Tag: father

Affidavit For my Father by Connie Post

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Affidavit For my Father

You were never in the Epstein files
the letters of your name
fell only inside my body

The island you so often frequented
was my room
with its small shelves
and bed partially sunk
in the center

now when I look back
I see scattered paper
and torn envelopes
with a suicide note
never fulfilled

I was the lone reporter
standing there
without a note pad
standing there
with my skirt
half pulled up

I said a quiet goodbye to you
when you went to work each morning
after breakfast you’d go to the driveway
and retrieve the morning paper

but our story was never in the headlines
you died in the same town, twenty-five years
after we stopped talking

all that’s left of my past
is the old flannel night gown
I used to wear as a girl
and my story redacted

like your face blacked out
in a dark room

*

Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California (2005-2009). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Cutthroat, River Styx, Slipstream, Spoon River Poetry Review, & Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her awards include the Crab Creek Poetry Prize, Liakoura Award and the Caesura Poetry Award. Her second full length book, “Prime Meridian” was released in January 2020 (Glass Lyre Press) and was a finalist for the 2020 Best Book Awards. Her most recent books are Between Twilight from New York Quarterly Books and Broken Metronome from Glass Lyre Press. Broken Metronome was the winner of the American Fiction Award and NYC Big book award for a poetry chapbook.

Two Poems by Jessie Carty

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Alternative Homes

I keep daydreaming of alternative
homes, ways to define
a room of my own. I’d take that
run-down, L-shaped, rural motel
and turn it into an artist retreat
named “Rhymes with Oranges”.
Each room, a different flavor
of citrus. The former owner’s
two-story quarters, converted
into a common space. Maybe
I’ve watched too many remodeling
shows, but every abandoned
retro, cinder block gas station
feels like an opportunity.

*

Running the Roads

The place I think of, most often,
as my childhood home
was off a paved, two-lane road.

To us, this was a “major” road.
And it did, in fact, connect
the whole neighborhood

to the four lane highway
about five miles away.
My father “joked” about the road,

telling us to go play in the street,
when he wanted us out of a room.
Or, he’d remark at how he’d run

over Santa or the Easter Bunny,
maybe even the Tooth Fairy,
to explain why they would not be visiting.

I didn’t walk along that road as often
as the side streets. I liked to wander,
sometimes closing my eyes to see

if I could walk in a straight line.
By the time I could drive
we’d moved away from that road,

into a more structured neighborhood
of unlined roads that argued for slow
speeds and polite “you go next,

no you” activity. Either way, I still
wanted to wander. My father called it
“running the roads”. He never understood

why I’d want to drive into town
(about five miles each way)
to pick up ice cream for a snack.

But, if I was going, he’d always add
to my list: dog food,
cigarettes, a newspaper.

As I grew older, I pondered how differently
we measured distance. He’d drive
across the state to look at a piece of land

he wanted to believe he could afford,
but he wouldn’t drive the same distance
to visit me once I’d finished college

and settled into marriage
and a career
hours away.

*

Jessie Carty (she/her) is the author of eight poetry collections including Shopping After the Apocalypse (dancing girl press, 2016) which was nominated for a 2017 Elgin Award. Jessie is a part-time freelance writer, teacher, editor, and full-time Instructional Designer. She recently got back into blogging about her travels to visit all 100 counties in NC: (http://notjessica58.blogspot.com)

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.

The One Story by Philip Terman

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The One Story

Little League all-star game,
I hit a homerun over the fence.
My father abandoned the bleachers

for the sidelines and after I crossed home plate
lifted me up onto his six foot four shoulders
and pranced me around the field

before my teammates and coaches
and all the other parents in the stands,
as if I were royalty.

And I was never closer to the sky
where the rabbi told us heaven was.
Do I recall this story because

it was our few minutes of glory?
Or because it was the only time
my father showed me off like a trophy?

Or is it because each time
I’m called upon by my daughters
to tell them a story about

the grandfather they never met
I tell them this tale, though
after a few words they stop me

to say they’ve heard it before.
Tell us another one. But I continue
the same words in the same order:

Little League all-star game,
I hit a homerun over the fence
and my father abandoned the bleachers

for the sidelines and after I crossed home plate
lifted me onto his six foot four shoulders
and pranced me around the field

before my teammates and coaches
and all the other parents in the stands,
as if I were royalty.

*

Philip Terman’s recent books include My Blossoming Everything, The Whole Mishpocha and, as co-translator, Tango Below a Narrow Ceiling: The Selected Poems of Riad Saleh Hussein. He directs the non-profit Bridge Literary Arts Center in Venango County, PA. bridgeliteararyartsartscenter.org

not a letter to my father by Claire Jean Kim

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not a letter to my father

kremlin was your nickname at work
because of the secrets you kept.
well, they didn’t know the half of it.
the down-low trips to beijing and pyongyang,
the rolls of c-notes you handed mom:
we’ll be rich one day. your husband is going
to be famous. by day, a professor in d.c.
by night, a man of international mystery,
an asian james bond, with the obligatory côterie
of female hangers-on. but it all came
to naught, didn’t it? the machinations
and assignations? except the wreckage; that part
was real. then, poetically, infirmity,
with your second ex-wife and third daughter
guarding your carcass out of spite,
as if anyone, anywhere would want a bite.
yesterday, i looked you up online
and saw you had died.

*

Claire Jean Kim is on the faculty at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on racial justice and human-animal studies. She is the author of three award-winning scholarly books. She began writing poetry in 2021, and her poems have been published in or are forthcoming in Rising Phoenix Review, Terrain.org, Tiger Moth Review, Anthropocene, Bracken, The Ilanot Review, Ghost City Review, The Summerset Review, Great River Review, TriQuarterly, Anacapa Review, The Lincoln Review, Arc Poetry, Pinch, The American Poetry Journal, North American Review, The Indianapolis Review, and The Missouri Review. The Lincoln Review nominated her poem “Things to do on a Fullbright fellowship in Japan” for Best of the Net in 2025. Terrain.org nominated her poem “Mastodon” for the Best New Poets anthology in 2024. The Missouri Review featured her poem “Amsterdam” as a “Poem of the Week” in January 2025.

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.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

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The Dark Undercarriage of the Purple Packard

If I were to pray for my father
it wouldn’t be for him exactly
but for the shadow beneath
the purple Packard where
he crawled when I was six.
I followed him into the darkness
of machinery, a mystery
men love though he in particular
knew nothing about what drives
things forward, power
carried from the engine to
the strange wheels and wires
of this life. Men love certainty,
rules and laws that determine
how things work, but the stories
we live by end too quickly
with a moral almost always
wrong. He wanted me to be
the man men pretend to be,
a lion of fire, the man men
imagine their leaders to be.
The voice that held my father
was his father’s, a burly man
who wrestled in high school,
worked on derricks and settled
in a career as a statistician
for Illinois Power and Light.
A lost photograph comes to mind
of three men in gray suits and
fedoras walking toward the lens
believing they owned the world
because they kind of did.
Before smoking himself to death,
he gave his son a 1949 purple Packard
fading to gray. My father and I lay
on the driveway of the very house
I remember in the shadow
of the memory of his father
whose son pointed at the dark
undercarriage, explaining
things he knew nothing about

* 

Rippling Waves of Heat over the Wheat Fields of Kansas

Somewhere north of Kansas City,
my father disappeared in himself
as he often did
then returned and noticed the blacktop rolling through
the roiling center of America which he loved
with unquestioning ardor. In the long journey away
from my father, I’ve often remembered
the way he drove in a trance
and suddenly woke
surprised to be in his life, and I promised myself
to be here, wherever here is

We were passing through a dead zone
where Jack Brickhouse, the Voice of the Chicago Cubs,
was telling my dad the pain he feels at his mother abandoning him
is alright because he’s about to steal second

An Oldsmobile like ours, driven by
a middle-aged white man, passed us
his wife beside him, eyes wide in terror.
Dad stepped on the gas and we flew down the road, passing them,
so the other man stepped on the gas passing us,
his wife yelling at him to slow down. And my father
going over a hundred miles an hour roared past them
again. Dad smiled. He’d won. I turned to watch
the Oldsmobile shrinking in the distance

Then, as we drove through the dry shadow of a cloud
Dad wiped the sweat from his face
and pointed at a large burial mound ahead of us
beautiful in the piercing light

He was delivering me to a life he disapproved of.
He expected gratitude
but I was the son who aspired to be a poet
and kindness from this rough man was like a stone in my throat

*

Michael Simms lives in the old Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His poetry collections include Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025.) His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Plume, Scientific American and Poem a Day (Academy of American Poetry). He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. In 2011, the Pennsylvania legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.

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.

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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Father, after all these Years

         — I’m still waiting
for you to fade.
The way dark stars and sorrow
are known to do.
Or like the sky at dusk.
A rhyme from childhood, or a tune.

*

Eight Years Dead

—and never once coming
to me in dreams
begging forgiveness. Self-righteous
in the afterlife as you were in this one, Mother.
Only with the whole sky in yourself
approach me. The whole sky
where there may be air enough
for me to breathe.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her new chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published by The Poetry Box (July 2025). https://lauraannreed.net/

Halo by Sydney Lea

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Halo

     I have heard the Master say that on no occasion
     does a man realize himself to the full,
     though the mourning for a parent
     may be an exception.
                   –Tseng Tzu

Fields the color of stale tobacco,
water barely breaching the dam.
Like anyone, I look forward and back,
though chiefly back these days.
I’m seeing myself at ten.

It’s years, however short they’ll have seemed,
before my father’s coronary.
It’s Sunday. The regular grownups–
parents, grandmother, bachelor uncle–
convene in the dooryard yew’s slim shade.

I’ve never returned to my father’s grave.
His shrine’s within my soul.
He exhales his Camel smoke,
which blends with the general August miasma.
No grasshoppers rattle. They hide from the heat.

No matter. I wouldn’t be tempted
to catch them to bait the pond’s small sunfish.
I need to stay, though I’m an outsider.
The murmur of voices blends
with the hum of the fan just inside on its sill.

Do I exist? I feel disembodied.
Stymied, I search for something to say,
to that notably big-hearted father mostly.
That’s not a halo he wears.
Of course not. It’s only that I dream one today,

and it’ll be part of that scene forever–
which, granted, was nothing unique,
and yet I tasted tears of confusion.
I taste them now. No doubt what I saw
was some commingling of smoke

and haze and the clouds that feathered the ridge.
Is that all I’m made of, just timeworn mourning?
I’ve outlived my father by decades,
always hoping, always vainly,
to say what’s always needed saying.

                                             – in mem. Sydney L.W. Lea (1909-66)

*

Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

After All These Years by Gloria Heffernan

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After All These Years

In another room,
at the other end of the house,
my husband talks on the phone
for an hour with his ex-wife
discussing the joys and sorrows,
wonders and worries of their children,
the oldest of whom is fifty-four.

A frequent enough occurrence,
I have grown so accustomed
to their conversations
that I sometimes forget to marvel
at the way they navigate
the geography of family.

Even now, thirty years after they ceased
being husband and wife,
they have never stopped being curators
of what they co-created,
parents, separate but together,
like the coiled strands of DNA
that course through
the generations.

“Your divorce is better
than most marriages,” I tease,
when the three of us find ourselves
together at the holiday dinner table.
They laugh good-naturedly at the quip,
but it’s really not a joke.

It’s a testament to harmony,
to the way voices blend different notes
to create a more complex music.
I listen and am quietly awestruck as I think,
This is what peace sounds like.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

This by Laura Garfinkel

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This

        after Marianne Moore

My father used to say, This too shall pass
to anyone who would listen. My friends
repeat it back to me like some kind of balm
when needed. But everything passes—
days, months, years. Youth. When
did growing up turn to growing old?
Opportunities have passed or were taken.
Photos save chosen moments;
writing captures observations, thoughts—
our attempts to stop time, to taste it twice.
And the things we pass down, what remains?
My father used to say, This too shall pass
and now that he has passed, I wonder
when does this become that?

*

Laura Garfinkel retired from a career as a medical and psychiatric social worker. Her poems have appeared in Feral: A Journal of Poetry & Art, Moss Piglet, Tule Review, Last Stanza, and elsewhere. On weekends, she loves to hike and bike with her husband who makes her laugh and who she affectionately calls her muse. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Pacific University.

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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Photograph

His back to the camera
my father stands at the ocean’s edge.
Hands in his pockets, the flannel lining
thin as the hospital-issue robe
his own father wore over his pajamas.
“Go out to the hallway,”
he was told, “if you’re going to cry.”
Today, a moth stirs the air
near the dogwood. Circling and reversing.
Searching for more than is there.
The unopened leaf buds like half-said things.
At what edge does my father now stand?

*

On Suffering

Studying my reflection in the blossoming plums
I stumbled and fell.
My mother, who could never forgive my beauty
leaned over the examination table.
“Now you know how it feels,” she said.
It meaning life, I supposed.
The nurse gave me a tender look, her face radiant
with the world’s pain. A shoulder blade
was eased back into place.
Gravel removed with a surgical blade.
I imagined myself as the rock before it was crushed
and made into pavement. This was consolation.
I sensed all my troubles dropping away.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/

Three Poems by Joseph Fasano

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To the Insurance Executive Who Denied My Heart Procedure

You may not think it is worth it
but at night, in the dark
before morning,
my son lays his ear on my gnarled heart
and tells me it is beautiful music.
He doesn’t fathom
what you did to me,
that you’ve traded our days of playing
for a few small pieces of silver.
All he thinks
is my father’s heart is music.
I hear. I hear. I knew.
Ruler, the children
will outlive you.
I wish you
a long, long life of silences
while dreamers hear the living world is singing.
The one you have denied a life is you.

*

The Reckoning

All your life you’ve tried to prove
your beauty. You have handed over
the locked harp of your darkened heart,
believing love a shelter from immensity.
Alone, in the clothes of old ghosts,
you have touched the face
of the mirrors of childhood
like lakes that hold the gold rings
of the wronged.

Listen. It is time. It is time now.
You cannot live in two worlds forever.
Rise up
and walk the way of changes,
deep through the wilds
of childhood, deep
through the cities of the living,
and tap your hand on the great weight
of love’s door
and say it, say the proof
is useless.
Fall into the arms that hear your song.

*

Lazarus

You ask what death was like.
It was like falling into water
as water.
My father was a dark ship
falling through me,
loaded with plum-wine and honey.
My mother moved the sea of me,
its stars.

I tell you
the new life is permitted.
A hand comes
and lifts you by the fingers,
and there you are,
blinking in the morning light,
the graveclothes falling from your shoulders,
a soft touch saying
start again, start again.
This time be the miracle you are.

*

Joseph Fasano is the author of ten books, including The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions). His work has been widely anthologized and translated into more than a dozen languages. His honors include The Cider Press Review Book Award, The Wordview Prize from the Poetry Archive, and a nomination by Linda Pastan for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living poet years prior to the award year.” He is the Founder of Fasano Academy, which offers instruction in several fields of study, including poetry, philosophy, and theology.

Two Poems by Tim Mayo

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A Candle For

After the half-life
of my daughter’s last year
a dimness appeared

like a veiled busker
sawing out sad tunes
on her violin

The few pieces of silver
glinting up from the dark
velvet of her case

made me think of moons

Remembrance mirrors
the invisible of someone
so a self seems immortal

a thing which zigs beyond
its now-pulseless zag
to exit flesh and hover

at least a part of forever
but a candle can
only glimmer until

snuff it just sputters out

*

A Father’s Lament

We almost never met
but at eleven you asked

I forced a truce of sorts
conceded your fidelity

The years huddled like orphans
between the now-and-thens

And the clock’s hand
scythed down

the might-have-beens
leaving only the likely

In the end I learned too late
the unconditional of surrender

*

Tim Mayo’s poems and reviews have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street Journal, Narrative Magazine, Poetry International, and Salamander among many other places. His poems have received seven Pushcart Prize nominations. His first full-length collection of poetry The Kingdom of Possibilities was published by Mayapple Press in 2009 and was a finalist for the 2009 May Swenson Award. His second volume of poems, Thesaurus of Separation (Phoenicia Publishing, 2016) was a finalist for both the 2017 Montaigne Medal and the 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award among other honors, and his chapbook Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (Kelsay Books 2019) also won an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award. He works at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, and is a founding member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.

Don’t Say You Never Knew Him by Paula R. Hilton

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Don’t Say You Never Knew Him

I was 27 when my mother pressed
her wedding band into my hand.
I’m so angry. I don’t want it.
Startled by venom in her voice,
I took it but told her I had no idea
what to do with it. Melt it down,
sell it, give it away. I don’t care.

Dad had dementia but hid his condition.
The man people flocked to for financial
advice died with the trunk of his Ford
stuffed with unpaid bills. Mom screamed
like a wounded animal. He’d bankrupted us.

A decade later, her memories soften.
Tells me Dad had been a great kisser.
He made my ears burn. She also shares
some advice. Don’t say you never knew him.
Say you didn’t know the extent of his illness.

I go to my room. Pull her band from
the jewelry box where it’s waited for
3,650 days, ask her if she wants it back.
She takes the gold ring from my open
palm. Slips it back on. Yes, she says, I do.

*

Paula R. Hilton explores the immediacy of memory and how our most important relationships define us. Her work has appeared in The Sunlight Press, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Feminine Collective, The Tulane Review, and many others. Her poetry collection, At Any Given Second, was selected by Kirkus as one of its best books of 2021. She earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Learn more at https://paularhilton.com

On His Birthday by Sarah Joy

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On His Birthday

“Keep writing,” were some of the last few words
my father said to me before the dementia took over.

My pen greets paper like a bird gracing the sky.
I try to avoid wind sheers, but these wings get tired;
I’d rather sit and preen my feathers,
and inspire the flightless from the ground.

I am a hypocrite of the worst kind,
writing down single phrases to start new poems
to only end up crumpled in trash cans:
I wish. I miss you. Come back.

I am a bird who walks on the sidewalk,
finding safety in the concrete barriers.

Today my father would have turned 75.
Gone only 847 days.
847 crumpled pages,
847 days of walking when I could have been flying,
could have been writing.
847 times of avoiding my memory,

trying to believe he’s still here,
as if his last words never happened.

*

Sarah Joy is a Toronto poet and Ph.D. student in Biblical Studies whose work explores longing, faith, and the quiet ache of being human. Her poem about David won the Canadian Bible Society’s 2022 BiblesCanada Creative Giveaway. When not writing, she studies ancient texts, tends to her community, and finds joy in stillness and sunlit afternoons.

Separation by Ryan McCarty

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Separation

Sometimes I feel like fatherhood
is a matter of standing still,
holding the crack of light open,
listening for the rumpled sigh
of a child back in bed, the terror
leaking in through loose seals of night
thoughts, caulked up by kisses, curing
slow. And then the other matter:
the pulling closed. I’m the servant
of the lonely dark, the bringer
to my children of time, the curse
laid on the heart that hears itself
beating, a sure sign it can stop,
that every light can be put out.
And what to make of that, knowing
how opening and closing doors
is the work of loving hands?

*

Ryan McCarty is a teacher and writer, living in Ypsilanti, MI. His writing has appeared recently or will appear soonish in Collateral, Door is a Jar, Pinhole, Rattle: Poets Respond, and Trailer Park Quarterly. You can find more of his writing at Politics of the Kitchen Table with My Family Crafting Nearby.

Two Poems by Dorian Kotsiopoulos

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Lynne

I remember your flinch
when your father
came home, his face red,
clinking a brown bag.

Who knew what laid ahead
was empties tumbling
from your locker, your
glazed eyes. I remember

the record we danced to,
it hit gold, Dizzy, 1969
by Tommy Roe. I know
all the lyrics. I can’t forget

how I shunned you in town
those times you waved,
your hand that shook,
shy half-smile,

how I pushed my cart
at the market, glided by,
as you sliced deli meats
to the tracks of Muzak.

* 

Missing Fathers

They visit while you sleep, pulling sheets to chins, brushing cheeks
with whiskers even if you didn’t see them much before they left.

They look over your school work and correct a math problem or two.

They tint the walls a shade darker and rearrange the furniture
so you know they were there.

Mothers get up first to fix the furniture back the way they like,
but they don’t say anything.

The Cherrios box might feel lighter if they needed a snack.

They are so considerate when they leave at night, closing the door
with the quietest sound, like the click that lives in my jaw now.

*

Dorian Kotsiopoulos’ work has appeared in various literary and medical journals, including Poet Lore, Salamander, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, On the Seawall, Rogue Agent, Smartish Pace, Thimble Literary Magazine, Third Wednesday, and The Westchester Review as well as in the All Poems Are Ghosts (Tiny Wren Lit) anthology. She is a reviewer for the Bellevue Literary Review.

Song of the Nude Marble Statue my Young Father Poses With by Carla Schwartz

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Song of the Nude Marble Statue my Young Father Poses With

Don’t touch me,
you bore me.
I’m here for the hundreds—
crooked on my elbow,
to gaze at the willows,
my scant drape, thigh-clasped,
not hiding from weather,
here for all seasons
stone-cold,
marble.

You touch
the back side
of my elbow,
study the soft curves
of my muscles,
my back.

I won’t lean
into shadow,
won’t bow
in shame—
you can’t shame me
young man,
young bow-tied man.
I flip you
my scrolls
of curls.

What’s that in your pocket?
What’s that on your mind?

Your beautiful wife,
or my beautiful back?

Your young girls
or the curve
of my spine?

*

Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in The Practicing Poet and her collections Signs of Marriage, Mother, One More Thing, and Intimacy with the Wind. Learn more at https://carlapoet.com, or on all social media @cb99videos. Recent/upcoming curations: Great Weather for MEDIA, Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands, Modern Haiku, Paterson Literary Review, New-Verse News, New Verse Review, Sheila-Na-Gig online, Spank the Carp, The MacGuffin, Verse-Virtual Online, and Leon Literary Review. Carla Schwartz received the New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.

Two Poems by Melissa Surrette

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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.

Dad Says His Gravestone Will Say He Did What He Had to Do by Charlotte Maiorana

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Dad Says His Gravestone Will Say He Did What He Had to Do

He hates seeing other people’s
vacation photos. Cobblestones,
small plates, good for them.

If their luggage was lost
for three days or they got sick
from street vendors then good.

He’s trying to get to the beach
but the wheelchair won’t fit
in the trunk.

Let the Mustang run her engine
from time to time, he says he doesn’t
want to feel his hip when he runs.

You know, he hopes they aren’t going
to the hospital again. Before the icy
commute he used a hair dryer on the pipes

made sure they didn’t freeze. Mom
thawed dinner when she could still stand
long enough to open the door.

Now every day he’s up at four to check
her CPAP machine; needing sleep less
than needing worry.

He doesn’t want to deal with a barbeque
so he doesn’t grow tomatoes anymore.
Leaves the piano open, plays Celluloid Heroes

after the closing bell, sometimes he thinks
about digging through boxes in the garage
to bring the old accordion out,

hang grandpa’s wedding photo on the wall.
He’s been calling all afternoon.
I put the knife down.

*

Charlotte Maiorana is an American-Italian writer and mother of two young boys. She is a current MFA student at Randolph College and lives in her hometown of Staten Island, New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Thrush Poetry Journal, Querencia Press, The Rumen, and elsewhere. You can find her at charlottemaiorana.substack.com and @charlotteccm on Instagram.

Three Poems by Renee Williams

~ ONE ART ~ 11 Comments

Bad Boys and Johnny Cash

How many times can you listen
to Folsom Prison Blues
at the request of a whiny five-year-old,
on the drive home from a trip to Florida,
who’s forgotten her Tatters doll,
left at the hotel a hundred miles back,
who’s crying nonstop, still demanding
to listen to Johnny Cash,
stomping and slamming her sticky,
snot-encrusted fists against the back
of the head rest so many times
that everyone in the cars feels
like they are in prison and just wants
to toss her out on the highway?

My Dad caved, went back,
got the doll. Growing up, I’d
cut out photos of Cash,
and stick them on my bedroom walls
because I could never get enough
of the Man in Black.
Probably the start of something not good,
never any good…

My father is to blame for all of this,
for indulging me
and introducing me to motorcycles
and dragging me on the back
of that dilapidated dirt bike
into Snake Holler and having it break down
on us when we ran out of gas
and had to walk home,
Walk of Shame, clean home
to Mom, who wasn’t amused,
just wanting us to wash
off the mud, so we could
have a proper dinner.

The flurry of bad boys hit
until I straight up married a proper fellow,
who became an accountant and had tax season,
but I just wanted to party, so I found
a better one, the love of my life.

We married, and he got a bike,
and then several more,
multiplying like rabbits.
He even got me one
for my own self.

But I couldn’t tell Dad.
Because I knew he’d be jealous,
because he couldn’t ride anymore,
because he thought I was getting
CPR training to save his life,
when I was really taking
my motorcycle safety class.

But I wasn’t there
when the CPR was needed.

When I go to see Dad now,
I’m greeted by Hoss,
the sexton’s Old English bulldog pup,
who nearly knocks me down
with his 70 pounds of bad boy exuberance,
the therapy dog for the ones
who still have imprisoned pulses
who still have teary blues
who still have tattered hearts
walking among the headstones.

*

Unmoored

They say that grief comes in waves,
but I find it lapping at my feet
as ocean waves tease the shore,
ripples small and steady for so long,
until one plows into me,
nearly knocking me off my feet.

Bobbing like a buoy in rough surf
I’m staggering through this life
no longer chained to commitments
and now I don’t know what to do.
Maybe the saddest thing in the world
is a caregiver
who no longer
has anyone to care for.

Tears won’t stop no matter how I try,
but lies come easily.
Everyone will believe I’m just suffering
from those darned allergies, right,
or maybe raging sinuses?
It’s been over a month.
Shouldn’t I be moving on by now?

I seek messages and meaning
in feathers and foliage,
creatures and constellations.
And I am left
as befuddled as I was
when my feet hit the floor
this morning.

*

We Know You Here

Our priest asks us to step into the light,
not to hide in the darkness.
I understand the metaphor,
but the reality horrifies me.
I recoil.

The sun, beautiful muse of goodness,
is not where I belong.
Please leave me here in the dark
and let the messages
come to me. In the shaded woods
illuminated only by moonlight
I am comforted, nurtured, restored.
Deer peek at me from the brush
eyes aflame, yet they do not fear me.
The chorus of spring peepers reminds me
this is my home. Safety is here.
Yes, coyotes prowl these hills at night
but they, too, will avoid me.
Ancient opossums traipse through the lawn
and sometimes a raccoon or rabbit or two
may join them. Nuisances, annoyances,
problems to so many, but here, they have a place.

I dance with Luna moths,
letting them light on my fingertips,
precious butterflies of the night.
Stay with me, I urge them.
The light is not your friend.
It will hurt you as it has me
mutilating and maiming.

But the sunlight beckons me forth
the highest card in the Tarot
the child astride a stallion
beams of light surrounding him.
I am drawn to that beacon of warmth.
I want to bask in those soothing rays.
But it’s an illusion.

I step back into the night and breathe.
Crisp night air fills my lungs.
Stars fall from the sky, as if offering me gifts
to welcome me home.
Stay, they tell me.
We know you here.

*

Renee Williams is from Nelsonville, Ohio. She is a retired English instructor whose poetry has appeared in Of Rust and Glass, Alien Buddha Press zines, Verse-Virtual, Deep South Magazine, Panoply, Impspired, Sein und Werden, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, and Beatnik Cowboy among others. She has written interviews and concert reviews for Guitar Digest, as well. Her photography has been featured in the Corolla Wild Horse Fund calendars, the Santa Fe Review, Moss Piglet, Anti-Heroin Chic, Swim Press, Lumineire as well as several others. She enjoys spending time with her family and dogs; she takes orders from her cranky cat who bosses her around daily.

MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON by Stephen Ruffus

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MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON

This is not the world.
No longer so green
and sweet.

Memory is a contusion,
an enlarged heart, blood
rampant against the vein.

This is not the world
without him in it.
Nor will it ever be or was.

*

Stephen Ruffus’ work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, 3rd Wednesday, the American Journal of Poetry, The Shore, Poetica Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Stone Poetry Quarterly, among others. Also, he will have a piece in a forthcoming issue of the I-70 Review and in Hanging Loose Magazine. Ruffus was a semifinalist for the 2022 Morgenthau Prize sponsored by Passenger Books, and has had two poems nominated in 2023 for a Pushcart Prize. He was a founding poetry editor of Quarterly West and twice a recipient of a Utah Original Writing Competition Award. While he has lived in Colorado, California, and Utah where he studied writing at major universities and held fellowships and teaching positions, he is originally from New York City and still considers himself a New Yorker in many respects. Currently, he lives in Salt Lake City with his wife.

Two Poems by David O’Connell

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Starter Home

Before us, others called our house our house.
We know their names, met their grown children.
At the closing, they said mom’s house, dad’s house,

but we were not confused. In one day, our house
was empty, full. If possible, it was more our house

because we thought, these walls should be blue,
not green, and we were right. Later, we returned
with the baby, and then years became these rooms

where she once and the times that we all. Now,
there is our house, and our house, and our house,

so that often when we speak, three doors open
on three rooms where what happened happens
almost as it happened in our house, which we agree

will always be our house, even when it’s theirs.

*

How to Tell the One About Fatherhood

A man and his daughter walk into a drugstore.
That he won’t know best is the twist. The setup
relies on a tacky Grim Reaper, its skull white

as disposable utensils, a plastic black cowl
hiding the wire it hangs from above them.
Explain it’s October and how the decoration,

triggered by their entrance, shimmies and moans
so that the daughter, just four, buries her face
in her palms. Jump then to bedtime: the girl

in tears, afraid of the dark, the man at a loss.
Understand that the story you’re telling
is less joke than trial, that its outcome

will mean one thing to the man and another
to this girl who’ll remember her whole life
what comes next. It’s death, of course,

that upset her, though she doesn’t know one day
she’ll die. As will her father. And the father,
through all his It can’t hurt you, I’d never let…

doesn’t think he’s lying. This is the time now
to pause, leaving space for your listener
to feel for a man who struggles for answers

as he gets in the car and drives his daughter
back to the store in her pajamas. Nearing
the end, take time to sketch the empty aisles,

the long fluorescents humming as if angry
with the night. Take care. Bring them
to this moment cautiously. Not so much

allegory as anecdote. Less anecdote than
ephemera: a father lifting up his child,
saying, trust me, there’s nothing to fear.

*

David O’Connell is the author of Our Best Defense (Červená Barva Press) and the chapbook A Better Way to Fall (The Poet’s Press). His work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Poetry Review, among other journals. More of his work can be found at davidoconnellpoet.com.

Sanctification or The Ongoing Saga of my Inheritance of Prunes by Betsy Mars

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Sanctification or The Ongoing Saga of my Inheritance of Prunes

In the 3082 days since my father died
prunes have accompanied me
to the East Coast and Midwest
and Northwest and Southeast,
to Lisbon and Sydney, Hawaii,
and Paris. I carry an emergency
stash in my go to work bag in case
in my hurry to leave I forget to taste.
Sometimes I swallow them nearly whole like an oyster.
Sometimes I chew them more thoughtfully
as if at a tasting.
Sometimes they sit on my tongue
like a sanctified wafer, the host
decomposing, my body finishing
the work the Sun began. Occasionally
my teeth hit a sharp bit the pitter missed,
and I flinch as if hit, remember the bitter,
the pain that sometimes even the softest
sweetest things hold within.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in Minyan, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which served as the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. In addition, she also frequently collaborates with San Diego artist Judith Christensen, most recently on an installation entitled “Mapping Our Future Selves.”

Ironing My Father’s Clothes by Sara Pirkle

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Ironing My Father’s Clothes

Sundays while my father slept,
my mother wrangled us girls
into tights and French braids,
slicked my brother’s cowlick
with a wet comb, slid a roast

in the oven for after church,
then ironed my father’s good shirt,
sprayed Niagara starch on the collar,
and hung it like a preacher’s robe

on the bathroom door. When
I turned twelve, I took over
this chore, and he thanked me
each time, thinking I did it for him,
when I was doing it for my mother.

*

Sara Pirkle is an identical twin, a breast cancer survivor, and a board game enthusiast. Her first book, The Disappearing Act (Mercer University Press, 2018), won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. She also dabbles in songwriting and co-wrote a song on Remy Le Boeuf’s album, Architecture of Storms, which was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY in the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album category. She is an Associate Director of Creative Writing at The University of Alabama.

Five Poems by Jennifer L Freed

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

How to Pack for the Move to Assisted Living

Feel once more the weight
of the little brass elephant
with the missing tusks.
Run your fingers along
the banister, the bedroom curtains. Listen
for the ticking of the antique clock
at the end of the hall.

*

Yellow Tags

At the parting edge
of ninety-four, my father
wonders what’s the point,
this accumulation of life
unspooling in Assisted Living,
while his home, so close,
a mere two streets away—
its wooded yard, its rooms
lined with books
and treasures—his home
is packed full

of people this very day, strangers
browsing shelves and closets,
burrowing in drawers, finding
the antique clocks and pewter mugs,
the Nikon camera he bought
in 1969, the Navy blanket
and hammock, boxed
in the basement, saved
for who knows what
but saved, nonetheless, a part
of his passing through
this life, and he wonders
how he got here—his past
now stickered with yellow tags.

*

My Father Helps My Mother with Her Compression Socks

He asks if she’s ready.
She sets her wheelchair brakes.
He kneels and she extends one leg.
He guides her foot to his knee, slides
the cuff of nylon over her heel, then yanks, hard.
The wheelchair wobbles.
Extra material hangs over her toes.
She does not offer her expertise
from years of putting on panty hose: how to
gather the nylon, pull gently, doling out fabric
through delicate fingers.
She thanks him.
He pats her leg, asks if the sock is too tight
below her knee. She always says it’s just fine.
Then they switch—her left foot on his right leg.
Sometimes he helps slide her feet into shoes,
the boxy, wide-mouthed pair with space
for swelling, before putting his hands on her
wheelchair arms, using them to tug himself back
up to standing. She pats his shirt into place
around his belt, makes sure he’s not dizzy
from rising too fast. Then he turns right, to the desk
with his computer, and she wheels herself left, to gaze
out the window while listening to the news.

*

Remote Control

My father, now 96—still spry, bright, quick-witted,
still learning yoga, climbing stairs, using his computer
to find etymologies, stock prices, names
of temples in ancient Greece—now

he asks me if—and this is not an urgent
request, he adds—but if, as my husband and I pack up
our home of 21 years, we should happen upon
the spare remote control for my parents’ TV,

which, my father explains, I would have found in the drawer
of the hutch by the den door of the house my parents left
two years ago, the house I emptied for them
when they moved into assisted living—

if I should come across that remote control now (I might not
have known it worked, my father says,
since it shared that drawer with other, outdated
remotes and garage door openers), or if I find it

in a few weeks, when my husband and I are unpacking
our lives in new, downsized rooms, then
could I please bring it next time I visit,
since the remote they’ve been using till now

isn’t responding anymore when he presses the buttons,
and he doesn’t think it’s the batteries, but
he’s ordering new batteries on-line, in case that’s all
that’s wrong.

*

Cutting My Father’s Hair

He’s still tough as leather, but so much shorter now.
He wobbles when he stands too quickly.
Why didn’t I realize sooner?
When I comment on his fringe of hair—a little fluffy,
I say—he waves a crooked hand
toward my mother, now maneuvering from wheelchair
to couch: She likes it that way.
Then, The damned clipper. Can’t get it to work right anyway.
And so I offer.
Why am I surprised that he agrees
so readily? That he brings out the electric clipper
almost immediately? He hands it over,
small and black with its little pronged comb, asks
if I know how to use it, then warns,
You might find it hard though.
It doesn’t cut as well as it used to.
And you can’t even find the damn power button.
Of course. The worsening neuropathy
in his fingers. His failing eyes.
They have the hairdresser here, but
I don’t know her, and why would I pay
all that money? I don’t even have that much hair.
He glances over at my mother, who catches my eye,
and winks. Your Mum always did it, he says. Before
her stroke.
So I sit him in the living room, under the light,
and he lets me turn his head this way and that.
I trim the patchy beard along his jaw, the grey scruff
brushing the back of his collar. He asks me
to thin his moustache, says the hair
curls into his mouth. I use a tiny scissors
for this, my fingers humming along smoothly
between nostril and lip. I think of the fine tuning
of my muscles, joints, nerves. How much
I have not yet lost. My mother
lies on the couch, watching us, smiling. My dead brother
hovers in my father’s face. My father’s eyes close
as I snip the long hairs of his eyebrows,
the fine whisps crowning his skull.

*

Jennifer L Freed’s full-length collection When Light Shifts (finalist, 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize) explores the aftermath of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage and the altered relationships that emerge in a family crisis. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Anthology. Other awards include the 2022 Frank O’Hara prize (Worcester County Poetry Association), the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club), and honorable mention for the 2022 Connecticut Poetry Award. Please visit jfreed.weebly.com to learn more.

Midwinter & my father wants to know by Amy Williams

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Midwinter & my father wants to know

if I can forgive him. Brow
furrowed, I know it’s just

a matter of time. Unstable
blood vessels & his hazel

iris failing to control
light. It’s natural, the way

Mercury changes position
when it approaches the sun.

It’s natural, the way
tissues decay & my blurred

face when the optic nerve
sparks images in his brain.

He’s sixty-six years old
& my body tenses still

at the sound of his heels
in a quiet room.

I swear I still can feel his fingers
curving the base of my

girl neck. Darkening
my mind. Darkening

stars that rupture
in a black hole’s gravity.

You know how dust
glitters in the sunlight

before it’s pulled to the ground?
I want to know the mathematics

of it. I want to know
how he outlived my mother.

I want to know
what he remembers.

I want to know
how much I’ll regret.

*

Amy Williams is a writer and educator based in New Delhi. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, Rust + Moth, Bodega Magazine, The Shore, Redivider, Sweet Tree Review and Contrary Magazine.

A PHOTOGRAPH OF A BOY’S LESSON IN MANHOOD by John Grey

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A PHOTOGRAPH OF A BOY’S LESSON IN MANHOOD

That’s me behind the lawn mower.
My father is in the background,
shouting orders.
“Hold down the bar!
Pull the cord!”
The grass is not high
but that’s not the point
of this exercise.
Though my head
barely rises over the handle,
he figures I’m old enough
to start the machine
and push it up and down
the back yard.
It’s his job normally.
But, in this photograph,
he’s working at his other job –
making me into
a miniature version of himself.
We’ve done the fishing-rod ritual.
We’ve played catch so much
I feel like a retriever.
And I’ve hammered a nail.
I’ve wielded a screwdriver.
And now it’s time
to mow the lawn.
This picture shows neither
triumph nor failure.
It’s the moment before
both things are possible.
So what happened?
As far as I know,
I did.

*

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Rathalla Review. Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.

Teaching My Father to Hug by W. D. Ehrhart

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Teaching My Father to Hug

I had to teach my father how to hug.
For years, he’d grip me by both arms,
one hand on either bicep, firmly
holding me away from him, our bodies
never touching. I’ve no idea why.
Men don’t hug? Afraid he once held
tight, he’d not let go again? Beats me,
but in my thirties, I got married,
and he’d hug my wife the same way.

I finally decided this would just not do.
Every time he tried to grab my arms,
I’d step inside his grip and pull him
close to me, a bear hug he could not
escape. I did this time and time again
until he finally got the hint, gave up,
and hugged me back as if he meant it.

We had our problems, Dad and me,
a lifetime of arguments and ugly
moments and miscommunications,
but he learned to hug before he died,
and I feel pretty good about that.

*

W. D. Ehrhart is an ex-Marine sergeant and veteran of the American War in Vietnam. His latest book is Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems, McFarland & Company.

Driving My Granddaughter Back to Her Dad’s House by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Driving My Granddaughter Back to Her Dad’s House

Spring
trees covered
with blossoms toss
shade over bus stops. Yellow
palo verde and purple jacaranda
offering refuge to roofless beings
on a street where my son
was roused from sleep
by a cop, then shot
on his last
24-hours
alive.

Shopping
carts piled with
blankets, plastic bags,
a man holding a cardboard
sign at the stoplight: HUNGRY.
People huddled in the shadow
of the onramp. A roadside
altar: flowers and
a wooden
cross.

I drop
into a litany
of what I might
have done differently
until Molly points and shouts, Look!
from her car seat. Two massive
trees backlit in sunlight,
lavender and gold
shimmering
like wind
chimes.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ. Susan’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Mom Egg Review, Gyroscope Review, and others. She is the author of Blame It on the Serpent (Finishing Line Press, Jan. 2022) and Cactus as Bad Boy (Kelsay Books, 2023). https://susanvespoli.com/

Few Words for Father by Tina Barry

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Few Words for Father

We recognize our father,
even with his edges blurred,
and the baritone that once curled

around our names, lost
in the hush
of the hospital’s language.

The doctor tells us he’s comfortable,
and promises to phone
when things change. And they do.

By morning, he is gone.
Because we’ve had so little
of our father to share,

we speak of him in a kind
of shorthand.
I pour coffee, and we begin:

Brut, my sister says,
recalling his cologne.
Parfait, pretty girls,

the pool, I say,
where he played with us.
Once.

*

Tina Barry is the author of Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower. Her writing appeared in ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, A-Minor, Nixes Mate, The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, Trampset, Gyroscope Review and elsewhere. Tina teaches at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.

Waiting Beside My Father by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

WAITING BESIDE MY FATHER

In the ICU room, ten days
where he coma-slept, arranged by the doctor
to rest his brain after the fall,
I sat beside him. I remember wearing
my slate-blue jacket with the big ruffle
at the collar, its cotton soft and somehow
reassuring on my body as I watched
the nurses glide by in the gleaming hallways,
and the kind hospitalist arrived with a lift
of hope in his voice. Inside me, I felt a small, carved
chapel of patience I didn’t know I possessed.
I closed my eyes, apologized to my father
for years of crabbiness between us.
I felt his brain smoothing out its frenzy, as if floating
on a long journey, as if a river
was carrying us, though
I had never learned to swim.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, including Marrow of Summer and Mothershell, both from Kelsay Books; and A Stone to Carry Home from Salmon Poetry. A new collection entitled Her Joy Becomes is forthcoming from Fernwood Press this November. Recent poems appear in The Sun, Poetry East, and Lyric. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

The Choice by Sharon Waller Knutson

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The Choice

He has no choice when his mother
dies giving him life with his father’s
name sealed on her blue lips.

He has no choice when his adopted
mother chooses him and sits
with him during sickness and nightmares.

Walks him to school, makes him peanut
butter sandwiches, kisses his bruises
and laughs at his silly jokes.

But when he is ten, he is asked
to make a choice at the Rose
Ceremony on Mother’s Day.

White if your mother is dead.
Red if she is alive. The only mother
he has known is sitting stiff

on a folding chair and he knows
she wants to jump up and say,
It’s okay if you choose her.

And he knows his birthmother
who is watching over him
wouldn’t mind if he chose red.

But it is his choice. With his right
hand he reaches for the red rose
and with the left hand he picks the white,

sticks them in his buttonholes
and marches off with the scout troop
to salute their mothers.

*

Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist who lives in Arizona. She has published several poetry books including My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields (Flutter Press 2014,) What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say and Trials & Tribulations of Sports Bob (Kelsay Books 2021) and Survivors, Saints and Sinners (Cyberwit 2022.) Her work has also appeared recently in GAS Poetry, Art and Music, The Rye Whiskey Review, Black Coffee Review, Terror House Review, Trouvaille Review, ONE ART, Mad Swirl, The Drabble, Gleam, Spillwords, Muddy River Review, Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, Red Eft Review and The Five-Two.

The Day Your Father Dies by Gary Fincke

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The Day Your Father Dies

Three time zones east, while you sleep
in your travel-vouchered hotel suite,
the ambulance, pulsing red, but mute,
arrives for your father. Your sister,
discreet, waits for what she believes
is a decent hour, her morning nearly
ended before she places her call.

Because you mark this moment,
you will always know that the first
of six job-candidate interviews,
right then, is eight minutes away.
While you fix on absence, your colleague
carries three morning conversations;
you make phone calls during lunch.

When, during the afternoon, you begin
to season your questions with banter,
the candidates are quick to smile.
Your rooms are swept and scoured while
you overhear strangers toast each other
before dinner in an expensive restaurant
so close you can walk there, then back

to where the hours, their voices hushed,
reuse their condolences throughout
your all-night sleeplessness. A plane
taxis to its gate with no plans but waiting
for you to board just after sunrise, exiting,
then entering two versions of winter, light
about to be altered by accumulated snow.

*

Gary Fincke’s collections have won what is now the Wheeler Prize (Ohio State) and the Wheelbarrow Books Prize (Michigan State). His latest collection, The Mussolini Diaries was published by Serving House in 2020.

Asking Dad for Help by Tom Bauer

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Asking Dad for Help

A friend advised I show him a budget plan.
And so I worked it all out–the diapers, food,
everything we needed. Our sole luxuries
a couple movie rentals on the weekend.
I never wanted this. It has me shaking
like I’m Tommy Wilhelm; nervous, filled with shame.
The whole time I’m speaking I slur and tremble.
He interrupts to call me names and shout.
And then I’m outside again, stuck in the why.
Why is he that way? Why is it so hard?
Why is he so cold? Why do I always fail?
Once more the wooden door stands at my back.
It’s snowing, big white flakes on city breezes.
It’s like the rule says, a man needs principles.

*

Tom Bauer is an old coot who did a bunch of university and stuff. He lives in Montreal and plays board games.

Three Poems by Lois Perch Villemaire

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Because You’re a Leo
           After Donika Kelly

You’re supposed to be confident,
happy to be the center of attention.
Not that you are that creature
knowing all too well
those waves of uneasiness
starting in your stomach
expanding to your shoulders and arms
worries over the crush of failure
moments of rejection
not being good enough
Are you a fraud?
Pretending to be something?

Don’t be so hard on yourself,
It’s a brand new season
relish those victories
those validations
summon up every shred
of positivity you can,
shape it into a mountain
of atomic strength,
acceptance of yourself
build on those affirmations
embrace the credit you deserve.

*

Dad Collected Penguins

Because he was a collector
of all sorts of things
from art to zebras
at one time he fell in love
with penguins
*
He told us penguins fly
through the water not the sky
diving deep into the world
of dreams— huddled together
—no wonder he held us close
calling us his chicks
*
we searched for penguin gifts
on holidays and his birthday:
mugs
pottery
framed artwork
sculpture
books
sweaters
*
until the day came when
Dad requested we stop
giving him penguins
we wondered why
but he laughed and said
his collection was complete
*
although he asked us
to cease gifting them
I will always associate
flightless seabirds with him
displaying mine like lucky stars
because at one time
he fell in love with penguins.

*

Who Lived on South 5th Street?

I’m done ruining my eyes
trying to read a spreadsheet
originated in 1910
to see who lived on South 5th Street,

After spending years
on family research,
spitting into a tube
sending it off to have
my DNA analyzed,

I’m done responding to
third cousins who may be related
but don’t have a family tree
or any helpful information,

I’m done paying Ancestry
several hundred dollars a year
to allow me to keep my research
in their data base,

I’m done running
into roadblocks each time
I try to figure out if Aunt Minnie
really had a son, James
who no one in the family recalls,

I’m done combing through
death notices on Newspapers dot com,
visiting rundown cemeteries
searching for gravestones
that may provide hints
to identify unknown ancestors,

And I’m really done
trying to figure out how
to pass along this information
because no one in my family
seems the least bit interested.

*

Lois Perch Villemaire resides in Annapolis, MD. Her stories, memoir flash, and poetry have been published in such places as Six Sentences, Ekphrastic Review, The RavensPerch, Trouvaille Review, FewerThan500, The Drabble, Pen In Hand, and Flora Fiction. Her poems have been included in anthologies published by Truth Serum Press, Global Insides – the Vaccine, American Writers Review 2021, and Love & the Pandemic by Moonstone Arts Center. She was a finalist in the 2021 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry.

My Father and Pavarotti by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

My Father and Pavarotti

On my stereo this morning,
just as I lean in to write, Pavarotti
came on, his aria filling the whole room.
I’m not schooled enough to know
which aria, only how my father loved him
and how, leaving his crabbiness aside, my father
would sit watching the Lake Michigan surf
from his living room window while the great man sang
over the speakers that filled the house;
and on the patio of his Southern winter home,
he listened, while the lapis surface of the pool sparkled;
then in the last years of the rehab home where he lived
with his rescued brain, a small carved canyon still visible
where the surgeon had rushed in. Once a week I drove
the eighty miles to sit with him there, his silver hair
still blazing, his eyes closed as we absorbed the pure notes
of the rich tenor who sang to my father still.

*

This poem is forthcoming in Andrea’s collection Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press, fall, 2022).

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books) and Mothershell (Kelsay Books). A new collection entitled Her Joy Becomes is due out from Fernwood Press in the fall of 2022. She has poems forthcoming in The Sun Magazine, Poetry East, Spiritus Journal, and The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy (Storey Publishing, April 2022).

TOO MANY PHOTOGRAPHS OF MY FATHER by Andrea Potos

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TOO MANY PHOTOGRAPHS OF MY FATHER

In frames, on poster boards, on tabletops
in the downstairs parlor of the funeral home
that humid evening in mid-August, low lighting
from wall sconces and brass lamps, loveseats
and chairs arranged to look like invitations,
so many people examining and exclaiming over all
that proof of my father’s long and irrepressible life;
I could only glance from a distance, I wanted only
to stand halfway between the overwrought mahogany
coffin my stepmother picked out, and the back of the room
where water was being served, surely it should have
been wine, my father merited the good wine I said to myself
standing there among the murmuring and respectful living,
holding on to my center the way I knew how
somewhere in the middle of the room.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Marrow of Summer and Mothershell, both from Kelsay Books; and A Stone to Carry Home from Salmon Poetry. You can find her poems many places online and in print, most recently in Spirituality & Health Magazine, Braided Way, Buddhist Poetry Review, and Poetry East. She is actively working on a new collection of poems entitled Her Joy Becomes.

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.

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.

Poem by Melody Wilson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Doctrine of the Kite

It floats from my fingertips—
a cathedral of rice paper
and balsa.
“Lighter than air,” Daddy said,
sipped his beer,
tapped ash from his cigar.

He said gold pounded thin enough
would cover the earth; meat should
never be wrapped in foil.
The number three always brings bad luck.

Morning was crowded with kites:
boxes, diamonds, deltas.
Children pelted the playground,
paper whiffling, tails flowing,
they released the keels
trusted in speed and skill.
Lines sang through sweaty hands.

Six toed cats are charmed, he said,
and Joshua trees can move.
Man and God are forever
locked in duel.

I held the kite above my head that day
reciting everything he said.
It quivered once,
twice, then rose
and rose.
The string pulling away
from the spool.

*

Melody Wilson lives and teaches near Portland, Oregon. She has one Academy of American Poets Award, and several smaller awards including a 2020 Kay Snow award. Her work has appeared in The Portland Review, Visions International, and Triggerfish Critical Review.

Unwelcome by Ann E. Michael

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Unwelcome

The caller
was
a stranger
soliciting
I don’t
know what
I told her
this
is not
a good time
my father
is dying
and
I hung up.
Now
as night
recedes
I find my
self awake
I think of
him
dying
and how
I was
unkind
to that young
woman
in a call
center
a stranger
I failed
to welcome
into
my heart.

*
Ann E. Michael lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, slightly west of where the Lehigh River meets the Delaware. Her most recent collection of poems is Barefoot Girls. Her next book, The Red Queen Hypothesis, will be published sometime in 2021. More info at www.annemichael.wordpress.com

Replacements by Robert Carr

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Replacements

I can’t do a dog, so my son’s first pet at my house
is a goldfish he names Zippy. I decorate the glass lung
of our separation. In the kitchen, orange circles –

flamingo pink pea gravel lines the bowl. Fake ferns
and a treasure chest hide a bottom feeder, the dull sucker
keeps it clean. Zippy tends to die on Fridays.

The sucker lives forever, but doesn’t have a name.
Because my son is with me twice a week,
I run out to replace Zippies before his next visit.

Whenever one goes belly up, double fins whitened
at the ends, I do my best to match the latest fish,
pray my boy won’t notice. Before we sit for supper,

Noah always asks to visit his fish friend.
I sit him on the counter, How’s Daddy doing, Zippy?
On Zippy number four, Noah cries out Daddy, look!

Zippy has a black spot on his nose! I gaze through
the far side, over a pink stone carpet. Wow! Some things
can’t be explained, I answer: He must be growing up.

*

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in the American Journal of Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Shenandoah and Tar River Poetry. Robert is a poetry editor with Indolent Books and recently retired from a career as Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org

Two Poems by Matthew J. Andrews

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Work Song

City birds seldom call out in song.
They speak in utilitarian chirps,
a squawking vernacular to guide
them on their morning commutes –
wire to branch, branch to dirt,
dirt to highway of cloudy skies –
the way we mumble to each other
about open seats on the bus,
our heads bobbing with the staccato
rhythm of halt and motion, mouths hungry
for crumbs scattered on the street.
Yet even then there are moments,
small moments late in the day
when the drumbeat of sledge
on steel brings to the lips a tune
our mothers used to whistle
in the kitchen as they worked,
their knuckles kneaded and buckled
but their mouths high in the clouds,
soaring on wingspreads of air,
and we softly sing their memories
to the waving branches of the trees
and listen as the birds sing back.

*

My Father and I Make Sausage

Everything must be cold,
he tells me, and it is,
the chill numbing the nerves
on the tips of our fingers.

Cutting the meat away from bone,
his knifework is almost surgical,
his free hand placed carefully
away from the sharper edges.

Out of the grinder, the flesh
is a frayed rope. The machine
whirs like a table saw, singing
the same shrill sounds as silence.

He feeds the casing until we have
links stretched to capacity with fat
and muscle. Don’t prick the skin,
he tells me, or it will all spill out.

*

Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer who lives in Modesto, California. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Orange Blossom Review, Funicular Magazine, Red Rock Review, Sojourners, Amethyst Review, Kissing Dynamite, and Deep Wild Journal, among others. He can be contacted at matthewjandrews.com.

Two Poems by Courtney LeBlanc

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POEM FOR NEW YEAR’S DAY

I’m lucky to have good neighbors, the kind
who pull your garbage bins in when you’re out
of town or gather your mail. This summer
I exchanged cucumbers from my garden
for mint from hers. And to have the kind
of neighbors who deliver a bouquet
of bright yellow buttercups when my dad
died, with a note filled with such kindness
I started crying all over again. And isn’t
that what the world needs right now, a little
more kindness? Because last night the ball
dropped and everyone held their breath
and made a wish, the world collectively hoping
that this year will be better than the last.
I started the first day of this new year with
a long walk with my dog, her anxiety
non-existent on these empty country roads.
And the few cars that passed contained
people who raised their palms in hello,
greeting me as if we were old friends, as if
they would happily accept cucumbers
from my garden, grab the package
at my front door, and deliver compassion
in the face of grief. They waved and I waved
back, this small act of kindness between
strangers, this small bit of hope carrying
us into the new year.

*

FOR MY SISTER, WHO TURNED 40 ELEVEN DAYS AFTER OUR FATHER DIED

We planned on Ireland, a week of lush
green and rolling hills, castles and seductive,
indecipherable accents. I would drive
and you would navigate. We’d hike and drink
Guinness, laugh and sleep late. Instead
we took turns holding our father’s hand,
the hum of the hospital and piped-in
Muzak, the soundtrack. After a week, we
brought him home, moved him close
to the picture window in the living room,
let the sun shine onto his skin as he gulped
for air and I pushed morphine into his cheek.
When he died we circled around his bed,
touched his cooling skin, wiped our tears
on the white sheets. Our father never left
the country, never had a passport, never
graduated high school. He left
the adventuring to us, his two youngest
daughters, the ones who flew farthest
from the nest. Let’s pull out calendars
and make plans. We’ll go next year,
or in five. We’ll explore the whole damn
world, we’ll see everything he never did.

*

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of Beautiful & Full of Monsters (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), chapbooks All in the Family (Bottlecap Press) and The Violence Within (Flutter Press). She is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Read her publications on her blog: www.wordperv.com. Follow her on twitter: @wordperv, and IG: @wordperv79.