Tag: family

Four Poems by Hilary Sideris

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Treatment

If not for that need
I took for love & then

that shove, I wouldn’t have
married & divorced &

owed five years
of maintenance to my ex-

spouse whose accent
I found sexy till I didn’t.

I wouldn’t have been awake
at 3 AM to see that bug

traverse our coverlet
& watch the blood—mine?

his?—gush as I crushed it
between finger & thumb.

The toxic squad
wouldn’t have come &

sprayed our bed, treatment
for which I also paid.

*

Testosterone

Ground down like a soft
graphite stub in a hand-turned

sharpener, at night I count
backwards to the beginning

of divorce till boredom
overcomes remorse. How many

have been fired since cancer
research stalled? Fools in charge

confuse transgenic mice with
transgender men. My lawyer

Venmos a reminder to replenish
his retainer. U-Haul boxes

accrue dust, pile up like debts
beside my bed. Should I have

tried testosterone, purchased
a magnifying mirror, plucked

my upper lip & wanted sex
with my husband?

*

Shove

My cute nephew, a studious child,
has joined a frat, lifts weights,

drinks protein shakes. Last week
he shoved his mother when she

got up in his face—my little sister
isn’t asking for advice. I offer none.

Now’s not the time to say the man
I married hit his mom. What’s

worse, a husband or son’s shove?
She hopes he finds a girlfriend soon.

* 

Boomer Beach

I’ve only met you once,
for Thai, but you live on a beach
& I watch waves to meditate,
so I lie to my therapist,
drive to your gated community.
The surf, gnarly before an early

Nor’easter, churns up the Jersey
shore, its seawall higher, reinforced
since Hurricane Sandy. I take a picture—
not of us—of the wild rose hips,
their easy sway that says we’re all
fair game, but we’re still here.

After two glasses of Sancerre,
you talk at length about containing
hydrogen—not arrogance, I think,
just a man lost in his work.
You say you levitated in your youth,
show me a star-shaped scar

in your left palm, stitches between
finger & thumb, tell me about
the house in the California hills
you didn’t want to sell,
but the wildfires
burned closer every year.

*

Hilary Sideris is the author of the poetry collections Calliope (Broadstone Books, 2024), Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press, 2022), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press, 2020), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books, 2019), The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful LLC, 2016) and Most Likely to Die (Poets Wear Prada, 2014). Originally from Indiana and a longtime Brooklyn resident, she is a co-founder and curriculum developer for CUNY Start, a college preparatory program within the City University of New York.

Idioms by John Amen

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Idioms

My mother loved that saying, the devil’s in the details.
As a kid, I somehow figured that if the devil’s there,
god must be there, too. That would mean, as I saw it,
that the holy & unholy are tucked into the invisible,
playing tug of war or wrestling or high-fiving in the atoms,
in the sprawling fog you find when you
twist & twist that knob on a microscope,
infinite white sea emerging.
I asked my father about it once.
I’m not sure about devils & gods, he said,
that’s more your mother’s department.
Which didn’t tell me much, other than
highlighting the difference between my parents:
my mother who read a poem each morning,
my father who once told me that mythology annoyed him.
What peninsula did they meet on,
waltzing a thin line before veering
to opposite sides of the world,
stamping in their own private tides?
I pray, but I don’t know to whom,
perhaps some cauterized sense of self, a mind removed
from memory & habit. I still dream a small room
where my parents share a kiss & drop their weapons,
my father tossing his boxcutter, my mother her paring knife.
They could both land a cut that didn’t heal easily.
I have the scars from their respective
swipes, & I’m sure my own blade is a cross
between the two: a prop you can dice
logic with, retractable steel you can deny
having used when your lover is bleeding in the sheets.
& speaking of logic, a throatful of proofs
is gathering dust in a bathtub. On the other
side of the house, tomes, magazines never read,
tapped for the yard sale. I’m culling, clearing,
fattening a dumpster that stretches in the backyard,
a black hole oozing its own sensible music.
My parents would be dismayed & proud, they’d
hover over my shoulder, each telling me what I
should keep & discard. These decades later,
I still pace a line between my mother
lost in her galloping verse & my father
muttering over a blueprint. But something,
yes, something writhes in that white streak,
that mist I dive & dive into, groping to find
the silver dollar, the hidden gem. If a god’s there,
so is a devil, & now look, the three of us
splashing like tourists in an empty pool.
Or maybe it’s just me, in the depths, the heights,
alone, thinking the universe is mine.

*

John Amen was a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.

Mango Languages by John Arthur

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Mango Languages

on his deathbed he lay
learning Italian one phrase
at a time from a free app
I downloaded for him
from the public library.

my daughter asked him why
learn something new now, grandpa?
what’s the point?
I think you mean perché he said
and that was his final word.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. He is the 2025 Grand Prize winner of The Poetry Box’s chapbook contest for Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide, which will be released early in 2026. His work has appeared in Rattle, DIAGRAM, Failbetter, trampset, ONE ART, Frogpond, and many other places.

Tripping Over His Shadow by Todd Wynn

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Tripping Over His Shadow

Metallica pounded from his bedroom,
the pulse of every summer—
the beat in my chest
before I knew the words.

I stitched myself
to his right side,
adhesive as only
little brothers can be,
tripping constantly
over his shadow.

He turned our roof into a runway,
called the trash bag a parachute—
it wasn’t.
I rolled my ankle.
Didn’t try again.

He was five years ahead of me—
enough to outgrow things
before I grew into them.

One day, he traded
his rusted Huffy for car keys,
moved out at eighteen
with Metallica still playing.

His music stayed.
Everything else changed.

*

Todd Wynn is a pediatric nurse living in Mansfield, Ohio. He recently began writing poetry as a way of working through past grief and understanding how that has shaped the way he sees the world around him. His work has previously appeared in ONE ART.

Photograph of my Brother by Rob Cording

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Photograph of my Brother

Half-dressed, a pair of socks in my hand,
I’m looking at a photograph of my brother,
framed atop my dresser. Dead now five years,
he’s hunched over his phone, a beer nearby
on the table, looking up at the camera
with that grin that showed off his dimples.
I’m wondering who he was texting,
imagining his smart-ass reply to our mom,
so I don’t notice, at first, my daughter.
“Why do you like that picture so much?”
she asks. How to respond to such a question?
How to explain that I’m trying to imagine
the way his shoulders would’ve turned
as he looked up, to feel his strong hands,
clean in this picture, but usually flecked
with paint. How to say that I want
to remember the sound of his voice better
than I do? “Because he looks so happy,”
I tell her, closing the dresser drawer.
I sit on the edge of the bed, start
to put on my socks. My daughter is looking
at the picture now, when she turns and asks,
“But he doesn’t know he’s going to die, does he?”

*

Rob Cording teaches high school English in Boston, MA. Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from New Ohio Review, Tar River Review, and Here: a poetry journal.

Scattering by Rob Spillman

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Scattering

Like gods gathering
tiny psychedelic planets,
we brim the red bucket
with superballs

I and my boy, now a man,
just shy of twenty-three,
scoop up balls cracked
with age and love

On three we hurl the planets,
the superballs pinging
off white worn tiles,
tub, ceiling, ricocheting madly,
my boy a boy again,
bathtime chaos and joy

We will not miss
this small, crumbling space,
but see how we sob,
the decrescendoing superballs
slowly rolling to silence
one last time
in the only home
we’ve known
*

Rob Spillman was the editor of Tin House from 1999-2019. He is the author of the memoir All Tomorrow’s Parties.

What Use? by Tim Snyder

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What Use?

Suppose today is a house
you inherit, full of sharpened saws
and drill-bits. The worn blade of the shovel
with its smooth oak handle
and the garden rake with its missing tine
converse (you imagine) and fill the house
with their voices, leaning
against the basement wall near the back door.

Fatherless now, is your house
a sort of meandering from thought
to thought all day until night
and the stars sing their lullaby
of in-between-moments?
Or does the darkness between the stars
report the consequence
of your father’s home?

*

Tim Snyder, originally from Rochester, New York, lives with his wife in a small house on a narrow road with a dog and six cats in Northwestern Ohio. He divvies his time up working on his house, teaching composition, and interpreting for Deaf folks in his adoptive home state. He has published his poetry in journals such as The Poet’s Billow, Heartwood Literary Magazine, and The Albatross.

Three Poems by Melissa Fite Johnson

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Estranged Villanelle

For forty years, I shared only the good—
my mother and I in a booth every Thursday,
long talks that avoided my childhood

memories. I left out the times she stood,
threatened to walk out, so I’d beg her to stay.
For forty years, I shared only the good—

antiquing in a charming neighborhood,
new bakery, bridal shower, Sunday matinee.
Long talks that pretended my childhood

didn’t color outside the lines of my baby book.
Why did I participate in her little stage play?
For forty years, I shared only the good,

unspoken agreement that some things should
be private. With friends I knew what to say,
long talks that amended my childhood.

Everyone loved my mother. Who would
believe this other side of her, anyway?
So for forty years, I shared only the good,
even with myself. I discounted my childhood.

*

Preexisting Conditions

My brother wouldn’t get the vaccine.
My mother’s partner wouldn’t let her see my brother.
My mother begged my husband and me to fix it.

We tried. Three years of this.

My brother said big pharma.
My mother’s partner uninvited us from his life.
My mother canceled Christmas but still texted

How about a phone call on Christmas to your mother?

I got the text in the car, passenger seat.
I pressed my hand flat against the cold window.
I knew I would never call my mother again.

My husband and I were driving to the zoo,
a pandemic tradition we kept when the world returned.
Every night-disappeared tree now outlined in color,
a reverse silhouette. The familiar made strange.
The sloth’s head on backwards. The owl upside down.

*

Am I the Asshole

I ask my husband, I ask my best friend. They say no.
I say I’m burning it all down. They say I’m cutting the rot.
I say this is a poem and it’s all clichés so far. They say
nothing because now I’m alone, writing this poem.

My mother’s frown. My brother saying I was her little doll.
My classroom ceiling collapsing after reporting a leak for a year.
My mother taught me politeness and quiet. She taught
my brother entitlement and demands. It scares me

how impolite I’m being, not talking to my mother or brother,
quitting my job. Writing this poem. I should smile
and sip tea. I should break cookies into fourths
so it takes half a week to eat one fucking cookie. I should

tell the therapist it’s fine, I don’t remember either.
I should forgive my mother because I should not remember.

*

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Pleiades, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Melissa, a high school English teacher, is a poetry editor for The Weight, a journal for high school students, and Porcupine Lit, a journal by and for teachers. She and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, KS.

Love in People, Not Things by Laura Foley

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Love in People, Not Things

When my mother died, she left behind
few things in her one room
assisted living space.

Some clothes, of course,
and a worn black leather purse.
In it, I discovered,

wrapped in shiny silver paper,
a chocolate, with a message inside,
repeated in five languages,

a fortune candy,
Italian dark chocolate
crisped with hazelnuts, so

I ate it.
Alone in a room emptied of her,
holding almost nothing she owned,

I read and re-read
her last message to me.

*

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, American Life in Poetry, ONE ART, and included in anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

Meditation (Intermission) by Bonnie Naradzay

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Meditation (Intermission)

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

        — Marcus Aurelius

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

*

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

After My Brother Died in An Explosion by Terri Kirby Erickson

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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.

All My Relations by Nancy Huggett

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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.

Net Worth by Hilary Sideris

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Net Worth

I watch the news & file
my statement of net worth,
sign a retainer stating I won’t date
until divorced. Mom loves Sam,

a man my age who lives with her
(locked out of his wife’s house,
his name not on the deed).
No one has ever treated her so well.

Ecstatic to have someone to cook for,
she wonders what sex will be like.
My father wasn’t nice. I have his eyes,
& the bags under them. At church

folks talk. Sam promises he’ll build
a mansion soon, maybe they’ll move
to Spain. Incredulous, she tells me
He even finds my phone.

*

Hilary Sideris is the author of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press 2020), and Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press 2022.) Her new collection, Calliope, is now available from Broadstone. Sideris works as a professional developer for CUNY Start, a program for underserved, limited-income students at The City University of New York. She can be found online at hilarysiderispoetry.com

One Afternoon in Maine by Brooke Herter James

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One Afternoon in Maine

When my sister tells me
she needs therapy because of me,

she is lying on the old green sofa.
I thought we were talking together

about the northwest breeze,
the rosa rugosa, the possibility

of a lobster roll for lunch.
When my sister tells me

she needs therapy because of me,
I can’t think of a single thing to say.

I look out the window at the ocean,
wonder if it’s dead low tide,

if there is still time left
to get outside

and dig for clams.

*

Brooke Herter James is the winner of the 2024 Fish Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Rattle, Orbis, Tulip Tree Review and other publications. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks and one children’s picture book. She lives on a hillside in Vermont.

Telling dad the trials and tribulations of Atomic City (Minneapolis Radiation Oncology) by Alex Stolis

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Telling dad the trials and tribulations of Atomic City (Minneapolis Radiation Oncology)

Remember when I was thrown in jail, called you
to bail me out; what wasn’t said meant the most.

Remember when I got clean, was afraid to say so
even knowing you got sober when I was twelve,

and when finally, I mustered the courage you said
Been waiting for you, I’m glad you made it, son.

How we went to AA meetings together, then made
the rounds to all the local bars, nursing our Cokes,

reminiscing with old-timers who used to get drunk
in your bar. Remember how you’d tell them about

my fourteenth birthday, taking me out to Bridgeman’s
and I ate two hot fudge banana sundaes, and a burger.

Remember when my sister was hospitalized after her
third, fourth or sixth suicide attempt, you said to me,

you’re responsible for the effort, son, not the outcome;
or the time you explained to my soon-to-be-ex-wife

what it meant to drink yourself sober; she stormed off,
and we laughed because she didn’t want to understand.

Today, the doc told me that after seven weeks, thirty
-five radiation treatments, and ten months of meds,

I’m cancer free.

Sixteen years ago, I gave your eulogy at St. George’s,
pews filled with a legacy of strength, hope, promises

fulfilled. I’m still sober, still looking for direction;
still hear, well done, son, I’m proud of you.

*

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press.

Division by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

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Division

My father’s ashes bloom
as I pour them into a jar
once used for pickles,
the smell of spice and brine
embedded in the lid. He
liked his food “sharp,”
with a kick—black pepper
on oatmeal, hot sauce
on everything else, years
of smoking having blunted
his tastebuds. Now his dust
clings to my hands, settles
like spilled flour on my granite
countertops. How did I end up
in possession of his remains?

His stepdaughter, a woman
I met only twice
in thirty years, the eldest
of Wife Number Two,
(the one my father left
my mother for), wrote
to request a portion
so she and her kids—
who call him “Grandpa”—
could make a special trip
to the lake he loved, scatter
him where he’d taken them
sailing and for ice cream,
full family time every summer
of their youth.

I knew a different man
than the one they remember.
He worked late, arrived home
angry, spoke rarely. Family
vacations were long hot days
in a crammed station wagon,
siblings bickering, our private
miseries disguised by covert
slaps and jabs. Hotel pools
never cool enough, ice the only
thing we got for free.

Yet every time I smell
pipe smoke I reel, spun
by a need to pinpoint
the source of this longing
I was foolish enough
to think I’d outgrown.

Now I tighten the jar lid,
rinse my hands,
sponge the countertop,
the messy dust, the blowback,
the unburied residue of love.

*

Lynn Glicklich Cohen lives in Milwaukee. Her poetry has been published in Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, Cantos, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Front Range Review, Grand Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, The Phoenix, The Red Wheelbarrow, St. Katherine’s Review, Thin Air Magazine, Trampoline, Whistling Shade, and others.

Parallels: A Pseudo Cento by Jean Voneman Mikhail

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Parallels: A Pseudo Cento

          Texts between a son struggling
          with addiction and his mom.

i.

I am 21 years old. Stop tracking me.
I told you already,
I am somewhere on a huge bridge.
I walked out of Poetsmouth into Kentucky. Portsmouth, I mean.
I can see these huge fish in the river.
There’s this one really big fish.
I can see him on the bottom.
Then rain in my eyes.
I’m sorry, mom. I love you.
Can you Venmo me some water, Mama?
Can you Venmo me some Taco Bell, Mama?
No, I have not been doing meth.
No. I’m not on jack shit.
I am crying and my head hurts.
I can’t cry most of the time.
I am out of breath and sweating.
I don’t see any street signs.
I am so tired. I only see stop signs.
My eyes are so red and blurry.
No. I’m not high.
No. I haven’t taken klonopin
in like forever.
The lights are hurting my eyes.
I am scared to be alone, mom,
so I am begging on my knees.
Please, can I come home?
I know you don’t want me to.
I am so ready to get out of here.
I’m so tired of sober living.
I am so ready to be free.
My bed has been tilting.
I never have food.
I feel like I’m never
going to get out of here.
I just want to die.
Don’t worry if I don’t answer.
I am so scared to be alone.
I need friends. Like, Jesus Christ.
I’ve been calling him. He won’t answer.
Did he change his name, or what?

ii.

Maybe you’ve been grinding your teeth.
You need a nightguard.
Call the doctor again.
Call the court again.
I would try calling them again.
Just leave a message.
I wish I knew how to help you.
Just cry it out. You will be ok.
He will help you figure it out.
You’re not really alone.
You just need to decide.
I don’t know why you can’t see that.
Either you want to live or die.
Since you are using right now,
I can’t be around you.
I can’t be around drugs.
I’m sorry. I love you.
I’m not buying you anything.
But water? Ok.
Why are you on a bridge?
Can you stay in one place?
Like go somewhere and stay?
I will come get you.
Wait for me there. Please,
don’t go anywhere.

*

Jean Voneman Mikhail lives in Athens, Ohio, where she first came to study for a Masters in Creative Writing. Many years and a few kids later, she now writes more than ever. She has published in Sheila Na Gig Online, The Northern Appalachian Review, Pudding Magazine and other poetry journals and anthologies.

Missing Pearls by Lucy Dale

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Missing Pearls

I feel tension between my brows,
my mother smiles in the wedding
photo, perched upon our duo washer
and dryer. I’ve lost the pearl necklace
that lines her collar bone. I see
church ceremonies as taboo, I hate
the idea of wearing white, I do
not tell my mom about the pearls.
Observers say I am an image
of my mother. We have the same
eyes and the same crooked tooth.
Wiping dust from her smile, I reach
for the missing pearls, tightening
around my neck.

*

Lucy Dale is a sophomore at Denison University studying Creative Writing and Women’s & Gender Studies. She graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy, where she studied Creative Writing. Lucy is originally from Cleveland, OH. Her writing has been published in literary magazines such as Sink Hollow, Nebo, and The Allegheny Review. In 2024, she was the third-place recipient of the Annie MacNeill Poetry Competition.

Three Poems by Ann Kammerer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Robin

We sat around
my kitchen table,
my brothers in town
for Christmas,
Mom and Dad
long divorced
and dead
for decades.

They talked about
high school.
They talked about
sports.
They talked about
being All-Region
in baseball,
and how
they could’ve been
All-State,
if only Mom
had married
someone else.

“We would’ve
been better,” Freddie said.

“Yeah,” Charlie said.
“We would’ve been
All-Stars.”

Charlie drank.
Freddie smoked.
They went
back and forth
calling Mom an idiot
for not marrying
a college player
named Robin Roberts,
a stand-out pitcher
recruited by the Phillies
and enshrined
in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“She dated him you know.”
Charlie leaned in,
his head tipped,
his eyebrows raised
just like Dad
used to do
when he tried
to make a point.

“I doubt it,” I said.
“Like Mom made
things up.
You know.
To get Dad mad.”

Freddie leaned in, too,
his jaw squared.

“She wouldn’t lie
‘bout that.” he said.

Charlie nodded.
He rapped the table
with his knuckles.

“Yeah,” he said.
“She wouldn’t do that.
Never.”

They fixed
on each other,
their eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Freddie said.
“It could’ve been perfect.”

Reseating their baseball caps,
they listed the keepsakes
they found tucked away
in Mom’s dresser drawer,
the college programs
with Roberts’ name underlined,
the ’49 rookie card,
the mint condition
Topps and Bowmans,
and the ‘53 baseball mag,
with “Wonder Boy” Roberts
on the color cover,
sizing up his pitch.

“She had
everything,” Freddie said.
“All his cards,
all those stories,
all those things
about him,
about his kids,
about his wife.”

Freddie paused.
He blinked and looked
out the window.

“Like that could’ve
been us,” Charlie said.
“Imagine it.”

Chugging their beers,
they opened two more,
saying they could’ve had
a star-quality Dad,
someone who taught them
how to throw,
catch, and hit,
someone who
coached them,
instead of a dad
in worn suits
and scuffed wingtips
who never even
tossed them a pitch
when they played ball
with neighbor kids
in a fenced back yard.

*

Curation

Mom needed money.
Dad wouldn’t give
her any.
He said she spent
whatever she got
on stupid things
instead of what
she should.

Her friend Charlotte
told her to have
a garage sale.
She said Mom
would be surprised
at how much money
she could make.

“People like to buy
other people’s junk,” she said.
“I’m sure your husband
has a lot of it.”

Mom emptied cupboards
and rummaged through
dresser drawers.
She pillaged closets
and dug deep
into crannies
and crawl spaces.
She gathered anything
deemed useless
or useful,
not caring
whose it was,
just as long
as it would sell.

“No one’s gonna miss
this stuff,” she said.
“Especially your brothers.”

Freddie and Charlie
had moved out
the summer I finished
seventh grade,
getting an apartment
and taking college classes,
vying to avoid
the Vietnam draft.
They left stuff behind,
their closets jammed,
saying they’d come get things,
as soon as they were ready.

“If they wanted
this crap so bad
they would’ve taken it,” Mom said.
“Finders Keepers, right?”

We cleared their closets
and set things on
the scuffed plank floor,
creating a line-up
of boxes and bags.

Mom split the tape
and opened
a small cardboard box
labeled “CHARLIE’S CARDS.”

“Well looky here.”
Her eyes reflected
a colorful collection
of rectangular cards,
the ones paid for
with nickels and dimes,
originally packaged
with a stale stick
of pink powdery gum.

“I betcha there’s
a Mickey Mantle
in here,” Mom said.
“Or a Willie Mays.”

She held up each card,
looking for bends
or worn edges,
making stacks
of MVPs,
sluggers,
and pitchers,
a few catchers
in between.
Lopsided frowns
crossed her face
as she discarded
dispelled prospects
and hopefuls
in a jumbled pile.

“Help me,” she said.
“Let’s see
what we got.”

I set down my Coke
and stood beside her,
a light breeze
carrying the roar
of the distant highway.
Our fingers nimble,
our eyes fixed,
we worked in sync,
silently sorting
the cardboard portraits,
a curated gallery
of young men
in pinstripes
and ball caps,
poised on green fields
against the bluest of skies.

*

Rookie

My brother Charlie
got fired from his sales job
after getting too drunk
at a Christmas party
and spouting off.

“My boss had it
in for me,” he said.
“Everyone says
it’s bullshit.”

Charlie sat around
for a month.
He went to bars
and sat around
some more.
He got drunk
and called me
all the time,
ranting about
his ex-wife,
ranting about
some college girl
he picked up,
calling her a slut.

“I don’t want
to hear it,” I said.

Charlie got foul mouthed.
I hung up.
He called back.

“Hey.
Listen to me,” he said.
You’re supposed
to be my sister.”

I hung up again.
He kept calling back.
I turned off the phone.

Six months later,
Charlie ran out
of money,
his prospects dry,
his savings thin.
His phone got
disconnected
so I went by his house,
the lawn overgrown,
the front door
kicked in.

I found him
in the back room
sunk in a vinyl recliner,
ringed by beer cans,
empty chip bags,
and crusted-over bowls
of beans and franks.

“Why you here?”
Charlie stared
at an ancient TV
coated with dust.
“The Tigers,” he said.
“They’re on.”

A sour smell
hung in the air,
the carpet squishy
beneath my feet.
I pulled over
a folding chair
and sat for a minute
on the torn sticky seat,
asking how he was.

He lifted his filthy ball cap
and smoothed his
gray-blonde hair,
his skin sallow
with tungsten light.

“Doing good,” he said.
He dunked his hand
in a Styrofoam cooler
filled with melting ice
and Miller Light.
“You know, though,
I still can’t believe it.”

He looked at me
and shook his head.
I asked him what.

“You know what.”
Charlie slurred,
starting in again
about his baseball cards,
how he could’ve
cashed them in,
been rich,
if only Mom
hadn’t sold them
at that garage sale
years ago
when he was away
at college.

“Man oh man,” he said.
“Mickey Mantle.
Rod Carew.
Hank Aaron.
Plus all those
rookie cards.
Goddamn her.”

Charlie picked
at the cracked vinyl
on the arms of his chair.
He bit his dry lip
and said yepper yep,
once, then twice.

“Goddamn it.”
Rising in his seat,
his eyes blistering,
Charlie threw his beer
as a Tiger struck out,
ending the inning
one run behind,
with two men stranded
on base.

*

Ann Kammerer lives in the Chicago area, having relocated from her home state of Michigan. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are coming in Fictive Dream, One Art, Open Arts Forum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Major 7th Magazine, Workers Write!, Chiron Review, Thoughtful Dog, and Ekphrastic Review, and in anthologies by Crow Woods Publishing and Querencia Press. Her chapbook collections of narrative poetry include “Yesterday’s Playlist” (Bottlecap Press, 2023), “Beaut” (Kelsay Books, 2024), “Friends Once There” (Impspired, 2024), and “Someone Else” (Bottlecap Press, 2024). You can find her here: annkammerer.com

Two Poems by Melissa Surrette

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Walking a chair home from the Clark Community Thrift Store

One hypotenuse across
the Saint Peter’s parking lot
was the trip from our apartment
to the thrift store that once
was Monihan’s Pharmacy.
“Have you seen that chair
they have over there?”
My dad swooned on our
trip a few blocks beyond
to Tedeschi’s market
“I’m gonna ask to sit in it.”

Dad oscillates from his couch-
made-bed to a cracked dining
chair to watch the news.
In secondhand socks and shoes,
he skips at the sight of
weighty wooden
slabs for arms (3ft. x 3ft)
sandwiching slightly scratchy cushions,
bistre brown—color of my hair.
Dad’s perfection, kept at bay
“If only I had forty bucks,” he’d say.

“How much do you have?”
Danielle asks.
“I’ll do twenty-five,
if you do fifteen.”

Comfy chair, but more so
comforting to fulfill
Dad’s humble indulgence.
Two teens with summer
jobs and City money.
A flutter from diaphragm
to the back of my nose
when I imagine him in
a tweed-upholstered throne.

“I need a break,”
I sigh to Danielle
and rub blood back into
my throbbing fingers
a few parking spaces
from the sidewalk.

“Twenty bucks and I’ll take
that anywhere you want,”
says a truck driver on Main street.
We wave him off,
pick up our cargo.

“You go girls!” from the woman
who sits at the bus stop, but
never boards. She watches
us shuffle down a mulched slope
and past three doorways.

“For me?” asks my dad
as he helps us labor
down landing stairs
his considerable chair.

*

Two-player Rummy with Mom

A deck split in half
a riffle shuffle
a bridging back together.

Soap opera marathon on
The bureau mounted TV. Mountain
Dew bottle sits on the plastic
tote bucket made side table

to Mom’s king size bed set:
two twin box springs under a
mattress for one.
On her bed, she sits sidesaddle.

I sit on my left ankle. Right leg
dangles, not yet long enough
to touch the rose and cream
rug. Seven cards dealt per person

on Merlot sheets pulled
and tucked taut between
my knee and where she sits
facing me.

Her Five-Star spiral notebook
sits open beside us. She keeps
score between neat lists in
blue ink, strickenthrough to-dos:

Laundromat: Four basketball
jerseys for this week’s game
Family physicals: 3 youngest Thursday,
4 middles Friday.
Food pantry Wednesday:
Request Parmalat milk.
Cash Welfare checks: Stop
by housing authority afterward

*

Originally from Worcester, Massachusetts, Melissa Surrette is currently a PhD student at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) engaging in and researching teacher education. Before that, she earned her Master of Arts in Teaching at Clark University in Worcester, MA. She has contributed chapters to edited volumes such as Qualitative Inquiry in the Present Tense: Writing a New History and in the Demystifying Social Justice Education book series. Melissa has also co-authored a forthcoming article in the “International Review of Qualitative Research”. Melissa is a member of the Poem Works poetry group as well as the Round Table Poetry Workshop.

Admission by Livia Meneghin

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Admission

The mourning doves returned this May. Despite
last summer’s shooing & ammonium poured

onto the terrace floor. Despite a ramshackle
bicycle as the only shelter to roost beneath.

They first came the year our home was vacated.
I went north. My sister went south. My mother,

away in her own way, tended to her dying
parents a ten minute drive down the Bronx River.

I admit, I was angry with my mother for leaving
our apartment. The words taste of guilt

because so had I. She chose to stay in her
childhood home instead—where her parents,

one at a time, over countless sleepless nights
& all the love a daughter could give, left her.

When my mother returned, the doves joined her,
knowing she would admit them a nest. Now,

two eggs await life in a shallow swirl of twigs
& dry leaves. We, her daughters, build lives

elsewhere, slowly learn to give her permission
to grieve how she needs, & imagine—

she does not wish to disturb the birds
on the terrace, so she looks out the window, hoping

they will come into view.

*

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Reads Editor. She has won fellowships and awards from Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, the Writers’ Room of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA, she teaches college literature and writing. She is a cancer survivor.

Dear Daughter, by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Dear Daughter,

I see you in the store, rummaging
through a display of tacky hibiscus
hairclips, our town´s new fad
among fourth graders. You ask me
which color bedazzles above
all the rest. I was nine once, too.
I know you want to buy the one
that will garner the most compliments
on the playground, or a nod from a girl
who swatted you out of her path
like a delirious September wasp.
I know the stings you´ll bring home
again and again, deem unbearable.
I see you, shushing me when I speak
too loudly in the language everyone
in Spain is trying to learn. Tweaking
your American accent in English class
to sound like your friends. I know
all the gifts you´ll toss in your closet,
the smile you´ll wipe off your cheeks
like a ruby red lipstick print
when I drop you off half a block
from the school gate. At your age
I, too, tried on seven different attitudes
a week, all of them as becoming
as an elephant beetle. I see the gluten-thick
birthday cakes you can´t taste,
the gapes when you mention your two
moms. I know how you regard your
differences—a weird gang of gargoyles
marring an otherwise beautiful garden.
I want to shout, “You´re wrong!”
Dear daughter, slam the fads
on the counter and tornado away. Wild
your hair into a style that will drop
this decade´s jaw. Catwalk through town
in a hodgepodge, expletives be damned.
Cartwheel past the gatekeepers like
a carnival act. Learn the word for perfection
in 7000 different languages.

*

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,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. Her work appears in Chestnut Review, ONE ART, Rust + Moth, and Sky Island Journal, among others. Originally from California, she lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.

Three Poems by Jane Edna Mohler

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Rare Beasts

The surface is broken
by my boat,
the hard heads
of turtles, fish stretching
their limits,
and dead branches
that have nothing left to defend.
Then a snake.
I understand
those better-safe-
than-sorry turtles leaping
from their logs; curious carp
that briefly visit our dimension.
But this snake,
this nonchalant
swimmer with such composure
decides that I’m
of no concern.
Yet my heart pounds,
as when holding my breath
for scans of my organs,
or listening for what to expect
while counting backwards.
So when do I get
that devil-may-care spirit,
the glassy eyes
of that scarce species that never worries?
Maybe that snake’s heart
beat a little too fast
when he saw me coming.
And why do I hope that’s true?
Our kind
is always crashing
in the calm between two thorned
shores: the threat
we feel or the threat we are.
I raised my paddle high.

*

Ornithology Lessons

I.

My yard ripples
with blue jays, a throng
of little tyrannosaurs

screeching and shuffling
seed. Before consulting
Peterson’s, I offered

apple and peach parings.
All spurned. Now I know
those jays want berries.

Is it a trivial thing to learn
what pleases
another?

II.

Whenever Mother deemed
some effort worthless,
she’d wave an arm and say,

That’s for the birds.
With no propensity for parenting,
cowbirds leave their eggs

to the care of others. Yet
how those fledglings
strut, it’s all

sweet feed
and what’s right
now.

* 

She’s Always Hungry

Winter arrives with the blank
face of a runway model, languid

and sheer as the chiffon scarf
that drifts across her shoulders.

Bored by the heat of living,
she abhors the goo and mess.

Old German named her
the time of water.

She makes my lake crack
and groan. That crisp

look she gives, so alluring
you’ll ignore the chilly

clues of flat infatuation.
You don’t stand a chance.

An empty retreat that never serves
meals; she wants us to learn

the difference between hunger
and greed. Praise the rare blue sky,

the weak brushstrokes of charcoal
trees, but don’t fall for those sharp

bones that grin from under
her waxen skin. Prepare

a bed of crocuses, anxious
to spring from her grave.

* 

Jane Edna Mohler is the 2020 Bucks County Poet Laureate (Pennsylvania). Recent publications include MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Verse News, and Verse Virtual. Her collection, Broken Umbrellas was published by Kelsay (2019). She is Poetry Editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. www.janeednamohler.com

Two Poems by David B. Prather

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Caring for Someone Who Won’t Care for Themselves

My parents drop by again today,
and when I say today, I mean to put you in my frame
of mind, this moment. My father
              doesn’t even come into the house.
It’s the middle of summer. It’s morning,
and it’s already ninety degrees.
              He sits in the breezeway
while my mother opens the kitchen door
and enters. She’s just had her hair cut,
but she tugs on a few strands that were missed.
I get the scissors and clip the strays.
Have you ever trimmed your mother’s hair?
I foresee a time when this will be a weekly show
of affection, which will then become washing
              and toweling and brushing
every day. Putting her purse on the counter,
the one I bought her for Christmas,
she tells me my father still won’t take care of himself
the way he should. And when he’s my father, I know,
              and I’m sure you understand,
my mother is frustrated with him.
She wants him to live as long as possible.
I’ve begun to think of the world without my father.
I can’t say when the clock in my brain started
that countdown. Are you the kind of person
              who wakes before the alarm?
I have a habit of tapping the snooze button,
sleeping through those warnings.
I don’t want to imagine the worst, but I am unable to stop.
My mother says he’s troublesome, that he ignores
his own heart, the way it beats like a trapped bird.
How is your heart these days? Mine is a mourning dove.
              Mine calls out under the threat of rain.

*

When my mother asks why

I spend the entire day in bed,
I tell her I’m a dog who’s lost
his master, my paws stretched

across the grave, unmoved
when called by name, unresponsive
to that come-home whistle.

I tell her I am a tree fallen
in the forest, heartwood rotted out,
food for the parasites that brought me down.

I tell her the blankets are too heavy,
made of an element so dense
they drag me down

to the center of the earth.
I tell her the air is so oppressive, a giant
pressing down on my body, this body

I don’t even know anymore.
I tell her I want to be done
with this life, but I don’t want to be done,

but I do, then I don’t, and I do, I don’t.
I tell her I don’t know anyone
who wouldn’t want a day alone

under the covers with their dreams
tangled up in the sheets.
I tell her I’m adrift on a raft

over the deepest trench in the ocean,
and all around me is only horizon,
the line that divides one life from another.

*

David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2023), and the forthcoming Bending Light with Bare Hands (Fernwood Press). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, Gyroscope Review, etc. He lives in Parkersburg, WV. Website: www.davidbprather.com

Two Poems by Heather Swan

~ ONE ART ~ 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.

The Family I Just Met by Marianne Szlyk

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The Family I Just Met

Having seen only old country portraits
in the parlor, graduation pictures
without smiles, hectic-colored prints of saints
and martyrs, eyes rolling, hands clasped in prayer,

I thought that Dad’s side of the family
was grim. They came from behind the Curtain,
iron folds falling, about to slam shut.
Left behind, Dad’s uncle Alex was shot.

In the boxes of snapshots to unpack,
I found my grandfather’s laughter. He sat
in his low armchair, roaring at the show
Mom’s card-playing, movie-going folks loved.

It was Christmas. The war was long over.
He didn’t have to open his market,
butcher meat still in short supply, sweep floors
until you could have eaten off of them.

He could sit by the radio and snort
at the show my friends’ families in the Bronx
loved, laugh at the snapshots his children took:
Bobby throwing snowballs, my dad leaning,

taking a smoke break, dark sunglasses on,
Bobby a cowboy on the horsehair couch
while his sister Irene rolls her eyes, smokes,
and Rita sits close to Henry, her beau,

the young Polish man just home from the war.

*

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, Green Elephant, and ONE ART. Her fiction has appeared in Mad Swirl, Impspired, and Storyteller Poetry Review. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and I Dream of Empathy are available from Amazon and Bookshop. She and her husband, the writer Ethan Goffman, live with their black cat Tyler who likes to hang out with them while they write.

The Giveaway by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Giveaway

Some people call it downsizing.
Barbara simply calls it the next step
as she lightens the load she will carry
to the assisted living community
down the road from her home of thirty years.

She extends an invitation to loved ones
to come and choose items
from the living gallery she has curated
throughout her eighty-three years.

She gives me a quilt she made by hand.
To her daughter, the collection
of blown glass paperweights collected
with Charlie during their three-decade marriage.
To her brother, all the tools and gardening supplies
used for a lifetime of spring plantings,
and their mom’s mixing bowl that he cherishes
even though he never bakes.

Every gift comes wrapped in a story,
and as they are carried out to various cars,
she smiles and nods approval,
each item a liberation.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. 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 forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in 2025. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Two Poems by Michael J. LaFrancis

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Assisted Living

Nan’s mother told her
she would not die from rust;

rather, she will pass away
when her life is all used up.

Her mother would live on
in her own home until she fell

out of it at ninety-three,
more than twenty years later.

Nan always said advice has to fit
the stage of life you are living in. Now

a nonagenarian herself, these words
are inspiring her. Nan has taken up

oil painting, bead making, praying on
rosary beads, calling neighbors by name.

After her husband of sixty-two years
gave up his spirit, she went to the cafeteria

at breakfast; the whole room came over
to extend condolences. Her heart heard

God’s promise—my house has many rooms,
I will prepare a place for you.

*

Cathedrals

We are centered,
in an ancient ecosystem,
of towering columns and spires
that seem to open heaven’s gate.

They are wearing a course red bark,
that can be one to two feet thick,
protecting their heartwood from fire,
Lucifer’s or anyone else’s.

They are fulfilling their promise,
with a quiet reverence, like apostles.
Their dark green and white ceilings
filter light, like stained glass windows.

Their parish is a connected community,
families surrounding proud parents;
some that have passed away.
Each is a resurrection from ashes and soot.

*

Michael J. LaFrancis is a trusted advisor, advocate, author and connector supporting individuals, groups and organizations aligning purpose and capabilities in service of their highest ideals. Writing poetry is a contemplative practice providing him with insight and inspiration for living a creative life. His poems are appearing in The City Key, Mocking Owl and Amethyst Review in the coming months.

LaFrancis’ hobbies include landscape gardening, nature walks, collecting fine art and writing. He and his partner Sharon are co-authors of their autobiography: Our Wonderful Life. They have two sons and have recently been promoted to being grandparents.

@michaeljlafrancis on Instagram

Two Poems by Rachel Marie Patterson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Stonetown Road

Sunday, black coffee and
rectangles of dishwasher soap.
We get the call at 10:30—
my mother-in-law fell hard
on the kitchen floor.
So we race two hours north
to find her in a mechanical bed,
two staples in her head,
asking every nurse to take her
for a cigarette. When I ask,
she can’t remember whether
she chewed the aspirin.
Outside the security glass,
a hawk surveys the embankment.
The night we met, I howled
with laughter as she gripped
my sleeve with a gauzy, manicured
hand. Her eyes were as clear
as the lake behind us. How
my husband gushed and beamed.
His mother used to write cards
and keep appointments, before
her pretty cursive looped away
to oblivion. In the ICU, he leans
to kiss her bloody forehead.
I know now I will watch him
lose her, slowly. Driving back,
we pass his childhood home–
the natural pool full of snakes.

*

Emergency Vet

When the dog stops blinking, I wrap
her in a towel and swerve the highway,
one palm cupping her distended bowel.
In the cement waiting room, black
coffee in a styrofoam cup. I stare
at the framed canine dental chart
while they thread the catheter and split
her open. Remember how she ate tissues
from the trash because they were mine,
wore circles into my bedroom carpet.
For 13 years, she followed me
from home to home, licking the salt
from my eyes. Now, there is nothing
to do but leave her.

*

Rachel Marie Patterson is the co-founder and editor of Radar Poetry. She holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro. Her poems appear in Cimarron Review, Harpur Palate, New Plains Review, The Journal, Thrush, Parcel Magazine, Smartish Pace, and others. The winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, her work has also been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Her poem “Connemara” was a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize in 2019. She is the author of Tall Grass With Violence (FutureCycle Press, 2022).

What My Family Never Talked About by Sue Ellen Thompson

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What My Family Never Talked About

Why my mother came home from the hospital
with a flat stomach and put the bassinet
back in the attic. When my Aunt Ginna
divorced Uncle Charlie—they showed up together
at family gatherings for decades, so how
would we know? Or the summer my sister
was planning her wedding—what went on
in the spare room so late at night
with our handsome Australian houseguest.
When my nephew first started walking,
he held a coat hanger straight-armed
in front of him, as if he were dowsing
for water. But no one ever mentioned
autism or suggested that his behavior
was anything other than fine.

If I asked my mother—gone 22 years
now—to please explain, she would use
the same gesture employed when a fly
dared to enter the kitchen where she
was preparing our dinner—as if to say Nothing
could be less important. Now please
set the table and call in your brothers to eat.

*

Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of six books, most recently SEA NETTLES: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Grayson Books, 2022) and the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1st ed.). She has won a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda/Nimrod Hardman Award, two individual artist’s grants from the State of CT, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Thompson teaches at The Writer’s Center in Washington, D.C., and received the 2010 Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association.

Three Poems by Michelle Meyer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

We Were Just Getting to Know Each Other

And then you died.
It was September. When I saw you
in April we put on your dresses,
adorned our bare necks
with your handmade scarves
and drove, windows down,
to a concert.
Before we left
I took your picture.
You were seated
in the dining room
looking out the window,
face turned, legs crossed,
the sun, a halo
circling your body.
There was one photo that you liked
best. In it, your image was blurred,
hazy around the edges, faint
as your ghost.

*

The Way It Is

I’m running. It’s the anniversary
of my mother’s death
and I’m a few miles out when I stop
to take in the view.
Somewhere I hear a rooster crowing
and somewhere else a siren
is wailing.

My Grandma used to smoke Marlboro’s,
drink Manhattan’s and say,
That’s the way it is. A lazy answer
to her bruises, the world’s bruises,
but then again, she could only bear to live
in the moment and in those moments
she wasn’t wrong.

I run further, see a purple morning glory
blooming near a discarded styrofoam cup,
an overstory of green shimmering
above an understory of brown.
There is a visible line
where the chemicals end, where life hovers
above death.

Everything is straddling some kind of line.

Mom is dead. Grandma is dead.
The tiny, nearly translucent spider
that I squashed with the tip of my thumb
is dead.
I had no right.
I am full of shame
but that’s the way it is.

* 

The Question of Whether or Not We Should Sell Our House

One day it feels like we should
and the next day it feels like we shouldn’t.
We speak of the pros and cons,
but logic has never lived here.
This is a place of romance and charm
say all of the eager realtors
whose calls we never return.
My dark-haired ambition has gone gray.
I’ve lost control
of two out of the five flower gardens.
It’s your prairie, says a friend,
and I remember how the goldenrod bloomed
at our wedding. My anxiety wilts.
I’m the only one who can see it
turning to seed, drifting away,
replanting itself in a daydream.
The one where I am sitting by a lake,
reading a book and all the sailboats
are unmoored.

*

Michelle Meyer is the author of The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child (2024, Cornerstone Press) and The Book of She (2021), a collection of persona poems devoted to women. Recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Humana Obscura, Remington Review, Under Her Eye: A Blackspot Books Anthology, and Welter among others. She is one of those people who loves kale.

The Only Photo by Arvilla Fee

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Only Photo

There’s a picture of me and my mother
I mean, technically, you can’t see me,

although you can see the outline of my form
curled as I was in utero;

but my mother—you can clearly see,
tall, legs like a giraffe, standing on the front porch

near a trellis of plump red roses, dressed in a t-shirt
and shorts; she has a sprinkle of freckles on her nose,

(which I inherited) and long strawberry-blonde hair;
her hand is tented across her forehead, shading

her gray-green eyes from the glare of the sun, and
she’s grinning like a cat who swallowed the canary—

perhaps because my father told one of his pre-dad
jokes—or perhaps because she was still snickering

about putting a plastic snake beside his coffee cup
(a story my dad has told me a thousand times),

or perhaps her sunlit smile was because she knew
I would push my way into the world in just one week;

but no one could know, of course, least of all her,
this would be the only picture I’d ever have of us.

*

Arvilla Fee lives in Dayton, Ohio, teaches English, and is the managing editor for The San Antonio Review. She has had poems, photography, and short stories published in Mudlark, North of Oxford, Drifting Sands Haibun, Triggerfish Critical Review, Cholla Needles, Havik, October Hill Magazine and many other presses. Her poetry books, The Human Side and This is Life can be found on Amazon. To learn more, visit Arvilla’s website.

Daffodils in February by Vivienne Popperl

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Daffodils in February

Some February days,
breathing in Portland
is like inhaling
champagne bubbles.
The sky is a sheer
innocent blue,
crocuses purple
in the sun, daffodils
coaxed golden,
play the wind.

February in Cleveland
the soil is still so cold.
New life is pressed
deep underground.
The sky spreads so thin,
a fragile skin,
stretched between
indifferent clouds.

My mother breathed
her last breath
in Cleveland
in February.
I was not at her side.
I sent daffodils.

*

Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Cirque, Rain Magazine, About Place Journal, and other publications. She was poetry co-editor for the Fall 2017 edition of VoiceCatcher. She received both second place and an honorable mention in the 2021 Kay Snow awards poetry category by Willamette Writers and second place in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Spring 2022 contest “Members Only” category. Her first collection, A Nest in the Heart, was published by The Poetry Box in April, 2022.

At the MoMA, With My Sister and Without My Glasses by A. A. Gunther

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

At the MoMA, With My Sister and Without My Glasses

I say
I love the way—
You grab my wrist:

Don’t put it into
words, don’t get it
twisted,

It just needs to exist.

So here I am, unmoored at the
museum,
Squinting at shapes arising in my vision
Like clifftops in the mist,
My eyes unlensed, imbibing the horizons
Of oddly-lighted rooms.
Of wire looms festooned with metal scraps,
Of dangled circuits lapsing into lassos,
Of crosshatched gray and black,
Of persons in long jackets
who murmur words like “angular” at the Picassos,

Trying to stop my words
From tangling round the things before I see them—
Their imprecision, their syllabic gallop,
The sleaze of them, like greasy bacon wrapped around a scallop,
Negating what they promise to enhance
With appetizer’s, advertiser’s, ease:
The cunning of them, running interference
Between the naked eye and the appearance,
Subtracting the refraction of a glance.

*

A. A. Gunther is a legal writer living in Long Island, New York. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and Literature from the Harvard University Extension School, and her short story “Baby Teeth” appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of Dappled Things. No art museum will be the same to her until her sister comes back from Germany.

Four Poems by Linda Laderman

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My Mother Holds Her Grief

like a collection of precious stones in a plum pouch. I watch her untie its silk strings & spread the stones across her satin sheets. She separates them by color & holds a cerulean blue with faceted edges up to the light. She rubs it over her body & lingers on her thigh, then takes a red thread & wraps it around. She hangs it from her neck, an amulet to hold her grief. She teaches me to hold her grief too, says it’s as easy as making a bed. Hold it there, fold it here, tuck the corners under. Always tuck the corners under. I sit beside her bed. She gives me a turquoise, cool and smooth. When she turns away, I rub it on my thigh & tuck it under the corner.

*

I should have left you first

but I waited until autumn’s red birds scattered
their seeds, giving way to a bitter winter, expected,

but holding out for a thaw. I waited for the peony,
pale pink, to emerge from the mound of dirt

near our doorstep, dependable, a return to life.
I waited for the blood moon to reveal itself, hopeful

it could be seen through earth’s hazy gaze—
I waited for spring’s rainy season to clear,

though June, being unseasonably stingy,
refused to cede a day without a downpour.

on summer’s cusp, I woke from a half sleep,
my skin drenched in knowing. still, my eyes

stayed shut, until the blue-black night found me.
I waited until the days stretched, the sun set late,

temperatures rose, and the duck in the Hosta
vanished, leaving a gap strewn with leaves and grass,

her batch of eggs hatched and ready to fly. I waited
until the children left, filled with illusions of time,

as if life was forever—a chance to do what I couldn’t.
I waited for your infatuations to wane, but they didn’t.

I waited for the first freeze, then blew my breath
into the icy vapor, kissing winter’s frosted air.

thinking, if I waited long enough, my haunted dreams
would disappear. and you did.

*

When We Dance

We dance on the hardwood floor. His white hair lays
        bare my memories. The nights that lasted until morning.

The sound of Detroit Jazz pushes us. Belgrave, Franklin, Carter.
        I turn it up. I’m wound. Our arms zig and zag, two old saws.

I hip bump him, snap my fingers. He lets out a surprised
        laugh and twists me around our kitchen. I let him do it.

We twirl. His face is red, shy, like a boy. I want to seduce him,
        but I don’t know. I’ve gotten used to not having.

My breath is hard. My hands sweat. I wonder if he took a Viagra.
        I take his arm. Purple blotches stain his skin. Mottled by time.

In the morning, I ask if he remembers when each day took its time.
        How we craved a chance to hear the silence.

Now, I store time in a stone. I step over its power to fool.
        When I feel regret, I sink into a place with no light.

*

Fine China

I worry that my last poem will be my last poem. Let’s talk about quatrains. I create a series of prompts, a list of lines. I’m exhausted from nothing. I list nothings. Nothing good can come from this. Can all this be for nothing? She has nothing on you, You know nothing about me. Only lines stacked, like my fine china, packed away, forgotten as the drop of dried cranberry stuck under the rim. I take the place settings out of the basement cabinet, sit on the cold concrete floor, and remove the felt separators. Nothing. I focus on the memories the dishes hold. An ekphrastic after the matching teapot? Nothing. Empty, like the dishes. I bring two place settings upstairs to soak. I shop for a roasting chicken, red potatoes, baby carrots, and a brown sugar pecan pie. If I can’t write, I’ll fill the damn plates.

*

Linda Laderman is a Michigan writer and poet. She is the 2023 recipient of The Jewish Woman’s Prize from Harbor Review. Her micro-chapbook, “What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know” will be published online at Harbor Review in September, 2023. Her poetry has appeared in The Gyroscope Review, The Jewish Literary Journal, SWWIM, ONE ART, Poetica Magazine, and Rust & Moth, among others. She has work forthcoming in Thimble Literary Magazine and Minyan Magazine. For nearly a decade, she volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Find her at lindaladerman.com

What I Loved by Robbi Nester

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What I Loved

As a child, I often visited my grandmother and cousins
in West Oak Lane, straight lines of dark brick rowhomes,
old trees, so wide you couldn’t get your arms around them.
In summer, people sat out on the stoop and watched
neighbors in their somber suits and hats parade
to service in the tiny synagogue where my uncle
served as sexton. In the back of each house, there was
an open space, a paradise of gardens, some gated.
I loved the ones with a reflecting ball, precisely
in the center, mirroring the bees and sulfur yellow
butterflies. I thought I saw some other country
there, one that I’d explore on some dull day
when my cousins were busy with their chores
or their piano lessons, and I was left to roller
skate for hours on the cracked concrete behind
their house. I didn’t like the other decorations—
plastic flamingos or painted plaster gnomes,
objects with no mystery about them, far preferred
to peer between the iron filagree or wooden slats,
pretending that I stood on soft green grass
instead of forever banished, on the other side.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry and editor of three anthologies. She is a retired college educator and elected member of the Academy of American Poets. Her website is at http://www.RobbiNester.net

One Poem by Sally Zakariya

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Animal Talk

She used to lie down in the field
and listen to the horses talking—
squeals, snorts, nickers, neighs
plus ear language, turns and twists

They told jokes to each other
made me feel like part of the family
my almost-sister told me years later

I live on an island, she says, literally
but also metaphorically

And still with animals, chickens
and dogs now and a crow named Luis
all talking to her, telling her
stories and secrets

We’re all alive together, she says

I picture her swathed in feathers
and fur, turning an ear to the bubbly
talk of the fish who circle her island
all alive together

*

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 80 print and online journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is Something Like a Life (Gyroscope Press). She is also the author of Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table. Zakariya blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

On a hike up the back mountain by Melody Wang

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

On a hike up the back mountain

my mother told me a story of a goose
shot down from the sky by a hunter’s single bullet:

its mate, stunned by the death of his beloved,
hurled himself headfirst into the rocks below

at dizzying speed, yielding the hunter two geese —
I can only picture the weight of his bounty that day.

Some of us never know when
just enough becomes too much

exactly how much pressure it requires
to hold a heart in your cupped hands, still

frantic from overuse, cool and slick
with the aftermath of someone else’s longing

*
Melody Wang currently resides in sunny Southern California with her dear husband. In her free time, she dabbles in piano composition and also enjoys hiking, baking, and playing with her dogs. She can be found on Twitter @MelodyOfMusings.

My Heart is a Shattered Windshield by Victoria Melekian

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My Heart is a Shattered Windshield

Four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, I’ve driven
three hours to a Best Western in the crappy part of town
for my son’s doctor appointment in the morning.
The desk clerk asks if I’m here on business or pleasure.

I look at the mangled Von’s grocery cart in the empty parking lot
through smudges on the glass lobby door. “Pleasure,” I say,
but the truth is neither. Untreated, my son’s life expectancy
is two point eight years. His disease can be managed,

but not cured, and the cost of medication is near impossible.
The truth is we’ve waited thirteen months for insurance
approval to see this specialist. The truth is I’m a howling
windstorm of fear—my boy is thirty-seven, not even middle aged.

I don’t yet know there is hope, that tomorrow the doctor will reach
into a drawer and toss my son a six-thousand-dollar miracle drug,
a bottle of pills lobbed across his desk like a red and yellow
beach ball sailing through a shimmering summer sky.

*

Victoria Melekian lives in Carlsbad, California where the weather is almost always perfect. She writes poetry and short fiction. You can read her work here: www.victoriamelekian.com

Two Poems by Rebecca Starks

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NIGHT VISION

In those moments I fumbled in the dark
you were the dog from the Atsugewi tale
bringing back fire cupped in coal-black ears,
lop-tips parrying buffets of rain
while you suffered pain sparks to burrow overnight,
pawing the coals out for me to cook with
once morning stole in. Then you disappear
from the telling, like a fire left to burn down:
the people praise the food and go out hunting.
How still you stood, the bright weave behind your eyes
letting no light escape.

*

SURROGATE

Midwinter saw a tug-of-war, my son
pulling me into the womb he wouldn’t leave.
When we first came home I had expected you
to wonder at the miracle—me, baby;
but after one sniff you gave him a wide berth
and lay Sphinx-pawed, back to the open doorway.
Conscientious objector? Ceding your place?
Standing guard? I suspect you didn’t know
yourself what instinct had kicked in, and with it
lassitude, ennui you’d always known
just what to do. Not me.

*

Rebecca Starks is the author of the poetry collections Time Is Always Now, a finalist for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, and Fetch, Muse (forthcoming from Able Muse Press), and is the recipient of Rattle’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Valparaiso Review, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Slice, and elsewhere. She lives in Richmond, Vermont.

Unstuck by Brian O’Sullivan

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Unstuck

Is there a newsreel, dear?,
Mom asks in the darkened cinema, her voice bubbly,
and I want to tell her there are no newsreels anymore—
Edsels are gone and flying DeLoreans are coming—
but I know for her newsreels are
now, and,
breathing buttered popcorn,
I feel my hand clenching under my seat’s arm,
picking at dried bubble gum, and
I don’t want her to hear sirens, so, as the screen flickers, I, smiling though tightened jaws,
whisper back, No newsreel today, Mom.
              But watch!

*

Brian O’Sullivan teaches rhetoric and English literature in southern Maryland. He has published in Everyday Fiction and in academic non-fiction periodicals, including KB and Studies in American Humor.

After My Father Died by Sara Backer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

After My Father Died

I longed to spend time with him in a dream
but over two years passed without one. I’m afraid I’ll forget
how he whistled Cole Porter and the way he squeezed
his eyes when he stuttered on Ws. When a dream came at last,
I heard his voice—but couldn’t see him.
I looked around: an outdoor festival, stage tents, musicians.
My sister waited in one of the tents. My father, invisible,
said I could continue to hear him or I could be with my sister.
The choice was presented like chicken or fish—no other options,
I couldn’t have both, and it was up to me.
I looked beyond stages to overlapping hills streaked with mist.
Too far to see, I knew a weighty ocean rolled indifferent through its tides.
Nothing more was voiced. As I walked to the tent,
I saw my sister’s thick blue sweater on the seat beside her,
saved for me.

*
Sara Backer’s first book of poetry, Such Luck (Flowstone Press 2019) follows two poetry chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press) and Bicycle Lotus which won the 2015 Turtle Island chapbook award. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art and reads for The Maine Review. Recent publications include The Pedestal Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Slant, CutBank and Kenyon Review.

It Takes a Calculator to Count the Dead by Leigh Chadwick

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It Takes a Calculator to Count the Dead

The sun bakes an island on the concrete.
I wake up to the smell of sulfur.
The magnolias in the yard are refusing to bloom.
I never know where to rest my hands anymore.
Between starting this poem on a Friday
and finishing it on a Monday, there have been
at least eleven more mass shootings.
I consider praying, but I was never taught how.
I dress my daughter in camouflage
and carry her from room to room. I tell her,
I’m sorry I brought you into this.
I tell her, Pretend a miracle is on its way.
I tell her, Maybe this is how we
learn how to pray.

Leigh Chadwick’s poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Milk Candy Review, Olney Magazine, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Bear Creek Gazette, among others. Her debut poetry collection, Wound Channels, will be published by ELJ Editions in February of 2022. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.

A Poet’s Mother Dies from Covid by Le Hinton

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

A Poet’s Mother Dies from Covid

No one inherits eloquent words nor leases the brilliance
of a perfect sonnet transcribed onto parchment in blue ink.

I speak no language that elevates each syllable so that every
word will be remembered alongside the dead.

It is a myth that poets possess inexhaustible grace
and passion, or feel more deeply than other human bodies.

There is no hidden box, dovetailed jointed, stained and polished,
that holds the perfect magic of metaphor and meter.

There is only a man standing mute over granite,
only a boy who misses his mom.

*

Le Hinton is the author of six poetry collections including, most recently, Sing Silence (Iris G. Press, 2018). His work can be found or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2014, The Progressive Magazine, the Skinny Poetry Journal, The Baltimore Review, The Pittsburgh Review, and outside Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Set by Ralph James Savarese

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Set

I’ve broken so
many bones,
that the word
fracture might
as well be father.
I love you, fracture…
Each cast was
a coffin, and home
room, a kind of wake
where the mourners
signed my body.
Punning, the doctor
said, “You’re all set!”
Every femur
needs a foster
placement.

*

Ralph James Savarese is the author of three collections of poetry: Republican Fathers; When This Is Over; and, with Stephen Kuusisto, Someone Falls Overboard: Talking through Poems.

Two Poems by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Kavod HaMet*

I circle among my dead,
trying not to neglect anyone.
What can I say of those
I have never known?
Even my mother eludes me,
her mind ever hidden
in shadows. We all flee
when we imagine danger,
acquiring a taste
for what can be carried,
the weight of the unrisen.

*honoring the dead

*

Bearing Water

To wash dust from jagged leaves
I turn the hose on the hibiscus.
Shriveled flowers fall to dirt,
water drips into soil, roots
reach for a sip, when suddenly
a moth, its rusty wings heavy
with moisture, fanning the same water
into steam, flutters to the earth,
damned while new buds open.
Some feel my intentions as mercy,
others nearly drown.

*

Betsy Mars practices poetry, photography, pet maintenance, and publishes an occasional anthology through Kingly Street Press. Her second anthology, Floored, is now available on Amazon. In 2020, her poem was selected as a winner in Alexandria Quarterly´s first line poetry contest series. In addition, she was a semi-finalist in the Jack Grapes poetry contest as well as the Poetry Super Highway annual contest. Her work has recently appeared in Sky Island Journal, Kissing Dynamite, Better Than Starbucks, and Gyroscope among others. She is the author of Alinea (Picture Show Press) and co-author of In the Muddle of the Night with Alan Walowitz (Arroyo Seco Press).

My Mother’s Coat on a Stranger (Phone Call with My Sister) by James Harms

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

My Mother’s Coat on a Stranger (Phone Call with My Sister)

No way, really?
Was it the blue one? The puffy one
she wore those last few years
that matched her eyes
sort of too much, as if
everything about her, her entire
presence was staring at you?
You think the woman bought it
at Goodwill? Do you remember
calling me from the drive-thru drop-off
sobbing about the teenage girl
who’d taken the bags of clothes
from the trunk, how you stood there
crying as she quietly lifted each
one and walked them through
the automatic sliding glass doors?
You told me, she had a nose ring
and lilac hair, remember?
Was she taller or shorter
than Mom, the lady wearing her coat?
Do you think Goodwill waits
a while before selling the clothes
of the dead; I mean it’s been almost
a year? Talk about a grace period.
Can you imagine seeing
her coat on some person crossing
the street in front of your car
a day or two after you donated it,
a week or two after she died?
Would you honk
or hit the gas? Or would you just
sit there long after the light
turned green and cry? Yeah,
me, too. A lot of green lights.

*

James Harms is the author of ten books including, most recently, ROWING WITH WINGS (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2017).

Persimmon Tree by Doeun (Jessica) Kim

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Persimmon Tree

A grandmother sits on a layer of newspaper
beside piles of flattened cardboard boxes.
The cold coats the palm of her hands
like a thin glove, slowly numbing the crevices of her fingers.
Dry flakes of skin dress her wrinkled knuckles
as she remembers her grandson
who would crouch beneath a persimmon tree.
The bright orange hue of the fruit glowed
amongst the frail branches.
She taught him how to trace the bruises
and pick out the ones with the smoothest skin.
She’d wipe off shreds of soft persimmon flesh
that lingered on the corner of his mouth.
This story of bliss splinters
when the feeling of warmth curl around her body
is forgotten and the cadence of her breath weakens.
She wishes memories were like books,
remaining on shelves for one to open,
over and over again.

*

Doeun (Jessica) Kim is a South Korean currently studying in the Philippines. Her work has been recognised by Austin Poets International, Cathartic Youth and Isacoustic among others. During her free time, she enjoys doing contemporary dance.

Two poems by Carla Sarett

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They Made Wars

We drank sweet Turkish coffee
and talked long into the night
of mothers who lost children in cities,
who locked them out of houses in thick rain,
who foresaw snow on a warm spring day,
how snow fell after their words.

By dawn, we forgot which stories
we had told and which we had forgotten
in the eagerness of our first revelations.

By starlight, we whispered our terrors:
Giant mothers outgrew houses.
They made wars without anyone noticing.

We never mentioned fathers.
Those pale and harried men.

*

no one says it

Deirdre’s sending
love w/ exclamation points
love! love! love!
John texts it (love)
no point wanting
a love letter she knows
that’s not the #love
they’re sending
& that song
love love love
all you need is
not the #love
she needs

*

Carla Sarett’s recent poem appear or are forthcoming in Blue Unicorn, The Virginia Normal, San Pedro River Review, The Remington Review, Sylvia, Words and Whispers and elsewhere. Her novella, The Looking Glass, will be published in October (Propertius); and A Closet Feminist, a full-length novel, will appear in 2022 (Unsolicited Press.) Carla lives in San Francisco.

Spelling Things Out by Elaine Sorrentino

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Spelling Things Out

It was a liberating Scrabble game;
she loved me, this woman who was my mother
yet not my mother,

soothing her burdened heart with a sip of gimlet
she confesses I cannot believe my son
does not want his little piece of the sod,

and as she places the tiles for ABSOLVE
on the triple word score, for 45 points,
her surprising instructions set me free,

If you find someone
who makes you happier than my son,
go with him.

*

Elaine Sorrentino is Communications Director at South Shore Conservatory in Hingham, MA. Her work has been published in Minerva Rising, Willawaw Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Global Poemic, The Writers’ Magazine, Haiku Universe, Failed Haiku, and has won the monthly poetry challenge at wildamorris.blogspot.com.

Four Poems by Sandra Kohler

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Having lost it…

When I tell my therapist about having lost it completely three days ago
when my husband gets angry at me because I’ve left a cabinet door open
and he bangs his head on it, says it’s something I’ve done before, I
tell her I don’t understand what set me off so completely, so that
I scream I can’t stand it, threaten to leave, to kill myself, outrageous
unforgivable behavior, and why, all because of his understandable
irritation at the end of a long siege of frustrations, stress, anxiety
in these awful pandemic days.

What was this about, I ask, and she asks me. “My mother,” I say. That
answer that we all come up with in the end, unless it’s “my father.” But
for me, it was her, not him. And somehow, I don’t know how, I have
reached, in these days, a kind of grim unrecognized decision: I reject
her definition of me, my life. I don’t want ever again to feel guilty or
unworthy or incompetent, I am done, finally, with apologizing for my
existence.

*

Recognition

I’m thinking this morning, as I often
do, of my wish that my husband and I
had known each other decades earlier,
ages before we met, middle-aged, with
years of living behind each of us. But
today for the first time I realize I’ve been
wrong, we do have that knowledge.

Each of us still carries the young self
we were inside, bringing a childhood,
a parentage, family, first marriage, years
of living adult lives. Here and now, in
the present, we see, hear, feel aspects of
that life, that person in the other. Here
and now, in this relationship, we are
each all the selves we’ve ever been.

*

Vanishing

Climbing a steep hill of iced-over
snow in front of a public building,
library of some kind, I know I have
to extract one book from the depths
of the mound, it’s what I’m here for.
The rest has vanished. We vanish
and don’t. We are alive in the dreams
of others, or dead, dreams which may
be closer to nightmare than dream,
or not. We are strange familiar ghosts
becoming apparitions, visitations.

I lose a hearing aid, the key to my
house, an hour, a morning, a slip of
paper with the name of the nostrum
that could save me, a child’s first all-
accepting love, a friendship that was
never whole but whose fractures still
beckoned. I lose my sense of humor,
my sense of proportion, my way,
my whereabouts, my why.

Do I have anything left to say? Of
course. Do I know how to say it? Of
course not. It’s the not which gives me
the knot to unpick, whose threads can
be woven into patches, forming a
patchwork which can be sewn into
a fabric which will be a statement
of something I don’t know I know.

*

What Follows

After ten years of living here, I still
don’t know the weather, its patterns,
where it comes from. Or the domestic
weather: my daughter-in-law’s moods.

Talking to her about the garden, I get
what I’ve asked for and then don’t know
what to do with it. I can accept or reject
it. Whatever. What would whatever be?

There are grave limits not on what I
can want but on how much I can have.
The sky says anything can come along
and will, but not what or where. Our

roses are blossoming today as if there
is no tomorrow. If they’re right I should
be attending not to weather but whether:
what can I create from today’s offerings?

*

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, (Word
Press) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of
Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including
The New Republic, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many
others over the past 45 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be
part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the new Comcast
Technology Center in Philadelphia.

Two Poems by Faith Paulsen

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Mother-in-Law

Invited to call her Mom, silently I called her Umbrella in Sunshine
Flea-Market Wristwatch Three Phone Calls A Day
Flash Flood Warning.
Why take a chance?
The cat will suck the breath out of the baby.
Spare Room Hoarder of get-well cards and flashlights
bottles of sleeping pills. (They’re not habit-forming – I should know,
I’ve been taking them for years.)
She called me Broken Eggs Hamster in a Plastic Ball.
Half-hour Early/Ten Minutes Late
She called me Barefoot in Snow–
That name I kept.
Years after her death
I wake stunned
when others call me Worry and I respond Be Safe.
Please don’t do
anything stupid.
Call it Poetic Justice. Call me So soon?
I call myself, I Didn’t Know—

*

My Mother’s Pessary *

Was she buried with it, I wonder?
That pinky-ball that for years supported
the vault over my begetting? My fault,
we used to joke.
Large baby, traumatic birth,
long-awaited longed-for,
late, costly.

Decades later, I witnessed
the price paid in her halting gait,
weary eyes (blue green like mine)
seeking a bench so she could sit down.
This is not like you, Mom.

Then it was I who supported
undressed, lifted. Even though
I was by then several times a mother —
I did not know this secret toll
that there could be this
late-in-life weight in the pelvis
pregnancy of years
this falling through
her overstretched muscles
falter, fail, a curtain’s elasticity lost
turned inside-out like a sock.

Attended, midwife to my mother’s aging
counted her breaths
an inexorable roller coaster inverted
dangles on the verge of dive-drop,
ripening
her tummy measured to house this blushing little thing
that for the last years of her life plugged up the dam
and kept the sky from falling.

* A therapeutic pessary is a medical device most commonly used to treat prolapse of the uterus.

*

Faith Paulsen’s work has appeared in Ghost City Press, Seaborne, and Book of Matches, as well as Thimble Literary Magazine, Evansville Review, Mantis, Psaltery and Lyre, and Terra Preta, among others. Her work also appears in the anthologies Is it Hot in Here or Is It Just Me? (Social Justice Anthologies) and 50/50: Poems & Translations by Womxn over 50 (QuillsEdge). She has been nominated for a Pushcart, and her chapbook A Color Called Harvest (Finishing Line Press) was published in 2016. A second chapbook, Cyanometer, is expected in 2021.

Family Food by Wendy Hoffman

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Family Food

For fifty years now, I sprinkle the Hungarian sweet paprika onto the cooled sautéed onions and stir in bits of ice.

Mrs. Mathies, who helped my mother clean, had dictated this recipe. She bought her paprika at Paprika Weiss on the east side. It’s all in the spice.

The shop went out of business decades ago.

As newlyweds, my sister and I cooked this dish for our philosopher-husbands—a coincidence. Mother said they became philosophers because they couldn’t win arguments with their parents.

Sisters sharing recipes for beef, chicken, taste, divorce.

We baked from Grandma’s recipe for lemon cake. Mother called it Grandmomela cake.

Sisters sharing histories, genes.

No one else comes so close, like skin, and then it’s gone
like the only store that grinds and sells the authentic.

*

Wendy Hoffman has published three memoirs, Enslaved Queen, White Witch in a Black Robe and in 2020, A Brain of My Own. A German translation of Enslaved Queen is forthcoming. Her book of poetry, Forceps, was also published along with a co-authored book of essays, From the Trenches, written with Alison Miller.

Winter’s Toll by Melanie Figg

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Winter’s Toll

The deer are starving.
Summer was too dry and snow came too soon
and too thick. They usually don’t come out
of the woods until February. It’s almost Christmas
and they’re in the trailer park by ten.

My mother died a week ago.
We cleaned out her refrigerator,
found two bins of apples
she had no energy to can
and left them for the deer.

After bar close I drive in slow: two doe and a fawn.
For a minute I feel lucky—to see animals so hungry
they’re at front doors eating
Christmas wreaths. One doe swings her head,
watches me park and go inside
my mother’s house. They keep walking,
looking for apples on the snow-covered lawns.

*

Melanie Figg’s debut poetry collection, Trace (New Rivers Press) was named one of the 100 Best Indie Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. Melanie has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The McKnight and Jerome Foundations, the Maryland State Arts Council, and others. Her poems, personal essays, and book reviews can be found in dozens of literary journals including The Iowa Review, Nimrod, and The Rumpus. As a certified professional coach, Melanie teaches creative writing, offers women’s writing retreats, and works one-on-one with writers and others. http://www.melaniefigg.net

Two Poems by Mark Saba

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Flowers in the Dark

The young man holding flowers
delivered our food in three boxes.
Loose potatoes and apples, lettuce

partially wrapped beside a box of butter,
berries, almonds, and Greek cheese.
He wasn’t sure which flowers we liked

so bought three: one, wrapped tulips
and two alstroemeria. Did we like
the purple or peach? He stood

in his buttoned rust jacket, a shadow
of the boy who graduated with my son
six years ago, now a generation

of wise old youth holding flowers
for their elders. Which one don’t you want
he asked. It will look nice

in my apartment. He stood there
six feet away in the dark
having delivered our groceries

holding a bouquet of flowers
that I’m not sure he really wanted
or knew what to do with

once back to his other world
the one without flowers
or any place to put them.

*

The Broken

My brother, my daughter, my father,
my wife. A cloudy eye, piece of leg
and vanishing arm.

An asymmetry in stride, an upbeat cheek
adjacent to uncertain lips.
The visitors come whole, hoping to embrace

the broken pieces of those they’d once known
but have been disassembled
as they try to reconstruct.

Outside, under searing light,
the rehab grounds remain dressed
in autumn finery: greens and golds

atop fiery trees, a harboring mountain,
glass-walled rooms that look out
and allow a looking in. My son,

my husband, my sister, my dear friend.
We hold the pieces of you
and let the pieces fall.

*

Mark Saba has been writing fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction for 40 years. His book publications include four works of fiction and three of poetry, most recently Two Novellas: A Luke of All Ages / Fire and Ice (fiction), Calling the Names (poetry) and Ghost Tracks (stories about Pittsburgh, where he grew up). Saba’s work has appeared widely in literary magazines around the U.S. and abroad. His is also a painter, and works as a medical illustrator at Yale University. Please see marksabawriter.com.