Tag: Francine Witte

ONE ART’s August 2026 Reading

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ONE ART’s August 2026 Reading

Date: Sunday, August 2
Time: 2pm Eastern
Duration: 2 hours

Featured Poets: John Amen, Tina Barry, Tim Mayo, Francine Witte, CL Bledsoe, Kip Knott

Tickets are FREE!
(donations appreciated)

>> Register Here <<

~ About The Featured Readers ~

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press. His most recent book of poetry, Rothko’s Gospels, is available from tiny wren publishing. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott.

Tim Mayo’s poems and reviews have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street Journal, Narrative Magazine, Poetry International, River Styx, and Salamander among many other places. His poems have received ten 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. His latest collection Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster was published by Bainbridge Island Press in March 2026. He lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he works at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, and is a founding member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe’s poetry collections include Riceland, and his newest, Banana for Scale, as well as his latest novel The Moon On My Back. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his kid.

Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte.

Tina Barry is the author of Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing 2019 and 2016). Her writing can be found in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including ONE ART: a journal of poetry, The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, Rattle, Verse Daily, trampset, SWWIM and elsewhere. Tina’s third collection I Tell Henrietta, with art by Kristin Flynn, will be published in 2024 by Aim Higher Press, Inc. She has three Pushcart Prize nominations as well as Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nods. Tina is a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.

John Amen was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024.

Two Poems by Francine Witte

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Elegy for Waiting for You

The dark clock by the old train station
where the people come and go and me,
I’d stand there and I’d see that clock
with its hands that wouldn’t stop
even though you’d think they’d be too
weighted down with all the time
those hands were holding.

It’s easy to wait for love when you
know it’s on the next train or even
the one after that. But that was the problem.
You were never on any of those. I must have

known that but sometimes we will do anything
to breathe love alive. We will stand there
in a too-thin coat, shivering in the almost
dark, waiting forever for the train I wanted
so much for you to be on and which always
seemed moments away.

*

That night, moonless,

there was enough room Inside me
for my heart to bulge up, rocket
up to the space where I could still
see your goodbye eyes, flat as a galaxy map
Where stars are pressed against black velvet.
And like a galaxy, remembering you went into
The billions, of matter, of time, of how
Many years do the light from any of those
Dull, finished stars take to reach the earth.

*

Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte.

Pizza Hut, 1990 by Francine Witte

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Pizza Hut, 1990

Outside, the rainstutter.
Inside, garlic waft, chatter
of highchair kids. The waitress
staccato, you tapping your fingers.
Say it, I say to rain outside, my
voice bouncing back off the tinted
window glass. The stop of the drops,
the start again. Just fall, I tell it,
just come in one steady stream,
like a river, like Mountain Dew
fizzing out of a soda machine,
like a man who doesn’t love me
anymore.

*

Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books). She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. She is an associate poetry editor for Pidgeonholes. Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) was published by ELJ Editions in September, 2021. She lives in NYC.

Two Poems by Francine Witte

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In the teal of morning

Sun lamping up the sky,
we rub our cloud eyes, rub
the fossil night off and start
the dayburn. Turn on the radio,
same old talk of a planet cracked
and ribbed with fires and flood
and hate, tarred up with sludge,
which, really, could have been
glitter if only we had tried.

*

Sunfizzle

And the drip of daywater
slowing, slowing. Nearby,
burnt rubber from a car
speeding on its way to begin
something, to end something.
Shreds of the day in the sky
going violet with twilight.
The sulk of the sun, its
fizzle coming to a dead
stop, the walkaway of time.

*

Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, Passages North, and many others. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and (The Theory of Flesh.) Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) will be published by ELJ September, 2021. She lives in NYC.