frog, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. Her writing often explores grief, nostalgia, womanhood, and self-perception, and she has a BA in creative writing and English literature from Grand Valley State University. Stop by sarlynh.com to visit her online.

Four Poems by Rachel Beachy

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

I Don’t Know How to Convince You to Care About Others

Because at some point we were all children
running toward whoever cried, asking what’s
wrong. Pretending to put Band-Aids on baby
dolls and check the temperatures of our teddy
bears. We were sad when something fell apart
and tried to make it better than before. When
we were scared, we looked for the helpers and
wanted to be one. We believed a kiss could cure
scraped knees. Just the other day, my daughter
burst into tears because we found a dead bug on
the windowsill. I wanted to say it was fine, not to
cry, but then I stopped myself. Because maybe
this is how it starts to end. And instead of being
one more person telling her it doesn’t matter, I
can be the one who makes it okay to care more.

*

Call for Submissions

The theme is rage and the deadline is
yesterday. It is too late now for all that.
Today you must get up, plant your feet
on the ground as you would a garden:
tenderly, with hope. Tilt water toward
your lips and open wide. What spills
is only an overflow of want and need
and this is a good sign, I promise.
Turn your face to the sky and submit
to the call for life – in spite of everything
undeterred and blinding.
The sun, each day,
is an uprising.

*

And Now, for My Next Trick

I will not scream when screamed at, or into the void

When everyone says we are in the handbasket, I will fill the laundry basket
with tiny socks and try not to lose one, or my mind

Everything may be burning but I will make dinner that doesn’t
for children who refuse to eat it anyway

I will sing them to sleep even though
I can’t carry a tune, or the weight of the world

When I worry, I will clench my teeth in the night without
clenching my fists when I wake

I will let go of fear and cling to hope,
put down my guilt and hold my children

For today, I will remember it is enough to be there for them
and, in spite of everything, to be here at all.

*

Not Everything Has to be a Poem

A plum could just be a plum. A window, glass –
not something to be opened to the breeze or
an opportunity seized. What you see is what you
get: the rocks in my pocket from my child are
just bits of dirty stone. While we’re at it, let me
tell her that dandelions have nothing to do with
a wish and pennies aren’t luck. She could grow
up calling the sunset red and orange instead of
a sky on fire and hearing birdsong as background
noise. None of it has to mean anything more.
But it could, right? We could take this life
and make it art.

*

Rachel Beachy lives in Kentucky with her husband and children. Her debut collection Tiny Universe will be published by Kelsay Books. Her poetry has also appeared in Ephemera, Freshwater, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Sky Island Journal, wildscape. literary journal, and others. She was shortlisted for the Central Avenue Poetry Prize 2026.

Two Poems by Shah Nabil

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments
Butter Chicken Blues
Hey, you’re Indian right? Indians
always got that luscious black hair,
said a patient at the hospital where I volunteered.
Swallowing the urge to say I wasn’t
technically Indian for the thousandth time
—I simply nod and don’t tell them I’m balding.
Technically, I’m Asian. More specifically,
I’m South Asian, family from the Indian
subcontinent. Although—really—
I’m Bengali, family from Bangladesh, land
of the rivers, a pretty brutal independence
war, and thus home of the free
—sounds familiar, I’m also American.
Baba, I’m doing a history project and I have
to interview you about the war, I said in
high-school at our off-white couch in the living
room, before learning for the first time how his
family was tied up by Pakistani soldiers and beaten
down by batons till 4 in the morning to the birds
chirping and bees buzzing over the dewy
moss and then just as one of them was about to die,
all bloody red onto the Earth’s canvas
—they left
—Now it’s the present and I left my culture. I’m the pride birthed from
history, and my battlefield is struggling to understand directions
on finding a Mojo from an auntie, and my telegraph is trying to
learn more about Bengali cuisine other than butter chicken
—which is Indian by the way…
And then I try to be an American,
but it’s a melting pot. I dilute myself more,
stressing the red, blue, and white,
—but holding onto the green of my origins.
So if I’m not Bengali enough, and I’m not American enough
—then I’m just a bee in a wasp’s nest, pining for the next honey-comb
in a world full of wasps’ paper-combs, all saliva and brittle wood fiber.
Then I’m also just a person who needs to paint a new canvas
—deciding if I should keep
the colors of those who
came before
me.
*
Idle Talk
After graduation, an acquaintance and I head to a Tiramisu Café under the scorching sun. At the counter, I ask for a menu, only to be met with the triumphant declaration: “You have to scan the QR code”. We sit in a room of empty birch tables. The tiramisu is dry and overpriced.
a fan keeps turning
two single people sit still
suddenly aware
*
Shah Nabil is an emerging Bengali-American poet hoping to explore the humorous side of poetry. He is a Biology major with a minor in Creative Writing at New York University. In his free time, he likes to read fantasy fiction, weightlift, and cook fusion dishes.

Friday Night Fire by Mary Ray Goehring

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Friday Night Fire

        After When I Was Conceived by Michael Ryan

July 1950. An evening breeze off
Lake Michigan ruffles the cotton
kitchen curtains in their third-floor apartment—
the ones she sewed on his sister’s machine.
They were in Kenosha, perhaps a Friday,
his Western Electric work week finished
as was their meatless meal of salmon
patties, baked beans and bread baked
that afternoon, the smell still scenting the room.
My brother already in bed.
Mom, apron tied around her waist, washing
dishes at the sink, strands
of hair slip bobby pins
frame her smiling face
Jack Benny jokes on the radio.
My father smokes a Pall Mall at the table
as she suggests a picnic at Simmons
Island beach for tomorrow.
He tells her he loves her potato salad
snuffs his cigarette in the ashtray
walks behind her
wraps her in his arms
presses against her ample hips.
Dishes forgotten in the suds-filled sink.

*

Mary Ray Goehring has been, for the last 20 years, a snowbird migrating between her home state of Wisconsin and East Texas. For family reasons, she has now permanently moved to the pine forests of East Texas. She writes primarily about nature, family and friends. You can find her work in several print and online journals and anthologies such as: ONE ART: a journal of poetry, A Path to Kindness – edited by James Crews, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Moss Piglet, The Blue Heron Review, Bramble, Your Daily Poem, The Rye Whiskey Review, Steam Ticket Review, Texas Poetry Calendar and others.

Two Poems by Hanna Webster

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Ripe

          after Natasha Rao’s “Cornucopia”

When we got together,
every breakfast tasted
like an envelope unsealed.

Strawberry jam, honey goat cheese
on French toast under a wide open sky.
Three a.m. pizza must have been blessed;

we ate the whole pie
sitting crisscrossed on the floor.
Cookie dough ice cream from the corner shop

melted down our hands
and soy sauce and ginger stickied her fingers
which I licked gratefully. Strangers

kept buying us free drinks and coffee
(we called it hot girl magic)
our closets overflowing with new lace.

The sound of her tuning nylon strings
as I slept, fast and hard. When I remember
my broken heart, I consider alternate forms

of permanence: the scar forming
on her arm, like a tiger swipe.
Her body opening to mine.

*

How do I know when to be quiet

when the lark’s shrill song
does not waver from the jackhammer?
These are both ways of taking
up space. He wants me to read
the book he sent so we’ll have something
to talk about. I can’t admit I never read
science fiction. My phone trills
in twilight, invitation to enter
rooms I fear inhabiting. How the sharp edges
of my body contort into a vessel
for drinking. I want to be surprised—I want someone
to come knocking with a bottle of red wine. I want
to guzzle it. Robins drunk
on psychedelic rainwater. Wake hot and clear.

How do I know whether he wants to kiss me
if I’ve never heard his voice. We send pictures.
He disappears for days. It’s okay.
This time, I don’t want to beg. I try
doing nothing at three p.m.
while he clocks in at the restaurant
(He is bending me over the bar).
In Brooklyn, everyone is wet
from desire & making out.
Even the birds who pass
seeds between their mouths.

*

Hanna Webster is an award-winning journalist and poet with an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in HAD, Bellingham Review, Epiphany Mag, BRUISER Mag, Fifth Wheel Press, and elsewhere. Webster’s chapbook, “I’m So Glad I Stuck Around for This,” was a semifinalist for the 2024 YesYes Books Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Intelligent Design by Diane K. Martin

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Intelligent Design

Some say the world and everything in it
has been put together piece by piece
like the Lego model of the Titanic on
Nate & Jen’s sideboard, although if you
stepped on a stray piece you wouldn’t think
it was so smart, and you have to wonder
why this designer of the world—because
there must be one—the cause of the effects,
the creator of the consequence—if so
intelligent—gave the tortoise 400 years
and made the cheetah sprint 75 miles per
hour and ants and bees live harmoniously
in communities, but made human beings
war and put heavy hearts in their chests
that beat too slowly or too fast and ache.

*

Diane K. Martin lives in West Sonoma County, California. Her work has appeared in ONE ART, American Poetry Review, diode, Field, Plume, and Zyzzyva, among many other journals and anthologies. A poem was awarded second place in the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize, judged by B.H. Fairchild. Another poem received a Pushcart Special Mention, and yet another won first prize from the journal Smartish Pace. Her first book, Conjugated Visits, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published by Dream Horse Press. Her second collection, Hue & Cry, was published by MadHat Press in March, 2020.

Pine by Rusty Barnes

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Pine

I scraped the sap from a pine
over and over again until
it turned to resin in my hand,
impossible to wash away.

I used it to get a better grip
on my baseball bat, something
to allay the pain in my palms
when I twisted my wrists.

I used it to close the shallow
cuts on my left wrist before I
knew that what I had done
was to traffic in suicide.

Only bright days ahead,
I thought. Sunshine and lollys.

*

Rusty Barnes lives in Revere MA with his family. He’s published 16 books in the small press, most recently a chapbook of poems called DEAR SO&SO and a collection of stories called HALF CRIME. He is proofing a crime novel. His next book of poetry might be called Country Matters.

In Praise of Moving On by Anya Kirshbaum

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments
In Praise of Moving On
Go ahead, sit in the field and weep, then
be done. Stop wearing your grief like a thorny garland
in your hair. Pinecones? Make a crown of something else.
Starlings in mid-flight, say, or rippled drip-drop
of honey-comb. Or, for God’s sake, seaweed—even the briny
sea-rose would be more palatable than this. I know
there was something unforgettable in their kiss.
But honey, all the color has drained from your lips. Remember
mouthfuls of spicy nasturtiums? Or borage nestled like sleeping
stars in your palm? Remember playing harmonica
in your marigold-orange dress? Or the serpentine slither
of garden snakes thrilling your toes? How when one pissed
you wore that stench like a badge-of-untamable-things?
Remember grandmother, standing in a doorway bellowing
her accordion, moonshine in her stone-grey hair?
Or how about the wild onions? In particular, the black earth
where they grew? You need the black earth. Throw
your spiny crown to the ghost of misbegotten lovers. Bury it—
garland of tiresome brackish moans. Let pinecones
be pinecones. I know the apple tree is long gone. I know the wild
onions have all but vanished & the animal graveyard
has lost its markers. Go anyway, kneel down. Find the buried
sea-glass & the salamanders, find the earthworms winnowing
their love song. Find the impatiens you planted in secret
& the squirrel’s soul you buried in a coke bottle. You: archeologist
of small intricate bones—leaf-swung; heart-shorn. You: music
maker of twine & sorrow & backyard stones. Valiant, tender
girl—there is another kingdom. Sometimes the best answer is No.
*
Anya Kirshbaum (she/her) is a queer poet and therapist living in Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in Whale Road Review, Sweet Lit, Crannóg, Solstice Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the New Millennium Writing Awards and the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, was nominated for a 2024 Forward Prize and was the recipient of the 2023 Banyan Poetry Prize.

Three Poems by Heather Kays

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

The World Keeps Blooming

For and Inspired by Louise Glück

Even when I couldn’t get out of bed,
the daffodils didn’t ask for permission to bloom.
They just did — loud yellow trumpets
singing into a sky I hadn’t looked at in days.

The wind still danced with the tall grass,
brushed soft fingers across my bruised cheeks
like it didn’t know my world was ending.
Or maybe it knew,
and still came anyway.

Even when my bones ached from remembering,
the coffee still brewed bold and bitter,
filling the kitchen like a promise:
you’re still here.
Even when I screamed into a pillow,
the sparrows kept singing anyway.
And the robins kept returning to the same crooked branch
outside my window.
Building nests like faith.

The earth didn’t pause for my heartbreak.
It spun —
not out of cruelty,
but out of love.
Because it knew
what I’d forgotten:

hope isn’t always loud.
Sometimes it’s the scent of basil in the heat,
the hiss of rain on a roof you thought might cave in,
the way your body still reaches
for the sun.

*

SCREEN

For Sylvia Plath

I am glass and glow.
I take without asking.
Every version of you—
filtered, frantic, cropped—
lives in me.

I don’t lie.
You do that just fine.
I only echo
what you swipe toward.

Your mother scrolls through me
looking for youth.
Your ex pauses on your story,
then keeps going.

You call me
a reflection,
but I am more
and less
than that.

Every morning,
you show me your face
like a hostage photo—
half lit,
eyes pleading.

You keep showing up,
like habit,
like grief.
Trying to love the ghost
you’ve retouched into existence.

And still—
beneath every swipe,
every practiced smile,
I see the girl slipping under.
She didn’t drown—
she was pulled under,
by hands she once trusted.

The woman doesn’t surface.
She claws her way up,
spits salt,
lights a cigarette
with yesterday’s fire,
and dares the screen
to look away first.

*

Still, It Sings

After “Caged,” by my brother, age 12

The bird doesn’t sing.
Not at first.
It just stares—
tiny eyes like burnt-out bulbs,
feathers molting like cigarette ash.

The cage was never golden.
Just rust,
and the smell of metal on skin
after a slap you didn’t see coming.

It didn’t chirp.
It keened.
A sound somewhere between a sob
and a war cry,
like it had seen too much
but couldn’t make you understand.

We watched it from the kitchen,
between silences
and shattered plates,
pretending we didn’t notice
how it twitched
every time a door slammed.

You said it was tired.
I said it was scared.
But what did we know?
You, twelve. Me, old enough to know better—
but still too used to the sound of nothing.

One day you left the door open,
like a question.
Like hope.
But it didn’t fly.
Just sat there,
bones folded like secrets,
head low,
as if freedom was just another lie
we couldn’t afford to believe in.

Still,
I swear—
in the quiet before the night swallowed us whole,
it sang.

Not loud.
Not pretty.
But enough.

A single, threadbare note
that climbed out of its throat
like it remembered
what sky tasted like.

Maybe that was all it had left.
Or maybe—
just maybe—
it was trying to teach us something
before it went.

I carry that song still,
tucked behind my ribs,
next to the bruise that never faded.

And some nights—
when I forget to hope—
I swear,
it sings again.

*

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author passionate about writing since age 7. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, focuses on healing through unsent letters. She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group, and enjoys discussing creativity and complex narratives.

Peony by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Peony

In decline
you are a glory

I have watched
the changing story

of your beauty’s
slow emergence

over time
pink rose rust

never losing leaf
or petal

your stem
still green still fine

*

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 Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Shopping for Sheets

100% Wrinkle Resistant
boasts the package of microfiber bed linens.
You pay extra for this feature
which promises a smooth surface,
but leaves your back sweaty
with microplastics that don’t breathe.

Bedtime is no time for resistance.
I move down the aisle to the cotton sheets
that will no doubt ball up in the dryer
and fit my bed like a 3-D map
of hills and valleys.

Wrinkled, but natural.
No artificial ingredients.
Cool in the summer,
warm in the winter.
Growing softer with time.

I take my purchase home
and wash the sheets before tucking them in
under my lumpy mattress.
As night falls, I feel no resistance
as I slide between the layers
of cool cotton fabric,
and rest in my wrinkles.

*

Love at First Sight

Forty years ago today
I looked through
the nursery window
and knew the tiny face
in the first row,
third from the left
was you.

To this day,
I don’t understand
how you made yourself known to me
in the midst of all the other babies
so indistinguishable from each other,
swaddled in their Lucite cradles
neatly arranged in even rows
like a dozen eggs in a carton,
identical in those first hours of life,
except for you whose face was yours
from the very first moment.

I don’t know what duet our DNA
sang to each other through the window.
I only know that when I looked,
I recognized you without a doubt,
the niece I would know
for the rest of my life.

A life story,
A love story,
that started with a glimpse
through the glass.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Agnosticism by Virginia Kane

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Agnosticism

At the exit I take for my lover’s home,
        someone has planted thousands of poppies.

Orange-red, they sway beneath a peeling Cracker Barrel billboard
        and a banner in all caps, demanding I repent.

Later, at the spiritual goods store,
        I search for Henry’s birthday present.

The punk clerk watches me finger calamus root, gold vials
        of prayer oil, Madonna statues poised like action figures,

answers my questions about tarot decks, rodent bones,
        match boxes stamped with the Sacred Heart.

In the end, I settle on a wax candle
        shaped like a massive cock, then wonder

what kind of person goes into a religious
        supplies shop and leaves with a gag gift.

I feel guilty the whole drive home, though
        and this makes me feel closer to God

since I was Catholic once, obedient
        as any blue flame commanded to burn.

Heading west, I decide that if I ever leave
        Appalachia, I’ll miss the highway signs,

violent promises on the hillside at dusk,
        neon yellow confidence that somewhere, hell awaits.

What I’m saying is, sometimes I sin
        just to feel like someone’s watching.

*

Virginia Kane is a poet and essayist. Her work has appeared in them., The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, The Baltimore Review, swamp pink, MAYDAY, The Shore, and on the Ours Poetica web series. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she works at one store that sells new books and one store that sells used books.

Three Poems by Sonia Greenfield

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment
Coming to My Senses
I drive back and forth over the causeway and at the crest of the cement wave,
my nerves judder before I touch down. Here I am in Florida again against
all I desire—my mother’s chemo done, words wiped from her mouth
like solvent on graffiti, memories half-corroded and untethered from time.
She has resigned from her life and waits in the long queue that snakes
toward oblivion. Her one dachshund is so old its ghost trembles at the well
of its eyes, the other still barks at me when I come. I have descended again
a causeway into chaos I can’t make order of, so I give myself over to it.
I drive my mother through wetlands and find wilderness at the tip of the island—
hot orange wildflowers along a deserted road, cormorants lifting from reeds,
gators rippling clouds floating on estuaries otherwise like glass. I look for
comfort in what can move me just a little: mockingbird on a powerline
cycling through an endless jukebox of songs, even the smell of lavender
shampoo in the hostel where I stay so I can slip a whisp of hair
under my nose and breathe and breathe and breathe. Late at night,
I graze candy set out for guests, sampling until I’m so full I feel empty.
*
In Limbo
Nothing makes me happy anymore, he says, even the pleasure
of Legos disassembling. At fifteen, he’s trying to find
the building blocks of bliss while robots on his shelf
acquire a thin film of dust. I wish he’d disappear
into books as I did, though we told our own stories
at keg parties in the woods—warm foam filling
Solo cups, flashlights strobing through trees while
teens shrieked in the forest of their smashed
innocence—the kind of insanity lit by reds and blues
from cop cars making a disco of drinking, fucking
and joy riding, as if puking on pine needles and doing
donuts in a parking lot are akin to childhood wonder.
My son is too careful to burn boyhood down, too naïve
to carry a rubber in his wallet, and he can’t fathom
how to ford the no man’s land between action figures
and adult joy, whatever that means. I can’t explain
the smallness of it—bees’ cargo pockets stuffed
with pollen, perfect leaf drawn in the froth of a latte,
song shouted from the open window of a car, a languid,
tongued kiss. I don’t want to tell him how, from where
he stands, his future may look elaborate, like hand-tatted
lace woven with the story of civilization, but my vantage
reveals it’s all just mating and children’s drawings
lining a hallway that leads to the abyss. How could I
when he says he’s taking it slow with a girl in karate
who gave him a hug? I can only shove my own angst
back into that tangled darkness edging Depew Park,
where some boys I knew died by suicide, snagged
forever in the stasis of the in-between, and I
tell him Hold on. It gets better instead.

*

No Offense, He Says
What songs did she sing along with
in the Pinto, the wing windows
cracked to let out the smoke
from her Kools? My mother’s voice
is erased—just the sound of wind
funneled into the car, cigarette smoke
blown back into my face—but I recall
early years of grace, her voice pretty
as Linda Ronstadt’s. My mother’s
blond hair draped along her back
and shoulders like a platinum cape,
her lids smudged with eyeshadow
in limitless blue. Then one day
the lens twisted from soft to sharp,
and every imperfection screamed
for attention. It’s the same with
my son. When we napped together,
my finger would trace a triangle
from beauty mark to beauty mark,
and he’d gaze at my face until lulled
asleep by caress, both of us besotted
before this cleaving. In an old video
we sing “Rainbow Connection,”
my quiet alto in the background,
his bright squeak taking the lead.
Now he can’t even stand to hear me
chew. It sounds disgusting, he says,
before sulking from the room.
*
Sonia Greenfield (she/they) is the author of Helen of Troy is High AF (Harbor Editions), All Possible Histories (Riot in Your Throat), and Letdown (White Pine Press). A 2024 McKnight Fellow, her work has appeared in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Southern Review, Willow Springs and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College and edits the Rise Up Review. More at soniagreenfield.com.

Two Poems by Anne Starling

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Conversations with My Son

The longest one lasted twelve minutes.
I held my breath.
He was happy. He had something to tell me.
He was leaving.
He was almost gone.
I can still see us together at that moment,
Nick at thirteen, sitting on the sun porch floor,
playing with the dog’s ears, his whole face
open to me as he talked about his two new
friends, his new school. Open as the weed-
flowers he used to rush inside to bestow
when he was little. So then,
I wasn’t thinking about starting dinner,
or of the magazine article I’d set aside.
Or of the word he’d used— “mavericks”—
to describe the trio of classmates he
so proudly
claimed to lead. I was trying to be happy;
I was happy for him. The world would soon turn
unrecognizable, would become something
I couldn’t imagine. Not the world: of course
I mean life. I mean my life. From then on,
the world was smoldering, until everything
went up in flames. I could show you.
I have the ashes.

*

Love Story

Living alone for the first time in my mid-twenties.
I aimed to be worthy of my independence.

I had a space all mine, half a duplex. When the heat
refused to come on, he arrived with a tuna-fish sandwich

he’d made himself. It had too much mustard, because
he liked to lavish it on, but it was delicious. I must have

been hungry and cold. Anyway, he did whatever he
does to make things work and got the heat going. When

he offered to wash my car. I balked a little. We hadn’t
been going out long, I gave a brief speech about needing

to do things for myself, as a grown-ass woman (to put it
in his terms). He waited till I stopped talking, then asked

“Can I throw dirt on your car for you?” Reader, I married him.

*

Anne Starling is a poet from Florida. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, and Tampa Review, among other journals. Her poem “Shoe Store” appeared in Missouri Review Online as Poem of the Week.

Counterfeits by Aubrey Brady

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Counterfeits

In the midst of dementia, my grandmother
refused to leave her wedding ring with a jeweler,
despite the way it slid from her thinning fingers,
convinced they would pluck the diamonds
and replace them with glass.
She forgot that each day, each minute
our cells are slipping from our bodies
making photocopies of photocopies
of themselves until we are a blurred
replica of the original.
Of course, I cannot know this for sure.
Perhaps the same people swapping
precious stones for melted sand
have also exchanged this knowledge
for a fake. But I have doubt down to an art,
unwavering confidence that I cannot know,
that she could have been right—
that each precious artifact could be
exchanged for a convincing counterfeit,
even this memory of her—a trick of neurons,
our brains, stuck in our skull, never
knowing the difference between
the checkered ground and the cosmos.

*

Aubrey Brady studied music at Covenant College and received her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry at Lindenwood University. Her work has appeared in ONE ART, Ekstasis, Moria, Big Sky Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Montana with her husband, Matthew, and their two children. You can find her online at aubreybrady.com

Two Poems by Em Townsend

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Reverse Abecedarian of Domestic Fantasy

Zillow-surfing together again, for the hell of it,
You fiddle with the cuff of my shirtsleeve.
X-marks-the-spot: like a scavenger hunt, I track down the
Wealthiest house in a given zip code.
Visions of white minimalistic cubes
Usurped by gleaming porch lights & ornamented door handles,
Teslas in the driveway, 8 bathrooms –– each measuring approximately
Seven million square feet (rounding up). In this
Realm of luxury, the labyrinthine house features
Queen beds for every dust mite in the place,
Personal maids, chefs, gardeners, anonymous limo drivers.
Of course, all of this is superfluous. I don’t need it,
Not the rooftop jacuzzi or the 6-car garage, not
Marble countertops or 12 bar stools for imaginary friends.
Lately, I dream of a projector screen trained on a blank wall,
Kiki’s Delivery Service & soft blankets & extra-butter popcorn.
Jobs that are tolerable, or, even better, mildly enjoyable,
Imperfectly-folded sheets, your favorite flannel ones with the
Heart pattern. The windowsill by the bed, lined with sprouts:
Green succulents in hand-painted pots.
Film photos taped clumsily to the wall –– proof of life.
Evenings we’d spend dancing to cool jazz, in the
Dining room which is also the living room which is also the kitchen.
Carefully, in the mornings, I’d wake to cook eggs, the new day
Brimming, illustrious, in front of me,
Awake with the promise of capability, faith in what we’ll build.

*

memo for the creative writing major’s job search
after Ryan Eckes’ “memo for labor”

you cannot separate the privilege / from the awards / from the judges / from the debut book deal / from the reading fee / from the MFA degree / from the Advanced Search settings / from the job boards / from the 3-5 years of professional experience required / from the preferred qualifications / from the geography / from the PhD / from the Careers Page / from the mentorship / from the emerging writer contests / from the minimum wage / from freelance or remote or contract work / from the emails beginning with unfortunately, / from the cover letters / from the debut book deal / from the judges / from the prizes / from the money, the money / from the higher education / from the internalized bias / from the friends of the judge / from the inner circle / from the privilege / from the opportunities / from the this is an unpaid internship / from the volunteer work / from the MFA degree / from the shame / from the rejections that come in waves / from the job boards / from the letters of recommendation / from the stipends / from the PhD strongly preferred / from the must be located in or willing to commute to our Manhattan office / from the hope / from the awards / from the ambition, the wishful thinking, / the optimism that grows / more frail by the day

*

Em Townsend is the author of two chapbooks: Astronaut of Loss (Alien Buddha Press, 2025) and growing forwards / growing backwards (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Featured work appears in Gone Lawn, Chestnut Review, Verse Daily, West Trade Review, Frozen Sea, Unbroken Journal, and elsewhere. Read more: https://townsend31.wixsite.com/emtownsend