ONE ART’s Nominations for the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards
Kai Coggin – I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW
Abby E. Murray – I Can’t Find My Gender
Julie Weiss – Dear Daughter,
Sean Glatch – Having a Gay Awakening at the Elm Grove Public Pool
Hannah Tennant-Moore – Other People Explain My Sexuality to Me
*
Learn more about the Monarch Queer Literary Awards.
Allison Blevins – Earlier, Jane Kenyon
Kai Coggin – I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW
Abby E. Murray – I Can’t Find My Gender
Alison Luterman – To a Mother I Know
Joseph Fasano – To the Insurance Executive Who Denied My Heart Procedure
Dana Henry Martin – Window Strike at Highlands Behavioral Health
Join ONE ART’s EIC Mark Danowsky and poet Alison Lubar as they host queer poets from ONE ART’s archives and the Philly poetry scene for an end-of-pride-month, but not end of Pride celebration! Poets will begin their set with a poem by a LGBTQIA+ predecessor of their choosing, then read their own work. All proceeds from the event will be donated to the Trans Lifeline.
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ONE ART’s End-of-Pride-Month But Not End of Pride Reading
Co-hosted by Alison Lubar
Monday, June 30
6:00-8:00pm Eastern
Featured Poets: Jennifer Espinoza, Sean Hanrahan, m. mick powell, Amy Beth Sisson, Louisa Schnaithmann, Nicole Tallman, Abby E. Murray
>>> Tickets Available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)
Please note: All proceeds from the event will be donated to the Trans Lifeline.
***
About Our Co-Host:
Alison Lubar (they/themme) teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary, biracial Nikkei femme whose life work has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices to young people. They’re the author of two full-length poetry books, The Other Tree, winner of Harbor Editions’ Laureate Prize (forthcoming September 2025), and METAMOURPHOSIS (fifth wheel press, 2024), as well as four chapbooks. Find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison.
About Our Featured Poets:
Jennifer Espinoza (she/her) is a poet whose work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, the American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Poem-a-day @poets.org, and elsewhere. She is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks), THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (The Accomplices) and I Don’t Want To Be Understood (Alice James Books). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and currently resides in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog.
Sean Hanrahan (he, him, his) is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collections Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt) and Ghost Signs (2023 Alien Buddha), and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in various anthologies and journals. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days, Ekphrastic Poetry, Poetry Embodied, and has hosted and read at poetry events throughout Philadelphia. He can be found on Instagram as gaycakepoet.
m. mick powell (they/she) is a poet, professor, artist, Aries, and the author of threesome in the last Toyota Celica and other circus tricks and DEAD GIRL CAMEO, forthcoming from One World Books this August. Find them on all social media platforms @mickmakesmagic.
Amy Beth Sisson (she/her) lives near the skunk cabbages in a town outside of Philly. She is a winner of the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia’s Joyful Abundance: Emerging Artist Commissioning Program, 2025. Amy Beth is a Special Projects Editorial Assistant for Fence Publishers and a former Associate Artist with the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.
Louisa Schnaithmann (she/her) is a relentlessly bisexual poet who is the author of Plague Love (Moonstone Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Summerset Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is the consulting editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry and lives in southeastern Pennsylvania. You can order a copy of Plague Love here.
Nicole Tallman (she/her) lives in Miami, where she serves as the official Poetry Ambassador. She is the author of four poetry books including her most recent, Dolce Vita/Let There Be a Little Light. She is also a Poetry and Interviews Editor for South Florida Poetry Journal and The Blue Mountain Review. Find her most recent poems in Poetry Magazine, Poet Lore, Pleiades, and ONLY POEMS. Find her on social media @natallman and at nicoletallman.com.
Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. As a nonbinary pacifist married to a cis-gender active duty army officer, they’ve spent their adult life writing and researching the struggle for voice and listening between disparate communities. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Prize from Ex Ophidia Press and has been nominated for the National Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches writing to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.
I Can’t Find My Gender
I must have set my gender down on the bus
and left it there for anyone to find.
Somewhere, a stranger turns my gender over
in his hands, holds it up to his ear, hears nothing.
I never thought to write my name on my gender,
or my phone number. For months, I thought
that I had swallowed my gender, somehow
absorbed it into my bones or my beautiful fat,
but I’ve had x-rays, MRIs, and mammograms
and the results showed no sign of my gender—
just dense breast tissue, an ulcer, some arthritis.
A colleague told me he assumed I was a woman
because of my earrings, the gold hoops, a gift
I was sad to smash in search of my gender:
Nothing. Just busted swirls of metal, genderless.
I’ve been told I talk like a man, so I recorded
my voice, played it backward and forward,
slowed down and sped up, and all I heard
was sound and language any human could use,
no matter their gender. Sometimes I wonder
if there are organizations with facilities where
my gender can find shelter, where it can be safe
until I come to claim it, and my gender
will know me when I walk in, will run to me
before the string of tin bells above the door
have stopped jingling their one-of-a-kind jingle,
so many ways for new songs to be sung
by the same instruments each day, each hour,
and my gender will jump into my arms
and a volunteer will say no doubt about it,
that’s your gender. But I also wonder—usually
at parties or before big work presentations
when I am lonely for my gender or given
a gender that isn’t mine to hold—whether
my gender is having the time of its life
wherever it is, whether it is thriving
on the kindness of those who notice it
and let it be, because sometimes I can’t find
my gender and yet I know it is there,
unable to be parted from me, its soft tongue
licking and licking the palm of my hand.
*
Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, recently won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Ex Ophidia Press. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.
ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of January 2025
ONE ART’s Top 25 Most-Read Poets of 2024
Note: Some poets were published multiple times in ONE ART in 2024. Links are to each poet’s most-read poem(s) of the year.
Today, I Am Not Kind Because I Love Love,
I am kind because I hate hate.
If viciousness drives a luxury car,
I am scratching my initials into its paint
using only the ragged edge
of my tenderness. This may be
the age of distance and shame
but I am kissing the hands of my friends
while I can. I am making it weird.
I am confessing my commitment
to the bumblebee who spent her last calorie
mistaking the palm of my hand
for a buttercup, curling up inside it,
and dying. Sometimes you’ve got to piss
in apathy’s coffee, antagonize the hell
out of indifference. You become
furiously nonviolent, wild with love,
hurling small mercies into your life
like you’re pitching stones
at the closed glass windows of cruelty.
*
Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.
~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of November 2024 ~
How (Not) to Die
She says that today, during recess,
they played dying. Basically, she says,
dying is when all the kids crowd
onto the slide until someone falls
over its side, and you cling to the edge
because the chipped rubber turf below
is death. A friend has to save you,
she says, and if they fail—if you’re lost
to the ground despite the hands
of your friend outstretched—you die.
But, she adds, if you die, you get
to come back as a ghost, climb
up the slide, and pull the socks off
your friend. In other words, you get
to haunt the one who tried hardest
to prevent your demise, take a little
of their warmth with you, leave them
less complete than they were, set
a fraction of their own body beyond
their understanding. And this strikes me
as unfair before it registers as accurate
too—so true, in fact, that it explains
survivor’s guilt in a way that makes
humans seem reasonable. Every ghost
will have its due. No one who lives
will remain completely whole. Friends,
who needs dreams or the cryptic ways
of the unconscious mind when there are
children on playgrounds, processing
what it is to exist in a world built
only by hands that cannot survive
or save it? When I tell my daughter
what I, a grownup, think is fair in life
and death, she looks at me with the same
pity any god might show me, as if to say
thinking has only ever gotten us so far.
*
Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.
It’s Going to Be Okay
I know it will be okay
because NASA has confirmed
Stephen Hawking was right
and the world will end
probably by the year 2600,
which means we are celebrating
the birth of our children
into oblivion with instructions
to make their own children
in the path of oblivion,
as if to hope someone’s children
at some point, and therefore
all of us, will live to be
obliterated, but the children
keep being born, keep entering
the world as if it is a relief
to finally be here, screaming
from the terrible joy of it,
and we all know children
carry wisdom from a universe
none of us can revisit
or reclaim, where our pre-sight,
pre-form, pre-human, pre-vengeance
and pre-war selves may still exist
as the perfectly contented
and eternally miserable dust
of stars, and the way back
to that place is printed inside
a pocket of the brain that’s been
sewn shut one fatal stitch
at a time, one earth-day
at a time by a divine and quiet
needle that does not ask
our permission, which explains
how we begin as children
but grow into grimness
then end up desperately needing
to understand how okay it will be,
and I know it will be okay
because there was a double rainbow
glowing against a heavy storm
as it fattened and purpled
over my city this morning
and all my friends took pictures
before the power outages
and fallen trees were noted
on living maps and grids,
and now we have proof
of the irreverence of light waves
and the indiscriminate
appearance of hope to look at
on dying screens tonight,
and I know it will be okay
because I overheard a crying man
in the lobby of an animal hospital
telling the shivering one-eyed dog
beside him that it would be okay,
he promised, it would be okay,
and when I asked what the dog’s
name was, the man said
my name, said Abby,
and isn’t that ominous,
isn’t it meaningful whether I like it
or not, and isn’t it true
that it happened and my dog self
was alive and visibly comforted
by his words, shivering less,
maybe awake more, loved more,
even though dogs are dual citizens
of this universe and the one
we can’t reach back to, where
wisdom is still just another type
of common matter, which is to say
dogs—animals—consistently know
it is not okay, has never been okay
will not become okay
and yet they gather with us
in the path of disaster after disaster,
purring or playing or burrowing
happily into our warmth
because it is not survival
to pursue anything otherwise,
and I know it will be okay
because I keep dreaming
that my daughter and I are falling
through the atmosphere toward
the very real stone earth
and when she yells what’s happening to us
I take two equally crucial steps:
first, I put my body between hers
and oblivion, and second, I shout
through the guiltless but roaring silence
that it will be okay
because even in my dreams
I am learning that another answer
would be death before impact
and I contain the residue
of asteroids, I am part animal,
so are you, and so is my child,
and we have been going on
for millennia through the awful
and the sometimes okay
without ever knowing how.
*
Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.
She Wants to Live
For her tenth birthday she receives a pale jade bracelet
with a shark charm and a QR code on the price tag,
which we use to download an app on my phone
and track Boo, the young female hammerhead swimming
laps around the Bahamas at .2 mph. Every morning since,
we’ve logged in to see how far Boo has traveled
in what might seem to be lazy triangles across the Tongue
of the Ocean, a dark chasm yawning at the bottom
of the Atlantic, even though we suspect how industrious
Boo must be to survive—that her path must be as deliberate
and careful as it is beyond any faraway child’s control,
no matter how true that child’s love is. When my daughter
blew out the single candle on her cupcake I told her
she is halfway old enough to set out on her own because
this news would have thrilled me at her age, and she cried,
said why would you tell me that! and I remembered how,
at her age, I’d attended zero protests, marched for human rights
roughly never, heard no constant reporting on the slaughter
of children, both here and abroad, and although my own
shoulders had been saddled with poverty, I carried no words
for its implications and origins. I didn’t know what it meant
to be powerless or complicit. I had not held my mother’s hand
outside the White House and screamed, our words swallowed up
by its depth, its capacity to consume even light. My daughter
is ten and like most ten-year-olds, she wants to live as if it is
not just an evolutionary chore to avoid the alternative
but also her joy. She wants to dive through the void
knowing safety will carry her like a wave. That said,
the world she’ll inherit leaves her wanting her mother
for as long as possible. Longer. How could I blame her?
While she’s at school, I check on Boo’s blinking transmitter,
notice she hasn’t surfaced yet today but is headed back
from the deep toward a shallow she clings to, a golden arm of sand
that’s been there, open to the abyss, since long before she was born.
*
In Which I Show Myself Some Mercy
But not too much, not enough
to be noticeable to fellow commuters
as I stand in the bus shelter reading
about a woman who lies down
on the quiet earth to lend a few
seconds of gratitude to the dirt,
the way it compresses its ancient self,
its already profoundly compressed
and contorted and torn up self
to accommodate her heels and calves,
weary hips, shoulders, her head
heavy as a stone, and I point it out
(to no one but me) reflexively
as luxury, this awareness of the world,
this calm, this time spent noticing
a thing as constant and plain as soil
while so many of us are running
through clouds of exhaust to get
to the next cloud of exhaust,
and because I am starting small,
I am microdosing mercy and usually
in places away from home, where
no one is likely to steal the stash
I have, I give myself the minute
it takes to remember: we don’t always
turn to the earth for comfort but
also its cold reminder: how furious
and stubborn hope can be, how good
it is at existing below ground, speaking
only in mushrooms for centuries
if it has to, bound in thorns or buried
under boulders or, yes, flattened
beneath the weeds and grass—hope is
no privilege, it is too inconvenient,
too irreverent, insistent as a hailstorm,
and so, as I step outside the bus shelter
pulling my hood up between me
and the downpour in order to leave
room for the woman who wears no coat,
I forgive myself, my chapped hands
and soggy shoes and reckless impulse
to survive at the expense of living,
my rush to call anything we need and take
a decadence, and this mercy is potent,
it is a quick deep inhale, it is tangerine
on a dry tongue, it is enough
to make me look up through the rain
on my glasses and know I’m seeing stars.
*
Abby E. Murray (she/they) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Her book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.
~ ONE ART’s Top 25 Most-Read Poets of 2023 ~
1. Abby E. Murray
2. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
3. Betsy Mars
4. Donna Hilbert
5. Linda Laderman
6. Alison Luterman
7. Julie Weiss
8. Robbi Nester
9. Roseanne Freed
10. Karen Paul Holmes
11. Heather Swan
12. Timothy Green
13. James Diaz
14. Jane Edna Mohler
15. John Amen
16. Barbara Crooker
17. Jim Daniels
18. Susan Vespoli
19. Sean Kelbley
20. Susan Zimmerman
21. Kip Knott
22. Jennifer Garfield
23. Margaret Dornaus
24. Paula J. Lambert
25. Gail Thomas
~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of December 2023 ~
ONE ART’s 2024 Pushcart Prize Nominations
Abby E. Murray – What It’s Like to Wonder Whose Country It Was First (12.11.23)
Bonnie Naradzay – Bede’s Sparrow (11.1.23)
Linda Laderman – Final Score (10.9.23)
Hayley Mitchell Haugen – Reserved (8.27.23)
Jennifer Garfield – self portrait at 39 (8.2.23)
Cheryl Baldi – THE DAY FALLING TO PIECES (7.30.23)
What It’s Like to Wonder Whose Country It Was First
It’s a bit like counting backward by last names
in search of one that’s never been claimed
by a man. You end up tallying centuries like beads
on a rosary, thousands of generations of names
owned and assigned by fathers and sons, fathers
and sons, until you see how we, the non-men,
survived before names even came to be.
Isn’t it likely that, pre-speech, we recognized land
as the body that grew us like flowers, or figs?
Isn’t each of us named after water and sun
in words only our mother can pronounce?
There have always been more than enough
weeds to pull and seeds to bury. What a waste
of energy it would have been then, to call a river
ours but not yours, to decide for a shoreline
which children it could hold on its hip. And yet,
it must have happened: a drink from a stream
so perfect it broke a man’s heart. In his grief,
he called it his, and we’ve been dying ever since.
*
Ode to an Invasive Species
My friend reminds me cats
are an invasive species,
citing every songbird she’s found
disemboweled on her doorstep.
What she means is, feeding one animal
is the same as killing another,
and what I mean is, I don’t know
how to unlove a thing once I love it.
I used to think shame could teach me,
but here I am, still dumbstruck
by the generator in my cat’s tiny throat,
the one she cranks to life in exchange
for any kindness I show her,
offering me her own broken song.
Here I am, smacking a sparrow
from her mouth, then giving it water
and a shoebox where it can rest
because I want it all, my version of peace
everywhere, which I think
makes me an invasive species too.
I spend most days trying to be good
while knowing I’m not, not completely,
and trying not to be crushed even though
I couldn’t live without deserving it.
*
On the First Day of School
I draw a wave that reaches
from the back of my daughter’s hand
up her arm, across her shoulders,
then down her other arm
to lap against the knuckles
of her opposite hand. I tell her
this is a river, and it belongs
only to her, for as long as she lives.
She likes this: the inheritance
of a body of water in lieu
of her own body, which harbors
many unnamed currents.
Her girl-not-girl-not-boy face
gleams like an agate among stones.
For now, she is her. I tell her
every word and glance she feels today
is a leaf, a spider, a lily, sometimes
a paper boat made just for her—
they float on the surface of her river.
Keep the ones you need, I say.
What about the rest? she asks.
She is trying to decide if the gift
I’m offering is too simple to be true,
or too true to be simple.
Reader, I am too. The river
sends the rest away, I say.
Her eyes are two pools
where memory twirls like a fish,
something bright in the dark—
a kindness she’s fed to some
thoughtful koi—but rejection
festers there too, aggressive
and determined as pike.
She’ll need to know them both.
I pack these metaphors
like firm mud for her to stand on
and she walks to school
where I can’t follow,
her hands empty as mine were
when I waded into my life,
ready to pick up what there is
to be found, to be held, or let go.
*
Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Her first book of poems, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Washington State Book Award. She served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.
On Your Birthday
When it isn’t a milestone
but some odd number
between multiples of ten,
when it falls on a Tuesday
and you celebrate by eating
yogurt alone at the sink
or cooking for those
who ought to feed you,
when it disguises itself
as any cold, damp day
and arrives like junk mail,
unconcerned with
the hundreds of thousands
of hours you’ve survived
on a temperamental planet
with a temperamental species,
when the anniversary of you
looks nothing like a gift
and brings you only
the absence of wonder,
find the nearest bit of light
in the room. Any scrap
will do, that sliver pressed
beneath the bathroom door,
maybe, or the quarter-sized
warmth in the palm of your hand
when you stand just so
at the kitchen window at noon—
it needn’t be bright or even
visible to seem impossible,
waves of energy through
nothingness, since nothingness
itself is a kind of space reserved
for brilliance. All this tiny shine,
the light you can reach
right now, is for you, from me,
because I say so. Take it.
What better way to accept a gift
than with empty hands?
Doesn’t it seem to blush
deeper when you know it is yours?
On your almost forgotten birthday,
I claim all that glows or flares
right here for you. It’s outrageous,
I know, but who’s to stop me?
Let’s get drunk on rights
no one suspected we’d claim.
Who will tell you a streetlamp’s gleam
on the hood of a neighbor’s Honda
can’t be yours? Nobody. So it is.
Enjoy it, secretly if you want,
and notice you’ve been noticed,
know somebody loves you
the way daylight loves
a windowpane, consistently,
the way a yellow lamp loves
an otherwise darkened room.
*
Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington. After serving as poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, she recently (and temporarily) relocated to Washington DC.
