Tag: election day

Two Poems by Meg Freer

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ Leave a comment

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She thinks the chapel service in her retirement home
is only for the Presbyterians, which can’t be true
since the home is run by the Episcopal Church,
but I decide not to ask what she means,
since she isn’t Episcopalian either.
She doesn’t want to go.

We go to a concert in a Presbyterian church
that burned 150 years ago and was rebuilt.
In the drafty space amid peeling paint
and dusty ceiling fans, the musicians
spin infinite loops and sing
about consistency and self-control.

A white dove perched at the top
of the largest organ pipe, the only item
to survive the fire, offers its own message:
Denomination means little next to love.
Have you been hospitable to angels?
They may be closer than you think.

*

Traces

It’s difficult to live in a jumbled house,
a body whose mind has lost its ability
to find what it’s looking for.

A forest of lilacs marks a place where people
once homesteaded and planted these shrubs
that spread underground into a thicket of beauty.

Each grain of ‘star sand’ on a beach, skeletal remains
of a 500-million-year-old marine organism
that brings the past into the present underfoot.

Fog prickles my nose like seltzer water,
fingers its way through my dog’s curly fur
to her scent memories of a close-range coyote.

Webs of molecules link brain cells
like garden trellises that past events cling to,
until they start to splinter and finally tumble down.

*

Meg Freer works in the arts in Ontario. Her prose, poetry, and photos have appeared in many journals, and in four chapbooks. She is co-poetry editor for The Sunlight Press and a contributing editor for Traces Journal. A full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from DarkWinter Press.

Two Poems by Heather Swan

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 4 Comments

What the Potter Knows

The way water bends the stem
of the daffodil as you
look through the vase
to the window where
the yard has suddenly
filled with birds––the doves
who only eat seeds
from the ground, and clouds
of sparrows who move together
suddenly like the ripples that
form on water after you
throw the stone––

Believe it––there is a different way
to know and see.

The woman with clay
in her hands and the sea
in her eyes knows more
than the man who believes
the daily kaleidoscope
of numbers spooling across
the screens are what to be
banking on. She spins
the wheel, a tale not
of woe, in spite of it all. Watch
as the birds return and return to her
as she bends down briefly
to touch the head of a violet
rising from the uneven ground.

*

Your Grandfather Loved Birds My Mother Said

In the dark, he’d wake his daughters
and lead them to the pickup truck,
hand them hot cocoas,
and drive them to the edge
of the arboretum to find birds
they didn’t know the names of
that he needed like stitches
to hold his day together, bright bits
of halcyon beauty.

This, rather than fold
under the weight of the war
he’d endured while the others
in his ski troup died in the same
room he had to hide in to
survive. So many days with
their bodies disappearing until
finally someone came for him.

As girls, they did not
understand this need
to get there at first light
to hear that fabric of song.
Years later, when they poured
bird seed into feeders to
invite the brightness, the flight,
the miracles, they understood:

It is worth it,
despite the horror,
to be alive another day.

*

Heather Swan is a poet and nonfiction writer. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Hopper, ONE ART, Terrain, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, and Cold Mountain. Her most recent collection Dandelion was released from Terrapin Books in 2023. Her first book, A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), published in 2020, was a finalist for both the ASLE Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. Her nonfiction book Where Honeybees Thrive (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. A companion book, Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, was just released in May 2024. She has been the recipient of the August Derleth Poetry Award, the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Best Chapbook Award, the Wisconsin Center for the Book Bookmark Award, the Martha Meyer Renk Fellowship in Poetry at UW Madison, and an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing at UW Madison.

Two Poems by Heather Kays

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Never Yours

They call me monster,
stone-hearted, serpentine queen—
but look deeper.
I was once tender, soft,
until the world taught me
hardness was survival.

Medusa, they say,
cursed by gods and scorned by men,
but what of the girl who loved?
What of the woman left shattered
beneath the weight of cruel desire?
The snakes are my protection,
not my punishment.
I did not turn men to stone,
I merely reflected what was already there.

I see Lilith in the shadows,
cast out for her refusal to bow.
A woman who dared to claim
her body as her own,
her voice as more than a whisper.
She chose to be free—
they called it rebellion,
I call it righteous.

Eve, they say, started it all,
but what choice did she have
in a garden full of silence?
Her bite was a hunger
for more than Eden’s cage—
it was her way to know herself.
In her shame, I see strength.
In her sin, I find salvation.
She did not fall,
she rose.

And then there’s Pandora,
blamed for every sorrow.
They never speak of the hope
she clutched in her trembling hands,
the last thing she saved
when all else was lost.
Even in chaos, she chose light.

We, the women of darkness,
the sisterhood of the misunderstood,
the ones they fear but never know,
We bear the weight of their myths,
yet we are so much more.

Medusa’s gaze wasn’t meant to harm,
but to hold the world accountable.
Lilith’s flight wasn’t defiance,
but the first act of courage.
Eve’s apple wasn’t betrayal,
but the taste of freedom.
Pandora’s box wasn’t her curse—
it was her power.

Call us monsters,
call us wicked,
but know we are heroes
in a story you’ve never learned to read.

You call us cursed,
but we are creators.
You name us temptresses,
yet it is you who are tempted.
We never sinned for you,
we simply sinned.

How do your sins make you human…
and our sins make us villains?
Can you taste the hypocrisy in your judgments?

We are not your scapegoats,
not your nightmares,
not your excuses.

We are the ones who stood,
broke the silence,
chose the fire over the chains.
We are the breath of storm winds,
the hands that tilt the scales.
Each of us, a force untold,
each of us, a reckoning.

We are Medusa,
we are Lilith,
we are Eve,
we are Pandora.
Our stories are not your warnings—
They are your reminders
that we were never yours to name.

*

The Matador’s Skin

My former stepfather is a bull of a man.
Filled with rage and misunderstanding —
He stomps, breaks, and smashes,
Never fulfilled by the carnage. Always craving more.

I tried to play matador.
I put on my bravest face and waved a red flag,
Trying to coax that bull away from my mother and siblings.
I purposefully wore a target,
Hoping my distraction and subterfuge
Might save the rest of my family some hurt.

Every bruise a declaration of war,
My skin now the only ground left to fight on.
Beneath the surface, the fault lines tremble,
Waiting for the next eruption, the next battle scar.
Blood pooled beneath the skin like silent rebellions,
Each one a promise that peace was never an option.

I am not the kind of woman
Who wants to hold hate in her heart.
I want to forgive, to grow, to love.
But I can’t love or forgive a bull of a man
Who treated my family like a china shop
He lived to destroy.

*

Heather Kays memoir/family saga, Pieces of Us, explores her mother Emma Mae’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her upcoming YA novel, Lila’s Letters, follows a young woman finding strength and healing through unsent letters. Writing has been her passion since she was 7, and she also runs The Alchemists, an online writing group. Heather enjoys discussing storytelling, complex narratives, and the balance between creativity and marketing.