Senryu
Mother’s Day brunch—
we have our usual
reservations
*
John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, trampset, Failbetter, Frogpond, and elsewhere.
Lost by Ashley Kirkland
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of April 2025
~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of April 2025 ~
Two Poems by Sreeja Naskar
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Dorian Kotsiopoulos
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Lorelai by Gavin Garza
Lorelai
What I never told you leaving the hospital
was I got denied the extension,
how San Francisco rush hour
holds me by my jugulars
just thinking about it.
Because “procedure” is a far scarier word to hear
when before you’d said It’s just a burn. Which is
how I learned you’d downplayed your hand
for my sake. Because you knew I’d do such a thing
as drive 90 on a 60 from campus
just to go get you,
and the truth is: yes,
I’d do it again. In my car, you said you said your ex’s name
when the nurse popped your blister,
a crinkled white petal flapping
from where he took your ring finger—
I love you. What will make you believe me?
*
Gavin Garza was raised in the Institute of Basic Life Principles, a Christian cult. Today, he is a Best of the Net nominated Chicano poet studying English at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in Eucalyptus Lit, MudRoom, The Acentos Review, Bleach!, and several more. Garza stays rooted to Fresno, California. Find him on Instagram @gavinopoet.
Cracked by Susan Vespoli
Cracked
Near the end of the lawsuit, I fell for him
when I hated every lawyer, even my own.
Christopher, public defender, who doesn’t
believe in god or religion or astrology or fate,
but collects Buddha heads, prayer beads,
lived in a commune in his 20s, reads Rumi,
Mary Oliver, loves Sexton. Stuck a magnetic
peace sign on the bumper of my car. Memorized
all the words to “Hallelujah.” Crooned them
to me over dinner. Believes in justice. How could
you stand it [the toxic legal wrestling pit]? Gentle
smile, says, everyone deserves representation. Case
after case, decades of finesse, respect; cracked
the enamel on his back teeth while he slept.
*
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
On the One-Year Anniversary of When my Husband and I Separated by Stefanie Leigh
On the One-Year Anniversary of When my Husband and I Separated
I slipped on the bottom step
at midnight, the wood corner
a jackknife, my wail thrown
as far from my abdomen as
my diamonds from my finger.
For two weeks, I shivered,
the ice packs numbing my ribs,
hip bones. My spine craving
the warmth, tenderness, I used to
dream about for twenty years.
As I laid in bed, stiff, sinking,
I stared at the door frame
imagining old lovers coming in,
the different ways their eyes, hands,
lips, once melted, or stiffened,
my limbs. I looked them up,
remembering dimples, voices. But,
avoided one. The one whose soft gaze
was seared into my cells, my throat
still wanting, always wondering—
I willed myself to sit up, dripped
pills onto my tongue before
wrapping my waist so tight, I
could finally breathe without wincing.
I drove my body to the studio,
my mind already in pointe shoes
as I gripped the barre, my soft tissue
still tender, but the ache gone
back to the spot behind my sternum,
where a scream cannot be heard.
*
Stefanie Leigh is a poet and ballet dancer based in Toronto. She holds a BA from Columbia University and was a dancer with American Ballet Theatre. Her work has been published in Rust & Moth, ONE ART, SWWIM, The Inflectionist Review and elsewhere. She can be found on Instagram @iamstefanieleigh
earth days by Tuni Deignan
earth days
What if we had to pay for thunder
if lightning and wind and sunshine were taxed
what if tokens were required
to hear Redtails scream keeee
or we were made to drop coins
when worms rose from the rains
let’s subsidize damsels and dragons who mate
like heart shapes pulsing as they procreate
let’s pay the ants, black and red, army strong,
salary stink bugs, and deer ticks, horse flies and moths
let’s Tik Tok the white pines where they all live
let’s pitch in for oaks, and cypress, and gingkoes,
a pop for each cherry blossom, five for a twig,
tariff moss, and squirrels and sea urchins and
air.
let’s pay interest on beaches, the seagrass, the sweetgrass,
blue grass, and wheat and forests of acorns
let’s donate our souls for the stones we bring home
infuse every cent, manmade of course,
into the war torn, routed planet
we take for granted.
You see,
I’m trying to imagine an existence for us
nondependent of earth,
our paradise, our home
sleep, yes, I can absolutely do that on my own
in a bed built of wood laid with cotton sheets
and dyes well, from likely
petrochemicals – oil and gas
But okay, what if they’re “naturally colored” from these:
roots, berries, bark,
leaves, wood
lichens, bugs
OURS, am I right,
to transform into linens,
and flannels, and wools, and sateen
and then there’s the floor where my feet land at dawn
(wood, clay, synthetic tiles, plastic shag or berber)
we are always the predator, manufacturer, the owner
twenty-four hours ongoing seven days long
Okay
put your shoes on, buttercup, go for a walk
don’t get started on figuring out the carbon footprint
of your outfit
which bottom line affects only the following things:
water resources, energy consumption, pollution throughout
plus, all stages of waste
from the ground up
So…
you’re walking
lucky you if it’s on some dirt, like the
earth,
is it possible our consumption will never recede
try something,
anything
look carefully
at greed.
*
Tuni Deignan’s memoir Underwater Daughter – A Memoir of Survival and Healing was published in May 2023 with She Writes Press. It received the Bookfest Award First Place 2023 winner in memoir, a First Place award in the Journey category of the 2023 Chanticleer International Book Award, and a Gold Medal for memoir in the 2024 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY). She has been an active member of The Grind since July 2024.
After My Brother Died in An Explosion by Terri Kirby Erickson
After My Brother Died in An Explosion
Our mother took up smoking. She would sit
by a window cracked by the blast that killed
him, legs crossed at the ankles, her auburn hair
flowing down her back like a swollen creek.
Smoke rose from her lips and swirled around
the room like her son’s spirit leaving his body
to the sound of sirens, the hiss of busted pipes.
Days went by when she barely spoke to anyone,
kept to her bedroom when people came to call,
was comforted by nothing. And all the while, she
smoked and smoked, her grief raw as a wound,
constantly weeping. It seemed as though her
will to live disappeared like a child rounding
a busy street corner, his mother frantic to catch
him before he dashed into the street. And then,
at what cost we cannot know, she returned to us.
It was like she never left—the only proof of her
pain the sorrow peering through her eyes like a
prisoner, crumpled packs of smokes in the trash.
*
Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including her latest collection, Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.
Tariffs by Gary Soto
Tariffs
Neruda, fill your ears with the sound of the sea
And stay home.
Chopin, close the lid of your piano—
Lay on the couch, hands on your playable ribs.
Koko, famed gorilla, eat your apple
And knuckle-walk yourself back to the jungle.
Rembrandt, enough of your self-portraits.
Tariffs are in place—
Cargo can’t unload
Or the sailors come ashore.
Wind, night stars, moon,
Don’t move your illustrious beauty
Into any of our three time zones.
The price of goods
According to the government?
30% before lunch, 157% after lunch.
Margaret Atwood, we’ve heard enough from you.
Lucien Freud, quit your scribbling.
Vicente Hernandez, your boleros went through one ear
Then out the other—let’s leave it at that.
The White House has gone dark—
No lightbulbs for the staffers.
Candles will lead the way
To a darker place.
Li Po, don’t bother crossing the Pacific—
Again, a tariff is in place.
Boil a small pot of rice,
Lick a knuckle for salt,
Place a mint under your tongue.
If you must come, old poet,
Remember that you’ll dock in the United States.
Speak English when you step off the boat.
*
Gary Soto is an independent writer who works in all genres. With two others, he recently produced an indie film based on his YA novel Buried Onions.
Two Poems by Matthew Isaac Sobin
Long Drive Home
For some reason that I do not know,
his old power isn’t there… He is meeting the ball,
time after time, and it isn’t going anywhere.
– Reporter James Kahn, writing about Lou Gehrig,
April 1939
I ask after your diagnosis, when do you
go back to the doctor? What a strange
answer: you’ve been referred
to a physical therapist. Like you have
a broken foot, or vertigo. Also here’s a pill
to prolong suffering, maybe
a month.
I read the doctor’s bio
on the prestigious hospital’s website:
A top specialist, they received
many awards that commend them
for compassion. Words in absence: treated, cured, lives
saved.
It’s obscene, pornographic, the way backs
get slapped. Specializing in identification: they test
a thousand tests to detect a chance
you’ve got something bad, because bad isn’t (always)
terminal. Patients arrive with hope/dread, anxious for the process
of elimination.
Eighty-five years since the Iron Horse
faltered, the invincible vanquished. Men walked
on the moon & didn’t go back for fifty years—
smallpox, measles, mumps, polio
eradicated. A long list of historical accomplishments
riddles the internet.
Maybe what’s required is an abundance
of research scientists, fewer diagnosticians,
our priorities scrambled by polarity. Or perhaps
what I’m offering (or trying to)
is long overdue: thank you
for picking up & telling me
truthfully, they’d run out of tests
to run.
*
My Wife Is A Loaded Shopping Cart
According to our salsa instructor
I must shorten my steps
To be a leader. To allow her
To spin around me in a wide arc–
Let the cart do the work
On its wheels. Its weight
Gives momentum or turns
Into an anchor if you pull
Perpendicular to the focus–
I raise my wristwatch
And watch as she spins
Away in time. The beat
Quickens until my feet
Barely move at all
*
Matthew Isaac Sobin’s (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. Poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in Stanchion, ballast, Ghost City Review, MAYDAY Magazine, The Hooghly Review, Stone Circle Review, and Hog River Press. He received an MFA from California College of the Arts. When he’s not teaching middle school, you may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California. He is on Twitter @WriterMattIsaac, Instagram @matthewisaacsobin, and Bluesky @matthewisaacsobin.bsky.social. His Linktree is linktr.ee/matthewisaacsobin.
Four Poems by Jennifer Franklin
THE VOICE
A woman like me should not have children.
Surrounded by books, oblivious to seasons.
Sitting with the dog, reading. A woman
like me doesn’t know how to live
in the present. When I got pregnant,
it was the first time I understood
I had a body but not how it could be
turned against me. Just because I
speak to my dog in a lilting voice
doesn’t mean I am maternal.
It means I prefer the simplicity of animals.
A woman like me should not have children.
Hour after hour, I arrange fragments of truth—
words on paper that cannot love me back.
*
BROKEN & UNALIVE
How horrible the sound, and how loud,
as the doe searches the woods for her felled fawn
who thrashes below us as if she can outrun
death. How alone each of us is in that moment—
the bereft doe, retreating up the mountain,
the dog smelling the deck, as the fawn flails
below her. You, waiting until she is still to drag
her stiff body up the mountain, away from the house.
And most alone—our daughter, singing to herself,
spinning through the cabin—locked in her damaged
mind. And me, watching. Always watching—
waiting for more terrible news. If it were just
the beautiful body of the fawn that was broken
and unalive, why are our limbs suddenly so cold?
*
PARABLE OF THE SICK CHILD BY THE WATER
My life with you these two decades
has been like sitting in the corner
of this deck on the salt marsh,
watching the inlet and seeing,
from time to time, without
warning, two swans flying
low over the water—
flapping their wings,
sounding their loud cry
into the afternoon. Communion
without words—something
between them—one always
ahead of the other. The same way
you lead, showing me how to follow.
*
PARABLE OF THE SICK CHILD IN THE CITY
The apartment is never quiet. Construction
workers bang on the parapets, endlessly.
My daughter’s therapist repeats simple
directions as my daughter, dazed, scripts
and smiles, moves her awkward body
back and forth through the four rooms.
I am never alone with the dog—no time
to know my own thoughts until everyone
finally falls into fitful sleep. All around me,
people plan as if there were a future to walk into.
I believed that too, once. All morning,
my daughter burns as she struggles to brush
her teeth and hair. Sometimes, I can’t look
at her—her face radiates too much light.
*
Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023), finalist for the Paterson Prize in Poetry and finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Poems from her manuscript in progress, A FIRE IN HER BRAIN, have been published in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Common, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology. Her work has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in The Bedford Guide to Literature (Macmillan, 2024), The Paris Review, The Nation, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion. She is the recipient of a 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2024 Jon Tribble Editing Fellowship from Poetry by the Sea, a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry, and a 2021 Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. She is Poetry Reviews coeditor of The Rumpus and coeditor, with Nicole Callihan & Pichchenda Bao, of the anthology Braving The Body (Harbor Editions, 2024). Jennifer teaches in the Manhattanville MFA Program, 24Pearl Street/Provincetown Fine Arts Center, and has been teaching manuscript revision workshops for over a decade.
Dithers and Bothers by Lynn Levin
Dithers and Bothers
As I was walking to the house, thinking of all the tasks
ahead of me and how prone I was to dawdle, I heard
a sound like a motor running or traffic on a distant highway.
If you could describe the sound of industry,
it was that: one-noted, yet harmonious.
This was the first warm day of spring.
The pale pink blossoms of the weeping cherry had opened
all at once, and all at once the bees winged in.
Each bee had her flower, each flower her bee.
There was gold enough for everyone.
None did quarrel as far as I could see.
They had the power to sting, but instead they worked.
The tree welcomed them like a hostess in a big hoop skirt.
In one day, the gold was gone, and the bees,
knowing time was honey, flew to newer flowers
while I buzzed about my dithers and bothers
for their perfume attracted me and their sameness too,
even as my song grew shorter and my hours.
*
Lynn Levin is a poet and writer. She lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and teaches English and creative writing at Drexel University. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Plume, Rattle, on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and other places. Her most recent books are the short story collection House Parties (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) and the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020). Her website is lynnlevinpoet.com.
Spare the Details by Nathaniel Gutman
Spare the Details
Their faces.
Twelve blank faces caught in the flashbulb.
I ask you:
Did they feel the walls closing in,
hear the drums beating?
The last one, number thirteen,
left Berlin three weeks before.
Her face,
locked inside a photo-within-a-photo,
placed on the lavish dinner table, the lace cloth,
her radiant shine.
She had the power—the power to shine.
Happy birthday,
champagne glasses raised.
I recognize some faces–
my own family.
Around the corner,
at Humboldt University,
students rejoice in Book Burning Day,
Einstein, Freud, Brecht, Helen Keller,
“cleansed” by massive fires.
Did they see the flames,
on their way to the elegant party,
did they smell the smoke?
There she is—my mother.
Her face,
the thirteenth,
against twelve grim faces.
Her radiant shine.
She knew.
Forced them to flee too,
her parents, my grandparents.
Here they are:
Your father is looking at you, Mother.
Your mother, at him.
Behind your parents, in the back,
is a man—uncle Ivan.
It is his house.
Didn’t much like him, Mother says,
don’t care, who the woman hugging him was,
who some of the other guests were.
Uncle Ivan.
What happened to him? I ask.
We know enough, she says.
We can spare the details.
My letter to Berlin
receives an immediate reply,
formal, polite—
attached, his Third Reich ID card:
Born: October 22, 1878
Berlin, Charlottenburg
Profession: Attorney
Religion: Moses
Address: Budapester Strasse 17
Deported: January 20, 1944, Auschwitz.
We know enough, she says.
We can spare the details.
*
Nathaniel Gutman, a filmmaker, produced, directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Deadline (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen).
Born in Israel, Nathaniel’s creative work often tries to come to grips with his bitter-sweet, overly sheltered German-speaking early childhood, of books, art and good (too good) manners, before being thrown, first in school, then, in the army, into the explosive reality outside.
Woman on Kitchen Chair Sunning Herself Behind the Dumpster at the Back of the Bakery by Dotty LeMieux
Woman on Kitchen Chair Sunning Herself Behind the Dumpster at the Back of the Bakery
She ignores the smells
to get the best light.
Reading a paperback, her long legs bare,
baseball cap tilted on her blonde head.
I know this woman, know that the sunny town home
on a shaded street she shared
with a guy who ran off with all the equity
and her beloved French bulldog
is now in the market.
Her new home an upstairs apartment,
no patio or back deck.
So this is where she comes to relax.
To read and to tan, undeterred
by odors from rotting vegetables,
left-overs from the most delicious tuna
and veggie sandwiches.
Smells I usually cross the street to avoid.
Maybe she wears Vicks under her nose
like detectives entering a room
where someone bled and died.
I’m not close enough to see and besides
her head is turned away, like she
doesn’t want to embarrass casual viewers,
ashamed of her partnerless, dogless status.
And maybe she, like the detectives,
needs to ignore the smell to do her job:
Forget the boyfriend,
the house, the privacy.
Pretend this is her choice, her way
of getting the job done,
burnishing arms & legs, losing herself
in the well-thumbed paperback romance
She must read this
to keep her hopes up.
*
Dotty LeMieux has published five poetry chapbooks, two during the pandemic: Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune from Finishing Line Press and Viruses, Guns and War from Main Street Rag Press in 2023. She formerly edited the eclectic literary and art journal, The Turkey Buzzard Review. Her work has appeared in numerous publications such as Rise Up Review, Loch Raven Review, Painted Bride, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gyroscope and others. She lives with her husband and accidental husky Mijah in Fairfax California.
The ONE ART 2025 Haiku Anthology
The ONE ART 2025 Haiku Anthology
A Note from the Editor:
While some are most concerned with filling the first page, I’m more daunted by the second iteration of anything. The first sets an expectation that the second must exceed. With how well our inaugural ONE ART Haiku Anthology was received (including Kat Lehmann’s monoku, which was shortlisted for a Touchstone Award), the pressure was on for this year’s. We exceeded my hopes!
The poems in this anthology capture the breadth of English haiku—from the lighthearted to the heartbreaking. The use of negative space and iterations within the haiku showcases the immense attention to detail that is a necessity for excellent haiku. This anthology also represents the first ever curation for a handful of poets, published right alongside award-winning poets. We are a community.
Contemporary haiku is an exploration of gratitude. As such, I ask you to share this anthology with someone who asks why the haiku aren’t seventeen syllables. Be bold, for as we know, the truth is far more interesting.
Best,
*
scrambled eggs
I’ve had my fill
of wasted potential
~ John Arthur
*
monarch butterfly migration
my mother dies in her sleep
~ Lana Hechtman Ayers
*
old hands repot flowers
they live for one another
~ Tom Barlow
*
freeing the umbrella first kiss
~ Roberta Beary
*
bowed head
the prayer of a snowbound
sunflower
~ Jaundré van Breda
*
park flasher now I’ve seen it all
~ Susan Burch
*
lark flying
into the sparkling
glass
~ Melanie Ehler Collopy
*
nightfall
we all lose
our shadows
~ Corey D. Cook
*
six years sober
i watch winter
frost its glass
~ Amanda Nicole Corbin
*
empty space
a voiding
former stars
~ Christiana Doucette
*
unguarded street crossing
ants commute
~ Charlotta Elmgren
*
daydreaming
the place no-one knows
pine cones fall
~ Sharon Ferrante
*
how quickly
the pages turn
sepia
~ Laurie Flanigan
*
blackout…
yard by yard
fireflies
~ Joshua Gage
*
the sky between two pairs of wild geese: deleted text
~ Nicole Caruso Garcia
*
bloomless paperwhites
broken promises
~ Jo Anne Moser Gibbons
*
surfboard
rides crowded elevator : : Honolulu
~ Cindy Gore
*
bright summer day
my notebook
still blank
~ Michael Buckingham Gray
*
knotweed I tailgate a student driver
~ David Green
*
with every wave
against the shore
less and less me
~ Denisa Hanšutová
*
monopoly
i let her win
every time
~ Quamrul Hassan
*
tornado alley
learning to expect
the unexpected
~ Mark Hendrickson
*
house of mirrors all the lives I could have had
~ Jackleen Holton
*
morning chill
putting away
the silver menorah
~ Ruth Holzer
*
locker room
we compare our
cancer gowns
~ Roberta Beach Jacobson
*
my heart
split in half
silver locket
~ Bethany Jarmul
*
angel devil shoulder season
~ kjmunro
*
digital blank page
my reflection
in the water
~ Zachary T. Kalinoski
*
getting closer …
the box of sakura mochi
slowly empties
~ Deborah Karl-Brandt
*
wishing I could
save you from yourself—
rising thunderhead
~ Julie Bloss Kelsey
*
migrating cranes
they say mountains
can’t be conquered
~ Ravi Kiran
*
what I don’t know grows daily fireflies at noon
~ Kat Lehmann
*
the weight
of slate-gray clouds
no message
~ Chen-ou Liu
*
opening the door
my hand forgets
letting go
~ Hemat Malak
*
breathtaking
inconvenience
camping
~ Jenny Mattern
*
mattress deflated awkward nude dance
~ Zachariah Matteson
*
spring shadows
the old woman rising
from a wheelchair
~ Michael Meyerhofer
*
ghost pipe flowers
stealing jewelry
from mom’s closet
~ Chelsea McClellan
*
computer news
streaming on my phone…
snow
~ Lenard D. Moore
*
tall cedars
all around
the kindness of strangers
~ Isabella Mori
*
gas lamp
light
verse
~ Brian O’Sullivan
*
whatever it takes
night college
~ Ginel Basiga Ople
*
summer afternoon
the soft hoot
of a loon
~ Nancy Orr
*
shower steam
I pretend I don’t
exist
~ John Pappas
*
elections over
still finding roads
in potholes
~ Vandana Parashar
*
picnic
in
her gingham dress
~ Jon Petruschke
*
early frost
so little
we agree on
~ Sharon Pretti
*
diaper bag
carrying
everything but myself
~ Caiti Quatmann
*
our children gone
this jar of shells
so far from the sea
~ Bryan Rickert
*
doomscrolling
all the storm clouds
I can’t see
~ Tracy Royce
*
through the fog
a rooster crows …
late breakfast
~ Rick Runner
*
sea wind …
a distant glacier
in her eyes
~ Jacob D. Salzer
*
midnight pancakes
empty syrup bottle
honey will do
~ Shawn Aveningo Sanders
*
walking heel to toe
on the railroad tie—
my pros and cons list
~ Kelly Sargent
*
beach walk
deep in my chest
ocean’s breath
~ Tere Sievers
*
night sky
searching for roots
and their roots
~ Kashiana Singh
*
late bonfire
he jabs the poker
at a dying star
~ Joshua St. Claire
*
forcing bulbs
girls who have learned
the hard way
~ Debbie Strange
*
grandchildren arriving
persistent saplings
encircle the tree
~ Nancy Tinnell
*
it fits too tight
said eternity
to Tuesday
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
*
while writing email
I leave my kids
to their own devices
~ Michael Dylan Welch
*
under the full moon
new fallen snow
angels
~ Dick Westheimer
*
pollen cloud
the longing
now falling
~ Joshua Eric Williams
*
false spring
I wave to neighbours
who aren’t my neighbours
~ Tony Williams
*
empty shells below
abandoned nest
two possibilities
~ Michele Worthington
*
old bookstore
dustmotes dancing
between two languages
~ Li Zhuang
*
~ Editor Bios ~
Katie Dozier is a former professional poker player, the author of Watering Can, and co-author of Hot Pink Moon with her husband Timothy Green. She loves long conversations about short poems. Katie is the creator of the podcast The Poetry Space_, the Haiku Editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry, and an editor for Rattle.
Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry.
Louisa Schnaithmann is Consulting Editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry. She is the author of Plague Love (Moonstone Press).
*
~ Contributor Bios ~
John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, DIAGRAM, trampset, ONE ART, Failbetter, Frogpond, and many other places.
Lana Hechtman Ayers has shepherded over a hundred forty poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Lana’s favorite color is the swirl of van Gogh’s The Starry Night.
According to an article in the journal Cell, as little as thirty percent of the cells that comprise Tom Barlow are human. The rest are primarily bacteria, fungi, protozoa and archaea, all playing their part in keeping the colony called Tom functioning. They all deserve a share of the credit for these poems.
Roberta Beary, (they/she) identifies as genderfluid and lives in Washington DC/County Mayo, Ireland. Beary is the longtime haibun editor for Modern Haiku. They are the author of two award-winning haiku collections, The Unworn Necklace and Carousel. Herselected haibuncollection, Crazy Bitches, was published March, 2025 by MacQ, an imprint of MacQueen’s Quinterly.
Jaundré van Breda is a poet from South Africa. One of his haiku appears in the 2024 ONE ART Poetry Haiku Anthology. Jaundré is the author of When Letting Go Is Just Another Way to Hold On: Haiku (2024). Visit swallowingpaint.com for more information about the author.
Susan Burch is a good egg.
Corey D. Cook’s eighth chapbook, heads held low, contains 24 haiku and senryu and was published by Bottlecap Press in 2024. His three-lined poems have appeared in Akitsu Quarterly, the Aurorean, Brevities, Cold Moon Journal, Fireflies’ Light, Fresh Out, haikuNetra, Haikuniverse, Scarlet Dragonfly Journal, tsuri-doro, and Wales Haiku Journal. Corey lives in East Thetford, Vermont.
Melanie Ehler Collopy is an Australian-American writer and dancer currently living in Sweden. In essence, a tumbleweed.
Amanda Nicole Corbin is an Ohio-based poet who has had her work published or forthcoming in The Notre Dame Review, The London Magazine, Door is a Jar, Palette Poetry, and more. She is the winner of the 2025 Mississippi Review Poetry contest. Her work was nominated for Best Microfiction 2024 & 2025. Her debut full-length collection, addiction is a sweet dark room, (Another New Calligraphy, 2024) focuses largely on her journey and struggles with mental health and addiction. She is currently working on a collection of poetry regarding the topics of bodily autonomy, loss, and early motherhood. Find her on Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram at @ancpoet.
During the winter Christiana Doucette builds miniatures. The smallest details create fascinating stories. She is the 2024 Kay Yoder Scholarship for History recipient and a judge for San Diego Writer’s Festival. She is represented by Leslie Zampetti. Find her recent poetry in Rattle, County Lines, ONE ART, and Wild Peach.
Charlotta Elmgren is an emerging poet drawn to explorations of nature, belonging and the soul. She holds a PhD in English literature and has published variously on the poetics of childhood and the (ir)responsibilities of literary creation. She lives with her family outside Stockholm, Sweden, where she increasingly finds herself looking up at the crow surveying her garden.
Sharon Ferrante has recently been seen fooling around with Jack Kerouac, somewhere in Daytona Beach Florida. Her work is rooted in fancy and whimsy. Her poems have appeared in many online journals and magazines, with love for the short form.
Laurie Flanigan is a New Englander who enjoys nature and connecting with people. She’d like to thank you for reading her work.
Joshua Gage is an ornery curmudgeon from Cleveland. He is the editor of The Ohio Haiku Anthology, the first collection of haiku by Ohio poets in over twenty years. He is a graduate of the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Naropa University. He has a penchant for Pendleton shirts, Ethiopian coffee, and any poem strong enough to yank the breath out of his lungs.
Nicole Caruso Garcia’s full-length debut OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press) received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Best New Poets, Frogpond, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Modern Haiku, 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.
Jo Anne Moser Gibbons is a published writer, poet, and photographer whose work recently has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Persimmon Tree, AvantAppalachia, Otoroshi Journal, Common Threads, and several anthologies.In 2024, she received Ohio Poetry Association first and third place awards.
Cindy Gore lives in Texarkana, Texas. Her poems have appeared in Rattle and ONE ART.
Michael Buckingham Gray is a poet, writer and creative writing mentor. His haiku recently appeared in Frogpond, cattails and Asahi Haikuist Network.
David Green has had haiku published in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, Mayfly, Confluence and other journals. One of his senryu won third place in the Haiku Society of America Gerald Brady Senryu Awards. A haiku of his has been displayed in the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Another poem was selected to be part of the Midwest Haiku Traveling Rock Garden. David is a teacher and poet in Chicago.
Denisa Hanšutová is a poet from Slovakia. Her poems have not appeared in any journals yet as she started experimenting with haiku only recently.
Quamrul Hassan is an MFA Candidate at the University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing and Translation. His haiku and other poems and translations have been published or forthcoming in Agni, Copper Nickel, The Malahat Review, Columbia Journal, Mantis, World Literature Today, The Los Angeles Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Usawa Literary Review, Asahi Shimbun, The Heron’s Nest, Modern Haiku, Blithe Spirit, Failed Haiku and Narrow Road.
Mark Hendrickson (he/him/his) is a poet and writer in the Des Moines area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Variant Lit, Vestal Review, Modern Haiku, Spellbinder, and others. Mark worked for many years as a Mental Health Technician in a locked psychiatric unit. He has advanced degrees in music, health information management, and marriage & family therapy. Follow him @MarkHPoetry or on his website: www.markhendricksonpoetry.com
Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies The Giant Book of Poetry, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Sun and others.
Ruth Holzer’s haiku and other short form Japanese style poems have appeared in journals including Acorn, bottle rockets, cattails, First Frost, Frogpond, Hedgerow, Kingfisher, Modern Haiku, and Ribbons. She lives in Virginia.
Roberta Beach Jacobson is the editor of Five Fleas Itchy Poetry. She lives in Iowa, USA.
Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer, poet, writing coach, and workshop instructor. She’s the author of a poetry collection, Lightning Is a Mother and a mini-memoir, Take Me Home. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, and Salamander. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. Born and raised in West Virginia, Bethany lives in Pittsburgh with her family. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul
kjmunro lives in the Yukon Territory, Canada, on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation & the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council. She is the recipient of the 2023 Borealis Prize – The Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution. She facilitates ‘solstice haiku’, a monthly haiku discussion group in Whitehorse, & she manages a weekly blog feature for The Haiku Foundation called Haiku Dialogue. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, & her debut poetry collection is contractions (Red Moon Press, 2019).
Zachary T. Kalinoski is a writer, born and bred in Ohio, based in Columbus. When not scratching lines on paper or pecking a keyboard, you can find him wrangling data for corporations, watching Rattlecast while washing dishes, and adoring time with his wife, daughter, and cavapoo. Some of his work appears in The Fib Review and The Columbus Dispatch.
Deborah Karl-Brandt lives in Bonn, Germany, with her husband, two rabbits and and a decent selection of books. After her PhD studies in Scandinavian languages and literatures, she works as a freelance author and poet. Her poems have earned her some honorable mentions and the 2nd place in the 2021 Pula Film Festival Haiku Contest.
Julie Bloss Kelsey’s haiku have been published worldwide. She is the author of three collections of haiku and related forms: The Call of Wildflowers (Title IX Press, 2020), the award-winning Grasping the Fading Light: A Journey Through PTSD (Sable Books, 2023), and After Curfew (Cuttlefish Books, 2023). Julie writes a column for beginning haiku poets, New to Haiku, for The Haiku Foundation, where she is on the Board of Directors. Connect with her on Bluesky: @mamajoules.bsky.social
Ravi Kiran is an Electronics Engineer and is a working professional. Ravi’s haiku have won international contests and are featured in journals like The Heron’s Nest, Modern Haiku & Frogpond. Ravi is a web-editor with the leading journal haikuKATHA and is an editor with Leaf – the journal of The Daily Haiku.
Kat Lehmann is a founding co-chief editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. Her fourth collection no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song (Rattle, 2025) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. Kat’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. https://katlehmann.weebly.com
Chen-ou Liu is the author of five books, including Following the Moon to the Maple Land (First Prize, 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest) and A Life in Transition and Translation (Honorable Mention, 2014 Turtle Light Press Biennial Haiku Chapbook Competition).
Hemat Malak is a poet and accountant from Sydney, Australia, who has crawled back to poetry after over forty-five years away. She mainly writes on themes which irritate her, hoping to run out of them one day. Her writing has appeared in Rattle, Rochford Street Review, Catchment Literary Journal, Short Stories Unlimited, and anthologies from WestWords and WA Poets.
Jenny Mattern is a poet, a crafter of stories, and a cake-for-breakfast enthusiast living in Montana with her husband and children. She has had poetry published in The Poetry Pea Anthology, Cold Moon Journal, and The Dirigible Balloon. She also writes middle-grade novels and is represented by Nicole Eisenbraun at Ginger Clark Literary Agency.
Zachariah Matteson is a violinist living and performing in Austin, TX. His poetry has appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar and the FailedHaiku Journal.
Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five books of poetry – including What To Do If You’re Buried Alive (free from Doubleback Books) – as well as a fantasy series. His eclectic work has appeared in Modern Haiku, The Sun, Brevity, Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, Rattle, and other journals. For more info and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit troublewithhammers.com.
Chelsea McClellan is a poet writing from a small homestead in NW Ohio, where she also spends much time re-reading Rhina Espaillat and Charlotte Mason, tending to her children and the family orchard, and mucking out the horse stalls.
Lenard D. Moore is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, book reviewer, photographer, playwright, and educator. He is the author of several books, including A Million Shadows at Noon; Long Rain; and The Geography of Jazz. He also is the editor and/or co-editor of several books, including All The Songs We Sing: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective; and One Window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku. He is the recipient of several honors and awards, including Induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Margaret Walker Creative Writing Award, and the Haiku Museum of Tokyo Award (thrice). He is former president of the Haiku Society of America (2 terms); longtime Executive Chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society; Founder and Executive Director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. In addition, he is the Co-founder of the Washington Street Writers Group.
Isabella Mori lives on the unceded, traditional, ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh aka Vancouver, BC, is the founder of Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize, and the author of three books of and about poetry, including Not So Pretty Haiku. They write pretty much everything that’s not nailed down.
Brian O’Sullivan teaches English at St. mary’s College of Maryland. His poems have been published in ONE ART, Rattle, Contemporary Haibun Online and other journals. He is a poetry reader at Chestnut Review and a squad member at ThePoetrySpace_.
Ginel Basiga Ople is from Cavite, Philippines. He works in the engineering industry and discusses poems on Discord. His poetry also appears in Rattle’s Tribute to the Haibun.
Nancy Orr discovered the joys of writing haiku after she retired. She had written poetry off and on for much of her life, but her time and energy was spent working in and around municipal government. She has published haiku and senryu in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, bottle rockets, Wales Haiku Journal, Pan Haiku Review, tsuri-doro, Akitsu Quarterly, and Failed Haiku, among others.
John Pappas is a poet and teacher whose work has appeared in many poetry journals and anthologies. His haiku have garnered a Touchstone Award from The Haiku Foundation, a 2023 Trailblazer award, a silver medal in the 2023 Ito En New Haiku Grand Prix, Best in the United States in the 2023 Vancouver Invitational, a Sakura Award in the 2024 Vancouver Invitational, and honorable mention in the 2024 Heliosparrow Frontier Awards, among others. His first chapbook dimes of light was published in 2024 by Yavanika Press. His work is featured in the recently published haiku anthology off the main road: six contemporary haiku poets (Alba Publishing, 2024) and his longer poetry has twice been selected for the Mayor of Boston’s Poetry Contest (2016 and 2020). As drummer and lyricist of the punk rock band Heather Hates You, he has recorded two albums and toured extensively. John lives in Boston, MA with his wife and two daughters, and has taught literature and general semantics in the Boston area for over 25 years.
Vandana Parashar is an associate editor of haikuKATHA and one of the editors of Poetry Pea and #FemkuMag. Her debut e-chapbook, “I Am”, was published by Title IX Press (Moth Orchid Press) in 2019 and her second chapbook “Alone, I Am Not”, was published by Velvet Dusk Publishing in 2022.
Jon Petruschke resides in Portland, Maine where he practices psychotherapy in addition to writing. He has two books — Dream Haiku: Poems from Nights and Naps, and Cherry Blossom: Erotic Haiku.
Sharon Pretti’s work has appeared in Calyx, The MacGuffin, The Bellevue Literary Review and other journals. She’s received Pushcart Prize nominations and was selected for the Best New Poets 2024 anthology. She is also an award-winning haiku poet and has been a frequent contributor to haiku journals including Modern Haiku and Frogpond. Sharon is a retired medical social worker and has taught poetry workshops in long-term care facilities in San Francisco.
Caiti Quatmann (she/they) is a disabled and queer writer residing in St. Louis. She is the author of Yoke (MyrtleHaus, 2024) and the forthcoming poetry collections Meditations (on Cheese) (Alien Buddha Press, 2025) and M(other)hood (Big Thinking Publishing, 2025). She is the Editor-in-Chief of HNDL Mag, and her work appears or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Rattle, Neologism Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, Little Old Lady Comedy, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Thread, and more. Find her on social media @CaitiTalks.
Bryan Rickert, President of the Haiku Society of America (2023-2024), has been published in many fine journals. He was the Editor of Failed Haiku Journal of Senryu (2022-2024) and edits The Living Senryu Anthology. Bryan has two books: Fish Kite (Cyberwit Publishing) and Just Dust and Stone, co-written with Peter Jastermsky (Velvet Dusk Publishing). His work was selected for inclusion in A New Resonance, Volume 12. He was also the recipient of the Touchstone award for individual poems in 2023.
Tracy Royce’s haiku or haibun have recently appeared in contemporary haibun online, failed haiku, Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Under the Bashō, whiptail: journal of the single line poem, and elsewhere.
An author and contributor to hiking websites, Rick Runner started writing haiku as an extension of practicing shinrin-yoku and journaling his frequent hiking adventures. In a very short time, his haiku have appeared in online journals, including Sense & Sensibility. After a 30-year career as a U.S. Army officer, as well as five years as a high school history teacher, Rick is now fully retired and living in Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay.
Jacob D. Salzer is a Pacific Northwest poet and editor who primarily writes haiku and tanka in English. He is the past managing editor of Frogpond: The Journal of the Haiku Society of America (2023-2024), and the founding editor of the Haiku Poet Interviews blog and Mayfly Editing. He also serves as a commentator for the Haiku Commentary blog with Nicholas Klacsanzky and Hifsa Ashraf. In his spare time, Jacob enjoys hiking, reading, and spending time with friends and family. His poetry website is: https://jsalzer.wixsite.com/mareliberumhaiku
Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poetry has appeared in journals worldwide, including Calyx, OneArt, Quartet, About Place Journal, Timberline Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, McQueen’s Quinterly, and many others. Author of What She Was Wearing (2019), her manuscript, Pockets, was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest (2024) and is forthcoming from MoonPath Press in Fall 2025. 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.
A significantly hearing impaired writer and artist adopted in Luxembourg, Kelly Sargent is the author of two memoirs in verse (Kelsay Books) and a collection of haiku and senryu entitled Bookmarks (Red Moon Press, 2023). Her short form poetry appears regularly in haiku and senryu journals online and in print. She is a six-time Touchstone Award for Individual Poems nominee, and has won or placed in a number of international haiku and senryu competitions. She resides in Vermont, where the picturesque beauty and four distinct seasons often serve as her inspiration.
When Kashiana Singh is not writing, she lives to embody her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her every day. Her newest full-length collection, Witching Hour, was released in December 2024 with Glass Lyre Press. She lives in North Carolina and proudly serves as Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News, as well as President of the North Carolina Poetry Society.
Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from a small town in Pennsylvania who works as a financial director for a non-profit. His haiku and related poetry have been published broadly including in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Mayfly. His favorite subject is the sky.
Debbie Strange (Canada) is a chronically ill short-form poet and artist whose work connects her more closely to the world and to herself. Her haiku collection, Random Blue Sparks, received the 2020 Snapshot Press Book Award, and was recently published by the press.
Tere Sievers lives and teaches in Long Beach California. She says,” Writing poetry helps me see clearly the joys of a long life and teaches me how to survive its losses.” Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Pearl, Nerve Cowboy, Silver Birch Press Anthologies and others.
Nancy Tinnell is from Louisville, KY. Her work has appeared in several online and print journals, for which she is grateful. She enjoys writing in both formal and free verse and frequently organizes events that feature both readings and music. Writing poetry is her favorite means of self-expression.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker, writing facilitator, and poet laureate of Evermore. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, Washington Post’s Book Club, andCarnegie Hall stage. Her newest book is The Unfolding. One-word mantra: Adjust.
Michael Dylan Welch has been writing haiku for nearly fifty years, and has had his haiku, tanka, longer poems, essays, and reviews published in hundreds of journals and anthologies in more than twenty languages. He has been keynote speaker for the Haiku International Association conference in Tokyo, and one of his translations from the Japanese has appeared on the back of 150 million U.S. postage stamps. Michael runs National Haiku Writing Month every February (www.nahaiwrimo.com) and documents his writing life at www.graceguts.com.
Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize 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
Joshua Eric Williams is a poet, essayist, and artist from Carrollton, GA. His work has appeared in various publications, including Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Rattle. Visit thesmallestwords.com for more information about his work.
Tony Williams lives quietly in a village near Glasgow in Bonnie Scotland where he enjoys nature, science, gardening, food, sci-fi TV, rain or sun, and reading inspiring short-form poetry. He is not unhappily retired.
Michele Worthington lives in Tucson, AZ where the Sonoran Desert, urban sprawl and our unacknowledged apocalypse inspires her writing. She has had poems published in Sandscript, Sandcutter, and Sabino Poets; an online chapbook at unlostJournal.com; and photography and poetry in Harpy Hybrid Review. She was a Tucson Haiku Hike and Arizona Matsuri contest winner, and a finalist for the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books literary awards.
Li Zhuang is a PhD candidate of Creative Writing at Florida State University. In 2019, Li graduated with an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her works have been featured and are forthcoming in Pleiades, the Common, Denver Quarterly, the Madison Review, Southeast Review, the Collapsar etc. Her Chapbook “But Octopi Don’t Sing” is a runner-up for Purple Ink Press’s Chapbook Contest selected by Chen Chen. Li is the nonfiction editor for the Southeast Review.
Three Poems by Jennifer Michael Hecht
Love Is the Only Way to Be Found
I know what I’m
running from but
not what I’m after.
Lost first is the only
way to be found,
it is still a disaster.
*
Metaphors As Chains
Metaphors and similes
control our thoughts
like a baker shaping
dough into loaves.
They can’t be avoided,
language is metaphor,
so I make sure no single
one is eating my prose
like rust. Mixed metaphors
are the only ones I trust.
*
Against the Memory
I was holding my baby when on television
the water started rushing in. Everyone else
was moving us out, everything in boxes
and on its way to the truck except for
the couch I was holding my baby on
and the television we were watching
and I didn’t understand what I was seeing.
I tried to tell the people who were helping
us move, there’s been a wave, but I
almost didn’t believe what I was seeing.
They didn’t understand. I went back
to watching. I stayed on that couch
forever, long after the move was over,
even now, even today. Me holding the baby
watching people not able to hold on
to anything, even each other, torn away
despite all conceivable intention, it made
a radical impression. The baby is twenty
now, we’ve moved twice since then,
sixteen years in one place and I miss it.
Sometimes you think or dream, the water
rising, the enormous wave, darkness
made visible and then the jolt slam
of it taking you. What’s the strategy?
How do we defend against the memory?
Always, at first, the ocean pulling back far,
leaving fish flopping and crabs scurrying,
always those moments of quiet, time
to run; and then the monster comes.
*
Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, historian, and commentator. Her most recent book is The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life (2023) a guide to using poetry to find meaning, invoke awe, and rest in some clarity of mind. She is the author of the bestseller Doubt: A History, a history of religious and philosophical doubt all over the world, throughout history. In Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It (Yale University Press, 2013) she scrutinizes the moral status of suicide. Her book The Happiness Myth (HarperOne, 2007), brings a historical eye to modern wisdom about how to lead a good life. Hecht’s The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology won Phi Beta Kappa’s 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “For scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.” Her books have been translated into many languages.
Publisher’s Weekly called her poetry book, Funny, “One of the most original and entertaining books of the year.” Her first book of poetry, The Next Ancient World, won three national awards, including the Poetry Society of America’s First Book award for 2001. Her most recent poetry book is Who Said (Copper Canyon, 2013). Hecht has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Politico, Vox, Poetry, and The New Yorker. She holds a Ph.D. in the history of science/European cultural history from Columbia University (1995) and has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University and the New School in New York City.
Hecht has also published in peer-reviewed journals, including: The Journal of the History of Ideas, Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society, French Historical Studies, The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, and has delivered lectures at Harvard, Yale, MIT, Cal Tech, Columbia University as well as The Zen Mountain Monastery, Temple Israel, Saint Bart’s Episcopal Church, and other institutions of learning and introspection. Hecht has been featured on many radio programs, including On Being with Krista Tippett, Leonard Lopate Show, the BBC, Speaking of Faith, Talk of the Nation, and Brian Lehrer. She has appeared on Hardball on MSNBC, the Discovery Channel, and The Morning Show. She lectures widely.
ONE ART’s May 2025 Reading
We’re pleased to announce ONE ART’s May 2025 Reading!
The reading will be held on Sunday, May 4 at 2pm Eastern.
We expect the event to run approximately 2 hours.
Featured Poets: Jennifer Mills Kerr, Terri Kirby Erickson, Dick Westheimer, Ann E. Michael, Kai Coggin
>>> Tickets available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)
+++++
~ About Our Featured Readers ~
Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. An East Coast native, she loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Northern California. After twenty years writing & publishing fiction, Jennifer has recently “come out” as a poet, thanks to supportive editors, teachers, & friends. You can connect with Jennifer & read her work at her website.
Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including her latest collection, Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.
Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have appeared in Only Poems, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Gasmius, 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
Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize; she’s the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks. She is a hospice volunteer, writing tutor, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at https://annemichael.blog/
Kai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, AR, and a recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her project Sharing Tree Space. She is the author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). Coggin is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, an Interchange Grant Fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.
Coggin was awarded the 2023 Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award for Visionary Service, and the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award for Arts in Education. She was twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, and nominated for Arkansas State Poet Laureate and Hot Springs Woman of the Year. Her fierce and tender poetry has been nominated nine times for The Pushcart Prize, and awarded Best of the Net in 2022. Ten of Kai’s poems are going to the moon with the Lunar Codex project, and on earth they have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Poets(.)org, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, About Place Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Editor-at-Large at both SWWIM and Terrain(.)org, Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. She lives with her wife in a peaceful valley, where they tend to wild ones and each other. www.kaicoggin.com
Harvesting the Lavender by Karly Randolph Pitman
Harvesting the Lavender
When the lavender dies in the winter storm
you strip the dried leaves from their stems.
The pall of their aroma stains your fingers
as you open a drawer, looking for
an envelope. You think you’ll mail them
to a friend. But you smile when you see
the address written across the front:
Montana Department of Revenue. You
dream of sending scented leaves
with your tax return, picture the look
on the face of the clerk who opens the flap,
reading your note: I’m sending you
my portion of the income I grew on Texas soil.
You like to imagine that the lavender leaves
can do as much for Montana as the dollars
and cents printed on your check. You see
a new mountain road in her future, poured
pavement to a rural school, a bike path
where children ride their bikes in
the early morning light. There’s fresh
concrete and alongside, lavender fronds
waving their hands in the summer wind.
*
Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, teacher, facilitator and mental health trainer who brings understanding to sugar addiction, overeating and other ways we care for trauma. You can find her poetry at O Nobly Born, a reader supported newsletter, and her healing work with food at her substack, When Food is Your Mother. She lives in Austin, Texas where she does as much as possible with her hands and is writing a book on overcoming food suffering.
Exhortation for any Innocence that Remains by Rachel Custer
Exhortation for any Innocence that Remains
Warning bell of a child, still, unwrung
as yet by what a tongue can hold, or what
can hold a tongue: let yourself be small.
Spent match, fire in another man’s belly,
word-weight in a dead language, rise up!
O exhale-born, o hymn-child, humming home
bearing your own song, held word (life
meaning what’s said, what’s said meaning
what’s heard), rise quietly, like heat
in a cheek burned first by turning. Warning
bell rung, unring yourself, become the truth
that binds another’s tongue, enter first
into any room as the haunt in a quarry’s eyes,
as a threat felt from behind. Dark child, planet
eclipsed, waiting like a star waits out the day,
let nightfall swallow all the drowning light.
Come forth, and when you come, come as you are,
small and deadly, thrust Godward like a fist.
*
Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, 2003) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, ONE ART, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com and songsonthewaytogod.substack.com.
Four Poems by Kimberly Ann Priest
In the News, December 31, 1980
The final day of the year before my sister is born,
two people die in a local gas station explosion that no one
can explain, as winter warms up her roar from the Ohio Valley
to overpower all the Northeast, and five Connecticut men,
employees of City Printing Co., go missing in a small plane
over Lake Michigan. Governor Milliken has signed new bills
into law to restructure Blue Cross Blue Shield,
a massive tax-exempt, non-profit health insurer created
forty-one years prior. “We made more progress in six days,”
says the Governor, “than we did in the past six years,”
addressing employee complaints concerning injured and laid-off
workers who weren’t receiving benefits, as well as employer
complaints of system abuse and expense. Still,
the sun will be shinning tomorrow morning, temperatures mild
even as energy audits roll out for home dwellers to cut
heating costs. Which is good because tonight we are getting
two to four inches of snow as bright Jupiter and Saturn cozy up,
appearing merely two moon-widths apart by pre-dawn
when you can view them if you want to. Next month,
Reagan will be our nation’s president, and I think my parents
are happy. A volcano has erupted in Vancouver, Washington,
and the Communist Party has announced to the Polish
that this new year will not be prosperous as the country
continues its path toward socialist development. There are deaths
on the streets of California again due to the introduction
of a new illicit drug that is not “White China,” but almost the same,
while X-rated gingerbread women and men are sold
at a shop in Maryland featuring prominent sex organs
as well as big smiles. They aren’t illegal so the Moral Majority
can’t do a damn thing to stop them being sold. What is it
my mother keeps saying? There’s nothing new under the sun.
The Beach Boys have a star in Hollywood now—been a band
twenty years. Bright Jupiter and Saturn won’t be this close again
until 2020 when I’ll miss them again. Dad’s part-time job
pays some of the bills and gifts us Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Our home is barely warm enough to insulate bodies from winter,
but I’ve got a hot water bottle and Pooh Bear in bed.
*
Recession [early 80s]
Birch Run, Michigan
Childhood
was good.
I didn’t know my parent’s poverty. Didn’t know
we rationed food because
I was out buzzing with bees—
white bursts of pollen floating
and the farmhouse
a yellow brushstroke against the corn-pierced sky.
Mother put the baby on the floor
before the car careened and spun. Summer
swooped like a starling around heads
protecting, the grasses bowing to breeze
like old Moses in Genesis leaning against his cane,
surrendering causes to a new generation.
I remember wild eyes and lore,
before seatbelts were lawful,
mother panting with miracle after arriving home safe,
no car or human damage, the baby
quieted and falling asleep.
She pointed to heaven, to Jesus,
when a rash of needle pricks covered my back—allergies
demanding so much medication. Cattails
grew thick and tall in the ditches, their inches
of stalk below the plateau
assuring I was just the same height. These days,
one must like apples
or applesauce,
or mustard shag carpet—something yellow
such as forsook corn hardened for crows,
or Queen Bee bushy all over pollinating red clover,
hovering the spiney pink globes,
deciding, asserting you, you, you,
you must like applesauce,
eat every last bite, to not taste the bitter white sprinkles
un-capsuled and tossed
into the sweetest luxury food stamps allowed.
I wished it could have been ice cream. It wasn’t.
Yellow ball of daytime sun gone down
as I ate the coveted portion, with spoon,
that no one else got, bees
all tired and sleeping, the baby
bundled for night.
*
After My Father Losses His Job, My Medicine Runs Out
And we lose our healthcare
like most unemployed families do,
so my mother lifts the empty bottle
of allergy medication
that keeps me breathing during the greener seasons
toward heaven (toward
our farmhouse kitchen ceiling) one late
Wednesday evening after mid-week church
and after the last pill is broke open
into my applesauce where I, a four-year-old child,
am willing to consume it. She has
no other option and a little girl
who loves to go outside: it’s Jesus
or nothing. Oh Lord, she intones, be good to me
throwing the bottle away. She will still
give me applesauce each evening without
the white medicinal sprinkles, still
pray nervously, still wake each morning
to feed me breakfast and watch me rush
out our front door
like an anxious little bee difficult
to contain. Some kids, I have learned,
grow out of seasonal allergies. Who knows?
Maybe that was me. Oh Lord
be good my mother prayed
as I rolled in the summer grass like a skinny cat
fighting off its fleas. As I marched
into the woodland’s verdant trees.
As I ate my applesauce; in return, offering my mother
sticks, pretty stones, dead leaves.
*
Locusts
1981
We searched for wild honey and found it late March
oozing from maple trees, declaring our woodlands
miraculous. Miracles! Miracles! we hollered,
demanding the wind turn north or south
at our command. My little brother lifts a stick and strikes a rock.
Water! he proclaims, hitting the rock
harder, promising a gusher and sputtering noises to mimic
its fake flow. We drank
from that rock and the wind and the trees. We imagined
meaty bugs and ate them, pretending their winged bodies
wriggled in our teeth. We listened for the forest,
pausing along a well-worn path to stand very still
and discern its murmur. Follow, follow, it said.
So we followed the inspirited tickle of leaves
in gentle breeze above us, limbs swaying and guiding west
then east. We were such good pantheists
wandering a wilderness like John the Baptist on transcendental
mission, stalking our Bible’s feral God.
*
Kimberly Ann Priest (she/her) is a neurodivergent writer and the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells. She is the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press 2025) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications 2021, finalist for the American Best Book Awards. A professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, she lives with her husband in Maine.
Call for Submissions: Poems About Work
Call for Submissions: Poems About Work
The Book of Jobs: An Anthology of Poems About Work (Online)
How to Submit: Email up to three poems of (up to 150 lines each) in the body of an email to:
oneartworkpoems [at] gmail [dot] com
Please also include a 3rd-person bio of up to 50 words.
Submission Window: April 13—July 12, 2025
Anticipated anthology publication date: Fall 2025
Fee/payment: No submission fee. Contributors to receive a $10 honorarium per accepted poem (thanks to a donation from an anonymous donor). The anthology will be available online at no cost to readers.
Requirements: Previously unpublished poems are preferred (though it’s fine if you have shared them on personal sites, including social media). We will consider poems that have been published in literary journals if the rights have reverted to the poet; please indicate this in your submission. Simultaneous submissions are permitted; please reply to your own emailed submission to let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere.
What We’re Looking For:
• Poems about all types of labor (industrial, agricultural, corporate, healthcare, domestic, creative, hospitality, caregiving, education, sports, and other fields of work).
• A variety of styles: narrative, persona, documentary, formal, experimental, erasure, cento, abecedarian, prose poems, etc.
• Serious poems, funny poems, seriously funny poems
• While we welcome poems about your own work experiences, we hope you’ll also consider submitting poems about the work of others, including family members, historical figures, or people you’ve observed, interviewed, or researched.
Sample work poems we admire:
“What Work Is” by Philip Levine
“Invisible Work” by Kwoya Fagin Maples
“Taking It Home to Jerome” by David Kirby
“Night Waitress” by Linda Hull
“Shirt” by Robert Pinsky
We’re looking forward to reading your work about work!
With all best wishes,
Erin Murphy
Editor, The Book of Jobs: An Anthology of Poems About Work
Publisher: ONE ART: a journal of poetry
Forsythia by Angie Blake-Moore
Forsythia
Driving with the sunroof open
and feeling spring pour in
onto my neck and shoulders,
I notice all the forsythia
in the neighborhood
have woken up.
Like a kindergartener’s overeager
drawing, all wild and woolly
with too much yellow—
these scraggly tentacles of sunshine
won’t be tamed.
You can come at them
with your pruning shears
but you will be rebuffed.
The forsythia bows to no man’s notion
of how a neat yard should look.
You will back away,
hands raised in surrender.
It will have its say
and it will be loud about it.
Yellow, yellow, and then some!
Spring is not a shy season–
forsythia denounces
winter days as if they will
never come again.
*
Angie Blake-Moore has been a teacher of 3- and 4-year-olds in Washington, DC for 30 years. She’s had work published in Potomac Review, Green Mountains Review, ONE ART, and like a field among others, including the anthology Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller’s Cabin 1984-2001. She recently had a poem chosen for Moving Words in Arlington, VA where her poem was displayed in county buses.
Everything Should Be a Love Poem by Steven Concert
Everything Should Be a Love Poem
Awash in the warmth
of a morning sun’s sky,
row-on-row bloom
of white daffodils,
crunchy Cheerios
splashed with almond milk,
you inside a well-worn pair
of faded Levis,
deep inhaled scent
of sweet and sensuous lavender,
soft glow of a lighthouse
through coastal fog,
frivolity of a bubble wand
waved in summer sunshine,
open highway cruise
at 70 miles per hour,
pulse-through-my-chest beat
of rock -n- roll,
closeness
of a skin-to-skin hug,
glint of sand dollars half-buried
in dampened earth after high tide,
left-over lasagna
gently warmed in the oven,
orange kayak afloat on lake
hidden deep in Penn’s woods,
inhalation
of your manly sweat,
snow-covered everything
undisturbed the morning after,
smash-crash of glass
shattered on concrete,
each warm spoonful
of home-made sausage and lentil soup,
sensory deprivation immersion
into a Dali canvas,
paralysis of never-ending fear
of high places,
steamy mug of coffee
on a rainy afternoon,
gentle scratch of your facial hair
on my naked torso,
poetic verse
read before bedtime,
melatonin induced
relaxation,
cherished memories
of a life together,
revelry of truth
when it blindsides fiction,
silence of shared space
between soul mates,
the last rays of sun
in the evening sky.
*
Queer American poet, Steven Concert has lived in the same small town for most of his life. He is a long-time member of the Pennsylvania Poetry Society as well as other state poetry organizations (OH, MN). His work has been published by Agates, Fixed & Free Quarterly, and the River Poets. Steven can be found on multiple social platforms: Facebook @ Paperless Poets, Blue Sky @PaperlessPoets.bsky.social, and Mastodon @PaperlessPoet
Steven is the author of three chapbooks—Too Blind to See (1996, reissued 2024), Standing in the Chaos (2006), No Mortar Required (2013)—and the full-length collection, Steer into the Skid (2022)
Late Again by Julie Weiss
Late Again
— after Danusha Laméris
I ignore the meteorologist´s warning,
surge out of the house hoodless,
umbrella propped in the farthest corner
of my home, like a perspective
I´ve outgrown. I stride to work,
each cement block a sinkhole,
black coffee sloshing over the rim
of my Starbucks Venti. Clouds silver,
then gray, then shed their final white
wisps, yet the only threat I sense
overhead is my deadline, screeching
like some clawed creature on the brink
of extinction. The rain comes yards before
I reach my office, comes down in ribbons—
there are no overhangs on this street.
Through the blur, I swear I catch
the fractured pieces of my career
but it´s only a smashed bottle, each shard
as sharp as my boss´s daily tirades.
In a different poem, the tap tap tap
on my shoulder might be collapsed
scaffolding, portending the end. I might
kneel on the street, grind my knees
in someone else´s stupor, pray for sirens.
Or, I might call in sick, crackling my voice
for good measure, scan the neighborhood
for a trail out of the day´s grasp. But I turn,
see a crossing guard with an umbrella,
saying “Here honey, take mine. I have a hood.”
*
Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net, she won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja,” and she was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Burningword Journal, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and others. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.
Seasons Affected, Disorder by Betsy Mars
Seasons Affected, Disorder
It’s spring but I’m stuck
in fall, roasting vegetables,
stocking savory seasonings,
drinking cider and spiced tea,
looking forward to holidays
that never were,
to a new year, different
from the one we’re in. I write
the wrong date on checks,
wait for the sky to get dark
earlier. The gloom blankets me
with autumn as I walk the dog.
The world is in a fog, thick
enough to drown.
Bundled in synthetic down,
the jacket’s insulated baffles
keep me warm, blind
to the flowers’ bloom.
*
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.”
Please by Kristie Frederick Daugherty
Please
(to my grandmother)
Put the number 40 on my back.
Let me run. Race away.
Cold tears on the paddock.
I’ve been weeping since June.
Stumbling around, no flashlight.
Seeing your face in every
unlit place, I’ve been
underneath cave after cave
trickles of water, formations
pushing up from the earth.
Tombstone. Graveyard.
Cemetery.
You were there
all of the times
I was in the back of the pack,
whipped to go faster.
You, my warm stable,
and my stable feedings.
How I bit into the spoon.
Feasts, apples, endless,
and your hand, patting my hand:
“You’re my good girl.”
I know you are at my end
of all of this,
whatever all of this
turns out to be:
when only a back porch light
remains flaming in my brain.
When more measures
would have been unkind,
we did not allow more tubes,
or let them break your legs.
Find a way to turn back.
The track is a circle.
Head toward the starting gate.
Come home.
*
Kristie Frederick Daugherty is a poet and a professor at the University of Evansville. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also a PhD candidate in Literature/Criticism at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of “Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift” which was published in December 2024 from Random House. Find her online at www.kristiefrederickdaugherty.com
Two Poems by Morrow Dowdle
Sleight
I have no idea how he does it, this man
with his braids like pretzel twists,
polo shirt red, color of his profession.
He’s ready with two lovely assistants.
One to distract with the promise
of stickers. The other to step forward
if there’s any resistance.
The magician draws back the tiny arrow.
His fingers flick. The needle leaps
into my son’s small wrist. The boy
doesn’t feel it. His blood slides
smooth into one vial, then two.
The magician slips out the needle quick
as he sank it, and there’s a bandage
over the puncture. He never smiles.
The children that come here need more
than magic. He’s just a passing trick.
*
Bones
If we’d had Appalachian grannies,
they might have shown us how
to throw those bones, inspect
angle, shape, and crack,
connect with ancestral knowing.
Instead, this was New Jersey,
and the most friendless girl I knew
was digging up her dead cat
for the fifteenth time, though this
was the first I’d seen of it.
No shaman, no peddler of relics,
she just wanted to see her again,
so she laid out the bones one by one
from the softening shoebox,
putting the skeleton in order:
Hyoid, clavicle, carpal and radius.
Gibbous scapula and matchstick ribs.
Pelvis ring that sprung one litter.
Each lonely vertebra. The tail’s spindly chain.
The skull she did not set
on dark March soil, but cuddled it
to her left breast bud.
I was afraid of the two gaping craters
where green orbits had lived,
the ghastly fangs. The girl asked,
Wasn’t she beautiful?
I was trying to be more to her
than witness, but this sealed it—
yes, our mothers sad dumbly
in their kitchens while our fathers
drank themselves numb—but we would
never be connected.
I could never dig up a dead cat.
I could never love something that much.
*
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.
Ars Poetica by Julia Caroline Knowlton
Ars Poetica
Burning sun
gilding autumn grass.
Fingerprints
on window panes.
Pink lipstick
on a glass.
Sting of a kiss or fist.
Ink bruise
on the skin of the page.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has won two separate Georgia Author of the Year awards for her poetry. Her latest volume of poetry is a children’s book. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.
Birds of a Feather by Lori Widmer
Birds of a Feather
Female cardinal
dashes against the living room window
beats her wings at her reflection
shrill chirped warnings and clicking beak against the glass
flailing wildly to beat back the image she sees.
She returns each day that week to
repeat the hysterical, irrational dance.
Lawn chemicals my husband says.
How do I tell him?
The bird and her fight with
her mirror image are
all too familiar.
*
Lori Widmer is a freelance writer and poet based in Valley Forge, PA. Her poems have been published in TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Philadelphia Stories.
Two Poems by Joseph Fasano
For My Friends Whose Hearts Are Breaking
This is how it is: we live again.
We rise up
from the love-bed in our wreckage
and we walk again
and we open
every window,
and we live again, though living
is the cost.
Yes, my friends, I have a thing to tell you:
My story
is your story, on this wild earth:
I loved once, I was broken,
and I rose again—
and although I closed my arms
around my body,
although I said that darkened harp
was ruined,
the nights have filled my life with brutal music
that has taught me that we’re only here
to listen,
to hold each other awhile
and to listen,
and to carry each other
with the song of songs inside us
that is wiser, and is greater than our changes,
and that sings the way most wholly when we’re lost.
*
Love Poems for Our Friends
Where are the poems for those who know us?
Not for star-crossed loves,
for agonies of longing,
but words for those who go with us
the whole road.
How would they start, I wonder?
You let me crash
when I was new to ruin.
You came to me
though visiting hours were over.
You held me when my loves
were done, were flames.
Yes, we will lose a few
in the changes.
But these are the ones
who save us:
not the charmers,
not the comets of wild passion,
not the ups-and-downs of love’s unlucky hungers,
but the ones who stand
by our shoulder at the funeral
and lead us back to the city of the living
and put our favorite record on the player
and go away, and come back,
always come back,
with bread and wine
and one word, one word: stay.
*
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.
Three Poems by James Crews
Peace Offering
I don’t know what love is, but I
know how to peel a blood orange,
how to unravel the dimpled outer skin
then pick the pith from its pink flesh
and hand it off to the man I love.
Is love the need to give all we have
to someone else, this feeling that
if I don’t share the abundance, I’ll suffer
alone for the rest of my life? Earlier,
my husband sat in the living room,
silent because I had said something
that hurt him. Call this trucked-in orange
my make-up gift, my peace offering
still cold from the fridge, as solid
as a promise in the hand. I don’t know
how to stop failing at love, only that
failure’s the way to keep loving
as imperfectly as we all must, pressing
my lips against his clean, wet hair
and holding out the sections I have
peeled for him as if I grew them myself.
*
Joy
after Michael Simms
Joy is the stranger who won’t
take no for an answer, who
keeps knocking at the back door
no one uses, who doesn’t care
about the mud he tracks in
across pine floorboards
when you let him inside. Joy is
a slice of fresh-baked sourdough
slathered with salted butter
when you should be doing
your taxes, gathering receipts,
sipping herbal tea. Joy is
the laughter of a coffeepot
sputtering on the counter,
and a carton of cream tipped
into each cup. Joy is the friend
you haven’t seen in months,
perhaps even years, and he
presses his stubbled cheek hard
against yours when he says hello
so your whole body remembers.
*
Love What Comes
Add this to my list of small ecstasies:
the scent of pencils made from cedar,
wafting up as soon as I open the box
given to me by friends, the feel of real
graphite imprinting a notebook page.
And the crimson stubs of new peonies
I watered this morning, beginnings
of leaves and ruffled blooms all stored
inside a stem no larger than my thumb.
So much of what we imagine turns out
differently, swerves off-course. Why not
learn to love what comes as deeply as
the idea first held in our minds, like
a poem traced lightly in pencil, or a star-
shaped crocus pushing up through mulch,
both leaning toward a source of light
they can’t quite see, but know is there.
*
James Crews is the author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Courage & Self-Compassion, and editor of several bestselling poetry anthologies, including Love Is for All of Us, a collection of LGBTQ+ love poems. He is also the author of four poetry collections and lives in Southern Vermont with his husband. For more info: www.jamescrews.net
An Abbreviated Glosa with Lines from Bishop’s Waiting Room by Kimiko Hahn
An Abbreviated Glosa with Lines from Bishop’s Waiting Room
… What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Not mother or choral teacher.
Maybe my younger sister
though she was only three
in a crib in the corner
near the wall father jerryrigged
like the washing machine
that would gag and screech.
What took me
finally (into my seventies)
beyond that sharp gasp
and maybe animal cries
(a squeak or mewl)
was remembering my throat
as if attached to my eyes. Eyes
completely by surprise
as if make-do–like
the hose out the bathroom window
so the pipes wouldn’t freeze
(we bathed in a bucket).
Then like a rabbit bit by a cat
my lungs and tongue agreed
… that it was me:
though I cannot recall
if the stair hissed
or the sofa growled
or the blender brayed.
I now know that the noise
was an alarm, a bowwow–
my voice, in my mouth.
*
Kimiko Hahn’s latest collection is The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems. She is the 2023 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement and teaches in the MFA Program for Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.
Two Poems by Lauren Camp
Dear Instant,
I have never thought to arrive on an indigo motorcycle,
racing for a view. All summer I bathed
between punishment and fury
and took many photos that in winter
will seem flowered with ghosts.
No soft voices comforted. Only down stars.
I could sing but I didn’t. When I walked the beach
I missed all the seals, and instead squinted
at the lost sneakers demanding a meaning.
Blue and red. I didn’t more than wash
and stack my dream that dove repeatedly into the water.
I call time little names and let its head roost
in my palm. Every path wild skeletons emerge
picked clean and silent, they remind me
to solve back to claws and perpetual distance.
Show me my face as a tintype. Make it shine
in a parlor. Show me more than none of
this is a glitter. Of course
my rubber boots make me slip
closer to the clouds and their pink underbelly.
That’s it, I’ve decided:
I will get there. I’ve gone.
*
Lapses
A ferry took us. Slow ship that moved through
water like a full city and landed
upon an open-edged building.
We were carrying some part of how much we’d each known
of exhaustion, which we’d packed in full and half
bags and lifted, pushed taut against the rail.
On arrival, all the gestures of split wet
wood and distance—and someone
put out a bowl of figs with their drowsing magic.
When left alone, I found and held
the limbs of the twisting mother tree.
Now into the black stove, I place logs and time here
is made as they greet and part, snapping the air.
I blow on the smoldering coals.
Here is what is fragile.
Here is what repair is. The mind I can use
to confront a lesser question. The boat will return.
I’ll once say I left for wetter places.
*
Lauren Camp serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Camp has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute, the Dorset Prize, a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award. www.laurencamp.com
After You Left by Lisa Low
After You Left
I have lived my life alone since then.
Raising our children alone. Waving them
onto the bus alone. Facing them nights
and mornings alone. I wish I could say
how happily we played, cold to your loss.
How we ran to the snow when you left
to roll another man with black raisin eyes
and a carrot nose, but six-year-old Sam
hid his face when you left and lay like
a plank on his bed and four-year-old Julia
spilled a mountain of pills on me where
I lay on the carpet, crying, and ever since
then we have plucked our backyard daisies
clean, saying we love him, we love him not.
*
Lisa Low’s essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has been shortlisted for Ploughshares and is published or forthcoming in many literary journals, among them Hopkins Review, Pleiades, One Art, Conduit, Louisiana Literature, Pennsylvania English, and Southern Indiana Review. Her chapbook, Late in the Day, is forthcoming in July 2025 from Seven Kitchens Press.
The Returning Or Circling Of Perception by Laura Ann Reed
The Returning Or Circling Of Perception
“This is still Eden, alright”, I remind myself.
But today seems to call for some recalibration.
Or maybe it’s only me that needs it.
I can hear my father saying, “Just be yourself,
dear.” Making everything better and worse.
He’d hijack this poem if I let him. Instead,
I attend to the sounds foregrounding
the morning: the washing machine whining
into its final spin; my husband crunching
his cereal, impeding my breakfast reading.
A vicious stab in my upper back recalls
the therapist who said, “shoulder-blade pain
can signal the wish to punch the hell
out of something.” This is husband number
two, the Keeper, mind you. Tomorrow,
I’ll be taking my earplugs to the table.
*
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 Kelli Russell Agodon
Spell to Find Meaning in Life
Stand on a cliff
until a redtail hawk mistakes you
as a friend, but don’t look down.
Trust the sense of heaven
even if you don’t
believe in heaven.
You may die skinny
dipping in the Mediterranean
or be hit in the head
by a loose screw sailing to earth
from above. You might drop dead
doing yoga. Done. Whatever
way, your future corpse awaits you.
Smile at the idea of your skull outside
your skin. Your bones like drumsticks
banging on a tympany. I saw a sweatshirt
that read, I just want my funeral
to sell out—to be that loved.
You are actually standing
on the cliff right now. Look down,
look down, look around.
*
Where I’m from: GenX Version
after George Ella Lyon
I am from a folded note from a friend
passed beneath desks, evenings of talking
on a rotary phone. I am from eating
butter out of the container and always wanting
the cookies to be raw. I am from a paint-by-
number Last Supper in the hallway and
a Harvey Wallbanger god. From sitting
on the mustard-colored couch waiting
for love to drive by. I am from a mercury-
in-the-sink-broken-thermometer childhood,
watching Lawrence Welk with my Nana
while she knits everyone a scarf. I am
from payphones on the sunny side of a road
and the downpour of a neighborhood,
from kickball in the cul-de-sac until 10 pm
and no streetlights except the moon. I am from
children with no curfew, from go-out-and-play,
and popsicles cure split lips. I am from melting
crayons on the sidewalk for fun, ice cream truck
afternoons, skateboard down a hill, banana
bike with a basket and no one in a helmet.
I’m from scarred legs and burying the dead
rabbit we found by the creek of waterbugs.
I am the love letter of a generation who
had parents but weren’t parented, I am
the song who learned who to write herself.
*
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 Naomi Shihab Nye
Dear Bobcats
We gather together now as true family instead of regular family
because we are far flung brave creatures and these are wild days.
I know people don’t see us very often.
We will not curl on your feet to sleep but
will accompany all your dreams.
Even if you see only one of us
in your whole lifetime.
Like the foxes, or single sleek coyote you witnessed
running up a major thoroughfare in your city,
then blink! Gone. We, the armadillos and snakes,
in the Year of the Snake, will be recognized.
We root and rumble, curl in a hollow.
We find our quiet ways.
Our numbers shrink, but we don’t do math.
We persist. You too must live like this.
*
Email Gift from Israeli Poet
For Naomi from Naomi
People in Israel are reading the names
of dead children and babies.
Speaking them slowly, each syllable a tuft of hair.
Pronouncing ages in holy succession.
Eight months, seven years. Hebrew speaker
shaping Arabic rolled from the throat,
rich with respect. Why can’t this be
our only way? Two years, eleven months.
Hendia Janan Bilal. Rafik Mahmoud Darwish Abdullah.
Blanket wrapped bodies, crushed,
mutilated, torn. The perfect ear ripped
from the perfect head. What did the mothers do next?
Catholic ex-president on beach
staring east. May he imagine you every day.
May you be the wind ruffling him.
Don’t stop. He didn’t stop. Onward.
His own dead daughter had my same name,
same as the Israeli poet who sent this video.
His granddaughter, recently a mother, too. Our name is
HUMAN (Holy Mary Mother of God).
The video lasts eleven hours plus.
*
Naomi Shihab Nye’s most recent books are Grace Notes – Poems About Families, Everything Comes Next, and The Tiny Journalist. She is a Palestinian-American writer on faculty at Texas State University.
Letter to My Son, Over Three Years Since He’s Gone by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Letter to My Son, Over Three Years Since He’s Gone
You would be jealous, I think,
of how your sister is learning trig,
speaking Spanish, playing bridge.
You’d probably tease her, but really,
what you’d be thinking is, She is so cool.
And she is, sweetheart. She’s fun
and silly. Like you. Only like her.
We talk about you, of course.
Just this weekend, we remembered
how once you said if a 99-pound person
ate a one-pound burger, they
would be one percent burger.
I wonder what percent of your sister
is grief? And what percentage love?
Tonight a girl asked her if she had any siblings.
She said, yes, a brother. When the girl
asked her how old you were, she told her
the truth. That you were seventeen
when you died. What a terrible gift
to learn how to say the hardest things straight.
I can’t help but think if you are watching her,
you, too, must be in awe of who she’s becoming.
Oh, how we learn to grow from whatever soil
we’ve been given. I do not pretend to know
how this works. I only know she
is learning to transform ache into beauty,
nightmare into dream. I only know
I long for her to know love from you
the way a garden feels loved by sun, by rain.
*
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is poet laureate for Evermore. She co-hosts the Emerging Form podcast. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her newest collection is The Unfolding. One-word mantra: Adjust.
ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2025
~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2025 ~
Interrobang by Donna Hilbert
Interrobang
I love the word.
Not in the way I love blossom,
which contains both bosom and bloom
signifying beauty, nourishment,
and pleasure within.
Interrobang, with just two marks,
shouts What The F without ever
spelling anything out.
*
Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella from Moon Tide Press, following Threnody, Moon Tide, 2022. A second edition of Gravity: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Moon Tide in early 2025. Work has appeared in numerous journals and broadcasts including Cultural Daily, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, Lyric Life, and anthologies including The Poetry of Presence volumes I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing. www.donnahilbert.com
Three Poems by Alexandra Umlas
Rules for Revision
Decide how long your lines and stanzas
will be, then stick to it, you can move them around
later. Break each one with beauty, falling
snow or something else that’s clever
or makes sense, but not too clever,
clever looks like cleaver, and that is what you need
to take to your poem. Chop the excess sinews, the thes,
those creepy adjectives that detract from the poem.
Be specific, write, no scrawl, Braeburns or Red Delicious
over apple, Poodle not dog, puddle not water,
fill your poem with p’s or toads or gardens, or wait…
didn’t I read that somewhere? Read! Then focus
on the real, but only if it seems real— like I believe
that Williams had a wheelbarrow, and that it was red
and glazed with rain – just don’t look up
What not to do in a plem, and misspell poem
Because the o and l are so darn close together –
you’ll only get articles on mucus-killing foods
and how to clear your throat. Stay on task, don’t let the poem drift
to places you can’t come back from.
Hold the wheel and drive, wait, that’s an Incubus
lyric. Move lyric to the previous line so two don’t end
with Incubus. Try not to say Incubus three times
in your poem. Instead, get stuck, take a walk,
walk the dog, oh no, not the dog again…walk
your grandma, wait… how did she get here? Know
that no matter how much you try to avoid writing
about your grandma, she will show up. Use imagery.
Include her orange tic-tac grandma-breath or some bells,
bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells—use similes too,
but not if they are about the moon. If the moon does fall
into your poem, smash it to shards, then edit out shards –
please don’t make me explain why… reverse! reverse!
riding a poem is like writing a bike. Write it!
Be sure to leave everything open at the end, like wonder,
like windows, like wound, but keep the poem
on one page, concise, so as not to drone on
and on. Writing a poem is like going to war, but the poem
is your enemy… kill your darlings… when in doubt,
put down the pen and shoot your poem in the heart.
*
This is a Poem Whose Hand Holds a Leash
in the early morning, before the sun ruins
the sky’s brilliance, when the grass, too, is filled
with stars, and the world waits to be swallowed.
The poem doesn’t want to walk, although
it knows it will be better by it. Sometimes
it reluctantly takes the mile around the school,
or hits the pedestrian push button to ask
to cross Goldenwest into the park’s brightening
lagoons. The poem walks like a wave rolling
onto shore, like it has somewhere inevitable
and ordinary to land. It feels the morning’s cold
sincerity, its closed-flower gardens.
The poem is almost home when the sky wakes
half numinous night, half pink light yawning
and marvelous. The poem, still holding the leash, marvels—
*
Passport Office
The poem walks into the passport office.
He sits down next to a particularly well-
put-together villanelle. Even with
an appointment, the bench is hard,
his lines begin to fall asleep. He thinks
he needs a revision and can hear the sestina
on the other side of the room whisper
to her young couplet, they’ll let anything
be a sonnet these days. When he finally
gets called, they double check his paperwork:
title (too on-the-nose), place of publication
(substandard), line-length (not consistent),
and send him to the camera, where they snap
a photo of him that he is not happy with
and send him on his way. For six-weeks
he’ll wonder if the passport will come
in time. He tries to better himself before
his trip by cutting down on adverbs
and wishing Frost had been his father.
When the passport finally arrives,
he holds it in his end-words and similes.
*
Alexandra Umlas is from Long Beach, CA and currently lives in Huntington Beach, CA. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection At the Table of the Unknown (Moon Tide Press).
Two Poems by Bethany Jarmul
Poem In Which I Bleed
for the first time at 13, at that charismatic church
up that gravel road in that rural Appalachian town
during youth group, with the four of us teens,
our fathers the church’s only deacons. I fled
the purple carpet & purple padded chairs
& purple banner with El Shaddai & a dove
hand-stitched & locked myself in the women’s room
with red & red & red. I thought to use my sock,
as I’d read in some preteen magazine, but I looked down
& saw my Old Navy flip flops. Some wadded up
toilet paper would have to do. In the sanctuary, I sat
cross-legged for an hour, stealing glimpses
at Jesus’ portrait, the blood dripping down his brow
from every thorn, as I squeezed my thighs
until they were sore. At home, I threw the soiled garment
in the trash. When I confessed to mom
she rescued the panties & scrubbed them
in the tub. Scolding me, for in that house
wastefulness was the darkest stain & blood
was how we were cleansed like snow.
*
When a Friend Tells Me I Look Beautiful Because I’ve Lost Weight Due to Prolonged Illness
Many things wither away—
a scorched tomato plant,
an orchid never watered,
a worm on hot cement,
a slug when salted,
a tire riddled with nails,
a balloon with a hole in its skin,
the runt kitten unable to suckle,
a miscarried twin.
They are beautiful too.
They remind me I’m not alone
in my diminishing.
*
Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of a poetry collection, Lightning Is a Mother and a mini-memoir, Take Me Home. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, and Salamander. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul
Rituals of Blood by Laurel Brett
Rituals of Blood
Blood prodded me to resign as a Jew.
Our Hebrew School teacher told
17 boys and 3 girls that God forbids us
to make love when our blood flows.
The 17 boys tittered
and 3 girls blushed, but I knew
I would always want to make love,
even if it was my time of blood.
I don’t know how I knew it,
but it proved true and 3 months later,
my first period began. The ache never
dampened desire. Ten year later
policemen bloodied us, shoving
supporters for Roe v Wade and the ERA
down stairs, We broke bones.
One of us had a heart attack.
In red states, women are bleeding
and dying again. Always rituals of blood,
like old rituals of water against women
who drowned innocent, weighed down by rocks.
*
Laurel Brett began writing poetry at fifteen because she loved writing with her purple flair pen. Since that time, she has become a college teacher, mother, political activist, literary critic, essayist and novelist. Her novel, THE SCHRÖDINGER GIRL, was published by Akashic Books (2020). Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Lilith, The Nassau Review, the anthology SONGS FOR SEASONED WOMEN, edited by Patti Tana, and the writing text, COMPLEMENTS, among other places. Two of her poems will appear in subsequent issues of SECOND COMING in March and April. She considers herself a refugee from the sixties. Her love of poetry began in seventh grade on a rainy day when she read a poetry anthology found on her parents’ book shelf cover to cover.
My Theory of Everything About the ‘Houthi PC small group’ by Marc Alan Di Martino
My Theory of Everything About the ‘Houthi PC small group’
My personal TOE is that this was an SOS,
a holler for help so dire it could only come
from inside the house, from someone
so paralyzed that their only hope of escape
was to cc the editor of The Atlantic
in a group chat on an unsecured app
and…let the tape roll. Maybe in this way
the outside world could intervene, call
their bluff, do something. My TOE is sound
and has been vetted. It has been confirmed
by the Senate. It has survived multiple
hearings and a couple of jittery visits
to the Supreme Court, where it won
in a 5-4 decision. My TOE is foolproof,
bulletproof, hundred proof grain alcohol,
Occam’s Razor-sharp, capable of shaving
the false beard off the baby face of Truth
revealing a lean, mean fact-checking machine.
These days it seems the Truth is under attack
from all sides—not unlike the Houthi pirates—
and many have come to the sad conclusion
that “truth” is merely a personnel [sic] opinion,
and that to lord one’s truth over another’s
is tantamount to flying your war plans [sic]
into the World Trade Center, which of course
was already destroyed by illegal immigrants
flooding our borders, and even J.D. Vance
giving a thumbs-up emoji is really just his way
of saying
I’m trapped
in a deep well please
somebody help—
*
Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco (World Poetry, 2024—longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.
Three Poems by Karen Craigo
Thanatopsis
There are so many ways
they can leave us, our people,
wired to monitors, swinging
from a tree, dropping
on a sidewalk. However
the universe selects,
they manage to find
the door—the one marked
exit, the single way away.
Sister, time is tricky.
I don’t believe moments
line up like beads in a row.
They seem more like a wad
of foil, building up as each
thin layer is tamped. Points touch
where we would not expect,
your loss, mine—pressed in,
they cleave to one another.
*
All you can think of is loss,
that crafty snake that slips in
at the neck and moves
to warm itself on any part
it touches. It slides down
to your sternum and beneath
your breast, and presses
so you won’t miss the fact
of it. That grief has made
Medusa of me is clear
when I sleep, dozens
of baby griefs curled up
beside my head, warming
my brain, that knot of vipers,
though I don’t know what
we have against vipers,
reduced as they are to nothing
but desire and a muscle
that pushes where it leads.
They’re a bit like we are,
feeling our way in absence
of a lodestar, snaking
through Earth’s ribs in search
of the hot red heart.
It’s cold down here, and we
don’t know how to back up
to that dazzling circle of light.
*
Grief as KitchenAid Mixer
It takes up space
on the counter, but I’ve learned
to look past it, to forget it’s even
there, red and obvious
as a body laid out
on a slab.
I’ll give it this—it’s
versatile, came standard
with hook, beater, whip,
and you can spiralize,
churn—whatever
the recipe demands.
Maybe one day I’ll make
a cake with it, though it’s fuzzy
with dust, and I’ll have to deal
with that—molecules of us
mottling every surface.
*
Karen Craigo, former Missouri Poet Laureate, has two full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks. She is also an essayist and writes for the Springfield (Missouri) Business Journal. She is nonfiction editor of Mid-American Review, prose poetry editor of Pithead Chapel, and poetry series editor for Moon City Press.
Dangerous Patterns by Michelle DeRose
Dangerous Patterns
More snow for Kentucky, deadly
cold in Minnesota. Gusts, chill,
headwinds swirl. Already so many
limbs down, mountains of mud
poised. Most of the forecasters
fired, their maps erased.
*
Professor Emerita of English, Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find some of her most recent publications in The New Verse News, Dunes Review, Peninsula Poets, Midwest Quarterly, miniskirt magazine, and Sparks of Calliope.
Three Poems by Valerie Braylovskiy
Shaving My Legs Before Surgery
to feel more like a woman
on a Cosmopolitan cover magazine
selling chocolate diet pills and soft
men. My sister’s vanilla cashmere cream says
I will glow better, scents pain
with supermarket cupcakes.
One day after, I am prescribed antiseptic skin
soap, used sparingly to sterilize
the body for cutting. I refuse to go under
as patient, chatting to my anesthesiologist
like two girls getting ready for prom.
My dreams last one blue
hued morning, noon sun sends
me back as a mannequin,
adorned and heavy.
*
Notes on RX
Living is strange
— C.D. Wright
Monday you shake three bottles, peer at cylinders with novelty.
One is rust, the other metallic blue. The biggest tastes
synthetic, screams illness.
Tuesday you think about your relationship
with Big Pharma.
You are due for a refill, chat with the robot
medical assistant.
Jolene, the nurse your age, says your insurance rejected
your needs.
Switches you to a generic brand, promises
it’s all the same.
Wednesday is pharmacy trip after daylight.
Small talk with striped purple hair looks-like-Nancy, bitching
about the economy.
She calls antidepressants placebo, tells you to enjoy
them while they work.
At the front of the line, you recite your identity.
Opt out of automatic refills, your bloodstream
revolting.
*
American Sonnet Of My Body’s Cross-Sectional Images On A Computed Tomography Scan
You’re going to feel like you have to pee
but don’t worry, the nurse says.
It tastes like the color blue, warmly
relentless. My throat makes a run
for it. My bad parts bathe in snow
colored mud. I’ve become a doctor
for killing what’s small. Faux plant
on my windowsill. Sickened fruit fly.
My own leaves—
blue enters me, bursting ice caps
melting cherry red. Paints me
aged magenta, leaves me unseen—
I swallow a kind of ending,
shimmery metal.
*
Valerie Braylovskiy is a poet from the Bay Area and the author of Half-Life, a chapbook by Alien Buddha Press. As a Canterbury Scholar at Santa Clara University, she is developing a poetry manuscript exploring chronic illness and womanhood.
Two Poems by Penelope Moffet
Waking
For Lynn Way
He didn’t like to wake up in the dark.
He needed light to seep in through the blinds.
Waking in the night was waking in prison,
mind and body pinioned to the bed.
He needed light to seep in through the blinds
or he woke into a nightmare from the past,
mind and body pinioned to the bed
beneath the car that crashed down a ravine.
He woke out of a nightmare of the past
into knowledge of the present, given light,
beneath the car that crashed down a ravine,
his arms still strong enough to lift himself.
In knowledge of the present, given light,
he could laugh, roll smokes, make love,
his arms still strong enough to lift himself,
swing his trunk and legs to the wheelchair.
He could laugh, roll smokes, make love
with his wild tongue, though nothing moved below,
swing his trunk and legs to the wheelchair,
roll forward into other rooms.
With his wild tongue, though nothing moved below,
he woke me from a too-long childhood,
rolled me into other rooms,
to pleasure so intense I levitated.
He woke me from a too-long childhood,
spoke to me of how he saw the world,
took me to pleasure so intense I levitated
then came to earth, and him, again.
He spoke to me of how he saw the world,
quoted the ancient Chinese poets,
then came to earth, and me, again.
He believed in nothing but erotic love.
He loved the ancient Chinese poets
and the spinning wood lathe in his shop.
He believed in nothing but erotic love,
relied on whisky and his work to get him through.
He loved the spinning wood lathe in the shop.
It was many years ago. I was so young.
He relied on whisky and work to get him through.
I’ve loved other men but now I sleep alone.
It was many years ago. I was so young.
Now waking in the night is waking in limbo.
I’ve loved other men but now I sleep alone.
I do not like to wake up in the dark.
*
A Friend for the Winter
The lizard moved indoors when the outside air
turned cold. He flickered here and there, found
hiding places in stacked wood, under the bed,
behind boxes. When sun came through French doors
he basked on the adobe floor, on gray days
calibrated his distance from the Franklin stove:
not too hot not too cold. Spiders, earwigs,
the last flies of autumn were his food.
Once those ran out he contemplated then ignored
carrot peel and broccoli florets that tumbled off
the cutting board. A friend to wild birds,
rosy boas, rattlers, the human didn’t mind
his presence, watched where she put her feet,
talked to him. They were a sort of family,
a mesh of solitudes. The weather warmed.
She left a door propped open.
Out he went for pushups on the stoop.
Quick as a flash a roadrunner was there
to grab him and run off.
*
Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems appear in Eclectica, ONE ART, Calyx and other literary journals. A full-length collection of her poetry will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2026. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives in Southern California.
Three Poems by Jennifer Franklin
TO VIRGINIA WOOLF IN WINTER—
You knew it never goes away—shame from childhood.
The fear of the face behind you in the dining room
mirror. The man who handed me history books
to harden my mind but instead made me too feeling.
I, too, was frozen in bed, petrified by the severe woman
in black, her raven hair pulled in a tight bun,
her disapproving stare. The letters and promises, lights
shut tight to hide the truth, threats writ large below my window.
The wine poured in my childhood glass as I ate
pounded chicken in a wood-paneled room
beside a cathedral. Thinking of the angels gilded wings
so I would not have to see his false face. The pretty things
he said to make me feel important. The walls and walls
of paintings he set before my hungry eyes.
*
VIRGINIA WOOLF KNOWS THE KEY TO LIFE BUT IS NOT ALLOWED TO USE IT
Most of the year had been filled with doctor’s appointments.
It did not count as leaving the house if the destination
was always another room where you were constantly
reminded how ill you were and that life is endlessly
on pause until you are healthy again. How can one
become healthy if one is prevented from walking,
from moving, from being part of the chaos and chatter
of the city and its citizens, knowing their purpose,
owning their various destinations, crisscrossing the city
and the river with the determination of birds of prey,
ready to descend at a moment’s notice? The unhealthy
are always excluded from the orchestra of daily life.
How unbearable to stand inside, listening to the swell
of music as it drifted across the Thames to her open window.
*
TO VIRGINIA WOOLF AS WE WATCH THE CHILDREN—
nieces and nephews— run the grounds,
chase rabbits, make crafts. The beautiful
sound grates our ears. Why can’t they see
suffering? How can they still think
the small self is the primary subject?
They trample grass as if it doesn’t feel
the abuse. Horrific—their twisted movement
and squeals rise into the clouds.
Outside they still want to scrape
my insides with their little shovels.
You were kinder than I am. You wrote
light verse for Vanessa’s children.
I am inviolate, in this burning garden,
the flowers share my fear of their unholy voices.
*
Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023), finalist for the Paterson Prize in Poetry and finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Poems from her manuscript in progress, A FIRE IN HER BRAIN, have been published in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Common, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology. Her work has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in The Bedford Guide to Literature (Macmillan, 2024), The Paris Review, The Nation, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion. She is the recipient of a 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2024 Jon Tribble Editing Fellowship from Poetry by the Sea, a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry, and a 2021 Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. She is Poetry Reviews coeditor of The Rumpus and coeditor, with Nicole Callihan & Pichchenda Bao, of the anthology Braving The Body (Harbor Editions, 2024). Jennifer teaches in the Manhattanville MFA Program, 24Pearl Street/Provincetown Fine Arts Center, and has been teaching manuscript revision workshops for over a decade.
I Had Such Complicated Feelings About My Mother’s Body by Tarn Wilson
I Had Such Complicated Feelings About My Mother’s Body
I had such complicated feelings about my mother’s body.
So much softness and self-hatred, but I liked her collar bone.
Her collar bone is the only jewelry she left me, the statement
necklace I wear just under my skin, so pronounced it collects
pools of water that could hold icy jewels or little fish.
Clavicle. The only large vertical bone in our bodies. A hanger
on which to balance our head and dangle the rest. The first bone,
in the womb, to begin to ossify; the last to finish, early twenties.
In my early twenties my newly-finished collar bone was an elegant
curve. Now my skin is a rumbled suit and my collar bone whispers
too loudly of skeletons. In the end, my mother was mostly bone,
and in that hollowed shape I could see every face she’d ever had.
A montage that shifted as she turned her head. You can only
love a body that has so little left, that has worked so hard to live.
I’ve never feared skeletons, maybe because I’m in love with form.
The shapes of leaves. The architecture of dogs. The silhouette
of trees. The intricacies of animal feet. My soft and hard, wild
and difficult mother knew little of the structures children need.
She was always changing: her job, her city, her story, her beliefs,
who it was this week she hated most until there was no one left
to hate. But there it was: her essential shape–with me always
–smaller than I would have guessed–and braver.
*
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.
To a Mother I Know by Alison Luterman
To a Mother I Know
I have seen you lift
the whole car of your pain
and hold it above your head
with trembling arms.
Seen you bench-press
that two-ton rusted hulk aloft
for eighteen years
so that your daughter
could play in the open air
creating whole worlds, innocent
of the superhuman effort
you were making
to keep the weight
off her. It happens all the time,
mothers do this, they hoist
the unbearable and they bear it,
but witnessing you achieve
the impossible, breaks
something in me. Not
my heart, but the ice sheath
around it. I think
of my own mother, of course,
and how valiant her effort
at keeping me apart
from her suffering, though you can’t
really keep a daughter apart,
we are too much entwined
in one long umbilicus
reaching down
the generations like tree vines.
And this is what’s
the matter, mater, mother
of all truths: the weight
of what we try to carry
for each other will never
be fully known.
*
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
Two Poems by Emily Patterson
Communion
My first cathedral was black sky
and stars. I sat on the garden wall
at fifteen, dwelling in wonder
and silence, our rural cul-de-sac
so recently a field—soil stripped
to bald clay an illusion of newness.
I didn’t try to decipher constellations,
describe the cool stone beneath me,
or map words to the expanse and glimmer.
I kept communion with my smallness
inside the world. I didn’t need to name
anything, not even myself.
*
My Daughter Gives a Master Class on Walking in the Rain
Opt for every puddle. Be kind
to fallen leaves. Weave a trail
of song along the sidewalk.
Feel each drop: cheek, nose,
eyelid. Hear them prick
the pavement and call it music.
Greet the half-petaled sunflowers.
Remember where you once saw
a dead raccoon. Say you loved
that raccoon. Use your pink t-shirt
as a tissue. Be the opposite
of hurried. Gift your attention
to the gift of the world.
*
Emily Patterson (she/her) is the author of three chapbooks, and her debut full-length collection, The Birth of Undoing, is forthcoming with Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2025. Nominated for Best Spiritual Literature and multiple Pushcart Prizes, Emily’s work is published or forthcoming in North American Review, SWWIM, Christian Century, Rust & Moth, Cordella Magazine, CALYX, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. Read more at emilypattersonpoet.com.
Speaking in Tongues by Barbara Eknoian
Speaking in Tongues
Every Tuesday night for two years a small group of us
meet in the basement of the priest’s rectory.
It seems as though we’re undercover
as most of the traditional church doesn’t join us.
We learn how to be Charismatic Catholics
and read the Bible faithfully
not just the catechism book, and to believe
in spiritual gifts, like speaking in tongues
and being slain in the spirit.
Several of my friends begin to speak in tongues.
I worry that somehow I’m not worthy of this gift.
One afternoon, I sit on my bed with my tape recorder
since I have begun to utter strange syllables,
and I want to know if I actually received this gift,
or is it just my imagination?
I speak into the recorder to see how it sounds,
and it jams, so I shut it off.
Oh ye of little faith, if it’s meant to happen it will.
Later, at my son’s birthday party all the little cousins
go upstairs and find my recorder.
I’m unaware until they join us at the table.
I feel my face redden, when my niece announces,
We heard some lady speaking in another language.
*
Barbara Eknoian work has appeared in Pearl, Chiron Review, Cadence Collective, Redshift and Silver Birch Press’s anthologies. Her newest poetry book More Jerkumstances, New and Selected Poems, was recently published by Moon Tide Press. She lives in La Mirada, CA with daughter, grandson, two dogs, and two cats (one mild and the other full of mischief). There is never a dull moment.
Work Ethic by Tamara Madison
Work Ethic
In Irish, sadness is a thing that is on a person:
Sadness is on me, grief upon me.
Yes, I feel it. Like a weight. But mine
surrounds me too, a fog that sunlight
can’t disperse; it’s not a coat I can shrug off
and hang in a closet. It’s more than just
upon me now; it dwells in me, part
of my aging self, like bunions, wrinkles,
arthritis. I’ve made a decision: Today,
I will garden. There are weeds to pull,
gutters to clean, storm debris to sweep.
Grief can sit in its bloody corner and do
as it must. I’ll pat its head from time to time.
But for now, I’ve got work to do.
*
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.
Five Poems by Athena Kildegaard
St. Brigid’s Day
On the first day of the month,
for luck, my husband and I say
“Rabbit” before speaking another word,
Some months it works. “Calm
us into a quietness,” a prayer
to the saint asks. But now, with
sheer vulgarity the order of the day
in our nation’s capital, luck seems
insufficient. And there is a quiet today,
the first birthday my father does not
progress into his new year. Bad luck,
his heart said, and stopped. Now the first
February 1 in 93 years he has remained
silent, the first in my many decades
I have not sung to him. How he
liked to hear it, how even on the phone
he grinned and said in his abashed
and undeserving voice, Thank You.
That gratitude being a sort of luck.
Perhaps I’m too old for luck-seeking.
The echo of his words, maybe that’s enough.
*
Winter Passage
To teach myself to pray
I walk where deer walk,
brush against last summer’s
bluestem and sedge. Bend
past arbor vitae, careful
against branch, against
abandoned hive. How swift
deer are to shift and counter;
the ample world curls
and blossoms around them.
At crack or cough they do not
hide or feint but flash.
Here, too, is path of coyote.
Red squirrel and vole
cross quick. My breath rises
in puff and volt, impermanent
marks. Two blue jays,
a junco, skirt my passage,
good companions near lake
and rush, chirrup chirrup,
no need to hurry prayer.
*
Take Hold
after “Petaluma Olive Trees” by JoAnn Verburg
Imagine a hand moving toward you
out of the tumult. Care must be taken.
It is a crone’s hand. Let’s say it is
your mother returned, her nails smooth,
knuckles like prayer beads, palm etched
in the sweep of contour lines.
This stranger’s hand emptied itself long ago.
Imagine replacing what has been lost.
Or chanting into it, your breath damp
and smelling of lemons. Any thought can be
sustained by the disposition of emptiness.
Imagine it is your hand—thick with lichen
the color of olives—arriving out of the future.
Do not be afraid when you do not recognize it.
*
Winter
“The house yawns like a bear.” – Denise Levertov
Snow glides down the steel roof,
shreds and fidgets past the door,
so that, when we step into the diffuse
light of afternoon, the snow cheers
below our boots a high and goofy
skirl, and we step with a light
flourish, dance even, the penguin shuffle
that keeps us centered and upright.
Thanks to snowfall the world’s muffled
and sedate. Though it’s too cold to delight
in being outside for long.
We stack the tinder, light a fire,
and are ready to hunker down
with the dog, spend the entire
evening find ways to belong
to winter: hot toddy, torrid film,
foot massage, sliced pears and camembert.
Once the moon rises avuncular and trim
we’ll go up to bed, we mellowed pair
and there embrace in our snug hibernal realm.
*
Question
We’d just eaten rice
and Brussels sprouts,
roasted chicken with lemon
when someone asked
Let’s say we had all day
with someone who’s gone on,
who would you invite,
and why? Your mother,
my father said.
I’d been thinking Emily
or Walt, but my father dropped
his history onto the table.
He was sitting beside
his second wife. Why my mother,
I asked? He had
things to say to her—
apologies to make. For one sweet
moment, I knew him as I’d never done.
*
Athena Kildegaard is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Prairie Midden, which won the 2023 WILLA Literary Award for poetry. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.
GETTING THE EKG by Andrea Potos
GETTING THE EKG
Electrodes seem suctioned
to my skin while my stockinged feet
peek out from the thin blanket.
I chat with nurses Darva and Mackenzie,
notice a tone in my voice
I didn’t know was mine. I can hear
my mother speaking, her small giggling,
gentle conversation while sitting
each week in Infusion Bay, and later,
waiting for another test to see
if the cancer had spread.
I don’t have cancer, but my chest
has been hurting, a steady ache which,
it turns out today, is nothing drastic.
Muscle strain or stress they say, or maybe
the patient diligence of loss, all that is
past and impending, the sustaining
rhythm that holds it.
*
Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently Her Joy Becomes from Fernwood Press and Marrow of Summer from Kelsay Books. A new collection from Fernwood entitled Belonging Songs will be published in 2025. New poems are forthcoming in Women Artists’ Datebook 2025, The Healing Muse, Braided Way, Delta Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly, and the Paterson Literary Review.
Four Poems by Robbi Nester
Vesuvius at Home
I judge from my Geography
Volcanoes nearer here
— Emily Dickinson
I remember the clatter my mother’s pressure cooker made
on winter afternoons, how it spat steam, played a tune.
Sometimes she sang along. Once, the gauge shot off,
embedding like a bullet in the ceiling. She just stood there,
gazing, as green goo geysered, slight smile on her lips.
My mother loved her pot. I’d even say she was inspired
by its potential, and her own. She knew volcanos can be
still for years, though magma brews beneath. Maybe
she sensed they were alike, she and this pot, that she
could capture the force of the words that fueled her,
the ones she muttered under her breath all day in two
languages. She trained me to be her surrogate, to believe
my words had heft, taught me to embrace the danger,
learn the craft of channeling all the rich profusion
that nascent power might allow.
*
Worm Farm
Near the end, you knew that you were dying,
though we never spoke of it, just went on
shopping for new socks and the special tidbits
you loved to snack on, though you had no more
than four teeth left to chew that crusty bread,
the Porterhouse we cut for you in ever-smaller bits.
You went on shredding peels and scraps to fertilize
your Meyer lemon and pomegranate trees, spoke to
the red wrigglers in your farm as though they were
your pets. “I can’t die,” you said, just a week before
you did. “What would happen to my worms?”
*
Ambivalence
Memory is / the past reversed
— Catherine Bowman, “Duende”
When I mouthed off, defiant in the face of my father’s
sudden rage, he used to say “No one will ever love you
but your parents.” He said it ruefully, so I knew he’d heard it
many times when he was young. He complained his mother
held him back. She wouldn’t let him work as the apprentice
to a veterinarian or train to be a jockey because they wouldn’t
feed him Kosher food. He didn’t speak to her for years.
But I had to wonder what he meant by “love,” if it was love
he felt when he hit me with his belt, claiming all the while
it hurt him more than me.
*
I have lived in many houses
but seldom think of them–except for the row-house on Stirling Street,
3 bedrooms, a garage, and basement, where laundry hung indoors
all winter on makeshift lines in the dark unfinished basement, haunt
of many nightmares, prison and sanctuary. I remember noisy radiators,
hyperactive poltergeists, rust-red brick exterior, steep flights of concrete
stairs, black and white tile in the bathroom, errant splotch of paint marring
the chessboard pattern of the floor. Neighbors like monarchs in their
lawn chairs watched every car and truck dodge dogs and children, balls
badly thrown. I sold it to an immigrant. Like almost everyone who lived
there, my parents were children of immigrants. All of them longed for
their community, but scarred beyond repair, turned on each other. I was glad
to leave that place, yet it’s still the house I always think of when I think of home.
*
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.
Four Poems by Barbara Crooker
THE COUPLE
Under a cloud of Covid restrictions,
ending up on the shores of hospice,
the couple set out in their canoe,
He was in the stern, steering as usual;
she was in the bow, looking for hazards.
The waves piled up; she began to bail,
while never letting go of his hand.
The journey lasted four nights; darkness
splashing over the gunwales. He grew
tired; she kept paddling. Eventually,
they started to drift with the current, which
took him out with the tide, then set him down
gently, on the farthest shore.
*
THE DREAM
Mark Chagall, 1945, oil on canvas
The prone artist with a palette in the bottom of this painting
is conjuring up our wedding. A snapshot of us just floated up
on Facebook; it’s our anniversary. Were we ever really
that young? You in your powder blue leisure suit, me
in my Gunne Sax by Jessica McClintock prairie dress.
In this painting is what came later, le tour Eiffel, la Seine,
her arched bridges, us in la belle France. This is happiness
enclosed in the bubble of the full moon. Nobody thinks
about what comes next, how one day one of us will sleep
alone. But though I’m blue, sometimes you come to me
in dreams. And my heart is infused with the thousand petals
of the rose-colored dawn.
*
THREE YEARS LATER
I know you’re gone, but my body remembers,
especially at night when we curled into
each other, bears in a den, silverware
in a drawer. Plaid pajamas, worn flannel
sheets, we made our own sort of nest
in the winter dark. The moon, a ball of frost,
floated outside. Some nights, we heard
the ghostly notes of Great Horned Owls
as they courted, called to each other:
you you you. The way I hear you calling
my name, even though I know
you are not here.
*
PANTOUM IN WINTER
Gray day in January, and light snow is sifting,
shifting, fine white music, slanted lines.
No cars, delivery trucks, not even dog walkers.
Just this silence, and the hush of bird wings.
This shifting linear music, slanted white lines.
Notes from the leaden skies: tiny shooting stars.
There’s nothing but silence and the hush of wings.
How do we weather all these losses?
Messages from the sky: stray meteors burning white.
A stutter, a stammer, white delineating every twig and limb,
coating every tree. How do we weather these losses?
Snow geese pour out of the quarry, white shimmering
into white. A stutter, a stammer, covering branch and bark.
Gray day in January, and light snow is drifting,
snow so fine the line between visible and invisible blurs.
The difference, Nemerov says, between poetry and prose.
*
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
Spell for Good Fortune by Hayden Saunier
Spell for Good Fortune
Wipe your windowsill clean
of desiccated insects hatched
from a dead poinsettia
with a folded fabric scrap
cut from your mother’s nightgown,
the one stitched through
with blue embroidery thread.
Summon a red-winged blackbird
with seed and suet, admire
the bright yellow slashes above
each scarlet shoulder patch,
the black glossy wink of its eye.
Most likely, no bird will show.
But by then you’ll know
that if you have a windowsill
and seed and fat, a mother
whose nightgown you possess—
the spell you seek was worked
like thread into your life
before you conjured up the bird
or spoke a single magic word.
*
Hayden Saunier is the author of six poetry collections, including most recently, Wheel. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda, Rattle Poetry, and Gell Poetry Awards and published in One Art, Southern Poetry Review, The Sun, 32 Poems, Thrush, Virginia Quarterly Review, among many others.
Gift by Donna Hilbert
Gift
O magnolia bloom
floating in a shallow bowl
adorning my window sill
glowing golden now
luminous in waning
a beauty
still
*
Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella from Moon Tide Press, following Threnody, Moon Tide, 2022. A second edition of Gravity: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Moon Tide in early 2025.Work has appeared in numerous journals and broadcasts including Cultural Daily, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, Lyric Life, and anthologies including The Poetry of Presence volumes I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing. www.donnahilbert.com
Two Poems by Sara Quinn Rivara
Autobiography
I was born in the middle of America
to a mother whose mother put her on diet
pills at age eleven. My mother eyed
my teenage body and said you’re getting
a little round in the shoulders. What
was I supposed to have? Right angles? Wings?
She meant to protect me. Sometimes
I still cannot feel my body’s borders,
flesh soft and fragile over my waistband,
the round bulge over my bra strap, pooling
in my armpits. At seventeen,
I stuffed myself to the gills
with Pop Tarts and Doctor Pepper
then rode my bike until I puked
with exhaustion. With shame, for what
is hunger but desire? If I could want
nothing, then nothing could hurt me.
What I wanted was to disappear.
But I didn’t. I’m still here.
When it rained today, cherry
blossoms floated onto the ancient
dog’s swayed back. Hummingbirds
buzzed the flowering currant.
Oh! I thought. The world is sweet
and impossible to bear.
*
Persephone in Middle Age
Once I was a young divorcee alone
in my apartment, so afraid
I barely ate. I thought no one
will love me and I meant no man.
I thought I needed one. I thought
I knew hell: a small bedroom
in a closed-up house, windows nailed shut,
bog-marriage.
My body pinned to cheap sheets.
Divorcee stunk of cheap perfume.
Mothers pulled their husbands
away from me at the park,
my son on my hip. I was dangerous.
I had a tattoo. Most nights my toddler slept
in my bed. The others he
was gone, his father pealing
out in a plume of dust, gravel
kicked up from the wheels
of the truck.
I never regretted leaving
that marriage.
Each night he was home,
my son tucked his feet beneath
my hip. I called
him Bird.
All these years
later, I am surprised
at the softness of my body,
that we survived.
*
Sara Quinn Rivara is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently LITTLE BEAST (Riot in Your Throat), a 2024 Finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her work has appeared recently in CALYX, LEON Literary, Bluestem, Colorado Review and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.
Picture Day, First Grade by Julie Barton
Picture Day, First Grade
This photo still evokes in me,
forty-five years later, a frail
sorrow–the little girl wanting
only to get it right, to do it well.
The arched rainbow design
on the dress I picked myself.
The hair disheveled as always
because mom left for work so early
and dad claimed no skill at hairdos.
My tooth missing, my smile unsure,
unconvincing. Sometimes when
I can’t sleep, I look at that photo
in my mind’s eye and whisper,
“You’re doing great. Nothing
you are doing is wrong. I love you.”
It’s nice to imagine little me
hearing that future me thinks of
this day so often, how I didn’t
understand why I felt so wrong.
Standing in the gymnasium,
waiting my turn to be photographed,
the thin black comb they handed out
only to the kids who had
something to fix.
*
Julie Barton is the New York Times Bestselling author of Dog Medicine, How My Dog Saved Me From Myself (Penguin, 2016). She publishes a poem every day at juliebarton.substack.com and can be found online at juliebarton.com. Her poems have appeared in The South Carolina Review, Caduceus, Art Place at Yale Medical School.
Three Poems by William Palmer
Portal
I hear my phone ding.
There is a photo of the baby
swaddled, a pink wool hat,
her skin ruddy and scraped
as though she’s come through
a portal in the cosmos,
eyes closed, delicate nose, lips—
a sob shoots from me like a star.
I had been praying
for days.
Later, getting a haircut,
I tell Kristy
my granddaughter was born
that morning
and when I heard,
a sob burst from me.
Oh yes, she says.
At the counter
I give her twenty-five.
Just twenty, today, she says.
*
Rhonda Posts Our Photo on Facebook
At the end of her visit
Rhonda, my former student, asks me
to hold her new book of poems
as she takes a photo of us on her phone
and in that moment
I don’t have time
to think—so my smile opens
wide, my teeth crooked and a little gray
and I don’t care
how I look
holding Rhonda’s book
with her beside me,
the way
I remember feeling
in classes
all those years,
my smile unleashed.
*
Sighing
I sigh a lot.
My doctor calls it frequent involuntary sighing.
But isn’t all sighing involuntarily?
Does anyone say,
“I’m going to sigh now”?
We just sigh.
I kept sighing
after my friend Roseanne
hanged herself,
and I sighed between sobs
on the steps of her church
after a young priest claimed
she would not go to heaven.
*
William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in Ecotone, I-70 Review, JAMA, One Art, Rust & Moth, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.
Three Years After You Die, I Have My First Date by Roberta Spivek
Three Years After You Die, I Have My First Date
because isn’t it time to stretch
limits, test waters, live
out all those clichés?
What do you do for fun
he asks and when I
blank he reveals
the sports teams he follows,
cardio workouts,
twisting spiritual path.
I’m a real beach nut, he says
but he’s lost me to you
at the water’s edge
in your black trunks,
that dive through
the breakers, your
effortless crawl.
Because didn’t it feel
we belonged to the
couple we made in the
Victorian town
with its bistros,
its roped-off
dunes of nesting plovers,
the red-haired guy
we rented bikes from,
its lagoons full of swans?
*
Roberta Spivek is a Philadelphia poet. Her poems have appeared in Friends Journal, Muleskinner Journal, Naugatuck Review, New Croton Review, Ritualwell, Women’s Studies Quarterly and other publications. She has spasmodic dysphonia, a speech disorder.
The Day I Got Fired from a Copywriting Job Because the Boss Said I was Too Good Looking by Terri Kirby Erickson
The Day I Got Fired from a Copywriting Job Because the Boss Said I was Too Good Looking
Decades ago, when women were considered
an accessory in the workplace—people to pinch
and poke and tell dirty jokes to, not colleagues
but play toys for all the men who liked to corner
us in the breakroom, trying to get a little kiss,
I was fired from my job for being a distraction.
The big boss called me into his ship-sized office
and proclaimed that since I’d been employed at
his radio station, his guy in charge of sales was
a useless idiot who couldn’t stop walking back
and forth in front of your office, trying to get
a load of you, he said, instead of doing his job.
And by the way, he told me, you can do a lot
better than Bob, like I, at nineteen, didn’t realize
a married, fifty-year-old chain smoker wasn’t
the best boyfriend for me. He sat there all smug,
kicking back in his giant leather chair, waxing
on about how there was a greasespot on my office
wall from his DJ’s leaning their heads against it
while trying to make time with a girl who was
too good looking for them, so he would have to
let me go. They know they haven’t got a shot, he
said, but they keep tryin’ so you gotta give ‘em
credit for that, chuckling like it was just a joke—
as if they deserved an atta boy from me. Then
he handed me a newly minted company calendar,
wished me luck in my future endeavors, and told
me to shut his big, boss-sized door on my way out.
*
Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including her latest collection, Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.
All My Relations by Nancy Huggett
All My Relations
have gone sour, even the one with my mechanic
who keeps toying with me—She’ll be ready at 2,
uh, make that 3. Or: Parts unavailable, come back
Monday. And that click when I hit the brakes
after replacing both rotors and pads—
that can’t be good. Last week a friend
raged at me for something she did.
Classic Narcissist! screams a meme
as I scroll social media, waiting for repairs.
But it’s more complicated than that, this trying
to untangle dead-end relationships that seem
to either overheat or stall. So I’m spending
money I don’t have to find out what skill set
I’m missing, where my engine needs grease.
My therapist says some relationships run out
of gas, others are clunkers, quick to break down.
But I never see it coming. I pay the insurance,
change the oil, schedule 52-point checkups.
And then the bottom rusts out.
*
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant writing and caregiving on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Find her work in Event, ONE ART, Poetry Northwest, and Rust and Moth. She’s won awards (RBC PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.
Three Poems by Rachel Custer
You: a Ghazal
Here’s the truth: you’re sick to the bone of you.
The whole world is selling you on the throne of you.
Better a shack in heaven than a mansion in this world;
The same ending awaits the most well-known of you.
A tsunami of sameness drenches all you meet
Even the stranger seems just a clone of you.
So much falseness demands your worship these days.
You grow weary of God sometimes, let alone of you.
Realize, Rachel, how little it all matters in the end,
How much of what’s true is overthrown – of you.
*
Repentance
Here is Mercy, Indiana,
a town you thought you knew.
Here is the room
behind the boarded door.
(To return is to repent
though you didn’t sin by leaving,
though you left
carrying nothing but regret.)
Some places kill with silence.
Some places kill with words.
Like cornstalks, gossips
crackle stories into the wind.
(to repent is to return)
Junkies inject the lies
they see in others’ eyes, the truth
nobody thinks they hear.
Mercy is a hard place to stay clean.
A child’s teeth rot for simple lack.
A mother trips along
toward the liquor store.
The fields hum a gathering song.
*
Malediction for the Madness in Me
Hard child, home
in my marrow, wildness
orbiting the eye of me,
may you live forever.
May you live forever cold,
wandering joint to joint
in search of burning,
purpling your bare arms
with desperate slaps (see, fever,
how the spell we need is never
the spell we cast? The reassuring
purr of pain?) and may
the fires you find be dying.
Despair, be a desert in me: entire
in your lifelessness, endless
in the pursuit of yourself.
May you never be loved
for what you are not: poet, lover,
woman, dancing alone
in your calloused feet. Be exile
in your own hallucinated homeland,
thumbing rides from men who promise
to feed you plums, so long as you lick
the stains from their thick thumbs.
Beg them to love you.
Beg them to love you again.
*
Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, 2003) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, One Art, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. She currently resides online at rachelcuster.wordpress.com and songsonthewaytogod.substack.com.
Write without Fear. Edit without Mercy. — A Workshop with Tresha Faye Haefner
Workshop: Write without Fear. Edit without Mercy.
Instructor: Tresha Faye Haefner
Date: Thursday, April 10
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern
Please note: This is a Virtual Workshop held via Zoom.
*
To register:
Make a payment using one of the following methods:
Price: $25 (payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp / Zelle / Personal Check)
Please contact Mark Danowsky, Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART, with any questions and to confirm registration.
Contact: oneartpoetry@gmail.com
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Workshop Description:
One reviewer said of Kim Addonizio’s work that not a word was unnecessary or out of place. How do poets write poems where every word feels essential? In this workshop, we will look at poets such as Addonizio, Hayes, Oxenhandler, Myles as examples. Then, we will generate some writing and edit it down without mercy. Participants will be challenged to both say the unsayable, and then murder many of their darlings* until their poems are trimmed down to the most surprising, essential language. (*no darlings will actually be harmed in the writing of these poems.)
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About The Instructor:
Tresha Faye Haefner is an award-winning poet, performer, educator and general facilitator of the fun times. Her work has been widely published and garnered several awards, including the Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and the Pangea Prize. Her first book, When the Moon Had Antlers (Pine Row Press, 2024) was a finalist for the Glass Lyre Poetry Prize. She is best described as an eco-poet, travel-poet, and performance poet. She writes words for the stage, page, coffee shop, words for sitting under a tree alone, and words for reading to someone you love while rowing them down a river towards dawn.
In addition to writing her own poems about nature and other mysteries, her most important role is to help others feel safe and inspired to write work of their own. Most importantly, she is founder of The Poetry Salon, an online learning community where poets meet to share inspiration, education and support as they write together and cheer one another on! You can get new information, updates and invitations to events at The Poetry Salon by joining The Poetry Salon on Substack at ThePoetrySalonStack.Substack.com.
Illicit Affairs by Kristie Frederick Daugherty
Illicit Affairs
Stop fucking around with me
and suggesting fresh watermelon
in the middle of winter.
Always wanting the fruits
that are out of season.
It was you who ate all
of my Rainier cherries last summer,
you fruit thief.
Their season is short
and they are up to nearly ten dollars
a pound. I saw pits under
your side of the bed when I looked
everywhere for my missing
red hoop earring at Christmas.
Thought the cat
might have dragged it under there.
I’m only saying this because
you will never read it.
I’m only breaking the fourth wall
because of how you
called me by my name
in a bedroom way that
you knew sounded like love,
texted my own name
to me over and over,
keeping me perched on
a windowsill of almost ripe.
The mistress of misdirections:
You must have eaten them
faster than you remember,
I did not touch them,
I’ve never cared for cherries.
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Kristie Frederick Daugherty is a poet and a professor at the University of Evansville. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also a PhD candidate in Literature/Criticism at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of “Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift” which was published in December 2024 from Random House. Find her online at www.kristiefrederickdaugherty.com
Two Poems by Erin Murphy
Insomnia Chronicles I
The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. I listened to a poetry podcast in the shower yesterday. A guy was reading a poem. I pumped shampoo into my hand and lathered my hair. He was still reading. I rinsed and conditioned. Still reading. The speaker was a father whose daughter was leaving for college. The relationship was complicated. There was a boyfriend. There were horses. I decided to shave my legs for the first time in two months (three months?), scraped the razor along rows of hair like a lawnmower. He was still reading. Man, I thought, this is a long poem. A long-ass poem. A good poem, but still. I stepped onto the bathmat and dried off. Twenty minutes and he was still reading. And that’s when I realized I’d mistakenly played a fiction podcast. It was a story, not a poem. But everything about it seemed like a poem. The precision, the images. I once wrote a poem called “18-Year-Old Daughter as Runaway Horse.” It’s like the Cliff’s Notes version of his story. Six lines. A short poem. A short-ass poem. What’s the difference between poetry and prose? my students ask and ask. I pretend and pretend to know.
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Insomnia Chronicles XXV
The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. A solitary rain drop—pink!—on the tin trash can outside our window. And then: pinkpink…pishpishpishpish. Then: shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. What seems like the absence of sound is actually a thousand soloists singing the same song. My husband gave me a bone-colored mug that fits neatly in my palm. Every morning I fill it with hot tea and lift the rim to my lips. Day after day after month after year after years. What’s the difference between full of faith and faithful? What’s the difference between noise and sound? I think the loveliest word in the English language is shush. Imperative. Verb. Noun. Maybe we don’t learn how to swim—we learn how not to drown.
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Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, 2024) and Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). Her recent work has appeared in Ecotone, Rattle, North American Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfiction 2024, and in anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, Bedford/St. Martin’s, and other presses. Her awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, two Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence, and a Best of the Net award. She serves as poetry editor of The Summerset Review and professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Website: www.erin-murphy.com
1986 in a Small Town in Ohio by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
1986 in a Small Town in Ohio
We cruised, riding around in someone’s older Civic, or borrowing a parent’s Impala, or taking the beater that was on the verge of breaking down or rattled or needed a muffler but why bother now? We drove by the home of every boy we liked. It never took us long, a mile to East Enon Road, a mile to Fairfield Pike, through the few neighborhoods—IGA Land, College streets, the houses near Ellis Pond. We cruised by Ha Ha’s Pizza and Ye Olde Trail Tavern but mostly by the arcade where boys let quarters fall out of their pockets, and sometimes we joined them but often we tired of playing Ms. Pac-Man and wanted something more, something else, and we drove to Young’s Jersey Dairy where they sold day-old donuts after midnight and we squeezed into those red vinyl booths, and the boys would be there, the girls would be there, and we would buy Diet Coke and stay out late and eat day-old anything and carry whatever this was into our futures, some of us leaving home and never coming back, some of us going to college and working summers at Glen Helen or Carol’s Kitchen or washing dishes at The Wind’s, some of us never going far in the first place. But before the future, it was boys we longed for, boys we wanted to notice us, boys we wanted to change our lives—so much happens and never once happens in a small town—and death would come early to two of us and shift all the trees on Mills Lawn and none of us would take Route 68 to Xenia at night anymore, yet we still thought we would always have more of them—these days that back then never sped up, only slowed down, and in all the years we cruised, we never spotted one boy we liked through any house or apartment window, but we talked for hours about what might happen if we did, and we rolled down windows and the smell of seasons blew into the car, and we knew it, all of it—what was and what never would be—and our imaginations ran ahead of the car and behind it as we held in our breath and sped toward the edge of town and tomorrow, turning up the radio, ready to arrive.
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Shuly Xóchitl Cawood teaches writing workshops, doodles with watercolors and metallic markers, and is raising two poodles and a dwindling number of orchids. She is the author of six books, including Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough (Press 53, 2023) and Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021), winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Sun, and Rattle. Learn more at shulycawood.com.
The Immigrant by Julie Standig
The Immigrant
My aunt’s apartment on Surf Avenue
was immaculate. I thought.
Until I had to clean it out. Shopping bags
overfilled, one on top of another—
in every closet, pantry, and storage bin.
I discovered old bank statements,
official letters from Germany—in German.
Letters from unknown-to-us people,
written in Polish.
Letters from Israel,
written in Hebrew.
Letters from lawyers that testified
what was taken, when, how much.
Her ketubah from Bergen Belson.
The linen closet was stuffed with towels,
and between those towels, more letters.
One took our breath away
They took the kinder, put them on a train.
We knew we would not see them again.
They took her father’s shoe factory.
They took the silver. The china.
Her hair. They sterilized her at Block 10.
They took her baby boy.
The bedroom closet was packed with racks
of shoes. Row after row after row.
A pair of slippers trimmed in fur. Size 5.
My aunt had small feet.
I clutched her nut-brown sweater to my heart.
It was the same one she wore
for her immigration photo.
She kept everything. And I unearthed it.
Stashed in a night-table drawer—
an evergreen marbled notebook
on dictation and grammar,
two accordion-folded rain bonnets,
in plastic sleeves with the ILGWU* stamp.
Small paperbacks:
Geography (for 7th and 8th grade)
Spelling
Mathematics
The D.A.R. Manual for Citizenship
And her porcelain plate with FDR
and Churchill’s side-by-side faces.
Written on the bottom—For Democracy.
*International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).
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Julie Standig’s poetry has appeared in Schuylkill Journal Review, Sadie Girl Press, Gyroscope Review and online journals. She has a full collection of poems, The Forsaken Little Black Book and her chapbook, Memsahib Memoir. Lifetime New Yorker, she now resides in Bucks County with her husband and their springer spaniel.
Named by All by Cindy Buchanan
Named by All
I’ve stood still—bereft—unable to remember
my name even when I search for it in the shrill
cry of an osprey, a stream rippling its banks,
the whisper of pine boughs. Too often,
all I hear is the muffled monotone of loss
droning between sky and rock, between my spine
and sternum, like the buzz a dying fly makes
as its legs claw air. In these moments,
when I am lost in an alien world with others
who yearn to reclaim their children from the realm
of hungry ghosts, I must unmask
and walk curious into here and now, attend only
to breath, lean into possibilities nascent
in the tight, pink buds on a rhododendron bush,
in the eggs of a song sparrow, and accept, no,
not merely accept, but comprehend, that I am not
trapped between is and isn’t. Ospreys and flies,
the ache for a lost child, the recurrence
of growth, bright and green, on the tips of boughs
in spring—I am named by all I encounter.
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Cindy Buchanan grew up in Alaska, has a B.A. in English from Gonzaga University, and studies poetry with Jeanine Walker in Seattle, Washington. She is a member of two monthly poetry groups, is an avid runner and hiker, and splits her time between Seattle and the Baja. Her work has been published in ONE ART, Chestnut Review, Evening Street Review, Hole in the Head Review, The Inflectionist Review, and other journals. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her chapbook, Learning to Breathe (Finishing Line Press), was published in 2023. Find her at cindybuchanan.com