ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2026
Tag: Hayden Saunier
Two Poems by Hayden Saunier
Something Is Not Right
My neighbors never turn off the light
in an upstairs room, so one eye
seems always open in the face of that house
which is how ducks sleep, and dolphins,
and wary parents of teenagers, like my sister,
who woke one night as certain of catastrophe
as the French nurse in a children’s book,
so she drove in her robe and nightgown to the house
where her daughter was sleeping over
in time to watch four girls crawl out a bedroom window,
drop to the ground and head toward town.
She stepped from her car, called their names
in the ragged-whispered voice of conscience,
watched them scramble back inside the house.
That’s the god we were taught we had.
God of highway guardrails
and get-your-butt-back-in-that-house.
God of adults not too drunk or damaged
to keep us safe. A clear-eyed god, unmoved
by megachurch money and gold filigree.
God as shepherd, like my sister, standing
under bright stars in a dark world,
nightgown hitched up in a robe sash, boots on,
ready to chase the young ones back to the fold,
away from the wolves, at least for that night.
*
Perfume Notes
An overwhelming waft of fake peachiness
stings my eyes from a bar of discounted soap
and it’s almost as awful as the sugary pink
aroma of Summer’s Eve strawberry douche
that stunk up the family bathroom
at an inlaw’s house— good god, decades ago—
and because memory mainlines scent,
every dissonance I ever ignored for love
comes back to me. I was young.
It takes time to trust your nose.
I dump the soap in a corner of the dirt cellar
to ward off mice, and I’m further back,
age six, in Erica’s damp brick basement,
concocting a magic fragrance from her perfume kit
that turned the gray world Technicolor
but I spilled the entire vial and never could
remake that mix. I pause halfway up
the outside steps and linger in the rich bouquet
of earth, cool bottom note to all our lives.
To this, I’d add dark roasted coffee, drying hay,
the spicy sweetness of mock orange in the air,
atomized atop the mammal musk of skin.
It’s taken years to know what scents to trust.
I douse my life with them.
*
Hayden Saunier is the author of six poetry collections, including her most recent book Wheel. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and Gell Poetry prize, and has been published in ONE ART, The Sun, 32 Poems, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. Hayden founded and directs the interactive poetry performance group No River Twice. More at haydensaunier.com.
Spell for Good Fortune by Hayden Saunier
Spell for Good Fortune
Wipe your windowsill clean
of desiccated insects hatched
from a dead poinsettia
with a folded fabric scrap
cut from your mother’s nightgown,
the one stitched through
with blue embroidery thread.
Summon a red-winged blackbird
with seed and suet, admire
the bright yellow slashes above
each scarlet shoulder patch,
the black glossy wink of its eye.
Most likely, no bird will show.
But by then you’ll know
that if you have a windowsill
and seed and fat, a mother
whose nightgown you possess—
the spell you seek was worked
like thread into your life
before you conjured up the bird
or spoke a single magic word.
*
Hayden Saunier is the author of six poetry collections, including most recently, Wheel. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda, Rattle Poetry, and Gell Poetry Awards and published in One Art, Southern Poetry Review, The Sun, 32 Poems, Thrush, Virginia Quarterly Review, among many others.
ONE ART Poems in Verse Daily
I’ve been a longtime fan of Verse Daily. Since the early days of ONE ART, it’s been a bucket list item of mine, so to speak, to see poems from ONE ART appear in Verse Daily.
To my surprise and delight, this goal had already been achieved well before I became aware of it.
When I was informed that Kim Addonizio’s poem ‘Eschatology’ would appear in Verse Daily, I decided to check to see if any other poems, by chance, previously appeared. As it turned out— there were several!
Today, checking again, much to my delight, I discovered Cindy King’s poem ‘Hysterical’!
What follows is the list of poems (to the best of my knowledge) that first published in ONE ART and then were republished in Verse Daily. Much thanks to J.P. Dancing Bear (and the Verse Daily team) for giving these poems a well-deserved larger platform.
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Kim Addonizio – Eschatology
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Cindy King – Hysterical
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Web Weekly Feature, December 4, 2023: “Feast” by Robbi Nester
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Web Weekly Feature, March 20, 2023: “for luck: an Arkansas Sonnet” by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
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Web Weekly Feature, November 29, 2021: “This Late Thanks” by Hayden Saunier
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Human Interest Story by Hayden Saunier
Human Interest Story
Always the final bit on the newscast,
a tiny Tinkerbell-sized light
lifted from the dank bottom
of the jam-packed Pandora’s Box
of horrors just unleashed at us
with shrieking chyron banners
and pop-up advertisements
for which heinous true crime story
or CSI procedural is coming up,
but for 30 seconds we see puppies
rescued from a storm drain,
a wedding ring returned
to a war bride after fifty years
lost in a Nebraska cornfield,
and last night, a man with one arm
paralyzed was offered a simple loop
to bind his dead arm to his working one
in such a way that he could now
raise both arms above his head
in a ballerina’s O, lift them over
his young son’s body to hug him
back, and I can’t stop seeing
the looks on both their faces, lit
so brightly from within, it’s hauled me
through this whole next day on hope.
*
Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry; her most recent is A Cartography of Home (Terrapin: 2021). Her work has been published in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bracken, Pedestal, Thrush, and Virginia Quarterly Review, featured on The Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize, among others. She is the founder/director of the interactive poetry reading, No River Twice. www.haydensanier.com @Hayden_Saunier
Three Poems by Hayden Saunier
Song for a Suburban Mid-Life Crisis
Four bedrooms, two baths.
Out front, a weeping cherry tree
and underneath each sink, a panoply
of poisons scented to the fantasy
of spotless linen hanging
sundried in an ocean breeze.
Don’t get me wrong,
I live here too.
When I stand before an oval mirror
pulling tight the skin
above my ears to give myself
a temporary facelift,
I watch my mouth lose
years of disappointment—
even though I can’t remember
what it was I wanted.
*
Weeding After an Argument
Neither of us
talking.
Instead, we grip
living things
by their crowns,
rip their roots
satisfyingly
out of the ground.
*
These Mornings When
I’ve dreamed so much
my whole heart beats
against the drumskin
of my body as though
a makeshift jazz
band has been jamming
all night long inside me
and the tenor sax and bass
have only just now
tucked their instruments
into the crushed velvet
insides of hard cases
and are riding the trains
home, tired, happy,
imaginary money
jingling in their pockets,
while the percussionist
taps out the last hi-hat
vibrations of a dream
into the turning world,
filling it with that buzz
of having played well
all night, for each other,
even when there was no one
to listen, no one to applaud,
no one to throw a single
shiny coin into the hat.
*
Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry; her most recent is A Cartography of Home (Terrapin: 2021). Her work has been published in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bracken, Pedestal, Thrush, and Virginia Quarterly Review, featured on The Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize, among others. She is the founder/director of the interactive poetry reading, No River Twice. www.haydensanier.com @Hayden_Saunier
Ghazal for Summer Squash by Hayden Saunier
Ghazal for Summer Squash
At the end of every farm lane, driveway, garden gate
is a basket, bag, or pilfered milk crate labeled “free,” filled with zucchini.
Loanwords are words adopted from one language and incorporated,
sans translation, into another: such as ghazal, stanza, sans, and yes, zucchini.
More potassium than a banana and packing only 25 calories makes
this charmer a nutritional powerhouse, says the PR lady for zucchini.
Julia Child served a dish called Tian de Courgettes au Riz,
composed of cheese, rice, too much work: it’s almost all zucchini.
The female flower forms a yellow trumpet; the male’s a thinner,
slightly duller bloom. Add a bee and presto! More zucchini.
One is a zucchina. But there’s never only one. A synonym
for surplus, surfeit, excess, glut, or way-too-much should be zucchini.
When possible, choose baby, small or barely medium, because
size matters when discussing gourds (and that goes double for zucchini.)
Shaved, dressed with garlic, panko, reindeer hearts or baco-bits,
then blackened, sauteed, pureed, whipped to foam: it’s still zucchini.
Praise song for gardens, blossom, vines, and plenty, I offer thanks
for frost and final stanzas, for an end to this zucchini of zucchini.
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Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry; her most recent is A Cartography of Home (Terrapin: 2021). Her work has been published in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bracken, Pedestal, Thrush, and Virginia Quarterly Review, featured on The Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize, among others. She is the founder/director of the interactive poetry reading, No River Twice. www.haydensaunier.com @Hayden_Saunier
This Late Thanks by Hayden Saunier
This Late Thanks
Hickory nuts shake down from shagbarks
onto blacktop, their leather cases cracked
at the seams, releasing the dense center
that as a child, I’d try to bust open
for food with a hammer against stone.
It never worked out. My first careful blows
revealed an intricate chambered hardness
that clenched the meat too tightly for my fingers
to pick out so I’d bring the hammer down
hard as Thor, which smashed the halves to mush
shot through with broken shell, impossible
to eat. Sometimes, even a truck can’t bust
a hickory nut’s core. Today, they drop
and settle atop asphalt, or skitter
into ditches to soften and take root,
get storm-washed into creeks to rot, decay,
go round again. For years, I thought that if
I really tried, I could discover where
the sweet spot lives between slow patient time
and swift obliteration— the perfect
angle, words, or pressure point to crack,
precisely to the right degree, the small
hard architectures held so tight inside—
but no such place. Instead, I have this late
and quiet thanks for fate or happenstance
or maybe even grace, that any one of us
has fallen, broken just enough,
onto an earth, or into hands, that give.
*
Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry, including A Cartography of Home, published in 2021. Awards include the Pablo Neruda Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Gell Poetry Award, Keystone Prize, and a dozen Pushcart Prize nominations. She directs No River Twice (poetry + improvisation), an interactive, audience-driven poetry reading/performance. More at http://www.haydensaunier.com.
Lunacy by Hayden Saunier
Lunacy
I fight a stuck window above
the bathtub on April’s first mild evening
after long enduring cold by banging hard
on rails that held tight all winter
with fists that held tight too.
As if this weather-spattered sash
were a rusted prison door that lifted
into madly temperate spring.
Turns out, it is. The window gives.
Allows a quarter moon trailing
its gauzy negligee of light
to float with me in warm water
as a congress of tree frogs no bigger
than buttons sings to the world born
of rain in the ditches to open
its hands, begin over again.
*
Hayden Saunier’s newest book of poetry, A Cartography of Home, was just published by Terrapin. Her work has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Gell Poetry Award, Keystone Prize, has been published in journals such as VQR, Beloit Poetry Review, Thrush, 32 Poems, Tar River Poetry, online at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and read numerous times by Garrison Keillor for The Writer’s Almanac. She is an actor and is founder and director of No River Twice (poetry + improvisation) an interactive, audience driven poetry reading/performance. More at www.haydensaunier.com.