Tag: Alison Hurwitz

I am sister to the rain. by Alison Hurwitz

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

I am sister to the rain.
~Dorothy Parker, “Rainy Night,” 1925

For years we scanned horizon, touched on desiccated things.
I tried to give a little limestone. You offered back a sky

devoid of cloud. Hummock, husk. A dry hill. For a time,
we swallowed powdered milk, tried to whisper to the walls

we were not water sisters. We tried gifting yellow grasses,
cacti, cracks. In the dust, we wrote each others’ names.

Our elbows, pinched, retained their ridges. Soon, the open
mouths of reservoirs silted, empty. Riverbeds forgot they

had held water, renamed themselves. In the city, sidewalks
hoarded refuse, cardboard boxes, the stench of urine.

Apologies, reunions, elopements, funerals. No one could cry
and every faucet ran with sand. Yet yesterday, when you called

and named the desert, clouds returned, and it began to rain.
We held the telephone receiver of our childhood stretched

across the continent till it worded into watering can. Oxalis
and trout lilies sprouted everywhere. I could not stop

singing. That night, I slept inside the wind, silvered with rain.
I woke to deeper green. Across a water color sky, the cry

of barred owl by the pond. In the trees a deer lifted up
its eyes from where it drank, and knew me.

*

Alison Hurwitz (she/her), alisonhurwitz.com, is a former cellist and dancer who finds music in language. Her work has been featured in SWWIM, Vox Populi, South Dakota Review, Sky Island Journal, and others. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Alison hosts a monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Her chapbook, Undersight, (Bottlecap Press, 2026), is available now. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings, takes long walks in the woods with her dog, and dances in her kitchen.

Scapegrace by Alison Hurwitz

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Scapegrace

My son does not want Anne of Green Gables
to make any more mistakes. First, a blunder sends

her best friend stumbling into drunkenness—
the raspberry cordial which was really currant wine.

Then, the mislabeled bottle of vanilla which she,
daydreaming, did not think to sniff, resulting

in a lineament cake. He tells me it’s disproportionately
unfair, and asks me what Marilla’s word scapegrace means.

All week, he’s been trailing misery and missed
assignments, wadded bits of paper, hiding in his

long red hair, too aware of his deficiencies.
His thin frame bows and quivers—drawn.

I find another definition. Let Anne take off her apron,
walk out into the air of late October, thrill to see

a Scapegrace Loon unfurl its wings and lift across the pond,
the fire at its throat a crimson arrow in the dusk.

*

Alison Hurwitz (she/her), is a former cellist and dancer who finds music in language. Nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Alison hosts the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Published in South Dakota Review, Sky Island Journal, SWWIM and others, her work was named as a finalist for RockPaperPoem’s 2025 Poetry Prize. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorials, hikes, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

  1. Kai Coggin
  2. Alison Luterman
  3. Donna Hilbert
  4. Betsy Mars
  5. John Amen
  6. Susan Vespoli
  7. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  8. Tina Em
  9. Kim Addonizio
  10. Molly Fisk
  11. Joseph Fasano
  12. Terri Kirby Erickson
  13. Robbi Nester
  14. James Crews
  15. Abby E. Murray
  16. Allison Blevins
  17. Erin Murphy
  18. john compton
  19. Dana Henry Martin
  20. Alison Hurwitz
  21. Moudi Sbeity
  22. Dick Westheimer
  23. James Feichthaler
  24. Karen Paul Holmes
  25. Naomi Shihab Nye

Note: For poets who published multiple times in ONE ART, in 2025, we are linking to the most-read curated work.

Tremolo by Alison Hurwitz

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Tremolo

        After the painting by Agnes Martin

Three thousand miles away, I can’t go with my mother to the heart doctor, so
I wish myself beside her, distance blurred until the two of us sit chilled inside

an antiseptic room, glance up at squares in the suspended ceiling–a chess board
bleached, strange game with no opponent, geometry of separation.

My mother waits to see the specialist, one hand holding closed the crease and fold
of paper dress. Her blue-veined feet can’t reach the floor. She asks me to read

the printed card adjacent to the wall art and I do- a cross-hatched Agnes Martin,
titled Tremolo. My brilliant mother tilts her head, says she thinks the patterned grid depicts

the futile effort we all make to subdivide uncertainty, to tuck each breath in its own box.
The ticking clock divides our waiting. At last, the click of door. The nurse enters

on a schedule. She calls my mother Hon but makes no eye contact, checks off
the list on which my mother’s name is written, slips out. The self I’ve willed

across the country climbs up to sit beside her on the crinkle sheet, one arm
around her shoulders. Every shift, an aural shiver. She says again she hopes

the surgeon can insert the mesh, expand the tunnel to her heart. She retells
the news she heard last time: her arterial valve, which should be a silver dollar’s

width, has tightened to a strand of straw. She gestures, hand so light it might
be filled with hollow bones, as if at any second she could float away.

Time and distance spiral through a fluttering
through which we hear the rush and pull of her hardworking heart.

We sit together side by side- listen to the minutes
pass in silicates, their sound sifting through

three thousand miles
of hourglass.

*

Alison Hurwitz is a former cellist/dancer who finds music in language. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Alison hosts the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Published in South Dakota Review, Sky Island Journal, SWWIM and others, her work was named as a finalist for RockPaperPoem’s 2025 Poetry Prize. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorials, hikes, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com

America, We Hope This is A Mammogram by Alison Hurwitz

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments
America, We Hope This is A Mammogram
America, it’s clear you’ve gone without deodorant,
driven into inquisition, arrived on time and tried
to find distraction in the waiting room.
America, we know you are half hoping they will never
call your name, hope that they forget to lead you
to a cell and strip. They don’t. You fold your bra,
try to tuck it underneath your shirt and sweater,
as if anyone would check, or for that matter, care.
America, you’ll tell yourself that this is routine screening,
discomfort best endured with equanimity. In the
examination room, a politician helps insert your tender parts
into the rack, the press, the radiation squeeze, then drape
your uterus away from inconvenient expression. They say
some soreness now prevents ineptitude or populist disquiet from
becoming angry subdivision. We hope this is your method here:
that after you are 3D screened and hold your breath, you will exhale,
emerging bruised and blotched with red, contused but cancer free.
We hope it isn’t already too late, hope you’ve not metastasized beyond
the reach of intervention. We’ll wait for your results. Fingers crossed.
*
Alison Hurwitz is a former cellist and dancer who now finds music in language. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and for Best of the Net in 2023 and 2024, Alison is the host of the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Published in South Dakota Review, SWIMM, Sky Island Journal and others, her work is forthcoming in The Westchester Review and Poetry in Plain Sight. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorial services, walks in the woods, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com

Masked Dancers at the Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, 2002 by Alison Hurwitz

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment
Masked Dancers at the Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, 2002
At work they have no names.
The beat heats up past fever pitch, past gilded balconies.
In pleather hot pants, they reflect too many mirrored balls, catch
stares and whistles, fishnets on the splintered stage, legs crosshatched,
grilled, their movements made for moistened lips.
Served up steaming for one more frenzied Silicon event, they’re
a Moulin Rouge-style fantasy for those more skilled with screens
and blue light than with flesh. Half their faces hidden under dominos,
they dance, blinded by the spotlights in their eyes. It is better this way.
For $80, they will whip the watchers dizzy with their spangled hips
and thighs, decolletage and driving syncopation. They shimmy scratchy tulle.
Chafing dishes, they set their incandescence spinning into spotlights, slick
the crowd before the chorus comes. Sizzle buys them Pad See Ew.
Breathing runway groin and sweat, they gyrate, smile and blister,
hot pants bunching where they can’t adjust. Bent to their task,
they lubricate the crowd, then disappear. All of them so good
at getting gone.
Home at 3 a.m. inside her tiny bathroom, one dancer scrubs
at greasepaint till it stings, until her lashes peel away, two rhinestoned
millipedes curled inward, winking and disfigured, skin stripped clean until
her naked face is no longer erased. The mirror cabinet’s been slammed
too many times, lost its magnet, cannot fully close. No matter: she owns
the eyes inside the glass. Safety waits until it spirals into exhale in the after-
shock of sound. She opens it, takes out her name, puts it back
into her mouth.
*
Alison Hurwitz has been featured in Rust and Moth, River Heron Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Shore, and Thimble, among others. Her work is forthcoming in Carmina Magazine, The South Dakota Review, and Black Fox Review. She is a 2023 Best of the Net Nominee. Alison hosts Well-Versed Words, a monthly online poetry reading. alisonhurwitz.com