Tag: home

The Giveaway by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Giveaway

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

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

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

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

*

Gloria Heffernan’s Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). Her forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in 2025. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Three Poems by Michelle Meyer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

We Were Just Getting to Know Each Other

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

*

The Way It Is

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

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

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

Everything is straddling some kind of line.

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

* 

The Question of Whether or Not We Should Sell Our House

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

*

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

Two Poems by Tami Haaland

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

What to Call This Embrace

One ponderosa leans inward where
         a slice of granite tips the trail as if
the tree compensates for the lurch,
         creates a curve to hold onto, and I do.

I feel something in my center, call it
         love for the younglings, the elders,
the twisted dead topping and edging the cliffs.
         Now, with you no longer ahead

on the trail, I hold to their steadiness
         and brace my weight.

*

Over Home

When we lived together, when my mother
and father, my brother and I still lived

in our house, my mother would say she was
going over home, meaning back to her parents,

to their two-story white farmhouse. Now,
when I dream of it, the roof opens to sky,

doors line a hallway and rooms hold
generations of treasures—stylish chairs,

strange musical instruments, layers of disorderly
potential if only someone could keep it straight.

*

Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections: What Does Not Return, When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room. Her poems have recently appeared in Fugue, Cutthroat, december, Cascadia, Healing the Divide and have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Slowdown.

When You’ve Lived in a House for Fifty Years by Judy Kronenfeld

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

When You’ve Lived in a House for Fifty Years

it breathes with you in your sleep;
it lights your lucky way
from morning bed to kitchen
of blessings–the filled
pantry, the humming fridge
committed to keeping the berries
you love for breakfast
firm and delicious.

It lets you move freely through
its pleasant rooms, as you water your
peace lilies and philodendrons,
and after a slightly scary check-up
at the doctor’s, and some fill-in shopping,
welcomes you again for dinner
and a little non-alarming TV, watched
with your spouse from the soft settee.
It vouchsafes both of you
a quiet passage to untroubled dreams,
guarded as it is by ancestors
assembled in multiple albums
in its cabinets, pressed
against each other in phalanxes.

You want to pray to this house’s
lares and penates. You want to
beg them to never let you
leave it, never make you sort
the dust-encrusted plastic bins
entrusted with hundreds of letters
you and your husband wrote to each other
in an almost mythical past.
You want to entreat the household gods
to keep them forever reachable
and uncorrupted on their sagging shelf
in the garage of inexhaustible mysteries.

*

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of nine collections of poetry. Her six full-length books include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was recently released by Bamboo Dart Press. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slant, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad, and Your Daily Poem and four dozen of them have appeared in anthologies. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Judy has also published criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998), short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, will be published by Inlandia Books in 2025. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, University of California, Riverside.

Two Poems by Shauna Shiff

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

A Home

Nothing fancy—a cottage, perhaps white clapboard
with a bright blue door. Oh, and flowers

tall as my thigh, a banshee of blooms that I would tend
and water and adore. This is what I wanted

before I had it. I thought my own walls
that I could paint any color I choose

would stop the tally I kept running
of all I didn’t have, like it did for my mother,

when as a child she graduated from shack to trailer,
stared up at the popcorn ceiling and thought

I have arrived. Permanence is a prayer all the poor
bow their heads toward, as if wanting is enough

to stop stability from its shifting, a foundation folding
at the slightest tremor. Finally, I am a fixed pinpoint

on the map, that once elusive wish is a solid floor
beneath me, but I wonder, maybe ungratefully

if I should have asked the world for more
than just a roof over my head.

*

Come Closer

Be it barstool
or grocery store line
when a man taps my arm

his words are shell-smooth,
sparse even, shucked clean
of the unnecessary,

talk like a foot path, sure
stone upon sure stone,
placed perfectly to lead

to a guileless glass window,
wide open. Look through
and see what he wants—

any woman, swallowing
his words whole.

*

Shauna Shiff is an English teacher in Virginia, a mother, wife and textiles artist. Her poems and short stories can be found in Stoneboat Literary Journal, Atticus Review, Whale Road Review, Rock Salt Journal, Cola and upcoming in others. In 2022, she was nominated for Best of the Net.

Three Poems by J. C. Todd

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Forced From Home

A bloom, the season’s first,
today, and a half-dozen buds
topping stems that shoot up
from a ruff of trefoil leaves.

Thirty-five years in a window box,
this single plant that once flourished
and seeded itself along the border
of a garden someone else now tends.

Thirty-five years in box,
one foot wide, three feet long,
one foot deep, reseeding
a single companion

to tilt with it toward the sun’s
narrow threading down
past shingle, brick, and siding,
into the arid, shadowed grove

of urban structures
where this migrant
has been transplanted.
Soil boosted, composted,

watered, mulched, and tended,
everything that can be done
to make a home for it, although
a holding cell is not a home.

*

Home as a Foreign Place

what’s been torn down
I revisit through language
a language of longing, solo
speaker, rooms empty of her
listening, except in memory
where I, having lived on
reassemble in sound
a monoculture of loss

*

Zemaitijos Gatve, Vilnius

I walk into their stairwell
where they passed up and down,
the granite steps dished out and chipped
by generations who went before them,
books tucked under arms—
books of prayer, laws, poems,
books of history, science, and tales
that made their way from mouth to page,
from air to ink, weighty books
tucked under coats for protection,
padding the hollows of bellies
in the starving times of winter or war.
Packed into five floors of flats, they shivered
and sweated, ate and argued, prayed and rested
and read, and then they were gone.
The gates to the ghetto were opened.
They were driven out, herded into trucks
and rail cars. 1943. You know this story, don’t you?

I’m looking back to where I can’t have been,
wishing for a girl or boy who reads them
out of the terrible dark that’s closing in.

*

J. C. Todd is the author of Beyond Repair, (2021) a special selection for the Able Muse Press Book Award, and The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press (2018), a finalist for the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award, as well as chapbooks and collaborative artist books. She is one of ten winners in the 2021 National Poetry Competition of the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom. Winner of the 2016 Rita Dove Poetry Prize, with fellowships from the Pew Foundation and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, she is a poet with the Dodge Poetry Program, Murphy Writing of Stockton University, and leads independent poetry workshops.

Three Poems by Michael J Carter

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Ghost Bus: Iiyama, Nabekura Plateau, Nagano Prefecture

A bus still runs its full route,
on roads cut through rice
and asparagus fields, the driver
still generates a pension
impeccable in his serious uniform
and white driving gloves. We all wave
when he drives away, Japanese style
two-handed, broad palmed. The only secure
bit of the language I’ve acquired in one day.
Our host tells us that no one ever boards
the bus, it remains empty all day,
every day, but keeps running
as a monument to the hope
of revitalization like that part
of me that remembers to call
my dad before I remember
that he’s dead. Sometimes,
I even say, Oh shit, its Sunday
I have to call him when
I get home. My dad’s favorite story
about his own father is how once a month
his dad would put on his suit and
go to the bank to pay off the loan
on the farm that failed. Ghost money
paying for a ghost farm, tilling
a future, seed pods empty as this bus,
prompt and hopeful.

*

Smell the Lilacs

Clicked on the burner
for tea and walked outside
to smell the lilacs at the end
of the driveway. An old craggy
bush, neglected by the landlords,
with both white and purple blossoms.
They opened yesterday
the same day I received
a note from my sister:
I just wanted you to know
that Mom’s headstone
was placed yesterday
at her grave. All day
The rain came in bursts,
grief-like, and now the sun
is setting over a saturated field—
bright green, shadow green,
a crab-apple tree is gussied up
in spring pinks wrapped
in a factory of bees rebuilding
the world. Then I went back
in to make tea, sat by the window,
and let it go cold.

*

Resurrection: Back Home

I brought you back to life
and then I called you
celebrating the miracle of your rebirth.
You were alive, the way you were.
You said, I’m watching your father hang pictures…
That was the deal, he did that while you rested
but you were tired, wanted off the phone
and Dad was busy.

*

Michael J Carter is a poet and clinical social worker. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College he holds an MFA from Vermont College and an MSW from Smith. Poems of his have appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Ploughshares, Provincetown Arts Magazine, Western Humanities Review, among many others. He lives with his two hounds and spends his time swimming and knitting.