Visibility and Book Sales: Marketing Your Small Press Book

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Visibility and Book Sales: Marketing Your Small Press Book
Instructor: John Sibley Williams

Date: Thursday, August 14, 2025
Date: Thursday, August 28, 2025

Time: 3:30-6:00pm Eastern

>>> Tickets available <<<

About the Workshop

With over 800 books per day published in the US alone, publicity for small press books has never been more necessary…and more difficult. The goal of “Visibility and Book Sales: Marketing Your Small Press Book” is to provide writers of all genres with the necessary tools, money saving techniques, and networking skills to market their books with maximum effectiveness. Topics include creating a cohesive business strategy, utilizing traditional and digital media, giving readings and other methods of selling books, balancing your marketing budget, and thinking outside the box to find your fans.

About The Workshop Leader

John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), skycrape (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translation from by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A thirty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, Poetry Editor at Kelson Books, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.

As if the Moon by Katie Olson Afshar

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As if the Moon

A man from the other side of the earth
taught me the word for belly button
pupik in his language, with two fingers
pressed on my navel.
Because I loved him
I thought of his father and mother
repeating the syllables when he was a child,
during baths, before bedtime,
and ancestors before them—generations
pointing out the body to their children.
Every word he said was beautiful
and I asked for more words. Pulled my lips
over the dappled vowels.
Cat. Morning. Milk. Moon.
Baby words re-learned
in my bedroom, the kitchen:
Olive oil.
Window.
He saved money by housesitting
so I learned the words of stranger’s lives,
star fish, cohav yahm, in the old woman’s bathroom.
A rabbit he fed while a family was out of town—arnav,
you’re soft like the arnav. I gathered his words in my cheek
when I wasn’t with him, went to barbecues alone,
watched a baby held over a shoulder,
how she cooed in desperation at the moon, as if the moon
were already inside the infant lungs,
or spleen. As if language were a release
of what was already inside a body.
Every time I saw him
he reminded me he’d leave one day
so I asked for more words:
the sky, sha-may-yeem
the water, may-yeem.
He rejected his country
so his freedom encompassed the surface of the Earth.
That’s just one kind of many kinds
of freedom
I told myself.
When he left
took me a long time
to say I don’t like the moon
full, over my head
dictator moon, won’t let me sleep
when I’m alone in the mountains.
But when it’s low and yolky
I’m loose with power,
a she-captain in a season of calm seas.
I love the moon.
I don’t care about the moon.
His name meant island of palms
which was tattooed on his shoulder when he was a boy.
I traced my finger over the blurred lump of land
the palm tree curved to the side in happiness.
Some simple words are tethered here
murmuring in the walls
of the big vessels
routing my blood.

*

Katie Olson Afshar is a writer and pediatrician. Her work has appeared in the Sun, Catamaran Literary Reader, RockPaperPoem and Hunger Mountain, among other journals. She lives in the California Bay Area with her husband and daughter.

The History of Emotional Ambush by Candice M. Kelsey

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The History of Emotional Ambush

It began with a path.
There was a girl.
There is always a girl
with a basket of obedience
and warnings. Don’t talk to strangers.
Stay on the trail.

But this story forgets
that wolves are never strangers.
They know our names,
say red is our color. The hood looks nice
with your tan before scampering off
to plot and plan.

The story knows we all learn
our lesson.

This wolf was memorable.
He said things like, come closer
so I can look at you.

But I knew his game.
What big arms you have.
Like all girls, I’ve been trained.

Until the story gets uncomfortable,
as it always does. His smile.
All the better to hug you with, my dear.

Even so, the story continues.
It never ends, actually. Fairy tales
are forever.

I buried my father
under an ambivalent sky,
as if mourning were a thing to be earned.
Standing apart, an estranged
daughter wearing
the wrong shoes and a quiet scandal.

This story is about a family
that still gathers
for pictures without the girl.
There is a cousin.
There was always her cousin
until there wasn’t.
Are you coming to the Steak Loft?
Am I coming.

Where grief and prime beef
were served. Under fluorescent lights,
a post-funeral feast. Iced
teas served with cocktail napkins
like small talk.

I walked this widow’s sad buffet path
when he came, this man
I hadn’t seen in over a decade.
My sister-in-law’s father

like a wolf from the forest,
unwelcome and sudden.
He opened his arms.
Aren’t you going to give me a hug?

Sometimes a story is too much.
There was a girl
raw with the scent of cemetery.
She was offered a trap
disguised as a question, a dare
written in teeth. Well, where’s my hug?

In the revised version,
the girl says something snappy,
something smart like
The only man I want to hug is my father.
She walks out the door.

But I did what the story wanted.
Reader, I hugged him.
His stubble grazed my cheek
like a threat. Beef breath and brazen.

See, this is how it begins.
Not with a devouring, but an embrace.
Fuck stories that teach the girl
to swallow her No.

Let the forest grow thick with refusal.
Or next time, I bring an axe.

*

Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a poet and educator living in both L.A. and Georgia. She’s developed a taste for life’s absurd glow, long skirts, and juicy opera podcasts. She roasts vegetables like it’s a sacred ritual and wears mostly black because her late father-in-law said it’s not her color. Somehow her work has received Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and she woke up one day as the author of 8 books. Please acknowledge her existence @Feed_Me_Poetry or https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/.

Two Poems by Derek Thomas Dew

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The Smoke in the Street

Our silence
is not true silence,

it is a scream
drowned en route

to its target,
lost to white gravel

under flakes
of dried blood.

Our disbelief
was given to us

by those who made us,
same as it was given

to them by whoever
came before, and just like

disbelief did for them,
it has quietly become

the lasting stillness
in which we will spend

the rest of our lives
looking to return belief

to a living silence
like smoke to an empty street.

*

Young Body Author

At the cinderblock wall outside the bar
yelling for his ma to get up,
does the boy invent himself and regret it?

Will he wish to flee flesh’s refuge
into disentangled & shrinking hand, reverse to
collapse hand inward as negotiable form

able to tilt its own genesis this way or that until
the just body rises to pattern and sinew?
He will have to walk home after the cops come.

He will have to decide if he is only this way
because he is in this place, somehow the only
place that ran between his baseball cap

& his jeans standing at the cinderblock wall
outside the bar.

*

Derek Thomas Dew (he/she/they) is currently living in NYC. Derek’s debut poetry collection “Riddle Field” received the 2019 Test Site Poetry Prize from the Black Mountain Institute/University of Nevada. Derek’s poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, and have been published in a variety of journals, including Interim, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, The Curator, Two Hawks Quarterly, Ocean State Review, and Cathexis Northwest Press.

Filing by Kate Howlett

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Filing

I finally
Put my dad’s
Funeral service sheet
In the recycling bin
It was so inadequate

Seemed the best place for it
Going through old files on a shelf
I realised I no longer had space
For something that reduced a life so rich
To a shopping list

In holding on
Shame had got stuck between the pages
Spilled out all over my younger self
Who had written it
The best she knew how at the time

Now there it was on my shelf
Magnetising shame
Accumulating an ugly pile
Bending the poor shelf
Beneath its weight

Much better to prise apart the pages
To see that shame
Should really be anger and sadness
That I and he were let down
By people who could have done better

Shame is a shapeshifter in the light

*

Kate Howlett is a writer and social ecologist based in Cambridge, UK. She lives with a snake called Luisa, a giant African land snail called Carrot and a cat called Steve. She writes about nature, grief, self-discovery and the toxicity of daughterhood. She holds a PhD in zoology from the University of Cambridge, where her academic research focused on exploring children’s relationship with the natural world. She writes a Substack newsletter called Natural Connection about fixing our broken relationship with nature and often shares her poems via Notes.

Miracles by Meg Pokrass

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Miracles

The summer I was four
my father locked
his bedroom door
every day after breakfast,
puttered out in the late afternoon
to defrost dinner.
We sucked Dutch pretzels
all day, like bones.

My teenage sister taught me
the word “fuck”.
I’d sing it operatically,
while dusting.
The word tasted like alphabet soup.

I imagined the two of us
flinging his bedroom door open,
chanting “Fuck!”
Watching him look up
from the gloom
and really see us
as if we were miracles.

*

Meg Pokrass is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of prose and prose poetry. Her work has been published in RATTLE, American Journal of Poetry, Plume, New England Review and Electric Literature. Meg is the Founding Editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series. She is an American writer currently living in the Scottish Highlands.

A Former Mean Girl Contemplates Her Life from the Parking Lot of a Strip Mall by Susan Cossette

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A Former Mean Girl Contemplates Her Life from the Parking Lot of a Strip Mall

I tug back the blank drapes
of memory from the rear-view mirror
of my hail-dented black Mitsubishi SUV–

which is in serious need of a wash
and interior cleaning.

What remains?

Two Minnesota winters
of road salt and gravel,
McDonald’s receipts,
three dimes, a quarter,
and some pennies in the console.

K-Mart winter boots,
a box of office things
from a job I was fired from
18 months ago

two coats (winter and spring),
jumper cables,
and unreturned library books
strewn on the back seat.

I look hard in the tilted mirror.

I have the same green eyes
I always had, the identical
double chin I teased my mother about
when I was 20.

In the parking lot of the Family Dollar
I remember friends
I am no longer friends with.

We were all bridesmaids
in each other’s weddings,
all of us shackled before the age of 24.

So much pink taffeta, blonde hair
and chocolate-covered strawberries
served on Royal Doulton dishes
should not be allowed to exist.

I am ashamed.

Ashamed of flicking cigarette ashes on fat girls,
scrawling graffiti on Jill’s dorm room door
because she smiled at my boyfriend,
snickering behind a pink manicured hand
at Tracy in her cheap dress with her acne scars
who tried way too hard to draw attention
to herself while dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

But really, I dug through the sofa
for spare change to do my laundry,
ate canned chili from a hot pot–

Small hands crumbling saltine crackers
over the warm Sunday night meal,
reading Dickens and Plath,
curled under my tartan quilt.

These green eyes remember
sinking shiny pink pedicured toes
into the sand of a Connecticut beach
I once called home—

Crab cakes and lobster,
a Polish lady who came weekly
to clean my home.

Today I will seek redemption

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she was awarded the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, look for her work in the Eunoia Review, Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women and Fast Famous Women (Woodhall Press).

Aposematism by Betsy Mars

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Aposematism

Porcupines have quills, skunks have their funk.
Hedgehogs roll away, leaving predators
to seek easier prey. Tortoises withdraw
into the home they carry. Rabbits
to their burrows. Even snails find refuge
from unwanted touch, and sea anemones, asexual,
retract into the cavity of their mouths
when under attack, armed to sting.
Poison dart frogs reveal
their toxicity through their skin,
pigments screaming caution.

The poor human
I am— evolved
with no protections,
offering no warnings—

I roll over, present you
the soft risk of my belly.

*

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.”

A Talking-To by Penelope Moffet

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A Talking-To

The citronella is in bloom again, pale
pink flowers the hummingbirds prefer
to the sugar-water feeder. Some smaller
thing, a wasp or bee, is at them
now, mumbling at the petals.

As if paralyzed I sit and look
at silhouettes. Plants, crows,
bugs, gardeners, my neighbor
walking his special-needs German
shepherd back and forth below.

Mind full of memories.
Shake them off, like a fearful
dog who forgets himself, runs
into a stream and out again,
droplets vibrating from his fur.

*

Penelope Moffet lives in Southern California, where she writes, draws and strives to keep her 18-year-old cat happy. Her most recent chapbook is Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by ONE ART and has been awarded residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts, The Mesa Refuge, the Helen R. Whiteley Center and Alderworks Alaska. Her poems appear in Eclectica, Calyx, New Verse News and other journals. A full-length collection of her poetry will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2026

Updated: ONE ART’s July 2025 Reading

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Updated: ONE ART’s July 2025 Reading

A slight change in line-up for ONE ART’s July 2025 reading. Laura Grace Weldon will be joining us!

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

The reading will be held on Sunday, July 20 at 2pm Eastern.

The official event is expected to run approximately 2-hours.

After the reading, please consider sticking around for ~ 30-minutes of Q&A with Featured Poets & Community Time (general conversation).

About Our Featured Poets:

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

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her two books are: No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot. Poetry credits include The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, and Plume. 

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, leads writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura is the author of four books with a fifth due out in 2025 from Sheila-Na-Gig. Her background includes teaching nonviolence, writing poetry with nursing home residents, facilitating support groups for abuse survivors, and writing sardonic greeting cards. Laura lives on a small Ohio homestead where she and her husband host occasional art parties and house concerts. lauragraceweldon.com  

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

Assisted Breathing by Ann E. Wallace

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Assisted Breathing

Put on your own oxygen mask
first.

For years, I dispensed this snappy
wisdom to myself and to friends lost

in the sleepless nights, the conflicted
allegiances of parenting.

This was before people spoke of self-care.
Back then, we were in survival mode.

Back then, we needed to remind ourselves
to breathe. But it wasn’t literal.

Nobody actually had an oxygen mask.
Life has grown more fragile.

When the air became thin,
my mask went on first.

The message—stay alive so you can help
your children—still holds true.

It’s no longer a metaphor.
And I did        and I am.

*

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

Two Poems by Terri Kirby Erickson

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Piano Practice

Years before the breakdowns and suicide attempts,
hospitalizations and shock treatments, my best
friend, Sara, and I sat at the piano in her family’s
formal living room. It was a cloudy day and the

house was filled with shadows save for the bright
light from a lamp that arced over the pages of her
music. Her reach across the keys was astounding,
like bridges connecting one note to another as her

adolescent body rocked back and forth to a song
I’d never heard—something classical—nothing
like the Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass tunes
my parents preferred. She claimed to hate piano

practice, but threw herself into it like everything
she did, including marrying a man who murdered
her for her money before she could divorce him.
Poison, the police told her parents who found her

lying on a couch in her new apartment, as if she’d
fallen asleep. Sara worked hard to get well and she
was well, at least long enough to marry and be
miserable with someone besides herself. But when

we were two young girls, bud-breasted and dreamy,
we vowed to be friends forever, pictured daughters
becoming best friends, too—how they would sit
side-by-side like we did, practicing being happy.

*

Simple Math

When we shed our clothes and lie down
together on a Sunday afternoon,
this room holds the silence

of a sanctuary save for our intimate
conversation punctuated by kisses. We
ease into it, our lovemaking,

like putting our feet into a pool before
slipping into the water like seals.
Half playful, half serious, we speak

of this and that as our hands slide
over each other’s bodies which, after
so many years, we could find

in a sea of bodies in the dark. But there
are only two of us in this nest we
have made of our marriage,

though what we do here is being done
right now, all over the world.
People keep reaching for each other

because love is like oxygen, the lack
of it deadlier than all the things that can
kill us. But let’s not speak of death

when talking has led to more touching
and thus, romantically, mathematically—
two will soon turn into one.

*

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.

Three Poems by Dolo Diaz

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Shaving

Father, shaving
starts crying
up above my head.
Mother asks
What is wrong?
I am only three.

He had come
to our house
to shave.
His mother had hidden
his shaving kit—
a little game?

He had found her
that morning,
still staring at the snow
on the TV.

It’s one of the few
memories I have
of my grandmother.

*

ALS

What is it like
to be distilled
to the essence
of who you are?

To pierce
with your eyes
and nothing else?

Your skin poised,
thirsty to feel the touch.
Nerve endings open
and wired.

But nobody
breaks through
the chrysalis.

And you,
longing to reach for
the feathery leaf,
willing it with your eyes

to slowly descend
from the tree
and rest
on your hand.

*

Bar Stool

I was frightened,
so I assembled a bar stool.

First night in the new house—
alone. The peace of the day
melted into the eerie quiet of night.

No blinds or curtains yet.
The house reveals
its pale yellow underbelly
to the outside.

I sit on the floor, unpack the metal parts,
find the tiny tools, the screws.
Lay them all out.

I focus on the instructions,
trying to ignore that anyone passing by
would see me bent over,
fussing over something.

My fingers are clumsy—
the screws slip from them,
the holes do not align.

The stool leg is backwards
and I have to start over.

Finally finished, I sit on it.
The first piece of furniture
in the house. I eye the other
one, and go back down.

The second one goes faster.

I look at the two stools—
white metal legs, grey cushion.

Fear screwed in, screwed in tight.

Tomorrow I will get two more stools
and assemble them at daylight.
That way, I will not know
which ones hold the fear.

*

Dolo Diaz is a poet originally from Spain, living in Palo Alto, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, Star*Line, Rogue Agent, Book of Matches, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and others. Her first chapbook Defiant Devotion has been published by Bottlecap Press.

What We Keep on the Fourth by Veronica Tucker

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What We Keep on the Fourth

It’s not the anthem
or the sparklers burning
their short, bright lives
in the hands of children
who will never know
how long we waited
for a moment like this.

It’s the way corn
tastes sweeter in July,
the way the dog sleeps
in the patch of shade
beneath the picnic table
while someone hums
an old song
that doesn’t need a name.

It’s flip-flops by the lake
and the screen door
slamming behind a cousin
you haven’t seen since last summer
but still love in the way
you love watermelon
and stories that start with remember when.

It’s the long daylight,
stretching like a promise
no one is ready to cash in.
It’s smoke curling from the grill,
the hush before the first boom
that sends every child
into the arms of whoever
feels like home.

We say it’s about freedom,
but maybe it’s about pause,
about holding still
on the lip of summer
long enough to know
you were here
for something that mattered.

*

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 and on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.

Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House by Mary Ellen Redmond

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Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House

My neighbor on the street behind me
is using his leaf blower on this Fourth of July
during that customary lull between the parade and fireworks,
when babies nap and dogs find solace in the shade.

It sounds like a giant mosquito hovering over
our neighborhood disrupting our quiet afternoon.
But when the buzzing continues for over an hour,
I ride my bike around the corner to investigate,

and there he is on his front lawn, shirtless, in the most
patriotic way —slightly hairy chest, gold chain— blowing
his lawn clean of any leaf, stick, piece of detritus

that has landed on his artificial turf.
The yard is bordered by dozens of tiny flags stuck
between plastic red geraniums, perpetually in bloom.
Why not vacuum the whole damn yard?

Peddling home, I imagine him a member of the militia,
a true Patriot—
defending his country,
his rights, his piece of the pie,
blowing those Red Coats away,
one by one,
his leaf blower resting on his arm.

*

Mary Ellen Redmond’s poems have appeared in a number of journals including Rattle and The Cortland Review, but the publication she is most proud of is the poem tattooed on her son’s ribcage. Her interview with Gregory Orr was published in The Drunken Boat. Her poem “Fifty-Six Days” earned a Best of the Net nomination in 2016 and her poem “Joy is not made to be a crumb” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024.

Like Lightning by tc Wiggins

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Like Lightning

If the myths are to be believed
there is no delight which lasts.
The beautiful grow old then die.
Children experience snow
for the first time, once, then never again.
Passion itself can only take us so far.
It guides us through the fields
of indulgence to abandon us
inside a constellation lit valley
beneath the crimson-throated chortle
of cuckoo. Leaves us there
repeating why, why, why, like a
rich-man-turned-beggar, hunched
off to the side of the pavement
as pedestrians pass or step around him.
Few loves become like the Moon.
Most become like lightning. Or,
if we’re lucky, like the clamoring of
excited hens. Wild, and echoing
for hours and hours through the thundering
night. Then echoing even after that.

*

tc Wiggins is an African American poet residing in Cincinnati, Ohio who has been writing since the August of 2022. His favorite writers and inspirations are Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Mary Oliver, Maggie Smith, Victoria Chang and Wendy Cope. tc suffers from chronic (if not terminal) boredom. You should send him poems to read, preferably your own. His Instagram handle is scaringthemuse.

Three Poems by Karly Randolph Pitman

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Let

after Jane Kenyon’s Let Evening Come

Let the brown tabby meow, paw
at your door and pull you out
of bed hours before you feel ready.

Let the hot sun bake the sweet
potato plants as you measure what
to water or what to let die.

Let the body buck from another wave
of dizziness as you learn a new way
to ride the body’s labor pains.

Let the hollow of grief come up for air
so the tears that are stuck in the corners
of your eyes can drop their heavy load.

Let the fridge empty. Let the dust gather
on the bookshelves. Let the to do list
unravel in the light of what is possible
instead of what you hoped would be.

Let help come. Let friends bring you pots
of soup, jars of tea and prayer flags, tied
on a string. Let the doctor insert the needle
that makes you tremble.

Let yourself fall. Let yourself weep. Let
yourself shatter, let yourself know you
don’t have to be any braver than you
know how to be.

The early rising brings morning flowers.
Sweet potatoes bring grace. The body
brings breath. Grief brings tenderness.
Unraveling brings silence. Help brings ease.
Shattering brings relief from holding up
what needed to break.

Let everything happen to you, Rilke says –
as if you’re given a choice, as if let is optional.
What if everything happens? What if this
is what I can trust? What if this is the way
that trust holds me?

*

Opening the Package

The medicine arrives
wrapped in paper, tucked
with care like a present,
folded triangles laid on top
of each other so that
opening the package
feels like receiving
a gift. You feel blessed
by this extra attention,
as if the person sending
you your medicine
whispered a prayer
on your behalf
as they packed up
the box for shipping,
a prayer that arises
to meet you now
as you slice open
the box with a knife,
spread apart each
cardboard flap,
and unwrap each vial
with a yes, yes.

*

Communion

This is my body, broken for you.
These words arise as I greet
the morning sun, my bare feet
sinking into the soft earth. All
my dead lie below me, their bones
feeding the soil, feeding the plants
and animals that make their way
to my dinner plate. Today I feel
their strength beneath me, holding
me up. Others have walked before
me. Others have shared my sorrow
and struggles. Others have wept
my tears. “Help me,” I pray,
offering myself to their bodies,
to the soil that grows me, to the sun
that warms my skin. Their bodies
were broken, too. They knew pain
and illness, loss and grief. They knew
the sting of betrayal and the ache
of failed dreams. I feel their broken
open bodies underneath me, the
cracked seeds of their hearts, each
body given to me this day so I may
rise, resurrected, to live.

*

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.

*

Karly is teaching a workshop for ONE ART this month (July 2025)!

Writing Through Illness
Instructor: Karly Randolph Pitman
Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern
Price: Sliding Scale
Event will be recorded
>>> Register for Karly’s workshop <<<

Two Poems by Michelle Menting

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

When the Dewpoint is High

July becomes a box of water,
one made of cardboard that seeps,

inside out, outside in. If August
is the Sunday of summer, July

is Wednesday—middle child
simmering. There is no Thursday

month-summer. I forget the gods
whose names we’ve borrowed

for time. I forget which people
created them. But I know

in summer, I pine for waves—
water over land impartial: rocks

eroded to sandy tears, mud
the mating of silt & clay,

humus an orgy of oak & ash,
buckthorn & maple, all dead,

all resting. I’ll float above
them all, that plethora of textures

bottoming waters—those lakes,
& ponds, rivers & oceans holding

us in. Submerge and resurface.
Maybe all gods are swimmers—

so much closer are we to holiness
in the depths of the bodies we choose.

*

The Gusts Reached 60mph

and then the power went out. Leaving us
in a darkness resembling our lives, the pitch

of your voice when it drives to cut, to fissure
a wound as deep as the temper that craves

to carve it. There is rain in December
in Maine, a downpour of confusion

as much spectacle as menace. We kept
waiting: for the lights to flicker,

for the hum of white noise to fade,
for that power to finally go out.

I no longer set aside candles. The matches
stay in the drawer. I’m used to these storms.

I know how to prepare, but I’m tired.
This one too will pass. The sun will return,

heating too hot a ground that should be
dormant. Frozen. Listen, I know now: night

is a shield of darkness that I’ve learned
to rest with. To hide within its corners.

To wait. Then walk in the thick mud
of another season’s morning.

*

Michelle Menting lives across a questionable bridge in rural Maine. Her poems, flash fictions, and flash nonfictions have appeared in Passages North, Cincinnati Review, Diagram, Tar River Poetry, and other places. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and directs a small-town library in midcoast Maine.

Three Poems by Amy Small-McKinney

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

We Are / I Am

How often did I sit beside
an older woman and ignore her?
What kind of tree

produces seeds encased in pealike
pods? I am searching
for its name. Call me if you know.

Call me if you are learning to love yourself,
your body that has lived through
seventy turns, at least.

At the park, the pond’s water appears textured
because of how the wind moves.
Wind, that body we don’t see,

except when it forces us to lose
what we love, a hat or—
We begin and we end.

Somewhere in between—
today—a young woman turned away.
I am her old woman.

Call me if you know
how to trace the blossoms’ origins.
How to look closely

to find the solid seedcoat
that must be broken
before another Redbud tree is born.

*

Paper, Tree, Ascension

On the mountain edge my daughter
talked me down.
My body, a slip of paper.
Why would I want to rise?
I’m afraid of heights.
Nothing but clouds and the sun
coming and going.

Romantics adore sunset.
I don’t like it.
It means opening to the arrogance
of the dark forcing its way through light.
It means remembering my husband
does not remember,
confuses day and night.

I love those mornings
when I am the only one awake,
when silence is my audience,
my consolation. This is my heaven.

If I had to ascend, I would become a tree.
Solid, I would not drift away.
Only my topmost limbs rising.
The slim document of my life would remain.
Beneath me, a woman would rest.

*

Missing Sock

uncovered from inside
my aging body

beneath mounds of carping voices
and a lifetime of a killdeer’s

displays of distraction
intent on staying safe.

I am grateful to have found it—
this softer self—as though another

heart unlocked.
How long have we been lost?

Very nearly forever.

*

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

Love in People, Not Things by Laura Foley

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Love in People, Not Things

When my mother died, she left behind
few things in her one room
assisted living space.

Some clothes, of course,
and a worn black leather purse.
In it, I discovered,

wrapped in shiny silver paper,
a chocolate, with a message inside,
repeated in five languages,

a fortune candy,
Italian dark chocolate
crisped with hazelnuts, so

I ate it.
Alone in a room emptied of her,
holding almost nothing she owned,

I read and re-read
her last message to me.

*

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, American Life in Poetry, ONE ART, and included in anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

Magpie by Hope Rudebusch

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Magpie

Magpie on the metal rail,
black and white,
echoing the mountain behind—
black pine and white snow.

Wrapped in fleece,
I wait for the water
to boil—
morning tea.

You are gone—
the house feels empty.
There won’t be oranges for breakfast.
And the magpie
and the mountain—
who will share their beauty?

*

Hope Rudebusch lives in Northern Arizona and writes poems rooted in memory, ritual, and the natural world. Her work explores quiet moments of connection and loss. This is her first publication.

Beyond the Childhood Horizon by Chloe Yue Zhou

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Beyond the Childhood Horizon

A child ran across the damp field,
pushing open the half-shut door,
discovering silence in the hollowed house.
The sound of her footsteps, with the falling
raindrops in the wood, echoed in the space.

Living under someone else’s roof,
her chopsticks extended with timid care.
She got used to walking on tiptoes, trembling
with constant fear. Even when she grew into an adult, her heart
shivered still when she saw those faces with smiles.
The world seemed like stage of judgement,
every move, every word observed and measured.

And you were jammed
among a crowd of boys at the classroom table,
cursed and whipped, yet
blamed by the teacher as the instigator.
The bruises on your arms have long since faded. The pain
remains, like a sad old song
whose melody lingers on
while its lyrics have already been forgotten.

Hope was to wait at the community gate, staring
at the cars driving from the way from home,
searching for familiar faces.

Your mother finally came to visit.
At the end of the day, she
tempted you with your favorite snacks,
then left you sobbing on the street, screaming.
That day you learned independence, and came to believe that
bad things would happen when someone offers you kindness.

No more screaming. Only endless waiting, and reunion
for a few Spring Festival days.
Unreachable sky
woven into the void of a child’s dream.
The waiting seems like winter wind in a coastal city, the
fleeting moment of togetherness is a sip of
honey, sweet and brief, after all
the opportunity of having the taste, just to take it away.

Always at dusk, the color of love
shadowed the blazing horizon,
far, spinning, receding.

This is a page written
in a private language. Every stroke
the weight of shadows.
Each syllable the vibration of the unspoken words.

Gazing into memories is to peer into a stifling well,
trapped there, a child is lost,
eagerly staring still,
toward the direction
from which the cars are approaching.

*

Chloe Yue Zhou is a poet and a translator currently living in Shanghai. She is a member of the Zhuang ethnic group, a minority in southern China. Influenced by Zhuang culture, Chinese traditional and Western poets, her poetic contents and style are diverse and cross-cultural. Her work has appeared in Moonstone Press, Tin Can Poetry, Shot Glass Journal, the Henniker Review, and elsewhere.

At the Edge of the Ocean by Rick Swann

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

At the Edge of the Ocean

Three days after my heart tissue inflamed
my brother died. The phone call came
on a cloudless day. I remember, because I hate
beautiful weather on days I’m sick. I thought
my sister had called to check on my health,
as my brother had done two nights before.
Then, like most times my brother and I talked
when one of us was sick, we’d joked about
who’d die first. That day, for the first time,
we talked about our near-death experiences—
my car accident, his coronary that made
the news because one of his students
performed the CPR that kept him alive—
the calmness we felt at the end, how we pictured
the people that mattered most, the letting go,
the gift of time only near-death can give.

Today, I began a poem about the weather,
how the steady drizzle reflected my mood.
I was going to ask if weather should reflect
our mood or change it. Weather carries extra
weight along the coast. I live on the shore
of Puget Sound. My brother lived on an island
in Maine. We shared views of water, but
different oceans. Right now, despite the rain,
there’s a touch of pale blue in the water’s surface.
Dull gray clouds hang overhead like drab sheets
in need of bleach and sunshine. Slate-colored
waves roll up the graveled shore one after
the other, the hiss of their retreat back
into the sea sounding just like the ventilator
the hospital used to keep my brother alive
until his children arrived to say their good-byes.

*

Rick Swann’s poems have been appeared in ONE ART, English Journal, Autumn Sky Poetry, Typehouse, Last Stanza, and other publications. He is a former Seattle Schools librarian whose children’s book of linked poems Our School Garden! was awarded the Growing Good Kids Book Award from the American Horticultural Society.

AGONAL by Bunny Goodjohn

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

AGONAL

After Matthew Dickman’s ‘Love’

Try as we might, we cannot help but die
in full view of the living: kissing brides,
choosing apples in the supermarket,
burying our fingers in the clothes
and folds of strangers. We die
when we are most alive: running
a marathon, braving Karaoke, choking
on a half-chewed piece of bread.
Twenty-somethings study
our wrecked hands over the edge
of their cell phones: they recommit
to skin care, renew their gym membership.
They too are dying. We die
in doctors’ waiting rooms watching
house renovation shows and navigating
online check-ins designed for the young
and good eyesight. We would sacrifice
to a god that skips the scales and tells us
how much time we have left. We go
to funerals like we used to go
to birthday parties and star in the dead’s
slideshow. We take more photographs.
At eight, I was struck mute at the slaughter
of Bambi’s mother, at how quickly she went
from here to not here with no regard
for what she left behind. A broken heap
of absence. How quickly our mothers leave us.
I’ve no time for churches with all their dead
saints and crypts. Even so, I’d like to light
a Roman candle for myself, ignite
until the matches run out. Each morning
I sit cross-legged on a cushion and imagine
my own death. I am quiet, intact, content.
Until I imagine myself kicked to death
by dwarves. My mother loved no one
but my father. Would not dance with the nurse
out of respect for a dead man. She imagined
him watching her from a celestial workbench
forever fixing the last thing she broke.
When Bolan died, the girls wore black
armbands, punctuated assembly that morning
with showy sobs. The boys were embarrassed
as boys often are. Death jumps categories:
my iPad dies every day, exhausted
by my need to know; on the counter,
lemons continue, incrementally, to die.
The boy who wrecked me died
when I was twelve. My mother bought me
a black dress, all velvet crush. I cried
with the best of them. I have paid good money
for death: the vets’ syringes, the patches of fur
shorn from the back legs. All slipped away smooth
save the three-legged cat who fought death
as if death were the neighbor’s German Shepherd
come to call him out through the fence. Yesterday,
I found a bee motionless on the deck rail.
I fed her sugar water and blew gently
across her wings. She drank and flew again
until the dog snapped her from the air.

*

Bunny Goodjohn is published in both poetry and prose. Her poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals including Connecticut Review, Zone 3, The Texas Review, Kestrel, and The Cortland Review. Her poetry collection Bone Song (Briery Creek Press, VA) was published in 2015. She has published two novels: The Beginning Things (Underground Voices, CA) and Sticklebacks and Snow Globes (Permanent Press). www.bunnygoodjohn.com

Two Poems by Scott Ferry

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

[sometimes the kitchen cleans itself]

sometimes the kitchen cleans itself
the shower shines white as the prayers of clouds

i look around and there are no grievances
even god’s nametag is crisp

and i take a breath and wait
another breath and wait

i don’t trust the sky to
hold

*

[my son spends two hours at the beach]

my son spends two hours at the beach
collecting body parts of dead crabs
i let him drift down the coast
as long as i can still see him
and i become a thing that sits
and stares at the water

the wind stops and the puget sound
becomes a white mirror
people and birds flick along
like sputtering fuses
my heart an open conduit
of brine and lost time

my son comes and reports
all of his discoveries the sharp footed crab leg
the ancient jaw of an extinct shrimp
a guarding claw or a killing claw
the fossil of a sea scorpion
the mouth pieces that slice

i don’t usually let time go like this
so i slowly gather it pull him from the devonian age
place all the skeletons into a bigger skeleton
he is not yet a being of the clock
so he transverses the river
his feet dappled light in a stream

of light all going toward the sound
and refilling spilling refilling
us transporting our brittle bones
against a current for a flash of
silver through the roots and a hand to
hold on the way back home

*

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His most recent books are 500 Hidden Teeth (Meat For Tea), Sapphires on the Graves (Glass Lyre), and dear tiny flowers (Sheila-Na-Gig).

Two Poems by Jennifer Mills Kerr

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Why I Write

Because yesterday, I saw a flock of birds,
circling silver-white, wings a sparkling

platinum ring, a proposal that can’t be denied.
Because I want to thread their music into lines,

or at least try. Because today my mind’s a
cellar, dimly-lit, with piles of torn fabric, and

I need to knit all my unrequited pieces.
Because somehow I still believe words

can answer our distances, our broken
relationships, every cracked window

distorting sight. Why can’t words be fire?
Why can’t they cauterize? And why can’t

I stop the urge to write when our world
declares it a waste of time? And on bad

days, so do I? Because those soaring
birds! They’ll never crash or change

or die, unlike you or I. Because the
page can be our sky.

* 

Last Light of Winter’s Day

Flying crows fade within the oaks’ dark arms,
and the lake, flickering with what light remains,
like tinsel after a holiday.

Standing at my garden gate, I’m awakened to
loss again, how it shines with what’s missing,
with what’s missed.

Loss isn’t inside lab tests. It doesn’t live within
my will or all the doctors’ visits, but sparkles
inside its own darkness–

a coin peeking from wet dirt, water blinking
at the bottom of a well, and the oak branches,
blatantly stripped,

blatantly open, now hold the light of dusk,
a whispering silver, so soft, so brief,
so precious.

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. An East Coast native, she loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Sonoma County. Her poems are forthcoming in The Inflectionist Review and SWWIM. Say hello at https://jennifermillskerr.carrd.co/

Nothing Gold by Kim Addonizio

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Nothing Gold

          Nothing gold can stay.
                    — Robert Frost

And nothing else can stay, either–
not the pay phone or parking meter,
not the coo and keck of the passenger
pigeon or the ambivalent lover
returning to his wife. A banner
saying Everything Must Go sags over
the failed restaurant supply store.
A plane takes off with a living brother
and lands with a dead one. Another
black car arrives at the gates. Dear
anyone, tell me how to hear
the sea’s consoling murmur
as it withdraws, then savages the shore.
Tell me how to love the nevermore.

*

Kim Addonizio has published over a dozen books of poetry and prose. Her most recent poetry collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton). Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life was published by Penguin. Her poetry has been widely translated and anthologized. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist. She teaches Zoom poetry workshops in Oakland, CA. https://www.kimaddonizio.com

ONE ART’s End-of-Pride-Month But Not End of Pride Reading

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Join ONE ART’s EIC Mark Danowsky and poet Alison Lubar as they host queer poets from ONE ART’s archives and the Philly poetry scene for an end-of-pride-month, but not end of Pride celebration! Poets will begin their set with a poem by a LGBTQIA+ predecessor of their choosing, then read their own work. All proceeds from the event will be donated to the Trans Lifeline.

***

ONE ART’s End-of-Pride-Month But Not End of Pride Reading
Co-hosted by Alison Lubar
Monday, June 30
6:00-8:00pm Eastern
Featured Poets: Jennifer Espinoza, Sean Hanrahan, m. mick powell, Amy Beth Sisson, Louisa Schnaithmann, Nicole Tallman, Abby E. Murray

>>> Tickets Available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)
Please note: All proceeds from the event will be donated to the Trans Lifeline.

***

About Our Co-Host:

Alison Lubar (they/themme) teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary, biracial Nikkei femme whose life work has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices to young people. They’re the author of two full-length poetry books, The Other Tree, winner of Harbor Editions’ Laureate Prize (forthcoming September 2025), and METAMOURPHOSIS (fifth wheel press, 2024), as well as four chapbooks. Find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison.

About Our Featured Poets:

Jennifer Espinoza (she/her) is a poet whose work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, the American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Poem-a-day @poets.org, and elsewhere. She is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks), THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (The Accomplices) and I Don’t Want To Be Understood (Alice James Books). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and currently resides in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog.

Sean Hanrahan (he, him, his) is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collections Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt) and Ghost Signs (2023 Alien Buddha), and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in various anthologies and journals. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days, Ekphrastic Poetry, Poetry Embodied, and has hosted and read at poetry events throughout Philadelphia. He can be found on Instagram as gaycakepoet.

m. mick powell (they/she) is a poet, professor, artist, Aries, and the author of threesome in the last Toyota Celica and other circus tricks and DEAD GIRL CAMEO, forthcoming from One World Books this August. Find them on all social media platforms @mickmakesmagic.

Amy Beth Sisson (she/her) lives near the skunk cabbages in a town outside of Philly. She is a winner of the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia’s Joyful Abundance: Emerging Artist Commissioning Program, 2025. Amy Beth is a Special Projects Editorial Assistant for Fence Publishers and a former Associate Artist with the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.

Louisa Schnaithmann (she/her) is a relentlessly bisexual poet who is the author of Plague Love (Moonstone Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Summerset Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is the consulting editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry and lives in southeastern Pennsylvania. You can order a copy of Plague Love here.

Nicole Tallman (she/her) lives in Miami, where she serves as the official Poetry Ambassador. She is the author of four poetry books including her most recent, Dolce Vita/Let There Be a Little Light. She is also a Poetry and Interviews Editor for South Florida Poetry Journal and The Blue Mountain Review. Find her most recent poems in Poetry Magazine, Poet Lore, Pleiades, and ONLY POEMS. Find her on social media @natallman and at nicoletallman.com.

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. As a nonbinary pacifist married to a cis-gender active duty army officer, they’ve spent their adult life writing and researching the struggle for voice and listening between disparate communities. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Prize from Ex Ophidia Press and has been nominated for the National Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches writing to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington. 

Force Fed by Kimmy Chang

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Force Fed

I spoon pepper pork into plastic—not to save sauce,
but to stretch its warmth across the silence
where my reply should be.

Ma scoffs: the wok wasn’t hot enough.
“American pans,” she says, “only good for eggs and regret.”
Steam clings like doubt, stinging my eyes
like the job I never chased.

All week, interviews line up,
as if I never left this kitchen. I stir. I wait.
I mouth polite answers that fade
while your voice crackles above the sizzle.

“Tell me about a time you failed,” they ask.
“Inclined to decline,” I joke—
but it sticks in my throat like pepper and blame,
too rough to swallow.

“Eat more pork,” you urge, though allergic.
You recall Cutie, begging on her hind legs.
“Not the new pup,” you sigh.

And I drift to Cutie’s kidneys failing—
guilt flooding the memory.

You tell me to pack the rice.
The new puppy laps sauce from my leg.
I scrape the pot clean, grain by grain,
whispering, let it stay whole—

as if saving rice might save something else.

*

Kimmy Chang is working toward her first chapbook. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in trampset, Scapegoat Review, and Sky Island Journal. She studied poetry at Stanford and works as a Computer Vision Engineer. Originally from McKinney, TX, she enjoys spoiling her two tiny, rambunctious fluffs.

Into the Empty Hours by Subhaga Crystal Bacon

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Into the Empty Hours

Outside, the spring grasses
rise up in tiny blades
yet I do the cutting.
I walk and walk, back
and forth behind the mower
with its front wheel drive
that pulls me like a wave.
The alder snags sticks
in my hair and the dying red
pine its brown needles.
They both need to be cut—
cut back, cut down. If a tree
can be a friend, then these
keep their counsel. One
tugs off my hat, the other
spreads death onto my shoulders.
What have I made of my life
except this loneliness?

*

Subhaga Crystal Bacon (they/them) is a poet from rural northcentral WA. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Terrain, Alaska Women Speak, Collateral, Action/Spectacle, and Mom Egg Review. Subhaga is the author of Transitory, BOA Editions, and A Brief History of My Sex Life, forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books.

ONE ART’s July 2025 Reading

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

ONE ART’s July 2025 Reading

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

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

The reading will be held on Sunday, July 20 at 2pm Eastern.

The official event is expected to run approximately 2-hours.

After the reading, please consider sticking around for Q&A with Featured Poets & Community Time (general conversation).

About Our Featured Poets:

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

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.

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her two books are: No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot. Poetry credits include The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, and Plume. 

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

Four Poems by Alex Stolis

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Phantom Threads

When I was five, Dad would leave a bag of bar
chips at the foot of my bed at 4AM.

Even then I knew it was an offering, an amends
for imagined sins; that took years to understand.

I felt fragile, responsible, as if I was the one who
needed to apologize; for existing, for not finding

the right words as if a kid could have a vocabulary
or understanding of how to end a perpetual cycle

of poisonous sabotage, a legacy built before being
born; a foundation laid before the Ace High,

US Steel, before the endless trek across an aloof
ocean to an adopted land. It began before English

was a second language; anger self-doubt guilt shame,
all that contraband smuggled in from the Old Country;

generational threads used to weave a tapestry,
one side warmth and fire

the other a cold, frozen ache passed down, down
down, an unintended inheritance until I decided

to bury that tainted treasure, without a map,
making it impossible for my kids to find.

Every night I pretended to be asleep, devoured
the Lay’s in bed as soon as I woke up.

The berating he received from Mom tempered
by her smile, reserved solely for me,

became the spark for another explosive day;
one more stitch to be tied, knotted. Unraveled.

*

1995 Morgan Park High School All-Class Reunion Part II

I remember transistor radios, eight-tracks and unfiltered cigarettes,
women in bouffants, high heeled and lip-sticked doing housework;
casseroles and televisions with three channels because PBS didn’t
count after you outgrew Sesame Street.

All-Star Wrestling: Baron Von Raschke, Iron Sheik, Verne Gagne;
we went digging for treasure in the cellar, playing mom’s old 45’s
and 78’s; Heartbreak Hotel, Wake up Little Susie, Long Tall Sally.
I remember Topps Baseball Cards, the inedible-hard-as-rock-gum

we trashed instantly; touch and tackle football behind St Elizabeth’s,
Father Dulcina shouting out to the altar boys to not be late for mass.
Every grandparent or parent an immigrant: Serbia, Greece, Albania,
Yugoslavia; all the fathers/brothers/uncles worked at the Steel Mill,

third shift waiting at the door for the bars to open, to cash paychecks,
drink the regret from their lives. I remember shouts and breaking glass,
name calling and cursing, smell of whiskey, beer, impatience, yearning.
I remember the sting of flat-handed slaps, the stiff pummel of fists.

Too-quiet evenings exploding into 2 am war-zone mornings, cries muffled
by the clap clap of trains running. I remember unrequited crushes, undying
loyalty and fleeting hatred, shifting alliances, running gags, cruelty born
from boredom. Speed, weed, Thunderbird and Mad Dog 20/20, lukewarm

Windsor Cokes and cold snaps of shame. We were the unloved, unwanted
unclaimed strays; holding hands, awkward first kisses, and copping a feel.
Laying in empty fields, some stranger’s bed praying for the world to stop
churning. Knowing we could live forever. It was only a matter of time.

*

The Wonder Years

My father took me hiking once; an ill conceived
picnic/trek combo behind our five-room apartment.

The trail loosely marked, we weren’t dressed
properly; Dad in lightweight khakis, shiny shoes.

Me, Batman t-shirt, shorts, tennies with holes
in the sole; my sister sun-dressed, learning to walk.

I don’t think he was drunk but at five-years old it’s hard
to tell; he was home so it must have been a weekday.

Benders were storms that gathered on cartoon Saturdays
or dress-up for church Sundays;

that swimming-hole July day was made for adventure.
Trains ran at night behind the house, not quite drowning

out their yelling-blaming, me believing it was my fault.
I knew those boxcars were headed to far-flung lands,

China, London, Africa, Italy, New York City. An escape
hatch into geography; every exotic country within reach.

Years later, my sister swore she had memories of that day.
Tears, she said; didn’t know whose, but surely not his.

I’ll never forget. Dad all slope-shouldered, wet with sweat,
silence and his permanent nothingwronghere smile;

me all bramble-scratched-dirty, feeling the low spark
and rumble of a binge in his footsteps.

*

If we knew how it felt to be free we could hold back rivers

On the swingset at Stowe Elementary we planned
our getaway; teen bodies awkwardly squeezed on
the small planks. You tried to shock me by taking
out a cigarette, gave me a canary swallowing smile,
asked for a light. You laughed when I flipped my
Zippo, fired you up, then lit my own Camel straight.
You recognized me from fourth period Spanish II;

wanted to move to Spain, raise horses, never get
married. I said Bien Catalina! You chewed your lip
told me you preferred Cat; French inhaled like a pro.
Wasn’t until later I noticed the burns on your arm,
later still, your scarred thighs when you wore short
-shorts. I wondered what it’d be like to kiss you, feel
the drum of your fingers on my chest. You exhaled

a stream of smoke, said you liked my name, sounded
like a poem or a fairytale hero; took my hand, pointed
to the sky, Alejandro, es luna de cosecha. The next day
at school, I tried too hard to be cool, pretended to not
know you. You pretended to not care. After I went off
to college I heard you were fired from Far West Market.
Frankie caught you spiking the milk jugs with vodka;

you shouted at him over your shoulder, Can’t anyone take
a joke in this joke of a town? I wonder if you ever made
it out of that one-horse life with five bars, two churches,
the poker-faced disapproval from self-anointed saints.
From my kitchen window, I watch kids in the playground
across the street; listen for the pounding of hooves, wait
for a Harvest Moon to rise.

*

Alex Stolis lives in upstate New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra; he has had poems published in numerous journals. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Ekphrastic Review, Louisiana Literature Review, Burningwood Literary Journal, and Star 82 Review. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press.

Two Poems by Brooke Herter James

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

When Everything Everywhere Seems So Grim

along comes the tatted-up guy
who beckons me into bay 2 at Jiffy Lube,
waving rag flags in both hands,
sleeves rolled high, cap to the side,
grinning and whistling to the tunes
rising from the well below.
The way he asks which oil I prefer
and How your wipers doin’?
makes something turn over inside me
like a hard tug on the rototiller
that’s been rusting in the barn all winter
and suddenly, surprisingly, restarts.
Anyway, that’s how I feel
when he shouts to his crew
No extras in Bay 2,
let’s get this lady through!
And now there’s three of them
hovering over my engine with hoses
and dipsticks, banging and clanging,
like the pit stop crew at the Indy 500.
Ten minutes later, just like the sign says,
they clunk shut my hood, give the thumbs up
and wave me out into midday traffic
amidst the smell of burgers, hot tar, and lilacs.
It’s the first Saturday of summer.
I think I might just be feeling it.

*

How My Father Taught Me to Wade Across the River

The trick, he said,
is to be afraid—
first of moving forward,
then of turning back.

*

Brooke Herter James’s poetry has appeared in online and printed journals, including ONE ART, Rattle, Bloodroot Literary and Orbis. She is the author of several poetry chapbooks and one children’s picture book. She lives in Vermont.

Three Poems by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

My Goldilocks Closet

There’s a place in the back of my closet,
where I hang my memory. I have this fear
that someday I’ll plummet again, that I
will forget how to be happy. Back there
is where I store the purple dress I wore
for my second wedding, just in case
I want to wear it for our anniversary. But
it’s three sizes too big. And that’s a good
thing—finally learning the art of self-care.
There’s that black velvet number, trimmed
with mink, I wore to a country club soiree.
Oh, to wear that dress again—such a classic—
alas, it’s two sizes too small. And let’s face it:
even if it did fit, it wouldn’t really “fit” this
body “of a certain age.” I try on the denim jumper,
the one appliqued with black kittens popping
out of pumpkins. The one I wore decades ago
trick-or-treating with my kids. Somehow, it fits
“just right.” I slip my hand inside the pocket,
find a wadded-up Skittles wrapper, and inhale
the rainbow of my children’s youth.
A happiness I will never forget.

*

A Second Life

Every time I toss an empty Country Crock
into the recycle bin, I feel a tinge of guilt.
But also, I smile.

MeMaw was known for her pantry
full of Trailer Park Tupperware, saving
containers that once offered up

cool whipped-cream dollops atop
strawberry shortcake. Or those packed
with that almost just-like-butter taste

to spread on biscuits. She granted
each plastic vessel a second life.
Some cradled batches

of snickerdoodles
on their journey to my dorm—
small packets of love

to soothe away my homesick blues.
My roommate asked me why
anyone would ship a tub

of margarine. I laughed.
Then I saw her brown saucer eyes
speak of loneliness.

I un-burped the lid,
to open the tub, offered her
a cinnamon-sugared treat,

so she, too, could know
the taste of home—
she, so far away from her own.

*

Labels

Have you ever noticed the women
who linger in the canned food aisle? How
they will stand there in their comfortable shoes,
wearing a modest shade of pink lipstick to
perk up an exhausted smile, scrutinizing and
scanning each label: cans of creamed corn,
stewed tomatoes, garbanzo beans, and soup.
Is it the calories? Allergies? Price?

After weeks in the ICU, he is finally coming home.
I pore over every prescription protocol; key-in
each doctors’ number into my phone; make copies
of his Patient Implant Card to tuck into my wallet.
I buy one of those easy-to-read neon pill caddies,
so he never misses a dose from the armada of pills
fighting for his failing heart.

I scan a list from my pocket. How long have I
been standing here holding this can, reading
this label? I get it now—what it means to join
the sorority of salt seekers. Our faithful mission:
rooting out sodium dangers at every possible turn.
I understand these tedious, loving acts
and the monumental task to save the hearts
that beat in unison with our own.

*

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.

Writing Through Illness: A Workshop with Karly Randolph Pitman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Writing through Illness: A Workshop with Karly Randolph Pitman

“Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you. Your feelings need you. Go home and be there for all of these things.”  – Thich Nhat Hanh

Illness – of all shapes and forms – is a complex threshold. As we journey through her doors, we meet change, loss, fear, pain, grief, fatigue, gratitude, wonder, awe – the full mystery of what it means to be human and to live in a human body.

In this online playshop, we’ll explore, write and share our way into a more generous, deeper connection with the complexity that arises when we host an illness in our body’s ‘guest house.’ We’ll use writing practices, presence, and poetry to meet these guests and nurture a more regenerative, curious, and compassionate relationship with our bodies, hearts, and minds. 

What might illness have to share with us? How might it meet us? How might we meet it?

This workshop is open to anyone who’s been touched by illness – their own, a loved one’s, a friend’s – and all kinds of illness – physical illness, mental illness, chronic illness, sudden illness. All levels of writing experience are welcome.

If you can’t join us live, we’ll record our time together so you can explore it later at your own pace. 

***

An image, like a poem, powerfully conveys where we’re headed.

Let Your Grief Wash You to Another Shore 

Used with the kind permission of the artist, Eddy Sara.

Find more about Eddy Sara on his website.

***

Writing Through Illness
Instructor: Karly Randolph Pitman
Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern
Price: Sliding Scale
Event will be recorded

>>> Register for Karly’s workshop <<<

***

~ About The Workshop Leader ~

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.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

The Old Neighborhood

Frankie was working with a crew
replacing a roof in the old
neighborhood when two women

passed on the sidewalk below.
Frankie wolf-whistled, put
his hands behind his head

and gyrated his hips while
the other guys laughed. It was
a long day under a brutal sun

and harassing women was
one of the few perks of the job.
But it was a mistake

to target two women who
had grown up in the neighborhood
and knew a thing or two about

men. Annie, who was ten years
older than Frankie but looked
half her age, was a prison guard

and Maria, a teacher at
Southside High, had grown up
with four brothers. Annie

squinted at Frankie, pointed
and shouted I know who you are.
You’re Mario’s little brother.

Your mother Anastasia Zaveni
scrubbed floors every night of her life
after your pig of a father

left her with seven kids to raise
by herself. It would break
her heart to hear her son

yell at women on the
street, women who have sons
of their own. And Maria

joined in, shouting I’m going
over to Ruth Street right now
to tell Anastasia

you’re a pig just like your
father. And
Big Man Frankie shrank

to a small boy and pleaded
in a voice Annie and Maria
could barely hear

Oh please don’t tell my mother.
Please don’t. Annie could hear
the pain in his voice

and remembered Anastasia’s
shame at her poverty
and pride in her boys

and she knew she and Maria
would never tell Anastasia.
But the guys on the crew

roared with laughter
at Frankie getting schooled
by two tough broads,

and the rest of the day
the foreman gave Frankie
the roughest jobs on

the hottest part of the roof
and when Frankie complained
the other guys who now

remembered their own mothers,
sisters, wives and daughters
told him to shut his trap

or they would tell his mother
what a miserable excuse of a man
she’d raised.

*

Summers

Klaus and I painted
my house waiting
for my son to be born
Mac and I delivered
gravel all summer

The summer I taught
fourteen year old boys
unsteady in their desks
the summer the cop
arrested me in pity

The summer my first wife
fled from me and I woke
in the back of a truck
with men speaking Spanish

But that was long before
I woke every dawn
to swim two miles
beside the old man
who loved everyone

My son was born blue
in summer my daughter
pink in summer I remember
The summer of our delinquency
The summer of our deliverance

The summer I stole a surfboard
and spent the whole day
riding waves to shore

*

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

The Question by Sonya Rose Hartfield

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The Question

As my fertile years
fall away like
milk teeth, my
dentist asks me
again if I have kids.
“Only a fur baby,” I reply
for the second time,
promptly canceling my
next visit. My dog lies
against my womb, warm.
I photoshop his image into
ultrasound photos I show when
people ask if I have children.
“Here is my baby,” I tell them
rather than joke about
infertility, like a sociopath. In truth,
we just aren’t ready yet. I once did
a reiki session on my
sister’s womb, felt her baby
bright inside, like a nursery
nebula, felt wonder at the
kicks, as the baby became
more active, like a little
alien pushing to be
exorcised, but
still so beautiful.

*

Sonya Rose Hartfield is a poet and creative nonfiction writer who explores the intersection of femininity, chronic illness, somatic healing, poverty, and grief. She believes writing is a powerful vehicle for resilience and the radical act of reclaiming joy.

When You Live Alone with a Chronic Illness by Derek Eugene Daniels

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

When You Live Alone with a Chronic Illness

Holidays are the worst. Nothing open, no one
to call if the dizziness worsens. I prefer weekdays
so I can leave the office door open or stay near

the copier, where I’m visible. Weekends –
it depends. I walk around the condo questioning
every time I feel like I’m teetering. No one around

to say this might be normal, maybe okay, perhaps a side effect
of the medicine. Late Friday, almost midnight. I can’t stop
vomiting. I call the nurse hotline, respond to her irrelevant

questions, my phone in one hand, the other clutching
my stomach, my face in the toilet. Would you like me
to just send a vehicle, sir? Her shift must be ending

soon. I make way downstairs to the lobby, inform
the desk attendant to watch for the EMS truck,
his legs sprawled over the counter, watching a portable

television. Two strong men in uniform find me, carry me gently
to the vehicle, the way my father used to hold me close
to his chest when I complained of a stomach ache. As I lie sideways

on the bench, they ask what I do for a living. That must really be
rewarding. After being admitted, I lay in bed, the thin curtain
separating me from coughs, sneezes, conversations I can’t help

but overhear. No one knows I’m here. I fight to stay awake
protecting my wallet this time. Discharged the next morning,
I wonder about my way home. When the nurse replies,

No, none of our service shuttles are available, I walk out alone
on a Saturday morning, crossing empty sidewalks and streets,
the clouds kind enough to hold back the rain.

*

Derek Eugene Daniels is a speech-language pathologist and an associate professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders (speech-language pathology) at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He is a member of Springfed Arts creative writing organization and regularly participates in creative writing workshops. Derek has been a finalist multiple times in the annual Springfed Arts Poetry Contest. His poems have appeared in Call+Response Journal. Derek is passionate about self-expression, intersectionality, and his work with marginalized communities. In 2023, Derek received the Professional of the Year Scholar and Service Award from the National Stuttering Association for his scholarly and community service contributions to the stuttering community. In 2025, he received the William T. Simpkins, Jr., Service Award from the National Black Association for Speech-Language and Hearing for his notable contributions to the organization. Derek enjoys country music, 80s music, 80s and 90s television shows, and handwritten notes.

Atlas by Claudia Gary

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Atlas

The world begins to wear
a flat spot into my shoulder.

I carry it by turns with my
writing and nonwriting hand.

Oceans lap at my temples.
Submarine and whale songs

confuse my ear so I
change sides again and shake

a cramp out of one forearm.
My fingers seek mountaintops

to stay away from city traffic,
seek coasts to avoid immersion

except for this one coast
that began to burn my palm.

Closing my eyes and bowing
my head I wonder what

is happening in this story
but can’t yet put it down.

*

Claudia Gary lives near Washington DC and teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also a health/science writer, visual artist, composer of tonal songs and chamber music, and an advisory editor of New Verse Review. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music, and some of her settings, can be found online at https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html. See also pw.org/content/claudia_gary

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

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

I Can’t Find My Gender

I must have set my gender down on the bus
and left it there for anyone to find.

Somewhere, a stranger turns my gender over
in his hands, holds it up to his ear, hears nothing.

I never thought to write my name on my gender,
or my phone number. For months, I thought

that I had swallowed my gender, somehow
absorbed it into my bones or my beautiful fat,

but I’ve had x-rays, MRIs, and mammograms
and the results showed no sign of my gender—

just dense breast tissue, an ulcer, some arthritis.
A colleague told me he assumed I was a woman

because of my earrings, the gold hoops, a gift
I was sad to smash in search of my gender:

Nothing. Just busted swirls of metal, genderless.
I’ve been told I talk like a man, so I recorded

my voice, played it backward and forward,
slowed down and sped up, and all I heard

was sound and language any human could use,
no matter their gender. Sometimes I wonder

if there are organizations with facilities where
my gender can find shelter, where it can be safe

until I come to claim it, and my gender
will know me when I walk in, will run to me

before the string of tin bells above the door
have stopped jingling their one-of-a-kind jingle,

so many ways for new songs to be sung
by the same instruments each day, each hour,

and my gender will jump into my arms
and a volunteer will say no doubt about it,

that’s your gender. But I also wonder—usually
at parties or before big work presentations

when I am lonely for my gender or given
a gender that isn’t mine to hold—whether

my gender is having the time of its life
wherever it is, whether it is thriving

on the kindness of those who notice it
and let it be, because sometimes I can’t find

my gender and yet I know it is there,
unable to be parted from me, its soft tongue

licking and licking the palm of my hand.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, recently won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Ex Ophidia Press. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.

Perhaps by Jo Taylor

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Perhaps

        The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing
        to call the future.
                —Tennessee Williams

I see tomorrow dimly, some spots
on the canvas smudged. Like

a painting with too much water
on the lilies, bleeding unwanted

textures, dark patches at the edge.
Perhaps there’s a house, trees and

shrubs in the background. Or
is that children on the horizon,

playing catch or red rover,
tug-of-war or tag? Perhaps a single

figure along the shadowy line? Maybe
it’s two, one holding up the other.

*

Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. In 2021, she published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire, and in 2025, she published her second book, Come before Winter (Kelsay Books). She has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net. Connect with her on Facebook or at https://www.jotaylorwrites.com/

On Plagiarism by Nicole Caruso Garcia

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On Plagiarism

You do what harm? I’d call it literary
masturbation, but let’s not knock an earnest
art: self-love—your own artillery
or sniper’s trigger. Fellow poets sneer at

not so much the theft but molestation
of the Muse. Your touch perverts the words,
left cheapened on a satinet loom.
Yet no one ought to put you to the sword.

Some silky day, you may find your flow,
the village cold, your poems crying wolf.

*

Nicole Caruso Garcia’s full-length debut OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press) recently received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Best New Poets, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere. She serves as associate poetry editor at Able Muse and as an executive board member at Poetry by the Sea, an annual poetry conference in Madison, CT. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

Re: Frank O’Hara, Cameron Awkward-Rich by Anna Gilmour

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Re: Frank O’Hara, Cameron Awkward-Rich

I’m up on fluoxetine
medication in an emergency
meditating on an insurgency
it’s 59 degrees
our garden’s sprouting jasmine green
AOC & Bernie hit the streets
I’m rereading Ross Gay
and relearning how to dream
golden hour finches dot the trees

the half-life of fear is hatred or fatigue
I’m sleeping deep
more interested in joy than grief
or, at least, the place they meet
Emmett’s taking his first steps
William’s swaddled to Sam’s chest
rabbits watch over their nest
ears flat against their heads

he’s not dead yet
but nothing here is permanent

*

Anna Gilmour is a psychologist revisiting non-academic writing after a long hiatus. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Colorado Boulder. She lives, laughs, and loves in Colorado with her partner and their menagerie of pets.

After All These Years by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

After All These Years

In another room,
at the other end of the house,
my husband talks on the phone
for an hour with his ex-wife
discussing the joys and sorrows,
wonders and worries of their children,
the oldest of whom is fifty-four.

A frequent enough occurrence,
I have grown so accustomed
to their conversations
that I sometimes forget to marvel
at the way they navigate
the geography of family.

Even now, thirty years after they ceased
being husband and wife,
they have never stopped being curators
of what they co-created,
parents, separate but together,
like the coiled strands of DNA
that course through
the generations.

“Your divorce is better
than most marriages,” I tease,
when the three of us find ourselves
together at the holiday dinner table.
They laugh good-naturedly at the quip,
but it’s really not a joke.

It’s a testament to harmony,
to the way voices blend different notes
to create a more complex music.
I listen and am quietly awestruck as I think,
This is what peace sounds like.

*

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.

This by Laura Garfinkel

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This

        after Marianne Moore

My father used to say, This too shall pass
to anyone who would listen. My friends
repeat it back to me like some kind of balm
when needed. But everything passes—
days, months, years. Youth. When
did growing up turn to growing old?
Opportunities have passed or were taken.
Photos save chosen moments;
writing captures observations, thoughts—
our attempts to stop time, to taste it twice.
And the things we pass down, what remains?
My father used to say, This too shall pass
and now that he has passed, I wonder
when does this become that?

*

Laura Garfinkel retired from a career as a medical and psychiatric social worker. Her poems have appeared in Feral: A Journal of Poetry & Art, Moss Piglet, Tule Review, Last Stanza, and elsewhere. On weekends, she loves to hike and bike with her husband who makes her laugh and who she affectionately calls her muse. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Pacific University.

When Did My Evenings Return to the Shortest Routes by Olga Maslova

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

When Did My Evenings Return to the Shortest Routes

skipping your street—my vespers—
where, ten yards away,
I’d catch your silhouette
at 8 p.m. exactly:

soft table light. A plate.
a glass of wine,
some flowers, a sage-green wall.
Oh, Salve, my Regina.

It is a shock to see you by the window
in daylight, gazing out:
a quiet smile, a teacup, something blue,
smudged by receding darkness.

You’re not looking at me—
but at the dogwood.
You wouldn’t know my car—
I totaled the Subaru.

Have the hummingbirds returned,
or is it our old friend,
the robin from that first summer?
You kept its blue eggshells.

Our Bible was full of birds:
the swallows, owls, ravens.
We loved like cardinals,
and fought like magpies.

I don’t remember your body
ever this soft, this quiet, unfolded,
unfamiliar—as if you are waiting
for annunciation.

You draw the curtains.
I turn, head home,
toward the rising red full moon
in the hollowed evening.
The tunnel of scattered green April light—
my only consolation.

*

Olga Maslova is a Ukrainian-American writer and theater designer, born and raised in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. Maslova is the winner of LitMag’s 2025 Emily Dickinson Award for Poetry, and her work appears or is forthcoming in “Beloit Poetry Journal,” “New Ohio Review” (nominated for the 2024 Best of the Net), “New American Writing,” “Plume Poetry,” “Frontier Poetry” (second place, 2023 Ekphrastic Poetry Prize), “RHINO Poetry,” “Strange Horizons,” “Naugatuck River Review” (semi-finalist for the Naugatuck Prize), and elsewhere. Her manuscript “Light Travels” is a semifinalist for the 2024 St. Lawrence Book Award. She is also the librettist for several large-scale vocal works composed by Ilya Demutsky, including the oratorio “The Last Day of the Eternal City,” the opera “Black Square,” and the art song cycle “Venetian Cycle.” These works have been performed in Moscow, Russia, and in the U.S. Maslova is an associate professor of theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. More information can be found at https://www.olgapoetry.com.

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Photograph

His back to the camera
my father stands at the ocean’s edge.
Hands in his pockets, the flannel lining
thin as the hospital-issue robe
his own father wore over his pajamas.
“Go out to the hallway,”
he was told, “if you’re going to cry.”
Today, a moth stirs the air
near the dogwood. Circling and reversing.
Searching for more than is there.
The unopened leaf buds like half-said things.
At what edge does my father now stand?

*

On Suffering

Studying my reflection in the blossoming plums
I stumbled and fell.
My mother, who could never forgive my beauty
leaned over the examination table.
“Now you know how it feels,” she said.
It meaning life, I supposed.
The nurse gave me a tender look, her face radiant
with the world’s pain. A shoulder blade
was eased back into place.
Gravel removed with a surgical blade.
I imagined myself as the rock before it was crushed
and made into pavement. This was consolation.
I sensed all my troubles dropping away.

*

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 forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/

Two Poems by Christina Daub

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

People are Dying, But

I’m in my fifties when the officer informs me,
houses are for kissing, not parks and especially
not parks after dark, never mind that’s where
the moonlight and the stars hang out. She bores
her blinding headlights into us and barks,
are you clothed, why are your seats reclined,
what are you doing–we terrible criminals trying
to steal a little romance under Orion and Mars.
She demands to know where we live and why
we don’t go home, because houses are for kissing,
she repeats, as if I’d never thought I might kiss
you over the sink, or while paused in the doorway
handing you a book. Never mind the loveseat,
the corners, or the infamous nooks. As if I’d never
imagined the whole house being one big kisseria,
because that’s how it is when you’re in love
and want to kiss everywhere. But it’s a rough
night for the thin-lipped park policewoman
who looks like she hasn’t kissed in years, she
with the deadest beat, her short arm of the law
stretching only from her high beams to random
parked cars, as she makes her rounds in Rock Creek
Park, driving from playground to playground after dark.

*

Grief is like that

the plovers ticking this way and that, threading
the shore with their disappearing tracks,
the waves relentless, lulling, the wake
as temporary as our own wakes will be.

When they took your body away, the quarters
that weighed your eyes shut dropped
to the floor. No one wanted to touch them.

Cards stacked up by the hothouse flowers.
We’d held it together all day. Then the sky broke
open, and we were gutted like fish. Someone
brought over ice cream. I don’t remember who.

*

Christina Daub is a poet from Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Stone Circle Review and others. She has been a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.

The Hundred-Line Poem: A Workshop with Harriet Levin

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The Hundred-Line Poem

Instructor: Harriet Levin

Please Note: This is a four-week workshop
Virtual workshop meetings via Zoom

Dates: August 5, 12, 19, and 26 (Tuesdays)

Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern

Standard Price: $100
Economic Hardship: $75

Please note: This workshop is being rescheduled. Most likely for Winter 2025/26

Workshop Description:

Jump to the next level in your writing! Often we stop ourselves from exploring our material before we even confront it. Some of us may hold misconceptions about resolutions and endings or how to lean into narrative leaps. Together, we will practice slowing down our pace, spreading out, sustaining our concentration as we carpet our poems to fill the space of an entire room. We’ll read examples of hundred-line poems, including poem cycles, sequences, centos, and narratives, written by poets such as Walt Whitman, Octavio Paz, Larry Levis, Frank O’Hara, Diane Suess, Marilyn Chin, Martha Silano, Terrance Hayes, Peter Gizzi, Erin Murphy, and Jorie Graham. We will try out techniques such as accordion-style writing, parallel constructions, chiasmus, and repetition in the work of the poems we’ve discussed. The takeaway is your creation of a hundred-line draft. Those who are willing will have the opportunity to share these drafts in a nurturing environment.

About The Workshop Instructor:

Prize winning poet and writer Harriet Levin is the author of three poetry collections, The Christmas Show (Beacon Press, 1997), Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books, 2010), and My Oceanography (CavanKerry, 2018). Eavan Boland selected her debut book for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She is also the winner of The Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a PEW Fellowship in the Arts Discipline Award, The Grolier’s Ellen LaForge Memorial Poetry Prize and Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Award. Her writing has appeared widely in journals such as The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, The Forward, Prairie Schooner, The Smart Set, The Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly Review, Plume, ONE ART, and The Kenyon Review. She’s held poetry residencies at Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. Levin is also the author of a novel, How Fast Can You Run, a novel based on the life of “Lost Boy” of Sudan Michael Majok Kuch (Harvard Square Editions, 2016), which came out of a project she founded with her students at Drexel University to reunite Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan with their mothers living abroad. How Fast Can You Run was excerpted in The Kenyon Review and profiled on NPR. Charter for Compassion chose How Fast Can You Run for its 2016 Global Read. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and has taught creative writing in both the undergraduate and MFA Program at Drexel University. In collaboration with PEN Haiti, she led a Drexel study abroad creative writing intensive to Port-au-Prince, from 2013-2018 for which the Philadelphia Haitian Coalition honored her with a Haiti Cultural Ambassador Award.

untitled by john compton

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

untitled

the vulture eats the deer;
the head is already gone.

the red beak & black wings
flash by my peripheral.

it swoops around in a circle—
a death kite:

wearing intestines like a medallion—
blood binding them to its chest.

it perches on my shoulders
& imbeds talons

to make us a singular objective;
to give me knowledge;

to teach me how to eat
the rot from this world;

to assist
in cleansing the decay.

*

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 Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

“Horoscope”

         ~ for Kate

You will wake
from the dream
of fentanyl, diagnosis,
homelessness, rise above
the clouds gurgled from a vape pen,

wear white clothes
and pink running shoes,
though still commune
with the invisible,
hear and see what others don’t.

Minimart store clerks
will loan you their phones,
call you “a sweetheart,”
you who travel light,
float in guitar licks
and piano notes
plinked as a child: Für Elise.

You who the Dollar Tree
cashier scorns with her held
breath, her averted
eyes, her lack
of response to your thank
you after ringing
up your Wet Wipes
and trail mix,

she who failed
to see the glow
of your aura,
you who smile
and heal and rise
above all who judge
you as dust.
You are moon.

*

Everything

is rolled between my palms:
brown sugar, peanut butter, unbleached
flour, and salt. Balls form on the creased
map of my hands. Travel line, heart
line, family line, fate line.

On the morning of my daughter’s
37th birthday, I lay it all out
on my kitchen counter, stir
and spoon, press a dozen
planets onto a metal tray. Criss-

cross each one with a wet fork.
Bake. Place in a clear bag.
Drive to the designated meeting
spot. Me and my sack of flat
orbs. Unless you make other choices,

I say (again and again and again),
this is your life. And then, Look
at my eyes. Her, a bird perched
on the passenger seat of my car
pulled by sky out the window.

And so she turns, her green eyes
touch my blue for a second
until she laughs, Your pupils
are so tiny! Me, I love you;
her, I love you, too,

and then goodbye.
Peanut butter cookies.
Intersect of life lines,
tight rope, high wire, thread
of connect. Energetic pinprick of light.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ who believes in the power of writing to stay sane. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Rattle, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. She is the author of four poetry collections. Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet

Where to Submit Your Poetry (besides ONE ART)

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

~ Meeting Day/Time ~  

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

1:00 PM (Eastern Time)

Please note: This meeting will not be recorded.

*

Register for the meeting: Here.

*

~ Meeting Description / Agenda ~

The plan is to use this space to discuss where ONE ART contributors and readers are submitting and publishing their work.

Further, this is an opportunity to discuss “comps”, that is, lit mags doing something at least somewhat similar to ONE ART, lit mags that may be good places to submit your work if your work tends to be a good fit for ONE ART.

We’ll also discuss general recommendations for lit mags that are doing good work, worth reading and supporting.

*

Mrs. T’s by Jeanine Walker

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Mrs. T’s

Middle-of-the-night pierogies is not my norm,
but it once was. I came home late after a shift
at the AMC Theatres or Wendy’s
and started the water to boil. So many of the foods
I love are a conduit for butter, and this was no
exception: buttered sautéed onions, fresh
broccoli if we had it, and the once-frozen, now-
boiled pierogies moved to sizzle with the butter in the pan.
I could fry them to their perfect crisp, their dough
browned, ready to slice, then bite, the warm
mix of potato and cheddar replacing whatever
hunger I might’ve felt, what hunger for a missing
parent, the necessity of two teenaged jobs,
the bare loneliness of that house. Father
gone. Brother gone, brother out.
When I ate the pierogies I must’ve known someone
cared I didn’t eat only the stale popcorn
I brought home. Me at the counter those summer
Thursday nights, sautéing, slicing, savoring.

*

Jeanine Walker is the author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2022) and the recipient of a 2025 microgrant for Korean poetry translation from Seattle City of Literature. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, and her poems and translations have found homes in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Jeanine teaches poetry and publishing in Seattle, where she runs a comedy-infused poetry event called It Goes On.

PALL MALL by Doug Fritock

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

PALL MALL

Whenever my father would give up
smoking—usually once a year
or so when I was a boy
and they showed us pictures
of blackened lungs in school—

he would first hold the half-smoked
pack under running water,
as if rinsing a piece of fruit,
before throwing them in the trash.

The reason for this was so he wouldn’t
go digging for one later
to puff on with a cup of coffee
after I had gone to sleep.

But cigarettes are easier to drown
than habits, and before long,
a fresh dry pack would appear
on the counter, and the cycle
would begin anew.

I remembered this last month,
when, after flying to Pittsburgh
to clean out his house, I found
a pack of his trademark PALL MALL
tucked under some papers
in a drawer in his kitchen.

And unsure what else to do,
I drenched them under the faucet
until they were sopping wet,
then tossed them into the garbage
with the rest of his life’s detritus.

*

Doug Fritock is a writer and father of 4 living in Redondo Beach, California. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, The Black Fork Review, and Hunger Mountain among other literary journals. He is an active member of Maya C. Popa’s Conscious Writers Collective.

15 by Clint Margrave

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

15

Your death is a teenager now.
Your death has acne,
is insecure,
has possibly even kissed someone.

In another year, your death
can get its driver’s license.
And after that,
your death will graduate high school
and I’ll have to ask it
if it ever plans to move out
and find a place to live.

But your death knows
it isn’t going anywhere.
Your death knows it’ll
stay here no matter
how much I try to kick it out.

Your death has mostly
been a good guest,
quiet, respectful,
staying out of my way
especially now that it’s older,
to the point where sometimes
I almost forget it’s there,
unlike the infant who used
to kick and scream
and keep me up all night.

Your death stays in its room
with the door shut
most of the time now,
like I used to do to you
when I was a teenager,

when I’d threaten to kill myself,
and light candles in my room,
sit on the floor,
thinking about how lonely I was,
your death, I’m sure,
is lonely too.

*

Clint Margrave is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including the poetry collections Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and Visitor, all from NYQ Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Sun, Rattle, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is currently a 2024-2025 U.S. Fulbright Scholar living in Sofia, Bulgaria. When not abroad, he lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Torii Gate, Knobs Haven Cemetery, Retreat, Day Two by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Torii Gate,
Knobs Haven Cemetery,
Retreat, Day Two

       — for my mother, Marien

Among so many markers anchored in Kentucky
grass, this one newly carved, my mother’s twin
in death.

She, too, would now be 91, gone
these 24 years. I still have her birding
guide in Portuguese, I remember, listening
to these songs I can’t identify. So many
stones, dates erased by time, wind, lichen
growing, the ledger slowly disappearing.
In another two years I will be older
than my mother lived to be.

Will my lungs fail me as yours did? Is there something
seeded in my anatomy, too, that will creep up, take me
down? O suffering Jesus. O sorrowful Marien—
your death wish finally caught up with you
when you no longer sought it. Sixty-seven
candles on your last birthday cake, no breath
to blow them out.

This afternoon I walked
through this pointless gate that keeps
nothing out and wondered at its purpose—
carved with pineapples, a sign of welcome,
with no fence on either side. At dusk, I passed
back through, followed my shadow
to the waiting room.

*

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.”

Three Poems by Dana Henry Martin

~ ONE ART ~ 16 Comments

Window Strike at Highlands Behavioral Health

While we were talking about death, bullet-like,
a crow struck the floor-to-ceiling window and landed
on his back two stories below. I checked on him
during a patio break. He was still alive. I placed him
in a shrub. He grabbed a branch with his talons
but flipped upside down when I let his body go.
He was too cold, his nictitating membranes
clouding his eyes as he lay on the shrub’s moat
of dank mulch. I rolled him onto his stomach
so he could breathe, but he flipped on his back
again and again. Is he dead, the patients asked,
most of them young men who were certain
everything was an omen. They lived from sign
to sign, deciphering what things really meant,
the secrets speaking all around them. I think
he’s dying, I said. There’s nothing we can do.
At our next patio break, the crow was gone.
What does that mean, the patients asked me.
I wanted to believe what I told them. The crow
was just stunned and needed time to fly away.
But I think a staff member went around the side
of the building and tossed the bird, alive or dead,
into a bag and then into the trash, a truth I could
barely confront, my mind lashed by sadness
and fear. Maybe that bird was a sign, an omen.
Maybe we were all the bird and the staff member
was the entire staff and the bag was our cure
and the trashcan was the hospital and we were
either alive or dead, all us patients and maybe
the nurses and techs, too. It was impossible
to confront that they were in our world like that
or that we were in their world like this, that we
were each other’s worlds. Our faces in their eyes,
theirs in ours appear. Bird gone to glass. Bird gone
to ground. Bird gone to trash. Patient gone to knees.
Patient gone to floor. Patient gone to needle. How
could I say that? I had to say, The crow survived.

*

Lost

The town I live in became a fun-house
version of itself when I slipped into psychosis
two summers ago. Or was it fall? Seasons turned
inside out, and time, and place. People I knew
looked like each other. The men like my father.
The women like my mother. I walked down streets
in the dark waiting for the LDS version of God
to take me or send me to perdition with his sons.
His call. He did neither. Every road ended in a field
or a turnabout, rows of cows or dark houses.
I was missing the signs, the ones I needed to see
in this rural puzzle game of piety. I called the police.
Maybe they’d book me for not being wanted, even
by God. Surely, that was a capital offense. They said
to go home, where I didn’t belong. I needed to be
forgiven once and for all or punished for eternity
for being his daughter. For being of him. For being his.
Heavenly father, on behalf of my father, wipe me off
this map, wrap me in your gown, lift me from this bed
and burn me until I’m clean or extinguish me before
I manage to burn down this whole damn town.

*

Bonnet About a Demurring Theme, I Mean

sonnet about a recurring dream, no world
outside this restroom with its busted squalls and
leashing skinks, I mean rusted stalls and leaking
sinks, a mingled blight nickering of love, I mean
single light flickering above. Unkind
prayers aren’t even falls, I mean sometimes there aren’t
even stalls, just one wrong stash in the drawer, I mean
one long gash in the floor. Or the best groom has no
whore. I mean the restroom has no door. There’s
never any wrath issued, I mean there’s
never any bath tissue, and I want to
clot over the stench, I mean squat over the
trench, but my eggs are breaking, I mean my legs are
shaking like I’m awake, I mean like I am a wake.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Trampoline, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press).

Four Poems by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

All Things Bloom

You cannot crack open a heart.
No more than you can bend steel
or pry open a still pursed blossom.
No more than you can peel back
the sky or force a seed to sprout
by hammering its shell.
Some things aren’t ready to stand
exposed and naked in the light.
Some cannot bear the violence
of knowing, the insistence of change.
All you can do is shine ever-on with
indiscriminate hope in trust that
all things bloom, with determined
patience that they will.

*

Gulf of My Body

water does not
concern itself
with what name
you give its
shaped body.
Water remains
what it is,
so long traveling,
passing through
our palmed attempt
at claiming it.

*

Whale Shark

A whale shark, according to the five year old at
the climbing gym, is what happens when a whale
eats a shark. Just like that. It’s simple. Everything
is separate and when two things join they just
add to another. The shark doesn’t die in this story.
Nothing changes. The world is still safe, predictable.
The whale shark was his favorite tattoo, but now it’s
erased. My full sleeve tattoos don’t erase though,
and they’re the biggest ones he’s seen. Like really big.
Like really really big. I thought of how when sorrow
consumes joy they don’t simply add to each other,
but become poignant. And when gratitude spills
into grief together they create the conditions for
surrender. Or even how water and flour make bread,
not Water Flour. Some things get lost along the way.
But I didn’t tell him this; that a whale shark is actually
a shark, just a really big one. I wanted more to believe
in the simplicity of his world, in the authenticity of
how things join, then come apart, and in the process
nothing is changed, no one dies. We just continue to
appear and disappear into each other’s lives unaffected,
our innocence not yet capable of breaking.

*

Vote For Dancing
        Cast all your votes for dancing – Hafiz

Send me a ballot that comes with a list of
public art installments and a referendum for
city funded meditation halls, and a closely
watched race for the elected vegetable of the
year – Italian squash. A ballot with a list of
dates for a day of non action, a month, a year.
Some stretch of time we agree to inhabit with
complete silence, in solitude, in stillness.
I want to choose between the many ways to
collectively practice prayer for the next while;
kneeling in front of the same tree at dawn,
submerging our feet in the creek reciting
loving-kindness mantras; may you flow freely,
unobstructed. May you never dry. And if you
do, may you still sing. I want to vote for some
body who, on more days than not, picks up a
poem, eats it, looks inside, loudly grieves.
Somebody who will pardon immigrating
geese, appoint a composer general, sign into
law a tax credit for books purchased by local
authors, farmer’s markets, sustainable meals.
I want a ballot that asks me to vote for harvest.
For dancing. For rain. In just the way a bridge
might vote for connection, and the sun for a
new day. And your hand on my shoulder
for steady, and the sky for welcome, for air.

*

Moudi Sbeity is a first-generation Lebanese-American currently enrolled in the Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling masters program at Naropa University. Prior to attending Naropa, they co-owned and operated a Lebanese restaurant in Salt Lake City, which served as a queer safe space. Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah in 2014. As a person who stutters, they are passionate about writing and poetry as transpersonal practices in self-expression.

Moudi’s poems have appeared in the following anthologies; Irreplaceable by Nan Seymour and Terry Tempest Williams (Moon In The Rye Press, 2025), Love Is For All Of Us by James Crews (Storey Publishing, May 2025), The Nature Of Our Times by Luisa A. Igloria (Paloma Press, Fall 2025). Moudi’s first book, Habibi Means Beloved, a memoir on growing up queer and stuttering in Lebanon, is expected to be published in late 2026 by University of Utah Press.

Three Poems by Joseph Fasano

~ ONE ART ~ 13 Comments

To the Insurance Executive Who Denied My Heart Procedure

You may not think it is worth it
but at night, in the dark
before morning,
my son lays his ear on my gnarled heart
and tells me it is beautiful music.
He doesn’t fathom
what you did to me,
that you’ve traded our days of playing
for a few small pieces of silver.
All he thinks
is my father’s heart is music.
I hear. I hear. I knew.
Ruler, the children
will outlive you.
I wish you
a long, long life of silences
while dreamers hear the living world is singing.
The one you have denied a life is you.

*

The Reckoning

All your life you’ve tried to prove
your beauty. You have handed over
the locked harp of your darkened heart,
believing love a shelter from immensity.
Alone, in the clothes of old ghosts,
you have touched the face
of the mirrors of childhood
like lakes that hold the gold rings
of the wronged.

Listen. It is time. It is time now.
You cannot live in two worlds forever.
Rise up
and walk the way of changes,
deep through the wilds
of childhood, deep
through the cities of the living,
and tap your hand on the great weight
of love’s door
and say it, say the proof
is useless.
Fall into the arms that hear your song.

*

Lazarus

You ask what death was like.
It was like falling into water
as water.
My father was a dark ship
falling through me,
loaded with plum-wine and honey.
My mother moved the sea of me,
its stars.

I tell you
the new life is permitted.
A hand comes
and lifts you by the fingers,
and there you are,
blinking in the morning light,
the graveclothes falling from your shoulders,
a soft touch saying
start again, start again.
This time be the miracle you are.

*

Joseph Fasano is the author of ten books, including The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions). His work has been widely anthologized and translated into more than a dozen languages. His honors include The Cider Press Review Book Award, The Wordview Prize from the Poetry Archive, and a nomination by Linda Pastan for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living poet years prior to the award year.” He is the Founder of Fasano Academy, which offers instruction in several fields of study, including poetry, philosophy, and theology.

Father Hopkins by Sally Nacker

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Father Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889

I’d like to walk with you today.
The bluebells hold the rain.
Spring rain holds sounds of bells
you rang in Wales, as rain
holds sounds. I see you
saunter through my wild
yard in your dark robe, pure
as water down a bluebell
leaf. All holy. All good.
I walk with you.

*

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.

Having a Gay Awakening at the Elm Grove Public Pool by Sean Glatch

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Having a Gay Awakening at the Elm Grove Public Pool

They carried their bodies like they had none,
the men I watched at the public pool
when no one was watching me—

Not even God,
whose body I imagined
while sitting erect in the crooked church pews
as gleaming, hefty, cloudy, wide.

My church: a pool of shirtless men.

What stirred under the water
I couldn’t name, wouldn’t tame.

O had I known
the animal want I wanted
to name and tame me.

Thank God I slept with God.
Thank God He ghosted me.
Thank chlorine water and summer heat
and the blood flower blooming
wild, yes, this beating want,

those bodies disastered
into doorways, the body made
enjambment, this Godhood I found

when I was too sacred and too scared
to be both prey and prayer,

hands cupped
on holy bushfire.

*

Sean Glatch is a queer poet, storyteller, and screenwriter in New York City. His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Milk Press, 8Poems, The Poetry Annals, on local TV, and elsewhere. Sean currently runs Writers.com, the oldest writing school on the internet. When he’s not writing, which is often, he thinks he should be writing.

The Mantra of a Teratoma by Carolynn Kingyens

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Mantra of a Teratoma

“Emptiness and boredom:
what a complete understatement.
What I felt was complete desolation.
Desolation, despair and boredom.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

I knew a woman once
who had absorbed
her embryonic, parasitic twin
while in utero
to show up decades later
masquerading as a brain tumor
on a brain scan
before revealing its true
albeit grotesque identity
to a gaggle of neurosurgeons
who’d gathered round
her open, egg-like skull
as they peered down
in total awe
at this little, shiny ball of fetal flesh
covered in random sprouts
of human hair, teeth,
and bone.

They call this thing,
this medical monstrosity,
a teratoma,
some mystical malady
ending in the scary suffix— “oma,”
joining the ranks
among the other omas:
melanoma, lymphoma, glaucoma,
sarcoma, carcinoma — oma
meaning abnormal growths.

Those of us who are
either too damaged
by life, by love,
or the lack thereof
morph into relational
“omas” of our own;
these walking,
human-husk monsters
eating the essence
of twin flames,
filling the internal,
howling void.

A Gen-Z philosopher
on YouTube
points to the power
of detachment —
the way of the stoic,
and every morning
I stare at the stranger
in the mirror
reciting a mantra
like some childish game
of Bloody Mary:

Observe, don’t absorb.

Master the pause.

Starve the drama.

*

Carolynn Kingyens was born and raised in Northeast Philadelphia, where the red brick row houses were prone to chronic leaks. She has authored two books of poetry, Before The Big Bang Makes A Sound, and Coupling. In addition to poetry, Carolynn writes essays, reviews, and short fiction. She writes on a myriad of topics ranging from pop culture to true crime on Medium.

Carolynn’s third book of poetry, Lost In The Bardo, is due out in 2025. American Poet, Peter Campion, writes:

“I don’t know of another book of poetry that portrays middle age with the blend of humor and deep emotion that distinguishes Carloynn Kingyens’ Lost in the Bardo. In vivid high res, these poems combine spiky wit and acute observation with the vulnerable openness of a voice “forever searching.” Contemporary poetry is larger and more alive for this superb collection.”

Two Poems by Steph Sundermann-Zinger

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Above Elizabeth, New Jersey

The bridge between Staten Island and Elizabeth
hangs so high above the water, I can’t tell
if the drab, grey boomerang below me is a bird
or its reflection. As I stutter toward New Jersey,

the Arthur Kill a stew of oil tankers, cormorants
whipstitching jagged seams across the sky,
I am my own fogged mirror, woman-girl,
my eyes turned inward. It will be dark

before I get to Plymouth; already, clouds ravel
to pastel threads, denuding the horizon, early moon
a vulgar eye. Arrival will be chaos, the night
fracturing into shards of discordant sound —

nephews bare-calved in the sharpness of mid-March,
shouting across the frozen yard in soccer shorts,
dog salting the air with shallow barks. My sister
in the window, waiting, her face an underwater echo

of my own. I’ll navigate the winter-yellowed hill,
step inside and find my mother angry, always
angry, and my father, treading water
in a sea of fish-slick thoughts, forgetting

and remembering, the living room a familiar
mystery. I wonder about Elizabeth, men fishing
in the Kill with their jacketed children, picture
their homes torch-bright in the middle distance

past enigmatic factories whispering smoke,
beyond the crackling Eiffel towers
of the power lines. Inside, marshmallow couches,
laminate tables, too many chairs, small fire

snapping behind its dusk-black grate. Everything soft,
easy. Fathers shed boots, glide sock-footed
to their seats, small children in their wake like paper
boats, adrift in a river I don’t want to cross.

*

To the Chimpanzee Mother who Carries an Ironwood Branch in Remembrance of Her Infant

I see the way you cradle
that blooming bough
against the blunt sorrow
of your stomach, having lost
even the small, still body, grief
upon grief. The way mourning wears you
like a pair of gloves, demanding
you do something
with your hands. When my unborn child
stopped growing, someone left me
a potted rosebush – I planted it
in peat and loam and watched it
wither anyway, loss
upon loss. The way we just can’t
keep a body alive, the way we reach
for something green to hold
when our ghosts pass through.

*

Steph Sundermann-Zinger is a queer poet living and writing in the Baltimore area. Her work explores themes of identity, relationship, and connection with the natural world and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Avenue, Blue Unicorn, Little Patuxent Review, Lines + Stars, Literary Mama, Split Rock Review, Writers Resist, and other journals. She was the 2023 recipient of the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize and a fall 2024 Writer in Residence for Yellow Arrow Publishing.

Two Poems by Kelli Russell Agodon

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments
Leki Ruse Tonight, the mango is a beautiful gay moon and how I adored the men during the Pride parade who said, Pretty girl coming through, no matter the age. My brothers, the men I love, and when the world told them they were being punished and “gay cancer” was what they deserved, I held Joseph’s hand and said—You did everything right. A year later getting an HIV test at Planned Parenthood the nurse told me, You can do this anonymously, I said, No, I’m not ashamed. I said, In solidarity. She pushed, Live quietly. Said, We don’t want your insurance to worry you took this test, said, Don’t be you. So, at twenty, for a moment I became Leki Ruse, a misspeak, misspell of my name—Kelli Russell—to keep me safe, to say—No one will come for you. To say—My god, we all deserve not to be blamed.

*

Even the Rain Has a Side Hustle

Every tenth piece of wood on the woodpile
holds a spider. A miracle beetle or bitsy ants.
It’s first light, and robins have their coffeetalk
in a fir tree that looks exhausted. Without
one cloud in the sky, the sun decides
if it’s going to rise—you don’t believe
the rising is certain, right? The sun wakes
each day and then chooses to go to work.
There is a chipmunk that shrieks its demands
at 6:30 a.m. every morning. First shift.
A banana slug slogs across the bumpy path
—an hour later, it’s arrived to the corporation
of grass. The hummingbirds have been whirring
for hours, over the blossoms of poppies, who
finally raise their heads like sleepy rich girls
with nowhere to go.

*

Kelli Russell Agodon is a bi/queer poet from the Seattle area. Her book Accidental Devotions will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2026. Her previous collection, Dialogues with Rising Tides, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. Kelli is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press and teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is also the cohost of the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard.
www.agodon.com / www.twosylviaspress.com / www.youtube.com/@PoemsYouNeed

Two Poems by Morrow Dowdle

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

I Decline the Order of Protection

I knew I had landed in Oregon because the airport speakers
were playing 80s goth rock and there were lots of people dressed
like skater punks or lumberjacks retrieving their luggage.
And the bathroom was all-gender, white and bright-lit
as a futuristic chapel, each stall with a door fully flush
with the floor. I stepped up to the bank of sinks
beside a buttoned-up cop. I admit I’m still scared of men
sometimes, and my mother-in-law’s crime dramas don’t help.
But not there, the officer and I just trying to eliminate
our bodies’ waste. He wasn’t pretending to be a man—
he was a man. Nor was the woman in the church bathroom
back home pretending to be a woman. Nor was she afraid
to wear a leather jacket and skirt to the service—that requires
real courage. She was taking her two little girls to pee,
each whining on the toilet. I was washing my son’s hands
as he resisted the soap. The woman and her kids came out,
and she and I rolled our eyes at each other, no longer
strangers as we sympathized about how our children
drive us nuts. She was just any other mother except
for the small lump at her throat that can never go away.
As if she carries some small sadness. And goes on anyway.

*

And Then, We Hear It

That is, I hear it, and then
she enters my bedroom.
Face stricken.

I heard it, she says. Something
booming. I don’t correct her,
don’t say shooting.

The book of essays stays
open on my lap. I’m reading
the scholar’s message

to the would-be confessional poet.
Their recommendation? Your verse
should be more gospel

than gossip. The only hymn
at present a ringing in my ears.
Aren’t you scared?

she asks. I tell again the saddest
lie—No, I reply. I cut her
loose in her fear, make

my face maddeningly flat.
And what could I say about
the stray bullet that found me

in Chicago. Or the ones
that fly by no accident
into a brother’s or sister’s

chest or head. Men do kill,
whether it’s bird or deer
or a queer who’s been known

to hold a red card, sitting
out here in the country
with my daughter,

where the KKK still lurks
in corners. Then there’s
the adrenaline of executive
orders, the line not far
from Klan to militia.
It’s probably someone

hammering, she says.
Yes, I say. I like that
explanation. I like us

to think that someone’s
out there in the dark
on a silver ladder, nails

sprouting from their mouth.
So eager to build a house
they could not wait for morning.

*

Morrow Dowdle is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the micro-chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Their work can be found in New York Quarterly, The Baltimore Review, Pedestal Magazine, and other publications. They run a performance series which features BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices. They are an MFA candidate at Pacific University and live in Durham, NC.

Five Poems by James Feichthaler

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Lines written on the 27th minute of my lunch hour in a Wawa parking lot

As the weeks deliver blow upon dull blow
To our sophisticated, fast-paced lives,
Keeping to schedules, always on the go,
With no time for ourselves in nine-to-fives,
“Surviving” mostly means that we’ll cut corners
While settling for fixes ’stead of cures;
From drive-thru grabs to greasy touchscreen orders
Of sloppy subs, a lunch hour’s breaded snares.
And even as these hurried words truck forth
From time-stressed regions of my anxious brain,
Some sparrows make a pit stop on the earth
And bathe in dirt, too long awaiting rain;
Shake off the dust their wings accumulate,
Then dart away, with nowhere to be late.

*

Sidewalk suns

Some call them “weeds,” these yellow miracles
That pushed through stone and found a way to thrive
Amongst the rubble’d ruins of this pavement;
Amidst the cracks and root-disjointed hills
(Of concrete) that have made it hard to move
Along these lanes, so desperate for improvement.
Most call them eyesores, born to be plucked out
And ripped from where their like has taken refuge,
As if their mere existence were too much
For eyes that can’t enjoy or won’t appreciate
Their growing here; fools’ gold, but double-rich
For their vitality: so heavenly huge
To the ants that wander by each grounded sun,
Who must look up at what dull souls look down upon.

*

So much baggage

I stop to watch him slide across the gravel,
His shelly suitcase proudly on display;
Horns pointing north, the safest way to travel
About these parts on such a gloomy day.
The path that leads to my apartment steps
Doesn’t see much traffic; byways clogged with moss
And wayward weeds have slowed the sleepy progress
Of many a tiny snail. The broad, slicked tops
Of dandelions are swaying on the breeze,
As he slimes toward his goal: a patch of grass
Spring suns have turned lime-green. His casual pace
Knows nothing of the scale-tipping stress
We mortals lug around; nor can we tell
What weight of worlds he’s learned to carry so well.

*

Such rarities abound

Those rush-hour miracles we mostly miss
While speeding down the highway into work,
Unheralded lights, which mostly we’ll dismiss
As hardly being worth a second search,
Call to us from the roadside, from up high,
In scattered bunches, singularly rare;
From shadowy places, sans celebrity,
Shout to us in their silence to “inquire.”
The tiniest weed that flourishes in the cracks
(Of a corroded guardrail) beat the odds
And shows so much resilience in its flex;
And where some tulips flaunt their ivory buds,
Unbuttoning in a ditch to taste the sun,
Their swaying might just save us from the gun.

*

Luck be a ladybug

To see this good-luck creature, on a day
When nothing’s going right or going my way,
Is to have proof that there’s a real order
To the things, both great and small, that see us suffer;
Is to imagine God as one great prankster,
Forever pulling the strings that set us up
For idiot choices, love, loss, epic failure,
Elated when our best-laid futures flop.
Or could this chance encounter with a lady
(Who picked spring’s chilliest day to wear all red)
Be no more palpable than any “maybe”
That the best philosophers have all deemed dead
And pointless to proclaim as ever being,
Beyond our mortal scope or supernatural seeing?

*

James Feichthaler is a poet with roots in the Philadelphia-area residing in Trenton, NJ, where he watches the skies for UFOs, sings Irish folk songs on his porch, and drinks beers. His new book From the Back Porch of a War (Parnilis Media 2024) pulls no punches in its assessment of a politically-divided America seemingly at war with itself, searching for moral integrity in a hashtag-hardened, spiritually-bankrupt world.

Two Poems by Tim Mayo

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

A Candle For

After the half-life
of my daughter’s last year
a dimness appeared

like a veiled busker
sawing out sad tunes
on her violin

The few pieces of silver
glinting up from the dark
velvet of her case

made me think of moons

Remembrance mirrors
the invisible of someone
so a self seems immortal

a thing which zigs beyond
its now-pulseless zag
to exit flesh and hover

at least a part of forever
but a candle can
only glimmer until

snuff it just sputters out

*

A Father’s Lament

We almost never met
but at eleven you asked

I forced a truce of sorts
conceded your fidelity

The years huddled like orphans
between the now-and-thens

And the clock’s hand
scythed down

the might-have-beens
leaving only the likely

In the end I learned too late
the unconditional of surrender

*

Tim Mayo’s poems and reviews have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street Journal, Narrative Magazine, Poetry International, and Salamander among many other places. His poems have received seven Pushcart Prize nominations. His first full-length collection of poetry The Kingdom of Possibilities was published by Mayapple Press in 2009 and was a finalist for the 2009 May Swenson Award. His second volume of poems, Thesaurus of Separation (Phoenicia Publishing, 2016) was a finalist for both the 2017 Montaigne Medal and the 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award among other honors, and his chapbook Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (Kelsay Books 2019) also won an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award. He works at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, and is a founding member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.

Two Poems by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

WHEN THE WOMAN TOLD ME SHE SELDOM USES A PEN OR A PENCIL

Her dailiness now being key-stroke
and finger-strike,

no ink drying, no textures of
a rough or creamy page–

I tried to imagine having forgotten or
never having learned how each word

takes its time to be born, the rise
and curve and dip of a letter,

the scritch-scritch on paper
like a patter of raindrops on the roof

of a garret where a woman once leaned
over a desk, writing her story by hand.

*

AFTER THE DREAM, MY FRIEND
       In memory, Rosemary

I woke up with her on my mind,
though not on my mind really–
an essence
hovering around me
like coastal weather–
her presence, the giant redwood
so often sheathed in mist
who still stands there–
a great reassurance on the path.

*

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

On Being Forgiven by Howie Good

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On Being Forgiven

It’s approaching dusk,
and at dusk the birds

in the marsh revive
old conversations

to which I sometimes
stop to listen, but,

more often, don’t,
and still the Earth,

despite the offense,
bears my weight.

*

Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry books, The Dark and Akimbo, are available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.

Wedding Music by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Wedding Music

How utterly ridiculous that she survived
specifically to see her youngest granddaughter
get married after ten agonizing months
post-brain surgery and several rounds
of chemo for a tumor that was
the kind that grows back to finally kill you
only to be prevented from leaving
the care facility that’s become home—
having given up her condo when
she could not remember “apple penny umbrella”
or where she’d left the car—held hostage
by a broken elevator for god’s sake, and since
everyone here has known forever
about the importance of this wedding
because that’s the kind of place it is,
sharing grandchildren’s nachas and mitzvahs—
between staff’s urgent calls to Mitsubishi for
service and caregiver texts back and forth
to alert the bride, everyone wants
to kill someone, even the violinist, who has
another gig and whose fingers are getting stiff
in the giant ballroom kept cold until the mob
of attendees are seated for dinner
and dancing at which point it gets hot,
not advisable in combination with the open bar
and slinky cocktail garb, but even blowing
on them isn’t helping until the cellist
offers his pack of Little Hotties hand warmers,
which she takes gratefully, and just in time,
as the grandmother, looking abashed, dazed,
and yet still somehow regal in a blue dress,
is escorted adorably by two tuxedoed little boys,
and the violinist has the sudden urge to stand,
salute the grandmother, who barely made it
and her standing prompts an ovation, clapping
and mazel tovs! and only after everyone has sat
back down does it occur to the violinist
that she’s taken something
away from the bride, but honestly,
she doesn’t care—she has her whole life
ahead of her—and she raises her bow, cues
the others and they begin to play.

*

Lynn Glicklich Cohen lives in Milwaukee, WI, walking distance to a Great Lake and an aspiring river. She spends at least some of every day reading and/or writing poetry. She is profoundly grateful to ONE ART and the numerous other literary journals that have published her work.

Don’t Say You Never Knew Him by Paula R. Hilton

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Don’t Say You Never Knew Him

I was 27 when my mother pressed
her wedding band into my hand.
I’m so angry. I don’t want it.
Startled by venom in her voice,
I took it but told her I had no idea
what to do with it. Melt it down,
sell it, give it away. I don’t care.

Dad had dementia but hid his condition.
The man people flocked to for financial
advice died with the trunk of his Ford
stuffed with unpaid bills. Mom screamed
like a wounded animal. He’d bankrupted us.

A decade later, her memories soften.
Tells me Dad had been a great kisser.
He made my ears burn. She also shares
some advice. Don’t say you never knew him.
Say you didn’t know the extent of his illness.

I go to my room. Pull her band from
the jewelry box where it’s waited for
3,650 days, ask her if she wants it back.
She takes the gold ring from my open
palm. Slips it back on. Yes, she says, I do.

*

Paula R. Hilton explores the immediacy of memory and how our most important relationships define us. Her work has appeared in The Sunlight Press, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Feminine Collective, The Tulane Review, and many others. Her poetry collection, At Any Given Second, was selected by Kirkus as one of its best books of 2021. She earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Learn more at https://paularhilton.com

Marriage Dance: Year 45 by Dick Westheimer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Marriage Dance: Year 45

Most nights it’s the same:
an onion sliced skin-thin,
cashews stirred in, over the flame,

while I go to the cellar
for garlic and winter squash.
The kitchen smells

of olive oil and the onions
now sugar sweet—are an almost
burning sap. Garlic

oils my fingertips which
I bring to my lips and lick
till the glow illuminates

my appetites. The skillet shimmers
syrupy and begs
for savory company—

the garlic and squash,
over-wintered collards,
just picked and washed.

My wife waits to come over
and brush against my hip
till I put down the knife.

She knows I hone it sharp enough
to shave. She knows that when I stand
over the cutting board, I am

married to wood and vegetable
and blade. She knows that I can
love only one thing at a time.

I tell her she is a lucky woman—
that I love her as well as my
kitchen tools that I’ve seasoned

and sharpened and cared for
since before our time. She sets the table,
lights a little flame, and doesn’t say a thing.

*

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio, his home for nearly 50 years, with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have appeared in Only Poems, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Abandon Journal, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com

Two Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Bringing Bodies like Kindling Wood

There are times, when the sky opens up and cries.
The sky cried all the time, it seemed, in Vietnam.
I tried pulling bodies out of the line of fire,
out of mud, out of endless caustic rainfall.
I’d find parts of a human and bring wounded back.
Often, death could not wait, and I’d arrive too late.
Rain was juxtaposed at intersection of life and death.
Rain did not care about longitude or latitude of pain.

In Vietnam, it rained bullets in Agent Orange skies.
On my last mission, the day before going home,
carrying a man, I hit a trip-wire, and I lifted into the sky.
Doctors took skin grafts from my arms to my burnt feet,
without medication, rain confessed to my wounds.
I learned what it is like to be carried out alive.

* 

On the Battlefield

During the shelling,
bullets sing as they pass by me.
I’m kneeling over a body
opening my field medic kit.
He is not going to make it.
He sees my concern, my averting eyes.
He asks the million-dollar question:
Where is God in all this?

I can’t save him.
I can barely save myself.
At this moment, religion abandons us.
What are we supposed to believe in?
During this moment of fear, sweat, and death,
I find no easy answer.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He was nominated for 17 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review’s William K. Hathaway Award; 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; 2014 Broadsided award; 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, November 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award and provided “Poetry on The Bus” which had 48 poems in local buses including 20 bi-lingual poems from 7 different languages. He has over 20 full-length poetry collections including “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Still Point Press, 2024); “Not All Beautiful Things Need to Fly” (Silver Bow Publishing, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Collected Works” (FutureCycle Press, 2024); and forthcoming, “Bone Chills and Arpeggios” (March Street Press, 2025).

Two Poems by Baruch November

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Lives upon Lives

Contractors affix buildings on top
of buildings in Jerusalem.
Occupants below must clear out
for all the years it takes
to finish adding
to sandstone structures.

I have lived lives upon lives.
I want to go back
to when I was certain—it was my twenties.
I dismissed many great women.
Someone greater was always coming along.

I have been an inept architect.
I built for one who does not live
with the truth of others.
I built for starlight,
not shelter.

I built for ghosts
of those never born.
I built a hollow home
for howling winds.

I built a demise
in waiting
and thought it
a masterpiece
towering over
the settled lives
of others.

*

The Tiger of Detroit

Every one of his home runs
in 1938 was hit off of Hitler.
Rage transformed
into urgency
in the batter’s box. 

He wanted so much to amaze those
who called him Christ-killer,
sheenie, kike, pant-presser.
They say only Jackie Robinson
had it worse.

When he did not play on Yom Kippur,
he electrified the fasting
congregation: tall shul doors
opened to reveal
the tiger slipping through.

The rabbi pounded his pulpit for silence.
Women swiveled their necks,
children stood on their chairs
to catch a glimpse of Greenberg–

A man who never played cards,
knowing his teammates
would holler if a Jew
threw down a full house,
a royal flush—
taking all their earnings
home to buy his wife
a necklace bright
as the closest
strand of stars.

*

Baruch November’s latest full-length book of poems, The Broken Heart is the Master Key, will be released this August. An earlier collection of poems, entitled Dry Nectars of Plenty, co-won BigCityLit’s chapbook contest in 2003. His works have been featured in Paterson Literary Review, Tiferet Journal, Lumina, NewMyths.com, and The Forward. His poem “After Esav” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a host and organizer of the Jewish Poetry Reading Series, which has featured poets such as Linda Pastan and Grace Schulman. For more than a decade, Baruch November has taught courses in Shakespeare, poetry, and writing at Touro University in Manhattan.

Two Poems by Michael T. Young

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Baroque Edge

We think of people in the past
as stuffed shirts, stiff in confines
of etiquette and rules, but
Bach carried a sword
on his long walks. Handel
would have died in a duel,
except for a well-placed button
that deflected the blade. So
maybe there’s an edge to
The Well-Tempered Clavier
that we fail to catch, or
a crosscurrent cutting across
The Water Music and imperceptibly
drawing us, gently nudging us, like
a gesture of defiance made
toward the dark depths, out
at the edges where
the silence growls and paces.

*

Erased

I sit in the dark listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
It’s a night a long way into the new world.

I can see its outlines in how this last movement
is a prolonged diminishment, one instrument at a time

disappearing into silence, like the loss of so many things:
we hardly notice them gone until we can’t hear them,

like a friend moving farther and farther away into a distance
that finally is too remote for us to reach across,

or freedom to speak our mind dwindled by a word
here, a word there. And there goes another violin

sinking into the absence of what we believed in,
who we thought we were, a kind of people who

could defy every power contrary to us. What it meant
to be American. But here I am, in the dark, on a cold night

deep into the new country, listening to an Austrian composer.
Now the cost of the needed medicine or food

drives us to work so late, we’re always tired
and there’s only collapsing into a moment of exhaustion

at the end of a day, watching TV or listening to music,
until that last violin holds as long as it can the final note,

a melodic fragment that Mahler marked in his German script,
a notation meaning “completely dying away.”

*

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.

Three Poems by Connie Post

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Maps

I no longer want
Google map directions

I want to stop at a local gas station
where the people know
how to get somewhere

I will buy a cold root beer
where the soda slightly spills out
the top of the lid

I want someone to understand
the loss of my tire pressure
and for someone to understand
that I’ve forgotten how
to pop the hood

I want the attendant
to tell me why the road
washed out last year

when I search for the money
to pay for my drink and Fritos

I want them to wait a long time
until my purse is an open cavern

I want them to see how long
I can stand there as a half shadow

I want them to see
there is a drought in my mouth

mostly
I want someone to know I’m lost

*

My Body is a Content Warning

The papers and files
are all boxed up

nobody wants to read my bones

these fractures didn’t just happen
overnight

nobody is willing to
sit with my marrow
in a room filled with
crumpled police tape

there is an empty can of mace
in my sleeve

I’ve never used it

all my offenders know me

the only stranger danger is
is my shadow self
sitting on the chair in my room

my body is surrounded
by the weeds of childhood

how many times must
I be told to take better care of myself

how many times
must I cauterize my subconscious

how many times
do I have to remind myself
that my memory
is an untreated hemophiliac

I don’t know how many more ways
to sacrifice this body

the gods are hungry

*

Sleeping With the Light On

You didn’t mean to
but you were too tired

maybe you took one pill too many

maybe daylight savings time
wanted you to exile yourself

most likely though

you didn’t want to find another
curtain in the dark

where the fibers hang like long strands
of your remaining sanity

they were hung
with the crippled hands of a mad man

the curtains
are a tripping hazard
they hang just low enough
to force you to feel
the partial existence
of your makeshift life

as dawn arrives
you erase the word “rape”
from a piece of crumpled paper
by the side of your bed

you get up early
and go to the department store
about ten miles away

you walk around
finding mannequins
that emulate the very expression
you had
when he found you

*

Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California (2005-2009). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Cutthroat, River Styx, Slipstream, Spoon River Poetry Review, & Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her awards include the Crab Creek Poetry Prize, Liakoura Award and the Caesura Poetry Award. Her second full length book, “Prime Meridian” was released in January 2020 (Glass Lyre Press) and was a finalist for the 2020 Best Book Awards. Her most recent books are Between Twilight from New York Quarterly Books and Broken Metronome from Glass Lyre Press. Broken Metronome was the winner of the American Fiction Award for poetry chapbook.

Double by Ellen Rosenbloom

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Double

My niece tells me she met my doppelganger.
She was going bra shopping and to the

woman who was fitting her, she said,
“You look just like my Aunt Ellen.”

“Really?” I said, “Are you sure she wasn’t
a shadow of me?” “No. She looked identical

to you—just like you, except her teeth weren’t
as good.” Do I want to meet this person. Probably

not. I don’t want to be offended by what
she thinks I look like. She told me the woman asked,

“Do you like your Aunt Ellen?” and my niece said,
“I love my Aunt Ellen.” My husband thinks we

should go see her under the guise of bra-shopping.
I sure hope she’s not fat or ugly…Or she’s just a slip

or a shadow of me. I guess I will go and meet her
or should I. Maybe it’s better not to know.

They say everyone has a look-alike somewhere
on earth. Maybe just to know she exists is enough.

*

Ellen Rosenbloom is a poet from New York City. Ellen’s poems have appeared in a chapbook, “Past Life Recall” by Bottlecap Press, and are forthcoming in a chapbook, “Traveling” by Finishing Line Press this August, 2025. Her poems have also appeared in Sonora Review, Zeek, Rosebud, Good Foot, Referential and more.

On His Birthday by Sarah Joy

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On His Birthday

“Keep writing,” were some of the last few words
my father said to me before the dementia took over.

My pen greets paper like a bird gracing the sky.
I try to avoid wind sheers, but these wings get tired;
I’d rather sit and preen my feathers,
and inspire the flightless from the ground.

I am a hypocrite of the worst kind,
writing down single phrases to start new poems
to only end up crumpled in trash cans:
I wish. I miss you. Come back.

I am a bird who walks on the sidewalk,
finding safety in the concrete barriers.

Today my father would have turned 75.
Gone only 847 days.
847 crumpled pages,
847 days of walking when I could have been flying,
could have been writing.
847 times of avoiding my memory,

trying to believe he’s still here,
as if his last words never happened.

*

Sarah Joy is a Toronto poet and Ph.D. student in Biblical Studies whose work explores longing, faith, and the quiet ache of being human. Her poem about David won the Canadian Bible Society’s 2022 BiblesCanada Creative Giveaway. When not writing, she studies ancient texts, tends to her community, and finds joy in stillness and sunlit afternoons.

Two Poems by Raven Lee

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Mercy

I sat with him,
that mountain of a man

that bear I had followed through the woods.
Don’t be scared. I eat those spiders for breakfast.

Alzheimer’s took his three-piece suit.
His stethoscope. His Lincoln.

Now he sits at this Formica, conquered,
wearing gardening gloves

with gripping circles on them.
White, but greying more each day.

Are your hands cold? I asked.
His glove wiped his runny nose.

His eyes holding all his thoughts
waiting to be picked up like lost luggage.

My name was the first to go.
My brother’s was the last.

In the ambient noise of his presence,
I was not me, but someone.

He looked at me and smiled.
He peered into his coffee,

thickened so he wouldn’t drown.
By now he had one phrase left,

This is the shitz.
And still, when I think of it,

I feel relieved that these
are the words he still had.

Because it was.

*

Coming Home

I sink my feet in the reunion
where salt meets fresh.
One tells the other how she reimagined
granite and earth, slicing stone and root
on her way home,
bringing the mountain with her,
one molecule at a time.

These waters don’t know
our books say they are different.
They know coming home
mother arms stretched
their meeting place remade
by the moon and her song.

The water burbles up to me and I say
yes mother.
I want to find ease in her embrace,
stretch myself into her arms with
the slack muscles of a sleeping newborn.
But I know.
My body knows.

Once the river almost took me back.
She saw my heart and folded herself around me.
Come home, she said.
I saw the water and light dancing
together and I wanted to stay.
I gave myself to the swirl.

I wish I didn’t know a mother
can pull you under as easily
as she can pull you up.

*

Raven Lee (she/her) lives on Wy-East (Mt Hood) where she spends her time writing memoir, essays and poetry, hanging out with trees and throwing funky pots on her pottery wheel. Raven’s writing has appeared in Honeyguide Literary, Amethyst Review and Hip Mama. Raven is on a hiatus from her career as a psychologist and therapist trainer.

Navigating by Lisa Romano Licht

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Navigating

You only show me your tattoos when they’re a done deal. Peel back your shirt, laugh nervously for the reveal. Know my surprise and disappointment will burst like a match-tossed flame. “Mom, are you mad?” you mouth. I shake my head no. A strange emotion rises in me for you, barely in your 20s, and it, so permanent. Potential future of hovering regrets. This one fills your upper arm. I cringe at its geometric spread, wonder how easily it can be hidden. You explain its design, tracing your birth constellation, Libra. Each of its five points bloom with the birth flowers of our family: us, your father, older sister and childhood dog. Morning Glory. Two Marigolds. Poppy. Lily of the Valley. Days later, the flame flickers, smolders. My mind flashes back to years ago when you, a sad girl, no ink, briefly drew hurting marks on that same skin. Pain we shared. Now I see you grown strong-muscled, clear-eyed, choosing a canvas that charts your universe of love instead. Stars fixed and aligned; blossoms awake in perpetuity. Show me your arm again.

*

Lisa Romano Licht’s poetry and other work has appeared in The Westchester Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, San Pedro River Review, Blue Heron Review, Steam Ticket, Mom Egg Review, Ovanque Siamo and elsewhere, and was selected for The Year’s Best Dog Stories and Nothing Divine Dies, both anthologies. She holds a Masters in Writing from Manhattanville College and lives in Rockland County, NY. Find her on X:@LRLwrites

Five Poems by Mary Katherine Creel

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

After the Thunderstorm

There’s a stillbirth in the attic
at the end
of a late-spring storm.

From a little brown bat
still clinging—

a thin cord, anchored
by a pulpy mass,

black fur & fused wings
wet with placenta.

The mother
is unable to leave.

I lie awake
in the bed below,

moonlight burns
my eyes wide open.

We grieve.

*

Because Every Cell is Listening

The doctor describes my condition
as a keyhole.

She has no idea
what I’ve kept locked in.

Because every cell in the body
is listening, skin makes itself

milk glass, mimics oak bark
to heal over old wounds.

Except, this is not a place
for the body to be scarred,

safe yet ever-guarding
from a wolf at the door.

Because every cell in the body
is fighting, I imagine

lavender light at the suggestion
of my therapist, whisper

healing mantras, lie down with
honey bees and clover,

sew myself into the earth.

*

Fortune Teller

Is it selfish to want more
moments like this—

more peach & lavender clouds
lined with rose gold,

the screech of a hawk
nesting in the neighbor’s oak,

honey bees swarming
the false holly?

This time tomorrow,
the cells collected from

my uterus will be packed
with other specimens

en route to a lab.
A stranger will read

stained membranes & mucosa
like tea leaves,

foretell a future with
or without me,

while I try to predict
when the milkweed will bloom.

*

If I Donate My Body to Science

Will the anatomy students find
the paper wasp nest

hung in my throat, snip away
bloodroot fused with foot bones?

Will they wake the black dog
curled inside my rib cage,

marvel at stardust clogging
every vein? Will my shadow

spill, dull flecks of fool’s gold
sifted from the Flint River?

Will they want to study catbrier
wrapping fallopian tubes,

berry-sized cysts, the reverse
scar behind my navel

grown over like bark to heal
a severed first connection?

*

The Day Before Surgery

When I say, I’m going outside
to feed the dark-eyed

juncos, what I really mean is
I need to find a place

where my shadow is one
with the red oak,

and this fear—weighing
like last night’s snow

on rhododendron buds,
turns to slush.

What I need is to follow
forked prints left by crows,

the zig-zag tail drag
of a hungry opossum

and blood-red berries
dropped by the mockingbird

rattling around
in the sleet-frozen holly.

I need to know, this is not
the last time I will hear

snow-crunch underfoot,
Carolina wrens fussing

at cats stalking the brush pile,
feel winter’s wind-sting,

the cold dagger of an icicle
in a wool mitten.

*

Mary Katherine Creel lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she has worked as a journalist and counselor to children and families. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of two poetry collections, including her most recent book, Every Note, a Lantern. She also writes the Substack publication, a small spectacle, featuring nature-inspired poems and short essays about finding gratitude, healing, and connection.

Ode to a Fake Plant by Gene Twaronite

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Ode to a Fake Plant

Your perfect leaves
shine back at me
as if freshly washed
by a spring rain
and make me
want to believe
in you
to touch your skin
and feel the pulse
of your artful
unblemished life
on display
in a tidy white pot
you will never outgrow
I do believe
you would thrive
in my sunless bathroom—
a perpetual plant
who never needs
watering or fussing
and would not care
if I live or die

*

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

Winter Before a Thirty-Year Marriage Ends by Maria Surricchio

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Winter Before a Thirty-Year Marriage Ends

       with a line by Seamus Heaney

Snow beyond the window
fills every corner—empty
of sound—piles in restless
drifts like the train
that just passed through
the town and didn’t stop,
the wisps the planes leave
across the sky. Into the room
where she sits—orphaned
in a little patch of light—
he steps, his lips against
her cheek are warm
and dry. She has forgotten
he can be warm.

*

Maria Surricchio is originally from the UK and now lives near Boulder, Colorado. A life-long lover of poetry, she began writing in 2020 after a long marketing career. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in Blackbird, Salamander, Chicago Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, On the Seawall, The Comstock Review and elsewhere. She has a BA in Modern Languages from Cambridge University and holds an MFA from Pacific University.

Meditation (Intermission) by Bonnie Naradzay

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Meditation (Intermission)

…what if the master of the show who engaged an actor
were to dismiss him from the stage? “But I have not spoken
my five acts, only three.” “What you say is true, but in life
three acts are the whole play.”

        — Marcus Aurelius

It’s all I think about these days, when intermission is,
will it ever come, has it passed, and how many scenes
are in this act that’s so interminable, if it’s not the last.
Could this be the whole play? Hamlet wanted more time.
The end seems hurried; everyone but Horatio falls dead
at the banquet, then Fortinbras appears. The play’s
the thing! Mother’s things are boxed up in a pre-fab shed
behind my sister’s place. Closets bulge with our belongings,
and what are they for? My father’s French wife got rid
of all he owned as soon as he died although I’d wanted
something to remember him by. She had him cremated;
then the VA sent his ashes east to Arlington Cemetery.
My sister wanted a ceremony right away to lay him
to rest behind a small locked door. I could not face it.

*

Bonnie Naradzay’s manuscript will be published this year by Slant Books. For years, she has led weekly poetry sessions at homeless shelters and a retirement community, all in Washington DC. Poems, three of which have been nominated for Pushcarts, have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Dappled Things, and many other places. While at Harvard she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Literature.” In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize – a month’s stay in Northern Italy – in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary. There, Bonnie had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read drafts of Pound’s translations.
https://www.bonnienaradzay.com

Book Launch: Human Resources by Erin Murphy

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Book Launch: Human Resources by Erin Murphy

ONE ART is hosting the launch of Erin Murphy’s new poetry collection— Human Resources.  

~ When & Where ~

We hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, June 18, at 7pm Eastern.

The book launch will be held on Zoom.

~ Event Description ~

Poetry reading by Erin Murphy & special guests to launch Human Resources, documentary poems about labor & employment (Grayson Books, June 2025). Sponsored by ONE ART. Pre-order from your preferred bookseller or here.

~ Special Guests ~

Marc Harshman, Brian Turner, Kwoya Fagin Maples, Le Hinton, Ginny Connors, Mark Danowsky

~ Registration ~

The book launch will be held via Zoom.

Register here.

~ Need more info? ~

Reach out to Mark Danowsky at oneartpoetry@gmail.com

~ What to support ONE ART? ~

Here are ways you can donate to ONE ART.

~ About Erin Murphy ~

Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently Human Resources, Fluent in Blue, Taxonomies, Assisted Living, and a forthcoming collection of lyric essays. Her areas of interest include poetry, creative nonfiction, demi-sonnets (a 7-line form she invented), docupoetics, prose poetry, class, labor & employment, medical humanities, the writing process, and humor. Her edited anthologies are Creating Nonfiction and Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine, both of which won Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, and Making Poems. Her work has appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfiction 2024, The Writer’s Almanac, and anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, Bedford/St. Martin’s, and other university and independent presses. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, the Foley Poetry Award, and The Normal School Poetry Prize. She is Professor of English at Penn State Altoona, where she has received the Athleen J. Stere Teaching Award, the Grace D. Long Faculty Excellence Award, the university-wide Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching, and Penn State’s inaugural BTAA Mellon Academic Leadership Fellowship.

Buttonology by Tarn Wilson

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Buttonology

It’s 1971. I’m four. We live in the toy-empty wilderness and I’m in love
with my mother’s button jar. Buttons waterfall between my fingers.
I sort them: big, small, shiny, dull—carved and shaped like animals.

It’s the 1300s. Someone finally invents the buttonhole and everyone
goes crazy for buttons. Before then, we fastened our clothes with lacing,
belts, and brooches; buttons were only decoration for the rich and royal.

With everyone bedazzled in buttons–breasts, elbows, wrists and necks–
down backs and up shoes–rulers fear commoners will forget their place,
so they pass laws against being too buttony. Which everyone ignores.

It’s the 1800s. Buttoners craft buttons of nut, bone, horn, wood;
of silk, linen, metal, leather; of enamel, porcelain, paper mache,
mother-of-pearl. They are stamped, painted, pressed and crocheted.

Now, buttons are mostly plastic and mass-produced. Businessmen
wear matching button-down shirts, and sixty percent of buttons
are shipped from a single town in China. Buttoned up means “conservative

in style and dress,” means “carefully planned and executed,” means
“to shut one’s mouth.” The person who traps you in a corner at a party
and will not stop talking has buttonholed you. A fuss button frets

about unimportant matters. Buttons are no longer a threatening excess
of beauty. It’s 1983. I’m fifteen. We live in the suburbs and my mother,
fearing I’m too prim, unbuttons my top shirt buttons to show more skin.

My mother, rattley with anger and loneliness and something frightening
I cannot name, always seems on the edge of losing her buttons. I don’t
want to come undone. This is what women hear: Be cute as a button,

neat as a button, bright as a button. But listen: once, a button was a con
man’s apprentice; a buttoner, a hitman. This, too, is a button: a flower
bud, 1/12 of an inch, a clitoris, a man’s nipple, the end of a fencing foil,

a dog’s ear that folds forward, a white spot on a cat’s coat, the bud
of a baby rattlesnake’s rattle. I don’t want to be buttoned too tightly. But
we need some restraint. The moon is a button that keeps the night-coat

from opening and spilling all the black holes. Once in a remote wilderness,
I hiked a stretch of trail made of small, white buttons. I want to be that person,
to create anonymous, useless delights. There is no word, as far as I know,

for love of buttons. Koumpounophobia is fear of buttons. Koumopouno
means beans in Greek. The first Greek buttons were made of beans.
Steve Jobs, they say, had a fear of buttons, which accounts for his love

of turtlenecks and touch screens. “So what?” “Sew a button on your
underwear.” It’s the 1930s, and that’s a sassy answer. Cute as a button.
A button is the final joke, a punchy line of dialogue that concludes a scene.

*

Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (Wandering Aengus Book Award), and a craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. Her essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, and The Sun. She is currently taking a break from her long-term relationship with prose and has been shamelessly flirting with poetry. New work appears in Grey Matter, Imagist, Museum of Americana, One Sentence Poems, Pedestal, Porcupine Literary, New Verse News, Right Hand Pointing, and Sweet Lit and is forthcoming in Only Poems and Potomac Review.

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Still

Be still for a long while
to catch what heron sees

in water’s flux and ruffle:
the tiny fish below.

To see the tiny fish below
that heron catches

in water’s flux and ruffle,
for a long while, be still.

*

Explanation

You wouldn’t have become a poet,
if you’d had a happy childhood
the mother said
to her grown-up child,

as if conferring a blessing,
offering consolation,
instead of the excuse,
the curse, the life-long sentence,
of becoming a poet.

*

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.

Strength by Kara Dorris

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Strength

When I buy seed pods, I choose by name
not looks or season. I don’t care how a succulent

shows off her curves or dives into a reservoir
of cliffs. I never knew the variations

of aloe: hedgehog, tiger tooth, candelabra,
& soap: all things that scratch & burn

& yet treatments for injuries.
I stuck my hand into a furnace’s mouth once.

I thought it was an industrial tiger. I thought
it was a learning experience. I was willing to take

my ruler slaps, my switch hits, just to have
that feeling committed to memory. Instinct

to avoid danger isn’t enough. I needed real
world, hands-on experience. Water doesn’t give

when you jump from a cliff. Water breaks bones.
I needed to know this. So I jumped. I have a reservoir

of muscle memories like this. My mirror
neurons have been in training since I was six

& realized people rarely said what they meant.
I used to suck purple kool-aid frozen in ice trays.

I let the cube rest on my tongue until
it stitched itself into my being & only warm faucet

water could save me. See, water kills & it saves.
Fire too. I held my hand in that furnace

to see what choice fire would choose.
When I jumped off that cliff

I spoke to water, not some god. Asked the waves
to let me be kindred for a while.

To let me wash up on some shore where families
picnic, where mothers & grandmothers

& daughters don’t fear their destinies
to become each other. Did you know The Fool

is the most powerful card in the Tarot deck?
Not the Lovers, not the Wheel of Fortune.

Not even Strength, which is my favorite, how
she walks side by side with a tiger

without fear or danger. The tiger eats her, of course.
But until that bite, she is unafraid & sticks

her hand in every furnace she encounters.
She smears her wounds with the stickiest, prickliest

aloe she can find. It’s this way she learns
that some things can hurt & soothe

simultaneously. It is succulent, this relieved pain.
It is many-named: unrequited, dual-

edged, the future tense. It is the seed pods we sow
into the ground with each step away,

because we can’t escape it. The pain. The relief.
The belief that we must suffer to know why

every furnace is worth the loss of a finger
or two, every cliff, worth

the ten seconds of fear
before the percussive splash.

*

Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: HitBox (Kelsay Books 2024), Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press. She has also published five chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Nine Mile, DIAGRAM, Wordgathering, Puerto del Sol, and swamp pink, among other literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She currently teaches writing at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.

Before The Paint Dries by P M F Johnson

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Before The Paint Dries

When I first met you, we leaned
against each other for practice,
not because we knew of any future
escape from the cigarette desert,
of draped passions in the boss’s chair,
all candle-incandescent, our faces
bright as beadwork on a prayer shawl.
We were like building blocks propped
against the side of the cage,
freeing ourselves to roam
the sidewalks with that
certain greedy, rebel grin.

It’ll be about cities
before we’re done. We get that.
We’re little more than wire loops
in an alley, fallen from cartons
in the dumpster, weathering.
The elements of faith.

Clouds pass, and a deep rain.
We’re not in arrears on
these spirit dreams anymore.
We use the bright blue, the greens
rubbed on with fingertips, a trace
of feline gold, two old lovers,
before the paint dries, hurrying
to get the memories right.

*

P M F Johnson has placed poetry with Blue Unicorn, The Evansville Review, The Main Street Rag, Measure, Nimrod International Journal, The North American Review, Poetry East, The Threepenny Review, and many others. He has won The Brady Senryu Award from The Haiku Society of America, been a 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.

Two Poems by Michael Juliani

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The World Is Not Astonished

I daydreamed often
about beating people up.

Touch was so rare those months
A.’s fingers felt like a doctor’s

probing for a lump. We heard
roars lifting from Prospect Park

like the cypresses were rising
against us. South Slope’s avenues

filled, sordid like a campus
after a football rivalry win—

wives on each other’s
shoulders, grade-schoolers

protecting their fathers’ beers.
My neighbor doused

his barbecue, ran into the fray,
the charcoal’s last gasps

reeking the dimensions
of my bedroom. We touched

how we did before our spit
could kill each other,

thin bands of white lace
and blown-out hair between my fingers

as we caught our breath
and listened. America intended

to cut this night
like a cake, parcel out a piece

to everyone, not just two
long-absent lovers beholding

each other’s nakedness
blue in the summer twilight.

*

Kingdom of Breath

White roses, old Volks
tarp-hidden, dreamcatchers,

pinwheels, surplus tents —
this moment a breeze, I think

I’ve been here, not just
this road, this house: pallid, burdened

single mother pinching
spiders off her quilt,

kissing matches
on the prey — I’m home

in these streets,
netless hoops tumble

like ramparts, buzzcut boys
hang on the rims, neck hair

sharp to soothing hand, my
mother taught me to leap

like them, touched me to that
boyhood flame — it journeys

ash to the last
breath, final prayers

in my body, which was
always footsteps

speaking: hello little kid
nothing really

needs you

*

Michael Juliani is a poet, editor, and writer from Pasadena, California. His poems have appeared in outlets such as the Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, Epiphany, Bear Review, SARKA, and the Washington Square Review. He lives in Los Angeles.

Trick by Paul Hostovsky

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Trick

Pick a disease, any disease.
Memorize it. Now put it back
with the other diseases. Shuffle them,
put them in separate piles,
the corners loosely interlocking.
Square them. Fan them out,
splayed and facedown like
so many bodies. The trick
is recognizing your disease
isn’t yours. Isn’t you. It could
have been any of them. This is the one
you were dealt, so deal with it
and when the time comes to fold,
fold. Forfeit. Because you lose
everything. Everybody does.
There are no winners. There is only
this dream. This game. This trick
of making the whole thing disappear.

*

Paul Hostovsky’s poems and essays appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Award, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com

Remind Me by Bonnie Proudfoot

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Remind Me

Swastika painted
on the outside wall
of the synagogue,
fear in the pews,
fear on the tongue.
How many coats
of white paint
to cover black slashes?

What’s your last name,
little girl? Where are
your people from?
how does dread enter
the body? Through
the nose, the eyes,
through the shade
of your skin?

Fear on your lips, solid
as an egg held
against the back
of the throat. Fold
your hands into your
lap, pray before
the match meets
the candle.

Here is history,
how loud it sounds.
White stucco walls,
crosses burned
on a lawn,
hate painted over,
but still there.
What America
does God bless?

*

Bonnie Proudfoot’s fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies, including ONE ART, SWWIM, Rattle, and the New Ohio Review. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart. Her novel Goshen Road (OU Swallow Press) received the WCONA Book of the Year and was long-listed for the PEN/ Hemingway. Household Gods, a poetry chapbook, can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. A full-length poetry collection, Incomer, is forthcoming on Shadelandhouse Modern Press. Bonnie resides in Athens, Ohio.

L’Dor V’Dor by Robbi Nester

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

L’Dor V’Dor

My father never told me stories about growing up.
I only know he left home at 16. I’m sure that he was
sick of that cramped apartment, where they must have
slept three to a narrow bed, like rolled up socks
crammed in the drawer. I gather these facts as one
might harvest onions in a ploughed-up field,
grabbing hold and pulling till they yield. Anyway,
I know for sure he joined the Airforce, though
he was just 16. Was that after grandmom
threw her second husband out, the only father
he had ever known? I heard my father speak
a dozen times about his fear that he might lose
his job, have to move us all back in with her,
to “double up.” His words. Like someone sucker-
punched, suffering under her reproachful eye.
Who did he remind her of? Perhaps her father.
I didn’t even know his name, just the stories,
mostly tales my mother whispered when we were
alone. She was a stranger to the family, not bound
to keep their secrets. Some families hand down
legacies of great estates, paintings and china.
My father’s family left only taut silence, old
resentments and the twisted chain of DNA.

*

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

Two Poems by Brian Beatty

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Silhouettes

A half dozen hawks
floated in the white sky

above an anonymous
river’s rushing brown floodwaters.

The sun above that scene was blinding,
beating down, drying

the bank’s loose prairie sand into cement.

There I stood like a monument
to tourism, lost in my phone.

Just one dumb picture of the birds’
perfectly choreographed circles

was all I wanted.
But they were already gone.

*

The Yawn

I’m so tired tonight
I worry I might

swallow the world.

*

Brian Beatty is the author of five small press poetry collections and a spoken word album. Beatty’s poems have appeared in Appalachian Journal, Conduit, CutBank, Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gulf Coast, Hobart, The Missouri Review, The Moth, ONE ART, The Quarterly, Rattle and The Southern Review.

Thirty-Eight Rings by John Arthur

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Thirty-Eight Rings

last night’s lightning split the sycamore.
how can I pledge myself
to you when I don’t know
what I am? you can see
where the wood was scorched.
you can see where it wasn’t.
I know death is impossible,
but it feels real when it happens
to anyone other than me.
and when it does happen to me
I imagine my daughters
will feel much as I do
looking now at this tree.
I rev my chainsaw and cut
what’s left into pieces
small enough to carry away.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, DIAGRAM, Failbetter, trampset, ONE ART, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best of the Net.

Cruel Spring by Tamara Madison

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Cruel Spring

My child calls to tell me a horror story,
a scene she’s just witnessed in her backyard
beneath the Bradford pear where, last week
her dog found a nest of newborn rabbits.
Before she could stop it, the pug
snatched one tiny life and shook it dead.
But that was already a week’s old tale.

Today’s story involves a crow. She saw it
fling a small thing into the air, then poke it
with its beak where it landed. Then it took off
with the thing in its talons. The mother rabbit
was left there under the tree, hopping around
in despair and disbelief. My daughter had
to tell me this.

Oh, bunny my bunny! Sometimes
I can hardly bear my own good fortune.

*

Tamara Madison is the author of three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic”, “Moraine” (both from Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar” (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and two chapbooks, “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig, Worcester Review, ONE ART, and many other publications. More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Lost by Ashley Kirkland

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Lost

I’ve lost my mother many times, enough
to fill a lifetime. She is always slipping away
from me. The first time (a classic) in a 90’s turn of events

in a department store, I pressed my face to soft silk shirts
& got lost in a rack of clothing. A woman found me crying
in the center of the circular rack. Years later, we nearly lost

her when her heart blew open in the living room,
her aorta fraying like the end of a rope. The ghost I was floated
across campus for weeks. A teacher called me honey

and I nearly cried: nearly motherless at 21. Now, 36,
my husband and I talk in the kitchen on a Sunday
afternoon, rain drizzling in late November, football helmets

clashing on the tv in the other room, and we talk about her
health as if it concerns us and I say he’ll be devastated,
referring to our older son, who loves my mother. She doesn’t realize

I say who she’s hurting by not taking care of herself as if her health
is something within our control. I was 21 & I said goodbye to her
over the phone and drove home while she was in surgery,

her chest splayed open on the operating table, her aorta
a patchwork. Now, 36, I stop and listen every time I hear sirens
to see if they turn in the direction of her street. I lose her again

and again, dread the day when I get the call (again),
when my father tells me to come home now, and I have to tell
my son, in words I don’t yet know, what has happened.

*

Ashley Kirkland writes in Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in Cordella Press, Boats Against the Current, The Citron Review, Naugatuck River Review, HAD, Major7thMagazine, among others. Her chapbook, BRUISED MOTHER, is available from Boats Against the Current. She is a poetry editor for 3Elements Literary Review. You can find her at lashleykirkland.bsky.social and lashleykirklandwriter on Instagram.