Tag: Grief

Three Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

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Bad News Comes in Threes

I found out my spine keeps narrowing into a funnel,
pinching my spinal cord, like pressing two fingers together,
cutting off blood circulation. I require surgery.
Can I handle surgery at my age? My spine pretzels
into a question mark like a contortionist,
asking questions only a surgeon can answer:

whatever happened to that boy
who climbed up the spine of a tree, into the whirlpool of light
and maple leaves? Or that boy swinging on a rope
over a curved river, letting go, ker-splashing,
surgically slicing open water, as it zipped up over me,

only to discover, much to my chagrin, the hard, recklessness
of boyhood that I could swim for the life of me.
I couldn’t float, and sank to rock bottom, Perhaps, I died,
fished out, spewing water out of my lungs.
Boys are notoriously born without sense of risk or caution.

I never noticed the wear and tear on my body, too manly
to admit defeat, to know when beaten into submission,
but when my primary doctor noticed my hands tremoring
like wind-tossed leaves, she sent me to a specialist.

Now, I have three diagnosis I never had before, each one
cascading worse than the first, like a river over rapids,
like the one I plunged into without thinking about my actions
or reactions. I believe all boys are born with jarred brains.

My nerves have bad and mixed messages, telling me
I am not worthy of this body. My muscles twitch and buckle,
and earthquake with epilepsy. I feel like drowning in currents
of electrical displacement, body jumbling and thrashing.

I recall, once, watching as a car was unable to stop,
smacked a dog, snapping its spine. I could hear the sudden,
sickening thump-whack, a sound lasting weeks afterwards,
the body, crying and promising to taking it to a vet.
As far as I knew, the dog had no owner, no one to return it to,
no known address. From there, the road never went straight.

I’m half-listening to my doctor about the second worse news, ever,
and I’m still wondering about that nameless dog.

*

Kingfisher

A kingfisher’s eyes peers deep
into the mystery of water and the illusion
for a fish’s actual location,
knowing patience rewards those that seek inward.

How quiet its strike, and the more intense quiet afterward.
Patience begins with mindfulness,
intense concentration, and seeing beyond this world.

The blue gill doesn’t stand a chance.
Nature contains both violence and calm.

When the bird’s beak thrusts into the aquamarine water,
its spear finds center mass.
Its beak’s spear shows no mercy,
the water does not shiver with grief.

This disturbance ends abruptly, and quickness crests.
Even my attention focused through binoculars
gets startled by swiftness and resolve.

Water covers up the evidence of death.

My intake and released breath make the kingfisher’s glance,
daring me to judge it
or its need and purpose.

The kingfisher goes back to work, studying for movement.

This world maintains its strange balancing act.

As a medic, I had to gauge who to rescue during war.
I had to decide who wouldn’t make it.
Am I any better than nature?
Is it always about trading one life for another?
Is it about solitude getting re-distributed elsewhere?

This world can include risk or survival.

Everywhere has an element of the quickening,
when moments happen too fast and we’re forced to decide.

*

Why Fishing Lures Are Alluring

I found a tackle box at a garage sale,
and my first thought was to go fishing,
even though I lived miles from water.
The water I knew was a swollen creak
that ran faster than deer from a hunter.
The water ran like it was in panic.
It looked as massive as the Mississippi River.

I never wanted to fish until I saw the box,
opening it like a pirate’s treasure chest,
finding lures flashing back light and colors.
I never considered their hooks dangerous.
All I needed included a fish pole, fishing wire,
a can of worms, an empty bucket to fill with fish.

The box cost a dollar, and I had one
burning a hole in my pocket.

I begged my dad to take me to the lake.
Dad, it’d be fun, we can go fishing together.
When he refused, I deflated like a balloon,
however, no one could stop my stupidly.
I peddled all the way to the state park,
and saw the toll collector, chose a deer trail,
sneaked in. I was bound and determined.

I blanched and almost passed out
trying to hook a worm. I thought I heard
it screaming in pain. It turns out the lake
had no fish when it’s out of season,
and water was about to freeze over. It turns out
I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is editor for Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022; He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize. His 24 full-length collections include Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024). He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize for “One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away in Search of Peace”. Forthcoming is “Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence” (Bainbridge Island Press, 2026).

Three Poems by Connie Soper

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Cynthia’s Gift

Sometimes, when the grains of my own private grief
sift through me like sand,
or I am saddened again by the loss of her, I remember
how she gifted me this purple glass
for no reason at all.
It has no use, she said—
won’t hold flowers, can’t pour wine—
yet it pools a lavender essence, mellow
and dusky by the end of the day, color of creeping violets
on their way to summer.
It mirrors itself in the window,
veined with shades of a Murano sunset—
tender on the eyes, bathed in an amethyst wash.
She was luminous that way, bright as the lip of an orchid,
elegant in dress and demeanor.
A lilac-perfumed aura wafted in her wake,
until she slowly faded from herself
and no longer knew my face or name, forgetting, too
what she had given me.
Just something beautiful to look at, she said.
That’s all.

*

Threshold

When I ask where she wants me to leave
her earthly remains, she won’t say, as if

naming a place will take her there sooner.
My mother won’t speak of unpleasantries,

such as the inconvenience of dying.
She won’t talk of hymns, prayers, or the afterlife

she’s bound to enter. Yet here she is,
wearing the weathered skin of a century,

hovering in the purgatory of half-life,
one foot wedged into the other side.

I could shake her ashes onto the beach
where she’ll blend into beige, becoming

the landscape itself. I could recycle her
to nurture a tree, leaving a greener planet.

An urn on the mantle, a crypt, a proper chiseled stone.
It doesn’t matter where she’s left—

she’ll come back. Not in the resurrection
of tulip bulbs proving spring,

but in the stubborn roots of dandelions
I can never yank out.

In her handwriting scrawled on a recipe—
the pie crust only she could make.

I’ll see her face reflected in the mirror, my features
softening into hers.

I can take her to the threshold, karma-kissed and letting go.
Then it’s up to her.

*

Junk to Treasure

Nobody looks at old slides anymore,
those little squares rotating on a Kodak carousel—
Grand Canyon to nameless bridge to yet another monument.
Now boutique shops repurpose them
into found art—lamps with a retro glow,
vintage Christmas ornaments next to the bell-bottoms
in a secondhand store. Junk to treasure.

I take a box from the closet shelf,
hold a slide to the light. Delphi in December—
sky a blue flamboyance over Mt. Parnassus.
Such a tiny image for an enormous place.
I am stepping off the bus from Athens,
knapsack full of books, sweater and apples.
I wonder now who snapped this memory,
then handed the camera back. That’s his shadow,
a dark blotch on the sidewalk,
just before he disappeared into the vortex
of his own epiphany.

Whatever I saw, wherever I stood—
crumbling columns at the ancient temple,
taverna, plaza, dusty paths pocked
with goat hooves—I wanted nothing more
than to hold those moments close, like a face
memorized by touch, one you think will never change.
Here she is, that girl I had forgotten,
arriving all over again.
Ready to become something new.

*

Connie Soper is a poet living and writing in Portland, Oregon. She likes to visit small towns, hike, and walk along Oregon’s public beaches. Many of her poems are inspired by these experiences as well as other travels, and have appeared in Ekphrastic Review, Catamaran, Cider Press Review, Sky Island Journal, ONE ART, and elsewhere. Her first full-length book of poetry, A Story Interrupted, was issued by Airlie Press in 2022.

Two Poems by Alina Kalontarov

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ACROBATICS

In the underbelly of grief
is more grief and beneath that
lies the pit of your stomach.
Daylight brings the catastrophe
of thought and you think
you are always just a thin veil
away from the unthinkable.
But you rise and rinse
the silt from your hair,
your teeth, your bones.
You bottle the balm
of your body and get to work
kicking death like a stone
further down the road.
You come to believe it
somehow wise to chart out
the future with old maps.
(A carousel must be a metaphor
for something, after all.)
You get so deft at the acrobatics
of survival that you learn
to abandon a place
without ever leaving.
You do not notice the sunbeam
that has crawled all day
across the floor just to sit
at your feet.

*

RATIONALE FOR A KISS YOU DIDN’T WANT

Because the air was thick as spit
and he groped your left breast with butter
fingers during a matinee so you took that
to mean he’s laid a claim to your heart.
Because this is how you practiced opening
yourself in the cheap mirror tacked
to your closet door, its silver lick plastic
and pushing back against your softest parts.
Because your father left you stranded
in a man’s world and humility gathered
her skirts the day your mother named you
slut. Because why not. Because you’d slurp
just about anything to dislodge the terror
from the mauve of your throat and if you keep
his face busy he might forget to reach
for the other breast. Because you think
this time it’ll work, and no one ever taught you
to drink from the well of your two hands
and no one ever showed you a better use
for the fire in your mouth.

*

Alina Kalontarov is an educator, poet, and amateur photographer from New York. She collaborates on the editorial teams of various publications and is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee with work that can be found or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, ONLY POEMS, Sky Island Journal, Gather, Thimble, Sand Hills, and elsewhere.

Happy Mother’s Day to My Mother* by Veronica Tucker

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Happy Mother’s Day to My Mother*

The asterisk does what I can’t
holds the part I keep stepping around

like a wet tile in a hallway
no one marked

*my mother is dead

and also
she is still the woman who labeled everything
clean block letters on masking tape
drawers, bins, the quiet logic of a house
where nothing was ever misplaced

*my mother is dead

no one will call me today
to ask if I remembered sunscreen
or if the children are wearing enough layers
or if I am sleeping at all

*my mother is dead

and the store is full of cards
printed with soft pink cursive
words that assume a living address

I pick one up
like a pulse I can’t quite find

*my mother is dead

into the space above the sink
where she used to stand
hands in warm water
watching something out the window
I never asked about

into the car she drove
too carefully
both hands at ten and two

into the last voicemail
I cannot bring myself to delete
her voice already thinning
like light through late afternoon blinds

*my mother is dead

and I am a mother now

I look for her in small decisions
how to answer from the other room
when someone calls Mom like it might break
if I don’t come fast enough
how to keep track of who needs what
before they ask
how to say no
and still mean I love you

*my mother is dead

but sometimes
when the house is quiet
between chaos and sleep

I swear
there is a presence
not words
just a steadiness
placed gently in my hands

as if to say
continue

*my mother is dead

I wear her gold bangle every day
the small, constant weight of her
resting against my wrist

and also
everything she touched
is still touching me

even now
even this morning
even as I write her name
inside a card
that has nowhere to go

*

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and lifelong New Englander. Her writing explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, memory, and the human experience. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in ONE ART, The Berlin Literary Review, and Rust & Moth, among others. Her debut chapbook, The House as Witness, is forthcoming in spring 2026. Find her at www.veronicatuckerwrites.com and on Instagram: @veronicatuckerwrites

BETTER DAYS by Kevin Ridgeway

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BETTER DAYS

My childhood best friend lives
in Colorado now, and I haven’t
seen him since we were both fourteen.
I haven’t seen any of the few friends
I had from the old seedy little
Southern California bedroom
community I grew up in and the sad,
paint chipped walls of its one story houses—
windows lined with bars and overgrown
lawns yellowed by the relentless sun.
Among scattered detritus in the gutters
were lemons and oranges reduced to pulp,
littering the street after we picked them
off of trees and chucked them
as our sporting, prepubescent sacrifice
at the asphalt altar of the 1990s wasteland
we roamed through, the concrete
hot enough to have us dance up
and down in our bare feet, away
from the domestic miseries we
all sought to one day escape.
Most of us were school yard rejects,
bullied by the worst of the worst—
but my friends and I enjoyed our own
moments of delinquency, like the time
we broke into what we had thought
was an abandoned haunted house
and the owner caught us—
when he asked us for our names
and our parents’ phone numbers,
in the age before cell phones,
intent on letting our parents know
what we thought we could get away with,
I was the first to lie, giving him a phoney
name and telephone number. My friends
all followed suit and we laughed about
that old fool for years. Until I stopped
seeing my friends, not just because
some of them moved away, but because
we no longer had anything in common.
I have no idea what happened to them
other than my best friend, Simon,
who I’m no longer close to but who
I matter enough to for him to have sent
the largest floral arrangement on display
at my mother’s funeral, the chapel
as quiet as what we once thought had
been a haunted house in our old suburb,
but was a life abandoned instead,
in a once promising world that had already
seen better days before we all got there.

*

Kevin Ridgeway’s books include Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press), Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and Death of the Coppertone Girl (Luchador Press). His work has been published in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Slipstream Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, Gargoyle, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Trailer Park Quarterly and Talking River Review, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, California.

Four Poems by Dolo Diaz

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Father at the Stove

Father was a picky eater.
Mother would fuss over the stove,
a different pot for each of us.
It was her undoing.
She would make cod for me.
Brother, sister, other dishes.
But Father was exotic:
razor clams, conger fish
goose barnacles—
all fine, till the egg.
The fried egg.
It was her Everest.
Her culinary summit
unconquered.
Arguments would flare,
the yolk was cold.
Father would demonstrate
with another egg.
Mother, humiliated,
Father at the stove
pouring hot oil
over the yolk.
The family meal
disrupted.
Irretrievably.

*

The Morning After the Storm

I walk into the fresh battlefield
to inspect the fallen limbs.
Which tree do they belong to?

The shapes they take—
landing and settling,
a second planting.

The missing sound
of the open wound.

The creek rages,
chocolate-thick,
oxidized venous blood
carrying limbs lost upstream.

There is a hush in destruction,
pregnant with sound.
It fades slowly,
like folding eggs into batter.

If you listen carefully,
you can hear the hum.

After the storm,
what needed to break
has broken,
and stilled.

*

Forcing Last Rites on My Father

Calling the priest never crossed our minds.
Religion was not your cup of tea.
But your sister insisted, called him anyway
behind our backs. And when he arrived—
black robes cloaking a flawed man—
he insisted too and barged into your room.
You sat there, puzzled by the vials of oil
and paraphernalia. We were kids, peering through
the cracked door, tears of helplessness.
When he was done, we cursed him down the stairs.
He claimed God was on his side.
We knew better.

* 

The Chestnut Grove

You took us to the mountains
to show us the forestland
we would inherit—
the three of us.

I don’t remember what
my two siblings were promised,
but mine was the old chestnut grove.

Ancient, contorted trees
offering green, spiky parcels
cradling leathery fruit.

Trees native to the land,
unlike the eucalyptus
crowding all around us.

I think about that grove—
seen only once
four decades ago,
three of those you’ve been gone.

Your will, still unsettled,
the land still waiting,
the trees still bearing chestnuts
every fall.

*

Dolo Diaz is a scientist / poet with roots in Spain, currently residing in California. Her work has appeared/forthcoming in ONE ART, The Summerset Review, Third Wednesday, The Lake, among others. Website: dolodiaz.com.

Hunger by Valerie Bacharach

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Hunger

Years ago, shortly after our younger son died, my husband and I, on a trip to D.C., visited the National Gallery. Caravaggio and Monet vied for wall space with Klimt and O’Keefe while other rooms held marble statues and religious icons. We pretended to look, to scan the commentaries,
pretended we set aside sadness, left grief on the hotel’s unmade bed. My eyes wandered to families with bored teenagers, with toddlers sliding on tiled floors, tugging a parent’s hand, standing too close to a painting. Our son was neither toddler nor teenager, but a man of 26. Once upon a time, before we moved into darkness, we brought our sons here, ran after them, bribed them with treats, tried to speak with them about old masterpieces. I stared at those families surrounding us, fencing us in with their happiness, followed them from room to room, hollowed with a hunger so huge it could swallow the heavens.

*

Valerie Bacharach lives in Pittsburgh, PA and is a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Workshops. She received her MFA from Carlow University in 2020. Her book, Last Glimpse, was published by Broadstone Books in August 2024. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net.

Two Poems by Laura Foley

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Coming Out to My Sister

My sister—
the aloof one—
wasn’t, that day.
She took my arm,
led me through Georgetown,
sunlight on brick sidewalks,
into a small boutique
where we found clothes
soft as permission.

I chose a black silk cape,
delicate women stitched
across the back—
a garment that felt
like stepping into myself.

For a little while
she smiled at me,
held clothes to my shoulders,
wanting to see
who I might become.

Many years now
she hasn’t called,
doesn’t answer emails—
has slipped again
into distance, into silence.

But the cape still hangs
in my closet,
light as breath,
reminding me
of the one day
we were gentle
with each other.

*

Tea and Sympathy

She drives all the way to my house,
up a steep hill in the woods of Vermont.

“I understand—this is someone’s life,”
she offers, as she stamps and signs,
as I sign and sign, blue pen looping my name.

We sit at the kitchen table.
She pats our dog,
explaining how, in her free time,
she takes in elderly Labradors
at the end of their lives.

“Give them a year or two of happiness.
One just passed, last week.
I still wake at night to take him out.”

We share spiced cookies,
Earl Grey tea,
as she tells me about her health,
a difficult teenage son,
how she loves to work on her own.

Meanwhile, I’m signing page after page—
tax documents, a deed—
as I sell my sister’s townhouse in Texas,
the one she flooded
as she was dying in her tub.

Sheila places her cup in the sink,
scans the documents into her phone,
beams them off across the country.

As she leaves, I feel lighter,
freer of a sister
I hadn’t known well—hadn’t seen in forty years;

thankful for the sympathy—
a notary
whose stamp feels like kindness.

*

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. Sister in a Different Movie (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) is due out later this spring. 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, ONE ART, American Life in Poetry, and 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.

Five Poems by Andrea Potos

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THE FRIENDSHIP

The week
when she wrote:

You and I will
explore Truth together,

my heart
signed on instantly:

Yes,
though nothing followed–

they were words
only, after all;

I who am one who believes
in words, words

have rescued my life, after all.
Some say words are cheap;

I say, they
are costlier than you know.

*

SADNESS IS ON ITS WAY

I can hear the foghorns,
skies a drizzled mist,
clouds sodden
with grey weight
as if with so much
to let go of,
so much to say.

*

THE MOMENT I SENSED MY MOTHER WAS LEAVING

Standing in the mist-
drizzled green of Connemara,
the Wild Atlantic Way thousands of miles
from my mother in the rehab home,
I called to make sure she knew
I’d be back in four days.
I needed to ask her
how she was that morning– her voice
weakened and crackling across the vastness–
Just fair, she said,
Unable, for the first time in my life,
to offer the reassurance
for the daughter she loved so well-
it was then I knew.

*

WHEN MY WIDOWER NEIGHBOR INVITES ME
TO COME AND TAKE WHATEVER I WANT
FROM HIS WIFE’S WARDROBE

Three dressing rooms of voluminous wonder,
ballroom gowns, brocaded jackets
and scarves, leather purses and shoes,
and dressers filled with nightwear and tops.
I browsed and lingered, stayed for nearly an hour.
When I opened the deepest mahogany drawer, I found
a pale pink sweater, cloud-soft,
patterned all over with lipstick prints.
I thought of my mother, all the years
of her beloved Revlon shades.
I might have felt her then
tap my shoulder: Here is some love
from me honey–take it–
and I did.

*

WHEN OUR FAVORITE RESTAURANT CLOSES
         for Mom

Though you’ve been gone
nearly ten years now,
I’d drive the eighty miles
to go there–the glass doors still
opening for both of us.
I’d order our coffee
in their thick ceramic mugs,
then slices of their legendary
blueberry pie for take-home–
heaping with plump berries,
no crust on top, cold, with clouds
of whipped cream for later.
Each bite would remind me.
Now I must find
another place for us–
I want a location to point to,
to say, here, Mom, let’s go together,
I’ll pick you up at noon.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem. You can find her at andreapotos.com

Three Poems by Joanne Leva

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Lobster

You could crack my lobster or pitch a tent,
festoon it with pirates’ flags and shiny
things flapping in the wind. Stinging wind off
the Atlantic bluster but only half
a block from the hotel where we would stay
year after year. You’d walk for our pizza.
You, with outstretched, undeniable arms.
And, dutiful you, you’d deliver the hot
pepperoni and cheese to our sea mist
balcony overlooking the Sea Foam
Arcade, which overlooks the famous Love
Locks Park where large glycerin bubbles float
buoyant in transitioning summer sky.

*

Daily Routine in Lansdale, PA

Remember you are all people and all people are you.
—Joy Harjo

Remember the bed beneath your body,
the arrival of dawn. How peach color
reveals and illuminates the good sky.
How the reliable sun is mercy.
Remember how you walk on maple wood
floors. How the spirit goes along with you.
Remember your mornings, alone. The way
you remember the cat. How he adores
your lap. Remember your daily work. How
you step up. Remember your voice. Use it.
How green shoots start to show in early spring
and the hardened earth under the feeder
crumbles when you cross the yard. Remember

*

Final Arrangement

Let me tell you it wasn’t all bad, yes
it was Alcoholics Anonymous
on so many nights, car wrecks, chain smoking,
and tripping on acid in our house. Or
the night you left our bed and never came
back, set up a make-shift boudoir complete
with a large screen TV, CDs galore,
tobacco for rolling cigarettes. But,
it wasn’t all bad, there were good times too.
There was kindness in the middle of it.
Odd little kindnesses on my birthday,
our anniversary, Mother’s Day, and
that surf-tumbled, deep-purple sea glass ring.

*

An advocate for creative writing and community service, Joanne Leva is the founder and executive director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program (MCPL), founder and coordinator of the Forgotten Voices Poetry Group out of the Indian Valley Public Library in Telford, PA, and author of the poetry collections Eve Would Know (2017) and Eve Heads Back (2020) published by Kelsay Books.

Leva’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Peace Is a Haiku Song, 50 Over Fifty, Apiary, E-Verse Radio, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Rag Queen Periodical, Bucks County Writer, Transcendent Visions, WILDsound Festival of Poetry and elsewhere. Her poem, “God Walks into a Bar,” was featured in a Philadelphia Calligraphers’ Society Poetry Reading & Exhibit and companion publication.

Two Poems by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

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Another Sparrow

Another sparrow
hits glass, flies away
stunned to die
like the husband
of a woman I knew, a pillar
of his community. Left her
with five children
and gambling debts.

After the first few
I call a service
that installs peel and paste
film sheets in patterns
birds can see the way
we see guard rails
or blinking arrows—
row of white dots, dashes
a coded message
on every pane.

They tell me my brain
will adapt and I’ll stop seeing
them. I don’t have that kind
of time or faith
in what I’m told.
So I move the feeders further
from the house, hoping
for fewer dead birds,
feathers in flower beds.

I wonder if the woman
whose husband died
ever stops wondering
where he thought
he was going.

*

You Still Can

A peach pink line cuts through the sky at dusk,
a plane coming in for a sunset landing, so many
humans having been somewhere else. If I were not
already here, I’d want to be home.

I don’t travel anymore. I make excuses:
the cost, my dog, flying, inconvenience, discomfort.
It’s gotten embarrassing, like the clatter
of empty bottles, their skinny necks, residual fumes.

I awake with a spider-legged dread.
I belong in a story they won’t let me forget.
Another gathering of Jews bullet-sprayed.
Ancestral warnings. Shocked not surprised.

Hiding is one way to survive but no way
to live. I stay home, sweep crumbs, feed
the dog, pay bills. I fold sheets, make toast.
A plane? You mean you can go anywhere?

*

Lynn Glicklich Cohen is a poet from Milwaukee, WI. A once-upon-a-time social worker, a perennial cellist and semi-retired Rolfer, her poems have been published in Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, Cantos, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Front Range Review, Grand Journal, Oberon, ONE ART, Peregrine, The Midwest Quarterly, The Phoenix, The Red Wheelbarrow, St. Katherine’s Review, Thin Air Magazine, Trampoline, Whistling Shade, and others. www.lynnglicklichcohenpoet.com

Five Poems by Erica Miriam Fabri

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Electric Lady

The grief counselor told me that widowhood is an amputation.
A part of me, cut away. I must learn to live
as a fraction of before. It had been a moon and a half
since you died. As she stared at me, a third eye
grew on her forehead. It had no lid. It never blinked.
She told me not to sleep too much. To take walks.
Do you like to garden? she asked. This made me think
of the cemetery. The way we planted you like a bulb.
I told her I feel like The Electric Lady. Who’s that? she asked.
It’s the nickname I gave to The Statue of Liberty, when I learned
that she is struck by lightning six-hundred times a year.
He wanted a son, I said to her third eye. The Electric Lady
was sculpted by her son. He used a hammer to strike copper,
until he re-shaped the shiny metal into his mother’s face.
She is one-hundred and fifty-one feet tall. She lives in a river,
but never gets to swim. Her insides are hollow. She is always tired,
but can never rest. At any moment the zig-zag light
will come for her, to set her nerves on fire,
for just part of a second,
and then again,
and again,
and again.

*

Widow Couture

They think I let myself go over the anguish of it all.
They don’t know I wanted this: black hair recycled
into silver wires, coiled antennae, conductors
to contact the afterlife.

I know my clothes are old. I don’t buy anything new
because these textiles lived in the same house as you.
They are passion relics, daily cassocks I nurture
as if sultan’s silk. I wash them with holy water.

I am ill-fit and shapeless on purpose. I am hiding
this body so no one can see how my skin moves
like train tracks, how I am made completely of teeth.

* 

The Evil Eye

On my sixteenth birthday, Nonna squeezed
three drops of olive oil into a blue water bowl.
We leaned over it, becoming hawks.
We watched the slick golden orbs float,
like alien ships, toward each other.
They merged into one almond shape:
Ah malocchio, she hissed, The evil eye
is watching you. Nonna poured salt
on my shoulder, hung a shiny horn
around my neck, and tucked garlic
underneath my breasts at bedtime.
But the headaches found me, my belly got sick,
and bad luck roared toward me like a parade.
She set my pillow on fire, got onto her knees
under the moon. Every day at breakfast
she held my hand under the kitchen table,
and told me that my skin was like silk.
She made us arrive at church, two hours early,
to sit in the very first pew. She rubbed holy water
on my neck, insisted we pray four rosaries
before mass began. Her shaky fingers,
bead-by-bead, prayer-by-prayer, begged Jesus
to let the curse in me find its way
out of my blood. She spent all of herself
trying to save me. I know I killed her.

*

Most of the People in the World Eat Rats

Most of the people in the world eat rats, he said.
We had just finished sex. Smoke was still rising
from his pelvis. They eat them on every continent,

he continued, rat-on-a-stick, rat stew, rat pie,
rats in cream sauce. It’s a delicacy. Most of the people
in the world don’t have electricity. So, they eat

their rats in the dark. Most of the people
in the world don’t put their wet clothes in a machine.
They use a rope. They hang their pants like flags

and let the wind take over. They go outside to pull
each flat arm and each flat leg off the rope, and then
someone who loves them calls them inside for dinner.

The dinner is rats. Most of the people in the world
don’t own an oven that plugs into a wall,
they use real fire, like I do. They ignite raw flame

to cook that day’s fresh batch of rats. If we lined-up
all the rats in the world, it would form a band of rats
that wraps around the planet forty-five times.

See how small we are? You and me? With all
of our big, hard decisions. See how slight
our two bodies are, here in this bed,

compared to a civilization of rat-eaters?
And yet, we found each other. And now,
I am certain there is no one else on Earth

that can make me roast and wither,
the way you do.

* 

Fever Dream

The ghost of my husband,
by now a heptagon of years dead,
was there, in the bed with us.
As that dog-eyed, extra-alive man
rushed through me like a river,
my husband’s shadow
perched on my shoulder.
His spirit-self wasn’t interrupting us,
he was guiding me. He was there
to remind me that this is the most
carnal part of having a body,
the mightiest bounty on Earth.
The rest of it is pain. This is all there is.
The tender spot. The quick.
In time, nerve endings expire. Fibers break.
The sensory pathway is interrupted,
a fallen bridge that once connected
a life of heat, and cold, and itch–
and then, no more neurons, no more
deep pressure, or fine touch.
His dissipated-self moaned
as we made love. He ordered me
to do everything he can no longer do:
trigger the involuntary muscles,
allow the unsacred parts to spasm.
Do not misspend your minutes.
Be greedy. Pirate every lick, every
grope. Before you evaporate.

*

Erica Miriam Fabri is a Brooklyn-based poet and the author of two books: Morphology (Write Bloody Publishing) and Dialect of a Skirt (Hanging Loose Press). Morphology was the winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Award and Dialect of a Skirt was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and included on the bestseller lists for Small Press Distribution and the Poetry Foundation. She teaches writing at Pace University and College of Staten Island. ericafabri.com

HAUNTING by Henry Israeli

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

HAUNTING

We got it backwards. The dead
don’t haunt us. We
haunt them. We follow them around
in our bathrobes,
with our votive candles,
our palms offered up to clouds,
waking them at odd hours
to dredge up the past.
Did you love us enough? we ask.
Did we love you enough? we ask.
The times we laughed together
they no longer find funny.
The times we cried together
stir up nothing.
Staring into a sink or looking up
from a mattress,
we torment them
with our irascible questioning,
our milky moods that skulk through
the deserted playground of our minds.
Still, we beckon them
watch us weep into our pillows.
Who can blame them
for hating us and our petty desire
for answers, for forgiveness, for closure?
They look at us the way me might
look at insects trapped in amber,
wrapped as we are
in our heavy loneliness.
We are more dead to them
than they to us.
They have better things to do
than mope around the house.
They’ve gotten over us.
We’ll never get over them.

*

Henry Israeli is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Our Age of Anxiety (White Pine Poetry Prize: 2019), and god’s breath hovering across the waters, (Four Way Books: 2016), and as editor, Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books (Saturnalia: 2022). His next collection, Between the Trees (or the Lonely Nowhere) will be published by Four Way Books in 2028. He is also the translator of three critically acclaimed books by Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Plume, and The Harvard Review, as well as several anthologies including Best American Poetry 2025. Henry Israeli is also the founder and editor of Saturnalia Books.

Two Poems by Barbara Eknoian

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Too Late

Watching the end of the movie,
I think the actor played a touching role.
As the credits roll down the screen,
I’m enjoying the orchestra music
playing, which causes tears
to sneak out of my eyes.
The music triggers thoughts
of my son’s loss, and he too,
had a lot of disappointment in life.

It was just before he left us that we had
an honest conversation. He shared
for the first time that he believed
his school problems began when
we moved him across country twice
at eight and ten years old.

I’m left with regret realizing
that I was part of his problem.
My eyes spot the words, The End.
I nod knowing that now it is too late.

*

A Visit

I wake up talking with my husband,
I look to my left, and his side
of the bed is empty.
I think he’s getting ready
to go to work
Then I realize it’s just a dream,
and has happened several times.

Listening to a podcast, a medium,
who hears from the dead explains,
that it is a sign from your loved one
he is still aware of you.
It’s a reassurance that he’s there.
My dreams disappear into
my night time world,
but I know I’ve been visited.

*

Barbara Eknoian’s work has appeared in Pearl, Chiron Review, and Silver Birch Press’s anthologies. She was twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her latest poetry book is available at Amazon along with her novels. She is a veteran of Donna Hilbert’s poetry workshop.

Miracle Girl by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Miracle Girl
              –Adamuz, Córdoba, January 18th, 2026

Six and barefoot, you falter
along the rails like a phantom

in limbo, though you´re very
much alive. Virtually unscathed,

reporters will say, despite
the wreckage around you.

Despite the bodies, writhing
like unanswered questions,

or still as a billion-year-old
mountain. The bewilderment

of limbs you crawled over
to reach the broken window.

At what point in your search
for your family does your mind

ramshackle, fracture under
the dead weight of despair?

At what point are your thoughts
launched off their tracks?

Maybe when a barn owl
screeches, or a big rig thunders

past the tragedy that will define
the rest of your life. Soon,

all of Spain will illuminate you
in halo. Miracle girl, they´ll say.

As a civil guard leads you
away, maybe you hear voices

among the debris—your cousin,
your brother, mostly mamá

and papá. At what point will you
understand they´re phantoms

now, crashing towards you
from the wrong side of the divide?

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in 2025. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, and MER. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com

An Afternoon of Hollow Things by Linda Mills Woolsey

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

An Afternoon of Hollow Things

Each thing cradles its own emptiness—
the feeder’s plastic cylinder drained
of seed, the tip of a branch shivering
loss as a chickadee takes flight, my heart,
circling your absence. The sky’s an erasure,
dubiously blank, the cup I clasp holds
only a brown film and air. For breath
to fill the lungs, they must be emptied.

Hours stall, empty as acorn cups, thin
as the ordinary need just to be loved.
The hollow of my heartbeat is narrow,
too—or simply shallow, condensation
on a cocktail glass, dust on the last book
we might have read together. My heart’s
not shattered, just empty as the space
between pressed lips, waiting to inhale.

*

Linda Mills Woolsey is a Western Pennsylvania native who has spent most of her life in Appalachia, north and south. She reviews poetry for Plume and Presence and reads submissions for River Heron Review. Her poems have appeared in Northern Appalachia Review, Wild Roof, The Christian Century, The Windhover, ONE ART and other journals. She lives with her husband and two companionable cats in a rural village in Allegany County, NY.

Three Poems by Abby McCartney

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Self Portrait as Crossword Puzzle

The sign of a beginner is their loyalty
to their first answer. Once you’ve banged
your head against the grid for four
or six months, trying to earn sleep,
you realize: do it in pencil.
Most days I try to pack too many letters
in the same box. Sometimes
that’s allowed – another thing I
had to learn the hard way. I remember
the first time I realized the answer
could spill over the edge, up the sides.
I want the gold star, the answers
clicking into place like a seatbelt.
My favorites, though, are the puzzles
that make their own rules, crossing
YELLOW down with RED across to
make the Orange Bowl. My grandmother
did a Monday crossword every night
before bed, one family pattern
I don’t mind repeating. When she
fought with my mother, it was always
in pen. It’s the work of a lifetime
to learn to erase.

*

Elegy with Summer Rain

The thing about an untimely death is
overnight your recipes became holy.
Your voicemails are relics, your
Cowboys sweatshirt a talisman.
Now I can say your name without
crying. Usually. Sometimes I want
to complain about you as my friends
complain about their mothers:
She never called me, but she assumed
I had been kidnapped if I didn’t call home
by Sunday noon. Sometimes
I want the last book you gave me
to be a book and nothing
more. After the summer storm
the city is bathed in an eerie pink
light, even past sunset, refracting
off the bouldering clouds, making
the bricks glow like jewels,
making everything look wrong.

*

When my mother visits my dreams

When my mother visits my dreams
she wants to know what happened
to all her stuff.
We gave your loaf pans away, I say.
Sorry. Why did you have four of them?
We sent one to my cousin
for their first apartment, I tell her.
She nods. She is glad.

I worry how I will explain the rest:
TikTok, hybrid meetings, Wordle,
The new house my dad lives in
full of a woman she barely knows.
You were gone a long time,
I say.
We didn’t think you were coming back.

I wake and remember
all the things I forgot to ask.

*

Abby McCartney (she/her) is an emerging poet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work explores themes of grief, motherhood, and lineage. She spends her days working on education finance policy at the state and local levels and previously served as an aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is also an active lay leader at Kol Tzedek Synagogue. In her spare time, she enjoys baking, reading, crossword puzzles, and walking her dog around South Philly. She holds an M.P.A. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a B.A. from Yale University, where she was a Truman Scholar.

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.

Love in People, Not Things by Laura Foley

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

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.

Two Poems by Christina Daub

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

People are Dying, But

I’m in my fifties when the officer informs me,
houses are for kissing, not parks and especially
not parks after dark, never mind that’s where
the moonlight and the stars hang out. She bores
her blinding headlights into us and barks,
are you clothed, why are your seats reclined,
what are you doing–we terrible criminals trying
to steal a little romance under Orion and Mars.
She demands to know where we live and why
we don’t go home, because houses are for kissing,
she repeats, as if I’d never thought I might kiss
you over the sink, or while paused in the doorway
handing you a book. Never mind the loveseat,
the corners, or the infamous nooks. As if I’d never
imagined the whole house being one big kisseria,
because that’s how it is when you’re in love
and want to kiss everywhere. But it’s a rough
night for the thin-lipped park policewoman
who looks like she hasn’t kissed in years, she
with the deadest beat, her short arm of the law
stretching only from her high beams to random
parked cars, as she makes her rounds in Rock Creek
Park, driving from playground to playground after dark.

*

Grief is like that

the plovers ticking this way and that, threading
the shore with their disappearing tracks,
the waves relentless, lulling, the wake
as temporary as our own wakes will be.

When they took your body away, the quarters
that weighed your eyes shut dropped
to the floor. No one wanted to touch them.

Cards stacked up by the hothouse flowers.
We’d held it together all day. Then the sky broke
open, and we were gutted like fish. Someone
brought over ice cream. I don’t remember who.

*

Christina Daub is a poet from Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Stone Circle Review and others. She has been a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.

Meditation (Intermission) by Bonnie Naradzay

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

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

Lost by Ashley Kirkland

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Lost

I’ve lost my mother many times, enough
to fill a lifetime. She is always slipping away
from me. The first time (a classic) in a 90’s turn of events

in a department store, I pressed my face to soft silk shirts
& got lost in a rack of clothing. A woman found me crying
in the center of the circular rack. Years later, we nearly lost

her when her heart blew open in the living room,
her aorta fraying like the end of a rope. The ghost I was floated
across campus for weeks. A teacher called me honey

and I nearly cried: nearly motherless at 21. Now, 36,
my husband and I talk in the kitchen on a Sunday
afternoon, rain drizzling in late November, football helmets

clashing on the tv in the other room, and we talk about her
health as if it concerns us and I say he’ll be devastated,
referring to our older son, who loves my mother. She doesn’t realize

I say who she’s hurting by not taking care of herself as if her health
is something within our control. I was 21 & I said goodbye to her
over the phone and drove home while she was in surgery,

her chest splayed open on the operating table, her aorta
a patchwork. Now, 36, I stop and listen every time I hear sirens
to see if they turn in the direction of her street. I lose her again

and again, dread the day when I get the call (again),
when my father tells me to come home now, and I have to tell
my son, in words I don’t yet know, what has happened.

*

Ashley Kirkland writes in Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in Cordella Press, Boats Against the Current, The Citron Review, Naugatuck River Review, HAD, Major7thMagazine, among others. Her chapbook, BRUISED MOTHER, is available from Boats Against the Current. She is a poetry editor for 3Elements Literary Review. You can find her at lashleykirkland.bsky.social and lashleykirklandwriter on Instagram.

Grief Comes on a Friday at 4 p.m. by Ellen Rowland

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Grief Comes on a Friday at 4 p.m.

A craving for your spinach and mushroom crepes.
The plastic recipe box. Colored tabs for appetizers,
main dishes, desserts. Your left-handed back slant,
smudged ink, a greasy fingerprint—
all landing like a gasping hammer. Where have you been?
I don’t think I ever buried you. You bloomed in me
right there at the kitchen counter on a Friday at 4 p.m.
The missing wail so deep and gaping, a childhood slipped
from those protective sleeves. A kinder birth, a difference.
A truth about keeping—you never did, and I never will,
make all the good things.

*

Ellen Rowland is a writer and editor who leads small poetry workshops on craft and form. She is the author of three collections of haiku: The Echo of Silence, Light Come Gather Me and Blue Seasons, as well as the book Everything I Thought I Knew, essays on living, learning and parenting unconventionally. Her latest poetry collection, No Small Thing, was published by Fernwood Press in 2023. You can find her writing in ONE ART, Braided Way, Rock.Paper.Poem and Silver Birch Press, among others. She lives off the grid with her family on an island in Greece. Connect with her on Instagram and Facebook.

After My Brother Died in An Explosion by Terri Kirby Erickson

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

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.

Letter to My Son, Over Three Years Since He’s Gone by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

~ ONE ART ~ 18 Comments

Letter to My Son, Over Three Years Since He’s Gone

You would be jealous, I think,
of how your sister is learning trig,
speaking Spanish, playing bridge.
You’d probably tease her, but really,
what you’d be thinking is, She is so cool.
And she is, sweetheart. She’s fun
and silly. Like you. Only like her.
We talk about you, of course.
Just this weekend, we remembered
how once you said if a 99-pound person
ate a one-pound burger, they
would be one percent burger.
I wonder what percent of your sister
is grief? And what percentage love?
Tonight a girl asked her if she had any siblings.
She said, yes, a brother. When the girl
asked her how old you were, she told her
the truth. That you were seventeen
when you died. What a terrible gift
to learn how to say the hardest things straight.
I can’t help but think if you are watching her,
you, too, must be in awe of who she’s becoming.
Oh, how we learn to grow from whatever soil
we’ve been given. I do not pretend to know
how this works. I only know she
is learning to transform ache into beauty,
nightmare into dream. I only know
I long for her to know love from you
the way a garden feels loved by sun, by rain.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is poet laureate for Evermore. She co-hosts the Emerging Form podcast. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her newest collection is The Unfolding. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Three Poems by Karen Craigo

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Thanatopsis

There are so many ways
they can leave us, our people,
wired to monitors, swinging
from a tree, dropping
on a sidewalk. However
the universe selects,
they manage to find
the door—the one marked
exit, the single way away.

Sister, time is tricky.
I don’t believe moments
line up like beads in a row.
They seem more like a wad
of foil, building up as each
thin layer is tamped. Points touch
where we would not expect,
your loss, mine—pressed in,
they cleave to one another.

*

All you can think of is loss,

that crafty snake that slips in
at the neck and moves
to warm itself on any part
it touches. It slides down
to your sternum and beneath
your breast, and presses
so you won’t miss the fact
of it. That grief has made
Medusa of me is clear
when I sleep, dozens
of baby griefs curled up
beside my head, warming
my brain, that knot of vipers,
though I don’t know what
we have against vipers,
reduced as they are to nothing
but desire and a muscle
that pushes where it leads.
They’re a bit like we are,
feeling our way in absence
of a lodestar, snaking
through Earth’s ribs in search
of the hot red heart.
It’s cold down here, and we
don’t know how to back up
to that dazzling circle of light.

*

Grief as KitchenAid Mixer

It takes up space
on the counter, but I’ve learned
to look past it, to forget it’s even
there, red and obvious
as a body laid out
on a slab.

I’ll give it this—it’s
versatile, came standard
with hook, beater, whip,
and you can spiralize,
churn—whatever
the recipe demands.

Maybe one day I’ll make
a cake with it, though it’s fuzzy
with dust, and I’ll have to deal
with that—molecules of us
mottling every surface.

*

Karen Craigo, former Missouri Poet Laureate, has two full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks. She is also an essayist and writes for the Springfield (Missouri) Business Journal. She is nonfiction editor of Mid-American Review, prose poetry editor of Pithead Chapel, and poetry series editor for Moon City Press.

Work Ethic by Tamara Madison

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Work Ethic

In Irish, sadness is a thing that is on a person:
Sadness is on me, grief upon me.

Yes, I feel it. Like a weight. But mine
surrounds me too, a fog that sunlight
can’t disperse; it’s not a coat I can shrug off
and hang in a closet. It’s more than just
upon me now; it dwells in me, part
of my aging self, like bunions, wrinkles,
arthritis. I’ve made a decision: Today,

I will garden. There are weeds to pull,
gutters to clean, storm debris to sweep.
Grief can sit in its bloody corner and do
as it must. I’ll pat its head from time to time.
But for now, I’ve got work to do.

*

Tamara Madison is the author of three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic”, “Moraine” (both from Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar” (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and two chapbooks, “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig, Worcester Review, ONE ART, and many other publications. More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Water Lilies

Large pancake-shaped leaves
hover in clusters on water
as still as an oil painting.

Monet spent years in a garden
like this, capturing the light
and the color on canvas.

I stand on a stone bridge,
remembering Monet,
and wishing I could paint myself
as a floating flower, anchored
by a long stem firmly rooted
beneath a surface
that never ripples.

*

I’ve Never Liked Roller Coasters

So I shouldn’t be surprised
by how miserable I am
riding with him now
in a rickety car destined
to plunge at high speed.

His cancer twists and turns
at 300 feet above the ground.
Each time it slows, the pace picks up,
and we’re tossed from side to side,
too dizzy to scream.

“Be grateful,” my cousin says.
“He’s doing better.”

For how long?

Will we have a full week this time?
Each day delighting us, by eating more,
walking more, staying alert longer,
before he’s suddenly feverish again.

No, I’ve never liked roller coasters,
never found a racing heart to be a thrill,
not even the relief of stepping out of the car,
shaken but okay, has ever pleased me.

So my knuckles stay white
as I grip the safety bar, wishing—
not wishing—for the ride to end.

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com

Grief Drops In by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Grief Drops In
         in memory of my friend

Dinner with your husband–
easy conversation and tall tales,
old-time jazz on the jukebox.
In the center of the table,
a basket of fries to share–
his hand reaching for one,
his ring finger bare.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently Her Joy Becomes from Fernwood Press and Marrow of Summer from Kelsay Books. A new collection from Fernwood entitled Belonging Songs will be published in 2025. New poems are forthcoming in Women Artists’ Datebook 2025, The Healing Muse, Braided Way, Delta Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly, and the Paterson Literary Review.

Gone by Barbara Eknoian

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Gone

The flowers are disappearing now
that it’s fall. Soon my property
will be covered with leaves, gone
will be the cheery yellow flowers.

My two grandsons have returned
to their home in Tennessee.
It was a short visit, but a happy one.
I make their beds until next time.

My oldest grandson has scheduled
his wedding for next autumn;
he has been here since he’s eleven.
The time will fly, and he’ll be gone.

I fell in June and broke my hip.
I’m alone most of the time. I’m learning
to walk again, but my phone stopped
ringing with invitations to go anywhere.

Hopefully, in time family and friends
will return, except for my son,
who I lost without warning.
He can’t return like the flowers.

*

Barbara Eknoian’s work has appeared in Pearl, Cadence Collective, Redshift, and Your Daily Poem. Recently, her New & Selected Poems, More Jerkustances, has been published by Editor Eric Morago. She lives in La Mirada, CA, with her daughter, grandson, two dogs, and two cats (one is mild and the other is full of mischief). There’s never a dull moment at her house.

Grief by Rose Gubele

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Grief

I wrote a note to myself: “Remember to grieve.”
I don black, turn my eyes down.
I need a minute to untangle my past,
mourn the girl who could have been.

Monsters are real:
not embodied evil, stalking silver screens,
not experiments performed by
unethical inventors who drink their own toxins.

Monsters have logic, though not excuse.
They can be kind, if it suits the goal:
manipulation, control, power.
Corrupted by pride, arrogance, greed.

I still remember the monster in the hallway:
no sharp claws, no pointed fangs,
just a boy with a knife,
trying to make his own life better.

*

Rose Gubele is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Missouri where she teaches courses in rhetoric and writing. She received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition at Washington State University. She has previously published poems in Red Ink and Penumbra.

March Birthday by Jeanne Griggs

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

March Birthday

I knew it was your birthday
as soon as I woke
so I told your father,
called your grandparents to come,
took your sister out with a friend,
packed my bag and smoothed the sheet
on the bassinet, ready for you.
All these years later I still wake
knowing it’s your birthday. I sent
a cake and a text
because you don’t know
how you’re still part
of the circulation of my blood,
your fetal cells still in my marrow,
and that the thought of you
is like sunshine on the forsythia
outside my bedroom window,
the same twigs suddenly showing
blooms as on that first morning.

*

Jeanne Griggs is a Pushcart nominated poet; her poems have appeared in the Mid-Atlantic Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Inquisitive Eater, Thimble Literary Magazine and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Jeanne is the author of Postcard Poems (Broadstone Books).

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).

I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?” by Karen Paul Holmes

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?”

He answers I am dying.
I can’t imagine typing I am dying,
like stating I’m finishing War and Peace.

Calendars full of treatments, ending.
Two surgeries nearly taking him.
He told me last year he had three years left—
maybe—but was fighting to see
his last child graduate.

Today, he says his last reading next month—
in a state where he used to live—
is a chance to say goodbye.
He lists all he’s grateful for. A big list,
and it comforts me. I’m a faraway friend,
and this dying man is comforting me.
I want to ask Has knowing been better
than not knowing?

It seems unbearably real to say
I am dying. To be on the other side of hope,
no longer seeing past the earth’s edge.
Do we all have that kind of brave in us?

Or is there still hope, but of a different kind?
A hope for the light at a shaded path’s end—
like those near-death have seen.
A glimpse of that shining.
That beautiful beaconing.

*

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her two books are: No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot. Poetry credits include The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, and Plume.

Practice by Aubrey Brady

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Practice

I practice grief every day

as if
pulling all these possibilities
lifting layers of loss
shuffling through frantically
scribbled sheaves

as if I can stop whatever tragedy I can predict

because
while I slipped my feet into
sands warmth flooding
my being with gold
listening to largeness
of water
coming and going
I also let slip
the memory of grandaddy’s
fading health
how he was slowly
disappearing into cold
blue beds and white walls
how
when i turned
he was gone

and because
when I am pulling belts
around fragile bodies
propelling us towards distances
I know
that if I can prepare myself
for a car’s swerve
the rush of metal that can slice
through bone
and all that’s dear
it will not
or has not

and because
each joy
turns eventually
tragedy launching itself
into every tender moment
spinning soft wool
into spikes

because
the body always betrays
either through its plush fragility
or brain bleeds
or heart’s assault
or cells turned rogue
or if lucky
entropy,

and so I practice
each note
each line
and prepare
so busy hoarding preserves
I miss how the light holds
the peach fuzz curve
of shoulder blade
how laughter
breathless and unrelenting
feels the same as sorrow.

*

Aubrey Brady studied music at Covenant College and is working on her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry at Lindenwood University. Her work has appeared in Solum Press, Book of Matches, Ekstasis, Moria, and Barbar. She lives in Montana with her husband, Matthew, and their two children.

Two Poems by Susan Vespoli

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Ode to the Modified Serenity Prayer

      “Grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change,
      the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it’s me.”

Your daughter camps near the methadone
clinic in a sea of bench and canal sleepers.

She’s lost another phone or charger or backpack,
wears a ball cap over her sunburnt face.

You could tell her to go back to the hospital
or sober living or Soul Surgery Treatment Center

or the 90-day rehab she left after four days.
You could drive her to Walmart, the Dollar Store,

buy her a phone charger, more clothes, shoes,
instant coffee, oatmeal, peanut butter, candy,

wring your hands, feel sick to your stomach
as she smiles, climbs out of your car, saying, “Yes,

I’d rather live on the street.” You could pretend
she’s gone to Woodstock, that it’s 1969, that addicts

are just kids passing through a phase where they drop
acid, wear tie-dye, dance in the rain to Canned Heat.

Or you could repeat the modified serenity prayer
            over and over and over and over,

then drive home, park your car, kiss your own
goddamn good life just as four geese fly over
your flowered front yard and honk.

*

Driving to pick up my daughter while wearing a purple T-shirt graphic-ed with Edvard Munch’s The Scream

      ~ “Do whatever you can do to support her healthy choices, not enable.” ~
            — my grief therapist

Head down, hands on the wheel,
breathe in the screeching bus, the careening
light rail, the two lanes of traffic closed
by a row of orange cones.

Breathe in 19th Ave. – a street
to avoid when you can.
Overflowing trash cans,
people lost or stumbling
or sleeping on a bench under a tarp.

Breathe. Breathe. Look up

at the unexpected flash of palm trees,
maybe 30 of them. Tall thin bristle-up
paint brushes that have caught the end-
of-the-day sun and they glow

like taper candles or hope:
this oasis of thrive rising above
billboards, asphalt, sirens,
rooftops and all the gas pumps at the Circle K.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Rattle, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. Susan is the author of Blame It on the Serpent (Finishing Line Press), Cactus as Bad Boy (Kelsay Books), and One of Them Was Mine (Kelsay Books). Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet

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.

Time and Space by Maria McDonnell

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Time and Space

“Swore I could feel you through the walls, but that’s impossible.”
               ~ Phoebe Bridgers

The trees are always on the cusp
            an ending & an entrance
warm winter       cold spring.

Light in the window brings soft morning
in a smoky rented room        galley kitchen overlooking the yard
            bike fallen near the shed        basketball in the garden.

Tonight could be a night on Magnolia Drive—
baby swimming in my bed—
a night on a chair in a private room
crash carts racing by the door.
Night alone in a king-sized bed
burning from within
phone on the pillow
everything is electric.

Stone steps from the Hall
chapel bells tell the hour but not the year.
This could the time they boarded up the library
or the day I fell and skinned my knees.
Today is four years ago        my son is on the line
saying that people are dying in Italy
and I should lock the doors.

Today is tonight
and my son is on the other side
of the moon        he’s sleeping in the room behind my bed.
He’s shooting a basketball that never stops arcing over the backboard
burning as it moves across the sky.

*

Maria McDonnell lives in Pennsylvania with her family and dogs. She works at Albright College where she teaches English classes and works as a student success coach. She has published poems and essays in various print and online journals including Motherwell, Rat’s Ass Review, The Elephant Journal, Paradigm, Steel Point Quarterly, and Parlor. She was included as a featured reader in a 2019 production of Listen to Your Mother. In 2009, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry book, First I Learn My Name, was published by Foothills Publishing in 2008.

Two Poems by Gary Fincke

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Exact Likeness for Grief

Swinging a pitching wedge, my father lofts
Seven golf balls over my mother’s grave.
To spare the grass, he hits from the shoulder,
Picking them clean from the thin lie of dirt.

It’s forty yards, I’m guessing, to the woods
Where all but one of seven disappear
In yardage he can manage, length to spare,
At eighty-eight, his knees beyond repair.

He limps to her grave site, his love an arc
That ends among trees. The flowers he’s picked
Follow him in my hands; he turns the club
Upside down and uses it as a cane.

“Some day you’ll know,” my father says, meaning
His knees, and then again, “Some day you’ll know,”
Meaning, this time, the grave, this selection
Of flowers, orange ones I cannot name.

My father, the prophet, bends to the vase
Of wilted stems. My father, who’s warned me,
“You’ll see” a thousand times, lifts the fresh buds
From my hands, steadies himself on my arm.

My father, who was a maintenance man,
Sends the old stems to the woods in my hands,
Seats the flowers by height like a teacher
While I kick the short ball into the trees.

*

Peace, a Flightless Bird

Algorithms are sending me ads
for cremation services, ones that
save money through pre-need purchase.

The world gives daily birth to flags;
They shriek their certainties
In foster homes they will grow to burn.

All myths have become biographies.
Every war is undeclared.
Even our secrets are undeserved.

Peace, a flightless bird, is extinct, war
So ordinary we show up for work
Like soldiers, our anger expected.

In the museum of memory
We inspect the webbed footprints
Sunk so far into the earth

We nearly remember the shape
Of a bird so large it must have
Believed there was nothing it need fear.

*

Gary Fincke’s poetry collections have been published by Arkansas, Ohio State, Michigan State, Lynx House, BkMk, and Jacar. His newest collection For Now, We Have Been Spared will be published by Slant Books late this year.

Two Poems by Lily Jarman-Reisch

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Affairs in Order

We were so thorough,
giving our kids instructions,
account names and passwords
should we suddenly die
while on this island for so long
trying to weave ourselves back together.
Even noted who to invite to our funeral.
Except, I realize,
shaded next to my husband
under a beach umbrella,

maybe she should be on that list.
He’d want her to know,
to be there. She might attend,
with me gone. But then she’d see
photos of our life together –
Soul kissing in the high Sierra
or when I was chemo bald,
my face in his hands. That time we
made the most of a blizzard,
piggy-backed on a sled.
Would she wonder
if she really knew him,
still mourn their romance?
And him?

When he deleted their texts,
did his phone, a hive
sheltering their intimacies,
become a shrine,
her name and number sacred relics?
Does he return to her on a breath
of rosemary, grieve
for lost things that won’t happen –
his fingers braided with her hair,
hers mapping the marriage
line of his palm?

*

Reunited

I still think you’ll rise from the floor
you collapsed on, your wine glass,
its shards rejoined, brought back
to your open lips.

Even on our wedding day, I wondered
who would go first,
if I’d wake one night
to your stopped
rhythm, if you’d wake to mine,
your arm on my mute chest.
And all the what if’s since:
if each clink of raised glasses was the last.
If I was laughing at your final
one-liner before you were downed
by a mass shooter, a speeding truck,
or I was.
If each word was the parting one–
the voice in my head yelling Stop! Stop!
as I yelled at you for leaving
your shoes where I would trip on them,
irritated when you talked too much,
my last thought
while one of us still breathed.

They tell me to choose clothes for your burial.
I picture the suit you wore to marry me
sagging, rotting in a dirt-smothered box.
I clutch your comb, your slippers,
gut the laundry for your socks, a t-shirt
still sour, damp with your sweat.
I put them all on,
curl under covers
on your side of the bed,
find a hair on your pillowcase
and swallow it.

*

Lily Jarman-Reisch is a 2024 Pushcart Prize recipient, poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review, and a Contributing Editor for Pushcart Prize XLIX. Her poems appear in Amsterdam Quarterly, CALYX, Collateral, Mobius, One, Pangyrus, Plainsongs, Pushcart Prize XLVIII, San Pedro River Review, Slant Poetry, among others. She was a journalist in Washington, D.C., and Athens, Greece, where she lived aboard a small boat she sailed throughout the Ionian and Aegean Seas, and has held administrative and teaching positions at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland.

Three Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

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Emptying Time

While I was asleep, my father died,
slipped into that great coda, when memory passes
from one person to another person,
and I became a gatekeeper of his life.

And since there were gaps in his history,
I began filling them.

On my way to my father’s funeral,
a large whooping crane wafts across the bay
where a lavender light floats on water.

Before the dead releases,
breath becomes one door closing,

another one opening.
That strange lyric
of a life that continues
when someone starts sharing a memory.

I wasn’t there when he died,
but I have witnessed others at their last sigh
as a field medic in Vietnam. I remember
each of them like a slick country road
I must maneuver/drive in the dark.

The crane lifts its impossible weight,
its head matching crimson morning-break,
its whoop-whoop trumpets my loss.

How heavy a crane looks, large wingspan
almost tipping both edges of the sky,

endlessly suspended in air,
an aimless cloud, always present,
untouchable as thought.

*

I Had Been Expecting This Phone Call Since January

I hoped I was wrong.
Unfortunately, his voice on the other end
confirmed what I knew had to be true.

“Mom died in her sleep.”

I felt sorry for my son
passing on this information.

At least she died in her sleep,
someone would say, eventually. This
kind of news I expected.

Some would say
it was a relief she died;
painless, in her sleep.

People always say this
when they do not know what else to say.

I do not know what to say to my son
to ease his pain,
when often I lack the necessary words.
Some experiences in life
are not explained easily.

Life’s hardest lessons
leave no rational justifications.

We muddle through trauma
hoping sadness eventually fades away.
And it’s hard work;
often memory-pain returns at the worst moments.

Yes, she died in her sleep.
It was expected, and then
it happened, quietly.

Unfortunately, my son witnessed her death.
It will hover in his heart for a long time.

I cannot tell him how long his sadness will last,
or how sadness ebbs and flows,
boomerangs back,
because each person enters grief differently,
and it has no set time limit
how long suffering will last.

There’s no manual to explain how grief works.
Loss is experiential.

I held onto the silence in the telephone call
like a lifeline to my son.
I knew he was drowning
and there are no words
to soothe this kind of pain.

Silence lasted for a long time.

*

Lastness of Silence

This world does not know true meaning of silence:
it disturbs, tears hearts. My son, my son,
where are you in this orange-red world? You left

         unsettling news. What could I do differently
         to change this terrible mockingbird song?

How could I have placed my thumb on these scales?
I find a distance between snapped hearts and no maps.
I walk as silent as this night, searching, searching,

         and you are not there. My son, my lost son,

lost within his own explanations. Answers are not here,
or in blank places in this sad jazz. My world empties.

You have not spoken to me since, my son, my son
of awful distances. This world cannot explain
true meaning of this silence, its haunting melody.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is an editor of Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Harvest Time” (Deerbrook Editions, 2021); “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022); “Not Only the Extraordinary are Exiting the Dream World (Flowstone Press, 2022); “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); and “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024).

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.

Grief by Robin Wright

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Grief

sits beside you, but doesn’t
draw you a bath or mix
a margarita, put its hand
on yours, rub your shoulders.
It runs off to the beach once
in a while but always comes back.
At first you want to lay your head
on its shoulder, find comfort
you know has to be there somewhere,
but it’s hidden deep in the bottom
of a closet or on a shelf
in the basement behind cans of paint.
The search a scavenger hunt
with no end and no prize.

*

Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Loch Raven Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, Spank the Carp, The New Verse News, Rat’s Ass Review, Fevers of the Mind, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her first chapbook, Ready or Not, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.

The Singing Birds by Marianne Worthington

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

The Singing Birds

In the graveyard the singing birds were all
you thought you needed. Grief makes you

want to rend your clothes like some histrionic
character from the Old Testament.

There is a violence to sadness: the force
of sorrow unwashed from the body, penetrating

your very scalp. Yet decorum dictates that you hold
it together while you stand over the dead when we

should be smashing our doubts and slapping each
other’s faces. Wake up. This is the hammering

injury that never heals. This is the time of day
when people should have tea, not bury their dead.

This is the moment when the singing birds follow
the wind and leave us stranded on a hill too big

to scale down without ropes and life support.
This is when you must face it: your loved one

in a box in the ground instead of dancing
with you on a Saturday night at the VFW.

Tonight, even the moon will be too cold to come out.

*

Marianne Worthington is author of The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Zone 3, and Swing, among other places. She cofounded and is poetry editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia since 2009. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in southeastern Kentucky.

Brunch with Missing Mother by Cynthia White

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Brunch with Missing Mother

To have at first missed the man’s you’re ugly,
my mind must have been on coffee
and cream. I must have been dreaming
of eggs with spinach and feta
as he shoved past me and out the café.
I ordered a fat cinnamon roll
to demolish, outer ring first,
working my way to the sticky heart.
My mother often told me,
Looks aren’t everything, though we both
loved a mirror. I needed her that day,
needed to see, in her
generous mouth and elegant
bones, my own beauty, resurrected.

*

Cynthia White’s poems have appeared in Adroit, Massachusetts Review, Southern Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA and Poet Lore among others. Her work can be found in numerous anthologies, including the recent leaning toward light, Poems for gardens & the hands that tend them. She was a finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize and the winner of the Julia Darling memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

What I’m Thinking About this Morning by Valerie Bacharach

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

What I’m Thinking About this Morning

That I have outlived my younger son.

That when I rise, the tendon
or ligament or muscle
behind my left knee hurts,
which makes me think about my mother
and her arthritic knees.

That the holidays hold too many memories, too many ghosts.

That my older son has outlived his brother,
and I worry about his grief,
but don’t ask because then he worries
about mine, and my husband
doesn’t ask because he too worries.
All this unshared grief
will crush us, flatten us,
so we move in quiet shadows
around each other.

That I am so tired, even after sleeping through the night.

That my husband moans
in his dreams, despairing,
searching for ways
to alter time,
bend it,
plant a different ending.

*

Valerie Bacharach’s book, Last Glimpse, will be published by Broadstone Books. Her chapbook After/Life will be published by Finishing Line Press. Her poem Birthday Portrait, Son, published by the Ilanot Review, was selected for inclusion in 2023 Best Small Fictions. Her poem Shavli has been nominated for Best of the Net 2023 and a Pushcart Prize by Minyan Magazine. Her poem Deadbolt has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by RockPaperPoem.

Two Poems by Callie Little

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Headstone

The text was three words:
Your mom passed.

My fifteen minute break.
Break like: my last baby tooth hits cement.

And then I was
back on the sales floor
where everything was plastic-wrapped perfection
where I did my best have-a-great-day smiling
impression of myself.

My coworker said they’d just gotten the worst text.
I wanted to say I bet I can top it, but I folded the tissue
paper behind the register, instead. Buried it.
And you might think that I wanted to go home,
but I wanted to stay tucked into the name tag
that was holding me together.

And then I was
outside.
It isn’t beautiful and poetic to tell you it was raining—
it just was. The rain pours in Seattle no matter how you feel.
I said the impossible words into my phone
The my and the mom and the died
And my spouse came to me.

And then I was
at a restaurant.
I bought us dinner. I bought us drinks.
I spent every minimum-wage dollar I had
and bought every appetizer on the menu
and too much dessert. A mudslide.
A warm apple pie a la mode,
the all-American mother ice cream dream.
I wanted to say, your mom only dies once
to the waiter but I didn’t feel like seeing him hurt for me
so I just said it to the person who loves me most.

And then I was
home.
And the grief only sat beside me, waiting.
I thought it might leave me in the night
like I might wake up
and it would just be another day.
I’d gone two years without hearing her voice
so it wouldn’t be any different.

And then I was
awake
and it was
cement.

*

Every Other Tuesday

Therapy begins at the same time as it always does
this morning, and it’s not the first time my voice
is all stone truth: “I think I might be cursed.”

My licensed therapist who is also secretly a witch
sees the light in my eyes flicker, and their hair stands on end.
They say, “that’s a sign that there’s truth there.”

This is how it works, therapy: I hand them a tangle
made of all my smallest pieces, they point to it
and say, “what a mess.”

Sometimes, this is enough magic to feel
a little bit like sanity— just being told
I’m not imagining it all.

*

Callie Little (she/they) is an artist and author from the Pacific Northwest. Her writing has appeared in VICE, Harper’s BAZAAR, Architectural Digest, and many more fine publications. Her debut non-fiction book, Every Little Thing You Do Is Magic, and its coordinating tarot deck featuring her illustrations will be published by Clarkson Potter in August 2024.

Of Course the World Still Spins by Hillary Nguyen

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Of Course the World Still Spins

But grief will latch onto bone once
Crossing the threshold one last time
These heavy wooden doors citadel
Threshold fortress protectors of home
How many sobs kisses deep belly laughs
Settled into these textured walls
The dust of dead skin in this grout
And windowsills know more
Of your memories than your skin
That renews itself every blind
Month or two this home has
You in its every nook– How
Could you leave like this?

*

Hillary Nguyen (she/her) is Vietnamese-American writer from the Bay Area who enjoys experimenting with new creative mediums (such as poetry, photography, and fiber arts), and exploring eclectic places. She creates spoken word as well as written poetry, and her work has been featured in LL Anthology: Circles, Hot Pot Magazine, and erato magazine.

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

Two Poems by Lisa Zimmerman

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Love is Invincible is What I Wrote

in my notebook. However,
it can only go so far
in terms of grief—
running parallel to the river,
kicking up dust, breathing hard,
never stopping to rest.
And the river of grief does not know,
is rushing so fast over stones,
bending its streaming tears
around fallen logs and tree roots—
Why do we pray? Why do we cry?
Love does not stop racing
beside our hurtling anguish,
won’t give up even though it knows
the galloping water is surging
to the sea of all grief. Why do I keep crying?
Love will be there too, not breathless,
not worn down or diminished,
but strong enough to hold
the whole cold ocean of grief
and never be drowned.

*

Things My Friend Mary Said Years Before She Died

She told me fear was just an acronym
for false evidence appearing real, as in
fabricating a future of tiny failures adding up
to disappointment in advance.
Fear is a lack of information, she said,
an absence—not of faith—but of trust.

Better to trudge the winter field this morning
with the dog, both of us unleashed among the dead
branches blown down from last night’s wind,
my mind empty of anything like knowledge
just a light scarf of sadness drifting behind me
like a broken aura, the white sky crimped
along its edge by mountains.

When my son was a boy he said, Fear is like a door.
I just have to walk through it.
Mary’s not here for me to ask, Who made the door?
And who made the other side?

*

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry and fiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Florida Review, Poet Lore, Hole in the Head Review, and Cave Wall. Her collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press), The Hours I Keep, and Sainted (Main Street Rag). She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado.

Evidently by Michele Parker Randall

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Evidently

My sister keeps using the word forensic
while breaking up dad’s house. Breaking

down? Breaking house. Stacking empty
blue Royal Dansk tins that held cookies,

then jam tarts, year after year. Drinking
cups of coffee as we jab with boxes,

memories, facing poses in dusty frames,
any thunder long passed, but the echo of

was that when…he must have been…did she
ever…do we dare ask? I place a few photos

under my knee—my sister by a honeysuckle-
covered slash pine, the kiddie pool at our house

on Cecil Field Naval base, a slumber party
with our pink sleeping bags, our Great Dane,

Cindy as my pillow. I can’t remember where…
whose orange tree were we in…where was…?

We never ask. There is no coming back from
critical-hit throws of the die. No escaping

a once remote thought sharpened into fact. But
we dig on, silently, for material and evidence.

*

Michele Parker Randall is the author of Museum of Everyday Life (Kelsay Books 2015) and A Future Unmappable, chapbook (Finishing Line Press 2021). Her poetry can be found in Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.

OLD GRIEF by Sean Kelbley

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

OLD GRIEF

Someday you’ll glance at bare-branched trees
and not think veins, and in those trees

the squirrels’ ragged nests will not be clots.
Above, the wispy cirrus clouds will look

like clouds and not at all like strands of lost
and drifting hair. It will be the same, in time,

with taste and touch and smell: senses
apprehending too-done steak, pilled Army blanket,

rained-out fire as only and exactly
what they are. Then dawn will dawn

as dawn instead of shiv, instead of even
dull and rusted butterknife, and you’ll forget

to wear an albatross to breakfast.
Which day? I’m sorry,

but it has to be a missed surprise,
unrealized until next morning

or a month of mornings after that—
whichever day some hungry disremembered

correspondence comes to table,
looking for a place you didn’t set.

*

Sean Kelbley lives on a farm in Appalachian Ohio and works as a primary school counselor. In addition to ONE ART, his poetry has appeared in Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Still: The Journal, Sugar House Review, and other wonderful journals and anthologies.

To My Sister on the Anniversary of Her Death from Covid by Margaret Dornaus

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To My Sister on the Anniversary
of Her Death from Covid

It’s been two years, and there are
those who still ask me to believe
you’re in a better place. Or
that we all are now that all is
said and done. Now that life is
back to normal, or at least
back to a semblance of the life
we once knew. Remember
how you liked to say you were

our mother? How you’d take us all
on weekend outings to bowling
alleys and drive-ins. The larger than
life images of good and evil projected
on a big screen. How we’d watch
Kong battling Godzilla, wide-eyed,
sure of nothing more than our own story.
The way summer nights embraced us,
the way starshine followed us home.

*

Margaret Dornaus holds an MFA in the translation of poetry from the University of Arkansas. A semifinalist in Naugatuck River Review’s 13th annual Narrative Poetry Contest, she had the privilege of editing and publishing a pandemic-themed anthology—behind the mask: haiku in the time of Covid-19—through her small literary press Singing Moon in 2020. Her first book of poetry, Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose, won a 2017 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in I-70 Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Minyan Magazine, MockingHeart Review, ONE ART, Silver Birch Press, and The Ekphrastic Review.

Two Poems by Karen A VandenBos

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Even Loss Can Be Beautiful

Loss comes quietly.
It surprises us as we look in the mirror, turn on the news,
answer the phone, open an email, look out the window
or spin around.
What was once a forest of golden leaves has faded into a
grove of muted browns and empty cathedrals.
The pure white of snow has been stained by the mud of
spring, no longer inviting.
Some lost things are found to have taken on new shapes:
a mitten without a thumb, a feather with a broken spine,
ashes with no fire.
They ask us to see the beauty in being broken, messy. Let
them surprise you with what they have to offer.
Let once shining blue eyes, now dulled by all they have
witnessed reopen in wonder.
Loss becomes rivers accepting the melting ice, forests
resurrecting into sanctuaries of green light and new life
awakening from a long winter nap.
In the way of the seasons, there is no word for loss, only
a continuous ebb and flow, a cycle of death and rebirth
where beauty can be found in the tiniest flaws.

*

Autumn in the Rear View Mirror

Our small lives rise and fall as
another November recedes in the
rear view mirror.

It has been a season of few mercies.
Bones worn down to the marrow and
hope vanishing like smoke from an
extinguished match.

The sun’s light grows softer as
the days grow shorter and shadows
lengthen. There is a new chill in
the air.

Night drapes us in her black robe
before the chime of the evening
church bells ring a call to vespers.

The trees are bare and the north
wind carries us inside.
Inside where we sit by the fire
dreaming of things that cannot last.

*

Karen A VandenBos was born on a warm July morn in Kalamazoo, MI. She can be found unleashing her imagination in three online writing groups and her writing has been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Blue Heron Review and others.

Three Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

~ ONE ART ~ 22 Comments

In the Garden, Again

After breaking, after kneeling,
after raising my ripe fist, after
opening my palm, after
clenching it again, after running,
after hiding, after taking off
my masks, after stilling,
after shouting, after bargaining
with God, after crumpling
and cursing, after losing,
after song, after seeking,
after breath, after breath,
after breath,
I stand in the sunflowers
of early September
and watch as the bees weave
from one giant bloom to another,
and I, too, am sunflower,
tall-stemmed and face lifted,
shaped by the love of light
and the need for rain.
I stand here until some part of me
is again more woman than sunflower,
and she notices how,
for a few moments,
it was enough just to be alive.
Just to be alive, it was enough.

*

A New Kind of Conversation

It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
—Linda Gregg, “The Presence in Absence”

I have no phone receiver to connect me to the other side,
but every day I speak to my beloveds through candle flame.
Every night, I speak to them through the dark before sleep.
I speak to them in the car when I am alone.
I speak to them when I walk beneath stars,
when I walk in the woods, when I walk in the rain.
It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
It is possible to feel what cannot be seen,
to sense what cannot be heard,
to be held by what cannot be touched.
It is possible for love to grow after death.
If there is a secret language, it is, perhaps, openness.
The way air lets light move through.
The way a window invites in the scent of grass.
The way sand receives the ocean,
then, rearranged, lets it pass.

*

Mycelial

Now I understand how grief
is like a mushroom—
how it thrives in dark conditions.
How it springs directly
from what is dead.
Such a curious blossoming thing,
how it rises and unfurls
in spontaneous bourgeoning,
a kingdom all its own.

Like a mushroom,
most of grief is never seen.
It grows and expands beneath everything.
Sometimes it stays dormant for years.

Grief, like a mushroom,
can be almost unbearably beautiful,
even exotic, delicate, veiled,
can arrive in any shape and hue.
It pulls me closer in.

Like a mushroom, grief
asks me to travel to regions
of shadow and dim.
I’m astonished by what I find—
mystery, abundance, insight.
Like a mushroom, grief
can be wildly generative.
Not all growth takes place
in the light.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form podcast on creative process, Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writers Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, Rattle, American Life in Poetry and her daily poetry blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Three Poems by Meg Freer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Grief Has a Name

A full ten minutes at sunset, hundreds
of crows fly south over the woods.
Moments after the last one,
snow blows in from the north.

I follow sheep trails across the fields,
unwind details I have been avoiding,
mental terrain more suited
for moose than human.

Mom’s two birthday balloons cling
together in her dining room for a day,
before one migrates to the kitchen
and the other moves into her bedroom.

A day later, the bedroom balloon
floats into Dad’s study to stay
just above the books. Dad must be
directing this scene from beyond.

In my dream, he fades into view
in the doorway holding a basketball,
says nothing, watches while I read
on the sofa, then drifts away.

Grief wants me to call it by name,
knows all 360 joints in my body,
tapes their seams to keep itself
from floating into oblivion.

*

All the Sounds of Summer

As gently as he once held a fledgling blue jay,
he cradles his sister’s arm, traces each of the thin,
horizontal lines he never knew were there,
saddened by scars not yet faded to white.

All the sounds of summer vanish
as he enters into her night and wonders at the fluency
of hands that treat the body in such disparate ways.
How to fathom the plight of molecules gone awry?

Ever distressed at the sight of his own blood,
though he understands artery over vein, he can’t
understand pain that calls out for more pain and hopes
his sister will fly, as the fledgling he buried never did.

*

New Mother
        for Mary P. and Minnow

I offer to walk with her on the nearby trail,
get her out of the house for a while.
We greet Archie and Jughead, the goats
with curly horns, as we pass their pen.
I pick up a guinea hen feather to bring home.
She sets a brisk pace as we leave the farm.
It hasn’t hit her yet, this unexpected freedom.

She stops short, as if she’s seen an apparition.
A cow stares at us through the brush.
What are you doing way over here by the fence?
Shouldn’t you be over with the horses?
This moody cow moves around the horse pasture
every day, rarely spends time with the other cows,
sometimes goes off by herself to figure things out.

We leave the cow to her moping, resume walking,
then she stops, looks back down the trail.
Wait. Am I even supposed to leave the farm?
I have babies back there, you know.
I reassure her that it’s fine to take a break,
she nursed her puppies, she needs fresh air.
She catches a whiff of spring and trots off.

The robins and redwing blackbirds are singing,
the stream is flowing, the spring scents
keep enticing, we continue our walk.
A bit further and she stops again, looks back
the way we’ve come, looks up at me.
Are you sure I was supposed to leave?
My puppies might need me, you know.

I try to persuade her to keep walking,
but no luck. We turn back, the cow
is still at the fence, but she doesn’t notice,
she is so excited to return to her seven pups—
lick them all over, move them around
with her paws and nose so they all
get a turn to nurse—be a good mother.

*

Meg Freer grew up in Montana and now teaches piano in Kingston, Ontario, where she enjoys the outdoors year-round. Her prose, photos, and poems have won awards in North America and overseas and have been published in journals such as Ruminate, Juniper Poetry, Vallum Contemporary Poetry, Arc Poetry, Eastern Iowa Review, and Borrowed Solace.

Passover by Ann E. Michael

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Passover

The first holiday without,
grief burns like anger.
Irritant. Tough fibers
scraping at skin raise a rash,
sore during celebration.
Empty ritual this year.
Empty place at the table–
bitter, bitter herbs.

*

Ann E. Michael’s upcoming chapbook is Strange Ladies, slated for publication in 2022 (Moonstone Poetry); she is the author of Water-Rites and six other chapbooks. She lives in eastern Pennsylvania and blogs at https://annemichael.blog.

Two Poems by Jennifer L Freed

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Gravity

                  Grief
pulls you close.
You know it too well
to think you can live without it.
You’ve learned
it is a chair that will hold you
up and ask nothing
of you but to live
with it. And so you live

through this spring day, drifting
from bureau to bed,
table to desk, touching
the shirt, the pillow, the cup,
the book; looking
out the window,
your hand on the windowsill, the sun
on your hand. Here is the view
so changed from yesterday. Here

is the blue of the veins in your wrist.
You can do nothing
and are grateful
there is nothing you need to do.
You let yourself sink
into your chair, let
the chair
hold you.

*

Widowed

Some days, she chooses not
to eat.
She needs to let absence
fill her body, to move with it, know
that she can.

On the table, fresh strawberries, radiant
in their blue bowl.

Without meals, extra pockets of time
unfold. She turns toward
books, sketch pads, longer walks
with the dog. Hunger swells, fades, swells and fades
again.

By night, stomach growling, she feels surprisingly
strong. She looks forward
to morning, when, standing at the counter, she will inhale
the scent of toasting bread.

*

Jennifer L Freed lives in Massachusetts. Her poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Atticus Review, Rust + Moth, West Trestle Review, The Worcester Review, Zone 3, and other journals. Her poem sequence “Cerebral Hemorrhage” was awarded the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club). She is the author of a chapbook, These Hands Still Holding, a finalist in the 2013 New Women’s Voices chapbook contest, and of a full length collection, When Light Shifts (Kelsay, 2022), based on the aftermath of her mother’s stroke.

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 Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Rosemary

You are the rosemary I add to the soup:
how you pressed pungent bristles
between thumb and finger,
how you lay sprigs atop red potatoes
glistening in olive oil, salt,
house alive with the fragrance
of vegetables roasting
on any given day of the week.

1,095 days past your death, young one,
I sometimes escape the earthquake
of absence upon awakening,
but daily remembrance, I never escape:
today, it was rosemary, yesterday,
blue sea glass washed up at my feet.

*

dent de lion

Don’t call me weed,
but love instead my golden
head dressing swards of green.

The sunshine of my flowering gone,
then love me in my second crown
of silver tuft and drifting thread.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach 2018. Other books include Transforming Matter, and Traveler in Paradise, both from PEARL Editions. Her new collection, Threnody, is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in late 2021.

Consumed by Edward Lee

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

CONSUMED

Grief consumes my heart,
a cancer devastating
all in its indifferent path,

almost a kissing cousin
to the cancer
that took you from me,
savage and swiftly.

*

Edward Lee’s poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales. His play ‘Wall’ was part of Druid Theatre’s Druid Debuts 2020. His debut poetry collection “Playing Poohsticks On Ha’Penny Bridge” was published in 2010. He is currently working towards a second collection.

He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.

His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com

One Poem by Patricia Davis-Muffett

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What to do with your grief
       for Dionne, June 2020

Butter. Sugar. Flour. Salt.
I am doing what I know.

Nineteen, I call my mother crying:
“I can’t make the pie crust work,”
“Come home,” she says. “We’ll fix it.”
The ice in the water,
the fork used to mix,
the way she floured the board.
It’s chemistry, yes–
but also this:
the things you pass
from hand to hand.

9/11. Child dropped at preschool.
Traffic grinds near the White House.
A plane overhead. The Pentagon burns.
The long trek home to reclaim our child.
We are told to stay in. I venture out.
Blueberries to make a pie.

My mother, so sick. Not hungry.
For a time, she is tempted by pies.
I bring them long after taste flees.

New baby. Death. Any crisis.
I do what my mother taught me.
Butter. Sugar. Flour. Salt.
I bring this to you–this work of my hands,
this piece of my day, this sweetness,
all I can offer.

Today, Minneapolis burns
And sparks catch fire in New York,
Atlanta, here in DC.
My friend’s voice says
what I know but can’t know:
“This is my fear every time they leave me.”
Three beautiful sons, brilliant, alive.
I have little to offer. I do what I know.

*

Patricia Davis-Muffett (she/her) holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She was a 2020 Julia Darling Poetry Prize finalist and received First Honorable Mention in the 2021 Joe Gouveia OuterMost Poetry Contest. Her work has appeared in Limestone, Coal City Review, Neologism, The Orchards, One Art, Pretty Owl Poetry, di-verse-city (anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival), The Blue Nib and Amethyst Review, among others. She lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband and three children and makes her living in technology marketing.

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

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.

On the Day After You Left This World by Heather Swan

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

On the Day After You Left This World

I floated out to the island
of bird bones, where
their long gone songs
now whisper in the cattails,
looking for solitude, solace,
but found instead
three cranes waiting
who let me join them
there on the shore,
their heads tipping
toward me, toward the
sounds of geese from
across the lake, toward
the jet plane flying overhead.
Night fell and we stayed—
all of us—cranes, crickets,
cattails, me with my broken body
breathing, and in the graying light
the breeze stroked
the cool waters of the lake,
the water lapping the mud
until all of it
was not separate, all of it
became one breath.

*

Heather Swan is the author of a new collection of poems, A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books) and the nonfiction book, Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press), winner of the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Minding Nature, ISLE, The Learned Pig, Edge Effects and is forthcoming in Terrain and Emergence. Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, The Hopper, Phoebe, Cold Mountain Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Raleigh Review and several anthologies. She has been the recipient of the Martha Meyer Renk Fellowship in Poetry and the August Derleth Prize. She teaches writing and environmental literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Two Poems by Kara Knickerbocker

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Grief Animal

Some days it is a pair of pearl earrings
I pick from my jewelry box
and put on like I’ve been taught.

But most days,
like today,
my grief breathes on its own,

chews through its leash—

carries me in its large mouth into
yet another ruthless month.

*

Hues of Havana
Cuba, August 2018

I can tell you how the golden hour is different here—
burnt heat cakes sidewalk streets,
swirled grit of city minutes
rush by in a cherry Chevy convertible.

In pastel facades, where laundry lines connect worn fabrics to faces
Havana beats blues back in time,
history written slow into this Saturday morning;
she beats on, ribcaged between all of us.

*

Kara Knickerbocker is the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press, 2018) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Poet Lore, Hobart, Levee Magazine, and more. She currently lives in Pennsylvania and writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online: http://www.karaknickerbocker.com.

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.

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.

Two Poems by Adam Chiles

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Inheritance

My mother found the dog rooting through
the mulch out back, nosing rotten cabbage leaves.
A blood shot eye. Need pushed deep into its nostrils.
What could she do but love the animal,
this famished stray, dirt steeled firm to its skin.
She nursed the creature back. Took to the fells
each day. Wandered the gravel paths
above the stacks and kilns, happy to be absent
from the tempers of that house. It didn’t last.
Her father kicked the animal out one night.
Snatched his supper plate and slammed it
against the wall. My mother rubs her arm
as she speaks. Eighty years on, she still feels it,
that sting, that phantom shard of porcelain.

*

Widower

Weekends, he parks his bike at the oak
and eases through the chapel turnstile.
As usual, a satchel slung over his back
filled with clippers, trowels, a bunch of
wildflowers. He walks to her plot, takes
out his tools and begins, digging out
a thin trench of soil, trimming its frame.
And what else can he do for her now
but this weekly crop and mend. His face
lost to a rampant beard. Below him,
daffodils, their ceaseless gold alarms.

*

Adam Chiles’ latest collection Bluff will be published by Measure Press this Summer. His work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2006 (Samovar) and has appeared in numerous journals including Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Connotation Press, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Magma, Permafrost, RHINO, The Threepenny Review and Thrush Poetry Review. He is professor of English and Creative Writing at Northern Virginia Community College and serves on the editorial board at Poet Lore.

Two Poems by Stan Sanvel Rubin

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Way I Miss You

In daytime when light plays over us
even from this all-gray winter sky,
something else is dancing.

It’s always there, the hidden thing
that makes everything possible.
This is how I miss you.

It isn’t that the moon
slips inside a sleeve of night
and vanishes so that anything I see

is a partial thing defined by darkness.
The universe itself that transmits light
hides in the gravity of darkness.

I don’t miss the light.
I miss the shadow
that was our shadow.

*

The Sea Is A Grief

Listen to the old accordion
making sad music
with bones and pebbles,
countless secrets
like hidden predators.

The sea grieves for its secrets,
which are those of a small boy
watching the waves rise and fall
from a pier where a horse dives
with a star-spangled rider

into the foamy water
and emerges in front of the boy’s own eyes
still carrying the woman in the wet shining cap
who leads it back to plunge again
from the high pier into the sea.

*

Stan Sanvel Rubin has poems recently in 2 River, Sheila-na-gig and Aji and has been previously published in Agni, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, One and others. His four full collections include There. Here (Lost Horse Press) and Hidden Sequel (Barrow Street Book Prize). He lives on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. He writes essay reviews of poetry for Water-Stone Review.

Grief by Donna Hilbert

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Grief

In the dishwasher,
nothing but spoons.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. She is a monthly contributing writer to the on-line journal, Verse-Virtual. She is eager to resume leading in-person workshops and hugging her friends. Learn more at http://www.donnahilbert.com