Two Hearts by Liz Weber

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Two Hearts

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by James Diaz

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will not be sweetened
I will not be eaten

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

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

*

Good Things

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

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

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

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

And then,

“Me too.”

He disappeared again.

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

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

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

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

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

You learn to run with it.

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

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

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

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

Good things, even.
Good things.

*

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

Four Poems by Andrea Potos

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AT THE NAIL SALON

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

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

*

JUNE IS A WORD AND A MEMORY

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

MY MOTHER AND LIPSTICK

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

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

*

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

TO BE LIKE YOU by Lori Levy

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TO BE LIKE YOU

In memory of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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

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

*

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

Matthew Writes His Obituary in Red by Kate Hanson Foster

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Matthew Writes His Obituary in Red

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

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

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

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

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

*

In lieu of flowers, please donate to BishopAccountability.org

*

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

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

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

         For Susan Vespoli

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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Self Portrait with Mary Oliver at Ashfield Lake, Late Fall

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

*

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

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

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As I Contemplate Precarity, the Dogs Eat Their Breakfast

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

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

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

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

*

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

Etiquette for Choking in an Applebee’s by Kristen Rapp

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Etiquette for Choking in an Applebee’s

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

*

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

Two Poems by Melissa Strilecki

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Rabid Omnivores

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Another Poem About

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

*

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

Battle of the Bulge by Tom Barlow

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Battle of the Bulge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Woof, Woof by Mark Williams

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Woof, Woof

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

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

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

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

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

to drown out a father’s laughter.

*

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

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

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When is a dining table not a table?

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Inside the Singing by Sally Nacker

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Inside the Singing

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

*

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

Take Five by Heidi Seaborn

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Take Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

Worm Wisdom by Marc Alan Di Martino

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Worm Wisdom

The cut worm forgives the plow.
—Blake

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Deer At the Hosta by Laurel Brett

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Deer At the Hosta

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

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

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

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

the fuchsia poppies
blooming now alone.

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

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

Everything is different
since you’ve gone.

Everything is different
each time I consider it—

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

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

Sometimes we just fumble
together hopelessly in love.

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

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

Someday the late bright white
perfection will return.

*

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

Breakfast in a Hotel in Västerås by Terri Kirby Erickson

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Breakfast in a Hotel in Västerås

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

*

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

One August Afternoon by Mary Ellen Redmond

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

One August Afternoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I see the rippling
of her delicate white throat.

The rippling of her throat
is enough and too much,

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

or when one considers the
tessellation of a honeycomb.

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Maggie Rue Hess

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

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

*

We Were Girls Together

        for H.S.B.

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

*

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

Masked by Tara Menon

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Masked

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

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

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

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

*

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

ONE ART’s September 2025 Reading

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ONE ART’s September 2025 Reading

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

Date: Sunday, September 7

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

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

>>> Tickets Available <<<

Free!

(Donations appreciated.)

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

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

*

~ About Our Featured Poets ~

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

Two Poems by Preeti Talwai

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Hypochondriac

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

*

Flight Path

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

*

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

Leaving Home by Tula Francesca

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Leaving Home

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

*

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

ONE ART’s 2026 Best of the Net Nominations

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s 2026 Best of the Net Nominations   

Allison Blevins – Earlier, Jane Kenyon

Kai Coggin – I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW

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

Alison Luterman – To a Mother I Know

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

Dana Henry Martin – Window Strike at Highlands Behavioral Health

After the Firestorm by Laura Ann Reed

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

After the Firestorm

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

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

*

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

Maintaining World Order by Tony Gloeggler

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Maintaining World Order

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Rebirth by Ellen Austin-Li

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Rebirth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

>>> Tickets available <<<

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

For the Friend Who Died Before We Could Reconcile

             for Shara

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

It’s an automatic response by Kit Willett

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

It’s an automatic response

to dance in the shadows,
to perform for myself,

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

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

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

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

*

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

Learner’s Permit by James Davis

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Learner’s Permit

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

* 

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

On Forgiveness by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ON FORGIVENESS

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Coffee Frother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

The gut is an aquarium of odd sea creatures

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Three Poems by Sayantani Roy

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

On the continent of mothering

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

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

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

and let me tell you this—

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

*

Ritual

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

*

The kitchen, your temple

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the woman who bore him seven children.

*

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

Two Poems by Karly Randolph Pitman

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Room at the Inn

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

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

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

* 

Growing Sweet Potatoes

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Untethered by Michelle DeRose

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Untethered

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

*

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

Two Poems by Veronica Tucker

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Once, on the Oncology Floor

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

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

*

In the Absence of Fever

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

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

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

*

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

Paper Lanterns by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Paper Lanterns

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

imagine
your name
on one of them
after Hiroshima

imagine
silence
burning

*

Martin Willitts Jr, a retired Librarian that trained Librarians for New York State Public Libraries. He lives in Syracuse, New York. He is an editor for Comstock Review, and he is the judge for the New York State Fair Poetry Competition. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the National Ecological Award winner for “Searching for What You Cannot See” (Hiraeth Press, 2013) and the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr: Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024).

A morning with my dead father by Linda Laderman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

A morning with my dead father

                       The morning air is all awash with angels
                                     — Richard Wilbur

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

*

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

Murderers by Marc Alan Di Martino

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Murderers

“Meditate che questo è stato.”
—Primo Levi

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

*

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

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

HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE by Dylan Webster

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HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE

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

*

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

Four Poems by J.R. Solonche

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

THE RAIN

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

*

A VERY BELATED LETTER TO ROBERT BLY

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

*

THE BUDDHA ON MY WINDOWSILL

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

*

IN THE BEAUTY PARLOR

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

*

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

Broken Chain by Jennifer L Freed

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Broken Chain

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

*

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

two haiku by Joshua Eric Williams

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

two haiku

*

playing me
by heart
birdsong

*

empty swing
still swaying
wildflowers

*

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

Lovestruck by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Lovestruck

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

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

*

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

ONE ART’s August 2025 Reading

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

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

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

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

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

About Our Featured Poets:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cashew Gatherers by Ranudi Gunawardena

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Cashew Gatherers

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

*

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

What I Remember of You Alive by Zander Crowns

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

What I Remember of You Alive

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

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

*

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

The Apartment Below by Tara Vassallo Consiglio

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

The Apartment Below

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Hellifino by Todd Wynn

~ ONE ART ~ 12 Comments

Hellifino

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

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

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

The car erupted in laughter.

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

*

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

Neither Right nor Beautiful by Sarah Lynn Hurd

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Neither Right nor Beautiful

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

*

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

Four Poems by Rachel Beachy

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

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

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

*

Call for Submissions

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

*

And Now, for My Next Trick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Not Everything Has to be a Poem

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

*

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

Two Poems by Shah Nabil

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

Friday Night Fire by Mary Ray Goehring

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Friday Night Fire

        After When I Was Conceived by Michael Ryan

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

*

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

Two Poems by Hanna Webster

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Ripe

          after Natasha Rao’s “Cornucopia”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

How do I know when to be quiet

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

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

*

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

Intelligent Design by Diane K. Martin

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Intelligent Design

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

*

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

Pine by Rusty Barnes

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Pine

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

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

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

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

*

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

In Praise of Moving On by Anya Kirshbaum

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

Three Poems by Heather Kays

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

The World Keeps Blooming

For and Inspired by Louise Glück

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

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

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

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

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

*

SCREEN

For Sylvia Plath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Still, It Sings

After “Caged,” by my brother, age 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not loud.
Not pretty.
But enough.

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

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

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

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

*

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

Peony by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Peony

In decline
you are a glory

I have watched
the changing story

of your beauty’s
slow emergence

over time
pink rose rust

never losing leaf
or petal

your stem
still green still fine

*

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

Two Poems by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Shopping for Sheets

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

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

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

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

*

Love at First Sight

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

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

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

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

*

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

Agnosticism by Virginia Kane

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Agnosticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Three Poems by Sonia Greenfield

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

*

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

Two Poems by Anne Starling

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Conversations with My Son

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

*

Love Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Counterfeits by Aubrey Brady

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Counterfeits

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

*

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

Two Poems by Em Townsend

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Reverse Abecedarian of Domestic Fantasy

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

*

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

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

*

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

Visibility and Book Sales: Marketing Your Small Press Book

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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