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

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

***

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

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

***

About Our Co-Host:

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

About Our Featured Poets:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Force Fed by Kimmy Chang

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Force Fed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

as if saving rice might save something else.

*

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

Into the Empty Hours by Subhaga Crystal Bacon

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Into the Empty Hours

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

*

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

ONE ART’s July 2025 Reading

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ONE ART’s July 2025 Reading

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

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

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

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

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

About Our Featured Poets:

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

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

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

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

Four Poems by Alex Stolis

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Phantom Threads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

1995 Morgan Park High School All-Class Reunion Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

The Wonder Years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Brooke Herter James

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

When Everything Everywhere Seems So Grim

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

*

How My Father Taught Me to Wade Across the River

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

*

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

Three Poems by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

My Goldilocks Closet

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

*

A Second Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Labels

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

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

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

*

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

Writing Through Illness: A Workshop with Karly Randolph Pitman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Writing through Illness: A Workshop with Karly Randolph Pitman

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Let Your Grief Wash You to Another Shore 

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

Find more about Eddy Sara on his website.

***

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

>>> Register for Karly’s workshop <<<

***

~ About The Workshop Leader ~

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

Two Poems by Michael Simms

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

The Old Neighborhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Summers

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

The Question by Sonya Rose Hartfield

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The Question

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

*

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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

When You Live Alone with a Chronic Illness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Atlas by Claudia Gary

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Atlas

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

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

Oceans lap at my temples.
Submarine and whale songs

confuse my ear so I
change sides again and shake

a cramp out of one forearm.
My fingers seek mountaintops

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

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

Closing my eyes and bowing
my head I wonder what

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

*

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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

I Can’t Find My Gender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

licking and licking the palm of my hand.

*

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

Perhaps by Jo Taylor

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Perhaps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

On Plagiarism by Nicole Caruso Garcia

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On Plagiarism

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

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

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

*

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

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

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Re: Frank O’Hara, Cameron Awkward-Rich

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

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

he’s not dead yet
but nothing here is permanent

*

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

After All These Years by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

After All These Years

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

This by Laura Garfinkel

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This

        after Marianne Moore

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

*

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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

When Did My Evenings Return to the Shortest Routes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Photograph

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

*

On Suffering

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

*

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

Two Poems by Christina Daub

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

People are Dying, But

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

*

Grief is like that

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

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

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

*

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

The Hundred-Line Poem: A Workshop with Harriet Levin

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The Hundred-Line Poem

Instructor: Harriet Levin

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

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

Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern

Standard Price: $100
Economic Hardship: $75

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

Workshop Description:

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

About The Workshop Instructor:

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

untitled by john compton

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

untitled

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

the red beak & black wings
flash by my peripheral.

it swoops around in a circle—
a death kite:

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

it perches on my shoulders
& imbeds talons

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

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

to assist
in cleansing the decay.

*

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

Two Poems by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

“Horoscope”

         ~ for Kate

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

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

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

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

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

*

Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Where to Submit Your Poetry (besides ONE ART)

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~ Meeting Day/Time ~  

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

1:00 PM (Eastern Time)

Please note: This meeting will not be recorded.

*

Register for the meeting: Here.

*

~ Meeting Description / Agenda ~

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

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

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

*

Mrs. T’s by Jeanine Walker

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Mrs. T’s

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

*

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

PALL MALL by Doug Fritock

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

PALL MALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

15 by Clint Margrave

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

15

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Torii Gate,
Knobs Haven Cemetery,
Retreat, Day Two

       — for my mother, Marien

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

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

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

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

*

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

Three Poems by Dana Henry Martin

~ ONE ART ~ 16 Comments

Window Strike at Highlands Behavioral Health

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

*

Lost

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

*

Bonnet About a Demurring Theme, I Mean

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

*

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

Four Poems by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

All Things Bloom

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

*

Gulf of My Body

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

*

Whale Shark

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

*

Vote For Dancing
        Cast all your votes for dancing – Hafiz

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

*

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

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

Three Poems by Joseph Fasano

~ ONE ART ~ 13 Comments

To the Insurance Executive Who Denied My Heart Procedure

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

*

The Reckoning

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

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

*

Lazarus

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

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

*

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

Father Hopkins by Sally Nacker

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Father Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889

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

*

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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Having a Gay Awakening at the Elm Grove Public Pool

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

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

My church: a pool of shirtless men.

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

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

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

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

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

hands cupped
on holy bushfire.

*

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

The Mantra of a Teratoma by Carolynn Kingyens

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Mantra of a Teratoma

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

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

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

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

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

Observe, don’t absorb.

Master the pause.

Starve the drama.

*

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

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

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

Two Poems by Steph Sundermann-Zinger

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Above Elizabeth, New Jersey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Kelli Russell Agodon

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

*

Even the Rain Has a Side Hustle

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

*

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

Two Poems by Morrow Dowdle

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

I Decline the Order of Protection

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

*

And Then, We Hear It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Five Poems by James Feichthaler

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

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

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

*

Sidewalk suns

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

*

So much baggage

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

*

Such rarities abound

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

*

Luck be a ladybug

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

*

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

Two Poems by Tim Mayo

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

A Candle For

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

like a veiled busker
sawing out sad tunes
on her violin

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

made me think of moons

Remembrance mirrors
the invisible of someone
so a self seems immortal

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

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

snuff it just sputters out

*

A Father’s Lament

We almost never met
but at eleven you asked

I forced a truce of sorts
conceded your fidelity

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

And the clock’s hand
scythed down

the might-have-beens
leaving only the likely

In the end I learned too late
the unconditional of surrender

*

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

Two Poems by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

AFTER THE DREAM, MY FRIEND
       In memory, Rosemary

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

*

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

On Being Forgiven by Howie Good

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On Being Forgiven

It’s approaching dusk,
and at dusk the birds

in the marsh revive
old conversations

to which I sometimes
stop to listen, but,

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

despite the offense,
bears my weight.

*

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

Wedding Music by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Wedding Music

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

*

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

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

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Don’t Say You Never Knew Him

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

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

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

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

*

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

Marriage Dance: Year 45 by Dick Westheimer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Marriage Dance: Year 45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Bringing Bodies like Kindling Wood

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

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

* 

On the Battlefield

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Baruch November

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Lives upon Lives

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

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

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

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

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

*

The Tiger of Detroit

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Michael T. Young

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Baroque Edge

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

*

Erased

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Three Poems by Connie Post

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Maps

I no longer want
Google map directions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mostly
I want someone to know I’m lost

*

My Body is a Content Warning

The papers and files
are all boxed up

nobody wants to read my bones

these fractures didn’t just happen
overnight

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

there is an empty can of mace
in my sleeve

I’ve never used it

all my offenders know me

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

my body is surrounded
by the weeds of childhood

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

how many times
must I cauterize my subconscious

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

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

the gods are hungry

*

Sleeping With the Light On

You didn’t mean to
but you were too tired

maybe you took one pill too many

maybe daylight savings time
wanted you to exile yourself

most likely though

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

where the fibers hang like long strands
of your remaining sanity

they were hung
with the crippled hands of a mad man

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

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

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

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

*

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

Double by Ellen Rosenbloom

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Double

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

On His Birthday by Sarah Joy

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On His Birthday

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Raven Lee

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Mercy

I sat with him,
that mountain of a man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because it was.

*

Coming Home

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Navigating by Lisa Romano Licht

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Navigating

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

*

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

Five Poems by Mary Katherine Creel

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

After the Thunderstorm

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

From a little brown bat
still clinging—

a thin cord, anchored
by a pulpy mass,

black fur & fused wings
wet with placenta.

The mother
is unable to leave.

I lie awake
in the bed below,

moonlight burns
my eyes wide open.

We grieve.

*

Because Every Cell is Listening

The doctor describes my condition
as a keyhole.

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

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

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

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

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

Because every cell in the body
is fighting, I imagine

lavender light at the suggestion
of my therapist, whisper

healing mantras, lie down with
honey bees and clover,

sew myself into the earth.

*

Fortune Teller

Is it selfish to want more
moments like this—

more peach & lavender clouds
lined with rose gold,

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

honey bees swarming
the false holly?

This time tomorrow,
the cells collected from

my uterus will be packed
with other specimens

en route to a lab.
A stranger will read

stained membranes & mucosa
like tea leaves,

foretell a future with
or without me,

while I try to predict
when the milkweed will bloom.

*

If I Donate My Body to Science

Will the anatomy students find
the paper wasp nest

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

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

marvel at stardust clogging
every vein? Will my shadow

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

Will they want to study catbrier
wrapping fallopian tubes,

berry-sized cysts, the reverse
scar behind my navel

grown over like bark to heal
a severed first connection?

*

The Day Before Surgery

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

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

where my shadow is one
with the red oak,

and this fear—weighing
like last night’s snow

on rhododendron buds,
turns to slush.

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

the zig-zag tail drag
of a hungry opossum

and blood-red berries
dropped by the mockingbird

rattling around
in the sleet-frozen holly.

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

snow-crunch underfoot,
Carolina wrens fussing

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

the cold dagger of an icicle
in a wool mitten.

*

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

Ode to a Fake Plant by Gene Twaronite

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Ode to a Fake Plant

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

*

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

Winter Before a Thirty-Year Marriage Ends by Maria Surricchio

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Winter Before a Thirty-Year Marriage Ends

       with a line by Seamus Heaney

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

*

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

Meditation (Intermission) by Bonnie Naradzay

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Meditation (Intermission)

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

        — Marcus Aurelius

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

*

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

Book Launch: Human Resources by Erin Murphy

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Book Launch: Human Resources by Erin Murphy

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

~ When & Where ~

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

The book launch will be held on Zoom.

~ Event Description ~

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

~ Special Guests ~

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

~ Registration ~

The book launch will be held via Zoom.

Register here.

~ Need more info? ~

Reach out to Mark Danowsky at oneartpoetry@gmail.com

~ What to support ONE ART? ~

Here are ways you can donate to ONE ART.

~ About Erin Murphy ~

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

Buttonology by Tarn Wilson

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Buttonology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Still

Be still for a long while
to catch what heron sees

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

To see the tiny fish below
that heron catches

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

*

Explanation

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

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

*

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

Strength by Kara Dorris

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Strength

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the ten seconds of fear
before the percussive splash.

*

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

Before The Paint Dries by P M F Johnson

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Before The Paint Dries

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

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

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

*

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

Two Poems by Michael Juliani

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The World Is Not Astonished

I daydreamed often
about beating people up.

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

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

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

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

wives on each other’s
shoulders, grade-schoolers

protecting their fathers’ beers.
My neighbor doused

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

reeking the dimensions
of my bedroom. We touched

how we did before our spit
could kill each other,

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

as we caught our breath
and listened. America intended

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

to everyone, not just two
long-absent lovers beholding

each other’s nakedness
blue in the summer twilight.

*

Kingdom of Breath

White roses, old Volks
tarp-hidden, dreamcatchers,

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

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

single mother pinching
spiders off her quilt,

kissing matches
on the prey — I’m home

in these streets,
netless hoops tumble

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

sharp to soothing hand, my
mother taught me to leap

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

ash to the last
breath, final prayers

in my body, which was
always footsteps

speaking: hello little kid
nothing really

needs you

*

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

Trick by Paul Hostovsky

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Trick

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

*

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

Remind Me by Bonnie Proudfoot

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Remind Me

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

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

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

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

*

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

L’Dor V’Dor by Robbi Nester

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

L’Dor V’Dor

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

*

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

Two Poems by Brian Beatty

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Silhouettes

A half dozen hawks
floated in the white sky

above an anonymous
river’s rushing brown floodwaters.

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

the bank’s loose prairie sand into cement.

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

Just one dumb picture of the birds’
perfectly choreographed circles

was all I wanted.
But they were already gone.

*

The Yawn

I’m so tired tonight
I worry I might

swallow the world.

*

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

Thirty-Eight Rings by John Arthur

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Thirty-Eight Rings

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

*

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

Cruel Spring by Tamara Madison

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Cruel Spring

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

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

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

*

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

Lost by Ashley Kirkland

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Tulips by Mary Ellen Redmond

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Tulips

I love tulips, especially in the dead of winter.
I love them even when they die.
They become something else entirely,
and somehow, more beautiful.
The petals dry and shrink and their bright colors fade.
Some crimp and curl creating petal-globes
surrounding the stamen and style.
Others flatten like a splayed star
revealing their inner workings.
Soon, the long green stems will arc
from the vase towards the table
resembling old women burdened
by the task of staying alive.
Now, I see the petals as tongues—
talking among themselves.

*

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.

Still Palatable by Shelly Reed Thieman

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Still Palatable

Just last week I worried
late snow might mute
the trumpet daffodils,

but the forces lined up
flawlessly, like dancers
in a well-rehearsed chorus

line, and today the sky
is that delirious shade
of blue which pauses

my morning roam
while I gawk, deepen
my breath—seventy-five

degrees, the sun buxom—
and for ten minutes,
forget the griefs

my mind has memorized.

*

Shelly Reed Thieman is a messenger of imagery, a mistress of montage. Her work is heavily influenced by the discipline of haiku. Her poems have appeared in diverse journals, most recently in Anti-Heroin Chic. She has poems forthcoming in The Sunlight Press and Lyrical Iowa 2025. Shelly is the facilitator of Poetry Brew, a monthly women’s poetry workshop group in central Iowa, and is a two-time Pushcart nominee.

Three Poems by M.L. Hedison

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Everyone knows sex is for men

my aunt said at eighty two—
between bites of quiche, sips of tea.
My young cousins and I stared

at our plates, shifted in our seats.
Chaste for thirty years
after her husband died, she put

sex on the table. Family matriarch
ready to tell all. One sexual partner
her entire life. A mercurial man,

moody, dark – quick with a bark.
Left with three boys to raise alone,
she praised him—love story

of her life. She wore slippers,
better to walk on eggshells.
Held her tongue. Unable to say

what gave her pleasure. This spot,
not there, here yes, right there.
Sex more duty than desire.

Repetitive like laundry.
As she spoke to us, oxygen
finally filled her lungs.

*

SILENT NIGHT

There are no airport runs
no one coming home to us.
Drive of wonder, glow of lights—

each year, we carry the biggest
tree into the house. Whiff of pine
on my hands, perfume.

Fills the space where kids
should be. Blinking color, angels
on their knees, amaryllis

about to burst. The image,
my three brothers and me,
five in the morning.

Huddled in one bedroom.
Oldest can tell time, still too early.
My father’s firm hand against the wall.

Why can’t you be like you were,
last treasure, a tangerine
in the toe of my stocking.

*

FOR FLORENCE

The cold bit off my fingers the day I buried you.
Jackhammer opened the earth.
Slabs of dirt to welcome you.
Not sun or birds or green pillow to kneel on.

This is when I turned solid,
fire hose in winter.
Nylon stockings covered my feet.
Your warm glow given at birth –
now a thin muslin shroud, no blanket.

A dull ache of clouds shivered with damp.
My head bowed to cut the wind.
Priest’s vestments blew black in snow.
I can’t leave you in the cold.

Grief still has me on my back,
boot at my throat.
I take in the plants at night so they don’t die.
I can’t remember your hands.

*

M.L. Hedison is an emerging poet based in the coastal town of Wakefield, R.I. She is a former advertising creative director and writer. Her work explores themes of absence, longing, and her Armenian family through lyrical verse. She has been writing poetry for three years and continues to study with Jennifer Franklin, Martha Collins and Wyn Cooper. M.L. is so grateful to have her work published for the first time in ONE ART.

ONE ART’s June 2025 Reading

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

Featured Poets: Barbara Crooker, Robbi Nester, Judy Kronenfeld, Cathleen Cohen


>>> Tickets Available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)

The reading will be held on Sunday, June 8 at 2pm Eastern.

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

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


About Our Featured Poets:

Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A poet, painter and teacher, she created the We the Poets program for children (www.theartwell.org.) Her poems appear in literary journals and in books: Camera Obscura (2017), Etching the Ghost (2021) and Sparks and Disperses (2021). Her artwork is on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery (www.ceruleanarts.com) and www.cathleencohenart.com. Cathleen blogs about ekphrasis (http://www.madpoetssociety.com/blog. Recently, one of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Judy Kronenfeld’s nine collections of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air  (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems was published by the Inlandia Institute in February, 2025.

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

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
www.barbaracrooker.com

>>> Tickets Available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)

New World Order by Kip Knott

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

New World Order

When I wake up this morning, it dawns on me
that I haven’t heard from Normal in a while.

The last time Normal called, it was on summer vacation.
Somewhere in the Canadian Rockies quietly flyfishing,

if I remember correctly. I recall that it didn’t say,
“Wish you were here,” which, in hindsight, seems odd.

And now it’s been months without so much as a word.
No calls. No texts. Nothing. So I’m left questioning

everything. Like, where does that leave me?
Where does that leave Normal? Alone

in some liminal space between today and tomorrow?
Between what Normal used to be, whatever this new reality is,

and whatever Normal will be if it returns?
Did I ever really know Normal at all?

Will I even recognize Normal? Will Normal embrace me
with open arms, or will it say I’ve become abnormal

and report me to the authorities?
I try to calm down by losing myself

in the minutia of daily chores. I vacuum and dust.
I clean out the fridge of leftovers I always mean to eat

but never do. I even breakdown all the Amazon boxes
I’ve received over the last days and weeks, boxes
that were filled with all manner of products

I was too afraid to venture out of the house and buy
on my own. But as I begin knitting a scarf

to welcome Normal back, should it decide to return,
the newsfeed scrolling across my flatscreen highlights

events in the outside world: more executive orders;
more firings; more plans to rename this and take back that;

more news stories of blind eyes turned.
I snap off the TV, pack away my needles and yarn,

and shuffle off to bed. Perhaps Normal is better off
where it is, I think as I sink deeper into the dark

well of a pill-induced dreamless sleep. Perhaps
Normal should remain incommunicado

and untraceable for its own protection. Perhaps
“out of sight, out of mind” is best for Normal,

and me, at least for the foreseeable future.

*

Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His writing has recently appeared in Bending Genres, Best Microfiction 2024, The Greensboro Review, HAD, Merion West, ONE ART, and The Wigleaf Top 50. His most recent book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press. You can follow him on Bluesky at @kiptain.bsky.social and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.

Three Poems by Szilvia Szita

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

Family nest

“Why do you go to see Dad every day?”

The mother tears fresh bread
into bite-sized pieces.
The children turn their faces toward her,
like baby birds waiting for crumbs.

“Dad has tubes
where his voice used to be—
you can’t even talk with him.”

She offers explanations,
but the two children
find all of them unacceptable.

They wait for this episode to end,
for their father to come home,
for everything
to go back to the way it was—
because parents don’t change
the way children do.

They have never
seen up close,
how an adult flails,
beats their wings,
tries to fly.

*

Reiki

Outside, a playground.
Through the poorly sealed door,
the sounds of the stairwell—
footsteps, a ringing phone,
children’s voices.

Inside, calm, soothing music,
closer to silence than to sound.

A cool weight
pressed to my forehead—
lapis lazuli.

My favourite stone, I say.
She smiles.

How did she know?
How can one person know
what another truly loves,
and act accordingly?

I feel her palms
cradling my head,
then passing over arms, torso, legs,
as if moving up and down the stairs.

There is a place in the body, she says,
where nostalgia and solitude meet—
Clearly, that spot must be healed.

She finds it,
covers it with her hands,
but the coldness does not go away.
My past is made of ice.

Must I feel this? Do I have no choice?
Choice is seldom required, she replies,
and places the blue stone
next to the others,
on her wooden table.

*

Internship

I tell you,
people aren’t well,
my nephew says,
after working at a pharmacy.

You wouldn’t believe
how many sedatives,
how many antidepressants
we give out each day.

I don’t tell him
that I take them too.
Sometimes more, sometimes less.
Right now, rather more.

I let him believe
that our family is different:
our bonds are strong,
and those prescriptions
belong to strangers.

One day he will understand:
what is missing inside
cannot be given by others.

He has already changed the subject.
No need to discuss in detail
what does not concern us.

* 

Szilvia Szita is a poet from Hungary. She has published 2 poetry books in Hungarian and is working on the third one right now. Numerous poems have appeared in several Hungarian literary journals such as Alföld, Új Forrás, Jelenkor, Bárka, Parnasszus and Látó. She is very interested in interpersonal relationships, especially in times of hardships (illness, addiction, the situation of refugees). She currently lives in Strasbourg where she works with refugees and teaches languages and creative writing at the University of Strasbourg.

Two Poems by Phyllis Cole-Dai

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WHEN THEY COME KNOCKING

& demand we obey
       we will not have knees to bend

& demand we leave
       we will not have feet to go

& demand we believe
       we will not have heads to nod

& demand we ignore the law
       we will not have eyes to shut

& demand we scapegoat
       we will not have fingers to point

& demand we snitch
       we will not have lips to tell

& demand we work
       we will not have backs to break

& demand we give them money
       we will not have noses to pay through

& demand we fight
       we will not have arms to bear

but when they demand we cook for them
       we will have hands to fix in our kitchen

such a sumptuous feast of won’ts and don’ts
       they will starve as they gorge at our table

                     After the “Ten Commandments” published by Večerní Praha
                     in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, 1968

*

THE SHORTEST

I wiggled
in the pew
fussing
in my new Sunday dress
and patent leather shoes
and they told me
it’s true
Jesus wept
is the shortest verse
and I waited
for them to tell me
how that could be
cause when
my mama cried
it was never short
it was big as the house
and the world beyond it too
and when they couldn’t tell me
why that was
I began to stop
listening to them
and listened instead
to all the crying
all around
they didn’t seem to hear
cause maybe
I could catch the falling
tears
in the cup of my ears
and save them
for someone in need
of a little drink
and that’s when
my little mind
began to think
that little verse
in that big black book
had to be so short
cause even
the ears of Jesus
big as God
just couldn’t
hold no more

*

Phyllis Cole-Dai resides in Maryland. She’s the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the popular Poetry of Presence volumes of mindfulness poems. She invites you to hop aboard The Raft, her online community.

Practices of Assembly: Compiling Your Poetry Manuscript ~ A Workshop with John Sibley Williams

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Practices of Assembly: Compiling Your Poetry Manuscript

Workshop: Practices of Assembly: Compiling Your Poetry Manuscript
Instructor: John Sibley Williams
Date: Thursday, June 5
Time: 12:00-2:00pm Pacific (3:00-5:00pm Eastern)

Price: $25 (payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp)

Are you interested in organizing a chapbook or poetry manuscript? This intensive manuscript workshop will teach participants different ways one can begin to compile a poetry manuscript. Expect to view manuscript samples and discuss techniques that can be applied to the process.

We will explore all the ins-and-outs of organization and publishing a chapbook or full-length, from writing toward a given theme to setting and keeping to creative deadlines to learning how to submit smarter, not harder. Poets will be guided through a series of lessons and hands-on activities that each focus on a different aspect of creating, structuring, and finally publishing a new collection.

Topics include selecting the best title, focusing on your first and last pieces, finding the thematic threads in your writing, organizing the entire collection so that it reads smoothly, deciding which structure works best for you, and submitting individual pieces to magazines and the book as a whole to publishers and contests.

Learn how to:

  • Set writing goals and make creative action plans
  • Make your work stand out
  • Get more acceptances…and faster
  • Submit smarter, not harder, to both journals and presses
  • Discover the thematic threads in your writing and how to weave them across a collection
  • Reshape previous poems to fit the themes and style of your collection
  • Order poems within a manuscript for cohesion and flow
  • Write powerful introductory and closing poems for your collection
  • Choose the right book title, poem titles, and epigraphs

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 isforthcoming 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, andfounder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.

Gender Dysphoria with Breast Self-Exam Pamphlet by Ren Wilding

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Gender Dysphoria with Breast Self-Exam Pamphlet

You should know
what your breasts feel like.
Lay down, reach across.
My chest is a stranger
I don’t want to know.
Hills mudslide into my armpits.
I can’t reach my arm far enough
across my body. I can only touch
where my heart is.

I hit them on door jams
because my brain
doesn’t know they exist.
They are only good for warning
the rest of me to stop
before I hit my body.
The walls know them
better than I do.

*

Ren Wilding (they/them) is a trans, queer, neurodivergent poet who earned an MA in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Missouri. Their work appears in Braving the Body (Harbor Editions), Trans Love (Jessica Kingsley Publishers), The Comstock Review, Lone Mountain Literary Society, Palette Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Red Eft Review, Stories that Need to be Told 2024 (Tulip Tree), and Zoetic Press. In 2023, they won the St. Louis Poetry Center’s James H. Nash Contest. They received a Pushcart nomination and are a co-curator of the “Words Like Blades” reading series.

Five Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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April’s Graveyard

My thoughts flee toward the margins.
Chasing after them is one kind of start.
                                    Another is burrowing
deeper into the bewilderment.
As on the day of my grandfather’s funeral.
The girl I was at fourteen in a borrowed
black, tight-fitting skirt who flirted
outside the graveyard gates
with the boy on a bike. Thinking of him
at the graveside.
                                    All these years later
something remains, unformulated.
A speechless undertow
of the loneliness that washes through me.

*

Childhood

In the back garden, diagonals
of late afternoon light. A few yard tools rest
against the fence. My father is cleaning the blade
of a hoe. He is probably whistling.
I think about my father all the time.
In part from a need like the pull to unravel
a recurring dream. In part because he was my father.
But now it is dusk. Under their tent of branches
the doves ask a question again and again.
Their patience is infinite. Below the silvering sky
the light is the color of an old coin.

*

Ladybugs

Not yet full spring. Mistrust among the tulip bulbs.
The girl pedals furiously, nevertheless.
Flight from childhood? A memory.
“Don’t be in such a rush to grow up, dear,” my father said.
We were in the grove of redwoods when I saw them.
Billions of them. Inches thick along the dark limbs.
The startling intimacy of the small bodies
one atop the other.

*

Beauty

                  —”is the subject of art,”
says Agnes Martin.

My mother wanted to be the child.
Wanted her beautiful future.
Wanted her infants who didn’t live.

I wanted to be the child.
Wanted the reddening leaves.
Wanted to burrow under the canopy of branches.

                  *

At opposite ends of a sandbox: two children
engaged in parallel play.

One with a bucket of water.
Building a castle. Filling a moat.

The other digging holes with a shovel.
Hunting for the delicate bones.

*

Early Memory

The doves summon me into the day.
I call back through the half-opened window.
The sunlight, too, is reaching for me
through the bars of the crib. Then my mother is there
in the way that the room is. Lifted and held, I understand
while the foghorns moan on the San Francisco Bay
that my mother needs to believe she is adored.
More than the doves. More than the sunlight.
Good girl that I am, I press my head
against her breast. Now look at the boat
of her dying, rocking softly
on the water.

*

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

Three Poems by Jen Karetnick

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Beachcombing

What you find depends on what
you want to find: Driftwood, sea glass,
teeth from sharks—lost weekly
as new ones rally forward from
the back, forcing others out
like the last remnants of an outgoing
year—recognized by their triangular
gleam, fossilized into sunset shades
by mineralization or white as the wake.
Spiral shells, those exoskeletons minus
their creatures. Or objects lost by others
who snapped them with clinging sand
from towels. To scour for these oceanic
souvenirs, there is no cost but the energy
you spend sieving in the intertidal zone
along with egrets looking for breakfast,
or sifting the deeper crystallization
closer to the dunes where the seagrasses
weave their equations in the air.
The evidence your fingers and feet
leave behind is temporary, scattered
impressions erased by the tide,
that nocturnal ritual that also brings in
a replacement batch of plunder to search.

*

Men from the Future Tell Julia to Smile
          After Julia’s Garden Party

          “In the photos that survive of her, Julia Tuttle looks
          stern and unsmiling, a long dark dress buttoned up to her neck,
          priestlike, often with the frowning expression of a mother
          disapproving of a daughter’s suitor.

          — Eric Barton, Flamingo, September 9, 2024

What do modern men know of
the Victorian era’s
rules for mourning dress, two years
of widow’s weeds, bombazine
suffocation of women’s
bodies in black so dark it
doesn’t reflect, midnight gloves,

boots, and crepe hats, the buttons
and buckles as lusterless
as a just-frozen pond
not yet sturdy enough to
blade on with ice skates,
mandatory even for
those whose husbands were worth less

than they should have been, or those
who were wealthy only in
meanness? What do modern men
know about powder ground from
burnt eggshells, chalk, sand, and salt,
that scrub free from teeth the plaque
but also the enamel?

About the incisors and
molars that decay surely
as plants in this swamp, tannic,
hidden by closed mouths? About
Lucy Hobbs Taylor, the first
female to graduate from
dental school in my native

Ohio, and before her
how male dentists pulled women’s
teeth before their weddings as
gifts to husbands, to replace
with a set of porcelain
dentures that rattle in mouths
like teacups on saucers? Or

the modes we take from other
arts like portraiture, where saints
are the only subjects who
are permitted a faint tip
of lips? The infrequency
of expensive images,
and how imprecise shutters

capture a scene that perhaps
isn’t intended? In one
“surviving” photograph of
my garden party, three of
us sit on the grass, five on
chairs and, in the back row, ten
stand in front of coconut

palm fronds that droop like our veils.
No one smiles; few even look
at the camera. Despite
the weather, we all wear clothes
that cover us from foot to
neck, shoulder to wrist, as if
in insensible denial.

*

Evaporating Villanelle for this Time of Life

I champion no term for the era I’m in now.
My friends introduce me as
the empty nester, as if they wonder how

their claim might ever be permitted to grow.
I lend the illusion of autonomous,
the champion of terms for the era I’m in now.

But grandsons or -daughters
might be pending soon enough—
the empty nester has to shoulder

a plan that’s much larger
than their own purpose.
I champion no term

to scan onto this turn
of decade, this age-sauce
an empty nester pours on—

so permanent
it masquerades
the empty
I champion.

*

A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 12 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award and semi-finalist for the PSV 2025 North American Book Awards. Forthcoming books include What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 2025) and Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026). Her work has won the Sweet: Lit Poetry Prize, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Roundhouse Foundation, Wassaic Projects, Write On, Door County, Wildacres Retreat, Mother’s Milk Artist Residency, Centrum, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, Miami-Dade Artist Access, and elsewhere. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, South Dakota Review, swamp pink, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.

Grief Comes on a Friday at 4 p.m. by Ellen Rowland

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Grief Comes on a Friday at 4 p.m.

A craving for your spinach and mushroom crepes.
The plastic recipe box. Colored tabs for appetizers,
main dishes, desserts. Your left-handed back slant,
smudged ink, a greasy fingerprint—
all landing like a gasping hammer. Where have you been?
I don’t think I ever buried you. You bloomed in me
right there at the kitchen counter on a Friday at 4 p.m.
The missing wail so deep and gaping, a childhood slipped
from those protective sleeves. A kinder birth, a difference.
A truth about keeping—you never did, and I never will,
make all the good things.

*

Ellen Rowland is a writer and editor who leads small poetry workshops on craft and form. She is the author of three collections of haiku: The Echo of Silence, Light Come Gather Me and Blue Seasons, as well as the book Everything I Thought I Knew, essays on living, learning and parenting unconventionally. Her latest poetry collection, No Small Thing, was published by Fernwood Press in 2023. You can find her writing in ONE ART, Braided Way, Rock.Paper.Poem and Silver Birch Press, among others. She lives off the grid with her family on an island in Greece. Connect with her on Instagram and Facebook.

How to See It by Moudi Sbeity

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

How to See It

What they don’t report on the news is the way,
after we’ve pooled on the couch from our daylong
forward press, my lover asks me to take off my socks.
And in his sweet way, in his gentle care, places palms
full of lotion around my callused heel, rubs his fingers
firm and deep along my arched sole, up through the
valleys between my toes, a secure five-in-five clasp
wriggling away the tension. He doesn’t mind that my
big toe has a fungus half the size of a quarter under
the nail bed, or that it’s been weeks since we’ve slid
into each other all naked and limbed and sweating.
Doesn’t even ask for a foot rub in return. Instead,
he kneads the miles ached around my tendons one
pressure release at a time. Wraps me in hopeful
maybes as we discuss migrating north to Canada,
or south to Argentina. Says maybe things aren’t
as bad as the headlines read, says without saying,
that maybe there are countless unsung others also
tending to this holy work of holding the world,
that maybe the world is full of nameless devotees
tracing their humble love along the sore contours
of a walked together life, so full of such kindness
to even consider how it is we might begin to see it.

*

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

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

Two Poems by Sreeja Naskar

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

TONGUELESS

I was born into a language
that taught me silence first.
The women before me stitched vowels into their throats
and called it survival.
My mother spoke softly so the walls wouldn’t hear.
My grandmother spat words into jars,
sealed them tight.

The men never asked.
They assumed the air around them was theirs to name.
My father’s voice cracked like a whip,
decibels louder than my mother’s love.
The priests spoke of god like they had
held her bones,
and the government scribbled laws in a dialect
that never learned to say no.

I tried once,
to speak with the shape of my own mouth.
But the men said it was vulgar, unnatural
for a woman to taste her own words.
They prefer us tongueless.
Silent but smiling,
familiar but forgettable.

In school, they taught me languages of conquerors.
English, Spanish, French — tongues of arrival and theft.
The only inheritance we were left with
was a dictionary of what we could not reclaim.
My people are fluent in translation —
We know how to make grief fit into smaller sentences.
We know how to dress shame in another nation’s verbs.

And still, the men argue about the gender of language,
as if a sentence must choose sides.
As if a noun can be broken down into pink or blue.
They call it grammatical necessity.
I call it a wound.

My mother once told me
that every tongue has a graveyard.
I imagine ours full of forgotten dialects,
the syllables curled like question marks.
No funerals. No mourning songs.
Plain drooping silence.

But I am learning now
to speak without apology.
To scrape the colonizer’s residue from my teeth.
I mispronounce their words on purpose.
I roll my R’s like thunder,
spit consonants like battle cries.
My tongue is a weapon they cannot disarm.

And when my daughter asks me why the world
sounds so loud,
I will tell her:
Because they are afraid.
Because a woman who knows the weight of her own voice
is the sound they tried to silence.
Because we were never meant to be
tongueless.

*

Instruction Manual for Being Human

step one:
you are born with the cord still attached,
red and slick, a snake that never leaves you.
it coils somewhere in the dark. your mother calls it love.
your father calls it god. you will call it hunger.

step two:
learn the word no but say yes anyway.
smile with your teeth even when they ache.
watch how the mirror fogs when you breathe —
proof that you exist, proof that you can still ruin something clean.

step three:
if a man touches you and you flinch,
convince yourself it was the wind.
if your body locks itself shut,
call it a trick of the light.

step four:
pain is a language you will learn to speak fluently.
twist your limbs into the shapes they expect.
hold your wrists like a fragile apology.
bleed discreetly. swallow the noise.

step five:
love will come and leave.
sometimes it will scrape its name across your ribs.
sometimes it will forget your name entirely.
this is normal.
this is expected.

step six:
bury the body.
not the one in the dirt, but the one in the bed.
the one who stares back at you in the window at night.
don’t ask what she wants.
she will never stop wanting.

step seven:
if the day comes when you look at the sky
and it does not beg you to stay,
close your eyes.
imagine a room with no doors.
call it freedom.

final step:
you were told to be soft,
but you sharpened your bones instead.
you were told to heal,
but you named the wound holy.
they will call this survival.
you will call it nothing at all.

*

Sreeja Naskar is a poet from West Bengal, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poems India, Modern Literature, Gone Lawn, Eunoia Review, and other literary journals.

Four Poems by Al Ortolani

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Eagles on Live Cam

My wife is watching an eagle camera
set above an Ozark aerie. The eaglets
are pecking escape from their shells.
They are ponderously slow, but my wife
watches the breaking
as if she can help the young crack free.
It’s the mother in her, identifying
with the helpless, as if enabling
them to emerge as downy tufts, hatchlings
in a decades old nest of driftwood weave,
two puffs of hunger in light snow.
An empty nest to her is the echo
in the kitchen, chairs shoved in,
children flown from the breakfast table.

*

Bird Feeders in the Next Life

Only the squirrels visit the handfuls
of birdseed I’ve broadcast across
the top of the snow. I break down

an Amazon box and smooth it flat
under the dogwood tree, one of the few
spots where the snow is shallow.

I pour a small mountain of seed
at the tip of the Amazon arrow. Only
the dog visits, sniffs the cardboard,

the scent of sunflower. For Christmas
my wife gave me a smart feeder, one
that when put together correctly and linked

to the internet, keeps surveillance on
the birds. Currently, it’s still in its box
and pushed under my desk. Buddhists

say that we continue to return to the world
like cicadas, until the suffering of all
sentient beings has been sung to its end.

I have time to link up the new feeder,
before it’s too late. The snow
turning to ice, the entire lawn concrete

to birds, their small chisel beaks
as hapless as best intentions. I have
become a hero to squirrels. They
dedicate their largest acorn to me.

*

Oyster Dressing

Boxes and ribbons still litter the living room
although we have scooted them into piles,
some for saving, some for the dumpster.

Now that Christmas is over and the family
has returned to their homes across the city
I retreat to my little office at the back of the house,

the dog curled on the one-man bed snoring.
It’s a quiet morning, except for the neighbor
trying out his new leaf blower. We could

have opened a bottle of red wine in front
of the fireplace, talked about the children
and the grandchildren they in turn are raising.

We might have wondered about our parents
and grandparents, the oyster dressing, the apple pies.
The recipes we thought we’d remember.

My wife opens the bifold doors to dump
a load of laundry into the washer. It is
the sound we share when moving on.

*

Harley Davidson

Even after his death, my father needed
to visit his children. It was a given
that he’d show up at unexpected moments

as a cardinal at the window, pecking on the glass,
moving around the house from pane to pane
or filling the backyard tree in a hooded red flock.

We’d come to expect him, to relish whatever
message he presumed to send. My niece dreamed
he rode a motorcycle, a Harley Davidson
into her sleep, which was odd, and humorous

since he’d been a fan of knock-off Vespas,
the cheaper the better. To comfort her grandmother,
she told the story of the dream, the scooter

turned muscle bike. Her grandmother paled,
and handed over a Harley Davidson key she’d found
in Dad’s coat pocket. There were explanations,

but no secret Harley tucked away under tarps
in the garage. My niece kept her story private,
the key in her jewelry box. Years later,

Dad rode again into her brother’s dream
on the same motorcycle after his dog passed,
the dog on his grandfather’s lap, tail wagging,

tongue lolling like it did for treats. My nephew,
an emergency room doctor, a man of heart monitors,
the science of code blue defibrillator paddles.

*

Al Ortolani is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize and has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. He was the recipient of the Bill Hickok Humor Award from I-70 Review. Currently, he’s a contributing poetry editor to the Chiron Review.

Spring Snow by Sally Nacker

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Spring Snow

Snow dusts the wood.
Peace resides in April snow.
Birdhouse roofs hold
tufts of snow, and bluebell
buds bow. Stilled,
stilled, the new
beginning of the world.

*

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.

Separation by Ryan McCarty

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Separation

Sometimes I feel like fatherhood
is a matter of standing still,
holding the crack of light open,
listening for the rumpled sigh
of a child back in bed, the terror
leaking in through loose seals of night
thoughts, caulked up by kisses, curing
slow. And then the other matter:
the pulling closed. I’m the servant
of the lonely dark, the bringer
to my children of time, the curse
laid on the heart that hears itself
beating, a sure sign it can stop,
that every light can be put out.
And what to make of that, knowing
how opening and closing doors
is the work of loving hands?

*

Ryan McCarty is a teacher and writer, living in Ypsilanti, MI. His writing has appeared recently or will appear soonish in Collateral, Door is a Jar, Pinhole, Rattle: Poets Respond, and Trailer Park Quarterly. You can find more of his writing at Politics of the Kitchen Table with My Family Crafting Nearby.

Roll Call Please by John Arthur

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Roll Call Please

falling through the hole
in her pocket—
another violation

The barista says, “you have to buy something to use the bathroom.”

The librarian says, “without proof of residence, we cannot give you a card.”

The officer says, “you have the right to remain silent.”

left behind
the library—her
temporary structure

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in ONE ART, Rattle, DIAGRAM, trampset, Failbetter, and elsewhere.

Metonymy by Robin Silbergleid

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Metonymy

It’s not like a love affair, it is a love affair.
         — Maggie Nelson

Scientists say that memory feels in the body
like reality; there is no neurochemical difference:

it has been three weeks since you put your hand
on that tender spot by my right ear

and at night, before I sleep
I call up the feeling of your thumb

on my nape, our breathing
together soft, a caress I take with me

into the cold for when I need it most—
which is to say, I miss you.

Which is to say, even in your absence
I feel adored, alive.

*

Robin Silbergleid is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently In the Cubiculum Nocturnum (Dancing Girl Press). With collaborators on The ART of Infertility, she is co-editor of Infertilities, A Curation (Wayne State). Born and raised in the Midwest, she currently lives in East Lansing, Michigan where she teaches at Michigan State University.

Hermit Crabs by Eric Nelson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Hermit Crabs

Most of them now use plastic or metal
for their homes. I saw one online
wearing a coffee scoop. Another hoisted a pvc joint
like a telescope. A little one donned a fun-size
fruit cocktail can. Shells are heavier and cumbersome
to lug around. But our garbage provides a steady
supply of lightweight camouflage and flashy displays.
The rakish tilt of the red coffee scoop sends
an unmistakable crawl hither signal, not to mention
the appeal of its long, hard handle. And the elbow joint—
he enters one side, she the other…you know the rest.
It’s unfortunate that some slip in, get stuck, and die.
But we once lived dangerously in caves and trees
and fashioned talismans with bones and feathers.
Seashell necklaces protected us. And look at us now,
thriving in our microplastics. Millions of pounds
of bottle caps, medicine cups, and other trash
are washing up on the beaches of the world. Hermits
are crawling and choosing among the bright array.

*

Eric Nelson’s most recent book is Horse Not Zebra (Terrapin Books, 2022). He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Two Poems by John Amen

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Hide & Seek

I was the golden boy. I bolted for the woods, running through ferns, past the sycamores, hiding behind the well-shed. The birthday song faded, my parents boarded their boat, leaving for a new life across the ocean. When I emerged, I was no longer the golden boy & my friend, who was supposed to be looking for me, had given up, married, he had children, grandchildren, houses scattered across the globe. Our lawn had turned brown, the roof was heavy with moss, our driveway littered with mannequins & car parts. I watched the Uber driver as he hauled the roast into the cul de sac. I stabbed it with my Swiss army knife until it stopped howling. That red juice flowed across the pavement, neighborhood, the county. I waited for the moon to appear, but no one was working the strings, at least that day, & like a train that’s leapt its rails, the night just never arrived.

*

FMJ

It happened again by the diamond highway. A satyr wearing a Budweiser cap put a bullet through a windshield & disappeared into the sunlight. Police arrived, dogs sniffed the tarmac, detectives found a casing with an inscription that read love is salvation. The highway was barricaded, cars & trucks backed up to the Standalone Gulf. Someone said, we’re in a loop here & smiled a terrifying smile. The day of the funeral in Chicago / in Manhattan / in Omaha a million people flooded a Zoom call, chanting until the FBI wrapped a trailer in Musgrove, a kidnapped baby sobbing on the back porch. The satyr in the Budweiser cap sang “Amazing Grace” through a bullhorn, then turned himself in. At the trial, he waved his beautiful hooves, declaring he’d heard voices in the forsythia, his angels ordering him to spread the holy word. An hour later the judge lowered his gavel, a long sigh unrolled through the city. The satyr’s hind legs were chained, his horns pared to a nub. A bailiff dragged him from the courtroom, mane shimmering, teeth bared for the folks back home. Someone said that night & that night only, they could see every star in the universe.

*

John Amen is the author of five collections of poetry, including Illusion of an Overwhelm, finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award, and work from which was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, and his poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew. He founded and is managing editor of Pedestal Magazine. His new collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024.

Two Poems by Dorian Kotsiopoulos

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Lynne

I remember your flinch
when your father
came home, his face red,
clinking a brown bag.

Who knew what laid ahead
was empties tumbling
from your locker, your
glazed eyes. I remember

the record we danced to,
it hit gold, Dizzy, 1969
by Tommy Roe. I know
all the lyrics. I can’t forget

how I shunned you in town
those times you waved,
your hand that shook,
shy half-smile,

how I pushed my cart
at the market, glided by,
as you sliced deli meats
to the tracks of Muzak.

* 

Missing Fathers

They visit while you sleep, pulling sheets to chins, brushing cheeks
with whiskers even if you didn’t see them much before they left.

They look over your school work and correct a math problem or two.

They tint the walls a shade darker and rearrange the furniture
so you know they were there.

Mothers get up first to fix the furniture back the way they like,
but they don’t say anything.

The Cherrios box might feel lighter if they needed a snack.

They are so considerate when they leave at night, closing the door
with the quietest sound, like the click that lives in my jaw now.

*

Dorian Kotsiopoulos’ work has appeared in various literary and medical journals, including Poet Lore, Salamander, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, On the Seawall, Rogue Agent, Smartish Pace, Thimble Literary Magazine, Third Wednesday, and The Westchester Review as well as in the All Poems Are Ghosts (Tiny Wren Lit) anthology. She is a reviewer for the Bellevue Literary Review.

Two Poems by Catherine Gonick

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

How I Became a Zionist Without Really Trying

Born on the wrong side of the Jewish blanket,
all I knew of Israel growing up was not the Exodus
but my crush, on fellow half-Jew Paul Newman
as he played a full one in the movie.

My uncles were anti-Zionist Communists,
my grandparents supporters of Birobidzhan,
the Soviet version of a Jewish homeland.
My father played violin at their parties.

I fell in love with a dual-national Jew from Detroit
and then with his nine-year-old Israeli son.
Terrorists attacked schools near the kid’s,
and he told me he felt like a target.

During the Gulf War, the kid put on a mask
and, surprise, my husband was called up,
ordered by the IDF to report to Fort Dix
with his reserve unit, all old men over 40.

Later the kid learned how to drive a tank,
got sent to Lebanon. In the West Bank, he checked
IDs, told me how easy it was to slip
on a mask of power in that thankless job.

My husband and I were on treadmills, watching tv,
when Rabin got shot. My beloved froze, almost fell.
Fast forward to October 7th. For failure to denounce
Israel’s response, I became a Zionist to anti-Zionist pals.

Now I felt like a target myself. Short on ideology,
I was long on lived experience. Love and history
met, as I double-checked the box for chance,
wept like a Jew by the rivers of New York.

*

Long Ago in the Bay Area

I never knew our gardener’s name
and he didn’t speak as he worked
miracles with the rosebushes.
Our last backyard had been ok,
but this one was heaven,
with a flagstone patio just outside
our backdoor, and two more levels,
up small flights of flagstone stairs.
Next came the garden, and on top,
a tall flagstone barbecue. We ate
our charcoal burgers at a redwood
table, sat on redwood benches, drank
red wine from Napa. Two first-generation
Americans, a Pole and a Jew,
my parents, had made it in California.

Our gardener came once a week.
I didn’t know where he lived, or
that, before I was born, he’d been forced
to live in hell. It wasn’t until college
in Berkeley that I happened upon the truth.
Sorting through boxes of paper files
and photos, randomly stored on a shelf
in the library where I worked, I understood—
there had been an internment—
and why, when the cute Japanese
guy from Oakland who was dating
my Jewish roommate from L.A.,
mentioned he’d been born in Alabama,
and I’d asked in surprise, How did that
happen?—he didn’t answer.

*

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including ONE ART, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Pedestal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. Her full-length collection, Split Daughter of Eve, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in the spring. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, with whom she works in a company to slow the rate of global warming.

ENOUGH by Tony Gloeggler

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

ENOUGH

Jesse’s been in joyous mode,
humming and breaking into belly
laughter, my whole after Christmas
3 day visit. Sometimes it can spill
into his insistent, somehow still
charming, never enough, insatiable
manner, where he makes mad dashes
down super market aisles to grab
another bag of Doritos or press
his face against the huge glass
refrigerator chanting for one more
blue drink while I’m handing
money to the cashier and other
customers stare at him, wonder
what’s going on with this big guy.
Right now I’m trying to keep him
in line, pay for Dr Seuss’ Hop
On Pop and wait for my change,
holding his sleeve and promising
we’ll go back to Crow Books
January 17, 2025, my next visit,
as he looks into my eyes begging
for another book. I guide him through
the door, onto Church Street, both
of us laughing. Walking past the lit
tree on our way to the bus station
to catch my 3 o’clock airport ride,
a woman approaches, hands out,
asking for help. The closer she gets,
the louder, more desperate she sounds.
I put my arm around Jesse, quicken
our pace as she veers nearer. Head
down, I say sorry. I can almost hear
myself whispering, telling myself
I’m already taking care of Jesse,
isn’t that enough for me to do?
The woman follows us, yells
you ain’t sorry, fuck you. I know
I should reach in my pocket, give
her the four dollars and change
from the book. I could be a hero
and she’d be halfway to a holiday
lunch. But I keep walking, flying
home, trying to forgive myself.

*

Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of NYC who managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 40 years. 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.

A Mindful Lament by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

A Mindful Lament

They say you can’t get it wrong.
But sometimes meditation
feels like an itchy sweater
on sunburned skin.

I want to peel it off,
free myself from the fibers
that brush and bristle
against the raw places.

Be in the moment, they say.
Feel the discomfort
and let it go.
If this is mindfulness,
let me be mindlessly busy.

Surely there must be a drawer
that needs tidying,
a shelf that needs dusting,
an empty space in my closet
where I can hang this sweater
and just let the sunburn
blister and fade.

You can’t get it wrong, they say.
So I sit. And breathe. I trust.
And I try so hard to empty my mind.
But oh, the burning itch.
Oh the blistering relentlessness
of thought.

*

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.

Two Poems by Naila Francis

~ ONE ART ~ 10 Comments

For my friend weeping at the coffee shop

Because he is reading a poem about peonies
which is really not about peonies
but maybe about prayer, the truest kind,
or about grief and how we’re spared
a home in its depths, given just enough soil
to catch our knees, collapse in the dark,
stay until we remember some purpose
beyond pain, past uncertainty,
begin to uncurl under a faint light that insists
on pulling us up, breathing us
nursling green, tender bloom,
this unimaginable bravery to come undone
and still be summoned by trembling touch
to a life that wants us wholly, here,
a delicate beauty amid so much else
we call beautiful
— the wild pen,
these rivered lines,
the morning shaken open.

*

Briefly

As I check out Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re
Briefly Gorgeous” at the library, the man
behind the counter eyes the cover, notes
he keeps waiting.
“For what?” I ask.
“To be briefly gorgeous.”
I laugh. His face, sunned pink under his baseball cap,
breaks into a grin.
“Every morning when I look in the mirror, I wait.
Is today the day?”
“That you’ll be briefly gorgeous?”
I smile wide, chest sugared,
body leafing, as it knows it can.
He is not unhandsome, tall, maybe late 50s,
light olive button-down shirt over loose jeans,
reddish-brown graze of a beard.
“Nope, still hasn’t happened, not even
briefly,” he says, cheeks bright-winged,
winking warmth in his eyes.
I insist there must be something to see
and — to myself — to love.
He refutes.
We keep chuckling.
“One day,” I offer as he hands me the book,
along with a tale of humpback whales. “One day, you’ll see
— forget briefly, you’ll be enduringly gorgeous.”
I leave, bounty in hands, cocooned by his mirth,
and watery, too, punctured by how it happens.
One moment we’re wrapped in our busy lives.
The next we look up,
a sudden intimacy
to scour everything clean.

*

Naila Francis is a poet from Philadelphia. Her poems have appeared in Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice, the Healing Verse Poetry Line, Voicemail Poems, North of Oxford and Wild Greens. Her first poetry album, “Wonder Unsung,” a collaboration with guitarist and producer Paulito Muse, was released in 2024.

Cold Creep by Yvonne Morris

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Cold Creep

You said you got tired of waking up
on strange kitchen floors, cold tile,
gritty like chin stubble against your
sticky cheek. Of course, you played
guitar, but gave up life on the road
for love, for cigarette burns on your
sleeve, like every good Marxist.
And when I asked you why you left
the band, you admitted the fist fight
on stage—over a woman. But I knew
the answer before I asked the question,
didn’t I? You told me how you stood
outside your ex’s trailer at night, crept
among the trees to watch who arrived.
Something darker soon predicted I’d
grow tired, too, after that final January
drive to your apartment, the blistering
moon slicing through my windshield.

*

Yvonne Morris is the author of two chapbooks: Busy Being Eve (Bass Clef Books, 2022) and Mother Was a Sweater Girl (The Heartland Review Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The Galway Review, The Swannanoa Review, The Santa Clara Review, The Main Street Rag, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Kentucky.